Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas [1]

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DICTIONARY OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

DICTIONARY OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas PHILIP P. WIENER EDITOR IN CHIEF (TW^)

VOLUME I

Abstraction in the Formation of Concepts

Design Argument

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

•

NEW YORK

Copyright © 1968, 1973 Charles Scribner’s Sons The Publishers are grateful for permission to quote from previously published works in the following articles: “Agnosticism” from Language, Truth and Logic, by A. J. Ayer, copyright 1935, by permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd. “Ambiguity as Aesthetic Principle” from Virgil, Aeneid, trans. H. R. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library, by permission of Harvard University Press from Camoens: The Lusiads, trans. W. C. Atkinson, copyright 1952, by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd. from The Odes of Pindar, trans. Richmond Lattimore, copyright 1947 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. from Richard of Saint Victor, ed. Clare Kirchberger, © 1957, by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers “Catharsis” from The Oxford Translation of Aristotle, trans. W, D. Ross, copyright 1925, by permission of The Clarendon Press, Oxford “Cosmology” from Early Science in Oxford, by R, T. Gunther, copyright 1931, by permission of The Clarendon Press, Oxford

THIS BOOK PUBLISHED SIMULTANEOUSLY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND IN CANADA— COPYRIGHT UNDER THE BERNE CONVENTION

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF

This

BOOK

MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.

1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 M10|C 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 72-7943 SBN 684-13288-5

Volume I

SBN 684-13289-3

Volume II

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Volume III

SBN 684-13291-5

Volume IV

SBN 684-13292-3

Index

SBN 684-13293-1

Set

5 V- /

EDITORIAL BOARD Isaiah Berlin George Boas Salomon Bochner Felix Gilbert Frank E. Manuel Ernest Nagel Rene Wellek

MANAGING EDITORS Charles E. Pettee Laurie Sullivan

CONSULTING EDITORS Harold Cherniss Wallace K. Ferguson E. H. Gombrich Paul O. Kristeller Peter B. Medawar Meyer Schapiro Harry A. Wolfson

PREFACE Artists, writers, and scientists do not hesitate in their

interpretation contained in the scholarship of our con¬

creative efforts and researches to borrow ideas outside

tributors, and in future research the cross-references,

their own special fields whenever their themes reach

bibliographies, and index should be valuable aids.

beyond established forms, styles, or traditional methods.

The topics chosen are intended to exhibit the in¬

The languages of the ai ts will often show the impact

triguing variety of ways in which ideas in one domain

of literary themes, scientific discoveries, economic

tend to migrate into other domains. The diffusion of

conditions, and political change. The physical, biologi¬

these ideas may be traced in three directions: hori¬

cal, psychological, and social sciences have branched

zontally across disciplines in a given cultural period,

out from ancient mythical and metaphysical ideas of

vertically or chronologically through the ages, and “in

nature and man, and in their historical development

depth” by analysis of the internal structure of pervasive

have utilized the results of analyses and experimental

and pivotal ideas. Internal analysis is needed if one is

methods that have emerged from the cross-fertilization

to discover the component ideas that have become

of tested ideas and methods. This outward reaching of the mind motivates the historian of ideas to explore the pivotal clues to man’s artistic and scientific achieve¬ ments in diverse fields. While respecting the integrity

elements of newer and larger thoughts or movements. A now classic model is Arthur O. Lovejoy’s historical study and internal analysis of the Great Chain of Being into its component “unit-ideas” of continuity, grada¬

and need for specialized departments of learning, the

tion, and plenitude. These unit-ideas are not descrip¬

historian of ideas makes his particular contribution to

tions of the whole organic cultural and historical setting

knowledge by tracing the cultural roots and historical

of thought, but products of analysis, which Lovejoy

ramifications of the major and minor specialized con¬

proposed as aids to the unravelling of complex ideas

cerns of the mind. The editors have invited contributions from scholars

and of their roles in different contexts. However, no

of many countries, especially those scholars who have shown a particular awareness of the cultural and his¬ torical affiliations of their respective disciplines with other allied fields. Departmental and national bound¬ aries have thus been crossed in the cooperative ex¬

single method or model has been prescribed or adopted as exclusive by either editors or contributors. We have, therefore, studies of three different sorts: cross-cultural studies limited to a given century or period, studies that trace an idea from antiquity to later periods, and studies that explicate the meaning of a pervasive idea and its

change of ideas and cultural perspectives among editors

development in the minds of its leading proponents.

and contributors. We cannot emphasize too strongly the point ex¬

reflect the prevailing climate of opinion of their times.

pressed in the subtitle of our work, that we are pre¬ senting a varied array of selected pivotal topics in intellectual history and of methods of writing about such topics. Although the number of topics discussed is large, we do not pretend that these volumes represent the entire range of intellectual history. To attempt a complete history of ideas would be to attempt (of course, in vain) to exhaust the history of the human mind; hence, the limited number of topics dealt with, and even these contain lacunae which we hope will encourage further studies. Students of the histoiy of ideas should profit from the substance and methods of

Minor figures cannot be neglected since they often The cross-references appended to each article have been carefully prepared to direct the reader to related articles in which the same or similar idea occurs within a different domain, often modified and even trans¬ formed by the different context. But despite our inter¬ disciplinary aim, we do not ignore the fact that de¬ partments of study are established in academic and other specialized institutions. The Dictionary will fa¬ cilitate the reader’s transition from the ideas familiar to him in his special area of study to those very ideas operative in, and transformed by, related ideas in other fields with which he is less familiar.

PREFACE In some cases the same word will have entirely

will lead outward to still other clusters of ideas. The

distinct meanings in different disciplines, so that it is

“Faust Theme,” for example, is an illustration of the

important not to confound words with ideas; for exam¬

more general idea of “Motif” in the history of litera¬

ple, it is a sophistic confusion to draw inferences from

ture, but the Faust theme is itself pregnant with sym¬

the theory of relativity in physics to relativism in

bolic references to the problem of evil, to the ideas of

morals, or to impose seventeenth-century mechanical

tragedy, of macrocosm and microcosm.

models on organic or social phenomena. But it is

Although the intensive synchronic study of any

germane to the history of thought and culture to record

“period” of cultural or intellectual history may reveal

the historical role of such pervasive models in diverse

the predominance of certain artistic, scientific, indus¬

fields. Consequently, we did not seek to collect topics

trial, political, religious, or philosophical ideas, there

for articles at random, but organized an analytical table

is no a priori ranking of these groups of ideas. Nor can

of contents into a seven-fold grouping of topics, thus

it be presumed that they are all of equal importance

discovering important relationships which might oth¬

through all periods of cultural development viewed

erwise have been overlooked. The following domains

diachronically. The Dictionary’s emphasis on inter¬

and disciplines, of course, involve unavoidable over¬

disciplinary, cross-cultural relations is not intended as

lapping, but form the basic framework of the selected

a substitute for the specialized histories of the various

topics contributed. I. The history of ideas about the external order of

disciplines, but rather serves to indicate actual and possible interrelations.

nature studied by the physical and biological sciences,

The purpose of these studies of the historical inter¬

ideas also present in common usage, imaginative liter¬

relationships of ideas is to help establish some sense of

ature, myths about nature, metaphysical speculation.

the unity of human thought and its cultural manifesta¬

II. The history of ideas about human nature in

tions in a world of ever-increasing specialization and

anthropology, psychology, religion, and philosophy as

alienation. These cumulative acquisitions of centuries

well as in literature and common sense. III. The history of ideas in literature and the arts in aesthetic theory and literary criticism. IV. The history of ideas about or attitudes to history, historiography, and historical criticism.

of work in the arts and sciences constitute our best insurance against intellectual and cultural bankruptcy. Taking stock of the ideas that have created our cultural heritage is a prerequisite of the future growth and flourishing of the human spirit.

V. The historical development of economic, legal,

The editors are indeed grateful for the cooperation

and political ideas and institutions, ideologies, and

of so many scholars, including advisers and readers as

movements.

well as contributors and the staff of the publisher.

VI. The history of religious and philosophical ideas.

Without the unstinting aid and constant encouragement

VII. The history of formal mathematical, logical,

of Mr. Charles Scribner, who initiated the idea of this

linguistic, and methodological ideas.

Dictionary, the project wouldnot have come to fruition.

Few of the pivotal ideas presented fall squarely and only within any one group. Even the ancillary topics

Vlll

PHILIP P. WIENER

ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS I. The history of ideas about the external order of nature studied by the physical and biological sciences, ideas also present in common usage, imaginative literature, myths about nature, metaphysical speculation. Alchemy

Genetic Continuity

Astrology

Health and Disease

Atomism: Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century

Indeterminacy in Physics

Atomism in the Seventeenth Century

Ipheritance of Acquired Characteristics (Lamarckian)

Biological Conceptions in Antiquity

Inheritance through Pangenesis

Biological Homologies and Analogies

Longevity

Biological Models Conservation of Natural Resources Cosmic Images

Changing Concepts of Matter from Antiquity to Newton Nature Newton and the Method of Analysis

Cosmic Voyages

Optics and Vision

Cosmology from Antiquity to 1850

Organicism

Cosmology since 1850

Recapitulation

Entropy Environment Environment and Culture

Relativity Space Spontaneous Generation Technology

Evolutionism Time and Measurement Experimental Science and Mechanics in the Middle Ages

Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism

ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS II. The history of ideas about human nature in anthropology, psychology, religion, and philosophy as well as in literature and common sense. Association of Ideas

Psychological Ideas in Antiquity

Behaviorism

Psychological Schools in European Thought

Empathy

Psychological Theories in American Thought

Imprinting and Learning Early in Life

Renaissance Idea of the Dignity of Man

Types of Individualism

Theriophily

Love

Universal Man

Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer

Virtu in and since the Renaissance

Pre-Platonic Conceptions of Human Nature

Virtuoso

Primitivism

Wisdom of the Fool

Primitivism in the Eighteenth Century

Witchcraft

III. The history of ideas in literature and the arts in aesthetic theory and literary criticism.

X

Allegory in Literary History

Demonology

Ambiguity as Aesthetic Principle

Evolution of Literature

Ancients and Moderns in the Eighteenth Century

Expressionism in Literature

Art and Play

Form in the History of Aesthetics

Art for Art’s Sake

Genius from the Renaissance to 1770

Baroque in Literature

Genius: Individualism in Art and Artists

Theories of Beauty to the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Musical Genius

Theories of Beauty since the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Concept of Gothic

Catharsis

Harmony or Rapture in Music

Chance Images

Iconography

Classicism in Literature

Impressionism in Art

Classification of the Arts

Irony

Sense of the Comic

Literature and Its Cognates

Creativity in Art

Literary Paradox

Literary Criticism

Millenarianism

ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS Mimesis

Periodization in Literary History

Motif

Rhetoric and Literary Theory in Platonism

Motif in Literature: The Faust Theme

Poetry

Literary Attitudes Toward Mountains Music and Science Music as a Demonic Art Music as a Divine Art Myth in Antiquity Myth in Biblical Times

and

Poetics

from

Antiquity

to

the

Mid-

Eighteenth Century Realism in Literature Rhetoric after Plato Romanticism in Literature Romanticism (ca. 1780-ca. 1830) Satire Victorian Sensibility and Sentiment

Myth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Style in Literature Myth in English Literature: Seventeenth and Eigh¬ teenth Centuries Myth in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centu¬ ries Myth in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Naturalism in Art

Sublime in External Nature Symbol and Symbolism in Literature Taste in the History of Aesthetics from the Renaissance to 1770 Temperance (Sdphrosyne) and the Canon of the Cardi¬ nal Virtues

Neo-Classicism in Art Sense of the Tragic Newton’s Opticks and Eighteenth-Century Imagina¬ tion

Ut pictura poesis

IV. The history of ideas about or attitudes to history, historiography, and historical criticism. China in Western Thought and Culture

Freedom of Speech in Antiquity

Crisis in History

Historicism

Cultural Development in Antiquity

Historiography

Culture and Civilization in Modern Times

The Influence of Ideas on Ancient Greek Historiog¬ raphy

Cycles Determinism in History Enlightenment The Counter-Enlightenment Fortune, Fate, and Chance

Humanism in Italy Oriental Ideas in American Thought Periodization in History Progress in Classical Antiquity

xi

ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS Progress in the Modem Era

Renaissance Literature and Historiography

Idea of Renaissance

Volksgeist

Renaissance Humanism

Zeitgeist

,

V. The historical development of economic, legal, and political ideas and institutions ideologies, and movements.

Xli

Academic Freedom

Ideology of Soviet Communism

Alienation in Hegel and Marx

Justice

Analogy of the Body Politic

Ancient Greek Ideas of Law

Anarchism

Ancient Roman Ideas of Law

Authority

Common Law

Balance of Power

Concept of Law

Causation in Law

Due Process in Law

The City

Equal Protection in Law

Civil Disobedience

Natural Law and Natural Rights

Class

Legal Precedent

Conservatism

Legal Responsibility

Constitutionalism

Liberalism

Democracy

Loyalty

Despotism

Machiavellism

Economic History

Marxism

Economic Theory of Natural Liberty

Marxist Revisionism: From Bernstein to Modem Forms

Education

Medieval and Renaissance Ideas of Nation

Equality

Nationalism

Equity in Law and Ethics

International Peace

Legal Concept of Freedom

Philanthropy

General Will

Property

Historical and Dialectical Materialism

Protest Movement^

Ideology

Revolution

ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS Romanticism in Political Thought

Utopia

Social Contract

Vox populi

Social Democracy in Germany and Revisionism

War and Militarism

Socialism from Antiquity to Marx

Welfare State

State

Social Attitudes Towards Women

Totalitarianism

Work

Utility and Value in Economic Thought

VI. The history of religious and philosophical ideas. Abstraction in the Formation of Concepts

Cynicism

Agnosticism

Death and Immortality

Alienation in Christian Theology

Deism

Analogy in Early Greek Thought

Design Argument

Analogy in Patristic and Medieval Thought

Determinism in Theology: Predestination

Antinomy of Pure Reason

Double Truth

Appearance and Reality

Dualism in Philosophy and Religion

Baconianism

Epicureanism and Free Will

Buddhism

Eschatology

Causation in the Seventeenth Century

Problem of Evil

Causation in the Seventeenth Century, Final Causes

Existentialism

Certainty in Seventeenth-Century Thought Certainty since the Seventeenth Century Chain of Being Christianity in History Church as an Institution Modernism in the Christian Church Cosmic Fall Creation in Religion

Faith, Hope, and Charity Free Will and Determinism Free Will in Theology Gnosticism Idea of God from Prehistory to the Middle Ages Idea of God, 1400-1800 Idea of God since 1800 Happiness and Pleasure

ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS Hegelian Political and Religious Ideas

Positivism in Latin America

Heresy in the Middle Ages

Positivism in the Twentieth Century (Logical Empiri¬

Heresy, Renaissance and Later Hermeticism Hierarchy and Order Holy (The Sacred) Idea Ideal in Philosophy from the Renaissance to 1780 Impiety in the Classical World Irrationalism in the History of Philosophy Islamic Conception of Intellectual Life Macrocosm and Microcosm Metaphor in Philosophy Metaphor in Religious Discourse Metaphysical Imagination Moral Sense Necessity Neo-Platonism Ethics of Peace Perennial Philosophy Perfectibility of Man Pietism

XIV

cism) Pragmatism Prophecy in Hebrew Scripture Prophecy in the Middle Ages Pythagorean Doctrines to 300 B.C. Pythagorean Harmony of the Universe Ramism Rationality among the Greeks and Romans Reformation Relativism in Ethics Origins of Religion Ritual in Religion Religion and Science in the Nineteenth Century Religious Enlightenment in American Thought Religious Toleration Right and Good Romanticism in Post-Kantian Philosophy Sin and Salvation Skepticism in Antiquity Skepticism in Modem Thought

Platonism in Philosophy and Poetry

Ethics of Stoicism

Platonism in the Renaissance

Theodicy

Platonism since the Enlightenment

Time

Positivism in Europe to 1900

Utilitarianism

ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS VII. The history of formal mathematical, logical, linguistic, and methodological ideas. Anthropomorphism in Science

Linguistics

Axiomatization

Linguistic Theories in British Seventeenth-Century

Casuistry Causation Causation in History Causation in Islamic Thought Chance Classification of the Sciences Continuity and Discontinuity in Nature and Knowl¬ edge

Philosophy Relativity of Standards of Mathematical Rigor Mathematics in Cultural History Number Probability: Objective Theory Formal Theories of Social Welfare Structuralism Symmetry and Asymmetry

Game Theory

Uniformitarianism in Linguistics

Infinity

Unity of Science from Plato to Kant

Study of Language

XV

LIST OF ARTICLES Abstraction in the Formation of Concepts

I 1

Atomism in the Seventeenth Century

I 132

Academic Freedom

I 9

Authority

I 141

Agnosticism

I 17

Axiomatization

I 162

Alchemy

I 27

Baconianism

I 172

Alienation in Christian Theology

I 34

Balance of Power

I 179

Alienation in Hegel and Marx

I 37

Baroque in Literature

I 188

Allegory in Literary History

I 41

Theories of Beauty to the Mid-Nineteenth

Ambiguity as Aesthetic Principle

I 48

Analogy in Early Greek Thought

I 60

Analogy in Patristic and Medieval Thought

I 64

Behaviorism

I 214

Analogy of the Body Politic

I 67

Biological Conceptions in Antiquity

I 229

Anarchism

I 70

Biological Homologies and Analogies

I 236

Biological Models

I 242

Buddhism

I 247

Ancients and Modems in the Eighteenth Century

Century

I 195

Theories of Beauty since the Mid-

I 76

Nineteenth Century

I 207

Anthropomorphism in Science

I 87

Antinomy of Pure Reason

I 91

Casuistry

I 257

Appearance and Reality

I 94

Catharsis

I 264

I 99

Causation

I 270

Causation in History

I 279

Causation in Islamic Thought

I 286

Causation in Law

I 289

Causation in the Seventeenth Century

I 294

Art and Play Art for Art’s Sake

I 108

Association of Ideas

I 111

Astrology Atomism: Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century

I 118

I 126

xvii

LIST OF ARTICLES Causation in the Seventeenth Century, Final Causes Certainty in Seventeenth-Century Thought

I 304

Certainty since the Seventeenth Century

I 312

Chain of Being

I 325

Chance

I 335

Chance Images

I 340

China in Western Thought and Culture

I 353

Christianity in History

I 373

Church as an Institution

I 412

Modernism in the Christian Church

I 418

The City

I 427

Civil Disobedience

I 434

Class

I 441

Classicism in Literature

I 449

Classification of the Arts

I 456

Classification of the Sciences

I 462

Sense of the Comic

I 467

Conservation of Natural Resources

I 470

Conservatism

I 477

C onstitutionalism

I 485

XV111

I 577

Crisis in History

I 589

Literary Criticism

I 596

Cultural Development in Antiquity

I 607

Culture and Civilization in Modern Times

I 613

Cycles

I 621

Cynicism

I 627

Death and Immortality

I 634

Deism

I 646

Democracy

I 652

Demonology

I 667

Design Argument

I 670

Despotism

Continuity and Discontinuity in Nature and Knowledge

Creativity in Art I 300

I 492

Cosmic Fall

I 504

Cosmic Images

II 1

Determinism in History

II 18

Determinism in Theology: Predestination

II 25

Double Truth

II 31

Dualism in Philosophy and Religion

II 38

Economic History

II 44

Economic Theory of Natural Liberty

II 61

Education

II 71

Empathy

H 85

Enlightenment

II 89

The Counter-Enlightenment

II 100

I 51,3

Entropy

II 112

Cosmic Voyages

I 524

Environment

II 120

Cosmology from Antiquity to 1850

I 535

Environment and Culture

H 127

Cosmology since 1850

I 554

Epicureanism and Free Will

II 134

Creation in Religion

I 571

Equality

II 138

LIST OF ARTICLES Equity in Law and Ethics

II 148

Harmony or Rapture in Music

II 388

Eschatology

H 154

Health and Disease

II 395

Problem of Evil

II 161

Hegelian Political and Religious Ideas

II 407

Evolution of Literature

II 169

Heresy in the Middle Ages

II 416

Evolutionism

II 174

Heresy, Renaissance and Later

II 424

Existentialism

II 189

Hermeticism

II 431

Hierarchy and Order

II 434

Historical and Dialectical Materialism

II 450

Historicism

II 456

Historiography

II 464

Experimental Science and Mechanics in the Middle Ages

II 196

Expressionism in Literature

II 206

Faith, Hope, and Charity

II 209

Form in the History of Aesthetics

II 216

Fortune, Fate, and Chance

II 225

The Influence of Ideas on Ancient Greek Historiography

II 499

Free Will and Determinism

II 236

Holy (The Sacred)

II 511

Free Will in Theology

II 242

Humanism in Italy

II 515

Legal Concept of Freedom

II 248

Iconography

II 524

Freedom of Speech in Antiquity

11 252

Idea

II 542

Game Theory

II 263

Ideal in Philosophy from the Renaissance to 1780

II 549

General Will

II 275 Ideology

II 552

Genetic Continuity

II 281

Ideology of Soviet Communism

II 559

Genius from the Renaissance to 1770

II 293

Impiety in the Classical World

II 564

Genius: Individualism in Art and Artists

II 297

Impressionism in Art

II 567

Musical Genius

II 312 Imprinting and Learning Early in Life

II 583

Gnosticism

II 326 Indeterminacy in Physics

II 586

Types of Individualism

II 594

Infinity

II 604

II 617 II 622

Idea of God from Prehistory to the Middle Ages

II 331

Idea of God, 1400-1800

II 346

Idea of God since 1800

II 354

Concept of Gothic

II 366

Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics (Lamarckian)

Happiness and Pleasure

II 374

Inheritance through Pangenesis

xix

LIST OF ARTICLES Irony

II 626

Marxist Revisionism: From Bernstein to Modem Forms

Irrationalism in the History of Philosophy

II 634

Islamic Conception of Intellectual Life

II 638

Justice

II 652

Mathematics in Cultural History

Study of Language

II 659

Changing Concepts of Matter from

Ancient Greek Ideas of Law

II 673

III 161

Relativity of Standards of Mathematical Rigor

Antiquity to Newton

III 170 III 177

III 185

Metaphor in Philosophy

III 196

Metaphor in Religious Discourse

III 201

Metaphysical Imagination

III 208

Millenarianism

III 223

Mimesis

III 225

Moral Sense

III 230

Motif

III 235

Motif in Literature: The Faust Theme

III 244

Literary Attitudes Toward Mountains

IH 253

Music and Science

III 260

Music as a Demonic Art

III 264

III 73

Music as a Divine Art

III 267

Literary Paradox

III 76

Myth in Antiquity

III 272

Literature and Its Cognates

III 81

Myth in Biblical Times

III 275

Longevity

III 89

Myth in the Middle Ages and the

Love

III 94

Ancient Roman Ideas of Law

II 685

Common Law

II 691

Concept of Law

III 1

Due Process in Law

III 6

Equal Protection in Law

III 10

Natural Law and Natural Rights

III 13

Legal Precedent

III 27

Legal Responsibility

III 33

Liberalism

III 36

Linguistics

III 61

Linguistic Theories in British SeventeenthCentury Philosophy

Loyalty

III 108

Machiavellism

III 116

Macrocosm and Microcosm

III 126

Renaissance

III 286

Myth in English Literature: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

III 294

Myth in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

III 300

Myth in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

III 307

Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer

xx

Marxism

III 131

Medieval and Renaissance Ideas of Nation

III 318

III 146

Nationalism

III 324

LIST OF ARTICLES Naturalism in Art

III 339

Nature

III 346

Necessity

III 351

Neo-Classicism in Art

III 362

Neo-Platonism

III 371

Newton and the Method of Analysis

III 378

Positivism in the Twentieth Century (Logical Empiricism) Pragmatism

III 545

HI 551

Pre-Platonic Conceptions of Human Nature III 570 Primitivism

HI 577

Primitivism in the Eighteenth Century

III 598

Probability: Objective Theory

III 605

III 391

Progress in Classical Antiquity

III 623

Number

III 399

Progress in the Modern Era

HI 633

Optics and Vision

III 407

Property

HI 650

Organicism

III 421

Prophecy in Hebrew Scripture

III 657

Oriental Ideas in American Thought

III 427

Prophecy in the Middle Ages

III 664

Ethics of Peace

III 440

Protest Movements

HI 670

International Peace

III 448

Psychological Ideas in Antiquity

Perennial Philosophy

III 457

Psychological Schools in European Thought

IV 10

Perfectibility of Man

III 463

Psychological Theories in American Thought

IV 16

Periodization in History

III 476

Pythagorean Doctrines to 300 B.C.

IV 30

Periodization in Literary History

III 481

Pythagorean Harmony of the Universe

IV 38

Philanthropy

III 486

Ramism

IV 42

Pietism

III 493

Rationality among the Greeks and Romans

IV 46

Rhetoric and Literary Theory in Platonism

III 495

Realism in Literature

IV 51

Platonism in Philosophy and Poetry

III 502 Recapitulation

IV 56

Platonism in the Renaissance

III 508 Reformation

IV 60

Platonism since the Enlightenment

III 515

Relativism in Ethics

IV 70

Newton’s Opticks and Eighteenth-Century Imagination

Poetry and Poetics from Antiquity to the

IV 1

Mid-Eighteenth Century

III 525

Relativity

IV 74

Positivism in Europe to 1900

III 532

Origins of Religion

IV 92

Positivism in Latin America

III 539

Ritual in Religion

IV 99

xxi

LIST OF ARTICLES Ethics of Stoicism

IV 319

Structuralism

IV 322

IV 109

Style in Literature

TV 330

Religious Toleration

IV 112

Sublime in External Nature

IV 333

Idea of Renaissance

IV 121

Symbol and Symbolism in Literature

IV 337

Renaissance Humanism

IV 129

Symmetry and Asymmetry

IV 345

Renaissance Idea of the Dignity of Man

IV 136

Taste in the History of Aesthetics from

Renaissance Literature and Historiography

IV 147

Revolution

IV 152

Rhetoric after Plato

IV 167

Right and Good

IV 173

Theodicy

IV 378

Romanticism in Literature

IV 187

Theriophily

IV 384

Romanticism (ca. 1780-ca. 1830)

IV 198

Time

IV 389

Romanticism in Political Thought

IV 205

Time and Measurement

IV 398

Romanticism in Post-Kantian Philosophy

IV 208

Totalitarianism

IV 406

Satire

IV 211

Sense of the Tragic

IV 411

Victorian Sensibility and Sentiment

IV 217

Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism

IV 417

Sin and Salvation

IV 224

Uniformitarianism in Linguistics

IV 423

Skepticism in Antiquity

IV 234

Unity of Science from Plato to Kant

IV 431

Skepticism in Modern Thought

IV 240

Universal Man

IV 437

Social Contract

IV 251

Utilitarianism

IV 444

Utility and Value in Economic Thought

IV 450

Utopia

IV 458

Religion and Science in the Nineteenth Century

IV 106

Religious Enlightenment in American Thought

the Renaissance to 1770 Technology

IV 353 IV 357

Temperance (Sophrosyne) and the Canon of

Social Democracy in Germany and Revisionism

XXii

IV 263

the Cardinal Virtues

IV 365

Formal Theories of Social Welfare

IV 276

Socialism from Antiquity to Marx

IV 284

Ut pictura poesis

IV 465

Space

IV 295

Virtu in and since the Renaissance

IV 476

Spontaneous Generation

IV 307

Virtuoso

IV 486

The State'

IV 312

Volksgeist

IV 490

LIST OF ARTICLES Vox populi

IV 496

Witchcraft

IV 521

War and Militarism

IV 500

Social Attitudes Towards Women

IV 523

Welfare State

IV 509

Work

IV 530

Wisdom of the Fool

IV 515

Zeitgeist

IV 535

xxm

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Listed below are the contributors to the Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Each author’s name is followed by his institutional affiliation at the time of publication and the titles of articles written. The symbol f indicates that an author is deceased.

NICOLA ABBAGNANO. Professor of the History of

Philosophy,

University

of

Turin.

Renaissance

Humanism.

H. B. ACTON. Professor, University of Edinburgh. Hegelian Political and Religious Ideas.

JOSEPH AGASSI. Professor of Philosophy and His¬ tory of Science, Boston University and Tel Aviv Uni¬ versity. Anthropomorphism in Science.

A. OWEN ALDRIDGE. Editor, Comparative Liter¬ ature Studies, University of Illinois. Ancients and Mod¬ erns in the Eighteenth Century; Primitivism in the Eighteenth Century.

A. HILARY ARMSTRONG. Gladstone Professor of

Greek, University of Liverpool. Neo-Platonism.

KENNETH J. ARROW. Professor of Economics, Harvard University. Formal Theories of Social Wel¬ fare.

STUART ATKINS. Professor of German, University

of California at Santa Barbara. Motif in Literature: The Faust Theme.

EDWARD G. BALLARD. Professor of Philosophy,

Tulane University. Sense of the Comic; Sense of the Tragic.

D. M. BALME. Professor, University of London.

Biological Conceptions in Antiquity. MOSHE BARASCH. Hebrew University. The City.

FREDERICK M. BARNARD. Professor, University of Western Ontario. Culture and Civilization in Mod¬ em Times.

FELICE BATTAGLIA. Professor, University of

Bologna. Work.

FRANKLIN L. BAUMER. Randolph W. Townsend

Jr. Professor of History, Yale University. Romanticism (ca. 1780 to ca. 1830).

MONROE C. BEARDSLEY. Professor, Temple

University.

Theories

Nineteenth Century.

of

Beauty

since

the

Mid-

LEWIS WHITE BECK. Burbank Professor of In¬

tellectual

and

Moral

Philosophy,

University

of

Rochester. Antinomy of Pure Reason.

ISAIAH BERLIN. President of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. The Counter-Enlightenment.

BERNARD BEROFSKY. Associate Professor of Philosophy,

Columbia

University.

Free

Will

and

Determinism.

PETER A. BERTOCCI. Borden Parker Bowne Pro¬

fessor of Philosophy, Boston University. Creation in Religion.

JAN BIALOSTOCKI. Professor of Art History,

University of Warsaw; Curator, National Museum in Warsaw. Iconography.

ROBERT BLANCHE. Honorary Professor, Univer¬

sity of Toulouse. Axiomatization. GEORGE BOAS. Professor Emeritus of the History of Philosophy, The Johns Hopkins University. Cycles; Idea; Macrocosm and Microcosm; Nature; Primitivism; Theriophily; Vox populi.

SALOMON BOCHNER. Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, Princeton University; Professor of Math¬ ematics and Chairman of the Department, Rice Uni¬ versity. Continuity and Discontinuity in Nature and Knowledge; Infinity; Mathematics in Cultural History; Space; Symmetry and Asymmetry. KENNETH E. BOULDING. Professor of Econom¬ ics, University of Colorado. Economic Theory of Natu¬ ral Liberty.

KARL DIETRICH BRACHER. Professor of Politi¬

cal Science and Contemporary History, University of Bonn. Totalitarianism.

S. G. F. BRANDON.f Church as an Institution; Idea

of God from Prehistory to the Middle Ages; Origins of Religion; Ritual in Religion; Sin and Salvation.

ASA BRIGGS. Professor of History and ViceChancellor, University of Sussex. Welfare State.

TEDDY BRUNIUS. Professor, Institute of Aes¬ thetics, University of Uppsala. Catharsis.

XXV

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS HERBERT BUTTERFIELD. Hon. Fellow of Peterhouse and Emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge. Balance of Power; Christianity in History; Historiography.

MILIC CAPEK. Professor of Philosophy, Graduate School, Boston University. Time.

D. S. L. CARDWELL. University of Manchester. Technology.

PETER CAWS. Professor of Philosophy, Hunter College and Graduate Center, City University of New York. Structuralism.

W. OWEN CHADWICK. Regius Professor of Mod¬ ern History, University of Cambridge. Religion and Science in the Nineteenth Century.

JACQUES CHORON.f Death and Immortality. VINCENZO CIOFFARI. Visiting Professor and Scholar-in-Residence, Boston University. Fortune, Fate, and Chance.

THOMAS COLE. Professor of Greek and Latin, Yale University. Cultural Development in Antiquity.

ROSALIE L. COLIE. Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University. Literary Paradox.

JAMES COLLINS. Professor of Philosophy, Saint Louis University. Idea of God, 1400-1800.

LEWIS A. COSER. Distinguished Professor of Soci¬ ology, State University of New York at Stony Brook. Class.

THOMAS A. COWAN. Professor of Law, Rutgers, The State University, Newark. Causation in Law.

MERLE CURTI. Professor Emeritus of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Philanthropy; Psy¬ chological Theories in American Thought.

Avalon

Foundation

Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University. The¬ ories of Beauty to the Mid-Nineteenth Century.

E. R. DODDS. Professor, University of Oxford. Prog¬ ress in Classical Antiquity.

ALAN DONAGAN. Professor of Philosophy, Uni¬ versity of Chicago. Determinism in History.

WILLIS DONEY. Professor of Philosophy, Dart¬ mouth College. Causation in the Seventeenth Century.

JACQUES DROZ. Professor, Sorbonne. Romanti¬ cism in Political Thought.

RENE DUBOS. Professor, Rockefeller University. Environment.

WAYNE DYNES. Assistant Professor, Columbia University. Concept of Gothic.

ABRAHAM EDEL. Distinguished Professor of Phi¬ losophy, Graduate Center, City University of New York. Happiness and Pleasure; Right and Good.

MIRCEA ELIADE. University of Chicago. Myth in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

JULIUS A. ELIAS. Associate Professor of Philoso¬ phy, City College, City University of New York. Art and Play.

ALVAR

ELLEGARD.

Gothenburg

University.

Study of Language.

ROGER L. EMERSON. The Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. Deism; Utopia.

AUSTIN FARRER.f Free Will in Theology. HERBERT FEIGL. Regents’ Professor of Philoso¬ phy Emeritus, University of Minnesota; Director, Min¬ nesota Center for the Philosophy of Science (1953-71).

MARY DALY. Associate Professor of Theology,

Positivism in the Twentieth Century (Logical Empiri¬ cism).

Boston College. Faith, Hope, and Charity; Social Atti¬

BLOSSOM FEINSTEIN. Assistant Professor of

tudes Towards Women.

RAYMOND F. DASMANN. Senior Ecologist, In¬ ternational Union for the Conservation of Nature. Conservation of Natural Resources.

ENRICO DE ANGELIS. University of Pisa. Causa¬ tion in the Seventeenth Century, Final Causes.

ALLEN G. DEBUS. Professor of the History of Science, University of Chicago (The Morris Fishbein Center for the Study of the History of Science and Medicine, Department of History). Alchemy.

PHILLIP DE LACY. Professor of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Skepticism in Antiquity.

ALEXANDER PASSERIN D’ENTREVES. Profes sor of Political Theory, University of Turin. The State.

DENIS DE ROUGEMONT. Director, Graduate Institute for European Studies, Geneva. Love.

xxvi

HERBERT DIECKMANN.

R. W. M. DIAS. Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. Legal Concept of Freedom.

English, C. W. Post College, Long Island University. Hermeticism.

BURTON FELDMAN. Professor, University of Denver. Myth in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.

DAVID FELLMAN. Vilas Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Academic Freedom; Constitutionalism.

FREDERICK FERRE. Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy, Dickinson College. Design Argument; Metaphor in Religious Discourse.

GRETCHEN LUDKE FINNEY. Harmony or Rap¬ ture in Music.

JOHN FISHER. Professor of Philosophy, Temple University. Platonism in Philosophy and Poetry.

ANGUS FLETCHER. Professor of English, State University of New York at Buffalo. Allegory in Literary History.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ELIZABETH FLOWER. University of Pennsyl¬ vania. Ethics of Peace.

PAUL FORIERS. Professor, and Dean of the Law School, University of Brussels. Natural Laiv and Natu¬

STEPHEN R. GRAUBARD. Professor of History, Brown University. Democracy.

MOSHE

GREENBERG.

Professor

of

Bible,

Hebrew University. Prophecy in Hebrew Scripture.

G. M. A. GRUBE. University of Toronto. Rhetoric

ral Rights.

MORRIS D. FORKOSCH. Professor, University of San Diego Law School. Justice; Due Process in Law; Equal Protection in Law.

and Literary Theory in Platonism.

GERALD J. GRUMAN, M.D. Special Research Fellow, Wayne State University; Center for Studies of

LIA FORMIGARI. Professor, Philosophy of Lan¬ guage, University of Messina. Chain of Being; Linguis¬

Suicide

Prevention;

National

Institute

of

Mental

Health. Longevity.

tic Theories in British Seventeenth-Century Philosophy.

HENRY GUERLAC. Goldwin Smith Professor of

WILLIAM K. FRANKENA. Professor of Philoso¬

the History of Science, Cornell University. Newton

phy, University of Michigan. Education.

and the Method of Analysis.

WOLFGANG G. FRIEDMANN, f Property. DAVID FURLEY. Princeton University. Rationality

ophy, Columbia University. Romanticism in PostKanttan Philosophy.

among the Greeks and Romans.

JOAN KELLY GADOL. City College, City Univer¬

JAMES HAAR. Professor of Music, New York Uni¬ versity. Pythagorean Harmony of the Universe.

sity of New York. Universal Man.

PATRICK GARDINER. Fellow and Tutor of Phi¬ losophy,

JAMES GUTMANN. Professor Emeritus of Philos¬

Magdalen College, University of Oxford.

DAVID G. HALE. Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Brockport. Analogy of the Body Politic.

Causation in History.

CHARLES EDWARD GAUSS. Formerly Elton

REINHOLD HAMMERSTEIN. Professor, Direc¬

Professor of Philosophy, George Washington Univer¬

tor of the Music Seminar, University of Heidelberg.

sity. Empathy.

Music as a Demonic Art; Music as a Divine Art.

HILDA GEIRINGER. Professor Emeritus of Math¬

FREDERICK HARD. Professor of English Litera¬

ematics, Harvard University. Probability: Objective

ture, University of California at Santa Cruz. Myth in

Theory.

English Literature: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Cen¬

NICHOLAS

GEORGESCU-ROEGEN.

Distin¬

guished Professor of Economics, Vanderbilt University.

turies.

DENYS HAY. Professor of Medieval History, Uni¬

versity of Edinburgh. Idea of Renaissance.

Utility and Value in Economic Thought. Emeritus,

R. W. HEPBURN. Professor of Philosophy, Univer¬

Washington University and University of Cologne.

sity of Edinburgh. Cosmic Fall. PETER HERDE. Professor of History and Director

DIETRICH

GERHARD.

Professor

Periodization in History.

FELIX GILBERT. Professor, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study. Machiavellism; Revolution.

LANGDON GILKEY. Professor of Theology, Di¬

of the Historical Seminar, University of Frankfurt. Humanism in Italy.

RONALD HILTON. Professor, Stanford University;

Executive Director, California Institute of Interna¬

vinity School, University of Chicago. Idea of God since

tional Studies. Positivism in Latin America.

1800. MORRIS GINSBERG, f Progress in the Modern Era. CLARENCE J. GLACKEN. Professor of Geogra¬

guistics, University of Pennsylvania. Linguistics.

HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD. Professor of Lin¬ BANESH HOFFMANN. Professor of Mathematics,

phy, University of California at Berkeley. Environment

Queens College, City University of New York. Relativ¬

and Culture.

ity.

ogy, State University of New York at Stony Brook.

sity of Uppsala. Cynicism.

BENTLEY GLASS. Distinguished Professor of Biol¬

Genetic Continuity.

THOMAS A. GOUDGE. Professor of Philosophy,

University of Toronto. Evolutionism. JOHN GRAHAM. Associate Professor, University of Virginia. Ut pictura poesis. ROBERT M. GRANT. Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, Divinity School, University of Chicago. Gnosticism.

RAGNAR HOISTAD. Assistant Professor, Univer¬

DAVID LARRIMORE HOLLAND. Professor of

Church History, McCormick Theological Seminary. Heresy, Renaissance and Later. SIDNEY HOOK. Professor Emeritus, New York University. Marxism.

PAMELA M. HUBY. Senior Lecturer in Philosophy,

University Will.

of

Liverpool.

Epicureanism

and

Free

xxvii

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS GRAHAM HUGHES. Professor of Law, New York University. Concept of Law.

GEORG G. IGGERS. Professor of History, State University of New York at Buffalo. Historicism.

DAVID IRWIN. Head of Department of History of Art, University of Aberdeen. Neo-Classicism in Art.

CARL T. JACKSON. Associate Professor of History, University of Texas, El Paso. Oriental Ideas in Ameri¬ can Thought.

MAX JAMMER. Professor of Physics, Bar-Ilan Uni¬ versity. Entropy; Indeterminacy in Physics.

H. W. JANSON. Professor of Fine Arts, New York University. Chance Images.

IREDELL JENKINS. University of Alabama. Art for Art’s Sake.

HAROLD J. JOHNSON. Professor of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario. Changing Concepts of Matter from Antiquity to Newton.

DAVID JORAVSKY. Professor of History, North¬ western University. Inheritance of Acquired Charac¬ teristics (Lamarckian).

CHARLES H. KAHN. Professor of Philosophy,

ELISABETH LABROUSSE. Maitre de Recherche, Centre de la Recherche Scientifique. Religious Toler¬ ation.

DONALD F. LACH. B. E. Schmitt Professor of Modern History, University of Chicago.

China in

Western Thought and Culture. SANFORD A. LAKOFF. Professor of Political Sci¬ ence, University of Toronto. Socialism from Antiquity to Marx.

GORDON LEFF. Professor of History, University of York. Heresy in the Middle Ages; Prophecy in the Middle Ages.

ARTHUR LEHNING. International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Anarchism.

SHIRLEY ROBIN LETWIN. Department of Phi¬ losophy, London School of Economics. Certainty since the Seventeeth Century.

HARRY LEVIN. Irving Babbitt Professor of Com¬ parative Literature, Harvard University. Motif.

MICHAEL LEVIN. Lecturer, Department of Polit¬

University of Pennsylvania. Pre-Platonic Conceptions

ical Science, University College of Wales. Social Con¬

of Human Nature.

tract.

WALTER KAISER. Professor of English and Com¬

R. C. LEWONTIN. Louis Block Professor of Bio¬

parative Literature, Harvard University. Wisdom of

logical Sciences, University of Chicago. Biological

the Fool.

Models.

ROBERT H. KARGON. Associate Professor of the History of Science, The Johns Hopkins University. Atomism in the Seventeenth Century.

STUART A. KAUFFMAN, M.D. Assistant Profes¬ sor, Department of Theoretical Biology and Depart¬

GEORGE LICHTHEIM. Historical and Dialectical Materialism.

G. E. R. LLOYD. University Lecturer, University of Cambridge. Analogy in Early Greek Thought.

LEROY E. LOEMKER. Professor Emeritus of Phi¬

ment of Medicine, University of Chicago. Biological

losophy,

Homologies and Analogies.

Theodicy.

MAURICE KENDALL. Chairman, Scientific Con¬ trol Systems, London. Chance.

ALVIN B. KERNAN. Professor of English, Yale University. Satire.

R. K. KINDERSLEY. St. Anthony’s College, Uni¬ versity of Oxford. Marxist Revisionism from Bernstein to Modern Forms.

ROBERT M. KINGDON. Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Determinism in Theology: Predestination.

FRANK H. KNIGHT, f Economic History. NORMAN D. KNOX.f Irony. HANS KOHN.f Nationalism. MILTON R. KONVITZ. Professor of Law and Pro¬ fessor of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell Uni¬ versity. Equity in Law and Ethics; Loyalty.

STEPHAN KORNER. Professor of Philosophy, University of Bristol and Yale University. Necessity.

xxviii

WARREN F. KUEHL. Professor of History, Uni¬ versity of Akron. International Peace.

LEONARD KRIEGER. University Professor, Uni¬ versity of Chicago. Authority.

Emory

University.

Perennial

Philosophy;

ANTHONY A. LONG. Reader in Greek and Latin, University College, London. Psyclwlogical Ideas in Antiquity; Ethics of Stoicism.

EDWARD E. LOWINSKY. Ferdinand Schevill Dis¬ tinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago. Musical Genius.

STEVEN LUKES. Fellow and Tutor in Politics, Balliol College, University of Oxford. Types of Indi¬ vidualism.

DAVID McLELLAN. Senior Lecturer in Politics, University of Kent. Alienation in Hegel and Marx.

ROBERT McRAE. Professor, Department of Phi¬ losophy, University of Toronto. Unity of Science from Plato to Kant.

EDWARD H. MADDEN. Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York at Buffalo. Civil Disobe¬ dience.

WILLIAM A. MADDEN. Professor of English, University of Minnesota. Sentiment.

Victorian Sensibility and

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ERNST MORITZ MANASSE. Chairman, Depart¬

and Comparative Literature, Columbia University.

ment of Latin and Philosophy, North Carolina Central

Cosmic Voyages; Literary Attitudes Toward Mountains;

University. Platonism since the Enlightenment.

Newton’s Opticks and Eighteenth-Century Imagina¬

ANTHONY MANSER. Professor of Philosophy, University of Southampton. Existentialism.

MICHAEL E. MARMURA. Professor, Department of Islamic Studies, University of Toronto. Causation

tion; Sublime in External Nature; Virtuoso.

KAI NIELSEN. Professor of Philosophy, University of Calgary. Agnosticism.

HELEN F. NORTH. Professor of Classics, Swarthmore College. Temperance (Sophrosyne) and the Canon

in Islamic Thought.

GERHARD MASUR. Professor Emeritus of His¬ tory, Sweet Briar College and University of Berlin.

of the Cardinal Virtues. FRITZ NOVOTNY. Professor, formerly Director of

Crisis in History.

Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna. Naturalism in Art.

ARMAND MAURER. Professor of Philosophy,

WALTER

JACKSON

ONG,

S.J.

Professor

of

Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and Univer¬

English and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry,

sity of Toronto. Analogy in Patristic and Medieval

Saint Louis University. Ramism.

Thought.

ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO. University College,

London. Freedom of Speech in Antiquity; Impiety in

D. H. MONRO. Professor of Philosophy, Monash University. Relativism in Ethics; Utilitarianism.

MORAN.

GIAN NAPOLEONE GIORDANO ORSINI. Pro¬ fessor of Comparative Literature, University of Wis¬

the Classical World.

MICHAEL

JANE OPPENHEIMER. Class of 1897 Professor of Biology, Bryn Mawr College. Recapitulation.

Lecturer

in

Philosophy,

Chairman of Intellectual History, School of European Studies, University of Sussex. Metaphysical Imagina¬ tion.

OSKAR MORGENSTERN. Professor of Econom¬

ics, New York University. Game Theory.

consin, Madison. Organicism. MARTIN OSTWALD. Professor of Classics, Swarthmore College and University of Pennsylvania. Ancient Greek Ideas of Law.

WILLARD GURDON OXTOBY. Professor of Reli

gious Studies and Near Eastern Studies, University of Toronto. Holy (The Sacred), CLAUDE V. PALISCA. Professor of the History of

ophy, University of California at Los Angeles. Legal

Music, Yale University. Music and Science. R. R. PALMER. Professor of History, Yale Univer¬

Responsibility.

sity. Equality.

Cosmology since 1850.

Reader in the History of Social Thought, University

HERBERT MORRIS. Professor of Law and Philos¬

LLOYD MOTZ. Professor, Columbia University. FERNAND-LUCIEN MUELLER. Professor, Uni¬

versity of Geneva; Secretaire general des Rencontres Internationales

de Geneve;

Member of Executive

Council, Societe Europeenne de Culture. Psychological Schools in European Thought. THOMAS MUNRO. Professor Emeritus of Art, Case Western Reserve University; formerly Curator of Education, Cleveland Museum of Art. Impressionism in Art.

MILTON C. NAHM. Professor of Philosophy,

Leslie Clark Professor of the Humanities, Bryn Mawr College. Creativity in Art.

HAJIME NAKAMURA. University of Tokyo. Bud¬

dhism.

SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR. Professor of Philosophy

and Dean, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Tehran University. Islamic Conception of Intellectual Life.

JOHN CHARLES NELSON. Professor, Columbia University. Platonism in the Renaissance.

J. P. NETTL.f Social Democracy in Germany and R /?•*

c inti i ctpi

MARJORIE HOPE NICOLSON. William Peterfield Trent Professor Emeritus, Department of English

HELLMUT O. PAPPE. Professor Emeritus of Law,

of Sussex. Enlightenment. JOHN PASSMORE. Professor of Philosophy, Re¬ search School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Perfectibility of Man, C. A. PATRIDES. Reader in English Literature, University of York. Hierarchy and Order. JAROSLAV PELIKAN. Professor of Religious Stud¬ ies, Yale University. Pietism.

STEPHEN C. PEPPER, f Metaphor in Philosophy. CHAIM PERELMAN. Professor, University of

Brussels; formerly Dean of the School of Philosophy and Letters. Natural Law and Natural Rights.

R. S. PETERS. Professor of Philosophy of Edu¬ cation, University of London Institute of Education. Behaviorism.

SIMONE PETREMENT. Agregee de Philosophic,

Docteur es Lettres, Conservateur k la Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Dualism in Philosophy and Religion.

JAMES

PHILIP.

Dean

of

Arts

and

Science,

Bishop’s University. Pythagorean Doctrines to 300 b.c.

MARTIN PINE. Assistant Professor of History, Queens College, City University of New York. Double Truth.

xxix

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS DAVID PINGREE. Professor, Brown University. Astrology.

JOHN PLAMENATZ. Liberalism. RICHARD H. POPKIN. Professor of Philosophy, Lehman College, City University of New York. Skepti¬ cism in Modern Thought.

GAINES POST. Professor Emeritus of History, Princeton University. Ancient Roman Ideas of Law; Medieval and Renaissance Ideas of Nation.

D. D. RAPHAEL. Professor of Philosophy, Univer¬ sity of Reading. Moral Sense.

JOHN RATTE. Associate Professor of History, Am¬ herst College. Modernism in the Christian Church.

MOSTAFA REJAI. Professor of Political Science, Miami University. Ideology.

MELVIN RICHTER. Professor of Political Science, Hunter College and Graduate Center, City University of New York. Despotism.

VASCO RONCHI. Professor, President of National Institute of Optics, Arcetri. Optics and Vision.

THEODORE ROPP. Professor of History, Duke University. War and Militarism.

EDWARD ROSEN. City College, City University of New York. Cosmology from Antiquity to 1850.

PAOLO ROSSI. Professor, Universita degli Studi di Firenze. Baconianism.

NATHAN ROTENSTREICH. Ahad Haam Profes¬ sor of Philosophy,

Hebrew University.

Volksgeist;

Zeitgeist.

R. A. SAYCE. Reader in French Literature, Worces¬ ter College, University of Oxford. Style in Literature.

WALTER SCHMITHALS. Eschatology. HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER. Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Columbia University and Claremont Graduate School. Religious Enlightenment in Ameri¬ can Thought.

PIERRE-MAXIME SCHUHL. Professor, Sorbonne; Membre de L’Institut de France. Myth in Antiquity.

CHRISTOPH J. SCRIBA. Professor, Lehrstuhl fiir Geschichte der exakten Wissenschaften und der Technik an der Technischen, University of Berlin. Number.

JERROLD E. SEIGEL. Associate Professor of His¬ tory, Princeton University. Virtu in and

since the

Renaissance.

JEAN SEZNEC. Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford. Myth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

JUDITH N. SHKLAR. Harvard University. General Will.

WALTER SIMON, f Positivism in Europe to 1900. W. SLUCKIN. Professor of Psychology, University of Leicester. Imprinting and Learning Early in Life.

T. B. SMITH. Professor, University of Edinburgh. XXX

Legal Precedent.

BORIS SOUVARINE. Institut d’Histoire Sociale. Ideology of Soviet Communism.

PIERRE SPEZIALI. Professor of Mathematics, College Voltaire de Geneve; also associated with Uni¬ versity of Geneva. Classification of the Sciences.

LEWIS W. SPITZ. Professor of History, Stanford University. Reformation.

WERNER STARK. Professor of Sociology, Fordham University. Casuistry.

PETER N. STEARNS. Professor, Rutgers, The State University, New Brunswick. Protest Movements.

PETER STEIN. Regius Professor of Civil Law, Uni¬ versity of Cambridge. Common Law.

TOM TASHIRO. City College, City University of New York. Ambiguity as Aesthetic Principle.

W. TATARKIEWICZ. Professor, University of War¬ saw; Member of Polish Academy of Sciences and Let¬ ters; Visiting Mills Professor, University of California at Berkeley (1967-68). Classification of the Arts; Form in the History of Aesthetics; Mimesis.

OWSEI TEMKIN. Professor Emeritus of the His¬ tory of Medicine, The Johns Hopkins University. Health and Disease.

E. N. TIGERSTEDT. Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Stockholm. Poetry and Poetics from Antiquity to the Mid-Eighteenth Century.

GIORGIO TONELLI. Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York at Binghamton. Genius from the Renaissance to 1770; Ideal in Philosophy from the Renaissance to 1780; Taste in the History of Aes¬ thetics from the Renaissance to 1770.

HELEN P. TRIMPI. Lecturer in English, Stanford University. Demonology; Witchcraft.

CHARLES TRINKAUS. University of Michigan. Renaissance Idea of the Dignity of Man.

RADOSLAV A. TSANOFF. McManis Professor of Philosophy, Rice University. Problem of Evil.

ERNEST TUVESON. Professor of English, Univer¬ sity of California at Berkeley. Alienation in Christian Theology; Millenarianism.

HELENE L. TUZET. Doctor in Comparative Lit¬ erature, University of Poitiers. Cosmic Images.

FRANCIS LEE UTLEY. Professor of English, Ohio State University. Myth in Biblical Times.

HENRY G. VAN LEEUWEN. Professor of Philoso¬ phy,

Hanover

College.

Certainty

in

Seventeenth-

Century Thought.

A. G. M. VAN MELSEN. Professor of Philos¬ ophy,

President

of

the

University,

University

of

Nijmegen. Atomism: Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century.

ARAM VARTANIAN. Professor of French, New York University. Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer; Spontaneous Generation.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS RUDOLF VIERHAUS. Professor, Director of MaxPlanck-Institut

fiir

Geschichte,

Gottingen.

RENE WELLEK. Sterling Professor of Compara¬

Con¬

tive Literature, Yale University. Raroque in Literature;

KURT VON FRITZ. Professor Emeritus, University

of Literature; Literature and Its Cognates; Periodiza¬

of Munich. The Influence of Ideas on Ancient Greek

tion in Literary History; Realism in Literature; Ro¬

servatism.

Historiography.

PETER VORZIMMER. Professor of History, Tem¬ ple University. Inheritance through Pangenesis.

JEAN WAHL. Professor, Sorbonne. Irrationalism in

manticism in Literature; Symbol and Symbolism in Literature.

RULON WELLS. Yale University. Uniformitarianism in Linguistics.

G. J. WHITROW. University of London. Time and

the History of Philosophy.

WILLIAM A. WALLACE. Professor of History and Philosophy of Science. The Catholic University of America. Experimental Science and Mechanics in the

Measurement.

PHILIP P. WIENER. Editor, Journal of the History of Ideas, Temple University. Pragmatism.

RAYMOND L. WILDER. Professor Emeritus, Uni¬

Middle Ages.

RERNARD

Classicism in Literature; Literary Criticism; Evolution

WEINRERG.

Robert

Maynard

Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Romance Languages, University of Chicago. Rheto¬

versity of Michigan. Relativity of Standards of Mathe¬ matical Rigor.

LEONARD G. WILSON. Professor of the History of Medicine, University of Minnesota. Uniformitari-

ric after Plato.

JULIUS WEINBERG .f Abstraction in the Forma¬

anism and Catastrophism.

RUDOLF WITTKOWER.f Genius: Individualism

tion of Concepts; Causation.

HERBERT WEISINGER. Professor of English,

in Art and Artists.

Dean of the Graduate School, State University of New

JOHN W. YOLTON. Professor and Chairman, De¬

York at Stony Brook. Renaissance Literature and His¬

partment of Philosophy, York University, Toronto. Ap¬

toriography.

pearance and Reality.

ULRICH WEISSTEIN. Professor of German and

ROBERT M. YOUNG. Director, Wellcome Unit for

of Comparative Literature, Indiana University. Ex¬

the History of Medicine, Fellow of King’s College,

pressionism in Literature.

University of Cambridge. Association of Ideas.

NOTE TO THE READER Each article is followed by a list of cross-references to other articles in the Dictionary. Cross-references appearing in bold¬ face type indicate articles which contain particularly significant treatment of a related topic. When appearing as cross-refer¬ ences, titles of articles are often given in abbreviated form. When referring to a group of articles on the same subject, a simple reference is used instead of a listing of all articles in that category. Thus, a cross-reference to “Platonism” is meant to indicate all four articles dealing with Platonism.

XXXI

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DICTIONARY OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

ABSTRACTION IN THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS ABSTRACTION IN THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS

with this particular one. Plato’s insistence that we are acquainted with objects that are nowhere completely realized in the physical world requires a different ac¬

“abstraction” is the usual expression in medi¬

count of our knowledge of such objects, and Plato

eval philosophical terminology for several processes

found the theory of reminiscence the only suitable

distinguished in Aristotle’s writings by different terms,

explanation.

The term

viz., aphairesis (aaipeats) and korismos (xupiopos)

But if there is no doctrine of abstraction in Plato’s

described in different ways. In all probability, it

works, there are passages which might have suggested

was Boethius who introduced the Latin abstractio and

the doctrine to his successor, Aristotle. It is sufficient

abstrahere to translate these Greek nouns and the re¬

to mention here only the passage in the Phaedrus

lated verbs. The main theories of concept formation in Greek

(249B-C) where it is written that “man must needs understand the language of Forms, passing from a

antiquity were those of Democritus, Plato, and Aris¬

plurality of perceptions to a unity gathered together

totle (Beare, 1906). According to all these theories,

by reasoning” (Hackforth, 1952). Since, in the very next

sense perception and intellectual cognition have to be

sentence, we are informed that “this understanding is

distinguished both by their objects and by their nature.

the recollection of those things which our souls beheld

For Democritus and the Atomists, knowledge as well

aforetime . . . ,” the intention of the passage is clear

as sense perception arises from effluvia of atoms which

enough. But the notion that this unity (eV) is somehow

are continually thrown off from the surfaces of physical

connected with a multitude of perceptions might have

objects, and eventually enter the percipient through

been one of the suggestions which led Aristotle to his

the various sense organs. Intellectual cognition depends

doctrine of abstraction.

on finer and subtler effluvia. This theory was further developed by the Epicureans.

It was Aristotle’s view that form and matter are joined in physical objects that made a theory of abstrac¬

The difference between sense objects and the objects

tion both possible and necessary: possible because

of intellectual cognition were also recognized by Plato

forms otherwise could not be known by way of per¬

but accounted for in a very different way. It is gener¬

ception and necessary because now perception is the

ally assumed that Plato adopted the Heraclitean view

only immediate source of cognition. Aristotle uses the

that the physical world is in continuous flux so that

term “abstraction” (afyalpems) in connection with the

it never exhibits stable objects for sensory cognition.

objects of mathematics, which “Platonists” had held

Because we know, for example, the objects of moral

were separate from the material world (Ross, p. 566).

ideals and of mathematics, it was necessary to assume a nonsensory origin of this knowledge. Objects of knowledge really are; objects of sense are perpetually becoming. The objects of intellectual cognition, ac¬ cordingly, must have been stored up in us from a previous existence. Knowledge, properly so-called, is reminiscence. As the Platonic Forms are separate from the physical world of flux, the knowledge of Forms can only be suggested by the approximations to them that the physical world is able temporarily to manifest. The theory, which Plato expressly defended in the Meno (81C), Phaedo (73A), and Phaedrus (247C) and nowhere expressly abandoned, is that we possess knowledge of the Forms from a previous existence, and that so-called learning is really reminiscence. Accordingly, we should not expect to find anything like a doctrine of abstrac¬ tion in Plato’s writings. The need for such a doctrine as we find in Aristotle is occasioned by Aristotle s insistence that the Forms of material things are not separate realities, yet we seem to be able to consider them without considering the matter or without con¬ sidering other concrete features of material things. Separate Forms provide us with difficulties but not

Aristotle maintained that these mathematical features were, in fact, inseparable from material things but could be thought of separately. In the Metaphysics (1060a 28-1061b 31) the process is described as fol¬ lows: in the mathematician’s investigations, he takes away everything that is sensible, e.g., weight and light¬ ness, hardness and softness, heat and cold, and all other sensible contrarieties, and leaves only quantity and continuity in one, two, or three dimensions, as well as the affections (rraOt]) of these quantities. Elsewhere (Post. Anal. 81b 3; De anima 431b 12ff.; Me. Eth. 1142a; De caelo III, 1, 299a 15) we are repeatedly informed that the objects of mathematics are treated as separate but cannot exist separately. It is this for¬ mulation which is repeated throughout the subsequent history of abstraction both by those who follow Aris¬ totle and by those who reject his views. A point here is worthy of remark. The authors from Boethius to modern times speak of abstracting forms (both

accidental

and

mathematical)

from

matter,

whereas Aristotle (as Owens has pointed out) in de¬ scribing mathematical abstraction speaks of taking away the sensible qualities, and leaving only the quan¬ titative features of physical objects.

ABSTRACTION IN THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS Although the process of coming to know the univer¬

in mind. It is, therefore, difficult to understand exactly

sal from repeated perceptions of particulars is not

how the form of anything comes to exist in the soul

called abstraction—Aristotle here uses “separation”

as an essential unity.

(xwptfetj')—there is at least one passage which, indi¬

Two main features, then, characterize Aristotle’s

rectly, connects these two activities (Post. Anal. 81b 3).

view of abstraction: formal aspects of physical reality

In both these cases, induction (e-naycoyt)) is associated

exist in the soul as separate from matter even though

with the process of coming to know the universal,

such a separation is impossible in the physical world

whether mathematical or physical. In the case of

itself. This is true of generic concepts, of mathematical

mathematical abstraction, it is sometimes indicated

aspects of things, and, of course, the specific concepts

that the observed object suggests something which is not actually presented, but the prevailing impression

of things. Cognition occurs when a form exists in the soul.

is that the mathematical features are literally in the

That abstraction need not involve any falsification

object, and are discovered by removing from consid¬

is insisted upon by the medievals, and the first state¬

eration all other sensible qualities.

matician is concerned with the shape and size of objects

in the Parva naturalia is important for the later devel¬

such as the sun or the moon, for example; but he does

opment of the doctrine of abstraction as we find it in

not consider them as limits of natural bodies, or with

medieval writers. The forms of sensible objects without

any properties of shape or size insofar as they are

their matter enter the soul, so that we know objects

aspects of physical objects. On the other hand, he

by the presence of their forms in consciousness. The

separates shape, etc., though without any falsity result¬

form as it exists in the soul is, presumably, numerically

ing from such conceptual separation (Physica II, 2,

different though specifically the same as the form in

193b 33ff.).

the object of perception (De anima III; VIII, 431b

The accounts which have come down concerning

26ff.). The forms of objects existing in the soul are,

the theories of concept-formation of Stoics and Epi¬

Aristotle assumes, the fundamental elements of thought

cureans contain nothing that can properly be described

which are the referents of the verbal symbols of spoken

as a theory of abstraction. Neither of these schools

discourse (De interpretatione I, 16a 3ff; cf. De anima

accepted the form-matter distinction; they both main¬

III, 6, 430a 26-430b 33). So, in many cases at any

tained a materialistic view of nature, and the Stoics,

rate, the general terms of discourse stand for isolable

at least, were nominalists in some sense.

objects of intellectual consideration. There are, how¬

For the Stoics, the main function of reason was the

ever, exceptions to this, the most important of which

grasp of the conclusion of demonstrations such as the

are the analogical or systematically ambiguous terms

existence of gods and their providential activity. Gen¬

of metaphysics. Still, the assumption that verbal terms

eral notions (vovpeva), they maintained, are gained by

usually stand for affections of the soul is one of the

contact or by resemblance; some come from analogy,

important ingredients of the doctrine of abstraction

still others by composition or contrariety. In another

which was later developed by the medieval philoso¬

testimony, general notions are said to arise by way of

phers. There are two doctrines of Aristotle which throw

2

ment of this is to be found in Aristotle. The mathe¬

The description of cognition given in De anima and

enlargement or diminution of what is perceived, or by privation (Diog. Laert. VII, 52-53).

some light on his views about abstraction. One is the

Epicurus and his school, in addition to their atomistic

contention that human cognition first comprehends the

materialism, held that we see, for example, shapes, and

generic features of physical things and only later comes

think of shapes by virtue of the entrance into the body

to the specific differentiae (Physica I, 1). The other is

of something coming from external objects. The efflu¬

the view that the essence of an organism is discovered

ence of atoms coming from the surfaces of physical

regressively by first knowing the activities, then the

objects enters the sense organs and produces images.

powers, and by subsequently discovering the essence

Universal ideas are stored in the mind so that when,

on which such powers depend (De anima II). The

for instance, the word “man” is heard, it calls up the

former doctrine indicates that there are generic con¬

shape stored in the mind. As all this must reduce to

cepts. The latter suggests that the concepts of essences,

a physical pattern, it is clear that all notions are ulti¬

in the case of those of organisms, are really no more

mately derived from perception by contact, analogy,

than conjunctions of powers. But the view that an

resemblance, or conjunction. None of this can be called

essence is an essential unity obviously conflicts with

abstraction.

this, because the coexistence of powers expressed by

Since Plotinus rejected the Aristotelian theory of

a conjunction of formulae could not constitute the sort

sensory cognition, there is no place for a doctrine of

of unity of essence that Aristotle seemed to have had

abstraction in his account of our conceptual knowledge

ABSTRACTION IN THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS (.Enneads IV, 6, 1-3). The same remark holds for Au¬

siders only the resemblance. In this way, the concept

gustine. In his accormt of sensory cognition, the soul

of “man” is abstracted from the perceptions of individ¬

suffers no changes from the sense organs, but is essen¬

uals, and the concept of “animal” from man, horse,

tially active, taking note of changes in the body by

etc. (ibid.).

a kind of vital attention. Hence there can be no taking

Similar views about abstraction are developed by

of a form into the soul from physical nature. An ab¬

the anonymous author of De intellectibus (cf. V. Cousin,

straction, therefore, is out of the question in his view

1859) and it is clear that this general agreement can

of perception. The doctrine that the laws of numbers

be accounted for by the fact that all the schoolmen

and of wisdom are somehow given to human conscious¬

of this period read Boethius, and, perhaps, also by the

ness by interior illumination from a divine source

influence of Abelard.

takes the place of abstraction. As Augustine’s views

The Arabic translations of Aristotle and some of his

on these and other questions were derived from Plo¬

earlier Greek commentators made the doctrine of ab¬

tinus and, indirectly, from Plato, this is to be expected.

straction available to the Islamic and Jewish philoso¬

The commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias, uses the

phers. But there were also translations or epitomes of

phrase e£ afyaipeoecos in describing the process of ob¬

the writings of Plotinus and Proclus and, even when

taining any form in consciousness as separated from

there was no confusion between Neo-Platonic and

the material which it determines in the external world,

Aristotelian views, attempts were made to harmonize

and it is from this source (Alexander, De anima, pp. 107,

Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic doctrine. In particular,

34) that Boethius derived his account of abstraction

the Neo-Platonic system of emanations was grafted

(In Isagogen Porphyrii commenta I, 11).

onto that doctrine of Aristotle which concerned the

According to Boethius, there are many things which

connection of the Agent Intellect to individual human

cannot actually be separated but which are separated

cognitive activities. The Active Intellect in Aristotle's

by the soul and by thought—e.g., no one can actually

psychology was identified with the last Intelligence.

separate a triangle from its material substratum, but

In some of these systems, the illuminative activity of

a person can mentally separate the triangle and its

the active intellect consists in the radiation of forms

properties from matter, and contemplate it. This sepa¬ ration does not involve any falsification because falsifi¬ cation can only occur when something is asserted to exist separately which does not or cannot exist sepa¬ rately. Thus the separation achieved by abstraction is not only not false, but is indispensable to the discovery of truth. This means, we propose, that abstraction provides the concepts which are to be united in affirm¬

into the material world and into the human mind. Attempts to combine this doctrine with the doctrine of abstraction produced strange

consequences.

In

Avicenna’s (Ibn Sina, 980-1037) treatises on psychol¬ ogy, for example, there are various degrees of abstrac¬ tion of forms which correspond to the ascending se¬ quence

of

cognitive

powers,

the

sensitive,

the

imaginative, the estimative, and finally the intellective.

ative propositions which truly state what charac¬

His account of abstraction of sensible forms seems to

teristics things possess. This account of abstraction follows along lines al¬

form of a material object apart from the matter

ready laid down by Aristotle and is repeated, with elaborations, by the logicians of the twelfth century. Thus Abelard tells us that, although matter and form are always together, the mind can consider each sepa¬ rately. Thus abstraction does not falsify because there is no assertion that anything has just the abstracted property and no others. The mind considers only one feature but does not assert its separation in fact from other features. “For the thing does not have only it, but the thing is considered only as having it

(Logica

ingredientibus). John of Salisbury provides a similar account. In abstracting a line or surface, the abstracting intellect does not conceive it as existing apart from matter. Abstraction is simply a contemplation of form without considering its matter even though the form cannot exist without the matter (Metalogicon II, Ch. 20). Again, some things resemble others and the mind abstracts from these particular individuals and con¬

conform to the Aristotelian psychology of taking the (Avicenna, Psychology, p. 40). But forms which have no embodiment or which are embodied accidentally must be received from the Agent Intellect when the individual human souls have been prepared by the appropriate sense experience to receive these emana¬ tions (Avicenna, De anima 5; cf. Al-Ghazali, Meta¬ physics, pp. 174ff.). This explanation of how we know the nature of qualities and of things thus combines a theory of abstraction properly so-called with a doctrine which accounts for conceptual knowledge by emana¬ tions of forms from a suprahuman source. This made it congenial to many of the earlier scholastics of the thirteenth century. Another feature of Avicenna’s views must be men¬ tioned: the doctrine of distinctions. This became im¬ portant for the scholastics of the thirteenth and four¬ teenth centuries, and figures in the discussions of the seventeenth century. One of the important sources is

3

ABSTRACTION IN THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS Aristotle’s statement in the Topics that “if one thing

determinate part of an aggregate thus separated func¬

is capable of existing without the other, the former

tions as a universal insofar as it is conceived as standing

will not be the same as the latter” (Topics Book VII,

in a relation to all similar individuals, and serves as

Ch. 2; Becker, p. 152 b34). This was taken to be the

an image for all other things similar to it (Tahafut

test of a real distinction of two things. According to

1958; cf. Averroes, Tahafut, 1954). Al-Ghazali may,

Avicenna, that which is asserted is other than that

therefore, be regarded as a precursor of the sort of

which is not asserted, and what is conceded is different

criticism of abstraction which later nominalists in

from what is not conceded (De anima I, 1). So, if

Christendom were to exploit. There is, of course, no

someone can assert or concede that he exists even

likelihood of any literary influence because this part

though he does not assert or admit that his body exists,

of Al-Ghazali was not accessible in Latin until the

this is sufficient ground for holding a real distinction

sixteenth century (Zedler, 1961). Moreover, Averroes

between the mind and the body. A similar idea under¬

opposed Al-Ghazali on this point and continued to

lies Descartes’ mind-body distinction as a consequence

uphold the Aristotelian doctrine. We find that Mai-

of cogito, ergo sum.

monides (1135-1204) also adheres to a doctrine of

Yet another aspect of Avicenna’s thought, important to the history of abstraction, is his doctrine of the common nature. Although Avicenna vehemently denies

In the philosophical writings of the early thirteenth

that universal have any extra-mental existence and

century in Christendom attempts were made to ac¬

although he asseverates that individuals alone exist, he

commodate the views of Aristotle to those of Saint

maintains that a nature can be contemplated which,

Augustine. Avicenna’s writings on psychology made

in itself, is neither one nor many (numerically) but is

this accommodation feasible especially to the Fran¬

simply the nature that it intrinsically is: horseness is

ciscans. But we should glance at one of the first at¬

simply horseness. This theory of natures was to be used

tempts in this vein by Robert Grosseteste.

by the thirteenth-century scholastics in diverse ways.

In his commentary on the Posterior Analytics, Gros¬

Aquinas draws upon it to avoid the Platonic paradox

seteste taught that the mind is capable of knowledge

about the one and the many in his De ente et essentia,

without the aid of the senses. Due to its incarceration

and it is essential to the views of Duns Scotus. Accord¬

in the body, however, the mind is darkened and re¬

ing to the latter, the common nature has a unity less

quires the aid of sensation. Accordingly, abstraction

than numerical unity so that the paradox of one nature

of forms from the data of sensation is normally re¬

or form in many individuals is again avoided. And it continues to receive support in the fourteenth century in the critique of Ockham by Richard of Campsall: Ilia natura . . . non estpleures nec una (Logica, Ch. 15). This theory that a nature as such is neither one nor many is essential to Scotus’ doctrine of abstraction. For although such a nature cannot be separated, even by divine power, from the individual differences by which each thing is individuated, it can nonetheless be con¬ sidered apart from such individuating features by ab¬ straction. Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) criticized Avicenna’s view of abstraction along lines which immediately call to mind similar criticisms made later by some fourteenthcentury nominalists (especially Ockham) and by some of the nominalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (especially Hobbes and Berkeley). Against the view that the intelligible universal in the intellect is divested of all specifying or individuating determi¬ nations, Al-Ghazali urges that everything in the intel¬ lect is derived from the senses and retains all the con¬ crete determinateness of sense experience. True, the intellect can separate parts of a composite, but each part thus separated is just as individual as was the 4

abstraction derived mostly from Avicenna’s Guide of the Perplexed.

aggregate from which it was separated. Each wholly

quired. So the intellect separates out for special con¬ sideration the features of things which are confused in sensation. Abstraction of forms usually is derived from many individual objects presented to the senses. But the knowledge thus attained is not of the highest grade. A representative view of the Franciscans can be found in Matthew of Aquasparta. Because the human soul is a sort of mean between God and creatures, it has two aspects, one of which, the superior part, is turned to God; the other, the inferior part, is turned toward creatures. According to the doctrine of “the two faces of the soul,

the correct explanation of

human knowledge is a medium between the position of Augustine and Aristotle. Knowledge of the world is generated in man by sensation, memory, and experience from which the universal concepts of art and science are derived. But in order fully to understand the natures of things thus abstracted from sensation we require an illumination from the Divine Light. Although we do not see Divine Light in our earthly existence, we see the natures of things by its means. The existence of this illumina.tion is explained as follows: we know eternal truths with certainty. These truths are immutable yet everything

ABSTRACTION IN THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS in the world about us and our very minds are mutable.

of individual men or dogs. Again, abstrahentium non

So, the immutable and necessary features of our

est mendacium (“abstraction is not falsification”) be¬

knowledge require the illumination of the Divine

cause the mind does not assert that the specific nature

Light.

of man can exist apart from particular men.

Matthew adopts the Augustinian theory that the

The generic nature common to several species can

corporeal world cannot produce changes in the soul

be abstracted so that the mind thinks only of the

(the inferior cannot affect the superior). Rather the soul

generic aspect of these several species and ignores the

is actively aware of changes occurring anywhere in

specific differences. “What is joined in reality, the

the body. The data which the soul makes from its

intellect can at times receive separately, when one of

notice of corporeal changes are rendered intelligible

the elements is not included in the notion of the other”

by the Agent Intellect which, Matthew says, is what

(Summa contra gentiles I, c. 54, para. 3). So, because

Aristotle calls abstractions. But these abstractions are

the concept of the genus “animal” does not explicitly

understood in the light of the immutable rules provided

contain the concept of, say, “rational,” the mind can

by divine illumination. This combination of “abstrac¬

consider “animal” without considering any particular

tion” and illumination is to be found in a number of

kind of animal. But this “animal” is not something

Franciscan thinkers of the thirteenth century.

existing apart from particular kinds of animal any more

Saint Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas expounds a theory

than these particular kinds can exist apart from indi¬

of abstraction according to which things (in the sense

vidual animals. Only in the mind that apprehends the

of objects of apprehension) can be considered, one

form of animal stripped of its individuating and speci¬

aspect apart from another, in cases in which the two

fying characteristics does animal as such exist (ibid.,

things cannot exist separated from one another. In cases

I, c. 26, para. 5). Nothing exists in a genus which does not exist in

in which one thing can exist apart from another we should speak of “separation' rather than abstraction

some species of that genus (ibid., I, c. 25, para. 2).

(Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate, Q5, a.3). Since

Animal cannot exist in re without the differentia “ra¬

substance, which is the intelligible matter of quantity,

tional” or the differentia “irrational.” Still animal can

can exist without quantity, it is possible to consider

be considered without these differentiae (ibid., I, c. 26,

substance without quantity. Again, to consider “ani¬

para. 11). There is, however, no piuely generic ex¬

mal” without considering “stone ’ is not to abstract

emplar in the divine mind (Summa theol. 1,15a. 3 ad 4).

animal from stone. Thus it is only in cases where things cannot exist separately but can be considered separately that we can properly speak of abstraction. Abstraction is of two kinds: the one, mathematical abstraction, involves a consideration of form from sen¬ sible matter. The other is the abstraction of the univer¬ sal from the particular. The possibility of abstraction depends on the fact that things (featiues of things) exist in one way in the realm of matter, but in another in an intellect which apprehends them. Thus, because the mind is immaterial, the natures of material things exist in the mind in a way suitable to the mind, i.e., they have an immaterial existence in the mind. But the simple apprehension of the mind does not involve any assertion that the features of things exist thus in reality, because simple apprehension is not an act which asserts or denies anything at all. The mathematical abstraction which considers only the quantitative features of phys¬ ical things does not assert that lines, planes, etc., exist independently of such objects. It merely considers these features without attending to other aspects of physical objects, although the mathematical or quantitative features cannot exist isolated from physical objects. In the case of the abstraction of the universal from particulars, the mind considers the specific nature of, say, man or dog, apart from the individuating aspects

Duns Scotus adopted from Avicenna the doctrine of a common nature which is in itself neither one nor many but simply what is indicated in the definition or description of such a nature. This nature can be individuated in the individuals of a species by the further determination of an individual difference or “haecceity” (i.e., “thisness” in contrast to “quiddity” or “whatness”), or it can be rendered a universal con¬ cept by the action of the active intellect; but in itself it is neither one nor many. The process of abstracting a imiversal concept from the common nature so conceived is not a “real action" because the common nature is already present in the individuals and formally distinguished from the indi¬ vidual differences prior to and independent of any action of tire intellect (Dims Scotus, Quaestiones in metaphyisicorum libros, VII, q. 18; Opus oxoniense II d. 1, q. 5 [q. 6], n. 5). This formal distinction of the specific nature from the individual differences which contract it to a numerical unity in the various individ¬ uals of the species applies just as well to the distinction between the specific and the generic featiues of a common nature, for these also are formally distinct in such a way that the mind can think of the generic nature as such. There is, therefore, no distortion or falsification in the result of abstraction, because abstrac-

5

ABSTRACTION IN THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS tion amounts to considering one aspect of a nature without considering the others (Opus oxon. Ill, d. 14, q. 2, n. 12). Thus, the distinctive feature of Scotus’ contribution to the doctrine of abstraction depends upon his doc¬ trine of the formal distinction between the individu¬ ating and the common nature which exists prior to any action of mind on the data of observation. William of Ockham. Ockham uses the term “abstrac¬ tion" and provides a number of meanings for it, but he departs from his predecessors on one very important point: he denies that we can think as separate what is incapable of existing separately in reality. However, he allows that we can understand one thing without understanding another at the same time even though the two things do, in fact, coexist. Thus he states “To abstract is to understand one thing without under¬ standing another at the same time even though in reality the one is not separated from the other, e.g., sometimes the intellect understands the whiteness which is in milk and does not understand the sweetness of milk. Abstraction in this sense can belong even to a sense, for a sense can apprehend one sensible without apprehending another' 111c).

(Expositio physicorum,

fol.

In his commentary on the Sentences (II, qq. 14, 15 xx) Ockham tells us that the abstraction of the agent intellect is twofold. On the one hand, it produces a thought (an intellection) which is either intuitive or abstractive, is wholly abstracted from matter because it is immaterial in itself, and has its existence in some¬ thing immaterial (i.e., in the soul). On the other hand, the abstraction produces a universal, i.e., a universal concept of a thing in representative existence. In still another sense, abstraction occurs when one predicable is predicated of a subject and another pre¬ dicable is not predicable of that subject even though the latter predicable applies to the subject. This takes place in mathematics. For the mathematician considers only such statements as “Every body is divisible,/ is so long and so deep,

and ignores statements about bodies

nature or form from its instances in such a way that the mind can contemplate the common nature as such. The only distinction Ockham will allow is the real distinction of one thing from another thing. A distinc¬ tion between the common nature and an individual difference which Scotus had defended is, for Ockham, entirely out of the question (Sent. I d, qq. 1-4). The reason why Ockham can allow the abstraction of matter and form in an individual physical object is because, for him, this matter and this form could exist apart from one another, at least by divine power. The same is true of accident and substance. An accident can be thought without its substratum because an accident and its substratum are two really distinct things, and one can exist without the other (Sent. II, q. 5, M; cf. I, d. 30, q. 1, P). Thus Ockham, as Vignaux observed, adopted the principle, much later exploited by Hume, that what¬ ever is distinguishable is separable. And like Hume, he practically rejected the distinction of reason. The result was a rejection of the central tenet of the classi¬ cal doctrine of abstraction, set forth by Aristotle and defended, in one form or another, by many of the scholastics of the twelfth and later centuries. Descartes. There were many elaborations of the Thomistic doctrine among the later scholastics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Cajetan, Suarez, John of St. Thomas and others. Suarez in particular, was responsible for sharpening the differences between abstraction and distinction (or “separation” as Saint Thomas had called it). And this, in turn, was almost certainly the immediate source of Descartes’ views. While Descartes allows that abstraction takes place in the mind, he is always at pains to notice that abstrac¬ tion renders our concepts inadequate in such a way that we cannot discover the important distinction of things. Thus, the distinction of reason by which a substance is distinguished from its principal attribute (of thought or extension as the case may be) is effected by abstracting one from the other. This is accomplished only with some difficulty and the result does not corre¬

which pertain to motion, to the composition of matter and form in physical things, etc.

spond with anything in the way of a real separation

Accordingly, Ockham allows that many things are

of Philosophy, I, 63). Thus the valuable operation of

really distinct which constitute a unity, as in the case of matter and form, or substance and accident. Now it is true that, in such cases, the mind can separate or divide these from one another so as to understand one and not understand the other. But if a and b are one thing and a may not be really distinguished from b, it is impossible that the mind may divide a from b so as to understand either without understanding the other (Sent. I, d. 2, q. 3, H). Hence, Ockham rejects any abstraction of a common

of a substance from its nature or attribute (Principles the mind is that which provides us with a real distinc¬ tion. This Descartes sometimes calls “exclusion.” The principal difference which Descartes makes between abstraction and exclusion is that, in the case of abstrac¬ tion we consider one thing without considering that from which abstraction has been made and so may not be aware that abstraction has rendered a concept in¬ adequate, whereas in distinguishing one thing from another, we must keep both clearly before us. Consid¬ ering an abstraction by itself prevents us from knowing

ABSTRACTION IN THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS well what it has been abstracted from (Letter to

Berkeley’s philosophy, of course, two ideas) can exist

Clerselier, 12 Jan. 1646).

separately, the mind can abstract one from the other.

The influence of Descartes on the so-called Port-

But if it is granted that two things cannot exist one

Royal Logic of Antoine Amauld (1612-94) is obvious.

apart from the other, i.e., that there would be a con¬

But this famous treatise presents an account of abstrac¬

tradiction if a were supposed to exist without h (or

tion which agrees in essential features with the stand¬

conversely), the mind cannot think of a without b or

ard medieval view. Amauld had argued, in his critique

of b without a. To argue otherwise would be to attrib¬

of Descartes, that the genus can be conceived without

ute to the human mind a power which not even God

conceiving its species so that, for example, one can

can be supposed to have or exercise.

conceive figure without conceiving any of the charac¬

Hume adopted Berkeley’s critique and elaborated

teristics proper to such a particular figure as a circle

a positive theory of the function of general terms which

(“Fourth Objections”). Again, length can be conceived

goes beyond Berkeley. Although every idea is particu¬

without breadth or depth. But such abstraction, prop¬

lar, some ideas can function as general ones by being

erly so-called, is only between aspects of things which

associated with a name of a number of particulars

are only distinct by a distinction of reason. Where

which resemble one another exactly or only approxi¬

things really distinct are distinguished, abstraction does

mately. In the latter case, the name is associated with

not occur (La Logique ou Vart de penser [1662], Part

a number of qualitatively different but resembling

I, Ch. 5).

images. One of these associated images will be domi¬

John Locke. The discussion of abstraction which is

nant, the others relatively recessive but, as Hume puts

perhaps most familiar to modern readers is to be found

it, “present in power to be recalled by design or neces¬

in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

sity.” Thus, although a red image may be recalled when

Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas; and ideas become general by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence.

the word “color” is pronounced, heard, read, or re¬ called, other color-images less strongly associated with the word “color” tend to appear in consciousness, are “present in power,” and will be recalled if there is

By this way of abstraction they are made capable of repre¬

danger of a mistakenly narrow use of “color” present¬

senting more individuals than one; each of which having

ing itself. This then, is Hume’s alternative to the doc¬

in it a conformity to that abstract idea, is (as we call it)

trine that there are either genuine images or abstract

of that sort (Book III, Ch. 3, para. 6).

general ideas. The traditional explanation of the ori¬

He goes on to suggest immediately that nothing new

gin of abstract concepts persisted, with some modi¬

is introduced in this process but that it is rather a

fications, among the philosophers of the eighteenth

process of omitting all individuating features, and re¬

century.

taining only what is common to all of a set of resem¬

A considerable advance in the understanding of the

bling particulars. This omission, he explains elsewhere

nature and function of concepts seems to have been

(Book II, Ch. 13, para. 13), is a kind of partial consid¬

made by Immanuel Kant. The verb, adjective, and noun

eration which does not imply a separation. But Locke

frequently occur in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

applies the notion of abstraction to cases which go

(Werke, A54, A70 [B95], A76, A96) without any special

beyond the mere omission of particular spatiotemporal determinations. In the famous example of forming the general idea of a triangle, Locke says that this idea of triangle in general is “something imperfect that cannot exist, an idea wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together (Book IV, Ch. 7, para. 9). Whatever Locke may have thought this “putting together” amounted to, it is certainly not achieved simply by omitting particularizing features of several particular triangles. The fact is that no single

explanation. But Kant’s doctrine of pure as well as a posteriori concepts leaves no doubt that abstraction alone cannot account for the existence or employment of concepts (Werke, VII, 400-01). “The form of a concept, as a discursive representation is always con¬ structed.” As Kant puts it in the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (para. 20), empirical concepts would not be possible unless a pure concept were added to the particular concept which has been ab¬ stracted from intuition. And, finally, in the Critique of

doctrine of abstraction can be found in Locke, as

Pure Reason, the concept is presented as a rule by

I. A. Aaron has shown (Aaron, 1937). Berkeley and Hume. Berkeley’s critique of abstrac¬

ple, the figure of a certain quadruped (say, a dog)

tion proceeds along lines which were relatively new to his readers but which had already been worked out by Al-Ghazali in the eleventh century and even by Ockham in the fourteenth century. If two things (in

means of which the imagination can outline, for exam¬ without limiting it to such a determinate figure as one’s experience or concrete images might present. Kant calls this a schema. Without such a schema (which is an application of the pure concepts of the under-

ABSTRACTION IN THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS standing) neither images nor a conceptualization of

impossible to obtain the number concept by simply

images would be possible.

omitting features of empirically accessible objects.

Kant’s doctrine that pure concepts, i.e., the cate¬

Because a number is a “property” of properties, it is

gories of the understanding, be at the basis of all con¬

not available from empirical inspection of individuals.

ceptual thinking thus makes the process of abstraction

And if we examine Frege’s definitions of particular

subsidiary to and dependent upon faculties which are

finite cardinals we see at once why the notion of cardi¬

logically prior to any process of abstraction from em¬

nal numbers can hardly be extracted as traditional

pirical data. As more than one writer has recently

abstraction doctrines suggest. The number one, for

pointed out, empirical concepts are more like disposi¬

example, is a characteristic of any “property F” which

tions than like static constituents of consciousness.

satisfies the following condition: there is that which

There is, however, no suggestion in Kant that abstrac¬

is F and which is the same as anything which is F,

tion does not occur. That this new view of the activities of the mind would require an entirely different account of abstraction is not made very plain in Kant’s writings. In the development of metaphysical Idealism in the post-Kantian philosophers, the notion of abstraction becomes very general, so general in fact that the origi¬ nal meanings of the term seem almost lost. What makes the matter even more difficult to discuss is the fact that, among these Idealists, any separation or isolation of one content or feature of experience or thought from another is condemned as falsification, so that “to ab¬ stract,

“abstract,’ “abstraction,” all acquire a pejora¬

tive sense. To separate the cognizing subject from its object, to attend to one discriminable element apart

more exactly: (3x) (Fx. (y) (Fy. D.y = x). It is readily seen, if we remove the expression “F” from the above formula thus obtaining (3x). ( —x. (y) — y. D. y — x), that the property of F is expressible solely in terms of logical constants. Now because these constants function in discourse in a manner that is not compara¬ ble with the way indicative or descriptive expressions function, it is hardly surprising that there is nothing available empirically from which they can be ab¬ stracted or upon which attention may be concentrated. A psychological account of the origin of the notion of number will doubtless be a very complicated affair but it will necessarily be radically different from ab¬ straction.

from its surrounding, and the like, are all condemned as falsifications of reality. This condemnation rests on the Hegelian doctrine that “the Truth is the Whole,” i.e., that all aspects of thought and reality are dialecti¬ cally interconnected. Other more significant attacks on the doctrine that general concepts result from abstraction come from Husserl s thorough critique of Locke and his eight¬ eenth-century critics. While insisting on the absurdity of Locke’s doctrine, Husserl attacked with equal vehe¬ mence the theories of Berkeley, Hume, and Mill. He insisted that the general attributes are given to con¬ sciousness initially, and thus repudiated the traditional doctrine of abstraction. There are similar views to be found in some of the writings of Whitehead and San¬ tayana. The “eternal objects” of Whitehead and the essences” of Santayana are supposed to be discoveries rather than constructions; they are not the results of creations of mental activities, and thus are not the result of abstraction as it was traditionally expounded, although the accounts of abstraction in terms of atten¬ tion and comparisons would be consistent with such views. One of the most significant critiques of abstraction comes from Gottlob Frege, in his Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884). While Frege appears to allow that color, weight, and hardness” are abstracted from ob¬ jects, he holds that number is not so abstracted. His O

theory of the concept of cardinal number makes it

The technique employed by Frege, Georg Cantor, and some others to elucidate the mathematical notions of cardinal number was recognized by Bertrand Russell as an application of a general principle which Russell called “the principle of abstraction.” But he added that it would have been better called the principle “for the avoidance of abstraction.” The principle is this: for any relation S which is transitive and symmetrical there is a relation R which is a many-one relation such that whenever xSy, there is a unique term z such that xRz and yRz; conversely, if there is a many-one relation R such that there is a unique term z so that xRz and yRz, there is a relation S which is transitive and sym¬ metrical (Principia Mathematica, Vol. 1, °72). The essential principle to notice here is that, instead of attempting to account for the concept by a psycho¬ logical theory by which the concept is derived some¬ how from the data of the senses or from some innate or at least internal feature of human consciousness, the concept is constructed by logical means from fairly simple relational concepts. Thus, a cardinal number is defined as either a class of those classes whose num¬ bers can be bi-uniquely correlated (in a one to one correspondence) with one another, or, as a property

P

of those properties

q\ q2, . . . , qn

such that those

things having any one of these properties can be corre¬ lated bi-uniquely with the things having any other of these properties. The formal definition of cardinal number brings into

ACADEMIC FREEDOM prominence the fact that it is constructed by means

(Chicago, 1963), Part I, Ch. 68, pp. 163-64; J. R. O’Donnell,

of variables ranging over individuals and properties,

ed., Nine Medieval Thinkers (Toronto, 1955), p. 191, is the

and by logical connectives and quantifiers. There is

source for Richard of Campsall. For Saint Thomas Aquinas,

nothing about such a construction which even suggests

Summa contra gentiles, the standard Latin text is edited

that it could have been “abstracted” (in the traditional

by Leonina Manvalis (Rome, 1946), and an English transla¬

sense) from sense given materials or that there is some “inner” source of the notion. It can be objected to all this that this logical construction of concepts of cardi¬ nal and ordinal numbers does not explain their psycho¬ logical origin. Doubtless this is correct. Frege and Russell probably both supposed that they were eluci¬

tion is that by Anton Pegis et al. (Garden City, N.Y., 1955-56); for Summa theologica, the standard Latin text is edited by M. E. Marietti (Turin, 1952), and an English version is Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton Pegis (New York, 1945). See also Beatrice H. Zedler, ed., Averroes Destructio destructionum (Milwaukee, 1961), pp. 18-31.

dating the nature of mathematical objects which are

Since the Renaissance, principal sources include I. A.

somehow given (in some very different way from ab¬

Aaron, John Locke (Oxford, 1937), pp. 194-200; A. Arnauld,

straction), whereas they were actually recommending

La Logique, ou Tart de penser, 5th ed. (Paris, 1683), Part

the replacement of obscure notions by clear ones. But whatever the psychological origin of mathematical concepts may be, the Frege-Russell construction shows that it must be far more complex than anything pro¬ posed by the traditional abstraction theories. So, while the psychological question remains a highly interesting one, the focus of interest has shifted to the logical content of formal concepts.

I, Ch. 5; Rene Descartes, Letter to P. Mesland, 2 May 1644, Principles of Philosophy, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tan¬ nery, 12 vols. (Paris, 1897-1913; 1964), I, 63 and VIII, 31. See also Replies to First Objections, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris, 1964), VII, 120, and Quartae objectiones, in the Haldane and Ross translation (Cambridge, 1912), II, 82; John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Under¬ standing (London, 1690), Book III, Ch. 3, para. 6. I. A; Immanuel Kant, Werke, ed. E. Cassirer, 11 vols. (Berlin, 1912-22), VII, 400-01; idem, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Leipzig,

BIBLIOGRAPHY For main developments in Greek thought, see J. I. Beare, Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition (Oxford, 1906). See

1924), A,

1781,

B,

1787;

H.

Scholz and H.

Schweitzer, Die sogenannte Definitionen durch Abstraktion (Leipzig, 1935). JULIUS WEINBERG

also Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library (London and New York, 1925), esp. VII,

[See also Analogy; Axiomatization; Experimental Science;

52-53; R. Hackforth, Plato’s Phaedrus (Cambridge, 1952),

Islamic Conception; Number; Optics and Vision; Organi-

p. 86; Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristote¬

cism; Platonism; Rationality.]

lian Metaphysics, 2nd ed. (Toronto, 1963); W. D. Ross, Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics (Oxford, 1949), p. 566. For Alexander of Aphrodisias, see his De anima (Berlin, 1887), pp

107, 34. Boethius is found in In Isagogen Por-

ACADEMIC FREEDOM

phyrii Commenta, Corpus Scriptorem Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vol. XLVIII (Vienna, 1906), 135-69; also Quomodo substantiae in eo quod sint bonae sint cum non sint substantialia bona (London, 1928), pp. 44-45; and in De Trinitate (London, 1928), Q5, a. 3. The sources for medieval figures include: Abelard, Logica ingredientibus, ed. B. Geyer, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Band XXI (Munster in W., 1921), Heft L, 25; and P. Abelardi opera hactenus inedita, ed. V. Cousin (Paris, 1849; Vol. II, 1859), II, 733-45; Al-

i Academic

freedom is the liberty of thought which is

claimed by teachers and other elements of the educa¬ tional community. While the claim to freedom of the mind has a very long history—it was asserted in ancient Athens, for example, by Socrates—academic freedom, as the more specialized concern of the schools, is a

Ghazali, Algazal’s Metaphysics, ed. J. T. Muckle (Toronto,

rather modern phenomenon, having been first recog¬

1933), Part II (IV, 5), pp. 174ff.; and Tahafut Al-Falasifah

nized in some of the universities of Western Europe

(Destruction

Kameli

in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emerging

(Lahore, 1958), pp. 218-20; Averroes, Tahafut, trans. S. van

in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the university

of the

Philosophers),

trans.

S.

A.

der Bergh (London, 1954), pp. 345-55; Avicenna, Psychol¬ ogy, trans. F. Rahman (Oxford, 1952), p. 40, also De anima (Venice, 1508), I, 1 and V, 5; Duns Scotus, Quaestiones in metaphysicorum libros (Lyon, 1639), VII, q. 18, also Opus oxoniense (Lyon, 1639), and Sentences (Lyon, 1639); John of Salisbury, Metalogicon (Berkeley, 1955), II, Ch. 20; Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines

in the medieval age was to a considerable extent an autonomous corporate institution, but the master or teacher was subject to powerful restraints, both internal and external, and to the inhibiting force of authori¬ tative tradition. Beginning with the founding of the university at Leiden in 1575, academic freedom began

9

ACADEMIC FREEDOM

10

to take root in the Western world, albeit very slowly, as a consequence of the gradual development of an atmosphere of tolerance nurtured by the rise of reli¬ gious, political, and economic liberalism, and the growth of the so-called new sciences. Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) proclaimed the phil¬ osophical underpinning of the case for freedom of experimental inquiry with respect to the new sciences. The fierce, destructive, sectarian religious and political conflicts which characterized the struggle between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation led a deci¬ mated and exhausted Western Europe to comprehend the values of toleration. The steady growth of com¬ merce, which, among other things, drew attention to the desirable consequences of competitive enterprise, together with the rise of the liberal state, led to the emergence of a philosophy of knowledge which stressed the basic contingency of ideas, and the utility of testing the value of ideas, not in terms of the power of those who espoused them, but rather in terms of their capacity to stand up under the competition of other ideas. There was a logical transition from the competition of the marketplace to the competition of ideas. While academic freedom has by no means achieved universal acceptance in the contemporary world, it is accepted as the normal expectation in most countries of Western Europe, with the exception of the dictator¬ ships on the Iberian peninsula. It is not accepted by the communist or communist-dominated countries in Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia. It is significant that academic freedom is regarded, at least in princi¬ ple, as a necessary and desirable aspect of higher edu¬ cation in many of the developing countries of Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. In the many coun¬ tries where academic freedom is understood and re¬ spected, however, there are two uses of the term which, if not fundamentally different, seem to differ in their points of emphasis. Thus, in Great Britain the term generally refers to the freedom of the educational institution as a whole from outside influences, political or otherwise. While this usage of the term is by no means unknown in the United States, in America it almost invariably refers to the freedom of the individual professor. Of course, outside influences are often brought to bear upon American colleges and universities, and the con¬ cept of academic freedom requires the institution to resist any attacks upon its freedom to act as a corporate body. Nevertheless, in accordance with the individ¬ ualistic tendency of the concept of rights in American constitutional law, the claim to academic freedom is generally stated and tested in terms of individual teachers. Whatever may be the force of outside influ¬

ences, the concept holds that the institution has an obligation to protect the rights of academic freedom for all of its faculty members. Since the ultimate power of control over an American college or university is vested in its governing board, a dismissal in violation of a professor’s academic freedom simply cannot hap¬ pen unless the board decrees it. It follows that in the American system of higher education, responsibility for protecting the academic freedom of teachers rests with those who are legally in control of the institution, and who have the power not only to condone violations of that freedom, for example, by making improper dismissals, but also the power to protect the faculty against outside pressures and to defend their freedom. American experience indicates that even though a university may enjoy complete institutional autonomy, so far as external pressures are concerned, it is still possible for the university’s administration to act in a manner which is injurious to the faculty’s claim to academic freedom. II

Academic freedom is usually described as the right of each individual member of the faculty of an institu¬ tion to enjoy the freedom to study, to inquire, to speak his mind, to communicate his ideas, and to assert the truth as he sees it. In the United States, the professor’s academic freedom is often defined in terms of full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, in classroom discussion of his subject, and in the exercise extra-murally of his basic rights as a citi¬ zen. But in America, and increasingly in other parts of the world, the concept of academic freedom has been broadened to include students as well as teachers. The freedom of the professor to teach is merely one side of the coin of academic freedom, the other side being the freedom of the student to learn. In the historical sense this concept is neither very novel nor particularly American. It was a familiar point in the great days of German higher education, during the half century preceding World War I, that a close affinity between Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit was rec¬ ognized, though for the student the freedom to learn assumed characteristics not generally to be found in other countries. Once he had received the abitur (an examination taken at age 19 or 20, at the end of the gymnasium period), he was free to wander from school to school, to attend classes as he chose, and to take examinations whenever he felt prepared, and to try again if he failed. Otherwise he was never given grades and the flunk-out for unsatisfactory scholarship was unknown. This sort of student freedom was not widely practiced or recognized in other countries. By the third quarter of the twentieth century, rmi-

ACADEMIC FREEDOM versity students in the United States, and indeed all

which the intellect may safely range and speculate,

other elements of the university community, became

sure to find its equal in some antagonistic activity, and

more and more interested in those aspects of academic

its judge in the tribunal of truth. It is a place where

freedom which are of immediate concern to students.

inquiry is pushed forward, and discoveries verified and

Various student associations began to draft statements

perfected, and rashness rendered innocuous, and error

of specific rights which they thought they were entitled

exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and

to claim as against interference by college and univer¬

knowledge with knowledge” (“What is a University?,”

sity authorities. Civil liberties organizations and pro¬

Historical Sketches [1872], I, 16). Thus it has been

fessorial groups also became active in this effort to spell

asserted that academic freedom exists “in order that

out the academic freedom rights of the students. This

society may have the benefit of honest judgment and

activity produced, in 1967, a Joint Statement on Rights

independent criticism which otherwise might be with¬

and Freedoms of Students, drafted by a joint committee

held because of fear of offending a dominant group

made up of representatives of the American Associa¬

or transient social attitude” (Clark Byse and Louis

tion of University Professors, the U. S. National Student

Joughin, Tenure in American Higher Education [1959],

Association, the Association of American Colleges, the

p. 4).

National Association of Student Personnel Adminis¬

The eminent scholars (including the distinguished

trators, and the National Association of Women Deans

historian of ideas, Arthur O. Lovejoy) who foimded the

and Counselors. Other educational associations have

American Association of University Professors in 1915

endorsed the Statement since its formulation, and thus

published a Declaration of Principles which stated the

it is rapidly acquiring standing as an authoritative

rationale for academic freedom that has been generally

statement of desirable normative principles.

accepted by the American academic community. They

The Statement points out that “freedom to teach and

pointed out that while professors are the appointees

freedom to learn are inseparable facets of academic

of the university’s trustees, they are not in any proper

freedom.” It is noted that since “free inquiry and free

sense the trustees’ employees, just as federal judges are

expression are indispensable to the attainment

of the

appointed by the President without becoming, as a

goals of academic institutions—which are: “the trans¬

consequence, the Chief Executive’s employees. “For,

mission of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, the devel¬

once appointed,” they declared, “the scholar has pro¬

opment of students, and the general well-being of

fessional functions to perform in which the appointing

society”—“students should be encouraged to develop

authorities have neither competency nor moral right

the capacity for critical judgment and to engage in

to intervene.” And they added: “A university is a great

a sustained and independent search for truth.

To this

and indispensable organ of the higher life of a civilized

end, the Statement spells out the rights of students as

community, in the work of which the trustees hold an

regards institutional admission policies, in the class¬

essential and highly honorable place, but in which the

room, in respect to student records, student affairs, and

faculties hold an independent place, with quite equal

off-campus activities. In the area of student affairs,

responsibilities—and in relation to purely scientific and

various standards are stated with respect to freedom

educational questions, the primary responsibility."

of association, freedom of inquiry and expression, par¬

Stressing the nature of the academic calling, they wrote

ticipation in institutional government, and student publications. A detailed final section seeks to delineate,

that “if education is the cornerstone of the structure of society, and if progress in scientific knowledge is

with considerable particularity, procedural standards

essential to civilization, few things can be more impor¬

in disciplinary proceedings, to the end that students

tant than to enhance the dignity of the scholar's pro¬

may enjoy a full measure of due process. Ill The fundamental case for academic freedom has always been that while it confers desired benefits upon the professors who enjoy it, it is defensible mainly on

fession, with a view to attracting to its ranks men of the highest ability, of sound learning, and of strong and independent character. A similar conception of the nature of academic freedom has, in recent years, been adopted by the United States Supreme Court. Speaking for the Court

the ground that the unhampered search for the truth

in 1957, Chief Justice Warren declared:

is for the benefit of society as a whole. A basic premiss

The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underes¬ timate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education

is that final truth in all branches of human knowledge has not yet been achieved, and that new truths will emerge only as ideas clash with ideas in an unrestricted marketplace of ideas. In the words of Cardinal New¬ man (1872), a true university or college is a place “in

11

ACADEMIC FREEDOM is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social

widely understood that in a fluid, open, democratic

sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as

society, in which the legally protected right to dissent

absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of

inevitably creates an atmosphere of controversy, the

suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always

schools cannot insulate their students from controversy,

remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain

since this would leave them unprepared to take their

new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die (Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234, 250).

rightful places in a society in which controversy is a daily and indispensable condition.

Furthermore, a

democratic, self-governing society cannot afford the

Similarly, in a concurring opinion filed in this case,

risk of having an ignorant and unenlightened citizenry.

Justice Frankfurter wrote:

Self-government means that the citizen must be able

These pages need not be burdened with proof, based on

to use his reason, and to be concerned with the public

the testimony of a cloud of impressive witnesses, of the dependence of a free society on free universities. This means the exclusion of governmental intervention in the intellec¬ tual life of a university. It matters little whether such intervention occurs avowedly or through action that in¬ evitably tends to check

the ardor and fearlessness

of

scholars, qualities at once so fragile and so indispensable for fruitful academic labor (ibid., 354 U.S. 262).

More recently, again speaking for the Supreme Court, Justice Brennan observed:

to govern himself, that is to say, to control his emotions, interest. To this end the schools, functioning in an atmosphere of academic freedom, make a weighty contribution. It follows that the freedom of teachers to teach and of students to learn is essential to democ¬ racy, to progress, to the security of a way of life com¬ mitted to the maximizing of human freedom. /V The world over, wherever the principle of academic freedom has been understood and respected, it has been

Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic

closely tied to the concept of tenure, since security

freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and

of employment is an essential precondition for the

not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.

“The vigilant protection of constitutional

freedom is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.” . . . The classroom is peculiarly the “marketplace of ideas.” The Nation’s future depends upon

unhampered exercise of academic freedom. While there are variations on the general theme, the concept of tenure which has taken root in tire United States comes to this: after a teacher has served on a faculty for a limited, prescribed number of years in proba¬ tionary status, he acquires a permanent position.

leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust ex¬

The American Association of University Professors

change of ideas which discovers truth “out of a multitude

has sought, during the past half century, to standardize

of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative

the maximum duration of the probationary period. The

selection” (Keyishian v. Board of Regents of New York, 385

influential 1940 Statement of Principles, which it nego¬

U.S. 589, 603 [1967]).

Thus, by the late 1960’s, the concept of academic freedom had been accepted by the United States Su¬ preme Court as an integral part of the civil liberties law of the cormtry. This concept was by then also regarded by the academic community as an essential element of the American system of intellectual free¬ dom. It was widely believed that the schools play an indispensable role in the progress of civilization, that the colleges and universities were the country’s most important instruments for the generation and testing of new ideas and the advancement of scientific knowl¬ edge, and for the training of new leadership in govern¬ ment, in the professions, and in the economy. Since leaders in a rapidly changing world should not be slaves to routine, but must, on the contrary, be able to take the initiative, handle new ideas, solve new problems, evaluate evidence, think rationally, and act purpose12

can produce such leadership. In a broader sense, it was

fully, it was felt that only a free educational system

tiated with the Association of American Colleges, and which has been endorsed by over sixty learned societies since its adoption, prescribed that the maximum dura¬ tion of the probationary period should be seven years. That is to say, after a teacher has served on a faculty for seven years in probationary status, the institution has an obligation to make up its mind whether to let him go or keep him permanently by granting him tenure. Tenure means that the teacher, having been found adequate by the institution during the proba¬ tionary period, is now entitled to hold his position until retirement. It is recognized, however, that the concept does not mean that a tenured professor can never be dismissed under any conceivable circumstances. On the contrary, it is agreed that the institution has a right to dismiss a tenured professor, but only if there is adequate cause for the dismissal, and only if adequate cause is established by procedures which satisfy the rigorous demands of due process. In addition, it is

ACADEMIC FREEDOM recognized that an institution may find it necessary to

ess of law is not for the sole benefit of an accused.

terminate a continuous appointment because of finan¬

It is the best insurance for the Government itself

cial exigency—though it is insisted, in the 1940 State¬

against those blunders which leave lasting stains on a

ment, that such financial exigency “should be demon¬

system of justice but which are bound to occur on ex

strably bona fide.”

parte consideration” (Shaughnessy v. United States ex

The essence of the tenure concept, then, is the rec¬

rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206, 224-25 [1953], dissenting

ognition of the right to serve until retirement, unless

opinion). When a professor is dismissed arbitrarily,

there is an earlier dismissal for an adequate reason

without charges and a chance to be heard in a fair

established through procedures which measure up to

proceeding, not only is the professor treated wrongly,

the requirements of justice by assuring the individual

but the institution deprives itself of the benefits and

concerned the protection of due process. This means

guidance which would be secured by following proper

that before the administration of an institution makes

procedures. An arbitrary dismissal also prevents the

an unfavorable recommendation to the governing

academic community from having confidence in the

board, the faculty member must be given a statement

institution’s course of action, since there are bound to

of specific charges, served upon him long enough in

be doubts about the acceptability of administrative

advance so that he has adequate time to prepare his

decisions which were taken with faulty procedure. Due

defense. Following the service of charges, he is entitled

process is regarded as vital for the academic commu¬

to be heard, in the first instance, by a faculty commit¬

nity, as it is in the general community, because it is

tee, preferably an elected committee not directly con¬

society’s best assurance that the action was taken justly.

trolled by the administration. Due process also assures the individual all of the elements of a fair hearing, such

V

as the right to be heard in his own defense, the right

In the United States there are a number of associa¬

to counsel, the right to offer witnesses and to confront

tions concerned with defining and defending the pro¬

and cross-examine witnesses who appear against him,

fessor’s claim to academic freedom, such as the Ameri¬

and a right to a stenographic record of all hearings.

can Civil Liberties Union, various teachers’ unions, the

Due process also demands that findings of fact and the

American Association for Higher Education (an affiliate

ultimate decision should be based on the hearing rec¬

of the National Educational Association), and many

ord. In addition, the burden of proof to establish the

other groups. Since its establishment in 1915, however,

existence of adequate cause for a dismissal is on those

of teachers in the world of higher education has been

who brought the charges, since the grant of tenure

the American Association of University Professors.

establishes a presumption of competence comparable

Over the years the Association has spelled out the

to the presumption of innocence which defendants

content of academic freedom, both substantive and

enjoy in criminal cases. If the faculty hearing commit¬ tee decides in favor of the involved faculty member, the normal expectation is that the charges will be dropped. If the administration persists in bringing the charges to the governing body for final action, then that body is expected to give the individual a hearing embracing all of the basic elements of due process. When a faculty committee has made a decision favora¬ ble to the individual, then an especially heavy burden of proof rests upon those who persist in pressing the charges. Thus, the real protection for the tenured professor, so far as dismissal is concerned, depends far more upon the procedures available to him, than upon any sub¬ stantive definition of the term academic freedom. Fur¬ thermore, while the rules of academic due process seek to protect the professor against injustice, they also protect the institution and its administration from act¬ ing unjustly and making mistakes. Speaking in the wider context of governmental action, Justice Jackson urged that it should not be overlooked that

due proc¬

the chief spokesman for the academic freedom rights

procedural, in numerous statements of principles and has dealt with specific complaints submitted to it by aggrieved professors. Complaints alleging improper dismissals are referred to the Association’s oldest and most influential committee. Committee A, on Aca¬ demic Freedom and Tenure. During the past half cen¬ tury the Committee, with the assistance of professional staff in the central office in Washington, has dealt with hundreds of cases, and has developed a large and so¬ phisticated body of interpretations and common law principles which relate to various aspects of academic freedom. Once the General Secretary of the Association has concluded that there is a prima facie case for believing that a serious violation of an important principle of academic freedom and tenure has occurred, he ap¬ points an investigating committee of disinterested scholars. Following its investigation, the ad hoc com¬ mittee reports to Committee A, which then decides whether to accept the report, and whether it should be published in the quarterly journal of the Association.

13

ACADEMIC FREEDOM Once a year, at the annual delegate meeting of the

harassment is to be found within the machinery of the

Association, Committee A decides whether to recom¬

institution itself. Thus, an essential element of the

mend for or against censure of the administration con¬

prevailing American conception of academic freedom

cerned. The ultimate weapon of the Association is a

is the principle of maximum faculty participation in

public censure, which is no more, and no less, than

the

an expression of moral disapproval. Through the in¬

Through faculty meetings, faculty committees, and

decision-making

processes

of

the

institution.

strumentality of censure the Association pronounces

other devices of communication, the faculty, it is

its special form of anathema upon the administration

believed, can achieve a responsible place in the making

of an institution, declaring that in its informed and

of institutional decisions. For example, institutions are

solemn judgment, proper conditions of academic free¬

encouraged to have faculty grievance committees, built

dom do not exist there. This is communicated to the

into the official organizational system of the institution,

academic world through the Association’s publications,

for the adjustment of complaints.

through the mass media, and through the efforts of

The whole concept of faculty involvement in insti¬ tutional government took a giant step forward in 1966,

other learned societies. There is every reason to believe that this weapon

when three major groups in American higher educa¬

of the Association is very effective, even though it does

tion, the American Council on Education, the Ameri¬

not go beyond the expression of moral disapproval.

can Association of University Professors, and the As¬

Administrations on censure are removed from the list

sociation of Governing Boards of Universities and

by vote of the annual delegate meeting of the Associa¬

Colleges, reached agreement on a joint Statement on

tion on the recommendation of Committee A. This

Government of Colleges and Universities. This State¬

occurs when it has been decided that the dereliction

ment recognizes that college or university government

which led to the censure action has been corrected.

is the joint responsibility of the various major elements

Generally this takes the form of changes in the institu¬

of the academic community, faculties, administrators,

tion’s rules and procedures, and the award to the in¬

governing boards, and students, since, it is noted, “the

jured party of some sort of redress.

variety and complexity of the tasks performed by insti¬

There are active associations of university teachers

tutions of higher education produce an inescapable

in the other English-speaking comitries, notably Great

interdependence” among them. Joint efforts by all

Britain, Canada, Australia, in the Scandinavian coun¬

components of the institution are needed for effective

tries, and rather less effective associations in most of

planning and communication, for budgeting, for the

the other countries of Western Europe. In addition

selection of the chief academic officials, and for the

there is an International Association of University Pro¬

optimum use of facilities. More particularly, the tri¬

fessors and Lecturers, with a part-time Secretary-

partite Statement recognizes that the faculty has “pri¬

General, but this is essentially an association of auton¬

mary responsibility” with respect to curriculum, sub¬

omous national bodies, and is limited in activity to the

ject matter and methods of instruction, research, and

holding of periodical conferences and seminars.

those elements of student life which relate to the edu¬ cational process. The faculty determines the require¬

V/

ments for the degrees offered in courses, and decides

The concept of academic freedom embraces more dismissals,

It is also recognized that the faculty has primary re¬

though the central purpose of tenure is to protect the

sponsibility with respect to academic appointments,

teacher against such dismissals. In fact, professors often

reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promo¬

have occasion to complain about many other forms of

tions, the granting of tenure, and dismissals. This re¬

mistreatment. The American Association, for example,

sponsibility rests upon the fact that scholars in a par¬

than mere

14

when and how degree requirements have been met.

protection against

arbitrary

has received frequent complaints about denial of salary

ticular field have the chief competence for making

increases, or the receipt of increases below the average,

judgments on all these matters of faculty status.

or the assignment of inconvenient hours or unwelcome

Of course, administrative review and board approval

courses, and other forms of unwanted action taking the

are part of the complicated procedures which are

form and having the purpose of harassment. If profes¬

involved in making decisions on questions of faculty

sors are to be free from external restraints in their

status, but faculty judgment on these matters should

pursuit of the truth, they must be as free from harass¬

normally be decisive, and should not be overruled

ment as they are from the crippling pressure of the

except for very compelling reasons, and in accordance

possibility of summary dismissal. The American Asso¬

with procedures spelled out in advance with explicit

ciation of University Professors has always taken the

detail. In addition, it is agreed that the faculty should

position that the best security against most forms of

be consulted in the selection of department chairmen,

ACADEMIC FREEDOM deans and presidents, and in the making of budget

wholly untenable the conception of the professor as

policy. Finally, it is recognized that if faculty partici¬

a hired hand.

pation is to be meaningful, the institution must have

Finally, the modem concept of academic freedom

suitable agencies for participation through regularly

insists that the professor has a right to exercise all of

scheduled faculty meetings, representative assemblies,

the rights of citizenship, including freedom of speech

and faculty committees, of which at least the most

and freedom of association, and that in exercising these

important should be elected directly by the faculty.

rights he should be subjected to no institutional inter¬

The tripartite Statement reflects a dramatic change

ference or academic penalties. The 1940 Statement

in the structure of American colleges and universities,

declares that the faculty member, as a citizen, has the

for in the early days of higher education in America

right to speak or write free from institutional censor¬

the faculty was weak and the president of the institu¬

ship or discipline, though attention is called to the

tion was in a very commanding position. The historic

professor’s special obligation to be accurate, to exercise

position of the American university president was a

appropriate restraint, to show respect for the opinion

powerful one from the very beginning, but changes

of others, and to make every effort to indicate that

have occurred in the course of history, and this has

he is not an institutional spokesman. It is widely recog¬

resulted in significant changes in the distribution of

nized in the American academic community that a

power within the institution. The basic historic fact

faculty member, like other citizens, should be free to

is that in the United States there were college presi¬

engage in political activities so far as he can do so

dents long before there were professionally-trained,

consistently with his professional obligations as a

full-time, competent faculties completely committed

teacher and scholar.

to the teaching profession. The earliest teachers in the American colleges were mainly preachers who taught

VII

part-time, or who taught occasionally as an alternative

The main elements of academic freedom are securely

to other activities. In contrast, from the very start the

established in those countries which recognize and

president was a full-time, fully-committed chief officer

respect the principles of intellectual and political free¬

of the institution. The colleges were weak, professional faculties were unknown, and the only person who could speak for the college, defend it against its enemies in the community, and secure the necessary support, was

dom. Academic freedom does not exist in dictatorship countries, or in countries which practice thoughtcontrol. This suggests that while academic freedom has its own special characteristics, it is invariably part of

the president. Thus, the president was strong because

a larger pattern of human freedom. Furthermore, just

the faculty was weak. The conditions which created the powerful presi¬

ject to the manifold pressures of a complex, problem-

dent, however, disappeared with the rise of strong, professionally-competent, full-time faculties, made up of scholars and teachers, able to insist upon sharing with the institution’s administration the responsibility for making basic policy decisions. The growing involve¬ ment of American professors in the governance of their institution is a consequence of their professional com¬ petence. This is not to suggest that presidents are unimportant or without power, but in the modern age the professors have assumed the responsibility of exer¬ cising a large portion of the innovative function in higher education, for the president has become an extremely busy academic entrepreneur who lacks the time and energy to be concerned very much or very often with educational innovation. The concept of a partnership between adminis¬ tration, teaching faculty, and students now dominates the American education scene. Professors do not regard themselves as mere employees who can be hired and fired at will, and the theory and practice of academic freedom, suitably buttressed by faculty participation in the governance of the institution, has rendered

as the other rights which modem man claims are sub¬ ridden, changing world, so does the right to academic freedom encounter powerful pressures which weaken or challenge the concept, and indeed, on some occa¬ sions and in some places, threaten its very existence. Some difficulties result, in the United States, from the very structure of the system of higher education which is, in reality, no system at all. There is no na¬ tional ministry of education, and the role of the na¬ tional government in education at all levels is largely limited to making and administering financial grants. For the public institutions the power of control rests in the fifty state governments, and in the governing boards created by these governments. For the private institutions the power of control rests in the boards of trustees. Some measure of conformity with minimum general standards is achieved through the several re¬ gional accrediting associations, and through the efforts of national professional associations in specialized schools and colleges, such as those of law, medicine, pharmacy, architecture, and journalism. But on the whole, variety and local control are the central features of the American system of higher education. While the

15

ACADEMIC FREEDOM spirit of localism may serve to insulate problems, in¬

University Professors, for example, were by-products

cluding violations of academic freedom, it also encour¬

of tensions generated by the race issue.

ages a chaotic tendency for the locally autonomous

Finally, all over the world, the decade of the 1960’s

institution to proceed on an ad hoc basis free from the

was a time of serious student dissatisfaction and unrest.

restraining influence of centralized standards of per¬

In many places student dissent ripened into disruption

formance. The still very considerable administrative

and violence, and led to stem measures on the part

power of the typical American college or university

of institutional administrations and governments. There

president,

self-defining sit¬

were large-scale police actions at such distinguished

uation, gives a willful or determined man great scope

institutions as the University of California in Berkeley

in which to operate with respect to his institution’s

and Columbia University in New York, and massive

personnel. In varying degrees throughout the world, the pro¬

military intervention against students in such cities as

fessor’s academic freedom is often under pressure from

of the institution as a whole was inevitably drawn into

all sorts of external forces—political parties and fac¬

the maelstrom of issues which large-scale student vio¬

tions, politicians, economic interests, religious groups, patriotic organizations, racial and national origins

lence created. Like so many other freedoms, academic freedom is

groups, and many others. In most institutions the influ¬

experienced unevenly in the contemporary world. It

ence of alumni and private donors is persistent and

is securely established in some countries, and scarcely

may be very weighty. In many countries, and especially

exists in others, and in between the extremes it exists

in the United States, there is a wide-spread, latent

in varying degrees of amplitude and security. Where

anti-intellectualism in large segments of the population

academic freedom is well-defined and respected, the

which, under certain conditions, may contribute to the

teaching profession understands that the principle pro¬

outside pressures which challenge or weaken the aca¬

tects the professor against the devastating conse¬

demic freedom of the teachers. In a broader sense it

quences of arbitrary dismissal. It is recognized that the

may be noted that, in the nature of their calling, pro¬

teacher can be dismissed only for adequate cause, as

fessors deal with new ideas, and it is often painful to

established in a proceeding which measures up to the

work with new ideas in areas where popular values

requirements of due process, including a hearing before

exercised locally

in

a

Paris, Mexico City, and Tokyo. The academic freedom

are deeply entrenched. Furthermore, the remarkable

a tribunal consisting of his academic peers. It is well

expansion of the social sciences in recent years has had

understood that the security of the professor depends

the result of involving professors more and more with

not so much upon the substantive definition of what

public issues on which large segments of the population

constitutes adequate cause, as upon the procedures

are deeply divided. Such issues as those involving war

which are followed. That proper procedure is an in¬

and peace, labor relations, regulation of the economy,

dispensable element of justice in the life of the state

public ownership, and basic political change are likely

is a commonplace observation. Proper procedure is

to be highly combustible.

equally essential if academic freedom is to remain a

During the period following World War II the out¬

viable concept.

standing political fact on a global scale was the pro¬ tracted Cold War between the communist and demo¬ cratic communities of nations, particularly between the

The leading history of academic freedom, with special

United States and the Soviet Union. The severe pres¬

reference to the United States, is Richard Hofstadter and

sures generated by the Cold War exerted a profoundly

Walter P. Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom

disturbing impact upon educational institutions. In the

in the United States (New York, 1955). The principal study

United States the Cold War led to the imposition of

of the tenure concept in American higher education is by

various forms of loyalty oaths, which many professors

Clark Byse and Louis Joughin, Tenure in American Higher

regarded as invidiously insulting to them, to legislative investigations, and sundry purges. In addition, and again particularly in the United States, the post-World War II period witnessed an agonizing conflict over race relations, and the colleges and universities were deeply involved in situations growing out of this conflict. In many institutions the freedom of professors to take sides in this struggle was sharply challenged, and ad¬

16

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Education (Ithaca, N.Y., 1959). Louis Joughin, ed., Academic Freedom and Tenure (Madison, 1967), contains most of the basic statements of principles adopted by the American Association of University Professors, as well as six important journal articles on the subject of academic freedom and tenure. Policy statements of the American Civil Liberties Union on academic freedom and due process are reprinted in the American Association of University Professors, Bul¬

letin, 42 (1956), 517-29, 655-61, and 48 (1962), 111-15. The

ministrative reprisals were by no means unknown.

place of academic freedom in American public law is re¬

Many censure actions of the American Association of

viewed in a symposium in Law and Contemporary Problems,

AGNOSTICISM 28 (1963), 429-671, and in William P. Murphy, “Educational Freedom in the Courts,” American Association of University Professors, Bulletin, 49 (1963), 309-27. The philosophy of academic freedom is reviewed and evaluated in Russell Kirk,

Academic Freedom; An Essay in Definition (Chicago, 1955), and in Robert M. Maclver, Academic Freedom in Our Time (New York, 1955). Specific academic freedom cases are reported on in almost every issue of the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors. DAVID FELLMAN [See also Democracy; Economic Theory of Natural Liberty; Education; Freedom; Law, Due Process in; Loyalty; Protest Movements; Religious Toleration.]

had in mind when he made his famous remark in his essay “The Will to Believe” that agnosticism was the worst thing that “ever came out of the philosopher’s workshop.” Without implying or suggesting any sup¬ port at all for James’s value judgment, we shall construe agnosticism in this rather more typical manner. Given this construal (1) “theistic agnosticism” is a contra¬ diction and thus one cannot be a Jew or a Christian and be an agnostic and (2) also agnosticism is neutral vis-a-vis the claim that there can be no philosophical knowledge or even scientific or common-sense knowl¬ edge. We shall then take agnosticism to be the more limited claim that we either do not or cannot know that God or any other transcendent reality or state exists and thus we should suspend judgment concerning the assertion that God exists. That is to say, the agnostic neither affirms nor denies it. This, as should be evident from the above characterization, can take further

AGNOSTICISM

specification and indeed later such specifications will be supplied. But such a construal captures in its char¬

i Agnosticism is a philosophical and theological concept which has been understood in various ways by different philosophers and theologians. T. H. Huxley coined the term in 1869, and its first home was in the disputes about science and religion, naturalism and super¬

acterization both what was essentially at issue in the great agnostic debates in the nineteenth century and the issue as it has come down to us. II

naturalism, that reached a climax during the nineteenth

T. H. Huxley was by training a biologist, but he had

century. To be an agnostic is to hold that nothing can

strong philosophical interests and as a champion of

be known or at least that it is very unlikely that any¬

Darwinism he became a major intellectual figure in

thing will be known or soundly believed concerning

the nineteenth century. In his “Science and Christian

whether God or any transcendent reality or state exists.

Tradition” (in Collected Essays), Huxley remarks that

It is very natural for certain people conditioned in

agnosticism is a method a stance taken toward putative

certain ways to believe that there must be some power

religious truth-claims, the core of which is to refuse

“behind,” “beyond,” or “underlying’

the universe

to assent to religious doctrines for which there is no

which is responsible for its order and all the incredible

adequate evidence, but to retain an open-mindedness

features that are observed and studied by the sciences even though these same people will readily grant that we do not know that there is such a power or have good grounds for believing that there is such a power. While the admission of ignorance concerning things divine is usually made by someone outside the circle

about the possibility of sometime attaining adequate evidence. We ought never to assert that we know a proposition to be true or indeed even to assent to that proposition unless we have adequate evidence to sup¬ port it. After his youthful reading of the Scottish meta¬

of faith, it can and indeed has been made by fideistic

physician William Hamilton’s Philosophy of the Un¬

Jews and Christians as well. Some writers, e.g., Robert Flint and James Ward, so construed “agnosticism” that (1) it was identified

questions about the limits of our possible knowledge

with “philosophical skepticism” and (2) it allowed for there being “theistic agnostics’ and ‘ Christian agnos¬ tics.” However, the more typical employment of

ag¬

nosticism” is such that it would not be correct to count as agnostics either fideistic believers or Jews and Chiistians who claim that we can only gain knowledge of God through some mystical awareness or

ineffable

knowledge.” It surely was this standard but more cir¬ cumscribed sense of “agnosticism

that William James

conditioned (1829), Huxley repeatedly returned to and came, as did Leslie Stephen, to the empiricist conclusion that we cannot know anything about God or any alleged states or realities “beyond phenomena." Whether there is a God, a world of demons, an immor¬ tal soul, whether indeed “the spiritual world” is other than human fantasy or projection, were all taken by Huxley to be factual questions open to careful and systematic empirical investigation. In short, however humanly important such questions were, they were also “matters of the intellect” and in such contexts the

17

AGNOSTICISM central maxim of the method of agnosticism is to “fol¬

under scientific scrutiny and when this is done it be¬

low your reason as far as it will take you, without

comes gradually apparent that the use of the scientific-

regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In

method and appeals to scientific canons of criticism

matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions

give us a far more reliable method of settling belief

are certain which are not demonstrated or demon¬

than do the scriptures and revelation.

strable” (Huxley, pp. 245-46). Operating in accordance

To commit ourselves to the Bible as an infallible

with such a method does not justify “the denial of the

authority is to commit ourselves to a world view in

existence of any Supernature; but simply the denial

which we must believe that devils were cast out of

of the validity of the evidence adduced in favour of

a man and went into a herd of swine, that the deluge

this, or that, extant form of Supernaturalism” (p. 126).

was universal, that the world was made in six days, and

Huxley found that he could no more endorse materi¬

the like. Yet such claims are plainly and massively

alism, idealism, atheism, or pantheism than he could

contravened by our actual empirical knowledge such

theism; they all claimed too much about essentially

that they are quite beyond the boundaries of respon¬

contested matters. Huxley felt that people espousing

sible belief. About such matters, Huxley argues, we

such world views were too ready to claim a solution

ought not to be at all agnostic. Moreover, we cannot

to the “problem of existence,” while he remained

take them simply as myths, important for the biblical

painfully aware that he had not succeeded in coming

and Christian understanding of the world, if we are

by such a solution and in addition retained “a pretty

to take seriously biblical infallibility and the authority

strong conviction that the problem was insoluble” (pp.

of revelation. For the Jewish-Christian world view to

237-38).

establish its validity, it must provide us with adequate

This conviction is at the heart of his agnosticism.

is no good evidence for such alleged realities and to

established that reason fails us—and indeed must fail

believe in them is the grossest form of superstition

us—when we try to establish that the world is finite

(Huxley, p. 215).

in space or time or indefinite in space or time, rational

Even if we fall back on a severe Christology, we

or irrational, an ordered whole or simply manifesting

are still in difficulties, for it is evident enough that Jesus

certain ordered features but not something properly

believed in demons and if we are to adopt a radical

to be called an ordered whole. Answers to such ques¬

Christology and take Jesus as our infallible guide to

tions reveal something about our attitudes but can

the divine, we are going to have to accept such super¬

never provide us with propositions we can justifiably

stitious beliefs. Such beliefs affront not only our intel¬

claim to be true or even know to be false. Agnosticism

lect—our credibility concerning what it is reasonable

is a confession of honesty here. It is “the only position

to believe—they also affront our moral sense as well

for people who object to say that they know what they

(p. 226). Yet once we give up the Gospel claim that

are quite aware they do not know” (p. 210).

there are “demons who can be transferred from a man

Such skepticism concerning the truth-claims of reli¬

to a pig,” the other stories of “demonic possession fall

gion and metaphysics, including, of course, meta¬

under suspicion.” Once we start on this slide, once we

physical religiosity, should not be taken as a denial that

challenge the ultimate authority of the Bible, and

there

follow experimental and scientific procedures, the

can be

reliable

knowledge.

Rather

Huxley

argued, as John Dewey did far more systematically

ground for the whole Judeo-Christian world view is

later, that we can and do gain experimental and ex¬

undermined.

periential knowledge of nature, including human na¬

Huxley obviously thinks its credibility and proba¬

ture, and that this, by contrast with so-called “super¬

bility is of a very low order; an order which would

natural knowledge,” becomes increasingly more exten¬

make Christian or Jewish belief quite impossible for

sive and reliable. And while remaining an agnostic,

a reasonable and tolerably well informed man. Those

Huxley saw in science—basically the scientific way of

who claim to know that there are such unseen and

fixing belief—a fundamental and well grounded chal¬

indeed utterly unseeable realities, are very likely peo¬

lenge to the authority of the theory of the “spiritual

ple who have taken “cunning phrases for answers,”

world.”

18

grounds for believing that there are demons. But there

Huxley was convinced that Kant and Hamilton had

where real answers are “not merely actually impossi¬

Whatever may have been the case in the seventeenth

ble, but theoretically inconceivable.” Yet as an agnostic

century, there was in Huxley’s time a state of war

one must always—even for such problematical trans¬

between science and religion. Huxley took science to

cendental claims—remain open to conviction where

be a challenge to claims of biblical infallibility and

evidence can be brought to establish the truth of such

revelation. The whole supernatural world view built

transcendent religious claims.

on the authority of the Bible and revelation must come

Leslie

Stephen

in his

neglected An

Agnostic’s

AGNOSTICISM Apology (1893) remarks that he uses “agnostic” in a

strongly inclined when we inspect these beliefs to

sense close to that of T. H. Huxley. To be an agnostic,

believe they are wish fulfillments. And while it may

according to Stephen, is to reject what he calls “Dog¬

indeed be true that for the moment dreams may be

matic Atheism,” i.e., “the doctrine that there is no God,

pleasanter than realities, it is also true that if we are

whatever is meant by God. .

it is, instead, (1) to

bent on attaining a more permanent measure of happi¬

affirm “what no one denies,” namely “that there are

ness, it “must be won by adapting our lives to the

limits to the sphere of human intelligence” and (2) also

realities,” for we know from experience that illusory

to affirm the controversial empiricist thesis “that those

consolations “are the bitterest of mockeries” (ibid.).

limits are such as to exclude at least what Lewes called

The religious platitudes “Pain is not an evil,” “Death

‘Metempirical knowledge’ ”

(“Metempirical

is not a separation,” and “Sickness is but a blessing

knowledge” is meant to designate all forms of knowl¬

in disguise” have tortured sufferers far more than “the

edge of a transcendent, numinal, nonempirical sort.)

gloomiest speculations of avowed pessimists” (ibid.).

(p.

1).

Stephen makes apparent the empiricist commit¬

However, the problem of meaning cuts to a deeper

ments of his conception of agnosticism in charac¬

conceptual level than do such arguments about the

terizing gnosticism, the view agnosticism is deliberately

ethics of belief. Where Judeo-Christianity does not

set against. To be a gnostic is to believe that “we can

have a fideistic basis, it is committed to what Stephen

attain truths not capable of verification and not needing

calls gnosticism. But does not such a doctrine fail “to

verification by actual experiment or observation” (ibid.,

recognize the limits of possible knowledge” and in

pp. 1-2). In gaining such a knowledge gnostics in

trying to transcend these limits does it not in effect

opposition to both Hume and Kant claim that by the

commit the gnostic to pseudo-propositions which are

use of our reason we can attain a knowledge that

devoid of literal meaning? Logical empiricists later

transcends “the narrow limits of experience” (p. 1). But

answered this question in the affirmative and while it

the agnostic, firmly in the empiricist tradition, denies

is not crystal clear that Stephen’s answer is quite that

that there can be any knowledge of the world, includ¬

definite, it would appear that this is what he wants

ing anything about its origin and destiny, which tran¬

to maintain. And if that is what Stephen is maintaining,

scends experience and comprehends “the sorry scheme

there can, of course, be no knowledge of the divine.

of things entire.” Such putative knowledge, Stephen

Stephen raises this key question concerning the

maintains, is illusory and not something “essential to

intelligibility of such gnostic God-talk, but he does

the highest interests of mankind,” providing us, as

little with it. Instead he focuses on some key questions

speculative metaphysicians believe, with the solution

concerning attempts by theologians to undermine

to “the dark riddle of the universe” (p. 2).

agnosticism. He first points out that an appeal to rev¬

In a manner that anticipates the challenge to the

elation is no answer to the agnostic’s denial that we

claims of religion and metaphysics made by the logical

have knowledge of transcendent realities or states, for

empiricists, Stephen says that in addition to the prob¬

in claiming to rely exclusively on revelation these

lem of whether they can establish the truth or probable

theologians acknowledge that “natural man can know

truth of “religious truth-claims” there is the further

nothing of the Divine nature.” But this Stephen replies,

consideration—actually a logically prior question—of

is not only to grant but in effect to assert the agnostic’s

whether such putative claims “have any meaning”

fundamental principle (p. 5). He points out that H. L.

(p. 3). It should be noted that Stephen does not begin “An

Mansel in effect and in substance affirms agnosticism

Agnostic’s Apology” by discussing semantical diffi¬

testimony of conscience does not provide a reliable

culties in putative religious truth-claims but starts with

argument on which to base a belief in God nor does

problems connected with what W. K. Clifford was later

he undermine the agnostic’s position, for “the voice

to call “the ethics of belief.” We indeed would all

of conscience has been very differently interpreted.”

and that Cardinal Newman with his appeal to the

want—if we could do it honestly—to accept the claim

Some of these interpretations, secular though they be,

that “evil is transitory . . . good eternal” and that the

have all the appearances of being at least as valid as

“world is really an embodiment of love and wisdom, however dark it may appear to us” (p. 2). But the rub is that many of us cannot believe that and in a question of such inestimable human value, we have “the most sacred obligations to recognize the facts

and make

our judgments in accordance with the facts. But the facts do not give us grounds for confidence in the viability of Judeo-Christian beliefs. Rather we are

Newman’s, for all that Newman or anyone else has shown. Moreover, on any reasonable reading of a prin¬ ciple of parsimony, they are far simpler than Newman’s interpretation. Thus Newman’s arguments in reality prove, as do Mansel’s, that a man ought to be an agnostic concerning such ultimate questions where reason remains his guide and where he does not make an appeal to the authority of the Church. They, of

19

AGNOSTICISM course, would have us accept the authority of the

the limits of the experiential “we have been able

Church, but how can we reasonably do so when there

to discover certain reliable truths” and with them “we

are so many Churches, so many conflicting authorities,

shall find sufficient guidance for the needs of life”

and so many putative revelations? Where reason can

(p. 26). So while we remain religious skeptics and

only lead us to agnosticism concerning religious mat¬

skeptical of the claims of transcendental metaphysics,

ters, we can have no ground for accepting one Church,

we are not generally skeptical about man’s capacity

one religious authority, or one putative revelation

to attain reliable knowledge. Yet it remains the case

rather than another. We simply have no way of know¬

that nothing is known or can be known, of the alleged

ing which course is the better course. Agnosticism,

“ultimate reality”—the Infinite and Absolute—of tra¬

Stephen concludes, is the only reasonable and viable

ditional metaphysics and natural theology (p. 26). And

alternative.

thus nothing can be known of God.

Like Huxley, and like Hume before him, Stephen

Ill

is skeptical of the a priori arguments of metaphysics and natural theology. “There is not a single proof of

Before moving on to a consideration of some twen¬

natural theology,” he asserts, “of which the negative

tieth-century formulations of agnosticism and to a

has

the

critical examination of all forms of agnosticism, let us

affirmative” (p. 9). In such a context, where there is

not

been

maintained

as

vigorously

as

consider briefly a question that the above charac¬

no substantial agreement, but just endless and irre¬

terization of Huxley and Stephen certainly should give

solvable philosophical controversy, it is the duty of a

rise to. Given the correctness of the above criticisms

reasonable man to profess ignorance (p. 9). In trying

of Judaism and Christianity, do we not have good

to escape the bounds of sense—in trying to gain some

grounds for rejecting these religions and is not this in

metempirical knowledge—philosophers continue to

effect an espousal of atheism rather than agnosticism?

contradict flatly the first principles of their prede¬

We should answer differently for Huxley than we

cessors and no vantage point is attained where we can

do for Stephen. Huxley’s arguments, if correct, would

objectively assess these endemic metaphysical conflicts

give us good grounds for rejecting Christianity and

that divide philosophers. To escape utter skepticism,

Judaism; but they are not sufficient by themselves for

we must be agnostics and argue that such metaphysical

jettisoning a belief in God, though they would require

and theological controversies lead to “transcending the

us to suspend judgment about the putative knowledge-

limits of reason” (p. 10). But the only widely accepted

claim that God exists and created the world. But it must

characterization of these limits “comes in substance

be remembered that agnosticism is the general claim

to an exclusion of ontology” and an adherence to

that we do not know and (more typically) cannot know

empirically based truth-claims as the only legitimate

or have good grounds for believing that there is a God.

truth-claims.

But to accept this is not to accept the claim that there

It will not help, Stephen argues, to maintain that

20

is no God, unless we accept the premiss that what

the Numinous, i.e., the divine, is essentially mysterious

cannot even in principle be known cannot exist. This

and that religious understanding—a seeing through a

was not a premiss to which Huxley and Stephen were

glass darkly—is a knowledge of something which is

committed. Bather they accepted the standard agnostic

irreducibly and inescapably mysterious. In such talk

view that since we cannot know or have good reasons

in such contexts, there is linguistic legerdemain: we

for believing that God exists we should suspend judg¬

call our doubts mysteries and what is now being ap¬

ment concerning his existence or nonexistence. More¬

pealed to as “the mystery of faith” is but the theolog¬

over, as we shall see, forms of Jewish and Christian

ical phrase for agnosticism (p. 22).

fideism when linked with modern biblical scholarship

Stephen argues that one could believe knowledge

could accept at least most of Huxley’s arguments and

of the standard types was quite possible and indeed

still defend an acceptance of the Jewish or Christian

actual and remain skeptical about metaphysics. It is

faith.

just such a position that many (perhaps most) contem¬

Stephen’s key arguments are more epistemologically

porary philosophers would take. In taking this position

oriented and are more definitely committed to an

himself, Stephen came to believe that metaphysical

empiricist account of meaning and the limits of con-

claims are “nothing but the bare husks of meaningless

ceivability. As we shall see in examining the conten¬

words.” To gain genuine knowledge, we must firmly

tions of some contemporary critics of religion, it is

put aside such meaningless metaphysical claims and

more difficult to see what, given the correctness of

recognize the more limited extent of our knowledge

Stephen’s own account, it could mean to affirm, deny,

claims. A firm recognition here will enable us to avoid

or even doubt the existence of God. The very concept

utter skepticism because we come to see that within

of God on such an account becomes problematical. And

AGNOSTICISM this makes what it would be to be an agnostic, an

the techniques of modern historical research. The vari¬

atheist, or a theist problematical.

ous accounts in the Bible must be sifted by methodical

The cultural context in which we speak of religion

inquiry and independently acquired knowledge of the

is very different in the twentieth century than it was

culture and the times must be used whenever possible.

in the nineteenth (cf. MacIntyre, Ricoeur). For most

Conservative evangelicalism is still strong as a cul¬

twentieth-century people with even a minimal amount

tural phenomenon in North America, though it is

of education, the authority of science has cut much

steadily losing strength. However it is not a serious

deeper than it did in previous centuries. The cosmo¬

influence in the major seminaries and modernism has

logical claims in the biblical stories are no longer taken

thoroughly won the day in the intellectually respect¬

at face value by the overwhelming majority of edu¬

able centers of Jewish and Christian learning. Huxley’s

cated people both religious and non-religious. Theolo¬

arguments do come into conflict with conservative

gians working from within the circle of faith have

evangelicalism and his arguments about the plain fal¬

carried out an extensive program of de-mythologizing

sity, utter incoherence, and sometimes questionable

such biblical claims. Thus it is evident that in one quite

morality of the miracle stories and stories of Jesus’

obvious respect the nineteenth-century agnostics have

actions would have to be met by such conservative

clearly been victorious. There is no longer any serious

evangelicalists.

attempt to defend the truth of the cosmological claims

Huxley’s side here. So, for a large and respectable

in the type of biblical stories that Huxley discusses.

element of the Jewish

But

the

modernists

would be

on

and Christian community,

However, what has not received such wide accept¬

Huxley’s arguments, which lead him to reject Christi¬

ance is the claim that the acceptance of such a de-

anity and accept agnosticism, are accepted but not

mythologizing undermines Judaism and Christianity

taken as at all undermining the foundations of Judaism

and drives an honest man in the direction of agnos¬

or Christianity.

ticism or atheism. Many would claim that such de-

Huxley’s sort of endeavor, like the more systematic

mythologizing only purifies Judaism and Christianity

endeavors of David Strauss, simply helps Christians rid

of extraneous cultural material. The first thing to ask

the world of the historically contingent cultural trap¬

is whether or not a steady recognition of the fact that

pings of the biblical writers. Once this has been cut

these biblical stories are false supports agnosticism as

away, modernists argue, the true import of die biblical

strongly as Huxley thinks it does.

message can be seen as something of decisive relevance

Here the new historical perspective on the Bible is

that transcends the vicissitudes of time.

a crucial factor. The very concept of the authority of

However, this is not all that should be said vis-a-vis

the Bible undergoes a sea change with the new look

the conflict between science and religion and agnos¬

in historical scholarship. It is and has been widely

ticism. It is often said that the conflict between science

acknowledged both now and in the nineteenth century

and religion came to a head in the nineteenth centiuy

that Judaism and Christianity are both integrally linked

and now has been transcended. Science, it is averred,

with certain historical claims. They are not sufficient

is now seen to be neutral concerning materialism or

to establish the truth of either of these religions, but

any other metaphysical thesis and theology—the en¬

they are necessary. Yet modern historical research—to

terprise of attempting to provide ever deeper, clearer,

put it minimally—places many of these historical claims in an equivocal light and makes it quite im¬

and more reasonable statements and explications of the truths of religion—is more sophisticated and less vul¬

possible to accept claims about the literal infallibility

nerable to attacks by science or scientifically oriented

of

thinkers. Still it may be the case that there remain some

the

Bible.

Conservative

evangelicalists

(funda¬

mentalists) try to resist this tide and in reality still battle with Huxley. They reject the basic findings of modern biblical scholarship and in contrast to mod¬ ernists treat the Bible not as a fallible and myth-laden account of God’s self-revelation in history but as a fully inspired and infallible historical record. Conservative evangelicalists agree with modernists that revelation consists in God’s self-disclosure to man, but they further believe that the Bible is an infallible testimony of God s self-unveiling. Modernists by contrast believe that we must discover what the crucial historical but yet divine events and realities are like by a painstaking historical investigation of the biblical material. This involves all

conflicts between science and religion which have not been overcome even with a sophisticated analysis of religion, where that analysis takes the religions of the world and Christianity and Judaism in particular to be making truth-claims. Let us consider how such difficulties might arise. Most Christians, for example, would want to claim as something central to their religion that Christ rose from the dead and that there is a life after the death of our earthly bodies. These claims seem at least to run athwart our scientific understanding of the world so that it is difficult to know how we could both accept scientific method as the most reliable method of settling

21

AGNOSTICISM disputes about the facts and accept these central

non-anthropomorphic forms is beyond the reach of

us about the world, these things could not happen or

evidence.

have happened. Yet it is also true that the by now

Christian belief could be disproved by modem scien¬

widely accepted new historical perspective on the

tific investigations.

Only

crude

anthropomorphic

forms

of

Bible recognizes and indeed stresses mythical and po¬

To believe that Christ rose from the dead is to be

etical strands in the biblical stories. And surely it is

committed to a belief in miracles. But, it has been

in this non-literal way that the stories about demons,

forcefully argued by Ninian Smart, this does not com¬

Jonah in the whale’s belly, and Noah and his ark are

mit us to something which is anti-scientific or that can

to be taken, but how far is this to be carried with the

be ruled out a priori (Smart [1964], Ch. II; [1966], pp.

other biblical claims? Are we to extend it to such

44-45). A miracle is an event of divine significance

central Christian claims as “Christ rose from the

which is an exception to at least one law of nature.

Dead,” “Man shall survive the death of his earthly

Scientific laws are not, it is important to remember,

body,” “God is in Christ”? If we do, it becomes com¬

falsified by single exceptions but only by a class of

pletely unclear as to what it could mean to speak of

experimentally repeatable events. Thus we can believe

either the truth or falsity of the Christian religion. If

in the miracle of Christ’s resurrection without clashing

we do not, then it would seem that some central Chris¬

with anything sanctioned by science. It is a dogma,

tian truth-claims do clash with scientific claims and

the critic of agnosticism could continue, to think that

orientations so that there is after all a conflict between

everything that can be known can be known by the

science and religion.

method of science or by simple observation. A thor¬

Given such a dilemma, the agnostic or atheist could

oughly scientific mind quite devoid of credulity could

then go on to claim that either these key religious

remain committed to Judaism or Christianity, believe

utterances do not function propositionally as truth-

in God, and accept such crucial miracle stories without

claims at all or there is indeed such a clash. But if

abandoning a scientific attitude, i.e., he could accept

there is such a clash, the scientific claims are clearly

all the findings of science and accept its authority as

the claims to be preferred, for of all the rival ways

the most efficient method for ascertaining what is the

of fixing belief, the scientific way of fixing belief is

case when ascertaining what is the case comes to

clearly the most reliable. Thus if there are good empir¬

predicting and retrodicting classes of experimentally

ical, scientific reasons (as there are) for thinking that

repeatable events or processes.

people who die are not resurrected, that when our

Christians as well as agnostics can and do recognize

earthly bodies die we die, and that there is no evidence

the obscurity and mysteriousness of religious claims.

at all, and indeed not even any clear meaning to the

The Christian should go on to say that a nonmysterious

claim that there are “resurrection bodies” and a “res¬

God, a God whose reality is evident, would not be the

urrection world” utterly distinct from the cosmos, we

God of Judeo-Christianity—the God to be accepted

have the strongest of reasons for not accepting the

on faith with fear and trembling. It is only for a God

Christian claim that “Christ rose from the Dead.” The

who moves in mysterious ways, that the characteristic

scientific beliefs in conflict with that belief are ones

Jewish and Christian attitudes of discipleship, adora¬

that it would be foolish to jettison. But it is only

tion, and faith are appropriate. If the existence of God

by a sacrifice of our scientific way of conceiving of

and what it was to act in accordance with His will

things that we could assent to such a central religious

were perfectly evident or clearly establishable by hard

claim. Thus it is fair to say that our scientific under¬

intellectual work, faith would lose its force and ration¬

standing drives us in the direction of either atheism

ale. Faith involves risk, trust, and commitment. Judaism

or agnosticism.

or Christianity is not something one simply must be¬

Some contemporary theologians have responded to such contentions by arguing that there are good con¬ ceptual reasons why there could not be, appearances to

22

be understood in some other way. God in his proper

Christian claims. Moreover, given what science teaches

the

contrary notwithstanding,

such

a

lieve in if one will only think the matter through as clearly and honestly as possible. What is evident is that the agnosticism of a Huxley

conflict.

and a Stephen at least—and a Bertrand Russell as

“Christ” is not equivalent to “Jesus” but to “the son

well—rests on a philosophical view not dictated by

of God” and God is not a physical reality. Christianity

science. James Ward saw this around the turn of the

centers on a belief in a deity who is beyond the world,

century and argued in his Naturalism and Agnosticism

who is creator of the world. But such a reality is in

that agnosticism “is an inherently unstable position”

principle, since it is transcendent to the cosmos, not

unless it is supplemented by some general philosophical

capable of being investigated scientifically but must

view such as materialism or idealism (p. 21). Yet it is

AGNOSTICISM just such overall views that Huxley and Stephen were

standard uses of “exist” that to exist is to have a place

anxious to avoid and along Humean lines viewed with

in space-time. Methodqlogical-monism is also beset

a thoroughgoing skepticism.

with difficulties. There are in science theoretically

In sum, the claim is that only if such an overall

unobservable entities and “from quite early times, the

philosophical view is justified is it the case that there

central concepts of religion, such as God and nirvana

may be good grounds for being an agnostic rather than

already include the notion that what they stand for

a Christian or a Jew. The overall position necessary

cannot literally be observed” (Smart [1962], p. 8).

for such a justification is either a position of empiricism

Moreover it is not evident that we could falsify state¬

or materialism and if it is the former it must be a form

ments such as “There are some graylings in Michigan”

of empiricism which in Karl Popper’s terms is also a

or “Every human being has some neurotic traits” or

scientism. By this we mean the claim that there are

“Photons really exist, they are not simply scientific

no facts which science cannot explore: that what can¬

fictions.” Yet we do recognize them (or so at least it

not at least in principle be known by the method of

would seem) as intelligible statements of fact. Such

science cannot be known. Where alternatively scien¬

considerations lead Ninian Smart to claim confidently

tism is part of a reductive materialist metaphysics,

in his The Teacher and Christian Belief (London, 1966)

there is a commitment to what has been called an

that “it remains merely a dogma to claim that all facts

“existence-monism,” namely, the view that there is

are facts about moons and flowers and humans and

only one sort of level or order of existence and that

other denizens of the cosmos. There need be no general

is spatiotemporal existence. That is to say, such an

embargo upon belief in a transcendent reality, pro¬

existence-monist believes that to exist is to have a place

vided such belief is not merely based on uncontrolled

in space-time. In support of this, he may point out

speculation” (p. 51). Smart goes on to conclude that

that we can always ask about a thing that is supposed

“the exclusion of transcendent fact rests on a mere

to exist where it exists. This, it is claimed, indicates

decision” (p. 52). So it would appear, from what has

how we in reality operate on materialist assumptions.

been said above, that agnosticism has no solid rational

And note that if that question is not apposite, “exists”

foundation.

and its equivalents are not being employed in their

The dialectic of the argument over agnosticism is

standard senses, but are being used in a secondary sense

not nearly at an end and it shall be the burden of the

as in “Ghosts and gremlins exist merely in one’s mind. ’

argument here to establish that agnosticism still has

Besides existence-monism there is the even more per¬

much to be said for it. First of all, even granting, for

vasive and distinctively empiricist position—a position

the reasons outlined above, that neither the develop¬

shared by the logical empiricists, by Bertrand Russell,

ment of science nor an appeal to scientism or empiri¬

and by John Dewey—referred to as “methodological-

cism establishes agnosticism, there are other consid¬

monism”: to wit “that all statements of fact are such

erations which give it strong support. David Hume’s

that they can be investigated scientifically, i.e., that

Dialogues on Natural Religion (1779) and Immanuel

they can in principle be falsified by observation

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) make it quite

(Smart [1966], p. 8). However, critics of agnosticism have responded, as

evident that none of the proofs for the existence of

has Ninian Smart, by pointing out that these philo¬

ments. Furthermore it should be noted that their ar¬

sophical positions are vulnerable to a variety of fairly obvious and long-standing criticisms. Perhaps these criticisms can be and have been met, but these positions are highly controversial. If agnosticism is tied to them, do we not have as good grounds for being skeptical

God work, i.e., they are not sound or reliable argu¬ guments do not for the most part depend for their force on empiricist assumptions and they most certainly do not depend on the development of science. The most rigorous contemporary work in the philos¬ ophy of religion has not always supported the detailed

of agnosticism as the agnostics have for being skeptical

arguments of Hume and Kant but it has for the most

of the claims of religion. Some samplings of the grounds for being skeptical

Alvin Plantinga, for example, in his God and Other

about the philosophical underpinnings for agnosticism are these. When I suddenly remember that I left my key in my car, it makes sense to speak of the space-time location of my car but, it is at least plausibly argued, not of the space-time location of my sudden thought. Moreover numbers exist but it hardly makes sense to ask where they exist. It is not the case that for all

part supported their overall conclusions on this issue. Minds (1967) rejects rather thoroughly the principles and assumptions of both existence-monism and metho¬ dological-monism and he subjects the particulars of Hume’s and Kant’s views to careful criticism, yet in the very course of giving a defense of what he takes to be the rationality of Christian belief, he argues that none of the attempts at a demonstration of the exist-

23

AGNOSTICISM ence of God have succeeded. He is echoed in this claim

contradicted. As for the agnostic, although he refrains from

by such important contemporary analytical theologians

saying either that there is or that there is not a god, he

as John Hick and Diogenes Allen. This lack of validated

does not deny that the question whether a transcendent

knowledge of the divine or lack of such warranted belief strengthens the hand of the agnostics, though it is also compatible with fideism or a revelationist view such as Barth’s, which holds that man on his own can know nothing of God but must rely utterly on God’s self-disclosure.

god exists is a genuine question. He does not deny that the two sentences “There is a transcendent god” and “There is no transcendent god” express propositions one of which is actually true and the other false. All he says is that we have no means of telling which of them is true, and therefore ought not to commit ourselves to either. But we have seen that the sentences in question do not express propositions

IV

at all. And this means that agnosticism also is mled out (p. 219).

In the twentieth century a distinct element comes to the fore which counts in favor of agnosticism but

Ayer goes on to remark that the theist’s putative claims

also gives it a particular twist. This new turn leads

are neither valid nor invalid; they say nothing at all

to a reformulation of agnosticism. It states agnosticism

and thus the theist cannot rightly be “accused of saying

in such a manner that it becomes evident how it is

anything false, or anything for which he has insufficient

a relevant response to one of the major elements in

grounds” (ibid., p. 219). It is only when the Christian,

contemporary philosophical perplexities over religion.

so to speak, turns meta-theologian and claims that in

We have hitherto been talking as if God-talk is used

asserting the existence of a Transcendent God he is

in certain central contexts to make statements of whose

expressing a genuine proposition “that we are entitled

truth-value we are in doubt. That is, there is no doubt

to disagree with him” (ibid.).

that they have a truth-value but there is a doubt which

The central point Ayer is making is that such reli¬

truth-value they actually have. Theists think that at

gious utterances do not assert anything and thus they

least some of the key Jewish or Christian claims are

can be neither doubted, believed, nor even asserted

true, atheists think they are false, and traditional agnos¬

to be false. With such considerations pushed to the

tics, as H. H. Price puts it in his Belief (London, 1969),

front, the key question becomes whether such religious

suspend “judgement on the ground that we do not have

utterances have any informative content at all.

sufficient evidence to decide the question and so far

There is something very strange here. Ayer, as we

as he [the agnostic] can tell there is no likelihood that

have seen, does not regard his position as atheistical

we ever shall have” (p. 455). But in the twentieth

or agnostic, for since such key religious utterances

century with certain analytic philosophers the question

could not even be false, they could not be intelligibly

has come to the fore about whether these key religious

denied and since they make no claim to be intelligibly

utterances have any truth-value at all.

questioned, they could not be sensibly doubted. But,

A. J. Ayer defending the modern variety of em¬

as Susan Stebbing rightly observed, “the plain man

piricism called “logical empiricism” argued in his

would not find it easy to see the difference between

Language, Truth and Logic (London, 1935) that such

Mr. Ayer’s non-atheism and the fool’s atheism” (Steb¬

key religious utterances are devoid of cognitive mean¬

bing, p. 264). But before we say “so much the worse

ing. Such considerations lead Ayer to deny that he or

that such key religious utterances are unbelievable

an atheist, or even an agnostic. In a well known passage

because nonsensical is even a more basic rejection of

Ayer comments that it is very important not to confuse his view with agnosticism or atheism, for, as he puts

religious belief than simply asserting the falsity of the putative truth-claims of Christianity, but allowing for

it,

the possibility that they might be true.

It is a characteristic of an agnostic to hold that the existence

ation, Price, Edwards, and Nielsen have characterized

of a god is a possibility in which there is no good reason either to believe or disbelieve; and it is characteristic of an atheist to hold that it is at least probable that no god exists. And our view that all utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical, so far from being identical with, or even lending any support to, either of these familiar

24

for the plain man,” we should remember that to believe

anyone taking such a position could be either a theist,

Because of this altered conceptualization of the situ¬ both agnosticism and atheism in a broader and more adequate way which takes into account these problems about meaning. A contemporary agnostic who is alert to such questions about meaning would maintain that judgments concerning putatively assertive God-talk

contentions, is actually incompatible with them. For if the

should be suspended for either of two reasons, depend¬

assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist’s

ing on the exact nature of the God-talk in question:

assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since

(1) the claims, though genuine truth-claims, are without

it is only a significant proposition that can be significantly

sufficient evidence to warrant either their belief or

AGNOSTICISM categorical rejection, or (2) their meaning is so problem¬

world is contingent or non-contingent, whether there

atical that it is doubtful whether there is something

is or can be something “beyond the world” upon which

there which is sufficiently intelligible or coherent to

the world in some sense depends, or whether there is

be believed. Where God is conceived somewhat an-

or could be an unlimited reality which is still in some

thropomorphically the

and

sense personal, theological reasonings have been no¬

where God is conceived non-anthropomorphically the

toriously unsuccessful. About the best that has been

second condition obtains. The contemporary agnostic

done is to establish that it is not entirely evident that

first condition obtains

believes that “God” in the most typical religious

these

employments is so indeterminate in meaning that he

swerable.

questions

are

meaningless

or

utterly unan¬

must simply suspend judgment about whether there is

Here a Barthian turn away from natural theology

anything that it stands for which can intelligibly be

is equally fruitless. To say that man can by his own

believed. His position, as Price points out, is like the

endeavors know nothing of God but simply must await

traditional agnostic’s in being neutral between theism

an

unpredictable

and

rationally inexplicable

self¬

and atheism (p. 454). He believes that neither such

disclosure of God—the core notion of God revealing

positive judgment is justified, but unlike a contem¬

himself to man—is of no help, for when we look at

porary atheist, on the one hand, he is not so confident

religions in an honest anthropological light, we will

of the unintelligibility or incoherence of religious ut¬

see, when all the world is our stage, that we have

terances that he feels that religious belief is irrational

multitudes of conflicting alleged revelations with no

and is to be rejected, but, on the other hand, he does

means at all of deciding, without the aid of natural

not believe one is justified in taking these problematic

theology or philosophical analysis, which, if any, of

utterances as being obscurely revelatory of Divine

these putative revelations are genuine revelations. It

Truth. Neither atheism nor any of the several forms

is true enough that if something is actually a divine

of fideism is acceptable to him.

revelation, it cannot be assessed by man, but must

The contemporary agnostic sensitive to problems

simply be accepted. But the agnostic reminds the reve-

about the logical status of religious utterances simply

lationist that we have a multitude of conflicting candi¬

stresses that the reasonable and on the whole justified

date revelations with no means of reasonably deciding

course of action here is simply to suspend judgment.

which one to accept. In such a context a reasonable

His doubts are primarily doubts about the possibility

man will remain agnostic concerning such matters. To

of there being anything to doubt, but, second-order as

simply accept the authorative claims of a Church in

they are, they have an effect similar to the effect of

such a circumstance is to fly in the face of reason.

classical agnosticism and they lead to a similar attitude

The most crucial problem raised by the so-called

toward religion. There is neither the classical atheistic

truth-claims of Judaism and Christianity is that of

denial that there is anything to the claims of religion

conceivability—to borrow a term that Herbert Spencer

nor is there the fideistic avowal that in spite of all their

used in the nineteenth century and thereby suggesting

obscurity and seeming unintelligibility that there still is something there worthy of belief. Instead there is a genuine suspension of judgment. The thing to ask is whether the doubts leading to a suspension of judgment are actually sufficient to justify such a suspension or, everything considered, (1) would a leap of faith be more justified or (2) would the overcoming of doubt in the direction of atheism be more reasonable? Or is it the case that there is no way of making a rational decision here or of reasonably deciding what one ought to do or believe? It may indeed be true, as many a sophisticated theo¬ logian has argued, that religious commitment is per¬ fectly compatible with a high degree of ignorance about

God

and

the

nature—whatever

that

may

mean—of “ultimate reality.’ But, if this is the case and if our ignorance here is as invincible as much contem¬ porary philosophical argumentation would have us believe, natural theology seems at least to be thor¬ oughly undermined. In trying to establish whether the

that there are more lines of continuity between the old agnosticism and the new than this essay has indi¬ cated. The incredibility■—to use Spencer’s contrasting term—of these central religious claims is tied, at least in part, to their inconceivability. “God” is not supposed to refer to a being among beings; by definition God is no finite object or process in the world. But then how is the referring to be done? What are we really talking about when we speak of God? How do we or can we fix the reference range of “God”? God surely cannot be identified in the same manner we identify the sole realities compatible with existence-monism. There can be no picking God out as we would a dis¬ crete entity in space-time. Alternatively there are theo¬ logians who will say that when we come to recognize that it is just a brute fact that there is that indefinitely immense collection of finite and contingent masses or conglomerations of things, we use the phrase “the world” to refer to, and when we recognize it could have been the case—-eternally the case—that there was

25

AGNOSTICISM no world at all, we can come quite naturally to feel

make it doubtful whether the discourse used to spell

puzzled about why there is a world at all.

out the reference range of “God” is sufficiently intelli¬

Is there anything that would account for the exist¬

gible to make such God-talk coherent. An agnostic of

ence of all finite reality and not itself be a reality that

the contemporary sort is a man who suspends judg¬

needed to be similarly explained? In speaking of God

ment, oscillating between rejecting God-talk as an

we are speaking of such a reality, if indeed there is

irrational form of discourse containing at crucial junc¬

such a reality. We are concerned with a reality not

tures incoherent or rationally unjustifiable putative

simply—as the world might be—infinite in space and

truth-claims and accepting this discourse as something

time, but a reality such that it would not make sense

which, obscure as it is, makes a sufficiently intelligible

to ask why it exists. Such a reality could not be a

and humanly important reference to be worthy of

physical reality.

belief.

In sum, we have, if we reflect at all, a developing

One reading of the situation is that the network of

sense of the contingency of the world. The word “God”

fundamental concepts constitutive of nonanthropo-

in part means, in Jewish and Christian discourses,

morphic God-talk in Judeo-Christianity is so problem¬

whatever it is that is non-contingent upon which all

atical that the most reasonable thing to do is to opt

these contingent realities continuously depend. God is

for atheism, particularly when we realize that we do

the completeness that would fill in the essential incom¬

not need these religions or any religion to make sense

pleteness of the world. We have feelings of de¬

of our lives or to buttress morality. But agnosticism,

pendency, creatureliness, finitude and in having those

particularly of the contemporary kind specified here,

feelings, it is argued, we have some sense of that which

need not be an evasion and perhaps is the most reason¬

is without limit. “God" refers to such alleged ultimate

able alternative for the individual who wishes, concern¬

realities and to something richer as well. But surely

ing an appraisal of competing world views and ways of

this, the critic of agnosticism will reply, sufficiently

life, to operate on a principle of maximum caution.

fixes the reference range of “God,” such that it would be a mistake to assert that “God” is a term supposedly used to refer to a referent but nothing coherently specifiable counts as a possible referent for “God,” where “God” has a non-anthropomorphic employment. Surely such a referent is not something which can be clearly conceived, but, as we have seen, a non-

Two extensive discussions are in Robert Flint, Agnosticism (London, 1903); and in R. A. Armstrong, Agnosticism and

Theism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1905). See also James Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism (London, 1899). The central works from Hume and Kant relevant here are

mysterious God would not be the God of Judeo-

David Hume, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

Christianity. But has language gone on a holiday? We

(1748), and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (London,

certainly, given our religious conditioning, have a feel¬ ing that we understand what we are saying here. But do we? Perhaps, as Axel Hagerstrom thought, “contin¬ gent thing,” “finite thing,” and “finite reality” are pleonastic. For anything at all that exists, we seem to be able to ask, without being linguistically or con¬ ceptually deviant, why it exists. “The world” or “the cosmos” does not stand for an entity or a class of things, but is an umbrella term for all those things and their

1779); Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vemunft (1781), and Die Religion innerhalh der Grenzen der blossen Vemunft (1793). For the paradigmatic nineteenth-century statements of agnosticism see T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays, 9 vols. (London, 1894), Vol. V; and Leslie Stephen, An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays (London, 1893), and English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1876). The following works are central to the nineteenth-century debate over agnosticism: Sir William Hamilton, “Philosophy of the Unconditioned,” Die Edinburgh Review (1829); H. L.

structural relations that religious people call “finite

Mansel, The Limits of Religious Thought (London, 1858);

things” and many others just call “things.” What are

J. S. Mill, Three Essays on Religion (London, 1874); and

we talking about when we say there is something

Herbert Spencer, First Principles (London,

infinite and utterly different from these “finite realities” and that this “utterly other reality” is neither physical nor temporal nor purely conceptual nor simply imagi¬ nary, but, while being unique and radically distinct from all these things, continuously sustains all these “finite things” and is a mysterious something upon which they are utterly dependent? Surely this is very odd talk and “sustains” and “dependent” have no unproblematical use in this context. 26

BIBLIOGRAPHY

These difficulties and a host of difficulties like them

Annan, Leslie Stephen (London,

1862). Noel

1952); William Irvine,

Thomas Henry Huxley (London, 1960); John Holloway, The Victorian Sage (New York, 1953); Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies (London, 1950); and J. A. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London, 1957), provide basic secondary sources. For material carrying over to the twen¬ tieth-century debate see R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Dieu, son existence et sa nature; solution thomiste des antinomies agnostiques (Paris, 1915); and J. M. Cameron, The1 Night Battle (London, 1962). For some contemporary defenses of agnosticism see Ronald W. Hepburn, Christianity and Para-

ALCHEMY dox (New York, 1966); Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a Christian (London, 1957); H. J. Blackman, ed., Objections To Humanism (London, 1963); Religion and Humanism, no editor, various authors—Ronald Hepburn, David Jenkins, Howard Root, Renford Bambrough, Ninian Smart (London, 1964); William James, The Will to Believe and Other Es¬

says . . . (New York, 1897), attacked agnosticism. The following books by contemporary philosophers or analytically oriented philosophical theologians make argu¬ ments relevant to our discussion. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth

and Logic (London, 1935); Axel Hagerstrom, Philosophy and Religion, trans. Robert T. Sandin (London, 1964); John Hick, Faith and Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, 1966); R. B. Braithwaite, An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief (Cambridge, 1955); Diogenes Allen, The Reasona¬ bleness of Faith (Washington and Cleveland, 1968); Ninian Smart, The Teacher and Christian Belief (London, 1966); idem, Philosophers and Religious Truth (London, 1964); idem, Theology, Philosophy and Natural Sciences (Bir¬ mingham, England, 1962). Alasdair MacIntyre, Secular¬ ization and Moral Change (London, 1967); idem and Paul Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York, 1969); H. H. Price, Belief (London, 1969); L. Susan Stebbing, “Critical Notice, Language, Truth and Logic,” Mind,

a special interest in the changes of matter and surely most of them accepted the concept of transmutation, but there were other significant strains evident in al¬ chemical thought as well. Important among these was the early and persistent belief that the study of alchemy had a special role in medicine through the preparation of remedies and the search for the prolongation of life. In addition to this was the belief that alchemy was the fundamental science for the investigation of nature. And yet, if the alchemists spoke repeatedly of experi¬ ence and observation as the true keys to nature, they also maintained a fervent belief in a universe unified through the relationship of the macrocosm and the microcosm—a relationship that of necessity tied this science to astrology. The alchemists were convinced further that their search for the truths of nature might be conceived in terms of a religious quest which would result in a greater knowledge of the Creator. It is not surprising then to find a late sixteenth-century author defining medicine as “the searching out of the secretes of nature,” a goal that was to be accomplished by resort to “mathematicall and supernaturall precepts, the ex¬

new series, 45 (1936); Kai Nielsen, “In Defense of Athe¬

ercise whereof is Mechanicall, and to be accomplished

ism,” in Perspectives in Education, Religion and the Arts,

with labor.” Having thus defined medicine, he went

eds. Howard Kiefer and Milton Munitz (New York, 1970);

on to state that the real name of this art was simply

Paul Holmer, “Atheism and Theism,” Lutheran World, 13

chemistry or alchemy (Bostocke, 1585).

(1966); Alvin Plantinga, God and Other Minds (Ithaca, 1967); George Mavrodes, Belief in God (New York, 1970). Some good critical and historical commentary on Hume occurs in Bernard Williams, “Hume on Religion,” in David

Hume: A Symposium, ed. D. F. Pears (London, 1963); in the essays by James Noxon, William H. Capitan, and George J. Nathan, reprinted in V. C. Chapell, ed., Hume: A Collec¬

tion of Critical Essays (New York, 1966); and in Norman

In short, while few would deny that there were elements of modern science in alchemy, it is also true that this was a study permeated with a mysticism foreign to the post-Newtonian world. ALCHEMY IN ANTIQUITY The difficulty in dating alchemical texts has resulted

Kemp Smith’s masterful and indispensable introduction to

in a long-standing controversy over its origins. Yet, if

Hume’s Dialogues. See David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. and introduction by Norman Kemp

the priority of Near Eastern, Indian, and Chinese al¬ chemists remains in dispute, there is general agreement

Smith (Edinburgh, 1947). For Kant see W. H. Walsh, “Kant’s

among scholars that the student in search of the roots

Moral Theology,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 49

of alchemy must be concerned not only with early

(1963).

concepts of nature, but also with the practical craft KAI NIELSEN

[See also Gnosticism; God; Positivism; Skepticism.]

traditions of antiquity. The oldest surviving works of metal craftsmen combine an emphasis on the change in the appearance of metals with the acceptance of a vitalistic view of nature—a view that included the belief that metals live and grow within the earth in a fashion analogous to the growth of a human fetus. It was to become fundamental to alchemical thought that the operator might hasten the natural process of

ALCHEMY

metallic growth in his laboratory and thus bring about

The alchemy of the sixteenth and the seventeenth

by nature. Several texts point to the existence of a practical

centuries represents a fusion of many seemingly dis¬ parate themes derived from ancient and medieval Near and Far Eastern sources. A simple definition is difficult if not impossible. The alchemists always maintained

perfection in a period of time far less than that required

proto-alchemical literature in the ancient Near East. The recent study of two Babylonian tablets (Oppenheim, 1966) dating from the thirteenth century b.c.

27

ALCHEMY but copied from still earlier originals describes the

sis and the Pymander attributed to Hermes Trisme-

production of “silver” from a copper/bronze mixture.

gistus were no less significant. Surely the alchemical

These early recipes already contain elements of ritual

literature was stamped with a Creation-element theme

and the processes themselves call for secrecy. Both

throughout its existence. In the sixteenth and the

were to become common themes in later alchemical

seventeenth centuries chemical authors still focused on

literature. The Leiden and Stockholm papyri (ca. third

the elements in their defense or attack of any given

century

would appear to be part of the same

system. An important example may be found in Ger¬

practical tradition. Here, among some three hundred

hard Dorn’s defense of the Paracelsians which he based

recipes, will be found directions for the imitation of

on an analysis of the “Physics of Genesis” and the

a.d.)

the noble metals. A method for the doubling of asem

“Physics of Hermes.” Similarly Robert Boyle placed

(the gold-silver alloy, electrum) indicates the future

special emphasis on the problem of the elements in

direction of alchemical literature. The similarity be¬

his criticism of the Aristotelians and the Paracelsian

tween the directions given in these papyri and passa¬

chemists in the Sceptical Chyinist (1661).

ges in the Physica et Mystica of Bolos Democritos of Mendes (perhaps as early as 200

b.c.)

indicates that

the latter work also profited from an acquaintance with

a.d.

These are clearly

connected with the earlier practical tradition as well

the metal craft tradition. However, mystical passages

as with current philosophical and religious thought.

in his work were to become the subject of exegesis

Two of the more important authors are Zosimos, author

for

The

of the encyclopedic Cheirokmeta, whose work links

pseudo-Democritos was revered by them as a sage of

these alchemical texts with the book of Bolos Demo¬

Hellenistic

alchemists

of

late

antiquity.

great authority and his work thus forms a connecting

critos, and Maria the Jewess, whose text is significant

link between the practical metal craft tradition and

for its detailed description of the laboratory equipment

the true Alexandrian alchemy of late antiquity.

of the Alexandrian alchemist. The latter work indicates

Alexandrian alchemy was based on Greek philosophy

that the emphasis on distillation and sublimation proc¬

as well as on the practical tradition of the craftsmen.

esses—still so pronounced in the Renaissance—was

The early comparisons of man and nature found in the

already characteristic of alchemical recipes in late

pre-Socratics and in Plato’s Timaeus fostered an inter¬

antiquity. These Alexandrian texts are openly con¬

est in the relationship of the macrocosm and the

cerned with transmutation. The processes given stress

microcosm, a doctrine which played a major role in

color change as a guide to progress—from black to

alchemical thought well into the seventeenth century.

white to yellow to violet. The sequence was clearly

Systems of intermediary beings and the pneuma were

associated with the change from a chaotic and un¬

employed by the Stoics, the Neo-Platonists, and other

defined primal matter to metallic perfection. And al¬

philosophical sects in antiquity to provide connecting

though the final stage was eventually to be changed

links between the two worlds.

from violet to red, the emphasis on color was to remain

Also important for the development of alchemical

28

The earliest true alchemical texts in Greek date from the end of the third century

a basic theme in descriptions of the Great Work.

thought was the long tradition of speculation on the

Although practical recipes form part of these third-

Creation. The philosopher interested in both the Crea¬

and fourth-century texts there is also present in them

tion and Nature was inevitably drawn to the question

a pronounced interest in secrecy and mysticism. Alle¬

of the origin of the elements and the possibility of a

gorical dream sequences form part of this literature,

prima materia. The views of the pre-Socratics on the

and the role of spirits is considered important in the

prime matter formed a springboard from which later

transformation of matter. And while one may extract

authors launched their own concepts. Thus Aristotle

some scientific information from the Greek alchemical

conveniently summarized the views of his predecessors

codices, he will find it difficult to separate this material

prior to refuting them in his Metaphysics. However,

from the ever-present religious aura that pervades these

the subject was one of no less importance to him than

works. An example may be seen in the analogous treat¬

it had been to them. Aristotle accepted the four

ment of metals and mankind. Because of the truth of

Empedoclean elements (earth, air, water, and fire) with

this it was felt that the operator might follow the death

their attendant qualities and he believed that they were

and resurrection theme as he pursued his work. It was

mutually transmutable.

this aspect of alchemical drought that dominates the

The genesis of the elements also forms an important

later Greek texts. The work of Stephanos (ca. 610-41)

section of Plato’s Timaeus where the subject is devel¬

is replete with prayers, invocations, and allegorical

oped mathematically, but to alchemical audiors of late

descriptions. There is little indication here that the

antiquity who were influenced by Neo-Platonic, Gnos-

alchemist still had close personal contact with the

tic, and Christian sources, tire accounts found in Gene¬

laboratory. The text of Stephanos was highly influential

ALCHEMY and it was used by later alchemists both as a model and as a subject for commentaries. Alexandrian al¬ chemy did not continue much longer as a living tradi¬ tion. Before the tenth century the basic texts had been codified and few new texts were composed in Greek after that time.

speculations. The origins of Islamic alchemy are some¬ what easier to discern. Here there is little question about the importance of Greek sources. Traditionally Prince Khalid ibn Yazid (d. 704) was the first Muslim convert to alchemy and it is significant that his teacher was said to be one Morienos, a pupil of the legendary

Although Pliny and Dioscorides refer to mineral

Stephanos of Alexandria. Although there is little likeli¬

substances of medical value, Hellenistic alchemical

hood of truth in this story, the strong Greek influence

texts do not indicate any real concern with pharma¬

on Islamic alchemy may be further confirmed by fre¬

ceutical chemistry. This is in marked contrast with the

quent references to Alexandrian authors and the gen¬

development of alchemy in China and India. As early

eral use of Greek philosophical concepts. Translations

as the eighth century

were made into Arabic at learned centers throughout

b.c.

there was a belief in physical

immortality in China, and this was later to become

the Near East not only of the works of such major

closely associated with Taoist thought. A text from the

figures as Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy, but also of

second century

refers to the transmutation of

Zosimos, Bolos Democritos, and Stephanos. Among

cinnabar to gold and within a few hundred years the

these centers the old Sassanian academy at Jundi-

b.c.

concept of longevity was to be clearly connected with

Shapur played a role. Similarly a group of Sabians at

chemically prepared drugs and elixirs. This is evident

Harran were influential in transmitting Indian alchemi¬

in the Nei P’ien of Ko Hung (ca.

cal and astrological thought into the Islamic tradition.

a.d.

320) which was

to become a standard Chinese text on this subject. In

The ascription of alchemical works to earlier authors

it will be found sections on the transmutation of metals

was as common to Islamic authors as it had been to

and on elixirs of life—and all this mixed with rules

their Greek predecessors. The short alchemical classic,

for the attainment of long life and immortality. Chinese

the “Emerald Table,” was said to have been written

alchemy paralleled Alexandrian alchemy in its frequent

by Hermes Trismegistus, but the earliest surviving

reference to the macrocosm-microcosm analogy as well

version is in an early ninth-century Arabic text ascribed

as in the development of both esoteric and exoteric

to the first-century

approaches to this subject. Thus, while the Chinese

Tyana. A similar problem exists in regard to the Turba

alchemist sought a potable gold and various chemically

philosophorum. This exists only in Latin, but it has been

prepared drugs in his quest for longevity and immor¬

shown by E. J. Holmyard and J. Ruska to have been

tality, the texts also indicate a real interest in alchemy

composed originally in Arabic early in the tenth cen¬

as the search for the inner perfection of the soul.

tury. The dialogue form is used in the Turba and the

From India the Sanskrit Atharva Veda (perhaps as early as the eighth century

(a.d.)

magician, Apollonios of

speakers are supposedly the Greek philosophers of an¬

refers to the use of

tiquity. Islamic alchemy did not confine itself to Greek

gold as a means of preserving life, and there are other

sages and gods alone in this regard. The eighth-century

b.c.)

early texts relating gold to immortality. Buddhist texts

scholar, Jabir-ibn-Hayyan, probably authored only a

of the second to the fifth centuries

discuss the

few works on alchemy. However, some two thousand

a.d.

transmutation of base metals to gold by means of a

titles are ascribed to him. The great bulk of these seem

juice concocted from vegetable and mineral sources.

to derive from members of the Isma'ilya sect, the

The still later tantric-Hatha yoga texts (post-eighth

Brotherhood of Purity, and they date from the ninth

century) show the same trend toward increased mys¬

and the tenth centuries.

ticism already noted in the Greek and the Chinese

Islamic alchemy is characterized by both the practi¬

sources. Here the operator undergoes the experience

cal and the mystical elements seen in the earlier Greek

of an initiatory death and this is followed by a resur¬

texts. There are frequent warnings that the information

rection. In metals the result may be seen in the perfec¬

being revealed is for the initiated alone and there is

tion of gold—in man, the alchemist induces in his own

a continued use of the allegorical approach which had

person a similar separation of spirit from gross matter.

become common in late Greek works. The religious

In this case the result is a perfected person with an

nature of the art is emphasized and the predominant

infinitely prolonged youth.

vitalism favored by alchemical authors may be seen in discussions of the generation of metals, and in the

ISLAMIC ALCHEMY Similarities between Chinese and Indian alchemy

sexual interpretation of fimdamental stages of the great work. As in the Alexandrian texts the progress of the

have long led to speculations regarding the possible

operator may be followed through the now standard

transmission of common concepts. To date, however,

sequence of color changes. The concept of the philoso¬

few facts have come to light to substantiate these

pher’s stone is also well developed in the Arabic litera-

29

ALCHEMY ture. This stone allegedly provided a substance which brought about the rapid transmutation of base metals to gold. It derived from the earlier concept of special elixirs which might cure illnesses in man and which in an analogous fashion might perfect—or cure— imperfect metals in inanimate nature.

Khwarizmi.

The

De

compositione

alchemiae

of

Morienos proved to be only the first of many such translations made during the following century. There are frequent references to alchemy in the work of Thomas Aquinas and from the commentaries

Aristotelian element theory is commonly employed

on Aristotle written by Albertus Magnus it is clear that

in the Arabic texts, but in addition the Jabirian works

the subject was of great interest to thirteenth-century

employed the Sulphur-Mercury theory of the metals.

scholars. Albertus knew the work of Avicenna and he

This concept suggests that all metals are composed of

commented on the fact that this Islamic scholar had

different proportions of a sophic sulphur and a sophic

both accepted and denied the possibility of transmuta¬

mercury. While there was general agreement that these

tion in different works ascribed to him. Although

two substances have a resemblance to common sulphur

Albertus believed in the truth of transmutation himself,

and mercury, it was asserted that they were much

he remained skeptical of the “transmuted” metals he

purer than anything that could be produced in the

had seen, since the artificial product had not been able

laboratory. A quantitative relationship between the

to withstand the heat of the fire. With Albertus we

two was implied, but the mathematical relationship expressed in these texts may be most easily related to the number mysticism favored by the Neo-Pythagoreans and Eastern mystics. Although the SulphurMercury theory appears first in this literature, it seems

also have early evidence of the application of the sulphur-mercury theory in the West. In his De mineralibus he referred to the ancient concept of the ex¬ halations, but he went on to discuss a new theory that attributed the origin of metals to sulphur and mercury.

to be a modification of the concept of the two exhala¬

Some of the most interesting medieval alchemical

tions within the earth that lead to the formation of

treatises date from the late thirteenth and the early

minerals and metals. This concept is discussed in the

fourteenth centuries. The Pretiosa Margarita Novella

fourth book of Aristotle’s Meteorologica.

of Petrus Bonus of Ferrara (ca. 1330) reflects the influ¬

In the Arabic literature the reader finds an emphasis

ence of scholasticism in its tripartite structure. Argu¬

on medical chemistry for the first time outside of the

ments in favor of transmutation follow the initial

Far East and India. The work of the physician al-Razi (Rhazes, 860-925) is decidedly practical in nature. Although he accepted the truth of transmutation and discussed elixirs of varying powers, in the Book of the Secret of Secrets Razi spoke at length of chemical equipment and he described in detail the laboratory operations requisite for the chemist. In addition he described a large number of laboratory reagents and classified them into the categories of “animal,’ “min¬ eral,” “vegetable,” and “derivative.” Chemical texts continued to employ the first three of these as a basic scheme for arrangement until well into the eighteenth

refutations, and these in turn are followed by positive answers to the objections. Peter accepted transmuta¬ tion himself, and he further stated that the true process might easily be learned in an hour. At the same time he was honest enough to admit that he did not know how to produce gold himself. No less influential was the Summa perfectionis which was ascribed to Jabir (Latinized as Geber, late thirteenth century). As in the Precious Pearl the sulphur-mercury theory forms the theoretical basis for an understanding of the metals, and the alchemist is informed that he must arrange these substances (understood as ideal substances resem¬

century. Razi’s interest in medicine and practical

bling most in nature common sulphur and mercury)

chemistry influenced later Islamic work in medical

in perfect proportions for the consummation of the

chemistry. The work of ibn-Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037)

Great Work. Geber described in considerable detail the

and Abu Mansur Muwaffak (late tenth century) indi¬

laboratory processes and equipment of the alchemist.

cates a special interest in chemically prepared sub¬

This text reflects an important change in distillation

stances of pharmaceutical value.

techniques that

THE EARLY LATIN ALCHEMY OF THE WEST

seems to

have

originated among

twelfth- and thirteenth-century chemists. The intro¬ duction of condensation at this time made possible the

Western alchemy developed from Arabic sources. As

collection of low boiling fractions for the first time.

Islamic scholars had sought alchemical texts in the

As a result we find in the literature of the mid-twelfth

eighth century, so their Latin counterparts sought sim¬ ilar works four centuries later. The earliest dated Latin translation of this genre is the story of Prince Khalid

30

completion of his translation of the Algebra of al-

century the first reference to alcohol. Geber confirms this change in equipment and procedure. He described condensation apparatus in detail, and in addition he

and Morienos. This was completed by Robert of

was the first to give a method for the preparation of

Chester on the eleventh of February, 1144, a year after

a mineral acid—our nitric acid. These substances plus

he had translated the Koran and a year prior to the

the mixtures of other mineral acids placed powerful

ALCHEMY new reagents in the hands of alchemists who were to use them regularly after this period.

emphasized distillation processes which seemingly separated pure quintessences from the gross matter of

The alchemy of the late fourteenth and the fifteenth

the natural substances. It was this medieval tradition

centuries indicates an increasing interest in allegorical

of medical chemistry that bore fruit in the Renaissance

and mystical themes. Thomas Norton’s Ordinall of

“distillation books” of Hieronymus Brunschwig, Con¬

Alchimy (1477) is little concerned with clear-cut de¬

rad Gesner, and others who looked on alchemy and

scriptions of chemical processes or laboratory equip¬

chemical operations as a basic tool for the preparation

ment. Rather, we meet here with a lengthy poetical

of medicines rather than the search for gold.

account of the difficult nature of the work, the need of virtue for its successful conclusion, and veiled de¬

RENAISSANCE ALCHEMY AND THE

scriptions of the true process. These and similar texts

“NEW SCIENCE”

were accompanied by a widespread reaction against

The work of Marsilio Ficino and his followers asso¬

alchemy. The unsavory characterization of the alche¬

ciated with the Platonic Academy in Florence resulted

mist in medieval literature knows no better example

in a heightened interest in the mystical texts of late

than Chaucer’s “Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” (ca. 1390)

antiquity.

while on an official level there were the decrees and

corpus (1463) and this text was of great influence in

statutes of Pope John XXII (1317) and Henry IV of

the revival of Natural Magic, Astrology, and Alchemy.

England (1404) directed against those who attempted

Interest in these subjects is closely intertwined with

to multiply gold.

Ficino himself translated the

Hermetic

the course of the Scientific Revolution. Indeed, the

Closely connected with the widespread medieval

sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries witnessed

interest in transmutation was a parallel trend toward

an ever-quickening concern with alchemy. This new

medical chemistry. By the fourteenth century distilla¬

interest reached a peak in the middle years of the latter

tion and other chemical processes were in use among

century before declining. It was just at this time that

Italian physicians as a means of identifying the dis¬

the major collected editions of alchemical classics were

solved substances in the much frequented mineral

being prepared by Zetzner (1602, 1622, 1659-61),

water spas. A century later Michael Savonarola ordered

Ashmole (1652), and Manget (1702).

these tests into a procedural form that became the basis

The fresh flavor of Renaissance alchemy is perhaps

of the later methods of aqueous analyses composed by

best seen in the work of Paracelsus (1493-1541) and

Gabriel Fallopius and Robert Boyle in the sixteenth

his followers. The iatrochemists of the sixteenth and

and seventeenth centuries.

the seventeenth centuries follow directly in the steps

No less important was the medieval physicians’ de¬

of their medieval predecessors. Like them, they ex¬

pendence on alchemy as a source for new medicines.

pressed an interest in transmutation, but they were

The Eastern interest in the prolongation of life is

primarily concerned with the medical applications of

evident here. This may be seen as early as the mid¬

alchemy. For some this meant the preparation of

thirteenth century in the work of Roger Bacon. Bacon

chemical drugs, but for others it meant a mystical

fully accepted the truth of metallic transmutation and

alchemical approach to medicine that might apply to

he suggested that this might be utilized to alleviate

macrocosmic as well as to microcosmic phenomena.

the poverty of mankind. For Bacon alchemy was a

Paracelsus may be characterized as one of the many

major field of experimental science and he explicitly

nature philosophers of his time, but he differs from

stated that one of its goals was the search for a length¬

others in his emphasis on the importance of medicine

ened life span. In the Opus tertium (1267) he com¬

and alchemy as bases for a new understanding of the

mented that although many physicians used chemical

universe. Characteristic of the Paracelsians was their

processes to prepare their medicines, very few of them

firm opposition to the dominant Aristotelian-Galenic

knew how to make metals and fewer still knew how

tradition of the universities. They were unyielding in

to perform those works which led to the prolongation

their opposition to Scholasticism which they sought to

of life.

replace with a philosophy influenced by the recently

The same theme occurs in the work of Bacon’s

translated Neo-Platonic and Hermetic texts. The reli¬

who

gious nature of their quest is ever present. Man was

argued that alchemy must play an important role in

to seek an understanding of his Creator through the

younger contemporary,

Arnold of Villanova,

the much needed reform of medicine. In this way new

two books of divine revelation; the Holy Scriptures

remedies and the elixir of life might be found. The

and the Book of Creation—Nature. The Paracelsians

alchemist John of Rupescissa (mid-fourteenth century)

constantly called for a new observational approach to

insisted that the only real purpose of alchemy was to

nature, and for them chemistry or alchemy seemed to

benefit mankind. His works abound with medicinal preparations derived from metals and minerals and he

be the best example of what this new science should be. The Paracelsians were quick to offer an alchemical

31

ALCHEMY interpretation of Genesis. Here they pictured the Cre¬ ation as the work of a divine alchemist separating the beings and objects of the earth and the heavens from

Paracelsian position by Thomas Erastus became a fun¬ damental text for those who opposed the chemical

the unformed prima materia much as the alchemist may

medicine, and a sharp confrontation between chemists

distill pure quintessence from a grosser form of matter.

and Galenists followed in Paris in the first decade of

The search for physical truth in the biblical account

the seventeenth century. Here the debate centered

of the Creation focused special attention on the forma¬

largely around the possible dangers of the new med¬

tion of the elements. Paracelsus regularly used the

icines. Both Andreas Libavius and Daniel Sennert re¬

Aristotelian elements, but he also introduced the tria prima—the principles of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. The latter were a modification of the old sulphurmercury theory of the metals, but they differed from the older concept in that they were to apply to all things rather than being limited to the metals alone. The introduction of these principles had the effect of

viewed this controversy and concluded that the best course for physicians would be to accept the useful remedies of both the old and the new systems. This was the compromise position taken by the compilers of the Pharmacopoeia of the Royal College of Physi¬ cians of London (1618) and after this time there were few who denied the value of chemistry for medicine.

calling into question the whole framework of ancient

Yet, if the chemists debated with more traditional

medicine and natural philosophy since these had been

philosophers and physicians, they disagreed no less

grounded upon the Aristotelian elements. Furthermore,

among themselves. At the opening of the seventeenth

the fact that Paracelsus had not clearly defined his

century

principles tended to make the whole question of ele¬

oriented views of the Rosicrucians and he described

mentary substances an ill-defined one.

his mystical alchemical interpretation of nature and

Robert

Fludd

defended

the

chemically

The Paracelsians sought to interpret their world in

supernature in a series of folio volumes on the macro¬

terms of alchemy or chemistry. On the macrocosmic

cosm and the microcosm. Here he placed considerable

level they spoke of meteorological events in terms of

emphasis on an alchemical interpretation of the Crea¬

chemical analogies.

On the geocosmic level they

argued over differing chemical interpretations of the growth of minerals and the origin of mountain springs.

tion and he utilized mechanical examples to support his views. His work gave support to the alchemical plea for a new science and it was viewed with alarm

And in their search for agricultural improvements they

by Johannes Kepler,

postulated the importance of dissolved salts as the

Gassendi.

Marin Mersenne, and Pierre

reason for the beneficial result of fertilizing with

Jean Baptiste van Helmont was no less a chemical

manure. For them this was the familiar universal salt

philosopher than Fludd, and he described in detail his

of the alchemists. The Paracelsians approached medicine in a similar

sample of the philosopher’s stone. Van Helmont sought

transmutation of mercury to gold by means of a small

fashion. They felt assured that their knowledge of the

a chemical understanding of man through medicine,

macrocosm might be properly applied to the micro¬

but, in contrast to Fludd and most Paracelsians, he

cosm. Thus, if an aerial sulphur and niter were the

rejected

cause of thunder and lightning in the heavens, the same

Helmont thus was less interested in macrocosmic and

the

macrocosm-microcosm

analogy.

Van

aerial effluvia might be inhaled and generate burning

geocosmic phenomena than Fludd and he concentrated

diseases in the body. Similarly, chemical deposits were

more on practical and theoretical medical questions.

formed when the internal archei governing the various

The influence of both authors was considerable in an

organs failed to properly eliminate impurities from the

age when great uncertainty existed about the future

system.

course of the new science. As late as 1650 John French

The Renaissance was a period of new and violent

could still suggest that only chemistry should properly

diseases and the chemical physicians stated that their

be considered the basis for a reform of the universities.

new stronger remedies were essential for the proper

Similarly John Webster (1654) stated that the new

cures. The work of Paracelsus is reminiscent of medie¬

learning must be grounded principally upon the works

val distillation chemistry, but by the end of the century

of Francis Bacon and Robert Fludd.

iatrochemists were tinning less to distilled quintes¬ sences and more to precipitates and residues in their

32

Galenists were common. The detailed critique of the

EPILOGUE

search for new remedies. In all cases it was argued

If tire chemical philosophy seemed a plausible alter¬

that alchemical procedures resulted in the separation

native to the work of the mechanical philosophers in

of pure substances from inactive impurities.

the middle decades of the seventeenth century,. this

In the century between 1550 and 1650 conflicts

alternative did not remain a viable one for long. The

between Paracelsian iatrochemists and more traditional

impressive results of the mechanists—culminating in

ALCHEMY the

Newton

own views in their attacks on authors such as Paracelsus

(1687)—stamped on “respectable” natural philosophy

Principia

mathematica

of

Isaac

and Robert Fludd. At the same time, however, the

the mathematical abstraction of the new physics. And

chemical and alchemical call for a new science based

yet, this is not to say that alchemical thought died after

on new observations in nature was important in a

a final flowering in the sixteenth and the seventeenth

period that witnessed an ever-lessening adherence to

centuries. The collection of manuscripts at King’s Col¬

scholastic authority. Finally, the Paracelsian and iatro-

lege, Cambridge leaves little doubt that Isaac Newton

chemical adoption of the primary goal of the medical

was passionately concerned with the traditional prob¬

alchemy of the Middle Ages resulted in the permanent

lems of transmutation. Furthermore, recent research

acceptance of chemistry as a legitimate tool of the

indicates that Newton’s alchemical speculations may

physician and the pharmacist.

have been instrumental in the crystallization of some of his more acceptable concepts of physics. Similarly, Robert Boyle was influenced by alchemical thought. He published on the degradation of silver and his theoretical views were strongly influenced by his early reading of van Helmont. However, it is possible to go beyond these examples. Alchemical works were written by the important practical chemist, Johann Rudolf

BIBLIOGRAPHY The standard source for Greek alchemy is the Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques Grecs edited by J. Bidez, F. Cumont, J. L. Heiberg, O. Lagercrantz, et ah, 8 vols. (Brussels, 1924-32). Earlier, but still useful is the Collection

des anciens alchimistes Grecs by M. P. Berthelot and C. E. Rouelle, 3 vols. (Paris, 1887-88). Recent editions of

Glauber and the medical chemistry of the Renaissance

Chinese alchemical texts include Alchemy, Medicine and

alchemists found a new proponent in the revision of

Religion in the China of a.d. 320. The Nei P’ien of Ko Hung,

Franciscus Sylvius de la Boe whose work went through

trans. and edited by James R. Ware (Cambridge, Mass.,

numerous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century edi¬

1966), and Nathan Sivin, Chinese Alchemy: Preliminary Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). A collection of Arabic and Syriac texts will be found in M. P. Berthelot, La chimie au moyen age, 3 vols. (Paris, 1893). The latter work should

tions. In like manner many elements of Paracelsian chemistry were retained in somewhat altered form in the texts of the eighteenth-century phlogiston chemists. At the same time the German revival of alchemy and Rosicrucianism stimulated a new interest in earlier interpretations of a vitalistic and mystically oriented universe. The impact of this on the growth of the

be supplemented with the numerous studies of Julius Ruska on all aspects of Islamic alchemy and the intensive study of Paul Kraus, Jabir ibn Hayyan, 2 vols. (Cairo, 1942-43). Basic collected editions of the Latin alchemical texts in¬ clude the six-volume Theatrum chemicum published by

nineteenth-century Naturphilosophie has yet to be as¬

Lazarus Zetzner (Strassburg 1659-61) and the two-volume

sessed.

Bibliotheca chemica curiosa edited by Jean Jacques Manget (Geneva, 1702). The most extensive German collection is

Many characteristic themes of alchemical thought and style are present in the earliest texts that have survived. Both the secrecy and the practical recipes of the metallic craft tradition are evident in the works of the late Hellenistic authors dating from the late third and the fourth centuries

a.d.

The allegorical and sym¬

bolical style of later alchemical works is also present here, and this is a reflection of the mystical tenor of the current philosophies and religions of the late Em¬

the Deutsches Theatrum Chemicum prepared by Friedrich Roth-Scholtz, 3 vols. (Nuremberg, 1728-32). The standard French collection is the Bibliotheque des philosophes chimiques prepared by Jean Maugin de Richebourg, 4 vols. (Paris, 1741-54). The most extensive collection of alchemical poetry in English is that of Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Che¬ micum Britannicum (London, 1652), reprinted with an intro, by A. G. Debus (New York, 1967). The standard edition of the works of Paracelsus is that of Karl Sudhoff and Wilhelm Matthiessen, Samtliche Werke, 15 vols. (Munich and Berlin,

pire. The medical theme is absent in the Greek tradi¬

1922-33), and the collected works of van Helmont went

tion and this seems to have been derived from Eastern

through numerous editions in several languages from 1648

sources. First found in Chinese alchemical works em¬

to 1707.

phasizing the lengthening of life and the search for immortality, medical alchemy was integrated first into Islamic and then into Western alchemy and medicine. There is little doubt that alchemy, understood in its broadest sense as a chemical key to nature, played a significant role in the development of the Scientific

Bibliographies of alchemical texts date from an early period, but the two standard lists are J. Ferguson, Biblio¬

theca Chemica, 2 vols. (Glasgow, 1906), and Denis I. Duveen, Bibliotheca Alchemica et Chemica (London, 1949). A survey of recent scholarship in the field will be found in Allen G. Debus, “The Significance of the History of Early Chemis¬ try,” Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, 9 (1965), 39-58, and ex¬

Revolution. The claim that this mystical science should

tensive bibliographies including recent research will be

replace the Aristotelianism and Galenism of the schools

found in R. P. Multhauf s The Origins of Chemistry (London,

was looked on with dismay by early seventeenth-

1966), pp. 355-89, and Mircea Eliade’s The Forge and the Crucible (New York, 1962), pp. 186-204. Eliade updated the

century mechanists who were forced to clarify their

33

ALIENATION IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY latter bibliography in his “The Forge and the Crucible: A

not merely as the familiar protector of a nation, but,

Postscript,” History of Religions, 8 (1968), 74-88. For a

uniquely among ancient cults, as the Father of a human

bibliography of Paracelsus and the later Paracelsians see

family—the tribes of Israel. The paradigm of the fam¬

Karl Sudhoff, Bibliographia Paracelsica (Berlin, 1894; re¬ print Graz, 1958), and “Ein Beitrag zur Bibliographic der Paracelsisten im 16. Jahrhundert,” Centralblatt fur Biblio-

thekswesen, 10 (1893), 316-26, 385-407. Recent research in this field is covered by the Paracelsus-Bibliographie 19321960 mit einem Verzeichnis neu entdeckter ParacelsusHandschriften (1900-1960), compiled by Karl-Heinz

ily, with its tensions of affection, hate, loyalties, and fears, permeates the Old Testament. Again and again the children are disobedient and become estranged from their Father: again and again, there is recon¬ ciliation between a sorrowing, merciful but divine parent and his loved, but wayward, family. As in a

Weimann (Wiesbaden, 1963). In these bibliographies the

human family, there is a separation between faithful,

reader is directed particularly to the works of Ernst Darm-

appreciative siblings and willful, rebellious ones. Some¬

staedter, Allen G. Debus, Mircea Eliade, Wilhelm Ganzen-

times the children wander off to other gods in place

muller, Gerald J. Gruman, E. J. Holmyard, C. G. Jung,

of their own Father.

Hermann Kopp, Edmund O. von Lippmann, R. P. Multhauf, A. Leo Oppenheim, Walter Pagel, J. R. Partington, P. Ray, John Read, Julius Ruska, H. J. Sheppard, John Maxson Stillman, Frank Sherwood Taylor, and R. Campbell Thomp¬ son.

The prophets are the agents through whom God communicates his love for his children, his repeated disappointment and anger over their behavior, and his plans for effecting a final reconciliation. The prophets do not merely warn of terrible punishments if the

ALLEN G. DEBUS

chosen people continue to disobey the Lord: they

[See also Allegory; Creation in Religion; Experimental Sci¬

constantly use figures from the patriarchal family to

ence in the Middle Ages; Hermeticism; Islamic Conception;

embody their message. In one of the most poignant

Macrocosm; Neo-Platonism.]

passages of the Old Testament, Hosea represents the Lord yearning over his people Israel just as a patriarch might speak of his sons: When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they

ALIENATION IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and burn¬ ing incense to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of compassion,

Alienation, in theology, refers to the idea that the

relation of the worshippers to God may be analogous to the alienation, or estrangement, between human beings. The word implies that a close relationship of affection, family, friendship, or another close tie has

fed them. . . . How can I give you up, O Ephraim! . . . My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender (Hosea 11:1-8, Revised Standard Version).

Elsewhere, the relationship is that of husband and wife:

been broken, often with detrimental effects on the

“And in that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My

psyche. The disorganization of the self, worries about

husband,’ and no longer will you call me, ‘My baal’ ”

guilt, and loss of identity which the breaking of a

(Hosea 2:16).

long and very close bond between people may bring

It is hard to find anything in other world-religions

are all familiar. The idea that man, by his sin and

to compare with this moving, divine domestic drama.

indifference, may similarly alienate himself from a

Even in Islam, Allah appears as judge and sustainer

loving Father is a distinguishing feature of the Judaic

of order only; man is created to fulfill the amr, the

and Christian religious traditions.

divine commandment. In Neo-Platonism, it has been

The Judaic conception of God and his people came

34

with the bands of love; . . . and I bent down to them and

asserted, there is a form of alienation, for man is seen

increasingly to be of a familial situation. The story of

as separated from his true divine source and home. The

the creation and fall of man stresses the point that

soul has been corrupted by matter, the lowest stage

Adam and Eve were both disobedient and potentially

of the emanations from the One, and so has turned

dangerous to the high God, since they were ambitious

away from its higher origin, the Intellect. The very

of raising themselves to divine status and might find

metaphysical structure and impersonality of this sys¬

the means of doing so (Genesis 1:22). Jehovah appears

tem, however, precludes anything like the relationships

as a jealous ruler. But there is a critical change when

and dynamic tensions among different psyches which

the Lord adopts Abram as a son, as a child is adopted,

are implied in alienation as we have defined it. The

giving him the new name Abraham (Genesis 17), just

process of return to the Intellect, which certainly never

as later, Jacob is renamed Israel. God is thought of

yearns over a lost soul, in fact implies something like

ALIENATION IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY de-personalization. Love, for example, must be univer¬ salized and purified from being directed to any one person or object. Similarly, in Manicheism, two powers, neither of which is a true personality, fight for domina¬ tion. Mankind, like the hero of a fairy tale, is held by enchantment in a dark prison—this world. He can be rescued only by being taught the secret of his true nature as a child of light, and through learning thaumaturgic formulas which will enable him to escape to his heavenly home. Alienation-reconciliation is the central pattern of Saint Paul’s interpretation of salvation. In adjusting the Hebraic tradition of a chosen people to a universal religion, however, he necessarily had to make some extremely important changes. The later prophets had begun to think of ultimate redemption in terms of all mankind, not just Israel. Paul completed the trans¬ formation: all of the human race are members of God’s family, and so all human beings necessarily have be¬ come alienated from their Father. Obviously, there must have sprung up serious faults in basic human nature which have estranged all men, not merely some, from God. There is a generalized malaise in the human experience, alienated as all men are from the source of all truth and values. Paul implies that for the Jewish people the alienation was at least partially cured; addressing the Gentiles, he recalls their desperate situ¬ ation before Christ: . . . remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise having no hope and without God in the world (Ephesians 2:12). He describes the plight of fallen man in terms of what the psychiatrist would immediately recognize as “al¬ ienation”: And you, who once were estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, . . . (Colossians 1:21). This statement demonstrates that alienation and rec¬ onciliation are always combined in Paul s teaching, for salvation is reconciliation with God. The Father has reunited and gathered his estranged human family, not by revealing the law through prophets, not by sending a teacher to reveal the secret way out of this evil world, but by curing human nature through joining the divine with the human. In the union of the two in Christ s unified personality, alienation has ended. The Christian message, Paul stresses again and again, is that God through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation (II Corinthians 5:18). The Christian is “reconciled to God. Thus it would be illuminating to speak of the “alienating sin instead of “original sin” and of redemption as reconciliation.

Whether this emphasis would survive in Christianity became the great issue of the first and second centuries. Opposed to such a view of salvation was the move¬ ment known as “Gnosticism.” Although it took a vast number of forms, this sect essentially continued Manicheism with Christian coloration. The good God, it taught, is not tire creator and ruler of the irre¬ deemably evil world in which man lives and suffers. Men, however, have a spark of “light” which can enable them to escape. Christ was a heavenly spirit, child of a heavenly spirit; both he and his mother were human only in appearance, having no real bodies. Christ’s mission was to reveal the gnosis, the secret wisdom. The whole thrust is that Christ did not join divine and human personalities. There is no recon¬ ciliation, here, nor any analogy with human experience. Man is saved by totally rejecting material nature, by heroic denial of one side of his being. It is inter¬ esting to speculate as to what kind of world we should have if, say, the Albigensians of the Middle Ages, who apparently carried on this kind of belief, had trimnphed. In the late second century, Saint Irenaeus, in a clas¬ sical attack on Gnosticism, stated the essence of the great division in Christianity: ... if we devise another substance of our Lord’s Flesh, then will his statement about Reconciliation no longer hang together. For that only is reconciled, which at one time was in enmity. But if our Lord brought with Him flesh of another substance, then no longer was the same thing rec¬ onciled to God, which by transgression has become hostile. But now by Man’s participation of Himself our Lord hath reconciled him to God the Father (Against the Heresies, trans. John Keble, V:14:3). Irenaeus adds an important idea: that imder the Mosaic law, Israel was never truly reconciled with God, but was only in a “servile” state; now God has truly adopted all mankind, without favoritism, and men once more are his “sons.” Hence they should have both more fear and love of God; “for sons ought to fear more than slaves, and to have greater love towards their Father” (ibid., IV: 16:5). This paradoxical combination underlies the conception of Christian liberty, and it could exist only in a relationship of alienationreconciliation. Saint Augustine in the course of his spiritual wan¬ derings became a Manichean, and he left that sect precisely because it offered no hope of real recon¬ ciliation with the Father. He says, in a sermon for Christmas, that God, “. . . remaining God, was made man, so that even as the Son of man he is rightly called God with us, not ‘God in the one case, man in the other.’” How could Christ, if we believe, with the Gnostics, in the “crucifixion of a phantasm,” abolish

35

ALIENATION IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY the “enmity” which man’s sins have created between

vidual self in all its integrity. Augustine certainly would

him and God? (Confessions 5:19).

have wished for a mind at one with God’s, but not

Augustine’s spiritual quest was for a faith that would

to cease to be Augustine. Finally, the obsession in

combine a return to a reconciliation with God, and

popular religion with a crudely thaumaturgic salva¬

to a strong sense that the Deity is truly transcendent

tion—sin being purged by rituals, relics, pardons,

and omnipotent; hence his struggles to formulate free

etc.—reduced the

will in accordance with divine power. So he vehe¬

ciliation.

of alienation

and recon¬

mently opposed the Pelagians, who denied that man’s

Essential to Martin Luther’s reform was a return to

nature is intrinsically alienated by sin, and that anyone

Irenaeus’ point: that man is redeemed when he returns

may, like the prodigal son, decide on his own volition

to become again, literally, a child of God. Luther puts

to arise and return to his Father. Augustine—and the

the point in homely, deliberately nontheological terms,

mainstream of Christianity after his time—emphasized

like speeches in a domestic drama:

the one-sidedness of the reconciliation. Only as om¬ nipotent God reaches out to the individual soul can reconciliation

begin.

Augustine’s

Confessions

elo¬

quently expresses the idea that natural man suffers from naturally incurable psychical unrest and distress, and therefore yearns for something to save him; and it

Christ says: formerly you were my enemies; but now you are friends because I regard you as friends, not because you do many good things to Me. ... I die for the sort of friends who have done Me no good. I have just loved them and made them my friends . . . (Commentary on John 15).

expresses the joy, the sense of repose and contentment

God, like a (medieval) father, plays and sports with

when his estrangement from his Father is ended.

his children, pretending to be enraged with them to

Augustine,

following

a concept implied in the

test their loyalty. Christ, unlike angels, lived with us,

prophets, describes another kind of alienation. The

“ate, drank, became angry, prayed, became sad, cried.”

human family itself, which should live in harmony

And in Luther, as commonly in Christianity, there is

under the Fatherhood of its God, continues in an in¬

an implication, very strong if seldom clearly defined,

curable state of estrangement within itself. Believers

that it is better for the human soul to have undergone

(the adopted people) and unbelievers, even though

alienation with subsequent reconciliation than it would

living and working side by side, are really in deep

have been never to have been estranged from God.

enmity. This alienation, moreover, is deceptive. The

The joy over the return of the prodigal son was greater

eye of worldly wisdom regards the City of God as

than that over the continued faithfulness of his brother.

composed simply of malcontents, since it is out of

In any event, the relation of a husband and wife, or

sympathy with the ideals and convictions of the

of friends who have been seriously estranged and then

“world,” which often professes good ideals and inten¬

reconciled, is very different from what it was at first.

tions. But, of course, it really is the “world” that is

The fall of man was a felix culpa, then, in the sense

alienated from the source of all goodness. Thus there

that a new and perhaps deeper relation of God to man

has been a continuing impression that alienation within

has been established, symbolized by the cross. A mys¬

society is inevitable, and that the righteous are perma¬

tique of alienation has been evident throughout the

nently estranged from the “establishment,” the domi¬

history of Christianity.

nant powers of the world.

36

sense

Thus in Western civilization the condition of aliena¬

Medieval scholasticism attempted to bring into a

tion has, so to speak, been institutionalized in religion.

syncretic harmony the many strains of thought that

The expectation that alienation is part of the human

had gone into Christianity. The pattern of alienation-

condition has endured even when specific Christian

reconciliation was not dropped, but the desire to find

belief has gone. Romanticism viewed man as “alien¬

precise metaphysical formulation for the experience

ated” from nature. Wordsworth’s The Prelude, for ex¬

of salvation greatly reduced it in importance. Saint

ample, tells the story of a boy, nurtured by the divine

Thomas Aquinas, for example, defining the end in life

Spirit of nature, subsequently alienated from it by the

as—in Aristotelian terms—pure contemplation, envi¬

temptations and corruptions of civilization, and finally

sioned something quite different from the recon¬

reconciled. In one very important respect, however,

ciliation of personalities Paul described. The meta¬

the tradition has changed it. The Judeo-Christian reli¬

physical definitions inevitably reduced the impression

gions, as we have seen, closely connected alienation

of immediate relationships between God and man. On

and reconciliation. The gloom of the Christian doctrine

the other side, the medieval mystical tradition, with

of “original sin” is greatly lightened by the idea that

its goal of absorption of the individual soul into the

this condition is a kind of nightmare from which those

divine,

of recon-

who receive grace have awakened. It is the dark before

ciliation, which implies the continuation of the indi¬

the light. Modern views of man as alienated, however,

worked

against

the

conception

ALIENATION IN HEGEL AND MARX have no such solution of the dilemma. Man appears to be afflicted by this state, but its cause and cure are uncertain. Hence we have lost the paradoxical sense of optimism that accompanied the idea of alienation in Christianity.

The central actor in this process for Hegel was Spirit. Hegel thought that reality was Spirit developing itself. In this process Spirit produced a world that it thought at first was external; only later did it realize that this world was its own production. Spirit was not something separated from this productive activity; it only existed

BIBLIOGRAPHY

in and through this activity. At the beginning of this

The main bibliographical items for this subject are men¬

process Spirit was not aware that it was externalizing

tioned in the text. In addition, the following may be cited:

or alienating itself. Only gradually did Spirit realize

J. M. Ward, Hosea: A Theological Commentary (New York,

that the world was not external to it. It was the failure

1966); Saint Augustine, Sermons for Christmas and Epiph¬

any, trans. T. C. Lawler (Westminster, Md., 1952); Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, trans. W. Pauck (Philadelphia, 1961); G. B. Hammond, Man in Estrangement (Nashville, 1965); and G. Sykes, Alienation: The Cultural Climate of Our Times (New York, 1964).

to realize this that constituted, for Hegel, alienation. This alienation would cease when men became fully self-conscious and understood their environment and their culture to be emanations of Spirit. Freedom con¬ sisted in this understanding, and freedom was the aim of history.

ERNEST TUVESON

Hegel had created a system; and all his disciples

[See also Alienation; Christianity; Dualism; Free Will;

agreed that it was the final one. However, when it came

Gnosticism; God; Heresy; Romanticism; Sin and Salvation.]

to applying the system to particular problems, they conceived their Master’s system to be ambivalent. The fact that alienation seemed to them to be a challenge, something to be overcome, led them to put the em¬ phasis on the concepts of dialectic and negativity in

ALIENATION IN HEGEL AND MARX

Hegel’s system; and thus they challenged, first in reli¬ gion and then in politics, the Master’s view that the problem of alienation had, at least in principle, been solved. The foremost among these radical disciples of

Although its roots lie far back in the Judeo-Christian

Hegel, Bruno Bauer, applied the concept of alienation

tradition, the concept of alienation first gained promi¬

to the religious field. Bauer, who lectured in theology

nence in the philosophy of Hegel, and particularly in

and made his name as a Gospel critic, considered that

his mature writings. There are signs of the idea in his

religious beliefs, and in particular Christianity, caused

earlier works, but it is not until the Phenomenology

a division in man’s consciousness by becoming opposed

(1808), thought by many to be Hegel’s most important

to this consciousness as a separate power. Thus religion

work, that alienation occupies a central place in his

was an attitude towards the essence of self-conscious¬

writings.

ness that had become estranged from itself. In this

In the opening sections of the Phenomenology Hegel

context, Bauer promoted the use of the expression

attacked the views of common sense and simplified

“self-alienation” that soon became current among the

natural science that the world consisted of discrete

Young Hegelians.

objects independent of man’s consciousness. Truth, for

Like Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach was also fas¬

Hegel, was not to be found in knowledge that was

cinated by the problem of religious alienation, but his

purified of any influence from man’s own desires and

concept of it was much simpler. Whereas Bauer con¬

feelings. Ultimately Hegel considered that there could

sidered

that

men’s

religious

creations

eventually

be no truth that was not intimately linked with the

adopted an inhuman form, Feuerbach saw in religion

ongoing process of human beings as thinking subjects;

simply the projection of man’s essential desires and

truth was their truth. The supposed objectivity of the

capacities. Since what was ascribed to God were really

world of nature was in fact an alienation, for man’s

attributes of man, man was separated from himself, and

task was to discover, behind these appearances, his own

thus alienated. This idea was elaborated in Feuerbach’s

essential life and finally to view everything as a facet

best known book The Essence of Christianity, published

of his own self-consciousness. The same principle ap¬

in 1841. Feuerbach described the “fundamental idea”

plied to the world of culture in which such spheres

of his book thus: “The objective essence of religion,

as art and religion, if viewed as independent of man,

particularly the Christian religion, is nothing but the

constituted so many alienations to be overcome by

essence of human, and particularly Christian, feeling.

integration into the final understanding and recapitula¬

The secret of theology is therefore anthropology. . . .

tion which was Absolute Knowledge.

