Dilemmas of Enlightenment: Studies in the Rhetoric and Logic of Ideology [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520913462

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D I L E M M A S OF E N L I G H T E N M E N T

The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor Also of interest in the series: Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, translated by Janet Lloyd Philippe Hamon, Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France, translated by Katia Sainson-Frank and Lisa Maguire Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from "Utopia" to "The Tempest" Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, translated by Emily McVarish Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry David Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 14.50-1700 Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge, Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600

DILEMMAS OF ENLIGHTENMENT STUDIES IN THE RHETORIC AND LOGIC OF IDEOLOGY

OSCAR KENSHUR

University of California Press Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1993 by The Regents of the University of California Parts of this book were published in earlier versions: Chapter 1: "Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism," Critical Inquiry 14, and "(Avoidable) Snares and Avoidable Muddles," Critical Inquiry 15. © 1988, 1989 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. Chapter 2: "Scriptural Deism and the Politics of Dryden's Religio Laid," ELH 54 (Winter 1987). Reprinted by permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter 5: "Fiction and Hypothesis in Voltaire," in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 24:1 (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1983). Reprinted by permission of Texas Tech University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kenshur, Oscar, 1942Dilemmas of enlightenment: studies in the rhetoric and logic of ideology / Oscar Kenshur. p. cm.—(The New historicism ; 26) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-08155-2 (alk. paper) 1. Literature—Philosophy. 2. Ideology in literature. 3. Toleration in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PN45.K428 1993 801—dc2o 92-36297 CIP Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. @

For Margot

Contents

Preface

ix

ONE METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION 1. Ideological Essentialism and How to Avoid It Ideas and Commitments The Theory of Limited Structural Co-optation The Theory of Absolute Co-optation The Concept of Intellectual Co-optation Intellectual Co-optation and the Theory of Ideology Intellectual Geography and the Mechanisms of Ideological Critique Ideological Criticism without Essences Motives and Explanations

3 3 8 10 17 21 24 35 42

TWO RELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY, TOLERATION, AND THE SOCIAL ORDER 2. Dryden's Religio Laid and the Politics of Scriptural Deism Orthodoxy and Political Logic Dryden's "Occasion" Père Simon and the Perils of Protestantism Minimalism: Rational and Revealed The Shifting Politics of Deism Despotism and Anarchy Conclusions

3. Bayle's Theory of Toleration: The Politics of Certainty and Doubt Bayle, Dryden, and Lord Herbert The Delimitation of Rationalism

49 49 52 54 62 64 72 75

77 77 85

The Erring Conscience The Paradox of the Persecutor's Conscience The Force of Uncertainty The Delimitation of Skepticism Moral Truths and the Politics of Doubt 4. Paganism, Christianity, and the Social Order Bossuet and the Tradition of Christian History Bayle on Religious Diversity and Social Order Hume on Christian Morality and Christian Intolerance Montesquieu on Roman Toleration and Social Control Gibbon and the Rhetoric of Dichotomies Conclusion: Structures of Erastianism THREE

87 89 92 95 102 112 112 120 129 135 143 150

SCIENCE, MORAL KNOWLEDGE, A N D T H E S O C I A L ORDER

5. Cosmic Politics and Counterhypothetical Fictions

155

Preliminary The Chain of Being and Social Stratification Jenyns, Johnson, and the Conflict of Legitimations Pope, Voltaire, and the Conflict of Theodicies The Rejection of Hypothesis Voltaire's Dilemma: Method versus Metaphysics The Dilemma Resolved Conclusion: Inductivist Toryism

155 159 163 167 172 175 183 186

6. Authorized Experience: Narration and Moral Knowledge in Rasselas

188

Dangerous Hypotheses Rasselas and Ethical Inductivism The Paradox of Mediated Inductivism Genres and Habits of Mind Induction and Revelation The Danger of Inductivism The Choice of Life

188 195 199 203 207 213 217

Notes

223

Index

251

Preface

This b o o k is an attempt to bring together disparate texts and disparate m o d e s of inquiry in order to recapture a world in w h i c h there w a s n o clear distinction b e t w e e n literary ambitions and political commitments, or b e t w e e n philosophical cogency and rhetorical finesse. A long process of fumbling and groping w a s required before m y e y e s could adjust to the light of that world, and before I could s o u n d as if I might k n o w w h a t I w a s talking about. In this process, I w a s aided by the expertise and critical intelligence of colleagues both in Bloomington and e l s e w h e r e , and by the generosity and hospitality of institutions and individuals w h o were willing to give m e time or space for research and speculation. Early w o r k on the project w a s supported by Indiana University, first b y m e a n s of a S u m m e r Faculty Fellowship and later b y means of a grant for research in L o n d o n from the President's Council on International Programs. T h e first draft w a s completed during a research year m a d e possible b y a fellowship from the National E n d o w m e n t for the Humanities. In the fall of 1989, w h e n I w a s a Visiting Scholar at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Center's Director, Paul Hernadi, w a s a gracious host w h o p r o v i d e d m e with the facilities for reclusive scholarship and the opportunities for stimulating discussion. A t the A m e r i c a n A c a d e m y in Rome, w h e r e I w a s a Visiting Scholar in the winter of 1990, m y w o r k on early m o d e r n ideas a b o u t religious toleration in ancient Rome benefited greatly from the classical erudition of several of m y fellow residents. A m o n g the helpful librarians w h o facilitated m y research, I am especially grateful to those at the William A n d r e w s Clark Library in Los A n g e l e s , the Institut Protestant de Théologie in Paris, and the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana. But I cannot omit mention of the grave bibliotecari w h o afforded me the piquant pleasure of s t u d y i n g H u m e ' s Natural History of Religion at the Vatican Library. ix

x

Preface

The following people read parts of the manuscript and made valuable suggestions: John Hazlett, Daniel Javitch, H. James Jensen, Richard B. Miller, Richard Nash, Orest Ranum, Lee Sterrenburg, Paul Strohm, James Winn, and my fellow members of the Indiana University Committee on Social and Political Thought. A question posed by a member of the audience—I believe it was Charles Hinnant—after I read a very preliminary version of chapter 6 at a conference helped to guide me in the subsequent expansion and clarification of my argument. Let my acknowledgment of the influence of that one questioner extend to numerous others, from London to Santa Barbara, who had a bigger impact on the shape of this book than they could imagine. Margot Gray entered the scene only during the last stages of the project, and although she may not have greatly affected the book, she certainly altered the landscape around it.

1

Ideological Essentialism and How to Avoid It But ideas don't originate anywhere, just as water doesn't originate in clouds. Ideas are there, waiting for someone to seize them. Charles Baxter

IDEAS AND COMMITMENTS

We are accustomed to the notion that people can hold conflicting and apparently irreconcilable beliefs. For example, many explain natural events in nonteleological, mechanistic ways in one sphere of their lives and think in terms of divine providence and mind/ body dualism in another sphere. And although we know stories of personal crises—those, for example, experienced by educated Christians who were suddenly confronted with the Darwinian conception of natural history—in which people have felt the need to decide between conflicting beliefs, and to reject one system in favor of another, we do not consider it obligatory, either in a moral or intellectual sense, for people to be troubled by inconsistencies between separate spheres. That is to say, neither our political culture nor the norms of intellectual respectability demand that people attempt to reconcile apparently conflicting systems of belief. Indeed, some sort of compartmentalization has come to have the status of an acceptable and even honorable alternative to thoroughgoing consistency. Thus, when we encounter a zeal for consistency and a refusal to compartmentalize beliefs—as when people with the conviction that they are obeying the revealed commands of God undertake to invade and occupy neighboring countries, or to establish theocracies, or to disrupt the lives of physicians who perform abortions—we may feel that the violation of compartmental boundaries poses a threat to civility and to the moral and social order. 3

4

Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

I think that these facts about our political and intellectual culture make it difficult for us to understand seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury literature and thought. The intellectual life of early modern Europe did not generally value compartmentalization or even tolerate its most harmless manifestations. Then, as now, people were deeply troubled when the religious beliefs of others were used to justify breaches of civility or disruptions of the public order. But such disruptions were not generally perceived as failures to observe the proper boundaries between religion and politics. There were no proper boundaries between religion and politics; the two realms were virtually inseparable. Religious beliefs that had bad political consequences were bad beliefs, and since it was widely believed that religious diversity had bad political consequences, heterodox beliefs were widely deemed ipso facto politically dangerous. To neutralize the threat posed by fanatics or heretics it was necessary to correct their beliefs—by persuasion or by compulsion—or to eliminate the obstinate dissenters from the body politic. Even the more enlightened thinkers—as we will see in the ensuing chapters—those who believed in toleration and ostensibly rejected attempts to compel beliefs, were often interested less in respecting private convictions than in promoting a certain kind of universal religion that everyone ought to accept. Since the right religion was the one that would promise salvation as well as promote social peace, and since any residue of sectarian beliefs that would still be held in private must be irrelevant to salvation or social harmony (and hence superfluous or nugatory), there would be little reason to respect private beliefs that did not conform to the official ones. Accordingly, those who spoke on behalf of persecuted minorities might argue that the maintenance of their beliefs was in fact necessary for their salvation and was at the same time not inimical to the public order. Those minorities who were of a more revolutionary bent might argue that the public order needed to be overthrown precisely in order to allow oneself and one's coreligionists to achieve salvation. Whichever side one was on, one's argument had to be comprehensive and had to include the political and soteriological aspects of one's systems of belief. Thus the intellectual norm shared by the advocates of persecution and compulsion, by the advocates of toleration, and by the advocates of revolution presupposed the need for consistency and would not attribute any value to compartmentalization.

