Thinking Impossibilities: The Intellectual Legacy of Amos Funkenstein 9781442689404

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: The Last German-Jewish Philosopher: An Intellectual Biography of Amos Funkenstein
PART I: HISTORICAL DIALECTICS
1. Divine Omnipotence and First Principles: A Late Medieval Argument on the Subalternation of the Sciences
2. Was Kepler a Secular Theologian?
3. Jewish Traditionalism and Early Modern Science: Rabbi Israel Zamosc’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Berlin, 1744)
4. Religion, Theology, and the Hermetic Imagination in the Late German Enlightenment: The Case of Johann Salomo Semler
5. Science and the Musical Imagination from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period
PART II: HISTORICAL ACCOMMODATIONS
6. Amos Funkenstein on the Theological Origins of Historicism
7. Of Divine Cunning and Prolonged Madness: Amos Funkenstein on Maimonides’ Historical Reasoning
8. History and/or Memory: The Origins of the Principle of Accommodation
9. Historical Consciousness Revisited: From Vico’s Mythology to Funkenstein’s Methodology
10. Francesco Bianchini, Historian. In Memory of Amos Funkenstein
PART III: MAKING KNOWLEDGE
11. Amos Funkenstein and the History of Scepticism
12. Two Talmudic Understandings of the Dictum ‘Appoint for Yourself a Teacher’
LAST WORDS
13. Jewish History among the Thorns
A Bibliography of the Published Works of Amos Funkenstein
Contributors
Index

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THINKING IMPOSSIBILITIES: THE INTELLECTUAL LEGACY OF AMOS FUNKENSTEIN

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Amos Funkenstein

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THINKING IMPOSSIBILITIES The Intellectual Legacy of Amos Funkenstein

Edited by Robert S. Westman and David Biale

Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

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Verso Running Head © The Regents of the University of California 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9795-8

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Thinking impossibilities : the intellectual legacy of Amos Funkenstein / edited by Robert S. Westman and David Biale. (UCLA Center/Clark series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9795-8 1. Funkenstein, Amos. 2. History – Philosophy. 3. Europe –Intellectual life – History. 4. Science – History. I. Funkenstein, Amos. II. Westman, Robert S. III. Biale, David, 1949– IV. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. V. University of California, Los Angeles. Center for 17th- & 18thCentury Studies VI. Series: UCLA Clark Memorial Library series. B29.T479 2008

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C2008-900898-7

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii Preface ix

Introduction: The Last German-Jewish Philosopher: An Intellectual Biography of Amos Funkenstein 3 david biale and robert s. westman

PART I: HISTORICAL DIALECTICS 1 Divine Omnipotence and First Principles: A Late Medieval Argument on the Subalternation of the Sciences steven livesey 2 Was Kepler a Secular Theologian? robert s. westman

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3 Jewish Traditionalism and Early Modern Science: Rabbi Israel Zamosc’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Berlin, 1744) 63 gad freudenthal 4 Religion, Theology, and the Hermetic Imagination in the Late German Enlightenment: The Case of Johann Salomo Semler 97 peter hanns reill 5 Science and the Musical Imagination from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period 112 dorit tanay

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PART II: HISTORICAL ACCOMMODATIONS 6 Amos Funkenstein on the Theological Origins of Historicism samuel moyn 7 Of Divine Cunning and Prolonged Madness: Amos Funkenstein on Maimonides’ Historical Reasoning abraham p. socher

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8 History and/or Memory: The Origins of the Principle of Accommodation 193 carlo ginzburg 9 Historical Consciousness Revisited: From Vico’s Mythology to Funkenstein’s Methodology 207 joseph mali 10 Francesco Bianchini, Historian. In Memory of Amos Funkenstein 227 j.l. heilbron

PART III: MAKING KNOWLEDGE 11 Amos Funkenstein and the History of Scepticism richard h. popkin

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12 Two Talmudic Understandings of the Dictum ‘Appoint for Yourself a Teacher’ 288 hanina ben-menahem

LAST WORDS 13 Jewish History among the Thorns amos funkenstein

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A Bibliography of the Published Works of Amos Funkenstein Contributors 339 Index

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Acknowledgments

In June 1996, the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, hosted a conference, first suggested by its director, Peter H. Reill, entitled ‘The Scholar, the Intellectual, the Teacher: Historical Representations, A Tribute to Amos Funkenstein.’ Originally, it was hoped that Funkenstein himself would be present for the occasion. Remarking on his absence, his longtime colleague Hans Rogger said, ‘I can best envision him sitting in the front row on the edge of his seat, twisting a lock of his hair, raising his hand before the speaker has barely finished, paying him a compliment, and then launching into a small counter- or complementary lecture.’ Although without benefit of such counter-lectures, the essays in this volume, many of which were presented at the 1996 conference, engage and honour Amos Funkenstein’s unusually wide-ranging contributions as a historian and the example that he set in the way he taught and lived his life as an intellectual. This collection has been long in the making. We wish here to acknowledge the forbearance and goodwill of those several original contributors who did not lose hope in this book’s eventual appearance. We are especially grateful for the steadfast support of Esti Micenmacher, the timely interventions of Gad Freudenthal, and the invaluable work of the staff of the William Andrews Clark Library and the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. We especially thank Ellen Wilson for her excellent work on the index and for contributions beyond the call of duty to the proofreading process. The editors and authors also gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following essays: David Biale, ‘The Last German Jewish Philosopher,’ Jewish Social Studies 6, 1 (Fall 1999); Robert S. Westman, ‘Eloge: Amos Funkenstein,’ Isis 90 (September 1999): 554–7; Samuel

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Moyn, ‘Amos Funkenstein on the Theological Origins of Historicism,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 64, 4 (October 2003); Abraham P. Socher, ‘Of Divine Cunning and Prolonged Madness: Amos Funkenstein on Maimonides’ Historical Reasoning,’ Jewish Social Studies 6, 1 (Fall 1999); Gadi Algazi and Esti Micenmacher, ‘A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Amos Funkenstein (1937–1995),’ Aleph 3 (2003).

Introduction

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Preface

Rare it is that an intellectual can leave a profound imprint on one field, let alone several. Amos Funkenstein’s intellectual range exceeded what one might expect from three or four scholars of outstanding talent: the philosophy of history from antiquity to modernity, medieval and early modern history of science, medieval scholasticism, and Jewish history in all of its periods. This collection of essays brings together Funkenstein’s colleagues, friends, and students to engage with important dimensions of his intellectual legacy. Originating in a conference in his memory, organized by the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and EighteenthCentury Studies and held at the William Andrews Clark Library in 1996, the essays found here are those that take direct inspiration from Funkenstein’s remarkable thought. The editors have also invited a number of essays that seemed particularly relevant to the purpose and spirit of this volume, including two (by Samuel Moyn and Abraham Socher) that initially appeared elsewhere. Only Funkenstein’s impact on the field of Jewish studies is somewhat underrepresented here (although Gad Freudenthal and Socher do speak directly to this subject), for the simple reason that a special issue of Jewish Social Studies (1999) brought together many of Funkenstein’s students in Jewish history to consider his contributions to that field. Funkenstein’s diverse interests were bound together by certain common figures of thought (or topoi, as he liked to say), described in greater detail in the editors’ introductory essay. In addition, these themes emerge out of the essays collected here and quite naturally dictate their organization. First and foremost, Funkenstein insisted on searching out the premodern intellectual grounds of modern ideas. Later thought patterns were dialectically prepared rather than bearing

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a simple linear relation to their successors. The seeming ‘impossibilities’ of one historical moment became positive resources of conceptual construction and development in another. The relationship between medieval theology and modern secularism revealed just such a paradoxical dialectic: God’s attributes, as conceived by medieval scholastics, evolved into secularized forms in early modern science and political theory, creating what he called a ‘secular theology.’ In another paradigm, a later thought structure transformed a minor possibility into a hegemonic one. The first set of essays in this volume variously explore such transformations. Steven Livesey carefully probes late medieval scholastic struggles to defend the certitude of theology within the constraining resources of Aristotelian disciplinarity. Early moderns, still grappling with Aristotelian conceptions of knowledge, would work out a more relaxed view of cross-disciplinarity. For Funkenstein these engagements opened up a wider vision of knowledge as ‘knowing by doing.’ In a detailed study of the polymathic Johannes Kepler, Robert S. Westman tests the analytic value of Funkenstein’s notion of secular theology as a theology oriented towards the created world and directed towards a new kind of audience outside the institution of the church. Kepler becomes an interesting case for examining Funkenstein’s notion that, in the seventeenth century, Aristotelian disciplinary classifications broke down and ‘God ceased to be the monopoly of the theologians.’ Gad Freudenthal shifts the discussion to still another Funkensteinian theme: the tensions and surprising paradoxes engendered by the encounter of seventeenth-century discoveries with traditionalist learning. Israel Zamosc, an important eighteenth-century Polish Jewish enlightener (maskil) illustrates how these modernizing currents sometimes directly assisted the defence of traditional Jewish natural knowledge against Greek philosophy; yet, at other times, Zamosc recoiled from their subversive impact, taking refuge in an anti-Enlightenment fideism. If the case of Zamosc reveals one kind of dialectic between Enlightenment and traditional religion in the Jewish context, Johann Salomo Semler demonstrates another one for the German Enlightenment. For Peter H. Reill, Semler, a theologian who wrote in defence of hermetic medicine and chemistry, shows that the Enlightenment was far less secular than is commonly believed and that, following Funkenstein, ‘absurdities can serve as the cornerstone for a set of theories that are neither absurd nor outlandish.’

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Finally, Dorit Tanay applies Funkenstein’s dialectic between medieval and modern science to operatic discourse. What late medieval musicians entertained as only theoretical possibilities later came to be realized in new forms. And seventeenth-century opera, particularly Monteverdi’s Orpheus, embodied in a musical idiom thirteenth- and fourteenth-century theological themes. In the second part of this volume, we turn to Funkenstein’s preoccupation with the history of the philosophy of history, a subject to which he devoted his doctoral dissertation and many subsequent works. One idea, in particular, stands out: God adapts his revelation to the capacities of human beings. Funkenstein called this ‘the principle of accommodation.’ As human capacities change over time, this revelation can shed old meanings and assume new ones. Similarly for the nineteenthcentury historicist idea that every age is equally ‘close to God’: it too had its dialectical origins in earlier writers like Vico and Maimonides and, ultimately, in early Christianity and apocalyptic Judaism. At a time when historians were becoming enamoured of well-defined episodes and thick descriptions of the local, Funkenstein unfashionably focused on origins over the longue durée, maintaining for the philosophy of history, as he did for the Scientific Revolution, that the ancient and medieval prepared the ground for their own transformation in the modern age. Historical consciousness was not an exclusively modern idea, even for the Jews, who seemingly eschewed the writing of history before the nineteenth century. Samuel Moyn broadly surveys Funkenstein’s historical thought, arguing that it originated both in reaction to Hegel’s division of history into the objective and subjective and in dialogue with Karl Löwith, who pioneered the notion that historicism secularized Christian philosophy of history. For Moyn, Funkenstein’s innovation lay in tracing how the historical method itself should be understood as a by-product of the secularization process. Next, Carlo Ginzburg engages with Funkenstein’s idea that historical consciousness mediates between history and memory. Ginzburg finds the idea of historical accommodation in Augustine’s ambivalent relationship to the Old Testament: the past must be understood both in its own terms (memory) and as a link in a chain that ultimately leads to us (history). He concludes that this tension, which is a crucial element in our own notion of history, ‘is a secularized projection of the Christian ambivalence towards the Jews.’ Abraham Socher then examines Funkenstein’s treatment of Mai-

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monides’ historicizing of the divine commandments, a central text in the development of the idea of accommodation. He shows how Funkenstein associates modern historicism with this passage, while Mary Douglas finds a very different lesson in the importance of ritual. The first reflects interaction with surrounding cultures and is historically contingent; the second is culturally autonomous. The debate between Funkenstein and Douglas is thus emblematic of the difference between the disciplines of history and anthropology. Finally, a key figure for Funkenstein in the development of modern historical consciousness was Giambattista Vico, and two of our authors foreground his importance. For Vico, each age had its own truths, truths that we may dismiss as myths but that are in fact the true story or vera narratio of every nation. Joseph Mali shows how Funkenstein adopted this idea from Vico in his own historical work, ranging from the seventh-century Sefer Zerubavel to his treatment of modern Zionism. John Heilbron demonstrates vividly how Vico’s own ideas were inherited from his elder contemporary, Francesco Bianchini. Analysing Bianchini’s Istoria universale, he shows that its author had a far more optimistic idea of progress than did Vico. In the spirit of searching for the origins of ideas, Heilbron’s treatment of Bianchini is precisely the kind of insight that Funkenstein would have cherished. At the end of his life, Funkenstein was at work on a monumental – but never completed – history of the idea of knowledge. All of the essays in this volume, of course, deal with some aspect of this synoptic theme, but two take it up directly. In a brief but poignant comment, the late Richard Popkin describes his decades-long debate with Funkenstein over the origins of early modern scepticism. Where Popkin looked to the revival of the writings of the ancient Sextus Empiricus, Funkenstein characteristically urged attention to the dialectical development of late medieval scholasticism. The final essay in Part 3, by Hanina Ben-Menahem, examines the transmission of rabbinic knowledge. The personal mode, emphasizing the relationship between teacher and disciple, took precedence in the Talmud over the more passive, impersonal mode embraced in the Middle Ages by Maimonides. Ben-Menahem correlates these two modes of transmission with a distinction Funkenstein made between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ forms of knowledge. While the personal was associated with closed knowledge in rabbinic culture, the same cannot be said for Funkenstein’s own practice as a teacher. His students for two and a half decades unanimously testified

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to the extraordinary sense of discipleship that he fostered as a teacher, much like that of the ancient rabbis. He conveyed not only astonishing knowledge but also an intellectual practice, the model of ‘a mind thinking.’ One of his last students, Isaac Miller, related the following anecdote: when Funkenstein came to Berkeley, Miller and another student approached him for bibliography about Nicholas of Cusa. Funkenstein replied, ‘We’ll meet every Tuesday and read texts together, but in order to understand Cusanus, you must start with Aristotle.’ That request for a reading list led to a five-year weekly seminar and, as Miller remembers, ‘we never got to Nicholas of Cusa.’ As this anecdote demonstrates, the form of knowledge Amos Funkenstein conveyed was anything but closed and hermetic. If that was the nature of rabbinical knowledge, his daring leaps from antiquity to modernity, from Christianity to Judaism, and from history to science offered a vision of knowledge that was open, soaring, and iconoclastic. It is fitting that his last essay, published here for the first time in English, addresses the question of knowledge in the field perhaps closest to his heart, that of Jewish studies.

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Introduction: The Last German-Jewish Philosopher

THINKING IMPOSSIBILITIES: THE INTELLECTUAL LEGACY OF AMOS FUNKENSTEIN

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Introduction

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introduction

The Last German-Jewish Philosopher: An Intellectual Biography of Amos Funkenstein DAVID BIALE AND ROBERT S. WESTMAN

When Amos Funkenstein was an adolescent, he assembled his schoolmates in the courtyard of Jerusalem’s famous religious school, Maale, and declared that there was no God. Called on the carpet by the school principal, he refused to repent, thus beginning a lifelong career of épater les religieux. Like Spinoza, whose philosophy played a central role in his work, Amos was a true epikores, a heretic from within his tradition. The term epikores, self-evidently derived from ‘Epicurean’ in the Greek, originally signified in the rabbinic idiom a Jew who, like the Epicurean philosophers, did not believe that the gods intervened in the affairs of this world. On one level, this was certainly Amos’s position. But in popular parlance, the epikores signifies much more broadly the rebel against Orthodox Jewish belief and practice whose rebellion is thoroughly grounded in the classical sources themselves. It is in this latter sense that one thinks of Amos, the heretic who knew the Jewish tradition better than most who call themselves Orthodox. Like Spinoza, however, Amos was not content to deny the existence of God. Instead, it is fair to say that he spent the next forty-six years of his life, up to the moment of his death in November 1995, in trying to understand this very Being whose existence he doubted, in trying to write God’s biography. This was a task he did by indirection: by engaging the most profound thinkers in the Western tradition: pagan, Jewish, and Christian, from the Greeks and the Hebrew Bible through the rabbis and church fathers, medieval Jewish philosophers and mystics, Christian scholastics, and up to the creators of modern science and philosophy. No stone could be left unturned, no thinker, either close to home or alien, could be ignored in this quest. If religious thought was

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close to the task, science and mathematics were equally to be pressed into service. In the final analysis, only by understanding Amos’s intellectual life as an unceasing search for ultimate Being is it possible to bring together all of its seemingly disparate parts: Jewish history, scholastic philosophy, and history of science, to name only the three most prominent. How else can we grasp a mind equally obsessed with biblical exegesis and twentieth-century mathematical logic, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason? In these brief remarks, we wish to call attention to Amos’s major intellectual contributions, but also to some features of his method. The power of his work stemmed from the congruence of profound intellectual curiosity with questions of deep existential urgency. Yet its power also derived from his ability to hold the personal in abeyance and to speak through the sources he studied. In the introduction to Theology and the Scientific Imagination, he described the emergence of secular theology in the seventeenth century, defined as the collapse of professional scholastic theology and its appropriation by lay thinkers. Theology was a term reserved for supernatural knowledge when it emerged within the universities, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as a distinct profession with its own well-protected social authority. Natural philosophers were members of the university arts faculty and respected the boundary that separated them from the theology masters. Although there was some erosion of theological authority in the fourteenth century, Amos believed that the key moment of change did not come until the Reformation, when there was an incursion of non-theologians across previously inviolable social-intellectual boundaries. This helped to transform the study of the natural world into a sacred activity. The study of this world became, as he says, ‘its own religious value in that, if well done, it increases God’s honor.’ For the great figures of the scientific revolution (Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton) – and, dare we say, for Amos himself – to take the questions of medieval theology and turn them towards this world became, paradoxically, a new form of worshipping God. It is in just such surprising and radical inversions that Amos’s work is at its most original. Amos Funkenstein’s interest in the history of science was therefore inseparable from this profound and unusual preoccupation with the divine – and this explains why he cannot be described in any straightforward way as a historian of science or, for that matter, a historian of religion – although he was both. His intellectual engagements and sensibilities were, like his linguistic universe, multivalent: Hebrew was his

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native language; German, the language of his university education; English, the main, although not the exclusive, language of his professional life; Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German, the principal languages of his sources; Yiddish, crucial for his historical intuitions about culture. His conceptual vocabulary was filled with Latinate neologisms, such as ‘unequivocation,’ ‘univocation,’ and ‘ubiquity.’ Such locutions – often unexpected and not always easily digestible – made him an unusually interesting and, at times, disconcerting conversationalist. At public conferences, his informal commentaries from the floor often left the impression of resolute positionality. Yet his real intellectual problematic lay in dialectical tensions: as often as not, the positions that he articulated so forcefully in public fora were positions whose opposite he had struggled with privately.1 The architecture of Theology and the Scientific Imagination suggests the philosophy of history with which he operated. The book is divided according to the scholastic attributes of God: omnipresence, omnipotence, providence, and divine knowledge. In each chapter, he seeks to show how the categories of scholasticism fed the discourse of the revolution against scholasticism. In the chapter on divine providence, for instance, he demonstrates how the medieval argument that God spoke the language of human beings – a doctrine he calls the principle of accommodation – was secularized and radicalized in Spinoza’s biblical exegesis. The process of appropriation was not usually this direct, however. Many of the connections that he was able to draw required the kind of dialectical inversions so characteristic of his sensibility. He shows, for example, how the impossibility of a vacuum in Aristotelian and medieval science provided the dialectical fulcrum for modern physics, which developed its mechanics by imagining an ideal type of motion in a vacuum. Medieval impossibilities became limiting cases in these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inversions. Indeed, thinking impossibilities – the title we have chosen for this collection – may be said to define Amos’s own singular bent of mind. This sustained argument for grounding modern thought in its medieval and ancient predecessors points to one of the characteristic features of Amos’s method. He held that to fully understand an idea, one had to know its origins, even if those origins appeared to lie in seemingly contradictory schools of thought. All thought, he believed, was connected in a grand chain of tradition: one could not speak about Kant without understanding Aquinas, just as one could not speak about Hermann Cohen without understanding Maimonides. This presupposi-

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tion led by necessity to intellectual history in the grand style, the kind of Geistesgeschichte once beloved of the German academy, where Amos did his training, but now largely out of favour throughout the academic world. It was not only because of his synoptic and encyclopedic knowledge that Amos seemed unique, but also because of a method virtually unknown in contemporary cultural studies and those other directions that intellectual life has taken. With no apologies for Eurocentrism or gestures towards the social context of the intellectual, Amos engaged the canonical thinkers of the West in a dazzling dialogue over the centuries. Perhaps, though, we have used the word canon too quickly, since there is one feature of Amos’s work that belies the canonical. The Western tradition has classically been understood as starting with the Greeks and then passing into the hands of Christian thinkers of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Hebrew Bible occupies an uneasy place in this canon, and the later Jewish tradition is conspicuously absent. From his earliest work, Amos set about to correct this portrait. His doctoral dissertation, Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung, is an account of the complex relationship between conceptions of natural historical development and supernatural eschatology. This interest in the religious origins of modern historical consciousness was to resurface in the Theology book, and again in Perceptions of Jewish History. What is striking, though, is how this brief and densely argued account of Christian philosophy of history begins with varieties of Jewish apocalpytic and eschatological thought in late antiquity. In the work he undertook after the dissertation, whether comparing Maimonides and Aquinas on law and history or examining the theologies of anti-Jewish polemic in the Middle Ages, Amos sought to infuse the study of the medieval Christian scholastics with their Jewish counterparts. By the time he published Theology and the Scientific Imagination, Jewish intellectual history had assumed as important a place as Christian in his dialectic of Western thought. What one senses in all this work is the mutual way in which Jewish thought illuminates Christian and Christian illuminates Jewish. For Amos, the history of relations between these two traditions was always one of tensions and polemics, but neither was it devoid of creative borrowings. In his unique vision, neither Jewish nor Christian intellectual history could be done without the other. Their often hostile symbiosis, if one can use an oxymoron, required of the historian command of both the Latin and Hebrew traditions and a willingness to venture beyond the familiar into the realm of the Other.

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The relentless probing of the religious and the scientific in Theology and the Scientific Imagination was actually part of a larger concern with cultural dialectics that included the religious and the secular, Jewish assimilation and autonomy, hatred of the Jews and Jewish self-hatred, the theological meaning or meaninglessness of the Holocaust – themes that led him into areas that do not obviously fall within conventional boundaries of the history of science. Was the existence of Yiddish, for example, a testimony to Jewish assimilation or Jewish isolation? Ever uncomfortable with binary oppositions, he concluded that it was both: for German Jews of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a sign of their appropriation of German language and literary tastes (Yiddish was the direct heir to Mittelhochdeutsch); for fifteenth-century German Jews immigrating to Poland, a sign of their ‘isolation from the local Polish and Ukrainian population.’ 2 Similarly, Amos did not merely study medieval theologians; he argued with modern ones. He was interested, for example, in the theological meaning of the Holocaust – arguing against the view that ‘To lose faith in the face of the Holocaust is itself ... a manner of faith, a positive religious act.’ 3 He associated himself instead with Primo Levi’s account of his experience in Auschwitz, which refused to regard the camp experience as either meaningless, incomprehensible, or fundamentally religious in character. ‘The reality of the concentration camps taught Levi other distinctions [than between Heidegger’s authentic and inauthentic existence], distinctions which are purely homocentric, such as the distinction between the “drowned and the saved.”’ 4 The Holocaust was an ‘eminently human event’ that ‘demonstrated those extremes that only man and his society are capable of doing or suffering,’ a ‘possibility, perhaps unknown before, of human existence.’ 5 What we are seeking to evoke here is not only an intellectual stance but also something of a singular personality. Amos was deeply, passionately, a Jew who liked nothing better than to deflate academic pretensions with a well-placed Yiddish bon mot. In this turn to Yiddish, he enjoyed the classic Jewish move of ridiculing the world of high, nonJewish culture by reducing it to Jewish provincialism. But he was just as interested in establishing a discourse of equals between the Jewish and Christian intellectual traditions. This was the Amos who related with relish how he conversed in medieval Latin with a French monk he happened to meet. Only he could thus recreate the intellectual symbiosis of the Middle Ages in an Israeli taxi. For all his deep forays into the worlds of medieval Christian scholas-

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ticism and modern science, Amos never left those Jewish texts he acquired in his rebellious boyhood. Although he received almost no formal academic training in Jewish history or thought, he steeped himself in the whole range of Jewish sources throughout his life. As is characteristic of great intellects, he seemed to have most of his most original ideas worked out at the very beginning of his career. In the last years of his life, he collected together his essays on Jewish history and added new ones in a book first published in Hebrew and then in English under the title Perceptions of Jewish History. Here he closed the circle that he had opened with his doctoral dissertation, showing now, as he had then for Christian philosophy of history, the connections between secular forms of Jewish historical consciousness and their traditional, religious roots. Against Yosef Haim Yerushalmi’s argument for a distinction between memory and history in Jewish thought, he traced the dialectical interplay between these two seemingly opposed attitudes towards the past. Once again, the modern, for all its revolutionary radicalism, turned out to be grounded in the ancient and medieval. Finally, there were the dialectics of his own life: the annual journey to teach in Israel, the attachments to friends and colleagues whom he would always leave and to whom he would always return. Such remarkable energy created the impression that he had actually resolved the scholastic question of whether a human, and not just an angel, could shlep with sufficiently high velocities to be in more than one place at the same time. His survival of catastrophe only added to the impression. One month after he and his wife, Esti, moved to the Berkeley Hills in 1991, a devastating fire reduced much of the residential hillside in Berkeley and Oakland to a surreal moonscape. Amos and Esti were forced to abandon their home as the fire encroached, literally sliding down the hill while clutching the two rarest books from his library. At the last moment, the winds shifted, and their side of the street was saved. A miracle, but still not enough evidence for the existence of a supreme being. One of the last chapters in the Perceptions book is entitled ‘Franz Rosenzweig and the End of German-Jewish Philosophy.’ But, we may ask, did German-Jewish philosophy in fact end with Rosenzweig? On the contrary, we believe that it is in Amos that we have the true last GermanJewish philosopher. To be sure, no Jew after the Holocaust could ever imagine a German-Jewish symbiosis, as had Hermann Cohen. Nor could

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the sensibility of one who had grown up in Palestine under the Mandate and gone through the siege of Jerusalem in 1948 remotely resemble a Moses Mendelssohn or a Franz Rosenzweig. Yet in his complex relationship to Germany, where he did most of his academic training and whose language he spoke and wrote flawlessly, Amos was closer to his German-Jewish ancestors than he himself might have been willing to admit. Even more, his intellectual sensibility was throughout German – no, even more German than the Germans – and in this, too, he resembled the tradition of German-Jewish philosophy. His very method, of searching for origins, owes much to Hermann Cohen’s Ursprungsprinzip, which Amos analysed and which, characteristically, he traced back to Moses Maimonides. But as German as the intellectual method may have been, the person behind the method was throughout Jewish. Like Heinrich Heine, his favourite German poet, Amos could never be anything but a sardonic outsider to German culture, just as he was always an outsider to American culture. His commitments and his passions remained in Israel, where he returned to teach part time starting in the 1970s and where he took active part in the struggle for peace with the Palestinians. He achieved that impossible high-wire act that all modern Jewish intellectuals have attempted but few have succeeded in accomplishing: to be at once a universal intellectual and a very particularistic Jew. Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, ‘I want to know how God created this world ... I want to know his thoughts; the rest are details.’ Amos, too, wished to read God’s mind. In the great intellectual adventure that was his life, he never deviated from this goal. He travelled far in search of the answer, geographically, intellectually, and religiously, yet in the final analysis, he never really left home.

Notes 1 Sometimes, for example, we find him explicitly anticipating objections with such phrases as the following: ‘You may respond ...’; ‘At this point, you may wish to accuse me of confusing ...’; ‘Now you are bound to claim that you have caught me contradicting myself shamelessly ...’ Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 34–5.

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2 Amos Funkenstein, ‘The Dialectics of Assimilation,’ Jewish Social Studies 1, 2 (1995): 1–14. 3 ‘The Dialectical Theology of Meaninglessness,’ in Perceptions of Jewish History, 329. 4 Ibid., 333. 5 Ibid., 337.

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PART I Historical Dialectics

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chapter one

Divine Omnipotence and First Principles: A Late Medieval Argument on the Subalternation of the Sciences STEVEN J. LIVESEY

Since the early years of the twentieth century, historians of science and intellectual historians have recognized the singular importance of divine omnipotence for seminal discussions of epistemology, law, cosmology, and natural philosophy, to say nothing of the more obvious issues of theology. As it was often observed, if God is omnipotent, then de potentia absoluta he is constrained only by the principle of non-contradiction. Can he then create in us an intuitive cognition of a non-existent, and if so, what effect does this admission have on the certainty of our knowledge of contingent facts? Can God change past events, as Peter Damian argued in the eleventh century, or would such omnipotence actually constitute a weakness in God, as St Anselm contended? Can God create a world better than the one he produced? The list of such queries is seemingly endless, yet were it compiled, it would certainly present a vexing litany of ‘the hard cases’ – as Rega Wood has called them1 – that create bad philosophy sometimes and fundamental understanding on other occasions.2 My purpose here will not be to create such a list; rather it will be to add to the list an item that for the most part has gone unnoticed in previous discussions. Briefly, what we shall find is that a significant number of fourteenth-century theologians invoked divine omnipotence when discussing the relationship between theology and the knowledge of God and the blessed. After tracing at least the partial development of these arguments in the fourteenth century, I shall draw some conclusions about its nature and significance within the history of disciplinary structures. The twin issues of divine omnipotence and disciplinary structures were frequent themes in Amos Funkenstein’s works. In his widely

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acclaimed Theology and the Scientific Imagination – itself the culmination of several previous studies – he uncovered the foundations of natural laws in medieval and early modern discussions of divine omnipotence, with Descartes’s radical voluntarism and Spinoza’s determinism giving way to the mediating distinction in Leibniz of logical and physical necessity (chapter 3). Parallel with this, he pursued the historical development of an ergetic epistemology, ‘knowing by doing,’ that replaced in the early modern world the old contemplative model of knowledge, a shift that involved erosion of Aristotle’s prohibition of metabasis, or cross-disciplinary demonstrations, and corresponding adjustments in late medieval notions of disciplinarity (chapter 5). In both arenas, the driving force was the demonstration of medieval roots of later positions that suggested neither naive continuity nor abrupt fissures between the two periods. As we shall see, late medieval scholars fused in at least one specialized case the issues of divine omnipotence, disciplinary structures, and, by extension, the prohibition of metabasis. As Funkenstein recognized in Theology and the Scientific Imagination, it was the prohibition of metabasis that served as the catalyst for important epistemological discussions by medieval scholastics, and so it is with Aristotle that we must start our journey. Like Plato before him, Aristotle was firmly convinced that knowledge (episteme, scientia) was strictly distinguished from belief or opinion. Knowledge begins with experience, the repeated applications of which produce intuition or insight of the universal condition. As a result, this side of Aristotle’s method resembles an inductive process.3 But Aristotle was also emphatic that real knowledge is not produced until it is rigorously demonstrated through a deductive process beginning with first principles and definitions, a procedure that must satisfy three criteria: the demonstrated propositions must be universally true; they must contain terms that are essential to one another, thereby ensuring the necessity of the propositions; and they must be formed in such a way that the predicate is true of the subject strictly speaking, and not by virtue of some wider domain. Particularly in view of this third criterion, Aristotle considered scientific disciplines largely autonomous entities, each with its own subject domain, principles, and propositions. As a result, the invocation of principles from one discipline in the demonstrations of another, which Aristotle referred to as metabasis, was strictly forbidden, because such boundary infractions could introduce ambiguities, or worse still errors, into the demonstrative process. The only exception admitted by Aristotle belonged to a relatively small class of disciplines known as the subalter-

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nate sciences. Aristotle recognized that, in a few cases, scientific disciplines were paired in such a way that one science ‘was under’ the other, and that while the subordinate science possessed only empirical knowledge of phenomena, the superior science provided the causal explanation for the fact. Among Aristotle’s favourite examples were the disciplines of geometry and optics: optical propositions are proven within the discipline of optics itself, yet the underlying reason embodied in the proof falls under the higher science of geometry.4 Closely related to these issues was the distinction between (as medieval scholastics referred to it) scientia quia (that is, knowledge of the fact) and scientia propter quid (that is, knowledge through the cause). In a purely formal sense, scientia for Aristotle was the search for the middle terms of syllogisms. As he observed in the Posterior Analytics (I.13 78b4–11), one can demonstrate that the moon is spherical by observing that the shadow cast upon the moon is circular, but such demonstrations arise not from the cause of sphericity but merely from the observed effect of sphericity. By changing the middle term of the syllogism – making sphericity the cause through which the moon’s waxing and waning arise – one obtains a qualitatively stronger result: because, as Aristotle asserted in the opening chapter of the Physics (184a10ff), we truly know things when we know their causes, the more conclusive form of demonstration (which the Middle Ages came to call demonstratio potissima) is that which is based on the ultimate principles of things, their causes. This, and only this, produces scientia propter quid. To see how medieval scholastics appropriated this material, one need look only to Thomas Aquinas, whose opening questions of the Summa theologiae parallel in some sense the opening books of the Physics, the Metaphysics, De caelo, or De anima; for before Aquinas begins to develop his more substantive discussions of Christian theology, he addresses the nature of theology itself, the subject of theology, its first principles, and its relationship to other sorts of knowledge. In particular, Aquinas recognizes that, like all sciences, theology must begin from first principles that are neither proven nor provable, yet – Aquinas contends – still unassailable. What conveys this certainty? Aristotle had suggested that metaphysics plays a role among the sciences, because while metaphysics cannot prove first principles demonstratively, it does argue them dialectically. In support of a particular principle, for example, metaphysics can suggest the implications of accepting the principle and its relationship both to the other first principles and to the subject matter. In so doing, it attempts to adduce probable reasons for accepting first princi-

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ples. Conversely, by using counterfactual arguments, the metaphysician can also respond to those who reject first principles or replace them with contrary principles. Neither technique is scientific in Aristotle’s sense of the word, since on the one hand each produces merely probable reasons, and on the other hand begins from premises that the protagonist but not the antagonist assumes to be true.5 And so perhaps because of this, Aquinas was reluctant to entrust the certainty of theological first principles to such a technique. Nor did he call upon the other possibility that we have already noted above, that first principles are acquired through the inductive process described in Posterior Analytics II.19. All considerations of Catholic tradition and authority aside, theology was presumed to hold higher certitude than that. Instead, Aquinas selected the Aristotelian discussion of the subalternation of the sciences and adapted it to his own problem in question 1, article 2: on the question of whether theology was genuinely scientific, Aquinas notes that some sciences – arithmetic, geometry, and the like – proceed from principles that are known per se. Others, like optics and music, proceed from principles that are known not per se, but per aliud: they proceed, as he puts it, ‘from principles known by the light of a superior science.’ In the same way, theological investigations do not stand sui generis; rather, they proceed from principles that are known by the light of a superior science, namely that of the blessed and God himself. Our theology and that of the blessed, like optics and geometry, stand in a relationship of subalternation.6 However attractive that argument may have been to Thomas, outside his order – and even on occasion inside the Dominican Order – it met with almost immediate opposition. The structural identity that Thomas sought failed at a number of points. Some, like Scotus and his followers, objected that if this subalternating relationship applied to theology, scientia and faith would coexist with respect to the same object.7 Furthermore, they observed that Aristotle had required that the subalternate and subalternating sciences be distinct disciplines, yet it appeared that our theology and that of the blessed were identical, differing only in the degree of knowledge that we and they attained.8 To suggest that the practitioners of sciences such as optics ‘believed’ their first principles in the same way that the faithful believed the articles of faith seemed to denigrate the position of the latter within the church.9 And so some supporters of Thomas, like Aegidius Romanus, chose to soften the position that Thomas had taken by suggesting that while Aristotle’s criteria for subalternation failed to satisfy the particular case of theology, there

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was nevertheless a ‘similitude’ between the subalternate sciences and the relationship of the two theologies.10 Aside from these exegetical problems, Aquinas’s argument also spawned an objection based on the effect that divine omnipotence might have on our acquisition of scientific principles and consequently on the structure of scientific demonstration. The earliest example of this argument that I have found comes from the commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard written about 1315–16 by the Franciscan Peter Aureol. It arises in the first question of his prohemium to the commentary on the Sentences, in which he asks whether one acquires more than a habit of faith through the study of theology and natural reason alone. His response begins with a review of five pertinent positions, the first of which argues that theology is a subalternate science, and thus produces more than a habit of faith. Aureol offers seven arguments for the position, the sixth of which is that [the discipline of] perspective at least can be conserved in the mind of the perspectivist through divine power while geometry is removed. But it is clear that such a perspectivist would know principles merely by belief, yet he would truly have knowledge of perspective. Therefore, it would seem that only faith and knowledge of principles based on belief should suffice for the subalternate science, and such is the habit of which we speak ...11

Aureol separates the disciplines of perspective and geometry by appealing to divine omnipotence: while it is generally the case that the perspectivist is proficient in both his own discipline and the superior discipline on which it is based, de potentia Dei he may be deprived of knowledge of geometry yet still retain his knowledge of perspective. Aside from its intrinsic value, the argument is interesting because of the way Aureol has introduced divine omnipotence. Here, in the context of what might be viewed as the rationes principales, Thomas is not mentioned as the author of this or any other argument, and indeed, when Aureol discusses the specific arguments of Aquinas, no mention is made of divine omnipotence. Thus, if Aureol was its creator, the argument seems to have arisen as a hypothetical one that itself appealed to a hypothetical noetic circumstance. Aureol quite clearly opposed Aquinas’s position on subalternation and produced long and detailed opposing arguments on several fronts, the substance of which we cannot discuss here. But the argument involving divine omnipotence seems to have intrigued him, since he devotes

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more time to it than to any of the other rationes principales. In response, he says, it must be said that God could conserve the subalternate science in the intellect while removing the subalternating science, knowledge of the conclusion while removing knowledge of the principle, since it is of absolute form. Nevertheless, such an intellect could not use the cognitive habit of the conclusion, since it would not know the conclusion except insofar as it previously knew and understood the principle. Similarly, one having the subalternate without the subalternating science could not use those things to understand conclusions, since he would not know them except insofar as he knew the principles, the understanding of which is the act of the subalternating science.12

The crucial element within this argument is the contention that principle and conclusion, subalternating and subalternate, are separable because they are, as Aureol states, absolute rather than relative forms. This, of course, was not universally accepted, for some regarded the conclusion as potentially present in the principle, and more pertinently the subalternate science as contained virtually in the subalternating science.13 Were this the case, even God could not separate something from itself. But having convinced himself that the subalternating and subalternate sciences are really distinct, one can imagine – and God could achieve – one without the other. But, says Peter, this would be a useless situation, for such a knower would be unable to understand scientifically the conclusions within the subalternate science because such knowledge requires knowledge of principles, which is attained through the subalternating science. Now Aureol moves one step farther epistemologically in a still hypothetical case: suppose that God should obviate this objection by conserving the intellectual act of cognizing the conclusion while removing the act of cognizing the principle. This, says Peter, would be equally fruitless: It would be equally invalid because whatever the case may be for God, [our] intellect cannot work this way, and consequently it cannot use the habit of the conclusion if it does not have the habit of the principle. For they are not two acts: although the principle can be known per se and by itself, the conclusion is not known except through the principle, and there is one act of the intellect that intuits and knows the conclusion through the

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principle, just as there is one act of the will to will something on account of its end. Therefore, God cannot remove the intuition of the principle from the intuition of the conclusion that arises out of and because of the principle, since the intuition acting on the truth of the principle by which something is known is the same as the intuition acting on the truth of the conclusion which is known.14

The previous argument had focused on the products of intellectual cognition: the subalternate and subalternating sciences, or the conclusion and principle. But in this argument, Aureol distinguishes God’s ability to separate and selectively conserve or destroy the objects of knowledge from his ability to conserve and destroy the acts of cognition. God cannot preserve one act without the other, because unlike their products – at either the propositional or disciplinary level – the intellectual acts are in fact one and the same thing.15 For Peter Aureol, then, the argument based on divine omnipotence was a hypothetical (and intriguing) one that might be advanced to support the Thomistic position but that Peter regarded as inadequate because of the nature of the subalternate sciences and the intellect’s process of acquiring knowledge. Subsequent commentators on the Sentences continued to address the issue of whether first principles in the subalternate sciences were ‘believed,’ and hence whether one could regard theology as a subalternate science, but for virtually thirty years, no one at Paris (or elsewhere) reproduced Peter’s novel argument. Then, in the academic year 1342–3, the task of commenting on the Sentences fell to the Augustinian Hermit Gregory of Rimini, and in the first question to his prologue, Gregory also asks whether knowledge properly speaking of a theological object can be acquired through theological discourse. After discussing at length the opinions of Ockham, Peter Aureol, and Franciscus de Marchia, he turns to Thomas, whose position, he says, is argued ab aliis as follows: the perspectivist, insofar as he is a perspectivist, is one who has knowledge; yet as such, he is not a geometer, and so insofar as he is not a geometer does not have knowledge of his own principles. The conclusion is that not every science necessarily has knowledge of its own principles.16 Subsequently, in his second confirming argument of the position, Gregory observes that God could conserve the habit of perspective in the intellect of someone, while not conserving in it the habit of geometry. But in such an intellect,

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Steven J. Livesey that perspective would truly be a subalternate science, and nevertheless it would have not understanding of its own principles, but only faith.17

In substance, the argument is the same as that suggested by Peter Aureol. But Gregory’s response is slightly different: I say first that the same argument could be made of a science [that was] not subalternate, supposing that the intellect of the principles be distinguished from the habit of the conclusion, and so equally they could have said absolutely that theology is a science without adding that it was subalternate (which nevertheless they do not). Second, I say that if God should conserve perspective (which now de facto is science) without [conserving] geometry, still it would be science, having suitably arisen in the same acts in which it is now, other things remaining the same. However, it does not follow from this that perspective which is acquired while geometry was lacking would be science.18

Gregory thus attacks the hypothetical argument (which he believes entails the Thomistic theory of subalternation of theology) first by suggesting that Thomas’s distinction between sciences that arise per se and per aliud and the restriction of only one sense to theology is a ruse, and that the very same argument could be made without resorting to subalternation, something that Thomas would be reluctant to do. More interesting, however, is his second argument, in which Gregory would distinguish between conclusions acquired before God ceased to conserve geometry in the mind of the knower and those acquired afterward. The former would remain scientific even after the knower had no awareness of geometry; the latter would never be considered scientific, and since under normal circumstances it is the latter which pertains in the strongest sense to the case of our theology, Thomas’s argument would be without merit. Some two years later, during the academic year 1344–5, Alphonsus Vargas, also an Augustinian Hermit, commented on the Sentences at Paris. In discussing Thomas’s theory in the second question to his prologue, Alphonsus argues that God could conserve the habit of perspective without geometry, or the habit of music without arithmetic, which is quite possible because they are distinct habits. Still, perspective and music would be sciences properly

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speaking, yet it would remain the case that they would not have evident knowledge of their own principles ...19

to which he replies: perspective without geometry [and] music without arithmetic would not be sciences properly speaking except by knowing their principles evidently either a posteriori and through effects or by means of sense perception through experience. Whence if someone had perspective without geometry and did not know its principles evidently in one or another of these ways, perspective would not be a science properly speaking to him, but rather faith or opinion, if those principles were probable.20

Despite their presence in the same order, Alphonsus seems not to have relied solely upon Gregory for his information about this argument.21 His statement of the hypothetical argument resembles more closely the formula in Peter Aureol, particularly in its insistence on the distinction between the habits of the superior and inferior disciplines. His argument in response, on the other hand, recalls the first of Gregory’s arguments, but provides somewhat more detail: drawing on Aristotle’s own discussion of the acquisition of first principles, Alphonsus observes that evident cognition of principles can be obtained from sense perception as well as mere assumption from a higher science. The next allusion to the argument occurs in the lectures on the Sentences written by the Cistercian James of Eltville during the academic year 1369–70. In article two of the first question to his prologue, James asks whether the theological habit customarily acquired by the wayfarer could be called scientific. After some preliminary remarks, he argues that the primary procedure of theology, in which the articles of faith are concluded to be the first principles of theology, is scientific, although it has the property of a subalternate science. This conclusion, he says, has many detractors, including Gregory of Rimini and Thomas of Strasbourg, and so he proposes four propositions in support of his contention.22 The first of these propositions is that evidence is not necessary for science, and he offers two proofs for this assertion. First, he says, if God should cause one science without any subject, such a science would not be evident to anyone, since no one would be a knower by virtue of it.

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Steven J. Livesey Yet it would truly be scientific, since it would have the certifiable truth of principles and necessary inference of conclusions from them. But just as it can be said that a habit of this sort would be scientific and no one be a knower through it, so also it can be said to be evident, and there will be nothing evident through it.23

In a sense, James turns the original argument inside out. He makes no mention of Thomas or the fact that the appeal to divine omnipotence had been suggested originally as a hypothetical argument for the Thomistic position. Nor is divine omnipotence invoked to secure the scientific status of first principles. Rather, James presents the possibility that we could have a collection of propositions that is scientific by virtue of the fact that it conforms to the rules of consequentiae, but which, through the agency of God’s power, has no subjective referent. Here, the argument has been transformed to incorporate elements of the debate over certitude and evidence arising from God’s ability to conserve an intuitive cognition of a non-existent. In his second argument for the proposition, James makes the connection with the subalternate sciences. As it has been transmitted through Ptolemy, astronomy is truly called a science, since it is one of the seven liberal arts. Yet it supposes many things that are at least internally non-evident. Similarly, says James, all subsequent astronomers such as Thabit, Campanus, and Alphonsus assumed the starting points (radices) and data (tabulas) as certain, which they held neither by evidence, nor by demonstration, nor by assent, but only because of the experience of the ancients.24 James also notes that one might argue that, although Ptolemy himself was not an expert, the things he supposed could be put to the test of reason, which is not the case for the articles of faith. But James suggests that this concedes the questions, since neither Ptolemy nor anyone before him had scientia, and Ptolemy himself did not have evident knowledge, so that evident knowledge is not necessary for science. Nor, says James, is it true to say that the things assumed in astronomy can be tested by human reason, since these things exceed the life of one person – for example, the trepidation of the equinoxes – and so one must believe the other.25 James gives several additional arguments for his principal contention that we need not consider. But in the one cited here, James asserts the similarity between subalternate sciences and the science of theology. Moreover, he is the first to advance divine omnipotence as a positive

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argument for such subalternation, although he says little more about its precise nature and does not tie himself to the formulation of Aquinas. And despite his citation of Gregory of Rimini, he offers no rebuttal to the counter-arguments. The remaining two fourteenth-century Parisian discussions of the argument can be dealt with rather quickly. In 1375, Pierre d’Ailly offers divine omnipotence as an argument for the subalternation relationship between our theology and the knowledge of the blessed, but subsequently rejects it on the grounds that any propositions acquired after God’s intervention would not be scientific.26 It is clear, from both the argument itself and Pierre’s explicit citation, that his source for the argument is Gregory of Rimini.27 In the following year, Johannes de Wasia offers the argument in his abbreviated rereading of Alphonsus Vargas’s commentary on the Sentences.28 Both of these convey nothing beyond their original sources.29 Finally, one might note that the argument, previously confined to the University of Paris, was transplanted at the University of Vienna, apparently for the first time in the work of Nicholas de Dinkelsbühl, whose Questiones communes on the Sentences date from the last years of the fourteenth century. In question one of his prologue, Nicholas acknowledged Gregory of Rimini as his source, and his statement is virtually copied from Gregory’s lectures. When Nicholas reworked these lectures as Questiones magistrales between 1408 and 1412, this section of the text was retained without change.30 Likewise, in Johannes Berwardi’s lectures on the Sentences that date from about 1403 we find the same arguments verbatim.31 The precise avenue by which the argument came to Vienna remains unclear. The university itself was formed around a nucleus of Parisian masters who emigrated in the 1380s, bringing with them both ideas about university structure and the libraries they had acquired. The dominant figure among them was Henry of Langenstein, and although he does not mention the argument in his own commentary on the Sentences,32 Henry’s familiarity with the Parisian theological tradition and his friendship with James of Eltville in particular may be significant.33 Whatever the vector of this tradition, it had clearly played itself out by the time it reached Vienna, for in Johannes Berwardi and Nicholas de Dinkelsbühl, and perhaps in others as well,34 the argument had lost any originality. It may be well at this point to take stock of the historical development of this argument For several decades, historians of theology and intel-

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lectual historians have pointed to changing tastes in the prohemial questions in commentaries on the Sentences. While thirteenth-century theologians engaged such issues as the scientific status of theology, or its subject or nature, all reflecting what Ernest Moody referred to as metaphysical concerns,35 fourteenth-century scholars shifted their focus to questions of epistemology, logic, and physics. The older, more traditional questions came to be viewed as quaint and were abandoned or greatly reduced in size or scope as the fourteenth century progressed. But taken as a group, the theologians whose commentaries include this argument about subalternation and divine omnipotence may cause us to rethink the transition between the two periods. Along with linguistic analysis, questions de potentia dei absoluta are often considered a hallmark of the new content and interest of fourteenth-century speculation. What these arguments suggest is that while questions of scientific theology and subalternation might be considered passé in some circles, there was also still some vitality left in the issue and an attempt to bridge the old issue with new forms of analysis. That these arguments were used at all is largely dependent on the role of Thomas Aquinas, for although Thomas never appealed to divine omnipotence in support of his contention about theology and the subalternation relationship, as we have seen, it was in large part Thomas’s position on subalternation that stimulated continued discussion of the issue through the end of the Middle Ages and spawned this novel argument. In fact, so closely is this argument tied to the Thomistic position that, when I originally began this investigation, I thought it might be valuable in identifying the dimensions of the revival of Thomism late in the fourteenth and early in the fifteenth centuries. What became apparent, however, is that virtually no Thomist responded to the hypothetical argument and its refutation posed by Peter Aureol and Gregory of Rimini. For example, Johannes Capreolus, the ‘prince of Thomists’ – at least among theologians – and otherwise a perceptive reader of both Peter Aureol and Gregory of Rimini, fails to mention the argument at all in his discussion of subalternation.36 Nor did Denis the Carthusian, whose commentary on the Sentences frequently served as an encyclopedic source for medieval arguments.37 In England, the same is true of Thomas Claxton, who undertook a long discussion of the scientific status of theology that cited Gregory of Rimini among other fourteenthcentury Parisian masters.38 And in Italy, the fifteenth-century Dominican Antonius de Carlenis, whose commentary is retrospective of many early-fourteenth-century positions, ignores the argument as well.39

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The reasons for this omission are not entirely clear. That the argument arose as a hypothetical one and had no basis in Thomas’s writing may have served as justification for silence, because in many cases, subsequent Thomists considered their responsibility the defence of Thomas’s position, not of later accretions to his views. Or it may be, as Leonard Kennedy has observed, that while subsequent Thomists did not oppose the notion of divine absolute power as a general principle, they avoided particular applications of it.40 Whatever the case may be, it is clear that until or unless additional citations of the argument from both sides of the theological spectrum are identified, the argument itself will not be sufficient to identify the allegiance of a particular commentator. The various arguments presented in this paper suggest that late medieval scholars achieved a fusion of issues involved with divine omnipotence, disciplinary structures, and Aristotle’s prohibition of metabasis. But if there was such a fusion, these arguments also display a fundamental difference between treatments of subalternation theory found in commentaries on the Sentences and those found in commentaries on the Posterior Analytics. As we have seen, the originators of the argument – Peter Aureol and Gregory of Rimini – both cast their discussion in the context of the nature and function of intellectual habits. The theory of habits had its origin in Aristotle’s Categories,41 but the Philosopher did not connect it to the theory of demonstration, the nature of science, or the subalternation of the sciences discussed in the Posterior Analytics. This distinction also seems to be found to a limited extent in the medieval commentaries on the Analytics, for while some fourteenth-century scholars did combine discussions of habits and subalternation in their lectures on the Posterior Analytics, as a rule a discussion of habits is not given the same degree of emphasis that one finds in commentaries on the Sentences and other theological works like the various summae and quodlibeta.42 This marriage of two traditions – one logical, the other psychological – in the theological literature, but not to the same degree in the philosophical literature, is also reflected in the argument based on divine omnipotence. Although the argument was used sparingly in the Sentences tradition, I have not found it at all in commentaries on the Posterior Analytics. The significance of this distinction brings us to a final observation. Aside from its value in the theological context, the argument contains a highly suggestive issue for the definition of subalternation theory. One could suggest that the argument, particularly as it was stated by Gregory

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of Rimini, is consistent with and indeed follows from Aristotle’s statements in Posterior Analytics I.13. There, one of the crucial distinctions between the subalternating and subalternate sciences is the fact that practitioners of the latter are collectors of empirical data while those involved with the former concern themselves with the reasons for those phenomena, and indeed are sometimes ignorant of the observations.43 But the converse is never true: practitioners of the subalternate science are not and cannot be ignorant of the subalternating science, for while the two disciplines are formally distinct, it is through the superior science that the inferior derives its full causal explanation. Now of course, as we have seen in the discussion by Alphonsus, many medieval scholars realized that this was not always the case: one might obtain at least some first principles of the subalternate science per experientiam as well as through the superior science. But failing that, Gregory and at least some of his colleagues asked an additional question, the extent to which the continued presence of the subalternating science was necessary to validate the scientific status of the subalternate science. This is, of course, an extreme condition. What should one decide about a selectively forgetful perspectivist who no longer remembers – that is, has lost the habit of – geometric properties of congruent triangles, but still recalls and uses the law of reflection to generate additional optical propositions? Improbable as this may seem, according to Gregory and some of his colleagues, such subsequent propositions would fail to be scientific because they lacked the scientifically validating principles on which the discipline of optics was based. In the final analysis, beyond the theological import of the argument, the appeal to divine omnipotence suggested a consideration of the boundary conditions and definition of science and the subalternate sciences in particular. There is, however, no evidence that those investigations were ever pursued more fully. In the Sentences literature, where the question had been raised, such considerations may have fallen beyond the purview of the theological context. In the philosophical context of commentaries on the Posterior Analytics, on the other hand, the question never arose, perhaps because the context never fitted the question.

Notes An earlier version of this paper was sent to Professor Funkenstein for his comments. Versions of the paper were also presented at the University of Okla-

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homa Medieval and Renaissance Faculty Colloquium, 31 October 1990; the Twenty-seventh International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 1992; and the Centre d’histoire des sciences et des philosophies arabes et médiévales: Philosophie médiévale latine, Sciences et théologie au Moyen Âge latin (méthodes et modes de connaissance), Paris, 3 March 1994. I should also like to thank my former colleague, David Kitts, for his comments on the paper. Errors in detail or judgment that remain are entirely my own. 1 Rega Wood, ‘Epistemology and Omnipotence: Ockham in FourteenthCentury Philosophical Perspective,’ in James Ross Sweeney and Stanley Chodorow, eds, Popes, Teachers, and Canon Law in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 160–76 at 161. 2 The literature on the medieval uses of divine omnipotence is enormous, but see in particular, Francis Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant and Order. An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Tamar Rudavsky, ed., Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy. Islamic, Jewish and Christian Perspectives (Dordrecht-Boston: Reidel, 1985); and Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), esp. part III. 3 Posterior Analytics II.19, 99b15–100b5. In the Nicomachean Ethics (I.7, 1098b3–4), Aristotle suggests that in addition to induction, first principles may also be acquired by perception, or by a certain habituation (as, perhaps in the case of ethics), and indeed in other ways as well. 4 Posterior Analytics I.13, 78b34–79a15; I.9, 76a9–15; I.7, 75b14–17. 5 Aristotle, Metaphysics IV.4, 1006a11–18; Posterior Analytics I.11. 6 Summa theologiae, Prima pars, q. 1, a. 2; ed. P. Caramello (Turin: Marietti, 1952), 3. 7 Duns Scotus, Quaestiones in librum tertium Sententiarum, d. 24, q. unic.; Opera omnia (Paris: Vivès, 1894), 15: 48a. 8 John of Reading, Scriptum in I librum Sententiarum, Prologue, q. 6; ed. Steven J. Livesey (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 106; Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, Prologue, pars 4, q. 1–2; ed. P. Perantoni, Opera omnia (Vatican: Polyglottis, 1950), 1: 146–7. 9 This also seems to be the underlying concern of one of John of Reading’s criticisms. See Scriptum in I librum Sententiarum, Prologue, q. 6; 109. 10 Egidius Romanus, Primus Sententiarum, 2 princ., q. 1, a. 2 (Venice: Octavianus Scotus, 1521), fol. 4vaK-L; see also Girardus de Bononia, Summa

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Steven J. Livesey theologiae q. 2, a. 3, ‘Utrum theologia sit subalterna’; Vatican, Borgh. lat. 27, fol. 7va–10vb at 7va–b. Petrus Aureoli, Scriptum, Prooem. sect. 1, A, 1, §6; ed. Eligius M. Buytaert (St Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1952), 133. Aureol, Scriptum, Prooem., sect. 1, C, 1, §134; 172. John of Reading, for example, argued this position at about the same time. See Scriptum, Prol. q. 6; 106–7, et passim. Aureol, Scriptum, Prooem., Sec. 1, C, 1, §135; 172. Peter Aureol’s invocation of divine omnipotence in this context raises the question of its connection with another issue in which, as both Katherine Tachau (‘Peter Aureol on Intentions and the Intuitive Cognition of NonExistents,’ Cahiers de l’Institut du moyen âge grec et latin 44[1983]: 122–50) and earlier Philotheus Boehner (‘Notitia intuitiva of Non Existents According to Peter Aureoli, O.F.M. [1322],’ Franciscan Studies 8 [1948]: 388–416) have shown, Aureol played a seminal role. Peter seems to have been among the first to develop the question whether God could create in humans intuitive cognitions de rebus non existentibus. Certainly both arguments are based on God’s ability to alter the normal course of human cognition, but an important difference is that intuitive cognitions of non-existents operate on individual things by their nature; Aureol’s suggestions about divine omnipotence and subalternation raise the issue to the level of propositional networks, which are not the objects (at least immediately) of intuitive cognitions. It is, however, possible that in extrapolating from his argument about intuitive cognitions, Aureol came to develop the disciplinary objection to Aquinas’s position on subalternation. Even if this was not the route by which Aureol devised the argument, James of Eltville certainly saw the connections some sixty years later (see pages 21–2 above). I am indebted to William Courtenay for raising the question regarding the relationship between the two issues. Gregory of Rimini, Lectura super I et II Sententiarum, Prol., q. 1, a. 4; ed. A. Damasus Trapp and Venicio Marcolino (Berlin and New York: Walter De Gruyter, 1981), 49. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 52. Concerning Gregory’s discussion of theology as a science and this argument in particular, see Onorato Grassi, ‘La questione della teologia come scienza in Gregorio da Rimini,’ Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica 58(1976): 610–44, esp. at 631. Alphonsus Vargas Toletanus, Lectura in I librum Sententiarum (Venice: Paganinus de Paganinis, 1490), fol. a4r: ‘deus conservaret habitum perspective sine geometria, vel habitum musice sine arithmetica, quod videtur

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satis possibile ex quo sunt habitus distincti. Adhuc perspectiva et musica essent scientie proprie dicte, et tamen constat stante casu, quod non haberent de suis principiis notitiam evidentem ...’ Ibid., fol. b2r: ‘perspectiva sine geometria, musica sine arithmetica non essent scientie proprie dicte nisi cognoscenti earum principia evidenter vel a posteriori et per effectum vel per experientiam mediante cognitione sensitiva. Unde si aliquis haberet perspectivam sine geometria et non cognosceret evidenter eius principia aliquo istorum modorum vel alio sit possibile, perspectiva non esset ei scientia proprie dicta, sed fides vel opinio, si principia illa essent probabilia.’ William Courtenay has observed the same independence in Alphonsus’s knowledge of the English Franciscan Adam Wodeham; see Adam Wodeham: An Introduction to His Life and Writings (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 131. Jacobus de Altavilla, Lectura super IV libros Sententiarum; Cambrai, Bibliothèque de la ville 570, fol. 4rb: ‘Hiis premissis, sit una conclusio responsionalis ad articulum: talis quod primus processus in quo articuli sint principia ex quibus veritatis theologie concluduntur est proprie scientia seu scientificus, licet habeat proprietatis scientie subalterne. Ista conclusio habet multos impugnatores, Gregorium, Thomam de Argentina, et multos alios et ideo pro probatione conclusionis et responsione valde multarum rationum que fieri solebant contra istam conclusionem. Pono quattuor propositiones.’ Ibid.: ‘Prima sit ista, quod evidentia non est de necessitate scientie. Probatur: scientia potest esse sine evidentia; ergo propositio vera. Consequentia tenet. Antecedens probatur quia si Deus causaret unam scientiam absque omni subiecto, talis nulli esset evidens quia nullus per eam esset sciens, et tamen vere esset scientia, quia esset certitudinalis veritas principiorum et necessaria illatio conclusionum ex ipsis. Sed quia ad istam rationem potest dici quod sicud talis habitus est scientia et nullus est per eum sciens, sic etiam est evidentia et nulli erit aliquid per ipsum evidens.’ Ibid.: ‘Secundo, arguo aliter ad propositum. Astronomia de motibus ut traditur a Ptolomeo in Almagesti vere dicitur scientia quia est una VII artium liberalium et tamen multa supponit ibi inevidentia etiam sibi. Similiter, omnis posteriori astrologi ut Thebit, Campanus, Alphonsus supponunt certes radices et tabulas quas nec per evidenciam nec per demonstrationem nec per assensum habent, sed per experientiam antiquorum. Ergo evidens non est de ratione scientie.’ Ibid., fol. 4rb–4va: ‘Ad istam rationem respondet auctoritas quod licet ipse (P)tolomeus non fuerit expertus, ea que supposuit talia tamen possunt ratione experiri. Sic auctoritas non est de articulis fidei, sed hoc videtur

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Steven J. Livesey concedere propositionem, quia Ptolomaeus non habuit scientiam et nullus // (fol. 4va) ante eum et tamen ipse non habuit evidentiam ut dicit auctoritas, ergo evidentia non est de necessitate scientie nec valet quod dicit quod ea que traduntur in astronomia possunt experiri ratione humana quia nullus potest experiri aliqua que sit in astronomia, quia excedunt vitam unius hominis, ut motus tardi in celo et sic oportet quod unus credat alteri. Ergo evidentia nullo modo est de necessitate scientie.’ Questiones magistri Petri de Aliaco ... super primum, tertium et quartum Sententiarum, Prologue, q. 1, a. 3; (Paris: Johannes Parnus, s.d.), fol. 52va, 53ra: ‘si Deus aliquam musicam que nunc est de facto scientia conservaret absque arismetrica adhuc ipsa esset scientia apta nata in actus similes in quos nunc est si cetera pariter concurrerent. Non tamen ex hoc sequitur quod musica acquisita in non habente arismetricam esset scientia etc.’ Ibid., fol. 52rb. Lectura magistri Alphonsi ... super I Sententiarum abbreviata per magistrum Johannem de Wasia; Erfurt, B. Amplon. F.110, fol. 22rb. Concerning the relationship between Johannes de Wasia’s text and Alphonsus’s commentary, see D. Trapp, ‘Augustinian Theology of the 14th Century: Notes on Editions, Marginalia, Opinions and Book-Lore,’ Augustiniana 6(1956): 146–274 at 213–15. One might note, however, that the issue of the credence given to principles in the subalternate sciences was a common, and certainly related, issue in many fourth-century commentaries on the Sentences. Paul of Perugia, who lectured during the same year as Alphonsus Vargas, points out that ‘perspectivus et geometra est vere sciens; sed talis habet principia credita; ergo ex principiis creditis potest esse scientia. Sed talis est theologia. Igitur etc.’; Paulus de Perugia, Lectura super Sententias, Prologue, q. 4; Vatican, Chigi B. VI. 97, fol. 6rb. But most, including Paul, do not invoke the further issue of omnipotence. Nicholas de Dinkelsbühl, Questiones in libros Sententiarum (Questiones communes), Prologue, q. 1; Vienna, Schottenstift 269(274), fol. 3r; Super I et II Sententiarum (Questiones magistrales), Prologue, q. 1; Vienna, Schottenstift 254(230), fol. 39v–40r: ‘secundo sic: omnis habitus procedens ex principiis sibi creditis notis autem in lumine superioris scientie est proprie scientia, licet subalternata. Patet de musica, que est scientia proprie subalternata quia procedit ex principiis sibi creditis et notis in arismetica, et idem de perspectiva, que credit principia que nota sunt in geometria. Sed theologia procedit ex principiis in ea tantum creditis, qualia sunt articuli et alia contenta in sacra scriptura notis autem in lumine superioris scientie, scilicet Dei et beatorum. Igitur etc. // (fol. 40r).

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‘Tertio, perspectiva est scientia distincta a geometria et tamen ut sic non habet notitiam suorum principiorum. Igitur si alias haberet perspectivam non habens geometriam, iste tantum crederet sua principia et tamen esset vere sciens. Sic est in proposito de theologia nostra. ‘Confirmatur. Deus posset conservare in intellectu alicuius habitum perspective, non conservando in eo habitum geometrice. Sed in tali intellectu scientia perspectiva esset vere subalternata. Et tamen de suis principiis iste non haberet notitiam, sed fidem tantum ...’ At fol. 4r [Schottenstift 254[230], fol. 40v), the opposing argument to the last confirming argument reads, ‘Ad confirmationem, dicitur quod si aliquam perspectivam, que nunc de facto est scientia Deus conservaret absque geometria, adhuc ipsa esset scientia apta nata in actus similes in quos nunc potest, si cetera pariter concurrent. Non autem ex hoc sequitur quod perspectiva, que acquireretur in aliquo carente geometria, esset scientia.’ One should note, however, that as in the case of Pierre d’Ailly and others, Nicholas has used only the second, not the first, of Gregory’s counter-arguments. Concerning Nicholas’s commentaries, see Alois Madre, Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, Leben und Schriften. Ein Beitrag zur theologischen Literaturgeschichte (Münster i. W.: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1940), esp. 72–97. 31 Johannes Berwardi, de Villingen, Questiones super I et II Sententiarum, Prologue, q. 1; Klosterneuberg, Stiftsbibliothek 41, fol. 4rb: ‘Deus posset conservare in intellectu alicuius habitum perspective, non conservando in eo habitum geometrice, sed in tali intellectu scientia perspectiva esset vere subalternata, et tamen de suis principiis iste non haberet notitiam, sed fidem tantum,’ and fol. 4va: ‘dicitur quod si aliquam perspectivam, que nunc de facto est scientia dominus conservaret absque geometria, adhuc ipsa esset scientia apta nata in actus similes in quos nunc potest, si cetera pariter concurrerent, non autem ex hoc sequitur quod perspectiva, que acquireretur in aliquo carente geometria, esset scientia.’ From the context of the argument, however, it is clear that John has drawn heavily on Nicholas de Dinkelsbühl’s Questiones communes for his knowledge of Gregory’s argument. The conclusion that must be drawn from the preceding is that in John we are twice removed from Gregory of Rimini, with perhaps James of Eltville as a partial intermediary prior to Nicholas de Dinkelsbühl. 32 Lectura super IV libros Sententiarum, esp. Prologue, q. 1; Alençon, Bibliothèque de la ville 144, fol. 9ra–21vb. One should note that Henry does refer to subalternation (fol. 18rb–21vb) and divine omnipotence (fol.

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Steven J. Livesey 11va–vb) in separate contexts, but did not discuss the argument that connects the two. Prior to his settlement in Vienna, Henry spent 1382–3 at Eberbach, where he reread James of Eltville’s lectures. See Trapp, ‘Augustinian Theology of the 14th Century,’ 252 and n93. In 1397, the Carmelite Walter de Bamberg lectured on the Sentences at Vienna. His commentary presents Thomas’s position, upon which he concludes, ‘Et ista responsio videtur mihi satis probabilis.’ He identifies Gregory of Rimini as an opponent of the position, but mentions nothing of the argument based on divine omnipotence. See Walter de Bamberg, Questiones super Sententias, Prologue, qu. 1; Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek MS. Theol. 77, fol. 9ra. I have not been able to consult the lectures of Petrus de Pulkau, which date from circa 1403 and are in other respects very similar to those of Nicholas de Dinkelsbühl; I strongly suspect that they contain the argument. Ernest Moody, ‘Empiricism and Metaphysics in Medieval Philosophy,’ in Moody, Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic: Collected Papers, 1933–1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 287–304. Johannes Capreoli, Defensiones theologiae divi Thomae Aquinatis, Prologue, q. 1, a. 2, §2; ed. C. Paban and T. Pègues t. 1 (Tours: Alfred Cattier, 1900; repr. Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1967), 6b-8a. Commentaria in IV libros Sententiarum, quaest. praev. q. 1–4, quaestiuncularum solutio brevis, q. 1–7; in Opera omnia (Tournai: Typis Cartusiae S. M. de Pratis, 1902), 19: 58–83, 88–93. Concerning Denis’s discussion of theology as a science, see Kent Emery, Jr, ‘Theology as a Science: The Teaching of Denys of Ryckel (Dionysius Cartusiensis, 1402–1471),’ in Knowledge and the Sciences in Medieval Philosophy. The Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Medieval Philosophy (SIEPM), Helsinki 24–9 August 1987, 3 vols, ed. Reijo Työrinoja, Anja Inkeri Lehtinen, and Dagfinn Føllesdal (Helsinki: Finnish Society for Missiology and Ecumenics, 1990), 3: 376–88. Thomas Claxton, Scriptum super I Sententiarum, Prologue, q. 2. The text survives in two of the three extant manuscripts of Claxton’s commentary: Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 370(592), fols 10v–37r, and Florence, BN Centrale, B.VI.340.1, fol. 6vb–24va. Concerning Claxton’s discussion of subalternation, see my ‘Science and Theology in the Fourteenth Century: The Subalternate Sciences in Oxford Commentaries on the Sentences,’ Synthèse 83(1990): 273–92 at 280–3. Carlenis’s commentary on the Sentences, produced in Bologna about 1439–40, is preserved in four manuscripts: Milano, Biblioteca Trivulziana 1682 (460), fol. 1r–117v; Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense 1025, fol. 1ra–131rb;

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Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. misc. 573, fol. 172ra–377ra; and Vatican, B. Reginensis lat. 392, fol. 105r–224v. See my edition of the first two questions from the prologue, which concern the issue of the scientific status of theology and its subalternation relationship, Antonius de Carlenis, O.P.: Four Questions on the Subalternation of the Sciences. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 84.4 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994). Leonard A. Kennedy, C.S.B., ‘The Fifteenth Century and Divine Absolute Power,’ Vivarium 27(1989): 125–52, at 149. See Categories VIII 8b28–34 and Metaphysics IV.2 1003b19–23. One finds, for example, that both John Buridan and Albert of Saxony discuss the matter of habits in their commentaries on Aristotle, but not with the same centrality. See Buridan, Quaestiones super VIII Physicorum libros I, q. 2 (Paris: Dionisius Roce, 1509), fol. 3ra–vb; and Albert of Saxony, Commentarius in Posteriora Aristotelis (Venice: Bonetus Locatellus for O. Scotus, 1497), fol. C6vb–D1ra. Posterior Analytics I.13, 78b34–79a7.

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chapter two

Was Kepler a Secular Theologian? ROBERT S. WESTMAN

1. Introduction: The Concept of ‘Secular Theology’ in Funkenstein’s Theology and the Scientific Imagination ‘Secular theology’ is one of those neologisms that Amos Funkenstein was fond of coining. Readers of Theology and the Scientific Imagination cannot help but be struck by the number of uncommon analytic categories that populate the book and that require mastery in order to follow the full argument – terms like ‘univocation,’ ‘unequivocation,’ ‘ubiquity,’ ‘theologumena,’ and ‘ergetic knowledge.’1 This is a conceptual vocabulary that bears the traces of an etymological ancestry that is largely Latinate, often medieval-scholastic, and sometimes Greek. It reflects both Funkenstein’s intimate proximity to the original sources and the unusual experience of someone who had learned classical languages early in life and had learned to write English only after having learned to write proficiently in the vernacular Hebrew and German. What may strike some readers today as an alien philosophical language results from ideals initially forged outside Anglo-American philosophy. Funkenstein showed a remarkable, critical ability to find virtues in positions rejected by all sides. He respected the problems and the technical resources of both the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century schoolmen and twentieth-century philosophers and freely used their categories and distinctions to read seventeenth-century texts. He was not as comfortable with social constructivists who took their inspiration from the premise that facts about the natural world, including machine-made ones, are the product of human fabrication.2 But, as was often the case, Funkenstein found a non-secular filiation. He claimed that the constructivists’

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‘knowing by doing’ (the ergetic ideal) lay in the seventeenth-century’s erosion of the divide between human and divine knowledge. This view involved the premise that God had constructed a world and humans could just about know how God did it. Therefore, to make knowledge was effectively to imitate the Creator. In Theology and the Scientific Imagination, as throughout his other writings, Funkenstein regarded the history of knowledge – both ideals of knowledge and specific theories – as a fundamentally dialectical process. Some novelties struggle into existence already containing the preconditions of their own future self-destruction. The phenomenon is evident, for example, in the widespread use of conceptual opposites among the early Greek nature philosophers (physiologoi), in Ptolemy, and, of course, in Aristotle. For example, in rejecting as absurd the possibility of never-ending rectilinear motion in a resistance-less medium, Aristotle formulated and thereby anticipated a concept that would later overturn his own.3 The creative and, at times, humorous possibilities of dialectical self-contradiction and tension were not to be avoided but to be noticed, applauded, and, of course, studied ... Secular theology is such a notion. Funkenstein was quite conscious that he was presenting the notion of secular theology as a sketch rather than as ‘a detailed and comprehensive description of a new cultural phenomenon.’4 His characterization is, nonetheless, highly suggestive. Secular theology involved the creation of a new kind of professional role in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: ‘conceived by laymen for laymen.’ Writers who were not themselves religious officials wrote about matters divine, but did so differently from orthodox theologians and in a way that paralleled, broadened, and effectively reconstituted the subject matter of theology itself. Of course, the purpose of systematic theology was, first and foremost, to clarify what it was proper to believe. Authors undertook to justify orthodox teaching by skilful interpretation of scripture and citation of lists of traditional authorities to justify the shared coherence of their conclusions. In establishing the conditions of right belief, orthodox theology became effectively the ‘wet nurse’ of heresy: it defined improper belief and thereby established the legal foundations for the management of dissent. What, however, should theologians teach about the divinely created world? Proper belief about the nature of the Trinity or Christ’s being was a different matter from prescribed belief about such natural philosophical matters as the infinitude of space, the earth’s motion, the exis-

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tence of a vacuum, or the influence of the stars on human fate. The former domain was a matter of faith and the decisions of bishops and church councils; the latter, that of sensory experience and reason. In the thirteenth century, the theology faculty at Paris became involved in a famous struggle with their brothers in the philosophy faculty about the viability of Aristotle’s positions on these and other questions about the natural world. In these struggles, the theologians applied the doctrine of absolute divine omnipotence and will: had He so wished, God could have created an infinite number of worlds, could have created a vacuum, and so on. God, not Aristotle, became the sum of hypothetical possibilities for having a world. The condemnations of 1277 declared that no one could hold as true any propositions detracting from the absolute divine power. Here, again, was the operation of a kind of dialectical imagination: it became a theological virtue for natural philosophers to imagine non-Aristotelian solutions to Aristotle’s problems. But the theologians continued to set the goals and epistemological limits even as they successfully (and remarkably) expanded the discursive space. For Funkenstein’s secular theologians of the sixteenth and, especially, the seventeenth centuries, one has instead ‘a theology oriented towards the world,’ a theology of the created world, written for a new kind of audience outside the institution of the church. The Protestant Reformation witnessed the breakdown of the profession of theology ‘protected from the incursions of laymen.’5 And it was this social ‘incursion’ across previously inviolable boundaries that represented for Funkenstein a central feature of the movement of secularization.6 That movement also occurred in another more explicitly Weberian direction: the natural world acquired a sacralized status, and the human study of the world became, in turn, a sacred activity. Contemplation of the world – conjectures about how God put it together – increased God’s honour. And finally, just as God’s temple was seen to be a subject worthy of human contemplation, so too the view developed that traditional ways of maintaining the boundaries between theology, philosophy, mathematics, and other disciplines could no longer be sustained. It now became an epistemological virtue to transport models between hitherto bounded areas of knowledge – from mathematics to physics, from physics to psychology, from theology to physics. ‘God,’ Funkenstein wrote, ‘ceased to be the monopoly of the theologians.’

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2. Kepler as a Secular Theologian It is curious that Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) does not figure prominently in Theology and the Scientific Imagination. And yet, at first glance, in many of his writings about the heavens, Kepler fits all of Funkenstein’s criteria for a secular theologian. Kepler’s works were not directed solely to theologians – although theologians were certainly part of his intended readership – but to princes, kings, emperors, and mathematically skilled readers in courts and universities. Yet it is clear that he understood his central objective as the interpretation of the divine world plan.7 For example, a little poem placed strategically on the back of the title page of his earliest major publication, the Cosmographic Mystery, evokes the first chapters of Genesis as well as Plato’s Timaeus: What is the world? What motivated God to create it and according to what plan? From whence has God drawn the numbers? Which rule governs such an enormous mass? Why has God created six circuits? Why has he created these spaces between each orb? Why are Jupiter and Mars separated by such a vast space when they are not the first two orbs? Here, indeed, Pythagoras teaches all this to you by means of five figures. He has shown us by his example that we can be reborn after two thousand years of error, provided that there is a Copernicus ...8

In the Harmonice mundi (1619) Kepler made explicit the connection to the Timaeus, ‘which is beyond all hazard of a doubt a kind of commentary on the first chapter of Genesis, or the first book of Moses, converting it to the Pythagorean philosophy, as is readily apparent to the attentive reader, who compares the actual words of Moses in detail.’9 However, unlike the numerous sixteenth-century commentators on Genesis, Kepler did not explicitly write this work as a theologian for other theologians.10 He did not use the genre of the commentary, and he did not use the Church Fathers to elucidate the meaning of the created world. Nor, like thirteenth- and fourteenth-century natural philosophical commentators, did he speak hypothetically of a world that God could have built. He represented himself as offering the reasons for the arrangement of the planets, as first conjectured by Copernicus ‘from the phenomena’ (ex ‘phainomenois’ ) and as God had actually made it to be (a Creationis Ideâ).11 Following baroque humanistic practice, Kepler cited a mixture of authorities from the ancients

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(Pythagoras, Plato, Euclid, Proclus, Ptolemy) and the moderns (Nicolaus Cusanus, Copernicus and his disciple Rheticus, Kepler’s own teacher Michael Maestlin, Tycho Brahe, and the Euclid commentator Francois Foix-Candale) – with a decided leaning towards the authority of the moderns.12 If God was forever a mystery, Kepler regarded God’s imago, his physical presence in the world, as transparent to human cognition. Indeed, for Kepler, ‘transparency’ is a term that is more than apt: he conceived of the human mind as analogous to an optical faculty, uniquely constructed to make pictures, just as the eye makes pictures by focusing rays on the concave surface of the retina. Kepler called mental activity symbolization. The human mind generates and (literally) ‘plays’ with geometrical forms that it tries to match to the divinely created sensible world.13 This knowing faculty thus corresponds to the manner in which the Creator went about fashioning the world as a likeness of His own being. As early as the Cosmographic Mystery, Kepler presents a God, who, like the Platonic demiurge, uses quantities.14 By embodying himself in three dimensions God makes himself visible to humankind through archetypal patterns. The Curved quantity expresses itself as the sphere and the planetary orbs, the Straight as the origin of created beings. Within the class of three-dimensional figures, Euclid had shown that only five solids can be constructed all of whose faces are identical; and Kepler claimed that these five regular polyhedra, when correctly situated, defined the spacing between the planets. Although Kepler himself surely would not have recognized ‘secular theologian’ as a meaningful self-representation, we shall see that it has unexpected analytic value for the historian. In this brief study, I want to suggest how Funkenstein’s problematic of a theology not directed to theologians might be taken in a direction at once more local and diachronic. I want to call attention to three important moments in Kepler’s life that might focus more precisely the engagement of scientific and religious elements in his work. The first was his preparation for a career as an academic theologian in Tübingen, where he had studied from 1589 to 1594; the second was his decision to abandon that goal and to take up a position as a school teacher at Graz in lower Austria until 1600. The third concerns the development of his religious identity within the new space of possibilities at the court of the Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II where he held the position of Imperial Mathematicus from 1600 to 1612.

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3. Kepler at Tübingen (1589–94) and Graz (1594–1600) Theology faculties controlled all the sixteenth-century German universities and Stiften (or theological colleges). German universities differed in this respect from the secular Italian universities where, for centuries, medicine and law ruled the upper faculties. The territorial princes used the church and, through the church, the educational system to inculcate and sustain loyalty to themselves. As Heinz Schilling has argued more broadly, ‘It was religious, that is, confessional uniformity [rather than national bonds] that at the beginning of the early modern era supplied the basis of social integration.’15 In the late-sixteenthcentury duchy of Württemberg, the scholarship system became an important tool for sustaining territorial sovereignty; it discouraged students from wandering away with their assets to study at other institutions.16 The scholarship (Herzogliches Stipendium) had been introduced by Duke Ulrich in 1536, ostensibly to help poor boys of ‘hardworking and God-fearing character’ to pursue their studies at Tübingen. In return, they were required to commit themselves to study only in that city.17 The dividend for the Württemberg dukes was that when their studies were complete the graduates would be expected to serve as loyal ‘preachers, advisers, and civil servants ... in our duchy.’18 The Württemberg scholarship policy was a success. It produced a substantial group of men who staffed the pulpits and taught in the lower Latin and German grammar schools. A rather smaller number became members of the university. If there was a surveillance mechanism or confessional ‘gaze’ at Tübingen, it manifested itself through the four professors who made up the university’s theology faculty. These men all came up through the ducal scholarship system and exercised considerable powers through a variety of offices that linked the university and the Stift to the duke. The first ordinarius, senior professor of theology, was university chancellor and officially the ducal theology adviser; in that capacity, he engaged in some pedagogical duties but otherwise spent much time away from the university. On the other hand, the superintendents of the Stift, the college where the scholarship students (Stipendiaten) lived a strict religious form of life, were the men ‘on the ground,’ most deeply involved in managing actual discipline and pedagogy. They lived in the Stift and were usually present at meals and in attendance at student disputations and sermons. There was something like an interlocking directorate: the

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two superintendents sat on the university’s theology faculty. The first superintendent of the Stift was the (second) ordinarius in theology and dean of the church. The other superintendent was the extraordinarius or third member of the university theology faculty. And a non-theologian (magister domus), who nonetheless was expected to have studied theology, was charged with daily disciplinary supervision of the students. Finally, a fourth theologian was pastor of the church and had no official connection to the Stift. The management of theological orthodoxy in Württemberg was achieved in a variety of ways. The scholarship students lived together in a highly disciplined setting, practising stylistic exercises, learning to dispute and to preach, often engaging in special ‘repetitions’ of points covered in the professors’ lectures with the help of students who had completed the Master’s (Repetenten).19 The theologians determined and influenced changes in the curriculum. They also controlled the publication of books in Württemberg. And, most importantly, they controlled appointments in the faculty of arts.20 A collection of some fifty-five Tübingen theological disputations, today held by the Schaffhausen Municipal Library, and dating as far back as the three decades preceding Kepler’s entry into the university in 1589, provides an idea of the kinds of topics deemed worthy of defence. The majority of these were conducted under Jacob Heerbrand, first superintendent of the Stift (1557–90); a few before the university’s chancellor, Jacob Andreae (1561–90), and the third ordinarius, Theodor Schnepf (1556–86). Typically, the examined student (respondens) disputed theses with obvious anti-Catholic motifs and worries about discord among the German evangelicals: good works (1567), indulgences (1572), dissensions in the church (1574), the errors of the popes (1577), penance (1580), predestination (1583), and so forth. Altogether, only three presiding professors (praeses) formally put the questions to be disputed by the responding student: Heerbrand, Andreae, and Schnepf.21 Moreover, the Tübingen publishers Alexander Hock and Georg Gruppenbach issued all the disputations.22 This was clearly a small, close-knit community, the training ground of an elite. It was also close knit in another sense: there was considerable intermarriage among faculty families, and this seems to have been an important route – or obstacle – to a professorial career.23 Although it was the job of the theologians to teach what it was proper for the duke’s subjects to believe – and what it was improper to hold – this did not mean that unanimity was easily attained. Before

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one could produce a catechism for popular as well as learned consumption there had to be agreement on a ‘standardized confession of faith.’ 24 But after the death of Luther, and especially after Melanchthon’s death in 1560, the German evangelical world was rent with interminable disputes and efforts to bring about common confessional agreement. The pressures towards confessional conformity were enormous; charges of false teaching were rife. In 1577, a group of theologians from Württemberg, Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Electoral Brandenburg, and Electoral Saxony drafted the Lutheran Formula of Concord. Led by Jacob Andreae – and encouraged by the territorial princes – the Formula of Concord produced a list of errors committed by ‘sectarians’ (Anabaptists, Schwenckfeldians, Antitrinitarians, and also Calvinists). The Formula regarded these sectaries as radical not least because of their missionary impulse to convert the world to their version of Christianity.25 Not everyone was willing to follow the 1577 prescriptions. Philipp Apianus, who taught mathematical subjects at Tübingen (1570–83), refused to subscribe; he was soon refused the right to teach astronomy and other mathematical subjects. This was not, however, because his mathematics was unorthodox but because his confessional position was out of line.26 However, his onetime student Michael Maestlin (1550–1631) had no such reservations and, after several years as a Tübingen Repetent, a short period as a pastor in Backnang, and a few years as professor of mathematics at Heidelberg, he returned to his alma mater in 1584 where he enjoyed a long teaching career until his death in 1631. Maestlin became one of the pre-eminent professors in the Tübingen arts faculty. He raised a large family, outlived most of its members, and died in 1631 at the age of eighty-one, just one year after the death of his most famous pupil, Johannes Kepler.27 As a member of the arts faculty, Maestlin published no works that were formally theological in nature, yet all his writings were produced in the context of late-sixteenth-century Württemberg Lutheran orthodoxy. Biblical passages praising the heavens adorned the introduction to his elementary textbook (Epitome of Astronomy, Heidelberg, 1582). The Epitome showed a great facility for clear exposition and added new materials not to be found in the numerous other textbooks available on the market. It went through multiple editions into the early seventeenth century.28 Although sixteenth-century works of astronomy and natural philosophy tended not to be overtly ideological in character, there were some important differences between Maestlin’s textbook and that of the

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leading Jesuit astronomer of the era – Christopher Clavius’s influential Commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco (first edition, 1570). Maestlin’s Epitome served as something of a counterpart to Clavius’s Sphere at Tübingen and other Lutheran schools.29 Clavius structured his presentation around Sacrobosco’s thirteenth-century text, while Maestlin used a freer question-and-answer format not dissimilar from the Tübingen theological catechisms. Also, unlike Clavius, whose astronomical writings were restricted to pedagogy and to his calendrical writings, Maestlin produced a separate work on the comet of 1577. There he claimed that the comet was located where Aristotle denied that comets should appear – in the unchanging aetherial region above the moon. But Maestlin went even farther: he produced a hypothesis that ascribed to the comet a circular path around the sun and located it in the same sphere in which Copernicus had alleged that Venus moved around the sun.30 Although this comet was never again seen, it was the first attempt to treat such an object as periodic rather than as a transitory earthly phenomenon – although, because this comet’s path was actually parabolic, it never reappeared.31 While the cometary treatise had no special confessional consequences, other astronomical work did. In 1586, Maestlin wrote a detailed and strident attack on Clavius, the author of the church’s reform of the civil calendar in 1582 under Pope Gregory XIII. The calendrical adjustment meant that, as a result of Rome’s calculations, everyone was supposed to set their calendars ahead by ten days. Maestlin advised against such indiscretion, and consequently the German Protestant territories resisted Rome by staying on the old-style calendar until Napoleon finally imposed the Gregorian in the nineteenth century.32 It is well known that Maestlin first introduced Kepler to the fundamental arguments for Copernicus’s theory. At the time that Kepler first showed up at Tübingen, Maestlin had been carefully (and affirmatively) annotating Copernicus’s main work for about twenty years – including, most unusually, those critical sections where Copernicus claimed that his new planetary arrangement explained the order and distances better than the Ptolemaic alternative.33 In the Cosmographic Mystery, Kepler wrote candidly that, ‘Six years ago [1590] when I worked under the direction of the very famous Master Michael Maestlin at Tübingen, I was disturbed by the many disadvantages in the usual opinion about the universe; also I was delighted by Copernicus, whom my Master often mentioned in his lectures ...’34 However, one looks in vain for any forceful advocacy of Copernicus in Maestlin’s astronomy textbook. This

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makes it more than likely that whatever he presented about Copernicus’s hypotheses in his regular lectures ignored the ‘disadvantages’ to which Kepler referred.35 Yet Kepler must have learned something about these deficiencies from Maestlin since he was already well enough acquainted with the elements of Copernicus’s argument by 1593 when he mentions defending the earth’s daily rotation in a physics disputation.36 Moreover, he must have had access to Maestlin’s annotated copy of De revolutionibus since he did not obtain his own copy until after he had left Tübingen in the fall of 1595.37 Kepler’s decision to defend Copernicus was, therefore, quite rapid: it occurred within two years of beginning his astronomical studies with Maestlin.38 Unlike Maestlin’s caution, however, Kepler’s excitement about the Copernican arrangement of the heavens seemed at times so passionate as to be virtually a devotional stance or illumination. ‘I am satisfied to ... guard the gates of the temple in which Copernicus makes sacrifices at the high altar,’ he wrote to Maestlin in 1598.39 But whatever genuine religious sentiment may have been embodied in passages of this sort, the question of planetary order did not carry with it anything like the same political/theological valence as doctrinal disputes about the Real Presence of Christ in the host or the freedom of the will. It was not a condition for signing the Formula of Concord or consenting to the Augsburg Confession.40 Kepler was very uncomfortable with the theological disputes at Tübingen, although formally willing to subscribe to the Augsburg Confession.41 And his move towards nature as a theological resource, within the context of his profession as an astronomer, frames a struggle in search of a more open, personal, religious identity. Kepler regarded the very act of contemplating heavenly order itself as a religious act that lifted men above the demands of ordinary life – including the conventional practice of casting annual astrological predictions. In fact, the dedication to the Cosmographic Mystery promised that its utility would not be at all obvious to ‘the unlearned’ but that its value would be ‘far preferable to annual prognostications.’42 Kepler’s preoccupation with this sharp distinction between a learned, contemplative astronomy and the issuance of lowly, practical forecasts was no mere topos. It was directly associated with events in his own life. In 1594, the Tübingen Academic Senate asked Kepler to take up a position at a Lutheran grammar school in the Austrian city of Graz. He was supposed to teach the rudiments of astronomy to the sons of the local Protestant nobility and, like his predecessor, Georg Stadius, he was sup-

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posed to issue astrological prognostications every year. Although Kepler often complained about the chore of preparing these forecasts, this was not (as is sometimes stated) because he doubted astrology as an enterprise but rather because he believed some of its main theoretical principles to be mistaken and in need of revision.43 In fact, he did his day job impressively well. Some of his prognostications hit close enough to the mark, predicting bad weather and bad harvests. His mind, however, was focused on astronomical, physical, and philosophical questions, on how and why the universe was constructed as it was. At the same time, his sense of who he was and what his vocation should be was still deeply cast in the categories and vocabulary of the Tübingen Stift. One may think of this emerging Kepler as struggling towards an integration of both the demands of the theologians and his simultaneously powerful attraction to Maestlin’s dissenting astronomical views. Kepler carried this problem with him to Graz. He already had a clear idea from Maestlin that the Copernican planetary ordering could not be an accident: only in that arrangement of the heavens did the periods of revolution increase with distance from the sun. This does not mean that Kepler, any more than Maestlin, believed that he was in possession of a strict Aristotelian-style proof whereby a true conclusion follows necessarily from premises that are true, proper, and irrevisable, and in which all alternatives are eliminated as false.44 Copernicus himself was surely aware that he lacked such a proof and resorted to the somewhat weaker claim that his hypothesis was true because it possessed a feature of harmonious coherence in the relation between the order and distances that the Ptolemaic hypotheses lacked.45 Kepler thought that there must be more to this scheme than either Copernicus or Maestlin had alleged. And in this respect, both his theological commitments and his physical intuitions were important. Already at Tübingen it had occurred to Kepler that if there was a proof, it must somehow be found not only in a posteriori inferences drawn from observations but also a priori from the domains of theology and physics. God’s power to create order must somehow reveal itself in the heavens themselves, in the ‘Book of Nature,’ rather than in the literal words of the Bible. Or, as Kepler put it charmingly in 1621: Certainly God has a tongue, but he also has a finger. And who would deny that the tongue of God is adjusted both to his intention and, on that account, to the common tongue of men? Therefore in matters which are

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quite plain everyone with strong religious scruples will take the greatest care not to twist the tongue of God so that it refutes the finger of God in Nature.46

But who could be sure how God made things? Unlike the medieval scholastics, Kepler would rarely speak of God as being able to do anything He wants; he was far more fond of invoking God’s ordained power, saying that ‘The Creator does nothing in vain.’ This was a god who used his powers to create a particular universe – and, for Kepler, that meant the best of all possible universes. Kepler sought to convince the reader on this matter by embedding his arguments within the frame of his own life experience. He presented a narrative of a discovery won from personal toil, wrong turns, reiteration, and eventual illumination. ‘On July 20 [1595],’ while teaching elementary astronomy to his young students at Graz, he reported to Maestlin that ‘amidst a flood of tears (and crying “Eureka”), I discovered the manner and reason for there being six orbs as well as the distances between them ...’ Kepler’s excitement about six had to do with the fact that the moon was no longer a planet, as it is in the seven-planet Ptolemaic universe; and his excitement about five came from the fact that there were now five spaces to be filled in the Copernican ordering and that Euclid had proved geometrically that there can be five and only five perfect, regular solids.47 The scene of this discovery narrative, as we have seen, was not a religious retreat or theological seminary, a secular court or a private study, but an audience of lower-level students.48 Kepler now drove this geometrical demonstration in two directions. First, Euclid’s proof was the bridge that he had been seeking between the visible world, directly accessible to human cognition, and the ideas that God used to construct it. As the culmination of the whole enterprise of the Elements, the geometrical proof signified necessity and, hence, an indication that God’s hand was behind the whole project.49 Secondly, the ratios of the radii of the circumscribed orbs to the inscribed orbs tally extremely well – although not perfectly – with the ratios of the Copernican planetary distances. Kepler thought that this showed necessity in the world – how God’s intentions were worked out directly in the creation; it also constituted a new and powerful hermeneutic for reading the first chapters of the book of Genesis. Again, the critical guide for reading Genesis was not the Church Fathers but Proclus’s Commentary on Euclid and Plato’s Timaeus where the five regular solids were first described as the forms of the elements.