The foundation

of

a new science is laid here in that

3/

ALIENATION IN HEGEL AND MARX the philosophy of religion is conceived of and pre¬

while Entausserung has more the sense of “making

ogy” (McLellan [1969], p. 88).

external to oneself” with legal and commercial over¬

Feuerbach made an even greater impact through his

tones. Neither of these words is to be confused with

Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy and

Vergegenstandlichung, that is, “objectification,” which,

his Foundations of the Philosophy of the Future, both

in Marx as opposed to Hegel, is a neutral process that

published in 1843. Their major purpose was to point

can be either good or bad according to the partic¬

out that Hegel’s philosophy was just as alienating a

ular circumstances.)

force as religion and needed to be reabsorbed in the

Marx first worked out his ideas in detail with regard

same manner. Feuerbach began his Theses with the

to political alienation in his Critique of Hegel’s Philos¬

statement “the secret of theology is anthropology, but

ophy of Right. Here Marx examined paragraph by

the secret of speculative philosophy is theology” (ibid.,

paragraph Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and claimed

p. 98). In Feuerbach’s view, the great deficiency in

that the state, described by Hegel as productive of,

Hegel’s philosophy was its negation of theology “from

and superior to, its own elements, constituted an aliena¬

the standpoint of theology.” Thus Hegel—the German

tion of man’s essence. Applying to Hegel Feuerbach’s

Proclus—never managed to break out of the circle of

reversal of subject and predicate, Marx wrote: “The

ideas and could not realize the true relationship of

Idea is made subjective and the true relationship of

thought to being: “being is the subject, thought the

the family and civil society to the state is conceived

predicate.” As a philosopher in his own right, Feuer¬

of as their imaginary activity. The family and civil

bach was only of the second rank: basically he had

society are the presuppositions of the state; they are

one idea that he expounded in many different ways.

its properly active elements. But in speculation the

As Marx said later: “Compared with Hegel, Feuerbach

relationship is inverted. When the Idea is made a

is very poor. Nevertheless, after Hegel he was epoch-

subject, the civil society, the family, ‘circumstances,

making because he put the emphasis on certain points,

caprice’ etc. become unreal objective phrases of the

uncomfortable for the Christian consciousness and im¬

Idea and have a completely different significance”

portant for the progress of criticism, which Hegel had

(Early Texts, p. 62).

left in a sort of mystical twilight between clarity and

The place where Marx wrote at greatest length on his concept of alienation and his debt to Hegel are

obscurity” (ibid., p. 113). It was in this atmosphere of rapid secularization that

38

two people are said to be alienated from each other;

sented as esoteric or secret anthropology or psychol¬

two passages in the Paris Manuscripts. In the passage

Marx evolved his own concept of alienation. Bruno

on “alienated labour” (ibid., pp. 133ff.), Marx deals

Bauer had talked of alienation in religion; Feuerbach

with the relationship of the worker to his product. The

had carried this further by pointing out that Hegel’s

fact that the worker is related to the product of his

philosophy was itself the last bastion of theology;

labor as to an alien object means that the more the

finally

worker produces the more he approaches loss of work

Moses

Hess—nicknamed

“the

communist

rabbi”—had transferred Feuerbach’s ideas to the realm

and starvation. Marx goes on to detail four types of

of economics, by analyzing, in his essay On the Essence

alienated labor: the alienation of the product from the

of Money (1844), money as the alienated essence of

producer; the alienation of the act of production; the

man. Marx accepted all these accounts of alienation,

alienation of nature from men; and finally of man from

considering economics to be fundamental inasmuch as

his species-being (a term borrowed from Feuerbach

work was man's basic activity. In all these fields Marx’s

meaning the common factors making up man’s nature).

common idea was that man had alienated to someone

This negative picture is complemented by the descrip¬

or something what was essential to his nature—

tion that Marx gives of unalienated man in the notes

principally, to be in control of his own activities, to

that he made on James Mill at the same time as the

be the subject and initiator of the historical process.

writing of the Manuscripts. Put rather roughly, what

In the different forms of alienation some other entity

Marx means when he talks of alienation is this: it is

had obtained what was proper to man: in religion it

man’s nature to be his own creator; he forms and

was God, in politics the State, in economics the market

develops himself by working on and transforming the

process and cash nexus. (A note is necessary on the

world outside him in cooperation with his fellow men.

German originals of the term “alienation.” Marx uses

In this progressive interchange between man and the

two words to express the

concept of alienation:

world, it is man’s nature to be in control of this process,

Entfremdung and Entausserung. His distinction be¬

to be the initiator, the subject in which the process

tween these two words is by no means as precise as

originates. However, this nature has become alien to

that of Hegel. Often they appear to be synonymous

man; that is, it is no longer his and belongs to another

and are used together for rhetorical effect. If anything,

person or thing. In religion, for example, it is God who

Entfremdung conveys the sense of alienation in which

is the subject of the historical process and man is in

ALIENATION IN HEGEL AND MARX a state of dependence on His grace. In economics, according to Marx, it is money and the processes of the market that maneuver men around instead of being controlled by them. The central point is that man has lost control of his own evolution and has seen this control invested in other entities. What is proper to man has become the attribute of something else, and thus alien to him. The second passage of importance in the Paris Man¬ uscripts is the final section entitled Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic (ibid., pp. 157ff.). Here Marx began by de¬ scribing Feuerbach’s “great achievement” which was to have demonstrated that Hegel’s philosophy was merely a different form of the alienation of man’s nature; Feuerbach had reestablished the primacy of man’s social relationship to man. Marx readily ac¬ knowledged his own debt to Hegel. “Therefore the greatness of Hegel’s Phenomenology, ” he wrote, “and its final product, the dialectic of negativity as the

gion and politics of his contemporary Yormg Hegelians as models, had its roots in the socioeconomic situation of the worker in capitalist society. Yet in the 1930’s and 40 s, alienation did not play any part in the many discussions of Marx’s thought. In the 1960’s, however, it was accepted that it is the major theme running through the whole of his writings. Those who wish to maintain that there is a break between the “young” and the “old” Marx usually maintain that alienation is a concept that was entirely restricted to Marx’s early thought and later abandoned. However, these state¬ ments can be shown to be incorrect. The term itself occurs much more frequently, even in Capital, than is commonly realized. In Capital Marx writes, for example: “The character of independence and estrangement which the capitalist modes of pro¬ duction as a whole give to the instruments of labour and the product, as against the workman, is developed

moving and creating principle, is that Hegel conceived

by means of machinery into a thorough antagonism” (I, 432). Yet it is not only a question of terminology:

of the self-creation of man as a process, objectification

the content, too, of Capital is a continuation of Marx’s

as loss of the object, as externalisation and the tran¬

early thoughts. The main discussion of Volume One

scendence of this externalisation. This means, therefore,

of Capital rests on the equation of work and value that

that he grasps the nature of labour and understands

goes back to the conception of man as a being who

objective man, true, because real man, as the result

creates himself and the conditions of his life—a con¬

of his own labour” (ibid., p. 164). Nevertheless, Hegel’s

ception outlined in the Paris Manuscripts. It is man’s

conception of labor was of abstract, mental labor and

nature, according to the Marx of the Paris Manuscripts,

he only succeeded in overcoming alienation in the

to be constantly developing, in cooperation with other

realm of consciousness.

men, himself and the world about him. What Marx

Although Hegel said that man suffered from eco¬

in Capital is describing is how this fundamental role

nomic and political alienation, it was only the thought

of man, to be the initiator and controller of the histori¬

of economics and politics in which Hegel was inter¬

cal process, has been transferred, or alienated, and how

ested. The whole process ended in Absolute Knowl¬

it belongs to the inhuman power of Capital.

edge, with the result that it was the philosopher who

The counterpart of alienated man, the unalienated

judged the world. In other words, Hegel had confused

or “total” man of the Manuscripts, also appears in

alienation and objectivity. Thus, according to Hegel,

Capital. In the chapter of Volume One on “Machinery

“What is supposed to be the essence of alienation that

and Modern Industry” Marx makes the same contrast

needs to be transcended is not that man’s being ob¬

between the effects of alienated and unalienated modes

jectifies itself in an inhuman way in opposition to itself,

of production on the development of human poten¬

but that it objectifies itself in distinction from and in

tiality. He writes: “Modern industry, indeed, compels

opposition to, abstract thought. The appropriation of

society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-

man’s objectified and alienated faculties is thus firstly

worker of today, crippled by the life-long repetition

only an appropriation that occurs in the mind, in pure

of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced

thought, i.e. in abstraction” (ibid., pp. 162f.). Marx’s

to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed

central criticism of Hegel, therefore, was that aliena¬

individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face

tion would not cease with the supposed abolition of

any change of production, and to whom the different

the external world. The external world, according to

social functions he performs, are but so many modes

Marx, was part of man’s nature and the point was to

of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired

establish the right relationship between man and his

powers.” The fact that, in Capital, the conclusion is

environment. Marx therefore rejected Hegel’s notion

supported by a detailed analysis of the effects of ad¬

of Spirit and replaced its supposed antithesis to the

vanced technology, should not obscure the continuity.

external world by the antithesis between man and his social being.

Tire section of Capital that most recalls the early writings, is the final section of Chapter One, entitled

In his early writings, therefore, Marx sketched a

“Fetishism of Commodities.” The whole section is

notion of alienation which, taking the analyses in reli¬

reminiscent of the passage on alienated labor in the

39

ALIENATION IN HEGEL AND MARX Paris Manuscripts and of the notes on James Mill that

the increasing complexity and anonymity of capitalist

Marx composed in 1844. Marx writes:

society, and the gap between ideology and reality in

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because

many socialist ones, the concept of alienation has be¬

in it the social character of man’s labour appears to them

come very topical. Its very topicality, however, is in

as an objective character stamped upon that labour; because

danger of rendering the concept of alienation vacuous;

the relation of the producers to the sum total of their labour,

for often it seems merely to be used to designate any

is presented to them as a social relation, existing not be¬

state of affairs that is considered unsatisfactory. How¬

tween themselves, but between the products of their labour

ever, Marx’s description of alienation, particularly as

(I, 488).

However, the writing that best shows the centrality

contained in the Paris Manuscripts, is by no means as vacuous as many of its contemporary interpretations.

of the concept of alienation to Marx’s thought is the

For it contains both an account of the relationship

Grundrisse. This manuscript is the thousand-page draft

between socioeconomic conditions and psychological

that served Marx as a basis for Capital but remained

states that is, to some extent at least, testable, and also

unpublished until 1941. The Grundrisse, of which the

a far from vague view of human nature. Because it

Critique of Political Economy and Capital are only

contains both of these it is also a concept in which

partial elaborations, is the centerpiece of Marx’s work.

facts and values are inextricably bound together, and

It is the basic work which permitted the generaliza¬

so one which runs counter to the prevailing demand

tions in the famous Preface to the Critique of Political

for a sharp distinction between evaluative and descrip¬

Economy. For Capital is only the first of the six volumes

tive statements. Thus, although Marx was always writ¬

in which Marx wished to develop his Economics, the

ing with certain initial value judgments presupposed,

title by which he referred to his magnum opus on the

empirical criteria are, up to a point, applicable to his

alienation of man through Capital and the State.

hypotheses. Marx’s concept can be further clarified by

The scope of the Grundrisse being wider than that

asking what he would consider as nonalienation. This

of Capital, Marx’s thought is best viewed as a con¬

positive side of Marx’s critique is less well-known. But

tinuing meditation on themes begun in 1844, the high

the passage on “alienated labour” in the Paris Manu¬

point in which meditation occurred in 1857-58. The

scripts should be read in close conjunction with his

continuity between the Manuscripts and the Grundrisse

description of “production in a human manner” con¬

is evident. Marx himself talked of the Grundrisse as

tained in his notes on James Mill, and with the concep¬

“the result of fifteen years of research, thus the best

tion of the future communist society outlined in the

period of my life.” This letter was written in November

Grundrisse. The metaphysical and ethical elements of

1858, exactly fifteen years after Marx’s arrival in Paris

the concept of alienation that originated with Hegel

in November 1843. He also says, in the Preface of 1859:

and Feuerbach still persist to some extent in Marx, but

“the total material lies before me in the form of mono¬

they are given a socioeconomic context that makes

graphs, which were written at widely separated pe¬

them all the more interesting to the modern mind.

riods, for self-clarification, not for publication, and whose coherent elaboration according to the plan indi¬ cated will depend on external circumstances.” This can only refer to the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 and the London notebooks of 1850-52. Marx constantly used, and at the same time revised, material from an earlier date: for instance, he used his notebooks of 1843-45 while writing Capital. The content of the Grundrisse only serves to confirm what is plain from the external evidence: the beginning of the chapter on Capital reproduces almost word for word the passages in the Manuscripts on human need, man as a species-being, the individual as a social being, the idea of nature as, in a sense, man’s body, the paral¬ lels between religious and economic alienation, the utopian and almost millennial elements, etc. One point in particular emphasizes this continuity: the Grundrisse are as Hegelian as the Paris Manuscripts and the central

40

concept of both of them is alienation. Aided by the publication of Marx’s early writings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY H. Arvon, Ludwig Feuerbach, ou la tranformation du Sacre (Paris, 1957). S. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1968). H. Barth, Wahrheit und Ideologie (Zurich, 1945). J.-Y. Calvez, La Pensee

de Karl Marx (Paris, 1956). L. Dupre, The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York, 1966). L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (London, 1853). J. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination (London, 1958). E. Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man (New York, 1961). G. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind (London and New York, 1910). J. Hyppolite, Genese et Structure da la phenomenologie de Vesprit de Hegel (Paris, 1947). E. Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (London, 1962). W. Kaufmann, Hegel (New York, 1965). A. Kojeve, Introduction a la lecture de Hegel (Paris, 1947). J. Loewenberg, Hegel’s Phenomenology (La Salle, 1965). H. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (London, 1941). K. Marx, Capital, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1961-62); idem, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, ed. T. Bottomore and M. Rubel (London, 1956); idem, The Early Texts, ed. D.

ALLEGORY IN LITERARY HISTORY McLellan (Oxford, 1971); idem, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York, 1967). D. McLellan, Marx before Marxism (New York, 1970), with extensive bibliography on the early Marx; idem, Marx’s Grundrisse (New York,

1971);

idem,

The

Thought of Karl Marx (New York, 1971), with extensive bibliography on Marxist thought as a whole; idem. The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London, 1969). B. Oilman, Alienation: Marx’s Concept of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge, 1971). J. Plamenatz, Man and Society, Vol. 2 (London, 1963). S. Rawidowicz, Ludwig Feuerbachs Philo¬ sophic (Berlin, 1931). R. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1961). DAVID McLELLAN [See also Alienation in Western Theology; Economic His¬ tory; Economic Theory of Natural Liberty; Hegelian Politi¬ cal and Religious Ideas; Historical and Dialectical Materi¬ alism; Marxism; Socialism.]

a person conveys or understands something else (Etymologiae I, 47.22). Such deceptively simple formulas, which abound in the history of allegory, suggest, if nothing else, the fundamentally oblique character of this symbolic mode. When Saint Augustine speaks of “a mode of speech in which one thing is understood by another,” his very open definition is based on the assumption that some primary or literal (pryrq) level of sense may include another secondary or even more remote sense, which the trained interpreter will seek out through a process of reflection. Such secondary meanings may be imposed upon a text, or an author may clearly build them into a text, but no clear dis¬ tinction separates the interpretive and creative aspects of allegory, since the two are poles in a single commu¬ nicative method. The allegorical poet encodes an oblique, multiple (Dante called it a “polysemous”) meaning in his fiction, using emblems and iconographic devices, for example, the scythe of time, or the apple of discord, and the stories that go with them. The allegorical interpreter decodes this same com¬ plex message, which assumes that allegory is a struc¬

ALLEGORY IN LITERARY HISTORY In the expansion of Western thought allegory has

tural reality within the text. Nevertheless, though al¬ legory may exist in a text as a structure, the key to this structure is usually found in some system of values or ideas that lies outside the immediate context. “The allegorical method means the interpretation of a text

played a major part from the earliest times to the

in terms of something else, irrespective of what that

present. Allegories have taken many forms, from mere

something else is. That something else may be book

emblems like the eagle and the dove, to the simple

learning, it may be practical wisdom, or it may be one’s

fables of Aesop and parables of Christ, to vast poetic

inner consciousness.

structures like The Divine Comedy and equally large

depend upon external circumstances” (Wolfson, Philo,

forms like the patristic glosses and commentaries on

I, 134). Allegory thus not only assumes a certain stabil¬

the Bible. Essentially a means of structuring language

ity of literal meaning, but also the legitimacy of a

so as to produce continuously linked series of double

movement back and forth between that literal meaning

or multiple meanings, this symbolic mode depends

and some external frame of reference. In the history

All

these

are

matters which

largely upon syncretic mixtures of symbols from which

of the mode both creators and interpreters have en¬

it builds up “levels of meaning,” sometimes as few as

joyed wide freedom in the ways they have understood

two, or as many as seven. Minimally it holds that no

the internal and external dimensions of their texts, and

single literal meaning can stand alone, but that a valid

the historian is faced with a bewildering variety of

utterance must possess a transcendent meaning as well,

allegorical procedures. Theologians, however, have

a symbolic surplus beyond the literal level. Most alle¬

often sought to systematize the allegorical method.

gories are images of cosmic order, and their fixed,

A plethora of traditional technical terms conveys the

hierarchical, and timeless character becomes problem¬

encyclopedic spirit of this procedure. Hardly an idea

atic whenever such cosmic orders are subjected to

in the history of Western thought has failed to find

temporal analysis. The key to the permanence of al¬

allegorical expression, at some period or other. Major

legory throughout history appears to be its ornamental

allegorists like Dante and Spenser have often summed

surface, which allies it with changes in cosmology and

up the world views of their time. The term “allegory”

decorum and gives it an exploratory as well as a tradi¬

itself comes from the teachings of Greco-Roman rhet¬

tional and conservationist function.

oricians, Demetrius, Cicero, Quintilian, and others,

Terminology. Following classical tradition, the sev¬

who take it to mean a series of linked metaphors, as

enth-century scholar Isidore of Seville called allegory

exemplified in Horace’s Ode (I, 14), in which the poet

an inversion of speech, alieni loquium, aliud enim

elaborates on the “ship of state,” subdividing the single

sonat, aliud intelligitur, whereby, in saying one thing

main figure of speech into a series of nautical/political

41

ALLEGORY IN LITERARY HISTORY

42

parallels. Unlike the single metaphor, however, alle¬

source in the text. This departure may become ob¬

gory

of sense-

sessive. Dante labels his Commedia “digressive,” while

experience, moving toward rumination. Metaphor sees,

typically the medieval commentator ringed his text

but allegory thinks, and thus often creates an effect

with marginalia. The medieval distinction between a

of geometric

Allegory is furthermore

gloss and a commentary allowed the latter to stray

highly ornamental, using elaborate symbolism and

further from the literal sense. The interpreter often

personification.

thought of himself as boring his way through a “rind”

tends

to

depart

from

abstraction.

the

world

Deriving from Greek alios + agoreuein (“other -f

or “bark,” so as to allow the hidden symbolic truth

speak out”), allegory implies only the most general

to flow outward from the textual center. In the Middle

kind of semantic doubling, and classical rhetoric draws

Ages at least a text would be valued in the measure

rather uncertain lines between allegory and other fig-

to which its lode of inner meaning appeared to defy

rues of speech, metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and

exhaustion.

the like. It associates allegory with notions of design,

Continuities in the History of Allegory. A literary

with terms like paradeigma and schema, and later

method which encourages the search for multiplicity

critics link allegory with figura, impresa, and emblema,

of sense is bound to provoke attack from rationalist

which point to vision, structure, and external form.

quarters, a situation we observe with Plato, whose

By contrast the older Greek term for allegorical

rejection of the poets from his ideal republic includes

meaning refers us to a veiling function of language.

a rejection of the allegorical defense of Homeric myth.

Hyponoia (imovoia) was the term which, Plutarch tells

Early Greek philosophers, among them Heraclitus and

us (De audiendis poetis 4.19), the “ancients” had used,

Pythagoras, had found a piety toward god, nature, and

and it implies a hidden meaning, a conjectural or

man in apparently scandalous passages concerning the

suppositious sense, buried under the literal surface.

gods. Philosophy inverted myth, so that, for example,

Plato

the jealousy of a god would “truly” represent the

(Republic

II.

378d),

Euripides

(Phoenicians

1131-33), Aristophanes (Frogs 1425-31), Xenophon

physical activity of a natural force. Such a means of

(Symposium III, 6), all use hyponoia to mean what is

saving Homer for morality proved both superficial and

later subsumed under allegory (Pepin, pp. 85-86). Hy¬

irrational in the light of Plato’s dialectical analysis.

ponoia furthermore has a noetic character; the reader

For Plato this allegorical transformation of evil-minded

or listener will have to think his way through a se¬

myths did more harm than good, for it permitted the

mantic barrier, beyond which lies a realm of mystic

continuance of poetry in preference to the higher

knowledge. Thus Philo Judaeus may equate the hy¬

pursuit of philosophy. The wisdom saved thereby was,

ponoia of a text with its latent theme, its mystery, its

in principle, sophistry. Ironically, Plato himself pro¬

secret, its unexpressed, unseen, nonliteral, or simply

vided the most substantial mechanism and authority

intelligible meaning. While theological and other ex-

for the persistence of Western allegory.

egetes stress the mysteries of allegory, and classical

The Platonic theory of ideas has two aspects which

rhetoric stresses its semantic form, analyzing the shift

lead to allegorical interpretations of both signs and

from hidden to open meaning as a semantic inversion,

things, provided the overarching authority of dialectic

both exegetes and rhetoricians alike possess a large

is allowed to fade from sight. In the first place the

store of technical synonyms, among them parabole,

ideas may be taken to constitute the formulas, if not

typos, fabula, symbolon, ennoia, fictio, figmentum,

exactly the forms, by which the allegorist’s “some¬

insinuatio, significatio, similitude, figura, imago, inter-

thing” is interpreted as “something else.” If the snake

pretatio, involucrum, integumentum. Some of these

is an emblem of jealousy, then it is the idea jealousy

terms define the “external circumstances” of allegory

that organizes the “coaptation” of the snake for this

as a theological framework, others as philosophy, still

symbolic purpose. To speak of “the idea of a thing”

others as rhetoric or poetics. In most of the terms

is almost to invoke the allegorical process, for the idea

obliquity and mystery are the chief emphasis. Augus¬

transcends the thing, much as the allegorist’s fiction

tine observes in his De doctrina (2.7-8) that “when

departs from the literal sense of an utterance. Yet this

something is searched for with difficulty it is, as a result,

is not the strongest Platonic support for allegory, pow¬

more delightfully discovered.”

erful though it is.

If an ascetic interpretive rigor is one main source

More important is the Platonic arrangement of the

of pleasure in allegory, exegetical intricacy is the vice

theory of ideas as a vast hierarchical construct, from

of the mode. From a certain angle allegory is merely

lower to higher forms. By adopting the “principle of

a mode of systematic commentary upon a text, as

plenitude,” the notion that an intelligible world would

opposed to an unmediated, direct, or literal reading

possess all possible forms of all possible things—as the

of the text, and thus exegesis must depart from its

effluence of the One—Plato answered the allegorist’s

ALLEGORY IN LITERARY HISTORY encyclopedic demand for a plenitude of “somethings”

words have magical power, a belief that is evident in

by which to symbolize his “anythings.” Plenitude also

the influential treatises of Pseudo-Dionysius, On the

implied an infinitely subdivided universe, while it led

Celestial Hierarchy and On the Divine Names. Plotinus

to an otherworldly tendency within the whole ap¬

had already systematized the hierarchical aspect of the

proach to life, such that a Platonizing allegorist would

Platonic ideas, giving to each hypostasis of the One

always be happy to think of X in terms of Y, since

a particular magical quantum of effluence and in¬

this would achieve transcendency beyond the bonds

fluence. Within such frameworks allegory can play a

of mere material reference. By questioning the essential

double role. In its Neo-Platonic aspect it looks “up¬

value of material nature, the Platonic dialectic opens

ward” to a transcendental plane of purer Being, but

the way to a spiritualizing of nature, and in the case

at the same time it retains the primitivist drive of a

of Plato himself this leads to the use of allegory pre¬

language system in which every term has its own share

cisely at the moment in his dialogues when the analysis

of magical force. By the same token most allegorical

of nature has reached the highest point of transcend¬

fictions are romantic myths, in which the characters

ence describable in natural, human terms. At that point

make full use of magical weapons, vehicles, settings,

a leap of iconographic faith takes place, as in the vision

and quests. The history of allegory is, strictly speaking,

of love Diotima gives Socrates, when the realistic and

not the history of rival theologies and philosophies. The

human drama of the Symposium gives way to a “con¬

logic of allegory is only remotely rationalistic. Instead,

ceptual myth,” a spiritual diagram of a love which

we observe a struggle of magic-thinking to survive

cannot be represented “in terms of” ordinary human

within a climate of ever-increasing intellectual and

experience. The Platonic use of allegory, itself alle¬

semantic sophistication. This is the more curious in the

gorized in the Myth of the Cave, reaches a climax in

light of the allegorist’s frequent pretense of being logi¬

the Timaeus. There, since the universe is not explicable

cal and rational. The pretense covers the true situation,

in purely natural terms, its ideal character is permitted

which is that allegories are strict in the manner of

to surge up in a fanciful, visionary theory of cosmic

magic rituals, substituting mechanical for rational

order.

rigor.

The Platonic example may be archetypal for the

Allegorical Syncretism.

The creation and inter¬

history of allegory, in that his attack upon Homeric

pretation of allegorical texts seems to depend on an

allegorizing is not as general or consistent as at first

acceptance of syncretism, the kind of colloidal mixture

it seems. He is perhaps open to the charge that he

of religious, philosophical, and cultural beliefs which

is attacking any allegory which differs in its frame of

particularly marks the Hellenistic Age, the second

reference from his own. Throughout the complex de¬

century

velopment of Hebraic-Christian exegesis such private

the Renaissance syncretism is strongly aesthetic in its

invectives are common. The Christian exegetes attack

combination of elements. Syncretism may be icono-

a.d.,

and the High Renaissance, although in

their pagan counterparts, and then proceed to employ

graphically distinguished from synthesis, insofar as the

the rejected hermeneutic method.

former preserves the individual traits of the combining

At the same time, while rejection and resistance to

beliefs, whereas the latter would achieve a radical

allegory occur periodically within and between con¬

transformation of disparate cultural forces, until a sin¬

tending schools of thought, the method can survive attack largely because its principle of semantic inver¬ sion enables the allegorist to shift his ground freely whenever an opponent questions him. Since in the theological context of most serious ancient allegory there is scarcely room for a scientific theory of lan¬ guage, since, in short, language is here a means of revelation, there seems to have been no way for the allegorist to gain perspective on his own activity. By the second century

a.d.,

as a treatise like Plutarch s

Of Isis and Osiris will show, a multiplicity of Medi¬ terranean religions had grown up, yielding an unre¬ strained exchange of figures between variant faiths, each one providing the materials for iconography within the framework of some other faith. In spite of the intricacy of much exegesis the mode generally depends for its force upon the belief that

gle set among them came to dominate and control the assimilation of other sets as minor premisses in the logic of the culture as a whole. Syncretism is the cult of diversity within a culture yearning for unified order. It is often to be associated with gnostic spirituality, since the experience of gnosis includes a transcendence of the multiplicity of faiths by entertaining all their claims on an equal footing. Thus Gnosticism finds its sources in Greek Orphism, Pythagoreanism, Mazdean dualism,

Jewish

apocalyptic,

Egyptian

mystery-

religions, Hellenistic astrological cult, and various kinds of numerology, “along with the crass ‘spirituality’ of mediums, quacks, and religious adventurers” (Grant, Roman Hellenism, p. 74). The early centuries of Christian expansion spanned a period of syncretism in the Mediterranean world, a fact not without its bearing on the development of

43

ALLEGORY IN LITERARY HISTORY Christian exegesis. The Alexandrian School, most nota¬

dom because they were divinely inspired. Inspiration

bly Clement and Origen, who anticipated the visions

in particular could account for the jumble of disparate

of

Caesarea,

pieces that, over time, found its way into a sacred

Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa, introduced

canon. The inspired and mystical meaning was proved

key notions from Greek philosophy, which was given

rather than disproved by the appearance of arbitrary

the

fourth-century

fathers,

Basil

of

authority for them by the syncretism of Philo, who,

inclusion. The more erotic the Song of Songs, the better

although a Jew, stands at the head of this tradition.

its candidacy for allegorical interpretation as a myth

The broadly allegorical structure of Augustine’s two

of hierogamy between divine and human partners.

cities, of God and Man, may owe something to his own

Once the alien document is compressed into the overall

syncretic background. In such a climate the religious

vision, its message, assumed to be an inspired revela¬

convert may bring remnants of his former faith with

tion, takes on a transcendental character, and allegory

him into the new faith. Syncretism has this great ad¬ vantage for the allegorist: it gathers in, rather than

must follow. To piety as the conservative force of syncretism may

expels; but at the same time it preserves the sense of

be added its debased form, superstition. A higher mo¬

diverse origins and intellectual styles.

tive, which is harder to define, is the conciliatory and

A similar, if theologically less complicated syn¬

accommodating desire to permit a diverse world of

cretism surrounds the artist, poet, and scientist during

many faces and characters. This motive comes into play

the Renaissance. The “survival of the pagan gods” can

when rival world views meet in conflict at their bor¬

occiu then, as during the Middle Ages, because while

ders, when the opposite impulse would, as with icono-

their pagan attributes are assimilated by allegory to

clasm, seek to destroy the rival iconography. Allegory

moral and mystical frameworks, all of which are guided

here becomes a diplomatic medium of thought. Pseudo-

by Christian principle, their identities as pagan gods

Heraclitus, for example, tries to balance different in¬

are still preserved in ornamental forms within the work

terests in his Homeric Problems (first century

of art. This “neo-paganism,” as we may call it, had

claims that Homer’s Apollo represents the sun, in a

arisen early in the West and its legacy remains alive

physical allegory of the origins of the plague in the

even during the Middle Ages, although only when the

44

a.d.).

He

Iliad, while his concern is with cosmogony in reading

Renaissance saw a fresh sense of freedom within the

Iliad XVIII, where the Shield of Achilles becomes for

domain of vision and imagination could the cult of

him a vast cosmological symbol. Yet with these materi¬

diversity be permitted to express itself in designs of

alist readings he aligns others of a different sort, as

universal harmony. There is thus no conflict in the fact

when he moralizes Athena to mean wisdom, or Hermes

that Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, bases an important

to mean eloquence and reason. Finally, his overall

episode and much of the detail of his Fifth Book on

syncretism stretches to include a quasi-historical alle¬

“Egyptian” lore, coming from Plutarch, Of Isis and

gory, by which the adultery of Ares and Aphrodite

Osiris, and Lucian, De Syria dea, while allegorically

represents the mythic origin of metalworking, while

the poet ties these materials to the legend of Saint

the ejection of Hephaistos from heaven stands for the

George of England, the Arthurian Legend, fairy lore,

physical discovery that heat can be focussed by mirrors,

and so on, weaving the whole structure with fine traces

to create fire. The immediate aim of these varied inter¬

of Hermetic philosophy, number symbolism, and the

pretations is the defense of Homer against his moraliz¬

cosmology of Giordano Bruno. Such combinations sus¬

ing detractors, but beyond this, and perhaps more

pend their elements in a sort of mosaic. On the surface

deeply felt, is the exegete’s desire to use Homer as the

such iconographies are richly textured and decorated.

encyclopedic container for a wide and disparate vari¬

Piety may be the chief source of syncretic abun¬

ety of intellectual disciplines. Philosophy ceases to be

dance. The allegorist does not wish to lose any of the

the framework for Homer; Homer becomes the frame¬

materials present to his mind. This is clear in the case

work for philosophy. Homer has attained the canonical

of both Homeric and biblical allegory. A range of

status of a sacred literary body.

motives may contribute to such systematic “accommo¬

The bolder allegorical syncretisms arise when the

dation.” Piety begins with the mystery of the word

elements to be contained by the allegory are histori¬

itself, spoken in fine verses or written down in magical

cally accidental inclusions within an inherited literary

alphabetic characters. Ancient allegory also displays

corpus. The problem is clearest with the Old Testa¬

a reverence for age, naturally enough, since men

ment. Origen, who believes in the mysterious revela¬

obeyed inherited social, political, and religious forms

tions of Scripture, is aware how absurd it is to believe,

of authority. Finally, piety includes the widely held

literally, that God planted a garden like a farmer, or

belief that poets, prophets, lawmakers, priests, and

that He walked about in the garden. With the New

philosophers—wise men, in short—enjoyed their wis¬

Testament Origen recognized the patently implausible

ALLEGORY IN LITERARY HISTORY character of the story that the Devil could show the kingdoms of the earth from a single mountain top. “And the careful reader will detect thousands of other passages in the gospels like this, which will convince him that events which did not take place at all are woven into the records of what literally did happen” (De principiis IV.3.1). The allegorist therefore proposes to supplant the literal inconsistency by a spiritual equivalent possessed of inner truth, precisely, in short, what had been veiled by the inconsistent literal surface. Believing that “the skillful plan of [God] the provi¬ dential ruler is not so clear in things on earth as it is in regard to the sun and moon and stars,” Origen asserts the revelatory function of language when deal¬ ing with sacred literature. Origen is influenced by Philo Judaeus, through the intermediary Clement of Alexandria, and this Alex¬ andrian tradition, which would show parallels in the development of Hellenistic allegory, suggests that major allegory requires a belief in miracles and epiphe-

dictory episode. But he does not do this in a spirit of negative or defensive reaction, but rather as the ex¬ pression of an intellectual or speculative freedom. This mode employs philosophic methods, but Philo is per¬ haps less a philosopher than a prophet of philosophy. Thus he may go beyond the Platonic use of the Ideas as the forms, or paradigms, of things in the universe, and can hold that the Logos is everywhere immanent in the cosmos—“the totality of the powers of God existing within the cosmos itself” (Wolfson, Philo, p. 327). This Logos, unlike the Stoics’ material logos, is immaterial, and on that basis can lead to allegories judged “unchartably subjective” from the perspective of natural and human history. Phrased differently, the Philonic use of an immanent logos directs hermeneutic towards mystery, which is buried within the Word, whereas the Stoic logos directs it away from mystery towards reason. Yet Philo and the allegorical tradition stemming from him may not be identified with the via negativa of the mystics, since rather than draw his

nomena, at least on a verbal level. Origen notes that

cosmological interpretations into such a spiritualism

it is “the most wonderful thing” that spiritual truths

of the Logos that they reach evanescence, in a cloud

could be veiled under “stories of wars and conquerors

of unknowing, he draws them toward an infinitely

and the conquered,” and he notes that “the Word of

ramified, but consistently word-centered universe of

God has arranged for certain stumbling-blocks, as it

discourse. What saves his allegory from irrationality

were, and hindrances and impossibilities to be inserted

is its recognition that “rationality, when conceived as

in the midst of the law and the history.” Such barriers

complete, as excluding all arbitrariness, becomes itself

are providential—the more strange they seem, the

a kind of irrationality” (Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being,

more they goad the reader to “learn from the Scrip¬

p. 331). Philo is continuously interested in the verbal,

tures.” Like many allegorists, Origen can suddenly

linguistic aspect of the Word. He shares the almost

undercut his own appearance of caprice. He holds that

immemorial use of exegetical etymologizing, which is

the historically true passages are “far more numerous

finally canonized in the encyclopedic Etymologiae of

than those which are composed with purely spiritual

Saint Isidore. If we broaden the Philonic approach to

meanings.” Yet whenever a historical scandal appears,

include images and figures of speech as well as the

he can, if he chooses, fall back on a spiritual inter¬

literal or referential materials of language, we may

pretation. For this reason his method has appeared to

speak of the “logology” of poets and artists as well

one of his close students “unchartably subjective. . . .

as of theologians and philosophers (Burke, Rhetoric of

Whatever Origen’s theory of allegory may have been,

Religion).

it is quite inaccurate to call his application of its sys¬

The underlying wisdom of the Philonic strain of

tematic” (Hanson, p. 245). Now, if allegory is expected

allegory is its stress on the freedom of the interpreting

to have what Hanson calls “rules,” it seems clear that

mind, on what a seventeenth-century divine called “the

Origen and all other major allegorists are “unchartably

liberty of prophesying.” Its vice is ingenuity, but its

subjective.” But then, so is syncretism in general, and

virtue is the corresponding one of a compulsion to

for that reason, in describing his own work, Dante used

investigate and comment upon the Word and its prog¬

his term “polysemous,” or ambiguous.

eny, words. The noblest document composed with such

Yet another approach will demand both more and

allegory in mind is the Fourth Gospel. Common to all

less from allegorical syncretism and will perhaps justify

such Logos-centered allegories is the belief that words

its endless prolixity. This approach is to be found in

contain wisdom, and the form in which we inherit

the Origenist and Philonic belief in the mystery of the

words from the past is itself not without reason, if we

Word. Prophecy assumes that the prophet not only sees

can only discover the iimer web of motives that led

the vision of the truth, but can “speak out

to the slow formation of that legacy. It is often said

for this

vision, sharing in the divine Logos. Philo may alle¬

that allegory, outside the specifically historical mode

gorize any portion of the Old Testament, any single

known as typology, is antihistorical. When morality

image or word, any story, any disparity or contra¬

and ethics are the reference-point, this is true enough.

45

ALLEGORY IN LITERARY HISTORY But because words are an essential mechanism of human thought, their recorded forms of combination and formation are primary resources of the historian, and the allegorist’s accommodative impulse includes a desire to preserve these resources, rather than see them destroyed by advances or regressions of a cultural set. When the ancient gloss identifies Zeus as “life,” be¬ cause his name coincides with the Greek word for life, an element of history enters the interpretation through what may be a false etymology. Such equations hold that the universe is coherent when read as a logos. Allegory and the Cosmos. The history of allegory is tuned to the history of cosmological speculation, so much so that allegory might be defined as figurative cosmology. Each such fiction presents the image of a universe (and this is true even of short works), or implies that its details fit into a cosmic picture. Yet this imagery is not identical with the scientist s use of theoretical models. The allegorist does not prove and disprove hypotheses which are then dropped if they fail to hold up as fact. Allegory does not move toward the certainty of fact; it moves toward tenacity of belief. Analogy serves the allegorist, as it serves the cosmologist, but here the test of the figurative schema is not its yield of experiment or observation, but its fertility in leading to still further figuration. The allegorist treats his universe as if its being were literal, as if it were a book. Thus there arises the tradition of “book as symbol,” in which Homer and the Bible hold the

it was not until the Middle Ages that the drive toward universal containment and encirclement led to the complete dominance of allegorical methods. Lrom the eleventh century onwards influences from PseudoDionysius, Plato, and Plotinus give exegetes a secure sense of philosophic direction. The Timaeus and the Celestial Hierarchy provide terms and images. But in all areas of life this period shows universalist pre¬ tensions, which Maurice de Wulf characterized simply as “a tendency toward unity.” Political dreams of a universal brotherhood, intellectual dreams of a totally organized body of knowledge, theological dreams of a total theological summa—these were the natural background

for

allegorical

literature.

Bernard

of

Clairvaux finds infinite detail in a closed world, by imagining four infinitely reflexive “mirrors ’ of knowl¬ edge—the natural, intellectual, moral, and historical. Dante’s Commedia, whose form and setting rival the universe, finds a parallel in his De monorchia, a theory of political unification. By symmetry the actual physi¬ cal universe is converted into a symbol, and we can speak of a “symbolic mentality” which denied the more immediate puzzles presented by the senses. The flight from the limited toward the infinity of the Divine Being kept its balance only, if at all, by asserting that man’s world was closed and finite. Ockham’s principle of parsimony was invented, it seems, to stem this mon¬ ographic tide, since scholastic thought, at first ration¬

first place. Such works are simply large enough to

alizing, ends by absorbing the medieval compulsion to

contain a world of words. In them the cult of the One

turn relations into icons.

gives way to a cult of the Universe. As distinct from the Hellenic, a somewhat less phys¬ ical notion of cosmos governs the Hebraic-Christian tradition. Here, from the encyclopedic resources of the Old Testament come theories of the Law as the form of the universe. Philo found the Law “complete and true and good,” and in this total system “anything that seemed to be lacking in it was really hidden behind the literalness of the words and it was the task of the student to search it out” (Wolfson, Church Fathers, p. 25). Not necessarily the truth or the goodness of the Torah led to its exegetical treatment, but rather its assumed completeness. Lor Christians this unity carried over into the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy by events recounted in the New. The structure of the Bible as it finally evolved into the canonical Books, bounded by Genesis and the Apocalypse, implies the cosmic analogy on which its Logos is ordered. Syncretism in ancient Mediterranean religious life raised the question of universal order, while the in¬ fluence of Alexander also led in this direction. The

46

lian and Ovidian poetry, so different from Homer. But

monolithic pretensions of Augustan Rome may likewise have influenced the strongly allegorical cast of Vergi-

In a sense allegory thrives even more abundantly during the Renaissance, because the new cosmology does not at once dr ive out the old, so that visionary and scientific cosmologies coexist, their very difference enriching the imagery of poets and theologians. The main development of the mode is the gradual rejection of the theory of “levels” of meaning. Most allegorists have in fact used two levels, whatever they may have claimed to do. They take a sentence and give it a double meaning. At its simplest this process will be seen in the parables of Christ. Clement of Alexandria, however, distinguished four levels on which he could read a sacred text, a literal level and three subsidiary symbolic stages, the moral, physical, and theological. Origen held that as man is made of body, soul, and spirit, so interpretation must yield three levels of meaning, the literal, moral, and spiritual. Jerome in¬ voked the literal, tropological, and mystical. Augustine held that all readings of Scripture, however structured, should express charity, yet he too could speak of a hierarchy of levels, for instance, historical, aetiological, analogical, and allegorical (De utilitate credendi, 3.5). What became the classical formulation of Christian

ALLEGORY IN LITERARY HISTORY method, the fourfold theory, appeared in Saint John Cassian, who set forth a system of historical (literal), tropological (moral), allegorical, and anagogical. This theory is encapsulated in the mnemonic distich, first cited in 1330, by Augustin de Dacie: Littera gesta docet, quid credos allegoria, Moralia quid agas, quo tendas anagogica. The effect of such planar theories of reading is that allegory becomes more mechanical in theory than it can or need ever be in practice. What was once available only to the instructed interpreter is now the common property of the experi¬ encing subject. It is an error, however, to believe that

tion of the origins of things, along with their progres¬ sive development away from those origins. The text of the Bible is one such object of study, but the physical universe and the historical world of men are more crucial. In the Monads of Bruno and Leibniz the Great Chain of Being is “temporalized,” as the closed world of Ptolemy, so useful to the poet’s need for a cosmos, gives way to an infinite universe. Even more upsetting is the discovery of anthro¬ pological development. With the Renaissance a some¬ what aesthetic cult of Euhemerus arises, finding human origins for the gods, who are regarded as divinized heroes. Such beliefs lead, along with new historical and archeological knowledge, to new theories of human

romantic “symbolism” destroys allegory, although it

evolution, beginning with primitive forms and advanc¬

loosens and reorders the “levels” on which texts are

ing to more complex societies. After Vico it is no longer

made and read. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is as

possible for mythology or iconography to divorce itself

much an allegory as the Psychomachia of Pradentius

from temporal change. First the pliilosophes of the

(348-P410). Where the mode radically declines in force

Enlightenment debunk the allegorizing of the gods and

is not as a creative method, but in the interpretive

daemons, then the ground shifts under all forms of

divisions of theology, where the new criticism of the

imagination, so that developmental myths take over

Bible, with its scientific research into textual evolution,

from the former static world view. The “new allegor-

raises questions about the literary level which are so

ism” tends to be more monolithic than the old, permit¬

searching that the dependent symbolic levels pale in

ting a single theory of change, whatever it may be,

theological importance.

to explain various possible modes of change.

Allegory and Time. “Rationality has nothing to do

Allegory and Decorum. While a large view may

with dates.” Thus Lovejoy epitomized the static and

portend the general undermining of allegory in the

“absolutely rigid” form of the Great Chain of Being

modem period, the close-up analysis of allegory makes

as it had set up the framework of traditional allegory.

this appear an unlikely development. Allegories are,

The stasis of hierarchy is mirrored in the markedly

as a symbolic mode, composed of ornaments—not,

static character of most allegorical fictions, be they

strictly speaking, metaphors. Thus, the Greek term for

stories, dramas, lyrics, or whatever. Allegorical narra¬

the larger outlines of a major allegory would be kosmos,

tive yields a fixated image of change, in which time

while in classical Greek the same term does double

is synchronic, never diachronic. Augustine imagines

duty for the rhetorician’s “ornament.” The same double

human destiny in the shape of a city, following the

usage appears in Latin decus, which grows into the

Book of Revelation. Joachim of Floris diagrams history

English terms “decoration” and “decorum.” Allegory

as an allegorical tree with stems and branches. Time

expresses the interplay of little and great worlds, which

becomes a hypostatized form of becoming.

are ornamentally reflecting surfaces of microcosm and

Two aspects of the mode are thus historically prob¬

macrocosm.

lematic. (1) The Hebraic-Christian belief in prophecy

There is no reason to suppose that men will cease

asserts that historical figures may prefigure other his¬

to decorate themselves or fail to recognize decorum.

torical figures, Joshua becoming the “type” of Jesus.

But modes of ornament continuously change. Con¬

Scholars have held that the historicity of the figurae

ceivably the present world, with its increased stand¬

radically differentiates them from allegorical emblems,

ardization of artifacts and its diminishing barriers to

such as the anchor of faith. Yet the typological figure

travel, will see the speeding-up of allegorical processes.

is under constant pressure to revert to a timeless sym¬

Whether revolutions undermine or reorder cosmologies

bol, since typology in fact is collapsing the diachronic

has become the allegorist’s chief problem. Allegory can

time-span and stopping the fluent openness of time by

no longer be what for centuries it had tried to be, the

envisioning miraculous kairoi, or prophetic moments

image of permanence in a world of flux. Franz Kafka

when time “stands still.” (2) Modern science attacks

is perhaps the greatest allegorical writer of modern

the fixation of allegory in yet another quarter, and here

times, and his work revels in cloudy interactions be¬

perhaps there exists a possibility of a radical change

tween wierdly undefined characters. Yet Kafka looks

in the allegorical method. During and after the Renais¬

at this obscure scene with microscopic delicacy. He

sance new methods arise for the analysis and explora¬

bases his fictions largely upon “the Law,” on which,

47

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE following the ancient Jewish tradition, he meditates and builds a vision of man’s destiny as a creature caught up in a closed, imprisoning world. Generally speaking, modern allegory shows signs of breaking down many of the normal divisions between things, either by use of dream-mechanisms or by other surrealistic devices. The mode is creatively perhaps most alive in science-fiction, but it permeates the art of advertising, wherever decoration and decorum aie the primary commercial interests. Philosophically and theologically there is less place for allegory than in earlier centuries, but one can discern traces of it in the subjectivism of the phenomenologist s concept of transcendence, and in the actual use of fiction by ex¬ istentialist authors (for example, the novels of Camus, or earlier, the quasi-fictional treatises of Kierkegaard). As in previous times, the allegorist can today use many different media, including music (with

programs

and

leitmotifs) and the visual arts (with emblems and icons).

BIBLIOGRAPHY General discussions: Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion (Boston, 1961); Jean Danielou, Sacramentum futuri: etudes sur les origines de la typologie biblique (Paris, 1950); Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, 1964); Northrop Frye, “Allegory,” Dictionary of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, 1967); R. P. C. Hanson, Alle¬ gory and Event: A Study of the Sources and Significance of Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture (London, 1959); Roger Hinks, Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art (London, 1939); Henri de Lubac, Exegese mddievale: les quatre sens de Vdenture. Parts I and II (Paris, 1959-64); Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939); Jean Pepin, Mythe et allegone: les origines grecques et les contestations judeochretiennes (Paris, 1958); Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (Princeton, 1968); H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, Vol. I: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (Cambridge, Mass., 1956); idem, Philo: Foundations of Reli¬ gious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, 2 vols.

1949); Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, 1948); F. C. Grant, Roman Hellenism and the New Testa¬ ment (New York, 1962); Adolf Katzellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Art (London, 1939); G. B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: a Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1936); Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Rene Roques, L Univers dionysien: Structure hierarchique du monde selon le PseudoDenys (Paris, 1954); Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: the Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renais¬ sance Humanism and Art (New York, 1953); C. S. Singleton, “Allegory,” Essays on Dante, ed. Mark Musa (Bloomington, 1964); Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore, 1963); Maurice de Wulf, Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1913); Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London, 1958). On literary conventions: Harry Berger, Jr., The Allegorical Temper (New Haven, 1957); Ernst Curtius, European Liter¬ ature in the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. Trask (New York, 1953); Edmond Faral, Les Arts poetiques du XII et du XIII siecle (Paris, 1924); Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: the Making of Allegory (Evanston, 1959); C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936); E. D. Leyburn, Satiric Allegory: the Mirror of Man (New Haven, 1956); Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory (Chicago, 1969). A crucial, but very recent, publication is D. C. Allen,

Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1970). ANGUS FLETCHER [See also Ambiguity; Analogy; Chain of Being; Hermeticism; Iconography; Prophecy; Symbol.]

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE

(Cambridge, Mass., 1947). More specialized treatments: Erich Auerbach, ‘ Figura,

48

Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (New York, 1959); Edgar de Bruyne, Etudes d’esthetique medievale (Bruges, 1946); Rudolf Bultmann et ah, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate (New York, 1961), trans¬ lated from the German, Kerygma und Mythos, Vol. I; Manfred Bukofzer, “Allegory in Baroque Music, Journal of the Warburg and Courtaidd Institutes, 3 (1939-40); M. L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (New Haven, 1968); C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge, 1953); E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (Cambridge, 1968); Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images: the Making of St. John’s Apocalypse (London,

In

Western

cultural history ambiguity has been a

pejorative term until the twentieth century. This bias against the presence of two or more meanings in any statement reflects the general bias of the civilization which traditionally from Classical Greek times has placed its faith in reason and an orderly universe—a civilization which, by extension, has operated on a tacit belief in the reliability of the reasoning process and its correspondence with external reality. Consequently men for centuries did not question the relationship between words and things, and were able to assume that no responsible statement could contradict any

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE other, that if apparent contradictions emerged in

all readers have remarked, but trail off and merely stop,

speaking, clarity and coherence, hence truth, could be

a criticism that may not be relevant to works meant

achieved by amplification. Thus the Greek word for

to be orchestrated and choreographed. Nevertheless

universe (Koopos) carried both a scientific and an aes¬

the structural peculiarities may point to another level

thetic meaning. Ambiguity in this cultural context

of meaning if the poems are accepted as Pindar’s

represented therefore a failure at truth, a failure in

records of theophanies that occurred at religious

communication attributable either to excessive brevity,

games, an institution that was more ancient than

deliberate obscurity of phrasing, or to ineptitude.

Homer and the Trojan War. Traditionally, the arena

Nevertheless, in spite

of this general prejudice

in which the contest took place was sacred ground,

against confusing or misleading statements, certain

the athletic event an agon, and the victory a kairos

kinds of ambiguous utterances were acceptable to the

that transformed the contestant into a hero, a term

ancient Greeks. The earliest examples of these ambig¬

originally applied only to the dead, but progressively

uities are sub-literary and are cast in forms that still

applied to the living.

reflect the primitive faith in a world that contains

This cultural change created a third, ambiguous

precise answers to all questions. Oracular utterances

middle zone between the natural and supernatural

emanating from holy places presupposed the accuracy

worlds, in metaphysical terms a new ontological cate¬

of the priestess’s veiled message, since it was the voice

gory to which the living aspired. Through excellence

of God that spoke through her. Because the passive

which led to transcendence, the presence of the gods

role of medium did not include comprehension, eluci¬

could be summoned to this juncture between two

dation for the priestess as well as the petitioner came

worlds. Victory conferred therefore a multivalent status

with the passage of time. With arcane formulae and

upon the hero, the attainment of a more complete state

recipes the speaker assumed an active role—curses,

of being poised between time and eternity. But the

spells, charms, and ritual signs and dances being early

duration of this achievement was also ambiguous, since

examples of human attempts to control external events

on the level of actuality the victory won by the indi¬

through empirical means. The body of knowledge

vidual could be lost at the next festival. It is likely,

behind these practical skills was invariably recorded

therefore, that the poet’s solution to this cultural para¬

in symbolic language, but the obscurity of this form

dox was the juxtaposition of his favorite images in the

of technical jargon could have been ambiguous only

context of an amorphous structure: gold representing

to the non-initiates of occult fraternities.

the permanence of the state of pure being; light repre¬

Closer to art in our sense of the word are riddles

senting the incandescent moment of victory when the

which are self-annihilating word games, a form of

hero became a presence, its occurrence a metaphor

social entertainment that also presupposes the existence

for the process of heroization, and its visible behavior

of precise answers to questions, but which require the

mysterious and of short duration. The waning structure

agency of interlocutor and respondee to complete the

of the Pindarics may allude therefore to metaphysical

process: riddles cease to exist when the meaning is

problems that had no solutions, problems that in a

discovered. The contrivance of an endpoint of only one

prelogical age could be expressed only in mythopoeic

possible answer or meaning differentiates riddles from

terms.

enigmas, myths, and genuine works of art for which

The traditional practice of classifying according to

there are no determinable endpoints of contemplation.

the place of the festival might have been consonant

Ambiguity as an aesthetic principle emerged therefore

with Pindar’s intention, for if the poems were records

when artists deliberately contrived complex structures

of theophanies, where they occurred was more impor¬

that generated a plurality of meanings.

tant than other considerations. The Olympia I, in

In Greek literature it was the mantic Pindar who

Bichmond Lattimore’s translation, begins:

modified the oracular tradition for artistic purposes. In the Hymn to Zeus (only fragments of which have survived) God announces that no beauty is complete without praise. By inference, therefore, the poet’s sta¬ tus was holy and his function was to celebrate. But what Pindar was celebrating in his hymns of victory for athletes, and why the odes are apparently lacking in unity constitute an enigma. While there is no mys¬

Best of all things is water; but gold, like a gleaming fire by night, outshines all pride of wealth beside. But, my heart, would you chant the glory of games, look never beyond the sun by day for any star shining brighter through the deserted air, nor any contest than Olympia greater to sing. It is thence that the song winds strands

tery as to to whom the emv'uaa were addressed, there

in the hearts of the skilled to celebrate

is ambiguity as to the tiue subject of the poems. More¬

the son of Kronos. They come their ways

over the praises characteristically open brilliantly, as

to the magnificent

board

of Hieron. . . .

49

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE A prose reading structured according to hierarchy

time” (Pindar and Aeschylus [1955]). But the optimistic

might be as follows:

view of history presented in Aeschylus’ Oresteia gave

Water is the best of all things if usefulness is the criterion, but it is too humble and ordinary to attract attention. Gold, on the other hand, not only has the appearance of excellence but is in fact more valuable than other metals. But better

and to the doubts raised as to the ambiguous benefits of language in Euripides’ Hippolytus, for the cultural relativity introduced by the Sophists had challenged

than either of these is my ode composed at Olympia, sacred

not only the traditional content of the arts, but the

to Zeus,

connection between words and things, as well. Thus

and occasioned by the

victory of Syracusan

Hieron. . . .

That this univocal lucidity was achieved by limiting meanings either by amplification or its opposites, com¬ pression or suppression, reveals something of the aims and techniques of Pindar. A multivalenced reading might superimpose upon the prose version the follow¬ ing:

on the one hand Aristophanes complained that “They have dethroned Zeus, and Vortex is King” (Georgio di Santillana, The Origins of Scientific Thought [1961]). On the other hand, the new status of language as reasoning instrument made words the domain of crea¬ tors of systems: the scientists, philosophers, and histo¬ rians in whom the tacit faith of the dramatists was continued. Their assertion of the inevitability of conse¬

Water is the best of all things because it supports life which

quences from acts knowingly or unwittingly committed

is the best of all things. But what is best in the world of

was abstracted as the uniformity of nature’s laws which

nature is not best in the metaphysical realm, since the gold

could be discovered by following the laws of logic. For

of pure being outshines the earthly fame that adheres to

the rationalists, therefore, ambiguity was neither thing

the possessors of great wealth. But I am a poet, and poetry is of this world. Therefore in the search for subjects I look no further than the visible world, but choose excellence. The sun has no rivals for brilliance by day, Olympia—sacred to the son of Kronos—none for antiquity and dignity. . . .

Pindar has contrived different levels of reality with

nor principle, but a phase in the reasoning process between perception and knowledge. But the history of this movement was also one of degeneration, since “Men seemed to be capable of sacrificing the Faw of Contradiction for the sake of comfort” (George Boas, Rationalism in Greek Philosophy [1961]).

different criteria of excellence through the use of

The history of rationalism parallels the story of

gnomic opening, riddle, paradox, symbol, myth, and

introspection and the discovery of the self. The reduc¬

a multiplicity of meanings through overlapping cate¬

tion of the wealth of Homeric terms for what subse¬

gories. Moreover, suppressed information that must be

quently were the simplified categories of “body” and

inferred is not only technique but meaning in poems

“soul” reveals the metamorphosis of the conception

that both celebrate and are theophanies. Olympia is

of man from aggregate to unit, a change confirmed

compared to the sun that makes invisible lesser stars.

in art by the abandonment of the geometric style of

That Pythia, Isthmia, and Nemea are not mentioned

the late archaic period (Bruno Snell, The Discovery of

may be more than tact. Also, the term “Son of Kronos”

the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought

is not only traditional formula, but a way of evoking

[1953]). This unification through simplification pro¬

both gods for the purpose of opposing Time with

duced at the same time a common denominator that

Permanence if the self-manifestation of Zeus is the true

could be projected either as causal nexus or as focus

subject of the poem. Standing, as it were, historically

of interest for artistic purposes. The failure of Greek

between Mycenae and Athens, and artistically between

politics thus gave a new direction to the arts in the

temple and hippodrome, the Theban Pindar in life was

Greco-Roman period (Moses Hadas, Hellenistic Cul¬

awarded the right to an equal share of first-fruit offer¬

ture: Fusion and Diffusion [1959]). The emergence of

ings by the Pythian priestess of Delphi, and after death,

the spiritual landscape of the pastoral lyric asserted

heroization, his ghost being invited annually to dine

the validity of the private and subjective world; the

with Apollo (Gilbert Norwood, Pindar [1945]). But

improbable world of the romances proclaimed at the

religious games, Thebes, and Pindar were all anachro¬

same time the unpredictability of Fortune and a faith

nisms in the light of world history, for the political

in an incomprehensible but benign Providence; and the

reality of the expansion of the Persian Empire and the

composition of spiritual biographies called aretologies

need for a Greek response gave the leadership of that

that transformed moral teachers into cult figures—all

civilization to Athens.

point to the kind of consolation men sought.

The rapidity of change that accounts for the ultimate

50

way to the inconclusive debate in Sophocles’ Antigone,

Nevertheless,

after Aristotle,

literary works ad¬

displacement of the arts in Athens also explains the

dressed to the reason as well as to the sentiments were

ascendance of drama over lyric in the early stages of

subject to more stringent standards of consistency,

this process. For, according to John H. Finley, Jr.,

hence the criticism of Vergil’s Aeneid that persists to

Aeschylus was “the inventor of the idea of meaningful

this day. Apparently in the cultural climate of his time,

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE even the political success of Augustan Rome did not

of allegory that was one of the several innovations of

prevent the poet from longing for the other world, and

the Old Testament Prophets. Responding to the imme¬

this moral ambivalence produced an artistic duplicity

diate political needs of a threatened Judea, their messi¬

in an epic that attempted to satisfy by simple juxta¬

anic message fused policy with prophecy by historical

position the rival claims of both worlds. The two halves

analogy. The recurrent cycle of slavery and deliverance

of the epic are thus disjunctive, the first modeled upon

encouraged faith in a redeemer; therefore some of these

the horizontal plan of the Odyssey, the second upon

leaders saw their lives as both fact and symbol: they

the vertical transcendence of the Iliad, with no attempt

were “types” of Moses and Messiah, intermediary fig¬

to relate them. At mid-point between the two halves

ures that recapitulated past events while prophetically

Vergil placed the gates from the underworld (VI,

living the future. And by generalizing and extending

888-98; Loeb Library, I, 571):

in both directions it was possible to join together the

And when Anchises had led his son over every scene, and fired his soul with love of fame that was to be, he tells

end of history with its beginning, erasing the distinction between prophecy and apocalypse; thus for Isaiah, the

him then of the wars he must thereafter wage, and instructs

Messiah that he prophesied was to be another Adam

him of the Laurentine peoples and the city of Latinus and

in another Paradise:

how he is to flee or face each toil. Two gates of Sleep there are, whereof the one is said to be of horn, and thereby an easy outlet is given to true shades; the other gleaming with the sheen of polished ivory, but false are the dreams sent by the spirits to the world above. There then with these words Anchises attends both his son and the Sibyl, and dismisses them by the ivory gate.

And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse. . . . And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. . . . And the lion shall eat straw like the ox (Isaiah

11:1, 5-7).

Because this episode is pivotal, its interpretation will

Isaiah’s inclusion of a genealogy was an expression

determine the meaning of the whole work. The easiest

of faith in the continuity of history, even as his projec¬

solution is to conjecture a mistake on the part of the

tion of a Messiah documented the need for a cult figure

author. The principle of durior lectio, on the other

(as alternative to relapse into idolatry) to focus the

hand, requires a reading of the text as it stands. Clearly

aspirations of a people in troubled times. Centuries

Aeneas and the Sibyl have made their exit from the

later the selection of Jesus as the announced Second

wrong gate if the world of political Rome is not to

Adam gave to his followers a fixed point for their

be dismissed as a vain dream; alternatively if the reality

interpretation of history, and Moses was then reduced

of Rome is asserted, Aeneas himself is a false dream.

to a “type” who prefigured the Christ in whom the

Thus the Law of Contradiction is evoked, and as the

Law and the Prophetic promises were fulfilled. Alle¬

two halves of the epic seem mutually exclusive, cen¬

gory became therefore an indispensable tool for this

turies of readers have in effect discarded the last six

new religion with evangelical and universalist aims.

books. It is likely, however, that the poet was in fact

The Prophetic interpretation of political events

asserting both worlds but could find no satisfactory

constituted in effect the invention of world history. And

solution to his problem. The characterization of his

because history was the revealed will of God, approved

eponymous hero as “pious” was Vergil’s way of making

records of the past were subsequently organized into

him both historical founder and presiding genius of city

a canon and elevated to the status of Scripture. The

and empire. Whereas the fusion of two roles in one

transcendence implied by this new category of writing

character succeeded, the work as a whole did not, and

produced therefore works in Greco-Roman times that

the poet’s instruction in his will that the epic be de¬

took on the character of vulgate romances with apocry¬

stroyed may be interpreted as the recognition of his

phal additions. The linear projection of history was

failure to reconcile the ideas of history and eternity,

now abandoned in favor of a single character who

a conjecture made more probable by the fact that

anachronistically embodied the past and future experi¬

Vergil died in Greece while revising the Aeneid. The

ence of the people. But world history could also be

precise destination of Vergil’s cultural pilgrimage is

projected in this fashion, as in the case of the gigantic

unknown, but it was at Alexandria, through Philo’s

statue of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the different mate¬

multileveled but unified interpretation of sacred his¬

rials of which the figure was made representing the

tory, that a solution was found. Philo’s elaborate rami¬

chronology of kingdoms, the last or fifth monarchy

fications of the allegorical method are, therefore, the

being the millenium. The author of the Book of Daniel

first critical treatises on one, perhaps the most rational,

(a figure unrecorded elsewhere before the second cen¬

type of ambiguity.

tury) retold therefore the history of the Jews, compos¬

Among the backgrounds to the solution of this two¬

ing a “myth” of the Old Testament as nucleus to a

fold problem was typology, a chronological projection

story intended to encourage the people persecuted

51

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE under the Seleucid King, Antiochus Epiphanes. Al¬ though he set his story in Babylonia and Persia, in the stratified characterization of Daniel the reader recog¬ nizes Joseph and Solomon, and in the apocryphal addi¬ tions the ritualistic bias of the Haggidic tradition. In

by a variety and contrariety of Romanesque . . . and, in theology and philosophy, by a similar multiplicity of diver¬ gent currents, from uncompromising fideism and ruthless rationalism to the proto-humanism of . . . the school of Chartres.

short, the character of Daniel is an “historical ex-

The allegory, analogy, and symbolism that charac¬

emplum,” and the technique of deliberate anachronism

terized medieval thought was the very foundation of

allowed the author to shift from Hebrew to late

the Gothic church, beginning with the cruciform

Aramaic in mid-sentence, a fact that could not be

groundplan and the general orientation of the struc¬

passed unobserved by his first readers. Seen in this light,

ture. The common supposition that everything visible

the Book of Daniel served the same aretalogical pur¬

was a symbol led William Durandus, the thirteenth-

pose as the Gospels, the author’s open-ended scheme

century Bishop of Mende, to compile and invent in

consistent with a religion historically predicated on the

his Rationale divinorum officiorum layer upon layer

metaphysical principle of becoming. But unlike the

of meaning to every detail of church, ornaments, rites,

Gospels, Daniel records the Jewish retreat from uni-

and ceremonies. Thus the foundation of the church

versalism, a fact that also explains their rejection of

represented Faith; the roof Charity, because it covered

Philo as biblical exegete. Contrary to his intentions,

a multitude of sins; the door. Obedience—“If thou wilt

therefore, Philo became the ancestor to the medieval

enter into life, keep the Commandments” (Matthew

Christian philosophers (Harry Austryn Wolfson, Philo,

19:17). Moreover, the sacristy symbolized the womb

2 vols. [1962]). The allegorization that unified the Old and New

of the Virgin Mary where Christ put on his humanity,

Testaments for the Christians also transformed their

on earth, put on their robes.

since that was where the priests, his representatives

Bible into a universal history; therefore the word alle¬

Because the main entrance to the church, the west

gory acquired a new meaning. For the Greek ration¬

door, faced the material world from which the laity

alists, allegory referred merely to a figurative use

came to worship, church facades became visual syn¬

of language—in short, a fiction. But for the Christians

opses of theology, and in some instances the anonymous

symbols were nothing less than visible signs of the

artists found ways to represent doctrinal ambiguities.

Truth they were instructed to propagate universally.

Among the statues and the high relief carvings that

In the resulting conflicts the production of apologies

make up the facade of the Cathedral of Notre Dame

in response to attacks progressively clarified doctrine

in Paris is a standing niche figure of the Virgin Mary,

and assumptions (Claude Tresmontant, La Metaphy¬

heavy with Child. What distinguishes this work from

sique du christianisme et la naissance de la philosophic

others that serve a similar architectural function (Adolf

chretienne [1961]) that later received systematic treat¬

Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs of Chartres

ment (Etienne Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age

Cathedral: Chmt-Mary-Ecclesia [1959]) is the series of

[1952]). But it was on the level of sentiment that the appeal

choices the artist made. Like his contemporaries, in his wish to recall an event in Time and to evoke its

of Christianity lay, since the pessimism inherent in the

Eternal meaning he engaged in deliberate anachronism,

Greek cyclical notion of history, and its counterpart

for his Virgin is not yet the Mother of Jesus; never¬

for the individual, endless reincarnation in an un¬

theless she is already crowned the Queen of Heaven.

changing world governed by eternal laws—could not

But beyond these conventional details is the more

compete against a religion that recognized the individ¬

significant combination of the Virgin’s enigmatic smile

ual soul and offered a personal redeemer, a compas¬

and the gesture of her hands, arrested in mid-motion.

sionate God, and a progressive, meaningful world his¬

The viewer is uncertain whether she (Figlia del tuo

tory. The conversion of Constantine that automatically

Figlio) is blessing the Fruit of her Womb or whether

made Christianity the official religion of the empire,

she is praying to the Eternal God. The ambiguity in

and the expansion of the Church’s boundaries as other

the intent of her gesture reflected that of her status,

forms of rule failed marked the extent and degree of

for on the one hand the doctrine of Christ’s humanity

this cultural revolution. According to Erwin Panofsky,

allowed one to believe that a dutiful Son would be

(Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism [1951], pp. 3,4):

obedient to the wishes of his Mother. On the other, it was also held that the Incarnation was the greatest

To the Carolingian revival of the arts there corresponds,

52

indignity suffered by God—in which case the status

in philosophy, the phenomenon of John the Scot, equally

of the Virgin was merely that of the Chosen Vessel

magnificent, equally unexpected. . . . About a hundred

which gave her a place of honor but not necessarily

years of fermentation in both fields were followed, in art,

any authority in heaven. Consequently both rank and

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE function of Queen of Heaven and Mediatrix of Grace, titles for which no authority existed, were doubtful. On the practical level the wish of the Church on Earth to be in accord with the one in Heaven raised questions touching upon the validity of unauthorized modes of worship. It is probable that the influence of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the Marian Doctor, en¬ couraged the church’s toleration of this form of idolatry as counter-measure against the growing popularity of

For as it is Leah’s part to love since she is the affection of the soul, so it is Rachel’s part to know, for she is reason. The former gives birth to ordered affection; the latter to the reason or the pure intelligence. Judah represents to us . . . love of the highest good. And when Judah is born . . . then Rachel begins to desire children passionately, for she wants to know. Where love is there is vision . . . and certainly he who can love invisible things will immediately desire to know them and to see them by the intelligence.

the secular cult of the Lady, no longer obscurely deified

The canon regulars of Saint Victor (in whose writings

in trobar clus, but openly in the vernacular romances

are preserved the earliest systematic treatment of the

(Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love [1958]). The

four-fold interpretation of Scripture: literal, allegorical,

ambiguities that surround the statue in question stem from the authoritative statement of doctrine,

moral, and anagogical) were the ancestors of the author

the

of the Epistle to Can Grande. But in adapting this type

Creed, which remains officially a Mystery even today.

of multivalenced textual criticism to the Divine Com¬

The implications of a triune God, his dual nature, and

edy the author of the letter (if it was Dante) stipulated

the manner of his birth challenged the artist to present

only two, the literal and the unspecified symbolic,

a mind in tacit play with unanswerable questions of

ambiguously stating that the work was “polysemos, hoc

faith inherent in the figures, both depicted and con¬ cealed.

est plurium sensuum, ” thus leaving open the question of how many levels of meaning apply.

The economic recovery of Europe that permitted

From a structural point of view the Commedia might

the building of cathedrals also formalized education

have included a fourth part, since the Christian heaven

institutionally (Charles Homer Haskins, The Renais¬

was located outside the closed Ptolemaic cosmos. But

sance of the 12th Century [1927]) a fact that may

while staying within this universe, Dante chose to open

explain the shift from positive to systematic theology.

up his world conditionally. Consequently the problem

But the pedagogue’s shift of focus from a theory of

that confronts the reader at the end of Purgatorio is

knowledge to a theory of learning led not only to a

similar to the pivotal episode in the Aeneid, But unlike

reclassification of things

according to

theoretical,

Vergil’s disjunctive ambiguity, Dante’s Garden of Eden

practical, mechanical, and logical categories, but to

is a conjunctive symbol, the most complex and open

empiricism, as well. Consequently in their theolog¬

of nexuses in Western letters. In Eden the pilgrim

ical-aesthetic didascalica they were natural theologians

Dante sees in a vision a giant temporalized emblem

who believed that the Creator could best be understood

(more complex than Diirer’s for the Emperor Maxi¬

by his Creation, and thereby gave an impetus to the

milian I) that is a pageant of the Church. This allegory

study of the world of things.

has been glossed alternatively as the Church Militant

They were also mystical theologians who thought

on earth or the Church Triumphant in Heaven, but

in terms of a sequence of experience out of which

the probability that Dante intended both is made more

knowledge was to be derived for the unification of

likely by the location of this episode in the work. For

man’s mind with that of God. Hence the structural

the purposes of his narrative, from Eden the pilgrim

metaphor of the voyage for Saint Bonaventure’s Itiner-

Dante continued his voyage to God in the Paradiso,

arium, the nuptial metaphor in Hugh of Saint Victor’s

but in terms of the meaning of the work, the untold

De arraha animae, and the figure of Jacob in the

story of the future of mankind also begins at this point.

Benjamin Minor of the later Victorine, Richard. For

Thus, on earth, the closed world of moral categories

Richard, man’s ascent from earth to heaven by means

is obliterated by the recovery of innocence, and even

of the mystical ladder was premiss and conclusion.

the memory of past history is washed away by the

What he analyzed was each episode of Jacob’s life as

waters of Lethe or Divine forgiveness, since Scripture

aspects—ways of seeing and interpreting—of the ulti¬

assures us that “When He forgives He forgets.” This

mate unity of things that was implied by the one¬

uncanonical second baptism constitutes therefore a

ness of God. The two wives of Jacob served therefore

new opportunity for man under the new dispensation

two

functions

of as

many

views

of the

subject

of Christian hedonism. Thus Vergil’s valedictory bene¬

“Man” as the author cared to contemplate. The fer¬

diction to Dante (Purgatorio, XXVII, 131, 142): . . . lo

tility of Leah and the sterility of Rachel, on one

tuo piacere omai prendi per duce . . . per ch’io te sovra

level, were interpreted as the appetites of the mind

te corono e mitrio (“Now take pleasure as your

(Richard of Saint Victor, ed. and trans. Clare Kirch-

guide . . . [because you are now master of yourself,

berger [1957], p. 91):

body and soul,] I therefore crown and mitre you”).

53

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE The withdrawal of Vergil as Dante’s guide was the poet’s way of announcing the obsolescence of reason as governing principle for human action or principle of political organization, since the second baptism made instinctive man’s knowledge of natural order, the poet’s definition of Good. His projection of Evil in the Inferno recalls therefore the statue in the Book of

system

of

medieval

Christendom. ...

it

changed

the

character of men’s habitual mental operations . . . [and] looms so large as the real origin both of the modem world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodisation of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.

Daniel, a human anatomy analyzed both tropologically

Accordingly, we will approach the centuries extending

and chronologically but inverted, its posture repre¬

from the Florentine Renaissance to the First World

senting the stance of sin in relation to the natural order

War as a single epoch, tracing the principle of ambig¬

created by God. Conversely, the figure of redemption

uity under three headings, all ultimately derived from

in the Purgatorio is represented upright, the attainment

geographical and cosmological exploration.

of the recta ratio by man paradoxically obliterating his

1. Accidentalism in Open Systems. The seeming

need for it. Consequently the problem that is raised

haphazardness of horizontal and open-ended works in

is the connection in Dante’s mind between the ideas

the Renaissance was implicitly a new projection of

of the possible intellect and plenitude, and what these

ambiguity, for the sole rule of the Abbey of Theleme—

terms meant to him. In his political theory, stated in

Fay ce que vouldras—when translated to aesthetic

metaphysical terms, Dante was explicit on the first

principle produced compositions as savory and varie¬

topic, but not the second (De Monarchia, trans. H. W.

gated (but unpredictable) as the Adventures of Pantagruel. Adventures, which for other men had led to

Schneider [1957], p. 6): . . . since this power can not be completely actualized in a single

man

or

in

any

of the

particular

communi¬

ties . . . there must be a multitude in mankind through whom this whole power can be actualized; just as there

the accidental discovery of new continents while merely searching for new ways of traveling to places long known, thus unwittingly shifted the center of the world from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and

must be a multitude of created beings to manifest ade¬

added impetus to the nationalism that challenged with

quately the whole power of prime matter. ... With this

a rival theory of sovereignty the first modem state, the

judgment Averroes agrees in his commentary on De anima.

Church. Similarly the faith in the goodness of instinct

The cultural rebirth of man announced by Dante was projected two centuries later as a revolution in education by Rabelais, for whom the exploration of hu¬ man possibilities through actualization automatically meant the rejection of allegory and multiple levels of reality. He therefore blasted, in the Prologue to the First Book of Gargantua, the tradition that had ex¬ tended from Philo to his day (trans. J. M. Cohen, Penguin Classics [1955], p. 38):

that dignified the study of man’s actual behavior led to the discovery of the ego. But because the ambiguities of accidentalism at this time had to be conceptualized by alternative characterizations of God as either the rational or the capricious Uncreated Being, the result for men was fideistic optimism or nescience. Thus Rabelais’ optimism shaded into skepticism for Mon¬ taigne, since the purposeless exploration of the inner world of man raised more questions than he could answer, or that he answered with another question:

But do you faithfully believe that Homer, in writing his

“Que sqay-je?” This impatient shrug of Montaigne

Iliad and Odyssey, ever had in mind the allegories squeezed

reflects the quickened time-sense of the age that now

out of him by Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius,

found essays and short novellas more congenial fare

and Phornutus, and which Politian afterwards stole from them in his turn? If you do, you are not within a hand’s or a foot’s length of my opinion. For I believe them to have been as little dreamed of by Homer as tire Gospel mysteries were by Ovid in his Metamorphoses; a case which a certain Friar Lubin, a true bacon-picker, has actually tried to prove, in the hope that he may meet others as crazy as himself and—as the proverb says—a lid to fit his kettle.

It was not, however, the force of Rabelais’ language, but the Scientific Revolution that destroyed the alle¬ gorical method. According to Herbert Butterfield in The Origins of Modern Science (1957), pp. 7, 8:

54

of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the

than long accretions. But it was in the developed drama with its possibilities for the simultaneous presentation of multiple relationships and causal connections that the eclecticism and the ambiguities of an open world were best expressed. No treatment of ambiguity can avoid the problem of Hamlet, since for so many both character and play have become synonymous with the term. But some of the problems are the invention of modern critics, dat¬ ing no earlier than the advent of the proscenium stage which introduced not only a different theater but also a different technique of interpreting drama. The mul¬

... it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity

tiple playing areas of the Elizabethan stage, simulta¬

and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank

neous action, multiple motives, and the several levels

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE of reality that are the bases of Shakespearean drama¬

ostensible reason for dispatching Hamlet to England

turgy were flattened out by the box-stage, realistic

is for the collection of the Danegeld (ca. ninth century);

decor, and notions of verisimilitude and linear progres¬

on the other hand, he is a student at Wittenberg which

sion of action that characterize the novels of Zola.

was founded in 1502, but which did not enjoy a foreign

Therefore the delight of the critic in the multivalence

reputation until Shakespeare’s day. Obviously anach¬

of Hamlet’s madness, or speculation on the motives

ronism is present, but the usual function of collapsing

for the delay in revenge are false problems; Hamlet

time does not seem to apply. In Hamlet the author’s

is under palace arrest, and only by his assumed antic

motive appears to be the opposite: the extension of

disposition (plan known to Horatio) does he have li¬

Danish and English history centuries beyond the two

cense to prowl and to spy.

months required by the action. Similarly, the dramatic

The genuine ambiguities have to do with the ideas

structure, “all beginning,” becomes appropriate when

explored by Shakespeare, and with the structure and

it is perceived that Shakespeare was experimenting

scope of the play. First, revenge is throughout Shake¬

with the hero in posse, a risky artistic challenge that

speare a negative term, at best what Francis Bacon

requires the identification of an adolescent protagonist

calls “a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s

with his potentialities rather than with his achieve¬

nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.”

ments, with becoming rather than with being: “For he

Whether Shakespeare meant to say that revenge is

was likely, had he been put on, to have prov’d most

acceptable when purged of passion and executed more

royal.”

in sorrow than in anger, or whether revenge is all that

Technically, Shakespeare had to negotiate the con¬

remains of justice when the times are out of joint must

stant shift in focus from the drama on the stage to the

remain a moot point. Secondly, two notions of kingship

drama within Hamlet’s inexperienced but learning

are present in the play: on the political level, Den¬

mind by regularly suspending the action with an ab¬

mark’s kings are elected; on the theological level suc¬

normal

cession of reigns and of dynasties are foreordained by

Shakespeare thought he succeeded in his attempts may

God. Thus, upon his providential return to Denmark,

be seen in Fortinbras’ epilogue, for when the poet feels

after Hamlet has proof of Claudius’ guilt and the assur¬

secure in his accomplishment he characteristically vio¬

number

of

internalizing

soliloquies.

That

ance that he is God’s chosen instrument, he announces

lates the illusion he has created in order to reveal his

his royal pretension with “I, Hamlet the Dane.” Later,

hand as creator. As for the meaning of so protean a

in

reviewing

with

Horatio

the

evidence

against

play, the history of Hamlet criticism parodies Polonius’

Claudius, he declares that “the interim is mine,” sug¬

response

gesting that the eldest crime has made invalid the

pretations placed upon Hamlet’s antic disposition by

to

cloud

formations,

the

various

inter¬

present reign. Hamlet, therefore, is his father’s succes¬

the other characters, and their various reactions to the

sor, the purpose of his uncrowned rule to bring to an

play within the play—all these examples anticipating

end a dynasty and his own life which are parts of the

the Borschach Test (1923) which is based upon the

general rottenness of Denmark. Hamlet thus is both

interpretation of an articulate but amorphous shape

scourge of God and victim whose double role in life

that elicits self-revealing commentary. The work is

requires premeditation of all action to prevent the

therefore informed with its own literary criticism,

tainting of his mind, that purity rewarded in death by

including the tacit assertion that works of art may be

an apotheosis hymned by flights of angels.

exercises in criticism as well as creation, endeavors

But death for the other characters is also a con¬

always subject to the fashions of the day. The explicit¬

summation, the manner of their dying indicating, but

ness of this awareness Shakespeare reserved for his

not revealing entirely, the ambiguous connection be¬

Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra, V, ii):

tween the actualization of God’s will that is provi¬ dence, and justice on earth. Among the problems that Hamlet ponders therefore are the purposes of knowl¬ edge, the limits of reason, and God’s will. But ulti¬ mately all attempts at the capturing of God’s mind are not only vain but blasphemous; therefore augury must be defied, and like the fallen sparrow man is God’s

The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us and present Our Alexandrian revels. Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’th’ posture of a whore.

captive, nescience reason’s response to omniscience,

But the poet’s desire to free his work from himself

and readiness the proper state of the will in relation

and from Time is also present in Hamlet, for the play

to providence.

concludes with an infinite regress. Horatio offers to

The historical setting and the scope of the play are

follow his prince in death, but his duties are not yet

impossible to determine, since on the one hand the

over. He is not only to report Hamlet’s cause aright

55

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE to the unsatisfied, but also, in this harsh world, to draw

valid, viewing the Mona Lisa becomes a continuous

his breath in pain “to tell my story.” Because Shake¬

process of collaborative recreation. Thus the roles of

speare’s Hamlet is not the Hamlet of saga, chronicle,

artist and audience are temporally reversed, and the

romance, or other dramatic presentations, telling the

question of who is who and what is what remains an

story aright requires returning to the beginning, da

open one. This problem was made the subject of a

capo, and re-experiencing the play, a simple form of

painting by Vermeer (Figure 1).

regress that was a familiar device in music. 2. The Autonomy of Art and Self-Reference. The

The original title of “An Artist in His Studio” was “The

Painter’s

Art”

(Lawrence

Gowing,

Vermeer

multivocality of Shakespearean drama that conceals

[1952]) which tells us a great deal more about the

the author’s point of view finds its counterpart in

meaning of the work. Vermeer has depicted an artist

painting with Leonardo’s invention of sfumato. This

painting from a human model costumed and furnished

shading and blurring of outline in combination with

with the trumpet of fame, the book of history, and

the disjunctive background explains the enigmatic

the crown of immortality. But a number of questions

quality of the Mona Lisa (E. H. Gombrich, The Story

are raised in the viewer’s mind. First, the imper¬

of Art, 9th ed. [1958]). A comparison of her smile with

sonation of Immortality, whether it can be done, and

that of the Virgin of Notre Dame described above

what reality there is in the artist’s portrait of her. It

reveals the historic changes in artistic aims, since re¬

has therefore been conjectured that the artist was

peated viewings of the medieval statue will add noth¬

painting Hope although his model represented another

ing to the doctrinal ambiguities once they are per¬

figure. Secondly, the causal connection between fame

ceived, for the work, like the church’s sacraments, was

and the artist’s work have been reversed, for fame is

no more than a visible sign for a reality that existed

a by-product of, not the subject of a painting.

elsewhere. But in the case of Leonardo it is precisely

But more importantly, who is the artist? The identity

the repeated viewings that convince the beholder that

of the painter depicted by Vermeer is concealed from

her expressions change. Because the moods of the

the viewer since he is seen only from the back. And

beholder that are read into the picture are ipso facto

when one steps outside the frame of the canvas, the same question is posed in a different context, for the beholder is standing where Vermeer must have stood as he painted the picture. While this last point may be made of all easel paintings, it has special relevance to this particular work because of the subject and its treatment. On the left side of the canvas is part of a tapestry painted to look as though it might have been hanging over the canvas itself. But an equally possible interpretation is that it hangs in the doorway that separates two rooms. In either case it is pulled back to reveal an artist in his studio—or, “An Artist in His Studio.” Whosesoever the hand that pulls back the tapestry to reveal the painter painting, the viewer is permitted an insight into the creative process itself, the most secret of mysteries. Yet at the same time it is also public and cosmic, for fame is the judgment of the world, but the governance of the world may be providential or entirely fortuitous, an historical accident. What then is the “subject” of this painting whose surface lucidity, explicitness of detail, and quietness of statement conceal as many ambiguities as the beholder can think up? It is astonishing that something originat¬ ing in so small and contained an area as a narrow Dutch room can have such wide application. But to say that an event “originates” in a specific place is to make an arbitrary decision, for within the context of the assumptions implicit in the painting, this need not be the case. If no limits of inference are set and if the

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE categories of causal relations are placed in doubt, each

innocent of melodies, the first half of which the modem

detail in the painting may at the same time be both

listener associates with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

cause and effect. Moreover, the abstraction that is

This toy of a tune is introduced by the first and second

Fame and the anonymity of the artist depicted place

violins, then as if to put finger to lip and walk tiptoe,

them in the category of common, not proper nouns.

the first violins play it again very softly, while the

Consequently it may be surmised that Vermeer was

second violins disappear pizzicato into the accompani¬

handling abstractions that touch upon communication

ment. The listener is now ready for something to

and the human understanding, both within the self and

happen—but not the loud crash he just heard. While

the public at large; that Vermeer was analyzing the

he is recovering from his surprise, Haydn with mock

interpenetration of working, thinking, and creating, as

innocence gives the second half of the melody.

well as the possibility of an almost infinite succession

The variations begin in the 33rd measure when the

of appreciation. That Vermeer’s legal executor was the

melody is abandoned to the second strings and the first

pioneer microbiologist Leeuwenhoek, famous for his

warbles momentarily with the flutes. The second vari¬

microscopes, is perhaps not without significance.

ation, beginning with the 49th measure, introduces a

The self-reference in a painting about painting was

series of questions. Is it possible to make this music-box

an acknowledgment of the disappearance of traditional

tune heroic? Haydn shifts to the minor and increases

content from art. When secularization also came to

volume. The result is as ludicrous as the listener ex¬

music, it had certain natural advantages that perhaps

pected. But surprisingly, when it is repeated exactly,

explains its ascendancy in the eighteenth century.

something ominous creeps into the music. Bemused,

Divorced from reference to the outside world, it be¬

the listener now expects to hear the second half of the

came not only the most abstract and formal of the arts,

melody repeated; instead Haydn shifts to the relative

but also a language without a subject. Or, stated in

key and engages in private mutterings. The listener

another way, it became the subject of its own discourse.

feels excluded from what seemed to have been a con¬

Thus when the composers turned their attention to the

versation. All patterns of expectancy are undermined

exploration of formal patterns their realization that

by this digression, and the listener gradually realizes

reiteration was the only referential mode available to

the destructive function of irrelevance (measures 57

this kind of music prompted them to explore the ambi¬

to 74). Haydn then pretends to apologize for his in¬

guities intrinsic to any melody. The pleasure they

hospitality by returning to the tune with the notes

derived in contriving these excursions is recorded by

playfully doubled as though in compensation for his

the number and extent of variations upon themes,

lapse of attention. The listener is safely back in the

whether their own or those of others, for such exercises

world of the miniature. But is he? As it turns out, he

could be cast as independent works, as are the Goldberg

has been led back only to hear loudly proclaimed the

Variations of Bach, or as part of a larger work. Because

martial and genuine heroic possibilities of the melody.

the point about themes and variations can most conve¬

The conclusion of the second movement however is

niently be made by the simplest of examples, we choose

not coterminal with its performance, for the question

the second movement of Haydn’s G Major Symphony

of what a melody is remains. Haydn’s selection of a

No. 94, the “Surprise,” one of the twelve he composed

well-known theme that had been used as popular

for the London season of 1792. In it Haydn projected

French folk song and German religious chorale might

a series of physical postures, psychological states, and

have been his way of alluding to other possibilities,

courtly

genial

possibilities that are now being gathered in the La Bue

nescience of a quiddity: What is a tune? For the oddity

Union Thematic Catalogue of 18th-Century Sympho¬

of reiterative utterances is that through repetition the

nies. The two versions familiar to Haydn’s audience

original statement is both strengthened and under¬

were:

ceremonies

that

concluded

in

the

mined, and credence in its validity is progressively obliterated into nonexistence or modified to the status

HAYDN:

of an enigma, as the title of a work of Elgar’s declares. The surprise commemorated in the informal title of Haydn’s symphony refers to the fortissimo crash in the 16th measure of the second movement, a social joke

jokes do not bear repeating, Variationen was a useful solution to an artistic problem. Thus the technically simple, superficially naive work begins with the most

FRENCH FOLK SONG: ■ Q, m /n———m m StrtT —1 %

of the time that permitted dozing at concerts. But since

1

that records Haydn’s disapproval of the conventions

r

rrj H

1

\

r

+- h *u r m i

-H-i-1

II

T=| *

J

Ah vous dirai-je maman ce qui cause mon tourment

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE BACH: -£>-Mrmv—m———r m Tr—m 1 " II =T=FZ O Lamm Gottes unschuldig

paradoxes that attempted to join together different worlds by verbal statements while acknowledging at the same time the impossibility of the undertaking

In addition to the demonstration of the ambiguity

(Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia epidemica [1966]). The

of melody, Haydn has also suggested in the da capo

century following Shakespeare’s was the last to concern

portions that repetition does not exist. But there are

itself with theodicies since the role of God was now

other paths open to musicians if they are preoccupied

passive; He existed, as it were, in the past tense merely

with the irretrievability of experience. Guarantees that

as the Creator of the world described by a Descartes,

preclude the possibility of recurrence can be built into

a Newton, or a Darwin (John C. Greene, The Death

compositions, and some of the works of the twentieth-

of Adam: Evolution and its Impact on Western Thought

century John Cage, along with other moderns who are

[1959]). Poets had learned to perceive the world

attempting to rejuvenate music, are so conceived. The

differently, but their delight was of short duration

problem of modernity is important to ambiguity as

(Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse:

aesthetic principle, for it traces at the same time the

Newton’s ‘Opticks’ and the Eighteenth Century Poets

decline of multivalence and opens up the question of

[1946]) and as a class they never again recaptured the

what the word “Art” means.

authority they formerly enjoyed. Their work, along

3. Modernity and the Rejuvenation of the Arts. The

with that of the painters, degenerated into academic

idea of modernity clearly present from the early

exercises stripped, as it were, of content, since they

Renaissance was not formulated as aesthetic principle

had imposed upon themselves unnecessarily long the

until the nineteenth century. The oddity of this fact

task of upholding a no longer viable tradition.

is perhaps best explained by the artists’ unwillingness

The new direction for the arts—rooted in the com¬

to abandon notions of hierarchy; consequently the story

merce and technology that was one facet of the

of the Scientific Revolution from their point of view

Renaissance—had been stated centuries earlier by the

is largely that of resistance. The New Science had its

sixteenth-century Portugese, Camoens, born in the

distinctly negative aspect, since the collapse of the old

same year that Vasco da Gama died. His epic, Os

cosmology (Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World

Lusiadas, had opened with a declaration for actual¬

to the Infinite Universe [1957]) had taken with it those

ity and modernity (trans. William C. Atkinson [1952],

older sciences that had been assimilated to it. The

p. 39);

decline of symbolism (Johann Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages [1924]) was hastened therefore, and the astrology, the faculty psychology, and the humoral medicine that relied upon the stars were automatically discredited. Thus the complex, multivalenced reso¬ nances that the artists had been able to achieve through

This is the story of heroes who . . . opened a way to Ceylon, and further, across seas no man had ever sailed be¬ fore. . . . Let us hear no more then of Ulysses and Aeneas, no more of Alexander and Trajan. The heroes and poets of old have had their day.

correspondence and cross-reference were now lost. The

This plea was for the most part ignored by the poets

coincidental revival of magic indicated therefore not

and painters, and not for want of heroes or themes

only a new phase of empiricism necessary for the

since Spain, England, and France had their Vasco da

reconstruction of the sciences, but also a longing for

Gamas also. Moreover, the seventeenth-century battle

secret, ancient wisdom, the possession of which gave

between the Ancients and the Modems was primarily

one the power and status of an adept. Hence the

the concern of the critics and fought on different

flourishing of witchcraft with its arcane formulae and

grounds well after the war was over. The revolution

recipes, the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, the Cabbalah,

in modernity that should have re-defined the meaning

the further additions to the Hermetic corpus, and the

of the word “Art” was delayed; meanwhile the sig¬

emblem books that had as their last readers women

nificant achievements from this period were coming

and children in seventeenth-century Holland.

from practical men; the architects who quickly rebuilt

For the artists not committed to such exotica the

58

became painfully apparent, and this dilemma was ex¬ pressed both in their works and in the collections of

the churches and hospitals after the Great Fire of

problem was acute, since it was not only the traditional

London, the craftsmen who planned the English manor

sciences, but also one of the major props of their

houses and laid out the gardens, the artisans in the

activity, the siderealized classical myths, that had been

ateliers of France who designed furniture, and the

undermined (Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan

Dutch factory workers who turned out porcelain and

Gods [1953]). As for the poets, the limits of language

china. It was only when Baudelaire, the contemporary

AMBIGUITY AS AESTHETIC PRINCIPLE of Darwin, pronounced modernity as an aesthetic

aestheticians also the isolation of the locus of ambiguity

principle that in extremis the artists finally responded

seemed to be a more fruitful line of inquiry than a

and the arts were rejuvenated. But one of the conse¬

taxonomy, since artists have not limited themselves to

quences of this late re-orientation in critical theory was

one type, and the combination of types in a single work

to make ambiguous what constituted an art, for any¬

allowed for different analyses. Both approaches are

thing could aspire to that condition or be analyzed in

obviously ahistorical. Ambiguities for us, however,

aesthetic terms. Not only a life-style like Baudelaire’s

have referred to something and often point to the

Dandy, but cities, factories, and subsequently, plans for

central concern of the artist, to the ideas and problems

regional development and political states—not to

in cultural history that ought to be explored for pur¬

mention found objects—have been so appraised. Un¬

poses of appreciation.

derstandably, modernity could not always be distin¬

In the long history of ambiguity as a pejorative term,

guished from mere novelty, since the rapid develop¬

an important distinction must be made. As stated

ment of technology along with the sciences made

above, for the critics ambiguity represented an an¬

inescapable the awareness of change and the shifting

noyance in the cognitive process that was to be elimi¬

grounds of reality.

nated as quickly as the rules of logic would permit.

For radical changes had been taking place in the

For artists the embarrassment of dilemmas and the

sciences, as well, and the complete causality implicit

delay in their resolution was the very focus of their

in Newton’s reduction of all physical phenomena to

interest; hence saying more than one thing at a time

matter, motion, time, and space was now challenged.

to express the complexity of experience has normally

In the Einsteinian world wherein matter had dissolved

been one of their aims. Thus in spite of the ultimate

into energy, time was a geometric projection, and the

agreement on the uniformity of nature’s laws, artists,

motion of individual charged particles unpredictable,

critics, and scientists have for centuries addressed

Niels Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer began to pon¬

themselves to different orders of reality.

der the latest physical discoveries in terms of radical

This condition may be coming to an end, for the

problems of the understanding. Because the laws that

current trend away from formal logic in favor of non-

had governed the familiar world of large objects did

discursive modes may be pointing to a new basis of

not seem to operate on the atomic level on which that

agreement more intimate than in the past. The merging

world is built, the introduction of the conjunctive

of function of studio and laboratory which is illustrative

principles of correspondence and contrariety became

of this union might also mean the end of pessimism

an operational necessity. Since, however, these princi¬

in the arts, since both are at present being utilized for

ples were admitted to be merely “a new mode of

the exploration of the limits of human perception, of

description” that conjoined different categories of

tolerance, attention-span, and how the interpretation

analysis, the ambiguities of language, mind, reasoning,

of events occurs. Accordingly, the researches of the

and levels of reality were now assimilated to physical

neuro-psychologists

research and theory. The epistemological quandary

mentations of Op Artists and Electronic Composers

that the physicists since Einstein found themselves in

(Fritz Winckel, Music, Sound, Sensation: A Modem

are

analogous

to

the

experi¬

gave added impetus to the cultural relativity explored

Exposition [1967]) and the results of these collabo¬

by the psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, and

rative efforts within the framework of the new biology

historians whose interest was to analyze structures of

may signify the emergence of a new image of man.

thought and patterns of behavior.

What is certain is that under pressure of historical

The cumulative effect of these various endeavors was

changes, all disciplines in the post-critical age are

the total reappraisal of the meaning of history and of

forced to revalue their methods of gathering data and

human culture. It was in this context that “ambiguity”

drawing inferences, and are consequently preoccu¬

as applied to the arts underwent a semantic shift

pied with the problems of heuristics. Thus the art of

(William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity [1949]) for in the bewildering diversity of categories of thought one response was to take pleasure in complexity; hence the presence of a multiplicity of meaning in a work, or the possibility of a variety of readings was equated with the positive value of richness. The term became therefore one of approbation, and attention was now directed to the psychology of ambiguity (Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art [1952]). For the

interpretation for

Michael

Polanyi

and Elizabeth

Sewell is subsumed under their cover-term, discovery, a way of approaching problems, whether scientific, philosophical, or artistic, those categories themselves no longer meaningful in the realignment of disciplines that constitutes for them an intellectual revolution. Seen in this light, the periodic restructuring of human knowledge and the invention of new methods of reasoning have as their purpose the elimination of

59

ANALOGY IN EARLY GREEK THOUGHT ambiguities and the preservation of the notions of rmity, both in man and in nature. But it may be ob¬ served that each new way of reasoning generates new ambiguities which in turn provoke the search for more comprehensive theories of causality. Consequently, if knowledge has no limits, ambiguity must remain a permanent part of the human experience. Under these conditions it is likely that artists will continue to search for significance through the cultural paradoxes exposed by their perceptions of discrepancies. And from the complexity and multivalence of their experiences they will continue to provide others with that special kind of entertainment that we call the arts. BIBLIOGRAPHY There exists no single work that traces ambiguity or multivalence through the whole of Western culture; there¬ fore the suggested readings are arranged historically. Jean Danielou, S. J., Sacramentum futuri: Etudes sur les origines de la typologie biblique (Paris, 1950). Jean Pepin, Mythe et allegorie: les origines grecques et les contestations judeochretiennes (Paris, 1958). For Eastern Christianity see R. P. C. Hanson, Allegory and Event: A Study of the Sources and Significance of Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture (London, 1959). For the history of mystical theology, Pierre Pourrat, La Spiritualite chretienne, 3 vols. (Paris, 1921-27), trans. W. H. Mitchell and S. P. Jacques as Christian Spiritu¬ ality, 3 vols. (London, 1922-27). Henri de Lubac, S. J., Exegdse medievale: les quatre sens de Vecriture, 3 vols. (Paris, 1959-61). For literary tropes, Ernst Robert Curtius, Europaische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Berne, 1948), trans. Willard R. Trask as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953) and their counter¬ part in the visual arts, Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, and London, 1939). For theological aesthetics see Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art (London, 1963); for philosophical criticism and a brief history of aesthetics, the studies of Monroe C. Beardsley; also E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (New York, 1960), Northrop Frye Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), and George Boas, The Heaven of Invention (Baltimore, 1961). For more specialized studies, Winifred Nowottny, The Lan¬ guage Poets Use (Oxford, 1962), R. P. Blackmur, Language As Gesture (New York, 1952), Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York, 1954), and W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Lexington, Ky., 1954). For the relationship between structural linguistics, mythology, and cultural anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York, 1963). For a new epistemology grounded in the ambiguities of heuristics, Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New York, 1966). TOM TASHIRO 60

[See also Analogy; Chain of Being; Hierarchy; Metaphor; Myth; Poetry; Symbol.]

ANALOGY IN EARLY GREEK THOUGHT I Analogy, in its broadest sense, comprehends any mode

of reasoning that depends on the suggestion or recog¬ nition of a relationship of similarity between two ob¬ jects or sets of objects. It includes not only four-term proportional relationships of the type A:B::C:D (for which the Greek term is avaXoyia), but also both explicit and implicit comparisons, for example the use of models (TTapadelypara) and of images (eikoves). In early Greek thought analogies played a fundamental role in the expression of cosmological doctrines, in the development of natural science, and in ethical and political arguments. The three most important types of images used in cosmological theories are (1) political and social, (2) vitalist, and (3) technological, in which, roughly speak¬ ing, the cosmos is conceived as a state, as a living being, and as an artifact respectively. 1. Political and Social Images. The use of political and social concepts is widespread in pre-Socratic cosmology. The idea of cosmic order as a balance of power between equal opposed forces goes back to Anaximander, who describes the relation between cer¬ tain cosmic factors in legal terms: “They pay the pen¬ alty and recompense to one another for their injustice according to the assessment of time.” Heraclitus, on the other hand, stresses the constant war and strife between opposites: “One must realize that war is com¬ mon and justice is strife and everything happens through strife and necessity” (frag. 80). But both Parmenides in the Way of Seeming and Empedocles in his poem On Nature revert to the idea of a cosmic balance of power. In Empedocles, for example, Love and Strife are equals: they gain the upper hand in the world in turn, and these alternations are governed by a “broad oath,” that is, by some sort of contract be¬ tween them. Anaxagoras and Diogenes of Apollonia use a third type of political model, ascribing supreme power to a single cosmic principle, and Plato similarly attributes supreme power to Reason which governs and arranges all things for the best. Superficially this last group of images resembles the traditional descriptions of Zeus as supreme god; but there is this fundamental differ¬ ence, that the philosophers ascribe supreme power not to a capricious deity, but to the principle of order and rationality itself, to Mind or Reason or, in the case of Diogenes, to Air, thought of as the seat of intelligence. These authoritarian images too, like the egalitarian ones of Anaximander and Empedocles, serve to express the idea of cosmic order, although they do so from

ANALOGY IN EARLY GREEK THOUGHT a different point of view and with different associations. All these philosophers describe the cosmos in terms of a concrete political or social situation, whether of a balance of power and equality of rights, or of constant war and aggression, or of benevolent, authoritarian rule.

Plato’s antidemocratic, authoritarian political

inclinations are echoed in his descriptions of Reason as a supreme, benevolent cosmic ruler, but the evi¬ dence concerning earlier philosophers is too scanty to allow us to determine how closely their cosmological images tallied with their particular political ideologies. However, there are two ways in which their images

114. Evidently he did not simply confuse human soci¬ ety and cosmic order. Yet law and justice applied to the cosmos were no mere figures of speech, for order in the human sphere was regularly conceived as part of the wider cosmic order and as somehow derived from it. 2. Vitalist Images. Most of the earlier pre-Socratic philosophers imagined that the primary stuff out of which things are made or from which they originate is not merely like something that is alive, but is indeed instinct with life. This is true of all three Milesian philosophers and of Heraclitus; when he describes the

may be related to their historical and social back¬ ground.

world-order as an “ever-living” fire in frag. 30, “ever-

First, the development of the Greek city-state from

lasting,’ for he held that fire is indeed the substance

about the seventh century b.c. was accompanied by an increasing political awareness and a new conception of political rights. In particular the framing of consti¬ tutions and the codification of laws led to a much less arbitrary administration of justice than had been the case in earlier periods. These changes had their coun¬ terparts in the political images used by the cosmologists; varied as those images are, they have in common the notion that cosmological changes are governed by rules that are independent of the caprice of individuals. The development in the attitude towards justice in the city-state is reflected in the development of Greek cosmology itself, since it was largely by means of the ideas of law and justice that the pre-Socratic thinkers expressed the notion that the changes affecting the primary substances in the world are orderly and regu¬ lated by immutable principles. Secondly, the very variety of images and of the

living" is not simply a poetical equivalent for “ever¬ of which our own souls consist. Later the Atomists too seem to have believed that the mass of atoms from which worlds originate is instinct with life in the sense that it is permeated by soul-atoms. Although Aristotle ridiculed the belief that soul is intermingled in the whole universe, he himself held that the heavenly bodies are alive, and indeed some of his general physi¬ cal theories, for example the doctrine of potentiality and actuality, are much influenced by ideas which apply primarily to the sphere of living things. These and other vitalist beliefs affected the develop¬ ment of Greek cosmology in three main ways. First, the earliest philosophers were “hylozoists”; they as¬ sumed that the primary substance, being alive, is in motion. The question of the origin or cause of move¬ ment only came to be recognized as a problem after Parmenides had denied the possibility of change. Secondly, vitalist notions are naturally very impor¬

cosmological doctrines themselves is significant. As in

tant in accounts of how the world developed from an

the political sphere the rise of the city-state is accom¬

original, undifferentiated state. Anaximander, for ex¬

panied by a proliferation of constitutional forms rang¬

ample, pictured the world evolving from a seed that

ing from extreme democracy to tyranny, the merits

separated off from the Boundless, and some of the

of each of which were much debated, so similarly in

Pythagoreans too thought that the One from which

the field of speculative thought the philosophers felt

the cosmos developed was composed of seed.

free to reject earlier ideas and to attempt to resolve

Thirdly, the structure of the cosmos was sometimes

each problem for themselves, and each new theory as

compared with that of man and vice versa. The idea

it was advanced was discussed and criticized openly.

that the world is a living creature may underlie the

It is difficult to decide how far any of the pre-

comparison that Anaximenes drew between the role

Socratics recognized an element of transference in

of air in the world and that of breath in man. But two

applying political and social conceptions to the cosmos.

of the Hippocratic treatises put forward much more

No philosopher before Plato explicitly refers to his

elaborate analogies between the microcosm and the

cosmological images as images

macrocosm. In De victu man’s body is said to be a

(eikoves),

and yet it is

unlikely that any of them simply failed to differentiate

copy of the world-whole, the stomach being compared

at all between the realm of society and that of nature,

with the sea and so on. And De hebdomadibus suggests

the relations between which had become, by the end

detailed correspondences both between the substances

of the fifth century at least, the subject of heated

in the body and those in the imiverse—where the bones

controversy. Heraclitus, for instance, tacitly distin¬

correspond to the stony core of the earth, for example—

guishes between human laws and the divine law, while

and between the various parts of the body and different

saying that the former depend on the latter, in frag.

geographical areas—where the Thracian Bosphorus is

61

ANALOGY IN EARLY GREEK THOUGHT said to correspond to the feet, the Peloponnese to the

described the world as a state governed by divine law,

head, and so on. While Plato proposed no detailed

and similar ideas had a long history in the Middle Ages

analogy between the anatomy of man and the structure

and in the Renaissance.

of the universe, he stated unequivocally his conviction

Moreover while Greek cosmology owed many ideas

that “this world is in truth a living creature, endowed

to politics and biology, Greek biological theories and

with soul and reason’

(Timaeus 30b), and according

political thought were similarly colored by the use of

to the Philebus (29b ff.) both our body and our soul

images drawn from one another. For example, the twin

are derived from the body and the soul of the world-

ideas that health depends on the equality of rights

whole respectively.

(taovopia) of opposed powers in the body, and that pre-

disease results from the supreme rule (/lompxta) of one

Socratics use the metaphor of steering in their cos¬

such power, go back to Alcmaeon and thereafter be¬

mologies, but the first to employ a wide range of

come commonplaces of Greek pathology and thera¬

technological images is Empedocles, and then both

peutics. Aristotle, too, compares the living creature

Plato and Aristotle use them extensively in two con¬

with a well-governed city, describing the heart as the

texts, especially, (1) to describe the role of a moving

central seat of authority in the body (e.g., De motu

or efficient cause, and (2) to express the idea of intelli¬

animalium 703a 29fL).

3. Technological

Images.

Several

of

the

Conversely

gent design in the cosmos.

Greek

political

theorists

sometimes

In Empedocles’ system everything is composed of

compare the state with a living organism, and the

the four “roots,” earth, water, air, and fire, together

influence of other biological and technological analo¬

with Love and Strife, and in describing how complex

gies on Greek ethics is marked. Here Plato provides

substances and the organs in the body come to be he

the best examples. First he constructed an elaborate

assigns to Love the role of craftsman, the four elements

analogy between the state and the individual in the

being the material on which it works. It would be

Republic, suggesting, for instance, that both may be

anachronistic to attribute a clear distinction between

divided into three parts, one of which—the Guardians

“material” and “efficient” causes to Empedocles; but

in the state and reason in the soul—should be in overall

it is in the descriptions of the craftsmanlike activity

control. A second important analogy in Plato is that

of Love that he comes closest to treating it as a purely

between justice and health. This provides the main

efficient cause. Plato’s Timaeus is the first Greek text

grounds for the two theses, (1) that the just man is

to describe the formation of the world as a whole as

happier than the unjust, and (2) that once having done

the work of a Craftsman. In Plato the Demiurge takes

wrong, it is better to suffer than to escape punish¬

over already existing matter and imposes order on its

ment—for punishment is the “cure” for injustice. And

disorderly movements, and his account of the details

a third recurrent analogy is that between the politician

of creation is full of images drawn from carpentry,

and the artist or craftsman, where Plato suggests that

weaving, modelling, metallurgy, and agricultural tech¬

the statesman must be an expert in politics in a way

nology. Aristotle’s unmoved mover, unlike

Plato’s

comparable with that in which a pilot is expert in

Craftsman, is only a final, not an efficient cause; but

navigation or a doctor in medicine. We find similar

Aristotle too believes that final causes are at work in

types of analogies in Aristotle, too. In the Politics (1295a

natural processes, and he uses comparisons drawn from

40f.) he describes the constitution as the life, as it were,

the arts and crafts extensively to illustrate this. Despite

of the state, and in the Nicomachean Ethics (1113a

their unconcealed contempt for the life led by merely

25ff.) he draws a comparison between the good man

human artisans, both Plato and Aristotle found techno¬

and the healthy: just as a sick person may be mistaken

logical imagery indispensable for expressing their belief

about what is hot or cold or sweet or bitter, and the

in the rational design of the universe.

judge of these things is the normal, healthy man, so, he argues, the good man (o o-uovdaios) is the judge of

II

62

what is right and wrong.

The history of early Greek cosmology is largely the

Greek ideas on nature and art, on the state, the living

history of the interpretation of tire cosmos in terms

organism, and the world as a whole, are linked by a

of various ideas derived from the three fields of politics,

series of interlocking analogies. Most of the major fifth-

biology, and technology. Aristotle, especially, criticized

and fourth-century philosophers put forward analogies

many such ideas, as for example the belief that such

of one or other of the types we have considered. Yet

substances as air or fire are alive. Yet these three types

the particular forms that their analogies take are very

of images continued to be influential long after him.

varied, and no single version of any of them dominates

The Stoics, in particular, not only represented the

the period. Had any such orthodoxy existed, these

cosmos as a living creature and believed in the pur-

analogies might have impeded the development of

poseful, craftsmanlike activity of Nature, but also

certain inquiries far more than they did. As it was,

ANALOGY IN EARLY GREEK THOUGHT although some Hippocratic writers produced elaborate

their ideas seem farfetched. Even so, analogy provided

versions of the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, this did

an important, indeed in some cases the only, means

not prevent other theorists from making considerable

of bringing empirical evidence to bear on obscure or

progress in both the study of anatomy and in astron¬

intractable problems, especially in such fields as as¬

omy, during the fourth century. Again, both Plato and

tronomy and meteorology, embryology and pathology,

Aristotle held that the stars are alive and divine, al¬

where direct experimentation was generally out of the

though this had been denied by such thinkers as

question.

Anaxagoras; yet this belief did not prevent Aristotle

Various writers, beginning with Anaxagoras at the

from attempting a detailed mechanical account of the

end of the fifth century, refer to this use of analogy

movements of the heavenly bodies, based on Eudoxus’

under the general heading of making “phenomena the

theory of concentric spheres.

vision of things that are obscure” (o\pis rwr aSpXtoi> rd

West itself, China possesses an ancient civili¬

zation of great complexity that is difficult to compre¬ hend quickly and fully. Before 1514, Europeans learned of China mainly through intermediaries, a few travelers, and luxury imports. In the sixteenth century China was thought to be a “Mightie Kingdome,” technologically more advanced than Europe. The Europeans of the seven¬ teenth century were told by the Jesuits that China had a rational society of great antiquity and continuous development that would have to be incorporated, by one means or another, into their Christian, monogenetic view of the world. Both the Jesuits and the

philosophes of the Enlightenment saw China as a model of Enlightened Despotism. Artists and connoisseurs of Figure

22. Landscape of Veined Marble. Chinese, ca. 1800(?)

PRIVATE COLLECTION, NEW YORK

the eighteenth century were intrigued with China as the source of exotic objets d art and as the home of

353

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE an imaginary, happy people who came to life in the paintings on porcelain. The reaction against China as a rational model and as a source of exotic delight came in the nineteenth century. While Sinologists sought to understand

the

China

of historical

reality,

other

Europeans esteemed Chinese poetry and culture as being aesthetically superior, and worthy of study and imitation. There were Westerners who also derided China as a stagnant, inferior society that had nothing to offer the West but problems. The modernizing,, nationalizing, and communizing of China produced the contemporary fear of China as a nemesis of Western culture. I In antiquity China gradually received a delineation in Western thought which set it apart from the rest of Asia, especially India, as an independent civilization. Trade on an important scale convinced the Romans of China’s advanced technical capability, but the ideas of China, even in arts and crafts, left few deep or lasting imprints upon Roman culture. From the fourth century

a.d.

to the return of Marco Polo to Venice,

nearly a millennium later, medieval Europe almost lost sight of China as an independent civilization and it

verely

restricted

foreign

intercourse,

but

a

few

Europeans still managed to penetrate China illegally. The earliest reports to reach the West based upon direct experience came from Europeans who were prisoners in China. In Europe the accounts of the Portuguese prisoners were used as sources by the chroniclers of the discov¬ eries, Fernao Lopes de Castanheda and Joao de Barros. The chroniclers also garnered whatever information they could from the oral reports of European mer¬ chants and sailors and natives coming from China itself, or from Eastern ports where information on China was current. Barros had a Chinese slave who read and abstracted materials for him from Chinese books that had been expressly collected for this purpose in the East. The Portuguese chronicles, like most of the pre¬ vious accounts, are limited to descriptions of the phys¬ ical aspects of life, political institutions, and history, and the most striking and obvious social practices. Observers and writers of the Catholic orders pro¬ vided the first glimpses of China’s religious and intel¬ lectual life. The Portuguese Dominican, Gaspar da Cruz, after spending several months in south China in 1556, presented in his Tractado . . . (Evora, 1569)

again became an undifferentiated part of a vague or mythical Asia.

a rounded and detailed account of life in China. In

The restoration of overland communications by the

Spanish Augustinian, Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza,

Mongols from 1215 to 1350 permitted Christian mis¬ sionaries and merchants to visit China (Cathay) and enabled them to prepare accounts of their experiences there. But even commentators as acute as Marco Polo and Odoric of Pordenone were unable to provide in¬ sights into Chinese thought, probably because they did not command the language. What the European re¬ porters of the Mongol era accomplished was to re¬ awaken interest in China as an advanced, wealthy, and independent civilization. It was not until the establish¬ ment in the sixteenth century of permanent relations by the sea routes that Europe began to acquire a sense of the depth and sophistication of Chinese thought and culture. The sea passage opened to India by the Portuguese in 1499 was extended to the coast of south China by 1514. With the establishment of direct intercourse the Portuguese and their associates in Europe eagerly sought information on the merchandise, military po¬ tential, religion, and customs of the Chinese. Their concern to learn about religion and customs was origi¬ nally inspired by the fear that the hated Muslims might

354

Chinese themselves. The Ming policy of isolation se¬

obedience to orders from Pope Gregory XIII, the completed his comprehensive Historia . . . del gran Reyno de la China (Rome, 1585). It was quickly trans¬ lated into most European languages and soon became one of the best selling and most widely quoted books of the day. The first systematic Jesuit work in which China figures prominently is the compendium of Giovanni Petri Maffei entitled Historiarum Indicarum

libri XVI (Florence, 1588). Maffei’s sketch of China is based in large part upon the manuscript descriptions prepared by Alessandro Valignano, the notable Jesuit Visitor to the Asian mission. Richard Hakluyt in his

Voyages (1599) published, in English translation, a small discourse prepared by the Jesuits in China which summarized briefly what the missionaries had learned of Chinese civilization to that time. In their descriptions of China the sixteenth-centurv religious observers in the field and the compilers in Europe show a fresh and lively interest in Chinese language, customs, arts, thought, and religious prac¬ tices. The Jesuits are the first to undertake the system¬ atic study of the Chinese language, the tool essential to the penetration of learning. Aside from describing

be firmly entrenched in China, as they were in India

the peculiarities of the Chinese language, certain of

and southeast Asia. The Portuguese were quick to

the more sophisticated commentators begin to specu¬

learn, however, that the obstacles to intercourse with

late on the possible relationships between Chinese

China were not created by the Moors but by the

pictographs, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the Amerindian

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE languages of the New World. Chinese books on cere¬

evangelized, the inference is clear that it would neces¬

monies, laws, sciences, arts, and history were collected

sarily become worthy of emulation by Europe.

and sent to Europe. Excerpts from some of these books were translated in the Philippines and then relayed to Europe. Mendoza, apparently on the basis of such translations, seeks to give a complete list of the names, chronological limits, and great achievements of the Chinese dynasties. All of the writers comment admir¬ ingly on the architectural monuments, great cities, and excellent social organization of the Chinese. Close attention is paid to Chinese methods and organization in education and to the examination system for state offices. The religious writers comment favorably on the treatment of women, and on the maintenance by the state of almshouses and hospitals. While their ad¬

II The Jesuits of the last generation of the sixteenth century had directed their efforts toward the develop¬ ment of a policy and program that would help them to penetrate the Chinese mainland and establish rela¬ tions with the highest levels of cultivated society. On the basis of their experiences at Macao, the Jesuits under Valignano’s leadership decided to pursue a policy of “accommodation,” or cultural compromise. It was in this conciliatory spirit that the Jesuits began to study seriously Chinese language, customs, and learning. Matteo Ricci, an Italian priest, appeared on the

miration in these cases is genuine, it should also be re¬

Chinese mainland in 1583, established cordial relations

membered

with Chinese officials and scholars, and ultimately

that

the

religious

commentators

were

always writing for the edification of their European readers. Certain of the sixteenth-century religious writers are highly critical of the content of Chinese learning. More than once the Europeans remark with disdain on the unsophisticated

character

of

Chinese

astronomy,

mathematics, and geography. The knowledge of the Chinese in these fields is judged to be limited to empir¬ ical observations of the sort that people everywhere make. Chinese science is esteemed to be in the same primitive state that the European sciences were in

made his way to the imperial court in Peking. Ricci resided at Peking from 1601 to his death in 1610. During that decade he won the confidence of the Ming Emperor and the Confucian literati through his gracious and dignified bearing, his polite and intel¬ ligent absorption in Chinese learning, and his sincere and sophisticated efforts to explain Western science and Christian teachings in terms that could be appreciated and understood by the learned and tolerant. While writing of Western thought and religion in Chinese, Ricci composed a manuscript history of the introduc¬

before Aristotle organized them and before Christianity

tion of Christianity to China. His Italian text, and

enlightened them. In their social life the Chinese are said to suffer from

by Father Nicolas Trigault while on a sea voyage from

gross superstition, inhumane tortures, unnatural prac¬ tices, and excessive preoccupation with pleasures of the flesh. Their three principal religions—Confucian¬ ism, Buddhism, and Taoism—do little, in the estimation of the Christians, to raise the moral tone of Chinese personal life. Confucianism, with its stress upon attain¬ ing the five virtues and an orderly society, approaches truth more closely than the other two faiths. Buddhism, which teaches a primitive notion of immortality, is otherwise fraught with obvious errors that are easily refuted. Neither the Taoists nor the Buddhists show

references from his Journals, were translated into Latin China to Europe. Trigault published Ricci’s work in five books under the title De Christiana expeditione

apud Sinas . . . (Rome, 1615). This account was quickly accepted throughout Europe as the official, best in¬ formed, and most recent exposition on China and the progress of Christianity there. Within a few years after its appearance, translations were issued in French, German, Spanish, and Italian. The first and the last of Ricci’s books deal with China; the others are mainly concerned with the history of the mission. Ricci, unlike Mendoza, was a close student of China’s

any interest in learning and their priests are reviled

thought and religions. Since he lived in China at a time

for their evil and servile behavior. To the Europeans of the sixteenth century, China

works exhibit forthright scorn for them. Especially

was a “Mightie Kingdome” whose major art was gov¬ ernment, or the effective political and social orga¬ nization of a large and heavily peopled nation. Its civilization was admired for longevity, continuity, and cohesiveness. In the arts and crafts it was thought to be as advanced as Europe, perhaps even more so. Its limitations in theoretical science, in personal morality, and in appreciation of religious truth were attributed to its ignorance of Christianity. Once China had been

when Buddhism and Taoism were degenerating, his repellent are Buddhist practices which appear to be devilish parodies of Christian rites. The “delirium” and “ravings” of the Taoists about Lao-Tze he attributes to the inspiration of the devil. Confucianism, the offi¬ cial thought of the literati, is much more to Ricci’s taste. Confucius he sees as the equal of the best pagan philosophers of antiquity and superior to many of them. The emphasis in Confucianism upon morality, ration¬ alism, public order, and teaching by precept and ex-

355

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE ample appeal to Ricci as being in accord with Christian principles. He points out further that the Confucianists have no idols, believe in one God, and revere the principle of reward for good and punishment for evil. The Chinese literati convinced Ricci that Confu¬ cianism was not a competing faith but rather a set of moral precepts which was used for the proper govern¬ ment and general welfare of the state. Ricci was also led to believe that Confucianism “could derive great benefit from Christianity and might be developed and perfected by it” (Gallagher,

p.

98). It was Ricci’s sim¬

plistic presentations of early Confucianism, uncompli¬ cated by the subtleties of later exegesis, that led several generations of Jesuits to believe that China could best be won by close study of the Confucian Classics, by alliance with a native literati devoted to its moral precepts, and by conversion of the leading lights of the realm and the emperor himself to Christianity. To the Jesuits at home such a program seemed congenial and likely, for it paralleled closely the educational,

teen years later a group of French Jesuits headed by Philippe Couplet published the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (Paris) and dedicated it to King Louis XIV. It contains translations of the Classics previously pub¬ lished as well as the Lun Yu (“Analects”). Francisco Noel in his Sinensis imperii libri classici sex (Prague, 1711) republished the earlier translations and added to them his own version of the Meng-tzu (“Mencius”), the Hsiao ching (“Filial Piety”), and the Hsiao hsiieh (“Moral Philosophy for Youths”), a small work of inter¬ pretation by Chu Hsi (1130-1200) that was then used in China for elementary instruction in the Classics. The Classics selected by the Jesuits for translation were those which had been given new prominence by Chu Hsi and the Neo-Confucianists of the orthodox school then dominant in China. While the Jesuits provided scholarly treatises and translations of the Confucian Classics, the merchants and diplomatic emissaries of Europe supplied by their

social, and conversion policies that they were then following in Europe.

accounts a less sophisticated and a more impressionistic

The Jesuit successors of Ricci in China included a

who had been sailing directly to the East since 1595,

number of mathematicians and scientists who contin¬ ued to advance the cultural mission. Reports on their progress began to appear in Europe at mid-century. Alvaro Semedo, a Portuguese Jesuit, published at Madrid in 1642 a work on the empire of China in which he pays far greater attention to secular affairs than Ricci had. He also gives the text of and explana¬ tory notes for the Nestorian monument found at Sianfu in 1625. He informs Europe about the wars being fought between the Ming and the Manchus. More material on the calamitous events taking place in north China was provided with the publication of Father Martin Martini’s De bello Tartarico historia (Rome, 1654). In the following year Martini published his Novus Atlas Sinensis (Amsterdam), the first scientific atlas and geography of China and one that remains a standard reference work. In 1658 Martini published at Munich his Sinicae historiae, the first history of China written by a European from Chinese annals. In the meantime Father Michel Boym had returned to Europe to announce in 1654 the conversion to Chris¬ tianity of members of the expiring Ming family and court. Far more important for European science and thought was the publication of Boym’s Flora Sinensis (Vienna, 1656), a work comparable in intellectual merit to Martini’s Atlas. The Jesuits also published Latin translations of selected Confucian Classics. Prospero Intorcetta issued the translation by Ignatius da Costa of the Fa Hsiieh

356

tion of the Chung yung (Doctrine of the Mean). Four¬

(“Great Learning”) in his Sapientia sinica (Goa, 1662). At Paris in 1673, Intorcetta published his own transla¬

documentation on China and its people. The Dutch, became particularly aggressive in the 1620’s as they sought to secure a monopoly of the trade with China. In connection with these efforts they established a fort and settlement in southern Taiwan in 1624. But with the dynastic troubles that swept China, Dutch hopes for an expanded trade were quickly disappointed. Once the Ch’ing dynasty took over at Peking, the Dutch tried to negotiate directly at the capital. But the embassies sent to Peking in 1656, 1667, and 1685 produced few concrete results, and so no further efforts were made to establish legitimate trading relations with China. The Dutch produced a number of independent ac¬ counts of China that were published in Europe be¬ tween 1644 and 1670. Isaac Commelin issued a collec¬ tion of early Dutch travel accounts in 1644 that was followed two years later by the publication of William Bontekoe’s Journal. These reminiscences paint a pic¬ ture of the Chinese that is far different from the glow¬ ing and adulatory image of an ancient, rational society created by the Jesuits. To the Dutch observers the Chinese were sinister, devoid of all virtue, and experts in treachery. The Dutch emissary, Johann Nieuhof, in his account of the embassy of 1665, presents a more balanced view of China based both on the Jesuit writers and his own experiences. Olfert Dapper, a Dutch phy¬ sician, compiled in Holland the reports of the second Dutch embassy to Peking, and in 1670 issued an ency¬ clopedic compendium on China gleaned from the em¬ bassy descriptions and a wide range of other sources. His book, entitled Atlas Chinensis in its English trans¬ lation, is often erroneously attributed to Amoldus

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE Montanus. The Dutch accounts share a distrust of the Chinese and a skeptical view of China’s vaunted civili¬ zation. The Dutch also provided Europe with its first comprehensive descriptions of the Chinese island of Taiwan, and of the widespread ruin produced on the mainland by the dynastic wars.

of their original position, held that these rites were social and political rather than religious ceremonies. The controversialists first appealed to Rome for an opinion in 1645. Pope Innocent X took a position that was critical of the Jesuit policies. But in 1656, Pope Alexander VII took a benign attitude on the question of the “Chinese rites” and granted that they should

Ill

be permissible under certain conditions. The Domini¬

The Jesuits were meanwhile faced with a crisis of their own, the Rites Controversy. In its origins this bitter struggle within the Catholic Church can be traced to Ricci’s view, which stressed the idea that no essential conflict existed between Confucianism in its pristine form and the tenets of Christianity. The origi¬ nal doctrines of Confucius, according to Ricci, taught monotheism and possibly even contained a primitive knowledge of Jehovah. Corruption of ancient Confu¬ cianism had taken place over the centuries as was clearly demonstrated by the growth of Taoism and the successful introduction of Ruddhism into China. Father Nicolas Longobardi, the Jesuit successor of Ricci at Peking, was himself skeptical that the ancient Chinese had knowledge of the true God. The Domini¬ can and Franciscan missionaries, who began to evan¬ gelize in south China in the 1630’s, were hostile to “accommodation” in any form. They branded all the Chinese sects as idolatrous, and initially made no seri¬ ous efforts to study the language or to understand Chinese civilization. The two methods of evangelizing quickly came into conflict, as each group embarrassed and outraged the other. It was not long before the issue was joined in Europe as well as in the East. At first the controversy raged over the question as to whether or not the ancient Chinese had a conception of the true God. Soon this debate led to the more practical question of the Chinese term best suited to render in its full significance the Christian conception of God, a problem that the Jesuits had earlier resolved in Japan by introducing the Latin word Deus into

can, Domingo Fernandez Navarrete, then assumed leadership in the struggle against the Jesuits. In China, where he was superior of the Dominican mission from 1664, Navarrete gathered a mass of data relating to the “terms” and “rites” questions. On the basis of these he prepared two imposing and authoritative volumes called Tratados historicos, politicos, ethicos y religiosos de la Monarchia de China (Rome, 1674). While it was a powerful attack upon the Jesuit position, Navarrete s book was also an excellent compilation of observations on Chinese life, customs, and practices. At this juncture the authorities in Rome became understandably confused and disturbed over the Rites Question. The Congregation of the Propaganda in Rome decided to include the China question among the problems of general missionary activity and proce¬ dure then under investigation. The learned of Europe were consulted and began to take sides on the question. The Missions etrangeres in Paris, which had increas¬ ingly become critical of the Jesuit effort to dominate the mission field, urged the Holy See to dispatch an Apostolic Vicar to China. Charles Maigrot, sent to China in this capacity, stood firmly in his mandate of 1693 against the practices being followed by the Jesuits. In Europe the Jansenists joined forces with those who denounced the Jesuit practices in China. The faculty of the Sorbonne in 1700 condemned the view advanced by the Jesuit, Louis Le Comte, that the primitive Chinese had practiced morality while the rest of the world still lived in corruption. The Rites Con¬ troversy, as it became involved with the Jesuit-Jansenist

Japanese. But in China, where the Jesuit linguists knew

debate, threatened to produce an irreparable split

that new terms could not so readily be added to the

within the Church. In a dramatic effort to investigate and resolve the

language, and where the Jesuits held that there already existed a primitive conception of Jehovah, the question of terminology could not be so adroitly handled. A host of other Christian terms, “soul” and “spirit

for exam¬

ple, could not easily be given Chinese equivalents that would carry with them the overtones that these words and concepts necessarily must have for believers. To the Dominicans and Franciscans the Confucianists for all their learning were simple atheists or agnostics who taught a materialistic doctrine inimical to the Christian faith. They were particularly outraged when the Jesuits permitted their Christian converts to continue per¬ forming ancestral rites. The Jesuits, following the logic

controversy. Pope Clement XI sent a special legate to China in the person of Charles de Tournon, Patriarch of Antioch. The De Tournon legation arrived at Canton in 1705 to begin its investigation. The atmosphere blackened quickly when, in 1706, De Tournon roundly denounced the Chinese, including the emperor, as atheists. Opposed on all sides for his ignorance and intolerance, the legate was condemned and arrested by the Chinese. De Tournon died in China in 1710 without retracting. In Europe the Papacy forbade further controversy, and in 1715 issued the constitution Ex ilia die which clearly condemned the Jesuit position.

35 i

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE Controversy nonetheless continued, both in Europe and China, until a strong papal pronouncement, Ex quo singulari, was issued in 1742 requiring the Jesuits in China to take a special oath to abide by the papal decisions. /V Etienne de Silhouette, a pupil of the Jesuits, wrote in his Idee generate du gouvernement . . . des Chinois

charges were quizzed by linguists at Oxford, Berlin, and Vienna about the nature of the Chinese language. Another Chinese convert remained in Paris to work on a dictionary that the French Jesuits were preparing as a tool for missionaries in the field. By 1700 European scholars had

learned from

their investigations

of

Chinese something about the differences between the

(Paris, 1729) that the controversies over the Chinese

literary and spoken languages; the tonal system and

Rites "have given rise in the minds of everyone to a

dialects of the spoken tongue; the monosyllablic nature

desire to know China” (Rowbotham, p. 145). He might

of the characters; the absence of grammar and inflec¬

also have observed that the question of the Rites and

tion; the historical evolution of the characters; and the

the religious, philosophical, linguistic, and social ques¬

various styles of calligraphy. They were not able, how¬

tions linked to it, had long been of deep interest and concern to intellectuals both inside and outside the Society. The compilation of Athanasius Kircher, China Illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667), an important work by a Jesuit scholar who had never been to China, inaugu¬ rated for the last generation of the seventeenth century the European age of erudition on things Chinese. Kircher’s huge tome, with its numerous illustrations,

ever, to produce the key either to Chinese or to the hieroglyphs of Egypt, which a number of them vainly sought. European interest in the Chinese language was orig¬ inally linked to the general Renaissance concern with Hebrew and Egyptian as primitive and emblematiclanguages; to the efforts of the rationalists to discover the primitive language from which all others were

was quickly reissued in Dutch, English, and French

supposed to derive; to the hopes of certain optimists

translations, and it thereafter became the starting-point

who sought to find a language more universal than

for those who wrote or thought about China. Kircher’s distinction as a scholar, his interest in the comparative study of languages, his analytical presentation of the Nestorian monument, his perceptive comments on flora and fauna, and his incorporation of authentic and nu¬ merous engravings of Chinese persons and scenes all combined to produce a work of enduring value and persistent influence. The Chinese language with its peculiar system of characters had intrigued the earliest commentators. Sample characters began to appear in European publi¬ cations of the late sixteenth century. While a practical knowledge of Chinese was acquired by most of the missionaries to China,

the scientific study of the

Chinese language in Europe emerged in the seven¬ teenth century through diverse routes. Jacob Golius in the Netherlands first became interested in the Chinese language by way of his Arabic and Persian studies. Students of Near Eastern languages were given an even better starting-point when Kircher published parallel columns of Syriac and Chinese (also Romanizations) copied from the Nestorian monument. Andreas Muller, the provost of Berlin and a student of Near Eastern languages, was one of the first to use the Nestorian inscriptions and other available materials in his fruitless efforts to produce a key for the easy understanding of Chinese. His contemporary in England, John Webb, published in 1669 a book in which he sought to prove that Chinese was the primitive language spoken from

358

When Father Philippe Couplet brought two Chinese converts to Europe in 1685, the Jesuit and one of his

the time of Adam to Noah, and that it had remained in a petrified condition ever since.

Latin, and to the ambitions of others to construct an artificial and perfected philosophical language for use in the arts and sciences. Chinese appealed to language theorists because the characters, they believed, were based

on

concepts

rather

than

arbitrary

sounds.

Seventeenth-century linguists thought this conceptual basis essential to the construction of a universal lan¬ guage. Some interested scholars thought of Chinese as the lost language of Noah, or as the primitive language of all mankind; others persisted in holding the belief that the revival of Chinese would restore the languages of the world to that perfect condition which had ob¬ tained before Babel. Leibniz hoped to use elements from Chinese in developing a philosophical language that would replace Latin and help to make direct communication possible among the intellectuals of the world. Closely related to the confusion of tongues was the problem of China’s antiquity and history, and its rela¬ tionship to orthodox Christian and Western beliefs in monogenesis. The publication of Martini’s Historiae sinicae (1658) set the stage for a fundamental contro¬ versy over historical chronology which was finally to shatter Western concepts based upon the Bible. Issac Vossius, an eminent Dutch scholar who was avowedly an ardent admirer of the Chinese, published his Dissertatio de vera aetate mundi. . . (The Hague, 1659), tire first essay to examine the implications of Martini’s historical data for Western thought. Martini’s book, according to Vossius, showed that China’s history

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE antedated the universal deluge, that its civilization was

and so could be brought into universal history through

continuous, and that its historical records took no

these channels. China raised an almost insoluble prob¬

notice of the Flood. Vossius, casting Christian tradition

lem because its civilization developed in isolation, its

aside, proceeded directly to the conclusion that the

history was uninterrupted, and its chronology con¬

history of man was fourteen hundred and forty years

flicted with Western conventions based on the Bible.

older than it was commonly supposed to be. The reason

Theories had to be devised consequently to account

for the error in the West was the tendency of the

for the repopulation of China after the Flood. Egypt,

Christian chroniclers to rely upon Hebrew texts rather

because of its antiquity and the affinities of the hiero¬

than upon the Septuagint version of the Old Testament.

glyphs to Chinese characters, was identified by some

Vossius likewise concluded that, because the Flood is

as die center from which the great postdiluvian migra¬

not mentioned in the Chinese annals, the probability

tion to the East began. The people of Pre-Columbian

is that it was not universal but simply an event in the

America, who likewise wrote in pictographs, were

history of the Jews. Vossius, on the basis of his faith

thought to be descendants of the earliest wave in the

in the Chinese annals, thus reduced the Bible to a book

great eastward migration. But such a theory of devel¬ opment upset the traditional periodization of the world

of local history (Pinot, p. 205). Horn,

based on the “four monarchies : Chaldean, Persian,

stressed his rashness in accepting uncritically the evi¬

Hellenistic, and Roman. In the light of the new knowl¬

dence of the Chinese annals. They also attacked the

edge this old geographical and political scheme of

The

critics

of Vossius,

especially

Georg

authenticity of China’s historical traditions and the accuracy of Martini’s chronological calculations. A tendency gradually developed, however, to effect a

periodizing gave way completely, and was supplanted by periods based entirely on chronology, i.e., ancient, medieval, and modern. It was only by this device that

reconciliation of Chinese and biblical history through

China’s history could be correlated with classical and

numerous elaborate devices, including the use of the

later Western historical periods.

Septuagint

chronology

suggested by

Vossius.

The

Chinese annals were thought to be at best distorted renditions of the events related in

Genesis.

The

Chinese, it was surmised, could recall their antedilu¬ vian history through remembrances preserved for them by Noah’s family. The sage emperors of China were identified with Adam, Cain, Enoch, and Noah. Once such identifications had been established, it became possible to argue that the Chinese annals provided verification for the historical authenticity of Genesis. The Jesuits, in part because of their position in the Rites Controversy, were compelled to uphold the veracity of the Chinese annals. In

1686 Philippe

Couplet published a Tabula chronologica monarchiae sinicae . . . (Paris), an effort at reconciling Chinese and Christian chronologies by trying to show that concord existed between

the

Septuagint

and

the

Chinese

records. In so doing he added fourteen hundred years to

the

period between

creation and

the

life

of

Abraham. But this solution failed to satisfy either the intellectuals of Europe or the missionaries in China. The Bible was hereafter used historically by the mis¬ sionaries in China mainly for the purpose of filling in gaps or of explaining obscure references in the Chinese annals. In Europe the Bible as a source for world chronology increasingly fell into desuetude. Even in the 1970’s we are required to use concordances to reconcile Chinese and European dates. In their conception of the beginnings of the world the Europeans were committed to a search for common origins. The ancient civilizations of Persia and Egypt were familiar to the writers of antiquity and the Bible,

The most ingenious and tortuous effort to reconcile Judeo-Christian and Chinese traditions was advanced by a small group of Jesuits in China who have been called “Figurists.” They claimed to find evidence in the Confucian classics and in other Chinese works that would support a theory of the common origin of man¬ kind and the law. The Figurists held that the Ancient Law given by God to man was originally in the hands of a supreme lawgiver: Enoch in the Hebrew tradition, Zoroaster in Persia, Fu Hsi in China. Shem, the son of Noah, carried the pure Logos to China after the Flood. Fu Hsi, following the precepts of Enoch, pro¬ mulgated the law in three forms: pictographic concepts and folk heroes for the simple people, more complex symbols for scholars and religious leaders, and mystical symbols for the sages. A source of mystical symbols of great import was thought to be the 1 Ching (Book of Changes), one of the most cryptic of the Chinese classical books. Once they had concluded that the mystical figures (trigrams and hexagrams) of the I Ching were symbols of eternal verities they tried to decipher them.

While nothing came of these attempts

at

cryptography, the Figurists by their enthusiasm and ingenuity did help to elevate China and its civilization to a place of primary importance in the deliberations of those intrigued with theories of common origin and universal kinship. The first and greatest of the European thinkers to come under the spell of Figurist ideas was Leibniz. The German philosopher, who had long been fasci¬ nated by the revelation of China’s great civilization, became a correspondent of Father Joachim Bouvet, one

359

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE

360

of the leading Figurists. Around 1701 Leibniz was won over to the idea that the “hieroglyphics” of the I Ching were the creations of Fu Hsi and were mystical symbols that represented the Infinite and the Chaos from which God had rescued mankind. For a time he himself ex¬ perimented with the trigrams, and sought through the analytical use of his binary arithmetic to show that they had a coherence and order about them which indicated that they might be a key to all the sciences. A successful deciphering of these symbols might lead, Leibniz thought, to the establishment of a firm scien¬ tific basis for the story of Creation and for the history of the antediluvian epoch. Andre-Michel Ramsay and Montesquieu were also intrigued by the ideas of the Figurists, but they made no serious efforts to help the Jesuits document their fantastic claims. However, they were impressed, as Leibniz was, by the Chinese Classics as sources which provide evidence for the homogeneity of human thought and for the objective existence of universality. European religious and lay thinkers of the seven¬ teenth century, under the influence of the debates attending the Rites Controversy, began to speculate as to whether the Chinese were materialists or spirit¬ ualists, atheists or deists. The freethinker Franqois La Mothe le Vayer in his De la vertu des payens (Paris, 1642) placed Confucius in Paradise with other great pagan thinkers. He also asserted that the Chinese, from time immemorial, have recognized but one God, and he then deduced that the Chinese ethical system is based on reason and the law of nature. Pascal believed that the Chinese were God-fearing people whose reli¬ gious beliefs could be understood only allegorically. In the Pensees (1670) he wrote: “China obscures, but there is clearness to be found; seek it.” Pierre Bayle suggested that Spinoza’s pantheism owed a debt to Confucian concepts of God. But Bayle, while praising the tolerance of China, like many other rationalists unhesitatingly branded the Chinese as atheists, and his opinion was to have influence well into the eighteenth century. Herbert of Cherbury, a precursor of the English Deists, looked upon the Chinese as proponents of natural religion. Antoine Amauld, the Jansenist lawyer and articulate foe of the Jesuits, saw nothing but iniquity in the Confucian ideas. Christian Thomasius, the Protestant educator of Halle, viewed Chinese religion as blind faith in the authority of dogma. Malebranche, the Oratorian philosopher, in his Conversation between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher on the Existence of God (1708) tried to refute the Chinese idea that matter is eternal. He, like Bayle, saw points of similarity between Spinoza’s philosophy and Chinese thought. Leibniz was the only secular philosopher of die later

seventeenth century to support the Jesuits in the Rites Controversy and in their interpretation of Chinese religion and thought. In his diverse writings Leibniz shows himself to be convinced that the ancient Chinese were monotheists who conceived of God as being both spirit and matter. This Chinese God he sees as an entelechy similar to his own Supreme Monad. In the practice of their religion the Chinese worship God in the virtues of particular objects. But they are not idol¬ aters, for they worship the spiritual rather than the material essence. In ancestral worship, he contends, there persists a concept of the immortality of the soul; rites are performed before the ancestors to remind the living to act so as to deserve the recognition of poster¬ ity. Leibniz’ interpretation of Chinese religion was more than faintly reminiscent of the leading ideas in his own Monadology. Like the Jesuits themselves, Leibniz rejoiced openly in the edict of toleration for Christianity promulgated in 1692 by the K’ang-hsi emperor. He congratulated the Jesuits on this success and heralded it as a vindica¬ tion of their understanding of how best to reconcile Christian and Chinese thought. In 1697 he published his Novissima Sinica as a call to Protestants to emulate the example of the Jesuits and to dispatch a mission to China. He was even encouraged to hope, after the conclusion in 1689 of the Treaty of Nerchinsk between Russia and China, that the land route to Peking might be reopened and regular communications established through Russia between learned groups in China and Europe. V The Jesuits took seriously Leibniz’ advice to send more useful objects and practical information to Europe from China. They also continued throughout the eighteenth century, even after the suppression of the Society in 1773, to publish detailed information on Chinese life ranging from the history of the Jews in China to brief essays on Chinese games. The Lettres edifiantes et curieuses, an intentional popularization, were issued in printed form beginning in 1702, and were later compiled and reissued in twenty-six volumes at Paris between 1780 and 1783. J. B. Du Halde, one of the editors of the Lettres edifiantes, published in four volumes his encyclopedic Description de la Chine . . . (Paris, 1735) which was translated into English and Dutch in the following year. In following the encyclo¬ pedic tradition which they helped to inaugurate, the Jesuits published at intervals from 1777 to 1814 what were called Memories concemant les Chinois (Paris). Unlike their earlier publications, the Jesuits, who were now generally in disrepute, here issued in sixteen vol¬ umes, with but few editorial comments, a wide vari-

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE ety of translations of Chinese materials. Contem¬ poraneously, Father Mauriac de Mailla published in 1778 a translation in twelve volumes of the Tung-chien, kang-mu (“The Outline and Details of the Compre¬ hensive Mirror”), a twelfth-century version of Chinese history prepared under the direction of the philosopher Chu Hsi. What most impressed the Jesuits and Leibniz about China, was its superiority to Europe in the establish¬ ment and maintenance of a rational social order. Leibniz fancied from what he read that the K ang-hsi emperor was a model ruler who governed his subjects firmly but with great respect for law and the advice of his counsellors. So great was Leibniz

admiration

for the government, social stability, and moral system of the Chinese that he confessed: . . . we need missionaries from the Chinese who might teach us the use and practice of natural religion, just as we have sent them teachers of revealed theology (trans. in Lach, Novissima Sinica, p. 75).

was

inseparable

convinced. In their determination to end what they thought of as Wolff’s heretical teachings, the Pietists prevailed in 1723 upon King Frederick William I of Prussia to banish Wolff from his territories. From the sanctuary of the University of Marburg Wolff continued thereafter to write about and teach his “practical philosophy.” Others continued to write polemical tracts about Wolff and his interpretations of Confucian morality and Chinese statecraft. In 1730 at Marburg Wolff delivered a lengthy lecture on China as the outstanding working example of an enlightened government. His views of the

Real Happiness of a

People under a Philosophical King

did not go un¬

noticed by Voltaire and the young Frederick whom he was tutoring at Rheinsberg. Within German univer¬ sity circles the moral philosophy and Sinophilism of Wolff continued to be a subject for learned debate until the last generation of the eighteenth century. Wolff s major pronouncements on Chinese morality and gov¬ ernment were greeted with great cordiality by the

To Leibniz and the Jesuits, the morality of the Chinese

his Pietistic colleagues at the university remained un¬

from

government.

The

Chinese, it was alleged, have no concern with abstract questions of morality but are interested only in apply¬ ing to daily life the teachings of Confucius regarding the duties of men. The morality of the Chinese is seen to be a set of prescriptions designed to procure and assure individual, familial, and social happiness. The successful organization of the Chinese monarchy, as opposed to the European states, is based on the fact that the emperor applies and adapts to the adminis¬ tration of the state the principles which obtain in individual and family life. Political means are used in China to achieve a more perfect morality. The end of life, society, and government in China is happiness, here and now. Abstract religious virtue, with its invisi¬ ble and other worldly rewards, is of no interest to the

Jesuits. In the Description of Du Halde, issued five years after Wolff’s lecture at Marburg, emphasis continued to be placed upon the natural morality, rational reli¬ gion, and enlightened statecraft of the Chinese. The first systematic treatise on the science of state¬ craft published in Europe was Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748). For his informa¬ tion on China Montesquieu used the merchant accounts as well as the adulatory statements of the Jesuits, but preferred the merchants as the less biased observers. The merchants, as we have seen, were as unanimous in their condemnation of the treachery, deceit, and dishonesty of the Chinese as the Jesuits were in their praise of China’s natural morality and good govern¬ ment. In response to the conflict in his sources, and in harmony with the thesis of his book, Montesquieu concluded that a wide gulf separates theory from prac¬

Chinese. China flourishes as a great and virtuous em¬

tice in the governing of China. Peace and tranquillity

pire without the aid of revealed religion. Among the earliest of the philosophical popularizers

minion of fear. An attack upon a magistrate becomes

to propagate to the learned public the Sinophilism of the Jesuits was Christian Wolff, the follower of Leibniz. In a lecture delivered at the University of Halle in 1721 before the combined faculty and student body, Wolff proclaimed the excellence of Chinese moral philosophy and its correspondence with his own teach¬ ings regarding the efficacy of human reason in meeting the problems of daily life. Duty and virtue, the differ¬ ence between good and evil, and the imperative to right action may be learned from nature as well as revelation, according to both the Chinese and Wolff. While Wolff contends that no conflict exists between this doctrine of lay morality and Christian teachings,

are assured by patriarchal repression and by the do¬ an attack upon the entire system, hence dissent and liberty are nonexistent and reform of evil impossible. As long as the elements are cooperative, the people industrious, and the state not too repressive, life in China is satisfactory. But nature is not often benign and so disruptions occur. And, since reform of the state is not possible, the individual Chinese make out as best they can by resorting to artifice. The state, handcuffed by its own system, tolerates deception while eschewing reform. China, because it is governed by the rod, is classified as a despotism in which honor and virtue are little more than theoretical objectives. Nonetheless, by the attention he gave to China, Montesquieu recog-

361

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE nized that study of its laws and institutions is necessary to any objective examination of the principles of gov¬ ernment and similar questions of universal import. Rousseau, in his Discourse on Political Economy (first printed in the Encyclopedic in 1755) likewise experi¬ enced the need to reckon with China in propounding his generalizations. The emperor of China he sees as being exemplary in unswervingly following the dictates of the “general will

in resolving disputes between the

officials and the people. Rousseau approvingly noted, that it is “the constant maxim of the prince to decide against his officers” without delay or investigation, and concludes that since the “public outcry does not arise without cause” the Chinese emperor finds “seldom any injustice to be repaired.” He also praised the fiscal system of China "where taxes are greater and yet better paid than in any other part of the world.” The reason for this, in Rousseau’s estimation, is that food grains are free of taxes, and the heavy duties levied on other commodities are paid by the ultimate consumer, or by those who can afford to pay. Voltaire in his historical works, especially in the Essai sur les moeurs et Vesprit des nations (1756), measured China’s civilization against the achievements of other peoples. China occupies the place of honor in his Essai and is the first civilization he considers. The Chinese are especially successful, in Voltaire’s eyes, in using government to protect civilization. The

in 1762

Vergleichungen der europaischen mit den

asiatischen

und

andem

vermeintlich

barbarischen

Regierungen. In this comparative work, as well as in several of his other writings on political economy, Justi concentrates on China as the foreign state most worthy of study. He is particularly attracted by China as an example of enlightened monarchy in which the un¬ limited authority of the ruler is effectually combined with moderation in its exercise. Moral restraint in the monarch is inculcated in China by careful education of the prince in humility, industry, respect for human life, reverence for learning, and concern for agricul¬ ture, the main occupation of the people. Like Leibniz, he believed that the Chinese emperor is constrained to virtue by his desire to receive the favorable judg¬ ment of history. While subjects have the duty to re¬ monstrate with the ruler, he sees in China no formal constitutional restrictions on the emperor. Systematic training in civil morality is taught to the people by the mandarins, who are themselves selected, rated, and promoted by a civil service institution. No hereditary nobility exists in China, and elevation to high rank comes only through excellent performance in public service. The censorate, which acts as the eyes and ears of the emperor, is the surveillance institution that guarantees integrity and efficiency at all levels of gov¬ ernment. Administration by boards rather than by

emperors of China, comparable to philosopher-kings,

individuals alone also helps to check license and des¬

for centuries maintained a stable, tolerant, and wise

potism among officials. Most impressive of all is the

regime. Their benign, patriarchal rule, reinforced and aided by a corps of dedicated mandarins, served the people well. Society, following the Confucian princi¬ ples, was built on respect for the Golden Rule, mutual toleration, and public service. In upholding the Confu¬ cian ideals, the Chinese produced throughout history an intelligent, rational, and deistie ruling class which set an example to the rest of society by cultivating virtue, refined manners, and an elevated style of life. But the Chinese system, for all of its moral and political virtue, could do nothing to encourage the expansion of the arts and sciences. Superstition, ancestor worship, and the character system of the language were persist¬

fact that the Chinese system is internally so well bal¬ anced and its administrative machinery so wisely con¬ structed that it works automatically to insure the gen¬ eral welfare. In China, Justi clearly thought he had found a working example of the kind of enlightened despotism that he and others were advocating for the German states. In France the ideal of an enlightened and rational absolutism was most fully articulated by the Physio¬ crats. The Physiocrats were especially critical of state economic policies which overstress commerce and neglect agriculture. In China they saw a government vitally concerned with agriculture, as was symbolized

ent deterrents to advancement. The consequence was

dramatically by the annual spring rites at which the

that China did not develop the arts and sciences as

emperor, or his deputy, turned the first furrow. The

it might have done. That China’s ancient civilization was overtaken by the European in the mid-seventeenth century is best documented by the fact that “even” the Jesuits were able to teach the mandarins something from their first arrival on the Chinese scene. If Voltaire’s Sinophilism was qualified, a number of political theorists of the mid-eighteenth century were

362

writer of the day, J. H. G. Justi published in Berlin

convinced that Europe had more to learn from China than it had to teach. In Germany, a leading cameralist

most characteristic of the Physiocratic writings which elevated China to a model for Europe was Francis Quesnay’s Le despotisme de la Chine (Paris, 1767). Quesnay sees the government of China as one in which the ruler through legal despotism enforces the natural economic laws. Authority is rightly invested in an emperor who is impartial, tolerant, and constantly careful to protect the public welfare. Since China is an agricultural nation, the ruler correctly pays special

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE attention to problems relating to the land and the

copying Chinese people, objects, and scenes that were

cultivator. He does not lay arbitrary taxes, but follows

born in the minds of those European artists and artisans

the Natural Law by requiring as payment “a portion

afflicted by Sinomania.

of the annual produce of the soil” (Maverick, p. 290).

“Chinoiserie” (meaning bizarre tricks or monkey-

He does not tolerate monopolies, but does his best to

shines in modern French usage) is a term descriptive

encourage free and natural competition in all economic

of the eighteenth-century European view of China as

enterprises. He demands regular accountings of public

a place of escape from the trials of daily life, as a haven

funds and swiftly punishes malversations. The per¬

of leisure and luxury, as a utopia where laughter is

petuity of China’s government is attributed to the

always gay. In this conception China is remote in

stable natural order enforced by the ruler. China’s

distance rather than in time. Its “Golden Age” is not

greatest problem is overcrowding of the land with the

in the past or future, but in a perpetual and glorious

result that too many of its people live in poverty or

present. Its landscapes are always green, its waters

slavery.

clear and cool, its skies sunny. The Chinese people are graceful, delicate, and colorful; they love beautiful VI

gardens, quiet ponds, tinkling bells, and happy society.

With the beginning of direct intercourse in the six¬

They are the gay Chinese of the porcelains who have

teenth century, the artists and craftsmen of Europe had

almost no relationship to the wise Chinese of the Jesuits

become intrigued with Chinese textiles, porcelain, and

and philosophers or the wicked Chinese of the mer¬

lacquer ware. A pronounced taste for Chinese art ob¬

chants. They are the untroubled people who live under

jects was widespread in Europe by the time tea was

the reasonable and tolerant rule of an enlightened and

introduced to Restoration England. The motifs on the

prosperous king. The playful, and sometimes wistful, spirit of chi¬

Chinese products were widely copied in Europe both in imitations that were made of the products them¬ selves and in other art forms. Europeans were success¬ ful by the late seventeenth century in producing an acceptable and competitive lacquer ware. A generation later they had learned to make true hardpaste porce¬ lain. Along with the art products themselves, the Europeans sought to obtain information on Chinese techniques. Books and articles on Chinese arts were collected and read by interested amateurs and profes¬ sionals as the China vogue spread from France to the other European countries, and from the nobility to the lowest classes in society. Never before had Europe received so powerful and varied an artistic stimulus from a distant civilization. The craze for Chinese art objects reached its peak in the early and middle years of the eighteenth century. Royalty, nobility, and men of substance collected Chinese cabinets, chairs, tables, screens, fans, hangings, porcelains, and lacquered bowls. Interiors were pan¬ eled with lacquer or wallpapered with Chinese designs. In the palaces a special chamber was often designed to house the porcelain collection of the owner. Many of the items collected were prepared in China espe¬ cially for this vast European market and were designed to appeal to the European taste for the exotic. As a consequence they often reflected more about the Chinese conception of European taste than about Chinese art itself. Parasols, pagodas, and mandarins were depicted on the wares made in China as the Europeans conceived of them rather than as they ac¬ tually looked. European artists, who incorporated these contrived designs into their own works, were often

noiserie

is

best

reflected

in

the

visual

arts.

To

Europeans, weary of Renaissance adulation of the staid art of antiquity, the strange objects of China provided welcome relief. Frivolous courtiers and serious artists at Versailles in the time of Louis XIV were among the first to bring the light spirit of chinoiserie into the established arts of Europe. Perhaps as a reaction against the classical plan of the park at Versailles, an exquisite pleasure house, the Trianon de porcelaine, was erected in the gardens in 1670. This was but the first of many such pavilions that would dot the classical and land¬ scape gardens of Europe in the following century. But, as was often the case, the Trianon was a building whose basic architecture was uncompromisingly French and baroque. It was only the surface ornamentation which gave it a bizarre, Chinese appearance. As a general rule, the Chinese taste was incorporated into baroque art by the addition of exotic ornaments and motifs to forms that remained fundamentally European both in conception and structure alike. The rococo art of the Regency period in France lent itself especially well to exotic treatment. Antoine Watteau in his drawings and paintings was the earliest and most influential of the creators of rococo chinoiseries. His mandarins, temples, and parasols became hallmarks of decoration a la Chine and were copied by lesser artists all over Europe. Monkeys came fre¬ quently into his fantastic decorations and they were regularly added to chinoiseries for exotic effects. The increased use of watercolors in painting probably owed a debt to the porcelain pictures. Francois Boucher, a painter and a designer of tapestries, stressed the charms

363

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE of Chinese pastoral and village life, and his people

society. Books on Chinese designs as exhortations to

began to look like real Chinese in face and figure.

adopt the new taste are typified by Thomas Chippen¬

Jean-Baptiste Pillement, draughtsman and painter to

dale’s The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director

Louis XIV, drew chinoiseries for engravers that were

(1754). Writers of fictional travel accounts, sometimes

even more fantastic and vivacious than the paintings

called

of Watteau. The drawings of Pillement were copied

sketches of Chinese people and places.

voyages,

provided

thumbnail

everywhere, and are still considered to be the best

The sage chinois, who represented in literature the

examples of ehinoiserie at the height of its refinement.

idealized Chinese of the philosophes, was frequently

While the artists themselves were not influenced by

used as a literary spectator of and commentator upon

the conception of China found in the philosophes, there

the European scene. The Marquis d’Argens dedicated

is no doubt that the popularity of the chinoiseries owed

his Lettres chinoises (The Hague, 1755) to the shade of

a debt to the high reputation which the savants gave

Confucius, “the greatest man the world has yet pro¬

to China. The ordinary person could readily draw the

duced,” and he speculated that Confucius and Leibniz

conclusion that these happy people lived under a phi¬

were holding frequent conversations in another world.

losopher-king.

Oliver Goldsmith in his Chinese Letters, which ap¬

In the eighteenth century it was generally agreed

peared in The Public Ledger between 1760 and 1762,

that the English landscape garden, as it then evolved,

put his critical observations of European society into

owed a substantial debt to the art of Chinese gardening.

the mouth of Lien Chi Altangi out of deference to the

Sir William Temple, a critic of classical, formal gar¬

prevailing fashion. Voltaire in his play of 1755 called

dens, noted in 1685 that the Chinese in their gardens

L’Orphelin de la Chine (or “Confucian morals in five

seek to reproduce natural effects by following schemes

acts”) actually utilized as the basis for his plot the

based on “Sharawadgi,” his own rendition of a Chinese

translation of a Chinese drama that had been published

or Japanese term meaning “studied irregularity.” On

by Du Halde. Voltaire’s play, which was extremely

the basis of Temple’s remarks the conviction grew that

popular on the contemporary stage, celebrates the

the Chinese example was more important to the evolu¬

triumph of Chinese civilization over the barbarous

tion of the landscape garden than were Roman proto¬

Mongols. Voltaire’s drama was also an indirect attack

types, the semi-formal garden, or a new attitude to¬

upon Rousseau’s adulation of the primitive and un¬

wards nature in its wild state. Naturalism as an end

spoiled society. The essayists of the Encyclopedie wrote

in itself was not enough to satisfy Sir William Cham¬

at length on Chinese customs and compared them to

bers, who believed that an inanimate, simple nature

those prevailing in Europe and in other parts of the

was too insipid and that gardens required “every aid

world. In most of these comparisons China’s practices

that either art or nature can furnish” (Bald, p. 318).

almost always win high honor for their rationality,

It was as such an aid that the ehinoiserie form was used. But because European garden architects had almost no direct knowledge of Chinese garden design,

364

extraordinary

refinement, and good taste. VII

art historians today generally hold that the Chinese

Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century disillu¬

example had no influence upon what has been called

sionment with China as a model of rationality, good

the Anglo-Chinese garden. The case for Chinese influ¬

government, and the gay life was expressed with in¬

ence has usually been supported exclusively by refer¬

creasing frequency and greater vigor. The hostility in

ence to the large number of garden buildings, pagodas,

Europe towards the Society of Jesus, its expulsion from

and bridges which were included in the new gardens

a number of countries, and its formal dissolution by

by their designers or added by their owners. Whatever

the Papacy in 1773 led many contemporary observers

else it was, the Anglo-Chinese garden was certainly

to be more than a bit skeptical about the veracity of

another art form which came under the influence of

the glowing Jesuit reports of China. The growing criti¬

the vogue for ornamenting through chinoiseries.

cism of rationalistic thought and enlightened absolut¬

From the arts of gardening and architecture, the

ism also produced a reaction against a China which

revolt against classical rigidity stimulated by the idea

had been elevated to a model society by rationalistic

of “Sharawadgi” speedily passed to the other arts.

social, economic, and political theorists. The more

Chinese

into

effective closure of China to European trade had the

baroque novels to provide gallant, grotesque, or fan¬

practical result of eliminating regular intercourse and

persons

or

scenes

were

introduced

tastic elements, as in C. W. Hagdorn, Aeyquan, oder

of forcing Europe’s attention to turn to other more

der Grosse Mogul (1670). Romances were based upon

hospitable places. The outbreak of the French Revolu¬

Oriental tales to lend them an idyllic and exotic air.

tion and the continental wars brought an end to almost

Utopian writers cited China as an example of a tolerant

all European relations with eastern Asia. England,

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE which managed to retain a degree of independence

of China and to put aside that of the Jesuits as suspect.

from continental involvements, turned the major share

“The accoimts of all travelers,” he noted, “inconsistent

of its attention to India. The United States, where the

in many respects, agree in the low wages of labor, and

China craze imported from Europe began just after

in the difficulty which a laborer finds in bringing up

the revolt against Britain, was one of the few places

a family in China” (Book I, Ch. VIII). Since the travel

in the Western world where disenchantment with

accounts from Marco Polo to those of his own day

China had not set in by the end of the eighteenth

describe China in essentially the same terms, Smith

century.

concluded that China “seems to have been stationary ”

The intellectual and artistic foes of rationalism and

(ibid.). But though China appears to stand still, “it does

classicism stood in the vanguard of those who attacked

not seem to go backwards” (ibid.). Its towns and culti¬

the China of the philosophes and the rococo painters.

vated lands are not deserted or neglected. China’s

The young Rousseau in his Discourse on the Arts and

failure to develop economically, despite its acknowl¬

Sciences (1750) raised two fundamental questions.

edged wealth in people and resources, he ascribed to

What advantage, he asked, has China “reaped from

its neglect of international trade. Failure of the state

the honors bestowed on its learned men?” Can it be,

to encourage trade and provide security for investors

he goes on satirically, “that of being peopled by a race

and workers produces a bipolarization of Chinese eco¬

of scoundrels and slaves?” Or is the reward for holding

nomic life by which “the oppression of the poor must

learning in honor the defeat of the empire by “rude

establish the monopoly of the rich” (Book I, Ch. IX).

and ignorant Tatars?” Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had

J. G. von Herder, in his earliest writings, conceived

been an ardent admirer of China in his earlier years,

of China as an agrarian country dominated by a pater¬

came to look upon the Chinese as barbarians who had

nalistic government which inhibits the growth of the

no art other than “pottery” and who had never ad¬

intellectual and creative capacities of the people. In

vanced sufficiently to possess an alphabet. Baron F. M.

his Ideen (1791) Herder self-consciously attempted an

Grimm, who castigated the Jesuits in his literary corre¬

objective appraisal of Chinese civilization in an effort

spondence for deceiving Europe with false reports,

to let it fit itself into his universal historical conception.

branded China an unenlightened despotism with the

He reviewed China’s natural environment and history

Confucian moral code fitting precisely a “herd of

and concluded that its physical isolation and rigid

frightened slaves” (Reichwein,

The young

institutions prevent the growth of dynamism and cre¬

Goethe, who had read the Analects as well as Mon¬

ativity. The descent of the Chinese from barbaric

p. 96).

tesquieu and Rousseau, had no patience with the

Mongols left a heritage of coarse habits and unrefined

“knickknacks” of chinoiserie and was inclined to regard

tastes. Natural growth is repressed by the false stress

China itself as possessing a hybrid, overrefined, super¬

placed upon filial piety and obedience to authority.

ficial, and sick civilization.

The civilization that evolves in stubborn isolation from

As ideas about China during the Enlightenment were

other world cultures is stultified, artificial, and un¬

subjected to a more intimate inspection, the tendency

imaginative. “The empire,” he asserted, “is an em¬

grew to stress the static quality of its civilization.

balmed mummy inscribed with hieroglyphics and

Enlightenment philosophers of progress generally con¬

wrapped in silk.” Later in life Herder modified this

cerned themselves with the advance of reason in the

view and praised the Chinese for their tolerance, pa¬

West and rarely referred in their considerations to

tience and enlightened government.

other parts of the world. Voltaire and other rationalists

T. R. Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Popu¬

were primarily intent upon revealing the universality

lation . . . (1798) analyzed the incentives to and checks

of reason and were content with simply finding a place for China in their cosmic designs. In doing so, even

upon the increase of China’s population. He estimated on the basis of Du Halde’s figures that China’s popula¬

some of the greatest admirers of China posited a civili¬

tion

in

the early eighteenth

century was almost

zation that was unchanging, unprogressive, and being

240,000,000; at the end of the century Sir George

rapidly overtaken by the West. None of the enlightened

Staunton, the British emissary to Peking, estimated it

writers, not even the authors of universal history from

at about 334,000,000. Malthus accounted for China’s

Bossuet to the Gottingen school, undertook seriously

vast numbers and their rapid increase by reference to

to bring China into their considerations of historical

the productivity of the land, its intensive cultivation,

process. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776) asserted

the government’s concern for agriculture, the indus¬

that the poverty of China’s lowest classes is far greater than anything to be found in Europe. Like Montes¬ quieu, Smith was inclined to accept the travelers’ view

triousness and relatively high social position of the farmer, and the encouragement given to marriage by the religious and social systems. He also noted that despite its vast area, China had a population density

365

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE of thrice to twice that of France, a deplorable situation

including China, at the bottom of his ladder of linear

brought on mainly by the cultural imperatives encour¬

history which culminates in freedom’s self-realization

aging marriage. But limits are set upon the operation

in the Europe of his day. But by this scheme Hegel

of marriage as an incentive to increase of population

did not succeed in explaining how universal history

by the large number of priests, monks, scholars, serv¬

itself progressed from its first “unchanging” phase to

ants, and slaves who remain single and childless. Dis¬

the Greek stage in which a greater degree of freedom

ease, especially among children, is a positive check but

somehow developed.

not as important as might be expected in such an

Marx’s concept of Asia, as spelled out in his writings

overcrowded country. Infanticide by exposure and

of the 1850’s, was based essentially on the views of

drowning is common but it varies with abundance and

the classical economists, especially John Stuart Mill.

scarcity. Frequent crop failures from drought, floods,

Both Marx and Engels embraced the then current belief

or plagues of insects produce devastating famines that,

in an Asiatic society that was unique in possessing

because of China’s isolation, cannot be relieved by

peculiar systems of land ownership and production

outside help. Unrelieved scarcity results in riots and

which definitely set it apart from the agrarian societies

wars, which with widespread famine act as the most

of classical antiquity and feudalism in the West. Cli¬

powerful check on population increase. Malthus saw

mate and geography necessarily made artificial irriga¬

little prospect for China to improve the lot of its

tion the basis of Asian agriculture. The Asiatic state

people through manufacture and the encouragement

came into being to control waterworks spread over vast

of foreign trade. Its wealth, based on cultivation, had

territories where the people, living in dispersed, self-

already reached its zenith and little hope for relief

supporting villages, depended upon strong central au¬

could be envisaged either through greater agricultural

thority to organize and control irrigation. In China the

or industrial productivity. In terms of material devel¬

economy rests upon a combination of small agriculture

opment China seemed doomed to stagnation and pre¬

and domestic industry in which the state consumes

destined to suffer a staggering burden of overpopula¬

almost totally whatever surplus value can be produced.

tion and grinding poverty.

The Asiatic mode of production thus made the state

The thesis that China was a static and unprogressive civilization received its classical formulation in Hegel’s

condition of general slavery for the masses.

Philosophy of History (1830-31). Hegel was a close

China, Marx and Engels thought in 1850, was the

student of the critical merchant and Protestant ac¬

“oldest and most unshakeable empire of the world”

counts of China as well as of the adulatory writings

(Lowe, p. 19), isolated and rotting. But, at about this

of the Jesuits. China, like other Oriental states, pos¬

time, China began to be forced out of its shell of

sesses for Hegel a civilization in which nature terrorizes

isolation by imperialist attacks from the West. The best

man and in which progress is limited by geographical

evidence for China’s loss of stability was the outbreak

and racial contradictions. While China has its own

of the Taiping rebellion in the 1850’s and the changes

Volksgeist, it has never advanced beyond the initial

that it threatened. Faced by the reality of a China in

stages in the realization of freedom. The only free

decline, Marx and Engels had to fit China into their

individual is the despot; for others freedom under the

theoretical framework as a changing element. China,

state has never been realized and no sense exists of

it was concluded, under pressure from industrial capi¬

the infinite worth of the individual.

talism, would leap over antiquity and feudalism to the

Hegel saw Confucius as a moralist, not a systematic

capitalist and ultimately to the socialist modes of pro¬

or speculative philosopher. The sage prescribed prin¬

duction. Marx and Engels saw changes in China of the

ciples for action, and made morality for the individual

kind they expected to see in the West. In their preoc¬

identical with the emperor’s will and law. It is this

cupation with Europe they failed to notice indigenous

prescriptive quality of Chinese morality which ac¬

reasons for change. In their concern with a changing

counts for

China, they abandoned their efforts to fit China into

the unchanging,

despotic character of

Chinese society and for the failure of the Chinese to

their unilinear scheme of universal history as they tried

have an interest in abstract knowledge for itself. Since

to understand what influence it might have upon the

China’s civilization does not progress, it is relatively

world transition from capitalism to socialism.

certain that China was not better off in antiquity than at present. Study of prevailing conditions might then

366

the real landlord, and it maintains in perpetuity a

VIII

be assumed sufficient to unlock the secrets of China’s

Professional study of China, especially of language,

past. Hegel, who was also a close student of Voltaire’s

literature, and history, made rapid progress in the early

idea of universal history, explicitly rejected the uni-

nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century a few

formity of nature and placed the stagnant Orient,

compendia, grammars, and dictionaries had been pro-

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE duced, such as G. S. Bayer’s Museum Sinicum (St.

China’s past and present. Bridgman also translated the

Petersburg, 1730) and Etienne Fourmont’s Grammaire

Bible into Chinese (with M. S. Culbertson), published

chinoise (Paris, 1742). The Society of Jesus, which was

in 1862. S. Wells Williams, an American mission¬

revived in 1815, continued to provide the scholars of

ary-scholar, lectured on China and compiled an ency¬

Europe with raw materials from the field. The Jesuits

clopedic two-volume study,

issued translations as well as essays on Chinese and its

(1848), which remained a standard reference work until

relation to other Asian tongues. J. P. Abel Remusat,

the end of the nineteenth century. Many of the mis¬

who in 1814 became professor of Chinese at the Col¬

sionaries or their children acted as interpreters in

lege de France, inaugurated serious study of Taoism

diplomatic negotiations with China or returned home

and Chinese medicine, and translated novels of ro¬

to teach in the universities, advise the government, or

mance and family life. He also participated in the

work in export businesses. In the learned societies

The Middle Kingdom

organization of the Societe asiatique in 1822. J. H.

devoted to the investigation of Chinese affairs the

Klaproth, an associate of Remusat, published the Asia

views of the missionaries commanded respect.

Polyglotta (1823) in which he divided Asian languages

Knowledge of China produced a practical impact

into twenty-three groups and indicated how compara¬

upon the agriculture and administration of the enter¬

tive studies might be undertaken. Sir William Jones,

prising West. Serious projects were undertaken in the

the father of modern Sanskrit studies in the West,

United States during the mid-nineteenth century to

studied Chinese language and history in his efforts to

compete with China in raising silk and tea, and experi¬

understand India’s early relations with China.

ments were performed to adapt Chinese plants and

The Protestant missionaries, who started evangeliz¬

animals to the needs of American agriculture. T. T.

ing China in 1807, compiled dictionaries in English,

Meadows, a British diplomat, published Desultory

studied dialects seriously, and established educational

Notes on the Government and People of China (1847)

institutions and printing presses in southeast Asia and

in which he described the civil service system of China

China. Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary

and urged the institution in Britain of a comparable

in China (1807), published between 1815 and 1823 a

examination system for the recruitment, rating, and

six-volume Dictionary of the Chinese Language. W. H.

advancement of civil servants. Through his statement

Medhurst published between 1832 and 1837 his Dic¬

the problem was aired, and in 1855 Britain created

tionary of the Hok-kien Dialect of the Chinese Lan¬

its first civil service commission. Most of the civil

guage. Both of these early dictionaries were published

service systems now in existence, including those

at Macao as were other early vocabularies and ency¬

started before the British system, owe an incalculable

clopedias designed for the use of missionaries. The

debt to the Chinese example.

Chinese themselves began around 1875 to prepare

James Legge, in the 1850’s, undertook the translation

dictionaries for the use of Westerners. But the English-

into English of the Confucian and Taoist texts, and

speaking world owes its greatest debt to the British

became the first professor of Chinese at Oxford. His

scholar Herbert A. Giles who published at Shanghai

pioneer translations, worked out with the aid of a

in 1892 his Chinese-English Dictionary, designed for

Chinese assistant, have been criticized by modern

merchants and missionaries. He provided as well a

scholars as being ethnocentric and inaccurate. None¬

system of transliteration which Western students still

theless, they still remain the standard English versions.

depend upon in working with the Chinese language.

In France the Marquis d’Hervey Saint-Denys published

In the nineteenth century Chinese dictionaries were

a valuable anthology of T’ang poetry in 1852 that was

also prepared for Portuguese, French, German, and

influential among the literati of Europe. The Berlin

Russian users. As comprehension of Chinese improved, translations

Orientalist, Karl Arendt, rendered into German in the 1870’s a number of selections from Ming novels the

of popular literature, classics, histories, and documents

themes of which inspired poets and dramatists of the

became more numerous. Dramas, poems, and short

following

stories were translated into English and French. As the

wrote at length on Chinese administration and inter¬

generation.

Continental

Sinologists

also

Protestant pastors and their families steadily grew in

national affairs with increasing reliance on Chinese

number, they came to exercise an enormous influence

sources. H. B. Morse in the early twentieth century

upon the growth of scholarly knowledge and upon the

organized for the English-speaking world the interna¬

formation of public opinion and policy in their home¬

tional relations and commercial administration of the

lands. Elijah C. Bridgman the first American missionary

Chinese empire, mainly on the basis of Western

to China, launched a periodical called the Chinese

sources.

Repository, published in China from 1832 through

The study of China in relation to its continental

1851, which was designed to inform foreigners about

neighbors was given its present structure in the works

367

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE of Sir Henry Yule. In 1871 he published The Book of

gations in depth by specialists in social history. For

Ser Marco Polo the Venetian with a complete scholarly

comparative religion, his examinations of Confucianism

apparatus. His documentation, drawn from his personal

and Taoism still constitute empirical starting-points for

travel experiences as well as from the best available

generalized typological concepts.

literary sources, set a new standard for Eurasian studies. He also edited the works of other medieval travelers

368

IX

and his studies were continued and augmented by

In the early nineteenth century the reaction against

Henri Cordier, a French diplomat and scholar. It was

China as a model state led to a more positive interest

Cordier who compiled the Bibliotheca Sinica (1904-08)

in the Chinese as human beings. The sources for this

which remains the standard bibliography of Western

new interest were found in the translations of popular

works on China. Paul Pelliot, the founder of the lead¬

literature, especially poetry, which had become in¬

ing scholarly journal T’oung Pao (1890-), continued

creasingly available. A precursor of this trend was

the Yule tradition but with a greater attention to

Ludwig Unzer, the German poet, who published in

monographic research. Rene Grousset, a French popu-

1773 an elegy entitled Vou-ti bey Tsin-nas Grabe, eine

larizer of Asian studies, sought more self-consciously

Elegie im chinesischen Geschmack. In this poem, which

than his colleagues to reinforce the literary sources

the young Goethe criticized as contrived, Unzer sought

with materials derived from study of the visual arts.

to depict the feelings of a Chinese who is bereaved

The Protestants, originally hostile to Buddhism for

at the death of his beloved. Unzer’s allusions to Taoist

its outward resemblances to Catholicism, began seri¬

beliefs and other Chinese attitudes are naive, but his

ously by the end of the century to translate and study

poem is important as the first European effort to show

its texts. Much of the growing interest in the study

that the individual Chinese is subject to the same

of Asian religions historically and on their own terms

emotions as others when facing death.

was due to the inspiration of Max Muller, the editor

Goethe, who had satirized the Chinese in his youth,

of the Sacred Books of the East (1875-1900). In this

was in the final decade of his life to express open

collection he presents, side by side with other Oriental

admiration for the Chinese attitude towards nature, the

books, most of the Chinese philosophical and religious

self-discipline and refinement of the people, and the

texts in careful translations. The availability in English

aesthetic qualities of Chinese literature. He was par¬

of this repository of material inspired serious historical

ticularly moved by the Chinese poems which were

and comparative studies of world religions.

published in English translation

in Peter Perring

Max Weber in his lengthy essays on Confucianism

Thoms’ Chinese Courtship (1824). He rendered a few

and Taoism, first published in 1916, brought China into

of Thoms’ translations into his own poetic language

his sociology of religion and more specifically into his

and epitomized others in his set of lyrical poems called

theoretical considerations about the relationship be¬

Chinesisch-deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten (1827).

tween the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.

Friedrich Riickert published in 1833 his imitation in

These essays, which consider the social and economic

freely paraphrased odes of the Shih-ching (“Book of

as well as the religious foundations of Chinese society,

Poetry”). The German romantic poets thus deepened,

constitute one part of a series of comparative studies

personalized, and beautified Europe’s conception of the

designed to throw light on the general question as to

Chinese. In their vision of Chinese imaginative life they

why rational bourgeois capitalism became a dominant

fused an admiration for the intellectual resources of

phenomenon only in the West. In China, as in other

the Chinese with a sensitivity to Chinese creativity that

Asian societies, Weber concludes that the dominant

was not appreciated in the eighteenth century.

religious traditions did not possess an “economic ethic”

But not all of the German poets shared Goethe’s

compatible with capitalistic growth. He concedes that

enthusiasm. Heinrich Heine, at the beginning of the

traditional China possessed the materialistic potential

third book of his Romantische Schule (1833), used one

for capitalistic development, but contends that Confu¬

of the stories of Chinese beauties, translated by Thoms,

cianism lacked the dynamism of ascetic Protestantism

to lend color to his own attack upon the grotesque

since it stressed rational adjustment to the world as

character of German romanticism. Others in the ro¬

given rather than rational mastery of it. Taoism he sees

mantic and Young German movements saw in China

as a conservative and negative force which stressed

nothing but dry pedantry and tiresome automatism in

passive acceptance rather than innovation and activ¬

government. The Liberals of the 1830’s regarded China

ism. In his analysis of the structure and function of

as a model of the police state that they so heartily

Chinese society, Weber provides startling insights into

despised (see Rose, p. 314). The American Transcen-

the roles of the bureaucracy, literati, and the kinship

dentalists, like the British romantic poets, were con¬

system, which have inspired numerous recent investi¬

cerned more with Indian than with Chinese thought.

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE But the ethical teachings of Confucius appealed to

interest in Chinese thought. Irving Babbitt at Harvard

Emerson, particularly the emphasis on the duty of the

early evinced an interest in the humane and moderate

individual to assume social responsibility. Tennyson

qualities in Buddhism and other faiths as they were

expressed the Victorian exasperation with a static and

practiced in China. The Imagist poets, particularly

unprogressive China by proclaiming: “Better fifty years

Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, were attracted to

of Europe than a cycle of Cathay” (“Locksley Hall,

Chinese poetry for its compact portrayal of universal

line 184). In France, Theophile Gautier, influenced by the

wisdom. In Germany, O. J. Bierbaum, one of the lead¬

China specialist G. Pauthier and the novelist Bene

poems on the basis of his own renditions of Chinese

Bazin, became at mid-century a propagandist for

themes. He stressed the erotic elements and burlesqued

Chinese literature and art. He wrote stories and verses

the pompous characters of his Chinese literary sources.

ers of impressionist art and culture, wrote novels and

on Chinese themes, collected Chinese art, and talked

More accurate translations of the meaning and spirit

about Oriental subjects with Flaubert, Baudelaire, and

of Chinese poetry were provided in Germany by

Victor Hugo. His daughter, Judith Gautier, who studied Chinese with a tutor, translated Chinese poems into French verse in the Livre de jade (1867). Her intention

Bichard Wilhelm, in America by Florence Ayscough, and in England by Arthur Waley. Through the efforts of both poets and translators, Chinese poetry, mythol¬

was to transmit poetic quality rather than linguistic

ogy, and history became a source of inspiration for

accuracy, a goal which has been retained by most

creative writers in the contemporary West.

Western translators of Chinese poetry ever since. She also wrote several novels about China and collaborated with Pierre Loti in preparing a Chinese play entitled La Fille du Ciel. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who

X The industrial development of Europe and its ex¬ pansion overseas in the mid-nineteenth century had the

were more interested in Japan than in China, were

general result of forcing an end to the seclusion of both

among the first to point out the debt of Japanese litera¬

China and Japan. China was opened to Western pene¬

ture and art to China. Among those who fell under

tration by the wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, and by

the spell of the Goncourts was Emile Guimet, an in¬ dustrialist and founder of the Paris museum of Oriental art that still bears his name. Georges Clemenceau, while not active in politics, prepared just at the begin¬ ning of the twentieth century a play about China that was inspired by his study of the Chinese classics and his reactions to the Boxer Rebellion. Collection of Chinese art became popular in Europe after 1860, the date of the sacking of the summer palace in Peking. The Boxer expedition of 1900 also brought a windfall of Chinese art into the West. But while individual connoisseurs and museums built up impressive collections of all forms of Chinese art, Western artists have so far not been inspired to imitate Chinese painting and sculpture. The influence of Chinese art in the West has been limited to a continu¬ ation of the popular vogue for chinoiseries and the decorative arts. This is particularly surprising in the light of the attraction that Japanese color prints, archi¬ tecture, and furnishings have had for Western artists. The visual arts have also had but a small interest as sources for China’s social and intellectual history. Only in recent years, and especially in the works of C. W. Bishop and H. G. Creel, have the findings of archae¬

the treaties which followed. Japan was opened by the “black ships” of the Americans in 1853-54 and there¬ after by a series of treaties with the Western powers. It was this train of events, observed and commented upon by Marx and Engels, which transformed quickly the belief in China’s stagnation into a positive assertion of Europe’s superiority. In his essay “On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill envisaged China as a nation victimized by despotic custom. China’s failure to im¬ prove over the millennia he attributed to the success of the Chinese in repressing individuality and mental liberty, and in impressing uniformity of thought and conduct through education and state control. The yoke of conformity to maxims and rules weighs so heavily upon society that, in Mill’s view, if China is

ever to

be farther improved, it must be by foreigners.” The Protestant missionaries were initially scornful of Chinese society, thought, science, and religion. Un¬ like the scholarly Jesuits, the conservative Protestants of the Victorian age saw little but vice and deprivation in China. The work of the missionary, they thought, was to bring the light of Christ to the heathen Chinese in order to save them from eternal damnation. But preoccupation with Chinese language and literature

ology been used in the West as aids in the reconstruc¬

gradually brought a more enlightened generation of

tion of China’s ancient past. The dispatch of Chinese students to the West on

a generation which took a more tolerant view of

Boxer fellowships and other grants helped at the be¬ ginning of the twentieth century to stimulate a new

missionary scholars into being in Europe and America, Chinese civilization. For example, James Legge, the missionary linguist, concluded in 1867 after long study

369

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE of Confucius that he was unable to regard the sage

was raised repeatedly in the last third of the nineteenth

as a great man;- but by 1893 he admitted: “The more

century by missionaries, racists, and military theorists.

I have studied his character and opinions, the more

Count Arthur de Gobineau who theorized on the supe¬

highly have I come to regard him” (Mason, p. 204,

riority of the white over the yellow and black races,

n. 33).

warned of the dangers to white dominance from exces¬

In the mid-nineteenth century the vast majority of

sive intermingling with inferior breeds. Blood pollution

Europeans held widely divergent and contradictory

was identified by Houston Stuart Chamberlain as a

views on Chinese society. Both missionary and secular

threat to the superiority of the Teutonic supermen.

writers praised the Chinese for mildness, docility, and

Kaiser William II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II

adaptability. They were also thought of as industrious,

of Russia corresponded after 1895 about “the Defense

shrewd, and practical, but with a penchant for lying

of the Cross and the old Christian European culture

and deceit without conscience. Chinese of all social

against the inroads of the Mongols and Buddhism . . .”

levels were considered to be extremely polite, urbane,

(Levine. Letters from the Kaiser. . . , p. 10). The British

and courageous in facing personal adversities; but they

publicist, C. H. Pearson, prophesied in 1893: “We shall

were also thought to be cruel, sensual, and licentious.

wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled and per¬

“Of the earth earthy,” in Legge’s words, “China was

haps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked

sure to go to pieces when it came into collision with

down upon as servile and thought of as bound always

a Christianly-civilized power” (Dawson, p. 139).

to minister to our needs” (National Life and Character,

The “scientific” historians of the nineteenth century,

p. 85). In the United States, the Hearst press warned

in their preoccupation with national and European

at the end of the century that more adequate defenses

history, rejected China even for comparative purposes.

were needed to protect the American way of life

Leopold von Ranke in his Lectures on World History

against the floodtide of Oriental emigration. The ghosts

(ca. 1830-48) pronounced as “unhistorical” Hegel’s

of the theorists were given flesh and bones by the

postulation of the eternal stagnation of the Orient, and

startling military victory of Japan over Russia in 1905

classified the Hindus and Chinese as living eternally

and by the swift rise thereafter of strong nationalist

in a state of Naturgeschichte of a completely secular

and anticolonial sentiment throughout the Far East.

and unreligious character. Ranke then went on to exclude China from history proper by asserting that the Chinese sources are mythical, unreliable, second¬

While it was generally alleged in the West that the

ary, or unavailable to one who does not read Chinese.

Chinese were scientifically inept and militarily weak,

Jakob Burckhardt prized the Western heritage so

it also gradually became apparent after 1860 that

highly that he completely excluded China from his

China had staying-power as well. How was it possible

lectures in the fear that alien infiltrations might muddy

that the Chinese with all their adversities continued

the limpid stream. Ernest Lavisse, who shared Burck¬

to go their own way and to remain singularly unim¬

hardt’s high regard for the West and his fears for the

pressed with the material superiority of the West?

future, grimly prophesied in 1890: “All strength gives

Chinese immigrants proved to be industrious, willing,

out; the ability to maintain the lead in history is not

and honest workers who adapted successfully to new

a permanent attribute. Europe, which inherited it from

environments. The Chinese of the treaty ports were

Asia three thousand years ago, will perhaps not always

also quick to learn the ways of the West. The govern¬

keep it”

ment in Peking, despite its obvious weakness, showed

(Vue generate

de

Vhistoire politique de

VEurope, p. 239).

370

XI

a remarkable ability to play off one Western power

The potential wealth of China in natural resources

against the other to preserve China from partition.

was spelled out for the West in three large volumes

Nationalist demands for the reform of the Manchu

and an atlas published between 1877 and 1885 by

government and the development of an embryonic

Baron

China,

industrial base in the Yangtse valley during the 1860’s

Richthofen gave for the first time a geographer’s sys¬

provoked Westerners to begin probing for the sources

tematic estimate of China’s economic resources. He

of China’s seemingly unquenchable vitality.

Ferdinand

von

Richthofen.

In

his

called attention to the rich oil fields of Shantung and

The basis for this new vision of China was not found

Manchuria and to the huge reservoirs of capable labor

simply in the increased knowledge and understanding

available

by

that resulted from closer contact. It also emerged from

Richthofen of an industrialized and modernized China

the belief that there was something to discover in

in

China.

The

prospect

envisaged

was shortly transmuted in the West into the specter

Chinese culture that the West did not possess at all

known as the “Yellow Peril.”

or possessed only to a lesser degree. Growing disillu¬

The threat of China to white, Christian supremacy

sionment with the nationalistic, materialistic, capital-

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE istic, and individualistic society of the West drove

a devoted pacifist in World War I, spent one year

leading thinkers to seek for new values and directions.

lecturing in China during 1920. Although he was

Joseph Ferrari, an Italian parliamentarian, wrote a

known internationally as a socialist, Russell felt that

comparative study called La Chine et VEurope (1867)

industrialization in China could best be promoted by

which denies that China is barbarous, static, or isolated

a partially nationalized system of capitalism. In the

and asserts that its civilization merits attention as an

articles which he wrote for Dial and the Atlantic

historical counterpoise to Europe. Eugene Simon, a

Monthly in 1921, Russell unabashedly asserted that the

French agricultural expert and consul in China, pub¬

Chinese were more “laughter-loving than any other

lished La cite chinoise (1885; cf. Fustel de Coulanges,

race,” not self-assertive either nationally or individ¬

La cite antique, 1864), which idealizes China as a

ually, avaricious for money for enjoyment rather than

peasant society where liberty in all its forms—political,

power, and socialist and scientific rather than capital¬

economic,

realized.

istic and mechanistic in temperament. R. H. Tawney,

Simon’s book, which was very popular, prophesied that

tire British historian and member of the League of

all European attempts to subject China to industriali¬

Nations Commission (1931-32) on the reorganization

zation, colonization, or modernization would fail be¬

of education in China, likewise held a romantic notion

cause of the astounding vitality of the rural nation and

of the historical isolation of China and its effects upon

its naturalistic civilization. On contemporaries, Simon’s

the growth of institutions, ideas, and practices.

religious,

and

intellectual—is

book, along with Richthofen’s of about the same pe¬

While

disenchantment

grew

in

the

twentieth-

riod, had an impact out of all proportion to its intrinsic

century West over China's inability to solve its own

importance. Paul Ernst, the German poet, was inspired

political and economic problems, inquiring minds

by Simon to adulate the collectivist peasant culture

nonetheless continued to examine China’s past institu¬

of China for giving a higher place to spiritual than

tions for fresh ideas. Henry A. Wallace, as a progressive

to material values. Later in life Ernst took most of his

American student of agriculture, was inspired by

illustrations and inspirations from his study of Chinese

studying the economic principles of Confucius to ad¬

art, poetry, and Taoism. He eventually concluded that

vocate experimenting in the United States with the

China offered the rest of the world a unique meta¬

“ever-normal granary” idea of the Chinese. When

physical revelation.

Wallace became Secretary of Agriculture in 1933, he

Tolstoy began to take an interest in China following

continued to work for a program that would provide

the religious crisis he experienced in 1884. He read

a constant supply of grain at all times without serious

widely, especially in the books of T. T. Meadows and

price fluctuations. In 1938 Wallace’s program became

Eugene Simon, on the political and social organization

part of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, a piece of

of China. Like Simon he was intrigued with Taoism

legislation that owed its direct inspiration to Chinese

and the peasant society of China and in his publications

ideas and practices. At the end of the Second World

he urged the Chinese not to follow the way of the

War Wallace called for the internationalization of the

West. He discerned a spiritual kinship among China,

“ever-normal granary” idea as a necessary step on the

Russia, and the other great agrarian countries which

road to world recovery. In response to Wallace’s sug¬

set them apart from the industrialized, materialistic

gestions and the pressing needs of the time, the United

West. He was especially attracted by the Taoist doc¬

Nations created a World Food Bank to establish and

trine that men by their own efforts achieve harmony

manage a world food reserve. Heavy political attacks

with nature and that the role of government should

from various nations quickly brought an end to this

be kept to a minimum. He also responded affirmatively

scheme.

to Confucian theories about the moral and immoral

Twentieth-century efforts at world history have self¬

effects of music. Tolstoy so greatly admired China that

consciously sought to make room for China and to

he asserted just before his death in 1910: “Were I young

integrate its civilization into the totality of history.

I would go to China” (Bodde, p. 29).

H. G. Wells, in his Outline of History (1920) deplores

John Dewey first lectured at Peking in 1912, and

the fact that Chinese culture has received such a

again after the First World War. Along with his pupil,

minimal treatment in world history. While he strives

Hu Shih, Dewey was disturbed by the popularity of

to bring China into his work at each appropriate point,

“isms” in China. He urged Chinese and Westerners

his isolated paragraphs on China are sketchy to the

alike to study the problems themselves, propose work¬

point of being unintelligible. Oswald Spengler’s The

able solutions, and avoid the panaceas of socialism,

Decline of the West (1918-22) treats Chinese civili¬

anarchism, or bolshevism. Dewey was convinced that

zation as an organism with a life cycle of its own that,

socialism could have no roots in China because of its

after an initial flowering, fell into decay and putrefac¬

low level of industrial development. Bertrand Russell,

tion. Arnold Toynbee in his monumental A Study of

371

CHINA IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND CULTURE History (1934-61) assigns Chinese civilization a philo¬

as a class was devoted to international revolution, he

sophical equivalence to Europe. But the actual amount

was convinced by 1927 that a socialist revolution

of space devoted to Chinese civilization is nonethe¬

would succeed in China. The undirected political radi¬

less relatively slight. Toynbee’s ideas about the ori¬

calism of the Chinese would be swept towards social¬

gins of the Yellow River civilization as a response to

ism by world revolutionary trends too powerful to be

a challenging environment and his chronological divi¬

resisted.

sions of Chinese history have been severely attacked

Stalin, once Lenin’s influence was removed, began

by specialists. In William McNeill’s The Rise of the

to emphasize the “feudal” character of China’s agrar¬

West (1963), China is for the first time integrated

ian society and bureaucratic government, and to deny

intelligibly into the history of tire human community

the common interests of the peasants and workers. Of

by the stress that is placed on its relationship to

the three types of class societies described by Stalin

rather than its isolation from other centers of civiliza¬

(slave-holding, feudal, and capitalist), Nationalist China

tion. Academic study of China in the West during the

was to become the prototype for latter-day Marxists of the “feudal” or “semi-feudal” society. Until his death

twentieth century has mainly been characterized by

Stalin remained convinced that the followers of Mao

greater attention to command of the language, to in¬

Tse-tung were “margarine Communists” and that rev¬

ternal developments, and to case studies of village life,

olution based upon the peasantry would fail. In 1950,

social classes, bureaucracy, and the effects of moderni¬

the leading lights in Oriental studies in Russia declared

zation and Westernization. Translations from popular

the complete “rout of the notorious theory of the

literature have focused upon the novels and dramas

‘Asiatic mode of production’” (Wittfogel, p. 5).

of social and individual discontent. Western literary

Karl Wittfogel, a close student of the Marxists and

creations about China, especially those of Alice Tisdale

Weber, finds the source of Oriental Despotism (1957)

Hobart and Pearl Buck, glorified the sturdiness of the

in what he defines as the hydraulic society. The total

common man in meeting adversity and the satisfactions

power characteristic of Asian states derives in his eyes

found by Chinese of all classes in the fullness and

from governmental management of the large-scale

vitality of the ancient culture. The resistance of China

works of irrigation and flood control necessary to the

to Japanese aggression reawakened interest in the study

development and nurturing of agriculture. The class

of China’s relations with its neighbors and in the na¬

that manages the government, not the property-owners

tion’s ability to survive in spite of foreign depredations

or the workers, constitutes the dominant elite in such

and internal political divisions. To the end of World

societies. Agrarian despotisms, such as China, suffer

War II the belief was commonly held that the social

from landlordism, capitalism, and domination by a

and cultural ties of traditional China were still solid

gentry inspired and sustained by the administrative

enough to withstand fundamental changes.

bureaucracy.

Social stagnation is characteristic

of

hydraulic societies, and fundamental social changes in XII

them have been affected historically only through the

Lenin, originally wedded to the Marxist idea that

impact of external forces. The endurance of the Con-

China suffered from the system of production and

fucian tradition in China is a cultural expression of the

governmental despotism peculiar to Asia, gradually

staying power of the monopoly bureaucracy which

began by the First World War to shift to the view that

upheld it as the official credo. Even in Communist

China might become a future center of revolution and

China a managerial order has been retained which,

social democracy. In his writings of the war years,

while differing from the old bureaucracy in structure

Lenin dismissed as irrelevant the peculiar character of

and intent, owes a substantial debt to the agrarian

Asiatic society and sought to demonstrate that elimi¬

despotism of traditional China.

nation of private property would lead everywhere to

The victory of communism in China in 1949 brought

the victory of socialism. But in the 1920’s he advocated

sympathy and affection in most Western powers to a

a closer union between the Western proletariat and

swift end. The treason of China to the West, and to

the Eastern toilers in their common struggle against

Western expectations, set up a formidable, and through

traditional bondage and capitalistic imperialism.

372

the 1960’s, irreducible barrier to communication and

Trotsky, a close student of Chinese affairs, saw in

understanding. Communist China is seen by those who

the economic backwardness of China a positive in¬

fear it as a growing industrial and nuclear power as

centive to creative revolutionary action. In his theory

nothing but a belligerent and implacable foe. Respect

of permanent revolution Trotsky envisaged China as

persists for its ancient culture; but fear of a united,

one of the leading elements in the movement towards

efficient, and totalitarian China as the leader of Asian

global

communism has come to override almost all other

revolution and rapid social

and

economic

progress. While he did not believe that the peasantry

considerations.

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY Throughout the history of modern Western thought,

“China” in Marx, Lenin, and Mao (Berkeley, 1966). Arthur

China and its civilization have been subject to a variety

O. Lovejoy, “The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism,” in A.

of interpretations. The number increased with the passage of time, but no one interpretation was ever completely lost. At all periods the West remained undecided as to how best to evaluate and relate to Chinese civilization as a totality. A fascinating ambi¬ guity constantly appears between the Westerner’s view of objective conditions in China, and his own vision of European society in its relations to other civili¬ zations. While the West’s changing conception of China strongly reflects the main currents of Western intellectual history, occasions arise when objective conditions in China impress themselves upon tire cur¬ rent image. To our own day China is still conceived of as being at once remote and fantastic, wise and admirable, backward and inferior, and fearful and dangerous. While it is conceivable that these paradox¬ ical characterizations are entirely of the West’s own creation, they are also reflections of the distortions that inevitably occur whenever spokesmen of one civili¬ zation take a fixed position from which to look at or

O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, 1960), pp. 99-135. Mary Gertrude Mason, Western Concepts of

China and the Chinese, 1840-1876 (New York, 1939). Lewis A. Maverick, “Chinese Influences upon the Physiocrats,”

Economic History, 3 (1938), 54-67. J. M. Menzel, “The Sinophilism of Justi,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 17 (1956), 300-10. Joseph B. Needham and Wang Ling, Science and Civilization in China, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1954-65). C. H. Pearson, National Life and Character. A Forecast (London, 1893). Virgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de Vesprit philosophique en France: 1640-1740 (Paris, 1932). Adolf Reichwein, China and Europe: Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century, trans. J. C. Powell (London, 1925). Ernst Rose, “Paul Ernst und China,’

Modern Language Quarterly, 4 (1943), 313-28. Arnold H. Rowbotham, Missionary and Mandarin: The Jesuits at the Court of China (Berkeley, 1942). Ernst Schulin, Die weltgeschichtliche Erfassung des Orients bei Hegel und Ranke (Gottingen, 1958). Raymond Schwab, La renaissance orientale (Paris, 1950). Elizabeth Selden, “China in German Poetry from 1773 to 1833,” in Vol. XXV (1941-44) University of California Publications in Modem Philology, Berkeley,

generalize upon an alien civilization of great longevity

1942. Oswald Siren, China and Gardens of Europe of the

and complexity. The total impression which Westerners

Eighteenth

possessed at every period derived from the prevailing

“Chinese Influence on the Western Examination System,”

intellectual conditions at home, the stereotypes in¬ herited from the Western past, and the objective con¬ ditions in China itself.

Century

(New

York,

1950).

Ssu-yii

Teng,

Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 7 (1943), 267-312. Ed. Horst von Tscharner, China in der deutschen Dichtung bis zur Klassik (Munich, 1939). Edwin J. Van Kley, “Europe’s ‘Discovery’ of China and the Writing of World History,”

The American Historical Review, 76 (1971), 358-85. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Total Power (New Haven, 1957).

William W. Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay. The Chinese

Vogue in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York, 1951). R. C. Bald, “Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 11 (1950), 287-320. H. Belevitch-Stankevitch, Le gout chinois en France au temps de Louis XIV (Paris, 1910). Henri Bemard-Maitre, Sagesse chinoise et philosophic chretienne (Paris, 1935). Derk Bodde, Tolstoy and China, No. 4 in The History of Ideas Series (Princeton, 1950). Raymond Dawson, The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis

of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization (London, 1967). Eleanor von Erdberg, Chinese Influence on European Garden Structures (Cambridge, Mass., 1936). Louis J. Gal¬ lagher, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journab of Matthew Ricci (New York, 1953). Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie, The Vision of Cathay (London, 1961). G. F. Hudson, Europe and China: A Survey of Their Relations from the Earliest Times to 1800 (London, 1931). Harold R. Isaacs, Images of Asia: American Views of China and India (New York, 1962). Donald F. Lach, The Preface to Leibniz’ Novissima Sinica. Commentary, Translation, Text (Honolulu, 1957); idem, Asia in the Making of Europe, Vols. I and II (Chicago, 1965; 1970); idem, “The Sinophilism of Chris¬ tian Wolff,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 14 (1953), 561-74. Isaac D. Levine, Letters from the Kaiser to the Czar (New York,

1920).

Donald M. Lowe,

The Function of

DONALD F. LACH [See also Buddhism; Enlightenment; Islamic Conception; Language; Marxism; Romanticism; Socialism.]

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY Christianity: the religion which grew out of the Jewish faith as transformed by the worship of Jesus Christ after the Resurrection, and which, by combina¬ tion with Greek culture and the conversion of a great part of the Roman Empire, took a systematized form as “historical Christianity,” having its chief basis in Europe and presiding over the development of Western civilization until recent centuries. I. THE EARLY CHURCH 1. Judaic Christianity. The disciples of Jesus, if they appeared ready to confess their despondency and even weakness at the time of the Crucifixion, made a recov¬ ery so rapid that it puzzles the historians. It altered

373

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY the course of history; for though, as a result of it, they

term “Christian” came into use, became the center for

countrymen,

which

a wider missionary campaign in the Greco-Roman

brought the older faith to its culmination, shattering

world. Rut also, at this early stage in the story, Chris¬

its traditional framework and calling for a host of new

tian missions (following previous ones on the part of

interpretations. It would seem that, during the lifetime

the Jews) spread eastwards to Transjordan and into

they

proclaimed

an

“event”

of Jesus, they may have followed Him without properly

Arabia, and they were pushed forwards to the upper

understanding the drift of His teaching; and it would

Euphrates and the Tigris. Here, churches using the

appear to have been the vividness of their belief in

Aramaic tongue became important during the earliest

the Resurrection that transformed the situation for

centuries. Some difficulty arose over the question

them, enabling them to feel that now everything could

whether the pagans should be made to conform to the

be fitted into place. It had in fact convinced them that

Jewish law and this may have created additional diffi¬

Jesus was the fulfilment of the famous prophecies on

culty for Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, as Jewish

which the Jews had been relying for a long time; and

nationalism became more intense, more exacting. But

that, if the truth had been so difficult to recognize,

the extension into the Greco-Roman world, together

it had been because those prophecies—and particularly

with the destruction of Jerusalem, brought the Chris¬

the notions of the Messiah and the divine Kingdom—

tian faith a higher degree of autonomy, a further scope

had been construed in too mundane a manner. Once

for development; and it opened to Christianity the

this basic insight had been reached, a remarkable work

possibility of becoming a world-religion. The early

of intellectual synthesis was quickly achieved, and

need for exposition in the Greek language, the marriage

there followed an amazing missionary endeavor, which

with Greek ideas, and the contact with a highly devel¬

required considerable bravery at first and cannot be

oped culture were to prove important in this connec¬

plausibly accounted for by reference to mundane

tion. “Historical Christianity”—the religion as we have

vested interests. It is clear to the historian, and it was

actually known it in its concrete development through

amply admitted at the time, that the dynamic behind

the centuries—comes in some respects as a Greco-

all this was the conviction that the beloved Leader

Jewish synthesis, owing part of its power to the combi¬

has risen from the dead. There was a strong expectation

nation of two such highly different systems. It would

that He would quickly return.

be interesting to know how the religion would have

It has always been a matter of the greatest difficulty for Christianity—and perhaps for any similar form of

374

Antioch, beyond the frontier; and Antioch, where the

did not exactly announce a new religion to their fellow

developed if, in its early generative period, it had combined with a different culture.

faith—to secure by peaceful means and sheer mission¬

The historian is hampered because the Christians in

ary endeavor the wholesale conversion of a people

their very earliest period produced so little in writing,

already dominated by an exclusive form of supernatural

or at least preserved so little. Their leaders knew what

religion. The Holy Land was in this position, and

was needed at the time, however, and the whole future

though Judaism was in a fluid and interesting state,

question of authority in the Church would seem to have

the disciples produced only what appeared to be an

been decisively affected by the fact that (for the imme¬

addition to the multitude of sects and parties there—

diate purpose) so much was realized to depend on the

some of these latter being impressive on the spiritual

evidence of eyewitnesses, and the primacy was natu¬

and ethical side, and some of them so similar in one

rally given to these. Perhaps it is for similar reasons

way or another that the tracing of influences among

that one glimpses the importance of certain relatives

them is a delicate affair. The Church for a few decades

of Jesus in the earliest days at Jerusalem; and, of course,

was predominantly Judeo-Christian, its members still

Saint Paul was accepted as an Apostle because his

attending the Temple and conforming to the Law, but

particular vision of the risen Christ was regarded as

meeting also in private houses or the Upper Room for

giving him first hand knowledge. Once the eyewitnesses

instruction, prayer, and the breaking of bread. Until

had passed off the scene, it was natural that a certain

tlie war which led to the destruction of the city in

primacy should be conceded to those who had been

a.d. 70, it was the group in Jerusalem (with James,

closest to them—those to whom they had communi¬

the brother of Jesus, at its head) which was the leader.

cated most; and the objective was the preservation of

It seems to have been quickly recognized that con¬

what had originally been delivered at first hand—what

verts from paganism were admissible; and pagans were

in the course of time could only appear in a less cogent

encountered in great numbers when the gospel was

form as “tradition.”

carried to the virtually Greek cities, such as Caesarea,

The attempt to secure uniformity in the Church

on the Palestine coast. Communities were soon estab-

would seem to go back to the jealousy with which the

lished also in Damascus and the Hellenistic city of

Judeo-Christian leaders in Jerusalem regarded the

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY “Hellenizers”—some of these latter being Jews who

to the primitive spirit, the exultant early days. It meant

had been affected by Hellenization or pagans who

a wave of “prophesyings,” a reawakening of more

(before becoming Christian) had been converts to

immediate eschatological hopes, a severity in disci¬

Judaism. When the “Hellenizers” carried the gospel

plinary matters and something like an actual thirst for

to pagans in the Greek coastal cities of Palestine or

martyrdom. Dealing with these problems was part of

in Syria, it would appear that the Church at Jerusalem

the larger process by which a sect that had envisaged

would send a “Hebrew” to check on the result of their

an imminent eschatological climax gradually turned

work. But, in spite of the care that was taken, there

into a sedentary Church, realizing what it needed if

were

in

it were to exist on a permanent footing. Controversies

Palestine; and in Samaria, which had already been

in the third century about penance, about relapses in

heterodox in its Judaism, an irregular form of Christi¬

time of persecution, about the validity of baptism by

anity slid away and became the origin of Gnosticism—

heretics, and about the rights of bishops, were part of

this after

the consequences of this transition.

aberrations even

a.d.

amongst the Christians

70, when the failure of Jahweh to grant

victory in an apocalyptic war helped to produce a

Christians were beginning to develop a larger world

movement partly directed against the Old Testament

view; scholarship was accumulating; the interest in

deity. Henceforward, the rise of Christianity was par¬

history was rising. Confronted by the multiplicity of

alleled by the multiplication of Gnostic sects which,

theological opinions, towards the end of the second

in spite of their fantastic character, proved imposing.

century, Irenaeus had insisted on the steadying influ¬

Now, more than ever, it was necessary to safeguard

ence of bishops, who were still regarded as the reposi¬

the original doctrines of the Church.

tories of the original apostolic tradition. In spite of the

2. The Church in the Roman Empire. The Chris¬

varieties at a certain level, an impressive uniformity

tians would appear in the empire as a strange small

and consistency had been made possible by such pro¬

sect and for a time their recruits were perhaps chiefly

cedures as the communication from one region to

amongst the lowly, though churches for which the

another of the decisions made by local councils of

epistles of Saint Paul were written can hardly be re¬

bishops. At the same time, the heads of great sees

garded as unimpressive. In the Roman Empire the

attempted on occasion to secure the support of Rome

believers might be hated because they were confused

in a doctrinal controversy, and this was capable of

with the Jews or because the Jews incited the pagans

being construed later as an appeal to Rome. The

against them; but in the first two centuries they suffered

church in Rome, very much a church of foreign colon¬

from the hostility of the populace rather than the

ists at first, was for a long time cosmopolitan—

intolerance of the emperors. After the fall of Jerusalem

consisting of groups that had brought their local tradi¬

it was in Asia Minor that they came to appear most

tions and customs with them. Like Christianity itself,

numerous, most lively, and most capable; and for a

all new sects, all heresies, all novel teaching sought

long time this was the most impressive seat of the

to reach the capital of the empire; and the bishop of

Church. In various parts of the empire the teaching

Rome would have to meet early at a local level the

in the apostolic period itself would tend to vary, at

challenge that these were later to present to the

least in its emphases, and the tradition came to develop

Church in general. When Christians from further east

on differing lines. Also, as time went on, one great

brought to Rome their different dates for the celebra¬

region (almost as a matter of temperament) would be

tion of Easter, he was in a position to be highly aware

preoccupied chiefly with doctrine while another con¬

of the inconvenience of this anomaly. Perhaps because

centrated on asceticism and another became interested

he was inclined to be less speculative than the bishops

in organization.

of the Greek-speaking East, and more concerned for

From the middle of the second century, Helleniza¬

tradition and order, he not only met problems early

tion—which found its climax in Alexandria—had cap¬

but seems often to have commanded respect by his

tured the mentality of churchmen, who, instead of

actual decisions. In the remarkable period in which

appearing as a mere sect came out into first-class con¬

the universal Church was developing its organization,

troversy with leading intellectuals. They had taken

he gains in importance, though all his claims do not

Platonic ideas into their own system, but they set out

go unchallenged. To us it might appear that the lead¬

to show where pagan thought had gone wrong, and

ership which he asserted was likely to become due to

claimed that Christianity was the culmination of Greek

him by reason of his merits. At the same time, it was

culture, the real heir of ancient philosophy. While this

still recognized that the authority of a bishopric—or

was happening, and the Church was settling down to

a local tradition—depended primarily on the distinc¬

a long-term role in the world, there arose in Asia Minor

tion of its apostolic origin. Rome could claim to go

the Montanism which in a sense implied a reversion

back to Peter and Paul.

375

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY

3/6

In the middle of the third century the expansion is

exist between God and Nature—bound to reject the

remarkable in Africa and in Western Europe, as well

view that matter is evil and that salvation must consist

as in the lands to the east of the Mediterranean. Further

in escape from the body. They could not believe that

east again, the missionary work pushes across Iraq,

in an eternity of cyclic repetitions Christ would go

though its effect is to be gravely limited from this point

on dying over and over again for sinners; so they were

by a Persian dynasty that is committed to Zoroastrian¬

released from extreme cyclic theories, while the Old

ism. At a time when the Roman Empire was coming

Testament presented history as moving forward, mov¬

under pressure on the frontiers and was moving to¬

ing to an objective, an unrepeatable and irreversible

wards a grim development—while in any case this

thing. The Old Testament indeed, forced them to look

empire held hosts of deracines, people feeling lost; not

at history and regard it as important, and it cannot

quite at home in the world—the older paganism was

have been without significance that in Europe, for

coming into decline. Oriental mystery cults attempted

generation after generation, men could not learn about

to answer the need for a Salvationist faith with its

their religion without turning to what was really very

mysticisms and forms of sacrament; philosophy outside

ancient history. Instead of a great emphasis on Fortune,

the Church was running to religiosity. By the second

Christianity gave currency to the notion that the hand

half of the third century the Church had become an

of Providence was in everything and (as had already

imposing body and a powerful influence in the empire,

happened) this might mean that retrospective reason¬

with important government and court officials amongst

ing could ultimately make sense of that kind of history-

its members. Amongst its assets in the great conflict

making which goes on over people’s heads, overriding

of religions were the possession of a sacred book; the

their conscious purposes and their predictions. Christi¬

attachment not to a mythical figure or a demiurge but

anity stressed the sanctity of human life, the impor¬

to a Person who had walked in the world and could

tance of the family, the inadmissibility of sexual license

be identified in history; the assistance of an imposing

and the evil of such things as gladiatorial contests and

organization; and the fact that this religion, besides

the murder of infants. It regarded suicide as wicked.

producing its martyrs and issuing in an expressive kind

It insisted that man’s life had a spiritual dimension,

of devotion, had become intimately connected with the

but it combined a high vieto of personality and its

moral life and works of charity. The Church was be¬

potentialities with an insistence on man’s universal sin.

ginning perhaps to suffer even from its prosperity, and,

It must have affected the world—the very conception

to some, the rise of heresies seemed to come as a

of a human being—when, week in and week out, in

retribution for this. Already the controversies had

numberless localities, men were reminded to reflect on

opened which led to the long conflicts over the Holy

their own sins, on forgiveness, humility, mercy, and

Trinity and the Person of Christ.

love.

Christianity had profited from the meeting of Jewish

3. The Christianized Empire. After the failure of

religion, Greek philosophy, and the Roman Empire—a

a great persecution and a tyrannical development of

conjimcture that seemed to coincide with the Incarna¬

the empire, the Emperor Constantine granted to the

tion. It had profited from the defects of all three—

Church in

Jewish legalism, the tendencies of Greek philosophy

restitution of confiscated goods. Henceforward, he in¬

a.d.

313 full freedom of worship and the

at this late period, and the frustrations and distracted¬

creased his favors to the Christians, and the Church

ness of the Roman world. It had appeared at an ad¬

began to move into a privileged position. It could be

vanced date in that long period in which much of the

argued that his interests as an emperor would recom¬

ability and the yearning of the human race in Asia,

mend an alliance with an institution that carried

and now even in Europe—the result of a great anxiety

power; but there are signs that he was a sincere be¬

about man’s destiny—had been directed to the explor¬

liever, though pagan in his manner of believing—too

ing of the possibilities of the spiritual realm. At a

sure that the Christian God was the one who was

turning-point in the history of man’s religious conscious¬

victorious in battle and helped him to outwit his ene¬

ness, Christianity, moreover, had moved into a highly

mies. All this came as the climax of the Christian

civilized world which had an advanced form of urban

interpretation of history that had been developing—

life—a world which could support it with a certain

with the Hebrews regarded as the fathers of civili¬

refinement of intellect.

zation, their language the original one, the language

Its success was bound to affect the mentality of

of God; Christianity being the return to the original

men—bound to alter their way of experiencing life,

religion of mankind, the one from which the Jews had

their attitude to nature, their posture imder the sun,

lapsed (only to be partially rescued by Moses) while

and their notions of human destiny. Since Christians

the Greeks had declined still more—the Church being

believed in the Incarnation, they were bound to deny

the heir of the wisdom of both Jews and Greeks, how¬

the gulf which the pagans had so often presumed to

ever, and the Incarnation coinciding neatly with the

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY establishment of the Roman Empire, the era of peace.

far enough from paganism to reject all ideas of subor¬

It seemed that, at this culminating moment, when the

dination in the deity, produced a doctrine which, while

empire itself was becoming Christian, churchmen were

asserting the divinity of the Son, secured a clear reduc¬

willing to attribute to a Christian emperor the kind

tion of status for Him. The controversy tore the Church

of divinity that they had refused to concede to his

apart until

predecessors. Henceforward it became almost consistently true

to say that for a longer period than this a great deal

that all who wished to gain imperial favor or to hold

wished to assert both the complete divinity and the

a.d.

381, and it is perhaps not too much

of the ecclesiastical conflict lay between men who

office or to make their way in society would have every

complete humanity of Christ, but could not agree on

motive for joining the Chinch; and the conversion of

the formula that would ensure the one without deplet¬

the Roman Empire—hitherto a matter of persuasion

ing

and not without its risks—was to be continued by the

homoousion (consubstantial with the Father) had al¬

strong arm of the state. This was almost bound to

ready been rejected in a part of the eastern Church

introduce corruptions in the Church itself, and to in¬

that had reacted against a heresy of an opposite tend¬

crease the danger of a formal Christianity, mixed with

ency. It was uncongenial to some because in any case

paganism and thinking in pagan terms—the danger also

it could not claim to be scriptural. Various shades of

of official compromises with paganism. It was perhaps

the Arian and Nicene formulas were attempted by one

natural, but it was unfortunate, that when there were

party and another, who suggested “like the Father”

parties in the Church, one or more of these (not merely

and “of like substance with the Father,” though there

the orthodox, but sometimes the heretical) should ap¬

emerged one group that diverged further than Arius

peal to the emperor, even when he was not inclined

and declared that there was no likeness at all. The

to intervene. This had its special dangers, for in

a.d.

emperors provided a complicating factor—now hesi¬

325 Constantine himself, having called the first ecu¬

tating, now changing their minds, now plumping for

menical council at Nicaea, put himself behind the

a form of Arianism. The West remained firm in its

decree of that Council, condemning the Arian heresy,

support of the Nicene formula, but subtle differences

but within less than three years was induced to change

arose when technical terms had been translated into

the

other.

The

formula

adopted

at

Nicaea,

Latin, and the West was later than the East in con¬

his mind. Stranger still, men so convinced that they spoke for the right religion—and so sure that government and power should be at the service of God—were soon advocates of persecution; and the process in this case

fronting the earlier heresy that had constituted the opposite danger. At a moment when a great work of reconciliation was being achieved, there emerged an emperor who was a Westerner and a pious man, and

was so understandable that nobody today can feel sure

he clinched the matter by an edict in 380, and a second

that, living in the same period and sharing the same

ecumenical council, that of Constantinople, 381, which

assumptions about religion, he would have decided

confirmed Nicaea. If the Church had become more worldly and more

differently. Some who were slow in their conversion to the practice appear to have been brought over when the victims of persecution declared later in life that they were now glad that they had been coerced. Already, in the reign of Constantine, there arose issues which were to trouble the Church for a long time. One of them was the Donatist schism, which arose out of the later persecutions and was directed against bishops who had consented to the handing over of sacred books to the magistrates. It led to the erection of a counter-church in Africa—bishop confronting antibishop—with

violence,

persecution,

atrocities,

self-immolation, and streaks of the revolutionary and the apocalyptic. An extravagant, though serious and understandable, religious issue received tremendous leverage from social discontent and possibly a sort of nationalism, and from hostility to the Roman establish¬ ment. The trouble lasted for a century, almost until the barbarians overran the province. Shortly before 325, Arius, who wished to guard the sovereignty of God the Father, and may not have been

contentious, its power to inspire renunciation and the life of the spirit was reasserted in the development of monasteries. There had been analogies to this in other parts of the globe, but Christianity had had from the first an ideal of chastity and poverty, and the sufferings of the martyrs had kept its self-denying aspects alive. The Egyptian anchorites are anterior to the victory of the Church in the empire, and, when they appear, they have strange features, particularly their obsession with

the

battle

against

the

vast

multiplicity

of

demons—a battle which could only be won by the repudiation of the world, a tremendous disciplining of the body, and a conquest of all ordinary emotions. It was a battle not to be won by the man who lived as a citizen in society; and, though prayers—sometimes repeated in what seems to be an incredibly mechanical manner—contributed to the objective, the movement was one which needed the greatest care by the Church. Nor is it clear how much of its deeper Christian character may not have been contributed retrospectively

377

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY

i

by the influential literature that it provoked. We are

who cluster in the latter half of the century—almost

told, however, that Saint Anthony, when he went to

all of them highborn, enjoying the best education of

a solitary life in the desert in

271, was moved by

the time, and trained in the monastic movement, yet

the injunction: “Sell all that thou hast and give to the

emerging also as great men of the world—Saint Basil,

a.d.

poor and follow me.” The Egyptian desert offered a

Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, and

remarkable opportunity, and great numbers followed

many more. In a period of influential bishops, particu¬

his example. Something that almost seems like a com¬

larly Saint Ambrose in Milan, the reign of Theodosius

petition in asceticism may have developed here and

I (379-95) saw paganism forbidden, heretics pursued

there—and warnings against spiritual pride in this

by the government. Catholic orthodoxy the official

connection appear early in Egypt—but out of his very

religion of the whole empire, and the spiritual author¬

loneliness the hermit was to contribute something of

ity boldly asserting its right against the temporal. The

rare quality to the inner life of the Church.

piety of the lower sections of society made itself evi¬

The

anchorites

grouping

for

came

certain

to

rudimentary

purposes,

Pachomius who, in about

a.d.

but

it

forms was

of

Saint

320 or 323, brought to

dent in the further development of the cult of martyrs and the veneration for relics, as well as in the eagerness for pilgrimages.

the problem an essentially organizing mind and estab¬

Early in the fifth century, Saint Augustine had to

lished the community principle. He prescribed rules

meet an important accusation from the paganism that

for a whole order of monasteries; and, now not only

still asserted itself, particularly in some of the aristoc¬

renunciation but also obedience was important, while,

racy. Barbarian raiders had even reached the city of

besides vigils, readings from the Bible, prayer, and

Rome. The tragedy that was falling upon the West was

contemplation, there was greater emphasis on manual

being ascribed to the desertion of the pagan deities.

labor. The hermit was to have a significant history in

Augustine answered the charge in his City of God.