Ideological Essentialism

5

The pressure against compartmentalization did not apply merely to the inseparability of political and religious commitments but also involved the relationship of religio-political issues to epistemological principles. After it became clear that battles over scriptural interpretation would have inconclusive outcomes, there were increasing attempts to buttress one's religio-political position by bringing to bear intellectual methods that appealed to human reason or to systematic observation. But the more elements one needs to tie together, the more difficult it is to maintain consistency. For example, epistemological ideas that one invokes to defend one's scriptural interpretations may ultimately throw into question the status of religious revelation as a guide to the divine will. For the epistemological principles, by dint of their very claims to universal truth, might overshadow or preempt the very texts that they were originally serving to explicate. In fact, there are numerous ways in which the epistemological principles that one embraces on behalf of one aspect of one's beliefs might ultimately threaten other commitments. The kind of situation that I am describing was dramatized by Montesquieu in his Lettres persanes. Usbek, the central character, has embraced an enlightened rationalism in one realm but clings to a different configuration of beliefs in another realm. As a philosopher who speaks the language of the Enlightenment, he believes that people are capable of obtaining moral knowledge through rational means, by dint of their capacity to grasp transcendent principles of equity and justice, and of behaving virtuously in accordance with that knowledge. Armed with such moral knowledge, individuals can transcend their selfish interests and join with others to form republics in which heroism and self-sacrifice constitute a norm of everyday behavior. Not only are people capable of being virtuous without being constrained to do so; only unconstrained acts can count as virtuous: actions performed out of fear of punishment or hope of reward are not meritorious. The philosophical Usbek is baffled by the specific and mutually inconsistent commandments of revealed religions, commandments according to which objects and practices are arbitrarily designated as pure or impure and hence as pleasing or repugnant to God. As the master of a seraglio back in Persia, on the other hand, Usbek sequesters his wives in order to protect them from defilement. Purity is not enhanced by being the product of free choice,

6

Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

just as impurity is not mitigated by good intentions.1 The taboos of the seraglio are enforced by fear of punishment and follow the mandates of a revealed religion. Usbek is a fictional character who is evidently untroubled by the fact that he appeals to universal reason when talking as a philosopher but appeals to narrow religious taboos when talking about the politics of the seraglio. But the sophisticated writers who participated in the polemical battles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—writers whose texts are now often read as timeless works of art or philosophy—were acutely conscious of the fact that their embrace of new ideas risked running afoul of other commitments. They were aware that ideas needed to be handled with care if they were to achieve the right results. Their purpose was not to achieve peace of mind or any other sort of personal fulfillment that might be derived from philosophical consistency; their purpose was to defeat their enemies and to avoid catastrophe for themselves. Usbek's crude compartmentalization of beliefs in fact results in catastrophe. The rebellion in the seraglio that serves as the dramatic climax of the novel has as its ideological justification precisely those principles that Usbek had accepted in the abstract but had attempted to keep from penetrating into the seraglio. These principles had, however, been taken up by one of his wives, Roxane, and had been used to legitimate her violation of the chastity taboo and her violent actions against the eunuchs who had enforced Usbek's authority. Although fiction sometimes has the virtue of dramatizing and highlighting phenomena that are less clearly defined in the world of everyday experience, my inquiries are ultimately concerned with clashes of ideas and perspectives as they were experienced by real historical figures, participants in early modern polemical battles involving religion, ethics, politics, and epistemology. Like Usbek, these writers often embraced new principles that were not in complete accord with other social, religious, or political commitments. They did so for various reasons. Perhaps it was because the new ideas were taken up when they seemed useful and before it became apparent that they were double-edged; perhaps it was because the new ideas carried a great deal of prestige by dint of their association with powerful new scientific explanations; or perhaps the ideas had already been used effectively by the other side,

Ideological Essentialism

7

and it was felt that it would be imprudent to leave such powerful weapons in the hands of one's enemies. These writers could not hope to get away with a compartmentalization of their beliefs. The sharply honed ability to point out inconsistencies and contradictions in the writings of one's enemies was a conspicuous feature of the intellectual life of the time. Montesquieu's satiric exposure of Usbek could readily be repeated in real life, against more formidable opponents and with greater acerbity and rancor. Or Roxane's appropriation of Usbek's arguments in the cause of rebellion could be carried out by other sorts of radicals who knew how to manipulate ideas that had previously been withheld from them or used against them. When each side has access to the same weapons, then success depends upon the subtlety of one's strategies, the ways in which potential inconsistencies are smoothed over, dangerous arguments neutralized, recalcitrant ideas made to fit—or to appear to fit—together. The world that I have been describing—a world in which politics, religion, ethics, and epistemology were inseparable, in which attempts to compartmentalize beliefs were liable to be exposed and used against one, and in which ideas were appropriated, neutralized, and put to new uses—is the world to be examined in this study. The intellectual dynamics of this world should be of interest not only to students of early modern literature and thought but also to those concerned with some of the theoretical debates that have been raging across the humanistic discourses. When I talk about religious and epistemological ideas as serving social and political ends, I am referring to phenomena that generally come under the heading of ideology—that is, ways in which particular symbolic structures play roles in overarching patterns of legitimation. But to talk about the ways in which individual writers appropriate ideas and thereby alter their ideological significance, or attempt to neutralize ideas that might otherwise prove to be dangerous, is to diverge radically from what has come to be a fashionable way of talking about texts and of talking about ideology. Indeed, one of the purposes of this book is to challenge contemporary assumptions about the ideological analysis of texts and to offer an alternative conception that is supported both theoretically and historically. I will argue that the ideological valences of ideas are not intrinsic

8

Methodological

and Theoretical

Introduction

to them but are context-dependent, and that the relevant context is not a given but is something that can be redefined by individual authors. Insofar as I talk about the recontextualization of ideas in terms of appropriation and neutralization, I am assuming that it is precisely the amenability of ideas to such procedures that poses a profound challenge to conspicuous currents in the contemporary theory and practice of ideological criticism. I wish to pose this challenge both by way of justifying my own methodology and by way of illuminating the broader relevance of the historical investigations that follow. Accordingly, I will introduce chapters 2 through 6 by discussing in relatively abstract terms the way intellectual appropriation or co-optation bears on our understanding of ideological mechanisms. It will be useful to begin by contrasting my approach to two theories of co-optation that have successively held the stage during the past twenty-five years. THE THEORY OF LIMITED STRUCTURAL CO-OPTATION

My own use of the term "co-optation" conforms in a general way with the sense that entered the lexicon only as recently as the 1960s but has come to be the standard sense: the preempting or disarming of one's opponents by "taking them over."2 But when we are discussing the co-optation of theories, ideas, artistic styles, or other symbolic structures, this general definition lacks adequate precision: it leaves room for distinctly different ways of understanding the process by which this "taking over" occurs. What might be called the standard account of co-optation is to be found in Herbert Marcuse's discussion of "repressive tolerance." Marcuse "initiated the analysis of co-optation as a theme of radical left critique," 1 but I think that it would be fair to say that, insofar as the concept remains alive in contemporary humanistic discourse, it is in a form that Marcuse would barely recognize. While I wish to raise some suspicions about the newer, more fashionable version of co-optation, I have no nostalgic impulse to revive Marcuse's theory. It is nonetheless worth recalling what Marcuse had to say. For embedded in his account is a conception of co-optation that goes against the grain both of his own theory and of the theory that has superseded it. It is this lost conception that seems to me

Ideological Essentialism

9

to m a k e the most sense in itself a n d to h a v e the greatest explanatory p o w e r ; accordingly, it is this lost conception of co-optation that I w i s h to dust off and give a prominent role in this study. The conception that M a r c u s e explicitly sets forth m a y be called "structural co-optation," and the conception that has superseded it I will call "absolute structural co-optation." Once w e h a v e looked at these t w o w a y s of understanding co-optation, w e will be in a position to appreciate the value of the alternative conception that informs this book and that I call "intellectual co-optation." M a r c u s e argues that "in our a d v a n c e d industrial society," tolerance of oppositional ideas serves, paradoxically, to strengthen and perpetuate the status quo. 4 This comes about because, in such a society, the structure of the w h o l e determines " e v e r y particular function and relation." In the context of contemporary society, " e v e n progressive m o v e m e n t s threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the g a m e " ("RT," 83). The expression of progressive principles in such a society serves to strengthen the established structures of p o w e r " b y testif y i n g to the existence of democratic liberties, which, in reality, h a v e c h a n g e d their content and lost their e f f e c t i v e n e s s " (84). Thus dissent is prevented from being efficacious at the same time that it serves to legitimate the democratic " o p e n n e s s " of the society in w h i c h it is voiced. T h e inability of the oppositional minority to h a v e an impact on the w h o l e , it should be noted, is not a matter of simply being d r o w n e d out by a pluralistic cacophony. It results from the fact that the majority has been "indoctrinated" through the media of mass culture ("RT," 98-99). Since the people are not a w a r e that they h a v e been indoctrinated, they think that they are a u t o n o m o u s and are m a k i n g free choices f r o m a range of alternatives. Hence they accept an illusory f r e e d o m while rejecting the ideas that w o u l d liberate them. A s this outline implies, M a r c u s e sees the cultural items that get co-opted by mechanisms of repressive tolerance as intrinsically oppositional a n d emancipatory. Indeed, Marcuse's project can be understood as an attempt to explain w h y , in a modern democratic society, the truth fails to m a k e people free. A m o n g the oppositional forces that get co-opted are art and rationality. Art is a "protest against the established reality": it

io

Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

"stands against history, withstands history which has been the history of oppression, for art subjects reality to laws other than the established one, to the laws of the Form which creates a different reality—negation of the established one" ("RT," 89).5 Also intrinsically oppositional, according to Marcuse, is rationality, which is "free from indoctrination, manipulation, extraneous authority" (93) and which, by getting beneath the appearances disseminated by the dominant culture, yields the "objective truth which can be discovered, ascertained only in learning and comprehending that which is and that which ought to be done for the sake of improving the lot of mankind" (89).h The conception of co-optation that emerges most conspicuously from this analysis, then, is one according to which intrinsically oppositional or emancipatory ideas, modes, or principles are allowed to be voiced while being rendered impotent by dint of their placement in the larger structure of power. Accordingly, I will call this conception "structural co-optation." THE THEORY OF ABSOLUTE CO-OPTATION