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Like a prophet, Kepler wanted to spread God’s word. He strongly resisted the circumspect, private manner that had characterized Maestlin’s approach to his annotations on De revolutionibus.50 He thought of the act of publishing his discovery (inventum meum) as a way to honour God, who wished to be known through the Book of Nature.51 To get it published at the official university press in Tübingen was another matter. The printer Gruppenbach required the faculty senate’s assent – which meant, of course, the acquiescence of the theologians – and to obtain that Kepler needed to enlist Maestlin’s support. Yet in spite of his many years of outward caution, Maestlin proved himself more than adequate to the task. In a sense, his student’s boldness licensed him to come forth in defence of views that he himself had long held. Moreover, both his confessional stance and his credibility as a mathematician were uncontested, and the manner in which he taught Copernicus in the classroom had, thus far, left no grounds for objection.52 Well experienced in the politics of the small Tübingen faculty, Maestlin mounted an effective strategy. He emphasized to the senate the great novelty of Kepler’s achievement without actually displaying its details. In Maestlin’s language, Kepler had ‘dared to think’ and had then ‘dared to try to prove’ that the number, order, and distances of the planets could be derived beforehand from the divine plan. He had succeeded in this demonstration, Maestlin averred, but in so doing, he had not made his work sufficiently accessible to the public. There were many who knew nothing about Copernicus and who did not know Euclid’s proofs. Master Kepler needed to explain these matters ‘less obscurely.’ 53 That is, he needed to add a preface in which he should explain Copernicus’s theories more clearly. Maestlin’s gambit had worked: there were no difficulties with Kepler’s discovery, just the manner in which he had communicated it. The senate unanimously approved publication of this unprecedented presentation of Copernicus’s theory on condition that Maestlin’s recommendations be followed. Kepler was extremely pleased, since he had feared that the theologians would reject publication on the grounds that his views were somehow incompatible with Holy Scripture. He was right to have had such worries. For, even though he had an answer, to which we shall come shortly, he decided to leave it out of this earliest work in response to the recommendations of the theologian Matthias Hafenreffer.54 In the meantime, Maestlin dropped everything and invested an enormous amount of effort in getting Kepler’s manuscript into shape for

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publication. He helped to clean up some of Kepler’s calculations, and he explained to him a feature of one of the planetary models that he had not represented correctly.55 In addition, he added two works of his own to Kepler’s own treatise that had not received specific senate approval. The first was a new edition of Georg Joachim Rheticus’s Narratio prima, the little work published by Copernicus’s first disciple (Gdansk, 1540, 1541; Basel, 1566), which presented a forceful summary of the new theory of the heavens. Maestlin added a strongly Copernican introduction that also praised Kepler’s discovery, and he added new diagrams and postils to Rheticus’s work, including his own visual representation of the Copernican arrangement that hinted at gaps between the spheres.56 The second was a work of his own, a lucid and highly technical presentation of the dimensions of the individual Copernican planetary models.57 Maestlin’s idea was that the ordinary reader would get the theoretical rudiments of Copernicus’s system from Rheticus (rather than from De revolutionibus), the parameters of the individual planetary models from his own presentation, and the physical and metaphysical causes of the planetary arrangement from Kepler’s Cosmographic Mystery – a complete rather than a partial explanation of the divine plan of the heavens. For all practical purposes, the three works together constituted a joint publication – and it had cost Maestlin dearly. He had had to postpone a major polemical work attacking the Gregorian calendar; but he clearly thought that it was worth the trouble. For the first time, he felt confident enough to express his own views publicly. The Cosmographic Mystery appeared from the Gruppenbach presses in April 1597. The response from the theologians was not long in coming. The published text of the Cosmographic Mystery contained materials not previously seen by the senate – bold Copernican diagrams, Rheticus’s Narratio, with Maestlin’s notes and introduction.58 Worse, it was clearly irritating and absurd that the correct interpretation of Genesis should proceed through Pythagoras, Proclus, and Copernicus. Suddenly, the earlier senate request for ‘less obscurity’ took on a new and unexpected meaning. In October, Maestlin reported an increasingly tense atmosphere: Time and again Dr. Hafenreffer has assailed me (jokingly, to be sure, although serious tones too seem to be intermingled with the jests). He wants to debate with me, while defending his Bible, etc. By the same token, not long ago in a public evening sermon he expounded Genesis, chapter 1: ‘God did not hang the sun up in the middle of the universe, like a

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Robert S. Westman lantern in the middle of a room,’ etc. However, I usually reply humorously to those jokes as long as they remain jokes. If the matter were to be treated seriously, I too would respond differently. Dr. Hafenreffer acknowledges your discovery to be wonderfully imaginative and learned, but he regards it as completely and unqualifiedly in conflict with Holy Writ and truth itself. Yet with these men, who are otherwise fine and very scholarly, but have no adequate grasp of the fundamentals of these subjects, in like manner, it is better to act jokingly while they accept jokes.59

Maestlin and Kepler had crossed a political and disciplinary boundary with the Tübingen theologians. Hafenreffer gave ‘brotherly advice’ to Kepler: he should remain a ‘pure mathematician,’ stay away from making true claims about the universe, and avoid provoking schisms in the church. But Hafenreffer and his colleagues did not move beyond this admonition – unlike the more serious warning given to Galileo some twenty years later. The difference lay in the process of confessionalization in the Protestant lands: the real head of the church, defensor ecclesiae, was the duke himself. And while the theologians had the duke’s ear in all sorts of important legal and moral matters that lay within their perceived area of competence, he turned naturally to his mathematicians for advice that normally fell into their domain. How did Maestlin and Kepler approach the duke? They avoided standard academic arguments, saying nothing at all about Holy Scripture or Aristotle’s physics. Instead, they constructed a completely exaggerated appeal to reputation and renown, advising that ‘all the famous astronomers of our time follow Copernicus instead of Ptolemy and Alfonso’ (after whom the thirteenth-century planetary tables were named).60 At the same time, they stressed novelty. Maestlin emphasized that Kepler had found a new method, appealing to geometrical/metaphysical considerations rather than to observations alone, by which the planetary distances could be established and ephemerides improved.61 And finally, Kepler requested financial support (‘under a hundred gulden’) to build a copper model of his polyhedral Copernican arrangement, with the planets represented as precious jewels. Like a Trojan horse sitting in the ducal palace, this princely emblematic display would call concrete attention to Copernicus, Kepler, and the divine a priori causes of the heavenly arrangement. Moreover, the cosmic mystery would become more and more obvious – and also pleasurable to contemplate – as the duke turned the spigots that released the beers, wines, and liquors filling the copper hemispheres

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Image Not Available

Figure 2.1 Johannes Kepler, Mysterium cosmographicum. Copper engraving, 1621 (Courtesy Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)

(i.e., cups) representing the spaces between the various planets. Like Kepler’s physical solar force that pushed the planets around the sun but weakened as it moved farther from the centre, the design called for ‘a costly aqua vite’ to flow from the sun and a ‘very bad wine or beer’ to be put into the last cup formed by Saturn and Jupiter. Decreasingly strong or good wines and beers would fill the remaining spaces.62

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Although this project and a mechanical Copernican planetarium eventually failed to materialize, Kepler did not cease his efforts to link the duke publicly to his inventum.63 Ultimately, he achieved this goal in the heading to the famous, dramatic, pictorial fold-out that appears as the third plate in the Cosmographic Mystery (fig. 2.1).64 And it is noteworthy that the polyhedral model is shown resting (suggestively) on an ornate supporting base-stand – clearly intended for a patron to put on display – rather than as an abstract spatial representation, as was common for such diagrams.65 And it was this diagram that embodied and conveyed patronal protection against theological criticism. As Maestlin remarked to Kepler, ‘They [the theologians] make no overt move because they are deterred by the authority of our duke, to whom the principal diagram is dedicated.’66

4. Kepler in Prague (1600–12) It is ironic that the Cosmographic Mystery cleared the Tübingen senate and the ducal palace more easily than it won assent from Kepler’s astronomically competent contemporaries. No one but Maestlin, among the astronomers of this period, gave it such a strong endorsement. Among those with reservations were the likes of Tycho Brahe and Galileo. Galileo wrote a friendly and encouraging letter but then did not engage in further correspondence with Kepler for more than a decade. Brahe was not pleased that Kepler had failed to rank his own system of the world as a divine revelation. But Tycho was also sufficiently impressed by Kepler’s abilities that he urged Kepler to join the household of heavenly practitioners that, in 1599, he had moved from his cloudy Danish isle to Prague in order to take up the post of Imperial Mathematician. At first, Kepler was reluctant to move, but on 31 July 1600, his choices were seriously proscribed: all citizens of Graz were ordered to appear before the city magistrate to be examined for their faith. All non-Catholics or those who refused to convert to Catholicism were banished. Kepler refused to convert.67 The question of returning to Tübingen also arose; but there Kepler was suspected of Calvinist sympathies, and also he did not have the right marital connections to gain entry into the faculty. Not surprisingly, therefore, Kepler described his decision to move to Prague as guided by divine providence. And when Tycho Brahe died a year after his arrival, Kepler was himself appointed as the emperor’s mathematician. But Kepler gained something beyond the honour of a title. He moved into a court where the emperor permitted an extraor-

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dinary confessional latitude. An eirenic atmosphere, opposed to dogmatic extremes, prevailed at the court – largely, it seems, because Rudolf was unsympathetic to both the Protestant sectarians and the Catholic church, of which he was a member. The Austrian archdukes in Vienna reported with some concern in 1606 that ‘His Majesty has now reached the stage of abandoning God entirely; he will neither hear nor speak of Him, nor suffer any sign of Him. Not only does he refuse to attend any sermon, public service, procession or the like, but he hates and curses all who participate in them, being never more impatient of God and every good work than on such holy occasions.’ 68 This brief historical moment, when a fragile eirenicism prevailed, was good for the diverse array of Rudolfine court natural philosophers. It was as welcoming to the independent-minded, moderate Lutheran, Copernican astronomer Kepler as it was to the Philippist Tycho Brahe and the moderate Calvinist, Paracelsian alchemist, and physician Oswald Croll (ca 1560–1609).69 And it was, of course, in these few years at the Rudolfine court that, among other things, Kepler produced his elliptical astronomy, his reformulations of Witelo’s optics, and his reform of the principles of astrology. And also, in the introduction to his New Astronomy (1609), Kepler freely and fully displayed the arguments about Holy Scripture that he had cautiously withheld from the Cosmographic Mystery. The rhetoric that frames the New Astronomy, especially as expressed in Kepler’s dedicatory letter to the emperor, leaves little doubt about its this-worldly imagery. With delicious irony, Kepler presents himself as aiming to reform all of astronomy by conducting a war on Mars, the god of war. This campaign to ‘capture’ Mars had been going on for many years before Kepler came on the scene. In this place chief praise is to be given to the diligence of Tycho Brahe, the commander-in-chief in this war, who, under the auspices of Frederic II and Christian, Kings of Denmark, and finally of Your Holy Imperial Majesty as well, explored the habits of this enemy of ours nearly every night for twenty years, observed every aspect of the campaign, detected every stratagem, and left them fully described in books as he was dying.

A soldierly Kepler (whose father, incidentally, had been a mercenary) then describes his own role in the campaign: ‘I directed the Brahean machines thither, equipped with precise sights, as if aiming at a particular target, and besieged each position with my enquiry as the chariots of the great Mother Earth were driven around in their circuit.’70 And so forth.71

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What then of God’s tongue? Kepler’s treatment of the theologians in the long introduction to the New Astronomy reveals an aggressively selfconfident tone that marks a shift from the Cosmographic Mystery. Holy Scripture accommodates its language to the human perceptual apparatus – most importantly, the faculty of vision. Yet sight, the only means for us to know the heavens, is vulnerable to illusions.72 The earth’s state of apparent rest with respect to the heavenly bodies is a prime example. The astronomer corrects these deficiencies of vision by optical and astronomical arguments that are, of course, geometrical in character. So, the burden of proof should be shifted to those who interpret the Bible’s language without due attention to its use of (uncorrected) visual expressions. An immodest postil (‘Advice for idiots’) bluntly marks Kepler’s unwillingness to make any concessions to professional theologians: Whoever is too stupid to understand astronomical science, or too weak to believe Copernicus without affecting his faith, I would advise him that, having dismissed astronomical studies and having damned whatever philosophical opinions he pleases, he mind his own business and betake himself home to scratch in his own dirt patch ... He should raise his eyes (the only means of vision) to this visible heaven and with his whole heart burst forth in giving thanks and praising God the Creator. He can be sure that he worships God no less than the astronomer, to whom God has granted the more penetrating vision of the mind’s eye, and an ability and desire to celebrate his God above those things he has discovered.73

It is easy to see why such a passage as this one, penned in the relative confessional openness of the Rudolfine court, could never have been included in the earlier Tübingen publication.74 And indeed, one finds in Galileo’s much better known Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina the same emphasis on the superior capacity of natural reason to interpret the Book of Nature’s true meaning and a corresponding denigration of theological authority.75 This theme of confidence in human reason and effort recurs again unexpectedly in the domain of astrology. On Easter Sunday 1611, Kepler sent a confidential note to one of the emperor’s advisers: Astrology inflicts severe damage on monarchs if some cunning astrologer wants to fool around with people’s gullibility. I think I must make an effort to stop this from happening to our emperor. The emperor is gullible ... I declare that astrology should vanish not only from the council but also

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from the very minds of those who today want to urge the best course on the emperor, and in the same manner it should be kept completely out of the emperor’s sight.76

Contrary to ordinary expectations, Kepler did not argue for the total rejection of astrology. Characteristically, he argued that advice based upon the stars ought to be strictly managed so that it does not hinder what politically wise men know directly from their own daily experience.77 Politics, in short, must not be a monopoly of ordinary astrologers any more than a theology of the natural world should be the unique preserve of ordinary theologians. Theologians should defer to the astronomer’s special capacity to speak for God’s intentions.

Conclusion To the extent that Kepler regarded his heavenly studies as a decoding of the handiwork of the Divine Finger, one might say that he understood himself to be extending the domain of theological practice beyond the conventional theology of the Word claimed by his Tübingen teachers. And more so: after his arrival at the Prague court, his language consciously challenged and undermined traditional theological authority in immediate association with his radical reformation of astronomical practice. The one went hand in hand with the other. These specific appropriations of hermeneutic authority suggest that the wider sacralization of nature to which Funkenstein suggestively pointed was also part of a complex political process whose contours we are only just beginning to understand.

Notes I wish to thank Luce Giard and Rachel N. Klein for helpful, critical comments on an early draft of this paper. 1 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 25, 35, 73, 83, 290. 2 For differing characterizations and assessments of the constructivist project, see Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Ian

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Robert S. Westman Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Amos Funkenstein, ‘The Dialectical Preparation for Scientific Revolutions: On the Role of Hypothetical Reasoning in the Emergence of Copernican Astronomy and Galilean Mechanics,’ in Robert S. Westman, ed., The Copernican Achievement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 165–203. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 5. One might distinguish here between the pairs christianization/dechristianization and theology/secular theology. The former concerns the social process of engendering ‘godly living’ among the laity, living according to moral law: thus, for example, matters of sexual mores, proper public decorum, relations among neighbours, the maintenance of a patriarchal family structure; see especially, Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978); Bruce Tolley, Pastors and Parishioners in Württemberg during the Late Reformation, 1581–1621 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Funkenstein’s notion pertains exclusively to elites and to the domain of ideas and ideals of knowledge. See Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein, ‘Theological Foundations of Kepler’s Astronomy,’ Osiris 16 (2001): 88–113. Barker and Goldstein go farther. They seek to derive Kepler’s views from Melanchthonian ‘Lutheranism,’ and they urge the view that Kepler’s earliest work ‘must be read as essentially theological’ (99). Johannes Kepler, Mysterium cosmographicum, in Johannes Kepler Gesammelte Werke (hereafter GW), ed. by Walther von Dyck, Max Caspar, et al., vol. 1 (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1937; first published in 1597 but with an imprint of 1596). In this paper, I also use Alain Segonds’s excellent translation and notes: Le Secret du monde (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984; hereafter ‘Kepler-Segonds’), 4, 236–7; and Alistair M. Duncan’s translation, Mysterium Cosmographicum: The Secret of the Universe, intro. and commentary by Eric J. Aiton (New York: Abaris Books, 1981; hereafter Kepler-Duncan). Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of the World, trans. E.J. Aiton, A.M. Duncan, and J.V. Field (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997; first pub. Linz, 1619), 301. The passage is a postil to a long quotation from Proclus’s Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements. See also Judith V. Field, Kepler’s Geometrical Cosmology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 50–1. See Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries

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on Genesis, 1527–1633 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1948). Kepler-Segonds, ch. 2, 48–54; see Segonds’s important note (275 n25). On Kepler’s humanist scholarship, see Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 178–203. See my ‘Nature, Art, and Psyche: Jung, Pauli and the Kepler-Fludd Polemic,’ in Brian Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 177–229. In the dedication to the 1621 edition of the Cosmographic Mystery, Kepler writes, ‘almost all the books of astronomy that I have published since that time could be referred to one or the other of the main chapters of the present work because they contain either an explanation or a fulfillment of it’ (Kepler-Segonds, 5). Heinz Schilling, ‘The Reformation and the Rise of the Early Modern State,’ in James D. Tracy, ed., Luther and the Modern State in Germany, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 7, 21–30 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1986), at 23. See Friedrich Paulsen, The German Universities and University Study, trans. by Frank Thily and W.W. Elwang (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 36–7. See Charlotte Methuen, ‘Securing the Reformation through Education: The Duke’s Scholarship System of Sixteenth-Century Württemberg,’ The Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 841–51, at 843. Ibid.: ‘[Sich] als Predikanten, Räten, Dienen ... in unsern Furstenthumb gebruchen zu lassen.’ The magistri repetentes were drawn from among former scholarship students of the Stift. See Charlotte Methuen, Kepler’s Tübingen: Stimulus to a Theological Mathematics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 51. Key members of the theology faculty preceding and overlapping Kepler’s years at Tübingen were Jacob Andreae, Jacob Heerbrand (who had been a one-time student of Philipp Melanchthon at Wittenberg), Stephan Gerlach, Matthias Hafenreffer, Johann Brenz, and Johann Georg Sigwart (ibid., 225). On the procedure for conducting the academic disputation at Tübingen, see ibid., 50; for the institutional setting of disputational practice, see William Clark, ‘On the Dialectical Origins of the Research Seminar,’ History of Science 17 (1989): 11–154. Shelf no. Ca13. The publisher’s name does not appear on all of the Tübingen disputations.

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23 See Richard A. Jarrell, ‘The Life and Scientific Work of the Tübingen Astronomer Michael Maestlin, 1550–1631’ (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1972), 36–7. Jarrell’s source is Gustav Keppler, Familiengeschichte Keppler, 2 vols (Görlitz: Starke, 1930). 24 Irene Dingel, ‘The Echo of Controversy: Caspar Fuger’s Attempt to Propagate the Formula of Concord among the Common People,’ Sixteenth Century Journal 26 (1995): 515–31, at 516. 25 Ibid.; George Hunston Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed., Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 15 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1992), 1224–5, 1276–7. 26 Apianus was dismissed from the Catholic university of Ingolstadt in March 1569 and was appointed at Tübingen by January 1570; in 1583, he fell afoul of the Formula of Concord on suspicion of crypto-Calvinism. For details, see Sigmund Günther, Peter und Philipp Apian, zwei deutsche Mathematiker und Kartographen, Abhandlung der Königlichen Böhmischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 6, Folge 11 (Math.-Naturwiss. Classe, 4), (Prague: Kön. Böhmischen Gesellschaft d. Wissenschaften, 1882), 88–108; also Richard Jarrell, ‘Life and Scientific Work of Maestlin,’ 16–19, and Jarrell, ‘Astronomy at the University of Tübingen: The Work of Michael Mästlin,’ in Friedrich Seck, ed., Wissenschaftsgeschichte um Wilhelm Schickard (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1981), 9–19. In spite of Apianus’s subsequent dismissal from Tübingen, a formal funeral oration for him was delivered in 1589 by Erhard Cellius, the professor of poetry and history: Oratio de vita et morte nobilis et clarissimi viri Philippi Apiani Ingolstadiensis, Medicinae Doctoris, & Mathematum in Academia Tubingensi Professoris ... (Tübingen: Gruppenbach, 1591). 27 The elements of Maestlin’s professional career are well established (see Edward Rosen, ‘Michael Mästlin,’ Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 9: 167–70; Jarrell, ‘Life and Scientific Work of Maestlin’; Methuen, Kepler’s Tübingen). 28 Charlotte Methuen, ‘Maestlin’s Teaching of Copernicus: The Evidence of His University Textbook and Disputations,’ Isis 87 (1996): 230–47; Friedemann Rex, ‘Keplers Lehrer Michael Mästlin und sein Lehrbuch der Astronomie (1582),’ in Gerhard Betsch and Jürgen Hamel, eds, Zwischen Copernicus und Kepler – M. Michael Maestlinus Mathematicus Goeppingensis 1550–1631 (Frankfurt am Main: Harri Deutsch, 2002), 11–32. 29 Methuen, ‘Maestlin’s Teaching of Copernicus.’ 30 ‘Est autem hic circulus OSQ, pars orbis, sphaeram Veneris integram ambientis, in concaua eius superficie descripta’: Michael Maestlin, Observatio et

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32

33

34 35

36 37

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39 40

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Demonstratio Cometae Aetherei, qui anno 1577 et 1578 Constitutus in Sphaera Veneris ... (Tübingen: Georg Gruppenbach, 1578), 44. See my ‘The Comet and the Cosmos: Kepler, Maestlin and the Copernican Hypothesis,’ in Studia Copernicana, 5 = Colloquia Copernicana 1 (Wrocl/aw: Ossolineum, 1972), 7–30; repr. in Jerzy Dobrzycki, ed., The Reception of Copernicus’s Heliocentric Theory (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973), 7–30. For the calendar reform, see George V. Coyne, Michael A. Hoskin, and Olaf Pedersen, eds, Gregorian Reform of the Calendar: Proceedings of the Vatican Conference to Commemorate Its 400th Anniversary, 1582–1982 (Vatican City: Pontificia Academia Scientiarum: Specola Vaticana, 1983). Ibid.; see also, my ‘Michael Mästlin’s Adoption of the Copernican Theory,’ Studia Copernicana, 14 = Colloquia Copernicana 4 (Wrocl/aw: Ossolineum, 1975), 53–63. The majority of sixteenth-century annotators of De revolutionibus tended to ignore the sections to which Maestlin was so positively drawn. Kepler-Segonds, 21; Kepler-Duncan, 63. Charlotte Methuen believes that Maestlin had always given his ‘advanced students’ special topics that he did not treat in his regular lectures, such as those concerning the Copernican problem. This is a plausible speculation, although her evidence for it is based entirely on a single disputation (1606) ten years after Maestlin had committed himself publicly to Copernicus for the first time (‘Maestlin’s Teaching of Copernicus,’ 230–47). The 1593 physics disputation also bears notice. Because it was a physics disputation, it would have been held under Georg Liebler rather than Maestlin. Kepler makes first reference to a personal copy of De revolutionibus after having left Tübingen: ‘Nam exemplar meum libro 5. Revol: Cap:4. quo loco nodus quaestionis haeret, aut mendosum est, aut ego caecus’ (Kepler to Maestlin, 3 October 1595, no. 23, GW XIII, 45). Maestlin’s copy is located in the Schaffhausen Stadtbibliothek. Many of Maestlin’s central Copernican views would have been plainly accessible to Kepler in the margins of this copy. Kepler to Herwart von Hohenburg (26 March 1598), GW XIII, 193. The Formula of Concord claimed to give the definitive interpretation of the teaching of the Augsburg Confession, especially regarding such critical matters as the nature of Christ, the Lord’s Supper, and original sin over which Lutherans, Calvinists, and followers of Melanchthon (‘Philippists’) had engaged in controversy (see Dingel, ‘The Echo of Controversy,’ 515–31).

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41 See Berthold Sutter, ‘Johannes Kepler zwischen Lutherischer Orthodoxie und Katholischer Gegenreformation,’ in Katholische Reform und Gegenreformation in Inner Österreich, 1564–1628 (Styria: Hermagoras, 1994), 459–87; Jürgen Hübner, ‘Naturwissenschaft als Lobpreis des Schöpfers: Theologische Aspekte der naturwissenschaftlichen Arbeit Keplers,’ in Fritz Krafft, Karl Meyer, and Bernhard Sticker, eds., Internationales Kepler-Symposium, (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1973), 357–76; Hübner, Die Theologie Johannes Keplers zwischen Orthodoxie und Naturwissenschaft (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1975). 42 Kepler-Segonds, 12; Kepler-Duncan, 53. I have much more to say about this theme in my forthcoming book on the Copernican question. 43 Kepler does not lay out the reformed foundations of astrology until his De fundamentis astrologiae certioribus (Prague: Schuman, 1602). An English translation has been made by Judith V. Field, ‘A Lutheran Astrologer: Johannes Kepler,’ Archive for History of Exact Sciences 31 (1984): 190–272. 44 The authority of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics was still considerable in the sixteenth century, and it was not yet fully obvious to Renaissance thinkers that the theory of demonstration described in that work bore little relation to Aristotle’s actual reasoning about the natural world. For recent analysis, see Jonathan Barnes, ‘Proof and the Syllogism,’ in Enrico Berti, ed., Aristotle on Science: The ‘Posterior Analytics,’ Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium Aristotelicum, Padua 1978 (Padua: Antenore, 1981), 17–60. 45 See my ‘Proof, Poetics and Patronage: Copernicus’s Preface to De revolutionibus,’ in David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 167–205. 46 Kepler-Duncan, ch. 1, n1, 85. 47 The episode is well known, although variously elucidated. See, for example, Max Caspar, Kepler, trans. by C. Doris Hellman, bibliog. citations by Owen Gingerich and Alain Segonds (New York: Dover, 1993; first pub. 1948), 60–4; Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1959), 247–53; Judith V. Field, Kepler’s Geometrical Cosmology, 45–51; Bruce Stephenson, Kepler’s Physical Astronomy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 8–20; and Bruce Stephenson, The Music of the Heavens: Kepler’s Harmonic Astronomy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 75–89. 48 Copernicus also presents his discovery as a solitary quest (see ‘Proof, Poetics and Patronage,’ 180). 49 ‘Euclid belonged to the persuasion of Plato and was at home in this phi-

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51

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losophy; and this is why he thought the goal of the Elements as a whole to be the construction of the so-called Platonic figures’: Proclus Diadochus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, trans. Glenn R. Morrow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 57. Around 1616, some twenty years after the appearance of the Cosmographic Mystery, Maestlin tried unsuccessfully to produce a new, annotated edition of De revolutionibus through the Basel publisher Henricus Petreius: Johannes Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia, ed. by Christian Frisch, 8 vols (Frankfurt: Heyder and Zimmer, 1858–91), 1:56–8. ‘Ego verò studeo, ut haec ad Dej gloriam, qui vult ex libro Naturae agnoscj, quam maturrimè vulgentur: quo plus alij inde extruxerint, hoc magis gaudebo: nullj invidebo. Sic vovj Deo, sic stat sententia. Theologus esse volebam: diu angebar: Deus ecce meâ operâ etiam in astronomiâ celebratur’ (Kepler to Maestlin, 3 October 1595, GW XIII, no. 23, 40). The question of what Maestlin felt able to teach in the classroom has been the subject of some dispute. Did he actually defend Copernicus’s main propositions in his regular lectures? Or did he only do so in special private classes or separate tutorials reserved for superior students such as Kepler? See Edward Rosen, ‘Kepler and the Lutheran Attitude towards Copernicanism in the Context of the Struggle between Science and Religion,’ in Arthur Beer and Peter Beer, eds, Kepler: Four Hundred Years, Vistas in Astronomy 18 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1975), 317–37; Methuen, ‘Maestlin’s Teaching of Copernicus,’ 230–47. Segonds, Secret du Monde, xvi–xviii. In a letter of 12 April 1598, Hafenreffer recalled to Kepler having recommended ‘not only in my own name but also in the name of my colleagues, the omission from your treatise of the chapter (I think it was no. 5) which dealt with this agreement [between Copernicus and the Bible], lest [theological] disputes arise therefrom’ (GW XIII, no. 93, 203). Kepler’s arguments were published later in the Astronomia nova. In the Cosmographic Mystery, he wrote, ‘although it is proper to consider right from the start of this dissertation on Nature whether anything contrary to Holy Scripture is being said, nevertheless I judge that it is (1) premature to enter into a dispute on that point now, before I am criticized. I promise generally that I shall say nothing which would be an affront to Holy Scripture and that if Copernicus is convicted of anything along with me I shall dismiss him [Copernicus] as worthless. That has always been my intention, since I first made the acquaintance of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions’ (KeplerDuncan, 75).

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55 See Anthony Grafton, ‘Michael Maestlin’s Account of Copernican Planetary Theory,’ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (‘Symposium on Copernicus’) 117 (1973): 523–50. 56 See Katherine A. Tredwell, ‘Michael Maestlin and the Fate of the Narratio Prima,’ Journal for the History of Astronomy 35 (2004): 305–25; for Kepler’s treatment of the Copernican gaps, see Michel-Pierre Lerner, Le Monde des sphères, 2 vols (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1996–7), 2: 70–3. 57 Grafton, ‘Maestlin’s Account of Copernican Planetary Theory.’ 58 ‘We cannot be blamed for the other material that was added, especially the foreword by Maestlin [to Rheticus’s Narratio] since none of these later additions were seen by us before they were sent to the printer’ (Hafenreffer to Kepler, 12 April 1598, GW XIII, no. 93, 203; quoted and translated in Rosen, ‘Kepler and the Lutheran Attitude,’ 327). 59 Maestlin to Kepler, 30 October 1597, GW XIII, no. 80, 151; quoted and translated in Rosen, ‘Kepler and the Lutheran Attitude,’ 326. 60 Kepler to Duke Frederick, 29 February 1596, GW XIII, no. 30, 66. 61 Maestlin to Duke Frederick, 12 March 1596, GW XIII, no. 31, 67–9. 62 For example, brandy (Sun-Mercury), mead (Mercury-Venus), ice water (Venus-Earth/Moon), strong, red vermouth (Earth-Mars), a costly new white wine (Mars-Jupiter): Kepler to Duke Frederick, 17 February 1596, GW XIII, no. 28, 50–4. 63 Kepler underestimated the difficulties of making a working model of a Copernican planetarium, some of whose metal components would involve cogwheels with up to 324 teeth (see Frank D. Prager, ‘Kepler als Erfinder,’ in Internationales Kepler Symposium, 385–92). 64 ‘Plate III. Showing the Dimensions and Distances of the Orbs of the Planets by means of the Five Regular Bodies of Geometry, Dedicated to the Most Illustrious Prince and Lord, Lord Frederick, Duke of Württemberg and of Teck, Count of Mömpelgard, etc.’ 65 Thomas Kuhn’s illustration of the Keplerian polyhedra provides a representation redrawn from the original that fails to show the base-stand or the dedication: The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985; first pub. 1957), 218. 66 ‘Idem (quod tamen tibi hîc concreditum velim) nostros Theologos etiam nonnihil offendit, authoritate tamen Principis nostri, cui principale Schema dedicatum est, moti, in medio relinquunt’ (Maestlin to Kepler, 30 October 1597, GW XIII, no. 80, 151). 67 Max Caspar, Kepler, 77–85. 68 R.J.W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 84.

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69 See Owen Hannaway, The Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 144–5. 70 Johannes Kepler, New Astronomy, trans. by William H. Donahue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 33. 71 I am not concerned here with the larger rhetorical strategy of the New Astronomy; but see the fine analysis of James Voelkel, The Composition of Kepler’s Astronomia nova (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 211–46. 72 Kepler, New Astronomy, 59–66. 73 Ibid., 65–6. The postil echoes Copernicus’s language in the preface to De revolutionibus. 74 Or the final thundering response: ‘As for the opinions of the pious on these matters of nature, I have just one thing to say: while in theology it is authority that carries the most weight, in philosophy it is reason. Therefore, Lactantius is pious, who denied that the earth is round, Augustine is pious, who, though admitting the roundness, denied the antipodes, and the Holy Office nowadays is pious, which, though allowing the earth’s smallness, denies its motion. To me, however, the truth is more pious still, and (with all due respect for the Doctors of the Church) I prove philosophically not only that the earth is round, not only that it is inhabited all the way around at the antipodes, not only that it is contemptibly small, but also that it is carried along among the stars’ (ibid., 66). 75 Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (written in 1615, pub. 1636), in The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, ed. and trans. by Maurice A. Finocchiaro (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 87–118. Richard Blackwell suggests – correctly, I believe – that Galileo owed more than he admitted to Kepler’s passages on the interpretation of the Bible: Galileo, Bellarmine and the Church (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 55–7; also, H. Darrel Rutkin, ‘Celestial Offerings: Astrological Motifs in the Dedicatory Letters of Kepler’s Astronomia Nova and Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius,’ in William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, eds, Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 133–72, esp. 157–9. 76 Quoted and translated by Edward Rosen, ‘Kepler’s Attitude toward Astrology and Mysticism,’ in Brian Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in

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the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 261, 264; GW XVI, no. 612, 373–5. 77 See Gerard Simon, Kepler astronome, astrologue (Paris: Gallimard, 1979); Sheila Rabin, ‘Kepler’s Attitude toward Pico and the Anti-Astrology Polemic,’ Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997): 750–70.

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chapter three

Jewish Traditionalism and Early Modern Science: Rabbi Israel Zamosc’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Berlin, 1744) GAD FREUDENTHAL

Introduction Amos Funkenstein had a knack for exposing novel ideas in short and dense papers that could easily serve as outlines for large monographs. One of them, ‘The Attitude of the Jewish Enlightenment to Medieval Jewish Philosophy’ (1990),1 attends to the singular relationship of the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah) to medieval Jewish philosophy. Funkenstein pointed out the following paradox: whereas early modern European philosophy was trying to rid itself of the medieval legacy, Jewish authors who (a century or more later) wished to move their co-religionists to join the movement towards modernity appealed to medieval Jewish philosophy for support. Whereas in most of early modern European philosophy ‘medieval’ was a synonym for holding irrationally to traditional ‘idola,’ signifying a burden to be shaken off, the Haskalah regarded medieval Jewish philosophy as the embodiment of rational, free thinking not committed to (religious) tradition. The Jewish epigones of the modernizing European philosophers looked back as they sought to move forward, appropriating the heritage of medieval philosophy as an asset in their struggle for enlightened modernization.2 One straightforward way to appropriate the medieval legacy was to republish the classics of that tradition. R. David Fraenkel (1707–62), Moses Mendelssohn’s teacher, then rabbi at Dessau, did just this when he and his family initiated in 1742 the Jessnitz printing of a new edition of Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed that had last been printed some two centuries earlier.3 R. Fraenkel reprinted the Guide with the classic commentaries (Efodi, Shem-T.ov, and Crescas), but in many cases, a medieval classic was accompanied with a new, contemporary

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commentary whose function was to bridge the gap between the medieval author and his eighteenth-century readers. In his article, Funkenstein attended to a particularly significant instance of such a commentary, namely Giv‘at ha-moreh (The Master’s [i.e., Maimonides’] Hill), Salomon Maimon’s (1753–1800) commentary on Part I of Maimonides’ Guide (1791). He showed that Maimon’s goal was not merely to make Maimonides’ text accessible by explaining its concepts and ideas but above all to ‘modernize’ it – bring it up to date – notably by integrating into his commentary the results and ideas of recent science and philosophy. Maimon thus produced a work in which the text and the commentary made contradictory statements, as, for example, that the heavenly bodies are eternally changeless (Maimonides) or constantly changing (Maimon). To describe the relationship between the two texts, Funkenstein suggested that Maimon had applied to Maimonides’ text the same hermeneutic method of allegorical and metaphorical interpretation that the latter had applied to the biblical or rabbinic works.4 The literary genre of the commentary on a philosophic or scientific text was of course centuries old: it goes back to late antiquity, it was widespread in the medieval Arabic tradition, and it was taken over by medieval Jewish scholars writing in Arabic or Hebrew, as well as by the scholastics. In the Hebrew philosophical tradition, the paradigmatic instances of such commentaries were the three types of Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle, especially the so-called long commentaries that reproduced and commented on the Stagirite’s text passage by passage; Averroes’ commentaries in turn were the objects of numerous ‘supercommentaries’ by medieval Jewish authors. Yet, as Salomon Maimon’s case clearly demonstrates, maskilim gave their commentaries a radically new twist: instead of commenting on a text (whose veracity was assumed) in order to gain access to the truth it harboured, the maskilic commentary set out to refute the commented text’s statements by confronting them with new, well-established information that straightforwardly negated them. This was a commentary of an utterly new, paradoxical genre: through the very act of republishing and commenting on the medieval text, the commentary recognized it as an authoritative text that was still a valuable interlocutor, while at the very same time it also showed that the canonic text made false statements.5 This genre of text can be described as a subversive commentary. Maimon’s commentary on Maimonides’ Guide was not the first (or for that matter the last) commentary to be written by a maskil on a classic of medieval Jewish philosophy.6 The very first commentary of this new

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genre seems to be the commentary on Ruah. h.en published by R. Israel Zamosc in Jessnitz in (5)504 (i.e., 1744), which will be at the centre of this article. In this work, Zamosc described many recent scientific discoveries, which it brought to the attention of Jewish readers for the first time. This work has therefore justly been celebrated by historians as a significant move towards what was to become the Haskalah. In what follows I will take a close look at Zamosc’s contribution to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. I will also identify some sources in contemporary German science on which Zamosc drew. Our inquiry into the text will however bring to light that although Israel Zamosc was the first to produce a subversive commentary, his move towards the Haskalah was less clear-cut than has been realized: the stance expressed in his commentary on Ruah. h.en was less maskilic and more traditionalist than is readily perceptible. We will see that Zamosc’s attitude towards science as a source of authoritative knowledge was ambivalent or even distrustful: his enthusiastic accounts of newly discovered scientific knowledge are punctuated by reserved remarks on the fallibility of human knowledge. I will suggest that the sudden contact with early modern science produced in Zamosc an intellectual upheaval that changed his attitude towards science: the radical champion of science and reason that he had been in his home town of Zamosc now became sceptical with respect to the capacities of autonomous human reason, and, consequently, he put his trust in traditional sources of knowledge. Zamosc’s encounter with early modern science, I submit, paradoxically produced a conservative turn from an initial rationalistic (or even ‘scientistic’) to a fideist attitude. Zamosc’s case thus illustrates that the meeting of a Jewish rationalistically oriented (Maimonidean) frame of mind with science in the early modern period was more problematic than is readily apparent.

2. R. Israel Zamosc and the Genesis of his Commentary on Ruah. h.en Ruah. h.en is a short treatise composed in Hebrew in the early thirteenth century as an introduction to Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. Its eleven chapters explain the fundamentals of Aristotelian science, psychology, and metaphysics that Maimonides’ discussions presuppose. It was written in the wake of the translation of the Guide into Hebrew (1204), for a public in southern France that until then had had little knowledge of Greek-Arabic science and philosophy; it quickly became very popular and remained so for centuries. The title page of the Jess-

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nitz edition of Ruah. h.en follows tradition in ascribing the work to Judah Ibn Tibbon, but this attribution is obviously wrong (Judah died in 1190, before the Guide was completed, let alone translated into Hebrew by Judah’s son, Samuel Ibn Tibbon). Modern scholars have considered other possible authors – notably Jacob Anat. oli – but the question remains open. In view of its great popularity over many centuries, it is not surprising that Ruah. h.en was printed early and often: Venice 5304 (1544) and 5309 (1549), Cologne 5415 (1555), Cremona 5326 (1566), Prague 5353 (1593), and Lublin 5380 (1620). Some of these editions carry one or the other (or both) of two anonymous commentaries on Ruah. h.en.7 After at least six successive printings within eighty years, more than a century elapsed before Ruah. h.en was published again, namely in Jessnitz in 1744 with the commentary by Israel Zamosc: this lapse is obviously due to the low interest in science and rationalist philosophy among Jews in Eastern Europe during the seventeenth century. Israel Zamosc is a well-known figure of the early Haskalah.8 Born circa 1700, he was educated in the town after which he was named (not far from Lublin), where he also taught at a yeshivah. In his mid-thirties he was already known for his expertise in philosophy and science, particularly astronomy and the other mathematical sciences. Israel Zamosc acquired his scientific proficiency exclusively from Hebrew scientific works, almost all translated or composed during the medieval period (twelfth to fourteenth centuries).9 Zamosc’s very competence in and use of the ‘foreign’ mathematical sciences makes him into an exceptional figure in the context of contemporary East European Jewish society, although by any standard of European science he was totally outdated. Around the years 1735–9 Zamosc composed four works: (i) Nes.ah. Yisrael (The Eternity of Israel), the most important of these, is traditional inasmuch as it is devoted to the discussion of Talmudic sugiyyot (problems), but it is highly unusual, indeed bold, in that many of its discussions are grounded in mathematics and astronomy, albeit all medieval. This work justly appeared to contemporaries as subversive because Zamosc cast doubt on the judgment of venerable Talmudic authorities, including Rashi, basing his uncompromising and often harsh criticism on demonstrations provided by reason as an independent and legitimate source of knowledge. Nes.ah. Yisrael earned its author a place in the history of the early Haskalah in Poland, but also the cognomen Res.ah. Yisrael (The Assassination of Israel) in contemporary traditionalist circles.10 (ii) The second work, Arubbot ha-shamayim (The

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Windows of Heaven), is an astronomical treatise according to the principles of Ptolemaic astronomy (extant in manuscript). (iii) The third was a commentary on the classic astronomical treatise Sefer yesod ‘olam by Isaac Israeli of Toledo (composed in the 1320s, a work not yet printed then and available only in manuscript). (iv) The fourth was a commentary on Sefer elim by Joseph Salomon Delmedigo, a some-time student of Galileo Galilei (published in Amsterdam in 1629). The last two works are now lost, and concerning their thrust we must content ourselves with speculation. Zamosc’s thinking in that period was entirely within the medieval Hebrew scientific tradition, and it can be surmised that his commentary on Sefer yesod ‘olam was quite traditional: Zamosc shared the Ptolemaic astronomy of this work and in Nes.ah. Yisrael he refers to Isaac Israeli with great esteem. More intriguing is Zamosc’s commentary on Joseph Salomon Delmedigo’s Sefer elim: inasmuch as this work was the first to present in Hebrew in some detail the heliocentric system,11 its very choice as the subject of a commentary was certainly not a trifling matter in Zamosc of the 1730s; yet a close look at the use that Zamosc made of Sefer elim in Nes.ah. Yisrael and in Arubbot ha-shamayim suggests that he all but ignored the heliocentric issue and attended only to the strictly mathematical and optical sections of Sefer elim.12 In 1740, Israel Zamosc left his home town, never to return: although he had some ‘allies’ in Zamosc, his rationalistic tendencies created a persistent tension with his surroundings, of which he complained bitterly. He went to Frankfurt on the Oder, where he had his book Nes.ah. Yisrael printed in 1741. He then moved on to Berlin, where he famously became the tutor in Hebrew philosophy and science to Aaron Salomon Gumpertz (1723–69) and to Moses Mendelssohn (1729–96). Only three years after Zamosc arrived in Berlin, his commentary on Ruah. h.en appeared in Jessnitz along with the commented text.13 During the following years, Zamosc composed three further works that were published posthumously: T. uv ha-Levanon (Lebanon’s Best), a commentary on Bah.ya Ibn Paquda’s H . ovot ha-levavot (Duties of the Heart); Os.ar neh.mad (A Lovely Treasure), a commentary on the Kuzari (composed, or at least terminated, in 1766);14 and Nezed ha-dema‘ (A Pottage of Tears), a dark and enigmatic satirical maqamah whose precise purpose is in dispute.15 In an exchange he initiated with R. Jacob Emden in 1764, Zamosc also mentions a volume of responsa that he composed, whose title probably was Even Yisrael (Israel’s Stone) and which is now lost.16 Israel Zamosc died in Brody on 20 April 1772.

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Israel Zamosc clearly had a penchant for the literary genre of commentaries on classics of the scientific and philosophic Hebrew tradition: he wrote no less than five of them. In this series, the Commentary on Ruah. h.en (hereafter CRH . ) occupies a middle position: the objects of the two first commentaries, written in Zamosc, were strictly scientific texts, and those of the two last commentaries, written in Berlin and Brody, were philosophical or spiritual works, but CRH . straddles both empirical science and philosophy. It will indeed be seen that it reflects a turn in the author’s thought away from his early commitment to science. 17 Consider now CRH . . Its publication came in the wake of the recent publication of Maimonides’ Guide, instigated by R. David Fraenkel.18 The Jessnitz 1744 edition of CRH . was presented by the publisher, Israel ben Abraham, a convert from Amsterdam,19 with a short ‘Publisher’s Apology’: After having printed and sold the holy book, the Guide of the Perplexed by Maimonides of blessed memory, I saw that many people are not used to the unfamiliar terms and the philosophical names that our Master and Teacher of blessed memory borrowed in that work from the profane sciences … Desiring to be useful to these numerous people, I became aware of the utility of printing this lovely book, Ruah. h.en, which embellishes and explains most of the odd terms, names, and notions, used by the students of natural philosophy.20

Ruah. h.en was presumably helpful to its thirteenth-century readers. But in the middle of the eighteenth century it was as enigmatic as the Guide itself: the old explanations of Maimonides’ ‘unfamiliar terms’ needed elucidation in their own turn. In his ‘Apology,’ Israel b. Abraham does not allude to Zamosc’s commentary, printed in smaller characters under the main text of Ruah. h.en, but on the title page he wrote, ‘To endear and facilitate this composition [i.e., Ruah. h.en] for its readers, I added a new commentary, composed by the accomplished scholar, expert in seven sciences, the great talmudic rabbi … R. Israel, the author of the fine book Nes.ah. Yisrael.’ Clearly, it was the publisher who decided to have the medieval text accompanied by a new commentary, which he commissioned from Israel Zamosc.21 The contact between the Jessnitz press and Zamosc, then a poor Hauslehrer (private tutor) in Berlin, was probably established via Fraenkel through Gumpertz or Mendelssohn. Zamosc was presumably chosen for the task because Israel b. Abraham and/or Fraenkel were aware

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that he had already written commentaries on two other classics of Hebrew medieval science. Writing a commentary on Ruah. h.en indeed fitted Israel Zamosc as a glove fits the hand.

3. The New Science in R. Israel Zamosc’s Commentary on Ruah. h.en: Enthusiastic Marvel, Ambivalence, and Resigned Traditionalism Written less than four years after the author’s departure from Zamosc, where his outlook was entirely informed by medieval Hebrew science, CRH . shows that within a short time, Israel Zamosc absorbed significant inputs from his new intellectual environment. He repeatedly proclaimed his amazement with the new science that he had discovered in Berlin, and which he wished to share with his readers. Commenting on Ruah. h.en, Zamosc reread the medieval elementary treatise, especially its scientific sections, through the perspective of the scientific knowledge he acquired in Berlin between 1741 and 1744. This science, as we shall see, was essentially empirical and not theoretical or mathematical. Consider some examples of the scientific disquisitions in CRH . and their implications and consequences for Zamosc’s world view.22 I. Celestial Science Following common medieval conceptions, Ruah. h.en introduces the various kinds of material and immaterial substances. One of them is the celestial ‘fifth body’ (fol. 1b). In his commentary, Zamosc explains that this entity was made necessary by the assumption of the existence of heavenly spheres ‘posited [or hypothesized: hunah.] in the astronomy of the ancients’ (fol. 1b): from the outset, Zamosc distances himself from the latter’s views by using the verb ‘posited.’ In the same vein he says that the ancients held that nothing can be known of this substance (here he echoes Maimonides in Guide II:19, 24), and that its name (‘fifth element’) was given to it merely in order ‘to make it seem intelligible’ (fol. 2a). The truth, he avers, is that ‘Aristotle has spun this notion out of his heart’ (fol. 2a). Zamosc next criticizes the medieval view on two levels. The existence of the alleged fifth element, he urges, is indeed upheld ‘neither in the Bible, nor in the statements of the Talmud Sages’ (fol. 2a). Various pronouncements of the sages show that they held the sun and the other heavenly bodies to be ‘fiery.’ Similarly, the famous Talmudic statement (Pesah.im 94b) according to which the Sages of Israel

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hold that the sphere is stationary and the stars move freely (whereas the scholars of the nations affirm that the sphere moves and the stars are fixed unto it) shows that the rabbis rejected the medieval notion of ‘a rigid substance in which the stars are fixed, so that they are moved by its motion’ (fol. 2a). The Sages of Israel rather held that the stars move through the firmament, which they took to be made of a very subtle substance. ‘This demonstrates that according to the Sages of Israel the existence of the fifth substance is false’ (fol. 2a): their view was that of the new science, not the obsolete medieval view.23 The analysis of some further passages reaches a similar conclusion. Israel Zamosc next switches to his second line of attack on the ‘fifth substance,’ which draws on science rather than on the Talmud. ‘I shall now proclaim what new things God has brought unto the earth’ (fol. 2a; after Isa. 42:9), he enthuses: Since the sciences have been transferred to Ashkenaz and the West, inquiries have multiplied on earth. Great sciences were born and the students of the sciences have become ever more numerous. Their science is ten times greater than that of the Greeks. After many years of arduous inquiry, and after having sent scholars to the four corners of the world equipped with the measuring stick and other instruments that were brought forth and invented anew by the science of dioptrics (the third part of the science of optics), they succeeded in recent years in demolishing and destroying the Ancients’ assumption concerning the fifth body. (fol. 2a)24

Zamosc goes on to relate that these scholars have established that the heavenly bodies move through a ‘very subtle, transparent sphere [galgal] called “ether,” which is a sort of very pure air’ (fol. 2b). Zamosc’s use of the inadequate term ‘sphere’ highlights how difficult it was to switch so quickly from medieval to eighteenth-century terms of reference. In the context of the new (notably Newtonian) science, a refutation of the existence of the ‘fifth body,’ circa 1744, cannot but raise an eyebrow. In truth, Zamosc was rather audacious, however. Until the age of forty, he was totally immersed in Hebrew medieval learning and knew almost nothing else: the commitment to the existence of the ‘fifth element,’ which underpins the entire framework of medieval physics and metaphysics, was an essential component of his way of thinking about the universe. Moreover, Aristotle and his followers over two millennia considered the existence of the ‘fifth element’ to have been

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demonstrated by reason (rather than having been established ‘merely’ empirically). Relinquishing it therefore implied not only depriving medieval physics and metaphysics of their grounding but also forsaking, tout court, the traditional foundation of rational thought: for Zamosc it meant sawing off the branch of rationality on which he was seated. Zamosc’s commitment to science as a legitimate and even indispensable mode of acquiring knowledge derived from Maimonides; it was indeed Maimonides, and the medieval Jewish rationalist tradition in general, that (as Funkenstein has argued) early maskilim like R. David Fraenkel sought to bolster in order to promote the cause of the Enlightenment. CRH . thus created a paradoxical situation. The medieval Ruah. h.en was reissued to endorse Maimonides’ Guide and its rationalism, but it carried a commentary that refuted the Guide’s theoretical postulates, thereby undermining its epistemological premises and authority. We should thus appreciate Zamosc’s boldness: not only did he compose a work that tore to pieces all that Zamosc himself had believed for decades and that was still entrenched in his reference group of Talmudic scholars, but it is also possible that Zamosc’s putative allies, the moderate rationalist R. David Fraenkel and his circle, felt let down by CRH .. It undercut the very rationalism that they wished to promote. Consider Zamosc’s argumentative strategy. In maintaining that the modern theory of a subtle ‘ether’ was once the very one that was upheld by the Talmudic Sages, he made them into forerunners of contemporary science. Already in Nes.ah. Yisrael, Zamosc had argued vigorously that all statements by the Talmudic Sages about physics and cosmology are true. There he took to task Talmudic commentators ignorant of the ‘profane sciences,’ including Rashi, charging that their own wrong scientific beliefs led them to ascribe false views – such as the earth’s flatness – to the Talmudic Sages. The radical changes in his scientific beliefs notwithstanding, then, Zamosc held fast to this stance. Having accepted that the ‘fifth body’ does not exist and that the celestial matter is a subtle ‘ether’ in which the planets move freely, he identifies these views in the Talmudic Sages. He even alludes (fol. 2b) to ‘the scientists of the Nations’ who referred to Talmudic statements to corroborate the new (i.e., heliocentric) astronomy.25 Thus, despite the upheaval in the body of knowledge that he accepted as true, Zamosc remained committed to the tenet that the Talmudic Sages never erred in matters scientific. Paradoxically, whereas his attitude to the medieval tradition, the fountainhead of his rationalism, is sceptical, Zamosc regards the early Talmudic Sages as expressing truth itself.

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Consequently, CRH . is a twofold commentary, simultaneously bearing on two texts – Ruah. h.en and the Talmud. Commenting on the medieval Ruah. h.en in the light of recent science, Zamosc offers new readings of Talmudic statements. In addition, he corroborates and legitimizes his onslaught on a central building block of medieval philosophy by arguing that the Talmudic Sages already foreshadowed the views of contemporary science. Thus, the commentary on an outdated medieval introduction to philosophy is innovative both on the level of scientific information and on that of Talmudic hermeneutics For Israel Zamosc, his boldness notwithstanding, the cosmological issue remained open and, indeed, deeply unsettling. He silently relinquished geocentrism, but remained undecided on the view he should adopt: the question whether, as Copernicus held, the earth belongs to the ‘celestial hosts’ and ‘rises upward’ to move around the stationary sun, or whether it is stationary, as Tycho Brahe maintained, ‘I cannot decide by means of rational argument and opinion,’ he acknowledged (fol. 2b). Zamosc recognized that Copernicus’s opinion is ‘closer to the methods of astronomy,’ wherefore ‘nearly all contemporary scientists of the Nations entirely accept this opinion.’ Yet, ‘anyone who smells the odor of [Copernicus’s] opinion gets nauseous’: the heliocentric view ‘appears to us to run counter to the spirit of the Torah and the sayings of the Sages and to be heretical. Consequently it is appropriate to opt for Tycho Brahe’s view,’ Zamosc concludes, promising to discuss this matter in detail in his astronomical work Arubbot ha-shamayim (fol. 2b).26 These few uneasy lines that Zamosc devoted to the topic bespeak the limits of the intellectual change he could undergo and also the deep embarrassment into which the new science plunged him.27 II. Observing Instruments and the Authority of Medieval Philosophy Israel Zamosc was much impressed by the ‘newly invented’ microscope (which he misattributed to ‘the famous scholar’ Galileo Galilei): It ‘magnifies the object and makes it seem many thousands of times greater than it in truth is’ (fols 3b–4a). Millions of tiny worms occupy the space of a single grain of barley. ‘Although these things stun and stupefy the hearers and make the fools giggle, yet their truth is well known. These instruments exist, the art [of their use] is well known at all places at which the sciences are studied, so that no critic can deny this’ (fol. 4a). Zamosc visibly struggled against the incredulity of his contemporaries, and perhaps as well against his own initial hesitations. He put this

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new startling discovery to different uses. That living beings can be exceedingly small established for him observationally the then-popular biological theory of pre-existence. (According to this view, each seed contains the seeds of all future individuals to be generated from it.)28 This theory he brings to bear on the medieval notions of psychology and biology discussed in Ruah. h.en. For instance, commenting on the notions of nutritive soul and the ‘generative power’ of seed and semen, Zamosc says that the ancients have talked much nonsense about how an animal is generated out of a seed ‘and have not come up with anything clear.’ The moderns, by contrast, say that the body of the animal already pre-exists ‘in actuality’ in the semen, although it is too tiny to be seen with the naked eye. With the help of the microscope, by contrast, ‘in the semen of any animal, while it still is warm, one sees small worms resembling the sire that move to and fro.’ This phenomenon elicits the exclamation ‘how awe-inspiring is this statement, which our forefathers did not fathom [lo shi‘aru]. The hearer’s soul is strongly moved by the oddity of the matter. We cannot escape this opinion unless we deny the testimony of the senses itself’ (fol. 5a). The new knowledge grounded in tangible experience refutes entrenched beliefs and undermines the authority of medieval science expounded in the commented text. Inasmuch as the eyes themselves witness phenomena ‘which our forefathers did not fathom,’ traditional authority, tout court, is also shaken. Israel Zamosc drew on the very same theory of animal generation also in order to buttress a central tenet of traditional Jewish thought – namely, that the world has been created a novo. Recent embryological theory offered a novel refutation of the theory of the eternity of the world, Zamosc urged. A seed contains in it all the seeds of the individuals that are to issue from it. If the world were eternal, then there must have existed individuals of each species whose seed contained in it the infinity of generations that were to follow – that is, an actual infinity of seeds. But an actual infinite is impossible, as Maimonides showed.29 Hence the world’s duration must be finite (fols 3b–4a). It is amusing to observe how Zamosc draws on a recent biological theory to reformulate a classic medieval argument against the eternity of the world in order to confirm a traditional position of Judaism in its struggle against Greek philosophy.30 The new theories were not only unsettling, therefore, but occasionally also comforting – a fact that certainly made it easier for Zamosc to accept them as true. Another modern invention of which Israel Zamosc was very fond was the air pump, ‘the wonderful device invented some ninety years ago,

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the mother of all new discoveries’ (fol. 18b).31 The discussion of the element air in Ruah. h.en offered an occasion to describe in detail how the air pump worked and some experiments that had been performed with it. His immediate point was to establish that the air is elastic (he uses the medieval term ‘spongy’ [sefogi]), but his lofty rhetoric signals that what really impressed him were the startling phenomena themselves. Zamosc does not emphasize that the described observations are at odds with tradition, but their very novelty, the fact that the ancients did not even suspect their existence, clearly enough casts doubt on the entrenched views. For instance, Zamosc notes that experiments with the air pump establish that ‘parts of air reside in the interstices [or: pores] of water’ (fol. 19a, see also 20b). The reader conversant with medieval physics immediately realizes that this contradicts the principle according to which light elements rise upward. With regard to the formation of ice Zamosc is explicit, and tersely remarks, ‘The Ancients have not properly understood its cause’ (fol. 19a). All along, the subtext of Zamosc’s account of the air pump conveys a subversive message: since the times of Aristotle and his medieval followers, unsuspected phenomena have been discovered that have totally changed what we know of the natural world. The old theories are no longer tenable. Even where Zamosc discusses purely descriptive, empirical knowledge, which on the face of it is theologically neutral, willy-nilly his discussions undermine the old, entrenched beliefs and thus are subversive of traditional authority. III. The Theory of the Elements In his commentary on the Aristotelian four-element theory as exposed in Ruah. h.en, Israel Zamosc announces, ‘You should know that this is the opinion of Aristotle and his followers among the Ancients. The later philosophers, however, are much divided on this issue’ (fol. 17a). (i) A first theory of matter is atomism (Zamosc states the idea but does not use this term). Some ‘think there is only one element, consisting of small points32 varying in their shapes and qualities, i.e. some are sharp, some spherical, etc.’; they maintain that ‘every existent is made out of this single element and uphold the existence of the void’ (fol. 17b). Zamosc is of course aware that Maimonides categorically rejected the Kalâm construal of atomism33 and comments that modern upholders of atomism have answered the arguments adduced against it in the past. (ii) A second view, affirming that there are three elements, is the Carte-

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sian (although Zamosc does not name it). Zamosc notes that it concedes to the ancients that the void is impossible. (iii) The chemists (ba‘aley ha-h.ime’ah), lastly, ‘have shown by experience [be-nissayon] that every substance is composed of five elements, namely: sulfur, mercury, salt, water, and earth’ (fol. 17b; similarly 3b).34 Zamosc concludes his discussion of elementary theories by saying, ‘The Moderns have strong arguments and proofs to sustain their claims, especially the chemists, who show empirically [lit. through the senses; be-h.ush] the truth of their opinion’ (fol. 17b). The upshot is that the three incompatible theories, while mutually divided, all concur that the traditional four-element theory is false. It follows that Aristotle’s view is obsolete: the old theory is ‘not sufficient to explain the causes of all composite substances’ (fol. 3b). The traditional physics with its four-element theory, that cornerstone of all medieval thought, is passé, then. Zamosc does not hesitate to pour witty sarcasm and derision on the old and venerated opinions. Referring to the account of natural place, he writes, ‘You should know that all this is the opinion of the Ancients who affirmed that heavy objects fall to the ground and light ones rise upward because each element desires to return to the place from which it issued, as if it had eyes made of flesh to watch out for its birthplace!’ (fol. 19a). ‘The opinion [or: hypothesis; sevarah] positing the sphere of fire has been rejected on many grounds that cannot be expounded here,’ he also writes (fol. 18b). The old view had been shattered, but no single new theory had taken its place. Raised on the traditional medieval elemental theory, Zamosc was disturbed by the lack of unanimity among the moderns that would have allowed him to switch to a new paradigm. Unable to choose between the competing views, faced with an anguished situation of uncertainty, Zamosc fell back upon tradition: ‘It is incumbent upon us to believe one thing only, namely that the elements of the elements [yesodey ha-yesodot] are the four ones enumerated by the Ancients,’ he declared, ‘for this is what we find in the Book of Creation, and even in some passages in the Zohar. And since this [opinion] has been passed down in tradition, we should accept it’ (fol. 17b).35 Two things need to be noted. First, on the level of scientific theory, Zamosc did not simply slip back into the traditional Aristotelian four-element theory. Rather he thought that underlying the elements posited in the different modern theories were more basic building blocks of matter, the elements of the elements, which he identified as the four traditional elements. Second, on the epistemological level, Zamosc held that knowledge concerning the

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most fundamental constituents of matter was beyond the bounds of scientific inquiry. At the end of the day, Zamosc relinquished rational inquiry, opting instead for a belief (le-ha’amin) in a view ‘passed down through tradition’ – namely, a view transmitted in two classics of the Jewish tradition. Empirical, scientific inquiry could not reach down to the deepest level of reality. Such knowledge could only be acquired through tradition and, ultimately, revelation. Elsewhere Zamosc similarly writes, ‘whether the essence[s] of sulfur, salt, and pure mercury are composed of things as yet unknown or [whether they] exist permanently as they were created [i.e., cannot be further analysed] – is not yet known. The judgment is God’s’ (fol. 3b). We will come back to Zamosc’s epistemological scepticism in the conclusion. To conclude this section, let me set the record straight: CRH . is not critical and subversive from cover to cover. While Zamosc clearly signals his distance from the Aristotelian views expounded in Ruah. h.en, he also feels duty bound to give the reader access to them (after all, CRH . was a commissioned work). For instance, referring to the theory of the generation of the elements, especially of fire, out of the hyle through the motion of the celestial sphere, Zamosc warns that ‘this refers to the opinion of the Ancients’ (fol. 17b), but then offers a fair, neutral outline of the theory, formulated in an imaginary idiom, easily accessible (I presume) to readers with no background in medieval philosophy. This account of the old, refuted views is followed by one describing the opinion concerning fire and inflammability held by ‘the Moderns,’ for which Zamosc is quick to find confirming biblical verses attesting to its truth (fol. 18a). Many other discussions in CRH . are also purely informative and didactic.

4. Israel Zamosc’s Arduous Road to the New Science Within three years of his arrival in Berlin in 1741, Israel Zamosc had published a work showing him to be conversant with significant chunks of recent science. He had made an astonishingly swift leap from the medieval world view of his traditionalist East European town to one integrating significant elements of eighteenth-century science. Where and how did he acquire this expertise in the new science, and to what degree did he succeed in appropriating its major features? Did he assimilate all parts of science to the same degree, or were some more accessible to him than others?

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In the early 1740s, German science was still entirely dominated by the Leibnizian Christian Wolff (1679–1754), and this is also the science that Zamosc encountered in Berlin. His principal source of information on physical science I could identify as Michael Friederich Leistikow’s Auszug der Versuche Herrn Christian Wolffens (Halle, 1738). This work is an abridgment of Christian Wolff’s famous treatise on physics, the so-called Deutsche Physik (1723).36 From this quite popular37 elementary exposition, intended for the classroom, Zamosc drew most of his information on matters physical. From Leistikow, Israel Zamosc chose to borrow his discussions of such topics as the following: • Account of the air pump: CRH . , fol. 18b = Leistikow, vol. I: 39, §63. • Description of the skin inflated in void: CRH . , fol. 18b = Leistikow,

vol. I: 51–2, §§83–4. • Heat increases the elasticity of air: CRH . , fol. 18b = Leistikow, vol. I:

105–6, §133. • Air present within water: CRH . , fol. 19a = Leistikow, vol. I: 120–2, §148. • Free fall in void shows that the differences in the velocity of fall

• • • • • • • •

result from the resistance of the air: CRH . , fol. 19b = Leistikow, vol. II: 7–8, §11. Exhalations, especially observing vapours through a microscope: CRH . , fol. 20b = Leistikow, vol. II: 69, §85. When water freezes, air escapes gradually: CRH . , fol. 19a = Leistikow, vol. II, 102–4, §§119–20. When water boils, air escapes rapidly: CRH . , fol. 19a = Leistikow, vol. II: 105, §121. Self-ignition of pure alcohol and of a mixture of sulfur and steel in water: CRH . , fol. 21b = Leistikow, vol. II: 118–20, §§140–1. Burning mirrors: CRH . , fol. 21b = Leistikow, vol. II: 115–18, §§135–9. The incident angle is equal to the angle of reflection: CRH . , fol. 20a = Leistikow, vol. II: 124, §145. Sound passes through iron: CRH . , fol. 6a = Leistikow, vol. III: 5, §6. The velocities of sound and light: CRH . , fol. 6a = Leistikow, vol. III: 12–13, §11 (only numerical values, not the explanation, on which see below).

It seems certain that Zamosc could not read Leistikow’s German textbook without help. Although some, if very few, Polish Jews succeeded in learning German – Salomon Maimon is the best-known example38 – this was not the case with Israel Zamosc. We have Friedrich Nicolai’s explicit

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testimony that Hebrew was the only written language he knew.39 A perusal of the Hebrew text of CRH . suggests that the German work was read aloud to Zamosc, accompanied by short explanations in Yiddish. CRH . in fact includes elucidations in Yiddish of some Hebrew words that were not entrenched terms of medieval Hebrew science. For instance, where Leistikow (vol. II: 120, §141) mentions Feilstaub (‘metal dust’) without any further explanation, CRH . writes (in Hebrew) ‘dust of refined iron,’ adding ‘which is called sta’l [steel]’ (fol. 21b), an explanation that seems to have been added by the reader-translator. Other elucidations in Yiddish are: the Aramaic es..tomakha is translated to magen (fol. 5a); shalpuh.it = blas (fol. 18b); ‘arafel = nebel (fol. 20b). One clarification is even offered in Latin: the fluid bringing about digestion is ‘called by the physicians “menstrum vestriculu” [read: menstrum ventriculu, i.e., gastric fluid]’ (fol. 5a).40 Explaining the air pump, Zamosc naturally is short of some terms in Hebrew and uses Yiddish ones: shroyf (screw; fol. 18b), luft pump (air pump; 18b). It seems that Zamosc had the assistance of an interpreter, who interjected short explanatory remarks while he read out Leistikow’s work. Zamosc included these explanations in CRH . because he correctly anticipated that his readers would also need them. For instance, where Leistikow (vol. II: 118, §140) mentions the name of the chemist Nicolas Lémery (1645–1715), CRH . has the common name ‘the masters of chemistry’ (fol. 21b). Some errors in CRH . seem indeed to go back to an oral communication of the text. For example, Leistikow (vol. III: 71, §74) mentions magnifying glasses and refers to Robert Hooke’s book Micrographia of 1665. What Zamosc remembered (or noted) is that ‘the looking-glass [!] invented recently, called in their language micro sqapia …’ (fol. 3b). Similarly, Leistikow (ibid., 71) mentions Anton van Leeuwenhoeck and his magnifying glasses: Zamosc remembered ‘Galileo’ as the inventor of the ‘looking-glass’ (fol. 4a). Zamosc clearly did not write CRH . with Leistikow’s book open before him on his desk. Who was the mediator who allowed Zamosc access to Leistikow’s textbook? In those years Zamosc had two brilliant students with whom he studied medieval Hebrew texts of science and philosophy, both very interested in the sciences, and each of whom was capable of playing the role of the go-between: Aaron Salomon Gumpertz and Moses Mendelssohn.41 Evidence suggests that it was the latter who assumed this role. In his biography of Mendelssohn, published in 1789, Isaac Euchel describes Mendelssohn’s study with Zamosc and continues, ‘Since Rabbi Israel knew no other tongue or book except the Holy Tongue, Moses expounded to him orally all the things that he read in

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German and Latin, so that they could discuss them.’42 CRH . is thus indirectly a product of Mendelssohn’s early period in Berlin. Possibly, however, Gumpertz was a second mediator through whom Zamosc obtained recent scientific information. It is difficult to decide whether Zamosc witnessed with his own eyes any of the phenomena that he reported or whether his reports depended on written sources alone. While his pupils Mendelssohn and Gumpertz could easily have taken him with them to experimental demonstrations they themselves attended, Zamosc may have imagined the experiments that he vividly describes on the basis of illustrations in textbooks. In all likelihood he never observed the experiments made with the air pump; a comparison of his accounts with Leistikow’s descriptions clearly establishes that he relied on the latter. Elsewhere, Zamosc occasionally uses a wording suggesting first-hand observation (‘as is indeed seen in the semen of every animal …’; ‘we cannot escape this opinion unless we deny the testimony of the senses itself’ fol. 5a), although he nowhere explicitly says that he saw a given phenomenon with his own eyes. Zamosc says that ‘these instruments [of observation] exist, [and] the art [of their use] is well known at all places at which the sciences are studied’ (fol. 4a), but not that he saw them himself. In any event, it is clear from Zamosc’s text that he visualized to himself the experiments he described to his readers. A reader of CRH . cannot fail to be impressed by the enthusiasm with which Israel Zamosc imparts his recently acquired knowledge to his readers. But one also repeatedly stumbles on numerous straightforward serious blunders in the understanding of contemporary science. What do these errors tell us about Zamosc? Until now it was difficult to answer this question, since we could not tell whether the errors were his own or whether they originated in his sources. Since we are now in a position to compare many of the physical accounts in CRH . with their source, we can appreciate to what extent Zamosc was capable of understanding Wolff’s physics as presented in Leistikow’s digest. It will transpire that while Zamosc understood the experiments described by Leistikow, more often than not he was totally off the mark when it came to understanding theory. His leap into the early modern era was far from being entirely successful. Consider the following examples: (1) Zamosc’s most revealing blunder is perhaps the following. CRH . (fol. 19a) describes an experiment made with the air pump estab-

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lishing that air has weight. Other experiments (related to the increase of the weight of metal subsequent upon calcination) show that fire also has weight. Zamosc thus concludes, contra Aristotle, that the two allegedly ‘light’ elements of Aristotelian physics in truth do have weight. It follows that all bodies fall, including those that, according to Aristotle, have an upward ‘natural movement.’ Zamosc goes on to explain that some bodies have more weight than others, so that when moving downward they displace the lighter bodies and settle below them.43 Thus far for statics. Things go downhill when Zamosc extends this scheme into dynamics. His source, Leistikow, discusses Galileo’s law of free fall and several related experiments, explaining that the observable differences of the velocities of free fall in the atmosphere result from the air’s resistance, which varies according to the falling body’s shape (vol. II: 1–7, §§1–10). This conclusion is corroborated by experiments of fall in a void (‘under the bell’), which show that a ‘ducat’ and a feather fall with the same velocity (ibid., 7–8, §11). What Zamosc made of this is as follows: ‘the velocity of motion [i.e., of the fall] is proportional to the magnitude of the weight [godel ha-koved]’ (fol. 19a). Now this is not, as appears on a first blush, a relapse into medieval orthodoxy, since Zamosc continues, ‘For instance, when a stone falls in the air it falls quicker than it falls in water, since [in water] the weight [koved] facing it lessens its own force [koah.] by its [the water’s] amount. For example, when a cubic foot of lead is weighed in void, i.e. in a place from which air has been emptied, it weighs one ounce more than it weighs in the air. This is so because to realize its heaviness and to fall it has to displace its own volume of air, whose power [koh.o; i.e., weight] in this amount [i.e., volume – in this case, one cubic foot] is an ounce, which is to be subtracted from the power of the lead, i.e. its weight’ (fols 19a–b). In a vessel filled with quicksilver, Zamosc continues, lead will not at all move downward. Zamosc steadfastly carries this reasoning one step farther: ‘This is how one can understand the great wonder seen in the glass vessel emptied of air, namely that when, using a contrivance, an experiment was made in which a grain of gold and a feather were dropped, the time of the feather’s fall is not longer [lit. not retarded] than that of the gold, which is the heaviest substance’ (fol. 19b). When these two bodies fall in the air, Zamosc explains, the feather displaces much more air than the gold, which ‘should be subtracted from its weight’; but in a void, when this difference does not exist, the two fall with the same velocity. Leaving aside the inappropriate theoretical vocabulary, the very ideas

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expounded are woeful: to account for the observable differences in the velocities of fall in void and in the atmosphere, Zamosc draws on Archimedes’ law,44 applying a correct law to phenomena on which it has virtually no bearing. The fact that in air a feather falls slower than in a void and the fact that lead cannot be immersed in mercury seem to him to follow from one and the same law. While Zamosc grasped the empirical fact that in a void all bodies fall with the same velocity, fundamentally he never entirely rid himself of the theoretical notion that the velocity of fall depends on the weight. He totally misconstrued Galileo’s law of falling bodies and the role of the medium in free fall, to which he improperly applied Archimedes’ law. The move from Aristotelian to Galilean physics (let alone Newtonian) was far beyond his capability. (2) The following error again shows how far Zamosc was from a real grasp of the new physics. Zamosc knew that sound propagates much more slowly than light: in twenty-one seconds sound travels one German mile, but light ‘at least sixty myriad thousand’ miles, he writes (fol. 6a).45 To account for the discrepancy, he offers a remarkable explanation. He observes that light travels only in straight lines, whereas sound also travels in a roundabout way (this is why it can go around obstacles). As a result, he opines, sound going from one point to the other travels a distance by far greater than that travelled by light, and hence ‘it needs much more time’ (fol. 6a). This account is Zamosc’s own (Leistikow does not give the speed of light and does not comment on this subject). Zamosc clearly did not realize that the difference of speeds is of an order of magnitude quite incompatible with his quite derisory explanation. (3) Many other, more circumscribed, errors can be detected throughout the text, confirming Zamosc’s limitations. I content myself with the following instances: • Leistikow (vol. I: 52n, §84) mentions that in a void air can expand

so as to occupy 4,000 times its initial volume. CRH . (fol. 18b) says it can expand ‘by some 4000 spans [le-hitpashet. bi-khmo dalet alafim zeratot],’ which is meaningless. • Leistikow (vol. I: 120–2, §148) describes the bubbles rising from water when the air above it is pumped out and offers a physical explanation.46 Zamosc (CRH . , fol. 19a) says that ‘when the air [in the water] feels the air above has left its place’ it rises to the surface.

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• Leistikow (vol. II: 110–11, §§129–30), in a section headed ‘Fire

Cannot Last without Air,’ reports that when the air is gradually withdrawn under the ‘bell,’ the smoke of a burning fire descends instead of rising. He goes on to state emphatically that when the air is entirely withdrawn, even easily inflammable substances cannot be ignited. Zamosc, for his part, writes that ‘when gun powder is kindled in void … the smoke goes downward, contrary to its nature in the air. For since there is no air weighing it down, it is appropriate that it move downward owing to its own weight’ (fol. 19b). He has failed to grasp that there is no fire at all in the absence of air. Leistikow’s textbook is not the only work on which Zamosc drew. Not a few discussions in CRH . – such as those relating to chemistry, botany, zoology, and geography – report recent scientific information that is not to be found there. Other German or Latin sources used by Israel Zamosc remain to be identified.47

5. Israel Zamosc’s Conservative Turn Israel Zamosc came to Berlin with a strong commitment to science and reason. His Maimonidean-inspired faith in the human intellect’s capacities to pierce the secrets of nature had nurtured the distinctively innovative and audacious sections of Nes.ah. Yisrael, which undermined traditional authority and triggered a conflict with members of his community in Zamosc. It is this confidence that moved Zamosc to study the new science upon his arrival in Berlin. The results are clearly discernible: within a breathtakingly short time, he became acquainted with a considerable number of ‘awe-inspiring’ facts, ‘which our forefathers did not fathom’ and which caused his soul to be ‘strongly moved by the oddity of the matter’ (above, page 73). Contrary to the ‘fools’ who refused to hear anything about these novelties, Zamosc eagerly sought them out. Yet he was clearly shaken by what he learned, facts that contradicted and called into question the entire body of knowledge on which he had been raised and that, during the first forty years of his life, he had considered as apodictically demonstrated truths. Zamosc was doubly audacious: not only did he come to grips with the new and threatening body of knowledge, but he wrote a work that sought to diffuse it, and this a mere three years after his daring rationalistic tendencies induced him to leave his home town. But, as noted, the move to the science and world view of the eigh-

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teenth century were clearly beyond Zamosc’s capabilities. While he was aware that the experiments he saw or visualized to himself refuted the Aristotelian philosophy of nature, he failed to comprehend the new physics. He realized that in a void bodies all fall with the same velocity, but believed that this followed from Archimedes’ law. More than a century after Galileo’s Two New Sciences and more than half a century after the publication of the first edition of Newton’s Principia, CRH . does not include a single mathematical formula, and it is clear that Zamosc was unaware that sublunar nature can be mathematicized. Even more striking than the failure to get farther along the route to modern science is Zamosc’s backing away from the scientific mode of inquiry. As already intimated, Zamosc’s early commitment to reason, science, and the scientific method was replaced by a scepticism that considered science as a body of knowledge offering at best an account of superficial reality only, the access to deep layers of reality being available only through revelation and Kabbalah. Similarly, Zamosc now adopted a fideist position that made allowance for God’s supernatural intervention in the course of nature. This is what I call Zamosc’s ‘conservative turn.’ Zamosc’s handling of matter theory well illustrates the process. We noted how embarrassed Zamosc was in the face of the three competing theories of elements, which concurred in disproving the traditional four-element theory but offered no agreed-upon alternative account, leaving him suspended in a cognitive impasse. At this juncture, Zamosc opted for a return to the security offered by tradition: underlying the building blocks of matter that are discoverable by science through experience, he decided, are the ‘elements of the elements,’ identified as the basic constituents of the world mentioned in Sefer yes.irah and knowable through Kabbalah alone. The conclusion thus was that ‘the judgment is to God’ (fol. 3b). Symptomatic of this ‘conservative turn’ is the fact that Zamosc identified his position with that of a medieval classic of antirationalistic Jewish thought, Judah ha-Levi’s Kuzari. The ‘pressure’ under which the four-element hypothesis has come, Zamosc writes, is nothing new: ‘We find that the wise Rabbi Judah ha-Levi, the author of the Kuzari, has argued against the four-element hypothesis. And these are his words’ (fol. 3a). Zamosc then quoted a famous argument (Kuzari 5: 14) whose point is that human reason falls short of determining the composition of substances, which is knowable by God alone. This quotation is telling: it signals a transfer of allegiance from the cultural hero Maimonides to his historical antithesis, Judah ha-Levi. Zamosc thus

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replaced the optimistic rationalism that he carried with him to Berlin by a sceptical traditionalism. He similarly subverted confidence in reason through a dose of fideism that imposed principled limits on science, as when he concludes a long account of the causes of rain and snow with the remark, ‘The fact that rain and snow do not always fall as a result of the above-mentioned [natural] causes is that the Lord our God, exercising His providence, seeks the well-being of the earth and of [the creatures] on it: He brings rain either as a punishment, or to satisfy [the earth] according to its needs’ (fol. 21a).48 It is this new, decidedly non(although not anti-) Maimonidean frame of mind that was to lead him in the next years to write his commentaries on the two classics of conservative Jewish thought, the Kuzari and H . ovot ha-levavot, which quickly became authoritative commentaries in traditionalist circles. Still, although science was no longer Zamosc’s central preoccupation, his strictly technical scientific competence remained intact and recognized: in 1762 Zamosc constructed an expensive sundial for Daniel Itzig (1723–99), who for awhile was his patron.49 The move away from rationalist philosophy and science towards tradition and Kabbalah is perceptible at many more junctures. For instance, Zamosc opposes Maimonides’ famous interpretation of .selem as ‘form’ (Guide I:1) and declares that the verse ‘Let us make a man in our image (be-s.almenu)’ (Gen. 1: 26) should be interpreted as stated by the Kabbalists (fols 11a–b). Elsewhere he juxtaposes the philosophical and the Kabbalistic construals of prophecy. He gives a poetically phrased account of the philosophical theory of prophecy, concluding with the phrase, ‘you should still know that all this is according to the opinion of Maimonides and his followers, who are raised on philosophy and whose entire secret concerning prophecy rests on mathematical, natural and metaphysical proofs, produced by human inquiry.’ He then briefly describes the view of the ‘lot of the Kabbalists, who fly high toward God’ and who ‘open the wings of their speculations which surpass the human intellect’ (fol. 12b). Although Zamosc says that it is not up to him to arbitrate such ‘vast’ controversies, he clearly has a preference for the Kabbalistic view (fol. 12b; similarly fol. 13a). The same applies to the question whether demons exist (fol. 12b). This frame of mind is also discernible in Zamosc’s view of the afterlife. Zamosc writes (in a decidedly non-Maimonidean idiom) that, having descended into a body from its ‘spiritual abode,’ the human soul can return to its origin and enjoy there eternal existence and bliss only by ‘drinking the rain of God’s words’ (fols 9a–b). The afterlife is attained through God’s word

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as transmitted by tradition, notably Kabbalah, not by intellectual activity à la Maimonides. In CRH . Zamosc occasionally mentions Rashi, but does not criticize him; by contrast, in Nes.ah. Yisrael, he harshly took him to task for his incorrect cosmological views. How, then does Zamosc construe the relationship of knowledge acquired through human reason and knowledge received through trustworthy tradition (Zamosc writes be-qabbalah, a term that includes but is not limited to Kabbalah)? Zamosc is not entirely clear or consistent in his pronouncements on this critical question, and this is hardly unexpected from a man who was in the process of intellectual turmoil. Only at one point does he hazard a general statement concerning their relationship. Following Maimonides, Ruah. h.en lists four classes of truth to which a person should acquiesce, one of which is that of truths received through a reliable tradition (qabbalah). This gives Zamosc the occasion to comment on the difference between one who searches for truth armed with tradition alone and one who draws on both tradition and the intellect (fol. 16a). The first is comparable to a blind man who puts his hand on the shoulder of one who sees and follows him:50 he walks in the right direction, but is likely to stumble on obstacles along the road. If he is linked to the seer through a chain of blind men, then the longer the chain the greater the danger of stumbling. The meaning of this parable, Zamosc says, is that while tradition indicates the right direction, the longer the chain of transmission, the greater the risk of errors. (The anti-Maimonidean message is clear enough, for Maimonides had insisted on the continuity and trustworthiness of the transmission.)51 It is here that the intellect proves its mettle: the one who uses it is comparable to a man who follows a route that had been marked out by a knowledgable explorer (i.e., a prophet), at the same time using his eyes to avoid obstacles. The intellect thus allows one to follow tradition without falling into the pitfalls of faulty transmission. In short, the route to salvation is indicated by revealed knowledge, but one also needs the guidance of the intellect in order to avoid the numerous errors that are likely to occur in the transmission of prophecy.52 Zamosc thus considers tradition and the intellect as complementary. This was also the case in Nes.ah. Yisrael. But the relative significance of the two sources of knowledge and authority has been inverted. In his first work, Zamosc wrote that ‘as the Moon receives light from the Sun, which actualizes its potential light, so also tradition receives its light from Wisdom.’53 The explicitly stated radical claim of this metaphor was that as the moon has no light of its own and illuminates only by virtue

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of the light it receives from the sun, so also tradition has no intrinsic light and shines only when illuminated by wisdom. In CRH . , the roles are reversed: tradition is taken to indicate the route, the intellect’s role, while important, being merely to undo the errors of transmission. True, already in his early period, Zamosc considered Kabbalah respectfully as a legitimate source of knowledge. Yet he took it to bear on domains of reality other than science and did not consider it as an alternative to science or even complementary to it. The superior role accorded to tradition in CRH . thus marks a consequential turn. It should yet be emphasized that even then Zamosc did not slide into an extreme anti-rationalism that would have denied to the intellect any role. He still held with Maimonides that the intellect (‘despised by the masses’) is superior to mere imagination (‘which the masses adore’) (fol. 14a), but he now gave tradition the prime role. Israel Zamosc’s CRH . , we can now realize, is a three-tiered work. A first layer consists of the numerous passages in which Zamosc straightforwardly explains the meaning of the text of Ruah. h.en on its own medieval assumptions. Not surprisingly, these passages are mostly found where Zamosc comments on chapters of Ruah. h.en that discuss topics other than science, such as psychology, noetics, logic, and metaphysics. Zamosc here acts as a loyal teacher who simply transmits (medieval) knowledge, without interfering with the text’s message. Then there is the most visible and spectacular layer, consisting of the elated reports gleaned in contemporary non-Jewish sources about recent astonishing discoveries in natural science. Ever since the publication of CRH . it is these accounts that have caught the eyes of both maskilim and historians, earning Zamosc a place of pride in the history of early Haskalah. This place he deserves, for his commentary for the first time brought to the attention of the contemporary Hebrew-reading Jewish public the very fact that ‘Gentile’ science had made numerous previously unheard-of discoveries, which could not be rejected ‘unless we deny sense-perception itself’ and which seriously challenge the traditional world picture and authority. Zamosc was not only enlightened; but sought to enlighten his brethren.54 Despite Zamosc’s conservative turn clearly expressed in CRH . , the very publicizing of so much new and unheard-of scientific information made the work into a subversive one. Packing his commentary of the venerated Ruah. h.en with facts refuting it and the entire medieval outlook was certainly an audacious move that may have displeased even supporters like R. David Fraenkel. Indeed, in

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Berlin too, as earlier in Poland, Zamosc had to struggle against conservative circles. He himself informs us that ‘many of the stupid ignoramuses of our generation,’ imbued with stupidity (‘their way is their folly’; Ps 49: 14), ‘believe that piety decreases among the students of the sciences and the erudite’ (fol. 16a). The third and last layer consists of dispersed remarks or short comments in which we get an insight into Zamosc’s own views and even his state of mind. This layer has gone unnoticed by historians – it was hidden by the impressive second layer. These isolated remarks and observations show that notwithstanding the outward ‘modernity’ of the exposition of empirical science in CRH . , Zamosc’s views in fact became more conservative and fideist than they had been when he wrote Nes.ah. Yisrael less than a decade earlier. Although Zamosc did not work out in any detail his new epistemology, his assessment of the relative importance of tradition and reason changed significantly. (I suspect that traditionalist circles, who cherish Zamosc to this day, clearly perceived the message of this third layer of CRH . .)