Palestine and Syria, but Saint Basil the Great, from about

a.d.

357, produced a community ideal which

superseded this and became current throughout the

1. The Church and the Barbarian Invaders. Be¬

Greek world. Before the middle of the century the

tween the fifth and the tenth centuries, the downfall

news had reached the West and very soon ascetic

of the Roman Empire in the West, the eruption of

groups were being founded there, though it was not

barbarian hordes from Asia, the establishment of

imtil something like two hunch ed years later that Saint

Teutonic monarchies and the long period of wars and

Benedict established his famous Rule that became the

migrations threw the map of the European continent

guide for Westerners. The whole movement, the liter¬

into the melting pot, imtil it finally emerged with a

ature that arose from it, and the spiritual teaching it

general pattern that is still recognizable today. From

produced had a great effect on the Church in general;

the seventh century, the rise of Islam and the expansion

and in the fourth century important people, including

of the Arabian Empire produced a drastic and perma¬

a surprising number of the leading intellects, associated

nent division in that Mediterranean world which had

themselves with it, at least during part of their lives.

been the seat of the Greco-Roman civilization and had

In its ultimate extension, it was to have by-products

formed the original Christendom. In the eastern half

of an unpredictable kind—especially its contributions

of the ancient Roman Empire, the imperial system

to cultural and even economic life. It may have been

maintained itself at Byzantium, and, though it lost to

in one sense a protest against the growing worldliness

Islam most of its territory bordering on the eastern as

of the fourth-century Church, or an attempt to find

well as all the southern Mediterranean, it retained its

a new pattern of renunciation, in some cases perhaps

cultural continuity (and preserved Christianity in

even an escape from civic obligations. But it became,

Constantinople) for a further period of something like

from die religious point of view, an eminently creative thing.

a diousand years.

It is a whole Christian version of civilization that

378

II. THE MIDDLE AGES

In a sense it is now the history of Europe that really opens, and this Europe is to emerge as the new form

comes to the front in the fourth century. Biblical

of “Christendom” though it is only very slowly that

scholarship has advanced and become a technical affair.

the northern part of it becomes Christianized. The

Eusebius not only reconstructs the story of the Chinch

centuries of upheaval produced a grave decline of

but has an interpretation of world history. The ancient

culture even in the south, and much of what had been

culture receives a Christian shape, and the transmuta¬

subtle and profound in classical thought—much even

tion sometimes shows originality. The greatest intel¬

of the scholarship and science—was to disappear for

lects of the time, and some of the most imposing Chris-

a long period. Henceforward, there is a separate history

tian figures of any age are the Fathers of the Chinch

of the West and we trace the rise of a Western civili-

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY zation from a comparatively early stage at which soci¬

therefore, by methods not unlike the ones by means

ety itself has returned in many respects to primitive

of which a similar area was brought over to commu¬

forms. Compared with the Byzantine world, and even

nism in the twentieth century. As in the case of

later with the rapidly developing culture of Islam, the

communism—though with greater effect in those ear¬

West appears as a backward region for a long time,

lier stages in the history of society—the Christian

its backwardness illustrated by the appalling collapse

control of education, the procedures of indoctrination,

of its city-life, at a time when Constantinople, and later

and the withholding of knowledge about possible al¬

Bagdad, were of tremendous prestige and size. For

ternative systems (or the treatment of all alternatives

special reasons this Western civilization at its formative

as merely disreputable) ensured the maintenance of the

period, when everything was still malleable, found

authoritarian creed in subsequent centuries, without

itself under the presiding influence of a Christianity

the need to continue perpetually the forcible methods

that had acquired greater power over mundane affairs

that had been required for its installation. Granted the

than ever before.

conditions of the time, one could say, however, that

Some of the Teutonic invaders had become Chris¬

those countries which became Christian were fortu¬

tianized before their eruption into the Roman world,

nate. The existing alternatives would hardly have been

but they had been converted by Arians and had re¬

more happy for them. Indeed, it was their conversion

ceived the faith in a heretical form. This would seem

that brought them into the orbit of civilization.

to have created difficulties with the populations they

In the Byzantine East, Roman Emperors, continuing

subjected, for no Arian dynasty survived, though, in

a regime that had developed from the time of Con¬

the case of Spain, the Visigoths maintained themselves

stantine, were able to exercise in some respects (though

by going over to Catholicism. The Frankish invaders

perhaps less than was once thought) a species of

of Gaul may have owed some of their success to the

“caesaropapism.” But in the West the Roman Emperor

fact that their dynasty was converted only after their

had disappeared, while the bishop of Rome maintained

migration into the Roman Empire, so that from the

his spiritual ascendancy amongst Christian believers

very first, they adhered to the Catholicism of their

and acquired during the invasions even a certain lead¬

Gallo-Roman subjects.

ership in some secular matters. Pope Gregory the Great

For

centuries

the

reigning

dynasties were to have an exceptional part to play in

(590-614) was fervent in his religious duties, extending

the shaping of the map, the history and the culture

his influence over western countries, directing the con¬

of Europe, and it was they who brought their peoples

version of England, and asserting the spiritual su¬

over to Christianity in those more primitive conditions

premacy of Rome as the see of Saint Peter. But in

under which it was inevitable that religion should be

default of anybody else, at a time when Byzantine

regarded as the affair of the group.

authority in Italy had become inert, he was compelled

If Christianity had won its way in the Roman Empire

to negotiate with the Lombard invaders of Italy and

through individual conversion, it owed its spread over

to administer Rome as a governor, inaugurating the

Europe sometimes to mass-conversion, i.e., to the de¬

temporal power of the papacy. It almost seemed as

crees, perhaps the example, sometimes the pressures

though the Church in the centuries before the barbar¬

and persecuting policies, of those who held the govern¬

ian invasions had unwittingly been developing an or¬

ment. It was to be extended further in the north of

ganization exactly calculated to survive, and to pre¬

Europe in subsequent centuries by movements from

serve the faith, through just such a period of cataclysm

both the Catholic West and the Orthodox East, so that,

as had now occurred.

when the thirteenth century opened, only a small

In a world where civilization had suffered such a

wedge of paganism remained, near the point where

recession, Christianity itself shared in the “barbariza-

the southern coast of the Baltic turns north. Lithuania

tion,” coming closer sometimes to those pagan super¬

resisted longest of all, balanced for a considerable

stitions that governed primitive minds. Neither the

period between the influence of Rome and the influ¬

spiritual life nor examples of saintliness were impossi¬

ence of Byzantium. From the western side the advance

ble, but the intellect was ready to accept magic and

was sometimes made through military conquest and

legend even more easily than before; and, since ancient

colonization policies, particularly in the east of what

thought itself was now imperfectly known and imper¬

the modern historian knows as Germany. Here the

fectly understood, something of superstition was run

warfare between Christian and pagan might be of a

into the interstices, and there was produced an outlook

brutal kind, down to the time when, in the thirteenth

which entangled the material with the spiritual, mak¬

century, Prussia was “converted” by the Teutonic

ing religion more earthy, in a way, and nature herself

Knights. A considerable part of Europe was Christianized,

a field for the miraculous. On the other hand, whatever may be said about the

379

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY way in which the new nations of Europe were con¬

Teutonic peoples who had acquired the predominance

verted, there was a sense in which the spread of

in Europe. In the most violent days the monasteries

Christianity was the kind of conquest that justifies itself

stood like fortresses, preserving the tradition of learn¬

retrospectively. The most impressive part of the story

ing—preserving, sometimes without knowing it, the

is the tremendous internal missionary work which the

manuscripts of classical works that went out of circu¬

Church conducted in the succeeding centuries in the

lation for centuries. And for centuries it was church¬

coimtries into which it spread—work calculated to

men—people with minds primarily shaped by their

bring religion home to the individual, and to make it

religious beliefs and religious training-—who took the

gradually more genuine and profound, even if it had

lead in the gradual recovery and deepening apprecia¬

been shallow and unreliable at first. It was not merely

tion of the thought and learning of antiquity. The

a case of eliminating all the superstitions that could

ancient materials were now envisaged in a framework

not be harnessed to Christianity or preventing lapses

of Christian ideas. It was as though, in Western Europe,

into paganism, but also teaching the belief that had

a civilization was being constructed from old materials

been handed down, influencing manners and morals,

but to a new architectural design. There emerged in

and deepening sincerity, deepening the appreciation

the Arabian Empire a parallel culture, closely con¬

of the faith. Part of the curious charm of Bede’s Eccle¬

nected with that of ancient Greece, but under the

siastical History (including those papal letters which

presidency of the Islamic faith. These two imposing

provide guidance for the conversion of England and

examples of a culture which developed in a religious

prescribe special consideration for those who need

setting almost under the eye of the historian, offer

careful weaning from paganism) lies in an amazing

promising material for a resort to the comparative

gentleness that stands out (early in the eighth century)

method.

against a background of violence; in it also is found

During centuries of tumult and upheaval, however,

a combination of high ideas at the spiritual level with

the framework of medieval culture (like the pattern

crude notions about the universe, a simple love of

on the map of Europe itself) was slow in taking shape.

amiable miracles. The great support of the Church in

There was a period in the eighth century when

the Middle Ages was to be the sheer fidelity of the

England and Ireland seemed to be the last refuge of

mass of the people to their beliefs, and whether the

civilization, and missionaries particularly from Nor¬

faith were superstitious or not, its genuineness was in

thumbria (often in the tradition of Bede) carried the

the last resort the real weapon that popes were to have

light back

against kings.

Germany that had never been Christianized, and con¬

the

continent,

converting parts

of

During its earliest centuries, the Church had devel¬

tributing to the emergence of the “Carolingian Renais¬

oped in a highly civilized world, and its theological

sance” at the end of the century. At this latter date,

teaching had come to require a considerable degree

a long alliance between the papacy and the prede¬

of sophistication. The literature to which it was at¬

cessors of Charlemagne had resulted in the re-creation

tached, and its own insistence on the continuity of its

of an “empire”—one in which Charlemagne was able

doctrinal tradition, gave it a vested interest in the

to exercise a sort of “caesaropapism,” controlling the

preservation of the Greco-Roman culture. It could not

Church even in essential matters and expecting from

prevent a serious relapse even within its own ranks;

it spiritual support—as though the function of the laity

but in a sense it had from the first been particularly

was to fight the battles while the function of the clergy

organizing itself for the preservation of a creedal system;

was simply to assist the warfare with their prayers.

and this—indeed the maintenance of the whole tradi¬

A “Carolingian Renaissance,” which did not itself open

tion—called for a staff of trained ecclesiastics. These

out into a long-term cultural development, established,

latter, precisely because of the education that was so

through the emperor’s edicts, the enduring principle

essential for them, were to become indispensable also

that monasteries and cathedrals should accept the re¬

in the work of secular government. The attachment

sponsibility for education.

to the Scriptures made the Christian Church the enemy

Then further waves of invasion in Europe—and even

of illiteracy at a crucial stage in the development of

in Britain—in the ninth and tenth centuries brought

peoples; and the need to have translations for mission¬

a renewed period of turbulence; and in the tenth cen¬

ary purposes secured that it might even be the chief

tury the papacy, having no longer an emperor to pro¬

agency in the development of a literary language.

tect it, came to “the saddest period in its history” when

The whole situation, in fact, imposed upon church¬

380

to

it met something worse than “caesaropapism,” becom¬

men the tasks of educating the “barbarians” and diey

ing the victim and the plaything of the local Roman

became the principal instrument by which the culture

aristocracy. The danger from violence of this immedi¬

of the ancient classical world was transmitted to the

ate sort was doubled by the spread of the doctrine that

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY the lord of the soil had the ownership of all the land,

was reached when the Emperor Henry III (1039-56)

even the land that was devoted to religious use. David

deposed three popes and installed his own nominees.

Knowles (in a paper, “Some Trends of Scholarship,

From the Church’s point of view, the main problem

1868-1968, in the Field of Medieval History”) has

to be solved was the question of the independence of

described how

the spiritual authority; for the existing system led to

The ownership and control of all churches, not excluding monastic and canonical foundations, passed gradually into the hands of individuals who, whether laymen or ecclesi¬ astics, were lords of the land. Thus from the eighth century

many abuses and obstructed any attempt to bring the clergy under discipline. A monastic reform which started in Cluny in 910, though it did not attack this problem, established centers of piety over a very wide

onwards there was gradually established in western Europe

area. Another such movement in Lorraine can be seen

the regime of the private or proprietary church, of which

from 1046 making a specific call for the absolute inde¬

the lord enjoyed many of the fruits and to which he ap¬

pendence of the spiritual authority. The demand for

pointed a priest (or abbot or bishop) of his choice, and which

change arose in the provinces therefore, and it was

he could give, sell or divide like any other real property. When the system was linked at the summit to the extreme claims [of] the emperors to appoint bishops and even popes, there existed in perfect form the “church in the hands of laymen.”

a band of people connected with the Lorraine move¬ ment who brought this latter program to Rome and became influential in that city. They supported their cause by a study of the canon law, and if on the one hand they made use of what we know as the “False

2. The Establishment of the Medieval Order. The

Decretals” (produced two centuries earlier in the

real recovery of Europe from what can justifiably be

province of Tours) they also found more imposing

regarded as “Dark Ages” dates from the latter half of

evidence,

the tenth century, when the Germans halted the

Gregory the Great. Perhaps their labors would have been ineffectual if

Magyars, nomadic hordes from Asia, who had carried their raids across the length and breadth of the conti¬ nent. Henceforward the west of Europe was guarded against the worst of its dangers by the consolidation of Germany and the establishment of the Magyars in a sedentary Christian state in Hungary, as well as the development also of Christian monarchies in Poland, Bohemia, and Scandinavia. The establishment of a “Roman Empire” under Otto I in 962 opened at last a period of comparative stability, and there emerged something like the shape of the Western Europe we know—a Europe which by 1053 had lost a great deal of its connection with the Orthodox Church. Trade and industrial production increased again, and the Medi¬ terranean, which in 972 “like the Baltic, was a hostile sea,” saw important developments which brought Venice, Genoa, and Pisa to the front. The period be¬ tween 1050 and 1150 was to prove one of the most creative epochs in European history, and its great achievement was that it established the real bases of the medieval system. In this period intellectual influ¬ ences from the more highly developed Islamic world provided an important stimulus; but it was only one factor in the case. The intellectual leadership had passed to the northern part of France and to Lorraine. The promotion of the study of logic (which goes back to Gerbert in Rheims,

a.d.

972, and was based at first

on the writings of Boethius) became “the most impor¬

including documents

from

the

time

of

the Emperor Henry III, though nominating popes, had not appointed some worthy people to the Holy See. Their efforts at a time when the next emperor, Henry IV, was a minor, led in 1059 to a crucial decree which excluded the laity—whether the emperor or the Roman aristocracy—from any part in the appointment of a pope and prescribed an independent election by cardi¬ nals. A great development of ecclesiastical litigation and an increasing number of appeals to Rome may have represented another way in which action from the provinces helped to elevate and transform the papal office. The Lorraine reformers had been equally anxious—indeed, it would seem to have been their initial anxiety—that

local ecclesiastical authorities

should be liberated from subservience to a powerful laity. During the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073-85) the zeal of the pope for the reform of the Church at large, and particularly the Church in Germany—the determination to get rid of such evils as simony—led to that conflict between papacy and empire which was to form one of the great themes of medieval history. In any case, the essential system of the Middle Ages now took shape. At first it was a controversy as to whether the mon¬ arch should choose his own bishops and invest them with the insignia of the spiritual office. And here the Church was faced with problems that arose out of the

tant feature in the advancement of learning in northern

character of its new entanglement with the world.

Europe.” But from the time of Otto I the Church had become

might be the heads of considerable principalities. An

still more the prey of the laity and a low-water mark

Bishops in Germany had vast temporal possessions and emperor could not be indifferent to the appointment

381

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY of such formidable dignitaries. What was called the "Investiture Contest

in preserving the larger territorial unit from disruption.

and one pope, in what seems like a fit of absent-

The ecclesiastics might introduce the monarchy to

mindedness, accepted the interesting idea of turning

ideas of law, notions of property, the use of written

the bishops into purely spiritual officers—a thing which

deeds—techniques of an older civilization which they

had no chance of being tolerated by the German epis¬

were in a position to remember, and perhaps to need

copate. The pope possessed weapons—he could use

for

discontented magnates, or incite foreign powers, or

endowed the Church; and at a desperate moment an

foment public opinion, against an emperor. Before

emperor had helped to produce that reformed papacy

long, pope and emperor were presuming to depose one

which was to harass his successors. When the two

another.

themselves.

Monarchs

in

turn

defended

and

clashed, it was almost in the logic of the medieval

There can be little doubt that the assertion of the

system that the conflict should be long and that the

independence of the spiritual authority, and the result¬

spiritual arm should ultimately prevail, but only to its

ing conflict between “spiritual” and “temporal,” were

own detriment. Already, for Gregory VII, the pope

amongst the factors that were to give to Western his¬

represented Christ, the real governor of the world, and

tory its remarkable dynamic quality. The controversy

it was for him to guide the destiny of the “religious

directed the thought of men to the question of the

society,” directing and coordinating its larger purposes.

origin and basis of government, whether secular or

The most signal illustration of this in the latter half

ecclesiastical, and produced a literature that has little

of the eleventh century was the way in which Gregory

parallel in the history of Byzantine Christianity. At

VII and his successor took up the idea of a Crusade

times it led to a confrontation between the theory or

assuming that Rome should have the role of inspirer

the assumptions of the canon law and the principles

and director. At a time when monarchs were in revolt

that lay behind Roman Law. The fervor for political

against the Holy See, and Germany in particular with¬

theory in Europe in the centuries from the time of

held its support, it was the pope, not the emperor, who

the Renaissance may owe something (just as medieval

launched the First Crusade (1096-99) and showed

thought itself owed something) to the influence of the

himself the leader of Western Europe.

ancient world. But many of the modern ideas rise more

3. The Culmination of the Middle Ages. What was

directly out of the politico-ecclesiastical controversies

now in the process of formation was a Christian culture

of the Middle Ages. This point became a great feature

based on the universal acceptance of the faith and

in the historical thinking of Lord Acton, who summed

typified in the twelfth century by the rise of scholas¬

up the matter by saying that Saint Thomas Aquinas

ticism, the great cathedral building, and the gradual

had been “the first Whig.”

transition to what we call universities. Behind it lay

In the age of the Reformation many of the medieval

the revival of Western economic life in the eleventh

patterns of thought are still visible, whether in the

century; the growth of towns; the emergence of some¬

theory of the divine right of kings, or the notion of

thing like city-states in Italy; the development of

a contract between king and people, or the idea of

Mediterranean trade by some of these as Moslem

constitutional limitations on monarchical authority, or

power in that sea declined; the success of the First

the controversy over tyrannicide. At a later period still,

Crusade; the wider view of the world; the contacts

it is possible to trace the actual secularization of what

with Arabian civilization; and the recovery of impor¬

had once been politico-religious ideas. Without what

tant areas of ancient thought—all these, together with

under various forms was an epic conflict between the

the fact that both men and society had come to the

secular authority and the spiritual, a Western Europe

stage of general intellectual awakening, or had found

under

382

the monarch because, for example, it had an interest

was in fact open to compromise,

a

predominant

religious

faith

might

have

the kind of exhilaration which lights the spark. Starting

hardened into something like the Byzantine or oriental systems.

from the discovery of Aristotelian logic—and greatly relishing this—while lacking the concrete knowledge

Gregory VII and the restored papacy stood for the

of the world and nature which Aristotle had possessed,

idea of a Christian Commonwealth—not a “state” but

men ran to a great amount of deductive reasoning from

a “religious society” existing for the glory and the

little material; and, as the more scientific work of

service of God. The whole was to be managed by a

Aristotle emerged, they accepted virtually his whole

secular arm and a spiritual arm, and these were sup¬

system of nature, which became to them an inherited

posed to cooperate with one another. Often the two

“authority,” almost like the Bible—an authority all the

did cooperate, the Church not only offering its prayers

firmer because it was in schools that medieval thought

and its spiritual services—not merely giving a vague

developed. The great achievement was the degree to

support to the whole order of things—but allying with

which the natural science and the philosophy of Aris-

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY totle were combined with the Christian faith, to pro¬

spreading into neighboring regions, the class of austere

duce a “scholasticism” which was bound to have a

perfecti were a reproach to the Church, while tire

character of its own, if only because the philosophy

ordinary credentes were allowed excessive license, and

(always remembering theology in the background)

the whole movement could be regarded as a threat

tended to concentrate on such problems as the exist¬

to society itself. The menace was so formidable that

ence of God, the immortality of the soul, the question

the idea of the crusade was now directed to the conflict

of free will. The pontificate of the statesmanlike Innocent III

against the heretic as well as against the infidel. A cruel

(1198-1216) sees the “religious society” of Western

ally developed to cope with the aftermath.

suppression took place and the Inquisition was gradu¬

Europe in all its majesty, and it is this that sets the

In the case of Peter Waldo and his followers who

stage in the thirteenth century for the development

from about 1170 took to poverty and began to draw

of scholasticism to its culmination in Saint Thomas

doctrine straight from the New Testament, the sup¬

Aquinas, the renewed cathedral building, and the

pression of the unauthorized preaching drove a band

spread of universities—the climax of that Christian

who had erred only through their enthusiasm, into

culture which, a century after Innocent, was to pro¬

revolutionary ways and actual heresy. When Saint

duce a Giotto and a Dante. Innocent more than once

Francis dedicated himself to poverty in 1208, Innocent

chose an emperor, and he forced Philip Augustus of France to recognize as a queen the first wife whom he had tried to divorce. He had the kings of Aragon, England, Portugal, Castile, Denmark, and Sicily as his vassals. He launched two crusades against the infidel, as well as a third against the heretics in the south of France. He also dominated the whole European diplo¬ matic situation. His Lateran Council of 1215 was at¬

III took care not to repeat the error, though Francis and his followers had found their own way of imitating the apostolic life and they, too, had preached without license. They were harnessed to the Church, and the organization of the movement was gradually taken out of Saint Francis’ hands. The monastic system, based on poverty, chastity, and obedience, was adapted to the purpose of men who went out into the world to

tended by over 1200 bishops, abbots, and priors (in¬

preach; and so the friars found their way into the

cluding representatives from Armenia and the Latin

medieval landscape.

churches that the crusaders had established in Syria and the Balkans) as well as many other people from European countries—proctors from the Emperor at Constantinople, for example, and from the kings of France, England, Hungary, and Poland. In other words, it

was

“like

a

representative

Parliament

of

all

Christendom.” It was entirely the pope’s council and it passed judgment between rival candidates for the empire, and between King John of England and his barons. It also allotted the major part of the county of Toulouse, besides taking measures for the reform of the Church, and planning a new crusade. The activities of the papal curia and its agents were now undergoing a great expansion. The multiplicity

Similarly, Saint Dominic in 1215 received permission to establish an order which should meet heresy with argument and learning, and the members of this order were particularly trained for a preaching and teaching role. These new orders of wandering friars, who served under the direct command of the pope and constituted his special sort of army, quickly became important and numerous. They brought religion home to the people and acquired a popularity that sometimes weakened the position of the parish priest. They recruited bril¬ liant men, some of the Dominicans leading in the development of scholasticism; and they came to ac¬ quire an important place in universities. The Francis¬ cans soon carried their missionary work into northern

of the appeals to Rome and the constant despatch of

Europe and North Africa. Before long they were in

delegates from Rome to all parts of Europe secured

China. This was a period when religion was so imposing

the authority of the canon law throughout the system, and kept the papacy in touch with all regions. The increasing organization and the increasing circulation of money assisted the development of papal finances and enabled Innocent to draw on the great wealth of the Church. This mundane success had its darker side, and, in¬ deed, for some time the protests against the worldliness of ecclesiastics had been rising—protests that took shape as heresies. In the case of the Cathari, who had brought Manichaeism from the East and had captured much of society in the south of France, as well as

in the way in which it was handed down and presented to people—and was so powerful in its forms of current expression—that, in spite of some strange deviations, it hardly occurred to the great mass of human beings (even to the rebels and the powerful intellects) that there was the alternative of disbelief. A religion that has soaked itself into the minds of men, and almost become second nature to them, can work like a chemi¬ cal in society, inspiring original thought, giving wing to the imagination and inciting the believer to strange adventures, curious experiments in living. In the Mid-

383

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY die Ages a certain marriage of Christianity and the

times on its own momentum, as a result of impulses

produced a supra-national religious society that was

within itself. Amid much confusion, we see deeper lines

itself an amazing structure and can now be envisaged

of continuous development, as though the logic of

as a work of art. If we have in mind all the external

events were working itself out.

apparatus of the religion as it existed at that time—its

It was in the realm of thought—indeed, it was at

symbolism and its ceremonial, its biblical personalities

the heart of scholasticism itself—that the most fateful

and famous saints, its associations with a peculiar pat¬

changes occurred. And these changes were calculated

tern of the cosmos, even its view of the hand of God

to affect the actual character of religion, not merely

in history—we can entertain the hazardous idea of a

the relations between Christianity and the world. Saint

“Christian civilization,’’ which, culminating in the

Thomas Aquinas, by his reexposition of Aristotelianism,

thirteenth century, affected the landscape of town and

had provided believers with a philosophy which ex¬

country, governed the calendar of the year, touched

plained the cosmos and was crowned by a theology;

the home, the craft guilds, the universities, and even

but the result had been to make philosophy an autono¬

put a stamp of its own on the most idle superstitions.

mous affair. Even while he was at work there were

This civilization carried its own ideas about the nature

men who were more down-to-earth, more prepared just

of personality and about the right posture to be

to hold their Aristotelianism neat; and perhaps a cer¬

adopted by human beings under the sun. It provided

tain worldly-mindedness made them a danger not only

the conditions for the development of piety and the

to an ecclesiastical system but also to religion itself.

inner life—for the deepening of religious thought and

Others who were not worldly-minded or unbelieving

religious experience—and for the expression of all this

tended to argue their way behind the tradition of

in cathedrals, in painting, and in poetry. Even the papacy, which can seem so unattractive

classical philosophy itself, and to question its basis—to doubt even the possibility of metaphysics. It meant

to us as it asserts its claims against powerful monarchs,

denying the ability of the human mind to reach the

stood in many ways as a beneficent influence, insisting

kind of truths that were associated with “natural reli¬

on certain standards, raising the quality of the clergy,

gion,” or to reason in any way about God.

checking forms of tyranny, providing antecedents for

Under tire influence of William of Ockham a great

modern international law, and directing governments

section of the academic world went over to a system

to objects that transcended the ambitions of secular

which, without denying the revelation, cut away the

rulers.

forms of rationalization hitherto current, making reli¬

4. The Beginning of Decline. However, in this whole

384

the medieval period moved into what we call modern

world—Christianity with the whole mundane order—

medieval

order

of things

gion a matter of pure fideistic acceptance. Even the

Christianity was

difference between right and wrong was removed from

gravely entangled with the systems of the world, its

the domain of reason—it came to be held that a thing

bishops, for example, being great landholders and

was good because an arbitrary God had decreed it so.

feudal lords. Even if men in general had been more

If scholasticism itself had emerged too directly out of

otherworldly, the conditions in the terrestrial sphere

a passion for logic, and had lost something by its devel¬

itself were bormd to suffer changes as time went on.

opment in an abstract realm, too remote from life and

Because even the ecclesiastics (by the very character

from general culture, the fourteenth-century develop¬

of the situation) were not sufficiently otherworldly, the

ments increased the gulf and helped to make the whole

Church itself came under the operation of some of the

system curiously arid. Even the content of religious

laws which govern other religions—govern human

thought came to be altered, for reflection was now

systems generally. In a sense it became the victim of

concentrated on the absolute power of a God who was

the remarkable success that it had achieved in the

beyond man’s reason, and who, from a state of uncon¬

preceding period. To the upholders of the existing

ditioned freedom, settled all things by sheer arbitrary

order of things, the changes that were brought about

decree. The will of God, the power of God, became

during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were

the great theme, and the result was by no means the

bormd to appear as a decline; and in certain respects

same as when the emphasis is placed on the thesis:

the medieval synthesis can be seen to be breaking

“God is love.” Even in the discussion of human beings,

down. But the story of religion—even the story of the

attention was fixed on the role of man’s will and that

state as essentially a “religious” society—had by no

of God’s grace in the work of salvation.

means come to its end. The downfall of the old order

These preoccupations help to explain some of the

is difficult to disentangle from the interesting move¬

peculiar emphases and developments in the sixteenth-

ments that were reassembling the materials and bring-

century Reformation. In any case, the separation be¬

ing about the creation of a new one. In some respects

tween faith and reason was bound to create difficulty—

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY belief itself now appearing more farfetched and more

Holy Spirit, and the notion of a clerical hierarchy,

unreal, God himself more remote—a situation which

imposed from above, and deriving a special authority

could encourage secularism and religious indifference.

from outside the system, i.e., direct from Christ. It'had

Perhaps more dramatic at the time, however, were

been noted that if Peter had received the power of

the changes in the relationship between the Church

“binding and loosing” (in Matthew 16:18-19) this

and the world, and even the appearance of a tremen¬

particular prerogative had been extended after the

dous controversy concerning the nature of the Church

Resurrection to all the Apostles (in John 20:22-23);

itself. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the

but though the effect of this was to widen the basis

papacy both presumed too much on the success that

the prevailing view that the bishop of Rome, as the

it had achieved, and discovered what it had lost by

representative of Saint Peter, had the effective power

the discomfiture of its chief rival, the empire in

of government.

Germany. Henceforward, it had to confront the rising

ambiguous—it could mean the local church of the city

national monarchies without the powerful assistance

of Rome but also it could signify the entire congrega¬

which, ideally, should have come from the ancient

tion of the faithful. It was the latter that was supposed

partnership between pope and emperor. In the bull

to be preserved against error, not in the sense that

Unam Sanctam of 1302, Pope Boniface VIII (1294-

lapses here and there were impossible, but in the sense

1303), relying on the assertions and on the victories

that the Church in its entirety would never go astray—

of authority in the Church, it did not in reality override

The

term

“Roman

Church

was

of his predecessors, issued too high a challenge to

there would never be heresy in all its parts at a single

monarchs—claiming too boldly the right to direct and judge them even in the exercise of their temporal

time. Even this stress on the wide-ranging community of

power. The resulting conflict, in which the French

believers, was not taken to mean that the community

government accused him of appalling crimes and demanded his trial before a general council of the Church, brought him to humiliation in 1303 at the hands of a body of desperadoes, and he died within a few weeks after he had been released.

as such could carry on the work of government without the directing hand of the papacy; and those who glori¬ fied General Cormcils of the Chruch normally assumed that the pope himself would actually summon these bodies and lead them—that, indeed, his own authority

In 1305, an archbishop of Bordeaux who was elected

came to its maximum when he worked through a

as Pope Clement V proved to be a creature of the

General Council. On the other hand, it was possible

French king; and, besides creating many French cardi¬ nals, he took up his residence at Avignon, which was then just outside the frontiers of France. Owing partly to the political confusion of Italy, a return of the papacy to Rome proved impracticable for a long time. Gregory XI went back there in 1377, but he died in

to consider that, though the church in Rome had played a distinguished part in the establishment and mainte¬ nance of orthodoxy, the pope as a man might fall into error; and if he notoriously supported what had long been regarded as heresy, his authority would be ipso facto at an end. It came to be asserted that the same

the following year and then the cardinals in Rome

would be true if he were publicly and obviously guilty

elected a pope, but another was elected in Avignon.

of serious crime. The possibility of such contingencies raised the

Now, therefore, the system reached its reductio ad absurdum, two successors of Saint Peter making con¬ current claims and exercising concurrent power. Noth¬ ing could have been more injurious to the Church and more damaging to prestige than the existence for over thirty years of the Great Schism—some parts of Europe attaching themselves to a pope in Avignon, others to a pope in Rome, with the further complication of overlappings here and there, so that a diocese might not be sure which of two rival claimants was its duly appointed bishop. There now arose the question: What

question of the part which the College of Cardinals or General Councils might have to play at the moment when the incapacity had to be declared. It has been pointed out that in canonist writers of about a.d. 1200 are to be found anticipations of all the main assertions of the Conciliar Movement. Yet this was the time when the papacy under Innocent III was making the highest possible claims and asserting that all other jurisdictions in the Church were only a derivation from Rome. In the thirteenth century, however, the development

means of rescue were open to a Church that seemed

of the kind of canon law which treated the Church

to have been struck at its very heart? 5. The Conciliar Movement. It was natural that

age of conciliar ideas. There now appeared more of

there should be some tension in the Middle Ages be¬ tween the idea of the Church as the entire community of believers, collectively sustained and inspired by the

as a corporation tended to increase the possible lever¬ the suggestion that a corporation is the source of the authority of its head, that all members of a corporation should take part in decisions which affect the whole

385

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY body, that a corporation could survive as a unity if

of Constance, it was through diplomacy conducted

to rectify the default in the leadership. Such ideas were

with various national governments that he secured a

able to develop at the very time when papal publicists,

broad basis for the assembly. This body attacked the

for their part, were continuing the line of thought

papal problem in 1415, and began by deposing the

which had brought the authority of Innocent III to

successor of the pope who had gained office as a result

its height. Amongst writers hostile to the papacy the

of the Council of Pisa—they struck at the very pope

idea arises not only that the cardinals could act on

who had joined Sigismund in summoning the new

behalf of the pope when he himself was defaulting in

Council. The resignation of another claimant was then

some way, but also the idea that in serious matters

secured; and, though the pope at Avignon refused to

the pope should always act in consultation with the

give way, the diplomacy of Sigismund prevented his

cardinals—and moreover the idea that the cardinals

having the support of reigning monarchs.

had the authority to summon a General Council. In all this we find the insertion of what the modern

The Great Schism was for practical purposes healed and a new pope, Martin V (1417-31), was appointed—a

student would regard as “constitutional” ideas into

man who, once in authority, opposed the conciliarist

canonist reflections on Church government. The sup¬

ideas then prevalent. The cry had gone up that a

porters of the Conciliar Movement at the beginning

General Council was superior to the pope and it was

of the fifteenth century could feel that they were by

decreed at Constance that a Council should be sum¬

no means innovators—that, indeed, they were follow¬

moned at least every ten years. There were some who

ing principles with a long and respectable ancestry,

urged that even laymen should have a place in such

principles essentially orthodox. In any case, the Great Schism—the scandal of two

386

the rival popes to summon the more imposing Council

it lost its head, and could take the necessary measures

a Council, which was being regarded as a repre¬ sentative body. Another Coimcil which assembled at

lines of successive popes reigning contemporaneously

Basel in 1431 refused to be dissolved at the command

and dividing the West—made it necessary to turn to

of another pope, and it brought absurdity to a higher

just that kind of thinking which envisaged the Church’s

degree than before, for it threatened a renewal of

power of self-rectification during a failure in the su¬

schism by presuming to depose the pope and to ap¬

preme leadership. The Schism lasted for nearly thirty

point another one. The excesses of the radicals fright¬

years, and, though almost all of the popes elected

ened some of the moderates into conservatism, how¬

during this period had sworn to resign if their depar¬

ever, and in any case it was the pope rather than the

ture would help the cause of unity, the promises were

Council who had the power to execute a policy ef¬

not kept. If either of the rival popes summoned a

fectively.

General Council it could only be a party affair and

In 1439 a rival Coimcil which the pope had sum¬

the two colleges of cardinals failed in their attempts

moned to Ferrara decreed that a Coimcil was not

to persuade their respective popes to issue a joint

superior to a pope; and though a dwindling body went

invitation to a Council. When in 1409 a Council was

on meeting at Basel, they came to terms in 1449,

called by cardinals at Pisa, its legality was doubtful,

abandoning their adhesion to the man whom they had

and though it pretended to depose the two existing

presumed to appoint to the papal office. They had

holders of the papal office and secure the election of

humiliated a supreme pontiff and compelled him to

a third, the real effect of this was to make the situation

treat with them after he had decreed their dissolution;

worse—there were now three claimants to the dignity

but they brought the whole Conciliar movement to

instead of two. It is understandable if such an im¬

a miserable end.

passe provoked much discontent with the general con¬

6. The Transition to a New Order. In the meantime

dition of the Chinch, and stimulated a great deal of

new forms of heresy had been arising, and they gained

thinking about the position of both popes and General

additional strength from the abuse that was being made

Councils.

of such things as indulgences, from the jealousy felt

The situation was aggravated by the fact that the

toward ecclesiastical property, and from national feel¬

nation-states were now becoming more important and

ing against the intrusions of papal power into one

governments that had the choice of adhering to one

country and another. From about 1374 John Wycliffe

pope rather than another acquired more power over

in England was preaching against the excessive wealth

their national churches. Their diplomacies (particularly

of the Church and claiming that the monarch should

during the Hunched Years’ War between France and

decide how much of this should be retained—a gospel

England) affected their ecclesiastical loyalties (the

that brought him the patronage of a powerful and

English disliking a pope at Avignon, for example); and

covetous nobility. He lost some of his humbler allies

when the Emperor Sigismund combined with one of

when he attacked the problem of the eucharist, declar-

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY ing that Christ was present spiritually but that the

increased the mundane claims on human beings. The

bread and wine retained their former substance. Em¬

growth of industry and commerce, the development

phasizing the absolute power of the will of God—a

of high finance, the increasing importance of a bour¬

form

Saint

geois class, and the blossoming of virtual city-states in

Augustine as well as contemporary movements in phi¬

Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands provided a new

of

emphasis

which

the

influence

of

losophy encouraged—Wycliffe ran to predestinarian views which were calculated to lessen the role of church offices in the work of salvation. He encouraged

dynamic for the secular activities of men. The resulting erosion of the traditional feudal forms of society was bound to produce disorder in the period of transition,

the reading of the Bible (and its translation into the

and the Church had tied itself unduly to the older order

vernacular) because the Scriptures were of higher au¬

of things—the very pattern of its organization ceased

thority than the traditions of the Church.

to correspond with the systems that were developing

Some analogies to the later Protestantism are appar¬

in the world. The exile of the papacy in Avignon, the

ent in all this; but the first Lancastrian monarch of

ensuing Great Schism and the Conciliar Movement had

England, Henry IV (1399-1413), desired the Church’s recognition of his title to the throne of England, and

increased the tendency of separate regions to look after their local religious afFairs, and the national govern¬

his parliament carried a new statute, requiring the

ments were growing in strength and importance, legis¬

burning of heretics—a statute which was severely exe¬

lating against papal interference or making their own

cuted during the reign of his son. The "Lollard

terms with the popes.

fol¬

lowers of Wycliffe, some of whom had tended to revo¬

The principle of nationality was itself receiving

lutionary ideas, could survive only as ineffectual secret

recognition,

heretics. Partly under the influence of the English movement,

the more effective recovery of the thought of antiquity,

John Hus led a similar revolt against ecclesiastical evils in Bohemia, and, though he avoided some of Wycliffe’s doctrinal innovations, he was burned in 1415 by the Council of Constance, which wished to show that at least it did not tolerate heresy. Some of Hus’s associates came nearer to the ideas of Wycliffe, and there

even in the organization of General

Councils and universities. The Renaissance in Italy and assisted a secularization which, however, had also been showing itself in the development of vernacular litera¬ ture and its advance to high artistic status. And the secularization showed itself within the great develop¬ ment of the visual arts, especially in Italy—perhaps also in the tendency of some scholastic writers to move

emerged a popular radical movement which attacked

over to science, to problems of celestial mechanics, for

monasticism, the adoration of saints, purgatory, indul¬

example. But all this—and the palpable abuses in the Church

gences, etc., on the ground that these things were not authorized by the actual words of Scripture. And here,

itself—did not mean that Christianity was coming to

as in England, a powerful and richly endowed Church, rife with obvious abuses, was challenged by a danger¬

its terminus or that there had been a serious decline of religious faith as such. The very revolts against the

ous picture of Apostolic Christianity—the concept that

Church were born of religious zeal—themselves signs

the clergy should be poor men leading a simple life

of a questing kind of religion that gets behind the

as they guarded their flocks.

conventions and seeks the original fountain of the faith.

In 1419 the Czechs revolted and their religious

The interesting eruptions of spontaneous life are not

grievances, which gave the conflict at times something

antireligious but are more like a groping for fresh

of an apocalyptic character, combined with a tremen¬

adventures in religion, longings for an almost noninsti-

dous national hatred against the Germans, who had acquired a strong position at court, in the university of Prague, and in the industry of the towns. Successive campaigns against the rebels came to disaster, and though the extremists were defeated in 1434, an agree¬ ment had to be made with the moderates which put the Bohemian church in a special position (e.g., in regard to the reception by the laity of communion in both kinds). Bohemia remained, indeed, a region of potential revolt, potential heresy. It might have been argued that the fifteenth century had a special need for the Christian religion at its best,

tutional kind of piety, as though it were felt necessary to cut through the artificialities and go direct to the essential things. Most significant of all are the devo¬ tional movements, that press for contemplation and austerity, or seek a mystical apprehension of Christ. And the Imitation of Christ which has been the inspi¬ ration of both Protestants and Catholics—written in the mid-fifteenth century, and more widely published and translated than anything in Christianity except the Bible—contains hardly a reference to the Church in spite of its devotion to the Eucharist. An interesting feature of the new age is the involvement of the laity

since deep forces in society were producing a great

in the new religious movements, and the association

secularization of life—producing indeed a society that

of these with mrmicipal life.

387

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY III. THE REFORMATION AND COUNTERREFORMATION

was often too much of what might be called paganism or superstition still mixed into the popular Christianity

1. The Pre-Reformation Church. The Church at the

authorities to exploit the willingness of ignorant people

the variety which we should expect to find when we

to rely on wonders that were mechanically operated,

look at the manifold life of a whole continent. There

salvation-devices that had lost their connection with

were abuses and disorders—indeed an unusual number

the inner man.

of grave scandals at certain levels—but also in many places even deep piety and reforming zeal.

Apart from the more technical controversies at a

The

higher level the Reformers were to attack in the world

Renaissance itself could bring attempts to enrich the

at large the attitude which the lowest classes were

Christian outlook with the new humanism, projects

encouraged to take towards images, relics, indulgences,

for a further alliance between Platonism and religion,

the invocation of saints, and the like. There were now

and a fresh interest in the ancient texts—the Scriptures

too many people who were coming to be too mature

and the Fathers of the Church. Even in Italy there

for this; and the Reformation (which could have

were many localities that had their religious revivals,

achieved nothing without the success of its preaching)

some of them medieval in character, popular and even

came in one aspect as a religious revival, a call to a

perhaps superstitious, though the one associated with

more personal faith, a demand for a more genuine

Savonarola in Florence captured some of the famous

“Christian society.” The Reformation was to have its

figures of the Renaissance. The monastic system, from

dark sides but it was to secure its successes because

its very nature, was subject to ups-and-downs, espe¬

so many people were ready to be earnest, ready (when

cially as its rules took for granted a certain intensity

called upon) to bring religion home to themselves and

of spiritual life. But if in some regions monasteries had

to feel that they had some responsibility in the matter.

sunk into immorality, there had been a number of

In a sense the Reformation occurred because (on a

reforming movements, some of them emerging from

long-term view) the medieval Church had done its

within and arising spontaneously. There had been edu¬

work so well, producing out of barbarian beginnings

cational developments—the religious schools under the

a laity now capable of a certain self-help, a certain

Brethren of the Common Life in the Netherlands, for

awareness of responsibility. And as the Church of

example,

and

the

founding

in

fifteenth-century

Rome, once it had been provoked into reexamining

Germany of universities under the patronage of the

itself, was to recover its hold on people by its own

clergy or the pope. Many of these movements were

preaching and its spiritual intensity, the opening cen¬

local in character, arising from below. Even a wicked

turies of modern times see the reassertion of religion

pope would normally have no reason for checking

both in the individual and in society.

them, or for discouraging piety as such. On the other hand, the leading officers of the Church

388

of the period—too great a readiness on the part of the

beginning of the sixteenth century confronts us with

The Reformation was to be helped at the same time by what on the one hand was a colossal envy and

could be too remote from these things and ordinarily

covetousness, and on the other hand a great resent¬

too indifferent in respect to them. It is doubtful

ment. The abuses in the ecclesiastical organization

whether the directors of the Catholic system took even

itself were sufficient to provoke a revolt, and if they

the minimum measures that were required to maintain

offered an opening for zealous reformers they pre¬

their guidance over religious life or ensure the survival

sented too great a temptation to monarchs and mag¬

of the system as a whole. In some regions the state

nates. In the Middle Ages there had been serious oppo¬

of the priesthood and die work of the pulpit had sunk

sition to the development of the power of the papacy

so low that a prince who wished to plunder the Church

in particular—the capture of the spiritual prerogatives

had only to open the door to the missionaries of

into a single center and the insertion of papal authority

Protestantism, who might bring an awakening or a

into every corner of the European system. At a certain

revolt without meeting with an adequate reply. Too

stage in the story the process had been understandable;

much of the burden of the Church had come to be

the papacy had often stood as the most beneficial

borne by a lower clergy who seemed sometimes hardly

agency on the continent; abuses, disorders, and lapses

trained to realize the nature of their own religion, and

into superstition had tended to occur in the regions

had every reason to be discontented with their lot. A

which the hand of the pope could not reach.

surprising number of them (and particularly of those

But the centralization did not prevent benefices,

who belonged to the minor and mendicant orders) were

offices, indulgences, dispensations, etc., being used as

to become Protestants, and some of those who had been

a means of making money, and new offices being cre¬

unsatisfactory before dieir conversion were by no

ated in order that they could be sold—the Church, and

means contemptible after it. It would appear that diere

particularly Rome, being saddled with dignitaries who

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY had to find the means of recouping themselves for the

looked certain aspects of theological teaching that had

initial outlay. Early in the sixteenth century the posi¬

not been lost in the Middle Ages, and he was brought

tion of the papal states was so difficult that the pope,

into the predicament of Saint Paul—powerless to

as the ruler of a principality, had a desperate need

achieve the good that he so greatly wanted to achieve.

for money; and he used his spiritual prerogatives in

After a distressing time, the help of his own superior

order to procure it—an evil that was liable to show

and the study of the Epistle to the Romans brought

its consequences throughout the length and breadth of

him further light, and he came to the view that man

Western Christendom. A higher clergy who were too

is justified by faith alone, but that the Catholicism of

often like the sharers in a colossal spoils system did

his time was preaching salvation by “works,” even by

too little for the earnest people, though they seemed

religious exercises. In reality historical Christianity had always excluded

to stamp very quickly on any enterprise that might threaten their own profits. The Church lost much,

as Pelagianism any idea that a man could save himself

therefore, through the nature of its entanglement with

by his own efforts; and Luther, though he had seized

the world; and its vested interests—the mundane pos¬

on something that had been part of the Church’s tradi¬

sessions that were supposed to guarantee its position—became in fact a terrible weakness, an abuse to some people, and, to others, the primary object of cupidity.

tion—going back to certain aspects of Saint Augustine and Saint Paul—went to the opposite extreme, insisting on the corruptness of man and his inability to have

2. The Reformation in Germany. The Reformation

a part in his own salvation, so that he ran to predes-

is to be regarded as essentially a religious movement

tinarian ideas which were later systematized by Calvin,

and all our history becomes distorted unless we see it as arising primarily out of the spiritual needs and aspirations of earnest men. Social conditions might place certain sections of the population in a favorable position for hearing propaganda or for welcoming it—rather in the way that townsmen may be more ready than peasants to open their minds to a new thing—and such factors might have an effect on the

and which gave the Reformation an antihumanist aspect. The later Middle Ages had seen a concentration on the problem of both freedom and the will in both man and God; and it seems clear that unfortunate consequences followed from too intent a consideration of the power and sovereignty of God, if these were regarded as separate from His love. In a sense Luther’s views sprang from the intensity

social or geographical distribution of a new religious

of his own spiritual experience and his feeling about

system. The current forms and the current needs of

what had happened in his own case; and they answered

society might affect that fringe of ethical ideas and

to what many people throughout the ages had felt to

practical precepts in which a new form of faith works

be their own experience—the sense of being drawn

out some of its more mundane implications.

by a power greater than themselves, pulled into salva¬

In history, everything is so entangled with every¬ thing else that for many students the political or eco¬

tion by forces which they tried in vain to resist. Luther therefore had been open to the criticism that he in¬

nomic consequences of the Reformation might appear

ferred too much of his theology from his personal

more momentous than any other aspect of the move¬

experience. In Wittenberg he was one of those people who

ment. But religion is the stone that is thrown into the pool, the agency that starts all the ripples. In the Reformation itself we are dealing with people for whom religion was not merely a matter of opinion or speculation, leaving an opening for alternatives. They were people who superstitiously feared the powers of hell, and reckoned the afterlife as clear a vested interest as anything in the world—people, also, who believed that only one form of religion could be right, and regarded it as a matter of eternal moment that God should be served and propitiated in the proper way. Martin Luther, while still a young man, and a mem¬ ber of the Augustinian order which was to produce so many supporters of the Reformation, became re¬ markable through the intensity of his inner experience and his exaggerated attempts to secure the salvation of his soul by his own works and religious exercises. In this whole endeavor he would seem to have over¬

promoted a local religious revival, and his immediate superiors were encouraging him in his work, advancing him to a professorship so that his influence would be enlarged. He was a mountain of a man, capable of great profundities and giant angers, but possessing a vein of poetry, and, at times, the heart of a little child. But he was liable to be intellectually erratic, and when in 1517 the abuses of indulgence-selling led him to offer his ninety-five theses as a debating-challenge, he en¬ larged the issue by his theological assertions and pro¬ vided his enemies with a basis for attack. Instead of calmly reasoning with him, they too set out to enlarge the issue, driving him from one logical conclusion to another and into positions that he had not anticipated. And he—incited by the wave of feeling that he had aroused in Germany as well as by his own mighty passions—was glad to be provoked, moving forward

389

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY until he had denied the authority of popes and councils,

the true one; and only sheer perversity could induce

and denounced the condition of the whole Church.

a man to read anything else into the text. Neither the

Carefully measuring his power, he enlarged the

Roman Catholics nor the Zwinglians nor the Ana¬

whole campaign in 1520, setting out to undermine the

baptists were free to interpret the Scriptures for them¬

sacramental system of the Church which contributed

selves. And when Luther came to the construction of

to the power of priests. He called in the secular au¬

his own system, he showed himself in many respects

thority to carry out the work of reform which the

a conservative at heart. Clearly it had not been his

Church seemed unable to achieve for itself. Against

desire

the power of a vast organization that had long had

teaching—and his persistence in it after it had been

the governments of Europe behind it, he asserted what

condemned—was almost bound to produce that result.

he called “the liberty of a Christian man.” Soon he

The general historian of Europe would have to say that

divide

the

Church, but his

theological

was attacking the monastic system to which he had

the most momentous consequences of the Lutheran

once been devoted. And he convinced himself that the

revolt were

pope was Anti-Christ.

disapproved.

things

of which

Luther would have

He was helped by a certain religious dissatisfaction

Lutheranism itself remained essentially Teutonic,

and by the anger, particularly in Germany, against

and, outside Germany, it established itself at the time

ecclesiastical abuses that were associated with Italy.

only in Scandinavia. There was a moment when it

He was enabled by the printing press, and by his own

seemed likely to sweep over Germany, a politico-

prodigious energy, to conduct what was perhaps the

religious upheaval of the kind that can create a nation.

first really large-scale publicity campaign of the kind

Once it failed to carry the whole country however,

that makes its appeal to general readers.

it was bound to have the opposite effect, creating a

An enormous factor in the case was the weakness

new, confessional division, in some respects more bitter

in Germany of the Emperor Charles V, who was dis¬

than any of the others, more difficult to overcome. It

tracted by the problems of the many countries over

resulted in one important contribution to the German

which he ruled, and by the princes of the separate

nation, however—Luther’s translation of the Bible into

states in Germany who sought to aggrandize their

a language which was to prevail over local dialects

authority and were sometimes ready to see the advan¬

and to have a imifying effect. But, though Luther, when

tage of an alliance with Lutheranism. The Emperor

he called for the aid of princes, thought of them as

was to be held up still further by the advance of the

servants of the Church, bound by duty to serve the

Turks, which made it necessary for him to postpone

lofty cause, he produced a situation in which princes

the solution of his German problems. When the cause

had the power to choose between competing systems

of the Reformation came to be preached—in the cities

and so acquired great authority in religious matters.

of South Germany for example—it found an eager

His pessimistic ideas about man and the world may

reception; and for a considerable time even regions

have had the effect of diminishing the role and the

like Bavaria and Austria—regions that later became

influence of religion in the political realm, making

renowned for their Catholicism—seemed to be moving

Lutheranism too uncritical an ally of monarchy.

over to Protestantism.

390

to

In the period immediately after his condemnation

In reality Luther seems to have been a man of con¬

at the Diet of Worms (April 1521), Luther was in

servative and perhaps authoritarian disposition. He had

hiding at the Wartburg castle, and during his absence

been moved to action because he could not bear the

more radical developments began to take place. In

manner in which the Church was tolerating both prac¬

Wittenberg itself, Andrew Karlstadt (or Carlstadt)

tical abuses and misrepresentations of the faith. But

promoted a further movement against the Mass and,

in the period of the great revolt he put forward certain

on the strength of the Old Testament attacked images

theses which were to be remembered as the great

and called for a stricter Sabbatarianism, so that signs

Reformation principles, and were to have a broader

of the later Puritanism were already visible. This, in

historical influence than even his theology. They as¬

March 1522, provoked Luther’s return to Wittenberg,

serted the right of the individual to interpret the

for he did not give the same authority to Old Testament

Scriptures; the priesthood of all believers; and the

law, and, in regard to the things that the populace

“liberty of a Christian man.” When others took these

loved, he deprecated a destructive policy conducted

theses according to their obvious meaning but at the

without sufficient previous explanation. In the mean¬

same time came to conclusions that were different from

time the reform movement had been establishing itself

his, he made it plain that he could not tolerate their

in towns where the social conflict had made the situa¬

individualism, and that indeed he had no use for rebels.

tion almost revolutionary; and by the spring of 1521

There was one interpretation of Scripture, and that

Thomas Miintzer had combined die religious cause

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY with civic revolt in the town of Zwickau. Before the

were more radical, more rationalistic than in the case

end of the year he had proclaimed in an apocalyptic

of the Lutheran Revolt. Here, however, the identifica¬

manner the downfall of the Church; he insisted that

tion of the movement with the political ambitions of

a scriptural religion was not enough since the voice

Zurich turned the Reformation into a politico-religious

of God spoke directly within the believer, and he

affair—a patriotic cause—Zwingli meeting his death

threatened the opposition with punishment at the

in battle.

hands of the Turk. Also some of the other “prophets"

What we might regard as the international Refor¬

of Zwickau moved in 1522 to Wittenberg, where they

mation is

produced trouble for the Lutherans. Soon the objec¬

Geneva—a city which was not yet part of the Con¬

associated with John Calvin

and with

tions to infant baptism became significant.

federation, and which belonged to no country, though

Forms of apocalypticism and mysticism had made

it stood at the point where France, Germany, Italy

their appearance in various regions in the later Middle

and Switzerland came together. After trying to estab¬

Ages, and in Germany not only the peasantry but the

lish himself in the city from 1536 and being driven

lower classes in the towns provided promising soil for

out in 1538, Calvin from 1541 gained the mastery, and

these movements. Now, as so often in history, religious

held it till 1564, though this involved the expulsion

radicalism could quickly lead to political extremism

of many of the ancient families and the granting of

and to the feeling that the time had come for the

citizenship to hosts of refugees from abroad. At the

destruction of the godless. Thomas Miintzer came to

beginning of this period, the Reformation itself had

be connected with the Peasants Revolt in 1525, and,

arrived at a critical stage. Many people had become

when speaking to the rebels about the enemy, could

weary of the conflict, and there were distinguished

say: “They will beg you, will whine and cry like chil¬

intellects as well as political leaders who had come

dren. But you are to have no mercy, as God com¬

to desire ecclesiastical reunion. Under Melanchthon,

manded through Moses.

the Lutherans seemed to be trying to discover how

Yet he is deeply moving when

he writes of his spiritual experience and the voice of

far they

God in the believer: “Scripture cannot make men live,

Catholicism. After the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany

as does the living Word which an empty soul hears."

in 1525 there had been the spectacle of the revolu¬

The sects for which Luther so unwillingly opened the

tionized city of Munster in 1534, and this had shown

way did not know how to apply the brake, and when

what could happen if religious rebellion was not re¬

they captured Munster in 1534 they established polyg¬

strained. Calvin represented a new generation, and an

amy, while in Moravia they experimented in commu¬

important part of his work was the stabilizing of the

nism. It was they who carried the seeds that were to

Reformation—conceiving it as an international affair,

be so important to the far future—the insistence that

and erecting it if possible into an international order

God regarded men as equal, that Christ had made them

comparable to the Catholic one of the Middle Ages. In 1536, by the first version of his Institutes of the

free and that there was an Inner Light which men had to obey. The twentieth century has shown that even the apocalypticism can be deeply ingrained in man and admits of being secularized. It goes back to biblical times, but (at least when the pattern has once been established) it can exist without a supernatural religion. 3. Calvin. In the Swiss Reformation the city-state made its last contribution to history; for it communi¬ cated to a nascent church something of the pattern of its own organization (and particularly government by councils) as well as something of its spirit, so that the secular and the spiritual seemed to have kinship with one another, just as the development of the Cath¬ olic hierarchy had fitted neatly into the feudal world. Here, moreover, the transformation that occurred was more radical—organized Christianity reshaped itself, producing a palpably different landscape. Signs of this are apparent in the case of Zwingli, the original leader of the revolt within the Swiss Con¬ federation. The initial breach occurred on matters of discipline, but the changes in doctrine and thought

could go

towards a reconciliation with

Christian Religion (which was to prove the best-seller of the sixteenth century), and then, in the following year, by his part in the “reunion” discussions in Germany, he had been qualifying himself to become an international leader. In 1539 his Letter to Cardinal Sadoleto had proved to be die most successful of the popular defences of the Reformation. The wheel had come into full cycle, and he saw that w’hat was needed was the reestablishment of ecclesiastical authority. He realized that the situation called for three important things: a confession of faith, a doctrine of the Church, and an ecclesiastical discipline. His originality lay not in the generation of new doctrines but in the better coordination of received ones, and their adaptation to the purpose of achieving a coherent system. Difficulties concerning the question of the “real presence

in the

Eucharist prevented a imion with the Lutherans, who preserved something of die Catholic point of view, and, for a long time, also, with the Zwinglians, who treated the sacrament as rather a symbol and a remembrance

391

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY of Christ. These latter began to be reconciled, however,

reality, the system was governed by an oligarchy which

from 1549.

recruited itself by cooptation and closely superintended

It is in Calvinism that the Reformation, at least in

its members, entering private houses, and exercising

externals, begins to wear the aspect of almost a new

control over private life. It was even something like

type of religion—like a new style in art or, as some

a police-state, with spies, informers, and occult agents,

would think (perhaps unfairly) a change from poetry

and with neighbors and members of families betraying

to prose, if not a reaction against aestheticism itself.

one another—the culprit being handed over to the civil

It becomes clear now that religion is a very serious

magistrate, who carried out the requirements of the

matter; the preaching holds a great importance; and,

Church. If the influx of foreign exiles enabled Calvin

under the tighter authority that is possible in the city-

to clinch his mastery of Geneva, it also provided him

states, there arises a severer control of private life.

with the means of extending his influence abroad. The

Calvin was ready (as Zwingli had been) to follow the

city became like a modem nest of international revo¬

Bible more consistently than Luther, and this was

lution, where the foreign guests received their training,

bound to give an increased importance to the Old

and then departed to continue the work in their home

Testament. He put the idea of the sovereignty of God

country.

at the center of his whole system, whereas Luther

Though he repressed freedom of conscience and

might be said to have been preoccupied by the idea

personal liberty, and, like Martin Luther, gave the

of

its

individual no right to rebel, he did allow disobedience

counterpart in the demand for obedience from the

Grace.

The

emphasis

on

sovereignty

had

to rulers who commanded what was contrary to the

human side. Here was the basis for a firm authoritar¬

word of God, and he gave currency to a theory of

ianism—an insistence that the Christian life should be

resistance to monarchy which was to be of great im¬

a severe discipline.

portance in the subsequent period. Individuals had no

It has been said that Catholicism is the religion of

rebel but representative

institutions

(the

States-General in France, the Parliament in England,

Calvinism the religion of the believing congregation.

for example) were justified in fighting the king. The

In spite of its inaccuracies, this comparison throws light

doctrine was quoted from Calvin by the early Whigs

on the Calvinist system in which, theoretically at least,

and debated by the nascent Tories in seventeenth-

the Church was the congregation of believing Chris¬

century England and it had already been significant

tians, independent of mystery and ceremony and ex¬

in other countries. It inaugurates the modern theory—

ternal paraphernalia. The system governed through

the modern paradox—of “constitutional revolution”

assemblies, synods, consistories; pastors were elected

where the organ of revolt (as in France in 1789) is

by congregations; and all pastors were equal, just as

the representative system itself.

all churches were equal. The layman was given a part

It happened that, in various countries, Calvinism

to play in ecclesiastical affairs; and the ministers were

spread originally in opposition to government, and its

to have no special immunities, no territorial lordships,

leader approved of these movements and guided them.

and they were to pay taxes like anybody else. The

Calvinism, in fact, often emerged in the attitude of

ecclesiastical system was to have no prisons, no instru¬

rebellion, and Calvin’s warnings against this were not

ments of mundane power; their sole weapon against

always heeded, if indeed he himself was quite consis¬

the offender was to be exclusion from the Lord’s Sup¬

tent about the matter. It is not an accident that liberty

per. In other words, sacerdotalism was at an end; and

extends itself in the modem world via Holland, Great

it was Calvin rather than Luther who broke the power

Britain and the United States—countries where politi¬

of priests. It was all congenial to the pattern of a

cal rebellion was allied to Calvinism.

city-state, and suggests a Christianity that is being reshaped in the context of a more modern world.

392

right to

priests, Lutheranism the religion of theologians, and

4. The Counter-Reformation. The Catholic revival of the sixteenth century has two aspects. On the one

Yet it was authoritarian, and only with the greatest

hand, like the Protestant Reformation itself, it can be

difficulty did Calvin impose it on an unwilling city.

regarded as a religious revival, a reaction against the

Coming later than Luther, and having a more re¬

ecclesiastical abuses that had been accumulating, and

morselessly logical mind, he did not pretend that the

a protest against the secularization of Church and

individual might interpret Scripture for himself. If

society. In this sense, if it ran parallel to the Lutheran

congregations elected their ministers the qualifications

movement, it had in fact begun at an earlier date. And

of these had to be approved, and their ordination

one of its important features had been a purification

carried out, by other ministers, and in Calvin’s time

of the Church in Spain—a remarkable reform of

the congregation would be provided with a nominee;

monasteries for example—before the end of the fif¬

all it could do was to give or refuse its consent. In

teenth century, that is to say, under Ferdinand and

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY Isabella, and chiefly through the piety of the latter.

and reunion was now virtually at an end. And though

One result of this was the fact that even the “Renais¬

at this time there were disturbing manifestations of

sance” in Spain had a peculiar character—it was

Protestantism in a number of localities even in Italy,

largely a regeneration of ecclesiastical scholarship, and

effective action was now taken against the movement.

for a time it gave Erasmus a considerable influence

In 1542, Cardinal Contarini, the leader of the reformist

on the religious life of that country. In their program

group died, and at about this time the stronger mem¬

for the New World the Spaniards gave a high place

bers of that party passed off the stage, leaving Cardinal

to the idea of transplanting Christianity and a Christian

Pole—a less effective personality—in the leading posi¬

civilization to the other side of the Atlantic. Spanish

tion. In 1542, moreover, a General Council of the

monks, using the Bible, canon law, and scholastic writ¬

Church was summoned; and, by this time, it had be¬

ings, assisted the transition to modern international law

come apparent that it would not represent an opposi¬

by their works on the laws of war and the rights of

tion to Rome in the way that the conciliar movement

the native population, as they related to the overseas

of the fifteenth century had done. It would itself be

empire. At the same time, the fanaticism and intoler¬

under the leadership of Rome.

ance of the Spaniards seems to have been an acquired

Some controversy has been caused by the question

characteristic, a product of history. At an earlier date

how far the leadership of Spain was responsible for

they had been reproached by other Christians for their

the turn which the Counter-Reformation took. Every¬

laxity, their resort to infidel doctors, their visits to

where—in the peninsula itself, in Africa, in the Medi¬

Moorish courts, so long as the Muhammadans remained

terranean and in America—Spain’s enemy seemed to

in the peninsula. The enduring conflict with the infidel,

be the infidel and the championship of orthodoxy had

and the religious propaganda connected with it, helped

become a major part of the national tradition. The

to make Spain more firmly Catholic, more intolerantly

Jesuit Order was founded and organized by Spaniards

orthodox, than any other country.

and its first generals were Spaniards. The new form

On the other hand there was a Counter-Reformation

of papal Inquisition was influenced by the more pow¬

in a stricter sense—the reaction against the Protestant

erful and modern form of Inquisition that had been

movement, which, to a Catholic was the greatest of

established in Spain. The pope’s chief assistants and

the disorders of the time. There was a moment when

advisers at the Council of Trent, particularly on theo¬

some men were able to feel that the Catholic revival

logical questions, were Spaniards. In the latter half of

might combine with the Lutheran movement, espe¬

the sixteenth century the Catholic party in the Erench

cially when more radical revolts had broken out and

Wars of Religion and the supporters of Mary Tudor

a section of the Lutherans had taken a conservative

in England looked to Spain, and the Counter-Reforma¬

turn. A group of important Catholics were even sym¬

tion came to be identified with the aggressive policies

pathetic to a certain form of the doctrine of justifica¬ tion by faith; and when the accession of Pope Paul

of Philip II. At the same time one must not overlook the deter¬

III brought something of a turn towards a reformation

mined manner in which the popes sej out to hold the

at Rome itself, the appointment of a number of cardi¬

leadership in the Counter-Reformation. They were not

nals in the year 1534 was significant in the story, for

Spaniards; they were often anti-Spaniards, and now,

a handful of these belonged to this more liberalizing

as in the past, they tended to be hostile to the Spanish

group, including Cardinal Contarini and the English¬

preponderance in Italy. The severest of the anti-

man, Cardinal Pole. The years 1537-41 saw the failure

Protestant popes, Paul IV (Caraffa) had been a Domin¬

of reimion negotiations which had been promoted in

ican and his religion may have been affected by his

Prance as well as Germany, and, from that time, the

residence in Spain at an earlier period in his life. But

men who had seemed prepared to broaden the basis

even as Pope he found himself at war with Philip II,

of the Church were in disrepute—indeed, more than

* and Spanish troops besieged him in Rome, where he

one of the Cardinals involved in this aspect of the

was defended by Lutheran mercenaries. The popes

reforming movement was himself in danger from the

were even a little hostile and jealous in their attitude

Inquisition. The years 1540-43 have special importance in the

to the Jesuit Order at first, and this was partly because that order seemed so closely connected with Spain. The

history of the Counter-Reformation. In 1540 the Soci¬

popes indeed would have liked to see the reform of

ety of Jesus was formed, and quickly attained an influ¬

the Church carried out through committees and com¬

ence, though its widespread results were only to be

missions in Rome, where in 1552 Julius III established

apparent in the second generation. In 1541 came the

a Congregation of Reform.

failure of conferences between Catholics and Lutherans

Important sections of the Catholic world, headed by

at Ratisbon, so that the movement for comprehension

the Emperor Charles V, had long wanted the summon-

393

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY

394

ing of a General Council of the Church to reform

uted to Divine Grace and to a man’s free will in the

abuses, particularly the abuses in Rome. On various

work of salvation. And though transubstantiation was

occasions—in Germany early in the 1520’s and in

confirmed there was still room for controversy within

France early in the 1550’s—there had been threats of

Catholicism about the interpretation of even this doc¬

a National Cormcil of the Church to bring about eccle¬

trine. In regard to an important dispute concerning

siastical reform within a single country. When the

the question whether bishops held their power direct

Council met at Trent it made sure that its decrees

from God or only through the pope—a controversy

should reserve the rights of the pope, and should be

in which the Spanish bishops were hostile to the

subject to his confirmation; also that he should have

papacy—the Council failed to come to a clear decision.

the sole right of interpreting them. Throughout the

In order to have a picture of the Counter-Reforma¬

proceedings (which took place in three sessions be¬

tion, however, it is not sufficient to see what was

tween 1545 and 1563) papal diplomacy proved to be

happening at headquarters and in the central institu¬

remarkably effective. Perhaps the great dynamic fea¬

tions of Catholicism—one must have some impression

tures of Protestantism, as it developed in later cen¬

of what was taking place in the world at large. One

turies, lay in the way in which it confronted a man

thing that was involved was the revival of preaching,

with the Bible and allowed him to seize upon the things

and in this connection some of the Observantine section

which he internally ratified, the things which in his

of the Franciscans, who reformed themselves in 1525

spiritual experience he grasped as living and true; the

and became known as the Capuchins, become impor¬

way also in which it could cut its way to the original

tant amongst the common people in Italy, France, and

sources, and, by returning to the fountain of the faith,

Germany. During the numerous outbreaks of plague

disengage Christianity from the accidents of a long

that occurred in Italy, their fidelity and courage made

period of intervening history. Perhaps the great stabilizing feature of Catholicism

a great impression.

has been that it sought rather to preserve a tradition

and became important at first through their teaching

of doctrine, so that a man did not just think out the

and influence in universities, though later they became

things he was to believe—he sought to discover the

powerful at royal courts. Even in Spain where they

teaching which had rmited Christians throughout the

gained most adherents, and in France, where the sup¬

centuries. On this system, at least one did not persecute

porters of Gallican claims and particularly the Parle-

on behalf of doctrines that one had only recently

ment of Paris had special reasons for jealousy, they

worked out for oneself. The impressive feature of the

suffered some opposition at first. When they went to

Cormcil of Trent is the way in which doctrine, instead

Cologne in 1544, some said that the urgent need was

of issuing from some brilliant book by an individual

rather for good bishops and parish priests. Just after

The Jesuits attacked the problem at a different level

theologian, was threshed out by commissions that

the mid-century, not only were many of the German

sought to discover what had really been the tradition

bishops still worldly-minded and indifferent to the

of the centuries. On questions of dogma, a conservative

religious cause, but there were regions where it was

position was maintained. Against Luther’s teaching

impossible for good Catholics to be served except by

about the interpretation of the Bible it was agreed that

priests who were actually married or living with con¬

the Bible must be interpreted by the tradition and

cubines, and preaching semi-Lutheran ideas. In the

conscience of the Church. And the audioritative ver¬

1550’s, however, the famous Jesuit, Canisius, began the

sion was the Vulgate, which had been related to the

important work which saved the city and university

development of Church doctrine through so many

of Vienna from the Protestants who had come to ac¬

centuries. The Bible in the original languages was

quire almost absolute control. His influence extended

available for academic work, but the decision of the

to Prague as well as to Ingolstadt, which became the

Church’s doctrines was not to be transferred in a spirit

great Catholic educational center in the next genera¬

of literalism to the experts in philology.

tion. The same Canisius was responsible for the issue

Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith was con¬

of a catechism which was to be of great importance

demned at the first session of the Council in 1545, but

in Catholic teaching. At the humblest level of all,

an opening was still left for the resurgence of the

moreover, great efforts were made to inspire and nour¬

tradition of Saint Augustine in the Jansenism of the

ish popular piety.

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The doctrine of

Even so, it is difficult to see how the new influences

predestination was condemned, but the Church had

could have found a footing if they had not been

never tolerated Pelagianism, and there was still room

patronized by princes, particularly the Wittelsbachs

in Catholicism for long quarrels between the Jesuits

in Bavaria and the Habsburgs in Austria. The papacy

and the Dominicans about the proportion to be attrib¬

was wise enough now to make concessions to princes

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY who might have become Protestant for the sake of the spoils; and the Bavarian princes were to acquire a good deal of revenue from ecclesiastical sources on which they were now permitted to draw. For a few years from about 1563 the Duke of Bavaria sought to bring his principality back to Catholicism but this imposed upon him a difficult conflict with his parliamentary estates and with the nobility. He succeeded in restoring the Church only by high-handed measures and by making encroachments on ecclesiastical jurisdiction himself. In general, the restoration of the clergy and the care for the educational work were calculated in themselves to have a great effect, and even in Bohemia, a traditional home of heresy, Catholic preaching and Catholic saintliness began to exercise their influence again. 5. The Results of the Reformation. It is more clear to the twentieth century than it was to the sixteenth that a great deal of the evil and the suffering which arose from the Reformation—a great many of the wars, atrocities and crimes that came to be associated with it—arose from the beliefs that the various parties had in common. The world had changed greatly since New Testament days, and all were agreed that religion was not a matter for the Individual only; that the uniform “Christian Society” was the important thing; and that only one form of faith could be true, the rest standing not merely as errors but as diabolical perversions. It was the duty of rulers to support the true faith and there were precedents for the view that when all else failed—when the ecclesiastical system was too deca¬ dent to rectify itself—the secular arm should reform the Church. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and the Ana¬ baptists sought to capture the government—if only the government of a city-state. And this only highlighted the fact that the papacy needed the support of the secular authority too. Many of the results of the Reformation—particularly the more paradoxical results—sprang from the fact that neither the papacy, on the one hand, nor Luther (or any other Protestant leader) on the other, was able to secure a total victory that would have reestablished

to become its own “Christian Society,

and authority

being now closer at hand—was liable to become more tyrannical than before. Although the tendencies were already in existence and may have contributed to the growth of an antipapal movement, the Reformation gave a fresh stimulus to the rising power of kings, and the development of nationalism. It was a great blow to such international order as had previously existed. A revival of religion had occurred, and both pub¬ lished works and private letters bear evidence of in¬ spiring thought and deep sincerity—a tremendous re¬ exploring of Christianity. But it was also a revival of religious passions, religious hatreds and religious wars, and it showed what a scourge a supernatural religion could be to the world if it were not tempered by the constant remembrance of the dominating importance of charity. In sixteenth-century Europe the rivalry between one set of doctrines and another, and even the negotiations between the parties—indeed all the transactions which related to doctrinal tests—inaugu¬ rated a period in which the confessional issue was too momentous, and there was too hard an attitude toward intellectual statements of belief. In the long run, the very conflict of authorities was bound

to

leave

a

greater

opening

for

individ¬

ualism—even a tendency to see all the religious parties with relativity. But the process to this was slower than one would have imagined and for nearly two centuries the conflict had a politico-religious character. In a given country the Reformation, particularly in its Calvinist form, was likely to arise in the first place amongst a minority; and there were signs of it even in countries that were to remain Catholic—signs in Italy and even Spain, and a formidable movement in France. The irrepressibility of these nonconformists, even when they failed to capture the government, added a dynamic quality to the history of a number of states, particularly England. Yet for the most part it was due to their predicament rather than to their theology that the dissenters made their great contri¬ bution to the modern world. They wished to capture the whole body politic; and because they failed they

unity in the West. This itself contributed to the power

were in the mood for opposition to the Establishment,

of princes, for it left them the choice in matters of religion, so that they tended to become masters rather

to judge society and government by reference to

than servants at the most crucial point of all. A mon¬ arch like Henry VIII of England could evade the alter¬ natives before him, simply setting up a system of his own. Furthermore, besides confiscating much of the prop¬ erty of the Church, they became accustomed to con¬ trolling religious affairs—even (in the case of Lutheran princes and Henry VIII, for example) replacing the pope as the superior over bishops. Each state tended

both Church and State; and they could better afford Christian principles and fundamental ideas. The elevation of the Bible by the Protestants, and particularly the Calvinists—what has been called the bibliolatry of the sixteenth century—was to have im¬ portant and widespread consequences. Even the trans¬ lation of the book had a wide general significance, especially in France and Germany. In an age when everything is being thrown into the melting pot, it becomes more easy to note the equality of men befoie

395

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY God, the Christ who makes men free, the idea of communism in the New Testament. One of the effects of the concentration on the Bible was the unprece¬ dented importance which the Old Testament acquired in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In some respects it replaced the volumes of canon law which Luther had burned, and it proved less flexible than the canon law, to which Luther objected, partly because of the development that had taken place in it; he objected not to its prohibition of usury but to the loopholes which it had come to admit. Now, economic regulations, political theories, ethical ideas—and even science, even one’s views about the physical universe— would be taken from the Old Testament, which was more relevant for these mundane purposes than the New. Monarchy itself found its justification there and Luther’s view of what we should call the state was Old Testament rather than medieval—the king having the power while being expected to listen to the prophet (the Reformation leader) at his side. And over and over again the early Protestants would refer to their mon¬ arch as the King Josiah, who had reformed the Church after discovering the books of the Law. The conception of the covenant, which was so fa¬ miliar amongst the ancient Hebrews, was now revived and seems to have played its part in the development of the Social Contract theory. When the Pilgram Fa¬ thers went to America, they signed what they called a “covenant,” in which they constituted themselves as a body politic. Amongst the Puritans the prohibition of images may have tended to the discouragement of the visual arts. In England, Sundays (which had at first been deprecated, along with the excessive number of saints’ days) came to be equated with the Jewish Sabbath. The Old Testament provided textual bases for witch-burnings, which multiplied at this period, as well as for religious intolerance and severe theories of per¬ secution, including the view that heretics should be destroyed as blasphemers. It has been held by Max Weber and others that something in the nature of Protestantism itself played an important part in the rise of capitalism, and the advance of England and Holland (together with a decline in Belgium and a backwardness in Spain and Italy) has lent plausibility to this view. But capitalism and the spirit of capitalism were highly advanced in Italy and the Netherlands before the Reformation, and the famous Fugger family in Germany was Catholic. Luther, joining in the hostility that had already arisen

should assist the capitalists and encourage usury. He would have liked to drive the latter out of the world, but since this was impossible, he said that one must give way to the general utility. He sought to prevent the evil which explained the antipathy of agricultural societies to usury—namely, the practices which took advantage of the misfortunes of the poor—and to him Venice and Antwerp were an exposure of the mammonism of the Catholics. In fact the traditional medieval policy was pursued in Geneva in Calvin’s day; and, after his time, the prejudice against usury continued in that city, where, indeed, business life proceeded as formerly, without receiving any great impetus from the religious move¬ ment, and in 1568 the influences of the Calvinist parties prevented the formation of a bank. In Amsterdam the biggest capitalists belonged to families that were working on a large scale before the Reformation and it was the poor who became the most fanatical Calvin¬ ists. It was preached that everything beyond a reasona¬ ble subsistence should be set aside for the poor, and disciplinary action was taken against bankers—the old prejudices continuing until the middle of the seven¬ teenth century. So long as a religious revival retains its character, it is not in its nature to encourage mammonism, a point which even the Puritans of seven¬ teenth-century England illustrate. The view that a believer should praise and serve God in his daily avocations should not be strange in any religion; and the Middle Ages (as well as the Jesuits later) began wisely to adjust their ethical precepts— their views on commerce and man’s daily tasks—to the needs of a changing world. It is surprising that anybody should hold the view that capitalism was encouraged because the Reformers separated salvation from “works”; for the Puritans were far from repre¬ senting an easy view of Christian conduct, though they held that a man did not win salvation by the effort. When Baron von Hiigel read Bunyan he said that the book was “curiously Catholic in its ideas . . . certainly very strong about the necessity of good works.

Puri¬

tanism encouraged work, reprobated waste of time in idle talk and mere sociability, and held that leisure was equivalent to lasciviousness. It also reprobated luxury and promoted virtues like thrift, no doubt giving reli¬ gious sanction to qualities that were particularly useful in the capitalistic world that had been developing. It is therefore open to the charge of regarding the making

against it—said that the greatest misfortune of the

of money as laudable while the spending of it was a

German nation was the traffic in usury, and he blamed

vice. John Wesley, when he drew up his first printed rules

the pope for having sanctioned the evil. Calvin, coming

396

money is “barren” but he was a little troubled lest this

at a later date, recognized the changed condition of the world and attacked the Aristotelian view that

for Methodists in the eighteenth century, condemned usury on biblical grounds and had to be made to see

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY that this was demanding the impossible, so that he

in this. With the breakdown of the medieval “univer¬

retreated and prescribed only a moderate rate. He

sal” idea, the overall picture became more disturbing;

sketched out the view that the very virtues of Chris¬

Europe had very slowly to find its way to a new kind

tians might lead to prosperity and thence to a decline

of international order, a new conception of the society

of religion. But it is only very late in the day that

of states. For the time being, a momentous religious

Puritanism is in any sense the ally of mammonism.

issue had arisen to complicate the relations between

Apart from the fact that Protestantism could spread

governments and to embarrass European diplomacy.

more easily in town than in country, it provided an

For nearly a century the world was torn by a succession

example of a new movement in religion which, in its

of wars in which religion (however closely it might

formative period, when so many things were malleable,

be combined with other factors) was the primary

confronted what men were recognizing to be a new

motor, or the real source of the fanaticism and bitter

economic world. Besides its theological doctrine, it was

feeling. But monarchs—though they were greatly elevated

bound to acquire an attendant social outlook—a fringe of more mundane prejudices and associations—and these showed it in the first place bitterly hostile to capitalism. But, as time went on, it was almost bound to give the support of religion to the ethical ideas which corresponded to the needs of the new social world. Catholicism had fixed many of its principles in a different state of society, and was likely to be less malleable, though it, too, made its adjustments (perhaps more slowly) as society changed. Late in the day, and almost as ratifying a fait accompli, Puritanism did perhaps become the support of a capitalist society; and, even so, it was a Protestantism that had changed its character; in a sense it was not religion but a decline

under the system of cujus regio ejus religio—were not always masters of the situation. Mary Queen of Scots was unable to prevent Scotland from being Calvinist, and the rulers of England could not prevent the Irish from remaining Roman Catholic. In the northern provinces of the Low Countries a minority of Calvin¬ ists, using sometimes almost gangster methods, cap¬ tured the magistracies in the cities and reduced a majority of Catholics to the status of “second-class” citizens, during the rebellion against Philip II. By the end of the sixteenth century, the humane and scholarly tradition that was associated with Erasmus had asserted itself in this region, and brought distinction to the

in religion, or an injection of secularism which had this

University of Leyden. There emerged the Arminian

result. Protestantism, more than Catholicism, tended to

predestinarianism amongst the Calvinists, and this was

change its general character as the centuries passed; it moved from its initial sixteenth-century form and preoccupations, and at least presented a different spectacle and assumed a different role. It was at a later stage that it became consciously and avowedly the ally of individualism, liberty, rationalism, capitalism, and the modern kind of state.

of cuius regio ejus religio (religion is determined by the ruler) prevailed from 1559, not because the aspi¬ ration for a “universal” Church, a single form of Christianity, had been surrendered, but because some¬ thing of a stalemate had been achieved. The various states now blossomed out as differing forms of

Chris¬

tian Society”; and it might be the accidents of history and geography (rather than any antecedent national “spirit”) that led e.g., England and Scotland or the two halves of the Low Countries to diverge from one an¬ other. It might be the form of confession then adopted which, for the future, conditioned the developing character and tradition of a country. The process of still

acquired a leading position in Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. The movement was re¬ sisted, however, by the populace, who were incited by the intransigeance of the Calvinist ministers and supported by the House of Orange. The defeat of Arminianism was registered in 1619 at the Synod of so many foreign countries that it almost looked like

1. The Age of the “Wars of Religion. ” The principle

was

supported by a burgher aristocracy whose culture

Dordrecht, which was attended by representatives of

IV. THE MODERN WORLD

nation-making

movement, which sought to soften the severities of

continuing,

and

religious

differentiations still tended to play a considerable part

a Calvinist attempt at a General Council of the Church. Because religion was such a momentous matter in those days, and was supported by such grim sanctions, it had the capacity to bring public opinion to new importance in the state, and it often increased the tensions within the body politic. In countries like England and Bohemia the resistance of a religious minority represented virtually the beginning of modern political opposition to the reigning monarch. Calvinism in particular was no more willing than Catholicism to be checked by the power of the king. This being the general situation, the peculiar pre¬ dicament of France was to give this country a signifi¬ cant role in the transition to a new order of things. Here, the action of the government against heretical movements at home had been delayed, partly by one

3 J7

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY king who had patronized certain Renaissance groups,

and that was because they could claim to be preaching

partly by another who had had a political quarrel with

a religion without any dogma. Given the structure of society as it existed in those

the pope. When serious attention came to be given to the problem in 1559, it transpired that the Reformers had become too strong to be dealt with by any ordinary police methods. In a way that often happened, an

means today. It could involve giving the nobles a free hand to force their tenantry to a change of religion.

unhappy social position made sections of the nobility

And only very gradually did the various Reformation

particularly ready for refractoriness in religion, and

parties learn to tolerate one another.

these not only took up the cause of the Calvinists but endowed it with a military organization. The whole issue became involved in further disputes concerning the rights of princes of the blood and the question of the Regency during a royal minority. On the whole— and especially in the desperate days of Catherine de Medici—the government would try to maintain itself by holding the balance between the overpowerful Catholics and the overpowerful Huguenots. For poli¬ tique reasons, it was prepared, in a time of great dan¬ ger, to adopt a policy of toleration which was anoma¬ lous for a Catholic ruler, and which in any case nobody

Early in the seventeenth century both Catholics and Protestants could hope that, by a special effort, they might turn the balance in their favor (particularly in Germany and the imperial territories). There are signs of anxiety and a special fear of war, as though one were already conscious of the looming shadow of the coming conflict—the struggle that was to last for thirty years. Plans for the establishment of perpetual peace or a remodelling of the map of Europe, the inclination of the Lutherans to work for appeasement, and the similar policy which helped to make James I so un¬ popular in England, are features of the time which

would have regarded as the ideal. In these circumstances, not only did repeated civil

seem to show the effect of these apprehensions. Projects

wars occur, as the one side and the other attempted

brought out by Grotius in Holland, John Drury in

to capture the government, but the two religious

England, and later by Leibniz in Germany.

parties would look abroad for allies, the ardent Catho¬ lics working with Philip II of Spain. At a time when France needed to safeguard herself against the pre¬ dominance of Habsburg Spain, those who were gov¬ erned principally by love of their country might be inclined to a politique foreign policy too—an alliance

for the reunion of Protestants and Catholics were

2. The Characteristics and Controversies of Re¬ vived

Catholicism.

The

intellectual

advances

of

Catholicism, its successful missionary work in Europe and elsewhere, and the victories of the Habsburg sup¬ porters of the papacy in the early stages of the Thirty Years’ War, brought about a fine feeling of exultation

with Dutch and German Protestants, for example. In

in Rome when the new basilica of St. Peter’s had been

these circumstances the extreme Catholics, looking to

completed there, and was consecrated in 1626. This

Philip II, tended to behave rather as a hostile force—a kind of “fifth column”—within the country itself. In

“greatest architectural wonder of the world’ still re¬ mained the real center of artistic activity in Rome

France, therefore, the problems of the age of religious

which, under Urban VIII (1623-44) and his two suc¬

conflict took an extreme form, and came near to ending

cessors, was turned into a baroque city. The sculptor

in the destruction of the state.

and architect, Lorenzo Bernini, and the painter, Pietro

Religious toleration begins to emerge as a politique

da Cortona, had a great part in this; and the new

policy, and some of its upholders recognize that it

style—which came to be associated with the Jesuits—

contravenes the whole ideal of the state as a religious

imprinted its character on the city more strongly than

society. They argue, however, that the killing has gone

any previous style had done. It was dynamic and sought

on too long and that the body politic itself is being

dramatic effects, loading churches with ornament and

too radically disrupted. It was as though a terrestrial

gilding, colored sculptures and sensuous curves. It

morality was being used to challenge an alleged supraterrestrial morality, and at first it was unscrupu¬ lous rulers, like Catherine de’ Medici, and not the pious ones, like Mary Tudor, who were prepared to allow religious dissidence. The members of a persecuted

398

days, toleration itself did not always imply what it

spread from Rome to Spain, Portugal, Austria, Catholic Germany, and Poland; though its influence seems to have been smaller in France. This whole form of art still seems to convey to us something of the exuberant spirit of the Counter-Reformation. Here, therefore,

religious party might protest against the intolerance,

Christianity, entangling itself once again with the

but even so, they sometimes made it clear that their

world, presents pictures and scenic displays quite

objection was not to persecution as such but to the

different from the religious landscape of England and

persecution of the right religion by the wrong one. Only the Socinians in Poland in the latter half of the

Holland. In France there emerged in the seventeenth century

sixteenth century proclaimed toleration as a principle,

a “Catholic Renaissance” which helped to enhance the

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY role of that country in the history of religion and of Europe in general. The intellectual strength of the movement is illustrated by the fact that the clergy moved over so naturally to the leadership of the state itself in peace and war. From 1624 to 1642 Cardinal Richelieu was the effective ruler, and he surrounded himself with priests and monks—a cardinal becoming a general, while an archbishop was made admiral—the most intimate counsellor, especially in diplomatic matters, being the famous Father Joseph. The new spirit showed itself in charitable foundations, attempts at reform and Christian missions to the native peoples of French Canada; and the beneficent work of Vincent de Paul was perhaps the most characteristic feature of the revival. Also there began, amongst the congre¬ gation of St. Mam, that scholarly work which was to

to the forefront again that assertive spirit of nationality which had been refractory to the papacy before the close of the Middle Ages, and which had then been a factor in the Reformation itself.

Gallicanism

was

medieval in origin, and it stressed the national charac¬ ter of the French Church—stressed the authority of the French bishops as something more than a mere delegation from Rome. The movement also had its internal constitutional aspect, and regarded the French king as holding his temporal authority direct from God, and therefore as not amenable to the pope in his exer¬ cise of it. In a sense, the king was the protector of the French bishops against the pope, but they were his subjects and if they gained ground from Rome, he himself stood out more clearly as their leader and chief. Also the Gallican cause was assisted by the fact that,

bring so much distinction to the Benedictines in the

since the Council of Constance, the king had more than

seventeenth century. Richelieu himself illustrates the way in which France,

rate agreements with the papacy. It had come to be

through her special problems and special position, was mediating the passage to a new order of things in Europe. In spite of his severities in desperate times, he was a pious man and he gave the politique policy a turn which made it more admissible for the Christian. He destroyed the military establishment by means of which the turbulent Huguenots had seemed their posi¬ tion within France; but he continued the religious toleration which this party had been enjoying since 1598, and he seems to have been sincere in his hope that this example of generosity would be conducive to their ultimate voluntary conversion. In respect of foreign policy, he judged that France would be eclipsed for an indefinite period if Spain were not checked; so he gave priority to the policy of war against the Habsburgs, though, again, he seems to have been sin¬ cere in his determination to see that this should do as little harm as possible to the cause of Catholicism. In both these cases his formulas more carefully pin¬ pointed the valid role of force and discriminated be¬ tween the objectives of foreign policy, imposing at home and abroad the idea of warfare for limited ends. It was a stage in the formation of a different kind of international order and in the transition by means of which even earnest Christians could find their way out of the Wars of Religion. It was to end in the virtual abstraction of religion from the game of power-politics. If the Western Church had come to a tragic cleavage at the Reformation, however, and if the Calvinism of the Dutch had later been brought to a serious crisis by the emergence of Arminianism, it is interesting to note that the seventeenth century saw great conflicts within the revived Catholicism—conflicts, moreover, on patterns already familiar—and that the chief arena for these should have been France. Firstly there came

once settled the position of the French church in sepa¬ easy to see that church as a national affair, to be conducted for the most part by French bishops under the French king; and even the idea of a national ecclesiastical council had been used as a possible weapon against the pope. The Spanish Church had already acquired a remarkable independence, and the French became the chief mouthpiece of the nationalist program, though a parallel form of protest against Rome distinguished the Venetians, particularly at the beginning of the seventeenth century. From the fifteenth century, the French enemies of the Gallican principles were beginning to be known as “Ultramontanes,” and, after the Counter-Reforma¬ tion, it was the Jesuits who distinguished themselves in this capacity. In the period of the

Catholic Renais¬

sance” the propaganda campaign involved an interest¬ ing development of politico-ecclesiastical thought; but Gallicanism rose to a new height when, firstly the monarchy came to its climax under Louis XIV, a king who received continual incense from a great part of the clergy, and, secondly when the movement became associated with the famous name of Bossuet, who tried to hold it within reasonable limits. A

Declaration of

the French Clergy” in 1682 asserted the principles; that the king’s temporal sovereignty was independent of the pope; that even in matters of faith the papacy needed the concurrence of the bishops; that a General Council was superior to the pope; and that the ancient Gallican liberties (e.g., the exclusion of papal bulls and briefs that had not received the consent of the king) were to be regarded as sacrosanct. The result was a violent conflict with the papacy at a time when Louis XIV was beset by other serious difficulties, and the Declaration was formally withdrawn. Its tenets continued to prevail in France, however, and Gallicanism

>399

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY was still to play a great part in the country, as well

suggested that “Jansenism” in North Italy in the nine¬

as setting an example for nationalistic aspirations else¬

teenth century became transmuted into a kind of secu¬

where.

lar religion.

The posthumous publication in 1640 of Augustinus

3. The Transition to the Age of Reason. Because

by Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) was to have tremen¬

the practice of the right religion was considered so

dous and far-reaching effects for a long period in

important, and because there was such a conviction

France and neighboring countries. The work tried to

that only one form of religion could be right, it was

show that Saint Augustine’s teaching conflicted with

only by a very slow process (and by certain changes

that of the seventeenth century (and particularly that

in the very structure of Christian thinking) that tolera¬

of the Jesuits); and by stressing the helplessness of man

tion could come to be itself a religious ideal. In the

it moved to predestinarian ideas, though an admixture

middle of the seventeenth century it seems to come

of Catholic doctrine still distinguished it from Calvin¬

almost as a “discovery” to some people that the other

ism. The cause was taken up by theologians at the

man’s creed, instead of being the product of perversity,

Sorbonne, and then by important scholars as well as

might be as much a case of conscience as one’s own;

the nuns of Port-Royal-des-Champs. When five propo¬

and perhaps it required the standing presence for a

sitions were condemned by Pope Innocent X in 1653,

considerable period of rival sects to produce the per¬

the French leader of the movement agreed that the

suasion that, though a man may hold his own faith as

propositions were heretical and that the Church had

an absolute, he must treat the matter with a certain

the authority to condemn them; but he denied that

degree of relativity in his relations with other men,

they

who have the same right to follow their conscience.

were

contained in

Jansen’s Augustinus

and

claimed that this was a historical point on which the pope’s ruling was not authoritative.

400

Some progress was made through pondering on the current doctrine that ethics required the granting to

The whole controversy flared up again at the begin¬

others of the treatment one expected to receive from

ning of the eighteenth century, when a number of

them. It was more easy for the various branches of

theologians at the Sorbonne claimed that absolution

Protestantism to adopt this attitude towards one an¬

need not be refused to a priest who maintained this

other than to give Roman Catholics the benefit of it.

distinction between questions of doctrine and questions

When sects were multiplied—as in Puritan England—

of fact. Pope Clement XI denounced this thesis in 1705

and when religious variety had become a standing

and, as he had the support of Louis XIV, the campaign

phenomenon, it was more easy to see that the individ¬

against Jansenism was a powerful one, culminating in

ual judgment had come to have preponderant signifi¬

the bull Unigenitus which in 1713 condemned 101

cance; and some sects were individualistic, some highly

propositions. Jansenism, which had spread widely

insistent about the Inner Light. It meant a kind of

amongst the people and the lower clergy, was sup¬

intellectual revolution, but when one came to see that

ported at times by the Sorbonne and the Parlement

voluntariness of belief was itself an essential thing (and

of Paris, and for some years the Archbishop of Paris

that the quality of belief even had some relation to

refused to submit to the bull Unigenitus. The persecu¬

its voluntariness), Christians in the course of time could

tion aroused great passions and led to an enlargement

come to wonder why they had ever permitted perse¬

of the area of the controversy, its victims appealing,

cution at all. Protestants came to feel that diversity

for example, for a General Council of the Church.

itself might be enriching for Christendom, that truth

Under desperate pressures the movement tended to

might be served by the clash of controversy, and that

change character, claimed to produce miracles, and

the right could be brought to prevail in the long run

had convulsionist manifestations.

by force of mere persuasion.

It turned into a

broader kind of opposition to Church and monarchy

But the laymen played a great part in the coming

in the eighteenth century and achieved at times an

of toleration. In England, a certain religious indiffer¬

almost revolutionary atmosphere.

ence—or a reaction against fanaticism—was visible

At the same time a great number of French Jan-

from the 1650’s. There may have been an increasing

senists fled to Holland where a permanent schismatic

squeamishness about the infliction of suffering for reli¬

organization was established in Utrecht. The move¬

gious reasons and a feeling that extravagant sects had

ment spread to North Italy and the system which it

exposed the pretentions of authoritarianism. The set¬

established at Pistoia was condemned by Pope Pius VI

tlement in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the need

in 1794. The “Jansenism” which was supposed to influ¬

for manpower in Germany to aid in the work of eco¬

ence tire ecclesiastical policy of the French Revolution

nomic recovery after the devastation of the Thirty

had departed far from the original movement, and

Years’ War, the growing importance of the laity in

involved Gallican ideas and democratic claims in re-

society and the decline in the general prestige qf the

spect of the rights of the lower clergy. It has been

clergy—these, as well as special political conjunc-

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY tures—have their part in the coming of a toleration which still left dissenters penalized in some ways. As the eighteenth century proceeded a country like England ceased to have the appearance of a “Christian Society” and the Church of England became more like a privileged “Establishment” in a secular state. In both England and Ireland, the Catholics were still harassed by cruel penal laws. In 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, and deprived his Protestant subjects of the toleration they had enjoyed for nearly a century. In the meantime, however, other factors had been altering the place of religion in society and in life, and making the survival of religious intolerance all the more anomalous. Christianity had successfully con¬ fronted the superior culture of Greco-Roman antiquity. In the Middle Ages it had subjugated Aristotle to its own purposes and had survived the contact with what had been in some respects the higher civilization of the Arabs. At the end of the seventeenth century it was to find itself more seriously embarrassed by a scientific movement which sprang in a sense from its own bosom—a movement absolutely and uniquely European, rising from the traditions of the Western world itself. The scientific movement of the seven¬ teenth century carried human thought beyond anything that ancient Greece or ancient China had ever given the promise of producing, and the student of its ante¬

seized with misgiving, because he realized that instead of leading to the greater glory of God, it might tempt men to think that a deity was henceforth a superfluity. At this point he seemed to show an uncommon anxiety to find some loopholes in the system that he had pro¬ duced. The inferences from the system itself, and the victory of the mechanistic (or, as it called itself, the “geometrical”) kind of thinking that now became fashionable—the overall result of the seventeenthcentury revolution in science—opened the door to a “deism” which allowed the existence of a Creator who, after setting everything in motion, had become the complete absentee. The Church confronted the crisis at an unfortunate moment, a moment when religion in general had come to an exceptionally low state. Fanaticism had continued until the middle of the seventeenth century and it had added to the bitterness of war in Europe, as well as the constitutional struggles in England. The Puritan regime in England had been followed by the relaxation and license that is associated with the reign of Charles II. The religiosity of the latest period of Louis XIV’s reign was followed by a similar reaction—the levity and the laxity of the subsequent Regency. The conces¬ sion of religious toleration in England at the end of the seventeenth century coincided paradoxically with the decline of the body who were to have been its

cedents would find himself carried back to some of the

main beneficiaries—the Presbyterians—some of whom

subtle thinking of the scholastic writers. The movement was promoted to a considerable

John Wesley put an end to what had been a serious

degree by men who often believed that, by concrete enquiries into history and nature, they were glorifying the Creator and illuminating the work of Providence. It was one of its essential principles that men should turn away from the discussion of final causes and the ultimate essence of things, topics which had hitherto proved so tantalizing and distracting. They should observe how one particular thing in the natural world acted upon another, and by reflection and inference upon the observed results, they should climb to a range of important intermediate generalizations. So they freed their minds for a more specialized form of re¬ search, freed science itself from its compromising en¬ tanglement with “natural philosophy.” Some of them were looking for laws before they properly knew how to discover them, and were seeking to embrace every¬ thing in the realm of law—leaving no gaps in the clockwork universe—before they had found the clue that might lead them to such a system. And they said that they were vindicating the rationality of God the “Creator,” a God whom they could not believe to be guilty of arbitrariness or caprice in his arrangement of the cosmos. It was Sir Isaac Newton who, when he had estab¬ lished the automatic working of the solar system, was

began to move into Unitarianism. Only the advent of religious setback in the country at large. The conflict between the Protestant and the Catholic versions of religious authority would seem in any case to have had the effect of undermining confidence in any kind of claim to authoritativeness. The results of the scientific revolution were some¬ times popularized and transmuted into a new world view by men like Fontenelle in France, who had caught skepticism not really from science itself but from the writings of classical Greece. The wider knowledge of the globe, the writings of travellers, the study of primi¬ tive peoples and distant civilizations, and developing notions of comparative religion, made it possible to reckon with cultures that had never been touched by Greece and Rome, and to envisage the traditions of Christendom as not in any sense universal, not neces¬ sarily even central, but something of a regional phe¬ nomenon. On this view, all religions were merely the effect of an original and basic “natural religion” which in every place had come to be overgrown with peculiar local accretions, local mythologies, local legends. When Sir Isaac Newton clinched the success of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, there was a sense in which, in any case, the authority of both the Middle Ages and the ancient world was at last over-

401

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY ecclesiastical seminaries, prescribed the spiritual func¬

government was committed therefore to a policy of

tions of the priesthood, attacked images, etc.,

in

persecution, and the revolution was jeopardized by a

churches, and insisted on an austere type of piety quite

first-class religious conflict which helped to provoke

different from the baroque piety that he regarded as

a civil war. Early in 1798 the French invaders of Italy

idolatrous.

established the revolution for a short time in Rome

In Austria, as elsewhere, what was called Jansenism

itself, and in 1799 Pope Pius VI died an exile and

implied Conciliar and Gallican ideas but also a stress

prisoner of France. Napoleon Bonaparte, as First Consul, was deter¬

on devotion and on works of charity and a genuine desire to raise spiritual standards. At the same time, the ecclesiastical work of Joseph II was a remarkable anticipation by a “benevolent despot” of the attempt by the French Revolution at an overall reconstruction of the Church. An ecclesiastical congress in Germany

tion, which had reorganized the Church without con¬ sulting the pope and had brought on itself the trouble of a religious war. He determined to secure the credit for restoring the Church, and this in fact enabled him

in 1786 produced the Punctuation of Ems, a program

to put greater pressure on the papacy, which was

for which Joseph II lost his enthusiasm when he saw

anxious for such a settlement. By his Concordat of 1801

that the powers it took from the pope might serve to

he saved essential features of the revolutionary settle¬

aggrandize the metropolitans and bishops of Germany

ment, and acquired for these the assent of the pope,

rather than the secular authority. A synod of 234 clergy

while recognizing Catholicism as “the religion of the

held at Pistoia in the same year under the patronage

great majority of French citizens.” But when he fol¬

of Joseph’s brother, Leopold, the Grand Duke of

lowed this by unilateral action in his 77 Organic Arti¬

Tuscany, combined the tenets of the Jansenists with

cles, which asserted Gallican principles and the pre¬

those of Gallicanism and called for the abolition of all

dominance of the state over the church, the pope and

religious orders founded since the time of Saint Bene¬

the French Catholics could do little unless they pro¬

dict. But the great mass of the population refused to

posed to destroy the effect of the whole settlement.

follow Joseph II in his religious policy; and the exten¬

From 1806 the spread of the Napoleonic Empire

sion of this to his Belgian territory led in 1786 to a

brought a conflict with the pope as a temporal prince;

revolt of students at the nationalized seminary of

because of his spiritual primacy, he felt unable to put

Louvain—a revolt which was to prove the prelude to

his territories at the service of the Lrench in their war

a

Joseph’s brother,

against England. The conflict became a dramatic one,

Leopold, was more careful of public opinion, his reli¬

and in 1809 Napoleon decreed the end of the temporal

gious reforms led to a popular upheaval in Llorence

power and declared Rome a Lree Imperial City. Very

in 1787. All this was only the prelude to the cataclysm of

soon, Pope Pius VII was himself a prisoner.

the Lrench Revolution. In view of the existing distress

history which concentrates on governmental affairs and

and the bankruptcy of the state, it was not easy for

on the writings of the intellectuals in eighteenth-

the Lrench after 1789 to treat as property dedicated

century Europe may do less than justice to the ordinary

to God a great deal of the wealth which had for so

life of town and cormtry, and the mood of a great part

long supported luxury and immorality amongst the

of society. It is easy to forget the famous hymns which

clergy. Church property was nationalized on 2 No¬

the eighteenth century produced, the choral music of

vember 1789, and then the state, which proposed to

Bach, Handel’s Messiah, the tremendous momentum

take the responsibility for clerical stipends, thought to

of the Methodist movement, and the way in which

rationalize the whole system in the interests of the

religion itself could even come to terms with the new

wider

rebellion.

And

though

6. The Nineteenth Century. A course of curriculum

taxpayer and the public in general, dissolving religious

outlook. At the same time, human needs, which the

orders that had no utilitarian function, rearranging

hard, dry thinking of the Age of Reason failed to satisfy,

bishoprics, fixing stipends, and regulating discipline.

are to be recognized in the quasi-religious aspirations

The Church, under this Civil Constitution of July 1790

of Rousseau and in certain aspects of that romantic

was to retain its communion with Rome, but the pope, who had not been consulted about the reforms, was no longer to invest bishops with their spiritual author¬ ity, and bishops and clergy were to be selected by popular election. The clergy were required to accept this Civil Constitution on oath, but, though the new

404

mined to make capital out of the errors of the revolu¬

system greatly improved the financial position of the lower clergy, half of the cures refused to conform. The

movement which was sometimes associated with the nostalgias of lapsed Christians—even (particularly in Germany) lapsed sons of the manse. Almost at the very time when Napoleon was realizing the political capital that he might gain within France itself from a Con¬ cordat with the papacy, Chateaubriand, in his Genie du Christianisme (1802) registered a new mood which was capable of reviving the power of religion, and his

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY influence seemed to be increased by the fact that he

were thrown back on the idea of the Church as a

gave more place to sentiment than profound reasoning.

separate body, functioning for special purposes and

At the same time the cataclysms of twenty-five years

existing by virtue of a divine commission. Something

were calculated to revive both a religious awe and a distrust of human systems; and, after 1815, it became easy (while, for many, it was a matter of high policy) to preach that the writings of the philosoph.es had been

of the resulting aspiration for autonomy is visible not only in the Oxford movement but even in Germany, where princes in the period after 1815 still had great power over their churches, and were able to bring

responsible for the recent tragedies, and that the

about the unification of the Lutheran and Reformed

human race cannot afford to turn its back on history.

systems in many regions.

The new situation helped to increase the significance of history and—particularly when combined with the romantic mood—it tended to alter the character of

At the same time the natural sciences, and the out¬ look that was associated with them, began to present more serious difficulties. In the 1830’s and 1840 s geol¬

the historical endeavor, creating a disposition to turn

ogy challenged the book of Genesis, though progressive

it into what was much more a study of the past for

Christians were able to meet the difficulty by reverting

its own sake. One result of this was the awakening of interest in the Middle Ages and a discovery of the achievement of the medieval Church; and this was initially the work of Protestant scholars, though it became a source of considerable stimulus to Roman Catholicism. After the example had been set in England by Edmund Burke before the end of the eighteenth century, the cause of tradition in both the political and the religious field came to find its expositors amongst the European intelligentsia, and conservatism itself acquired a more imposing intellectual support. These factors help to explain why, in the nineteenth century, religion again became a power in the world, and why also the most remarkable features of the story were the revival of Roman Catholicism and the emergence in the 1830’s of the Oxford movement. Yet, to a considerable degree, the movement against Christianity increased in power, and the hostility to ecclesiastical systems now turned more definitely into an attack on religion as such. The formidable character of the secularizing forces helped in fact to provoke a counter-movement (to alarm the Tractarians in Oxford, for example) and the conflict between belief and unbelief became a more profound and serious affair. It is interesting to see that in France, where the hostility to Rome and to Christianity itself was still so strong, the growth and the assertiveness of Catholic piety became particularly evident; and the very power which the state acquired over the church in the Napoleonic settlement drove Catholics to recognize

to more flexible ideas about biblical inspiration—ideas which had been held before, and the resort to which was coming to be necessary for other reasons. But the doctrine of evolution, particularly as developed by Charles Darwin in the Origin of Species (1859), seemed to involve a more radical change in one s views about the nature of man, the character of the universe, and the potentialities of science. All the while the develop¬ ment of biblical study and the application of the his¬ torical method in that field—including a closer analysis of the Gospels—was producing equally disturbing re¬ sults, especially in the work of the Tubingen school, for example the Life of Jesus (1835) by David Friedrich Strauss. Some people met all this with blind con¬ servatism, some left the Church, and from memoirs, biographies, and fiction we can see how often this was accompanied by great heart-searching, carried out as though it were itself a religious act. Some kept the old belief that in the long run religion would become compatible with both science and history, and were driven to think more deeply about the essential nature of their faith. Apart from the ferment of the liberal and democratic ideas which had come down from revolutionary France and had been disseminated over Europe through the victories of Napoleon, the rise of industrialism, the emergence of vast urban concentrations, and the plight of the new working classes resulted in an environment more hostile to religion, more refractory to ecclesias¬ tical teaching. For many centuries it had been almost

the papacy as their true support, the old Gallican

too easy to be a believing Christian. Now, it was not

prejudices giving way to Ultramontanism. The century saw the continued enlargement of the

think more deeply about the nature of it and revise

power and the scope of the state—a state now by necessity increasingly engrossed by secular preoccupa¬ tions—and this became irksome at times even to Protestants, irksome even to sections of that highly national body, the Church of England. Precisely be¬ cause the state was so obviously no longer a “religious society,” virtually coextensive with a church, Christians

so easy, and those who adhered to the faith had to their notion of the duties that it carried with it. Roman Catholicism may have gained considerable strength from the fact that it set itself so consistently against the very things that were to become the pre¬ vailing tendencies of the nineteenth century. It seems to have acquired internal depth and spiritual intensity from the fact that it stood so firmly by its ancient

405

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY teaching and was so assured in its dogmatic claims. Its revival had begun before 1815, and it produced a

amongst the Protestants). Though there were features

restoration of religious orders (including the general

in this Modernism which disturbed even enlightened

reestablishment of the Jesuits in 1814); also an intellec¬

Protestants, the radical nature of its suppression lent

tual revival in Germany which made Munich an ex¬

color to the view of Baron von Hugel that the Curia

hilarating city before the middle of the century. The

was carrying reaction too far.

creation of an unprecedented number of congregations, societies, etc., meant that the activity and support of the laity as well as the clergy were recruited, as never before, for the care of the distressed, the carrying of the gospel to neglected areas in the towns, and the missionary work abroad. Attempts to reconcile the religion and the authority of the papacy with a program of modern democratic ideas were firmly suppressed, however. Fora little while

In England and Germany the Pietistic and Evangel¬ ical movements went on increasing their power. In England the nonconformists had been growing rapidly in numbers, embracing a quarter of the population at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Their expan¬ sion became still more remarkable from this time, especially in the newly industrialized regions, and it was now that “the nonconformist conscience” became a formidable affair. From 1833, however, when as a

after his elevation in 1846 Pope Pius IX tried to coop¬

result of the Reform Bill it was less easy than before

erate with liberalism in the Papal States; but the drift

to regard Parliament as the lay assembly of the

to extremism, and the crucial demand that he—a

Anglican Church, and when the Whigs seemed partic¬

prince of peace—should turn “nationalist” and help

ularly menacing, the Oxford movement reasserted the

to drive the Austrians from Italy, showed the impos¬

idea of the Church as a separate, divinely constituted

sibility of this. In 1864 his Syllabus of Errors made

body to be governed by bishops who held authority

clear how Rome had been setting itself against the

as the successors of the Apostles. Still more, they

encroachments of the state in ecclesiastical matters,

wished to reassert the Catholic side of the Anglican

including education; it was also against the views of

tradition, to revive the spiritual life that had been

liberals on toleration, and against any qualification of

manifested in the ancient saints and to restore the

the claim that Roman Catholicism was the single true

beliefs and ceremonies of earlier times. The very epis¬

religion. There was specific condemnation of any sug¬

copal authority which they invoked declined on the

gestion that the Supreme Pontiff either could or ought

whole to tolerate them, and in this predicament some

to reconcile himself with “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.” If the year 1870 saw the great

406

flexible views of biblical inspiration now familiar

of

their

distinguished

representatives—men

like

Newman and Manning—moved over to Rome. Like

humiliation of the pope—his loss of Rome and his

the nonconformists, the Oxford Tractarians had an

disappearance as a temporal power—it saw also the

influence that extended far beyond their own circle,

Infallibility Decree of the First Vatican Council and

and in their case it was an influence out of all propor¬

the explicit recognition of his supremacy in the spirit¬

tion to their numbers. Germany,

on the other hand, not only saw a

ual realm. All this would have been impossible if he had not

quickening of religious life, but also acquired a re¬

now found in faithful Catholics throughout Europe a

markable intellectual leadership in the Protestant

support more reliable than his predecessors had re¬

world. The predominance that she had achieved in

ceived from actual governments, and if there had not

philosophy and historical science gave her resources

been a widespread resolve to rescue the traditions and

for adventurous attempts to vindicate the Christian

doctrines of the Church from current, fashionable,

outlook, and made Lutheranism more creative than it

intellectual movements. On the theoretical side, the

had been since the days of its founder. The German

conservative attitude itself became imposing through

thinkers tried to meet the challenge of the age by

the reassertion and reexposition of the

scholastic

examining the bases of religion itself—some grounding

teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Before the end of

theology on inner experience, some insisting on a

the century Pope Leo XIII encouraged French Catho¬

creatureliness and a feeling of dependence in man,

lics to cooperate with the French Republic, but this

some stressing the direct apprehension of the divine,

did not prevent the complete separation of Church and

some holding that all thinking should start with Christ

State and further attacks on the religious orders in that

and the Gospel. Certain writers raised the question

country. In the ten or fifteen years from 1893 an effec¬

whether the surrender of Christianity to Greek thought

tive resistance was made to the Catholic “Modernist’

in the early centuries of the Church had not been a

movement,

of

misfortune. Others carried further than ever before the

achievements in biblical scholarship and historical

study and criticism of the Bible, the examination of

criticism (and in particular to introduce the more

the early Church, and the history of Christian dogma.

which

attempted

to

take

account

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY Protestantism became more splintered than ever in the nineteenth

century;

but

even

more

than

Roman

Catholicism it expressed itself in movements to assist the distressed classes, to reform society, to carry reli¬

offer the kind of message that could reach the people. Within Protestantism it was now the Baptists and Methodists who multiplied, swamping the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, who had

gion into neglected areas, and to enlarge the missionary

predominated at the beginning of the century.

work abroad. The nineteenth century was important in the history

became the largest single religious body in the country,

of religion, partly because it saw advances in thought

Roman Catholicism from being one of the smallest partly as a result of the great number of immigrants.

on both the Catholic and the Protestant sides, and

Protestantism now acquired a remarkable

popular

partly because the conflict with secularism and unbelief

shape which corresponded to the “popular

had become so formidable. In spite of the great seces¬

Catholicism, though it bore a vastly different character,

sions that took place, both Catholicism and Protes¬

which contributed similarly to the cause of intellectual

tantism appeared stronger at the end of the century

conservatism in the churches. The whole movement

than at the beginning, besides involving far greater

led to a great splintering of the older denominations

numbers of their adherents in a clearer act of affirma¬

and the founding of new ones, particularly Mormonism

tive decision, and stimulating greater activity in the

in 1830, the Seventh Day Adventists, organized in

laity. In both great sections of the Church, the clergy, in their combination of earnestness, intelligence, and training, may have reached a general standard rarely known in the history of the Church. It would not be easy for people today to realize the degree to which, down to 1914, the local church was for most people the hub of their social life—the place that often pro¬ vided the only societies, sporting clubs, festivals and

side of

1863, and the Church of Christ Scientist in 1879. In the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth there was a vast increase in the percentage of the population that was actively connected with some church, and, by the'close of that period religion— with its Social Gospel and its colossal philanthropies— had done much to shape the American outlook, helping first to generate the American ideal and then, perhaps,

parties, informative lectures, and musical evenings—

to fasten Christianity itself within the limits of that

the place where men met their sweethearts and

ideal. 7. The Twentieth Century. In the twentieth century

gathered their circle of friends. A tremendous foreign missionary endeavor from the 1790’s, particularly in Protestantism (and facilitated to some degree by the opportunities open to colonialist nations), had far ex¬

two World Wars, centered at the heart of European Christendom, shook the earth and made history more dynamic. Christianity was faced by organized systems

ceeded all precedents and had carried Christianity into

such as Communism and Nazism, which constituted

every quarter of the globe. In the United States the number of Christians and

of the traditional fabric of society, than anything hith¬

the percentage of the population that were church members, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were remarkably low and ecclesiastical systems did not possess the privileges that they so often enjoyed in the European states. The material preoccupations of a pioneer society, and the industrial and urban develop¬ ments as the century proceeded, would have seemed calculated to check the development of religion; yet a tremendous internal missionary work made the ad¬ vance of the churches in the United States more re¬ markable than in the Old World. This missionary work accompanied the westward movement, and the pecu¬ liar needs of the frontier and of pioneer conditions helped

to

meetings,

produce circuit

“revivalist”

riders,

and

methods, travelling

campevange¬

lists—techniques of mass-conversion often supported by the fervor for “Gospel hymns

and negro

spirit¬

uals.” The effect of all this was to alter the balance of forces and in general to change the physiognomy of American religion. Victory came to the denomi¬ nations that had missionary ardor and the ability to

a more powerful threat to it, and cleared away more erto known. The acceleration of scientific progress, the resulting change in one’s notions of the physical uni¬ verse, the great power that man had acquired over nature, the enormous advances of educational systems that were essentially secular, and the influence of the popular press, radio, and television in the dissemination of a new world view—all these produced a greater intellectual challenge than religion of any sort had ever had to meet before. Now, also, the ethical ideas of society, though so many of them still carried the marks of Christian influence, came to conflict in an unprece¬ dented way with some of the longest and most consist¬ ent traditions of the churches. The fact that the churches had so often been engaged in a rearguard action—sometimes against liberty, sometimes against science itself—became a disadvantage, since it left (as an additional obstruction to the hearing of the Gospel) a resentment in intelligent people, even a fear lest the Church should ever recover its power. In other conti¬ nents, the great missionary endeavor (in which man may sometimes have tried unthinkingly to tie Christi-

407

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY anity to the values and the manners of Western civili¬

feel one another as allies against a world of hostile

justly,

forces. To a considerable degree it was coming to be

with

having

sought

to

provide

cover

for

the case that, within Protestantism, the differences

imperialist purposes. The resulting issues are as momentous as in the days

between the liberals and the conservatives in the vari¬

when the faith of the first disciples had to confront

ous churches were deeper than the differences between

the culture of the Greco-Roman world, and it is not

one denomination and another. Even in the decades

easy to say what will be the long-term effects of the

after 1914, it became an important consideration that

new situation on the intellectualization of the faith and

the work of foreign missions was being hampered by

the attempt to run it into a new world view. The actual

the divisions within Christianity. Unions between de¬

experiences of the human race, as it develops the

nominations

implications of its current systems, may affect the story;

though not unknown before, now became much more

and it is not clear that Christianity may not have to

frequent and significant. The Ecumenical movement

confront a world somewhat similar to the one which

was a natural development of this and a typical feature

and

cooperation

for

special

objects,

the early Church had to face in the Roman Empire—a

of it was the preparation in 1938, and the official

hostile world, but suffering strange nostalgias and

constitution at Amsterdam in 1940, of the plan for a

harassed by competing forms of faith.

World Council of Churches. The work of Pope John

In some respects the churches may have drawn in

XXIII and the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65

upon themselves as though determined not to lose

stand as one of the most remarkable features of the

anything essential in their ancient heritage. A liberal¬

twentieth-century story—a significant change in the

ism which, before and after the First World War, may

relations between Catholic and Protestant, who (in

have been too directly rationalistic, soon came to ap¬

spite of rivalries and hostilities) had never, throughout

pear “dated,” and even Protestants—even noncon¬

the centuries, quite ceased to exert a beneficent influ¬

formists—became somewhat more interested in their

ence on one another.

tradition. The situation of the world may help to ex¬

Lord Acton once remarked that he saw Providence

plain why Karl Earth in 1918 began to present the

in general history (saw it in the march of “progress,”

“theology of Crisis,” directly attacking liberalism and

as he explicitly stated on a number of occasions); but

reviving some of the profounder aspects of early

he added that he did not detect it in the history of

Lutheranism. But historiography raised radical prob¬

the Church. His attitude is understandable, for ecclesi¬

lems, especially when from

1919 the teachers of

astical systems have not been exempted from scandals

Formgeschichte examined the shape which the early

and crimes; and (at least in those tangible things which

Church had given to the packets of oral tradition that

the secular historian has chiefly in mind) they would

lay behind the Gospels. History emerged again as a

seem to have been subject to the laws which govern

crucial issue for an “historical religion” in the much

other religions, including that of the Old Testament.

controverted work of Rudolf Bultmann. He called for

Acton may have been misled because he tended to be

“de-mythologizing” and presented existentialist ideas

interested in the kind of history that deals with “public

which threw light on some aspects of Christianity if

affairs” and perhaps saw the historical Church too much as a politico-religious institution. All the same,

not also on history itself. The Bible retained its influence even amongst people

he must have known in his heart that its essence lay

(including Roman Catholics) who had accepted the

in the spiritual life which presumed the immediacy of

kind of criticism that could be described as central.

divine activity,

In the United States the churches retained their high

“progress”—a spiritual life which might be at least as

though it might be unrelated to

membership and remarkable vigor for further decades,

profound in the fifth or the fifteenth century as in the

the country acquiring a recognized leadership in the

twentieth. He was prepared also to see all history as

Protestant

408

former fanaticism and hostility, and should come to

zation) came to be charged understandably, but un¬

world.

But,

even

amid

technological

the development of the scope and the quality of the

progress and booming prosperity, influential teachers

human conscience, this conscience being a key to

issued their moral challenges, took their stand on the

progress itself and the effective dynamic behind even

Bible, and reasserted the pessimistic view of human

modem revolution, in his view. The enlarged scope

nature. The spectacular scandals and crimes in certain

for the individual conscience had been achieved by the

sections of society did not nullify that compassion and

influence of Christianity, making the great contrast

that American idealism which owed so much to an

with classical antiquity where, he said, man’s duty had

ultimate Christian influence.

been prescribed to him by the state.

It was natural that, in the new situation, the various

Mazzini regarded the French Revolution as the cli¬

sects and denominations should lose much of their

max and fulfilment of Christianity which, by making

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY every human being a value incommensurate with any¬

century it was true for the most part that the Patri¬

thing else in the created universe, could be regarded

archate of Constantinople covered the area effectively

as working throughout the centuries for the principle

ruled by the Eastern emperor. Elements of an earlier democracy continued in the

of “individualism,” working for it at times even when ecclesiastical systems were resisting it. On this view a Christian civilization operates (as Acton believed) to produce a regime of freedom, and the effect of its advance is to bring about a greater differentiation in personalities, a world in which each man decides the object he will work for and the God whom he will serve. Mazzini was not content with this, however, and insisted that a new stage had been reached—a stage at which the individual ought to give way to the

or¬

ganic People.” And this is perhaps the great issue; whether men shall be organized, and even herded like

ecclesiastical system, the laity having a part in the election of a priest, the lower clergy in the choice of a bishop. The laity—and perhaps, in particular, the mob in Constantinople—were a force in religious affairs, and were not regarded as incapable of holding views on theology. They were greatly under the influ¬ ence of the lower clergy and the monks, and able to resist even a Patriarch, even an emperor. Perhaps the most effective practical difference from the West came from the continuance of secular education in the Byzantine Empire: the fact that high civil servants

cattle, to carry out a single all-consuming purpose that

might be more cultured than the bishops and might

is imposed on everybody. There are elements or patterns of Christian thought

matters Constantinople was disposed to have respect

that appear in a more or less secularized form in a Voltaire, a Rousseau, a Hegel, a Mazzini, a Ranke, and a Marx; and perhaps they come to an end there. From the middle of the twentieth century, the world moves on its own momentum to new patterns of thought, new notions of the enterprise of living, new realms of

be appointed to high ecclesiastical office. On doctrinal for Rome, but in the East, the final authority in this field was an Ecumenical Council, and there was a greater desire not to allow minute differences of doc¬ trine to ruin charitable relations with other parts of the Church. Greater value was attached to mysticism, and there was less suspicion of it, than in the West,

human experience. Rehind the technological age and

the emphasis being more definitely on the otherworldly

the attempt to explore the outer universe, and behind

aspect of religion. When the Church had settled down after the Icono¬

the permissive society are elements which were part of the Christian outlook, but which, having become autonomous, have moved far forward on their own account. Perhaps the great compassionateness now visible in contemporary society will stand as the most palpable result of fifteen hundred years of Christian predominance in Europe. And now, perhaps, for the first time during those fifteen hundred years, Christi¬ anity returns to something like its original state—a world in which it cannot be objected that, for the great majority of people, things are unfairly disposed in favor of conventional or habitual or hereditary belief. V. THE ORTHODOX CHURCH In the Byzantine or Orthodox Church of the East the situation was seriously affected by the fact that the culture, the imperial system and religion itself enjoyed a continuity which the barbarian invaders had badly broken in the West. The Eastern Emperor re¬ mained still in a sense the Pontifex Maximus; he could virtually choose the Patriarch of Constantinople, he legislated on ecclesiastical matters, initiated such leg¬ islation, and could behave tyrannically on occasion. It gradually became explicit that the ordinary adminis¬ tration of the Church was regarded as shared by the five Patriarchates of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem; though a place of special honor was conceded to Rome, and, from the eighth

clastic controversy in the eighth and early ninth cen¬ turies, the missionary work amongst the Slavs was taken up, and with it went the general civilizing influ¬ ences of Byzantium, producing a distinct differentiation in culture between the two halves of the whole conti¬ nent. Soon after 860 Cyril and Methodius carried to the swollen Moravian empire the Slavonic literary language which they had constructed apparently on the basis of a dialect in Macedonia. Both here and in the conversion of Bulgaria the competition between the Eastern and the Latin church is visible, and it brought out a tendency to mutual criticism, but did not produce anything like the serious schism once associated with the name of Photius. Over a century later the conversion of a Russian prince and his marriage

to a Byzantine princess

heralded the Christianizing of Russia and brought that country into the orbit of Byzantium, though Latin missionaries had appeared there at an earlier date. Earlier than all this the rule of Byzantium in southern Italy, and the policy of taking over for the Orthodox church that region, together with Illyrium (which had been part of the Roman Patriarchate), had begun to lead to serious trouble. Furthermore the conquests by the Normans in southern Italy in the eleventh century, together with their threat to move into the Balkans, complicated still further the relations between Latin

409

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY and Greek. The troubles of 1054, however, did not produce the real schism or the enduring estrangement that the Western church later alleged to have taken place. Political events and purely ecclesiastical rivalries and disputes would lead to polemical quarrels between Rome and Constantinople over points where each side had often been content to allow differences. The em¬ perors in Constantinople, however, often needed help from tlie West, and tended to be an influence on the side of reconciliation. The chief difficulties had reference to some things which had received general recognition in the Western church only comparatively recently, so that in a sense they were the result of the separate life that had been developing. This was true of the most serious theolog¬ ical difference, the famous filioque clause, the Western view that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as from the Father. Fundamental differences in mentality and language between the Greeks and the Latins obstructed any agreement on this; but in any case the East had a still stronger hostility to the West¬ ern policy of adding to the creed without reference to a general council. The reform of the Western church and the tremen¬ dous advance of papal claims in the latter half of the eleventh century (at a time when conditions in Rome for a long period had led Easterners to have a low opinion of the papacy) provided a substantial cause of further alienation, especially as the claims involved the right to appeal to Rome from ecclesiastical courts in Constantinople. For the rest the Orthodox Church tended to feel strongly about the comparatively recent development which had brought the West to the use of unleavened bread in the sacrament. And, once hos¬ tility was awakened, there were numerous differences in custom that could be turned into debating points against the West—the fasting on Saturdays, the clerical shaving of beards, the question of the celibacy of the

410

clergy', etc. Though the first Crusade was an answer to a call for help from Constantinople, it increased the es¬ trangement. The establishment of a Latin bishop of Antioch, while the Orthodox one went into exile, pro¬ duced a real schism in one of those eastern Patri¬ archates that had hitherto tried to avoid participation in the quarrels between Rome and Constantinople. The Fourth Crusade, involving the sack of Constantinople and the establishment for a time of a Latin empire there, made the estrangement enduring and profound, and marks the fundamental breach. From the thirteenth century Byzantine culture was brilliant, as the empire declined. The Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus in 1273-74, hoping to stave off another attack from the West, overbore both the Patri¬

arch and the Synod and, in an agreement for ecclesias¬ tical union, admitted the full primacy of the Roman See. But the Church refused to hold to this. The teach¬ ing of Gregory Palamas, which gave Orthodox mysticism a dogmatic basis and was adopted as official doctrine, provided a new obstruction to union; but the need for help against the Turks made the issue a live one in the fourteenth century and the Conciliar Move¬ ment in the West produced a situation somewhat more favorable to the policy. Representatives of Byzantium appeared at the Council of Constance. In 1439 a union was achieved at the Council of Florence. The Russians rejected this; however, the Byzantines were unrecon¬ ciled; Constantinople fell in 1453; and in 1484 the agreement was formally repudiated there. Before 1453 a great part of the flock of the Patriarch of Constantinople (in Asia Minor, for example) had been living under Turkish rule and the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem had long been under the infidel. After the conquest, the Christians were allowed to exist as a separate nation, governing their own affairs according to their own laws and customs, the Patriarch being responsible for the ad¬ ministration, the securing of the payment of taxes, and the maintenance of a proper attitude towards the gov¬ ernment. The Turkish government itself was not hostile but the local authorities in Asia seem to have been more intolerant than those in Europe. Also, in their reduced position, the Christians were unable to keep up their educational system, and the church suffered disastrously for this, though before long some use was being made of facilities in Venice. The Russians were more passionately Orthodox than the Greeks, and more hostile to other forms of Christi¬ anity, so that diey regarded the fall of Constantinople as the punishment for the union attempted with Rome. The Christians under Turkish rule might have a Patri¬ arch, but they no longer had the leadership of a Chris¬ tian emperor, and as the rulers of Russia increased in power—becoming Tsars from 1480—they saw them¬ selves as heirs of the Byzantine emperors, Ivan III having married the niece of the last of these in 1472. They appointed their own Metropolitan of Kiev (after a nominal election) and though Ivan III had declared that the Patriarch of Constantinople had no authority in Russia, the Metropolitan acknowledged the superior position of the latter. The Russian clergy came to have a certain contempt for the Greeks, and the Tsar claimed to be the royal leader of Orthodoxy. In 158/ Constantinople recognized Moscow as a Patriarchate. After the Time of Troubles, the first Romanov Tsar, Michael, made his able father Patriarch, and from 1610 to 1633 these two ruled together, to the great advan¬ tage of the Church. Orthodoxy had suffered a great loss

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY during the troubles, however, because the whole of the Ukraine, including Kiev, had passed to Poland, which was attempting to impose upon it a Uniate system, agreed upon in that country in 1595. This involved the recognition of papal supremacy but the retention of the Orthodox liturgy, marriage of the clergy, etc. Between 1652 and 1658 Nikon, the Patriarch of Moscow, made a thorough reform of the Russian church, and even pressed ecclesiastical authority in the spirit of the medieval papacy. Peter the Great saw the danger, however, and, from 1700, he and his successors refused to nominate a Patriarch. Relations with the West are illustrated by the fact that Cyril Lucaris, who was Patriarch of Constanti¬ nople from 1620 to 1635 and in 1637-38, put out a distinctly Calvinistic “confession of faith. Before 1640, Peter Moghila, Metropolitan of Kiev drew up (in Latin) a similar “confession” which showed a curious sympa¬ thy with Catholic doctrine. From 1672, Dositheus, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, was working to secure the production of a “confession” which should at least avoid these aberrations. In the eighteenth century progress was limited by the fact that in Constantinople the lay intelligentsia acquired the leading position amongst the Greeks, while Catharine the Great in Russia tended to elevate free-thinkers to high ecclesi¬ astical appointments. In 1774 Russia created trouble for the future by securing treaty-recognition of her right to intervene on behalf of Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The prosperity of the Phanariots, the great influence they acquired over the church in Constantinople and their dream of a revival of Greek imperialism brought embarrassment to the Patriarchs; and the opening of the Greek revolt—which the Patriarch could not bring himself actually to denounce—led to the execution of the head of the church, two metropolitans, twelve bishops, and all the leading Phanariots in 1821. The Patriarchate never recovered from this blow and began to lose many of the features that had made it generally important in mundane affairs. With the establishment of a Greek kingdom not only the Orthodox Greeks of the country itself but also those in Turkey tended to look towards the Metropolitan of Athens. The twenti¬ eth century has seen an important squeezing out of Orthodoxy in Turkey and Egypt, and this has been helped in both cases by the departure of so many of the Greeks from these two countries. The See of Anti¬ och has become much more important because it con¬ tains along with the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the main Arabian section of Orthodoxy, and has itself been in Syrian or Lebanese hands throughout the present century. The Orthodox church in Europe became closely associated with nationalism in the Balkans, and

this worked to the detriment of the Patriarch of Con¬ stantinople, who, however, was perhaps too Greek to be truly ecumenical. It was even Arab-speaking mem¬ bers of the Orthodox church who played a leading part in the rise of Arabian national movements. The Church has suffered of late from the secularizing, tendencies of the modern world, and in the 1960’s it has in the Middle East only a fifth of the numbers it had fifty years ago. Though the Patriarch of Constanti¬ nople has only a small immediate flock, the very mis¬ fortunes of the office seem to have freed it for a more ecumenical role, especially as the Orthodox in Western Europe, in America, and in Australia are under its jurisdiction. And at least, in spite of all that has hap¬ pened in recent centuries, the Church has maintained its spiritual power and its ability to play a part in the ecumenical movements of the present day.

BIBLIOGRAPHY General. F. L. Cross, The Oxford Dictionary of the Chris¬ tian Church (Oxford and New York, 1957). Adolf von Harnack, Outlines of the History of Dogma, 3rd ed. trans. Neil Buchanan, 7 vols. (London, 1894-99). K. S. Latourette,

A History of the Expansion of Christianity, 7 vols. (New York, 1938-45). The Early Church. N. H. Baynes, “Constantine the Great and the Christian Church,” Proceedings of the British Acad¬

emy, 15 (1929), 341-443. Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, Vol. I of The Pelican History of the Church (Harmondsworth, 1967; London, 1968). Jean Danielou and Henri Marrou, The First Six Hundred Years, Vol. I of The

Christian Centuries: A New History of the Catholic Church, ed. L. J. Rogier, et al. (London and New York, 1964). E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cam¬ bridge and New York, 1965). Louis Duchesne, Early History

of the Christian Church. . . , trans. Claude Jenkins (from the 4th French edition), 3 vols. (London, 1920-24). W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church . . . (Oxford and New York, 1952). A. H. M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe (London, 1948; New York, 1949). J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 2nd ed. (London and New York, 1960); idem, Early Christian Doctrines, 4th ed. (London, 1968). D. Knowles, Christian Monasticism (New York and Toronto, 1969). M. J. Lagrange, Histoire ancienne du Canon du Nouveau Testament (Paris, 1933). Hans Lietzmann, A History of the Early Church, trans. B. L. Woolf, 4 vols. in 2 (New York, 1961). A. Momigliano, ed.. The Conflict be¬ tween Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford and New York, 1963). James M. Robinson, A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (London and Naperville, Ill., 1959). Albert Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (1906), trans. Mont¬ gomery as The Quest of the Historical Jesus (London, 1910). The Middle Ages. A. Fliche, La Rtforme gregorienne et la Reconquete chretienne, 1057-1125, Vol. 8 of Histoire de

411

CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION

412

Vfglise, ed. A. Fliche, et al. (Paris, 1934). Andre Forest, F. van Steenbergher, M. de Gaudillac, Le Mouvement doctrinal du Xle an XlVe siecle, Vol. 13 of Histoire de VEglise, op. cit. (Paris, 1934). E. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London and New York, 1955). E. F. Jacob, Essays in the Conciliar Epoch (Manchester, 1943). D. Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (London and New York, 1962). V. Martin, Les Origines du Gallicanisme, 2 vols. (Paris, 1939). G. Mollat, The Popes at Avignon, 1305-78, trans. from the 9th ed. (London and Camden, N.J., 1963). J. R. H. Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order . . . to the year 1517 (Oxford and New York, 1968). H. St. L. B. Moss, The Birth of the Middle Ages, 395-814 a.d. (Oxford, 1935). Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (Cambridge and New York, 1951-54). K. M. Setton, ed., A History of the Crusades, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1955-62). R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London and New Haven, 1953; London, 1967). B. Tierney, Foundations of Conciliar Theory (Cambridge and New York, 1955). W. Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (London, 1962; New York, 1963); idem. The Origins of the Great Schism (London, 1948). Reformation and Counter-Reformation. R. H. Bainton, “Here I Stand.” A Life of Martin Luther (London and New York, 1951). H. Boehmer, Road to Reformation (Phila¬ delphia, 1946). E. Doumergue, Jean Calvin, 7 vols. (Lausanne, 1889-1927). H. O. Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Cambridge and New York, 1968). H. Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent (London and New York, 1957), Vol. I. M. Philippson, La Contrerevolution religieuse au XVIe siecle (Brussels, 1884). E. G. Rupp, Luther’s Progress to the Diet of Worms, 1521 (London, 1951); idem, Patterns of Reformation (London, 1969). R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1926). M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1930). Modem Times. R. Aubert, Pie IX, Vol. 21 of Histoire de VEglise, op. cit. (Paris, 1952). R. W. Church, The Oxford Movement (London, 1891). R. E. Davies, et al., eds., A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain (London, 1965), Vol. I. A. L. Drummond, German Protestantism since Luther (London and Naperville, Ill., 1951). E. E. Y. Hales, Revolution and Papacy, 1769-1846 (London and New York, 1960). K. S. Latourette, Christianity in a Revolutionary Age, 5 vols. (New York, 1958-62; London, 1959-63). E. Preclin and E. Jarry, Les luttes politiques et doctrinales aux XVlie etXVIIIe siecles, Vol. 19 of Histoire de VEglise, op. cit. (Paris, 1956). H. Welschinger, Le Pape et VEmpereur, 1804-15 (Paris, 1905). Byzantine Church. F. Dvomik, Byzance et la primaute romaine (Paris, 1964), trans. as Byzantium and the Roman Primacy (New York, 1966). G. Every, The Byzantine Patri¬ archate (London and New York, 1962). J. M. Hussey, Church and Learning in the Byzantine Empire (Oxford, 1937). Steven Runciman, The Eastern Schism . . . the Papacy and the Eastern Churches during the Xlth and Xllth Centuries (Oxford and New York, 1955); idem, The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople

from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (Cambridge, 1963; New York, 1968). HERBERT BUTTERFIELD [See also Church as Institution; Gnosticism; God; Heresy; Millenarianism; Myth in Biblical Times; Religious Tolera¬ tion; Sin and Salvation.]

CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION The word “Church” (in German, Kirche; Dutch, kerke)

probably derives from the Greek KvpiaKov, meaning “belonging to the Lord” or “the Lord’s house.” It is likely that the term was first acquired by Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire before their conversion to Christianity; for otherwise it would seem that they would, on their conversion, have adopted from their Christian teachers some form of the word ekkXtio'ux (Latin, ecclesia), which was in current use for the “Church.” It has been suggested that the heathen Germanic peoples got their term from the Christian buildings (“belonging to the Lord”) which, as invaders, they pillaged and destroyed. The word EKKXyoia, which was first used by the primitive Greek-speaking Christians, meant in secular speech an assembly, primarily of citizens in a selfgoverning city (the Acts of the Apostles, 19:39, in its original Greek text preserves an instance of this mean¬ ing in so describing the assembly of the citizens of Ephesus). But for the early Christians skkXtjoco: already had a sacred significance, since it was used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, dating from the second century b.c., which the early Christians used) for the assembly or congre¬ gation of the Israelites. The Hebrew word kahal, which the Septuagint rendered as EKKkqoia, meant, however, more than a physical gathering or assemblage: it signi¬ fied the nation of Israel as the Elect People of its god Yahweh, and it implied a covenant relationship with Yahweh that marked Israel off from all the other na¬ tions or “Gentiles.” Another word used in the Septua¬ gint which had an equivalent meaning to eKJcArjaia was ovvaycoyr] (“synagogue”), which translated the Hebrew term ledhah; but “synagogue” came increas¬ ingly to be applied to local congregations of Jews formally gathered for worship. As the Book of the Revelation to John shows (2:8, 9; 3:7, 9), already by the end of the first century, Christians were employing the word ekklesia for their own body (i.e., the Church), in counterdistinction to synagoge for Jews or Judaism.

CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION However, the emergence of the idea of the Christian

ple and zealously practiced the ritual Law. Their two

ekklesia or Church, as a distinct and different entity

distinctive customs were the baptism of converts, as

from Judaism, was a more complicated process than

an initiatory rite of purificatory significance, and a

appears in the New Testament writings. For example,

common meal, commemorative of the Last Supper of

in the Gospel of Matthew (16:18; 18:17) Jesus is repre¬

Jesus. They were distinguished from their fellow Jews

sented as both declaring his intention to “build my

only by their recognition of Jesus as the Messiah of

Church (ekklesian)” and implying that the Church was

Israel; and this faith had the effect of making them

already in existence in his lifetime. But it is the general

more zealous for the Mosaic Law (Acts 21:20). They

opinion of New Testament scholars that these two

clearly never contemplated their faith in Jesus as con¬

passages reflect the anachronistic belief of the Christian

stituting a new religion, distinct from Judaism. The

community for which the Matthean Gospel was written about

a.d.

80-85, i.e., some fifty years after the death

of Jesus. The Acts of the Apostles (1:8, 2:lff.) presents a different suggestion, namely, that the Church was miraculously founded fifty days after the Crucifixion. Recent research into Christian origins has shown,

Qumran community, known to us through the Dead Sea Scrolls, affords an interesting contemporary paral¬ lel. The peculiar beliefs of these “Covenanters” caused them to live in the inhospitable desert by the Dead Sea, and, like the Jewish Christians, they were critical of the Jewish authorities who ran the Temple; but they,

however, that the idea of the Christian Church as a

too, remained within the fold of Judaism, hoping for

distinctive body,

a reformed and purified Israel.

divinely

authorized and with

a

worldwide mission, emerged only after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in

a.d.

70. Since this date is

climacteric in the evolution of Christianity, it is im¬ portant to appreciate the transformation that was con¬ sequently wrought in the movement that had stemmed from the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth in Judaea some forty years earlier. So far as it is possible to reconstruct the beginnings of Christianity, as a historical phenomenon, from the extant evidence, it would seem that Jesus inaugurated a Messianic movement aimed at preparing Israel for the coming of the Kingdom of God. This apocalyptic program involved a reformation of the sacerdotal aris¬ tocracy that controlled the cultus of the Temple at Jerusalem, and it implied the end of the Roman su¬ zerainty over Israel. In other words, the movement as conceived by Jesus was concerned essentially with the apocalyptic destiny of Israel. Jesus was recognized as the Messiah of Israel by his followers, and it is probable that he made this claim himself. He was executed by the Roman

governor,

Pontius

Pilate, for sedition

against the Roman government in Judaea, which fact should have terminated his movement. But the subse¬ quent belief of certain of his chief disciples, that God had raised him from the dead and that he would shortly return to earth, with supernatural power, to complete his Messianic role of “restoring the kingdom to Israel (Acts of the Apostles, 1:6, Revised Standard Version), revived the movement. Jerusalem, instead of Galilee, then became the center of the movement, the aim of which was adjusted to persuade the Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah redivivus and prepare for his second coming. The movement continued to be essen¬ tially Jewish in practice and outlook. The Jerusalem Christians, organized as a community by pooling their economic resources, worshipped regularly in the Tem¬

There is some obscurity, doubtless due to apologetical reasons, in the New Testament documents about the organization of the Christian community at Jeru¬ salem. It would seem that for a short while Peter, the chief disciple of Jesus, was recognized as the leader or spokesman of the community; but he was soon replaced by James, the brother of Jesus. This fact is significant, for it, too, attests to the essentially Jewish nature of the Christian movement at this stage, James being the next male successor to the founder. On the execution of James by the high priest Ananus in 62, the succession went to Symeon, a cousin of Jesus (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, III, xi). The position of James, according to the Epistle to the Galatians 2:12 and Acts 15:13, 19, appears to have been monar¬ chical; he seems to have been assisted by elders (presbyteroi), but they evidently had a subordinate role (Acts 21:18). The movement remained strongly centralized in Jerusalem, and the community there, which com¬ prised the original apostles of Jesus presided over by James, constituted the unchallenged source of authority and discipline. Thus, emissaries from Jerusalem were sent to order the affairs of new communities at Samaria and Antioch (Acts 8:14ff., 15:22ff., Galatians 2:12-13), financial contributions were required from the daugh¬ ter communities (Galatians 2:10; Epistle to the Ro¬ mans 15:25-26; II Epistle to the Corinthians 9: Iff.), and the Apostle Paul had to report back to Jerusalem on his missionary work in various places in the GrecoRoman world, “lest somehow I should be running or had run in vain" (Galatians 2:2; Acts 21:17-19). The evidence indicates, accordingly, that, at this initial stage, the Christian movement, although con¬ scious of itself as a distinct community of believers in the Messiahship of Jesus and organized as such, saw its mission strictly in terms of the destiny of Israel.

413

CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION A reminiscence of this limitation of outlook is pre¬

pel” can be pieced together from Paul’s writings, al¬

served in a saying of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of

though he gives no systematic presentation of it.

Matthew 15:24: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of

Paul, who was a Hellenistic Jew and not an original

the house of Israel.” Consequently, when certain Gen¬

disciple of Jesus, conceived of Christianity as a univer¬

tiles, resident in Judaea, desired to join the movement,

sal salvation-religion, and not as a form of Judaism that

according to the Acts of the Apostles 10:1-11:17, Peter

identified Jesus as the Messiah of Israel. He presents

was only persuaded to accept them for baptism after

Jesus as a preexistent divine being, whom God sent

a special revelation from God, and even then he en¬

into the world in human form to rescue mankind from

countered the criticism of some of his fellow Christians.

their state of spiritual perdition. This state of perdition

In the narrative of the Acts, this incident is followed

he refers to under various images, e.g., as enslavement

by an account of how certain Jewish Christians, who

to daemonic forces, associated with the planets, who

were not natives of Palestine but of the Diaspora of

ruled this lower world (I Corinthians 2:6-8; Galatians

Cyprus and Cyrene, “preached the Lord Jesus” to

4:3-10; Colossians 2:13-15, 20), as deliverance from

Greeks living in Antioch, the capital of Syria, with

the wrath of God (Romans l:18ff.). But what is espe¬

considerable success (Acts 11:19-21). This action con¬

cially important in the present context is that, as the

stituted a notable departure from what had hitherto

basic presupposition of his soteriology, Paul envisaged

been the aim and outlook of Christianity, and it is

the whole of mankind, both Jew and Gentile, as being

unfortunate that the text of the Acts at this point is

in this fatal state of perdition and as needing a common

essentially obscure. It is, for example, difficult to un¬

savior, who is Jesus. The death of Jesus, at the hands

derstand what is meant by preaching “the Lord Jesus”

of the Romans, Paul lifted completely out of its histori¬

to non-Jews. In Greek the word “Lord” (kyrios) had

cal setting, ascribing it to the daemonic powers that

a wide range of meaning, and it is crucial to know

ruled the lower universe (I Corinthians 2:8). Hence in

in what sense at Antioch Jesus was thus presented as

Paul’s “gospel,” Jesus is presented as the divine savior

Kyrios. It is, however, significant that such a term is

of mankind, who saves by his death and resurrection;

used instead of “Messiah.” For it indicates an acknowl¬

on this evaluation, the Jesus presented by the Jerusalem

edgment that Jesus could not be presented to Gentiles

Christians as the Messiah of Israel was a subsidiary,

as the Messiah of Israel such as he was conceived as

if not an irrelevant, equation.

being by his original Jewish disciples, and such as he

In turn, Paul’s conception of the Church is corre¬

probably claimed himself to be. Such a presentation

spondingly universalist in scope and vocation. Thus he

to Gentiles, if it were indeed understood by them,

writes in his Epistle to the Galatians (3:27-28), pic¬

would have been essentially offensive unless they were

turing initiation into the Church as mystical incorpo¬

prepared themselves to become Jews. This step meant,

ration into Christ: “For as many of you as were bap¬

for male Gentiles, being ritually circumcised as well

tized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither

as observing the Mosaic Law. It was a condition that was, indeed, demanded by a significant body of Jewish

414

Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ

Christians. The sequel is obscure, owing to the conflict

Jesus.” Although he saw Christianity in this universalist

of interests in the relevant documents: it seems that

context, Paul still remained by feeling and upbringing

some kind of compromise was arranged, but it is obvi¬

a Jew, and he keenly felt the problem inherent in the

ous from Paul’s Epistles that the circumcision of Gen¬

fact that the majority of the Jews continued to reject

tile converts remained a disputed issue.

Jesus. How was this rejection to be reconciled with

But whatever was the form in which Christianity

the long-cherished belief in Israel’s Election as the

was first presented to the Gentiles, the real and effec¬

People of God? The solution that Paul found was

tive change from the original Jewish form of Christi¬

destined to have a profound effect upon the later

anity was due to Paul of Tarsus. In his Galatian Epistle

conception of the Church. Invoking the prophetic idea

(1:11-17), Paul claims that his gospel or version of

of a “Godly Remnant” of the nation that constituted

Christianity was directly mediated to him by God for

the “True Israel,” whatever the apostasy of the rest,

propagation among the Gentiles; and he vigorously

Paul identified this True Israel with the Jews and

asserts that he was wholly independent of the Jerusalem

Gentiles who

Christians at this critical juncture in his career. Ac¬

9:22ff.). In other words, the Church was the true heir

had

accepted

Christianity

(Romans

cording to Paul, there were two versions of Christi¬

to the promises, recorded in the Hebrew scriptures,

anity: one for the Jews, which he calls the “gospel to

which God had made to the Hebrew patriarchs. The

the circumcised,” and that with which he was divinely

full implications of this identification were not worked

entrusted, namely, the “gospel to the uncircumcised”

out by Paul, but they remained for later Christian

(Galatians 2:7). The general content of this latter “gos¬

theologians to draw. Paul’s outlook, so far as the future

CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION of the Church was concerned, was limited by the

garrison from the nearby Antonia fortress; rather than

current eschatological expectations of the original

have his case tried in Judaea, he then invoked his rights

Jewish disciples of Jesus. He believed that Christ might

as a Roman citizen to be tried in Rome. He was sent

suddenly return at any moment, “then we who are

there, but then disappears from history without record

alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with

of his ultimate fate, except in later legend (Acts

them [i.e., the resurrected dead], in the clouds to meet

21:17-28:30). However, from a farewell speech attrib¬

the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with

uted to him in Acts 20:17-38, and from other evidence,

the Lord” (I Thessalonians 4:17). Consequently, al¬

it is patent that his reputation suffered eclipse for a

though he speaks exaltingly of the Church, as an insti¬

time, and that his version of Christianity would doubt¬

tution he sees it as having but a brief duration in this

less have disappeared but for political events in Judaea.

world, as indeed he regarded the world itself as fast

Proper appreciation of the environment of primitive

approaching its end. Together with this universalist and

Jewish Christianity, by which it was profoundly in¬

transcendental conception of the Church (ekklesia),

fluenced and its fate decided, has been achieved only

Paul also spoke of local communities of Christians, for

in the last two decades. This has been due chiefly to

example, at Corinth and in Galatia and Judaea (I

the acquisition of a better understanding of the essen¬

Corinthians 1:2; Galatians 1:2, 22) as churches (ekklesiai), and he even refers to the church (ekklesia) in

tially religious character of Zealotism, the patriotic “resistance” movement against the Roman government

the house of two distinguished Christians, Aquila and

of Judaea, especially through the excavation of the

Prisca (I Corinthians 16:19).

Zealot fortress of Masada. Also there has been a more

Paul’s version of Christianity, however, was not accepted by the members of the Mother Church of Jerusalem. They quickly saw that Paul’s teaching, namely that the whole of mankind, both Jews and Gentiles, were in a common state of perdition and alike needed a savior, negated the unique spiritual status of Judaism, which was the basic tenet of their religious faith. And this teaching not only conflicted with their own version of Christianity; it endangered also their position and prospects with their fellow Jews in Judaea. Indeed, reports came back to Judaea that Paul was undermining the foundations of Judaism by teaching the Diaspora Jews not to circumcise their children. The reports were a distortion of Paul’s actual teaching; but they gravely compromised and endangered the position of the Jerusalem Christians with their compatriots. Consequently, the leaders of the Mother Church of Jerusalem repudiated Paul as an accredited apostle and teacher of the faith. This they were easily able to do, since Paul had not been an original apostle of Jesus and an eyewitness of his life; to implement this repudi¬ ation, they sent out emissaries to inform Paul’s converts and to present the Jerusalem gospel as the authentic form of the faith. Paul was in a fundamentally weak position; for, whereas he had to recognize the authority of the Jerusalem leaders as the original apostles of Jesus, he could only base his own authority upon his private conviction that he had been divinely commissioned to preach his version of Christianity to the Gentiles. His position became increasingly untenable, and he finally went to Jerusalem to try to effect some modus vivendi with James and the other leaders. They compelled him to give proof of his Jewish orthodoxy in the Temple. The sequel was disastrous for Paul: set upon by a Jewish mob in the Temple, he was rescued by the Roman

critical evaluation of the evidence of the Jewish his¬ torian Josephus, and circumstantial evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the excavation of the Cove¬ nanters’ settlement at Qumran. This evidence, in turn, has placed the trial and execution of Jesus of Nazareth by the Romans in a new context; it has helped to explain the execution of his brother James, the head of the Jerusalem Church, in the year 62, and it has made intelligible the complete disappearance of that Church after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Ro¬ mans in

a.d.

70. This destruction came as the disastrous

climax of the Jewish revolt against Rome which began in the year 66. In this revolt, which was religiously inspired and led by the Zealots, the Jerusalem Chris¬ tians must surely have joined and perished in the final overthrow of their nation. This new interpretation of the nature and fate of the original Christian movement is a subject for continuing specialist research and de¬ bate, since the assessment of the relevant evidence is a difficult and complicated task; but what, in the con¬ text of the present article, is beyond dispute is the fact that after the destruction of Jerusalem in

a.d.

70, the

Mother Church of Christianity ceased to exist and a completely new situation succeeded. Thus, whereas before

a.d.

70 the Christian movement was directed

and controlled by the Jerusalem community, which constituted the unique source of authority in faith and discipline, after that date Christian life is organized and directed from churches in a number of Gentile cities, namely, Rome, Antioch, Ephesus, Alexandria. This transformation of the Christian organizational situation was reflected in a new conception of the Church and its vocation. Christianity ceased to be a Jewish Messianic movement, aimed at preparing the Jewish people for the second coming of Jesus as the

415

CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION Messiah to “restore the kingdom to Israel”—a move¬ ment to which was attached, awkwardly and illogically, a body of Gentile converts largely through the activity of Paul. Instead, Paul’s idea of Christianity as

to his Apostles was passed on through a ritual laying-on of hands, in a service of ordination to the particular office concerned. With this sacramental system, and

a universal salvation-religion was rehabilitated in con¬

the hierarchy that managed it, there went also a system

sequence of the obliteration of the original Jewish form

of discipline. Approved forms of faith, practice, and

of the faith. It was rehabilitated, however, in a modified

conduct were laid down as consistent with orthodoxy,

and amended form, owing to a variety of causes, the

and deviation from these standards had to be confessed

chief of which was the disappointment of the primitive

and atoned for by a prescribed form of penance. In

apocalyptic hope that the Second Advent of Christ was

cases of heinous transgression and refusal to submit to

imminent. While Christians believed that the world was shortly

correction, a Christian could be officially excommuni¬

coming to a catastrophic end, the Church corre¬

ministrations. To give spiritual guidance and help to the faithful,

spondingly was seen as having a limited existence here.

cated from the Church and denied its sacraments and

To Paul it was the community of those reborn in Christ

the Church was regarded as having also a teaching role.

by baptism to a new transcendental life (Romans 6:2ff.),

But the teaching of the faith also meant the defining

who would shortly be caught up to meet the returning

of the faith. Since Jesus had given to his disciples no

Christ in the sky (I Thessalonians 4:17). The upheavals

written systematic exposition of his doctrine, from the

occasioned by the Jewish revolt in 66, the Roman civil

beginning Christian doctrine consisted of the inter¬

war consequent on the death of the Emperor Nero in

pretation put by those disciples upon what they re¬

68, and finally the signal destruction of Jerusalem and

membered and understood of his life and teaching, and

the burning of the Temple, greatly excited the eschato¬

the significance of his death. As was noted above, the

logical expectations of the Christians, as is seen, for

evidence of Paul’s writings shows that within some

example, in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of

twenty years of the death of Jesus two different versions

Mark. But, as the years continued to pass after

a.d.

of Christianity were current within the Church: the

70 and Christ did not return, a new orientation of

“gospel” of the Jerusalem Christians and that of Paul.

outlook, which profoundly affected the evaluation of

The evolution of Christian doctrine after

a.d.

70 was

the Church, gradually began to emerge. Instead of

a gradual process, whereby a kind of synthesis between

being the temporary community of Christ’s redeemed

Paul’s concept of the divine savior and the tradition

in a world on the brink of destruction, the Church was

about the historical Jesus, which was first achieved in

now seen to have an enduring role in a world that

the Gospel of Mark, was assimilated and interpreted

strangely continued to endure. Consequently, it came

by Christian thinkers educated in the concepts and

to be evaluated as a divinely instituted society, en¬

terminology of Greek philosophy. Out of much conflict

trusted with a twofold long-term mission. Since Chris¬

of opinion, sometimes involving bitter controversy, the

tians, after their baptism, had to continue to live in

great dogmas of the Church, such as those of the Trinity

the midst of a pagan world that both tempted them

and the Nature of Christ, gradually emerged. They

from their allegiance to Christ and persecuted them

were ultimately defined and proclaimed at councils of

for their loyalty to him, they needed spiritual help and

bishops, of which those held at Nicaea (325) and Chal-

guidance. Accordingly, the Church gradually devel¬

cedon (451) are the most notable. These dogmas were

oped a sacramental system through which such help

held to constitute the orthodox Catholic faith, and,

was given. Baptism, which Paul had already made into

after the Church won the patronage of the Roman

a rite of spiritual rebirth in Christ, and the Lord s

Emperor Constantine (288-337), acceptance of these

Supper (in time to be known as the Eucharist or Mass),

dogmas was enforced by imperial power. Those who

became the two great sacraments, to which five other

dissented were excommunicated from the Church as

so-called Lesser Sacraments were gradually added. This

heretics, and were often punished by civil penalties.

developing sacramental system went together with a

The ideal of Catholicity, as characterizing the faith

gradual evolution of a hierarchy of ministers endowed

and practice of the Church, was laid down by Vincent

with specific spiritual powers and authority. The three major orders of this hierarchy, in ascending order, were those of deacon, priest, and bishop. The bishop came to be regarded as having a plenitude of spiritual power as a successor of the Apostles of Christ, and gradually a doctrine of Apostolic Succession emerged. According 416

thority and power which Christ had originally given

to this doctrine, it was believed that the spiritual au¬

of Lerins (died ante 450), in his Commonitorium (II.3) as quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est (“what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all”)—a formula, incidentally, that described an ideal rather than historical reality. The Church was regarded, from the beginning, as being divinely commissioned to preach the Gospel of

CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION Christ to all nations, and it has continued down the centuries faithful to this charge. The obligation is a logical corollary of Christian soteriology: that Christ was incarnated, died, and was resurrected to save man¬ kind from a state of perdition from which its members could not save themselves. The logic of this doctrine was absolute, and it was uncompromisingly stated by

although the practice of designating the period pre¬ ceding that event as “Before Christ

(b.c.)

did not start

until the eighteenth century, the idea of a Praeparatio

Evangelica was prevalent from the first century as Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians 4:4 and the Epistle to the Hebrews 1:1-2 attest. The development of the Church during the first

Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430): nulla salus extra

millennium of its existence was closely related to the

ecclesiam (“no salvation outside the Church”; De baptismo IV: 17). The Church, accordingly, was regarded

and within which its formative years were spent. From

as the only divinely instituted means for saving the fallen human race from eternal damnation. All other religions and philosophies were rejected as either in¬ adequate, as in the case of Judaism, or as inventions of demons as were the cults of the Greco-Roman world, or as a pernicious heresy as was Islam. In order not to condemn the Old Testament saints, such as Abraham, to this fate, it was believed that, before his resurrection, Christ had descended into Hades to rescue those godly Hebrews who had lived before his coming. The fate of pious pagans, such as Socrates and Plato, also puz¬ zled some Christians; a solution was found by inventing the idea of limbo, a special compartment of Hades

fortunes of the Roman Empire, into which it was bom the reign of Constantine I, the Roman Empire, from being its persecutor, became the Church s supreme patron and protector. But the moving of the imperial capital by Constantine from Rome to Constantinople, and the subsequent division of the Empire into eastern and western parts, followed in time by the collapse of the Western Empire centered on Rome, had pro¬ found repercussions for the Church. The bishop of Rome, who had long enjoyed a unique status by virtue of his location in the metropolis of the Empire, in¬ herited much of the prestige of Rome after the last Western Emperor was deposed in 476. On the mins of the Western Empire the new states of Europe were

where they dwelt without torment, but also without

gradually established, and, on conversion to Christi¬

hope of salvation. In consequence of their need to defend the Church

the ordained center and head of the Christian world.

against pagan attack, early Christian thinkers gradually formulated a philosophy of history to explain the Church’s place in the scheme of divine providence. They were particularly embarrassed by pagan taunts about the newness of Christianity, compared with the ancient cults of the Greco-Roman world. They sought, therefore, to show that the Christian Church had its roots in a remote antiquity. Paul had prepared the way for this by identifying those Jews and Gentiles who accepted Jesus as the True Israel, as was noted above. This identification meant, in practical effect, that the Church considered itself entitled to take over the Jew¬ ish Scriptures (in their Septuagint form), as its own inheritance, and to interpret them according to its own views. In process of time (by the fourth century) the Church produced its own sacred scriptures, which were embodied in the corpus known as the New Testament, in theological distinction from the inherited Jewish scriptures which were designated the Old Testament. The idea implied in this nomenclature was that God had originally made a covenant or testament with Israel, which was superseded by the new covenant or testament made by Christ through his own sacrifice on the Cross. This conception of there being two stages in the unfolding of divine providence for the salvation of mankind found expression also in chronology. From 525 the custom arose of reckoning time from the Birth of Christ as anni Domini, “years of the Lord ; and,

anity, they naturally looked to Rome and its Pope as In the Eastern Empire, which survived until the cap¬ ture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, a very different situation prevailed. The Patriarch of Constantinople remained subservient to the Emperor, who had a quasi-sacred character. The political sepa¬ ration of East and West soon involved a cultural and religious separation, which was finally consummated in the schism of 1054, when the authorities of each Church excommunicated one another. Although in agreement on the fundamental doctrines of Chiistianity, the Eastern (or Orthodox) Church has continued to be different from the Western Church in ethos and character. It is essentially a mystical hiemrgical insti¬ tution concerned with the salvation and divinization of man. Owing to the fact that those lands in which the Eastern Church was established fell victim to the onslaught of Islam, it suffered much loss and persecu¬ tion, and for centuries was isolated from the progres¬ sive culture of the West. The Church of Russia, which became the most influential of the national Orthodox Churches after the fall of Constantinople, suffered a great diminution of power and influence from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It was in the Papal-controlled Church of Western Europe that Christianity achieved, in the Middle Ages, its greatest power and influence. That achievement finds its classic expression in the Gothic cathedral, the

Summa theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the

41/

CHURCH, MODERNISM IN THE CHRISTIAN Divina commedia of Dante. The Church was conceived

works and some ecumenical participation in worship

as being tripartite in its constitution, until the Second

have been achieved, it remains to be seen whether the

Coining of Christ. The visible Church Militant here

major denominations will be able to overcome their

on earth comprised the body of the faithful, striving

basic doctrinal differences and reestablish a truly united

to live the Christian life amid the perils and tempta¬

Christian Church.

tions of this world. Beyond this world was an invisible Church, which had two divisions: the Church Expect¬ ant, containing the souls of the faithful departed under¬

BIBLIOGRAPHY There is a vast literature on the nature and mission of

going purification in purgatory, and the Church Tri¬

the Church, and on its history. Much of this is from the

umphant of the saints, who enjoyed already the Beatific

point of view of the allegiance of each writer. The following

Vision of God. This situation would continue until a

books may be reasonably regarded as objective studies, and

final apportioning of destiny was made at the Last

give extensive bibliographies. Standard reference works

Judgment, consequent on the Second Coming of Christ.

include: Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. J. Hast¬

The Church Militant, as organized in this world, was regarded as Christendom; and in theory it reflected the feudal structure of medieval society, with Christ pre¬ siding as King. The idea stemmed from Saint Augus¬ tine’s great work De civitate Dei (“The City of God”), in which he virtually identified the Church as the Kingdom of God on earth. In the medieval conception

ings, 12 vols. (Edinburgh and New York, 1910), Vol. Ill, article “Church” by J. Oman; The Oxford Dictionary of the

Christian Church, ed. F. J. Cross (London and New York, 1958), many relevant articles; Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3rd ed. (Tubingen, 1959), III, 1296-1339; Real¬ lexikon filr Antike und Christentum, ed. T. Klauser (Stutt¬ gart, 1959), IV, article “Ekklesia”; Dictionary of the Bible, rev. ed. J. Hastings (London and New York, 1963), article

of Christendom, Christ’s authority was delegated to

“Church”; Dictionary of Comparative Religion, ed. S. G. F.

two representatives on earth: the Pope and the Em¬

Brandon (London and New York, 1970), many relevant

peror of the Holy Roman Empire. This latter office

articles.

was created in 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, the king of the Franks, as “Emperor of the Romans.” Theoretically the Pope was the Spiritual Head, and the Emperor the Secular Head of Christen¬ dom. The history of medieval Europe, however, was much concerned with the subsequent struggle for su¬ preme power between Pope and Emperor. A notable manifestation of the idea of Christendom was the Cru¬ sade of Christian armies against the Islamic powers for the recovery of the sacred places of the Holy Land; in reality the Crusades epitomized both the idealism and the moral defects of medieval Christendom. The monolithic structure of the medieval Church was shattered by the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The movement drew its strength

Among books, the following are especially pertinent: G. Barraclough, The Medieval Papacy (London, 1968). S. G. F. Brandon, The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church, 2nd ed. (Naperville, Ill., 1957); idem, Jesus and the Zealots (New York, 1967-68); idem, History, Time and Deity (New York, 1965). A. G. Dickens, Reformation and Society (New York, 1966). A. A. T. Ehrhardt, Politische Metaphysik von

Solon bis Augustin, Band II (Tubingen, 1959); idem, The Apostolic Succession (London, 1953). M. Goguel, The Birth of Christianity (New York, 1953); idem, The Primitive Church (New York, 1964). A. Hamack, History of Dogma, 7 vols. (reprint, New York, 1961). F. Heer, Aufgang Europas (Vienna and Zurich, 1949). N. D. Kelley, Early Christian Creeds (London and New York, 1950). S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (New York, 1954). N. Zernov, Eastern Christendom (New York, 1961). S. G. F. BRANDON

from various sources: abuses of Papal government and ecclesiastical practice, new nationalist aspirations, new modes of thought generated by the Renaissance. Prot¬ estantism was essentially a centrifugal force, and, de¬

[See also Christianity in History; Church, Modernism in the Christian; God; Heresy; Hierarchy; Prophecy; Reforma¬ tion; Religion, Origins of; Ritual in; Sin and Salvation.]

spite the efforts made at consolidation and control by the major Protestant authorities (Lutheran, Calvinist, Presbyterian, and Anglican), subdivision into small independent sects continued in all lands where Protes¬ tant Christianity became established. Most of these churches and sects have, each, their own peculiar con¬

MODERNISM IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

ception of what the Church should be.

418

Since World War II most Christian bodies, including

1. Introduction. The term “modernism,” when used

the Roman Catholic Church, have shown an active

in the context of the history of religions, refers most

desire for the reunion of the Church in some form.

precisely to tire cluster of critical, philosophical, and

Many conferences have been held and much mutual

ecclesiological

good will expressed. Although cooperation in good

European Roman Catholic intellectuals in the period

ideas

advanced

by

a

number

of

CHURCH, MODERNISM IN THE CHRISTIAN 1890-1910, and especially to the systematic condem¬ nation of these ideas by Pope Pius X in 1907. It also denotes the liberal (broad) and radical movement for reform in the Church of England which began in the late nineteenth century and reached its peak in the years after World War I. The term has also served very loosely and without precise theological reference as the opposite of fundamentalism, or the equivalent of liberal Protestantism, especially in the United States. Even more generally the attempts of all traditional religions, including those of the East, to come to terms with the secular and scientific culture of the modern Western world have been described as modernism. The words “modernist” and “modernism” were originally negative and polemical in meaning. To be a modernist was to be a heretic. For three generations in

Roman

Catholicism

“the

taint

of modernism

effectively destroyed careers and ended serious consid¬ eration of new ideas.

In what follows the word

“modernism” is used to refer to the papal synthesis, and the word “modernist” is restricted to the ideas of men directly involved in the condemnation. It must be understood, however, that the terms have also been used by participants in it and by sympathetic historians of the movement (Houtin, 1913; Petre, 1918; Vidler, 1934, 1970). And it should be clear that for many contemporaries of the crisis, inside and outside the Church, the ideas of all nonscholastic or more gener¬ ally,

non-Curial

thinkers,

from

J.

A.

Mohler

of

Tubingen to Cardinal Newman of Oxford and Maurice Blondel of Aix, were suspect for several decades. Two tasks concerned the handful of Roman Catholic clerical and lay intellectuals who were to emerge as the central figures of the crisis at the turn of the cen¬ tury. The first was the development of a biblical criti¬ cism which was both scientific by the standards of nineteenth-century historiography and supportive of the essentials of Catholic teaching. The second was the creation of a new philosophical language which would provide Catholicism with an apologetic tool suited to men of the twentieth century. Two principles con¬ trolled both efforts. The first was the conviction that if change was to come to Roman Catholicism in either criticism or theology it would have to come from within: the new ideas must be introduced by men whose loyalty and personal faith were above criticism. The second was that the Catholic faith and culture could be shown to be complementary to the vision of man and society which modern thinkers had developed since the Reformation. In “reconciling” traditional Catholicism and the modem world these intellectuals drew deeply on sev¬ eral major currents of thought. First was the tentative tradition of liberal Catholicism. Two attempts had

already been made to break the intellectual and politi¬ cal isolation of the intensely ultramontane church. Felicite de Lamennais and his followers during the 1830’s, and then Marc-Rene, marquis de Montalembert, Johann Joseph Ignaz von Dollinger, and Lord Acton in the 1860’s served as examples of Catholics generat¬ ing a more vigorous approach to their religion, as well as examples of the personal dangers such an effort entailed. For the Italian modernists in particular the social concerns of early liberal Catholicism were to be influential; but both Alfred Firmin Loisy and George Tyrrell cite in their autobiographical writings the great impact of reading books by Lamennais, Montalembert, and J. B. Henri Lacordaire. And more recently there was the great figure of John Henry Newman, whose idea of development seemed to have been at least indirectly endorsed by his elevation to the cardinalate by Leo XIII in 1879, and the work of American Catholics like John Ireland and Thomas Hecker. French Catholic intellectuals interested in applying nineteenth-century historical techniques to the Bible could find a model in their own church: Richard Simon, the tireless critic who had been politically, if not intellectually bested by Bishop Bossuet. But there were more contemporary stimulants in Germany. The long “quest

for

the

historical

Jesus”

which

Albert

Schweitzer was summarizing in his 1906 study, Von Reimarus zu Wrede had produced new techniques for studying the new and old testaments, as well as a variety of scandalously “naturalistic” interpretations. These made Christian revelation subject to Kantian, Hegelian, and Darwinian concepts and produced sev¬ eral major betes noires for the polemicists, notably D. F. Strauss, and the high priest of scientism in France, Ernest Renan. More recently attention had come to focus on Albert Ritschl and Adolf Harnack, and exegetes like J. Wellhausen, J. Weiss, and H. J. Holtzmann. By the end of the century the ferment of German Protestant theology and criticism had produced two images of Jesus Christ, and by implication, of the Church, with which Catholic scholars would have to come to terms. The first and better known was the liberal

Protestant

image

of

Jesus

as

the

God-

enlightened founder of an ethical and moral kingdom. On this idea had been built an interpretation of the Church as the embodiment of human progress. The approach was initially very attractive to some Catholic critics of their church’s social backwardness. The sec¬ ond image was quite different. Called the radical or consistent eschatological school, it presented the Jesus of the Gospel as a messianic figure who preached a kingdom completely at odds with that of the world and who died to force it into life. This second version

419

CHURCH, MODERNISM IN THE CHRISTIAN of the gospel brought those who adopted it to an

of science,” even as the editor of the influential Revue

impasse. Though initially stimulating it offered a poor

des Deux Mondes, Ferdinand Brunetiere, was an¬

foundation for building an apologetic for the century

nouncing, after a visit to the Vatican, that the time

of science, progress, and bourgeois order. Theolog¬

had come for intellectuals to recognize the great power

ically, it demanded a demythologization—or in terms

for moral order which was embodied in Catholicism.

of the day, a “symbolic” approach—not only to the

With

gospel but to the whole Catholic tradition: and that

Taine and Renan and finding good words to say for

undertaking called for a new language, one which also

the pope, the moment for a Catholic offensive into

could be found in German thought.

the learned world had come.

anticlericals

suddenly

criticizing

Thomism, of course, was the official philosophy of

2. Criticism and Dogma. The question of the Bible

the Catholic Institutes started in response to Leo XIII’s

and a new apologetic for Catholicism were most

call for a revival of Catholic learning, but by the mid-

dramatically broached in the work by the French

1890’s the new or revitalized Catholic journals and

scholar Alfred Loisy. Loisy was a critical autodidact,

reviews were responding to the stream of French

who escaped from rigid scholastic and Gallican semi¬

translations of German philosophers, and some early

nary teaching into the study of Bible languages, the

enthusiasts of the new scholasticism were agreeing with

French liberal Catholics, Newman, and the German

Marcel Hebert who declared in 1881 that “Kant had

critics, especially the exponents of the consistent

the great distinction of giving to philosophical minds

eschatological

a powerful impulsion.” In 1885 the Thomist Society

Loisy’s critical work had radical theological implica¬

in Paris heard Hebert’s paper on “Thomism and

tions which he was not afraid to draw out in his teach¬

Kantianism”: in the succeeding decade the roster of

ing, unlike the more politic Louis Duchesne, another

names evaluated in the more progressive publications

pioneer

grew to include Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The

sponsorship Loisy came to the newly-founded Institut

major channel through which German thought reached

Catholique in Paris. Dismissed from his post at the

the progressive wing of the French Catholic commu¬

Institute in 1893, for denying the inerrancy of scrip¬

nity was the work of Maurice Blondel, who drew major

ture, and indirectly censured in Leo XIII’s encyclical

in

school

scientific

like Johannes

historiography,

Weiss.

under

Alfred

whose

elements of his complex philosophy of action from

(.Providentissimus Deus) on Bible study in the same

Spinoza, Fichte, and Schelling as well as from Kant

year, Loisy developed a general theory of cultural and

and Hegel, after finding these writers sympathetically

religious evolution, and presented it in the form of an

discussed at the Ecole Normale by his teacher Emile

antiliberal Protestant polemic, L’Evangile et Veglise

Boutroux and his friend Victor Delbos.

(“The Gospel and the Church,” 1902), a refutation of

At the same time other currents of thought were moving over Europe and even across the Atlantic.

the French edition of Hamack’s popular Berlin lec¬

Baron Friedrich von Hugel in England was reading

that he was not a theologian but simply a Catholic

the neo-Kantian Rudolf Eucken and recommending his

and a critic though he believed, contrary to the pro¬

tures, The Essence of Christianity (1900). Loisy claimed

books; Englishmen and Frenchmen were learning

gressives who welcomed his work, that the Church

neo-Hegelianism from the popular works of John

could not merely translate its old formulas into a mod¬

Caird; Frenchmen and then Englishmen were enthus¬

ern language but needed to completely revise its

ing over the mixture of Schleiermacher and evolu¬

cosmology. He insisted on the necessity of this under¬

tionary thought in Auguste Sabatier’s Outlines of a

taking because he saw the Church as the major pre¬

Philosophy of Religion (1892). Besides drawing on the

modern manifestation of man’s spiritual evolution, and

Germans Blondel could point to an indigenous alterna¬

a guarantee as well of social order. In his modernist works Loisy argued that Harnack

tive to scholasticism in the works of Olle-Laprune, and much earlier, Maine de Biran and Ravaisson. All these

was wrong to see the fatherhood of God and the

intellectual exchanges were among those committed

brotherhood of man as the essential Christian gospel

to one form or another of traditional Christianity, but

obscured by the later development of Catholicism. The

they were paralleled by a remarkable renaissance of

original gospel, as a rigorous but Catholic criticism

interest in religion among secular intellectuals which

revealed it, was not the source, but the product, of

began in the mid-1890’s. The philosophies of intuition

the faith of the first followers of Jesus. Its message

and pragmatism developed by Henri Bergson and

was exclusively messianic and eschatological. Jesus,

William James

the

“neo-

who entered history as man, not as God, felt himself

fostered

more

to be the Messiah and died for his belief. But if he

dramatically by the novels of Paul Bourget, whose Le

announced the kingdom, it was the Church which

Disciple (1889) dramatized for many the “bankruptcy

came. The “impulse of will” or “soul of Jesus,” origi-

Christianity”

420

republican

of

had the

their

impact,

1890’s

was

but

CHURCH, MODERNISM IN THE CHRISTIAN nally expressed in the messianic teaching, was given new forms. The theological formulations of Paul, who was “compelled to explain, since he could not narrate, ’ and of the fourth Gospel, and the whole rest of the history of Christian doctrine were successive symboli¬ cal representations of the original mystery, which is itself inaccessible to the historian. “The Church can fairly say that, in order to be at all times what Jesus desired the society of his friends to be, it had to become what it has become; for it has become what it had

3. Philosophy and Belief. Although his writings were never censured, the work of Maurice Blondel stood at the center of the controversies over the pos¬ sibility for a new Catholic apologetic. Blondel’s thesis, L Action (1893) was criticized by his Sorbonne exam¬ iners, partisans of Renan’s scientism, for its religiosity. His approach was long rejected by Roman theologians as religiously insufficient: the “method of immanence was seen as a device for infiltrating agnosticism and fideism into Catholic doctrine. Blondel irritated both

to be, in order to save the Gospel by saving itself”

camps because he wished to draw the attention of all

(Loisy [1912], p. 151). The theologian and the man of faith could make

commitment and action. He argued that man s need

larger statements than the historian. The raw mate¬ rials of historical science did not reveal transcendence any more than did the rest of the natural world. “God does not show himself at the end of the astronomer’s telescope. The geologist does not find him in his sam¬ ples, nor the chemist at the bottom of his test tube. God may very well exist through all the world, but he is in no way the proper object of science” (Loisy [1903], p. 9). These public statements paralleled a more pantheistic personal religious stance: Loisy’s historicism was apparently Christian to those of his readers who admired the emergence of a sophisticated (and

philosophers away from abstract thought to personal to know stems from the dynamism of his will as it faces life situations. Once man has intellectually mas¬ tered the world of phenomena a new act of will is demanded. Either he must settle for the reality around him, or assume a stance which is open to religious experience. Blondel held that there was sufficient testi¬ mony to the ultimate transcendence of human action to make the hypothesis of a supernatural gift of life philosophically necessary for true freedom. “I must be involved to rim the risk of losing all; I must be compromised. . . . Head, heart, and hand, I must give them willingly or they will be taken from me. If I

polemically antiliberal Protestant) critical mind, but

refuse

for himself, the personal incarnation of God was “a

(Blondel [1893], pp. viii-ix). The implications of what Blondel styled “the method

philosophical myth,” and not simply because human philosophy had not yet developed a more adequate notion of personality than those of the Fathers and the Councils. “More pantheist-positivist-humanitarian than Christian” in 1904 ([1930-31], II, 397), Loisy still insisted in 1936 that there was a “moral and spiritual supernatural” reality at work in human history, and he hoped for a new religion, “crown of the Christian religion and of every other,” concentrated “on the perfecting of humanity in the life of the spirit, that is, in communion with God” (1950, p. 32). Loisy’s ideas were the focus for a complex critical and theological debate long before tire condemnation of 1907. While his works were officially censured and he engaged in a cat-and-mouse game of conditional retraction with the authorities, enthusiasts for a radical

my free

dedication,

I fall into servitude”

of immanence” for Christian faith were developed in his “Letter on Apologetics” in 1896, in which he argued that while philosophy could not prove the truth of any religion, much less the superiority of one over another, it was central to a modern apologetic which would help the autonomous mind to recognize through the method of immanence the reality of revelation. Blondel insisted that Christian faith was a gift and not something immanent in man s nature; what was imma¬ nent was the ability of mind to understand its need for transcendence. To have faith “as issuing from our¬ selves” alone is not to have it at all. Blondel s eagerness to preserve the transcendence of Christian faith— especially the mystery of Christ’s divinity in the face of the critic’s focus on the Jesus of history—led him

freedom in critical matters like Baron von Hiigel (him¬

into a complicated correspondence assessing Loisy’s

self a Bible student, but better known for his writings

critical work. Some of the letters formed the basis of the essay

on mysticism and his correspondence with the leading figures of the crisis) defended Loisy s work. Exegetes who appreciated the dangers of historicism, but who wished for more and better critical work (Pierre Battifol of Toulouse, and Marie-Joseph Lagrange of the Ecole biblique), tried to separate the two. The majority of Loisy’s critics rejected the techniques along with the evolutionary and culture-relative religious philoso¬ phy implicit in his use of them.

History and Dogma (1905) in which Blondel attacked both the historicists—i.e., Loisy, who argued that criti¬ cism had made it clear that if religion was to survive it must be as an evolving expression of man’s spirit in relation to an unknowable force without—and those he dubbed “extrinsicists,” that is, the orthodox Roman theologians who believed that the Christian revelation was completely trans-historical

and arbitrary,

the

421

CHURCH, MODERNISM IN THE CHRISTIAN unchallengeable (and inexplicable) foundation of a

Blondelian ideas in Italy), the Gospel principle: qui

societies. Blondel rejected those who argued that “the

facit veritatem venit ad lucem. All those who sought

Bible is guaranteed en bloc, not by its content, but by

a new understanding of the dynamic character of

the external seal of the divine: Why bother to verify

Christian teaching opposed the tyranny of Aristote¬

the details?” (Blondel [1964], p. 229). He proposed,

lian categories, especially the dominant intellectual

in place of the excesses of Loisy and of his ultra¬ orthodox critics, a new emphasis on the Church as a

tradition of neo-scholasticism. For all of these men the Thomistic revival en¬

living tradition. Blondel believed that his idea of “a

couraged by Leo XIII in the encyclical Aetemi Patris

concept of tradition obtained with the help of a phi¬

(1879) was no more helpful than the categories of

losophy of action” would lead to a Christianity “both

Gallican theology. It was especially inadequate to deal

more concrete and more universal, more divine and

with the problems raised by biblical criticism in

more human, than words can express” (ibid. p. 286).

Christology. There was considerable difference of po¬

The need for a new philosophical approach to reli¬

sition among the philosophical modernists on the ques¬

gion was directly associated with the critical question

tions of Christ’s nature and knowledge.

In

1903

by an essay entitled “Qu’est-ce qu’un dogme?” (“What

Laberthonniere wrote that Blondel, von Hugel, and he

is a Dogma?”) published in 1905 in the progressive

had the same goal in their reconsideration of Catholic

Catholic journal, Annales de philosophic Chretienne by

teaching: “. . . a Christ truly real and truly human”

the mathematician and layman Edouard Le Roy, who

(Blondel [1961], p. 161). Blondel wrote that “as hu¬

was in fact more a student of Bergson than of Blondel.

manity grows, Christ rises above the horizon, ’ but he

Le Roy’s article became the center of a controversy second in intensity only to that provoked by Loisy’s

rejected von Hiigel’s argument that Christ’s knowledge of his messianic mission developed in time. In his turn,

The Gospel and the Church. Le Roy argued that dogma

von Hugel tended to side with Loisy in insisting that

was simply “unthinkable” for modern man “because

history has to set the canons for the philosophy of

it is imposed by simple fiat and because it is conceived

tradition and action, and he criticized Blondel’s tend¬

as a function of outworn systems, reaffirming those

ency to attribute to Christ an entirely time-trans¬

anthropomorphic notions which make it unacceptable

cending human consciousness. The extrinsic, static, excessively rational character

to the mind.” The moral meaning of a dogma must be placed before its speculative meaning; the latter only functions negatively to establish the minimal

of Catholic intellectual life was vigorously attacked by the Irish convert Jesuit George Tyrrell, whose books

parameters of belief. Le Roy interpreted the dogmatic

were the second source, after Loisy’s work, for the

propositions on the personality of God as meaning

papal synthesis of modernist teaching. Tyrrell was a

“practically” that man must deal with God as he would

combative and eloquent writer of apologetic, who had

with another human person; the resurrection of Jesus

developed a unique pastorate among English Catholic

meant that “he still mediates and lives among us, and

intellectuals; his independent development was rein¬

not at all merely as a thinker who has disappeared and

forced by his friendship with von Hiigel. The influence

left behind a rich and living influence ... he is literally our contemporary” (Le Roy [1918], p. 70). Blondel’s closest disciple was the oratorian Lucien

422

J. Semeria (the Bamabite priest who disseminated

dogmatic fortress normative for all times and all

of Matthew Arnold and of his own personal brand of Thomism was soon overshadowed by that of Loisy’s critical works, by the consistent eschatology of Weiss,

Laberthonniere who developed similar ideas in a

and by “the method of immanence” presented by

specifically religious context in his Essai de philosophie religieuse (1903), and in Le realisme chretien et

Blondel and Laberthonniere.

Videalisme grec (1904), and who was silenced in 1914

of religious knowledge which emphasized his belief

for his polemical battle with the ultraorthodox Catholic

that revelation was a deposit of faith which was first

defenders of the Action Franqaise. Laberthonniere

a law of prayer and life, and second, a law of belief.

wrote that dogmas were not “simply enigmatical and

“Devotion and religion existed before theology, in the

In his mature work, Tyrrell developed a philosophy

obscure formulations which God has promulgated in

way that art existed before art criticism, reasoning

the name of his omnipotence to mortify the pride of

before logic, and speech before grammar” (1907, p.

our spirit. They have a moral and practical meaning;

105). Tyrrell feared (and sometimes hoped) that if the

they have a vital meaning more or less accessible to

Church really accepted the implications of develop¬

us according to the degree of spirituality we possess”

ment as well as the eschatological reading of the

(1903, p. 272). Le Roy and Laberthonniere both insisted

gospel, she would be absorbed by modern rational and

that their concern with action and practice was corn-

material culture just as she had once absorbed the

pletely traditional; Le Roy cited, as did Blondel and

Hellenic world view. He searched for an interim theo-

CHURCH, MODERNISM IN THE CHRISTIAN logical formulation which would preserve the gospel

to the Enlightenment. According to the pope, philo¬

and the church Loisy had sundered. He argued that

sophical modernism taught that man could not know

there was a revelation: there was a transcendent reality

God by reason and that what sense he did have of the

and it was manifest in Jesus Christ; but everything the

transcendent came through the “vital immanence” of

Catholic believed was “an analogue of metaphor

the divine in the human. Theological modernism held

substituting for an original experience of the divine,

that religion was an expression of the collective con¬

given to the apostles, but now “withdrawn from view."

sciousness of mankind which expressed itself in purely

The evident impasse reached by making dogma and

symbolic dogmas. Historical modernism maintained

theology equivalent as relative conceptual devices or

that all ideas and institutions evolved and could only

analogies for transcendence—thus fixing an apparently

be understood relative to their epoch.

unbridgeable gap between the revelation of transcen¬

apologetic was castigated for daring to associate these

Modernist

dence in Jesus Christ and the faith of the believer—was

ideas with Catholic tradition. And finally the modernist

overcome first by Tyrrell’s conviction that “the spirit

as reformer was condemned for advocating an end to

of Christ has lived and developed in the collective life

fasts and to clerical celibacy, demanding seminary

of the faithful,” and later by his belief that the “reli¬

reform, the purging of popular devotionalism, com¬

gious sense” operated immanently in men who were

plete freedom of church and state as an ideal, and the

open to it: the soul of every man was naturaliter

democratization of the government of the Church,

Christiana. This religious sense, or “consciousness," was universal: it was not a moral principle, but the ability

especially the Curia. The papal condemnation of 1907 was followed by

to respond to God, and the force which linked “the

a series of excommunications, most notably those of

life of religion with the rest of our life,” proving that

Tyrrell and Loisy, the censuring of works of Le Roy

“the latter demands the former.”

and many others, and by the institution of an anti-

Knowledge of God through immanence was to be

modemist oath in September, 1910. The body of bitter

seen as intimately bound up with knowledge of him

polemical literature already generated by the affaire

through the historical revelation of the gospel. Growth

Loisy and by the writings of the Rlondelians was now

occurred in the former, and thus preserved life in the latter, even though it remained fixed in the apostolic era.

The

correlation

between

the

revelation

of

immanence and that of history in Jesus Christ, was made by the consensus of the “people of God’ (con¬ sensus fidelium),

and

of

“theoreticians

like

the

modernists, not of the theologians of Rome. The followers of Jesus must evolve new symbols, sacra¬ ments,

and

institutions

to

express

the

notion

of

immortality—the linking beyond time of man with the transcendent—which was taught by Jesus when he preached the kingdom, and which was entirely de¬ pendent on the example of his life and death and resurrection. Thus all dogmas, all theologies, were “symbols of the transcendent.” Christians faced with modern life needed hope, rather than faith. “Our best God is but an idol, a temple made with hands in which the Divine will is as little to be confined as in

enlarged through the efforts of a secret antimodernist society, the Sodalitum pianum or Sapiniere, whose members, known as Integrists, devoted particular at¬ tention to the links between modernism and Christian democracy, as in Marc Sangnier’s Sillon movement. (Integrism in its excessive zeal was in turn censured by Pope Renedict XV in 1914.) Some “progressive” or “liberal” thinkers—as such they described them¬ selves—rejected the notion of a “modernist” heresy as (in Loisy’s phrase) a “figment of the papal imagina¬ tion.” Anticlericals competed with orthodox publicists in exaggerating the extent of the “infection.

One

journal estimated that modernist ideas had captured 15,000 priests in France alone. Tyrrell, who defended his version of modernism in two long letters to the Times of London, said 20,000 would be a better figure. Loisy said 1,500 was more accurate than

15,000.

Anonymous publications presented counter-systems

our Hell-Purgatory-Heaven schematization" (Tyrrell

and demands; in Italy, The Program of the Modernists

[1912], II, 416). 4. Condemnation of Modernism and Extension of

and Letters of a Modernist Priest (Buonaiuti, 1907,

the Crisis. The argument of the magisterium, later developed by Catholic scholars, was synthetic. The modernist was seen in the encyclical letter Pascendi (1907) as a “type” who “sustains and includes within himself a manifold personality; he is a philosopher, a believer, a theologian, an historian, a critic, an apolo¬ gist,

a

reformer”

(Sabatier

[1908],

pp.

236-37).

Modernist ideas were traced to the Reformation and

1908); in America, Letters of a Modernist to Pope Pius X (Sullivan, 1909). A Revue Moclerniste Internationale was only one of several short-lived journals which sprang up to advance the cause of reform, if necessary against the Curia, explaining ideas the Pope had “improperly understood and wrongly condemned. The condemnations of 1907 had in fact brought to a head a crisis of belief which had roots antedating any of the condemned works and which continued long

423

CHURCH, MODERNISM IN THE CHRISTIAN after the crisis was over. Many priests, disillusioned by the obstinacy of the magisterium in the face of

Periodical literature was the major German contri¬

minimal pleas for autonomy in scholarship, or over¬

bution, in particular, the Zwanzigste (1909: Neue)

whelmed by a loss of personal belief in anything but

Jahrhundert. In England Maud Petre, a friend of Tyrrell and his

the most broadly symbolic understanding of Christian faith, left the Church. Others hid their true views. Notable in their impact in the years when Loisy’s critical work was first coming to notice were Marcel Hebert, a dynamic Parisian priest and teacher whose dialogue, Souvenirs d Assise (1889), stated the dilemma of many who gave up faith reluctantly (“I am not agnostic, because I affirm the Divine: but what is the Divine?”), and Albert Houtin, the major contemporary historian of the general crisis of faith and knowledge who wrote as a Catholic long after he had abandoned orthodoxy—as did Loisy. Italians involved in the crisis tended to persist in their efforts after the rationale for their work had been destroyed. Antonio Foggazzaro had called for a revival of mysticism and a reform of church polity in his tremendously popular novel II Santo (“The Saint, 1905); in spite of censure he helped to found the modernist review II Rinnovamento in 1907. This jour¬ nal was the organ of the group of national liberal Italian reformers who tried to reconcile Catholicism and modernity by discussing intellectual freedom, the need for an accommodation with post-Kantian sub¬ jectivism, the involvement of the laity in the life of the Church, and a new approach to church-state rela¬ tions. Such efforts at synthesis were paralleled by two other thrusts in Italian modernist circles. On the other hand, a small number of priest-scholars took their lead from the French thinkers who were intermediaries of the ideas of Baron von Hiigel, and sought to develop an apologetic less concerned with Protestant and rationalist science. There were also priests and laymen who were primarily socially and politically motivated, and who moved beyond officially sanctioned activities like the Opera dei congressi to¬ ward Christian democracy. Of the former group the most prominent figure was the church historian and

executor, refused to take the antimodemist oath and predicted the eventual recognition of the validity of much of modernist apologetics. Two other Englishmen, both friends of Tyrrell, mediated much of Catholic modernist thought into the separate evolution of Anglican

modernism;

Alfred

Lilley

through

his

Modernism: A Record and a Review (1908), and Alfred Fawkes in his Studies in Modernism (1913). But the complicated, highly institutionalized, and long-lived movement of modernism in the Church of England developed mainly out of two indigenous sources, nine¬ teenth-century liberal theology (especially the work of F. D. Maurice and H. F. D. Hort) as well as the new critical currents from Germany. Just as in Roman Catholicism, Anglican modernism was a clerical and intellectual

effort

at

providing an apologetic for

Christianity which would foster its appeal to the mid¬ dle classes drifting away from orthodoxy. Defenders of the established church could claim with some justice that “we have never yet met a Modernist kitchen maid” (Pryke [1926], p. 1). Through the Modern Churchman’s Union (1898), the periodicals Liberal Churchman

(1904-08)

and

Modem

Churchman

(1911-56), and annual conferences the modernists had a considerable effect on the establishment, especially in prayer-book reform. The theology and history of the Anglican movement and its connections with the Catholic crisis was assessed by H. D. A. Major, one of several critics who in the years after World War I have extended universally the movement by defining it as “the claim of the modem mind to determine what is true, right, and beautiful in the light of its own experience . . . whether in religion, ethics, or art (1927, p. 8). A comparable dilution of the term oc¬ curred in America in the wake of the crisis, most notably in the liberal-fundamentalist controversy, but

polemicist Ernesto Buonaiuti; of the latter, the political

also closer to the Catholic tradition in the writings of

leader Bomolo Murri, founder of the Lega democratica

William L. Sullivan. A dense web of correspondence among men involved

nazionale (Scoppola, 1961). The crisis made little impact in Germany. Nine¬ teenth-century

German

Catholic

scholarship

had

developed in a more realistic relationship to Protestant and secular thought. Anti-ultramontanism was the major dimension of reforming movements before and after the condemnation, motivated in part by resent¬ ment against Boman distrust of German thought, reflected in the excommunication of Dollinger in 1871

424

with the nation in the wake of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.

and the more recent censuring of the liberal Hermann Schell, in part by zeal to express Catholic solidarity

in the new ideas, the personal activity of Baron von Hiigel, who traveled continuously and who had con¬ nections in the Vatican, and a flood of short-lived periodicals boasting the defense (and orthodoxy) of the components of the condemned system created the appearance of an international modernist movement. In fact one secret meeting of leading figures did take place, in the Italian mountain town of Molveno in 1907, but little came of it except fuel for Integrist paranoia.

CHURCH, MODERNISM IN THE CHRISTIAN 5. Historiography and Conclusion. The history of the idea of crypto-modernism in the Church since 1910 is an index to the dismal ramifications of the condem¬ nation. Leonce de Grandmaison, editor of the Jesuit periodical Etudes during the crisis, summarized the liberal-progressive view of the crisis when he defined the modernist as one who believes that there could be a conflict between “the traditional and modern positions” in Christian teaching, and who, faced with that conflict, decided that it was “the traditional view which must be adapted to the modern, by retouching, or, if necessary, radical alteration or abandonment” (Etudes, 176 [1923], 644). The progressives argued that the modernist error did not necessitate the abandon¬ ment of the vital work of bringing the truth of tradition into contact with the truth of modernity. They wanted development in Christian teaching, defined by Blondel as “a continuous creation starting from a germ which transubstantiates

its

nourishment,”

as

opposed

to

evolution, which he saw as change resulting only from “external pressures” (Marie [1960], p. 129). They re¬ jected historicism and, in Wilfrid Ward s phrase, they called for “not less, but more, and better, theology.” The progressive—by the standards of 1929—historian of the crisis, Jean Riviere, said that the modernist effoi t was a revolution, not a reform, which

ended in

destroying the objective fundamentals of Catholic dogma,” but he regretfully noted that the most visible result of the “odious and deplorable campaigns

of the

Integrists was to panic bishops and people, polarize opinion, render the loyal suspect, and thus make

more

difficult the already hard task of those who were exert¬ ing themselves to combat modernism effectively on its true ground” (1929, col. 2041). What should be noted in conjimction with these three opinions is that Grandmaison was himself suspect, that a special papal document from Pius XII was nec¬ essary to remove all taint of heterodoxy from Blondel s name as late as 1944, and that Riviere was regarded as a crypto-modernist and officially limited in his teaching. In fact the literature and correspondence of the period is a vast set of criss-crossing efforts to indict or to exculpate figures seen as heterodox by Roman theologians, including Newman before the crisis, and Teilhard de Chardin after it. The sad human dimension of the crisis and the subsequent repression of intellec¬ tual life in the Church were summed up in the advice given by a veteran of those days to a church historian in the 1950’s: “If you ever treat of the modernist crisis, do not forget to tell how much we suffered.” Recent historians, most notably Emile Poulat, have attempted to approach modernism and integrism sociologically (1960, 1962, 1969), and with an eye on the tumult in the Church in the wake of Vatican II (O’Dea, 1968).

Seen from the general perspective of intellectual history in the modern period the modernist crisis in Catholicism is an example of the imperfect transfer of ideas between two cultures which, in spite of a common heritage, were quite distinct by the opening of the twentieth century. Protestant and scientific thought, the secular national state and the trans¬ formation of its class structures and ideologies through industrialization and world commerce created a world alien in almost every principle to the Catholic universe encapsulated within it, even as the Rome of the popes was circumscribed and sealed by the modern Italian state.

Roman

Catholicism

was

perceived

by

its

defenders as a closed and perfect system of belief and action. From time to time concessions were made to the epiphenomena of modernity and the perennial tradition of mysticism, but generally the magisterium insisted that “the human intellect could know God from his effects, that the historical proofs of Christ’s divinity were perfectly proportioned to the minds of men of all times, that there was an objective super¬ natural order adequately defined by the Church s doc¬ trine” (O’Dea, p. 86). Accustomed to the use of power by centimes of political experience, the magisterium found it natural to use power to suppress and thus negate the existence of an intellectual upheaval which was evident disproof of the fundamental premiss of its life: the unthinkableness of an alternative cosmology and another language of theological and philosophical discourse for any man shaped in its ways. It was the argument of most modernists that they had not been deeply influenced by currents of thought outside the Church, but had simply drawn out the logic of Catholic tradition. Thus Loisy insisted on the originality of his own work in part because once the statement was made that his teaching was ‘ German rational-Protestant theology translated into French" his work would no longer be studied seriously, and his usefulness for change within the system would end. Similarly Tyrrell polemicized violently against liberal Protestantism, not only because he felt that he had been too attracted by liberal Protestantism in his early writing but because he knew that once an idea could be labeled Protestant,

or worse,

Kantian,

it was

automatically refuted. The dilemma of the modernists in relation to contemporary thought was intensified by the fact that they were in revolt against the rationalism of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church and the ration¬ alism and materialism of secular thought. They also tended to ignore their dependence on the modern culture they sought to manipulate. Thus Foisy’s work was often naively historicist, and Tyrrell was utopian in his scheme for a science of religion. This occurred because, as “latecomers to the Enlightenment," in

425

CHURCH, MODERNISM IN THE CHRISTIAN Gentile’s phrase, they were overwhelmed by the out¬

and secular scientific world can be complemented by

pourings of the Pandora’s box of ideas which had been

tracing patterns of influence in reading and corre¬

closed to Catholic thinkers for so long. The confusion

spondence. The model for this kind of study is the

of themes in modernist books puzzled the Pope: in the

examination, done by most students of the crisis, of

encyclical the modernists were condemned both as

Harnack’s Das Wesen des Christentums (1900) and

rationalists and as anti-intellectuals.

Loisy’s h’Evangile et VegUse (1902).

In their turn, many of the modernist intellectuals,

Finally, modernist ideas should be examined in the

overwhelmed by the attractions of scientism and

context of Catholic critical movements in the sixteenth

historicism, saw the obstinacy of the magisterium as

and seventeenth centuries, and in conjunction with the

final proof that Catholicism as a syncretistic expression

emergence of radical Catholic theological currents in

of man’s moral evolution was as unacceptable in the

the 1960’s. Comparisons of the two recent periods

modern world as the eschatological “late messianic

should prove particularly enlightening, since in both

Judaism” from which it had sprung. Institutional re¬

cases Protestant thought and scientific advance were

forms unimagined by the modernists have been ac¬

major spurs to innovation. Students of the relationship

complished in the era of Aggiornamento. A theological

between the crisis and the development of Catholic

revolution has grown out of the ecumenical movement

science in Germany should examine Edmond Vermeil,

many of them derided. Transformations in the scientific

Jean-Adam Mohler et Vecole Catholique de Tubingue,

climate have weakened the attacks of the secular

1815-1840 (1913).

humanist. But the Catholic Church and ecumenical Christianity are still deeply challenged by dynamics of modern culture. The threat of the religio depopulata which this handful of religious intellectuals feared remains as the residues of “a religious past defined long ago” confront “a present which has found elsewhere than in it the living sources of its inspiration” (Poulat [1969], p. 5). Emile Poulat’s wide-ranging study of the first stage of the modernist crisis has been characterized as

The recent works of Emile Poulat locate the modernist crisis in a sociopolitical context. His edition of the memoir of Albert Houtin and Felix Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy, sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris, 1960), contains an indispensable biobibliographical index of all major figures in the controversy; his Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste (Paris, 1962) relates the periodical literature to the major works of Loisy and Harnack, discusses manuscript sources, and

“sociological.” Hopefully, further studies of individuals

offers a comprehensive bibliography for the French and

involved in the controversy will follow his example

English aspects of the crisis; finally, his Introduction to

and attempt to locate the theological and philosophical

Integrisme et catholicisme integral (Paris, 1969) assesses the

issues in a social and political context. The separation of church and state, the rise of left Catholic political thought and movements, and the utilization of the modernist crisis for political purposes by the Catholic right, are important issues with which the history of

antimodemist campaign, as does his article “ ‘Modemisme’ et ‘Integrisme’; du concept polemique a Tirenisme critique,”

Archives de Sociologie Religieuse, No. 27 (Jan.-June 1969). Other studies are evaluated by Roger Aubert, “Recent Literature on the Modernist Movement,” Historical Investi¬

done for modernism in England. The integrist position

gations, Concilium, Vol. 17 (New York, 1966). For Italian modernism, Pietro Scoppola’s Crisi modernista e rinnovamento cattolico in Italia (Bologna, 1961) is important. Alec Vidler, whose The Modernist Movement in the Roman Catholic Church (Cambridge, 1934) was the first study sym¬

has been examined in the setting of social history by

pathetic to Loisy and Tyrrell to appear in English, writes

modernism in France should be fully integrated. Recent work on Italian modernism (Scoppola, 1961), explores the larger context, but comparable work has not been

Poulat in the introduction to his edition of documents,

about a few major and several minor French and English

Integrisme et catholicisme integral (1969). Of greater

participants in A Variety of Catholic Modernists (Cambridge,

significance for the general history of ideas is the proc¬ ess whereby the currents of positivism and historicism were brought to bear on traditional Catholic thought. The lines of this development can best be traced through the reconstruction of the understanding of Protestant and secular learning held by Catholic writers, as has been done for the influence of German philosophical sources on the formation of Blondel’s

426

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1970). The impact of modernism within the Anglican is examined in H. D. A. Major, English Modernism (1927), W. M. Pryke, Modernism as a Working Faith (London, 1926), while the inter-war tendency to Communion

globalize the conflict of tradition and modernity in religion is clear in Victor Branford, Living Religion (London, 1924). For American echoes, see John Ratte, Three Modernists (New York and London, 1967). Thomas F. O’Dea’s The

Catholic Crisis (New York, 1968) is one of the many post-

method and thought by J. J. McNeill in The Blondelian

conciliar liberal attempts to reassess the crisis in the light

Synthesis (1966). The comparative analysis of modern-

of subsequent history; a useful collection of revisionist essays

ist writings and the seminal works in the Protestant

appeared in Continuum, 3 No. 2 (1965). Jacques Maritain

CITY takes a more traditional view in Le paysan de la Garonne (Paris, 1967). Central sources for study of modernist ideas are the papal

types in the constellations: Sippar in Cancer, Nineveh in Ursa Major, Assur in Arcturus. Sennacherib had Nineveh built according to the

form . . . delineated

documents translated in Paul Sabatier’s Modernism (New

from distant ages by the writing of the heaven-of-stars.

York,

most notably

This model, situated in a celestial region, antedates the

L’Evangile et Veglise (Paris, 1903; Eng. trans. New York, 1912), Autour d’un petit livre (Paris, 1903), Memoires pour servir a Vhistoire religieuse de notre temps, 3 vols. (Paris, 1930-31); Maurice Blondel, L’Action (Paris, 1893), idem, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma (London, 1964), idem (with Laberthonniere), Correspondance philosophique (Paris, 1961); L. Laberthonniere, Essais de philo¬ sophic religieuse (Paris, 1903); Edouard Le Roy, Dogme et critique (Paris, 1907; partial Eng. trans. New York, 1918); Rene Marie, ed., Au coeur de la crise moderniste (Paris,

terrestrial city. The terrestrial city, usually with the

1908);

the works of Alfred Loisy,

sanctuary at its center, is a copy of the divine model, executed according to the command of the gods. This is still reflected in the Wisdom of Solomon 9:8—"Thou gavest command to build a sanctuary in thy holy mountain, and an altar in the city of thy habitation, a copy of the holy tabernacle which thou preparedst aforehand from the beginning. Similar ideas are found in India. Royal cities are

1960), a collection of letters by Blondel, Loisy, von Hiigel,

believed to have been constructed after mythical

and others; Baron Friedrich von Hiigel, Selected Letters,

models. The relationship between model and copy

1896-1924 (London, 1928); George Tyrrell, Through Scylla and Charybdis (1907), idem, Christianity at the Crossroads

sometimes implies an additional meaning: in the age

(London, 1908; New York, 1966), and George Tyrrell and

city; the earthly king, residing in the terrestrial city

Maud Petre, Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell, 2 vols. (London, 1912). Histories of the movement and the crisis which them¬ selves form part of the explosion of ideas include Jean Riviere’s article on modernism

in the Dictionnaire de

of gold the Universal Sovereign dwelt in the celestial built after the celestial prototype, promises to revive the golden age. Somewhat similar ideas are also found in Greek philosophy. Plato’s ideal city also has a celestial proto¬

theologie catholique, Vol. X, Part 2, cols. 2010-47, his book, Le Modernisme dans Veglise (Paris, 1929), the article on modernism in the Dictionnaire apologetique de la foi catholique. III, col. 592-637, and the classic pro-modernist accounts of Albert Houtin, Histoire du modernisme catholique (Paris, 1913) and Maud Petre, Modernism, Its

type (Republic 592; cf. 500). The Platonic “Forms” are

Failures and Its Fruits (London, 1918).

cording to several sources it was created by God before JOHN RATTE

[See also Agnosticism; Church as Institution; God; Myth in Biblical Times; Reformation.]

not patterned after the planets, but they, too, are situated in a supra-terrestrial, mythical region, and at times reference is made to astral bodies (Phaedrus). In the Western tradition, the best known example of a city with a celestial prototype is Jerusalem. Ac¬ it was built by men. The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch II (4:2-7) suggests that the celestial Jerusalem, graven by God’s own hands, was shown to Adam before he sinned. The Heavenly Jerusalem inspired the Hebrew prophets and poets (e.g., Isaiah 60ff.; Tobit 13:16ff.). Ezekiel is transported to a high mountain to be shown by God the city of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 40:2). According

The

religious

THE CITY

to the Apocalypse 21:2ff. the new Jerusalem actually

I. ANCIENT CITIES

Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven,

and cosmic symbolism of the city

reaches back to the early stages of human culture. It seems that in none of the great archaic cultures have cities been understood simply as settlements, arbitrarily established at a certain place and in a given form; both the placing and the shape of cities were conceived as related, in a hidden or manifested form, to the structure of the universe. The most common form of this sym¬ bolism is the belief that the cities have astral or divine prototypes, or even descend from heaven; sometimes they were believed to have a relationship to the under¬ world. In both cases, however, they refer to an extra¬ terrestrial reality. Babylonian cities were believed to have their proto¬

descends from heaven. “I John saw the holy city, new prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

In later

Jewish traditions the divine city was actually the start¬ ing point of creation. According to Yoma, “the world was created beginning from Zion,” the holy city. Adam, too, was created and buried in Jerusalem, and there¬ fore, according to well-known Christian traditions, the blood of the crucified Christ could drip down on him and redeem him. The spot on which the city is placed may also have cosmic significance. In the Near East the city was sometimes believed to mark the meeting ground of heaven, earth, and hell. Babylon was a Bab-ilani, a “gate of the gods,” for it was there that the gods descended to earth. But it had also been built upon

427

CITY the “Gate of the Apsu”—Apsu designating the waters

the period, and perhaps also by some symbolic religious

of chaos before Creation. In the Roman world, the

traditions; in the diffusion of the system, however,

mundus—i.e., the trench dug around the place where

economic advantages and practical hygienic consid¬

a city was to be founded—constitutes the point where

erations seem to have played a more important part.

the lower world and the

terrestrial world meet.

Macrobius (Saturnalia I, 16, 18) quotes Varro as saying that “when the mundus is open it is as if the gates

The Romans evinced a deeper concern for the city as a whole, and made significant and lasting contri¬

of the gloomy infernal gods were open.” Another common form of granting significance, to

butions to town planning. Roman towns developed

the city’s location is to assume that it marks the center

mainly from the castrum, basically a gridiron pattern

of the world. In some Indian cities the foundation stone

subdivided into four major parts by two main axes, the

is said to have been placed above the head of the snake

cardo and decumanus. A square was placed at the

which supports the world; in other words, it is placed

crossing of the two axes. Both the major buildings and

exactly at the center of the world. The map of Babylon

the square proper had an axial location. In laying out

shows the city at the center of a vast circular territory

military settlements with permanent

bordered by a river, precisely as the Sumerians pic¬

which were established along the expanding frontiers,

tured Paradise. This belief persisted into later periods.

the Romans followed the same pattern (the so-called

It has rightly been said that the pilgrimages to holy

castra stativa). Another characteristic feature of the

cities (Mecca, Jerusalem) are implied pilgrimages to

Roman town is that it was set off from the landscape

the center of the world (see M. Eliade). The shape of actual ancient cities (as excavated in

fortifications,

surrounding it (contrary to the transition from town to landscape in Greece).

archaeological campaigns) does not always conform to

Although functional considerations clearly played an

the vast body of religious symbolism. Some basic con¬

important part in establishing this pattern, the town

cepts of city planning go back to the third millennium

plan and the foundation of cities did not lose their

The earliest pattern of a planned city, the gridiron

symbolic significance. The historian Polybius and the

scheme (i.e., straight parallel streets crossing other

geographer Hyginus Gromaticus (early second century

straight parallel streets at right angles) is found, in a

a.d.)

b.c.

slightly

irregular

roughly 2500

form,

b.c.).

in

India

(Mohenjo-Daro,

This pattern probably emerged

from the practice of “orientation,” i.e., the establishing of a connection between man-made structures and

describe the standard layout of the castrum town,

but also discuss in detail the “orientation” of the towns and the consecration rites of newly established settle¬ ments. According to Pliny, measurements and propor¬ tions of the castrum were based on “sacred numbers,’

celestial powers. The grid pattern is also foimd in

but so far no conclusive archaeological evidence has

Mesopotamia, and in Egypt King Akhnaton followed

supported his statement.

it in building his capital (ca. 1370

b.c.).

In Greece, ideas on town planning do not appear

The major Roman contributions to city building, the feeling for strict regularity, the organization of the city

The acropolis, the original

in large areas, and the firm shaping of space (best

nucleus of the Greek town, developed from a fortified

expressed in the patterns of squares), declined with the

place of refuge, and usually consisted of an accumula¬

decline of the Empire.

before the fifth century

b.c.

tion of irregularly shaped and dispersed volumes. Greek architectural thought was focused, as most scholars

II. MEDIEVAL

ORGANIC” TOWN

“

agree, on the individual building rather than on the

The medieval approach to the city, emerging in a

town as a whole. Similarly Greek artists were more

period in which urban culture broke down, is complex

deeply interested in the volume and structure of bodies

and ambivalent. One of the characteristic features of

than in the space surrounding the figures.

the early medieval attitude is a disconnection between

The decisive step towards a regular layout of the

the notions of the celestial and the terrestrial city.

city as a whole is traditionally connected with Hip-

Probably the most explicit expression of this attitude

podamus of Miletus (active ca. 470-430 legendary

“Homer

of city

planning.”

b.c.),

a half¬

is to be found in Saint Augustine’s famous work, The

The

“Hip-

City of God. In this work, the image of the city be¬

podamic system” is basically the gridiron scheme with

comes highly metaphorical, the term denoting a com¬

particular emphasis on space classification, and a ten¬

munity rather than a material city. Even in his meta¬

dency towards symmetry. Aristotle contrasts the “Hip-

phors Augustine rarely refers to the city plan, to

podamic system” distinctly with the archaic procedure

architectural elements (walls, gates, squares, etc.), or

of building without plan. Originally the system may 428

In Greece, no ritual laws seem to have existed for the foundation and layout of new settlements.

have been influenced by the mathematical thought of

to actual cities (with the exception of Rome and Jerusalem, both of which assume a highly symbolic

CITY significance). The basis of “cities” is moral values or

towns,

the

innumerable

representations

of

the

metaphysical ideas: the foundation of the terrestrial

“Heavenly Jerusalem” and of other holy cities in the

city is the “love of self” while the celestial city is based

art of the Middle Ages frequently show a regularity

on the “love of God” (XIV, 28; cf. XI, 1 and X, 25).

and symmetrical arrangement which strongly suggest

The two cities, the terrestrial and the celestial, are not

the image of a “planned” city. In early Christian rep¬

only unrelated to each other, but there is a contra¬

resentations (e.g., the fifth-century mosaics in Santa

diction between them. The City of God “is a pilgrim

Maria Maggiore and in SS. Pudenziana), the Heavenly

on the earth” (XVIII, 54); the citizen of the Heavenly

Jerusalem is reduced to a simple round wall, but in

City is “by grace a stranger below, and by grace a

later renderings (see Santa Cecilia) it becomes more

citizen above” (XV, 1); Cain is described (based on

elaborate, sometimes adorned with towers, gables, and

Genesis 4:17) as the founder of a terrestrial city, while

columns. However, in spite of the inclusion of such

Abel, who was conceived as a prefiguration of Christ,

actual architectural elements, the overall shape of the

“being a sojourner, built none” (XV, 1).

sacred city retains a remarkable regularity. Thus, in

Like the Near Eastern thinkers, Augustine conceived

a ninth-century mosaic in San Marco in Venice, the

of a celestial and a terrestrial city. But while in the

city of Bethlehem has a clear oval shape. Even when

Near East the city on earth is believed to be a copy

representing the earthly Jerusalem (representations

of the one in heaven, Augustine sees the two as alien

which are certainly symbolic rather than documentary

to each other. In moral terms they are even mutually

records), the medieval artists tended towards clearly

exclusive: one belongs to either one or the other. Thus

laid out, regular forms.

the hostile attitude towards the (terrestrial) city, an attitude that was to play a major part in medieval thought, is already clearly articulated at this early stage. This attitude may be understood as an expression of a broad historical process which is probably also reflected in the development of the actual medieval

The iconography of the city in medieval art has not yet been systematically studied, but a review of the rich material pertinent to this theme suggests that the hostile attitude towards the city has had a formative influence on artistic imagery. Since the eleventh or twelfth centuries the city is symbolically portrayed not only by architectural motifs (walls, gates, towers) but

town, and in the iconography of the city in medieval

also by secular, inherently vicious figures and scenes,

art. It is significant that in a period as permeated by

considered typical of urban life. The view of the city as a place of carnal temptation, debased entertainment,

symbolism as were the Middle Ages not much thought

and avarice is visually portrayed by figures of jugglers

was given to the symbolism of the city plan, as far

and acrobats, loose women, misers, and, in the late

as actual cities are concerned. The organization of the

Middle Ages, by scenes of gambling seen against an

town as a whole was, as a rule, neither understood nor

urban background. In medieval art, cities are often

desired by medieval builders. This lack of interest led

inhabited by demonic creatures. Such figures and

to the well-known irregular shapes of medieval towns.

scenes, sometimes appearing in the margins of sacred

Even in cities which developed from Roman towns,

texts, frequently anticipate the specific realism of a

the additions and changes which originated in the

burgher art.