To many engaged in the contemporary analysis of culture, Marcuse's claim that art and rationality are intrinsically oppositional might seem decidedly quaint. For it has become virtually commonplace to treat rationality and art (especially the formalist conception of art embraced by Marcuse) as anything but oppositional and, furthermore, to challenge the concept of oppositionality itself. An increasingly familiar way of challenging the idea that any cultural phenomena are oppositional has been by bringing the radical critique of subjectivity to bear on the concept of co-optation. When the notion that all subjectivity is culturally constituted—a notion that has become something of a staple in various strains of contemporary humanistic theory—is applied to the analysis of co-optation, it has the effect of blurring Marcuse's distinction between the indoctrinated public (which, as a result of indoctrination, rejects liberating truths) and the intellectual vanguard (which proffers the emancipatory truths only to have them rendered impotent by the structures of domination). If the individual's sense of his or her subjectivity is itself something constituted by the dominant culture,

Ideological Essentialism

11

then it is easy to suppose, with Althusser 7 and with Foucauldian new historicists, that "certain forms of subjectivity that felt oppositional were really a means by which power relations were maintained ."B Such a viewpoint has the effect of extending the role of "indoctrination" 9 to the point at which it infects not only the democratic public (which harbors the illusion that it is choosing between a variety of options) but also the progressive vanguard (which harbors the illusion that it is transcending indoctrination). I said that this radical critique of subjectivity challenged Marcuse's view that rationality and art are intrinsically oppositional. It does so by extending the domain of illusion. Marcuse, to be sure, saw something illusory about oppositionality; that is, insofar as oppositional thinkers and artists fail to recognize or understand the structures that rendered them politically impotent, they would be laboring under an illusion. But a much stronger and more pervasive sense of illusion is yielded by the notion that everything that is tolerated in a culture and, indeed, everything that is declared to be intolerable—including the oppositional roles of those who would subvert or transform the status quo—is somehow produced by the structures of domination. Marcuse's attempt to portray cooptation as depriving oppositional forces of the power to be efficacious, without at the same time depriving them of their essential truth, becomes harder to sustain in the glare of the newer, more pervasive concept of co-optation. For as power becomes the comprehensive reality underlying claims to knowledge, Marcuse's implicit distinction between political potency and truth value becomes more tenuous. What Marcuse had seen as the neutralization of opposition is transmuted into the social construction of pseudoopposition, and the only truth that survives, in fact, would seem to be the sociological one according to which power creates the ideological structures that allow it to perpetuate itself. George Orwell once wrote that Swift's rational horses represented the highest stage of totalitarian organization, the stage at which conformity has become so general that there is no need for a police force. 10 The type of co-optation that follows from the notion that subjectivity and hence oppositionality are socially constituted is perhaps even more insidiously totalitarian than what Orwell described; for it creates a version of nonconformity that is an illusory epiphenomenon of conformity. Oppositionality, including,

12

Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

presumably, that practiced by Orwell himself, c o m e s to be seen as s o m e t h i n g called into being by the p e r v a s i v e p o w e r of the status quo. In this radical version, the concept of co-optation becomes virtually indistinguishable f r o m that of an all-embracing ideology. W h e r e a s traditional Marxist theory had various w a y s — i n c l u d i n g the dialectical conception of rationality that w e h a v e encountered in M a r c u s e — t o explain h o w the Marxist critique of ideology could pierce t h r o u g h the ideological superstructure that expressed or e m b o d i e d the n e e d s a n d values of the ruling class, the radical theory of co-optation, in its purest a n d most rigorous form, e s c h e w s a n y exemption for an o p p r e s s e d class or an intellectual elite. It rejects a n y attempt to establish one's o w n extraideological status, one's o w n e s c a p e f r o m co-optation. If all subjectivity is socially constituted, then the theorist w h o points this out is no exception. E v e n one's a w a r e n e s s of the w o r k i n g s of the s y s t e m remains a part of the s y s t e m . This is w h a t I call the theory of absolute structural co-optation. This extreme version of the theory of structural co-optation, centered on the critique of subjectivity, is closely related to recent theories centered on the critique of l a n g u a g e , or the critique of representation. In all of its v a r i o u s incarnations, the general doctrine is that thought a n d l a n g u a g e are culturally constituted a n d that cultures or conceptual s y s t e m s are self-contained. To be " o p positional," in s u c h a view, is to be constituted by the system a n d to function in the service of the s y s t e m . Marcuse's claim that art a n d rationality are intrinsically oppositional thus gets s u p p l a n t e d b y a v i e w that holds, in effect, that because e v e r y t h i n g is constituted by the s y s t e m , e v e r y t h i n g is intrinsically

nonoppositional—that

is, intrinsically complicitous. T h e only w a y to be truly outside the s y s t e m is to be part of another s y s t e m a n d hence to be constituted by it a n d to speak its l a n g u a g e . In such a case one is so radically outside as to lack oppositional force by dint of the fact that one s p e a k s a separate l a n g u a g e . Rival conceptual s y s t e m s or rival cultures are n o closer to "external reality" or "objective truth"; for " t r u t h " a n d " r e a l i t y " are constituted by each s y s t e m , and hence each s y s t e m h a s its o w n reality. T h e separate s y s t e m s , including those of separate historical periods, are thus incommensurable. B y this point in m y exposition, the concept of absolute cultural

Ideological Essentialism

13

co-optation is seen to merge with a complex of ideas that lie at the heart of what in humanistic studies has come to be called "postmodern theory/' or—among those for whom counterintuitive ideas have miraculous potency— just plain "theory." Although the issues are only occasionally formulated in terms of co-optation, the question of the degree to which conceptual systems (or linguistic systems, or systems of representation) are social or conventional constructs, and the degree to which such systems are monolithic and incommensurable, is at the center of the overlapping debates throughout the humanistic disciplines. Although I cannot deal in detail with the nature of these debates, or even rehearse some of the arguments that have been raised against the absolute conception of structural co-optation," I do wish to place these grand issues in the somewhat narrower context of the so-called politics of theory. A bizarre aspect of the absolute theory of structural co-optation is the way in which it transforms the concept of co-optation from an instrument of social critique to an argument for the illusoriness of social critique and the inevitability of submission to an unalterable reality. Co-optation, in such a view, ceases to be sinister and becomes, simply, the nature of things. Interestingly enough, however, among the scholars who embrace the radical conception of co-optation that I have just outlined, few seem to be so rigorous as to deny themselves any intellectual or political merit for seeing through the mechanisms of co-optation. That is, they act as if their theories deserve to be evaluated favorably in accordance with disciplinary norms and/or as if their recognition of what they take to be political reality deserves some sort of moral approbation. Indeed, although the absolute view of co-optation could be seen as militating toward quietism rather than intellectual strife—since it tends to reduce intellectual strife to the status of an illusion— proponents of the theory of absolute co-optation have nonetheless engaged in notable battles against those who argue for objectivism or commensurability. Those proponents who see themselves as having pierced through the veil of illusion often evince an air of self-congratulation while hurling political accusations against their allegedly less sophisticated opponents. In numerous cases, the insults are programmatic and become part of the theory that is being defended, whereas in other cases the political accusations appear to have the status of mere asides—as when Stanley Fish

14

Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

parenthetically says that "there is something of the police state" in M. H. Abrams's objectivism. 12 Where the accusations against those who fail to embrace the absolute theory of co-optation are programmatic, they tend to function as a way of reconnecting the theory of co-optation with left-wing cultural critique, as in the case of various neo-Marxisms or critical Marxisms. But even where the theory presents itself as transcending politics, and where, as in the case of Fish, the accusations seem more offhanded, they share with the neo-Marxists a tendency to depict objectivism or anticonstructivism as betraying an authoritarian bent and hence as indicating a taste for right-wing politics. In both cases, those who question the absolute theory of structural co-optation are branded as authoritarian and right wing. I would argue that in both cases these political accusations have the effect of transforming and undermining the theory that they are serving. For while theorists may strive to avoid difficulty by refraining from placing themselves outside the structures of cooptation they are analyzing, their deployment of political accusations has the effect of subtly undermining this strategy. Whether or not the political accusations are formally integrated into the argument, they implicitly modify the argument so as to give it the following form: "The notion that autonomous subjects, through the aid of reason or observation, are capable of achieving objective knowledge that transcends ideology is a product of ideology and hence a prime ingredient in the structure of co-optation. Thus those who argue for the existence of the sovereign subject and the power of reason or empiricism to achieve truth are particularly complicit, particularly ensnared by structural co-optation." Such an argument assumes that there can be degrees of complicity and implies that those who understand the nature of cooptation are less complicit, less co-opted than those who—whether naively or diabolically—embrace the claims of subjectivity, reason, and truth. Even if understood in relative terms, this amounts to a degree of self-exemption for those who denounce the ideology of subjectivity and truth and thereby renders the absolute theory of co-optation somewhat less absolute. Such self-exemption may seem to be only a small chink in the theory of absolute structural co-optation, but it actually represents

