THE

Erilightenment:AN

BOOKS BY PETER GAY

The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria .to FreudEducation of the Senses (1984)

The Tender Passion (1986)The Cultivation of Hatred (1993)

'The Naked Heart (1995)PleasureWars (1998)

INTERPRET ATION,Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments (1990)

Freud: A Life for Ou~Time (1988)

A Godless Jew:Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (1987)

Freud for Historians (1985)

Freud, Jews and Other Germans:Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (1978)

Art and Act: On Causes in History-Manet, Gropius, Mondrian (1976)

Style in Hisrory (1974)

.. Modern Europe (1973),with R. K.Webb

The Rise ,ofModern Paganism

\by PETER GAYThe Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues on the Enlightenment: (1970)

The Enlightenment: An InterpretationVol. II The Science of Freedom (1969)

Weimar Culture:The Outsider as InsiderIroox)

A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (1966) ,

I "

The Enlightenment: An InterpretationVol. t The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966)

The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (1964)

Voltaire's Politics:The Poet as Realist (1959)

The Dilemma 'of Democratic Socialism:Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (1952)

11-i!'III

r.W . W· NORTON & COMPANY

New York· London\

If the Antients, in their Purity, are as yet out of yourReach; search the Moderns, that are nearest to them.If you cannot converse with the most Antient, use themost Modern. For the Authors of the middle Age, andall that sort of Philosophy, as well as,Divinity, will beof little advantage to you.

Lord Shaftesburyto Michael Ainsworth.

May 5.1709

Lassen Sie uns bei den Alten in die Schule gehen.Was konnen noir nach der N atur fur bessere Lehrer

, -uiablen?Lessing

to Moses Mendelssohn., 1756

Lecteur eclaire et judicieux ... de grace apprenez auos amis quelle est Nnorme distance des Offices de.Ciceron du Manuel d'Epictete,des Maximes de l'em-" ,pereur Antonin, a taus les plats ouorages de morale[crits dans nos jargons du Nord. Auons-nous seule-ment, dans taus les liores faits depuis six cents ans, riende comparable a une page de Seneque? Non, nousn'avons rien qui en approche, et nous osons nouseleuercontre nos maltres! '

Voltaire,. Note of 1769. to the poem Les trois empereurs en Sorbotme .

CHAPTER ONE

The Useful and Beloved Past

, ,

I. HEBREWS AND HELLENES

I. ,.,

As CULTIVATED MEN in a c~ltivated age, the philosophes loved, classicalantiquity and took r-ure pleasure in it; as reformers,

they did.not hesitate to exploit, shrewdly and unscrupulously. theclassics they loved., They could exploit'them because, thoughtheir affection was authentic, they confronted the ancients withthe self-confidence of men who had become their own masters.~'Boerhave utilior Hippocrate, Neuiton totd antiquitate, T'assus

.Homero; 'sed-gloria primis," Voltaire jotted down in one of hisnotebooks: "Boerhaave is worth more than Hippocrates. Newton'more than all antiquity, Tasso more than Homerjbut glory tothe first."!

For the men of the Enlightenment, glory to the first ancestorsimplied disrespect for the second. All men have a single past with

,many facets, but the philosophes divided their past into twosectors and put both to work. The Christian sector gav,e them anadversary worthy of their hostility: when the philosophes pro-

.,'claimed that it was their mission to eradicate bigotry and super-stition, they meant that it was a: historic mission. At this point,

, on .this issue, history became not past, but present politics: thephilosophes never tired of pointing to the record Christians 'hadcompiled through the ages as evidence confirming the need' fordrastic remedial action in their own time. In the same manner,~he'pagan sector had its uses: it supplied them with Illustrious, ,;{~;.

,,,'•.. 1Notebooks, :409.

I: THE APPEAL TO ANTIQillTY32models and a respectable ancestry. The philosophes liked. tovisualize themselves reenacting historic battles, to denounce re-ligIous fanaticism and popularize Newton wrapped in the togaof Cicero or Lucretius. This is how they gave, their polemics thedignity of an age-old struggle between reason and unreason, astruggle that had been fought and lost in the ancient world andwas now being fought again, this time with good prospects ofsuccess.