Middle Ages were made without consideration for the original Roman layout. The medieval town thus pro¬ vides an almost perfect example of the city that has “grown” versus the “planned” city. The narrow, wind¬ ing streets (ruelles, Gasseri) of medieval towns and their beautiful but unpredictable vistas could be taken as an expression of “organic life," as the writers of the

III. RENAISSANCE IDEAS OF THE CITY The city, both as a social reality and as an architec¬ tural

environment,

played

an

important

part

in

Renaissance thought and art. This may be partly ex¬ plained by the fact that Renaissance culture developed in cities, and was an almost completely urban phe¬

romantic period, in fact, characterized medieval life.

nomenon (even the newly discovered affection for the

“Organic growth” as an overall characterization of

rustic life of the villa attests to its basically urban

the medieval town is not radically challenged by the

character). The acquaintance with ancient literary

fact that, especially in the thirteenth century, some

sources further intensified the interest in the city; the

new cities (villes neuves) were built according to a

polis became an object of study and imitation. But

preconceived plan, and do in fact display some regular

although Renaissance authors often referred to the

features (e.g., Aigues-Mortes, foimded in 1240 by Saint

polis, they usually attributed its characteristics to the

Louis; Montpazier, established in 1284 by Edward I of England). These “new cities” remained exceptions. In contrast to the irregularity of actual medieval

Italian city-states of their own period. Thus Leonardo Bruni, in his Laudatio Florentiae urbis as well as in other writings, describes Florence as a model of an

429

CITY ideal city of justice, a city well-ordered, harmonious, beautiful, governed by taksis and kosmos. Bmni pro¬ claims that Florence is rational and functional in her institutions as well as in her architecture: “Nothing in her

[Florence]

is

confused,

nothing

inconvenient,

nothing without reason, nothing without foundation; all tilings have their place, not only definite but conve¬ nient and where they ought to be. Distinguished are the offices, distinguished the judgements, distinguished the orders.” The architectural structure corresponds to the rationality of the social and political structure. The city is built along a river, a module of urbanism is consistently applied in her architecture. As in a polis, in the center of Florence are the Palazzo dei Signori and the “Temple,” i.e., the Duomo. In this early stage we encounter already a character¬ istic feature of Renaissance urbanistic thought: the ideal city can, at least in part, be identified with a real one. Historians have remarked that the fifteenth cen¬ tury, instead of producing utopias, gave rise to many laudationes of actual cities, investing them with all the virtues of utopian settlements. Venice and Florence were described as embodiments of the political thought of the ancients. Probably the earliest expression of the Renaissance spirit in actual town planning is to be found in Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, written between 1450 and 1472. Alberti’s civic convictions as well as his aesthetic and moral values are clearly reflected in his treatise. The novelty of Alberti s method is that he proposes a scheme for the building of an entiie town. Although he carefully considers the problems of architecture for private and for ecclesiastical purposes, in his city plan every detail is subordinated to the design of the town as a whole. He strongly criticizes the medieval habit of each family’s building a palace and a tower of its own without any considexation of its neighbors, except that of rivalry (VIII, 5). Alberti stresses rational and “functional” elements. The site of the town must be healthful, in temperate climate, conveniently placed for water supply, and easy to defend. Convenience and clarity are the tailing prin¬ ciples of his city plan. The town should be clearly laid out, and the main streets conveniently connected with the bridges and gates; the streets should be wide enough not to be congested but not so wide as to be too hot (IV, 5). The predominant aesthetic principle is that of symmetry, particularly visible in the relation of the shapes of the two rows of houses on both sides of the street (VIII, 6). Although Alberti probably was the first modern author to articulate this attitude, similar tendencies can

430

be discerned in actual Italian architecture of his period. In the Piazza San Marco in Venice, a standard design

had been repeated around a square, and a similar procedure can be found in the square in front of the SS. Annunziata in Florence. The same spirit also governs Pius IPs plans for Pienza, and Nicholas V s idea for linking Saint Peter’s with the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome (but in the latter project Alberti was personally involved). Closely related to Alberti, and probably influenced by him, is Filarete, whose Trattato di architettura was composed in 1460-64. It is written in a somewhat romantic form which, as scholars have noted, brings it into close relation to the Hypnerotomachia polifili (written a few years later), and on ground of which the author has sometimes been called a “romantic. Part of the treatise

describes

an imaginary city,

Sforzinda. Filarete depicts the pageantry accompany¬ ing the founding of the city, the time of which is chosen according to astrological observation. But behind these “romantic” details there is a rational spirit which reaches its clearest expression in the outlining of the town plan. Filarete’s ideal city has the overall shape of an octagonal star with a round piazza at its center from which a radial system of streets emerges. Filarete is wholeheartedly antimedieval, i.e., he is a radical critic of the city that has merely “grown.” In his treatise great emphasis is placed on regularity and on the importance of having large squares. To the author’s mind, however, the proposed city is no artificial struc¬ ture; Filarete believes that Sforzinda, the ville radieuse of the Renaissance, is “beautiful and good and perfectly in accord with the natural order.

At the same time,

Sforzinda is designed to meet the economic and social needs of the community. Moreover, the town plan of Sforzinda, although “perfectly in accord with the nat¬ ural order,” translates into stone the political and social order of the Italian city-states of the fifteenth century. Cosmic and religious symbolism appears in the central buildings of Sforzinda. The dome of the Cathedral is covered by a mosaic representation of God in the form of a “resplendent sun that lights all the dome with its rays of gold,” surrounded by a hierarchy of angels and saints. On the pavement beneath the dome there is a map of “the lands and waters,” surrounded by the symbols of the seasons and the elements (Book IX). In several of his notes Leonardo da Vinci (who in this case was interested mainly in problems of engi¬ neering) sketches an interesting model of an ideal town: the healthful city is built near the seashore or along a river (so that the dirt may be carried away by the water), and is constmcted on two planes connected to one another by stairs. On the upper level live the “gentlemen” (gli uomini gentili), on the lower level the poor (la poveraglia). Traffic and services are con-

CITY centrated on the lower plane. The aesthetic principles

temple is located. The temple itself, Campanella says,

governing the town plan are largely functional. The

“is perfectly round, free on all sides, but supported

beauty of the city follows from its functional form and

by massive

its mathematical foundations. Thus, a given proportion

admirable work, in the center or ‘pole’ of the temple

and elegant columns.

This dome,

an

should dictate the height of the houses and the width

. . . has an opening in the middle directly above the

of the streets. At the same time, the city should be

single altar in the center. . . . On the altar is nothing

built “according to human measure,” a well-known

but two globes, of which the larger is a celestial, the

concept in the Renaissance which, in the context of

smaller a terrestrial one.”

urban planning, is already found in Filarete’s treatise,

The round form, an old symbol of perfection, has

and was later hilly expressed by Francesco di Giorgio.

an interesting history in utopian town planning, and

In sum, then, in fifteenth-century thought the ideal

frequently occurs both in the form of a radiating center

city is, first of all, a rational structure (and even in

and as a concentric arrangement. Its immediate source

studying ancient models the rational elements are

in Renaissance and baroque periods is the central plan

emphasized). Further, Quattrocento thought of the

in religious architecture.

model city, although containing some elements of cos¬

Campanella’s City of the Sun is an encyclopedic

mic symbolism, is mainly concerned with problems of

system with a “celestial” principle of organization. On

civil life, of how to make justice and wisdom work

the walls of the temple are depicted all the stars of

effectively in the community and be clearly expressed

heaven with their relation to things below. The walls

by urban architecture. Finally, the ideal city of the

of the houses bear depictions of mathematical figures,

fifteenth century is altogether on earth; it is neither

animals, and the different occupations of man; on the

merged with, nor juxtaposed to, a “heavenly

outermost circle or wall are exhibited statues of great

city.

In the sixteenth century urbanistic thought under¬

men, moral leaders, and founders of religions. The City

goes a significant transformation: different types of

of the Sun has indeed been understood (in accordance

symbolism acquire a greater significance in the outlin¬

with Campanella’s intentions) as a “book” and has had

ing of the town plan than they had in the fifteenth

a significant influence on pedagogic thought. Cornen-

century, and the ties between the ideal and the real

ius’ Orhis pictus is clearly patterned after Campanel¬

city are less close. Although this process takes place

la’s City of the Sun. Utopian thought in general has frequently been in¬

under the impact of the Counter-Reformation, there is no return to medieval attitudes or models. Human¬ istic symbols prevail, but they are often transformed, given a new meaning and transplanted into a new realm. The most original contribution of this period is found in utopian town planning. The cities described in the utopias are separated from real cities; they are not placed in heaven, but are located in distant regions. Geographical isolation is a persistent characteristic of utopian descriptions. Civic functions, although de¬ scribed in detail, are usually less important than sym¬ bolic aspects in the outlining of the overall shape of the utopian town plan. The architecture usually is of an abstract regularity. Utopian literature abounds in references to the ideal town, but the most detailed description of the town plan is given in Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, written in 1602 and first published, in a Latin version, in 1623. Although Campanella was a monk trained in the Dominican convent of Naples, his utopian city (which he locates in a distant isle) is governed by a solar religion, and an astral cult performs in it. For both the town as a whole and the central building Campanella accepts the round form as the most perfect. The overall shape of the City of the Sun is round. The houses are arranged as circular walls, or gin, concentric with the central circle in which the

terpreted as implying a criticism of the society in which the utopia was written; what the author feels as bad, or as missing, in his own social environment is corrected, or supplied, in his utopia. This may also hold true of the utopian town plan. The rigidly planned and perfectly regular utopian town constitutes a criti¬ cism of the “naturally grown” cities in which the authors lived. The narrow streets and confused ar¬ rangement of most medieval cities are criticized by depicting their opposite as ideal and perfect. In this respect, utopian town planning represents another chapter in the history of the debate between the planned and the grown city. The rational and easily comprehended plan of the imaginary town is also related to the authors views on the desirable structure of society as a whole. Partic¬ ularly in the case of Campanella, the city plan seems to express the perfectly regulated and completely centralized structure of society which he envisaged. The utopian town plan thus becomes a mirror image of the utopian society. /V. MODERN CITY PLANNING

The hectic social transformations and the rapid in¬ crease in urban population in modern times led to a heightened awareness of the social and economic

431

CITY problems of the city. There also emerged moral atti¬ tudes towards the urban settlement; it was criticized as a place of vice or hailed as the promise of a radiant

city” and Le Corbusier’s cite radieuse. Ledoux’s poetic gifts become particularly evident in his plans for indi¬

future. Such thoughts and attitudes were expressed, and

vidual buildings which, although designed in the form

modified, in actual town planning. The Enlightenment conceived of the city as a place

sonal, subjective symbolism.

of virtue. Voltaire considered London, the typical modern city of his time, as the fostering mother of social freedom and mobility as against the fixed hierar¬ chy in rural society. He noticed that even the aristoc¬ racy, traditionally connected with land, moved into the cities, bringing culture to the hitherto uncouth towns¬ men. Adam Smith, whose attitude to the city was more ambivalent than Voltaire’s, also defended the city in relationship to the cormtry. But he did see some of the moral deficiencies of town life, particularly its “unnaturalness and dependence.

The nostalgia for

rural life that was to characterize significant parts of English social thought of the nineteenth century is already expressed by Adam Smith. In Germany, where no large cities existed, the radical humanists exalted the communitarian ideal of the Greek city-state; but also the medieval town appeared to the early romantics as a culture-forming agent, and as the seat of virtues like loyalty, honor, and simplicity. German thinkers of the early nineteenth century

(Schiller,

Fichte,

Holderlin) fused the characteristics of the Greek polis and the medieval town into the image of a burgher-city as a model of an ethical community. In the town planning of the period the ideal of the “planned” city clearly prevailed, although in actual fact most cities were not built, or expanded, according to an overall plan. The emerging science of city plan¬ ning was challenged to provide rationally for the necessities of a progressively more industrialized and mechanized society. This led to the conception that the city as a whole is “architecture.” Its spatial rela¬ tionships, its organization, and the forms and levels of activity in it require that a city be “built. At a very early stage of the modern period the visionary architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) drew an elaborate plan for a “built” city. A project, begun in 1773 when he was asked to propose some improvements in the residential quarters of a small, salt-producing town, continued all his life and resulted in the publication of L Architecture consideree sous le rapport de Vart, des moeurs, et de la legislation (1804). Ledoux planned five volumes, but completed only one. Filled with enthusiasm for J. J. Rousseau and the hope for an improved social order, Ledoux envisioned his ideal city and drew plans for it, thereby boldly com¬ bining traditional patterns with original motifs. The shape of his ideal town is a semicircle, with the factory 432

He thus anticipated both Ebenezer Howard’s “garden

at its center and the important buildings on the rings.

of simple geometric shapes, are permeated by a per¬ Ledoux’s starting point was comparatively modem (the salt-producing plant of Chaux) but the solutions he proposed place him within the tradition of utopian town planning. Like Campanella and other authors of utopias he emphasized the principle of the “planned city” and like them he preferred the round form. The vision of an ideal city continued to exercise its fascination in the later nineteenth century, but more attention had now to be paid to problems arising from economic and technical conditions. One specific type of “built” city was proposed by Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928), a London architect who was deeply in¬ fluenced by an extended visit to the United States. In order to counteract the industrial congestion of modem cities (mainly in England), Howard evolved the Con¬ cept of the garden city. He published his proposals in his work Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Reform (1892), reprinted as Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902). Howard envisaged a self-contained town of strictly predetermined size (approximately 35,000 inhabitants) and plan. A well-balanced proportion between the urban area and agricultural land is essential. Any in¬ crease in population would be met by the creation of satellites, none nearer than four miles to the original city. The town plan of the garden city owes much to Ledoux, and through him to the utopian tradition. Howard’s imagined city is round; factories and houses are placed on belts of open land to combine town and cormtry advantages. (In this particular feature Howard is perhaps preceded by some English and American industrialists who moved their factories into the coun¬ try and established villages arormd them.) Of particular interest in Howard’s plan is the fact that he paid atten¬ tion to, and made provisions for, the specific joys of urban life. Thus, in a wide glass arcade (significantly called “Crystal Palace”) near a large park, that kind of shopping is done “which requires the joy of deliber¬ ation and selection.” Howard’s garden city allows large space for nature (not more than one sixth of the general area should be covered by buildings), but it is a built town, with rigidly prescribed boulevards, distribution of buildings, etc. Even nature is planned, being funda¬ mentally recreation ground. Howard’s close relation to what is known as the “English garden” is obvious. Town planning in the twentieth century, although it largely remains on paper, shows the profound changes in urbanistic thought. Most of the problems of contemporary town planning were anticipated by

CITY Tony Gamier (1869-1914) in his first project for an industrial town, designed in 1901-04. In his further projects and commissions, and in his book Une cite industrielle (1917) he discusses his plans in great detail. Clearly distinguishing between the different functions of the city (living, work, leisure, education, traffic), Gamier undertakes to design a town which will fully serve the needs of man in an industrial age. A bold innovator in the use of materials and in the shape of individual buildings (preferring an ascetic geometry), he is also highly original in the disposition of the town as a whole: he separates vehicular and pedestrian traffic, designs a residential district without enclosed courtyards but featuring continuous green areas, and

problem. Without ever allowing himself to be moved by “local color” or aestheticism, he denounced the blemishes of modern cities, that is, those aspects of the city not well enough adapted to their various functions. He also rejected the utopian ideas of limiting the size of cities, and contrary to Frank Lloyd Wright, who advocated the diffusion of urban communities, was opposed to horizontal spreading of the urban complex. Le Corbusier’s work in urbanism bears the mark of both rationalism and a philosophical image of man. His rationalism leads to an analysis of the city’s differ¬ ent functions, and to an allocation of distinct spaces to each function. The establishing of an orderly rela¬ tionship between traffic lanes, on the one hand, and

plans a community center that anticipates contem¬

living and working zones, on the other, is of primary

porary social centers. Another architect and town planner who anticipated

approach is Le Corbusier’s famous hierarchy of roads

the problems and shapes of the modem city, Antonio Sant’ Elia (1880-1916), was sometimes associated with the Futurists. Sant’ Elia was greatly attracted by some features of North American civilization, particularly by the romantic aspects of its technical development and by the progressive expansion of an industrial me¬ tropolis. His grandiose project for a Citta Nuova was shown in Milan in 1914. In the catalogue to the exhibi¬ tion Sant’ Elia published a manifesto on the need of breaking with the past. The “New City

should corre¬

spond to the mentality of men freed from the bonds of tradition and conventions. In his many drawings a major theme is the architecture of a metropolis which is the result of a technological and industrialized soci¬ ety. In designing towering buildings with exterior ele¬ vators, multi-level road bridges, and imaginary fac¬ tories (“monuments of the city of the future ), Sant Elia raised these modern forms to the level of symbols. Gamier and Sant Elia influenced Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier’s work in urbanism consists of a large number of articles and books, and an impressive num¬ ber of projects for town planning. Only a small part of these projects has materialized (of particular importance is the so-called Marseille Block of 1952). Le Corbusier took a decisive step beyond Gamier and Sant’ Elia. While Gamier still thought of small towns, limited to 35,000 inhabitants who are all engaged in industry, and Sant’ Elia’s visions remained in bare outline, Le Corbusier planned in detail for a city of 3,000,000 inhabitants. From the outset he steered to¬ wards the problems of the “change-over town

(as he

later called it), a metropolis with diverse functions which must be disentangled. A significant part of Le Corbusier s theoretical inquiry into the urban problem is a critical apprecia¬ tion of cities of the past, particularly of the recent past, and of the solutions that have been proposed to this

importance in this context. A famous result of this (the 7 V system), starting with 1 V, an artery carrying international and inter-urban traffic, and ending with 7 V, a fine capillary system in the zone reserved for children and schools.

The

analytical

character

is

expressed even in small details. “So great is Le Cor¬ busier’s need for logical organization that, having to lay out the vast capital of Candigarh, he divides the vegetation to be used into six categories, each of which receives a precise function (F. Choay, p. 16). Le Corbusier combines the analysis of the city’s functions with a philosophical image of man, for whom the city is built. Although he emphasizes the specific¬ ally modern conditions of urban life (millions of inhab¬ itants in one metropolis, the decisive role of traffic) and

proposes

specifically

modern

solutions

(the

“Cartesian skyscraper,” the zoning of traffic), he is deeply indebted to

the humanistic tradition.

The

thought of the Utopians (especially of Charles Fourier) was of particularly great importance for his work. This is reflected even in his language: terms such as “radiant city,” “architecture of happiness” are both frequent in his writings and characteristic of his ideas and attitudes. In his work, both in individual buildings and in town planning, he tries to achieve an “adaptation to the human scale”: in individual buildings by applying the “Modulor” (his own invention of a scale of architec¬ tural proportions related to the proportions of the human body), in the designing of the city as a whole by assuming an hour of walking as the basic unit of town planning. In his town planning he emphasizes the city’s center: on a small scale it is a community center (as in St. Die, 1945-46), on a monumental scale it is a capitol (as in Candigarh, the metropolis of Punjab, begun in 1950). Under Le Corbusier’s influence the “Athens Charter” was published by the international architectural organization (CIAM) in 1933, set-

433

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE ting out data and requirements connected with the planning of modern cities under five headings (Dwell¬ ings,

Recreation,

Work,

Transportation,

Historic

Buildings). Le Corbusier’s work makes it evident that in the twentieth century, as in former periods, town planning is not only a highly complex technical task but involves philosophical ideas and the creation, or application, of traditional, symbolic forms. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. General. Sir Patrick Abercrombie, Town and City Planning (London, 1944). Joseph Gantner, Grundfomien der europaischen Stadt (Vienna, 1928). Pierre Lavedan, Histoire de Vurbanisme, 2 vols. (Paris, 1926, 1941). Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York, 1938); idem, The City in History: Its Origin, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York, 1961). Camillo Sitte, The Art of Building Cities (New York, 1945). Paul Zucker, Town and Square: From the Agora to the Village Green (New York, 1959). For bibliogra¬ phies, see: George C. Bestor and Holway R. Jones, City Planning: A Basic Bibliography of Sources and Trends (Sacramento, 1962); Philip Dawson and Sam B. Warner, Jr., “A Selection of Works Relating to the History of Cities,” in Oscar Handlin and John Burchard, The Historian and

the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 270-90.

rissbildung der deutschen Stadt im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1912). Achille Luchaire, Les communes franqaises, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1911). Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities (Princeton, 1925). Earl Baldwin Smith, Architectural Symbolism of Imperial Rome and the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1956); idem, La citta nell’alto medioevo (Spoleto, 1959). 4. Renaissance and Utopian Town Planning. Wolfgang Braunfels, Italienische Stadtebaukunst (Berlin, 1950). Andre Chastel, “Cites ideales: Marqueteurs italiens du XVe siecle,”

L’oeil (Dec. 1957). Horst de la Croix, “Military Architecture and the Radial City Plan in Sixteenth Century Italy,” The Art Bulletin, 42 (1960), 263-90. S. Lang, “The Ideal City from Plato to Howard,” Architectural Review, 112 (1952). Robert Klein, “L’urbanisme utopique de Filarete a Valentin Andreae,” Actes du Colloque international sur les utopies

a la Renaissance (Brussels, 1963), pp. 209-30. Georg Miinter, Idealstadte: Ihre Geschichte vom 15.-17. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1957). Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London, 1949). 5. Modem.

Giulio C.

Argan,

Albert Morance, L’oeuvre de Tony Gamier (Paris, 1938). Franjoise Choay, Le Corbusier (New York, 1960). Yvan Christ, Projets et divagations de Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (Paris, 1961). Gordon Cullen, Townscape (London, 1962). Frederick Gibberd, Town Design (London, 1953). Roland Rainer, Stadtebau und Wohnkultur (Tubingen, 1948). MOSHE BARASCH

2. Antiquity. India and the Near East: B. B. Dutt, Town

Planning in Ancient India (Calcutta and Simla, 1925); Mircea Eliade, “Centre du monde, temple, maison,” Le symbolisme cosmique des monuments religieux (Rome, 1957), pp. 57-82; Henri Frankfort, The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient (Baltimore, 1959), with a good bibliogra¬ phy; Francis John Haverfield, Ancient Town Planning (Oxford, 1913); Stuart Piggott, Some Ancient Cities of India (London, 1945); Earl Baldwin Smith, Egyptian Architecture as Cultural Expression (London, 1933). Greece: Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis: The Ancient City (New York, 1955); M. Erdmann, Zur Kunde der Hellenistischen Stadtegrundungen (Strasbourg, 1879); Knud Fabricius, “Stadtebau der Briechen,” in Pauly, Realencyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, revised by Georg Wissowa (1929); A. H. M. Jones, The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian (Oxford, 1940); Roland Martin, L’urbanisme dans la Grece

[See also Astrology; Enlightenment; Iconography; Organicism; Renaissance; Romanticism in Literature; Technology;

Utopia.]

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE I The phrase

“civil disobedience" now used so widely

for all cases of individual or group dissent from civil law appeared on the scene quite late. Henry David Thoreau is usually credited with coining the term,

(Paris, 1956). Rome: R. C. Bosanquet, “Greek and Roman

though it is not known for certain that he did or why

Towns,” Town Planning Review (1914); William Warde

he changed the title of his essay, later to become world

Fowler, Social Life in Rome at the Age of Cicero (London,

famous, from “Resistance to Civil Government” to

1908); Leon Homo, Rome imperiale et Vurbanisme dans

“Civil Disobedience.”

Vantiquite (Paris, 1951); Guido Kaschnitz-Weinberg, Uber die Grundformen der Italisch-Romischen Struktur, 2 vols. (Munich, 1944, 1950). 3. The Middle Ages. R. Borrmann, “Vom Stadtebau im islamischen Osten,” Stadtebauliche Vortrage (1914). A. E.

Stadtanlagen in SudFrankreich (Berlin, 1910). Edith Ennen, Fruhgeschichte der europaischen Stadt (Bonn, 1953). Karl Gruber, Die Gestalt der deutschen Stadt: Ihr Wandel aus der geistigen Ordnung der Zeiten (Munich, 1952). Christoph Klaiber, Die GrundBrinckmann,

434

“II pensiero critico di

Antonio Sant’ Elia,” L’arte (Sept. 1930). Jean Badovici and

Spatmittelalterliche

The concept of civil disobedience, as distinct from the phrase, has a long and notable histoiy, appearing already as the Antigone theme in Greek drama and in the antiwar motif of Lysistrata, where the women, in addition to deserting their men, seize the Acropolis and the Treasury of Athens. The conflict between civil law and conscience was sharply featured when the Jews passively resisted the introduction of icons into Jerusa¬ lem by Pilate, procurator of Judaea, and by Jesus in

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE his dramatic purification of the temple, when he over¬

of just laws if such disobedience appears to be an

turned the tables of the money changers and the seats

effective way to focus public attention on unjust laws.

of those who legally sold pigeons. The conflict has been

The defiance must be publicly announced, since the

highlighted in the history of English-speaking countries

point of it is to bring the unjust and/or unconstitutional

many times, though rarely more forcefully than when

laws, policies, or commands to the attention of the

Milton refused to obey the licensing and censorship

public, for the purpose either of stirring its conscience

laws of seventeenth-century England and when the

or of frightening it into helping repeal the laws, change

Abolitionists attacked the institution of slavery in

the policies, or mitigate the commands; or to get the

nineteenth-century America. The most widely known

attention of the courts so that their constitutionality

cases of the conflict in the twentieth century are

can be judged. The defiance may take the form of doing

Gandhi’s campaigns against colonial rule in South

what is prohibited (say, burning a draft card) or of

Africa and India, passive resistance campaigns against

failing to do what is required (say, refusing to report

Nazi occupation governments during World War II,

for induction). The defiance, moreover, must be a pre¬

and the civil rights campaign against segregation in

meditated act, understood to be illegal by the perpe¬

the United States starting in 1954. Civil disobedience

trator, and understood to carry prescribed penalties.

attitudes and techniques also spread into attacks against

Willingness to accept such penalties is a crucial part

the Vietnam War, draft laws, poverty, and the authori¬

of that sort of civil disobedience which hopes to stir

tarian structure of colleges and universities in the

the public conscience, while eagerness to escape pun¬

1960’s. As the examples of it make clear, the concept of

disobedience which aims to pressure and frighten the

civil disobedience is extremely rich and diverse, not at all precise and specific—the way it is with most terms or ideas outside of a formal system. Yet much can be done to analyze and clarify the concept, though not formally define it, if attention is paid to recurring themes in the rich context of historical examples. An appreciation of these themes, without fixation on any one case, will, hopefully, make it possible to avoid the emotionally persuasive definitions of what civil disobe¬ dience “really” is, so popular at times as different groups try to put the phrase to work for them. The concept of civil disobedience presupposes, first of all, some formal structure of law, enforced by estab¬

ishment is perfectly compatible with that sort of civil public. The defiance, finally, may be either nonviolent or violent and still count as civil disobedience. To restrict the concept of civil disobedience to nonviolent acts, as some authors do, ignores the difficulty of finding a precise dividing line between “nonviolence” and “violence” (Is rigidly blocking a doorway nonviolent?) as well as the facts of usage. Defiant acts of a violent sort, if they are focused, at least for the present, on specific laws, policies, or commands (and hence are short of unrestricted defiance of the whole government) and meet the above criteria, are in fact called acts of civil disobedience just as much as those which meet the same criteria but are nonviolent.

lished governmental authorities, from which an indi¬ vidual cannot dissociate himself except by change of citizenship. (Disobedience in the contexts of family, clan, church, lodge, or business does not count as civil disobedience.) It is not necessary, however, that an individual ultimately accept the governmental frame¬ work in which he acts disobediently; he may be ac¬ cepting it only conditionally at a given time as a nec¬ essary but temporary fact of life or as a step in die direction toward the framework he ultimately accepts. To insist on the ultimate acceptance of the framework in which the act occurs, as some authors do, has the absurd consequence of denying that Thoreau, Tolstoi, and Gandhi engaged in acts of civil disobedience, since Thoreau and Tolstoi were anarchists and Gandhi was protesting colonial rule. Civil disobedience, then, consists in publicly an¬ nounced defiance of specific laws, policies, or com¬ mands of that formal structure which an individual or group believes to be unjust and/or unconstitutional. The defiance may also take the form of disobedience

II Assuming that the notion of civil disobedience is reasonably clear, the question immediately arises why anyone should be civilly disobedient. Is it ever legiti¬ mate? If so, under what conditions? The two most important justifications of civil disobedience tradi¬ tionally have been the Higher Law doctrine and some version of Natural or Human Rights. 1.

The Higher Law doctrine asserts that God s law

takes precedence over civil law whenever it can be shown that the two come into conflict. Man is ordinar¬ ily duty bound to obey the civil law and magistrates since the benefits of orderly government are large indeed; on the other hand, man cannot, out of higher duty, obey the civil law or magistrates if they command him to break the word of God. While the Higher Law doctrine was never wholly absent from thought and practice during most of the career of Western civilization, it was usually sporadic and individual in nature. Lor the most part, people

435

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE were happy to accept the Higher Law concept without drawing its painful corollary of civil disobedience. The most sustained development of the concept and its most thorough application was the work of those nine¬ teenth-century American abolitionists who owed their inspiration either to transcendentalism or to the pietistic, free-will Trinitarianism that came to dominate many branches of Protestantism early in the century. According to the transcendentalists, the Law of God says that men are morally equal, while certain aspects of civil law in the United States either deny this or prevent its recognition. In view of this conflict, it becomes the duty of an honest man to follow God’s law and defy Fugitive Slave Laws and other aspects of the civil law (the extent of violation depending upon whether or not one countenances violence, and to what extent). Not to do so is to be a “practical atheist”—that

itself accomplished nothing, but for many people his act became highly significant as a symbol of passive resistance to injustice. There is little doubt that it can be so construed and that Thoreau so intended it. But the truly radical nature of his political beliefs is by no means adequately suggested by this standard inter¬ pretation, for Thoreau was essentially an idealistic anarchist who believed that all civil law that touched moral matters was an unacceptable encroachment on the rights of an individual. A majority vote, he thought, does not establish what is true or right. In the ideal state all individuals would act according to their own insights into Universal Truth and there would thus be no need of civil government at all, except for the exercise of practical affairs like garbage collection, road building, and other matters where decisions of

is, one who says he believes in God but does not follow

conscience are not involved. Thoreau stated his an¬

his commands. The transcendentalists, while united on the principle

archism succinctly by saying that if that government is best which governs least, then that government is

of Higher Law, certainly did not agree on how far to

absolutely best which does not govern at all.

extend the commitment to civil disobedience. Emerson

The majority of antislavery activists owed their

was reluctant to extend it very far because he felt that

Higher Law inspiration to the pietistic, free-will Trini¬

the only permanent solution to the evils of the world

tarianism that flourished in the first half of the nine¬

is a regeneration of men’s souls. While he spoke sharply

teenth century as a protest against both the theological

against slavery, it remained for transcendentalists like

and social conservatism of Calvinism. Although there

Theodore Parker and George William Curtis to be

were many differences, this “New Light

theology

civilly disobedient and to answer effectively the critics

shared with the transcendentalists the notion of indi¬

of this activist policy. The critic is wrong, Parker and Curtis said, in think¬

vidual inner light that provides direct communication with God. When the law of God so obtained is violated

ing that civil disobedience will lead to chaos or under¬

by civil law, as in the case of slavery, the duty of the

mine the benefits of orderly government. Proponents

Christian is to be disobedient. The most interesting of

of the Higher Law recognize the importance of stabil¬

this group, because they were the most radical and

ity and so are willing to obey many questionable laws;

effective, were the Oberlinities, both the College and

they claim only that some laws and policies are so

community, led by Asa Mahan, Charles Finney, John

thoroughly immoral that they must be publicly dis¬

Keep, James H. Fairchild, and others. They ran a

obeyed as well as denounced else one renounces his

fabulously successful Underground Railway and par¬

own humanity. Moreover, the man of principle who

ticipated in the famous Wellington Rescue Case that

will not obey a vicious law is that sort of person who

provided much important propaganda for the young

can be counted upon as the strongest upholder of law in general since he will not break laws for selfish rea¬

Republican Party. While the Oberlinites were thoroughly radical, they

sons or obey the law only when the constable is watch¬

completely rejected the views of William Lloyd Garri¬

ing. Finally, a person who would obey any law just

son. Garrison was radical, they felt, in a completely

because it is a law is utterly immoral, for the vilest

useless way. He rejected both the Christian Church

crimes are often committed on the excuse of following

and the United States Constitution because they pro¬

orders of a legally constituted superior. If the colonials

vided a framework that tolerated slavery. He believed

had obeyed the law, they would never have thrown

that the only thing to do was for the North to secede

the tea into Boston Harbor and there would not have been a United States of America.

436

of jail when friends paid it in his stead. The protest

and start over. The Oberlinites felt that this plan might help the consciences of some Northerners but would

Henry David Thoreau is, no doubt, the most famous

not help the slaves in the slightest. It was better, they

advocate of civil disobedience among the transcenden¬

felt, to make the Church militant (they helped organize

talists. It is well known that he refused to pay his poll

the American Missionary Association); to work through

tax by way of protest against the Mexican War and

the courts (they effectively nullified the Ohio Anti-

the expansion of slavery, and that he was turned out

Slave Law); to help create new political channels (they

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE worked for the Free-Soil and Republican Parties); and, finally, to be civilly disobedient in an effective fashion (they never lost a slave to federal authorities). 2. The notions of “natural rights” and “human rights” are by no means identical since the former usually involves an absolutistic and rationalistic outlook in moral philosophy and is usually based on a theolog¬ ical foundation such as “God-given rights,” while the latter does not usually entail such conceptions but leaves open the possibility, at least, of relativistic, voluntaristic, and humanistic foundations for man’s basic rights. The concept of human rights is the one usually used these days, not simply because ours is a more voluntaristic and humanistic era but because this concept includes many social and economic freedoms which seem important to our age, along with the more traditional concept of freedom as “freedom from” various restraints. For example, the Universal Declara¬ tion of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, recognizes, among others, the rights to life, liberty, personal security, and equal protection of the law; freedom from slavery and degrading punishment; freedom of thought, conscience, speech, religion, and peaceful assembly; and the right to an education, choice of one’s own employment, favorable working conditions, and protection against unemployment. The concepts of natural and human rights, with all their differences, still have a core of common meaning, namely, that there are certain rights which belong to a man independent of his position in a civil society. Since society does not bestow these rights, it cannot justifiably take them away. This is the point in saying that such rights are inalienable. The function of society, far from interfering with these rights, is to sustain and protect them and to adjudicate conflicts that arise in the common pursuit of these rights. If a civil govern¬ ment subverts these rights in a wholesale fashion, it is not fulfilling its proper role and hence the people are justified in overthrowing that spurious government (with the least violence possible) and erecting a legiti¬ mate one in its place. It follows as a corollary of this general principle that if a government which on the whole respects its proper role nevertheless infringes or denies some specific rights, either to a majority or minority of people, then they have the right to civilly disobey the offending laws, policies, or commands (either nonviolently or violently, depending upon fur¬ ther arguments). The notion of natural or human rights, it should be noted, strongly supports Thoreau’s contention that a majority vote cannot decide what is right or wrong, and helps put the concept of democracy in its proper perspective. The notion of Popular Sovereignty es¬ poused by Stephen Douglas in pre-Civil War days was

supposedly the democratic answer to the problem of slavery in the territories. Let the settlers in each terri¬ tory vote on whether or not to have slaves! This con¬ cept of democracy, of course, subverts the whole notion of human rights and is the rule of the majority to which Thoreau so strongly objected. The democratic princi¬ ple envisioned by most of the architects of the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution and of the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations is that the rule of the majority is the best way known to man of adjudicating the conflicts which inevitably arise in the common pursuit of their human rights by millions of people. It would have been shocking indeed to these people to have envisioned the democratic principle as deciding who is going to be allowed to have human rights. The concept of human rights provides, no doubt, the most prominent justification of civil disobedience in the humanistically oriented modern world, and yet prudential considerations are sometimes offered by believers in the concept to soften the commitment to civil disobedience. These prudential considerations have always been with us (Bay [1968], p. 476). Thomas Hobbes represented the extreme position, of accepting the concept of natural rights and yet, out of fear of anarchy, rejecting not only civil disobedience but even dissent. David Hume provided a teleological, utilitarian approach to the relative limits of obedience and diso¬ bedience to civil magistrates and adopted “with con¬ siderable vehemence” a libertarian position in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40). Later, out of fear of anarchy again, he recommended “exact obedience " to the law of the land and the authority of its adminis¬ trators. Jeremy Bentham saw no more point in these sweeping generalizations and anxieties about civil dis¬ obedience and anarchy than he did about generaliza¬ tions in any other part of moral philosophy. On his view, each situation and political context should be carefully studied in its own right and the likely conse¬ quences predicted. If the prediction is for fewer overall mischievous consequences by disobedience than by submission, then it is the duty, not simply the right, of the conscientious citizen to resist the government. To Bentham’s counsel, the modern proponent of human rights who takes civil disobedience seriously adds that the cry of anarchy and civil disintegration is all too often unintentionally and at times even inten¬ tionally the mask of vested interests. There are, to be sure, genuine dangers in civil disobedience, well un¬ derstood by its intelligent agents, but the dangers are to be weighed by a believer in human rights and not used as a rationalization for doing nothing when he has the security and someone else suffers the infringe¬ ment of human rights. The point is simply this: if a

437

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE person is so concerned about civil stability that he

tian must refuse jury duty, conscription, and any state

cannot conceive any conditions that would justify dis¬

work, and he must likewise refuse to participate in any

obedience, then he really has abandoned any tenable

violent efforts to overthrow the state. Property, Tolstoi

concept of human rights.

believed, is the private usurpation of what belongs to all men and is the source of most greedy activity and Ill

Assuming that at least in some cases civil disobe¬

socialistic anarchist, though he never called himself an

dience is justified, the question of what form it should

anarchist since anarchists frequently justify violence.

take immediately arises. Should it always be nonviolent

Gandhi called his own concept of disobedience the

in nature or is the use of violence ever justified? And

doctrine of Satyagraha, or “truth force.” To him the

if violence is ever justified, what limits must be set upon

concept of passive resistance came to seem inadequate

it? Efforts to answer these questions form a large bloc

to capture the full scope of nonviolence practiced as

of the literature on civil disobedience.

a matter of principle. One must not only resist passively

The defense of nonviolence has taken two radically

the injustice of government but do so without feelings

different forms, one prudential in nature, the other a

of animosity or hatred. Complete commitment to the

matter of principle. The prudential argument holds

love of fellow men is necessary not only as intrinsically

that if government forces are so strong and oppressive

right but as providing that “truth force” which is

that they would retaliate tenfold against any violence,

crucial to the success of civil disobedience. The adjec¬

then they should be opposed only nonviolently or by

tive “civil” in the phrase “civil disobedience” meant

“passive resistance.” If the situation changes, if the

for Gandhi peaceful, courteous, “civilized” resistance,

strength of the oppressive government declines, then

and it is for this reason that some scholars have insisted

it may be violently resisted. There can be little doubt

that nonviolence is part of the very meaning of “civil

that this was the attitude of the valiant civilians in

disobedience.” Admiration for Gandhi’s views and

Norway and Denmark during the Nazi occupation

campaigns, however, is not a good reason for making

whose campaigns of resistance are so vividly described

these views definitive of a network of views only more

in (and were influenced by) John Steinbeck’s The Moon

or less closely related. Such admiration is also not a

is Down. It was a grave offense to have a copy of this

good reason for overlooking the historically relevant

book in one’s possession in any Nazi occupied country.

use of the adjective “civil” in speaking of the civil

The most important defenders of nonviolence as a

government or the civil magistrate simply to distin¬

Mohandas

guish them from ecclesiastical, military, and other

Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The principle

authorities. Thoreau in the earlier title of his essay,

matter of principle

438

hence the root of violence. Tolstoi, in short, was a

were

Leo

Tolstoi,

usually invoked to justify nonviolence was the religious

“Resistance to Civil Government,” surely did not wish

and moral belief that love is necessarily good and hence

to imply that the American government was distinctive

that violence by its very nature is evil; that only love

in its courteousness.

of others brings happiness and the realization of a

Gandhi’s formulation of civil disobedience was, in

moral self, while anger and violence debase the char¬

part, much like that of the Oberlin abolitionists. The

acter of the agent as well as wounding and killing

lawbreaker should openly and quietly disobey unjust

others. There was a seriatim influence among Tolstoi,

laws and suffer the consequences of such disobedience

Gandhi, and King, though it must not be assumed that

with dignity. However, Gandhi also felt it was legiti¬

their concepts and campaigns of disobedience were

mate to dissent from unjust policies and commands of

identical simply because they agreed on these princi¬

a government by disobeying laws which were not

ples of nonviolence.

themselves unjust provided that breaking these just

According to Tolstoi, man’s conscience reveals to

laws did not itself violate principles of conscience. This

him a God that is the supreme Good, not a personal

addition to the Oberlin formula suggests that while the

God but a God “within us.” Jesus was absolutely right

Oberlin

in saying, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” not, however,

framework in which it operated, though critically,

community

accepted

the

governmental

because he was the Son of God but because this is what

Gandhi ultimately rejected the framework itself. And

is dictated by the conscience of man. Moreover, the

this suggestion, of coruse, is true in fact, for Gandhi

goal of man is to achieve happiness and this can only

was ultimately protesting the illegitimacy of colonial

be accomplished by getting rid of the greed and lust

rule and not simply the injustice of certain laws within

that continually breed trouble among men and by

the English colonial system.

putting love in their place. Love precludes violence,

Martin Luther King, Jr. interpreted the Christian

which is wrong in every form, including the forms

message as one of love and compassion and hence

inherent in every form of government. The true Chris¬

accepted the doctrine of nonviolence as a matter of

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE religious principle. He was also much influenced by

psychological health of individuals and communities.

Gandhi’s techniques of passive resistance, which he

Finally, the argument is advanced that the absolute

incorporated whenever possible into the civil rights

view of nonviolence is based on a mistaken view of

movements, and by Gandhi’s statement of the principle

man’s present nature and future possibilities. The ma¬

of civil disobedience. Like Gandhi he believed that

jority of men simply are not moral in nature and are

unjust laws should be disobeyed quietly and the conse¬

incapable of responding to the call to conscience

quences suffered with dignity when they cannot hon¬

sounded by the advocates of nonviolent civil disobe¬

orably be avoided. He carefully defined the nature of

dience. Psychiatrists assure us that some people are

the unjust laws against which Negroes were dissenting

incapable of the moral point of view because the

as the laws which a minority are forced to observe

affective tone of their emotional life is so dulled that

but which are not binding on the majority. However,

they are incapable of fellow-feeling. Experience assures

in later years, after much civil rights legislation had

us also that many more people simply reject the moral

been passed but either not enforced at all or only partly

point of view as a piece of outright foolishness; they

so, he emphasized that the root of racial injustice lay

are selfish as a matter of self-evident principle. Still

in a double standard of law enforcement—in short, in

others are selfish unwittingly, never having given any

the unjust policies and commands of civil authorities

matter of principle a moment’s thought. Certainly

rather than in unjust laws (King [1967], p. 82).

nonviolent civil disobedience is just so much chaff in

Many arguments have been offered against the view

the wind to all these people—and always will be. If

that nonviolent civil disobedience is always right in

anything will work it will be the use of pressure tactics.

principle and that acts of civil disobedience therefore

To be sure, pressure tactics are also irrelevant to those

must always be peaceful (which is the common de¬

of seriously dulled emotions, but such tactics do have

nominator in the thought of Tolstoi, Gandhi, and King).

desirable effects on those who are selfish-on-principle

It should be borne in mind, of course, that arguments

or thoughtlessly selfish if they are reasonably enlight¬

which claim to show that violence is not in principle

ened. Such tactics may not convert these people, of

wrong are not arguments to show that violence is

course, but they will increasingly help justice be done

always right or that any certain degree of violence is

as these people become convinced that their own wel¬

right but no other. When violence is justified and to

fare depends on it; and, hopefully, what they are at

what extent, are further questions that need to be

first pressured to do out of enlightened selfishness they

answered by further arguments. Indeed, as we have

will gradually out of habit come to regard as moral.

seen, it is possible to believe that violence is not in principle wrong and still believe on prudential grounds that violence is not ever justified. The arguments against nonviolence-in-principle are too numerous to examine in detail here, but the general strategies in¬ volved are few and clear. Some people reject the

IV Former Justice Abe Fortas offered a new justification of nonviolent dissent which does not view violence as necessarily wrong in all societies but as unnecessary in a free society like that in the United States of

pacifistic interpretation of Christianity and certain

America. There is no need for disruption and destruc¬

other world religions, while others reject entirely a

tive violence, he says, when there are constitutional

religious viewpoint from which any moral position,

and rational means of dissent in this society unparal¬

pacifistic or otherwise, can be deduced. Still others

leled in previous history. Universal suffrage allows the

reject the formalistic view of moral philosophy which

majority of people to express their dissent by voting

gives rise to an absolute commitment to nonviolence.

out of office those officials whose policies and com¬

Others point out that a utilitarian justification of non¬ violence is useless, since it would never yield the abso¬ lute quality necessary to the pacifist commitment. (It is also pointed out that unfortunately some of the most eminent

proponents of nonviolence

mix together,

unwittingly, incompatible formalistic and utilitarian justifications.) Moreover, there are difficulties with an absolute commitment to love, since it implies an abso¬ lute commitment to forgiveness, as well as to nonvio¬ lence, which conflicts with that concept of justice which entails the need for punishment. Moreover, there are various crucial roles that anger and other emotions condemned by a nonviolence doctrine play in the

mands are objectionable. Moreover, individuals and groups are guaranteed the right to bring pressure to bear on their government by writing, speaking, orga¬ nizing, picketing, and demonstrating, provided only that laws governing public safety, etc., are obeyed. They may also challenge imjust laws through the courts, claiming that the laws are unconstitutional as well as unjust. And when they sue the state or its officials, they are equals with the state in court and have the protection of elaborate procedural rights. This is possible because the courts are totally independent of the executive and legislative branches of govern¬ ment. This path of legal dissent was the one taken by

439

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE the Negroes in their famous dissent over school segre¬

hospital facilities and used only sparingly in regard to

gation in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the

schools. Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act only a

Court ruled that state-maintained segregation of public

pitifully small number of federal registrars have been

schools was unconstitutional.

sent to the South. And, most crucially of all, due to

The nature of civil disobedience endorsed by Fortas

our computer revolution and the declining need for

is wholly procedural, and never violent, and always

unskilled and semi-skilled workers, the employment

directed against specific laws. An unjust law which is

situation of the Negro, in spite of feeble efforts to aid

judged to be unconstitutional is disobeyed so that a

him, is worse than it was ten years ago.

court test can be made. If the decision of the Court

Instead of a social revolution, one writer sees “little

bears out the judgment of the dissenter he is justified

more than federally approved tokenism” and “a con¬

and exonerated, but if the decision goes against him,

tinuation of paper promises and ancient inequities”

he must accept the penalty of disobeying that law with

(Duberman [1968], p. 38). And Martin Luther King,

dignity, the mark of his respect for the overall system

Jr. in his later work sadly concluded that “there is a

in which he is operating. Furthermore, it is crucial that

tragic gulf between civil rights laws passed and civil

in disobeying a law which he judges to be unconstitu¬

rights laws implemented.” There is “a double standard

tional the dissenter not violate laws which are clearly

in the enforcement of law and a double standard in

valid as a way of publicizing a protest and exerting

the respect for particular laws” (King [1967], p. 82).

pressure on the public.

King still offered universal love and nonviolence as the

A good example of this sort of admissible civil diso¬

only answer to the new difficulties, but many black

bedience, Fortas thinks, is the work of Martin Luther

men found the old answer utterly irrelevant given these

King, Jr., who pledged that Negroes would disobey

new revelations. The history of S.N.C.C. from “sit-ins”

“unjust laws”—defined as laws that only a minority

to militancy is instructive on this point. For better or

are compelled to obey—openly and peacefully, and

for worse, black militants of all varieties marched in,

that they would accept whatever penalties might re¬

and civil disobedience using various types and degrees

sult. “This is civil disobedience in a great tradition.

of pressure is now very much part of the scene. Some

It is peaceful, nonviolent disobedience of laws which

have felt it necessary to go beyond civil disobedience

are themselves unjust and which the protester chal¬

to terrorism.

lenges as invalid and unconstitutional” (Fortas [1968],

But it is not only in the civil rights area that a feeling

p. 34). It is part of the valid framework of dissent and

of no progress and double-dealing has led to the fall

disobedience provided by the Constitution and consti¬

of the “great tradition” in civil disobedience. In pro¬

tutes a workable alternative to violence. Fortas con¬

tests against the Vietnam War, the draft laws, poverty,

cludes that “the experience of these past few years

and

shows, more vividly than any other episode in our

universities, the same pattern of increasing militancy

history, how effective these alternatives are.” It has

is exhibited. The common theme in the campaigns of

been “through their use—and not through the sporadic

the black man, the yoimg man, and the poor man is

authoritarian

structure

of

colleges

and

incidents of violence—that we have effected the cur¬

that they want more participation in the decisions

rent social revolution . . .” (p. 64).

which are always being made for them by someone

This view of dissent and disobedience has many

440

the

else. They want more “participatory democracy” be¬

merits and is worthy of the deepest respect. One only

cause they feel that their “representatives” and “public

wishes that it were the whole story, but, alas, it does

servants” have produced sham progress and usually

not seem to be so. One writer has found as many as

apply double standards. They ask pointedly: Are not

“nine fallacies” in Fortas’ view (Zinn [1968], passim).

those who refuse to implement laws just as civilly

There is, unfortunately, grave doubt that the sort of

disobedient as those who disobey laws, with the crucial

social revolution that Justice Fortas has in mind has

exception that there are severe penalties for the one

in fact taken place, even though a legal one certainly

but none at all for the other? It is not the American

has. A vast majority of school-age Negroes still go to

system and not the American judiciary that they are

segregated schools in the South in spite of the 1954

rejecting or have lost faith in, many militants say, but

Supreme Court ruling, or attend de facto segregated

rather it is those who have been making their political,

and/or inferior schools in the North. Poverty funds

economic, and social decisions for them in whom they

have been frequently used for political purposes or,

have lost confidence and now completely reject.

in any case, for something someone else thought would

Rejection and alienation are frightening symptoms

be good for the black population. Title VI of the 1964

in the body politic as well as in the individual. Some¬

Civil Rights Act, which allows federal withdrawal of

times they are the result of deep understanding, other

funds in cases of discrimination, has been ignored in

times of misunderstanding or ignorance; sometimes

many cases of unequal treatment such as segregated

they are the result of deep injury, other times of fancied

CLASS CLASS

grievances; sometimes they are the result of righteous anger, other times of blind and selfish rage. It is most crucial at this point in history to distinguish more carefully than in the past these different origins and types of alienation so that they can be differentially and more effectively responded to than heretofore. No doubt, the wisest first move would be to take the clear-cut, deep grievances seriously and listen to what the oppressed themselves have to say. Not to do so is to run a grave risk of producing further ‘uncivil disobedience.

The word “class” in the social sense is relatively new. It appears in the English and other Western European languages at the time of the Industrial Revolution. This article will emphasize English usage; French and Ger¬ man developments are roughly parallel. Before the 1770’s, the ordinary use of “class” in English referred to a division or group in schools and colleges. In the late eighteenth century we first come upon “lower classes,” to join “lower orders,” which was a term used earlier in that century. As a designation for workers, the terms

BIBLIOGRAPHY

poor la¬

borer” and “the poor” had been used synonymously

Consult the standard editions of the works of Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Hobbes, Milton, Hume, Bentham,

since the sixteenth century, thus pointing to a relation

Garrison, Emerson, Thoreau, Tolstoi, and Gandhi. This bibliography contains the less well-known historical figures mentioned in the text, anthologies, and contemporary arti¬ cles and books where further bibliographical detail is to

century a distinction was made between those not able

be found. Christian Bay, “Civil Disobedience,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills, 17 vols. (New l;ork, 1968), 2, 473-87. Hugo Bedau, ed., Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice (New York, 1969). Edward Cary, George William Curtis (Boston, 1894). Henry Steele Commager, Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader (Boston, 1947; reprint 1960). G. W. Curtis, Orations and Addresses, Vol. I (New York, 1894). Martin Duberman, “Black Power in America,” Partisan Review, 35 (1968), 34-48. James H. Fairchild, Moral Science, revised ed. (New York, 1892), pp. 172-81. R. S. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College (Oberlin, 1943), I, 207-426. Abe Fortas, Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience (New York, 1968). Walter Harding, “Did Thoreau Invent the Term ‘Civil Disobedience,’ Thoreau Society Bulletin, No. 103 (1968), 8; idem, The Variorum Civil Disobedience, annotated and with an introduction (New York, 1967). Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York, 1967). Louis E. Lomax, The Negro Revolt (New York, 1962; 1963). Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York, 1968); idem. Nonviolence in America: A Documentary His¬ tory (Indianapolis, 1966). E. H. Madden, Civil Disobedience and Moral Law in Nineteenth Century American Philosophy (Seattle, 1968). Asa Mahan, Series of articles on “Reform," Oberlin Evangelist (1844). Theodore Parker, Speeches, Addresses and Occasional Sermons, 3 vols. (Boston, 1852); idem, Additional Speeches, Addresses and Occasional Ser¬ mons, 2 vols. (Boston, 1855). Mulford Q. Sibley, ed.. The Quiet Battle: Writings on the Theory and Practice of Non¬ violent Resistance (Garden City, N.Y., 1963). Charles E. Silberman, Crisis in Black and White (New York, 1964). Howard Zinn, Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order (New York, 1968). EDWARD H. MADDEN [See also Anarchism; Constitutionalism; Democracy; Free Will; God; Individualism; Peace; Protest Movements; Revolution.]

between poverty and wage earning. By the eighteenth to work, “the very poor” or “paupers,” and those able to work, “the laboring poor.” This term is widely used until and beyond the threshold of the Industrial Revo¬ lution and again suggests the connection between pov¬ erty and wage earning. But from the early nineteenth century on, as in the works of Malthus and Ricardo, the term now in common use is “the laboring classes (the term “working class,” or “classes,” makes its ap¬ pearance around 1815 in England and around 1830 in France). Function in the economic process replaces the earlier implicit focus on social rank and hierarchy of possessions. Without going into detail regarding the designation of other social strata, it can simply be noted that “higher classes,”

“middle

classes,”

classes” appear in the 1790 s, and

and

“middling

upper classes

in

the 1820’s. The “upper middle classes” are first heard of in the 1890’s and the “lower middle classes” in the present century. The late appearance of the term

class

does not,

of course, indicate that social divisions were not recog¬ nized earlier. But it indicates changes in the character of these divisions and in attitudes toward them, which came about with the Industrial Revolution. Class is a less definite and more fluid term than

rank

or

or¬

der,” and the use of this less specific term subtly indi¬ cates the erosion since the Industrial Revolution of the earlier clear-cut hierarchical rank order which used to govern the English social structure and a shifting of focus from social status to economic criteria. Slightly later than in England, but roughly in the same period, the French terminology shifts from etat to classe and the German from Stand to Klasse. It is interesting to note in this connection that some of the new terms, such as “working

or

laboring

classes,” referred to functional contributions in indus¬ trial production; others, such as “middle classes

or

“upper classes” still referred only to position in a

441

CLASS hierarchy. The difference between classifications of

Cain against Abel; Ishmael against Isaac; Esau against

positions will be dealt with presently. But before dis¬

Jacob—they stood to him and his co-thinkers for those

cussing modern conceptualizations of class a much

who had illegally seized power and land and had

older notion needs to be considered, i.e., the repre¬

turned their brothers into servants. The Levellers saw

sentation of societies as aggregates of people some of

the Norman conquerors who had enslaved the English

whom are above and others below. This notion can

people as the symbolic heirs of Cain. More generally,

indeed be found throughout recorded history. It repre¬

every biblical case in which a good brother confronted

sents, in its various forms, the effort of social thinkers

a bad one was used to represent the dichotomous

as well as of common men to come to grips with the

division of society between oppressors and oppressed,

stubborn fact of human inequality.

have and have-nots.

Ideas meant to explain or justify inequality among

The concrete images of polar divisions between the

men are embodied in a variety of religious myths. In

top and bottom of society as they appear in history

the Bible, for example, the offspring of Ham, who had

were, however, not uniform. At least three basic forms

been cursed by Noah, were condemned to eternal

of dichotomy can be discerned, depending on what

bondage in the service of Noah’s descendants. Saint

aspects of the privileges enjoyed by the upper classes

Augustine cited this in The City of God when he wished

are perceived as salient. Conceptualization differs de¬

to show that slavery was justified, and medieval theo¬

pending on whether power, wealth, or relationships

logians used the same story to condone serfdom. Ac¬

in the process of production are given central emphasis.

cording to the Koran, social stratification originates

Hence we get the dichotomous concept of rulers and

from the very will of Allah who has decreed, “We have

ruled, of rich and poor, or finally, of exploiters and

exalted some of them above others in degrees, that

exploited. These variant formulations are, of course,

some of them may take others in subjection” (Sura

not mutually exclusive but occur in a variety of combi¬

XLIII, 31). In the ancient Vedas, a vertical system of

nations.

classes, or rather castes, was legitimated by way of an

The primacy of the power dimension is expressed

anatomical illustration. The Brahmins sprang originally

in such thinkers as Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406): “The

from the lips of Brahma, the Kshatriya from his shoul¬

possession of power is the source of riches” (Les pro-

ders, the Vaishya from his thighs, and the Shudra from

logemes,

his feet. The notion of caste, which may be defined

Marxian socialist doctrine reversed the relation be¬

as “an endogamous and hereditary subdivision of an

tween power and wealth by stressing that the posses¬

ethnic unit occupying a position of superior or inferior

sion of economic resources confers social power. The

rank or social esteem in comparison with other sub¬

contemporary social critic, Ignazio Silone, attempted

divisions” (A. L. Kroeber, “Caste,” Encyclopedia of the

to come to grips with the characteristics of totalitarian,

Social Sciences, New York, 1935), will not detain us

post-capitalist society and with the change in class

Paris

[1936],

II,

339).

Pre-Marxian

and

here. While it is of central importance for Indian and

relations resulting from power superseding wealth. He

other Asiatic societies, it is of but marginal interest

quipped, in his The School for Dictators (1938), that

in the context of the Western world. Note, however,

in contrast to the capitalist era which was dominated

that the relationship of American Negroes to the white

by plutocrats (rule by wealth), the totalitarian society

majority has at least caste-like elements (John Dollard,

had given rise to cratopluts (rule over wealth).

Caste and Class in a Southern Town, New York, 1949).

The relation between those who work and those who

Dichotomous Conceptualizations. While the image

are idle, rather than seen as due to factors of ownership

of society as some kind of vertical order is widespread,

or power, was most clearly articulated by the rebellious

the specific forms in which such an order is conceived

underprivileged during the waning of the Middle Ages.

has varied considerably throughout history. Perhaps the

“When Adam delved and Eve span,” the impoverished

most popular conceptualization is one which sees soci¬

queried, “Who was then a gentleman? ” Such imagery

ety as a dichotomous structure of top and bottom

is common in utterances during a variety of peasant

strata: the rich and the poor, the powerful and the

revolts and jacqueries as well as in such writers as the

powerless. Such conceptualizations are most frequently

Anabaptist leader of a Peasant War, Thomas Miinzer

held by spokesmen for negatively privileged groups

(ca. 1490-1525). Shelley’s formulation in his “Song to

who wish to attack the prevailing system of inequality

the Men of England” is but a reformulation of this

(though, as will be seen, these have no monopoly on

theme:

such

442

privileged landed oppressors of the common people.

people in terms of functional contribution or scalar

conceptions).

For

Gerrard

Winstanley

(fl.

1648-52), representing the extreme radical wing in the

Men of England, wherefore plough

English Revolution, Cain becomes the forefather of the

For the Lords who lay ye low?

CLASS Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear?

tion may be, make a dichotomous view of society agreeable to certain classes insofar as it can help pro¬ mote their interests or contribute to the development

Yet the use of the image of a dichotomous society was not limited to the spokesmen for the under¬ privileged. For the classical thinkers of antiquity, the basic division in the social structure was that between freemen and slaves, and this distinction was said by Plato and Aristotle to have a biological basis in human

of a strong sense of identity and historical mission. The particular antagonists with whom they are locked in combat seem to them to dominate society generally. For the serf, society is composed above all of serfs and lords; for the industrial worker, it is composed of workers and capitalists. The existence of other strata

nature. Though Aristotle made more complicated dis¬

may be known, but they play no central part in the

tinctions when it came to the body of freemen, he was

consciousness. From the point of view of the privileged classes,

nevertheless certain that all physical work should be reserved for the slaves so that the legal division be¬ tween free citizens and slaves would at the same time coincide with the economic division between non¬ laborers and laborers. In the writings of the early Church Fathers, e.g., John Chrysostom (329-89), Patriarch of Constanti¬ nople, in Homilia, 34, the major problem of social inequality was discussed not so much in terms of free¬ men and slaves or of masters and servants as in eco¬ nomic terms; social stratification was seen as based on relations of ownership. Rich or poor, owners and nonowners were seen as the two basic strata in society, no matter whether a specific Christian writer sided

dichotomous images are likely to be prominent when, as in an estate system, the contrast between the elite and the rest of the society appears so sharp that further differentiation between the underlying population can be safely ignored. Finally, during periods of intensified class conflict, it might be to the advantage of rising classes to over¬ look intermediary positions and to focus attention on one basic cleavage. In 1789, all the divisions within the Third Estate were temporarily pushed into the background of the consciousness of its proponents. This cemented all those who fought against the aristocracy. A few years later, Francis Emile Babeuf divided the

with the oppressed or was moved to defend the inter¬

population of France into 24 million real producers

ests of the privileged. Images of a dichotomous society are likely to conflict

Paris, 1935)—totally neglecting those who were in

with everyday experience in societies that are at least as differentiated as those of the Greek polls. Such dichotomies clash with the perception that there are gradations of wealth and poverty—and not simply two classes, rich and poor—and that there are intermediate strata to be found between freemen and slaves or between nobles and commoners. Despite the inability of such dichotomies to encompass the totality of social differentiation, however, they have continued to be salient in the whole history of class societies. Among the reasons for such persistence may be mentioned the widespread psychological disposition to concentrate on extremes and to think in terms of polarities. But more important than such dispositions are those sets of cir¬

and one million exploiters (Pages choisies de Babeuf, intermediate positions. And Henri de Saint-Simon used the dichotomous division between the industrial class and the idle class for similar ideological purposes (Manuel, 1956). Similar dichotomous notions are fre¬ quent in the nineteenth-century socialist movement from Chartism (1830-48) to Louis Blanqui and Ferdi¬ nand Lassalle. Tripartite Divisions. Despite the continued appeal of dichotomous conceptualizations of class structure, one has always had to contend with rival notions, viz., tripartite divisions or more complicated systems of multiple divisions and gradations. Perhaps the best known of all trichotomous con¬ ceptualizations of class structure is the one Aristotle

cumstances which may favor the emergence or per¬

described in his Politics (Book IV, Ch. XI, 1295b):

sistence of dichotomies. In the first place, societies may in fact have a bipolar

very rich, the very poor, and those who are between

division so salient that finer gradations appear as of secondary importance. This is likely to be the case in slave societies, where, in view of the gulf between freemen and slaves, further differentiations within these categories, or the existence of strata—such as the Greek

In

every city the people are divided into three sorts; the them.” We encounter similar conceptualizations in the Church’s interpretation of medieval society as divided into three basic estates, those who pray, those who defend the country, and those who toil. And in France, the image of Three Estates (clergy, nobility, com¬

metics, who belong to neither side of the great divide—

moners) dominated social perception till the eighteenth

may not be given major emphasis. In the second place, there are socio-historical cir¬

conceived as distinctions along functional lines had

cumstances which, no matter what the objective situa¬

century, even though by that time what had once been already become overt distinctions of privilege. Finally,

443

CLASS

444

as modern capitalistic society replaced the medieval

Among the types of perceptions of class relations

and post-medieval hierarchy, Adam Smith, in his In¬

that emerged in the nineteenth century—though we

quiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of

can find approximations much earlier—we may distin¬

Nations (1776), introduced a new trichotomous scheme

guish, following Stanislaw Ossowski (1963), between

referring to economic functions. The old trichotomy

schemes of simple and schemes of synthetic gradations.

of priests, knights, and commoners became one of

In both cases, instead of viewing the class structure

proprietors of land, proprietors of stock, and laborers.

in terms of the fixed properties of two or more classes,

Society was now divided into those who lived by the

the relation of higher and lower classes is based on

rent of land, those who lived by profits, and those

the grading of some objectively measurable charac¬

whose income was the wage of labor.

teristics. In the case of simple gradation, concern is

Thinking in terms of intermediary classes instead of

most commonly focused on gradations of wealth or

dichotomies may have various consequences for the

income. In this view, relative wealth or income deter¬

overall conceptualization of a particular thinker. There

mines class membership, and assigns respective class

are at least two extreme positions in this respect, one

positions in the vertical order. In contrast, ideas about

of which is associated with Aristotle, the other with

synthetic gradations reject a simple gradation of classes

Marx. For the former, the middle class is—or rather

in terms of economic criteria and combine these with

should be—the basic class, with the rich and the poor

the factors of education, occupation, social standing,

simply deviations from the mean. “The best political

and the like.

community is formed by citizens of the middle class,

When diverse criteria are being used in the assign¬

and . . . those states are likely to be well-administered

ment of class positions, relatively low rank in one

in which the middle class is large, and stronger if

dimension, say income, may be compensated by rela¬

possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than

tively high rank in another, say education. Such rank¬

either singly (Politics, 1295b; trans. B. Jowett, New

ing systems hence seem to have certain compensatory

York [1943], p. 191). For Marx, in contrast, and though

and consolatory functions, which cannot be performed

he also at times used the trichotomous scheme of the

by systems relying entirely on ranking in the economic

political economists, the two fundamentally opposed

order. When lack of education or inferior birth can

classes are the basic classes; the middle class is less

be offset by economic standing, as among the “nou-

enduring and less stable. It typically is marginal in the

veaux riches,” or when inadequate income can be

sense that it allegedly will join with one or the other

compensated for by relatively high social status, as in

of the major classes when class conflicts are “inevit¬

the case, at least until recently, of college teachers,

ably” sharpened. For Marx, a dichotomous scheme is

such arrangements or perceptions may help combat

still dominant, and the trichotomous division is seen

alienative tendencies in various sectors of society.

as a deviation which is “by its very nature” only tem¬

In similar ways, stratifying society into six or more

porary. The radical thinker tends to be drawn toward

layers may have additional compensatory functions for

dichotomies even when he recognizes that reality does

the people involved in all but the very lowest rank.

not correspond to this image. Conservative or liberal

The finer the gradations and the larger the number

thinkers, however, when they think in trichotomies,

of dimensions used for establishing class position, the

tend to stress the virtues of middle strata as most

greater, it would seem, the conservative or stabilizing

conducive to the pursuit of moderate policies.

potential of stratification schemes.

Multiple Divisions and Gradations. At the begin¬

However, it would be a mistake to explain the more

ning of the capitalist era Alexander Hamilton still

complicated class schemes that have come to be used

proposed a simple dichotomous model of class divi¬

in the modern social sciences, as well as in popular

sions: “All communities divide themselves into the few

consciousness, by ideological reasons alone. Modem

and the many. The first are rich and well-born and

industrial society has created so complicated a division

tlie other the mass of the people who seldom judge

of labor and so differentiated and fluid a status system

or determine right” (Speech [June 18, 1787], Papers,

that any simple classificatory scheme such as prevailed

ed. H. C. Syrett and J. E. Cooke, 15 vols.. New York

till the eighteenth century could no longer be adequate.

[1961-68], IV, 185-200). But given the complicated

Or, to put the matter differently, not even in so highly

and multifaceted class relations in nineteenth-century

capitalist a society as that of the United States are

America as well as in Europe, and, in addition, the

economic criteria likely to be the only ones used in

need to bring definitions of class relations into line with

assigning people relative standing in society.

ideological justifications of the prevailing state of

Max Weber’s recognition that exclusive emphasis on

affairs, such dichotomous notions gave way to more

economic factors as determinants of social class was

complicated schemes among those whose social per-

insufficient to do justice to complex systems of stratifi¬

ceptions dominated the scene.

cation accounts perhaps for his current popularity

CLASS among social scientists concerned with class analysis.

Since Weber’s time, his list of three basic dimensions

Weber made distinctions between a variety of sources

in the assignment of rank in modem societies has been

of hierarchical differentiation. Among the most impor¬

further enlarged, and, depending on the interests and

tant he selected class, status, and power. He reserved

concerns of the investigators, increasing attention has

the term “class” to designate economic differentiations.

been given to such factors as occupational prestige,

A class, in his usage, was composed of people who

education, kinship, ethnic group position, and the like.

shared common life chances or a similar situation in

Though these dimensions of stratification tend to be

the market. Status, Weber’s second major dimension

highly interdependent, they nevertheless may vary

of stratification, refers to the honor or prestige and

independently from one another.

hence the amount of deference accorded to individuals

The picture that emerges from this simplified sketch

or positions. Status systems are linked to specific life

of contemporary theory of stratification suggests a

styles and manners of living. Although Weber was

complexity of the class system that contrasts sharply

aware that class and status positions in a given society

with the stark simplicity of some of the earlier con¬

are likely to be highly correlated, he performed the

ceptualizations. Although there may be ideological

distinct service of highlighting those situations in which

reasons for the adoption of contemporary views, the

these correlations are less than perfect. For example,

major reason for their prevalence seems to lie in the

groups with higher status will be motivated to support

fact that, because of their fluidity, contemporary class

manners and values that serve to perpetuate that status,

systems no longer lend themselves to the relatively

no matter whether a particular holder of the status

simple categorizations that were more or less adequate

ranks high in an economic class hierarchy. In aristo¬

for

cratic or semi-aristocratic circles people will contend

Hemingway was clearly wrong when, in answering

that their superior life styles entitle them to deference,

Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, “The rich are truly differ¬

regardless of their economic attainments. Thus, even

ent,” he said: “Yes, they have more money.” Whether

in capitalist systems, money-making may be considered

in the world of the robber barons or in that of The

understanding

earlier

class

structures.

Ernest

vulgar by those in superior status positions, and Boston

Great Gatsby, in the world of Henry James or of

Brahmins, just as East Elbian Junkers, may claim the

Theodore Dreiser, no man has been simply assessed

rewards of high status, such as power, even though

on the scale of wealth and income exclusively. Os-

their rank in a purely economic hierarchy may be

sowski’s synthetic gradations are hence likely to remain

relatively low. Just as at the dawn of the bourgeois era, merchants

the most common way of conceptualizing the complex

were wont to marry their daughters to the scions of

capitalist societies. Class Differentiation on the Basis of Social Func¬

aristocratic families, in effect exchanging the perqui¬

class relations of contemporary capitalist and post¬

sites of class position for superior status, so in the

tions. In addition to, and often accompanying, scalar

contemporary world

may,

conceptualizations of social class, functional conceptu¬

through marriage, education, philanthropy, or other

alizations are discernible from antiquity to the present

means, attempt to acquire a status which is otherwise

day. Society is differentiated into a number of classes

unobtainable.

that fulfill different functions in the division of labor,

the

“nouveaux

riches”

Weber’s third major dimension of stratification, power, was defined by him as the ability of a man or a group to impose its will on others even, if necessary, against their opposition. Power may flow from the possession of resources, be they economic or political. High position in both the status and the class system may confer power, as may commanding positions in religious,

political,

or

trade

union

organizations.

Power, then, is likely to be highly correlated with high positions in the other two dimensions, yet may also vary independently from them. In particular, as against the Marxist contention that the only basic source of power is the ownership of means of production, Weber argued that in the modem world commanding positions in a variety of administrative and bureaucratic hier¬ archies may confer social power on men whose purely economic power is minimal and who have but little social honor (Weber, 1946).

and this distinctiveness of function determines the relations between these classes. The various classes generally are seen as complementary to one other and mutually interdependent. Some of these functional theories of stratification stress primarily tire contri¬ bution this interdependence makes to the total society; others, particularly Marxian theory, focus on incom¬ patibility of interests, antagonism, and conflict. The

functional

conceptualization

was

self-con¬

sciously elaborated by Saint Thomas Aquinas, John of Salisbury, and other medieval Church spokesmen. They did not deny that society was full of inequalities; the equality that did exist was purely religious. These inequalities, however, as they appear in the relation of master to servant and in the differences in property or social standing, are legitimized by an ethic of “call¬ ing.” It is the duty of every man to remain within his own class, and to serve others gladly. The teaching of

445

CLASS Saint Paul about remaining “in the calling to which

performing the more complex tasks require longer and

one has been called” (II Corinthians 7:20) was now

more intensive preparations, and therefore need to

developed into a rational justification of inequality. The

receive greater rewards of power and wealth or in¬

division of labor is the result of inequality in human

come. As in the case of their medieval forebears, the

endowment and capacities. It behooves man to accept

suspicion is strong that they in fact but rationalize a

the inequalities appointed by God, stay in his own

given distribution of power and privilege. Moreover,

order, and do his own work. Society is seen as an

when these theorists are asked how they establish

organic whole to which the various vocational orders

which functions are more important than others, they

make their peculiar contribution. Luther’s conception of the “calling” is essentially similar. To him, just as to Aquinas, men as they are

Moving from the facts of differentiation to the reali¬

variously placed within the social structure perform

ties of hierarchy has been less serious a problem for

differing and yet complementary functions. One ought

the classical economists ever since Adam Smith enunci¬

to live within his own class, according to the social

ated his functional classification: proprietors of land,

standards of that class, and efforts at individual im¬

proprietors of stock, and laborers. Here tautological

provement of one’s style of life or social position cannot

reasoning is avoided. Though these economists agreed

be condoned. Obedient service in the calling is the first

that all three classes made functionally indispensable

duty of the Christian.

contributions to the well-being, stability, and develop¬

One difficulty with these and similar functional con¬

ment of the whole, they were also at one in according

ceptualizations arises from the fact that, as a contem¬

preeminence to the proprietors of stock, the new capi¬

porary sociologist, Ralf Dahrendorf has stated, “The

talists, who represented the dynamic principle of the

notion of differentiation does not in itself imply any

new industrial order and the progress it promised.

distinctions of rank or value among the differentiated

Though by no means oblivious to conflicts of inter¬

elements” (Dahrendorf, p. 162). That is, an additional

ests between various classes, the classical economists

act of evaluation seems to be necessary if we are to

nevertheless tended to assume a fundamental identity

move analytically from differentiations that are rooted

of interests common to all classes. It is the rejection

in the division of labor to a rank order in a system

of this postulate which lies at the basis of Karl Marx’s

of social stratification. Medieval social theory tends to

theory of stratification.

obviate the difficulty by explicitly or implicitly ac¬

The Marxian Scheme. The rejection of all models

cepting the rank order as it exists within medieval

of harmonious society, and their replacement by a

estate society. As Ernst Troeltsch puts it, “This actual

conceptualization that lays utmost stress on the funda¬

situation, through its incorporation into the religious

mental conflict of interests between classes is, of course,

and organic theory as ‘vocation,’ is idealized and

at the very core of the Marxian conception. According

rationalized” (Troeltsch, I, 295). In the case of Luther¬

to Marx, ever since human society emerged from its

anism, likewise, and though there appear contradictory

primitive and relatively undifferentiated state, it re¬

tendencies within it, by accepting the existing rank

mained fundamentally divided between classes whose

order it translated the ideal of a “cosmos of callings”

interests are opposed and who clash in the pursuit of

into a conception of a desirable social hierarchy. Cer¬

these interests; the whole of previous social history is

tain social theorists, more particularly Charles Fourier,

a history of class struggle. With this overriding empha¬

deploring the lack of functional adjustment in their

sis as a point of departure, Marx used a variety of class

age, projected utopian images of a future society in

conceptualizations according to the context in which

which the specific contributions of differently consti¬

he wrote and the problem he dealt with.

tuted individuals would all blend harmoniously into an integrated whole.

446

tend to reply tautologically by pointing to those that receive greater rewards.

Marx most frequently saw economic interests as being rooted in differing positions in the process of

The problem of how to move from the recognition

production. Here he integrated the categories of the

of differing functional contributions of social classes

classical economists with his basic concept of class

to the establishment of a scalar hierarchy still besets

conflict and viewed the relations between the classes

modern sociological theory. It led functional theorists,

of landowners, industrial capitalists, and wage earners

such as W. E. Moore and K. Davis (see Bibliography),

as antagonistic rather than harmonious. Where the

to claim that certain contributions are being judged

classical economists had seen this tripartite division as

more essential or “functionally important” for a society

eternally given in the natural order of things, Marx,

than others, and therefore need the rewards of high

in time with his relativizing historicism, saw such rela¬

rank. They also claimed that, given the different de-

tions as typical only for specific historical periods, as

grees of complexity of different social tasks, those

a historically transient state of affairs. Though all pre-

CLASS vious historical periods were marked by class struggles,

labor-power, owners of capital, and landowners, whose

these struggles differed according to historical stages

respective sources of income are wages, profit, and

of production. In contradistinction to his radical pred¬

ground-rent . .

ecessors, who had tended to see history as a monoto¬

Sometimes, more particularly in his historical writings,

nous succession of struggles between rich and poor,

he adopted a multidimensional scheme, as when in his

(Das Kapital, Vol. Ill, last chapter).

or between the powerless and the powerful, Marx

Class Struggles in France (1850) he distinguished be¬

maintained that, though class struggles had indeed

tween the class interests of the financial and those of

marked all history, the contenders in the battle had

the industrial bourgeoisie; or when in The Eighteenth

changed over time. Though there might have been

Brumaire (1852) he talked about the class interests

some similarity between the journeymen of the late

which divide the owners of capital and the owners of

Middle Ages, who waged their battles against guild-

land. In addition, the rural population is sometimes

masters, and modern industrial workers, journeymen

seen as a specific class in Marx’s historical writings,

were yet in a functionally different situation from

as is the Lumpenproletariat (“dregs of society"), so that

modem proletarians struggling with modern factory

we obtain an image of society, which, far from the

owners.

usual dichotomic or trichotomic image, is differentiated

Although Marx used a functional analysis of classes

into several strata with multiple interests. When Marx

in terms of position in the economic process, which

wrote as a propagandist, he used the stark imagery of

was ultimately derived from the classical economists,

a simple polarity of interests between two basic classes.

he also wrote about class in a variety of contexts which

When he wrote as a social analyst or historian, dichot¬

show that this was by no means the only connotation

omous concepts appeared inadequate and he used a

of the concept. In particular, and in tune with the other

more complex scheme which, though less serviceable

great intellectual tradition to which he was indebted,

as a means of energizing social consciousness, proved

that of German idealism, Marx used a notion of class

more in tune with actual complexities. The class

in which class consciousness or class awareness became

schemes he used depended on the direction of his

central. Here economic or social factors were supple¬

interests.

mented by social-psychological ones. Though an ag¬

There are still other interpretations of class phe¬

gregate of people, he argued, may all occupy similar

nomena in the work of Marx. Although the major

positions in the process of production and hence have

emphasis is on the separation between those who own

objectively similar life chances, they become a class

the means of production and those who, owning no

as a self-conscious and history-making body only if they

means of production, must sell their labor power, at¬

become aware of the similarity of their interests. An

tention is sometimes focused on the opposition of those

objective economic class, a Klasse an sich (“class in

who work and those who do not, or of those who

itself”), becomes a Klasse fur sich (“class for itself”)

employ hired labor and those who do not. In the first

only if its members, through a series of conflicts with

case, a wealthy farmer who employs a few hired hands

opposing classes, have acquired an awareness of the

is not reckoned among capitalists; in the second, he

communality of their interests. And only such self-

is. Enough has been said to document the fact that

conscious classes can be said to be capable of changing

the Marxian scheme of class analysis is by no means

the course of history; classes lacking such psychological

as uncomplicated or unitary as both proponents and

bonds between their members remain impotent. (Marx

adversaries of his theories have often made it appear.

expected that in time deprived classes would neces¬

Yet all such variations in Marx’s scheme must not

sarily acquire such consciousness; Communist Mani¬

obscure the major difference between this and other

festo, 1848, and passim.)

theories of stratification. As distinct from all social

Most of the time Marx was drawn to a drama¬

theories that see society as a layer cake in which strata

turgical vision of society, a dichotomous conception

are simply superimposed upon one another, classes in

in which two major classes preempted the center of

Marx’s view are essentially conflict groups. They gain

the scene, even though an intermediary middle class

their identity and the realization of the communality

might at times appear on the stage—only to be ground

of their interests in confrontations and clashes with

down by powerful grindstones: the two major class

other, antagonistic, classes. Ultimately, then, classes are

antagonists. Yet we encounter also different types of

always power phenomena. The class struggle is a

schemes. Sometimes, as in the final, uncompleted

struggle for povyer between rulers and ruled, between

chapter of Das Kapital (1867-95) which represents his

oppressed and oppressing classes. Class relations, by

most self-conscious effort to present a theory of strati¬

their very nature, are asymmetrical relations in which

fication, Marx adopted the trichotomous functional

those above and those below, exploiters and exploited,

scheme of Adam Smith, e.g.: “the owners merely of

contend with each other for dominance. Man will truly

447

CLASS come into his own, Marx contended, only when all class

Rousseau posits the moral equality of men in the

tory will culminate in a classless society in which the

state of nature and contends that only upon leaving

strife of classes will be replaced by an ultimate har¬

that state, through the emergence of private property,

mony of cooperatively producing men no longer di¬

did class distinctions emerge in civil society. Not phys¬

vided by divergent interests. The Fact and the Scandal of Inequality. Defenders of the status quo, when they did not have recourse

ical inequalities, such as those based on differences in health or bodily strength; only political inequalities were morally and socially relevant.

to “functional” justifications, have most frequently used

The stress on private property rather than human

two strategies in order to cushion the impact of in¬

nature as the root of inequality remains central in the

equality on the underlying population. They have ei¬

pertinent discussions from Rousseau to Marx. Thinkers

ther referred to the transitoriness of human life and

in this general tradition do not differ so much in their

the promised righting of earthly imbalances in privi¬

views regarding the origin of class differences, which

leges and rewards in the afterlife; or they have at¬

all of them seek in historical development rather than

tempted to show that social inequalities were but a

in biological or theological factors, but, rather, in their

result of natural differences in biological endowment.

opinions as to their permanency. Conservatives such

Echoing, as he so often does, previous Christian

as Lorenz von Stein and liberals such as the British

conceptualizations in secular form, Diderot wrote in

utilitarian political economists consider them an in¬

the article “Societe” in the Encyclopedie, “There is

eradicable feature of modem societies. In contrast,

no more inequality between the different stations in

socialists and radicals envisage a future society, if only

life than there is among the different characters in a

as a kind of asymptotic goal, in which distinctions of

comedy: the end of the play finds all players once again

class and rank are abolished. Radical and socialist

in the same position, and the brief period for which

theories look upon the present order as merely tran¬

their play lasted did not and could not convince any

sient and emphasize a dialectical tension between a

two of them that one was really below the other.” Yet

provisional state of affairs and an ultimate classless

without promise for rewards in the hereafter, such

future.

stress on the unimportance of class distinctions, sub

Equality of Opportunity. There is yet another posi¬

specie etemitatis, was not very likely to command

tion which needs detain us—if only because it has

assent in the modern age.

become a vital component of the common conscious¬

A stronger impact and social efficacy was provided

448

in Contrat social, new ed.. Gamier, Paris, n.d., p. 39).

struggles which have so far characterized human his¬

ness of modern America, and,

though to variant

by theories of differences in natural endowment from

degrees, of all industrial societies: the notion of equal

the days of the ancient Greeks to Vilfredo Pareto and

opportunity within societies of unequals. This notion,

the prophets of the modern eugenics movement, such

though discernible among the forerunners of Saint-

as Francis Galt on and Karl Pearson, as well as their

Simon, has been fully articulated by the master and

utopian forerunner Thomas Campanella.

his disciples. Saint-Simon retained what had been,

Ever since the eighteenth century, opponents of the

despite Rousseau and radicals such as Morelly, the

status quo have rejected the otherworldly justification

major eighteenth-century view that the maintenance

of human inequality; their arguments are so well-

of civilization required the preservation of inequality

known that they need not detain us here. As to the

in wealth and status. But in contrast to his eighteenth-

argument from biological inequality, social reformers,

century ancestors who had argued that the inequalities

like the French disciples of Locke (Helvetius and

were necessary to force men, indolent as they were

Condillac), either contended that all men were biolog¬

by nature, to submit to the necessity of work and

ically similar at birth, or, like Rousseau, argued for a

industry, he elaborated a distinctive defense of inequal¬

sharp distinction between two kinds of inequality,

ity: since men are unequal in their capacities a society

natural and moral: “I perceive two kinds of inequality

is needed where each can function according to his

among men: one I call natural or physical . . . ; the

ability.

other might be called moral or political” (Rousseau,

In tune with the emigre traditionalists and such

Second Discourse). Denying that there were any neces¬

representatives of a new physiology and psychology

sary correlations between the two, he questioned

as M. F. X. Bichat and P. J. G. Cabanis, Saint-Simon

“whether rulers are necessarily worth more than the

opposed the egalitarian tendencies of the disciples of

ruled, and whether strength of body and mind, wisdom

Locke and stressed the existence of natural inequalities

and virtue are always found in the same individuals,

among men. The good society, he argued, was indeed,

and found, moreover, in direct relation to their power

as the philosophes had said, a society congment with

and wealth . . .” (Discours sur Vorigine de Vinegalite;

what is natural in man—but what was natural was

CLASSICISM IN LITERATURE inequality rather than equality. The ideal society was

temporary industrial societies both East and West have

seen as a harmonious association between men who

come so near the image of their desire that there must

were fundamentally different in their essential natures

be great rejoicing in heaven among Saint-Simon and

and capacities. Men fall essentially into three types:

his disciples.

those with rational scientific capacities who will be the

Whether the present stress on “meritocracy,” to use

leaders and guides of society; those with primarily

Michael Yoimg’s telling phrase (1959, passim), might

motor capacities apt mostly for manual labor; and

in due course be followed by a counter-tendency em¬

those with sensory capacities who would be artistic

phasizing a reduction or elimination of factual differ¬

and religious performers. Each man would express his

ences in power and reward, only the future can tell.

own deeper nature and contribute to society in terms of his natural endowment. Similar ideas

BIBLIOGRAPHY

about innate

differences have,

of

course, been expressed by writers ever since Plato and

Stanislaw Ossowski’s seminal work. Class Structure in the Social Consciousness (New York, 1963) is a basic source,

Aristotle. What is new, however, is Saint-Simon’s em¬

especially for the first part of this article. Other books

phasis on the need to organize society in such a way

covering aspects of the subject: Goetz A. Briefs, The Pro¬

as to “afford all members of society the greatest possi¬

letariat (New York,

ble opportunity for the development of their faculties”

Teachings of the Christian Churches, 2 vols. (London, 1931);

(Notice

Ralf Dahrendorf, Essays in the Theory of Society (Stanford,

historique,

in

Oeuvres

de

Saint-Simon

et

d’Enfantin, 47 vols., Paris [1865-76], I, 122). Equality of opportunity rather than equality of condition, equality at the point of departure in a man’s adult life cycle rather than equality of status, is the hallmark of Saint-Simon’s doctrine. This idea has become a major emphasis in Western social and popular thought. Whether in British liberal or Fabian thought of the

1937);

Ernst Troeltsch,

The Social

1969), esp. Chs. 6 and 7; Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (New York, 1963); Frank E. Manuel, The New World of Henri Saint-Simon (Cambridge, Mass., 1956); Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy (New York, 1959); Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. and eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1946); Reinhard Bendix and Seymour M. Lipset, eds., Class, Status and Power, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, 1966). Cf. also K. Davis and W. E. Moore,

nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, in Pareto’s

“Some Principles of Stratification,” American Sociological

notion of the circulation of the elite, in similar con¬

Review, 10, 2 (1945); Melvin Tumin, “Some Principles of

ceptualizations by Mosca, or in contemporary socio¬ logical theories such as those of S. M. Lipset, the stress at the point of departure on openness of opportunity and equality has been pervasive. In America, in partic¬ ular, equality of opportunity, whether as a description of what allegedly exists or as an ideal, has become part of an expected ideology which permits a reconciliation

Stratification: A Critical Analysis,” American Sociological Review, 18, 4 (1953), and “On Inequality,” American Socio¬ logical Review, 28, 1 (1963). Also useful are the entries under “Stratification, Social” by Bernard Barber and Seymour M. Lipset, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), Vol. 15. LEWIS A. COSER

between ideals of individualistic achievement—in the

[See also Economic History; Education; Equality; Hierar¬

tradition of the Protestant Ethic—and the tradition of

chy; Ideology; Marxism; Property; Socialism; Utopia.]

political equalitarianism. Although men receive un¬ equal rewards or goods and power, so it is argued, they have nothing to complain when, given equal opportu¬ nities, their differential positions express only their differential capacities. In the mid-twentieth century all industrial societies

CLASSICISM IN LITERATURE

continue to be class societies with sharp differentiations

The term “classicism” is comparatively new, particu¬

between top and bottom strata and a veiy large mid¬

larly in English. Thomas Carlyle used it in 1831 for

dle-class bulge, in which people are assigned to their

the first time, complacently and prematurely reflecting

class positions largely, though by no means wholly, in

that “we are troubled with no controversies on Ro¬

terms of imputed merit and achievement. Ascribed

manticism and Classicism,” in his “Essay on Schiller"

characteristics, such as those that come with birth and

(■Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Centenary Edition

kinship, have receded in importance while achieved

[1899], II, 172). John Stuart Mill, in 1837, explained

characteristics

Although

that the “insurrection against the old traditions of

Saint-Simon’s ideal of a totally open society has not

classicism was called romanticism” in France (“Armand

been attained, and although certain social strata, espe¬

Carrel,” Dissertations and Discussions [1867], I, 233).

cially among American Negroes and some other mi¬

Both these early uses refer to the Continental debate.

norities, still suffer from severe social disabilities, con¬

But even there the term cannot be traced back very

have

gained

ascendancy.

449

CLASSICISM IN LITERATURE far. It seems to occur first in Italy, in 1818, during

Ill) picks it up. In 1889 Georges Pellisier’s Le Mouve-

classicismo frequently in a series of articles, “Idee

ment litteraire aux XIX siecle contained an introductory

elementari sulla poesia romantica” in the famous “blue

chapter “Le classicisme.” In 1897 Louis Bertrand put

sheet,” II Conciliatore. (See Discussioni e polemiche sul

the term on the title page of his book, La Fin du

romanticismo, ed. E. Bellorini, Bari [1943], I, 436ff.)

classicisme et le retour a Pantiquite, a study of the late

Stendhal picked up the term in Milan: he read and

eighteenth-century classical revival in France. But

paraphrased Visconti whom he also knew personally,

Gustave Lanson’s standard Histoire de la litterature

and then gave in Racine et Shakespeare (1823) the

franqaise (1894) still avoids the term in the text, though

famous facetious definitions of classicism and romanti¬

two chapter captions use it casually. Louis Bertrand

cism. “Classicism is the literature which gave the

later belonged to the group of conservative critics who

greatest possible pleasure to our great grandfathers,”

early in the twentieth century launched the anti¬

while romanticism is the literature which gives us

romantic campaign which accused romanticism of all

pleasure now.

the evils brought about by the French Revolution and

But neither in France nor in England was the term

the anarchy of our time. Charles Maurras, the editor

widely used in the nineteenth century. In England rival

of the Action franqaise, Pierre Lasserre, the author of

forms which have since dropped out of use, occur

a violently

occasionally. “Classicalism” appears, e.g., in Elizabeth

(1907), and the Baron Seilliere who wrote many books

antiromantic Le Romantisme franqais

Barrett (1839), in John Ruskin (1846), and in Matthew

attacking the romantic disease, made Classicisme a

Arnold (1857). The alternate form “classicality” was

new slogan in France where it became also a political

used by Ruskin when he referred to the “vile classi¬

and philosophical war cry. In England T. E. Hulme

cality of Canova” (Modem Painters, Vol. I). In the

drew heavily on the doctrines of the new French clas¬

atmosphere of the later nineteenth century generally

sicism: his paper “Romanticism and Classicism” (1913,

hostile to the eighteenth century, the term “pseudo¬

published in Speculations, 1924) provided the most

classicism” emerged. James R. Lowell, in his essay on

often quoted statement of the new classicism in Eng¬

Pope (1871) speaks of a “pseudo-classicism, the classi¬

land. T. S. Eliot proclaimed his classicism in the Preface

cism of red heels and periwigs” (Literary Essays, Bos¬

to For Lancelot Andrewes (1928).

ton [1891], IV, 8). In 1885 the word appeared for the

In Germany around 1800 the term “Romantik” be¬

first time on the title page of an American book.

came the battle cry of a whole group of writers. But

Thomas Sergeant Perry’s From Opitz to Lessing: A

the word “Klassik” occurs only in then unpublished

Study of Pseudo-classicism in Literature. The neutral

notes of Friedrich Schlegel. In 1797 he jotted down

term “neo-classicism” emerges also toward the end of

the puzzling statements; Absolute Classik also anni-

the nineteenth century and is still used widely to refer

hilirt sich selbst (“absolute classicism thus annihilates

to the period of Dryden and Pope. But in that era

itself ") and Alle Bildung ist Classik Abstraction (“Every

“classicism” was even more successful. It occurs in

structure is classic abstraction”) (Philosophische Lehr-

Matthew Arnold’s essay on Heine (1863). Walter Pater,

jahre, ed. E. Behler, Munich [1963], I, 23). “Klassizis-

in his essay on romanticism (1876), quotes the defini¬

mus” seems not to be used at all until Hermann Hettner

tion of Stendhal and literary historians increasingly

in his Literaturgeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts

refer to the age which used to be called “Augustan”

(6 vols., 1856-57) used it in referring to French clas¬

as the “age of classicism.” Louis Cazamian’s Histoire

sicism. In Wilhelm Scherer’s standard Geschichte der

de la litterature anglaise (1925) called a section “Clas¬

deutschen Literatur (1883) the term occurs only in the

sicism (1702-1740)” and his book was, in English

Table of Contents. But about that time “Klassizismus”

translation, the standard English literary history for

in Germany was slowly replaced by the term “Klassik.”

many years. Handbooks now contain chapters “The

It seems to have been invented by Otto Hamack

Rise of Classicism,” “The Disintegration of Classicism,”

around 1887: in his Goethe in der Epoche seiner Vol-

etc.

lendung (1887) he uses it first in quotation marks. He

Similarly,

classicisme was

felt it to be an innovation as he explained in the preface

rarely used in the nineteenth century. It is called a

in

France,

the

term

to a later book, Der deutsche Klassizismus im Zeitalter

“neologism” as late as 1863 in Littre’s Dictionnaire.

Goethes (1906): “I could not this time avoid the un¬

Saint-Beuve and Taine do not use the term. It spread

pleasant expressions ‘Classicism’ and ‘classicist,’ for

more widely about 1880: Emile Deschanel, in Le

which I usually substitute ‘Klassik’ and ‘klassisch,’ be¬ cause usage has given the word ‘klassisch’ a special

Romantisme des classiques (1882) uses the term and

450

Phistoire de la litterature franqaise, Paris [1890], Vol.

the discussion waged in Milan. Ernies Visconti uses

Ferdinand Brunetiere, in his review of the book

narrow

(“Classiques et romantiques,” in Etudes critiques sur

Hamack draws a distinction between “Klassizismus,”

meaning

in

relation

to

German

poetry.”

CLASSICISM IN LITERATURE the imitation of antiquity, and “Klassik,” a term desig¬

tion to Shakespeare’s Poems (a part of Pope’s Shake¬

nating tire works of Goethe and Schiller. The new term

speare, 1725) asked for careful editions of English

replaced the older early in the twentieth century:

authors which “we in justice owe to our own great

Friedrich Gundolf, the most prominent literary histo¬

writers, both in Prose, and Poetry. They are in some

rian of the circle around Stefan George, concluded

degrees our Classics.” Sewell thought of Shakespeare

his book, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (1911)

as deserving and getting such treatment. Pope, in 1737,

with a chapter “Klassik und Romantik.” In 1922 Fritz

in the First Epistle of the Second Book of his Imitations

Strich attempted to apply the principles of Wolfflin’s

of Horace said that “who lasts a century can have no

art history and his contrast between Renaissance and baroque to the conflict between classicism and roman¬

flaw,/I hold that Wit a Classik, good in law.” The same expansion of the meaning occurred also

ticism in Germany in his Deutsche Klassik und Ro¬

in France, though surprisingly later than in England.

mantik: oder Vollendung und Unendlichkeit. The tri¬

Pierre-Joseph Thoulier D’Olivet, in his Histoire de VAcademie (1729) complains that “Italy had classical

umph of the new term was soon complete. The reasons for its success are obvious. Classicism,

authors and we as yet have none” (ed. Livet, Paris

in a sense resembling that of French classicism, is not

[1858], II, 47). Years later Voltaire in a letter to the

a very appropriate term for most of the writings of

same abbe D’Olivet, proposed to edit the “classical

Goethe and Schiller if one excepts the stages in their

authors” of the French, reserving Corneille for himself.

careers when they consciously aimed at the imitation

Voltaire’s own Siecle de Louis XIV (1751) put that age

of the ancients. The term “Klassik” resumes the old

next to other golden ages: that of Leo X, of Augustus,

meaning of standard or model, while the association

and of Alexander. Characteristically, the age of Pericles

with the ancients almost ceases to be felt. It has become

is missing from the list. In all these discussions the

a term which pries the German classics loose from

implication of “classicity” as mode and standard is

international classicism and yet resists the Western

dominant. The remoter model behind the great modern

tendency to treat Goethe and Schiller as romantics.

writer in antiquity is assumed as a matter of course,

The noun “classicism” and its variants are, of course,

but no more so than when Dante is considered a “clas¬

derivatives of the adjective “classical.

Classicus first

occurs in Aulus Gellius, a Roman author of the second

sic” in Italy or when Spaniards speak of their Golden Age. The matter of style did not enter.

century a.d. who in his miscellany Nodes Atticae (19,

The decisive event for the development of the con¬

8, 15) refers to classicus scriptor, non proletarius, ap¬

cept of “classicism” was the great romantic-classical

plying a term of the Roman taxation classes to the

debate waged in Germany by the brothers Schlegel.

ranking of writers. Classicus means there “first-class,

The transformation of the meaning of the word “clas¬

“excellent,” “superior.” The term seems not to have

sical” from a term of value to a term for a stylistic

been used in the Middle Ages but it reappears in the Renaissance in Latin and soon in the vernaculars. The first recorded occurrence in French, in Thomas Sebillet’s L’art poetique (1548) refers, surprisingly, to les hons et classiques poetes frangais comme sont entre

trend, type, or period in which differences of quality are allowed to exist, was the crucial turning point. The historistic revolution brought about an awareness of the existence, side by side, of at least two literary traditions. The Schlegelian dichotomy was first ex¬

les vieux Alain Chartier et Jean Meun (Paris [1910], Ch. II, p. 26). The names of these two medieval poets

pounded in France by Madame de Stael in De VAl-

show that the word had then no association with classi¬

publication of the book August Wilhelm Schlegel’s

lemagne (1814) but a few months before the delayed

cal antiquity and meant simply “standard” or “excel¬

Vorlesungen uber dramatische Kunst und Literatur

lent.” It remains to be found how the term became

appeared in a translation by her cousin, Madame

soon to be identified with the ancients, as in the phrase “classical antiquity.

“Classical ’ came to mean Roman

and Greek and still implied, for obvious reasons, supe¬ riority, authority, and even perfection. “Classical” became also associated with the class¬ room, with the texts taught in schools, as the ancients

Necker de Saussure. In her Preface (1813) Madame Necker commented perceptively: “In Mr. Schlegel s work the epithet ‘classical is a simple designation of a genre, independent of the degree of perfection with which the genre is treated.” Madame de Stael’s book excited violent polemics in France. What had been a

were then the only secular authors studied and they

local German debate became a European one. The

were studied as models of excellence, both in content

terms “classical” and “romantic” soon were discussed in every country of Europe and of the Americas.

and form. The meaning “classical’ and “classics,

re¬

stricted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the ancients, was later extended to the vernacular literatures. In England George Sewell, in his introduc¬

The history of the term reflects the history of its meaning: at first, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a term for excellence, particularly in the

451

CLASSICISM IN LITERATURE writings of antiquity, it changed under the impact of

Ponsard rather coyly pretended hardly to remember

the romantic and historistic revolution, to a term for

that one used to distinguish between “Classics and

a style challenging opposed or parallel styles: romantic,

romantics, or people who were called something like

realist, modern, etc. The exact value put on classicism

that.” But nothing came of this revival. The new en¬

will necessarily vary with the context and the polemi¬

thusiasts for classical antiquity preferred to speak of

cal attitude of the writer. Often “classicism” is used

the “pagan school” or named their style neo-grec.

pejoratively to refer to academic, conventional art. In

It was rather a new Hellenism which saw itself as very

other situations it assumes again the old meaning of superior value, perfection, and excellence as in the

different from the tradition of French classicism. Sainte-Beuve’s famous essay “Qu’est-ce qu’un clas-

French classicist critics of this century or in their

sique?” (1850) must be seen in this context. While

English counterparts, T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot. In

insisting on the Greco-Latin tradition Sainte-Beuve

different countries different ages are labeled “classi¬

aims at enlarging the concept. He recognizes the exist¬

cal”: the meaning shifts then from excellence, pre¬

ence of something transcending the French tradition:

scriptive greatness with an implied relation to antiq¬

Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are also classics,

uity,

or

even

a

claim

of rivalling

or surpassing

though they do not conform to the demands of what

antiquity, to that of a neutral, objective designation

we would call French classicism. This kind of classi¬

of a past style of art. The situation differs greatly in

cism, with its rules, Sainte-Beuve knows, is definitely

the main countries of Europe.

a thing of the past. Still, he pleads, we must preserve

Italians speak of “classicism” today mainly as apply¬

time widen it and make it more generous (Causeries

or speak of neoclassicismo in the eighteenth century:

du Lundi, Vol. III).

e.g., in the tragedies of Alfieri. But there is in Italy

In England, the period generally referred to today

no particular feeling that Italy had its classical age,

as the Age of Classicism, has no comparable standing,

though Dante is the great classic in the sense of excel¬

because, in the later view, the age of Dryden and Pope

lence. A series such as Classici Italiani includes simply

was surpassed by the Elizabethan age and particularly

writers of all epochs and styles of any eminence.

by Shakespeare and Milton. The English classicists did

In France, the seventeenth century is considered the

not call themselves by that name. They spoke of the

classical age: Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Pascal, La

imitation of the ancients or the observance of the rules.

Fontaine are the classics. Early in the nineteenth cen¬

Under the impact of the romantic movement their

tury beginning particularly with Chateaubriand, the

reputation declined early in the nineteenth century and

French seventeenth century was exalted as the classical

they were looked upon as belonging to a bygone age,

age in sharp contrast to the eighteenth century which

which was called variously the Augustan Age, the Age

to a modern literary historian may appear stylistically

of Pope, the Age of Queen Anne, but not the Classical

and in critical theory largely a direct continuation of

Age. Macaulay, in 1820, spoke of “the Critical School

the seventeenth century. But in the early nineteenth

of Poetry”; others referred to it as “the French

century the two periods were contrasted for reasons

School,” a disparaging term, as it implied that the

which can be called political: the seventeenth century

English poets were derivative from France. This was

appealed to the conservative reaction, while the eight¬

the assumption behind Pope’s well-known lines (from

eenth-century literature bore the stigma of having

the First Epistle of the Second Book in Imitations of

prepared and even caused the French Revolution. De¬

Horace [1737]):

sire Nisard was, in his Histoire de la litterature franqaise (4 vols., 1844-61), the most influential propounder of this conception. The French spirit, he assumes, reached perfection in the seventeenth century, while everything

452

the notion and the cult of the classics and at the same

ing to what is usually called the Italian Renaissance,

We conquer’d France, but felt our captive’s charms: Her Arts victorious trimph’d o’er our Arms.

since appears as decadence. He regards the French

English classicism was, it was assumed, the direct result

classical age as parallel to that of the great Augustus

of the Restoration of 1660 when the Stuarts returned

while—as he had argued in an earlier book, Etudes

from exile in France. This dependence of the English

des mceurs et de critique sur les poetes latins de la

classics on the French has been since disputed: vio¬

decadence (2 vols., 1834)—the age of Silver Latin

lently, e.g., by Thomas De Quincey, in 1851, who

corresponds to the French nineteenth century.

denied that “either Dryden or Pope was even slightly

With the triumphs on the stage of the actress Rachel

influenced by French literature” (Collected Writings,

in seventeenth-century tragedies, and the great success

ed. D. Masson [1896], XI, 61) and more sensibly by

of Francois Ponsard’s tragedy Lucrece in 1843, some-

modern scholars who pointed out the native elements

thing like a comeback of classicism seemed assured.

in English neo-classicism (e.g., P. S. Wood, in Modem

CLASSICISM IN LITERATURE Philology, 24 [1926], 201-08) and traced neo-classical

rather a man of the Enlightenment whose art strikes

theory in England to Ben Jonson.

us often as rococo; Herder would seem an irrationalistic

This pushes the matter back into the past of the

preromantic. It is difficult to see how a writer like

history of criticism, to die sources common to both

Herder can be called klassisch. In 1767 he exclaimed

French and English literature of the neo-classical, i.e.,

“O the cursed word ‘Classisch’ ” (Sdmtliche Werke, ed.

Aristotelian and Horatian theory, which was formu¬

B. Suphan, I, 412) and he attacked Goethe’s and Schil¬

lated in Italy late in the fifteenth and early in the

ler’s turning toward classicism as a betrayal of his

sixteenth century and codified in Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetics (1561) and by the Dutch humanists, Vossius

teachings. Goethe and Schiller did not call themselves Klas¬

and Heinsius. Ben Jonson paraphrased and translated

siker and actually had an ambiguous attitude toward

these writers in his Discoveries (see J. E. Spingam, “The

the whole enterprise of establishing a classical litera¬

Sources of Jonson’s Discoveries,” in Modern Philology,

ture. Goethe, in 1795, in an article, “Literarischer

1 [1905]) and French seventeenth-century critics were

Sansculottismus” argued that no German author con¬

clearly influenced both by the Italians and the Dutch.

siders himself klassisch and that he would not desire

(See also Edith G. Kern, The Influence of Heinsius and

“the revolutions which could prepare classical works

Vossius

in Germany”

upon French

Dramatic

Theory,

Baltimore

[1949].) The direct influence of Boileau on Dryden and

(Sdmtliche

Werke,

Jubilaumsausgabe,

XXXVI, 141). The paper was written when the French

Pope is undeniable as is the influence of Moliere on

Revolution had not yet run its course: Goethe feared

Wycherley. There were many other contacts, which

the dangers of centralization and the abolition of the

should not, however, obscure the substantial originality

little German states, with one of which (the Duchy

of the great poets, Dryden and Pope, and of the great¬

of Weimar) he was closely identified, since “classical”

est prose writer of the time, Jonathan Swift.

meant to him writing which would express the unity

Still, the English eighteenth-century writers could

of a nation. Only after the Schlegels had excited the

never after 1800 assume the position of authority which

great debate did Goethe use the term more freely,

the French classics of the age of Louis XIV or Goethe

either denying the distinction and clinging to the older

and Schiller assumed in France or Germany. In recent

meaning of excellence or taking sides against the ro¬

decades, with the general antiromantic reaction, much

mantics. A letter in 1804 reports that Goethe rejected

has been done to rehabilitate the “classical” English

the difference between the romantic and the classic

literature, particularly in scholarly circles. T. S. Eliot

because “everything excellent is eo ipso classic” (Letter

exalted Dryden (see Homage to John Dryden, 1924). Pope has found many defenders and admirers: even his translation of Homer has been reinstated as a tri¬ umph of the art of adaptation. Dr. Johnson has always had a following, mainly as person and sage. Scholarly efforts to revive the eighteenth century, particularly in the United States, are often motivated by a nostalgia for a time which is assumed to have been still a coher¬ ent society with its proper hierarchy of classes, a tran¬

by Heinrich Voss, Jr., to L. R. Abeken, 26 January 1804, in Goethe’s Gesprache, ed. von Biedermann, Wies¬ baden [1949], p. 163). But later in 1829 Goethe made the famous pronouncement to Eckermann: “I call the Classic the healthy, the Romantic the sickly” (April 12, 1829, Gesprache mit Goethe, Houben ed., Leipzig [1948], pp. 263-64). Goethe was then disturbed by what he considered the excesses of the German ro¬ mantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and he disliked the

quil refuge from the stresses of our time. But the figure of the misanthropic Dean belies this conception. T. S.

new French roman frenetique,

Eliot is right in saying that “we have no classic age,

of the much wider meaning of the contrast, though,

and no classic poet in English,” though he reminds us that “unless we are able to enjoy the work of Pope,

particularly Victor

Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (1831). He had lost sight in a conversation in 1830 with Eckermann, Goethe claimed wrongly that the Schlegels merely renamed

we cannot arrive at a full understanding of English

Schiller’s distinction between the naive and the senti¬

poetry” (What is a Classic?, London [1945]). Germans still recognize six Klassiker: Klopstock,

mental (ibid., 21 March 1830, pp. 322-23). Goethe

Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller (Wil¬

Helena and particularly in the figure of Euphorion

helm Munch, “Uber den Begriff des Klassikers” in Zurn

Goethe aimed at “reconciliation of the two poetic

deutschen Kultur- und Bildungsleben, Berlin [1912]), an

forms” (ibid.,

extremely heterogenous group of which Klopstock today would appear to belong to what is usually called sentimentalism;

Lessing,

in

spite

of his

polemics

against the practices of French tragedy, is a ration¬ alistic classicist who worshipped Aristotle; Wieland is

himself always professed to stand above the battle. In

16 December 1829, p. 299). While

Goethe viewed the debate rather detachedly, he was, during his lifetime, fast becoming the German Klas¬ siker or at least one of the two great Klassiker. Goethe, after the great international success of the Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) fell into comparative

453

CLASSICISM IN LITERATURE

l

writings of antiquity, it changed under the impact of the romantic and historistic revolution, to a term for

Ponsard rather coyly pretended hardly to remember that one used to distinguish between “Classics and

a style challenging opposed or parallel styles: romantic,

romantics, or people who were called something like

realist, modem, etc. The exact value put on classicism

that.” But nothing came of this revival. The new en¬

will necessarily vary with the context and the polemi¬

thusiasts for classical antiquity preferred to speak of

cal attitude of the writer. Often “classicism” is used

the “pagan school” or named their style neo-grec.

pejoratively to refer to academic, conventional art. In odier situations it assumes again the old meaning of

It was rather a new Hellenism which saw itself as very

superior value, perfection, and excellence as in the

different from the tradition of French classicism. Sainte-Beuve’s famous essay “Qu’est-ce qu’un clas-

French classicist critics of this century or in their

sique?” (1850) must be seen in this context. While

English counterparts, T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot. In different countries different ages are labeled “classi¬ cal”: the meaning shifts then from excellence, pre¬ scriptive greatness with an implied relation to antiq¬ uity,

or

even

a

claim

of rivalling

or

surpassing

insisting on the Greco-Latin tradition Sainte-Beuve aims at enlarging the concept. He recognizes the exist¬ ence of something transcending the French tradition: Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are also classics, though they do not conform to the demands of what

antiquity, to that of a neutral, objective designation

we would call French classicism. This kind of classi¬

of a past style of art. The situation differs greatly in

cism, with its rules, Sainte-Beuve knows, is definitely

the main countries of Europe. Italians speak of “classicism” today mainly as apply¬ ing to what is usually called the Italian Renaissance, or speak of neoclassicismo in the eighteenth century:

a thing of the past. Still, he pleads, we must preserve the notion and the cult of the classics and at the same time widen it and make it more generous (Causeries du Lundi, Vol. III).

e.g., in the tragedies of Alfieri. But there is in Italy

In England, the period generally referred to today

no particular feeling that Italy' had its classical age,

as the Age of Classicism, has no comparable standing,

though Dante is the great classic in the sense of excel¬

because, in the later view, the age of Dryden and Pope

lence. A series such as Classici Italiani includes simply

was surpassed by the Elizabethan age and particularly

writers of all epochs and styles of any eminence.

by Shakespeare and Milton. The English classicists did

In France, the seventeenth century is considered the

not call themselves by that name. They spoke of the

classical age: Corneille, Racine, Moli^re, Pascal, La

imitation of the ancients or the observance of the rules.

Fontaine are the classics. Early in the nineteenth cen¬

Under the impact of the romantic movement their

tury beginning particularly with Chateaubriand, the

reputation declined early in the nineteenth century and

French seventeenth century was exalted as the classical

they were looked upon as belonging to a bygone age,

age in sharp contrast to the eighteenth century which

which was called variously the Augustan Age, the Age

to a modern literary historian may appear stylistically

of Pope, the Age of Queen Anne, but not the Classical

and in critical theory largely a direct continuation of

Age. Macaulay, in 1820, spoke of “the Critical School

the seventeenth century. But in the early nineteenth

of Poetry”; others referred to it as “the French

century the two periods were contrasted for reasons

School,” a disparaging term, as it implied that the

which can be called political: the seventeenth century

English poets were derivative from France. This was

appealed to the conservative reaction, while the eight¬

the assumption behind Pope’s well-known lines (from

eenth-century literature bore the stigma of having prepared and even caused the French Revolution. De¬

Horace [1737]):

sire Nisard was, in his Histoire de la litterature franqaise (4 vols., 1844-61), the most influential propounder of this conception. The French spirit, he assumes, reached perfection in the seventeenth century, while everything since appears as decadence. He regards the French

the First Epistle of the Second Book in Imitations of We conquer’d France, but felt our captive’s charms: Her Arts victorious trimph’d o’er our Arms.

English classicism was, it was assumed, the direct result

classical age as parallel to diat of the great Augustus

of the Restoration of 1660 when the Stuarts returned

while—as he had argued in an earlier book, Etudes

from exile in France. This dependence of the English

des mceurs et de critique sur les poetes latins de la

classics on the French has been since disputed: vio¬

decadence (2 vols., 1834)—the age of Silver Latin

lently, e.g., by Thomas De Quincey, in 1851, who

corresponds to the French nineteenth century.

denied that “either Dryden or Pope was even slightly

With the triumphs on the stage of the actress Rachel

influenced by French literature” (Collected Writings,

in seventeenth-century tragedies, and the great success

ed. D. Masson [1896], XI, 61) and more sensibly by

of Francois Ponsard’s tragedy Lucrece in 1843, some¬

modern scholars who pointed out the native elements

thing like a comeback of classicism seemed assured.

in English neo-classicism (e.g., P. S. Wood, in Modem

CLASSICISM IN LITERATURE Philology, 24 [1926], 201-08) and traced neo-classical

rather a man of the Enlightenment whose art strikes

theory in England to Ben Jonson.

us often as rococo; Herder would seem an irrationalistic

This pushes the matter back into tire past of the

preromantic. It is difficult to see how a writer like

history of criticism, to the sources common to both

Herder can be called klassisch. In 1767 he exclaimed

French and English literature of the neo-classical, i.e.,

“O the cursed word ‘Classisch’ ” (Samtliche Werke, ed.

Aristotelian and Horatian theory, which was formu¬

B. Suphan, I, 412) and he attacked Goethe’s and Schil¬

lated in Italy late in the fifteenth and early in the

ler’s turning toward classicism as a betrayal of his

sixteenth century and codified in Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetics (1561) and by the Dutch humanists, Vossius

teachings. Goethe and Schiller did not call themselves Klas¬

and Heinsius. Ben Jonson paraphrased and translated

siker and actually had an ambiguous attitude toward

these writers in his Discoveries (see J. E. Spingam, “The

the whole enterprise of establishing a classical litera¬

Sources of Jonson’s Discoveries,” in Modern Philology,

ture. Goethe, in 1795, in an article, “Literarischer

1 [1905]) and French seventeenth-century critics were

Sansculottismus” argued that no German author con¬

clearly influenced both by the Italians and the Dutch.

siders himself klassisch and that he would not desire

(See also Edith G. Kern, The Influence of Heinsius and

“the revolutions which could prepare classical works

Vossius

upon

French

Dramatic

Theory,

Baltimore

[1949].) The direct influence of Boileau on Dry den and Pope is undeniable as is the influence of Moliere on

in Germany”

(Samtliche

Werke, Jubilaumsausgabe,

XXXVI, 141). The paper was written when the French Revolution had not yet run its course: Goethe feared

Wycherley. There were many other contacts, which

the dangers of centralization and the abolition of the

should not, however, obscure the substantial originality

little German states, with one of which (the Duchy

of the great poets, Diyden and Pope, and of the great¬

of Weimar) he was closely identified, since “classical

est prose writer of the time, Jonathan Swift.

meant to him writing which would express the unity

Still, the English eighteenth-century writers could

of a nation. Only after the Schlegels had excited the

never after 1800 assume the position of authority which

great debate did Goethe use the term more freely,

the French classics of the age of Louis XIV or Goethe

either denying the distinction and clinging to the older

and Schiller assumed in France or Germany. In recent decades, with the general antiromantic reaction, much has been done to rehabilitate the “classical” English literature, particularly in scholarly circles. T. S. Eliot exalted Dryden (see Homage to John Dryden, 1924). Pope has found many defenders and admirers: even his translation of Homer has been reinstated as a tri¬ umph of the art of adaptation. Dr. Johnson has always had a following, mainly as person and sage. Scholarly efforts to revive the eighteenth century, particularly in the United States, are often motivated by a nostalgia for a time which is assumed to have been still a coher¬ ent society with its proper hierarchy of classes, a tran¬

meaning of excellence or taking sides against the ro¬ mantics. A letter in 1804 reports that Goethe rejected the difference between the romantic and the classic because “everything excellent is eo ipso classic” (Letter by Heinrich Voss, Jr., to L. R. Abeken, 26 January 1804, in Goethe’s Gesprache, ed. von Biedermann, Wies¬ baden [1949], p. 163). But later in 1829 Goethe made the famous pronouncement to Eckermann: “I call the Classic the healthy, the Romantic the sickly” (April 12, 1829, Gesprache mit Goethe, Houben ed., Leipzig [1948], pp. 263-64). Goethe was then disturbed by what he considered the excesses of the German ro¬ mantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and he disliked the

quil refuge from the stresses of our time. But the figure of the misanthropic Dean belies this conception. T. S.

new French roman frenetique,

Eliot is right in saying that “we have no classic age,

of the much wider meaning of the contrast, though,

and no classic poet in English,” though he reminds us that “unless we are able to enjoy the work of Pope,

particularly Victor

Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (1831). He had lost sight in a conversation in 1830 with Eckermann, Goethe claimed wrongly that the Schlegels merely renamed

we cannot arrive at a full understanding of English

Schiller’s distinction between the naive and the senti¬

poetry” (What is a Classic?, London [1945]). Germans still recognize six Klassiker: Klopstock,

himself always professed to stand above the battle. In

Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller (Wil¬

Helena and particularly in the figure of Euphorion

helm Munch, “Uber den Begriff des Klassikers” in Zurn deutschen Kultur- und Bildungsleben, Berlin [1912]), an extremely heterogenous group of which Klopstock today would appear to belong to what is usually called sentimentalism;

Lessing,

in spite

of his

polemics

against the practices of French tragedy, is a ration¬ alistic classicist who worshipped Aristotle; Wieland is

mental (ibid., 21 March 1830, pp. 322-23). Goethe

Goethe aimed at “reconciliation of the two poetic forms” (ibid., 16 December 1829, p. 299). While Goethe viewed the debate rather detachedly, he was, during his lifetime, fast becoming the German Klas¬ siker or at least one of the two great Klassiker. Goethe, after the great international success of the Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) fell into comparative

453

CLASSICISM IN LITERATURE oblivion. Only the success of Hermann und Dorothea

In retrospect it is obvious that the term “classicism”

(1797) and the effect of the collection of epigrams,

is a nineteenth-century term. It occurs first in Italy in

Xenien, written in collaboration with Schiller, gave

1818, in Germany in 1820, in France in 1822, in Russia

him a commanding position in German literature.

in 1830, in England in 1831. In Germany about 1887

Goethe’s towering reputation was secured first by the

the new term Klassik, first used casually by Friedrich

brothers Schlegel who played him up against Schiller

Schlegel in 1797, expelled Klassizismus. Clearly the

yet did not consider either Schiller or Goethe classics.

terms have something in common: the reference to

Friedrich Schlegel hoped as early as 1800 that Goethe

excellence, to authority, and to the relation to antiq¬

would accomplish the task of “harmonizing the classi¬

uity. In the countries we have discussed “classicism”

cal and romantic” (Gesprach uber die Poesie, in Kri-

refers however to three distinct bodies of literature:

tische Schriften, ed. W. Rasch, Munich [1956], p. 334).

the French seventeenth century,

In August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic

seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the

Art and Literature (1809-11) Goethe is discussed with

very late eighteenth-century German literature. They

the romantic drama written in the wake of Shake¬

differ widely in their substance and form, their claim

speare. While Goethe’s reputation as a great poet and

to authority and greatness, and even in their relation

sage steadily grew in the first decades of the nineteenth

to antiquity. French classicism has preserved its im¬

century and while his writings began to penetrate into

mense prestige, but recent scholarship has minimized

the schools, neither he nor Schiller was considered a

its debt to antiquity. Henri Peyre, in Qu’est-ce que le

Klassiker or as representing “classicism” for a long

classicisme? (1935) has emphasized the distinctness and

time. The whole early nineteenth century in Germany,

uniqueness of French classicism and argued that “the

dominated as it was by Romantic theory and taste,

relations between French literature of the seventeenth

would not have considered the term “classicism” flat¬

century and that of antiquity were much looser than

tering. Friedrich Schlegel, in

1800,

referred con¬

it is usually assumed” (Le Classicisme frangais, New

temptuously to the “so-called classical poets of the

York [1942], p. 32). English classicism has remained

English: Pope, Dryden and whoever else” (Gesprach

mainly a scholar’s delight and preserve. The German

uber die Poesie, ibid.,

classics, even if reduced to Goethe and Schiller, loom

p.

288).

August Wilhelm Schlegel’s influential lecture courses

still large on the literary horizon. French and English

treated all forms of classicism, French, English, and

classicism is far more “Latin” than German classicism

German with polemical harshness. The literary histo¬

which is more self-consciously “Greek.” In a history

ries of the time avoided the terms “classicism” and

of European styles of literature based on an analogy

“classical.” Thus Gervinus in his standard Geschichte

with art history, French classicism will appear as

der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen (5 vols.,

closely related to the baroque: it has many baroque

1835-42) never refers to Goethe or Schiller as Klas-

features which are however, muted and subdued as Leo

sisch or Klassiker. Gervinus thought rather that the

Spitzer has shown persuasively in “Die klassische

new edition of Faust (1808) put Goethe “in the van¬

Dampfung in Racines Stil,” found in Romanische Stil-

guard of romantic trends” (Leipzig [1871-74], V, 789).

und Literatur-studien (Marburg [1931], I, 135-268).

The same is true of other histories such as A. F. C.

English classicism seems most closely related to the

Vilmar’s popular Geschichte der deutschen National¬

Enlightenment, to realism, though on occasion it has

literatur (1857). Not imtil Rudolf Gottschall’s Die

affinities with what could be called rococo in its artistic-

deutsche Nationalliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts (1854)

style. This seems true of Pope’s Rape of the Lock

were

454

the English late

die

(Friedrich Brie, Englische Rokoko-epik, Munich [1927]).

Klassiker. In 1867, when the privileges protecting the

Goethe

and

Schiller called consistently

German classicism even in its most self-conscious stage

reprinting of the works of Goethe and Schiller were

appears often romantic

abolished,

Klassikerausgaben began to

proliferate.

or possibly nostalgic and

With tire establishment of the German Empire the

utopian as did also the contemporary classicism else¬ where. The elegiac note is prominent in Andre Chenier

works of Goethe and Schiller assumed more and more

and the painters and sculptors of the return to antiq¬

the role of a national palladium: a cultural heritage

uity. David, Canova, and Thorvaldsen have a strong

surrounded by almost superstitious awe. The founding

sentimental streak. The dream of the golden age is

of the Goethe-Gesellschaft (1885), the publication of

never far away (Rudolf Zeitler, Klassizismus und

the 143-volume edition of Goethe’s complete works

Utopia, Uppsala [1954]). The Empire style of Napoleon

known as Weimarer Ausgabe and the emergence of a

is classicistic: but Napoleon carried Werther and Ossian

new academic profession, Goethe-philologie, are symp¬

about with him.

toms of this victory. Only in the twentieth century

The revival of classicism late in the nineteenth and

did more detached views of the German classics be¬

early in the twentieth century was strongest and most

come possible in Germany.

articulate in France. Charles Maurras (1868-1952)

CLASSICISM IN LITERATURE proclaimed classicism as a slogan aroimd 1894. “Clas¬

Eliot in his admiration for the French neo-classicism

sicism” with him and his followers was part of a general

but could not have influenced Eliot as Hulme’s essays,

ideological scheme in which monarchism, belief in the

Speculations, were printed only in 1924; Eliot’s posi¬

Roman Church as an institution, a concept of history,

tion had been reached much earlier in the twentieth

of France and its past, were amalgamated into a co¬

century.

herent ideology which had strong political appeal. But

In Germany there were also attempts to revive

the Action franqai.se became discredited by its collabo¬

classicism: Paul Ernst (1866-1933) spoke in these

ration with the Germans during the second World War.

terms, Hugo von Hofmannsthal showed such tenden¬

Many other contemporaries, often in violent disagree¬

cies, as did the whole circle around Stefan George, but

ment with Maurras and his group, also embraced what

one cannot speak of a concerted movement. The same

they called classicism: Julien Benda, a violent anti¬

is true of Russia where the symbolist poet Vyacheslav

romantic polemicist, highly rationalistic in outlook,

Ivanov (1866-1949) was a classical scholar, and the

recommended classicism. For a time even Andre Gide

group which called itself Acmeists resumed classical

considered himself “the best representative of classi¬

themes and forms.

cism,” as he told Emile Henriot in 1921. Its secret was

Twentieth-century neo-classicism is and often was

“modesty,” the tendency toward litotes, understate¬

escapist and academic: in France it combined with

ment. Gide argued that there are classics only in

xenophobia, with a violent nationalism conscious of its

France, if one excepts Goethe; classicism is a French

opposition to everything Nordic, German, and roman¬

invention, elsewhere it remained artificial as the case

tic. But the neo-classical movement provided also

of Alexander Pope shows. (See “Billets a Angele”

something of aesthetic importance: a resistance against

CEuvres completes [1932], Vol. XI.) When the critic Jacques Riviere returned from German captivity after

the abolition of art and the rejection of beauty which

the first World War and assumed the editorship of La

and electronic music. Neo-classicism may be a narrow

Nouvelle Revuefranqai.se he promised, in his statement

taste and assumes a specific image of man but Phidias

of purpose, to “. . . describe what seems to us to fore¬

and Vergil, Raphael and Titian, Racine and Goethe will

shadow a classical renaissance, not literal and purely

always provide a center of security, a point of stillness,

imitative . . . but a deep, inner classicism” (La Nouvelle

an exemplification of what is art, or at least one kind

Revue frangaise, 13 [June 1919], 8). Also Paul Valery

of art, admired through the ages. In this sense the

culminated recently in pop and op art, concrete poetry,

considered himself a classicist and defended even the

concept of classicism is likely to survive and is likely

most arbitrary rules and restrictions. Discipline, purity,

to be restored in the future. It is not merely a historical

form, restraint are classicist motifs in his poetics.

concept but a living idea.

French neo-classicism radiated abroad. The two American neo-humanists, Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt drew on the earlier versions of French anti¬ romantic thought, particularly on Brunetiere. Babbitt referred with approval to Maurras but was shocked to discover that Lasserre’s book on romanticism was displayed in a bookshop in the Quartier Saint Germain along with books advocating the restoration of the monarchy. Babbitt remained a good American repub¬

BIBLIOGRAPHY The history of the term has hardly been investigated. Some remarks are to be found in Pierre Moreau, Le Classi-

cisme des romantiques (Paris, 1932); Henri Peyre, Le Classicisme franqais (New York, 1942), Ch II, “Le Mot Classicisme,” deals with the word “classique" and has nothing to say about “classicisme” as a word; Ernst Robert Curtius,

Europaische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern,

lican who had no use for “an impossible political and

1948), esp. pp. 251 ff.; Harry Levin, “Contexts of the Classi¬

religious reaction” (Preface to The New Laokoon, Bos¬

cal,” in his Contexts of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1957),

ton [1910]). Babbitt was T. S. Eliot’s teacher at Harvard

pp. 38-54; Georg Luck, “Scriptor Classicus,” in Comparative

and must have influenced his literary ideology. Eliot read Maurras, dedicated his booklet on Dante (1929) to Maurras, and recognized the great influence of Maurras on his intellectual development (Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, 11 [1923], 619-25). Eliot’s “classi¬ cism” has however only a very general similarity with Maurras’. In describing modern classicism as “a tend¬ ency toward a higher and clearer conception of Rea¬

Literature, 10 (1958), 150-58; Rene Wellek, “The Term and Concept of Classicism in Literary History,” in Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Earl R. Wasserman (Baltimore, 1965), pp. 105-28; also in Proceedings of the IVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association: Fribourg, 1964 (The Hague, 1966), pp. 1049-67. Most other discussions of “classicism’’ are analytical, ideological, or historical. Here is a small selection: P. Van Tieghem, “Classique,” in Revue de synthase historique, 41

son, and a more severe and serene control of the

(1931), 238-41, is purely analytical; Gerhart Rosenwaldt,

emotions by Reason” he quotes a heterogeneous list

“Zur Bedeutung des Klassischen in der bildenden Kunst,”

of names: Sorel, Maurras, Benda, Hulme, Maritain, and Babbitt (Criterion, 4 [1926], 5). T. E. Hulme preceded

Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik, 11 (1916), on page 125 contains a striking definition: Klassisch ist ein Kunstwerk das voll-

455

CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTS kommen stilisiert ist, ohne von der Natur abzuweichen, so doss dem Bediirfniss nach Stilisierung und Nachahmung in gleicher Weise Genuge getan ist (“A work of art is classical that is completely stylized without deviating from nature, so that the requirements of both stylization and imitation are equally well met”); Helmut Kuhn, “ ‘Klassisch’ als historischer Begriff,” in Werner Jaeger, ed., Das Problem des

Klassischen und die Antike (Stuttgart, 1933, reprint 1961), pp. 109-28; idem, Concinnitas: Beitriige zum Problem des Klassischen. Heinrich Wolffin zum achtzigsten Geburtstag ■ . . zugeeignet (Basel, 1944); Kurt Herbert Halbach, “Zum Begriff und Wesen der Klassik,” in Festschrift Paul Kluckhohn und Hermann Schneider gewidmet . . . (Tubingen, 1948), pp. 166-94; Heinz Otto Burger, ed., Begriffsbestimmung der Klassik und des Klassischen, Wege der Forschung, Vol. 210 (Darmstadt, 1971); W. Tatarkiewicz, “Les quatre significations du mot ‘classique,’ ” Revue Internationale de

Philosophie, 43 (1958), 5-11; E. F. Carritt, “Classicism,” ibid., 23-36. Fritz Ernst, Der Klassizismus in Italien, Frankreich und

or doing. The work of an architect or a sculptor an¬ swered to this definition, but so did the work of a carpenter or a weaver, for their activities belonged in equal measure to the realm of art. Art by definition was rational and implied knowledge; it did not depend on inspiration, intuition, or fantasy. This conception of art found expression in works of Greek and Roman scholars. Aristotle defined art as the “ability to execute something with apt comprehension,” and some cen¬ turies later Quintilian explained it as based on method and order (via et ordine). “Art is a system of general rules” (Ars est systema praeceptorum universalium), Galen said. Plato stressed the rationality of art: “I do not call art irrational work,” he said. The Stoics placed greater stress on a fixed system of rules in the arts and simply defined art as a system. Aristotle stressed the idea that knowledge on which art is based is general knowledge. This ancient conception of art is not foreign to us,

Deutschland (Zurich, 1924), is a thin sketch. Sherard Vines, The Course of English Classicism from the Tudor to the Victorian Age (London, 1930), is lively but confused. Two

but it appears today under other names: craft, skill,

books on Goethe’s fame are relevant: Reinhard Buchwald,

as a matter of fact our term “technique” suits the

Goethezeit und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1949), and Wolfgang Leppmann, The German Image of Goethe (Oxford, 1961), German version: Goethe und die Deutschen (Stuttgart, 1962).

ancient idea of art better than our term “art,” which

Three encyclopedia entries merit

attention:

Antonio

Viscardi, “Classicismo” in Dizionario letterario Bompiani

delle opere (Milan, 1947), I, 22-43; Henri Peyre, “Le Classicisme,” in Encyclopedie de la Pleiade. Histoire des litteratures (Paris, 1956), II, 110-39; and W. B. Fleischmann, “Classicism,’ in Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. A. Preminger (Princeton, 1965), pp. 136-41. RENE WELLEK [See also Ancients and Moderns; Baroque; Criticism; En¬ lightenment; Historicism; Mimesis; Nature; Romanticism; Style; Ut pictura poesis.]

or technique. The Greek name for art was techne, and

is now used as an abbreviation for fine arts. The Greeks had no name for the latter since they did not recognize their distinctiveness. They grouped fine arts together with handicrafts, convinced that the essence of a sculptor’s or a carpenter’s work is the same, i.e., skill. The sculptor and the painter, working in different media with different tools and applying different tech¬ nical methods, have only one thing in common: their production is based on skill. And so is the production of a craftsman; therefore a general conception which embraces fine arts cannot but likewise embrace the crafts. The Greeks regarded both sciences and crafts as belonging to the realm of art. Geometry or grammar were indeed areas of knowledge, rational systems of rules, methods of doing or making things, and so they

CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTS I. ANTIQUITY The

456

history

of the classification of the arts is compli¬

certainly answered to the Greek meaning of the term “art.” Cicero divided arts into those which only com¬ prehend things (animo cernunt) and those which make them (Academica II 7, 22); today we consider the first category as sciences, not as arts.

cated for several reasons but chiefly because the idea

So “art” in the original meaning of the word em¬

of art has changed. The classical idea differed from

braced more than it does in our times, and at the same

ours in at least two respects. First, it was concerned

time it embraced less: it excluded poetry. Poetry was

not with the products of art but with the act of pro¬

supposed to lack the characteristic trait of art: it

ducing them and in particular the ability to produce

seemed not to be governed by rules; on the contrary,

them; e.g., it pointed to the skill of the painter rather

it seemed to be a matter of inspiration, of individual

than to the picture. Second, it embraced not only

creativeness. The Greeks saw a kinship between poetry

“artistic” ability but any human ability to produce

and prophecy rather than between poetry and art. The

things so long as it was a regular production based on

poet is a kind of bard, while die sculptor is a kind

rules. Art was a system of regular methods of making

of artisan.

CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTS The Greeks included music together with poetry in the sphere of inspiration. First, there was a psychologi¬

however, as perfect arts, not the fine arts, but the sciences (e.g., mathematics or astronomy).

cal affinity between the two arts; both were compre¬

2. Plato based his classification on the fact that

hended as acoustic productions, and both were sup¬

different arts are differently related to real objects;

posed to have a “manic” character, i.e., to be the

some produce things, as does architecture, and others

source of rapture. Second, they were practiced jointly

imitate them, as does painting. This opposition be¬

since poetry was sung and music was vocalized, and

tween “productive” and “imitative” arts became pop¬

since both were essential elements of “mysteries.”

ular in antiquity and continued to be so in modern

Before the ancient idea of art became modern, two

times. Another Platonic classification distinguished arts

things were to happen: poetry and music were to be

which produce real things, e.g., architecture, and those

incorporated into art, while handicrafts and sciences

which produce only images, e.g., painting. For Plato,

were to be eliminated from it. The first happened

however, this classification was in fact the same as the

before the end of antiquity. Poetry and music could

former. Imitations of things are no more than images

indeed be considered arts as soon as their rules were

of them.

discovered. This happened early so far as music is

Aristotle’s classification of the arts differed little from

concerned: since the Pythagoreans found the mathe¬

Plato’s; he divided all arts into those which complete

matical laws of acoustic harmony, music has been

nature and those which imitate it. This was his excellent

considered as a branch of knowledge as well as an art.

formula for the Platonic division.

It was more difficult to include poetry in the arts.

3. The classification most generally accepted in an¬

The initial step was made by Plato: he admitted that

cient times divided arts into “liberal" and “vulgar."

there are two kinds of poetry; the poetry springing

It was an invention of the Greeks, though it is known

from poetical frenzy and the poetry resulting from

mainly in the Latin terminology as artes liberates and

literary skill, in short, “manic” and “technical” poetry.

artes vulgares. More than any other ancient classifica¬

The second is art, the first is not. Plato however con¬

tions it was dependent on social conditions in Greece.

sidered only the first as true poetry. Aristotle made

It was based on the fact that certain arts require physi¬

the next step by supplying so many rules of poetry

cal effort from which others are free, a difference that

that for him and for his successors there could be no

to ancient Greeks seemed particularly important. It

doubt that poetry is an art. It is an imitative art: “the

was the expression of an aristocratic regime and of the

poet is an imitator just like the painter or other maker

Greek contempt for physical work and preference for

of likenesses,” Aristotle said (Poetics 1460b 8).

activities of the mind. The liberal or intellectual arts

On the contrary, crafts and sciences were not ex¬

were considered not only a distinct but also a superior

cluded in the classical Greek era from the realm of

group. Note, however, that the Greeks considered

the arts. Neither were they in the Hellenistic period,

geometry and astronomy as liberal arts, although they

in the Middle Ages, and in the Renaissance—the early,

are now considered sciences.

classical idea of art survived for more than two thou¬

It is doubtful whether it is possible to indicate who

sand years. Our idea of art is a comparatively modern

was the inventor of the division of the arts into liberal

invention. In antiquity numerous attempts were made to clas¬

thinkers who accepted it; Galen, the famous physician

sify the arts; all of them classified the arts in the broad¬ est sense of the word, by no means the fine arts alone. The first classification had been originated by the Sophists. Their work was continued by Plato and Aristotle and by the thinkers of the Hellenistic and

and vulgar; we know only the names of some later of the second century

a.d.,

was the one who developed

it most fully. Later the Greeks called the liberal arts also “encyclic” arts. The word, almost a synonym of the

modern

word

“encyclopedic,”

etymologically

meant “forming a circle” and signified the circle of

Roman period. 1. The Sophists distinguished two categories of arts;

arts obligatory for an educated man.

arts cultivated for the sake of their utility and those

to liberal and vulgar arts; for instance, Seneca added

cultivated for the pleasure they offer. In other words,

those which instruct (pueriles) and those which amuse

they differentiated arts into those which are necessary

(ludicrae). In doing so he fused, in fact, two different

Some ancient scholars added other groups of arts

in life and those which are a source of entertainment.

classifications: that of Galen and that of the Sophists;

This classification was widely accepted. In the Hel¬

his fourfold division was more complete, but lacked

lenistic epoch it appeared sometimes in a more de¬

unity. 4. Another ancient classification is known from

veloped form; Plutarch supplemented the useful and pleasurable arts with a third category, that of the arts

Quintilian. This Roman rhetorician of the first century

cultivated for the sake of perfection. He regarded,

a.d.

(inspired

by

an idea of Aristotle’s) divided the arts

457

CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTS into three groups. In the first group he included those

Quintilian—on products of the arts; (5) the classification

arts which consist only in studying things. He called

of Cicero—on value of the arts, and (6) the classifica¬

them “theoretical” arts giving astronomy as an exam¬

tion of Plotinus—on the degree of their spirituality.

ple. The second group embraced the arts consisting

All of these were general divisions of all human skills

solely in an action (actus) of the artist without leaving

and abilities, none being just a division of fine arts.

a product; Quintilian called them “practical” arts and

What is more, none singled out the “fine arts,” and

gave dance as an example. The third group embraced

none divided arts in the broader sense into fine arts

the arts producing objects which continue to exist when

and crafts. On the contrary, fine arts were distributed,

the actions of the artist have ended; he called them

and divided into opposing categories.

“poietic,” which in Greek means “productive”; paint¬ ing served him as an example. This classification had several variants. Dionysius Thrax,

a writer

of

the

Hellenistic

(1) Thus, in the classification of the Sophists archi¬ tecture was considered a useful art, while painting was

epoch,

added

an art cultivated for pleasure’s sake. (2) Plato and Aristotle considered architecture a productive and

“apotelestic” arts, which meant “finished” or “carried

painting an imitative art. (3) Liberal (encyclic) arts

out to its end”: this was, however, only a different name

embraced music and rhetoric, but did not include

for “poietic” arts. Lucius Tarrhaeus, the grammarian,

architecture or painting. (4) In Quintilian’s classifica¬

added to the practical and apotelestic arts “organic”

tion dance and music were “practical” arts, while

arts, i.e., arts which use instruments or tools (organon

architecture and painting were poietic (apotelestic)

being the Greek name for tool), as playing a flute does.

arts. (5) None of the liberal arts were considered by

In this way he enriched the classification but deprived

Cicero as major arts; only poetry and rhetoric were

it of its unity.

supposed to be median arts, and all other fine arts to

5. Cicero used several classifications of the arts, most

be minor arts. (6) In Plotinus’ classification fine arts

of them based on the old Greek tradition, including

were divided between the first and the third groups.

the one which seems to be relatively original. Taking

Consequently, antiquity never did face the possi¬

as the basis of the division the importance of the vari¬

bility that fine arts could form a distinct group of arts.

ous arts, he divided them into major (artes maximae),

There may be a certain affinity between our notion

median (mediocres), and minor (minores). To the major

of fine arts and the notion of liberal arts, of arts for

arts, according to Cicero, belonged political and mili¬

entertainment’s sake, of imitative arts, of “poietic” art;

tary arts; to the second class belonged purely intel¬

however, all these ancient notions were broader than

lectual arts, i.e., sciences, but also poetry and elo¬

the notion of fine arts and, at the same time, in some

quence; to the third class belonged painting, sculpture,

respects, narrower. Some of the liberal arts, some of

music, acting, athletics. Thus he considered fine arts as minor arts.

not all of them however, belonged indeed to the group

6. At the end of antiquity Plotinus imdertook once

we call “fine arts.” Neither freedom, nor entertainment,

the entertaining arts, and some of the productive arts,

again the task of classifying arts. This most complete

nor imitation, nor productiveness were the properties

classification distinguished five groups of arts: (1) arts

by which arts in the modem, narrower meaning could

which produce physical objects, as architecture does;

be defined; imitation came relatively nearest to being

(2) arts which help nature, like medicine and agricul¬

such a property. The historian is tempted to believe

ture; (3) arts which imitate nature, like painting; (4)

that the ancients faced all reasonable possibilities of

arts which improve or ornament human action, like

classifying the arts except the division into fine arts

rhetoric and politics; and (5) purely intellectual arts,

and handicrafts.

like geometry. This classification, which may seem to be lacking a principium divisionis (“principle of divi¬

458

II. THE MIDDLE AGES

sion”) is in fact based on the degree of spirituality in

The Middle Ages inherited the ancient idea of art

the arts; it forms a hierarchy, beginning with purely

and made use of it theoretically and practically. Art

(as he supposed) material architecture and ending with

was considered as a habitus of the practical reason.

purely spiritual geometry.

Thomas Aquinas defined art as an “ordering of reason”

Let us summarize: Greek and Roman antiquity knew

and Duns Scotus as “the right idea of what is to be

at least six classifications of the arts, most of them

produced” (ars est recta ratio factibilium, Col. I, n. 19),

having several variants: (1) The classifications of the

or as “the ability to produce based on real principles”

Sophists were based on the aims of arts; (2) the classifi¬

(ars est habitus cum vera ratione factious;

cation of Plato and Aristotle—on the relation between

Oxoniense, I, d. 38, n. 5). Medieval art was indeed

arts and reality; (3) the classification of Galen—on

governed by fixed canons and by rules of the guilds.

physical effort required bv arts; (4) the classification of

Hugh of Saint Victor said: “Art can be said to be a

Opus

CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTS knowledge which consists in rules and regulations” (ars

into entertaining, jocose, and instructing youth (ludicre,

did potest scientia, quae praeceptis regulisque consistit;

giocose e puerili); like Plato, into those which make

Didascalicon, II). This medieval idea of art embraced

use of nature and those which do not; like Cicero, into

handicrafts and sciences as well as fine arts. Liberal arts were now considered as the arts par excellence, the arts proper; “art” without an adjective meant: liberal art. The seven liberal arts were logic, rhetoric,

major (architettoniche) and minor (subalternate) arts. However,

the

status

of architecture,

sculpture,

painting, music, and poetry changed greatly: these arts were now so much more appreciated than other arts,

grammar, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music

that to single them out conceptually became a matter

(including acoustics); they were—according to our

of course. In order to achieve this, it was necessary

understanding—sciences, not arts.

to realize not only what separates the arts from handi¬

However, the Middle Ages were interested in non¬

crafts and from sciences, but also what binds them

liberal arts as well; they did not depreciate them any

together. This became a major achievement of the

longer by calling them “vulgar” but called them “me¬ chanical arts.” Since the twelfth century Scholastics had tried to classify these arts and made a point of distinguishing seven of them, in symmetry with the seven traditional liberal arts, as did Radulphus Ardens in his “Speculum Universale” (see Grabmann). So also

Renaissance: it was not a proper classification, but a preparatory operation, the integration of fine arts. It had to be carried out on several conceptual levels. 1. First, general ideas of particular arts had to be formed. Neither a general idea nor a general term of sculpture existed at the beginning of the Renaissance.

did Hugh of Saint Victor, who divided the mechanical

The term “sculpture” had a narrower meaning, it

arts into lanifidum (supplying men with wearing ap¬

meant only sculpture in wood. To denote those, whom

parel), armatura (supplying men with shelter and tools),

we call “sculptors,” Poliziano had to use five terms;

agricultura, venatio (both supplying food), navigatio,

statuarii, caelatores, sculptores, fictores, and encausti,

medidna, theatrica. This was the major contribution of the Middle Ages to the classification of the arts. Two of those seven arts were similar to modem “fine” arts, namely armatura, which embraced architecture, and theatrica or the art of entertainment (a peculiar medi¬ eval concept). Music was considered a liberal art, being based on mathematics. Poetry was a kind of philosophy or prophecy, or prayer or confession, and by no means an art. Painting and sculpture were never listed as arts, either liberal or mechanical. Still they certainly were

meaning those who used, respectively, stone, metal, wood, clay, and wax. After 1500 the term “sculptor” already embraced all five of them. A similar integration occurred in painting and architecture. 2. A general idea of plastic art was also lacking. In antiquity and the Middle Ages architecture was con¬ sidered rather a mechanical and utilitarian art and seemed to be unrelated to sculpture and painting. In the sixteenth century it was first noticed that all three of them are similarly based on drawing (disegno): G. Vasari as well as V. Danti started to consider them as

arts, after all, as abilities based on rules; why then were

one group and called them the arti del disegno (“arts

they never mentioned? It was because they could have

of drawing”). 3. A further integration was necessary to classify

been classified only as mechanical arts, appreciated only when useful; the utility of painting and sculpture seemed insignificant. This shows the great change which has taken place since; these arts which we con¬ sider as arts in the strict sense, the scholastics did not think worthy of being mentioned at all. UI. THE RENAISSANCE The classical idea of art and the traditional classifi¬ cations of the arts were retained in the Renaissance. The philosopher Ramus, as well as the lexicographer Goclenius, repeated Galen’s definition of art verbatim. Benedetto Varchi, a major authority on classification of the arts, in his Della Maggioranza delle arti (1549), divided the arts, as did the Sophists, into those which are produced by necessity, for utility, and for enter¬ tainment (per necessita, per utilita e per dilettazione); like Galen, into liberali e volgari; like Quintilian, into theoretical and practical (fattive e attive); like Seneca,

“arts of drawing” together with music and poetry. A general idea which would embrace all of them did not exist. The integration began in the fifteenth century, but it took time before the result was satisfactory. The affinity of those arts seemed certain, but the prindple that would include all of them and exclude the crafts was lacking; since the Quattrocento diverse principles were suggested to fill this gap. Ingenious Arts. The Florentine humanist of the fifteenth century, C. G. Manetti, suggested calling them ingenious arts because they are produced by the spirit (ingenium) and for the spirit. This suggestion did not, however, add very much to the traditional opposition of liberal and mechanical arts. Musical Arts. Marsilio Ficino, the leader of the Florentine Academy, wrote: “It is music that inspires the works of all creators; orators, poets, painters, sculptors, architects.” He continued to call those arts

459

CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTS

460

liberal arts, though in accordance with his idea the proper name would have been “musical arts.” His idea was never published but only expressed in letters and therefore it never won a more general recognition. Noble Arts. G. P. Capriano in his De vera poetica (1555) singled out the same group of arts, but applied a different principle; their nobility. They are “noble arts,” he said, as they are the object of our noblest senses and because their products are durable. Commemorative Arts. L. Castelvetro in his Poetica dAristotele vulgarizzata (1570) contrasted crafts with arts on a different basis. While crafts produce useful and necessary objects, the function of painting, sculp¬ ture, and poetry is to keep things in human memory. Metaphorical Arts. On the other hand E. Tesauro, in Cannochiale Aristotelico (1655) tried to convince his readers that metaphorical speech, parlare figurato, constitutes the essence of these arts and distinguishes them from crafts. This was a point of view peculiar to the manneristic trend in aesthetics of the seven¬ teenth century. Figurative Arts. Some theoreticians of the seven¬ teenth century supposed that the peculiarity of this group of arts consists rather in their figurative, pictorial character, since even poetry is ut pictura. Especially C. F. Menestrier in his Philosophic des images (1682), stressed that all these arts—poetry not less than paint¬ ing and sculpture—travaillent en images (“work in images”). Fine Arts. The idea that such arts as poetry, painting, and music are distinguished by beauty was very seldom uttered before the eighteenth century (e.g., in the sixteenth century by Francesco de Hollanda, who called them boas artes). As the traditional idea of beauty was very broad, successful works of industry and handicraft wefe also called beautiful. However, the narrower meaning of the work permitted one to separate poetry, music, dance, painting, sculpture, and architecture as a peculiar group of beaux arts, “fine arts.” This is often believed to be an achievement of the eighteenth century. But as early as 1675 the out¬ standing French architect F. Blondel, in his Cours d architecture said that what these arts, called by earlier writers “noble,” “commemorative,” “metaphorical,” etc., have in common is harmony. Although harmony meant certainly the same as beauty, Blondel failed to call those arts beautiful. On the other hand, C. Batteux in his Beaux arts reduits a un seal principe (1747), used this term and included it in the title of his book. This was conclusive; the principle of beauty and the name “fine arts” were now generally adopted (though Batteux himself saw the common link of those arts not so much in their concern with beauty, as in the fact that their purpose is pleasure

and their method is imitation). However, a proper name came to be as important as a proper concept for the progress of aesthetic theory. Elegant and Agreeable Arts. A few years earlier different names were proposed for beautiful arts. In 1744 G. B. Vico suggested “agreeable arts” and in the same year J. Harris recommended “elegant arts.” However, Batteux’s terminology has prevailed. The “system of fine arts” was established, embracing poetry, music, theater, dance, painting, sculpture, and archi¬ tecture. Since the fifteenth century it had seemed cer¬ tain that these arts formed a peculiar group of arts. However, it took centuries before what unites this group and what separates it from crafts and science was made clear (see P. O. Kristeller [1951-52]). Para¬ doxically Batteux contributed to the acceptance of the “System of the arts” although his own system was different: he divided arts (in the broad, old sense) into mechanical arts, fine arts, and intermediate arts (archi¬ tecture and oratory). IV. MODERN TIMES

In about the second half of the eighteenth century there was only one major controversy (chiefly in Ger¬ many) concerning the arts: whether or not poetry belongs to the fine arts. Some writers contrasted beaux arts with belles lettres, considering them as two differ¬ ent fields of human endeavor. Still, Moses Mendelssohn in 1757 called for a common theory of both. This was done first by J. G. Sulzer in his Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Kunste (1771-74). The agreement was not general. Goethe in his review of Sulzer’s book (1772) ridiculed the linking of two things which, for Goethe, were very different (Kristeller [1951-52]). By now new problems of classification arose and had to be solved. First, how is all human activity to be classified and what place do fine arts occupy in it? The classical solution was prepared by Francis Hutcheson and the Scottish thinkers such as James Beattie and David Hume, and eventually formulated in 1790 by Kant: there are three major human activities: the cog¬ nitive, the moral, and the aesthetic; fine art is the product of aesthetic activity. The second problem was how to classify the nar¬ rower field of fine arts. Let us again take Kant as an example; he suggested that there are as many kinds of fine arts as there are ways of expressing and trans¬ mitting thoughts and feelings. There are three different ways, he said, and likewise there are three fine arts: using words, plastic images, or tones. The first way is used by poetry and oratory, the second by architecture, sculpture, and painting, the third by music. Kant sug¬ gested other classifications as well: he distinguished (following Plato) the arts of truth and the arts of ap-

CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTS pearance, architecture being an art of truth and paint¬

purely intellectual (artes liberales) and mechanical arts;

ing an art of appearances. On the other hand, he

in the Renaissance attempts were made to divide arts

divided fine arts into those which, like sculpture, deal

into “fine arts” and others; since the eighteenth century

with objects existing in nature and those which, like

it has been a division among fine arts themselves.

architecture, deal with objects possible only through

The problem seemed to have been settled, but in the twentieth century unexpected difficulties emerged.

art. Classifications of the arts were continued in the

The established classification was based on three as¬

nineteenth century. While the ancients attempted to

sumptions: (1) there exists a closed system of arts; (2)

classify arts in the broad sense of the word, the nine¬

there is a difference between arts and crafts and sci¬

teenth century classified only fine arts. It did this in

ences; (3) the arts are distinguished by the fact that

various and ingenious ways. It distinguished not only

they seek and find beauty. It took a long time and much

“free” and “reproductive” arts, but also “figurative”

effort to get this system accepted but eventually it

and “nonfigurative”; arts of motion and motionless arts;

seemed to be firmly established. However, we must

spatial and temporal arts; arts which require a per¬

observe that: (1) new arts were born—photography and

former (like music) and those which do not (like paint¬

cinema—which had to be included in the system. The

ing); arts evoking determinate associations (as painting

same applied to those arts which have been practiced

or poetry do) and evoking indeterminate associations

before but were not covered by the system, like town

(as do music or architecture). These different principles

planning. Moreover, the character of arts included in

lead after all to a similar classification of the arts. This

the system has changed: a new architecture, abstract

result is demonstrated in Max Dessoir’s table (1905):

painting and sculpture, music in a twelve-tone scale, and the anti-novel have appeared. (2) Doubts arose

Temporal arts Spatial arts

Arts of motions

Motionless arts

Arts dealing

Arts dealing with images

whether one really ought to contrast crafts with arts. As recently as the end of the nineteenth century William Morris argued that there can be no nobler

with gestures

art than good craft. And ought one to contrast science

and sounds

with art? Indeed, many twentieth-century artists regard Reproductive arts

SCULPTURE

POETRY

PAINTING

DANCE

Figurative arts Arts with determinate associations Free arts

ARCHITEC¬ TURE

Abstract arts MUSIC

Arts with indeterminate associations

their work as cognitive, similar to science, or even science itself. (3) Finally, is it correct to assume that seeking beauty is essential in art and represents its differentia specifica? Is not the concept of beauty too vague to be useful in defining art? One can say of many works of art that beauty was not their objective. What one can say of them rather is that the reason for their creation was the artist’s need of expression or his desire to excite and move other men. Everything seems to speak for the need to define anew the concept of art. And, consequently, for the need to start afresh the classification of arts.

Dessoir, the most expert aesthetician at the turn of the twentieth century, ended his review of art classifi¬ cation, however, with a pessimistic conclusion: Es scheint kein System zu geben das alien Anspriichen geniigte (“there appears to be no system that satisfies all claims”). Hegel’s well-known division of the arts into sym¬ bolic, classical, and romantic had a different purpose: it did not differentiate branches of arts, poetry, paint¬ ing, music, etc., but diverse styles of poetry, painting, music, etc. In classifying styles the nineteenth century was not less ingenious than in classifying arts. In summary we may say that the meaning of the classification of arts has changed; in antiquity the clas¬ sification of arts was a division of all human abilities; during the Middle Ages it was a division between

BIBLIOGRAPHY The most important though indirect contribution to the history of the classification of the arts is: P. O. Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 12, 4 (1951), 496-527, and 13, 1 (1952), 17-46. W. Tatarkiewicz dealt with the subject in The History of Aesthetics, 3 vols. (Polish ed., Wroclaw, 1960-67; English ed., The Hague, 1970); idem, “Art and Poetry, a Contribution to the History of Ancient Aesthetics,” Studia Philosophica, 2 (1939); idem, “Classification of the Arts in Antiquity,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 24, 2 (1963), 231-40. Classical and medieval sources are: Radulphus Ardens, in M. Grabmann, Geschichte der scholastischen Methode, (1909), 1, 254. Aristotle, Poetics, passim, and Physica, 199a

461

CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES 15. Bekker, Anecdota Graeca, II, 654 (670). Cicero, De oratore. III, 7, 26. Galen, Protrepticus, 14, (Marquardt, 129). Isocrates, Panegiricus, 40. Plato, Republic, 601D; Sophist, 219A, 235D. Plotinus, Enneads, IV, 4, 31; V, 9, 11. Quin¬ tilian, Institutio oratoria, II, 18, 1. Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon, II, in Migne, 176, cols. 751, 760. Seneca,, Epistolae, 88, 21. References for modem classification of the arts: C. Batteux, Les beaux arts reduits a un seul principe (1747). F. Blondel, Cours d architecture (1675), pp. 169, 783. G. P. Capriano, De vera poetica (1555). L. Castelvetro, Poetica

d'Aristotele vulgarizzata (1570); Correzione d’alcune cose del dialogo della lingua de B. Varchi (1572), p. 72. V. Danti, Trattato della perfetta proporzione, (1567), in P. Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, Vol. 1 (Bari, 1960). D’Alembert, Oeuvres (1853), p. 99. M. Dessoir, Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1906). M. Ficino, Commentarium in Convivium (1561). J. W. Goethe, review of Sulzer’s paper, Werke, (Weimar, 1896), 37, 206. J. Harris, Three Treatises (1744), p. 25. G. W. F. Hegel, “Vorlesungen iiber die Asthetik,” Heidelberg Lectures, 1818-29 (East Berlin, 1955). J. Hippisley, The Polite Arts or a Dissertation on Poetry, Painting, Musick, Architecture, and Eloquence (London, 1749), Ch. 2.1. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), p. 51. G. Manetti, De dignitate et excellentia hominis, (1532), 3, 131. M. Mendelssohn, Betrachtungen iiber die Quellen der schonen Kiinste und Wissenschaften (1757). F. Menestrier, Philosophie des images (1683). A. Poliziano, Panepistemon (1491). J. G. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Kiinste (1771, 1774). E. Tesauro, Canocchiale aristotelico (1655), p. 74. B. Varchi, Della maggioranza delle Arti (1549), reprinted in P. Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, Vol. 1 (Bari, 1960). C. Vasari, Le vite, ed. G. Milanesi (Florence, 1878, 1906), 1, 168. G. B. Vico, Scienza nuova (1744), p. 25. B. Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961), contains important references on the sixteenth century. W. TATARKIEW1CZ [See also Classicism in Literature; Classification of the Sciences; Education; Mimesis; Music and Science; Music as a Divine Art; Naturalism in Art; Platonism; Renaissance Humanism; Rhetoric; Style; Ut pictura poesis.]

of classification, however, goes beyond a mere inven¬ tory or “table of contents,” no matter how complete. The very fact that classification appeals to logical criteria which may possibly be subjective or objective in nature gives us an initial idea of the obstacles con¬ fronting the classifier, difficulties scarcely encountered in the preparation of a catalogue, properly so called. Consequently, a well conducted effort at surveying the history of the classification of the sciences may be valuable in leading us to discover the connections and analogies existing among the different fields of knowl¬ edge at a given time, and within the context of a particular type of civilization. However, history of any sort is not a static phenomenon, but follows an evolu¬ tionary course. We are obliged therefore to study the sciences and their classification considered essentially as an historical process subject to continuous develop¬ ment. We shall thus see the appearance of the great currents of ideas which have sometimes dominated many centuries and we can seek what is less apparent, namely, the structure underlying these ideas. We can already discern among the ancients this need to classify and discover relationships and hidden con¬ nections in order to obtain a total view of reality and to

explain the mechanism

of the universe.

Take

Pythagoras, for example, whose life was described by Porphyry and Iamblichus, and whose teaching was addressed primarily to those initiated in his circle. According to Pythagoras, geometry, arithmetic (theory of numbers), and music (acoustics) lead to the discovery of the secrets of number and harmony; only the sage by starting with these principles is able to reconstruct reality (Stobaeus, Florilege, I, 62-63). Through Archytas of Tarentum, Plato had been introduced to the Pythagorean method, as can be seen in several places in the Timaeus, the Platonic dialogue on which Proclus wrote a commentary in four books. Plato thought that ideas should be ordered according to their extension (denotation) in inverse relationship to their intension (comprehension): by starting from general and vague ideas, one should end up with more specific and clearer ideas. This dichotomy and progres¬

CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES

sive division of each idea into those ideas immediately below it, is expounded in the Republic. There is really a hierarchy made up of genus (yeirq) and species (elSt]), but for Plato, genus and species are inseparable. Be¬

462

The aim of every classification is to establish order in

sides, Plato applies the term mathemata (pad-ypara)

things and in thought. When this operation is applied

not only to the exact sciences but also to the technical

in the sciences at a given time in their evolution, it

and mechanical arts and to the liberal arts like music

provides a faithful though provisional picture of the

and gymnastics, that is to say, to all the disciplines

scientific knowledge at that time. By enabling us to

capable of educating a man. However, among these

take such an inventory of our knowledge, classification

mathemata Plato bestows a privileged place on the

provides a sort of spatiotemporal cross section of the

sciences properly called mathematical. We must re¬

sphere of ideas and culture of a given period. The value

member that geometry, arithmetic, astrology (in the

CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES sense of astronomy), and music belonged typically to

nizers of the library in Alexandria, the center of scien¬

Hellenic culture. In the Laws, Plato returns to this

tists and philosophers. He deserves mention here for

question in order to remind the reader that the first

having introduced divisions and subdivisions of knowl¬

three sciences must be acquired by every free man

edge with the aim of permitting specialization in a

{Laws VII, 817E).

given field of study. In the second century

b.c.,

there

It was not until Aristotle that we find the separation

was Posidonius of Apamea, the Stoic and polymath;

between species and genus, which was to become the

he was later in Rome and Cadiz; his work also included

basis of Aristotelian logic. The species is the specifica¬

all fields of learning, though unfortunately only some

tion of the genus; both appear in deduction, induction,

few fragments of his work are extant.

and in the theory of definition (per genus proximum

In the following century, in Rome, Marcus Terentius

et differentiam specificam). We find this hierarchy again

Varro expounded a whole program of studies extending

in all the later types of classification, however, the

from grammar to architecture (Varro was contem¬

criterion of division by species and genus was later

porary with Vitruvius), the program answering certain

shown to be inadequate; for example, according to the

practical needs without being devoid, however, of a

theory of evolution zoological and botanical species

certain idealism. In Varro’s Disciplinarum (ca. 50

have no stability. We must therefore take into account

which may be regarded as the first illustrated encyclo¬

other criteria: such as the contrasting criteria of objec¬

pedia, we find the following classification: grammar,

tivity and subjectivity, criteria varying with respect to

dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology,

method, foundations, aims, and so forth. But, returning

music, medicine, and architecture. It reflects perfectly

to Aristotle, who is generally more systematic in his

the genius of his time and especially of his people;

ordering of the sciences, we note that for him there

it owes nothing, in any case, to Aristotelian ideas. With

exist only three large groups of sciences: (1) theoretical

respect to special disciplines, mention must be made

sciences (physics and philosophy); (2) practical sciences

of the works of the physician A. Cornelius Celsus and

(ethics and politics); (3) poetic sciences (aesthetics).

the Natural History of Pliny the Elder in 37 books,

We also note that for him all reality is knowable

completed in

only through classification, but we must not forget also

ence and a model of classification within a branch

that for Aristotle all sciences have to be subordinate

of science. Pliny’s work has come down to us in its

to philosophy. It is true that Aristotle’s Physics comes exactly between mathematics and theology and is pre¬

entirety. We know that the Arabs preserved Greek science,

ceded by Logic, which is the structure of science and

that they translated the works of the ancients, added

also the science of structure. Physics is followed by

commentaries, and not only left the imprint of their

Aristotle’s treatises On the Heavens (De caelo), and

genius on these commentaries, but made some original

Meteorology. This plan is in conformity with the prin¬

contributions in every field of knowledge. Greek sci¬

ciples of classification which appear in several places of his work. We note three in particular. In Aristotle’s Topics we read that science “is indeed called specula¬ tive, practical, and poetic, the differences depending on how each is related respectively to the theory, the production, and the action of something” (Topics VI, 6, 145a 15). In the Nicomachean Ethics (VI, 3-5) there is a brief passage concerning art (techne), science (episteme), wisdom (phronesis), philosophy (sophia), and

a.d.

b.c.),

77, a true testament of ancient sci¬

ence, enriched by the Arabs’ contribution, was intro¬ duced by the Moors into Spain, and then proceeded to penetrate other European countries. Within Islam there appeared during the seventh century the first seeds of the new sciences which were essentially reli¬ gious; then a distinction was made between Arabic sciences (such as poetry and the art of oratory) and foreign sciences (astronomy, medicine, mathematics). Most of the “foreign sciences” came from the Greek

intelligence {nous). There are longer passages in the

heritage, thanks to the Syrian translations; there were

Metaphysics. “Physics is the theoretical science of material objects

also works translated from the Sanskrit via the Pali. A very distinct effort at classification is discernible

in motion . . . ; mathematics is a contemplative sci¬

among the Arabs, for example, in A1 Farabi and

ence, though certain mathematical entities are station¬

Avicenna (Ibn Sina), an effort which had been preceded

ary” (VI, 1026a). Then farther on: “Theoretical sci¬

by the work of systematization. To be remembered are

ences come before the practical ones and philosophy

the names of Djahiz ('Amr Ibn Bahr Jahiz), an Iraqian

before the theoretical sciences . . . ; motion exists only

scientist (died 868), author of a bestiary, or Book of

(XI, 7

Animals in seven volumes, in which we meet subjects

Among Aristotle’s pupils, Demetrius of Phalerum

Ibn Qutaibah wrote a treatise, Adab al Katib, contain¬

in relation to quantity, quality, and place’ passim; XI, 12, 1068b).

was a great encyclopedic mind and one of the orga¬

going beyond the scope of the title. His contemporary ing an essay on classification (in the introduction).

463

CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES In China and in India throughout the centuries, there

which was one of the famous Parisian schools of the

are examples of classification in encyclopedic works.

twelfth century, was the important scholar, Hugh of

In China such works always enjoyed, more than else¬

Saint-Victor. His chief work, the Didascalicon, contains

where, an important role in education and in prepara¬

a classification of the sciences and is a typical example

tion for taking examinations for official positions. In

of the cultural level of the high Middle Ages. The

the Han dynasty (second century

appeared a

following are its main divisions, resulting from philos¬

dictionary entitled Erh-ya; it was probably composed

ophy’s encompassing all knowledge. Philosophy is sub¬

earlier. This work is divided into nineteen categories:

divided into: (1) theoretical sciences (mathematics,

b.c.)

explanation of definitions, definitions of concepts, ex¬

physics, theology); (2) practical sciences (private or

planation of words, degrees of affinity; then come the

public); (3) mechanical sciences (navigation, agricul¬

art of construction, tools, music, heaven, earth, hills,

ture, hunting, medicine, theater); (4) logic, including

mountains, water, fields, forests, insects, fish, birds,

grammar and rhetoric. There is obviously a certain

quadrupeds, and domestic animals. Notice that this

arbitrariness in the system proposed here, but nautical

series is not devoid of a certain structure. During the

knowledge emerges as a new branch of science. Fur¬

same period there also appeared a classification in the

thermore, cartography is soon to make its appearance—

dictionary of Liu Hsi (or Liu Hsieh), the Shth-ming

well before the era of great sea voyages and discoveries.

or interpretation of concepts. The criterion applied is

As for Hugh of Saint-Victor, a curious mind and good

the way of passing from heaven to earth and from earth

pedagogue, he gave his readers the following advice:

to man; it includes twenty-seven divisions. In the Ming

learn everything, you will see later that nothing is

era, which marked the first commercial contacts with

superfluous (omnia disce, videbis postea nihil esse

the Occident, the number of schools and candidates

superfluum).

taking examinations increased rapidly; in 1615, Mei

In the thirteenth century, we see how Roger Bacon,

Ying-tsu published the Tzu-hui, a dictionary which

continuing the work of Robert Grosseteste, placed

revolutionized the arrangement of words by ordering

mathematics at the base of the sciences of nature. His

them on the basis of graphic analogies. A century later,

classification contains four large classes: (1) grammar

by taking the Tzu-hui as a model, a new dictionary

and logic; (2) mathematics; (3) philosophy of nature;

was published, the K’ang-hsi tzu-tien, (dictionary of

and (4) metaphysics and ethics.

the era of “splendid peace”) which serves as the basis of modern Chinese encyclopedias.

464

We must now observe that the essays on classification mentioned above, though they provide us with a fairly

In India, works embracing the whole of knowledge

faithful picture of the knowledge of an era and in a

or bearing on a particular field have been traditional

given country, have yet failed to yield any satisfactory

since ancient times. The language used in the beginning

connection among the scientific disciplines; they fail

was nearly always Sanskrit. In the first centuries

a.d.

even more to furnish a theory of knowledge internal

there were the Dharmasastra (Treatises of the Correct

to the sciences which would enable us to take into

Order) in which there are ideas on cosmology, social

account the great currents of thought in the sciences.

rules, human functions, and law. In the eleventh cen¬

It was not until the time of the Renaissance, more

tury, the encyclopedic work of the Sanskrit author

specifically, the end of the Renaissance, that a system

from Kashmir, Abinavagupta, and in the twelfth cen¬

of classification appeared which for the first time is

tury Somadeva’s work on the arts and techniques are

logical, organic, and firmly structured with respect to

worthy of notice. At the beginning of the nineteenth

aims, objects, and different groups of phenomena. It

century, encyclopedic works multiplied constantly, at

was the system proposed by Francis Bacon in his work

first in Sanskrit, then in the majority of the languages

on the worth and advancement of the sciences (De

of India: Hindi (the government’s language), Bengali,

dignitate et augmentis scientiarum). The author applied

Marath, Gujrati, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada.

psychological criteria, namely, Memory, Imagination,

Returning to the Occident, more precisely to the

and Reason: history is constructed by memory, and may

medieval Christian Occident, we find that for many

be either Civil History or Natural History; poetry flows

centuries the regular study of the Quadrivium (arith¬

from the fancy or imagination, and may be narrative,

metic, music, geometry, and astronomy) was a required

dramatic, or parabolic; finally, philosophy, which re¬

preliminary to the study of philosophy and theology.

sults from the use of reason, is divided into the sciences

This rule, followed in Paris as well as in Oxford, had

of the divine, of nature, and of man. The system of

been the practice in Constantinople where a new

the classification of the sciences and arts by Francis

branch of science was added to the list, namely, the

Bacon was adopted, with a few modifications, by

art of “horse-matters” or veterinary art. In Paris,

d’Alembert in the Discours preliminaire des editeurs

among the first masters of the Abbey of Saint-Victor,

de VEncyclopedie.

CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES Locke and Leibniz make a clear distinction between

can again be raised whether each science does not have

natural sciences (of bodies and of the mind) and moral

its own axiomatic structure or whether there might not

sciences (history and ethics). Locke introduced Semi¬

be a common axiomatic structure underlying all the

otic or the science of language, and Leibniz gave logic

sciences.)

a preponderant place. From the eighteenth century on,

Not long after Cournot, Herbert Spencer started

most philosophers and scientists who dealt with clas¬

from the assumption that all knowledge varies with

sification divided the sciences into two fundamental

the object, and he classified the sciences according to

kinds: sciences of nature and sciences of the mind.

their degree of abstraction in relation to the object.

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century there

He thus obtained a linear series going from the abstract

appeared the system of Auguste Comte, which is based

to the concrete, in which series there is the following

on a series of decreasing generality and increasing

order of succession: the abstract sciences, like logic and

complexity of subject matter in the following order:

mathematics which are concerned with the form in

mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology,

which phenomena appear; the abstract-concrete sci¬

sociology. The order of the classes is inherently linear,

ences, like mechanics, physics, and chemistry which

and has several weak points. Comte pictured in it a

investigate the causes of these phenomena; and, finally,

“natural logic” which has nothing to do with the mod¬

the concrete sciences which are interested only in

ern idea of axiomatic logic. He excluded the study of

results. There is a striking similarity between this divi¬

a spiritual or purely mental subject (it is true that he

sion and the one in the passage from Aristotle’s Topics

later added morals and introspective data); he included

quoted above.

among the abstract sciences the concrete science of

It is in the Manuel du libraire et de I’amateur de

astronomy. His system was reshaped by T. Whittaker

livres (“Bookseller’s and Book-Lover’s Manual”) of

who separated the two orders of objective (physical)

Jacques-Charles Brunet, and exactly in tire introduction

and subjective (psychological) sciences; unfortunately,

to Volume 6 (5th ed. 1865), that we find the first insight

this separation fails to take account of the historical

into a historical classification. The author examines

development of the sciences.

many systems, including Konrad Gesner’s, that of the

It was the great physicist A. M. Ampere who pro¬ posed to make a comprehensive table of all the fields

Parisian publishers at the time of the Bevolution, and Ampere’s.

of science. In his first table, Ampere separated all

Several German and British philosophers and scien¬

knowledge into two domains and divided each domain

tists dealt with the same problem of classification.

into subdomains and branches; the first domain com¬

Besides Schopenhauer, who

prised the cosmological sciences and the second the

empirical (a posteriori) sciences and pure (a priori)

sciences of the mind. In his second table, each branch

sciences,

is divided into sub-branches and into the primary sci¬

Dilthey, Hugo Miinsterberg, and later the psychologists

ences. In a third and final classification, he divided each

Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Wrmdt. Wundt drew a sharp

science of the first order into sciences of the second

contrast between the sciences of the real and formal

and third orders, thus producing a sort of binary system

sciences. The chemist and Nobel laureate Wilhelm

there

were

Hegel,

distinguished between Helmholtz,

Wilhelm

which provided a total of 2' = 128 names of disci¬

Ostwald divided the sciences into formal, physical, and

plines. Ampere’s system based on the content of the

biological. Paul Tillich considered three kinds: sciences

sciences, possesses a very dynamic internal structure;

of thought or the ideal, of being or the real, and of

it takes into account the historical relations among

the mind or normative sciences. Among the British

different domains and it remains the most complete

writers, classifications were made by Jeremy Bentham,

inventory

John Stuart Mill, Karl Pearson, and Franklin H. Gid-

of

scientific

knowledge

for

the

mid¬

nineteenth century.

dings. The American scientist and philosopher Charles

In 1851, A. A. Cournot worked out a system which

S. Peirce (son of the mathematician and astronomer

introduced a separation between structural laws and

Benjamin Peirce) classified the sciences after investi¬

historical criteria in all their forms by employing three

gating and writing on logic, psychology, mathematics,

great series of sciences, a theoretical, an historical, and

astronomy, optics, chemistry, and even technology.

a practical series, each composed of the following kinds

Peirce emphasized methods of inquiry in two essays

of science: mathematical, physical, biological, mental

“The Fixation of Belief” and “How To Make Our Ideas

or symbolical, and political. Every branch of science

Clear” (Popular Science Monthly, 1877-78), which

has its place in one of the three times five boxes in

mark the beginning of American pragmatism, though

columns. This is clearly an advance on Comte’s system

he later preferred the term “pragmaticism” (as ex¬

in particular, even though, here again, logic remains

plained in the article “Pragmatism” in this Dictionary).

a difficult science to place satisfactorily. (The question

Peirce’s trichotomous classification placed Sciences of

465

CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES Discovery first, followed by Sciences of Review and

The object is known only through actions of the subject

Practical Sciences in a descending order of importance.

and the subject is known only through the relations it has

Sciences of Discovery included Mathematics (of logic,

to objects, from which the twofold consequence is that in

of discrete series, of continua and pseudo-continua), Philosophy (phenomenology, normative science, meta¬ physics), and Idioscopy (physical and psychical sci¬ ences). Peirce had a low opinion of Comte’s and Spen¬ cer’s attempts at synthesis which fell under Sciences

order to ground logic and mathematics we must really go back in one form or another to the subject, and in order to construct a science of the subject we must go back to biology, hence also to physics and mathematics (Piaget, p. 1159).

of Review, and had even a lower opinion of the Practi¬

Lately a leading role has been assigned to language,

cal Sciences which included a motley array of items

to its mathematical structure, its axiomatic logic of

such as etiquette, paper-making, wine tasting, etc.

grammatical categories, and to the logic of binary

(Peirce, I, 77-137).

relations in linguistics. The linguistic problem is tied

In 1920, Adrien Naville’s Classification des sciences

to the automatic (computerized) treatment of “infor¬

appeared, based not on nomenclature, strictly speaking,

mation,” which is a matter of interest not only to

but on the leading ideas of the principal groups of

philologists,

sciences and their interrelations. Naville separated

equally as much to mathematicians, cybernetic theo¬

philosophers,

and

psychologists

but

three great classes of science: Theorematics, science of

rists, and engineers. Logic, which has only with great

laws; History, science of facts; and Canonics, science

difficulty found its place in the classification of the

of normative rules. These three classes provide answers

sciences, is not the sole basis of structural linguistics,

to three questions, respectively: What is possible?

for the latter depends on the psychology of form

What is real? What is good? To Naville the science

(Gestalttheorie) and on topology and graphs. Starting

of laws (nomology) is fundamental. A law is a condi¬

with language everything seems to converge on the

tionally necessary relationship; law exists wherever

unity of knowledge. This advance towards unity should

resemblance dominates the scene. Hence, science must

perhaps be, after all, the primary aim of a new scien¬

be concerned with general facts, thus recalling the

tific humanism. A classification of the sciences which

statement of Marcelin Berthelot (1827-1907) in the

is free from the subject-object dualism and from an

Preface to the Grande Encyclopedic (p. v): “The classi¬

enslaving chainwork of values, and which takes into

fication of general facts is the classification of the

account the profound, intimate, and reciprocal rela¬

sciences.”

tionships among all disciplines, would be the only

In the first class considered by Naville, following nomology are mathematics, physics, chemistry, somatic

classification fit to instruct us about the present state of our scientific knowledge.

biology, psychology, and sociology. Natural history, the theory of evolution, and human geography belong to the second class. The sciences of normative rules are the work of the arts and of everything concerned with the beautiful, the true, and the useful for society as well as for the individual. Among recent thinkers preoccupied with the prob¬ lem of classification is the Soviet writer Bonifatii M. Kedrov whose system is a closed, cyclical, and tight structure based on principles of objectivity, subordi¬

A.-M. Ampere, Essai sur la philosophic des sciences, ou Exposition analytique d’une classification de toutes les connaissances humaines (Paris, 1834). F. Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (London, 1623); Advancement of Learning (1605), Novum organum (1620); rev. English ed. with Introduction by J. E. Creighton (London and New York, 1900). R. Bacon, The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, ed. J. H. Bridge, Vols. I and II (Oxford, 1897), Vol. Ill with

nation, and transition from lower to higher forms. The

revisions (London, 1900); idem. The Opus Majus of Roger

psychologist Jean Piaget has on several occasions in¬

Bacon, trans. R. B. Burke (Philadelphia, 1928). L. Baur, ed.,

vestigated classification, its history, and its importance

“Die

for the theory of knowledge. He has emphasized the increasing interpenetration of all the branches of knowledge, the role of linguistic structuralism, and the operational theory of intelligence. The system which he has proposed is not circular or closed, and even less a lineai' one, but rather takes the form of a con¬ stantly

growing

spiral.

According

to

Piaget,

the

philosophischen

Werke

des

Robert

Grosseteste,

Bischofs von Lincoln,” in Beitrdge zur Geschichte der Philos¬

ophic des Mittelalters (Munster, 1912). J. Bentham, “Essay on the Nomenclature and Classification of Arts and Sci¬ ences,” in Works, 11 vols. (New York, 1962), VIII, 63-128. A. Comte, Corns de philosophie positive (Paris, 1830-42). A.-A. Cournot, Essai sur les fondernents de nos connaissances (Paris, 1851); idem, Des methodes dans les sciences de rai-

nated, for there is a constant interaction and mutual

sonnement (Paris, 1865). Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Discours preliminaire de TEncyclopedie (Paris, 1751). Stewart C. Easton, Roger Bacon and His Search for a Universal Science

exchange between the two.

(New York, 1952), has an extensive bibliography. G. Goblot,

subject-object opposition and dualism must be elimi¬

466

BIBLIOGRAPHY

COMIC, SENSE OF THE Essai sur la classification des sciences (Paris, 1898); idem, Le systeme des sciences (Paris, 1922). H. von Helmholtz, Uber das Verhaltnis der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesamtheit der Wissenschaften (Brunswick, 1862). A. Hill, Introduction to Science (London, 1911). B. M. Kedrov, “La classification des sciences,” Actes du He Congres de philosophie scientifique (Zurich, 1954). G. W. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur Ventendement kumain. Book IV, Ch. XXI, “De la division des sciences,” in Oeuvres philosophiques . . . (Amsterdam and Leipzig, 1765), pp. 489-96. A. O. Lovejoy, “The Unity of Science,” University of Missouri Bulletin (1912). R. P.

the Margites (ca. ninth century

b.c.).

Aristotle makes

reference to comic plays enacted in fifth-century Megara. There are other early evidences of comic mimes who, in their little dramas, poked fun at mytho¬ logical characters or at self-important citizens. Some scholars maintain that the comic tradition, beginning with these Greek sources, is continuous to modem times (cf. A. Nicoll, Masks, Mimes, and Miracles, 1963). The relation of comedy to tragedy has, since the Greeks, appeared to be complex. In a famous passage

McKeon, Selections from Medieval Philosophers, 2 vols.

of the Symposium (223D) Socrates argued that the art

(New York, 1929), I, 259-314, contains excerpts from Gros¬

(rexifi) of composing comedy is the same sort of thing

seteste. A. Naville, Classification des sciences (Paris, 1920).

as the art of composing tragedy. An ancient tradition

The Grammar of Science (London, 1911). C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. C. Hartshome and P.

the Poetics. The Tractatus coislinianus (ca. 100

K.

Pearson,

Weiss, 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), I, 77-137. J. Piaget, “Classification des sciences et principaux courants epistemologiques contemporains,” Logique et connaissance scien-

tifique (Paris, 1967), esp. pp. 1149-1271. E. C. Richardson, Classification, Theoretical and Practical (New York, 1901). H. Spencer, The Classification of the Sciences (London, 1864). Paul Tillich, Das System der Wissenschaften nach Gegenstanden und Methoden (Gottingen, 1923). UNESCO, Cahiers d’histoire mondiale (Journal of World History), 9,

ascribes to Aristotle an essay on comedy paralleling b.c.)

may have drawn upon such an essay, for it formulates a definition of comedy closely analogous to the famous definition of tragedy in Poetics VI, only it remarks that comedy effects the catharsis of “pleasure and laughter.” Perhaps an excessive or inappropriate pleasure or laughter was, by means of the comic action, thought to be rendered moderate, as measured by the political and rational nature of man. However, definitions of

3 (1965); this number is devoted to encyclopedias from

these terms and the theory explicating their usage have

antiquity to the present in Europe and in other parts of

not come down to us. Other aspects of this Aristotelian

the world. W. Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive

tradition are mentioned by such writers as Iamblicus

Sciences (London, 1847). T. Whittaker, The Metaphysics of Evolution, with other essays (London, 1926). PIERRE SPEZIALI [See also Axiomatization; Classification of the Arts; Lin¬ guistics; Pragmatism; Unity of Science.]

and Proclus; it has been elaborated in modern times by Lane Cooper (1922) and by Elder Olson (1968). Comic writings are loosely organized compared to tragic writings; nevertheless, there is sufficient unity among them to warrant considering the form of com¬ edy in a single section. The use of this form, however, is varied and will later be considered under several headings. 1. The Form of Comic Action. If, inclined by the

SENSE OF THE COMIC

tradition mentioned above, we accept the view that comedy is analogous in certain respects to the Aris¬ totelian account of tragedy, then the discussion of the

“Comedy” designates certain traits of man’s

formal structure of tragedy, its beginning, middle, and

relationship with his fellows. More or less as fate is

end—and the reference of the end back to the begin¬

to the tragic hero, so society is to the comic hero. The

ning—will be relevant mutatis mutandum to comedy.

The term

idea of the comic, then, refers to some aspect of man’s

However, certain differences should be emphasized.

conflict with his group (political, familial, etc.) and its

The principles of likelihood and necessity, which unite

conventions, mores, ideals. But the same man is also

the episodes of tragedy, become the principle of comic

part of that society; hence, in struggling with it he is apt to trip himself. Comedy, thus, is an ironic strug¬

likelihood. Comic likelihood is not without its own system, yet its logic may be quite different from, often

gle with society.

the reverse of, tragic likelihood. It is usually related

Comedy involves the failure to live up to an ac¬

somehow to the socially actual, desired, or desirable,

cepted standard, a failure which usually elicits a smil¬

and by comparison with this standard its ridiculous,

ing or laughing reaction. This article will not be con¬

absurd, or naturally unlikely character emerges. For

cerned with theories of laughter but only with the form

instance, a man for whom life has become intolerable

and content of the kind of action which awakens the

jumps from a thirty-story building. On the way down

sense of the comic. The recorded lineage of comic action goes back to

he passes another man in a parachute. “Sissy,” he murmurs.

467

COMIC, SENSE OF THE

468

Surely also the comic catharsis is significantly differ¬

Illustrating this comic pattern on the generic scale

ent from the tragic. Since the Tractatus coislinianus

is Homer’s Odyssey. Although the story begins with

fails to develop definitions of “pleasure and laughter,”

the tragedy of the Trojan War, the epic continues with

it may be maintained that the purgation of folly by

Ulysses’ journey back to Ithaca, his arrival disguised

folly comes closer to describing the effect of actual

as a beggar, his energetic restoration of order, and his

comedies and comic situations. If the admired average

repairing to bed with Penelope. All these events come

of human kind is the careful worker or the grave

off in a manner basically in accord with the comic

professional man, both seriously concerned to act

spirit; thus life was restored and traditional or ideal

creditably within their social roles, then we must also

values were affirmed.

suppose them at least occasionally to resent the disci¬

2. The Content of Comic Action. Taking comedy

pline which their roles require and to be restive under

seriously for a moment, we can imagine the comic hero

the constant restraint which their reputations impose.

asking why man is involved in a Kafkaesque labyrinth

Beneath the conformist, as Nietzsche insisted, there

of institutional red tape, conventional values, and con¬

lives the satyr. Comedy tears off the foolish mask of

flicting ideals. The comic spirit responds that the evil

conformity and indulges for a brief but relieving inter¬

of this situation is not an evil in itself. It is not a

val the equally foolish satyr. This catharsis yields an

function of fate nor of cosmic order; rather it is a

insight into the less respectable but ever present ani-

function of human and social order. Comedy manipu¬

mal-like basis of the human being. Thus it purges folly

lates this situation so that the hero appears as ridiculous

by means of folly and brings man and his milieu into

(more or less harmlessly excessive) and could reform,

an easier and perhaps more fruitful harmony. Comedy

or society appears as ridiculous and perhaps might be

deprecates the traditional mores, and by means of this

reformed, or the hero and his society become self-

permissive irreverence it preserves them. Comedy, like

aware, self-critical, and appropriately reaffirm their

tragedy,

John

common ideals. Comedy, thus, tends to adjust the

Meredith could speak of comedy as the “ultimate

individual toward the actual, or the actual toward the

civilizer.”

possible, or both toward the ideal. These three alterna¬

is

a

self-corrective

action.

Hence

Guided by suggestions offered by Aristotle in the

tives point to the three kinds of content which are

Poetics, F. M. Cornford (1914) holds that comedy, like

enlivened by the comic vision of life. We shall briefly

tragedy, evolved from the ancient ritual slaying of the

illustrate and consider each kind.

old king or scapegoat for the sake of the continued

(a) Aristophanes often speaks strongly for an indi¬

survival and fertility of the tribe. The agon between

vidual’s accepting the ancient order of things. In the

the old king and the young pretender, which often

Frogs, for instance, he stages a kind of mock contest

ended in the death or mutilation of the former, con¬

between Euripides, representative of liberal social re¬

tinued beyond the tragically relevant part usually to

form, and Aeschylus, representative of traditional wis¬

a triumphal procession (the komos), a feast, and a

dom and order; although Aeschylus is pictured as

marriage. The procession, feast, and marriage com¬

laughably excessive in his traditionalism, he wins the

prised the portion which became the source of comedy.

contest hands down. And in the Clouds, Socrates is

Or perhaps comedy is the whole ritual action perceived

presented either as impiously searching out knowledge

from the point of view of the komos, feast, or marriage.

about the moon and clouds or else as teaching a de¬

In any event, this account of the ancient ritual provides

structive and rather foolish sophistry. In the end old

a likely story of the beginning of comedy, its continued

Strepsiades, who had apprenticed himself to Socrates,

preoccupation with political and sexual matters, and

returns chastened to the old ways and Socrates’ “think-

its ambiguous combination of opposites: cruelty and

tank” is burned to the ground. Shakespeare is often

celebration, penance and festival, the serious and the

moved to make comedy of excess and admonishment.

irreverent. Comedy, then, is a forgetting of the tragic

The newly crowned King in the second part of King

and bloody renewal in a careless, happy release. Yet

Henry the Fourth represses the irrepressible Falstaff

a note of anxiety often still runs beneath its ridiculous

and strongly suggests that he act his age. In Measure

and jovial surface.

for Measure the good Duke gives over the rule to the

Doubtless no human value is absolute, and no human

self-righteous Angelo. Angelo sets up a Puritanical

act or role is as significant as it may at the time be

society, but then his ordinary human weaknesses get

thought to be. The insight of comedy is directed upon

the better of him. His not unusual use of office for

the meaningless aspect of human values and upon the

egotistical sexual ends is mercilessly exposed.

absurdity inherent in all human acts, roles, and projects.

Moliere is deeply devoted to the norms of his culture.

Yet it is sometimes not without the suggestion of a

Comedy for him is the “mirror of society” in which

vision beyond such foolishness.

a man of his time could see the excesses for which

COMIC, SENSE OF THE society could and would make him suffer. Moliere

and thrown by Socrates. In the Meno, Meno, a notable

portrays the ridiculous attempts of the bourgeois “gen¬

general, comes off less well in his dialectical struggle

tleman” to deck himself out in aristocratic finery, to

with Socrates than his slave boy. And at the end

acquire fashionable arts and wit, and to marry off his

Anytus, taking the part of all right-thinking Athenian

daughter above her station. In L’Avare, Harpagon

gentlemen, is offended upon being shown by Socrates

sacrifices everything for money and in the end he gets

that he knows nothing of the virtue to which he lays

only that, but only a little of that. Excessive anxiety

claim, and cares less. Socrates himself, with his uncon¬

about death, exaggerated fear of cuckoldry, misan¬

ventional manners, his appearance, and his ironic style,

thropy, religious hypocrisy, all these and more are

is as much a comic as a tragic character. Often, as

limned by Moliere against the backdrop of the honest

in Gorgias (485ff.), by drawing ridicule upon his strange

normalcy of middle-class seventeenth-century mores.

ways, he was able to turn it back upon popular con¬

Tom Jones, hero of Fielding’s famous novel, lacks social prudence—“the duty which we owe to our¬

ventions and values. With gentle humor Chaucer set the men and women

selves,” as Squire Allworthy explains. Otherwise he is

of his own day into contrast with a society or a life

brimful of the most acceptable natural virtues. He is

symbolized

tricked by the hypocritical prig, Blifil, out of his name,

Rabelais, in a manner which Falstaff himself could not

his inheritance, and a possible fortunate marriage. As

better, exploited the same contrast.

by

the

Canterbury

Pilgrimage.

And

an outcast he wanders amiably but unthinkingly into

Much of English Restoration comedy expresses dis¬

various situations, mostly amorous. Finally he discovers

gust with the customs of the times and a longing for

himself apparently in the Oedipus predicament. In the

reform. Johnson’s Volpone, like his Alchemist, exposes

end, though, the predicament proves to be illusory.

the lust after gold which seemed to infect everyone

Tom acquires a modicum of prudence, discovers his

with greed and duplicity, vices which are only thinly

real parentage, and of course marries the girl. Blifil

disguised by the ceremonies of civilized life. The elab¬

is unmasked and gets his due. The norms of good British

orate plot and counterplot of Volpone are uncovered

society are once more reasserted and Fielding has

in the end not by the officers of justice but by the

realized his purpose of helping “to laugh mankind out

plotters themselves who fall to noisy recrimination.

of their favorite follies and vices.”

Moreover, the world, it is suggested, is as rapacious

though appearing in other comic roles, as a recollection

and as deceptive as Volpone himself. Wycherly’s comedies likewise depict a life which is nasty, brutish,

of the Fool in King Lear will indicate, is often utilized

and if not short, certainly hypocritical. Indeed much

by this species of comedy. The medieval clown, like

of Restoration comedy may be characterized as the

the modem, possessed the usual human appurtenances

presentation of a consciously dissembling world. Its

and attitudes but to a laughably exaggerated degree.

manners become the comic mask and, like Swift’s bitter

Punch, for instance, like many comic-strip characters,

satire, suggest by negation a society quite opposite

is berated and beaten for the thousand petty preten¬

from the actual. No less does Huxley’s Brave New

tions and foibles to which socialized man is heir.

World make the same suggestion.

The tradition of the clown, the fool, and the mime,

(b) Comedy not only finds grist to its mill in the

Jean Anouilh’s comedy, on the other hand, fre¬

task of converting the deviant or the crackpot individ¬

quently takes the opposite tack. As if in opposition

ualist into the reliable citizen; it also engages in the

to an exaggerated and impractical idealism, Creon of

movement toward social betterment. Aristophanes

Anouilh’s Antigone,

Lysistrata, written shortly after the disastrous Sicilian

Dostoevski’s Brothers Karamazov, freely admits that

expedition, presents a simple plan for converting

systematic injustice and clever manipulation, masked

Athens from a warlike imperialist power into a peace¬

if need be by sophistry and ceremony, offer the only

ful city: the women plan to go on a sex-strike until

means to maintaining a modicum of social order. And

the men agree to give up war. After some little diffi¬

in his Waltz of the Toreadors a due concern for forms

culty in reaching unanimity among the ill-disciplined

and ceremony is said not only to keep society going

and lusty Athenian women, peace is achieved and all

but to provide a convenient and probably defensible

ends happily in bed. Many of the Socratic dialogues are comic or utilize

screen for a modest self-indulgence. Still Anouilh s

comic devices. The Euthydemus, to take one instance,

like

the

Grand

Inquisitor

of

personages often seem more or less genuinely to long for an order where the ideal would be pursued for its

offers the spectacle of two Sophistic clowns challenging

own sake and where the individual and the common

the bystanders in the Lyceum to verbal battle. They

goods would be at one.

easily defeat the boy, Cleinias, much to their delight, but then they seem to be unaware of being tripped

(c) Another species of comedy turns upon the point where the humorous and the tragic seem to blend and

469

CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES where the harsh actualities and deception of the world

edy, even as the autumn moves around to vernal excess

are somehow transformed by a lively faith. This point

and as springtime moves on to the fall dance, feast,

of turning is admirably illustrated in much of Chekhov.

and festival. The two complement each other and form

It is developed at length for their respective worlds

a unity. Perhaps indeed the seeming two arts of tragedy

by Dante in the Divine Comedy and by Goethe in the

and comedy may at this point become parts of one

two parts of Faust.

and the same whole.

More obviously, Cervantes’ Don Quixote belongs to

The comic sense, in sum, is an awareness of the ironic

this species of comedy. The Don’s foolish and romantic

character of man’s involvement in social evil. In form

idealism needs to be brought low and awakened to the

it may most briefly be described as the catharsis of

realities of the real world. But what is this real world?

folly by folly. Comic action has been regarded as a

As embodied in Sancho Panza, it halfway credits the

means for disciplining the foolishness inherent in pre¬

Don’s imaginary realm, and in any event it is unwilling

tentions to social respectability by exhibiting and in¬

to risk losing the opportimity to profit from Don

dulging the foolishness of the “lower” and disreputable

Quixote’s possible discoveries. If the Knight of the

self. Consequently it depends upon the possible unity

Mancha is the wild adventurer and explorer, his squire

of the traditional duality of “that amphibious crea¬

is no less the egotistical exploiter. The gaming, crimi¬

ture,” man. This unity may be seen in the tendency

nal, ribald real world of Sancho Panza is quite as

of the comic sense to bring the deviating individual

disproportionate in its own way as Don Quixote’s.

into accord with social norms, or to bring the deviating

Society continually unhorses the Knight for his non¬

society to awareness of the ideal, or, finally, to recon¬

conformity, but this is such a society as needs to be

cile the individual and his social milieu with the ideal

spurred into movement. Still in the end Sancho Panza

by way of a productive and unifying insight into a more

achieves some insight into his limitations and is re¬

authentic vision of human possibilities.

signed to being himself and to caring for his crops and his family. Likewise at his journey’s end, Don Quixote acquires a certain wisdom. He sees that all men are equal in death, and are equally purged of their folly and illusions. Nowhere, though, is this kind of comedy more clearly and beautifully set forth than in Shakespeare’s later plays, the tragicomedies such as The Winter’s Tale or The Tempest. The action in the latter play takes place on the island to which a tempest had borne the dispossessed Duke. Here Ariel balances Caliban; Prospero foils and forgives the unjust manipulations of his brother, and the magic of the world, its cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces, all give way to the young lovers. Prospero is a comic Lear; he calms rather than defies the tempest, and he gives himself to wisdom and

BIBLIOGRAPHY E. M. Blistein, Comedy in Action (Durham, N.C., 1964), biblio. pp. 131-39. A. Cook, The Dark Voyage and the

Golden Mean (New York, 1949). L. Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (New York, 1922), biblio. pp. xv-xxi. F. M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (London, 1914). M. Eastman, The Enjoyment of Laughter (New York, 1936). E. Lauter, Theories of Comedy (New York, 1964). A. Nicoll, The Theory of Drama (New York, 1931), pp. 175-243; sug¬ gestions for reading, pp. 245-56. A. Nicoll, Masks, Mimes, and Miracles (New York, 1963). E. Olson, The Theory of Comedy (Bloomington, Ind., 1968). H. T. E. Perry, Masters of Dramatic Comedy and their Social Themes (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), biblio. pp. 409-17. L. J. Potts, Comedy (London, 1948), biblio. pp. 168-71.

his daughter to Ferdinand rather than both to death.

EDWARD G. BALLARD

Recent tragicomedy is differently keyed. In Samuel

[See also Art and Play; Catharsis; Classification of the Arts;

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, two bums, reminiscent

Motif; Satire; Tragic Sense; Wisdom of the Fool.]

of Rouault’s sad clowns, stand aside from the endless sadomasochistic spectacle of the passing world. They wait, for whom or what they know not. Call it Godot. They savor the passage of time, waiting absurdly for

CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES

the unintelligible object of their faith. Time passes. They consider suicide. A tree buds. Is it the tree of life? Is it Godot himself? Who can say? At least they reach a vague recognition of their indeterminate plight. The note struck by this kind of comedy is some sort

470

The word

conservation has its origins in the Latin term

conservare, meaning “to guard,” and has been passed

of reconciliation. This is the comic spirit discovering

on to English through the Old French verb conserver.

in itself a tincture of seriousness and idealism. This

The dictionary definition equates it with preservation,

spirit originated in the tragic world, but here it is

guarding, protecting, or with the related word “con¬

caught at the moment at which it dissolves into com¬

servancy.” In its modem usage, however, and relation

CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES to natural resources, conservation has become a well-

that are today characterized as conservation. The evi¬

known idea only during the twentieth century and

dence for such awareness is to be found, however,

largely through the efforts of such men as Gifford

among most primitive peoples and among the historical

Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt in the United States

evidences of man’s use of the land. Edward Graham

(Pinchot, 1947).

(1947) has reviewed some practices of the early Eskimo

During the

twentieth century

conservation has

that fully qualify as conservation practices. Stewart

formed the basis for scientific, economic, and political

Udall (1963) discusses the reverence felt by the Ameri¬

attitudes toward man’s environment. In the decade of

can Indians for the lands on which they depended, and

the 1960’s in particular it has attracted many sup¬

the skill with which they cultivated and fertilized their

porters, each with a somewhat different idea of its

gardens. The adaptation of various primitive land-use

meaning. The definition accepted in 1969 by the

practices to environmental realities is discussed in Carl

United Nations and the International Union for the

Sauer (1952).

Conservation of Nature is “the rational use of the

It may be generalized that primitive peoples learned

environment to achieve the highest quality of living

those conservation practices that permitted their sur¬

for mankind.” This definition covers a wide range of

vival, although the abstract idea of conservation was

ideas that could only be discussed in a long book. In

probably neither understood nor stated. Man’s early

this brief account, some of the development of these

view of “natural resources” would necessarily be lim¬

ideas in Western culture will be examined. However,

ited by his technology, and would at first include only

conservation as an activity if not as a philosophy is

those plants and animals useful for food or other pur¬

to be found in all human cultures. It is of ancient origin.

poses, water, and places in the environment suited to

Natural resources are variously defined in textbooks

various needs. Much that is regarded today as a “natu¬

as “elements of the natural environment come into the

ral resource,” metallic ore, for example, would have

service of man” (Smith, 1950); “uncaptured natural

no known value to primitive man. Much that he

stores which are useful to mankind in any way' (Allen,

regarded as of great value, obsidian for spearheads,

1959), or those natural “materials, areas, or living

for example, would scarcely be considered a natural

things considered useful or of value to a particular

resource today except as a part of a broader environ¬

human culture” (Dasmann, 1968). This concept, like that of conservation, has had a shifting meaning over

ment. In the written records of mankind the idea of con¬

time. In 1969 resources are being equated with the

servation is closely related to man’s view of the natural

sum total of the physical and biological environment

world and of his relationship with nature. It can be

for man on earth.

reasoned that the idea of nature or of a natural world

Concern over population increase or decrease is

did not occur until man, through civilization, had

probably as old as mankind. Unquestionably at many

created an environment different from and in part

times in human history, local populations exerted pres¬

separate from the surrounding world. But long before

sure upon local environments, and through this dis¬

the obvious differences between the city and wild land

turbance of the conditions of living endangered their

had appeared, man had been modifying the environ¬

own survival. The origin of primitive means for popu¬

ment in which he lived. Sauer (1952) has emphasized

lation control can be attributed to such recurring pre¬

the role of Paleolithic man in changing his environment

historic dilemmas. However, concern for the dangers

through the use of fire, and of his role in the extermi¬

inherent in a worldwide increase of the human species

nation of the larger wild animals that had survived the

can be considered of recent, probably eighteenth-

Ice Ages. From the time when man first practiced

century, origin, since it was at this time that the di¬

agriculture and began to domesticate animals, the con¬

mensions of the world and the potentials for human

trast between the tamed agricultural landscape and the

population increase were first well understood. Wide¬

wild, untouched country elsewhere must have been

spread apprehension over such dangers, and the con¬

apparent. Clarence Glacken (1967) has pointed out that

cept of a “population explosion” followed World War

the contrast between man and nature observed by the

II. The relationship between world population increase

Greeks and Romans was less the contrast between the

and world conservation appears to have been first

city and the wilderness, for the latter was little known

defined and stressed in popular language by William Vogt (1948) and by Fairfield Osborn (1948). It is impossible to identify the time when man first became aware of the consequences of excessive use or misuse of the resources of his environment, and took measures to protect himself and his habitat—measures

to them, than that between the city and the rural landscape of farms, pastures, and woodlands. In the literature of the Western world a clear de¬ scription of a conservation problem first appears in the writings of Plato. In Critias he attributes the decline in the fertility of Attica to deforestation, soil erosion,

4/1

CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES and the consequent disruption of the hydrology of

courses—their limits as well as their origins. Consid¬

mountain watersheds.

eration, too, should be paid to the faith of their fathers,

A. O. Lovejoy (1936) attributes to the Timaeus of

country streams. Besides they were reluctant that Tiber

significance to modern conservation and to the science

himself, bereft of his tributary streams, should flow with

of ecology. Essentially this states that the world is

diminished majesty” (Glacken [1967], p. 135).

better the more things and the more variety it contains;

The writings of Columella (first century

a.d.)

show

that there is a striving in nature toward diversity,

great understanding of the relationship between misuse

toward the filling of all vacant niches in the environ¬

of the lands and their declining fertility. His descrip¬

ment with differing kinds of living things. The philoso¬

tions of the ways in which soil fertility is derived and

phy of those who today seek to preserve the maximum

maintained

variety of living species may be traced back to this

closely that of modern ecologists. Pliny carries this

beginning. The writings of Charles Elton (1958) and

reasoning further, and recommends such practices as

Raymond Dasmann (1968) develop the more recent

contour plowing to prevent loss of soils on the hillsides

scientific basis for the ecological “principle of diver¬

(Glacken, 1967). However, long before this time the

sity.”

Phoenicians had terraced the hills of Lebanon as a soil

Glacken (1967) has traced to such ancient Greeks

under

undisturbed

conditions

follows

conservation measure.

as Anaxagoras, Anaximander, Empedocles, and Plato

Lewis Mumford (1961) has pointed out that in an¬

the general concept of a terrestrial unity in the midst

cient Rome the full enormity of many of our modern

of diversity, of an earth that is a fit environment for

problems of pollution had been recognized. Efforts to

people and other forms of life. The Greek concept of

cope with them led to the construction of the great

the ecumene, sometimes translated as the inhabited or

sewer, the cloaca maxima, of Rome, as a means for

inhabitable world, is clearly related to the modern

removing water-borne wastes, but this was at best a

ecological concept of the biosphere—the thin film of

partial solution. The disposal of solid wastes remained

air, water, and soil on the surface of the earth, upon

a serious problem for all of the large cities of ancient

which all life depends, and within which it exists.

times.

Sound guides to land care based upon conservation

Perhaps because man’s own existence was continu¬

in some

ally threatened in the European world that existed

of the writings of the Hellenistic period. Thus, The

from the fall of Rome into the Middle Ages, there

Tebtunis Papyri of Egypt includes instructions for the

appears to be little writing relative to conservation.

management of irrigated lands, for sowing, planting,

From the seventeenth century onward, however, with

principles appear by the third century

b.c.

and land care (Glacken, 1967). But long before this

the agency of man on earth securely established and

the Egyptians had been practicing empirically a high

his hegemony reinforced by the growing industrial

degree of sound conservation in their management of

revolution, a concern for nature and for the growth

the lands of the Nile Valley. It is significant that these

of human populations becomes more apparent.

lands have supported civilization over five millennia, without serious impairment until recent times.

4 i2

who had hallowed rituals and groves and altars to their

Plato the “principle of plenitude,” an idea of major

An interest in wildlife conservation, related to an interest in hunting, appears to be of great antiquity

Some agricultural conservation with particular at¬

among the writings of mankind. Thus there is an in¬

tention to the maintenance of soil fertility and the

scription attributed to Sennacherib, describing the

prevention of soil erosion was well established in

establishment of a wildlife sanctuary near Nineveh—an

Roman times and has been perpetuated in the writings

effort that would do credit to the best modem wildlife

of Cato, Columella, and Pliny. In Roman times also

conservationists (Graham, 1947). Efforts to preserve

the movement of water over long distances to reclaim

game through regulation of human hunting and trap¬

lands through irrigation had reached a level of devel¬

ping of wildlife has a long history, but is related com¬

opment not to be equaled again in the Western world

monly to the desire to preserve suitable hunting

until the twentieth century. In this period also there

grounds for royalty rather than any broad concern for

is a forerunner of the controversies to be waged be¬

wildlife as such. Aldo Leopold (1933) has traced the

tween the builders of dams and the conservationists

development of game laws from biblical injunctions

of twentieth-century America. In the writings of Tac¬

through Greco-Roman times to the present British and

itus is an argument against the damming of rivers and

American legal concepts. Graham (1947) in a similar

the changing of their courses, pleading the loss of

review of the history of wildlife conservation points

long-established farming lands. “Nature has made the

out that the American view of ownership and authority

best provision for the interests of humanity, when she

over wild animal life relates back to the British view

assigned to rivers their proper mouths—their proper

that wildlife was the property of the Crown: Thus,

CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES fee-simple ownership of land in America includes the

He described with accuracy the major communities of

ownership of vegetation and underground resources,

vegetation on earth, the natural processes operating

but not of the wild animals that live on the land.

on them and the effects of man’s activities, and pro¬

Although there are many forerunners, a broad, mod¬

vided a foundation for ecology and conservation.

ern view of conservation becomes most clearly appar¬

Count Buffon brought together much of the knowl¬

ent in two seventeenth-century works. John Evelyn,

edge of natural history available in his day. His interest

a founder of the Royal Society of London for Improv¬

lay in the agency of man on earth, rather than in wild

ing Natural Knowledge (1662), in his Silva: or a dis¬

nature as such. He distinguished the role of man in

course of forest trees . . . (1664), provided a view of

making the earth more fit for his own occupancy, and

the consequences of deforestation in Great Britain, and

also his role as an exploiter and destroyer of natural

recommended the establishment of forestry as a science

resources. In one sense he can be considered a fore¬

and a concern of the Royal Society. His writings go

runner of those technologists who believe that through

beyond forest conservation to expound ideas of land

the application of science the earth can be made in¬

management to create a landscape more pleasing as

creasingly fruitful for ever increasing numbers of men.

well as useful to people. He presents one of the early

The dangers inherent in the increase in human num¬

descriptions of the causes and consequences of air

bers on a limited earth exercised the thinking of many

pollution, already a serious concern in London because

during the late eighteenth century. Noteworthy were

of the industrial use of soft coal. At approximately the

M. J. de Condorcet, William Godwin, and Thomas

same time in France work was progressing under the

Malthus. The argument in which they were engaged

leadership of Louis XIV’s minister, Colbert, to produce

continues with similar vigor today. The Marquis de

the French Forest Ordinance of 1669. Motivated also

Condorcet foresaw an infinite perfectibility in human

by the evidence of increasing forest destruction and

institutions. Although concerned with the potential for

its consequences, the writers of this ordinance sought

increase in human popidations, he foresaw man’s abil¬

to present a plan for sound land management to be

ity to cope with this problem when it arose. He was

applied to all of France.

not unaware of the need for an ultimate limitation on

Increasing knowledge of natural history and biology,

the numbers of mankind but believed implicitly in

and an ever broadening view of the realities of the

man’s future ability to limit his own increase and not

global environment gave greater scope to eighteenth-

to “encumber the world with useless and wretched

century ideas of conservation. The ability of G. W. Leibniz to define order in the midst of apparent chaos

beings.” Godwin had less faith in human institutions, but

foreshadowed the work of modern technology and

more in individuals. He could not foresee any real

ecology. The establishment by Carolus Linnaeus of a

environmental limitations on either the numbers of

philogenetic classification of living species provided a

man or his individual perfectibility. It was against

basis for describing and analyzing nature that permit¬

Godwin in particular, but also de Condorcet, that the

ted the development in the next century of Charles

essays of Malthus were directed. In his view human

Darwin’s evolutionary theory. It also paved the way

perfectibility was a chimera, human population in¬

for ecological understanding, and for greater human

crease inexorable. Despite man’s best intentions he was

concern over the fate of wild species. Immanuel Kant

bound to run afoul of the limited capacity of the earth

analyzed the distinction between natural and man¬

to provide for his sustenance. He foresaw a time of

made processes on earth, and recognized man as an

misery when populations would exert pressure upon

agency causing change on earth comparable to a geo¬

the farthest boimdaries of the earth. Only in the latter

logical force (Samtliche Werke, 8, 300). J. W. von

half of the twentieth century has the evidence in sup¬

Goethe showed an understanding of the relationships

port of Malthus’ thesis become widely available, but

between organisms and environment that was later to

the argument continues to rage between those who see

be substantiated by ecologists. However, the works of

applied technology as the answer to population prob¬

Count Buffon and of Alexander von Humboldt reflect

lems, and those who view dismally the limits of the

some of the major advances in thinking relative to

earth.

conservation during the eighteenth and early nine¬ teenth centuries. Among his many accomplishments, including that of providing a basis for the science of biogeography,

It is necessary next to move to America to follow the trend of ideas relating to conservation, since it is in the United States that the concept has received its greatest development.

Humboldt was able to perceive the concept of a unity

In the colonization of the New World the emigrants

and prevailing order in nature, exhibiting itself in

of Europe were placed in a position similar to that

various environments in great variety and complexity.

of primitive man. Wild nature was omnipresent; man’s

4 13

CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES

474

influence and power seemed insignificant. The issue at

festation of divine being. Thoreau saw in nature the

stake was survival for the fragile first colonies, not a

possibility for true human freedom and spiritual en¬

concern for the preservation of nature. The concept

richment. His oft-quoted phrase “in Wildness is the

of a relatively limitless continent with inexhaustible

preservation of the World” reflects his philosophy, and

resources unquestionably dominated popular thinking

was first stated in 1851. In 1858 he called for the

during most of colonial times. Yet the danger of running

creation of national parks in which wilderness could

out of some needed resource seemed apparent to cer¬

be preserved.

tain individuals even at a time when overall space and

Thoreau’s moral view of man’s relationship with

resources were obviously vast. Thus, in the seventeenth

nature, recognizing an obligation toward it and a spiri¬

century, in the earliest of colonial times, a concern for

tual enrichment to be derived from it, is carried on

game preservation appears. In 1677, the colony of

by George Perkins Marsh whose Man and Nature

Connecticut provided for the regulation of hunting,

(1864) is a scientific, comprehensive account of the

and prohibited the export of game, hides, or skins

worldwide impact of man upon the natural world,

(Graham, 1947). Protection of wildlife through regula¬

including

tion of hunting was established in twelve of the thirteen

watershed abuse. Marsh saw in the ruined lands around

the

consequences

of

deforestation

and

American colonies by the time of the revolution

the Mediterranean the probable future of the new lands

(Palmer, 1912). Forest conservation attracted attention

being recklessly misused in America. He called for a

at an even earlier date, so that by 1626 Plymouth

program of action to restore and rebuild the land,

Colony passed an ordinance prohibiting the cutting of

essentially the creation of a conservation movement.

timber on colony lands without official permission. In

Unlike Thoreau, Marsh was practically oriented, and

1681 William Penn provided that one acre of forest

concerned with the use of natural resources under

land be left untouched for every five that were cleared.

proper limits to improve the lot of mankind. He thus

As early as 1799, the federal stake in forests was recog¬

bridged the gap to arise later between utilitarian con¬

nized when Congress provided for a forest reserve to

servation and the believers in nature preservation as

supply ship’s timbers to the Navy (Illick, 1939).

such.

At a time when the American wilderness appeared

It is worth noting that the thoughts and words of

endless and had scarcely been explored, a wilderness

all who preceded Marsh had little influence upon the

traveller, George Catlin, artist and student of the In¬

course of events in the world. Destruction of natural

dian, foresaw a time when wilderness might disappear.

resources, encouraged by the decisions of political men

Witnessing the slaughter of buffalo, he could envisage

and carried out by practical men of action, went on

their disappearance from the plains of America, and

despite all that had been written. Early measures for

with them the Indians who depended upon them. In

conservation had little effect on man’s behavior. Laws

his journal for 1832 he proposed, for the first time,

were seldom or poorly enforced. What was later to

the concept of a national park in which the wild lands

be known as America’s federal department of con¬

in all of their beauty, the animals, and the primitive

servation, the Department of the Interior, was estab¬

Indians also, might jointly be protected for the ages

lished in 1849, but in its early decades it was far more

to come. Several decades were to pass before Ameri¬

concerned with the transfer of land and resources into

cans could accept the need for such a park.

private hands to encourage settlement than it was with

The awakening of an American interest in the beauty

their conservation. Government policy and private

of nature, the value of wilderness, and an appreciation

initiative operated on the understanding that nature

of wildlife, owes much to the writings of such men

was a force to be overcome, not an ally to work with

as William Bartram, who explored the wild country

and cherish. Yet, by the time Marsh’s words appeared

of the East and South, and described it in his Travels

in print, the first steps toward arresting the degradation

(1791); James Fenimore Cooper, whose Last of the

of natural resources had been taken.

Mohicans appeared in 1826; and the writing and

The New York landscape architect, Frederick Law

painting of John James Audubon, which began to ap¬

Olmsted, who had designed Central Park in New York

pear in the 1830’s. However, a broad philosophy of

City (1857-58), visited California in the early 1860’s,

nature and man in America owes its origin in particular

and saw the grandeur of Yosemite Valley. Due to his

to Henry David Thoreau. Although a dweller in the

influence, in part, Congress was persuaded, in the dying

rural woodlands rather than the Western wilderness,

days of the Civil War in 1864, to pass a bill to preserve

his appreciation of the values of the natural world

this area “for public use, resort and recreation.'' The

transcended his geographical limitations. In his religion

significance of this act was scarcely realized by those

and philosophy he is indebted to his friend Ralph

who engaged in it, but the first step had been taken

Waldo Emerson. Both saw in man and nature a mani¬

toward realizing the dream of Catlin and Thoreau.

CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES Lacking at that time a federal organization to operate

realized until the creation, in the year of his death

parks, Congress turned Yosemite over to California, as

(1902) of a Bureau of Reclamation in the Department

the nation’s first state park.

of the Interior. Powell, along with Marsh, recognized

In 1872, when Ulysses S. Grant was President, a bill

the role that scientific knowledge must play in any

that in Udall’s words (1963) was “little-debated and

rational policy of land use. Through his influence the

little understood” passed Congress, and Yellowstone

Geological Survey was established in the Department

National Park was created in the wilds of Wyoming.

of the Interior in 1879, and still earlier the private

This first unit in the national park system provided for

American Association for the Advancement of Science

the protection of wild nature, and had the greatest

was created. The followers of Powell’s brand of con¬

appeal to the followers of the Thoreau tradition. As

servation, however, were later to come into frequent

a result of the influence of Stephen T. Mather, a

conflict with those of John Muir, as we shall see below.

Chicago businessman, the national parks were placed

Under the administration of President Hayes, the

in 1916 under the administration of a special agency

Department of the Interior was headed by Carl Schurz.

in the Department of the Interior, the National Park

In 1877 his first report as Secretary scored the lumber¬

Service, which Mather was to head. Unfortunately, the

men for their depredations of America’s public lands,

act creating the Service contained wording that pro¬

and called for establishment of a system of federal

vided a built-in dilemma for those charged with the

forest reserves. It was not, however, rmtil 1891 that

administration of the parks. They were told to provide

President Harrison was influenced by Interior Secretary

for public use and enjoyment of the parks while at

John Noble to establish such reserves. By a brief clause

the same time leaving them “unimpaired for the en¬

in a public lands bill, Harrison was authorized by

joyment of future generations.” With ever-growing use

Congress to establish by proclamation what was later

in the twentieth century the task of avoiding impair¬

to become the national forest system of the United

ment has been at times impossible.

States.

The late 1860’s brought into the field men who were

Because the last decades of the nineteenth and the

to contribute greatly in later decades to thinking about

first of the twentieth centuries in America saw the

natural resources and their use. John Muir, a naturalist

culmination of a long period of plunder of natural

bom in Scotland, came to California and began to

resources, and also the end of the frontier period in

explore the Sierra Nevada in 1868. In 1869 the Ameri¬

history, there was a widespread awakening of interest

can explorer and geographer, John Wesley Powell,

in conservation. However, much of this concern was

began his descent of the Colorado River through the

directed toward the halt of further depredations of

Grand Canyon. Muir deplored the despoiling of nature.

America’s resources, and a belief that what was gone

In the tradition of Thoreau he worked for the preser¬

was forever lost. Only a few were thinking of possible

vation of great wilderness areas, not as storehouses of

restoration and repair through the operation of natural

materials, but as sources of spiritual enlightenment and

ecological processes—of the return of wildlife, the

physical well-being for man. He became a battler for

regeneration of forests, the long-term management of

national parks, with Yosemite his special concern, and

living resources based on recognition of rates of growth

for wildlife and wilderness. With Thoreau he is a foun¬

and of population increase. Ecology was a new science,

der of the nature “preservationist” school of con¬

and it was not until the appearance of Frederick

servation thought. Although Muir’s books, such as Our

Clements’ book Plant Succession (1916) and Charles

National Parks and The Mountains of California were

Elton’s Animal Ecology (1927) that it became generally

mostly published after the turn of the century, his

applied to natural resource management. Forestry was

influence was felt strongly during the late nineteenth

an exception, and America’s first foresters were trained

century. John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Lands of the

in Europe where ecological thinking was further ad¬ vanced than in America.