Ideological Esscntialism

15

a major methodological shift, and a major metaphysical shift as well. To assert that the structure of power (or the interpretive community) is the ultimate reality, and that oppositionality is illusory, is to engage in a version of metaphysical reasoning similar to that employed by philosophical idealists. 11 Having established that the phenomenal world is the realm of the illusory, the idealist does not need to weigh the separate claims of individual portions of the phenomenal world. Her metaphysical principles allow her to treat every bit of the phenomenal world as equally illusory, and there is no need to specify what makes any given bit of the phenomenal world illusory. By the same token, a rigorous adherent of the theory of absolute structural co-optation does not need to be able to specify why the apparent oppositionality of a particular idea or other symbolic structure is actually a subservient part of the cultural system in which it is embedded. The illusoriness of the oppositionality is stipulated by metaphysical principle underlying the theory. However, once an exception is made, once the theory of absolute co-optation portrays itself as less authoritarian than rival viewpoints, and hence as less complicit, then it is claiming to be relatively oppositional. Once this occurs, whether or not the theory explicitly claims to have transcended the system in which it is embedded, there suddenly emerges a need for a criterion that would allow us to distinguish the truly oppositional from the pseudo-oppositional, or the strongly complicit from the less strongly complicit. For the complicity of the sovereign subject or of rationality can no longer be established automatically, by means of the theory of co-optation. Complicity now needs to be demonstrated. It is this requirement that moves the theory of absolute structural co-optation, paradoxically, to support itself by entering the realm of ideological criticism, where the particular complicity of rationalism and the rational subject is demonstrated by means of an analysis of the political implications of the theories or beliefs at issue. In the crudest versions of such analysis, "implications" often seem to amount to nothing more than the accusation that to appeal to the "authority" of facts or rationality or any other epistemological criterion is to be authoritarian tout court and hence to be an abettor or a lover of oppressive political systems. Such analyses, of course, equivocate on the term "authority" in such a way as to essentialize

16

Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

it. That is, they seem to presuppose, in almost mystical fashion, that there must be some unified essence that underlies the various applications of any given word. Other analyses are less crude and more elaborate. Indeed, the more sophisticated analyses often are not analyses of contemporary theories per se but of early modern philosophical ideas. The seventeenth century, after all, was the period during which early modern epistemology and the scientific movement laid the foundations for modern notions about subjectivity, objective knowledge, and intellectual method. The assumption seems to be that these ideas arose when they did in order to serve specific political interests, that this historical conjunction can be demonstrated by analyzing the political implications at the core of these ideas. Accordingly, the analysis of early modern ideas about reason and representation and the self purports to show that the theories have triumphed because the sectional interests that they served to legitimate have triumphed and that the contemporary theories that are descended from these early modern philosophical ideas are implicated in the structures of power by dint of their origins and their logic. Thus it is that modern adherents of objectivism find themselves accused of conscious or unconscious complicity in the oppressive structures of society. The sort of analysis of ideas that postulates an intrinsic and invariable connection between specific sorts of ideas and specific sectional interests or political modes I call "ideological essentialism." We have already encountered a version of it in Marcuse's claim that art and rationality are intrinsically oppositional. But now we find it taking shape as the inverse of Marcuse's view, as an attempt to defend the theory of absolute structural co-optation by claiming that the culture's dominant ideas can be historically traced to show their connection to the mechanisms of domination. Thus the theory summons up an "originary" situation in which the concept of rationality and the theory of the sovereign subject begin their ideological careers by seducing people into thinking that the subject and rationality are liberating. Descartes has achieved a special status in the demonology of contemporary theorists because his cogito can be seen to combine the search for absolute certitude with the claim that the knowing subject is an irreducible entity that is the starting point for indubi-

Ideological Essentialism

17

table knowledge. Since British empiricism takes the Cartesian subject as the starting point in its search for the knowable, it too is easily linked to the general configuration of beguiling ideas that is condemned by the theory of absolute co-optation. Descartes is thus viewed not merely as an example of the kind of thinking that brings together the elements at the core of modern cultural co-optation but as the starting point for that kind of thinking, the historical anchor of the theory of absolute structural cooptation. To portray Descartes thus is not simply to stipulate an essential connection between the elements of his philosophy but also to stipulate origins while giving the impression that these origins have no origins of their own. Such thinking, of course, is facilitated for contemporary theorists by the Kuhnian concept of the paradigm shift and its Foucauldian analogue, the q>isteme or the discursive practice—both of which tend to see supercession as a sudden starting anew rather than as a product of gradual reconfigurations of ideas. Thus the appeal to Descartes provides a prime example of the way that the theory of absolute co-optation attempts to ground itself in history. But once the theory of absolute structural co-optation attempts to justify itself by entering the historical arena, its cogency is threatened by history itself. I will demonstrate this in various ways; indeed, this book as a whole will serve as a multifarious demonstration of the precariousness of such a theory once it encounters the nitty-gritty of history. I am not speaking of brute historical facts standing in opposition to the abstractions of theory. Rather, I am speaking of the way theories depend upon historical claims that prove to be their undoing. THE CONCEPT OF INTELLECTUAL CO-OPTATION

Let us begin by returning to Marcuse and examining the phenomenon that I referred to earlier as embedded in his analysis. An aspect of Marcuse's account that is indispensable to it, but whose significance seems to have been overlooked, by Marcuse himself and by his followers, is foregrounded when we consider the role played by toleration. Marcuse treats toleration as a procedural mechanism that is a precondition for co-optation. Toleration is part

18

Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

of the structure w h e r e b y emancipatory items are deprived of their political efficacy. However, toleration can be considered not only a procedure but also an idea. For to advocate or to oppose toleration on the g r o u n d that it is morally good or bad in itself, or on the ground that it is or is not conducive to social and political goods, is to treat it as an element of ethico-political theory. Marcuse indicates that toleration "originally" had an oppositional function, meaning, presumably, that during the early modern period toleration had been an element in progressive discourses that had been deployed in opposition to repressive social and political structures. In the context of modern capitalist society, the oppositional role has been neutralized, and toleration has been transformed into an "instrument for absolving servitude" ("RT," 84). Thus defenders of the status quo can appeal to the idea of toleration (and freedom) qua ideas in order to legitimate a corrupt social order. Insofar as the idea of toleration is n o w being used to justify the status q u o and is being deprived of its progressive potential, one could say that it too is being co-opted. But there is an important difference between the w a y in which toleration is being co-opted and the w a y in which rationality and art, according to Marcuse's account, are being co-opted. Rationality and art are intrinsically liberating, and their co-optation amounts to blunting their effectiveness. The idea of toleration itself, however, is not intrinsically liberating and is not simply being tolerated but is being positively embraced by conservative forces as they put it to their o w n uses. These differences m a y seem small, but they have large implications. First, the fact that the idea of toleration can be utilized in both oppositional and conservative discourses indicates that its cooptation can, in principle, take place independently of preexisting structures of power. Since the concept of structural co-optation d e p e n d s u p o n the existence of a dominant culture that absorbs and neutralizes dissent, it is unidirectional. It does not include any reverse mechanism w h e r e b y oppositional forces could co-opt the w e a p o n s of the dominant culture; for the requisite structures, virtually by definition, are functions of power. Since the idea of toleration, on the other hand, can be put to either progressive or conservative uses, its co-optation can g o in either direction. N o r does the shift in direction have as a precondition the passage of centuries or the radical alteration of the socioeconomic context.

Ideological Essentialism

19

A l t h o u g h M a r c u s e m a y give the impression that toleration w a s progressive in the early modern context a n d has turned conservative in the context of a d v a n c e d industrial society, w e shall see that toleration can b e w r e s t e d from an oppositional discourse utilized b y one's enemies a n d put to conservative uses, or it can be wrested f r o m a conservative discourse and put to oppositional uses. T h u s , like moral a u t o n o m y and other co-optable symbols, it can be u s e d to counteract the dominant group's attempt to k e e p exclusive control of the symbols with w h i c h it legitimates itself. Indeed, in chapters 2, 3, a n d 4, this study will examine the shifting ideological u s e s of the theory of toleration itself. T h e type of co-optation that I h a v e brought out of the s h a d o w s of Marcuse's theory, then, is not a unilateral p h e n o m e n o n that inevitably disarms a n d domesticates oppositionality; it is instead a double-edged s w o r d , an intellectual technique that can serve either the maintenance of p o w e r and authority or its subversion. Such a technique, which I call "intellectual co-optation," can function in the absence of preexistent structures of cultural domination by dint of the fact that the cultural item is not simply being blunted but retains its e d g e w h i l e changing its legitimating function as it passes f r o m the h a n d s of one g r o u p to those of its enemies. Intellectual co-optation is not an inevitable structural feature of society but a victory that e m e r g e s from the s m o k e of dubious battle. This does not m e a n that intellectual co-optation can take place only in times of social instability, w h e n the structures are not firmly established. But it does m e a n that, just as intellectual co-optation does not d e p e n d on the prior possession of power, it does not necessarily alter the structures of power. For example, an o p p r e s s e d g r o u p m a y seize a symbol or a principle that the dominant g r o u p h a s u s e d to legitimate itself and m a y cogently integrate the coopted item into an emancipatory discourse. But the rebellious g r o u p m a y nonetheless fail to wrest p o w e r from the dominant g r o u p . T h e fictional Roxane e n g a g e s in a form of intellectual cooptation w h e n she brings the elements of Usbek's rationalistic republicanism into her emancipatory discourse on behalf of sequestered w o m e n . Yet, although her discourse is accompanied by a violent rebellion that shakes the structures of p o w e r in the seraglio, a n d although her suicide is a heroic one, the system of p o w e r is not o v e r t h r o w n . Likewise, as w e will see in chapter 3, Pierre