The historical writings-of the Enlightenment are more than.special pleading; they are comprehensive, critical, often' brilliant-they are true history. Reversing Tacitus' famous precept, thephilosophes wrote history, with rage and, partisanship, and theirvery passion often allowed them to penetrate into regions hitherto. .inaccessible to historical explorers. Yet it also. made them con-

.\.~descending ~nd o~dly p~rochial:their. sense of the pa~ merged .: )h\\.,,[1\:lf~ all too readily With their sense of the present., Whet?er, they, 'I were imitating Lucretius, maligning St. Augustine, or flattering

Catherine the Great, they. were the same men facing different 'quarters of their intellectual horizon. Even more often than theyintended, Enlightenment. historians advanced the mission andbuoyed up the missionaries; they looked into the past as into amirror and extracted from their history 'the past they could use.This limits the range of philosophic history but enhances itsvalue as a clue:' 'it permits us to look over the philosophes'shoulders to discover in their historical portraits a portrait ofthemselves, and to read in their accounts of Seneca's heroism, orthe iniquities of the Inquisition, the mind of the Enlightenment.

II

With all their-passion for history, the philosophes' visionof the past was remarkably pessimistic. History was a register ofcrimes, a tale of cruelty and cunning, at best the record of unre-mitting conflict. All was not black: each age, each civilizationhad its defenders of the oppressed, its champions of reason andhumanity. Diderot's bleak ',Essai sur les regnes de Claude et deN eron pits courageous Stoics against superstitious tyrants; Hume

1: THE USeFUL AND BELOVED PAST33

finds a minority of sensible men in the midst of darkest medievalEngland. In general, barbarism arid religion had dominated thep~st, but a few glorious ages testified to the possibility that reasonmIght not merely be the critic but the master of civilization.

. It is possible to' explain this pessimism as a projection of thephIlosophes' own situation, as a mixture of self-pity and self-Importance which exaggerates the difficulties of their position toenhance the significance of their achievement. But it was moreth.an. that: it Was a coherent account of the motive power bothwithin and among epochs. As the Enlightenment saw it, thew.o:ld was, a~d had always been divided between ascetic, super-St1tIOUSenemies of the flesh, and men who affirmed life, the body,knowledge, .and generosity; between mythmakers and realists,pri~sts and philosophers. Heinrich Heine, wayward son 'of theEnlightenment, would later call ,these parties, most suggestively,Hebrews and Hellenes.

This conflict between' two irreconcilable patterns of life,t~o~ght and feeling, divided historical periods internally; it alsodivided them from one another. Each era had a dominant style,:vi~h either re~son o~ superstition in control, but thephilosophesmsisred that this dominance was merely the temporary ascendancyof one combatant over the other: few periods in history werewithout their admixture of reason or superstition-the darkest,most primitive ages had their philosophers, the most brilliant agesof reason and cultivation were infected by the survivals of old,or the seeds of new superstitions, This is What Voltaire meantw~en he said that the eighteenth century was both th~ Age ofPhilosophy and the Age of Superstition; it gives new'meaning toKant's observation that his age was the Age of Enlighten'ment,but not. an enlightened age. The conflict between Hebrews andHellenes was at once the source of disast~r and of progress.

This dualist view of history, rather than the celebrated theoryof progress,. characterizes the mind of the Enlightenment. Thetheory of prowess was. a: special case of this dualism: it gaveforma,l expreSSIOnto the hope that the. alternations between Agesof Philosophy and Ages of Belief were not inescapable, that manwa.s not ~orever. trapped' on the, -treadmill of historical cycles.Philosophical SOCIOlogyand philosophical history. supported and

r

I;1I'

IiIf

);1

-- - ~-'-----.-~- .. ---~-_. _._'. -" -.:...

34 I: THE APPEAL TO ANTIQUITY

confirmed eich other: both studied the conflict betw~en reasonand unreason. The first sought laws that might decide the struggle;the second traced its course through the ages. In fact, the philo-sophes developed a kind of comparative history which they ex-plicitly distinguished from the study of the past for its own sake.This history, first practiced by Montesquieu, later explored byScottish, sociologists like Adam Ferguson, and finally christened"Theoretical or Conjectural History," was sociology.PBut what-ever history the Enlightenment historians pursued, they focusedtheir attention 011 the rise and decline of the philosophic party,on the fortunes of criticism.

