Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (43 page)

Figure 8.4
Balthasar Bekker sieving devils, from
Curieuse Gespräche im Reiche derer Todten. Zweyte Unterredung oder Gespräche im Reiche derer Todten
(Leipzig and Braunschweig: s.n., 1731), frontispiece to part 2. Wellcome Library, London.

More broadly, Bekker’s insistence on natural or physical explanations for all supposed encounters with spirits, angels, and devils led him to emphasize the power of the night and sleep to cloud the mind. Dark times and places became the antipode to the Cartesian rationality
he took as his method. The accounts of Jacob wrestling with an angel (Genesis 32; Hosea 12) “occurred, as in every case before and after, in a divine night-vision,” Bekker explained.
¹⁰¹
Likewise “the Devil … does not have the freedom to haunt the world or appear to people, except in sleep or in a dream.” In books
II
–
IV
of
The World Bewitched
he explains dozens of biblical, historical, and contemporary encounters with angels, devils, or spirits as nocturnal dreams, visions, or misperceptions. Examining an account from the early church, Bekker asks “At what time” did the Devil appear to Theodoretus? “At night. He was perhaps sleeping or dreaming.” One must consider the time of day when examining any account of a ghost or demon, Bekker insists.

In his refutation of dozens of ghost stories in book
IV
, Bekker articulates the role of the night in his analysis:

For example, when the will-o’-the-wisp sometimes pops and crackles and gives off a strange and unpleasant noise, like the whimpering or sighing of a person, it seems to some, because man’s fearfulness is greater at night than by day and hinders him from using his judgment and reason properly (so that the true cause is not recognized) that all these … are the antics of Satan.

Bekker follows this observation with a series of accounts concerning ghosts and specters, emphasizing that each occurred “in the evening, while lying in bed,” “in the evening hours,” “in the evening twilight,” or “at night in front of the bed.”
¹⁰²
Signaling a key theme in the later Enlightenment understanding of the night, Bekker demonstrates in example after example that the dreams and fears of the night check the use of reason. Night became the shadowy supplement to the light of reason, always dispelled but ever-present.

Fontenelle and Bekker shared a mission to reorient their world by placing the familiar in a startling new contexts. The secularizing, disenchanting force of their works redrew lines of intellectual and cultural division between men and women, between Europeans and
the wider world, and between the enlightened and the superstitious. Questions of human difference by gender, region, and culture play a key role in
The Conversations
and in
The World Bewitched
. Fontenelle and Bekker figure very differently in the early Enlightenment, but in their projects of education and enlightenment they both propose new zones of ignorance and new boundaries between light and darkness. Both rely on a hierarchy of perception to break down old barriers and create new divisions.

References to region and race set the stage for the last lesson in Fontenelle’s explication of astronomy. At the end of the final evening, the marquise asks “‘haven’t I always heard that the Chinese were very great astronomers?’” The narrator agrees as to their reputation, but corrects the marquise. He explains:

In truth, I am more and more persuaded there is a certain Genius which has hitherto been confined within our Europe, or which at least has extended very little beyond it.
¹⁰³

Here the fundamental distinction between the
raisonneurs
and the vulgar is generalized across the earth. Among the Europeans some few would be enlightened; among other peoples, likely none. The Europeans stand in the same relationship to other peoples as the
raisonneurs
to the vulgar, at the summit of a hierarchy of perception and understanding. This European claim on enlightenment is underscored throughout the
Conversations
by reference to the astrological and cosmological “fallacies” of other peoples, for example in the discussion of the fear caused by eclipses or comets. Indeed, Fontenelle describes the earth itself demarcated by “complexions.” Looking down from the height of understanding, Fontenelle explained:

I sometimes imagine that I’m suspended in the air, motionless while the Earth turns under me for twenty-four hours, and that I see passing under my gaze all the different faces: white, black, tawny, and olive complexions. At first there are hats, then turbans; wooly heads, then shaved heads.

The text brings the “certain Genius” of the Europeans together with the visible contrast between “societies.” Trying to imagine what inhabitants of other worlds would look like, Fontenelle’s narrator generalizes about human variety, observing that “‘All faces in general are
made on the same model, but those of two large societies – European, if you like, and African – seem to have been made on two specific models’.”
¹⁰⁴
Visible difference and intellectual superiority coincide in the construction of race.

In Fontenelle’s most popular work the intellectual darkness of “the vulgar” serves as a backdrop to the glittering intellects of the marquise and the narrator, who agree not to even address the irrational masses. On a larger scale, the absurd beliefs, barbaric practices, and scientific ignorance of the “Africans and Tartars,” “Iroquois,” and Chinese which decorate the
Conversations
reveal the new hierarchies of race and region built into this fundamental Enlightenment text.

The relationship between gender and race in the
Conversations
is mirrored in the contemporary
Code noir
regulating slavery in France’s American colonies, also published in 1687.
¹⁰⁵
The gender inclusion of the
Conversations
, in which the beautiful blond marquise becomes the intellectual superior of the waggish noblemen who fail to understand the solar system, is consolidated as the marquise takes her place in the European superiority asserted by Fontenelle. The inclusion of enlightened women takes place in a new hierarchy which is based on European knowledge of the natural world and marked by race. The authors of the
Code noir
sought to consolidate difference through gender in similar terms by decreeing that slave status followed the maternal line. Articles 8–13 of the code asserted that all persons born in the French Caribbean colonies “will follow the condition of their mother.” The maternal transmission of status in the
Code noir
contrasted sharply with French practice and noble ideology, which relentlessly emphasized the male line of descent.
¹⁰⁶
In the colonies, however, concubinage with female slaves was an overriding factor. The
Code noir
punished such “free men who will have one or several children from their concubinage with their slaves,” fining them heavily. “Beyond the fine, they [would] be deprived of the slave and the children, and … she and they be confiscated for the profit of the [royal] hospital, without ever being manumitted.” Creating race as a category of division shifted the transmission of civil status from men to women in the
Code noir
. In practice, racial separation in the French Caribbean hardened in the following years, making the
Code
noir
appear relatively liberal in its tolerance for mixed-race marriages, for example. The
Conversations
and the
Code noir
use gender in similar ways to draw new boundaries between learning and ignorance, or between freedom and slavery, in order to consolidate the category “European” or “French,” defined in opposition to extra-European ignorance, superstition, dark skin, and servility.