20

Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

Bayle, as a spokesman for the oppressed French Protestants, brilliantly appropriates philosophical principles that had previously been used to legitimate Catholic hegemony and royal authority and transforms them into elements of an emancipatory discourse. But he does so without changing the fortunes of his persecuted coreligionists. Whereas structural co-optation is, by definition, politically efficacious, intellectual co-optation need not be. It can succeed discursively while it fails politically. This means that, in principle, the two types of co-optation can occur in the same sociopolitical context, but one can be swallowed up by the other. Thus, an oppositional movement can co-opt principles that have been used to legitimate the dominant class and bring them to bear on behalf of a group that has been marginalized and dispossessed, but this intellectual co-optation can be deprived of efficacy by the mechanisms of structural co-optation. In such a situation, the success of the intellectual co-optation would seem to be rather hollow since it failed to affect the structure of power. Indeed, the intellectual co-optation could easily escape our notice since it occurs in the realm of texts without necessarily having a visible impact on political history. But there are reasons why intellectual co-optation ought not to escape the notice of those who are interested either in the history of texts or in the history of power. Thus far I have spoken as if I am merely foregrounding a neglected feature of Marcuse's own account of co-optation. But once intellectual co-optation is placed in clear view, we can see why it has remained in the shadows for so long. For it does not merely amplify Marcuse's account; it radically alters it. And, more important for our purposes, the phenomenon of intellectual co-optation challenges the theory of absolute structural co-optation. When I showed that Marcuse's treatment of the idea of toleration pointed to a different sort of co-optation from that which was foregrounded in his discussion of art and rationality, it might have seemed as if, along with my claim that there were actually two different sorts of co-optation, I was supposing that there were two distinct classes of symbolic structures, a protean class made up of cultural items amenable to intellectual co-optation and an immutable class that is impervious to ideological variation, that serves either the powerful or the powerless, but that cannot do double duty. Whereas intellectual co-optation requires that the items have

Ideological Essentialism

21

no intrinsic ideological valence, structural co-optation had appeared to be the realm in which the intrinsically oppositional was deprived of its oppositional force. But now we can see that the concept of structural co-optation does not require that any items be intrinsically oppositional since it allows for the possibility that what structural co-optation deprives of political efficacy may be the products of intellectual co-optation: if the oppositional items that are neutralized by the mechanisms of structural co-optation took on their oppositional roles as a result of intellectual co-optation, then they are not intrinsically oppositional. For, as we have seen, anything that is subject to intellectual co-optation ipso facto has no intrinsic ideological valence. This means that we can have a coherent theoretical understanding of co-optation while dispensing with Marcuse's key assumption that some cultural items are intrinsically oppositional. Thus we can accept the notion that structural cooptation can deprive rationality of its oppositional force without following Marcuse in supposing that rationality is intrinsically liberating. The rationality whose oppositional force is being blunted may have previously been used to legitimate the status quo and may have been brought over to the side of oppositional forces through the technique of intellectual co-optation. I said earlier that once proponents of the absolute theory of structural co-optation enter the arena of history in an attempt to demonstrate that some ideas are more complicitous than others, they run the risk of being refuted by history. What I meant by this was that history—including the very historical texts invoked by proponents of absolute co-optation—is replete with cases of intellectual co-optation, which, once they are recognized as such, make it hard to sustain the view that the ideas being analyzed are intrinsically complicitous with the established structures of power. This book will examine some complex cases of intellectual cooptation, and to that extent it will provide an historical argument against the theory of absolute structural co-optation. INTELLECTUAL CO-OPTATION AND THE THEORY OF IDEOLOGY

My main reason for pausing over the theoretical implications of chapters 2 through 6 ultimately has more to do with methodological concerns than with the ambition to deflate grand theories. For I

22

Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

wish not only to justify the methodology that I employ in this book but also to offer it as an alternative to the sort of methodology that currently dominates ideological criticism and cultural studies. To accomplish this, I will need to explore the implications of intellectual co-optation for the theory and practice of ideological analysis. The concept of co-optation, as has already been indicated, is closely tied to the concept of ideology. When a legitimating strategy is embraced by the group, gender, or class whose interests it is serving, and when opposing groups have their own countervailing legitimating strategies, the term that we normally apply to each of these strategies is "ideology." However, when the ideology of the dominant class becomes so pervasive that it is accepted by those whose interests are not being served by it, then the ideology has begun to co-opt its enemies. Thus far I have mounted a challenge to the notion that ideas composing an ideology, even a culturally pervasive one, are intrinsically tied to the interests of culturally or politically dominant groups. I have thereby challenged the notion that culturally pervasive ideologies necessarily preclude oppositionality. For if a symbolic structure is not intrinsically tied to dominant interests, but rather is subject to intellectual co-optation, then oppositionality is possible. Even if we set aside the broader issue of absolute co-optation, however, a critique of ideological essentialism also has consequences for our understanding of what we mean when we identify a symbolic structure as "an ideology." For ideological analysis may be carried out, as it were, locally, without appealing to comprehensive cultural or social theories, and the cogency of our analyses will depend in part on our understanding of what it is that we are doing. One of the most persistent ways of understanding the enterprise of ideological analysis is in terms of a science/ideology dichotomy that derives from the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers saw science (or reason) as the weapon that would vanquish superstition, which was seen as a strategy of priestcraft and hence an instrument of political oppression; or they saw science as an alternative to fanaticism and hence as a way of protecting the social order against illicit knowledge claims that could be used to legitimate sedition. Insofar as the classical Marxist critique of ideology has seen itself as the démystification of false consciousness, it

Ideological Essentialism

23

follows the Enlightenment in distinguishing between science (in this case, Marxism itself) and ideology—that is, the non-Marxist modes of thought that falsify reality in order to promote or maintain domination by sectional interests. Since an ideology, in this traditional Marxist conception, is both false and oppressive, there is a tendency to suppose that the epistemologica! claims and the political uses "go together" and, indeed, that the political function provides the motivation, whether conscious or unconscious, for the falsification. At first glance the current situation in ideological criticism may seem far removed from this dichotomy of science versus ideology. After all, fashionable theories, as already indicated, claim that the notions of objective science or rationality are themselves distortions that are falsified by the true nature of language, culture, cognition, or desire. This might seem to militate toward relativism and the abandonment of the scientific pole of the dichotomy. However, when the critique of rationalism or other epistemological stances is linked to the critique of ideology, false consciousness tends, once again, to be attributed to the strategies of domination. Thus the epistemological stance is deemed false, and those who have supported it are accused of serving those interests that wish to perpetuate oppression. And, by implication, the theory that unmasks objectivism, even if it is explicitly relativistic, is seen to be true and liberating and thus, paradoxically, takes on the role traditionally occupied by science. This is merely a reformulation of the paradox that I have identified earlier as undermining the absoluteness of absolute structural co-optation. The analyst is, in principle, incapable of achieving an Archimedian vantage point but implicitly claims one nonetheless. Now insofar as I pose the difficulty in terms of the paradox of filling the position of science in the traditional dichotomy while denying that one is doing so, or while failing to support one's implicit claim to a privileged, extraideological standpoint, it might seem as if I were attempting to challenge the ideological analysis of epistemological (and other) viewpoints by raising epistemological objections against it. But in fact what I wish to do is to free ideological analysis from its epistemological difficulties by disengaging it from its self-defeating epistemological claims and metaphysical presuppositions. And to do so will require the dissolution

24

Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

of the science/ideology model. By this I mean not merely the theoretical rejection of the model but the development of a methodology that refuses to sneak the model in through the back door. 1 4 The epistemological claims made under the aegis of the science/ ideology model are, as w e have seen, twofold. The analyst claims both that the position from which he or she is carrying out the analysis represents science (that is, is objectively true, even if it paradoxically rejects objectivity and rationality) and that the ideolo g y being analyzed not only serves to legitimate sectional interests but is objectively false. The w a y that the historical examination of the ideological uses of ideas undermines the science/ideology model is not merely by s h o w i n g that the ideas being subjected to ideological analysis keep changing their ideological function through the process of intellectual co-optation but also by s h o w i n g that ideas refuse to stay on the ideology side of the dichotomy. Early modern ideas lend themselves to this sort of demonstration precisely because of the w a y writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries carried out polemical battles that w e r e unmistakably political in nature. There is no question that these writers were putting ideas to ideological uses, but part of their political strategy w a s often to demystify the epistemological claims of their enemies by setting out to demonstrate that they w e r e self-serving. That is to say, the very writers w h o s e epistemological claims are subjected to ideological critiques by modern scholars were themselves carrying out ideological critiques of their enemies.

INTELLECTUAL GEOGRAPHY AND THE MECHANISMS OF IDEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE In order to present a thumbnail sketch of the kind of philosophical/ polemical interplay that I am talking about, while at the same time setting the stage for the detailed interpretation of texts in the ensuing chapters of this study, I will look briefly at some aspects of the impact that the Puritan revolution and Hobbes's response to it had on the philosophical and rhetorical landscape of seventeenthcentury England.