The Enlightenment's conception of history as a continuingstruggle between two types of mentality implies a' general scheme

~:~t.,1u.\ of periodization. The philosop~es di."i.d.ed~he past, roughly, into!,~,c:i"'four great epochs: the great nver civilizations of the Near East;

~d;~\ ancient Greece and Rome; the Christian millennium; and moderntimes, beginning with the "revival of letters." These four epochs

.\lL were rhythmically related to each other: the first and third were7f\ paired off as ages of myth,' belief, and superstition, while the

second arid fourth were ages of rationality, science, and enlight-'enment,

" I should observe immediately that the philosophes did notpropose this scheme as a rigid system. They recognized the stub-born individuality of cultures, 'and the continuities that link themost disparate ages. "The arts and sciences, indeed," David Humeremarked, "have flourished in one period, and have decayed inanother; but we may. observe, that at the time when they rose, togreatest perfection among ore people, they were perhaps totallyunknown to all the neighboring nations?" Some philosophescalled attention to the autonomous development of Eastern, civi-

.lizations: Voltaire, partly in calculated rebellion against Bossuet'snarrow vision of, the past, partly in unfeigned awe of Orientalsagacity, opened his Essai sur les mceurs et l'esprit des nationswith some appreciative passages on the civilizations of the Indiansand the Chinese. Others, like Condorcet, musing, on the uneven

2 The phrase is by Ferguson's favorite pupil, Dugald Stewart.See Gladys Bryson: Man and Society (1945), 88.3 "Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations," Works, III, 382.'

1: THEUSEFUL AND BELOVED PAST35

development of social classes and neighboring cultures 'jI;l their jl!own time; sympathetically described the plight of contemporary dsavages (who 'seemed to have undergone-little significant historical'idevelopment), and of the lower orders (which remained much 'f jlike their ancestors-in the darkest of dark ages). 'Besides, despite 2 } :1

some extravagant epithets, the most' fanatical anti-Christians Iamong the philosophes did !lot claim that the two pairs of ages 'jmatched' pre~iselYI; thdey conc~d~li? tdhat

hthe hChristll'an ~!ll~en~ium .* ,I

was more ranona 'an more CIVI ~e t an t e ear y CIVI izanons,just as they took pride in the superiority of their own time over :Greece and Rome. .,:.'I!

_ But while the philosophes themselves sensibly insisted onthese variations, the exceptions they adduced did not invalidate :itheir general scheme; they wrote the history of the human mind "ias the history of its ~ from myth, in classical antiquity, its dis-astrous decline under Christianity, and its glorious rebirth. InOnemanner or another, whether expressed in the prophetic fervorof Condorcet or the ironic detachment of Hume, the scheme,dominates philosophical history. The famous first chapter' ofVoltaire's Siecle de Louis XI V specifies "four happy ages": thecentur~es of Pericles and Plato, and of Caesar and Cicero (whichcorrespond to what I shall call the First Age of Criticism); andthe ages of the Medicean Renaissance, and of Louis XIV (whichconstitute the prehistory of the Enlighteiunent).4 These happyperiods are embedded in two Ages of Belief, which Voltaire dis-misses with superb disdain as miserable, vicious, and' backward.

• This periodic scheme, interestingly enough, was first devel-oped in the last two of these four happy ages. Renaissancehistorians like Giorgio Vasari periodized Italian art from itsperfection in Greece and Rome, through its decay afterConstantine, to its rebirth in the time of Giotto. And FrancisBacon wrote: "Only three revolutions and periods of learningcanproperly be reckoned; one among the Greeks, the secondamong, the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, thenations of Western Europe; and to each of these hardly twocenturies can justly be assigned. The intervening ages of theworld, in respect to any rich or flourishing growth of thesciences, were unprosperous. For neither the Arabians nor theSchoolmen need be mentioned; who in the intermediate times

, rather crushed the sciences with a multitude of treatises thatincreased their weight." The New Organon, LXXVIiI, inWorks,IV,·77.