6. Conclusion: The Dialectic of Scientific Enlightenment – Israel Zamosc as a New Conservative It is not difficult to understand the intellectual upheaval that Israel Zamosc underwent. The encounter with modern science shattered his medieval Weltanschauung irremediably. As Aristotelian science was decisively refuted, the metaphysics erected on it also crumbled. All of sudden, the Maimonidean synthesis, which underlay not only Zamosc’s own religious world view but also that of the centuries-old rationalist tradition with which he identified, was invalidated. In Nes.ah. Yisrael, Zamosc drew on Maimonides to break away from the traditionalist framework of Talmudic study, but now even Maimonides himself was passé. At the same time, Zamosc was unwilling and probably also unable to enter the world of the non-Jewish majority culture (as, for example, Salomon Maimon was to do a generation later). This situation was one of existential insecurity in which tradition was the only available body of knowledge that allowed Zamosc firm ground under his feet, thereby making him into a New Conservative. This is not a little paradoxical. Zamosc’s first book, Nes.ah. Yisrael, written in the provincial Polish town of Zamosc, was a conservativelooking work of Talmudic sugiyyot, which carried a radical message of

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confidence in man’s intellect. CRH . , written in the Prussian metropolis Berlin, was a progressive-looking work that expounded recent spectacular scientific information but whose resigned author subscribed to a conservative fideism. Zamosc’s strong commitment to science led him to seek out with great zeal the new science, which he understandably marvelled at; yet it is this new science itself that not only wrecked his old Aristotelian world picture but also, inasmuch as it was far beyond his digestive capacities, destroyed his Maimonidean commitment to science and reason as the supreme means for acquiring felicity. The commitment to science produced its own negation. Israel Zamosc’s all-toosudden contact with modern science had an anti-enlightening effect: there was a real ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ at work here. That a failed attempt to join in with modernity too rapidly can elicit fundamentalist reactions hardly comes as a surprise to us, men and women of the twenty-first century. Notes Research for this study was done at the Herzog-August Bibliothek (HAB), Wolfenbüttel, at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. I am very grateful to the staff of all three libraries for their valuable and kind assistance. I am indebted to the HAB for a research grant that made work in Wolfenbüttel possible. I am also grateful to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, program of cooperation with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG]) and to the Hanadiv Charitable Foundation for research grants that made possible my stays in Berlin. 1 ‘Das Verhältnis der jüdischen Aufklärung zur mittelalterlichen jüdischen Philosophie,’ in K. Grunder and N. Rotenstreich, eds, Aufklärung und Haskala in jüdischer und nichtjüdischer Sicht (= Wolfenbütteler Forschungen zur Aufklärung, 14) (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1990), 13–20; incorporated into his Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 234–47. 2 See also David Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1997). 3 See Max Freudenthal, Aus der Heimat Mendelssohns. Moses Benjamin Wulff und seine Familie, die Nachkommen des Moses Isserles (Berlin, 1900), 213–21; see also M. Freudenthal, ‘R. David Fränckel,’ in M. Brann and F. Rosenthal, eds, Gedenkbuch zur Erinnerung an David Kaufmann (Breslau, 1900),

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569–98. Immediately before the Guide of the Perplexed, Fraenkel and his family had published (1739–42) the Mishneh torah. Freudenthal suggested that Fraenkel’s (moderate) rationalism goes back to R. Moses Isserles, from whose family he descended. On the method of Maimon’s commentaries see also Gideon Freudenthal, ‘Salomon Maimon: Commentary as a Method of Philosophizing’ (Heb.), Daat (Ramat Gan) 53 (2004): 125–60. A ‘refuting commentary’ is known also in non-Jewish early modern thought: in 1697 the Newtonian natural philosopher Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) published an English translation of Jacques Rohault’s Traité de physique (1671), whose stance was Cartesian, and in his notes he disproved the statements made in the text. Contrary to the maskilim, however, Clarke did not recognize the commented text as authoritative – he rather used it as a platform for a refutation of Cartesian physics. It is unlikely that this work had any influence on the Hebrew tradition. Other examples include Aaron Salomon Gumpertz’s super-commentary on Abraham Ibn Ezra’s commentary on the Five Scrolls (published in 1765, but written earlier); Mendelssohn’s commentary on Maimonides’ Millot ha-higgayon (Logical Terminology) (1762, 1766); and Satanov’s editions of and commentaries on Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1790), Judah ha-Levi’s Kuzari (1795), Menahem b. Abraham’s (Bonafoux) Mikhlal Yofi (1798), and parts II and III of Maimonides’ Guide (1798). Israel Zamosc’s Commentary on Ruah. h.en often refers to and takes to task these two commentaries. The present paragraph is based on my ‘Hebrew Medieval Science in Zamosc ca. 1730: The Early Years of Rabbi Israel ben Moses Halevy of Zamosc,’ in Resianne Fontaine, Andrew Schatz, and Irene E. Zwiep, eds, Sepharad in Ashkenaz. Medieval Learning and Eighteenth-Century Enlightened Jewish Discourse (Amsterdam: Edita, 2006), 25–67, where all relevant sources are indicated. See also my ‘Jisrael ben Moshe Halewi Zamosc,’ in Andreas Kilcher and Otfried Fraisse, eds, Lexikon jüdischer Philosophen und Theologen (Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2003), 174–6, and ‘Zamosc, Israel ben Moses Halevy,’ YIVO Encyclopedia (forthcoming). For an exhaustive description of this literary corpus, see Moritz Steinschneider, Die Hebraeischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (Berlin, 1893; rpt Graz, 1956); for a short aperçu see Gad Freudenthal, ‘Les sciences dans les communautés juives médiévales de Provence: Leur appropriation, leur rôle,’ Revue des études juives 152 (1993): 29–136; and Gad Freudenthal, ‘Science in the Medieval Jewish Culture of Southern France,’

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Gad Freudenthal History of Science 33 (1995): 23–58, reprinted in: Science in the Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Traditions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), Essay I. On the subversive message of this book see Gad Freudenthal, ‘Nes.ah. Yisrael or Res.ah. Yisrael ? The Place of Science in R. Israel of Zamosc’s Talmudic Novellae’ (Heb.), in: Haim (Howard) Kreisel, ed., Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought. vol. 2 (Heb.) (Beersheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2006), 223–35. See Hillel Levine, ‘Paradise Not Surrendered: Jewish Reactions to Copernicus and the Growth of Modern Science,’ in R.S. Cohen and M. Wartofsky, eds., Epistemology, Methodology and the Social Sciences (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983), 203–25. See also below, n27. Sefer Ruah. h.en … [‘im] perush h.adash she-h.ibber he-h.akham ha-kolel … Yisrael n.r.w. ba‘al meh.abber Nes.ah. Yisrael … Editio princeps (Jessnitz, 1744). In what follows I use the readily available Warsaw 1826 edition (repr. Jerusalem, 1970), which I checked against the 1744 edition. The editio princeps (Vienna: Joseph Hrschansky, 1796) was published by Zamosc’s nephew Yeruh.am b. Issachar Beer, who in his ‘Editor’s foreword’ (unpaginated) writes that it was composed by Zamosc in Berlin, under the patronage of Daniel Itzig (‘who paid for it a fortune’), thirty years earlier, that is, about 1766. This fits well with the date of the sundial that Zamosc made for Itzig in 1762 (below, n49). Moses Mendelssohn, who studied with Israel Zamosc shortly after both arrived in Berlin, copied parts of this work in his own hand. It seems plausible to suppose that he did so early in his life, and this suggests that Zamosc had already begun writing the work in the 1740s. Mendelssohn at first copied the commentary on the margins of the Buxdorf edition (Basel, 1660) of the Kuzari and later on sheets inserted in the book. The manuscript was separated into several parts, of which two are known to survive: New York, JTS Mic. 2520, and Warsaw, Jewish Historical Institute 1215 (= Jerusalem, Institute for Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, Nos 28773 and 10113 [also 31022], respectively). For a comprehensive study and critical edition see Yehuda Friedlander, Bemisterei hasat. irah. Hebrew Satire in Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Heb.), (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1989), 2: 9–110. Jacob Emden, Sefer She’elat Ya‘abes., Pt II (Lemberg, 1884), fol. 10aa, Qu. 19 dated Wednesday 28 Iyyar (5)525 (19 May 1764), where the title is given as Even ha-sho’el (The Questioner’s Stone). However, on the title page of the editio princeps of the Kuzari with Zamosc’s Commentary (n14) the title of this work is given as Even Yisrael, which seems more in tune with the rabbinic practice to include the author’s name in the titles of his books.

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17 Two recent studies of this work include David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 333–4, 342–3, and David Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1997), 50–2; abridged version in David Sorkin, ‘The Early Haskalah,’ in Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin, eds, New Perspectives on the Haskalah (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 2001), 9–26 at 17–19. 18 Max Freudenthal, Aus der Heimat Mendelssohns, 225–6. 19 See on him Marvin J. Heller, Printing the Talmud. A History of the Individual Treatises Printed from 1700 to 1750 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 75–83. 20 CRH . (editio princeps), back of the title page (unnumbered). The work has no rabbinical approbations. Since the same holds for the Jessnitz printings of the Guide and of David Gans’s Neh.mad we-na’im (1743), it seems that the printer or the Fraenkels, his mentors, thought this was not necessary; it does not necessarily mean that Fraenkel was unable to obtain such approbations as Max Freudenthal (Aus der Heimat Mendelssohns, 220–1) speculates. 21 This may explain why Zamosc did not write a preface to this work: the preface to Nes.ah. Yisrael is very long and personal, and if he had written CRH . as a result of his own initiative, presumably he would have introduced it in a similar fashion. 22 In what follows, indications of page numbers in the body of the text refer to CRH . in the 1826 [1970] edition; see above, n13. 23 A similar argument is made by Joseph Salomon Delmedigo in his Sefer elim, with which Zamosc was well acquainted. See Y. Tzvi Langermann, ‘Hebrew Astronomy: Deep Soundings from a Rich Tradition,’ in Helaine Selin, ed., Astronomy across Cultures. A History of Non-Western Astronomy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 555–84, at 564. (I am grateful to Prof. B.R. Goldstein for having brought this reference back to my memory.) 24 Zamosc seems to have in mind the measurement of the earth by the expedition to Lapland led by Maupertuis (1698–1759) in 1735. The measurement confirmed Newton’s prediction that the earth is flattened at the poles and thereby confirmed Newton’s theory of gravity and hence, indirectly, the non-existence of Aristotle’s ‘fifth body.’ 25 The unnamed scholar is Tycho Brahe: ‘Know that the wondrous researcher in the science of the stars … Tycho Brahe, said to me: “it was not wise of your [Jewish] Sages to assent to something false [put forward by] the scholars of the Nations. The Sages of Israel were right in affirming that the planets [lit. stars] follow their own recurring motions without being constrained through the rotations [lit. motions] of the spheres, and

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Gad Freudenthal that they move on their own, travel and rush like a bird flying in the air,” ’ David Gans reported, in Neh.mad we-na‘im (Jessnitz, 1743), 15ba, §25. Noted in Langermann, ‘Hebrew Astronomy,’ 564. Israel Zamosc says he would discuss heliocentrism in a part entitled HaShamayim ha-h.adashim (The New Heavens) that he intends to write as a sequel to Arubbot ha-shamayim. The latter was written in the town of Zamosc, and obviously now appeared to Israel Zamosc outdated, especially after the publication in Jessnitz in 1743 of David Gans’s Neh.mad we-na‘im (written ca 1601). The two extant manuscripts of Arubbot ha-shamayim do not include the promised part, which presumably was never written. In Os.ar neh.mad, his commentary on the Kuzari (above, page 67), Zamosc similarly alludes to Copernicus for his computations but does not comment on his cosmology; see commentary on Kuzari 4: 29 (current editions 4: 133; I am grateful to Adam Shear for this reference). Zamosc’s strong dislike for Copernicus explains why he did not draw on Delmedigo’s Sefer elim in his refutation of the medieval philosophy of nature: the latter’s attack on the Aristotelian world picture was grounded on heliocentrism, which Zamosc could not accept; by contrast, his own criticism of Aristotelianism was grounded only on newly discovered, observable terrestrial phenomena. On the distinction between ‘pre-existence’ and ‘preformation’ theories, see Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, ed. by Keith R. Benson, trans. by Robert Ellrich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), ch. 6; and Peter J. Bowler, ‘Preformation and Pre-existence in the Seventeenth Century: A Brief Analysis,’ Journal of the History of Biology 4 (1971): 221–44. On the contribution of the microscope to the development of the debate, see Catherine Wilson, The Invisible Word. Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. ch. 5. The topic was very ‘hot’ in Prussia of the 1740s, and was to remain so for some time: see Shirley A. Roe, ‘Voltaire versus Needham: Atheism, Materialism, and the Generation of Life,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985): 65–87. Towards the end of the century Salomon Maimon still devoted to this issue a long discussion in his commentary on Maimonides’ Guide: see his Giv‘at ha-moreh, ed. S.H. Bergman and N. Rotenstreich (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1966), 119–22. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, II, Introduction. The medieval argument runs as follows: if the world were eternal, then (assuming individual immortality of the soul) the souls of all the human beings that had lived during the infinite past would be infinite, that is, an

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actual infinite would exist; but Aristotle has shown that an actual infinite is impossible; hence the world is not eternal. See Maimonides, Guide, I:74 (7), and Herbert A. Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, Creation and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 123. Cf Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 333–4. The strange use of the term ‘points’ (nequdot) to refer to atoms probably follows Shem-T.ov b. Shem-T.ov’s commentary on Guide I:73, first premise (Warsaw, 1872), 116a: the indivisible particles of which, according to the Kalâm, all substances are constituted ‘are called “separate particles” [‘as.amim pirdiyyim], or “indivisible particles,” or “points,” for the nature of the point is that it is indivisible.’ Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, I:73. This is a hybrid chemical system consisting of the three Paracelsian elements and two of the Aristotelian ones. The first to propound it seems to have been Nicolas Lefèvre in 1660, but it had followers also in the eighteenth century. See Hélène Metzger, Les Doctrines chimiques en France du début du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1923; rpt 1969), 74 ff, 309 ff. It is another question where Israel Zamosc learnt about it; see below. Elsewhere, too, Zamosc comments positively on the chemical theory: ‘the generation of metals has been explained with the greatest perfection by the masters of the art of chemistry, drawing on proofs and analogies [moftim we-dimyonot] [whose discussion] is out of place here’ (fol. 2b). We-’ah.ar she-hu’ qabbalah, neqabbel. On the origin of this expression see E. Ben-Yehuda, Millon ha-lashon ha-‘ivrit, 11: 5697a. Auszug der Versuche Herrn Christian Wolffens … welchen Zum Gebrauch der Schulen verfertigt und nebst kurzen Anmerckungen mitgetheilet hat Michael Friedrich Leistikow (Halle, 1738). 183+159+143 pages + Register (unpaginated). 3 vols in one. Christian Wolff, Nützliche Versuche. Vernünfftige Gedanken von den Würckungen der Natur (= Deutsche Physik) (Halle, 1723). Zamosc seems to allude to this title when he writes, apropos experiments performed with the air pump, that ‘this has been adduced by a famous contemporary scholar in his books on experiments of nature [sifrey nissyonot ha-t. eva‘]’ (fol. 18b). Wolff’s work is divided into short numbered paragraphs, and Leistikow’s abridgment follows that numbering. (However, in volume II there is a gap of one beginning with §37, and another at §157, owing to errors in Wolff’s numbering.) Leistikow on some rare occasions updated Wolff’s treatise by adding material from other sources: the presence of some such items in CRH . establishes beyond doubt that Zamosc used Leistikow’s work, and not Wolff’s. The name Deutsche Physik refers

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Gad Freudenthal only to the work’s language, Wolff having written mostly in Latin, and of course has none of the connotations that were to be given to it by the Nazis. For the book’s popularity, see Göttingische Zeitungen von Gelehrten Sachen, dated 21 May 1739 (41. Stück), 355 (wrongly numbered 359)–6; ibid., dated 14 December 1739 (100. Stück), 893; ibid., dated 1 August 1740 (61. Stück), 544. For another, little-known example (dating from the 1740s), see M. Vishnitzer, ed., Zikhronot R. Dov mi-Bolechow (Berlin, 1922), 103–4 (= M. Vishnitzer, trans., The Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow [Oxford, 1922], 166–8). The article by Daniel Stone, ‘Knowledge of Foreign Languages among Eighteenth-Century Polish Jews,’ in Gershon David Hundert, ed., Jews in Early Modern Poland (= Polin vol. 10) (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization), 200–18, is disappointingly uninformative. ‘Friedrich Nicolai’s Anmerkungen zu Moses Mendelsohn’s Briefwechsel mit Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,’ in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Sämtliche Schriften, Bd 29 (Berlin and Stettin, 1828), 373; Friedrich Nicolai, ‘Nachruf auf Mendelssohn’ (1776), reprinted in Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe, vol. 23: Dokumente II (Stuttgart: Friedrich Fromann Verlag, 1992), 10–18, at 12. I am very grateful to Prof. Gerrit Bos (University of Köln) for his kind help with this term. On the former see Gad Freudenthal, ‘Aaron Salomon Gumpertz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the English “Jew Bill” and the First Call for an Improvement of the Civil Rights of Jews in Germany (1753),’ AJS Review 29 (2005): 299–353; on the latter, Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn. A Biographical Study (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1973; repr. London: Littman Library, 1997). Isaac Euchel, Toldot rabbenu he-h.akham Moshe ben Menah.em (Berlin, 1789), 10. Disappointingly, Leistikow’s book is not among the books listed in Verzeichniß der auserlesenen Büchersammlung des seeligen Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (Berlin, 1786); but this is not surprising, because the fifteenyear-old Mendelssohn was very poor in 1744 and had very few books. On Euchel, see Sh. Feiner, ‘Isaac Euchel – “Entrepreneur” of the Haskalah Movement in Germany’ (Heb.) Zion 52 (1987): 427–69. Despite the obvious differences, the latter idea is reminiscent of the original account of gravity offered by Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides, 1288–1344), naturally in a globally Aristotelian framework. See on it Ruth Glasner, ‘Gersonides’s Theory of Natural Motion,’ Early Science and Medicine 1 (1996): 151–203. Gersonides expounded his theory mainly in his

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super-commentaries on Averroes, which Zamosc is not likely to have read, but there are echoes of it in his Sefer Milh.amot ha-Shem (printed in 1560), with which Zamosc was acquainted. It is therefore possible, although not likely, that Zamosc was familiar with Gersonides’ theory. Zamosc may have known Archimedes’ law from Leistikow, vol. I: 145–50, §§178–82. The value for the speed of sound is taken from Leistikow (vol. II: 12–13, §11), but that of the speed of light is not given there. This is one example of a piece of scientific information that Zamosc derived from a source other than Leistikow; see below. (The quite fantastic value Zamosc quotes may have resulted from oral transmission.) CRH . mentions the method of measurement of light’s speed (fol. 5b): the method is Roemer’s, although Zamosc does not mention his name. ‘Durch das Auspumpen wird die Lufft unter der Glocke dünner auch schwächer: sie vermag demnach das Wasser, mithin die darin enthaltene Lufft nicht mehr so starck zu drucken, als vorhin. Daher bereitet sich diese aus, und zwar um so viel mehr, je weniger sie gedrucket wird’ (Leistikow, vol. I: 121, §148). Another, although only probable, source of CRH . is Johann Gottlob Krueger’s Naturlehre of 1740: this is where Zamosc seems to have found the table of specific gravities (luah. ha-kovadim) that he offers his readers (fol. 2b) when explaining the meaning of the term ‘mineral’ (domem). Zamosc there observes that the seven metals differ in density, and goes on to explain that the table indicates the weight in grains of a cubic foot of the respective metal (Krueger, Naturlehre, 487–8). Zamosc does not cite the relevant passage verbatim, and could have found the same table elsewhere. However, the fact that Krueger ridicules in this context the alchemists’ claim that the metals grow under the ‘influence’ of the planets and also mentions Copernicus, and that Zamosc, too, mentions, and rejects, the alchemists’ claims and also mentions Copernicus, suggests that Krueger was indeed his source. Noted in Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah, 52. On 29 April 1865, an auction took place in Berlin from the estate of the Itzig family, one of whose items is described as follows: ‘Endlich ist noch der Sonnenuhr zu gedenken, auf einer kupfernen Tafel mit detaillirten Eintheilungen nach der inschriftlichen [word missing] Erfindung des ,Rab Israel Moses’ vom Jahre 1762 von Ring in Berlin gearbeitet und auf zierlichem Postament aufgestellt.’ See Vossische Zeitung (Berlin) dated Wednesday, 3 May 1865 (no. 103), ‘1. Beilage,’ 4a; for this reference I am indebted to L. Landshuth, ‘Dr. Aron Gumpertz gen. Aron Emmerich,’ Die

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Gad Freudenthal Gegenwart. Berliner Wochenschrift für Jüdische Angelegenheiten 1 (1867): 325a. Ben-Zion Katz, Rabbanut, h.asidut, haskalah (Tel Aviv: 1956), 1: 279, n165, reports that Simon Bernfeld (1860–1940) saw the sundial in a Berlin museum; however, given Katz’s general unreliability, this information is to be treated with caution; it may be a corruption of the report in C. Stanislavsky, ‘Israel Zamosc’ (Russian), Voskod 6 (1886): 131–7 at 135n. Zamosc writes that this ‘parable’ has been conceived by ‘the Ancients.’ His source seems to be the medieval anonymous Orh.ot .sadiqim, Gate IX. (I am grateful to Prof. Boaz Huss of Ben-Gurion University for this reference.) Notably in the Introduction to the Commentary on the Mishnah. Zamosc made a creative use of the parable he found in Orh.ot .sadiqim. The latter’s point is that the faithful are like blind men who all depend on the leader, identified as the deity: ‘each one of them [the blind men] knows that although his hand rests on the shoulder of the one who walks in front of him and who leads him, yet the guidance itself does not originate from him; rather they all follow the first seer … One should pay attention to this and realize that the One Blessed be He is the leader and we are all blind … No one has any power [of his own], independent of the Supreme Leader, whose ways are all rightful and who is above scrutiny.’ The point concerning the danger of pitfalls, which increases as the line of transmission is longer, is thus Zamosc’s own, as is the point that the intellect is helpful in avoiding them. The latter contrasts with the statement in Orh.ot .sadiqim that God is ‘above scrutiny.’ Nes.ah. Yisrael (Frankfurt on the Oder, 1741), fol. 40bb. See Immanuel Etkes, ‘Immanent Factors and External Influences in the Development of the Haskalah Movement in Russia,’ in Jacob Katz, ed., Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1987), 13–32, at 20–1. Etkes perceptively observes that Zamosc, like R. Barukh of Shklov some forty years later, ‘shared a common resolve to propagate scientific knowledge among the Jews.’ In terms of his ideal-type model of the Haskalah, he consequently classifies both as belonging to an ‘intermediate phase’ in that they ‘did not [yet] link the dissemination of scientific knowledge with a program or vision of a radical change in Jewish society and its relation to the surrounding.’ In this precise sense, Zamosc can be viewed as a ‘forerunner’ of the Haskalah, rather than as a mere ‘early maskil.’ On the distinction between the two notions see, for example, Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century (Heb.) (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2002), 46–56.

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chapter four

Religion, Theology, and the Hermetic Imagination in the Late German Enlightenment: The Case of Johann Salomo Semler PETER HANNS REILL

Amos Funkenstein contended in Theology and the Scientific Imagination that the ideals of science and theology were intimately connected in early modern Europe. Despite the supposedly secular character of the Enlightenment, I argue that the same proposition holds true for the eighteenth century, at least in Germany. I build my case around an essay that appeared in 1786 entitled ‘Of True Hermetical Medicine: To Herr Leopold Baron Hirschen in Dresden; Against False Masons and Rosicrucians’1 that quickly became a minor cause célèbre within the German intellectual community. Its defence of hermetic medicine and chemistry generated an immediate negative response in the pages of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, the unofficial organ of the Berlin Enlightenment, and in other ‘Enlightened’ journals in northern Germany, and induced one of Germany’s most respected academic mathematicians and chemists to write a two-volume monograph attacking it.2 Each of these critiques was answered by a spirited defence of ‘true hermetical medicine’ by the author, Johann Salomo Semler.3 In the years following, Semler continued his championship of hermeticism, composing a fourvolume study of the Rosicrucians, five more defences of hermetic medicine, and four tracts describing how he was able to generate thirteen grains of air-gold (Luftgold).4 These texts did not cause an uproar just because of their championship of ‘true hermeticism’; in fact, with the rise and splintering of the Masonic movement and especially with the resurgence of the Rosicrucians in the late eighteenth century, an increasing fascination with hermeticism and alchemy became a part of the German and European

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intellectual landscape. Yet for most established intellectuals these arcane interests were associated with the fringe of learned society – outsiders, ‘enthusiasts,’ fanatics, failed academics, and Grub Street publicists. Semler, however, was neither an outsider nor an enthusiast and certainly could not be seen as either a failure or a Grub Street publicist. He was clearly part of the German Enlightenment academic establishment; in fact he was one of its most respected members. As senior professor of theology at the University of Halle – the largest theological training ground in Protestant Germany – Semler was considered by many of his contemporaries to be the leading spokesman for a new form of Enlightenment theology that stressed the primacy of individual conscience, that argued for the necessity of advancing toleration for the health of society and religion, and that proclaimed a ‘progressive’ hermeneutical analysis of religion founded upon historical and philological analysis. Though today regulated to the rank of a ‘secondary’ figure in Enlightenment historiography, Semler was, during his lifetime, one of Germany’s most renowned theological thinkers. In the 1770s and 1780s he often was compared to Lessing and Mendelssohn, considered to have a theological imagination comparable to theirs, but endowed, at least with respect to Lessing, with a far greater command of history, philology, and hermeneutics. Like them, he was attacked by the same critics, including Pastor Goeze of Hamburg, Lessing’s theological arch-enemy, and Lavater, Mendelssohn’s nemesis. For many German Enlightenment thinkers, Semler served as a theological herald for a non-dogmatic, humanistic, and progressive Protestantism, often referred to as neology. Neology, according to Karl Aner, its most prominent twentiethcentury historian, formed the second phase of the Enlightenment’s critique of orthodox religion, following the Wolffian moment that sought to draw a parallel between reason and revelation, and preceding the rationalist phase, which equated reason with revelation. In Aner’s view, neology eliminated all of the non-rational elements of revelation, which included most of its historical content, without denying the concept outright.5 The neologists were able to achieve this feat by ‘historicizing’ the biblical message, interpreting the meaning of Holy Scripture by an analysis of local customs, geography, mentalities, and social and political structure. In support of this, they also argued that the Bible was a form of sacred poetry, governed not by the rules of discursive logic but rather by the predominance of metaphor and poetic expression. Hence any literal interpretation of the Bible’s meaning was denied. Certainly

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for Semler’s contemporaries, the neological endeavour was a daring attempt to redefine religion.6 Given Semler’s reputation as a ‘progressive’ or ‘rationalist’ theologian, it is easy to understand the consternation of some of his Enlightenment colleagues when confronted with his defence of hermetic medicine and chemistry. That consternation has continued to dominate the subsequent analyses of Semler and his place in the German Enlightenment, for it has been assumed that a belief in hermeticism and alchemy and a sympathy for certain Rosicrucian endeavours were diametrically opposed to the dynamics of Enlightenment thought, signs rather of a creeping anti-Enlightenment reaction first announced by the Wöllner edicts of 1788. To escape the conclusion that Semler’s liberal theology could have been shaped, influenced, or guided by the hermetic imagination, two interpretive strategies have been proposed. The first and oldest simply assumes that the elder Semler could not cope with the manner in which things were changing, left the ranks of the Enlightenment, and partook in the beginning of the conservative reaction symbolized by Wöllner. According to this interpretation there were two Semlers: a progressive one and one who, in his later life, was ‘awash in alchemical daydreams’7 and conservative politics. The second interpretive strategy, simply minimizes the importance of Semler’s scientific vision for the development of his views on religion and theology. In fact, it projects the contemporary possibility that a serious theological thinker could separate his or her ‘natural scientific’ concerns from theological ones. Thus, Gottfried Hornig, the foremost interpreter of Semler’s theology today, contends that ‘Semler’s failed experiments to generate gold were indeed serious activities and accorded with his natural scientific inclinations. But, they remained a sideline activity and were not able to interfere with the continual and intensive work on exegetical, church historical and dogmatic themes.’ 8 I would like to propose two counter-propositions, the first of which I explore here, the second of which I state here but have adumbrated elsewhere.9 The first counter-proposition is that Semler’s concepts of theology and religion, his view of history, his technical language, and his vision of the future cannot be explained without reference to his ‘scientific inclinations,’ no matter how embarrassing they may seem to later commentators. In Semler’s case the period of his most intense concern with developing his hermetic ideal corresponded to a deepening and a clarification of his definition of religion and theology, resulting, in Hornig’s words, ‘in a theology that was significantly different than that

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of his contemporaries.’10 The second is that Semler’s vision of nature, though extreme, was part of a larger discourse forged during the late Enlightenment to overcome scepticism by creating a vitalist ideal of nature and science. In fact, the intensity of the negative response to Semler’s scientific ideas can be explained in part because some of them sounded very much like ones proposed by the forgers of this Enlightenment discourse. The participants in this debate used similar tropes, metaphors, and ideas, though they differed greatly in their specific explication of them. However, unlike in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the ground upon which these battles were contested had shifted from the physical-mathematical sciences to natural history, physiology, comparative anatomy, and chemistry, sciences intimately associated with the new concepts of life and activity. In our world in which lives can be lived on many self-contained levels, it is plausible that one can be involved in studying science and theology and still be able to separate them. For the eighteenth century this is a tenuous proposition, for it was then assumed that nature and human activities were analogous – in fact, that nature served as the guide by which one could understand and regulate human affairs. The ‘great analogy of nature,’ as Herder termed it, was considered the essential reference point for discussions concerning truth, beauty, and human organization. As Steven Shapin has argued, ‘this was not because of “mere” metaphysical glossing, but because in these (and later) cultural contexts nature and society were deemed to be elements in one interacting network of significance.’11 In this sense, Semler was typical. Like Herder, he continually drew the parallel between nature and spirit, between natural and human history. ‘It is and remains God’s holiest and wisest order, that he rules and develops the moral human world not any less than the physical.’12 ‘I do not doubt in the least about a revelation and lesson from God whereby the moral world has similar periods as the physical world has great revolutions.’13 In short, according to Semler, ‘the developments in the moral world have, following God’s plan, their periods and steps as the knowledge and discovery of the physical.’14 This correspondence between developments in the natural and moral world and the methods by which knowledge in both is achieved served as the epistemological foundation for the development of Semler’s theology, assuring its veracity and providing the ultimate proof for his propositions. For this reason it is necessary to examine the hermetic ideal that informed Semler’s thought.

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Probably the most sensitive issue in science and theology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries focused upon the theory of matter; in its elaboration it touched directly upon issues concerning the Eucharist, resurrection, salvation, life after death, and the relationship between being and becoming, mind and body. Semler’s naturalistic and theological thought was directed to this problem. The basic proposition informing Semler’s ideal of nature was that ‘the site of the whole of nature presents an unlimited scene of God’s power and wisdom.’15 Like many late Enlightenment thinkers, Semler tried to combine the positions that had separated Newton and Leibniz – God as logos and God as will. Plan and internal activity were to be joined. Nature was filled with secret, active powers and their effects, which were infinite, never circumscribed by eternally fixed or stable relations. Matter, then, was not that described by the mechanists or atomists but rather something forever changing, driven on by the internal forces established by God and in continual movement towards a goal. For that reason, Semler distinguished between two types of matter: perceptible matter, which appeared at a certain time and place, and a more spiritual matter, lacking specific form but being, actu primo, something possessing the tendency to achieve specific forms over time. This higher or more spiritual substance was what he called primary matter, Urstoff, lying before, above, and in normal matter. Driven on by internal powers this primary matter is essential substance (daseiende Substanz), which takes form at a specific time and place. Thus, all specific manifestations of primary matter consist of emerging outer form and internal movement propelled by the living powers of infinite nature. For this reason, the gross, outward manifestations of matter do not encompass the total idea of substance. Beneath them or in them is the more perfect idea or spirit of that substance. All perceptible matter consists of a unique, harmonic combination of gross and subtle matter possessing its own characteristic internal powers, generated by the specific way in which it was formed. The substances that have acquired form are but a part of infinite nature; in addition to them we are surrounded by matter in formation, or embryonic matter not yet coagulated. Thus, for example, in addition to the gold we are able to mine, the air is filled with potential gold growing from seeds of matter in formation (daseienden Samen oder Stof ),16 which could be precipitated out if one possessed the correct solvent to do it; hence the concept of air-gold. Given the dual nature of matter and the infinite variety of nature, Semler argued that different sciences were required to investigate per-

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ceptible matter and matter in formation. Normal, or scientific (wissenschaftliche) chemistry did the first; hermetic chemistry addressed its efforts to the second. Scientific chemistry halted nature in order to dissect it and determine its structure. It focused upon regular relations and drew up standard procedures – based upon analysis and synthesis – that could be taught in schools and laboratories and that were capable of infinite replication. In effect, these very methods, Semler believed, robbed matter of its internal life, turning it into a dead torso. ‘Through analysis one destroys the nature of a product that was so deliberately conjoined and the movement that it had acquired as a totality ... because one robs the substance of its internal movement through the introduction of an external, foreign movement.’17 Here Semler echoed those vitalist scientists, such as Paul Barthez, Viq d’Azur, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who argued that comparative anatomy was incapable of providing complete information concerning the living body. It had to be enriched by the study of physiology, which dealt with live bodies in motion. In contradistinction to normal chemistry, ‘the secret chemistry looks quite surely at totally other things, when it observes inner, invisible nature.’ Semler argued that in the ‘investigation of infinite nature,’ it is equally necessary to extend one’s study to ‘things that are not yet perceptible, which still are in actu primo,’ to ‘the just initiated possibilities, to the embryonic substances, which merely develop externally according to time and place.’18 Normal chemistry investigated the world as it had become – the static set of relations governing existing matter. Hermetic chemistry, on the other hand, dealt with the world of living creation, with genesis and reproduction and the mysterious powers associated with this process. Hence it was directed to investigating the dynamic processes of matter formation. Thus, both the object and the method of hermetic chemistry differed radically from those of normal chemistry. Semler defined hermetic chemistry’s character as follows: ‘1) it cannot be taught publicly as a science which everyone may be able to learn. 2) it does not occupy itself with the visible, already corporeal substances and their artificial dissolution, but rather more with natural, still imperceptible elements composed by nature through development and transformations. 3) it has or seeks a universal solvent, because it postulates that the Urstoff of all things is one and the same and therefore expects a coagulation from nature.’ 19 Instead of turning to the ‘artificial’ methods of analysis and synthesis, hermetic chemistry focused upon purification through distillation, slacking away gross

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matter in order to arrive at more general or ‘catholic’ matter and to coagulation or the precipitation of growing matter into perceptible matter. But why must hermetic chemistry and medicine remain a secret science, unable to be standardized or publicly taught? More than anything else, this aspect of hermetic science formed the core of the criticisms levelled at Semler’s hermetical writings. The answer is that hermetic science, which deals with spiritualized matter or matter in formation, requires a certain type of person to practise it – namely, one whose own spiritual sense has been awakened and heightened, who eschews worldly fame or fortune, who is in harmony with the processes of invisible nature, which reveal and reflect God’s wisdom. Hermetical science is the product of private industry practised by ‘quiet individuals’ whose main concern is to probe the depths of living nature. The very title of Semler’s first work on hermetic medicine reveals this difference between its audience and the intended audience of scientific chemistry. The work was addressed to a specific reader, Baron Hirschen, though open to all who cared to read it. That reader was already aware of the specific requirements of hermetic science. He was a witness to truth, whose moral and elevated character validated the efforts Semler described. Hence the truth of this science could only be attested to by those whose moral character gave them a privileged position vis-à-vis the rest of the learned public. Hermetical chemistry was a private chemistry that could never be made the object of public instruction or the possession of a group in society because it required the personal involvement of the individual researcher with the processes of nature itself. The intensely individualistic spiritual nature of true hermetic chemistry also led Semler to launch major attacks against secret societies such as the Rosicrucians and some of the Masons, which had sought to extend their power and position through alchemy by producing wealth for their own advancement. They were ‘false brothers,’ purveyors of a debased hermetical science, concerned only for their own egotistical interests.20 Tying all of this together is what I would like to call Semler’s epistemological modesty. Because of nature’s infinite diversity, its unlimited powers and effects, Semler argued that it was beyond the possibility of any one person, group, or age to ‘lift the heavenly, infinite veil of nature.’21 Since absolute knowledge was beyond our ken, it was imperative that each person be allowed to choose his or her own position from which to investigate nature. Only through the exercise of per-

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sonal, private freedom could understanding be advanced, guided by private industriousness and moral commitment. But even then, complete agreement could never be achieved and certainly should not be forced. Conflict and controversy are normal and lead to improvement. ‘Our contemporaries have not been harmed because judgments and opinions concerning science have remained just as opposed as they were for more than a thousand or so years, not just in these chemical questions, but also as they took place in other physical, philosophical, juridical, and theological issues – have taken place to the real advantage and for the best of humankind – in which one group has always constructed systems and the other operating without systems always has expanded the materials and products of human knowledge.’22 Semler believed that this interplay between system building and individual empirical research established the dynamics for the expansion of knowledge and understanding in all realms. In order to capitalize on this process, Semler argued that the clearest way to enhance the progress of knowledge was to avoid establishing one answer, system, or solution as dominant. Instead, one should follow the middle way: encourage the free expression of private opinion and then try to mediate between the extremes, establishing a creative harmony between the broad vision and focused inquiry. But what kept the results of this continual interplay between system builders and individual interpreters from disintegrating into pure subjectivism or relativism, not to say scepticism? The answer, of course, was the inherent, active powers of nature that in their development adhered to God’s plan, providing humans with an enhanced knowledge of nature as nature itself developed. The search for truth was itself a natural force, a reflection of God’s plan. Thus, the two paths of divine wisdom and action, nature and history, met and reinforced each other. At the same time that Semler was involved in probing the secrets of hermetic science, partly by actual experiments, but mainly through an extensive critical evaluation of an enormous body of hermetic writings, he also was attempting to chart a middle way between the claims of orthodox theology and the new assertions of natural religion. His theological solutions, forged in the last part of his life, were analogous to his scientific ones. Five elements characterize his approach: (1) as in his hermetical writings, he drew a sharp distinction between public and private religion, between form and spirit, and between theology and religion; (2) he interpreted the history of Christianity as one of ever-

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increasing knowledge into the essence of its true nature. Its plot was that of perfectibility; (3) he made the concept of infinity central to his explication of religious history; (4) he employed the same epistemological modesty found in his hermetic writings in order to relativize all formal theological teachings; and (5) he argued that perfectibility could best be achieved through the free and unrestricted exercise of private, individual inquiry into religion. In so doing, he completely reversed the major tenets of both Catholic and Protestant orthodox theology, denying all claims that religious truth can be known for sure; that the Christian religion was fixed and best understood at the time of its inception; that the whole New Testament was a divinely inspired work, literally true for all believers; that religious contention and dispute were signs of a falling away from the true religion; that demons, devils, and evil spirits were part of the Christian religion and were natural phenomena; and that it was necessary for the welfare of the person and the state to impose religious uniformity upon all of its citizens. Semler’s basic distinction between public theology – specific precipitations of religious belief occurring at a given time and place – and a more universal moral or spiritual private religion was clearly analogous to the differentiation between perceptible matter and matter in formation and between publicly adopted normal science and secret, private science. He used the same metaphors of life and death to characterize them. ‘Moral power, life, spirit, and effect is the beginning of the true Christian religion; one cannot hold history, memory, a dead recitation of words and teachings as the essence, as the new ability and practice of the pure Christian teachings!’23 At best, the organized church could serve as the means to help one appreciate a true inner religion. It was the shell in which private religion could grow and flourish and finally lead to a new precipitation of religious experience. Thus, Semler would argue that ‘a Christian’s salvation does not depend on the public organized religion but rather on its contents that only can be found in private religion.’24 The true Christian religion, therefore, was not fully proclaimed in the Bible; rather it is and remains the new beginning and the source for a more perfect religion for all Christians. But this perfectibility is only actu primo there, is only in the conception ... There is the same infinite, constant order in the moral world as in the physical, from beginning to distant development.

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The maxims about the unity and permanence of the sum and contents of the Christian message are totally false, totally unchristian, and totally contradictory to God’s dignity; it is as though the real rise of the Christian religion in all peoples was once and for all apparent, as though it were already a done thing or was a mass of corporeal, simply receptive, but not active, self-realizing things. The whole history of the Christian religion contradicts this false and dangerous principle.25

Since the Christian religion approximated an emerging force in nature, its manifestations were infinite, its appearances and specific contents equally infinite. The total possible contents of these new principles is therefore as infinite as their possible applications are infinite. All of the teachings that Jesus, the Apostles and the first church fathers gave to this new religion serve merely as a guide to the individual development of better moral concepts and their application that belong to every Christian ... Neither Jesus, nor the Apostles, nor other early teachers have written down all of the ideas, all of the convictions, all of the steps of possible Christian belief. They were the authors of new teachings and basic truths of a spiritual or always improving religion, which should become present, develop and continually grow in each individual Christian.26

As in his hermetic works, he held that the infinity of religion made it apparent that the formal aspect of religion was continually in flux, responding to specific conditions, individual needs, and linguistic protocols. At certain times and places specific constellations of belief would coagulate out of the evolving substance, but they remained time and space bound, mere local expressions of a larger, evolving spiritual process. Their authority was as limited as their origins. In this process, the real religious innovators were those ‘silent’ Christians who pursued the true callings of their heart without direction from the public religious institutions of the time. They offered testimonies of truth in the same way that Semler offered his hermetical writings to Baron Hirschen. For this reason, Semler would plead for the right to follow one’s own religious needs without interference from either state or church. A true toleration of all responsible parties and beliefs – including not only the three major Christian parties but also Jews, Socinians, Mennonites, Naturalists, and Free Thinkers – was the precondition for the further

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advancement of ‘true’ religious knowledge. Probably of all of the late eighteenth-century German writers who addressed the issue of toleration, Semler was the most fervent defender of the total toleration of all beliefs, without any imperatives that non-Christians somehow accommodate their practices to those prevailing at the moment – so long as they did not extend their arguments beyond the scope of their individual moral convictions – that is, attempt to institutionalize them. Unlike normal proponents for Jewish emancipation and toleration such as Christian Konrad Wilhelm von Dohm in Germany and the Abbé Gregoire in France, Semler did not accompany his plea for toleration with a plan for the designated groups’ ‘moral improvement’ or ‘regeneration,’ or for their integration into the prevailing conventions of the dominant community, resulting ultimately in the disappearance of the tolerated religious practices. Unlike Dohm or Gregoire, Semler did not see toleration as the vehicle to achieve civic unity, leading, in the end, to a slow disappearance of all ‘sects.’ Rather Semler’s belief in the necessity for religious innovation carried forth by individuals – often persecuted as heretics – affirmed the centrality of religion as an existential reality, not a mere point of doctrinal agreement. Semler’s commitment to toleration also explains his perplexing championship of Wöllner’s decree, usually seen as the beginning of the anti-Enlightenment rise of conservatism in Germany.27 It is often forgotten that, despite the decree’s generally conservative and repressive intentions, it also specifically affirmed religious toleration not only for the three major religions in Prussia but also for members of minority ones such as the Jews, Mennonites (earlier excluded from Prussia), and Socinians. For liberal theologians of the eighteenth century, whose gaze was fixed more on the bloodshed caused by religious intolerance over the past three hundred years than on the excesses of political repression, Semler’s position is not inconsistent. What makes his stance difficult for us to understand is how a seemingly modern person could join a belief in hermetic and alchemical traditions with a liberal, perhaps even radical, theological world view. In many ways Semler’s intellectual universe challenges us to reconsider the now current attempts to characterize ‘modernity.’ In the normally accepted contemporary discourse concerning modernity, its origins are located in the Enlightenment, its features defined as the predominance of instrumental reason, science, secularism, and a power/knowledge relationship built upon the image of the panopticon

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controlled by specialized experts supervising hapless victims, who had no idea of what their designations were. In this vision, modernity combined a ‘liberal’ ideology with a repressive policy that in its effects led to the increasing regulation of humans. Semler presents us with an interesting case study of the supposed relationship between the birth of modernity and the Enlightenment. If presented with his theology, most of us would probably consider it modern: the dynamization of belief and nature, the relativity of specific theological formulas, the plea for absolute toleration, and the location of true religious belief in the individual consciousness are postulates that many of us would eagerly accept. Yet how many of us would entertain the idea that under the correct conditions we could precipitate gold from air? Or that this precipitation was a necessary proof for the validity of the religious position many of us would accept as self-evident? The fact that Semler and others could entertain and defend these dual propositions and consider them intimately linked demonstrates both the complexity of Enlightenment thought and its otherness. On another level, it is this otherness that intrigues me, especially with respect to the epistemological connotations it proposes. Semler’s desire to construct a form of knowledge that mediated between the extremes of system building and simple empiricism was not unique; in fact many late Enlightenment thinkers experimented with such a mediating epistemology, turning to analogical reasoning, comparison, and paradox as ways to explicate the complexities of reality. In so doing they deployed, whether consciously or not, earlier forms of knowledge considered by many to have been superseded by ‘modern’ discursive logic. In the wake of the postmodernist critique of scientism and rationality, this aspect of late Enlightenment thought can serve as both an epistemological challenge and a proof that the Enlightenment described by late twentieth-century critics is a mere stereotype. Perhaps more important than anything else I learned from Amos Funkenstein was the recognition that what are often considered ‘absurdities’ can serve as the cornerstone for a set of theories that are neither absurd nor outlandish. Semler’s position as both insider and outsider helps make this clear. And his individual story should encourage us to look seriously at the traditional stereotypes of past ages, in this case the Enlightenment, in the hope that this act of critical evaluation will help us better to understand our condition.

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Notes 1 Johann Salomo Semler, Von ächter hermetische Arznei. An Herrn Leopold Baron Hirschen. Wider falsche Maurer und Rosenkreuzer (Leipzig, 1786). 2 Berlinische Monatsschrift (April 1786); Stettinische Zeitung (1786); Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeige (1787), 1288. W.J.G. Karstens, Physische-chemische Abhandlung, durch neuere Schriften von hermetischen Arbeiten und andere neue Untersuchungen veranlasset, 2 vols (Halle, 1786, 1787). 3 Johann Salomo Semler, Ueber ächter hermetische Arznei, zweites Stuck. Zur Vertheidigung des Luftsalzwassers wider die Anzeige in der Stettinischen Zeitung und in der Berlinischen Monatsschrift, April. Von Dr. Joh. Sal. Semler (Leipzig, 1786); Semler, Von ächter hermetischer Arznei. 4 Johann Salomo Semler, Unparteiische Sammlungen zur Historie der Rosenkreuzer, 4 vols (Leipzig, 1786–88); ‘An die Herausgeber der Berlinischen Monatschrift,’ in Berlinische Monatsschrift 9 (1787); Schreiben an Hrn Baron von Hirschen zur Vertheidigung des Luftsalzes (Leipzig, 1788); ‘Schreiben an den Baron von Hirschen, nebst historischen Bemerkungen über Cagliostro,’ in Archiv der Schwärmerey und Aufklärung, vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1788); An seine Königliche Hoheit Prinz Ferdinand von Preussen, von Johann Sal. Semler als er dreizehn Grahne Luftgold unterthänigst einschickte (Halle, 1788); ‘Erklärung über die neue chemische Untersuchung des Luftgoldes,’ in Berlinische Monatsschrift 18 (1789); ‘Schreiben an die Herrn Herausgeber der Berlinischen Monatsschrift’ in Berlinische Monatsschrift 13 (1789); ‘Goldfinderei,’ in Berlinische Monatsschrift 16 (1789). 5 Karl Aner, Die Theologie der Lessingzeit (Halle, 1929), 3–4. 6 Goethe’s negative characterization of it in The Sorrows of Young Werther reveals the threat it posed to many. In one scene of the work, Werther returns to Lotte’s village to discover that the new pastor’s wife had had the enormous walnut trees of the old pastor’s residence cut down. Playing with symbols of destruction (the tree as symbol of life) and emasculation, Goethe portrays the pastor’s wife as incapable of appreciating life and the healthy aspects of tradition because ‘she pretends to be very learned, dabbles in new interpretations of the Scriptures, shrugs off Lavater’s ecstasies, and occupies herself with the moral-critical reformation of Christianity that is currently fashionable.’ The main culprits behind this movement were, Goethe proclaimed, ‘Kennicott, Semler, and Michaelis.’ 7 Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970), 1: 40. 8 Gottfried Hornig, Johann Salomo Semler: Studien zu Leben und Werk des Hallenser Aufklärungstheologen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), 82.

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9 See the following articles: ‘The History of Science, the Enlightenment and the History of “Historical” Science in Germany,’ in Konrad Jarausch and Jörn Rüsen, eds, Geschichtswissenschaft vor 2000: Festschrift für Georg Iggers (Hagen: Margit Rottmann, 1991); ‘Between Mechanism and Hermeticism: Nature and Science in the Late Enlightenment,’ in Rudolf Vierhaus, ed., Frühe Neuzeit-Frühe Moderne? Forschungen zur Vielschichtigkeit von Uebergangsprozessen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992); ‘Die Historisierung von Natur und Mensch. Der Zusammenhang von Naturwissenschaften und Historischen Denken im Entsehungsprozess der modernen Naturwissenschaften’ in J. Rüsen, W. Küttler, and E. Schulin, eds, Geschichtsdiskurs: Anfänge modernen historischen Denkens. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994); ‘Science and the Construction of the Cultural Sciences in Late Enlightenment Germany: The Case of Wilhelm von Humboldt,’ History and Theory 33 (October 1994); ‘Anthropology, Nature and History in the Late Enlightenment: The Case of Friedrich Schiller,’ in Otto Dann, ed., Schiller als Historiker (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1995); ‘Herder’s Historical Practice and the Discourse of Late Enlightenment Science,’ in Wolf Koepke, ed., Johann Gottfried Herder: Academic Disciplines and the Pursuit of Knowledge (Columbia, SC: Cambden House, 1996). 10 Hornig, Johann Salomo Semler, 152. 11 Steven Shapin, ‘The Social Uses of Science’ in G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds, The Ferment of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 101. 12 ‘Es ist und bleibt Gottes heiligste weiseste Ordnung, daß er die moralische Menschenwelt, nicht weniger als die physische ... selbst regiert und entwickelt.’ Semler, Neue Versuch die gemeinnüzige Auslegung und Anwendung des Neuen Testaments zu befördern (Halle, 1786), 93. 13 Ibid., 18. 14 Johann Salomo Semler, Joh. Salomo Semlers Lebensbeschreibung von ihm selbst abgefaßt, 2 vols (Halle, 1782), 2: 158. 15 Semler, Von ächter hermetischer Arznei, 3: xiii: ‘Der Umkreis der ganzen Natur ist ein unumschränkter Schauplatz der Macht und Weisheit Gottes.’ 16 Ibid., 3: xxii: ‘Ich bejahe die Sache, daß die geheime Chymie ganz gewis Gold aus daseienden Samen oder Stof, ordentlicher Weise, natürliche Weise, erzeugen könne.’ 17 Ibid., 3: 243–4. ‘daß man durch diese Zerlegung die Nature des Produkts, das so bedächtig zusammengesetzt worden; die Bewegung, die ihm als Totum zukömt, zerstört ... weil man die Substanz der ihr gehörigen innern Bewegung, durch diese äußerliche, fremde Bewegung, geradehin beraubt hat.’

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18 Ibid., 3: 211: ‘Ich halte aber dafür, daß die Untersuchung der unendlichen Natur, sich auch auf die noch nicht sichtbaren Dinge, die in actu primo noch sind ganz recht erstrecken dürfe; auf die angefangene Möglichkeit, auf die embryonischen Substanzen, die sich nun blos, nach Zeit und Ort, äußerlich entwickeln ...’ 19 Ibid., 3: 213: ‘Die hermetische Chymie aber wird 1) nicht als eine Wissenschaft, die jedermann lernen möge, öffentlich gelehret; 2) sie hat es nicht zunächst mit den sichtbaren, schon körperlichen Substanzen und ihrer künstlichen Auflösung zu thun; sondern vielmehr mit näturliche, durch die Natur bewerkstelligte, durch Entwicklung und Veränderung der noch unsichtbaren Elemente. Sie hat oder sucht ein allgemein Auflösungsmittel, weil sie voraussezt, der Urstof aller körperlichen Dinge sey einer und derselbe, sie erwartet eben so eine Coagulation von der Natur.’ 20 Ibid., 3: 299. He also published a volume attacking one of these masonic orders, Briefe an einen Freund in der Schweiz über den Hirtenbrief der unbekannten Obern des Freimaurerordens alten Systems (Leipzig, 1786). 21 Ibid., 3: 250. 22 Ibid., 3: 295. 23 Semler, Zur Revision der kirchlichen Hermeneutik und Dogmatik (Halle, 1788), 88. 24 Semler, Neue Versuch, 50. 25 Ibid., 118–19. 26 Ibid., 14–15. 27 The classic account in English is given by Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

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chapter five

Science and the Musical Imagination from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period DORIT TANAY

For Amos Funkenstein, absurdity constituted the main key to understanding continuity and change in the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Funkenstein’s fascination with the notion of absurdity dominates his works on medieval as well as early modern topics.1 Fascinated by the similarities and differences between medieval and early modern modes of thought, Funkenstein compared the critical and theological use of absurdities in late medieval thought to the seventeenth-century constructive approach to various types of impossibilities. He perceived the problem as one of tracing the origin of conceptual pathways. Delineating the history and evolution of the possibility of thinking the unthinkable, Funkenstein drew a map of ideas that leads from Aristotle’s principle of reductio ad absurdum (interconnected to his tacit identification of logical and physical necessities) to the formulations of the laws of nature as counterfactual conditionals in seventeenth-century scientific thought. Unlike Foucault’s rather flat dichotomy between the old episteme of similitude and the new episteme of representation2 – the old mode of understanding natural phenomena as reflecting each other and that which is beyond them vis-à-vis the new scientific mode of determining precisely sameness or difference – Funkenstein discussed the distinct and complex history of the ideals of univocal language and homogeneity of nature. He stressed that never before the seventeenth century were they correlated and integrated. In their vicinity, Funkenstein identified the ideal of mathematization and the ideal of mechanization as ‘perhaps subordinate yet not identical’ to the former two most comprehensive ideals of rationality of the seventeenth century.3

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Such differentiations saturate Funkenstein’s map. It is a web of highly subtle nuances that derive from highly variegated yet always absolutely differentiated access roots. His markers of possible access lead eventually from the absurdities of Aristotle to the improbabilities of medieval thought. In late medieval thought, logical and physical improbabilities became possibilities de potentia Dei absoluta. Finally, in the seventeenth century impossibilities or absurdities in the terms of scholastic Aristotelians reached their end location as the limiting case of our universe. As the architect of the history of absurdities, Funkenstein focused on the transition from the old to new theories, arguing for various modes of mediation by which apparently incompatible theories could be understood, in the final analysis, as a set of continuous and unified ideas. Late medieval mathematics foreshadowed the new symbolic mathematics of the seventeenth century, Funkenstein argued, pointing at the complicated quantifications of the fourteenth-century Oxford calculatores. Not yet a purely symbolic language, but already a flexible tool for describing nature’s variability, late medieval mathematics prepared the ground for the mathematics of the scientific revolution. In the same vein, the revolutionary principle of inertia, underlying Galileo’s law, was already partially assumed by late medieval theories of impetus. Johannes Buridan, for example, like Galileo, recognized that all terrestrial motions are complex motions (produced by the interaction between the natural inclination of the body and the impetus it acquired by its natural inclination or by an external force). But, unlike Galileo, he could not mediate between the motion produced by impetus only and the motion of the same body in the plenum.4 Ockham’s theology and logic are central for Funkenstein’s thesis, which sees Ockham’s rejection of a necessary interdependence among the various beings, to save God’s infinite freedom, as an early version of Descartes’s principle of considering each thing in itself, in its pure nature, removed from all material hindrances and isolated from its natural context – namely, Descartes’s principle of annihilation. These are but a few of the medieval roots of the new seventeenth-century mode of thought. Though laden with Jewish and Christian, philosophical and scientific, sacred and secular discourses, Funkenstein’s map leaves out human creations that are sensual rather than purely intellectual – namely, the vast realm of the arts. In this essay, I explore the idea that one can interpret certain points of transition in music history through Funkenstein’s interpretive categories. The case of music, in turn, not only lends

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support to Funkenstein’s interpretation but also supplements it with additional access routes to the intellectual achievements of the seventeenth century. Following recent studies on the relation between music and science in the seventeenth century,5 I would argue that contextual studies on the evolution of musical theories and practices yield enormous benefits: they enable us to interpret rather than merely describe ontological development as well as changes in aesthetic ideals in music. When fourteenth-century theologians used hypothetical reasoning, they induced mathematical as well as musical reasoning secundum imaginationem.6 New rhythmic variant cases appeared in theoretical discourses as logical possibilities for theoretical consideration. In (the world of) music, theory generally follows practice, but in the fourteenth century, we find the most unusual case of theory developing autonomously. Music theorists conceptualized and tested hithertounheard-of rhythmic possibilities that were not to be realized in concrete musical works until later. This is a reversal of the normative course of events, in which musical works nourish theories rather than the other way round. An ever-increasing array of new rhythmic possibilities grew out of the awareness of the infinity implied in the continuum of time and the audacity to break the traditional indivisible and smallest possible rhythmic units, defined by theorists as the indivisible minima.7 Late medieval music can therefore be interpreted as reflecting, in its singular way, the age’s intoxication with varieties of hypothetical reasoning. In the first part of this essay, I explore the idea that late medieval music presents an unexpected variation of the period’s fascination with imaginary worlds in general, and with the world of the mathematics of the infinite and continuous in particular. It is the compulsion, to use Funkenstein’s words, to actually devise orders of nature different from the one existing8 that may account for the dynamics that made musical treatises – traditionally devoted to the explanation of the actual procedures used in concrete music – speculative and irrelevant to the music of their own time. For example, the shortest rhythmic unit, the minima, was not used in the music of the first half of the fourteenth century. Yet around 1320 theorists discussed its properties and possible relations with other rhythmic values. According to Funkenstein, however, late medieval schemes of imaginary orders had no bearing on the actual interpretation of the existing world because they were still considered as incommensurable with it.9 The case of music is different. The new theoretical rhythmic possibilities were devised for the glory of man: musicians were invited to tread

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new ground discovered first in theory and to apply the new rhythmic possibilities in their musical compositions. The musical compositions of the second half of the fourteenth century betray the fact that composers met the challenge. Funkenstein, as noted above, attributes the audacity to conduct thought experiments fruitfully, that is, as a heuristic tool pertinent to the interpretation of nature, to Galileo and Descartes. In the second part of this essay, I point to slightly earlier musical discourses that may have paved the way for the seventeenth-century mode of positing counterfactuals. Galileo’s own father, Vincenzo Galilei (1520–91), together with his colleagues in the famous Florentine Camerata, revolutionized the musical world, grounding their reformed musical practice on the impossible principle of the miraculous power of music (musica vis miraficae) through which their new act of composing music was nevertheless consummated. Furthermore, in rejecting the perfect Pythagorean harmonies and blurring the distinction between consonance and dissonance, Vincenzo Galilei redefined music in terms of a constant disturbance of stability and perfection. The transition from static harmony to dynamic harmony took place in the music and theory of Vincenzo Galilei’s generation.

Potentia dei absoluta and the Scope of Musical Imagination in the Late Middle Ages In 1323 Pope John XXII condemned ‘certain disciples of the new school, much occupying themselves with the measured division of time, [who] display their method in notes which are new to us, preferring to devise ways of their own rather than continue singing in the old manner.’10 The expansion of the rhythmic vocabulary beginning in the early fourteenth century was indeed the most significant development in music theory of the late Middle Ages. From a merely quantitative point of view, the rhythmic vocabulary increased from the two general rhythmic durations (the long versus the short) of the thirteenth century to a seemingly endless abundance of new durations represented in the music of the late fourteenth century. From a conceptual point of view, this transition represents a hitherto unnoticed shift from the representation of pre-existing and already known poetic metres, devoted to the reification of divine perfection, to a new artificial language capable of representing every rhythmic idea that the human voice is capable of performing. Referring to the transition from the old rational and con-

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trolled music to the new chaotic style of the late fourteenth century, the French composer Guido laments the lost tradition in his ironic ballade Or Voit, dated circa 1375: Now everything is uncontrolled, since I have thus to follow the new fashion which is bound to displease everyone, for it is quite the contrary to good art, which is perfect. Indeed, this is not well done. We are acting against nature undoing what was well done ... it is too self-opinionated for one to follow and portray these figurations, and derives everything where nothing is of good design: indeed, this is not well done!11

Once the system of constraints had been abandoned, composers acted ‘against nature.’ Countering the well-made rhythmic order of his predecessors, Guido and his colleagues devised rhythmic orders different from the norm and free of any reference to nature as the foundation of the new rhythmic entities. To appreciate and assess the new musical semiotics, we need first to note how the normative rhythmic order imitated nature and how the new, artificial, and chaotic music of the late fourteenth century realized – or, more precisely, accentuated – the subversive tendencies implied in the rhythmic musical thought of the early fourteenth century. Until 1300, musical time was commonly divided into uniform cycles or periods. Each such cycle was conceived as a perfect rhythmic whole, comprising three smaller rhythmic units. This fixed pulse, the perfect whole, by which musical time was measured, was identical to one of the two basic durations by which musical time was articulated. Conceived as a concrete duration, and notated by a specific note-shape, the pulse had no separate existence at that time. In light of the scholastic-Thomistic propensity for analogical relations, this pulse was termed a perfect long (longa perfecta) and viewed as the reflection of divine perfection in concrete musical works: It was a trinity (composed of three smaller units) and a unity, a discrete rhythmic whole.12 In practice, this basic unit could be replaced by either three equal parts (three breves) or by two unequal parts (a long consisting of two equal parts and an adjoining breve consisting of one rhythmic unit). Oddly enough, the replacement of the perfect long by a long plus a breve (2 + 1) was conceived in terms of a concrete division (into 2/3 + 1/ ) of the musical object represented mimetically by the figure of the 3 longa perfecta: losing one-third of its original value, the shorter longa (of two rather than three smaller units) was termed longa imperfecta.

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Since thirteenth-century musical concepts were developed within the framework of the Aristotelian mode of thought, rhythmic durations were conceived in terms of qualities rather than quantities and abstracted into the general qualitative distinction between the long and the short. The breve could be replaced by three equal smaller parts, termed semibreves, but it could not be made imperfect by its third part. In other words, at this point in music history the rhythmic hierarchy was based on three levels of duration: the long, the breve, and the semibreve. But these levels operated independently: they did not relate mathematically as parts to a larger whole, and each level was governed by its own set of rules. Three different graphic signs accounted for the distinction between a long, a breve, and a semibreve. However, each of these distinct signs actually denoted more than just one rhythmic value: the figure of the long could signify a prolongation throughout three units of time or throughout two units of time (that is, a shortened long containing only 2/3 of the perfect triple long). Likewise, the figure of the brevis could indicate two variations of short values, one containing a single unit (1/3 of the longa perfecta) the other containing 2/3 of the longa perfecta. Such semiotic behaviour well suits the scholastic understanding of rhythmic values as distinct qualities rather than quantities. We need not linger on the inherent ambiguities and anomalies of this peculiar system of representation. More germane in this context is the sacred overtone of thirteenth-century musical discourse, which presupposed the priority and superiority of triple metres or units, called perfect, as opposed to the binary values, termed imperfect.13 No less significant is the restricted nature of this rhythmic language, the archaic ontology that it presupposed, and the rhetorical style by which it was communicated. Rhythmic figures were conceived as standing for concrete musical objects that underwent a process of change, becoming shorter and imperfect. This type of rhetoric is grounded on the analogical principle of like to like, replete with anthropomorphic similitudes.14 Around 1300 this trans-European system bifurcated into two conceptually different alternatives, the French versus the Italian. Both called for exhaustive expansion towards endless abundance, and both eroded the ancient bond between language and reality. Last but not least, both reversed the order of priority, developing and broadening mainly the realm of binary values, the realm of imperfection – the hitherto forbidden zone of instability, variability, and disorder.

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French Musical Speculations Secundum imaginationem In the early fourteenth century, the new rhythmic theory of the French music theorist, mathematician, and astronomer Johannes de Muris affirmed an explicit departure from the qualitative discourse of his predecessors. While for the latter, long and short were two opposing qualities, Muris’s Notitia artis musicae (1321) presupposed the continuity and commensurability of rhythmic values. Muris demonstrated the latitude and limits of rhythmic duration with a table where the latitude of a prolonged sound is divided into four grades of perfection, and each grade is further subdivided into three parts by a ratio of 3:2:1. The new minima was given the value of one rhythmic unit. All of the larger units resulted from triple or double multiplications of the absolute and indivisible rhythmic minima, all the way up to the longissima, which had a value of eighty-one minims. Rhetorically, Muris still adhered to the analogical discourse of his predecessors: he maintained the traditional attributes of perfection for triple values and imperfection for binary values. Muris’s table not only implies the idea of commensurability of various rhythmic values but also posits a multitude of possible rhythmic combinations. Such combinations would make the texture of parts and whole more subtle. The long, the breve, and the semibreve could each be divided into either two or three equal parts. To maximize variability Muris exhausted the possibility of combining triple and duple divisions: the breve, for example, could be divided into three equal parts, each divisible into three shorter equal parts. But it could also be divided into two equal parts, each divisible into three shorter parts, or into two equal parts. In fact, Muris enlarged upon the thirteenth-century system by listing new and increasingly complicated possibilities of imperfecting perfect values, namely, by dividing them into their relative 1/3 and 2/3 components, and even by dividing them into 1/3 of 1/3 of their original length. The rhythmic long, for example, could now be imperfected not only by its immediate third part, the breve, but also by its remote part, the semibreve. Here we are reminded of Funkenstein’s observation that the use of mathematical complexities, such as proportions of proportions (e.g., 1/3 of 1/3), for the interpretation of physical motions in the mathematical discourse of the Mertonian calculators reflected a new attitude towards mathematics itself: a small but significant move away from a mathematics that dictated which perfect, simple forms or relations ought to be reified in nature, towards the new

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understanding of mathematics as a symbolic language.15 Searching for increasingly new and complicated cases of rhythmic imperfections, Muris had to introduce less simple and less beautiful mathematical proportions. However, the resulting complicated variant cases of rhythmic possibilities had no concrete musical counterparts in the musical compositions of the early fourteenth century. Muris looked beyond the musical practice of his time, thereby preconceiving rhythmic progressions that were only to appear in actual musical compositions several decades later. In other words, it was the internal coherence of the new rhythms that called for their presentation and not their actual realization. Muris conceived his list of new vocabulary as open-ended. Declaring his new rhythmic minim to be indivisible and absolute, Muris nonetheless conceded that ‘time in general can be divided into as many equal parts as one wishes.’16 Hence, he argued, his innovations represented an incomplete list of rhythmic possibilities: ‘In these nine stated conclusions there are implicit many other special ones which application will make clear to the student.’17 In the framework of fourteenth-century musical theory, derivations of logical possibilities took priority over the presentation of empirical facts. This is where I propose to situate Muris’s theory. It was the principle of God’s potentia absoluta that stimulated investigations beyond the paradigmatic principles that had governed traditional bodies of knowledge. It not only encouraged open-mindedness, but called explicitly for variations and innovations, guiding scholars away from the realm of the known to the imaginary space of logical possibilities. The issue of God’s infinity, which had induced the fabrication of possible worlds, infiltrated into the seemingly local field of rhythmic notation. The unprecedented interest in developing different rhythmic signs and the quest to represent maximum musical variability resonate in Johannes de Muris’s visionary demand that ‘Everything that is uttered singing with a normal, whole, and regular voice, the knowledgeable musician must write by appropriate notes.’18 In this condensed statement, Muris expressed the whole spirit of the fourteenth century: its fascination with the category of possibility, its concern with variability, and above all, the shift from knowing by contemplating to knowing by representing possibilities. Muris’s Notitia artis musicae of 1321, thus, exemplifies Funkenstein’s claim that, after Ockham, epistemological discussions were no longer confined to the Aristotelian ‘forms’ but rather focused on abstract notions (notitiae) representing objects in linguistic propositions. Hence, Funkenstein con-

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cluded, ‘It is clear why the attention of 14th- and 15th-century schoolmen could have shifted from philosophical questions of justification to the logico-mathematical questions of representation.’ In this context, the intoxication with rhythmic notation throughout the fourteenth century finds its home ground. Theorists and composers of the late fourteenth century refined and broadened the possibilities of dividing the rhythmic values that appeared in Muris’s table of rhythmic values, evoking a new concept of time as a continuum. Their approach to the composition of time unshackled Muris’s system of constraints, allowing free play with, and indefinite subdivisions of, any rhythmic unit, including the standard minimal rhythmic unit, which was no longer taken as the ultimate solid limit of rhythmic division. As an open-edged rhythmic value, the minim fired the imagination of composers and theorists alike. New symbolic figures were required to represent the new, more often than not, minute parts of the rhythmic minim. Composers apparently needed an indefinite number of notational symbols to represent the indefinite possible rhythmic durations. In practice, composers used their own symbolic systems, inventing new ad hoc figures and using, in addition to the traditional black notation, red notation or half-red notation to represent the new minute particles of the standard rhythmic minima. A comprehensive survey of late fourteenth-century notation is beyond the scope of this paper, and unnecessary to appreciate the crucial fact that these new note shapes were unambiguous and absolute, no longer associated with preordained patterns, and capable of representing generally whatever rhythmic progression one might wish. Unlike the older system of rhythmic notation, the new note shapes were mere symbols. They did not imply natural objects as their foundation, nor did they refer to any presumed musical objects (as had the old system of rhythmic figures) that allegedly underwent change, losing a third part and becoming imperfect. To assess the scope of the use of imagination and artificial language in the field of rhythmic notation, I now turn to the Italian style.

Via naturalis, via artis: Italian Theories of the Early Fourteenth Century When in 1412 the Paduan professor of astronomy, mathematics, and music Prosdocimo de Beldomandi called for restoring the Italian rhythmic system, it was clear that the Italians had developed their own

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musical identity by the early fourteenth century. Protesting the tendency of his contemporaries to assimilate into the French system, he argued that they were ‘neglecting their own practice and reveling in the French, thinking their own defective and the French more elegant, more perfect and more subtle, the contrary of which view I shall present in what follows.’19 By the early fourteenth century, Italian theorists had already discussed the difference between art and nature. The distinction is as old as Aristotle, yet within the context of rhythmic theories it was introduced by Italians differentiating between rhythmic combinations via naturalis and rhythmic variations via artis. The leading theorist of the early trecento, Marchettus of Padua, expounded on the two musical ‘paths’ in his canonic treatise Pomerium, dated 1318.20 For Marchettus, rhythmic combinations via naturalis constituted the traditional and conventional patterns, limited in number and adapted from French music in the thirteenth century. In these patterns, the short always preceded the long, perhaps in imitation of the natural process of growth. In other words, via naturalis referred to the well-known list of pre-existing poetic metres, and was thus used as a prompt to the performer to indicate which of these patterns to perform. Via artis is man’s musical creative ‘orchard (Pomerium) of fruits and flowers’ – to use Marchettus’s own figure of speech – that is, the new rhythmic combinations invented by the Italian composers of the early fourteenth century.21 For Marchettus, rhythmic invention via artis, mediated through rhetorical theories, became analogous to the creation of artful and artificial constructs by rhetorical manipulations, such as the use of images, tropes, and so on. Although art imitates nature, so argued Marchettus, inasmuch as it is grounded in nature, natural things may be combined in art in a way that they are not found in nature. Hence, a goat (hircus) and a deer (cervus) are both natural, but art can combine them to create a goat-deer (hircoservus). Such things, which are not extracted from nature but made by art, are nevertheless taken from nature.22 In other words, Marchettus accepted the limitations set upon art as a mimetic expression but tacitly acknowledged a certain degree of autonomy that art could explore. For him the combination of two different natural things is artful rather than monstrous. To the extent that it distinguished between a rhythmic order understood as natural and a non-natural order devised secundum imaginationem, it attributed (on a much smaller scale, of course) to man’s creativity gifts that can be construed as analogous to God’s power to act both ways: de potentia ordinata or de potentia absoluta.

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Rhetorical inventions set the model for the musical via artis. Elaborating on this analogy, Marchettus acknowledged the power of musicians to change and diversify the properties of the musical notes and indicate that they have properties beyond their nature. Like rhetoricians, musicians23 too can superimpose two different natures of two different notes and create something new, grounded in nature yet not existing therein.24 The present discussion does not require a precise catalogue of Marchettus’s via artis rhythmic variations.25 Suffice it to note that Marchettus, somewhat like the rhetoricians, assumed a figurative register wherein notes, like words, transcend their natural foundation and modulate the sense in which natural things are presumed to inhabit nature. Marchettus’s distinction between via naturalis and via artis would have fascinated Amos Funkenstein, who was so interested in the analogous and contemporaneous theological distinction between potentia Dei ordinata and potentia Dei absoluta. For Funkenstein, the scholastic, theological distinction, though irrelevant to the interpretation of nature, prepared the ground for the seventeenth-century constructive rather than merely speculative mediation between the natural and the imaginary. Seventeenth-century scientists used imaginary states constructively in their formulations of some basic principles of nature as counterfactual conditionals, such as the principle of inertia. The case of music underscores Funkenstein’s point that, during the fourteenth century, man had recognized not only God’s power to create possible worlds but also his own power to invent new worlds. This brings us back to the rhythmic theory of the trecento, via artis, as a mechanism of displacement, mutation, and transformation that called for ad hoc and non-mimetic graphic signs to represent the new rhythmic values and their new combinations. Via artis was a legitimate path for novelties, emancipating composers from dependence on preconceived music, and therefore declaring man’s ability to imitate God himself. Where did Marchettus’s idea come from? He may have extracted the notion of two expressive paths – the via naturalis and the via artis – from rhetoric in general and the ars dictandi in particular. A product of early twelfth-century Bologna, the ars dictandi was standardized and developed into a comprehensive theory of dictamen in the Summa dictaminis of Guido Faba, dated around 1230.26 To the problem of rhythm in linguistic expressions and to the choice of word order (the via naturalis or artificialis in writing), Faba dedicated four sections on divisiones (punc-

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tuation). According to Faba, word order follows via naturalis if ordered as subject-verb-object. Via artis allows for artificial and more beautiful (quando partes pulcrius disponuntur) word order, such as the separation of the adjective from its noun, variations in the place of the verb, and the placement of a relative pronoun before its antecedent. Via artis is rhetorically more original, demanding grammatical virtuosity and resulting in unexpected and especially elegant style. This was, in essence, the Aristotelian categorical distinction between the natural and the artificial that had already been challenged in the late Middle Ages in both fields: rhetoric and music. The rhetorical art of re-presenting pre-existing materials, of reordering the various parts, and of amplifying and ornamenting simple expression can be seen, at least to a certain extent, as closely associated to the musical art of inventing or reordering rhythmic units. Both offered a niche for exercising one’s virtuosity, and hence originality and individuality. Following Funkenstein’s line of thought, we must ask, to what extent did early modern theories of music resemble the late medieval conceptual models? In what sense can music historians talk about continuity or mediation between old and new theories? To read early modern musical novelties as already implied in their late medieval counterparts is to take a historiographical position utterly foreign to musicology. The sound and syntax of late Renaissance and early baroque music are so different from those of late medieval music that a comparison may prove futile. Yet when one takes into account that Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, was one of the most influential spokesmen for the new artificial instrumental music and its artificial system of tuning, as well as for the creation of the opera as the impossible revival of Greek music, then questions of influences, anticipations, continuity, and changes may abound – with consequences.