Ideological Essentialism

25

Like his contemporary Descartes, Hobbes is a rationalist who claims that philosophy needs a new foundation of proper intellectual method. But whereas Descartes sought, by means of his metaphysical dualism, to deflect the accusation that his scientific principles threatened to reduce everything to mechanistic principles, and hence to overthrow Christianity, Hobbes adhered more closely to a mechanistic mode of explanation that appeared to leave no room for the realm of the spiritual. This materialism, while raising doubts about his Christian orthodoxy, helped to dramatize Hobbes's opposition to the Puritan revolutionaries, or "enthusiasts," so called because of their claim to divine inspiration. Much of Leviathan is directed against the people who had overthrown civic order, plunged the nation into civil war, and, in Hobbes's view, violated the indivisible sovereign authority of the monarch. When Hobbes describes his seditious enemies as "people possessed of an opinion of being inspired," 15 he is confronting one of their key warrants for political action. For Hobbes, as J. W. N. Watkins observes, "the main cause of the Puritan Rebellion was the puritan ideology," whose tenets included the following: "that private men are judges of good and evil; that it is a sin to do something against one's private conscience; that a man's private conscience may be supernaturally inspired.""' Hobbes sees the claims to private conscience founded on private inspiration as stemming from a misguided conviction that one has immediate and infallible access to truth: The opinion of Inspiration, called commonly, Private Spirit, begins very often, from some lucky finding of an Errour generally held by others; and not knowing, or not remembring, by what conduct of reason, they came to so singular a truth, (as they think it, though it be many times an untruth they light on,) they presently admire themselves; as being in.the speciall grace of God Almighty, w h o hath revealed the same to them supernaturally, by his Spirit. (L, 1 4 1 )

To the extent that the enthusiasts arrogate to themselves a cognitive authority that they do not in fact possess, Hobbes is accusing them of an epistemological error. To the extent that they appeal to Scripture to justify the belief that they are inspired, Hobbes will attack them on theological and hermeneutic grounds. To the extent

26

Methodological

and Theoretical

Introduction

that Hobbes considers these various claims to be self-serving justifications of sedition, grounded in mere appetite, he is carrying out an ideological critique of his enemies. As an antidote to the epistemological immediacy on which the Puritans erroneously base their knowledge claims, Hobbes will insist upon the mediation of method: Reason is not as Sense, and Memory, borne with us; but attayned by Industry; first in apt imposing of Names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly Method in proceeding from the Elements, which are Names, to Assertions made by Connexion of one of them to another; and so to Syllogismes, which are the Connexions of one Assertion to another, till w e come to a knowledge of all the Consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it, men call S C I E N C E . (L, 1 1 5 )

In attacking the scriptural exegesis on which the Puritans base their seditious behavior, he accuses them of misconstruing textual details, instead of "considering the main Designe," and of employing the "ordinary artifice of those that seek not the truth, but their own advantage," (L, 626). And in the specific matter of the alleged scriptural warrants for belief in private inspiration, Hobbes will repeatedly accuse the enthusiasts of taking literally biblical language that needs to be understood metaphorically. Here is an example: O n the signification of the word Spirit dependeth that of the word I N S P I R A T I O N ; which must either be taken properly; and then it is nothing but the blowing into a man some thin and subtile aire, or wind, in such manner as a man filleth a bladder with his breath; or if Spirits be not corporeall, but have their existence only in the fancy, it is nothing but the blowing in of a Phantasme; which is improper to say, and impossible; for Phantasmes are not, but only seem to be somewhat. That word therefore is used in the Scripture metaphorically onely: A s {Gen. 2.7.) where it is said, that God inspired into man the breath of life, no more is meant, then that G o d gave unto him vital motion. (L, 440)

Just as Hobbes is accusing the enthusiasts of falsely claiming that knowledge is immediately available to them by dint of having been breathed into them by God, he is attacking the interpretive procedure on which this claim is based, on the ground that it too is based on the immediacy of literalism, which ignores the mediating function of metaphor.

Ideological Essentialism

27

In e m p l o y i n g t h e intellectual o p p o s i t i o n b e t w e e n e p i s t e m o l o g i cal i m m e d i a c y a n d t h e m e d i a t i o n of rational m e t h o d a s a w a y of p r e s e n t i n g t h e religio-political o p p o s i t i o n b e t w e e n

Hobbes—the

d e f e n d e r of t h e a b s o l u t e a n d u n d i v i d e d s o v e r e i g n t y of t h e m o n a r c h — a n d the sectarian r e v o l u t i o n a r i e s , I h a v e p u r p o s e l y set t h i n g s u p in a tidy w a y that m a y s e e m to l e n d itself to a n essentialist i d e o l o g i c a l a n a l y s i s . I n v o k i n g this pattern, o n e m i g h t claim that t h e a p p e a l to m e d i a t i o n (and c o m p l e x i t y ) is t h e habitual or invaria b l e t e c h n i q u e of t h o s e w h o w i s h to b r i n g intellectual subtlety to t h e d e f e n s e of the e s t a b l i s h e d social o r d e r a n d that the a p p e a l to e p i s t e m o l o g i c a l i m m e d i a c y a n d the simplicity of truth is the " n a t u r a l " w e a p o n of t h o s e s e e k i n g to o v e r t u r n the e s t a b l i s h e d order. I n d e e d , t h e a n t h r o p o l o g i s t M a r y D o u g l a s h a s m a d e just s u c h a claim, n o t w i t h r e f e r e n c e to s e v e n t e e n t h - c e n t u r y E n g l a n d , b u t w i t h r e f e r e n c e to s t u d e n t d e m o n s t r a t o r s in the late 1960s: " O n e important f o r m of natural s y m b o l i z a t i o n is that w h i c h r e g a r d s s y m b o l i c f o r m s as a n i n t e r f e r e n c e in c o m m u n i c a t i o n , to b e b y p a s s e d or s e e n t h r o u g h a n d r e p l a c e d b y s o m e less artificial vehicle. . . . T h e e x p r e s s e d l o n g i n g for n a t u r a l n e s s is a k i n d of w o r d - p l a y u p o n the c o n d i t i o n s of c o m m u n i c a t i o n a n d a u t h o r i t y w h i c h c o m e s naturally to p r e a c h e r s of revolution." 1 7 If t h e

Puritans'

appeal

to e p i s t e m o l o g i c a l

immediacy—and

H o b b e s ' s ideological u s e of m e d i a t i o n in attacking the P u r i t a n s — c o u l d e a c h b e raised to the status of a u n i v e r s a l principle, this w o u l d a l l o w u s e f f o r t l e s s l y to i d e n t i f y c o n s e r v a t i v e s or reactionaries b y d i n t of their place in the i m m e d i a c y / m e d i a t i o n d i c h o t o m y . T h i s is p r e c i s e l y w h a t ideological essentialism a t t e m p t s to d o . T h e r e w o u l d b e several p r o b l e m s , h o w e v e r , w i t h a n y a t t e m p t to e s s e n tialize t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n H o b b e s ' s e p i s t e m o l o g y a n d his politics. C o n s i d e r first that a recent i d e o l o g i c a l critique of H o b b e s , b y M i c h a e l R y a n , associates h i m n o t w i t h m e d i a t i o n b u t w i t h i m m e d i a c y a n d associates m e d i a t i o n a n d deferral not w i t h the legitimation of a u t h o r i t y b u t w i t h liberation f r o m authority:

Hobbes demonstrates the relationship between the metaphysical concept of the logos as a point of absolute cognitive authority, from which laws issue in an unequivocal language that excludes all possibility of ambiguity of intention or interpretation, and the absolutist political concept of a sovereign w h o represents the whole state and

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Introduction

who is the unique source of laws whose authority is incontestable. In Hobbes, metaphysical rationalism and political absolutism are mutually supporting, and this is made clear in the way an absolutist theory of meaning in language hinges with an authoritarian theory of law. The authority of the sovereign's law depends on the establishing of unambiguous proper meanings for words. Perhaps this is why Hobbes associates ambiguity, equivocation and improper metaphor with sedition.1"

Ryan is writing from the perspective of Derrida's critique of logocentrism and is attempting to link Hobbes's theory of sovereignty to a theory of language that Derrida and his followers take to be false and oppressive. In this regard, deconstruction, for all its renunciation of certitude and determinate meaning, is taking the position of science in the science/ideology dichotomy. More interesting still is the fact that Ryan, who is arguing in favor of subversion, is associating subversion with mediation and deferral. Just as Ryan valorizes metaphorical deferral and blames Hobbes for his rejection of metaphor in favor of absolute presence, Hobbes himself valorizes method and blames his fanatical enemies for rejecting method in favor of a claim to absolute presence. Both Ryan and Hobbes put themselves on the side of mediation and deferral and portray the enemies whom they are analyzing as advocates of epistemological immediacy. In depicting Hobbes as representing claims to epistemological immediacy, and in ignoring or suppressing the fact that Hobbes had represented his enemies in precisely the same fashion and had placed himself on the side of intellectual mediation, Ryan is appropriating Hobbes's own polemical technique. Although Hobbes's theory of language is, to be sure, quite different from Ryan's, the similarity in their techniques allows us to see that Ryan is engaging, on the rhetorical level, in a kind of intellectual co-optation. Our recognition of this fact should help to demystify not simply Ryan's claim that Hobbes's politics are logically tied to logocentrism but also many other recent claims about the inherent ideological tendencies of early modern ideas. Although a comparison between Ryan's ideological critique of Hobbes and Hobbes's ideological attack on the Puritans can help to illuminate the unacceptability of ideological essentialism, 19 the principal method employed in this book is not to debunk specific