Arid Region of the United States, published by Con¬

Conservation as a national movement in America

gress in 1878, did much to dispel the “myth of abun¬

owes much to the influence of such men as Gifford

dance” which had influenced the thought of pioneer

Pinchot, a forester trained in France, and Theodore

America. Surveying the arid West, Powell recognized

Roosevelt, a naturalist who became president. This

the limitations of its capacity to support either agri¬

early development of the conservation movement is

culture or grazing animals, and saw in its watersheds

described in Pinchot’s Breaking New Ground (1947).

and their hydrology the key to its future. The rec¬

In his view a “turning point in human history” oc¬

lamation of arid lands through irrigation became a

curred when Roosevelt called his Governors’ Confer¬

theme which he pursued throughout his life, although

ence on conservation in 1908. Pinchot’s point of view

his goal, a federal role in reclamation, did not become

on forest conservation was use-oriented. Forests, he

475

CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES found, could be managed to produce crops of trees,

the problem of human population increase and its

restoring themselves through natural regeneration, or

consequences. Ideas and practices of conservation

through man’s aid in reforestation. Most lands could

developed in America have been widely accepted

be managed to produce useful products as a “sustained

throughout the world. The international scope of the

yield” if care was taken to preserve the soil and a seed

conservation movement was indicated by the formation

stock. Furthermore, any area of land could be managed

in 1948 of what is now the International Union for

to produce several kinds of useful products such as

the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

water, wood, and wildlife, an idea later to be formal¬

Recent views of the broad scope of conservation are

ized into the “multiple-use” concept adopted by Pin-

available in such books as Udall’s (1963) or Dasmann’s

chot’s Forest Service for management of national forest

(1968).

lands. It was inevitable that the Pinchot view of con¬ servation, like that of Powell, would clash with that of John Muir and his followers, who preferred nature in a wild and undisturbed state and were unattracted by useful products from former wilderness areas. This clash first attracted public notice when a proposal to construct the Hetch-Hetchy dam and reservoir in the Tuolumne Canyon of Yosemite National Park reached the attention of John Muir and his followers in his

The idea of conservation, related as it is to the man-nature theme, can be traced through Clarence Glacken, Traces on

the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley, 1967). Glacken follows the theme of nature and culture in Western thought from an¬ cient times up through the eighteenth century, and presents a comprehensive bibliography. William L. Thomas, ed.,

Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago, 1956), is the transactions of a conference sponsored by the

newly established Sierra Club. To Muir the Tuolumne

Wenner-Gren Foundation, and pursues many of the con¬

was “sacred ground” not to be marred for utilitarian

cepts basic to the idea of conservation. For the development

purposes. To the followers of Pinchot and to Roosevelt, it was not. Despite Muir’s resistance, the dam was constructed. It is significant that one of the more important con¬ tributions to the ethical and spiritual view of con¬ servation since the time of John Muir came from a man who was himself basically in the Pinchot tradition of management for use. Aldo Leopold, who is credited

of the conservation idea in America, Stewart L. Udall, The

Quiet Crisis (New York, 1963), is particularly useful. It can be supplemented by Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Gound (New York, 1947), and by Roderick Nash, The American Environment: Readings in the History of Conservation (Reading, Mass., 1968). A history of ideas on wildlife con¬ servation is presented by Aldo Leopold, Game Management (New York, 1933), and Edward H. Graham, The Land and

Wildlife (New York, 1947). The urban environment and the

by many as being the founder of modern, scientifically-

conservation problems related to it can be examined in

based wildlife management, believed in producing

Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York, 1961).

game for the hunter’s pleasure and table. His Game

The first books relating the world population problem

Management was the first textbook of wildlife con¬

to the problems of conservation are those of William Vogt,

servation, and took into account the principles of ani¬ mal ecology of Charles Elton. Nevertheless, he was a leading exponent of the preservation of wilderness for the same reasons as those that motivated Catlin, Thoreau, and Muir. In his A Sand County Almanac . . . (1949) he pleaded for the development of an eco¬ logical conscience to guide man’s relationships with the

Road to Survival (New York, 1948), and Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (Boston, 1948), covering the period of population crisis following the end of the Second World War. The modem scope of conservation is presented in Raymond F. Dasmann, Environmental Conservation (New York, 1968), and in Udall’s book mentioned above. Other references included in the discussion are: Shirley Allen, Conserving Natural Resources (New York,

1959).

land and his total environment, and for an extension

William Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram . . . (1791;

of ethics to include a land ethic which might lead to

various reprints). Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon,

a consideration of nature at least equal to man’s con¬

Natural History, General and Particular (1749ff.; London, 1812). Frederick Clements, Plant Succession (Pittsburgh, 1916). M. J., Marquis de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Conquest of the Human Mind (1795; New York, 1955). Charles Elton, Animal Ecology (London, 1927); idem, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (London and New York, 1958). John Evelyn, Silva: or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominion (1664; later reprints). William Godwin, Of Population (London, 1820). Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe (1845-62; many editions). Joseph Illick, An

sideration for his fellow human beings. During the twentieth century, and in particular during its second half, the concept of conservation has steadily broadened to include all of those relationships between man and his environment, from the environ¬ ment within cities, with their problems of crowding, congestion, and pollution, through to the preservation of rare species in remote wilderness regions. Starting

476

BIBLIOGRAPHY

with the works of Vogt and Osborn after World War ii, conservation writings have become concerned with

CONSERVATISM Outline of General Forestry (New York, 1939). Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York, 1949). Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1936). Thomas Malthus, An Essay on Population . . . (1798; various reprints). George P. Marsh, Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modi¬ fied by Human Action (1864; Cambridge, Mass., 1965). John Muir, The Mountains of California (New York, 1894); idem. Our National Parks (Boston, 1901). T. S. Palmer, “Chronol¬ ogy and Index of American Game Protection, 1776-1911,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Biological Survey, Bulletin

indispensable for the stability of a society with deep concern for the maintenance of continuity. 2. Etymological

Summary.

In

Latin

conservare

means to protect, preserve, save; the norm of agency, conservator, appears as a synonym for the substantives custos, servator. Just as the Greek Soter (“Savior”) was adopted from the religious realm by the Hellenistic cult of the ruler, so too conservator is found among the Romans beginning in the Augustan era (as an epithet of both Jupiter and Caesar). Augustus appears

41 (1912). John Wesley Powell, Report on the Lands of the

as Novus Romulus, as protector of the mos maiorum

Arid Region of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1878). Carl O. Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (Ameri¬

coinage inscription Parenti Cons (ervatori) Suo.

and pater patriae to whom the Senate dedicated the

can Geographical Society, 1952). Guy-Harold Smith, ed.,

In Christianity conservator appears along with the

Conservation of Natural Resources (New York, 1950). Henry David Thoreau, Excursions, the Writings of Henry David Thoreau (1863; reprint Boston, 1893).

proper name for the Savior (salvator) on some occa¬

RAYMOND F. DASMANN

of the Alps as a juridical and administrative term for

[See also Environment; Environment and Culture; Evolu¬ tionism; Nature; Perfectibility.]

sions. Beginning in the thirteenth century, upon the acceptance of Roman law, conservator appears north an imperial, royal, or church functionary charged with the preservation or restoration of rights; in England they were predecessors of the “Justices of the Peace. ’ In French conservateur is used roughly from 1400 to the end of the eighteenth century in the sense of an “official charged with the guardianship and protection of certain rights, of certain public property.”

CONSERVATISM

The political usage of “conservative” is derived from the French conservateur, and begins to appear only

I. INTRODUCTION

after the French Revolution, and then very hesitantly.

1. Contemporary Usage. With the exception of

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Scandinavia, England, and a few countries of the

Burke used the verb “to conserve,” while his German

British Commonwealth, no major national political

translator, Friedrich Gentz, later spoke of the “tend¬

party

ency to conserve.” In France conservateur in the sense

has

officially

labelled

itself

“conservative.”

Parties of the political “right” are, however, frequently

of moderation and conservation may also refer primar¬

called “conservative.” Moreover, in the course of a

ily to idees liberales. In this sense it was used, among

general broadening of the political spectrum to the

others, by Mme de Stael (1798) and by Napoleon on

“left,” the range of positions called “conservative” has

the 19th of Brumaire 1799; “Conservative, tutelary,

become increasingly wider; however, it has become

and liberal ideas have come into their own by the

necessary to make a distinction between conservative and reactionary positions and policies. In everyday speech in the 1960’s the term “conservative” seems to be more widespread than the contrasting terms “liberal” or “radical”; it denotes, as used by opponents mostly with a critical or pejorative tone, an attitude

dispersion of the factions which have been oppressing the Councils.” The modern political meaning: “one who is a partisan of the maintenance of the established social and political order,” derives from Chateaubri¬ and’s weekly newspaper Le Conservateur (started in 1818). (“Le Conservateur will support religion, the

that attaches greater importance to the preservation

King, liberty, the Charter, and loyal, respectable peo¬

and care of the traditional and enduring than to inno¬

ple. . . .”) “Conservateur” has never appeared as the

vation and change. The typical conservative defends

official name of a party in France.

individual and collective material and cultural posses¬ sions, fears and resists revolution, and accepts progress only as a gradual development from the existing politi¬ cal system. This in turn places those who think and feel conservatively in a permanently defensive position from which they either incline to cultural pessimism or are obliged to demonstrate that “genuine,

“true

conservatism is not really hostile to change, but is

The

characteristic

political

connotation

of

the

English term “conservative” took final form in the 1820’s in line with French usage. In 1827 Wellington expected from the “parti conservateur” of England the unity of all forces dedicated to the preservation of monarchical and aristocratic privileges in opposition to radical demands; in the struggles over the final version of the Reform Bill after 1830, “conservative”

47 l

CONSERVATISM was' often understood in the sense of “local, consti¬ tutional,” and as the antithesis of “anarchic, radical.” As the name of a party and as the expression of a changed conception of its own policies, “conservative party” appeared along with “Tory party” for the first time in 1830, though its meaning remained contro¬ versial. It was the personality of Peel that imposed an interpretation on the word “conservative” that may still count as valid to this day: defense of law and order,

pendent of ephemeral fads and fashions. Intellectuality, rationalism,

and criticism

are

indeed

rejected

as

abstractions, but so are their opposites: extravagance of feeling, ecstatic self-abandon, and mystical with¬ drawal. In contrast to these the conservative mentality claims to be realistic and “practical,” yet orients itself mostly by a pristine model that is thought to be perfect. Its reaction to the present is thus often defensive or

along with a willingness to reform any institution really

selective, rejecting certain tendencies as destructive

in need of amelioration, but by gradual and deliberate steps.

and affirming others as constructive and sound.

II. NONIDEOLOGICAL CONSERVATISM At all times and in all societies there are people—not only those who belong to the “establishment”—who desire the continuance of the value systems and milieu in which they have grown up or to which they have risen. Just to the extent that they fear departure from the familiar and prefer the certainty of the known to the risk of innovation, the traditional way of life will seem binding and sacrosanct to them, and imperiling it blasphemous. Much more so than those who see themselves as liberals, democrats, progressives, or so¬ cialists, and who have more or less conscious notions of what ought to be, conservatives perceive (and con¬ duct) themselves within the framework of traditional value systems and models of behavior which are taken for granted rather than thought about; the ideological character of this is usually denied. Indeed, in the con¬ servative’s ideology and outlook on life there is hardly any distinction in the natures of religion, ethics, every¬ day morality, philosophy, politics, and understanding of the contemporary age. There is, instead, a reliance upon the individual and collective experience of living due to the superiority of age; upon historical develop¬ ment understood by analogy to the process of biologi¬ cal growth; upon an order that is not intellectually postulated but is imposed by nature, and upon the authority of persons and institutions whose legitimacy is considered to be self-evident rather than calling for critical examination. A conservative mentality is some¬ how a “natural” phenomenon, above all in established social groups: among the representatives and officials of traditional institutions as well as among the locally and professionally relatively stable portions of society (farmers, craftsmen). It also develops when upward social mobility has proved successful or when there is a readiness, following initial opposition, to identify oneself with the status claims and experience of family, occupation, or social group. The criteria of value and taste corresponding to this

478

to the “eternal’ values that are assumed to be inde¬

mentality rely on preconceived judgments, on the tried and true,

and eo ipso a higher status is given

This “traditionalist” mentality remains latent so long as it is not provoked by encountering change or by an attack on vested rights and interests. When it is given expression, conservatism is thus almost always resistant and liable to react. From this mentality forms of social behavior result that are determined by a sense of family, local and social stability, and the recognition of intrasocietal distinctions. The circle of marriages is kept relatively small, differences of faith and education are rarely overlooked, local usage and established class morals are heeded, and much is made of the authority of parents and the teacher’s right to correct. Family and regional groups organized along corporative (standisch) lines constitute the inner framework of conservative social conduct, so that individualism is as suspect as egalitar¬ ian collectivism; the concept of universal freedom is as incomprehensible as the concept of universal equal¬ ity. The Church and its behests are approved and defended as social forces or factors; the standards of conduct and morality of earlier generations still possess the binding force of law. Social origin is assigned higher prestige than earned status; inherited property is more highly valued than acquired possessions; congenital qualities are given greater weight than those condi¬ tioned by and acquired in the environment. Con¬ servative social conduct functions within the structure of a preconceived class and hierarchical order encom¬ passing the whole of society, within which each man has his recognized station, and is protected in it by valid rights and by higher authority legitimized by its office (not democratically or by popular vote). When placed on the defensive, conservative social action can easily turn into ideology and thereby achieve a consciously stylized veneration of past order in opposition to the present-day “fragmentation” and “destruction” of society. Aspects of this kind of attitude are still to be found everywhere even in contemporary egalitarian societies. In its economic thought and action the conservative mentality is expressed in its attachment to traditional modes of labor and consumption, in its reluctant acceptance and almost rejection of industrialization

CONSERVATISM and capitalistic competition, and in its inclination to¬

legitimized by the consent of the governed, but by

ward paternalism in business methods. The farmer,

divine law. Changes in law, religion, and societal

artisan, merchant are taken to be the basic types of

structure were therefore sternly rejected; their protag¬

working man; their attitude toward work (Arbeitsethos)

onists were found guilty of heresy, disturbance of the

is frequently preserved even in industrial society and

“natural” order, and lese-majeste by the established

is often idealized. If, as a result of changes in the

powers. Conservative mentality is manifested, for ex¬

economic structure and rationalization of production

ample, in Cicero’s standardizing of the old consti¬

methods, certain branches of the economy are forced

tutional res publica and in the idealizing of the old

on the defensive, antimodernistic feelings often arise,

Roman way of life by Roman historians, as well as

including demands for a protectionist economic policy

generally in the exemplary lessons taught by history

in which the interests of a specific group are blandly

(historia magistra vitae).

presented as being for the universal good; their preser¬

It was on the basis of the same views, however, that

vation is justified not only for economic reasons but

reformers and rebels—among them Tiberius Gracchus,

also for the well-being of society.

Cola di Rienzo, John Wycliffe, and the leaders of the

The conservative mentality does not distinguish be¬

German Peasant War—understood and justified their

tween society and state, morality and politics. Society is controlled by vested rights and a leadership that is

objectives as restoration (renovatio, restauratio, refor¬ matio, Renaissance). Leopold von Ranke called Luther

legitimized by religion, myth, and seniority: a reflec¬

“one of the greatest conservatives who ever lived.” The

tion of what is assumed to be a universally valid divine

Glorious Revolution of 1688 was interpreted as the

and natural order. Within this order the claim to privi¬

restoration of the traditional constitution proper to

lege has a role just as does the pursuit of simple self-

England. Only after “revolution” was understood as

interest to the extent that it can advance itself as the

a deliberate total change in accordance with norms

exercise of some “legitimately acquired” right. Naive

of universally valid rational and natural rights, as the

political conservatism represents its notions of order

elimination of abuse, and as a means of emerging from

as self-evident or obviously derived from nature and

self-imposed infancy, could it no longer be represented

history. It rejects as impudent and utopian the belief

as restoration. Instead, restoration became a conscious

in the possibility of a rational structuring of social and

attempt to reverse revolutionary change, and con¬

political conditions in order to achieve their conscious

servatism became conscious opposition to

amelioration; generally it does not prohibit reforms,

tionary tendencies.

revolu¬

but remains convinced of the fundamental imperfec¬

The change from a mood of predominant “stand-

tion of man and of natural differences among their

pattism” to one of reactionary opposition and of active

rights and duties, and therewith of the necessity of the

defense of positions imder attack, from habitual to

leadership of the many by the few. It instinctively

conscious traditionalism, was not merely a consequence

rejects not only the principle of democratic majority

of political revolutions, but arose in opposition to

rule but also that of intellectual and bureaucratic elites.

criticism of and changes in the predominant mood, e.g.,

Leadership should be personally manifested; not how¬

the Sophistic accusations against the Greek polis, the

ever in the hands of one individual, but entrusted to

changed attitudes toward the ecclesiastical reforma¬

the soimder part (senior pars) of society; in practice,

tions of the sixteenth century, and also towards the

therefore, to a class accustomed to and experienced in leadership. The rulers are obliged to intervene to

Enlightenment. The earliest translation of the antagonism between

direct and order the lives of those classes not yet pos¬

the defenders of the traditional social and ecclesiastical

sessing discretion. The main task of legislature and

order and their adversaries into a party system of

judiciary is taken to be the safeguarding of vested

political conflict took place in England during the

interests; this, of course, applies to all, but in fact

seventeenth century; it influenced the whole political

benefits the possessors, excluding the have-nots and

thinking of Europe and North America. In England,

making them the object of charity.

the influence was due to political institutions (Parlia¬ ment, State Church, common law) and societal factors

III. CONSERVATISM AS A

(an aristocracy far from immune to panic, an ascending

POLITICAL IDEA AND IDEOLOGY

gentry, and an economically powerful bourgeoisie in

In prerevolu¬

London). Also the wide range of political positions,

tionary, pre-industrial, and corporatively (standisch)

from the patriarchalism of Filmer via Hobbes, Hooker,

1. Prerevolutionary Conservatism.

structured society a conservative social and political

Locke, and Milton to the radicalism of Winstanley,

mentality was normal. It rested on the assumption that

articulated during the fights between partisans of Stuart

law is not made but discovered, and rulership is not

absolutism (closely connected with the Church of

479

CONSERVATISM England) and Puritan-Independent opponents in the

direct propaganda. Such a policy could always rely

necessary impetus. The same basic political and ideo¬

on the approval of those who view order, security, and

logical assumptions still shaped the fundamental prin¬

a strong authority as the highest political values, even

ciples of those Parliamentary groups which were called

if this authority—by strictly conservative standards—is

by their nicknames “Tories” and “Whigs” around 1679,

of dubious legitimacy. In fact, however, political con¬

though these parties gradually became guided by po¬

servatism has with increasing frequency since the

litical conceptions during the eighteenth century.

eighteenth century found itself in a position where it

The beginnings and core of the traditionalist defense

could not rely on established authority—not only in

and the formulation of a conservative position consisted

those cases where it was put into power by the majority

in rejecting criticism of dogma, of the authority of

will of the sovereign people, but even under absolute

ecclesiastical teachings, and of their influence in the

monarchy—because that authority itself brought about

realm of secular education which became increasingly

changes in traditional social conditions and political

independent. With the extension of this criticism to

institutions (“revolution from above,” as expounded,

the whole hierarchical and aristocratic culture of the

for example, by Joseph II). With this weakening of the

seventeenth century and to the traditional corporative

traditionalist components in conservatism naive sup¬

and regional

institutions

conservatism

port for traditional authority felt uncertain, and not

developed into a general social and political viewpoint

infrequently released an unrealistic desire for restora¬

of Europe,

opposed to the contract theory on which monarchy

tion of that authority after it had been removed by

depended to support its centralizing administrative

revolutionary

tendencies. The Enlightenment critics, the reform

democratic age the guiding image of monarchy into

policies of progressive governments, and above all the

a version of the state as authoritarian, bonapartistic,

activity,

thereby

transforming

in

a

French Revolution were the factors that led con¬

presidential (when oriented toward a strong executive;

servatism out of mere traditionalism and made it a

prasidial demokratisch), or totalitarian. Practical conservative politics, whether pursued by

political ideology.

It did not, however, result

in

the dissolution of “pre-ideological” traditionalism.

480

tions, but also school instruction, church sermons, and

English Parliament, which lasted for decades, gave the

governments or by political groups and parties showed

Conservatism never attained the systematic unity

itself—simply because of its scarcely fixed ideological

and orthodoxy of Jacobinism, or of democratic radical¬

basis—to be extraordinarily adaptable. Only rarely

ism, nor even that of liberalism. Down to the 1960’s

(Mettemich!) did conservatives understand their posi¬

it remains an assortment of political ideas, a political

tion by reference to abstract principle; in general they

credo that is more clearly delimited by what it rejects

can be characterized as pursuing a policy along certain

than by any positive program. The latter substantially

conservative guidelines in the interest of preserving the

depends on the degree of challenge at any given time.

influence of the ruling classes who assumed their social

Thus conservatism is conceived of as antirevolutionary

and political position to be necessary for the function¬

thought (Burke), as a counterrevolutionary appeal (de

ing of their respective countries (Bismarck, Disraeli).

Maistre), as a “conservative revolution” (Hofmanns¬

It is on the basis of such an identification of group

thal). Even when it supposes itself anti-ideological, this misunderstanding itself displays ideological traits.

and state interests that conservative parties, above all rural interests, have ruthlessly pursued partisan politics.

In an “age of ideology” conservatism has also not been

It is difficult to trace the development of new ideas

able to escape ideological alignments; conservative

in the antirevolutionary politics of conservative gov¬

ideologies, however, remain relatively unarticulated in

ernments, groups, and parties beyond adapting them¬

any systematic theories; among the important repre¬

selves to changing conditions in society. Conservative

sentatives of political conservatism, then, are a large

political philosophy in essence expresses uneasiness,

number of practical statesmen, while only a few can

and describes what is in principle a stable model of

be named whose influence has been exclusively through

society

their writings.

changes only within the historical continuity of an

that,

without

excluding

change,

permits

2. Antirevolutionary Conservatism. An antirevolu¬

order determined by the social nature of man. The

tionary policy has by no means always been the aim

conservative has always held firmly to this model in

of conservative political principles; in the vast majority

response to the challenge of social change and pro¬

of cases the objective of such a policy was rather a

gressive political ideologies. Thus the speed and direc¬

suppression of forces which, in the judgment of the

tion of the development of conservative ideas have

rulers, threatened the existing order. The instruments

been substantially determined by those forces that

used were (and are) press censorship, repressive laws

seemed to jeopardize this continuity. The only ones

governing association and assembly, and police regula¬

who moved away from a defensive position have been

CONSERVATISM the romantic conservatives (A. Muller), the nationalistic

rejected abstract political theories and efforts to found

conservatives of Action Frangaise (Maurras), and the

a constitution on them, because he esteemed as higher

German neo-conservatives of the Weimar republic. But

than the rationality of philosophers the reason that

even here the positive values whose validity is claimed

formed social and political institutions in accordance

are at the same time negations of those principles

with natural and divine laws operating in the historical

which constitute the rationale of modern social philos¬

process. It is not the task of men to impose an order

ophy and political thought; even so, as negations they

on things, but to recognize the order implicit in them

are themselves rationalizations of mere traditionalism

and to act accordingly. With his practical political

and of the naive conservative mentality.

sense and philosophical inclination to identify nature

Moreover, conservatism has not been able to isolate

and history Burke had too much respect for the tradi¬

itself from the enlightened liberal ideas that dominated

tional social order to be willing to cede its fate to the

the political consciousness of the nineteenth century.

ratio and the deliberate plans of contemporary authors,

The general feeling of progress and the power of the

and he was too skeptical a judge of men to have confi¬

trend toward emancipation and egalitarianism were

dence in their original goodness (Rousseau) or in their

too strong for conservatism not to be drawn into their

rational foresight. He approved reforms, but rejected

wake. On the other hand, an increasing number of

revolution because it destroyed tradition and continu¬

liberals delimited the boundaries of progressivism be¬

ity. He relied too heavily, moreover, on the foundations

cause of the growing pressure of egalitarian democracy,

of a functioning English constitution to be able to

and increasingly drew back from the ideas of bourgeois

understand the revolutionary challenge to conditions

or social democracy. Thus an area of political thought

that had arisen historically in other countries. Burke’s ideas were of particular importance to

was marked off in which conservative and liberal ideas drew so close as to be almost indistinguishable, above all in their joint approval of historical continuity, ‘ or¬ ganic” development, and “moderate

progress, in the

rejection of revolutionary overthrow, in the recognition of the state as embodying the power to impose order on all classes and parties, and of the security of law and property as the foundation of society. Most politi¬ cal thinkers around the middle of the nineteenth cen¬ tury were active in this area: A. de Tocqueville, Robert Peel, F. J. Stahl, among them. Not until the late nine¬ teenth century was there a shift; beginning with criti¬ cism of culture (.Kulturkritik) and continuing in youth movements and the formation of elitist groups, political philosophies with antibourgeois and antiliberal as well as antidemocratic, antisocialistic, and anti-egalitarian viewpoints deliberately inscribed rejections of the nineteenth century on their banners, and after World War I coalesced into an ideologically authoritarian neo-conservatism.

European and American conservatism: he assigned priority to the historical accomplishments of genera¬ tions rather than to the plans of individuals and the revolutionary acts of the masses; he did not acknowl¬ edge the separation of nature and history; he legiti¬ mized feeling and tradition as forces shaping the pres¬ ent, taking religion to be the “foundation of civil society,” and provided an arsenal of arguments against revolution that appeared to have the weight of histori¬ cal experience on their side. 2. Restorationist Conservatism. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France rapidly found an echo in Germany, where reception was prepared by the historicist opposition to radical enlightenment—above all in J. Moser, E. Brandes, A. W. Rehberg, and Friedrich Gentz. Though at first stamped by the Enlightenment, all of these found in Burke that mixture of political experience with concrete reflection, of assured con¬ sciousness of freedom with a skeptical attitude toward innovation and emancipation that could not have arisen independently under German conditions. Their rejec¬

/V. VARIOUS TYPES OF

tion of revolution was not directed against Jacobin

CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT

horrors alone. Because they recognized that it was no

1. Edmund Burke and Anglo-Saxon Conservatism. Despite the relatively substantial unity and stability of its central values, conservatism displays a variety of nuances based on the different social experiences of its partisans at different times and in different coun¬ tries. This was already apparent in the reaction to the democratic revolution of the late eighteenth century. Edmund Burke, who, as a critic of the French Revolu¬ tion, gave the first (and to date most important) formu¬ lation of conservative political philosophy, vehemently

longer merely a question of a “change of regime the old manner, but of a “total revolution

in

(Gentz),

even though executed by a part of the nation only, they denounced revolution as a “breach of the social contract” hostile to every order in society and therefore as an “amoral operation” (Gentz). To the claim of revolution to reconstitute society they opposed an equally comprehensive denimciation of revolution as a breach of law and as destructive of the foundations of the order of European society and state, but did

481

CONSERVATISM not yet present any antirevolutionary counter-ideol¬ ogy, nor any program of restoration. The former appeared in French aristocratic Catholic emigre circles from the pens of J. M., Comte de Maistre and L. G. A. de Bonald. They were consciously opposed to liberal enlightened thought, considered revolution as simply evil, and favored instead a retroactively purified “order” that was traditional, hierarchical, and springing directly from the will of the Creator; against revolutionary changes they offered the wisdom of his¬ tory as the instructress of politics. A state could not be organized in accordance with rational constitutional principles; its form must derive from the history of a people, and the sovereign power that constitutes it originates in God, and so obtains its legitimacy. Written statutes are only the formulation of the unwritten, eternally valid laws; only those institutions can endure that are founded on religious conceptions. For de Maistre individual reason is presumption condemned to error, and philosophy is a destructive force. Since monarchy is for him the traditional ordering power and almost “natural,” he wants it to be restored; not indeed in its absolute form, but in a patriarchal and decentralized manner commanding a society divided into corporations (Stande) and in the closest relation to the Catholic Church as the universal force for tradi¬ tion and order. By setting the Church over the state, and the Pope over kings, de Maistre made them the most powerful instruments of counterrevolution and restoration, a barrier to enlightenment and individ¬ ualism, and the prop of monarchy and corporative structure. Even more clearly than de Maistre, de Bonald emphasized the view that only in society is human nature truly realized; he thereby gave expression to those anti-individualistic features of conservatism that enabled it to recognize the social problems of an industrial society in process of development and so to advance the social science. Bonald also formulated most clearly the differences between the individualistic and abstract versions of a republic (that could not achieve any important social objective) and a real “social" monarchy; his criticism became focal in con¬ servative argumentation. Like de Maistre he sought restoration, but was not content with simply denounc¬ ing revolution; rather he presupposed its existence in order to derive from its abstract principles the con¬ creteness of restorationist politics. The content and style of his Frangaise.

thought

later

influenced

the

Action

In central Europe restorationist conservatism foimd its most acute proponent in the Swiss, K. L. von Haller,

4oZ

who saw patriarchal leadership, the prerogative of civil law, and the corporate patrimonial state as “natural”

institutions; on the other hand, he viewed the entire development of the modern state as a path of error, and so won the approval of the Prussian conservatives close to Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Western and middle European restorationist conservatism found an echo in Russia and—together with ideas of mysticism, quietism, and romanticism—influenced Tsar Alexander I; the Holy Alliance, which was initiated by him and repre¬ sented an antirevolutionary program, aimed at stability and was based upon the assumption of the solidarity of all Christian sovereigns and people. 3. Romantic Conservatism. While romantic con¬ servatism in Germany was in practice drawn into res¬ torationist politics, its ideas and intentions, however, were developed in dialectical opposition to enlighten¬ ment theories of the state and society as founded on rational laws, and in opposition to the politics of enlightened despotism. These theories and politics, and not primarily the revolution, were made responsible for the abandonment of the beautiful hierarchical order (family, corporate state, monarchy, church) that had been formed in the Middle Ages. The road to revolu¬ tion had followed an inevitable path from the Refor¬ mation to rationalism and individualism, to adminis¬ trative centralism and to the decline of corporative prerogatives. Rather than regard the revolution merely as a misfortune romantic conservatives understood revolution to mean that a soulless, nonreligious state and the presumptuous attempt to reconstruct it on substantially

rational

principles

were

doomed

to

failure. In opposition to this, they relied upon the old order and envisioned the better future of an idealized and harmonious Christian state (Novalis, A. Muller, F. von Baader). Since the evil reality of the present was viewed as a nonessential phenomenon the only escape was seen in the aesthetic reconciliation of opposites. Romantic conservative political thought in Germany was closely intertwined with historicism, with Schelling’s philosophy of identity, and with the nationalist movement.

The preference for vested rights over

consciously sought “progress” and the conviction that every people must proceed along the lines of its own unique organic development, jointly produced in the educated classes a growing tendency to political con¬ servatism. This attitude also penetrated the ranks of moderate liberalism in its increasing concern about radical and social democracy. It was the reception of German romantic thought and its insistence upon history and Volk that formed the conservative component in the growing nationalism among the mainly democratic, educated classes of Eastern Europe. “The Society of Friends of Wisdom” (liubomudry,

1823)

with

its

romantic-conservative

nationalism and the circle surrounding N. V. Stankevic

CONSERVATISM were also shaped by ideas originating in Germany; both

post-capitalistic world. Its derivative conceptions of

Muscovite groups were—despite a rather short exist¬

social order were by no means uniform; but there was

ence—forerunners of the accentuated Russian nation¬

substantial agreement among neo-conservatives to the

alism during the second half of the nineteenth century.

extent that they were antiliberal, antidemocratic, and

4. Neo-conservatism. Since the late nineteenth cen¬

antisocialistic. The Volk must be ranked above the

tury conservatism has in different ways moved away

state, the nation above mankind, community above

from being defensive as a result of the influence of

individual and society. The social organization of the

industrialization and capitalism, of growing social

Volk was conceived along occupational lines, the ad¬

mobility, of advances in scientific and technological

ministration of the state as authoritarian: Kultur rooted

thought, the liberalization of state and economy, and

in the soil was to be cultivated above cosmopolitan

the secularization of thought and public life. Even then

“civilization.”

it has been easier for conservatives to determine what

Neo-conservatism of this kind had its day on the

it is they are opposing than to design clear and realistic

continent of Europe especially after World War I. It

programs. The criticisms of civilization by Nietzsche,

was able to represent itself as a new national socialism

Renan, Taine, Dostoevski, and ]. Burkhardt, among

(solidarity) and was used as the official ideology of

others, hardly fall under the rubric “conservative”;

national movements and national dictatorships, so that

nonetheless they have furnished the political con¬

it sometimes came very close to fascism. One must,

servative with both a basic philosophy of civilization

however, carefully distinguish between the “right” and

and a wide audience. The conservative “intellectual”

fascism. The incorporation of elements of conservative

has come forward to express the discontent felt for both

thought in the wake of fascist movements and systems

the world of bourgeois capitalism and the programs

has been so damaging for the former that it is only

of socialism; in his formulating new myths, forecasts,

with the greatest difficulty that a program of inde¬

and schemes a skeptical, sometimes even nihilistic,

pendent political conservatism can be formulated.

accent has not been lacking. Appearing increasingly

5. Conservatism in the United States. The position

less aristocratic or class-oriented than intellectual and

occupied by conservatives among the political view¬

elitist, this type of conservative has attained his most

points in any given country depends upon the political

widespread influence in conjunction with militant and

and social conditions obtaining in it. The attitudes and

integrative nationalism.

goals

The best known phenomenon of this type was the Action Franqaise, whose protagonists, Maurice Barres

called

“conservative”

appeared to European

in

the

United

States

eyes to be

mostly

rather

“Whiggish.” Until the 1960’s it seemed even less easy

and Charles Maurras, saw nationality as the inalienable

in the United States to find a powerful national “right

distinction of man. Combining antisecular and anti-

wing” of antirevolutionaries, restorationist legitimists,

Semitic tendencies with ideas derived from Sorel they

supporters of romantic and organic social doctrines,

promoted an authoritarian conception of the state

and antidemocrats than to find a precise counterpart

without undue scruples as to its legitimacy. Maurras

of European liberalism. A radical left wing, on the

demanded the establishment of an hereditary anti¬

other hand, has been almost nonexistent. Such facts

parliamentary monarchy, hierarchically structured and

made the dominant American credo look rather mod¬

corporatively organized, among whose firmest sup¬

erate; it may among other things be traced back to

porters should be the Catholic Church.

the working of its democratic machinery and to its

In Germany before World War I conservatism of

antifeudal past, though its revolutionary break with

this type was the program of small and isolated, though

feudal Europe was in a way justified by a restoration

influential, groups. P. de Lagarde, with some bearing

of colonial rights.

on romanticism, had demanded a state adequate to the character of the German people as well as a “German

Despite that and despite the influence of Locke on American political thinking, political conservatism was

religion, and based his hopes on a new elitist brand

manifested at the inception of the Union by the fathers

of education. J. Langbehn adopted this approach and developed it, amplifying its anti modernistic tenden¬

of the Constitution. Their concern was for order and security to be attained by limiting the radical demo¬

cies: homeland,

cratic tendencies found in the separate states, and

Volk, nature, and art constitute a

powerfully emotional ideological syndrome in Lang¬

thereby to strengthen the authority of the new federa¬

behn that had its effect on the youth movement.

tion. Suspected during the conflicts with the South

“restora-

from Calhoun to Little Rock, the defense of states

tionist”; it sought not to preserve the existent, but to

rights—formerly the official position of radicals and

eliminate what had come to be; not to restore some

liberals alike (Bill of Rights, Tenth Amendment), and

This

neo-conservatism

was

no

longer

medieval order, but to make room for a post-bourgeois.

adapted by Jefferson to the necessities of an expanding

483

CONSERVATISM “empire”—was considered

in

the

1960’s

as

con¬

servative a policy as the insistence on laissez-faire economics. Once stock-in-trade of American capital¬

was being spectacularly exploited by some conservative and right-wing American politicians about 1970.

istic democracy it became the main argument of con¬ servatives in the twenties (Herbert Hoover) against the modern welfare state. A similar ambiguous attitude was displayed by the West. At first often expressing its outrage at economic and political supremacy of the East in terms of a radical and even egalitarian democracy, the rural West at the same time, and increasingly since the 1870’s, displayed a rather conservative mentality. Strongly influenced by religious fundamentalism, its criticism of the megapolitan industrial East and its harking back to an authentic Americanism supplied the conservative cause with emotional arguments. In America as well as in Europe liberal and con¬ servative arguments often merged. What makes it so difficult for Europeans to draw a sharp line between liberals and conservatives in the United States is a missing guideline along strictly liberal or conservative terms; there is neither a Burke nor a Locke in the United States, which furthermore looked askance at any influence of the Catholic Church. The controversy between Hamilton and Madison seems to be reversed though both sides claim Jefferson to be in their camp. Even the often described tendency of Americans to solve their hardly articulated ideological practically

conflicts

tends to be conservative in itself and has

led to almost schizophrenic attitudes toward social problems. As a counterpoise to the social dynamism of a democratic society, conservatism in the United States has from time to time raised its head (for examples, Henry and Brooks Adams), just as it has recurred as the politics promoting the self-interest of social groups. While the most convincing American conservative of the nineteenth century was perhaps the Southerner John C. Calhoun, the development of new forms of conservatism independent of a certain area can be traced back to the end of the century. The social mobility of the American society at this time began to run out into horizontal movements whereas such ideals as the American “self-made” man were still worshipped. Asking for stability and a social equilib¬ rium Americans formed a society with deep distrust of nonconformist behavior and change.

the “left

has had the result that many ideas and con¬

ceptions of social order and governmental organization that were initially promoted by liberal forces have not only found their way into conservatism, but themselves appear

comparatively

conservative.

While

liberal

party politics in contemporary Europe is only very sluggishly active, conservatism has manifested itself as a stable counterweight to socialism; this has, however, been attained by a substantial surrender of its ideologi¬ cal substance. It has even been able to absorb some features of egalitarian democracy. It has come to an accommodation with representative democracy most readily in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries. In Catholic countries it has not really appeared inde¬ pendently in political parties, but has animated the conservative clerical wing of Catholic People’s parties. In the countries of the European continent, those with moderate conservative outlooks vote mostly for Chris¬ tian Democratic parties (Italy, Belgium, Netherlands).

Germany,

Austria,

A special role has been played by de Gaullism, which has displayed features of the Bonapartism of the nine¬ teenth and the nationalist presidential system of the twentieth century. Its success may be ascribed to the crisis of the parliamentary system and to national selfconsciousness in France. In the 1960’s when radical critics denigrate even bourgeois liberals and social democrats as conserv¬ atives, the conservatives themselves are hardly able to articulate their position unequivocally and ration¬ ally. It is doubtful whether they are capable of offering a convincing alternative to the democratic welfare state with its liberal social character. They cannot halt the profound and comprehensive social changes which the modem world is experiencing. In this process con¬ servatism seems to have the task of assuring continuity, to be a corrective against progress-at-any-price, and simply in this way to blunt reactionary tendencies. BIBLIOGRAPHY H. Barth, ed., Der konservative Gedanke (Stuttgart, 1958).

Further social and political changes in the last dec¬

R. Blake, Disraeli (London and New York, 1966). Crane

ades of the nineteenth century and particularly in the

Brinton, Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (Oxford,

1910’s and 1920’s, business reactions to certain New Deal measures, and above all antisocialism, the fear of communism, the “Cold War,” and the hot ones in Korea and V ietnam together with latent prejudices and

484

CONCLUSIONS The general expansion of the political spectrum to

antimodernistic

tendencies

(Irving

Babbitt)

have

induced a psychological and political situation which

1926; reprint New York, 1962). H. R. H. Cecil, Conservatism (London, 1912). Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby (London, 1844); idem, Sybil (London, 1845); idem, Tancred (London, 1847). K. G. Feiling, A History of the Tory Party 1640-1714 (London, 1924); idem,

What is Conservatism? (London,

1930); idem. The Second Tory Party 1740-1832 (London, 1959). H. Gerstenberger, Der Revolutiondre Konservatismus.

CONSTITUTIONALISM Ein Beitrag zur Analyse des Liberalismus, Sozialwissenschaftliche Abhandlungen 14 (Berlin, 1969). Stephen R. Granbard, Burke, Disraeli and Churchill: The Politics of Perseverance (Cambridge, Mass., 1961). M. Greiffenhagen, Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in Deutschland (Munich, 1971). R. Kirk, The Conservative Mind. From Burke to Santayana, revised ed. (Chicago, 1954). K. von Klemperer, Germany ’s New Conservatism. Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1957), K. Mannheim, “Das konservative Denken. Soziologische Beitrage zum Werden des politisch-historischen Denkens in Deutsch¬ land,” Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 57 (1927), 68-142, 470-95. H. McClosky, “Conservatism and Personality,” American Political Science Review, 52 (1958), 27-45. A. Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutsch¬ land 1918-1932. Grundriss ihrer Weltanschauungen (Stutt¬ gart, 1950). H. Muhlenfeld, Politik ohne Wunschbilder. Die konservative Aufgabe unserer Zeit (Munich, 1952). Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge and New York, 1933; reprint 1966); idem. Rationalism in Politics (New York, 1962). S. M. Osgood, French Royalism under the Third and Fourth Republics (The Hague, 1960). H. S. Reiss, ed. and Introduction, The Political Thought of the German Romantics 1793-1815 (Oxford, 1955). H. Rogger and E. Weber, eds., The European Right. A Historical Profile (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965). C. Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion, 2nd ed. revised (New York, 1962). P. Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform (Toronto, 1967). R. Spaemann, Der Ursprung der Soziologie aus dem Geist der Restauration. Studien uber L. G. S. de Bonalcl (Munich, 1959). E. C. Thaden, Conservative Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Seattle, 1964). E. Troeltsch, “Konservativ und Liberal,” Die Christliche Welt (1916), Nos. 33, 35. F. Valjavec, Die Entstehung der politischen Stromungen in Deutschland 1770-1815 (Munich, 1951). Peter R. E. Viereck, Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill (New York and London, 1956); idem, Con¬ servatism Revisited; The Revolt Against Revolt, 1815-1949 (New York, 1949). E. Weber, Action Franqaise. Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford, 1962). R. J. White, ed.. The Conservative Tradition (London, 1950). E. L. Woodward, Three Studies in European Conservatism. Metternich, Guizot, The Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1929; reprint 1963). RUDOLF VIERHAUS [See also Authority; Constitutionalism; Historicism; Ideol¬ ogy; Liberalism; Nationalism; Revolution; Social Contract; Social Democracy; State; Totalitarianism; Volksgeist.]

CONSTITUTIONALISM I Constitutionalism is descriptive of a complicated concept, deeply imbedded in historical experience, which subjects the officials who exercise governmental

powers to the limitations of a higher law. Consti¬ tutionalism proclaims the desirability of the rule of law as opposed to rule by the arbitrary judgment or mere fiat of public officials. Thus Charles H. Mcllwain has written that the essential quality of constitutionalism is that “it is a legal limitation on government; it is the antithesis of arbitrary rule . . (Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modem, p. 21). Another eminent scholar of constitutional law, Howard Jay Graham, has ob¬ served that “constitutionalism ... is the art and the process of assimilating and converting statute and precedent, ideals and aspirations, into the forms and the Rule of Law—into a Fundamental and Supreme Law” (Everyman’s Constitution, p. 6). Throughout the literature dealing with modern pub¬ lic law and the foundations of statecraft the central element of the concept of constitutionalism is that in political society government officials are not free to do anything they please in any manner they choose; they are bound to observe both the limitations on power and the procedures which are set out in the supreme, constitutional law of the community. It may therefore be said that the touchstone of consti¬ tutionalism is the concept of limited government under a higher law. This should not be taken to mean that if a state has a constitution, it is necessarily committed to the idea of constitutionalism. In a very real sense, every state has a constitution, if by a constitution is meant, in the words of Lord Bryce, “the aggregate of the laws and customs through and under which the public life of a State goes on . . .” (Studies . . . , I, 159). A consti¬ tution, Bryce asserted, is “a frame of political society, organised by and through law; that is to say, one in which law has established permanent institutions with recognized functions and definite rights” (ibid., 195). In this sense, every state may be said to have a consti¬ tution, since every state has institutions which are at the very least expected to be permanent, and every state has established ways of doing things. Even if the essence of the constitution is that the dictator exercises absolute or despotic powers, it may be said, for what¬ ever it may be worth, that this is the constitution of the state. But no one would assert that in a despotically governed state the idea of constitutionalism has any place. In the absence of a commitment to limited government under the rule of law, it may be said that a state has a constitution without any constitutionalism. Furthermore, even if a state does in fact possess a formal written document labelled “constitution” which includes the provisions customarily found in such a document, it does not follow that it is committed to constitutionalism, if in fact the document is a mere sham and not a statement of higher law which is actu¬ ally followed and reasonably well enforced. Scholars

485

CONSTITUTIONALISM have pointed up the distinction between “normative” and "nominal” constitutions. A good illustration of this point is the so-called Stalin Constitution of the Soviet Union. For a variety of reasons the Russian dictator found it desirable, in 1936, to adopt a written consti¬ tution. He was then trying to organize a collective security system against Hitler; this occurred in the popular front period when Stalin found it useful to try to win over the world’s great body of democratic opinion. The Stalin Constitution was also intended to serve as a measure of progress for the Russian Revolu¬ tion, and as the expression of goals for the future. It is also a testimony to the strength of the tradition of constitutional democracy that Stalin thought he would derive some political advantage from going through the motions of producing a written constitution in the democratic style. Even so, the Stalin Constitution does not purport to guarantee traditional individual free¬ doms in clear and unequivocal terms. For example, Article 125 declares that citizens are guaranteed free¬ dom of speech, press, assembly, street processions and demonstrations, but only “in conformity with the in¬ terests

of the

working

people,

and

in

order

to

strengthen the socialist system. . . .” Furthermore, these individual freedoms are not in fact respected by the government of the Soviet Union, and even mild expressions of dissent from prevailing official policy are subject to police repression and severe punishment. Communist China presents another example of a state which has a constitution without a commitment to constitutionalism. For example, Article 87 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (1954) provides: “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of pro¬ cession and freedom of demonstration.” In actual fact, these freedoms do not exist in Communist China, and institutions and procedures are lacking for their effec¬ tive implementation. There is, however, a tradition in the history of polit¬ ical thought which describes a constitution in terms of a higher law which is an expression of the will of the people. In this view, the people are the ultimate source of all political power, and in promulgating a constitution they declare the supreme will of the state, binding upon all organs of the state. Thus, by definition, government is created by the constitution, and the constitution endows government with its powers and establishes limitations upon the exercise of those pow¬ ers. Appropriate government officials may create stat¬ ute laws, but the statute law must conform with the requirements of the higher law of the constitution.

486

Implicit in this conception of the constitution is a basic distinction between the state and the government, and

between statute law and constitutional law. The state is created by and is organized by the people in the writing and adoption of a constitution, and government derives its authority, institutions, and procedures from this constitution. Statute law is law, but it is subordi¬ nate to the higher law of the constitution. These con¬ cepts are underscored by

the fact that

different

methods are utilized to create constitutions and stat¬ utes. The higher law of the constitution is not subject to formal alteration by ordinary legislative procedures, and the constitution, unlike statutes, emanates directly from the whole body of citizens in the form of an organic document written and ratified in some special way which stresses that the people are the ultimate repository of political power, and that their enduring will must be obeyed by government officials. This conception of a constitution was well stated by Bolingbroke when he wrote, in 1733: “By consti¬ tution we mean, whenever we speak with propriety and exactness, that assemblage of laws, institutions and customs, derived from certain fixed principles of rea¬ son, directed to certain fixed objects of public good, that compose the general system, according to which the community hath agreed to be governed.” Similarly Thomas Paine maintained that any government which violates the constitution exercises “power without right.

If the distinction between constitution and gov¬

ernment is ignored, then, Paine argued, there being no check upon the will of the government, it follows that the state is a despotism. A true, written consti¬ tution, he held, was always antecedent to the actual government, for, in his words, “The constitution is not the act of its government, but of the people consti¬ tuting a government” (Basic Writings . . . , p. 42). Generally speaking, this conception of the nature of a constitution prevails in countries committed to de¬ mocracy and freedom. Where such a concept exists, it follows that constitutionalism is also concerned with freedom and the ultimate responsibility of government to the people. Thus in his classic treatment of this subject, Mcllwain concluded his book with this sen¬ tence: "The two fundamental correlative elements of constitutionalism for which all lovers of liberty must yet fight are the legal limits to arbitrary power and a complete political responsibility of government to the governed” (Constitutionalism . . . ,

p.

146).

II Some conception of a higher law will be found throughout the history of Western political thought. Thus in the very early Greek classical period Heraclitus taught that “all human laws are sustained by the one divine law, which is infinitely strong, and suffices, and more than suffices, for them all

(quoted in Andrews

CONSTITUTIONALISM [1968], p. 15). Generally speaking, however, the an¬ cient Greeks made no distinction between the state and society. In their view the state is as old as human association itself, from which it followed that there was no natural law older than the law of actual states. For them, the law of nature merely meant the actual laws which were the same in all states. Furthermore, since the ancient Greeks had no concept that an unconstitu¬ tional law is unenforceable, they had no remedy for an unconstitutional act short of actual revolution. For them a revolution did not merely change the public law of the state; it changed the whole state and its

earliest significant development in the thinking of the Stoics of Greece and Rome after about 300 b.c. Thus Cicero made a characteristic statement of the nature of natural law in the following words: There is in fact a true law—namely, right reason—which is in accordance with nature, applies to all men, and is unchangeable and eternal. By its commands this law sum¬ mons men to the performance of their duties; by its prohi¬ bitions it restrains them from doing wrong.... To invalidate this law by human legislation is never morally right, nor is it permissible ever to restrict its operation, and to annul it wholly is impossible (Coker [1938], p. 151).

institutions, which was a very compelling reason why revolution was so much feared.

In accordance with this point of view, the Roman

Plato believed that human law was at best an imper¬

jurists established a basic distinction between public

fect reflection of an idea in the world of ideas. Contrary

law (jus publicum) and private law (jus privatum).

to the teaching of the later Stoics, he believed that

Furthermore, it was a basic principle of Roman juris¬

the law of nature was merely an intellectual standard,

prudence that the ultimate source of all legitimate

a basis for comparison, and most certainly not a basis for actual judicial decisions. His ideal, or best form of government, as set forth in The Republic, was one ruled over by philosopher-kings who were not limited by

political authority in a state is the people, not the ruler. This principle prevailed through the Middle Ages. That all political authority is limited by a higher law was a staple of medieval political thought. The medie¬

law. But he came to believe that supermen with the

val schoolmen regarded the origin of natural law as

necessary divine qualities were not and were not likely

divine since they tied natural law to God. Illustrative

to become available. Accordingly, in his later thought,

of this view is the statement of Thomas Aquinas in

as expressed in The Statesman and in the Laws, Plato

the Summa Theologica that man as a “rational creature

settled for constitutional government, but only as sec¬

. . . has a share of the Eternal Reason . . . and this

ond best. The best sort of government would be one

participation of the eternal law in the rational creature

unhindered by law, but this was only an ideal, and he

is called the natural law” (Pegis [1948], p. 618). Thus

believed that actual states can only approximate the

God and reason were fused. Above all, the natural law,

ideal. Whether the state had one or several rulers, his

along with the Church and the feudal nobility, limited

main point was that in a constitutional system govern¬

the power of the king. This is suggested by the well-

ment is limited by law derived from the uniformities

known observation of John of Salisbury in Policraticus

of nature.

(1159) that “there are certain precepts of the law which

Aristotle, fully committed to the politics of modera¬

have a perpetual necessity, having the force of law

tion, rejected Plato’s ideal state as a form of despotism,

among all nations, and which absolutely cannot be

however benevolent. He was unwilling to vest un¬

broken with impunity” (Sabine [1937], p. 247). John

restricted power in any particular individual or class,

distinguished between a proper king and a tyrant in

and insisted that those who exercise the powers of

terms of whether the ruler obeyed the law.

government must be guided by the law. Thus he fa¬ vored constitutionalism in that the guiding principle

For

medieval

England,

Magna

Carta

(1215)

strengthened the traditional view that the law is su¬

of rulership was the rule of law, not force. He thought

preme. This supremacy was best stated in Chapter 39,

that governments must be responsible to the governed,

which declared: “No freeman shall be taken or im¬

and that freedom depends upon the right of men to

prisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any

have a hand in making the laws they are required to

way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon

obey. The rule of law also meant for Aristotle that all

him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or

men are equal under the law. The procedural aspects

by the law of the land (vel per legem terre).” Magna

of constitutionalism were well developed in Aristotle’s

Carta derived a great measure of its influence from

Politics. A constitution, he wrote, is “in a sense the

repeated confirmations by later rulers (there were

life of the city.” Thus he emphasized law, rather than

forty-four confirmations between 1327 and 1422), and

human will, as the repository of the basic norms of

from its revival and reinterpretation by Coke and other

the political society.

lawyers and judges in the conflict between parliament

Natural law theory, which has been an essential

and the Stuart monarchy in the seventeenth century.

element of concepts of constitutionalism, received its

Thus, in the words of Arthur Sutherland, “the Great

487

CONSTITUTIONALISM Charter was obviously a cherished standard, a welcome

no prerogative, but that which the law and the land

assurance that people could set some limitation on the

follows.”

arbitrary powers of the king” (Constitutionalism in America, p. 31). Writing in the thirteenth century, Bracton, a justice

While Coke’s contention that the judges have the power to refuse to enforce acts of Parliament which they deem to be contrary to the supreme law of the

of King’s Bench in the reign of Henry III, and the most

land, now known as the power of judicial review, did

important English law writer before Blackstone, de¬

not prevail in subsequent English practice, his view

clared in De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae that

that Magna Carta, later strengthened by frequent royal

the law “is not anything rashly presumed by will of

confirmations, was a compact between ruler and the

the king, but what has been rightly defined with the

ruled binding upon government, merged quickly into

king’s authorization on the advice of his magnates after

broad theories of social compact and natural law which

deliberation and conference concerning it.” In this

contributed much to the modem history of higher law

philosophic treatise on the laws and customs of Eng¬

concepts.

land, Bracton distinguished between “government,”

The great natural law philosophers of the sixteenth

which was within the king’s control, and “right,” which

and seventeenth centuries—such as Hugo Grotius,

was based on ancient custom, the elements of which,

Samuel Pufendorf, Algernon Sydney, and John Locke—

“since they have been approved by the consent of those

took God out of the law of nature and made it the

using them and confirmed by the oath of kings, can

basis for the modem secular constitutional state. For

neither be changed nor destroyed without the common

John Locke (Second Treatise on Civil Government,

consent of all those with whose counsel and consent they have been promulgated” (Mcllwain [1947], p. 83). To put it somewhat differently, Bracton made a basic distinction between government (gubernaculum) and

1690), government was based on a social contract entered into in a preexisting state of nature operating under natural law, and for him natural law became the natural rights of the individual. Since the purpose

law (jurisdictio), and held that the king’s absolute au¬

of the social contract was to create government in

thority extended only to the former. The basic weak¬

order more effectively to protect man’s natural rights,

ness of this concept, and indeed the fundamental in¬

Locke, as the justifier of the Revolution of 1689, con¬

adequacy of all medieval constitutionalism, was that

cluded that when government fails of its central pur¬

there was no way to combat violations of the law

pose the people regain the right to create a new social

except by revolutionary violence or the threat of its

contract. The state, therefore, is committed to consti¬

use. The supremacy of the law over government was

tutionalism, the terms of which are spelled out in a social contract which controls the acts of government.

greatly strengthened in England by the stirring events of the seventeenth century, culminating in the Revolu¬ tion of 1689, which made the royal title dependent upon an act of parliament, the Act of Settlement of

488

Ill American constitutionalism was derived, historically, from the views of the English common law lawyers

1701, which gave the judges a tenure independent of

and judges, and the natural law, social contract phi¬

the will of the king, and which established parlia¬

losophers. During the period of colonial tutelage, the

mentary control over the government. As Coke, one

American colonists, in their perennial disputes with the

of the leading spokesmen of the resistance to Stuart

government in London, looked for protection of what

claims to absolute power, declared in 1610: “That

they regarded as their rights in the colonial charters,

ligeance or obedience of the subject to the Sovereign

thus forming the habit of appealing to a higher law

is due by the law of nature: 2. That this law of nature

stated in documents. As the colonists moved from

is part of the laws of England: 3. That the law of nature

protest to revolution, American revolutionary doctrine

was before any judicial or municipal law in the world:

was, on the whole, in line with English philosophy and

4. That the law of nature is immutable, and cannot

historical precedents. Those who articulated the polit¬

be changed.” Speaking as a Justice of the Court of

ical theory of the revolutionary movement did not even

Common Pleas, Coke went so far in Dr. Bonham’s Case

claim that their ideas were original. On the contrary,

(1610) as to declare that under certain circumstances

speaking of “Revolutionary principles,” John Adams

the judges could refuse to enforce even an act of Par¬

declared that “they are the principles of Aristotle and

liament, “for when an act of parliament is against

Plato; of Livy and Cicero; and Sydney, Harrington and

common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible

Locke; the principles of nature and eternal reason; the

to be performed, the common law will controul it and

principles on which the whole government over us now

adjudge such act to be void.” Similarly, in his historic

stands ’ (Works, IV, 15). It is, of course, wholly under¬

debate with James I, Coke asserted that “the King hath

standable that the leaders of a revolution should appeal

CONSTITUTIONALISM to familiar principles. The ideas of natural law and

in the celebrated case of Marbury v. Madison (1 Cranch

social compact spelled out in the Declaration of Inde¬

137). For Marshall the choice before the Court was

pendence found wide acceptance among the people

a simple one: either the Constitution controls any

precisely because they were thoroughly familiar ideas.

legislative act repugnant to it, or, in the alternative,

The keystone of American constitutionalism has been

the legislature may change the Constitution by ordi¬

the written national Constitution of 1787, for this

nary legislation. There is, he insisted, no middle ground

document is deeply rooted in a complex mythology

between these alternatives.

which makes the American higher law doctrine truly meaningful and effective. To begin with, the Consti¬ tution was drafted in a special way, by a convention of delegates selected for this one purpose, and ratified in a special way, by conventions selected for this single

The constitution is either a superior paramount law, un¬ changeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and, like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary

function in the states. This is a far cry from the ordinary

to the constitution is now law: if the latter part be true,

process of national legislation, which is in the hands

then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part

of Congress and the President. In addition, there is a

of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable.

special method of amending the Constitution, by an extraordinary two-thirds vote of Congress plus ap¬ proval by three-fourths of the states, which is alto¬ gether

different

and

more

complicated

than

the

method available for amending legislation. These spe¬ cial procedures have the effect of highlighting the distinction between constitutional law and statute law. Other provisions of the Constitution underscore the supremacy of the former over the latter. Thus the preamble recites the fact that “We the People of the United States ... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

John Marshall maintained that a written Constitution is intended to serve as the nation’s “fundamental and paramount” law. He went on to say that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the law to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each. So if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the consti¬

This is consistent with the widely accepted notion that

tution, disregarding the law; the court must determine

the people are the true and original source of all gov¬

which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is

ernmental authority, that government is their agent, not their master, that government is based on the popular will. In addition, Article VI declares that this Constitution “shall be the supreme Law of the Land,” and goes on to say that “the Judges in every State shall

of the very essence of judicial duty. If, then, the courts are to regard the constitution, and the constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the legislature, the constitution, and not such ordinary act, must govern the case to which they both apply.

be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or

However the cogency of this reasoning may be chal¬

Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding,”

lenged—and there have been challenges—this aspect

and provides that all national and state officials must

of the Constitution as judicially-enforceable higher law

take an oath or affirmation to support this Constitution.

has prevailed in subsequent American history. Judicial

Furthermore, all civil officers of the United States are,

review by an independent judiciary, that is, a judiciary

under the terms of Article II, Section 4, subject to

independent of the political branches of the govern¬

impeachment if they betray the people’s trust. Finally, the Constitution achieves viability as a

ment, is an indispensable element of American consti¬ tutionalism.

higher law through the practice of judicial review,

This aspect of constitutionalism has been stated and

which means that the judges, and ultimately the Jus¬

restated by many members of the United States Su¬

tices of the United States Supreme Court, have the

preme Court. Thus, in the landmark case of Ex parte

power to refuse to enforce legislative or executive acts

Milligan (4 Wall. 2), decided in 1866, the point was

found to be contrary to the Constitution. While the

made that the Constitution is the supreme law of the

Constitution does not provide for judicial review in

land even in time of war. In this case, Justice Davis

clear and unequivocal language, it was established

said:

early in the history of the document as a natural out¬

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers

growth of higher law doctrine and colonial experience. That courts have the power of judicial review was first

and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times,

established in the jurisprudence of the United States

and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more

Supreme Court, in 1803, by Chief Justice John Marshall

pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of

489

CONSTITUTIONALISM man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism ... (4 Wall. 120). The nature of the theory of constitutionalism was explained by Chief Justice Hughes in De Jonge v. Oregon (299 U.S. 353, 365), decided in 1937, in the following language: The greater the importance of safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve inviolate the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly in order to maintain the oppor¬ tunity for free political discussion, to the end that govern¬ ment may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes, if desired, may be obtained by peaceful means. Therein lies the security of the Republic, the very founda¬ tion of constitutional government. The concept of constitutionalism was spelled out from a different angle of vision by Justice Jackson in the Flag Salute Case of 1943, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (319 U.S. 624, 638), where he wrote: The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections. This statement goes to the very heart of the American concept of constitutionalism, that the constitution is a fundamental written law superior in obligation to all other forms of law. Indeed, there is a standard for measuring the justness of governmental acts which is not only binding upon all agents of the government, but which is independent even of the will of the current popular majority. While the American system is com¬ mitted to majority rule as being preferable to rule by elites or by divine right, it is also committed to the proposition that government must be righteous and just, in spite of majority rule. These objectives are sought through a variety of devices, including judicial review by an independent judiciary, an enforceable Bill of Rights, the guaranty of equality before the law, the diffusion of governmental power through territorial federalism and functional separation of powers, checks and balances, and the subordination of military to civil authority. The government is obliged to observe the fundamental law, and the Constitution cannot be changed except in some special way.

490

American constitutionalism has been remarkably successful, if success is measured by such criteria as

longevity and consensus. The American Constitution is the oldest written national constitution in service today, and mere survival is a benchmark of success in the difficult, complex world of government. Further¬ more, age alone confers respectability, although the veneration of the United States Constitution is attrib¬ utable to many other sources. Derived from the solid authority of “We the People,” it was drafted by a convention which included many of the nation’s most revered national heroes. It was not imposed upon the people by outside authority, but was, rather, an act of free will. In an age which believed that only a social contract created legitimate government, the Consti¬ tution, as a written document, was regarded from its inception as the very model of what a soundly con¬ ceived social contract should say. The success of the American economy has been tied in with the success of the Constitution, the one inter¬ acting with the other. Above all, American consti¬ tutionalism has succeeded because it has been sup¬ ported by a general popular consensus. This does not mean that the people have been in agreement on everything, since such agreement has never existed anywhere. But it does mean that there has been general acceptance of basic institutions and procedures that matter most, and that have the potentiality of becom¬ ing the sort of issues that men fight about. As a bare minimum, consensus as the underpinning of consti¬ tutionalism is possible only if there is very wide agree¬ ment on such vital matters as the regime itself, the form of government, the basic methods for making and unmaking policy decisions, and the fundamental goals of the society. /V There are many differences among constitutions from the point of view of both style and content. Indeed, Great Britain to this day has no single docu¬ ment labelled “Constitution,” and for this reason it has become customary to describe the British Constitution as being an “unwritten” one. This is very misleading, since many parts of this Constitution are written, for constitutional status is invariably ascribed to such doc¬ uments as Magna Carta (1215), the Habeas Corpus Act (1641), the Bill of Rights (1689), the Act of Settlement (1701), the Act of Union (1707), the Parliament Act (1911), and the successive Representation of the Peo¬ ple, Judicature, and Local Government Acts. All of these written documents, it is generally agreed, are parts of the British Constitution. But this Consti¬ tution includes much more, notably the rules of the common law, and well-established customs and con¬ ventions which deal with very basic matters, such as the principle of ministerial responsibility to tire House

CONSTITUTIONALISM of Commons, and which are observed as faithfully as the formal law itself. During the troubled and revolu¬ tionary days of the Cromwellian period, several efforts were made to reconcile the prerogatives of the ruler with the privileges of Parliament by the device of some sort of written constitution, but these efforts failed, and with

the

death

of Cromwell

the

monarchy

was

promptly restored. Since then the limitations which

created

so effective in operation that it has not been found necessary to state the basic constitutional law of the realm in the style of a formal written code. There is general agreement among students of government with the observation made by William E. Gladstone in 1878 that “the British Constitution is the most subtile orga¬

Constitutional

Council

(conseil

consti-

Parliament unconstitutional before enactment, and ordinary laws invalid if sent to it by the President or Parliament. But this Council is not a true court and is not part of the judicial system; private individuals and groups have no access to it, and it does not hear appeals from lower courts.

the traditional parts of the English Constitution impose upon arbitrary rule have been so clearly delineated and

a

tutionnel) with the power to declare organic laws of

The absence of judicial review, however, as the English and Israeli examples illustrate, does not mean the absence of constitutionalism. An independent judi¬ ciary endowed with judicial review powers may exert a powerful influence as a limitation upon the exercise of governmental powers, but there are other instru¬ ments available to make constitutionalism a viable concept. These include periodic elections, a free press,

nism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history” (Wolf-Phillips [1968], p. 182).

political responsibility. As a protection against the

A much more significant difference between the

constitutionalism is a viable force because it is fully

English and the American constitutions than mere matters of form and style is the existence in Britain of the principle of parliamentary supremacy. From the

opposition political parties, and various elements of exercise of arbitrary authority in Britain, for example, accepted by an informed electorate which has the power of voting out of office a government which would presume to ignore its requirements.

point of view of fundamental constitutional law, par¬

A constitution is more than a mere document, and

liamentary supremacy means that the courts of the

even in judicial review countries, more than a mere

realm are legally incapable of refusing to enforce an

law. It imposes restraints upon government, but at the

act of Parliament on grounds of unconstitutionality.

same time it also legitimizes its power. It is a record

To be sure, the word “unconstitutional” is often used

of national experience and a symbol of the nation’s

in Great Britain to describe an act believed to be

aspirations. It serves the important function of articu¬

contrary to the basic law of the country, but this does

lating the ideals of the community, of stating its social

not have the legal significance which the term has in

and economic aims. It exerts a tremendous educational

the United States. Parliament is supreme in the sense

influence as a convenient, easily-read compendium of

that all of its enactments have the quality of law. This

the nation’s basic purposes and principles.

does not mean that the English courts are powerless,

There are many differences among constitutions.

since they have the responsibility of interpreting stat¬ utes. In view of the fact that Parliament legislates less

Some are extremely detailed (e.g., the constitutions of India and Mexico), and some, like that of the United

than does the American Congress, and usually in more

States, are very short. Some are judicially enforceable,

general language, tire judicial power of statutory inter¬

while most are not. Some constitutions are “norma¬

pretation is not to be taken lightly.

tive,” while others are merely “nominal,” not to be

Most of the new states of Africa and Asia have, in

taken too seriously. Some are stable, others are fragile.

the twentieth century, felt that it was necessary to

Some are republican, while others are monarchical.

adopt formal, written constitutions, although the State

Some create parliamentary systems of government,

of Israel has preferred to follow the English example.

while others provide for presidential systems. Some

Israel has no formal constitutional document, and ac¬

establish federal systems while others, such as the

cepts the principle of parliamentary supremacy, for

American states, provide for unitary systems. Some are

the Israeli courts do not have the power of judicial

described as rigid, and others as flexible, depending

review. On the other hand, on the continent of Europe

upon the ease or difficulty of the processes of consti¬

the practice has prevailed in modem times of having

tutional amendment. There are many other terms used

formal written constitutions, but usually without judi¬

to

cial enforcement. The 1948 Constitution of West Ger¬

tionary, bonapartist, legitimist, programmatic, confirm¬

many,

atory-all suggesting aspects of world history.

however,

created

a

Constitutional

Court

describe various constitutions—such as

revolu¬

(.Bundesverfassungsgericht) with judicial review pow¬

Whatever particular form of government a consti¬

ers, and the Supreme Court of Canada has such powers

tution delineates, however, it serves as the keystone

also. The de Gaulle Constitution of France (1958)

of the arch of constitutionalism, except in those coun-

491

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY tries whose written constitutions are mere sham. Con¬

or another, is frequently attributed to processes or

stitutionalism as a theory and in practice stands for

developments in mathematics, science, philosophy,

the principle that there are—in a properly governed

history, and theology. In mathematics proper and its

state—limitations upon those who exercise the powers

direct applications, especially to “exact” science, con¬

of government, and that these limitations are spelled

tinuity is nowadays rigorously defined and unequivo¬

out in a body of higher law which is enforceable in

cally fixed. Also, in mathematical contexts continuity

a variety of ways, political and judicial. This is by no

is sharply distinguished from neighboring concepts like

means a modern idea, for the concept of a higher law

uniformity, steadiness, constancy, etc., all of which

which spells out the basic norms of a political society

have, in mathematical contexts, definitions of their

is as old as Western civilization. That there are stand¬

own. But, by reason of its general nature, continuity

ards of rightness which transcend and control public

is a sprawling concept. Outside of mathematics, it is

officials, even current popular majorities, represents a

ambiguously conceived and loosely applied, and merg¬

critically significant element of man’s endless quest for

ers and fusions with neighboring concepts are really

the good life.

unavoidable.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

a vast dissertation on the Lord’s unceasing concern for

Thus, the historical books of the Old Testament are The leading books on the concept of constitutionalism

his “Chosen People”; and a theologian may pronounce

from the point of view of general history are by Charles

with almost no difference of meaning that the Lord

H. Mcllwain, Constitutionalism and the Changing World

perseveres

(New York, 1939), and Constitutionalism: Ancient and Mod¬

“steadiness,” “constancy,” “uniformity,” etc.

ern (Ithaca, 1947). Other useful books on constitutional¬ ism around the world are: Carl J. Friedrich, The Impact of American Constitutionalism Abroad (Boston, 1967); Leslie Wolf-Phillips, Constitutions of Modern States (Lon¬ don, 1968); William G. Andrews, Constitutions and Con¬ stitutionalism, 3rd ed. (Princeton, 1968); and Francis D. Wormuth, The Origins of Modern Constitutionalism (New York, 1949). Leading books on American constitutionalism which are well worth consulting include: Edward S. Corwin,

The “Higher Law” Background of American Constitutional Law (reprint, Ithaca, 1955); Howard Lee McBain, The Living Constitution (New York, 1927); Arthur E. Sutherland, Constitutionalism in America (New York, 1965); Howard Jay Graham, Everyman’s Constitution (Madison, 1968); and Charles G. Haines, The American Doctrine of Judicial Su¬ premacy (New York, 1914). Useful essays will be found in James Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence (Oxford, 1901), Vol. I, Ch. Ill, pp. 145-254, “Flexible and Written

in

this

concern

with

“continuity,”

or

In general history and theology imprecisions as to the meaning of continuity may be enriching rather than disturbing, but in descriptive science, in which impre¬ cisions also occur, they may become outright embar¬ rassing. A leading instance of such an embarrassment is the case of the hypothesis of uniformitarianism. The hypothesis asserts, for geology and biology, that there has been a certain continuity of evolution since the formation of the earth. But no satisfactory definition of this would-be continuity has been agreed upon, or is in sight. (See section V.) Imprecisions as to the meaning of continuity may border on the very threshold of “exact science.” A notable case is Isaac Newton’s description of his abso¬ lute time, which runs as follows: Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from

aequabiliter]

Constitutions,” and Vol. II, Ch. XI, pp. 112-71, “The Law

its own nature, flows equably [Latin:

of Nature.”

relation to anything external, and by another name is called DAVID FELLMAN

without

duration [F. Cajori trans., p. 6].

[See also Authority; Democracy; General Will; Law; Legal

Newton makes it clear that this pronouncement,

Responsibility; Nation; Revolution; Right and Good; Social

which is made in an elucidating scholium only, is not

Contract; State.]

meant to be a primary operational definition of abso¬ lute time but only a supplementary background de¬ scription of it. The decisive ingredient of this descrip¬ tion is the word “equably” (which does not occur in

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY IN NATURE AND KNOWLEDGE I. INTRODUCTION

492

the immediately following description of “absolute space”), and it is meant to suggest that the flow of time is somehow intrinsically continuous and uniform. But this suggestion is tenuous and fugacious, and Newton’s sentence about the nature of his time cannot be made into a truly informative definition.

Continuity is a key conception in the history of ideas

Two thousand years before the Principia, Aristotle,

in many fields. A form of continuity, under one name

in his great essay on time (Physica, Book 4, Chs. 10-14),

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY performed much better than Newton. Aristotle’s time is hierarchically anterior to events in it and even to our awareness of it; and Aristotle is much more per¬

Hampole, or from later sources, even much later ones. Thus, according to this dictionary, our adjective con¬

suasive than Newton in his expostulations that time

tinuous gained currency in the seventeenth century only.

is intrinsically continuous, and that this continuity is

Continuity has many shadings of meaning and

a preexistent standard by which to assess, for any

therefore also many antonyms. The leading antonym

“movement —which, in Aristotle, stands for a general

to “continuous” is “discrete”; other ones are: saltatory,

process in nature, more or less—whether it is continu¬

sudden, intermittent, indivisible, atomic, particulate,

ous, discrete, or constant (Bochner, Ch. 4). Further¬

and even monadic. A monad however, being a kind

more, already many centimes before Aristotle, a lin¬

of synonym for unity and one-ness, may suggest both

guistic bond between time and continuity had been

continuity and discreteness, at one and the same time.

clearly present in Homer, and we are going to describe it briefly.

The monad of Leibniz, as presented in his Monadology, is apparently of such a kind; that is, it also suggests

The Greek word for our “abstract” noun “continu¬

continuity, even if it is an irreducible ultimate imit,

ity,” as standardized by Aristotle, is the adverbial form

not only of physical structure but also of consciousness,

to syneches (to ovvexes), and the cognate verb syn-

cognition, and metaphysical coherence. In the thinking

echein means literally “to hang, or hold together.” It

of Leibniz this simultaneousness is groimded in the

so happens that the Latin root of the English word

all-pervading lex continui, which maintains that “all”

continuity also means literally “hanging, or holding

basic constituents of the universe are somehow contin¬

together”; but works on Indo-European linguistics do

uous, be they physical or metaphysical, elemental or

not assert that the Greek and Latin stem words for

rational.

continuity had a common root in Sanskrit.

Long before Leibniz, the outlines of a lex continui,

Now, the verb synechein and the adverb syneches

and an involvement of unity with continuity, were

occur already in Homer, but on different levels of

already present in the great ontological poem of Par¬

abstraction. The verb occurs in Iliad 4, 133, in the

menides (sixth century b.c.) from which we quote two

expression: “The golden clasps of the belt were held

passages (L. Taran, p. 85).

together,” in which its meaning is quite concrete. But the adverb, which is used twice, is both times used in a semi-abstract meaning, namely in the meaning of: continually (in time). The first occurrence is in Iliad 12, 25-26, thus: “Zeus made it rain continually”; and the second occurrence is in Odyssey 9, 74, thus: “There for two nights and two days we lay continually.” Also, in the second passage the adverb syneches is reinforced,

Being is uncreated and imperishable, whole, unique, im¬ movable and complete. It was not once, nor will it be, since it is now altogether, one, continuous (frag. 8, lines 3-6). Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike. Nor is there some¬ what more here, and somewhat less there, that could pre¬ vent it from holding together; but all is full of Being. There¬ fore it is all continuous, for Being adheres to Being (frag. 8, lines 22-26).

seemingly redundantly, by the adverb aiei (aiei) which means:

The Odyssey thus

In sum, the Parmenidean “Being” is one, yet contin¬

adumbrated a tripartite bond between continuity, time,

always, ever, eternally.

uous; homogeneous, that is continuously distributed,

and eternity, and this bond has been variously contem¬

yet indivisible; ungenerated, and imperishable, and

plated and exalted in general philosophy and theology

atemporal. Such bold accumulations of divers attributes

since. This bond is nowhere stronger than in the Old

in one have been occurring in Western philosophy ever

Testament, but the extant canon of the Old Testament

since. And Western science has been harboring self¬

does not have a word whose functions would corre¬

dualities and near-inconsistencies, many of which affect

spond to those of syneches.

continuity, from early Pythagoreans until our very day.

Post-Hellenistically, this bond is also verified by the

Our present-day intellectual discomfort, if any, over

order in which the cognates of our English word con¬

the contrast between the continuous and the discrete

tinuity have come into use. According to the entries

is an inheritance from the nineteenth century. Through

in the Oxford English Dictionary, our word continual

the length of the nineteenth century there was a wide¬

(in time) was the first to emerge. It occurs already

spread predilection for continuity in all areas of

around a.d. 1340, in the phrase: “great exercise of body

knowledge, in mathematics, physics, earth-and-life sci¬

and continual travail of the spirit,” in one of the so-

ence, general philosophy, and even in historiography.

called English Prose Treatises of the hermit Richard

This predilection manifested itself in a tendency to

Rolle of Hampole (1290-1349). But for all other cog¬

subsume and subordinate the discrete under the con¬

nates of continuity the same dictionary quotes only

tinuous, even when the presence of the discrete was

from Chaucer, who wrote about half a century after

freely and fully acknowledged. In the twentieth cen-

493

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY tury the Victorian outlooks on continuity have been modified and reoriented, some gradually and some vehemently; and the discrete has come into its rightful own, reaching a high-point in quantum mechanics.

is tones which the ear cannot “resolve” by physically subdividing them. Physics of the twentieth century changed all this. It did not give up nineteenth-century insights but it refocused them. All field-like constructs of the preced¬ ing century were fully retained, and even enlarged and

II. PHYSICAL SCIENCE The nineteenth century created the great doctrines of molecular chemistry, thermodynamics, and statis¬ tical mechanics, all of which take full cognizance of the fact that physical matter consists of discrete parti¬ cles. Yet, in an overall sense, “Physical Science” of the nineteenth century gave decisive preference to “field” theory over “particle

theory, diat is to continuity over

discreteness. Thus, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Thomas Young and A. Fresnel rendered a decision, which was then long adhered to, that light is composed of waves and not of corpuscles. Secondly, D. S. Poisson, C. F. Gauss, and G. Green created field conceptions of “potential,- with parallel mathematical properties, for

electrostatics,

magnetostatics,

and

gravitation.

Thirdly, Maxwell's electrodynamics, as corroborated by Fleinrich Hertz, was a field theory, and it is frequently viewed as the representative field theory of the cen¬ tury. Fourthly, mathematical physicists from Cauchy to Kirchhoff created and standardized the theory of mechanics of continuous media, which assumes that mechanical matter is distributed continuously, with a finite density point-by-point. This mathematical as¬ sumption runs counter to the indisputable hypothesis of basic physics and chemistry that matter is atomistic, or molecular; but, operationally, the theory of contin¬ uous media has been overwhelmingly successful and it is simply indispensable for many contexts. Finally, in statistical phenomena and theories, nineteenthcentury physics was led to operate almost exclusively with the Gaussian law of probability, and this law represents continuous distribution par excellence. Furthermore, within fluid mechanics, which is a part of the theory of continuous media, Helmholtz created a major theory of vortices. Lord Kelvin, his contem¬ porary, was so impressed with it, that he hastily dashed off a theory of “vortex-atoms,” in which individual atoms, even in their singleness, were made into contin¬ uously spread-out vortices k la Helmholtz. This attempt of Kelvin was so ill-advised that present-day physics has all but “suppressed” the memory of it (R. H. Silliman). Lastly, Helmholtz fully shared the general pre¬ sumption that acoustics is a theory of waves, that is, a field theory, although it was he who pioneered in

494

the discovery (for which he is justly famous), that, physiologically, there are discrete “tone atoms,” diat

added to; but they were all balanced or complemented by the introduction of appropriate particle-like con¬ structs of a dual kind. Thus, electric fields were bal¬ anced by electrons, light waves by photons, sound waves by phonons, and even gravitational fields were balanced by would-be duals which are hopefully called gravitons; conversely, and most importantly, all ele¬ mentary particles of matter were balanced by undulatory counterparts, the so-called de Broglie waves. In the final outcome, the nineteenth-century link between physics and continuity was nowise weakened, but it was balanced by an equally viable link between physics and discreteness, and the whole structure of physics has been brought to rest on a duality between the continuous and the discrete. Except for sporadic and disjointed anticipations in philosophy of science (M. Jammer, p. 241), general philosophy of the late Victo¬ rian and even Edwardian era was unprepared and illequipped to cope with the novel postures in basic physics, and only very slowly is general philosophy accommodating itself to the stubborn fact that the duality principle in physics is here to stay. A peculiar adumbration of our present-day duality between the continuous and the discrete may be dis¬ cerned in the outlooks of the first atomists Leucippus and Democritus (fifth century b.c.). They recognized from the first that an atomic hypothesis does not only assert that physical matter is “granulated,” that is, built up of particles which in a suitable sense are indecom¬ posable, but also that these particles “interact” with each other across the “void” that separates them from one another. They interact unceasingly, and for the most part “invisibly.” It is the mode and manner of these interactions which constitute the structure of matter, mainly in its microscopic properties, but also in its macroscopic attributes. Democritus saw this more clearly than most participants in the seventeenthcentury “Revival of Atomism” (R. H. Kargon, 1966), and even chemists of the nineteenth century may have been lagging behind Democritus in this crucial insight. Democritus may have also known, in thought patterns of his, that even if an atomic theory intends to be "philosophical” rather than “physical” (van Melsen), it still has to establish its “legitimacy” by offering a context of physical explanations of some degree of novelty. Giordano Brimo, for instance, did not know this at all. He offered various atomistic and monad-

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY ological statements, but they served no purpose in physics (K. Lasswitz, I, 391-92). Aristotle, who lived about a life span after Democ¬ ritus, was much concerned with the first atomists and

vation that “the two together are the material causes of existing things” is an oracle for the ages, for our age of physics, at any rate.

their doctrine. He was opposed to atomism, but not

III. ATOMISM AND DISCONTINUITY

because it assumed that matter consists of minimal

IN THEOLOGY

constituents. In this assumption, Aristotle might have acquiesced. He was a biologist, and a very great one too, and as such he had it in his thinking that an organic tissue (like flesh, skin, bone, etc.) consists of “minimal” parts; just as in modern biology a tissue is composed of cells, which are ultimate units of life. What Aristotle could not accept for himself was the crucial assertion of atomism that, ordinarily, any two atoms are sepa¬ rated from each other by a spatial vacuity, which surrounds each of the atoms and extends between any two of them. Aristotle simply “abhorred” a vacuum, any vacuum, and he could do so with metaphysical justification. Firstly, even in present-day biology, cells are adjoined wall to wall, without biological interstices; and secondly,

in physics proper, Aristotle was a

In the European West, atomism since Democritus has been persistently associated with forms of atheism, or at least with suspicions of it. But, as against this, in the Islamic Middle East, in the tenth and eleventh centuries

a.d.,

when Islam’s philosophy and theology

were at their height, Islamic theologians—most of whom were of Persian extraction—based their ortho¬ doxy, which was philosophically articulated, on a radical form of atomism and discontinuity in nature. (For a balanced recent account see M. Fakhry, Chs. 1 and 2.) From the Islamic approach it was the avowal of continuity which represented atheism, and the avowal of discontinuity which represented theism. It is worth noting that a late Victorian scholar, a leading one, finds “Mephistophelian humor” in the fact

thermodynamicist, and it is a fact of present-day phys¬

that Islamic theists could embrace “atheistic” atomism.

ics, which Aristotle anticipated, that in a purely

The scholar concludes that this came about because

thermodynamical system an absolute vacuum is not

Aristotle had depicted Democritus so engagingly in¬

allowed for. It is true that since the nineteenth century

stead of warning theists against seeking refuge with him (L. Stein, pp. 331-32).

this kind of thermodynamics has been deemed com¬ patible with an atomic, or rather molecular structure

This Islamic doctrine, whatever its origin, was part

of the substances which compose the system (Bochner,

of the so-called Kalam. Its intent was not so much to

p. 160). However, this reconciliation of apparent op¬

deny continuity as to deny causation, but it strongly

posites has been brought about by statistical mechanics;

correlated the two. And it denied causation, because

but the basic attitudes of this doctrine were far beyond

any general law of causation would circumscribe, and

the reach of Aristotle, and of antiquity in general.

even inhibit God’s freedom of intervention and thau-

In spite of his opposition to atomism, Aristotle had

maturgy. Thus, within this intellectual setting, the

a masterful grasp of the achievements of the Atomists,

physical atomism of the Kalam became a scientific occasionalism of its philosophy.

as evidenced, for instance, by the following passage. Leucippus and his associate Democritus hold that the ele¬ ments are the Full and the Void; they call them Being and Non-Being respectively. Being is full and solid, Non-Being is void and rare. Since the void exists no less than the body, it follows that Non-Being exists no less than Being. The two

A famous account of this atomism is incorporated in the Guide of the Perplexed (Maimonides, Part I, Chs. 71-75). As usual with Maimonides, his report is some¬ what over-systematic, but the account seems very reli¬ able and adequate. Now, according to this account,

together are the material causes of existing things (Meta-

the Mutakallemim—that is, the professors of Kalam—

physica, 985b 4-10; trans. Kirk and Raven, pp. 406-07).

atomized, or rather quantized (in the sense of our

This remarkable statement could serve as a motto

quantum theory) everything; matter, space, time, and motion.

for the polarity between particle and field and even

Specifically they taught that the seemingly continu¬

for the de Broglie duality between corpuscle and wave.

ous locomotion of a body is in fact not really continu¬

It is notable that Aristotle even “apologizes” for the

ous but a succession of leaps between discretely placed

Atomists for expressing the polarity between full and

positions; and they apparently took it for granted that

void in the quaint, and possibly misleading Parmenid-

there is a imiversal minimal distance between any two

ean contrast between “Being” and “Non-Being,” and

positions. Also, what is important, a leap from position

Aristotle is reassuring the reader that the “Non” in

A to position B consists of two interlocking subevents;

is only a faqon de purler without any

the original body in position A ceases to exist, and an

negative intent or force. And Aristotle’s casual obser¬

“Non-Being

“identical” body comes into being in position B. This

495

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY sounds surprisingly like the leap of a Bohr electron,

atomism may have arisen within the Kalam indige¬

when rotating around a proton, from one energy level

nously (O. Pretzl). There are intimations that, from the

into a neighboring one; except that in the Kalam, the

beginnings of Islamic thought there had been reflec¬

second subevent follows on the first “occasionalisti-

tions, naive ones, on the concentration of space and

cally,” that is by an act of God, and not “causally,”

matter in elemental emits. Also, the problem of the

that is by a law of nature. Somewhat more occasionalistic, but still compatible

differences between Islamic and Greek atomism is

with our physics of today, was the insistence of the

gences of philosophy even between Democritus and

Mutakallemim that if a white garment turns red by

Epicurus themselves.

being dipped into a red dye then it is wrong to say

It is reported that Democritus was of a serene dispo¬

that red pigment has been transferred from the dye

sition in his personal deportment. This serenity in

to the garment. Rather, by God’s volition, an amount

manners may have corresponded to a determinism in

of red pigment ceased to be in the dye, and a corre¬

scientific outlook which takes it for granted that, ordi¬

sponding amount of the pigment was created in the

narily, the physical constellation of today will deter¬

garment.

mine the physical events of tomorrow. In the universe

Most alien to our thinking is the “Hypothesis of

of Democritus, atoms were unceasingly in motion, by

Admissibility.” It apparently asserted that anything

fixed laws and unchangeable rhythms. In the course

which is “imaginable” is also possible. It is “imagin¬

of their

able” that man might be much larger in size than he

“worlds”—which we may take to be solar systems, or

is now, and he might indeed so be; in fact, he might

galaxies, in our experience—and the worlds could also

be as large as a mountain. Fire usually goes upward,

fall apart by dissolution of the combinations of atoms

but we can “imagine” it going downwards, and so

which constitute them. Also, by their structure, the

indeed it might go.

worlds of Democritus were mostly (spiral) vortices, and

motions

atoms

would

combine

to

form

Even more striking than the atomistic pronounce¬

once upon a time the vortices emanated from some

ments, were the accompanying occasionalistic theses,

kind of “turbulence,” that is, from some kind of

and the latter were displayed most dazzingly in the

“primordial chaos” (Diogenes Laertius).

work of the Iranian Muslim theologian al-Ghazali.

All this sounds astonishingly “modem.” Primordial

Nevertheless, they were leading Islamic philosophical

turbulence, and spiral-shaped galaxies are giant-sized

thought into a cul-de-sac, and it was very fortunate

discontinuities in nature, the account of which fills the

for the nascent medieval civilization on the European

pages of any book on cosmogony of today; and it must

continent

schoolmen,

not be held against the first atomists that they did not

Muhammadan, Jewish, and Christian, were refusing to

that

the

leading

European

explain their provenance, because present-day cosmol¬

be drawn into this blind alley. In the twelfth century, the Spanish Jew Maimonides was opposed to the occa¬

ogy cannot explain it either (J. H. Oort, p. 20). The system of Democritus was not “atheistic” in a

sionalistic doctrines of the Kalam, and so were also,

militant sense, but it was indifferent to divinity in a

very systematically, his contemporary Averroes (a

passive sense. Since everything in nature and life was

Spanish Muslim), and, almost a century later, the Latin

presumed to follow predictably by laws and rhythms,

schoolman Thomas Aquinas in his Summa contra Gen¬

there was apparently no need, or rather no room, for

tiles, Book III. It is regrettable, though, that this opposition to the

a Divine Providence that would affect the fate of man, or the course of the world, by acts of willed interven¬

Islamic occasionalism also kept the West from becom¬

tion and prodigy. Very much later though, mostly in

ing generally acquainted with its scientific atomism.

response to Islamic occasionalism, the counterargu¬

Saint Thomas, for instance, has very little about it.

ment was fashioned that it is noncontinuity and inde¬

Almost a century after Aquinas, a Karaite schoolman,

terminacy which bespeak the absence of divine Provi¬

Aaron ben Elijah of Nicodemia (1300-69), who stood

dence; and that it is continuity and causality in nature

intellectually between West and East, made a last

which testify to a rule by Providence and perhaps even

major attempt to keep Islamic atomism alive, but to

to an original creation by a divine resolve.

no avail (Husik, Ch. 16).

496

compounded by the fact that there had been diver¬

While the system of Democritus has the mystique

It appears that the atomism of the Islam had been

of an incomparable classical creation, the atomic sys¬

greatly influenced by the atomisms of Democritus and

tem of Epicurus, over a century later, bears the mark

Epicurus, but it is not easy to say why the metaphysical

of an important but epigonic adaptation. It had a great

and religious evaluations were so divergent. It has been

appeal though. But the appeal was not due to the

suggested that Islamic philosophers were exposed to

power of scientific inventiveness in Epicurus, who had

Inchan influences (S. Pines), and also that a primitive

set “Epicureanism” in motion, but to the beauty of

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY Lucretius’ De rerum natura in which it is poetically

based on a certain kind of metaphysical “materialism,”

enshrined. The latter work is not an essay in science

and that this materialism must more or less be predi¬

but a poet’s sweeping vision of the Great Chain of

cated on a form of atomism.

Being in its manifold manifestations; however, by some

Developments in twentieth-century science have

irrationality of inspiration, which has been a puzzle

been undermining the possibilities of such firm corre¬

to many a poet and literary critic since, Lucretius

lations. In the nineteenth century there were firm

transported his vision through the rather amorphous

distinctions and separations between materialism and

medium of Epicurus’ system of knowledge, and thus

idealism, reality and imagination, phenomena and ob¬

immortalized Epicurus’ variant on atomism in the

jects, experience and theory, experiments and explana¬

process. Democritus had been a physicist, first and

tions. But in the twentieth centiuy, the spreading prin¬

foremost, and very genuinely so. Epicurus however was

ciples of duality for particle and field, for corpuscle

first and foremost a moralist and a social critic, even

and wave, and the progressive and unrelenting mathe-

if he elected to transmit his philosophemes in a setting

matization of all of theoretical physics, have been

of physical assumptions; and it was this humanism

dissolving the scientific foundations for such distinc¬

which attracted Lucretius to him.

tions and separations. Therefore, not only standard

With regard to discontinuity in the universe Lucre¬

“Marxist” tenets, but also, many other Victorian and

tius avers, as did Democritus long before him, that,

Edwardian correlations are losing their obvious justifi¬

by conjunction and disjunction of atoms, numerous

cations, and they will have to be re-thought from the

“galaxies” are formed and dissolved. He even alludes

ground up.

to a primordial turbulence (nova tempested), but, re¬ grettably, not to vortices (P. Boyance, p. 273). Lucre¬

IV. MATHEMATICS

tius even seems to suggest, in words of his own—what

In mathematics, continuity is an all-pervading concept.

is

about

Topology is a relatively recent major division of math¬

Democritus—that the separate galaxies of the universe

apparently

not

in

the

extant

reports

ematics, and in the half-century 1890-1940 it was a

are likely to be distributed throughout the universe

vast exercise in continuity from a novel comprehensive

with a certain uniform frequency of occurrence (De

approach. Also, this novel pursuit of continuity sup¬

rerum natura, Book II, lines 1048-66; C. Bailey, 2,

plemented but did not supersede the study of continu¬

964-65). Lucretius also has the significant report—which most regrettably does not occur in the extant remains of Epicurus himself, but has also been confirmed by

ity in “analysis,” in which, knowingly or not, it had been a central conception since the fifth century

b.c.

It will suit our purposes to distinguish, and keep apart two aspects of continuity in mathematics.

Cicero, Plutarch, and others—that the atom of Epi¬

Aspect (1). Continuity of linear ordering. This aspect

curus was endowed with a so-called clinamen of his

of continuity is suggested by, and is embodied in the

invention. It was a small-scale swerving motion of the

intrinsic continuity structure of the so-called linear

atom, and Epicurus superimposed it on the large-scale

continuum of real numbers — oo < t < oo.

rectilinear motion that had been advocated by De¬

Aspect (2). Continuity of a function y = fix). The

mocritus. This clinamen was designed to temper the

simplest, and still very important case of a continuous

basic determinism of physics by an element of inde¬

function f(x) arises if x and y are both real numbers,

terminism; and as a suggestion in physics it was a

and in this case a function is “equivalent” with an

remarkable adumbration of indeterminacies in the

ordinary graph or chart on ordinary graph paper. In

physics of our day. But Epicurus, and his followers ever

the general case, a function y = f(x) is a “mapping”

since, went much too far in using it as a physical

from any topological space X:(x) to any other topo¬

justification for indeterminacies in the science of man,

logical space Y:(y).

namely as a justification for the freedom of human will

Aspect (1) was envisioned by the Greeks, and they

and for man’s self-mastery, in a moral, social, and

worked long and hard at elucidating it. Aspect (2)

theological sense.

however eluded them. The Greeks had fleeting chance

Epicurus was adopted as the ancestral creator of the

encounters with it, but they were not inspired to focus

nineteenth-century Marxist doctrine that certain fixed

on it in any manner. This failure of the Greeks to

assumptions in physics are an unfailing indicator of

recognize aspect (2) far outweighed their ability to

certain fixed attitudes in sociology. Thus, the Dialectics

identify aspect (1). By a purely scientific assessment,

of Nature of Friedrich Engels, and, much more shrilly,

this failure greatly contributed to the eventual decline

the Materialism and Empirico-Criticism (1908) of V. I.

of Greek mathematics in its own phase.

Lenin, were proclaiming the doctrine that a philosophy

Even in the recognition of aspect (1) the Greeks had

which affirms the primacy of human freedom must be

two blind spots. Firstly, Greek mathematics never

49 i

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY created the real numbers themselves. When the Greeks formed the product of two quantities that were repre¬ sented by lengths then, conceptually, the product had to be represented by an area. Descartes may have been the first to state expressly, as he did with some emphasis at the very beginning of his La Geometrie (1637), that the product may also be represented by a length. The

“when the essential determinations of one being ap¬ proximate those of another, as a consequence, all the properties of the former should also gradually approxi¬ mate those of the latter” (Wiener, p. 187). It is not easy to state the direct effect of Leibniz’ Law of Continuity on the growth of mathematics and physics. In working mathematics, the meaning and role

Greek substitute for our concept of real numbers was

of continuity unfolded excruciatingly slowly in the

their quasi-concept of magnitude (peyeOos; megethos),

course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

and the corresponding elementary “arithmetic” was the Greek theory of proportions, as presented in Euclid’s Elements, Book 5.

through

cumulative

work

of

Lagrange,

Laplace,

Cauchy, Dirichlet, Riemann, Hankel, P. du Bois Reymond, Georg Cantor, and others, without any manifest

The Greek magnitudes were a “substitute” for posi¬

reference to the metaphysically conceived lex continui

tive real numbers only; and we view it as a second

or Leibniz. Of course, the “Law

blind spot of the Greeks that they did not even intro¬

been burrowing deep inside the texture of our intellec¬

duce a magnitude of value

0

(= zero), which, by con¬

tinuity, would be the limiting case of magnitudes of decreasing (positive) values. Thus, Greek mathematics

of Leibniz may have

tual history, thus affecting the course of mathematics. But to establish this in specific detail would be very difficult.

never had the thrill of conceiving that two coincident

Mathematics of the nineteenth century elucidated

lines form an angle of value 0; and Greek physics of

basic facts about both aspects of continuity, for real

locomotion, as expounded in Aristotle’s Physica, Books

numbers, and for real and complex numbers. These

5-8, always viewed “rest’’

facts about continuity were intimately connected with

(17pepia)

as a “contrary to

motion” (idiryais) and never as a motion with velocity 0. In fact, the first outright criticism of this Aristotelian view is to be found only in Leibniz. It is strongly implied in his pronouncement that “the law of bodies at rest is, so to speak, only a special case of the general rule for bodies in motion, the law of equality a special case of inequality, the law for the rectilinear a sub¬

facts about infinity, especially about the infinitely small. The efforts to elucidate these two sets of facts, severally and connectedly, had begun with early Pythagoreans and Zeno of Elea, and it took twenty-four centuries to bring them to fruition. The twentieth century greatly widened the scene of continuity, especially of its aspect (2), by extending the

species of the law for the curvilinear” (H. Weyl, p. 161).

real (and complex) numbers to functions from and to

This pronouncement of Leibniz was part of a uni¬

general point-sets, that is general aggregates of mathe¬

versal lex continui (“Law of Continuity”) which runs through his entire metaphysics and science. Leibniz did not present the law in a systematic study of its own, but he frequently reverted to it, presenting some of its aspects each time. Leibniz recognized, reflec¬ tively, the importance of functions for mathematics. He coined the name “function” in 1694, and, what is decisive, he was well aware of our aspect (2) of con¬

conception of continuity from functions from and to

matical elements. In fact, a numerical function y = f{x) is continuous if it transforms “nearby” numbers x into “nearby” numbers y. Therefore, in order to apply the notion of continuity to a function y = f(x) from a general point-set X:(x) to a general point-set Y:(y) it suffices to know what is meant by the statement that points of X or points of Y are “sufficiently near” each other. Now, in the twentieth century this has been

tinuity (Bochner, pp. 216-23). But he did not “create”

achieved by the introduction of a so-called topological

functions in mathematics. As rightly emphasized by

structure on a general point-set. For any given topo¬

Oswald Spengler, the concept of function began to stir

logical structure it is meaningful to say when two

in the late fourteenth century, and its emergence con¬

points of the set are “near” each other, and when the

stituted a remarkable difference between ancient and

two point-sets X and Y are each endowed with a topo¬

post-medieval mathematics. Also, as early as 1604, that

logical structure of its own it thus becomes meaningful

is 90 years before Leibniz coined the name, Luca

to say when a function y = f(x) is continuous. The

Valerio had de facto introduced a rather general class

conception of a topological structure opened new

of (continuous) functions f(x) to a purpose, and had

vistas, and it has become involved in most of the math¬

operated with them competently in the spirit of the

ematics of today.

mathematics then evolving. However, it was Leibniz who was the first to assert, more or less, that functions

498

V GEOLOGY AND BIOLOGY

and frmctional dependencies in nature are usually con-

Continuity plays a major role in descriptive science,

tinuous. Thus he states the maxim of cognition that

mainly in geology and biology, but also in psychology.

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY Aristotle’s Historia animalium has already a renowned aphorism to this effect:

tonely increasing or decreasing there corresponds a real number which is a limit of the sequence. The com¬

Nature passes little by little from things lifeless to animal

pleteness of the linear continuum was properly estab¬

life, so that, by continuity, it is impossible to present the

lished only in the nineteenth century by Dedekind and

exact lines of demarcation, or to determine to which of the

Cantor; but Eudoxus and Archimedes had, more or less,

two groups intermediate forms belong (588b 4-7).

known it for their magnitudes, and Leibniz must have half-known it for real numbers too.

Also, in Aristotle’s system of psychology there may have been a hierarchy of souls corresponding to the hierarchy of living things (Tricot, pp. 492-93, note 2). Altogether Aristotle already envisioned the so-called Great Chain of Being, which reached a dominant posi¬ tion in the thinking of Leibniz and of the Age of Enlightenment (Lovejoy). Leibniz took pains to expound that the Great Chain is indeed “great” in the sense that All the orders of natural beings form but a single chain in which the various classes, like so many rings, are so closely linked one to another that it is impossible for the senses or the imagination to determine precisely the point at which one ends and the next begins (B. Glass, p. 37).

Also, in other contexts, Leibniz intensified, or diver¬ sified, the adjective “great” by equating it variously with “maximal,” “optimal,” “perfect,” “complete,” “continuous,” etc. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the redoubtable man of letters, termed the Great Chain of Being the “Arabian Scale of Existence,

and he made a very pertinent observa¬

tion about its “greatness.

But Leibniz pretended to be undeterred by such differences. He desired to coalesce heterogeneous phe¬ nomena from exact science, descriptive science, and metaphysically oriented “moral” science into one comprehensive law of continuity. The latter was ap¬ parently also a law of optimality, and in this guise it was closely allied to a principle of contradiction and of sufficient reason. Yet, at other times Leibniz also acknowledged that heterogeneity cannot be forcibly overcome. Such an acknowledgment seems to be im¬ plied in the following statement in which Leibniz avows that his so-called labyrinth has two separate aspects. There are two famous labyrinths where our reason very often goes astray. One concerns the great question of the Free and the Necessary, above all in the production and the origin of Evil. The other consists in the discussion of continuity, and of the indivisibles which appear to be the elements thereof, and where the consideration of the infinite must enter in (Leibniz, Theodicy, p. 53).

He compared this scale of

In the nineteenth century, a quest for continuity was

existence to the mathematical linear continuum, which

particularly pronounced in geology and biology. As

he probably knew from Aristotle’s Physica, and he

already mentioned in section I, the hypothesis of con¬

pointed out that, notwithstanding a superficial similar¬

tinuity peculiar to geology is called uniformitarianism;

ity,

the two are very different from each

other

(Lovejoy, pp. 253-54). In fact, as stated by Aristotle in his Physica over and over again, the mathematical linear continuum is “everywhere dense,” meaning that

and its contrary was called catastrophism. Uniformi¬ tarianism was introduced in 1795 in a treatise by James Hutton (Gillispie, pp. 122-48; Albritton, chapter by G.

G. Simpson), and it became generally known

between any two elements of it there are always some

through a large-scale treatise of Charles Lyell, Princi¬

other ones; in particular, no element of it is isolated.

ples of Geology, whose first edition appeared in three volumes, 1830-33.

However, in nature’s Chain of Being, biological and mineral, however great and complete it be, only a finite

In biology of today, the hypothesis of continuity is

number of Links can be discerned. Thus, even if the Chain of Being has been made optimally great by

specifically the hypothesis of “transformism,” that is

filling in all possible gaps in it, there still is only a

evolution of life which proceeds by a transformation

finite number of Links, all told. Because of that, each individual member of the Chain is isolated; meaning that there is a first neighbor that is hierarchically above it, and another one that is hierarchically below it. Leibniz must have been aware of this unbridgeable difference between the Great Chain and the linear

the hypothesis that there is in operation an organic of one species into another; the direct contrary to it would be the doctrine of “fixed species” which the French call “fixism

(P. Ostoya). Transformism as a

biological hypothesis fully began with Lamarck, and evolution was assumed by him to come about by adaptation. Charles Darwin presented an impressive

continuum. He must have even been aware of the fact

plea that evolution comes about by natural selection;

that the linear continuum is not only “everywhere

and, “popularly,” transformism is associated with this

dense,” as already known to Zeno of Elea and to

kind of evolution only. Yet in present-day biology,

Aristotle, but also “complete,” in the sense that to any

adaptation is not entirely ruled out, even if Natural

bounded sequence of real numbers which is mono¬

Selection remains the prime cause.

499

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY Geologists nowadays greatly favor uniformitarianism

consensus that, contrary to the view of Lyell, uniform¬

over catastrophism, but it is easier to say what catas-

itarianism and transformism mutually condition and

trophism asserts than what uniformitarianism actually

justify each other (Glass, pp. 367ff.). To Lyell, the

discon¬

transition from one species to a next following one,

tinuities in geological stratifications of mineral deposits

however short the distance, was a “catastrophe,” and

and imbedded fossils are due to discontinuities in the

thus not admissible (de Beer, p. 104). To affirmers of

physical processes which brought about the stratifica¬

general continuity however, a sufficiently close transi¬

tions and perhaps even abrupt changes in the physi¬

tion from species to species ceased to be a “catas¬

cal laws which produce the processes (Toulmin, Ch.

trophe,” that is a disquieting discontinuity, and became

7). Uniformitarianism however wants to be a true con¬

“progress,” which bespoke the kind of continuity that

trary to catastrophism and not only a negation of it.

arises in the optical merger of rapidly succeeding visual

A mere negation would only demand that important

tableaus. (In the motion picture industry, “continuity”

basic data and phenomena be continuous in time, and

refers to the coherence of the scenario, and not to the

nothing more; there would be no need for anything

flow of the optical illusion).

is.

Catastrophism

maintains

that

manifest

to be a constant in time, say. Thus, the gravitational

In the twentieth century, the continuity aspect of

force need not have at all times the same Newtonian

organic evolution has been somewhat beclouded by the

value 1/r2, but it might be a positive function of dis¬

fact that, genetically, evolutionary transition comes

tance and time, provided that the dependence on all

about by a so-called mutation of the chromosomic

its variables is a continuous one. This however is not

apparatus and that “the basis of spontaneous mutation

what uniformitarianism really wants to be. Its real aim

remains one of the great unsolved problems of genet¬

is to avow that there is “uniformity” in nature; and

ics” (McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Tech¬

this seems to imply that certain basic causes and laws

nology, “Mutation”). Nevertheless, the fact that every¬

are not only continuous in time, but also constant in

thing proceeds by mutations is no more damaging to

time, and perhaps constant in some other parameters

the overall continuity in evolution than atomic and

too. By the prevalent interpretations of uniformitari¬

quantum spontaneities in basic physics are prejudicial

anism, certain leading attributes of nature are recog¬

to overall continuities in the foundations of modem

nizably always the same, so that the “present deter¬

physics and related science.

mines the past” and, of course, the future. It appears that our perception of “uniformity” and of “continuity”—in whatever form these concepts

likely, no one event actually proceeds as mapped on

appear—is inseparable from our rational awareness of

the mathematical continuum in its conceptual purity.

the flow of time. The awareness of time, in its turn,

But the “fiction” that most events are best described

has come about by the presence of cyclical and recur¬

by continuous functions seems to be an operational

rent phenomena in nature, although by cognitive

necessity, and there is nothing to suggest that it will

structure time is rectilinear and. in fact, a mathematical

ever be possible to abandon it entirely. For instance,

linear continuum. It also appears that within our

the principles of our engineering mechanics, as taught

Western civilization man’s capacity for specific rigor¬

in engineering schools all over the world, were laid

ous knowledge has been awakened and shaped under

down in Victorian and Edwardian treatises, and it

the impact of lunar, sidereal, and planetary events in

would be most cumbersome and inappropriate to make

the external world which are recurring periodically (O.

this entire mechanics, in all its parts, nuclearly discon¬

Neugebauer, Ch. 1). Apparently in keeping with these basic ingredients of our rationality, the demand of uniformitarianism is a compound of constancy, continuity, and cyclicity; and the relative magnitude of these three components varies with the approach to the conception.

500

Strictly speaking, every event in nature is probably discrete, or a union of discrete subevents; that is, most

tinuous in accordance with some quantum field, or solid state theory of our day. VT. PHILOSOPHY

Continuity enters into all parts of philosophy. A measure of continuity is involved in any conception

In the first half of the nineteenth century, in the

or philosopheme of Plato’s, be it about man or God,

thinking of Charles Lyell at any rate, the component

body or soul, memory or ideas, mathematics or morals,

of constancy was predominant; so much so that when

poetry or artisanship, state or citizen. Without an

Lyell was extending uniformitarianism from geological

awareness of continuity there would have been no City

to organic matter, he had to give preference to fixed

of God or Confessions of Saint Augustine; no medieval

species over evolving ones. But in the second half of

problems about particulars and universals, creation and

the nineteenth century, continuity proper was ever

eternity, fate and free will, Faith and Reason. And yet,

more outweighing constancy; and there was a rising

only in the philosophy of nature and of mathematics

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY is the presence of continuity immediate and tangible; in other areas of philosophy the degree of its presence

section on “Synechology” in his Metaphysics. Next, Gustav Theodor Feehner (1801-87), co-founder of the

is not easy to verify and the importance of its role is not easy to determine.

famed Weber-Fechner law of quantitative psychology

Thus, Aristotle’s Phijsica is full of concern for conti¬

stimulus), the first of its kind, has, in an impenetrably

nuity, directly and emphatically, and it is easy to iden¬ tify its presence in related treatises like De caelo and De generatione et corruptione. But there is, directly, very little about continuity in the Metaphysica, and almost nothing indirectly to stir one’s imagination. Thus, at the beginning of Book 10 of the Metaphysica, continuity is mentioned, directly, as one of several meanings of Unity, but the context is philosophically

(intensity of sensation varies as the logarithm of the obscure book of his, a section on the “synechological outlook versus the monadological outlook” (Feehner, p. 204). Finally, and most importantly, the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), the leading architect of the algebra of relations in symbolic logic, denotes by “synechism” what, from a certain retro¬ spect, was a revival of Leibniz’ Law of Continuity. But Peirce made the lex continui genuinely universal,

indifferent and little known. And even the continuity

and he updated it in its scope and intent, so as to make

in Physica deals, for the most part, only with the linear

it measure up to the exigencies of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

continuum of mathematics, which, from our retrospect, is a rather circumscribed topic, in a sense. The first Western philosopher on record who tried to visualize the problem of continuity in its entirety,

Herbart’s synechology is a peculiar philosophical compound of realism and psychology. As a realist Herbart finds that data from natural philosophy like

that is for philosophy in general, was G. W. Leibniz.

space, time, and matter exist outside ourselves. As a

He set out to spread his lex continui over the vastnesses

psychologist however he finds that all attributes of such

of the theories of cognition, metaphysics, and sciences. He even asserted that the mission of the Law of Conti¬ nuity is to affirm that “the present is always pregnant

data, continuity among them, are created by the psy¬ chological process which operates on the intuition through which such data reveal themselves to us. These

with the future,” and he also implied that to deny the

two findings seem to be divergent, but Herbart some¬

law would amount to denying die Principle of Suffi¬

how reconciles them.

cient Beason, whatever that be (Leibniz Selections, p.

In connection with this we wish to point out that

185). Yet, whenever Leibniz attempts to be specific and

a passage in Aristotle’s De anima apparently argues

to adduce some particular application of his general

against identifying the continuity of the process of

Law of Continuity, the application usually becomes

thought with the continuity of data conceived by thought:

a specific assertion within mathematics, or within nat¬ ural philosophy, or within philosophy of mathematics. It is true that in his mathematical allusions Leibniz sometimes reaches out far into the future, but it is a future of professional mathematics and not of extramathematical philosophy. After Leibniz, the eighteenth century contributed

But the thinking mind is one and continuous in the same sense as the process of thinking. Now thinking consists of thoughts. But the unity of these thoughts is a matter of succession, that is the unity of a number, and not the unity of a magnitude. This being so, neither is mind continuous in the latter sense, but either it is without parts, or it is

nothing notable to the comprehension of continuity in

continuous in a different sense from an extended magnitude

philosophy. This fully applies even to Immanuel Kant.

(407a 6-11).

To judge by the entries “Kontinuitat,” and “Stetigkeit” in a recent Kant dictionary (R. Eisler, Kant-Lexikon), Kant made no pronouncements on continuity that contributed anything new to what had been said by philosophers from Aristotle to Leibniz. In the nineteenth century, in general philosophy, most pronouncements on continuity were likewise monotonous and uninspiring (R. Eisler, Worterhuch). But a few philosophers did try to break out of the monotony; and by an odd coincidence, or perhaps concurrence, they designated continuity in philosophy not by names that are cognates to the Latin verb continere, but by names which they coined from the Greek verb synechein. Thus, Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) has a

Herbart has been lauded for the saying: “Continuity is union

in separation,

and separation in

union”

(Mauxion, p. 107). The saying is interesting enough, but there are plenty of similar statements in Aristotle. Also, after Herbart, in Feehner, there is a counterpart to Herbart’s saying which seems more original. We translate it thus: What is psychically uniform and simple comes out of physi¬ cal variety; and physical variety contracts into something that is psychically uniform, and simple, or, at any rate, simpler (Feehner, p. 247).

Following this, Feehner asserts in a very difficult sentence of his that this “contraction” leads to a kind of “synechological”

equidistribution in the world,

501

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY which Fechner opposes to a “monadological” concen¬

had never been able to erect it. And a recent critic

tration at points, and, Fechner continues, of this equi-

puts it thus:

distribution we have a divinely inspired awareness. C. S. Peirce, finally, being a master of mathematical logic and also of philosophy of mathematics, knew about the importance of continuity for mathematics in considerable detail; he also knew how the concep¬ tion of continuity, when fanning out from mathematics, was reaching into large areas of cognition. Being thus

The grand design was never fulfilled. The reason is that Peirce was never able to find a way to utilize the continuum concept effectively. The magnificant synthesis which the theory of continuity seemed to promise somehow always eluded him, and the shining vision of the great system always remained a castle in the air (Murphey, p. 407).

equipped, Peirce was elaborating aspects of continuity

This harsh verdict against Peirce is true as to fact;

which are recognizably mathematical, and he was also

and yet it can be mellowed by the fact that Peirce

endeavoring to establish a presence of continuity,

was reaching out for the impossible and stumbled over

under the name of “synechism,” in most of philosophy.

his own genius when attempting this. Peirce wanted

It is however not clear from the statements in Peirce,

a conception of continuity that would be philo¬

and it may have never become clear to himself,

sophically as all-pervasive as Leibniz had envisioned

whether synechism is indeed effectively present outside

it, and, at the same time, logically as rigorous as math¬

of areas of philosophy of mathematics, or whether,

ematics of his own day was capable of making it. But

conversely, philosophy of mathematics extends into

Peirce was striving after an impossibility. Mathematics

every precinct of metaphysics in which the presence

cannot be thus fused with philosophy in entirety, and

of synechism is detectable. Peirce was one of the first

mathematics is in no justifiable sense sufficient to de¬

of a species of philosophers who by trend, intent, or

termine philosophy in its general scope. If a conception

circumstances had been blurring the several demarca¬

from

tions between mathematics, mathematical logic, phi¬

matically rigorous, then it can wear the vestments of

losophy of mathematics, and general philosophy.

mathematical rigor to advantage only when moving

general

philosophy

has

been

made

mathe¬

Being a logician by intellectual faculty, Peirce con¬

about in areas of mathematics proper, or, at best, in

ceived his synechism within a logical setting. Peirce

border areas which mathematics is in the process of

established a certain triad of metaphysical constructs

penetrating, but certainly not when moving about in

which he called categories, in which he placed “Syne¬

areas which are well outside of mathematics’ sphere

chism’’ along with “Tychism” and “Agapism.”

of influence. There are differences between mathe¬

Peirce called his three categories “cenopythago-

matics and philosophy which cannot be winked at with

rean”: “Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness,” and they

impunity. A. N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell were

recognizably corresponded to the triads in Kant’s table

frequently musing that it ought to be possible to tres¬

of twelve categories, but also resembled the stages of

pass on philosophy proper with conceptions from

Hegel’s phenomenology of mind (Peirce, pp. 384ff.).

mathematics. But they were prudent enough, especially

Now,

“syn-thesis”

means

literally

“putting-

together,” and in analogy to this, Peirce associated

Whitehead, not to become entangled in difficulties into which Peirce was stepping only too boldly.

various aspects of Thirdness with “synechism,” which means literally “hanging-together.” And Peirce’s aim

VII. HISTORIOGRAPHY

becomes clear if one contemplates the actual content

Excepting simpleminded chronicles and listings, any

of his Thirdness, which a commentator of his has de¬

historical work has a theme of continuity inside of it.

scribed thus.

The theme of the Old Testament, whatever the many

Thirdness is mediation, generality, order, interpretation, meaning, purpose. The Third is the medium or bond which connects the absolute first and last, and brings them into relationship. Every process involves Continuity, and Conti¬ nuity represents Thirdness to perfection (Freeman, p. 19).

digressions, is the gradual erection of the Israelite theocracy. Thucydides fused the two parts of the Pelo¬ ponnesian war, which were separated by the peace of Nicias, into one continuous event. Aristotle created our academic field of the history of philosophy by conceiv¬ ing a closely-knit continuity of development in natural

Thus Peirce’s design for his Synechism was even

502

philosophy from Thales to Democritus. Within this

more ambitious than Leibniz’ design for his lex con-

development he even created, rather forcedly, the

tinui, but Peirce was even less successful than Leibniz

subdevelopments of “monism” and “pluralism.” Aris¬

in carrying out his plans. Even friendly critics of Peirce,

totle says himself that it may appear incongruous to

like Morris B. Cohen, were complaining that Peirce

create a continuity of transition from the “materialists”

had been promising a vast philosophical system, but

Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, to the “ontologists”

CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY Parmenides and Melissus by calling them all “monists,” but that he is going to do so anyhow (Physica, Book 1, Ch. 2). Aristotle also knew well that there had been a great difference between the four “roots” (= ele¬ ments) of Empedocles and the infinitely many atoms of Leucippus and Democritus, but he subsumed them under the rubric of “pluralists” nonetheless. Continuity as a methodology in history does not at all mean that all leading developments are presumed to be continuous, that is composed of accumulations of small-step events, let alone that developments are presumed to be always “progressive,” that is positively accented forward advances. After the Renaissance, under the spell of a wide¬ spread “idea of progress” (J. B. Bury), and lasting deep into the nineteenth century (Bochner, pp. 73-74), such presumptions sometimes did assert themselves. Thus, in the history of science, the inductivism of Francis Bacon presented such an idea of progress fairly closely. It presumed that science advances gradually from ob¬ servation to theoretization, imivalently, forcibly, uner¬ ringly. It also assumed that there are ways in science of deciding between right and wrong and that an experimenting and observing scientist can report on facts “faithfully” without at all rendering an opinion on them (Bochner, p. 62). The twentieth century has become very critical of inductivism in the history of science, but it has not decided what to put in its stead. It is not properly known what brings about significant changes in science, and what the actual mechanism of change is. Some¬ times a major change in science appears to be literally a

revolution

which came about in a single step, but

at other times a major change, an equally significant one, may appear to be the sum of many relatively small changes in rapid succession. It is very difficult to find a rationale for difference of these two types of change or a schema common to both types. The nineteenth century brought to the fore an inter¬

An unmistakably continuist enterprise is evident in the large-scale work of Pierre Duhem in the history of science, which was achieved in the beginning of the twentieth century. In this work the author, una¬ bashedly, . . . forges what seems to be an unbroken chain of human links, from Thales to Galileo, clear across the entire Middle Ages, without omitting a single decade, or even a single year of them. He does not naively whiten out all the dark¬ nesses of the Middle Ages; but to Duhem the darknesses only indicate a certain lowering of the level of intellectual¬ ity, and not at all some chasmal rupture in the substance of the flooring (Bochner, p. 117).

Duhem’s continuism is obvious and obtrusive, and therefore somewhat tedious; but subtler forms of con¬ tinuism have been fully operative in many areas of academic activity since the early nineteenth century. Continuism has greatly influenced the routines of aca¬ demic research, and it has been involved in an un¬ precedented growth of scholarship and of historically oriented analyses in many compartments of knowledge. Whether it be the study of the origins of the Iliad or the Old Testament, of Herodotus or Diogenes Laertius, of a play of Shakespeare or the Opticks of Newton, there is always a strain of continuism involved in the investigation. Finally, like all methods in historiogra¬ phy, continuism had its distant roots in antiquity. In fact, Aristotle’s conception of Pre-Socratic philosophy was entirely continuist, and has remained so since. After Aristotle, versions of continuism are identifiable in scholarship of any period, but it was the nineteenth century which made the most of it. In the twentieth century a major challenge to straightforward continuism has come from the problem of the rise of Western civilization as a whole. It has long been recognized that in Western civilization in its total coruse there had been, at various stages of its growth, component civilizations with distinctive

pretation of continuity in history which is much less

characteristics of their own. This finding by itself is

naive than the ordinary belief in “inevitable progress,”

not in conflict with continuism. But a conflict might

although it is deceptively similar to it. If we adopt

arise if one posits that two component civilizations did

the term “continuism ’ (Bochner,

61), its relation to

not affect each other in a major way although they

p.

the idea of progress may be seen as follows. Continuism

were temporally contiguous or even overlapping. And

also assumes that any event of today was directly

that there had indeed been such component civili¬

preceded by some event which must have taken place

zations has been proposed, respectively, by Oswald

yesterday. However, the event of today is not neces¬

Spengler and by Arnold Toynbee. The novelty of such

sarily an “advance” over the event of yesterday, but

proposals is wearing off, yet the echo of them lingers

it is only a “reaction” to it, and the reaction may be

on and is likely to persist.

a positive or negative one. That is, the event of today

Very intriguing is a certain “continuist” question

may concur with yesterday’s event and carry it for¬

relating to the origin of Western civilization in its

ward, or it may disagree with it, and oppose it with something different.

Mediterranean littoral. The oldest components of this total civilization were the Old Egyptian and the Old

503

COSMIC FALL Mesopotamian civilizations. From the distance of our

York, 1962). Kurd Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik . . . ,

retrospect the two arose “almost simultaneously” in

2 vols. (Hamburg, 1892); Vol. I contains a scathing criticism

the fifth and fourth millennia

This poses the prob¬

of Bruno’s atomism after a full account of its scope. Gott¬

lem whether there were any links between them, and,

fried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard

if so, what the links were. They both initiated the art

(New Haven, 1953). Leibniz Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener,

b.c.

of writing in a major way; and the absorbing problem is whether there was any “stimulus diffusion” (Toynbee, 12, 344ff.) from the one to the other, and also what

revised ed. (New York, 1959). Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great

Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1936; New York, 1960). Charles Lyell,

eligible for the rise of both.

Principles of Geology, being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation (London, 1830-33). Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed (Moreh Nebuchem, ca. 1170). Three leading

BIBLIOGRAPHY

translations are: (1) S. Munk, in French, with copious notes,

it really was that made the Mediterranean littoral

Al-Ghazali, The Destruction of Philosophers (Tahafut alFalasifah), trans. A. Kamali (Lahore, 1958). This is his lead¬ ing philosophical work. Aristotle, History of Animals; our text is adapted from D’Arcy W. Thompson’s version in the Oxford translation of Aristotle’s works under the general editorship of W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1910), Vol. 4. Averroes (Ibn Rushd), The Destruction of the Destruction (Tahafut al-Tahafut), trans. S. van Bergh (London, 1954); this is a refutation of al-Ghazali. Salomon Bochner, The Role of

Mathematics in the Rise of Science (Princeton, 1966). Pierre Boyance, Lucrece et TEpicurisme (Paris, 1963). J. B. Bury,

The Idea of Progress (London, 1920; New York, 1932; reprint 1955). Florian Cajori, ed., Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and his System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte (1729) revised by F. Cajori (Berkeley, 1934; many reprints); the Latin title Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (London, 1687) is briefly identified as Principia. Gavin de Beer, Charles Darwin (London, 1963; New York, 1964). Rene Descartes, La Geometrie, original text, with an English translation by David Eugene Smith and M. L. Latham (Chicago, 1925). Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols. (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1935), Book IX, secs. 28-51 on Leucippus and Democritus; Book X on Epicurus; II, 439ff. Pierre Duhem, Etudes sur Leonard de Vinci, 3 vols.

3 vols. (Paris, 1856-66); (2) M. Friedlander, 3 vols. (London, 1881-85, reissue 1 vol. 1925; reprint, New York, 1940), copiously annotated in English; (3) Shlomo Pines, in English also (Chicago, 1963), closer to the original than Friedlander’s, and has important long introductions.

G. Murphey, The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy (Cam¬ bridge, Mass., 1964). Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences

in Antiquity, 2nd ed. (Providence, 1957; New York, 1962). Parmenides, Works, trans. Leonardo Taran (Princeton, 1965). Charles S. Peirce, Selected Writings (New York, 1966). Shlomo Pines, Beitrage zur Islamische Atomenlehre (Berlin, 1936). Otto Pretzl, “Die Friihislamische Atomenlehre,” Der Islam, 19 (1931), 117-30. Robert H. Silliman, “Smoke Rings and Nineteenth-Century Atomism,” Isis, 54 (1963), 461-74. Solvay Institute, 13th Physics Conference. Structure and Evolution of Galaxies (New York, 1965). Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. C. F. Atkinson, 2 vols. (New York, 1926-28). Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (London, 1965). Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London and New York, 1935-61). J. Tricot, Aristote: histoire des animaux (Paris, 1957). Andrew G. van Melsen, From Atomos to Atom (New York, 1960). Hermann Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science (Princeton, 1960).

(Paris, 1906-13); idem, Le Systeme du monde. Histoire des

doctrines cosmologiques de Platon a Copernic, 10 vols. (Paris, 1913-59). Rudolf Eisler, Kant-Lexikon (Hildesheim, 1961); idem, Worterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe, 4th ed. (Berlin, 1930), article, “Stetigkeit.” Friedrich Engels, Dia¬ lectics of Nature, ed. C. Duff (New York, 1940). Majid Fakhry, Islamic Occasionalism and its Critique of Averroes and Aquinas (London and New York, 1958). Gustav Theodor Fechner, Die Tagesansicht gegenuber der Nachtansicht, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1904). Eugene Freeman, The Categories of Charles S. Peirce (Chicago, 1931). Charles Coulston Gillispie, Genesis and Geology (New York, 1960). Bentley Glass, Fore¬ runners of Darwin, 1745-1859 (Baltimore, 1958). Johann Friedrich Herbart, Allgemeine Metaphysik (Konigsberg, 1829). Isaac Husik, A History of Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Philadelphia, 1916), Ch. XVI. Max Jammer, The Conceptual

504

Development of Quantum Mechanics (New York, 1966). Robert Hugh Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford and New York, 1966). G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge and New

Marcel

Mauxion, La Metaphysique de Herbart (Paris, 1894). Murray

SALOMON BOCHNER [See also Baconianism; Cycles; Historiography; Infinity; Platonism; Pragmatism; Pre-Platonic Conceptions; Progress; Pythagorean . . .; Revolution; Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism.]

COSMIC FALL Within the Christian tradition remarkably different answers have been given to the question; What was the extent of the damage wrought by the Fall of Man? On some accounts it was confined to human nature; on others, it was extended to other living beings, some¬ times to the whole earth, and even to the cosmos at large. Some held that the damage was caused at the

COSMIC FALL time of the Fall—once for all; and others that there

ment sheweth his handywork” (Psalm 19:1), and that

is a continuing process of decay of the created world.

the world is not in decline or decay. God works in

Those issues were debated with unusual intensity in

the world, and not only as judge or avenger. He

the late sixteenth century and the first half of the

“maketh the clouds his chariot” and “walketh upon

seventeenth century. The controversy is of importance

the wings of the wind” (Psalm 104:3).

to the historian of ideas, because among its participants

As will be apparent, the materials of the controversy

were major writers in very diversified fields, literary,

were drawn from several traditions—not only from the

theological, philosophical, and scientific; and because

biblical. Among Platonic themes, the Theory of Forms

the patterns of argument used in the debate have great

could be invoked to express a sharp and congenial

intrinsic interest, arguments attempting to display the

contrast between the corruptible and defective objects

whole world (or large parts of it) as decayed, ruined,

of the spatiotemporal world and the perfection of the

or as fecund and virile. The citation of empirical “in¬

timeless archetypes and exemplars, the Forms them¬

stances,” appeal to authority and metaphysical reason¬

selves. In the cosmogony of the Timaeus, Plato’s divine

ing were supplemented by a lush and often eloquent

Craftsman exerts his creative power upon a nature that

use of metaphor, analogy, and imagery.

is recalcitrant in some degree. Although such a view

The controversy would scarcely have been possible,

could not ultimately be reconciled with the Christian

if the biblical accounts of the Fall and its effects had

doctrine of Creation, it had affinities with an account

been free from ambiguity. What exactly was the

of nature as “fallen” and inhospitable to value; and

“curse”

these affinities were exploited.

elicited by sin,

on the Genesis account?

“Thoms also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee

Aristotelian materials were also prominent, espe¬

. . .” (Genesis 3:18). But was it only the ground and

cially the concepts of “privation” and of “contraries.”

its cultivation that were affected—or the entire earth?

We shall note how any lack of accord between what

The Septuagint and the Vulgate took Genesis 3:17 to

a thing is observed to be and what it ideally ought

mean “Cursed is the earth in thy work”—the whole

to be was to be taken by Goodman as a case of “priva¬

earth (1777), terra). The Authorized Version (more cor¬

tion,” and the mechanism by which Decay proceeded

rectly) has “Cursed is the groimd for thy sake.” This

was the conflict of contrary, discordant elements.

disparity added to possibilities for complex disputes.

Lucretius, in Book II of De rerum natura, provided

The narrative of the Flood was a second obvious

a story of cosmic deterioration, which was often al¬

source for the view that human sin had results not

luded to in later literature: “. . . The ramparts of the

limited to human affairs; though again the extent and

great world will be breached and collapse in crumbling

duration of these results were disputable. We shall see

ruin about us. Already it is far past its prime.” Once

that one of the last and most influential writings of

nature yielded of its own accord “smiling crops and

the main controversy—Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory

lusty vines . . . which now can scarcely be made to

of the Earth (Latin, 1681; English, 1684) attributed to

grow by our toil. . . . Everything is gradually decaying

the Flood nothing less than the formation of the chief

and nearing its end, worn out by old age” (trans.

features of the earth’s topography as we know it.

B. E. Latham, Baltimore, n.d.). From another point of

Claims that the world is decaying, or is in its old

view, however, Lucretius’ world-picture could not

age, could find some Old Testament support, if only

have been more different from that of the Cosmic Fall

in a few much-quoted texts, such as Psalm 102:25-26:

theorists. To him the universe was “certainly not cre¬

“. . . the heavens are the work of thy hands. They

ated for us by divine power: it is so full of imperfec¬

shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them

tions” (Book V).

shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them. . . .”

Cosmic Fall theories repeatedly drew upon the imagery of a primeval Golden Age and a subsequent

To Saint Paul, the entire cosmos suffers and is in

decline, symbolized by successively “baser” metals. For

need of redemption: “The whole creation groaneth and

Christianity, this could not be a recurrent, cyclical

travaileth in pain together” (Bomans 8:22). The effects

movement, but a single irreversible decline. The stages

of human sin are not “insulated” from the rest of the

were labeled in more than one way. “The Brasen-Age

world: it is too tightly integrated a unity. At least equal

is now, when Earth is wome,” wrote Fulke Greville

support, however, could be drawn from the Bible by

(Works, ed. A. B. Grosart, 4 vols., New York [1870],

writers who denied there had been any Cosmic Fall.

III, 51f.). Philip Stubbes called this “. . . third and last

They could make a strong case for claiming that in

age . . .” indifferently “the yron or leaden age” (The

the dominant biblical view, nature continues to reflect

Anatomie of Abuses, 1583).

the divine goodness, wisdom, and creative power; that

Martin Luther’s Commentary on the Book of Genesis

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firma¬

(1545) claimed that “The world degenerates and grows

505

COSMIC FALL worse and worse every day.. . . The calamities inflicted on Adam . . . were light in comparison of those in¬ flicted on us

(on Genesis 3:17-19). The Flood was an

important crisis.

The whole face of nature was

changed by that mighty convulsion”; and the trees and fruits of the present-day earth “are but miserable rem¬ nants ... of those former riches which the earth pro¬ duced when first created” (2:11-12). Calvin, in his Institutes (1536), argued that if we fail to see God’s glory in the created world, the failure is due not to that world’s decrepitude but to men’s own stupidity and inattentiveness. In his Commentary upon the Book of Genesis (1554), however, he wrote that “The inclemency of the air, frost, thunder, un¬

Despite his enthusiasm over the opening up of new lands and new routes, Samuel Purchas was also con¬ vinced that this is a decaying world, that no progress can be permanent, and that improvements in the human condition are merely providential interludes. ... the earth is accursed, whereby many things are hurtfull to mans nature, and in those which are wholsome, there is not such variety of kinds, such plentie in each variety, such ease in getting our plenty, or such quality in what is gotten. . . . Had not man sinned, there should not haue needed the death of beasts to nourish his life, which without

seasonable rains . . . and whatever is disorderly in the

such stay should haue beene immortall: the vse whereof

world, are the fruits of sin’ (3:19). Calvin denied that

was after granted, rather to supply necessitie when the

The earth was exhausted by the long succession of time.. . . They think more correctly who acknowledge that, by the increasing wickedness of man, the remain¬ ing blessing of God is gradually diminished and im¬ paired” (3:18). Calvin’s conclusion is measured and balanced: “The order of the world is indeed disturbed by our vices . . . yet we perceive the order of nature so far to prevail, that winter and summer annually recur, that there is a constant succession of days and nights,” and so on (8:22). From the mid-sixteenth century, the idea of a con¬ tinuing process of cosmic decay began to have an increasing imaginative influence—an influence extend¬ ing far beyond technical theology. Current scientific observation could be interpreted as showing that not only the “sublunary” domain was involved in decay, but that the heavens too were not immune to corrup¬ tion. For blemishes were observable on the moon; and there appeared the ominous “new star” of 1572. The antique world, Faerie

Queene

wrote Edmund Spenser, in The

(1590-1609),

“in

its

first

flowring

youth,/ Found no defect in his Creatours grace.” But the world today, he lamented, “being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse:” with all its “crea¬ tures from their course astray/ Till they arrive at their last ruinous decay” (II. vii. 16; V. Prologue i. 6). In The First Anniversary (1611) and in his Sermons John Donne gave powerful expression to the theme of Decay. Donne saw man’s mortality as due to the Fall: and he spreads the pathos of mortality over human life in general. “All our life is but a going out to the place of execution.' Corruption and decay did not stop at man. “The noblest part, man, felt it first; and then/ Both beasts and plants, curst in the curse of man’ (The First Anniversary, lines 199-200). “God hath put into [the world] a reproofe, a rebuke . . .

506

and pock-holes”—mountains and sea-depths. He in¬ stances too disorder in the seasons and the untoward appearing of new stars.

sensible decay and age.

Earth had been first created

as a smooth sphere: now it is “disfigured” with “warts

Floud had weakened the Earth, then to minister a greater abundance then before it had (Purchas his Pilgrimage, 1613; 1626 ed., I, 14).

Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World (1614) presented the image of a nature whose energies are all but exhausted: “Both the ages of men, and the nature of all things Time hath changed —and changed for the worse. Some interesting variations on (and hesitations over) Cosmic Fall doctrine can be found in Greville’s poems. Sometimes Greville emphasizes the limits of change and decay:

Poor Earth, that dost presume to judge

the skye;/ Cynthia is euer round, and neuer varies” (Works,

III,

64). “Etemall Truth . . . [is] Onely exiled

from man’s fleshly heart” also say:

(III,

126). Yet Greville can

For as the World by Time still more de¬

clines,/ Both from the truth and wisedom of Creation:/ So at the Truth she more and more repines,/ As making hast to her last declination”

(II,

30), and “Thy word

incarnate, glorious heauen, darke hell/ Lye shadowed vnder man’s degeneration”

(III,

142).

The most detailed dispute on the whole issue of a Cosmic Fall is contained in the writings of Godfrey Goodman and George Hakewill. Goodman’s The Fall of Man . . . was published in 1616. Hakewill’s defense of an undecayed world, An Apologie ... of the Power and Providence of God . . . appeared in 1627: its third edition, 1635, included arguments by Goodman, and further responses from Hakewill. Goodman argued that to be aware of the vast extent of decay and disorder brought about by the Fall was essential to contrite and devout living. The world was originally well constructed to serve and to delight man, its centerpiece. Every feature of the world today that thwarts this purpose can be known, for that very rea¬ son, to be a result of the Fall. Nature as a whole is directed to man

(Fall, p. 14); thus when man breaks

his owne bounds ... it must necessarily follow, that

COSMIC FALL all the rest of the creatures, which were bound or knit together in man, should likewise be inordinate” (p. 17). To Goodman again there would have been no mortality but for sin:

Obseruing the course and prouidence of

nature, man should be exempted from death” (p. 331). Evil proliferates: while there is only one (precarious) state of health, there are innumerable forms of illhealth, countless ways to die. Man’s intellectual powers are diminished; his passions conflict with his will; con¬ stant war is waged between man and the animals, and among the animals themselves. The rest of nonhuman nature is no less afflicted. Nature seems “more carefull of thomes, then of the best fruits” (p. 225, margin). “If God punish the earth with a great drought ... it argues the barrennesse of our nature, in respect of good workes” (p. 92). Contrariwise, when we want it dry, we are given harmfully wet weather—for instance, at harvesttime. Man cannot feel at home in a world, the greater part of which is wild and uninhabitable. Good¬ man attributes an important share in the disturbance of nature to the Flood: “This generall deluge was indeed the generall confusion of nature” (p. 281). The heavens are not exempt from decay: the sun’s heat has diminished. The 1572 “comet” showed that change was occurring in the superlunary sphere where no change should be. The Fall of Man ... is a remarkable compendium of vilifying arguments and imagery. Because death terminates life, Goodman argues, “Our life is a kind of dying.” As in the example from Donne, Goodman too spreads the emotion proper to dying over the

the corruptions of nature, he does not deny that nature is in God s control. “God . . . hath so ordained nature, to worke His owne purpose” (p. 269). “Nature” and “grace” are not set in opposition: “both of them pro¬ ceed from one fountaine,” God being author of both (p. 10). But Goodman, in fact, oscillates between seeing nature (God-made, basically good) as God’s obedient instrument for man’s correction, and seeing it as itself horrifyingly involved in disorder and disintegration. The decay of nature is not the work of specific and constant divine interventions. From the very beginning, there have been “contrary” elements in nature, capable of conflict, privation, and corruption. Before the Fall God prevented these destructive possibilities from being realized; but since the Fall, he prevents them no longer; although he does restrain the process from leading directly to the annihilation of the world. George Hakewill’s Apologie opposes Goodman’s po¬ sition in argument, attitude, and tone. Instead of the imagery of senescence and exhaustion, we find constant reference to new birth, growth, and virility. The curve of “decline

is repudiated. Hakewill combats Good¬

man’s view not only by opposing instance to instance (he sees that appeal to cases cannot be decisive), but by attacking his use of the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, denying his general account of decay through the conflict of contraries, and arguing that the Cosmic Fall doctrine is incompatible with the demands both of theology and morality. On tlie last point: Hakewill claims that the doctrine of decay tends not to be morally healthful, but “rather

activities of living as well. The further spreading of

to breed sloath then to quicken industrie” (Apologie,

decay-and-senility language to the nonhuman world is

p. 18). What is morally salutary is to contemplate God’s

justified in terms of the pervasive analogy between

wisdom and goodness, as these are still amply displayed

microcosm and macrocosm, and by the claim that

in his creation. Not that Hakewill is an unbounded

disorder at the teleological center of the world cannot

optimist, or takes human sin lightly. God will end the

fail to infect all the rest, which is “bound or knit together in man.”

world, and there will be a final judgment. But to claim that God will act in these ways is altogether different

Any skill that today requires study and labor to

from positing a running-down of the world. Both

acquire, “must” have been possessed by man, innately,

Scripture and reason lead us to expect “that the world

before the Fall, and required no laborious process of

shall bee by fire totally and finally dissolved and an¬

learning. Goodman’s instances range from abilities like

nihilated” (Book IV, Sec. 4).

swimming (p. 88), to intellectual activity and human

Hakewill denies that human nature is deteriorating

communication in general (e.g., pp. 305, 299). If it is

over the centuries. He compares the men of his own

possible to imagine ourselves as possessing an ability

day with the Romans. Were the Romans braver? No:

in a more perfect manner than we do, we can infer

the corruption of their aggressive aims prevents us

that, before the Fall, men did actually possess it in

commending them as brave. (Hakewill, i.e., makes it

that way. Today “we (that is, our souls) doe not receiue

a necessary condition of bravery that the action should

the things themselues, but the species or images of

be in a good cause.) Men today are freer from various

things” (p. 46). “Were it not, that man is falne,” we

kinds of lasciviousness, luxury, and vicious excess. We

should be able to reason infallibly; the soul dealing

have not become more vulnerable to diseases: some

“directly” with “intelligible objects” themselves (p. 48).

diseases have in fact abated. There has been no general

Goodman’s view of the relations between God and

decline in length of life. Cases of unusual longevity

nature are complex. For all his constant emphasis on

among the ancients can be ascribed to special acts of

507

COSMIC FALL God for special purposes—such as the initial popu¬

deny that the unhappy effects of human sin must nec¬

lating of the world. Whereas Goodman lamented a

essarily “infect” the cosmic environment, and he ar¬

decline of intellectual powers, Hakewill reminds us of

gued that these effects are contained and confined

recent increases in knowledge and accomplishment, in

within the little world of man. He claimed that, in

the arts, in philosophy, science, and technology. In

general, there is no close and reliable set of corre¬

religion too Hakewill tells a story of progressive de¬

spondences between microcosm and macrocosm. The

liverance from superstition and idolatry, and from

analogy, he believed, is a seriously misleading one, and

inadequate conceptions of God: there has been progress

to use it uncritically is to ignore important qualitative

also in understanding the Christian faith.

differences among the constituents of the world.

With nonhuman nature, Hakewill again believes he

It should be clear that Hakewill did not counter

can break the pattern of decline. The earth is no less

Goodman’s metaphysics with a “scientific” and anti-

fertile than in the past—though men may sometimes

speculative theory. Hakewill, like other more scientifi¬

blunder in their cultivation. Goodman had been quick

cally-minded opponents of Cosmic Fall theories after

to point out areas where the land is becoming less

him, certainly stressed the orderliness of nature. But

hospitable to man: Hakewill alleged that the contrary

he depended very heavily upon authority, on appeals

pattern was no less prevalent—a compensatory resto¬

to the supernatural and miraculous, and on eschato¬

ration and improvement of conditions in other regions.

logical doctrine. Further, as Goodman relied on a

The eroding of barren mountains is followed by the

pervasive imagery of gloom, deterioration, and death,

appearance of a fertile alluvial plain, rich for the

so Hakewill bombarded his reader with a selective and

plough and ready for new life. Hakewill is very willing

persuasive imagery of awakening life, vigorous growth,

to acknowledge mutability; but he makes a very sharp

and fecundity. His aim was to “free the world from

distinction between mutability and decay, a distinction

old age.” The elements “by continuall generation each

essential to his whole case. In place of Goodman’s

out of other renew their parts” (p. 109). The “slumber¬

pattern of steady change-for-the-worse, Hakewill thus

ing drowzie spirit of the Grecians began againe to be

sought to establish a cyclical pattern—a pattern of

revived and awakened” (p. 217). Medicine was “borne

decay-and-restoration. Compensation or renewal can

againe” under Galen (p. 226); and so on, through topic

be counted upon to follow injurious events. Certainly,

after topic.

this pattern is not always empirically observable, but

If fecundity and growth are emphasized by Hake¬

where it is not, Hakewill has a parable to meet the

will, so equally is diversity, as a basic positive value.

case. A human observer is like someone who studies

Where his opponents tended to see diversified scenery

the “end of a peece of Arras” and “conceives perhaps

(e.g., mountain-and-plain) as a declension from an

an hand or head which hee sees to be very unartificially

original smoother, “perfect,” topography, the diversity

made.” But if he should uncover the whole, he “soone

itself is seen by Hakewill as intrinsically good. The

Andes that it carries a due and just proportion to the

debate over nature’s alleged decay was thus, in impor¬

body” (p. 96). The total pattern comes into view. So

tant measure, a contest between alternative criteria of

it is with any apparent decay in nature: if we could

aesthetic value.

assume a synoptic view, that fragmentary pattern

Among other authors of the early seventeenth cen¬

would be seen as part of a larger design, a design that

tury who expressed views analogous to Goodman’s was

involves “reciprocal compensation” (p. 28).

508

Robert Burton (Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621). “The

To consider finally the heavens: we are not entitled

virtue of all the vegetals is decayed,” he wrote: men

to infer decay from the evidence of the telescope. What

grow less in stature. Burton accepted the analogy be¬

the telescope reveals (e.g., spots on the moon) has

tween microcosm and macrocosm. He preferred nev¬

always been so, though we have not been able to see

ertheless to raise questions rather than offer systematic

it so clearly till now. The issue is not, in any case,

answers on Goodman’s lines. Some apparently dis¬

to be settled empirically. Hakewill argues that there

ordered events may in fact be orderly, though not

are no conflicting elements in the heavens that could

properly understood by us. He muses over the existence

make deterioration possible. He takes the question: Are

of marine fossils: Are these due to “Noah’s Flood, as

the heavens in fact decaying? as equivalent to: Are

Christians suppose, or is there a vicissitude of sea and

they “in a naturall course . . . capable of such a sup¬

land?”

posed decay?” (p. 67). The heavens, furthermore, are

Drummond of Hawthomden (A Cypresse Grove,

moved by angels, and for that reason cannot “erre or

1623) made liberal use of the imagery of cosmic decay.

faile in their motions.”

Inconstancy, he believed, is unlimited throughout the

To oppose Goodman effectively, Hakewill had to

whole creation, the heavens included. In all growth

COSMIC FALL the upward curve of youthful life is followed by a downward plunge to senility. Today universally the wheel is on that downward swing. The central theme is tersely expressed in George Herbert’s poem “Decay”: I see the world grows old, when as the heat Of thy great love, once spread, as in an urn Doth closet up itself, and still retreat, Cold sinne still forcing it, till it return, And calling Justice, all things bum.

And to Henry Vaughan, man “drew the curse upon the world, and Cracked/ The whole frame with his fall” (“Corruption”). John Swan’s Speculum mundi (1635) draws a sharp contrast between early times “when all things were in their full strength,” and the present day, “. . . this weak age.’

Men today are “Pygmies”—“reeds com¬

pared to the Cedars of those times.” The air is now “corrupted”; and the “fruits of the earth of a feeble nourishment” (4th ed.

[1670], p. 457). The Flood

wrought damage through the action of “the salt waters of the great deep,” and also by way of “vapours or . . . Exhalations” (p. 458). Swan is not undiscriminating. Hills and mountains, for example, are not held to be the results of Cosmic Fall, but “were created in the

Spring/

Perpetual

smil’d

on Earth

with

Vernant

Flours.” War starts among the animals; “. . . To graze the Herb all leaving,/ Devourd each other; nor stood much in awe/ Of man.” Although human morality goes on deteriorating, and Milton speaks of the “growing miseries which Adam saw/ Alreadie in part,” the changes in nonhuman nature are not described in terms of a continuous process of decay (X.650-719). In his poem

“Upon Appleton

House”

Andrew

Marvell claimed that the topography of the world today is dramatically different from its appearance at first creation. It is now a mere “heap,” “together hurled;/ All negligently overthrown,/ Gulfes, Deserts, Precipices, Stone.” A most detailed and influential account of how the world changed for the worse was Thomas Burnet’s Telluris theoria sacra (1681; Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684). Burnet set out to prove that the topography familiar to us was largely determined by the cataclysm of the Flood. Originally the earth was “smooth” and regular. ’ “It had the Beauty of Youth and blooming Nature, fresh and fruitful, and not a Wrinkle, Scar or Fracture in all its Body.” Below the crust were the “waters under the earth.” Because of mounting pres¬ sure from vaporized water, the crust became weak¬ ened, and eventually fractured. “When the appointed

beginning" (p. 37). He testifies to the “delectation and

time was come that All-wise Providence had design’d

profit of the mountains, which do thereby . . . amplifie

for the Punishment of a sinful World, the whole Fab-

the goodness of God in his works” (p. 39). On the other

rick brake, and the Frame of the Earth was torn in

hand, decay is active in the heavens: we read of dim¬

Pieces,”

ming heavenly bodies and ominous signs of their cor¬

Burnet intended his account to be at once naturalistic

ruption.

mountains

and sea-depths

being

formed.

and theologically acceptable; but the possibility of such

Not all Cosmic Fall theories were theories of a

a harmony looked less plausible as the implications of

continuing process of decay. Decay is denied, for in¬

the theory were worked out. He could not defend his

stance, in Jean F. Senault’s L’Homme criminel (Man

theory without being forced well away from any or¬

Become Guilty, or the Corruption of Nature by Sinne,

thodox interpretation of Scripture.

1650). Nature’s order was damaged at the time of man’s

If science and theory were in tension in Burnet, so

Fall: there was loss in beauty, fertility, harmony, and

also were two criteria of aesthetic value. On the one

in the proper subordination of animals to men: the sun’s

hand, the perfect earth was the smooth earth: all ir¬

light was diminished. But these were once-for-all

regularity was subsequent deformity. On the other

changes, not signs of a continuing decline or waning

hand, the ruggedness and vastness of mountains had

of nature’s powers. John Milton also rejected the lan¬

a fascination for Burnet, as his eloquence makes clear:

guage of old age and decline. The poem Naturam non

terror and mystery often assiune positive aesthetic

pati senium (1628) denied that nature’s face withers,

value, both in Burnet himself and in the many writers

“overgrown with

who learned from him—among them Edward Young

furrowing wrinkles,” her womb

grown barren. Nor does “the never-ending hunger of the years . . . harry the stars.”

and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Among authors who weakened the case for a Cosmic

In order to stress the enormity of the Fall of man,

Fall, Francis Bacon must have first mention. The de¬

in Paradise Lost, Milton did describe cosmic upheaval.

velopment of the new sciences required attitudes to,

At the instant Eve plucked the apple, “Earth felt the

and beliefs about, the relation between nature and man,

wound” (IX.782). Then the sun was ordered to molest

very different from those we have been recounting in

the earth with “cold and heat/ Scarce tollerable.”

this article so far. Bacon rejected any adulation of

Inclement seasonal change begins:

ancient authorities, and repudiated the myth of a

“Else had the

509

COSMIC FALL

510

Golden Age in the remote past. For science to be possible, men must come to understand nature, not exclusively as a background to the human drama, or as a participator in that drama, but in terms of its own laws and its own life. Hakewill drew upon Bacon in his polemic against Goodman; although Hakewill him¬ self relied heavily upon appeals to authority. John Wilkins (Discovery of a World in the Moone, 1638) suggested that the universe may well not be the nursery of human beings alone. There may even be life on other worlds, creatures on the moon perhaps; though we cannot tell of what kind. It was becoming increasingly hard to see the little world of man (as Goodman saw it) as a center from which malign in¬ fluence would be expected to pass to the rest of the cosmos. Cosmic Fall and Mutability themes appear in the writings of Sir Thomas Browne (Religio medici, 1642, written 1635; Hydriotaphia, 1658); but Browne did not consistently identify himself with the view that the world decays. In human affairs decay is acknowledged: and he can claim that “while we look for incorruption in the heavens, we finde they are but like the Earth” (Hydriotaphia, Ch. V). Yet he also affirms that the world is not in its old age or in progressive decline—though its end is not very distant (Christian Morals, III, Sec. 26). The Cambridge Platonist, Henry More, makes very evident a growing tendency to look to nature not for signs of decay but rather for evidence of divine benefi¬ cence, wisdom, and design. In his Antidote against Atheism (1652), More adduces many instances of “things as might be otherwise, and yet are far better as they are.” The structure of animals “is far more perfect then will merely serve for their bare existence” (Antidote, in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings [1662], p. 5). On the alleged inhospitability of the world, More argued that it is necessary “there should be sufficient difficulty and hardship for all sensi¬ ble and intellectual creatures to grapple and contest with” (Divine Dialogues [1668; 1743 ed.], p. 155). “The inclination of the axis of the earth is so duly proportionated for the making it as habitable as it can be, that the wit of man cannot imagine any posture better” (p. 162). The existence of wild animals is justi¬ fied on two somewhat different scores—as a “ready instrument of Divine wrath . . . and a great enricher of the history of nature, which would be defective, did it not run from one extreme to another” (p. 196). More generally, in the biological world are “infinite examples of a steddy . . . acting according to skill and design” (pp. 22f.). Any appearance of malignity in nature is due to an inadequate and partial view of a world that in reality is glorious, diversified, and full.

The vitality and progress of the sciences in the mid-seventeenth century were taken increasingly as refuting claims about a general decay. Joseph Glanvill’s Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) argued on these lines, and so did Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy (1664). “This is the Age wherein all mens Souls are in a kind of fermentation, and the spirit of Wisdom and Learning begins to mount”—to mount, not to decay (Exper. Phil., pp. 19If.). The earth is not physi¬ cally the world’s center, nor is there adequate reason to believe that man is the raison d’etre of the universe. All nature is not directed to man, agreed John Spencer (Discourse concerning Prodigies, 1663-65): nature has its own laws, unvarying from the first creation of the world. The replacing of a nature in decay by a welldesigned nature was furthered by John Ray’s The Wis¬ dom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691). Like Henry More, Ray argued that man is not the sole center of value and significance, and that the other creatures have a life of their own. As well as wise contrivance, fecundity is one main criterion of divine creative power; and because of God’s fecundity, we are entitled to infer, for instance, that “Every fixed star has [its] Chorus of planets.” Decay is expressly denied in Ray’s Miscellaneous Discourses (ca. 1692); and we are at the furthest remove, in these writings, from Goodman’s picture of a disordered and sindevastated world. Cosmic Fall speculation (Burnet’s in particular) was described as the product of poetic imagination, an “Ingenious Romance,” by John Keil in his Examination of Dr. Burnet’s Theory of the Earth (1698). Keil found no lack of mathematical and scientific muddle in Burnet. Burnet’s account of the cracking of the earth’s crust will not bear scrutiny: “The heat of the sun could never reach so far into so thick a Crust as to be great enough to raise water into Vapours (Examination . . . , pp. 175, 147ff.); nor would there have been “so much water in the Abyss as was sufficient to cover the face of the whole Earth” (p. 175). Keil concludes: . . never any Book was fuller of Errors and Mistakes in Philosophy, so none ever abounded with more beautiful Scenes and surprising Images of Nature” (pp. 175-76). A succinct and forthright denial of any anthropo¬ centrism can be found in Pierre Bayle. “If we had a proper conception of the universe, we should readily understand that the death or the birth of a Prince is such a small event—considering the nature of things as a whole—that it does not merit the concern of Heaven” (Pensees diverses ... a Voccasion de la Com¬ ete, 1683). Celestial phenomena, that is to say, are not primarily concerned with human weal or woe, nor are they to

COSMIC FALL be explained in terms of these. Bayle’s arguments are directed, not expressly against Cosmic Fall theory, but

by natural laws that make no reference at all to human affairs.

against the whole climate of thought in which these

So long as the traditional distinction remained be¬

had flourished. One way of combatting the theory was by affirming the integrity of man, and a fortiori the integrity of nature. But equally well it could be coun¬ tered, as here, by playing down the cosmic importance of man and deploring his vanity. In the eighteenth-century literature of ideas Cosmic Fall controversy has not ceased. To take only one example: Voltaire devotes some words to a criticism of Flood-theories like Burnet’s. Some writers, he says,

tween the sublunary, corruptible realm and the sup¬ posedly incorruptible heavens, advances in astronomy (such as Galileo’s observations of irregularities on the moon in 1610) could furnish new disturbing data for theories of a Cosmic Fall. But the same new science was simultaneously making untenable that distinction itself. When it had lost its authority, the Cosmic Fall theories had lost also their most dramatic demon¬ stration of decay.

have believed that “the world we inhabit is a mere

The New Science did not oust teleology: on the

ruin, and that such a fate befits guilty creatures like

contrary, it gave a quite new popularity to the Argu¬

ourselves.” But these writers are to be contrasted with

ment from Design. In the writings of the Royal Society

those more enlightened philosophers who “discern a

scientist-theologians, nature was seen as a single well-

wonderful and confusion.”

divine Mind. All apparent disorder and irregularity

necessary

order

in

that

seeming-

ordered system, mirroring the supremely intelligent

Voltaire realizes that there is enormous scope for

could in the end be brought under the unity and sim¬

divergent interpretations of the same data, depend¬

plicity of Newtonian law. There was an immense spate

ing on one’s presuppositions and predilections. “To

of writings that sought to exhibit the marvelous fitness

some, all seems disorder and vengeance; to others,

and benevolent contrivance in the relation of organism

design and goodness” (Oeuvres completes, Paris [1879],

and environment. But it is obvious how very different

22, 549).

were teleological views of this general kind from the

But straightforward error is also involved in those

teleology which figured in the Cosmic Fall theories—

theories. Burnet and his fellow spirits, for instance,

theories that tended to see all nature as a stage-

have vastly exaggerated the present irregularity of the

backcloth to the drama of man, and which proclaimed

earth’s surface:

a radical breakdown of order.

considering the proportion of the

height of mountains to the size of the earth, there is less irregularity than on the surface of an orange!

The topic of nature’s inhospitability to man, which we saw recurrent in the Cosmic Fall literature, re¬

Essential to most theories of a Cosmic Fall was the

appeared in a variety of much later writings. One

analogy between microcosm and macrocosm—between

thinks, for instance, of J. S. Mill’s essay, “Nature”

the world of man and the greater world around him.

(1874), T. H. Huxley’s lecture, “Evolution and Ethics”

Only if there were some necessary correspondence

(1893), and of writers such as Giacomo Leopardi and

between the activities of man and events in the non¬

Thomas Hardy. (For an earlier eloquent statement one

human world would it be at all plausible that man’s

may study “Philo’s” contributions in David Hume’s

Fall should have cosmic repercussions, or that the

Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, 1779.) But none

pattern of man’s growth, maturity, and senescence

of these posits a prior harmonious and hospitable state

would be doubled by the course of nature as a whole.

from which a Fall took place; and none is a defender

This is, of course, a stronger claim than the claim that

of Christian theism.

the creation of man was the culmination of God’s work.

It is interesting and instructive to bring the Cosmic

And one could hold the latter while denying the for¬

Fall controversy into relation with the tradition of the

mer. A view like Burnet’s, on the other hand, which

Great Chain of Being. Ideas central to that tradition

tried to give a physical and natural explanation of the

were invoked by both sides in the polemic. Argument

Flood and its effects, was not dependent on the anal¬

for the fallenness of nature was facilitated by the claim

ogy between microcosm and macrocosm.

that the whole of nature is a closely interconnected

Denials of the analogy were sometimes specific and

hierarchical system; it is a chain all of whose links must

direct, sometimes indirect and implicit. It could be

be intact, or else disaster ensues to the whole system.

argued, for instance, that God’s glory was more fittingly

The thought of the chain in its original perfection

manifested by his limiting the effects of sin to humanity

provides an ironical counterpoint to Goodman’s ac¬

itself and not allowing a universal decay. The analogy

count of nature as it was in his day: only a grim car¬

was indirectly challenged by any argument against

icature remains. (Compare also Sir Richard Barckley,

man’s central importance in the scheme of things, and

who specifically likened the cosmos to a disintegrating

by the increasing success of science in explaining events

chain—The Felicitie of Man, 1598.)

511

COSMIC FALL Opponents of Cosmic Fall theories, however, could appeal to other elements of the Great Chain tradition. That tradition saw the world as the work of divine

Although rarely given prominence in twentieth-

fecundity: diversity and variety were supreme values.

century theological discussions, Cosmic Fall specula¬

Better a world with all possible types of being (graded

tion is not dead. One significant statement appeared

in value from God downwards) than a world with little

in N. P. Williams’ The Ideas of the Fall and of Original

variety, even though it contained other, high forms of

Sin (1924). According to Williams, there occurred a

value. Now, one who made that sort of value-judgment

Fall in the “life-force” itself, “before the differentiation

could easily be persuaded that the present-day earth

of life into its present multiplicity of forms and the

with its varied topography was preferable to the

emergence of separate species” (p. 523). This pre-

smooth “perfection” of the imagined pre-Fall sphere.

cosmic vitiation of the whole “life-force” was respon¬

If preferable, then there is no sign that a catastrophe

sible both for human evil and for the conflictful and

occurred: the world we see could be the world as God

wasteful aspects of nonhuman nature.

made it. Again the higher the value placed upon the

In some versions responsibility is placed upon a

infinite divine fecundity, the more difficult it was to

plurality of rebellious conscious beings other than man,

believe that such a deity would permit his world to

beings whose Fall precedes man’s. C. C. J. Webb

decay or to suffer “old age.” The doctrine would argue

thought it possible that “Superhuman evil wills exist

against God’s superabundant generosity and creative

and have injuriously affected the environment of hu¬

power. The Craftsman of Plato’s Timaeus was not

manity as a whole” (Problems in the Relations of God

“grudging” in his creative work: likewise Hakewill

and Man [1911], p. 270). And in the mid-twentieth

argued, God could not be “niggardly or sparing. . . .”

century Dom Illtyd Trethowan could claim from a

The Great Chain tradition dealt with the problem

Roman Catholic standpoint, that “sin . . . started with

of evil in several familiar ways. What we call evil is

the angels.” A result of their Fall, “. . . we may sup¬

really imperfection—measured by distance from the

pose, was a disorganization of the material universe,

summit of the hierarchy of being. For a hierarchy to

over which, according to a reasonable theory, the

be possible, there must be beings at all distances from

angels had charge” (An Essay in Christian Philosophy

the summit. Again, only a synoptic view of the world

[1954], p. 128). Such theories are, of course, left with

as a whole (which is beyond our capacities) could

a serious problem over how to maintain God’s unquali¬

reveal the necessary place of apparently evil events

fied omnipotence, and his perfect goodness and fairness

in the good totality. On such a view there was no

to his creatures—in permitting this “disorganization.”

need to resort to the idea of a Cosmic Fall or a Decay

But the problem may be ultimately no more or less

of Nature, in order to account for the presence of

intractable, in this sort of theory, than in any other

evil.

Christian treatment of evil.

Although theories of a Cosmic Fall were primarily

Although the details of the Cosmic Fall controversies

and originally ventures in theology, they had implica¬

can appear remote and even grotesque to a reader

tions, as we have seen, far outside the theological field.

today, such a reader cannot fail to be reminded also

It made a great difference to a person’s aesthetic expe¬

of certain deeply troubling issues of his own time. He

rience of nature, for instance, whether he saw nature

may not speculate whether a deity has permitted the

as a colossal ruin, a rapidly running-down world, or

continuing process of decay of nature on account of

as manifesting divine splendor undiminished. The Fall

man’s disobedience; but he is aware of the problems

of nature was widely admitted to involve an aesthetic

of man’s own despoliation of his planet, the rendering

Fall. The aesthetic repercussions of the Cosmic Fall

extinct of animal species, industrial pollution of air and

were expressed not only in systematic statements like

water, open cast or strip mining, radioactive fallout.

Goodman’s and Hakewill’s, but in countless brief, fugi¬

The idiom of discussion is a predominantly secular one,

tive allusions in poetry and prose. The theory offered

but there remain striking analogies in tone and attitude,

a rich stock of imagery; imagery of barrenness, old age,

between the statement of the old anxieties and of the

the proliferation of weeds and poisons, and fostered

new.

a sense that the earth had once possessed a beauty of which only a few hints now remained. So John Donne:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“. . . the worlds beauty is decai’d, or gone” (The First

Unless otherwise identified, translations are by R. W. Hepburn. Godfrey Goodman, The Fall of Man; or the Corruption of Nature . . . (London, 1616). George Hakewill, An Apolo-

Anniversary); and Fulke Greville: “Beauty growne sick; nature corrupt and nought” (Works, II, 52). Late

512

interesting ambiguity—evoking awe and fascination as well as dread.

in the controversy, as we noted in Burnet, the aesthetic quality of a ruined world became charged with an

gie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in

COSMIC IMAGES the Government of the World (Oxford, 1627). Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone (Chicago, 1949)—a study of the six¬ teenth- and seventeenth-century debate, to which this arti¬ cle is much indebted. Marjorie Nicolson, Mountain Gloom

and Mountain Glory (Ithaca, N. Y., 1959).

Universe grows. The idea that man makes of the world, therefore, affects on all levels that power of imagina¬ tion which we have said engages his whole mental life. 2. Let us start from the highest level. We owe to A. O. Lovejoy the idea of “metaphysical pathos”; we

R. W. HEPBURN

may prefer the more general term, “the pathos of

[See also Chain of Being; Cycles; Design Argument; Evil;

abstract ideas.’’ Certain ideas of this kind, despite their

Hierarchy; Macrocosm; Primitivism; Sin and Salvation;

barren appearance, awaken in different temperaments

Sublime.]

various reactions of a specifically emotional resonance. No better definition of this phenomenon can be given here than that of Kant in his Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, 1755): “If the aspect of so perfect a totality stirs the

COSMIC IMAGES

imagination, a delight of another sort grips the intel¬ lect, all the more so when it considers how so many

i I. Astronomy may be broadly defined as any attempt at a logical explanation of celestial motions. For a long time this science was based essentially on calculation. Indeed, the distance of objects at first confined obser¬ vation within certain limits; the positive data acquired were limited to the study of positions and displace¬

magnificent and grand consequences flow from a single general law. . . .” Kant’s intellectual delight here was stimulated by a consummately abstract idea: the har¬ mony of a unified explanation. Like this aesthetic emotion, to which it is closely allied, the intellectual emotion often originates on a level where obscure stimuli, difficult to bring to light,

ments. However, this descriptive knowledge was ex¬

can yield only an incomplete explanation of their

tended naturally by scientific hypotheses. With the use

effects, so enriched are they by the development of

of Galileo’s telescope (1610) observation leaped for¬

culture and thought. However, certain cosmic hy¬

ward as did speculation about the constitution of

potheses appeal to unconscious predilections which are

heavenly bodies. But astrophysics really began only

comparatively easy to detect: such are all dreams about

with

genesis. In order to expose the origins of these imagi¬

spectrum

analysis

(1859).

Despite

constant

progress, our knowledge of astrophysics will probably

native constructions we shall look to the undisputed

remain, even in our time, indirect and limited; specu¬

gains of the main psychoanalytical schools (but without

lation and imagination will both probably continue to

referring to any of the strictly orthodox among them).

enjoy more or less an open field.

Here, however, we shall adopt a working hypothesis:

Imagination—the ability to elicit, forge, and connect

there exist families of minds, each corresponding to

a chain of images—is necessarily oriented and main¬

a type of cosmic imagination; furthermore, the manner

tained by preferences of taste and sensibility. We shall

in which a thinker conceives and imagines the imiverse

here consider imagination as a comprehensive faculty

is the best key to the character of his mind.

which involves the whole of our psychical life from

Since attempts at classifying minds according to

the most intellectualized level to the depths of the

ways of imagining the world have been made before,

unconscious. Now the field of astronomy makes a pow¬

our course has already been charted. G. Bachelard has

erful appeal to this faculty or power of imagination.

distinguished four types based on their respective

Nothing is more important to man than to have a view

modes of dreaming about the elements, and we shall

of the universe as a whole, because all life on earth

meet them on the way. However, we prefer to follow

depends on cosmic cycles and because the celestial

the ideas of A. O. Lovejoy, A. N. Whitehead, M. H.

world surrounding us seems to exert a compelling

Nicolson, and A. Koestler who have brought to light

influence on man’s destiny. The idea of a corre¬

a certain polarity and classified minds in two opposing

spondence

Microcosm

groups, which will be described below as the Parme-

strengthens the bonds between the mind of man and

nidean and the Heraclitean. The works of these four

the Universe. In the view of philosophers, the cosmos,

authors, based on the study of scientific ideas and their

between

Macrocosm

and

the whole of God’s creation, is the very archetype of

reverberation in the poetic imagination, are to be

any harmonious construction of the mind and the

joined to the conclusions of other inquirers whose

pattern of any work of art. From the time when the

starting point is different, namely, those who have been

Earth is no longer the fixed center of a closed world,

occupied with the idea of the baroque in the arts and

the proportions in the mind’s picture of the universe

literature: H. Wolfflin, E. d’Ors, and J. Rousset. There

change; but as the Earth shrinks the importance of the

would then be two types of minds, one attracted

513

COSMIC IMAGES strongly by permanence, the other by change. The first

assumes a willingness to take risks of all sorts. The

are usually called “classical,” the second either “ro¬

appeal of the Heraclitean kind of pathos to instinctive

mantic” or “baroque.” We prefer to follow Koestler’s

forces and to the Unconscious is naturally greater than

suggestion, and designate the two types of mind under

it is in the Parmenidean family of minds.

the names respectively of two precursors of cos¬ mogony: Parmenides and Heraclitus.

514

The Heraclitean type includes everything arising out of the fascination of change, and transfers to the cosmic

The Parmenidean places himself outside of time and

plane whatever is integral to the cycle of life. There

takes the side of the eternal. Underneath his choice,

are dreams of life’s genesis: the pathos of Birth and

one can detect perhaps a fear, a recoil from whatever

its original freshness, the pathos of continuous Creation

is transformed, crumbles, decays . . . ; in short, he

and its inexhaustible onward surge. There are dreams

recoils from the biological laws which include decom¬

of life’s evolution: the pathos of continuity and of the

position as an integral part. Because he fears death,

flow of the forms of life. Opposing the Parmenidean

the Parmenidean does not love life. But there is some¬

pathos of Unity is that of Variety: the taste for profusion

thing more: an aesthetic taste, a choice of an idea, and

and even disorder; the taste for the irregular, the origi¬

at times, a religious motivation.

nal, the unique which will feed the dream of the

The forms of cosmic pathos to which the follower

plurality of worlds. In opposition to the joy of feeling

of Parmenides is susceptible are those which have come

satisfied with being “in one’s place,” there is the intox¬

to terms with the Eternal, attracted by the purity and

ication of being lost in the swarming proliferation of

rigidity of an incorruptible substance.

Everything

universal Being. In order to accommodate all these

enters into a clear and stable harmony: the Pythago¬

wonderful things, the true Heraclitean requires Pleni¬

rean aesthetic of numbers and configurations, the circle

tude, a fullness within the Infinity of space, akin to

and sphere as types of perfection; and as the divine

the infinity of God and to the unlimited capacity of

type of motion a steady eternal rotation, equivalent

the soul of man.

to the unmoveable. With a greater degree of com¬

While the Parmenidean accepts hierarchy and its

plexity, the Music and Dance of the planets appear

hemmed-in gradations, the Heraclitean, on the other

in a harmony of numbers and combination of configu¬

hand, is alive to the pathos of absolute freedom; and

rations in a similarly experienced duration and in

in certain eras, he experiences the pathos of liberation,

strictly determined limits.

of transport, and of flight without thought of return.

For this aesthetic of the Eternal is an aesthetic of

He is a traveler in the mind. Lastly, the science of

the Finite: what is perfect or complete necessarily has

motion for him is not mechanics but dynamics. Cosmic

limits. It is also the aesthetic of Discontinuity and of

energies are absorbed in vital forces; he is receptive

Hierarchy: the Scale of Being is fixed with distinct

not to steady and completely smooth rotation, but

levels in the Parmenidean cosmos. Each thing has

welcomes the conflict of opposites, tension, and effort,

its place, and the thinking man enjoys the pleasure

so that his Universe tends to be polarized.

of feeling that he is in his right place. It is an aes¬

3. In practice it is not always easy to classify types

thetic of immutable Unity, and not of a process of

of imagination because there are mixed forms. Some¬

Fusion. The Parmenidean thinker is more or less suscep¬

times the same myth can be sensed in two opposite ways, e.g., in the case of the idea of Eternal Return.

tible—and susceptibility varies in degree with each

There are, after all, pathological cases: obsessions

individual—to the pathos of Unity in explanation, of

which cannot be judged as preferences, but as feelings

simplicity in basic assumptions, and of implacable rigor

of disgust and terror; there also exist minds that are

in formulated laws. There is also the pathos of ideal

perverted or paralyzed by the dominant world view

exactness in the appropriation and coherence of a

of their times. In fact, different sorts of individual

well-knit network of logical correspondences and rela¬

characters are encouraged or modified by the spirit of

tions which take in the whole of creation and leave

the times. Philosophical influences play their role in

nothing out.

the predominance of different tvpes of imagination,

As for the Heraclitean, he is susceptible to the pathos

e.g., whenever die Platonic influence is foremost, the

of Becoming, and in order that it may unfold and reveal

heavens claim more attention; on the other hand, the

itself, he needs the Unlimited. If we seek any deep

Aristotelian influence turns the mind away from too

motivation, we discover a taste for life which accepts

eager concern about outer space. Furthermore, in the

everything which life implies, including death as a

interaction of scientific research and cosmic dreams,

condition for a new birth. There is a boldness in his

the scale of science and imagination is displaced to

outlook which rejects protection and authority, and

the extent that the former makes itself independent

COSMIC IMAGES of the latter. Man’s effort to confine science to involve¬

them in its own way. We shall give only some attention

ment with his deeper wishes becomes more and more

to the second point of view.

difficult, although never discouraged. II

4. For we must take into account a phenomenon often noted but never explained: a sort of respiratory

1. We shall consider astronomy at the time when

rhythm in history, a psychological balancing-wheel,

it began to stir, that is, when the sky was discovered

which creates kinships between one epoch and another,

to be observable, when the personality of astronomers

separated by long intervals. According to E. d’Ors, a

and their relations to their cultural environment be¬

classical era is followed by a baroque era; in the cos¬

came more accessible to investigation. And we shall

mological imagination, a Parmenidean era is followed

follow this intellectual adventure only imtil the first

by a Heraclitean era. Intellectual rigor gives way to

third of the twentieth century when the Einsteinian

an insurgence of instinctive forces. There are whole¬

theory of relativity gradually brought to the uninitiated

some but harsh disciplines (like Aristotelianism) which

an unimaginable world. Individual psychology will be

are obstacles to such revolts; then the day comes when

only a secondary consideration. (Kepler’s psychology,

the barrier collapses. It was maintained by timidity;

for example, has been admirably studied by Nicolson

all of a sudden fear has disappeared, and the attractive

and Koestler.) It is rather the turn of imagination

but disturbing doctrines regain their sway and release

characterizing a whole era which will be discussed

an enormous internal flood of images. These move¬

here.

ments are difficult to explain, for social causation does

We start with the Ptolemaic cosmos, an improve¬

not help; neither do the discoveries of new worlds or

ment on Aristotle, whose reign, established in the

of Greek manuscripts. But they must be recognized

thirteenth century, was soon to crumble. Ptolemaic

and taken into account.

astronomy provided a home for the Parmenidean imagi¬

We can indicate summarily some of these intellectual

nation and satisfied both of its intellectual and aes¬

rhythms. The triumph of scholastic philosophy in the

thetic demands: a refuge secured by the closed-in

thirteenth century inaugurated a Parmenidean era in

cavernous Cosmos in which the stars, solidly attached

cosmology. The Florentine Renaissance in the fifteenth

to their spherical vaults of rigid ether, followed these

century inaugurated a Heraclitean era which was

spheres in their eternal roimds. It provided, with a

joined with the Neo-Platonism of the first centuries;

sense of security, the intellectual satisfaction of simple

the new spirit kept growing stronger making possible

mathematical relations and the aesthetic delight of a

the infinite worlds of Bruno’s cosmology and the dis¬

perfect harmony: circles and spheres, inserted within

coveries of Kepler and Galileo. The seventeenth cen¬

a single finite Sphere outside of which nothing existed

tury saw the opposition between classical French

except the world of pure minds.

thought dominated by Descartes and British thought

It is true that this perfect image was merely a

dominated by the appeal of the infinite. Newton rec¬

simplification, for the uninitiated, of a more hetero¬

onciled temporarily the two tendencies by satisfying

geneous and complicated view. There was the duality,

both. But the eighteenth century, in the main super¬

unacceptable to a rigorous mind, of the incorruptible

ficially classical, marked a return to the Renaissance,

superlunar spheres and of the impure sublunar sphere

to a taste for magic and the occult; Leibniz’ philoso¬

of the Earth subject to change, this very Earth which

phy, whose influence was enormous, strengthened the

paradoxically formed the center of the whole system,

renewed need for Plenitude, infinite Diversity, and

i.e., usurped what was, for the spontaneous imagina¬

creative profusion. And the nineteenth century, despite

tion, the place of honor. Only astrological influences

the steady progress of pure science, was to see, about

wove a network from one world to the other without

every twenty years, a return of this Leibnizian intel¬

succeeding in unifying them. There was also the in¬

lectual outlook accompanied by the flourishing growth

creasing complexity of celestial mechanics accom¬

of the same dreams; for example, the plurality of in¬

panying progress in the observation of celestial move¬

habited worlds offered itself to a plurality of existing

ments, which required the refinement of Ptolemy’s

beings in a continuous ascent towards an unattainable

system; efforts made to “save the appearances” and

Perfection.

to preserve the dogma of the Circle greatly compro¬

The relations between imagination and astronomy

mised the simple harmony of the Great Dance. The

will be studied here from two points of view: how

aim of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus (1543) was pre¬

imagination favors or obstructs the efforts of true sci¬

cisely to restore that simplicity, and to do it by return¬

entists; and how, among nonspecialists, it takes posses¬

ing to the heliocentric view of Pythagoreans like

sion of discoveries, distorts them, and supplements

Heraclides of Pontus. Copernicus, as Koestler has

515

COSMIC IMAGES shown, was Parmenidean: to solve the mathematical problem of the world, Copernicus sought a more ele¬ gant solution than Ptolemy’s and wished to repair the

Only the blind need a guide, but anyone with two eyes in his head and with a mind should use them to guide himself.

old clock by changing the arrangement of its wheels. However, around Copernicus an intellectual ferment

However, this turn of mind had asserted itself much

was taking place in which he did not seem to partici¬

earlier. Thanks to it certain events in the sky—the

pate; and, as in times of crises, the two families of

outburst of new stars (the Novae of 1572 and 1604)

minds became self-conscious and opposed each other.

and the passing of comets, introducing change in the

The return to favor of Neo-Platonism at the end of

immutable superlunar heaven—created a sensation and

the fifteenth century contributed to the unification of

excited discussions. Concerning the Copemican clock¬

the world. Marsilio Ficino explained astrological influ¬

work, the followers of Heraclitus would maintain above

ences by the Spirit of the World (Spiritus mundi), a

all that the “Sphere of the Fixed Stars” had become

kind of vital fluid which came from the stars and

useless because it no longer moved; it could dissolve

planets to impregnate our earthly abode (De vita libri

and open out on the Infinite. It was thus that, before

tres, 1489). Thinkers were thus prepared to accept the

the crucial astronomical discoveries were made, G.

unity of substance between our Earth and the other

Bruno (in his Dialogues, 1584) was able to put forth

heavenly bodies. Moreover, the Platonic cult of the

through

divine Light and of the Sun as the image of the Idea

Heraclitean cosmos: an infinite space, infinitely full,

of the Good, encouraged these thinkers to accept the

an inexhaustible, creative gushing of energy, an un¬

power

of his

imagination

a

typical

central place which Copernicus was to assign to this

limited number of suns as centers of as many infinitely

orb, and he did so with visible satisfaction. In addition,

varied planetary systems, endless degrees of Perfection,

they were prepared to accept the role of the Sim as

an equilibrium in motion, a network of transformations

the mover of the planets, a role which Kepler was later

and of perpetually new forms—all of it alive and giving

to attribute to it (Astronomia nova, 1609).

birth to life. No hesitancy in Bruno; he trampled with

Moreover, a new state of mind was created: man

the rapturous fury of an iconoclast over the ruins of

took confidence in his powers to explore the world and

the old cosmos, and the impulse of liberation and

to make use of it, affirming an idea that the world was

departure on his part was unattended by any appre¬

put at his disposal by God. The outstanding work in

hensiveness or by any looking back. From Bruno came

which this assurance was expressed is the Oration on

the avid concern for the infinite which we find in

the Dignity of Man (1436) by Pico della Mirandola.

British thought of the seventeenth century; following

For the first time Prometheus had a clear conscience.

Bruno also, intoxication with life and variety was

A new boldness inspired him: he no longer needed the

henceforth linked to the theme of the “Plurality of

safeguard of a protective shell; the rigid casement of

Worlds,” a theme which would still be alive in the

the celestial spheres seemed like a prison to him, as

work of Camille Flammarion and in novels of the

did the infallible doctrine of Aristotle. A curiosity that

twentieth century.

was both more exact and more extended encouraged

2. Bruno will be remembered for a long time as a

voyages of exploration, and in turn was developed by

bold and audacious soul, gifted with an unusually fiery

them. This curiosity extended to the celestial domain,

temperament. It was, however, by following the path

where it was believed there was nothing more to dis¬

of observation that astronomy leaped forward with

cover. Finally, a fresh love of life led to the joyous

Kepler and Galileo; the spirit of the times was all for

acceptance of everything life brought with it: genera¬

observation. It was a novel thing to devote so much

tion and decay. Alchemy contributed to this appraisal

time and effort to determining the orbit of Mars, and

of the vital cycle that was thought to be realized in

especially to do what Kepler did, not without anguish,

the alchemist’s oven (athanor); and the incorruptible

namely, to sacrifice doctrine for facts and the dogma

nature of the starry world lost its prestige. This cult

of the perfect circle for the evidence of the ellipse.

of life and this explorer’s sort of boldness found perfect

It would have been unthinkable, a half century earlier,

expression in Galileo (Dialogue on the Two Main Sys¬

to perfect, as Galileo did, a magnifying lens as a tele¬

tems of the World, 1632). In this work he proclaimed

scope directed towards unknowable celestial bodies,

the superiority of the living over the static:

and to accept the facts of a moon with mountains, a

As for me, I hold the Earth as noble and admirable because of the numerous and varied alterations, mutations, and generative changes that take place in it.

516

the

And with regard to Aristotle’s authority:

sun soiled with spots, and celestial bodies woven out of the same elements as the earth. However, the victory of the sons of Heraclitus was hotly disputed. What resisted change and the infinite was not primarily, as is commonly believed, the con-

COSMIC IMAGES servatism of the Church and the Aristotelian School¬

started with an infinitely divisible and inert matter.

men, but rather a bundle of prejudices which occupied

Perfect motion, for Descartes, would be the kind that

the framework of their inner lives. It is hard to under¬

is determined by the principle of inertia, not in a circle

stand today the moral collapse which the crumbling

but in a straight line. However, this motion is impossi¬

of the immutable Firmament signified for the sons of

ble in a Plenum in which no particle could be moved

Parmenides. After losing the physical shelter and moral

without displacing another—whence the Vortex, and

asylum of that deathless sphere towards which he could

whence by friction the formation of three kinds of

look for a refuge, man felt as exposed as a mollusk

particles. The most tenuous or subtle matter immedi¬

whose shell is broken. In the Dialogues of Bruno and

ately fills all empty spaces; this dust forms the suns

of Galileo, the Parmenidean role is played by car¬

and their planets. In all this there is no scale of values

icatured persons: “Where then is that beautiful order

or importance. So Descartes constructed, starting from

and that elegant hierarchy of Nature?” moans Bruno’s

an initial simplicity, a complicated, unstable system

critical interlocutor. Still the bewilderment and confu¬

which was as stifling for an imagination in love with

sion of Simplicius and his like are natural and worthy

life and freedom as it was repugnant for the soul in

of compassion. John Donne spoke the same language:

love with harmony.

. . all coherence gone.” Even in the soul of the

This system seemed, nonetheless, to satisfy both the

innovators opposing reactions conflict with one another

rigorousness and the imagination of Descartes. The

and block progress.

numerous images that he employed (eels twisted on

The case of Kepler is typical. This great mind

the floor of a boat, straws in the eddies of a river) bear

brought together within himself in tense opposition

witness to his bias for minute displacements which

Heraclitus and Parmenides. He started from a dream

reduce the universe to terrestrial models.

of classical harmony, from a Pythagorean worship of

And yet Descartes did serve the cosmic imagination:

numbers and shapes. He shied away from the Infinite,

he contributed greatly to the vogue of astronomy at

because nobody could locate any determinate place

the end of the seventeenth century. Since his was an

in it (De Stella nova, 1606). He needed a hierarchy,

unlimited universe, he satisfied those sensibilities that

a special nobility for the Sun and the Earth. His uni¬

hungered for the infinite. As he brought in a great

verse has a center, it remains spherical, and his pro¬

variety of vortices in perpetual combination and sepa¬

portions are based on the regular solids, perfect poly¬

ration, he drew in his wake the lovers of change and

gons, and musical harmonies (Harmonice mundi, 1619).

diversity. He revived the great dream of the plurality

Kepler made sure to integrate into this equilibrium the

of inhabited worlds. He created an impression of

discoveries of his own calculations: the elliptical orbits

intimacy among these systems which come in contact

of the planets and the inequalities of their motion.

with each other and modify one another. Finally, by

But Kepler’s geometric God is also an energetic God;

introducing a cooling off of the sun or the impact of

the fusion of these two natures was achieved at the

a comet, Descartes provided, in his lifeless cosmos, for

summit of Kepler’s genius. The sun, image of the Fa¬

death as a stage of the life-process. The end of the

ther, is the source of life and motion; from the central

world, formerly considered a supernatural event, had

astral body, there emanates a “moving force,” an “im¬

now become Nature’s threat; and it had to do with

material substance” which draws the planets, an idea

a theme of fascinating astronomical dreaming, as we

which came close to Newton’s universal force of at¬

shall see.

traction. In Kepler’s Pythagorean cosmos, we have the first model of a dynamic universe, the first hint of Energy. 3. A few years after Kepler’s discoveries, mechanism

4. However,

Newton’s

system

of

mathematical

physics (Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, 1687) was going to offer a fuller and more lasting satisfaction to both the types of minds defined above.

triumphed over vitalistic dynamism in science and in

Newton as a scientist—prudent and modest—seems to

the formulation of celestial motions.

have been at first a mathematician preoccupied with

Descartes was not an astronomer, but his cosmology

giving not an exhaustive explanation of the universe

wielded a powerful influence on thinkers in many

but a simple and elegant equation. He was also a

countries as well as in France (Principles of Philosophy,

religious man and wished to show the necessity of a

Latin ed., 1644; French, 1647; Treatise on the World,

permanent divine activity in the construction and

posthumous, 1664). With respect to imagination Des¬

working of the world-machine. He did not seem to

cartes’s case is imique. He is undoubtedly classical

have foreseen the many consequences of his theory that

in his preference for the simplicity of basic premisses

were often in conflict with one another.

and for the inflexible Rigor of fixed Laws. Space was

To the classical type of imagination Newton offered

not absolute and the Void did not exist; Descartes

certainty and balance; real space and real motion in

517

COSMIC IMAGES

518

relation to really immutable points; independent sys¬

twentieth century by the Swedish astronomer Svante

tems, each being supported by a practically fixed lumi¬

Arrhenius (The Evolution of Worlds,

nous body (a sun), around which dark bodies revolve

Newton’s system stirred the bold imagination of those

1907).

Thus

at wisely measured distances, all arranged by an infal¬

who had inherited that proud confidence in the worth

lible Governor who is ready to repair any alteration.

of man which inspired the Renaissance and burst out

Thus, he offered harmony in motion, not so different

afresh in the eighteenth century. Newton is responsible

from the Great Platonic Dance. But above all, his

for the cosmic voyages of the mind which have multi¬

system is charming for the wonderful simplicity of its

plied in poetry and fiction.

resources: once the Universe is set in motion by the

Furthermore, Newton brought about the triumph of

initial push which inertia perpetuates, a single force

a new pathos of dynamism. Universal gravitation for

suffices

attraction.”

the first time gave a universal value to the idea of mass:

From the Atomists and from Descartes, Newton in¬

the ancient and medieval celestial bodies were weight¬

herited a unified idea of matter to which a universal

less. Now, the Creator became the athlete who shapes

thereafter,

namely,

“universal

law could be applied; now the latter did not end up

and hurls these cannonballs. His poetic emblem is no

with complications and disorder, as Cartesian me¬

longer Milton’s compass but Edward Young’s scale-

chanics did, but resulted in a more satisfying harmony.

balance (Night Thoughts, 1742-44). If the classical

The limitless character of this universe no longer con¬

mind tends to reduce to unity the agent of universal

tradicts classical taste, henceforth adapted to the Infi¬

motion, the romantic mind tends to polarize the world

nite for various reasons. Philosophical reflection from

and insists on seeing a conflict between the two forces,

Bruno to Henry More made acceptable, especially to

repulsion and attraction. In contrast to Newton, the

the British, the idea that an infinite God could find

romantic mind tends to make of both repulsion and

his perfect image in an infinite creation. On their side

attraction forces which, though working in exactly

the Cartesians believed that the simplicity and rigor

opposite directions, have the same nature; just as inex¬

of laws could suffice to assure the unity of a boundless

plicable on the physical plane as they appear similar

universe. The natural bent of their minds was to em¬

to psychical forces—Love and Hate—a view which

phasize among Newton’s classical disciples the reassur¬

Empedocles had already declared.

ing stability of this system as well as its unifying char¬

According to H. Metzger, whom we follow here,

acter. In the eighteenth century theories abounded in

the paradoxical force of attraction, which mysteriously

attempts to reduce the two laws of motion to a single

acts at a distance, owed its career precisely to this

one, and Louis de Tressan (1783) already utilized for

unconscious or conscious assimilation by the imagina¬

this purpose an electric fluid as a universal agent.

tion. The idea that a thing is attracted by what it

Now the romantic mind found in the Newtonian

resembles is also part of the primitive mentality; the

world a still more complete satisfaction. The imagina¬

“active power of desire” experienced within us directly

tion in search of liberty and free flight found in

is easily transferred to the external world. By reversing

Newton’s space a propitious and exalting medium.

this transfer the romantic imagination went on to see

Among the independent systems, all related to ours and

in human love a particular case of the universal law

yet different from ours, in which we can imagine an

of Attraction. This confusion already inspired the sys¬

infinite variety of living forms, suited to delight the

tem of R. G. Boscovich (Theoria philosophia naturalis,

human visitor, large spaces open up which evoke not

1758) and prevailed as late as the works of the astrono¬

a dark and dry abyss, but a peaceful ocean welcoming

mer Camille Flammarion.

the navigator. The Void assured the elasticity of a very

The equilibrium of the two forces, an equilibrium

tenuous ether and the smoothness of celestial motion;

so dear to classical minds, was capable of being shaken

it is bathed by an omnipresent Light, and especially

by the baroque imagination in love with conflict and

by the “very subtle Spirit” which Newton inherited

in a close conspiracy with cataclysmic catastrophes.

from Henry More and which, from the depth of

Attraction and repulsion could take turns in triumph¬

Newton's thought, assured the transmission of this

ing, the first reducing the world to a fabulously dense

unexplained force of Attraction. The contemporaries

molecule, the second expanding it and scattering it

and successors of Newton went much farther and

anew, all this in accordance with a rhythm of alternat¬

imagined worlds related to one another by mysterious

ing expansion and contraction: a dynamic and spatial

life-messengers: imperishable seeds. The idea came

variant of the ancient “Eternal Return,” an idea which

from a fanciful cosmologist who had been speaking for

has had an influential career since the middle of the

Descartes, namely, B. de Maillet (Telliamed, 1748); but

eighteenth century, enjoying favor that has lasted down

Newton’s system contributed to the success of this

to our own times, thanks to the theory of the expanding

fascinating dream, which was to be revived in the

universe.

COSMIC IMAGES 5. With Newton’s system assuring the classical unity of explanation, there were also minds for whom the spatial unity of the architecture of the universe re¬ mained such a desideratum that they went ahead and worked at reconstructing the centralized universe of the ancients. The desire among these minds for a regular arrange¬

ples there was a slipping away; for the majority of minds curious about astronomy the fate of the universe was being progressively consummated in time. As we have already indicated, starting from the middle of the eighteenth century there occurred a return of the imagination in favor of a cyclical concep¬ tion of that destiny (such as Vico had just installed in

ment of the stars on the celestial vault was at the base

human history). The “Eternal Return” may be a way

of their reconstruction. If from the earth the skies

of saving Parmenidean changelessness, but such was

appear so irregular (a fact which Descartes found

not the case with the men of that centurv, for it was

shocking), it was because our vortex could not be the

the life cycle that mattered to them; we shall come

center of the world; but there should exist a center

back to this matter. Euler’s calculations (Memoire,

from which the celestial vault would appear in a per¬

1746) on the progressive recession of the orbits of the

fect harmony. The first astronomical observations on

planets provided an astronomical excuse for reviving

the displacement of the fixed stars (by E. Halley in

an obscure desire. The idea spread that the planets of

1718) favored the idea of the rotation of the whole

each system would return to the sun, and the latter

of our galaxy (perhaps around Sirius, which would be

to the “Sim of Suns,” which periodically would absorb

its great sun) and of the entire universe around a central

them, and then would disperse new worlds into space.

star. Thus appeared the system of Thomas Wright (An

Thus Unity alternated with Diversity. This obsession

Original Theory of the Universe, 1750), which despite

was exceptionally strong in the troubled time of the

its mediocre mathematical value impressed important

turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, and

thinkers like Kant. In Wright’s system there reappeared

inspired such visionaries as Delisle de Sales, Restif de

the old cult of the Circle and Sphere and the vast

la Bretonne, and Fabre d’Olivet; it was also to give

rotation of the whole starry vault, which had been at

birth to its masterpiece, the Eureka (1848) of Edgar

a standstill since Copernicus. But the original creation

Allan Poe. In this work, the cyclical idea retained only

of this visionary cosmology was the fabulous “central

a minimal relation to obscure pulsations, and assumed

body,” the only stationary body, balancing by itself the

a maximum of aesthetic satisfaction. Poe’s idea of the

Universe; the “central body” was not a sun of fire, but

cosmos as a poem inspired him with a pure intellectual

a habitable globe around which the stars appeared

joy resembling Kant’s. What constituted Poe’s delight

juxtaposed, forming a continuous vault of fire. It was

was the law of Reciprocal Adaptation in virtue of

the “First Mover,” seat of the forces which move the

which cause and effect flow into each other and be¬

universe, God’s throne, and the “Abode of Recom¬

come indiscernible. The Circle of Perfection was re¬

pense.”

established on an intellectual plane. “Beauty is truth,

The central body and the great vortex appeared

truth beauty,” and that is all there is to know. Diversity

again among serious astronomers at the end of the

was integrated with Unity in the form of the greatest

eighteenth century; and among imaginative cosmolo-

possible totality of relationships in continuous growth

gists like J. A. Lambert (Kosmologische Briefe, 1761)

imtil they are resolved. Matter was integrated with

and J. E. Bode (Anleitung zur Kenntniss des gestirnten

energy and the latter with pure Spirit. Finally the

Himmels, 1768), whose influence on the Sturm und

yearning to return to the Source was sublimated here

Drang dreamers was great.

into a mystical unity.

Nevertheless these minds shared the then dominant

7. However, the cosmogony of Eureka was late and

yearning for infinite diversity. Wright established it in

isolated—intellectually Poe was an offspring of the

both space and time: he envisaged an unlimited plenum

eighteenth century—at a time (1848) when the trium¬

of creations, each with its central body, and conceived

phant world view was not only Heraclitean but ro¬

the blessedness of the elect to consist in the contem¬

mantic, in the strict sense of the word, rather than

plation of the wonderful variety of the world. Bode

baroque. The Great Vortex, without being abandoned

insisted not only on the multiplicity of forms but also

(pure astronomers are still inclined to accept it, at least

on their perpetually changing variety in which an

in the form of a complete rotation of our whole galaxy)

inexhaustible creative power was displayed.

enjoys less favor than the flight to infinity. The circle,

6. Henceforth, the cosmos definitively entered the

and even the ellipse, yielded to the straight line or

historical scene. Newton’s system was the last to have

to curves (parabola, hyperbola) which are fascinating

placed the “Harmony of the World" outside of time,

because they are open-ended. Scientific excuses were

installed and maintained by God, and transfigured by

offered by Herschel and then by Laplace (Exposition

him on the “Last Day.” Now, among Newton’s disci¬

du systeme du monde, 1796). “Several observations,”

519

COSMIC IMAGES Laplace says, “are represented well enough by suppos¬

“canals” revived speculation on the plurality of in¬

ing the solar system being carried towards the constel¬

habited worlds, and the flood of Martian fiction began

lation of Hercules.” It was only a mere hypothesis but

to mount.

the romantic imagination took hold of it. And for the

The influence of Schopenhauer and Hindu philoso¬

intellectual delight of completely embracing the whole

phy, accompanying perhaps an era of social stagnation

cosmos, the romantic substituted the joy of feeling

and boredom, and perhaps also, the mysterious play

himself projected outward, beyond all anticipation, the

of the psychological pendulum, imposed on cosmolo-

joy of resigning and losing one’s self, relishing the

gists and poets the vision of an empty, dark, and icy

mysterious and a certain intellectual vertigo with the

space in which the imaginary voyage can only be a

savor of the “maybe.” Carried away towards what?

nauseating dizzy fall into the infinite. The hospitable

Towards regions of light, dense with stars, or towards

space of Newton gave way to an uninhabitable space.

some frightful collision? The romantic mind succumbed

And in this Sea of Darkness all that the earthly ship

to the pathos of the “Voyage Out With No Return.”

could expect thereafter without a pilot was shipwreck.

This propensity for the “voyage out,” associated with

Ill

the desire for freedom, had created the prestige of comets. (We refer to the comet of the astronomical era, when the comet was recognized as a heavenly

potheses about the birth and death of worlds; they were

body and not as a supernatural apparition.) The comets’

bound to have privileged connections with the imagi¬

vast orbits, their unpredicted appearance, and the

nation through the overtones they awaken in the

belief, due to Descartes, that they can escape from

darkest regions of human sensibility.

their own vortex and pass from one system to another—

There is hardly any question here of anything sug¬

all that had made comets the model vagabonds; but

gestive of the Parmenideans. We are about to talk of

now the whole solar system was in flight. Works, solidly

those who are friends of Change when it assumes the

documented for their time in astronomical matters,

form which is closest to our inner being; the life cycle.

yielded to this intoxication and maintained it. For

The lovers of change conceived the evolution of the

example, Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos (1845)

world as a biological process, a favorite model of

offered the reader an impressive speeded-up film of

explanation especially from the start of the eighteenth

a universe in flight: “Countless stars are carried away,

century.

like whirlwinds of dust, in opposite directions.” Jean

In particular two modes of the genesis of worlds

Reynaud’s Earth and Sky (Terre et del, 1854) also

excite the imagination, and one of them is especially

insisted on the exalted idea that navigation by the stars

explosive and violent. Out of a primordial star, father

never followed the same route twice.

of worlds, are born secondary heavenly bodies; the

However, among the romantics (with a few excep¬

planets escape from their suns, and these suns escape

tions like Byron and Leopardi) optimism carried the

from the “Sun of Suns”: by means of centrifugal force

day; fear itself can be, after all, no more than a

(Emmanuel Swedenborg, Principia rerum naturalium,

pleasurable intoxication. Faith in a Supreme Reing was

1734) or by means of a collision with a comet (G. L.

not given up. Only the “harmony of the world” was

L. de Ruffon, Theorie de la terre, 1745). For the scien¬

not divorced from time; it was in the process of be¬

tist, it seems, a rational explanation is in order, but

coming. Minds, preoccupied with socialism, like the

reverie takes hold of it and the dreamer sees a seminal

Saint-Simonian socialism of J. Reynaud, or with an

emission or childbirth instead. This fantasy slips easily

esoteric idea, like that of Flammarion (to name only

into the dream of the Great Pulsation. The Sun-father

truly informed astronomical writers), conceived the

becomes the God Saturn who devours his children;

universe as “a great fraternal society” (Reynaud) or

then, after a period of digestion, which is also a gesta¬

as a place reserved for souls allowed to rise from one

tion, he procreates them again.

world to a higher world in an indefinite progress.

520

1. We must devote particular attention to the hy¬

Opposed to this violent parturition there is a type

Quite different was the reaction to the universe in

of slow, mysterious genesis whose prestige is bound to

flight by the pessimistic type of minds that formed the

be much greater than the violent type, since the

majority of sky-watchers at the end of the nineteenth

Mother nostalgia is powerful among most men. Only

century. What occurred now was a very intense nega¬

this nostalgia can explain the capture of the imagina¬

tion of the “harmony of the world.” The source of this

tion by the idea of “Prime Matter,” which revives the

current was not astronomical; the slow and steady

old dream of primordial waters. In rationalistic cen¬

progress of science did not justify it, but on the con¬

turies while scientific astronomy makes progress, we

trary, it offered grounds for creating enthusiasm. The

shall see the triumph of cosmogonies which owe not

discovery of Neptune in 1877, the study of Mars

their development but their success among the profane

COSMIC IMAGES or semi-profane to strong unconscious motivations. The first and one of the most grandiose unitary systems of the formation and evolution of the world was Kant s Theorie des Himmels (1755), conceived six years

earlier when

he was

twenty-five.

Like

many a great mind, Kant reconciled within himself two contrary tendencies. From the Parmenidean he sought a holistic structure: “a single system ... a single general law in an eternal and perfect order.” He in¬ herited from his time a corpuscular Matter scattered to infinity in an infinite space. He reestablished an

achieved in the realm of chaos.” More than that is the way the death of worlds is seen as a phase of that eternal process, visible also in flowers and insects, a process which the philosopher has to accept, not with resignation but with a certain delight. 2. Kant’s hypothesis, like many syntheses of geniuses, remained ignored in his time. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, another hypothesis emerged which was to enjoy a resounding success through the associations it awakened in the imagination, namely, the idea of a Primordial Nebula.

effective center, but it was not a geometric one, which

The idea did not come out of Kant’s system, but from

would be absurd for an infinite universe. The first

the observations of J. F. W. Herschel on nebulae. These

condensed nucleus was to become the Central Body

remote cosmic clouds exercised a strange attraction as

of the Universe. And if it was not God’s throne, as

soon as they were discovered. Herschel had discerned

Wright would have it, at least this Sim of Suns had a most extraordinary density and power of attraction. Nevertheless, the Heraclitean tendency is dominant in the young cosmologist. The order of the universe is always in the process of being worked out. As in Laplace’s hypothesis of the origin of the solar system, rings of gaseous vapors start turning around the primi¬

in these accumulated gases that the nebular matter condensed more or less around more luminous nuclei; he had thought he recognized in them embryonic stars in various stages of development (Memoir, 1811). Lap¬ lace took up the idea, and brought it closer to home by applying it to the formation of the solar system (Systeme du monde, 1824). For Laplace, a particularly

tive star, break off, condense, and thus form systems

objective scientist, astronomy was “the solution of a

of concentric zones farther and farther away from the

large problem in mechanics.” Concerned solely with

center. As the organized universe wins over chaos, the

explaining the direction of planetary motion, he offered

earliest bom worlds grow old and disintegrate through

his account “with all the reservations that should be

the wear of motion. And so there reappears an internal

induced by everything which is not a result of observa¬

zone of unorganized matter, though this chaos cannot

tion and reasoning.” And he said this in a terse and

remain at rest more than an instant; active forces start

coldly neutral tone. Now we know that this theory met

to work on it again, and while the cosmic bubble

with an enormous success, a success whose causes are

expands to infinity, a new bubble swells at its center.

far from being purely intellectual (even among true

Whence the dynamic Universe has an equilibrium

astronomers).

guaranteed by a central mass, but it is perpetually

Thanks to Herschel, and then to Laplace, an exalted

broken and reestablished like the march or progress

idea, taken up again by many cosmologists (e.g., H.

of man. The Scale of Perfection is not a fixed one either,

Faye, and by J. H. Jeans, The Nebular Hypothesis,

but is constantly adding new gradations. In fact, the

1923), was to fascinate the imagination: the genesis of

further one goes away from the center, the more does

the universe is in continual process under our very eyes.

the finer attenuated matter show itself gently yielding

And philosopher-poets like Lamennais multiplied such

to the soul embodied in it, and the distant planets are

metaphors: for example, the worlds “appear to us at

the most perfect abode of the most perfect creations.

first like the small egg in which the liquid of life

However, that absolute Beauty which resides in the

thickens gradually” (Esquisse dune philosophie, IV

realization of all possible worlds is never completely

[1846]).

attained.

The gropings of scientific explanations take turns in

No matter how intellectual the young philosopher

thwarting or favoring the nebular reverie. Telescopes

Kant may be, he is still under the shadow of the pres¬

of increasingly greater power reveal in the nebulae no

tige of the idea of genesis. When he approaches this

longer fragments of primordial chaos waiting to give

chapter, he speaks of the “ravishing charm of the

birth to new worlds, but simple masses of stars, a far

subject.” He takes some delight in evoking a primordial

less exciting idea. Herschel was familiar with this dis¬

matter buried “in a silent night,” but possessing “in

appointment, but the strongest disappointment was

its essence” the forces which are the sources of motion

caused by the giant telescope of Lord Rosse (1845).

and life. Sleep is only apparent in this maternal obscu¬

The imagination, however, takes refuge in its origins;

rity, in the depths of which Kant saw seeds of worlds

if prime matter no longer exists as the mother of

germinating: “It is not a minor pleasure to let the

worlds, at least it has existed. The joy of seeing creation

imagination wander to the limits of the creation

in the process makes room for the nostalgia of the

521

COSMIC IMAGES vanished Mother, and especially of our nebula, the

1815, and then again in the 1880’s, the obsession of

Mother of our solar family (in the poetry of J.

universal darkness weighed on the imagination. Of

Laforgue). The resurrection, by means of spectrmn

course, there are exceptions and distinctions that should

analysis, of the gaseous nebula (1864) released, for example, in Flammarion’s Astronomie populaire (1864;

be made. The appeal of a slow death during the night may

Popular Astronomy, 1879), a delight whose sources are

manifest itself in two very distinct ways, for there are

suspicious. Henceforth, said the astronomer, we can

two nights: one, the gentle enveloping night, represents

see in these “lights which palpitate on the frontiers

to the unconscious the Mother rocking her child;

of creation” the “genesis which shows us the birth of

worlds allowed to fall asleep in her arms return to

other Universes.” It was the same emotion of young

primordial matter or to the nebulous in order to be

Kant concerning the fringes of Chaos.

born again rejuvenated. But there is another night,

The discovery of spiral nebulae (1845) threw the

which is a Void at absolute zero, and is associated in

dream again on to new paths. The observer thought

the unconscious with a devouring mother, who is far

himself the eyewitness of the great tournament thanks

from preparing for any rebirth. Now there are types

to which systems have been formed. The arms of the

of men who not only aspire to an annihilating void

spiral can only be imagined as moving, as either curling

but desire to extend it to all, to “being” itself; and

up or unrolling. Whether it is a condensation or dis¬

this suicidal desire extends to the cosmic plane. This

persion, it is still a matter of genesis. The whirlwind

disease of the imagination, encouraged by the vogue

motion (very different from circular rotation, eternally

of Schopenhauer, prevailed all over Europe during the

the same) is essentially creative. Dispersion triumphs

1880’s and 1890’s. We can also see a return of the

in the hypotheses of S. Arrhenius (Evolution of Worlds,

Parmenidean imagination in the haunting fear, then

1907) and of J. H. Jeans (The Universe Around Us,

current, of petrifaction in various forms: the com¬

1929) which have so powerfully affected the modern

placent evocation of a dried-up earth reduced to a

imagination.

skeleton of rock, caught in a shroud of ice or salt. The

3. The death of universes appeals to the imagination

vision that Galileo scoffed at, an earth turned to a

no less than their birth; but it does so in two very

desert of sand or block of jasper, became once again,

different ways. It can exert a horrifying fascination or

through disgust with life, the nostalgia of a decadent

can be joyfully accepted as a stage of the cycle of life

generation.

and condition of rebirth. There is a problem here in which hidden individual or social preferences play an important role; for from

out by its motion and by the degradation of its energy.

the day when we are to be faced with the death of

Herve Faye (Theories cosmogoniques, 1884), for in¬

universes as a physical phenomenon, several ends are

stance, offers an impressive table of these “dark and

considered possible: death by cold, after the extinction

icy globes circulating in the gloom of eternal night.’

of the sun; by slow disintegration; by die return of the

Similarly with Flammarion (La fin du monde, 1894)

planets to the Father Star in a final flare-up; by collision

and with countless works of fiction and poetry, we find

with an intruder, e.g., an extinct star. These kinds of

the same images reproduced.

death—for the earth, for the solar family, and for the

4. The death of worlds by the ordeal of fire exerts

entire universe—may be reduced to two types, which

a strange fascination on other minds. The appeal of

approximate the two old myths of the flood and the burning: a slow death at night, a sudden death by fire.

flames has retained the attention of psychoanalysts, in particular, of G. Bachelard (Psychanalyse du feu,

Now there are eras in which concern for the end

1938). Fire for the unconscious mind has two opposing

of the world is absent, others in which eschatology

functions, one destructive and the other regenerative.

becomes obsessive. And the prevailing choice is not

On the cosmic plane, the destroyer Fire, the Fire of

made for reasons that are essentially scientific, even

Anger, devours and volatilizes worlds. But beneficial

among scientists. Apparently before and during periods

and fecund Fire, like the binning woodpile of the

of crisis, the imagination finds some satisfaction in

Phoenix, restores new life to the world transfigured.

imagining a cosmic cataclysm, followed or not by a renovated world; whereas in periods of disappointment and political stagnation, the nightmare of a slow death predominates. Thus, before and during the French

522

Among cosmologists the physics of that period justi¬ fied an increasing and total torpor of the universe worn

This great flame, which is an integral part of biblical prophecies of the Doomsday, as also of the pagan myth of the “Eternal Return,” is one that cosmologists find excuses for integrating into the evolution of their uni¬

Revolution and the Empire, the expectation of a catas-

verse, not so much through their fidelity to tradition

trophe dominated the mind; on the other hand, after

as through a deep attraction to it. In England, Thomas

COSMIC IMAGES Burnet (Telluris theoria sacra, 1681), William Whiston

awakens it; and this impact gives birth either to a new

(New Theory of the Earth, 1696), and J. Ray (Three

star (nova) or to a spiral nebula; a striking sketch shows

Physico-theological Discourses, 1713) fell back on the

the two powerful jets of fire shooting out and whirling

Holy Book. The French enlighteners, like Delisle de

about. This impact theory was then popularized by

Sales or Restif de la Bretonne, who were little con¬

H. Poincare (Hypotheses cosmogoniques,

1911), by

cerned with the Bible, opted for the flames and the

Abbe Moreux, and by M. Maeterlinck (La grande

eternal return because these satisfied their insatiable

feerie, 1929).

appetite for life and enjoyment. But right in the middle

Now, starting in 1927, the theory of the expanding

of the nineteenth century, a genuine astronomer, J. P.

universe took shape and satisfied once again the need

Nichol, believing he saw the nebulae rolling up and

for a imitary pulsation of the great Totality of the

turning into globes, secretly hoped that the universe

universe. Minds repugnant to the idea of Infinity took

was marching “up to that mysterious terminating

refuge in the curvature of space. To those who fear

glory” (Architecture of the Heavens, 1838). And this

cold and darkness, the nuclear furnace of the sun has

was the message which aroused in the fantasy of Poe

appeared inexhaustible; the quasars enable one to

the final flames of his Eureka.

dream of fabulous stores of energy. Articles populariz¬

In order to spark the conflagration, as an unconscious

ing science suggest to us every day that light, the

desire urges, cosmologists at the end of the century

cosmic voyager par excellence, traveling for billions

resorted to the shock of the collision of two worlds.

of years might end up by bringing back news of the

It was a matter of a more fortuitous and more partial

Creation. Astronomy still appeals to all types of imagi¬

version of the eternal return, lacking the aesthetic rigor

nation, to lovers of the immutable as well as to lovers

of Poe’s system, but having a more immediate physical

of change, provided that they can detach themselves

verisimilitude. The comet has always been given the

from the individual destiny of man and lose themselves

role of torch-bearer; meeting it is a fearful thing, like

in that which surpasses them and all things.

meeting love, but a new life can be expected of it. The comet stands in line among the hypotheses of Flammarion concerning the end of the world, and in 1910, materialized by Halley’s comet, it was to let loose a flood of fears and hopes. At the end of the nineteenth century, the comet found rivals in the ex¬ tinct stars with which Faye, Flammarion, and their followers peopled space, and which revived the old myth of the Dark Sun. Universal death by the degradation of energy and total stabilization at absolute zero in absolute night was a tolerable vision only for the decadent family of minds of the catastrophists obsessed with the idea of the impending death of the universe. Others refused to accept it. This deathly equilibrium, before being definitely established, was to be broken constantly by some shock, transforming into heat the energy of mo¬ tion; such was the “impact theory” of James Croll (,Stellar Evolution, 1889). So it was at the beginning: the primordial spark jumped between two cold and black masses. So will it eternally be. This fascinating vision, resembling the alchemists’ dreams, the marriage of two dead stars giving birth to a glorious child, is the view adopted by Flammarion (Astronomie popu¬ late, La fin du monde). It was also the vision of a cosmologist who enjoyed great prestige in the first third

BIBLIOGRAPHY Gaston Bachelard, La formation de Vesprit scientifique (Paris, 1938); idem. La psychanalyse du feu (Paris, 1938); idem, L’air et les songes (Paris, 1943); idem. La poetique

de Vespace (Paris, 1957). E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (London, 1924; 1932). Pierre Duhem, Le systeme du monde: Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon a Copernic, 10 vols. (Paris, 1913-59). C. M. Edsman, Ignis divinus (Paris, 1949). Mircea Eliade, “Prestiges du mythe cosmogonique,” Diogenes (1958). C. G. Jung, Symbole der Wandlung (Berlin, 1950). Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers (London, 1959). A. Koyre, La gravitation universelle de Kepler a Newton (Paris, 1951); idem, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957). Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1933; New York, 1960). R. Lenoble, Mersenne ou la naissance du mecanisme (Paris, 1943); idem, “Origines de la pens6e scientifique moderne,” Histoire de la science (Paris, 1957). Helene Metzger, Attraction universelle et religion naturelle (Paris, 1938). Marjorie H. Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle (New York, 1949); idem, Science and Imagina¬ tion (New York, 1956). G. Poulet, Les metamorphoses du cercle (Paris, 1961). Helene Tuzet, Le cosmos et I magina¬ tion (Paris, 1965). A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge, 1926). HELENE L. TUZET

of the twentieth century: Svante Arrhenius (L’Evolution des mondes, 1907). He insisted on the fabulous

[See also Chain of Being; Continuity; Cosmic Voyages;

reserve of energy—therefore, of life and fecundity—

Cosmology;

which can remain in an extinct star until a collision

Infinity; Macrocosm; Metaphysical . . .; Romanticism.]

Creation;

Cycles;

Evolutionism;

Hierarchy;

523

COSMIC VOYAGES COSMIC VOYAGES

moon-voyages in 1634 was in part responsible for the

i

reached the moon not by design but by chance. Ad¬

The desire for the wings of a dove seems to have been

venturing into unknown territory beyond the Pillars

perennial among human beings. At the dawn of re¬ corded Chinese history we are told of Emperor Shun who was said to have made a successful flight and a descent in a parachute. In the Bible we hear of Elijah carried to heaven by good angels in a fiery chariot and of Christ’s being transported by the devil to the top of a mountain and to the pinnacle of a temple. Solomon is said to have given the Queen of Sheba a vessel by means of which she could traverse the air. Greek leg¬ end told of flying gods like Hermes and flying mortals like Daedalus and Icarus. In Platonic myths we hear of the rise and fall of human souls through the heavenly spheres and of the winged chariots in the Phaedrus. In the myth of Er we are sometimes on the earth, sometimes above it, looking down. Both classical and later literatures use the device of dream or ecstasy in which the soul leaves the body to travel through space. Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis set the pattern for much later dream literature: Scipio in his dream gains a conception of the universe and of the comparative insignificance of earth. Plutarch s De facie in orbe lunare is a cosmic voyage in its implications, concerned with the moon’s size, shape, distance, light, and nature. In medieval literature such themes were picked up and others added as man in trance sought other worlds and

of Hercules, mariners found their ship caught up by a whirlwind. After eight days they reached the moon. Lucian’s description of the moon-world, and his voyage among the stars to “cloud-cuckoo land” were the merest fantasy with no attempt at even semi-scientific verisimilitude. The voyage of Lucian’s other moonvoyager, Icaromenippus, has more similarities with the cosmic voyage as it developed. Menippus reached the moon by design, not chance. He fastened to his body two wings, one of a vulture, the other of an eagle, and after a period of practice took off from the summit of Olympus. His first stop was at the moon, from which he looked back upon an earth, which—according to the Ptolemaic astronomy—remained stationary below him. But not content merely with a moon-voyage, he went on through the stars to heaven, which he reached in a few days. He was returned to earth by Hermes, and his wings stripped away to prevent further audac¬ ity. But, while the Lucianic voyages helped establish the literary pattern, the great stimulation of the cosmic voyage to imagination was a major scientific discovery. In March, 1610, appeared the Sidereus Nuncius (“the starry messenger,” or message) of Galileo Galilei, Pro¬ fessor of Mathematics at the University of Padua. In this little pamphlet, Galileo set down excitedly the

Dante descended into Hell, then made his journey to

chief discoveries he had made by his fifth telescope,

Paradise. In England the prehistory of aviation begins with

tial observation. For centuries it had been taken for

a monarch, as in China, this one better known to us for his son than for himself. Bladud, legendary tenth king of Britain, was said to have made a flight on feathered wings, which resulted in his death and the accession of his son, King Lear. Into his death was read a lesson on overweening ambition expressed by one of many poets who wrote of him: As from a Towre he sought to scale the Sky, He brake his necke, because he soar d too high. During the Renaissance that myriad-minded man, Leonardo da Vinci, discovered the principle of the glider and invented a parachute, in addition to his many important studies of birds wings and the princi¬ ples underlying their flight. But it remained for the seventeenth century to make basic discoveries that presaged modern aviation and to develop the cosmic

524

popularity of the theme. In the True History men

the first one developed to a power sufficient for celes¬ granted by Greek, Roman, and medieval men that all the stars were known and numbered and that they were arranged in the familiar constellations, by a knowledge of which men were able to travel by land or sea. Through his “optick tube”—it was not called “tele¬ scope” for some time—Galileo had observed

stars

innumerable,” and had solved the mystery of the Milky Way, which proved to be the radiance of myriads of stars never seen by the naked eye. What seemed to Galileo his major discovery was one that began with an incorrect surmise: he thought at first (1609) that he had discovered four new planets but not much later (Jan. 7, 1610) he found them to be satellites of Jupiter. This discussion will be limited, however, to his obser¬ vations on the moon, which proved very different from the smooth lustrous body shining by its own light which man observes at night. “The Moon,

Galileo reported,

voyage into the important type of literature it le-

“certainly does not possess a smooth and polished

mained for many years. There were two main causes for the emergence of

face of the Earth itself, is 'everywhere full of vast

the cosmic voyage as a form of art, one literary, one scientific. The first English translation of Lucian’s

surface, but one rough and uneven, and just like the protuberances, deep chasms, and sinuosities.

This was

not entirely new, since Plutarch and other classical

COSMIC VOYAGES philosophers had presupposed such a possibility, but

author looked eagerly at illustrations to see what flag

their theories were based at most on logic. Galileo had

floated over the new territory. Let us turn now to some

seen the sinuosities of the moon with his own eyes

of the various imaginary journeys.

through his tube. So too he could prove, not merely conjecture, that the moon has no light of its own but shines by reflected light. Most of all, Galileo had dis¬ covered moon-spots, as later he discovered sunspots.