Composing the Uncomposable: The New Music of Vincenzo Galilei Consensus holds that late sixteenth-century music theory, and especially the musical experiments of Vincenzo Galilei, had an impact on the new science. Historians of science have already recognized the contribution of Galilei’s musical experiments to the early modern disenchantment of the universe.27 As is well known, Galilei severed the umbilical links between musical intervals and celestial harmony. Refuting the Pythagorean bond between simple and perfect mathematical propor-

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tions and the musical harmonies, he dissociated the ancient monochord from its metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical associations. Why believe in the Pythagorean perfect ratio of 2:1 as the natural, magical cause of the harmonious octave if the same octave could be variously produced by other less simple and less perfect proportions, depending on such contingent physical circumstances as the ever-changing qualities of the materials capable of producing octaves: weights in quadruple proportions or pipes in octuple proportions?28 Having proved that the Pythagorean numbers do not determine consonances, Galilei undermined the ancient and medieval association of the inaudible harmonies of the spheres with both the corresponding vibrations of the human soul and man’s audible music. Galilei not only silenced the music of the spheres, he also displayed a counter-intuitive attitude towards the conditions of truth in the field of music theory. His criticism of the ruling Pythagoreanism showed that the greater the deviation from the pure and simple Pythagorean proportions the more concordant the instrumental ensemble. Insisting on the paradox that inequality produces equality and equality produces inequality, Galilei demonstrated that an ensemble of heterogeneous instruments would sound harmonious and would be able to play uni voce only if tuned unequally, such that each instrument used a different system of tuning. If tuned equally according to the same mathematical principle, the ensemble would produce false notes and discordant harmonies. Galilei elaborated on these disturbing themes in his short and quite neglected Discorso particolare intorno all’unisono, circa 1590.29 Below, I explore the possibility that Galilei’s tacit references to the gap between intuitive knowledge and the condition of truth may have inspired his son Galileo to accept counter-intuitive propositions and conduct thought experiments.30 Vincenzo Galilei begins his discourse on the unison by noting that: Some believe it is possible to tune the strings of a keyboard instrument to those of a lute, but they find it hard to believe that when the keyboard is tuned so that the major third reaches the size it is accustomed to have in the temperament of the lute, these thirds can appear so sharp to the sense that they are little less than intolerable. Their sharpness does not manifest itself so plainly in the lute, where the thirds are somewhat sharper than their true sesquiquartal (5:4) ratio. The difficulty arises from the difference that exists between a true and a false unison, or between a true one and one that is close to true. What this difference is I shall show presently.31

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These introductory remarks must have been very confusing for Galilei’s contemporaries: How can the unity turn paradoxically into a plurality if the major third of the keyboard will sound little less than intolerable if tuned to reach the exact size it has on the lute? Moreover, on what grounds should one accept Galilei’s counter-intuitive claim that if a keyboard instrument is not tuned like the lute, then the lute and the keyboard instrument will approach unisonant equality? In view of this confusing condition, Galilei defined unisonant equality as follows: By unisons a musician means those pitches that issue from two strings made of the same material, length, thickness, and goodness, when they are stretched over a plane surface, tuned to the same pitch, and are then struck. Every time one or more of these conditions is missing, they will come short of or close to this unison, proportionately that much more or less ... Therefore a unison is the sound of those strings between which the sense knows no difference of any kind either of quantity or quality.32

Before proceeding any farther, it is important to note that the problem of the unison had never before been considered in the history of music theory. The conventional view was that the unison is an unquestionable musical fact, analogous to the number one in medieval arithmetic and, like it, not an interval but the root of all intervals. However, a close look at Galilei’s argument raises the possibility that he perceived the unison not as a matter of fact but rather as the ideal condition, unobtainable in everyday music making. Reinforcing his claim and risking superfluous repetition, he restated the issue, but this time he drew an analogy between the mathematical problem of squaring the circle and the musical problem of producing a perfect and pure unison: [Those who believe it is possible to tune in unison] ask me again whether I can stretch two strings to be in unison. I answer no, not without the conditions mentioned above. They reply that, given any two strings stretched to a particular tension, I can raise or lower the pitch of one more or less than the other. I answer yes, and they reply that since I can raise or lower one more than the other as I wish, I can make them equal and unisonant. In this case I reply as Aristotle did to those who denied the squaring of the circle, for they responded just as do the people I am talking about. Aristotle says, then, that since you can find a circle greater than a [particular] square and another smaller than that square, you can subsequently find

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one that is precisely the size of the [required] square. I do not deny that this can happen, but I say as well that this circle equal to a square has been sought by the greatest intellects this world has known as long as the world has existed, yet it has not been found, so far as I know.33

The very notion of harmonic perfection underwent a crucial change here. If, as Galilei thought, unisonant harmonic equality is an unreachable ideal, the whole theory of musical harmony must be grounded on an utterly new philosophical premise: a basic state of imperfection, irregularity, and instability. To be sure, Galilei’s theory is anchored to the empirical and the sensual: using concrete experiments with various musical strings, he put the differently formed unisons to the test of the human ear. Yet his paradoxes delineate a possible venue for the revelation of a new notion of truth – allowing for counter-intuitive statements to be not only a legitimate component of the musical discourse but also a guide to a mysterious but nonetheless profound truth – namely, that difference engenders greater accordance and harmony than plain identity: ‘Moreover, every time a keyboard instrument is tempered punctiliously according to the division of the lute, and they are played together, they will agree less than when each is played in its own ordinary temperament.’34 To conclude his short Discorso particolare intorno all’unisono, Galilei constructed an experiment that involved several paradoxes. The experiment was nothing but a polyphonic piece that he composed to be sung and played in order to (1) refute the prevailing view that human voices always sound better than musical instruments in performing any music, (2) make room for the invisible and unreal, and, finally, (3) consolidate further his paradoxical claim that the irrational proportions of the Aristoxenian tuning create wonderful harmonies and reduce pitch differences to sameness. Galilei’s contemporaries regarded his experimental polyphonic piece as a musical absurdity – a musical grotesque. Let me explain the problem by drawing an analogy between Galilei’s audible grotesque and the contemporaneous visual grotesque of Arcimboldo.35 Like Arcimboldo’s astonishing portraits, Galilei’s musical piece pushes to the limit the rhetorical principle of expressing the same thing through different forms. Violating the standing harmonic grammar, Galilei, like Arcimboldo, represented objects that disguised themselves: Arcimboldo used vegetables or animals to form a nose, to recall one famous example; Galilei used musical notes that did not belong naturally to the given

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tonal space of his composition to articulate and round off the given tonal space. His tonal or harmonic landscapes, then, were composed of unnatural and autonomous pitch contents. This called for a new type of understanding, one that transcended that which is actually seen or heard. Galilei’s little piece, much like Arcimboldo’s grotesque paintings, problematizes the relation between appearance and reality, turning ‘appearance’ into its own epistemological unreliability. By featuring so many chromatic clashes and making no musical sense as notated, Galilei’s experimental piece actually displayed the new artificial notation of the artificial instrumental music. All the apparent harmonic absurdities disappear and turn into an illusion through the metamorphic enharmonic exchange engendered by the Aristoxenian system of tuning that Galilei recommended so strongly in his Discorso.36 In other words, corrective enharmonic equivalents eradicate and replace all the ridiculous and bad harmonies. Hence, in order to become musically logical and to arouse delight, musicians had to abandon the ancient Pythagorean tuning and its mimetic mathematical proportions in favour of the Aristoxenian irrational proportions. Galilei’s polyphonic song was an experiment that conveyed profound knowledge in its very performance, a performance that proved the new theory. In discussing the song, Galilei did not use the term ‘experiment,’ but his rhetoric suggests that he inserted the musical example into his Discorso in order to conduct a kind of test or experiment: ‘Now let these same singers sing the present song and let us have it played on an instrument tempered according to the said usage [of Aristoxenus]. They will reply after hearing it sung and played that it satisfies them more played than sung. And they will speak correctly for reasons I will give now.’37 Here another theme of Funkenstein’s thesis comes to the fore: the convergence of human and divine knowledge in the seventeenth century and the birth of the new ideal of ‘knowing by doing’ or by construction.38 Constructing an experiment to be performed according to the Aristoxenian tuning, Galilei demonstrated that what appears visually to be musical nonsense turns harmonious and beautiful if played on an instrument ‘according to the imperfect usage in which this song is imperfectly composed ...’39 In addition, Galilei placed unprecedented weight on audible imperfections. According to his teaching, dissonances should proliferate and dominate the musical scene to maximize its expressive quality, destabilize its flow, and theatricalize the passion described in the texts that are conveyed through the music.40 In subverting the ancient

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distinction between the venerated consonances and the forbidden dissonances, Galilei can be described as an iconoclast. The categorical distinction between stable and beautiful consonances and unstable, harsh, and disturbing dissonances dictated for generations the notion of musical harmony and its syntactical correctness.41 Indeed, the entire history of Western music can be told as a chronicle of the gradual and extremely cautious broadening of the class of dissonances allowed under restricted conditions in polyphonic musical compositions. Galilei inherited from his predecessors a theory of harmony that admitted the contribution of dissonances to the expressive quality of the music, yet locked the dissonances within the Renaissance Ciceronian matrix of decoro, limiting and balancing its inseparable corollary of variazione.42 Accordingly, the desired pan-consonant musical texture could be variegated by dissonance applied under a set of spatial and temporal restrictions: dissonances could be used as unaccented beat to dim their effect, and as relatively short notes. As a rule, dissonances were eclipsed by a consonance: they had to be prepared by a preceding consonance, and resolved immediately to a consonance, and not to any consonance but to the nearest one in the same voice, and in a certain direction or downward only or upward only, depending on the specific musical condition. This is to say that each possible deployment of a harmonic dissonance called for its special regulative rule. Galilei, however, wanted to remove all the restrictions that controlled the use of dissonances, to dispose of all such special cases and formulate a general theory of dissonance. He did not announce the complete autonomy of the dissonance but rather changed completely the structure of the musical space, rejecting the traditional distinction between possible and impossible locations for dissonances within the musical texture. Allowing, for example, the two dissonant intervals, the second and the seventh, to appear on an accented beat and to be approached by a skip even in the relatively airy texture of two-part writing, Galilei upset the traditional rules. He did so even more courageously when he allowed three dissonances to sound simultaneously, one on top of the other.43 Galilei displayed his ‘clusters’ of dissonances, hitherto unthinkable, in a table that indicated all the possible permutations of two and three simultaneous dissonances. To prove the applicability of his new ideas, he added a musical example that proved his eccentric theory.44 Whether related or not to late medieval endeavours to enlarge the scope of legitimate rhythmic imperfections, Galilei’s approach to the dissonances can be construed as a major step towards

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the rejection of the old ontological distinction between consonance and dissonance. If so, one can argue that Galilei replaced the old distinction between stable consonance and unstable dissonance with a new distinction between the controlled dissonances of the old school (prima pratica) and the free dissonances of the new school (seconda pratica). In light of the seventeenth-century emancipatory replacement of the old Aristotelian distinction between rest and motion with the new distinction between uniform motion and accelerated motion, Galilei’s new understanding of musical harmonies is all the more interesting. To return to Galilei’s audacity in thinking the unthinkable, his various pathways towards the problematic zone of the dissonance were a means to his far more profound trespass into the realm of Orphic wisdom – of divine-like power. Being a member of the Florentine Camerata, Galilei was exposed to the stormy humanistic debates over the nature of ancient music and the methods of imitating its practice. Influenced by the discussions of the Camerata, Galilei became convinced that there was an enormous gap between the miraculous expressive power that humanists attributed to Greek music and the emotionally powerless polyphonic practice of his own time. As is well known, Galilei devoted his famous Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna (1581) to the revival of the legendary effects of ancient music, which were lauded by Plato and recounted in many myths and Greek stories. Galilei accepted the Greeks’ claim that music possesses vis miraficae. Among many other things it can calm the furious, give peace to troubled spirits, make depressed spirits happy, and even cure snake bites. Although Galilei had no direct knowledge of the musical procedures of ancient music, nor a direct original musical model to follow, he nonetheless maintained Of this ancient manner we shall speak a little further on, and we shall throw upon it the greatest light possible with the sole object of inciting great and virtuous minds to labor in so noble a science and to see to bringing it back to its first and happy state. This I do not consider impossible, knowing that it was not revealed by the stars to those who first discovered it and brought it to the highest of perfection. The ancient music, I say, was lost, along with all the liberal arts and sciences, and its light has so dimmed that many considered its wonderful excellence a dream and a fable.45

Surely it was a fable. Galilei, however, took it for real. He placed the inaudible and impossible musica vis miraficae at the centre of his agenda

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for a reformed music. To contextualize Galilei’s theory, let us recall that, several decades earlier, Copernicus had supposed the sun to be the centre of all planetary motions, without new empirical evidence. Vincenzo Galilei’s son, Galileo, a Copernican long before he made his telescopic observations, accepted the motion of the earth, although he did not have a satisfactory physical theory that would justify his conviction. Whatever differences there may be between Galilei’s supposition of the impossible musica vis miraficae and Copernicus’s or Galileo’s assumption of the unobservable motion of the earth, these three scholars shared the courage to be counter-intuitive and to accept a theory that lacked a strict demonstration. In the new music and in the new astronomy, instead of focusing on explanation of the observable or the audible, it was now necessary to make the unreal understood by the known and the real. Galilei, then, divorced reality from credibility. The structural homology between Galilei’s reformed music and the Copernican shift goes yet deeper. Similar anxieties generated the Copernican shift and opera, its mirror. Copernicus complained about the prevalent Ptolemaic system, which featured an immense variety of epicycles and a complicated mixture of parallel and non-parallel relations between the position of the sun and the position of the planets on their epicycles. Comparing the diffused Ptolemaic universe to a ‘monstrous’ work of art, Copernicus said, ‘As though an artist were to take hands, feet, a head, and ... other members of his image, from diverse models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body and since the parts do not match each other, the result would be monster, rather than man.’46 Monstrous musical texture emotionally powerless to the ‘naked ear’ drove Galilei to attack the confused polyphony of his age, in which each voice conveyed a different passion: I say accordingly that the nature of the low sound is one thing, that of the high sound another, and that of the intermediate sound different from either of these. I say likewise that fast movement has one property, slow movement another, and that intermediate movement is far from either. Now, if these two principles are true, and they most certainly are, it may easily be gathered from them, since truth is a unity, that singing in consonance in the manner that the modern practical musicians use is an absurdity ... for if we find this contrariety of passion, between the extreme sounds, of a simple consonance, how much more the extended composite consonances will have by reason of the greater distance between their extremes,

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and how much more than these the consonances that are several times extended and composite, which because of their greater distance from their origin are less pure, less perceptible to the ear and less comprehensible to the intellect. Nonetheless, the modern practical musicians go industriously seeking them out on the artificial and natural instruments.47

To advance his case, Copernicus invoked a bit of little-known Greek wisdom – Aristarchus’s astronomical arrangement (mentioned in an early manuscript and omitted in the printed edition of De revolutionibus), which, in the operatic mirror, corresponds graphically to the lost Greek musical wisdom: For all the height of excellence of the practical music of the moderns, there is not heard or seen today the slightest sign of its accomplishing what ancient music accomplished, nor do we read that it accomplished it fifty or a hundred years ago when it was not so common and familiar to men. Thus neither its novelty nor its excellence has ever had the power of producing any of the virtuous, infinitely beneficial and comforting effects that ancient music produced.48

All the information that Galilei had regarding the ancient musica vis miraficae came from his correspondence with the humanist and music scholar Girolamo Mei in 1572. But Mei himself had no single piece of direct evidence on the wonderful effect of ancient music: ‘What chiefly persuaded me that the entire chorus sang one and the same air, was observing that the music of the ancients was held to be a valuable medium for moving the affections, and from noticing that our music, instead, is apt for anything else, to put it colloquially.’49 Upon observing the dissatisfying quality of the prevailing polyphony, Mei argued that Greek music must have been the opposite: monophony rather than polyphony. Invoking the corrective monophony of the Greeks, Girolamo Mei, like Copernicus, conducted a thought experiment. For Mei and Vincenzo Galilei, as for Copernicus, the unreal (the miraculous power of Greek music) becomes accountable by means of the real or the audible – the polyphonic music of the sixteenth century. Invoking the unobservable motion of the earth, Copernicus expressed an overriding desire to restore the mythic simplicity, unity, and symmetry of the cosmos, which, on the strength of the Platonic notion of the world, reified the most perfect and simple mathematical form and relations. Invoking the lost power of Greek monophonic music, the inven-

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tors of opera, Mei and Galilei, expressed their overriding desire to restore the expressive transparency of Greek music, the ideal of the utmost simplicity of linguistic representation: At another time they will say that they are imitating the words when among the conceptions of these there are any meaning to flee or to fly: these they will declaim with the greatest rapidity and the least grace imaginable. In connection with words meaning to disappear, to swoon, to die, or actually to be extinct, they have made the parts break off so abruptly, that instead of inducing the passion corresponding to any of these, they have aroused laughter and at other times contempt in the listeners, who feel that they were being ridiculed. Then with words meaning alone, two, or together they have caused one lone part, or two, of all the parts together to sing with unheard of elegance. Others, in the singing of this particular line from one of the sestinas of Petrarch: And with the lame ox he will be pursuing Laura, have declaimed it to staggering, wavering, syncopated notes as though they had the hiccups ... Finding words denoting diversity of colors, such as dark or light hair and similar expressions, they have put black or white notes beneath them to express this sort of conception craftily and gracefully, as they say, meanwhile making the sense of hearing subject to the accidents of color and shape, the particular objects of sight and, in solid bodies, of touch ... At another time, finding the line: He descended into hell, into the lap of Pluto, they have made one part of the composition descend in such a way that the singer has sounded more like someone groaning to frighten children and terrify them than like anyone singing sense ... And coming as sometimes happens, to words meaning weep, laugh, sing, shout, shriek or to false deceits, harsh chains, hard bonds, rugged mount, unyielding rock, cruel women and the like, to say nothing of their sighs ... they have declaimed them, to color their absurd and vain designs, in manner more outlandish than those of any far-off barbarian.50

It is clear that Galilei regarded as ridiculous the sixteenth-century technique of expressing words in music through ‘word-paintings.’ In search of modes of portraying texts in sounds, composers used musical notation or musical gestures to make their music reflect the meaning of sung words. Black notes, for example, were used as a representation of words such as ‘black,’ ‘night,’ ‘shade,’ or ‘death.’ White notes expressed words such as ‘day,’ ‘light,’ ‘pale,’ ‘pure,’ and so on. This mode of representation is visible but not audible – intended for the composer or the performers who see the notation but of no value to the audience. Words

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referring to affections (weep, sorrow, pain) and words referring to motion (ascent, descent, rise) were ‘painted’ by musical gestures. Descending melodies were used to depict tears flowing from one’s eyes, and harsh harmonies made the music itself to suffer despair and agony. Since these word-painting techniques were used in many different compositions, and since one and the same technique – a descending melody, for example – was used for a large group of words (running water, descending into hell, flowing tears) they became conventional and common, concealing emotional emptiness rather than moving one’s affections. To retrieve the lost emotional power of Greek music, Galilei, following Girolamo Mei, demanded the abandonment of polyphony and the reinvention of the singing style of the Greeks – the monophonic incantation or musical recitation. The secret of musica vis miraficae was utmost simplicity and economy, so as to produce the maximum effect with the minimum means. The model was the songs of the legendary Olympus, which were said to engender great wonders even though they were limited to four notes. Less is more, so preached Galilei, indicating contemporaneous popular airs or melodies sung on many social occasions throughout the sixteenth century: ‘As for his [Olympus’s] airs not requiring more than three or four notes ... still today many of our airs do not reach or extend beyond a compass of six notes.’51 Popular airs of his time thus shared with Greek song a simplicity, naturalness, and direct expression of text and mood. Singing in the Greek style, Galilei argued, ‘has to be different from speaking only enough to distinguish it from speech.’52 Speaking through singing – recitar cantando – was the new singing style that ushered in the new genre of opera. Born around 1600, opera was the end product of continuous musical and humanistic efforts to revive the power of music as consummated in Greek dramas. Together with the other members of the Florentine Camerata, Galilei set the stage for the new sung drama. Opera brought about a radical renewal of the world of art in general and the world of music in particular. As the art of all arts, it caused a break with the long Aristotelian tradition of absolute, immutable, and autonomous categories. Early operas were based on the myth of Orpheus. In other words, they were music about the power of music, that is, about Orphic vis miraficae, but in this case, and this is crucial, it was the power of man’s singing voice, which crosses the boundary between human speech and Godlike singing.

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The key that I suggest to the birth of opera, its essence and meaning as a cultural representation, is also a central conceptual feature of the new science: the willingness to overlook material obstacles, to rise above the real and accept physical absurdities as the constitutive principle of the real. In this I challenge Gary Tomlinson’s recent claim that early baroque operas look back to the mythological dramas, providing a final homage to the whispered incantations of the Platonic enchanted universe, wherein musical speech was credible, within its well-defined mythical context.53 I also rethink Nino Pirrotta’s notion that the inventor of opera chose mythological musicians because they were aware of the need for the ‘suspension’ of disbelief in the face of the anti-rational anomaly of characters speaking in song.54 I contend, rather, that the story of Orpheus fleshed out the central theme of the new science, namely, the divorce between vision and scientific knowledge and the consequent possibility of thinking the unthinkable and invoking counterfactual conditions reached by way of thought experiments. The divorce between knowing and seeing was crucial to the new mathematical sciences of the seventeenth century. Indeed, in the archetypal story itself, seeing, or visual knowledge (Orpheus’s backward look), is contraposed with his power to conquer nature. I would venture that Orpheus’s lament on Eurydice’s death is a ‘farewell’ to our intuitive knowledge, that which is based on sense data. Orpheus’s power to conquer nature depended on his having the courage to set aside verisimilitude. Moreover, Orpheus himself is no longer the figure of Christ, nor a mythological figure, but rather a figure resembling the real, new, scientific type of the seventeenth century who sought divine wisdom and conquered nature through supersensory knowledge. Early baroque opera captured the struggle between the power of God and that of man with its singular singing style: parlar cantando. Parlar cantando was believed to reconstruct the enchanting Greek style of ‘dramatic’ singing. If so, in this new idiom of ‘speaking through singing’ it is the human voice that is relocated, that crosses the boundaries between human speech and divine singing. Recitative as trespass reflects the opposition between God and man as being neither absolute nor immutable. It can be set in motion, and potentially, later on in history, even reversed. Parlar cantando is just that: speech mobilized towards, but not yet become, melody. Baroque operas in general concern the confrontation between autonomy and mercy, to use Ivan Nagel’s insightful expression.55 At opera’s

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very core, two dominant powers struggle for supremacy: the power of that which is above rule, the unruled, or the menace of the incomprehensible, as against the power of entreaty. Opera, therefore, is about power relationships. It is generally assumed that the power of the unruled is that of the absolute monarch, for the glory of whom the opera was originally presented. As I have suggested, opera may represent yet another level of reflection: a reflection within a reflection, as it were. Orpheus, the apparent representative of the dependent, lamenting subject, reflects the new scientist or new artist of the seventeenth century. Armed with his new supersensory knowledge, he challenges the omnipotence of God. It is significant that Monteverdi did not posit these two powers, menace and mercy, in separate fields, that is, not in any social-cultural construction vis-à-vis a theological setting, but deep inside the human soul itself. In his introduction to his eighth book of madrigals (1638), Monteverdi claims that wrath (ira) and entreaty (supplicatio) are the two dominant emotions of the human soul. The new recitative style, as a musical trespass, encapsulates opera’s very essence: the confrontation between ira and supplicatio. According to Ivan Nagel, the wrathful one will hear the prayer of the supplicant only when that supplicant is singing.56 But what does this really mean? What is the relationship between mercy and supernatural power? It is typical of early baroque opera not only to tell the story of Orpheus but also to leave undecided whether God, who breaks his own rule and lets Orpheus enter the realm of divine wisdom, thereby becomes stronger or weaker.57 Does divine mercy prove or disprove omnipotence? In a more penetrating formulation, does God grant mercy out of goodness or because he has no choice? I believe that these are the essential problematic questions raised in baroque operas and disguised in man-made art form. It is precisely these kinds of problems that fuelled Amos Funkenstein’s imagination, nourishing his construction of ‘secular theology,’58 the fusion of theology and science in the seventeenth century as the emblematic summation of the seventeenth-century spirit of time, the cunning of God transformed into the cunning of reason. How rich the history of early baroque music becomes when approached through Amos Funkenstein’s interpretive categories. His seminal work inspired the development of my own arguments. In his ‘The Dialectical Preparation of Scientific Revolutions,’ Amos Funkenstein traced the history of the gradual modifications in the status of absurdities from antiquity to the seventeenth century. However, only

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on the final page does he admit that there must have been external circumstances leading to the conception and reception of the Copernican and Galilean theories. Funkenstein claims, Even a shift in esthetic ideas played a modest role. I see some correspondence between the foundation of universal harmony on elliptical orbit and the predilection for the elliptic forms in Baroque architecture. In both cases harmony is still defined as unity within multiplicity, but it ceased to be static, namely, harmony expressed in one ideal geometrical form, and became so to speak dynamic. What was previously regarded as the deviation from the ideal form, was comprehended for the first time as an integral part of the form, or form of forms, which are capable of endless transitions one into another.59

This essay is a variation on Funkenstein’s themes.

Notes 1 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 2 Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), chs 2 and 3. 3 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 29. 4 Ibid., 168–71. 5 For a recent and insightful study, see Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). For a seminal study, see Floris H. Cohen, Quantifying Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution, 1580–1650 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1984). 6 For the exhaustion of the axiomatic system in the various branches of mathematics and natural philosophy, see John E. Murdoch, ‘Mathesis in philosophiam scholasticam introducta: The Rise and Development of the Application of Mathematics in Fourteenth Century Philosophy and Theology,’ Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge (Montreal: Institut d’études mediévales, 1969), 215–54, and ‘The Development of a Critical Temper: New Approaches and Modes of Analysis in Fourteenth Century Philosophy, Science and Theology,’ Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1978): 51–79. 7 See Johannes de Muris, Notitia artis musicae, ed. U. Michels, vol. 17, Corpus

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10 11 12

13

14

15 16 17

18 19

20 21

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Scriptorum de Musica, American Institute of Musicology (NeuhausenStuttgart: Haenssler-Verlag, 1982). Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 171–9. According to Edith Sylla, such exhaustions were not always irrelevant with respect to concrete physical explanations; see E. Sylla, ‘The Oxford Calculators and Mathematical Physics: John Dumbleton’s Summa Logicae et Philosophiae Naturalis, Parts II and III,’ in S. Unguru, ed., Physics Cosmology and Astronomy, 1300–1700: Tension and Accommodation (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 129–61. See E. Fubini, The History of Music Aesthetics, trans. M. Hatwell (London: Macmillan, 1990), 98–9. For a comprehensive study of this text see, U. Günther, ‘Das Ende der Ars nova,’ Die Musikforschung 16 (1963): 105–21. For the paradigmatic source of thirteenth-century rhythmic notation, see Franco of Cologne, Ars cantus mensurabilis, ed. G. Reaney and A. Gilles, vol. 18, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica, American Institute of Musicology (Neuhausen-Stuttgart: Haenssler-Verlag, 1974). Here the theological and the Pythagorean converged in the notion that binary or even numbers were ill-famed, carrying the association of disorder and boundlessness. For an analysis of medieval rhythmic notation in light of scholastic philosophy, see D. Tanay, Noting Music, Marking Culture: The Intellectual Context of Rhythmic Notation ca. 1250–1400, vol. 46, Musicological Studies and Documents, American Institute of Musicology (Holzgerlingen, 1999), 48–63. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 312–13. ‘Tempus potest dividi in quotlibet partes aequales.’ Johannes de Muris, Notitia artis musicae, 87. ‘Sub sistis novem conclusionibus declaratis multae latent conclusiones aliae speciales, quae per exercitum erunt studentibus manifestae.’ Ibid., 106. ‘Omne quod a voce recta, integra et regulari cantando profertur, debet sapiens musicus per notulas debitas figurare.’ Ibid., 94. Prosdocimo de Beldomandi, Tractatus practice de musica mensurabili ad modum italicorum, ed. C. Sartory (Florence, 1938), 35. English translation by J. Huff, A Treatise on the Practice of Mensural Music in the Italian Manner, vol. 29, Musicological Studies and Documents, American Institute of Musicology (Rome, 1972), 11. Marchettus de Padua, Pomerium, ed. G. Vecchi, vol. 6, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica (Rome, 1961). ‘Libellum quoque hunc decrevi POMERIUM nuncupari, eo quod florum et

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23

24

25

26

27

28 29

Dorit Tanay fructuum velut immensitatis cultu plantario emissiones poterunt invenire cantores.’ Marchettus de Padua, Pomerium, 37. ‘Si dicatur: Ars imitatur naturam in quantum potest; dicimus quod verum est, ratione fundamenti. Et tamen naturalia ita componuntur ad invicem in arte, quod non sic reperiuntur in natura; nam hircum et cervum, quae sunt naturalia, ars ad invicem componit, faciendo hircocervum; et tamen talia non sunt simul in rerum natura quae ars habuit simul pro suo fundamento. Unde, licet tale quid non sit a natura, sed ab arte, ars tamen a rebus naturalibus ipsa accepit.’ Marchettus de Padua, Pomerium, 104. In Latin, musicus, referring here to the composer rather than the musical theorist who abstracts the mathematical foundation and understands the reason of music, yet does not produce music. ‘Dicimus ergo quod musicus potest diversificare et conditiones apponere ipsis quae innuant ipsas habere proprietates ultra suam naturam; et hoc facit diversas naturas notarum ad invicem diversimode componendo. Unde licet hoc faciat per artem, a naturalibus tamen (puta a partibus temporis et ab ipsis notis componendo eas a diversis partibus temporis) accipit fundamentum, quod est aliquid addere per talem compositionem supra naturam talium notarum, et non contra naturam ipsarum.’ Marchettus de Padua, Pomerium, 105. In the first rhythmic level: binaria, ternatia; in the second rhythmic level: quartenatia, senaria imperfecta, senaria perfecta, novenaria; in the third rhythmic level: octenaria, duodenaria. My discussion on the ars dictandi is based on Charles. B. Faulhaber, ‘The Summa dictaminis of Guido Faba,’ in James J. Murphy, ed., Medieval Eloquence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 85–112. Studies on the musical path to the Scientific Revolution emphasized above all Vincenzo’s contribution to Galileo’s empirical rationality. Special attention was given to the intriguing relation between Galileo’s investigation of the phenomenon of the pendulum and the close association of pendulum effect with the phenomenon of vibrating strings. See Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 15–17; and Drake, ‘Renaissance Music and Experimental Science,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1970): 497–8. See also Claude V. Palisca, Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (Oxford, 1994), 200–35. Palisca, Studies in the History of Italian Music, 228. Vincenzo Galilei, Discorso particolare intorno all’unisono, in Claude V. Palisca, ed., The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, 197–207.

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30 The debate among scholars regarding the role and type of experiments underlying Galileo’s physics has no bearing on the following discussion. 31 Galilei, Discorso particolare intorno all’unisono, 199. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 203. 34 Ibid. 35 My discussion is based on Giancarlo Maiorino, The Portrait of Eccentricity: Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). It is not my intention here to give a comprehensive account of Arcimboldo’s mannerism. I refer to works to illustrate and make clearer to non-musicians Galilei’s musical example. 36 Aristoxenus divides the octave into twelve equal semitones. Since the ratio of the octave is 2:1, the ratio of frequencies between any two consecutive semitones is the twelfth root of two. Contrary to the Pythagoreans, who believed that the consonances were characterized by the first few integers, Aristoxenus called for the ugly and hitherto forbidden irrational numbers. 37 Galilei, Discorso particolare intorno all’unisono, 207. 38 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 12. 39 Galilei, Discorso particolare intorno all’unisono, 207. 40 For a survey of Galilei’s theory of dissonance, see Palisca, Studies in the History of Italian Music, 30–53. 41 Rooted in and transmitted through commentaries on Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius’s De institutione musica, trans. Calvin M. Bower as Fundamentals of Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), the categorical distinction between consonance and dissonance was never questioned in theory before Galilei’s subversive reinterpretation or in practice before the avant-garde composers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, who practised the so-called seconda pratica. 42 For Ciceronianism in Renaissance musical theory and practice, see Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 123–71. 43 My survey of Galilei’s theory of harmony is based on Palisca, Studies, 30–53, which is the most comprehensive analysis of Galilei’s theory of harmony. 44 Ibid., 50–2. 45 Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna (1581), in Oliver Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music History (New York: Faber and Faber, 1950), 310. 46 Nicolas Copernicus, On the Revolution, translation and commentary by Edward Rosen (Baltimore, 1978), 4. 47 Galilei, Dialogo, 307.

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55 56 57 58 59

Dorit Tanay Ibid., 306. Palisca, Florentine Camerata, 57. Galilei, Dialogo, 316–17. Palisca, Studies in the History of Italian Music, 352. Ibid., 361. Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 9–27. Nino Pirrotta and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, trans. Karen Eales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 262–4. Ivan Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy: Reflections on Mozart’s Operas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Ibid., 3. Ibid., 3–27. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 3. Amos Funkenstein, ‘The Dialectical Preparation of Scientific Revolutions,’ in Robert S. Westman, ed., The Copernican Achievement (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 230.

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chapter six

Amos Funkenstein on the Theological Origins of Historicism SAMUEL MOYN

When I look at this age with the eye of a distant future, I find nothing so remarkable in the man of the present day as his peculiar virtue and sickness called ‘the historical sense.’ Friedrich Nietzsche

The meaning of history (as a whole) and the meaning in history (of its facts) underwent a revolution of no less significance than the revolution in the natural sciences. Again we wonder: how radical was this break, what precisely was new in this ‘New Science’? Amos Funkenstein

Introduction It is not, of course, a new suggestion to turn history on itself in order to discover the historical conditions for the possibility of the modern historical outlook. This project began in the early modern period, taking on a new direction and momentum with J.C. Gatterer’s complaint that his discipline had studiously exempted itself from the methods it pioneered.1 Few recent contributors to this ongoing endeavour, perhaps, have undertaken as interesting or fundamental a version of it as the late Amos Funkenstein. As his student Abraham P. Socher has recently observed, ‘One of Amos Funkenstein’s central historical concerns was the development of the discipline and methods of history itself.’2 Nonetheless, Funkenstein’s contribution in this realm of inquiry remains little known and ill-understood; this paper attempts a critical overview of it.

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Born in Palestine in 1937, Funkenstein died prematurely in 1995 after teaching for more than two decades, mainly at several Californian universities. Educated in postwar Germany, Funkenstein received his doctorate from the Free University of Berlin in 1964 under the guidance of such teachers as Wilhelm Berges, Reinhard Elze, Dieter Henrich, Adolf Leschnitzer, and Jacob Taubes. After the publication of his dissertation, Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung: Formen der Gegenwartsbestimmung im Geschichtsdenken des hohen Mittelalters, Funkenstein restricted himself mainly to the article form until the landmark publication of his Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton University as Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century; in Jewish history, Perceptions of Jewish History collected his major articles to complement his short volume Maimonides: Nature, History, and Messianic Beliefs.3 Funkenstein, a confirmed adherent of the German style of Geistesgeschichte, began his career with a dissertation dedicated, in part, to friendly criticism of Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History, a study of the biblical, patristic, and medieval lineage of the modern philosophy of history. And whatever the corrections he offered to Löwith and the prior German discussion of the derivation of Western historical thought, Funkenstein never left behind many of the basic assumptions of the discourse into which he initially entered.4 It is essential to understand Funkenstein’s project as germinating in a particular place at a particular time – postwar Germany. Nevertheless, contextualization may not exhaust the interest of his argument, in part because Funkenstein offered a genealogy of the contextualizing spirit itself. The predominant focus in what follows is, therefore, on the possible lessons and not on the obvious limitations of Funkenstein’s account, idealistic, disembodied, and geistesgeschichtlich though it always remained. In what follows I do not try to verify historically (much less advocate) the account Funkenstein generated; I aim only to reconstruct it and to reflect on what it might add to more familiar and ingrained ways of thinking about the historical backgrounds to history.

The Unity of Two Versions of Historicism In his dissertation Funkenstein cited as a methodological guide G.W.F. Hegel’s dictum from the ‘Introduction’ to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History that ‘in our language the term History unites the objective with the subjective side, and denotes the res gestae quite as much as

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the historia rerum gestarum; in other words, it comprehends not less what has happened, than the narration of what has happened.’5 The term ‘history’ in English, as in Hegel’s German, has two different referents. One is the ‘objective’ res gestae, the historical events themselves. The other is the ‘subjective’ historia rerum gestarum, their narrative representation. ‘This union of the two meanings,’ Hegel had gone on to note of the coincidence of two distinct acceptations in the same word, ‘has to be regarded as of a higher order than mere outward accident,’ for there ‘is an internal vital principle common to both that produces them simultaneously.’6 Out of allegiance to Hegel’s argument, Funkenstein made the processes of historical evolution of both the objective and subjective sides of modern historical consciousness central subjects of his work. Hegel’s observation, Funkenstein seems to have assumed, suggested that the ‘objective and subjective sides’ of history have to be considered and therefore chronicled together because their fates have always been linked. But Funkenstein could not follow up Hegel’s insight without in a sense reinventing it. For Hegel apparently relied for his conclusion on the strange principle that all events worthy of the name are recorded – both depend on the rise of the state – so that ‘history’ as event and ‘history’ as report are necessarily congruent. If the subjective and objective dimensions of history were to maintain the symbiotic relationship Hegel attributed to them, then Funkenstein would have to find a new explanation of their interdependence.7 Hegel’s observation about the duality of ‘history’ is repeated and brought to a higher level today in a duality at the heart of the newer word ‘historicism.’ It is useful to think of Funkenstein’s project as an attempt to show that the two contemporary meanings of ‘historicism,’ one objective and one subjective, are unified just as significantly – that is, non-coincidentally – as Hegel originally claimed for the two meanings of ‘history.’ On the objective side, that of the res gestae, Funkenstein chronicled the rise of the definition of historicism that, to avoid confusion, is in the Anglo-American world sometimes called ‘the philosophy of history.’ This version of historicism involves a thesis about how the historical process is structured and organized. It is the definition of the term given by Karl R. Popper in various treatments and, climactically, in his book-length indictment, The Poverty of Historicism.8 Popper’s notorious attack on Karl Marx and his communistic votaries targeted their peculiar notion that history follows a foreordained script or compulsive

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sequence – one given in advance and followed by actors even when they are unaware of their participation in it, thanks to what Hegel had called the ‘cunning of reason’ (List der Vernunft). But what are the origins of this conception of how the historical process is organized? Funkenstein made this question one focal point of his investigations. On the subjective side, that of the historia rerum gestarum, Funkenstein singled out for explanation the other, more canonical definition of historicism, the one that describes not the substantive organization of the historical process but rather the methodological principle of the historian’s craft. This principle holds that epochs differ fundamentally from one another and have to be understood in their own terms. Each age is ‘equally immediate to God,’ as Leopold von Ranke expressed it in a famous apothegm. This conception is sometimes thought to have a substantive component, presuming the ‘individuality’ of each historical moment or epoch. But it has a methodological thrust, for it suggests that the only understanding of a historical datum – text or event – is a contextual one, anchored in the difference and particularity of a singular time. But what are the origins of this methodological conception of how the past is to be understood by the historian?9 Funkenstein made this question a second focal point of his work. It has been observed by many writers that the rivalry between the definitions of historicism is so dangerous because they refer not merely to different but to opposite conceptions. Where the one definition fastens on the particularity of every historical moment and separates it from all the rest, the alternative definition binds each historical moment to every other so that they combine to add up to a complete master-script of time. Where the one separates every moment from the entire historical process, the other subsumes each within it. When they are so defined, it seems hard to advocate both consistently. But following Hegel, whose philosophy had perhaps gone farthest in combining both conceptions,10 Funkenstein tried to explain why these apparent opposites shared more than just their name. It is true, of course, that other scholars, pre-eminently Karl Löwith, had attempted to historicize the philosophy of history before. The central novelty of Funkenstein’s effort, I believe, is to have done so without leaving out the rise of the other kind of historicism that likewise made Hegel’s approach so powerful. The key to the relationship between the two kinds of historicism, the one objective and the other subjective, lay in the fact that they emerged together – or so, at least, Funkenstein argued. They became bitter rivals only late in the day; in their origins they were inseparable.

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Historicism as Teleology The first kind of historicism, involving the attribution of a singular ruling meaning and purpose to time, is considerably older than the other one – indeed, if Funkenstein is correct, it made the other possible. The teleological philosophy of history Funkenstein traced back to the very foundational periods of Western monotheism and, more specifically, to the Hebrew prophets. It is with this ancient material that Funkenstein began his dissertation, Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung, very early establishing to his satisfaction the fundamentals of a story to which he constantly returned. In his dissertation Funkenstein joined the general drift of this literature in tracing what Erich Auerbach called the biblical discovery of ‘the concept of the historically becoming.’11 The Hebrew Bible as a whole depends on novel conceptions of historical time insofar as the Israelites understood themselves as a youthful and novel sect. But it is – so Funkenstein argued – thanks to the later prophets of the subjugated people that the historical sense is truly born. In the admonitions and promises of Hebrew apocalyptical figures, one could find a kind of detailed temporal imagination, to be taken up into early Christianity, that made possible the very notion of history as the purposive unfolding of time towards an end state. For they claimed that the end of time itself is already appointed and in the process of coming to pass according to a carefully ordained schedule. All history is future history. ‘The fascination with historical time and its structure,’ Funkenstein wrote, counted as the ‘important contribution of the apocalyptic mentality to the Western sense of history. The apocalyptician grasped all of history as a structured, well-articulated meaningful unity. [He gave a] detailed account of the future drama of the end, down to days, hours, and precise actors, [based on] his perception of the whole of history as a dramatic struggle between the forces of good and evil.’12 In this frame of thought the ‘very powerlessness of Israel’ looked paradoxically to be proof of God’s immense power, which manifests itself by his using the biggest empires, Assyria, Babylon and Egypt, as ‘the rod of his wrath’ … to chastise Israel and to purify it. Yet these world-powers are unaware of it, of their historical mission … and attribute their success to their very own strength and their God’s. Here, perhaps, we encounter the earliest, original version of reading into the history ‘the cunning of God’ or ‘the cunning of reason,’ … [since] by following their own, blind urge for power, the nations of the world unknowingly serve a higher design.13

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Already, Funkenstein seemed to imply, Hegel is on the horizon. As Yosef Yerushalmi later expressed the same point, ‘If Herodotus was the father of history, the fathers of meaning in history were the Jews.’14 In beginning with this material in his dissertation Funkenstein appears to have taken Löwith’s Meaning in History as his point of departure. A citation to the German edition of Löwith’s book appears in the very first footnote of Funkenstein’s career of many footnotes.15 Though written in exile before Löwith had returned to the University of Heidelberg from America to take up his commanding position in the postwar German academy, The Meaning of History is, like Funkenstein’s later work, anomalous only where it appeared in print and not in the geographical and academic culture in which it originated in spirit. The comparative strength of theology in the German universities had led to a veritable obsession, from the later Wilhelmine to the postwar periods, with the relation between ‘Christianity and culture.’ The immediate post-Second World War moment saw a spate of works about the theological origins of historical reason.16 Funkenstein’s teacher, Jacob Taubes, established a trend when he published his Western Eschatology, an idiosyncratic account of the development of the philosophy of history written in a vatic style, covering similar material from the ancient Israelites to Karl Marx and suggesting the impossibility of understanding the historicity of particular events without grasping the deeper and more profound ‘possibility of history.’ In a book that matched Löwith’s in range and theme, Taubes posed a question that Funkenstein in a far more nuanced, careful, and historical mode preserved and transmitted to American readers unaware – perhaps to their benefit – that history is a problem.17 German conservatives, in these years, wrote of living in a ‘posthistorical’ epoch, and in a Cold War world they dismissed communism as the transparent but perverted secularization of a theological, chiliastic design that remained delusionally anchored in the myth of progress and redemption in history.18 Löwith’s book argued the need to retreat from the modern historical consciousness that Friedrich Nietzsche had tried and failed to master, on the grounds that ‘there has never been and never will be an immanent solution of the problem of history, for man’s historical experience is one of steady failure.’19 Funkenstein’s most important claim to originality in relation to this older German (as well as to contemporary Anglo-American) discussion is to have studied historicism as a teleology without neglecting historicism as methodology, a move essentially without precedent in Löwith, Taubes, and others. Still, Funkenstein clearly hoped to affiliate with

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(and criticize from within) the project of finding the theological origins of teleological modes of thought that Löwith had made so compelling. Consequently, Funkenstein’s dissertation, which ends with medieval historians, is chiefly devoted to their theological sources, beginning with biblical prophecy. Since Funkenstein never left this idealist historiography behind, restricting himself to criticizing it from within, his own beginnings are fundamental to understanding not only his contribution but also its potential limits. His dissertation, which focuses more than his later writings on the early parts of the evolution of Western historical consciousness, could nevertheless claim several advances on Löwith’s work. In the first place it is more detailed. Funkenstein’s early study shared the same ultimate horizon in the nineteenth-century philosophy of history. But where Löwith had simply examined the high points of the trajectory, leaping from the Bible to Augustine and his student Orosius and from there to Joachim of Fiore before an unceremonious entry into the early modern period, Funkenstein’s doctoral work dwelled at greater length and with greater discernment on the early stages of the development of the notion of reason in history, before Joachim’s transformative intervention, leaving the pursuit of the story into the early modern and modern periods for later works. But Funkenstein’s dissertation made another, substantive advance on Löwith’s work. In the preparatory section of his dissertation concerning the ‘ancient foundations’ Funkenstein claimed the major innovation of distinguishing sharply between what he called ‘apocalyptics’ and ‘eschatology.’ Löwith, Funkenstein suggested, had missed this critical difference. Where apocalyptics had insisted on the imminence of the parousia, eschatology had to suppress the apocalyptic impulse in order to postpone the end of history indefinitely into the future. The reason for this manoeuvre is that failures of predictions of the First (for the Jews) or Second Coming (for the Christians) had to be converted from a source of embarrassment into a result intended from the outset. The central argument Funkenstein made is thus that the two approaches to history were not truly continuous. Instead, eschatology had to be invented through the departure from apocalyptics, so that the ‘revolutionary’ consciousness had to become ‘evolutionary.’ The implication of this argument – one made with striking simultaneity by the philosopher Hans Blumenberg in his defence of the modern age – is that the eschatology secularized in the early modern period had itself originally been an agent of secularization: a means of accommodating religions of

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impatient expectation to a world that disappointingly refused to end. Not apocalyptics but eschatology made the maturation of Western historical reasoning possible.20 After the establishment of this point, much of the rest of Funkenstein’s dissertation is dedicated to medieval theology and historiography – chiefly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries – and the sense in which they both resumed and detailed the initial eschatological scripts left over especially from the patristic authors. It would take too long to summarize the many facets Funkenstein claimed to unveil, and it is in any case unnecessary for my purposes.21 Various writers came to see history as not only evolutionary but also gradualistic as well as progressive. The slow maturation of the world in the ‘Middle’ Ages came to be likened to the natural life of a biological person in which the present is always somewhere in between beginning and ending. The appearance of misdirection or decline in history various philosophers explained away as the mysterious workings of providence, intentional in God’s mind even when they surpassed the merely human understanding. The conclusion of central importance for this paper is that the Middle Ages had, so Funkenstein argued, a mature sense of the operations of God in the historical process – what Maimonides called, in a phrase that Funkenstein saw as a clear if distant anticipation of Hegel, ‘God’s cunning.’22 Each chapter of Funkenstein’s magnum opus, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, is devoted to the early modern secularization of a divine attribute. In his treatment of the origins of the modern historical attitude from God’s providence Funkenstein returned to finish the story he began in his dissertation on the origins of the teleological interpretation of the sweep of time. The story culminated in Vico’s conception of providence, which fully internalized (for the Gentiles at least) God’s intention to the orderly unfolding of the historical process, making it the outcome if not of man’s intention then at least of man’s creative activity. ‘Thus,’ Funkenstein concluded, ‘providence’ came to signify man’s emancipation from nature or even from God, the spontaneity of his social endeavors … With the help of this version of a List der Vernunft, Vico can reintroduce providence into history and thus resume, on a richer base, a tradition of Christian philosophy of history … seeking to establish the correspondence between the divine plan of salvation and the immanent nature of man.

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But Vico also made the figure of thought available for those who would cast historical evolution as a wholly human activity, even if it is to be fully understood only from the end of the process, when the philosopher can let fly the Owl of Minerva at dusk.23

Historicism as Methodology Funkenstein’s main achievement, however, is not to have intervened in the ‘secularization debate’ about the origins of modern teleologies out of theological scripts; it is his argument that the historical method itself has to be understood, in important part, as a historical by-product of the secularization process.24 Already Funkenstein’s dissertation, in its most important difference from Löwith, Blumenberg, and other secularization theorists, is fundamentally interested in the implications of historical scripts for understanding historical practice; it turns from the theological materials in the early part of the book to concrete examples of medieval historical writing in figures such as Rodolfus Glaber, Frutolf of Michelsberg, Hugh of Fleury, and Otto of Freising. But Funkenstein refused to restrict his sense of the linkage to the medieval period. The chapter he wrote on the secularization of God’s providence in Theology and the Scientific Imagination is a detailed portrait of the connection between the secularization of theology and the rise of the modern historical method. It may not seem surprising that the philosophy of history, even when only nascent in the form of theodicy, should have compelled some awareness that different periods are characterized by distinct mentalities. But Funkenstein made this hypothesis the source of a rich historical investigation into the origins of modern historicism. For this reason he sought the origins of methodological historicism, in the sense of distinction of different ages from one another, not only in their political actors but in their more fundamental social understandings, in the theological discovery of history in general. If his hypothesis is correct, one should expect to be able to find a nascent methodological consciousness of historical difference long before the early modern period. Funkenstein considered the dominant classical and medieval impulse to be the separation of ‘historical facts’ from ‘historical context.’ In his words, ‘for ancient or medieval authors, historical facts were, so to say, atomic entities that are immediately perceivable and understandable, and hardly in need of interpretation.’ By contrast ‘in the modern per-

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ception, no historical fact is in and of itself meaningful: only its context endows a historical fact with meaning and significance.’25 Funkenstein claimed that a proto-historicist outlook is to be discovered in a great number of domains, but he stressed law in both Christian and Jewish traditions as a particularly rich source. In legal reasoning, Funkenstein remarked of the Jewish discussion that one can ‘find clear distinctions of time and place throughout: distinctions concerning customs and their context, exact knowledge of the place and time of the messages and teachers of halakha, the estimated monetary value of coins mentioned in sources, the significance of institutions of the past.’ But the same observation applied to the Christian milieux, so that ‘the degree of historical awareness of the commentators and creators of the halakha was approximately the same as the degree of historical awareness of the interpreters of Roman law in the Middle Ages prior to the development of the mos gallicus.’26 But legal texts of the period were for Funkenstein ‘only one of the many instances of thinking about history [for] the exegetical, homiletic, and philosophical literature abounds with them.’27 Instead of concentrating most assiduously on the law, however, Funkenstein furthered his thesis at greatest length in his history of the ‘principle of accommodation’ generally and through a study of the use that the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides made of it specifically. Accommodation is the theological notion that because humans live in historical time, God’s timeless mind is ‘adjusted’ to suit their particular level of development. Because ‘the scriptures speak the language of man,’ as a rabbinic formula had it, God’s word had to be interpreted not literally but through transposition to the age to which evolution had brought humankind. This principle, though initially a legal tool, came to have widespread exegetical and philosophical use in both Jewish and Christian culture.28 More important, it suggested a proto-historicist outlook long before the historicist innovations of the early modern period. Funkenstein’s nearly obsessive repetition and elaboration of this argument led him again and again to Maimonides as an exemplar of the theological origins of historicism. His specific example is Maimonides’ theory of the ‘reasons for the commandments’ (ta’amei ha’mitzvot). For example, the Bible commands certain sacrifices, a practice that Jews ever since the destruction of the Temple have renounced. In light of this shift Maimonides is compelled to explain why the commandment to sacrifice is fitting in certain historical circumstances only – why God

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required it not as a timeless duty but rather as a temporary necessity. The cultic mentality of the biblical context demanded certain practices, Maimonides suggested, in an argument that (whether or not historically correct) documents an awareness of the relative integrity of each age and an ability to imagine historical evolution from one age to another. The main thrust of Funkenstein’s analysis is that a theological imperative led almost necessarily to the development of a nuanced sense of the difference in collective mentalities from place to place and from age to age. While God may not evolve in history, man does.29 The consequences for historical understanding were immense. Eventually, Funkenstein claimed, the principle of accommodation matured into the methodological recognition that deep historical differences obtain between periods, with profound implications for how they are to be interpreted. This ‘revolution’ occurred in the early modern period. As Funkenstein wrote, Again it was Vico who first gave systematic expression to most facets of [the] methodological revolution. A new concept of historical periods as dynamical contexts emerges from his writings: it consists of the demand and of the serious attempt to determine historical periods from within, through some internal, integrating principle ...30

Thus, historicism as a methodological assumption reached maturity in the thought of the same figure who likewise appeared to complete the secularization of historicism as a substantive teleology. In an essay published in a collection he dedicated to Funkenstein’s memory, Carlo Ginzburg endorsed the essence of Funkenstein’s account. ‘The kernel of the current historiographical paradigm,’ he concluded, ‘is a secularized version of the model of accommodation.’31 As Funkenstein contended, methodological historicism developed for centuries in a theological matrix. During this time it figured as an adjunct of the other, substantive kind of historicism. Funkenstein’s main contribution to the origins of the modern historical outlook is thus an argument regarding what one could term ‘the theological origins of historicism.’ In a recent publication Allan Megill has plausibly stressed ‘the extent to which the crisis of historicism had its roots in theology and religion, not in historiography or philosophy.’ The implication of Funkenstein’s study is that it is, ironically, not only the crisis of historicism but historicism itself that had roots in theology and religion, rather than in historiography or philosophy.32

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Early Modern Secularization Were Funkenstein’s argument about the original interdependence of the two historicisms to become plausible, it would necessarily force a renewed appreciation of the significance of early modern historical thought. Befitting his professional specialty as a medievalist, Funkenstein argued that both the objective and subjective senses of history that appeared in Hegel’s thought had their origins very deep in Western history and came to fruition in the medieval period: the main significance of the early modern era, according to his grand theory, is that the two were secularized together, paving the way for Vico, Kant, and Hegel. Funkenstein did not ‘leap’ from medieval Jewish and Christian sources to early modern historicism. Instead, a chapter of his Theology and the Scientific Imagination is expressly dedicated to charting the path across this divide. On the objective side Funkenstein concentrated on the perception that the view of society and history as self-regulating – a view offered by a whole host of early modern thinkers, including Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and Giambattista Vico, to say nothing of the later German idealists such as Immanuel Kant and Hegel himself – looked to be a secularized medieval theodicy. They retained the religious notion of history as an unfolding of God’s plan, but they replaced God with reason: The objectives of reason are realized obliquely. Without being an instrument, the historical agent acts as one by following [God’s] will. Only to the subjective consciousness do subjective freedom and objective necessity appear to be in conflict. In the Zeitgeist of each phase they coincide; the growing insight into their coincidence constitutes the progress in the objective consciousness of freedom. This very mediation of freedom and necessity is ‘the cunning of reason.’33

Like Löwith, Funkenstein went on to contend that the view of history as possessing an immanent purpose counted not as new in the early modern period but rather as very old. Only the impersonality of the intention – attributed eventually by Hegel to spirit and reason – seemed new; it somehow replaced the originally divine intention behind the authorship of the script of history. The visible hand became invisible. On the subjective side the early modern period saw what Funkenstein called ‘a revolution … that was no less radical than the concurrent scientific revolution.’ This upheaval ‘brought about a new contextual

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understanding of history, in which [a] historical fact became “understood” or meaningful only through the context in which it is embedded. This applies to both historical texts and any other monument of the past. The historian must reconstruct the context, and the reconstruction is always linked to his or her ‘point of view’ in the present.’34 But the crux of Funkenstein’s project is nonetheless to insist that this revolution did not occur either instantaneously or without important ancient and medieval preparation. As he remarks, Aristarchus of Samos had already ‘formulated the basic interpretative rule that Homer should be explained by Homer alone.’35 Funkenstein’s purpose, however, is not only to name precursors but also to propose an argument why and how the historical revolution could have occurred. He is certainly aware of the major and standard works on the early modern transformation of the historical sensibility that prepared the notion that culture is a totality – one, as Ranke eventually held, intelligible only in its own terms. Invoking the centrality of the neo-Romanist mos gallicus, innovations in biblical research, and humanist textual study (as epitomized by Lorenzo Valla’s erudition) that have received the lion’s share of attention in Anglo-American scholarship of the last generation, Funkenstein allowed that ‘[l]egal scholarship, biblical criticism, and classical philology were the main bearers of the new historical method: history writing lagged considerably behind.’36 Still, Funkenstein considered those ‘bearers’ of the new historical sensibility only part of the story. This argument is perhaps the most critical implication of Funkenstein’s account for students of the rise of the historical outlook because it is so foreign to the Anglo-American approach to understanding the origins of the historicist mood. It is clear that Funkenstein deeply respected, and internalized to his narrative, the work on early modern European development of historical thought inspired by J.G.A. Pocock’s landmark The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law and continued so educationally by his followers in charting the secular, humanist, and legal origins of modern historical methodologies. He also cited Arnaldo Momigliano’s approach, perhaps the most dominant in the Anglo-American academy today, emphasizing the development of erudition and technique. Funkenstein contended, however, that it is a distortion not to place these origins of historical thought in a wider frame. Where the dominant Anglo-American view casts Renaissance humanism and its sequels as standing largely alone in making the historicism of the modern outlook possible, Funkenstein argued that it functioned at best as a catalyst in the further development of a much older and longer

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process. Pocock, in various writings, gave the dominant view an especially philosophical cast in his argument that only Renaissance humanism could grasp historical particularity because it refused the emphasis on timeless universality of medieval thought and grounded life in the ‘moment.’ This view normally led in his work to a stark differentiation of humanism from what came before.37 Funkenstein’s model suggests that this distinction is typically overdrawn. Since the continuities between sacred and secular and medieval and modern are far more significant than the dominant view is often willing to allow, no persuasive account can omit them. A main objective of Funkenstein’s argument, then, is to suggest what transformation is wrought on the study of early modern historical thought when the revolution in historical methods is not kept artificially isolated and insulated from the study of the transformations of historical consciousness more broadly, so that the ‘subjective’ side of history that underwent a revolution in the early modern period always has to be considered together with the ‘objective.’ According to Funkenstein, both kinds of historicism have theological origins. For in Hegel’s words, ‘It is an internal vital principle common to both that produces them simultaneously.’

From Modern Separation to Modernist Crisis Funkenstein’s main achievement is, then, to have insisted on the connection between historical scheme and method, a connection for which he argued beginning in his dissertation. If Funkenstein’s approach is correct, the study of the development of historical consciousness commits one to a far more general – and admittedly more elusive – enquiry than the study of the progress of historical methodology would by itself. Nonetheless, if the hypothesis that historical methodology presupposes historical consciousness proves sustainable, then it turns out to be a necessary enquiry. For then it does not necessarily follow that the best place to look for the conditions for revolutions in historical thought is in the books of history or the practices of historians alone. For the methodological self-awareness of the history books and writers of a one period may depend on the historical consciousness nurtured in quite unrelated sources before. Yet Funkenstein left open the question how the connection between the two historicisms came to be severed, and their prior relationship obscured, in the modern historian’s consciousness. It is on this point

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that I would like to argue for a tension and a gap in Funkenstein’s account. At some point, that account implies, the substantive and methodological versions of historicism reached a fateful point of separation. The ‘increased sense of the actual historical interdependence of institutions and the events within a period’ initially originated out of ‘the evolutionary sense of an almost necessary sequence of periods.’38 But in a reversal that shattered their original interdependence, these two insights subsequently became detached from one another. Strangely, Funkenstein did not explain how the historical sense became able to operate independently of the theological, eschatological framework that originally helped make it a possibility. The existence and importance of this gap comes to seem more obvious as soon as one examines Funkenstein’s writings more closely. For even as he consistently implied the original interdependence of the two kinds of historicism, he just as consistently separated his attempts to historicize them. The separation is especially clear in the various accounts Funkenstein gave of Maimonides, who figures in some places as a progenitor of dialectical materialism in his view of a necessaritarian and compulsive sequence of stages in history but appears in others as a precursor of the historical school in his view of the autonomy of discrete moments in time as meaningful wholes. But it turns out that Funkenstein’s explanatory separation of the two kinds of historicism from one another pervades his work. It seems that Funkenstein adopted compositionally the very distinction between the two historicisms that he denied conceptually.39 It is possible that Funkenstein made the choice to separate the two historicisms simply in the interests of clear explanation, but there exists an alternative possibility, which is that he did not take seriously enough the conceptual immiscibility of the proto-teleological and the proto-historicist approaches to the past even when they were most unified. How is it, when they enjoyed an original fraternity, that the two historicisms could have later become such deadly opposites? The ultimate viability of Funkenstein’s account, then, would turn on the availability of a plausible story of how the harmonious partnership became a hostile split. Why and how did the breakdown occur? Did it have to happen? Could it have been avoided? These questions may not have seemed so pressing in the years when Funkenstein’s project took root, but from the present standpoint, it may well seem as if the origins of the catastrophic dissolution of the historicisms in the nineteenth century demand more attention. In his history

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of history Funkenstein aimed to historicize the unity of the two historicisms in Hegel’s thought; but he did not effectively acknowledge – much less historically explain – the break up of this unity, the ‘crisis of historicism’ that Friedrich Nietzsche predicted and that soon occurred, and the alternative ways philosophers and philosophically minded historians have since proposed to respond to this crisis down to the present day.40 Funkenstein focused on a moment of reconciliation in taking Hegel as the end point of his story. In light of the agony of dissolution that ensued, the history of history may well deserve a more tragic rendition than Funkenstein could give it by leaving the last acts out. It is worthwhile to note, moreover, that Funkenstein’s omission of a plausible story of the separation appears to leave his argument for the continuity of historical writing and historical consciousness with an important gap. The argument that the story of historical practice presupposes his own story of ‘historical consciousness’ provided the crux of the well-known controversy that Funkenstein initiated against Yerushalmi. Even if the Jews did not write history, Funkenstein claimed, it by no means implied that they lacked historical awareness. Funkenstein claimed that his usage of ‘historical consciousness’ as a ‘mediating category’ between professional history and collective memory made the novelty of nineteenth-century Jewish historicism far less emphatic and unprecedented than Yerushalmi had supposed. It is not the worth of historical consciousness as a ‘mediating category’ between history and memory that Funkenstein’s omission leaves fragile; instead, the gap may undermine Funkenstein’s attempt to offer the existence of that category by itself as evidence that the nature of historical consciousness did not change fundamentally in the modern period. Differently put, Funkenstein’s argument against Yerushalmi allowed a methodological distinction to accomplish too much substantive work, since the fact that history and memory are two forms of a more generalized historical consciousness by no means alters the fact that the distance between them became great enough for this deeper unity to be obscured in modern times. If it is with a prestigious, autonomous, and secular historicism that modernizing Jews came to affiliate, then knowing the distance of that outlook from more traditional forms of historical consciousness and how the distance became so great becomes the truly crucial problem, one that Funkenstein did not adequately solve. These considerations, to conclude, imply that Funkenstein’s case – about the origins of modern historical reasoning as well as about the affiliation of Jews with that project – could become fully convincing only

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if he could explain not just the original unity that once characterized methodological and substantive historicism but their breakdown, too – the uprooting of profane historical practice from the nourishing soil of sacralized historical expectation.41 I believe the attachments between the two may have lingered and that in many milieux methodological historicism may have maintained a productive communion with teleological historicism through much of the nineteenth century. It is not so much that the slow pace of secularization allowed the persistence of archaic forms of knowledge; in secular guise, this communion gave the social theories of Hegel and Marx their extraordinary power – their inspired ability, never achieved before and rarely repeated since, to combine an interest in explanation of the past with a commitment to a vision of the future. The early modern period may have seen the beginnings of the breakdown of unity; but it required late modernity for it to be finally and fatefully completed.

Conclusion At a memorial service, Funkenstein’s student David Biale labelled his teacher ‘the last German-Jewish philosopher.’42 Whatever the justice of this title, it is certainly true that so far as the history of history is concerned Funkenstein’s approach differed substantially from that current in the Anglo-American world today. It cast the problem of early modern history at a far more general, philosophical, even metaphysical level than that of simple methodological innovation – and therefore, perhaps, in a mode redolent of some German scholarship of the golden age. When understood in relationship to contemporary scholarship, however, Funkenstein’s work represents not only a counterpoint but also a challenge. The most important element of his challenge would appear to be the thesis that the rise of modern historical methods has to be studied together with the rise of the modern historical consciousness more generally – that the rise of historicism as a methodological principle has to be understood in part as ‘fallout’ of the transformation of historicism as substantive world view. For to cite Hegel’s words again, ‘It is an internal vital principle common to both that produces them simultaneously.’ The major significance of early modern European developments, if it is possible to make Funkenstein’s thesis persuasive, is therefore not the invention of a new methodological outlook for historical inquiry but

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rather the separation of this outlook from a much older substantive framework rooted in theological premises. But this framework did not die either, for it became secularized into the great modern philosophies of history of the nineteenth century. Even after Funkenstein’s pioneering work, the breakdown between the two kinds of historicism remains ill-understood. How the separation happened is a critical historical question Funkenstein left inadequately answered, with substantial implications for his theory of the relationship of historical practice to historical consciousness in the contemporary world. Historicism cannot remain immune from itself. Professional historians sometimes are willing to accept the insight that the historical method itself has a history, that the way they presently approach the past implies not the existence of an exclusive and necessary organon but instead the provisional supremacy of one method among a plurality of diverse alternatives. Yet they rarely acknowledge so explicitly what this fact suggests, which is that the historical method may also therefore have a plurality of alternative futures. The modern historian, operating after the fateful distinction between knowledge about the past and hopes about the future, often defends the purity of historical investigation from the contamination of normative commitment. But in light of Funkenstein’s recovery of the original dependence of modern historical thought as a method on a sense of the ultimate meaning and purpose of history as a process, this typical outlook seems contingent (and perhaps even confused). Habitually mute on the contemporary implications raised by his work, Funkenstein left open the question whether and how to reunite two approaches to the past that, like long-lost brothers estranged from one another through the secularizations of their maturity, have forgotten the interdependence of their theological origins. Though fatefully separated later, these eventual foes were born together: this message appears to be the essential contribution of Funkenstein’s career-long inquiry into history.

Notes Originally published under the same title in Journal of the History of Ideas 64, 4 (October 2003): 639–57. Thanks to Ann Blair, for whose Harvard University seminar on early modern approaches to history I originally wrote up this

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paper, and to Leora Batnitzky, Julian Bourg, Peter Eli Gordon, Martin Jay, Abraham Socher, and a JHI reviewer for valuable advice. 1 ‘I do not know why this branch of learning has suffered the unfortunate fate of not having admirers and practitioners who up to now ever thought of producing a History of History worth reading.’ Cited in Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955; rpt, Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 5; see also Peter Hanns Reill, The Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 2 Abraham P. Socher, ‘Of Divine Cunning and Prolonged Madness: Amos Funkenstein on Maimonides’ Historical Reasoning,’ Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 6, 1 (Fall 1999): 7, rpt in this volume. 3 Amos Funkenstein, Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung: Formen der Gegenwartsbestimmung im Geschichtsdenken des hohen Mittelalters (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1965); Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Maimonides: Nature, History, and Messianic Beliefs, trans. Shmuel Himelstein (1983; Tel Aviv: MOD Books, 1998). In subsequent footnotes, I have abbreviated my references to these books by citing the first word in each title. 4 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). This study originally appeared in English, then in German as Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen: Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Geschichtsphilosophie, trans. Hanno Kesting (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1953). A set of very similar themes followed through time is to be found in Frank E. Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965). 5 G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Willey Book Co., 1944), §68. 6 Ibid., translation altered. 7 As Funkenstein explained early and late, the doctrine that events do not ‘count’ unless recorded – with the consequence that history only begins with the state – is considerably older than Hegel’s philosophy. See Heilsplan, 76, and Perceptions, 3–4. Such views explain the otherwise unintelligible word and concept of ‘prehistory.’ 8 Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). 9 On the term, see Dwight N. Lee and Robert N. Beck, ‘The Meaning of “Historicism,”’ American Historical Review 59, 3 (April 1954): 568–77, and

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Samuel Moyn Georg G. Iggers, ‘Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 56, 1 (January 1995): 129–52. The most capacious attempt to historicize the rise of the new methodological consciousness is Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, 2 vols (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1936), which appeared in English as Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J.E. Anderson (New York: Routledge, 1972). The major discussions of historicism as philosophical, theological, and cultural quandary took place in early twentieth-century Germany in the context of what Ernst Troeltsch labelled the ‘crisis’ of historicism. See Troeltsch, ‘Die Krisis des Historismus,’ Die Neue Rundschau 33 (1922): 572–90, and Annette Wittkau, Historismus: Zur Geschichte des Begriffs und des Problems (Göttingen: Vandenkoeck und Ruprecht, 1992). See Frederick C. Beiser, ‘Hegel’s Historicism,’ in Beiser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and esp. Michael N. Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Part III. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländische Literatur (Berlin: A. Francke, 1946), in English, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 23. Funkenstein, Perceptions, 77. Ibid., 54 (note omitted); cf 72–3, and Theology, 243–50. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 8. See Funkenstein, Heilsplan, 123, n1. The obsession with ‘the problem of history’ at this moment awaits its historian. At this time, see Oscar Cullmann, Christus und die Zeit: Die urchristliche Zeit- und Geschichteauffassung (Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1946), in English as Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, trans. Floyd V. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1950); Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Zurich: Artemis, 1949), in English as The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Marcus Bullock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953); and Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), esp. ch. 4; also Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologie der Geschichte: Ein Grundriß (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1950), in English as A Theology of History (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963); and Josef Pieper, Über das Ende der Zeit: Eine geschichtsphilosophische Meditation (Munich: Kösel, 1950), in English as The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History, trans. Marcus Bullock (New York: Pantheon, 1954). For Carl Schmitt’s review of Löwith’s

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book, see Schmitt, ‘Drei Stufen historischer Sinngebung,’ Universitas 5 (1950): 927–31. Also important in this context is Leo Strauss’s claim that ‘historicism thrives on the fact that it inconsistently exempts itself from its own verdict about all human thought.’ Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 25. Jakob Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie (Bern: A. Francke, 1947), on which see Reinhard Mehring, ‘Karl Löwith, Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes, und das “Ende der Geschichte,”’ Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 48 (1996): 231–48, and Richard Faber et al., eds, Abendländische Eschatologie: Ad Jacob Taubes (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2001). See Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Is History at an End?, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Verso, 1992). Löwith, Meaning in History, 191. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Karl Löwith: Stoic Retreat from Historical Consciousness,’ in Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983); Jeffrey Andrew Barash, ‘The Sense of History: On the Political Implications of Karl Löwith’s Interpretation of Secularization,’ History and Theory 37, 1 (February 1998), 69–82; and Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), ch. 4. In his book, Blumenberg made the claim that Christianity had already been ‘secularized’ well before modern times and therefore could not claim any special purity from secularization. See Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), 32–9. This work appeared later in English as The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983). See Funkenstein, Heilsplan, Parts II and III, and Theology, 243–75. See Funkenstein, Heilsplan, 169, n17; Theology, ch. 4, esp. 232; Perceptions, 131–55; and Maimonides, §§ 3–10. A crucial point of inspiration for much of Funkenstein’s project may well have been the attempt by his teacher to find anticipations of Hegel in another medieval thinker. See Funkenstein, Theology, 236, n52; and Wilhelm Berges, ‘Anselm von Haverberg in der Geistesgeschichte des 12. Jahrhunderts,’ Jahrbuch für Geschichte Mittel-und Ostdeutschlands 5 (1956): 52. Funkenstein, Theology, 288. Cf António Pérez-Ramos, ‘And Justify the Ways of God to Men,’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 21, 2 (June 1990): 323–39. Funkenstein noted that ‘elsewhere I tried to show that Hans Blumenberg’s model does not work sufficiently well to explain what he intended to explain.’ Funkenstein, ‘Response,’ History and Memory 4, 2 (Fall/Winter

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Samuel Moyn 1992): 148. He presumably referred to Theology and the Scientific Imagination, but there is no explicit polemic with Blumenberg in that book. The present article does not attempt to determine Funkenstein’s place in the secularization debate. Funkenstein, Perceptions, 24–5; he pioneered this argument in Heilsplan, 70–7 (‘Die mittelalterliche Anschauung vom historischen Faktum’). This view appears to contrast starkly with recent scholarship suggesting that it is in the early modern period that facts, historical and otherwise, were initially separated as atomic entities. Lorraine J. Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books 1998), esp. ch. 6; Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). Funkenstein, Perceptions, 17. Funkenstein, ‘Response,’ 147. Aside from some mentions in Heilsplan, e.g., 51–4, Funkenstein’s main introduction of this argument appeared in 1970. See Funkenstein, ‘Gesetz und Geschichte: Zur historisierenden Hermeneutik bei Moses Maimonides und Thomas von Aquin,’ Viator 1 (1970): 147–78; ‘Periodization and Self-Understanding in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times,’ Medievalia et Humanistica n.s., 5 (1974): 3–23; also Stephen D. Benin, The Footprints of God: Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), originally a dissertation written under Funkenstein’s supervision. See Funkenstein, Theology, 222–43. Funkenstein, Theology, 209. He claimed that Vico illuminated rather than influenced developments: ‘Vico’s impact was negligible. But his main themes maintain a regulative role in the formation of modern historical reasoning’ (ibid., 212). Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 155. Allan Megill, ‘Why Was There a Crisis of Historicism?’ (review of Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995]), History and Theory 36, 3 (October 1997): 419; also Thomas A. Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) on some roots of this crisis. Funkenstein, Theology, 204.

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34 Funkenstein, Perceptions, 14–15. 35 Ibid., 9, n19; cf 17. 36 See Funkenstein, Theology, 205–13, at 212, and Perceptions, 25–7, where he cites such important contributions as J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), esp. ch. 1; Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); and Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). Pocock’s dissertation has subsequently been reprinted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) with a long retrospect. 37 See esp. J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 80–5, for an entirely unguarded argument to this effect, and The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), Part I, for details. On this period, Funkenstein’s contribution is far more in the spirit of Adelbert Klempt’s Die Säkularisierung der universalhistorischen Auffassung: Zum Wandel des Geschichtsdenkens im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1960), a work he knew, than the restrictedly secular Anglo-American scholarship he hoped to supplement. Ironically, Butterfield, the teacher in whose thought Pocock’s work in this area is rooted, showed himself far more aware of the pioneering German-language discussion on the topic and, as a committed Christian thinker, may have been more open to the notion of a theological background to modern historiography. Butterfield’s Man on His Past is littered with references to the Wilhelmine and Weimar discussion: for example, Hans Proesler, Das Problem einer Entwicklungsgeschichte des historischen Sinnes (Berlin: E. Ebering, 1920). For the current state of the approach Momigliano founded, focused on erudite methods and textual apparatus (e.g., footnotes), see Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi, eds, Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005). 38 Funkenstein, Theology, 268. 39 Cf Funkenstein, Perceptions, 141–4 and 145–7. Abraham Socher ignores this point in his constructive and illuminating response to the original version of this essay. Socher suggests that Funkenstein’s main energies were devoted to telling a story that connected medieval to early modern historicism, and wonders whether the story is historically documented. Nevertheless, I would respond that my criticism of Funkenstein for assumptions he

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made about late modernity – which are clearly and deeply embedded in his project – still stands, since it is directed to the argumentative logic of Funkenstein’s writing rather than its specific focus or historiographical plausibility. See Socher, ‘Funkenstein on the Theological Origins of Historicism: A Critical Note,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 67, 2 (April 2006): 401–8. 40 See Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism, for a clear study of Martin Heidegger’s attempt to overcome the relativistic crisis of values that followed from the German historical school. See also Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (Dordrecht: D. Riedel, 1988). Inadequate was Funkenstein’s occasional suggestion that his argument explained the emergence of ‘universal hermeneutics,’ a philosophy that developed as a result of the crisis of historicism and its thorough regrounding in the work of Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. 41 See Funkenstein, ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness,’ History and Memory 1, 1 (Spring/Summer 1989), 5–26, rpt with many changes as Perceptions, ch. 1. Cf David N. Myers, ‘Remembering Zakhor: A Super-commentary,’ History and Memory 4, 2 (Fall/Winter 1992): 129–48, along with Funkenstein’s short reply. 42 David Biale, ‘The Last German-Jewish Philosopher,’ in Biale et al., Amos Funkenstein: A Celebration (Berkeley: Townsend Center, 1996), rpt as ‘The Last German-Jewish Philosopher: Notes towards an Intellectual Biography of Amos Funkenstein,’ Jewish Social Studies n.s., 6, 1 (Fall 1999): 1–5.

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chapter seven

Of Divine Cunning and Prolonged Madness: Amos Funkenstein on Maimonides’ Historical Reasoning ABRAHAM P. SOCHER

To say more than human things with human voice, That cannot be; to say human things with more Than human voice, that can also not be; To speak humanly from the height or from the depth Of human things, that is acutest speech. Wallace Stevens, ‘Chocorua to Its Neighbor’

One of Amos Funkenstein’s central historical concerns was the development of the discipline and methods of history itself. He was interested in the realization that the recovery of historical truth is not merely the collection and chronological ordering of simple, atomic facts but rather what he called a process of ‘contextual reasoning,’ in which the historical datum is ‘alienated’ from the present and understood through the painstaking reconstruction of its original context. In a rich series of studies he argued that such a realization was first developed through applications of the medieval doctrine of divine accommodation to human finitude, the exegetical form of which was that ‘Scripture speaks the language of man’ (dibrah Torah ki-leshon bnei adam; Scriptura humane loquitur). In this connection, Maimonides’ theory that many of the biblical commandments, paradigmatically the sacrifices, were to be understood as polemical reactions against – and strategic compromises with – the prevalent idolatry of the ancient world held pride of place in Funkenstein’s account as a theoretically daring extension of the principle of accommodation and a surprising origin of the discovery of the historical. ‘Maimonides’ reconstruction of the taamei ha-mitsvot [reasons for

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the commandments] was,’ Funkenstein claimed, ‘a genuine medieval precursor of the revolution of historical reasoning.’1 In a long and striking footnote to his discussion of Maimonides’ theory of the reasons for the commandments in his Theology and the Scientific Imagination, Funkenstein wrote, In her famous study, [Mary] Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Danger and Taboo, pp. 41–57, refers to Maimonides’ theory of taame ha-mitsvot as a paradigm of wrong methodology (looking for external causes for taboos). She already takes for granted Maimonides’ methodological breakthrough – if perhaps on the wrong object – in trying to reconstruct the original setup in which taboos were meaningful; she takes it for granted that Maimonides could make errors on the same level as Robertson-Smith ... As to Douglas’ powerful thesis itself, I am not competent to judge its merits. I have but one specific question, leading to a more general observation. Jewish law lacks any prohibition concerning the consumption of vegetables; surely in any conceivable primitive taxonomy, some plants will resist orderly classification. One may answer that dietary prohibitions stem from an older, nomadic, cattle-raising society, but mixed ‘weaving and sowing’ (shaatnez ve-kilayim) were likewise prohibited, as was the sowing with two kinds of animals. Perhaps the thesis suffers from overprecision. Granted that taboos originate in the contraposition of order and disorder, culture and wilderness (chaos); the forbidden belongs to the latter, the undomesticated, but it need not defy attempts at classification. Its classification may not even always be attempted. It suffices that it is at odds with the familiar.2

Those of us who were fortunate enough to be his students can imagine (or perhaps even remember) Funkenstein, with his sly half-smile, delivering himself of this little pilpul in seminar. Indeed, the digression exemplifies several characteristic features of Funkenstein’s scholarship and is a good entry into the discussion of his account of Maimonides’ taamei ha-mitsvot. First, there is the terse language of the note, in which difficult arguments are summarized briefly then criticized and emended with scholastic or, if you prefer, Tosafistic peremptoriness (‘one may answer’). Second, Funkenstein’s criticism of Douglas is analytically acute. His point is transcendental in a (loosely) Kantian sense: in criticizing Maimonides, Douglas presupposes the modern epistemic viewpoint of contextual reasoning, the historical grounds of which Mai-

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monides helped to lay in precisely those texts that Douglas criticizes. Third, there is Funkenstein’s very openness to considering the remarks of a cultural anthropologist (or anything else that might help) within the often narrow confines of serious Maimonidean scholarship. Finally, of course, there is his characteristic willingness to return the favour and, protestations of disciplinary competency notwithstanding, revise Douglas’s thesis (a revision that, as we shall see, echoes Maimonides’ insistence upon the contingency of ritual). However, Funkenstein was also wrong, or at least not entirely correct, in his criticism of Douglas. She had represented Maimonides as a medieval precursor of cultural materialism who took a strictly functionalist attitude towards ritual and propounded ‘the view that religious prescriptions are largely devoid of symbolism.’3 I shall argue that this is not only true of Maimonides but also dialectically related to the proto-historicism that Funkenstein discerned. Maimonides’ opposition to symbolic interpretation actually motivated and enabled his methodological breakthrough. We might even say, with a little poetic licence, that Funkenstein’s disagreement with Douglas is a kind of recapitulation of the debate between Maimonides and his later anti-rationalist opponents on the meaning of the commandments, only at the meta-level of history and anthropology. I shall spell out what I mean by this characterization and try to make it more plausible in the final sections of this article. However, we shall first have to understand Funkenstein’s account, which was the first to fully grasp and contextualize the nature of Maimonides’ twelfth-century historicism. Maimonides’ theory of the commandments was one of the subjects to which Funkenstein continually returned throughout his career, and consequently his treatment was laid out in overlapping discussions, published over four decades in three languages. Nonetheless, the texts with which he was concerned and the principal line of interpretation remained consistent, and I shall treat his account as basically unitary, focusing on his most accessible discussion of the subject, in Perceptions of Jewish History.4

A God Who Is Not in the Details Part of what made Funkenstein’s argument for the originality of Maimonides’ historical thought surprising is that Maimonides himself dismissed the value of historical writings several times. Thus, in a famous discussion of the principles of Jewish faith found in his Commentary to the

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Mishna, heretical works are compared to books ‘such as those found among the Arabs: books of chronicles, on the government of kings, genealogies of the Arabs, and books of songs, and similar books which have no wisdom and material purpose, but are only a waste of time.’5 The Commentary to the Mishna is an early work, but we find precisely the same disdain for the contingency of history and the triviality of historical writing in the Guide of the Perplexed itself. Almost at the outset, the reader is admonished not to read the Bible (and implicitly the Guide) ‘as you would glance through a historical work or a piece of poetry.’6 Indeed, the distinction, invoked in the passage from the Commentary above, between works that have either a spiritual or a material purpose and those that – like history – do not is still operative in the Guide and, as we shall see, central to its historicist theory of the commandments. Such dismissals of medieval Arabic historiography provoked the great twentieth-century Jewish historian Salo Baron to defensive protest: ‘But he [Maimonides] must have recognized the profound quest for truth and honest philosophic attitude of an all-embracing historian such as alMas’udi.’7 Ultimately, however, Baron concluded that the ‘historical outlook,’ which he reconstructed from the bits and pieces of world historical narrative scattered throughout the Maimonidean corpus, was unoriginal, indeed ‘unhistorical,’ and merely typified that of ‘a twelfthcentury educated Jew.’8 Moreover Baron, like Douglas, was unimpressed with Maimonides’ contextualization of biblical law as a set of rational polemics against an improbably described near-universal pagan culture. It struck him, as it had struck his nineteenth-century predecessor Heinrich Graetz, as ‘flat.’9 Maimonides’ account of the pernicious absurdities in belief and practice of ‘the religious community of the Sabians’ was, indeed, not a work of persuasive thick description. However, it was one of Funkenstein’s great achievements to look past the substantive faults of the Maimonidean account to its genuine methodological breakthrough: the idea that biblical religion could only be understood within the context of the pagan practices of the ancient Near East. Maimonides’ originality, in this respect, had been noted in more limited fashion by Baron’s older contemporary Julius Guttman, who had showed Maimonides’ influence on the seventeenth-century Bible critic John Spencer and others.10 But it was Funkenstein who demonstrated the centrality of this insight to Maimonidean thought and then placed it within the broader context of the medieval development of the idea of the historical past. This followed from his insistence that one must look beyond historiography

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proper to gauge a sense of what he called the ‘historical consciousness’ of past thinkers and epochs.11 Funkenstein’s attempt to do so was part of his larger (one might say magisterial) project of charting the transitions from medieval to early modern modes of reasoning, in particular the ways in which thought about the deity became thought about His world. What he discerned in Maimonides, then, was precisely an early and influential instance of this transition. For in Maimonides’ account it turns out that God is precisely not in the details of the rituals that He prescribed; man is. It was this deliberate disenchantment of the mitsvot that, according to Funkenstein, underwrote Maimonides’ discovery of a gradually evolving, contingent historical world. It is well to remember, in this regard, that Funkenstein’s account, despite having been composed largely in the United States, was first thought through in the German academy of the 1960s, during which the questions of historicism and secularization, and the techniques of Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history), were central to historical discourse.12 In this respect, Funkenstein’s project may be usefully compared with that of his older contemporary Hans Blumenberg, who described a process in which medieval nominalism evacuated the world of its meaning in order to safeguard God’s pristine otherness and thus paradoxically opened up a space for human autonomy.13 In Maimonides’ taamei ha-mitsvot, and in other instances of the ‘principle of accommodation,’ Funkenstein discerned a similar process in which safeguarding God from contingency created the possibility for the understanding of an (almost) entirely human world.14

Prolonged Madness and the Maimonidean Antidote Maimonides’ account of the reasons for the commandments begins in Guide III:26, where he notes that, just as religious philosophers argue about whether God’s works are ‘consequent upon wisdom or upon the will alone without being intended toward any end at all,’ there is a parallel disagreement with regard to God’s commandments. Maimonides was a partisan (or at least so it would seem) of the former position; both God’s works and His word follow upon wisdom, and to think otherwise would be to ascribe purposelessness to (and thus to blaspheme) God. However, Maimonides entered a subtle caveat, which Funkenstein rightly emphasized. Towards the end of the chapter Maimonides wrote,

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The offering of the sacrifices has in itself a great and manifest utility as I shall make clear. But no cause will ever be found for the fact that one particular sacrifice consists in a lamb and another in a ram and that the number of victims should be one particular number. Accordingly, in my opinion, all those who occupy themselves with finding causes for something of these particulars are stricken with a prolonged madness in the course of which they do not put an end to an incongruity, but rather increase the number of incongruities.15

Maimonides’ antidote for such prolonged madness is well known. What can be rationally explained is the social and spiritual utility of ritual practice, but the particulars – a ram or a lamb; seven, eight, or twenty – are merely instrumental. Indeed, at this point in the argument it would seem that such particulars are – unlike the general ends they serve – arbitrary acts of divine will. They neither represent nor explain anything, and they cannot, in turn, be explained. In the very act of obedience to such requirements we are, perhaps, ‘purified,’ but this is not in virtue of some intrinsic feature of a given sacrifice. It was, in fact, precisely this passage that Douglas adduced in support of her view that the Maimonidean account is a prosaic rejection of symbolic interpretation.16 A few lines after the passage above, Maimonides elaborated his position in the following way: Know that wisdom rendered it necessary – or, if you will, say that necessity occasioned – that there should be particulars for which no cause should be found; it was as it were impossible in regard to the Law that there would be nothing in this class in it ... one particular species [i.e., ram or lamb] had necessarily to be chosen ... This resembles the nature of the possible for it is certain that one of the possibilities will come to pass.17

The move Maimonides made here is crucial to his argument and one that Funkenstein, as a historian of medieval science, was peculiarly well situated to explicate. For Maimonides connected the question of divine reasons for ritual particulars (a ram or a lamb) with the question of the relationship between the divine (hence universal) laws governing nature and physical particulars. Funkenstein wrote: What do we really look for when we ask for a reason for a commandment? Must a rationale for a specific law cover every part and detail of that law?

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In a preliminary answer Maimonides draws a strict analogy between laws of nature and social laws. In the second part of the Guide, Maimonides developed one of the most original philosophies of science in the Middle Ages. There he proved that not only are the laws of nature ... in themselves contingent upon God’s will; but that each of them must include, by definition, a residue of contingency, an element of indeterminacy.18

Thus, the particularization of a given individual is, at a certain point, necessarily arbitrary. It is simply the ‘nature of the possible’ that there be more than one possibility that could equally well instantiate the divine will, as expressed in the physical laws of the universe. Funkenstein’s preferred illustration of this principle was of a craftsman who travels to a remote forest in Indonesia to choose the best sort of mahogany for making a table. At some point he will run up against two or more equally suitable possibilities. It is in the nature of the case, and the world generally, that no amount of specification will obviate the need, at some point, to choose.19 Precisely this relationship holds between the divine plan of the universe and its material instantiation. ‘The natural world is,’ wrote Funkenstein, summing up the doctrine, ‘a continuum of instances of the accommodation of divine planning to indifferent if not resilient substrates.’20 This is also true of the social world of the commandments; that is, although they are rational (in the same sense that building a table is rational),21 their particular details are not strictly necessitated by their governing reason(s). Moreover, to pursue the analogy, this means that the details of the commandment are a matter not so much of divine fiat as of divine accommodation, in this case not to the physical world of the universe but to the social world of humanity. Thus, although Maimonides never did give a reason why, for instance, seven rams and not eight or twenty lambs are to be sacrificed, he did provide contingent, historical reasons, or at least origins, for similar ritual details. It is here, and in particular in his account of the sacrifices in chapters 29 and 32 of the third section of the Guide, that we see the scope and richness of Maimonides’ historical insight. Maimonides’ reasons for the commandments were not just theoretically motivated speculation. He considered himself to have discovered not only an explanatory schema but also a set of historical documents. In Guide III:29, he wrote that ‘the meaning of many of the laws became clear to me and their causes became known to me through my study of the doctrines, opinions, practices, and cult of the Sabians.’ Maimonides

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believed the Sabians to be adherents of a more or less universal astrological polytheism. This religion flourished from at least the time of Abraham until the rise of Christianity and Islam brought one form or another of scriptural monotheism to most of the world.22 The principal document of Sabianism was the Nabatean Agriculture, which Maimonides believed to preserve accounts of the doctrines and practices of Israel’s neighbours in the ancient Near East.23 The universal service in which we were brought up consisted in offering various species of living beings in the temples in which images were set up, in worshipping the latter ... His wisdom ... and his gracious ruse ... did not require the abolition of all these kinds of worship. For one could not then conceive the acceptance of [such a law] considering the nature of man, which always likes that to which it is accustomed.24

The form of worship prescribed by the Bible was, then, an accommodation to the contingent features of the social world of Israel and a subtle attempt to change that world. Hence sacrifices, which misrepresent the Maimonidean God (who is literally defined only by the negative propositions that He does not eat, drink, smell, need or desire offerings, and so on), nonetheless serve divine purposes.25 Such a doctrine inoculates the deity from the vicissitudes of a contingent world, but it also served as the impetus for an ambitious historical research program. As Funkenstein wrote, It seems as if Maimonides’ doctrine is just another variation of the medieval principle of accommodation. But consider the following. None of these traditions is actually concerned with the reconstruction of the original meaning of biblical ... institutions out of their forgotten background ... His theory not only explains how the ‘forgotten’ culture of the Sa’aba accounts for the opaque parts of the law; it explains at one and the same time why these original ‘reasons for the commandments’ were forgotten and must now be reconstructed so painfully.26

Thus, to take a less famous Maimonidean explanation, the prohibition against eating blood (Lev. 17:10) is because ‘the eating of blood led to a certain kind of idolatry, namely, the worship of the jinn. Scripture pronounced blood pure and turned it into a means of purification for those who come near it.’27 The sacrificial cult itself is an accommodation to the historical moment, but it is redirected towards a single god,

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and its implementation is crafted so as to undermine precisely the set of beliefs and practices with which it was forced to compromise. The strangeness and opacity of such biblical religion is precisely a result of its historical success in eradicating all but the faintest traces of the cultures with which it was engaged.

Divine Cunning and Displaced Symbolis In Guide III:32, Maimonides propounded and defended this picture of divine cunning with two examples, one from the natural world and the other from biblical history. At the outset, he illustrated the ‘deity’s wily graciousness and wisdom’ in the natural world through the example of ‘the gradual succession and states of the whole individual’: The brain is an example of the gradation of the motions and the proximity of the limbs of an individual: for its front part is soft, very soft indeed, whereas its posterior part is more solid. The spinal marrow is even more solid and becomes more and more so as it stretches on ... the nerves are organs of sensation and movement ... [which are] ramified into fibers, and the latter having been filled with flesh become muscles.

Similarly, mammals are born ‘extremely soft and cannot feed on dry food. Accordingly breasts were prepared for them so that [they could] receive humid food ... until their limbs gradually ... become dry and solid.’ Just as the biblical language of revelation is subtly adapted to the limitations of human intelligence (dibrah Torah ki-leshon bnei adam), the natural world is also adapted to the limited nature of the material with which the divinity has to work.28 Later in the chapter, Maimonides addressed the religious anxiety this trend of thought arouses when applied to the commandments with a parable drawn from biblical history: How then is it possible that none of the commandments, prohibitions, and great actions – which are set forth precisely and prescribed for fixed seasons – should be intended for its own sake but for the sake of something else ... as if this were a ruse invented for our benefit by God ... ? Hear then the reply ... the Torah tells a quite similar story: God led them not by the way of the land of the Philistines, although it was near ... But God led the people by way of the wilderness of the Red Sea (Ex. 13:17–18). Just as God perplexed them in anticipation of what their bodies were naturally incapable of

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bearing ... so did he in anticipation of what the soul is naturally incapable of receiving, prescribe the laws ... so that the first intention should be achieved, namely the apprehension of Him, may He be exalted, and the rejection of idolatry.29

Maimonides’ account of a divine wisdom that respects the limitations of its material, human and otherwise, and works through rather than around them to get at its own ultimate ends led Funkenstein to a bold comparison: Just as Hegel’s objektiver Geist uses the subjective, egotistic freedom of man to further the objective goals of history ... so also Maimonides’ God fights polytheism with its own weapons ... Maimonides spoke of the cunning of God (ormat ha-shem u-tevunato; talattuf fi’allahu) where Hegel will speak of the cunning of reason (List der Vernunft) – their point of agreement is at one and the same time their point of difference. Hegel’s ‘List der Vernunft,’ much as its forerunners – Vico’s ‘providence’ ... [and] Kant’s ‘geheimer plan der Natur’ – articulate a sense of the absolute autonomy of human history and its self-regulating mechanisms. Maimonides, as all other medieval versions of the divine economy, allows at best a relative autonomy to the collective evolution of man.30

The comparison is indeed striking, but, if anything, and particularly in the case of Hegel, Funkenstein might have gone farther. As we have seen, not only does a metaphor of organic growth underwrite Maimonides’ historicist research project, but the engine of that growth is precisely an infinite Divine Mind working its way through finite human history, so that the subjectively free actions of persons and societies conform to a larger rational historical pattern. There is even a sense in which Maimonides might be said to anticipate Hegel in the dialectical form that this process takes: God (Geist) appears and objectifies itself in the form of commanded ritual and its implied object. The deity does this ‘for itself’ despite the fact that this objectification is precisely not itself.31 The depth and theoretical articulation of Maimonides’ medieval historicism are dazzling. Not only does his theory of the commandments open up the possibility for the discovery of biblical history as a distant entity to be understood through the patient reconstruction of text and artefact, but it also provides a historiosophical schema through which to understand human history as a gradual, contingent

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process subsumed under universal laws. Nonetheless, Douglas’s criticism (and the medieval criticisms it echoed, albeit in a different theoretical register) do not, as Funkenstein charged, miss the point. For in interpreting biblical doctrine and rituals as piecemeal responses to pagan religion, Maimonides not only instrumentalized the commandments, he deflected their meaning onto ‘Sabian’ culture. Puzzling or troubling aspects of biblical religion are always explained as having their origin in rational polemics against an exotic irrationalism that is forever elsewhere, a hypostasized other. Such a historical application of negative theology will never ask the anthropological question of whether, say, the fact that blood is both taboo and holy might have a meaning within the symbolic economy of ancient Israelite culture,32 nor whether such facts ought to be correlated with (to give just one possibility) the blood of circumcision.33 Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked that ‘anthropology is the science of culture as seen from the outside’ and that ‘whenever it is practiced by members of the culture which it endeavors to study, loses its specific nature and becomes akin to archaeology, history and philology.’34 The mid-twentieth-century Parisian malice of the statement notwithstanding, something akin to this does seem to be the case with Maimonides. He seems to have discovered history at the price of culture. To employ Funkenstein’s preferred terms, Maimonides’ theoretical ‘alienation and recontextualization’ of puzzling commandments not only uncovered their historical dimension but also allowed their problematic symbolism to be displaced onto a putative pagan culture.

The Reasons of God and the Reasons of Nature Funkenstein’s account was synthetic and thus only intermittently close to the texts, but, as we shall see, it does provide a powerful analytic framework for thinking through issues in the Guide and its medieval reception. We can pose two related questions to this account that will lead us into what I think are central issues to both Maimonides’ theory of the commandments and the intellectual stance of the Guide as a whole. First, Funkenstein called the Maimonidean analogy between social laws (mitsvot) and physical laws ‘strict,’ but also ‘preliminary.’ Is the qualification necessary? What is the connection between this and the characterization of the commandments as acts of divine cunning?