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29

ideological critiques of early modern texts but rather to apply a contextualist approach to the ideological dynamics of early modern works, thereby illuminating the texts themselves and the world in which they are embedded. Thus, the main work of this study is historical, and it is the task of this introductory chapter to attune the reader to the theoretical implications of the historical work that follows. Thus I have offered the above sketch of Hobbes's epistemological and ideological attack on the Puritans for heuristic purposes, precisely because it is tidier than the dense and variegated ideological interplay between competing epistemologies that will be analyzed in chapters 2 through 6. However, in the context of the theoretical overview that is being offered in this chapter, it will be useful to slice out a cross-section of a larger context in which the battle between Hobbes and the Puritans is situated. 20 For I need to indicate briefly w h y an understanding of the dilemmas that Hobbes faces in attempting to legitimate his position and to demystify that of his enemies can thwart any attempt to impose ideological fixity on the simple epistemological opposition between method and immediacy. I propose to do this by placing the foregoing sketch of Hobbes and the Puritans in the context of the rejection of Catholicism and of Scholasticism. The Puritans' claim to private revelation may be seen as merely a radical expression of the Protestant rejection of Roman Catholic hierarchy that mediates between God and the individual Christian. The general Protestant principle of lay exegesis might be buttressed by God's inspiring the lay reader of Scripture just as he had inspired those w h o had originally transcribed his words. A n d direct revelation outside the realm of biblical exegesis might be seen as the final step in the rejection of Catholic structures of mediated authority. The dilemma facing anyone in a Protestant country w h o wished to reject claims to private revelation as self-serving arrogations of cognitive authority was that any reassertion of hierarchical authority and intellectual mediation might be perceived as a reversion to Roman Catholic principles. Moreover, just as Catholicism was seen as a tyrannical structure of authority that improperly mediated between the individual Christian and God, Scholastic philosophy w a s widely seen as an instrument of obfuscation, filled with a complex terminology that had no referents in reality, and therefore

30

Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

as an impediment both to true religious knowledge and true knowledge of the natural world. The new philosophical movements, in attempting to overturn Scholasticism and to build knowledge on a new foundation, were vehemently rejecting traditional structures of intellectual authority and were suggesting that, through the new instruments of investigation, authority could be wrested from the doctors of the church and given to the laity. The name that was given to the various new modes of investigation that would liberate us from oppression was method. I suggested earlier that method is associated with mediation as opposed to epistemological immediacy, but that does not necessarily prevent it from serving the same ideological role as Protestantism, including its more radical manifestations, in empowering those who have heretofore been cognitively disenfranchised. Thus it need not be surprising that the Puritans themselves often advocated Bacon's scientific inductivism and thereby utilized the ideological power of epistemological mediation. Bacon presents his inductive method precisely in terms of mediation. The revival of skepticism in the sixteenth century had made philosophers painfully conscious of the unreliability of the senses and hence of the dubiousness of knowledge claims based on perception. Bacon's New Organon would overcome this weakness of sense perception: "For the sense by itself is a thing infirm and erring; neither can instruments for enlarging or sharpening the sense do much; but all the truer kind of interpretation of nature is effected by instances and experiments fit and apposite; wherein the sense decides touching the experiment only, and the experiment touching the point in nature and the thing itself."2' The method thus mediates between the senses and the world and thereby yields an objective knowledge of reality. The method also mediates in another sense: it provides a middle ground between dogmatism and skepticism, "between the presumption of pronouncing on anything and the despair of comprehending anything." To challenge dogmatism, in this case, was to challenge the established Aristotelian physics of the schools and thus to be subversive in the same sense in which Hobbes and Descartes and the other leaders of the new philosophical movements were subversive. But to be subversive in this way involved

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31

mounting an assault on hierarchical intellectual authority. For alt h o u g h the method mediated between the fallible investigator and the world, it nonetheless w a s based fundamentally on observations, and its practitioners did not require special k n o w l e d g e or ability: "The course I propose for the discovery of sciences is such as leaves but little to the acuteness and strength of wits, but places all wit and understandings nearly on a level. For as in the drawing of a straight line or a perfect circle, much d e p e n d s on the steadiness and practice of the hand, if it be done by aim of hand only, but if with the aid of rule or compass, little or nothing; so is it exactly with m y plan" (NO, 1, 56). Here, then, individuals lacking special talent or the traditional aristocratic education can claim for themselves the capacity to explain the world b y means of their senses, by means of experience and observation; and method can be inv o k e d to support these claims. Method is a force that harnesses and e m p o w e r s the abilities w e all possess and thus bypasses the mediating structures of established intellectual authority. In the light of this analysis, it is easy to see w h y the Baconian philosophy w a s extremely congenial to the Puritans and w h y Puritans might profitably appeal both to unmediated private experience and to the mediation of Bacon's inductive method. 2 2 For although claims of divine inspiration and claims of scientific method might seem to be epistemological contraries, both are "democratic" and m a y serve to legitimate a group that stands in opposition to hierarchy and tradition. 23 The Puritans, like their e n e m y Hobbes, rejected the established " d o g m a t i s m " associated with Scholastic philosophy, and it is interesting to see h o w they could do so in terms similar to those in w h i c h Hobbes attacked the Puritans themselves. 2 4 Consider, for example, a passage by the Puritan John Dury, published about a year before the publication of Leviathan. Dury is arguing for a n e w Baconian system of education to supplant the established Scholastic training. Those taught under the old system are lead into a maze of subtile and unprofitable Notions; whereby their minds are puft up with a windy conceit of knowledge: their affections taken off from the plainnesse of Usefull Truths; their naturall Corrupt inclinations strengthened in perversitie; So that they become both unwilling to seek, and incapable to receive any

32

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and Theoretical

Introduction

Truth either Divine or Humane in its simplicitie: for their heads are filled with certain termes and empty shewes of learning; which neither containe any substance or solidity of Matter; or give them any addresse by w a y of Method to make use of that which they know for the benefit of M a n k i n d . "

Dury attacks traditional education by marshaling the metaphor of inflation, charging that Scholasticism puffs the mind up "with a windy conceit," that its victims are filled with pride and with error, neither of which leaves room for the infusion of truth or for correction by method. Dury thus links and valorizes two sources of knowledge that Hobbes treated as irreconcilable rivals—namely, inspiration and method—and suggests that both may provide knowledge but that both may be thwarted by the inflation of false learning. 26 Hobbes is in the position of attempting to use method—which had originally defined itself as subversive of traditional authority— as a rational antidote to the fanatical belief in inspiration and hence of using method to support the monolithic authority of the king. This is in itself a kind of intellectual co-optation since, from the perspective of the enthusiasts, the monarchy and the Church of England are very much like the Catholic church, both in their hierarchical structures and in their strategies of legitimation. A s part of his strategy, Hobbes finds it useful to ignore the fact that Puritans also accept the claims of method and also reject Scholasticism as illicit. The rhetorical force of his attack on sectarian fanatics depends upon suppressing points of contact with them and linking them with everything that is repugnant. Accordingly, in more than one daring tour de force, Hobbes attempts to link the Puritans to the Scholastics. If we read Dury, we might suppose that the Scholastics and the Puritans represent two opposing extremes, not simply theologically but also in terms of the demeanor and intellectual method separating the "empty shewes of learning" of the Scholastics from "the plainnesse of Usefull Truths" accessible to the Puritans. But Hobbes attempts to link the positions that Dury is at pains to separate, and he does so by finding similarities between the kinds of entities that both Scholastics and Puritans believe in and in the ways in which both use language to obscure rather than clarify. The abuse of language, Hobbes tells us in part 1, chapter 8, is a sort of madness that occurs "when men speak

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33

such words as, put together, have no signification at all; but are fallen upon by some through misunderstanding of the words they have received, and repeat by rote; by others, from intention to deceive by obscurity."27 Hobbes is now ready to subsume the Scholastics under the fanaticism of the Puritans: The common sort of men seldome speak Insignificantly, and are therefore, by those other Egregious persons [the Scholastics] counted Idiots. But . . . their words are without any thing correspondent to them in the mind. . . . When men write whole volumes of such stuffe, are they not Mad, or intend to make others so? And particularly, in the question of Transubstantiation; where after certain words spoken, they that say, the Whiteness«, Roundness?, Magnitude, Qualify, Corruptibility, all which are incorporeall, etc. go out of the Wafer, into the Body of our blessed Saviour, do they not make those Nesses, Tudes and Ties, to be so many spirits possessing his body? For by Spirits, they mean alwayes things, that being incorporeall, are neverthelesse moveable from one place to another. So that this kind of Absurdity, may rightly be numbred amongst the many sorts of Madnesse; and all the time that guided by clear Thoughts of their worldly lust, they forbear disputing, or writing thus, but Lucide Intervals. (L, 146-47)

Thus Hobbes links the Scholastics' claim that their abstract terms designate real entities that are present in (among other places) the sacramental wafer and in the body of Christ with the enthusiasts' claim that God is present in their own bodies. The mysterious entities are, according to Hobbes, spirits that allegedly possess bodies; and their presence, like the presence of the divine spirit in the Puritans, is subjected to Hobbes's critical and rhetorical attack. Hobbes the materialist thus seems to be demystifying both the enthusiasts and the Scholastics by finding them to share a belief in spiritual entities that enter bodies. And as if to underline the fact that he is self-consciously performing a Rabelaisian bouleversement in which the natural and commonsensical mocks the impalpable and abstruse, Hobbes slyly equates corporeal lust with sanity and speculation about the presence of the incorporeal with insanity.28 In linking his defense of royal authority to the philosophical movements that appeal to method and revile Scholasticism, Hobbes is not exemplifying any intrinsic connection between his epistemological views and his political views but is rhetorically creating that connection by altering the ideological valence of ideas that