, i

,36 I: THE APPEAL TO ANTIQUITY

Other .historians use a similar vocabulary, suggesting the rhythmicalternation of periods: "Mankind," writes Hume, "having atlength thrown off this yoke [of Aristotelianism], affairs are ,nowreturned nearly to the same situation as before, and EUROPE is.at present a copy at large, of what GREECE w~s' formerly a pat-tern in miniature.?" Rousseau, with all ·the extravagance .of hisearly Discours sur les sciences et les arts, characterizes .medievalhistory asa return to the grossest of antiquity: "Europe had re-lapsed into the barbarism of tl- ' earliest ages. The peoples of thispart of the world, so enlighte.ied today, lived some centuries ago

. in a condition worse than ignorance."6· D'Alembert, too,' speaksof the "revival of letters" as' emerging from a long. interval ofignorance which had been preceded by' centuries of enlighten-ment, of the "regeneration of ideas," the "return to reason andgood taste," the "revival of spirits," and the "rebirth of light."7Condorcet, finally, PQrtrays early modern Europe smarting undermedieval tyranny, awaiting the moment when a new enlighten-ment would allow it to be reborn a free civilization. Cliches, allof' them, but therefore' all the more eloquent 'witnesses to thementality of the philosophes. .

, This historical scheme will find few defenders today. It bearsall the stigmata usually imputed to Enlightenment historiographyin general-inadequate grasp of development, deficient sympathywith cultures alien or hostile to the rnovement.. assimilation ofpast events to polemical interests, smuggling in of moral judg-ments, and rationalistic interpretations. I have no intention ofdenying that these indictments, first .presented by. nineteenth-century historicists and current today, are weighty and valid, butthey concentrate on the' failings of philosophic history at theexpense of its merits. In fact, the historical writings of the En-

. lightenment were part of. a comprehensive effort-of physicists,epistemologists, and literary critics as much as of historians-tosecure rational control of the world, reliable knowledge of thepast, and freedom from the pervasive domination of. myth.

5 "Of the Rise and Prog-ress of the Arts and Sciences," Works,III, 183.6 Rousseau: tEuores, III, 6.7 Discours prelirninaire de l'Encyclopedie. in Melanljies, I; loi-5.·

1: THE USEFUL AND BELOVED PAST

I ~•

37In the midst of the struggle for objectivity they could not them-selves be o.bjective: 'myth could. be sympathetically understoodonly after It had been fully conquered,. but in the course of itsconquest .it.had to be fa.~ed as the enemy. The "pure insight"charactens:Ic of the Enlightenment, writes Hegel in some finepages. of his Phenomenology, "only appears in genuinely activeform in so far as it enters into conflict with belief."8 The Enlight-enment had to treat religion as superstition and error in order torecognize itself. Worship of the Chosen People' and submissiveconcentration on saints' lives could be overcome only by a violent,and hence one-sided reaction. Scholars could see the Christianmillennium fairly only after polemicists had freed themselves fr~mit by seeing it unfairly. '. , . .' .

.. The historians. of the Enlightenment,~, did much. Theydid not do everythmg. because they could not do everything, butat least they freed history from the parochialism of Christianscholars and from theological presuppositions, secularized theidea of causation and opened vast new territories for historical~nqu'iry. They went beyond tedious chronology, endless researchinto sacr~ddocu~~nts, and single-minded hagiography, and im-posed rational, critical methods of study on social, political, andI?tellectual d~vej.o.pments. As the organizing principle of En-lightenment histonography, the fourfold periodic scheme there-fore. shares its excellences as much as its shortcomings. Its mostglanng an.d.most notorious defect was 'its unsympathetic, oftenbrutal, .~tlffiat~ of. Ch~istianity; yet it achieved the rudimentaryreC?gOl~IOnthat .historical epochs have a prevailing mental styleWh.IChinforms their science, their morals, their whole way ofs~e~ng.t~e world; t~at the' spectrum of' available styles may bedI;I.ded mto. tw~ kinds, ~be mythmaki?g or religious and thecritical or scientific; and finally, that history has discontinuitiesas well as continuities, dramatic revolution's as well as slowchanges.