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Second, Maimonides spoke of the ‘prolonged madness’ of attempting to give meaning to ritual detail, a characterization that Funkenstein emphasized. What sort of madness is this? Does the description have a historically determinate reference? A necessarily brief exploration of these questions will return us to the opposition with which we began, between Funkenstein and Douglas, armed, I trust, with a richer sense of what is at stake in that debate. Let us turn now to the first question of the analogy between the laws of scripture and the laws of nature. One of the keys to reading the Guide, as Maimonides specifically tells us at the outset, is to find links between widely separated chapters.35 It was just such a link that Funkenstein exploited in following up on the remark that the contingency of ritual particulars ‘resembles the nature of the possible’ – that is, the contingency of physical particulars – which is discussed in the previous book of the Guide. However, it is important to realize that this is actually only one of a delicate network of intratextual connections between discussions of revealed law and physical law in the Guide. Thus, as we have already seen, Maimonides actually began his discussion of the commandments with an allusion to this analogy: Just as there is disagreement among the men of speculation among adherents of Law whether His works, may He be exalted, are consequent upon wisdom or upon the will alone without being intended toward any end at all, there is also disagreement among them regarding our Laws.36

We may ask then of both God’s word and His world whether it must merely be accepted as divine fiat or whether it can be understood as an act of wisdom. A few lines later, Maimonides cited Psalm 19: 10, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,’ as a prooftext that the law is to be understood as an act of wisdom. The use of Psalm 19 here to clinch the argument that revelation was as much an act of wisdom as creation had been is not incidental. The psalm’s first substantive verse is ‘The heavens declare the glory of God,’ and it continues in this vein until precisely the centre of the poem, at which point it turns from the praise of creation to the praise of revelation, with the words ‘The Torah of the Lord is perfect.’37 In the later Middle Ages, the interpretation of this psalm was a key site for the Jewish version of the topos of ‘the Book of God and the Book of Nature.’38 In this guise, the analogy famously textualizes the natural world: explanation of natural phenomena is to be had in terms of sign,

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symbol, and analogy.39 Nachmanides, the thirteenth-century adversary of Maimonidean thought, invoked the psalm in something like this way in a famous theoretical sermon, which begins, ‘Scripture states ‘The Torah of the Lord is perfect.’ After it said ‘the heavens declare God’s glory,’ it turned and elaborated the praises of the Torah, and said that it [Torah] declared the praises of the Holy One Blessed Be He even more than the Heavens.’40 Similarly, Profiat Duran, in an introduction to a fifteenth-century work of Hebrew grammar, interpreted the psalm as indicative of just this kind of world/word isomorphism while alluding to Maimonides’ treatment of the commandments in the Guide.41 Nachmanides, too, had alluded to Maimonides’ use of the verse in his sermon, but Maimonides’ own use of the analogy would seem to be precisely contrary to this trend of thought: instead of the world being textualized, the text is naturalized. Maimonides returned to this analogy at the very end of his discussion of the reasons for the commandments through the citation of another verse that employs the crucial word ‘perfect’ (tamim): Marvel exceedingly at the Wisdom of His commandments ... just as you would marvel at the wisdom manifested in the things He has made. Scripture says ‘The Rock, His work is perfect, for all his ways are judgment’ (Deut. 32:4). It says that just as the things made by him are consummately perfect, so are his commandments consummately just ... We only apprehend the justice of some of His commandments just as we only apprehend some of the marvels in the things He has made, in the parts of the body of animals and in the motions of the spheres.42

Maimonides interprets the verse in Deuteronomy as analogous to Psalm 19. It compares the divine work of created ‘things,’ such as rocks and rabbits, with His ways, or commandments. This, however, still leaves us with the question with which we began this discussion: is there a strict analogy, or even equation, between these two species of divine production, or is the comparison merely heuristic and preliminary? The case for a radical naturalism that equates the two would seem to be supported by an earlier passage at the conclusion of the second book of the Guide: ‘Everything that is produced in time must necessarily have a proximate cause which has produced it. In its turn that cause has a cause and so forth until finally one comes to the First Cause of all things, I mean God’s will and free choice. For all these things the expressions to say, to speak, to call and to send are used.’43

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Here we would seem to have, at least at first glance, a statement that equates all acts of God with natural events, and one in which even human legislation could be called a divine commandment, merely by virtue of God’s position as the First Cause. If this were the case, then Maimonides’ claim that there are reasons for the commandments would just amount to the claim that they (like everything else in the world) have causes. When Funkenstein compared Maimonides to Hegel, Kant, and others, he ended with the statement that ‘Maimonides, as all other medieval versions of the divine economy, allows at best a relative autonomy to the collective evolution of man.’44 However, it may now appear that this reads Maimonides too conservatively and that in fact calling Mosaic law a ‘divine commandment’ is to be analysed as meaning merely that it is a useful product of natural events.45 Such an interpretation would seem further confirmed by a close look at the paraphrase with which Maimonides began his discussion of divine cunning: ‘If you consider the divine actions – I mean to say the natural actions – the deity’s wily graciousness and wisdom,’46 which seems to suggest that God’s actions just are the actions of nature, under a different description. Nonetheless, such a reading seems to me to illicitly radicalize (and thus flatten out) the Maimonidean account. In the first place, we are speaking about an Aristotelian causal chain that includes not merely efficient causes but teleological, final, causes, which may include divine intentions.47 One stark way of framing this problem is to ask whether, if everything in the universe may be traced back to the First Cause and thus described as an action of God, the laws of idolaters might also be described as divine. In an earlier discussion of the nature of law, which also crucially invokes Psalm 19, Maimonides implicitly addressed this problem: [T]he law ... should be considered with reference to the man who is perfect among the people. For it is the aim of the law that everyone should be such a man. Only that Law is called by us divine Law, whereas other political regimens – such as the nomoi of the Greeks and the ravings of the Sabians and of others – are due ... to the actions of rulers who were not prophets.48

This would seem to merely answer the question by verbal fiat: we do not call such law divine. The tension that this line of questioning exposes in Maimonidean thought may be irresolvable; it certainly will not be

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resolved here. It may be more fruitful instead to ask what drove Maimonides to this position. To turn to my second question, what was the prolonged madness he was trying to avoid? The earlier discussion has already brought us part of the answer. Although Maimonides was committed to explaining the commandments as constituents of a past historical world, he seemed to reject any symbolic reading of that world. Problematic commandments are to be understood as tools that have worked so well their function is now forgotten. The particulars either reflected the surrounding culture (the way in which Israelites expected their tools to work) or were a functionally necessary feature of the tool. In his methodological introduction to the Guide, Maimonides made a similar point with regard to the interpretation of parables: Know that the prophetic parables are of two kinds. In some of these each word has a meaning, while in others the parable as a whole indicates the whole of the intended meaning ... When therefore you find that in some chapter of this treatise I have explained the meaning of the parable and have drawn your attention to the general proposition signified by it, you would not inquire into all the details ... for doing so would lead you one of two ways, either in turning aside from the intended subject or in assuming an obligation to interpret things not susceptible of interpretation ... [which would] result in extravagant fantasies.49

The ‘extravagant fantasies’ of the over-ingenious interpreter of the parable and the ‘prolonged madness’ of one who would interpret ritual detail both seem to be the result of an attempt to interpret what should not be interpreted. The princess’s hair was blonde because it must be some colour; seven lambs are to be sacrificed because it must be some number; and in any event the audience expects princesses to be blonde and sacrifices to come in sevens. In both cases, Maimonides seemed to be warning against fetishizing or reifying particulars, in imagining they lead to some universal truth, when they are merely ineliminable contingencies of one sort or another. It is worth asking, if only in contrast, what sort of medieval religious thought did take this risk. In several places in his commentary to the Guide, Moses of Narbonne, a fourteenth-century Averroist, suggested that Maimonides was opposing the Kabbalists (to whom he ironically refers as ‘those who dwell in light’) in his insistence on the historical contingency of the commandments.50 Such remarks are, in part, autobiographical, for Narboni, at an

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earlier stage of his career, propounded a version of the astrologically tinged, theurgic Kabbalah he later opposed.51 In his commentary to the Shiur komah, an early gnostic text given over to the praise and literal measurement of God’s greatness (His limbs, for instance, or His cheekbones), Narboni correlated the heavenly spheres with the divine potencies, or sefirot, which manifest the divine presence and towards which religious acts are directed. In doing so, he read contemporary Kabbalistic doctrine into this ancient text and attempted to harmonize it with natural philosophy.52 Narboni’s later rejection of such theologizing as idolatrous was in the Maimonidean spirit, but it is historically unlikely that such criticism is literally implicit in Maimonides’ text. The first clear instance of an explanation of the commandments in terms of the unification of divine aspects or potencies is in the Sefer ha-bahir, which, though it might conceivably precede the Guide, first appeared in Provence and was almost certainly unknown to Maimonides.53 In its discussion of precisely those commandments that Maimonides would historicize, the Bahir reveals a connection between human actions and divine being. Thus, with regard to sacrifices, the Bahir states, ‘And why do we call it a sacrifice [korban] if not because it brings together [she-mekareb] the holy powers?’54 Historically, such statements – not to speak of the lush theosophy to which they gave rise – were not available to Maimonides; however, Narboni’s identification of them with Maimonides’ ‘prolonged madness’ was analytically acute. For what such a theology provides is precisely a systematic method for endowing intrinsic, synchronic significance to ritual detail. It is the Kabbalists who insist upon decoding as symbol what Maimonides considered to be merely a contingent means to a now-forgotten end. It is perhaps worth noting in this context that Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s contemporary translation of the Guide, composed in Provence at the end of the twelfth century, may already contain a slighting allusion to the Sefer ha-bahir. In the first few lines of the first chapter of the Guide, Maimonides wrote, ‘People have thought that in the Hebrew language “image” denotes the shape and configuration of a thing. This supposition led to the doctrine of the pure corporeality of God, on account of His saying “Let us make man in Our image after our likeness” ... However He is in their view bigger and more resplendent.’55 Those who believe that God has a body (just a very big one) are almost certainly to be understood as the readers of the Shiur komah, which Maimonides elsewhere suggested ought to be permanently disposed of.56 The

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second reference, to those who believe him to be ‘more resplendent,’ would appear less determinate, but perhaps it gains a referent in Ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation from the Arabic that reads ‘yoter gadol veyoter bahir.’57 Moses of Narbonne, who lived just after the height of early Kabbalistic theosophy, and, perhaps, Samuel Ibn Tibbon, who lived at its inception, saw such theosophy as falling under the Maimonidean category of ‘prolonged madness.’ This seems to me a worthwhile analytical, or phenomenological, point if not a historical one.58 For if, as Douglas charged, Maimonidean historicism is symbolically colour blind, then we may begin to wonder whether that trend of thought to which it was later opposed may, in its determination to take the details of ritual seriously and decode their symbolism, also have represented a kind of methodological breakthrough, albeit (to adopt Funkenstein’s original caveat) ‘perhaps on the wrong object.’ In short, the Kabbalist’s answer to questions such as ‘Why a ram and not a lamb?’ might have something to say to the cultural anthropologist.

Kabbalistic Explanation and Cultural Anthropology Joseph Dan, a distinguished scholar of Jewish mysticism, has argued that kabbalistic taamei ha-mitsvot do not really constitute an explanation but merely exchange one symbolism for another. Thus, he writes, the sefirotic account of the Sukkah as representing the bridal canopy under which the male and female aspects of the godhead (Tiferet and Shekhinah, respectively) unite during the fall harvest is simply ‘not an explanation ... This picture of a divine wedding is a kabbalistic symbol that has no literal significance ... the kabbalist writing taamei ha-mitsvot is just changing one set of symbols for another.’ 59 Maimonides, among others, would have agreed, but it is worth thinking through what such an explanation, however farfetched, does contain. In the first place, it takes for granted the significance of ritual detail. Second, it presupposes a closed symbolic economy in which widely divergent cultural phenomena may be related. Third, it explicates the ritual in terms of a myth in which the family acts out an episode of the divine life. Such symbolism might tell us a great deal about the culture from which these rituals sprang, or at least the culture in which the interpretation arose. Gershom Scholem seemed to be making a similar claim when he wrote that, ‘It

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is a paradoxical fact that none other than the Kabbalists, through their interpretation of various religious acts and customs, have made it clear what they signified to an average believer, if not what they really meant from the beginning.’60 It is unlikely that the untutored believer would ever have thought that the Sukkah represented the divine wedding canopy (an item, needless to say, found in no biblical or liturgical text), but Scholem’s point is, I think, different. It is that in taking ritual as a datum to be explained – or better yet interpreted – rather than explained away, the Kabbalist is closer to the spirit of the average believer than is the Maimonidean. One can, moreover, imagine a particular Kabbalistic explanation being exploited in an anthropological account of Jewish ritual, and perhaps not merely as the ‘secondary explanation’ of an informant to be quoted and analysed but as a genuine theoretical resource – that is, as a discursive account that ‘reads’ ritual symbolically and with the conviction that it is to be systematically connected with, or opposed to, other rites and doctrines within the cultural system. To put the suggestion in the terms suggested by Victor Turner, Kabbalistic explanations might function not merely at the level of exegetical or operational meaning (the manifest and immediate reasons for a ritual) but even as a clue to a ritual’s ‘positional meaning’ – its meaning within the symbolic economy of the culture61 In doing so, it fastens on just the sort of detail that Maimonides considered contingent, and indeed it produces an extravagant mythos that he would have considered anathema. Nonetheless, it may also be an instance, like Maimonides’ historical explanations of the commandments, of a process by which a religious tradition develops the means to step outside itself. I return now (or finally) to Douglas and Funkenstein. We may say that, whereas Funkenstein was right in pointing out Maimonides’ methodological achievement in finding a contingent human world behind the biblical commandments, criticism such as Douglas’s points to another sort of contextual reasoning to which Maimonides (and perhaps Funkenstein too) were less sensitive. Such reasoning approaches cultural phenomena as part of an ideally closed and synchronic system that must be understood, in the first place, in their relations to one another. This is the way at least some forms of cultural anthropology may be said to proceed, and it is true of certain forms of Kabbalistic thinking as well.

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Epilogue As we have seen, Kant and Hegel were often at the horizon of Funkenstein’s conceptual history. It may be worth noting, then, that Kant very likely was alluding to Psalm 19, which played an important exegetical role in some of the medieval arguments sketched above, when he wrote of the awe he felt before ‘the starry heavens above and the moral law within.’ The heavens have been de-animated and the perfect law internalized, but they are still, perhaps, recognizable in their juxtaposition.62 The remark, which occurs in the concluding pages of The Critique of Practical Reason, also served as Kant’s epitaph. The inscribed bronze plaque is apparently all that is left of his gravesite. Although I shall not presume to compose my teacher’s epitaph, this one would serve Amos Funkenstein – who spent his life tracing the ways in which thought about God’s word became thought about His world, and how in that very process it ceased to be His – as well.

Notes Original version published in Jewish Social Studies 6, 1 (Fall 1999): 6–29. 1 Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 146. 2 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 233, n40. 3 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 43. 4 The account in Perceptions is found in ch. 5, 131–55, though discussions in the previous and following chapters are relevant. Funkenstein’s earlier discussions begin with a long suggestive footnote in his first book, Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung: Formen der Gegenwartsbestimmung im Geschichtsdenken des hohen Mittlealters (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1965), 169–71, which compares Maimonides to Anselm of Havelberg in prefiguring the views of Hegel and characterizes his view of history as ‘organological.’ Several later essays validate and deepen this insight. Chronologically the most important of these are ‘Gesetz und Geschichte: Zur historierenden Hermeneutik bei Moses Maimonides und Thomas von Aquin,’ Viator 1 (1970): 147–78; ‘Maimonides’ Political Theory and Realistic Messianism,’

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Abraham P. Socher Miscellanea Medievalia 11 (1977): 81–103; Teva, historyah u-meshikhiyut etsel ha-rambam (Tel Aviv, 1983); and Theology and the Scientific Imagination, esp. 227–34. Maimonides, Perush ha-mishnah, sanhedrin, trans. J. Kafih (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1965), 2: 140 (perek helek). Whether Arab belles-lettres and historiography were actually being listed among the sefarim hitsoniyim here or are merely comparable in their lack of spiritual and material purpose is unclear. For Maimonides’ relative indifference to the Jewish genre of ‘chains of tradition,’ see his remarks in the Introduction to Perush ha-mishnah. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), I:2 (24). Hereafter this work will be cited simply as Guide. Salo Baron, ‘The Historical Outlook of Maimonides,’ in Baron, History and Jewish Historians: Essays and Addresses (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1964), 112. Compare, for example, J. Abelson’s earlier discomfort with Maimonides’ dismissal of ‘the Parnassus of Arabic Literature’ in Jewish Quarterly Review 19 (1906–7): xxx. Isadore Twersky was in general, if somewhat muted, agreement with Funkenstein on these issues; see An Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (Mishneh Torah) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), esp. 220–8. Baron, ‘Historical Outlook,’ 110, n3, and see 113–14. Heinrich Graetz, Die Konstruktion der jüdischen Geschichte (Berlin: Schocken, 1936), 85. Julius Guttman, ‘John Spencers Erklärung der biblischen Gesetze in ihrer Beziehung zu Maimonides,’ Fetskrift i anleding af Professor David Simonsens 70–arige fodelsdag (Copenhagen, 1923), 258–76, and more briefly in Guttman, Philosophies of Judaism, trans. D. Silverman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 206–7. It was part of Funkenstein’s disagreement with Baron’s student Yosef Haim Yerushalmi on the role of history in Judaism to insist on this category of ‘historical consciousness’ as mediating between the ahistorical typologies of collective memory (operative, for instance, in the Passover Seder) and the formal genre of historiography. For Funkenstein’s explicit critique of Yerushalmi, see Perceptions, esp. 9–11. Although Maimonides, who is a special case, was not a crux of this debate, one can see the difficulties of Yerushalmi’s binary opposition in his own brief remark that Maimonides ‘had his own historical concerns and sensitivities’: Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (New York: Schocken, 1989), 126–7, n5. In ascribing ‘historical sensitivity’ to Maimonides, Yerushalmi is driven to a functional ana-

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logue of Funkenstein’s ‘historical consciousness.’ For a defence of Yerushalmi’s position, see the work of his student David Myers, ‘Remembering Zakhor : A Super-commentary,’ together with Funkenstein’s brief response, in History and Memory 4, 2 (1992): 129–48. The realization that the most creative medieval historical thought might be found outside the genre of historiography was, of course, not Funkenstein’s alone. Compare R.W. Southern’s remarks on Maimonides’ Christian contemporary Hugh of St Victor: ‘His historical thoughts came to him not through writing history but through writing theology and biblical commentaries and through teaching the liberal arts’: in ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing II, Hugh of St. Victor and the Idea of Historical Development,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1971): 164. This is not to suggest that such concerns are projected onto the Maimonidean sources. For an explicit application of a Weberian model of disenchanted rationality to Maimonides’ taamei ha-mitsvot by another sensitive reader, see Bernard Septimus, ‘Biblical Religion and Political Rationality in Simone Luzzatto, Maimonides and Spinoza,’ in Bernard Septimus and Isadore Twersky, eds, Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 407–8. Blumenberg writes, ‘Deprived by God’s hiddenness of metaphysical guarantees for the world, man constructs for himself a counterworld of elementary rationality and manipulability’: in Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 177. Actually the similarities between Funkenstein and Blumenberg go much farther. Both Blumenberg’s Legitimacy and Funkenstein’s Theology are in part reactions to Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History, and both were written from within the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte. The similarities, however, should not be overstated. It is central to Blumenberg’s project to reject the concept of secularization; Funkenstein was dubious of Blumenberg’s alternative notion of ‘re-occupation.’ For a discussion of Funkenstein in this context, see Samuel Moyn’s contribution to this volume, pages 143–166. For my (mild) strictures on the first published version of this paper, see Socher, ‘Funkenstein on the Theological Origins of Historicism: A Critical Note,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 401–8. Guide III:26 (509). Douglas, Purity, 29–31. Guide III:26 (509). Funkenstein, Perceptions, 138. In doing so, Funkenstein follows Shem Tov Ibn Joseph Shem Tov’s classic

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Abraham P. Socher fifteenth-century commentary to Guide III:26, which uses the example of two glasses of wine before a thirsty man. Such examples are members of a family of philosophical puzzles named after ‘Buridan’s Ass,’ who starved in indecision between two entirely equivalent bales of hay (and was apparently never mentioned by Buridan). They actually originate with AlGhazali, who wrote of a thirsty man before two glasses of water, and with whom Maimonides was familiar. See Nicholas Rescher, ‘Choice without Preference: A Study of the History and of the Logic of the Problem of “Buridan’s Ass,” ’ Kant Studien 51 (1959/60): 142–75. For a vigorous and sophisticated attack on this line of interpretation, see Josef Stern, ‘The Idea of a Hoq in Maimonides’ Explanation of the Law,’ in Yirmiyahu Yovel and Shlomo Pines, eds, Maimonides and Philosophy (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1986), esp. 105–7. Stern has developed his important interpretation in several subsequent publications; see especially his Problems and Parables of Law: Maimonides and Nahmanides on Reasons for the Commandments (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998). Funkenstein, Perceptions, 139. That is, they have a purpose or telos; see Guide III:25 (506). In Guide III:29, we are told that Abraham grew up in this religion. In Maimonides’ code, Mishneh torah, hilkhot akum 1: 1–2, idolatry is presented as degeneration from an original monotheism. Funkenstein was inclined to accept Maimonides as having held some such theory of decline and restoration, as does Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides. However, several early commentators (e.g., Narboni) suspected an esoteric and more thoroughly historicist doctrine: that idolatry was, in fact, the first religion. On such a reading, the account in Hilkhot akum might be taken as an ahistorical cautionary parable. He even believed it to have been polemicized against in the Bible: ‘I am of the opinion that the Book of Medicines, which Hezekiah put away, was like the beginning of the Nabatean Agriculture’: Guide III:32 (529). Guide III:32 (526). Maimonides makes the explicit argument for his famous doctrine of negative attributes in Guide I:50–60. Funkenstein, Perceptions, 145. Guide III:46 (58)6. Maimonides employs a similar analogy with the infant and breastfeeding mother in an explication of the principle of exegetical accommodation in Guide I:33. Guide III:32 (537). Funkenstein, Perceptions, 143–4. Cf Shlomo Pines’s similar suggestion in his

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‘Translator’s Introduction,’ to Maimonides, Guide, lxxii–lxxiv, especially n32. Funkenstein appears to have come to this comparison independently (he was already working on Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung, when Pines’s Guide came out in 1963). In any event, he never explicitly engaged with Pines’s important discussion. Of course the religious model for Hegel’s schema was the accommodation effected by the incarnation of God in Christ and the consequent supersession of the old covenant by the new; nonetheless, the analogies are striking. In its implicit criticism of biblical sacrifice from the standpoint of medieval Aristotelianism, Maimonides’ schema in the Guide might also be considered supersessionist. This is, of course, a crux of traditional and academic Maimonidean scholarship. This is, of course, famously the topic of Douglas’s Purity and Danger. Circumcision is discussed as a kind of sacrificial offering in Zohar I: 93a. For discussion of the possible anthropological uses of such texts, see below. A recent study of circumcision very much indebted to Douglas’s brand of cultural anthropology is Lawrence Hoffman, Covenant of Blood (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995). Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 2: 55. Guide, Intro., esp. 17–18. Guide, III:26 (506) (my emphasis). Note the exegetically sterilizing effect – philologically correct or not – of nineteenth-century biblical scholarship, which split Psalm 19 into two poems. On this reading the psalm contains ‘a morning hymn, praising the glory of El in the heavens ... [and] a didactic poem describing the excellence of the law’: C.A. Briggs and E.G. Briggs, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Psalms (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1906], 162). I owe this observation to a remark of the late Professor Isadore Twersky in a 1995 seminar. See also the brief remarks in Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides, 376–7. The topos goes back at least to Augustine, but is especially important in the ‘12th century Renaissance’ associated with such figures as Alan of Lille, who famously wrote Omnis mundi creatura / quasi liber et pictura / nobis est in speculum. On Lille and the ‘Symbolist Mentality,’ see M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Such thought was revived in the early modern period with statements such as Paracelsus’s ‘the firmament is another book of physic’; see Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 319–26, and

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Abraham P. Socher Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970), esp. 17–44. C. Chavel, ed., Kitvei ha-ramban (Jerusalem: 1964), 1: 141–2. See also the thirteenth-century commentary of R. David Kimhi to Psalm 19, which is more in line with Maimonides’ use of the psalm. Profiat Duran, Maaseh efod (Vienna, 1865), 1. Duran, who worked in Christian Spain (indeed for a time was a Christian), is also the author of one of the standard commentaries to the Guide. Guide, III:48 (605–6) (my emphasis). Guide, II:48 (410). Funkenstein, Perceptions, 144. Compare the characterization of Bernard Septimus: ‘one crucial distinction is that, for Maimonides, the achievement of rationality was itself the rationally planned intention of the Lawgiver’ (‘Biblical Religion,’ 413). Josef Stern appears to take this line in ‘The Idea of a Hoq.’ Guide, III:32 (525) (my emphasis). For brief but suggestive remarks on the relationship between Aristotelian and Hegelian accounts of causation and their relation to the ideal of verstehen in social sciences, see George Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), ch. 1. Guide, II:39 (381). Guide, Intro., 12–13. Compare also the remark at Guide II:25 (328), that thoroughly allegorizing biblical narrative would lead to ‘crazy imaginings.’ Moses Narboni, Beur le-sefer moreh ha-nevukhim, ed. J. Goldenthal (Vienna, 1852), at, e.g., 34a, 49a, 61b, 62a, 63b. For his ironic characterization of the Kabbalists, see 14a–b. For a more harmonistic account of Narboni’s intellectual development, see Colette Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 333–41. My reading follows Alexander Altmann, ‘Moses Narboni’s Epistle on the Shiur Komma,’ in Altmann, ed., Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Gershom Scholem dated the Shiur komah to ‘not later than the second century,’ in his Origins of the Kaballah, ed. R.J. Werblowsky, trans. A. Arkush (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 20. Scholem and others have located the Sefer ha-bahir as first appearing among the mystical circles of Provence in the late twelfth century, but this has recently been contested; see n57, below. Daniel Abrams, ed., Sefer ha-bahir: An Edition Based on the Earliest Manuscripts (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 1994), sec. 78: 164–5. Among the other

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ritual commandments similarly treated in the Bahir are tefillin, tsitsit, and, repeatedly, the taking of the four species during the festival of Succot. Guide, I:1 (21). See, for instance, the comment of the modern translator, J. Kafih, Moreh ha-nevukhim (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1980), 1. It is probably also meant to be cross-referenced internally to the description of Sabian religion in Guide III:32. I hope to return to this hypothesis on another occasion. For now, compare the translation of Ibn Tibbon’s competitor, Judah Al-Harizi, which does not employ the term. Note, also, the entries under Bahir in the respective philosophical lexicons that both Al-Harizi and Ibn Tibbon appended to their translations. In conversation, Moshe Idel has taken exception to this hypothesis, arguing, pace Scholem, that recent research has suggested that the Bahir ought to be dated much later and thus would not have been available to Ibn Tibbon either. For a review of current literature, see Abrams, Sefer ha-bahir. The question of who Maimonides was reacting to in such characterizations is an important one but is, unfortunately, outside the scope of this article. Clearly he was rejecting the various uses to which astrology was put as well as the less ‘scientific’ forms of superstition, as was already noted by Narboni, Beur, 62a. More generally, however, he opposed all attempts to ascribe intrinsic, non-instrumental value to the commandments. Here Judah Halevi may have been a hidden opponent. In Kuzari, I: 79, Halevi described the commandments as possessing, like medicines, intrinsic curative properties that can only be administered by the expert physician (Moses). At the conclusion of his theoretical discussion of the commandments (Guide III:34), Maimonides rejects precisely this analogy, though he does not mention Halevi. Commandments, like all laws, are blunt instruments of social policy, framed in the general case, and may harm some individuals. In general, Maimonides’ relationship to Halevi calls for further exploration. Halevi is never mentioned in the Guide, and some have taken this as evidence that Maimonides did not read, or at least was not influenced by, Halevi. My own inclination, on the contrary, is to see him as a kind of Bloomian ‘strong poet’ whose presence Maimonides suppressed. Joseph Dan, Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), 90–1. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, trans. R. Mannheim (New York: Schocken, 1941), 36. Scholem cites the folklore studies of J.Z. Lauterbach, now collected in Lauterbach, Rabbinic Essays, as partial confirmation.

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61 Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 131–50, on ‘Muchona the Hornet Interpreter of Religion,’ a native informant whose ‘daily seminar’ on Ndembu ritual and religion with Turner was devoted to matters of ‘positional meaning.’ 62 When I pointed this out to Funkenstein, he said ‘Yes, of course, [he] knew it from the Lutheran hymnal.’ In contrast to this bibliographical speculation, see Ben Ami Scharfstein’s somewhat strained psycho-biographical discussion of the passage in The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 211–12.

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chapter eight

History and/or Memory: On the Principle of Accommodation CARLO GINZBURG

1. In the last decades the relationship between history and memory, history and oblivion, has been scrutinized with unprecedented intensity. This widespread concern arose, we have been told, from multiple challenges: the imminent physical disappearance of the last generation of witnesses to the extermination of European Jews; the upsurge of old and new nationalisms in Africa, Asia, and Europe; the limitations of a dry, ‘scientific’ approach to history, and so forth. These underlying motivations should be submitted to a careful analysis, which is outside the scope of my paper. But they all aim to integrate memory within a more comprehensive vision of history. This intellectual endeavour is, I believe, extremely valuable. But it does not take into account the other side of the coin: the irreducibility of memory to history. It is this tension between ‘and’ and ‘or’ that I would like to explore. My debt towards Amos Funkenstein, and especially towards his emphasis on Augustine’s deeply original notion of accommodation, will be immediately clear; but my conclusions will be rather different. 2. In his book Zakhor, Yosef Yerushalmi analysed a double paradox: on the one hand, ‘although Judaism throughout the ages was absorbed with the meaning of history, historiography itself played at best an ancillary role among the Jews, and often no role at all’; on the other, ‘while memory of the past was always a central component of Jewish experience, the historian was not his primary custodian.’1 The answer which Yerushalmi gave to this paradox is well known. Jews entered into a vital relationship with the past through the prophets, who explored the meaning of history, and through a collective memory

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transmitted by rituals, which conveyed ‘not a series of facts to be contemplated at a distance, but a series of situations into which one could somehow be existentially drawn.’ This is especially evident, Yerushalmi wrote, ‘in that quintessential exercise in Jewish group memory which is the Passover Seder ... a symbolic enactment of an historical scenario whose three great acts structure the Haggadah that is read aloud: slavery – deliverance – ultimate redemption.’2 The ahistorical, if not antihistorical, attitude that is so prominent in the biblical and rabbinical tradition, Yerushalmi wrote, ‘did not inhibit the transmission of a vital Jewish past from one generation to the next, and Judaism neither lost its link to history nor its fundamentally historical orientation.’3 ‘History’ here means past, res gestae – not historia rerum gestarum. Of the three elements mentioned in the subtitle of Zakhor’s first chapter – ‘Meaning in History, Memory, and the Writing of History’ – the third one, until the nineteenth century, played a minor role, and often no role at all, in the ‘transmission of a vital Jewish past.’ 3. Amos Funkenstein’s commentary on Zakhor is included in ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness,’ an essay first published in the journal History and Memory and then reprinted with minor changes as an introduction to his own collection Perceptions of Jewish History. In stressing the distinction between collective and historical memory, Funkenstein argued, Maurice Halbwachs had been right; but in sharply opposing them, he had gone too far.4 Therefore, Funkenstein wrote, in order to refrain from postulating an unbridgeable gap between collective memory and the recording of history, and at the same time not to blur the differences between them, we need an additional interpretative dynamic construct to explain how the second arises out of the first ... I introduce the term ‘historical consciousness,’ in this precise meaning, as such a dynamic heuristic construct – the degree of creative freedom in the use of interpretation of the contents of collective memory.

These remarks provided the framework for Funkenstein’s main criticism of Yerushalmi’s book: lacking the mediating category of historical consciousness (which is not at all confined to historiography proper) Yerushalmi, like Halbwachs before him, inevitably polarizes the contrast between historical narrative and ‘collective memory.’ It is my contention that, with or without historiography

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proper, creative thinking about history – past and present – never ceased. Jewish culture was and remained formed by an acute historical consciousness, albeit different at different periods.5

Both Yerushalmi and Funkenstein agreed on the lack of distance that collective memory implies. In the Seder ceremony, Yerushalmi wrote, ‘memory ... is no longer recollection, which still preserves a sense of distance, but reactualization.’6 ‘Collective memory,’ Funkenstein remarked, is ‘almost by definition, a “monumental” history in the Nietzschean sense.’7 But here a divergence emerged. A vital connection with the past is not synonymous, Funkenstein emphasized, with the ‘creative freedom’ (another Nietzschean echo) ‘in the use of interpretation of the contents of collective memory.’8 These words were followed by specific remarks on Jewish history on which I am unable to comment. My reflections will focus on the general implications of the debate. If collective memory, reinforced by rituals, ceremonies, and other communal occasions, did not allow any distance from the past (it never does), how was that distance achieved? I will try to show that, besides his reference to ‘historical consciousness,’ Funkenstein suggested another, more specific, and in my view more acceptable, answer to this question. 4. I will also start from memory and ritual – in fact, from a case in which their connection was made particularly explicit. In celebrating Passover, just before his death, Jesus said, ‘This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me’ (Luke 22:19). These words were certainly consonant with the Jewish tradition.9 But Paul’s momentous interpretation of these words, which he quoted with some additions in 1 Corinthians 11:23 ff, transformed Jesus’s body into a corpus mysticum, as it was later called – a mystical body in which all believers were incorporated: ‘The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of the blood of Christ? the bread which we break, is it not a communion of the body of Christ? seeing that we, who are many, are one bread, one body: for we all partake the one bread’ (1 Cor. 10: 16 ff). ‘All,’ as one reads in Galatians 3:28, implied the disappearance of every specificity – ethnic, social, or sexual: ‘there can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male nor female; for ye are all one man in Christ Jesus.’ In this universal perspective the connection with the past took a new form. The issue was addressed in general terms by Augustine, in a passage

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of his treatise On the Trinity (14. 8. 11). In discussing the seeds of the image of God in the human soul he wrote, ‘Things that are past do not themselves exist, but only certain signs of them as past, the sight or hearing of which makes it known that they have been and passed away. And these signs are either situated in the places themselves, as for example monuments of the dead or the like; or exist in written books worthy of credit, as is all history that is of weight and approved authority; or are in the minds of those who already know them.’10 The power that masters the signs in our mind is memoria, on which Augustine wrote so profoundly in the tenth book of his Confessions. But, as Victor Saxer showed in his remarkable work Morts martyrs reliques en Afrique chrétienne aux premiers siècles, in Augustine’s writings memoria had also a range of other (and for us less predictable) meanings. It referred to funerary monuments of martyrs, the monumenta mortuorum mentioned in the passage I just quoted; to relics; to reliquaries; to liturgical commemorations.11 All these signs were related to the Ecclesia sanctorum, which Augustine defined in his Enarrationes in Psalmos (149. 3) in the following terms: The church of the saints is that which God first prefigured [praesignavit] before it was seen, and then set forth that it might be seen. The church of the saints was heretofore in writings, now it is in nations. Heretofore the church of the saints was only read of, now it is both read of and seen. When it was only read of, it was believed; now it is seen, and is spoken against.’12

Ecclesia sanctorum erat antea in codicibus, modo in gentibus. A contemporary of Augustine, Nicetas of Aquileia (ca 340–414) stressed the continuity between the Old and the New Testament, between what could be read in the sacred books and what could be seen in reality, in even stronger terms: ‘What else is the Church but the congregation of all saints? From the beginning of the world, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; the prophets; the apostles; the martyrs; and the other just who were and are and will be, are one Church, because sanctified by one faith and one conversation, signed by one Spirit, they are made into one body; the head of which is Christ, as it is written.’13 5. In Augustine’s thought the Jewish and the Christian past were usually connected through the notion of figura.14 In his treatise De doctrina Christiana he relied on this criterion in order to clarify some difficult passages in the New Testament. For instance, the seemingly monstruous

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injunction in John 6:53 – ‘Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you’ – must be understood figuraliter: ‘It is therefore a figura, enjoining that we should have a share in the sufferings of our Lord, and that we should retain a sweet and profitable memory [suaviter et utiliter recondendum in memoria] of the fact that his flesh was wounded and crucified for us.’15 But in another passage of De doctrina Christiana Augustine pointed to the excesses of a figurative interpretation of the Bible. We must refrain, he insisted, from projecting into the Bible the customs of the time and place in which we readers live (III. 10. 15): But since humanity is inclined to estimate sins, not on the basis of importance of the passion involved in them, but rather on the basis of their own customs, so that they consider something to be culpable in accordance with the way it is reprimanded and condemned ordinarily in their own place and time, and, at the same time, consider it to be virtuous and praiseworthy in so far as the customs of those among whom they live would so incline them, it so happens that if the Bible commend something despised by the customs of the listeners, or condemns what those customs do not condemn, they take the biblical locution as figurative if they accept it as an authority. But the Bible teaches nothing but charity ...16

This principle implied that ‘careful attention is ... to be paid to what is proper to places, times, and persons lest we condemn the shameful too hastily.’17 In some cases we must read the Bible both on a literal and a figurative level – once again, because customs since then have changed (III. 12. 19): The just men of the past [iusti veteres] imagined and foretold the heavenly Kingdom in terms of an earthly kingdom. The necessity for a sufficient number of children was responsible for the blameless custom by which one man had several wives at the same time ... And whatever is so narrated is to be taken not only historically and literally, but also figuratively and prophetically [non solum historice ac proprie, sed etiam figurate ac prophetice acceptum interpretandum est] so that it is to be interpreted for the end of charity, either as it applies to God, to one’s neighbor, or both.18

6. I am approaching – albeit from a slightly different angle – the topic which Amos Funkenstein analysed in a dense, magnificent chapter of his book Theology and the Scientific Imagination: accommodation.19 It may

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be noticed that the exegetical argument based on ‘the divine accommodation to the “language of man,”’ as Funkenstein labelled it, insisted mostly on a figurative reading of the Bible. The passages I have just quoted show that the related argument of ‘the divine accommodation to the history of mankind,’ which justified the existence of ancient customs like the patriarchs’ polygamy, stressed the need to read the Bible historically and literally, historice ac proprie, as well.20 But as Augustine warned his reader (III. 18. 26), ‘Again caution must be exercised lest anyone think that those things in the Old Testament that are neither vices nor crimes because of the condition of their times, even when such things are taken literally rather than figuratively [in scripturis veteribus pro illorum temporum condicione, etiamsi non figurate sed proprie intellegatur], may be transferred to our own times and put in practice.’21 Augustine emphasized the need to judge customs according to ‘the condition of their times’ particularly when he dealt with the issue of Jewish sacrifices. The Roman senator Volusianus once raised a provocative question: How could God welcome the new Christian sacrifices and reject the old ones? Could He ever change His mind? In his reply, addressed to the imperial commissioner Flavius Marcellinus, Augustine relied upon the notion of accommodation, as Amos Funkenstein showed. My reading of this crucial text will be a bit different from his.22 Let us first hear Augustine’s voice: The wide range opened up by this question may be seen by any one who is competent and careful to observe the contrast between the beautiful and the suitable [pulchri aptique distantiam], examples of which are scattered, we may say, throughout the universe. For the beautiful [pulchrum], to which the ugly and deformed is opposed, is estimated and praised according to what it is in itself. But the suitable [aptum], to which the incongruous is opposed, depends on something else to which it is bound, and is estimated not according to what it is in itself, but according to that with which it is connected: the contrast, also, between becoming and unbecoming [decens atque indecens] is either the same, or at least regarded as the same. Now apply what we have said to the subject in hand. The divine institution of sacrifice was suitable [aptum] in the former dispensation, but is not suitable now. For the change suitable to the present age has been enjoined by God, who knows infinitely better than man what is fitting for every age [quid cuique tempori accommodate adhibeatur], and who is, whether He give or add, abolish or curtail, increase or diminish, the unchangeable Governor as He is the unchangeable Creator of mutable things, ordering all events

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in His providence until the beauty of the completed course of time, the component parts of which are the dispensations adapted to each successive age, shall be finished, like the grand melody of some ineffably wise master of song, and those pass into the eternal immediate contemplation of God who here, though it is a time of faith, not of sight, are acceptably worshipping Him.23

In this text, as Funkenstein rightly noticed, Augustine relied upon his Platonic aesthetic theory.24 We may recall here that Augustine’s first work was a treatise on De pulchro et apto, dedicated to Hierius, a Roman orator born in Syria and educated in Greece (Conf., IV, xiii, 20). In his Confessions, Augustine gave a hint of the content of this treatise, which was already unavailable to him and has been lost ever since, and retrospectively criticized its Manichean perspective (IV, xv, 4). The treatise, as both the title and Augustine’s succinct recollection suggest, dealt with the distinction between ‘pulchrum,’ on the one hand, and ‘aptum’ and ‘accommodatum’ on the other.25 The distinction had been dealt with in Plato’s Hippias Major, and was certainly part of the Platonic legacy. Augustine – who had practically no Greek – must have had an indirect access to these topics through Cicero’s writings, which he had read passionately in his youth.26 In my view, Augustine’s letter to Marcellinus shows distinct echoes of Cicero’s De oratore (55 bce). Crassus, who represents the author’s point of view in the dialogue, introduces his remarks on oratory by recalling Plato’s dictum that all intellectual activities are bound together by an internal coherence; but what follows has a definite unplatonic ring. There is in nature, Crassus-Cicero says, ‘in its own kind a multiplicity of things that are different from one another and yet are esteemed as having a similar nature’ (in suo genere res complures dissimiles inter se, quae tamen consimili laude dignentur).27 This apparently obvious principle is then projected by Cicero first into the arts, both visual and verbal, then into rhetoric, transforming the notion of genre (genus) into something close to our notion of individual style.28 Within a single art, like sculpture, he writes, we have excellent artists such as Myro, Polyclitus, and Lysippus, whose extreme diversity is appreciated by everybody. The same can be said about painting (he mentions Zeuxis, Aglaophon, Apelles) or poetry. Latin poets such as Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius are as different one from the other as the Greek poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides: all of them are nearly equally praised ‘in their various genre of writing’ (in dissimili scribendi genere). Their excellence is incomparable; perfection, as Cicero shows

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by giving succinct definitions of the characteristics of various orators, is reached by every artist in his own way. But ultimately, Cicero says, if we could scrutinize all the orators from every place and every time (ubique sunt aut fuerunt oratores), would we not conclude that there are as many genres as there are orators (quot oratores, totidem paene reperiantur genera dicendi)?29 We are far away from Plato’s search for a universal idea of beauty. Cicero’s emphasis on the importance of specific genres, even to the point of identifying them with single individuals, was dictated by a practical concern. He explicitly rejected the notion of an all-embracing genre of oratory that would be appropriate for all causes, all audiences, all orators and all circumstances (non omni causae nec auditori neque personae neque tempori congruere orationis unum genus). The only advice he gave to his readers was to choose a style – high, low, or middle – that would be appropriate to the legal case they would be dealing with (figuram orationis plenioris et tenuioris et item illius mediocris, ad id quod agemus accommodatam) (III, 54, 210–12). 7. Aptum and accommodatum, the Latin equivalents of the Greek ␶␱` ␲␳⑀´␲␱␯., were technical words that Augustine had learned to use first as a student and then as a teacher of rhetoric.30 Augustine’s notion of accommodation had a rhetorical origin. In approaching the relationship between Christians and Jews he relied upon a conceptual framework provided by his youthful reflections on the relationship between pulchrum and aptum, universal beauty and appropriateness to specific conditions. His praise of the beauty of history (universi saeculi pulchritudo) in the letter to Marcellinus can be regarded as a development of Cicero’s reflections on the nature of art and poetry. Cicero had argued that, in the realms of the visual and verbal arts, excellence and diversity were not incompatible. But his argument, notwithstanding the allusion to orators ‘of any time,’ was basically achronic. Augustine took the same model but projected it into a temporal dimension. The seasons of the year and the ages of human life show, Augustine wrote, that both nature and human activities ‘change according to the needs of times by following a certain rhythm, but this does not affect the rhythm of their change’ (rerum ipsa natura et opera humana, certa ratione, pro temporum opportunitate mutentur, nec tamen eadem ratio sit mutabilis qua ipsa mutantur).31 In this way Augustine came to justify both divine immutability and historical change, the truth of the Jewish sacrifices in their own time as well as of the Christian sacraments that had superseded them.

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8. Ancient historians, from Thucydides to Poliby, notwithstanding their stress on the immutability of human nature, had understood that institutions and customs change. Augustine was also aware of this. In his De doctrina christiana (III. 12. 19) he noticed that, ‘Although the ancient Romans considered it shameful to wear tunics stretching to the ankles and with long sleeves, now it is shameful for a well-born man not to wear a tunic of that type when he puts one on’ – a remark that was far from trivial, since it provided an example of historical change to be compared with the patriarchs’ polygamy.32 But usually Augustine regarded the Jewish past as a special case, connected to the Christian present through a typological rather than an analogical relationship. The argument he raised in his letter to Marcellinus was different, and much more unusual. In order to articulate the notion that the Old Testament was at the same time true and superseded, Augustine looked for a new approach, involving a less ‘jealous’ (Ex. 34:14; Deut. 4:24) attitude towards truth. Augustine found the seeds of such an approach in Cicero’s argument that artistic excellence is intrinsically beyond comparison.33 9. The religious implications of memory are often missed. Even the obvious allusion to the Eucharist in the last line of ‘Harmonie du soir,’ one of Baudelaire’s most splendid poems – ‘Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!’ – has been ignored by most critics.34 Not, however, by a very great one, who was also a profound reader of Baudelaire – I mean Marcel Proust. In Contre Sainte-Beuve Proust praised ‘les grand vers flamboyants “comme des ostensoirs” qui sont la gloire de ses [that is, Baudelaire’s] poèmes’ – (the great flamboyant lines, like monstrances, which are the glory of his poetry).35 Moreover, as Franco Moretti noticed, the madeleine, the cake (in the first version it was a piece of grilled bread), which for the narrator of la Recherche embodied the memory of his forgotten summers at Combray, had clear Eucharistic overtones.36 In the case of Proust, individual memory became a sort of secularized religion. But collective memory, that form of ‘“monumental” history in the Nietzschean sense,’ as Funkenstein called it, often has a strong Christian flavour as well: one thinks of expressions like ‘resurrecting the past,’ ‘making the past alive,’ ‘making the past present.’ Memory can achieve all this, on a metaphorical level. But how can we keep the past at a distance, knowing it in its own terms? We are back to the questions raised by Funkenstein in his commentary on Zakhor that I started from. ‘If Herodotus was the father of

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history, the fathers of meaning in history were the Jews,’ Yerushalmi recalled.37 But neither the Greeks nor the Jews ever thought of something comparable to our notion of historical perspective. Only a Christian like Augustine, reflecting on the fateful relationship between Christians and Jews, between the Old and the New Testament, could have come to the idea, which – eventually reinforced by Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung – we all share, Jews and Christians, Hegelians and nonHegelians: that the past must be understood both in its own terms and as a link in a chain that ultimately leads to us. I would like to suggest that this ambivalence, which is a crucial element in our notion of history, is a secularized projection of the Christian ambivalence towards the Jews – the theme that was at the very centre of Amos Funkenstein’s work.

Notes This is the paper I read at the conference; many thanks to Paul Holdengräber for his suggestions. A different, enlarged version (‘Distance and Perspective: Two Metaphors’) is included in my book Wooden Eyes. Nine Reflections on Distance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 139–56. 1 Y.H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1982), 14. 2 Ibid., 44 3 Ibid., 26. 4 M. Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 35–79, esp. 74. See also Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1925; repr. 1952). 5 A. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993), 9–11. 6 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 44. 7 Funkenstein, Perceptions, 8. 8 Ibid., 16–17. 9 G. Tellenbach, ‘Die historische Dimension der liturgischen Commemoratio im Mittelalter,’ in K. Schmid and J. Wallasch, eds, Memoria. Der Geschichtliche Zeugniswert der liturgischen Gedenkens im Mittelalter, Münstersche Mittelalter-Schriften 48 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1984), 200–14, esp. 201–2, quotes Joachim Jeremias, Die Abendsmahlworte Jesu (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960), 229 ff, 239 ff, who stresses the Jewish origins of the passage.

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10 PL 42, 1045: ‘Trinitas quae imago Dei, jam quaerenda in principali mentis parte. [...] unde quae sciuntur, velut adventitia sunt in animo, sive cognitione historica illata, ut sunt facta et dicta, quae tempore peraguntur et transeunt, vel in natura rerum suis locis et regionibus constituta sunt, sive in ipso homine quae non erant oriuntur, aut aliis docentibus aut cogitationibus propriis [...] Haec atque hujusmodi habent in tempore ordinem suum, in quo nobis trinitas memoriae visionis et amoris facilius apparebat. Nam quaedam eorum praeveniunt cognitionem discentium. Sunt enim cognoscibilia, et antequam cognoscantur, suique cognitionem in discentibus gignunt. Sunt autem vel in locis suis, vel quae tempore praeterierunt: quavis quae praeterierunt, non ipsa sint, sed eorum quaedam signa praeteritorum, quibus visis vel auditis cognoscantur fuisse atque transisse. Quae signa vel in locis sita sunt, sicut monumenta mortuorum, et quaecumque similia; vel in litteris fide dignis, sicut est omnis gravis et approbandae auctoritatis historia; vel in animis eorum qui ea jam noverunt’; quoted by J. Pelikan, The Mystery of Continuity. Time and History, Memory and Eternity in the Thought of Saint Augustine (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 36–7; see also De trinitate, 15. 12. 21. 11 V. Saxer, Morts martyrs reliques en Afrique chrétienne aux premiers siècles (Paris: Beauchesne, 1980), 125–33 (monuments), 197–8 (liturgical commemoration), 261–2 (relics), 298 ff (reliquaries). 12 PL 37, 1951, quoted by J. Pelikan, The Mystery of Continuity, 107–8. 13 S. Benko, The Meaning of Sanctorum Communio, Studies in Historical Theology, 3 (London, 1964), 98 ff, on Nicetas of Aquileia’s Explanation of the Creed (Explanatio Symboli ). 14 E. Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 11–76, 229–37 (‘Figura’). 15 Augustine, De doctrina christiana III. 16. 24. 16 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr (Indianapolis and New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), 88 (slightly changed) = De doctrina christiana, III. 10. 15: ‘Sed quoniam proclive est humanum genus non ex momentis ipsius libidinis sed potius suae consuetudinis aestimare peccata, fit plerumque ut quisque hominum ea tantum culpanda arbitretur, quae suae regionis et temporis homines vituperare atque damnare consuerunt, et ea tantum probanda atque laudanda, quae consuetudo eorum cum quibus vivit admittit, eoque contingit ut, si quid scriptura vel praeceperit quod abhorret a consuetudine audientium vel quod non abhorret culpaverit, si animum eorum iam verbi vinxit auctoritas, figuratam locutionem putent. Non autem praecipit scriptura nisi caritatem ...’ 17 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 91 = De doctrina christiana, III. 12. 19:

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Carlo Ginzburg ‘Quod igitur locis et temporibus et personis conveniat, diligenter attendendum est, ne temere flagitia reprehendamus.’ Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 91 (with a change). A. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 202–89. Ibid., 222. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 94–5 (I corrected the translation, which reads: ‘lest anyone think that those things in the Scripture which are neither vices nor crimes among the ancients’). Funkenstein, Theology, 223–4. In the passage that follows the end of the paragraph I relied upon a section of my paper ‘Style as Inclusion, Style as Exclusion’ (Wooden Eyes, 109–38). S. Aureli Augustini ... Epistulae, ed. A. Goldbacher (Vindobonae-Lipsiae, 1904), Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 44:3, ep. 138, ‘ad Marcellinum,’ 1, 5, 130, partially quoted by Funkenstein, Theology, 223. See PL 33, 527: ‘haec quaestio quam late pateat, profecto videt quisquis pulchri aptique distantiam sparsam quodammodo in universitate rerum valet, neque negligit intueri. Pulchrum enim per seipsum consideratur atque laudatur, cui turpe ac deforme contrarium est. Aptum vero, cui ex adverso est ineptum, quasi religatum pendet aliunde, nec ex semetipso, sed ex eo cui connectitur, judicatur: nimirum etiam decens atque indecens, vel hoc idem est, vel perinde habetur. Age nunc, ea quae diximus, refer ad illud unde agitur. Aptum fuit primis temporibus sacrificium quod praeceperat Deus, nunc vero non ita est. Aliud enim praecepit quod huic tempori aptum esset, qui multo magis quam homo novit quid cuique tempori accommodate adhibeatur; quid quando impertiat, addat, auferat, detrahat, augeat, minuatve, immutabilis mutabilium, sicut creator, ita moderator, donec universi saeculi pulchritudo, cujus particulae sunt quae suis quibusque temporibus apta sunt, velut magnum carmen cujusdam ineffabilis modulatoris excurrat, atque inde transeant in aeternam contemplationem speciei qui Deum rite colunt, etiam cum tempus est fidei.’ For the English translation see The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, ed. by Rev. M. Dods, XII: 2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1875), 197–8. On Volusianus see P. Courcelle, ‘Date, source et genèse des “Consultationes Zacchaei et Apollonii,”’ Revue de l’histoire des religions 146 (1954): 174–93; A. Chastagnol, ‘Le Sénateur Volusien et la conversion d’une famille de l’aristocratie romaine au Bas-Empire,’ Revue des études anciennes 58 (1956): 241–53; P. Brown, ‘Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman Aristocracy,’ Journal of Roman Studies 51 (1961): 1–11; Brown, Augustin of Hippo,

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new ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 298–300. 24 Funkenstein, Theology, 224. 25‘Et animadvertebam et videbam in ipsis corporibus aliud esse quasi totum et ideo pulchrum, aliud autem, quod ideo deceret, quoniam apte accommodaretur alicui, sicut pars corporis ad universum suum aut calciamentum ad pedem et similia,’ Conf. IV, xiii, 20; ‘et pulchrum, quod per se ipsum, aptum autem, quod ad aliquid adcommodatum deceret, definiebam et distinguebam et exemplis corporeis adstruebam,’ Conf. IV, xv, 4. See also S.D. Benin, The Footprints of God. Divine Accommodation in Jewish and Christian Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 102 ff. 26 H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1957, Retractatio [1949]), 631–7; P. Brown, Augustin of Hippo, 57; M. Testard, Saint Augustin et Cicéron, vol. 1 (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1958), 49–66; A. Solignac, note on St Augustine, Les Confessions, livres I-VII, ‘Bibliothèque augustinienne,’ 2e s., 13 (Paris, 1963), 671–3; T. Katô, ‘Melodia interior. Sur le traité De pulchro et apto,’ Revue des études augustiniennes 12 (1966): 229–240. 27 Cicero, De oratore, Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942). 28 A. Desmouliez, Cicéron et son goût. Essai d’une définition d’une esthétique romaine à la fin de la République (Brussels: Latomus, 1976), 240 ff. 29 ‘quid censetis si omnes, qui ubique sunt aut fuerunt oratores, amplecti voluerimus? nonne for ut, quot oratores, totidem paene reperiantur genera dicendi?’ 30 M. Pohlenz, ‘⌻␱` ⌸␳⑀´␲␱␯: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des griechischen Geistes,’ Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen 16 (1933): 53–92. The importance of Augustine’s rhetorical education is stressed by M. Simonetti, in his introduction to Augustine, L’istruzione cristiana (Milan: Mondadori, 1994), xxxii ff. 31 PL 33, 527 (ep. 138, 1, 2, ‘ad Marcellinum,’ ed. A. Goldbacher, 130). 32 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 91: ‘Sicut enim talares et manicatas tunicas habere apud Romanos veteres flagitium erat, nunc autem honesto loco natis, cum tunicati sunt, non eas habere flagitium est.’ 33 In Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 241, Funkenstein referred to Vasari’s distinction between absolute beauty and beauty secundum quid, that is, dependent from a specific historical stage of artistic progress. Disagreeing with Panofsky, who had connected Vasari’s argument to the scholastic tradition, Funkenstein wrote, ‘It seems to me that Vasari’s doctrine owes much more to the historical interpretation that Augustine gave to the Pla-

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Carlo Ginzburg tonic distinction between aptum and pulchrum. Vasari could have known it directly or indirectly.’ Funkenstein was right: Vasari was echoing a passage on painting from Castiglione’s Courtier, based on Cicero, De oratore III, 25–7 – the passage that had inspired Augustine. C. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, ed. A. Adam (Paris: Garnier, 1994), 52, and commentary on 331–2: ‘ Ses [Baudelaire’s] plus beaux poèmes sont celui du “temps retrouvé.”’ See also A. Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 165. M. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 184; By Way of Sainte-Beuve, trans. S. Townsend-Warner (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), 100. M. Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1: Du coté de chez Swann, ed. by P. Clarac and A. Ferré (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954), 46–8; Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1: Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933), 56–62; see F. Moretti, Opere-mondo (Turin: Einaudi, 1994), 144, n47, who quotes E. Heller, The Artist’s Journey into the Interior (New York: Random House, 1965), 170, on Rilke, The Duino Elegies. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 8.

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chapter nine

Historical Consciousness Revisited: From Vico’s Mythology to Funkenstein’s Methodology JOSEPH MALI

I In one of his last essays, ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness,’ Amos Funkenstein sought to reappraise the notion and manifestations of ‘historical consciousness’ in Jewish historiography.1 According to his own testimony, he borrowed the term ‘historical consciousness’ from the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, who fashioned it in order to distinguish certain atavistic forms of historical comprehension like ‘sensation’ or ‘evocation-of-images’ from the more scientific ‘historical knowledge.’2 As Funkenstein showed, this conception inspired Huizinga’s masterpiece, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, and is also implicit in his ultimate definition of history as the ‘mental form by which a culture accounts to itself for its past.’3 In his gloss on that much-cited definition Funkenstein writes that the task of modern historiography is to sort out all the various ‘mental forms’ – the legends, the folk tales, the myths, the counter-histories – that the cultural community has forged throughout its history, for these, before or more than any official record, were at times the best or the only available means to account for chaotic historical experience and existence.4 Applying these categories to Jewish historiography, Funkenstein thus reasoned that its deeper ‘historical consciousness’ ought to be retrieved from mythological rather than from theological stories, as much from the imagistic perceptions of the Kabbalah as from the more rationalistic conceptions of the Halacha. This was the main gist of his critical observations on Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s book Zakhor.5 He was particularly concerned with Yerushalmi’s assertion that Jewish scholarship between Josephus Flavius and the nineteenth century shunned proper

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historiography because it relied on ritual-memorial traditions. Yerushalmi employed Maurice Halbwachs’s sociological definition of ‘collective memory’ as pertaining to the semi-official formation of communal identity around canonical histories in order to argue that this traditional mode of consciousness, with its intuitive and associative means of identification, sufficed as long as the Jewish people kept its ethnic unity and continuity. The need for a more ‘rational’ mode of consciousness like ‘historiography’ arose only in modern times, when the Jewish predicament became more problematic, critical in the literal sense of the term.6 Funkenstein sought to rebut this assertion by arguing that, With or without historiography proper, creative thinking about history – past and present – never ceased. Jewish culture was and remained formed by an acute historical consciousness, albeit different at different periods ... A new type of historical images emerged, in antiquity, out of collective memories: it consisted not only in a reminder of the past in order to forge a collective identity and to maintain it, but in the attempt to understand the past, to question its meaning.7

What rendered Jewish culture so acutely conscious of its historicity was the perception that Israel was indeed a nation unto itself, an old biblical observation that later hostile commentators such as Tacitus and Christian adversaries developed into a total condemnation of Jewish life and history. Faced with such polemical and apologetical exigencies, Jewish scholars in antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages were forced to defend their own historical development and predicament, and thereby came to reappraise this perception, giving all kinds of expressions and explanations to ‘an incessant astonishment at one’s own existence.’8 Funkenstein demonstrates how such literary and legendary sources as Sefer zerubavel or Sefer toldot yeshu and similar ‘rabbinic fantasies’ were crucial for the formation of Jewish ‘historical consciousness,’ arguing that it was largely through these modes of radical yet dialectical engagement with Christian representations of Jewish history that Jewish intellectuals in the Middle Ages – and ever since – have come to elucidate their own perceptions of Jewish history.9 As the title of Funkenstein’s last book indicates, his main aim was to reappraise such stories as putative histories of the Jewish people, to show that their intuitive and imaginative ‘perceptions’ of Jewish history are still vital to our more critical conceptions and proper methodology

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of Jewish historiography. In current parlance, such sources would be known as the ‘historical myths’ of the Jewish nation. For historical myths are now commonly perceived as ‘foundational narratives’ – namely, as stories that purport to explain the present in terms of some momentous event that occurred in the past. As Wendy Doniger O`Flaherty has put it, ‘a myth is a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it; it is a story believed to have been composed in the past about an event in the past, or, more rarely, in the future, an event that continues to have meaning in the present because it is remembered.’10 However legendary ‘historical myths’ may be, they are not completely fabricated because they usually contain or refer to certain crucial issues in the history of the community, such as those that concern its common ancestry or territory, or, as in the case of the Book of Zerubavel, its specific trajectory in universal history. The mythological visions in this book encode the historical convulsions in Palestine during the first decades of the seventh century ce. In order to make sense of the dreadful experiences of the wars between the Persian Sassanian Empire and the Byzantine Empire from 614 to 628, its author resorted to what the sages of Genesis Rabba had decreed: ‘When you see empires in conflict, expect the footsteps of the Messiah.’11 The rhetorical evocation of so many wars and disasters in the Book of Zerubavel bears out a deeper historical conviction that the apocalyptic End of Days (acharit ha-yamim) is imminent. In that way, Funkenstein argues, even though ‘historical consciousness’ is more critical of the sources it uses, it does not contradict the ‘collective memory,’ but rather revises its mythical forms of narration into more logical forms of reflection, as does also proper historiography.12 Ultimately, not only are the images and myths that make up the historical narrations of successive generations needed to form a national identity, but they pass into that identity itself. The history of that nation becomes meaningful only within the narratives that make up its tradition. My main aim in this essay is to probe the origins and potentialities of this conception of historical consciousness – primarily in Funkenstein’s works, as well as in those of the historical scholar who seems to have inspired him most profoundly, Giambattista Vico. For although Funkenstein had dealt with the basic features of historical consciousness already in his doctoral dissertation, where he discerned in medieval theological and apocalyptical treatises tacit forms of ‘reflective historical interpretation’ (reflektierende Geschichtsdeutung),13 he came to perceive, and eventually to define, historical consciousness as

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a distinct form of historical awareness only in the mid-1970s, roughly at the time when he began to study Vico’s New Science.14 Funkenstein readily acknowledged his debt to Vico. Thus, in his discussion of the origins of the notion of historical consciousness in modern historical scholarship he states that it was Giambattista Vico who already in the early eighteenth century had ‘built the many methodical impulses into an impressive “new science” of historical reasoning, a science aware of its own unique mode of interpretation.’15 More concretely, Funkenstein maintains that Vico’s ‘new science’ initiated a revolution in historical scholarship ‘that was no less radical than the concurrent scientific revolution,’ for it affected a radical revision in such major terms as historical facts, periods, and traditions. For Funkenstein, Vico initiated a revolution in contextual reasoning. More than just the identification and verification of historical sources, it required a reconstruction of social-historical conditions and human motivations. Funkenstein shows, for example, how Vico reappraised historical periods as organized by an internal, integrating principle rather than, as hitherto, by external, artificial boundaries – monumental events, beginnings and ends of dynasties, rounded dates such as millennia or centuries. Funkenstein, however, does not explain how this principle works – what kind of norm integrates the forms of life in any given society or period. As I shall suggest, Vico offered a precise and radical answer to this question: historical unities like periods or societies consist in their specific ‘myths.’ I shall further argue that Vico’s definition of myth as the ‘true narration’ (vera narratio) of human life and history was crucial for Funkenstein’s theory of historical consciousness. Funkenstein delineated some of the main features of ‘historical consciousness’ in his first and most significant publication on Vico.16 In a review-essay Sir Isaiah Berlin poignantly summed up the main thesis: ‘Funkenstein draws a sharp contrast between the utilitarian doctrine of society, law, and justice as arising out of fear or indigence and the pursuit of utility which he finds in Epicurus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle, as against Vico’s theory for which these factors are not so much causes as occasions for the development of social justice and the natural “flowering” of human nature ... Imagination, he rightly maintains, is for Vico at once the creative faculty and the means, if used analytically, of reconstructing the history of past imaginings of which it is itself the organ.’ Berlin thus concludes: ‘The problem of how Vico supposes we can “enter into” or “descend to” the life and experience of remote and savage ancestors is a notoriously difficult one. Funkenstein,

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it seems to me has come as near as anyone to elucidating Vico’s doctrine of historical insight, even if the problem is not wholly solved.’17 Following on these astute observations, I would like to show how in his subsequent works on Vico and other historical thinkers, and above all in his theory of ‘historical consciousness,’ Funkenstein sought to resolve precisely this problem. For the main methodological postulation of ‘historical consciousness’ is that any explanation of past or primitive societies must always include – and perhaps even take the form of – an attempt to recover and interpret their myths from the point of view of their makers. This attempt requires a combination of historical faculties not normally appreciated, let alone used, by modern historians: imagination, emotion, association, identification, projection, and other subjective qualities that defy the apparently more objective rules and disciplines of scientific inquiry. As Donald Kelley put it, ‘The study of history, like the human condition it affects to portray, cannot entirely disengage itself from the irrational and the subconscious; as a form of human memory, it cannot entirely escape its own primitive heritage.’18 In his New Science of 1744 Giambattista Vico offered the first – and perhaps still the best – vindication of this methodology in the modern human sciences.19

II Giambattista Vico figures prominently in Funkenstein’s master work, Theology and the Scientific Imagination. Funkenstein singles him out as one of the major proponents of a new vocation – unique to intellectuals in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – that Funkenstein terms ‘secular theology.’ Along with laymen like Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, and Newton, Vico advanced a new, distinctly secular, world view by offering scientific interpretations for theological conceptions.20 Moreover, in Funkenstein’s historical reconstruction Vico emerges as the ultimate representative of this movement: his notion of ‘verum ipsum factum’ (‘The true is what is made’) forged ‘a new ideal of knowledge,’ which, for Funkenstein, is the most significant philosophical achievement of this entire intellectual movement. The modernity of both the natural and the human sciences in the seventeenth century consisted in that conviction: for a capability (potentia) that had previously been attributed only to God was now applied to human beings.21 Vico’s concrete contribution to ‘secular theology’ was a new theory of ‘providence.’ For Vico’s definition of his own work as a demonstration

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of ‘a rational civil theology of divine providence’ implies that divine manifestations were not to be sought in miraculous interventions in natural and human affairs but rather in their very regulations – namely, in the ‘rational’ and ‘civil’ achievements of human life and history. ‘Divine providence’ thus became synonymous with ‘history.’ This, according to Funkenstein, was the main message of Vico’s programmatic announcement that his ‘New Science or metaphysics, studying the common nature of nations in the light of divine providence, discovers the origins of divine and human institutions among the gentile nations, and thereby establishes a system of the natural law of the gentes, which proceeds with the greatest equality and constancy through the three ages ... The age of the gods … The age of the heroes ... The age of men, in which all men recognized themselves as equal in human nature.’22 Funkenstein shows how this conception of ‘divine providence’ as an immanent rather than a transcendent force in human life and history, a force that operates, as it were, not on human beings but in and through their all-too-human faculties, was the necessary ‘dialectical preparation’ for the ‘scientific revolution’ in the human and social sciences. For ‘divine providence’ now turned out to be synonymous with whatever ‘governs the affairs of nations by the very laws that govern the enfoldment of societies.’23 What, however, are these laws? As Funkenstein rightly observed, Vico differed from Hobbes, Spinoza, and all other rationalists (whom he used to mock as ‘The Princes of Natural Law’) in his strong humanist commitment to the ideal of ‘human dignity,’ a belief in the autonomy and spontaneity of human affairs. According to Vico, the laws that govern human life and history are not physical or rational reactions to natural reality, as Hobbes and Spinoza maintained, but rather those metaphysical-poetical creations that human beings have forged out of – yet set up against – their own propensities: the mythopoeic norms and forms of social-historical reality, their morality.24 As Vico put it: Hence poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world, must have begun with metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined as that of these first men must have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination. This metaphysics was their poetry, a faculty born with them (for they were furnished by nature with these senses and imaginations); born of their ignorance of causes, for ignorance, the mother of wonder, made everything wonderful to men who were ignorant of everything ... In such

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fashion the first men of the gentile nations, children of the nascent mankind, created things according to their own ideas. But this creation was infinitely different from that of God. For God, in his purest intelligence, knows things, and, by knowing them, creates them; but they, in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination. And because it was quite corporeal, they did it with marvelous sublimity; a sublimity such and so great that it excessively perturbed the very persons who by imagining did the creating, for which they were called ‘poets,’ which is Greek for ‘creators.’25

Vico’s entire New Science consists in his recognition of the poetic ability of human beings to make and live up to their own images of reality. And this recognition determined his new methodology for the human sciences, which was different from that of the natural sciences: For, ‘as geometry, when it constructs the world of quantity out of its elements, or contemplates that world, is creating it for itself, just so does our Science, but with a reality greater by just so much as the institutions having to do with human affairs are more real than points, lines, surfaces, and figures are.’26 Hence, just as ‘rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendo fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia); and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.’27 Vico thus came to the conclusion that his new science of humanity was not only more ‘certain’ (certum) than the science of nature – because it relied on a more intimate knowledge of its object – but that it was also more ‘true’ (verum) because it possessed a better kind of knowledge: that of the one who has made the object. Vico celebrated this seminal illumination in some memorable words: But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He

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alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men had made it, men could come to know.28

This passage is often quoted and discussed by theorists of the human sciences, who rightly regard it as one of the most significant contributions to the formation of their historicist methodology.29 Yet very few of them, if any, have realized that the actual method of inquiry that Vico had in mind pertains to ‘mythology, or the interpretation of fables.’ For Vico saw that in our (and any other) civilization the fictions of mythology illuminate the ‘real world’ by constituting or ‘prefiguring’ all its human actions and institutions. Unlike natural occurrences, which display lawlike, repetitive regularities that are unknowable to us because they are totally alien to our form of life, human occurrences throughout history display forms of moral action that are knowable to us insofar as we can recognize in them the coherent narrative patterns of the mythical stories with their well-made characters and plots. Our Science therefore comes to describe at the same time an ideal of eternal history traversed in time by the history of every nation in its rise, development, maturity and fall. Indeed, we make bold to affirm that he who meditates on this science narrates to himself this ideal eternal history so far as he himself makes it for himself by that proof ‘it had, has, and will have to be.’ For the first indubitable principle ... is that this world of nations has certainly been made by men, and its guise must therefore be found within the modifications of our own human mind. And history cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them.30

Both the original poetic maker (‘who creates the things [and] also narrates them’) and the modern scholar of history equally participate in the same narrative process of making history insofar as they both make and remake its constitutive narrative myth for themselves. And what this myth narrates is an ideal and eternal, not real and empirical, account of history, purified, as it were, of all the accidents, distortions, and misfortunes that normally occur and obscure our vision of the basic pattern of the cyclical evolution of mankind. What we, like our ancestors, could ever discover in history is not a scientific law or model but only a narrative account of it, one that ‘traverses’ its chaotic happenings into a coherent form of a well-ordered story of the rise, devel-

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opment, maturity, decline, and fall of all peoples, societies, nations, and civilizations. Like Augustine’s Civitas Dei or Dante’s Divine Comedy, Vico’s New Science is as much a work of myth as it is a work on myth.31 Assuming that human reality is permeated by its foundational myths to such an extent that it cannot be reduced by scientific-historical research to more elemental explanations, he came to perceive the narratives and other symbolic interpretations of historical reality that the people believe to be as real as the conditions and events in which they actually live. Moreover, these sacred narratives were, on his account, the means by which we could study other human beings and societies that are ‘so remote from ourselves,’ as they might enable us to ‘descend from these human and refined natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures, which we cannot at all imagine and can comprehend only with great effort.’32 This effort was crucial to Vico’s new science of humanity because if, as he maintained, the ‘truth’ about the ‘civil world’ – how men had made it and why, therefore, men could come to know it – hinged on the fact that ‘its principles are to be found within the modifications of our own human mind,’ then it was necessary to retrieve these archaic principles from within our modern minds and cultures. Vico, in other words, claims that our ability to understand how men in ‘earliest antiquity’ had made their world guarantees that we could come to know what our world is. And we can do so because, and only insofar as, we share those archaic patterns of thought that enabled them to know and to make this world – the myths that still persist in our minds and cultures in a variety of forms: in linguistic metaphors, literary idioms, religious rites, moral rules, political institutions, national traditions, and so on. Hence his resolution that, ‘It follows that the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables ... which were the first histories of the nations. By such a method the beginnings of the sciences as well as of the nations are to be discovered, for they ... had their beginnings in the public needs or utilities of the peoples and were later perfected as acute individuals applied their reflection to them.’33 In his Autobiography Giambattista Vico recalls the moment in which he first realized the conceptual and historical primacy of myth. It was in 1707 when he was reading Bacon’s treatise On the Wisdom of the Ancients, a book that he found ‘more ingenious and learned than true.’34 Bacon failed to discover the ‘true’ meaning of ancient mythology because he presumed to have rediscovered therein allegorical representations of modern scientific theories and discoveries. Bacon claimed that

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beneath no small number of these fables of the ancient poets there lay from the very beginning a mystery and allegory ... in some of these fables, as well as in the very frame and texture of the story as in the propriety of the names ... I find a conformity and connexion with the thing signified, so close and so evident, that one cannot help believing such signification to have been designed and meditated from the first, and purposely shadowed out.35

In his New Science Vico dismissed this kind of reasoning as a ‘conceit of the scholars, who will have it that what they know is as old as the world.’36 Against such anachronistic fallacies he postulated that ‘Theories must start from the point where the matter of which they treat first began’:37 a rule which meant that any theory must be mythology in the literal sense of the term – an attempt to expose the logic of myth, as well as the myth of logic, in all cultural manifestations. From these first men, stupid, insensate, and horrible beasts, all the philosophers and philologians should have begun their investigations of the wisdom of the ancient gentiles ... And they should have begun with metaphysics, which seeks its proofs not in the external world but within the modifications of the mind of him who meditates it. For since this world of nations has certainly been made by men, it is within these modifications that its principles should have been sought.38

Vico, then, was well aware of the fact that he was living in a post-mythical age ruled by the theories of ‘men’ rather than by the stories of ‘gods’ and ‘heroes,’ and that his task in making sense of myth was much more complicated than that of the ancient writers, or even Dante, who still lived in an age that was largely myth oriented. As he duly acknowledged, ‘The fables in their origin were true and severe narrations, whence mythos, fable, was defined as vera narratio. But because they were originally for the most part gross, they gradually lost their individual meanings, were then altered, subsequently became improbable, after that obscure, then scandalous, and finally incredible.’39 Nevertheless, the fact that these mythological fabrications were still most pervasive in modern reality implied that they entailed some potential messages to mankind even in its modern period. Vico thus sought to regain their ‘true’ meanings by a method that he called ‘new critical art,’ and that was, in fact, the first attempt to reappraise the function of myth in and for modern historical scholarship. In his New Science he inquired under

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what psychological and historical conditions certain mythopoeic modes of comprehension were necessarily created, what higher metaphysical truths they served, and, ultimately, why they still persist in the collective imagination of whole nations and civilizations. This was, on his own testimony, his greatest discovery, ‘the master-key’ of his science: We find that the principle of these origins both of languages and of letters lies in the fact that the first gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters. This discovery, which is the master key of this Science, has cost the persistent research of almost all our literary life, because with our civilized natures we [moderns] cannot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men. The [poetic] characters of which we speak were certain imaginative genera (images for the most part of animate substances, of gods and heroes, formed by their imagination) to which they reduced all the species or all the particulars appertaining to each genus ... These divine or heroic characters were true fables or myths, and their allegories are found to contain meanings not analogical but univocal, not philosophical but historical, of the peoples of Greece of those times.40

Vico’s ‘discovery’ is akin to what modern theorists of culture have eventually come to proclaim as their own discovery, that ‘a whole mythology is deposited in our language.’41 As a philologist of ‘earliest antiquity’ Vico was particularly privileged – and obliged – to observe the various ways in which its mythopoeic tradition still inspired the age of enlightenment: ‘The poetic speech which our poetic logic has helped us to understand continued for a long time into the historical period, much as great and rapid rivers continue far into the sea, keeping sweet the water borne by the force of their flow.’42 On a more fundamental level, this discovery suggests that Vico, like many modern interpretive social theorists, could establish his New Science only after he had taken a linguistic turn: he saw that inasmuch as the world in which we live is a world of institutions based on language, the task of the human sciences most resembles, and must be modelled on, the interpretation of texts. His concrete ‘New Science’ was in fact ‘philology’ – an old art that traditionally entailed the formal interpretation of words in classical books but that Vico transformed into a new science of understanding human beings in past or foreign cultures through their symbolic figures and myths. Assuming that the ancient myths encode the innermost motivations that drove man to make up, and still sustain, those ‘human insti-

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tutions’ that have proven crucial for ‘the preservation of the human race,’ Vico sought to decipher in their images and tales the deep reasons of what he called the ‘principles of humanity’: ‘Our mythologies agree with the institutions under consideration, not by force and distortion, but directly, easily, and naturally. They will be seen to be civil histories of the first peoples, who were everywhere poets.’43 Vico could thus proclaim that Plato and Bacon failed to understand mythology because they imputed too much and the wrong kind of ‘wisdom’ to the ancients. They failed to see that ancient or primitive mythology was not theoretical but practical, historical rather than philosophical, its aim being primarily social, and ultimately political, or ‘occasional,’ to use Vico’s exact term.44 For Vico regarded myths as stories that explain the present in terms of some momentous ‘occasions’ that occurred in the past. Such were, for example, the stories about the Deluge or the Tower of Babel for the Jewish and Christian nations, or the ‘Thunderstorm’ for the Gentiles. Vico’s famous description of that latter scene – which impressed James Joyce so profoundly – invokes the moment in which ‘divine providence initiated the process by which the fierce and violent were brought from their outlaw state to humanity and by which nations were instituted among them. It did so by awakening in them a confused idea of some divinity, which they in their ignorance attributed to that to which it did not belong. Thus through the terror of this imagined divinity, they began to put themselves in some order.’45 This narration of ‘fabulous beginnings’ preserved for the ancients and their inheritors ‘the memories of the laws and institutions that bind them in their societies.’46 Modern scholars of mythology largely concur with this observation on the function of mythical stories in the constitution of ethical and political theories.47 The impersonal style of the mythical narration, aptly characterized by Claude Lévi-Strauss as ‘anonymous, collective, and objective,’ serves this purpose by rendering its messages impervious to any possible refutation: ‘The original form (provided this notion means anything) is and remains forever elusive. However far we may go, a myth is known only as something that has been heard and repeated.’48 Or, to rephrase this notion in the well-known terms of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, historical myths function as ‘social charters,’ for the narration of ultimate origins and ends of the most fundamental laws and institutions of the community secures their authority against any rational or historical attack on their validity.49 As Vico summed it up,

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Truth is sifted from falsehood in everything that has been preserved for us through long centuries by those vulgar traditions which, since they have been preserved for so long a time and by entire peoples, must have had a public ground of truth. The great fragments of antiquity, hitherto useless to science because they lay begrimed, broken, and scattered, shed great light when cleaned, pieced together, and restored.50

What is the character of that truth? Presumably the truth about the ‘truths’ by which we live, that ultimately, all our moral and social theories are mythological: they grow out of and express ‘the public grounds of truth’ of specific historical communities and civilizations. Publici motivi del vero: the English rendition of this expression as ‘public grounds of truth’ does not convey the exact meaning of the Italian original, which indicates more clearly what Vico regards as the main force in the social construction of reality: the popular impressions and interpretations of reality that, being the essential lessons of the collective-historical experience, empower the various ‘vulgar traditions’ in which we all believe – and live. Amos Funkenstein understood – and shared – this conception of historical reality. He also duly perceived its meanings and implications for modern historiography. Vico’s main contribution to modern historical scholarship, he wrote, was the very realization that ‘the science closest to us is the science of humanity because “we made this world of nations” ourselves. But in each period of history, that which society construed – gods, laws, institutions – was its truth, was true for its members – as absolutely as is our science to us.’51 Vico indeed made this point, albeit most enigmatically, when he stated that his new science of history was ‘a rational civil theology of divine providence ... in keeping with the full meaning of applying to providence the term ‘divinity,’ from divinari, to divine, which is to understand what is hidden from men – the future – or what is hidden in them – their consciousness.’52 Recalling the opening passage of this essay – and Huizinga’s definition of historical consciousness as consisting in ‘sensation’ and ‘evocation-of-images’ – we may now be in a better position to reassess Funkenstein’s determination to subject myths of divination to historical interpretation. He saw that such myths were true for the author and his nation in both the epistemic and pragmatic senses of the term; that is to say, they determined the narrative patterns in which they conducted their actual life and history. As Ernst Cassirer (paraphrasing Schelling) once put it, ‘In the relation between myth and history myth proves to be the primary, history the

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secondary and derived factor. It is not by its history that the mythology of a nation is determined but, conversely, its history is determined by its mythology – or rather, the mythology of a people does not determine but is its fate, its destiny as decreed from the very beginning.’53 Some modern scholars in the humanities and the social sciences have largely come to accept this conception of myth as the ‘true narration’ of any society. The political theorists and historians who abide by the new methodology of the so-called ‘interpretive social science’54 now commonly argue that any ‘nation’ requires that kind of mythical ‘narration.’ Whereas the more radical historians of the old Marxist or the new postcolonialist schools still tend to denounce myths of the nation as ideological fabrications or ‘inventions’ of the ruling authorities, there are many revisionists who would simply argue that modern nations not merely invent but actually consist in myths of historical unity and continuity.55 According to Anthony Smith, the retention and occasional ‘invention’ of historical myths has become imperative in the modern world, in which ‘ethnic profiles and identities are increasingly sought, if only to stem the tide of rationalization and disenchantment. It is to their ethnic symbols, values, myths and memories that so many populations turn for inspiration and guidance, not in the everyday, practical business of running a state, but for that sense of fraternity and heroism which will enable them to conduct their affairs successfully.’56 Myths, then, are the ‘true narration’ (vera narratio) of human life and history that not only the nations but also their historians actually have, and their task, therefore, should be to illuminate, not to eliminate, these myths by showing their extension or configuration of historical reality. And this, I think, is what Funkenstein’s theory of ‘historical consciousness’ is all about. In my final comments I shall show, very briefly, that this was also his practical method as a historian of his own nation.

III In the last page of his last book Perceptions of Jewish History, Funkenstein writes about the current ideological tensions in Zionism, primarily the political conflict in Israel between the ‘mystic’ expectations (and actions) of the national-religious zealots and the ‘realistic’ pragmatism of the secular Israelis who seek normality. Funkenstein was unquestionably a secular Jew with a strong and proven commitment to realisticpragmatic Zionism. And yet, like other historical scholars of Judaism – most notably Gershom Scholem – he was acutely aware of the vital

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potency of myths like that of the ‘Messiah’ or ‘The Promised Land’ for Jewish religion and history. In his essays on Jewish political theories, from Maimonides’ ‘realistic messianism’ to Herzl’s Altneuland, Funkenstein consistently praised such attempts to fuse the ideal and the real in actual policies.57 The theoretical and moral reasons for this policy might be found in the theological notion of ‘accommodation,’ which Funkenstein had really made his own: for the ‘assumption that revelation and other divine institutions were adjusted to the capacity of men at different times to receive and perceive them’ was, for Funkenstein, not only one of the major exegetical discoveries of medieval theology (which he rediscovered for modern historical scholarship) but also a practical strategy to conduct our all-too-human affairs according to ideal virtues.58 Applying this notion to political reality in Israel, Funkenstein thus strove for what he called ‘synthetic Zionism,’ such as would sustain the two polar national ideologies in a permanent, distinctly dialectical, tension, thereby retaining both the realistic and the mystic orientations that, as Scholem has shown, were crucial for any Jewish form of life. In the last paragraph of this book Funkenstein raises these critical objections to Amos Oz’s book In the Land of Israel : At its conclusion the author brings us to Ashdod, a town ‘in human measure,’ without exaggerated dreams of messianism or of becoming ‘a light unto all nations,’ without monumental buildings and without an unbearable burden of history, a typical social-democratic town. He calls upon us to be content with it. But perhaps we ought to keep alive the utopian element of Zionism. It belongs no less to the measure of humans that they strive for the stars, per aspera ad astra. Had we not dreamed exaggerated dreams we would not have built even a modest town.59

These are the last words of Funkenstein in his last book. Their message for the historians is clear: Work on Myth! For, as Hans Blumenberg once put it, ‘Only work on myth, even if it is the work of finally reducing it – makes the work of myth manifest.’60 This was also the explicit message of Funkenstein in his last publication in Hebrew, the essay ‘As a Lily among Brambles: Jewish Historiography and Other Disciplines,’ which appeared after his death in the official journal of the Historical Society of Israel, Zion, and may well be read as his last testament to his fellow Israeli historians.61 His main aim in that essay was to reassess the predicament of modern Jewish historiography in the new, post-modernist age, when all kinds of ‘new’ crit-

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ical disciplines and schools have challenged, and seem to have undermined, its ‘old’ ideological and methodological conventions. Reflecting on some recent controversies in Jewish studies concerning the works of young scholars such as Yehuda Liebes, Moshe Idel, or Israel Yuval, and bearing in mind the controversies over the ‘new historians’ of Zionism, Funkenstein discerns a common theme in them: the disintegration of one singular and common ‘master-narrative’ of Jewish historiography, which reflects, at a deeper level, the demise of the belief in the sacred or any other essential ‘meta-narrative’ of Judaism such as has always imparted a semblance of homogeneity to the Jewish identity, nation, and history. In his lecture Funkenstein sought to revise this revision: while he welcomed the attempts to deconstruct the homogeneous conception and narration of Jewish history, to reveal in its seemingly monolithic world picture alternative norms and forms of life that have been ignored, forgotten, or suppressed – like, for example, the feminist perspectives that scholars such as Paula Hyman and Ilana Pardes have resuscitated – he nevertheless insisted, in the final words of his lecture, that some kind of historical meta-narrative was inevitable, indeed indispensable, for the Jewish nation, as well as for each of the members of the nation. As Funkenstein states, ‘meta-narrative not only identifies the subject, but is that subject – every human being lives the meta-narrative which it forges not only in words, but also in life and deeds – so that the attempt to get rid of meta-narrative is a dangerous deception.’62 What is needed, then, is not a further and endless deconstruction of the ‘master-narrative’ of Jewish historiography but rather its reconstruction on and out of new, distinctly heterogeneous sources, those that have been revealed by the new scholars. Funkenstein’s emphatic approval of the contribution of Liebes, Idel, and Yuval to Jewish historiography indicates what these sources are: for these scholars dealt not with common historical sources, such as political or social documents, but rather with mythological sources, whether liturgical, mystical, or martyrological texts, in which Jews in late ancient and medieval times reflected on their personal and historical experiences. And as to the postmodernist charges that such meta-narratives are mythologies, Funkenstein would have responded that indeed they are, but could have added, with Vico, that they are the ‘true narrations’ that make up, and might still reveal to us, the ‘historical consciousness’ of people in past or foreign societies.

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Notes 1 Amos Funkenstein, ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness,’ History and Memory 1 (1989): 5–26. The essay is reprinted (with some revisions) in Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). 2 Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. R.J. Payton and U. Mammitzsch, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). The best discussion of Huizinga’s historical vocation is Karl J. Weintraub, Visions of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 208–46. 3 Johan Huizinga, ‘A Definition of the Concept of History,’ in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. R. Klibansky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 1–10. 4 Amos Funkenstein, ‘Passivity as the Mark of Diaspora Jewry: Myth and Reality’ (Hebrew), in the Hebrew edition of Perceptions of Jewish History (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991), 232. 5 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). For further observations on this debate see David N. Myers, ‘Remembering Zakhor: A Super-Commentary,’ History and Memory 4 (1992): 129–46. 6 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 101. 7 Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 11. 8 Ibid., 11. 9 For translations and discussions of these sources see David Stern and Mark J. Mirsky, eds, Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990). 10 Wendy Doniger O`Flaherty, Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 27. 11 See also David Biale, ‘Counter-History in Jewish Anti-Christian Polemic: The Sefer toldot yeshu and the Sefer zerubavel,’ Jewish Social Studies (Special Edition in Memory of Amos Funkenstein) 6 (1999): 130–45. 12 Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 18–19. 13 Amos Funkenstein, Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung. Formen des Gegenwartsbestimmung im Geschichtsdenken des Mittelalters (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1965), 69ff. 14 Funkenstein discovered Vico through the works of eminent German scholars like Erich Auerbach, Friedrich Meinecke, and Karl Löwith. But he began to work on Vico only in the early 1970s at UCLA, and was prompted

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29

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Joseph Mali mainly by Donald R. Kelley, The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 27. Funkenstein, ‘Natural Science and Social Theory: Hobbes, Spinoza, and Vico,’ in G. Tagliacozzo and D.P. Verene, eds, Vico’s Science of Humanity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 187–212. This essay was incorporated in Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 202–89. On this book and Funkenstein’s interpretation of Vico see Sandra Rudnick Luft, ‘Funkenstein’s Vichian Reassessment of Verum/Factum for the Modern Age,’ New Vico Studies 6 (1988): 105–12. Isaiah Berlin, ‘Corsi e Ricorsi,’ Journal of Modern History 50 (1978): 486. Donald R. Kelley, Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 3. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. M.H. Fisch and T.G. Bergin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1968). Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 3. Ibid., 12, 178–9, 290–345. Vico, The New Science, par. 31. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 285. For a wider discussion of Vico’s theory of myth see Joseph Mali, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s New Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Vico, The New Science, par. 375–6. Ibid., par. 349. Ibid., par. 405. Ibid., par. 331. For comprehensive reviews of this notion see Rodolfo Mondolfo, Il ‘verumfactum’ prima di Vico (Napoli: Guida, 1969); Karl Löwith, Vicos Grundsatz: Verum et factum convertuntur: Seine theologische Prämisse und deren säkulare Konsequenzen (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1968); Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), 21–38. Vico, The New Science, par. 349. Francesco de Sanctis rightly compared Vico’s New Science to Dante’s Divine Comedy: ‘Bristling with myths, with etymologies, with symbols, with allegories, and pregnant with presentiments and divinations, it is not less great than the “sacred poem” itself; it is the work of a fantasy excited by philosophical genius and fortified by erudition, and has all the physiognomy of a great revelation.’ History of Italian Literature, trans. J. Redfern (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1959), 2: 807–8.