In
The World Bewitched
Bekker also redefined the relationship between enlightened Europeans and “all the Pagans in the World … in Asia … in Africa … and at last in America” in far-reaching terms. Bekker considered the place of these “Modern Pagans” in the first book of
The World Bewitched
, described by an English reviewer as “being but a collection of the various Opinions of Men about this Matter.”
¹⁰⁷
The reviewer thought that this first book of
The World Bewitched
“has not been attended with great Difficulties.” Compared to the furor created by the Cartesian and exegetical arguments in books
II
and
III
, that was true, and few scholars today have examined the argument Bekker makes in the first book.

Contemporaries
did
respond to his discussion of belief in the Devil by “Pagans as well Ancient as Modern,” however. These contemporaries, such as Benjamin Binet and John Beaumont, saw that, far from being a noncommittal survey of beliefs in demons, the Devil, ghosts, and witches in all times and places, this first section makes a bold and startling argument that redraws the dividing lines between knowledge and ignorance, shifting the “the frightful Darkness of Paganism” onto the beliefs of the other peoples of world, ancient and modern.
¹⁰⁸

In the first book of
The World Bewitched
Bekker assembles evidence about pagan beliefs in the Devil, demons, ghosts, witches, and spirits. He argues that “the difference to be found amongst them is not material, and must be accounted as inconsiderable, comparatively to the conformity that is betwixt them all.” Bekker interprets the consistent pagan belief in evil spirits in light of his assertion, “certain and undoubted, that every Opinion that proceeds from Paganism as from its Original, cannot at the same time be founded upon the Holy Scripture.” Bekker implies here and argues later that pagan belief in spirits is “contrary to true Reason, and … Holy Scripture affords no
proofs of it.”
¹⁰⁹
These pagan beliefs are thus entirely false, not merely distorted misperceptions of a Christian reality that includes ghosts, demons, and witches. The overall claim of
The World Bewitched
that spirits and demons can affect nothing material, and that the Devil’s reach does not extend to the physical world, is supported in book
I
by this evidence, leading Bekker to conclude, for example, that “It is … sufficiently proved, by all the quotations of this Book, that there are no Miracles, Oracles, purging Fires, Apparitions of Hobgoblins or Souls, Witchcraft by Letters and Characters, or choice of Days, either in Judaism or Popery; but they draw their Original from Paganism.”
¹¹⁰
Rooted in paganism, these beliefs had no place in the further reformation of Christianity Bekker proposed.

The place of the practices and beliefs of modern-day pagans in Bekker’s argument presented the strange reversal of the well-known proof of the existence of God “by universal consent.” The argument from “universal consent” functioned as a “moral proof” of the existence of God, quite familiar to Protestant and Catholic theologians alike.
¹¹¹
According to this proof all nations, ancient and modern, demonstrated some belief in a god or gods. However mistaken these pagan conceptions of the Divine might be, taken as a whole they showed an inescapable underlying truth. No reasonable person would conclude that all these peoples were mistaken; therefore, there must be a real God. Among the many proofs of the existence of God taught by early modern theologians, that from universal consent was a widely cited and seen as a meta-proof, a “consequence of the force of all proofs of God.”
¹¹²
Theologians distinguished, of course, between the proper Christian understanding of God based on revelation, and the misconceived, anthropomorphic pagan gods. Nonetheless, “the abuse which one does to a truth does not destroy it,” as the Huguenot theologian Benjamin Binet explained, and pagan beliefs testified indirectly to the reality of the Christian God.
¹¹³
This argument for the existence of God underscored, however tentatively, the fundamental unity of humankind. Belief in the Divine was universal and evident – the only partial exceptions were the European “atheists,” real or imagined, against whom seventeenth-century theologians sharpened their arguments.
¹¹⁴
A flicker of the true God was visible even in the darkest pagan idolatry.
Recognition of a common truth united all peoples, however distorted or idolatrous pagan understandings of God might be.

Bekker divided this unity. In his view ancient and modern pagans joined most Christians in the common and false belief in the power of the Devil, spirits, and witches. Bekker opposed himself and an enlightened minority of his readers to the superstitious pagans and Christians of his age. He proposed “to the Reader and myself, the lesson of the Apostle in his first Epistle to Timothy. 4:7: ‘Reject prophane, and Old Wives Fables, and exercise thy self to Godliness.’” In the first book or section of
The World Bewitched
Bekker argued from universal error: the age-old and world-wide belief in spirits and the Devil was, according to his Cartesian understanding of spirits, impossible; according to his reading of the Bible it was unscriptural as well. Reason and Scripture showed pagans to be in utter darkness on this issue, and their ignorant belief in ghosts and spirits could only be cleared up from Cartesian and scriptural starting points. Bekker’s reliance on these two sources of authority, the New Philosophy and Scripture, led him to forthrightly deny any truth or value in the beliefs of the “Pagans as well Ancient as Modern” he surveyed. This denial distinguished him from the detached but respectful tone of eighteenth-century works which developed the concept of “comparative religion,” such as Picart and Bernard’s
Religious Ceremonies of the World
(1723–37).
¹¹⁵