II It seems ironic that one of the last voyages to employ the supernatural as a device for journeying to the moon

To some extent, the spots implied change or decay from

should have been the work of a great scientist. Johann

perfection, which up to the time of Galileo had been

Kepler’s Somnium was published posthumously in

limited to the sublunary world. The “great or ancient

1634, though it had been written much earlier. Kepler

spots” on the moon man had always known, drawing

had hesitated to publish it during his lifetime since it

them into various patterns of “the man in the moon.”

contained veiled references to his mother who had been

But Galileo had discovered “other spots smaller in size,

condemned as a witch and would have been executed

but so thickly scattered that they sprinkle the whole

had it not been for the heroic efforts of her son. As

surface of the moon.” From his observation Galileo

the title indicates, the work was in the form of a dream.

concluded that the surface of the moon, like that of

The author says that while he had been reading Bohe¬

earth, is varied by mountains and valleys, and, indeed,

mian legends, he fell into deep sleep, and dreamed that

for a time he thought that some spots might indicate

he was reading a book on magic. The story concerns

the presence of lunar seas and lakes. Galileo later

a young man named Duracotus, whose mother was a

denied the existence of water on the moon, though

“wise woman,” who supported herself and her son by

other astronomers continued for some years to pre¬

selling mariners little bags of herbs containing charms.

suppose its existence, making it possible for writers of

Upon one occasion when her young son pried too

moon-voyages to imagine moon-worlds with atmos¬

curiously into the bags, Fioxhilda, a woman of un¬

phere in which their travellers could breathe as on

governable temper, gave the boy to a sea-captain in

earth.

place of one of the bags. Duracotus—a disguise for

The new moon-maps that began to appear during

Kepler himself—made a voyage to Denmark with the

the seventeenth century were engrossing to the imagi¬

captain. He was set ashore to deliver letters to the

nation. For a time England used one nomenclature,

astronomer Tycho Brahe, with whom Kepler actually

the Continent another, both imaginative and poetic.

spent several years at the observatory, Uraniborg,

They agreed in giving names to the lunar mountains.

learning the principles of astronomy. After five years

There might indeed be, as Fontenelle suggested in his

Duracotus returned home to find that his mother had

Plurality of Worlds (Entretiens sur la pluralite des

long repented her rashness. He discovered that she

mondes, 1686) “a promontory of dreams, a sea of tears,

knew as much astronomy as he did, since she was in

or a sea of nectar.” Others suggested that there might

league with the “daemons of Levania,” spirits of the

be a desert uninhabitable because of heat or an ocean

moon, whom she could call and with whom an occa¬

unknown to sons of Adam. So human imagination

sional mortal travelled to the moon.

played with the idea of a new world in the moon, as

From the daemon who appeared at his mother’s

one hardy mariner after another set off on voyages of

summons, Duracotus learned that mortals who trav¬

discovery.

elled to the moon were given a “dozing draught,” so

Among the themes that entered imagination in the

that they remembered few details of the journey.

seventeenth century was the possibility that man might

Although this still sounds like magic, it was not. Kepler

colonize the moon. The original suggestion was Ger¬

was pondering the effect of gravity upon a human body

man, made by no less a person than Johann Kepler,

as it left the “attractive power” of the earth, consider¬

according to John Wilkins’ Discourse concerning a New

ing too the probable effects of rarefied air upon human

World (1638). England, with true British imperialism,

physique. He considered “weightlessness,” since once

inevitably adopted the idea, as Wilkins shows. Indeed,

the daemons had lifted their passenger above the “at¬

one of the reasons for the advance in aeronautics during

tractive power,” they needed no extra force but carried

the seventeenth century was the belief that, once the

the passenger without effort.

principle of space-flight was discovered, the first nation

Fantasy and realism are mingled in the first part of

to raise its flag on the moon—and later on the planets—

the Somnium, but when Duracotus reaches the moon,

would possess new colonies. As time went on, the moon

fantasy falls away and we find ourselves on the moon

was to be claimed by Spanish, Italian, and Dutch

Galileo had seen through his tube. Seasons, length of

romancers, as well as by German and British. In the

days and nights, climates are different from anything

various travels that make up Voyages to the Moon, this

known on earth. The moon-world is divided into two

525

COSMIC VOYAGES zones, “Subvolva” and “Privolva.” In Privolva, “night

have fallen (II. 570-628), they find “fierce extremes,

is 15 or 16 days long, and dreadful with uninterrupted

extremes by change more fierce,” heat and cold, tow¬

shadow.” No sun or moon shines there. All is intensely

ering mountains and caverns vaster than any known

cold. In Subvolva the situation is less drastic, thanks

on earth, “a frozen continent . . . beat with perpetual

to “Volva,” the moon, yet the cold is more extreme,

storms ... a gulf profound as that Serbonian bog.”

the heat more intense than anything experienced by

Here the “parching air Bums frore, and cold performs

man in this world. The terrain is much like that of

the effect of fire”:

earth, but the mountains tower to heights higher than Everest, the declivities are more profound than any terrestrial Grand Canyon. In one detail Kepler departed from Galileo, since he continued to posit atmosphere on the moon, and believed that certain forms of life were possible. There is nothing corresponding to human life in Subvolva, but there are plants and animals. Some appear at dawn, only to die at night. Others seem to bask in the hot sun, then disappear into the caverns as evening comes. The animals are of serpentine nature, like great lizards or antediluvian monsters. The Somnium is a dream with nightmare touches, the scale of everything on exaggerated size, the lunar terrain forbidding and the prehistoric creatures monstrous. The influence of the Somnium continued well down through the nineteenth century. There are reminis¬ cences of its moon-world in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865), although Verne’s is a dead world; if ever life existed there, it was in the remote past, and is now extinct. The last specific reminiscences

Through many a dark and dreary vale They passed, and many a region dolorous, O’er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp, Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death . . . Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things.

In the meantime Satan, travelling in a different direction, has met Sin and Death, and arrives at the gates of Hell (II. 629-1055; III. 540-742). When Sin opens the doors, even the intrepid Satan is momentarily appalled, but after his first amazement his sail-broad vans He spreads for flight, and, in the surging smoke Uplifted spurns the ground; thence many a league. As in a cloudy chair ascending rides Audacious.

Satan was surprised to find that the intervening air was “neither sea, nor good dry land,” requiring him to make

to be found are in H. G. Wells, The First Men in the

use of every part of his body for navigation:

Moon (1900). Wells’s lunar landscape reflects Kepler’s,

O’er bog or steep, through strait, rough,

particularly in its mingling of beauty and terror. Wells posits the existence of vegetation growing to incredible heights in a single lunar day. When Bedford and Cavor land, they think the moon lifeless, but as they watch at dawn, what had seemed to be dry sticks and pebbles

dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way, And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.

prove to be seeds, showing lines of yellowish green.

Satan’s is a cosmic rather than a moon-voyage. Unlike

The arid land becomes a combination of desert and

many mariners he did not pause at the moon. He takes

jungle, with plants and flowers growing in lush profu¬ sion. When the lunar explorers are seized and thrown into subterranean caverns, Cavor’s mind goes back to his reading. “Yes,” he said, “Kepler with his subvolvani was right after all.” The idea of a supernatural voyage continued for some time, particularly among Roman Catholic writers such as Athanasius Kircher (1601-80) an important Jesuit traveller, Egyptologist, and scientist, whose Itinerarum exstaticum is in the tradition. The hero Theodidactus set off with an angel guide upon a cosmic tom as part of his education, an idea which Voltaire perhaps picked up in his Micromegas. But the only supernatural voyage that can vie with Kepler’s in liter¬ ary merit is Milton’s in Paradise Lost, in which there

526

His flight precipitant, and winds with ease Through the pure marble air his oblique way Amongst innumerable stars, that shone Stars distant, but nigh-hand seemed other worlds.

He proceeds to the sun, where an astronomer observing him would have taken him for another of Galileo's sunspots. The world of the sun Satan found “beyond expression bright.” Within the light he saw “a glorious angel stand,” the archangel Uriel. From him Satan learns about the new world which God has created for man, to take the place of the fallen angels. The unsuspecting Uriel gives him directions, and Satan completes his cosmic journey by landing in

are Keplerian reminiscences. When a group of fallen

This little world, in bigness like a star

angels set out to chart the new world into which they

Of smallest magnitude, close by the moon.

COSMIC VOYAGES hi

Gonsales trained to come at his signal, then to carry

The idea of human flight by means of birds is proba¬

provisions from one end of the island to the other.

bly as old as the supernatural voyage. Far earlier than

Secretly hoping it would be possible to train them to

Britain’s King Bladud, the tale is found in Babylonian

carry a man, Domingo made a harness for six or seven

literature, in the Zend Avesta (ca. 650

tradi¬

birds, by which they carried a lamb, “whose happinesse

tionally ascribed to Zoroaster, and in other Persian

I much envied, that he should be the first living crea¬

literature. In Greek literature Zeus performed the

ture” to fly. “Surprized with a great longing to cause

abduction of Ganymede by transforming himself into

myselfe to be carried in the like sort,” harnessing still

b.c.),

an eagle. The winged horse, Pegasus, who carried

more gansas, and providing himself with a little swing¬

Bellerophon when he aspired to heaven, is a variant.

ing perch, he took off from the top of a rock on one

Some forms of the tale entered Europe through “Alex¬

side of a river, and flew to another rock on the opposite

ander legends,” ascribing every kind of feat to Alex¬

side, where his pride knew no bounds: “I hold it farre

ander the Great. There is a passing memory of the

more honour to have been the first flying man, than

legend of Ganymede in Dante’s Purgatorio and a more

to bee another Neptune that first adventured to sayle

extended one in Chaucer’s House of Fame. During the

upon the Sea.” Three months later, when he was res¬

Renaissance these combined with travellers’ tales, par¬

cued, Gonsales took with him his birds and his “En¬

ticularly of Marco Polo, of gigantic rocs capable of

gine,” and when the ship was set upon by the British,

scooping up a horse and rider or an elephant. If these

he was saved by flying his machine to land. From his

birds could be trained, they might transport a man to

landing-place Domingo set out upon an adventure he

the heavens. Even in modern times, after ascents of

had never expected. He had, of course, no way of

the balloon in 1783-84, attempts were made to harness

knowing that this was the season for hibernation among

to the lighter-than-air machine eagles to direct the

gansas, and certainly could never have guessed that

steering.

they hibernate in the moon. He thought his birds were

The theme of the possibility of a flight to the moon

making off for the peak of Teneriffe, but higher and

by harnessing birds was picked up by Francis Godwin

higher they went until Gonsales realized that they were

in a romance published (posthumously) in 1638, The

ascending to the moon.

Man in the Moone: or A Discourse of a Voyage thither

With Kepler, but even more clearly with Godwin,

by Domingo Gonsales, which had a greater vogue than

there was established what became a literary conven¬

Kepler’s Somnium, since between 1638 and 1768, at

tion in moon-voyages, the description of “weightless¬

least twenty-five editions were published in four Euro¬

ness.” The gansas had been laboring against Domingo’s

pean languages. The first English edition seems to have

weight, but “At length, O incredible thing, they forbare

been so small that the British Museum copy is unique.

moving any thing at all! and yet remained unmoveable,

Because of the hero’s name the tale was often thought

. . . the Lines slacked; neither I, nor the Engine moved

to be Spanish. Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe, both

at all, but abode still, as having no manner of weight.”

of whom borrowed from it, thought the romance

Weariness, hunger, and thirst proved all to have been

French. How early it was written we cannot tell:

effects of gravity upon the human body. Domingo was

Antony a Wood thought it was in Godwin’s student

not sure in which direction his gansas flew, “whether

days at Christ Church, 1578-84, but if so it was materi¬

it were upwards, downwards, or sidelong, all was one.”

ally revised after Galileo’s description of the moon in

Looking down at the earth he had left, Domingo as¬

1610. With the Somnium, which had appeared four

sured himself of the truth of the Copernican hypothesis,

years earlier, The Man in the Moone established the

that it turned upon its axis: “I will not go so farre as

literary genre of the moon-voyage in France and Eng¬

Copernicus that maketh the Sunne the Center of the

land. This romance of a castaway voyager foreshadowed

Earth, and immoveable. . . . Only this I say, allow the

Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, both of which

to be his due) and these absurdities are quite taken

drew from it. The hero, Domingo Gonsales, a Spaniard

away.” Domingo’s voyage to the moon took “Eleven

Earth his motion (which these eyes of mine can testifie

of noble parentage, had had many adventures before

or Twelve daies.” He estimated it as 50,000 miles, a

we meet him in the Isle of St. Hellens, where he had

distance only one-quarter of that computed by the best

been put ashore with a Negro servant, Diego, a “man

mathematicians of the day who used a figure much

Friday.” In the island they remained for a year, en¬

closer to our own. Godwin was probably following

countering no difficulty in nourishing themselves by

Kepler but was not aware that Kepler spoke in German

semi-tropical fruit, vegetables grown in the rich soil,

terms, not in miles as the British computed them.

fish, and birds. Among the last, the most interesting

Godwin paid some attention to the attractive power

to Domingo were “gansas” or wild swans, which

of the moon but not as much as to that of the earth

527

COSMIC VOYAGES when he left it. On the twelfth day the gansas set

to realize that Wilkins had written in a pre-Newtonian

Domingo down on a high lunar hill. Godwin’s moon-

era, and that Newton in the Principia had sometimes

world is by no means scientific as was Kepler’s. It is

disproved and sometimes advanced principles of as¬

largely fantasy. He does posit the idea that lunar ob¬

tronomy and physics which Wilkins had accepted

jects are on a vaster scale than terrestrial, “10, 20, I

without question.

thinke I may say 30 times more than ours.” There are

Most charming among the many engrossing passages

anticipations here of Swift’s Brobdingnag, and indeed

in the Discourse are those on diet and sleep. How is

of the land of the Houyhnhnms, since Domingo found

the traveller to rest and refresh himself on his long

himself regarded by the lunarians just as Gulliver was

journey? “I believe he shall scarce find any lodging

considered a Yahoo. But in spite of its charm and

by the way,” Wilkins wrote, slily picking up a passage

occasional moments of scientific imagination, Godwin’s

from Ben Jonson’s News from the New World (1621):

moon-world remains largely fantasy. Gonsales spent a

“No inns to entertain passengers, nor any castles in

year on the moon, and then, his gansas beginning to

the air (unless they be enchanted ones) to receive poor

droop for lack of their annual terrestrial visitation, he

pilgrims or errant knights.” As scientist Wilkins replied

returned to earth, landing in China where he was to

to his own questions by a passage in which he discussed

continue his adventures.

“weightlessness.” When the body is beyond the effect

The literary influence of Godwin’s tale was great.

of gravity, it will feel neither hunger nor weariness.

Wilkins and Fontenelle introduced it to some readers.

But his far-ranging imagination played also with old

Cyrano de Bergerac, Defoe, and Swift borrowed from

legends of the effect of the music of the spheres, of

it. Samuel Butler and William Congreve wrote passing

the "aethereal air” that nourishes plants growing with¬

satire upon it. A minor poet, Samuel Wesley, produced

out soil, of men who are said to have lived on the smell

a variant upon it in his “Pindaric Poem on Three

of a rose, of papists like Ignatius who fasted indefi¬

Skipps of a Louse.” Thomas D’Urfey made it into a

nitely. It was this Wilkins who replied to Margaret

comic opera in his Wonders of the Sun, and there were

Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle—herself a fancifier—

many reminiscences in Elkanah Settle’s The World in

when she inquired of his cosmic voyagers: “But where,

the Moon and in Aphra Behn’s Emperor of the Moon.

Sir, shall they be lodged, since you confess there are

The tale continued to be read and referred to well into

no inns on the way?” Dr. Wilkins is said to have

the nineteenth century by Jules Verne, Edgar Allan

replied: “Surely, Madam, you who have written so

Poe, and others.

many romances will not refuse my mariners rest and

The influence of Kepler and Godwin merged with

528

refreshment—in one of your castles in the air.”

that of another to establish the conventions of the

Only one full-length moon-voyage by the use of birds

moon-voyage as it remained for a hundred years. In

remains from the eighteenth century, A Voyage to

the same year as Godwin’s voyage appeared the first

Cacklogallinia (1727), by a pseudonymous Captain

edition of John Wilkins’ A Discourse Concerning A

Samuel Brunt, who has never been identified. It has

New World (1638). Wilkins was no mere romancer, but

been attributed to both Defoe and Swift, neither of

a member of the Philosophical Society of Oxford, and

which attributions is valid. It is an obvious imitation

one of the founders of the Royal Society. His Discourse

of Gulliver’s Travels, though it differs in one important

is one of the important works in seventeenth-century

way, since this is basically an economic satire, pro¬

popular science, its science accurate, the general style

voked by the inflation and crash of the South Sea

so readable that its technicalities can be readily under¬

Bubble. As Gulliver found a land peopled by horses,

stood by a layman. For his first edition Wilkins had

Brunt found one inhabited by birds. It was also a land

used the Somnium; in the second he used also Godwin’s

peopled by “projectors” who were proposing to the

romance that had appeared in the same year as his

government every conceivable scheme for investment.

own. Kepler, Godwin, Wilkins—these were the three

Project after project, tax after tax were suggested, one

pioneers in the cosmic voyage.

more fantastic than another. Brunt proposed one that

In careful detail Wilkins discussed various problems

caught both popular and governmental fancy: that an

that Kepler and Godwin had raised, paying particular

expedition be sent to the moon to extract gold from

attention to the distance of the moon from earth, which

the mountains in the moon and bring it back to

he estimated at 179,712 miles; the nature and extent

Cacklogallinia. The journey to the moon was no prob¬

of gravity; the nature of air and intervening space; and

lem to birds who were natural fliers. For Brunt, who

“weightlessness.” In many ways he advanced science,

was to head the convoy, they designed a palanquin,

though in some ways he retarded it for writers of

powered by lower-class birds. Upon tire announcement

cosmic voyages, since some eighteenth-century authors

of the project, wild speculation broke out in Cacklo¬

were so impressed by the Discourse that they failed

gallinia. Men mortgaged their houses, women offered

COSMIC VOYAGES their children for adoption in order to invest in shares. On his journey, Brunt sent back bird-messengers daily to His Majesty with reports of progress. Good reports precipitated an orgy of speculation; the lack of a report sent the market to a new low. A certain amount of science enters the Voyage to Cacklogallinia, though it looks back to Wilkins rather

fowl. He advocated that, to the efforts of arms, be added “the labours of the feet,” so that a man might swim through the air as now through water. The An¬ cients and the Moderns disputed learnedly about the possibility of human flight. Joseph Glanvill wrote in his Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661): “It may be some Ages hence, a voyage to the Southern unknown Tracts,

than to Newton. There is talk of the thinness of the

yea possibly to the Moon, will not be more strange

air on the top of a mountain from which the caravan

than one to America. To them that come after us, it

set out and the use of “humected sponges”—reminis¬

may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into

cent of Kepler—which Brunt used for himself as the

remotest Regions, as now a pair of Boots to ride a Journey.”

palanquin took off through the orb of gravity. Brunt pays some attention to “weightlessness” which he ex¬

Whatever the facts about Danti’s flight, there is no

periences once he passes the orb of gravity of the earth.

question that in 1679 a French smith named Besnier

In less than an hour the bird-leader comes to the

achieved a flight across a river by means of four folding

palanquin to inform Brunt that he may now get out,

wings transversely fastened to both arms and legs.

since for a quarter-hour the bird-pilots have not felt

Attested by the Journal des Sgavans, the contrivance

his weight. Dismounting, Brunt found himself in a new

was also described in the Philosophical Transactions

world in which weight did not exist, where he could

of the Royal Society, before whose members Robert

“with as much Ease lift a Palanquin of Provisions . . .

Hooke and Christopher Wren reported their own find¬

as I could on our Globe raise a Feather.”

ings in experiments about flying.

The world on Brunt’s moon is more like a comic

So engrossing had the theme of human flight become

opera than like Kepler’s science, and will not be dis¬

that eighteenth-century literature is Rill of it. Addison

cussed here. The lunarians proved idealists with no

and Steele had their fun with it in the Guardian for

material desires. They are an Englishman’s reply to

July 20, 1713: “The philosophers of King Charles’ reign

an England that had gone mad over gambling, for¬

were busy in finding out the art of flying. . . . The

getting eternal values. The lunarians did not want an

humour so prevailed among the virtuosos of this reign,

Englishman in the moon, and Captain Brunt returned

that they were actually making parties to go up to

to earth, carefully steering his way to arrive in Jamaica

the moon together.” In the same number was a pseu¬

rather than in England, and sending back his pilot to

donymous letter from “Daedalus,” who asserted that

face in Cacklogallinia the bursting of the South Sea

he had made considerable progress in the art of flying.

Bubble.

“I flutter about my room two or three hours in a IV

The supernatural voyage and flight by harnessing

morning, and when my wings are on, can go above an hundred yards at a hop, step, and jump.” On the next holiday he intends to sit astride the dragon on

birds remained literary conventions. During the seven¬

Bow steeple, from whence he will fly over Fleet Street

teenth and eighteenth centuries, men devoted their

to the maypole in the Strand. He plans to take out

efforts to the possibility of inventing artificial wings

a patent for making wings so that none can make them

or a flying-machine for man. There is a tale—accepted

but himself. He looks forward to a glorious future for

by some historians, denied by others—that in the six¬

England in a new era of air-travel, far superior to an

teenth century Giovanni Battista Danti attempted to

age of coaches or packet-boats. But the editor, “Mr.

fly over the lake of Trasimeno by the use of artificial

Ironside,” was outraged and declared that he would

wings, one of which failed him so that he fell on a

use every effort to discourage flying in his time. Con¬

roof and was seriously injured. The influence of Leo¬

sider what would happen to morals: “You should have

nardo’s careful study of birds’ wings and their principle

a couple of lovers make a midnight assignation upon

of flight lay behind many of the early attempts at

the top of the monument, and see the cupola of St.

artificial wings. Wings of potential fliers expanded until

Paul’s covered with both sexes like the outside of a

those of early ones came to seem absurd: e.g., Daedalus

pigeon-house.” “Mr. Ironside” seems to have taken his

and Icarus or King Bladud attempting to soar on tiny

point of departure from a Latin poem In artem volandi

wings attached only to the shoulders. Wings expanded

written by Francis Harding in 1692, in which the poet

and imagination expanded with them. Wilkins in vari¬

shook his head over the enthusiasm for human flight.

ous editions of his works pointed out the fallacy of

What will happen in this insane new world? Will

thinking of wings as attached only to the arms, by

laborers fly to and from their work on artificial wings?

means of which men could fly no further than domestic

Let the husband beware and strengthen the bolts on

529

COSMIC VOYAGES his doors and windows, lest a new type of adulterer

in which he found that the natives spoke French. The

enter his wife’s chamber on wings.

earth had turned on its axis and Cyrano was in French

Among the many vanities of human wishes, Samuel

530

Canada.

Johnson satirized man’s desire for wings in his “Disser¬

Not caring for either the accent or the manners of

tation on the Art of Flying,” the sixth chapter of Ras-

the French Canadians, Cyrano occupied himself by

selas (1759). On a visit Rasselas found a mechani¬

building a flying-ship for the lunar voyage he still

cally-minded man busily engaged in making artificial

intended to make. He has told us little about the vessel

wings on the model of a bat’s. With them he planned

except that it had wings and some form of spring. His

to fly, possibly even into space. To him the advantages

first attempt was a failure. “I placed myself within and

of human flight would far offset its dangers. An ironic

from the Top of a Rock, threw myself in the Air. But

belief it proved to be since, when the wings were made,

because I had not taken my measures aright, I fell with

the mechanic took off—as usual from a hill. “He waved

a sosh into the Valley below. Bruised as I was, however,

his pinions awhile to gather air, then leaped from his

I returned to my Chamber, and with Beef-Marrow I

stand, and in an instant dropped into the lake. His

anointed my Body, so I was all over mortified from

wings, which were of no use in the air, sustained him

Head to Foot.” Returning to his flying-chariot, Cyrano

in the water, and the prince drew him to land, half

discovered a group of soldiers fastening to it bunches

dead with terror and vexation.”

of firecrackers. His invention in peril, Cyrano plucked

But although artificial wings produced much satire

the match a soldier was lighting out of his hand “and

and some attractive romances, they were not to take

in great Rage threw myself into my Machine . . . but

human beings on cosmic voyages. For that man needed

I came too late, for hardly were both my Feet within,

what John Wilkins called a “flying-chariot.” “I do

then whip, away went I up in a Cloud.” Unwittingly

seriously and upon good ground” he wrote in his Dis¬

Cyrano became the first imaginary voyager to reach

covery of a New World, “affirm it possible to make

the moon by rocket. It seems strange that, familiar as

a flying-chariot; in which a man may sit, and give such

our seventeenth-century ancestors were with gun¬

motion unto it, as shall convey him through the air.

powder and firecrackers, no other writer employed

And this perhaps might be made large enough to carry

such form of propulsion before the eighteenth century,

divers men at the same time, together with food for

and then only two of them, neither well known in our

their viaticum, and commodities for traffic.”

time. On flew Cyrano, his machine rising higher and

Such a simple device as the kite—still a novelty in

higher, until “all the combustible Matter being spent,”

England in the early seventeenth century—played

speed slackened and the chariot fell beneath him,

some part in the history of aviation, as did the elaborate

descending to earth. Cyrano himself continued to

fireworks of the period. But it is better not to pause

mount. He had an explanation: his body was covered

over them but to turn to the brilliant satires on aviation

with the marrow he had daubed on his bruises; “I knew

of Cyrano de Bergerac, two of which involve flying-

that the Moon being then in the Wain, and that it being

chariots. Cyrano was a satirist but his satire on this

usual for her in that Quarter, to suck up the Marrow

particular theme was as good as it was because—friend

of Animals; she drank up that wherewith I was

of Pierre Gassendi and Jacques Rohault—he was well

anointed.” Three-quarters of the way to the moon,

versed in contemporary science. His Histoire comique

Cyrano found himself making a somersault dive, a

des estats et empires de la lune (1656) included his first

device in which various later writers followed him.

two attempts to reach the moon. The first is quite

Peering between his legs, he looked back on earth

different from anything we have seen in the pseudo¬

which “appeared to me like a large Holland-Cheese

scientific literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth

gilded.” On he went until he felt the attractive power

centuries. The sun, said Cyrano, sucks up dew. If he

of the moon’s gravity, which caused him to make a

fastened about himself vials of dew, would he not be

crash landing in a tree. He recovered consciousness to

sucked up? In contemporary illustrations we see him

find himself in a new Garden of Eden, “my face plais-

with his dew-vials, “a great many Glasses full of Dew,

tered with an Apple.”

tied fast about me; upon which the Sun so violently

Cyrano’s moon-world was no such telescopic one as

darted his Rays, that the Heat, which attracted them,

Kepler’s. There are reminiscences of Godwin so that

as it does the thickest Clouds, carried me up so high,

it is no surprise to meet Domingo Gonsales, who be¬

that at length I found myself above the middle Region

came Cyrano’s lunar guide. In other ways Cyrano’s

of the Air.” So strong was the power of attraction and

lunar adventures are very different from Domingo’s,

so rapidly did he rise that Cyrano began to break some

with reminiscences of literature from Lucian to Rab¬

vials in an effort to adjust gravity and attraction. In

elais and many fantastic adventures. The most amus¬

the space of a few hours he made a landing in a world

ing section is that in which the “philosophers” attempt

COSMIC VOYAGES to discover by logic and science whether Cyrano is or is not a human being, leading to Cyrano’s trial for heresy, because he, who on earth had attempted to prove to his friends that the moon is inhabited, now tries to persuade the lunarians that their moon is our world and inhabited. Curiously enough, although the lunarians are scien¬ tifically in advance of terrestrial beings and know much

Cyrano had designed a sail for his ship but found it useless because of the force of wind he encountered as he ascended into the air. He had intended the ma¬ chine for his escape from prison, planning, at least temporarily, to land elsewhere in France. But his vessel rose rapidly to the “Middle Region” of the air, then continued on a journey that was to take Cyrano to the sun. Again, he did not experience hunger or thirst.

about the possibilities of flight, they do not send Cyrano

This, he suggested, might have been due to the lack

home in a flying chariot. Momentarily we return to

of gravity, but also to the bottle of spirits he always

the theme of the supernatural voyage, when an attend¬

carried, which seems to have been a perennial fountain

ant spirit rose like a whirlwind, and holding Cyrano

of youth since it lasted him all the way. In four months

in his arms, descended with him to earth in a day and

he had approached only the outermost of “those little

a half. As on his arrival in the moon, so on his return

Earths that wheel about the Sun.” It was nearly two

to earth Cyrano suffered a brief period of unconscious¬

years before he reached the sim. So human imagination

ness, so that he had no clear memory of his arrival

was expanding with the expansion of space. He experi¬

or the departure of his guide. But his memories of the

enced neither weariness nor tedium as he studied the

moon-world remained vivid and he spent so much of

“new astronomy” at first hand. This time he bypassed

his time trying to prove to his terrestrial friends that

the moon, his mind set upon the planets, other worlds,

there were men in the moon that he was imprisoned

often with little worlds of satellites around them. “And

for heresy.

therefore Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and

There had been talk among the lunarians of their

Saturn, have been constrained to whirligig it, and move

inventing a flying-machine that would carry three or

both at once around the Sun.” As on his voyage to

four of them. Perhaps it was from them that Cyrano

the moon, he ultimately lost his flying-chariot, which

picked up details for the elaborate flying-chariot in

fell to earth, to be used by another mariner. According

which he made his voyage to the sun. This machine

to his own cryptic statement, he continued his journey

operated in part upon the principle of a burning glass:

by “an ardour of Will.” At the end of twenty-two

It was a large, very light Box, that shut tight and close:

months he arrived at the sun, so luminous that it looked

of about six Foot high, and three Foot Square. This Box had a hole in it below; and over the Cover, which had

“like flakes of burning snow.” There we may leave this most amusing of cosmic voyagers, as he, like Milton’s

likewise a hole in it, I placed a Vessel of Christal, bored

Satan, perhaps became another sunspot to be observed

through in the same manner, made in a Globular Figure,

by a terrestrial astronomer.

but very large, the Orifice whereof joyn’d exactly to and was enchaced, in the hole I had made in the head. The Vessel was purposely made with many Angles, and in form of an Icosaedron, to the end that every Facet being convex and concave, my Boul might produce the effect of a Burning-Glass ... It shut so close, that a grain of Air could not enter it, except by the two openings; and I had placed a little very light Board within for my self to sit upon.

As Cyrano rose from the tower of his prison, he further explained the machine: When the Sun breaking out from under the Clouds, began to shine upon my Machine, that transparent Icosaedron, which through its Facets received the Treasures of the Sun, diffused by it’s Orifice the light of them into my Cell . . . I foresaw very well, that the Vacuity that would happen in the Icosaedron, by reason of the Sun-beams, united by the concave Glasses, would, to fill up the space, attract a great abundance of Air, whereby my Box would be carried up; and that proportionable as I mounted, the mshing wind

In that extraordinary age of the seventeenth century, truth often proved as strange as fiction.

Kepler,

Godwin, Cyrano, and other mariners stimulated imagi¬ nation with their tales of moon-flight, and Wilkins appealed to both literary and scientific imagination. But the most important stimulus to the history of aeronautics in the century occurred in 1670 when Francesco Lana, an Italian scientist, published his Prodromo, with a description and design of an airship. Although the vessel never flew, it marked a milestone in the history of aviation. Its principle is so simple that even a layman can readily understand it. It consisted of “a wooden car . . . fashioned like a boat,” a canoeshaped vessel. It had a sail and oars. Lana was aware of all the scientific work that had been done on the nature of air, which had been shown to be much like water. “It has weight owing to the vapours and hala¬ tions which ascend from the earth and seas to a height of many miles and surround the whole of our ter¬

that should force it through the Hole, could not rise to the

raqueous globe.” As a boat is rowed against the resist¬

roof, but that furiously penetrating the Machine, it must

ance of water, Lana’s boat was to be rowed against

needs force it upon high.

the resistance of air. The novelty of the airship lay

531

COSMIC VOYAGES not in the sail and oars but in four evacuated globes

dwelling-houses, and brought to earth for the landing of

attached to the boat by four ropes of equal length.

its crew? And in the case of ships that sail the seas, by

The principle of the vacuum is familiar to laymen. By Lana’s time philosophers no longer feared the honor vacui, the idea accepted for centuries that Nature abhors a vacuum. The Torricellian barometer of 1643, Otto van Guericke’s air-pump of 1650, and the work of Francesco de Mendoza, Gaspar Schott, and Robert

the level of their sails, their cordage would be cut, or even without descending so low iron weights could be hurled to wreck the ships and kill their crews, or they could be set on fire by fireballs and bombs; not ships alone, but houses, fortresses, and cities could be thus destroyed.

Boyle on specific gravity had put an end to the long

So the seventeenth-century inventor anticipated the

“horror.” Lana acknowledged his debt to all of these.

possible destruction of civilization through the inven¬

It soon became clear to the continental and British

tion of flying-machines.

scientists who discussed the invention that, while a

The literary influence of Lana’s Prodromo was conti¬

toy-model might fly, if the evacuated globes of glass,

nental rather than English. With the addition of two

cooper, or any other thin metal Lana presupposed were

more evacuated balls, mariners made a cosmic voyage

increased to a size necessary to carry a man or men,

to the moon and all the planets on the appearance

they would be crushed under atmospheric pressure.

in 1744 of Eberhard Kindermann’s Die Geschwinde

Before man could hope to fly in an airship of this kind

Reise auf dem Lufft-schiff nach der obem Welt (“Fast

still more scientific work must be done on the nature

trip on an airship to the heavens”). In 1768 Lana’s

of air. Robert Boyle, England’s most important worker

little ship was used by his countryman,

in the field, was close to making the discovery made

Zamagna, in a Latin epic poem, Navis aeria, which

later by Henry Cavendish (1731-1810), when he noted

described the first air-flight around the world. A variant

the effect of heat in causing the expansion of air. “It

of the canoe was proposed in Portugal by Bartholomeu

was experiments such as this,” says J. E. Hodgson in

Lourenco de Gusmao, the “Passarola.

his history of aeronautics, “that led to the assertion,

large part by two amber balls operated by magnetism,

met with after the invention of the balloon, that Boyle’s

a small model is said to have flown in a royal hall on

Bernard

Motivated in

investigation on the weight of the air gave birth to

August 8, 1709. Lana’s and Gusmao’s ships were com¬

the new discoveries of Montgolfier.” Mr. Hodgson

bined in a long poem, Gli Occhi di Gesu (“The Eyes

suggests, too, how close John Clayton was to a solution

of Jesus” [1707]), in which Pier Jacopo Martello de¬

of the problem when in 1739 he experimented with

scribed a voyage to the Earthly Paradise under the

“spirit of coal,” filling thick bladders with gas. But the

guidance of the prophet Elijah. When we have a close

discovery of hydrogen remained for Cavendish in 1766.

view, as the airship draws near the world in the moon,

The ascent of the first balloon of the Brothers Joseph

we discover that the crew consists of one hundred apes,

and Etienne Montgolfier in 1783 resulted in disaster,

some dressed in blue, some in yellow, harnessed to each

but later that year a safe ascent was made near the

other and the boat by collars of thin metal.

Palace of Versailles. The balloon carried as passengers

Flying-machines in the imaginary voyage in England

a cock, a hen, and a descendant of the “happy lamb”

grew larger and larger until they were capable of

of Domingo Gonsales.

532

allowing the aerial ship to descend from the high air to

carrying groups of men, in one case a whole race of

From the history of aviation, let us return momen¬

people. Two such voyages were written by well-known

tarily to Francesco Lana and his little canoe. Scientifi¬

men of letters, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. Defoe

cally Lana was an optimist who believed that he had

played with the theme of flight several times in 1705.

solved the problem of human flight. But as a son of

His full-length use was in the Consolidator, in which

the Church, he did not believe that man would ever

Chinese men and lunarians plied between the earth

fly. “Other difficulties I do not see that could prevail

and the moon. The work is strongly marked by the

against this invention, save one only, which to me seems

chinoiserie which was becoming important in English

the greatest of them all, and that is that God would

art,

never surely alloiv such a machine to be successful.”

Defoe seems to shrug his shoulders at such tyros as

landscape gardening,

and interior decoration.

The “benefit and use of man”—so Francis Bacon,

Wilkins, Godwin, and other “moderns.” He went back

one of the founders of science, optimistically anticipated

to the idea of China’s excelling in aviation early in

its future. Francesco Lana was a scientist, but it was

recorded history. In the libraries in China, he de¬

he who most clearly pointed out the dangers of avia¬

clares, there was a record of a man bom in the

tion—then in its seminal stage—in his Prodromo:

moon, who had made a journey to earth to instruct

Where is the man who can fail to see that no city would

the Chinese in the lore of lunar regions. Defoe’s chief

be proof against surprise, as the ship could at any time be

attention was upon an elaborate flying-machine, “a

steered over its squares, or even over the courtyards of

Consolidator”:

COSMIC VOYAGES ... a certain Engine, in the shape of a Chariot, on the backs

it lie the several minerals in their usual order.” Ada¬

of two vast Bodies with extended Wings, which spread about

mant was considered in Swift’s time the most magnetic

fifty yards in breadth, composed of Feathers so nicely put together, that no air could pass; and as the Bodies were made of lunar Earth, which would bear the Fire, the Cavi¬ ties were filled with an ambient Flame, which fed on a certain Spirit, deposited in proper quantity to last out the Voyage; and this Fire so ordered as to move about such springs and wheels as kept the wings in most exact and

of minerals, but it alone was not responsible for the path taken by the Flying Island. In the Astronomer’s Cave in the heart of the island Gulliver was shown “a loadstone of prodigious size,” by means of which the island is made to rise and fall and move from one place to another. One of its sides has attractive, the

regular Motion, always ascendant.

other repulsive power.

Defoe’s source for his happy anticipation of the gaso¬

Swift’s loadstone was a magnification of William Gil¬

line age, in his “ambient Flame” which was fed by

bert’s famous dipping needle. As in the voyages to

It has been shown (Mohler and Nicolson, 1937) that

a fluid deposited in sufficient quantity to last a journey,

Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Swift readily changed feet

is unknown. Actually he himself was less interested in

to inches and inches to feet to keep his proportions

that than in the “513 Feathers” of which his vessel

exact. Swift had visited the Royal Society where he

was composed and which he describes in more detail,

would have seen the Gilbertian terrella described in

five hundred and twelve of them matched in length

the catalogue as “an orbicular loadstone, about four

and breadth,

inches and l/2 *n Diameter.” From it he created his

one

a

“presiding

or

superintendent

Feather, to guide, regulate, and pilot the whole Body

“little world” of the Flying Island, “four and one half

. . . the rudder of the whole Machine,” which probably

miles in diameter.” If in Swift’s “its diameter 7837

symbolized the Prime Minister, Lords, and Commons

yards,” we substitute “miles” for “yards” we find the

who flew the ship of state.

approximate diameter of our own earth. It is not mere

In the room of this great flying Chariot, which plied

coincidence that the measurements agree so closely

between China and the moon, Defoe placed a Euro¬

with those given by Isaac Newton and G. D. Cassini.

pean who remembered little of his journey, since Defoe

The slight variation of nine miles between Swift’s figure

went back to the use of anaesthesia suggested by

and Newton’s may easily be explained: Swift slyly split

Kepler, a “dozing Draught” administered to the trav¬

the difference between Newton's average and least

eller. He found the lunar world far in advance of ours,

diameters of the world, which happens to work out

particularly in the invention of various kinds of glasses,

at exactly 7837 miles.

including telescopes more powerful than our modern

The Flying Island of Laputa did not fly free or wild:

ones at Mount Wilson or Palomar. Through these the

it was governed by the mainland of Balnibarbi below,

lunarians could clearly see the towers and cities of

as is shown by the map which charts its course. William

China. Defoe’s lunar voyager summarizes his conver¬

Gilbert (1540-1603) had pointed out that islands are

sation with a man in the moon by saying: “He was

more magnetic than seas. So the little world rose or

the Man in the Moon to me, and I was the Man in

fell, governed by the magnetic attraction of Balnibarbi.

the Moon to him; he wrote down what I said, and made

The great world and the lesser obeyed natural law.

a Book of it, and call’d it. News from the World in

Each was dependent on the other. By physical laws

the Moon.”

man knows but cannot control, microcosm and macro¬

In his third adventure, The Voyage to Laputa, Gulli¬

cosm are combined: the terrella is “prodigious” as a

ver looked up to see “a vast opaque body between

magnet, yet it is a small power to govern the Flying

me and the sun,” moving forward toward the island.

Island. The island in turn is a macrocosm when com¬

Through his pocket-perspective the captain was able

pared to the loadstone, but it is a microcosm in com¬

to see numbers of people, though only later did he

parison with Balnibarbi, which it governs in the sense

know what they were doing. When the body de¬

that it had the power to shut out light and rain from

scended, Gulliver went aboard to find this a little

the country below. In this voyage, unlike the others

world, inhabited by a whole race of men. Here is one

of Gulliver’s Travels the author has considered less

of the most brilliant variations upon the theme of the

relationships between men than relationships in the

cosmic voyage. For many years Mahomet had gone

Newtonian universe: planets, stars, or feathers observe

to the mountain; now the moon-world descends to

the universal laws of motion and attraction. Swift’s

Mahomet. When Gulliver had opportunity to study the

Flying Island is unique in the history of pseudoscience,

little world more carefully he found it “exactly circu¬

since it carried a whole nation of men, and unique in

lar, its diameter 7837 yards or about four miles and

its plausibility of motivation by the principle of terres¬

a half,” its bottom a plate of adamant “shooting up

trial magnetism.

to the height of about two hundred yards. . . . Above

Swift was in part satirizing the engrossment of his

533

COSMIC VOYAGES contemporaries in the idea of a world in the moon.

destroy the cosmic voyage, which continued on its way

Voltaire’s Micromegas (1752) is the most satirical of all

in the nineteenth century in the hands of Jules Verne,

cosmic voyages. As the moon-world came to Gulliver

Edgar Allan Poe, and others. One of the most brilliant

in the Voyage to Laputa, so an inhabitant of Sirius came

variations upon it was by the Danish dramatist and

to earth in Micromegas. The circumference of Sirius,

historian Ludwig Holberg (1684-1754) who wrote—

we learn, is 21,600,000 times that of earth; the hero

originally in Latin—a world-classic. There are at least

of the tale is 120,000 royal feet in height. Micromegas

fifty-nine editions in eleven languages of the adventures

had been well educated. He was an expert in telescopic

of Nils Klim in Iter subterraneum novam (1741; pub¬

and microscopic observations, on the basis of which

lished in English as Niels Klim’s Subterranean Journey,

he had written a book which was suspected of being

1742), his voyage to the center of the earth. As cosmic-

heretical, since it suggested the existence of inhabitants

mariners had taken off from earth to discover a new

in other worlds than his. For this he was exiled from

world in the moon. Nils, in his enthusiasm to explore

Sirius for eight hundred years, a short period in his

a Danish mountain, fell into its crater to find a new

long life. He decided to spend the time in making a

world in the center of the earth. Down the crater he

tour of the imiverse to discover at firsthand how much

fell until the attraction of the world drew him into

of his hypothesis of life in other worlds would prove

its orbit, and Nils became for a time a satellite. He

true. Micromegas needed neither wings nor a flying char¬

his pocket but finding it nauseous—like other cosmic-

iot. Over the Milky Way he merely stepped from one

mariners he experienced neither hunger nor thirst—he

star to another. He was disappointed in the planet

threw it away to find that, as he described a circle

Saturn which seemed little more than an anthill to him.

around the earth, the biscuit described a circle around

He remained there, however, for some time, having

him. Around they went, Nils and biscuit, to learn later

struck up an acquaintance with the Secretary of the

that astronomers in the world in the center of the earth

Grand Academy. As the result of a protracted argu¬

had plotted the period of a new satellite, or—some

ment on the question of life in other planets, the Sirian

said, since Nils’ mountain-rope had fallen with him—a

and Saturnian undertook a cosmic journey. They

comet with a tail. Although we have English transla¬

leaped upon the ring of Saturn, then from one of its

tions of the Iter subterraneum novam, we have none

moons to another. A comet passed, by means of which

worthy of the Latin or Danish original. But we do have

they arrived at the satellites of Jupiter from which they

the finest imitation—Alice in Wonderland.

could readily jump to the planet itself. On they went

During the twentieth century the moon-voyage

to Mars, which they found so insignificant that after

turned from the “imaginary voyage” to settle into a

a glance or two they passed by.

pattern of “science fiction.” The literary career of

Why they bothered to stop at Earth—a most inferior

H. G. Wells suggests something of a change that was

planet—is not entirely clear, but stop they did, and

occurring. His twentieth-century novels were to deal

gave themselves exercise circumambulating the globe

largely with social reform; during the last decade of

which for a time they believed not only insignificant

the nineteenth, he wrote such pseudo-scientific works

but unpopulated, since the Sirian and the Saturnian

as The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897),

could not see the insignificant earth-dwellers. Except

The War of the Worlds (1898). In 1938 Orson Welles

for an accident they would not have known of our

startled and terrified large segments of the United

existence. Micromegas happened to break his diamond

States by a radio version of that last-named work of

necklace and amused himself by using one diamond

H. G. Wells, and was widely believed to be reporting

as a microscope. On the ocean—a mere puddle to the

an invasion from Mars. It is doubtful that any radio

travellers—they saw what seemed an aquatic animal,

or television version of such a pseudo-scientific work

which proved to be a ship filled with scientists who

could today startle many Americans, who seem to have

were returning from an exploration of one of the poles.

drawn in scientific fiction with their mothers’ milk. But

Reluctantly the travellers were forced to conclude that

even the most blase readers and auditors remained

the tiny creatures had sense and also reason, when one

close to their radios and televisions during the period

of them computed the measurements of the Sirian by

which came to its climax on July 21, 1969, when the

the method used on earth for computing the height

first two human beings landed on the moon.

of lunar mountains. They further astounded the visitors by informing them of the existence in their world of animalcules as invisible to them as they had been to

534

occupied himself with a round biscuit he took from

their temporary guests. Voltaire laughed, but even his laughter could not

BIBLIOGRAPHY Samuel Brunt, (pseud.) A Voyage to Cacklogallinia: With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of that Country (London, 1727). Cyrano de Bergerac, His-

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 toire comique des Estats et Empires de la lune (Paris, 1656; seven other editions 1659-87). Quotations in this article are largely from The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Worlds of the Moon and Sun . . . newly Englished by A. Lovell (London, 1687). Daniel Defoe, The Consoli¬ dator: or Memoirs and Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (London, 1705). Bernard de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes (Paris, 1686). Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius (Venetiis, 1610). Quotations in the text are from The Sidereal Messenger of Galileo Galilei, ed. E. S. Carlos (London, 1880). Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone: or a Discourse of a Voyage thither. By Domingo Gonsales, The Speedy Messenger (London, 1638). Francis Harding, “In artem volandi. Musarum anglicanarum ana¬ lecta, (Oxford, 1692), I, 77-81. Ludwig Holberg, Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum novam telluris theoriam (Hafniae and Lipsiae, 1741). Quotations are from A Journey to the World Underground. By Nicholaus Klimnius (London, 1742). Samuel Johnson, The Prince of Abissinia. A Tale in Two Volumes (London, 1759), the first edition of Rasselas. See also J. E. Hodgson, Doctor Johnson on Ballooning and Flight (London, 1925). Johann Kepler, Joh. Keppleri mathematici olim imperatorii somnium seu opus posthumus de astronomia lunari (Francofurti, 1634). Also in Joannis Kepleri astronomi opera omnia, Vol. VIII (Francofurti, 1858-71). Eberhard Christian Kindermann, Die Geschwinde Reise auf dem Lufft-Schiff nach der obern Welt (1744). Athanasius Kircher, Itinerarium exstaticum quo mundi opificium, id est, coelestis expansi (Romae, 1656). Francesco Lana, Prodromo overo saggio di alcune inventioni nuove premesso all’ Arte Maestra (Brescia, 1670). There is a modem translation in Aeronautical Classics, No. 4 (London, 1910). John Milton, Paradise I^ost (1667, 1674), The Poems of John Milton, ed. J. H. Hanford (New York, 1953). Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver (London, 1726). Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Le Micromegas de M. De Voltaire (London, 1752). Quotations are from the English translation in The Works of Voltaire, with notes by Tobias Smollett, Vol. III. (London, 1901). John Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet (London, 1638). The work is often called The Discovery of a New World, the title of the first book. Bernard Zamagna, Navis aeria et elegiarum monobiblos (Roma, 1768); republished with an English translation by Mary B. McElwain, Smith College Classical Studies, No. 12 (Northampton, 1939). Secondary Bibliography. J. E. Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain from the Earliest Times to the iMtter Half of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1924). Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science (London, 1963). Francis Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England (Baltimore, 1937). Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (New York, 1958). T. S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, 1957). Marjorie Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (New York, 1948; reprint, 1960); idem, Science and Imagination (Ithaca, 1956); idem, The Breaking of the Circle (New York, 1960); idem, with Nora M. Mohler, “Swift’s ‘Flying Island’ in the ‘Voyage to Laputa,’ ” Annals of Science, 2 (October, 1937), 405-30.

H. H. Rhys, ed., Seventeenth Century Science and the Arts (Princeton, 1961). Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1926; Cambridge, 1938; many reprints). MARJORIE HOPE NICOLSON [See also Cosmic Images; Cosmology; Macrocosm and Microcosm; Myth; Newton . . .; Optics.]

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 Cosmology as the endeavor to understand the motions

of the heavenly bodies may well have begun with our earliest ancestors. In their unceasing efforts to feed on other animals, and to avoid being themselves devoured in turn, they found it advantageous to familiarize themselves with the habits of their prey and predators. It was important to know whether these beasts prowled by day and slept at night, or the reverse. Such knowl¬ edge could spell the difference between life and death for man the hunter and hunted. For this as well as other reasons he was sternly driven to note carefully the alternating cycle of day and night, thereby acquir¬ ing his first rudimentary concept of the cosmos in action. The light that came down to him at night fluctuated far more conspicuously than daylight. As a cosmic body, the moon shone bright and full on certain nights, whereas on others it disappeared altogether. Between these extremes it displayed a recurring sequence of changing visible shapes, expanding steadily from the thin sliver of its crescent to the full roundness of its circular disk, and then shrinking in the opposite order until it vanished again from view. This striking series of lunar phases, constituting the synodic month, offered man another basic cosmological idea. It also provided him with a second unit of time as the measurement of cosmic motion. For longer periods the month was more useful than the day, which was reckoned as the interval between successive risings, culminations, or settings of the sun, moon, or stars. The dark portion of such a day was discovered to vary in length. The months during which the nights lasted longer manifestly coincided with a distin¬ guishable aspect in the life cycle of edible plants and animals. Comprehension of the revolving seasons, with their alternating warmth and cpld, rainfall and drought, storms and fair weather, further aided mankind to survive and multiply by enlarging the food supply derived from agriculture, fishing, and hunting. The

535

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 accompanying variations in the observed motions of

logical thought, the whole universe originated from

the sun, mounting higher or lower at noon, shining a

water. In a valley inundated each year by the Nile’s

longer or shorter time on any given day, rising and

flood, the dry land, which emerged when the waters

setting at shifting points on the horizon, provided the

subsided, naturally suggested itself as a model for the

basis for the year as man’s third chronological tool in

imaginary creation of the cosmos. In the beginning

carving out for himself a more secure place in the

there was nothing but the unlit abyss (Nun). From this

cosmos. The calendar in any of its divergent forms

primeval slime arose a hill, on which the god Atum

was an invaluable achievement of early cosmological

created himself first, and then by masturbation gener¬

thought.

ated a pair of divinities. From their sexual union the

After being invisible for a considerable number of

of this account were developed in religious centers

and then fade out of sight in the more brilliant light

which claimed primacy for the local divinity. No single

of the sun. But every morning following this heliacal

hierarchical organization was strong enough to sup¬

rising, the star emerged from the eastern horizon ear¬

press competing dogmas. Later recensions tended to

lier and earlier. The heliacal rising of Sirius, the most

subsume their predecessors by absorbing the essential

conspicuous star in Egypt, coincided with the start of

content and reducing it to a secondary level. As a result

the Nile’s annual flood, on which the livelihood of that

of these conflicting sacerdotal ambitions, Egypt devel¬

mainly agricultural country depended. Ten days after

oped divergent and mutually inconsistent cosmogonical

Sirius’ heliacal rising, another notable star repeated its

schemes rather than a single unified view.

performance. Three such individual stars, or readily

In Mesopotamia the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

recognizable clusters of stars, were grouped together

continually poured their fresh water into the salty brine

to form a month, and three sets of four months each

of the Persian Gulf. Accordingly, for the local popula¬

constituted a fairly close approximation to a solar year.

tion the cosmos commenced with a mingling of salt

But the principal purpose of these thirty-six decans,

water and sweet. These two forms of prime matter

or ten-day groups of stars, was to tell the time by night.

were personified as male and female divinities, from

Such a diagonally arranged star clock was employed

whose union sprang the rest of creation.

For daylight a shadow clock

Similarly, in the Hebrew Bible the primordial sub¬

was used a millennium later. The end of the shadow

stance was water, from which the dry land earth ap¬

cast by an upright cross-piece on a horizontal beam

peared. However, before the sun was created as the

in Egypt by 2500

536

rest of creation proceeded stage by stage. Rival versions

nights, a bright star would reappear briefly at dawn

b.c.

reached a series of parallel marks indicating the prin¬

greater light to rule the day, and the moon as the lesser

cipal divisions of the day.

light to rule the night, the light of day was divided

The sun, like the other cosmic bodies and forces of

from the darkness of night. This unexplained pre-solar

nature, was manifestly much stronger than man’s lim¬

light, contrasted with utter darkness, recalls the dualis-

ited physique. Accordingly his unlimited mind imag¬

tic Iranian conception of brilliant light and endless

ined various divinities, which he proceeded to identify

darkness as the twin primeval forces locked in ceaseless

with the natural powers. Thus the ancient Egyptians

combat for control of the cosmos.

sometimes conceived the sky to be the goddess Nut,

An alternative, and presumably earlier, cosmogony

whose enormously elongated body overarched the

in the Hebrew Scriptures is affected by a physio-

earth, the tips of her fingers touching the horizon at

graphical environment vastly different from irriga-

one side while her toes rested on the other side. Addi¬

tional agriculture, with its abundant and sometimes

tional support was provided in the middle of her torso

excessive supply of water. Here the primordial sub¬

by the upstretched arms of her father Shu, the god

stance is dry earth without vegetation, since there had

of the air, who stood erect with both his feet firmly

not yet been any rain. The cosmic features mentioned

planted on the solid earth. As the sun or god Re set,

in this creation story do not include the sea, nor are

he was swallowed by Nut’s mouth in the west. During

fish listed among tire species brought to fife.

the night he was hidden while passing through Nut’s

The Hebrews rejected astronomical observations,

body, from whose feet he reemerged the following

systematically performed by “measurers of the heavens

morning in the east. Alternatively, he traveled in his

and stargazers who prognosticate each month what

night barge through the dark underworld (Dwat),

shall be.” The exiled prophet’s scornful condemnation

which extended beneath the earth. The next morning,

of predictions based on recorded first visibilities of the

on terminating his subterranean sojourn, he transferred

lunar crescent was aimed at his Babylonian conquerors.

to his day boat.

They had long watched the western sky after sunset

Re’s night barge could traverse Dwat because a great

to note precisely when the moon emerged from com¬

river ran through the netherworld. In Egyptian cosmo¬

plete obscuration during its conjunction with the sun,

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 the phase in which it rose and set nearly simultaneously with the sun. When the new lunar crescent was seen thereafter for the first time, the month was officially declared to have begun. The number of whole days between any two such successive occurrences was either twenty-nine or thirty. To know in advance which of these two lengths of the lunation was applicable to any particular synodic month was the chief purpose of the Babylonian observers. In their unremitting efforts to solve this baffling problem they found it necessary to “measure the heavens,” that is, to deter¬

lowest point on their nightly curves. These were com¬ plete circles, centered at various distances around an unseen point. This was conceived to be a pivot which turned, or around which turned, an invisible heavenly canopy bejewelled with the multitudinous sparkling stars. The distance between any two of them remained unchanged night after night, thereby reinforcing the impression that they were all attached to the imper¬ ceptible celestial awning. Each star always rose at exactly the same point on the eastern horizon. But its time of rising was somewhat

mine the angular distance between two cosmic bodies.

earlier on successive nights. Gaining a little on the sun

By contrast, no such measurement of angular separa¬

every day, the star overtook it in the course of a year.

tion is found in indigenous Egyptian documents. In¬

This steady advance of the stars with respect to the

stead, there the observer is depicted facing an im¬

sun, those east of it constantly approaching closer to

mobile, seated collaborator (or a life-size model of him)

it, and those west of it steadily withdrawing farther

and identifying the stars near their culmination with

from it, could be interpreted otherwise. The stars could

reference to his right elbow, left eye, or other bodily

be regarded as fixed, and not as slipping westward away

feature.

from the sun. Instead, the sun was deemed to be mov¬

In Mesopotamia the stars were used as reference

ing eastward slowly among the fixed stars in a journey

points to locate the moon when, having passed beyond

that lasted a whole year, while every day of that year

its crescent phase each month, it set later and later

the sun traveled rapidly westward across the sky.

than the sun. Three stars, or striking configurations of

The speed of the sun in its annual eastward trek was

stars, were assigned to each month. For the needs of

discovered to change in a periodic manner. It was

urban life, such as the computation of interest on

therefore indispensable to grapple with this period,

business loans, a uniform length of thirty days was

since the moon’s daily withdrawal from the sun was

conventionally adopted for the civil month, and twelve

the basis of the Babylonian lunar calendar. Instead of

such months for the year. But such a curtailed year,

assuming that the solar velocity varied continuously

however convenient for city-dwellers, was unsuitable

throughout the year, some Mesopotamian astronomers

for farmers. When the harvest month arrived before

preferred to keep the speed steady at one level for

the grain was ripe for cutting, a thirteenth month had

about six months, drop it down to a lower constant

to be intercalated. If no such intercalation had oc¬

level for the rest of the year, and then jump it back

curred, the purely lunar calendar would soon have been

up again to the higher initial level, where it started

out of phase with the seasons, as indeed it is today

to repeat the previous pattern. This discontinuous

in Islamic countries, since twelve lunations fall many

treatment of the varying speed, so that it steps up or

days short of a year. On the other hand, thirteen luna¬

down from one straight row of numbers to another,

tions would be excessive.

produces what is termed a “step function.” Alterna¬ the

tively, the sun’s eastward velocity was deemed to de¬

Babylonians recognized a near equation. Nineteen solar

After centuries of spasmodic intercalations,

crease continuously from its maximum to its minimum,

years were almost exactly equal to 235 lunar months.

and there alter its direction abruptly, climbing at the

In this nineteen-year lunisolar cycle, twelve years re¬

same rate of change back again to the maximum, where

ceived twelve months each for a subtotal of 144. The

it began the second period of this so-called “linear

remaining seven years were each assigned thirteen

zigzag function.” Both step functions and zigzag func¬

months, bringing the full total to 235 (91 -f- 144). By

tions were in use at the same time, the former more

380

widely because somewhat easier to handle.

b.c.

a definite pattern evolved in which the first,

fourth, seventh, ninth, twelfth, fifteenth, and eighteenth

These two types of numerical tables made it possible

years were made a month longer than the other twelve,

to predict not only the beginning of tine month but

with the intercalation being inserted after the twelfth

also the lunar eclipse at mid-month. It was noticed that

month six times and once after the sixth month (of the

the moon suffered eclipse, either total or partial, only

eighteenth year).

when it rose near sunset or set near sunrise. This lunar

Many stars, after traveling along arcs in the sky,

phase of opposition to the sun, however, did not always

dropped out of sight below the horizon in the west.

coincide with an eclipse. This striking phenomenon

By contrast with this disappearance, some northern

occurred only when the moon was near the track

stars remained visible above the horizon even at the

followed by the sun in its annual eastward circuit

537

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 through the constellations. This solar path was later

tables, however, are far more complicated, containing

named the “ecliptic,” because the moon was eclipsed

as they do supplementary column after column of the

only when its opposition to the sun took place in the

corrections needed to obtain increasingly accurate

vicinity of the sun’s line of march. More often than

predictions of the highly erratic motion of the moon.

not the moon at opposition was not eclipsed, because

Like the other cosmic bodies, the moon was deemed

it was too far above or below the ecliptic; in other

to be a divinity. Each followed its own course in the

words, its northern or southern latitude was too great

sky, and in so doing gave signs to mankind. In the

to permit the effect to occur. However, when the moon

remote past the gods had on occasion spoken directly

approached one of its nodes, where its path crossed

to this or that man. Now they wrote their will in the

the sun’s, it underwent an eclipse, which would be

heavens. For those who professed to be skilled in the

followed by another in either five or six months. Con¬

art of reading these celestial omens, there was fore¬

tinuous records of lunar oppositions with or without

knowledge of the near future: impending floods and

eclipses revealed a pattern that repeated itself after

storms, size of the crops, state of the public health,

approximately eighteen years.

outbreaks of civil disorder, length of the ruler’s life,

No such cycle was discovered for solar eclipses,

intentions of foreign powers, duration of peace, and

which occur toward the end of the month, when the

outcome of wars. Such political astrology was espe¬

sun and moon are in conjunction. While a total or

cially prominent in Assyria, whence it spread westward

nearly total solar eclipse is a spectacular event, a minor

through the Hittite realm. On the other hand, those

partial eclipse of the sun might easily be overlooked

who revered the cosmic bodies were fiercely con¬

in the daylight, and in any given case might not be

demned by the monotheistic Hebrew prophet: their

visible to observers in Mesopotamia.

bones shall be spread “before the sun and the moon

At an early date they distinguished the planet Venus,

shipped”; their bones “shall not be gathered, nor be

grouped with the sun and moon to constitute a trinity

buried, they shall be for dung upon the face of the

of celestial divinities. From the day the observers first

earth” (Jeremiah 8:2).

saw Venus rise in the east earlier than the sun, they

538

and all the host of heaven . . . whom they have wor¬

which on account of its extraordinary brilliance was

That oblique portion of the host of heaven within

watched it as a morning star for more than eight

which the sun, moon, and planets travel was divided

months, until it disappeared from the sky for three

by the Babylonians into configurations resembling to

months. Then it reappeared in the west, setting later

a greater or lesser extent some terrestrial beast, real

than the sun as an evening star. These recurring ap¬

or fanciful, plant, human, or artifact. These imaginative

pearances and disappearances of Venus were faithfully

constellations were later borrowed by the Greeks, who

recorded. In due course the observers recognized the

modified them somewhat and called them in their own

remaining “stray sheep,” as the planets visible to the

language zodiacal, because their word for a little figure

naked eye were called.

was zodion. The number of these Babylonian zodiacal

One of them, Mercury, behaved like Venus, which

constellations was gradually reduced to twelve. Each

disappeared twice during each cycle. By contrast, three

constellation was then assigned to one of the twelve

other “stray sheep” became invisible only once in each

months during which the sun completes its yearly

cycle. The performance of these three (Saturn, Jupiter,

course along the ecliptic or “line through the middle

and Mars) was remarkable also in another respect. They

of the zodiac.” To each such twelfth of the zodiac,

traveled eastward at a varying speed, stopped at their

or zodiacal sign, 30° of longitude were allotted. The

first stationary point, reversed their direction for a short

dividing fine between any two neighboring signs was

while, halted at their second stationary point, and then

drawn so that the constellation from which the sign

resumed their normal eastward or direct motion. These

took its name would fit as well as possible within the

critical junctures—where the planet stood still, first

corresponding sign.

appeared, and disappeared—attracted the attention of

A planet could now be located as being at a given

the Babylonians. They compiled lists of the dates on

time at a definite degree within a specified zodiacal

which these transitions occurred. Dividing the planet’s

sign. This method of pinpointing the position of a

varying velocity into several discontinuous levels, they

cosmic body was more precise than the previous pro¬

treated it either as a periodic step function or as a

cedure of placing it in relation to a constellation, whose

linear zigzag function. These functions were often

boundaries in the nature of things were bound to be

modified in a variety of ways as different observers

much more difficult to define.

adopted divergent methods of approximating the plan¬

From the planetary tables it was now possible to

et’s mean motion. These arithmetical planetary tables

say where each planet was at any given moment, even

in general resemble those used for the moon. The lunar

if it happened to be in the invisible portion of its orbit.

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 With the positions of all the planetary divinities known at the instant of any individual’s conception or birth, it was believed possible to make a long-range predic¬ tion of his fate. Two of these deities, Venus and Jupiter, were regarded as benevolent; two others, Mars and Saturn, as malevolent; and Mercury as ambivalent. Their effect on the individual was strengthened or weakened by their presence in a particular zodiacal sign and by their aspects, or mutual angular distances within the zodiac. This kind of horoscopic or genethliacal astrology, based on the locations of the planets at a supposedly critical juncture and on their imagined potencies, could profess to read far into the future, where the planetary tables covered extensive periods of time. Moreover, the new predictive service was at the disposal of any person wealthy enough to afford the fee, and was no longer confined to royalty and other potentates.

phanes had supposed that it extended infinitely down¬ ward. But its roundness was proved visually by the convex shape of the shadow it always casts on the moon during a lunar eclipse. By the same token, the shadow thrown by the moon on the sun in a partial solar eclipse demonstrated ocularly the sphericity of the moon. This conclusion was confirmed by the lunar phases, with the half-moon regularly intervening between concave and convex illuminated segments. Since the moon was spherical, so were all the other cosmic bodies, and indeed the universe itself was one big ball. To the under surface of its exterior shell the stars were attached like bright studs, whereas the planets were free to roam. As the planets revolved at various distances from the center at different speeds, they emitted diverse tones which blended into a celestial harmony, unno¬ ticed because we mortals have all heard it from birth. This was only one indication to the mystically inclined

The nations who worshipped the moon as a deity

Pythagorean brotherhood that the cosmos was con¬

might predict its eclipses correctly, but could offer no

structed on mathematical lines. Philolaus, one of the

physical explanation of them. Nor could the Hebrews

brethren, held the earth to be a planet, revolving like

who, although they deprived it of its divine status,

the others around a central fire, the Hearth of the

regarded it as a self-luminous body, somewhat less

Cosmos. Ecphantus, another brother, maintained that

brilliant than the sun. Their god announced that he

the earth rotates about its own center from west to

would “show wonders in the heavens. . . . The sun shall

east. “Motion like an auger whirling around the same

be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood” (Joel

place” was attributed by Plato and the Pythagoreans

2:30-31). The copper color of the lunar eclipse was

to the fixed stars. Convinced that the planets could

a product of the divine will, not a natural effect. So

have no reason to speed up, slow down, stop, and

also among the Hindus, the moon was eclipsed because

retrace their steps in loops, the brotherhood asked how

it was swallowed by a demon; the lunar nodes, the

the phenomena seen in the sky could be explained on

two points on its orbit where the moon crosses from

the assumption that the cosmic motions were all per¬

north latitude to south and from south to north, were

fectly circular and absolutely uniform.

long called the dragon’s head and the dragon’s tail.

Although the same question was propoimded by

Anaxagoras, however, who was denounced for impi¬

Plato, he insisted that “we shall dispense with the

ety and imprisoned in Athens, discovered that the

bodies in the heavens if we propose to obtain a real

moon’s light is not its own, but comes from the sun.

understanding of astronomy” (Republic VII, 530C). No

Hence the eclipses of the moon are caused by its falling

perceptible object could furnish true knowledge, which

within the shadow of the earth, which comes between

comes only from pure reason, not from lowly sight.

the sun and the moon at that time. Anaxagoras also recognized that the sun is eclipsed

Like diagrams in geometry, the visible cosmic bodies merely furnished illustrations to facilitate a putatively

at new moon, when its dark and opaque bulk is inter¬

“higher” study. Plato nevertheless proceeded to con¬

posed between the earth and the sim. By contrast, in

coct a creation story, complete with an uncreated

pre-Hellenic cosmology, which made no effort to as¬

creator god and a divine cosmos animated by a univer¬

certain the earth’s distance from the sun and moon,

sal soul. With regard to the three outer planets, he

these bodies, or rather divinities, were regarded as

said that men “neither give them names nor investigate

equally remote. In like manner no attempt had been

the measurement of them one against another by nu¬

made to estimate their size. Anaxagoras, on the other

merical calculation” (Timaeus 39C). With all its ob¬

hand, insisted that the sun was a red-hot rock bigger

scurity and obscurantism, Plato’s Timaeus exerted a

than the Peloponnesus. Did he suppose that the large

pervasive and pernicious influence on subsequent cos¬

meteorite which landed during his lifetime fell down

mological thought. It undertook to combat the specu¬

from the sun? In any case he surmised that the moon

lations advanced by the founders of the atomic theory.

is earthy, having mountains, plains, and ravines.

According to them, space is infinite and contains innu¬

The shape of the earth had puzzled earlier Greek

merable atoms in ceaseless motion. From their colli¬

cosmologists. Thus, to account for its stability, Xeno¬

sions imnumbered worlds arise, some expanding, others

539

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 was seen to move more rapidly than at its apogee, or greatest distance from the earth (Figure 1). Such an “eccentric” pattern fits the sun’s annual journey. This solar orbit is divided into four equal quadrants by the solstices and equinoxes, which mark the four seasons of the year. But the sun traverses these equal arcs in unequal times. Of the four seasons, the spring, extending from the vernal equinox to the sum¬ mer solstice, lasts the longest. Because the sun travels Eccentric orbit. P = moving planet, C = center of planet’s orbit, E = Earth. In the left-hand diagram, P is at its apogee; in the right-hand diagram, P is at its perigee. From Three Copernican Treatises, Dover, 1959. Copyright by edward rosen. Figure

1.

most slowly then, it crosses its apogee. By the same token it passes through its perigee in the autumn, the shortest of the four seasons. This simple eccentric scheme had to be modified in the case of Mars. When this planet culminates at mid¬

collapsing, and still others devoid of moisture. Metro-

night it is at its brightest, and therefore closest to the

doms, a pupil of the atomist Democritus, maintained

earth. At that same time it is in opposition to the sun.

that “a single plant growing in a broad field is just

Mars’ opposition, however, does not always occur at

as absurd as one cosmos in infinite space” (Guthrie,

the same point of the zodiac. On the contrary, the

II, 405; trans. E.R.).

opposition may take place anywhere along Mars’ orbit.

The only cosmos we know was viewed by Eudoxus

To permit the opposition to shift in this way. Mars’

as a nest of twenty-seven homocentric spheres. To the

eccentric was provided with a moving, instead of a

sun, moon, and five known planets he assigned a com¬

fixed, center. This center, always aligned with the sun,

bination of perfect spheres, each rotating with a con¬

revolved around the earth in the course of a year. A

stant angular velocity. The cosmic body was attached

similar moving eccentric suited the other two planets,

to the equator of its innermost sphere. As this carrying

Jupiter and Saturn, which are found at any angular

sphere rotated forward, its axis was borne backward

distance, or elongation, from the sun (Figure 2).

by a second sphere to whose surface its poles were

In the case of Venus and Mercury, however, the

fixed, the axes of both spheres being inclined to each

circle described by the eccentric’s center would have

other. By adding a third similar sphere for the sun and

to exceed the eccentric itself in size. This arrangement

moon, and two more for each of the planets, Eudoxus

would be tantamount to each of these planets riding

succeeded in representing the observed motions with

on a small epicycle whose center traversed a large

qualitative fidelity, although not with quantitative preci¬

deferent. This moving center could be identified with

sion, especially in the case of Mars. The seven separate mathematical models of Eudoxus were later converted into a single physical mechanism by Aristotle. However, whether merely an abstract geometrical blueprint or a solid contrivance, no ar¬ rangement of concentric spheres could alter the dis¬ tance of any planet from the eyes of the observer on the earth at the middle of the whole system. But Mars and Venus in particular, and the other planets too, vary considerably in brightness, and therefore in their dis¬ tance from the earth. Moreover, the moon’s distance from tlie earth also changes, as is shown by central solar eclipses, in some of which the sun’s disk is entirely obscured, whereas in the annular eclipses a bright ring surrounds the moon’s shadow. These two fatal defects in the theory of homocentrics were overcome by removing the earth from the center of the cosmic body’s uniform circular motion in its orbit. The displacement of the earth from the orbital center made the distance from the revolving cosmic

540

body to the terrestrial observer a variable quantity. At its perigee, or closest approach to the earth, the body

Figure

2. Epicycle and deferent, from Angus Armitage, Sun,

Stand Thou Still. Copyright 1947 by henry schuman, inc. By PERMISSION OF ABELARD-SCHUMAN LIMITED.

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 the sun, since Venus and Mercury are never seen very far away from that luminary, their greatest elongations

of which were catalogued in forty-eight constellations (twelve zodiacal, twenty-one northern, and fifteen

from it being quite moderate. Moreover, they are

southern). Each star was attached to the universe’s

sometimes east of it, and at other times west of it. This

outermost sphere, which completed a daily rotation

alternate crisscrossing and perpetual proximity sug¬

from east to west aroimd the poles of the celestial

gested the inference that Venus and Mercury revolved around the sun like satellites, while at the same time the sun executed its annual orbit around the earth. The epicycles of Venus and Mercury had a material

equator. This diurnal rotation affected also the sun, moon, and five planets. Since a planet’s apse-lines, drawn through its apogee and perigee, did not change their position in the starry sphere, the planets shared

body, the sun, for their moving center. If this became

in that outermost sphere’s slow eastward rotation

an

earth-

around the poles of the ecliptic in 36,000 years. It was

centered deferent, the planet-bearing epicycle pro¬

immaterial

point,

revolving

around an

this rotation which produced the phenomenon still

duced the same visual effect for a terrestrial observer

called the “precession of the equinoxes.”

as an eccentric with a fixed center. The radii of the

Below the sphere of the stars three planets—Saturn,

eccentric and deferent were equal and parallel to each

Jupiter, and Mars in that descending order—par¬

other, while the eccentricity was equal to the radius

ticipated in the daily cosmic rotation westward. But

of the epicycle. The kinematic equivalence of these

just as passengers may stroll slowly eastward on the

two simple schemes was demonstrated by Apollonius.

deck of a ship traveling swiftly westward, each of these

The introduction of eccentrics and epicycles in place

three planets at its own speed completed its orbital

of geocentric spheres gave mathematical cosmology a

revolution in the zodiac. This prevailingly eastward

new freedom to choose any center of rotation outside

march slowed down and halted at a first stationary

the earth and at any suitable distance from it. In every

point, reversed its direction for a time, and after a

case the accepted procedure was to adopt the fewest

second stationary point resumed its direct motion. To

and simplest hypotheses that would produce results

account for these irregular loops Ptolemy had the

conforming as closely as possible to the observed

planet revolve on an epicycle whose center was in turn

phenomena, or “save the phenomena,” as the Greeks

carried around by an eccentric deferent. At a distance

liked to say.

from this deferent’s center along the apse-line con¬

A startling phenomenon, either a nova or a comet,

necting the apogee and perigee lay the earth. On the

impelled Hipparchus to compile for posterity the first

apse-line at a distance from the deferent’s center equal

catalogue of fixed stars, “indicating the position and

and opposite to the earth’s, Ptolemy placed an equant.

magnitude of each, so that from this catalogue it could be readily determined not only whether stars perish and are born but also whether some of them actually shift and move” (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, II, 24, 95; trans. E.R.). While comparing previous obser¬ vations of eclipses with his own, Hipparchus noticed that a certain star’s longitudinal distance from the nearby equinoctial point had decreased somewhat be¬ tween the two observations. He interpreted this de¬ crease as a slow westward displacement or precession of the equinoxes, carrying the equator with them. Afterwards the alternative explanation prevailed, that the celestial sphere rotated eastward about the poles of the ecliptic. Hipparchus refrained from attempting to construct theoretical schemes for the five planets because he did not have at his disposal an adequate supply of accurate observations. In remedying this deficiency he learned that the planetary retrograde arcs vary. Building on the foundations prepared by his highly admired prede¬ cessor, Ptolemy was able to complete the edifice of ancient cosmology. In the Ptolemaic system the finite spherical cosmos was bounded by the fixed stars, more than a thousand

Figure

3. Function of an epicycle, from Giorgio de Santillana,

The Crime of Galileo. CHICAGO.

AlX

Copyright

RIGHTS RESERVED.

1955

by

the

university

of

541

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 As measured from this equalizing point, and not from the deferent’s center, the mean angular velocity of the epicycle’s center was uniform (Figure 3). These three outer planets could be observed at any elongation from the sun, which revolved around the earth in a year, either on a simple eccentric or an epicycle carried by a concentric deferent. In so doing the sun separated the three outer planets from Venus and Mercury, which never depart very far from it. Because Mercury’s motion is so irregular, Ptolemy had to rotate the deferent’s center on a circlet. Below Venus and Mercury (the inner planets) the moon revolved around the earth. Its motion on an epicycle carried by a concentric deferent agreed fairly well with the observations when the moon was in syzygy, where an eclipse could occur because the moon was either in opposition to the sun or in conjunction with it. In quadrature, however, where the half-moon formed a right angle at the earth with the sun, the distance moon-earth had to be reduced to conform with this “evection,” as it was called later. Ptolemy accom¬ plished this result by making this distance depend on a line connecting the epicycle’s center with a point moving around a circlet centered on the earth (Fig¬ ure 4). In the middle of this Ptolemaic cosmos the spherical earth, or rather terraqueous sphere, rested immovable. The interval extending outward from the surface of this sphere to the lunar perigee was filled with air and

9I

Figure 4.

542

Ptolemy’s lunar theory, from Otto Neugebauer, The Exact

Sciences in Antiquity.

Dover publications, inc., new york, 1957.

Reprinted through permission of the publisher.

elemental fire, in that order. The lunar apogee coin¬ cided with the perigee of Mercury, whose apogee was contiguous with Venus’ perigee. This tight fit of apogee with the next perigee continued all the way out to the fixed stars on the principle that “in Nature a vac¬ uum, or any meaningless and useless thing, is incon¬ ceivable” (Ptolemy, Planetary Hypotheses). When viewed abstractly or theoretically, these neatly designed concentrics, eccentrics, deferents, and epicycles were merely indispensable mathematical aids in computing and predicting the positions of the cosmic bodies. Alternatively, these constructs were regarded as physical or material entities. Thus, “like a pearl on a ring” the spherical body of the planet was affixed to the equator of its epicycle, which was a solid ball running in a groove. This channel’s lower surface was formed by the outside or convexity of the planet’s deferent, which was now conceived as a spherical shell or hollow sphere. The groove’s upper surface in like manner consisted of the interior or concavity of the next higher planet’s deferent. From the stationary earth to the slowly rotating starry sphere, the celestial bodies, mounted on their epicycles, each confined within its own groove, performed their stately and intricate bal¬ let. This absolutely full Ptolemaic universe devoid of empty space, or its mathematically equivalent blue¬ print, dominated cosmological thought for fourteen centuries (Figure 5). Arab observers found that in their time the preces¬ sion of the equinoxes moved faster than 1 ° in 100 years, the slightly mistaken figure announced by Ptolemy. Instead of discarding his value as too slow and accept¬ ing their own more rapid rate of 1° in 66 years as constant, some of them revived an ancient notion that the precessional speed swung back and forth between a maximum and a minimum. With this imaginary peri¬ odic oscillation or trepidation, they connected another supposed cyclic variation. This affected the angle at which the plane of the celestial equator is intersected by the plane of the ecliptic. This obliquity of the ecliptic had been somewhat overstated by Ptolemy at 23°51'20". Putting the maximum at a rounded figure in this vicinity, the Arabs conceived the obliquity as oscillating slowly through an arc of about two-fifths of a degree. Whereas the Koran was satisfied with only seven heavens (presumably one each for the moon, sun, and five planets), these Muslim cosmologists added Ptole¬ my’s eighth sphere of the fixed stars. To account for the precession of the equinoxes, they introduced a ninth sphere, and then a tenth for the trepidation of the precession. For the related fictive cyclic variation in the obliquity of the ecliptic an eleventh sphere was adopted by some Muslims and their Christian followers.

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 tion, like a living bird. Taken as a whole, the cosmic bodies flew through space like a flock of birds, each at its own pace and on its own course. In late antiquity Johannes Philoponus, a Christian commentator on Aristotle, early in the sixth century dismissed the angels who had formerly tugged and strained at the cosmic bodies. Instead, he had God implant within them at the time of creation an impetus which kept them going round and round. The Christian version of the creation story insisted that with His unlimited might their God made the entire universe out of nothing at all. This denial of the existence of matter prior to creation reinterpreted the Hebrew Bible’s primordial material abyss, and controverted

the

ancient

atomists’

teaching

that

“nothing is ever produced by divine action out of nothing.” Nor, in the Nature of the atomists, is any¬ thing reduced to nothing. Instead, it is dissolved into its component indivisible atoms which, being inde¬ Figure 5.

Reconstruction of a fifteenth-century cosmological scheme

utilizing solid spheres, from Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo.

Copyright 1955 by the university of Chicago.

All rights

RESERVED.

structible, are everlasting. Then time itself has no end, although the several worlds created by Nature may come into being and pass away. For space is boundless. If it were confined within the stars, where would a javelin go when hurled outward from those “flaming

Early Christian writers had denied that the earth is round, since in that case on the opposite side of the

ramparts of the cosmos”? This was not the kind of question with which

globe there would be people with their feet upwards

Aristarchus had grappled in the third century

and heads downwards. In the Hebrew Bible, which

when he enormously enlarged the size of the cosmos

they misappropriated to themselves imder the extrane¬

without declaring it to be infinite. He ascribed to the

b.c.,

ous designation “Old Testament,” they professed to find

earth a daily rotation about its own axis, so that the

sacred warrant for their contention that the earth is

stars remained motionless. He also assigned to the earth

the floor of the cosmos. On this flat surface their imagi¬

an annual revolution around the sun, which he held

nation erected in the north a high conical mountain,

stationary at the center of the earth’s orbit. For he

whose summit created darkness by blocking out the

had computed the sun to be some 300 times larger

light of the sun which passed from west to east during

than the earth in volume, and how could so big a mass

the night. In comparison with the earth, therefore, the

revolve around the smaller earth? Did not the moon,

sun was a small object. Its heat, like that of all the

whose bulk he calculated as about one-thirtieth of the

other celestial bodies, would be extinguished, at the

earth’s, revolve around the bigger body?

dissolution of the cosmos, by the waters providentially stored for that purpose above the firmament. While it still continued to function prior to that

After lying dormant beneath the ruling geostatic cosmologies, the Aristarchan geokinetic thinking was revived early in the sixteenth century of our era by

cataclysmic event, each cosmic body was propelled in

Nicholas Copernicus. Whereas Aristarchus had pro¬

its course by a tireless angel. This Christian angel

vided only the bare bones of the heliostatic system,

replaced the pagan soul which Plato and the Neo-

Copernicus fleshed it out.

Platonists had assigned to each cosmic body as its

He was unaware that the followers of the fifth-

driving force. On the other hand, Aristotle’s First

century Hindu astronomer Aryabhata “maintain that

Mover, being incorporeal, could not itself move, but

the earth moves and heaven rests. People have tried

operated like a beloved object after which the First

to refute them by saying that, if such were the case,

Movable, or sphere of the stars, strove and thereby

stones and trees would fall from the earth.” But

communicated motion to the remaining cosmic bodies.

Brahmagupta, Aryabhata’s seventh-century successor,

They did not receive any impulse from without, ac¬

disagreed, “apparently because he thought that all

cording to Ptolemy. On the contrary, each of them

heavy things are attracted towards the center of the

had within itself its own vital energy propelling it

earth” (Sachau, ed. and trans., I, 372).

forward. Every planet was the source of its own mo¬

Copernicus was equally

unaware

that

in

1377

543

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 Nicholas Oresme, while explaining his translation of

ets therein always appeared brightest in opposition;

Aristotle’s Heavens—the earliest rendering in a modern

the radius of the epicycle remained at all times parallel

language—considered many arguments for and against

to the line drawn from the terrestrial observer to the

the daily rotation of the earth. Recognizing that it

sun; and the arc of retrogression in the apparent loop

benefits from the sun’s heat, Oresme reasoned that in

diminished from Mars outward to Saturn. All these

familiar things what “is roasted at a fire receives the

phenomena were now seen to be necessary conse¬

heat of the fire around itself because it is turned and

quences of the earth’s orbital revolution.

not because the fire is turned around it’’ (Le Livre du

In like manner the Ptolemaic system kept Venus and

del et du monde, eds. A. D. Menut and A. ]. Denomy,

Mercury within their greatest elongations from the sun

Madison [1968], p. 533). Nevertheless Oresme, bishop

by requiring the line from the earth to the epicycle’s

of Lisieux, decided in favor of a static earth, on the

center to be prolonged through the sun. But these two

basis of biblical passages.

bodies became true inner planets in Copernicus’ cos¬

At the same time in the Islamic world Ibn al-Shatir

mos, and as seen from the earth they could not exceed

of Damascus rejected Ptolemy’s equant as a violation

their limited maximum elongations from the sun.

of the principle that a cosmic body’s orbit must be

Moreover, by evaluating the distance from Venus to

compounded from absolutely uniform circular motions.

the sun in terms of terrestrial radii, Copernicus finally

This Muslim timekeeper at the mosque in Damascus

found the way to determine the absolute dimensions

also introduced a second epicycle into Ptolemy’s lunar

of the planetary system. And he correctly reinterpreted

theory in order to eliminate its grossly excessive varia¬

the precession of the equinoxes as due to a continuous

tion in the length of the moon’s apparent diameter.

shift in the direction of the earth’s axis of rotation,

In these two respects Copernicus’ theories resembled

instead of to a slow eastward rotation of the sphere

Ibn al Shatir’s. But, unlike his Damascene prede¬

of the stars around the poles of the ecliptic.

cessor, Copernicus did not use a second epicycle for

In Copernicus’ cosmos the earth revolved around the

the sun; he retained eccentric orbits; and his numerical

sun in a huge orbit requiring a whole year to be tra¬

results also differed, being based in part on his own

versed. Then the direction of any star, as observed at

observations. He knew neither Arabic nor French, and

an interval of six months from two diametrically oppo¬

the relevant writings of Ibn al-Shatir and Oresme had

site points on the earth’s orbit, should exhibit the dis¬

not been translated into Latin. Copernicus evidently

placement known as the “annual stellar parallax.” To

shared earlier imeasiness with aspects of the Ptolemaic

account for the nonobservation of this phenomenon,

cosmology. But entirely independently he went back

Copernicus asserted that the enormous remoteness of

to Aristarchus’ heliostatic cosmos.

the stars made the diameter of the earth’s orbit a

One objection thereto was that any motion of the

negligible quantity. In other words, Copernicus’ uni¬

earth must disrupt it. But, as regards its daily rotation,

verse became immensely great. But he stopped short

the only available alternative required the vastly

of proclaiming it to be infinite, confining himself to

greater heavens to whirl round with immensely swifter

the description “similar to the infinite.” Unlike the

speed each day. Would not, Copernicus asked, a more

Buddhists who declared that “the cosmos is neither

devastating destruction necessarily be entailed thereby?

finite nor infinite,” Copernicus “left to the philosophers

Then the daily rising and setting of the sun must

of nature the question whether the universe is finite

be recognized as a mere appearance, due to the real

One philosopher of nature who spoke his mind was

of the seasons is caused by the earth’s annual tilted

Thomas Digges. In 1576 he declared that the sphere

orbit. As it carries the observer around, the optical

of the fixed stars reached “up in spherical altitude

effect of his motion must be disengaged from the real

without end.” Therefore, although the stars still stayed

revolutions of the planets. These bodies do not actually

within the same sphere, their height varied. Thus

speed up, slow down, stop, and reverse their course.

Digges agreed with the ancient Greek expositor Gemi-

They seem to do so only because they are observed

nus, who “would not assume that all the stars he on

from that ceaselessly moving observatory which is our

a single surface, but rather that some are higher and

earth. In truth the planets always proceed in the same

others lower, the difference in their height being im¬

direction at a constant speed. So does the earth, which

perceptible because our sight attains [in all directions

now took its rightful place in the cosmic order, a planet

only] to an equal distance” (Cohen and Drabkin, p.

like the others.

544

or infinite.”

axial rotation of the earth. In like manner, the cycle

118; trans. E. R.). Just as the Roman poet Manilius had

Copernicus’ rearrangement of the cosmic bodies for

attributed the dimmer brilliance of some stars to their

the first time clarified certain previously unexplained

greater height, so Digges’ stars looked smaller the more

coincidences in the Ptolemaic system. The outer plan¬

remote they were, and “the greatest part rest by reason

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 of their wonderful distance invisible to us.” Never¬

trophes demonstrated the entirely imaginary nature of

theless the sun and its satellites remained in the middle

the spherical machinery which had so long crowded

of Digges’ heliocentric cosmos.

the heavens before his time. Thereafter the cosmic

On the other hand, the nonfinite universe preached

bodies moved on their own through the upper regions.

by the mystical theologian Nicholas of Cusa had its

Copernicus’ reasoning that five planets revolved

circumference nowhere and its center everywhere.

around the sun was accepted by Tycho. But he refused

Then the earth could no longer be in the middle of

to believe that the heavy, sluggish earth was capable

the cosmos, and it therefore ceased to be the dregs

of motion, which, moreover, conflicted with the Bible

of the universe. Instead, it became for Cusa a “noble

as he interpreted it. In his own cosmology, therefore,

star,” whose motion was circular albeit not perfectly so. Cusa’s loosening of the rigid bounds of the traditional

he kept the earth motionless at the center of the uni¬ verse. Around it revolved the sun, which in turn served

cosmos made a profound impression on an ill-fated

as the center for the planets revolving around it. This

genius who was publicly burned at the stake by the

Tychonian compromise appealed to those who, while

Roman Catholic church in 1600. But Giordano Bruno

feeling the force of Copernicus’ argumentation, still

went far beyond his master Cusa in recognizing our

clung to the remnants of their obsolete metaphysical

sun as one of the countless stars in an infinite universe.

prejudices and dogmatic bibliolatry.

In Aristotle’s finite rmiverse everything had its natu¬

No such hindrances prevented the intellectual de¬

ral place. Whether at rest therein or violently displaced

velopment of Brahe’s most famous assistant, Johannes

therefrom, a body capable of motion was in a place

Kepler. Inheriting the invaluable treasure of Tycho’s

bounded by the inner surface of a stationary nontrans¬

accumulated observations, Kepler tried to fit them to

portable containing vessel. This Aristotelian concept

the orbit of Mars while confining himself to the tradi¬

of place was rejected by Bernardino Telesio, “the first

tionally sanctioned cosmological devices. Unable to

of the modern men,” as he was called by Francis Bacon.

find a satisfactory agreement between Tycho’s obser¬

Telesio maintained that all bodies are contained in a

vations and any conceivable combination of uniform

single vast emptiness, for which he introduced the term

circular motions, Kepler finally discarded the bimillen-

“space.”

nial prejudice against all curved tracks save the circu¬ infinite by

lar. An ellipse, departing only slightly from a perfect

Telesio’s contemporary, Francesco Patrizi. His infinite

circle, turned out to be the true (predictably correct)

This universal

emptiness was made

mathematical space, which he paradoxically described

path of the planet. Its motion along the ellipse could

as an “incorporeal body,” surrounds an inner physical

be kept uniform by measuring, not the linear velocity,

space, containing the cosmic bodies. Thus Aristotle’s

but the areas swept out in equal intervals of time by

hierarchically ordered set of finite places gave way to

the straight line connecting the moving planet with

Patrizi’s infinite emptiness, which in due course won

the sun, located at one of the two foci of the elliptical

acceptance as the concept of absolute space.

orbit. The square of the time required by any planet

The new star of 1572 convinced Tycho Brahe that,

to traverse its ellipse showed the same proportion in

contrary to the long accepted belief in the immuta¬

all cases to the cube of the planet’s mean distance from

bility of the perfect heavens, changes can occur there.

the sun.

However, he declined to speculate how the nova came

These three principles of planetary motion consti¬

into existence, although he concluded that it must have

tuted Kepler’s imperishable contribution to cosmology.

decreased in size.

They confirmed the essential truth of the Copernican

The great comet of 1577 challenged the traditional

system, while revising it drastically. Gone forever were

sublunar location of these spectacular bodies. Aristotle

the pre-Keplerian eccentrics, deferents, and epicycles

had said that they were ignited below the moon as

in their complicated combinations.

dry exhalations rose up from the earth. But a genera¬

Gone too was the conception that a cosmic body

tion after Peter Apian remarked that a comet's tail

could revolve around a mathematical point not occu¬

always pointed away from the sun, the comet of 1577

pied by a physical body. For example, in Copernicus’

showed no perceptible daily parallax. Therefore it had

cosmos the sim had been near, not at, the universe’s

to be traveling far beyond the moon. In antiquity

center, which was also the center of the orbit of the

Seneca had said: “We see the comets mingling with

earth. Hence this particular planet still retained a

the stars and passing through the higher regions. "

privileged status in Copernicus' nominally heliocentric

Then the comet’s head and tail must collide with

system, wherein the physical sun was separated by a

the crystalline spheres carrying the planets. But, Tycho

significant distance from the center of the universe.

pointed out, no such collisions between comet and

Kepler, however, elicited an implication from the

crystal occurred. The absence of these dreaded catas¬

Copernican cosmos which its architect himself had

545

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 failed to draw. Since Copernicus’ earth was a planet,

Meanwhile in a magnificent series of discoveries

then the other planets must be physical bodies like the

made with the recently invented telescope, Galileo

earth. But when a physical body traverses an elliptical

Galilei helped to establish some characteristic features

orbit, it must have the physical body of the sun present

of the emerging cosmology. He revealed that the moon

in one focus of its ellipse. The sun thereby acquired

abounds in lofty mountains and depressed hollows.

its rightful special status in the heliocentric system.

Then its surface is no more perfectly spherical than

Since the planets had now become material bodies

is our lowly earth’s. Even more irregular was Saturn

like the earth, some physical cause had to be invoked

with its protruding ears, as that planet’s rings looked

to explain their motion. Kepler could no longer accept

for a time in Galileo’s primitive instrument. Sunspots

Ptolemy’s pronouncement that “the power and activity

impaired the perfection of that luminary, and their

of an aster in its proper place and around its own

rotation proved that the sun whirls around its own axis,

center consist of self-coherent revolution.” For Co¬

like Copernicus’ earth. Our planet reflects sunlight on

pernicus, revolution aroimd a center was the motion

the moon (as Kepler’s teacher had publicly announced

natural to a sphere, although in his cosmos two spheres,

in 1596). Venus displayed phases resembling the moon’s

the sun and the stars’, were motionless. Before Kepler

and due to the same causes. By detecting the four

liberated himself from the grip of traditional notions,

principal satellites of Jupiter, Galileo established that

he had believed that the planets were driven around

the earth was neither the only planet accompanied by

by “moving souls.” But in the second edition of his

a satellite nor the only center of a cosmic motion. He

youthful work he wrote:

observed numerous stars invisible to the naked eye, and

If you substitute the word “force” for the word “soul,” you have the very principle on which celestial physics is based in my Commentaries on Mars. . . . For previously I used to believe that the cause responsible for the motion of the planets was unquestionably a soul. But when I considered that this moving cause diminishes with distance, and that the sun’s light is also attenuated with the distance from the sun, I concluded that this force is something corporeal (Gesammelte Werke, 8, 113; trans. E. R. See also, Mysterium cosmographicum [2nd ed. 1621], Note 3, Ch. 20). Copernicus had correctly maintained that the cos¬ mos must have more than one gravitational center, with each planet serving as the collecting core for its own detached heavy bodies. Accepting this plurality, Kepler reversed the traditional conception of the fall of a heavy object. No longer did the freely falling body

located them at various altitudes between two spheri¬ cal surfaces, the more distant being regarded as con¬ cave, and the closer as convex. In the telescope the stars were not magnified, but remained vividly spar¬ kling points. On the other hand, the planets showed enlarged pale disks. Bv thus proving the self-luminosity of the stars as contrasted with the darkness of the planets, Galileo settled the age-old controversy once discussed by al-Biruni:

Opinions of intelligent people differ ... as to whether the planets are self-luminous like the sun, or merely illuminated by the rays of the sun falling on them. Many assert that light is exclusively the property of the sun, that all the stars [and planets] are destitute of it. . . . But others believe that all the planets are luminous by nature with the exception of the moon (The Book of Instruction . . . , p. 67, H156).

seek its natural place as close as possible to its gravita¬

546

tional center. Instead, the gravitational center attracted

Disturbed by the Inquisition’s condemnation of

to itself its separate parts. But Kepler’s earth and moon

Galileo as a heretic and by his being sentenced to life

were kindred bodies. Therefore they exerted a mutual

imprisonment, Rene Descartes concealed his adherence

attraction on each other. In exercising its gravitational

to a cosmology very similar to the Copemican. In his

pull on the earth, the moon helped to produce the ebb

own cosmos the earth was declared to be at rest, but

and flow of the oceanic tides on the earth’s surface.

only with respect to the celestial matter surrounding

So did the sun. And while imagining a flight to the

it. While this fluid vortex rotated around the sun, it

moon, Kepler attributed to his fictional space vehicle

pushed the earth along with it, as flowing water affects

the property of spontaneously persevering in the mo¬

an unpropelled boat or a moving vessel transports a

tion initially imparted to it, an incomplete expression

sleeping passenger. Similar whirlpools carried the other

of the principle of inertia, a term which he added to

planets aroimd the sun, while smaller eddies bore the

the vocabulary of the exact sciences. Moreover, he

satellites around the earth and Jupiter. Thus in Des¬

asserted that the light radiating spherically from a

cartes’ cosmos, as in Aristotle’s, all action was by direct

point source diminished in intensity with the square

contact, and there could be no action at a distance.

of the distance from the source. Then in 1644 G. P.

Nor could there be a void or empty space, the entire

Roberval insisted that “all the parts [of the matter in

universe being filled with imperceptibly subtle matter.

the universe] tend toward one another with unceasing pressure and mutually attract one another.”

Like Descartes, G. A. Borelli avoided assigning any motion to the earth by professedly confining his cosmo-

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 logical discussion to Jupiter’s satellites. But, following

Hooke’s mathematical ability was not great enough

Kepler, he ascribed to the rotating sun a physical force

to perform the requisite calculation, but he did proceed

that drove the planets along. To explain why they do

to demonstrate to the Royal Society of London a pen¬

not fly off into space, as would a stone being whirled

dulum whose bob executed a continuous closed curve

round in a sling, he attributed to the planets a “natural

in a conical sweep, instead of simply oscillating to and

instinct” to approach the sun as the center of their

fro in a vertical plane like the bob of a conventional

motion. The equilibrium between these two centrifugal

pendulum. By imparting to the bob of his conical

and centripetal motions kept the planets in their orbits,

pendulum the right impulse in the right direction,

and their satellites circulating around them.

Hooke produced a laboratory replica of planetary

Whereas in 1666 Borelli attributed to the planets

motion (Figure 6).

a natural tendency to approach the sun, that body

The previous assumption that “only a spherical

attracted the planets and was in turn attracted by

shape” befitted a cosmic body was shattered when

them, according to Robert Hooke’s reflections early

Christiaan Huygens announced anagrammatically in

in 1665: I suppose the gravitating power of the Sun in the center of this part of the Heaven in which we are, hath an attrac¬ tive power upon all the bodies of the Planets, and of the Earth that move about it, and that each of those again have a respect answerable, whereby they may be said to attract the Sun in the same manner as the Load-stone hath to Iron, and the Iron hath to the Load-stone (R. T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford, Oxford, VIII [1931], 228). Then on 23 May 1666 Hooke advanced beyond mutual gravitational attraction between sim and plan¬ ets by combining that cause of motion with the princi¬ ple of inertia: I have often wondered, why the planets should move about the sun according to Copernicus’s supposition, being not included in any solid orbs (which the ancients possibly for this reason might embrace) nor tied to it, as their centre, by any visible strings; and neither depart from it beyond such a degree, nor yet move in a straight line, as all bodies, that have but one single impulse, ought to do: For a solid body, moved in a fluid, towards any part . . . must preserve [persevere] in its motion in a right line, and neither deflect this way nor that way from it. But all the celestial bodies, being regular solid bodies, and moved in a fluid, and yet moved in circular or elliptical lines, and not straight, must have some other cause, besides the first impressed impulse, that must bend their motion into that curve. And for the performance of this effect I cannot imagine any other likely cause besides these two: The first may be from an unequal density of the medium, through which the planetary body is to be moved. . . . But the second cause of inflecting a direct motion into a curve may be from an attractive prop¬ erty of the body placed in the centre; whereby it continually endeavours to attract or draw it to itself. For if such a principle be supposed, all the phenomena of the planets seem possible to be explained by the common principle of mechanic motions; and possibly the prosecuting this specu¬ lation may give us a true hypothesis of their motion, and from some few observations, their motions may be so far brought to a certainty, that we may be able to calculate them to the greatest exactness and certainty, that can be desired (idem, VI, 265-66).

1656 that with his eyes he had clearly seen Saturn “surrounded by a thin flat ring not touching it any¬ where” (Oeuvres . . . , XV, 177, 299). Because the ring is tilted at a considerable constant angle to the plane in which Saturn revolves around the sun, it presented quite different appearances to observers from Galileo’s time on. Their bafflement was finally cleared up by Huygens’ discovery of the exterior formation, which is without any parallel. Just as the planet Saturn departs from perfect spher¬ icity, so does the planet earth. It is flattened at its two poles, thereby approximating the solid generated by an ellipse rotating about its minor axis. Then the gravi¬ tational pull felt at the earth’s equator should be A

Figure 6. Hooke’s drawing of a conical pendulum, from R. T. Gun¬

ther, Early Science in Oxford, Oxford, 1930. Courtesy of a. e. GUNTHER, F. G. S.

547

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 weaker than at the less distant poles, and Huygens’

made plain that it can be no other than a gravitating force,

pendulum clock should beat time more slowly at lower

we shall hereafter call it gravity. For the cause of that

latitudes than at higher latitudes on this oblate spheroid

centripetal force which retains the moon in its orbit will

which is our earth. All the above mentioned partial successes achieved by Copernicus, Brahe, Digges, Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, Roberval, Borelli, Hooke, and Huygens were incorpo¬ rated in the grand synthesis accomplished by Isaac Newton, who admitted that he “stood on the shoulders of giants.” His cosmos consisted of discontinuous mat¬ ter moving in continuous space and time. Newton’s matter was composed of solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles; . . . these primitive particles being solids are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them, even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces. . . . The changes of corporeal things are to be placed only in the various separations and new associations and motions of these permanent particles; compound bodies being apt to break, not in the midst of solid particles, but where those particles are laid together and only touch in a few points (Opticks, Book III, Query 31). Newton’s motion comprised the force of inertia or inactivity, “a passive principle by which bodies persist in their motion or rest, receive motion in proportion to the force impressing it, and resist as much as they are resisted” (loc. cit.). By contrast with the passive principle of inertia, there were also “active principles, such as is the cause of gravity, by which planets and comets keep their motions in their orbs, and bodies acquire great motion in falling” (loc. cit.).

5, Theorem 5, Scholium).

In the General Scholium inserted at the end of the second edition of his Mathematical Principles of Natu¬ ral Philosophy, Newton said: Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power. . . . Hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I feign no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hy¬ pothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. ... To us it is enough that gravity does really exist and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies and of our sea.

To one of his supporters Newton had previously written: “You sometimes speak of gravity as essential and inherent to matter. Pray do not ascribe that notion to me, for the cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know” (Correspondence . . . , III, 240). About a month later Newton expressed himself even more em¬ phatically to the same correspondent: That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action or force may be conveyed

Every body continues in its state ... of uniform motion in a right [straight] line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it. ... A stone, whirled about in a sling, endeavors to recede from the hand that turns it; and by that endeavor distends the sling. . . . That force which opposes itself to this endeavor, and by which the sling continually draws back the stone toward the hand and retains it in its orbit, because it is directed to the hand as the center of the orbit, I call the centripetal force. And the same thing is to be understood of all bodies revolved in any orbits. They all endeavor to recede from the centers of their orbits; and were it not for the opposition of a contrary force which restrains them to and detains them in their orbits . . . would fly off in right lines, with a uniform motion (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Axioms or Laws of Motion, Law I; Definition V).

from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that

In particular, there was a centripetal “. . . force, what¬

without relation to anything external, remains always

ever it is, by which the planets are continually drawn

similar and immovable” (Mathematical Principles . . . ,

aside from the rectilinear motions, which otherwise

Definitions, Scholium II).

they would pursue, and made to revolve in curvilinear orbits” (Definition V).

548

extend itself to all the planets (idem. Book III, Proposition

The force which retains the celestial bodies in their orbits has been hitherto called centripetal force; but it being now

I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to the consideration of my readers (op. cit.. Ill, 254).

In Newton’s cosmos there was no vacuum or void, because, as he told Robert Boyle, “I suppose that there is diffused through all places an aethereal substance capable of contraction and dilatation, strongly elastic, and in a word much like air in all respects, but far more subtle.” Newton’s subtle aether was universally diffused through his absolute space, which, “in its own nature,

No other places are immovable but those that, from infinity to infinity, do all retain the same given position one to another, and upon this account must ever remain unmoved and do thereby constitute immovable space.

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 Yet he acknowledged that “it may be that there is no

served in the more remote stars, but visible in those

body really at rest to which the places and motions

that were largest and nearest to the earth, as Giordano

of others may be referred” (idem, IV).

Bruno had surmised.

In like manner Newton’s “absolute, true, and math¬

Halley’s discovery of stellar proper motion had a

ematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows

profound effect on an acute astronomical observer,

equably without relation to anything external, and by

Thomas Wright of Durham, who in 1750 turned cos¬

another name is called ‘duration.’ ” Yet “it may be that

mological thought in a new direction. Because the stars

there is no such thing as an equable motion whereby

of the first three magnitudes are distributed irregularly

time may be accurately measured. All motions may

throughout the heavens, Wright contended that the

be accelerated and retarded, but the flowing of absolute

sun, and the solar system, cannot be located at the

time is not liable to any change” (idem, I).

center of the universe. Instead, the sun, its planets, their

In writing about the comet of 1652-53, Giovanni

satellites, and the comets are situated in the Milky

Domenico Cassini ascribed to those bodies a curved

Way. This vast ring, as Democritus had taught, contains

closed orbit, so that they would return periodically.

an immense number of closely packed stars. These lie

That the orbit was nearly parabolic was suggested by

between two parallel planes. If we direct our gaze

Borelli. On 4 May 1665, Borelli wrote from Pisa to

between these planes, we see the cumulative effect of

a private correspondent, requesting him to treat as

the light emanating from the stars in the Milky Way.

confidential “until further attention and events throw

On the other hand, the rest of the heavens outside the

light on the truth,” the idea that

Milky Way shows us only scattered constellations. The

the real movement of the present comet [of 1664-65] can

other similar formations being visible elsewhere in the

on no account be along a straight line, but along a curve so similar to a parabola as to be astonishing, and this is shown not only by computation but also by a mechanical contrivance, which I shall demonstrate to you when I arrive in Florence (Lettere . . . , I, 130-31; trans. E. R.).

Then in 1668 parabolic movement was publicly as¬

Milky Way, however, is only one such aggregation, heavens. All the stars, including our sim, move round some still unknown common center. Wright likened their movement to that of the innumerable tiny bodies whirling around Saturn and appearing to us as that planet’s compoimd ring. An extensive summary of Wright’s novel ideas was

cribed to comets by Hewelke (Hevelius). When the

promptly

great comet of 1680 made a very close approach to

spondent in London to a Hamburg journal. This report

dispatched by

an

alert

German

corre¬

the sun, Hewelke’s follower, Georg Samuel Dorffel, in

caught the eye of a young man then unsuccessfully

1681 computed a parabolic orbit, with the sun in one

pursuing the career of a private tutor. Immanuel Kant,

focus. Thereafter Newton showed that the cometary

however, went far beyond Wright, who was theolog¬

path was really an ellipse, the visible portion of which

ically oriented. Taking the precaution of publishing his

might be indistinguishable from a parabola. Edmond

Allgemeine Naturgeschichte (1755), subtitled (in trans¬

Halley, without whom Newton’s Mathematical Princi¬

lation) Essay on the . . . Mechanical Origin of the

ples of Natural Philosophy might never have been

Whole Universe, anonymously, Kant undertook to set

published, then computed the orbits of twenty-four

forth a natural history of the heavens, or evolution of

comets. By scrutinizing earlier descriptions of them,

the cosmos. He argued, for example, that the moon

when they were still regarded as nonrepeating phe¬

is more recent than the earth. In its original state the

nomena, he identified periodic returns of the same

moon was fluid. The gravitational attraction exerted

body. For instance, the comet observed by Apian in

on this lunar fluid by die earth in due course slowed

1531 was identical with that described by Kepler in

the moon’s axial rotation down to the time required

1607 and studied by Halley himself in 1682. Thus a

by the moon to revolve once around the earth. Recip¬

new regular member was added to the family of celes¬

rocally, the earth’s day is gradually lengthening, and

tial bodies. Instead of being an unanticipated inter¬

in the remote future will coincide with the month.

loper, the comet was now an orderly constituent of

When that condition occurs, only one side of the earth

the cosmos.

will always be presented to the moon, and the two

Halley discovered that the latitude of three conspic¬ uous stars had altered perceptibly since antiquity.

bodies will journey through space face to face, so to speak.

Consequently he suggested that the stars, whose angu¬

Like the ancient atomists, Kant started his cosmic

lar distances from one another had seemed unchanged

history with an initial stage in which primitive vapor¬

throughout the ages, wherefore they had traditionally

ous matter was universally dispersed. Through the

been called the “fixed stars,” had their own particular

operation of Newtonian attraction, heavier particles

or proper motions. These were imperceptible or unob¬

attracted lighter, which were deflected from their rec-

549

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 tilinear path by mutual repulsion. The resulting whirl¬ ing in a disk produced the cosmic bodies, which still

(.Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 74 [1784], 260).

continue to revolve in the same orbit, direction, and plane. This formation of an orderly system occurred

While investigating the properties of sunlight, which

not only around that center of attraction which is our

Newton had demonstrated to be composed of differ¬

sun but also around an infinite number of similar suns

ently refracted rays related to the colors of the spec¬

infinitely distant. Yet they all constitute a single system

trum, Herschel found that the various colors are linked

related to a single center. This process has already gone

with different heating effects. These increased toward

on for millions of centuries, and will continue to do

the red end of the spectrum, but did not stop there. “The full red falls still short of the maximum of heat;

so for myriads of millions of centuries. The distribution of Kant’s cosmogony was delayed

which perhaps lies even a little beyond visible refrac¬

by its publisher’s bankruptcy. In any case a rival view

tion. In this case radiant heat will at least partly, if

was propounded by the celebrated French astronomer

not chiefly, consist ... of invisible light” (op. cit.

Pierre Simon de Laplace about half a century later.

[1800], p. 272). Herschel’s discovery in 1800 of the

Unlike Kant, whose critics objected that his combina¬

infrared radiation beyond one end of the spectrum was

tion of attraction with repulsion could never produce

promptly followed by the finding of chemical reactions

a rotational motion, Laplace started his cosmos with

beyond the violet end of the spectrum in 1801. Thus

a “protosun” already undergoing a slow axial eastward

the spectrum was revealed to be only the visible por¬

rotation. This immense vaporous mass was initially

tion of a more extensive radiation possessing continuous

fiercely hot. Slowly it cooled, contracted, and speeded

properties.

up. At its outer edge, when centrifugal force matched

In his Dialogue of 1632 Galileo had proposed a

the attraction to the center, a ring around the equator

method of proving the Copemican thesis that the earth

became detached. This was only the first such product

revolves around the sun. This orbital motion should

in a series of such crises. A ring might condense into

produce the optical effect of a larger annual parallax

a separate planet, which then proceeded to spin off

in a nearby star than in a distant star situated nearly

satellites of its own. Or a ring might disintegrate into

along the same line of sight. In pursuit of this so-called

a group of small planets, such as was discovered be¬

differential parallax Herschel undertook to discover

tween Mars and Jupiter at the turn of the century.

and catalogue such pairs of stars. It had recently been

Or a ring might persist in the form discovered by

pointed out that double stars, being too numerous to

Huygens in Saturn. Laplace published his nebular hy¬

be the result of a random scattering throughout the

pothesis in four successively developed versions ex¬

heavens, must in at least some cases form a physically

tending

connected pair. Herschel reasoned that “as the mutual

over

a

period

of

twenty-eight

years

(1796-1824).

cient to account for the union of two stars, we are

to the bodies composing the solar system, the stars were

authorised to ascribe such combinations to that princi¬

the chief subject of William Herschel’s scrutiny. By

ple” (op. cit. [1802], p. 485). The effect of Newtonian

discovering Uranus far beyond Saturn and thereby

gravitational attraction in uniting such binary stars

making in 1781 the first addition to the family of

exemplified the essential unity of the cosmos.

planets in historic times, Herschel was enabled to for¬

A binary may consist of two components differing

sake music as his means of livelihood and devote his

in brightness. As the fainter star passes in front of its

undivided talents to the advancement of science, pre¬

brighter partner, the latter’s light diminishes. The first

viously his passionate hobby.

such periodically variable star was detected in 1596

Herschel discovered the period of Saturn’s axial

by Kepler’s correspondent, David Fabricius, a minister

rotation with only a minute error. He did the same

who was murdered by an enraged parishioner. Fabric¬

for Mars, whose white polar caps he showed were

ius’ Mira Ceti varies in a long period averaging 330

subject to seasonal fluctuations:

days from its brightest as a star of the second magnitude

If . . .we find that the globe we inhabit has its polar regions frozen and covered with mountains of ice and snow, that only partly melt when alternately exposed to the sun, I may well be permitted to surmise that the same causes may probably have the same effect on the globe of Mars; that

550

gravitation of bodies towards each other is quite suffi¬

While Laplace’s attention was directed principally

down to its minimum of ninth magnitude, invisible to the naked eye. On the other hand, such a short-period variable as Algol was known to complete its cycle in about 69 hours. Herschel found a variable having a period of about two months, lying in the interval be¬

the bright polar spots are owing to the vivid reflection of

tween a few days and a year, and bringing the variables

light from frozen regions; and that the reduction of those

into a single class of stars, with which he associated

spots is to be ascribed to their being exposed to the sun

our sun.

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 Herschel was convinced “that there is not, in strict¬ ness of speaking, one fixed star in the heavens,” and that our sun too must have its own proper motion (Armitage, p. 94). As a German contemporary had pointed out, when we take a walk through the woods, the trees in front of us seem to move farther apart as we approach them, while those behind us appear to close up. By analogy, if the solar system of which our earth is a part is moving toward some point in the heavens, which Herschel called the “apex of the solar motion,” then the stars in that direction should seem to open out, whereas those in the opposite direc¬ tion should appear to come closer together. By analyz¬ ing the then known proper motions Herschel located the apex somewhere near Lambda in the constellation Hercules, a conclusion regarded by astronomers today as reasonably close to the truth (Figure 7).

projected into a great circle, which will appear lucid on account of the accumulation of the stars; while the rest of the heavens, at the sides, will only seem to be scattered over with constellations, more or less crowded, according to the distance of the planes or number of stars contained in the thickness or sides of the stratum (Philosophical Trans¬ actions . . . , 74 [1784], 442-43). In the hope of determining the sun’s place within the

Milky Way

Herschel

introduced a

statistical

method in stellar astronomy. Dividing the sky into hundreds of regions, he directed his telescope to each region in turn, and counted the stars visible therein. As he thus “gaged the heavens,” he could see many more stars in some directions than in others. The more tightly packed they were, the farther out they extended into space. Herschel surmised that our sun is situated “very probably not far from the place” of division of

Herschel placed the sun in

the Milky Way, that “very extensive, branching, com¬

the Milky Way, which undoubtedly is nothing but a stratum of fixed stars. . . . This . . . immense starry bed is not of equal breadth or lustre in every part, nor runs on in one straight direction, but is curved and even divided into two streams along a very considerable portion of it. . . . Suppose a number of stars arranged between two parallel planes, indefinitely extended every way, but at a given considerable distance from each other; and, calling this a sidereal stratum, an eye placed somewhere within it will see all the stars in the direction of the planes of the stratum

pound Congeries of many millions of stars” constituting a “detached Nebula” or island universe, bounded on all sides by empty space (op. cit., 75 [1785], 244, 254). “It may not be amiss to point out some other very remarkable Nebulae which cannot well be less, but are probably much larger than our own system,” from which they are separated by vast distances, no less vast than those by which they are separated from one an¬ other (idem, 258). In many star clusters Herschel noted “a number of lucid spots, of equal lustre, scattered over a circular space, in such a manner as to appear gradually more compressed towards the middle” (op. cit., 79 [1789], 214). Those clusters showing the greatest density “must have been the longest exposed to the action of” cen¬ tripetal force.

Utilizing the implications of Olaus

Romer’s demonstration that the transmission of light is not instantaneous but requires a finite time, Herschel maintained that a telescope with a power of penetrating into space . . . has also ... a power of penetrating into time past. . . . When we see an object of the calculated distance at which one of these very remote nebulae may still be perceived, the rays of light which convey its image to the eye, must have been . . . almost two millions of years on their way; and . . . consequently, so many years ago, this object must already have had an existence in the sidereal heavens, in order to send out those rays by which we now perceive it (op. cit. [1802], pp. 498-99). Herschel became convinced that not every nebulos¬ ity could be resolved by increased telescopic power into an aggregation of stars. In the middle of some Figure

7. The Starry stratum and the Milky Way, from Angus

Armitage, William Herschel, London, 1962. ROYAL SOCIETY, LONDON.

Courtesy

of

the

nebulae he saw a somewhat greater brightness, which could serve as “a seat of attraction” for the formation of stars.

551

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 Sincfe we are already acquainted with the centripetal force of attraction which gives a globular figure to planets, keeps them from flying out of their orbits in tangents, and makes one star revolve around another, why should we not look up to the universal gravitation of matter as the cause of every condensation, accumulation, compression, and con¬ centration of the nebulous matter? (op. cit. [1811], p. 284). For “what might be called the growth of stars” “mil¬ lions of years perhaps are but moments.” “We have an eternity of past duration to recur to.” For cosmologists the nineteenth century opened most auspiciously with the discovery of an asteroid on the very first evening of the new century. The succes¬ sive distances of the planets from the sun had showed

Galle, an assistant at the Berlin Observatory, the two countries not being at war: I would like to find a persistent observer who would be willing to devote some time to an examination of a part of the sky in which there may be a planet to discover. I have been led to this conclusion by the theory of Uranus. ... I demonstrate that it is impossible to satisfy the obser¬ vations of Uranus without introducing the action of a new planet, thus far unknown; and remarkably, there is only one single position in the ecliptic where this perturbing planet can be located. . . . The mass of the planet allows us to conclude that its apparent diameter is more than 3" [three seconds] of arc (Grosser, pp. 115-16).

a disproportionately wide gap between Mars and

Leverrier’s communication reached Galle on 23 Sep¬

Jupiter. In that gap the relatively tiny asteroids (as this

tember 1846. Two days later Galle replied: “The planet

class of cosmic bodies was constituted and christened

whose position you have pointed out actually exists.

by Herschel) have been found in great numbers. Since

The same day that I received your letter, I found a

their brightness fluctuates considerably, their shape

star of the eighth magnitude. . . . The observations

to

made the following day determined that this was the

Herschel on 17 June 1802, Wilhelm Olbers, the dis¬

sought-for planet”—Neptune. Further examples of in¬

coverer of the second asteroid, suggested that the two

ternational cooperation in the peaceful investigation

known asteroids might be “just a pair of fragments, of

of our cosmos were provided by corrections of Lever¬

portions of a once greater planet which at one time

rier’s computations by John Couch Adams in England

occupied its proper place between Mars and Jupiter,

and Benjamin Peirce at Harvard.

may be

irregular

rather

than

round.

Writing

and was in size more analogous to the other planets,

Later unexplained perturbations of Uranus as well

and perhaps millions of years ago, had, either through

as irregularities in the motion of Neptune led to a

the impact of a comet, or from an internal explosion,

search in the twentieth century for a trans-Neptunian

burst into pieces” (Lubbock, p. 273).

planet. Pluto was found in 1930 by an American farmer

An alternative origin of the asteroids was proposed

and amateur astronomer, Clyde W. Tombaugh, who

about a century later by two American scientists. Con¬

detected in photographic plates exposed two days apart

vinced that the technical defects in the nebular hy¬

a shift in an image of the fifteenth magnitude. This

pothesis could not be overcome, they imagined that

most recently discovered satellite of our sun turned

in the remote past while our sun still had no planets,

out to be much less of a giant than its four closest

it was approached by another star closely enough to raise huge tides upon it. Where the matter ejected by

neighbors. The art of photography, invented in the nineteenth

the sun was dominated by a nucleus, a planet was

century, proved to be of inestimable value to the cos-

formed. But the asteroids or planetoids occupy a region

mologist. It provided him with a precise, impersonal,

in which no dominating nucleus existed to assemble

and permanent record of the object or field he was

them as a single planet. Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus led to a search for earlier determinations of its position, which

552

matician, U. J. J. Leverrier, wrote to Johann Gottfried

investigating. It could make faint objects or details visible by prolonging the exposure, since the action of light on the sensitive plate is cumulative.

had often been noted under the mistaken impression

At least equally valuable is spectroscopy. When

that it was a star. When these prior observations were

sunlight was passed through a narrow slit and then

compared with those made after Herschel’s discovery,

dispersed by a prism, Joseph Fraunhofer noticed that

it was found that the two sets of data could not be

the continuous bright band of color in the solar spec¬

combined into a unified dieory of the motions of

trum ranging from red at one end to violet at the other

Uranus. Moreover, the computed tables of the planet’s

was crossed by many narrow dark lines. These Fraun¬

places increasingly diverged from fresh observations.

hofer lines, as they were later called, signified that some

Hence the suspicion grew that Herschel’s planet was

constituents were missing from sunlight. Laboratory

subject to perturbations caused by an unknown cosmic

investigations subsequently showed that every chemical

body. Could the position of this trans-Uranian planet

substance, when heated to incandescence, gives off its

at a given time be mathematically deduced from its

own characteristic line spectrum. When light from a

disturbing effect on Uranus? A young French mathe¬

hotter source passes through a cooler gas, the latter

COSMOLOGY FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1850 absorbs and does not transmit those components of the

with an accompanying output of energy approximating

source’s light that correspond to the bright lines in the

the present radiation of the sun. The other stars may

spectrum of the gas. Bright lines in the spectra of some

be considered to be similar atomic furnaces at various

common chemical elements were shown by Gustav

stages of development.

Kirchhoff to coincide with dark lines in the solar spec¬

On the basis of the different kinds of spectra which

trum. He therefore concluded that these elements were

they exhibit the stars have been grouped into a number

present in the atmosphere of the sim. Then that body

of classes capable of being arranged in a single se¬

consists of an intensely hot core surrounded by layers

quence. These various types have been viewed as suc¬

of somewhat cooler gases containing in incandescent

cessive chronological stages in the evolution of the

form chemical elements found on the earth. The spec¬

stars, some of which are giants while others are dwarfs.

tra of the other stars likewise reveal the presence in

Variable stars of a certain variety have been regarded

them of known terrestrial chemical elements. In one

as gaseous spheres alternately expanding and contract¬

case, helium was first detected spectroscopically in the

ing rhythmically in response to balanced opposing

sun before its existence on the earth was discovered,

forces of gravitational attraction and internal pressure.

and its lightness and noninflammability utilized in bal¬

When the latter crosses a critical threshold, the result¬

loons. Spectroscopy has proved that the cosmos is built

ing explosion produces a nova. After it subsides, in its

up of the same elements throughout its enormous

defunct state the former nova resembles the so-called

extent.

planetary nebula.

When a chemical element is heated to incandescence

Ingenious measurements of the velocity of light on

in the laboratory, its line spectrum coincides with that

the surface of the earth showed that this velocity was

derived from its counterpart in a distant star. A dis¬

unaffected by the direction. Whether the beam of light

placement of the corresponding lines may indicate that

traveled in the direction of the earth’s orbital motion

the two sources are not at rest with respect to each

or in the opposite direction, the speed remained the

other. If they are in relative motion, a displacement

same. This experimental result was combined by Albert

toward the violet end of the spectrum indicates a

Einstein with his own theoretical analysis to yield the

lessening of the distance between them. On the other

postulate that the velocity of light is a constant of

hand, a displacement toward the red end of the spec¬

nature. Accordingly he dismissed as superfluous the

trum signifies an increase of the distance between them.

supposed existence of a luminiferous aether, widely

This principle was formulated by Christian Doppler

accepted throughout the nineteenth century. He like¬

in 1842. Since then the spectra of remote nebulae have

wise denied the reality of absolute space and absolute

exhibited a shift toward the red.

Regarded as a

time, insisting that all motion is relative, with no sys¬

“Doppler effect,” this red shift indicates that these

tem of coordinates possessing any privileged status.

nebulae are receding into space at speeds proportional

Thus the fundamental underpinning of the Newtonian

to their distances from us, with important implications

synthesis was removed to make way for the sweeping

for the history of the cosmos.

rival speculative cosmologies of the twentieth century.

Whereas it had always been assumed that the atom as the ultimate constituent of matter was indivisible, in 1896 Henri Beequerel discovered that uranium and its compounds in their natural state spontaneously gave off an invisible radiation capable of affecting a photo¬ graphic plate. When similar radioactivity was found in other heavy chemical elements, their atoms were regarded as breaking down into lighter atoms, while the process of disintegration was marked by the emis¬ sion of charged particles. The rate at which this trans¬ formation proceeds can be computed and used to form an estimate of the age of the earth. Such release of energy stored up within the atom was soon accomplished artificially by man-made de¬ vices. An atomic nucleus bombarded by particles pen¬ etrating it at extremely high velocities was transformed into a different atomic nucleus. At the enormous tem¬ peratures prevailing in the interior of the sun thermo¬ nuclear reactions could convert hydrogen into helium

BIBLIOGRAPHY Al-Birani, The Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology, trans. R. Ramsay Wright (London, 1934). A. Armitage, A Century of Astronomy (London, 1950); idem, William Herschel (New York, 1962). For G. A. Borelli, see Lettere inedite di uomini illustri, ed. Angelo Fabroni, 2 vols. (Florence, 1773-75). S. G. F. Brandon, Creation Legends of the Ancient Near East (Mystic, Conn., 1963). David R. Dicks, Early Greek Astronomy to Aristotle (London, 1970). For Geminus, see M. R. Cohen and I. E. Drabkin, A Source Book in Greek Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1966). Morton Grosser, The Discovery of Neptune (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 115-16, translating from the French text in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 71 (1910-11), 278-79. W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, 3 vols. (New York, 1962, 1965, 1969). T. L. Heath, Aristarchus of Samos (Oxford, 1959). M. A. Hoskin, William Herschel and the Construction of the Heavens (Chicago, 1968). Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres completes . . .

553

COSMOLOGY SINCE 1850 (The Hague, 1888-1950). Johannes Kepler, Gesammelte Werke (Munich, 1937—); see also idem, Mysterium cosmographicum (1596; 2nd ed., 1621), Note 3, Ch. 20. A. Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1968); idem, La revolution astronomique (Paris, 1961) ; idem, Newtonian Studies (Chicago, 1968). B. and J. Lovell, Discovering the Universe (New York, 1963). Con¬ stance A. Lubbock, The Herschel Chronicle (Cambridge, 1933). H. Messel and S. T. Butler, The Universe and its Origin (New York, 1964). M. K. Munitz, ed.. Theories of the Universe (New York, 1965). O. Neugebauer, Astronomical Cuneiform Texts (Princeton, 1955); idem, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, 2nd ed. (New York, 1969); idem and R. A. Parker, Egyptian Astronomical Texts (Providence, 1960-68). Isaac Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1959-67). Nicholas Oresme, Le Livre du del et du monde, eds. Menut and Denomy (Madison, 1968). A. Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy (New York, 1961). Ptolemy, Planetary Hypotheses, Book I, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Sodety, new series, 57 (1967), Part 4, p. 8. A. Romer, ed., The Discovery of Radioactivity and Transmutation (New York, 1964). E. Rosen, ed.. Three Copernican Treatises, 3rd ed. (New York, 1971); idem, ed., Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger (New York, 1965); idem, ed., Kepler’s Somnium (Madison, 1967). Edward Sachau, Alberuni’s India, 2 vols. (Lahore, 1962) . H. Shapley, ed., Source Book in Astronomy, 1900-1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960). E. T. Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, 2 vols. (New York, 1910; 1960). Wanda Wolska, La topographie chretienne de Cosmos Indicopleustes (Paris, 1962). Translations identified as E. R. are by the author of this article.

tions ranging all the way from the motion of the planets to the behavior of the tides on the earth. The great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mathematicians such as Euler, Laplace, Lagrange, Hamilton, and Gauss had cast the Newtonian laws into beautiful and magnificent

mathematical

forms

which

had

their

greatest applications to celestial mechanics. Astrono¬ mers happily used these techniques to show how excel¬ lent was the agreement between observation and the¬ ory. The two domains of physics that still lay outside the Newtonian laws—electromagnetism and optics— were also soon to be incorporated into a satisfying theoretical structure. In the year 1865, James Clerk Maxwell published his famous papers on his electro¬ magnetic theory of light, which gave a precise and beautiful mathematical formulation of Faraday’s ex¬ perimental discoveries, unified electricity, magnetism, and optics, and opened up the whole field of electro¬ magnetic technology. Thus, at the end of the first decade of the last forty years of the nineteenth century, everything seemed to fall neatly into place in the world of science. To the scientists of that period, the universe appeared to be a well ordered arrangement of celestial bodies moving about in an infinite expanse of absolute space, and with all the events in the universe occurring in a unique and absolute sequence in time. There was no question at that time as to the correctness of this Newtonian universe based on the concepts of absolute space and time; only the observational and experimental details were lacking to make the picture complete, and

EDWARD ROSEN [See also Astrology; Atomism; Cosmic Fall; Cosmic Images; Cosmic Voyages; Islamic Conception; Pythagorean Har¬ mony; Relativity; Space; Time and Measurement.]

everyone was confident that, with improved technol¬ ogy, these details would be obtained in time. This absolute concept of the universe and of the laws of nature

was

very

satisfying

to

the

late

nine¬

teenth-century man, who saw in the orderly and abso¬ lute scheme of things the demonstration of the Divine Omnipotence which he worshipped and which gave him the reason for his existence; moreover, the infini¬

COSMOLOGY SINCE 1850 I. INTRODUCTION The last forty years

of the nineteenth century were

among the most remarkable in the history of science, for this was a period of amazing scientific achievements and contradictions; on the one hand classical physics and astronomy were enjoying some of their greatest

tude of space and time required by the Newtonian universe was also required by the concept of an in¬ finitely powerful deity, as described by Alexander Pope: He sees with equal eye as God of all A hero perish or a sparrow fall; Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d; And now a bubble burst, and now a world. (An Essay on Man III. 87-90)

successes during this period, but at the same time observational and experimental data, which were ulti¬ mately to overthrow the classical laws of physics, were slowly being collected. Until the year 1860 physics and

554

II. DISCREPANCIES IN THE NEWTONIAN UNIVERSE

astronomy were dominated by Newton’s concepts of

But even while this neat, orderly scheme of the

space and time and by his laws of mechanics and

universe was being eagerly incorporated into Victorian

gravitation; these seemed sufficient to explain observa¬

philosophical and social concepts, its very basis was

COSMOLOGY SINCE 1850 being undermined by experimental and observational

geometry of actual space might not be Euclidean. He

data, and by logical analysis in four different realms

proposed the following ideas: (1) that small portions

of physics and astronomy: in the realm of optics, the

of space are, in fact, of a nature analogous to little

experiments of Michelson and Morley on the speed of

hills on a surface which is, on the average, flat—

light were to destroy the Newtonian concepts of abso¬

namely, that the ordinary laws of geometry are not

lute space and time and to replace them by the Einsteinian space-time concept (the special theory of rela¬ tivity); in the realm of radiation, the discoveries of the

valid in them; (2) that this property of being curved or distorted is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave;

properties of the radiation emitted by hot bodies were

(3) that this variation of the curvature of space is what

to upset the Maxwell wave-theory of light and to

really happens in that phenomenon which we call

introduce the quantum theory (the photon) with its

motion of matter, whether ponderable or ethereal; (4)

wave-particle dualism; in the realm of observational

that in the physical world nothing else takes place but

astronomy, the discrepancy between the deductions

this variation, subject (possibly) to the laws of con¬ tinuity.

from Newtonian gravitational theory and the observed motion of Mercury (the advance of its perihelion) indicated the need for a new gravitational theory which Einstein produced in 1914 (the general theory of relativity); finally, in the realm of cosmology, var¬ ious

theoretical

analyses

showed

that

the

nine¬

teenth-century models of the universe, constructed with Newtonian gravitational theory and space-time concepts, were in serious contradiction with stellar observations. Although the investigation of each of these depar¬ tures from classical physics is of extreme importance and each one has an important bearing on the most recent cosmological theories, we limit ourselves here to the cosmological realm and, where necessary in our discussion, use the results of modern physics without concern about how they were obtained. However, before we discuss the difficulties inherent in Newtonian cosmology, we must consider one other important nineteenth-century

discovery which,

at

the

time,

seemed to have no bearing on the structure of the

Clifford summarized his opinion as follows: The hypothesis that space is not homaloidal and, again, that its geometrical character may change with time may or may not be destined to play a great part in the physics of the future; yet we cannot refuse to consider them as possible explanations of physical phenomena because they may be opposed to the popular dogmatic belief in the universality of certain geometrical axioms—belief which has arisen from centuries of indiscriminating worship of the genius of Euclid. These were, indeed, prophetic words, for, as we shall see, in the hands of Einstein the non-Euclidean geome¬ tries became the very foundation of modern cosmo¬ logical theory. But let us first examine the flaws and difficulties inherent in the Newtonian cosmology of the nineteenth century.

III. CONTRADICTIONS IN THE NEWTONIAN COSMOLOGY

universe but which ultimately played a most important

We first consider what is now called the Olbers

role in the development of cosmology. This was the

paradox, a remarkable conclusion about the appear¬

discovery of the non-Euclidean geometries by Gauss,

ance of the night sky deduced by Heinrich Olbers in

Bolyai, Lobachevsky, Riemann, and Klein. At the time

1826. Olbers was greatly puzzled by the fact that the

that these non-Euclidean geometries were discovered,

night sky (when no moon is present) appears as dark

and for many years following, scientists in general

as it does instead of as bright as the sun, which, he

considered them to be no more than mathematical

reasoned, is how it should appear if the basic New¬

curiosities, with no relevance to the structure of the

tonian concepts of space and time were correct. In

universe or to the nature of actual space. Most mathe¬ maticians and scientists simply took it for granted

be infinite in extent, with the average density and the

deducing this paradox, Olbers assumed the universe to

that the geometry of physical space is Euclidean and

average luminosity of the stars to be the same every¬

that the laws of physics must conform to Euclidean

where and at all times. He assumed, further, that space

geometry.

is Euclidean and that there are no large systematic

This attitude, however, was not universal and Gauss

movements of the stars. With these assumptions we

himself, the spiritual father of non-Euclidean geometry,

can see, as Olbers did, that each point of the night

proposed a possible (but in practice, unrealizable) test

sky should appear as bright as each point of the surface

of the flatness of space by measuring the interior angles

of the sun (or any other average star). The reason for

of a large spatial triangle constructed in the neigh¬

this is that if the stars were distributed as assumed,

borhood of the earth. Also, the mathematician W. K.

a line directed from our eye to any point in space

Clifford, in The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences

would ultimately hit a star so that the whole sky should

(1870; reprint, New York, 1946), speculated that the

appear to be covered with stars.

555

COSMOLOGY SINCE 1850 Until quite recently this apparent paradox was taken as a very strong argument against an infinite Newtonian universe (or at least against Olbers’ assumptions) but E. R. Harrison (1965) has shown that Olbers’ conclu¬ sions are contrary to the principle of conservation of energy. To understand this, we first note that a star (like the sun) can radiate energy at its present rate for only a finite time because only a finite amount of nuclear fuel is available for this release of energy. Now if we assume that stars (or galaxies) are distributed everywhere the way we observe them to be in our part of the universe, it would take about 1023 years before the radiation from these stars would fill the universe to give the effect deduced by Olbers. But all stars would have used up their nuclear fuel long before this time and their luminosities would have changed drasticallv. Thus Olbers’ assumption that the luminosities of the stars do not change during their lifetimes is not tenable. Harrison has shown that the radiation emitted bv stars in a period of about 1010 years (which, on the basis of modem theories we may take as a reasonable estimate of the age of the universe) should give just about the kind of night sky we observe. Although Harrison’s analysis of the Olbers paradox removes this flaw in a static infinite Newtonian uni¬ verse, another difficulty, first pointed out by Seeliger in 1895 and also by C. G. Neumann, still remains. In a static Newtonian universe (one which is not expand¬ ing), -with stars (or galaxies) extending uniformly out to infinity, the gravitational force at each point must be infinitely large, which is contrary to what we actu¬ ally observe. This difficulty with a Newtonian universe can be expressed somewhat differently by considering the behavior of the elements of matter in it. These elements could not remain fixed but would move to¬ wards each other so that the universe could not be static. In fact, a Newtonian universe can remain static onlv if the density of matter in it is everywhere zero. To overcome this difficulty Neumann

(1895)

and

Seeliger (1895) altered Newton’s law of gravity by the addition of a repulsive term which is very small for small distances but becomes very large at large dis¬ tances from the observer. In this way a static, but modified, Newtonian universe can be constructed. We may also exclude a Newtonian universe of in¬ finite extent in space but containing only a finite amount of matter. The principal difficulty with such a universe is that, in time, matter would become in¬ finitely dispersed or it would all coalesce into a single globule—contrary' to observation.

556

without the addition of a repulsive term to Newton’s law of force) could not lead to a static model of the universe, most scientists lost interest in the cosmologi¬ cal problem and very little work was done in this field until the whole subject was dramatically reopened by Einstein in 1917, when he published his famous paper on relativistic cosmology. New life w'as suddenly given to cosmology by the appearance of this paper, since it now appeared that the flaws in Newtonian cosmol¬ ogy would be eliminated with the introduction of the Einsteinian space-time concept. As we shall presently see, this is indeed true, but difficulties still arise because a number of different model universes can be obtained from general relativity theory, and we are then left with the problem of deciding which of these is the correct model. This is a somewhat unsatisfactory situa¬ tion since one of the purposes of a theory is to restrict the theoretical models that can be deduced from it to just those that we actually observe in nature; but in spite of this drawback, we must turn to the general theory of relativity for an understanding of cosmology, since it is the best theory of space and time that we now have and Newtonian theory has certainly been disproved. However, before we can discuss relativistic cosmology meaningfully, we must understand the basic concepts of the theory of relativity itself. This theory was developed in two stages: the first (1905) is called the special or restricted theory of relativity and the second (1915) is called the general theory. The basic feature of the special theory is that all observers moving with uniform speed in straight lines relative to the distant background stars (such observers are said to be moving in inertial frames of reference) are equivalent in the eyes of nature, in the sense that the laws of nature are the same for all of them. Put differently, the special theory states that an obseryer in an inertial frame cannot determine his state of motion by any kind of experiment (or observation) performed entirely in his frame of reference (that is, without referring to the background stars). Before the time of Einstein, this formulation of the special theory was accepted by physicists only insofar as it applied to the laws of Newtonian mechanics. They believed that an observer in an inertial frame could not detect his uniform motion by means of any mechanical exper¬ iment, but they assumed that the principle did not apply to optical phenomena and that an inertial ob¬ server could detect his motion through the ether (whose existence had been postulated to account for the prop¬ agation of light) by observing the way light moves (that is, by measuring the speed of light) in various directions

IV. COSMOLOGY AM? THE THEORY

in his frame of reference. Physicists believed this to

OF RELATIVITY

be so because the Newtonian concepts of absolute

When it became apparent at the end of the nineteenth century that pure Newtonian theory (that is,

space and absolute time lead precisely to this very conclusion.

COSMOLOGY SIXCE 1850 One can deduce from these concepts that the speed

which all observers measure the same space-time in¬

of light is not the same in all directions, as measured

terval. We may state this somewhat differently by

by a moving observer—the measured value of the

saving that the univ erse of the special theory of rela¬

speed of light should be a maximum for a beam of

tivity is a four-dimensional space-time universe gov¬

light moving against the motion of the observer and

erned by Euclidean geometry. The last part of this

a minimum for a beam moving in the same direction

statement is important since it is equivalent to saying

as the observer. This deduction, however, is contrarv

that the square of the space-time interval in a universe

to the experimental evidence. In 1887 Michelson and

governed by special relativity is exactly cP-c^t2. In such

Morley demonstrated experimentallv that the speed of

a universe, free bodies (bodies that are not pulled or

light is the same in all directions for all inertial ob¬

pushed by ropes, or rods, or by some other force) move

servers. Thus the constancy of the speed of light for

in straight lines in space-time.

all such observ ers must be accepted as a law of nature.

We must now see howr this theory, which is restricted

This means, as emphasized by Einstein, that the special

to observ ers in inertial frames of reference, is to be

theory of relativity must apply to optical phenomena

extended when we introduce gravitational fields and

just as it does to mechanical phenomena, so that an

observers undergoing any arbitrary7 kind of motion

observer in an inertial frame cannot deduce his state

(rotation, linear acceleration, etc.). That the theory as

of motion from optical phenomena. Since this is con¬

it stands that is, the special theory of relativity) is not

trary to the deductions from the Newtonian concepts

equipped to treat observ ers in accelerated frames of

of absolute space and absolute time, Einstein rejected

reference or to deal with gravitational fields can be

these absolute Newtonian notions and replaced them

seen easily enough if we keep in mind that the special

by relative time and relative space.

theory is based on the premiss that all inertial observ ers

To illustrate the essential difference between the two

are equal in the eyes of nature and that there is no

concepts (absolute and relative) we may consider two

observation, mechanical or optical, that an inertial

events separated in space by a certain distance d and

observer can make to indicate how he is moving.

in time by the interval t as measured by some particular

Now it appears at first sight that such a statement

observer in an inertial frame. Now, according to the

cannot be made about observ ers in accelerated frames

absolute concepts of Newton, all other inertial ob¬

of reference since the acceleration causes objects to

servers recording these two events would find the same

depart from straight line motion. If one is in a train

distance d between them and the same interv al t. This

which is moving at constant speed in a straight line,

is what Einstein denies, for, as we have noted, this

objects in the train behave just as they would if the

contradicts the observed fact that the speed of light

train w ere standing still: thus one can as easily pour

is the same in all directions for all observers. This

coffee into a cup when the train is moving with con¬

means that the distance d and the time interval t are

stant speed as when it is at rest. But any departure

different for observers moving with different speeds,

from constant motion (that is, any kind of acceleration)

so that space and time separately vary as we pass from

can at once be detected, because such things as pouring

one inertial frame to another. The special theory of

liquids from one vessel into another become extremely

relativity replaces the separate absolute Newtonian

difficult. We should therefore be able to detect that

concepts of space and time with a single absolute

we are in an accelerated frame by observing just such

space-time concept for any two events, which is con¬

phenomena. It thus appears that inertial frames of

structed as follows by any observer: Let this observer

reference and accelerated frames are not equivalent.

measure the distance between these two events and

This, then, at first blush, would seem to eliminate the

square this number to obtain d2. Next, let him measure

possibility of generalizing the theory of relativity. But

the time interval between the two events and square

we shall presently see just how Einstein overcame this

this to obtain t2. He now constructs the numerical

difficulty.

quantity dr-c2t2, where c is the speed of light. This

That the law of gravity, as stated by Newton, is not

quantity, which is called the square of the space-time

in conformitv with the special theory of relativity, is

interval between the two events, is the same for all

evident from the fact that, according to this theory,

observers moving in different inertial frames of refer¬

clocks, measuring rods, and masses change when

ence.

viewed from different inertial frames of reference. But,

We see from this that the absolute three-dimensional

according to Newton’s law7 of gravity, the gravitational

Newtonian spatial universe, with its events unfolding

force between tw o bodies is expressed in terms of the

in a unique (absolute) temporal sequence, is replaced

masses of the bodies and the distance between them

bv a four-dimensional space-time universe in which the

at a definite instant of time. Hence this force can have

spatial separation and the time interval between any

no absolute meaning—in fact, there is no meaningful

two events varv from observer to observer, but in

wav for an inertial observ er to calculate this force since

OO/

COSMOLOGY SINCE 1850

558

he has no way of knowing which values to use for the

speed in a gravitational field means that the inertial

masses of the two bodies and the distance between

mass and the gravitational mass of a body must be

them. This breakdown of the Newtonian law of gravity,

equal.

and the impossibility of incorporating accelerated

This remarkable fact had been considered as no more

frames of reference in the framework of special rela¬

than a numerical coincidence before Einstein devel¬

tivity, convinced Einstein that a generalization of the

oped his general theory of relativity. Einstein started

theory of relativity was not only necessary, but possi¬

out on the assumption that the equality of the inertial

ble. For if it were not possible to generalize the theory,

and gravitational masses of a body is not a coincidence

a whole range of observers and of physical phenomena

but, instead, must have a deep significance. To see what

related to gravity would not be expressible in terms

this significance is, consider the way bodies behave in

of a space-time formulation.

an accelerated frame of reference somewhere in empty

To see how Einstein set about generalizing his the¬

space (far away from any masses) and the way they

ory, we may first note that two apparently unrelated

behave in a gravitational field (for example, on the

classes of phenomena—those arising from accelerations

surface of the earth). Owing to their inertial masses,

and those arising from gravitational fields—are ex¬

all the bodies in the accelerated system behave as

cluded from the special theory. Einstein therefore

though they were being pulled opposite to the direc¬

proceeded on the assumption that these two groups

tion of the acceleration and they all respond in exactly

of phenomena must be treated together and that a

the same way (that is, they all “fall” with the same

generalization of the theory of relativity must stem

speed). To Einstein, this meant that there is no way

from some basic relationship between gravitational

to differentiate between an accelerated frame of refer¬

fields and accelerated frames of reference. This basic

ence and a frame that is at rest (or moving with con¬

relationship is contained in Einstein’s famous principle

stant speed) in a gravitational field. This is called the

of equivalence, a principle which permits one to state

principle of equivalence. Another way of stating it is

that all frames of reference (in a small enough region

to say that the apparent force that a body experiences

of space) are equivalent and that in such a region there

when it is in an accelerated frame of reference is

is no way for an observer to tell whether he is in an

identical with the force this body would experience

inertial frame of reference, in an accelerated frame,

in an appropriate gravitational field; thus inertial and

or in a gravitational field. Another way of putting this

gravitational forces are indistinguishable.

is that the principle of equivalence permits one to use

Since the principle of equivalence makes it impossi¬

any kind of coordinate system (frame of reference) to

ble to assign any special quality or physical significance

express the laws of physics. This means, further, that

to inertial frames of reference, the special theory

no law of physics can contain any reference to any

(which is based on the assumption that inertial frames

special coordinate system, for if a law did contain such

are special in the sense that only in such frames do

a reference, this in itself could be used by an observer

the laws of physics have their correct and simplest

to determine the nature of his frame of reference. Thus

form) must be discarded for a more general theory

all laws must have the same form in all coordinate

which puts all frames of reference and all coordinate

systems.

systems on the same footing. In such a theory, the laws

To understand how the principle of equivalence

of physics must have the same form in all coordinate

leads to the general theory, we must first see just what

systems. With this in mind, we can now see how

the basis of this principle is and what it states. The

Einstein constructed his general theory of relativity.

principle itself stems from Galileo’s observation that

We begin by noting that the special theory replaces

all bodies allowed to fall freely (that is, in a vacuum

the concepts of absolute distance d and absolute time

with nothing impeding them) fall with the same speed.

t between events by a single absolute space-time inter¬

This can be stated somewhat differently if we consider

val whose square is cP-c?1?. Consider now a freely

the mass of a body (the amount of matter the body

moving particle as viewed by an observer in an inertial

contains). This quantity appears in two places in the

frame of reference in a region of space where no

laws of Newtonian physics. On the one hand, it is the

gravitational fields are present. If this particle moves

quantity that determines the inertia of a body (that

a distance d in a time t, the quantity cP-c2t2 must be

is, the resistance a body offers to a force that tries to

the same for all observers in inertial frames. This simply

move it). For this reason, the quantity is referred to

means that the natural space-time path of a free parti¬

as the inertial mass of the body. But the concept of

cle for inertial frames of reference is a straight line

mass also appears in Newton’s formula that expresses

and that the space-time geometry of the special theory

the gravitational force that one body exerts on another;

of relativity is Euclidean. We may take this formulation

this mass is then referred to as the gravitational mass

then as the law of motion (and hence a law of nature)

of the body. The fact that all bodies fall with the same

of a free particle.

COSMOLOGY SINCE 1850 Now if we are to carry out our program of extending

theory of relativity, the space-time path of a freely

the principle of relativity to cover observers in gravi¬

moving particle is not cP-c2t2, but some variation of

tational fields and in accelerated frames of reference,

this, which depends on the kind of gravitational fields

we must say that this same law of motion (straight line

that are present, and on the acceleration of our coordi¬

motion) applies to a body moving freely in a gravita¬

nate system. We can therefore go from the special

tional field or in an accelerated frame of reference.

theory to the general theory of relativity by replacing

But we know that the space-time path of a free particle

the space-time interval (cP-c2t2) by the quantity gd2-

in a gravitational field (or in a rotating system) appears

qc2t2, where g and q are quantities that vary from point

to be anything but straight. How, then, are we to

to point. The value of the quantities g and q at any

reconcile this apparent contradiction? We must re¬

point for a given observer will depend on the intensity

define the concept of a straight line! We are ordinarily

of the gravitational field at that point and on the

accustomed to think of a straight line in the Euclidean

acceleration of the frame of reference of the observer.

sense of straightness, because the geometry of our

Just as the special theory of relativity is based on the

world is very nearly Euclidean and we have been

statement that the quantity cP-c?t2 is the same for all

brought up on Euclidean geometry. In a sense, we

observers in inertial frames of reference, the general

suffer from the same kind of geometrical bias concern¬

theory of relativity is based on the statement that the

ing space-time as does the man who thinks the earth

quantity gcP-qc2t2 must be the same for all observers,

is flat because he cannot detect its sphericity in his

regardless of their frames of reference.

small patch of ground.

Now the use of the latter expression as the absolute

To overcome this parochial attitude, we note that

space-time interval instead of the former means that

we can replace the “straightness” concept by the con¬

we pass from Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometry

cept of the shortest distance between two points. We

in going from the special to the general theory, and

can now state the law of motion of a free particle as

the quantities g and q (they are also referred to as the

follows:

Einstein gravitational potentials) determine by how

A free particle moving between two space-time

much the geometry at any point of space-time departs

points always moves in such a way that its space-time

from

path between these two points is shorter than any other

quantities determine the curvature of space time at

space-time path that can be drawn between the two

each point. If, then, we know how to find g and q,

points.

we can determine the nature of the geometry in any

Euclidean

geometry—in

other words,

these

This statement of the law of motion makes no refer¬

region of space-time and hence the path of a free

ence to the way the space-time path of the particle

particle in that region. The curvature of space-time

looks, but refers only to an absolute property of the

thus becomes equivalent to the intensity of the gravi¬

path which has the same meaning for all observers.

tational field, so that the gravitational problem is re¬

If no gravitational fields or accelerated observers are

duced to a problem in non-Euclidean geometry. The

present, the shortest space-time path is cP-c2t2 and the

next step, then, in this development was to set down

geometry is Euclidean. But if gravitational fields are

the law that determines the quantities g and q, and

present, the shortest space-time path of the particle

this Einstein did in his famous field equations—a set

(that is, its geodesic) is not given by cP-c2t2, but by

of ten partial differential equations that show just how

a different combination of d and t because the space-

the quantities g and q (there are actually ten such

time geometry is non-Euclidean. The essence of Ein¬

quantities, but in the gravitational field arising from

stein’s general theory is, then, that a gravitational field

a body like the sun, only two of these ten quantities

distorts space-time (it introduces a curvature into

are different from zero) depend on the distribution of

space-time) and the behavior of a free particle (that

matter. These gravitational field equations are the basis

is, the departure from Euclidean straight-line motion)

of all modern cosmological theories which we shall

is not due to a “gravitational force” acting on the

now discuss.

particle, but rather to the natural inclination of the free particle to move along a geodesic. In a sense, this

V. THE EINSTEIN STATIC UNIVERSE

is similar to what happens whan a ball is allowed to

The first great step in the development of modern

roll freely on a perfectly smooth piece of ground. The

cosmology was taken by Einstein in his famous 1917

ball appears to us to move in a “straight line,” but

paper, in which he set out to derive the physical

we know that this cannot be so because it is following

properties of the imiverse by applying his field equa¬

the contour of the earth, which is spherical. Actually

tions to the kind of distribution of matter that one

the ball is moving along the shortest path on the

might reasonably expect to find in the imiverse as a

smooth surface, which is the arc of a great circle. From this discussion we see that in the general

whole. Here Einstein had to introduce some simpli¬ fying assumptions, since we have detailed knowledge

559

COSMOLOGY SINCE 1850 about the distribution of matter only in a relatively small region of space (within a few thousand light years of our own solar system) and we find that the matter here is concentrated in lumps (the stars) with some dust and gas between the lumps. Einstein therefore intro¬ duced the cosmological principle, which states that, except for local irregularities, the universe has the same aspect (the same density of matter) as seen from any point. This means that what we see in our region of the universe is pictured as being repeated everywhere, like a wall-paper or linoleum pattern. Einstein next replaced the lumpiness of the distribu¬ tion of matter (as indicated in the existence of stars and galaxies) by a smooth, uniform distribution which we may obtain by picturing all the matter in the stars as smeared out to fill space with a fog of uniform density (actually a proton gas with a few protons per cubic foot of space). Einstein made one other assump¬ tion—that the universe is static; that is, that the density of matter does not change with time and that there are no large scale motions in the universe. At the time that Einstein did this work, this assumption appeared to be eminently justified because the recession of the distant galaxies had not yet been discovered and the stars in our own neighborhood of space were known to be moving with fairly small random velocities. With these assumptions, Einstein still had to make one im¬ portant extrapolation—he had to extend his field equa¬ tions to make them applicable to the entire universe and not just to a small region of empty space around the sun. It is useful here (as a guide in our discussion) to write down Einstein’s field equations in the form in which Einstein first used them in his study of cos¬ mology:

fl«-y2*go = -—cg

560

w

This equation really represents ten distinct equations since the quantities fly, gy, and Ty are components of three different tensors, and there are just ten such distinct components in each of these tensors. The tensor components fly, which are constructed in a welldefined way from the potentials gy (which are also called the components of the metric tensor) determine the nature of the space-time geometry. The quantity fl gives the curvature of space-time at any specific point, and the tensor Ty is the matter-energymomentum-pressure tensor. G is the universal gravita¬ tional constant and c is the speed of light. This set of ten equations thus tells us how the matter and energy that are present determine the metric tensor gy at each point of space-time and therefore the geometry at each such point. To determine the potentials gy and hence

the geometry of space time, one must thus solve the ten field equations for the known or assumed dis¬ tribution of matter and energy as given by the ten¬ sor Ty. In the case of planetary motion, one simply places Ty = 0; this leads to Einstein’s law of gravity for empty space

fly = 0, which reduces to Newton’s law for weak gravitational fields. But for the cosmological problem, Einstein placed Ty equal to a constant value (the average den¬ sity of matter at each point) and then sought to solve the field equations (1) under these conditions. In other words, he attempted to obtain the potentials gi;- from equations (1) under the assumption that there is a constant (but very small) density of matter throughout the universe. His idea was that this small density would introduce a constant curvature of space-time at each point so that the universe would be curved as a whole. This initial attempt to obtain a static model of the universe was unsuccessful, however, because the equa¬ tions (1) lead to a unique set of potentials gy only if one knows the values of these quantities at infinity. Now the natural procedure in this kind of analysis is to assume that all the values of gy are zero at infinity, but this cannot be done if one keeps the equations (1) and also retains the assumption that the density in the universe is everywhere the same. In fact, the values of gy become infinite at infinity under these conditions, so that the equation (1) can give no static model of the universe. This very disturbing development forced Einstein to alter his field equations (which he did very reluctantly) by introducing an additional term on the left-hand side. Fortunately, the field equations (1) are such that this can be done, for it is clear that the character of these equations is not changed when one adds to the left hand side a second order tensor which obeys the same conservation principle (it must represent a quantity that can neither be destroyed nor created) as the other two terms together. Now it can be shown (as Einstein knew) that the only physical term that has this impor¬ tant property is Agy, where A is a universal constant. Hence Einstein enlarged his field equations by the addition of just this term and replaced (1) by the fol¬ lowing most general set of field equations: Ra -

+ Aga = (8v/ 0 and

model by the expanding I model is that he had no

k = +1 (expanding II or oscillating), we are dealing

reasonable explanation for the start of the initial ex¬

with a group of models that are referred to as the “big

pansion of the actual universe from an Einstein static

bang” models of the universe, since all of them picture

state. Although his own theoretical investigations and

the universe as having originated explosively from a

those of McCrea and McVittie (1931) strongly sug¬

point. The term “big bang” was first introduced by

gested that any local condensation of the matter in

Gamow (1948) who, together with Alpher and Herman

the Einstein static universe (for example, the formation

(1950), sought to account for the origin of the heavy

of a single galaxy or star) would cause it to start ex¬

elements by supposing that they were formed from the

panding,

investigations left unanswered the

original protons and neutrons in the very early and

question as to why other galaxies were formed. If

very hot stage of the explosion. According to this

expansion began after the formation of a single galaxy,

picture of the origin of the universe, neutrons were

the density of the universe would immediately begin

the principal components of the original material

to decrease and other condensations into galaxies would

ejected from the primordial atom or point source. Some

be precluded. This would mean, of course, that the

of these neutrons quickly decayed into protons and

cosmological principle defined in Section V would be

electrons, and these protons then captured other neu¬

these

untenable, since the distribution of matter in the

trons to build up the heavy elements. This whole

neighborhood of this initial condensation would be

buildup of heavy elements must have occurred during

different from that elsewhere in the universe. More¬

the first thirty minutes after the initial explosion, for

over, it is difficult to see how the heavy elements such

the temperature of this primordial material dropped

as iron, lead, and uranium could have originated in

very rapidly after that and everything then remained

an Einstein static-state universe, since we know from nuclear theory that the formation of such elements

frozen. Gamow’s theory was very appealing at first since

from hydrogen in great abundance requires extremely

no other theory of the elements was available then;

high temperatures and pressures. This means that the

the theory of stellar structure and evolution had not

entire universe, or at least parts of it, must have passed

yet reached a point of development where it could

through a high temperature-high pressure phase. Thus

be shown that heavy elements can be and are built

the very existence of the stars and heavy elements

up inside stars, as they evolve from structures like the

argues against the Einstein static state as the initial

sun into red giants like Antares and Betelgeuse, with

phase of our present universe.

their internal temperatures rising to billions of degrees.

Owing to these difficulties, inherent in the assump¬

Gamow’s theory of the buildup of the heavy elements

tion that our present universe evolved from an Einstein

during the first thirty minutes of the life of the universe

static universe of finite radius, Lemaitre introduced the

had to be discarded, however, since there are no stable

assumption that we live in an expanding universe of

nuclei of atomic masses 5 and 8, so that neutron cap¬

type I, which began its expansion from a highly con¬ densed state. He referred to this initial condensation as the primordial atom or nucleus and assumed that a vast, radioactive explosion occurred in this atom and that what we now see in the recession of the galaxies

566

Whether we are discussing an Einstein-Friedmann expanding model, with X = 0; or an oscillating model,

ture alone could not have bridged the nuclear gap between the light and heavy nuclei. Even if some heavy nuclei were formed by neutron capture in this early fireball stage of the universe (and all nuclei capture neutrons very readily) a half hour would hardly have

all about is the result of this explosion. In this picture,

been long enough for the heavy elements to have been

the expanding universe is always finite in size, but

formed in their present abundances. Since we now

closed like a sphere. The initial condensed state (that

know that the heavy elements can all be baked in the

is, the Lemaitre primordial atom) may be pictured as

stellar furnaces at various stages of evolution, this phase

having been present for an infinite time in the past

of the Gamow “big bang” theory is not essential and

or we may suppose that the universe began its life in

one can discard it without invalidating the overall

the Einstein static state and then collapsed violently

concept. If we then accept this Lemaitre-Gamow hot "big

into a primordial atom from which it began to expand.

COSMOLOGY SINCE 1850 bang” hypothesis, the universe must have passed

is an overall helium abundance of about 25%, some

through a very high temperature phase (about 1010 to

stars have been observed with very weak helium lines.

1011 degrees K) soon after the initial explosion, and

In spite of these, however, the overall evidence favors

some observable evidence of this may still be around.

the 25% abundance, which is in agreement with the

That this should be so was first pointed out by Gamow

“big bang” hypothesis.

himself, who argued that there must have been a con¬

Taking all of the observed data into account (the

siderable amoimt of very hot black body radiation

3°K black body radiation and the helium abundance)

present in this initial phase of the universe and most

the preponderance of the evidence favors the “big

of it must still be around, but in a very much red-shifted

bang” theory and points to an age of at least 1010,

form. He estimated that its temperatures would now

i.e., ten billion years for our universe. The observed

be 6°K. Without knowing about Gamow’s suggestion,

helium abundance (if we accept 25% as the primeval

Dicke proposed the same idea in 1964 (he called it

abundance) also indicates that the density of matter

the “primordial fireball radiation”) and later, in collab¬

in the rmiverse must be at least 4 X 10“31 grams per

oration with Peebles, Roll, and Wilkinson (1965), dem¬

cc. But if the density of matter in the universe is no

onstrated that the initial hot black body radiation (at

larger than this, we run into difficulty with the obser¬

a temperature of 1010 degrees K) must now be black

vations on the rate at which the expansion of the

body radiation (at a temperature of 3.5°K). The general

universe is decelerating. We have already noted that

idea behind this deduction is the following: if the

Humason, Mayall, and Sandage have given a value for

universe was initially filled with very hot black body

this deceleration which indicates that the universe must

radiation (that is, of very short wavelength), this radia¬

ultimately stop expanding and begin to collapse. This

tion would remain black body radiation during the

means that the correct model of the universe is an

expansion of the universe, but it would become redder

oscillating one, rather than expanding, but, as we have

and redder owing to the Doppler shift imparted to it

seen, this requires the density of matter to be about

by the expansion. This is similar to radiation that is

10-29 gms/cc, as compared to the observed density of

reflected back and forth from the walls of an expanding

7 X 1(T31.

container. This 3.5°K black body radiation was de¬

In spite of this, the evidence for an oscillating uni¬

tected by Penzias and Wilson in 1965 and has since

verse has been greatly strengthened recently by the

been verified by other observers. It is present in the

analysis of the distribution of quasars and of quasi-

form of isotropic, unpolarized microwave background

stellar radio sources in general. Since these objects

radiation in the wavelength range from 1/10 to 10 cm.

(according to their red shifts) are at enormous distances

One other residual feature of the “big bang” should

from us, they give us the rate of expansion of the

still be visible, or at least amenable to verification—the

universe in its earliest stages. By comparing this with

present helium abundance. During the initial fireball

the present rate of expansion, we obtain a very reliable

period when the temperature was considerably larger

value for the deceleration, which shows the universe

than 1010 degrees K, the thermal electrons and neu¬

to be oscillating. To account for the discrepancy be¬

trinos that were present would have resulted in very

tween the observed and required density of matter for

nearly equal abundances of neutrons and protons.

such a model of the universe, we must suppose that

When the temperature of the fireball dropped to 1010

there are large quantities of dark matter in inter-

degrees K these neutrons and protons would have

galactic space—in the form of hydrogen clouds, black

combined to form deuterium, which, in turn, would

dwarf stars, and streams of neutrinos. But until we have

have been transformed into He4, and no heavier ele¬

direct evidence of this, we cannot be sure about the

ments would have been formed. Two questions then

validity of the oscillating model.

arise. (1) Is the helium that we now observe all about

X. THE STEADY-STATE THEORY AND

us, in our own galaxy and in others, still this primordial

OTHER COSMOLOGIES

helium? (2) If so, what can this tell us about the models of our universe?

We shall conclude our discussion of modern cos¬

The evidence relating to the first question is some¬

mologies with brief descriptions of theories that are

what ambiguous because we know that helium burning

related to, but do not spring directly from, Einstein’s

occurs during the giant stage of a star’s evolution, so

field equations, whether or not we place A = 0. Of

that some of the original helium must certainly have

these, the most popular, and one which, has been

been transformed into heavy elements in stellar inte¬

strongly supported by outstanding cosmologists and

riors, and thus disappeared. But we may assume that

physicists, is the steady state or continuous creation

the helium that is found in stellar atmospheres is pri¬

theory of Bondi and Gold (1948) and Hoyle (1948).

mordial and the evidence here is that although there

On

the basis of what they call the perfect cosmological

56 t

COSMOLOGY SINCE 1850 principle, which is an extension of Einstein’s cosmo¬

Milne (1935) and the cosmologies of Dirac (1937) and

universe present the same appearance to all observers,

Jordan (1947). Although these theories are extremely

regardless of where they are, but it must appear the

interesting and beautifully constructed, we can only

same at all times—it must present an unchanging as¬

discuss them briefly here. Of all the cosmological theo¬

pect on a large scale. The immediate consequence of

ries that we shall have discussed in this essay, Milne’s

this theory is that mass and energy cannot be conserved

is the most deductive, for instead of starting with the

in such a universe. Since the universe is expanding,

laws of nature as we know them locally, and then

new matter must be created spontaneously and contin¬

constructing a model of the universe based upon these

uously everywhere so as to prevent the density from

laws, he introduces only the cosmological principle and

decreasing. It can be shown from this theory that matter would

unique model of the universe, but also the laws of

have to be created at a rate equal to three times the product of the Hubble constant and the present density of the universe, in order to keep things as they are. One nucleon must be created per thousand cubic cen¬

attempts to deduce, by pure reasoning, not only a nature themselves. To do this, Milne had to assume the existence of a class of ideal observers attached to each particle of an ideal homogeneous universal sub¬ stratum, which is expanding according to Hubble’s law.

timeters, per 500 billion years to maintain the status

To carry out his analysis consistently, Milne had to

quo. Hoyle arrived at the same result by altering

introduce two different times; a kinematic time which

Einstein’s field equations. Although the steady-state theory was very popular

applies to the ideal observer and which also governs electromagnetic and atomic phenomena, and according

because it eliminated entirely the question of the origin

to which the universe is expanding; and a dynamic

of the universe, it was rejected by most cosmologists because of its continuous creation and the consequent denial of the conservation of mass energy. But the strongest argument against the steady state theory is the existence of the 3°K radiation, which shows clearly

time, so that a good deal of arbitrariness is inherent in this theory, particularly at the boundary region where we pass from one kind of time to another. But the major objection to this theory arises from its basic assumption that an absolute substratum exists in the

that our universe has evolved from a highly condensed

universe, and that a privileged class of observers is

state. In addition, the observed distribution of quasars,

associated with this substratum.

radio sources, and other distant celestial bodies shows that the density of matter in the universe was much higher a few billion years ago than it is now. The

Although a cosmological principle of one sort or another is at the basis of the cosmologies which we have discussed here, other types of principles have also

observational evidence seems weighted against the

been used. The most notable of these is that proposed

steady-state theory. Other general principles have been invoked to derive

by Dirac in 1937 (and later in a slightly different form by Jordan), according to which certain basic numbers

cosmological theories. Perhaps the most ambitious of

associated with matter and the universe are not con¬

these theories is that of Eddington (1946), who at¬

stant, as had been assumed in all previous cosmologies,

tempted, in his later years, to deduce the basic con¬

but vary with time. The numbers Dirac had in mind

stants of nature by combining quantum theory and

are certain dimensionless quantities which are obtained

general relativity. Starting from the idea that the re¬

by taking the ratio of atomic quantities to cosmological

ciprocal of the square root of the cosmical constant

quantities of the same kind. Dirac expressed this prin¬

represents a natural unit of length in the universe, and

ciple as follows: “All very large dimensionless numbers

that the number of particles in the universe must de¬

which can be constructed from the important constants

termine its curvature, he derived numerical values for

of cosmology and atomic theory are simple powers of

such constants as the ratio of the mass of the proton to that of the electron, Planck’s constant of action, etc.

the epoch.” One consequence of this principle is that the univer¬

But very few physicists have accepted Eddington’s

sal gravitational constant would have to decrease with

numerology since his analysis is often obscure, difficult to follow, and rather artificial. In any case, the exist¬ ence of nuclear forces and new particles which Ed¬ dington was unaware of when he did his work, and which therefore are not accounted for in his theory,

568

tems were introduced: the kinematic cosmology of

logical principle, they assert that not only must the

time. But one can show, as E. Teller did (1948), that this would lead to a sun that was much too hot during the Cambrian period; the temperature of the earth would then have been so high that its oceans would have been boiling. Owing to this discrepancy, Dirac’s

destroys the universality which he claims for his theory.

theory has generally been discarded, although, more

During the period that Eddington was developing

recently, C. Brans and R. H. Dicke have introduced

his quantum cosmology, three other cosmological sys¬

a variation of it, starting from a different point of view.

COSMOLOGY SINCE 1850 SUMMARY

radiation was then favorable for gravitational contrac¬

At this point in our narrative, the reader may well

tion to take over in local regions and to compress the

feel that modem cosmology is a welter of conflicting

gas into huge clouds. This, however, could occur only

theories, all of which contain some elements of truth,

after another process had come into operation—the

but none of which gives a complete picture of the

natural and unavoidable fragmentation of the expand¬

actual universe. This, however, would be a wrong

ing gas into local eddies. One can show that a stream

conclusion to draw from the present state of affairs.

of gas becomes unstable against such a fragmentation

It is true that a few years ago this would have been

when the length of the stream exceeds a certain num¬

a fair assessment, since the observational evidence then

ber whose value can be derived from hydrodynamical

was far too meager to permit us to choose from among

theory. In an expanding universe this is bound to hap¬

the various cosmologies that stem from the basic field

pen after the expansion has progressed beyond a given

equations. But even then, the common heritage of all

point. The average size of the turbulent eddies that

of these theories (the general theory of relativity) indi¬

are formed during this kind of fragmentation is deter¬

cated that the basic differences among them are more

mined by the speed and density of the expanding gas.

apparent than real. The situation in the early 1970’s was quite different,

The details of this fragmentation process were worked out many years ago by J. H. Jeans. According

for a threshold had been reached for a cosmological

to his calculation, we know that the expanding gas must

breakthrough; as we have seen, enough observational

have broken up into fragments having an average size

evidence was available to show us that our universe

equal to that of a typical galaxy. These galaxies in turn

originated explosively, about ten to twenty billion years

also suffered fragmentation (on a smaller scale) by the

ago, from a highly condensed state. Even though we

same process and the oldest stars were thus formed.

still could not decide unequivocally between an ex¬

These oldest stars (about 8 billion years old) were

panding and an oscillating universe on the basis of the

formed at the center of the galaxies; and that is where

observational evidence, the major problem of the origin

we find them now, although they also constitute the

of the universe had been solved and we had a self-

globular clusters that surround the core of a galaxy.

consistent picture. It accounted not only for the reces¬

Since the very oldest stars were formed almost ex¬

sion and distribution of the distant galaxies but also

clusively from the primordial hydrogen and helium,

for many diverse phenomena, ranging from the back¬

at least some of the heavy elements that we now ob¬

ground radiation all around us in space (the 3° K. iso¬

serve all about us in the universe must have been

tropic radiation which we have already discussed) to the

synthesized in the interiors of these stars as they

formation of the stars and the heavy elements.

evolved. This, indeed, is the case, for we now know,

The most remarkable thing about the state of matter,

from the theory of stellar interiors, that thermonuclear

whether in the form of stars or interstellar dust and

processes occur near the center of a star, resulting in

gas all around us, is that it points to some momentous

the transmutation of the light to the heavy elements.

event that must have occurred some billions of years

When the oldest stars were first formed, they con¬

ago and which led to the pronounced differentiation

tracted very rapidly until their central temperatures

that we see now. Starting from the “big bang,” to

reached about 10 million degrees, at which point ther¬

which all these observations point, we can now arrange

monuclear energy was released with the transformation

the succession of events that led to the present state

of hydrogen to helium; this process kept the stars in

of the universe into a well-ordered, meaningful, and

equilibrium and supplied them with their energy for

understandable sequence. After the original explosion,

the first few billion years of their lives—in fact, until

when the temperature was still very high, about 30%

about 12% of their hydrogen had been transformed into

of the primordial neutrons and protons were fused into

helium.

He4, but the expanding gas cooled off much too rapidly

The core of each star, consisting entirely of helium,

for elements above He4 to be built up in any appreci¬

then began to contract quite rapidly under its own

able quantities, and these had to wait for the stellar

weight, and the central temperature rose (in a few

ovens that were to be formed when the rapidly ex¬

hundred million years) to about 100,000,000 degrees.

panding gas of hydrogen and helium was fragmented

At this high temperature, the helium nuclei in the core

into stars by turbulence and the gravitational forces.

were transformed to carbon—the first step in the

The fragmentation of the original hydrogen-helium

buildup of the heavy elements. This led to the forma¬

gaseous mixture into galaxies and stars occurred when

tion of a carbon core which contracted still further,

the exploding universe had cooled off to very nearly

resulting in still higher core temperatures. In fact, the

its present value—about two hundred million years

temperature in the core continued to increase until the

after the initial explosion. The density of matter and

billion degree mark was reached, and the heavy ele-

569

COSMOLOGY SINCE 1850 ments, right up to iron, had been synthesized. But at

tions about the universe that seemed so unanswerable

that point a drastic change occurred in the evolution

just a few years ago, for never before in the history

of the star, for very little of its nuclear fuel was left

of science have so many capable scientists been work¬

to supply the energy required to support its own

ing on this exciting problem.

weight. The star, which by this time had evolved into a very large and luminous object, collapsed violently and became a supernova, ejecting great quantities of material from its outer regions. Following the supernova explosion, the hot residual core (consisting of such nuclei as iron, calcium, magne¬ sium, and free electrons) continued to contract, finally becoming a white dwarf of enormous density. It re¬ mains in this stage when the outward pressure of the free electrons just balances the gravitational contrac¬ tion. But this is not so in all cases, and the star must continue to contract beyond the white dwarf stage if it is massive enough—ultimately becoming a very hot neutron star, about ten miles in diameter. Although such stars have not yet been observed directly, astron¬ omers believe that they constitute some of the X-ray sources now being observed and are the recently dis¬ covered “pulsars.” But even neutron stars are not the final stage of stellar evolution, for the theory of relativ¬ ity tells us that such stars must continue to contract until they disappear from sight. But what of the material that was ejected from each star that became a supernova? This was swirled into the outer regions of the galaxy, where it became the gas and dust that formed the spiral arms that we now see. From this gas and dust—consisting not only of the primordial hydrogen and helium, but also of such heavy elements as carbon, oxygen, sodium, calcium, and iron—the second generation, and hence younger stars such as our sun, were formed. But something else happened at the same time—planets were also formed. It can be shown, as has been done by C. F. von Weizsacker, G. F. Kuiper, H. Urey, H. Alfven, and others, that the turbulences that must occur when a star like the sun is formed by gravitational contraction,

R. Alpher and R. Herman, Reviews of Modem Physics, 22 (1950), 153. H. Bondi and T. Gold, Monthly Notices, Royal Astronomical Society, 108 (1948), 252. R. H. Dicke, P. J. E. Peebles, P. G. Roll, and D. T. Wilkinson, The Astrophysical Journal, 142 (1965), 414. P. A. M. Dirac, Proceedings of the Royal Astronomical Society, A, 165 (1938), 199. A. S. Eddington, The Expanding Universe (Cambridge, 1933); idem, Fundamental Theory (Cambridge, 1946). A. Einstein, Sitzungsberichte der Preussische Akademische Gesellschaft, 142 (1917). A. Friedmann, Zeitschrift fur Physik, 10 (1922), 377. G. Gamow, Physical Review, 70 (1946), 572; 74 (1948), 505. E. R. Harrison, Monthly Notices, Royal Astronomical Society, 131 (1965), 1. F. Hoyle, Monthly Notices, Royal Astronomical Society, 108 (1948), 372. M. L. Humason, N. U. Mayall, and A. Sandage, The Astronomical Journal, 61 (1956), 97. J. Jeans, Astronomy and Cosmology (Cambridge, 1928, reprint 1961). P. Jordan, Die Herkunft der Sterne (Stuttgart, 1947). G. Lemaitre, Monthly Notices, Royal Astronomical Society, 91 (1931), 490. W. H. McCrea and G. C. McVittie, Monthly Notices, Royal Astronomical Society, 92 (1931), 7. A. A. Michelson and E. M. Morley, Philosophical Magazine, 190 (1887), 449. E. A. Milne, Rela¬ tivity, Gravitation, and World Structure (Oxford, 1935). C. G. Neumann, Uher das Newtonische Prinzip der Fernwirkung (Leipzig, 1895). A. A. Penzias and R. W. Wilson, The Astrophysical Journal, 142 (1965), 419. H. P. Robertson, The Astrophysical Journal, 82 (1935), 284; 83 (1936), 187, 257. A. Sandage, The Astrophysical Journal, 133 (1961), 335. H. Seeliger, Astronomische Nachrichtungen, 137 (1895), 129. W. de Sitter, Monthly Notices, Royal Astronomical Society, 78 (1917), 3. R. C. Tolman, Relativity, Thermodynamics, and Cosmology (Oxford, 1932). A. G. Walker, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (2), 42 (1936), 90. H. Weyl, Physikalische Zeitschrift, 24 (1923), 230.

from dust and gas, must lead to the formation of planets

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

at fairly definite distances from the star. This is in

H. Bondi, Cosmology (Cambridge, 1961); Rival Theories of Cosmology (Oxford, 1960). P. Couderc, The Expansion of the Universe (London, 1952). G. Gamow, The Creation of the Universe (New York, 1952). E. Hubble, Realm of the Nebulae (Oxford, 1961). G. C. McVittie, Fact and Theory in Cosmology (New York, 1961). M. K. Munitz, ed., Theories of the Universe (New York, 1957). D. Sciama, The Unity of the Universe (Garden City, N.Y., 1961). J. Singh, Great Ideas and Theories of Modern Cosmology (London, 1961). W. de Sitter, Kosmos (Cambridge, Mass., 1932). E. Teller, Physical Review, 73

agreement with the arrangement of the planets in our solar system. We thus see that the cosmological theories that stem from Einstein’s gravitational field equations agree with the overall architectural and dynamical features of the universe as we now observe them. At the same time, these theories show us how the present state of the universe has evolved from a highly condensed initial state, and tell us what to expect in the future evolution of the universe. Although many of the details are still missing from this forecast, the dominant features are

570

BIBLIOGRAPHY

clearly indicated, and we have every reason to believe that we shall soon be able to answer most of the ques¬

(1948), 801. LLOYD MOTZ [See also Cosmic Images; Cosmic Voyages; Cosmology from Antiquity to 1850; Infinity; Relativity; Space; Time.]

CREATION IN RELIGION CREATION IN RELIGION

God makes man free in a world ultimately governed by God’s purpose. When man freely chooses to abide

Creation, in religion, refers to a special way of relating

by God’s purpose for him, he will realize the best in

physical things, plants, animals, and persons to God.

himself and in Nature.

All believers in God hold that whatever exists depends

Thus in postulating creatio, Judeo-Christian-Muslim

upon the nature of God, and that the worship of God

theism protects both God’s unlimited freedom to create

is essential to supreme well-being. However, believers

and man’s limited freedom to be creative (or destruc¬

who use the word “creation” wish to defend both the

tive). This postulate is also directed against the view

supremacy of God, and the autonomy of persons.

that the human soul has existed in some form before

The words in the Declaration of Independence (1776):

its present existence. This view also leaves the door

. . that all men are created equal, that they

open to annihilation for, since man comes “from noth¬

are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable

ing,” he may return to “nothing.” Most theists, how¬

Rights,” involve the conviction that men, free before

ever, hold that God will grant personal immortality.

God, are responsible ultimately to Him. Believers in

Furthermore, early Christian apologists, like Saint

“creation” do not themselves agree about what exactly

Augustine (De civitate Dei XI:24; XIV II) used creatio

it means, although they intend the term to express their

in order to stress that creation is God’s own “free act,”

conviction that God is never identical with his creation,

bom of his goodness. They hold that the “stuff of his

and with persons in particular. The most explicit ex¬

own being” is never involved in creating either the

pression of this view takes the form of creatio ex nihilo

world or man. Or the stress, as in Philo, is on the fact

(“creation out of nothing,” hereafter referred to as

that no inner “fate” governed God’s creating this

creatio) and this intention differentiates theists from

world. God could have created a different one, and

religious monists or pantheists. Thus theists emphasize

he can override the laws of this present world if he

that God both transcends, and is immanent in, His

sees fit.

creation. Their view is best understood in the context

2. In the Timaeus Plato seeks an account of the

of other religious, moral, and intellectual concerns to

generation of the space-time world that is “inferior to

be considered below.

none in likelihood” (Timaeus 29d). A good but not

/. THE RATIONALE OF CREATIO EX NIHILO

omnipotent Demiurge desired that all should be “so far as possible, like unto himself” (29d). He was limited by the fact that he must deal with two other kinds

1. To the ancient Indian and Greek thinker the

of being: the Receptacle and the Forms. The Recepta¬

notion of creatio is unthinkable. Yet what captured the

cle is the “mother” of all becoming, a kind of “mould¬

imagination of the dominant theistic strand in Jewish,

ing-stuff” of everything “invisible and unshaped, all

Muslim, and Christian thought was expressed in the

receptive.” It could never be a cosmos unless “in some

first two chapters of Genesis. “In the beginning God

most baffling way” (51b), it could partake of Forms

created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was

or Ideas. Plato’s Demiurge, keeping his gaze fixed on

waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of

“these co-eternal Forms” (29a), “persuades” the in¬

the deep: and the spirit of God moved upon the face

choate Receptacle to take on as much form as possible

of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and

(48a). The world thus generated is “planned” as “a

there was light. And God saw the light, that it was

movable image” (37d) of the perfect Forms.

good” (Genesis 1:1-4). The picture that unfolds in this

In postulating three co-eternal Beings, Plato departs

first chapter is that of a Creator-God responsible for

from his contention in the Republic that the Good is

every created being.

the source of everything’s being and being known. The

What is further distinctive in this vision is the pas¬

imperfect world is there likened to the manifold radia¬

sage: “And God created man in his own image, in the

tions of the Sim (the Good). The theory in the Timaeus,

image of God created he him; male and female created

of a Demiurge persuading a somewhat recalcitrant

he them. . . . And God saw everything that he had

Receptacle to take on form, seems better able to ex¬

made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:27,

plain imperfections in the world. But a good Demiurge offends the religious conscious¬

31. See also Genesis 2; Jeremiah 27:5, 31:35; and Isaiah 40:12-31). The phrase creatio ex nihilo is not a biblical

ness of most theists. God, to be God, must be perfect,

phrase (though it does occur in Maccabees II:vii, 28).

limited by nothing but his own will and reason. At

The dominant if not exclusive image in the biblical

the same time, Plato’s view, even as a “likely” account,

account stands clear. God and the world are not iden¬

faces theoretical difficulties. For if God, the Forms, and

tical; nor are the world and man “modes” of God’s

the Receptacle are co-eternally independent of each

being. Furthermore, in creating man in his own image.

other, why can God know the Forms? Or why should

571

CREATION IN RELIGION the Receptacle be such that it could be persuaded to

God is the Creator who thinks and acts in accordance

take on the Forms?

with goals intrinsic to his being. In creating the order

To avoid such religious and theoretical difficulties

of Nature which supports human effort without anni¬

the traditional theist substitutes creatio ex nihilo. He

hilating man’s freedom, God expresses his loving pur¬

concedes that creatio too is baffling, that the how of

pose—a mutually respecting and responsible commu¬

creation is unknowable. But three co-eternal Beings,

nity of persons. Hence, this world, as Leibniz put it,

interacting and yielding a cosmos like ours, compounds

is the best possible world once it is seen as the arena

mystery. Mysterious as the how of creatio may be, it

for the development of persons who cannot escape the

offends no theoretical norm, and protects the absolute¬

responsibility for their own actions. In the theistic view, the natural world may be con¬

ness and perfection of God. 3. The words creatio ex nihilo are intended, then,

ceived as the order of interacting nonmental entities

to deny the existence of any other Being co-eternal

(in Thomistic realism) or as part of the mental nature

with God, or any world identical with God.

of God (as in Berkeley), or as a world of psychic unities

For example, the theist cannot with Spinoza say

The conception of man’s interaction with Nature and

a God who created the world must have been imperfect

with God varies in each of these theistic views. But

before its creation. If God is perfect the world must

the religious and moral relation of men to each other

follow from his nature “as the nature of a triangle that

and to God is not significantly affected by viewing the

its two angles should be equal to two right angles”

natural world as mental or nonmental. Yet man’s con¬

(Ethics, I, Prop. 17 Scholium).

fidence that the natural world expresses God’s reason

In similar vein, the emanationist argues that the

and goodness, supports the scientific conviction that

mystery of ex nihilo can be avoided by thinking of the

man’s disciplined observation and reflection is not alien

world as “radiating” the unchanged One in different

to the order of Nature.

degrees. For Plotinus, influenced by Plato’s image of

In sum, then, the classical theistic model of the uni¬

the Sun, the world is the efflux of the ineffable, tran¬

verse is of a self-existent God who, in accordance with

scendent, “creative” One. Such emanation should not

his rational and loving nature, relates himself con¬

be confused with the “creative” or “emergent" evolu¬

stantly to a world contingent on his creative activity.

tion in which real novelty is produced “in time.” For

His general providence for free persons is expressed in

is

the natural structure of things and persons. His individ¬

not real; the One and the many stages of “evolution”

ual providence depends on the fellowship each person

are in fact one. Hence, emanation hardly escapes

freely seeks with God in prayer, worship, and action.

monism in its attempt to avoid the ex nihilo that defies

Even when theists, like Calvinists, denied human free¬

imagination and intellect.

dom, the ethical effect seemed to be strenuous effort

the emanationist the temporal order of “descent

The monist and emanationist usually urge that the One cannot be described in terms that reflect, as human

572

of different grades (as in Leibniz’ panpsychism).

Deus sive natura (“God or Nature”). Spinoza held that

by individuals who used their worldly accomplishment as an index to their divinely ordained destiny.

thinking must, only a part of the world. The One is

This emphasis on responsible fellowship, as the ideal

super-personal. The human at best is part of the world

of worship and of human community, influences the

and can provide no adequate analogy to the nature

theist’s interpretation of the religious and mystical

of the One. Hence Spinoza declared that to conceive

experience. Many mystics hold that in their experience

of the one Substance as a person is like comparing the

of God the finite self is literally lost in God or the One,

constellation The Dog to a barking dog. Similarly, the

and they argue that this “union” favors monism. The

most noble ideal of human goodness, or will, or reason,

theist objects: religious “union” is also frequently ex¬

cannot serve to characterize the One.

perienced, and interpreted, as interaction with, and not

The theist agrees with the monist and emanationist

absorption in, God. In any case, the experience of love

that God cannot be One among equals, or co-eternal

and worship is meaningless if the lover and the beloved

with any other being or beings. But he counters that

are in fact one. Furthermore, to say that man is, and

mystery is not decreased by considering an imperfect

is not, identical with God is more mysterious than

world, manifesting the One, ultimately good. Nor does

creatio and self-contradictory. How can the perfect

he see how human freedom is consistent with emana-

God “somehow” include all the imperfection in man

tionism or monism. Creatio allows him to think of the

and in the world? Must not responsibility for all human

Unity as the ultimate Agent who in creating is self-

error and for evils in Nature be God’s? Indeed, if

guided by his ideals of goodness and of reason. God

whatever happens in Nature and in man is ultimately

is not even, as Aristotle seems to have held, the Thinker

good, there is neither final distinction between good

whose perfection is the unifying lure of all finite beings.

and evil nor any standard for human progress.

CREATION IN RELIGION 4. Such reasoning in support of the doctrine of crea¬

bad. God endowed it with seminal principles (rationes

tio helps to clarify what it is intended to mean: God

seminales) which can be brought to fruition under

creates what was not in existence and could not exist

appropriate conditions by created agents. The creating

unless God created. Nothing less than a radically new

of the seminal principles is always the work of God.

model of coming-to-be and passing-away is advocated.

A mother and father, for example, do not create the

A finite being is a no-being, a no-being, until it is

child, but their “creative” action brings the form of

created; it cannot come into existence or continue to

the child as created by God into fruition.

exist on its own initiative.

In this view, God allows persons to make a difference

This model, the creationist argues, is mysterious only

in the actual history of the world. Yet, at every point,

in the sense that any ultimate state or quality of being

Augustine protects the insuperable glory, goodness, and

is mysterious. Given this model of ultimate Being and

creativity of God against any alternative that might

coming-to-be, problems such as those indicated above

even seem to limit his power. Thus, the doctrine of

can reasonably be resolved. Creatio itself cannot be

seminal principles enables Augustine to deny that any¬

understood by reference to any event within the world.

thing kept God from creating the world and all it could

The theist often refers to the creative activity of an

become “from the beginning.” Nor is God limited by

artist as providing only a faint analogy, because the

time since he created time with the world.

artist perforce uses materials not of his own making.

Yet tension exists in this view. Augustine attributes

Indeed, the creationist is at pains to suggest that

free will to man. Man is responsible for whatever

unfortunate picture-thinking leads to misunderstanding

changes for good or evil depend upon his use of free¬

of creatio. Picture-thinking leads to the question: How

dom. The goodness in the world and in man are not,

can any being, however powerful, make something out

therefore, a reflection of God only. But if God does

of nothing, or, to put it crudely, how can he make

create human freedom, must it not be possible for

something out of little bits of nothing? As Anselm said,

persons to contravene God’s purpose? Augustine, intent

ex nihilo does not mean de nihilo ipso (Monologium,

on preserving God’s sovereignty, holds that the outcome

VI-VII). Incomplete understanding underlies the objection

of human existence is predestined. He even adds that men cannot believe in God except as God in his grace

that “from nothing, nothing comes.” Lucretius, for

moves them to do so, with no regard for their present

example, argues (I, 154), “if things came from nothing,

and future merit. Thus Augustine’s emphasis on both

any kind might be bom of anything, nothing would

freedom and predestination, on both the immutability

require seed” (Oates, 1957). The creationist grants this.

of God and his immanence in the changing world,

But creation, he argues, is the activity of the self-

raises difficulties which such theism must confront.

existent God, not of nothing. This God creates what

2. All the more fascinating, then, is Scotus Erigena’s

was not existent. Hence, no beings come “from noth¬

attempt to clarify both the Unity of God and the

ing”; the Creator-God creates, and this means that

interrelated orders of existence (ca. ninth century). God

what was not, is now because of his act.

is the Being who creates but is not created. To Him

This model of creatio is intended to replace all

no categories of existence, even self-comprehension,

others. But theists have nevertheless moved toward

apply. He is Nothing, that is, nothing like anything

deism, emanationism, and pantheism as they dealt with

else. From this Nothing comes all else. Nevertheless,

such questions as: Having created, is God then indiffer¬

the essence of this intrinsically invisible God is manifest

ent to his creation? Does God need the world? Are

in creation. God without any world would be only a

the world and God thinkable without each other? How

possible Creator, hence this world is not accidental to

can the unchanging God remain unchanging if he is

God’s being. Just as the sun must shine, so the creative

immanent in his changing world? The thought of sev¬

eternal Goodness must create; there can be no chasm

eral great thinkers makes such theoretical tensions

between God’s will, his thought, and his being. Yet God

within theism clearer.

and the world are not one.

II. PERSISTENT CREATIONIST ISSUES 1. Saint Augustine’s God is self-identical, immutable,

The stress is clear: creation must not be a divine fiat that is arbitrary, or unrelated to God’s essential na¬ ture. Hence God is not one being alongside of other be¬

not in any way changed by the created world. The

ings. As James Ward suggests (1935), words like “super¬

Ideas are God’s ideas; they constitute eternal perfection

essential, super-rational, super-personal, nay, super¬

imperfectly mirrored in all individuals and species. God

absolute unity” are intended to express the fullness

did not have to create. He did so, in order that crea¬

of “inexhaustible positivity” (p. 35). God does not know

tures might share in his goodness.

himself (if to know is to know what some other is).

The material world, therefore, is not intrinsically

Erigena’s problem is to link his full Nothing with

573

CREATION IN RELIGION the realms of immaterial and material beings and their

There is a certain power in this argument once it

composites. The Logos, created and creating, is the

is seen that the Creator and the created cannot be of

first manifestation of the Nothing of God. The Logos

the same quality in every respect. In Gilson’s words:

lures the created and uncreated realms “below” it, thus

“No creature receives the whole fulness of divine

unifying the manyness of being with the One.

goodness because perfections come from God to crea¬

The traditional creationist will insist that such at¬

tures by a kind of descent” (p. 155). But must the

tempts do nothing ultimately to bridge “the ugly broad

Perfection, expressed in limited creatures, also include

ditch” between the One and the many. Nor is the

their imperfections? Must the eyes be imperfect eyes?

distance between the Unity of God and the manyness

Granting that evil has no independent power but is

of the world decreased by introducing many grades

the absence of good as defined for a given kind of

of being that are lured by the immaterial Logos (or

creature, does the actual distribution of natural good

“Ideas”) without which they would be nonexistent.

and evil add up to perfection?

Such juxtaposing of emanationism with creationism is

But Aquinas’ main metaphysical model is clear. A

not in fact helpful. For if it helps to argue that man’s

self-sufficient God expresses his perfection in creating.

knowledge of Nature is possible because his mind

The creative activity changes the Creator no more,

“participates” in the mediating primal Ideas, it does

presumably, than the knowing process changes what

not help us understand the existence of human freedom

is known. God is not a member of any genus but he

and natural evil. For the many, including man, still

is the principle and cause of every genus. Were He

exist in the Absolute, Self-Determining, God. Nothing

incapable of creating in accordance with his will and

that appears to be evil, including man’s misuse of his

reason, he would not be perfect. Only this kind of

freedom, has reality apart from God. Thus, a high price

being, never Himself nonbeing, can create ex nihilo.

is to be paid for unifying all Being and Goodness, for

Yet to create is to create some limited order of being

holding that evil is ultimate Harmony misunderstood.

as distinct from every other. This entails at best the

3. In Thomas Aquinas the temptation to emanation¬

creation of mutually supporting beings and of mutually

ism is overcome, and creationism is more clear-cut.

supporting parts within them. These beings come into

Aquinas’ God is changeless, transcendent in being and

being and go out of being, within the limits of the

in self-knowledge. He is, nevertheless, immanent in the

divine plan. Their ultimate nature is not theirs to

world without its changing Him in any respect. Noth¬

constitute or reconstitute; they affect and are affected

ing but God’s own being and free decision determine

in accordance with their particular created consti¬

the “moment” of creation or the duration and quantity

tutions. Persons, however, have limited freedom, which

of the created world. For Aquinas the question whether

can be strengthened by God’s grace, which is respected

God can be God without the world is not answerable

by God even when it is abused.

with logical necessity. Aquinas concentrates on understanding how the one eternally perfect God can maintain his Unity and Per¬

Theology

(1930). Tennant argues that there is no denying the

fection in creating both the many individuals and their

finite self, but that as regards all other philosophical

forms of being. The controlling analogy here is that

questions, probability is the guide of life. He concludes

of an artist whose quality is expressed not in one work

that a cosmic Person is the most reasonable hypothesis

alone but in a variety that express his quality, and

for interpreting man’s cognitive, aesthetic, moral, and

together display the many aspects of his perfection.

religious experience as a whole.

Aquinas’ God, accordingly, creates individuals within

574

4. This Thomistie theism has an outstanding coun¬ terpart in F. R. Tennant’s Philosophical

Tennant struggles with the problem of the divine

species, but the individuals are concrete, graded ways

immanence in Nature. God, in creating, delegated

that bring out the richness possible in each species.

spontaneous activity to unities (“substance-causes”) in

For example, eyes are eyes; they perform their limited

the subhuman world. A gradation, as biological evolu¬

function in all beings. But they, with other limited parts

tion shows, eventuates in human self-consciousness,

of the body, go to make up the harmony of the body.

desire, reason, and free will. The facts of moral and

Similarly no species can express the perfection of God,

natural evil are most intelligible if we hypothesize both

for each species is limited. But the hierarchy of limited

the delegating of limited spontaneity to subhuman

species, each with its imperfect but definite members

orders and the “planting out” and “positing” of per¬

are—all taken together—concrete manifestations of the

sons. With such metaphorical expressions, Tennant

perfection of God. God, in freely creating, perforce

stresses the fact that things and persons are no part

creates finite forms of his perfection; but their rich variety and hierarchical gradations together express the

of God. More specifically, God is the Creator of the primary

perfection of his handiwork.

collocations of the world. He is transcendent insofar

CREATION IN RELIGION as the constitutive elements in Nature exhibit some

world we know, for us to talk of God’s entertaining

spontaneity and persons enjoy limited moral freedom.

other eternal ideas is to talk as if we had some other

Is God, then, a deistic spectator of the created world?

evidence for thinking about God’s nature other than

Is he immanent as a painter is immanent in his paint¬

this world with man in it. For Tennant, God has “no

ings? Or does God, as in the Augustinian and Cartesian

empty capacity which somehow hits upon definite

view, create from moment to moment and thus provide

modes of activity” (II, 184). “The world is what it is

continuity in his creation?

because God is what he is” (II, 184). It is this particular

Tennant answers each of these questions negatively. The Augustinian view does not take seriously enough

evolutionary world, not a “static perfection,” which calls for a World-Ground.

the “planting out” of beings-for-themselves. Tennant

In Tennant, the relation of the unchanging eternal

thinks that evils in Nature, like cyclones and cancer,

God of classical theism to the temporal world is stated

may be seen as an inherent, but not predetermined

very cautiously. On the one hand, he does not wish

consequence of the delegated spontaneity at the sub¬

to restrict God to the conceptual time of scientific

human level. Such evils and disorder, however, must

description; on the other, he wishes to keep God func¬

be seen within the context of prevailing order and the

tionally related to the created changing world. So he

possibilities for goodness in things. At the same time,

finally says, somewhat enigmatically, “We have no

Tennant urges, “through God’s immanence all things

right to regard God as not supra-temporal. I admit that

consist” (II, 212). Purpose-foiling tendencies in the

He cannot be regarded as supra-temporal” (P. A.

subhuman realm are not allowed to disrupt the pur¬

Bertocci, The Empirical Argument, p. 255).

pose-realizing cosmos because of God’s appropriate

5. Theists who have less faith in such reasonable

directive and creative activity in keeping “the world

theorizing, and who hold to creation as an article of

with all its differentiated detail and its ever emergent

nonrational faith, tend to reinterpret creatio by em¬

products” one whole (II, 216). Tennant reasons, ac¬

phasizing man’s commitment to his own freedom. They

cordingly,

world-

are suspicious of any doctrine of transcendence that

elements,” be it occasional or continuous, is coherent

makes God one being alongside of others, or that con¬

with the intricate adaptations required for our under¬

ceives man as a thing and not creative in God’s image.

that

“divine

action

upon

the

standing of cosmic evolution, including man (II, 215).

Hence they see creatio not as in any way separating

The how of this direction, like the original act of

man, world, and God, but as symbolizing both man’s

creation, is not open to human analogy; but it contra¬

freedom and his dependence on unconditioned Being.

dicts nothing we know. Tennant leaves it as an empiri¬

John MacQuarrie’s Principles of Christian Theology

cal question whether interference with such law as we

(1966) gives expression to this existential-ontological

know in Nature has actually taken place when God

view.

acts to preserve the dependable unity of Nature. In

MacQuarrie’s conclusion is that the term “letting be”

any case, Tennant’s God is no spectator; he is no artist;

best expresses the meaning of creativity. The specula¬

he is no continual creator (Augustine). God delegates

tive questions about whether time had a beginning give

autonomy, but does not remain helpless as he directs

way to the existential meaning of time. A creative,

and creates in order to maintain and enrich the created

loving Being “lets be . . . only at the risk to itself, only

realm.

by giving itself and going out into openness” (p. 200).

Tennant distinguishes between God’s action upon

In this view man can understand himself as that

subhuman beings and his action on persons capable

being among dependent beings who, most open to

of reasonable, moral, and religious response. He rejects

fulfillment, is also most responsible for his development

any theory of God’s action upon man that suggests

as part of the risk of being itself. What this view

indwelling possession; no quasi-physical, impersonal

emphasizes is expressed in MacQuarrie’s belief that

coercion by God—even if it be called God’s grace—-is

creatio overstresses the difference between God and

acceptable in a universe intended to support man’s

his creation, thus tending to make creation an arbitrary

moral development.

act. Hence MacQuarrie moves toward the image of

Tennant also differs from other theists in holding that

emanation which “stresses affinity” and suggests “that

it is unempirical, and therefore unreasonable, to speak

God does really put himself into the creation so that

of God as creating the best possible world from an

the risk of creation really matters to him" (p. 202).

infinite number of contemplated possibilities. “God

Clearly MacQuarrie uses emanation to avoid what

without a world is a superfluous abstraction, and a God

could be arbitrary chasms between beings and Being.

who might have ‘chosen’ a different seminal world from

Like Paul Tillich he stresses the participation of con¬

this, or different ‘primary collocations’ would be a

ditioned beings in the unconditioned Being. At the

different God” (II, 183). Since this world is the only

same time, he has God “going out of himself” and

575

CREATION IN RELIGION “risking” the creation of the evolutionary order of

by a God whose very being is involved with that of

subhuman and human beings who uniquely share in being and nonbeing. The stress remains on man’s con¬

the world. But all such views, despite their protestations to the

tinuity with the subhuman world, and on the “leap

contrary, are faced with the problem of protecting the

that differentiates man as rational, as responsible for

nature of the individuality of both God and man. Their

his own development, and as capable of participation

stress on human autonomy and independence of the

in Nature and in cooperative intimacy with God.

world tends to be lost in a polarity between God and

The contrast between Tennant and MacQuarrie is

his creation. Such is the critique that underlies tempo¬

significant. Both stress human autonomy in particular,

ralistic personalism. E. S. Brightman, in particular,

but Tennant would be suspicious of images like “par¬

resists any blurring of creatb, individuality, and free¬

ticipation”

despite

dom, even as he takes both time and the problem of

MacQuarrie’s insistence that participation must never

nondisciplinary suffering seriously (1958). The sugges¬

mean “absorption.” MacQuarrie does say that creation

tion is that the working out of the purpose of the

as

inconsistent

with

creation,

means “the coming out or emergence of particular

Creator-God is affected by changes in the world and

things” (p. 214). With what Tennant would approve

by the free choices of persons. This suggestion may

MacQuarrie continues: “The more multiple the created

be expressed in four theses that at once summarize and

beings, the richer is the unity, or at least the potential

develop the basic themes in this essay.

unity [of God], and all this richness would be shattered

First, God in his metaphysical structure is a Person,

and destroyed by the collapse of everything into the

aware of his own being and purposes. In creating, God

stillness of an inert monolithic Being” (p. 214). There

brings into being what could not be apart from his

may seem to be only a verbal difference between

willing it into being. Created beings are “posited”

Tennant’s speaking of “planting out

with their own quality and degree of activity-passivity

and “positing”

or “delegating” autonomy, and MacQuarrie’s “creation

(or, at the subhuman level, they may be identical with

where being confers itself, gives itself to the beings

God).

who have been called out of nothing

(p. 214). But

Second, in creating free persons especially, God is

MacQuarrie’s concern for inner kinship inspires other

both limiting his own power and the particular way

images which for Tennant weaken both transcendence

in which he will affect them. Persons, with limited

and mutual responsibility.

Still both Tennant and

freedom, operating within the collocated structures

MacQuarrie are not far apart when MacQuarrie says:

that make the world a cosmos, cannot change these

“time is in Being rather than Being in time,” and

structures; but they can select among possible alterna¬

“Being must remain at once stable and dynamic”

tives allowed by these structures. In so doing they

(p. 320). 6. It is clear that classical, absolutistic theism has

influence the quality of their own experience and

produced uneasiness even in its more refined attempts

pressed in the next three contentions.

to reconcile the transcendent, unchanging God with

Third, God is not the stem cosmic Potentate, impas¬

the God immanent in a changing world and presuma¬

sive to the suffering and enjoyments of men; nor is he

bly affected by the moral growth and sin of persons.

the beneficent Overseer. He is indeed the Creator who

When struggling with this problem classical theism has

in creating expresses his own being. The created world

veered toward monism and emanationism: God’s na¬

is indeed one in which co-creators arrive, survive, and

ture can be expressed in, but not affected by, change

are basically responsible for the quality of the respon¬

and suffering in all its finite centers.

sive-responsible community involving God and man.

Indeed, the classical God who creates ex nihib sug¬

God indeed continues to create without infringing the

gests an omnipotent, sovereign King, the benefactor

dependable order of being and in cooperation with

of his obedient creatines. But this image does not

human choice. And God can never become less than

cohere with the image of God as cosmic Lover sensitive

real, being a self-caused Person. But his creative acts

to all sentient creatures, and to overcoming sin and

in the evolution of world history, including man, make

suffering in man. For some thinkers, such as S. Alex¬

him a participant in, but not victim of, all that occurs.

ander, H. Bergson, C. Hartshorne, A. N. Whitehead

He responds creatively and mercifully to what is

and H. N. Wieman, this seems to mean the bankruptcy

effected in the realm of delegated agency at all levels.

of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. They therefore

This cosmic Creator is the redeeming Lover who is

supplant creatio with an ultimate creativity, congenial

concerned that nothing valuable be lost as shared crea¬

with the emergence of novelty in biological evolution

tion continues.

and moral worth in man. The dominant model now 576

God’s. The contrast with this classical theism is ex¬

Fourth, God does not create the world and time

is creative emergence within a temporalistic, teleo-

together, for the Creator himself is temporal insofar

logical reality guided and directed in different degrees

as he creates and responds to his co-creators. The

CREATIVITY IN ART historic process is integral to the very being of the

CREATIVITY IN ART

Creator, who, in creating any specific beings, expresses the nature of His own being in that specific way. Thus,

Perhaps the most significant interpretation of the con¬

the model of an unchanging Creator is supplanted by

ception of “creativity in art” which has appeared in

the model of a unified Creator who is self-continuous

the history of ideas, and certainly the one most fruitful

in creating and knows the agony and ectasy of all

for the aesthetician, is that couched in terms of free¬

creativity and destruction.

dom. Philologists have attributed the more extensive

Fifth, in this perspective, the notion that there is

meanings of “make” and “grow” to the hypothetical

no model for creatio ex nihilo in the finite world is

root of “create,” the Indo-European °kerdh- or the

challenged. Man is indeed usually an artificer in a

Sanskrit °ker- or °kre-. (See J. Pokomy, 1, 577; Walde-

material given to him and in him. But the counter¬

Hofmann, III, 288, Ernout and Meillet, III, 208, 260;

suggestion is that man does create ex nihilo when, given

and S. M. Kuhn, II, 713ff.) The proliferation of mean¬

his created nature, he does bring into being what was

ings of the word “create” in less hypothetical contexts

not. This is so when he creates in the realms of knowl¬

has been extraordinary: “causing to grow,” “ability to

edge, ethics, art, and religion. Obviously this creation

produce,” “ability to make,” “ability to call into exist¬

is within limits, but what comes to be would not be

ence, to construct, to give rise to, to constitute, to

to the extent, and in the way that, a person wills it.

represent, to invest, to occasion, to form out of noth¬

There is an experiential person-model for creatio ex

ing.” (See, for example, H. C. Wyld, The Universal

nihilo.

English Dictionary.) A philosopher of art, in contrast

Accordingly, temporalistic personalists reject deism,

to the philologist and to the maker of dictionaries,

emanation, monism, and a dialectical polarity. They

discovers that the identification of “creativity” with

seek to harmonize transcendence and immanence in

freedom is not hypothetical and that it is with widely

a cosmological model of a Unified Person, who creates

received interpretations of freedom that he must deal.

without being transformed, who maintains his unity

He finds, moreover, that the conception of freedom

and continuity as he creates and undergoes the conse¬

underlying speculation on art in all its phases—the

quences, good and bad, of his creations. This creationist

artist’s creativity, the autonomous judgment of works

model must be seen teleologically. A loving Person

of fine art, and the productive imagination at work

purposes a cosmic community of mutually responsible

in the experience of profoundly moving works of

co-creators—the present and continuing goal of all

art—is the theme of God’s power and freedom to make

creative activity. This view of God imderlies the ethics

or to originate the universe. This primarily theological

and social philosophy not of authoritarian fascism or

and cosmological conception of creativity has influ¬

communism, but of communitarian personalism.

enced both philosophy of art and aesthetics principally through what has been called “the great analogy” between the artist and God (Nahrn, The Artist as Cre¬ ator and “The Theological Background of the Theory

BIBLIOGRAPHY Peter A. Bertocci, The Empirical Argument for God in Late

British Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1938); idem, “Toward a Metaphysics of Creation,” Review of Metaphysics, 17 (1964), 493-510. Henry Bett, Johannes Scotus Erigena (New York, 1964). Edgar S. Brightman, Person and Reality (New York, 1958). Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (New York, 1956). Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (New Haven, 1948). Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, I, 154, in The Stoic and Epicurean Philoso¬ phers, ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York, 1940). John MacQuarrie, Principles of Christian Theology (New York, 1966). Robert C. Neville, God and Creator (Chicago, 1968). Fred¬ erick R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology, 2 vols. (Cam¬ bridge, 1930). James Ward, Realms of Ends (London, 1935). Harry A. Wolfson, Religious Philosophy . . . (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).

of the Artist as Creator”). Two dominant conceptions of deity have persisted within this analogy. These have provided conditions for two basic conceptions of the artist and for two main lines of speculation in the history of ideas concerning “creativity in art.” The analogue to God the Creator is the inspired genius who, it has been maintained, is capable of producing works of art which cannot be explained solely in terms of artifacts. In classical spec¬ ulation on art, the inspired genius was said to be entheos, “filled with god,” and because he utters divine words, able to give “birth to beauty.” In modern times, the genius is ordinarily regarded as a man endowed with a marked productive or creative imagination. The analogue to God the Maker is the artist as imitator and technician, one who proceeds by “right

PETER A. BERTOCCI

reason,” the ground for techne (rrxi,rl)- Each concep¬

[See also Creativity in Art; Death and Immortality; Deism;

tion of deity and of artist is presupposed by a contrast¬

Evil; Existentialism; Free Will in Theology; God; Hierar¬

ing conception of freedom. The creative god and the

chy; Nature; Right and Good; Time.]

creative artist are free to originate; the artisan deity

5/7

CREATIVITY IN ART and .maker are free to discover what is already there,

tion or that its experience is to be explained in terms

to select, and to. construct. These differing conceptions

of a catharsis of feelings.

of deity and artist have influenced the entire aesthetic

Plato and Aristotle, the two principal speculative

universe of discourse, with results happily suggested

philosophers in classical Greece who systematically

by Friedrich Schiller. In The Aesthetic Education of

examined “creativity in art” in terms of freedom, both

Man (Letter I), the poet writes of art that it is “a

take art to be a basic and significant human activity,

daughter of freedom” and adds that “through beauty

and they do so for a variety of reasons which are not

. . . we arrive at freedom.” It is with the principal

directly relevant here. Their views diverge sharply as

implications of “creativity in art” as human freedom

regards the nature and value of mimetic art. This is

in terms of choice and origination, of techne and fine

in part owing to the fact that for Plato the Idea of

art which signifies more than techne that we shall be

Beauty transcends the work of art, whereas for Aris¬

concerned here. Owing to the scope of a problem

totle the universal is in the thing. Still, as we shall

which touches the philosophy of art and aesthetics at

argue, the transcendence for Plato is not for its own

almost every point, we shall limit this discussion prin¬

sake but for the establishment of a ground for a theory

cipally to classical speculation on the subject, indicat¬

of technique intended to produce “absolutely and

ing in the conclusion by reference to various “heralds

eternally beautiful” mathematical objects, whereas

of creativity” some of the directions taken by writers

Aristotle is evidently confident that his assumption—art

on “creativity in art” in modern times.

is “the rational state of capacity to make”—is adequate

In spite of the fact that for Greek philosophers art

5/8

to the task of accounting for poetry, sculpture, music,

as making or techne is principally examined in terms

and similar productions. It is techne which is significant

of mimesis or imitation—and, indeed, it is for Plato’s

in both philosophies, insofar as they treat “creativity

cosmic architect as he constructs the world (Timaeus

in art,” and the divergences are the clearer if we attend

28A-B)—the basic outline for the speculative tradition

first to the different sources upon which Plato and

concerning artistic creativity in the West is firmly

Aristotle drew.

drawn by them. For Aristotle, mimesis in the strictest

Plato is indebted to Pythagorean number-theory, to

sense is no longer adequate for the expression of his

the Fleraclitean conception of eternal process, to the

theory of the artist and the work of art (Politics 1340a

Sophist doctrine of subjectivity, and to the opinions

13ff.). Even the conception of productive or creative

of Socrates concerning tragic and comic poets. He

imagination, perhaps the most significant modern con¬

owed an important debt to earlier Greek cosmological

tribution to the subject, is foreshadowed by Philostra-

theories, as we shall observe in an illustration drawn

tus. The notion of genius is clearly formulated in Pla¬

from the fragments of Empedocles' philosophy. Aris¬

tonic philosophy. A belief that the poet is free from

totle’s indebtedness to Plato in speculation upon phi¬

the

rooted

losophy of art is enormous, as is evident whether we

in Greek speculation. The ground for creative freedom

concentrate attention upon the agreements or the dis¬

is present at the end of the classical period in the

agreements in theory of these two superb speculative

writings of Philo and Saint Augustine.

minds. Still, Aristotle draws primarily upon nonmathe-

requirements

of

technique

is

firmly

More specifically, we discover in ancient speculation

matical sources, although he clearly values Pythago¬

that the theory of art as techne or intelligible making

rean speculation on art (Metaphysics Book XIII). He

was developed within die context of Greek philosophy

abandons Plato’s search for absolutely beautiful forms

by thinkers who maintained both that the process of

and places art in the area of the variable and contin¬

constructing a work of art is demonstrable and that

gent (Nicomachean Ethics VI. 4). The scientific tradi¬

criticism of the product of the process is adequate. This

tion upon which Aristotle draws is largely that of the

conception of art was argued at the same time that

biologists and members of the medical schools, more

some of these philosophers sought to “explain” various

particularly the cult of Asclepius at Epidaurus. The

aspects of the phenomena—principally those of crea¬

influence of this tradition is evident in his conception

tive productive activity—in terms of nonrational in¬

of the beautiful object (Poetics 1450b 34; Metaphysics

spiration. For the most part, Greek theory tended to

XIII). It also conditions his interpretation of the expe¬

explain the experience of works of art in terms of

rience of tragedy (Poetics 1449b 26, 1453b 1) and some

responses to stimuli, without even hinting that the

kinds of music (Politics 1342a 6).

perceiver entered into the relation with the work of

We may best begin a brief examination of Platonic

art in a productive and creative, rather than in a

and Aristotelian theories of artistic creativity by ton¬

reproductive and re-creative way. As we shall observe,

ing to an anticipation of the “great analogy” between

however, it clearly becomes increasingly difficult for

the artist and God in Plato’s cosmology and philosophy

speculative minds to entertain dogmatically either the

of art. For Plato, the cosmos is made by a Demiurgos,

theory that the work of art is a mere stimulus to imita¬

a world-artisan, who uses solid geometrical bodies for

CREATIVITY IN ART

Figure

1. God, Cosmic Maker or Architect. These miniatures are

intended to illustrate Book XI, Chapter XIX of Saint Augustine’s The City of God. Augustine’s God is a creative deity but the miniaturist has illustrated the text as though the God he portrays is closely akin to Plato’s Demiurgos. The Augustinean text tells us that

. , God made two great lights. . . . He made both them and

the stars: and God set them in the firmament of heaven. . . .” The process of “making” them in the miniatures requires that God use a drawing compass (compare Figure 4). From Les Manuscrits et peintures de la cite de Dieu de St Augustin, Vol. II by le Conte A. de Laborde. 1909

the task (Figure 1). The Demiurge models the universe

intelligibility by definition into music. As regards

after the Ideas and creates neither the pattern nor the

“creativity in art,” two specific contributions in Py¬

“material” from which the cosmos is constructed.

thagorean philosophy are to be noted. In the first place,

Empedocles had used a similar illustration: Love and

Pythagoras measured the length of vibrating taut cords

Strife, the forces of nature which direct the cyclical

and discovered that the concordant intervals of the

processes in the cosmos, are compared to painters, men

scale can be expressed in terms of the ratio 6:8: : 9:12.

“well taught by wisdom in their art” (texv^) (Nahm

Secondly, in a brilliant act of imagination, the concep¬

[1964], p. 112, frag. 121).

tion of this “harmony” was extended to the cosmos,

It is to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, rather than

and the image of a universe in which the planets and

to Empedocles, that we turn for one of the principal

stars move in a circle and produce harmonious sounds

sources of Plato’s conception of “creativity in art." The

(Aristotle, Physics 290b 15) has served since to light

experience of beautiful forms induces pleasure unmixed

the imaginations of innumerable creative artists. Among

with pain as a depleted body undergoes repletion and

these are Hindemith, Holst, Blake, and Yeats, and the

so returns to a state of harmony (Philebus 3IB, 42D).

notable instance among scientists, Johannes Kepler

The conception of harmony is central to the Pythago¬

(Spitzer, pp. 14—17fF.).

rean account of what the artist may do to introduce

A no less important but somewhat disregarded aspect

579

CREATIVITY IN ART of Pythagorean philosophy, which is an integral part

tudes” or because “harmony is a ratio of numbers, and

of a most significant tradition in the history of art,

so too is man and everything else. . . .”

radically affected Plato’s mature conception of “crea¬

Some of Aristotle’s difficulty would appear to arise

tivity in art.” Like Pythagoras’ reduction of “woodland

because his is a critical examination of the Pythagorean

notes wild” to mathematical ratio, the writers within

metaphysic of visible numbers (Metaphysics Book

this tradition have tried to make of painting and sculp¬

XIII), an important issue but not the immediately

ture arts wholly intelligible in mathematical terms. The

relevant one. The context of Eurytos’ speculation is

core of the tradition is the “canon of proportions,”

not the making of a living man or of a substance in

which has its antecedents in Egyptian theory of sculp¬

Aristotle’s interpretation of this passage. What the

ture and its descendants in the formulations for apt by

Pythagorean meant Aristotle does in fact suggest in

artists such as Diirer, Leonardo, and Le Corbusier. (See

the phrase “to imitate the shape of natural objects.”

W. M. Conway, pp. 165, 179; Leonardo da Vinci,

The passage is meaningfully interpreted in terms of

Trattato

E.

the relation of mathematics to art and it is of interest

Jeanneret-Grist [Le Corbusier], Modulor 2.) Plato ar¬

that in an earlier passage in Metaphysics (1078b 1 Iff.)

. . . ,

Secs.