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32 Vico, The New Science, par. 338. 33 Ibid., par. 51. 34 Giambattista Vico, The Autobiography, trans. T.G. Bergin and M.H. Fisch (Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, 1963), 148. 35 Francis Bacon, On the Wisdom of the Ancients, in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis, and D.D. Heath (London: Longman, 1858–74), 6: 696. 36 Vico, The New Science, par. 127. 37 Ibid., par. 314 38 Ibid., par. 374. 39 Ibid., par. 814. 40 Ibid., par. 34 41 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, ed. R. Rhees, trans. A.C. Miles (Retford: Brynmill Press, 1979), 10. 42 Vico, The New Science, par. 412. 43 Ibid., par. 352. 44 Funkenstein probes the affinities between Vico and Malebranche’s ‘occasionalist’ theology in Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 290–6. 45 Vico, The New Science, par. 178. 46 Ibid., par. 201. 47 Leszec Kolakowski, The Persistence of Myth, trans. A. Czerniawski (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). On the recognition of myth in modern historiography see Joseph Mali, Mythistory. The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 48 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. J. and D. Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 18. 49 Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Myth in Primitive Psychology,’ in Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948). 50 Vico, The New Science, pars 356–7. 51 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 285. 52 Vico, The New Science, par. 342. 53 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2: Mythical Thought, trans. R. Mannheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), 5. 54 Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, ‘The Interpretive Turn: Emergence of an Approach,’ in P. Rabinow and W.M. Sullivan, eds, Interpretive Social Science (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979). 55 John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). For critical commentaries see the essays in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and

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58 59 60 61

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Joseph Mali Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). For a brilliant revision of these views see David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Anthony D. Smith, ‘The Myth of the “Modern Nation” and the Myths of Nations,’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 11 (1988): 12. See Funkenstein’s essays ‘Maimonides: Political Theory and Realistic Messianism,’ and ‘The Political Theory of Jewish Emancipation,’ in Perceptions of Jewish History. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 11–12; on the origins and transformations of this principle see pages 213–71. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 350. Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. R.M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 118. Amos Funkenstein, ‘As a Lily among Brambles: Jewish Historiography and Other Disciplines’ (Hebrew), Zion 60, 3 (1995), 335–47. References to scholars and works mentioned below can be found in this publication, which is reprinted in this volume. Ibid., 346.

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chapter ten

Francesco Bianchini, Historian. In Memory of Amos Funkenstein J.L. HEILBRON

Magnam vim habet ad amicitias inter Homines eruditos coniugendas morum Studiorumque similtudo. Majorem etiam, si alter alteri ad virtutem aut scientiam viam praeundo mostraverit. Maximam denique si studia, quorum inter eos communio est, minimè sunt vulgaria. Johannes Clauberg, Physica (Amsterdam: Elzevir, 1664), f. *3r

I recall with a still lively amazement a conversation I had with Amos Funkenstein at one of our monthly lunches a few years ago. Usually our talk related to the questions in which he was particularly interested, and I played the role of Simplicio to his Salviati. On this occasion, however, I thought that at last I could introduce a subject that I could dominate. I had been doing some geometry to preserve my sanity during an administrative stint and had solved one or two problems in ways I thought amusing. I gave him the problems; he said that he would try his hand at them. Then I made a remark about the connection between some related proofs in Euclid. That was a mistake. Amos immediately supplied from memory the numbers of the propositions, the rationale for their placement, the basis of their demonstration, their excellences, and their shortcomings. Used as I was to Amos’s vast learning and easy recall, I was flabbergasted to find that he knew Euclid as well as he knew the Bible. The feat had a plausible explanation. Amos had tutored highschool geometry to help support himself when a student in Germany. His ease with the subject appears from the few pages he devoted to the methods of Greek geometry in Theology and the Scientific Imagination (1986).1 A major theme of this masterwork is the productive force of ‘accommodation.’ Its operation in the history of science is best known from

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Galileo’s compromising letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. With learned references to St Augustine and other patristic fathers, Galileo argued that the Bible spoke to the people it addressed using language and concepts adapted to their understanding. The semi-barbarous old Hebrews would not have admired Joshua’s intelligence if he had bid the earth to stand still to allow them to complete their slaughter of the Amorites. Scriptura humane loquitur.2 This gloss paralleled St Augustine’s explanation of the allowance of pagan sacrifices among the early Hebrews: only gradually could they be weaned from their primitive errors and the purified symbolic acts of worship perfected in the Christian Mass be introduced. Accommodation in lesser matters continued after Augustine as popes and councils brought in new teachings to match the maturation of humankind. As Maimonides and Funkenstein observed, God could not have bothered to specify every acceptable observance. Accommodation would become an important force in the liberalization of thought: what the law does not forbid it allows. For those who understood the use and purpose of accommodation, the church’s capricious insistence on the immutability of law and custom was a charade, a way to secure respect from the uneducated.3 A second major theme in Theology and the Scientific Imagination is ‘knowing by doing.’ That is how we learn geometry. We can understand mathematics and also the human-built world, its history, laws, and institutions, but not the cosmos, precisely because we made one and not the other. Perhaps the best-known formulations of this concept, verum est factum and verum et factum convertuntur, ‘the true and the constructed are convertible,’ indeed, identical, come from Giambattista Vico’s De antiquissima italorum sapientia (1710); they generalize the teaching of his De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), that ‘we are able to demonstrate geometrical propositions because we create them.’4 Funkenstein devotes considerable attention to Vico’s New Science, which grounds the possibility of a scientific history of mankind implicitly on the verumfactum principle.5 We are able to follow the rise of the primitive brutish savages that survived the Flood up to yesterday’s civilized men because the power of our developed imaginations allows us access to theirs, which produced both the poetic language of their myths and the dynamics of their ascent. The climb took place through several welldefined stages of an ‘ideal eternal history’ that all peoples except the Jews traversed, more or less, in accordance with natural law. By introspection we can recognize the poetic wisdom of primitive men as a language, and we can intuit the historical stages.6

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Funkenstein credits Vico with introducing the concept of historicalsocial context in the guise of his ideal eternal history, and with focusing attention on the mutual ‘correspondence’ or ‘accommodation’ of the actions and concerns, the images, languages, and religions, that make a Zeitgeist.7 Put in the sort of triads Vico liked, his main themes, and his major contributions to the methodology of modern history, were ‘the contextual harmony within each period, the necessary regularity in the succession of periods (nature), and the growing spontaneity of the social endeavor (freedom).’8 The theme of freedom and spontaneity may be more Funkenstein’s than Vico’s. As for the first two, contextual harmony and necessary succession, they apply equally well to the Istoria universale of Vico’s elder contemporary, Francesco Bianchini (1662– 1729). Vico did not mention Bianchini in his Scienza nuova; but similarities in phraseology and thought leave no doubt that Vico made use of Bianchini’s work. No more than Vico did Funkenstein refer to Bianchini. The following essay presents material that Amos might have included in Theology and the Scientific Imagination if Vico had acknowledged his debt to the celebrated Bianchini, confidant of popes, head of antiquities in Rome, world-class astronomer, member of the royal societies of London and Paris, and universal historian, ‘the greatest man that Italy produced in the [eighteenth century].’ Or, indeed, in all time. ‘Perhaps Italy has never had a man with a mind at the same time deeper and more profound.’9

1. Learned Play A Career Move Bianchini, a native of Verona, laid the foundations of his learning at the Jesuit College in Bologna. He wanted to join the order, but his father, judging him immature for such a decision, sent him to the University of Padua.10 There he studied theology and fell, still immature, under the influence of the professor of mathematics, Geminiano Montanari. An excellent teacher and practised astronomer, Montanari led a new generation of ‘fisico-matematici’ who took their inspiration from Galileo.11 Bianchini became Montanari’s assistant and then his collaborator. Together they tracked comets and followed up Montanari’s discovery of variable stars. Bianchini brought to the collaboration a taste for mathematics, keen eyesight, and an ability to draw developed by the Jesuits.

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His mathematics and drawing would also support his universal history by enabling him to fix dates and depict monuments. His unusual vision eventually created his most remarkable work in natural science, a map of the invisible surface of Venus. It appears that he may have projected onto the Venusian landscape an image of his own retina.12 In a similar way his Istoria universale adduced as evidence from pagan history conclusions drawn from his own Christian substance, notably the dating of creation at 4,000 years before the reign of Augustus Caesar. After graduating from Padua in 1684, Bianchini went to Rome to continue the study of theology and mount the ecclesiastical ladder. An interlude in Verona to extract his father from debtors’ prison and, incidentally, to participate in founding or refounding an academy of experiments there, ended, in 1688, with his definitive return to Rome. From Verona he had sought a minor post in the Vatican Library; but family contacts brought him the more promising charge of custodian of the collections of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. When in 1689 Ottoboni became Pope Alexander VIII, he rewarded Bianchini with a sinecure or two and reassignment as librarian to the cardinal nephew, another Pietro Ottoboni, who would become the most generous and knowledgable private patron of the arts in Rome.13 One of the younger Ottoboni’s friends was Giovanni Francesco Albani, who noticed the talent of the librarian. Though a cardinal, Albani had not bothered to become a priest. He corrected the omission in 1700, just before entering the conclave from which he emerged as Pope Clement XI. With Clement’s patronage, Bianchini quickly rose to be Rome’s leading astronomer and archaeologist. Between the reigns of Alexander VIII (who died in 1691) and Clement XI, Bianchini looked for job security. He again aimed at the Vatican Library, not, as before, as a scribe, but somewhere near its head. In 1692 his formidably learned townsman, the Augustinian Cardinal Enrico Noris, became prefect of the Vatican Library despite the opposition of the Jesuits. Noris enjoyed his job. ‘Often I use [my carriage, a perk of the job] to ride past the Jesuits’ college ut videant et invideant.’ But annoying the Jesuits proved insufficient compensation for the bother of bureaucracy. ‘This life does not give me time for my studies … I prefer to be a writer than a custodian of books.’14 Since Bianchini was not and never would be a cardinal (he declined to go beyond the order of deacon), he would have to demonstrate extraordinary breadth and depth of knowledge to attain a high post at the Vatican. He decided on a bold plan, the composition of a universal history on

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new principles. In keeping with the genre, it would run from creation to his time. His new principles were to eschew biblical sources, to periodize by the character of the times, and to illustrate each period with a montage of artefacts – monuments, coins, gems, sculptures, pottery, sarcophagi, inscriptions – that expressed its character and forced it on the memory. The scheme was brilliant. The illustrations enabled Bianchini to apply his artistic skill, make use of the latest archaeological finds and the artefacts preserved in the Ottoboni and other collections, and appeal to what he identified as his century’s love of symbols.15 The reliance on artefacts and pagan sources had the further advantage of allowing him to sidestep the most difficult historiographical problems of the day: the antiquity of man and the relationship between Gentile and Jewish history. When Bianchini planned his Istoria universale the irksome question of the date of creation deducible from scripture was again in the news. St Augustine had declared it insoluble, and he had been right; but that did not stop powerful Renaissance savants armed with precise chronology and the three languages from disputing whether the Hebrew or the Greek text of the Old Testament gave the more reliable chronology. Since the Greek version made the world a millennium or more older than the Hebrew, the question of reliability meant something to savants who calculated the likely length of human history at 6,000 or 7,000 years, from start to finish. By the middle of the seventeenth century some fifty dates competed for the honor of marking the beginning of historical time. By the early eighteenth century, according to the careful count of the Huguenot minister and mathematician Alphonse des Vignoles, the number had risen to 200 and the difference between the earliest and latest dates to 3,400 years.16 Mathematics engenders quarrels. A pamphlet war erupted in the Netherlands between Isaac Vossius, who dated the Deluge according to the Greek count, and Georg Hornius, who favoured the Hebrew. The dispute settled nothing, which only caused it to spread. No doubt Bianchini knew it in its French guise, in the lengthy dispute that began around 1690 between the Cistercian Paul Pezron, who followed Vossius, and the Benedictine Jean Martianay, who defended Hornius.17 Pezron chose the longer Greek count in an attempt to meet a severe challenge to the Bible as a general guide to human history. In 1655 the librarian of the Comte du Condé, Isaac de la Peyrère, then a Calvinist, previously perhaps a Jew, and soon to be a Catholic, published anonymously his demonstration of the existence of men before Adam. He had

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floated this idea for a decade, usually to strong disapprobation; but he had also received encouragement during missions on behalf of Condé to Holland and Scandinavia. Queen Christina of Sweden received him in Stockholm and, after her abdication, in Belgium, and urged him to publish his odd opinion. Perhaps she appreciated that pre-Adamites could provide parents for people apparently and mysteriously unrelated to Adam, like those for whose instruction God branded Cain; put back creation indefinitely, and so allow the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Chinese the seniority they claimed over the Jews and explain the high state of Chaldean culture in the time of Abraham; and reduce the events of Jewish history, including its miracles and even the Flood, to local happenings, and so cancel the problem of deriving the Chinese and the Americans from the line of Noah. The book aroused an ecumenical spirit: Jews, Protestants, and Catholics all condemned it. The Roman Inquisition picked up La Peyrère. By a curious plea bargain, he was allowed to expiate his sin by travelling to Rome, confessing to the pope, and converting to Catholicism. The pope, Alexander VII, offered him a benefice if he would stay in Rome, as a counter-piece to his one-time patroness and Alexander’s most spectacular convert, Queen Christina.18 La Peyrère preferred to return to Paris and his librarianship. He continued to lobby for his pre-Adamites but now in the way the Jesuits argued for Copernican astronomy: it was a useful hypothesis, did not change the observed facts, and was known to be wrong only because a pope had said so. La Peyrère liked to compare his discovery with Copernicus’s and to draw out a parallel consequence: even if untrue, the Copernican theory showed the Ptolemaic to be false; similarly, consideration of the hypothesis of pre-Adamites supported the conclusion that the Old Testament could not be the history of the entire human race. Just before reaching the patriarchal age of seventy, La Peyrère retired as a lay brother to the Oratorian convent in Aubivilliers outside Paris. There he developed further his notion that extant scripture is just a fragment from a much fuller record, and the explanation that the discrepancies within and between the versions of the Old Testament arose in the process of abridgment. He did not publish this insight but put it into the head of the Oratorian savant Richard Simon, who argued, in his Histoire critique du vieux testament (1678), that although scripture is infallible, no infallible date for creation or unambiguous human history can be obtained from its available synopses.19

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This reasoned position did not deflect Pezron, who imagined that he had found the explanation for the short count in the Hebrew Bible. His Antiquité des tems rétablie (1686) revealed that the Jews had falsified their scriptures to escape the obligation to recognize Jesus. According to their tradition, the Messiah was to come during the sixth millennium, which had been reached at the time of Christ according to the chronology of the Septuagint. Martianay dismissed all this, and the extended age of the Gentile kingdoms that went with it, and insisted on the letter of the Hebrew text.20 The would-be universal historian aspiring for a position at the pope’s elbow in the 1690s faced many tough problems of accommodation. The writings of La Peyrère and Simon (and, of course, Spinoza) cast doubt on the most authoritative source for the history of mankind before the rise of the Greeks. And even if accepted as an account of the Jews, the Old Testament did not agree at all with what the Gentile nations said about themselves. This was the great problem faced by Bianchini and later by Vico. They solved it in very different ways. A Clever Ploy Everyone knew that Gentile historians had grossly exaggerated the age of their nations. To take a notorious example, Berossus the Babylonian, who lived at the time of Alexander the Great, made out that 432,000 years of recorded history, or perhaps 472,000, had run their course before the Flood. Against this boast the claims of the Chinese and the Egyptians to an antiquity of 40,000 years, or perhaps 80,000, were not only vain and false, but also unimaginative. Most Christian historians summarily dismissed these numbers as lies or conceits. Others interpreted the 432,000 years of the Babylonians as so many days; Vignoles thus cut their history down to 1,200 years.21 Bianchini took a more principled course. From the Roman historian Varro he knew that the Greeks had required around a millennium to build up their arts and sciences. That made a very useful yardstick. The Chinese, Egyptians, and Babylonians would have been dim-witted indeed to have made so little progress during the vast stretches of time their annals boasted. In fact, according to Bianchini, their boasts were a very useful datum: they confirmed that the Flood, the universal deluge recorded in most Gentile histories, had wiped out virtually all memory of the prediluvian past.22

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The outstanding question then was to fix the date of the Flood. To do so from pagan history alone, Bianchini invoked the yardstick he had deduced from Varro and the plausible assumption that the Greeks started from a higher state of civilization than the first men: Noah and his family, though more pious than learned, had known enough to reestablish agriculture and its subsidiary arts. Hence the time from the creation of the world, of which all societies preserved a memory, to the Flood had to be more than a thousand years. By how much? It does not do to be too exact about such things. Let us say half again as long. All respectable chronologists (that is, all who followed the Hebrew Bible) put the Flood halfway between creation and the first Olympiad, which occurred around 800 years before the time of Augustus. Taking creation to have preceded the Flood by 1,500 years or, so as not to rush the post-Adamites, by 1,600, we have the beginning of human history about 800 + 1,600 + 1,600 = 4,000 years before Augustus. What could be freer from arbitrary assumptions? The calculation is as reliable as Bianchini’s plausible premise of progress: ‘men of equal capacity for the sciences can in equal times create arts and learning that, if not completely equal, are at least proportional to the time and the paucity of means and workers.’23 No doubt the argument had a weakness. The suppositious agreement among correct chronologists that the Flood came halfway between creation and the first Olympiad did not follow from the premise of equal progress in equal times. Bianchini said in answer to the implied question that by purging Greek fables of their nonsense and by making use of Chinese records chronologists could work backward from the first Olympiad to the Flood. That too had a little of the arbitrary about it. By the time he came to write up the history of the seventeenth century after creation, however, Bianchini had found a uniformitarian argument apparently free from objection. Recent excavations of land at the base of Vesuvius had disclosed layers of soil interrupted at several depths by detritus from volcanic eruptions. Assuming that the uppermost eruption documented was the one that had destroyed Pompeii, and that ‘ordinarily equal intervals produce corresponding effects,’ Bianchini had the geochronometer he needed. Vigorous digging hit water at a level corresponding to the traditional date of the Flood, 2,400 years before the explosion that had levelled Pompeii. Luckily the volcano’s heat had not yet dried up the dampness. ‘It is worthy of the curiosity of philosophers to try similar experiments in other mountains of Asia that throw out fire.’24

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The date of creation deduced assumption-free from the progress of mud and mankind agreed with that recoverable from the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, its coincidence to one part in 1,000 with the value computed by the precise and learned Anglican Archbishop James Ussher, and to one part in a hundred with those of two chronologists Bianchini admired, the Lutheran Sethus Calvisius and the Jesuit Pétau, might seem an ecumenical miracle.25 Not to Bianchini. He did not suppose that his 4,000 years was anything closer than a gross approximation; and he no doubt held, with Martianay, that it made no sense to be punctilious about dates to which the historical actors themselves attached no importance.26 But even as a gross approximation, the 4,000 years gained a very important objective. As the censor who recommended publication of the Istoria remarked, it compressed pagan annals within the minimum span conventionally allotted to the history of the Jews. Hence Bianchini’s answer to the Pyrrhonism of La Peyrère: considerations drawn from Gentile historians indicate that, when properly deflated, their annals will agree well enough with the Old Testament. Polygenetic creation, an indefinitely old world, and men before Adam were not required. Another advantage of Bianchini’s calculation of creation was to provide an elegant if arbitrary organizing system for the largely unknown and undatable history of the human race (apart from the Jews) before the Olympiads. Varro had worked with three ages: the unknown and uncertain, from creation to the Flood; the mythical and fabulous, from the Flood to the first Olympiad; and, thenceforward, the historical. Bianchini split the first age into two and symmetrized the whole. Making creative use of the church’s inability to decide when the most ancient times began and ended, he assigned ten centuries to each of his four ages. The removal of the Flood to the middle of the second ‘uncertain’ age had the advantage of emphasizing again how little the human race remembered of the times immediately after almost all of it had drowned.27 The symmetrizing into four equal ages made explicit the symbolic character of Bianchini’s world history. As he put it, he aimed to inculcate comprehension of human development, not apprehension of disconnected facts. Disconnection had been the hallmark of universal histories, even of those of which Bianchini spoke most highly. Calvisius’s Opus chronologicum is an unrelenting sequence of factoids. Its last, posthumous edition of 1685 begins with the separation of the waters on 27 October in year 1, and proceeds, with one damn thing after another,

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through 900 double-column pages, down to December 5633 and the destruction of Huguenot churches in France. (Calvisius’s book, rated by the grand chronologist Joseph Scaliger as ‘most reliable, useful, and packed with learning,’ followed the Hebrew count.) Pétau’s abridged chronology of 1682 has several features in common with the history Bianchini would write. It emphasizes pagan history (it gives short shrift to the 1,656 years from creation to Flood), provides genealogies of the heroes of myth, treats them in a euhemerist manner, periodizes events rather than lists them, and occasionally introduces a chapter on the arts and sciences.28 Still, like Calvisius, Pétau remained too concerned with chronology to provide a big picture. Or, to change to Bianchini’s metaphor, both of them played upon single instruments, whereas history required an orchestra. To be sure, history cannot do without dates. ‘History without chronology is music without a beat; [but] annals without history are beats without music.’29 The framework of forty centuries of average constant progress provided the steady beat. It remained to write the music, or exhibit illustrations, of the evidence. Bianchini devoted special effort to these illustrations. At the head of the description of each century he put an image, usually a montage of objects, which caught its essence. As the subtitle to the Istoria makes clear – ‘proved with monuments and illustrated with symbols of the ancients’ – Bianchini regarded the objects as not only representations but also demonstrations of historical developments. The ancients had found two ways of preserving their history, one suited to fixing every particular circumstance, the other to comprehending a series of interconnected subjects. ‘The former they called the art of letters, the latter the understanding of symbols. Each invention is nothing other than a way of communicating thoughts: the first more general but more difficult to learn … the second more restricted but faster because more directly connected to the immediate impression that the imagination receives from the feelings.’ Symbols represent only objects of the mind and do not express its operations, such as affirming, denying, comparing, deducing, ‘in which the substance and variety of thinking consists’; but symbols have the advantage that they convey their meaning directly, so that even if the language of those who invented them should perish, they can still be understood, ‘as we see in the insignia of magistrates, in paintings, marbles, shields, gems, and seals of our own people, and of barbarians.’ Altogether, Bianchini chose and drew over 130 objects to give his readers direct access to ancient history.30

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If he and the world lasted long enough, Bianchini intended to produce a second volume of universal history, running from Augustus to 1600, divided into centuries and subdivided into scores, each with its own image, amounting to 80 in all. His projected two volumes of world history therefore would contain 120 carefully constructed images. In the event, he did not push his history beyond the thirty-second century after creation, because, as he explained, his book was becoming too large and he had reached historical time; and perhaps also because Innocent XII, who felt stronger claims on his patronage than Bianchini’s, did not appoint him to the Vatican Library. Before collapsing along with the Assyrian Empire, Bianchini drew and printed the 120 images, issued them on strong paper, and recommended cutting them out for use in a card game of ‘History.’ Forty cards divided into four suits constituted a deck. For ancient history, the suits were, in chronological order, Fragments (only bits and pieces have come down to us from the first centuries), Waters (the Flood came in the second millennium), Stars (the constellations that commemorate the age of myth), and Writers (the worthy identifiable people of the historical age). The cards were to be played following suit and chronological sequence; after a little practice, players would know not only the order but also the meaning of the images, and so have universal history literally at their fingertips.31 The pedagogue in Bianchini recommended his approach as suited to forming the Ciceronian citizen of the world at home everywhere because of his grasp of the essential elements of universal history and natural science. Such a person transcends time as well as space. ‘[He is] one of the republic of all men, born to extend himself to, and converse virtually with, every age, although obliged to restrict himself to a certain place and time.’32 Images help in the communication. They appeal simultaneously to the three faculties of the mind: reason, memory, and imagination. Their sequence shows at a glance the life cycles of kingdoms and principalities, their growth, maturity, decay, and ruin. Their power appears also in the sciences, which have been transmitted primarily by symbols and representations, like geometrical figures and armillary spheres. ‘Wherefore we must declare our great obligation to the ancients, who not being content with discovering the sciences and arts, also multiplied ways of transmitting them; and even after inventing a method of writing down sounds with letters, cultivated the practice of summarizing and illustrating thoughts with symbols.’33 Bianchini’s framework and program for universal history exploited the leeway in accommodation that Funkenstein detected in the Rome

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of the 1690s.34 Sidestepping scriptural problems by pretending to deal only with pagan histories would not have worked if the church had not acceded already to the sort of erudition the project required. However, ignoring scripture in accounts of human history during biblical times undercut the accommodation that made Bianchini’s Istoria possible. The tools that he and other scholars developed to analyse Gentile texts were turned easily, and eventually, against the Bible. Funkenstein observed that the accommodation of the 1690s represented a fleeting equilibrium. Doubtless he would have taken Bianchini as an exemplar and thus have agreed with a recent encyclopedia of Italian literature that ranks Bianchini as the most important exponent, and the Istoria universale as the best example, of Roman erudition around 1700. It accords him this status not only for the sensibility of his historiography and the richness of his documentation but also because of his skill in accommodation, his ability to keep his results within the expanding envelope of the allowable. His astronomy offers an exact parallel. He never advocated heliocentrism, but insinuated it quietly, especially in his book on Venus, which uses Copernican models throughout, ‘for convenience.’ And he openly sought, though he did not find, the stellar parallax that would have confirmed Copernicus’s model of the universe.35

2. Istoria universale Evidence The claims and counterclaims of Protestant and Catholic authorities locked in erudite combat over church history, though productive of books, had demonstrated to bystanders that the study of the past could no more uncover the truth than it could turn scholars into gentlemen. As Bianchini developed his forty-century format, sceptics like Pierre Bayle were illustrating the principle enunciated by Felix de la Mothe le Vayer that, since historians must rely either on the testimony of others, which is notoriously unreliable, or on their own observations, which are distorted by their commitments and interests, ‘there is almost no certainty in anything that the most famous historians have spread abroad and future historians will produce.’ The wise man discounts historical reconstructions as he does portraits of beautiful women.36 Finding the true features of the woman falsely beautified – that is, the kernel of truth in historical documents – made the great challenge of

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historiography in the second half of the seventeenth century. A standard solution was to prefer artefactual to literary evidence, the testimony of coins and inscriptions to the text of ancient historians. Bianchini adopted this manner of blunting historical Pyrrhonism by giving preference to symbolic transmissions. As he said, the artefacts date from antiquity, whereas we have only copies of copies of the books of the ancient historians. To be sure, the objects in his images seldom date from the times he takes them to illustrate: it would be asking too much to demand an inscription or coin made on the day after creation, if for no other reasons than because Adam could not write and had no need of money. To employ artefacts for his purpose, Bianchini assumed that symbolic representations existed in the minds of human beings long before the inventions of the arts needed to materialize them, and that the materializations faithfully preserved traditional forms. A hazardous assumption to be sure. In favour of it he argued that both the symbolic representations and their physical realizations were public property. Although artists might manifest a personal style in their designs, the result could not differ much from public expectation if it were to accomplish its purpose. ‘Whence if the facts [recorded by Roman inscriptions and medals] were not true, men living at the time would not have preserved them in memorials corroborated by many signs of public authority.’ Verum est factum. ‘It is incredible how quick our mind is to extract the signs of truth from objects: and the force with which truth insinuates itself firmly into the mind is equally admirable and efficacious.’37 In practice Bianchini took much from the ancient historians despite their doubtful reliability. He tried to apply to them the sort of criticism practised by the Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon and the scholars who took his De re diplomatica (1681) as their guide.38 Bianchini knew the man personally. While on a trip to Italy in 1685–6 to hunt for manuscripts, Mabillon attended a meeting of the Accademia Fisicomatematica supported by Giovanni Giusti Ciampini, a Monsignor high up in the papal bureaucracy. Mabillon was then at his prime as leader of the historical school of the Benedictines of St Maur, headquartered at St Germain in Paris, an imposing and influential figure, ‘the greatest historical scholar of the seventeenth century,’ ‘the Galileo of scholarly history.’39 By grit and scholarship he had cut out much that was fabulous from the medieval history of France and reduced the number of Benedictine saints from eighty to twenty-five. This formidable exposer

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of undocumented martyrs heard Bianchini give a talk at Ciampini’s academy on a mathematical subject and was impressed.40 No doubt Bianchini listened to Mabillon speak about historical evidence.41 In De re diplomatica, Mabillon gave methods for testing charters, rolls, and bulls for authenticity. He considered the character of the ink, the paper or parchment, handwriting, form, seals – every physical characteristic accessible to touch or sight. His approach stimulated scholars such as Bianchini and Ciampini who, like him, had an interest in experimental natural science and material objects. Also, as Gabriel Maugin observed a century ago, Mabillon’s ability to slaughter saints with impunity showed that faithfulness to the sources, that unflinching erudition, was compatible with good relations with prelates.42 Following such methods, Ciampini and later Bianchini demonstrated that most of the collection of popes’ lives, the Liber pontificalis of one Athanasius Bibliothecarius (ninth century), could not have been written by him, and, moreover, contained much that could not be true.43 Mabillon rated Bianchini’s historical scholarship highly. He had occasion to say so when Bianchini sent him corrections to one of his saintly house cleanings. This book, Epistola … de cultu de sanctorum ignotorum (1698), attracted the attention of the censorship. Bianchini read the manuscript of a second edition as consultant to the cognizant censor. He found nothing to object to except some errors and omissions, which he forwarded to Mabillon. The diplomat replied: ‘If there is anything less unpolished in this edition than in the previous one, it is owing entirely to your care.’ Mabillon mentioned particularly Bianchini’s identification and correction of faults in Eusebius, the standard ancient source for the history of the early church. That was praise indeed from the man who set the standard for the evaluation and emendation of historical sources.44 Another visitor to Ciampini’s academy who thought hard about history was Leibniz. He and Bianchini had much to discuss, including steps to obtain the cancellation of the Vatican’s prohibition of the Copernican system, and they corresponded for some time after Leibniz left Italy in 1690. Many of Leibniz’s attitudes towards history have exact counterparts in Bianchini: admiration of Calvisius, Pétau, and Mabillon; interest in universal history, including its extension to China; attention to pedagogy and mnemonic images; insistence on the use of ‘monuments’ as well as literary sources; and, above all, persistent attention to the place of history in the body of science, that is, to the problem of historical truth.45 Bianchini took the solution of this problem, in the form

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of distinguishing narration from myth, as the main objective of his Istoria universale. Although he respected Herodotus and other ancient historians for their efforts, not always successful, to collect proofs, written and artefactual, from ruins, statues, informants, and books, he placed himself with the moderns, the Mabillons and Leibnizes, who surpassed the ancients in ‘the refinement of judgment we call criticism, [which] investigates marbles and manuscripts of every age and country in order to separate even in matters of little moment the certain from the doubtful.’ Bianchini acknowledged that the best source even for profane history during the forty centuries before Augustus was the Bible. Nonetheless, modern euhemerists could reconstruct much from fable without opening scripture, and from material representations of capital events like the Flood, which Bianchini found in sufficient numbers to obviate recourse to the Bible’s ‘true depiction.’46 Bianchini had powerful tools for his impossible task: his knowledge of materials, mathematics, and languages; his doctrine of symbols as an answer to historical Pyrrhonism; his association with accomplished scholars such as Ciampini, Leibniz, and Mabillon; his skill in drawing; and his position as keeper of the Ottoboni library, ‘this wonderful library, this excellent museum, which supplied the historical proofs described in [my] book,’ and which Mabillon’s disciple, Bernard de Montfaucon, rated as second only to the Vatican in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin sources (fig. 10.1). As librarian, Bianchini kept current with books produced and imported into Italy and profited from conversations with scholars resident in or visiting Rome.47 Nor did books and people exhaust the treasures of the library. Ottoboni had a valuable collection of ancient coins. Ciampini and other wealthy men put their artefacts at Bianchini’s disposal, and he himself, with the income from the benefices that the popes had given him, acquired items suitable for historical images. He put all Rome under contribution for proofs for his Istoria universale.48

Creation, and All That We know with certainty the fact and the date of creation. Bianchini’s method required that we also have an image that fixes in our memory some of the ideas that ancient civilizations retained of this singular event. The apposite image (fig. 10.2) gives priority to symbols recalling the foreplay of the games of the Roman circus. Bianchini remarked that the preliminary seven circuits made by the chariots, and the twelve

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Figure 10.1 View of the Ottoboni library flanked by globes presenting the new and the old worlds. Istoria universale, f. b.1 (All figures courtesy of the Niedersächsische Staat- und Universitäts-Bibliothek, Göttingen)

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carceri, represented the order of the world: the number of planets, zodiacal signs, months. The sacrifices that followed the seven circuits recorded the natural impulse to revere the cause of the world order. Bianchini’s montage includes, besides the chariots, the goal posts of the circus topped with cosmic eggs (as taken from a bas-relief and a coin) and emblems of origins from China and America. He drew on Aristotle for the information that common people everywhere believed in a divine creation, ‘before the errors of those who called themselves philosophers threw it into doubt,’ and on the Jesuit Danielo Bartoli for comparable beliefs among Asiatic peoples. Bianchini’s iconography included the latest pertinent find, a medallion picturing the Eleusinian creation mystery complete with God, the sun and planets, the zodiac, and, disporting in a cave, a female figure of fecundity.49 A slight, unacknowledged hint from scripture suggested the next step into the Age of the Unknown, a mixture of the poetical teaching of the four metallic ages and the myth of Pandora. Taken together, they describe a fall from a golden state owing to disobedience and unbridled curiosity. Bianchini found fall stories in all the cultures he studied; whence a compact image featuring the doings of Pandora and of similar sinners in Japan and the Americas. Hesiod and Ovid treated Pandora’s story as if it had occurred soon after creation. This suggested so strong a link between Jupiter and Adam that Bianchini could not suppress it. He incorporated an unhappy Adam and Eve, posing before the tree of knowledge in their new awareness of their nakedness, as portrayed on a tombstone found in a Roman villa. The correspondence required distinguishing between Jupiter the contemporary of Adam (Jupiter I) and his namesake (Jupiter II) who lived in the time of Noah. The mythographer must be on guard constantly against confusing different fabulous characters with the same name, as Cicero had warned while pointing out six different Herculeses, three Jupiters, five Mercurys and as many Minervas, and an indefinite number of Vulcans. Recognition of this multiplicity enables us to accept the existence of real people and true episodes aggrandized in the fables. With Plato, Livy, Tertullian, and Augustine we must recognize that ‘truth has a certain odor of eternity, impervious to time: and its perennial fragrance filters through the densest tissue of lies.’ We can choose to sniff the fables or remain in ignorance. ‘But woe to learning if it dismisses mythology as terra incognita!’50 Myths are not so hard to decipher. For example – still in relation to the Golden Age – Bianchini deduced from the beard on a figure on a certain bas-relief that, contrary to most interpretations, it recorded an

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Figure 10.2 Relics of Creation. Istoria universale, Image I

early depiction of Saturn. A figure of Saturn on one of the items in Cassiano dal Pozzo’s famous paper museum confirmed that the bas-relief had to do with the Saturnalia. Bianchini regarded the licentiousness and indulgence of this festival as indications of a time of plenty, an easy life, no slavery, in short, a golden age, perhaps the Age of Gold – certainly an undecorous concept of the desirable for a pious, studious young deacon. But in fact Pandora-Eve had come and gone by the time memorialized on the bas-relief. Images of the Saturnalia recorded only debased recollections of a lost age of ease and innocence. This explanation refers to Saturn I, reputed by some to have been the first man; like Jupiter and Minerva, Saturns recur with confusing irregularity in the fables that have come down to us.51 According to the poets, the Age of Silver saw the beginnings of astronomy, arithmetic, and agriculture. Bianchini assigned the age’s com-

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mencement to the third century after creation. Saturn I was still around, as he lived for a thousand years. So did most of his family, just as if they were Hebrew patriarchs. That suggested a correspondence between the inventors of the arts, like Saturn II and Uranus (the father of Jupiter II), and the house of Adam down to Noah. Bianchini drew up partial family trees, ending with Noah and Uranus, who was known to have drowned in the ocean. Apparently (Bianchini concluded) a longlived character named Uranus invented mathematics and astronomy (whence the name of its Muse), no doubt in the service of agriculture: not real astronomy, the astronomer Bianchini added, ‘but the study of the seasons and meteorological phenomena, not the theory of celestial motions.’ So much we can infer from myth and poetry. We can recover Uranus’s knowledge in its most developed form from surviving fragments of the astronomy and arithmetic taught by the Egyptian Toth (Cicero’s Mercury V) just before the Flood. Chinese records, collected by Jesuit missionaries, indicated an equally early enlightenment in exact science in the Far East. No matter that writing had not been invented yet. The calendar stones of the Americans show that determined astronomers can do without it.52 To illustrate this last point, Bianchini included an abacus-like calculator in the image for Century III (figure 10.3: position 3). A bas-relief of the god Annui, to whom the Egyptians ascribed the invention of science in general, also appears (10.3: 1), carrying a celestial globe (10.3: 2); under which a perplexed Chinese, leaning on an armillary sphere and studying his ‘hieroglyphs,’ confirms that his countrymen knew as much as the Egyptians, and at the same time. Evidently, they had their own version of Annui, Toth, and Mercury V. The centrepiece, an ancient plough, symbolizes the art that began civilization. To the left, a Minerva examines boundary stones of the sort enlarged at position 4; agriculture required surveying of fields, and thus more arithmetic, and even geometry. There can be no doubt that before the Flood people knew agriculture and the limited mathematics and astronomy it required. ‘The fabulous names of Uranus and Jupiter and Minerva do not detract in the least from this fact when the most ancient nations, like the Chinese, Chaldeans, and Egyptians, attest to the same thing: to having learned from their ancestors who lived close to the time of the Flood that people then existed who practiced these arts, and compared parts of quantities by means of numbers.’53 The Age of Copper, commencing in the fourth century, continued the build-up of the arts and the decline of virtue. We infer the decline from the creation of weights and measures to combat fraud. The

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Figure 10.3 The Silver Age. Istoria universale, Image III

Copper Age also saw the invention of the first musical instruments. In general, the arts most necessary to human survival, such as agriculture, came first; music belonged among them for its role in sacrifices and ceremonies. Arts necessary only to procure goods from afar, such as navigation, came last. The mnemonic image for the Copper Age features the raising of a boundary stone and some musical instruments. Bianchini explained that the stone and the instruments both referred to the law, ‘infused in the soul with the reason, which we call the law of nature.’ The stone marked the boundary or limit of the law, which (as Bianchini knew from Plato by way of Plutarch) the ancients associated with the periods and harmony of music.54 During the Bronze Age, Vulcan developed the art of the blacksmith,

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which presupposed a knowledge of fire. His sister (or perhaps his wife) Minerva invented more arts. Bianchini supplied a family tree for Cicero’s five Minervas; the eldest of them is Uranus’s daughter and Vulcan’s wife. The image for this fifth century after creation boasts a forge, an anvil, two blacksmiths, and a set of bellows, all taken from ancient monuments. Bianchini conceded that the dating of the arts of Vulcan and Minerva II, and of the arts devised in the preceding metallic ages, gave only a rough indication of the sequence of human inventions. Some began later than Century V, and all continued to develop down to the Flood. Having no information about the true historical order, Bianchini assigned to Centuries VI through XVI inventions in accordance with his estimate of their relative amounts of necessity and luxury. So in Century VI humans discovered the uses of fruit (about which their experience in Eden presumably had made them wary) and the milk of animals; in VII, they dressed in animal skins; in VIII, they improved astronomy, and in IX, measures and arithmetic; in X, they built their first, primitive, permanent shelters. Thus ended, in relative comfort, the first millennium of human existence.55 During the next 600 years our ancestors learned how to use fire (XI) and invented the arts of the potter and the mason (XII), improved those of the smith (XIII) and the hunter (XIV), continued to seek discipline in the marketplace with weights and measures (XV), and discovered iron, war, and navigation (XVI).56 The easier their lives, the more attached men grew to luxury and violence. It became necessary to drown them. That happened halfway through Century XVII. Bianchini rehearsed all the Flood stories known to him from the Middle East, China, Japan, Greece, Europe, and America. He deduced that the Flood was universal and catastrophic. Even without written testimony, the scattering of animal remains outside their natural habitats – for example, marine fossils on mountain tops – sufficiently evinced the power and extent of the Deluge. To which Bianchini added the impeachable testimony of Berossus, who reported that in his day remains of the ark still could be seen in Armenia. The available illustrative material was as abundant as Flood stories. Bianchini chose a Neptune sitting in a cave with his feet in the water; coins with aquatic scenes; and, over all, the upper body of a bearded, winged figure with outstretched arms resting on a rainbow. He is not the Christian God but Jupiter Pluvius as depicted on a column of Marcus Aurelius. Between the rainbow and the cave hangs a human skull.57 The second millennium concludes with the division of the earth into

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three main nations (Century XVIII), the origin of idolatry and writing (XIX), and the rise of the most ancient kingdoms in Egypt, Babylon, and China (XX). Bianchini’s account of the triune inventions of sculpture, idolatry, and writing is worth recounting. Prometheus, a man of the nineteenth century, invented sculpture, perhaps in Egypt, where idolatry probably began. The connection between sculpture and idols is clear enough – Cicero had observed it. As for writing, we have it from Hyginus that one Mercury or another, having interpreted the words of man, divided the nations and sowed discord. Bianchini inferred that this Mercury had invented writing to preserve his ‘interpretations’ of words and rituals. In support whereof Hyginus had remarked that the word ‘hermeneutics,’ that is, ‘interpretations,’ derives from ‘Hermes,’ which is Greek for Mercury. To end the anarchic babble started by Mercury, Jove instituted kingship and installed one Phoroneus, who had been the first to worship Juno, as king of the Peloponnese. Besides being an idolater, Phoroneus was a commercial man; in both capacities he could use the writing that Mercury had invented to preserve the rites of idol worship. Quid clarius? ‘If this narrative is not history, certainly it contains very little of the fabulous.’ We must not allow the mythmakers, who acted on behalf of kings and priests, to mislead us as they hoodwinked more primitive peoples.58 The episode of the literate Mercury corresponded with the first or mythical stage of Varro’s three stages of theology, which Bianchini found in St Augustine. In Varro’s second stage, less primitive people, and even philosophers, accepted the false gods introduced in the first stage. The philosophers made gods of fire and atoms and amused themselves with disputes about the age and number of the deities. The third or ‘civil’ stage of theology left the philosophers with their symposia and the crowd with official priests, prescribed rites, and also plays, games, and dances that preserved the old fables for the use of discriminating historians: ‘in a word, imitating the vices rather than the virtues of their ancestors, and placing among gods and genii living persons who inherited their waywardness and their guilt.’59 The progression through the stages was accompanied by the invention and improvement of writing – initially, as we know, to preserve the rites of worship, ultimately to perpetuate philosophy and codify law. All of which Cicero made clear in the opinions of the sceptic in De natura deorum, who regarded the tales of the gods as ‘a composite of sheer inanity and arrant stupidity’ but tolerated their worship as the basis of civil society.60 As Gibbon put it, ‘The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all

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considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrates as equally useful.’61 The Third Millennium We have crossed a deluge of obscurity to reach a beachhead of history; that is, we have landed in the third millennium. Not that our travel has been unproductive. We have found relics of the search for the necessities of life even before the invention of writing and have confirmed the order of development derived from analysing Greek myths with the help of the records of other civilizations. Thus we have found astonishing agreement about creation from chaos, ordering of the world, states of innocence and guilt, invention of the basic arts, ill-will and dissensions among men, universal castigation by flood, political division of the earth, and the introduction of idolatry and writing. ‘Therefore there shines forth from the first twenty centuries of the world so great a character of truth, even if framed in the dim light of national tradition conserved by providence together with men, as to suffice for the most necessary historical knowledge, and the most worthwhile erudition.’ In continuing into the age of the heroes, we can call on astronomy to help unveil myth; for the third millennium saw the creation of the asterisms that remain on our celestial globes and that recount for those who can decipher them the political and dynastic history of the eastern Mediterranean.62 The poets and chronologists put the foundation of the Assyrian dynasty by Belus (a grandson of Noah’s) or Belus’s son Ninus (Nimrod) in the twentieth century before Augustus, that is, in Century XXI after creation. The chroniclers further agreed, as much as chroniclers do, that Assyrian dominance lasted for thirteen centuries. Ninus made certain that the people understood the power and majesty of his lineage by placing Belus among the stars, as the constellation the Greeks preserved as Orion. Bianchini pointed out that Orion’s weapons – a club and an animal-skin shield – show that the figure must be very old. He placed it, as drawn on the Farnese globe (an artefact, of which more later, of Century XLII), in his image for Century XXI (fig. 10.4: position 1). Much of the rest of the image concerns Queen Semiramis (10.4: 2), reputed to have built a great palace from whose roof Chaldean astronomers observed the stars (10.4: 8). The pedestal (10.4: 5) shows a young Jupiter standing on an eagle between two rivers and flanked by the sun and moon, symbols assigned to him by the Assyrians, ‘simulta-

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Figure 10.4. Beginning of the Third Millennium. Istoria universale, Image XXI

neously worshippers and observers of these planets.’ The youths (10.4: 6) present to Semiramis a plaque depicting the temple devoted to her relative Belus. Or rather Belus-Jupiter, for Belus might well have been that Jupiter II who invented, or profited from, idolatry. The moon (10.4: 7) was one of the two planets attached to the cult of Semiramis. The other was Venus, prompting the surmise that the Queen of Assyria may have been Venus, or perhaps Dione, who may also have been Venus.63 The use of astronomy appears to best advantage in the century (XXVIII) of the Argonauts. Then Chiron and Hercules made the first celestial spheres, invented chronology, and applied it to civil use by fashioning the Olympiads. Hercules’ role is indicated by his relieving Atlas of the weight of the heavens; signifying, as Plutarch and others had perceived, that Hercules learned astronomy from Atlas and disseminated

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Figure 10.5. The Farnese Globe. Bianchini, in Bianchini, Demonstratio (1752)

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it further. ‘Thus the Greek Republic triumphed in arms in Asia and in learning in Europe.’ Much of this history appears on the Farnese globe (fig. 10.5), which Bianchini studied with the leading astronomer of his age, Gian Domenico Cassini. They decided that, though made in the time of Ptolemy the astronomer, the globe pictured the asterisms as drawn at the time of the Argonauts. Their inference rested on the euhemerist arguments that the asterisms represented real people and events and that no one of importance after the time of Hercules has a place in the heavens.64 Hercules of Alcmena, who, according to Hyginus and Eusebius and many others, invented the Olympic games, was either Hercules the teacher of astronomy or a contemporary. The constellations, ‘a sort of hieroglyphs that conserve the meaning of heroic times,’ corroborate the histories: Hercules is among them, and Theseus, who slew the Minotaur and contributed to the design of the games, and Lyra, the instrument of Orpheus, likewise an Olympian. All evidence concurred in making Hercules, Theseus, Orpheus, Chiron, Esculapius, Achilles, and Castor contemporaries. Hence Bianchini united them and their attributes in his image for Century XXVIII (fig. 10.6): the constellation of Saetta (Hercules’ arrow), Corona (perhaps Theseus’s), Lyra (certainly Orpheus’s), Esculapius or Serpentus, Hercules, Chiron (10.6: 1–6), all taken from figures on the Farnese globe (10.6: 6).65 Bianchini did not have the time to analyse the globe in detail while writing his Istoria. Later he made a thorough analysis, which was published posthumously. It reworks material from the Istoria and adds technical detail. The reworking incorporates a coin from 157 ce in Ottoboni’s collection that bears the symbols of Belus-Jupiter, who transmitted knowledge of astronomy to Babylonia, and an Atlas carrying a globe. Bianchini explained that the coin recalls the invention of the sphere, with its poles, tropics, and equinoxes, by Atlas I and the earliest systematic observations of the Babylonians. The globe itself bears residues of the labours of Hercules, the voyage of the Argonauts, and the Olympic games, which Bianchini identified through a penetrating analysis of the relevant myths and fables.66 But the main business was to date the design of the globe. The positions of the stars relative to the equinoxes as defined by the circles on the globe corresponded to Ptolemy’s era, as Bianchini showed by calculating the precession of the equinoxes from the latest data from the Greenwich Observatory. The Greek astronomer Eudoxus, who lived in the fourth century bce, recorded that the inventors of the sphere placed the colures (the great

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Figure 10.6. The Age of the Argonauts. Istoria universale, Image XXVIII

circles through the poles and the equinoxes, and the poles and the solstices) in the middle of the asterisms. Assuming that that also was the norm in Jason’s day, and that the globe was designed then, determinaton of the middle point of the ram and calculation of the precession yielded the result that 1,425 years before Ptolemy the vernal equinox sat in the middle of the constellation Aries. A date of 1,425 years before Ptolemy falls in Century XXVIII, agreeing with traditional dating from Greek literature and with the euhemerist inference from the personages identified with the asterisms as analysed in the Istoria.67 Freed from its poetical veil, the voyage of the Argonauts appears to have been a hunt for gold and perhaps also a trading venture. Jason probably brought hides produced in Thrace and returned with precious metals; whence the first coins bore the likeness of a sheep or an ox, and the Latin word for money, pecunia (pecus = cattle).68 The battle of Troy also must be regarded as an episode in commercial competition and colonial rivalry, with the participating gods standing for different

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regions or kingdoms; thus, Venus for Ethiopia, Juno for Syria, Minerva for Egypt, Neptune for Caria, Mercury for Phoenicia.69 No doubt, too, the flight of Daedalus and the appetite of the Minotaur bear witness to the acquisitiveness of the age. The image of the century refers to these fables by representations of the Trojan Horse (10.6: 10), the ground plan of Minos’s labyrinth (10.6: 8), and a portrait of its renowned architect, Daedalus, shown fashioning his wings (10. 6: 7).70 Bianchini identified the lifting of the siege of Troy with a treaty between the combatants over spheres of influence in the Mediterranean. As for the capital question for chronologists – when did the siege take place? – Bianchini gave a common-sense answer in the style of Mabillon. Two dates competed. The authoritative Scaliger and Pétau followed the Greek polymath Eratosthenes, who gave a date 407 years before the first Olympiad, presumably on the strength of reports of eclipses. Bianchini preferred a date 26 years earlier on the evidence of the Parian marble, a stele giving a synopsis of Greek history from around 1580 to 355 bce. As a practised astronomer, Bianchini dismissed Trojan observations as too imprecise to support chronological inferences, and, in any case, as probably corrupted by copying. Hence, faithful to his method, he put his trust in the Parian marble, ‘still extant in the original … rather than in books transcribed by other historians.’71 Thus Troy fell around 800 + 433 = 1,233 years before the reign of Augustus, within a generation of the voyage of Jason. The third millennium, whose commencement saw the rise of the longest-lasting monarchies, the Chinese and the Assyrians, closes with the ascendancy of the most extended, the Egyptian or – as Bianchini preferred to call it after the birthplace of its king Sesostris – Ethiopian or Arabian. The image of Century XXX features a pyramid, a map, and a celestial globe (fig. 10.7: positions 1, 5, 9), which originated during the millennium.72 Ethiopian-Egyptian mathematicians described the empire on maps and modelled it on globes; and Egyptian architects piled up a part of it (‘I would say a rather noticeable part’) in the great masses of the pyramids.73 To date Cheops and his great pyramid as late as annus mundi 3000 took some argument against Egyptian claims to antiquity and also against more sober estimates (the modern date is the twenty-sixth century bce). Bianchini managed by adjusting Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, the ancient sources he trusted, so as to agree with one another; and by inventing etymologies on Hebrew names for Assyrian and Babylonian kings to eke out a history of Egypt from the descendants of Ham to the conqueror Sesostris and the builder Cheops. The

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Figure 10.7. Conclusion of the Third Millennium. Istoria universale, Image XXX

symbols and proofs of the Arabian and Ethiopian origins of Egypt are its obelisks and mathematics (brought by the Chaldeans) and its pyramids (inspired by the monuments of Abu-Simbel).74 The map (fig. 10.7: 6) shows Asia Minor, ‘the birthplace of geography and geophysics,’ a region of travel, warfare, and commerce, and extends far enough to include all the sites that claimed to be the birthplace of Homer, the father of geographers (because of his account of Odysseus’s travels) as well as of poets. Figure 10.7 at positions 2 and 3 depicts reincarnation as taught by Pythagoras and Plato. The earth mother leaning on the globe (fig. 10.7: 3) receives souls ordered by lot (10.7: 2); Bianchini omitted the return path so as not to crowd his drawing. The scene comes from an ancient funeral painting that could not stand the air in modern Rome, ‘and perished miserably under the learned eyes of our century.’75 Its symbolic value for

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Century XXX is to indicate the final place of virtuous souls among the stars: ‘I think that the same figure can express the history and superstition of the Greeks, since, around a thousand years after the first invention of idolatry, they consecrated … this second type of their gods and celestial beings, honoring with the title of heroes the Argonauts and the captains of Troy.’76 Figure 10.7: 4 also represents the completion of the age of heroes: it is the Milky Way, which, according to the Pythagoreans, bears evidence of the thousand years elapsed from the beginning of idolatry to the end of the heroic age. Figure 10.7: 5 confirms this reading, since none of the asterisms on it refers to anyone who lived later than Century XXX, ‘although there was no lack of adulation devoted to introducing the images of new princes into the heavens up to the time of Augustus and Nero.’ The ancient asterisms have survived through the inertia of teachers and students, although we now have no interest in heroes like BelusOrion.77 The Chinese did not learn from the Babylonians, and invented constellations different from ours. Yet they worked in much the same way, and at about the same time: an accomplished school of astronomers supported by a powerful king devised and propagated their asterisms, ‘the exemplars of monarchies and the sciences.’ To indicate this parallel, Bianchini drew out two constellations (10.7: 7) from the Chinese planisphere given to Ciampini by the orientalist Philippe Couplet, and by Ciampini to Bianchini. Under the stars stands the ‘celebrated observatory of Ceucun [Chou Kung], which as a testimony of that age and that art, the Chinese still preserve after so many years, as I heard from father Bartoli.’ Bartoli also disclosed that Prince Ceucun was the Ptolemy of China and that he lived 1,200 years before the real one, and so around annus mundi 3000. Alas! The tower Bartoli knew was first raised in 1276 ce and has nothing to do with the prince or with Bianchini’s drawing; the prince himself has been consigned to legend by modern authority.78 The fact destroys for us, but not for Bianchini, his stirring epitaph to the third millennium of the existence of mankind: The two extremes of Asia, Ionia and China, and the two most ancient books of men, the heavens and the earth, thus close the decade of heroic centuries with admirable completeness: and human genius [observing that East and West invented different constellations] recognizes that it goes as far astray in searching for the future among the stars as it comes close to the past from reading in the asterisms of the globes the memorials of for-

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gotten events. And so, instead of feigning a suppositious language of stellar influence, search diligently to learn the plain and simple interpretation of chronology, and of those primary signs and characters that convey history to us.79

The Fourth Millennium, and Later The fourth millennium brought Bianchini to historical times, relative reality, and exhaustion. He reckoned that he would require another 250 to 300 densely printed pages to complete a book already overlong. He promised a second volume, to contain the missing eight centuries and a few essays on special subjects.80 One of these was the analysis of the Farnese globe published 23 years after his death. By that time, Isaac Newton’s Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) had appeared. In it Newton operated on the myths of Hercules and the Argonauts in the same manner as Bianchini. He credited not Atlas but Chiron the Centaur with the invention of the celestial sphere, on the report that Chiron had taught Jason how to use it. Newton also fixed dates astronomically in the same manner as Bianchini. However, in applying the assumption that Chiron had passed the equinoctial colure through the middle of Aries, Newton departed from Bianchini. He charted its course via poetical descriptions in Aratus and the constellations as depicted in Johann Bayer’s Uranometria (1603), the standard early modern star chart. Straightening out the poetical colure so as to run through Bayer’s stars involved some arbitrariness. Newton’s solution launched the Argonauts in 936 bce, that is, Century XXXI. Bianchini referred to Newton’s preference for Chiron and to the discrepancy between his and Newton’s dates for the Argonauts. Although his choice agreed better than Newton’s with the usual calculations of the extent of Greek history, as deducible from the Parian marble, Bianchini allowed that a defensible choice for the boundary of Aries and the course of the colure could move its centre three degrees closer to the vernal equinox than he had made it. That would displace the date of the voyage of the Astronauts two centuries later, but would still leave a gap of 136 years, equivalent to almost two degrees of precession, between Bianchini’s and Newton’s computations.81 It is not likely that Bianchini, who died in March 1729, ever saw Newton’s Chronology let alone incorporated its results into his essay on the Farnese globe. Although he might have read about it in one of the

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unauthorized epitomes that circulated after 1714, it is possible, and even likely, that he learned about Newton’s closet historical research from the man himself. In 1713 Bianchini visited England, preceded by his fame as a chronologist, archaeologist, astronomer, and historian. The Royal Society immediately elected him a fellow, on Newton’s recommendation. The two met several times and had no trouble communicating in Latin. Newton, the closet Unitarian and fierce anti-papist, made much of his Italian visitor, despite Bianchini’s being a devout Catholic and confidant of popes. Although Frank Manuel, who studied Newton’s manuscripts on chronology and history closely, does not mention Bianchini, it is improbable that Newton and his visitor omitted from their conversations a topic of so much interest to both. Each had worked hard at euhemerist interpretations of Gentile history during the 1690s. Although Newton may have dropped the subject around the time of his appointment to the Mint, he had resumed by the time of Bianchini’s visit.82 This timing and certain coincidences of detail concerning the origin of astronomy among the Argonauts and of idolatry among the Egyptians suggest that Newton might have gained something from his conversations with Bianchini, whom he ranked among such ‘candid promoters of truth’ as Kepler, Galileo, Torricelli, and Huygens.83 The critical question of the size and shape of the asterism on the primitive sphere would have been a worthy subject. Bianchini had brought a copy of his drawing of the Farnese globe to England and may well have discussed it with Newton.84 How then should the colure of the Argonauts be drawn? In his posthumous treatise on the globe, Bianchini allowed a leeway of three degrees, which made the latest possible date of the voyage of the Argonauts around (to pick a memorable number) 1066 bce. Since Newton’s main concern was to delay the arrival of astronomy among the Gentiles until after Jewish civilization began to flourish around the time of Solomon, he might have found Bianchini’s three degrees just sufficient. If so, it would not have been for long. Newton stayed faithful to the calculation he had based on Aratus informed by Eudoxus, and, after some fiddling, retained 936 bce for the Argonauts and a comfortable seniority for the Jews.85

3. Bonds of Scholarship Bianchini’s Istoria universale, though little known outside Italy, has had an appreciative following there. An early admirer was the energetic historian and critic Ludovico Antonio Muratori, who, like Bianchini,

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brought an admiration of Mabillon’s methods and Galilean experimentation to historiography. Muratori studied with Mabillon’s close associate in Italy, the Benedictine Benedetto Bacchini; a study that included natural philosophy, experiments on the vacuum, and a dissertation, in 1692–3, De barometri depressione.86 Muratori regarded Bianchini as Italy’s leading man of letters and of science; around 1703 he tried to enlist him as the head of a pan-Italian Repubblica letteraria, which would demonstrate to the world the high but neglected attainments of Italian savants. In Muratori’s plans, which did not materialize, history informed by artefacts and by natural knowledge derived from instruments would be combined to the greater glory of the peninsula: ‘our best hope for fame lies in the philosophy we call experimental.’ In this project too Muratori took a cue from Mabillon, who had undertaken to correct foreign underestimates of Italian scholarship.87 On the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication of the Istoria, a bookseller in Rome brought out a second edition under the high patronage of Louis XV of France. (Bianchini had developed some ties with the royal family when he spent time in Paris on the diplomatic mission for the Pope that also took him to England.)88 Eighty years later a printer in Venice puffed a third edition, in five volumes, of ‘one of the most stupendous works that the Italian genius has ever produced.’ According to the practical printer, Bianchini’s genius lay in reading symbols and fables as ‘the expression of public opinion,’ and thus he understood the Trojan War as a fight not over a woman but over control of navigation. Another half-century and we have the images without the history in an account of Bianchini’s historical card game. Unfortunately, all the images reproduced came from the eighty prepared for the unwritten third volume of the Istoria, since no sheet containing the set for the first forty centuries could be found.89 The most enthusiastic of Bianchini’s latter-day panegyrists was the scholar and writer Ugo Foscolo, who rests near Galileo in the pantheon of great Italians in the church of Santa Croce in Florence. The bond may appear surprising. Foscolo was a great sympathizer with the French Revolution, no friend or admirer of kings and popes. When his expectation that Napoleon would liberate northern Italy from the Austrians and the ancien régime proved illusory, he became an ardent advocate of the study of Italian literature to secure a national identity; so ardent that his inaugural lecture as professor of rhetoric at the University of Pavia in 1809 provoked Napoleon to suppress all chairs of Italian eloquence in the parts of Italy he controlled. Foscolo promoted Bianchini’s

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Istoria as ‘a very great book, unworthily forgotten by us, who enthusiastically embrace what comes from abroad and take no interest in our treasures.’ Foscolo extolled its boldness as well as its method: ‘undertaking a history in which the poetic and fabulous become testimony and demonstration of the existence and vicissitudes of people buried by the forgetfulness of many centuries was certainly a new and very bold venture.’90 While Italians ignored their national hero, foreigners exploited him. Foscolo gave the compromising example of Charles-François Dupuis, whose immense Origine de tous les cultes (Paris 1795) draws on Bianchini’s methods of teasing history from asterisms. Dupuis cited Bianchini directly, for the discovery of a fragment bearing a figure significant in ancient astrology. The acknowledgment would not have pleased our Monsignor. Dupuis stood at the revolutionary limit of the philosophes and exegetes who had followed out the logic of Bianchini’s treatment of profane history. What, apart from good manners and the weakening authority of the church, prevented the bold historian from treating the ‘history’ of the Jews as so much myth and fable? Dupuis tried to prove that the religion of the ancient Hebrews was one version of a universal astral cult, and that Christianity was but a ‘branch of the Zoroastrian religion’ and Jesus Christ a version of Mithra. Sparing no effort to spread this dreadful doctrine, Dupuis designed a sphere on which to demonstrate the precession of the equinoxes and the asterisms of the ancient cults, in effect his own Farnese globe, and had it made up for sale to historians perplexed by astronomy.91 Contemporary readers of Bianchini had taken tentative steps down this dangerous slope. Scipione Maffei, a friend and fellow Veronese, rated Bianchini a prodigy of learning and modesty. Following the facts and not the fables, Maffei deduced that no order of chivalry existing in his time predated the crusades. In particular, the Order of Constantine, then recently revived by Pope Clement XI, did not go back to Constantine but only to the sixteenth century. The Pope was not pleased. ‘In matters of faith and morals the pope is my supreme judge,’ said Maffei, ‘but in matters of erudition and philology I do not concede to him, for in them he returns to being a man liable to err like others.’ With similar confidence in facts purged of fables, Muratori wrote against the supernatural and, like Mabillon, waged war against doubtful saints.92 These exercises brought Maffei and Muratori to the attention of the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books, which, as we know, had not ignored Mabillon.93

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The most creative of the philosophical historians who drew on Bianchini was Vico. We see the same reliance on euhemerism and etymology, and a similar blending of idea and symbol, word and image, facts and imagination, history and poetry.94 Vico’s Scienza nuova and Bianchini’s Istoria universale both prescind from scriptural history in order to secure a scientific history while remaining within the 4,000 years allotted by the Hebrew Bible; follow similar dating for the Flood and the Argonauts; unscramble the multiple Saturns, Jupiters, and Minervas indicated by Cicero; exploit Varro’s three eras (gods, heroes, men) and three theologies (mythic, philosophic, civic ); elaborate parallel theogonies; adapt the metallic ages; and so on.95 More detailed correspondences exist as well: for example, identification of people, references to historiographical controversies, the proposition that numbers preceded letters, the interpretation of the winged horse Pegasus as a corsair ship, the glossing of the Homeric stories.96 To which might be added interpretation of artefacts, roots in the methodological controversies of the late seventeenth century (notably those concerning La Peyrère), and attribution of characteristics or special integrating principles to each historical period and sub-period – to name several of the marks by which Funkenstein distinguished Vico’s historiography.97 The external evidence for a connection between Bianchini and Vico is unequivocal. Although Vico said that he stopped reading other people’s books around 1700, and Paolo Rossi concluded that he did not share the interests of the progressive historians of the period, an exception must be made for Bianchini. The Istoria universale may have been the most up-to-date historical work Vico read. The two may have met. Vico lived in Naples. In 1702 Bianchini went there in the conspicuous position of secretary to the papal legate, Cardinal Carlo Barberini, and with a glowing reputation as a man of letters.98 There are traces of a connection between Vico and Bianchini in a letter of 1699 concerning the authenticity of some archaeological fragments and in Vico’s ‘reverent’ presentation to Bianchini of a copy of his defence of ancient educational practices, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709).99 Another possible bridge was Lucantonio Porzia, whom Vico claimed as a close friend and ranked as the ‘last Italian philosopher of the school of Galileo.’ Porzia, a Neopolitan, had served as secretary to Ciampini’s academy in Rome, which he left in 1683, before Bianchini became a member; but he no doubt had channels through his old academic connections to Clement XI’s man of letters.100

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Needless to say, Vico was not an echo of Bianchini. Three examples will suggest the characteristic differences between the dour philosopher and the sunny erudite. In Vico’s vision, the first men and women, including the ancient Hebrews, lived in a disgusting, savage, brutal state from which they eventually emerged to create a rudimentary civil society to answer their first social needs – marriage, burial, religion.101 His primitives had a mentality altogether different from ours; they were ‘poets’ given to myth making and incapable of reasoned thought.102 Their wildness appears clearly in the character of their gods and their religious practices.103 Vico’s savages advanced through the mythologizing power of the poetic mind, designing and redesigning gods accommodated to their crude but self-improving understandings.104 Bianchini’s primitive people, though poor and ignorant, resembled the men of his time in mental make-up. They progressed in the same way, in accordance with the usual range of passion and reason, and under his optimistic rule of a general average improvement proportional to time. Where Vico supplied both a dynamics (the primitive poetical mythologizing power providentially directed towards betterment) and a historical epistemology (our recognition of the nature of human institutions by the verum factum principle), Bianchini gave a kinematics (universal progress proportional to time) and a personal guarantee (his informed interpretations of myths). For both Bianchini and Vico, the Flood was the great event in history. But whereas to the progressive mind of Bianchini, who understood the advances in the natural sciences of his time, the fallen might regain Eden, to the ‘melancholy and irritable temperament’ of Vico, who depreciated modern physics and mathematics, the blissful ignorance or knowledge of Adam is gone forever.105 To think otherwise, according to Vico, is a conceit, ‘the conceit of scholars,’ who ascribe their own power of reasoning, in which they take inordinate pride, to ancient people (who had their conceit, too, which made them exaggerate their antiquity).106 In fact, the pushy desire to know, which knocked Adam and Eve out of Paradise, also caused the diaspora after Noah, with all its miserable consequences. The curiosity of Ham and Japheth, which prompted them to look upon their sleeping naked father, resulted in their banishment and the decline of their offspring to the bestiality from which their imaginative powers and divine providence slowly rescued them.107 Without a guiding hand, poetic imagination could not drive mankind along the stages of ideal history towards civil society; and without the maintenance of religious practices relapse would certainly occur.

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Although Bianchini also mentioned providence as a guide in Gentile history (for example, in leading the Eastern monarchies towards Europe), and although he was a churchman and a believer, he would doubtless have rejected the notion that the stability of the state required suppression of curiosity and thus restraint on the pursuit of natural knowledge.108 A second characteristic distinction between Vico and Bianchini may be found in their euhemerist practices. Although both applied this hermeneutics to move facilely between fable and history, Vico went farther and deeper and, in the process, diminished its inherent arbitrariness. Bianchini spied individual historical actors in myth and fable. Vico identified the greatest poets with entire cultures (‘nations’). Thus ‘Homer’ properly deciphered is not an individual but the Greek people, whose developing minds created their laws, history, and religion. The ‘author’ of the Iliad and the Odyssey was a poetical fiction. Hermes Trismegistus was another such fiction, the representation of the developing mind of the Egyptian people. Vico tells us that his discovery of the truth that heroes were not individuals provided his key to the lock of prehistory.109 Among other consequences, it gave an immediate explanation of the puzzling multiplication of Joves, Mercurys, and so on: each Gentile nation has invented the same set of deities in expressing its unfolding humanity.110 Most important of all, the assimilation of heroes to peoples solved the problem of the relationship between Jewish and Gentile history. The Gentiles were not liars but poets: their ‘histories’ are not facts; there can be no opposition between their annals and the Old Testament.111 The third representative distinction between Bianchini’s and Vico’s histories lies in the use of images. Bianchini’s images were integral to his work. Vico used only one, a complicated frontispiece, which, he said, was an afterthought, introduced together with a lengthy explanation to replace cancelled pages during the printing of the second version of the Scienza nuova (1730).112 Whereas Bianchini, acting as a historian, carefully chose a few ancient artefacts to illustrate each century, Vico, acting as a philosopher, hastily invented an allegory incorporating both his major argument and his claim to originality. His long elucidation of this invention can be abbreviated as follows. A clothed female figure wearing a breastplate and representing metaphysics stands on a celestial globe balanced precariously, half on and half off a cubical altar in a forest landscape (fig. 10.8). A ray from the eye of God in the upper left corner penetrates background clouds, reflects from Metaphysics’

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Image Not Available

Figure 10.8. Frontispiece to Vico, Scienza nuova (1730)

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breastplate, and strikes a statue of Homer on a cracked pedestal. The altar supports a lituus (an augur’s staff), a jar of water, and a lighted torch in addition to the globe. At the right side of the altar just in front of the forest stands a funerary urn. In front of the altar lie many emblems of civil society: a fasces, a rudder, a tablet with letters, a caduceus, a balance, and so on. Here is the decryption. The precarious balance of the globe and the background of clouds and trees indicate that before Vico philosophers had contemplated divine providence only through the natural order; but metaphysics (‘beyond physics’) now transcends the natural order to contemplate providence with respect to the institutions of man. These derive from human social nature, which operates by certain laws that form the basis, and the discovery, of Vico’s Scienza nuova.113 The globe carries a zodiac with the signs of Leo and Virgo turned towards the viewer. Leo recalls Hercules, the Nemean games, the heroes who preceded generals and kings, the inventors of the Olympiads, and time reckoning. Familiar stuff. Virgo stands for the abundant harvests of the Golden Age, when the gods consorted with the heroes on earth before their translation to the heavens. The ray of divine light illuminating history singles out Homer as the first Gentile author whose works have survived. They allow a glimpse of the crude minds of the founders of the Gentile nations, all imagination, stupid and unreasoning, yet possessed of a certain poetical wisdom. The cracked pedestal indicates Vico’s great discovery of the identity of Homer and the Greek mind. As for the objects on the altar, the lituus signifies the beginning of religion and hence of society; the torch, marriage, the first civil institution; fire and water, sacrifices, weddings (a disingenuous association), and the necessities of life. The urn represents the second institution of civil society, burial. It resides near the trees to indicate the origin of marriage and burial in forests in which our forefathers and foremothers lived after the Flood like beasts, coupling at random, until the accumulated terror evoked by lightning and wild animals drove them into caves. There they sorted out their women, buried their dead, and invented gods to represent their fears and scare them into a better way of life. Thus the first and faint beginnings of civil society, whose higher accomplishments are suggested by the clutter of articles placed before the altar.114 Among the clutter the plough is conspicuous, as it should be, for it represents settlement, agriculture, and the promise of cities, and commemorates the heroes who first brought their families from the forest onto cultivable land. The clearings served not only as fields but also as

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altars, whence the association of plough, fire (used to clear the land), and altar. The rudder rests some distance from the plough since it indicates nomads, the wild and desperate men who remained in the forest. When eventually they emerged, they were enslaved; in time they rebelled and carried the culture of their former masters throughout the world. The alphabet signifies languages, the earliest of which the heroes invented when they came together to form the first nations. The outcome, under providence, was inevitable: woods, words, cultivated fields, villages, cities, academies, philosophers; ‘this is the order of all progress from the first origins.’115 The fasces indicates the first cities and kingdoms, government and laws, and the perpetual opposition between plebs and nobles. The sword leaning on the fasces suggests resolution of civil conflicts by force before the institution of a judiciary; the purse, commercial exchange through money. The balance records the final stage of civil life, civil equality, which resulted from the discovery that rational nature is the same in all men. The caduceus symbolizes peace and the tolerance that rational people exercise over those they vanquish in battle. ‘And this by a high counsel of divine providence.’116 The Istoria universale also has a frontispiece that speaks to the whole work and to God’s providence. It shows a veiled female figure seated on a cubical altar (fig. 10.9). On the right, a Roman soldier with the letters ‘XP’ on his (or her) helmet crowns the lady with one hand and with the other holds a torch to a book of Egyptian hieroglyphics; (s)he stands partly on the book and partly on a basket containing emblems of other once-proud conquered peoples. The altar bears a Greek inscription referring to Alexander VIII, Bianchini’s first patron, the elder Pietro Ottoboni. On the left, figures representing the four continents offer the seated lady a model of the Roman Pantheon (which had towers in Bianchini’s day) while she dribbles water on their heads from a bowl she has filled from a basin supplied through an eagle’s mouth. Above her sits St John the Evangelist, recognized by his halo, pen, scroll, and legend ‘A & ⍀,’ a good omen for any book concerned with that ‘which is, which was, and which is to come.’117 Behind St John is the plinth of an obelisk; on one of its sides the title of Bianchini’s book is chiselled. He does not explain this image, perhaps because its meaning is so obvious: the seated figure is the church triumphant over the Gentile nations, whose history Bianchini will elucidate with the help, perhaps, of the evangelist, who advertises a knowledge from alpha to omega. Further to the theme, the personification of Christianized Rome crowns the church triumphant while she diverts the stream of water from the eagle’s

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Figure 10.9. Frontispiece to Istoria universale

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mouth to baptize the four continents. The action takes place against a backdrop of ancient and modern images of the Eternal City. Five years after completing the Istoria universale Bianchini had an opportunity to create a hieroglyph in stone and brass similar in meaning to its frontispiece. At the Pope’s order and expense, he built a meridian line in the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which Michelangelo had designed within the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian. This instrument, at which Bianchini would observe the sun for a quarter of a century, was the greatest, and is still the most accessible, of his works. He decorated it with a unique set of concentric ellipses that amounted to a calendar with dates 25 years apart. The ellipses represent the diurnal path of the pole star around the pole, from which it is removed by a few degrees. Owing to the precession of the equinoxes, the size of the ellipse slowly changes. There are in all sixteen ellipses, marked out by brass stars, on the pavement in Santa Maria degli Angeli, which anticipate the pole star’s approach to, and recession from, the pole of the heavens for a period of 800 years.118 The years picked out by Bianchini’s ellipses were jubilees. Clement XI’s predecessor, Innocent XII, who had planned the jubilee celebration of 1700, had been stingy or, perhaps, attentive to Jansenist criticism of ostentation and indulgence, and had not copied the magnificence of the jubilee of 1675. The meridiana in Santa Maria degli Angeli and its ellipses should be considered as a contribution to jubilee architecture, like the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain, which Clement’s successor, Benedict XIII, built for the jubilee of 1725.119 The installation at Santa Maria degli Angeli represented the combination of astronomy, chronology, artefacts, and history from which Bianchini had made his Istoria universale – with the essential addition of the Christian element. The meridiana and its ellipses resided in a great church dedicated to the Virgin Mary and her angels and symbolizing, in its occupation of a building originally erected by a notorious maker of Christian martyrs, the Church Triumphant. Thus in one unified display Bianchini had a precise meridian line to serve astronomy and chronology, a grid of jubilee ellipses representing history to be written, a basilica that symbolized the conquest of the old Rome by the new, and the simultaneous observation of the Mass and the sun. A perfect image for the first quarter of Century LVII. The works of Bianchini and Funkenstein exemplify ideals of comprehensiveness, rigour, and honesty, and a mastery of subjects, languages, and auxiliary sciences to which lesser scholars can only aspire. It has

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been important to me to know both of them. Recently in a fit of serendipity I ran across the old book on natural philosophy from which I took the passage placed as an epigraph to this paper. The author was a Cartesian philosopher of modest attainments. The passage, from the dedicatory letter to the learned man with whom he shared his thoughts and studies, reads in English: ‘Similarity of habits and studies is a great force for fashioning friendships among learned men. The force is greater still if one precedes the other and shows him the way to virtue or knowledge. The force is the greatest if the studies that bind the two have nothing commonplace about them.’

Notes The following abbreviations are used: JHI – Journal of the History of Ideas; IU – Francesco Bianchini, La istoria universale provata con monumenti, e figurati con simboli de gli antichi (Rome: for the author, 1697; 2nd edn, 1747; 3rd edn, 5 vols, 1825–7); NS – Giambattista Vico, The New Science [1744], trans. T.G. Bergin and M.H. Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968); TSI – Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 1 TSI, 300–6. 2 Galileo, ‘Letter,’ in Maurice Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 87–118, esp. 92–3, 106–7, 114–16; Joshua 10: 12–13; TSI, 216–17. 3 TSI, 222–32, 239, 271; re Augustine, Mark Lilla, G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 148–51. 4 Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time [1709], trans. Elio Gianturco (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 23 (quotation); cf James C. Morrison, ‘Vico’s Principle of Verum Is Factum and the Problem of Historicism,’ JHI 39 (1978): 379–95. 5 TSI, 201–3, 328; cf Lilla, Vico (1993), 24–9; Leon Pompa, Vico: A Study of the ‘New Science’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 77–86, and Pompa, ‘Introduction,’ in Giambattista Vico, The First ‘New Science,’ ed. Leon Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xix–xliv, on xx–xxi. 6 TSI, 281–3. 7 TSI, 209–10, 284–7; NS, §§32, 348. 8 TSI, 212.

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9 Honorifica from, resp., Gaetano Marini, Iscrizioni antiche delle ville e de’ palazzi d’Albani (1785), quoted in Isidoro Carini, ‘Diciotto lettere inedite di Francesco Bianchini a Giov. Ciampini,’ Il Muratori 1, 4 (1892): 145–75, on 145; Ugo Foscolo, Opere, ed. Franco Gavazzeni (2 vols; Milan: Ricciardi, 1981), 2: 1917. Cf TSI, 212–13. 10 Bianchini awaits his biographer. Until they meet, the hagiographical work of his cousin Alessandro Mazzoleni, Vita di monsignor Francesco Bianchini veronese (Verona: Targa, 1735), and of his fellow citizen Francesco Uglietti, Un erudito veronese alla soglie del settecento. Mons. Francesco Bianchini (Verona: Biblioteca capitolare, 1986), will have to do. A revival of interest in Bianchini, signalled by international conferences held in Augsburg in 2003 and Verona in 2004, suggests that the biographer must appear soon. 11 J.L. Heilbron, ‘Bianchini as a Natural Philosopher,’ in Unità del sapere, molteplicità dei saperi: L’opera di Francesco Bianchini (Verona: Convegno internazionale, 28–30 ottobre 2004, Atti, to appear). 12 Francesco Bianchini, Hesperi et phosphori nova phaenomena. Sive observationes circa planetam Veneris (Rome: Salvini, 1728); J.L. Heilbron, ‘Bianchini as an Astronomer,’ in Valentin Kockel and Brigitte Sölch, eds, Francesco Bianchini (1662–1729) und die europäische gelehrte Welt um 1700 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005), 57–82, on 73, 75. 13 Edward J. Olszewski, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (1667–1740) and the Vatican Tomb of Pope Alexander VIII (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004), ch. 1 (APS, Memoirs, 252). 14 Noris to Antonio Magliabeccchi, 24 and 28 June 1692, in Antoine Claude Pasquin Valéry, Voyages historiques et littéraires en Italie (5 vols; Paris: Le Norment, 1831–3), 2: 338. 15 Cf Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods. The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (New York: Harpers, 1961), 250, 258–71, 321. 16 Alphonse des Vignoles, Chronologie de l’histoire sainte et des histories étrangères qui la concernent depuis la sortie de l’Egypte jusquà la captivité de Babylone (2 vols; Berlin: Haude, 1738), 1: ‘Preface,’ b.3v-b.4r, c.1v, c.4v, d.1–6. The longest estimate of the time between creation and Christ’s birth, 6,894 years, was almost twice the shortest, 3,483. 17 Adalbert Klempt, Die Säkularisierung der universalhistorischen Auffassung. Zum Wandlung des Geschichtsdenkens im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1960), 85–6, 97–101; Vignoles, Chronologie (1738), 1: 33, 153, 595–615. 18 Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text. The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991),

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204–13; Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), ch. 11, and Isaac de la Peyrère, 1596–1676. His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 10–17, 21–3, 46–8, 51–2. Popkin, La Peyrère (1987), 17–19, 48–9, 87–8; Klempt, Säkularisierung (1960), 89, 91–5, 102–4; Henning Graf Raventlow, ‘Richard Simon und seine Bedeutung für die kritische Erforschung der Bibel,’ in Georg Schwaiger, ed., Historische Kritik in der Theologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1980), 11–36, on 23–8; Blandine Barret-Kriegel, La défaite de l’érudition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), 246–53. Cf Michel Lequien, Defense du texte hébreu et la version vulgate (Paris: Auroy, 1690), ‘Epistre,’ agreeing that the Hebrew text had not been corrupted. Vignoles, Chronologie (1738), 2: 625–9, allowing 360 days to a year. IU, 68, reports the claims of the Chaldeans to 470,000 years of astronomical observations, and of the Egyptians to 48,800. IU, 64–5. IU, 59–60, 61 (quotation). IU, 59, 246–7, 248 (first quotation), 249 (second quotation), 250–1. Bianchini received the facts about Vesuvius, which were discovered around 1690, from the professor of mathematics at Rome, Adriano Ariano. James Ussher, The Annals of the World. Deduced from the Origin of Time (London: Crook and Bedell, 1658), ‘Epistle to the Reader’ (‘from the evening ushering [!] in the first day of the World, to the midnight that began the first day of the Christian aera, there were 4003 years, seventy days, and six temporarie hours’); Sethus Calvisius, Opus chronologicum (Frankfurt and Leipzig: C. Gensch, 1685), passim (4043); Denis Pétau, Abrégé chronologique de l’histoire universelle, sacrée et profane (3 vols; Paris: Billaine, 1682), 1: ‘Introduction,’ ad fin. (4043); IU, 7. Jean Martianay, Defense du texte hébreu et de la chronologie de la Vulgate contre le livre de l’Antiquité des temps rétablie (Paris: Rouland, 1689), 63–4; Vignoles, Chronologie (1738), 1: f. c.1. IU, 17–19. Calvisius, Opus (1685), 169, 1050, and App., 71 (Scaliger’s opinion); Pétau, Abrégée (1682), 1: 3–9 (creation to Flood), 60–1, 74–5, 466–9 (savants active between Caesar’s death and Christ’s birth). IU, 5, 6 (quotation), 9. IU, 1–2. IU, 20, 23–4, 51; Francesco Bianchini, Carte da giuoco in servigio dell’istoria e della cronologia (Bologna: Romagnoli, 1871) (Sceltà di curiosità letteraria e rara del secolo xiii al xvii, vol. 120); Carlo R. Chiarlo, ‘Francesco Bianchini e

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J.L. Heilbron l’antiquaria nell’Italia del settecento,’ in L’eredità classica in Italia e in Polonia nel settecento. VIII simposio polacco-italiano (Breslau: Zaklad naradowy Imienia Ossolinskich, 1992), 167–86, on 167– 8, 178–80. IU, 8–10. IU, 2. Cf Eric W. Cochrane, ‘The Settecento Medievalists,’ JHI 19 (1958): 35–61, on 37, 47. Riccardo Merolla, ‘Lo stato della chiesa,’ in Letteratura italiana. Storia e geografia. L’età moderna (2 vols; Turin: Einaudi, 1988), 2: 1019–1109, on 1073; Heilbron, in Kockel and Sölch, Francesco Bianchini (2005), 76–82. François de La Mothe le Vayer, ‘Du peu de certitude qu’il y a dans l’histoire,’ in Oeuvres, 13 (Paris: Billine, 1669), 409–48, on 418 (quotation), 437–8, 445; Popkin, La Peyrère (1987), 5; Robert Lenoble, Mersenne, ou la naisaance du mécanisme (2nd ed. Paris: Vrin, 1971), 193–5, 343–6, 510–11. Cf Urbain Chevreau, Chevraeana, ou Diverses pensées d’histoire, de critique, d’érudition et de morale (2 vols; Amsterdam: Lambrail, 1700), 1: 217–18: ‘[O]n ne remarque dans la plupart des critiques d’aujourdhui [among historians], ni moderation, ni bienséance.’ IU, 20, 21 (quotations). Cf Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 13 (1950): 285–315, in Momigliano, Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 1955), 67–106, on 67, 85–9; Chiarlo, in Eredità (1992), 181–6; Jerzy Kolendo, ‘Nota di lettura,’ in Franceso Bianchini, Camera ed iscrizione sepulcrali de’ liberti, servi ed ufficiali della casa di Augusto scoperte nella Via Appia (Naples: Jovene, 1991), xii-xxxii, on xvi-xxi; Daniela Gallo, ‘Rome, mythe et réalité pour le citoyen de la République des Lettres,’ in Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet, eds, Commercium litterarium, 1600–1750. La Communication dans la République des Lettres (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1994), 191–205, on 192–6; Anthony Grafton, ‘Morhof and History,’ in Françoise Waquet, ed., Mapping the World of Learning: The Polyhistor of Daniel Georg Morhof (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 155–77, on 162–3, 173. Blandine Barret-Kriegel, Jean Mabillon (Paris: PUF, 1988), 25–59, and Défaite (1988), 145–75. James Westphal Thompson, A History of Historical Writing (2 vols; New York: Macmillan, 1942), 2: 15 (first quotation), 18; Barret-Kriegel, Mabillon (1988), [9] (second quotation); Manfred Weitlauff, ‘Die Mauriner und ihr historisch-kritisches Werk,’ in Schwaiger, Kritik (1980), 153–209, on 169–78, 185–90. Barret-Kriegel, Mabillon (1988), 67–86; Hanns Gross, Rome in the Age of the

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46 47

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Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 264–5; PierAlessandro Paravia, ‘Vita di M. Francesco Bianchini,’ in Bianchini, IU (1825), 1: xv–xliv, on xviii. Cf Arnaldo Momigliano, Terzo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (2 vols; Rome: Storia e letteratura, 1966), 1: 137–40; Gallo, in Bots and Waquert, Commercium (1994), 197–9. Thompson, Hist. (1942), 2: 19–21; Gabriel Maugain, Etude sur l’évolution intellectuelle de l’Italie de 1657 à 1759 environ (Paris: Hachette, 1909), 91–3, 109. Sergio Bertelli, Erudizione e storia in Ludovico Antonio Muratori (Naples: Nella sede dell’Istituto, 1960), 322. Mabillon to Bianchini, 10 February 1705, in Codex CCCLX: 22, f. 83, Biblioteca capitolare, Verona; Bianchini’s report to the censor and reading notes are in ibid., 71–82. Louis Davillé, Leibniz historien (Paris: Alcan, 1909), 86, 136, 337–9, 355, 373, 376–93, 398–9, 466–7; André Robinet, G.W. Leibniz. Iter Italicum (Florence: Olschki, 1988), 43–51, 54–62, 87–92. IU, 31, 32 (quotation), 36–7, 39 (quotation). IU, dedication to Cardinal Ottoboni; Claude Estiennot to Mabillon, 23 September 1698, in Valéry, Corr. (1847), 3: 42; Bernard de Montfaucon, The Travels of the Learned Father Montfaucon from Paris through Italy (London: Curll et al., 1712), 293. Cf Mario Rosa, ‘Un “médiateur dans la République des Lettres”: Le bibliothécaire,’ in Bots and Waquet, Commercium (1994), 81–99, on 84–94. Cf IU, 43. IU, 67–8, 71 (quotation), 72–5. IU, 78–9, 83, and ‘Al discreto lettore,’ f.b.3r,v (quotation); Cicero, De natura deorum, iii.16, 21, 24, in Cicero, Brutus. On the Nature of the Gods. On Divination. On Duties, trans. Hubert M. Poteat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 178–333, on 308, 313–17. IU, 84–91, 93–4, 96; The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo (Milan: Olivetti, 1993), 7–9. 20–6, 73, 81, 99, 137, indicates the sorts of images that Bianchini employed. IU, 99–106. IU, 115–16; figures on 93, 114–15. IU, 117–23, 121 (quotation). IU, 153–65. IU, 167–85. IU, 186–201, esp. 187–91. IU, 216–17, 227. Cf Cicero, De natura deorum, i.27, 29, in On Divination (1950), on 205–8.