.' ' . Pa~ad~xical as it may sound, then, Enlightenment historians;rationalist m sensibility, partisan in purpose, careless in detail,

. ,

8 G. W.F. Hegel: Phenomenology of Mind, tr. ). B. Baillie(1955), 560.

I: THE APPEALTO ANTIQUITY38hasty in judgment, unfair in char~c.terizati?n, and defi~ient.inempathy, willful, sectarian, even VICiOUS,still made a historicaldiscovery of enduring validity. This emergenc~ of truth fromerror is neither a dialecrical miracle nor an Instance of pre-established harmony. It is something far more .modest. For alltheir misjudgments and prejudices-and sometimes because. ofthem-the philosophes took first steps, no more, toward a SCIen-tific history of culture. Montesquieu's distinction' between fo.rmsand principles of government; Turgor's ladder of theologIcal,metaphysical, and positive forms of thought:r~vers~d by su~-ceeding epochs; Hume's analysis of :he religiOus. Impulse mprimitive and civilized countries; Lessing's ,speculatIv~ ac~ountof the evolution of religious beliefs; even Gibbon's fehne dIss~c-tion of Christian meekness insinuating itself into the Roman mind-all these are attempts to grasp the deepest, and he?ce .le~stvisible, convictions that hold a culture together and gIve It Itsdistinctive shape. '.'

It is largely the philosophes' own fa~lt If later wnt~r5~ rarelyappreciated their contribution t.o .hist?rIcal understanding. ~hephilosophes' perception of a dIstInctiOn. between mythma~mgand scientific mentalities ,was the perceptIon of, a fact, but SIncethey came to it first of all through their position a~ cr~tics andbelligerents, they almost ine~i.tably' conve~ted ~e. historical factinto a moral judgment, praISIng, Indeed identifying themselveswith, one mentality and denigrating the other. They;translatedtheir insight into an indictment, and this made it no.t only lessvalid, but also less palatable and less visible, to succeedI~g genera-tions. It is hardly surprising that those who l~ter re)ect~d t~ephilosophes' verdict failed to, gi~e them credit 'f?r theIrd~s-covery. But whatever the ingratItude of a later time, the, dIS-covery was theirs, and it, reassured, them and gave them:a plac,e

~ to stand. It must be a peculiar pleasure to' be able to kill one sIf\- father and choose another. '

1: THE USEFUL AND BELOVED PAST 39

2. A CONGENIAL SENSE AND SPIRIT

I'N ' ,OT ALL of the philosophes' classicism aimed at anything 50, ' portentous and liberating as parricide. Precisely because

they were above all men of their times, much of their classicalerudition' was politically innocuous. Instead of separating them'from the established orthodoxy, it tied them to it. After all, in theAge of Enlightenment classical literature was the common pos-session of educated men, not the preserve of the specialist; to quotea line from Lucretius was to demonstrate ,one's respectabilityrather than one's radicalism. Samuel Johnson spoke for the republicof letters as a whole when he' defended, the practice as demon-strating "a community of mind." "Classical quotation," he said,"is the parole 'of literary. men all over the world.t'?

In our time, when Latinity is dying and has retreated to the,, academy, it is hard to visualize the easy, intimate traffic between'the eighteenth century and "the ancients.' Educated Christiansnever thought for a moment that their classicism might in anyway interfere, with their religious duties. Horace especially,Horace, the most pagan of poets, was the great favorite of thecentury: Swift tried his hand at translating him, and so did Tur-g!'lt; Diderot imitated him, and so did Wieland. Horace supplied

'topics for Addison's Spectator and rationalizations for country, squires enjoying rural contentment. When Oglethorpe's expedi-

tion set sail for Georgia, ,Charles Wesley, with no sense ofincon-gruity, borrowed 'his pious benediction-e-Cbzisro duce et auspice'Cbristo-i-ircm a Horatian ode.' Even in East Prussia classicalcurrency was valid coin: Kant did not find it necessary to identifythe phrase sapere aude, which 'he had suggested as a motto for theEnlightenment, as a Horatian tag.2 And so when Diderot quoted

9 Life of Johnson (under May 8,.1781), IV, 101.1Epistles, I, 7, 27: nil desperandum Teucro duce et auspice.See Richard M. Gurnrnere: The American Colonial Mind andthe Classical Tradition (1963), 17.2 See Horace: 'Epistles, I, I,' 4<r1': "Dimidium .facti qui coepithabet: sapere aude: Incipe,,-,iTo have begun is to be half, done;dare to know; start!"