309,

313,

342,

366;

C.

gues in Timaeus 44D that God copied the figure of

Aristotle himself sets us on the right track. The main

the universe, which was round and produced a spheri¬

species of beauty, he writes, are orderly arrangement,

cal body, our head, “the most divine and sovereign”

proportion, and definiteness and he adds that as orderly

body. But, as we shall see he also advocated the reten¬

arrangement and definiteness are causes of many things

tion of the Egyptian practice of using fixed and un¬

the mathematical sciences must to some extent treat

changeable patterns in their art. (See M. C. Nahm,

of “the cause in the sense of the Beautiful.” Eurytos,

Aesthetic Experience . . . , Chs. Ill and IV.) In this he

in relating mathematics to art, proceeds by “limiting”

was defending the Polycleitean canon of proportions

man by the number of pebbles required to define him.

in which it is stated that “Beauty . . . arises ... in

As the Pythagoreans defined numbers as “triangular,”

the commensurability of the parts, such as that of the

“oblong,” and “square” in terms of the shape of the

finger to the finger . . . and ... of everything to every¬

space enclosed by pebbles as “terms,” so Eurytos is

thing else. . . .” (See Galen, De Placitis Hippocratis et

limiting or defining man by the number of pebbles

Platonis, ed. Muller, p. 45; P. Schuhl, Platon et Part

needed to define him in contrast to a plant. Burnet

. . . , pp. 6ff.; E. Panofsky, “The History of the Theory

quotes Alexander of Aphrodisias to the effect that 250

of Proportions . . . ,” in The Meaning of Art, pp.

is the number which defines man, 360 the number

55-108.) But he was defending the Egyptian tradition

which defines plant (Burnet, pp. 52ff., 90). Within the

and the Polycleitean Canon in the face of the actual

context of the theory of art, the point, as Alexander

practice of artists who had acquired a sound knowledge

observes, is that he proceeded

of perspective. (For Egyptian practices, see C. R.

counters in the outline ... of the man he had imaged

Williams, The Decoration of the Tomb of Per-neb, pp.

by the number of counters equal in number to the units

7ff., and E. MacKay, “Proportion Squares. . . .”)

which he said defined the man.” (He uses oKlaypafyia,

It is therefore not only to understand more com¬

580

. . to fix some of the

i.e., “drawing.”)

pletely Plato’s theory of art but also to learn something

The Pythagorean theorist took the delineation or

concerning the actual processes believed to be ade¬

form to define the essence of man. Thus, his theory

quate for “creativity in art” that we turn to a fragment

is integral to the ateleological theory of art as a mathe¬

of Pythagorean speculation. It is attributed to Eurytos,

matical form. Its source for the Greeks was Egypt and

a student of the renowned Philolaus. Aristotle is the

one of the principal speculative heirs was Plato. What

principal source of our information (Metaphysics 1092b

Eurytos asserted concerning outline or delineation has

10; cf. Theophrastus, Metaphysics 11, 6a 19), and the

an antecedent in Pliny’s writing on the history of art.

obscurity of the reference suggests his own puzzlement

Pliny tells us (Pliny, Ch. XXXV) that either Philokles

as regards Eurytos’ meaning. Aristotle says that Eurytos

of Egypt or Cleanthes of Corinth invented painting,

“determined which number belongs to which thing—

and proceeds to speculate on the possibility that the

for example, this number to man, and this to horse—by

art originated “with the outlining of a man’s shadow”

using pebbles to imitate the shape of natural objects,

(omnes umbra hominis lineis circumducta). We also

as those do who arrange numbers in the form of geo¬

learn (ibid., XXXV. 151) that Boutades, a potter of

metrical figures, the triangle and the square.” Aristotle

Sikyon, discovered with the help of his daughter how

remarks that it has not been determined whether the

to model portraits in clay. It is of less consequence

Pythagoreans use numbers as the causes of substances

to determine whether or not this is sound history than

and of Being as though the numbers are boundaries,

to notice how persistently in the history of ideas on

“e.g. as points are the boundaries of spatial magni¬

“creativity in art” the “outline,” “form,” or “delinea-

CREATIVITY IN ART tion” has been taken to be the essential and permanent

they “would appear to be out of proportion with the

factor to be sought in the production of works of art.

lower, which is nearer.” It is strange to leam that

It is clear that a complex of reasons dictates this line

sculptors or painters who employ perspective “give up

of speculation. Boutades’ daughter clearly wanted a

the truth of their images (eidola; eiSwAa) and make only

permanent reminder of her loved one. Eurytos pre¬

the proportions which appear to be beautiful, disre¬

sumably searched for precision and accuracy. Plato,

garding the real ones.”

in Philebus, likewise wants accuracy and it is on this

Two points should be noted. Plato is in search of

ground that he prefers building as an art to music

a beauty which is not relative to context or person

(Philebus 56A ff.). What artists believed they could get

(Hippias Major 291D). The practicing artists of Greece,

by mathematical methods is suggested in the tale told

on the other hand—although they had turned to

of two brothers, Theodoros and Telekles. Each, one

Egypt for the canon of proportions and had borrowed

in Ephesus, the other in Samos, made one half a figure.

from that country the results of “the technically diffi¬

When the two halves were brought together, so the

cult achievement of extracting life-size solid images

story runs, they fitted perfectly into a single statue

of men and animals out of quarried blocks of stone,”

(.Diodorus Siculus, I. 98).

a technique evolved “two thousand years before the

There is no evidence that Eurytos believed that what

classical era . . .” (Carpenter, pp. 164ff.)—unlike the

the pebbles could define was beautiful; there is every

Egyptians, had been boimd neither by ritual nor the

evidence that Polycleitus’ Canon is intended to enable

power of magic. To put the matter simply, they were

the artist to produce beauty. Finally, there is no doubt

not forced to follow a formula and so were able to

that Plato believed that mathematical measure was the

attend to the essential problems of sculpture and

instrument most useful for the achievement of beauty,

painting, more particularly in the achievement of per¬

providing a technique for the attainment of perfected

spective and dynamic power.

forms. In line with the strong influence of Pythagorean

Two stories illustrate the issue of Sophist 234ff. In the first, it is said that Phidias entered a contest to

philosophy which affected his speculation and in view

make a statue of Athena (Overbeck, No. 772). Two

of his own defence of the Doryphorus, Plato upheld

statues were to be made. Both were to be set on high

what he believed to be the Egyptian practice of fixing

columns. Alkamenes made one, Phidias the other.

and exhibiting patterns in their temples which “no

Phidias made his Athena as would one who knew optics

painter or artist is allowed to innovate upon ... or

and geometry and “knowing that things that are high

to leave the traditional forms and invent new ones.”

will appear very small.” His Athena was made with

“To this day,” he added, “no alteration is allowed in

her mouth open, nostrils distended, and the rest in

these arts, or in music at all. . . .” And, as a final fillip,

proportion to the height of the columns. As a result,

he writes, “their ancient paintings and sculptures are

the sculptor was in danger of being stoned by the

not a whit better or worse than the work of today,

outraged populace. But when both statues were raised

but are made with just the same skill” (Laws 656D-E;

on their columns, Phidias was seen to have produced

cf. 799A).

a statue admirable for the excellence of its sculptural

Plato is not content, however, merely to defend what he interprets to be an Egyptian theory of painting and

technique, whereas Alkamenes, whose statue had ear¬ lier been admired, was subjected to ridicule.

sculpture. He directs an argument against contem¬

The second story concerns Socrates’ visit to the

porary innovations in these arts and in doing so pro¬

sculptor Cleiton—probably Polycleitus—and indicates

vides at once groimds from which attacks have been

also how little likely it is for a sculptor to be bound

launched against his entire philosophy, points of de¬

by categorical formulae. Socrates asks the artist (Xeno¬

parture for theories of Greek culture, and bases for

phon, Memorabilia III. 10. 6) how he produces the

detailed studies of the development of Greek art. These

illusion of life in his statues and then proceeds to

arguments, all pertinent to Greek and, more particu¬

answer his own question. The sculptor, he says, faith¬

larly, Platonic interpretations of “creativity in art"

fully represents the form of living things “by accurately

center on the interpretation of Plato’s dialogue, Sophist

representing the different parts of the body as they

234-36. In this dialogue, Plato divides imitative art

are affected by the pose . . . the limbs compressed or

into the art of making “likenesses” and that of “fantas¬

outstretched, the muscles taut and loose.” The impli¬

tic art or the art of making appearances.” This theory

cation is that close observation of the variety of poses

is applied to massive sculpture and mimetic painting.

possible for the sitter is the basic requirement, rather

Plato asserts that the maker of “fantastic art” is, in

than adherence to a strict canon of proportions. A work

the nature of the case, forced to deceive: if the true

of sculpture is produced by its maker taking into ac¬

proportions of the upper part of a statue were given,

count time, place, and pose. What is also needed, we

581

CREATIVITY IN ART learn, is a capacity to represent in his figures “the

582

ing” theory of art which must be understood, so much

activities of the soul.” This is the proper method of

as Plato’s effort to establish a theory of ideas or univer-

procedure.

sals as an objective ground for truth and existence.

The story of the contest in which Phidias partici¬

What Plato implies concerning perspective and imita¬

pated and the account of Socrates’ visit to Cleiton

tion is most fully understood in the light of his objec¬

suggest how alien to sculptural practice were Plato’s

tions to Heraclitus’ philosophy of constant change, in

desires, as expressed in his Sophist. Plato’s reasons for

which the emphasis rests on the relations of contraries

what he wrote are basically philosophical. Still, it is

and on the consequences of the Sophists’ doctrine that

illuminating to glance briefly at several of the alterna¬

man is the measure of all things. Heraclitus’ discovery

tive possibilities which have been put forward to ex¬

of subjectivity finds its most vivid expression in the

plain his attitude. We have mentioned Plato’s adher¬

remark, “In the same rivers we step and we do not

ence to the canon of proportions, which is coupled

step. We are and we are not” (Nahm [1964], p. 73,

with his distaste for the innovations by Lysippos and

frag. 81).

Euphranor, who distorted hair and neck of sculptured

Its implications for the philosophy of art are best

figures (Schuhl, pp. 6ff.). Mary Swindler has argued (p.

expressed (ibid., p. 74, frag. 99) in the judgment that

336) that Plato was one of the first writers “to criticize

“The fairest ape is ugly compared with anything of

‘humbug’ in painting” and that his belief that painting

another kind and the fairest pot is ugly compared with

must be an exact copy of the original led him to attack

any maiden.” Few statements in the history of the

Agatharchos and Apollodorus, “who had failed to fol¬

philosophy of art express more cogently the implica¬

low in the old, plastic fashion” and had abandoned the

tions of this Heraclitean remark for the doctrine, de

older way of Polygnotus and Apelles for chiaroscuro

gustibus non est disputandum, than those of the anon¬

and perspective. A not unrelated point of view is

ymous Sophist who wrote The Argument on Both Sides,

expressed by the philosopher-historian, R. G. Colling-

just as few have ever asserted so baldly the opinion

wood, who argues that Plato was inveighing against

that the judgment of the fair and the ugly is not only

the decadent “amusement-art” which had emerged

subjective but unconditionally free as well: “Some say

with the disappearance of the great artistic tradition

that the fair is one thing and the ugly another,” writes

(pp. 97ff.). A radically different interpretation is put

the Sophist (Diels, II. 407ff.), “as the name differs. . . .

forward by Arnold Hauser, who asserts (I, 99) that in

If anyone bade all men to bring together into a single

the passage in the Sophist Plato offers an instance—

place the things that each thought were ugly, and then

consonant with the entire theory of Ideas—of a con¬

bade them take from this gathering the things each

stant effort to champion the “cultural ideals of the

considered fair, nothing would have been left, and all

nobility” (ibid., p. 110). Of the theory of Ideas, the

would have taken every last tiling. ...”

sociologist writes that it is “the classical philosophic

The completely unconditioned creativity and free¬

expression of conservatism, the pattern for all subse¬

dom of judgment which the Sophists attributed to each

quent reactionary idealism” (ibid., pp. 110-11), a view

subject are converted in Plato’s philosophy of art into

seconded by an anthropologist, V. Gordon Childe (pp.

the complete and unconditioned freedom of the imita¬

208ff.), who believes that the origin of the theory is

tive artist to make everything. Plato believes that there

to be found in the influence upon the individual of

is a class of “extraordinarily ingenious persons,” prac¬

a serf or slave society.

titioners of “shallow versatility” who not only can

The most that can be granted the sociologist and

construct all manufactured articles but are able also

the anthropologist is that Athenian society was a con¬

to produce “everything that grows out of the ground

ditioning factor in the development of Plato’s thought.

... all living things, himself among others; and, in

Nevertheless, the attention that has been paid to Plato’s

addition to this, heaven and earth and the gods and

regard for the canon of proportions and Egyptian art

all heavenly bodies, and all beings of the nether world”

is more relevant. Of more importance is Swindler’s

(.Republic 596C). In his interpretation of the imitative

suggestion that Plato was attacking “humbug,” a sug¬

arts, Plato goes beyond Heraclitus and the Sophists.

gestion which verges on the basic problem of Sophist

In the world of becoming, things “play double”; in

234 as this affects an interpretation of Plato’s notion

the world of art, the mimetic artist produces a copy

of “creativity in art,” a notion which turns on the

of a copy, an object twice removed from reality (ibid.,

distinction between the original inventor (4>vrovpyos)

596-97). The imitative artist knows neither truth nor

and the artisan (Srpuovpyos). These authors, however,

falsity (Laws 719B-C). What he practices is not in fact

all but ignore the philosophical problems of art pre¬

an art: his technique is likened to a mirroring of tire

sented to

world and since he copies what the artisan makes, his

Plato by

Heraclitus,

the

Sophists,

and

Socrates. It is not a reactionaiy society or an “archaiz¬

art has its essence in another.

CREATIVITY IN ART It is evident that Plato believes that such creative freedom as the Sophist had evidently judged to be possible for the subject is for the imitative artist the worst form of bondage. Such a life is one spent in search of “images of beauty,” a beauty “clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all the colors and vanities of human life” (Symposium 211E-212A). For Plato, sound art and genuine classification are attain¬ able but the imitative artist cannot achieve them. However, neither mimetic art nor craft is the sole product of techne which is possible. Plato’s search is for that art which is master of its own subject matter and has its own technique. Almost by definition, the search cannot reach its goal by means of mimetic art, for this has its subject matter in the product of another art. Plato seeks the answer to the question by way of the Idea of beauty. In doing so he informs us concern¬ ing human creativity, insofar as creativity is to be achieved in terms of intelligibility. It was remarked earlier that Plato’s speculation on beauty transcends art, whereas Aristotle's does not do so. It should be noted, however, that the arduous ascent to the Idea of beauty in Plato’s philosophy presupposes experience of works of art and, more significantly, that the transcendence is directed to the reestablishment of the theory of techne on grounds of beauty. In order to achieve this, Plato introduces the nonrational theory of inspiration. The transcendent experience achieved in inspiration establishes the absolute and eternal beauty of mathematical forms. The point is significant for many reasons, not the least of which is this; for Plato, in examining “creativity in art,” the transcend¬

2. De Chirico’s The Poet and His Muse (ca. 1925) portrays an essentially Platonic conception of “the shy, winged, and holy Figure

thing," the poet, who writes not by wisdom but “by a sort of genius and inspiration.” When the poet “sits down on the tripod of his muse,” writes Plato, he is “not in his right mind.”

Philadelphia

MUSEUM OF ART, THE LOUISE AND WALTER ARENSBERG COLLECTION

ence is not for its own sake. It tends to become so, and in Greek thought the tendency is the more notable because the explanation of the poet in terms of nonra¬

to flow out freely whatever comes in. . . . Neither can

tional experience pervades even the most rational

he tell whether there is more truth in one thing that

metaphysical theories (See Delatte). An example is

he has said than in another . . .” (Figure 2).

found in the fragments of Democritus' philosophy

The state of inspiration in Plato’s philosophy is the

(Diels, II. 145-46, frags. 17 and 18). The Atomist,

end of an ascent to the world of Ideas, the suprasensible

builder with Leucippus of the greatest mechanist phi¬

world of universals. “The true order of going ... is

losophy of ancient times, believed that without mad¬

to use the beauties of earth as steps along which” a

ness there is no poetry and that what the poet produces

man “mounts upwards . . . for the sake of that other

by divine inspiration and enthusiasm is “most beauti¬

beauty.” He who searches for beauty proceeds from

ful.” Plato’s master, the rationalist Socrates, said of

all fair forms to fair actions to fair notions imtil he

poets that they sing, not by art, but “by power divine”

arrives at absolute beauty and knows what its essence

and do not understand hilly what they make (Ion 534).

is (Symposium 211-12). Until beauty is reached, the

Plato himself chaws the sharp distinction between the

procedure is rational, but the experience of beauty

inspired man and the interpreter of his words (Timaeus

itself is nonrational, “a vision” and “a communion.”

71E, 72), and in the Laws (719B-C) makes a radical

What is revealed in this inspired state is “a single

statement concerning the poet and the judge of the

science which is the science of beauty everywhere”

poetry, expressing a view which has exerted consid¬

(Taylor, pp. 230-31).

erable influence upon the theory of criticism. When

Plato’s Socrates had maintained that there is no

the poet “sits on the tripod of his muse,” he writes,

invention in the poet imtil he is inspired and possessed

“he is not in his right mind,—like a fountain, he allows

(Ion 534C). Plato writes (Phaedrus 245) that only he

583

CREATIVITY IN ART who is inspired may enter the temple; the man who

to sight.” The “vision” of absolute beauty is “com¬

believes he will-enter by the help of art, “he and his

munion” with the supreme value, beauty, and is the

poetry will not be admitted.” The importance of this

presupposition of the experience of the mathematical

for an understanding of Plato’s theory of “creativity

forms in Philebus as beautiful forms. Plato holds that

in art” is evident in his suggestion (Symposium 206ff.)

they, like the Idea of beauty, are not relatively beauti¬

that men who have experienced the “vision” of beauty

ful, nor are they imitative of men or animals (Philebus

are “creative souls.” They achieve immortality. Their

51B-C).

souls are pregnant with ideas. When inspired, they practice their creative arts, the processes by means of

of art in which there is no transcendent beauty and

which passage from nonbeing to being is brought

one in which, for many, there is no theory of “creativ¬

about. By implication the experience creates creativity.

ity.” It is certainly clear that creativity in the sense

most obviously

of origination, i.e., out of nothing, would violate a basic

freedom from the pollution of mortality. This freedom

Aristotelian doctrine, repeated by Lucretius, ex nihilo

is, however, not the sole creative result of the “com¬

nihil fit. For Aristotle there is no need for such tran¬

munion” with beauty. By its means, Plato relates the

scendence as Plato describes for the experience of the

particular beauties of the ascent in Symposium to the

Idea of beauty, because the universal is in the thing.

“absolutely

mathematical

One may accumulate considerable evidence, in fact,

forms of Philebus. It has been argued, on the contrary,

that there is no place in Aristotle’s theory of art for

that there is no relation between these two dialogues

“creativity”: he (or his follower, Theophrastus) reduces

(see R. Hackforth, p. 99n.). The argument in Sympo¬

“genius” to suffering by poets and philosophers from

sium shows that a man may proceed by an arduous

black bile (Problems XXXI). Works of art are to be

ascent from the experience of objects which have their

explained in terms of man’s “rational state of capacity

essence in another to the experience of the Idea of

to make”; art belongs to speculation concerning what

beauty which has its essence in itself and, unlike

is probable; the process of making a work of art in¬

mimetic objects, has no external relations (Symposium

volves the imposition of a form upon matter; this

Creativity here means freedom,

and eternally beautiful”

209-10; cf. Timaeus 52C, Republic 438D, Parmenides

operation is physically possible because men have

133D). This conception of the Idea of beauty leads Plato

hands with retractable thumbs, the hand being an

to employ inspiration as an epistemological theory

Poetics and the Rhetoric give the impression that

different from that grounded on rational knowledge.

Aristotle proceeds on the assumption that works of art

In the latter, we know by means of external relations;

are intelligible and that criticism is an adequate cor¬

subject and object are separate. In the inspired state,

relative to art. Aristotle proceeds from the genus, imi¬

the self is related to the object by becoming one with

tation, to its differentiae. The work of art—the tragedy

it. From the point of view of “creativity in art,” this

or music—is a stimulus for various responses, all ex¬

way of knowing beauty is in sharp contrast to that by

plicable in natural terms.

which the mimetic artist “knows,” for what the latter

instrument for making instruments. Moreover, the

Still, despite this evidence, the matter of “creativity

“knows” has its essence in what is twice removed and

in art” is not so simply disposed of. Two passages in

therefore a double set of external relations is involved.

Aristotle’s writings merit attention. In the Nicoma-

In systematic terms, however, the identification of the

chean Ethics (VI. 1140a 11), we are told that “All art

self with the Idea is of vital importance.

584

As we turn to Aristotle, we come to a philosophy

is concerned with the realm of coming into being, i.e.,

As has already been suggested, this transcendence

with contriving and considering how something which

of the world of images is not only of value in itself

is capable both of being and non-being may come into

but is valuable for the establishment of the grounds

existence.” In the Poetics (IV. 1449a 11) we are told

for a technique which will produce objects and events

that “Tragedy advanced by slow degrees” from the

which are not mimetic, and are not relatively, but

dithyramb, “and each new element that showed itself

absolutely beautiful. The Idea of beauty provides the

was in turn developed. Having passed through many

needed connotation in which mathematical objects are

changes it found its natural form, and there stopped.”

no longer merely spheres and straight lines but are

In the latter passage, Aristotle is writing of tragedy

beautiful. Plato tells us in Phaedrus (250E) that the

as the actualization of the potentiality, the dithyramb,

beauty which shone bright in the world of forms is

precisely as “potentially ... a statue of Hermes is in

apprehended in this world below through sight, “the

the block of wood” (Metaphysics 1048a 25b 1). But

clearest of our senses” and that coming to earth we

clearly, while this is in agreement with the theory of

find beauty here, too, for it is “the privilege of beauty,

potentiality and actuality, of form and matter, what

that being the loveliest she is also the most palpable

Aristotle writes in both passages is not concerned

CREATIVITY IN ART merely with such natural processes as the development of the oak from the acorn. The freedom of the artist intervenes in the case of artistic making, and this fact suggests an interpretation of Aristotle’s writings on art in terms of something other than an analysis in terms of techne. There are passages in the Poetics and in the Rhetoric which are not wholly explicable in terms other than “creativity” and “novelty.” It is of interest in this regard that the texts led Sir Arthur Grant (Aris¬ totle’s Ethics, Book VI. 4.4) to translate genesis as “creation.” The issue is, however, not only a textual one. In part, it turns on the adequacy or inadequacy of Aristotle’s theory of freedom to account for the facts he adduces. It is clear that Aristotle’s artist is free—to discover, to select, and to make—and that the conception differs radically from the Platonic image of the mimetic artist as a mirror, reflecting everything and anything. For Aristotle, the origin of art is in the maker. He who errs willingly and voluntarily is to be preferred to the maker who errs involuntarily. One might add other instances all of which underline the basic fact that the artist discovers the potentialities of the material and actualizes them in the work of art, and selects and makes an object or event separate from himself as the maker. Still it is more important to note that Aristotle raises issues which suggest not mere discovery or selection, but rather, that making pro¬ duces what is new and that criticism is not adequate to explain certain results of technical processes. It is evident, for example, that in its approach to the problem of ugliness as the artist copes with it, Aristotle’s theory is an enormous advance over Plato’s. (For Plato, see Philebus 48 A ff.) Both the Poetics and the Rhetoric imply that the power of the artist pro¬ duces what is new, i.e., what is pleasant in the imitation from what is painful or unpleasant in the object imi¬ tated. “For,” Aristotle writes, “it is not the object itself which here gives delight”; also, we may be pleased “even if the object imitated is not itself pleasant" (.Rhetoric I. 1. 1371b 1; cf. Poetics 1446b 5). So far as the adequacy or inadequacy of techne to accormt for all aspects of works of art and so permit the critic to analyze these in wholly rational terms, we need cite here but two instances. Making may proceed “under the guidance of true reason” but this argument can accormt fully neither for the divergence of tragic ex¬ cellence from technical skill nor for the production of metaphor. As for the first, we are told (Poetics XIII. 1453a 26) that Euripides is the most tragic of the poets, even if his execution, i.e., his technical skill, is inferior in every other respect. As for the second, “The greatest thing by far is to have command of metaphor,” but metaphor alone cannot be imparted by another. It is

“the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances” (ibid., XX. 1459a 5). It is not implied that Euripides errs voluntarily, and it is argued that metaphor is not teachable and its making not demonstrable. “Creativity in art” does enter the Aristotelian theory in both instances, as well as in the argument concerning the artistic transfor¬ mation of ugliness into what is aesthetically acceptable. It is important to point out that whatever the impli¬ cations may be concerning artistic creativity in Aris¬ totle’s own philosophy of art, these tend to disappear in the primarily critical and analytical interests of those who found in his philosophy the principal source for their own speculation. Jacques Maritain is the authority for the statement that the Schoolmen wrote no phi¬ losophies of art, and one may indicate the postAristotelian tendency to limit the scope of artistic creativity by following his interpretation of what Saint Thomas Aquinas argued in this field. We shall then turn to the tradition of artistic creativity which derives from Platonism and “the great analogy” of the artist to God. Thomas defined the beautiful as id quod visum placet (Summa theologica, i.q.5, a.4 ad 1). “For beauty, three things are required, integrity or perfection, for what¬ soever things are imperfect, by that very fact are ugly; and due proportion or consonance; and again efful¬ gence; so bright colored objects are said to be beauti¬ ful” (ibid., i.q.39, a.8). Beauty is the “splendor of form shining on the proportioned parts of matter” (Opus de pulchro et bono, Thomas Aquinas or Albertus Magnus). God is beautiful and imparts beauty to all things (De divinis Nominibus, Ch. IV, lessons 5 and 6, Commentary of Thomas). The basis of the teach¬ ing, however, is that Art makes a work of art and, according to Maritain, the artist must content himself with good workmanship. In discussing abstract art, Maritain concludes that “to order contemporary art to exist as airs tract art, discarding every condition determining its existence in the human subject” is to have it arrogate to itself the absolute self-sufficiency of God (Art and Scholasticism, p. 90). In contrast, there are heirs to Greek rationalist the¬ ories of technique in which “creativity in ai t” is more than implicit, as one discovers in such a work as Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della pittura, which has roots in classical medieval metaphysics and its elabora¬ tion in Renaissance theory and practice. But for the tradition of the genius, of artistic origination, of the ugly, and, finally for the effort to reconcile techne and inspiration in terms of the structure of the work of art in relation to imagination, we must turn to various interpretations of Platonism in conjunction with ideas derived from the theology of the Hebraic-Christian tradition.

585

CREATIVITY IN ART One of the extraordinary contributions to the modern

of the emergence of the theory of a genius and his

conception of “creativity in art” was made by the

originality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

systematic philosopher, Plotinus (See Nesca Robb). It

Plotinus suggests (Enneads 3.2.4) that we should not

was, however, not a systematic philosopher but a great

complain that the colors in a painting are not every¬

critic, Longinus (d. 273), who in On the Sublime influ¬

where beautiful. Contrast is necessary. This echoes the

enced the eighteenth century as powerfully as did Plato

beginning of the Fourth Book of Plato’s Republic. But

in his Ion and Symposium, while another nonphiloso¬

Plotinus also argues that ugliness is nonexistent. Saint

pher, Philostratus (Life of Apollonius, VI, XIX) pro¬

Augustine, similarly, maintains that ugliness is defi¬

duced a brilliant and illuminating statement concerning

ciency

the

form

of beauty

(Contra

epistolam

imagination. Longinus abandons the theory that the

Manichaei . . . XX. XLIII, 49). For Augustine, God is

work of art is simply a stimulus for a response and

responsible neither for evil nor ugliness. His freedom

makes evident as well the fact that some aspect of

to create is unconditioned. The contrast to Plato’s

creativity in the philosophy of art must be attributed

conception of a cosmic artisan is radical.

to the man who experiences the product of art.

Demiurgos (see above) constructs the cosmos after the

Plato’s

Briefly, Plotinus rethinks the conception of mimesis.

model of eternal Ideas which he does not create, and

Not only is the One, from which all emanates, creative

out of what Paul Shorey calls die “vaguely visioned

(.Enneads 1.6.9), but the World Soul, a derivative prin¬

preexistent chaos,” which in later speculation is identi¬

ciple, is free and autonomous (ibid.. III.8.2). These

fied with matter (Timaeus 28B ff.). Augustine, in con¬

explanatory principles are, however, the grounds for

trast, maintains that God creates the world out of

Plotinus’ theory that the arts, which produce by imita¬

nothing (Figure 3). He creates matter (Confessions XII,

tion of natural objects, are not merely reproductive.

Ch. viii). The Ideas (ratione) exist “. . . in the very mind

The arts do go back to the Ideas but “much of their

of the Creator” (De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII).

work is all their own.” They are “holders of beauty

The Platonic and the Hebraic-Christian conceptions

and add where nature is lacking.” In consequence,

of the making and creation of the world provide the

Phidias did not make Zeus from a model among things

ground for “the great analogy” of the artist to God.

of sense but rather “by apprehending what form Zeus

For the Platonists, God’s freedom is conditioned by

must take if he chose to become manifest to sight”

matter and Ideas. For the followers of Genesis, God’s

(ibid., V.8.1).

freedom is unconditioned. Moreover, in the demiurgic

Plotinus does retain, however, the notion of art as

tradition man is a microcosm of the macrocosm and

imitation. In contrast, his contemporary, Philostratus,

is a maker (Figure 4). In the Hebraic-Christian tradi¬

asserts that it is not by imitation but by imagination

tion, man is made in the Image of God (Genesis 1:27),

that Phidias and Praxiteles work. According to Philo¬

and endowed with free will and the power to create.

stratus, there was no need for these men to mount to

Harry Wolfson, discussing the contrasting views of

heaven and make a copy of the forms of the gods they

Plato and Philo in an article, “Philo on Free Will

reproduced in their art. It is imagination, “baffled by

(pp. 138-40) makes the central point that both Plato

nothing,” autonomous, and “marching undismayed to

and Philo believe that the laws of nature were im¬

the goal it has itself laid down,” to which Philostratus

planted by God in the universe as an act of good will.

turns in order to explain what artists create. Similarly,

For Plato, the laws once implanted could never be

Longinus in one of the great critical writings in the

upset, whereas Philo believed that “God may change

West, remarks that imagination, affected by the expe¬

the order of natural events when it serves some good

rience of great or sublime works, “oversteps the bounds

purpose.” God is a miracle-worker for Philo and He

of space.” The man affected by sublimity, “the echo

endowed men with similar powers of freedom to upset

of a great soul,” is made creative—he feels as though

the laws of nature.

he himself had produced what stirs him.

If we return to Augustine’s philosophy, we find that

To present a summary notion of the main line of

in it the artist’s freedom is not equal to God’s. Still,

systematic speculation concerning “creativity in art,”

man is creative under the condition that the artist does

it is of value to turn to the problem of ugliness. As

not make the material with which he works (Confes¬

we have observed, Aristotle’s conception of the power

sions XI). It requires only that the analogy be drawn

of art includes the point that techne and mimesis may

between the absolutely creative God and the wholly

transform what is ugly into what is pleasing in art.

creative artist, and that this be conjoined with the

What occurs to the conception of ugliness once it is

ancient conception of the inspired genius in order for

involved in

586

of

the complications of theologia super-

the full potentialities of productive imagination to be

naturalis and, more particularly, in “the great analogy”

brought to bear on speculation concerning artistic-

of the artist to God, is of value for an understanding

freedom. The consequences for theories of criticism

CREATIVITY IN ART

3. God the Creator. Michelangelo’s God Creates the Sun and the Moon (ca. 1510), in the ceil¬ ing of the Sistine Chapel, depicts a God whose creat¬ ing is miraculous. In contrast to Figure 2, this is a portrayal of a creating—an exhibition of the power and freedom to originate without tools and without physi¬ cal contact with what is created, alinari-art refer¬ Figure

ence BUREAU

4. In sharp contrast to de Chirico’s poet, inspired by the Muse, is Blake’s Newton (ca. 1795). The man portrayed by Blake is a maker or artisan, equipped with the drawing compass, one of the tra¬ ditional tools which ensure accuracy and intelligi¬ bility in drawing a mathematical figure. He is Plato’s microcosmic man. the tate gallery, London Figure

and taste become no less important for the conception

poet resembles God “who without any trauell to his

of “creativity in art" than do those which concern the

diuene imagination, made all the world of nought, nor

artist and the work of fine art.

also by any paterne or mould as the Platonists with

What occurred to ancient speculation on “creativity

their Ideas do phantastically suppose.” Second, Edward

in art,” once it was conjoined to the theological doc¬

Young in Conjectures on Original Composition (p. 49),

trine of “the great analogy” and subsequently was

argues that the inspired genius is one who “differs from

established as autonomous in the philosophy of art and

a good understanding as a magician from a good archi¬

aesthetics, can only be sketched here. We need, how¬

tect”; the former “raises his structure by means invis¬

ever, merely quote from the writings of some of the

ible,” the latter “by the skilful use of common tools.”

many “heralds” of the modern conceptions of genius,

Third, Joseph Addison in The Spectator (No. 421) holds

of the critic, and of taste to suggest something of the

that this “talent of imagination . . . has something in

modern temper. First, let us turn to George Putten-

it like a creation . . . ,” a view echoed by Coleridge’s

ham’s restatement in The Arte of English Poesie (p. 3)

note that poetry is “a dim analogue to creation.”

for poetry of Augustine’s remarks concerning creativity

Henry Home, in Elements of Criticism (p. 524), asserts

in terms of man and God. Puttenham writes that the

that imagination is “a sort of creative power” which

58 /

CREATIVITY IN ART can “fabricate ideas ... of more surprising events, than

Expression and elaborated in R. G. Collingwood’s The

in fact ever existed.” Finally, as regards criticism,

Principles of Art. For Croce, criticism is nonaesthetic

Daniel Webb reproduces Plato’s image of the poet in

classification. It does not express the work of art, which

. . the best critic,

is an image or intuition without external relations.

considered merely as such, is but a dependent, a sort

Technique as the means of “externalizing” is likewise

of planet to his original; he does no more than receive

denied relevance to aesthetic: the work of art, the

Laws (719). Webb writes that

and reflect that light of which the poet is a fountain

intuition, the image is completely expressed without

. . .” (Remarks . . . , p. 63).

such

as

is

involved

in

artistic

“making.” Moreover, the artist in creating, is inspired.

ing Alexander Pope, William Duff, Alexander Gerard,

He need have recourse neither to means nor ends.

Francis Hutcheson, and Shaftesbury—contributed to

What the artist does is to express. The creativity of

Kant’s conception of aesthetics, but the reconciliation

the artist is an act of complete imagination. Art is “free

of the main elements which enter on the conception

inspiration.” What is imagined is an individual, neither

of “creativity in art” and which appear in the Critique

to be compared nor contrasted to other individuals.

of Judgment results from Kant’s own systematization.

In Croce’s theory of art as expression, the suggestion

Freedom is the core of creativity and taste in this most

made by Kant that taste is free but not productive is

powerful of eighteenth-century works. The judgment

denied. Genius and taste are identical in creativity

of taste is the only free judgment and Kant contrasts

(Croce, ibid., pp. 120ff., and J. E. Spingarn, p. 42). It

it on this basis to judgments of morality and of pleasure.

is clearly on this issue that the theory of sheer creativity

Taste is free. It is not, however, productive or creative.

in Expressionism encounters a serious problem. If the

Productivity is the function of the genius who makes

man of taste may re-create the expression the genius

fine art. The genius employs imagination—no value is

creates, some externalized object of art must serve as

placed in Kant’s aesthetic theory on imitation—and this

the starting point for the experience which, for Croce,

productive faculty of cognition is “very powerful in

ends in the establishment for the man of taste of the

creating another nature, as it were, out of the material

same state of mind as that expressed by the artist.

that actual nature gives it” (Kant, Sec. 49). Kant calls

Nietzsche offered the soundest beginning to a recon¬

the genius’ originality “its first property.” It is a natural

ciliation of creativity in art and in criticism. “Valuing

talent; genius cannot be taught, nor can the genius

is creating . . .” (Thus Spake Zarathustra I. XI). There

teach another. Yet, in a brilliant interpretation of the

is criticism which is concerned solely with the accurate

function of the original genius, Kant argues that the

description of the facts of works of art—the symbols,

work of fine or free art produced by a genius awakens

media, forms, and the feelings they are presumably

another genius “to a feeling of his own originality”

intended to evoke. But there is also criticism which

and “stirs him to exercise his art in freedom from the

is “creative,” not only in the sense that some critics

constraint of rules.” Kant insists that productivity is

have produced works of criticism which are also works

not capricious. Genius cannot throw off the constraint

of fine art but have performed as well the highest

of all rules. Imagination itself must be brought under

function of criticism: to create and to apply the aes¬

the laws of the Understanding (the source of the cate¬

thetic values of the tragic, the comic, the sublime, the

gories, such as causality, relation, necessity, etc.).

beautiful, and the ugly.

Kant’s interpretation of creativity encounters two primary obstacles. He follows David Hume in dismis¬

BIBLIOGRAPHY

sing criticism and proceeds to argue the point on

Joseph Addison, The Spectator (London, 1867). Aristotle, Aristotelis Opera, ed. I. Bekker, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1831-70); idem. The Works of Aristotle Translated into English, ed. J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1908-52). Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. William Watts (New York, 1912); idem, Opera Omnia, ed. J. R Migne, 12 vols. in 16 (Paris, 1841-77); Patrologia Latina, Vols. 32-46. E. de Bruyne, Etudes d’estetique medievale (Bruges, 1946). John Burnet, Greek Philosophy: Thales to Plato (London, 1932), Part I. Rhys Carpenter, Greek Sculpture (Chicago, 1960). V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (New York, 1946). R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford, 1938). B. Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression, trans. D. Ainslie (London, 1929); idem. What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, trans. D. Ainslie

grounds that art is conceptual, mediated, and authori¬ tative. The “taste” that is the core of Kant’s aesthetic theory is immediate judgment and direct experience. The second obstacle is presented by the fact that some artistic representations “cannot be completely com¬ passed and made intelligible by language.” Clearly, fine art, the product of genius, is “ineffable” in some degree and, therefore, beyond intelligibility. In part, one of the most radical results of Kantian speculation is the emergence over a century later of a theory of sheer creativity in art. This is the product

588

“extemalization”

Addison and Home—as well as many others includ¬

of Benedetto Croce’s speculation on language and art, most fully expressed in his Aesthetic as Science of

CRISIS IN HISTORY (London, 1915). Armand Delatte, Les Conceptions de Venthousiasme chez les philosophes pre-socratiques (Paris, 1934). H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1906-10). William Duff, An Essay on Origi¬ nal Genius (London, 1767). A. Diirer, The Literary Remains of Albrecht Diirer, trans. W. H. Conway (Cambridge, 1889). G. F. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, Mass., 1957). A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine (Paris, 1932). Galen, De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, ed. I. Muller (Leipzig, 1874). Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London, 1774). Arthur Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle (London, 1885). R. Hackforth, Plato’s Examination of Pleasure (Cambridge, 1945). J. Hambidge, Dynamic Symmetry (New Haven, 1920). Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, 4 vols. (New York, 1957). G. W. F. Hegel, The Introduction to Hegel’s Philoso¬ phy of Fine Art, trans. B. Bosanquet (London, 1905); idem, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (London, 1920); idem, Samtliche Werke, 26 vols. (Stuttgart, 1927-40). Henry Home (Lord Karnes), Elements of Criticism, 5th ed. (Edinburgh, 1774). Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 5th

Manners, Opinions, Times .... ed. John M. Robertson (1711; London, 1900). Paul Shorey, What Plato Said (Chi¬ cago, 1933). J. E. Spingarn, Creative Criticism (New York, 1917). Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore, 1963). Mary H. Swindler, Ancient Painting (New Haven, 1929). Saint Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, 34 vols. (Paris, 1871-80). Alois Walde and J. B. Hofmann, Lateinisches Etymologisches Worterbuch (Hei¬ delberg, 1930—). Daniel Webb, Remarks on the Beauties of Poetry (London, 1762). C. R. Williams, The Decoration of the Tomb of Per-neb (New York, 1932). H. A. Wolfson, “Philo on Free Will,” Harvard Theological Review, 35, 2 (1942). H. C. Wyld, The Universal Dictionary of the English Language (London, n.d.). Xenophon, Memorabilia of Socra¬ tes, trans. E. C. Marchant (London, 1949). Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. M. W. Steinke (1759; New York, 1917). MILTON C. NAHM [See also Analogy; Art and Play; Beauty; Creation in Religion; Expressionism; Genius; God; Mimesis; Platonism; Pythagorean Harmony of the Universe.]

ed. (London, 1753). C. E. Jeanneret-Grist (Le Corbusier),

Modulor 2 (Boulogne, 1964). I. Kant, Kant’s Kritik of Judge¬ ment, trans. J. H. Bernard (London, 1892). Leonardo da Vinci, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. J. P. Richter, 2 vols. (London, 1883; 1939). Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W. R. Roberts (Cambridge, 1899). E. MacKay, “Proportion Squares on Tomb Walls in the Theban Necropolis,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 4 (1917), 7ff. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. J. F. Scanlan (London and New York, 1930). Milton C. Nahm, Selections

CRISIS IN HISTORY During the last fifty years the word “crisis” has achieved a popularity among writers and their audi¬

from Early Greek Philosophy, 4th ed. (New York, 1964); idem. Aesthetic Experience and Its Presuppositions (New York, 1946; 1968); idem. The Artist as Creator (Baltimore,

ences which stands in need of clarification. The prolif¬

1956); idem, “The Theological Background of the Theory

as a salient feature of contemporary consciousness.

of the Artist as Creator,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 8 (1947), 363-72. F. Nietzsche, The Complete Works of

Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy, 18 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1909-1913; reprint New York, 1964). J. Overbeck,

Die antiken Schriftquellen . . . den Griechen (Leipzig, 1868). E. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, 1955). Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana (London, 1912). Plato, Opera Omnia, ed. G. Stallbaum, 20 vols. (Gotha, 1857-85); idem, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, 4 vols. (new impression, Oxford, 1952). Pliny the Elder, The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art in the Historia Naturalis, trans. K. Jex-Blake (London, 1896). Plotinus, Enn6ades, ed. E. Brehier, 7 vols. (Paris, 1924-38); idem, Plotinus, trans. Stephen Mackenna, 4 vols. (London, 1917-26). J. Pokorny, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Worterbuch (Bern, 1948—). George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589; Cambridge, 1936). Nesca A. Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London, 1935). F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. R. Snell (New Haven, 1954). A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 3 vols. (London, 1883-96). P.-M. Schuhl, Platon et Fart de son temps (Paris, 1933). Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men,

erated use of the term can be attributed neither to vogue nor fad; it indicates, rather, an awareness of crisis However, the frequently indiscriminate use of the word has resulted in considerable confusion as to its exact meaning. Newspapers and magazines employ the ex¬ pression to describe any change in human activities, whether impending or completed, thus permitting it to cover a multitude of topics from the production of moving pictures to political action. Historians have spoken of the Crisis of the English Aristocracy, or the Crisis of the European Mind, or the Age of Crisis, failing to give a precise meaning to the word, though we are occasionally warned that such terms should not glide inadvertently from the pen. In view of the uncertainty pertaining to the word, we must without delay reach some understanding of the sense in which the expression is used. Even if there were a tacit consensus as to the significance of the word “crisis,” such elucidation would seem necessary. The dictionary tells us that it is of Greek origin (/cptats) and carries the meaning, to separate or to divide. Three different, though obviously related meanings are listed; “1. the tanning point in the course of a disease, when

589

CRISIS IN HISTORY

590

it becomes clear whether the patient will recover or

with locating the cause or causes of economic crises,

die, 2. a turning point in the course of anything; deci¬

and they found them variously in overproduction,

sive or crucial time, stage or event, 3. a crucial situa¬

underconsumption, disequilibrium of production and

tion; a situation whose outcome decides whether possi¬

consumption, oversaving, etc. Their findings might be

ble bad consequences will follow: as, an economic

summed up in the epigrammatic remark of Clement

crisis” (Webster’s New World Dictionary, 1966).

Juglar in Les Crises commercials et leur retour peri-

A precise history of the word does not exist. Of the

odic/ue en France, en Angleterre et aux Etats Unis

three meanings given in Webster, the medical one was,

(Paris, 1862), that the only cause of depression was

we should judge, the oldest. It was used frequently in

prosperity; in other words, crises were natural phases

professional treatises and in literary descriptions to give

of the business cycle which ran its course in accordance

an account of human illness. The wider purport of the

with its own laws and dynamics.

word is of more recent usage and was rarely applied

The great exception to this interpretation was taken

before the end of the eighteenth century. Thomas Paine

by Karl Marx, who saw in economic crises one of the

wrote in 1776 about The American Crisis, saying,

characteristic features of the prevailing capitalistic

“These are the times that try men’s souls.”

system which he considered of enormous significance.

Both his assertion and the date of his assertion are

Though Marx distinguished between general institu¬

significant. The end of the ancien regime in the West¬

tional conditions that allow for cyclical movement of

ern world was hastened by three great revolutions: the

the economy, and extempore conditions which actually

American, the French, and the Industrial Revolutions.

spark the outbreak of crises, he accepted the notion

Their impact on many observers was that of precip¬

of the periodical recurrence of crises as a matter of

itous, even calamitous, change; in a word, crisis. Al¬

course. The idea was first expressed in the Communist

though premonitions of even greater transformations

Manifesto (1848): “In these crises a great part not only

yet to come were voiced many times during the early

of the existing products, but also of the previously

nineteenth century, no general theory of crisis had been

created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.

developed even by those thinkers most deeply con¬

Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of

cerned with the future of European civilization, such

momentary barbarism . . . industry and commerce

as Henri de Saint-Simon or Auguste Comte. It should

seem to be destroyed. . . .” Furthermore, it was stated

be noted, however, that the term was introduced and

that crises tend to become more and more destructive

acquired wider currency in the conceptual language

in the course of capitalistic development, thus leading

of economic analysis.

to the final breakdown of bourgeois society in a

Although earlier centuries had experienced frequent

“super-crisis” from which the old society cannot re¬

economic disturbances, it was only during the period

cover and during which the working class will seize

following the great revolutions that economists under¬

power through the dictatorship of the proletariat.

took a preliminary analysis of what is today known

Marx restated his theory of crisis several times, espe¬

as “the business cycle.” It is in these descriptions and

cially in Das Kapital (1867-94), but he died before

dissections of the business cycles that we first encounter

he could clarify some of die ambiguities of his doctrine.

a broader use of the term “crisis.” Theorists did not

As Joseph Schumpeter has said in his History of Eco¬

at first distinguish between external influences, which

nomic Analysis (p. 1131), it remains “the great unwrit¬

might produce a disruption of the economic process,

ten chapter” of Marx’s work. Consequently, his disciples

and internal causes produced by the dynamics of the

disagree in their interpretations of this cardinal point

business cycle proper. Gradually, however, it came to

in the Marxian theory. The crucial issue concerns the

be recognized that the term “crisis” as used in eco¬

prognostication of the nature of the final crisis, whether

nomic theory should be applied in a restricted sense

it would be a violent overthrow of the existing order,

indicating the span of time required for the trans¬

or a gradual transformation. Lenin, in Imperialism

formation of extraordinary phenomena from a patho¬

(New York, 1939), assumed that a world war would

logical to a normal situation. Such a definition would

bring on the end-crisis from which the world revolution

imply that a crisis is only a transitory occurrence, and

would emerge with irrepressible force.

that after it has passed, the economy returns to a state

We need not delay over other details of the Marxian

of health. Indeed, this was the conviction of most

crisis theory which are still under debate. Its value lies

economists of the nineteenth century, J. B. Say, for

not only in the explanation it offered for the cyclical

instance, or J. C. L. S. de Sismondi, Thomas Malthus,

movements of the capitalistic economy, but even more

and J. S. Mill. The frequency of economic crises, oc¬

for allocating the latter in the framework of a universal

curring in 1815, 1825, 1836, and 1847, seemed to

historical process, making the final crisis the decisive

confirm this belief. Most economists were concerned

step from man’s pre-history to his history. Its lirnita-

CRISIS IN HISTORY tions should likewise be transparent. It is heavily

Burckhardt’s criterion is culture. He goes on to say that

weighted toward the economic factors of history, thus

there is a healthy barbarism just as there is a negative

precluding any objective evaluation of crises that stem

and destructive one. Thus in exhausted civilizations a

from other sources. Finally, its eschatological deter¬

crisis may bring out greatness, but it may be the

minism forces the crisis phenomenon into the pattern of a revolutionary development that allows of only one

euphoric vigor of the dying. The next phenomenon Burckhardt considers as a

solution. Nevertheless, it seemed the most plausible

contributing factor in the coming of crises is war.

explanation of the changes that took place in the world

Inevitably his horizon here is the nineteenth century,

during the nineteenth century, and it was given added

a century that accepted war as necessary and even

credence by the outbreak of the great depression of

beneficial. Burckhardt admits to some of the standard

1929. Since then, however, the resilience of the capi¬

arguments of his age, but his overall evaluation is

talistic economy in combination with the new Keynes¬

skeptical and pessimistic. That wars may produce crises

ian theories has greatly weakened the influence of

could not be denied, but, “Men are men, in peace as

Marx.

in war, and the wretchedness of earthly things lies

Several thinkers and statesmen of the nineteenth

equally upon them both.”

century felt, for different reasons, as did Marx, that

In discussing wars as elements of crises, Burckhardt

the Western world was in a cataclysmic state, and they

makes an important distinction between surface crises

shared in his consciousness of crisis. Among them were

and genuine crises. For instance, he considered the

Metternich, de Tocqueville, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,

wars of his own century as surface crises only. He even

and Henry Adams. Yet, strangely enough, none of these

went so far as to describe the entire history of the

developed a theory of crisis. The Swiss historian, Jakob

Roman empire, from Augustus to Constantine, as un¬

Burckhardt, would appear to be the only outstanding

touched by genuine crises. Genuine crises are rare, he

thinker who accepted the gambit. Burckhardt was as

asserted; they should not be confused with civil or

much concerned with the future of Europe (“Alt

religious disputes which fill the air with deafening

Europa,” as he called it) as any one of the politicians,

clamor and soon fade into oblivion. The test of the

historians, and philosophers we have mentioned. How¬

genuine crisis is that it leads to vital transformations,

ever, he was a historian by profession, and thought it

such as followed the invasion of the Roman empire

his duty to elucidate certain processes which had es¬

by the Germanic tribes.

caped the attention of other observers. He carried out

The distinction between surface and genuine crises

this self-imposed obligation in a course of lectures at

is one of the significant contributions of Burckhardt’s

the University of Basel, first given in 1868. His notes

study, as is also his differentiation between genuine

were published posthumously under the title, Reflec¬

crises, abortive crises, and arrested crises. He asked the

tions on World Historij (Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtun-

questions asked by every historian: Why do certain

gen), and included a chapter on historical crises.

crises go unchecked?, Why do others fail to reach the

The earlier lectures dealt with the three great forces

turning point and fizzle out?, and finally, Are there

which make up the fabric of history: state, religion,

some crises which could have been avoided, and if so,

and culture. But Burckhardt goes on to contend that

how could this have been accomplished? Burckhardt’s

these slow and lasting mutual influences and interac¬

originality lies not so much in the answers he offers

tions are accompanied by certain phenomena which

(they were necessarily conditioned by the scholarship

provoke an acceleration of the historical process. He

of his period), as in the queries he poses, for instance,

called them historical crises. Bypassing the crises of

his assertion that the Reformation could have been

primitive times, about which there is insufficient infor¬

checked, and that the French Revolution might have

mation, Burckhardt begins his review with migratory

been moderated. However that may be, what counts

movements and invasions, such as the invasion of the

for our study of the problem of crisis is his observation

Roman empire by the Germanic tribes, the rise of

of the dynamics of the true or genuine crisis. Genuine

Islam, or the conquest of the Byzantine empire by the

crises, he asserts, produce a sudden acceleration of the

Ottoman Turks. Movements like these are important

historical process in a terrifying manner. Developments

because they provoke a clash between old cultures and

which under “normal” circumstances might have ex¬

young ethnic forces. Invasions may bring on rejuvena¬

tended over centimes, are completed in a matter of

tion or barbarism, and, says Burckhardt, not every

months or weeks.

invasion rejuvenates; only those that carry a youthful

At this point it might seem as though Burckhardt

race capable of assuming the culture of an older, al¬

meant to identify crisis and revolution, but this would

ready cultured race can do so. Clearly, as we might

be an erroneous assumption. According to him, every

expect from the historian of the Italian Renaissance,

revolution is a result of the interaction of one or several

591

CRISIS IN HISTORY

592

crises, though it does not follow that every crisis leads

it has lasting value and may be used as a foundation

to or ends in revolution. Crisis is the general term, and

for those crises which Burckhardt did not adequately

it encompasses revolution. There can be little doubt,

analyze or which have been clarified by later events.

however, that many crises tend to unleash revolu¬

Thus, the Reformation must be seen, regardless of

tionary upheavals. As Burckhardt sees it, one of the

Burckhardt’s evaluation, as a chain reaction of crises.

psychological motives for the eruption of crises is man’s

The personal crisis of Luther led to his confrontation

perennial and deep-rooted desire for change. More¬

with the authorities of the Old Church, and eventually

over, he seeks revenge for his sufferings, and since he

his reforms engulfed the politics and the economy, first

“cannot reach the dead,” his blame falls on the existing

of Germany, and finally of nearly all Europe. Viewed

authorities. There are sufficient instances in the history

from close range, a crisis often turns out to be com¬

of communism and fascism to support Burckhardt’s

posed of two or more interlocking crises in which the

observation. A blind coalition between all malcontents

strongest element subdues the others or drives them

combines with a radiant vision of the future: the bril¬

underground, where they may live a subterranean

liant farce of hope.

existence and emerge again at a more propitious mo¬

One further comment of Burckhardt’s deserves our

ment. Nor is it always an easy matter to determine

attention. He maintains that the force and value of

the moment when a crisis has come to the end of its

a crisis cannot be assessed at the initial stage; a crisis

course. For instance, it would be fair to say that the

should not be appraised by its program but by the

Reformation had spent itself in Germany by 1648,

quantity of explosive material at hand. The test of a

whereas it was still vigorous in England and in the

genuine crisis lies in its actual force under pressure.

New World.

Once again, he introduces here a new concept to clar¬

The Protestant Reformation did not overthrow the

ify his idea of the genuine crisis: “counterfeit crises”

reign of the Papacy; it can be said, rather, that, since

are easily paralyzed; only the real ones will prevail.

its triumph in the eleventh century, it has weathered

In praise of crises, Burckhardt states that they are the

all crises that threatened its existence, but that the

result of real passions and that passion is the mother

marks left upon the institution are clearly visible.

of great events. Crises do not necessarily interfere with spiritual or

of historical crises never refers to the Renaissance,

It is worthy of note that Burckhardt in his treatment

cultural achievements. Whereas continuity and tradi¬

though he was without doubt the most outstanding

tion may induce a favorable climate for culture, man

historian of that period during the past century. Fur¬

may thereby be lured into a false security and his

thermore, his own treatment of the Renaissance seems

intellectual life become a matter of routine. Crises,

to suggest that he did in truth see it as the end-crisis

argues Burckhardt, may be regarded as authentic signs

of the medieval world and as the nativity of modern

of vitality. “All spiritual growth,” he says, “takes place

man. We do not know what moved him to exclude

by leaps and bounds, both in the individual and in the

the Renaissance from his analysis, but whatever the

community.” Moreover, crises should be regarded as

reason may be, he thereby came closer to the contem¬

a proof of growth. Negatively speaking, they clear the

porary view of the Renaissance than might have been

ground of institutions that have long since withered

expected.

away or of pseudo organizations which had no reason

After a long debate about the origins, the character,

to exist except as obstacles to excellence. In proof of

and the impact of the Renaissance, most historians of

his point, Burckhardt says that The City of God would

today would agree that it should not be treated as a

never have been written had it not been for the col¬

genuine crisis in the Burckhardtian sense. Certain his¬

lapse of the Roman empire in Italy, and he adds that

torians have argued that the term “Renaissance” should

the Divina Conimedia was composed while Dante was

be eliminated entirely (F. Heer); some emphasize the

in exile. Crises teach men to distinguish between what

gradual transformation of the world from medieval

is trivial and what is fundamental in human life, and

times to the present (C. H. Haskins, J. Huizinga); still

he quotes Ernest Renan, who asserted that philosophy

others point to the persistence of the Latin tradition

has never flourished more freely than it did during the

which permeated literary expression throughout the

great days of history. We may, however, be allowed

Middle Ages, delivering itself to the future without

to question whether the great days of history are per¬

benefit of crises (E. R. Curtius, 1954). These views

force days of crisis. Crises may indeed fertilize human

support the belief that the Renaissance cannot be pre¬

thought, but they may also annihilate it.

sented as a sudden break with the medieval perspec¬

Viewed as a whole, what Burckhardt gives us is less

tive, but should rather be looked upon as a constant

an anatomy of crisis than a typology of crisis. As such

ground swell, reaching such proportions by 1500 that

CRISIS IN HISTORY we are obliged to acknowledge a fundamental change

whereas they are in reality only “counterfeit crises

in man’s outlook upon himself and upon the world.

which do not result in a vital transformation of the

Needless to say, violent upheavals occurred, and the

status quo, but merely a change of the guard with

struggle between the republican ideal prevailing in

promises which remain unfulfilled after victory has

Florence and Venice, and the absolutism to which the

been achieved.

rulers of Milan aspired created a favorable climate for the rise of the new humanism (H. Baron, 1955).

The rise of the absolute monarchies in Europe, su¬ perseding feudalism without destroying it, furnished

Nevertheless, these sporadic events do not permit

further examples of the genuine crisis. It is in the nature

us to classify the Renaissance under the heading of

of crises to change complexion in accordance to the

crisis. If we accept this stricture, we may be able to

country in which they occur. Consequently the rise

arrive at a more concise use of the word “crisis” than

of absolutism presents a different picture in Spain,

is commonly accepted: only a precipitous change over

France, Germany, Denmark, Austria, and Russia. Yet

a short span of time affecting the very vitals of institu¬

in every instance the concentration of power in the

tions, mores, modes of thought and feeling, power

hands of a dynasty supported by bureaucracy and

structures, and economic organizations, may rightly be

military power seems essential. The crisis character of

termed a “crisis.” Economic and political crises are most easily de¬

bility to the will of “The Prince” with the subsequent

tected, perhaps because they affect the lives of more

economic and social changes effected thereby. In many

the situation lies in the political subjection of the no¬

people more directly and more brutally than intellec¬

instances certain events marked the crisis, such as the

tual or emotional changes. It does not follow, however,

joumee des dupes (“the day of fools”) by means of

that they are always understood as such. More often

which Richelieu cemented his power in France. Such

than not, economic crises can only be properly under¬

occurrences might be called sub-crises, since their full

stood in retrospect; take for instance the economic

meaning can be grasped only within the framework

changes which took place after the Black Death in

of the greater genuine crisis.

Europe, or the price revolution of the sixteenth cen¬

Abortive political crises are frequent, though it is

tury, which left observers completely bewildered. Po¬

not always easy to distinguish them from arrested

litical upheavals, on the other hand, seem less opaque

crises. The Russian revolution of 1905 might come

and less difficult to group under the heading of crisis.

under either heading. On the other hand, La Fronde

But here, too, we should beware of hasty generaliza¬

is a classical example of the abortive crisis, as is also

tions which stamp every change with the trademark

the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831. Another abortive

of crisis. Political crises may be more readily recogniz¬

crisis occurred in Prussia in 1819; it determined the

able because they have a greater degree of visibility;

policy of that country for half a century and prevented

their protagonists attract the limelight in history and

the liberalization of the state at a time when such a

provoke a more complete documentation both of the

move could have had a decisive influence on the des¬

actual events and of the motives behind them. The most important political crises are to be found

tiny of Germany. Apprehension of the political crisis is not always

in the great revolutions; from them, as E. Rosenstock-

followed by comprehension. There are some which re¬

Huessy (Die europaischen . . . , 1961) has said, the

semble earthquakes; they are felt by everyone, but they

characteristics

nations

defy explanation. The phenomenon of German national

emerged. There was the Papal Revolution of the

socialism is a case in point. In spite of the large body

eleventh century, the English Revolution of the seven¬

of literature on the subject, no convincing explanation

teenth century, the French Revolution, and the Russian

of this greatest retrogression in the history of Western

of

the

different

European

Revolution. This writer would rank the revolt of the Netherlands and the American Revolution among the genuine historical crises which fulfill the criteria we

civilization has been provided thus far. As we have said, wars must be counted among the most important causes of historical crises, and this is

have listed above. The revolution of 1848, however,

twice true. Wars may by themselves indicate a turning

must be rejected; it was, in the felicitous phrase of

point in history, and we regard the great battles as

G. M. Trevelyan, “the turning point at which modern history failed to turn” (Trevelyan, 1946). It was an

was at stake; we recall the Spanish Armada, or the

arrested crisis brought to fruition at a later date in those

battle of the White Mountain, or Trafalgar, the Battle

countries affected by it. Many of the revolutions and pronunciamentos in

of the Marne in 1914, or, more recently, Stalingrad.

Latin America and Africa are called revolutions,

economic, social, and moral forces of unforeseen power

engagements in which the survival of this or that power

Yet wars spark crises in still another way. They release

593

CRISIS IN HISTORY and dimensions, which often make any return to the

teenth and fifteenth centuries in The Waning of the

status quo impossible. Karl Marx called them the ex¬

Middle Ages (1948), and Paul Hazard’s La Crise de la

press trains of history. Not every war, however, is a

conscience europeenne (1935) is even more in line with

genuine crisis; it may be a surface event or a counter¬

our reasoning.

feit crisis. Special attention should be given to the effect that

Europeans aware that all was not well with their civi¬

technological changes produce on the course of history.

lization. A number of minds began to probe the depth

Here too, one must beware of generic statements. Not

of the sickness that had come over Europe; Rudolf

all technological inventions have produced crises, and

Pannwitz’s Die Krisis der europaischen Kultur (1921),

much depends on the cultural environment in which

was one of many efforts in this direction. It is impossi¬

they occur. A comparison between Western and Chi¬

ble to say whether the general concern over the fate

nese technology would be very enlightening in this

of the Occident inspired Hazard’s enterprise, though

respect. Yet, without question, technological discover¬

there are good reasons to think so. In the final chapter

ies or improvements must be coimted among the prime

of his book, he speaks of the genius of Europe which

agents of precipitous change. For instance, the inven¬

is never content with itself, which at all times pursues

tion of gunpowder, of the compass and the printing

contradictory aims, one of truth and one of happiness,

press, figure in every school book as instruments in the

whose labor is like the labor of Penelope, unravelling

fracture of the medieval mold. During the last two

at night what she had woven during the day. Yet the

centuries this process has continued with tremendous

immediate purpose of this remarkable work was a more

speed. The advances in communication, the new mass

limited one: Hazard wanted to establish the moment

media, or the steady increase in firepower by the intro¬

at which the European mind passed from its timid

duction of nuclear weaponry have become matters of

beginnings in the Renaissance to a determined revision

almost daily acceptance. By themselves, these discov¬

of age-old prejudices and preconceived notions by

eries are rather symptoms of a long-lasting crisis than

applying the new standards of critical, rational think¬

crises themselves, and in many instances we shall have

ing. Hazard proved that the “moment” spanned the

to wait for their sequel. In other cases, the impact of

years 1680 to 1715, that it provoked a violent clash

technological artifacts on society becomes clear at the

of ideas, and that modern ideas emerged triumphant

outset. The introduction of farm machinery deprived

in the end, though some comers of Europe continued

the southern American Negro of his job. This led to

to harbor the old ones. Hazard demonstrated that over

the migration of the Negro to the great industrial

the thirty-five years to which his essay is limited there

centers of the North, the Midwest, and the West, and

occurred a lasting and vital transformation of the

the migration, in turn, contributed to the growth of

European consciousness.

the “ghettoes.” Finally, the ghettoes provoked the

The word “crisis” seems to imply a break in conti¬

urban crisis which began in the 1960’s to shake the

nuity, but such breaks are often more apparent than

United States from one end to the other, causing in

real. The crisis of the late seventeenth century had been

its very beginnings a profound transformation of the

nourished by many subterranean waters imtil it finally

American society.

broke ground and reached the light where historical

Medical discoveries are in the same category, and

decisions take place. Hazard is deeply conscious of this

have had a far-reaching effect on the demographic

continuity, and presents the crisis with all its real and

structure of the world. Overpopulation is at least in part the result of medical advancements; on the other

apparent contradictions. The second cultural crisis—romanticism—of which

hand, it is not at all certain that medical remedies will

we now must speak, would have been fortunate to find

be successful in checking the population explosion and

such a master analyst as Hazard; but although it caused

the specter of a world famine which for some holds

an enormous amount of literature and discussion, no

more frightening perspectives than a nuclear war. One

consensus emerged as to its origins, its essence, and

is tempted to speak of a suspended crisis. Since technology is basically applied science, our rapid survey must move into yet another field, namely

594

In all probability, the First World War made the

its scope. The historian is obliged to grope through a labyrinthian profusion of scholarly effort to come to grips with the phenomenon.

the cultural sciences. As we have noted above, the

Romanticism presents a crisis that in many ways

permanent crisis in which we are forced to live has

parallels the one described by Hazard, but in other

produced a crisis-awareness. This has opened our eyes

respects it gives evidence of fundamental differences.

to cultural changes and transitions which heretofore

It too was European in scope, and was also accompa¬

escaped notice. Huizinga, in one such attempt, de-

nied by a deep-reaching change in perspective for

scribed the forms of life, thought, and art in the four¬

almost all aspects of human life: poetry and philosophy,

CRISIS IN HISTORY music and painting, political thought and social ideals.

Hughes undertook such a study in his Consciousness

Yet any perusal of the literature devoted to its under¬

and Society (1958), and the present writer offered a

standing shows the widest divergency. The movement

similar essay in Prophets of Yesterday (1961). There are

was at first called the romantic school, later the ro¬

differences of opinion as to the chronology of the crisis

mantic protest. It was alternately praised and vilified,

and about the comparative value of the contributions

its influence exaggerated or belittled. At the outset it

made by the various European nations, but these are

seemed clear that its origins lay around 1790, and that

minor matters. It is clear that the crisis was advanced

its birth took place in Germany concurrently with the

by a “cluster of geniuses” somewhat like that which

other great revolution across the Rhine. However, its

ushered in the crises of 1680 and 1790. To come upon

beginnings have gradually been pushed back to 1750.

a common denominator for the crisis is more difficult.

Preludes have been discovered that are called pre¬

Some observers have used the term, “the new irra¬

romanticism, and its origins have been traced back

tionalism,” and certainly this marks one, though not

to such movements as German Pietism and the French

all, of the decisive changes that took place. The crisis

and Spanish Quietism. To compound the difficulties,

of 1890 touches on the very vitals of the intellectual

scholars have failed to realize that romanticism could

life of the West, its attitude toward science, the hu¬

not be comprehended simply by taking note of the

manities, and religion, as well as toward poetry and

ideals it proclaimed or the political parties it espoused.

the arts.

There was a conservative romanticism, just as there

Future historians may well see the two World Wars

was a liberal and a democratic one, and one could even

with their social and economic concomitants as wave

list a socialist one. But it is hopeless to arrive at any

movements in the great transformation that is taking

definition of romanticism by regarding the objects it

place at all corners of the earth. Few will doubt that

emphasized or discovered, as for instance, the Middle

the crisis which has engulfed our century is a genuine

Ages, or folk poetry, or the Catholic Church. Thus we

crisis in the Burckhardtian sense. One of its results

come to the essential question: Was romanticism a

appears to be the emergence of a consciousness which

matter of being or seeing or both, and in what order?

is learning or trying to learn a way of life that can

The distinction has been made of late between in¬

accommodate the antitheses of crisis. We are beginning

trinsic

romanticism

and

historical

romanticism

to wonder whether our destiny is to live under condi¬

(Barzun), and this at least gives the basis for viewing

tions of permanent crisis throughout any predictable

the historical romanticism of the period between 1750

future. The emergence of the New Physics, the experi¬

and 1850 as a change in mood and temper before it

mental way in which modern art changes its methods

became a change in thought and ideas. Such shifts in

and its goals every year, the questioning of historicism,

mood had occurred in Europe in earlier times and had

all would seem to prove that old concepts are failing

not always been recognized for what they were. In

—i.e., that the idea of crisis is penetrating the most

the case of the romantic movement an emotional

varied fields of human activities.

subjectivism was brought to the fore, and it formed the core of the entire trend and constituted the crite¬ rion for the separation of the true romantic from the fellow traveller, of which there were many. It merits further study. It is considerably more difficult to describe a third

BIBLIOGRAPHY The term “crisis” in its economic sense is discussed by H. Herkner in the article “Krisen,” Handworterbuch der

Staatswissenschaften, 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 1910), VI, 253-76; and by J. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New

crisis in the cultural evolution of Europe. There is some

York, 1955). Jakob Burckhardt’s theory is presented in Welt-

reason to believe that it is still in process, and if this

geschichtliche Betrachtungen, Vol. VII (Berlin and Leipzig, 1929); trans. J. Hastings Nichols as Force and Freedom, Reflections on History (Boston, 1964). See also: H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Prince¬ ton, 1955); E. R. Curtius, Europaische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, 2nd ed. (Bern, 1954), trans. as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, 1953); Paul Hazard, La Crise de la conscience europeene (Paris, 1935), trans. as The European Mind (reprint New York); H. S. Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New York, 1958); J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London, 1948; New York, 1954); Gerhard Masur, Prophets of Yesterday (New York, 1961); E. Rosenstock-Huessy, Die europaischen Revolutionen und der Charakter der Nationen, 3rd ed.

be true, the historian can do little more than note some of its aspects while its full impact is reserved for later writers. Keeping these reservations in mind, it may be said that aroimd 1890 Europe entered into one of the most profound transformations of its entire history. There were those who interpreted the symptoms as indications of a final breakdown; such were the apoca¬ lyptic prophets Nikolai Danilewski (Rossiia I Europa, 1895)

and

Oswald

Spengler

(Der

Untergang

des

Abendlandes, 1918). More restrained minds contented themselves with describing and analyzing the phenom¬ ena as they were revealed to a critical mind. H. S.

595

CRITICISM, LITERARY (Stuttgart, 1961); G. M. Trevelyan, British History in the

Kritizismus was used by Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel,

Nineteenth Century and After (1782-1919) (London, 1946),

Jacobi, and Hegel for the philosophy of Kant. This

p. 292.

nonliterary use penetrated then into French, Italian, GERHARD MASUR

[See also Cycles; Economic History; Historicism; Marxism; Revolution; Romanticism; War and Militarism.]

and Spanish. In these languages criticisme or criticismo means today only Kantianism. The term ultimately derives from the Greek krind, “to judge,” and krites, “a judge” or “juryman.” Kritikos, as “judge of literature” was used as early as the fourth century b.c.

LITERARY CRITICISM

b.c.

Philitas, who came to Alexandria in 305

from the island Kos as the tutor of the future king

Ptolemy II, was called “a poet and also a critic.” Crates was at the head of a school of “critics” at Pergamon which seemed to have argued for a distinction from

may be defined as “discourse about

the school of “grammarians” headed by Aristarchos in

literature,” and in this wide sense, usual in English,

Alexandria. The word “critic” is used in contra¬

Literary criticism

it includes description, analysis, interpretation as well

distinction from “grammarian” in the pseudo-Platonic

as the evaluation of specific works of literature and

Axiochos (366E). Galen, in the second century

discussion of the principles, the theory, and the aes¬

wrote a lost treatise on the question of whether one

thetics of literature, or whatever we may call the

could be a kritikos and a grammatikos at the same time.

discipline formerly discussed as poetics and rhetoric.

But the distinction seems to have become blurred in

Frequently, however, literary criticism is contrasted

antiquity. The term is rare in classical Latin: Hieron

with a descriptive, interpretative, and historical ac¬

in the Epistolae speaks of Longinus as criticus. Criticus

count of literature and restricted to evaluative, “judi¬

was a higher term than grammaticus but criticus was

cial” criticism. In other languages the more narrow

also concerned with the interpretation of texts and

conception is preferred, particularly in German where

words. What today would be called literary criticism

Kritik usually means only “the reviewing of literary

was, in antiquity, discussed by philosophers like Aris¬

novelties and the judging of literary and musical per¬

totle and by rhetoricians like Quintilian.

formances in the daily press” (Reallexikon der deut-

In die Middle Ages the word seems to occur only

schen Literaturgeschiclite, Bern [1959], 2, 63), though

as a term in medicine: in the sense of “critical” illness.

recently, probably under English and American influ¬

In the Renaissance the word was revived in its ancient

ence, the wider use has again become common.

meaning. Angelo Poliziano, in 1492 exalted the critic

Criticism in English emerged early in the seven¬

and grammarian against the schoolman. Grammarian,

teenth century, apparently based on the analogy of

critic, philologist became almost interchangeable terms

such sixteenth-century terms as Platonism, Stoicism,

for the men engaged in the great revival of classical

skepticism, etc., devised to avoid the homonym which

learning. With Erasmus “the art of criticism,” (ars

arose from the impossibility of distinguishing in English

critica) was expanded to include the Bible. On the

between “critic,” the person, and “critique,” the activ¬

whole, however,

ity. Dryden, in the Preface to the State of Innocence

“critic” and “criticism” was limited to the editing and

among the humanists,

the term

(1677), said that by “criticism, as it was first instituted

correcting of ancient texts. For example, Karl Schoppe

by Aristotle, was meant a standard of judging well,”

(1576-1649) defined die “only aim and task of critics”

and in the same year in a letter (Letters, ed. C. E. Ward

as “taking pains to improve the works of writers in

[1942]) he spoke of Thomas Rymer’s Tragedies of the

either Greek or Latin.” Joseph Justus, the younger

Last Age as “the best piece of criticism in the English

Scaliger (1540-1605), made criticism even a subdivision

language.” Two years later, his play, Troilus and Cres-

of grammar, confined to distinguishing the spurious

sida, was introduced by a preface on “The Grounds

lines of ancient poets from the genuine, to correcting

of Criticism in Tragedy.” Pope’s Essay on Criticism

corrupt readings, in short to what today is called

(1711) established die term for good, though for a time

“textual criticism." The elder Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558) was the

the term “critic,” “critick,” or “critique” was used in

596

a.d.

the eighteenth century where we would say “criticism.”

most influential propounder of a wider conception. In

Long forms, analogous to the English “criticism” are

his posthumous Poetics (1561) the entire sixth book,

rare in other languages. Criticismo occurs in Spanish,

entitled criticus, is devoted to a survey and comparison

in Baltasar Gracian’s El Heroe (1637), and sporadically

of the Greek and Roman Poets with the emphasis on

in eighteenth-century Italian, but disappeared as there

weighing and ranking. The penetration of the term into

was no problem of homonymy. In Germany, however.

the vernacular was, however, very slow. Modem books

CRITICISM, LITERARY entitled “Literary Criticism in the Renaissance” ob¬

and local, defensible only as custom or fashion. He is

scure the fact that these questions were discussed in

already touched by the new revolutionary force in the

the sixteenth century only as rhetoric or poetics. In

history of criticism: the historical spirit.

Italy the term critica seems to have occurred first as

It was in Germany that the most radical conse¬

late as 1595 in the Proginnasmi Poetici of Benedetto

quences of the historical approach affected criticism.

Fioretti

Udeno

Johann Gottfried Herder was the first critic who com¬

Nisiely), while it was in France that the term caught

pletely broke with the ideal of the (fundamentally)

on and spread rapidly early in the seventeenth century

Aristotelian tradition aiming at a rational theory of

probably under the influence of Scaliger and his Dutch

literature and permanent standards of judgment. He

disciples, Heinsius and Vossius. Chapelain called Scali¬

conceived of criticism as a process of empathy, of

ger le grand critique in 1623. In 1687 La Bruyere could

identification, of something intuitive and even subra-

(published

under

the

pseudonym

complain that the “critics and censurers” appear now

tional. He constantly rejected theories, systems, fault¬

in swarms and form factions which retard the progress

finding. We find Herder quoting Leibniz with approval

of the arts (Les Caracteres).

to the effect that “he likes most things he reads”

In France, in the seventeenth century, criticism

(Sdmtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, XVII, 338). The cor¬

emancipated itself from its subordination to grammar

rect method “in order to understand and interpret a

and rhetoric and absorbed or replaced “poetics,” at

piece of literature is to put oneself in the spirit of the

least in part. This movement is connected with the

piece itself ” (ibid., VI, 34). It is “the natural method,

growth and spread of the critical spirit in general, in

which leaves each flower in its place, and contemplates

the sense of increased skepticism, distrust of authority

it there just as it is, according to time and kind, from

and rules, and later with the appeal to taste, sentiment,

the root to the crown. The most humble genius hates

feeling, je ne sais quoi. The few writers who expressly

ranking and comparison. Lichen, moss, fern, and the

reflected on the concept of criticism or the role of the

richest scented flower: each blooms in its place in God’s

critic, Father Bouhours in France and Alexander Pope

order” (ibid., XVIII, 138). Each work of art is seen

in England, defended their ideal against pedants, cen¬

as part and parcel of its milieu, fulfilling its function

surers, and mere verbal quibblers, and described and

and thus needs no criticism. Literary study became a

exalted the true critic as a man of taste, a wit, a bel

kind of botany.

esprit. Pope, in particular, deplored the false divorce

Goethe, Herder’s pupil, has the same gospel of tol¬

between wit and judgment and advocated a respect

erance. Criticism should be only criticism of beauties.

for antiquity and even of the rules while admitting “a

He distinguishes between destructive and productive

grace beyond the reach of art” and praising the inven¬

criticism. The first is easy as it is simply the application

tion and imagination of Homer and Shakespeare.

of a yardstick. Productive criticism is much harder. “It

During the eighteenth century, a term which had

asks: What did the author set out to do? Was his plan

become confined to the verbal criticism of classical

reasonable and sensible, and how far did he succeed

writers was slowly widened to include the whole prob¬

in carrying it out?” (Review of Manzoni’s Conte di

lem of understanding and judging and even the theory

Carmagnola,

of knowledge and knowing. Lord Karnes, a Scottish

Goethe hopes that such criticism may be of assistance

judge, attempted in his Elements of Criticism (1762)

to an author and admits that his own criticism describes

to give criticism an elaborate groundwork in associa¬

largely the influence which books have had on himself.

tion psychology, and proudly claimed that he was

“At bottom this is the way all readers criticize” (ibid.,

founding a new science: “To reduce the science of

37, 280). Herder and Goethe with all their historical

criticism to any regular form, has never once been

relativism and subjectivism have not yet broken their

Werke,

Jubilaums-Ausgabe,

37,

180).

attempted.” In practice, he defends neo-classical taste

ties to the classical tradition: but by the nineteenth

based on imiversal human nature which, he recognizes,

century their theories had led to complete critical

is, however, upheld only by a small group of people

relativism or to the subjective criticism, memorably

who enjoy leisure, live in an enlightened age, and

phrased by Anatole France’s definition of criticism as

escape corruption. Dr. Johnson’s ideal is also to “estab¬

“the adventures of a soul among masterpieces.”

lish principles of judgment,” but he does not rely on

Actually, about the same time, Immanuel Kant, in

any psychology theoretically formulated and always

his Critique of Judgment (1790) had offered a solution

finds “an appeal open from criticism to

to the central problem of criticism which recognized

nature”

(Preface to Shakespeare, 1765). He is both a classicist,

tire subjectivity of aesthetic judgment but still allowed

who believes in “fundamental laws of criticism dictated

for its universality. Kant rejects any view of criticism

by reason and antiquity” (Rambler No. 156), and an

by a priori principles, by laws or rules. Taste is subjec¬

empiricist, who admits that many rules are temporal

tive, yet aesthetic judgments differ from a taste, say,

597

CRITICISM, LITERARY for olives or oysters by claiming universalis. Aesthetic

enclosed within itself, we must consider it as belonging

judgment, while subjective, appeals to a general judg¬

to a series” (Berlin Lectures, 3, 9). Criticism, in relation

ment, to a common sense of mankind, to an ideal

to theory and history, is the mediating middle link.

totality of judges. It is thus neither relative nor abso¬

The critic is subjective but can strive for objectivity

lute, neither completely individual, which would mean

by a knowledge of history, bv reference to theory' as

anarchy and the end of criticism, nor absolute in the

“critical reflection is a constant experimentation to

sense of an application of eternal norms. While Kant

discover theoretical statements” (ibid., 1, 27). Disa¬

stresses the role of personal feeling he recognizes

greement does not necessarily result in general skepti¬

something like an aesthetic duty. We should respond

cism. “Different people may very- well have their eyes

to great art if we are to be fully human. It is a contem¬

on the same center, but since each of them starts from

plative, problematical imperative—not a categorical

a different point of the circumference, they inscribe

imperative as in ethics. Kant’s view of criticism rejects

also different radii” (ibid., 1, 28). A “perspectivism”

principles and doctrines. Criticism is always by exam¬

mediating between historicism and absolutism is thus

ples, from the concrete. Criticism is historical, in the

envisaged.

sense of being individual and thus different from gen¬

Adam Muller (1779-1829) who arrived at a completely

confrontation with other men, and hence is introspec¬

historistic point of view. In his Lectures of 1806

tion, self-criticism, an examination of one’s feelings.

Yorlesungen uber Wissenschaft und Literatur) he con¬

Kant had, however, little interest in concrete works

ceives of the totality of literature as developing like

of art. Still, the speculative movement inaugurated by

an organism. Friedrich Sehlegel is criticized for not

him gave rise to a flowering of aesthetics in the philo¬

seeing the complete continuity of literary tradition and

sophies of Schelling and Hegel and to the elaborate

for exalting one kind of art: romantic art. This recon¬

literary theories of Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt,

ciling, mediating criticism does not, however, imply

and many others. The two brothers Sehlegel (closely

a complete abdication of judgment; every work of art

connected with Fichte and Schelling formulated the

is to be judged by its place and weight in the whole

most complex and coherent theory of criticism at that

of literature. Each work contributes to the whole and

time. The younger, Friedrich

in so doing modifies the whole. Its goal is to achieve

1772-1829 . was the

more original mind but August Wilhelm, the elder,

008

This mediating function of criticism was exalted by-

eralizing science: it is comparative, in the sense of a

the reconciliation of judgment and history.

1767-1845) found the most influential formulas for the

Compared to the attention given to the theory of

romantic-classical contrast, for the organic-mechanical

criticism in Germany, England and France contributed

dichotomy which through Coleridge became part of

little at that time. S. T. Coleridge, who was the one

the history of English criticism. Friedrich Sehlegel

Englishman thoroughly familiar with German critical

decisively rejected Herder’s universal tolerance which

thought said surprisingly little about his concept of

would lead to an abdication of criticism. He knew that

criticism. Coleridge did formulate an ambitious pro¬

the critical view could not be superseded by the

gram of aiming “at fixed canons of criticism, previously

historical as books are not “original creatures.” Criti¬

established and deduced from the nature of man,” and,

cism must “ascertain the value and non-value of poetic

in retrospect, said of himself, referring to the 1790’s,

works of art" (Prosaische Jugendschriften, ed. Minor,

that “according to the faculty or source, from which

2, 11). It can be done by close attention to the text

the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived,

which must begin with an intuition of the whole. This

I estimated the merit of such a poem or passage”

whole is not only the individual work of art but the

Biographia Literaria, ed. Shawcross, I, 14, 44). The

whole of art history. Even- artist illuminates even-

theory of criticism implied is a psychological one: a

other artist: together they form an order. The critic

ranking of the faculties with the imagination higher

must “reconstruct, perceive, and characterize the sub¬

than fancy, reason higher than the senses. But Cole¬

tle peculiarities of a whole” , Lessings Gei-st, 1, 40-41 .

ridge never developed this as a theory of criticism.

This “characterization” is the business of criticism. But

Among the English critics of the time, William

Sehlegel also recognizes another function of criticism;

Hazlitt made a conscious attempt to formulate what

polemics, incitory, anticipatory criticism, a criticism

would later be called “impressionistic criticism.” “I say

which would be not merely explanatory and con¬

what I think: I think what I feel. I cannot help receiv¬

servative but productive, by guidance and instigation

ing certain impressions from things; and I have suffi¬

stimulating an emergent literature.

cient coinage to declare (somewhat abruptly) what

August Wilhelm, while in general agreement with

they are” (Complete Works, ed. Howe, V, 175). The task

his brother, emphasizes in his Berlin Lectures the role

of criticism is the communication of feelings. He uses

of history; “Even though a work of art ought to be

the new methods; elaborate evocative metaphors, per-

CRITICISM, LITERARY sonal reminiscences, a feeling of intimacy like an en¬

up of ideal norms—of the universal human spirit, of

thusiastic guide in a gallery or a host in a library.

the genius of France, and of the perfection of the

Hazlitt faces a new middle-class audience; he wants

French language—which would allow him to judge

to win it over, to cajole it to the enjoyment of litera¬

every work of French literature correctly. He expressly

ture. The critic becomes neither a judge nor a theorist,

condemned criticism of “each according to his taste”

but a middleman between author and public.

and criticism which would reduce literature to a mirror

Thomas Carlyle, in his early essays, adopted the idea

of history and social change (Histoire de la litterature

of sympathetic criticism drawing apparently on Herder

francaise, IV, 540). Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, in

and the Schlegels. The critic’s aim, he says, is “trans¬

a famous essay on Dussault (1819) advised us “to aban¬

position into the author’s point of vision”; he must

don the petty and easy criticism of faults in favor of

work his way into the poet’s “manner of thought, till

the great and difficult criticism of beauties.” With

he sees the world with his eyes, feels as he felt and

Victor Hugo, particularly in his late book on Shake¬

judges as he judged” (Essays, Centenary ed., I, 39). In

speare (1864), the repudiation of judicial criticism is

the act of enjoying a work of art “we partially and

complete. The complete negation of criticism as judg¬

for the time become the very Painter and the very

ment is proclaimed complacently. “Genius is an entity

Singer” (ibid., HI, 46). The older view survives, how¬

like nature and must, like her, be accepted purely and

ever, in Macaulay when he called the critic “a king

simply. We must take or leave a mountain.” Hugo

at arms versed in the laws of literary precedence, who

admires everything comme une bete.

must marshall his author to the exact seat to which

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, however, was the

he is entitled” (Critical and Historical Essays, Boston

French critic of the nineteenth century' who most

[1900], VI, 50). Judging and ranking of authors was

consistently reflected on the concept of criticism. His

Macaulay’s passion.

attitude shifted in the course of a long career from

Criticism in the United States echoes these views.

an early, more subjective concept as personal expres¬

Edgar Allan Poe exalted the function of criticism and

sion to greater objectivity, detachment, and tolerance,

hesitated whether to consider criticism a science or

and at the same time from a rather uncritical, sympa¬

an art. Criticism requires art in the sense that each

thetic acceptance of the role of “secretary' of the pub¬

essay should be a work of art, but it is also a science

lic” (Causeries du lundi, I, 373) to an increasing em¬

based on principles. R. W. Emerson like Carlyle knows

phasis on the role of judgment, to a definition of taste

only a criticism of empathy and identification. He calls

and tradition. These two trends are often at cross¬

the old saw that “every scripture is to be interpreted

purposes in Sainte-Beuve. His early romantic histori-

by the same spirit which gave it forth,” “the funda¬

cism goes with tolerance and relativism, but it is often

mental law of criticism” and he boldly asserts that “the

contradicted by his partisanship in the literary battles

reader of Shakespeare is also a Shakespeare” (Complete

of the time. He became, for a time, the “herald” of

Works, Centenary ed., I, 35). Surprisingly, among

Victor Hugo. The objectivity and the detachment of

Americans Margaret Fuller reflected most concretely

Sainte-Beuve’s later stage appeals rather to natural

on the nature and office of criticism. She distinguishes

science as the model. The late Sainte-Beuve aimed at

three kinds of critics: “subjective” critics who indulge in personal caprice, “apprehensive” critics who can

a theory' of psychological ty'pes of men (see the essay on Chateaubriand. 1862). Still, his return to classical

enter fully into a foreign existence, and finally “com¬

taste brought about a reassertion of the judicial func¬

prehensive” critics who also must enter into the nature

tion of criticism, a tone of authority and even of dog¬

of another being but must, besides, judge the work by

matic certainty'. “The true critic precedes the public,

its own law. The critic “must examine, compare, sift

directs and guides it” (Chateaubriand et son groupe

and winnow.” Saying that “I cannot pass on till I know

litteraire [1949], II, 95). The critic “maintains tradition

what I feel and why” (Art, Literature and the Drama,

and preserves taste ” (Causeries, XV, 356).

Boston [1841], pp. 23-24) is not a bad expression of

In the later nineteenth century', the divergence be¬

a critic’s conscience. In France, prescriptive criticism survived longer

tween concepts of criticism aiming at scientific objec¬ tivity and views that considered criticism an act of

than elsewhere. In Julien-Louis Geoffroy (1743-1814)

personal appreciation became more accentuated. The

it found a theorist who thought of it as serving the

concept of criticism as judicial, as an upholder of the

government, “good taste, sound morals and the eternal

tradition, receded into the background though in

foundations of the social order” (Journal des debats.

England it found an influential spokesman in Matthew

Feb. 16, 1805). He would call in the police to punish

Arnold. Arnold was an important apologist for criti¬

bad authors. Desire Nisard attempted to establish criti¬

cism, for “disinterestedness,” for a free circulation in

cism as an “exact science,” by which he meant a setting

England of ideas from Europe. At times he believes

o99

CRITICISM, LITERARY in a purely descriptive criticism, informative, liberat¬

relativism. But actually Taine does not consider all

the judicial function of criticism, and defended the

works of art to be of equal value. He tries to overcome

“real estimate” against the “historical” and “personal”

relativism by the criterion of representativeness. He

estimate, both of which seemed to him fallacious. By

asks whether a work represents a transient fashion, or

personal estimate he meant an estimate in terms of

a historical moment, or the spirit of a nation, or hu¬

“our personal affinities, likings and circumstances,”

manity in general, and ranks works according to such

which made it inevitably subjective while the historical

a scale. The work of art is always considered a sign

estimate distorted values, overestimated works useful

or symbol of humanity, nation, or age. It is a mistake

in a certain stage of the development of literature. The

to consider Taine as a sociologist who thinks of works

“real estimate” is the only critical one—it appeals to

of art as social documents. They are rather in his

permanent standards,

scheme the essence or summary of history, in terms

to “the best that has been

thought and said in the world.” (See “The Study of

which are ultimately Hegelian.

Poetry” in Essays in Criticism, 2nd Series [1888], pp.

Among Taine’s followers Emile Hennequin tried in

6-7, 11.) Arnold’s own criticism, appealing to impres¬

La Critique scientifique (1888) to give a different sci¬

sionistic “touchstones” or to a historical concept of the

entific basis to criticism than Taine. He criticized

“adequacy” of a literature to its time, may be riddled

Taine’s triad of milieu-moment-race and preferred a

by contradictions but consistently upholds judgment

psychology of the author and the audience. The em¬ phasis on the audience as a mental analogue of the

as an ideal of criticism.

600

to lead to universal tolerance and hence to complete

ing, preparatory to creation. But later Arnold stressed

In Italy, the greatest critic and historian of the nine¬

work was particularly new though it remained only

teenth century, Francesco De Sanctis, came to similar

a suggestive proposal. Still, Hennequin offered a way

conclusions

three

out from the purely causal thinking into a “synthetic”

stages in the critical act: first an act of submission, a

literary criticism which would include an aesthetic, a

surrender to first impressions, then recreation and fin¬

psychology, and a sociology in a discipline he called

ally judgment. “Criticism cannot take the place of

“anthropology.”

independently.

He

distinguishes

taste, and taste is the genius of the critic. Just as one

Ferdinand Brunetiere, who followed Taine in his

says that poets are born, so also are critics bom” (Saggi

adherence to a scientific ideal (in his case, biological

critici, ed. Russo, I, 307). The critic should “remake

evolution), reflected more systematically on the theory

what the poet has done in his own manner and by other

of criticism. He believed that criticism must focus on

means” (ibid., II, 90), by translating into consciousness

the work of literature itself and must distinguish the

what is created in a work of art. Still, the proper

study of literature from biography, psychology, sociol¬

critical act is deciding the intrinsic value of work and

ogy, and other disciplines. He defended the final aim

“not what it has in common with the times, or with

of criticism as that of judging and even ranking, and

its predecessors but what it has that is peculiar and

distinguished this act of judgment from any purely

untransferable” (Saggio critico sal Petrarca [1869], ed.

personal preference, impression, or enjoyment. Brune¬

Bonora, Bari [1954], p. 10). In Germany, Wilhelm

tiere saw clearly that the work of literature itself and

Dilthey, who wrote a psychological poetics (Die Ein-

not the soul of the author or the social background

bildungskraft des Dichters, Bausteine fur eine Poetik,

is the object of criticism. “If criticism,” he argued,

1887) which aimed at scientific rigor, came late in his

“forgets that a poem is a poem, when it claims to

life to recognize the need for criticism. “Criticism,”

refrain from judgment, it is no longer criticism but

he argued, “is inevitably linked with the hermeneutic

history and psychology” (Etudes critiques, IX, 50).

process. There is no understanding without a feeling

Taine’s and Hennequin’s attempt to make criticism

of value, but only by comparison can the value be

scientific in the sense of abstaining from praise or blame

ascertained to be objective and universal” (Gesammelte

is inevitably a failure. Brunetiere also argued passion¬

Schriften V, 536).

ately against the impressionist creed which at that time

Hippolyte Taine, with his theory of la race, le milieu,

was wittily stated by Anatole France when he declared

le moment (“race, environment, moment”) was the

the ideal of objective criticism an illusion. “The truth

outstanding figure who tried to model criticism on the

is that one never gets outside oneself. What would we

pattern of deterministic science. Taine upholds the

not give to see for a minute, the sky and the earth

view that criticism is “analogous to botany, which

with the faceted eye of a fly or to understand nature

studies the orange, the laurel, the pine, and the birch,

with the crude, simple brain of an orangutan? . . . The

with equal interest” (Philosophie de Part [1865], p. 22).

critic should say if he is candid: gentlemen, I am going

The historicism of this conception seems (as in Herder)

to speak about myself in connection with Shakespeare,

CRITICISM, LITERARY Racine, Pascal, or Goethe” (La Vie litteraire, I, 5-6).

must enter into the skin of the created being, become

Brunetiere answers that we are neither flies nor oran¬

deeply imbued with the feelings which he expressed,

gutans but men, and that the whole of life consists in

and feel them so thoroughly, that it seems to you as

a going out of oneself. “Otherwise there would be no

if it were your own work" (L’Art romantique, ed.

society, no language, no literature, no art” (Essais sur

Conard, p. 198). But often Baudelaire thought of criti¬

la litterature contemporaine [1892], pp. 7-9). He proves

cism as self-expression and self-criticism. It should “be

that even the most extreme impressionists make judg¬

partial, passionate, and political, that is to say, written

ments all the time and that they themselves cannot

from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view

obscure the fact that “there are differences in rank

that opens up the widest horizon” (Curiosites esthe-

between Racine and Campistron, or that one cannot

tiques, ed. Conard, p. 87).

put Victor Hugo below Madame Debordes-Valmore,

For Jules Lemaitre criticism is nothing but “the art

or Balzac below Charles Bernard” (ibid.). Brunetiere

of enjoying books and of enriching and refining one’s

sees in criticism “a common effort” (Etudes critiques,

impression of them.” The divorce between admiration

IV, 28) and finds a wide agreement about the classics.

and liking accepted by Brunetiere is not only deplor¬

Mere enjoyment is not a criterion of value. We laugh

able but false. “One calls good what one loves.” The

more at a farce than at Moliere’s Misanthrope. Still

critic is not a judge but only a reader. He needs “sym¬

“we can raise ourselves above our tastes” (L’Evolution

pathetic imagination” (Les Contemporains, III, 342; II,

de la poesie lyrique [1894], I, 25). Sympathy and judg¬

85; I, 164). The same was said, in the United States,

ment, sensibility and reason in this case are danger¬

by Henry James who greatly admired Sainte-Beuve.

ously divorced.

As early as 1868 he wrote that “the critic is simply

An English writer equally preoccupied with the

a reader like all the others—a reader who prints his

scientific ideal, John Addington Symonds, also saw, like

impressions” (in The Nation, I, 330-31), and repeated

Brunetiere, that the evolutionary scheme with its

that “Nothing will ever take the place of the good old

fatalistic assumption of a necessary rise and decline

fashion of ‘liking’ a work of art or not liking it” (Partial

raises the problem of criticism in its most acute form.

Portraits [1888], pp. 395-96). Criticism is “the only

The analogy with the life of a plant or animal must

gate of appreciation” (Future of the Novel, p. 97). The

lead to universal tolerance, to an abdication of criti¬

true method of criticism is always that of sympathy,

cism. It is impossible to criticize youth for being young,

of identification with the work of art.

or old age for being close to death. But he sees the

The English aesthetic movement presents arguments

need for overcoming such relativism. The critic cannot

along the same lines. But Walter Pater is wrongly

be confined by history. “He must divert his mind from

called a mere impressionist. He stresses the duty of

what is transient and ephemeral, must fasten upon

the critic to grasp the individuality, the imiqueness of

abiding relations, ‘bleibende Verhaltnisse’” (Renais¬

a work of art. He considers the question, does this book

sance in Italy: the Catholic Reaction [1886], II, 396).

give one pleasure, as no more than a first step in

There are three types of critics: the judge, the show¬

criticism. The critic must go beyond it: penetrate

man, and the natural historian of art and literature.

“through the given literary or artistic product, into the

The judge is the classical critic who judges by princi¬

mental and inner constitution of the producer, shaping

ples and the decisions of his predecessors. The show¬

his work” (Guardian [1901], p. 29). He must, moreover,

man is the romantic critic who exhibits his own sensi¬

know how to communicate this insight by finding what

bilities. The scientific analyst is the morphological

Pater calls the “formula,” the “active principle” or the

historian who sees literature in terms of evolution. But

“motive” of a work. Oscar Wilde, among English

even this scientific analyst does not satisfy Symonds,

writers, is the one who went furthest in advocating

who demands that the true critic must combine all

subjectivity. In the “Critic as Artist

three types. “He cannot abnegate the right to judge”

for criticism as a creative art. Criticism is a form of

but “. . . it is his supreme duty to train his faculty of

autobiography. The work of art is only a starting point

(1893) he argues

judgment and to temper his subjectivity by the study

for a new creation, which need not bear any obvious

of things in their historical connections” (Essays, Spec¬

relation to the thing it criticizes. Objectivity is an

ulative and Suggestive [1890], I, 98-99). Ultimately

absurd ideal, “Only an auctioneer can equally and

Symonds admits that criticism is not a science but can

impartially admire all schools of Art.” Wilde sees the

be exercised in a scientific spirit.

dialectics of subjectivity and objectivity; “It is only by

In many variations the importance of sympathy,

intensifying his own personality that the critic can

even of identification, is stressed by many writers.

interpret the personality and work of others.” Wilde’s

Charles Baudelaire formulates this ideal well: “You

position thus fluctuates between an advocacy of criti-

601

CRITICISM, LITERARY cism as empathy and historical imagination, as an

lyze the sources of misreadings made by students when

sheer wilfulness and caprice. His concept of criticism

confronted with anonymous poetic texts. A theory of

represents

emotive language obscures Richards’ successful manner

the

other

extreme

at

which

nine¬

teenth-century thinking had arrived.

602

tionnaire. Richard’s work is rather an attempt to ana¬

exercise in cosmopolitanism, and a paradoxical plea for

of looking at texts and judging them sensitively.

The twentieth century brought a new sharpening of

Both Eliot and Richards deeply influenced F. R.

the conflicts between the main concepts of criticism:

Leavis. His concept of criticism is equally tentative

judicial, scientific, historical, impressionist, and “crea¬

and empirical but he is more deliberately moralistic

tive,” and added some new motives and refinements.

and pedagogical. Criticism trains “intelligence and

In England, an empiricist and antitheoretical point of

sensibility together, cultivating a sensitiveness and

view prevailed even in such a critic as T. S. Eliot. Eliot

precision of response and a delicate integrity of intelli¬

is suspicious of aesthetics and thinks of criticism for

gence.” “Everything must start from and be associated

the most part as that of a poet “always trying to defend

with the training of sensibility” (Education and the

the kind of poetry he is writing” (The Music of Poetry,

University, pp. 34, 120). Criticism begins with the

1942). In distinguishing three types of criticism: the

texture of texts in front of us. Hence literary history

so-called “creative criticism,” really “etiolated crea¬

and scholarship are useless, though on occasion Leavis

tion” for which Pater serves as a horrifying example,

recognizes the necessity of a “critique of criticism.”

“historical” and moralistic criticism represented by

The central ethos of criticism is the preserving of the

Sainte-Beuve, and “criticism proper” or the criticism

tradition, but tradition, in Leavis, is very different from

of the poet, Eliot forgets or ignores theory completely.

Eliot’s view of tradition. Leavis’ view is nonreligious,

The only exception Eliot allows is Aristotle, whose

Arnoldian, and appeals to the basic values of the old

influence as a critic seems quite inexplicable in Eliot’s

English organic society, though in recent decades this

scheme (Chapbook, No. 2, 1920). Criticism is left with

Arnoldian concept has been modified or subverted by

little to do. Occasionally Eliot described the function

Leavis’ unbounded admiration for D. H. Lawrence and

of criticism as “the eludication of works of art and

his worship of “Life.” Life, with Leavis, is a vague

the correction of taste” or even as “the common pursuit

and shifting term. Ultimately he has to appeal to intui¬

of true judgment” (Selected Essays, pp. 24-25). But

tive certitude. “A judgment,” he tells us, “is a real

he

criti¬

judgment, or it is nothing. It must, that is, be a sincere

cism in any case. “Interpretation” seems to him only

personal judgment; but it aspires to be more than

a necessary evil productive of fictions, and judgment

personal” (Scrutiny, 18 [1951], 22).

rejects

both

interpretative

and

judicial

is expressly forbidden to the critic. “The critic must

English criticism has not extricated itself from these

not coerce, and he must not make judgments of worse

antinomies, though very diverse formulas can be found

and better.” The critic “must simply elucidate” (an

for alternatives. Herbert Read, in a piece on “The

activity which differs obscurely from interpretation);

Nature of Criticism,” advocates simply Jungian psy¬

“the reader will form the correct judgment for him¬

chology as the solution. William Righter, in Logic and

self” (ibid., p. 10). In practice, Eliot judges, however,

Ciiticism (1963), argues for the “irrelevance of precise

on almost every page and conceives his own role as

intellectual machinery to the general criteria of critical

that of an upholder of the tradition or even as “the

success,” while John Casey, in The Language of Criti¬

creator of values” (Criterion, 4 [1926], 751). Eliot’s

cism (1966), which is indebted to Wittgenstein’s cri¬

concept of criticism seems thus quite inadequate in the

tique of language, comes rather to rejecting the whole

light of his practice.

English tradition of a theory of emotion and to stress

Eliot’s rival I. A. Richards belongs to the upholders

the need of history. Historical criticism was also de¬

of a scientific ideal. Criticism should become a new

fended by Helen Gardner in her The Business of Criti¬

science, or at least “a cooperative technique of enquiry

cism (1959) while George Watson in The Literary

that may become entitled to be named a science”

Critics (1962) distinguishes “legislative” (i.e., judicial)

(Coleridge on Imagination [1934], p. xii). Richards

and “theoretical” criticism, and judges that “descrip¬

hopes for an ultimate total victory of science: “We

tive” criticism is “the only one which today possesses

have,” he said in 1952, “to seek a way by which Value

any life and vigour of its own.” The history of criticism

must unrestrictedly come into the care of Science”

appears to Watson as “a record of chaos marked by

(Speculative Instruments, p. 145). The science on which

a sudden revolution.” “The great critics do not con¬

he leans is psychology and in his early books neurology.

tribute: they interrupt.” Against these excesses of em¬

But in his Practical Criticism (1928) no scientific exper¬

piricism in England one can quote, at least, one book,

imentation is used, no analysis in quantitative terms

such as Harold Osborne’s Aesthetics and Criticism

nor any controlled method of formulating the ques¬

(1955), which makes a reasoned defense of the depend-

CRITICISM, LITERARY ence of criticism on aesthetics and expounds a theory

petually necessary” and “perpetually impossible” (The

of “organic configuration” which appeals to the main

Forlorn Demon, 1952).

tradition of aesthetics. Criticism is, for Osborne, ap¬

No such anti-intellectualism pervades the critical

plied aesthetics. Also Graham Hough, in An Essay on

writings of either Cleanth Brooks or William K.

Criticism (1966), sees criticism as rational discussion

Wimsatt. Brooks has argued against critical relativism

and as leading to judgments of value. The principles

and for standards, and Wimsatt has defined the “do¬

of literary criticism are not “just matters of taste.” In

main of literary criticism” as “the verbal object and

principle, literary judgments are objective: some things

its analysis.” Wimsatt sees the critical act largely as

are really better than others. The most recent theoret¬

an act of explication out of which a judgment of value

ical discussion of the concept, F. E. Sparshott’s Concept

grows almost spontaneously. “The main critical prob¬

of Criticism (1967), while scholastically elaborate in

lem is always how to push both understanding and

its distinctions, comes to the conclusion that there is

value as far as possible in union, or how to make our

“no general theory of evaluative discourse,” though

understanding evaluative” (The Verbal Icon, p. 251).

criticism is, in his definition, a “discourse apt to ground

Brooks and Wimsatt’s Literary Criticism: A Short His¬

evaluations” (p. 39).

tory (1957) and Wimsatt’s classifications of critics allow

In the United States, early in the twentieth century,

a combination of methods, a pluralism which belies

criticism became largely social, and generalized to

the reputed charge of dogmatism or formalism often

embrace

made against the New Critics.

a criticism

of American society.

H.

L.

Mencken showed, however, a surprising sympathy for

Dogmatism can be ascribed rather to Yvor Winters,

the view of Joel E. Spingarn, the propounder of a

who has most strongly urged the need for ranking and

somewhat diluted version of Croceanism. What ap¬

has practiced it. “Unless criticism succeeds in providing

pealed to Mencken in aestheticism was die rejection

a usable system of evaluation it is worth very little,”

of the old didactic view of criticism: the critic as

he says, and he proceeds to supply such a system which,

constable or “birchman.” Mencken saw only another

in practice, amounts to the application of a criterion

version of the old kind in the criticism of the New

of rational coherence and moral soundness.

Humanists: of Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt who

Two twentieth-century critics, R. P. Blackmur and

defended judicial criticism, a criticism with standards

Kenneth Burke, have expanded the field of criticism

which were basically classical and ultimately moral.

far beyond the boundaries of literature. Burke has

Norman Foerster argued most clearly for the view that

become a philosopher aiming at a system which com¬

an aesthetic judgment is equally an ethical judgment

bines psychoanalysis, Marxism, semantics, and “what¬

in The Intent of the Critic (1941).

not” with literary criticism. He tries to absorb literary

With the advent of the New Criticism closer defini¬

criticism into a philosophy of motives which he calls

tions of the nature of criticism were attempted. They

“dramatism.” The critic, for Burke, is a prophet who

all reflect the deep divisions even in the movement

is to remake society and life. Blackmur, who diagnosed

misleadingly called the “New Criticism,” a name de¬

the

pathologies

of

our

culture,

speculated

more

rived from a book (1941) by John Crowe Ransom which

modestly also on the concept of criticism. Oddly

was actually extremely critical of T. S. Eliot, I. A.

enough he defines it at first as “the formal discourse

Richards, and Yvor Winters. Ransom has most consis¬

of an amateur" but then argues that “any rational

tently advocated the necessity of grounding criticism

approach is valid to literature and may be properly

in theory and aesthetics. He has focussed on the central

called critical which fastens at any point upon the work

object of criticism: the work itself, the “criticism of

itself” (“A Critic’s Job of Work,” 1935, in Language

the structural properties of poetry.” His philosophic

as Gesture, 1952). He recognizes that aesthetics is at

alignment with Croce and Bergson is obvious.

least implicit in any criticism. Still it is no science

Ransom’s followers and disciples differ from him

because “science cannot explain the feeling or existence

widely; Allen Tate asked skeptically whether literary

of a poem.” In these pronouncements Blackmur is near

criticism is possible and came to the conclusion that

the New Critics, but later he felt that they provide

criticism is “perpetually obsolescent and replaceable,”

methods only for the early stages of criticism, viz.,

a parasitic growth on creation. He hands over philo¬

analysis and elucidation, but fail to compare and judge.

sophical and stylistic criticism to other disciplines and

He advocates a rational judgment but neither his prac¬

asks for a criticism which would “expound the knowl¬

tice nor his later theory lives up to this ideal. The

edge of fife contained in a work”—surely something

critical act becomes with him the creative act, the

that has been done for centuries—and finally queries

product of the tension of the writer’s lifetime, a self¬

whether criticism is possible without a criterion of

definition which, in many later essays, seems hardly

absolute truth. Criticism is paradoxically both “per¬

related to any literary text.

603

CRITICISM, LITERARY Other American New Critics upheld concepts of

but a form of theology, an all-inclusive system, a world

criticism which can be described as broadly social. F. C.

hypothesis. R. W. Lewis formulated this well when he

Matthiessen pleaded in 1949 for the social “respon¬

said that “criticism, ceasing to be one of the several

sibilities of the critic,” in The Responsibilities of the

intellectual arts, is becoming the entire intellectual act

Critic (1952). Lionel Trilling is mainly concerned with

itself,” and the critic has become a “prophet announc¬

the moral and political issues in modern literature.

ing to the ungodly the communication of men with

Harry Levin also conceives of literary criticism in

ultimate reality.” This is meant as serious praise; it

broadly cultural terms, viewing literature “as an insti¬

shows that this concept has broken completely loose

tution,” but is relativistic and historistic in his orienta¬

from the traditional concern with literature. It has

tion. The relativity of all critical judgments has been

ceased to be literary criticism, and has become a ver¬

argued in many contexts; e.g., in George Boas’ Primer

sion of philosophy.

for Critics (1937, new edition Wingless Pegasus, 1950),

In France, despite the great differences in the ideol¬

in Bernard Heyl’s New Bearings in Esthetics and Art

ogies and concrete taste of the critics, the same variety

Criticism (1943), and in Wayne Shumaker’s Elements

of concepts of criticism was stated and restated. There

of Critical Theory (1952). A pluralistic and instru¬

is the rationalist tradition of the new classicists who

mentalist view of criticism is also defended by Ronald

upheld an ideal of judicial criticism, eloquently put,

S. Crane, the main spokesman of the so-called “Chi¬

e.g., by Charles Maurras. Ramon Fernandez, who had

cago Aristotelianism.” Criticism is defined as “reasoned

his affinities with T. S. Eliot, formulated an ideal of

discourse, an organization of terms, propositions and

a rather philosophic criticism, whose aim would be an

arguments,” which is subject to the critic’s choice and

“imaginative ontology,” a definition of the problem of

hence necessarily relative. Still, in practice, the group

being. Fernandez believes that there is a “philosophic

has been committed to a rigid application of a doctrine

substructure” of a work, a body of ideas which the

of genres and ranking within the elements of a work

critic has to relate to the problems of general philoso¬

of art, appealing to Aristotle as its ultimate source. In

phy. But Fernandez knows well that critical conscious¬

contrast to the New Critics, language and symbol are

ness is not the task of the author: it is reserved for

slighted in favor of plot and character. The Chicago

the critic (Messages, 1926).

Aristotelians consider criticism “a department of phi¬

Generally, however, in the France of the early

losophy” and claim for their doctrines an immense

twentieth century irrationalistic tendencies were vic¬

certainty.

torious: Bergson became the philosopher inspiring, e.g.,

These pretensions have been questioned insistently

theory

of

criticism

in

Albert

Thibaudet

(1874-1936), who among the French reflected most

who shies away from anything that has to do with

fruitfully on the concept of criticism. Still, Thibaudet

philosophy. He recommends “creative criticism, as a

understands while pursuing an intuitive and metaphor¬

work of art about another work of art” (In Defense

ical method of criticism that the critic translates what

of Ignorance, 1960), while Randall Jarrell has pleaded

is conceived in poetic terms into intellectual terms,

for the strict subordination of criticism “to help us with

changes the concrete into the abstract, though he is

works of art.” “Principles and standards of excellence

also aware of the perils. He is afraid “to substitute for

are either specifically harmful or generally useless; the

the profound clarity of an image the semi-obscurity

critic has nothing to go by except his experience . . .

or the shadow of an idea” of such a translation (Valery

and is the personification of empiricism” (Poetry and

[1924], p. 160). Besides translation, Thibaudet recog¬

the Age, 1955). No theory, no history.

nizes two other kinds of criticism: “pure” criticism

There is only room for theory in Northrop Frye’s

604

the

in the twentieth century by poets such as Karl Shapiro,

which is theory of literature, thinking about genres and

Anatomy of Criticism (1956). In a “Polemical Intro¬

principles, and historical criticism. He sees also that

duction” Frye excludes all value judgment from criti¬

“there is no criticism without a criticism of criticism”

cism, as criticism “should show a steady advance to¬

and has written sketches of the history of French criti¬

ward undiscriminating catholicity.” The book tries to

cism (Physiologie de la critique, 1930) in which he

construe an all-inclusive scheme where literature is

attacks the certitudiens, the dogmatists of the Right.

conceived as “existing in its own universe, no longer

He wanted mobility, flexibility, or what he called

a commentary on life and reality, but containing life

“literary pantheism.” What in Thibaudet is phrased

and reality in a system of verbal relationships.” Criti¬

as a defense of tolerance, became in some contem¬

cism in Frye’s sense clarifies this order and should

poraries an emphasis on complete submission, on a lack

succeed in “reforging the links between creation and

of critical personality, on identification which, at times,

knowledge, art and science, myth and concept.” Criti-

sounds like mystical union. Jacques Riviere laments his

cism in Frye becomes not only a theory of literature

“frightening plasticity” while Charles Du Bos made

CRITICISM, LITERARY much of his “liquidity,” of the central virtue of the

assimilate the critic to the poet, the critic transforming

critic as a “pure receptacle” of the life of another. Also

the work of art into his image.

Marcel Proust, in many scattered pronormcements, sees

The other new critics seem to take the opposite

the critic as entering the mind of others and complains

position: Georges Poulet, for example, advocates par¬

of Sainte-Beuve’s detachment and irony as well as of

ticipation or better “identification” with an author, the

his confusion of life and art. Imitation, the pastiche,

“integral transposition of a mental universe into the

is the proper form of criticism for Proust.

interior of another mind.” This is an old idea known

The second World War brought a reaction against

to the Schlegels or Croce, proclaimed as great novelty.

all theories of pure art and pure criticism. Jean-Paul

The declaration, “The basis and substance of all criti¬

Sartre’s watchword

litterature engagee,” pro¬

cism is the grasping of a consciousness by the conscious¬

pounded in Qu’est-ce que la litterature (1947), implies

ness of another” (Les chemins actuels de la critique,

a concept of committed criticism, criticism committed

1968), gives it a new twist: the “identification” is not

to a social and political cause. Sartre chides academic

with a text but with the “consciousness” of a writer

critics for “having chosen to have relations only with

which is not identical with his biographical psyche but

the defunct.” Pure art and empty art are the same

is a construct accessible through the totality of his

thing. But Sartre reserves a nook for pure poetry and

writings. His attitudes toward time or space (Poulet),

“La

in his actual criticism uses largely psychoanalytical

or toward the life of the senses (J.-P. Richard) are to

methods to criticize Baudelaire as a man or to exalt

be reconstructed without regard to the individual

Genet for the identity of man and work.

works or their form. It follows even for a critic such

Surprisingly enough, the finest, most intellectual

as Jean Rousset who does pay attention to the form

critic of the first half of the century, the poet Paul

of individual works that the aim of criticism is “to

Valery, held a theory of criticism which opens the way

participate in the existence of another spiritual being”

to a total divorce between the work of art and the

by “an act of adhesion so total that it excludes, at least

reader or critic. Valery believed that a work of art is

provisionally, all judgment” (Forme et signification

so ambiguous that it has no proper meaning and that

[1962], p. xiv). The older concepts of criticism, judicial

it is open to what he calls “creative misunderstanding.”

and aesthetic in the sense of an analysis and inter¬

“There is no true sense of a text. The author has no

pretation of a single work as an entity, are dismissed

authority.” The critic is completely free to read into

or minimized.

a work his own mind. The solution seems to be “crea¬

In Italy, Benedetto Croce had come to deceptively

tive criticism” which soimds like Oscar Wilde’s defense

similar conclusions long before. One of Croce’s earliest

of caprice or Anatole France’s “adventures among

publications was a book La Critica letteraria (1894)

masterpieces,” but is in Valery rather motivated by a

which simply denied that the various operations and

deep conviction of the unbridgeable gulfs between

approaches which are called “literary criticism” make

author and work and work and reader.

a unified and meaningful subject. But later Croce de¬

This liberty of interpretation is then preached and

fended a view of criticism as identification. He went

practiced by the so-called “new critics” in France. The

so far as to say that “if I penetrate the innermost sense

concerns may be very different:

of a canto of Dante, I become Dante” (Problemi di

psychoanalytical,

mythographical, structuralist, or what is called la cri¬

estetica [1909], p. 155). But at an even later stage of

tique de conscience; in all cases, the new French critics

his thinking he considered imaginative re-creation only

argue that the work of art is not something out there

a presupposition of criticism and concluded that criti¬

which has a proper meaning for the critic to discover

cism is a translation from the realm of feeling into the

and to formulate, but that the work itself is a mental

realm of reason and thought. He found that critics

construct realized only in collaboration with the sub¬

should be reminded of the prohibition posted in some

ject. The conflict of concepts of criticism came out

German concert halls in his youth: Deis Mitsingen ist

most clearly in the recent debate between Raymond

verboten. In practice Croce asked of criticism nothing

Picard and Roland Barthes. Picard attacked Barthes’

else than that it “know the true sentiment of the poet

interpretation of Racine from a historicistic and phi¬

in the representative form in which he has translated

lological point of view. Barthes, in replying (Critique

it” (Letter to R. W., June 5, 1952). But besides this

et verite, 1966), criticized cogently the limitations of

task of characterization the critic must also judge.

conventional historical criticism, its ignoring of the

There is, however, no other criterion than the distinc¬

changing “life” of a work through history, its obtuse¬

tion between art and non-art, poetry and non-poetry,

ness toward ambiguity and symbolism, but he goes far

as in Croce there can be no intermediary between the

beyond this in asserting the right of criticism to “du¬

individual and the universal. No classification of the

plicate” a work of art. The term ecriture is used to

arts, no genres, no styles or technical services matter,

605

CRITICISM, LITERARY because “what is external is no longer a work of art.”

(1811-48) who dominated Russian criticism for the rest

cism have become more vocal: Marxism and stylistics.

of the century. Belinsky’s concept of criticism is ex¬

An adherent of Croce, Mario Fabini, advocates a

pounded in a “Speech on Criticism” (1842) in which

broadening of criticism to include the study of style

he rejects arbitrary pronouncements of taste or judg¬

and genres (Critica e poesia, 1956), and a whole group

ment by rules and defines “criticizing as seeking and

of Italian scholars has returned to a concept of criti¬

discovering the general laws of reason in particulars.”

cism as a study of the aesthetic surface, of language

Criticism is philosophical knowledge while art is im¬

and style. In recent years French existentialism and

mediate knowledge. In practice, criticism in nine¬

structuralism have made their impact in Italy.

teenth-century

Russia was

ideological

and social.

The peculiarity of the German situation is the sharp

Apollon Grigoriev seems to be an exception. He advo¬

divorce between criticism as carried on in the daily

cated an “organic criticism” which is intuitive, imme¬

press and the Literatunvissenschaft of the Academy

diate. The aim of the critic is to grasp the individuality

which was traditionally philological but early in the

and tone of an author or of an age, its particular

twentieth century became largely speculative, philo¬

atmosphere or “drift.” Grigoriev rejected historical

sophical (under the influence of Geistesgeschichte).

relativism but in practice was, like his radical rivals,

Concepts of criticism were not widely examined,

mainly concerned with social types. Impressionistic and

though the trends prevailing in the West are also re¬

aesthetic concepts emerge only late in the nineteenth

flected in German discussions. Alfred Kerr, for example,

century. A symbolist poet like Alexander Blok, in an

argued (in Vorwort zum neueren Drama, 1904) for the

article on criticism (1907), complains rather of a lack

superiority of criticism over creation, for criticism as

of philosophy, of a “soil under one’s feet.” The Russian

a kind of poetry, thus going even beyond Oscar Wilde.

Formalists on the whole dismissed criticism in favor

The scholars went the other way, arguing for criticism

of a technical science of literature, while Soviet criti¬

as a science, though Ernst Robert Curtius, for instance,

cism constitutes a return to nineteenth-century de¬

sees criticism “as the form of literature whose subject

mands for ideological clarity, for the “social mandate”

is literature” (Kritische Essays uber europaische Liter-

of both writer and critic.

atur, 1958). The creed of most German scholars was

606

this changed soon with the advent of Vissarion Belinsky

After the death of Croce, different concepts of criti¬

Today in Russia and generally behind the Curtain,

relativism and historicism: it is formulated by Erich

the Marxist concept of criticism prevails. In its official

Auerbach, for example, in a review of Wellek’s History

version it is simply didacticism: criticism serves the

of Modern Criticism in Gesammelte Aufsatze zur

inculcation of Communism and writers are judged

romanischen Philologie (Bern, 1956).

according to whether they do so or not. This didacti¬

Still, there were many critics interested in judging

cism is combined with sociologism: a study of the

and ranking. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who usually

society which assumes that the writer is completely

defends empathy and imderstanding, recognizes also

determined by his class origins and reflects and should

the need for ranking, as does, in practice, the whole

reflect the society he describes. In subtler versions of

circle around Stefan George, who thinks of its master

Marxism, mainly in the writings of the Hungarian

as prophet and judge laying down the law. Among

Gyorgy Lukacs and his follower Lucien Goldmann

more recent German critics Hans Egon Holthusen

in France, this simple version is rejected; rather, the

shows a concern for ethical judgments, commitments

critic’s task is to analyze the structure of his society

also in political matters, arguing that there is no such

and that of former ages and to interpret and judge

thing as “pure” literary criticism. He is one of the few

authors in their historical place, dividing them into

Germans who have written on critical understanding

reactionary and progressive without regard, however,

(Kritisches Verstehen, 1961) and have thought about the

to their overt intentions and allegiances. Goldmann

concept of criticism while there is, of course, a prolif¬

draws a distinction between comprehension and expli¬

eration of theories of poetry and much that could be

cation. Explication is the insertion of a work into the

called close reading or interpretation. Emil Staiger’s

context of a social structure. In the dialectical thinking

preface to Die Zeit ah Einbildungskraft des Dichters

of Lukacs no contradiction is felt between asserting

(1939) formulated the rejection of Geistesgeschichte,

that the relative truth of Marxism is absolutely valid

the new focus on the text.

(.Beitrage zur Geschichte der Asthetik, Berlin [1954], p.

Russian criticism has great interest because in Russia

102) and that the party spirit demanded of the critic

radically opposed conceptions were formulated most

is not in contradiction to the other duties of an author:

sharply. As late as 1825 Alexander Pushkin could com¬

the objective reproduction of reality. In practice, the

plain that “we have no criticism ... we have not a

exact rules for criticism are laid down by solemn delib¬

single commentary, not a single book of criticism.” But

erations of the party congresses. Marxist criticism has

CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN ANTIQUITY returned to prescriptive criticism, to the imposition of specific themes, views, and even styles imposed by the

Istoriya russkoi kritiki, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1958). In Italian: Luigi Russo, La Critica letteraria contemporanea, 3 vols.

immense power of the state, the party, and the literary

(Bari, 1946-47). G. Marzot, “La Critica letteraria dal De

organizations, which enforce the edicts in ways un¬ dreamt of even in the days of Richelieu.

Sanctis ad oggi,” in Letteratura italiana: Le Correnti, 2 (1956). On English criticism: George Watson, The Literary

issues are reducible to a strictly limited number. The

Critics (Harmondsworth, 1962). On American criticism: Norman Foerster, American Criticism (Boston, 1928); Bernard Smith, Forces in American Criticism (New York, 1939); Stanley Edgar Hyman The Armed Vision (New York, 1948); William Van O’Connor, An Age of Criticism: 19001950 (Chicago, 1952); Floyd Stovall, ed.. The Development of American Literary Criticism (Chapel Hill, 1955); Walter Sutton, Modern American Criticism (Englewood Cliffs,

conflict between objective and subjective standards is

N.J., 1963).

Such a survey of the diverse concepts of criticism in history leads to the inevitable conclusion that “criti¬ cism” is an “essentially contested concept,” that in the last two hundred years the possible positions were formulated and reformulated in different contexts, for different purposes, in different countries, but that the

basic and overlaps somewhat the debate between ab¬ solutism and relativism which may be historical. Sub¬ jectivism may be absolute in its claims. The methods

RENE WELLEK [See also Beauty; Empathy; Historicism; Literature; Style.]

of criticism also divide easily into intuitive and objec¬ tive, while objective may mean an appeal to absolute standards of beauty or may appeal to the model of science with an implied indifference to criteria of quality. Intuitive (misnamed impressionistic) criticism can be judicial. Judicial criticism is usually absolutist,

CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN ANTIQUITY

at least by implication. Scientific criticism can abdicate all judgment but may try to arrive at it by new criteria.

It is a commonplace of modern thought that culture

All kinds of crossbreedings and compromises between

is always in a state of transformation; that the complex

these positions are possible and were actually formu¬

of arts, institutions, and ideas by which any society lives

lated. While the dominance of judicial criticism, until

has been built up gradually through a long process of

the latter part of the eighteenth century, is incontest¬

development that is still going on. This idea of culture

able, the development since about 1760 cannot be

entered modern thought as an inheritance, taken over

described in terms of a simple succession of concepts

more or less intact, from certain thinkers of classical

which can be clearly related to social, political, or even

antiquity; but the classical versions of it were, like

literary contexts. There appears to be a tug of war

culture itself, the products of an evolutionary process,

between the main trends—judicial, personal, scientific,

one whose various stages can be traced in the writings

historical—a tension which was still continuing una¬

of early Greek poets and philosophers.

bated in the 1960’s.

Two attitudes dominate the earliest recorded Greek thought about the remote past of the human species.

BIBLIOGRAPHY There is no extensive history of the concept of criticism. See, however, “The Term and Concept of Literary Criti¬ cism” in Rene Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963); and most histories of criticism, e.g., George Saints-

Neither is uniquely Greek, and neither can easily coex¬ ist with the notion of culture as evolving gradually from the simple to the complex. One attitude derives from retrospective admiration for the unparalleled achievements of an age of heroes; the other from long¬

bury, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe,

ing for an earthly paradise of abundance and ease, a

3 vols. (Edinburgh and New York, 1900-04); J. W. Atkins,

paradise which, like the biblical Garden of Eden, was

Literary Criticism in Antiquity, 2 vols. (London, 1934; re¬

imagined as having actually existed in the remote past

print New York), and three sequels on English Criticism

of the human race. The former attitude is characteristic

up to the end of the eighteenth century; Rene Wellek, A

of Homeric epic, which presents its leaders as men of

History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1955-65); up to 1900. Cleanth Brooks and William K. Wimsatt, Literary Criticism; A Short History (New York, 1957). There is no large history of French criticism. In German: G. Gudemann, “Kritikos,” in Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll,

Real-Encyclopadie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1921), II, 1912-15; Bruno Markwardt, Geschichte der deutschen Poetik, 5 vols. (Berlin, 1937-67). In Russian: B. R Gorodetsky, A. Lavretsky, and B. S. Meilash, eds.

an earlier time, directly descended from the gods, and deriving all their arts and institutions from the gods. Individual feats of skill and strength, as well as the general level of power, wealth, and military orga¬ nization in this heroic age are pictured as far surpassing anything which the poet or his hearers might have experienced themselves. The age of heroes appears in Hesiod as well as

607

CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN ANTIQUITY Homer, but alongside the earthly Paradise or Eden-

radical change (ca. 700

motif and in the framework of a myth, probably Near

opening of all the Mediterranean to Greek trade and

Eastern in origin, in which a succession of races or

colonization, the diffusion of the art of writing, the

epochs in human history is likened to a series of suc¬

invention of coinage, the first written constitutions,

cessively baser metals: gold, silver, bronze, and iron

extensive reorganization of political and social struc¬

(Works and Days, 106-201). In this scheme of history

tures over much of Greece, and important develop¬

the golden race becomes the inhabitants of the Greek

ments in technology, mathematics, and the fine arts.

Eden, the race of heroes is inserted somewhat oddly

It was natural for Greeks of this time to assume that

after the races of silver and bronze, and Hesiod’s own

the step-by-step transformation of all aspects of human

contemporaries are the race of iron. Hesiod is far more

life which could be observed in recent history had gone

The period witnessed the

interested in contrasting the iron present with the

on throughout all of history and that the earliest human

golden and heroic pasts than he is in developing in

existence must have been, as a consequence, far simpler

detail the idea of a step-by-step deterioration. The

and poorer than any within memory.

latter idea may, in fact, have been adopted by him

The new view is already found in the writings of

chiefly as a means of working these two different no¬

the sixth-century philosopher Xenophanes (frag. 18),

tions of the past into a single historical narrative. When

but there is no evidence to suggest that it crystallized

the Eden-motif appears alone in early Greek thought

into a comprehensive reconstruction of the life of early

it is regularly in the context of another myth altogether,

man before the mid-fifth century. The first revisions

that which connects the harsh lot of contemporary man

of earlier notions seem to have been piecemeal in

with the stern rule of Zeus and the ease of an earlier

character: gods who had once been the divine patrons

time with the mild rule of Zeus’s father, Cronus. It

or supreme practitioners of a given art came to be

was only when the myth of the Ages of Man was

regarded as the ones responsible for first acquainting

revived in Hellenistic and later times that it came to

mankind with its use, or the earliest men associated

be used as a setting for the Eden-motif alone—a change

in mythological tradition with a given technology as

which led, almost without exception, to the elimination

its inventors. So Demeter becomes the bringer of agri¬

of the age of heroes from the scheme altogether. But

culture, Prometheus the discoverer of fire, Daedalus

Hesiod’s later imitators were true to their model in

the inventor of sculpture, and the Argonauts the

that they continued to emphasize the first and last

world’s first sailors. When a group of such “firsts” was

phases of the cycle at the expense of the intervening

assembled the result would not be an analysis of cul¬

two. The borrowed notion of a degenerating succession

tural development but a catalogue of inventions, and

of epochs was never really assimilated either by Hesiod

this is the form taken by the earliest connected piece

or his successors: the oriental cycle became and re¬

of Greek cultural history that has survived: the Titan

mained a Greek antithesis.

Prometheus’ description of his services to mankind in

Both Homer and Hesiod are products of a transi¬

Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (ca. 460

b.c.).

The gap

tional period between the relatively static era that

which separates this account from the more genuinely

followed the breakup of Mycenaean civilization in the

scientific speculations of later thinkers is evident not

twelfth century

and the Greek renaissance of the

only in its form, but also in the character of Prometheus

seventh and sixth centuries. Homer looks back over

himself. On one level, he is a personification of the

b.c.,

the static centuries to the highly complex Mycenaean

intelligence of man the deviser (prometheia in Greek

world and locates the deeds of his heroes there; Hesiod

means “forethought”); but on another level he is an

dislikes the signs of incipient change he sees around

early fifth-century scientist or natural philosopher. The

him and, by way of reaction, idealizes the fixed agri¬

remote past is still seen very much in the image of

cultural existence of a less remote past into the life

the recent past, so that the inventions by which

of the Golden race. Change is still seen only as a

Prometheus is supposed to have raised man from his

disruptive process, and so this past is not a simpler

primitive savagery are largely in those fields—such as

or more primitive time but essentially Hesiod’s own

written communication, astronomy, medicine—where

society minus the aspects of it he dislikes: sea-borne

advances in the preceding century had been especially

commerce, covetousness and litigation, and the hard

remarkable.

labor in the fields which the gods have imposed on man as a punishment for his wickedness.

608

b.c.).

The first comprehensive attempt to envisage the character of human life in its pre-technological stages

It was probably the pressure of external events

belongs to the generation following Aeschylus’ if, as

which, more than anything else, led to the ultimate

is now generally assumed, the doctrines ascribed to the

abandonment of such views of the past. Hesiod lived

Sophist Protagoras (fl. ca. 440

at the beginning of two centuries of continuous and

are in fact his. Protagoras sees the development of

b.c.)

in Plato’s Protagoras

CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN ANTIQUITY technology in the context of the struggle which men, like all other animals, must wage for survival. Fire, housing, clothing, and agriculture are techniques de¬ vised to avoid death by starvation or exposure to the elements; the various social virtues (reverence, justice, piety) are a similar set of techniques (called by Protag¬ oras “the civic technology”) devised to secure the peaceful communal existence that is necessary if men are to cooperate effectively with one another in fight¬ ing for survival against other animals.

Once the fact of technological and material progress was generally accepted, the emphasis in discussions of cultural development tended to shift away from the simple assertion of the importance of technology and a catalogue of its achievements—even though the cat¬ alogue of inventors continued to be an established minor genre down to the end of antiquity and into the early Middle Ages. The capacity for technology is no longer, as it had been for Protagoras and his predecessors, simply a characteristic excellence of man.

The civic technology is one in whose development

It is rather something whose existence calls for expla¬

all men participate, and Protagoras’ whole theory can

nation within the context of a more general theory,

be regarded as a secularization and democratization

often psychological in character, of the nature of man

as well as an extension of the approach which gave

and the sources of man’s actions. Here it is possible

rise to the catalogues of inventors. The latter tended to concentrate on the outstanding achievements of

to distinguish two main lines of thought—a naturalistic and a teleological one.

individual inventors, often divine or semi-divine in

The former antedates the latter, which arose par¬

character, and to neglect the more primitive and basic

tially in response to it. It recalls Protagoras in connect¬

skills which could be felt as the property of the whole

ing the beginnings of technology and society with the

race. The transformation may be the work of Protag¬

struggle for survival, and in its view of social and

oras himself, who was the first man to take higher

ethical usages as a kind of “civic technology” acquired

education out of the control of the family or profes¬

in the same way as the other arts and crafts. But the

sional guild and make it the subject of public lectures;

Protagorean notion of technology as a mechanism of

but there is reason to believe that the evolutionary

survival that comes into being through a vaguely con¬

cosmology and biology of the Pre-Socratics were influ¬

ceived process of “challenge and response” is replaced

ential as well. Protagoras introduces his account of

by something far more precise.

early man by a zoogony and regards the capacity for

In some authors this more precise formulation in¬

technology as a human trait which stands in lieu of

volves a fairly simple historical determinism. Prodicus,

the various natural advantages (claws, wings, bodily

a Sophist of the generation following that of Protag¬

strength) which fit animals for survival. Man’s ability

oras, held that society, religion, and most civilized

to exploit his environment by various arts and crafts

usages followed inevitably as soon as man’s natural

is similarly described as compensating for physical

quest for food led him to take up farming; and

weakness in a fragment of a Pre-Socratic who was

Thucydides in the opening chapters of his history of

Protagoras’ contemporary, namely, Anaxagoras (frag.

the Peloponnesian War seems to derive political and

21b); and the latter’s pupil Archelaus is credited with

economic institutions exclusively from man’s inevitable

an account of the way in which “human beings were

quest for security and power. Theories of geographical

separated out from the other animals and then devel¬

or climatic determinism also found their adherents; and

oped leaders and lawful usages and techniques ...”

the whole method was soon taken over by rhetoricians

(frag. A4). He must have covered much the same

as a standard topos, by which any given art or activity

ground as Protagoras does in Plato’s dialogue.

could be praised as the principal cause of man’s rise

Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Archelaus are probably

from savagery to civilization. Love between the sexes,

symptomatic of the thoroughgoing character of the

oratory, poetry, sailing, even cooking are all exalted

revision of earlier ideas which was going on in the

in this fashion.

middle of the fifth century, and it is a reasonable

Other thinkers within the naturalistic tradition seem

inference that by the end of the century few if any

to have posited a more complex process, one in which

educated Greeks would have questioned the view that

there is an interaction between a number of instincts

man’s life had been radically transformed and enriched

or drives common to man and other animals—for food,

by his own technology. Later pictures of the Golden

shelter, physical comfort, sexual satisfaction, security

Age and reign of Cronus, whether Greek or Roman,

from attack, proximity to members of one’s own

are either consciously fanciful and metaphorical, or are

kind—and, on the other hand, certain physical and

modifications of the Hesiodic myth in that they de¬

mental endowments—hands, upright stature, the ca¬

scribe the earliest men as living with no technology

pacity for articulate speech, the ability to calculate

at all, or only its rudiments, and seek to show that they

the future consequences of a decision—which are pe¬

were better off as a consequence.

culiar to man or possessed by him to a peculiar degree.

609

CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN ANTIQUITY

610

This ability to calculate functions passively rather than actively at the outset of human development, allows men to seize on the advantages of a situation that has already been presented to them (e.g., a chance fire, first terrifying, then fascinating and comforting mo¬ mentarily with its warmth, eventually preserved as a continuing source of comfort and put to other uses) rather than to plan methodically for the future. With the passage of time men come to look for such situa¬ tions and to seize upon their implications even when they are not immediately obvious, and so to expand constantly on the suggestions and models provided by nature and accident. Such advances always begin with one individual, but are quickly imitated by others, so that the rate of progress is much faster than if the talents of only one person were involved. Only when such activity, carried on over a long period of time, has produced a surplus of the necessities of life does pleasure as well as need become the goal toward which men work; hence the late origin of the fine arts as opposed to the useful arts. Language and social mores arise in a similar manner: the first step in the transformation of the inarticulate cries men share with other animals occurs when a chance incident creates an association between a sound and a certain meaning and the utility of the resulting signal makes it a model for the creation of other mean¬ ingful utterances. (So, for example, a cry of terror in a moment of danger may save the utterer by attracting the attention of others who come to his aid, and then may be retained as a rallying cry). A characteristically human society begins to evolve out of an animal-like herd when the vague patterns of cooperation and more or less amicable coexistence which characterize herd-existence are broken by acts of unprovoked aggression. Such departures from the expected pass unnoticed in other animal herds, but the human animal looks to the future and, foreseeing situa¬ tions when he may be in the place of the injured party, registers indignation and disapproval in such a way as to inhibit future occurrences of the particular asocial or “unjust” act involved. Similar chance occurrences of desirable modes of behavior (e.g., exceptional brav¬ ery in combating the common enemies of the herd) are the occasion of approbation and rewards, and are thus encouraged. The result is a gradual and progres¬ sive standardization of behavior along the lines most conducive to the welfare of the whole herd, and the behavior patterns acquired in this way become second nature for each successive generation. The purely social system of rewards and punishments that is involved in this process is reinforced by government when the herd’s leader (regularly, as in animal herds, its strongest member) for one reason or another decides to employ

his own strength on the side of what the herd considers just; the advantages of having such a leader are per¬ ceived, and rule is henceforth based on consent rather than submission to superior force. Such are some of the main ideas that enter into the composite picture of cultural development which can be pieced together from scattered accounts in a num¬ ber of Greek and Latin texts, most of them dating from the late Hellenistic or early imperial period (the first book of Diodorus Siculus’ universal history, the fifth book of Lucretius’ exposition of Epicurean philosophy, the account of the origin and transformation of politi¬ cal constitutions found in the sixth book of Polybius, the description of the beginnings of architecture in the second book of Vitruvius). The passages in question are linked by general agreement as to the factors at work in the growth of culture (the continuing presence of certain basic human needs plus a continuously in¬ creasing ability on the part of man to calculate consist¬ ently for his future satisfaction) and, more strikingly, by the shared notion of cultural development as pro¬ ceeding via a series of chance situations which provide opportunities or suggestions that man exploits for his own benefit. Whether all aspects of the general picture were ever present in a single account is uncertain, but the basic ideas or principles involved, and many of their specific applications, were probably first foimd in the writings of the late fifth-century atomist Democritus. Indeed, the whole theory, since it decom¬ poses the seeming continuity of human life and culture into a series of discrete events each involving an abrupt transformation of a small portion of the life of a society, can be regarded as a kind of sociological atomism. It thus forms a natural counterpart to the atomistic anal¬ ysis of change in the physical world as resulting from a series of sudden rearrangements of two or more of the tiny particles of which matter is composed. This version of the process of cultural development, like the physical systems of Democritus and other Pre-Socratics, did not posit the existence of a final or formal cause, and as such was unlikely to appeal to thinkers trained in the Platonic and Aristotelian tradi¬ tions. It is accordingly common to find in Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian philosophy an altogether different view of cultural development—one which sees it as a gradual unfolding of the capacities inherent in man’s nature, a process which proceeds in orderly fashion toward its telos, which is the realization of human nature in all its fullness and perfection. The various human endowments to which the naturalistic theory called attention cease to be efficient causes in this scheme and become symptomatic of the operation of a final or formal cause. Man, as Aristotle says (correct¬ ing Anaxagoras), is not the most intelligent of animals

CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN ANTIQUITY because he has hands but has hands because he is the

man (evidently guided by the feeling that these are

most intelligent (De partibus animalium 687a 7-10).

progressively more complex and advanced fonns of

Moreover, since all the virtues of civilized man must

activity and hence must follow in this order) seems

have been present in embryonic form in his primitive

not to have felt that the progression was in the direc¬

ancestors, there is a strong—though not universal—

tion of a better life for man; and another pupil of

tendency to idealize the state of nature as incomplete

Aristotle, Theophrastus, in tracing the development of

but also uncorrupted.

religious usages, assigned considerable importance to

Human development for the teleologists is analogous

historical accident. But these are minor deviations

to the growth of an organism, or to the gradual perfec¬

which do not affect the basic character of the doctrines

tion of an art, science, or other discipline through a

involved.

series of discoveries which bring men progressively

Insofar as such doctrines are not specifically teleo¬

closer to the practice of the discipline in its ideal form.

logical but simply a form of historical determinism,

Perhaps as a consequence, teleological accounts of the

and insofar as they tend to minimize the importance

growth of culture often seem to have included not

of communities and social conditioning in the creation

simply a speculative reconstruction of prehistory but

of man’s civilized traits, they have parallels in Hellen¬

also historical research aimed at fixing the place, time,

istic thought outside the teleological schools. For most

and author of each of the discoveries which went into

of the thought of this period, whether teleological or

the creation of a given art or science, somewhat in

nonteleological, tended to eliminate the contingent in

the manner of the earlier catalogues of inventors. The

favor of the necessary in its theories of causation, and

account of the growth of tragedy found in Aristotle’s

in the study of man to regard human nature as a

Poetics is the best-known surviving example of the

universal, essentially the same regardless of the partic¬

method.

ular social context in which it might find itself. The

Technology, viewed as an organized system of skills,

points at which the Epicurean account of cultural

thus continued to receive a share of attention from the

origins found in the fifth book of Lucretius seems to

teleologists, but it is regularly relegated to an earlier

depart from its Democritean model are indicative of

stage in the process of cultural development, as being

both these characteristically Hellenistic tendencies. On

a product of that lower portion of man’s capacities

more than one occasion Lucretius’ account gives bio¬

which is directed toward the satisfaction of material

logical and environmental determinism a greater causal

needs. Disinterested speculation on the constitution of

role as against the play of accident and human calcula¬

the universe and the nature of Being constitute the

tion, working in a particular social context, stressed

final and culminating stages of man’s cultural progress,

by Democritus. Primitive language and primitive ethi¬

with the fine arts occupying occasionally an interme¬

cal notions are thus regarded as physiologically and

diate stage.

geographically determined: men are impelled by their

This view of cultural development is implicit in a

physical and psychic makeup and the climatic features

passage of the Epinomis, ascribed to Plato’s pupil

of a given region to attach certain designations to

Philip of Opus, and seems to have appeared in Aris¬

certain objects, and, when brought together with other

totle’s early work (now lost) called De philosophia. It is best known, however, in the form given it by the

men for mutual protection, to recognize as immedi¬

Stoic Posidonius (ca. 135-51 b.c.). The latter held that

behavior, which are thus the basis of the moral codes

man’s earliest existence was under the guide of “phi¬

operative in all societies.

ately self-evident the advantages of certain modes of

losophers,” who showed man the various necessities of

Elements of the teleological view of the develop¬

life, then led him to discover all the arts, and finally

ment of civilization appear as early as the late fifth

taught him the methods of philosophy proper—the

century. Euripides and Xenophon, for example, refer

implication being that technology is an early and im¬

to man’s capacity for speech and his other physical

perfect version of a discipline which finds its fullest

advantages as the gifts of a benign providence to facil¬

embodiment in pure theory.

itate the development and exercise of his higher facul¬

The teleological view is not maintained with com¬

ties. But the theory seems to have become fully formu¬

plete consistency by all of its proponents. Posidonius

lated only in the Academy of Plato’s later years (cf.

himself, in describing the growth of technology, posited

the works of Philip of Opus and the young Aristotle

a process of discovery which closely resembles that

mentioned above). Even in Plato’s own works the idea

envisaged by Democritus and was probably influenced

of technology as preparation for philosophy never

by Democritean doctrines; Aristotle’s pupil Dicaear-

appears. Plato’s concern in the three dialogues (Re¬

chus, though he argued for a progression from food¬

public, Politicus, Laws) in which he deals most exten¬

gathering to herding to agriculture in the life of early

sively with the question of cultural development is

611

CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT IN ANTIQUITY rather to separate the intellectual and technological elements in civilization and to emphasize the fact that it is only the former, not the latter, which can ensure man’s happiness. He does this by contrasting the cul¬ ture of his contemporaries with culture at an entirely different stage of technological and material develop¬ ment in such a way as to show that not technological superiority but the possession of philosophical wisdom

612

nally, the system of world-cycles separated by cata¬ clysms which appears in the Politicus and Laws was to provide the most common setting for the teleological theory of cultural development, providing as it did a series of appropriately finite chronological settings for the finite evolutionary processes posited by this theory. The teleological conception of cultural history does not allow for further technological, social, or political

is the criterion to be used in determining which cul¬

development of any significance once the stage of

ture is better for man. In the Republic the contrasting culture is that of

philosophical inquiry has been reached. One would not expect, therefore, to find in writers who belong to or

a “simple” state in which a rudimentary division of

anticipate this tradition any counterpart to the modem

labor and exchange of services satisfies man’s essential

idea of potentially unlimited progress, except insofar

needs; in the Laws it is a primitive pastoral society

as it applies to the realm of philosophy. The idea is

(peopled by the survivors of one of the cataclysms

not in fact found in such writers when they are con¬

which occur periodically through human history),

cerned with cultural development in general—though

which has retained from the period prior to the cata¬

they may on occasion allow for the possibility in con¬

clysm certain rudimentary arts (weaving and pottery)

nection with a specific technology (see, most strikingly,

and social institutions (the patriarchal family) but lost

Politicus 298b-99c). When the prospect of a radical

all the rest. Plato clearly suggests that the rudimentary

transformation of man’s way of life must be contem¬

technologies of this pastoral society and of the simple

plated, writers working within this tradition can only

state in the Republic are more conducive to virtue and

describe it as a return to the Golden Age or a realiza¬

happiness than the more advanced technology of his

tion of it—as, for example, the Roman poets described

own day. The only thing that makes life unsatisfactory

the renovation of the Roman body politic attempted

in both these primitive states is the absence of philoso¬

by Augustus.

phy. Philosophical wisdom is not among the virtues

The Denrocritean theory and its antecedents are, by

which Plato ascribes to the primitive shepherds in the

contrast, not committed on principle to the rejection

Laws (679e), and the philosopher class only arises in

of unlimited future progress in any realm of human

the “luxurious” state which succeeds the simple one

activity. The climate of the time in which such theories

in the scheme of development posited in the Republic.

were formulated—middle and late fifth century—

In the Politicus Plato pictures the Hesiodic reign of

would have been favorable to such an idea, for the

Cronus as existing in a cycle of human existence prior

period saw the limitless aspirations of Periclean Athens

to the present one. Cronus’ subjects enjoy an easier

and the first practical plans for reorganizing society

and more abundant supply of material wants than

along new lines, with provisions to ensure that the new

technology in the present cycle can supply, but cannot

societies should be themselves innovatory rather than

be considered to have been truly happy if they lacked

static (see the suggestion of Pericles’ friend, the city-

philosophy (272b-c). The three passages in which Plato treats cultural

Politics 1268a 6-8). Democritus in several fragments

development at some length do not present a coherent

seems to be proposing far-reaching reforms in the

planner Hippodamus of Miletus, reported in Aristotle,

theory of it, but they were of fundamental importance

political and social structure of the city, and Plato may

for the development of later ideas. The teleological

be drawing on earlier theories of cultural history when,

notion of the relation between technology and philos¬

in the Laws (683a), he suggests that the city itself is

ophy was probably an outgrowth of Plato’s strict sepa¬

not the ultimate stage in political evolution but may

ration of the two, a kind of compromise designed to

be replaced by a larger unit—league, alliance, or con¬

preserve tire supremacy of the latter without totally

federacy. When the Democritean view of cultural

rejecting the importance of the former. In the Republic

development is transformed, as it is in several early

and the Laws Plato envisaged the minimum of techno¬

Hellenistic texts, into monarchists propaganda, the

logical development that is requisite for human happi¬

transformation is achieved by attributing man’s early

ness, and attributed this level of technological devel¬

progress to beneficent kings and by suggesting that

opment to the inhabitants of an early society. In so

contemporary monarchs, like their primitive fore¬

doing he created an intellectually acceptable moderni¬

runners, can be expected to bring new levels of pros¬

zation of the Hesiodic Eden myth that was to be¬

perity and technological achievement to their realms

come the ultimate model for the state of nature as

and to extend the blessings of civilization to ever larger

praised by primitivists throughout later antiquity. Fi¬

portions of the habitable world. Even Democritus'

CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION IN MODERN TIMES conception of cultural development as a response to

giinther, “IIPf2T02 EYPETH2,” Philologus Suppl. 26.1

certain constant elements in human nature does not

(1933) and K. Thraede, “Erfinder,” Reallexikon fiir Antike

preclude the idea of infinite progression, since Democ¬ ritus recognizes the existence of such a thing as second nature. Nature is not simply inborn but may be im¬ planted through education and training (frag. 33). Yet we cannot be sure how far such faith in progress went. Protagoras’ contemporary, Sophocles, wrote the most enthusiastic proclamation of man’s ability to con¬ trol and transform the world that survives from antiq¬ uity (Antigone 332-75), yet he closed his encomium

und Christentum, 5 (1962), 1191-1278 (inventor catalogues); T. Cole, Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology, in American Philological Association Monographs XXV (1967); W. Theiler, Geschichte der teleologischen Natur-

betrachtung bis auf Aristoteles (Zurich, 1925); and E. A. Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven, 1957), 25-124 (theories of cultural development in the larger context

of

early

Greek

anthropological

and

political

thought). As is inevitable, since so many of the principal authors survive only in fragments, all these studies make

with a cautionary reference to the fact that such power

extensive use of hypothetical reconstructions; and any two

can be a mixed blessing. And the Democritean frag¬

scholars’ reconstructions will show important areas of dis¬

ments just mentioned must be compared with others,

agreement. For views differing sharply from those here

which stress the necessity of always limiting one’s needs

presented of the importance of Democritus in the shaping

and being content with little. Greek distrust of power and affluence was perhaps too strong ever to allow the ancient apostles of progress to be as confident as some of their modern counterparts, and it is reasonable to assume that their voice became less and less confident as time went on. Political progress was so intimately bound up with technological progress in the minds of those who accepted the possibility of both processes continuing indefinitely, that the whole notion would have been difficult to maintain after the end of the fourth century

b.c.

By then Greece’s control over her

destiny had passed out of her own hands, and the most that the educated class could hope for politically was

of the tradition and of the place of the idea of progress ancient thought see W. Spoerri, Spathellenistische Berichte uber Welt, Kultur und Gotter (Basel, 1959) and L. Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Balti¬ more, 1967), reviewed critically by E. R. Dodds, Journal of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968), 453-57. For other relevant in

passages from ancient authors see the very full survey in Thraede, “Fortschritt,” Reallexikon fiir Antike und Christentum, 8 (1969), 141-61. K.

THOMAS COLE [See also Atomism; Culture and Civilization; Historiogra¬ phy, Ancient Greek; Platonism; Pre-Platonic Conceptions; Progress in Antiquity; Technology; Work.]

to maintain the social status quo against the threat of internal revolution. Teleological doctrines would have had an especial appeal for this age, for by their view of the position of philosophy in human history they taught that man was simply fulfilling his destiny in ultimately abandoning action for thought.

CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION IN MODERN TIMES

The coming of Roman domination in the second only intensified this trend in Greek

Semantic Origins. Both “culture” and “civilization”

thought; and Roman historical thought, insofar as it

derive their original meaning from Latin: from cultura

did not simply reflect Greek ideas, was dominated by

which referred to the cultivation of the soil, and from

retrospective admiration for its own race of heroes:

civis which referred to the status of citizenship. In

century

b.c.

the plain-living, self-denying warriors and statesmen

Latin, however, both words also acquired secondary

of the early Republic. It is hardly surprising, therefore,

meanings. Cicero, for example, used cultura in a trans¬

that the teleological theory of cultural development

ferred sense when he identified cultura animi (“culture

was, either in combination or in alternation with the

of the soul”) with philosophy or learning generally.

primitivists’ idealization of a simple and unproblematic

Civis denoted not only the fact of Roman citizenship,

state of nature, canonical throughout later antiquity.

but also its superiority over the primitive condition of the foreigner or barbarian. In each case the acquired

BIBLIOGRAPHY The principal texts are collected and translated in A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in

Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935). The best general survey of the whole subject is still W. von Uxkull-Gyllenband, Griechische Kultur-Entstehungslekren (Berlin, 1924). For more special¬ ized discussions, see B. Gatz, Weltalter, goldene Zeit und sinnverwandte Vorstellungen (Hildesheim, 1967); A. Klein-

as well as the literal meaning has lingered on into modern times, although the words “culture” and “civi¬ lization” themselves did not gain currency in European thought until the second half of the eighteenth century. The inherited meanings were, however, soon joined by others. Indeed, even before the last decade of the eighteenth century, the proliferation of meanings led the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder

613

CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION IN MODERN TIMES to remark of “culture” that “nothing was more inde¬

succumbing to ethnocentrism, humanists maintain the

terminate than this word” (Works, Suphan ed., XIII,

possibility, and indeed desirability, of evaluating di¬

4). Its extended usage in the subsequent period has not

verse forms of human activity and human goals in the

enhanced its

a

light of universal values which, they insist, are objec¬

twentieth-century writer, A. Lawrence Lowell, com¬

tively ascertainable. Although there is agreement on

plains, “is more elusive. ... An attempt to encompass

the need to distinguish the cultural from the biological

clarity.

“Nothing

in

the

world,”

its meaning in words is like trying to seize the air in

in human and social life, the fulcrum of opinion as to

the hand, when one finds that it is everywhere except

what is crucial and problematic differs between these

within one’s grasp” (“Culture,” in At War With Aca¬

two conceptions.

demic Traditions in America, Cambridge, Mass. [1934],

Dl4

p. 115). Nonetheless, such attempts have been made.

SPECULATIONS ON CULTURE

A recent survey of the concept, by A. L. Kroeber and

AND CIVILIZATION

Clyde Kluckhohn (Culture, 1952), brought no less than

The last two hundred years have witnessed a sharp¬

164 definitions to light. Distinctions between “culture”

ened interest in what causes men to do, believe, create,

and “civilization” have also been rather abundant.

or destroy, and under what circumstances and influ¬

In some cases man’s spiritual development has been

ences; what has helped to sustain or threaten the pres¬

identified with culture, in others with civilization; the

ervation of their ideas, norms, values, symbols, manners

same is true of man’s control over nature and his

and customs, institutions and artifacts; what degree

external social relations. Frequently man’s moral de¬

of balance or tension has attended contemporaneous

velopment and the improvement of his material condi¬

social configurations, or their chronological trans¬

tions or refinements of social manners have been

formation through time (the “synchronic” and “dia¬

viewed as opposing, rather than reinforcing, tenden¬

chronic” mode of culture in anthropological termi¬

cies. Then again culture has been treated as a particular

nology). This growing preoccupation has been the

component or stage of civilization, a sort of subculture

cause and the symptom of what is meant by the histor¬

within a “superculture”; at other times culture has

ical and cultural self-consciousness of modem times.

been considered the more generic term while civili¬

The chief practitioners in this search have been a

zation has been confined to the culture of cities. A

hybrid species of historians cum philosophers, though

distinction commonly made is in terms of modes of

some, M. J. de Condorcet, Auguste Comte, or Karl

development, according to which civilization (defined

Marx, for example, might have preferred being thought

as “techniques”) is a continuous and cumulative proc¬

of as social scientists. Frequently these thinkers were

ess, susceptible to generalizing methods and capable

also social critics, no less eager to bring about change

of universal diffusion, whereas culture (defined as

in the future than they were to trace it in the past.

“creativity”), occurring sporadically, is not susceptible

But notwithstanding divergences in orientation or

to these methods and not transferable.

method, they all derived inspiration from, or reacted

On the other hand, a contemporary writer, Raymond

to the challenge of the advances made in the physical

Williams, in his Cidture and Society (1958, p. 16),

sciences. The idea that the emergence, perpetuation,

regards the concepts as sufficiently synonymous to

and development of human events were phenomena

warrant the attribution of four jointly applicable

susceptible to discoverable principles was never far

meanings: (1) a general state or habit of mind, having

from their minds, even when they emphatically insisted

close relations with the idea of human perfection; (2)

that these principles were sui generis and attainable

a general state of intellectual development in a society

by methods radically different from those of the physi¬

as a whole; (3) the general body of the arts; and (4)

cal sciences.

a whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual.

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), was one who indeed

The first three meanings have come to be associated

boldly declared that the cultural world of man, since

with what are called “humanistic” conceptions of cul¬

it was created by man, was more likely to yield its

ture, whereas the fourth meaning is usually associated

secrets to human inquiry than the world of nature

with “anthropological” approaches. Humanistic con¬

which only God, the sole creator of that world, can

ceptions are held to be selective, separating certain

know with certainty. Explicitly or implicitly, this basic

segments of man’s activities from others, and designat¬

premiss of Vico’s New Science (Scienza nuova, 1725)

ing them as cultural; anthropological conceptions are

became the bedrock of subsequent speculations about

held to be nonseleetive, by applying “culture” to the

the genesis, content, and development of culture.

total fabric of man’s life in a given society, to his entire

Ideas on the Genesis of Culture. When in his New

social heritage and whatever he mav add to it. While

Science (1744 ed., §331; trans. Bergin and Fisch) Vico

anthropologists eschew value judgments for fear of

claimed that “the world of nations, or civil world.

CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION IN MODERN TIMES which, since men had made it, men could come to

substantially the same meanings find as many diverse

know,” he did not mean that man, as an individual,

expressions as there are nations ancient and modern.”

everywhere, and at all times, consciously made the

To observe the diversity of cultural manifestations and

institutions, symbols, and norms that characterize civil

to uncover the “common mental language” underlying

cultures or civilizations. The first steps in the building

them was the task of philology which, for Vico, pro¬

of the “world of nations” were, on the contrary, taken

vided the essential empirical foundation upon which

by creatures, the consequences of whose acts were not

philosophy could erect its theoretical edifice (ibid.,

intended by them (ibid., §133). Thus religion, for ex¬ ample, came about “when men’s intentions were quite

§§161-62). Closest to Vico’s thought is that of Herder. Inquiring

otherwise, it brought them in the first place to fear

into the genesis of culture Herder asks what charac¬

of the divinity, the cult of which is the first fundamental

terizes man as a creature of culture as distinct from

basis of commonwealths” (ibid., §629). Unintended

his biological existence as a creature of nature. In his

consequences, then, are clearly conceived of as integral

first major philosophical work On the Origin of Lan¬

to the emergence and development of social cultures.

guage (Uber den Ursprung der Sprache, 1772), Herder

Vico concedes, indeed stresses, that men have finite

had refuted the idea of man as essentially a “rational

minds, that they frequently do not know the outcome

animal,” of reason as some sort of entity or “faculty”

of their actions, yet he also insists that their intentions,

that was simply superimposed on man’s animal nature.

their “wills” rest on consciousness, or conscienza (ibid.,

Man, he maintained, was fundamentally different from

§137). There is no suggestion that men follow the

the animal. His capacity for speech, therefore, was a

dictates of some transcendent being or, as in the Third

function of the totality of his powers, the manifestation

Proposition of Kant’s “Idea of a Universal History”

of the “entire economy of his perceptive, cognitive,

(Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in Weltburger-

and volitional nature” (Werke, V, 28). By virtue of this

licher Absicht, 1784), that they toil “for the sake of those who come after them,” even without intending

wholly different direction of his energies man is no longer “an infallible mechanism in the hands of Na¬

it. Men merely obey their own spirit and, in so doing,

ture.” Although not endowed at birth with conscious

may or may not advance tire cause of posterity (New

self-awareness, he has the propensity to attain it, and

Science, §§340, 376).

thus, unlike the animal, he can attain a state of devel¬

On the assumption, then, that men, being partici¬

opment in which by “mirroring himself within himself"

pants in and not only observers of their form of life

he becomes a reflective being (ibid., V, 28, 95). Owing

or culture, can understand the working of human wills

to this capacity for self-awareness man is acutely con¬

or purposes in a way they can never hope to understand

scious of his imperfections and hence “always in mo¬

the working of nonhuman phenomena, Vico proceeded

tion, restless, and dissatisfied.” Unlike the bee “which

to trace the origin of human cultures. Emphasizing that

is perfect when building her first cell,” man’s life is

these cultures had “separate origins among the several

characterized by “continuous becoming” (ibid., V, 98).

peoples, each in ignorance of the others” (ibid., §146),

In addition to the capacity for reflection. Herder,

he also sought to discover “in what institutions all men

like Vico before him, stresses man’s sense of freedom.

have perpetually agreed and still agree. For these

While the animal is wholly a creature of nature, and

institutions will be able to give us the universal and

confined to that sphere of activity for which it is

eternal principles (such as every science must have)

equipped by its natural instincts, man, not thus deter¬

on which all nations were founded and still preserve

mined, is also a creature of freedom. His perfectibility

themselves” (ibid., §332). These primary institutions,

or corruptibility is closely bound up with this distin¬

without which culture would be inconceivable, Vico

guishing feature. “Man alone,” Herder writes in his

identified with religion and rituals of birth, marriage,

Ideas for a Philosophy of History (Ideen zur Philosophie

and burial, events common to all cultures (ibid.,

der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784-91), “has made a

§§330-37).

goddess of choice in place of necessity . . . , he can ex¬

In effect, therefore, Vico advanced two theories of

plore possibilities and choose between alternatives. . . .

the genesis of culture. On the one hand he rejected

Even when he most despicably abuses his freedom,

cultural diffusion as an explanation for the emergence

man is still king. For he can still choose, even though

of a given culture in favor of a multiple-independent-

he chooses the worst” (ibid., XIII, 110, 146-47). Man’s

origin theory. On the other hand he stipulated a

sense of imperfection and his sense of freedom, then,

common-origin theory, by viewing diverse manifesta¬

are posited as the essential (psychological) prerequisites

tions of culture as “modifications” of certain archetypes

for the emergence and development of human culture.

“common to all nations,” a proof for which he saw

Herder’s theme of self-consciousness was taken over

in “proverbs or maxims of vulgar wisdom, in which

by Hegel who made it the very condition of a people’s

615

CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION IN MODERN TIMES sense of history, while the notion of restlessness reap¬

duces diverse fruits” (ibid.). The crowning achievement

peared in a more socially oriented form in Kant’s essay

of these diverse cultural endeavors, and the means of

on universal history. Kant identified men’s “mutual

their perpetuation, Voltaire saw in the rise of great

antagonism in society” as the origin of “all the culture

cities. In this close identification of culture with the

and art that adorn humanity” (op. cit., Fourth and Fifth

emergence of cities he was, however, at odds not only

Propositions).

with Montesquieu but with many subsequent writers,

But were man’s imaginative, cognitive, and social

who viewed urban growth as a threat to the continu¬

propensities primary determinants, inherently self¬

ance of culture, if not as an unmistakable symptom

generated and autonomous, or were they rather reac¬

of its decline.

tions, induced by and contingent upon the particular

Ideas on the Content of Culture. Broadly speaking,

physical environment in which he found himself? This

there are two distinguishable approaches: (1) those

was the question with which Montesquieu essentially

which essentially constitute a critique of modern civi¬

sought to come to grips. In his De Vesprit des lois

lization, stressing its cultural fragmentation, and (2)

(1748), he inquired into the nature and source of a

those which conceive of culture as an integral whole.

“general spirit” within a given society. Fully aware

At times both positions have been held concurrently,

of the interrelations between natural or physical and

the critique of disunity being in fact a plea for unity.

social or institutional elements, he seems on occasion quite undecided which to regard as the ultimate deter¬

Culture

versus

Civilization.

When

Diderot,

minant, as in his hesitancy over the primacy of climate versus political constitutions, or in his vacillation con¬

organic, creative, genuine, on the one hand, and the

cerning religion, which he alternately described as a

artificial, mechanical, stereotyped, and superficial, on

determining and determined factor (Book XXIV, Ch.

the other, between the nobility, deep-rootedness, free¬

3). However, the prevailing tenor of his account of the

dom, and equality of the savage, or the contentment

rise of civilizations was in terms of geographical and

of medieval man, and the corruption, alienation, ser¬

climatic determinants, echoes of which are still dis¬

vility, and exploitation of modern man, the chief

cernible in Arnold Toynbee’s formula of challenge-

impetus was invariably polemical. That the apotheosis

and-response in his A Study of History (1934-61). Thus,

of primitive or medieval man was or was not support¬

when enumerating such culture-determining agents as

able by anthropology or history was scarcely relevant.

religion, laws, maxims of government, mores, and

What mattered was to unmask the pretensions of con¬

manners, he mentioned these after climate (ibid.. Book

temporary civilization, to puncture the pride and complacency that went with it. Underlying the polem¬

XIX, Ch. 4). This emphasis on geo-climatic determinants has

ics was a craving for spontaneity, sincerity, and warm

prompted commentators like R. G. Collingwood, in

sensibility rather than cold rationality, the concrete

The Idea of History (1946, p. 79), to suggest that

rather than the abstract, and a recognition of the in¬

Montesquieu “in fact conceived human life as a reflec¬

comparability and immeasurability of things. Though

tion of geographical and climatic conditions, not oth¬

Vico’s ideas were seminal in a number of these direc¬

erwise than the life of plants.” What lends support to

tions, they were rarely known at first, and there can

this criticism was Montesquieu’s basic assumption that

be little doubt that Diderot’s influence was the most

human nature itself was a constant.

pervasive, soon to be followed by that of Rousseau and

Like many Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire did not

616

(1)

Rousseau, Herder, the romantics, or, more recently, Spengler, pointed up the contrast between the natural,

Herder.

challenge this assumption, but he did question Montes¬

Diderot’s critique of contemporary society, center¬

quieu’s emphasis on geo-climatic factors as the prime

ing on the self-estrangement of modern man, finds its

determinants of cultural differences. Not the physical

most pungent articulation in his novel

facts of a given environment, Voltaire argued in his

Nephew (Le Neveu de Rameau) written in the 1760’s

Rameau’s

Essai sur les moeurs et I’esprit des nations (1769), but

but not published dming his lifetime. The abject

man’s ingenuity in mastering these, constituted the root

Rameau extols vice, but in doing so, uncovers the

of civilization. If human life were a matter merely of

inversion and perversion of prevailing values. Rous¬

biology,

same

seau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Discours sur

wherever natural conditions were alike. But “the realm

les arts et sciences, 1750), written some fifteen years

civilization

would

indeed

be

the

of custom is much vaster than that of nature; it extends

earlier, though with Diderot’s encouragement, also

over manners and morals, over all habits; it gives vari¬

pursues the theme of alienation. Rousseau does not

ety to the scene of the universe” (Oeuvres, Paris

claim that human nature was intrinsically better before

[1877-85], Vol. XIII, Ch. 197). Therefore, it is not

the advance of the arts and sciences, only that social

nature, Voltaire concluded, but “culture [which] pro¬

life and mores were in closer harmony with it. Modern

CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION IN MODERN TIMES civilization imposed its pattern on men, unlike the

Spengler civilization marks the disintegration, the last

original cultures which grew out of men’s needs. What

dying phase of a culture. In his characterization of

is more, modem civilization imposed a wholly uniform

civilization one encounters practically every one of the

pattern, casting every mind in the same mold. “Polite¬

themes just traced. The basic source of cultural decline

ness requires this, decorum that; ceremony has its set

Spengler sees in the giant city, the “megalopolis,” as

forms, fashion its laws, and these we must always fol¬

he calls it. Its society is not a community but a “mass,”

low,

never

the

promptings

of

our

own

nature”

(Oeuvres, Deterville ed., I, 10).

leading a sort of nomadic, parasitic life, devoid of past or future. Rootless, restless, traditionless, it is constantly

In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Dis¬

on the move, knowing neither whither nor why. In

cours sur I’origine de Vinegalite, 1754) Rousseau assails,

the end the city—and with it civilization—proves the

as Vico had done before him, the natural law theorists

negation of the negation, the seed of its own destruc¬

for mistaking the artificial for the original, for making

tion (I, 31-34, 424; II, 310; trans. C. F. Atkinson, New

man a philosopher before he is a man, and for giving

York [1926-28]).

the name of natural law to a collection of norms they

For writers such as Kant, Coleridge, and Matthew

happen to find expedient, thus rationalizing existing

Arnold, culture represents essentially the moral condi¬

practices and institutions, in particular that of private

tion of the individual, while civilization means the

property. Such natural laws may be in conformity with

conventions of society. Invariably the former is also

modern civilization, but they have nothing in common

associated with “spiritual” values, the latter with “ma¬

with original customs and traditions. Private property

terial” values. Remarking that Rousseau was not so far

may indeed have ushered in the era of civilization, but

wrong when he preferred the state of the savages, Kant

what has it done to the traditional way of life of earlier

adds (in the Seventh Proposition of the “Idea of a

cultures? “It now became the interest of men to appear

Universal History”) that though we are civilized, “even

what they really were not. To be and to seem became

to excess in the way of all sorts of social forms of

two completely different things.” Men lost their sense

politeness and elegance . . . there is still much to be

of identity; they became estranged from themselves

done before we can be regarded as moralized.” Exter¬

and from each other. In place of the bonds of organic

nal propriety merely constitutes civilization; only the

community relations there arose “rivalry and competi¬

idea of morality “belongs to real culture.” This distinc¬

tion on the one hand and conflicting interests on the

tion, and to some extent the skepticism about the value

other” (Oeuvres, I, 286). -

of

civilization,

became

quite

common

in

nine¬

Herder’s indictment of his age was no less severe.

teenth-century English writing, largely owing to the

Few documents constitute so devastating an attack on

influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an ardent disci¬

contemporary civilization as his Yet Another Philoso¬

ple of Kant. “Civilization,” Coleridge writes in On the

phy of History (Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte,

Constitution of Church and State (1830, Ch. V);

1774). With the incisiveness of a surgeon’s knife it lays bare the sores of the eighteenth-century world. The so-called enlightenment and civilization have affected only a few in a narrow strip of the globe, and even where light has been shed, ominous shadows are never far afield. Civilization has forced people into mines, into treadmills, and into cities which are fast becoming

... is itself but a mixed good, if not far more a corrupting influence, the hectic of disease, not the blossom of health, and a nation so distinguished more fitly to be called a varnished than a polished people, where civilization is not grounded in cultivation, in the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity.

slag-heaps of human vitality and energy. So much in

Matthew Arnold, another leading advocate of cul¬

the arts, in industry, in war and civil life has been

ture in terms of moral self-perfection, interestingly

mechanized that the human machine has lost its zest

anticipated in his Culture and Anarchy (1869) C. P.

to function. Man is alienated from himself; head and

Snow’s theme of the “two cultures.” Culture is first

heart are rent apart. The culture of the age is a paper

and foremost moral improvement and not “merely or

culture, its ideals mere abstractions, instruments of

primarily [the perfection] of the scientific passion for

self-deception (Werke, V, 532-41).

pure knowledge” (Ch. 1). Toynbee, by contrast, gener¬

Much of what these critics had to say on the ills

ally understood by civilization the highest development

of eighteenth-century civilization in Europe, on alien¬

of social cultures from their primitive origins (op. cit.,

ation, acquisitiveness, colonialism, and so on, reverber¬

I, 438).

ates in subsequent sociopolitical writings; but nowhere

None of these distinctions, however, has found reso¬

is the parallelism of mood and terminology quite so

nance in the writings of modern cultural anthropolo¬

striking as in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West

gists, the first leading exponent of whom was E. B.

(Der

Tylor. In

Untergang

des

Abendlandes,

1918-23).

For

his

Primitive Culture (1871, p. 1)

he defined

617

CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION IN MODERN TIMES i

618

culture as “that complex whole which includes knowl¬

cultural entities, each with its own pattern of develop¬

edge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member

ment, its own inner dynamic growth. Although Herder was mainly concerned with elicit¬

of society.” This holistic conception was, however, not

ing sources of integration within a given culture, he

entirely novel; it had its intellectual antecedents from

recognized that there were subcultures that could ex¬

Vico to Herder and beyond.

ercise a divisive no less than a unifying influence. “A

(2) Culture as an Integral Whole. Vico’s ideas prove

nation,” he writes, “may have the most sublime virtues

highly original in this direction also. Both his multiple-

in some respects and blemishes in others . . . and reveal

independent-origin theory and his theory of cyclical

the most astonishing contradictions and incongruities”

development clearly indicate that he thought of .cul¬

(ibid., V, 506). To speak, therefore, of a cultural whole

tures in terms of wholes or configurations. At each stage

is not necessarily a way of referring to a state of blissful

of its development a given culture represents a com¬

harmony; it may just as conceivably refer to a field

plex of interrelated and interdependent constituents,

of tension. In contrast to those who identified culture

each of which shares with the others certain distinctive

with spiritual pursuits, and civilization with material

characteristics. “As from a trunk, there branch out from

progress, Herder rejected the dualism between “mate¬

one limb logic, morals, economics, and politics,” Vico

rial” and “non-material” activity. Artifacts are as much

wrote in the New Science (§367). Diderot, in D’Alem¬

part of culture as ideas, beliefs, and values. Culture

bert’s Dream (Le Reve de D’Alembert, 1769), employed

comprises all of man’s creative activities, both what

the image of a swarm of bees in order to give expression

he does and what he thinks. Of particular concern to

to this notion of organic unity, i.e., to the idea that

Herder were culture determinants that help to produce

a whole is qualitatively unique and different from a

a sense of collective identity, and these he identified

mere aggregate of individual parts. The conception of

chiefly with language, shared symbols and values, cus¬

a whole as a complex whole characterizes also Voltaire’s

toms and norms of reciprocity. Physical environmental

epoch-making contribution to the study of culture, the

factors he considered of secondary importance, capable

Essai sur les moeurs. Civilization, for Voltaire, is a

of “only influencing, favorably or unfavorably, but not

totality forged by men in their social life and actions.

of compelling a given course of development,” as he

Few thinkers before or after him penetrated more

put it in the Ideas (ibid., XIII, 273). It is interesting,

profoundly into the “spirit of the time,” a concept he

both from the point of view of modem anthropology

was the first to express; yet only rarely did he succeed

and also against the historical background of the “age

in transcending the values of his own times. While he

of reason” to find that Herder saw in nonrational ele¬

strongly emphasized the need for a harmonious balance

ments significant molding agents of social cultures.

of diverse human aspirations, his criterion for what

Neither myths nor prejudices are dismissed by him as

constituted a proper balance was highly culture-bound,

irrelevant aberrations. Furthermore, unlike subsequent

a fact which the yoimg Herder was not slow in observ¬

thinkers, Marxists in particular, Herder did not view

ing. Why, Herder asked in Yet Another Philosophy,

ideas and beliefs as epiphenomenal, as mere super¬

should we take for granted that the beliefs of past ages

structures. Certain myths or religious doctrines, he

were the same as ours, their standard of happiness

agreed, may indeed be intimately associated with eco¬

identical to our own? “Has not each man, each nation,

nomic and political institutions and practices; but this

each period, the center of happiness within itself, just

does not prove anything about their respective origins

as every sphere has its center of gravity?" (Werke, V,

or significance, nor does it deny their essential auton¬

509). Though Herder’s thought owed much to Voltaire,

omy. By the same token, whatever “functions” either

it marks an important departure from Voltaire’s cul¬

tem” proves nothing about their necessary or even

tural monism. Herder felt it would be more accurate

sufficient conditions or interrelationships. Myths and

to speak of specific cultures—in the plural—rather than

religions may or may not serve the function of main¬

of them may be said to perform within a given “sys¬

of culture in general. There is no such thing. Herder

taining authoritarian (religious and/or political) struc¬

further declared, as a people devoid of culture. To be

tures, but this is not tantamount to saying that such

sure, there are differences, but these are differences

structures would necessarily disappear with the disap¬

of degree, not of kind. To apply the standard of Euro¬

pearance of myths and religions (or vice versa), or that

pean culture as a standard for comparison, let alone

shamans, priests, or dictators invented certain beliefs,

as a universal yardstick of human values, is plainly

or invariably used them to deceive others without

meaningless. Each culture carries within itself its own

accepting them themselves. “By dismissing them as

immanent validity, and hence we have to think of the

cheats,” Herder observes in the Ideas (ibid., XIII, 307),

world as being composed of uniquely different socio¬

“one is inclined to think that one has explained every-

CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION IN MODERN TIMES thing. They may well have been cheats in many or

It is evident from these assumptions, particularly the

most places, but this should not induce us to forget

last, that the notion of cultural development raises the

that they were people too, and the dupes of myths

problem not only of change but also of persistence.

older than themselves.”

Generally speaking, writers employing the organismic

Herder’s historical relativism and cultural pluralism

paradigm of growth—and these tend to coincide with

affected, directly or indirectly, the thinking of J. G.

the “holists”—have acknowledged the significance of

Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel and Hegel, the historical law

persistence. Civilization, Edmund Burke, for example,

school of Savigny, the political romantics, J. S. Mill,

insisted in his Reflections on the Revolution in France

and the writing of cultural history up to Spengler, T.

(1790), was chiefly a matter of past achievements over

S. Eliot, and Toynbee. Nor has Herder’s anatomy of

the ages (Works, London [1899], II, 351). The political

culture lost relevance for modern sociology and an¬

romantics, likewise, preferred to cast their gaze back¬

thropology. In particular it demonstrates that situa¬

wards rather than forwards.

tional-functional analysis, taken by itself, is inadequate

The prevalent orientation, however, was forward-

as an explanatory tool if what we seek in terms of

looking or progressivist, even among those who traced

explanation is evaluation of content and/or determi¬

cyclical or dialectic patterns in development. Vico, for

nation of purpose, and that, therefore, functionalism

example, envisaged the course of development in terms

can scarcely dispense with process analysis. Thus, far

of recurrent cycles, with each cycle comprising three

from

ages, of gods, heroes, and men, dominated by religion,

being

inconsistent,

frmctional

and historical

approaches are indeed complementary or interde¬

myth, and philosophy, respectively, and reappearing,

pendent. Furthermore, Herder’s heuristic principle of

not in identical form, but in a “diversity of modes”

treating every manifestation of culture as essentially

as an upward-spiralling movement

autonomous,

two-

§1096). Kant, Hegel, and Marx insisted in their differ¬

dimensional sense indicated, also implies that the ap¬

ent ways on dialectic rather than unilinear change, but

though

interrelated

in

the

(New

Science,

plicable mode of causality is that of multiple causation.

at the same time saw each stage subservient to the

Both the idea of two-dimensional interaction and the

next, inexorably leading to a predetermined end. Even

idea of multiple causation have come to be recognized

Herder, the most outspoken opponent of the idea of

as potentially fruitful perspectives or conceptual aids

linear progress, never concealed his faith in secular

in the study of social cultures.

redemption as the terminal goal of the historical proc¬

Ideas on the Development of Culture. As a result

ess. Curiously enough, the man who set the tone of

of eighteenth-century progressivism and nineteenth-

the progressivist era, Voltaire, was no sanguine pro¬

century evolutionism the very notion of “develop¬

gressivist himself. It is true that the distant past was

ment” has become culture-impregnated. It has as¬

for him an age of darkness or semidarkness, yet he

sumed the status of an absolute, a universal value, a

expressed no inordinate trust in the future as the har¬

symbol of modernity and, as such, a conscious goal or

binger of apocalyptic portents. Acutely conscious of

ideal in a growing number of social cultures. Ideas on

the debits that accompanied the credits in the ledger

the development of culture are, therefore, in a real

of history, “later” did not self-evidently mean “better”

sense, also ideas of the development of culture.

for him. In comparing his own age with that of Louis

Apart from the assumption of continuous improve¬

XIV, for example, he left no doubt about his preference

ment (intimately associated with unilinear ideas on

for the latter. It would seem, therefore, that it was

progress), three other assumptions commonly underlie

Voltaire’s contempt for the more remote past, in par¬

the notion of cultural development. First, there is the

ticular the Middle Ages, rather than his faith in contin¬

belief that despite discontinuities there is a substantial

uous progress which cast him into the mold in which

degree of continuity between phases or stages of a

others came to see him.

given culture, although writers differ regarding the

But if the origin of the idea of uninterrupted cultural

individual significance and the mutual linkage of such

progress has somewhat erroneously been associated

stages. Secondly, there is a widely shared consensus

with Voltaire, its culmination is rightly identified with

that striving towards ends is implicit in the notion of

Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Pro¬

human or cultural development, even if it is frequently

gress of the Human Mind (Esquisse d’un tableau his-

not clear whether a thinker is discussing teleology in

torique des progres de Vesprit humain, 1794), which

history or the teleology o/history, or both. Lastly, there

expressed unbounded optimism in man’s progressively

is the assumption that culture constitutes not a “thing,”

mounting capacity to understand and hence to control

but a relational continuum in and through time, so that

the “laws” of his own development. For Condorcet,

culture is both a product of the past and a creator

no less than for Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson

of the future.

after him, the “march of civilization” was continuous.

619

CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION IN MODERN TIMES f

Barbarism was bound to recede before the advance and

derivability of universal laws from its study. Marx also

diffusion of knowledge and the emergence of a new

generally wrote as if he regarded historical tendencies

social and political ethic. Scientific procedures would

to be akin to the operation of natural laws, having

liberate man from the excess baggage of the past.

universal applicability and “working out,” as he put

While for Vico and Herder religion and myth were

it in the Preface of the first edition of Das Kapital

vital ingredients of culture, Condorcet dismissed them

(1867), “with iron necessity towards an inexorable

summarily as the work of cheats and scoundrels. And

destination,” so that the laws of development operating

in contrast to their skepticism towards cultural diffu¬

in industrially advanced countries “simply present the

sion, Condorcet displayed complete confidence in the

other countries with a picture of their own future

transferability of cultures from more to less developed

development.” The most succinct statement of Marx’s

countries, maintaining indeed that the latter would,

views on cultural development is in the Preface to A

after importing the “know-how,” actually overtake the

Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Zur

former, whenever they were able to avoid their mis¬

Kritik der politischen Oekonomie), according to which

takes. For Condorcet cultural development consisted

“the sum total of the relations of production constitutes

essentially in technological and scientific advance, and

the economic structure of society—the real foundation,

his Sketch surveyed the history of man’s intellectual

on which rise legal and political superstructures and

achievements, divided into ten stages of scientific and

to which correspond definite forms of social conscious¬

technologically based progress. Arriving at his own age

ness.” In addition to his descriptive theory of socio¬

he felt that “philosophy has nothing more to guess,

cultural development Marx advanced a prescriptive

no more hypothetical surmises to make; it is enough

doctrine intended to meet the problem of alienation,

to assemble and order the facts and to show the useful

on which he had focused in his earliest writings and

truths that can be derived from their connection and

in particular in The German Ideology (Die Deutsche

from their totality” (Introduction, trans. June Barra-

Ideologic, 1846, with Engels). The theme of alienation

clough). Condorcet’s faith in strict empiricism and scientific

links Marx most intimately with the romantics, but

procedures profoundly inspired Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophic positive (1830-42). In it Comte sought

the future, the romantics reverted to the past, finding that man had taken the wrong turn by seeking libera¬

to establish universal historical laws, the most funda¬

tion from a traditional order of society.

mental of which stipulates three phases through which

Among attempts to reconcile traditionalism with

all human societies must pass, the theological, meta¬

progressivism, or persistence with change, Herder’s

physical, and positive.

Of considerable interest is

treatment of Bildung and Tradition is undoubtedly the

Comte’s analysis of cultural development in terms of

most original contribution which still has lost none of

social statics and social dynamics, in that it emphasizes

its relevance. Both these terms were used by him in

the two-dimensional nature of interaction to which

their original dynamic sense of “becoming” or “build¬

Herder had drawn attention. Social statics seeks to

ing up” and of “passing on,” respectively, and not in

study the interconnections and functions of cultural

their better-known acquired sense. Thus Bildung is not

components within a cultural whole at a given time,

equated with a particular state of development or

while social dynamics focuses on the vertical interrela¬

confined in its connotation to intellectual or strictly

tions and changes over time. Comte’s demand that

individual pursuits. Instead it is viewed as an inter¬

sociocultural development should be studied in a man¬

active social process in which men receive from and

ner analogous to that applicable to causal uniformities

add to their distinctive cultural heritage. The modern

in the realm of nature did not fall on deaf ears.

concept of “socialization” comes, perhaps, closest to

Two influential works that appeared in close succes¬

620

whereas Marx sought the cure of man’s alienation in

Herder’s interpretation of Bildung.

sion, Henry Thomas Buckle’s Histonj of Civilization

It is also of interest that Herder conferred upon

in England (1857) and Karl Marx’s A Contribution to

Bildung a distinctly dialectic meaning by identifying

the Critique of Political Economy (1859) attempted to

it with evaluation as well as assimilation (Werke, XIII,

pay heed to Comte’s insistence on inductive inquiry.

343-48). Thus understood, it is not simply a replicative

Buckle sought to demonstrate that “the actions of men

process but also a process of change. Indeed, Herder

being determined solely by their antecedents, must

saw in Bildung the only alternative to sociocultural

have a character of uniformity, that is to say, must,

discontinuities attending the replacement of values

under precisely the same circumstances, always issue

through their destruction rather than their trans¬

in precisely the same results” (Buckle, Vol. I, Ch. 1).

formation. But he was aware that the merging of the

Like Comte, he was convinced of the superiority of

old and the new involves in its operation both affirma¬

European (and particularly English) culture and the

tive and negative properties, and that change is not

CYCLES tantamount to a smooth advance or progress. Every

“A Normative Theory of Culture,” American Sociological

discovery in the arts and sciences, he wrote in the

Review, 29 (1964), 653-69. A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluck-

Ideas, knits a new pattern of society. New situations

hohn, Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), contains a detailed

create new problems, and every increase in wants (even

bibliography. Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of

of life that have become “patterns” by virtue of a

Culture (London, 1956). Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of His¬ tory: The Great Speculators from Vico to Freud (New York and London, 1966). Wolfgang Schmidt-Hidding, ed., Kultur und Zivilisation (Munich, 1967), includes extensive bibliog¬ raphies. Giambattista Vico, Scienza nuova (1725), trans. H. Bergin and M. Fisch as The New Science (Ithaca, 1948; 1963). Alfred Weber, Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie (Leiden, 1935). Karl J. Weintraub, Visions of Culture (Chicago and London, 1966). Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (London, 1958).

greater or lesser degree of institutionalization through

FREDERICK M. BARNARD

if they are satisfied) does not necessarily augment human happiness (ibid., XIII, 372-73). Tradition, likewise, is not identified with a stock of accumulated beliefs, customs, and ways of doing things, but with an ongoing process of intergenerational trans¬ mission. Bildung and Tradition entail culture as both a product and an emergent force at any given time, insofar as Bildung leads to shared patterns or forms

Tradition. Although Herder opposed the idea of linear progress, he nonetheless refused to view stages of de¬ velopment in a dichotomous manner. Hence, in place of the idea of polarity he advanced the idea of inter¬

[See also Cultural Development; Environment and Cul¬ ture; Hegelian . . .; Marxism; Positivism in Europe to 1900;

Volksgeist; Zeitgeist.]

play. Tradition and progress no longer embody two opposed tendencies, but a single continuum. Progress, or more precisely change, becomes a built-in charac¬ teristic of tradition, and development is seen, therefore,

CYCLES

as at once part of a given culture continuum and the instrument for its transformation. It requires not only

Theory of History is a doctrine that all

historical antecedents but also emerging goals pointing

The cyclical

to the future. What is also worth noting is that, while

events occur in cycles that are more or less alike. It

Herder admitted conflict and tension as potentially

has two main forms, one that posits cosmic cycles and

inherent in the processes of Bildung and Tradition, he

one that posits cycles only in human affairs. Though

categorically denied the possibility of complete discon¬

the second of these concepts is logically independent

tinuity within any given culture. In this he revealed

of the first, it is sometimes found in company with it.

considerable astuteness. For it is difficult to see how

One must also distinguish those thinkers, like Plato and

one can speak of “development” in terms of complete

Aristotle, who believed in periodic cataclysms and

or total change without raising serious problems of

beginnings, from those, like the Stoics, who believed

identity. Finally, Herder’s analysis of socialization as

in the return of identical events. The doctrine in some

a nonreplicative process and his interpretation of tra¬

of its forms is found in ancient India, in Babylonia,

dition as a dialectic continuum clearly suggest that any

and in Greece.

attempt to explain change must entail a recognition of persistence or vice versa. A theory which cannot account for both is therefore unlikely to account for either.

I. COSMIC CYCLES The notion of the rhythmical recurrence of cosmic events may well have developed out of the charac¬ teristics of the solar year, the periodicity of the lunar

BIBLIOGRAPHY Translations of Kant, Herder, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Marx are by F. M. Barnard. Philip Bagby, Culture and History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959). F. M. Barnard, “Culture and Political De¬ velopment,” American Political Science Review, 63 (1969), 379-97. William R. Dennes, ed., Civilization (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959). T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition

of Culture (London, 1948). L. Febvre, ed., Civilisation: Le mot et I’idee (Paris, 1930). Patrick Gardiner, ed., Theories of History (Glencoe, Ill., 1959). Johann Gottfried von Herder, Samtliche Werke, ed. Bernard Suphan, 33 vols. (Berlin, 1877-1913). Gertrude Jaeger and Philip Selznick,

phases, the round of the seasons in regular order, the life cycle of the individual human being. That the idea of birth, maturation, senility, and death followed by rebirth interested the ancients is shown by the many myths and rites in which this series of events is figured. We no longer possess the documents which might have provided the evidence on which the concept was based, assuming that such documents ever existed, but there are certain hints from early intellectual history which suggest an answer. The observation of astronomical rhythms goes back to Babylonian times; the Pythagor¬ eans as early as the sixth century

b.c.

had speculated

on numerical repetitions such as are found in decimal

621

CYCLES fractions; in India various theories about ages, pe¬

In

riods, recurrences were elaborated; and the early Greek

contrast to the mythographers, the philosophers all

philosophers in general were given to mentioning

believed the world to be everlasting, though the pres¬

cyclical changes in the transmutations of the four ele¬

ent condition of the world might come to an end. Even

ments: earth, water, air, and fire. In many of the think¬

Plato in his Timaeus, which was later used as a creation

ers who believed in cosmic cycles one also finds traces

myth, held that the matter out of which the world was

or definite assertions of the transmigration of souls.

made was everlasting, and for him the work of creation

1. India. In India the doctrine appears in the form

was the forming of this preexisting matter into a cos¬

of the four yugas,

or ages, which make up the

mos. If then the world was endless in its duration, there

mahayuga (Great Year), a period lasting for 4,320,000

were either no changes in it at all, or the changes must

solar years. Each of the yugas differs from its prede¬

have occurred in random or orderly fashion. The Greek

cessor much as the Ages of Hesiod did, in that wicked¬

philosophers, like their modem successors, were un¬

ness and general evil grow greater. The last yuga in

willing to accept a chaotic world and indeed some

the series is our own, and will come to an end with

changes were so obvious that they could hardly escape

a great conflagration followed by a deluge. Between

the notice of a normal man. Among such were the

each two ages there is a twilight and a dawn lasting

familiar examples of birth and death, the apparent

for one tenth of the duration of the preceding or fol¬

disappearance of matter when it is burned or dissolved

lowing age. By the time the fourth age, the Kaliyuga,

in water, the freezing and melting of liquids and solids,

has come to an end, the world is made ready for the

sickness, growth, decay, the processes of digestion, and

beginning of a new Great Year. But Indian imagination

the chemical changes involved in metallurgy. It was

was such that the Great Years themselves were orga¬

one of the intellectual achievements of the early Greek

nized into groups of a thousand, called kalpas, a con¬

philosophers to attribute all such changes to various

cept which was introduced at the time of the Emperor

phases of one or more of what were later to be called

Asoka, in the third century

the “elements.”

b.c.

It should be observed

that the yugas varied in length: the first, the Satyayuga, corresponding to the Golden Age in Greek mythology,

By the time of Heraclitus (early fifth century

b.c.)

three and possibly four of the elements were already

was the longest; the Kaliyuga, which began on 18

distinguished: fire, air, and water. This might seem to

February 3102

will be the shortest. It is interesting

be a great reduction in itself of complexity to simplic¬

that the four yugas have some of the characteristics

ity, but Heraclitus went further. We find him saying

of the human life-cycle in that the capacity for com¬

in one of his fragments, “Fire lives the death of air,

mitting evils enters after childhood and increases until

and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death

b.c.

of earth, earth that of water.” There are justifiable

old age.

622

Western world with Judaism and Christianity.

2. Greece and Rome. In Greece a distinction must

grounds for doubts about the authenticity of the details

be made between those philosophers who believed in

in this series of changes, but that the author believed

cycles and those who believed that each cycle repeated

in a general pattern of elemental transmutations is

the characteristics of its predecessor, or what was

clear. This pattern becomes even clearer in Aristotle

called by Friedrich Nietzsche the Eternal Recurrence.

and the changes occur in definitely described manners.

Among the latter was Empedocles (fifth century

b.c.),

Fire changes to air by losing its heat and earth changes

but even he, as far as the evidence goes, did not say

to water by losing its dryness. But Aristotle does not

that every event was endlessly repeated. Yet Empedo¬

say that at one time the cosmos was entirely composed

cles did assert that the general course of each cycle

of one of the four elements and then produced the

was repeated in its successor and he also seemed to

others step by step, after which they all eventually

believe in the transmigration of souls. The course of

returned to their primitive material unity. The changes

cosmic history ran from a period when the force of

occur as the sun moves along the ecliptic and to that

Love was in command, a time very like the Golden

extent there is a cosmic cycle in Aristotle’s thinking.

Age or the Age of Kronos. This was followed by the

Each year brings about the same series of elemental

entrance of Strife upon the scene, to be followed in

changes but the whole never changes as a unit.

turn by the predominance of Strife, apparently the

The Stoics are responsible for the clearest theory

worst of times. But when Strife was uppermost it began

of cosmic cycles, though they attributed the source of

to give way again to Love, and finally Love returned

the idea to Heraclitus. According to Stoicism there

to take over the management of the universe. The

would occur at a given time a general conflagration,

rhythm was endless.

the ekpyrosis, after which the world would begin again

None of the Greek philosophers believed that the

as it was in the distant past. The cycle as a whole was

cosmos had a beginning in time; that idea entered the

called by Cicero the Great Year (Annus Magnus). Its

CYCLES length was variously calculated, now being 18,000 solar

bring their accusation [against Socrates] and Busiris

years, now 10,800. But that it was the year of all years

slay the Strangers, and Hercules perform his labors.”

is clear enough. What was desired was the length of

It is Tatian clearly who draws this inference, though

time which it would take for the heavenly bodies to

Eudemus, a pupil of Aristotle, had attributed the same

return to the position that they had held at a defined

belief to “the Pythagoreans.” In fact the accusation

time, thought of as a begiiming.

and trial of Socrates became a favorite example of what

One of the founders of Stoicism, Cleanthes (early

the eternal recurrence involved.

is said to have described the ekpyr¬

Yet Vergil in his Fourth Eclogue also plays on the

osis as a process of death and growth. The fire burns

theme and mentions specific events and individuals that

up all things but is followed by a period of moisture

will reappear in the new age which is to come. In our

in which the “seeds” of everything remain. These seeds

own time Shelley in the final chorus of his dramatic

begin to grow again at the proper time and eventually

poem, Hellas, imitated Vergil, verbally in places; and

the cosmos is restored to what it was. The seeds in

a less important literary figure, George Moore, the Irish

question were called the spermatic logoi or perhaps

novelist, in his story “Resurgam,” depicts the destruc¬

“principles,” (for only a vague word can name them),

tion of the world and its restoration in some detail.

third Century

b.c.),

which are material but probably as everlasting as fire

3. The Christian Fathers. There were two basic

itself. Mysterious as the doctrine is, the world turns

reasons why the Christian apologists tried to refute the

out to be self-destructive and self-regenerative, like the

doctrine of cosmic cycles. First, it seemed to contradict

phoenix which may indeed be a symbol of the process.

the essential Christian dogma of free will, for if every¬

According to Cicero one of the later Stoics, Panae-

thing recurs in the same manner ad indefinitum and

did not accept the doctrine

if the same identical persons commit the same deeds,

of the ekpyrosis. But in spite of Cicero’s well-known

then all choice is eliminated. This was the position of

admiration for Panaetius, he himself did accept it. He

Origen. Since his statement in De principiis is clear,

describes it in his treatise On the Nature of the Gods

it may be well to quote it in full.

tius (second century

b.c.),

(Book II, 46): “There will ultimately occur a conflagra¬ tion of the whole world, because when the moisture has been used up neither can the earth be nourished nor will the air continue to flow, being unable to rise after it has drunk up all the water; thus nothing will remain but fire, by which, as a living being and a god, once again a new world may be created and the or¬

The disciples of Pythagoras, and of Plato, although they appear to hold the incorruptibility of the world, yet fall into similar errors. For as the planets, after certain definite cycles, assume the same relations to one another, all things on earth will, they assert, be like what they were at the time when the same state of planetary relations existed in the world. From this point of view it necessarily follows

dered universe restored as before.” The process is based

that when, after the lapse of a lengthened cycle, the planets

on sensory observation. Moisture, i.e., water, is dried

come to occupy towards each other the same relations

up by fire; the air, which normally is found between

which they occupied in the time of Socrates, Socrates will

the level of fire and that of water, is exhausted by the combustion, and thus fire alone is left. What happens to earth is not revealed. But by the time of Cicero Greek science was either the collection of data, such as are found in Pliny and Seneca, or it had turned to mathematics, astronomy, and geography. One finds little scientific clarity in the philosophers. The other pagan witnesses to the Stoic belief in the ekpyrosis and the renewal of the world are Seneca,

again be bom of the same parents, suffer the same treat¬ ment, being accused by Anytus and Meletus, and con¬ demned by the Council of the Areopagus. . . . We who maintain that all things are administered by God in propor¬ tion to the relation of free will of each individual, and are ever being brought into better condition, so far as they admit of being so, and who know that the nature of our free will admits of the occurrence of contingent events . . . yet we, it appears, say nothing worthy of being tested and examined.

Diogenes Laertius, and Plutarch. But they add little in the way of detail, and for the most part we are forced to rely on Christian writers who referred to the

But, he goes on to say, we do believe in the resurrection of the body. In view of Origen’s mistaken idea of

process in order to combat the ideas on which it was

Plato’s views, it is probable that he did not understand

based or its supposed implications. It is they who tell

what the Stoics said either, and we quote his words

us that the details of a given age will be repeated identically in later ages. Tatian (second century

a.d.),

for instance, in his Adversus Graecos says, “Zeno [the founder of Stoicism] has shown that after the ekpyrosis . . . men will be resurrected as they were. And I say that this must imply that Anytus and Meletus will again

not as testimony to what any Platonist, Stoic, or Pythagorean actually said, but as testimony to current opinion among the Fathers. One of the difficulties that the Church Fathers faced is the verse in Ecclesiastes which says that there is nothing new imder the sun. Where Stoicism was held

623

CYCLES to imply the recurrence of individuals, this verse was

of changes based on the expenditure of energy, the

interpreted as implying only the steady occurrence of

number of kinds of things is finite. Since the duration

the same kinds of things. Saint Augustine in his City

of time is infinite, has already lasted for an infinite

of God (Book XII, Ch. 13) takes this up and replies

series of moments and will continue to exist for another

that it does not imply the total recurrence of the past,

infinite series of moments, all possibilities must have

but speaks simply of the course of generations, solar

been already realized and the future will inevitably

phenomena, floods—in short, of the coming into being

repeat the past. It is perhaps unnecessary to point out

and the passing away of kinds of things. It does not

that at most this argument would imply the recurrence

mean, he says, that the philosopher Plato, who in a

of kinds of things, something that every man has ob¬

certain century in Athens in a school called the Aqad-

served in his daily life. This is very different from the

emy, formed of his pupils, must reappear in the future

recurrence of identical individuals. But Nietzsche had

during an infinity of centuries in the same city, in the

been a professor of classical philology and, though he

same school, before the same public, and teach the

may have forgotten his Stoic forebears, he was repeat¬

same lessons. For otherwise, and this is the second

ing their conclusions if not their reasoning.

objection that the Christian apologists had to the doc¬

The importance of the argument for him was its

trine of cosmic cycles, it would mean that Christ would

supposed ethical implications. To accept to the full the

have to be born again, crucified again, resurrected

eternal recurrence meant for him to live “beyond good

again. And this thought is repugnant to Saint Augus¬

and evil.” Good and evil could be relevant within the

tine. He knows that Christ died once for our sins and

context of a given cycle, but had no transcendent

furthermore that His resurrection has freed mankind

importance. Believers in Judaism and Christianity,

from death forever. The world will last for six thousand

however, had grown up in the belief that good and

years and then be destroyed, but its destruction will

evil were standards laid down by God eternally, not

not be followed by its resurgence.

for now and here. And since Nietzsche above all

The doctrine of cosmic cycles plus that of the eternal

wanted to liberate his reader from what he called the

recurrence was dropped by Christian writers, though

slave-morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition, he per¬

their continued exposition of it and arguments against

ceived an escape in this idea of eternal recurrence.

it must imply that it had a certain popularity among the laity. It was revived again by Friedrich Nietzsche

624

II. CYCLES IN HUMAN AFFAIRS

in the nineteenth century, but his arguments in support

1. Plato. That the cosmos itself goes through a series

of the idea were different from those of the Stoics, as

of changes is clearly stated by Plato in the Statesman

far as we have the latter. The idea seems to have come

(269D). During one period, he says, God accompanies

to him while resting after a walk from Sils-Maria to

the course of the world but “when the periods have

Silvaplana. He thought that since there is no end to

run the measure of time allotted to it by him, he leaves

time, and presumably only a finite number of possible

it, and automatically it moves in the opposite direction,

events and things, everything now existing must recur.

for it is a living creature endowed with thought by

The obvious basis of this argument is that any calcula¬

him who constituted it in the beginning.” As in the

ble probability must happen in infinite time. Nietzsche

Timaeus, God organized the world; He did not create

took the reasoning seriously and contemplated writing

it. Its history has two periods, one in which God is

a book (for which only notes remain) to be called The

its guide and one in which it changes its course and

Eternal Recurrence. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (par.

moves under its own power. The reason for the reversal

270-71) we find the Superman saying:

is its corporeal nature. Only the incorporeal has the

The plexus of causes retumeth in which I am intertwined,— it will again create me! I myself pertain to the causes of the eternal return.

power of remaining unchanged. Hence when the world

I will come again with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent—not to a new life, or a better life, or a similar life: I come again eternally to this identical and selfsame life, in its greatest and its smallest, to teach again the eternal return of all things,—to speak again the word of the great noontide of earth and man, to announce again to man the Superman.

of direction entails a “very great destruction of all

In the notes for The Eternal Recurrence he extends

of the postdiluvian race from stones. The occurrence

the reasoning to this end. The extent of universal en-

of catastrophes in the past which annihilated almost

ergy, he says, is finite. Since all events are the result

all life was not an uncommon belief. One finds a similar

is left to itself, it can only reverse its direction and this happens “through myriads of times.” The change animals,” and only a few humans are left alive. After this, history is just the reverse of what we are used to. The living grow younger and finally disappear and a new race is born of the earth. All this is related by Plato in the form of a myth, but it was a myth more or less harmonious with Greek folklore, and the birth

CYCLES story in Ovid’s account of the Deluge in his Metamor¬ phoses (Book I).

and why men lost their acquired knowledge, no story of cataclysmic destruction of races or nations. Nor does

Plato’s account of such catastrophes is given in

he attempt to connect the periodic recurrence of ideas

Timaeus (22C) where he tells the story of Solon’s

with any set of cosmic cycles. In the Meteorologica

meeting with an Egyptian priest who says: “There have

(352a. 32) he does mention Deucalion’s Deluge, but

been and will be many and diverse destructions of men.

limits its extent to the Greek world, though later

The greatest by fire and water, and the lesser by thou¬

(352b-353a) he speaks of geological changes as occur¬

sands of other means.” When a flood occurs, only those

ring at all times, but not in identical cycles. In the

who live on mountain tops are saved, but those who

Politics (1269a. 3) he accepts the theory of cataclysms

live in cities are borne into the sea by the rushing

as possibly true and that of primitive men as either

waters. Happily Egypt is preserved for it has no high

born of the earth or survivors from some catastrophe.

mountains from which torrents can descend; its waters

In the Pseudo-Aristotelian Prohlemata (910a. 35) the

well up from below. But in other parts of the world

Deluge is again mentioned. Aristotle apparently dealt

the celestial waters pour down and drown all but the

with periodic catastrophes in his lost work On Philoso¬

“illiterate and uncultured,” who naturally have no

phy (frag. 8) in which he also described the rebirth

memory of what has transpired in ancient times. That

of civilization after the Deluge. But none of this is

is why the Greeks speak of one flood, whereas there

precise and we have no speculations about the length

have been several. A similar account of cataclysms is

of cycles nor about the similarities of their details.

given in Critias (11 IB) and in The Laws (677). The

Aristotle’s works do, however, show how widely ac¬

latter version also includes the story of man’s progress

cepted was the idea of periodic cataclysms and the

after the Deluge. The main difference between this

periodic rediscovery of the arts and sciences.

version and that given in the Statesman is that the race

Aristotle is also responsible for the idea (which was

whose history begins the new period is not earth-born

to be developed by Polybius) of the degeneration of

but descends from those few shepherds who lived on

forms of government. There are, he says in his Politics

the hills.

(Book III, Ch. 7, 1279a. 23ff„ and 1279b. Iff.), three

The details of these stories are fanciful but it is likely

kinds of good government: the rule of one man. Mon¬

that the principal fact of multiple cataclysms was taken

archy; of a few, Aristocracy; and of many, Consti¬

seriously by Plato. For he had no conception of the

tutional Democracy. Corresponding to these are three

“infinite perfectibility of mankind,” such as was enter¬

forms of bad government; tyranny, which is govern¬

tained by Condorcet and others in the eighteenth cen¬

ment in the interest of the ruler; oligarchy, in the

tury. He knew that any change this side of Heaven

interest of the rich; democracy, in the interest of the

must come to an end. But since there was no logically

needy. But he is careful to point out that the number

deducible end for human affairs, and since they could

of people in the governing body is not so important

not continue unchanged forever, the best way to ex¬

as wealth. Government by the rich is an oligarchy even

plain their cessation was by a conflagration, a deluge,

if the rich are numerous; government by the poor is

or a plague. Such catastrophes could in turn be ex¬

a democracy even if the poor are few. So far nothing

plained by a myth and that myth we have seen in our

has been said about historical changes in governmental

previous reference to the Statesman. Put in its barest

forms. But later (1286b. 7) he points out that the first

terms, Plato’s view is that all history is advance and

governments were monarchical. They degenerated into

retrogression. These occur in cycles. But only the most

oligarchies, then into tyrannies, and finally into de¬

prominent features of them are repeated, not the de¬

mocracies. But Aristotle does not say that monarchies

tails; and, if we are to believe Solon’s Egyptian priest,

will arise anew out of democracies. The process is not

the calamity varies in its severity, Egypt being specially

eternal, though one suspects that after a flood or con¬

favored. It is clear that none of this anticipates the

flagration the kind of government that will arise will

notion of the Great Year.

again be monarchical. 3. Polybius. The Aristotelian formula was taken up

2. Aristotle. The general idea of cyclical history is repeated by Aristotle, but only in passing, as if it was

by Polybius (ca. 204-122

so generally accepted that it needed no support. He

his History (Book VI, 3), there are six kinds of govern¬

flatly says in the Metaphysics (1074b. 11) that the arts

ment, as in Aristotle, but they occur in a definite series.

and sciences have been lost and regained many times;

By a natural growth monarchy comes first and turns

in the Politics (1264a. 1) that all ideas of any value

into “kingship” by the aid of art and the correction

have already been discovered and tried; and in De caelo

of defects. Both are government by one man. Monarchy

(270b. 19) that the same doctrines have been discovered

inevitably turns into tyranny against which aristocracy

innumerable times. But he gives no account of how

is organized. Aristocracy in turn degenerates into oli-

b.c.).

For him, as he says in

625

CYCLES garqhy. Revulsion against oligarchy produces democ¬

Greek is doubtful since the Greek manuscripts came

racy which in its turn becomes mob-rule. All this pro¬

later to Italy. Villani’s cycle depends on the supposed

ceeds as by a natural law.

psychological fact that success engenders pride, pride

Governments, says Polybius, are instituted after the

It was Machiavelli who earned on the tradition of

“as tradition tells us has more than once happened and

Polybius. In his Discourses (Book I, Ch. ii) he argues

as we must believe will often happen again, all arts

that the mixed form of government is the best and that

and crafts perishing at the same time.” Then the survi¬

it was found in Rome. He bases his argument on the

vors herd together because of their weakness. The

same points as those made by Polybius. Also Francesco

strongest and most courageous rules over the others

Guicciardini in his Ricordi argues that the future re¬

and thus monarchy arises. Primitive monarchy is the

peats tlie past and that only the names of things change.

rule of force. But once order is established, notions of

But the history of this particular idea, which is one

goodness, justice, evil, and injustice arise because of

of the bases for the program of mixed constitutions

the conduct of ungrateful children “and others.” There

belongs elsewhere We shall here merely point to its

thus is formed an idea of duty and a benefactor wins

outcome in the Constitution of the United States.

gratitude and respect. At that point the monarch is obeyed because of his administration of justice and then reason replaces force.

626

sin, and sin brings on decline.

human race has been destroyed by floods and famines,

in.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS

The people trust in the descendants of their kings from

Only two influential theories of cycles need be cited

the conviction that their qualities are inherited. But

as representative of twentieth-century thinking on this

the heirs yield to their appetites, even wearing special

problem, the theories of Oswald Spengler and those

clothes, and live so that their conduct gives rise to envy and offense, hatred and resentment. At this point tyr¬

of Arnold Toynbee. According to Spengler, and Toynbee as well, human

anny takes over. The noblest members of the commu¬

history must be divided longitudinally into the biogra¬

nity, however, being unable to tolerate tyranny, con¬

phies of civilizations, cultures, nations. These historical

spire to overthrow the government, succeed, and

items are to be considered under the metaphor of a

establish an aristocracy. Unfortunately the children of

living organism which is bom, matures, and dies. In

the best may be bad. They give in to love of money,

Spengler’s view, as given in his Decline of the West

to lust, to pleasures of all sorts; and aristocracy becomes

(German 1918; English 1926-28), people begin in a

oligarchy. Oligarchy then becomes intolerable and

creative state of mind, which he calls “Faustian”—very

turns into democracy; and, for the same reason that

similar to what Nietzsche had called in his Birth of

kings become tyrants, aristocrats, oligarchs, democrats

Tragedy “Dionysian,” where music and the dance,

become mob-leaders.

where the dramatic and the lyrical, are the dominant

Thus Polybius anticipates Lord Acton’s dictum that

features of life. This period he calls that of a culture.

power corrupts. But to Polybius’ way of thinking the

But as a culture develops, it inevitably gives way to

cycle is established by natural law: it is the course

rationality, and the Apollonian attitude, where the

appointed by nature in which constitutions, states, the

geometric, the static, the formal predominate. When

arts change, disappear, and finally return to the point

such features reach their height, there is no longer a

from which they started. Polybius is so convinced of

culture, there is only a civilization. As a result the

this position that he says it may be used as a basis for

people’s creative spirit dies. The Decline of the West

prophecy. The only remedy is a mixed constitution.

is the story of how this has happened in the Occident.

He found one, he thought, in Rome, where the Consuls

The same story has been repeated and presumably will

were monarchs, the Senators aristocrats, the Many

be repeated again in the Orient. Thus the cycle of

democrats. Nevertheless the course of history was one

culture-civilization-death-culture goes on forever.

of constant decay. 4. The Italian Renaissance. Reflections upon the

of thinking there have been twenty-six nations or civi¬

course of human events were reoriented during the

lizations so far in world history. All have undergone

Middle Ages when the moral behavior of states was

the same stimuli, known as challenges. To these chal¬

Toynbee is a bit less discouraging. For to his way

of more importance than natural law. But early in the

lenges they have responded in various ways and the

Renaissance the ideas of Polybius were revived. Before

ways are what we call their histories. So far none has

Polybius was translated from Greek to Latin and

succeeded in successfully meeting the challenges which

printed in 1473, we find in Giovanni Villani’s Chronicle

have been put to them. But there is always the possi¬

of Florence the cyclic pattern emphasized. Whether

bility that some civilization will succeed in doing so.

Villani (ca. 1275-1348) could have read Polybius in

The latter half of the twentieth century will see how

CYNICISM successfully occidental civilization can meet the chal¬

cal

lenge which has confronted it. Just what this challenge

Chronicles,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 28, 2 (April-

is, is far from clear, unless it is the challenge that

June, 1967), 161-78; Machiavelli, Discourses, Book I, Ch.

communism has put up to capitalism. But since capi¬

ii; Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance

talistic countries have absorbed certain socialistic de¬ vices and communistic countries have either retained or introduced capitalistic devices, there must be some other explanation that Toynbee has in mind. What recurs eternally in both Spengler and Toynbee is the general pattern of history, not the individual events.

Interpretation

in

Fourteenth-Century

Florentine

Statesman (Ricordi), trans. Mario Domandi (New York, 1965), pp. 60, 89. For comment on cycles in early Christian writers: Justin Martyr, Apology, I. 20, trans. Marcus Dods, George Heath, and B. P. Bratten (Edinburgh, 1872); Origen,

De principiis. Book II. Chs. 3, 5 from Patrologia Graeca, Vol. XI, col. 192, trans. Frederick Crombie (Edinburgh, 1871) p. 84; idem. Contra Celsum, Book V. Ch. 20, from

There have been and probably will continue to be

Patrologia Graeca, Vol. XI, cols. 1213, 1216, trans. Alexander

international wars, for instance, but no given war will

Roberts and James Donaldson (Edinburgh, 1872). F. W.

be repeated. The problem that such historians have

Nietzsche, Complete Works, ed. Oscar Levy, 18 vols. (Lon¬

to face is how to use their classifications, how much

don, 1909-13), 16, nos. 237-47; Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche, trans.

similarity they will demand of those events to which

Charles F. WallrafF and Frederick J. Schmitz (Tuscon, 1965),

they give the same name. In one sense of the word,

pp. 352ff.

every time a person is born there is a repetition of a set of events. But what is bom, beyond that which is named by the noun “person,” is individual and different from every other member of his class. This problem is one that few historians have been willing

GEORGE BOAS [See also Analogy in Early Greek Thought; Christianity in History; Historiography; Periodization in History; Primitiv¬ ism; Renaissance Literature and Historiography.]

to face, for it carries one off into the regions of meta¬ physics. Related to the doctrine of historical cycles is that based on the metaphor of the swinging pendulum, according to which an historical movement will reach

CYNICISM

an extreme and then turn back until it reaches an

1. The Problem. The problem of the origins or

opposite extreme. Thus radicalism and conservatism in

sources of Cynicism has attracted the interest of

politics, romanticism and classicism in art, skepticism

scholars since Ferdinand Diimmler published his dis¬

and authoritarianism in religion, have all been said to

sertation Antisthenica in 1882. Diimmler thought he

occur in this manner. But the extremes have never been

had found a whole series of polemical allusions to

clearly defined except possibly by Hegel, whose histor¬

Antisthenes in Plato’s works. Diunmler’s thesis was

ical theory is discussed elsewhere.

soon pushed to extremes by other scholars, who gave Antisthenes a central position in Greek philosophy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY For Empedocles and Heraclitus, see John Burnet, Early

Greek Philosophy, 4th ed. (London, 1945); cf. A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism . . . in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935), pp. 79ff. For Pagan testimony to the Stoic doctrine of cycles and the ekpyrosis, Cicero, Academics, II. 37, 119; idem, De

natura deorum, II. 46, 118, trans. H. Rackham (London and

Antisthenes’ role as the founder of a philosophical school was not called in question. Diogenes of Sinope was regarded as his immediate pupil in accordance with ancient tradition. Cynicism was regarded as an ethical and mainly practical philosophical movement with later additions of certain abstruse traits but still essentially a bearer of a Socratic tradition.

Cambridge, Mass., 1933), pp. 621 and 635 respectively;

Contrary to this conception of the problem we find

Seneca, Consolatione ad Marciam, XXVI. 5 to end; idem,

another radically different view. In this view Antis¬

Consolatione ad Polybium, I. 2, in Moral Essays, trans. John

thenes was not an independent thinker or writer of

W. Basore (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1935), II. 95,

any particular importance and had nothing at all to

357; Plutarch, The E at Delphi, 388 F, in Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1936), V. 221f.; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VII. 19; XI. 1. For the “reverse in cosmic history,” see Plato, Statesman, 269D; for conflagrations and floods, Timaeus, 22B; for cataclysms,

Critias, 110A, Laws, 677. For historical repetition in Aris¬ totle, works as indicated in the text above; for political cycles, Politics, III, 7 (1279a. 23ff. and 1286b. 7). For the

do with Cynicism. The linking together of Antisthenes and Diogenes is then explained as a Stoic attempt to derive the Stoa directly from Socrates. Cynicism is not a philosophy, it is an asocial, amoral, and anti-intellec¬ tual way of living. Without Diogenes there would be no Cynics. He is the creator of the true Cynic type with all its burlesque, asocial and anticultural features,

same in Polybius, see History, Book VI. 3 and 5. For political

described in an abundance of Cynic anecdotes. The

cycles in the Italian Renaissance, see Louis Green, “Histori¬

picture of Diogenes as a type, conveyed by the anec-

627

CYNICISM dotes, is true in its main features, even though the The problem of Cynicism is essentially a problem

have lived ca. 380-20. The ancient testimonies are

concerning the sources. No original writings, with few

unanimous in placing Diogenes’ death towards 320.

exceptions, have survived. Our knowledge of Cynicism

There are no reasons for doubting the existence of

rests largely on quotations from late authors, on a rich

personal contact between Antisthenes and Diogenes.

profusion of anecdotes, and on late spurious letters.

Besides direct teaching, Diogenes also carried on a

The interpretation of isolated sentences, torn from their

rather extensive literary activity. Diogenes Laertius

context, and of resumes must therefore be conjectural

gives a list of writings attributed to him that comprises

and need to be viewed from the standpoint of . the

thirteen dialogues, seven tragedies, and letters; in a

history of the ideas associated with the so-called

second, shorter list, with mostly other titles, Diogenes

Cynics. The widely differing positions taken up in this

Laertius enumerates thirteen works, besides letters.

field of research are due to the conditions suggested

With the letters are probably those spurious letters that

here. The account of a few central themes in Cynicism

under the names of various philosophers were current

that will be given here rests solely on doxographical

in the first centuries

material or such material as can be related to the

mentioned in this second list. That the teaching activity

doxographies.

presupposes some kind of literary activity and literary

2. Early Authors. First we present a short survey of persons and authors in the Cynic tradition during the fourth and third centuries

628

on an extensive literary activity, was the instructor of Alexander and wrote a history of him. He is said to

details are invented.

b.c.

b.c.

and

a.d.

No tragedies are

reputation can hardly be doubted, but nothing remains. Among

Diogenes’

personal

pupils,

besides

the

above-mentioned Onesicritus and Anaximenes, were a

Antisthenes—dates unknown, but still living at an

number of Cynic authors, among others Monimus of

advanced age in Athens in 366—came from the

Syracuse, who wrote jocular poems with a serious

Sophists as a disciple of Gorgias. According to the

intent; Philiscus of Aegina, who besides dialogues

practice of the Sophists he gave instruction for a fee

wrote tragedies intended for reading, in which Cynic

in the gymnasium of Cynosarges outside the city-wall

paradoxes were paraded; also, Crates of Thebes, who

of Athens, offering lessons intended for the education

likewise wrote jocular poems of which we get a fairly

of young Athenians without full citizenship. Antis¬

good idea from fragments that have been preserved.

thenes himself was not a full citizen of Athens, his

Metrocles of Maroneia, Crates’ brother-in-law, origi¬

mother being a Thracian woman. The Cynosarges

nally a Peripatetic but later a pupil of Crates, played

contained a famous shrine of Heracles; the name

an important role, in the generation immediately after

“Cynic,” it is usually believed was derived from

Diogenes, through his writings containing helpful

Cynosarges. Heracles as Cynic hero has his origin here.

words for everyday use intended to strengthen the

Antisthenes was a prolific writer. Diogenes Laertius,

philosophical attitude towards life. He had a decisive

in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, gives us under

influence on the creation of the type of Cynic philoso¬

Antisthenes’ name one of the longest lists of books, 66

pher, and of the Diogenes legend.

titles in all, divided into ten sections. His literary out¬

In the generation after Metrocles we find a number

put belongs within the scope of the problems which

of important writers. Diogenes Laertius mentions as

were of interest to the Sophists. Of this immense liter¬

a pupil of Metrocles among others Menippus of

ary output nothing remains except two declamations

Gadara, originally a slave at Sinope, who continued

about Ajax and Odysseus, which betray the influence

in the way which Monimus made vivid by putting forth

of Gorgias’ rhetorical style but show manifest traces

philosophical maxims in a jocular form. His style, a

of Cynic “king-ideology” (which is discussed below).

mixture of prose and poetry, was imitated by Varro

Besides the life in Diogenes Laertius there are only

in tlie latter’s Saturae Menippeae, of which about 600

a few scattered quotations, mostly in the writings of

fragments have been preserved. In addition, to this

late authors. Diogenes of Sinope probably came to Athens as a

generation of authors belongs Bion the Borysthenite,

political exile in connection with the Persian satrap

Xenocrates, but above all of Crates, the Cynic. Bion

Datames’ capture of the Athenian colony of Sinope

was already considered in antiquity to be the originator

on the south coast of the Black Sea in 370. He possibly

of the so-called diatribe style. Then we have Teles of

also a freedman, and a pupil of Theophrastus and

taught in Athens after the decade of 360-50. Among

Megara, diatribist after the manner of Bion (of whom

his better known pupils were Onesicritus, Alexander’s

a considerable number of extracts have been preserved

admiral, who took part in the expedition to India and

by Stobaeus), and Cercidas of Megalopolis. Cercidas

wrote a novel on Alexander and descriptions of India;

does not at all conform to the vulgar conception of

furthermore, Anaximenes of Lampsacus, who carried

a Cynic. He served his native city as general, diplomat,

CYNICISM and lawgiver, but attained his greatest fame as Cynic

part. According to Diogenes Laertius he wrote a con¬

philosopher and poet. He was strongly influenced by

siderable number of political pamphlets under tradi¬

Diogenes as well as by Bion, whose diatribic style he

tional titles. Our information about this literary output

developed.

is scanty. Antisthenes criticized the tyrants for their

In the latter half of the third century Menedemus

excessive greed which led them to the greatest crimes.

from Asia Minor was active as a writer in a sternly

He also criticized Pericles and other politicians in

moralizing, polemical style. Finally, mention must be

special pamphlets, and appeared in public with his

made of the satirist Meleager of Gadara, poet and

political criticism. More important are the conclusions

Cynic philosopher in the Menippean style, who lived

that can be drawn about Antisthenes’ political writings

at the end of the second century

by viewing the fragments in relation to the Sophistic

b.c.