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59 IU, 219–23, 227–8, elucidated with the help of St Augustine, City of God, vi. 2–5, trans. Marcus Dods, in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 14 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 129–618, on 232–5. 60 De natura deorum, ii.28 (quotation, On Divination [1950], 253), iii.2, 4 (ibid., 293–6). Bianchini illustrated the three stages by objects in a threetier curio cabinet: a Mithraic bull, a triangle, and an image of the Roman pantheon (IU, 216, 228–9). 61 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, i.2, ed. J.M. Bury (7 vols; London: Methuen, 1909), 1: 31. 62 IU, 243–4, 245 (quotation). 63 IU, 236–7, 255–6, 262, 264–5. 64 IU, 367–71, 377–8. 65 IU, 373–4, 379–80. 66 Francesco Bianchini, ‘De globi farnesiani structura, figura et indicationibus,’ in Giuseppe Bianchini, ed., Demonstratio historiae ecclesiasticae quadripartae comprobatae monumentis pertinentibus ad fidem temporum et gestorum (3 vols in 4; Rome: Typ. Apollinea, 1752–4), 1: cclxxx–cccxxvi, on cclxxxi, cclxxxiii, ccxc–cccxv; Otto Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy (3 vols; Berlin: Springer, 1975), 2: 596, 599. 67 Bianchini, Demonstratio (1952), 1: cclxxxiv–cclxxxix, cccxx–cccxxii. The calculation set the middle of the vague asterism of the ram at 13 degrees 24 minutes of the zodiacal sign Aries and used one degree/71 years as the rate of precession. 68 IU, 374–5. 69 IU, 463–5. 70 IU, 380–6, 387–8. 71 IU, 300–4, 385 (quotation). 72 IU, 413. 73 IU, 417. 74 IU, 418–43, 474 (genealogical table). 75 IU, 477–8, 479 (quotation). 76 IU, 479. 77 IU, 480. 78 IU, 481; Joseph Needham and Wang Ling, Science and Civilization in China. Vol. 3. Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 174, 177, 290–1, 296–7. 79 IU, 483. 80 IU, 42, 369, 571–2. 81 Bianchini, Demonstratio (1752), 1: cccxvii–cccxviii; Frank E. Manuel, Isaac

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Newton Historian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 70–4; Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest. A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 812–13. Francesco Bianchini, Dei viaggi di Monsignor Francesco Bianchini con alcune sue lettere (Verona: Tip. Vescovile, 1877), 17–24 (Nuova serie di aneddotti, n. 19); Salvatore Rotta, Bianchini in Inghilterra (Np: Paideia, 1966), 39, 58, 63, 64, 67; Westfall, Never at Rest (1980), 807–9, 812. Newton to J.B. Meinke, 1724, draft, in Isaac Newton, Correspondence (7 vols; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77), 7: 255. Rotta, Bianchini in Inghilterra (1966), 59. Bianchini, Demonstratio (1752), 1: cccxxii–cccxxiv; Manuel, Newton (1963), 78–88; John Gascoigne, ‘“The Wisdom of the Egyptians” and the Secularization of History in the Age of Newton,’ in Stephen Gaukroger, ed., The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 171–212, on 185–7; Gary Trompff, ‘On Newtonian History,’ in Gaukroger, Uses (1991), 213–49, on 216–18, 221, 226–30, 233–4. Uglietti, Erudito veronese (1986), 47; Bertelli, Erudizione (1960), 374–5; Eric W. Cochrane, ‘Muratori: The Vocation of an Historian,’ Catholic Historical Review 51 (1965), 153–72, on 166–7, and JHI 19 (1958): 47–8; Momigliano, Terzo contributo (1966), 1: 143– 6. Bertelli, Erudizione (1960), 375–6 (quotation); Ezio Raimondi, ‘I padri Maurini e l’opera di Muratori,’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 128 (1951): 429–71, on 430–1, 433, 442, 444–5, 452–3. IU (1747), ‘Al cortese lettore;’ IU (1825), 1: xvi, xxi–xxii (quotation). G. Batt. Carlo Giuliari, ‘[Introduzione],’ in Bianchini, Carte (1871), 5–30, on 15–17. The sheets Giuliari found were printed by the press of the Camera Apostolica in 1695. Foscolo, Opere (1981), 2: 1260–1 (first quotation), 1918 (second quotation). Foscolo, Opere (1981), 2: 1304–5; Charles-François Dupuis, Origine de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle (3 vols + 1 vol. plates; Paris: Agasse, an III), 1: 180 (Bianchini), 3: 41–5 (the dreadful doctrine), 4: verso of t.p. (the globe). Cf Hans-Joachim Krauss, Geschichte der historischen-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments (3rd edn; Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1982), 133–47; Elinor S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 21–3, and Paolo Rossi; ‘La sacra scrittura e i tempi della storica,’ in Maurizio Mamiami, ed., Scienza e sacra

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scrittura nel xvii secolo (Naples: Vivarium, 2001), 3–30, on 17, 22. 92 Maffei, in IU (1747), a.3r; Maugain, Etude (1909), 110–11, 116–17, citing Maffei, Della scienza chiamata cavalleresca (1710). Muratori’s works in question were Buon gusto (1708) and Della regolata divozione (1747). 93 Maffei’s De fabula equestris ordinis constantioni epistola was indexed; Muratori skirted condemnation. Indice dei libri proibiti riveduto e pubblicato per ordine di Sua Santità Pio Papa XI (Vatican City: Tip. Poliglotta, 1930), 321; J.L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church. Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1999), 201, 347, n102. 94 Foscolo, Opere (1981), 2: 1257–8; N. Tommaseo, ‘[Note],’ in Bianchini, Carte (1871), 31–40, on 34. 95 Benedetto Croce, ‘Francesco Bianchini e G.B. Vico,’ La critica, 15 (1917): 262–6, on 265, and Franco Lanza, ‘L’istoria universale del Bianchini e la Scienza Nuova,’ Lettere italiane 10 (1958): 339–48, on 343, 348, notice some of these correspondences. Lilla, Vico (1993), 146–7, frees history for science by bracketing off the Jews, on the authority of NS, §371. 96 Fausto Nicolini, Commento storico alla seconda Scienza nuova (2 vols; Rome: Storia e letteratura, 1949–50), 1: 30, 55, 178, in reference to NS, §§44, 84, 440; Lanza, Lettere italiane, 10 (1958): 345, 346–7 (NS, §§635, 873). 97 TSI (1986), 202–10; Popkin, La Peyrère (1987), 91–2; Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘La nuova storia romana di G.B. Vico,’ Rivista storica italiana, 77 (1965): 773–90, on 780–1. 98 Paolo Rossi, ‘Introduzione,’ in Giambattista Vico, La scienza nuova, ed. Paolo Rossi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), 21; Maffei, in IU (1747), a.3r; Francesco Bianchini, Astronomicae, ac geographicae observationes selectae, ed. Eustachio Manfredi (Verona: Romanzini, 1737), 26; Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Vico’s Scienza nuova: Roman “Bestioni” and Roman “Eroi,” ’ History and Theory 5 (1966): 3–23, on 7, 14–15 (on Vico’s reading). 99 Niccolini, Commento (1949), 2: 224; Croce, La critica 15 (1917): 266. 100 Giambattista Vico, The Autobiography, trans. M.H. Frisch and T.G. Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1944), 153 (quotation); Maurizio Torrini, Dopo Galileo. Una polemica scientifica (1684–1711) (Florence: Olschki, 1979), 170–4, 180–1. 101 NS, §§9–12, 18, 195, 333, 369, 374. 102 NS, §§34, 375–84, 339–40. 103 NS, §§191, 517. Cf Morrison, ‘The Interpretation of Vico,’ JHI 39 (1978): 511–18, on 511–13, and ‘Vico and Spinoza,’ JHI 41 (1980): 49–68, on 58, 63. 104 NS, §§379, 554–71. 105 Vico, Autobiography (1944), 111 (quotation); Lilla, Vico (1993), 48–51; Vico, Study Methods (1965), 21–5.

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106 NS, §§120, 122, 137, 236, 330; Lilla, Vico (1993), 11, 109, 112–20, 141. 107 NS, §§62, 195, 301; cf Lilla, Vico (1993), 19, 21–3. 108 NS, §§178, 179, 245, 349, 393; Vico, Autobiography (1944), 171–2; IU, 447; Lilla, Vico (1993), 9, 16, 52–6, 130–5. Cf TSI, 283, 287–9. 109 NS, §§68, 74, 483, 873, 875. Cf IU, 521, 532–3, on Homer’s biography and similarities between his stories and those told by Arabs, Persians, and Egyptians; Salvatore Nicosia, ‘Vico e Omero,’ Forum italicum 4 (1980): 418–23, on 418–21; and J.L. Myers, Homer and His Critics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 57, 67, 79. 110 NS, §§47, 193, 196, 198, 380. 111 Cf Momigliano, History and Theory 5 (1966): 5, 13, 22. 112 Vico, Autobiography (1944), 194. Cf Liselotte Dieckmann, ‘G.B. Vico’s Use of “Renaissance Hieroglyphics,”’ Forun italicum 4 (1980): 382–5, on 382–3. 113 NS, §§1–2. 114 NS, §§3–40. The positions and arrangements of the articles within the clutter have important symbolic significance. 115 NS, §§14–20, 22 (quotation). 116 NS, §§25–9, 30 (quotation). 117 Rev. 1:8; Susan Dixon, ‘Francesco Bianchini’s Image and His Legacy in the Mid-eighteenth Century,’ in Kockel and Sölch, Bianchini (2005), 83–106, on 101–3. 118 Heilbron, Sun (1999), 160–4. 119 Lucetta Scaraffia, Il giubileo (Bologna: Il mulino, 1999), 86–8, 90; Alfredo Cattabiani, Breve storia dei giubilei (1300–2000) (Milan: Bompiani, 1999), 150–2; Vignoles, Chronologie (1738), 1: 698–714. Clement’s first bull concerned the jubilee of 1700: Clement XI, Opera omnia (Frankfurt: Weidemann, 1729), Bullorium, cols 1–6.

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PART III Making Knowledge

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chapter eleven

Amos Funkenstein and the History of Scepticism RICHARD H. POPKIN

Amos Funkenstein and I debated the history of scepticism from September 1967, when he was the first to question a lecture that I gave at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, until our very last meeting in his hospital room in October 1995. In his book Theology and the Scientific Imagination,1 Funkenstein has modern scepticism descending from the heavens, whereas I have it ascending from the rubble of antiquity, emphasizing the fallibility of human beings and of their faculties, an outlook that was revived and employed during the chaos of the sixteenth century. A crucial difference between us concerned Funkenstein’s argument that modern scepticism emerged out of the discussions about divine omnipotence in the late Middle Ages. I had limited my discussion of the history of scepticism to those intellectual developments that followed after the text of the ancient Greek sceptic Sextus Empiricus became available in Europe in the sixteenth century. There were some Latin manuscripts of Sextus in medieval collections in France and Spain, but there is no evidence as yet discovered of anyone reading them or citing them.2 Indeed, both the rediscovered ancient and medieval sources of modern scepticism are part of the story of the making of the modern mind, and they meet, as Funkenstein noticed, in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique article ‘Rimini, Grégoire de.’ In Funkenstein’s account, the dialectical play of the late Ockhamites on the meaning of divine omnipotence led to speculations on the part of Gregory of Rimini in the fourteenth century and Gabriel Biel in the fifteenth century about whether God’s omnipotence, the complete power to do anything, included the ability to deceive and to lie to human beings, and/or to allow both of two contradictory propositions to be true.3

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Bayle is identified in the index of Funkenstein’s book as Henri Bayle rather than Pierre.4 Henri is, of course, the real name of Stendhal, the author of Le Rouge et le noir, not the great sceptic. (I assume that some not-too-worldly graduate student or overeager indexer at Princeton made the index.) Pierre Bayle presents the medieval speculations in the context of Descartes’s answer to scepticism, centring on the claim that God is no deceiver, and hence humans can trust in what God clearly and distinctly makes them believe.5 The issue of whether God can be a deceiver was seen by Bayle, and Funkenstein, as both the culmination of the medieval discussions on divine omnipotence and the opening wedge to Descartes’s answer to scepticism, as well as the sceptics’ answer to Descartes. Bayle went farther than Funkenstein, as I’ll discuss shortly, in seeing this as an issue that runs through the entire seventeenth century,6 at least up to the presentation of Bayle’s contention that two self-evidently true propositions can logically lead to a demonstrably false conclusion! (This was a claim that startled thinkers like Leibniz, who saw the whole rational world collapsing if anything like this could be the case.) Funkenstein pointed out that if God’s omnipotence involves His being able to do anything, even making contradictory propositions both be true, then God can also change the laws of nature. And Funkenstein said that Descartes went farther than even Gregory of Rimini on this by contending that God in His or Her omnipotent phase can change a true mathematical proposition like 1 + 2 = 3 into a false one. If this can be the case, then all truths that humans know are God-dependent, and the only reason we can discover their truth is that God so wills them.7 We can accept these God-ordained truths as really true only because God is no deceiver. Descartes’s extreme voluntarism led to his answer to scepticism and his defence of the new science. The mathematical physics developed by Descartes was true because God so willed, not because it followed from any scholastic chain of reasoning. Our God-ordained realization that the essence of matter is extension then allows us to formulate mathematical laws about material objects that are true as long as God so wills, and does not change the principles of mathematics.8 Funkenstein proceeded in his account to show that Descartes’s allimportant contention that ‘God is no deceiver’ is not original with him but is in fact discussed in Gregory of Rimini and Gabriel Biel. (The latter claimed that God had the power to make humans believe false and contradictory statements.) Thus a basic answer to modern scepticism, that of Descartes, is really a repeat of a late medieval discussion.

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Historically this is the case, and Descartes may well have been aware of these discussions about divine omnipotence when he worked out his solution to the sceptical crisis. However, Descartes does not cite any medieval author. The only one at the time who cites both Gregory of Rimini and Gabriel Biel was Descartes’s good friend Father Marin Mersenne. It is interesting that Bayle, who brings up the matter in his article ‘Rimini,’ immediately turns to discussions among Descartes’s contemporaries and later seventeenth-century writers, presenting evidence that God not only can deceive but actually does deceive according to the known historical record. Mersenne, who had arranged for the publication of Descartes’s first full exposition of his philosophy in the Meditations on First Philosophy of 1641, appended to the book a series of objections by leading thinkers of the time. Thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, and Antoine Arnauld offered stern and harsh criticisms of Descartes’s new philosophy. In the collection of objections there is one, the second set, identified as gathered by Mersenne himself. The content of this set strongly suggests that it is actually by Mersenne himself, since it is full of views that he had already published in his own answers to scepticism.9 Mersenne pointed out that not only can God deceive human beings, but according to scripture He has in fact done so several times, as when He hardened Pharaoh’s heart and led him to believe untruths. Other instances recorded in the Bible are also cited. Descartes, in his response, first said that he, Descartes, was not a Bible scholar or a theologian, and hence would not discuss the scriptural texts except to say that sometimes the Bible speaks in terms appropriate for ordinary humans but not appropriate for philosophers or theologians. Hence one does not have to take the biblical cases literally. After saying this, Descartes then greatly escalated the problem of divine deception by saying that it is possible that what appears to be true to us may not be true to an angel or even to God Himself. Human truths foisted upon us by God may not be the same as divine truths! Having said this, Descartes then dismissed the matter by contending that since we cannot tell if this is the case, and since it does not matter in terms of what we believe to be true, we can ignore the matter and act on the truths that we accept even if they are not divine truths.10 This would appear to give away all that Descartes had worked so hard to prove in the Meditations – namely, that since God is not a deceiver, we can accept as true what God makes us believe. Descartes had offered a

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new basis for a more dire scepticism than he had claimed to refute, since we have no way of ever determining if what is true for us is in fact true in any ultimate sense. Thus Descartes’s following out of the dialectic of divine omnipotence pushed the sceptical problems to the very core of human knowledge, which is at the mercy of an all-powerful deity. In Descartes’s writings and in his discussion with his critics, the two sources of modern scepticism interact: one, the logical results of following out the implications of divine omnipotence, and the other, the limitations of human knowledge due to the limitations of human faculties and capacities. Pierre Bayle in his article ‘Rimini’ continued the story beyond Descartes, showing that the issue of whether God can lie, and whether we can tell if we are being deceived, was a subject frequently raised in Calvinist theology in the Netherlands post- Descartes. Various theologians were accused of saying or implying that God can lie, and defended themselves from the barefaced implications of such a view by maintaining that, because of God’s omnipotence, such a possibility could not be ruled out, and that we do not have the ability to tell whether or not divine lying is taking place.11 Bayle himself seems to be the culmination of these two strains of modern scepticism. Bayle was trained first at the Jesuit college at Toulouse and then at Geneva University where he studied under a Cartesian Calvinist.12 At Toulouse he was trained in the dialectic of the last of the Spanish scholastics, Roderigo Arriaga, whom Bayle called ‘the subtle Arriaga.’ Bayle says that Arriaga taught the pro and the con of everything and never presented a dogmatic position. This is, in fact, how Bayle later taught at the Ecole Illustre of Rotterdam. His course of philosophy is apparently just what he himself was taught at Toulouse.13 Every theory in science, philosophy, and theology is shown to be ‘big with contradiction and absurdity.’ And Bayle claimed in his article about Uriel da Costa that human reason, in pursuing these matters, ultimately destroys itself. When that happens, believers see that true faith is built on the ruins of reason.14 For Bayle, part of the problem is the human situation. Because our faculties are so weak, our reason inadequate, the rational quest for certainty only leads to complete scepticism. From the divine side, the problem is that the Christian faith, the ship of Jesus Christ, was not made to sail on the stormy seas of sceptical questioning. ‘If a philosopher were asked to put on a level basis and in perfect harmony the Gospel mysteries and the Aristotelian axioms, one would be requesting

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of him what the nature of things will not permit. One must necessarily choose between philosophy and the Gospel. If you do not want to believe anything but what is evident and in conformity with the common notions, choose philosophy and leave Christianity. If you are willing to believe the incomprehensible mysteries of religion, choose Christianity and leave philosophy.’15 Bayle then carried this total separation of reason and faith to the point of claiming that, based on the ‘incomprehensible mysteries of religion,’ one can show that two selfevident true propositions, one from philosophy and one from religion, logically entail a necessarily false conclusion.16 Thus Bayle’s fideism becomes the end result of fusing the two strains that lead to modern scepticism. God’s omnipotence leads to the rational unknowability of God by human reason, and human reason in its human limitations cannot know divine truths. One has to choose between reason and faith. No one is quite sure which Bayle himself chose, but his exposition of the problem became the basis for the final secularization of philosophy and science that Funkenstein stressed as a central development of seventeenth-century thought. Bayle’s many sceptical arguments, drawn from both the medieval theological and ancient Greek sceptical tradition, became what Voltaire called ‘the Arsenal of the Enlightenment.’ Bayle’s article ‘Rimini’17 shows how two paths to modern scepticism fuse in the seventeenth century and lead to the total divorce of religious belief and rational knowledge. One path descends from the heavens, from the highest heights of theology that Funkenstein loved to contemplate, and the other rises from the most detailed exploration of the weakness of the human faculties, the senses and reason, compiled in the third century of the Common Era in the works of Sextus Empiricus, revived in the sixteenth century, and made generally known in modern times by the presentation of Michel de Montaigne in his essay ‘Apology for Raimund Sebond.’ Expositing the effects of the second has been my life work. Putting the results of Funkenstein’s efforts and my own together may give us a richer and deeper appreciation of how our modern intellectual world, shorn of its foundations in theology or necessary philosophical truths, emerged in the formation of Cartesian philosophy and the counter-attacks against it. In 1706, when Leibniz heard of Bayle’s demise, he lamented that he had lost his best intellectual opponent. Interacting with him had led Leibniz to develop his own theory and to produce his very best efforts. Although I never regarded Funkenstein as an opponent, he was one of

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the best discussants I ever encountered about problems in modern intellectual history. I regret that we have had our last face-to-face discussion, but we can continue our decades of interaction by studying his texts and reacting to them.18 The many discussions Funkenstein and I had over the years have helped me to better see what I have been doing in tracing one side of the history of scepticism. Adding Funkenstein’s vision to mine provides, I think, the best way of seeing how scepticism overwhelmed the intellectual world from Montaigne to Descartes to Bayle to today.

Notes I should like to thank my assistants, Tim Correll and Stephanie Chasin, who helped me in preparing this paper. 1 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 2 A critical edition of the Madrid manuscripts is being prepared in Spain along with editions of sixteenth-century Spanish Latin manuscripts of Sextus. Funkenstein and I discussed over and over again why there is no sign of Sextus’s arguments during the Middle Ages. We were both startled by a paper we heard at a conference on scepticism at UC Riverside in 1991 on an unidentified manuscript from the fourteenth century that clearly had an illustration from Sextus. The manuscript was cited by a Mexican professor of philosophy, Mauricio Beuchot, in his article ‘Some Traces of the Presence of Scepticism in Medieval Thought,’ in Richard H. Popkin, ed., Scepticism in the History of Philosophy: A Pan-American Dialogue (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 1996), 37–43. In our very last conversation in the hospital we pondered this news once more, but still did not know what to make of it. 3 Funkenstein, Theology, and the Scientific Imagination, ch. 3, 117ff. 4 Ibid., 403. 5 Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, article ‘Rimini,’ rem. B. First published 1697, second edition 1702, and many editions thereafter. 6 Ibid., rem. C. 7 Another medieval figure not discussed by Descartes, Bayle, or Funkenstein was John of Mirecourt, who apparently contended that God can be a deceiver and that God can change the past!

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8 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, ch. 3. 9 R.H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1979), ch. 10, ‘Descartes: Sceptique malgré lui,’ 202–4; and Marin Mersenne, ‘Secondes objections,’ in René Descartes, Oeuvres, Adam Tannery edition (Paris: Cerf, 1897–1910), Tome 9A, 99–100. 10 Descartes, ‘Réponses de l’auteur aux secondes objections,’ in Oeuvres, Tome 9A, 113. 11 Bayle, Dictionnaire, ‘Rimini,’ rem. C. 12 On Bayle’s life and career, see Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); and R.H. Popkin, ‘Introduction,’ to Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. R.H. Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1991). 13 This course appears in Bayle’s Oeuvres diverses as Système de philosophie. 14 Bayle, Dictionnaire, ‘Acosta, Uriel de,’ rem. G. 15 Bayle, Dictionnaire, éclaircissement sur les Pyrrhoniens. Translation in Bayle, Selections, 423–4. 16 Bayle, Dictionnaire, ‘Pyrrho,’ end of rem. B. Selections, 199–204. 17 One of the only two citations to Bayle’s writings in Funkenstein’s Theology and the Scientific Imagination. The other is to Bayle’s comments on the Arnauld-Malebranche dispute. 18 Funkenstein’s widow, Esti, gave me a copy of his unfinished manuscript, which is really a marvel of insight on the ways that knowledge has been conceived from ancient times onward. Unfortunately, the manuscript ends before modern scepticism comes on the scene. But as much as we have of Amos’s last efforts will give us great food for thought for years to come, and aid us in understanding the intellectual roots of our present world.

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chapter twelve

Two Talmudic Understandings of the Dictum ‘Appoint for Yourself a Teacher.’ HANINA BEN-MENAHEM

Amos Funkenstein introduced the distinction between open and closed knowledge in his Theology and the Scientific Imagination, and in greater detail in The Sociology of Ignorance.1 Open knowledge can be identified by two main characteristics: (a) it clearly demarcates, on the basis of objective and rational criteria, information relevant to a subject from information irrelevant to it; and (b) it is accessible to a population whose size is not restricted in advance. Closed knowledge has the opposite characteristics: (a) there are no explicit criteria stipulating what this knowledge comprises and what it excludes; and (b) it is restricted to a particular group of individuals. It should be noted that being well or poorly demarcated is an epistemic trait, whereas accessibility is social, and invoking them together here calls for some clarification. First, what is the relationship between these two features of a body of knowledge, epistemic ‘demarcation’ and social ‘accessibility’? Is there a logical connection, so that neither can be present in the absence of the other, or merely an empirical correlation? Could there be a body of knowledge that is accessible to the public at large yet has no clear conditions for what it includes? The connection, I would argue, is merely pragmatic, in the sense that it would be almost impossible to convey to a broad audience a body of knowledge that does not satisfy the first criterion of open knowledge, in other words, that is not clearly demarcated. If the information is transmitted to a limited circle of students, however, it can indeed be conveyed by processes such as modelling (on the part of the teacher-transmitter), and observation and emulation (on the part of the student). Funkenstein regards tacit knowledge as a type of closed knowledge. Tacit knowledge assumes a fact-of-the-matter approach to the issue at

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hand, an issue not amenable to explicit articulation. Tacit knowledge thus exemplifies knowledge that has the first feature of open knowledge – namely, objectively unambiguous demarcation of relevant information from irrelevant information. Because of its complexity, however, it cannot be satisfactorily verbalized, and can only be transmitted and acquired by way of observation. Pragmatically speaking, therefore, it can only be transmitted to a limited audience. Categorizing such knowledge as closed gives more weight to the accessibility criterion than to the demarcation criterion. Funkenstein is, it appears, more interested in the social dimension than the epistemic. This inclination to give precedence to the social is also manifest in the very labelling of the two types of knowledge: open knowledge is really open only when viewed from the social perspective. When approached from the epistemic perspective, it can be equally aptly characterized as closed, since it is by definition knowledge that is well circumscribed and delimited. There may be yet another connection between the two features of open knowledge. If a body of information that was initially closed knowledge in both senses gradually becomes socially open – that is, accessible to the public – it may eventually be transformed into open knowledge in the epistemic sense of the term as well. But this transformation is contingent, not necessary. In The Sociology of Ignorance, Funkenstein brings up the issue of open knowledge in discussing certain historical processes of change. He argues that we can identify a specific event in the history of Jewish law – namely, the removal of Rabban Gamaliel from the presidency and the opening of the academy to any interested party – as the culmination of the move from closed knowledge to open knowledge. But here again Funkenstein is more interested in the social dimension of the process, paying little attention to the epistemic. I will argue in this paper that though the transition from closed knowledge to open knowledge in the social sense may have taken place at the juncture identified by Funkenstein, it was not accompanied by an epistemic change from non-demarcated to demarcated knowledge. Let me begin by distinguishing between two models of the rabbistudent relationship – the personal and the impersonal. The personal model reflects the assumption that the law is an epistemically closed body of knowledge. The impersonal model, on the other hand, assumes that it is open. In the rabbinic literature, that is, the literature of the Talmudic period, we often encounter among the sages individuals who fulfil a

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variety of distinct social roles, including those of scholar, teacher, provider of moral guidance, legislator, and judge.2 In particular, it was very common for scholars of the Talmudic period to serve in the community as teachers of the law and judges. In this paper, I examine the dynamic underlying this social role of sage-cum-law teacher-cum-judge, or for simplicity, rabbi, focusing on the rabbi-student relation. I suggest two conceptions of this relation, one that can be described as the personal model, and the other as the impersonal model. We will see that while both models find expression in the rabbinic literature, the former undoubtedly prevails. On the personal model, the rabbi is conceived of as a singular personality whose legal rulings, scholarship, occupation (many of the sages earned their livelihood by plying a trade), experiences, personal life, and social interactions constitute an integrated whole. This means not only that the rabbi is seen unapologetically as fully human, with all this entails – passions, limitations, and imperfect understanding – but further, that the rabbi’s life is understood as a creation in its own right rather than simply a means for transmission of the culture. Consequently, on this model, to be the student of a rabbi is to become part of his life. Only through such an intimate relationship can the fullness of the sage’s being be vouchsafed to the student, who must internalize this unique personality. The rabbi’s authority as a teacher is not restricted to a particular area of expertise but transcends the formal curriculum, so to speak, to encompass the entire spectrum of human existence. On the second model, the impersonal model, the rabbi is viewed simply as a medium for the transmission of the legal heritage. He serves as a link in the masoretic chain, literally, the chain of transmission – that is, the mechanism by which Jewish law is handed down from one generation to the next – and engages in its interpretation in accordance with the traditional principles of interpretation. His decisions are subject to rational evaluation, but he himself remains perfectly transparent, and his contribution does not retain the mark of his personality. Although the rabbi’s personal conduct can indeed ordinarily be assumed to exemplify the law, the law itself, on this model, is seen as a system entirely independent of the rabbi’s life, as a consistent edifice defined without reference to those engaged in its transmission and interpretation. The status of the rabbi, on this view, is exclusively a function of his mastery of the system. At this juncture it is important to distinguish between two questions. The first, posed from the external vantage point, is as follows: what

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degree of impact can the individual be expected to have on the evolution of a given culture? In the present context, this translates into inquiring, from our own (non-rabbinic) perspective, into the degree of influence on the evolution of the Halacha, the corpus of Jewish law, that should be assigned to particular individuals. What impact did such preeminent sages as Rabbi Akiba (first to second century ce) and Maimonides (twelfth century), have on the law? This question, fascinating though it is, is not the one I want to address. I will restrict my attention to a question that arises only in the context of the internal point of view: what is the significance ascribed by a given culture itself – in our case, the Talmud – to certain institutions within that culture – in our case, to the rabbi? This is a jurisprudential question, and the answer can be found by perusing the rabbinic literature. I will endeavour to ascertain how the Talmudic rabbis, or ‘the Sages,’ as they are collectively – and affectionately – referred to, viewed their role. The task before us, then, is to decide which of the two models described above best captures the Talmudic self-understanding. To further hone our definition of this task – namely, exploration of the internal question of the Talmud’s self-understanding – it can be distinguished from the entirely different project of investigating why the rabbis of the Talmud so understood themselves – that is, why one model was adopted and the other rejected. What advantages dictated its adoption by the sages? This query is, like the question of the impact of preeminent jurists, one that arises from the external perspective, as opposed to the internal question of the Talmudic jurisprudential vision, and is best left to sociologists of science and experts in the field of intellectual history. To help us comprehend the jurisprudential thinking that might motivate the rabbinic conception of the teacher qua institution, let me note that each of the two models has certain advantages with respect to establishing authority. On the impersonal model, the rabbi can demand that his opinion be acknowledged, and the view of his fellow rejected, by dint of the fact that his view indisputably represents the law, leaving no room for other opinions. Without having to grant any consideration whatsoever to opposed views, the rabbi can demand that his view alone be accepted as valid. On the personal model, on the other hand, because the law is not necessarily a single consistent structure to which all acceptable views must conform, the rabbi, while not in a position to demand exclusive recognition for his own view, is always justified in demanding that it receive the same recognition that has been accorded to other views.

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I must emphasize that although the personal and impersonal models are incompatible, we often find, in practice, that some form of compromise emerged. Nevertheless, as I hope to show, the personal model was by far the more popular in the Talmudic sources, certainly up to the redaction of the Mishnah (about 200 ce), and to a considerable extent afterwards. Endorsement of the impersonal model can, to be sure, also be detected in later rabbinical sources. In fact, Maimonides himself was an enthusiastic champion of this model at its most radical. But in adopting it, Maimonides is intentionally departing from the Talmudic approach and endorsing that of the Greeks. Indeed, with regard to all the issues I touch upon below, he consistently favours the impersonal model of the teacher-mentor-sage. I have already alluded to various associations between the manner in which the Talmudic rabbis perceived their role and the manner in which the law itself is understood. These fascinating connections between conceptions of the law and conceptions of those who personify it will become more apparent as the discussion of the personal model, as reflected in the Talmudic sources, proceeds.

Consistency and Continuity A recurring concern in Talmudic thought is the question of whether consistency and coherence are to be found in the law, or in the life of the rabbi, with all it embraces. The rabbi’s interpretive acumen and judgment are tested, first and foremost, against the background of his own behaviour, teachings, and judicial rulings. The coherence and overall compatibility of these facets of his life work are perceived as far more important than the fit between the rabbi’s particular legal outlook and that of the system as a whole. This explains the tremendous significance ascribed to strict quotation, to citing the words of sages in the name of their utterer. The Talmud is replete with locutions such as ‘R. Idi b. Abin said in the name of R. Amram quoting R. Nahman who had it from Samuel’3 and ‘R. Nahman stated in the name of Samuel in the name of Abba Saul the son of Ima Miriam,’4 which record the masoretic chain, the order of transmission, with great exactitude. Immense intellectual effort is expended in trying to trace the authors of particular Halachic opinions. Unless ascribed to the collective body of members of the study hall, anonymous opinions, detached from the life of a particular individual, are experienced by the rabbis as disconnected and even incoherent, and fre-

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quently require additional explanation. Were it the case that coherence was a demand made of the system as a whole, the existence of anonymous opinions would not be cause for concern. However, if the desideratum of coherence applies to the sages as concrete individuals particularized by their teachings, experiences, and idiosyncrasies, anonymous opinions present a problem. Of course, it is also true that often an attempt to ascertain the authorship of a particular opinion is motivated by the desire to assess its reliability and authenticity. The Talmud itself remarks on this on several occasions. However, examination of the dicta in question reveals that the Talmud’s primary interest is to integrate the unattributed opinion into the thought of a particular sage, and thereby endow it with the authority it merits by virtue of this contextualization.

Ministering to the Sage The rabbi also serves as a role model, and his conduct is to be emulated. It is considered of particular importance that students serve their teachers and minister to their needs: ‘However learned he may be, one who has not attended a sage is no better than an ignoramus.’5 According to R. Akiba, such an individual is deserving of capital punishment.6 Attending sages is a means of fostering the intimacy between student and teacher mentioned above, an intimacy that encompasses every aspect, however banal, of the teacher’s comportment. Since virtually every detail of the teacher’s daily routine is a matter for instruction, the student seeks to attend his teacher to the greatest extent possible. The teacher, for his part, is called upon to allow the student this familiarity, for such unmediated closeness between teacher and student is unparalleled as a medium for education, and far superior to formal instruction. Indeed, one passage in the Talmud relates instances in which students, themselves sages, sought to observe their teachers’ practices regarding bodily hygiene; and even one instance where a student, reprimanded by his teacher for attempting to ascertain his conduct during marital relations, states as his defence, ‘This too is the law and I must learn it.’7 It is interesting to note that this phrase recurs in a parallel incident, where it is the defence offered by a student who has offended his teacher by querying him as to the explanation for his advanced years.8 Some commentators, however, understand the concept of ministering to one’s teacher differently. Rashi (eleventh century), for example, systematically interprets all references to this service as pertaining to ‘the harmonizing of explanations of the various passages of the

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Mishnah, clarifying the explanations and their sources,’ an understanding that diverges, it seems, from the original meaning of the term ‘attending one’s teacher.’ This intellectualized interpretation presupposes the impersonal model and downplays the relevance of the experiential dimension – specifically, the teacher’s conduct. However, this understanding of the notion of ‘attending one’s rabbi’ is somewhat novel. The more common interpretation is the literal one: ‘R. Joshua b. Levi said, All the tasks that are performed by a slave for his master are performed by a student for his rabbi.’9 R. Judah the Prince, redactor of the Mishnah, explains his unrivalled scholarly acumen as resulting from his having seen, when a young boy, the back of R. Meir, a renowned authority.10 This may be an allusion to the revelation of God referred to in the Book of Exodus: ‘and thou shalt see My back; but My face shall not be seen’ (Exod. 33:23). R. Judah says that had he seen R. Meir from the front, his scholarly acumen would have been greater still, citing, in support of this contention, the verse ‘[And thy teacher shall not hide Himself any more,] but thine eyes shall see thy Teacher’ (Isa. 30:20). In this context, ‘seeing’ refers to the insight acquired in the course of first-hand contact between teacher and student, and the intimacy forged during lengthy periods spent in each other’s company. This is the primary meaning of the Mishnaic injunction ‘Appoint for yourself a teacher.’11 Apart from the obligation to be instructed in the law, the student is obliged to forge a close relationship with a learned teacher. In insisting on this directive, the Talmudic tradition takes a stance diametrically opposed to that of classical Greece, which, while embracing the teacher-student dynamic, nonetheless celebrated the autodidact: ‘The home-grown is better than the acquired, as it is harder; Hence the words of Homer: I have learned from none but myself.’12 It seems quite probable that the contrast between this accolade to the self-taught and the Talmudic injunction ‘Appoint for yourself a teacher’ is to some degree accounted for by differences in the subject matter acquired. To the extent that this subject matter is perceived as completely imbued with the teacher’s stamp – that is, as closed knowledge – the possibility of its independent acquisition is virtually nil, and conversely, to the extent that it is perceived as neutral, the possibility of its acquisition through independent study comes across as a reasonable, if challenging, intellectual objective. Ministering to the sage also has another dimension: it underscores the hierarchical nature of the teacher-student relationship, given that the ministrations in question are not reciprocal but performed only by

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the student. This service instils in the student a humble and compliant disposition that enhances the teacher’s ability to have an impact on the student. As an illustration of this, let me quote the following passage from the Talmud: R. Hisda said to Rami b. Hama: Last night you were not with us at the study hall [lit., our neighbourhood] when we examined an important matter. He said: What important matter? He said to him: One who lives in the courtyard of another without his knowledge – does he have to pay him rent, or doesn’t he? ... He [Rami b. Hama] said to him [R. Hisda]: [The solution] is found in a Mishnah. Which Mishnah? He said to him: Go and perform some service for me. He [R. Hisda] lifted up and folded his scarf. He said to him: [The Mishnah is:] ‘But if [the animal] has benefitted [from the damage it caused], [the owner] pays for the benefit that accrued.13

The Teacher/Student Relationship Mirrors the Relationship between the Almighty and the Individual One is to be ‘in awe of one’s teacher as one is in awe of the Almighty,’14 and the respect due a teacher is like that due the Almighty. Emulation of the teacher and attendance to his needs are compared to the emulation and service of the Lord. And to dispute the views of one’s teacher is likewise comparable to disputing the word of the Lord.15 On the view that the law is, as far as the student is concerned, defined in terms of the rabbi’s demeanour and actions, the rabbi represents the law, and to challenge him is tantamount to challenging the law itself. The Talmudic emphasis on the student’s submission to his teacher raises the question of whether this same submission is called for in contexts where there is a written legal corpus. For in this case, it might be argued, we can rely on the written word and do not require the rabbi to expound and interpret it for us. Note, however, that this suggestion is made from the perspective of the impersonal model. The Talmud, committed, as we said, to the personal model, rejects it, stressing that even in the realm of knowledge that has been set down in writing, the importance of the teacher remains.16

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It must be kept in mind that at this stage in the history of the law – the Talmudic era – the amount of material that had been committed to writing was slight – almost negligible relative to the vast amount of oral law and lore that remained unwritten. Much later, in twelfth-century France, we find the question raised, and the suggested answer put forward, in arguing that a change had come about in the status of the rabbi: ‘But now the rulings and the decisions are written down, and anyone can consult the collections of rulings and reach a decision, and the rabbi has much less eminence than in former days.’17 This rabbinical observer posits a causal relation between the decline in the rabbi’s status and the fact that most of the legal corpus had by then been committed to writing. The same idea is echoed in a source from the early fourteenth century: We can no longer say that one is to be ‘in awe of one’s teacher as one is in awe of the Almighty’ (mAvot 4:12), and all the laws specifying services a student ought [to] perform for his teacher are no longer in place, because the tractates of the Gemara, the commentaries, novellae and other works, are in effect generating the rulings that are handed down, and it is all a question of the intelligence of the one who rules on the case.18

At this point in the evolution of Halachic jurisprudence, when a student disputes the view of his teacher, this is perceived not as a challenge to the law itself but rather as contesting the way in which the law is interpreted, and as such, altogether legitimate.19 However, the Talmudic attitude, as we said, is that the rabbi’s privileged status does not rest on his superior wisdom or learning but rather on the inherently edifying nature of the teacher-student relationship.

The Rabbi Whose Conduct Is Improper A direct confrontation between the two models arises over the question of what should be done in the case of a rabbi whose conduct is improper. On the impersonal model, there is a clear distinction between a given body of knowledge and the personality and conduct of the individual engaged in its dissemination. On the personal model, however, this distinction cannot be made, and the rabbi himself, his character, and his conduct are all subject to evaluation. The twentiethcentury reader needs no reminding of the complexity of this matter.

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Wagner, Heidegger, Paul de Man, and Celine surely suffice to illustrate the quandary. Did their personal failings defile their works of art? Should Celine’s anti-Semitic tracts influence the way we read Journey to the End of the Night? These questions concerning the connections between the different sides of an artist’s, or any great individual’s, life and works have been tackled by many thinkers in recent years, but no consensus has been forthcoming. A similar dilemma arises in the Babylonian Talmud concerning the relationship between R. Meir and his teacher, Elisha b. Abuya.20 Elisha b. Abuya was a sage who espoused heretical opinions and generally rebelled against religious conventions. Despite this, R. Meir continued to be his student. The Talmud asks how R. Meir permitted himself to study with him, as the Sages had taught: ‘If the teacher is akin to an angel of the Lord of hosts, one should aspire to be personally instructed by him; if he is not, one should not so aspire.’ The Talmud justifies R. Meir’s position by citing another verse: ‘Incline thine ear, and hear the words of the wise, and apply thy heart unto My knowledge’ (Prov. 22:17) – that is, the truth should be hearkened to regardless of its source. As the Talmud further asserts, ‘R. Meir found a pomegranate, ate the insides and threw away the rind.’21 In other words, that which is essential must be distinguished from that which is not. Still, despite R. Meir’s conduct and the fact that it is ultimately justified by the Talmud, clearly such behaviour is deviant and calls for explanation.

The Student amid Scholarly Controversy When there is a difference of opinion among scholars, who, as we saw, also serve as legal authorities, the individual is permitted to choose which authority he prefers to follow, as long as he follows him consistently. It was taught: The law is always in accordance with the view of the School of Hillel, but he who wishes to act in accordance with the view of the School of Shammai may do so, and he who wishes to act in accordance with the view of the School of Hillel may do so. He who adopts the more lenient rulings of the School of Shammai and the more lenient rulings of the School of Hillel is a wicked man, while of one who adopts the strictures of the School of Shammai and the strictures of the School of Hillel, Scripture said: ‘the fool walketh in darkness’ (Eccl. 2:14). But rather, if one adopts the views of the School of Shammai, one should adopt both their lenient and their strict rulings, and if one adopts the views of the

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School of Hillel, one should adopt both their lenient and their strict rulings.22

That is, the desideratum of consistency is applied not to the legal system as a whole but to the conduct of the individual. Above, we noted that the sage’s life and thought are understood as constituting an integrated, coherent whole. Here we see that a similar approach is adopted with regard to the conduct of the ordinary individual. The demand that the individual conduct himself in a consistent manner can be fulfilled by the individual’s choosing a teacher for ongoing guidance. This highlights the fact that the Talmud construes the immediacy of the relationship between an individual and his mentor as far more important than the relationship between the individual and the law as an abstract entity. Teachers are chosen not necessarily on the strength of rational assessment of the legal positions they uphold but on the strength of the influence they can be expected to exercise on students, both directly and indirectly, via their personalities and conduct. Here, once again, we see the primacy of the sage’s personality. The choice of an individual to serve as mentor and legal authority is a choice made not only by individuals but by communities as well. The acknowledged local authority has a unique status. On a number of key questions, the Talmud speaks of many local variants of the accepted law, indicating that, as a result of the fact that each community followed a different legal authority, there seems to have been considerable intercommunal pluralism. It is important to emphasize that the allegiance of a community to a particular rabbi is not the result of his appointment by some central authority; rather, it is rooted in popular acceptance of the rabbi stemming from recognition of his character and merits. The Halachic establishment validates this popular acceptance by recognizing the authority’s decisions as binding on members of the community even when they diverge from, or openly conflict with, the norm – that is, the decision most commonly rendered in the type of case at hand.

Controversy Controversies among the sages of the Talmud are sometimes decided on the basis of who the sides are rather than which side is actually correct. The underlying idea here is that it is quite conceivable for a particular sage to possess qualities that themselves suffice to endow his opinions with legal force. In determining the law, objective concerns –

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the facts of the matter and the relevant legal issues – are not the only factors that come into play. The personality of the sage arguing for a particular position can also be decisive. This is, indeed, a generalization of the phenomenon, noted above, of the individual’s choosing the sage whose decisions he will abide by, not on the basis of whether he deems the sage’s decisions correct but on the basis of whether he accepts his authority. The passage quoted above in this regard mentioned two schools of thought – one known as the School of Hillel, the other as the School of Shammai – that existed during the Mishnaic period; they tended to uphold opposed positions on a wide variety of legal questions. The law, the Talmud reports, was, with almost no exceptions, decided in accordance with the view of the School of Hillel, not because of the superiority of its opinions to those of the School of Shammai but because of the comportment and attitude of its members. For what reason did the School of Hillel merit the law’s being decided in accordance with its views? Because they were pleasant and humble, and they studied both their own views and those of the School of Shammai, and not only that, but they would also mention the views of the School of Shammai before their own views.23

This is the explanation found in the Babylonian Talmud. Interestingly, however, a different version is found in the Jerusalem Talmud, which states: For what did the School of Hillel merit having the law decided in accordance with their views? R. Yuda b. Pazi said, they would mention the views of the School of Shammai before their own views, and not only that, but when they acknowledged [the correctness of] the views of the School of Shammai, they retracted their own.24

Here, ethical considerations have been superseded by methodological considerations. The advantage of the School of Hillel’s approach is not a matter of their actions per se but arises from the fact that their conduct reflects a distinct epistemic program: the School of Hillel retract their views when this is warranted by objective considerations. The Jerusalem Talmud is thus arguing, here, that rather than the personal qualities and demeanour of its proponents, it is a position’s veracity that is crucial. It rejects the personal in favour of the impersonal.

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The Personal Model, Controversy, and the Nature of Law Having elucidated what I mean by the personal model of the teachersage, I will now turn my attention to anchoring this model within a broader issue in Talmudic legal thought, an issue that greatly intrigued Amos Funkenstein – the Talmud’s attitude to the phenomenon of controversy. One approach mentioned in the Talmud, but little analysed or elaborated, understands controversy as a sort of unintended, but virtually unavoidable, consequence of human frailties. Poor recall, lack of knowledge or learning, and inappropriate behaviour conspire, all too often, to produce wrangling and bickering within the community of scholars. Underlying this approach is the idea that, unless distorted, the Halacha is a coherent structure of rational judgments and arguments that yields only universally accepted pronouncements. On this approach, the personal element that tends to slip into the Halachic dialogue is of no value and should be minimized or, ideally, eliminated altogether. A more popular approach, and one more typical of the Talmudic orientation in general, sees controversy as an integral part of the law. Now, as a tool for getting at the truth, controversy obviously has considerable utility: by encouraging the rabbis to formulate their views in order to participate in the ongoing legal discussion, controversy enhances the collective, collaborative effort, thereby increasing the likelihood of arriving at the truth. However, from the various passages in which the Talmud engages in introspective analysis of the notion of controversy, it is evident that the Talmud’s positive attitude to controversy is not due to such methodological considerations. Rather, the rationale for this approbation of controversy is the view that every human sentiment, every conviction, however idiosyncratic, expressed by one of the sages, contains a grain of insight, even truth, and as such is inherently valuable. It is not the epistemic contribution of an utterance that is precious but its very existence. One of the most vivid manifestations of the positive rabbinic attitude to interpretive inclusiveness is the following exegesis from Leviticus Rabbah,25 which ascribes to every opinion the status of having been revealed to Moses at Sinai. R. Joshua b. Levi explained: It says, ‘On them ... according to all the words’ (Deut. 9:10) and it is also written, ‘All the commandment which I command thee’ and so on (Deut. 8:1). Instead of just ‘all,’ the phrase

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‘according to all’ [is used], instead of ‘words,’ the phrase ‘the words’ [is used], instead of ‘commandment,’ the phrase ‘the commandment’ [is used], implying that Scripture, Mishnah, laws, Talmud, Toseftot, Agadot, and even what a seasoned student would, in the future, say in his teacher’s presence, were all spoken to Moses at Sinai; as it is said, ‘Is there a thing whereof it is said: “See, this is new”?’ (Eccl. 1:10), and the next part of the verse gives the answer: ‘It hath been already.’26

The personal model described above, which views Halachic knowledge as to some degree dependent on the personality, in the widest sense, of the teacher-sage, almost guarantees controversy, since it is impossible to suppose the mental lives of different individuals to be perfectly in harmony. If the law as a whole is not simply a mechanical product of rational judgments, the only reasonable attitude is to accept the inevitability of controversy. Consider the biblical verse ‘The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails well fastened are the masters of assemblies; they were given from one shepherd’ (Eccl. 12:11). This verse is interpreted by the Talmud as follows: ‘Masters of assemblies’ refers to the scholars who sit in various assemblies and apply themselves to the Torah; some deem a matter impure, others deem it pure, some prohibit, others permit, some disqualify, others declare fit. Lest someone say: Under these circumstances, how can I learn the Torah?, therefore Scripture says: All ‘were given from one shepherd.’ One God gave them, one leader uttered them from the mouth of the Master of all deeds, blessed be He; as it is written, ‘And God spake all these words’ (Exod. 20:1). 27

I have quoted this passage at length because it poignantly expresses the Talmud’s struggle with the question of the very concept of legal truth, given the reality of numerous different opinions on almost every single issue. Its answer, in essence, is that the phenomenon of controversy is acknowledged and accepted: ‘both these and those are the words of the living God.’28 The endorsement of theoretical pluralism legitimizes not only the different views that have been proffered but also those who formulated them. Were this not the case – that is, were consistency sought – mavericks and dissenters would not be tolerated within the system. Hence this endorsement of pluralism reflects the crucial role of the sage in the

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overall structure of Jewish law, which is akin to a tapestry of distinctive but interrelated patterns woven from an indeterminate body of norms by means of interpretation and application.

Judicial Deviation from the Law Against the background of this picture of the law as an indeterminate body of norms whose application is dependent upon the sage, I would now like to turn to another feature of Talmudic jurisprudence that highlights the salience of the personal: its unique attitude to judicial deviation. Elsewhere, I have argued that the position of Talmudic law regarding the nature of the judicial process can be summarized by reversing the traditional Western approach: it is best understood as governed by men rather than laws.29 Classical Western legal theory demands total obedience to the letter of the law, making no allowance for extra-legal considerations. The reasoning underlying this approach is that people are arbitrary and capricious and hence cannot be relied on to rule over others. Justice – indeed, the existence of the rule of law itself – can be maintained only if society is governed by laws and not by men. This principle – in its original formulation ‘Non sub Homine sed sub Deo et Lege,’ that is, ‘not under man, but under God and the law’ – is a cornerstone of Western jurisprudence.30 The fear of tyranny and despotism that motivates this extreme position accounts for the creation of law as a governing entity. As intentionally forged for this purpose, the law is presumed to be maximally impartial, beneficial, and just. The flaw in this reasoning is that before the law can be obeyed, it must be understood. This in turn requires its interpretation, but interpretation can only be carried out by individuals, who by virtue of their very humanity suffer from the shortcomings noted above. The problem thus remains, for the keys to the great fortress built to safeguard individuals from the arbitrary rulings of their fellows are vouchsafed to these same fellows. Awareness of this deficiency, indeed, induced some legal thinkers to argue against the classical Western understanding, and to emphasize the role of the judge in the application of the law; I refer, of course, to adherents of American legal realism, and its successor, the critical legal studies movement. Talmudic jurisprudence, being, from the start, more pragmatic and less high-minded, employs a different approach. It allows judges to deviate explicitly and openly from the law if, in their opinion, such a

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course is justified. This attitude does not attest to indifference to the value of legal certainty and stability. Rather, Jewish legal thinking, while motivated by the same concerns that impelled its Western counterparts, arrived at a different conclusion: namely, that good laws by themselves are not sufficiently protective, and imperfect laws do not necessarily lead to injustice. On the Talmudic world view, the only guarantees against arbitrariness are the judges’ sense of responsibility, esteem for their office, fidelity to the spirit of the law, and concern for society. It has been suggested, by Ronald Dworkin among others, that at the root of the classical Western conception is a litigant who has come to court to claim his due rather than to plead for succour from the judge. The Western litigant claims that he is entitled to a favourable ruling. By necessity, such a claim is based on the court’s subordination to a consistent set of standards from which no deviation is permitted. In a Talmudic court, on the other hand, the litigant cannot claim any right to a favourable ruling, even if there is a legal rule in his favour. He can merely request that the judges come to his aid because his situation merits such relief. There are no specific directives that prescribe in advance the extra-legal factors that should be taken into account in deciding the law, or that place limits on the kinds of factors that can be cited. As a result, the factors considered inevitably reflect the judge’s own temperament, leanings, experiences, and philosophy of life. The maxim ‘governed by men, not by rules’ thus more faithfully expresses the Talmudic conception of the judicial process. We have explored some of the diverse contexts in which the personal model of the rabbi – at once scholar, judge, and teacher – can be discerned in the Talmud, and we have reflected on its implications. Perhaps the most significant is the idea just considered: that ultimately the judicial process is governed by individuals rather than by rules. This takes us full circle. I began this paper by adducing the very profound distinction, drawn to our attention by Amos Funkenstein, between open and closed knowledge, and noted a key characteristic of (epistemically) closed knowledge: there are no explicit criteria stipulating what it comprises and what it excludes. I then argued that, inasmuch as the Talmud, generally speaking, conceives of the rabbi-scholar as personally embodying the law, it assumes – implicitly, of course – that Halachic knowledge is closed knowledge. But a significant qualification of this conclusion is in order. It will be recalled that I stressed that my discussion was a jurisprudential reconstruction of the Talmudic self-understanding. Yet the nature of the

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society governed by the Talmudic jurisprudential regime is very different from that of contemporary society. As we saw, the personal model is premised on the idea that the rabbi-scholar-judge who embodies the law is a spiritual leader and not merely someone with expert legal knowledge. This in turn assumes a homogeneous community with shared values and beliefs. Only within such a community is it plausible that teachers will be esteemed and revered, their authority submitted to voluntarily, and their teachings considered a precious legacy to be cherished, nurtured, and passed on to the next generation.

Notes 1 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Amos Funkenstein and Adin Steinsaltz, The Sociology of Ignorance (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Broadcast University, 1987). 2 This is not, of course, to deny the existence of overlap between these functions. Indeed, the intimate connection between legal decision making and instruction is manifest in the fact that the same Hebrew term (horaa) is used to denote both activities. The term ‘Torah,’ used to refer to either the Pentateuch or, more broadly, the entire corpus of the written and oral law, derives from the same lexical root. 3 bBerakhot 49b. 4 bKetubot 87a. 5 bBerakhot 47b; cf bYoma 86a. 6 jNazir 7:1 (Venice edition 56a–b). 7 bBerakhot 62a. 8 bMegila 28a. 9 bKetubot 96a; and see also bBaba Kama 20b, quoted below. 10 bEruvin 13b. 11 mAvot 1:6. 12 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1365a. Notwithstanding this ideal, mentor-disciple relationships in ancient Greece were, of course, complex, robust, and nuanced. 13 bBaba Kama 20a-b. 14 mAvot 4:12; cf bPesahim 22b. 15 bSanhedrin 110a. 16 See, for example, bEruvin 62b. 17 Sefer Mitzvot Katan of Zurich, Har Shoshanim edition (Jerusalem: 1973), 275.

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18 Orhot Haim, Laws of the Study of the Torah, 28. 19 This was also pointed out by Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, ch. 2, in commenting on the impact of printing on the practice of Judaism. 20 bHagiga 15b. 21 Ibid. 22 bEruvin 6b. 23 bEruvin 13b. 24 jSuka 2: 8 at the end (Venice edition 53b). 25 This passage is apparently earlier than a parallel passage, Ecclesiastes Rabbah 5: 7. 26 Leviticus Rabbah (Vilna edition) 22:1. 27 bHagiga 3b. 28 For more on this, see Hanina Ben-Menahem et al., Controversy and Dialogue in the Jewish Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 29 See my Judicial Deviation in Talmudic Law: Governed by Men, Not by Rules, vol. 1 of Jewish Law in Context (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1991), from which the next three paragraphs are, with minor changes, taken (pages 54, 181). 30 Henri de Bracton, thirteenth century, De legibus et consuetudinibus angliae.

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chapter thirteen

Jewish History among the Thorns AMOS FUNKENSTEIN

The Problem I was asked to speak about the place of Jewish history among the other disciplines of Jewish studies. Is there a noticeable tension between the study of Jewish history (i.e., Jewish historiography) and the ‘science of Judaism?’ The question may seem either trivial or tautological – empty of content. If by the science of Judaism we mean the traditional study of Gemara, Midrash, Kabbalah, and Responsa, this discipline certainly regarded and still regards a historical perspective on its subject matter with great suspicion if not animosity, because a genuine historical outlook threatens it with secularization and the relativization of its fundamental values. But if we have in mind the Wissenschaft des Judentums founded by Wolf, Jost, Zunz, and Geiger, its very core was precisely the cultivation of a historical understanding. Even Nachman Krochmal, who still regarded himself as a tradition-bound religious thinker seeking to fortify the faith of his generation by appropriate methods, interpreted Judaism as the embodiment of the process of ‘the spirit becoming acquainted with itself.’ Krochmal dared to identify the heart of this evolution of religion with the historico-evolutionary process itself – what he calls, in an inverted eschatological idiom, ‘knowledge of the end of days’: And if there ever existed a well-known and well-paved road, this road may well be inadequate to provide instruction for another generation that is distant from the first in both time and background … If for the ancients it seemed proper to locate the subjects of the Scriptures as early as possible

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… in our own time the opposite is the case and it is better to inquire and interpret and set each subject in its proper time of composition.1

Perhaps, then, we should say – with Krochmal – that times have changed. Whereas, throughout the nineteenth century, the historicalphilological perspective constituted the backbone of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and sustained all its branches, this is no longer the case today. The status of the historical-philological method is being eroded; there is a tension between it and other disciplines within and outside Jewish studies. But where are the visible traces of that tension? One indication of the trouble is, perhaps, the chain of controversies that has recently erupted in the field of Jewish studies – provided that the links of that chain are not purely coincidental. In the acrimonious disputes about some of the conclusions drawn by Yehuda Liebes, Moshe Idel, Israel Yuval, Benny Morris, Tom Segev, and – to a lesser extent – Jacob Neusner, I see more than random disputes concerning theory and method. These are not just waves of the normal tides of scholarly revisionism. The rage they provoke cannot be accounted for only by the threat to cherished preconceptions, by the shattering of myths. A silent participant in all these fierce debates is, I believe, the nagging suspicion that the historical- philological method, with its foundation in the analysis of texts, has lost its hegemony even in its own backyard. Or, to use a more fashionable idiom, some recent historians seem to have lost the faith we all once shared in the existence of a single coherent and harmonious master narrative representing reality. The place of that master narrative, I will argue, has been taken over by a discordant polyphony of competing and even contradictory voices, each with only relative validity, and all of them blurring and calling into question the borders between narratives and their referents, between signifier and signified. Some of the aforementioned participants in the recent debates might protest that I am turning them into postmodernists malgré eux. Whether or not I do so I shall discuss later, when I return to my main subject. Before we ponder the state of the historical sciences today, however, another question must first be dealt with. If the historians of earlier generations agreed on the necessity of a master narrative, what place did it – and they – occupy in the society, culture, and politics of the age? Logically, the self-reflection of historiography should begin not with the question of its relationship with other disciplines but with a clarification

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of its social role. Historians who always insist on the need to reconstruct the Sitz in Leben of the phenomena they treat should apply their professional insights to themselves as well.

Scholarship and Life in Europe The nineteenth century was, by all accounts, the golden age of historical studies in Europe. Historians officiated as high priests of culture, with a relatively wide and faithful reading public that ranged far beyond the confines of experts. The reason that so many Berlin streets were named for historians – even second-rate ones – rather than philosophers is that history replaced philosophy as the representative discipline. History acquired not only disciplinary-institutional autonomy but even a hegemony of sorts over other disciplines: historicism became the matrix of discourse for the nineteenth century, the recognized essence of modernism, the cardinal mode for understanding society and even nature itself. Not even metaphysical principles or transcendent values were immune to being subsumed under historical categories. Hegel’s programmatic declaration in the Preface to the Phenomenology – that one ought ‘to determine the substance as a subject’2 (‘Die Substanz ist als Subjekt zu bestimmen’) – says it all: even the Absolute coincides seamlessly and completely with the unfolding of its ‘moments’; it is nothing but its own history throughout its phases. It is no wonder, then, that Friedrich Meinecke, in his Die Entstehung des Historismus,3 mistakenly took the early nineteenth century to be the true beginning of modern historical thought and method. In fact, that method had emerged more than a century earlier. History enjoyed its royal status in the nineteenth century not because of the discovery of a new method but by virtue of its new role in the nation-states of post-revolutionary, post-Napoleonic Europe. Even before the French Revolution, some theoreticians of absolutism were willing to concede that the nation (or the people) is the source of sovereignty – an idea found even in the law of imperial Rome: ‘quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem utpote cum lege quae de imperio eius lata est populus ei potestatem conferat.’4 Starting with the French Revolution, though, ‘the people’ metamorphosed from the theoretical source of all sovereignty into its true location and true carrier, even in those states that retained a rigid class structure (Ständestaat). What was this new ‘nation’? In the eyes of the bourgeoisie, the third

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estate was itself the be-all and end-all. In the eyes of the enemies of the revolution and the defenders of the Ständestaat, the nation was constituted by the organic unity of the estates. Two different (although not necessarily conflicting) master narratives were thus born, whose common denominator was that they endowed the nation-state with a new mode of historical legitimacy. Political romanticism sought the legitimacy of the state in the anonymous ‘national spirit’ (Volksgeist) rather than in dynastic continuity. Liberal-national historians showed how the bourgeoisie, through its silent and diligent labour over centuries, had acquired the political right to rule and represent the society whose prosperity it secured. Historical research itself became hard labour rather than, as in previous centuries, the edification of a patron or the product of gentlemanly leisure. Because the nation-state became a secular cult, historians laboured ad majorem gloriam civitatis and toiled in the patient uncovering and reconstruction of sources. Their research became work in the bourgeois sense of the term. They even spoke of the ‘life’s work’ of kings and heroes – almost an oxymoron. In each of these master narratives, organic metaphors were employed to the limit. In both, national history was interpreted as a hidden organic unity in which the significant deeds of individuals are merely a manifestation of the volonté générale or the Volksgeist. Hegel’s universal ‘cunning of reason,’ which exploited the self-interest of individuals to achieve its nobler ends (‘Dies ist die List der Vernunft zu nennen, daß sie sich die Leidenschaften des Einzelnen zu eigen macht’),5 was replaced by the particular cunning of the national spirit, which was supposed to act in the same manner. Consider, for example, Durkheim’s sociological analysis of the notion and function of the individual. Throughout the nineteenth century, the reciprocal relation between individual and milieu was a key notion in history, literature, and political thought. Durkheim translated it into the precise language of the contrast between a primitive, mechanical society – in which each self is identical to, and replaceable by, another – and a developed, organic society. Here ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ switch the meanings given them by Ferdinand Tönnies in his contraposition of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The well-articulated division of labour in an ‘organic’ society demands that room be left for the creative initiative by the individual, whom society created in its own image.6 As Georg Lukács and Erich Auerbach have shown, the realistic novel of the nineteenth century was guided by similar assumptions. Or, in the words of Thomas Mann, ‘A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, con-

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sciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.’7 The crisis of the First World War was the crisis of the homogeneous nation-state and therefore also that ‘Crisis of Historicism’ spoken of by many, such as Ernst Troeltsch.8 The national-liberal alternatives yielded to others, some of which, like the Marxist master narrative, were products of the nineteenth century. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did the sense emerge and proliferate that all master narratives are equally deceptive, that all of them belong in the trash bin, because they all wield a manipulative power that organizes the world in a way that marginalizes unwelcome ethnic, social, or gender minorities. So far as the master narrative is concerned, these minorities have no history. Not long ago, Peter Burke edited an anthology of recent currents in historiography. In a concluding essay he calls for a new conception of historical narrative. Historians, he writes, should learn from those innovative works of literature that shatter the temporal and narrative continuum; like them, they should cultivate ‘heteroglossia’ (a term tacitly borrowed from Bakhtin). Their narrative should include competing and even contradictory voices, with no attempt to unite them into a harmonious whole – voices that could not speak in the past because they were suppressed and their memory was blotted out.9 Two assumptions underlie this challenge to the traditional trust in the existence of a master narrative – a challenge of which Michel Foucault was, perhaps, the most brilliant spokesman. First, the demand that the past be recounted as it really happened (‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’) is meaningless. There is no representative story; nor can the story – the representation – be separated from its object. The story told by the historian is itself one of those competing voices and in no way privileged; it is part of the res gestae themselves. So argued Paul Ricoeur and Hayden White.10 The second assumption concerns method. The suppressed voices cannot be lifted directly from the historical records, which are produced by the victors, who erased all memory of the other voices. The suppressed voices can be reconstructed only from vague and unintended hints, by ‘brushing history against the grain,’ to use Benjamin’s felicitous expression.11 To these two assumptions one should add a third, of which the other two are almost corollaries: the loss of faith in the existence of a historical subject, whether individual or collective. Nietzsche may have been the first to demand the deconstruction of the subject: the I, this centre of all philosophizing since Descartes, is no more than ‘a grammatical construct,’ a useful social

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convention. This is what Foucault meant when he proclaimed the ‘death of man.’12 For the historians who entertain them, these and similar assumptions produce a new attitude towards other disciplines. They hope to derive new methods and insights from anthropology and comparative literature, philosophy and semiotics, because they have been disappointed by the traditional mode of writing history, which emphasized its methodological autonomy and superiority among the humanities. A brief comparison between the Methodenstreit of the early twentieth century and recent methodological controversies may illuminate the point. The point of Dilthey’s famous dichotomy between Verstehen and Erklären was that only those who participate in the historical subject, the ‘we’ to be described, can really and fully understand it; whereas, in the exact sciences, the geometrician need not be a triangle, nor the zoologist an elephant. Only a member of a nation can write its history. That is why I said that the crisis of historicism went hand in hand with the crisis of the nation-state. Today, by contrast, empathy or participation – the emic mode of discourse – is often perceived as a myopic factor, distorting its object without the observer’s being aware of the fact. One might counter that the insight that historical events or texts are never simple, that they never speak ‘for themselves,’ that they always depend on a context to be reconstructed by the observer – and that only their context endows them with meaning – was already part of the revolution in historical thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the eighteenth century, Chladenius and Gatterer claimed that all history writing depends entirely on the ‘point of view’ (Standpunkt) of its period13 – a term they probably borrowed from Leibniz’s monadology. What, then, is so new about postmodern historiography? The answer is that the aforementioned and their descendants down to the twentieth century still believed in one representative point of view, even though it changes from generation to generation. The postmodern historians, by contrast, demand diverse and even contradictory points of view in every attempt to write history, even by a single individual in a single age. Just as society has lost its faith in its own homogeneity and in its right to impose a cultural or political homogeneity, historians have lost their belief in the collective subject. The status of the master narrative has been undermined only because that of the historical subject in which the historian participates has also been undermined.

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Scholarship and Life in Israel All of this was and is happening in the world of historians in Europe and North America. What, in the meantime, was happening among Jewish historians? A short time after the founding of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, something of great symbolic significance took place. For the first time in the annals of Western universities, chairs were established in Jewish history. The chair in medieval Jewish history was filled by Yitzhak Baer; he, along with Benzion Dinur, Gershom Scholem, Simha Assaf, and others, founded the so-called Jerusalem school of Jewish studies.14 The distinctive characteristic of this school was its endeavour to construct an unequivocal master narrative for every period of Jewish history and for every other discipline in Jewish studies. Baer and his colleagues wanted to free their scholarly occupations from the apologetic tendencies they believed marked the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the nineteenth century. They demanded that Jewish history be read as the coherent history of one homogeneous organism – an organism and not a mere idea. Even Heinrich Graetz had erred when he told the history of the Jewish people as the history of an embodied idea.15 Indeed, Baer wrote, ‘Judaism is not something that is conditioned and influenced by what lies outside it; rather, it is a force that awakens and reveals itself in various manifestations, depending on the exigencies of times and places that bring it into the world of action.’16 This force, wrote Baer, in a clear allusion to the motto that historicism borrowed from Goethe, individuum est ineffabile, is ‘the unique something whose identity we cannot know,’ ‘the force that carries the history of the nation,’ in which every event is ‘the organic outcome of inner forces.’17 Baer recognized the romantic pedigree of his notions and was proud of it: Graetz’ weakness had deeper roots. At times some historical instinct arises in his heart and breaks through, like a bright flame, but the foundations of his education are not located in the world of historical thinking. Of late, some have spoken about Ranke’s influence on Graetz and have even dared to compare the two historians. In fact, Graetz, like all his Jewish allies and adversaries, remained alien to the teachings that originated in Romanticism … Only Zunz displays, here and there, some insight from the enchanted doctrine of the Romantics, an illumination that quickly dies down, scattered in the raw material and apologetic tendencies.18

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Like his teacher Friedrich Meinecke, Baer saw individualism and evolution (Individualität und Entwicklung) as the formative categories of historical thought.19 The key terms in his work, and in that of his disciples, were ‘organism,’ ‘organic,’ ‘original,’ ‘sovereign,’ ‘spontaneous,’ ‘creative,’ ‘creativity.’ For these historians of the Jerusalem school, the periodization of Jewish history was evident and clear-cut; in every period, its subject a sovereign ecclesia/community (äééìéä÷,éðøáåñ äéñðë), tracing a path from a handful of early pious ones to the age of secularization and renewed political aspirations. In Baer’s eyes, constructing this master narrative was the national vocation of the modern historian in Zion: ‘And if we really grasp the unity of our history, if we really grasp that its beginning lies in its end and its end in its beginning, then we will also achieve an illumination of our present situation; and by awakening the creative forces of bygone times we will also awaken the creative powers hidden in us for the future.’20 Baer’s perception of Jewish history, with clear criteria for deciding which phenomena are authentically Jewish and which – like the Dead Sea Scrolls – are not, differed considerably from that of Gershom Scholem, who insisted that nihil Iudaicum a me alienum puto. Everything created in the framework of a Jewish community by Jews is, he maintained, Jewish by definition. But both of them and many others shared the belief in a true master narrative to be told and dedicated their scholarly energies to its construction. Elsewhere I have tried to show that Scholem began his scholarly career somewhat differently – namely, in the aborted endeavour to prove the antiquity and autochthony of the Kabbalah – including the Zohar.21 Towards the end of the twenties he changed his course; thereafter he searched in the Kabbalah not for a philosophia perennis – like Adolf Franck before him – but rather for a historical-revolutionary expression of contemporary historical trends and forces. The Kabbalah, in this later view, reflected contemporaneous events in Jewish history and sometimes even shaped them. Scholem set out to delineate its course in an unequivocal master narrative. His language, too, was saturated with organic metaphors, but alongside another family of images and metaphors, such as ‘dialectical,’ ‘paradoxical,’ ‘revolutionary,’ and even ‘nihilistic.’ He used them to analyse the Lurianic Kabbalah and the Sabbatean movement as the outburst of messianic expectations that had accumulated since the expulsion from Spain. In the article mentioned, I also tried to show how and why Scholem’s scholarly approach was suited to the ␬␣␫␳␱´V, that is, to the anxieties and expectations entertained by the Yishuv in the 1930s and

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1940s. Scholem wanted to show how the last large messianic outburst had eroded traditional Judaism from within, exposed the lethal dangers of messianism, and paved the road towards secularization. Unlike the unbuffered messianism of the seventeenth century, the Zionist movement drew on messianic energies without falling prey to messianic fantasies. Its realistic attitude assured it a genuine social ‘chance,’ in Weber’s sense of the term. I shall not examine here other master narratives, such as the Marxist. Having grown up in their shadow, we Jewish historians remember them only as fierce competitors; but all the master narratives – Jewish, Marxist, or others – shared the certainty in a unique historical subject. Traditional Jewish thinkers grounded their belief in the uniqueness of Israel on transcendental assumptions, a divine premise and promise. To them, ‘Israel has no guiding star’ (ìàøùéì ìæî ïéà) meant that Israel exists outside the domain of natural law and general providence. Its existence is a perpetual miracle, because God himself guides its destiny without mediation; and the uniqueness of Israel lies in its Law. The Western European Jews of the nineteenth century, hungry for emancipation, saw the distinctiveness of Israel, on the contrary, precisely in its universalism and universality – in the manner in which it upheld abstract, universal, ethical monotheism. Yet both the traditional and the new perceptions of Jewish uniqueness were grounded in the nation’s past. Zionism, by contrast, drew its vision from the future. Its early thinkers believed that only the rebuilding of the Land of Israel could provide a framework for renewed Jewish creativity – whatever shape it might take. Here lay its ‘chance’ – and, in fact, Zionism and the Yishuv hardly had more than a chance in the nineteen thirties and forties, a chance that hung by a thread during the Second World War.

Whence and Whither After these lengthy preliminaries, I return to the subject with which I began. Without the detailed explanation of what I mean by ‘the historical master narrative,’ its assumptions, and its Sitz im Leben, I would not be able to point out what strikes me as most significant in the work of some recent Jewish historians. The remarks that follow are not intended to resolve the scholarly disputes under consideration. In fact, I will treat them as if they are themselves a historical source or phenomenon. What these disputes have in common is their deliberate or accidental challenge to the very possibility of an unequivocal master narrative and an

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identified historical subject. In this respect, Jacob Neusner is the most conservative of the scholars I mentioned at the start of this lecture, because he has merely replaced one master narrative with another. Rejecting the assumption of continuity between biblical Judaism and the world of Halacha and of an organic growth of the oral law over several centuries of the Second Temple period, Neusner argued for the ex nihilo creation of Halachic Judaism in a relatively short span during the second century ce.22 But his denial of the continuity of Judaism strikes at a tender nerve. Continuity is a sine qua non for identifying a historical subject. His challenge irritated many, all the more because it found an enthusiastic echo among Protestant theologians, because of the sloppiness of his work en gros and en détail, and because of his blunt, even vulgar language. One might counter that no one mentions him any longer, especially in Israel. But that is precisely my point: dum tacent, clamant. Yehuda Liebes dared to admit the serving maid into the salon of the princess. He rescued the voice of early Christianity from the marginal place it occupied in the Jewish narrative of the Second Temple period and brought it to centre stage, to the very heart of the Jewish liturgy – thereby turning it into a legitimate and alternative Jewish voice.23 True, his conjecture that the liturgical line ‘who causes the horn of salvation [yeshu’ah] to grow’ refers to Jesus [Yeshu] is founded on an indirect allusion only, but hints vaguer than this have served biblical critics with impunity for the construction of far larger edifices. Even if we reject his conclusion, the methodological impulse underlying it may still yield better results in other areas. In the master narrative we inherited, Christianity was treated as a marginal phenomenon that soon turned utterly alien if not downright pagan. What if this was not so? What if Christianity and Christian theologoumena not only repelled loyal Jews but also attracted them strongly? ‘Rabbi, you gave them a weak answer; how would you answer us?’ asked Rabbi Simla’i’s disciples after a disputation with the (Christian) heretics [minim].24 The Kabbalah may have been receptive to Christian doctrines, from the unity-within-multiplicity of the deity to original sin. It is certain that it was accused, from its inception to the nineteenth century, of Christianizing tendencies. Consider, for example these polemical verses from the early thirteenth century: He [the Kabbalist] soiled with his words / the sanctum of the Lord. Whatever he puts forth / is not a penny’s worth. And since he failed in all, / destruction was his goal. Tell ‘all’ he misconstrued, / Just as a bishop would.25

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To sustain such arguments we must invoke indirect evidence; no medieval Jewish text would admit to Christian influences. Shlomo Pines once remarked that even in the relatively neutral domain of philosophical discourse, our sources mention Muslim philosophers freely but tend to cover all traces of Christian scholastics.26 Perhaps the antagonism between Judaism and Christianity is more historical than doctrinal? Reliance on vague textual or even extratextual clues also characterizes many of Moshe Idel’s theses of recent years. Because he tries to reconstruct the experiential-ecstatic basis of the Kabbalah from texts that seldom spoke of mystical experiences and the practices that induce such experiences, he was forced to look for hints and allusions: This example [Idel is referring to a letter from Rabbi Shem Tov Ibn Gaon to one of his disciples] illustrates the need to distinguish carefully between what was understood as Kabbalah according to Kabbalistic Masters, who revealed it only fragmentarily, and what contemporary scholars, who assumed that the discipline was disclosed in written documents, believed to be Kabbalah. It is reasonable to suppose [sic!] that those Kabbalistic matters that were kept secret even from younger Kabbalists concerned sensitive pivotal subjects. Hence, if we do not attempt to uncover the hidden problems of the Kabbalists and to decode them, our view of Kabbalah may be … misleading. As far as I know, consciousness of this methodological question is absent in modern research of Kabbalah; rather, this lore is described and analyzed on the implicit assumption that all major Kabbalistic views are presented as such in documents in an articulate manner … [For example:] The existence of advanced states of ecstatic Kabbalah, taught orally, is suggested by the question the anonymous Kabbalist … asked his master: ‘In heaven’s name, can you perhaps impart to me some power to enable me to bear this force emerging from my heart and receive influx from it?’27

This is a very vague hint indeed to support the burden Idel would have it bear. Yet Idel could answer all objections to the weight and validity of his proof texts by rejecting the false analogy between historiography and a court of law. The historian is not bound by the legal criteria of admissible evidence. His duty is to listen for nuances that others may not be able to discern. Many of the theses advanced by Idel are bound, almost by definition, to sever the Kabbalah from any possible national or social function and

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thus to deny the relevance of historical events to understanding it as well as its relevance to historical events – a relevance that is prominent in Scholem’s later perception. Idel’s analysis, as he repeatedly admits, is ‘phenomenological’ rather than historical. Whether his views on ecstasy and mystical union really contradict Scholem or merely emphasize aspects to which Scholem assigned only marginal value can be debated. Undoubtedly, though, his research follows a direction that is diametrically opposed to Scholem’s, in that he challenges not only Scholem’s master narrative but also, implicitly or explicitly, the value and utility of any historical master narrative for grasping the world of the Kabbalists before and even after the expulsion from Spain. Israel Yuval’s article on the Jewish response to the Crusader pogroms and the origins of the blood libel sparked tumult and even anger.28 Some of his readers were indignant because they understood him to be assigning – even if only obliquely – some of the responsibility for the medieval blood libels to their victims. This is not how I read the article. I see it as an essay in the history of the mentalité of Ashkenazi Jewry, an attempt to point out the resemblance of the mindsets of the Jews and their environment, a resemblance that can also be seen in the obsession with motifs of blood and vengeance. Yuval’s evidence, too, is indirect – an attempt to remap topoi on the basis of nuances. Again I do not say this to reject his attempt outright; even though his thesis is susceptible, by definition, only of indirect proof, it is certainly worth examining. Indeed, if true, it poses a challenge to the assumption that the Jews possessed a unique moral consciousness among the wolves surrounding them. The work of Paula Hyman and others should be seen not as feminist history but as an attempt to resuscitate and reconstruct the stifled voice of Jewish women.29 But this attempt is stuck in a methodological vicious circle. Women were not called up to read the Torah in the synagogue ‘out of respect for the congregation’s honour,’ nor were they supposed to hold public office of any sort. Aside from a handful of documents, we have no direct evidence of what they did in different times and places. It is not even clear which tehinot (private prayers for women) were written by women. Rare direct evidence is provided by the memoirs left by Glückel of Hameln, in which, as noted by Bluma Goldstein, there are allusions to Israel in the diaspora as a deserted wife, an agunah.30 But this is an old theme and can be traced back to one of Eleazar ha-Kallir’s poems:

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On this night the wheel turned with its chain Both my houses destroyed, first once then again, Without mercy the daughter, her misdeeds so grave, With bitter waters an ordeal had to brave. Was expelled from his home, lost all his favor, Great was the hatred of him who once loved her. Now a live widow, deserted wife of a sort – Says Zion: I was abandoned by my Lord.31

In short, there is no avoiding mediation by the male voice. Historiography used to bow to these methodological difficulties and remained largely silent about issues concerning women and their point of view. At best, their status was mentioned to support the mainstream male, public, historical narrative, in en passant remarks such as Joseph Klausner’s: The crucial test of a nation’s civilization at any specific epoch, is the position of its women. And this position from the Maccabean period is a tolerably high one. The Ketubah, the text of the marriage contract, was certainly earlier than the time of Simeon ben Shetah … But all the amendments introduced by Simeon ben Shetah were in favor of the women … The story of Hanna and her seven sons and that of Judith, where the woman holds the most important possible place as defender of the faith and savior of her country and nation, both show the high status of the women of the time … Such a status for women in Judea shows that Hebrew civilization had, by the time of Jesus, reached a considerably high general level.32

In other words, not only was the female condition good because women were serving their nation (as they also serve their husbands); the very story of the women’s deeds ‘serves’ to demonstrate the society’s high cultural level. Did the women in question like being ‘in service’? This is one of the questions that recent women’s history tries to answer. There is another field – closer to us in time and extremely painful – in which the faith in a master narrative has been called into question. The scholarly establishment can no longer ignore the allegations that the Zionist master narrative was and is unable to provide a fair and consistent account of the Holocaust and its aftermath – claims advanced by Hannah Arendt in the sixties, by Shabtai Beit-Zvi in the seventies, and now by Tom Segev and others.33 The very possibility of representing the

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horrible events was the subject of a fascinating conference organized by Saul Friedländer.34 Again, it would not do to enter the substance of the debate here, all the more so because I do not feel competent to decide even questions of fact. Let me offer only one suggestion concerning the subject matter of some of these debates: whether the Yishuv and the Zionist leadership could have done more to save lives. Neither Yehuda Bauer, nor Dina Porat,35 nor their critics have paid attention to the important distinction between what efforts the Yishuv could have made and what results it could have actually achieved after the reports of the annihilation of European Jews reached it and were corroborated. Granted that the means and opportunity available to the Yishuv to mount rescue operations were close to nil and that no more than the little that was actually achieved could have been. Nevertheless, more could have been done: more and more vigorous protests, more support for the Jews in Nazicontrolled territory. Remember Yitzhak Zuckerman’s bitter denunciation of the Yishuv for not sending an emissary or even a message to the Jews in Poland to tell them that they were not cut off from the world.36 I do not wish to elaborate further. My acquaintance with the material is, as I said, limited. The vehement debates that have flared up recently do, however, highlight the serious flaws and contradictions in the story of Holocaust and National Rebirth that we, who were raised in Israel, learned at school. Finally, a group of historians, sometimes referred to as the ‘New Historians,’ has challenged the Zionist master narrative about the origins of the State of Israel. The conventional narrative claimed that Israel’s birth in the 1948 War was a case of a weak army almost miraculously fighting off Arab forces from all sides and that the Palestinian refugees had only themselves and the Arab regimes to blame for their fate. While this view held that the state was born ‘in innocence,’ Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Ilan Pappe all showed in different ways that it was rather born ‘in sin.’37 While this historiography reflected originally a ‘leftist’ critique of Zionism, it also exhibited ideological fluidity. Thus, Morris, who moved towards the political right (or, at least, centre) with the outbreak of the Second Intifada, nevertheless issued a second edition of his pathbreaking book in which he showed that expulsions and atrocities against Palestinians in 1948 were even more widespread than he had documented in his first edition.38 Such expulsions Morris now judged necessary to create a state with a Jewish majority. Zionists should not be afraid to admit that they engaged in ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Once again, the

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story taught to Israeli school children – and the public at large – was very different from the one uncovered by the New Historians. Let me summarize and indicate my own stand – since, up to now, I have tried to abstain from judgment, not only about the details of the various disputes but also about their common deeper trend. In the generation of Yitzhak Baer, Benzion Dinur, Gershom Scholem, Michael AviYonah, and H.H. Ben-Sasson, Jewish historians played a well-defined public and national role and enjoyed a secure general audience. In our generation their role has been seriously questioned and their general audience has evaporated. Our predecessors wrote with certainty about the identity of their historical subject and the justice of its goal; they believed in their ability and duty to construct a master narrative that both demonstrates this identity and endows it with a scientific basis. Many of us have lost this certainty as well as faith in the autonomy of the historical method. Am I exaggerating? Perhaps the Ariadne thread that I see as leading from one of these controversies to the next exists only in my synthetic imagination. Some of those involved in these controversies could indeed claim that challenging the possibility of a historical master narrative as such could not have been farther from their intentions. I could respond, of course, that their subjective intentions may be at odds with their objective course. But that would be a cheap shot – and, moreover, an answer that imitates precisely the forms of thought that generated and trusted the uncritical master narrative. A more reflective answer must take account of my own methodological assumptions. I can delineate my position only very briefly and without a proper grounding. I would argue, against all the trends of radical deconstruction in the recent methodological literature, that any attempt to destroy or get rid of the central position of a subject, a self, amounts to a philosophical deception (or self-deception). There is no substitute for the self – neither in epistemology, nor in history, nor in life; scrutiny of any attempt to do away with it always reveals the assumption of some other, hidden, subject or self.39 A coherent narrative is the mark of a subject’s identity. It even is the self, inasmuch as every self lives the narrative it shapes, not only in words but also in deeds: our narrative is our life. The attempts to do without master narratives are, therefore, also deceptive. We must, of course, admit that an authentic, reflective narrative will not try to smooth over contrasts and even contradictions in the account of the self and its identity. But an authentic narrative, true to reality, does exist, even if the criteria for recognizing it cannot be summed up in a

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neat formula or algorithm. Reality and the narrative thereof do not have a naive relationship of representation, adaequatio rei ad intellectum, but an extremely complex, dialectical relation of mutual reinforcement and mutual construction.40 The moral of my story? I do not claim that Liebes, Idel, and Yuval are necessarily pursuing an agenda of radical deconstruction of our field, an agenda that seeks to destroy identity altogether – either explicitly or implicitly. A more optimistic outlook would read them as the beginning of a search for a more complex, more interesting, and more authentic identity. ‘The babes have reached the birthing stool,’ says Isaiah (37:3); now let us see whether ‘there is strength to give birth.’

Notes This is a revised version of a paper published in Hebrew in Zion 60 (1995): 335–347. 1 Nachman Krochmal, Moreh nevukei ha-zeman, in The Writings of Nachman Krochmal, ed. S. Ravidowicz, 2nd ed. (London: Ararat, 1961), 3. Cf Y. Amir, ‘Krochmal and Psalm 137’ (Hebrew), Tarbiz 61, 4 (1992): 527–70. 2 G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hofmeister (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1952), 18. See D. Henrich, Hegel im Kontext (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967), 95; K. Düsing, Hegel und die Geschichte der Philosophie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 170–93. 3 Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, ed. C. Hinrichs (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1959), esp. 2–10. 4 Gaius, Instit. I, 2, 6; Ulpian, Dig. 1, 4, 31; ed. J.B. Moyle, Imperatoris Iustiniani Institutionum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 103. See M.J. Wilkes, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 154 (and n1); F. Schultz, ‘Bracton on Kingship,’ English Historical Review 60 (1945): 136–76. 5 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. F. Brunstädt (Leipzig, 1961), 61–9, 78. See also Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 203–5. 6 Emile Durkheim, ‘L’Individualisme et les intellectuels,’ Revue bleue, 4th series, 10 (1898): 7–13, at 12ff; S. Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 332–49. 7 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York:

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Vintage, 1944), 32 (‘Der Mensch lebt nicht nur sein persönliches Leben als Einzelwesen, sondern, bewußt oder unbewußt, auch das seiner Epoche und seiner Zeitgenossenschaft’). Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston, 1963); Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 493–553. Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Überwindung (Berlin: R. Heise, 1922). Peter Burke, ‘History of Events and the Revival of Narrative,’ in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, PA, 1991), 233–48. Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Cf Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 32–6. Walter Benjamin, ‘Geschichts-philosophische Thesen, VII,’ Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), 272: ‘Er [der historische Materialist] betrachtet es als seine Aufgabe, die Geschichte gegen den Strich zu bürsten.’ Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), Conclusion. R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 176–207; P. Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 125–36; and Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 205–10. See David N. Myers, Re-inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Heinrich Graetz, The Structure of Jewish History, and other Essays, trans., ed., and introduced by Ismar Schorsch (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1975), 63–74. Yitzhak F. Baer, Studies in the History of the Jewish People (Hebrew), 2 vols (Jerusalem, 1987), 2: 12. Ibid., 2: 15. Ibid., 1: 15. Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus; and Meinecke, ‘Klassizismus, Romantizismus und historisches Denken im 18ten Jahrhundert,’ Zur Theorie und Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. E. Kessel (Stuttgart: Koehler, 1965), 264–78. Baer, Studies, 1: 18. Amos Funkenstein, ‘Gerschom Scholem: Charisma, Kairos and the Mes-

326

22

23 24 25

26

27 28

29

30 31 32 33

Amos Funkenstein sianic Dialectic,’ History and Memory 4, 1 (1992): 123–40. See, further, David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Jacob Neusner, From Politics to Piety: The Emergence of Pharisaic Judaism (New York: K tav, 1979), which sums up the arguments of The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70, 3 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1970). See also Neusner, Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) for another aspect of this interpretation. Yehuda Liebes, ‘Who Causes the Light of Redemption to Grow’ (Hebrew), Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 3, 3 (1984): 313–48. J Berakhot 9: 1 (62b). G. Scholem, Reshit ha-qabbalah (Jerusalem, 1948), 154 (the verses are not quoted in the German or English translations of the book). The translation is mine. Shlomo Pines, Scholasticism after Thomas Aquinas and the Teachings of Hasdai Crescas and His Predecessors (Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, vol. 1, no. 10) (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1967). Only in Italy was there a readiness to name Christian thinkers. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 21–22. Israel J. Yuval, ‘Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations’ (Hebrew), Zion 58, 1 (1993): 33–90. Zion 59, 2–3 (1994) devoted much space to responses. See further, Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1995). See Bluma Goldstein, Enforced Marginality: Deserted Wives. Jewish Narratives on the Agune (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). H. Brody, ed., Anthologia Hebraica (Leipzig: Insel, 1922), 42. Translation mine. Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times and Teachings, trans. Herbert Danby (New York, 1925), 195–6. Shabtai B. Beit-Zvi, Post-Ugandian Zionism in the Crucible of the Holocaust (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv, 1977); Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993; first published in Hebrew in 1991).