3. Sophistic Background. From the point of view of the history of ideas Cynicism as a practical-philo¬

writings. The Sophist Antiphon wrote a book about Concord.

sophical movement begins with the Sophists. Most of

The word has on one side a political sense, concord

its theoretical motivation and ideological substance is

between warring groups of society, but on the other

derived from the Sophists’ nominalistic theory of

side it had undergone a development in an individ¬

knowledge and materialism, the radical opposition to

ualistic direction and acquired the sense of harmony

society and its conventions through the assertion of

with oneself. Plato defines the wicked man as one who

natural law as against positive law, and a ruthless and

is not in harmony with himself, and he says that what

unrestricted individualism. From the pedagogy of the

is in opposition to itself, can hardly be a friend of

Sophists came also the interest in practical ethical

anything else. The formula “to be in harmony with

questions and educational problems. Antisthenes, who

oneself’’ was familiar to Plato in his early writings. In

began as a Sophist and in spite of his attacks on his

the Stoa the concept of concord was defined as knowl¬

former teacher Gorgias always remained a Sophist,

edge about common advantages. Only the wise pos¬

later on attached himself to Socrates, whom he admired

sessed this knowledge. A number of fragments from

highly and to whom he probably stood in a close

Antisthenes’ writings must be read in this connection:

relationship. He was with Socrates in the prison, when

criticism of the existing society with its demand for

Socrates drank the hemlock. In Socrates Antisthenes

political concord on the basis of the law, in contrast

met with what was later associated with the Cynic type

to this the concord that exists in accordance with

in its serious form: poverty, voluntary asceticism,

nature above the law and in opposition to it, e.g.,

physical insensibility and hardiness, psychical firmness,

between brothers and above all between the wise. This

and absolute personal integrity. Out of this encounter

concord is based on the philosopher’s ability to hold

Cynicism

converse with himself, to be in harmony with himself,

was

born.

With

Antisthenes'

successor

Diogenes the theoretical motivation receded to give

which is possible only for the wise.

place to a practical demonstration against established

Antisthenes, like Antiphon, took up the cudgels

social behavior for the benefit of an individualism

against the traditional code of morality and its laws,

pushed ad absurdum.

and set up the antithesis: nomos versus physis (“cus¬

4. Political Ideas. The Sophists, who almost without

tom” or “convention” versus “nature”). In a religious

exception were of non-Athenian descent, wrote a

fragment he makes use of this antithesis to show that

number of critical and comparative descriptions of the

polytheism exists only according to law; according to

constitutions of various states. The points of view var¬

nature there is only one god. In a political fragment

ied considerably between conservative and radical

this antithesis recurs: the wise man must not live in

ideas, and various attempts were made at justifying

accordance with the established laws but with the law

society’s demands for subordination. Protagoras put this

of virtue. There are other utterances that seem to show

justification in a mythical form as innate feelings of

that Antisthenes used this and similar expressions in

right and wrong, thus giving society a foundation in

polemics against democracy.

irrational, religious conceptions. Law and nature are

The wise man’s ethical superiority to other men leads

not contradictory notions; on the contrary, they are

to another antithesis with political consequences, the

complementary to each other. The Sophist Antiphon,

contrast between the good and the bad. The bad must

on the other hand, equated nature and truth in contrast

be separated from the state just as the weeds are sepa¬

to law, which means a violation of nature. As an exam¬

rated from the corn or the cowards from the battle.

ple he cites the fictitious difference between social

The good must unite, become friends and allies in the

classes and between Greeks and barbarians, differences

ethical battle. Their weapon is virtue and this weapon

which have no foundation in nature.

can never be lost. This virtue, which is itself a law

In this political literary activity Antisthenes took

in opposition to the laws of society, is teachable. Still

629

CYNICISM it demands no great learning but practical training.

in a caricatured form, goes back to an early burlesque

Human fellowship can only be based on equal spiritual

variant (Menippus?) is doubtful. The pedagogy of the

qualities, irrespective of all conventions. It can as a

Eubulus version is of an idyllic character which has

matter of fact exist only between the wise.

its counterpart in a hedonistic theme in the doxography

Politics and pedagogy were closely connected in the

Diog. L. VI 71: the despising of pleasure is the greatest

Sophistic. The aim of the Sophists was to create by

pleasure. In Lucian we meet a Cynic pedagogy of quite

instruction conditions for success in society. But the

another character in line with the many Diogenes

content and value of this Sophistic instruction were

anecdotes representing traits of rigorous asceticism and

called in question. Antisthenes sought a solution of the

abstruse shamelessness.

problem of politics in opposition to Plato, whose theory

630

into slavery given by Lucian, where Diogenes appears

Family ties and difference of sex do not cormt here.

It is easy to relate the varying motifs in the Eubulus

of ideas he polemized against and rejected. We do not

pedagogy to ideas generally known in the fourth cen¬

know how far the state in Cynic writings approximated

tury

Plato’s ideal of the state, but there were some striking

the idyllic training in hunting, archery, riding, and

parallels: in both cases there was a question of an

other forms of athletics as a complement to reading

ethical aristocracy with justice and virtue as central

and learning by heart select passages from the works

concepts, a philosopher state with no possibility of

of poets and other writers. Even the framework itself,

b.c.:

the ruler-teacher motif, the slave-ruler motif,

realization in practical life. As to the Cynics this led

the sale of Diogenes into slavery, had its model in

to the idea of a simple and remote life in harmony

Euripides’ play Syleus, where Heracles is sold as a

with nature, which education should aim at.

slave. But while Eubulus’ pedagogy with its archaic,

5. Cynic Pedagogy. Diogenes Laertius’ account (VI

Spartan education (paideia) was disappearing from the

70f.) of Diogenes’ maxims is a summary of early Cynic

Cynic tradition, a burlesque variant was being created

pedagogy. The theme is “the double training,” the

which left its most important traces in Lucian several

necessary training of body and soul, and the passage

centuries later. Instead of Eubulus’ mild, hedonistically

is one of the few sources of information about early

tinged asceticism we find a coarse and vulgar asceticism

Cynic ideology of Heracles. Both forms of training are

which was self-contained and was the form of Cynicism

equally necessary for him who wants to learn how to

that Lucian criticized, and which furnished the mate¬

act rightly. More explicit information as to the methods

rial for countless popular anecdotes.

of this pedagogy is given in Diog. L. VI 30f. Diogenes

The idyllic existence which Eubulus’ pedagogy de¬

Laertius quotes a certain Eubulus who wrote a book

scribes has to a certain extent its counterpart in some

about how Diogenes was sold as a slave and became

fragments of an early Cynic poem (Crates’ poem, Pera)

the teacher of Xeniades’ two sons. These he trained

which describes in allegorical form an ideal society.

in various sorts of athletics, not in an exaggerated way

Crates’ social backgroimd was different from that

but only enough to keep them in good physical condi¬

of Antisthenes and Diogenes. He was a full citizen of

tion. The pupils also had to learn by heart passages

Thebes but distributed his wealth, which was consid¬

from poets and historians, and the writings of Diogenes

erable, among his fellow citizens. Teles describes him

himself. Part of the education also consisted in learning

as a sort of pre-Christian Saint Francis, who derived

a simple way of living as to food, drink, and clothes,

the highest ethical values from his voluntary poverty.

and modest behavior. Thus Diogenes appears here as

Apuleius provides an interesting example of Heracles

a representative of the traditional type of education,

as an ethical model in his description of Crates. Here

which reminds one of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and

we find a picture of the Cynic saint, reconciler and

shows a

adviser of men. punisher of all evil. In Crates we find

certain affinity

to

Prodicus’

allegory

on

Heracles. As a youth Heracles chose the virtuous

the dream of the far-off state, which no evil men or

woman Arete instead of the woman of pleasure, Kakia,

evil conditions can reach. Pera—the type of wallet

when he was confronted by both where paths crossed.

associated with the Cynics—stands as name and symbol

The passages in Diog. L. VI 30 and 70 correspond to

of this state. Crates praises self-sufficing simplicity,

each other. Diogenes proclaimed a pedagogical doc¬

isolation, and freedom. A simple way of life brings

trine which has left traces in early Cynic literature.

contentedness. The inhabitants of Pera are men who

The story of the sale of Diogenes into slavery has been

are not the slaves of pleasure, but who love freedom,

treated by several Cynic writers in the next generation.

the eternal queen.

The quotation from Eubulus (Diog. L. VI30) represents

In Crates’ new kingdom there is no war. Men do

a serious variant of the story. In this variant Diogenes

not fight with each other for food since where frugality

appears outwardly as a slave but inwardly as free and

reigns there is enough for all. Crates embraces Cynic

a master. Whether and how far the version of the sale

pacifism, which may well have been introduced by

CYNICISM Antisthenes. The poem is a mixture of fun and serious¬

the whole line of reasoning in this section is foreign

ness. What Crates describes in the Pera is a never-never

to the traditional view of Diogenes, which ignores his

land. There is no question of a state in the usual sense:

intellectual side, we must still reckon with the possi¬

Pera is a dream, which the Christian Fathers compared

bility that Diogenes justified his radical views with

with the heavenly Jerusalem. It is the Cynic ideal

plausible and appropriate scientific arguments. He was

community, without the difficulties of sustaining itself,

not, however, interested in physical or logical problems

of war or wickedness, a society in which dwell such

for their own sake.

men as the Cynics endeavor to fashion by education. The doxography Diog. L. VI 70ff. contains in section

in the whole Diogenes tradition where we have a

This part of Diogenes’ doxography is the only place

72 an account of Diogenes’ political views. It is possible

reference to a really scientific theory as a justification

that the passage is a summary of the content of

of Diogenes’ views. Elsewhere he adduces simple,

Diogenes’ book, Politeia, which described a philosopher

eristic arguments to support a radical thesis or to

state and contained principles that were later adopted

explain an objectionable phenomenon. The passage

by the Stoa. The elements of this account can in any

contains no word about the desirability of the realiza¬

case easily be related to the political debate of the

tion of the theory in actual society or in any ideal state.

fifth and fourth centuries: the wise are god’s friends,

7. Cynic Asceticism. Lucian’s version of Cynicism

hence everything belongs to them; noble birth and

represents the aspect of Cynicism that has become best

fame are valueless things; common possession of wives

known thanks to a profusion of anecdotes. The most

and children should take the place of marriage; the

varied anecdotes, some strictly rigorous and coarsely

purpose of the state is to afford its citizens protection

hedonistic, some serious and burlesque, and both sym¬

and help; this the state cannot do without law, conse¬

pathetic and hostile to civilization, have attached

quently, law is necessary for the state. Then the ques¬

themselves to Diogenes of Sinope. Various scholars

tion arises, which state is the right one. The Sophist

have maintained that the rigorous type of anecdotes

Antiphon had shown in his book Truth that the histori¬

is

cal state was unable to provide the legal protection

hedonistic type of anecdotes was introduced in the

that men needed. The answer to the question about

Diogenes tradition by Crates and especially his disci¬

the right state is also given: the only right state is the

ples Bion and Menippus, as a more human reaction.

primary

and

genuinely Diogenic,

whereas

the

world state. The expression “the right state” was a term

A strict and rigorous movement also continued, which

accepted in the political writings of tire fourth century.

actually even attempted to outdo Diogenes himself.

What is new in the Diogenes doxography is that it is

Diogenes appears as a misanthrope in the pessimistic

applied to a “cosmos-state.”

28th letter. Most words of rebuke occur in tire Cynic

6. Scientific Views of the Cynics. The doxography

texts of Roman imperial times. The creation of the

contains in section 73 a passage of scientific, theoretical

legend began immediately after Diogenes’ death and

character. Cynicism may have derived its view of

took place simultaneously along two lines—the strict

nature via the Sophists from Anaxagoras (who had

and rigorous, and the hedonistic.

philosophical

At a definite point we can see how a rigorous type

views), from Diogenes of Apollonia, and from the

of asceticism evidently influenced the Diogenes legend.

Atomists. It is easy to find fragments which tie up with

Onesicritus, Alexander’s admiral, tells, in Strabo, the

considerable

influence

on

Athenian

the main theme of this passage. The source quoted is

story of his encounter with an Indian ascetic sect, the

Diogenes’ tragedy Thyestes, with the reservation that

so-called Gymnosophists. Naked and motionless, in

the tragedies may not be genuine. Diogenes

various positions on the rocks, they endured the heat

. . . saw no impropriety either in stealing anything from a temple or eating the flesh of any animal; nor even anything impious in touching human flesh, this, he said, being clear from the custom of some foreign nations. Moreover, accord¬ ing to right reason, as he put it, all elements are contained in all things and pervade everything: since not only is meat a constituent of bread, but bread of vegetables; and all other

of the equatorial sun until the evening. The motive for their harsh asceticism is conveyed in the following words: Man trains the body for toil in order that his opinions may be strengthened, whereby he may put a stop to dissensions and be ready to give good advice to all, both in public and

bodies also, by means of certain invisible passages and

in private.

particles, find their way and unite with all substances in

Onesicritus is comparing oriental asceticism with the

the form of vapor.

form of asceticism he had come to know at home in

It is quite possible to date this passage to the fourth

Greece in the Cynicism of Diogenes. The comparison

century

The idea that lies behind it is old; the

is to the disadvantage of Cynicism. In the Gymnosoph¬

scientific terms are early technical terms, and even if

ists he found ascetics of a far more radical type than

b.c.

631

CYNICISM he had previously encountered. In this respect he puts

ing to virtue, virtue can be taught and when once

Pythagoras, Socrates, and Diogenes on the same plane:

acquired cannot be lost.

they failed because they put law before nature. This

As to Diogenes the doxography Diog. L. VI 70 offers

rigorous type of asceticism is reflected in the anecdotes

an example of early Heracles ideology. Heracles is the

about Diogenes rolling in the hot sand or embracing

prototype for the pedagogic ideas propagated here.

in winter statues covered with snow, and others.

The passage ends with a reference to Heracles:

Within the Cynic movement itself the increasing oriental influence on Greek religion, following the time of Alexander, created a necessity to maintain the school’s saint Diogenes as a thoroughgoing, rigorous ascetic. Onesicritus' comparison between Indian and Greek ascetic philosophy was no isolated phenomenon.

The Heracles mythology had been dealt with at

The story recurs as one of the sources in a papyrus

great length and in various aspects in the fifth century,

from the second century

but Heracles declined rapidly in popularity both in

b.c.

It remains an open question how much of the harsh,

Cynic and in extra-Cvnic literature. The vogue he

rigorous asceticism goes back as far as the historical

enjoyed during the whole fifth century in epic, lyric,

Diogenes. It may be assumed that it does, to a certain

tragedy, and finally in the allegorical and rationalistic

extent. The history of ideas shows clearly that the

interpretation of myth did not continue into the fourth

eudaemonistic, Socratic asceticism, which is pedagog-

century. The only thing which survived apart from the

ically motivated and has its background in the peda¬

sterile references scattered throughout literature is the

gogical debate of the fifth and fourth centuries, belongs

allegory and the ethical propaganda in Cynic circles.

to Cynic philosophy from its beginning.

In Dio Chrysostomus in the first century

a.d.

we find

8. Cynic Hero and King Ideology. The Heracles

relatively unequivocal themes of Cvnic Heracles prop¬

mythology contained a great many features that let

aganda; there is an attempt to achieve a refined picture

themselves be easily applied to Cynic philosophy. The

of Heracles along Cynic lines, in which the divine

suffering Heracles appears as a benefactor in the

character of the hero is rationalized and his labors are

drama. In Euripides’ Heracles the theme philanthropia

given an allegorical interpretation. His virtues are

through suffering is clearly delineated. But the drama

individual-ethical, but the philanthropia theme is pre¬

did not advance to the position of Antisthenes in re¬

served and a firm front maintained against intellectual-

garding pain as something good. Antisthenes demon¬

ism and athleticism. This use of Heracles by Dio was

strated that pain is a good thing by instancing the great

due to Dio’s becoming acquainted with a Cynic way

Heracles and Cyrus, drawing the one example from

of life and Cynic literature. Diogenes in Dio Chrysos¬

the Greek world and the other from the barbarians.

tomus Or. 8 compares himself with Heracles. The

An important step towards the possibility of using

moral struggle against pleasure is designated by the

Heracles for philosophical, ethical purposes had al¬

term labor, and Heracles is held up as an example.

ready been taken in the Ionian criticism of the myths.

We find in Dio Chrysostomus a picture of Heracles

In the extensive Ionian literature about Heracles the

which has nothing in common with the athletic, sensual

Sophist Herodorus of Heraclea in Pontus was the cre¬

Heracles of satyrical drama and comedy. He is adapted

ator of the allegories of the philosophic Heracles. In

to the Cynic ideal of behavior and appears in his new

the

Sophist

Prodicus’

allegory

of the

Choice

of

Heracles there appears a philanthropical as well as an

632

. . . allowing [sc. Diogenes] convention no such authority as he allowed to natural right, and asserting that the manner of life he lived was the same as that of Heracles when he preferred liberty to everything.

guise as a Cynic saint, a portrait for which Dio was indebted to earlier Cynic sources.

ascetic theme, a hedonistic attraction towards a sim¬

The most important feature in Dio’s characterization

pler, more natural way of life as a reaction against

of Heracles is the education, the double paideia, the

artificiality and excessive civilization. Antisthenes’ view

“human” and the “divine”; the “divine” paideia repre¬

of pain as something good is fully consistent with

sents the true Cynic pedagogics with Heracles as a

Prodicus’

of

model in opposition to Sophistic Rhetoric and vulgar

Heracles offered a multitude of possibilities for a phil¬

description

of

Heracles.

The

myth

Cynicism. Dio’s view's on this subject, maybe through

osophic sect which, because of its origin in circles

early Stoic intermediaries, were influenced by classical

without full political rights, was burdened by social

Cynicism. In Dio we find the ideas and problems of

and political discontent.

the fourth century

b.c.

with its interest in the rela¬

The fragments of Antisthenes’ Heracles are not very

tionship between education and politics, its opposition

extensive. The main points are: Heracles receives in¬

to the Sophists’ unsuccessful efforts in this field, and

struction in virtue from the wise centaur Chiron, pain

the individual-ethical form given to educational and

is something good, the purpose of life is to live accord¬

political theories with the important central themes:

CYNICISM to govern oneself — to

govern men;

education =

of suffering and struggle. The philosopher must endure

authority; philosopher = ruler. The Cynic educational

hunger, thirst, cold, ill-treatment, poverty, and igno¬

theory is a pedagogy for rulers. From the point of view

miny, but he does so without complaining; on the con¬

of the history of ideas it belongs together with Xeno¬

trary, he considers these burdens easy to carry. The

phon’s Cyropaedia and the Aristippean polemic in

eudaemonistic motivation of the moral struggle, the

Xenophon’s Memorabilia II 1. A basic idea common

endurance, the absence of effort and strain in this

to these texts is the part played by the paragon in their

struggle, in which, on the contrary, he engages with

pedagogic theory: the ruler is a model and his position

ease and joy, are all typical Cynic traits. The noble

is based on his moral supremacy.

man, who is also perfect, is identical with the true king,

Antisthenes described Cyrus’ development according

the basileus disguised as a slave.

to the scheme slave-king (doulos-basileus), and used the

The best know n example of the use of the doulos-

same theme in his portrayal of Odysseus. The theme

basileus motif is the antithesis Diogenes-Alexander the

recurs in the idealization of Diogenes, and its main

Great. This antithesis belongs to the first half of the

point was to show the philosophical inner freedom

third century

which is founded on moral perfection and not on out¬

ander as an unfree and unhappy man full of erroneous

ward circumstances. The application of the theme to

ideas about the true values of life. Diogenes’ aim is

Diogenes has taken place among the authors of the

to teach .Alexander what true kingship is. Diogenes not

b.c.

Dio Chrysostomus describes Alex¬

generation after Diogenes. In Dio Chrysostomus we

only gives instruction about the true king, but he views

find this Cynic theme elaborated in detail, and there

himself as the real king. Alexander is unfree or a slave,

is no doubt that Dio reflects early Cynic basileus-

whereas Diogenes is the freest of men. In order to

ideology. In Dio’s Cynic speeches there occur a num¬

become a real king Alexander must exchange his royal

ber of catalogues of virtues and vices of a relatively

splendor for the philosopher’s ragged cloak and first

fixed form. The man who does not possess the right

learn to master himself before he can rule others. Still

qualities, i.e., a character firmly formed along individ¬

more, he must put on the slave's garment and serve

ual-ethical lines, is not a basileus at all. Although

those who are superior to himself. He must deliberately

Xerxes is by external standards the most powerful of

walk the road of suffering and sendee and submit to

kings and by his external power can perform the most

the philosopher’s instruction and way of life, in order

unbelievable things, he is weaker than those who do

that in this way he may avoid false kingship.

not even possess an obol, if he does not possess the

The Cynic preaching contained, among other things,

right, i.e., the Cynic character. The term “basileus”

a conception of kingship of a unique character—the

belongs properly only to the morally perfect ruler, a

solitary,

king with pronounced individual-ethical qualities, with

Heraelean allegory has played a decisive role in this

simple, uncomplicated social functions illustrated by

connection. Even Antisthenes’ works on Odysseus and

comparison to a herdsman, and by the father figure.

Cyrus have been influenced by the same and similar

He is an idyllic type who belongs historically to Xeno¬

motifs. After his death Diogenes is described in the

poor,

and

suffering basileus.

The

Cynic

role of the slave-king who is mocked and ridiculed,

phon’s portrait of Cyrus. But in his writings Dio presents a further portrait

but at last raised above all surrounding adversities.

of the king, namely the basileus as a solitary, poor,

The other side of this Cynic conception of kingship

and suffering figure. This portrait is modelled on

is the purely ethical. We are concerned with a question,

Diogenes, but probably originated in the works of

popular and much discussed in the fourth century

Antisthenes. The model for this type of basileus was

the question of the true king’s ethical qualifications and

Heracles with his solitariness,

b.c.,

nakedness, poverty,

their indispensability as conditions for the position of

homelessness, suffering. Yet with all this Heracles was

basileus. Xenophon and Plato have both given evi¬

the son of Zeus and worthy of kingship. In Dio we

dence, each one in his own way, of the central role

find that Diogenes plays the part of the suffering

winch this pedagogical motif has played in the Socratic

basileus: in his humiliation, exposed to men’s abuse and

circle. The Antisthenie-Diogenic theory of the double

ill-treatment he resembled a real king and ruler in his

paideia must be looked upon as emanating from the

garment of a poor man. The philosopher in his simple

same Socratic source. The stress falls on individual

tribon (the philosopher’s cloak) must submit to suffer¬

ethics, the “divine” paideia. “Human” paideia, al¬

ing and ignominy. This “abuse” theme is an insep¬

though hazardous and misleading, is allowed to have

arable component of the Cynic type of behavior. The

some value, but only in relation to “divine ” paideia.

Cynic is reviled for his poverty, for consorting with

The

bad men, for his humble origin, and for his appearance

brought forth in argument against the Sophists, are

pedagogical

theories

of

Dio

Chrysostomus,

and demeanor. We have in Dio veritable catalogues

directly influenced by the Socratic-Cynic pedagogy.

633

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY to signify deathlessness as well as survival after death,

BIBLIOGRAPHY F. D. Caizzi, Antisthenis Fragmenta (Milan, 1966). D. R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism. From Diogenes to the 6th

Century a.d. (London, 1937). R. Hoistad, Cynic Hero and Cynic King: Studies in the Cynic Conception of Man (Uppsala, 1948). A. O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. A Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas (Baltimore, 1935). K. Praechter, Die Philosophic des Altertums (Berlin, 1926), gives exhaustive lists of text editions and literature. F. Sayre,

Diogenes of Sinope. A Study of Greek Cynicism (Baltimore, 1938); idem, The Greek Cynics (Baltimore, 1948). R. Vischer, Das einfache Leben (Gottingen, 1965). C. J. de Vogel, Greek Philosophy: A Collection of Texts (Leyden, 1950-59). K. von Fritz, Quellenuntersuchungen zu Leben und Philosophic des Diogenes von Sinope, Philologus, Supplementband 18:2 (Leipzig, 1926). RAGNAR HOISTAD [See also Law, Natural; Nature; Platonism; Pre-Platonic Conceptions of Human Nature; Rationality; Stoicism.]

whereby survival would be that of the whole man and not merely of a hypothetical incorporeal entity. It was only after it had become apparent that death was not a mere temporary lapse and that the change was irre¬ versible and extreme that the notion could occur that what survives is something other than the whole man. Even then the “survivor” was not conceived of as something immaterial, but as a replica of the body, a “ghost” or “shadow,” and only much later did it become the completely disembodied “soul.” The primitive’s misconception of death is due pri¬ marily to his inability to draw the proper conclusions from his observations, but it is also strongly favored by the difficulty of visualizing the end of one’s exist¬ ence. This psychological peculiarity is not charac¬ teristic of the primitive alone. As Freud, and Schopen¬ hauer before him, have pointed out, “deep down” even contemporary man does not “really” believe in his own death. And Martin Heidegger shrewdly observed that the proposition, “all men are mortal” usually involves the tacit reservation “but not I.” Neither the time nor the historical sequence of the

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY DEATH

634

two elements in the discovery of death—its inevita¬ bility as well as its possible finality—can be determined with any degree of accuracy. On the one hand, the realization of the inevitability of death may conceiv¬

1. The Discovery of Death. It is a matter of debate

ably have preceded the suspicion of its finality. On the

whether animals have air awareness of mortality, but

other hand, the finality of death is in no way predicated

it is certain that man alone among all living creatures

on its inevitability. But if we judge by the testimony

knows that he has to die. Yet even Homo sapiens ac¬

of the first written record of man’s discovery of death,

quired this knowledge relatively late in the long history

the Gilgamesh Epic (ca. 2500

b.c.),

the realization of

of the species. It is reasonable to assume, as Voltaire

the inevitability of death as well as its possible finality

did in his Dictionnaire philosophique (article, “Tout va

would seem to have occurred simultaneously. If this

bien”), that man has learned about death “through

is so, it is pointless to ask which of the two produced

experience.” More recently some philosophers, notably

the greater shock. But again on the basis of the

Max Scheler, asserted that man possesses an intuitive

Gilgamesh legend, there can be no doubt about its

awareness of his mortality, and Paul Landsberg sug¬

severity. As a result we find in Gilgamesh most of the

gested that it is not through experience in the usual

themes of the meditation on death as we know them

meaning of the term but by way of a particular “expe¬

today. But while King Gilgamesh strongly suspects that

rience of death” that one realizes one’s own finitude.

death may well be total extinction, the predominant

There is undoubtedly some truth in this view but as

view of death of his contemporaries, obviously still

numerous anthropological studies have shown, primi¬

rooted in primitive ideas, was that the dead somehow

tive man is totally unaware of the inevitability as well

continue to exist. But one cannot help but be impressed

as the possible finality of death. For him it is neither a natural event nor a radical change: death occurs only

by the somber and frightening nature of the afterlife as it appears in the Babylonian and Greek mythologies.

as a result of violence or of a disease brought on by

Typical is Achilles’ complaint in the Odyssey that it

magic, and those who do die merely enter into another

is better to be a slave on earth than a king in the realm

mode of living in which the need for food, drink, and

of phantoms. Such an image of a miserable existence

clothing does not cease.

as a mere “shadow” ought to throw considerable doubt

Therefore it is misleading to speak of the primitive’s

on the usual interpretation of the belief in immortality

belief in immortality, because his view of death is

as a mere “wish fulfillment,” at least as far as the

rooted not in a denial of death but in the ignorance

earliest manifestations of this belief are concerned. This

of its nature. And the term “immortality” would have

kind of survival must have appeared, at least to some,

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY as worse than complete extinction. For most peo¬ ple, however, the prospect of total annihilation was as frightening and repulsive as that of a miserable afterlife. Seen against this background, the earliest philosophical speculations about the soul’s ultimate blissful immortality must have appeared as welcome news. We shall deal with these, and subsequent, doctrines of immortality in the second part of this article and consider the various attempts to come to terms with mortality without taking refuge in comforting visions of post-mortem existence. 2. Epicurus. These attempts were mainly concerned with gaining mastery over the fear of death. It is important, however, to realize that the first such at¬ tempts made by Democritus, and in particular by Epicurus, have been imdertaken at a time when the predominant view of death was that of dismal survival in a bleak Underworld. Consequently Epicurus’ liber¬ ating message consisted primarily in the denial of the reality of Hades. Later thinkers, however, had a differ¬ ent, and clearly a more difficult, task of trying to reconcile man with death meaning total extinction. According to Epicurus the fear of death is one of the two major afflictions of mankind, the other being the fear of the gods. Man fears death because he errone¬ ously believes that he will experience pain and suffer after he has died. But, says Epicurus, death is depriva¬ tion of sensation. As to the soul it too does not survive death because, as Democritus has taught, like all things, it too consists of atoms (albeit particularly fine ones) which will disperse at death. Consequently “Death, the most terrifying of all ills, is nothing to us, since as long as we exist, death is not with us, and when death comes, then we do not exist’’ (Fragment XLVII, in Whitney J. Oates, The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers [1940], p. 42). This argument is frequently invoked even today in spite of the fact that it can be effective only against the fear of what comes after death—what may be done to the dead body, as well as what is supposed to happen to one’s “shadow” in Hades. (The fear of mutilation and desecration of the corpse and the fear of being deprived of a proper burial were widespread in an¬ tiquity and sometimes appear to have been stronger than the fear of death itself.) But what is mostly feared today is precisely that which has been so lightly dis¬ missed by Epicurus, namely, that one shall not exist anymore. Another obvious shortcoming of the Epicurean argument is that it might alleviate the fear of death “at the thought of death,” but not in its actual pres¬ ence. The inadequacy of the argument in this respect, as well as with regard to the fear of annihilation, has

been noted even by some of Epicurus’ contemporaries. In one of the Platonic apocrypha, the Axiochus, the dying ruler rejects it as “superficial twaddle which can impress only little boys.” Perhaps this was the reason for which Lucretius, while exalting Epicurus as the great liberator from the “dread of Acheron,” intro¬ duced the additional argument of a pessimistic evalua¬ tion of life: “And quitting life you quit thy living pain. . . . For all the dismal tales, that poets tell, are verified on earth and not in Hell” (De rerum natura, trans. John Dryden, Book III, 978-79). 3. Methods of Mastering the Fear of Death. The pessimistic evaluation of life can be considered as the oldest “remedy” against the fear of death. That “the best thing is not to be bom, and the second best is to escape life as soon as possible” has been, since Theognis of Megara (sixth century b.c.), a recurrent theme of Greek poetry and drama. Pessimism is an important element also in Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ approach to mastering the fear of death. But for most people the pessimistic stance carries no real conviction. Thus, another Roman Stoic, the slave Epictetus, relies more on self-discipline and the sense of decorum when it comes to death. His answer is that we have to take modestly the place assigned to us by God or Nature at the banquet of life and when the end approaches to leave it quietly and gracefully. This is also the view of Seneca. But he realized, however, that such an attitude is rather the result of the conquest of the fear of death than its condition. He was, therefore, more specific in suggesting as a remedy the constant thinking of death. However, this second method of conquering the fear of death, even if it is done in the framework of hope of a future life, is scarcely realistic. And without that hope it is a “remedy” which may be worse than the affliction. The shortcomings of this method gradually became clear to Montaigne. In the chapter of his Essays significantly entitled “That to philosophize is to learn to die,” he reports that being bothered by attacks of dread of dying, he at first tried to follow Seneca’s advice. As time passed, he came to the con¬ clusion that the only proper remedy against the fear of death is not “philosophy, which orders us to have death constantly before our eyes,” but the attitude of the unsophisticated peasant whom “nature teaches not to think of death except when he actually dies. . . . If this be stupidity, let’s all learn from it” (Essays [1595 ed.], Book III, Ch. 12). But how can not thinking of death be effective in the “presence” of death? What about the problem of “easy” dying? Here Montaigne is somewhat vague. He praises Nature which arranged things so that dying is in reality not too hard. And he says that “if we have known how to live properly

635

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY and calmly, we will know how to die in the same

aware of this. But, according to him, not any kind of

manner.”

study but only philosophical reflection which leads to

However, Nature’s cooperation is not necessarily realized in every case, although it was in Montaigne’s:

truly

effective.

Therefore, his

famous

proposition

he did not have a chance to put the above statement

LXVII (in the fourth part of Ethics), “A free man thinks

to a test, having died suddenly of a stroke. His expecta¬

of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a medita¬

tion of a peaceful death as an outgrowth of a “proper

tion not of death but of life,” is not advice to avoid

life” does not really convey Montaigne’s radically new

thinking of death as a means of overcoming fear of

attitude toward life which determines his eventual

it. To interpret this proposition as meaning that only

attitude toward death. It is quite different from, the

fools waste their time on meditating about death is

Stoic position and even more so from that of Christi¬

to misunderstand it completely. Spinoza’s “free ” man

anity; it is the expression of the Renaissance spirit with

is the wise man, and the latter is defined as “one who

its appreciation of the exciting and wonderful world

lives under the guidance of reason and is not led by

surrounding man of which he feels himself to be a part.

fear.” But as Spinoza points out at the end of his

Life is not seen any longer as something to be endured

magnum opus, the attainment of wisdom is one of the

but something to be enjoyed and which can be shaped

most difficult things in the world. Thus the above

and changed for the better by man’s own effort. In

proposition is not an admonition not to think of death

short, the memento vivere replaces the Christian me¬

because no reasonable man does such a foolish thing,

mento mori. (It is plausible to assume that this radical

but a promise of a reward for the effort of becoming

reversal was, at least in part, an anticlimax to the

wise. It asserts that when one finally attains wisdom

pathologically heightened consciousness of mortality

(that is, becomes “free”) he will be able not to think

characteristic of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,

of death, but of life. And it is obvious that only after

which grew out of the disaster of the “Black Death.”)

having thought of death a great deal did Spinoza him¬

What a “proper and calm” life was for Montaigne,

self become able not to think of it any longer because

a useful and productive life was for Leonardo da Vinci.

he had learned not to fear it.

“As a day well spent bestows pleasant sleep, so a life well used bestows pleasant death.”

Although the method of allaying the fear of death by not thinking about it is a defective one, particularly

This has become the most often suggested secular

since one usually thinks of it for some good reason (be

answer to the problem of coming to terms with the

it real danger of death to a loved one, or to oneself),

fact of death. A variant of it, which puts even a greater

the proffering of such advice is understandable if we

emphasis on achievement, has been given expression

consider man’s uncanny ability to ignore his mortality.

by the German poet Holderlin: “Should my verse grow

There is also the previously mentioned phenomenon

perfect/ Most welcome then, O stillness of shades

that, in Freud’s words, “in the unconscious no one

below . . . (“To the Fates”). It is obvious, however,

really believes in one’s own death.” Were it not for

that such a condition for overcoming the reluctance

these psychological defense mechanisms, who knows

to die is well beyond the reach of the majority of

what havoc the knowledge of death would create in

mortals. Moreover, even the consciousness of having

man’s psyche.

led a “full” life, and achieved great things may not

Finally, a fourth method of mastering the fear of

be enough to make death welcome. What usually

death is that of “minimizing” death. We have noted

makes death acceptable is its coming as a well deserved

already that Epicurus’ argument against the fear of

surcease from a life of continuous hardship and partic¬

death was, to a large extent, based on such an ap¬

ularly from the indignity and suffering of old age.

proach. But it was Socrates who must be considered

However, it is hardly necessary to point out that the

as its initiator when, in Plato’s Apology, he presses the

problem posed by premature death still remains in all

analogy between death and sleep. “For fear of death

its poignancy.

is indeed the pretense of wisdom . . . being the pre¬

The weakness of the method of allaying fear of death

tense of knowing the unknown. . . . We may well hope

by not thinking of it is that under certain circumstances

that death is good, since it is either dreamless sleep or migration of the soul from this world to another

it is easier said than done. Robert Burton realized it when he wrote in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

636

what he calls “a higher kind of knowledge” can be

. . .”

(Apology 39D).

that “if our present weakness is such that death

A telling criticism of the sleep analogy is Keats’

frightens us, we cannot moderate our passion in this

complaint that “Mortality weighs on me like unwilling

behalf. We must divert them by all means, by doing

sleep” (“Endymion,” 1818), and John Drvden’s insist¬

something else, thinking of another subject. Study is

ence that death is a very special kind of “sleep”: “to

above all the best means to divert one’s thoughts” (Part

sleep, and never wake again.” These are valid reasons

a, sec. 3, mem. 5 [1907 ed.]). Spinoza too was well

why the other alternative suggested by Socrates has

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY been so popular. From the point of view of the

knowledge, the philosopher strives in this life to ap¬

conquest of the fear of death, the belief in immortality

proach the condition in which his soul will be after

is nothing but another way of “minimizing” death. While the method of not thinking of death could be effective only in instances of the fear of death “at the thought of it,” that of thinking of it constantly (and thus becoming “familiar” with it) could probably be of help also in the “presence” of death. The two other methods, that of minimizing death, and that of mini¬ mizing the value of life may be helpful in both in¬

death. In philosophizing, he is, as it were, rehearsing death. Death was also an important theme among the Stoics, Montaigne, Bruno, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz,

Kant,

Hegel,

Schopenhauer,

Feuerbach,

Nietzsche, and many others of lesser stature. In any case, not until very recent times did philoso¬ phers—with the notable exception of “existentialists”—

stances and unlike the first two are not mutually exclu¬

deliberately shun the problems arising from the fact

sive, but can and have been combined for greater

of mortality. This is the more surprising since the

efficacy. None of the four, however, is effective in the

prominent place which the topic of death occupies in

case of pathological fear of death. As the fifteenth-

contemporary literature (Malraux, Camus, Heming¬

century Scottish poet, William Dunbar, stated in his

way, Faulkner, Beckett, Ionesco to mention but the

“Lament for the Makaris” (stanza 10),

most outstanding examples) seems to reflect the pro¬ found uneasiness concerning man’s ultimate fate.

. . . Art magicians, and astrologis, Rhetoris, logicians and theologis, Thame helpis no conclusions slee;— Timor mortis conturbat me (“Fear of death shatters me”).

One of the reasons for the reluctance of most contem¬ porary philosophers to deal with death is their disen¬ chantment

with

metaphysical

speculation

which

seemed to yield nothing but contradictory opinions. Moreover, the “glamor” of science, due to its spec¬

Before we consider what, if anything, contemporary

tacular advances and the visibility of its practical ap¬

psychology and psychotherapy have to contribute to

plications, awakened the ambition to make philosophy

this issue, we have to say a few words about death

an “exact” science in its own right. Both of these

as the motive as well as the theme of philosophy.

tendencies led to a considerable restriction of the scope

4. Philosophers and Death. Schopenhauer main¬

of philosophy. “Professional” philosophers today are

tained that death is the muse of philosophy and that

neither disposed nor expected (at least by their peers)

“all religious and philosophical systems are principally

to concern themselves with “ultimate questions.” But

directed toward comforting us concerning death, and

if the so-called analytical philosophers, who predomi¬

are thus primarily antidotes to the terrifying certainty

nate in the English-speaking countries, exclude death

of death" (The World as Will and Idea, III, Ch. 16).

as a legitimate topic of philosophy because of a narrow

This

over¬

view of the task of philosophy, some of those who still

statement. The origin of religion involves many other

cling to a broader and more traditional view of the

is

an

obvious

oversimplification

and

factors than just the dimension of human anxiety with

philosophical enterprise disregard death because indi¬

regard to death, and this is true even more of philoso¬

vidual man and his death appear to them to be of little

phy where “wonder

importance.

(Plato) and intellectual curiosity

were motives of equal if not greater importance.

Typical is the remark of the German philosopher

Still almost from the very first, death was a major

Nicolai Hartmann that only “self-tormenting meta¬

topic of philosophical reflection. Of the 126 known

physicians” waste their time on meditating on death

fragments of Heraclitus, no less than sixteen deal with

and speculating about immortality. And most pragma¬

death. And while it is a mistake to impute to Plato

tists are, in addition, haunted by the fear that concern

the proposition that philosophy is a meditation on

with “otherworldly” things will interfere with the task

death or to suspect him of an inordinate fear of it,

of improving the conditions of existence here and now.

there can be no doubt whatsoever that it held a promi¬

It may be argued, however, that a better life includes

nent place in his thought. What Plato did say was

also a satisfactory coming to terms with death. In any

that “the true philosopher is ever pursuing death and

case, for better or for worse, a great many contem¬

dying” (Phaedo 64A). This statement can be understood

porary philosophers have abandoned the field almost

correctly only in the context of Plato’s notion that

entirely to psychologists and sociologists.

the soul is a prisoner in the body, that the body is an

5. Contemporary Psychology and Death. System¬

obstacle to the acquisition of knowledge, that the

atic studies of man’s attitudes toward death and dying

philosopher is a seeker after truth, and that the attain¬

have begun only around the turn of this century. They

ment of true knowledge is possible only when the soul

have elicited information with regard to different age

is liberated from the chains of the body, which is what

groups, sex, occupation, marital status, education, and

death means to Plato. Thus, in the pursuit of true

physical as well as mental health and sickness. Most

637

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY of the results are, however, conflicting, and no uni¬

if, in the end, I shall disappear like a soap bubble?”

versally accepted theory of the genesis of the fear of

(Tolstoy, A Confession, 1879).

death has emerged. But it has become amply clear that

It is important to realize, however, that the notion

the term “fear of death’’ is a catch-all label which hides

of a pleasant immortality for all and sundry runs coun¬

heretofore unsuspected complexities. Not only do the

ter to the sense of justice which otherwise plays such

emotions described as death-fear range from simple

a prominent role in man’s claim to immortality. While

reluctance or aversion to think of death to outright

it was felt that it would be an “injustice” if man were

terror, but these emotions refer to a variety of “ob¬

condemned to total annihilation, it did not make sense

jects.” There is fear of what comes after death (fear

that evil men should enjoy the same privileges in the

of the effects of death), and fear of the process of dying

hereafter as did the good ones. Thus we find in all

(fear of the pain and anguish of dying). As to the

doctrines of immortality some restrictions as to the

therapy of the (pathological) dread of death and dying,

enjoyment of a blissful afterlife, be it a permanent

(that is, when no valid medical reasons to expect im¬

exclusion from it of those guilty of crimes, or a merely

pending death exist), it appears that the two most

temporary one, allowing for rehabilitation, expiation,

effective approaches so far are that of psychoanalysis,

or purification. The main difficulty with personal im¬

which considers “anxiety” over death as but a special

mortality, however, is that once the naive position

case of a general anxiety state which has become

which took deathlessness and survival after death for

“fixated” on this particular subject, and hypnotic sug¬

granted was shattered, immortality had to be proved.

gestion therapy, for which Russian psychiatrists claim

All serious discussion of immortality became a search

outstanding successes. In the case of apprehension and

for arguments in its favor.

fear in people actually dying, recent experiments with

The three main variants of the idea of immortality

LSD have shown promising results. One should be

are the doctrine of reincarnation, or transmigration of

careful, however, not to confuse the cure of the

the soul, the Platonic theory of the immortality of the

pathological fear of death or the chemically induced

soul (which also admits the possibility of transmigra¬

relief of the anxiety of the dying with a “solution” of

tion), and the Christian doctrine of resurrection of the

all the problems which the fact of death continues to

body, which includes “Platonic” immortality. Histori¬

present to the inquiring mind.

cally they seem to have appeared in the Western world

This does not mean that there is, or must be, such

in that order. But we shall begin with the doctrine

a “global” solution. However, it is important to re¬

of the immortality of the soul as expounded by Plato,

member that until very recently it was generally as¬

partly because his position was the best argued, and

sumed that the answer to the problems of death was

because it is around it that in subsequent times most

known, universally accepted, and it is still considered

serious discussions revolved.

valid by many. This answer was “immortality.” IMMORTALITY

638

I. IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 1. Plato. The two basic premisses of Plato’s doctrine

Before discussing the main doctrinal formulations of

of the immortality of the soul are a radical dualism

the idea of immortality, a few preliminary remarks will

which sees man as a composite of a material body and

be useful.

an incorporeal soul, and the assertion that the soul,

In order to be a satisfactory solution to the problems

and not the body, is the essential, the true man. The

arising in connection with the fact of death, immor¬

soul is not only totally independent of the body, but

tality must be first a “personal” immortality, and sec¬

it is of divine origin and only an unwilling guest in

ondly it must be a “pleasant” one. Only pleasant and

the body. This is what makes Plato define death as a

personal immortality provides what still appears to

liberation of the soul from the bodily “prison.” The

many as the only effective defense against the fear of

probable source of this view is the Orphic “soma-

death. But it is able to accomplish much more. It

sema,” the body is the prison (of the soul). Whether

appeases the sorrow following the death of a loved

it is this view of the soul which leads to the notion

one by opening up the possibility of a joyful reunion

that the soul is the essential person or the other way

in the hereafter. It satisfies the sense of justice outraged

around, is impossible to determine. In any case, when

by the premature deaths of people of great promise

Crito asks Socrates how he wants to be buried, the

and talent, because only this kind of immortality offers

latter expresses surprise that his listeners apparently

the hope of fulfillment in another life. Finally, it offers

still did not get the main point of his discussion,

an answer to the question of the ultimate meaning of

namely, that it is the Socrates who is now conversing

life, particularly when death prompts the agonizing

with them, and not the corpse he will soon become,

query, “What is the purpose of this strife and struggle

who is the real Socrates (Phaedo 115C-D).

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY Plato advances the following arguments for the

the separate existence of Ideas, because “the shape of

immortality of the soul: (1) the argument from remi¬

a bronze sphere exists at the same time as the bronze

niscence. Man has certain ideal concepts as well as

sphere exists,” but it is not at all certain that “any form

some knowledge of a priori (e.g., mathematical) truths

survives afterwards” and “the soul may be of this sort”

which could not have been derived or been acquired

(.Metaphysics 1070a).

through experience (Phaedo 72A-77A; Meno 81B-86B).

But while he was quite positive in his denial that

Thus we must have acquired them before this life

the soul could survive in its entirety, Aristotle spoke

began, which indicates that the soul is prior to the

of the possibility of survival of the intellectual part

body. But this would prove only the preexistence of

of it. Unfortunately, it is not at all clear what he meant

the soul, not its immortality, although the latter is made

by the term “pure intellect”: on the one hand he

more plausible if preexistence is true. The case for

described it as a capacity, but then there are passages

immortality is strengthened, however, when we con¬

where he speaks of it as if it were an incorporeal

sider that in order to apprehend the eternal “Ideas”

substance. Clearly, only the latter could be conceived

or “Forms,” the soul must itself be eternal for “noth¬

as immortal. What Aristotle may have had in mind

ing mortal knows what is immortal.”

is that if not the whole soul, then at least man’s active

(2) Argument from the “fact” that the soul is the

intellect is of divine origin (since he spoke of it as

principle of life: the soul, whose essence is life (vitality)

coming from the “outside”) and as such can be said

and thus the very opposite of death, cannot be con¬

to be eternal. But this is not the immortality of the

ceived as dying any more than fire can be conceived

soul as Plato conceived it. Not only does Aristotle seem

as becoming cold. This argument (Phaedo, 100B-107A)

to be contemptuous of this doctrine (Nicomachean

is based on Plato’s arbitrarily equating “soul” as the

Ethics 1111b), but most of his commentators beginning

principle of life with soul as the bearer or originator

with Alexander of Aphrodisias, and particularly Aver-

of mental and emotional activity. Moreover, to hold

roes, were of the opinion that “The Philosopher” did

that as the principle of life the soul is the “Idea” of

not believe in any kind of individual immortality.

life and, as such, deathless and eternal has no bearing

2. Descartes. For almost two thousand years, few

on the immortality of the individual soul, since the

new arguments were propounded in favor of the doc¬

“Idea” of a thing is, according to Plato himself, very

trine of the immortality of the soul until Descartes

different from its individual manifestation.

turned his attention to the problem. In the meantime

The same unwarranted equation of the two meanings

the reintroduction to the Western world of Greek

of soul underlies the third argument, (3) the soul as

philosophical works, in particular those of Aristotle,

self-moving, which states that since the soul moves

by Arabic scholars about the middle of the twelfth

itself and is the source of movement and life, it must

century, brought with it the first serious threat to the

be immortal because that which moves itself is incor¬

universally accepted belief in immortality, since these

ruptible and ingenerable (Phaedrus 245C-246A).

works, and the commentaries on them, contained

(4) The soul as “simple.” Plato argues that the soul must be immortal since it is “simple” and incorporeal.

shocking but well-reasoned arguments against immor¬ tality of the soul.

An incorporeal substance is “naturally” incorruptible,

The reaction among Christian philosophers to this

and “simple” means that it is uncompounded and

threat was exemplified by Siger of Brabant in the

therefore incapable of dissolution (in the sense of falling

twelfth century, and set the pattern for the next six

apart; Kant has later argued that even if it has no

hundred years. This reaction consisted in the distinction

“extensive quality,” it nevertheless possesses “intensive

between the truth of reason and the truth of faith.

quality” and can therefore dwindle to nothingness “by

Although on rational grounds the immortality of the

a gradual loss of power”).

soul is, at best, doubtful, human reasoning must yield

Plato himself was well aware of the inadequacy of his arguments for the immortality of the soul (and this

to the divinely revealed truth as set forth in the Holy Scriptures.

may be taken as a proof that he never doubted its

Descartes shared the view of the religious apologists

truth). He admitted that the divine origin of the soul

about the morally disastrous effects of disbelief in the

as well as the existence of eternal “Ideas” require

immortality of the soul. In Part V of the Discourse

further investigation (Phaedo 107B). His former pupil,

on Method, he wrote that “next to the error of those

Aristotle, rejected these basic assumptions on which

who deny God . . . there is none which is more effec¬

Plato’s doctrine of immortality of the soul rested.

tual in leading feeble minds from the straight path of

Aristotle held that the soul is one with the body as

virtue than to imagine that . . . after this life we have

its “form” (which term is quite different from Platonic

nothing to fear or to hope for, any more than the flies

sense of “Form” or “Idea”). There is no necessity for

or the ants” (Haldane and Ross, trans. throughout).

639

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY

640

He asserted that “our soul is in its nature entirely

false, it must needs be that I, who was thinking this

independent of the body, and in consequence it is not

was something” to the conclusion that this something

liable to die with it. And then, inasmuch as we observe

was the incorporeal soul, that it was entirely distinct

no other causes capable of destroying it, we are natu¬

from the body, and thus will survive bodily death.

rally inclined to judge that it is immortal.’’ How did

It is interesting that Descartes sometimes appears

he justify the first assertion? Harvey’s discovery of the

to have been more concerned with proving the exist¬

circulation of the blood gave Descartes the idea that

ence of the soul than with the search for ultimate

both animal and human bodies might be regarded as

certainty. Having been advised by his friend, the

“machines.” But, although, according to Descartes,

mathematician Father Mersenne, that his cogito, ergo

there is no real difference between a machine and a

sum is not an original discovery since it can be found

living organism, man is much more than just a body.

in Saint Augustine’s The City of God (XI, 26), Descartes

For he is able “to reply appropriately to everything

defends himself in a letter to Andreas Colvius (Novem¬

. . . said in his presence” and “act from knowledge,

ber 14, 1640) by pointing out the difference between

whereas the animal can do so only from the disposition

them: “The use I make of it is in order to show that

of its organs” (Discourse, Part V). What this means is

that ‘I’ which thinks is an immaterial substance which

simply that man alone “thinks.” Thinking, however,

has nothing corporeal about it.”

was conceived by Descartes rather broadly to include

Descartes’ difficulties in attempting to explain how

“all that we are conscious as operating in us . . . will¬

such two radically different substances as the immate¬

ing, imagining, feeling” (Principles of Philosophy, I, IX).

rial soul and the extended body could interact, since

And “all that is in us and which we cannot in any

they obviously do interact, are well known. In them¬

way conceive as pertaining to the body must be attrib¬

selves, they do not invalidate the notion of an incorpo¬

uted to our soul” (Passions of the Soul, I, IV).

real and immortal soul. But he must have felt in the

Since the idea that something material may be

end that to prove it may be as impossible as to solve

endowed with thought is not contradictory and must

the problem of the interaction between body and soul.

have been known to Descartes (it was the view of the

It is significant that he changed the original subtitle

Greek atomists and presented with eloquence by

of his Meditations from “In which the existence of God

Lucretius),

attributing

and the Immortality of the Soul are demonstrated” to

thought to an immaterial soul apart from his commit¬

“In which the Real Distinction between Mind and

ment to religious dogma? The “proof” that there is

Body is demonstrated.” But this does not mean that

a soul totally independent of the body appears as a

Descartes gave up his deep conviction that the soul

by-product of his revolutionary approach to the prob¬

was immortal.

what were his reasons

for

lem of a criterion of certainty. In the Discourse (Part

The belief in immortality did not have to rely on

IV) he describes how he arrived at what he claimed

rational proofs. As early as the ninth century, the Irish

to be rock-bottom certainty of the cogito ergo sum—“I

monk John Scotus Erigena held that personal immor¬

am thinking, therefore I exist”: “. . . I saw that I could

tality cannot be proved or disproved by reason. A much

conceive that I had no body, and that there was no

more forceful, detailed, and influential statement of the

world nor place where I might be; but yet that I could

same position was made by Pietro Pomponazzi in his

not for all that conceive that I was not.” Thus he

De immortalitate animae (1516). After having examined

concluded that he was “. . . a substance the whole

various arguments in favor of immortality and dis¬

essence and nature of which is to think, and that for

cussed several sets of objections to them, he concluded

its existence there is no need of any place, nor does

that the question should be regarded as a “neutral”

it depend on any material thing; so that this ‘me,’ that

one since man’s natural reason was not strong enough

is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely

either to demonstrate or to refute immortality of the

distinct from the body . . . and even if the body were

soul. Pomponazzi added, however, that the question

not, the soul would not cease to be what it is.”

of the immortality of the soul had been answered

The strength of the above argument in favor of a

affirmatively by God himself as reported in the Holy

soul entirely distinct from the body derives from the

Scriptures. This is, in essence, a reiteration of the

ease with which everyone can follow it, and from the

position advanced by Siger of Brabant. Pomponazzi's

familiarity with the experience described therein, be¬

conclusion was interpreted by some of his contem¬

cause everyone at one time or another did have the

poraries, and many modern historians have agreed with

impression of being a disembodied “spirit.” The main

them, as implying that Pomponazzi himself did not

objection to Descartes’ conclusion is his unwarranted

believe in the immortality of the soul. Nevertheless,

equating of “me” with the soul. It is a far cry from

the imputation of hypocrisy in Pomponazzi has very

the reasoning that “while trying to think everything

little real evidence to support it.

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY In any case, in spite of the position that the truth

modified this argument somewhat by stating that we

of immortality of the soul should be based on faith

are required by moral law to become morally perfect.

and revelation, and asserted on this ground alone,

But “no rational being is capable of holiness at any

philosophers continued to seek proofs of immortality.

moment of his existence. Since, however, it is required

However, Descartes’ fiasco made it clear to some that

as practically necessary, it can be found in a progress

a radically new approach had to be tried, the more

which continues into infinity. . . . This infinite progress,

so because of new arguments against immortality.

however, is possible only if we assume an infinitely

The most cogent and influential were those advanced

lasting existence of the same rational being (which is

by David Hume. According to Hume, the doctrine of

called the immortality of the soul)” (Critique of Practi¬

immortality is suspect since it is so obviously favored

cal Reason, trans. L. W. Beck [1949], pp. 225-26).

by human desire. Man would not cling so tenaciously

Unfortunately, there is no absolute necessity that

to this belief if he did not fear death. But the very

reality will yield to moral demands unless, of course,

fact of this fear points rather in favor of the assumption

we assume that the world is ruled, as Kant asserts,

that bodily death brings with it also the end of the

“with great wisdom” and with a purpose which in¬

conscious personality. Since “Nature does nothing in

cludes the moral perfection of man. This, too, however,

vain, she would never give us a horror against an

can be “proved” only as a postulate of practical reason.

impossible event.” But what is the point of making

No wonder, then, that Kant’s moral argument for

us afraid of an unavoidable event? Hume answers that

immortality of the soul failed to impress even his

without the terror before death, mankind would not

admirers.

have survived. Moreover, why does Nature confine our

4. Some Recent Philosophical Arguments. The in¬

knowledge to the present life if there is another? All

fluential

the arguments from analogy to nature, Hume dismisses

Englishman, John McTaggart, and the German, Max

as being rather “strong for the mortality of the soul.”

Scheler, were probably the most notable twentieth-

Finally, “What reason is there to imagine that an

century thinkers who opposed the predominant anti-

immense alteration, such as made on the soul by the

immortalist trend of the nineteenth century,

dissolution of the body, and all its organs of thought

argued in favor of immortality. All three embraced

French

philosopher,

Henri

Bergson,

the

and

and sensation, can be effected without the dissolution

more or less the position that we cannot form a correct

of the soul?” (“Of the Immortality of the Soul,” Unpub¬

judgment on the issue of immortality because we do

lished Essays [1777], pp. 401-06).

not know all the relevant facts about mental life.

The last argument was, in essence, the one advanced

Bergson felt that to consider man as limited to his

also by the French Encyclopedist d’Alembert and by

bodily frame is “a bad habit of limiting consciousness

the materialists, La Mettrie, Cabanis, and d’Holbach.

to a small body and ignoring the vast one.” He argues

3. Kant. The most notable attempt to provide a new

that the only reason we can have for believing in the

basis for ascertaining immortality of the soul, was

extinction of consciousness at death is that we see the

Kant’s “moral” argument. His starting point was that

body become disorganized. But this reason loses its

man is not only a rational but also a moral being, and

force if it can be shown, as Bergson believed, that

that human reason has two functions, one “speculative”

almost all of consciousness is independent of the body

or theoretical (“pure reason”), and the other concerned

(Time and Free Will [1913], p. 73). But if the “mental

with moral action (“practical reason”). In his Critique

life overflows the cerebral life, survival becomes so

of Pure Reason (1781; revised 1787), Kant showed that

probable that the burden of proof comes to lie on him

God, freedom, and immortality are ideas which specu¬

who denies it” (ibid.). Max Scheler took a similar posi¬

lative reason can form but cannot prove. They are,

tion and declared that the burden of proof (onus

however, “postulates” of “practical reason,” that is,

probandi) falls on those who deny immortality.

they “are not theoretical dogmas but presuppositions

McTaggart, however, was much more of an old-

which necessarily have only practical import . . . they

fashioned metaphysical idealist. He believed that “all

give objective reality to the ideas of practical reason

that exists is spiritual,” that reality is rational and

in general.” Thus the immortality of the soul must be

external, and that time and change are only apparent.

true because morality demands it. In his Critique of

Death is not the end of the self, even though it deprives

Practical Reason (1789), Kant argued that the highest

the spirit of an apparent finite body.

good (summum bonum) is the union of happiness and

Basic to the views of all three philosophers is their

virtue. But while happiness can be attained in this life,

conviction that the self—the unchanging, unifying core

perfect virtue (“holiness”) cannot and requires, there¬

of man’s personality—is not identical with the body

fore, that the existence of man be prolonged to infinity.

and not wholly dependent on the brain, since it controls

Thus there must be another, future life. Later on, Kant

and drives the body in ways which are not native to

641

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY it. The body gives to the self merely a location and

referred to above. But Maritain may have in mind

an opportunity to act. This is also the view of William

certain experiences which, for the lack of a better

Ernest Hocking, and of Gabriel Marcel who essentially

word, we can call “mystical,” like those described in

repeats Socrates’ assertion that “I am not my body.”

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister: “During some sleepless

William James, however, held that even if the “soul”

nights, especially, I had some feelings . . . as if my soul

may be the function of the brain, this does not at all

were thinking unaccompanied by the body. . . . The

exclude the possibility that it continues after the brain

grave awakens no terror in me; I have eternal life.”

dies. According to James, this continuity is, on the

But this and similar experiences are strictly “private”

contrary, quite possible if we think of their relation

insights and, as such, not very convincing. Sometimes

as one of “functional dependence,” that is, if the brain

they are not convincing even to those who have such

just fulfills a “permissive” or “transmissive” function.

especially

since

they

are

counter¬

balanced by other experiences recently emphasized by

for the immortality of the soul advanced by philoso¬

some “existentialists.” For example, Karl Jaspers speaks

phers, there are several less sophisticated ones. Among

of the “awareness of fragility,” and Heidegger speaks

them are the following.

of the “experience of progressing toward death.”

A. Argument of “General Consent.” This argument

What is needed, then, in order to make immortality

is simply that the universality of the belief in immor¬

credible would be empirical, publicly verifiable evi¬

tality is evidence of its truth. Others see such evidence

dence, without which the subjective feeling of one’s

in the universal desire for immortality. However, both

indestructibility will have great difficulties in over¬

arguments are fallacious, if for no other reason than

coming the formidable obstacle voiced by

Omar

the fact that such a belief is neither universally held

Khayyam that

nor is immortality universally desired. Moreover, no

us passed the door of Darkness/ Not one returns to

matter how intense and widespread such desire may

us. . . .”

be, there is no guarantee that the object of a desire must actually exist or be realized. In addition, it must be pointed out that what is

. . of the myriads who/ Before

D. Spiritism and Psychical Research. It is precisely because it claims to offer empirical proof that the dead do survive, and can be communicated with, that

actually desired (although far from being a universal

“Spiritualism” (or “Spiritism”) exercises a strong ap¬

wish) is not the immortality of the soul but “deathless¬

peal to more people than is usually realized. “Spirits”

ness”: most people would rather go on living indefi¬

and the doctrine of Spiritism were revived in the

nitely, and the belief in an immortal soul is merely

United States in 1844, in Hydesville, New York, where

a “compromise,” a “second best” for those who are

mysterious happenings occurring in the farmhouse of

reluctant to face the prospect of total extinction but

the Fox family were assumed by the members of the

know that death is inevitable.

family to be due to the “spirits” of people, now dead,

B. Argument that Cessation is “Inconceivable.” The

who had previously occupied the house. The “experi¬

difficulty of imagining one’s own demise has been

ences” of the Fox sisters, who claimed to be able to

used, among others, by Goethe as an argument for

communicate with these spirits, served as a basis for

immortality: “It is quite impossible for a thinking being

the book of a Frenchman, Leon Rivail (who assumed

to imagine nonbeing, a cessation of thought and life.

the spirit-inspired name of Allan Kardec), entitled Le

In this sense everyone carries the proof of his own

Livre des esprits, which is considered the “bible of

immortality within himself” (Johann Peter Eckermann,

Spiritism.”

Conversations with Goethe, 1852). He tries to compen¬

There are two schools of Spiritism. The one preva¬

sate for the obvious weaknesses of this “proof ” by

lent in Anglo-Saxon countries believes in a single

taking refuge in the difficulties of proving immortality.

embodiment of the soul. The other, popular in Latin

“As soon as one endeavors to demonstrate dogmatically

countries, follows Kardec who teaches multiple incar¬

a personal continuation after death, one becomes lost

nation. Both posit the existence of an “astral” body

in contradictions” (op. cit.). But Hume has disposed

which is conceived as an infinitely fine matter, or subtle

of this excuse by asking why, if man is indeed immortal,

fluid, which envelops the immaterial soul. It is said

he does not have a clearer knowledge of it.

to be observable when a person dies and the soul

C.

642

“revelations,”

In addition to the sometimes very subtle arguments

Mystical “Evidence.” As a counterargument

reverts from the carnate to the disincarnate state. This

against the above, Jacques Maritain affirms that there

“visibility” as well as the communication between the

is in man “a natural, instinctive knowledge of his im¬

living and the dead (by means of the tapping of a

mortality.” The question is whether this “instinctive

three-legged table or the utterances of medium in

knowledge” is not the very same psychological phe-

trance) is the “proof” of immortality which the spirit¬

nomenon of disbelief in one’s mortality that we have

ists offer. And since immortality is thus for them a

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY proven fact, they claim that they bring it down to earth

of immortality by materialist philosophers, and scien¬

as a purely naturalistic phenomenon and not something

tific data showing the dependence of mental phenom¬

that involves supernatural intervention or magic. The

ena on the brain. Another reason could well be that

idea of an astral body had been entertained by several

many may not really care about it. If this is so, it would

early church fathers. Thus Tatian speaks of an ethereal

signify a radical change in attitudes not only toward

body which envelops the soul, and Irenaeus maintains

death but also toward life.

that the soul retains the imprint of the body like water

II. RESURRECTION

which retains the shape of the receptacle in which it froze.

Bodily reconstitution combined with the immortality

The obvious criticism of the spiritist doctrine of

of the soul has been the universally accepted version

immortality is that although there may be mental and

of immortality in the Western world for almost two

even physical paranormal phenomena, it is quite far¬

thousand years. Only recently (1968) Pope Paul VI

fetched to assume that they are caused by the spirits

reaffirmed this doctrine, thus categorically repudiating

of the dead. Moreover, not only are the messages from

all attempts to interpret it symbolically.

“beyond the grave” uniformly trivial, not to say

The Christian view of the immortality of the soul

asinine, but all the mediums have been so far exposed

differs significantly from the Platonic in that it is some¬

as frauds, even by sympathetic investigators of the

thing which results from divine grace, whereas for the

“occult” world. The more serious among the students

latter, immortality is a “natural” endowment of each

of these strange phenomena assert only that they are

and every soul. As Pope Paul formulated it, “We be¬

the result of the hidden or neglected powers of the

lieve that the souls of all those who die in the grace

mind, that these point to the mind’s independence of,

of Christ, whether they must still be purified in Purga¬

and mastery over, the body, which renders the hypoth¬

tory or whether from the moment they leave their

esis of its survival after death not only plausible but

bodies Jesus takes them to Paradise, are the people

even probable.

of God in the eternity beyond death which will be

More recently, experimental studies of these unusual

conquered on the day of resurrection when these souls

powers of the human psyche have been undertaken,

will be reimited with their bodies” (Time, August 1968).

of which those of J. B. Rhine of Duke University have

Most of those who accept this position as well as

received the most publicity. Without necessarily deny¬

those who consider it unacceptable in such literal terms

ing the existence of “extrasensory perception” (ESP),

are unaware that the belief in the resurrection of the

critics point out that it may be superfluous to assume

dead antedates Christianity. It is an integral part of

a spiritual entity in order to explain parapsychological

the Zoroastrian eschatology and it is found among the

powers and that these are not more spectacular or

Jews prior to Jesus’ time. Although, according to

uncanny than other psychological capacities which are

Josephus Flavius, the sect of the Pharisees believed

taken for granted.

“that every soul is incorruptible, but that only the souls

E. Conclusion. It has become clear from our brief

of the good pass over to other bodies,” and thus appear

survey of the arguments for immortality that they are

to have believed in transmigration rather than resur¬

perhaps sufficient to reinforce an already existing con¬

rection, Saint Paul (Acts 23:6) attributes to them the

viction, but not good enough for someone skeptical about the possibility of survival after death. Nor is the

latter belief. Generally speaking, the idea of the resurrection of

position that the burden of proof lies on those who

the body is not at all strange if we consider that, like

deny immortality particularly persuasive.

the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, it was a

William James noted that on this subject there are

reaction to the popularly held somber vision of post¬

two kinds of people, “those whom we find indulging

mortem existence in Sheol or Hades. Man is no more

to their hearts’ content in the prospects of immortality,

content with a sad conclusion to the drama of his

and . . . those who experience the greatest difficulty

existence than he is with this existence being an un¬

in making such a notion seem real to themselves at

mitigated calamity. Moreover, the awakening moral

all. These latter persons are tied to their senses . . .

conscience demanded not only punishment but also

and feel a sort of intellectual loyalty to what they call

rewards for one’s actions in this life. And what better

hard facts” (The Will to Believe [1897], p. 40). But

reward for a decent life could there be than restoration

today, even among the first kind, we find rather a hope

to life?

of immortality than a firm belief in it.

Significantly, however, what Saint Paul had been

Several causes of the erosion of the immortalist’s

preaching seems to differ from the later, official Cath¬

position have been suggested, among them the general

olic doctrine. Not only did he speak of the resurrection

decline of religious beliefs, the refutation of “proofs”

of the body (resurrectionem corporis) and not of the

643

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY flesh (resurrectionem carnis), but he insisted that the

immortality of the soul, would fulfill this promise. And

body will be resurrected in a new, changed form. Twice

if the soul would not return to the very same body

in I Corinthians he says, “We shall all be changed.”

it left at death, it would not be true resurrection.

In his view, God will recreate man not as the identical

Modem man has considerable difficulty in accepting

physical organism that he was before death but as a

the doctrine of literal resurrection of the body. As

“spiritual body” (soma pneumaticon) endowed with

Edwyn Bevin points out, “For many people today, the

the characteristics and the memory of the deceased.

idea of a literal resurrection of the body has become

Yet such a view of resurrection may have been trou¬

impossible” (The Hope of a World to Come [1930], p. 53).

blesome. Skeptics doubted that Jesus had risen from IU. REINCARNATION

the dead at all, and in order to convince them, it was

644

imperative to be able to say that the disciples ’did

Various forms of this doctrine are transmigration,

recognize Him because He was physically exactly the

metempsychosis, palingenesis, and rebirth. It does not

same—“flesh

necessarily

and

bones”—(sarka

kai

ostea,

Luke

imply

the

eternity

of

the

soul

since

24:29). Obviously, such a positive identification would

Buddhism, which teaches reincarnation, denies it. The

not have been possible in the case of a changed, “spir¬

belief that the soul of a dead individual reenters im¬

itual” body. In any case, the early church fathers did

mediately (or as in the Tibetan book of the dead, the

reshape the Paulinic view of resurrection to conform

Bardo Todol, after 49 days) that of a newborn child

to these requirements.

eliminates the difficulty of visualizing a totally disem¬

This raises, however, the thorny question as to the

bodied soul and the question of its destiny after it leaves

condition in which the body will be resurrected, e.g.,

the body. The doctrine of reincarnation seems to have

as it was at the time of death, or in its youthful

originated in India, possibly in prehistoric times. Many

splendor. Another perhaps even more serious problem

primitives in various parts of the world believe that

was whether, on the day of the Last Judgment, the

man possesses several souls, one of which reincarnates

souls which were in Purgatory or Paradise awaiting

in a descendent of the deceased, a notion which may

that decisive hour would indeed rejoin the right bodies.

have been suggested by the sometimes striking resem¬

The officially accepted answers to these and other

blance between a child and his dead relative. It is

problems are those of Thomas Aquinas.

interesting, however, that no traces of the belief in

Concerned as he was with proving the truth of

reincarnation can be found among the ancient Egyp¬

resurrection, Aquinas was attracted to Aristotle’s view

tians or the Assyro-Babylonians. There is also no hint

that the person is the living human body. And faced

of it in Homer, or Hesiod, and no mention of it in

with the necessity of asserting the immortality of the

the Old Testament. Among the Jews we find it much

soul, he had, however, to show that it was a substance

later, and the sect of the Pharisees which adopted it

or, in his terminology, “something subsistent.” There¬

had been obviously influenced by their Greek contem¬

fore, in his commentary to Aristotle’s De anima,

poraries. In Greece itself, the doctrine of reincarnation

Aquinas tries to interpret Aristotle’s remark that the

was first taught by Pythagoras in the sixth century

intellect exists separately as meaning that “the princi¬

and is usually assumed to be of orphic origin. Some

ple of intellectual operation which we call the soul

scholars,

is both incorporeal and subsistent." Only in this way

“invented” by Pherecydes of Syros and base their

however,

claim

that

the

doctrine

b.c.

was

was a “synthesis” of the Aristotelian and the Platonic

opinion on a passage in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations.

positions possible. And only if such synthesis could be

Others point out that to trace it to Orphism of which

accomplished and the unity of body and soul demon¬

little is known is to beg the question of an even earlier

strated can bodily resurrection, and not merely im¬

source.

mortality of the soul, be asserted as man’s true post¬

It is tempting to seek it in the influence of Indian

mortem destiny. On the other hand, only if the soul

thought if it were not for the difficulty of finding

is an incorporeal substance will it survive death and

concrete evidence for such a connection. Moreover,

be available for the reunification with the resurrected

there is a basic difference between the Hindu version

physical body. That it will find the identical former

of the doctrine and that of Pythagoras. While the latter

body is, according to Aquinas, quite certain because

considers successive reincarnations as the opportunity

the truth of resurrection is vouchsafed by the Holy

for the purification and perfection of the soul, for the

Scriptures. He argues further that since man is created

Hindus, Brahmanists and Buddhists alike, reincarnation

for happiness, and since it is unattainable here on earth,

represents merely

a

continuous repetition

of the

there must be an afterlife where this goal will be

suffering and misery of earthly existence. It is tied in

attained. But the whole man, body and soul, is destined

with the doctrine of cosmic eternal recurrence and the

for happiness. Thus only resurrection, and not mere

periodic disappearance and reappearance of humanity

DEATH AND IMMORTALITY during which the soul transmigrates without end. And

exhibit certain instinctive capacities, and a few are

while, for the Hindu, salvation consists in an escape

even geniuses at a very early age. This is supposed

from the wheel of rebirths, in the Greek version the

to prove that there must be reincarnation, since other¬

soul is ultimately united with God.

wise the possession of such extraordinary gifts remains

In the Western world, the doctrine of reincarnation has

never

achieved

popularity.

The

totally uncomprehensible.

Pythagorean

Another argument is the occurrence of the phenom¬

brotherhoods were secret societies, and subsequently

enon known as deja vu. But the most popular and

only sectarian and heretical movements like the Jewish

supposedly clinching argument is that some people

Cabalists, the Christian Gnostics, and the Cathars

apparently remember their previous existences, some¬

embraced it. It fared somewhat better among philoso¬ phers. Aside from Pythagoras, one has to mention

times without extraneous help, though usually under hypnosis.

Empedocles and, in particular, Plato who gave a more

The obvious counterarguments, as far as genius in

or less systematic account of the doctrine of the trans¬

children and the deja vu phenomena are concerned,

migration of the soul in several of his dialogues (Gorgias

is that although they are difficult to explain, the re¬

525C-526B; Phaedrus 248A-B; Phaedo 82A, 113E,

course to such an extreme as the preexistence and

114A-B; Republic X, 614C-625A; Theaetetus 117A;

reincarnation of the soul seems unjustified. And re¬

Timaeus 91D, 92A-B). Plotinus incorporated this doc¬

garding people who claim to remember their previous

trine into his philosophical system. Soon thereafter it

lives, not only can the information elicited not be

was completely displaced by the Christian doctrine of

reliably verified, but such people are exceedingly few

resurrection. It reappears again in the Renaissance

and far between.

among the Italian Platonists of the fifteenth century,

It remains to mention the reply of the adherents of

in the Cambridge Neo-Platonists in the seventeenth

the reincarnation doctrine to the last counterargument.

century, and is sympathetically considered by Giordano

They contend that death is a traumatic experience of

Bruno, and later on by Leibniz. Even the skeptical

such a force that it seriously affects or obliterates

Hume felt that if there were immortality, “metem¬

memory. But this argument tacitly assumes the immor¬

psychosis is the only system of this kind that philosophy

tality of the soul, since only in such a case can one

can hearken to” (“Of the Immortality of the Soul,”

speak of the consequences of the traumatic experience

op. cit.). In the twentieth century, McTaggart argued

of death. And while dying may well be traumatic for

in its favor, and C. J. DucasSe considers it the most

many, on all available evidence it appears to be the

plausible hypothesis.

last experience of a person.

Apart from metaphysical considerations, what are

Substitute Immortalities. Some of those who bring

the most important arguments for reincarnation? Here

forth arguments against immortality of the soul (or

again we have to distinguish between the Hindu and

resurrection of the body) propose other kinds of

Western proponents of this doctrine. In the West it

“immortality,” thus giving this term a broader and

is but one of several answers to the question of man’s

often misleading meaning. There is, first of all, what

post-mortem destiny, and unless it is accepted un¬

may be called the doctrine of impersonal immortality:

critically, it adds the burden of proving multiple incar¬

the spirit, or mind of man, is not destroyed at death

nations of the soul to the already sufficiently taxing

but returns to and merges with the universal or divine

task of proving its immortality. In Hindu thought, for

Soul, or mind. This is the possible meaning of Aris¬

which (with the exception of a few materialist philoso¬

totle’s hint about the eternity of the active intellect.

phers) the immortality of the soul is axiomatic, its

The main representatives of this view are Averroes,

reincarnation is most often equally so. And if one

Bruno, Spinoza, and the German and English romantic

should, nevertheless, want proofs, these are usually

poets and philosophers of the late eighteenth and early

based on the soul’s “obvious” immortality. Thus the

nineteenth centuries. Of this kind of immortality, Ma¬

leading contemporary philosopher (and ex-president)

dame de Stael remarked somewhat sarcastically that

of India, S. Radhakrishnan, advances the following

"if the individual inner qualities we possess return to

argument: since souls are eternal, and since their nor¬

the great Whole, this has a frightening similarity to death.”

mal condition is to be associated with a body which is perishable, it is plausible to assume that in order

Another kind of “immortality” which is intended to

for the soul to remain in its normal condition, it must

console, as well as to justify death, is “biological”

inhabit an unending succession of bodies.

immortality of our germ plasm (genes). The prospect

But the Western mind is not impressed and prefers

to live on in one’s children has, however, lost much

empirical proofs. Among these, one of the favorite

of its comforting power since the realization that man¬

arguments is the undeniable fact that some children

kind itself will some day disappear, and particularly

645

DEISM

such an outcome not infinitely remote but a very real

The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnation (New York, 1961).

and even immediate possibility. It might not neces¬

JACQUES CHORON

now that the atomic and hydrogen bombs have made

sarily affect Santayana’s “ideal"’ immortality which is reminiscent of Goethe’s view that the “traces on one’s earthly days cannot be erased in Aeons.” Nor would

[See also Antinomy; Buddhism; Existentialism; Faith; Idea; Platonism; Pythagorean. . . .]

it affect what is known as “cosmological” immortality, according to which our energy-matter does not cease to exist but is only transformed and dispersed. But to

DEISM

both of these “immortalities,” Madame de Stael’s criti¬ cism equally applies. Of course, many people would be satisfied with mere “social” or “historical” immor¬

Deism is the belief that by rational methods alone men

tality—to have left traces of one’s passage on earth

can know all the true propositions of theology which

in the form of an artistic achievement, scientific dis¬

it is possible, necessary, or desirable for men to know.

covery, or other remarkable accomplishments. “How

Deists have generally subscribed to most of the follow¬

can he be dead, who lives immortal in the hearts of

ing propositions, and have ranged widely from Chris¬

men?” asks Longfellow in speaking of Michelangelo.

tian rationalists or fideists to atheists:

This was the meaning of immortality for the great men of Ancient Rome. In modern times, this kind of “immortality” was first suggested by M. J. de Condorcet in his Outline of the Progress of the Human Mind,

and,

with

particular

force,

by

Ludwig

Feuerbach. The least ambitious immortality would be to live on for a short time in the memory of one’s family and friends. Very probably this is the only kind of “immortality” that the overwhelming majority of peo¬ ple will ever have. But for many people, this is not a completely satisfactory thought.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

646

Death. Jacques Choron, Death and Western Thought (New York, 1963); idem, Modern Man and Mortality (New York, 1964), which contains an extensive bibliography of the most relevant philosophical and psychological works in English and foreign languages dealing with death. Herman Feifel, ed., The Meaning of Death (New York, 1959). Robert Fulton, ed.. Death and Identity (New York, 1965). Arnold Toynbee, Man’s Concern with Death (London, 1968). Immortality of the Soul. W. R. Alger, A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life (New York, 1871). Anthony Flew, ed., Body, Mind and Death (New York, 1964), James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 13 vols. (Edinburgh and New York, 1910), Vol. XI, article “The State of the Dead.” Corliss Lamont, The Illusion of Immortality (New York, 1950). F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (London and New York, 1903). Resurrection. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (London, 1958). James MacLeman, Resurrection Then and Now (Philadelphia, 1967). K. Stendahl, ed.. Immortality and Resurrection (New York, 1965), consists of four Ingersoll Lectures (1955, 1956, 1958, and 1959), by Oscar Cullmann, Harry A. Wolfson, Werner Jaeger, and Henry J. Cadbury. Reincarnation. S. G. F. Brandon, “Man and His Destiny,” World Religions (Manchester, 1962). C. J. Ducasse, The Belief in a Life after Death (New York, 1961). Ian Stevenson,

1. One and only one God exists. 2. God has moral and intellectual virtues in perfec¬ tion. 3. God’s active powers are displayed in the world, created, sustained, and ordered by means of di¬ vinely sanctioned natural laws, both moral and physical. 4. The ordering of events constitutes a general provi¬ dence. 5. There is no special providence; no miracles or other divine interventions violate the lawful natu¬ ral order. 6. Men have been endowed with a rational nature which alone allows them to know truth and their duty when they think and choose in conformity with this nature. 7. The natural law requires the leading of a moral life, rendering to God, one’s neighbor, and one’s self what is due to each. 8. The purest form of worship and the chief religious obligation is to lead a moral life. 9. God had endowed men with immortal souls. 10. After death retributive justice is meted out to each man according to his acts. Those who fulfill the moral law and live according to nature are “saved” to enjoy rewards; others are punished. 11. All other religious beliefs or practices conflicting with these tenets are to be regarded critically, as at best indifferent political institutions and beliefs, or as errors to be condemned and eradicated if it should be prudent to do so. Deism is thus the name given to a set of epistemologi¬ cal and metaphysical claims. It has sometimes been discussed in the light of what it positively affirms but more often with respect to what it denies. To discrim¬ inate positive or constructive deism as a view different

DEISM from negative or critical deism, while it may be useful in emphasizing the characteristics of particular deists

extended only to the propagators of known falsehoods. Abstractly considered, deism has an optimistic view

or their works, obscures the fact that deism is critical

of the human condition: there can be no radical evil

in its affirmations and constructive in its denials. Pyr¬

in the well-ordered world created by a good God.

rhic or academic skepticism, fideism, any view which

Moreover it assumes that the true religion, if known,

relies upon nonrational intuitions or feelings to estab¬

will be followed by men because they find it true and

lish religious truth, or any claims to a nonrational

in their interest to follow it. Regarding the actual

revelation are implicitly rejected by deists. Also re¬

situation of men, deists could only be pessimistic, criti¬

jected is any philosophy which affirms the nonexistence

cal, and even politically subversive in their demands

of God or which claims that nothing can be known

for reform.

about any relations asserted to exist between God and men.

Deism has flourished only among rationalists posses¬ sing, in relatively closed societies, the freedom and

Deists have varied considerably in their views of

leisure to criticize popular and authorized religious

what constitutes a rational methodology. Some have

beliefs. Its concern with reason, its reliance on classical

held their religious beliefs to be warranted by a priori

sources, and its dislike of popular superstition contrib¬

arguments, while others claimed that their conclusions

uted to make it rather aristocratic in outlook. Where

were based on wholly empirical evidence. A deistic

it has not been so, notably in the United States, it has

view of the world is a static one which exacts from

been a form of protest allied to republicanism. Lacking

all men an identical religious response. Any thorough¬

exponents of the first intellectual rank and exercising

going relativism is incompatible with deistic teleolo¬

little hold on the emotions, it has never been a popular

gies. Equally clear is the deistic presupposition of a

creed, not even in the Enlightenment. As is appropriate

uniform human nature. All reasoning men have and

to a view with a negative philosophy of history, it has

always will have the same religious views in any time

scarcely varied since its first appearance.

or place. These views receive no support from tra¬

Elements of the deistic position are as ancient as

dition or authority, which, according to deists, are

critical religious thought itself. False gods and impos¬

sources of pedantic error and corruption. History con¬

tors appear in the Old Testament, as does a providential

tains a history of religious error but not of religious

God who is both creator and preserver of the world.

evolution.

Saint Paul’s statements concerning the law of the

Deists claim that all or most of the true propositions

Gentiles (Romans 2:13-15) yield the base for a natural

of theology are and have been known with certainty

religion. Among the pre-Socratics there are sixth- and

whenever men have reasoned correctly about theology.

fifth-century

Variations in religious belief, not the tenets of true

One, and the logos which suggest attempts at the con¬

belief, have to be explained and accounted for. Reli¬

struction of a rational theology. The imposture theory

b.c.

fragments dealing with being, the

gious cults, the chief form taken by such variations,

of the origin of the gods and of popular, politically

are the products of innocent or malicious human error.

useful religious cults can be found in the fragment from

Among the innocent errors and mistakes giving rise

the Sisyphus of Critias of Athens. Plato and Aristotle,

to religious diversity are sickness, madness and delu¬

in their differing ways, contributed both to rational

sion, fear, mistaken reasoning, and the transmission of

theology and to the critical literature on the origin

false information. Malicious errors are propagated by

of the gods. Epicureans, Stoics, and Academics further

priests, rulers, artists, and generally unscrupulous men

elaborated and criticized rational theologies resembling

who, having no regard for truth, impose false reasoning

deism, discussing the existence, attributes, and relation

upon men whom they wish to control or in some

of gods to men. Cicero, who transmitted these specula¬

manner use to their own advantage. Error once estab¬

tions both to the Romans and to later thinkers, deserves

lished is maintained by the force, authority, and cun¬

the title, and perhaps was, the father of deism, the first

ning of men no different from the first deceivers.

deist, even though he never gives wholehearted assent

Truth may be discovered only when men are free

to the deistic position.

to reason. It can be maintained only where they have

All of the defining principles of deism appear in

liberty to criticize errors, even those dogmatic errors

Cicero’s works, notably in De natura deorum (Book

maintained by authority. No society which wholly

III). Cicero, like later deists, distinguished between

prohibits criticism, in the form of argument or ridicule,

philosophical and popular religions, defending the lat¬

can be good, happy, or enduring. Free discussion is

ter by appeals to authority, reason, and utility. Writing

a necessity; any political practices or institutions which

in an age of political chaos and religious credulity in

prevent this should be overthrown. Censorship and

which cults were seen as political contrivances, Cicero

repression, if legitimate and feasible at all, should be

outlined views appealing to later thinkers who found

647

DEISM

648

themselves in similar circumstances. Such views sur¬

chance, prudence, or the folly of men accordingly as

vived in the ancient schools, in the philosophical

things happen” (trans. R. Emerson).

paganism of men such as Plutarch, Celsus, and the

Viret thought these “atheists” greatly abused the

emperor Julian, even in works Christian apologists

liberty which the Reformation had given them to criti¬

devoted to their refutation.

cize idolatry and superstition. With horror he berated

The Christianization of Europe put an end to deism

deists, much as Roger Ascham, writing the Schole-

until the Renaissance. Yet even in this long period ideas

master at the same time, did “Italianate Englishmen.”

essential to a deistic outlook were kept alive in a

Like Roger Ascham, he gave no names. As a represen¬

variety of ways. Controversy over the limits of faith

tative thinker exemplifying these views we might pick

and reason usually ended with the assignment to reason

Jean Bodin, the author of Colloquium Heptaplomeres

of proofs for the existence of God and often allowed

(1588), a dialogue on religion which includes a diest

for the discussion of some of His attributes. Natural

among the discussants. One might also choose from the

law remained an expression of divine general provi¬

list of deists given by Robert Burton in the Anatomy

dence and specified moral obligations which, if fulfilled,

of Melancholy ([1621], Part 3, Sec. 4, Member 2, Sub¬

entailed some merit if not saving grace. Christian and

sec. 1). Or, one could examine the natural religion in

Muslim scholars speculated about the eternity of the

the Utopia (1516) of Sir Thomas More as a model of

world and the immortality of souls. In doing so they

what sixteenth-century thinkers, inspired by discoveries

put their arguments more rigorously than the Stoics

in the New World, thought a religion of reason could

or Cicero had done. Schism, heresy, and anticlericalism

be—a religion whose saving efficacy they denied.

were common to all of the western countries producing

Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century

or keeping alive theories of imposture as well as giving

produced few deists. Numerous controversies over the

convincing examples. The Middle Ages thus preserved

nature and source of religious truth produced a body

ideas which, taken from their Christian contexts, might

of literature used in the formation of deism in the

be reformulated in more rigorously monotheistic syn¬

second half of the century. Skepticism deriving from

theses than they had received in classical or Christian

classical sources, the works of Michel de Montaigne

works.

and Protestant and Catholic fideists, was developed

Deism revived with the new philosophy, science, and

philosophically and applied to historical and religious

culture of the Renaissance but also owed something

works by libertins such as Cyrano de Bergerac and

to the concomitant religious upheaval which offered

erudits, including Gabriel Naude, La Mothe le Vayer,

freedom, opportunity, and incentive to the critical

and

proclivities of religious thinkers. Moreover, concern

Catholic fideists and a somewhat indifferent Protestant.

rationally to ground revealed religion in natural reli¬

In the skeptical and fideistic literature can be found

Giovanni

Diodati—respectively

two

nominal

gion, to find an irenic and fundamental basis for Chris¬

most of the arguments of critical deism. Other studies

tian imity, and to end sectarian controversies furthered

placed a premium upon reason and natural law which

the development of deism in the sixteenth and seven¬

was to nourish the positive claims of deism. Jurists like

teenth centuries. Socinians and Baptists as well as

Hugo Grotius appealed to reason and natural law as

Renaissance philosophers and scientists played a role

the bases of morality and law; religious thinkers such

in the reemergence of deistic views in Europe. Perhaps the first reference to deists which employs

as the great Anglican apologist Richard Hooker sought in reason an irenic principle and recognized that reason

that term is foimd in Pierre Viret’s Instruction Chres-

constituted the common meeting ground of all religious

tienne (1564), reliably reprinted in Bayle’s Dictionnaire

polemicists. Christian humanists trained in Scholastic

entry, Viret. To the Calvinist Viret, deism was a new

philosophy who sought to be reasonable men believed

species of heresy brought forth by Italian Renaissance

in a rational religion prior to, but compatible with,

naturalism in the turmoil of reform. Allowing the de-

Christianity.

istes a belief in God like the Turks and Jews (comme

Rene Descartes or Lord Herbert of Cherbury (often

les Turcs & les Juifs), he went on to say that they

called the first English deist), to name but two, usually

thought the doctrine of the evangelists and apostles

attempted to prove the existence of God and to work

Philosophers who refuted skepticism,

only “myths and dreams” (la doctrine des Evangelistes

out a rational religion as part of their philosophic

ir des Apostres only fables (? resveries). Deists tended

system. Thomas Hobbes did this in such a fashion that

to treat the creator in an Epicurean fashion. “There

religion was reduced to a wholly natural phenomenon

are some among them who have a belief in the immor¬

and one not very reasonable at that. As yet science

tality of the soul: others agree with the Epicureans,

played little role in the growth of deism which insofar

and likewise about the providence of God with respect

as it emerged at all, did so in the context of debates

to men: as He did not concern Himself with the con-

in theology, philosophy, and history.

duct of human affairs, so these would be governed by

The deists of the early seventeenth century asked

DEISM only to be allowed to believe, in peace, the religion

duced a distrust of enthusiasm and religious emotion

of wise men; like most wise men they did not impru¬

not to be overcome until the end of the eighteenth

dently preach it. We glimpse it as the rebellious pro¬

century. “Priestcraft,” which until the 1640’s had been

tests of wits in the circle of Theophile de Viau, long

primarily a sin of Catholics, now appeared as a univer¬

thought to be the author of Les Quatrains du Deiste

sal clerical trait. Irenicism, based on appeals to natural

(ca. 1626), and we occasionally find it as an easy surro¬

theology and reason as essentials in religious debate,

gate for conviction among wits and gentlemen who

had marked Anglican apologetics since Archbishop

regarded it as quite compatible with the established

Jewel’s (1522-71) time. Richard Hooker was succeeded

religion. Among the scholars Thomas Campanella in¬

by men like W’illiam Chillingworth, John Hales of

troduced it in his utopia, The City of the Sun (ca. 1602,

Eton, the Cambridge Platonists, and latitudinarians,

published 1627), where it is joined to radical social and

who throughout the century in the interests of Chris¬

political views and to a philosophic outlook common

tian unity appealed to reason and formulated a justifi¬

in the Italian Renaissance. In France its most distin¬

cation of Anglican practices which made Christianity

guished exponent was probably Isaac de la Peyrere,

itself supportable only as a reasonable revelation,

the author of Du Rappel des Juifs (1643) and Praeada-

moralistic rather than sacramental in character. Natu¬

mitae (1655). In England Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s

ral theology became, as it was not among Calvinists

later works De religione laid and Dialogue between

or Catholics, the apologetic mainstay. English rational

a Tutor and His Pupil (ca. 1641-45, published 1768),

theology, which became increasingly liberal as the

exemplify its critical side as his De veritate (1621) had

century progressed, was the product of religious con¬

stressed its constructive arguments.

troversy, not a philosophic inquiry into epistemology.

The middle and late seventeenth century saw a

So much was this the case during the 1620’s, ’30’s, and

change in the character of European deism. Conti¬

’40’s that Lord Herbert’s deistic works were not refuted

nental deists continued to maintain their beliefs largely

until after the Restoration. Religion became an openly

as they had in the past but modified them by supplying

political issue in England and those who found repub¬

new scientific evidence of design in nature while sup¬

licanism congenial often tended to maintain religious

plementing the argument from imiversal consent by

views equally rationalistic. Levellers and near deists

citations from travel literature. The skeptical tradition

such as Henry Marten, William Walwyn, Major John

was nourished by Cartesianism. Libertine erudits found

Wildman, reputed deists like the first Lord Shaftesbury,

their natural successors in men like Simon Tyssot de

James Harrington, and Henry Neville were republicans

Patot, Charles de Saint-Evremond, and Pierre Bayle,

in political theory as English deists tended to be in

the first two of whom were deists while the latter

the 1690’s and throughout the eighteenth century.

shared and diffused their critical arguments. European

Political and religious protest joined not only in these

deism continued to be both scholarly and aristocratic,

men but in Puritans like Milton who moved progres¬

apolitical even while condemning the vulgar religion.

sively in the direction of a rational religion. Even

It existed in the protected homes of the wealthy, in

Puritan mystics, Quakers or pantheistic Ranters, and

the Bohemian world of journalism, among a few

those disturbed by the inner light often spoke in ra¬

scholars, and in the places of exile and refuge such

tionalistic terms, thus introducing into popular par¬

as Holland. In Rotterdam Peyrere’s deism supplied

lance a rational religion of sorts. “The light of reason,”

Benedict Spinoza with a few critical analyses of the

“the spirit of reason” were for the Digger, Gerrard

Old Testament; elsewhere Giovanni Marana’s L’Espion

Winstanly, synonyms for the divine in human con¬

du Grand Seigneur (The Turkish Spy, 1684) could

sciousness: “When Mankind lives in the imity of the one

defend a natural religion that was not Islam, and the

Spirit of Righteousness, he lives in the light and the

Baron Lahontan’s imaginary member of the Huron

light lives in him, which is Christ in him, the light

tribe, whom he named Adario, would show that even

of the Father, or the restoring power.” Such talk made

savages could reason better than Jesuits. The epistemic

a less heated rationalism in religion acceptable to many

claims, the uniformities which deism asserted, and its

who on the Continent would have had no exposure to

rationalism, appealed to those who thought vulgar

it. London judges worried over Peyrere’s work on the

religion an imposture, sects equally wrong, and mira¬

pre-Adamites published in translation in 1655. Bul-

cles unlikely to happen in a world composed of sub¬

strode Whitelock related in his Memoirs (March 22,

stances and modes behaving according to rules known

1651) “That one Boston . . . was cashiered for holding

with near mathematical exactitude.

some dangerous opinions, as that god was reason, etc. upheaval

Heresy was for a longer time more freely expressed

affected the course of development in several ways.

than it had been hitherto in any Christian country save

The spectacle of sectarian strife, prophets in the coun¬

perhaps in Luther’s Germany. From this confusion

tryside, and saints at Westminster deepened or pro¬

deism grew either as a rejection of sectarian extrava-

In

England

a

political

and

religious

649

DEISM gan.ce or from revulsion against enthusiasm or in some

These developments in philosophy, science, and re¬

cases as an outgrowth of the ideas held by Puritans

ligion were given renewed impetus by the work of John

and Anglicans themselves.

Locke whose empirical methodology, reasonableness

The Restoration of Charles II brought a reaction to

in religion, and conviction that the new physics re¬

Puritanism which made fashionable among rakes like

vealed God’s design in nature were widely shared. John

Charles Sedley, George Etherege, the Duke of Buck¬

Toland and Anthony Collins, whose writings appeared

ingham “a general creed and no very long one” such

after Locke’s great works of the 1690’s and also after

as the Marquis of Halifax ascribed to Charles II. Hali¬

the lapsing of censorship laws in 1694, elaborated the

fax, “the Trimmer” in politics, was himself a Trimmer

implications of the new science and philosophical

in religion. Thomas Shadwell and the young John

empiricism. For them clear and distinct ideas con¬

Dryden shared the literary interests of the courtiers

forming to “their Objects, or the Things we think

whose “atheism” they occasionally displayed on stage.

upon” are the “ground of all right Persuasion” (Toland,

Seldom really godless, it was much more a religion of

Christianity Not Mysterious [1696], p. 16). Reason,

reason and nature quite compatible with neo-classic

“That faculty of the Soul which discovers the Certainty

tastes. Generally critical, as in Shadwell’s The Lanca¬

of God’s own Existence, so we cannot otherwise discern

shire Witches (1685), it could be more explicitly con¬

his Revelations but by their Conformity with our natu¬

structive. Dryden’s The Indian Emperour (1665) has

ral Notices of him, which in so many words, do agree

a Montezuma capable of the following statement of

with our common Notions,” reason was to be the sole

natural religion:

base of religion (ibid.,

That which we worship, and which you believe. From Nature’s common hand we both receive: All under various names, Adore and Love One power Immense, which ever rules above.

13). With ideas limited by

experience and the mind’s ability to reflect and com¬ pare ideas there could be no mysteries in religion. Toland wrote biblical criticism designed to rationalize the apparent mysteries found there. In Nazarenus

Vice to abhor, and Virtue to pursue,

(1718) and Tetradymus (1720) he used apocryphal and

Is both believed and taught by us and you.

pseudo-epigraphic literature as well as Muslim sources

. . . this must be enough, or to Mankind

to catalogue the errors and deviations from the true

One equal way to Bliss is not design’d.

religion taught by Christ and reason. His biblical criti¬

For though some more may know, and some know less, Yet all must know enough for happiness (Act 5, Scene 2).

Dryden was later to attack such views in Religio laid

650

p.

cism went beyond that of Benedict Spinoza and Jean Le Clerc and fell short of Richard Simon’s not in design but in erudition. Toland’s history of religious error

(1682). In a more popular genre Richard Head’s picar¬

placed Christianity firmly in a secular context while

esque novel The English Rogue (1665) contains a por¬

his comparison of it with Celtic and Muslim sources

trait of an “atheist” whose deism is plainly apparent.

stripped it of uniqueness. Without radically breaking

The publication of Dryden’s Religio laid and the

with the Christian conceptions of history he introduced

answer to it by Charles Blount in a pamphlet of the

techniques which would make it imperative to do so.

same name began in England a controversy over deism

Collins and Toland both, like most English deists, were

which was to last until after 1750. The initial years

more interested in philosophical and critical problems

of this controversy, to which Blount was a major con¬

than in the application of the discoveries of the new

tributor, show that English deists had begun to appeal

science to religion. Both argued forcefully against cen¬

to the new science as well as to the classics and the

sorship but did not go as far in their demands for free

philosophers. Science was widely held to reveal the will of God in a natural and rational way and it bol¬

expression as did Trenchard and Gordon. Other English deists of this generation, e.g.. Lord

stered arguments from design with new evidence. The

Shaftesbury,

philosophy of Herbert, Hobbes, and Spinoza was

Thomas Chubb, John Trenchard, Conyers Middleton,

Matthew

Tindal,

Thomas

Woolston,

searched for biblical criticism and their psychologies

Lord Bolingbroke, are of interest in several respects.

applied to the analysis of religion. The latter were

They kept alive a controversy in religion, which,

plagiarized by the anonymous pamphleteers like the

merging into polemics about the trinity and the nature

author of Miracles No Violation of the Law of Nature

of the church, kept England in heated debate for the

(1683) to show “that the power of God and the power

better part of fifty years and provided open discussions

of Nature are one and the same, and that all her laws

of what had to be clandestine elsewhere in Europe.

are his eternal decrees” (p. 3). Due to the relative

It was a discussion known on the Continent through

freedom of the press, deism could be openly advocated

translation, refutation, and even bibliographies such as

and was in a pamphlet by Charles Gildon entitled A

those of Trinius, Alberti, and Thorschmid. Second,

Summary Account of the Deist ’s Religion (1686).

these writers show that empirical philosophy was not

DEISM the only source of eighteenth-century deism, nor reli¬

Smith. Even the political opportunism of Bolingbroke

gion its only concern. Tindal and Chubb relied upon

and Napoleon is partly explained by deistic views of

a priori reason to perceive the natural law and the

vulgar religion and the credulity of the people. For

eternal and immutable relations of things and less on

republicans from Toland to Robespierre, Gordon to

the argument from design bolstered by science. Tindal’s

Thomas Paine, it justified and sanctioned republican

Christianity as Old as the Creation (1731) is probably

government and served as a counterweight to theories

the best summary of deism in its a priori form. Their

of divine right. As a regulative principle its teleology

work and that of Shaftesbury helped to divorce ethics

structured the works of Abbe Pluche and other physico-

from the religion of the churches. Third, Thomas

theologians in the eighteenth century as well as scien¬

Woolston and Conyers Middleton, the first a professed

tists in royal societies and academies throughout

allegorist who scurrilously likened Christ to a gypsy,

Europe. In America Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine,

the second a clever historian and polemicist whose

and Thomas Jefferson among the great, and Ethan

works on miracles cast doubt on the authenticity of

Allen and Elihu Palmer among the lesser, testified to

any, forged arms which Voltaire and Gibbon were to

the truth, political usefulness, and scientific accuracy

employ against the “infamous” with greater effective¬ ness. Likewise John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (d.

of the deists’ creed. The eighteenth century saw not only the heyday of

1750), editors of the London Journal, Cato’s Letters,

deism but the beginning of its demise. David Hume

and The Independent Whig, extreme Whig opponents

exposed its shoddiness: its teleology was unproven; its

of Walpole, joined religious and political radicalism

easy epistemology unsound; its rationalized universal

in amusing essays almost unique in the history of deism.

human nature a myth exploded by the passions, diverse

Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury,

habits, and customs of essentially unreasonable crea¬

made deism not only a good-natured religion, the mark

tures who never possessed a rational religion, just as

of breeding, wit, good taste, and refinement but also

they never lived in a state of nature. Bishops George

Buoyed by

Berkeley and Joseph Butler showed the deistic argu¬

Shaftesbury’s moral-sense theory and aesthetics, tinged

ments to be fallacious or inconclusive, while a host of

gave its

most

optimistic formulation.

with a self-conscious rhetorical enthusiasm, it made a

minor apologists in England attacked individuals, their

mark on the continent where Shaftesbury was trans¬

scholarship and claims, with arguments now as dead

lated by Diderot, and eagerly read and used by German

as the deists’ own. In France materialists put together

writers, including Christlob Mylius, Johann Spalding,

not only a competing radicalism but evolved a theory

Gotthold Lessing, and Hermann Reimarus. In France

of self-regulating nature which needed no creator and

there was less need of translation since many of the

led to no divinely sanctioned moral duties. Denis

older philosophes had become deists. Bernard de Fon-

Diderot’s rationalism implied a vitalism which out¬

tenelle, the Abbe de St. Pierre, Voltaire, and Montes¬

moded the stable mechanisms of the deistic cosmos.

quieu could be added to the list along with many

Rousseau’s romantic appeal to conscience and the

authors of clandestinely circulated tracts.

emotions as a source of religion and his concept of

Deism penetrated and influenced many aspects of

a normative general will undermined the deists’ super¬

life. Debated in the coffee houses and salons, it formed

ficial

an essential ingredient of freemasonry and had the

Ephraim Lessing’s conception of a progressive educa¬

allegiance of philosophes, princes, soldiers, statesmen,

tion of mankind, indeed the idea of progress as the

abbes, and tradesmen. Its simple message of equality,

immanent teleology of unfolding reason, was inimical

optimism, and reason contributed to the ideas of pro¬

to the deists’ assumption of the fixity of things. The cultural pluralism of Edmund Burke and of J. G.

gress and the complacency of the enlightened. Ex¬

religion

and

political

rationalism.

Gotthold

pressed in such works as Joseph Addison’s rendition

Herder, insofar as it implied and prized uniqueness and

of Psalm 19, Alexander Pope’s Universal Prayer (1738),

variation, had no room for the uniformities upon whose

James Thomson’s Seasons, or the plays, essays, and

existence deism was predicated. Even notions of utility

stories of Voltaire, it became a cliche of poets and the

called in question the deists’ easy appeal to imposture

readers of periodicals like Le Journal Encyclopedique

and fraud.

(1756-93). Given a measure of endorsement by works

Attempts to understand the minds of primitives, or

as diverse as Samuel Clarke’s Demonstration of the

in the case of Jean Astruc, Robert Lowth, and Herder,

Being and Attributes of God (1704) or Maupertuis’

the genesis and form of inspired poetry, forced men

Essai de philosophie morale (1750), it helped to liberal¬

to make less simple analyses of the origins and function

ize Christianity and to accommodate it to the age of

of myth than deism had purveyed. Of equal importance

reason. It is central as a unifying conception in Les¬

was the fact that most Christians were willing to accept

sing’s plays and in the moral philosophy of Adam

the validity of a natural religion as the basis upon

651

DEMOCRACY which a revealed religion might be asserted. Fideism

the views of a typical deist, 1756-93. F. Brie, “Deismus

was dead. Imposters and fanatics no longer menaced

und Atheismus in der Englishen Renaissance,” Anglia Zei-

states where standing armies moving over good roads

tung, 48 (1924), 54-98, 105-68. R. L. Colie, “Spinoza and the Early English Deists,” Journal of the History of Ideas,

had replaced the established religion as a means of control. Only in the United States, among republican revolutionaries and proletarians, was deism to have a further career. Tom Paine’s style, thought, and appeal were vulgar; so were the readers of his books and those published by Elihu Palmer, Richard Carlisle, and the half-literate Chartists of the 1840’s. As a secularizing force making for order and placing a premium upon

20 (1959), 23-46. G. Gawlick, “Cicero and the Enlighten¬ ment,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 25 (1963), 657-79; idem, Moralitat und Offenbarungsglaube:

Studien zurn englischen Deismus (Stuttgart, 1965). F. H. Heineman, “John Toland and the Age of Reason,” Archiv

fur Philosophie, 4 (1950), 33-66. G. V. Lechler, Geschichte des Englischen Deismus (Tubingen, 1841). D. R. McKee, “Isaac de la Peyrere, A Precursor of Eighteenth Century

reasonableness in all areas of life, deism ceased to live

Critical Deists,” PMLA, 59 (1944), 456-85. H. M. Morais,

after 1800. This judgment, however, has been ques¬

Deism in Eighteenth Century America (New York, 1934).

tioned by some scholars, notably E. C. Mossner, who

G. L. Mosse, “Puritan Radicalism and the Enlightenment,”

point out that the heirs of deism are to be found among the liberal and freethinking religious critics of the nineteenth century and among those who defended

Church History, 29 (1960), 33-66. E. C. Mossner, “Deism,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vols. (New York and London, 1967), II, 326-36.

toleration.

ROGER L. EMERSON [See also Agnosticism; Enlightenment; God; Nature; Reli¬ gion.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bibliographical Works. J. A. Trinius, Freidenkers Lexicon (Leipzig and Bernburg, 1759); many attributions are wrong but Trinius’ work is useful as a guide not only to European deists but to the freethinking background from which they stemmed. U. G. Thorschmidt, Versuch einer Vollstandigen

Freydenker-Bibliothek, 3 vols. (Halle, 1765-66). N. R. Burr, A Critical Bibliography of Religion in America (Princeton, 1961), Parts I and II, pp. 184-237.

DEMOCRACY

Engellandischen

652

Democracy,

a transliteration of the Greek SypoKparta,

General Works Bearing on the History of Deism Con¬

is government by the people. The historians and phi¬

taining Bibliographical Information. D. C. Allen, Doubt’s

losophers of the Aegean world invented the term,

Boundless Sea (Baltimore, 1964). H. Busson, Les Sources et le developpement du rationalisme dans la litterature franqaise de la Renaissance, rev. ed. (Paris, 1957). E. Cas¬ sirer, Die Philosophic der Aufklarung (Tubingen, 1932), trans. as The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1951). J.-R. Charbonnel, La Pensee italienne au XVIe siecle et le courant libertin (Paris, 1919). P. Gay, The Enlighten¬ ment: An Interpretation (New York, 1966); contains a useful bibliographical essay. P. Hazard, La Crise de la conscience europeenne (Paris, 1935), trans. as The European Mind 1680-1715 (Cleveland, 1963); idem, La Pensee europeenne au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1946), European Thought in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1954). A. O. Lovejoy, “The Parallel of Deism and Classicism,” Modern Philology, 29 (1932), 281-99, reprinted in idem, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948). R. Pintard, Le Libertinage erudit dans la premiere moitie du XVlIe siecle (Paris, 1943). R. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Des¬ cartes, Part I (Assen, 1960). T. S. Spink, French Free Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (Bristol, 1960). L. Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd ed. (London, 1902). R. N. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth Century England (Oxford, 1954).

situated it within a larger political vocabulary, again of their own invention, and provided a mode of politi¬ cal analysis that enjoyed authority well into modern times. Greek political institutions did not survive; Greek political theory did. As a consequence, attitudes about popular rule, characteristic of a slave-owning society, whose social organization permitted direct citizen-participation, received attention, even when the conditions that made Greek “democracy” possible had completely disappeared. As late as the eighteenth century political classifica¬ tion schemes and value systems gleaned from classical Greek texts were current in the West. The Greek experience,

transmitted

through

Rome,

was

still

thought to be applicable. It mattered little that many who cited the Greek (or Latin) texts knew them badly; their citation was the significant fact. The texts, how¬ ever ancient, carried authority. Just as Niccolo Machiavelli, seeking to reestablish the virtu of his native Florence, thought it entirely proper to recollect the glories of republican Rome, so the American consti¬

Studies of Deism and Deists. R. F. Bim, “Pierre Rousseau

tution-framers showed themselves students of the clas¬

and the philosophes of Bouillon,” Studies on Voltaire and

sical world, anxious to discover classical texts that

the Eighteenth Century, 29 (1964), 170-79; a summary of

might be useful to their purposes.

DEMOCRACY The Greek achievement, then, was not a capacity

The democratic theme figures only tangentially in

for institution-building, but a genius for developing

Herodotus; with his successor, Thucydides, it is abso¬

modes of analysis that survived even when filtered

lutely central to his purpose (Book II, 35-46). Pericles’

through Roman and Christian experience. There is, in

funeral oration, often cited as the single most eloquent

Herodotus, a fairly primitive formulation of a debate

statement celebrating the virtues of Athenian democ¬

embellished by Plato and Aristotle, that still produced

racy, is also the classic defense of democracy’s claim

an echo in the eighteenth century. Herodotus is led

to being the school of civic virtue. Athens, Pericles

to inquire into the relative virtues (and vices) of three

tells us, does not choose to copy the laws of its neigh¬

forms of political authority—monarchy, oligarchy, and

bors; it provides the pattern that others follow. Athens

democracy. The circumstances of the debate are not

is well and justly administered; the many and not the

without interest: a decision has to be made concerning

few are favored; capacity is the sole criterion for

the establishment of a new government for Persia. The

office-holding. Personal relations are easy; lawlessness

idea that governments are not immutable, that they

is uncommon; valor in the service of the city-state is

are chosen, that their selection ought to depend in

habitual. Thucydides, in his dramatic rendering of the

considerable measure on their prospective utility, and

humbling of democratic Athens by Sparta, makes Peri-

that reasonable men may differ about such matters,

clean rule seem a “golden age” before ignominious

are all characteristic Greek attitudes. A civilization of

defeats, produced by miscalculations in foreign and

city-states, with diverse political institutions, found the

military policy, and before a deterioration in the

idea of debating the relative merits of one kind of rule

Athenian populace causes the society to change. The

rather than another entirely congenial.

citizens, tried by the rigors of war, are quite incapable

The arguments in Herodotus are simple: democracy’s

of rising above their private ambition and private

advocate maintains that only “popular” government

interest. No leader, after Pericles, is in a position to

guarantees equality before the law; monarchy, by con¬

check the insolence and vanity of the citizenry. In the

trast, is said to encourage envy and pride; it is inher¬

age of Pericles, Thucydides writes, “government was

ently unstable and leads almost invariably to violence

by the first citizen” (Book III, 37-40). Those who

(Book III, 80-82). Oligarchy’s defender thinks such

follow Pericles flatter the multitude, appeal to its baser

arguments specious; disparaging the rule of the many,

instincts, and create conditions that encourage dema¬

he insists that the masses are feckless, ignorant, irre¬

goguery. Athens is made to pay heavily for the blunders

sponsible, and violent; their capacity for capriciousness

of its citizens.

is certainly equal to that of any king. The multitude,

In describing Cleon, a leader he abominates, Thucy¬

having never been taught to know what is right, cannot

dides dwells on the violence of Cleon’s words while

be expected to pursue the right. Neither argument

never neglecting to emphasize the approval they in¬

carries the day; instead the votes go to the spokesman

spire (Book III, 82-84). Cleon knows how to use the

for monarchy. He argues that democracy is a political

masses for his own purposes; contemptuous of gifted

system that encourages cliques; it stimulates rivalry

men, he ingratiates himself with those whom he aspires

among them and generally ends in tyrannical rule. The

to rule. While passages in the history suggest a concern

mob, peculiarly susceptible to the wiles of the dema¬

to assess individual blame for the final catastrophe that

gogue is generally prepared to abdicate its authority.

overtakes the city, this was clearly not Thucydides’

Oligarchy is held to be no more stable; it shows an

chief interest. His larger purpose was to probe the

equal tendency to degenerate into tyranny. The best

vulnerability of the Athenian democracy, as it showed

guarantee of freedom, then, is to be found in monarchy,

itself in time of war. In peace and prosperity, when

defined as the rule of an individual respectful of the

individuals lead easy lives, and adversity is uncommon,

laws. The Greek preoccupation with order is apparent

tolerance comes naturally. In time of war, however,

throughout; so, also, is the overwhelming and perpetual

and justice are the daily casualties of war. The war

fear of tyranny. Governments are inherently unstable;

is catastrophic precisely because violence,

one must search constantly for the least vulnerable

partisanship, greed, and a lust for power, are its inevi¬

“imperious necessity” takes over; prudence, caution, excess,

form. The decision to vest authority—in an individual,

table results (Book II, 65). Civilized behavior is rare

a small group, the multitude—is recognized to be the

in time of war; debate enjoys little respect and becomes

significant political act. Stability and justice are the

uncommon. Law itself finds itself impotent before the

desired ends. Herodotus saw that equality before the

incessant calls for action; superiority of every kind

law was the boon promised by democracy. If, however,

becomes suspect.

that good might be obtained from monarchy, with the

The political reflections of Plato and Aristotle need

added advantage of stability, there was no doubting

to be read in the context of the history provided by

its superior claim.

Thucydides. Both philosophers reflect the widespread

653

DEMOCRACY corruption and loss of confidence characteristic of their

well-governed. Aristotle clearly considered this kind

time. Plato, in commenting on the ignorance of de¬

of democracy better than one that saw large urban

mocracy’s political leaders, is appalled by the incom¬

populations involving themselves in the daily manage¬

petence they show. He has no great admiration for

ment of their affairs; such democratic rule generally

the gifted amateur. Statesmanship is a disciplined call¬

opened the way to demagogues and almost invariably

ing: it depends on precise and full knowledge. All states

ended in some form of tyranny. How to unite an intel¬

are riven by a rivalry between those with property

ligent administration with the power of the citizens

and those without; factionalism and partisanship are

was the problem that democracy had always to contend

the inevitable consequences of the division between

with; and Aristotle makes no effort to minimize its

rich and poor. So long as extremes of wealth and

difficulty.

poverty exist, Plato says, there can be no just society

If democracy involves the whole body of citizens,

(Republic, Book VIII, 551f.). Democracy, by definition,

oligarchy restricts the ruling function to some fraction

must always be government by and for the many; the

of them; property qualifications, more or less stringent,

poor who lack property and birth will always control

are generally imposed in oligarchical states. Oligarchy,

a democracy. Oligarchy, just as inevitably, must oper¬

like democracy, easily runs to excess; when it does,

ate in the interest of the few who enjoy property and

effective government falls into the hands of a small

birth. Plato finds both democracy and oligarchy inher¬

band of wealthy men, factionalism becomes common¬

ently unstable.

happens under the rule of a tyrant. So long as the

a just state can exist in which all citizens participate;

property qualification is not too restrictive, there is a

he explicitly denies the Periclean ideal. In the States¬

chance that oligarchy will not so mistreat the masses

man, he gives a six-fold categorization of states. Three

as to bring about disorder. When, however, it does

depend on fidelity to the law; three are essentially

become too closed, oligarchy may prove even more

lawless. The rule of an individual produces monarchy

oppressive than democracy.

or tyranny, depending on whether or not the individual

Aristotle hopes for a state that will combine the best

at the head is law-abiding; when a few rule, the results

features of democracy and oligarchy; this, he calls a

are aristocracy or oligarchy; when the many rule,

polity, or constitutional government. Again, the signifi¬

democracy exists, but again of two kinds, depending

cant feature of the constitution is its class base. If there

on whether or not the popular rule is law-abiding.

are too many rich or too many poor, there is a danger

Democracy, Plato accepts as the best of the lawless

to the stability of the state. The instruments of govern¬

states, but the least desirable of the law-abiding. Aris¬

ment ought to show themselves hospitable to various

totle’s categorization of states is not very different from

kinds of qualification; while there must be repre¬

Plato’s. What makes Plato’s definitions important,

sentation of wealth, birth, and ability, there must also

however, is that he comes close to accepting in the

be a sufficient regard for numbers. If oligarchy and

Laws, the last of his works, that in the real world there

democracy are inherently unstable, always tending

ought in fact be a mixing of types (Book III, 691-94).

towards tyranny, polity gives promise of that modera¬

If moderation is the quality hoped for, it comes only

tion which is the only sure guarantee of stability.

from combining the best in monarchy, aristocracy, and

Aristotle thought in terms of class when so many

law-abiding democracy. In his Republic, Plato de¬

before and after him did not. This, however, never led

scribes a quite different state, but clearly one that he

him to question slavery, an institution that dominated

does not expect to be realized in practice.

Greek society. The Greek city-state seemed unimagin¬

Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, while interested in reflecting

654

place, and the results are scarcely different from what

Plato, in the Republic, excludes the possibility that

able without slavery, and Aristotle never thought to

on the ideal state, showed a greater propensity to study

abolish it. Only in extreme democracy, he wrote, would

actual conditions by analyzing the constitutions of a

slaves be given “license.” He had no doubts of how

large number of existing states. Aristotle is particularly

such a government would end. Aristotle knew that

concerned to dwell on the class character of the politi¬

“most men find more pleasure in living without any

cal societies that he surveys. Farmers in an agricultural

discipline than they find in a life of temperance,” but

society with a democratic constitution may concern

society could not be constructed on such a base (Poli¬

themselves very little with public affairs, preferring to

tics, Book VI, Ch. 4). Always preoccupied with the

leave such matters largely in the hands of wealthier

state’s survival, Aristotle feared for the stability of the

men who have the leisure to attend to public business.

political order that he knew. His principal concern was

This ought not to be taken to mean that citizens have

to delineate the conditions of political stability, to

given up their authority; they simply choose not to

emphasize the relation between the constitution of the

make use of it for as long as they think themselves

state and the character of its citizens.

DEMOCRACY came almost

never represented itself as democratic, the Republic

coincidentally with the demise of the Greek city-state.

The death of Aristotle in 322

was proud of its popular instrumentalities, and took

b.c.

Its heir, republican Rome, was animated by new values,

care to protect its fame as law-giver. Rome’s capacity

though its reliance on Greek thought remained consid¬

to survive and expand—to elicit service and enforce

erable. The extent of the change may be suggested by

obedience—contributed to its later reputation. The

the distance that separates Aristotle from Polybius.

Roman Empire never enjoyed an equivalent success.

Polybius, born a century after Aristotle died, wrote his

Contemporary judgments of its qualities were more

universal history to show “by what means, and thanks

modest; the old Republican virtu seemed to have given

to what sort of constitution, the Romans subdued the

out. Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, expresses a view

world in less than fifty-three years.” When Polybius

markedly different from either Polybius or Cicero. He

describes constitutions, he uses the six categories em¬

suggests that politics are not within the individual’s

ployed by Plato and Aristotle, but his purpose is new;

power to change; the wise man will not be overly

it is to explain Rome’s success in unifying the world,

concerned with political activities. The citizen will,

which he attributes to her “mixed constitution,” with

if asked to do so, consent to serve the state, but he

the consuls representing the monarchical principle, the

will not push himself forward. This new “quietism,”

Senate the aristocratic, and the popular assemblies the

influenced also by the religious ferment of the first and

democratic. In checking each other, these powers pre¬

second centuries, created a political climate distinctly

vent disintegration and disorder. Polybius’ history is

different from the one that had previously existed.

a tribute to a constitution, but even more to a people,

There were no new political institutions to celebrate,

and to its imperial achievement. Greek political theory

no new concepts of citizenship to proclaim.

lives on in this history; Greek history, however, is

With the barbarian invasions and the destruction of

effectively set aside. The stage is suddenly larger; what

Roman political authority, local rule reasserted itself.

had seemed significant to Thucydides and Aristotle (the

In the feudal situation that developed, older concepts

details of city-state existence) are scarcely alluded to.

of citizenship became increasingly irrelevant. Democ¬

Polybius’ purpose is to show why the Roman consti¬

racy had no place in a society increasingly supportive

tution worked, and why, even were the people to grow

of a value system that emphasized stability and custom;

corrupted by flattery and idleness, showing a tendency

change was thought to be degenerative, political inno¬

to violence and arrogance, the constitution would sur¬

vation was suspect. The world was a divine creation;

vive. Its self-regulating mechanism is its genius: the

man’s obligation was neither to control it nor to make

three powers are interdependent; each checks and

it over. Even the recovery of Aristotle’s writings in

controls the other.

the thirteenth century, important as they were for

Cicero, influenced by Polybius, is again content to

medieval scholarship generally, did not make the po¬

repeat the conventional Greek classification of states—

litical concerns of the Aegean world altogether mean¬

monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—and the con¬

ingful for men who were confronting problems differ¬

ventional criticisms of each. If a preference is to be

ent from those of the Greek city-state..

expressed, it is for monarchy, though the best state is

The genesis of Greek democracy has not been much

not monarchical, but one that combines the virtues of

studied; the genesis of modern democracy has been

all three. Cicero, following his Stoic masters, sees the

investigated in the most painstaking manner. In the

equality of men neither in their possessions nor in their

nineteenth century, when the origins of modern de¬

learning, but in their capacity to reason, to distinguish

mocracy were closely inquired into, there was a tend¬

between right and wrong. The state is a res publica,

ency to give the most extensive intellectual and insti¬

an “affair of the people,” which exists to give the

tutional genealogy for the “love of liberty and the

people justice, and derives its authority from them.

capacity for self-government.” William Lecky, the

Cicero, like Polybius, created the myth of a Roman

English historian, may be taken as a not unrepresenta¬

constitution that combined the love a king bears for

tive Victorian scholar, searching for modern democ¬

his subjects (as incorporated in monarchy), the wisdom

racy’s beginnings. His History of the Rise and Influence

characteristic of aristocracy, and the freedom generally

of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865) offers an

associated with democracy. Authority, in theory, pro¬

almost classical nineteenth-century Liberal explanation

ceeded from the people, but there was no indication

of how democracy came into being. In a chapter enti¬

of what remedies they might avail themselves of to

tled “The Secularisation of Politics,” Lecky sees the

thwart a ruler who in fact ignored them.

increase of wealth and knowledge as predominant

Republican Rome, in its self-praise, registered its

factors; roads, the printing press, universities, Protes¬

defiance of those who thought only of the “corruption”

tantism—all are declared crucially important. So, also,

of states and of their inevitable decline. Though it

Lecky insists, are changes in the art of war; in his

655

DEMOCRACY

656

words, “it is curious to trace from a very distant period

own Leviathan (1651), written many years later, he

the slow rise of the infantry accompanying the progress

shows himself no less dubious about the virtues of

of democracy” (II, 213). The diffusion of Rationalism,

democracy. In considering types of commonwealths,

as expressed in the “triumph of tolerance,” and the

he recognizes only three—monarchy, aristocracy, and

growth of free trade are also contributing factors.

democracy. While others are named in the classical

Another historian of the period might offer a slightly

texts—oligarchy, tyranny, anarchy—Hobbes dismisses

different and more sympathetic listing of factors. All

these as being essentially the same forms of govern¬

such accounts would agree in emphasizing the impor¬

ment, disliked by the commentator. The question for

tance of the French Revolution; some would think it

Hobbes is simple: shall sovereignty rest with one, with

necessary to dwell also on the American Revolution;

a few, or with the multitude? On purely utilitarian

a few would cite the English Civil War. While no one

grounds, he establishes the advantages of monarchy

of these events had democracy as its goal, and while

over democracy.

the term itself was little used in its modern form until

Contemporary with Hobbes, others saw the matter

after the French Revolution, ideas that carried with

differently. The pamphlet literature for the years

them the promise of a new politics circulated before

1640-60, which compares not at all unfavorably with

1789. Just as it would be inaccurate to say that puri-

the outpouring of tracts in America after 1763, regis¬

tanism caused capitalism, so it would be folly to claim

ters every kind of opinion. Some express a clear pref¬

that it caused democracy. Yet, puritanism was inti¬

erence for democratic rule. The Levellers, who enjoyed

mately involved in historical developments that were

a certain notoriety in the years 1646 to 1649, pro¬

to have importance for the generation of a new demo¬

pounded no formal doctrine, but their leader, John

cratic idea. So, also, were the theories of Hobbes and

Lilburne, argues for the sovereignty of the common

Locke, of Montesquieu and Rousseau, and of a great

people, who need to be made the masters of Parlia¬

many others. For a new democratic idea to develop, it was neces¬

ment. Among the demands made by the Levellers and

sary that medieval attitudes be set aside, that man

electoral districts, and biennial parliaments. Their

perceive himself in a new way and aspire to new

doctrine seemed radical in the seventeenth century;

political roles. Such perceptions began to be common

when compared with other groups, the Diggers, for

in England and France after the Reformation; events

example, they emerge as the first of a long line of

their supporters are: universal manhood suffrage, equal

in both countries were to have marked influence else¬

British radicals. Their purposes are overwhelmingly

where. The anxiety that existed in Europe in the six¬

political; by comparison, the Diggers are early social¬

teenth and seventeenth centuries has been frequently

ists. The rights of ownership, the Diggers recognize

remarked on. The disintegration of an earlier religious

as God-given; they entitle every individual to share

unity produced a marked disquietude; so, also, did

in the bounty of the land. Hostile to private property,

rapid economic changes, with large social dislocations

they view it as the source of human suffering and vice.

flowing from them. The seemingly interminable na¬

Democracy, for them, is not realizable without a social

tional and international wars conducted with a strik¬

revolution.

ingly new armament—Machiavelli was one of the

The Levellers and Diggers were little known in their

earliest to gauge their significance—contributed to

own time; they were minor sects. The same cannot

feelings of insecurity and panic. In the circumstances,

be said of the larger body of Puritan “saints” who held

the theories of someone like Hobbes were compelling.

no such radical economic and social views but who

For Hobbes, the state was a human invention, cre¬

were the first modern revolutionaries. They developed

ated by man to satisfy a basic need, a release from

and practiced a new kind of politics, scarcely demo¬

the fear that existed when he could depend on no

cratic, but considerably more activist than any common

protection other than that provided by his own brute

in Europe (except in a few Italian cities). As has be¬

strength. Man made the state, created the authorities

come increasingly obvious in the twentieth century,

in it, and chose to obey them simply because he recog¬

the English Civil War provided an early prototype of

nized the utility of doing so. Whatever rights existed

a new form of political revolution. As Michael Walzer

derived from this decision to form a state and to vest

has argued in his Revolution of the Saints, the Civil

authority in a sovereign. Hobbes effectively destroyed

War in England had an international significance. It

the medieval preference for corporate rights, hierar¬

involved the execution of a king and the assertion by

chy, and divine sanction. Man creates the state to avoid

his adversaries of the legitimacy of their action and

perpetual war; it is his reason that tells him to do so.

the propriety of their instituting new forms of govern¬

When Hobbes, in 1628, published a translation of

ance to protect them in their rights. It emphasized the

Thucydides, he described him as the most political of

importance of participation: the traditional idea of

historians and the most hostile to democracy. In his

accepting one’s status as the subject of a monarch was

DEMOCRACY shaken; while the modern idea of citizenship, with its

Locke does not believe, as Hobbes had, that authority,

emphasis on individual rights, was not fully articulated,

once established, can never be broken; the community

there was a new “purpose” in politics, very different

is always free to remake its constitution. While ac¬

from what had been characteristic of medieval Europe.

cepting that monarchy is the original form of govern¬

Finally, the events of the period were highly visible

ment, he refuses to accept Hobbes’ view that it is the

not only for those who remained in England but for

best. As for oligarchy, it tends to favor the interests

those who emigrated abroad. The Puritans who came

of a few, to the disadvantage of the many. Democracy

to the New World arrived with a suspicion of mo¬

offers the only adequate solution for a just rule. Locke

narchy and a willingness to experiment with govern¬ ment.

which the delegates are controlled by popular election.

If Hobbes and those who governed England in the

Locke accepted the fact that monarchy would con¬

argues that the legislative power ought to be one in

1640’s and 1650’s lived at a time when anarchy seemed

tinue; his main concern was that the monarch should

a constant threat, giving them an incentive to search

not have the supreme legislative power.

for forms of sovereignty that would not be easily set

These ideas were important in the eighteenth cen¬

aside, that mood was no longer common after the

tury; they did not, however, create democratic gov¬

Restoration. The greatest dangers appeared to have

ernment. In England they provided a defense for the

been traversed; it was possible to think of government

Glorious Revolution and a rationale for the legislative

in less catastrophic terms. English political thought,

supremacy that gradually developed under the Hano¬

even before John Locke, showed a tendency to be more

verian kings. In France they provided an additional

concerned with the rights of individuals and less pre¬

incentive for comparing the “free” institutions of Great

occupied with the rights of the sovereign. Those who

Rritain with the more despotic institutions of the

favored

Bourbon monarchy. Great Britain, for Voltaire and

republican

rule—Harrington,

Milton,

and

Sidney were prominent—were to be influential in

Montesquieu, and for many others as well, became the

America years later; none was a democrat, but each

standard against which they compared their own soci¬

was concerned with precisely the kinds of electoral

ety. This is most apparent in Montesquieu, particularly

and political safeguards that later democrats would

in his Book XI of the Spirit of the Laws (De Vesprit

value. The republicanism of the seventeenth century

des lois, 1748), where he dwells on what he assumes

favored a “commonwealth” closely modeled on that

to be the genius of the British Constitution—its sepa¬

of ancient Greece or republican Rome,

with an

ration of the executive, legislative, and judicial powers,

“aristocracy of talent” governing in the name of the

and its balancing of these powers, one against the other.

people.

The inadequacies of the theory, and its irrelevance to

John Locke emerges as the political philosopher of the later years of the seventeenth century.

historical facts, were not demonstrated until later in

Like

the century when Jeremy Bentham corrected William

Hobbes, he is concerned with developing a rationale

Blackstone, who had followed Montesquieu in this

for political authority. His state of nature is not like

general description. Montesquieu’s work, apart from

that of Hobbes; it is not a time of terror and conflict;

its putative influence on the American revolutionaries,

man, endowed with reason, enjoys a certain equality.

contributed to making the philosophes more aware of

Unhappily, however, there is no common authority to

the British political achievement. Even in romanticiz¬

whom all men give obedience; each interprets the laws

ing that achievement, he, together with Voltaire, gave

of nature as he wishes. The uncertainty that develops

the French a sense of the gulf that separated England

is contrary to the interests of the individual, and in

and France in the kinds of freedom that subjects en¬

order to escape the inconveniences of the state of

joyed on either side of the Channel. Church and State

nature, each joins with the others to form a society.

in France were exposed to a kind of criticism that

It is man’s reason that tells him to enter into this

neither had previously known.

contract with his fellowmen; necessity does not drive

Still, neither Montesquieu nor Voltaire produced

him to it. Ry the social contract, the individual gives

anything that could be appropriately described as a

up his personal rights to interpret the laws of nature

theory of democracy. This was the major contribution

in return for a communal guarantee that his rights of

of Jean Jacques Rousseau; departing from Greek and

life, liberty, and property will be maintained.

Latin texts, showing himself independent of Aristotle

Once the political state is established, authority has

and Polybius, but independent also of his Enlighten¬

to be fixed within it. In this, Locke follows the Aris¬

ment contemporaries, he produced an original formu¬

totelian example in his categorization of states, but

lation of the problem of political obligation. While

recognizes that the disposition of the legislative power

there are evidences of indebtedness to Locke in Rous¬

is the all-important decision; the executive and judicial

seau’s psychology and to Montesquieu in his sociology,

powers will be dependent on the legislative power.

his overall thesis is novel. With Rousseau, a new con-

65 /

DEMOCRACY

658

cept. of citizenship emerges; it is the awareness of

quoted them without knowing them. What was new,

interests in common that creates the bond between

after 1776, and even more after 1789, was not that

men. What are those interests? For Rousseau, they

men could not (or did not) consult the past, but that

derive from a single determination—to prevent in¬

the more recent past became a more compelling sub¬

equality among men. Though the term “general will”

ject of concern to them. Talk of democracy increased,

had been used before, it was Rousseau’s use of the term

but examples were no longer borrowed from Greece

that gave it a general currency.

in the time of Pericles; the greatness of the American

The “general will” expressed the interest that men

political experiment or the horrors of the Revolution

shared. Kings might pursue war and trade and seek

in France, depending on the point of view taken, were

to make it appear that they were acting in response

the new subjects of major political discourse. The de¬

to the will of the people; this was an elaborate fiction.

bate on democracy entered an entirely new phase; it

The “general will” operates best in small states, where

was now linked to contemporary events and to theo¬

citizenship is felt, and where the identity of interests

retical reflections they had incited.

is real. Large states, ruled by monarchs, inevitably

In the decade preceding the American Revolution,

deteriorate into tyrannies. There is no “sovereignty of

the British colonists in the New World produced a large

the people” possible in such societies. Without equality

and varied pamphlet literature to demonstrate the

there can be no liberty. For Rousseau, neither kings

injustice of Parliament’s claim to certain types of juris¬

nor representative parliaments can bring about justice;

diction over them; they insisted that a new kind of

only the “general will” can enforce justice, since it is

social and political justice was possible in the New

based on mutual respect and the absence of the type

World. The colonists supported their arguments with

of subordination that is the essence of what passes for

citations from a political literature that originated in

“civilization” in the modern world. The people, Rous¬

the English Civil War and continued on into the eight¬

seau believes, are capable of making and being faithful

eenth century; it contained a radical critique of the

to such avowals of self-control and mutual respect; the

prevailing political system. The warnings about politi¬

rich and the intellectual can never be expected to abide

cal corruption, common in the age of Walpole, had

by such an ethics. This, for Rousseau, is the essence

dwelled on the dangers of autocracy. They were taken

of citizenship; it is the opposite of the subordination

seriously and served the colonists’ purposes in their

that “subjects” experience under a king or other form

own quarrel with the King and Parliament.

of imposed rule. Man, through the “general will,” is

The Americans saw themselves as maintaining a

inclined to do what duty tells him he ought to do.

tradition of opposition that had already shown its

Many have argued about the “modernity” of Rous¬

strength in the mother country. There was little explicit

seau’s theory; some insist, however, on seeing him as

democratic sentiment in their philosophy; it was not

the last of the ancients. Both interpretations are possi¬

overly concerned with either economic or social re¬

ble. In understanding the “passion for equality,” Rous¬

form. Their hostility was to certain forms of govern¬

seau anticipates the nineteenth century, describing a

ment, based on corruption, that threatened traditional

phenomenon that will increasingly preoccupy both

liberties. The power of a few—officeholders and mem¬

Socialists and Liberals. Rousseau, in linking equality

bers of Parliament—was endangering the freedom of

and liberty, throws down a challenge to those who

the many. Despotic government, for the colonists at

imagine that one is possible without the other, or even

least, seemed a real possibility. There was a conspiracy

inimical to the other. In another sense, however, Rous¬

abroad—its purpose was to destroy the English consti¬

seau is writing for a world still familiar with the ancient

tution and, with it, the liberties of free-born English¬

texts, and still respectful of classical insights. Rousseau,

men. Parliamentary legislation after 1763 confirmed

despite his efforts to disassociate himself from many

the colonists in their belief that a ministerial conspiracy

of his fellow intellectuals, belongs to a European intel¬

existed to destroy their liberty, and that their mission

lectual society for whom the events of Greece and

ought to be to preserve it, to save it for all mankind.

Rome are immediate, and the categories developed by

This was the special “duty” to which they felt them¬

Plato and Aristotle are meaningful. His is a voice in

selves called. In the process, they developed a new idea

a political dialogue that had been proceeding, with

of representation, one that was to have the greatest

interruptions, for more than two millennia. That dia¬

importance for democracy (though no one viewed the

logue, however, even among intellectuals, was losing

matter in this light at the time).

its force. It was not that the educated lacked the re¬

The colonists disputed Parliament’s claim to author¬

quisite Greek and Latin to consult the original texts

ity over them. While members of Parliament might

(many had known the ancients imperfectly even before

claim that the colonists were as much represented in

Rousseau), and many (in America and elsewhere)

Westminster as the “nine tenths of the people of

DEMOCRACY Britain ’ who did not vote, American pamphleteers

ancient

criticized this notion of “virtual representation.” In

compounded with “new republican materials.” The

England, where representation was traditionally by

two powers, by being hereditary, were independent

tyrannies—monarchical

and

aristocratic—

“interests," the idea of personal (or individual) repre¬

of the people, and “contribute nothing towards the

sentation was unknown. The member of one seaport

freedom of the states.” Paine saw monarchy as essen¬

city could be held to represent the interests of all

tially oppressive, imposing a distinction between kings

others. This, the Americans refused to admit. They saw

and subjects for which there could be no rational de¬

no one in Parliament at Westminster who represented

fense. The time had come for a “final separation”

their “interests,” who stood to lose or gain in the way

between the colonies and the mother country. Paine

they would through new taxation. The idea of “virtual

called for a “more equal” system of representation, one

representation” was condemned, and support grew for

that would create imicameral assemblies in each of the

the principle that a man could be bound only by his

colonies, and provide for a continental unicameral

own assent or by that of a representative for whom

legislature as well. As for a King, there ought to be

he had voted. This was a radical notion, whose demo¬

none; the law would be sovereign. The alternative to

cratic and republican implications were perceived, and

his proposal, Paine insisted, was a perpetuation of royal

refuted by many. Still, the idea of “virtual repre¬

tyranny.

sentation” was clearly on the defensive.

John Adams was only one of many who saw the

There were other changes also, no less subtle, with

democratic implications of Paine’s scheme and who

large implications for democracy, though scarcely rec¬

had reservations on that as well as on other accounts.

ognized as having that import at the time. Increasingly,

Power could not be vested safely in a single national

Americans came to define a constitution as a “set of

assembly elected democratically. Though one might do

fundamental rules” that even the legislature was for¬

away with king and peers, Adams wrote in his Thoughts

bidden to alter. These rules, they insisted, ought to be

on Government (1776), other balancing authorities

instituted by delegates elected by the people, and could

would have to be introduced. There were many who

be altered only by procedures that involved the people.

wondered what the final consequence of such emphasis

This was a far cry from the notion that Parliament

on equality and the right of citizens to choose their

could by simple legislative enactment make or unmake

governors would be. Would it not lead in time to a

any rule. For Blackstone, sovereignty rested in Parlia¬

denigration of all authority and a constant defiance of

ment—King, Lords, and Commons. The American

existing institutions?

response was to question the notion, so popular in the

The Americans saw themselves as reinventing a form

seventeenth century, of the necessity of this undivided

of government that had once existed but had fallen

sovereignty. Sovereignty might be limited; an authority

into decline. Their “republic” would not, however, end

might have full power in one sphere and none in

in the manner of Rome. The word republic, Paine

another (where a distinctly different authority might

explained, “means the public good, or the good of the

govern). The idea of federalism was nascent in the

whole, in contradistinction to the despotic form, which

Americas of the early 1770’s. Also, increasingly, there

makes the good of the sovereign, or of one man, the

was talk of the fact that human rights existed above

only object of the government.” When Americans set

the law, and that the law’s purpose ought to be to

about establishing their new state governments, they

uphold these rights. The statement might have been

showed little inclination to choose the “simple democ¬

made by Locke; the rhetoric suggested that something

racy” that Paine argued for. The greater number chose

more was intended by it.

to establish bicameral legislatures; and only in Penn¬

While all such criticisms of British constitutional

sylvania, where a radical spirit dominated, did the

practices showed hostility to the status quo, the colo¬

Constitution provide for a ruiicameral legislature, with

nists were reluctant to carry out the full implications

annual elections and rotation of office. The Pennsyl¬

of their theoretical positions. They used the term “re¬

vania Constitution was subjected to immediate attack;

public” increasingly, as they did the term “democ¬

first, by those who argued that only in a bicameral

racy,” but they felt embarrassed by both. Thomas

legislature would wealth and talent be duly repre¬

Paine, in 1776, just a few months before the Revolu-

sented; second, by those who insisted that the existence

tion, published Common Sense; it was the first explicit

of two houses simply gave an additional guarantee

defense of democracy. Paine saw America’s cause as

against hasty and ill-considered action.

“the cause of all mankind,” and, refusing to follow

Important as this issue might be—it continued to

Montesquieu or Blackstone, saw the English consti¬

arouse discussion at the time that the Federal Consti¬

tution not as a finely balanced artifact with each au¬

tution was drafted and debated—another exercise of

thority checking the other, but a combination of two

popular power was taking place that would have im-

659

DEMOCRACY portance for democracy. It became increasingly com¬ mon for the state constitutions to be drafted by con¬ ventions called explicitly for that purpose, and having no other responsibility. The convention that drew up the Constitution for Massachusetts was elected by uni¬ versal male suffrage; other states showed an equal readiness to make the constitution-framing and consti¬ tution-amending procedure democratic. Ratification of the Massachusetts Constitution (1780) was by twothirds vote, with all male residents of the state being eligible to vote. This did not mean, however, that all men would also vote for members of the legislature. In Massachusetts, as in many states, property qualifica¬ tions were introduced. Still, the people had been con¬ sulted, as they were to be again at the time of the ratification of the Federal Constitution. In the 1780’s, alarms were sounded concerning the new republican system. Americans were said to be losing their traditional virtues—industry, frugality, and the like—and tending towards luxury and extrava¬ gance. In the absence of virtue, there would be no commonwealth. This threat led Jeremy Belknap to write in 1784 that “the people of this country are not destined to be long governed in a democratic form” (Wood, p. 425). Jefferson, however, refused to despair. To live in a European capital, he explained, was to be made aware of the worth of republican governance. Benjamin Rush expressed confidence that “our republi¬ can forms of government will in time beget republican opinions and manners. All will end well’ (Wood, p.

660

426). This opinion was not shared by John Adams. The experience after independence told him that though hereditary dignities might be abolished, the scramble for place and property would continue unabated. He believed that “a free people are the most addicted to luxury of any.” The desire for luxury and distinction created new divisions, and there was no longer a he¬ reditary monarch to serve as a scapegoat. Americans, he insisted, were no different from any other people; republican institutions make them no better than any other. The “rich, the well-born, and the able” were dangerous, but so also were the poor and the ignorant. Adams searched for an authority that would keep the peace between these contending elements; he thought he discovered such an authority in a strong executive. Adams continued to yearn for something like the bal¬ anced constitution that Montesquieu and Blackstone had admired (and, in part, invented). He thought in terms of monarchs, aristocracies, and popular repre¬ sentatives. Other Americans had gone far beyond this. They insisted that they had instituted a government and made its officials answerable to themselves. As John Taylor was to say in the nineteenth century, “all our governments are limited agencies”; the people remain

l

sovereign. It was the popular self-interest that had to be counted on, and not the people’s virtue. This, alone, made a republic secure. By the late 1780’s Americans were referring to their governments as democracies, but democracies of a new kind, “Democratic Republics,” or to put the matter another way, “representative democracies.’ Madison saw the novelty of the American experiment in “the delegation of the government to a small number of citizens elected by the rest.” James Wilson said that the Federal Constitution was “purely democratical,” since “all authority of every kind is derived by repre¬ sentation from the people and the democratic principle is carried into every part of the government.” The idea that authority existed outside the people and had to be limited by the people, so that govern¬ ment would not degenerate into tyranny, was felt to be old-fashioned. There were no longer evil kings or illegal acts of Parliament to rail against. Within gov¬ ernment, in its several branches, the people were rep¬ resented. The struggles would take place within gov¬ ernment between authorities seeking to please constituencies who never lost sight of their self-interest. Madison, in defending the Constitution, said that his object was to establish a nontyrannical republic. To do this, it was necessary to avoid the accumulation of powers—legislative, executive, and judicial—in the hands of any one group; factions were always danger¬ ous. Minority “factions could be controlled by the operation of majority vote; majority “factions” would develop less easily if the electorate was large and disparate in its interests. However much Eiuope might interest itself in the events of the American Revolution, honor its heroes— Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson—and construct its own mythology to explain what was happening across the Atlantic, the events of a distant continent, sparsely populated and little known, could not call forth the enthusiasms generated by the electrifying news that came out of Paris in the summer of 1789. The nation that had made “reason” the emblem of its modernity was seen to be dismantling the political institutions of an earlier age. This was an event of the greatest import to all who heard of it anywhere in the world. The fall of the Bastille, followed closely by the National As¬ sembly’s actions in destroying traditional feudal privi¬ lege, was overshadowed only by the issuance of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, adopted by the National Assembly on August 26, 1789. Comparable statements had been issued years earlier in America, but neither the Virginia Declaration of Rights nor the Declaration of Independence itself could match the French statement in its appeal. That all sovereignty rested in the nation, that the aim of all political association was to preserve the natural rights

DEMOCRACY of man, that no group and no individual might exercise

a threat to all Europe and all mankind. It taught false

authority that did not emanate from the nation, that

principles; it questioned hereditary right and threat¬

all citizens had the right to participate personally, or

ened inherited liberties; it justified the overthrow of

through their representatives, in the making of law and

governments on the flimsy charge of misconduct; it

in the voting of taxes, that every man was presumed

pretended that sovereignty lay with the people; it took

innocent until judged guilty, that punishments had to

power from the gifted and gave it to men who had

be established by law, that freedom of speech and press

no experience of government. Burke was unimpressed

was guaranteed, that no one could be disturbed for

with the fact that Revolution gave citizens the right

his opinions, even in matters of religion, provided that

to elect representatives; small men were not made

he did not trouble public order as established by

great by their having been popularly chosen. Burke

law—to assert all these things was to bring into exist¬

fixed on a sermon preached by Richard Price and

ence a new concept in Europe—that of the citizen,

contemptuously

possessing rights that could not be trespassed on.

“democratists” who spoke as he did.

dismissed

him

along

with

other

The sovereignty of the people was explicitly de¬

Burke’s attacks elicited a large number of responses;

clared, and with it the principle that there would be

none was more devastating, perhaps, than that issued

one law for all, with public office open to citizens on

by Tom Paine, who, in The Rights of Man (1791-92),

the basis of their abilities. These ideas, in germ, circu¬

accused Burke of pitying the plumage but forgetting

lated in Europe many years before the French Revolu¬

the dying bird. In A Vindication of the Rights of Man

tion, but there was a significant difference between the

(1790) Mary Wollstonecraft wrote: “I pause to recollect

Abbe Sieyes, in a provincial assembly in 1787 urging

myself; and smother the contempt I feel rising for your

the nobility to give up their privileges, and the Na¬

rhetorical flourishes and infantine sensibility.” Others

tional Assembly voting, in effect, to institute a demo¬

were more civil. All, however, contributed to an un¬

cratic constitution. It was precisely the authorship of

paralleled international debate on the ends of govern¬

the declaration that gave it its dignity, its importance,

ment, the rights of the citizen, and the advantages of

and its legality. Democracy, a term not much used in the eighteenth

representative rule.

century, though a number of Swiss cantons and German

tinent more generally, groups argued about the sover¬

cities thought themselves “democratic,” now came into

eignty of the people and the implications of the con¬

more general favor, though it was still not employed

cept. With the dethroning of Louis XVI and his

with the frequency that is sometimes imagined. Other

execution, new attacks on the Church, and the impris¬

terms—republican, Jacobin, patriot—were more com¬

oning and beheading of the moderate Girondins, opin¬

mon. What is important, however, is that whereas for

ion grew increasingly divided. The term “Jacobin” or

Rousseau,

Helvetius, and others it was taken for

granted that “pure democracy

could exist only in

small states, the question now raised was whether it

Throughout the 1790’s, in England, but on the Con¬

“democrat” became pejorative, at least in the mouths and writings of those who considered themselves part of the established order. When Europe’s monarchs

was not also a viable system for large and complex

went to war with the “revolution,” those who held

kingdoms.

“democratic” opinions were seriously threatened. Even

events

The

excitement

generated,

that

particularly

the in

revolutionary

the

intellectual

classes, was well-nigh universal.

in Britain, which so prided itself on its constitutional liberties, the life of the “radical” became exceedingly

It was not until the end of 1790, when Edmund

dangerous. The “treason trials” of 1794, following on

Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France ap¬

the suspension of habeas corpus, testified to the hazards

peared, that someone of some intellectual prominence

encountered by those suspected of holding “revolu¬

thought to condemn the events of the French Revolu¬

tionary” opinions. Meanwhile, in France, a Jacobin idea of “the nation”

tion. Burke’s misgivings, expressed earlier in the year in Parliament, had not been generally noted. He had warned England that she would not be untouched by the “distemper” raging across the Channel. Were

developed. Increasingly, it was made synonomous with “the people.” Popular sovereignty was also increas¬ ingly pitted against the “old order,” with its royal,

England to imitate the French example, he said, the

aristocratic,

result would be confiscation and plunder in the name

faithful to Rousseau, had great suspicion of parlia¬

of democracy and the replacement of religion by athe¬ ism. Even his threat to “abandon his best friends and join with his worst enemies” if he found them on the side of the revolutionaries caused no stir.

inegalitarian

traditions.

Robespierre,

mentary assemblies, which might easily become “rep¬ resentative despotisms.” Only through direct popular control over assemblies—direct popular action in them—could representatives be kept honest. The con¬

The same could not be said of the blast that he issued

stitution of 1793, with its universal suffrage, unicameral

later in the year. The Revolution, Burke insisted, was

legislature, and collectivist Bill of Rights (very different

661

DEMOCRACY from the American); expressed the political and social ambitions of the Jacobins. The constitution, over¬ whelmingly accepted in a national plebescite, was, however, suspended until the end of the war. The Terror and the rule of Robespierre only raised new questions about popular rule, and while some imagined that Thermidor and the execution of Robespierre sig¬

the same as the interest of the government. Public opinion ought to weigh heavily; the education of the electorate was a prime responsibility, since it gave the greatest promise of opinion being informed. The mid¬ dle class, in James Mill’s opinion the wisest part of the community, ought to be enfranchised. They would

nalled the end of the Revolution, many saw that it only

give the lead to the lower classes, who could be ex¬

marked the end of an episode in the larger history.

pected to follow their example. Through each man

A good argument can be made that “revolutionary

pursuing his individual interest, the greatest good of

democracy” reached its zenith in Europe in the eight¬

the greatest number would result.

eenth century not in 1794 but in 1798; it was then

The philosophical radicals, believing in the middle

that democratic enthusiasm seemed most widespread.

class, argued for a form of government that would be

This was the time when republican ideas, as inspired

responsive to educated opinion, that would, in short,

by the French example, enjoyed currency with men

be capable of rationalizing institutions and making

of all classes who held “advanced” opinions. The basic rights to liberty, equality, security, and property were constantly reiterated; so, also, was the notion that

them efficient. Crucial to their philosophy was the idea that the government must encourage each individual to pursue his own interest, and that there be no delu¬

sovereignty lay with the “citizenry as a whole,” and

sions about what government might do for man. This

that the right to vote ought to be extended generally

was to be a representative government, certainly, but

to male citizens. The Revolution created its own mys¬

if a certain level of competence was to be assured,

tique or mystery about the virtues of the people, in

there must be room in it for those who had special skills.

which ardent democrats believed. Those who espoused democratic ideas had a new sense of time, a new set

In his earliest writing, his anonymous Fragment on

of values, and a new kind of self-confidence. Democ¬

Government, published in 1776, Bentham wrote: “The

racy was a term scarcely used before the French Revo¬

age we live in is a busy age; in which knowledge is

lution; by the beginning of the nineteenth century it

rapidly advancing towards perfection. In the natural

had its firm adherents and its equally ardent enemies.

world, in particular, everything teems with discovery

The repression of democratic (or Jacobin) opinion was common during the last years of the eighteenth and the first years of the nineteenth centuries. During the long years of Napoleonic rule, in England there were the beginnings of a new democratic or “radical” school. The sources of the “philosophical radical” tra¬ dition are not easily given; it is generally accepted that Bentham’s conversion to democracy began with his friendship with James Mill in 1808. Not until 1818, however, did Bentham draw up his Resolutions on Parliamentary Reform, which established his support of universal male suffrage and the secret ballot. The “philosophical x'adicals” were never numerous, but they were effective publicists and held views different from those of the “radicals” of the 1790’s. They issued no call for violent revolution; they never suggested that government might one day be abolished. Instead, they propagated the idea that under a system of universal suffrage many opinions would be registered, that these would cancel each other out, and that what was com¬ mon to the majority would in time become law. Bentham believed that Blackstone was essentially mistaken in his ideas about the virtues of a constitution characterized by checks and balances; he refused to believe that bills of rights effectively restrained gov662

the people; the interest of the people needed to be

eminent. The only good government was derived from

and with improvement” (ed. Harrison, p. 28). Since nature had “placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure,” it was es¬ sential that it not be placed under any other, but that it be free to determine its own destiny. Governors should not choose for the governed; this was to demean them. The right and proper end of government was the greatest happiness of the greatest number, “and this could not be legislated for.” Men had to be pre¬ vented from doing harm to others, but governments ought not to seek to direct them in doing good for themselves. There were agencies in society other than the state which could be depended on to look after the social needs of men. A legislator inevitably imposed his will on others when he passed a law; he should do so only when he was persuaded that good would come out of his action. Men’s needs were different; they ought to be permitted to seek their happiness in the way they thought most reasonable. There were some areas where governmental intervention was clearly called for, but these were fewer than was gen¬ erally thought. Modem democracy could be tmsted. “I have not that horror of the people,” Bentham wrote; “I do not see in them that savage monster which their detractors dream of

(Letwin, p. 152). Still, Bentham had no

DEMOCRACY illusions about the people. He did not praise their

Democracy in America. That two-volume study, pub¬

virtues; it was simply that if all were permitted to

lished in 1835 and 1840, was the first large-scale em¬

pursue their interests, that would itself provide the

pirical investigation of a modern democracy. It was

check that was needed. The new society had no need

also a prophetic work, seeking to indicate what Europe

of the mythological “natural rights” and “constitutional

might itself soon be experiencing. Tocqueville, per¬

balances” that others favored; the principle of utility

suaded that the passion for equality would not be

was a sufficient guarantee of good government.

stilled, asked Europeans to reflect on whether liberty

Bentham’s individualistic creed never lacked critics.

would in fact survive the move towards equality. While

What made his ideas important, however, was that they

admiring certain attributes of America—its restless

provided a rationale for a new kind of “liberalism,”

energy, industry, and traditions of self-governance—

one that became the dominant political philosophy in

there was a good deal that Tocqueville formd disquiet¬

Britain after the 1820’s, influencing democratic theory

ing. If the democratic movement was indeed irre¬

in many countries for the rest of the century. In

sistible, if it originated in America principally because

Bentham, as in his collaborators, there was an explicit

of the absence there of an hereditary aristocracy, would

preference for individual over collective action; and

it end in the creation of a state with vastly increased

with it went an absolute confidence that there would

authority, a new kind of tyranny, with the majority

be material progress and improvement in the condition

exercising its power over every minority?

of men’s lives if men obeyed the new principles of

The tyranny of public opinion, Tocqueville argued,

political economy. Bentham and the philosophic radi¬

could prove more burdensome than the tyranny of any

cals accepted the industrial revolution; they took for

monarch. New values would predominate in a demo¬

granted that they were living in a new age and that

cratic society; the desire for riches would take the

this required them to search for new knowledge. For

place of the desire for glory; there would be few totally

the state to tamper with industry or trade was to say

uninstructed men but few learned ones. The prejudices,

that government understood an individual’s interest

passions, and interests of the multitude would always

better than he himself did. This was unthinkable. The

have great weight, and this would generally militate

legislator was right to concern himself with the needs

against the type of political careers possible in more

of the indigent, but he ought to take care to define

“aristocratic” societies. Government would not attract

that class closely and not make the mistake of believing

great talent, precisely because the interest in equality

that humanitarian impulses would be productive. Su¬

would make any kind of superiority irksome. Men of

perstition, war, indolence—all the evils of the past

wealth would be preoccupied with their own affairs

were to be swept away through the pursuit by each

and not with those of the state. Democracy does not

of the possibilities inherent in an industrial society.

guarantee efficient government; it does provide free¬

Such an idea was anathema not only to men like

dom for the pursuit of one’s own interest, subject

Coleridge, Newman, and Carlyle, but also to many who

always to the tyranny that comes from the majority

might have been expected to be most sympathetic to

insisting that its values and ideas should be safeguarded.

such ideas. John Stuart Mill, reared to be the heir of the Ben¬

Democratic societies have a taste for easy success and

thamite legacy, found himself increasingly alienated

weakness.

present enjoyment; this is their strength and their

from what he thought to be its narrow, limited, and

Equality, Tocqueville insisted, tends to isolate men,

ungenerous perspectives. Influenced by the writings of

to cause them to concentrate on themselves only; it

Auguste Comte, he looked for a reform of government

gives them an inordinate desire for material goods and

that

best-

comfort. For him, the liberal French aristocrat, the

instructed” to the top in a position to give the lead

important question for the future was how to avoid

to others. Increasingly, the theme of expert leadership

the new kind of despotism that might be based on

would

bring

the

“most

virtuous

and

insinuated itself into Mill’s writings. After the passage

popular opinion, with the state’s power being “abso¬

of the Beform Act of 1832, Mill went out of his way

lute, minute, regular, provident, and mild." Tocqueville

to remind his readers that popular government meant

saw the new state power as rather like that of the

not so much that the people govern as that they are

parent, except that the parent prepared the child for

in a position to choose their governors. The business

manhood; the democratic state was interested in per¬

of government had to be “by the few for the many.”

petuating childhood in man. It would provide for his

The science of politics was an exact one; not every

necessities, facilitate his pleasures, and direct his in¬

elector could aspire to master it.

dustry. What remains, Tocqueville asked, “but to spare

Mill’s attitudes during this period were substantially

them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of

influenced by the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s

living?” Tocqueville saw in religion, an independent

663

DEMOCRACY

664

judiciary, voluntary organization, and the press certain

in spawning large Marxist parties. They were hostile

restraining elements on state power. However, these

to the anarchist and syndicalist spirit that remained

guarantees were not sufficient to bring him to conclude

prominent in certain segments of the working class.

his work with a verdict clearly favorable to democracy.

Eduard Bernstein, for all his acceptance of the benefits

If a prevailing opinion existed in Europe in the

secured by the worker as the consequence of the new

1850’s and 1860’s, it was certainly not that of Karl

social legislation, had no doubt that Germany’s political

Marx, but probably of those who called themselves

system was essentially undemocratic, and that a prin¬

liberals. John Stuart Mill may be taken as a repre¬

cipal purpose of his political effort ought to be to

sentative liberal. In his classic work, On Liberty (1859),

achieve democracy. Socialism, he believed, could only

he spoke out against the tyranny of public opinion;

come about through democracy; in his words, “democ¬

the common opinion ought not to be permitted to

racy is a condition of socialism to a much greater

interfere with individual opinion. The individual is not

degree than is usually assumed, i.e. it is not only the

accountable to society for actions that concern himself

means but also the substance.” Bernstein came very

only; for those actions affecting others he may be

close to expressing what certain English social reform¬

judged. Mill’s concern was always for the gifted indi¬

ers had argued in the nineteenth century, and what

vidual whom the multitude might find objectionable.

Fabianism announced explicitly: socialism was a con¬

Persuaded that political responsibility was the greatest

tinuation and a fulfillment of industrialism and of

good that could come to a man, and that to be active and serve the public weal ought to be the objective

democracy. This was not a view that all working-class advocates

of all in a position to do so, he saw that while not

would accept. The syndicalist spirit, going back to

everyone could participate directly in public life, all

Proudhon and Blanqui, had deep appeal for many.

could do so through representative institutions. This

Georges Sorel may be taken as typical of those who

was Mill’s ultimate reason for preferring representative

spoke glowingly of the possibilities of the “general

government.

strike” in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Not all communities, however, were

ready for it. The duty of a colonizing power was to

Rejecting the democratic bias of Marxists like Bern¬

prepare its dependencies for self-government. Britain

stein, and detesting democracy generally as the crea¬

clearly had such an obligation in India.

tion of the bourgeoisie, Sorel feared what democracy

Towards the end of the century, liberalism moved

was doing in weakening the revolutionary ardor of the

increasingly in a collectivist direction and lost its ear¬

working class. The camaraderie of workers ought not

lier hostility to socialist experimentation. There was

to be lost; the attack on the state had to continue; it

still some of the old-fashioned Benthamite individ¬

could only lead, he insisted, to the collapse of the state.

ualism, but it was tempered by a willingness to support

Sorel, a syndicalist at the time, passed through other

health and unemployment insurance, a widening of the

ideological schools in time, but in every one he per¬

franchise, a steady improvement in wages, and the

sisted in his diatribe against bourgeois democracy.

granting of specific legal rights to trade unions. The

Others writing at the same time—Vilfredo Pareto,

working-class misery of the early industrial era seemed

Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca—inquired into the

to be greatly attenuated. It was almost possible to

oligarchical tendencies of democracy. Where the nine¬

believe that representative institutions had indeed re¬

teenth century prided itself on the suffrage—on the

solved the political and social problems of industrial

importance of extending the vote—these men ex¬

society. Many believed they had. Some, like Eduard

pressed misgivings about the habits and tendencies of

Bernstein, felt compelled to “revise” Marxist doctrine,

men selected by democratic ballot-box procedures.

to take account of the new economic and political facts

Could such men be entrusted with power? Would they

(not foreseen by Marx). Whether in the tradition of

not be self-serving or the servants of special interest

the “revisionists,” or in its pure, unadulterated form,

groups? These questions had not been much asked in

Marxism seemed to gain a new repute.

the nineteenth century.

Marx, in accepting the industrial system—in refusing

So long as democracy was a political movement

to posit an ideal society based on older agrarian

making its way, so long as there were classes to be

models—in insisting that social inequities could be

enfranchised, constitutions to be written—so long, in

overcome through a rational organization of society,

short,

laid the basis for a doctrine that gained new adherents

partisans of popular rule were disposed to be fairly

as

democracy

was

an

uncommon

thing—

late in the century. On the Continent, though not in

uncritical of democracy. When, however, as in the

England or the United States, Marxist parties grew in

early twentieth century, manhood suffrage was largely

prestige and power. France and Germany, whatever

achieved, female suffrage was making progress, trade

their mutual political antipathies, resembled each other

union rights were recognized, freedom of assembly,

DEMOCRACY speech, press, and religion seemed assured, a new kind

disgusted by the defection of Western Social Demo¬

of questioning began. Perhaps elections were not as

crats from a pacifism they had long preached, per¬

significant

suaded that these men had abandoned their interna¬

as nineteenth-century

liberals

imagined

them to be. Perhaps political movements that insisted

tionalist class-war ideology in favor of conventional

on

mechanisms—

patriotic nationalism, saw the war as advantageous only

“recall,” “referendum,” “proportional representation,”

if it could be transformed from an “imperialist war”

instituting

complex

democratic

and the like—dwelled on quite secondary matters.

into an international “civil war,” to hasten the inevita¬

Mosca, Michels, Pareto—and others of their persuasion

ble revolution. Lenin’s object was to bring into a com¬

—argued that democracy was itself a fraud, a delu¬

mon rebellion workers who were the subjects of mod¬

sion by which men lived. Many, they said, could not

em capitalism and colonial peoples who were the

bear to admit that self-government was impossible,

subjects of capitalist imperialism. After March 1917,

that men lived under modern (bureaucratic) oligarchies

his only objective was to bring about revolution in

and that there was no escape from that power. Gov¬

Russia; this, he accomplished in November. His instru¬

ernment, for those who held such views, became a form

ment was the Communist Party, for which he had

of monopoly; the politician was the new monopolist,

labored since the early years of the century. A central¬

though he pretended to identify with the subjects over

ized party, of professional revolutionaries, it accom¬

whom he exercised his authority. The ballot box, the

plished what social democracy had never been able

glory of the nineteenth-century democrat, was made

to achieve in the West—absolute control, through

little of; so, also, were the political parties, with their

party instrumentalities and a highly centralized bu¬

pretensions to being checks on oligarchic power.

reaucracy, of the whole of a state’s power. Lenin

What the effects of such theories might have been

achieved this in the name of democracy; not the bour¬

had World War I not intervened, it is impossible to

geois democracy of parliaments, but the proletarian

know. The war was important for democracy, not least

democracy of Soviets. Lenin, like his successor, Stalin,

because it catapulted into international prominence

never doubted the legitimacy and superiority of the

Woodrow Wilson and Nikolai Lenin, who, whatever

people’s democracy established in the Soviet Union.

their other gifts, knew the value of rhetoric. Each

Its institutions and values—so different from those of

contributed to making new slogans for their age.

bourgeois democracy—were flaunted in a whole suc¬

Wilson, in bringing the United States into the war in

cession of written constitutions.

April 1917, claimed that he was enrolling the country

To the Communist disparagement of bourgeois de¬

in a war to make the world safe for democracy. The

mocracy, democratic theorists have generally felt some

fact that the Tsarist regime had been toppled some

obligation to give an answer. To the Fascist and Nazi

weeks earlier made it possible for Wilson to argue that

critics of liberal democracy, increasingly vocal in the

the Entente powers were “democracies,” while Ger¬

1930’s, there was less response; it was as if criticism

many remained victim of its authoritarian regime. He

from that quarter—with its simplistic racial and na¬

pledged a League of Nations—of peace-loving states—

tional myths, glorification of a “leader,” and dispar¬

the institution of a permanent organization to which

agement of representative institutions—scarcely mer¬

only democratic states would be admitted. All this was predicated on the notion that selfgovernment would be the prevailing political form of

ited a serious retort. In the 1930’s, there was some disposition to argue; the defeat of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy closed off the discussion.

the future, and that the war was being waged to guar¬

The mood of the war years and of the immediate

antee that possibility. Wilson thought that one of his

postwar period cannot be represented by any single

purposes ought to be the encouraging of those elements

work. Yet, that of Joseph Schumpeter, as expressed in

in Germany that displayed “democratic” tendencies.

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, merits attention.

They might prove useful in rendering assistance to the

Schumpeter argued that the classical theory of democ¬

Allies in the democratic objective of overthrowing the

racy did not describe the political situation as we know

Junker power. Such arguments were highly propa¬

it; there is no possibility of pretending, as the eight¬

gandists; democracy became a word of common usage

eenth century did, that “the democratic method is that

in a way that it had never been previously. An exami¬

institutional arrangement for arriving at political deci¬

nation of the press, not only in the United States, but

sions which realizes the common good by making the

in other Allied states as well, shows a tendency to use

people itself decide issues through the election of indi¬

the word democracy in ways that Wilson made re¬

viduals who are to assemble in order to carry out its

spectable and possible.

will” (p. 250). Schumpeter saw such description as an

Meanwhile, another new voice was heard, though

elaborate fiction; he preferred a new definition: “the

not with anything like the same amplification. Lenin,

democratic method is that institutional arrangement

665

DEMOCRACY for arriving at political decisions in which individuals

Dahl’s view, was not that Madison and his colleagues

struggle for the people’s vote” (p. 269). This, Schum¬

had constructed such delicate mechanisms for guaran¬

peter said, implied nothing less than that “democracy

teeing a political balance, but that the Constitution

is the rule of the politician.” Modern democracy was

was frequently altered to fit a changing social balance

the product of capitalism. If capitalism were to disap¬

of power. It was the American penchant for bargaining

pear and be replaced by socialism, he said, this would

that made the whole political process work.

not necessarily mean that democracy’s institutions

Debates that were once vivid about the relative

would go. Parties, elections, parliaments—all these

advantages of presidential and parliamentary systems,

might prove convenient political instruments even for

about two-party versus multi-party constitutions, have

a socialist society. Central to the survival of democracy,

lost some of their urgency in recent years. Increasingly,

for Schumpeter, was the agreement of the “vast major¬

there is a tendency to distinguish between consti¬

ity of the people in all classes ... to abide by the rules

tutional and autocratic regimes in a way that Eric Weil

of the democratic game.” This, in turn, “implies that

does in his Philosophic politique (1956); constitutional

they are substantially agreed on the fundamentals of

regimes involve a set of judicial institutions inde¬

their institutional structure” (p. 301).

666

reason the American Constitution had survived, in

acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive

pendent of political authority, and generally provide

Another critique of the classical theory of democ¬

for a method whereby political leadership may be

racy, one that attracted great attention on its publica¬

altered by the citizens’ vote. In an autocratic state,

tion in 1956, was that of Robert Dahl. In his published

the citizen has no legal recourse against administrative

lectures, A Preface to Democratic Theory, he showed

or political decision, and can neither legally challenge

an empirical grasp that had not been at all common

the decisions of government nor alter the political

in the prewar period. Contrasting his own theory of

leadership. By this standard, democracy becomes the

polyarchy, which focused primarily on the social pre¬

best form of government in a healthy society, since

requisites for a democratic order, with what he called

it has the best chance of bringing good men to major

Madisonian theory, which emphasized the consti¬

positions. In a community in decomposition, violent,

tutional prerequisites, Dahl insisted that a theory of

passionate, and dominated by conflicts between rival

social checks and balances was very different from one

interest groups, the reign of the mediocre and the

that dwelled on constitutional checks and balances.

wicked will generally be the rule; this will often lead

Dahl argued that “the bent given to American thought

to an autocratic government. This, Weil says, is the

by the Constitutional Convention and the subsequent

response of men who deem efficiency to be a para¬

apotheosis of its product . . . hindered realistic and

mount virtue, with all other values being secondary.

precise thinking about the requirements of democracy”

In a healthy community, where rational discussion is

(p. 83).

possible, at least among those who participate in the

For Dahl, the possibility of majority rule on any

direction and control of public affairs, democracy will

specific policy was negligible. Where the prerequisites

bring the best men to power. Reasonable discussion

of polyarchy, as he outlined them, existed, then the

must lie at the base of any stable democracy. Parlia¬

election itself was “the critical technique for insuring

mentary institutions are no guarantee against tyranny;

that government leaders will be relatively responsive

nor can universal suffrage be held to provide any de¬

to non-leaders.” Of the eight conditions he laid down

fense. Even the law does not provide absolute assur¬

for polyarchy, Dahl saw a small possibility of their

ance. Each is necessary to discussion, and each con¬

being met. Elections were “a crucial device for con¬

tributes to

trolling leaders,” but “quite ineffective as indicators

encourage the assertion of talent. The basis of democ¬

of majority preference.” Specific policies tended to be

racy, then, is an administration capable of acting ra¬

the products of “minorities rule.” Majority rule, in the

tionally, and capable of keeping the confidence of the

sense that Madison had used the term, Dahl saw as

electors. The electors cannot themselves decide; they

providing

circumstances

calculated

to

largely a myth. In most societies minorities frustrate

cannot hope to master the complexities of fiscal or

and tyrannize others, but this is a far cry from dic¬

military reform. They must be prepared to accept the

tatorship.

judgment of those who are qualified to know.

Dahl concluded from all this that constitutional

Today, when there is so much effort to appropriate

forms were not a principal device for protecting one

the democratic label to governments that would not

group in society against another. What, then, were they

normally qualify as such, it becomes increasingly im¬

useful for? He thought them significant mostly for

portant to distinguish between the conditions for de¬

determining “what particular groups are to be given

mocracy and the criteria of democracy.

advantages or handicaps in the political struggle.” The

Martin Lipset, in his Political Man (1960), has tried

Seymour

DEMONOLOGY to do that, relating democracy to levels of economic development, but also to the effectiveness and legiti¬ macy of particular governments. For Lipset, effective¬ ness has to do with actual performance, the extent to which the government satisfies powerful groups within the society, and is able to carry out its functions. Legitimacy, he defines as “the capacity of the system to engender and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the society.” Increasingly, one returns to the ancient Aristotelian idea that there is a relation between a society’s prop¬ erty distribution and its form of government. A large impoverished mass and a small elite will generally produce oligarchy or tyranny. Greater equalization of wealth favors democratic rule. As the relation between the educational level of a people and democracy is increasingly examined, the question of why certain developing societies achieve democratic forms while others do not becomes a matter of controversy. Indus¬ trialization is clearly possible in both democratic and

McKeon and Stein Rokkan eds., Democracy in a World of Tensions (Chicago, 1951). Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, 1966). Thomas Paine, Complete Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, 2 vols. (New York, 1945). Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolutions, Vols. 1 and 2 (Princeton, 1959; 1964). Plato, Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, 1963). George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 3rd ed. (New York, 1961); contains a good bibliography of secondary works. Giovanni Sartori, Demo¬ cratic Theory (Detroit, 1962). Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capi¬ talism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York, 1950). Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge, 1969). E. P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963). Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (New York, 1960). Adam Ulam, The Unfin¬ ished Revolution (New York, 1960). Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1965). Eric Weil, Philosophic politique (Paris, 1956). Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969).

nondemocratic societies. Material progress does not

STEPHEN R. GRAUBARD

appear to depend on popular rule. What, then, are

[See also Constitutionalism; Equality; General Will; Liber¬ alism; Nation; Social Contract; State.]

the incontestable advantages of democracy? The prob¬ lem of Herodotus is as much the problem of the latter part of the twentieth century as it was of the Greek city-state where direct citizen participation was possi¬ ble. There is a new sense today of the fragility of

DEMONOLOGY

democratic institutions. Perhaps the preoccupations of Athens are not so foreign to the twentieth century as they were to the more self-confident nineteenth.

Demonology, the theory of beings intermediate be¬ tween the divine and man, begins in European thought

BIBLIOGRAPHY Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, eds.. The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, 1960). Aristotle, Politics, trans. and ed. Ernest Barker (Oxford, 1946). Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967). Ernest Barker, Reflections on Government (Oxford, 1942). Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government, ed. W. Harrison (Oxford, 1948). Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London, 1969). Crane Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1949). Maurice Cranston, Freedom, A New Analysis (London, 1953). Bobert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago, 1956). William Y. Elliott, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics (New York, 1928). Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (London, 1949). Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power; Its Nature and the History of its Growth (New York, 1949). Harold J. Laski, A Grammar of Politics (New Haven, 1925). Shirley Robin Letwin, The Pursuit of Certainty (Cambridge, 1965). A. D. Lindsay, The Modern Democratic State (London, 1943; New York, 1962). Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Base of Politics (New York, 1960). T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, 1950). Richard

as a collection of religious and philosophical ideas. In general,

classical

and

Hellenistic

Greek

thinkers

ordered these ideas in relation to the philosophical concept of the One, while Jewish and Christian thinkers ordered them in relation to the religious concept of a unique Creator God. These two principles of order interact, Neo-Platonic speculation influencing angelology, as in the dependence of Pseudo-Dionysius’ On Celestial Hierarchy (ca. 500) upon Proclus, and the reverse, as in the progressive degradation of the pagan “gods” to “demons.” Greek demonology includes the following religious ideas. There are incorporeal beings differing in rank but all requiring human respect to insure their favor. There is a being called a daimon who is either identical with theos or is the power or agency of theos (Homer). The souls of the dead who are distinguished—either for great goodness, as the men of the Golden Age (Hesiod, Works and Days), or for great evil—survive and have an influence upon the living. Some part of man’s consciousness is akin to the divine, can be puri¬ fied of sensual attachments and become a higher being

667

DEMONOLOGY called a daimon (Pythagorean). A daimon is a divine

tempt man. Subsequently, the Jewish Pseud-Epigrapha

sign given to an individual (Phaedrus, 242B) or it is

and Apocalyptic literature elaborate on the angelic

a guardian spirit that acts as a conscience.

rebellion and descent to earth, the origin of evil spirits,

The Pythagorean philosophical idea that there are

the hierarchical ranking of the angels, their habitations,

spirits who are the necessary intermediaries between

their physical and moral affliction of men, and their

the gods and men, “because the divine will not mingle

temporal and final pmiishment, as well as that of the

directly with the human,” is expressed by Diotima in

evil spirits bom of their union with women. The chief

Plato’s Symposium (203A) and is developed by succes¬

rebel

sive Neo-Platonists. It is combined with the notion of

Mastema, Beliar, Satanail, Sammael, or Satan in this

is

variously

called

Semjaza,

Azazel,

the survival of the souls of the dead in the Xenocratic

literature. The context of Jewish religious thought lies

philosophical theory of daimones who are capable of

behind the frequent New Testament references to

good and evil, are suprahuman but limited, and who

Satan, to the diabolus (“adversary”), and to daimones

dwell near Hades and imder the moon. Plato contrib¬

and daimonia. Also the idea of the evil spirits who

utes the notion that the heavenly bodies are moved

issued from the union of angels and women and who

by divine souls, which develops into Aristotle’s theory

remained on earth to plague mankind probably lies

that the planets and stars are moved by “intelligences”

behind the New Testament concept of possession by

(later

disease-causing demons.

called

“separated

substances”

in

medieval

thought) which are perfect and incorporeal—a philo¬

Greek and Judaic traditions mingle inextricably in

sophical answer to the question of the origin of the

the

movement of the heavenly bodies. The idea of a hier¬

b.c.-a.d.

archy of corporeal and incorporeal beings between

to give the name of angels to those whom other philos¬

earth and the outermost border of the world is a philo¬

ophers call demons (or spirits), souls that is which fly

sophical theory of the cosmos in the pseudo-Platonic

and hover in the air” (De gigantibus, Loeb trans.). In

Epinomis (ca. 347

equating biblical

b.c.?)

and later works of the Neo-

Platonic school.

synthesizing

comment

of

Philo

Judaeus

(20

50) on Genesis 6:1-5: “It is Moses’ custom

angelos

with

daimones

and

in

peopling the upper divisions of the universe with

In the Judaic religious tradition the concept of

spirits, Philo anticipates the subsequent adaptation of

mal’ak, a “messenger” of the one God, entirely subject

Greek philosophical speculation to Christian exegesis,

to his will, is found in the Old Testament, carried on

a most important result of which is On Celestial Hier¬

in the New Testament, and developed as a theological

archy, which becomes in turn the basis for most medi¬

idea in Christian thought. Also found in the Old Testa¬

eval scholastic doctrine on angels. The blending of

ment is the statement that certain “sons of God ’ (later

traditions persists throughout the Middle Ages and

interpreted as fallen angels) intermarried with women

Renaissance; as late as 1621 Robert Burton writes:

and gave birth to “giants” (Genesis 6:1-5). A satan

“Substantiae separatae and intelligences are the same

(“adversary”) or Satan is included in Jahweh’s council

which Christians call angels, and Platonists devils, for

of angels and functions as tempter of Job and David

they name all the spirits daemones, be they good or

in the Old Testament (Zechariah 3:1; Job 1 and 2; I

bad angels” (Anatomy of Melancholy, Part I, Sec. ii,

Chronicles 21:1). Alien national or nature gods are real

Mem. i, Subsec. 2).

though inferior spiritual powers in the Old Testament from 700-600 on.

Under Platonic influence Philo varies from the Hebrew view that the “gods” of the Gentiles are evil

In the Septuagint (200-100), the Greek angelos

daimones, treating them as good subsidiary powers. He

translates mal’ak, while daimon (or neuter daimonion)

sees (De somnium) these intermediary spirits allegor¬

with the meaning “a spirit less than divine” translates

ically in the angels who ascend and descend the ladder

the Hebrew for idols, alien gods, some hostile natural

in Jacob’s dream (Genesis 28:11-13), a figure that par¬

creatures, and natural evils, and theos is used for the

allels in Christian thought Plato’s ladder of Love in

one God. Hence, the hitherto morally ambivalent or

the Symposium and becomes one of the most influential

neutral word daimon acquires an almost exclusively

in Christian speculation and art.

evil connotation in the monotheistic context. At nearly the same time the idea of the angelos develops in Hebrew Rabbinical commentary as a source for the

Both Philo and Plutarch (De defectu oraculorum) anticipate the Christian Apologist Justin Martyr in explaining pagan myth, ritual, and oracles as the ac¬

explanation of the origin of evil. The “sons of God”

tions of daimones, but Justin’s interpretation of them

in Genesis 6 are interpreted as angels who had de¬

as deceits of the fallen angels and their offspring

scended of their own will and given birth through 668

angel

demons (Dialogue with Trypho,

a.d.

155) is the back¬

women to evil spirits in this world. Sanmiael, chief of

ground for Saint Augustine’s treatment of the pagan

these rebel angels had entered the serpent in Eden to

gods in The City of God, Books 1-X.

DEMONOLOGY The idea of a hierarchy of grades of being among the various spiritual beings—gods, daimons, heroes—

in a simpler mode, and governs the functions of any rank inferior to it.

correlative to their positions in the physical universe

Saint Thomas Aquinas carries speculation on the

seems to originate with the Neo-Platonists. In the

angelic nature to its theological conclusion, using

schematic order of spirits in Epinomis the greater the

Aristotle’s notion of the intelligences that move the

degree of participation in matter, the lower the status

spheres,

Neo-Platonic

ideas about pure spirits

as

of the being. Between the stars (which are made of

degrees of being, and Scriptural accounts of angels and

fire and are either gods or images of gods) and men

demons. Rejecting the early notion of their imion with

are the daimons made of aether, air, and water. Like

women, he affirms their incorporeality, and to the

Plato’s Eros in the Symposium—only in a physical

question of how to distinguish angels if they have no

sense—they fill the gap between gods and men and

matter to provide a basis for distinction, numerical or

communicate in both

More abstractly,

otherwise, he replies that each is a species unto itself.

Xenocrates theorizes that daimonic souls exist between

More importantly, in order to distinguish them from

the divine and the human on the analogy of the isosce¬

God, Thomas discerns composition in them in that their

les triangle existing as a semi-perfect form between

immaterial form remains in potentiality in what con¬

the equilateral triangle (perfect) and the scalene trian¬

cerns its actual existence, its own proper esse. Only

gle (imperfect). The schematization of grades of being

in God is there no difference between his esse and his

is even more abstract in Plotinus, where it takes the

essentia, between the act-of-being and what God is.

form of the doctrine of emanation of all grades of being

Thus Thomas places angels definitively within a God-

from the One, who is beyond being. In Plotinus, there

created imiverse. Between God and creation there is

directions.

is a subdivision of species of intelligences within the

“discontinuity in the way the act-of-being is possessed”

Intelligence, which is the first of the degrees emanating

although there is continuity of order of both knowing

from the One.

(becoming more and more simple reaching up to God)

In Proclus’ Platonic Theology (ca.

a.d.

450) the

and of being (becoming more and more pure) (Gilson,

hierarchical entities are correlated with the gods,

1957). Accepting the Judaic idea of the pre-Adamic

goddesses, daimons, and heroes of Hellenistic religion.

fall, Thomas deals with the problem of the angels’ sin

It can be said that in rationalizing thus their deities

as with the case of man’s: the angels have liberty of

the Neo-Platonists developed a “theology,” but their

choice. One fell through pride and envy in seeking to

concept of theos, as a being less than the Good, the

have final beatitude of his own power. Others, from

One, or some other philosophic principle, limited their

all ranks (Saint Gregory) or from only the lower ranks

“theology” to a “demonology”—a system dealing with

(Saint John Damascene) followed the first; some are

beings less than the highest being or principle. In

punished in hell and some in the cloudy atmosphere

Platonic Theology, Proclus correlates his gods with the

where they serve God by tempting men (Summa theo-

“intelligibles”

Plotinian “One.” He has no reason to rank any of them

logica, I, 63, passim). The idea of beings intermediate between the divine

on a level with the One, the first principle of reason,

and man changes definitively with the definition of God

as Christian theology ranks its unique Creator God.

and his relation to nature in the Thomistic philosophy

In Christian thought the Creator is, philosophically

of being. In withdrawing from nature true “divinity,”

speaking, the first principle, existing beyond nature but

Thomas redefines the border between the “natural” and

organized

hierarchically

under

the

not beyond being; and there is created nature, which

the “supernatural,” not placing it between the cor¬

includes both angels and demons—all things except

poreal and the incorporeal but between created nature

God. The anonymous Christian thinker called Dionysius

and the Creator. Hence, created nature, having been

the Areopagite adapts Proclus’ schema of incorporeal

though not the divine capacity for self-existence, be¬

beings to the various angels of Judaic-Christian revela¬

comes philosophically assured of the reality of its being

tion. In his Celestial Hierarchy he places in the highest

and of its complete accessibility to human reason and

triad the Seraphim (OT), Cherubim (OT), and Thrones

experimental investigation.

made by a God who freely bestows existential reality

(NT); in the second, Dominations (NT), Virtues (NT),

In Renaissance Christian thought it is clear that the

and Powers (NT); in the third, Principalities (NT),

divine is not locatable in anything short of God, whose

Archangels (NT), and Angels (OT, NT). The fusion of

essence is unique, but the revived Neo-Platonism of

the philosophic idea of beings who are pure intellect

Cornelius Agrippa, Marsilio Ficino, and Giordano

with the religious idea of angelic messengers is com¬

Bruno brings with it the old gods and demons located

plete when Dionysius says of the angels that “their life

in the stars, planets, and elements and the theurgy

is only intellection.” In Dionysius each rank contains

associated with them in the Hermetic tradition. Making

669

DESIGN ARGUMENT DESIGN ARGUMENT

use of the emanationist theory of the origin of being and the Pythagorean idea that man’s soul is akin to the divine, they attempt to carry on the old idea of

The design

argument in theology is often immediately

gods and demons in nature who are manipulatable by man.

identified with the “argument from design,” i.e., the

In the seventeenth century demonology becomes for

found in the world one may reasonably infer the exist¬

some a mistaken line of defense for Christianity based

ence of a purposeful Intelligence responsible for the

on the equation of the incorporeal with the super¬

world. Logically, however, the full design argument

natural. The power and reality of the devil were de¬

(or teleological argument) must be seen as more com¬

fended by polemicists such as Joseph Glanvill, S'ad-

plex in structure, since the argument from design itself

argument that from evidences of intelligent planning

ducismus triumphatus (1681) and Richard Baxter, The

rests on the controversial premiss that there are sig¬

Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691) as if God’s

nificant similarities between objects in nature (or nature

existence itself were involved. On the other hand, for rationalists such as Descartes the Thomistic distinction remains clear and demons themselves dwindle into sophisticated rhetorical figures, as for example in Med¬ itation I of his Discourse on Method, where the first step in systematic doubt is to entertain the possibility that all perceptions are the delusive work of a malig¬ nant demon. Such rhetorical use is echoed in J. C.

taken as a whole), on the one hand, and objects intelli¬ gently contrived by man for some purpose, on the other. Only after somehow supporting this preliminary analogical basis, which, if formalized, amounts to an “argument to (not from) design,” can one properly even begin to move on “from” design to invoke the theoretical need for a deity as cosmic Designer. His¬ torically both aspects have appeared in theological

Maxwell’s nineteenth-century figure of a demon who

speculation, although more explicit attention has usu¬

plays a logical role in his thought-experiment in statis¬

ally been paid to the move from apparently purposeful

tical thermodynamics.

natural phenomena to a divine Purposer than to the

In the nineteenth century. Renaissance demonology together with its Neo-Platonic philosophical founda¬

logically prior question of the actual presence of pur¬ poseful design in nature.

tions survives in the use of the old nature gods and demons, with their Judaic-Christian accretions,

as

/. ANCIENT ORIGINS OF THE ARGUMENT

sources of feeling in romantic and symbolist literature.

The prehistory of the design argument is to be sought

Concurrently, the history of demonology is used by

in the forms of thought characteristic of early man.

some historians of religion for their theory that moral dualism may be inherent in all historic religions.

Though these forms are difficult to reconstruct with any certainty, it does seem probable that mythopoeic consciousness was devoid of the sharp distinction be¬ tween animate and inanimate that we suppose to be

BIBLIOGRAPHY Denys L’Areopagite, La hierarchie celeste, eds. R. Roques, G. Heil, M. de Gandillac (Paris, 1958). Marcel Detienne, La notion de daimdn dans le pythagorisme ancien (Paris, 1963). E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1968). Gilbert Franfois, Le polytheisme et Vemploi au singulier des mots Oeos, Salpur dans la litterature grecque d Homere a Platon (Paris, 1957). Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Toronto, 1952); The Christian

obvious. Since the natural world was simply addressed in personal or quasi-personal terms, there seems to have been no sense of analogy in attributing purposive be¬ havior to the cosmos and its contents; purpose was immediately to be read off from natural events and things just as it was directly to be found in human society. Thus far, of coruse, there is no question of argument.

Thomas Aquinas, trans. L. K. Shook

Argument arises in Greece with pre-Socratic specula¬

(London, 1957). Francis X. Gokey, The Terminology for the

tion, and even then mythopoeic roots are not wholly

Devil and Evil Spirits in the Apostolic Fathers (Washington,

severed to whatever extent the living, purposive char¬

Philosophy of St.

D.C.,

1961).

(Munksgaard,

Soren 1966).

Jensen,

Dualism

Edward

and

Langton,

Demonology Essentials

of

Demonology (London, 1949). Proclus, The Elements of The¬ ology, rev. ed., trans. E. R. Dodds (Oxford, 1963). Erwin Rohde, Psyche, trans. W. B. Hillis (New York, 1925). Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York, 1969). HELEN P. TRIMPI

acter of nature is taken as a datum of experience rather than as an explicit consequence from evidence. It is not clear, in this context, exactly what was meant by Anaximander, a yormger contemporary of Thales in Miletus, when he affirmed that the indefinite primal stuff (the arretpov) of the universe “steers all.” If this “steering ’ is to be understood as somehow conscious and purposeful, then in Anaximander we may have

[See also Evil; Hierarchy; Music as a Demonic Art; Neo-

found at least the germ of the design argument as early

Platonism; Pythagorean. . . .]

as the first half of the sixth century

b.c.;

that is, An^xi-

DESIGN ARGUMENT mander may have argued that only because the aweipov

fourth century

“steers” all according to “justice” can one understand

Socrates was hoping for can be found in one of Anax¬

why the universe remains in orderly balance as it does.

agoras’ somewhat younger contemporaries, Diogenes

Aristotle, further, tells us that Anaximander credited

of Apollonia. Diogenes was an eclectic thinker, for the

this “steering” substance with being “divine” (Physica

most part, combining the interests of the early Milesian

b.c.,

but a close approximation of what

III 203b 7), though we must realize that such divinity

philosophers in identifying a primal world-substance

would have had very little in common with the an¬

with the quest of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras for expla¬

thropomorphic divinities of popular religious thought

nations of the ordered dynamics of change. Like Hera¬

or with any supernatural being. On the other hand,

clitus, Diogenes was much impressed by the regularity

it is likewise possible that Anaximander conceived of

of the world and the need to accoimt for it; and like

the awEipov as “steering” quite mechanically, or per¬

Anaxagoras he specified that this account could only

haps as manifesting only the immanent purposiveness

be given in terms of “intelligence” (p&qais). Intelligence

common to the “life” of nature as a whole.

he identified with warm air, following Anaximenes (the

Another partial hint of the design argument is found

Milesian successor of Anaximander), and he explained

in Heraclitus, at the very end of the sixth century or

its method of working through the mechanism of rare¬

early in the fifth,

faction and condensation. Beyond all this, however,

b.c.,

whose emphasis on the fluxing

character of all things led him to infer the need for

Diogenes made an explicit teleological claim—one that

a unifying formula of the flux, the Logos, which rules

we shall find very prominently in Plato and later

the struggle of opposites in the world of constant

tradition—that intelligence disposes of all things “for

change and insures that long-term balance prevails.

the best” (KCtWiora) (frag. 3, Simplicius Phys. 152, 13).

Once again it is not possible to be sure from extant

With this we find we are in possession of all the

sources whether Heraclitus conceived of the Logos as

elements ingredient in the design argument: (1) the

intelligent and purposeful, though subsequent signifi¬

observation that there is order in nature or that nature

cant Logos traditions in Stoicism and Christianity de¬

as a whole is orderly, (2) the asseveration that natural

velop this theme, but at least the essential intellectual

order is not self-explanatory but requires an ordering

demand for some agent to account for observed order

agency of some kind, (3) the identification of this

in a changing world was self-consciously sounded by

agency as explicitly aware and acting from intelligent

Heraclitus himself. Explicit appeal to “mind” (vovs) as the needed agent

benevolent moral purpose.

was first made by Anaxagoras, probably in Athens toward the middle of the fifth century,

b.c.,

when he

design, and (4) the attribution to this Intelligence of The first full articulation, in combination, of the various elements in the design argument was given by

developed a theory of the universe in which some

Plato. Here was no mere eclectic, however; the syn¬

principle of ordered change was seen to be necessary

thesis was distinctly his, and the argument he offered

over and above the infinite and confused swarm of

follows directly from central themes within his own

qualitatively distinct but intrinsically inert items that

philosophical position.

he believed to make up the universe. Mind, being the

One such theme is rooted in Plato’s view of soul

one reality that can remain itself while ordering and

as always the source of spontaneous motion. Our first

controlling other natures very different from itself and

experience of any genuine originative change springs

from each other, is uniquely qualified to rule the mixed

from within ourselves. Changes observed in our bodies

realm of nature. “For it is the finest of all things and

or in nature are always derivative, communicated from

purest, it has all knowledge about everything and the

something else which is already in motion, that motion

greatest power; and mind controls all things . . .” (Kirk

in turn borrowed from still something else, and so

and Raven, p. 373). Still this position falls short of a

on—until a truly originative or spontaneous motion is

full design argument, however, if Socrates’ complaint

finally introduced to ground the series. “Soul," there¬

(.Phaedo 98B) is justified, that Anaxagoras’ appeal to

fore, comes to have a technical meaning for Plato as

“mind” as a cosmic orderer had no bearing on the

the “self-moving” or the “beginning of motion” wher¬

deeper question “why” matters should stand as they

ever or whenever change genuinely originates: “He

do and not in some other way. It appears that “mind”

who affirms that self-motion is the very idea and es¬

was drawn in by Anaxagoras as an ordering dynamic

sence of the soul will not be put to confusion” (Phae-

principle only, and not as belonging to a moral agent

drus 245D). The changing universe, consequently, is not able to

expressing ends in view through the organization of the world order. For an unequivocally clear statement of such an

be understood on its own material terms alone. Its

argument we must await the writings of Plato in the

of initiating change, not merely of transmitting it.

changes demand the postulation of something capable

671

DESIGN ARGUMENT Hqw can a thing which is moved by another ever be the

of the world, so Aristotle argued against separating the

changes other, and that again other, and then thousands

source of order from the natural order itself. The uni¬

upon tens of thousands of bodies are set in motion, must not the beginning of all this motion be the change of the self-moving principle? (Laws X, 895).

verse contains goal-directed activity, even in areas of change where there is clearly no conscious deliber¬ ation, but Aristotle argued from this that in this case

The only known self-moving principle, however, is

“purpose” must be understood as inherent and non-

soul. Therefore it follows that soul must be invoked

deliberative. “For natural things are exactly those

to account adequately for the changes that we observe.

which do move continuously, in virtue of a principle

In the above we have witnessed the birth of the famous “first cause” argument; and for Plato the design argument follows immediately upon it. Having estab¬

inherent

in

goal . .

(Physics 199b).

themselves,

towards

a

determined

Thus, instead of making the inference from orderly

lished that the natural world is ultimately dependent

processes in nature to an intelligent orderer above or

upon soul, the question must be asked: “What kind

beyond nature, Aristotle offers a thoroughly immanent

of soul is it that rules the changing universe?” The

view of natural teleology and offers an illustration:

answer, Plato says, depends on the kinds of changes

“The best illustration is the case of a man being his

we actually observe. If the soul ruling nature is “good”—

own physician, for Nature is like that—agent and pa¬

and here Plato makes use of another of his prominent

tient at once” (Physics 199b). God, for Aristotle, neces¬

themes, urging the equation of goodness with rational¬

sarily exists as ultimate actuality, but he is too perfect

ity, harmony, intellectual coherence—the universe will

even to know about the changing, self-correcting do¬

exhibit lawful behavior. “But,” Plato allows, “if the

main of nature, much less to have taken any part in

world moves wildly and irregularly, then the evil soul

designing it. Plato’s greatest pupil abandoned both

guides it” (Laws X, 897B). A survey of pertinent fact,

Demiurge and separate realm of Forms as theoretically

however, particularly astronomical data, will convince

redundant, and with them, as we see, the design argu¬

any careful observer that nature changes with the

ment for God.

utmost regularity and that, in consequence: “There would be impiety in asserting that any but the most perfect soul or souls carries round the heavens” (Laws X, 898C). A more pictorially vivid version of this general posi¬

n.

THE MEDIEVAL “SYNTHESIS”

Despite significant support in the scientific writings of Galen (fl.

a.d.

164) and in the philosophy of Boethius

(480?—?524), there is little evidence of the design argu¬

tion is found in Plato’s Timaeus where the Demiurge

ment playing an important role in theological thought

is represented as a craftsman, fashioning the world of

before the thirteenth century of our era. Biblical

natural change by copying off eternal formal principles

writers did not characteristically argue at all, though

of reality into a matrix of flux. The myth adds little,

the wonders of nature are sometimes urged as illus¬

however, to the design argument itself except in pro¬

trations of the might and grandeur of God (e.g., Psalms

viding an answer to the ultimate question why the

8, 19). Likewise the Church Fathers spent their ener¬

cosmic artisan should have done his work at all. Plato’s

gies on other controversies than the existence of God;

suggestion is that the Demiurge acted from pure

and even when the latter question did arise as a ques¬

benevolence:

tion at all, the defense of belief was typically based

He was good; and in the good no jealousy in any matter

on what was taken as more worthy than the character

can ever arise. So, being without jealousy, he desired that

of the natural world. It was in this era, for example,

all things should come as near as possible to being like

that Saint Anselm (1033-1109) created the famous

himself. . . . Desiring, then, that all things should be good

ontological argument for God (Proslogion), purporting

and, so far as might be, nothing imperfect, the god took over all that is visible—not at rest, but in discordant and unordered motion—and brought it from disorder into order, since he judged that order was in every way the better

(Timaeus 29E-30A). Aristotle, although he shared Plato’s keen sense of

672

alleged “separating of the Forms” from the substances

beginning of change? Impossible. But when the self-moved

to depend on nothing beyond an understanding of what it means to be God in order to demonstrate his neces¬ sary existence. With the rediscovery of Aristotle’s philosophy, how¬ ever, and with the attempt of Saint Thomas Aquinas to build an intellectually viable Christian theology on

the order within nature and argued forcefully on other

a fundamentally Aristotelian framework, the design

grounds for the existence of conscious deity at the apex

argument reappears. This would be odd, since we have

of actuality, did not advance the design argument we

seen that Aristotle himself dispensed with this argu¬

have been following. Just as he objected to Plato’s

ment for God, if it were not for two pertinent consid-

DESIGN ARGUMENT erations: first. Saint Thomas was by no means slavish

the arrow. The model for nature is clearly technologi¬

in his use of Aristotle (as is sometimes falsely alleged),

cal as contrasted to Aristotle’s mainly organismic ex¬

and, second, Plato’s Timaeus had exerted great influ¬

amples of immanent teleology, such as the physician

ence over the intervening centuries and had given

who treats himself.

philosophical reinforcement to the biblical vision of

Third, Saint Thomas concludes with the claim that

God as actively concerned with the created universe.

his argument has shown that there must be “some

Saint Thomas’s design argument, therefore, stands out

intelligent being” who is responsible for the alleged

as a fundamentally non-Aristotelian correction of Aris¬

design in the world. This, too, is a bolder claim that

totle in a corpus that is usually considered to be a

Plato permitted himself. Plato, as we saw, admitted

synthesis of Christian faith with Aristotelianism.

the possibility of plural souls guiding the orderly phe¬

The argument itself, the fifth of Saint Thomas’s Five

nomena of nature. Saint Thomas gives no argument

Ways (of which the first three are indeed Aristotelian),

here to show why his evidence points to only one

reads as follows:

intelligent being rather than several, and we shall see

We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting

that this remains a persistent problem for the design argument taken by itself.

always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain

Fourth, and boldest of all, Saint Thomas equates the

the best result. Hence it is plain that they achieve their

“intelligent being” of his argument with God. Perhaps

end, not fortuitously, but designedly. Now whatever lacks

this equation can be made good, but it must be recalled

knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be di¬

that insofar as Plato argued carefully in the Laws he

rected by some being endowed with knowledge and intelli¬

claimed only to have shown the need for postulating

gence; as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God

(Summa Theologica, Q. 2, Art. 3).

“the most perfect soul or souls” to account for specific astronomical phenomena. Even in the mythological Timaeus, where a single perfect soul is depicted as ordering the whole cosmos, Plato does not go beyond

There are several interesting features of this argu¬

presenting him as a Demiurge, limited by what he finds

ment. First, it is taken as obvious that there are end-

by way of formal possibilities and material medium

directed activities within nature. This claim, on which

for the always somewhat imperfect realization of these

the rest of the argument depends, is significantly

pure Ideas. Can the design argument support more

different from Plato’s appeal to the order of the visible

than this? It all depends, assuredly, on what is supposed

universe, especially astronomical order which seems

to be meant by “God” whether God’s existence can

not to be directed at any identifiable goal. It may be

be supported by this approach. Saint Thomas, at least,

that orderly change and end-directed change may be

whose conception of God was shaped by both biblical

intimately related in some way. At the moment, how¬

and Aristotelian influences, seems unaware of the pos¬

ever, it remains a disputable point and one which needs

sibility that there may be a wide gap between what,

to be argued for.

on the most generous possible reading, he has shown,

Second, we see that Saint Thomas has adopted Aristotle’s remarks about the presence of “purpose” in nature without accepting his conclusion that such observable regularities may be accounted for by appeal

and the God of his theological concern. III. MODERN DEVELOPMENTS OF THE ARGUMENT

to an immanent teleology. This view, indeed, is not

It is significant that revival of interest in the design

ever considered. In this dismissal by silence we find

argument appeared in Europe along with the birth of

an implicit dualism between bodies and minds that

natural science in its distinctly modern form. It is the

Aristotle found objectionable in Plato. It is not self-

most empirical of the arguments for God, requiring,

evident, of course, which position is the stronger.

as we have seen, observational premisses about the kind

Aristotle argued that such “separation” is in the end

of order we discover in nature. These are not the only

metaphysically redundant; Plato, on the other hand,

premisses, of course, that go into its structure, and we

could have replied that in this respect his great succes¬

have already noted some of the distinctively philo¬

sor had not sufficiently advanced beyond the mytho-

sophical disputes that may arise in connection with its

poeic blurring of distinctions between the animate and

use; but from this point forward we shall find that the

the inanimate. Saint Thomas, in any event, we find to

design argument is intimately linked with the history

have applied to natural changes a very sharp distinc¬

of modern science.

tion between the “ensouled” and the “unsouled,” as

Copernicus, who in many ways began this history,

shown by his choice of illustration of the archer and

appealed to the wonderful harmony and divine reason-

673

DESIGN ARGUMENT ableness of the sun’s placement at the center of the

That “mere mechanical causes” could have given rise

universe: “In the middle of all sits Sun enthroned. In

to such regular motions as the facts of science show

this most beautiful temple could we place this luminary

is quite inconceivable, Newton insisted, and concluded,

in any better position from which he can illuminate

as Plato also had: “This most beautiful system of the

the whole at once? ” (De revolutionibus orbium caeles-

sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the

tium [1543], Book I, Part 10). Likewise Kepler, the

counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful

great Neo-Platonist astronomer, advanced passionate

Being” (ibid.).

arguments for the elegant and beautiful mathematical structure of the cosmic design.

But unlike Plato, whom we saw to have allowed the possible multiplicity of intelligent and powerful beings,

Through the seventeenth century it continued to be

Newton adds a new argument, now for the first time

the scientists, or those with deep scientific interests,

made scientifically possible by his having shown the

who stated the design argument with most force. John

existence of a single system of the world. “And if the

Ray, author of The Wisdom of God Manifested in the

fixed stars are the centres of other like systems, these,

Works of Creation (1691), was best known as a wide-

being formed by the like wise counsel, must be all

ranging naturalist. Robert Boyle, the eminent physicist

subject to the dominion of One; especially since the

and chemist, was responsible for developing an early

light of the fixed stars is of the same nature with the

analogy between the universe and a clock, and the

light of the sun, and from every system light passes

Boyle Lectures established by his will were influential

into all the other systems” (ibid.). Although we have

in defense of Christianity among the intellectually

previously seen this attribution of unity in the cosmic

advanced. Robert Hooke was also a brilliant scientist

designer as mythically portrayed by Plato and as theo¬

who, among other achievements, anticipated Newton’s

logically affirmed by Saint Thomas, this is the first time

inverse square law and formulated the kinetic theory

we find the design argument itself extended to support

of gases, and lent his support to belief in God based

such a monotheistic conclusion.

on the order of nature. Even Ralph Cudworth, chief

Newton went even further, however, and argued that

of the Cambridge Platonists, a philosopher who seems

such universal control over limitless space and endless

the one prominent exception to the list of scientists

duration as must be admitted for the One Being, given

employing the design argument, also cast his argument

the Newtonian system of the world, requires that this

for a divine intelligence into the scientific matrix of

Cosmic Intelligence also be recognized as Lord God.

his day in The True Intellectual System of the Universe

“He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient;

(1678).

that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity;

The greatest scientist of the age, however, was Isaac

his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all

Newton, whose publication of the Principia (1687)

things, and knows all things that are or can be done”

established the framework of the new science and drew

(ibid.).

the physical outlines of the great world-machine that

For some time the prestige of the leaders of modern

was to dominate scientific imagination for centuries.

scientific thought supported the design argument they

Newton’s own deployment of tire design argument,

employed and believed. Even David Hume’s brilliant

therefore, is especially interesting. Newton summarized

attacks in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,

his view in the “General Scholium” added to Book

posthumously published in 1779, did not immediately

Three, “The System of the World,” of the Principia

dampen the enthusiasm of eighteenth- and early nine¬

in 1713, and carefully revised it in 1726. There he

teenth-century exponents. The classical statement of

argued that the beautiful arrangement of the heavenly

the argument in its modern form, indeed, was not

bodies—especially the planets, the comets, and the

published rmtil 1802 when William Paley brought out

moons of the planets—demands an intelligent agent

his celebrated Natural Theology, or Evidences of the

to account for such formal perfection. The great law

Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from

of gravitation, which he had first enunciated, could

the Appearances of Nature. In that work Paley argued

only deal with part of the facts:

explicitly for the presence of intelligently designed features in nature. The marks of design, he said, are

674

The planets and comets will constantly pursue their revolu¬ tions in orbits given in kind and position, according to the laws above explained; but though these bodies may, indeed, continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws (Principia, “General Scholium,” 1713).

what we observe in contrasting a watch with a stone. The stone, for all we can tell, might just have “hap¬ pened”; but the watch is clearly put together out of parts that work together in an arrangement that is essential to their function, and the function of the whole has a discernible and beneficial use. Wherever we find such a constellation of characteristics, Paley

DESIGN ARGUMENT said, we must admit that we are in the presence of contrivance

and “design,” and since in our experi¬

ence the only known source of such contrivance is the intelligence

of some

designer,

we

are

entitled—

obliged—to infer an intelligent designer somewhere behind anything possessing the above mentioned marks of design. Given this general approach, Paley then multiplies instance after instance of natural phenomena that require the admission of intelligent design in their contrivance. Not astronomical phenomena alone, as had been the mainstay of design arguments from Plato to Newton, but biological mechanisms were Paley’s stock in trade. The human eye, plants, anatomical and physiological features of men and beasts, instincts, birds, insects—all these and more went into Paley’s massive argument, the constant theme of which was that all these data reveal elaborate structures made up of parts which work together with amazing ingenuity to perform useful functions for their possessors. Each taken separately, he contended, proved the need for an intelligent designer working behind the “appear¬ ances of nature”; taken together the case was crushingly conclusive. Paley drew back, however, from the strongest of

ever, Paley believed, since the limitations of natural theology can always be supplemented by revealed theology which, thanks to the design argument, has been shown to be wholly compatible with rigorous empirical thinking. The pungent philosophical critique, however, of David Hume had raised serious questions about the claims on behalf of the design argument’s empirical rigor. And Immanuel Kant had pressed equally severe objections against the assumption that traditional the¬ ology can find relevant support in the design argument. (For an earlier severe critique of the design argument, cf. Spinoza’s Ethics, Part I, appendix.) Hume was not the first to point out that the design argument is an argument from analogy. Samuel Butler had published his influential book, The Analogy of Religion, in 1736; and from then on it was generally acknowledged by users of the argument that their reasoning rested on the discovery of similarity between the world, or objects in the world, and products of human continuance. Hume, however, was the first to raise sustained and imaginative objections to the key analogy itself. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion he attacked from several sides. Analogies are

Newton’s claims for the unity and infinity of the deity

most trustworthy when the things compared are more

thus allegedly proved. With greater philosophic cau¬

or less comparable, he argued; but how comparable,

tion he admitted that attributes like “omnipotence,”

really, are things in the world to the world as a whole?

“omniscience,”

Comparing causes between things or events in the

“infinity,” and the like cannot be

strictly derived from the design argument: Nevertheless, if we be careful to imitate the documents of our religion by confining our explanations to what concerns ourselves, and do not affect more precision in our ideas than the subject allows of, the several terms which are employed to denote the attributes of the Deity may be made, even in natural religion, to bear a sense consistent with truth and reason and not surpassing our comprehension (Natural

Theology, Ch. XXIV). This more accurate way of dealing with such terms is to recognize their logical status as “superlatives expressing our conception of these attributes in the

world may sometimes be justified, but logic stretches beyond its breaking point when one of the terms of the comparison is supposed to be beyond the world as somehowJXs cause. Again, how alike, really (asked Hume), are the forces now in existence with those which would have been in the world when it was being formed? We cannot say, and dare not suppose that our little analogies, drawn from the present state of things, can have fruitful application under such vastly different conditions. What a suspicious choice, in any case, to make human intelligence the model for the cosmic cause! The vice of pride may well be lurking here, especially when there are so many alternative analogies

strongest and most elevated terms which language

that might do equally well to account for the order

supplies’ (ibid.). “Omnipotence,” thus construed, can

observed in nature. Why not, Hume asked, take forces

mean no more than “powerful beyond all comparison”

of generation or vegetation as explanatory of the

since he must be allowed to be powerful enough to

world? Why not take the analogy, in other words, from

design and rule our observed universe. “Omniscience,”

what appears to be immanent ordering principles in

likewise, literally means whatever enormous wisdom is required to account for the yet unmeasured intricacy of the world’s intelligible structure. The uniqueness of this cosmic intelligence, too, is not demonstrable from the design argument: “Certain however it is,” Paley acknowledged, “that the whole argument for the divine unity goes no further than to a unity of counsel” (Nat¬ ural Theology, Ch. XXV). This is quite enough, how¬

nature, such as the spinning of a spider’s web? The analogy to intelligence is not only farfetched, he chal¬ lenged, but it is also far from uniquely serviceable—if any such explanation must be offered. But must it? Hume insisted not; any such explanation leads on to a never-ending regress of further questions (such as, “Who designed God’s intelligence if all orderly things require a designer?”); any such analogy leads too far

675

DESIGN ARGUMENT if it leads anywhere (e.g., can we deny that we experi¬ ence intelligence only with embodied organisms? Must

Kant was generous to the design argument, as we

we therefore attribute hands, feet, sex to God?); and,

see in the above quotation, on the ground that when

finally, no causal argument for the whole universe

he wrote these words there seemed to be no more

seems logically possible in any event, since the uni¬

theoretically adequate hypothesis on which to explain

verse, being unique, does not fall into the class of

the amazing intricacy of the natural order than that

caused things—effects are only known to be such by

of intelligent design. Hume’s proliferation of alterna¬

repeated conjunction in experience with their causes—

tives was more ingenious than convincing if looked to

and therefore

the world is improperly called an

for genuine help in understanding the facts such as

“effect.” Besides this volley of arguments against the logical

those Paley had later piled so high. This situation, however, was radically changed by Charles Darwin’s

underpinnings of the design argument, Hume pressed

Origin of Species (1859); and the weight of scientific

the darker side of the world’s organization. If the well

prestige, which had supported the argument since its

functioning nature is evidence for intelligence, benev¬

championing by physicists of the seventeenth century,

olence, and power, he pointed out, then disease, dis¬

fell heavily against it because of the biologists of the

order, and natural evil is counter-evidence for stupid¬ ity, malice, or impotence. Which shall it be? The

nineteenth. Darwin’s primary contribution to the opponents of

design argument opens the door to natural evidence

the design argument was to make available an intel¬

at a very high cost to one who would preserve belief

ligible and convincing alternative causal hypothe¬

in the perfection of God since the evidence, if taken

sis—just such as Kant acknowledged he had failed to

seriously, can never lead to such a conclusion.

find—to take the place of intelligent contrivance. This

Kant, although more sympathetic to the design ar¬

alternative was the mechanism of natural selection,

gument than Hume in some ways, develops the last

through which “adaptation to environment” took the

point into a necessary principle. The argument, Kant

place of “purposive design” as the concept by which

said, “is the oldest, the clearest, and the most accordant

Paley’s evidences could be understood. Changes in

with the common reason of mankind” (The Critique

biological species have occurred randomly over vast

of Pure Reason, 2nd ed. [1787], B651); but it cannot

periods of time, Darwin argued, and the fonns of life

possibly lead to a theologically significant conclusion

best equipped in the struggle for scarce resources have

about God.

merely a

left their progeny to be admired by the natural theolo¬

God is not,

Kant insisted,

Demiurge; God is not only a Designer of nature’s

gians. Their intricate structures and admirable func¬

wonderful contrivances. God, to be theologically ade¬

tioning need not be attributed to an intelligence behind

quate, must be understood through a completely de¬

nature, however, since the facts are as they must be

terminate concept as absolutely necessary, perfectly

if living forms are to survive at all.

powerful, all knowing, utterly good, and all the rest.

It might be tempting to compare this position, on

Between the essentially loose textured concept of an

which nature is alleged to need no external intellect

Author of the world which is appropriate to the em¬

to bring about orderly and well adapted changes, with

pirical argument before us—the concept of a being

Aristotle’s urging of immanent teleology against Plato’s

who is (vaguely and at most) “very” powerful, “enor¬

more dualistic view. To some extent the parallels hold:

mously” wise, “admirably” good, and tire like—and the

Plato, lover of mathematics, reminds us of Newton;

full determinate concept of God there is a radical

and Aristotle, son of a physician and ardent collector

logical gap. It is a gap that in the nature of the case,

of biological specimens, cannot fail to suggest an earlier

because empirical evidence is never complete, can

Darwin. But the biology of Darwin is post-Newtonian,

never be closed by any amount of additional empirical

and it would be misleading to push the comparison

evidence. The design argument, therefore, Kant con¬

too far. Precisely what is not present in the evolution¬

cluded, can never succeed in helping theology in ways

ary process of natural selection is immanent purpose

theology should welcome, though it may convince the

in the Aristotelian sense. Teleology, immanent as well

speculative reasoner that:

as external, is dispensable, and totally non-telic proces¬

If we are to specify a cause at all, we cannot here proceed more securely than by analogy with those purposive pro¬ ductions of which alone the cause and mode of action are fully known to us. Reason could never be justified in aban¬ doning the causality which it knows for grounds of explana¬

676

/V. THE ARGUMENT SINCE DARWIN

tion which are obscure, of which it does not have any knowledge, and which are incapable of proof (ibid.).

ses of chance variations and physical interplay consti¬ tute all the parameters of the theory. From its original home in biology, evolutionary thinking has spread to other fields as well. Theories of cosmic evolution have replaced Newton’s appeal to intelligent design in the arrangement of the solar sys¬ tem and the galaxies. Historical geology, in a closely

DESIGN ARGUMENT related development, has extended understanding of the present state of our terrestrial environment. In all this “evolution” has come to mean something more inclusive than Darwin’s original theory, but in all its scientific applications evolutionary thinking has in¬

BIBLIOGRAPHY Careful examination of selected Greek texts is provided in G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1957), which also offers an excellent bibliogra¬ phy and useful indexes. Various translations of Plato, Aris¬

terposed itself between the “appearances of nature”

totle, and Saint Thomas are readily available. A good trans¬

and any easy appeal to the explanatory need for

lation of Nicholas Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium

design. Given this situation the design argument in its clas¬ sical form has found few friends in recent times. There have been, however, post-Darwinian variations of the ancient argument intended to take account of the battering it has received from both philosophy and science since the mid-eighteenth century. The laws of the natural order itself, including the laws of evolution,

caelestium (1543), Book I, is found in Occasional Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society (London, 1947), Vol. 2, No. 10, by J. F. Dobson and S. Brodetsky. David Hume’s Dia¬ logues Concerning Natural Religion (originally published 1779) may be found in a popular edition edited by Henry David Aiken (New York, 1948). Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der

reinen Vernunft (first ed. 1781) has been well translated by Max Muller (second ed. revised, 1927) as well as by Norman Kemp Smith, whose more interpretative translation (1929)

may be taken as requiring some explanation in terms

reflects Kant’s second edition of 1787. William Paley’s

of a transcendent purpose. F. R. Tennant, for example,

Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attrib¬ utes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature

wrote: The forcibleness of Nature’s suggestion that she is the out¬ come of intelligent design lies not in particular cases of adaptedness in the world, nor even in the multiplicity of them. . . . The forcibleness of the world’s appeal consists rather in the conspiration of innumerable causes to produce, by their united and reciprocal action, and to maintain a general order of nature (Philosophical Theology, Cambridge [1930], II, 79).

Others in the twentieth century, like Peter A. Bertocci, following Tennant, and Charles Hartshome, following Alfred North Whitehead, have developed current var¬ iations of the argument; and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin worked out a form of design argument in his deeply evolutionary and widely influential posthumous work

(London, 1802) is available in an abridged version edited, with a critical introduction, by Frederick Ferre (Indianapo¬ lis, 1963). Modem works relevant to the support of the design argument include F. R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology, Vol. II: The World, The Soul, and God (Cambridge, 1930); Charles Hartshome, Man’s Vision of God (New York, 1941); P. Lecomte du Nouy, Human Destiny (New York, 1947); Peter A. Bertocci, Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (New York, 1951), especially Chs. XXI-XV; and P. Teilhard de Chardin, Le Phenomene humain (Paris, 1955), translated by Bernard Wall as The Phenomenon of Man (New York, 1959). Some recent works relevant to the attack on the argument include G. G. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven, 1949); C. J. Ducasse, A Philosophical Scrutiny of

remains alive, therefore; and though it has lost much

Religion (New York, 1953), Ch. XV; John Hospers, An Intro¬ duction to Philosophical Analysis (New York, 1953), Ch. V; and Michael Scriven, Primary Philosophy (New York, 1966),

of its support in philosophical circles, its perennial

Ch. IV.

The Phenomenon of Man (1959). The ancient argument

appeal to religious persons and to others who approach

FREDERICK FERRfi

the intelligible order of nature with a touch of wonder

[See also Analogy; Anthropomorphism; Causation, Final

and awe will in all likelihood assure its continued

Causes; Evolutionism; God; Metaphor; Myth; Pre-Platonic

survival as a live topic for meditation and debate.

Conceptions; Skepticism; Uniformitarianism.]

677

>