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34 Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 35 Dina Porat, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David: The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990; first published in Hebrew in 1986). 36 Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, trans. and ed. Barbara Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 37 See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and Ilan Pappe, The Making of the ArabIsraeli Conflict, 1947–1951 (London: Tauris, 1992). For a review of some of this historiography, see Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds, The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). This paragraph was written by the editors, since it seemed necessary to complete Funkenstein’s review of revisionist historiography. 38 Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 39 See also Manfred Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 40 For an elaboration of my views on this matter, see Amos Funkenstein, ‘History, Counterhistory and Narrative,’ in Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation, 66–81; repr. in Funkenstein, Perceptions, 32–49.

Verso Running Head

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A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Amos Funkenstein (1937–1995) PREPARED BY GADI ALGAZI, GAD FREUDENTHAL, AND ESTI MICENMACHER

1954 1 .160–161 :(ã“éùú) ì êøë ,â ‘úåðåéìâ’ “.äôùå ä÷éøéì” [Lyricism and language.] 2 êøë ,áé-àé ‘úåðåéìâ’ “,úéøáòä øåôéñä úëàìî ìù äéåöøä êøãä ìò : úåéììë úåøòä” .254–257: (ã“éùú) èë [General remarks: On the appropriate course of Hebrew narrative.] 1955 3 .260–262 :(å“èùú) àì êøë ,àé ‘úåðåéìâ’ “.äéâåñì úåìéëøä ìò” [Some versions of gossip.] 1965 4 Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung: Formen der Gegenwartsbestimmung im Geschichtsdenken des hohen Mittelalters. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1965. The complete text has been posted on the Web and can be accessed freely at: http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/cohn/funkenstein.html. 1968 5 “. á“éä äàîá íéøöåðì íéãåäé ïéáù úãä çåëååá úåøåîúä” .125–144 :(ç“ëùú) âì ‘õéáøú’ [Changes in the patterns of Christian anti-Jewish polemics in the twelfth century.] Included in 61, 68, and 77. 1970 6 ‘Gesetz und Geschichte: Zur historisierenden Hermeneutik bei Moses Maimonides und Thomas von Aquin.’ Viator 1 (1970): 147–178.

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1971 7 ‘Some Remarks on the Concept of Impetus and the Determination of Simple Motion.’ Viator 2 (1971): 329–348. 8 ‘Basic Types of Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics in the Later Middle Ages.’ Viator 2 (1971): 373–382. 1972 9 ‘Review Essay: The Cambridge History of the Bible.’ American Historical Review 77, 1 (1972): 100–106. 1974 10 ‘Periodization and Self-Understanding in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times.’ Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 5 (1974): 3–22. 11 ‘,øìäî ìàôø øôñ’ êåúá 82–88 îò “.ã”áç úðùîë íåöîöä âùåîå Imitatio Dei” .ã“ìùú íéìòåôä úééøôñ äéáçøî .ïéáéé ù :êøåò [Imitatio Dei and tzimtzum in the doctrines of Habad.] 12 Review: ‘Peter von Moos, Hildebert von Lavardin, 1056–1133.’ Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 85 (1974): 415–416. 13 Review: ‘Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study.’ AJS Review (June 1974): 14–16. 1975 14 ‘The Dialectical Preparation for Scientific Revolutions: On the Role of Hypothetical Reasoning in the Emergence of Copernican Astronomy and Galilean Mechanics.’ Pages 165–203 in Robert S. Westman, ed., The Copernican Achievement. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975. 15 ‘Descartes, Eternal Truths and the Divine Omnipotence.’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 6, 3 (1975): 185–199. 16 ‘Hugo von St. Victor.’ Pages 19–22 in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 10. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1975 (with Jürgen Miethke). 1976 17 ‘Aristotle, Imaginary Experiments and the Laws of Motion.’ Pages 223–233 in Bert S. Hall and Delno C. West, eds, On Pre-Modern Technology and Science: Studies in Honor of Lynn White, Jr. Malibu: Undena Publications, 1976. 18 ‘Natural Science and Political Theory: Hobbes, Spinoza and Vico.’ Pages 187–212 in G. Tagliacozzo and D. Phillip Verene, eds, Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

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1977 19 ‘Maimonides: Political Theory and Realistic Messianism.’ Miscellanea Medievalia 11 (1977): 81–103. See 28. Included in 61, 68, and 77. 1979 20 ‘The Political Theory of Jewish Emancipation from Mendelssohn to Herzl.’ Pages 13–28 in W. Grab, ed., Deutsche Aufklärung und Judenemanzipation (Jahrbuch des Instituts für deutsche Geschichte, Beiheft 3). Tel Aviv, 1979. Included in 61, 68, and 77. 1980 21 .35–59 :(í“ùú) äî ‘ïåéö’ “.ï”áîøä ìù úéâåìåôéèä åúåðùøô” [Nachmanides’ typological exegesis.] A revised and enlarged version of 26; included in 61. 22 2 ‘äéøåèñéäì ïåòáø — íéðîæ’ “.íééðéá-éîé úô÷ùäá úåéøåèñéä úåãáåòå äéøåèñéä” .39–42 :(1980) [The medieval concept of history and historical fact.] Included in 61, 68, and 77. 1981 23 úéìàøùéä úéîåàìä äéîã÷àä éøáã’ “.äéòãîáå æ“éä äàîä úáùçîá ùåãéçå úåéëùîä” .à“îùú ,íéìùåøé .6:6 ‘,íéòãîì [Continuity and innovation in seventeenth-century science and thought.] 24 ‘Anti-Jewish Propaganda: Ancient, Medieval and Modern.’ Jerusalem Quarterly 19 (Spring 1981): 56–72. See 25. 1982 25 10 ‘äéøåèñéäì ïåòáø — íéðîæ’ “. úéðøãåîå úéøöåð úéðàâàô :úéãåäé-éèðà äìåîòú” .4–14 :(1982) [Anti-Jewish propaganda: pagan, Christian, and modern.] Hebrew version of 24. 26 ‘Nachmanides’ Symbolical Reading of History.’ Pages 129–50 in Joseph Dan and Frank Talmage, eds, Studies in Jewish Mysticism. Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies, 1982. Original version of 21. 27 .á“îùú ,áéáà ìú úèéñøáéðåà ‘.úåàéöîå ñåúéî :äìåâä úåãäé ìù äðîéñë úåéáéñôä’ [Passivity as the hallmark of Diaspora Jews: myth and reality.] A public lecture. Included in 61. See also 54 (German translation).

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1983 28 .â“îùú ,øåàì äàöåää ïåçèáä ãøùî :áéáà ìú ‘.í“áîøä ìöà úåéçéùîå äéøåèñéä òáè’ [Nature, history, and messianism in Maimonides.] Based on 19, included in 61. See also 43 (French version). 29 ‘The Genesis of Franz Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlösung: “Urformel” and “Urzelle.”’ Pages 17–29 in W. Grab, ed., Gegenseitige Einflüsse deutscher und jüdischer Kultur von der Epoche der Aufklärung bis zur Weimarer Republik (Jahrbuch des Instituts für deutsche Geschichte, Beiheft 4). Tel Aviv, 1983. Included in 61, 68, and 77. 30 .235–261 :(â“îùú) ã :àì ‘ïåéò’ “.úéèðà÷åàðäå úéèðà÷ä òãîä úøåú” [On the Kantian and neo-Kantian theory of science.] For English version, see 37. 1984 31 ‘Hermann Cohen: Philosophie, Deutschtum und Judentum.’ Pages 355–364 in W. Grab, ed., Jüdische Integration und Identität in Deutschland und Österreich, 1848–1948 (Jahrbuch des Instituts für deutsche Geschichte, Beiheft 6). Tel Aviv, 1984. 1985 32 ‘Interprétations théologiques de l’holocauste: un bilan.’ Pages 465–495 in L’Allemagne nazie et le génocide juif. Paris: Gallimard–Le Seuil, 1985. See also 49 and 52 (English versions); included in 61, 68, and 77. 33 ‘A Schedule for the End of the World: The Origins and Persistence of the Apocalyptic Mentality.’ Pages 44–60 in S. Friedlander et al., eds, Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth? New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985. Included in 61, 68, and 77. 34 .1985 ,ïîöééå íééç ãé :úåáåçø ,ïîöééå íééç øëæì äàöøä ‘.íéèáéä äùåìù :òãîå úåðåéö’ [Zionism and science: three aspects.] .1985 ‘,ïîöééå íééç ø“ã íù ìò úåàöøä è÷ì .ïîæä çåø’ êåúá 7–18 ‘îò .ùãçî ñôãð Included in 61, 68, and 77. 35 øñåî øôñ’ êåúá 214–242 ‘îò “.å÷éå ,äæåðéôù ,ñáåä :úéúøáçä äøåúäå òáèä éòãî” :áéáà ìú .øùë àñà :êøåò ‘,äøáçäå øñåîä ìù äéôåñåìéôá íéøîàî :ìëùäå .1985 ,åéãçé úàöåä [The natural sciences and social theory: Hobbes, Spinoza, Vico.] Hebrew translation of 18. 1986 36 Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. See 76 (French version) and 83 (Italian translation).

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37 ‘The Persecution of Absolutes: On the Kantian and Neo-Kantian Theories of Science.’ Pages 39–63 in E. Ullmann-Margalit, ed., The Kaleidoscope of Science. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986. English version of 30. 38 ‘Scripture Speaks the Language of Man: The Uses and Abuses of the Medieval Principle of Accommodation.’ Pages 92–101 in Ch. Wenin, ed., L’homme et son univers au moyen âge. Louvain-la-Neuve: Editions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie, 1986. Included in 61, 68, and 77. 39 .79 ‘îò ,(æ“îùú) 5–6 ñ ‘íéðæàî’ “.úåìéôú íò úéâåìåàéú äøéù” ,óùø .à [‘Theological poetry with prayers’ – a poem under the pseudonym E[ven] Reshef (‘Funkenstein’ in Hebrew).] 1987 40 ïéãò áøä íò ãçé) 1987 ,øåàì äàöåää ïåçèáä ãøùî :áéáà ìú ‘.úåøòáä ìù äéâåìåéöåñä’ .(õìæðééèù [The sociology of ignorance (with Adin Steinsalz).] 41 ‘Scholasticism, Scepticism and Secular Theology.’ Pages 45–54 in R. Popkin and Ch. B. Schmitt, eds, Scepticism from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 35). Wiesbaden: In Kommission bei Otto Harrassowitz. 42 íéìòåôä úééøôñ :áéáà ìú ‘.åðéîé úåãäéá äðåáúå ñåúéî’ ,ìè ìàéøåà ìù åøôñì äîã÷ä .vii–xvi :(1987) [Preface to Uriel Tal, Myth and Reason in Contemporary Judaism.] 1988 43 Maïmonide: nature, histoire et messianisme. Translated from the Hebrew by C. Chalier. Paris: Le Cerf, 1988. French version of 28. 44 ‘The Body of God in Seventeenth-Century Science and Theology.’ Pages 149–175 in R. Popkin, ed., Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650–1800. Leiden and New York: Brill, 1988. 45 ‘Revolutionaries on Themselves.’ Pages 157–163 in R.W. Shea, ed., Revolutions in Science: Their Meaning and Relevance. Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1988. 46 ‘Jewish Historical Claims to the Land of Israel.’ The Daniel E. Koshland Memorial Lecture. San Francisco: Congregation Emanu-El, 1988. 47 .2.10.1988 ,úåøôñå úåáøú óñåî ‘,õøàä’ “.ìàä ÷åãéö àìá áåéà” [Job without divine justification.] Included in 61, 68, and 77.

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48 .9.12.1988 ‘õøàä óñåî’ “.úåðáøñ ìò âåìåðåî” [A monologue on conscientious objection.] 49 ‘Theological Interpretations of the Holocaust.’ The Tel Aviv Review (1988): 67–100. English translation of 32, by B. Harshav. See also 52. 1989 50 ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness.’ History and Memory 1 (1989): 5–26. Included in 61, 68, and 77. [See also History and Memory 4, 2 (1992): 147–148, for AF’s response to D. Meyer’s article (pages 129–146 of that journal) that takes issue with some theses of 50.] 51 ‘Intellectuals and Jews.’ The Albert T. Bilgray Lecture, University of Arizona, Tucson, 6 April 1989. Tucson, AZ: Temple Emanu-El, 1990. See 87 (Hebrew version). 52 ‘Theological Interpretations of the Holocaust.’ Pages 275–303 in F. Furet, ed, Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. English translation of 32, by AF. 53 .14–16 :(1988 øàåðé) ‘ä÷éèéìåô’ “.úéúîàä äîçìîä äî ìò” [What is the real war about?] 54 ‘Die Passivität als Kennzeichen des Diaspora-Judentums: Mythos und Realität.’ Babylon 5 (1989): 47–57. German translation of 27. 1990 55 .1990 ,ãåàì äàöåää ïåçèáä ãøùî :áéáà ìú ‘.íééðéáä éîéá àø÷îä úåðùøôá úåðåðâñ’ [Styles of medieval biblical exegesis.] 56 ‘An Escape from History: Franz Rosenzweig on the Destiny of Judaism.’ History and Memory 2, 2 (1990): 117–35. Included in 68 and 77. 57 ‘Das Verhältnis der jüdischen Aufklärung zur mittelalterlichen jüdischen Philosophie.’ Pages 13–21 in K. Gründer and N. Rotenstreich, eds., Aufklärung und Haskala in jüdischer und nichtjüdischer Sicht (Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung 14). Heidelberg, 1990. Included in 61, 68, and 77. 58 .28.9.90 ,úåøôñå úåáøú óñåî ‘,õøàä’ “.àéáð åððéàù àéáð ,äðåé” [Jonah, a prophet who is not a prophet.] Included in 68 and 77.

334 59

Bibliography of the Published Works of Amos Funkenstein úéèñéðîåä úåãäé ïòîì úéìàøùéä äãåâàä ïåàèá

,úéðåìéç úéèñéðîåä úåãäé’ “.úéðåìéç úåãäé” .24–29 ‘îò ‘,úéðåìéç

úåãäéì éîåàìðéáä ïåëîä ñðëá ìñéøáá àùðù íåàð ìò ññåáî

.1988 ,úéðåìéç úéèñéðîåä [Secular Judaism.] “,åîöò ìò àéáäù ãåáòùä ïî íãàä ìù äéöôéñðîàä” úøúåëä úçú ,ùãçî ñôãð .2006 ,íéìùåøé ‘.ìàøùéá äùãç úåâä :úéðåìéçä úåãäéä úåáøú’ êåúá 81–87 ‘îò 60 ‘Descartes and the Method of Annihilation.’ Pages 70–75 in David S. Katz and Jonathan I. Israel, eds, Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews. Leiden, 1990. 1991 61 .1991 ,ãáåò íò :áéáà ìú ‘.úéúåáøúä äúáéáñáå úåãäéá úéøåèñéä äòãåúå úéîãú’ [Historical image and consciousness in Judaism and its social surroundings.] ;(62–71) 22 ;(79–159) 21 ;(199–216) 20 ;(56–105) 28 ;19 ;(82–102) 5 :ììåë] ;(279–291) 34 ;(41–61) 33 ;(243–278) 32 ;(217–227) 29 ;(235–242) 27 [(189–198) 54 ;(13–30) 50 ;(335–340) 47 ;(72–81) 38 [A collection of AF’s articles in Jewish studies; those written in other languages were translated into Hebrew by several hands. See also 68 (English version) and 77 (German).] 62 .45–65 :(1991 ìéøôà) ‘ úåáùçî’ “.íéðùéå íéùãç íéðîæ” [New times and old.] 63 ‘ “Kurzum, die Juden sind ein eigensinniger Haufen”: Über die religiöse Polemik zwischen Juden, Christen und Muslimen in Mittelalter.’ Frankfurter Rundschau, 27.7.91, page 14. An abridged version of a public lecture given in Munich during the summer of 1991. See 68 and 77. 1992 64 ‘Gerschom Scholem: Charisma, Kairos and the Messianic Dialectic.’ History and Memory 4, 1 (1992): 123–40. English version of 79. 65 ‘History, Counter-History, and Memory.’ Pages 66–81 in Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Included in 68 and 77. 66 ‘Gersonides’ Biblical Commentary: Science, History and Providence.’ Pages 305–15 in G. Freudenthal, ed., Studies on Gersonides, a FourteenthCentury Jewish Philosopher-Scientist. Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1992. 67 ‘Juden, Christen und Muslime: Religiöse Polemik im Mittelalter.’ Pages 33–49 in W. Beck, ed., Die Juden in der europäischen Geschichte. Sieben Vorlesungen. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1992.

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Based on a public lecture given in Munich during the summer of 1991. See 63 and 73. 1993 68 Perceptions of Jewish History. Berkeley: California University Press, 1993. A reworking of 56. The articles were extensively revised to create a unified book: duplications were removed and new text was added, along with introductions and two additional articles. Contents: 5 (172–200), 19 (131–154), 20 (220–233), 21 (98–120), 22 (22–32), 29 (260–270), 32 (306–337), 33 (70–87), 34 (338–350), 38 (88–98), 47 (58–64), 50 (3–21), 56 (291–305), 57 (234–247), 58 (64–70), 65 (32–49). 69 ‘The Incomprehensible Catastrophe: Memory and Narrative.’ Pages 21–29 in R. Josselson and A. Lieblich, eds, The Narrative Study of Lives 1. Newbury Park: Sage, 1993. Originally delivered as a lecture in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Seeing Through “Paradise”: Artists and the Terezin Concentration Camp,’ at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California, March 1992. 70 ,áéáà ìú) “‘éðøãåîä éèñéðìää éãåäéä úòôåäå úåðååéä éàøá úåãäéä’ ,èéáù á÷òé :øôñ úøå÷éá” .123–126 :(â“ðùú) à :çð ‘ïåéö’ .(á“ðùú [Review of Y. Shavit, Judaism in the Mirror of Hellenism and the Birth of the Modern Hellenistic Jew.] 71 ‘úéøá ìù äúåùãçúä ,ïåéöì éðéñî’ ,ïîèøä .ã :øôñ úøå÷éá “.äéâåìåàéúì ÷åù ïéà” .27.8.93 ,úåøôñå úåáøú óñåî ‘õøàä’ .(1993 ,áéáà ìú) [There’s no market for theology (review of D. Hartman, From Sinai to Zion: The Renewal of a Covenant).] 72 ,é÷öéáø øæòéáà ìù åøôñ ìò .463–466 :(â“ðùú) á âñ ‘õéáøú’ “.íéãåäéä úðéãîå äìåâîä õ÷ä” .(1993 ,áéáà ìú) ‘ìàøùéá éúã íæéì÷éãøå úåðåéö ,úåéçéùî :íéãåäéä úðéãîå äìåâîä õ÷ä’ [The visible end and the Jewish state (review of A. Ravitzky, The Visible End and the Jewish State: Messianism, Zionism, and Religious Radicalism in Israel).] 1994 73 ‘Jews, Christians, and Muslims: Religious Polemics in the Middle Ages.’ Pages 23–37 in W. Beck, ed., The Jews in European History. Seven Lectures. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1994. English translation of 67. 74 ‘The Polytheism of William James.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994): 99–111.

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Bibliography of the Published Works of Amos Funkenstein

75 ‘Reform und Geschichte: Die Modernisierung des deutschen Judentums.’ Pages 1–8 in Sh. Volkov, ed., Deutsche Juden und die Moderne. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1994. 1995 76 Théologie et imagination scientifique. Translated from the English by JeanPierre Rothschild. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995. French version of 36, with extensive revisions and corrections; should be considered the definitive version. 77 Jüdische Geschichte und ihre Deutungen. Translated from the English by Christian Wiese. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp-Verlag, 1995. German edition of 68, with the addition of yet another article (No. 81). 78 ‘Commentary.’ Pages 347–354 in D. Bates, ed., Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 79 ‘Gerschom Scholem: Charisma, Kairos und messianische Dialektik.’ Pages 14–31 in Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith, eds, Gerschom Scholem. Zwischen den Disziplinen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995. See 64. Based on a paper delivered in German at a conference in Berlin in 1992. 80 ‘Terrorism and Theory.’ Qui parle: Literature, Philosophy, Visual Arts, History 8, 2 (1995): 112–122. 81 :(ä“ðùú) ñ ‘ïåéö’ “.úåøçà úåðéìôéöñéã ìåîì äéøåèñéää :íéçåçä ïéá ìàøùé úåãìåú” .347–355 [Israel among the thorns: History vs other subjects.] Included in 77. 82 ‘The Dialectics of Assimilation.’ Jewish Social Studies 1, 2 (1995): 1–14. 1996 83 Teologia e immaginazione scientifica dal Medioevo al Seicento. Translated from the English by Aldo Serafini. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Italian translation of 36. 84 .64–71 :(1996) 55 ‘äéøåèñéäì ïåòáø — íéðîæ’ “.úåììåáúää ú÷éè÷ìàéã” [The dialectics of assimilation.] Hebrew translation of 82. 85 ‘Le judaïsme émancipé face à la Loi dans la France du XIXe siècle.’ Pardès 22 (1996): 91–102 (with Perrine Simon-Nahum). 1999 86 ‘Die Dialektik der Assimilation.’ Pages 203–219 in Ulrich Raulff and Gary Smith, eds., Wissensbilder: Strategien der Überlieferung. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999. German translation of 82.

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2001 87 .4–9 :(2001) 37 ‘äéøåèñéäì ïåòáø — íéðîæ’ “.äìåàâì çúôîë òãéä” [Knowledge as the key to salvation.] Hebrew translation of 51. 2003 88 ‘The Disenchantment of Knowledge.’ Aleph. Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 3 (2003): 15–81. 2004 89 ‘“Der Sinn der Gebote” nach Maimonides.’ Kirche und Israel 19, 2 (2004): 99–105. Translation from Hebrew of chapter 3 of Nature, History and Messianism in Maimonides (item 28 above). About Amos Funkenstein Townsend Center Occasional Paper No. 6 (1996): The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities of the University of California in Berkeley published a small volume with contributions on Funkenstein by Robert Alter, David Biale, Anthony Long, Isaac Miller, and Steven J. Zipperstein. Jewish Social Studies 6, 1 (1999) is devoted to ‘Amos Funkenstein’s Perceptions of Jewish History: An Evaluation of His Works by His Students.’

We will try to post more hard-to-find texts on the website http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/cohn/funkenstein.html as they become available.

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Contributors

Hanina Ben-Menahem holds the Montesquieu Chair in Comparative Law and Legal History, Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 2000, he has spent the spring semester at Harvard Law School as Gruss Visiting Professor of Talmudic Civil Law. Among the books he has written or edited are the four-volume anthology and commentary Controversy and Dialogue in the Halakhic Sources (1991, 1993, 2002, 2005); Judicial Deviation in Talmudic Law: Governed by Men, Not by Rules (1991); and Authority, Process and Method: Studies in Jewish Law (1998). David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. A student of Amos Funkenstein in the 1970s, he is the author, most recently, of Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (2007) and Pouvoir et violence dans l’histoire juive (2005). He is the editor of Cultures of the Jews: A New History (2002). Gad Freudenthal is permanent senior research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. His books include Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance. Form and Soul, Heat and Pneuma (1995); Mélanges d’histoire de la médecine hébraïque. Études choisies de la Revue de l’histoire de la médecine hébraïque, 1948–1985 (coedited with S. Kottek, 2003); and Science in the Medieval Hebrew and Arabic Traditions (2005). He is the editor of the journal Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism. Carlo Ginzburg is professor of history, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and Franklin D. Murphy Professor Emeritus of Italian Renaissance

340

Contributors

Studies, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His books include The Night Battles (1966; Eng. trans., 1983); The Cheese and the Worms (1976; Eng. trans., 1980); The Enigma of Piero della Francesca (1981; Eng. trans., 1985); Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (1986; Eng. trans., 1989); Ecstasies. Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1989; Eng. trans. 1991); History, Rhetoric, and Proof (1999); Wooden Eyes. Nine Reflections on Distance (1998; Eng. trans. 2001); No Island Is an Island (2000); Il filo e le tracce. Vero falso finto (2006). John L. Heilbron is professor of history and vice-chancellor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley. Much of his recent work, beginning with The Sun in the Church. Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (1999), concerns science and religion in early modern times. Its focus is on individuals and their ways of resolving the conflict of authority to which their diverse commitments subject them Steven Livesey is professor and chair of the Department of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. He received his PhD at UCLA under Amos Funkenstein, and now specializes in medieval science, the history of early scientific methodologies, and science in medieval universities. His publications include Theology and Science in the Fourteenth Century: Three Questions on the Unity and Subalternation of the Sciences from John of Reading’s Commentary on the Sentences, an edition and critical commentary (1989); and ‘Accessus ad Lombardum: The Secular and the Sacred in Medieval Commentaries on the Sentences,’ Recherches de philosophie et théologie médiévales 72 (2005): 153–74. Joseph Mali is professor of history at Tel Aviv University. His recent publications include Mythistory. The Making of a Modern Historiography (2003); and, as editor, Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment (2003). Samuel Moyn is professor of history at Columbia University and the author of Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (2005). Richard H. Popkin was, at the time of his death in April 2005, emeritus professor of philosophy at Washington University (St Louis) and adjunct professor in the Departments of History and Philosophy at UCLA. He also taught at the University of Iowa, Harvey Mudd College, and the University of California, San Diego. He wrote or edited more

Contributors

341

than thirty volumes on the history of philosophy and the history of ideas, including his classic The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (final ed., 2003); Spinoza (2004); and The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (1999). Peter Hanns Reill is professor of history at UCLA and director of both the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. His books include The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (1975); and Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (2005). He is editor or co-editor for the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (1996, 2004); Aufklärung und Geschichte (1986); Visions of Empire (1996); Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis (1999); and, with Keith Baker, What’s Left of the Enlightenment (2001). Abraham P. Socher is associate professor of Jewish studies and religion at Oberlin College. He is the author of The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy and Philosophy (2006), and a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: The Modern Era. Dorit Tanay is associate professor of musicology, Tel Aviv University, Israel. She is the author of Noting Music, Marking Culture: The Intellectual Context of Rhythmic Notation, 1250–1400 (1999), and several articles on relationships between music and other fields of intellectual enquiry in fourteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, including ‘Monteverdi, Foucault and the Transition from Renaissance to Baroque’ (2003); ‘Music, Mathematics and the Rejection of Pansemioticism in the Renaissance’ (forthcoming); and ‘Between the Fig Tree and the Laurel, or Voit Revisited’ (2005). Robert S. Westman is professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. His publications include The Wittich Connection: Priority and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Cosmology (1988; with Owen Gingerich); as editor, The Copernican Achievement (1975); as coeditor (with David Lindberg), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (1990); and The Copernican Question. Prognostication, Scepticism and Celestial Order (forthcoming). From 1969 to 1988, he was a colleague of Amos Funkenstein in the Department of History at UCLA.

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Index

Abraham, Israel ben (eighteenthcentury publisher of Jewish classics and commentary), 68, 91n20 Abuya, Elisha b., 297 Accius, 199 ‘Advice for Idiots’ (Kepler), 52, 61n73, 61n74 Aeschylus, 199 Aglaophon, 199 Ailly, Pierre d’ [Petrus de Aliacus], 23, 31n30; Questiones magistri Petri de Aliaco ... super primum, tertium et quartum Sententiarum, 30nn26–7 Akiba (rabbi): and Jewish law, 291, 293 Alan of Lille, 189n39 Albani, Giovanni Francesco (Pope Clement XI). See Clement XI (pope) Albert of Saxony: Commentarius in Posteriora Aristotelis, 33n42; on habits, 33n42 Alexander VII (pope): and La Peyrère, 232; and Queen Christina of Sweden, 232 Alexander VIII (pope) [Pietro Ottoboni]: and Bianchini, 230, 266

Alexander the Great, 233 Alfonso X (king) [Alphonsus ‘the Astronomer’], 22, 48 al-Ghazali: and Maimonides, 188n19 al-Harizi, Judah: translator of Maimonides’ Guide, 191n57 Aliaco, Petrus de. See Ailly, Pierre d’ Alphonsus. See Vargas, Alphonsus Amos. See Funkenstein, Amos Anat.oli, Jacob, 66 Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, The (Pocock), 155–6 Andreae, Jacob, 41, 55n20; chancellor at Tübingen, 40 Aner, Karl, 98 Anselm (saint): on divine omnipotence, 13 Antiquité des tems rétablie (Pezron), 233 Apelles, 199 Apianus, Philipp, 56n26; and Maestlin, 41 ‘Apology for Raimund Sebond’ (Montaigne), 285 Aquinas, Thomas, 5, 6, 19; and certainty in theology, 15–16; and

344

Index

epistemology, 15; and subalternation of the sciences, 16–17, 23, 24, 28n15; Summa theologiae, 15 Aratus: Newton and, 257, 258 Arcimboldo, 139n35; and the visual grotesque, 126–7 Arendt, Hannah: on the Zionist account of the Holocaust, 321 Ariano, Adriano: and Bianchini, 234, 271n24 Aristarchus of Samos, 131, 155 Aristotle, 69, 93n30, 121, 125, 243; Aquinas on, 15–16; Bianchini on, 243; commentaries on, 33n42, 64, 89n6; Funkenstein on, 14–15, 35, 112, 113; Maestlin on, 42; in Zamosc, 74, 75, 80, 91n24; on epistemology, 14, 15–16, 21, 25, 27n3, 70–1; on metabasis, 14–15, 25; on physics, 36, 42, 70–1, 74, 80, 91n24; on subalternation, 16, 25, 26. See also Aristotle, works Aristotle, works: Categories, 25, 33n41; De anima, 15; De caelo, 15; Nicomachean Ethics, 27n3, 89n6; Physics, 15 ; Metaphysics, 15, 27n5, 33n41; Posterior Analytics, 15, 16, 25–6, 58n44 Aristoxenus, 139n36; Vincenzo Galilei and, 126, 127 Arnauld, Antoine: and Descartes, 283; dispute with Malebranche, 287n17 Arriaga, Roderigo: pedagogical method of, 284; teacher of Bayle, 284 Ars cantus mensurabilis (Franco of Cologne), 137n12 Arubbot ha-shamayim (Zamosc), 66–7, 72, 92n26

‘As a Lily among Brambles’ (Funkenstein), 221, 226n61 Assaf, Simha: and Jewish studies, 315 Astronomia nova (Kepler), 51, 59n54, 61n71; and ‘accommodation,’ 52 Auerbach, Erich, 223n14, 312; and biblical historical thinking, 147 Augsburg Confession, 43, 57n40 Augustine, 61n74, 149, 189n39, 202, 203n16, 205n30, 205n32, 215; and ‘accommodation,’ 193, 198–9, 200, 228; and aesthetic theory, 198–200; and Cicero, 206n33; Bianchini and, 243, 248; on interpreting the biblical past, 195–7, 198–9, 200, 231. See also Augustine, works Augustine, works: Civitas Dei, 215; Confessions, 196, 199; De doctrina Christiana, 196–7, 201, 203n16, 204n21, 205n32; De pulchro et apto, 199; Enarrationes in Psalmos, 196; Letter to Flavius Marcellinus, 198, 199, 200, 201; On the Trinity, 196 Augustus: in Bianchini, 230, 234, 237, 241, 249, 254, 256 Aureol, Peter [Petrus Aureolus]: and the theory of habits, 25; on the Sentences (of Peter of Lombardy), 17; on subalternation, 17–18, 19, 28n15; use of ‘divine omnipotence,’ 17, 18, 19, 28n15; use of hypothetical arguments, 18, 19, 21, 24 Auszug der Versuche Herrn Christian Wolffens (Leistikow), 77, 93n36 Autobiography (Vico), 215 Autumn of the Middle Ages (Huizinga), 207 Averroes, 64, 89n6, 95n43

Index Avi-Yonah, Michael, 323 Bacchini, Benedetto: Mabillon’s associate, 259; Muratori’s teacher, 259 Bacon, Francis: on the interpretation of mythology, 215–16; On the Wisdom of the Ancients, 215; Vico on, 215–16, 218 Baer, Yitzhak, 323; and Meinecke, 316; on the historiographic conceptualization of Judaism, 315; on the historiography of Graetz and Zunz, 315 Bahir. See Sefer ha-bahir Bakhtin, Mikhail, 313 Bamberg, Walter de. See Walter de Bamberg Barberini, Carlo (cardinal): and Bianchini, 261 Baron, Salo: on Maimonides, 170 Barthez, Paul: vitalist physician, 102 Bartoli, Danielo, 256; and Bianchini, 243 Baudelaire: Harmonie du soir, 201 Bauer, Yehuda: and Jewish historiography, 322 Bayer, Johann: Newton and, 257; Uranometria, 257 Bayle, Pierre, 286n7; and Arriaga, 284; and origins of modern scepticism of, 238, 281, 282, 284–5, 286; Dictionnaire historique et critique, 281, 283, 284, 285; fideism of, 284, 285; Funkenstein on, 210, 281, 287n17; Leibniz on, 285; on Descartes, 281, 282, 283; on divine deception, 282, 283, 284; on Gregory of Rimini, 281, 283, 284, 285; on Uriel da Costa, 284

345

Beit-Zvi, Shabtai: and the Zionist account of the Holocaust, 321 Beldomandi, Prosdocimo de, 120–1 Benjamin, Walter, 313 Ben-Sasson, H.H., 323 Berges, Wilhelm: teacher of Funkenstein, 144, 163n22 Berlin, Sir Isaiah: on Funkenstein, 210–11; on Vico, 210–11 Berlinische Monatsschrift, 97 Berwardi, Johannes [de Villingen], 23; Questiones super I et II Sententiarum, 31n 31 Biale, David: on Funkenstein, 159 Bianchini, Francesco, 270n10; accommodation strategies of, 238; addresses problems of chronology, 233–5, 249–50, 252–3, 254, 257, 258; adopts euhemerist methods, 234, 243, 245, 252, 256, 258, 261, 263, 276n95; adopts new principles for universal history, 230–1; and Bartoli, 256; and Ciampini, 241, 261; and Pétau, 235, 236; and Varro, 233, 234, 274n60; applies data from geology and astronomy to historical questions, 234, 252, 257, 258, 268, 271n24; Ariano and, 271n24; assistant to Montanari, 229; Cassini and, 252; Dupuis and, 260; Foscolo and, 259–60; historicizes asterisms, 249, 250, 252–3, 256, 260; Istoria universale, 229, 230, 231, 235, 236, 238, 241–58, 259–60, 261, 266, 267, 268, 274n60; librarian for the Ottobonis, 230, 241; Mabillon and, 239, 240, 241; Maffei and, 260; Muratori and, 258–9; on Bibliothecarius, 240; on symbols and

346

Index

historical understanding, 236–7, 239, 240, 241, 246, 255, 256, 259; reception of, 259–60; uses material artefacts as historical sources, 245–6, 247, 248, 249, 252, 253, 254, 257, 273n51, 274n60; Vico and, 229, 261, 262, 263 Bible, 44, 47, 69, 227, 241; and chronology, 231–3, 234, 235, 236; and development of historicist thought, 147, 149, 155, 170, 174, 196; and Midrash, 309; and the genre of universal history, 231–3, 234, 235; Genesis, 37, 45, 47–8, 54n9; Hebrew version, 3, 6, 147, 233, 234, 235, 261; interpretive strategies towards, 48, 51, 52, 59n54, 61, 61n75, 64, 98, 105, 153, 174, 188n23, 197–8, 201, 228, 231, 232, 233, 238; language of accommodation in, 152, 167, 174–5, 198, 228, 283; Old Testament, 198, 201, 231, 232, 233, 235, 263; Psalm 19, 178–9, 180, 189n37, 189n39, 190n40. See also Bianchini, Francesco; Galileo; Kepler, Johannes; Pezron, Paul; La Peyrère, Isaac; Semler, Johann Salomo; Simon, Richard; Talmud; Torah; Vico, Giambattista Bibliothecarius, Athanasius: Liber pontificalis, 240 Biel, Gabriel: and divine omnipotence, 282; Funkenstein on, 281, 282; Mersenne and, 283 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich: vitalist, 102 Blumenberg, Hans, 149, 221; Funkenstein and, 164n24, 187n14;

on secularization, 151, 163n20, 171, 187n13 Boethius [Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius]: De institutione musica, 128, 139n41 Book of Zerubavel. See Sefer zerubavel Brahe, Tycho (astronomer; imperial mathematician at the Rudolfine court), 50; Kepler and, 38, 50, 51; Zamosc and, 72, 91n25 Brenz, Johann: Tübingen theologian, 55n20 Buridan, John, 188n19; on bodies in motion, 113; on the theory of habits, 33n42; Quaestiones super VIII Physicorum libros, 33n42 Burke, Peter, 54n6, 313 Butterfield, Herbert: and historiography, 165n37; Man on His Past, 165n37 Calvisius, Sethus: admired by Bianchini, 235, 240; admired by Leibniz, 240; chronologist, 235; Opus chronologicum, 235–6; Scaliger and, 236 Campanus: astronomer, 22 Capreolus, Johannes, 24 Carlenis, Antonius de: on the Sentences (of Peter of Lombardy), 24, 32–3n39 Cassini, Gian Domenico: studies Farnese globe with Bianchini, 252 Cassirer, Ernst: on the relation between history and myth, 219–20 Castiglione: Courtier, 206n33 Categories (Aristotle): theory of habits, 25, 33n41 Céline: Journey to the End of Night, 297

Index Cellius, Erhard: and Apianus, 56n26 Chevreau, Urbain, 272n36 Chladenius [Johann Martin Chladni]: on historiography, 314 Christina of Sweden (Grand Duchess): and Galileo, 228; and La Peyrère, 232. See also Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended (Newton), 257 Ciampini, Giovanni Giusti: and Couplet, 256; Bianchini and, 240, 241, 256; Leibniz and, 240; Mabillon and, 239, 240; on Bibliothecarius, 240; supports the Accademia Fisicomatematica, 239, 240, 261 Cicero: aesthetic theory of, 199–200, 201; and Augustine, 199, 206n33; De natura deorum, 248; De oratore, 199, 206n33; on multiplicity, 199, 200, 243, 261; on mythography and the problem of the gods, 243, 246, 248, 261 Civitas Dei (Augustine), 215 Clarke, Samuel, 89n5 Clauberg, Johannes: Physica, 227, 269 Clavius, Christopher: and Maestlin, 42; Commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco, 42 Claxton, Thomas, 24; Scriptum super I Sententiarum, 32n38 Clement XI (pope) [Giovanni Francesco Albani]: and Bianchini, 230; and Maffei, 260; and Ciampini, 261 Cohen, Hermann, 5, 8; Ursprungsprinzip, 9 ‘Collective Memory and Historical

347

Consciousness’ (Funkenstein), 194, 207 Commentaria in IV libros Sententiarum (Denis the Carthusian), 24, 32n37 Commentarius in Posteriora Aristotelis (Albert of Saxony), 33n42 Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements (Proclus), 54n9 Commentary on Maimonides’ Millot ha-higgayon (Mendelssohn), 89n6 Commentary on ‘Ruah. h.en’ (CRH) (Zamosc), 91n21; as subversive commentary, 71, 76, 88; fideist aspects of, 87; Fraenkel and, 68, 71, 86, 91n20; Mendelssohn and, 78–9; new empirical sciences in, 70, 72–4, 77, 79–82, 83; on Maimonides, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 83, 84, 85, 86; on Rashi, 85; relation of tradition to intellect in, 86; sources for, 77–82, 93n36, 95nn44–5, 95n47; Talmud Sages in, 69, 70, 71–2 Commentary on Sefer elim (Zamosc), 67 Commentary on Sefer yesod ‘olam (Zamosc), 67 Commentary on Shiur komah (Moses of Narbonne), 182 Commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco (Clavius), 42 Commentary to the Mishnah (Perush hamishnah, sanhedrin) (Maimonides), 169–70, 186n5 Condé, Comte du, 231, 232 Confessions (Augustine), 196, 199 Contre Sainte-Beuve (Proust), 201 Copernicus, [Nicholas]: 58n48; aesthetic ideals of, 130, 131, 238; Bianchini and, 238, 240; De revo-

348 lutionibus, 43, 46, 47, 57n33, 57n37, 57n38, 59n50, 59n54, 61n73, 131; Kepler and, 37, 38, 42, 43, 47, 48, 52, 57n37, 59n54, 61n73; Krueger and, 95n47; La Peyrère and, 232; Leibniz and, 240; Maestlin and, 42–3, 44, 46, 47, 48, 57n35, 57n38, 59n52; methods of, 37, 38, 42, 43, 44–5, 52, 59n54, 130–1, 232; Rheticus and, 47; Zamosc on, 72, 92n26, 92n27, 95n47 Cosmographic Mystery (Kepler). See Mysterium cosmographicum Couplet, Philippe: and Ciampini, 256 Courtenay, William, 28n15 Courtier (Castiglione), 206n33 Crescas: Maimonides’ Guide commentator, 63 CRH. See Commentary on ‘Ruah. h. en’ Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 4, 5 Croll, Oswald, 51 Cusanus, Nicolas of, 38 da Costa, Uriel, 284 dal Pozzo, Cassiano, 244 Damian, Peter: on God’s omnipotence, 13 Dante: Divine Comedy, 215, 216, 224n31 Dead Sea Scrolls, 4; Baer on, 316 De anima (Aristotle), 15 De antiquissima italorum sapientia (Vico): verum-factum principle in, 228 De barometri depressione (Muratori), 259 De caelo (Aristotle), 15 De doctrina Christiana (Augustine),

Index 196–7, 201, 203nn16–17, 204n21, 205n32 De fundamentis astrologiae certioribus (Kepler), 58n43 De institutione musica (Boethius), 128, 139n41 De natura deorum (Cicero), 248 De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (Vico), 228, 261 De oratore (Cicero), 199, 206n33 De pulchro et apto (Augustine), 199 De re diplomatica (Mabillon), 239–40 De revolutionibus (Copernicus), 57n33, 131; Kepler and, 43, 46, 47, 57n37, 59n54, 61n73; Maestlin and, 43, 46, 57n38, 59n50 Delmedigo, Joseph Salomon: Sefer elim, 67, 91n23, 92n27; student of Galileo, 67; Zamosc and, 67, 91n23, 92n27 Denis the Carthusian: Commentaria in IV libros Sententiarum, 24, 32n37 Descartes, René, 4, 285, 313; and Bible, 283; and Mersenne, 283–4; and Ockham, 113; and ‘secular theology,’ 211; answer to scepticism, 282, 284, 286; Arnauld on, 283; Bayle on, 282, 283, 284; Funkenstein on, 113, 115, 282; Gassendi on, 282; Hobbes on, 283; Meditations on First Philosophy, 283–4; on the possibility of divine deception, 282, 283–4; possible debt to Biel and Rimini, 284; radical voluntarism of, 14, 282; thought experiments in, 115 Deutsche Physik (Christian Wolff), 77, 93–4n36 ‘Dialectics of Assimilation’ (Funkenstein), 5n2

Index

349

Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna (Vincenzo Galilei), 129 Dictionnaire historique et critique (Bayle): on Rimini, 281, 283, 284, 285; on da Costa, 284 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 314 Dinkelsbühl, Nicholas de. See Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl Dinur, Benzion: and Jewish historiography, 315, 322 Discorso particolare intorno all’unisono (Vincenzo Galilei), 124–6, 127 Divine Comedy (Dante), 215, 216; compared to Vico’s New Science, 224n31 Dohm, Christian Konrad Wilhelm von: proponent of Jewish emancipation and toleration, 107 Douglas, Mary, 189; Funkenstein and, 168–9, 178, 184; on Maimonides, 168, 169, 170, 172, 177, 178, 183, 184 Dupuis, Charles-François: Origine des tous les cultes, 260 Duran, Profiat, 179; Maimonides’ Guide commentator, 190n41 Durkheim, Émile, 312 Dworkin, Ronald, 303

Emden, Jacob (rabbi): and Zamosc, 67 Enarrationes in Psalmos (Augustine), 196 Ennius, 199 Entstehung des Historismus, Die (Meinecke), 162n9, 311 Epicurus, 210 Epistola ... de cultu sanctorum ignotorum (Mabillon), 240 Epitome. See Epitome of Astronomy Epitome of Astronomy (Maestlin), 41–2 Eratosthenes, 254 Esti: wife of Amos Funkenstein, 8, 287n18 Euchel, Isaa: Mendelssohn’s biographer, 78; on Mendelssohn and Zamosc, 78–9 Euclid: and Plato, 58–9n49; Elements of Geometry, 45, 54n9, 59n49; François Foix-Candale on, 38; Funkenstein and, 227; Kepler and, 38, 45; Proclus on, 45, 58–9n49 Eudoxus: Newton and, 258; on colures and asterisms, 252–3 Euripides, 199 Eusebius, 240, 252 Even Yisrael (Zamosc), 67, 90n16

Efodi: Maimonides’ Guide commentator, 63 Einstein, Albert, 4 Elements of Geometry (Euclid), 54n9, 59n49; Proclus’s commentary on, 45 Eltville, James of. See James of Eltville Elze, Reinhard: teacher of Funkenstein, 144

Faba, Guido: and Marchettus of Padua, 122; Summa dictaminis, 122–3 Flavius, Josephus, 207 Foix-Candale, François: Euclid commentator, 38 Foscolo, Ugo: on Bianchini, 259–60 Foucault, Michel, 112, 313, 314 Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (Kelley), 224n14

350

Index

Fraenkel [Fränckel], David (rabbi): and Zamosc, 68, 86; Mendelssohn’s teacher, 63; moderate rationalist, 71, 88–9n3; publisher of Jewish works, 63, 68, 89n3, 91n20 Franck, Adolf: and Kabbalah, 316 Franco of Cologne: Ars cantus mensurabilis, 137n12 Frederick, Duke of Württemberg, 48 Frutolf of Michelsberg, 151 Funkenstein, Amos: and Liebes, 324; Berlin on, 210–11; dispute with Douglas on the interpretation of Maimonides, 168–9, 170, 177, 178, 184–5; Ginzburg and, 153; on ‘accommodation,’ 144, 145–7, 152–3, 164n25, 167, 171, 173, 174–5, 197–8, 221, 226n58, 227, 228, 229, 233, 237–8; on Aristotle, 112; on Augustine, 198, 199, 204n23; on Baer and the historiographic conceptualization of Judaism, 315, 316; on Bayle, 287n17; on Biel, 281, 282; on Blumenberg, 163n20, 163–4n24 , 171, 187n14; on collective memory, 158, 194, 195, 201; on contingency, 173, 174–5, 187–8n19; on Descartes, 113, 115, 211, 282–3; on disciplinary boundaries, 13–15, 27n2, 35–6, 309; on divine omnipotence, 13, 27n2, 122, 281, 282; on Fraenkel, 71; on Galileo, 211; on Gregory of Rimini, 281, 282; on Halbwachs, 194; on Hegel, 144–5, 146, 148, 150, 154, 158, 161n7, 163n22, 176, 180, 185, 185n4; on Herzl’s Altneuland, 221; on historicism, 143–56, 158, 160,

163n22, 164n25, 164n28, 165n37, 167, 169, 170–1, 176, 180, 186–7n11, 311–14; on historiography, 143, 147, 149, 150, 151–2, 153, 154–5, 156, 161n7, 164n28, 207, 261, 311–14, 318, 319, 320–4; on history of knowledge, 5–7, 35–6, 53, 54n3, 54n6, 112, 127, 211, 228; on Hobbes, 211; on Huizinga, 207; on Hyman, 320–1; on Idel, 324; on Jewish historiography, 207, 309, 310, 315–16, 320–4, 327n37; on Kant, 176, 180; on Leibniz, 211; on Löwith, 144, 148, 149, 151; on Maimon, 64; on Maimonides, 144, 152–3, 167–8, 169, 170–5, 176, 177 178, 180, 221; on Maimonides’ historicist theory, 152–3, 167–8, 169, 170, 171–5, 177, 178, 180, 183, 184; on ‘master narrative,’ 221–2; on medieval origins of early modern thought, 4, 5, 6, 14, 34–5, 63, 64, 112, 113–14, 123, 144, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 165n39, 167–8, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 176, 180, 186n11, 209, 221, 282; on Newton, 211; on Ockham, 113; on origins of modern scepticism, 281, 282–3; on Panofsky, 205n33; on philosophy of history, 135, 146, 147, 150–1, 154, 158, 171, 176, 177, 188–9n30, 194, 195, 207, 209, 210, 211–12, 220; on Rimini, 281, 282; on ‘secular theology,’ 34–6, 37, 38, 54n6, 135, 211; on secularization processes, 4, 35, 36, 122, 135, 150, 151, 153, 154–6, 161; on Septimus, 187, 190n44; on Vasari, 205n33; on Vico, 153, 164n30,

Index 176, 180, 210–12, 219, 223n14, 225n44, 228, 229, 261; on Yerushalmi, 158, 186n11, 194, 195, 201, 207–8; on Yuval, 320, 324. See also Funkenstein, Amos, works Funkenstein, Amos, works: ‘As a Lily among Brambles,’ 221, 226n61; ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness,’ 194, 207; ‘Dialectics of Assimilation,’ 5n2; Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung, 6, 144, 147, 151, 164n25, 164n28, 185n4, 188–9n30; Maimonides: Nature, History and Messianic Beliefs, 144; Perceptions of Jewish History, 6, 8, 9n1, 144, 151–2, 164n25, 169, 185n4, 186n11, 194, 208, 220; Sociology of Ignorance, 288, 289; Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 4, 5, 6, 7, 14, 34, 35, 37, 97, 112, 151, 154, 164, 168, 197, 211, 227, 228, 229, 287n17, 288; ‘Verhältnis der jüdischen Aufklärung zur mittelalterlichen jüdischen Philosophie, Das,’ 63, 88n1. See also under individual titles Gadamer, Hans-Georg: and the ‘crisis of historicism,’ 166n40 Galilei, Vincenzo: and the Florentine Camerata, 115, 129, 133; and Galileo, 123, 124, 138n27; and Mei, 131–2, 133; Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna, 129; Discorso particolare intorno all’unisono, 124–6, 127; methods of, 124–9, 130; on harmony and dissonance, 115, 124, 126, 127–9, 139n41; on the unison, 124–6; on

351

tuning, 124, 126–7; undermines ancient music theory, 115, 123–4, 126, 127–8, 129, 131–2, 139n41 Galileo [Galileo Galilei], 4, 48, 67, 138n27, 139n30, 258, 259, 261; and accommodation, 227–8; and Augustine, 228; and Delmedigo, 67; and Kepler, 50, 61n75; and ‘secular theology,’ 211; and thought experiment, 113, 115, 124, 130; Funkenstein on, 115; Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, 52, 228; Montanari and, 229; Porzia and, 261; son of Vincenzo Galilei, 115, 124; Two New Sciences, 83; Zamosc on, 72, 78, 80–3 Gamaliel, Rabban, 289 Gans, David: Neh.mad we-na’im, 91n20; on Tycho Brahe, 91–2n25; and Zamosc, 92n26 Gassendi, Pierre: on Descartes, 283 Gatterer, Johann Christoph: and historiography, 143, 144, 161n1, 314 Geiger: and the science of Judaism, 309 Gemara. See under Talmud Genesis. See under Bible Genesis Rabba, 209 Gerlach, Stephan: Tübingen theologian, 55n20 Gersonides [Levi ben Gershom]: and Zamosc, 94–5n43 Gibbon: on Roman religions, 248–9 Ginzburg, Carlo: on Funkenstein, 153 Giv‘at ha-moreh (Maimon): commentary on part I of Guide of the Perplexed, 64, 92n28 Glaber, Rodolfus, 151

352

Index

Glückel of Hameln: source for history of Jewish women, 320 God, 5, 9, 70, 76, 83, 84, 96n52, 100, 101, 134, 146, 182, 196, 197, 232, 243, 247, 263, 266, 294, 301, 302, 317; accommodation and, 44, 52, 147, 152–3, 175–6, 189n31, 198–9, 228; ‘cunning’ of, 135, 147, 150, 174–5, 176, 180; contingency and, 171, 173, 174, 181; natural world and knowledge of, 4, 36, 37, 38, 44–5, 46, 47, 53, 101, 103, 104, 178, 213; omnipotence of, 13, 17–20, 21, 22, 23, 28n15, 36, 101, 119, 135, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286n7; providence of, 150, 151, 211–12, 266; secularization and, 35, 36, 121, 122, 151, 154, 185, 211; wisdom of, 178, 179 Goethe: critic of neology, 109n6 Goeze (pastor): critic of Semler and Lessing, 98 Goldstein, Bluma: and history of Jewish women, 320 Graetz, Heinrich: and Jewish history, 315 Grégoire, Abbé: proponent of Jewish emancipation and toleration, 107 Gregory. See Gregory of Rimini Gregory XIII (pope): and calendar reform, 42 Gregory of Rimini, 28nn26–8, 31nn30–1; and Aureol, 19, 20; as critic of Aquinas, 19, 20, 24; Bamberg on, 32n34; Bayle on, 281, 282, 283, 284; Claxton’s use of, 24; Descartes’s possible debt to, 282–3; Funkenstein on, 281, 282; James of Eltville on, 21;

Mersenne and, 283; on divine omnipotence and the question of divine deception, 281, 282; on Ockham and Franciscus de Marchia, 19; on knowledge in subalternate sciences, 19–20, 24; on the Sentences of Peter of Lombardy (Lectura Super I et II Sententiarum), 19–20; source for Ailly, 23; source for Nicholas de Dinkelsbühl, 23; Vargas and, 21 Gruppenbach, Georg: Tübingen publisher, 40, 46, 47 Guide. See Guide of the Perplexed Guide of the Perplexed (Maimonides), 189n31; accommodation/divine cunning/divine wisdom in, 172, 174–6, 188n28; commentary on, 63, 64, 65, 68, 84, 89n6, 92n28, 93n32, 181–2, 187–8n19, 190n41; contingency in, 172–3, 174; Fraenkel and, 63, 68, 88–9n3, 91n20; Funkenstein and, 177–8; historicism in, 170, 171, 173–4, 176, 188n23; methodological introduction in, 178, 181; reasons for the commandments in, 171–2, 173, 174–5, 177, 179, 190n49, 191n58; Samuel Ibn Tibbon’s translation, 66, 182–3. See also Crescas; Douglas, Mary; Duran, Profiat; Efodi; Maimon, Samuel; Mendelssohn, Moses; Moses of Narbonne; Nachmanides; Ruah. h.en; Satanov; Septimus, Bernard; Shem-Tov Ibn Joseph Shem-Tov; Zamosc, Israel Guido: fourteenth-century music theorist, 116; Or Voit, 116 Gumpertz, Aaron Salomon: Ibn Ezra

Index commentator, 89n6; and Zamosc, 67–8, 78, 79 Guttman, Julius: on Maimonides, 170 Hafenreffer, Matthias: Tübingen theologian, 46, 55n20; and Kepler, 46, 59n54, 60n58; and Maestlin’s edition of Mysterium cosmographicum, 47–8, 60n58 Halbwachs, Maurice: on collective memory, 194, 208 Ha-Levi [Halevi], Judah: Kuzari, 67, 83, 89n6, 90n14, 191n58; on the commandments, 191n58 Harmonice mundi (Kepler): commentary on Genesis in, 37; reasons for the planetary arrangement in, 37–8; Timaeus in, 37 Harmonie du soir (Baudelaire), 201 Heerbrand, Jacob: Tübingen theologian, 40, 55n20 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 159, 190n47; and the ‘cunning of reason’ (List der Vernunft), 146, 176, 312; Aufhebung and the Jewish-Christian historical relation, 202; Funkenstein and, 144–5, 146, 148, 150, 154, 158, 161n7, 163n22, 176, 180, 185, 185n4; Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 144; Phenomenology, 311; philosophy of history, 144–5, 154, 156, 158, 189n31, 311; supersession, 189n31 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 297; and the ‘crisis of historicism,’ 166n40 Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung (Funkenstein), 144, 189n30; explores the origins of historical

353

consciousness, 6, 147, 151, 164n25, 164n28, 185n4 Heine, Heinrich, 9 Heinrich, Dieter: teacher of Funkenstein, 144 Henry. See Henry of Langenstein Henry of Langenstein, on the Sentences (of Peter of Lombardy), 23, 31–2n33 Herder: and the ‘great analogy of nature,’ 100 Hermes Trismegistus: Vico on, 263 Herodotus, 148, 201; Bianchini on, 241, 254 Herzl, 221 Hesiod, 243 Hierius, 199 Hippias Major (Plato), 199, 205–6n33 Hirschen, Baron von: Semler and, 97, 103, 106 Histoire critique du vieux testament (Simon), 232 History and Memory (journal), 194 Hobbes, Thomas: and ‘secular theology,’ 211; compared with Vico, 210, 212; Funkenstein on, 210, 211, 212; on Descartes, 283 Hock, Alexander: Tübingen publisher, 40 Homer, 155, 255, 277n109, 294; Vico on, 263, 265 Hooke, Robert: Micrographia, in Leistikow, 78 Hornig, Gottfried, 99 Hornius, Georg: chronologist and adversary of Vossius, 231 Hugh of Fleury, 151 Hugh of St Victor, 186–7n11 Huizinga, Johan: and concept of ‘historical consciousness,’ 207;

354

Index

Autumn of the Middle Ages, 207; Funkenstein and, 207 Hyginus, 248, 252 Hyman, Paula: and history of Jewish women, 222, 320 Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 89n6 Ibn Paquda, Bahya: Zamosc on, 67 Ibn Tibbon, Judah (father of Samuel Ibn Tibbon): and Ruah. h.en, 66 Ibn Tibbon, Samuel (son of Judah Ibn Tibbon); and Guide of the Perplexed, 66, 182–3; and kabbalistic thought, 183; and Judah Al-Harizi, 191n57; and Sefer ha-bahir, 182–3, 191n57 Idel, Moshe, 191n57, 310; Funkenstein’s evaluation of, 222; historical methods of, 319–20, 324 In the Land of Israel (Oz), 221 Innocent XII (pope), 268; Bianchini and, 237 Israeli of Toledo, Isaac: Sefer yesod ‘olam, Zamosc on, 67 Istoria universale (Bianchini), 229, 238; account of history in, 241–58; compared with Vico’s Scienza nuova, 261; compositional principles in, 231; frontispiece, 266–8; methodology in, 230, 235, 236, 238, 241, 245, 249, 252, 254, 261; reception of, 259–60; sources for, 248, 249, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256 Itzig, Daniel, 84 James. See James of Eltville James of Eltville [Jacobus de Altavilla], 31n31; and Aureol, 28n15; and Gregory of Rimini, 21;

and Henry of Langenstein, 23; and Thomas of Strasbourg, 21; Lectura super IV libros Sententiarum, 21–3, 29nn22–5, 32n33; on divine omnipotence and subalternation, 22–3; 28n15 Joachim of Fiore, 149 John. See Berwardi, Johannes John XXII (pope), 115 John of Reading, 27n9, 28n13 Jost: and the science of Judaism, 309 Journey to the End of Night (Céline), 297 Joyce, James, 218 Judah the Prince (rabbi): redactor of the Mishnah, 294 Kabbalah, 83, 86, 91n20, 182, 189n33; and Jewish historiography, 207, 316, 318, 319–20; Franck on, 316; Funkenstein on, 207, 309, 316, 318, 319–20; Idel and, 319–20; Scholem and, 316, 320; Zamosc and, 84–5 Kant, Immanuel, 154; Critique of Pure Reason, 4, 5 Kelley, Donald: Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, 224n14; Funkenstein and, 211 Kennedy, Leonard, 25 Kennicott, Benjamin, 109n6 Kepler, Johannes: and Genesis, 37, 38, 45, 47; and place of ordinary astrology, 43–4, 51, 52–3, 58n43; and Rudolfine court, religious atmosphere of, 50–1, 52, 53, 61n74; and Tübingen theologians, 43, 46, 47–8, 57n36, 59n54; as a secular theologian, 37, 38, 43, 44, 45, 48, 52, 53; Hafenreffer and,

Index 46, 48, 59n54, 60n58; Maestlin and, 38, 41, 42–3, 44, 45, 46–8; methods of, 37, 38, 44–5, 48, 52, 55n13; on Copernicus, 37, 38, 42–3, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52, 57n37, 59n54; on planetary order, 37–8, 42, 45. See also Kepler, Johannes, works Kepler, Johannes, works: ‘Advice for Idiots,’ 52, 61n73, 61n74; Astronomia nova, 51, 52, 59n54, 61n71; De fundamentis astrologiae certioribus, 58n43; Harmonice mundi, 37; Mysterium cosmographicum, 37, 38, 42, 43, 47–8, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55n14, 59n50, 59n54. See also under individual titles Kimhi, David (rabbi), 190n40 Klausner, Joseph: and Jewish historiography, 321 Krochmal, Nachman: on Judaism, 309–10 Krueger, Johann Gottlob: Naturlehre, 95n47 Kuzari (Judah ha-Levi): on the commandments, 191n58; Satanov’s commentary on, 89n6; Zamosc’s commentary on, 67, 83, 84, 90n14, 90n16, 92n26 La Mothe Le Vayer, Felix de: and historiography, 238 Langenstein, Henry of. See Henry of Langenstein La Peyrère, Isaac de: pre-Adamite controversy and, 231–3 Lavater: critic of Mendelssohn and Semler, 98; in Goethe, 109n6 Lectura in I librum Sententiarum (Vargas): on subalternation and

355

divine omnipotence, 20–1, 26, 28–9nn19–20 Lectura magistri Alphonsi ... super I Sententiarum abbreviata per magistrum Johannem de Wasia (Wasia): on Vargas, 23, 30n28 Lectura super I et II Sententiarum (Gregory of Rimini), 19–20 Lectura super IV libros Sententiarum (James of Eltville), 21–3, 29nn22–5, 32n33 Lectura super Sententias (Paul of Perugia), 30n29 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Hegel), 144. See also Funkenstein, Amos Leibniz, 4; and Bayle, 282, 285; and Ciampini’s Accademia Fisicomatematica, 240; and historiography, 240, 241; and ‘secular theology,’ 211; Bianchini and, 240, 241; Chladenius and, 314; Funkenstein on, 14, 211; Gatterer and, 314; Mabillon and, 240; philosophy of, 27n2, 101, 282; Wolff and, 77 Leistikow, Michael Friedrich: and Mendelssohn, 94n42; and Zamosc, 77–82, 93n36, 95nn44–5, 95n46; Auszug der Versuche Herrn Christian Wolffens, 77, 93n36 Leschnitzer, Adolf: teacher of Funkenstein, 144 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: and Semler, 98 Letter to Flavius Marcellinus (Augustine), 198, 199, 200, 201 Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (Galileo), 52, 228 Levi, Joshua b. (rabbi): on the rabbi’s role, 294, 300

356

Index

Levi, Primo, 7 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 218 Liber pontificalis (Bibliothecarius), 240 Liebes, Yehuda: and Jewish historiography, 222, 310, 318, 324 Liebler, Georg: Tübingen physics professor, 57n36 Lilla, Mark, 276n95 Livy, 243 Louis XV (king of France), 259 Löwith, Karl: Funkenstein and, 144, 149, 151, 223n14; historicizes the philosophy of history, 144, 146, 149, 154; Meaning in History, 144, 148 Lukács, Georg, 312 Luther, Martin, 41 Lysippus, 199 Mabillon, Jean: and historical methodology, 239–40, 260; Bacchini and, 259; Bianchini and, 239, 240, 254, 273n44; De re diplomatica, 239–40; Epistola ... de cultu de sanctorum ignotorum, 240; Leibniz and, 240; Muratori and, 259 Machiavelli, 210 Maestlin, Michael [Mästlin; Maestlinus], 56n27; and Copernican theory, 42–3, 44, 46, 47, 48, 57n33, 57n35, 57n38; and Kepler, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 59n50; and Kepler’s Mysterium cosmographicum, 46–7; and Rheticus’s Narratio prima, 47, 60n58; and Tübingen theologians, 46–8; Epitome of Astronomy, 41–2; Observatio et Demonstratio Cometae Aetherei,

qui anno 1577 et 1578 Constitutus in Sphaera Veneris ..., 42, 56n30 Maffei, Scipione: and Bianchini, 260; and the Index, 276n93 Maimon, Samuel, 77, 87; Funkenstein on, 64; Giv‘at ha-moreh, 64, 92n28; method of, 64, 89n4 Maimonides, Moses, 5, 6, 9; and the principle of accommodation, 152, 167, 174–5, 188n28, 189n31; Baron on, 170; commentaries on, 63, 64, 65, 66, 71, 89n6, 181, 187–8n19; Crescas on, 63; Douglas on, 168–9, 170, 171, 172, 177, 178, 183; Duran on, 179, 190n41; epistemology of, 71, 85, 86, 172, 178, 181, 188n19; Funkenstein on, 144, 150, 152–3, 157, 163n22, 164n28, 167–9, 170, 171, 172–3, 174, 176, 177, 178, 180, 183, 184, 185n4, 187n12, 187–8n19, 188n22, 188–9n30, 221; historicism of, 152–3, 157, 167, 169, 170–1, 173–4, 175, 176, 177, 183, 185n4, 186n5, 186n7, 186n11, 188n22; Maimon on, 64, 92n28; Mendelssohn on, 89n6; Moses of Narbonne on, 181–2, 183; Nachmanides against, 179; on contingency, 171, 172–3, 184; on divine cunning (divine wisdom), 150, 152–3, 172, 175, 176, 190n44; on Psalm 19, 178–9, 180, 190n40; on reasons of the commandments, 152–3, 167, 169, 170, 171–2, 173–6, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 191n58; on the role of the rabbi, 291–2; rationalist philosophy of, 71, 73, 74, 84, 87, 172, 174, 179, 188n25, 228; Satanov

Index on, 89n6; Septimus on, 190n44; Shem-Tov b. Shem-Tov on, 93n32, 187–8n19; Zamosc on, 71, 73, 84–5, 86, 87. See also Maimonides, Moses, works; Ruah. h.en Maimonides, Moses, works: Commentary to the Mishnah (Perush hamishnah, sanhedrin), 170–1, 186n5; Guide of the Perplexed, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 92n30, 171–2, 173, 177, 178, 181, 182, 187–8n19, 188n22, 188n25, 188n28, 188–9n30, 189n31, 191n58; Mishneh torah, hilkhot akum, 89n3, 188n22. See also under individual titles Maimonides: Nature, History and Messianic Beliefs (Funkenstein), 144 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 218 Man, Paul de, 297 Man on His Past (Butterfield), 165n37 Mandeville, Bernard, 154 Mann, Thomas, 312–13 Manuel, Frank, 258 Marcellinus, Flavius: Augustine and, 198, 199, 200, 201 Marchettus of Padua: distinguishes between via naturalis and via artis, 121–3; on rhythm, 138n25; Pomerium, 121–2, 137–8nn21–2, 138n24 Marchia, Franciscus de, 19 Marcus Aurelius, 247 Martianay, Jean: and chronology, 231, 233, 235; supporter of Hornius, 231 Marx, Karl: on philosophy of history, 145, 148 Maugin, Gabriel, 240

357

Maupertuis, 91n24 Mazzoleni, Alessandro: and Bianchini, 270n10 Meaning in History (Löwith), 144, 148 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes), 283–4 Megill, Allan, 153 Mei, Girolamo: and thought experiment, 131–2, 133; and Vincenzo Galilei, 131 Meinecke, Friedrich: and historicism – Die Entstehung des Historismus, 162n9, 311; Funkenstein and, 223n14, 311; teacher of Baer, 316 Meir (rabbi), 294, 297 Melanchthon, Philipp, 55n20, 57n40 Mendelssohn, Moses, 9; and Fraenkel, 63, 68; and Leistikow, 94n42; and Semler, 98; and Zamosc, 67, 68, 78–9, 90n14; commentary on Maimonides’ Millot ha-higgayon [Logical Terminology], 89n6 Mersenne, Marin: and Descartes, 283 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 15, 27n5, 33n41 Michaelis, Johann David: neologist, 109n6 Micrographica (Hooke): in Leistikow, 78 Middle Commentary on Nicomachean Ethics (Averroes), 89n6 Mirecourt, John of: on divine deception, 286n7 Mishnah. See under Talmud Mishneh torah, hilkhot akum (Maimonides), 89n3, 188n22 Momigliano, Arnaldo: and historiog-

358 raphy, 155, 165n37; Funkenstein and, 155 Montaigne, Michel de: and scepticism, 285, 286; ‘Apology for Raimund Sebond,’ 285 Montanari, Geminiano: Bianchini and, 229; discoverer of variable stars, 229; Galileo and, 229 Monteverdi, Claudio, 135 Montfaucon, Bernard de: disciple of Mabillon, 241 Moody, Ernest, 24 Moretti, Franco, 201 Morris, Benny: and Jewish historiography, 310, 322–3 Morts martyrs, reliques en Afrique chrétienne aux premiers siècles (Saxer), 196 Moses of Narbonne [Narboni]: and Kabbalistic doctrine, 182, 190n50; and Maimonides, 181–2, 190n50, 191n58; commentary on Shiur komah, 182 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio: admirer of Bianchini, 258–9; and Bacchini, 259; and Galileian experimentation, 259; and historical methodology, 259; and the Index, 260, 276n92, 276n93; and Mabillon’s methods, 259; De barometri depressione, 259 Muris, Johannes de: Notitia artis musicae, 118, 119; theory of the minims, 118–20 Myro, 199 Mysterium cosmographicum (Kepler), 42, 43, 49, 50, 51, 55n14, 59n50, 59n54; and Genesis, 37, 45, 47–8; and Timaeus, 37; compared with Nova astronomia, 52; Hafenreffer

Index and, 46, 47–8; idea of God in, 38; Maestlin and, 46–7, 60n58; printed by Gruppenbach, 47; Rheticus’s Narratio prima in, 47 Nabatean Agriculture: Maimonides on, 174, 188n23 Nachmanides, 179 Nagel, Ivan, 134, 135 Napoleon, 42; Foscolo and, 259 Narboni. See Moses of Narbonne Narratio prima (Rheticus): Maestlin and, 47, 60n58 Naturlehre (Krueger), 95n47 Neh.mad we-na’im (Gans), 91n20 Nero, 256 Nes.ah. Yisrael (Zamosc), 67, 68, 87, 91n21; on epistemology, 82, 85; on Rashi, 66, 71, 85; on the Talmud Sages and scientific truths, 71; subversive positions in, 66, 82 Neusner, Jacob: and Jewish historiography, 310, 318 New Astronomy (Kepler). See Astronomia nova New Science (Vico). See Scienza nuova Newton, Isaac, 4, 70, 91n24; and Aratus, 257, 258; and Bayer, 257; and Bianchini, 257–8; and ‘secular theology,’ 211; Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended, 257; on God, 101; Principia, 83; uses euhemerist approaches to chronological problems, 257, 258 Nezed ha-dema‘ (Zamosc), 67 Nicetas of Aquileia, 196 Nicholas. See Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl, 23, 32n34;

Index Gregory of Rimini and, 13, 23; James of Eltville and, 31n31; Johannes Berwardi and, 31n31; Questiones communes, 23; Questiones in libros Sententiarum (of Peter of Lombardy), 23, 30n30; Super I et II Sententiarum (Questiones magistrales), 23, 30n30 Nicolai, Friedrich: on Zamosc, 77 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 27n3, 89n6 Nietzsche, Friedrich: on historicism, 158 Noris, Enrico (cardinal): and Vatican Library, 230–1 Notitia artis musicae (Muris), 118, 119 ‘Of True Hermetical Medicine’ (Semler), 97, 103 O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, 209 On the Trinity (Augustine), 196 On the Wisdom of the Ancients (Bacon), 215 Opus chronologicum (Calvisius), 235–6 Or Voit (Guido), 116 Origine des tous les cultes (Dupuis), 260 Orosius: and philosophy of history, 149 Os.ar neh.mad (Zamosc): commentary on Kuzari, 67, 84, 90n14, 90n16, 92n26 Otto of Freising, 151 Ottoboni, Pietro (cardinal). See Alexander VIII (pope) Ottoboni, Pietro (cardinal’s nephew): and Bianchini, 230, 241 Ovid, 243 Oz, Amos: In the Land of Israel, 221

359

Pacuvius, 199 Padua, Marchettus of. See Marchettus of Padua Panofsky, 225n33 Pappe, Ilan: and Jewish history, 322 Paracelsus, 189n39 Pardes, Ilana, 222 Paul of Perugia [Paulus de Perugia]: Lectura super Sententias, 30n29 Perceptions of Jewish History (Funkenstein), 8, 9n1, 144, 220; commentary on Yerushalmi’s Zakhor in, 186n11, 194–5, 208; on historicist methodology, 151–2, 164n25; on Maimonides’ theory of the commandments, 169, 185n4; on the origins of modern historical consciousness, 6, 208 Perugia, Paul of. See Paul of Perugia Pétau, Denis: Bianchini and, 235, 240; euhemerist methods of, 236; Leibniz and, 240; on chronology, 235, 236, 254 Peter. See Aureol, Peter Petrus de Pulkau: on the Sentences of Peter of Lombardy, 32n34 Pezron, Paul: and chronology, 231, 233; Antiquité des tems rétablie, 233 Phenomenology (Hegel), 311 Physica (Clauberg), 227, 269 Physics (Aristotle), 15 Pierre. See Ailly, Pierre d’ Pines, Shlomo: and Jewish historiographic treatment of Christian sources, 319, 326n26 Pirrotta, Nino, 143 Plato, 14; aesthetic theory of, 199, 200; and legendary powers of ancient music, 129; Augustine’s use of, 199, 205–6n33; Bianchini

360

Index

and, 243, 246, 255; distinction between pulchrum (beauty) and aptum (accommodation) in, 199, 205–6n33; Hippias Major, 199, 205–6n33; Kepler’s use of, 37, 38, 45; Proclus on Euclid’s Platonism, 58–9n49; Timaeus, 37, 45; Vico on, 218 Plutarch: Bianchini and, 246, 250 Pocock, J.G.A.: Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, 155–6; on the development of historical thought, 155–6, 165nn36–7 Poliby, 201 Polyclitus, 199 Pomerium (Marchettus of Padua), 121–2, 137–8nn21–2, 138n24 Popper, Karl: and historicism, 145–6; Poverty of Historicism, 145 Porat, Dina, 322 Porzia, Lucantonio: and Vico, 261 Posterior Analytics (Aristotle), 16; commentaries on, 25–6; on demonstration, 15, 58n44 Poverty of Historicism (Popper), 145 Primus Sententiarum (Romanus), 16–17, 27n10 Principia (Newton), 83 Proclus [Proclus Diadochus]: commentary on Euclid, 45, 54n9, 58–9n49; in Kepler, 38, 47 Proust, Marcel, 201 Psalm 19. See under Bible Ptolemy: Bianchini on, 252, 253; conceptual opposites in, 35; Copernican challenge to, 42, 44; James of Eltville on, 22; Kepler and, 38, 45, 48 Pulkau, Petrus de. See Petrus de Pulkau

Pythagoras: Bianchini on, 255; Kepler on, 37, 38, 47; Vincenzo Galilei and Pythagorean theory, 115, 123–4, 127, 139n36 Quaestiones super VIII Physicorum libros (Buridan), 33n42 Questiones communes (Dinkelsbühl), 23 Questiones magistri Petri de Aliaco ... super primum, tertium et quartum Sententiarum (Ailly), 30nn 26–7 Questiones super I et II Sententiarum (Berwardi), 31n31 Questiones super Sententias (Walter de Bamberg), 32n34 Rabbah, Leviticus, 300 Ranke, Leopold von: on historiography, 155, 315 Rashi: on the student-rabbi relationship, 293–4; Zamosc on, 66, 71, 85 Recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 201 Rheticus, Georg Joachim: Kepler and, 38; Maestlin and, 47; Narratio prima, 47, 60n58 Ricoeur, Paul: and historiography, 313 Rimini, Gregory of. See Gregory of Rimini Rohault, Jacques: Clarke on, 89n5; Traité de physique, 89n5 Romanus, Aegidius [Egidius Romanus]: Primus Sententiarum, 16–17, 27n10 Rosenzweig, Franz, 8, 9 Rossi, Paolo: on Vico, 261 Ruah. h.en: an introduction to Guide of the Perplexed, 65; anonymous commentary on, 66, 89n7; Aristotelian

Index science in, 65, 69, 76; disputed ascription of, 66; on four classes of truth, 85; translated by Samuel Ibn Tibbon, 66; Zamosc’s commentary on, 68–9, 72, 89n7. See also Commentary on Ruah. h. en (Zamosc) Rudolf II (Hapsburg emperor): Kepler and Brahe at the court of, 50, 51, 52, 53 Sacrobosco, 42 Sanctis, Francesco de: on Vico, 224 Satanov, 89n6 Saxer, Victor: Morts martyrs, reliques en Afrique chrétienne aux premiers siècles, 196 Saxony, Albert of. See Albert of Saxony Scaliger, Joseph: and chronology, 236, 254; on Calvisius, 236 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 219 Schilling, Heinz, 39 Schnepf, Theodor: Tübingen ordinarius, 40 Scholem, Gershom: and Idel, 320; and the founding of Jewish studies, 315, 323; and the master narrative of Jewish history, 316–17; on interpreting religious acts and customs, 183–4, 191n60; on Judaism, 220, 221, 316; on Kabbalah, 316; on messianism and secularization, 316–17; on Sefer habahir, 190n53, 191n57; on Shiur komah, 190n52 Scienza nuova (Vico): allegorical frontispiece in, 263, 264, 265; compared with Bianchini, 261–3;

361

Funkenstein and, 210, 212, 228–9; methodology of, 211, 213, 214–15, 216–17; role of the mythopoetic in, 212–14, 217; role of ‘divine providence’ in history in, 212; Sanctis on, 224n31 Scotus, Duns: on subalternation, 16 Sefer elim (Delmedigo), 91n23; Zamosc and, 67, 92n27 Sefer ha-bahir (anon.), 182, 190n53, 190n54, 191n57 Sefer toldot yeshu: and Jewish historical consciousness, 208 Sefer yes.irah, 83 Sefer yesod ‘olam (Isaac Israeli of Toledo): classical treatise of astronomy, 67; Zamosc’s commentary on, 67, 84; Zamosc’s use of, 83 Sefer zerubavel: and the development of Jewish historical consciousness, 208, 209, 219; Funkenstein on, 208, 209 Segev, Tom: and the Zionist account of the Holocaust, 310 Semler, Johann Salomo, 108, 109nn6–7, 110n15, 111n20; and neology, 98; charts middle way between orthodox theology and natural religion, 104–5; compared with Mendelssohn and Lessing, 98; epistemological position of, 100, 103–4, 108; Goeze and Lavater, critics of, 98; Hornig on, 99, 109n8; liberal theologian and student of hermetic chemistry, 97–9; matter theory of, 101–2, 105; ‘Of True Hermetical Medicine,’ 97, 103; on diversity in nature and religion, 103, 105–6;

362

Index

on hermetic medicine and chemistry, 102–3, 104; on toleration, 106–7; redefines true religion, 103–6 Sentences (Peter of Lombardy): commentaries on, 25, 26; Aureol, 16–19; Berwardi, 23; Carlenis, 24, 32n39; Claxton, 24; Denis the Carthusian, 24; Gregory of Rimini, 19–20; Henry of Langenstein, 23; James of Eltville, 21–3; John of Reading, 27n9, 28n13; Nicholas de Dinkelsbühl, 23; Petrus de Pulkau, 32n34; Vargas, 20; Walter de Bamberg, 32n34 Septimus, Bernard, 190n44 Sextus Empiricus: ancient Greek sceptic, 281, 286n2; Montaigne and, 285 Shapin, Steven, 100 Shem-T.ov: Maimonides’ Guide commentator, 63, 93n32 Shem Tov Ibn Joseph Shem Tov: Funkenstein and, 187–8n19 Shlaim, Avi: and Jewish historiography, 322 Shiur komah: early gnostic text, 182; Maimonides on, 182; Moses of Narbonne on, 182; Scholem on, 190n52 Siculus, Diodorus, 254 Sigwart, Johann Georg: Tübingen theologian, 55n20 Simon, Richard: and biblical chronology, 232; Histoire critique du vieux testament, 232; La Peyrère and, 232; on the Bible as a historical source, 232, 233 Smith, Adam, 154 Smith, Anthony, 220

Socher, Abraham, 143, 165–6n39 Sociology of Ignorance (Funkenstein), 288, 289 Sophocles, 199 Southern, R.W., 187n11 Spencer, John, 170 Spinoza, 3; biblical exegesis of, 5, 233; compared with Vico, 210, 212; determinist view of, 14; Funkenstein and, 5, 14, 210, 212; on laws of human life and history, 212 Stadius, Georg, 43 Stern, Josef, 190n45 Strasbourg, Thomas of. See Thomas of Strasbourg Summa dictaminis (Faba), 122–3 Summa theologiae (Aquinas), 15 Talmud: Gemara, 296, 309; attitude towards controversy, 297–9, 300–2; Mishnah, 292, 294, 295, 301; on rabbinic authority, 291, 292, 293, 295–6, 297, 298, 299, 300–1, 303; Sages, 69, 70, 71, 72, 91n25, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 297, 298, 300; Zamosc on, 66, 69, 70, 72, 87 Taubes, Jacob: teacher of Funkenstein, 144; Western Eschatology, 148 Tertullian, 243 Thabit: astronomer, 22 Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Funkenstein), 6, 7, 97, 164, 227, 229, 287n17; architecture of, 5; concept of ‘secular theology’ in, 4, 34, 37; on accommodation, 197; on dialectic processes in the history of knowledge, 35; on Douglas’s interpretation of Maimonides, 168; on ‘knowing by

Index doing,’ 14, 228; on the development of modern historiography, 154; on the distinction between open and closed knowledge, 288; on the origins of modern scepticism, 281; on the prohibition of metabasis, 14; on the secularization of God’s providence, 151; on the secularization of theology, 4, 151, 211; on the theological foundations of natural law, 14; on univocal language and homogeneity of nature, 112; on Vico, 211 Thomas. See Aquinas, Thomas Thomas of Strasbourg, 21 Thucydides, 201 Timaeus (Plato), 37, 38, 45 Tomlinson, Gary, 134 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 312 Torah, 167, 178, 320; definition of, 304n2; Maimonides and, 89n3, 175; Nachmanides and, 179; Talmud and, 301; Zamosc on, 72 Traité de physique (Rohault), 89n5 Troeltsch, Ernst: and the ‘crisis of historicism,’ 161–2n9 Turner, Victor, 184, 192n61 T.uv ha-levanon (Zamosc): commentary on H . ovot ha-levavot, 67, 84 Two New Sciences (Galileo), 83 Tycho. See Brahe, Tycho Uglietti, Francesco, 270n10 Ulrich, Duke of Württemberg, 39 Uranometria (Bayer), 257 Ussher, James: and chronology, 235 Valla, Lorenzo: Funkenstein and, 155 Van Leeuwenhoeck, Anton, 6, 78

363

Vargas, Alphonsus [Alphonsus Vargas Toletanus], 30n29; and Wodeham, 29n21; Lectura in I librum Sententiarum (of Peter of Lombardy), 20–1, 26, 28–9nn19–20; Wasia on, 23, 30n28 Varro: account of universal history, 235, 248, 261; Bianchini and, 233, 234, 235, 248, 261 Vasari, 205n33 Verhältnis der jüdischen Aufklärung zur mittelalterlichen jüdischen Philosophie’ (Funkenstein), 63, 88n1 Vico, Giambattista, 222, 224n13, 233; and Bayle, 210; and Epicurus, 210; and historicist methodology, 213–14, 229, 261; and Hobbes, 210; and Machiavelli, 210; and Porzia, 261; and ‘secular theology,’ 211–12; and Spinoza, 210, 212; and the controversy over preAdamite theory, 261; Berlin on, 210–11; compared to Bianchini, 261–3; creates a ‘new critical art’ of mythography, 216–17; Funkenstein on, 150, 151, 153, 154, 164n30, 176, 209, 210, 211, 212, 215, 219, 223n14, 225n44, 228–9, 261; Lilla on, 276n95; on Bacon’s allegorical method, 215–16, 218; on historical epistemology, 210 211, 213–14, 215, 217, 219, 228, 262; on mythopoetic and historicist thinking, 210, 211–13, 214–15, 216, 217–18, 262; on the philosophy of history (providence), 150, 176, 211–12, 218, 262, 263, 265. See also Vico, Giambattista, works

364

Index

Vico, Giambattista, works: Autobiography, 215; De antiquissima italorum sapientia, 228; De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, 228, 261; Scienza nuova (New Science), 210, 211, 212–13, 214, 215, 216, 217, 228, 229, 261, 263–5. See also under individual titles Vignoles, Alphonse des: and chronology, 231, 233, 271n21 Viq d’Azur: vitalist physician, 102 Volusianus, 198 Vossius, Isaac: chronologist, adversary of Hornius, 231 Wagner, Richard, 297 Walter de Bamberg: Questiones super Sententias (of Peter of Lombardy), 32n34; on Aquinas, 32n34; on Gregory of Rimini, 32n34 Wasia, Johannes de, 23, 30n28; Lectura magistri Alphonsi ... super I Sententiarum abbreviata per magistrum Johannem de Wasia, 30n28; on Vargas, 23, 30n28 Weber, Max: on ‘chance,’ 317; on ‘disenchanted rationality,’ 187n12; on sacralization, 36 Western Eschatology (Taubes), 148 White, Hayden, 313 Wodeham, Adam, 29n21 Wolf: and the science of Judaism, 309 Wolff, Christian: Deutsche Physik, 77, 93–4n36; Zamosc and, 79, 93–4n36 Wood, Rega, 13 Yerushalmi, Yosef Haim: and Halbwachs, 208; Funkenstein on, 158,

186–7n11, 194–5, 201, 207–8; on collective memory, 195; on distinction between memory and history, 8, 148, 158, 186n11; on Jews and history, 148, 186n11, 193–4, 195, 202; Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, 186n11, 193, 194, 201, 207 Yuval, Israel, 222, 309; historiographic method of, 320 Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Yerushalmi), 186n11, 193, 194, 201, 207; and Halbwachs, 208; Funkenstein on, 194–5, 201, 207–8 Zamosc, Israel (rabbi), 80, 81, 88, 90n14, 91n24, 93n34, 95n43, 95n47, 96n50, 96n52, 96n54; and Bible, 69; and Brahe, 72; and Delmedigo, 67, 91n23, 92n27; and empiricist physics, 69, 70–1, 76, 77–82, 83; and epistemological issues, 65, 75–6, 83–4, 87–8; and Galileo, 72; and Gumpertz, 78–9; and Itzig, 84; and Krueger, 82, 95n47; and Leistikow, 77–82, 93n36, 95nn44–5, 95n46; and Mendelssohn, 68, 78–9, 90n14; and Wolff, 77, 79, 93n36; argumentative strategies of, 71, 73, 74, 75, 79, 83–4; Berlin and, 76, 77, 79, 82, 84, 87; Etkes on, 96n54; on Aristotle, 69, 87; on Copernicus, 72, 92n26, 92n27; on Maimonides, 61, 69, 82–6, 87; on Rashi, 85; on the relation of rational to traditional knowledge, 85–6, 87; reconciles Talmud Sages and modern science, 69–70, 71,

Index 72; refutation of medieval science in, 71–2, 73; subversive effects of, 65, 66, 71, 74, 82, 86, 87; writer of commentaries, 65, 66–7, 68–9, 84, 92n26. See also Zamosc, Israel, works Zamosc, Israel, works: Arubbot hashamayim (The Windows of Heaven), 66–7, 72, 92n26; Commentary on‘Ruah. h. en,’ 68, 69, 71, 72, 77, 78, 79–82, 83, 85, 86–7, 88, 91nn20–1, 95nn44–5, 95n47; Commentary on Sefer elim, 67;

365

Commentary on Sefer yesod ‘olam, 67; Even Yisrael, 67, 90n16; Nes.ah. Yisrael, 66, 67, 68, 71, 82, 85, 87, 91n21; Nezed ha-dema‘, 67; T.uv haLevanon, 67, 84; Os.ar neh.mad, 67, 84, 90n14, 90n16, 92n26. See also under individual titles Zeuxis, 199 Zohar, 189n33, 316 Zuckerman, Yitzhak [Yitzchak], 322 Zunz: and the science of Judaism, 309, 315