34

Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

Dury had marshaled on the side of Puritanism. For polemicists who, unlike Hobbes, are not linked to the new philosophical movements, it might be rhetorically effective to attack the enthusiasts by stressing precisely their embrace of modern ideas. Indeed, the very metaphor of inflation that Dury used against the Scholastics could be used to link enthusiasts to the moderns and to attack them in a single volley of invective. Thus will Jonathan Swift attack the Puritans by appropriating the rhetoric with which Dury had defended them, charging them with pride and with being inflated or puffed up, not with divine inspiration but with noxious winds that they have generated in their own bowels. But while Hobbes, enlisting method on his side, ignored the Puritan claim that method was on their side, Swift, far from ignoring the Puritans' embrace of Baconianism, turns method into a term of opprobrium; he subsumes method under the fanatical claims to inspiration. Method, in Swift's satire, becomes a "mechanical operation of the spirit," a technique "to divert, bind up, stupify, fluster and amuse the Senses." For the senses are "so many Avenues to the Fort of Reason, which in this Operation is entirely block'd up," so that "Spirit . . . proceeding wholly from within" is able to perform its part. 29 Swift thus valorizes both reason and sense perception, and, since the despised enthusiasts embraced both inspiration and method, Swift lashes out at both the new scientific method and the enthusiastic claims to epistemological immediacy, which he sees as two mutually enforcing instruments of fanatical self-delusion. Nor does Swift, for his purposes, need to distinguish between the Cartesian deductive method and Baconian inductivism. For Swift, the claims of Descartes and his rationalistic followers were no less dangerous than those of Baconian inductivism. The rejection of traditional wisdom in favor of pseudo-knowledge drawn out of one's own entrails was a mad and arrogant attempt to subvert authority—something that, in Swift's view, connected Puritan fanaticism to all varieties of modern method—including that of Hobbes. 3 0

Ideological Essentinlism

35

IDEOLOGICAL CRITICISM WITHOUT ESSENCES

In the cases that we have examined, it would seem that the political and intellectual landscape can be divided up in various ways, that epistemological positions may be variously combined, and that the ideological tables can easily be turned. Each side does an ideological analysis of its enemies not only by "deconstructing" their epistemological claims—by attempting ultimately to show that their claims to knowledge are nothing more than self-serving appeals to their own authority—but also by linking their claims to those of other despised groups. These permutations point to some historical observations that have consequences for our understanding of the theory and methodology of ideological analysis. Although much of what I will say here has been said by others, perhaps its conjunction with the foregoing analysis will give it added concreteness and renewed force. First, for a group that lacks the power that it thinks it deserves, all sorts of knowledge claims can be ideologically useful, provided that they challenge the ruling group's claim that knowledge and ability are restricted to its own hierophants or experts or to the products of its own exclusive educational establishment. Thus epistemological appeals to reason, to perception, to intuition, to experience, or even to private revelation can be of use to an oppressed or ambitious group, provided that its members can claim that they have at least as much access to reason, perception, intuition, experience, or revelation as do those in power. And indeed, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, religious communities or social classes who were persecuted or marginalized, or whose ambitions were thwarted, made use of each of these epistemological claims as well as various combinations of them. Ruling groups, of course, can reject all varieties of epistemological onslaughts by appealing to tradition or to divine will, but rebellious groups can just as easily claim that the status quo is a perversion of tradition or that their own goals are endorsed by divine will or by the telos of history. It may well be, in fact, that conflicts as to how tradition or revelation ought to be read are a precondition for the emergence of epistemologa 11 But once epistemology emerges, all its weapons may be seen to be double-edged

36

Methodological and Theoretical

Introduction

and hence subject to intellectual co-optation. Thus, while the Baconian appeal to the observational powers of private individuals might be useful to radicals wishing to overthrow a political order justified by "subtle and unprofitable notions," abstract reasoning in general, both in Swift and in Burke, can be associated with private individuals bent on overthrowing traditional authority. Burke's heirs, however, d o w n to the present day, will distinguish sharply between speculative reasoning and Baconian norms of experience and observation. Armed with this empiricist distinction, these conservatives will defend the status quo and condemn progressive social visions as speculative or as empirical failures. A s we will see in chapter 5, however, Voltaire attempted to reconcile his rejection of speculative reasoning with conservative social commitments that were rooted in speculative reasoning. These are the sorts of amenability to intellectual co-optation that prevent any epistemological position from being intrinsically reactionary or intrinsically progressive. Neither philosophical skepticism nor relativism is an exception to this rule. For while many contemporary theorists seem to assume that skepticism is intrinsically subversive of established authority, the history of skepticism is fraught with claims that the lack of certitude provides a powerful impetus for obedience to religious and civil authority. Montaigne, for example, makes this traditional point by means of rhetorical questions: Vaut-il pas mieux demeurer en suspens de s'infrasquer en tant d'erreurs que l'humaine fantaisie a produites? Vaut-il pas mieux suspendre sa persuasion que de se mêler à ces divisions séditieuses et quereleuses? Is it not better to suspend judgment than to entangle oneself in so many errors that have been produced by the human imagination? Is it not better to suspend one's opinions than to involve oneself in seditious and querulous discord? 12

In fact, as w e will see in chapter 3, Pierre Bayle's argument that uncertainty obliges the monarch to tolerate religious dissent marks a dramatic shift in the traditional political deployment of skeptical ideas. 3 3 I have suggested that an awareness of the actual techniques of intellectual co-optation would point toward an understanding of ideological analysis that would go beyond the understanding per-

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sistently enshrined in the science/ideology dichotomy. We now need to spell out just what gets left behind when we abandon the science/ideology dichotomy and just what conception of ideological criticism I am offering in its place. The ideological critiques and co-optations that we have looked at have involved attempts to treat the theories of one's enemies as false and as intrinsically connected to a given political position. Thus writers claiming to be on the side of science treat the views of their enemies as essentially ideological. But at the same time as they are actually co-opting one another's positions and techniques, they are also co-opting the claim to be positioned in the science pole of the dichotomy. The fact that one person's science is another person's ideology dramatizes a difficulty that, as indicated earlier, has long bedeviled the theory of ideology—namely, the difficulty of privileging the standpoint from which ideological analysis is to be carried out, or, put another way, of establishing science's credentials as science. Moreover, our analysis of Hobbes and others reveals why the historical self-consciousness that underlies the analysis of ideologies cannot, in itself, insure that the perspective of the person carrying out the analysis represents science rather than ideology. For Hobbes, as we have seen, is both the object of Ryan's ideological analysis and the author of an ideological analysis of the enthusiasts. And, similarly, the enthusiasts themselves can be seen both as the objects of ideological critiques by Hobbes and others and as the authors of ideological critiques of hierarchical structures of authority. In fact, Jürgen Habermas has suggested that ideology comes into being precisely when legitimation becomes linked to a critical analysis of the legitimations offered by others. According to Habermas, then, the claim that one is being scientific is a defining characteristic of ideology, and legitimations that are uncritically dogmatic are themselves preideological. 34 Habermas's definition may be considered unduly stipulative, but it has the virtue of reminding us how far the practice of ideological analysis is from providing any automatic guarantees of its status as nonideological science. We have seen that a single epistemological stance can be used to support divergent sectional interests and that the same sectional interests can be served by surprisingly divergent epistemological

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Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

claims. Thus a class or group seeking to support its demand for, or seizure of, greater political power can justify itself both on the ground that its members obtain knowledge directly through divine inspiration and on the ground that its members can control nature by means of knowledge obtained through an inductive scientific method. Both of these disparate claims have the ideological function of giving moral and epistemological autonomy to the individual and of challenging the hierarchies that would make the layperson subservient to priest and scholar. Thus, insofar as religious enthusiasm and Baconian science serve ideological functions, they may simultaneously engage—whether implicitly or explicitly—in the ideological critique of hierarchical structures of religious or cognitive authority. They may be used to suggest, that is, that the hierarchical authorities are self-serving and that they distort the truth. Now suppose that we find the enthusiasts' implicit ideological critique of the hierarchical structure of the Anglican church to be cogent; suppose, that is, that we agree that the hierarchical church uses its claims to authority to justify the social order that places the enthusiasts in an unfavorable position. To be convinced by the enthusiasts' ideological critique of hierarchical structures of ecclesiastical authority—and I leave aside the question of what makes such a critique convincing—in no way implies that we are convinced by the enthusiasts' claim that they themselves received private and unmediated revelation from God. Thus the validity of the ideological analysis is completely independent of the analyst's own epistemological position and the validity of her claim to be scientific, objective, or ideology-free. Recognizing the mutual independence of claims to scientific status and claims to cogency in ideological analysis has the result not of undermining the ideological analysis but of freeing the analyst from having to demonstrate that he or she is ideology-free. Conversely, an epistemological claim need not be false in order to function to legitimate sectional interests. We can, for example, point out how seventeenth-century Baconians used the concepts of observation and experimentation to legitimate class interests without having to refute the epistemological claims of scientific empiricism. And even if we happen to be inclined to put more credence in observation and experiment than in divine inspiration,

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39

their status, from an ideological perspective, would be precisely the same. By the same token, we can see how Ryan uses deconstruction to justify subversion—we can, that is, carry out an ideological analysis of his argument—without having to make any judgment about the merits of deconstruction as a theory of language. I have suggested that an epistemological stance is not intrinsically linked to one political stance or another. My ensuing analysis suggests that the truth or falsity of an epistemological position does not affect either its amenability to ideological analysis or the validity of an ideological analysis carried out in its name. Thus it turns out that the science side of the science/ideology dichotomy need not be science and that the ideology side need not be associated with false consciousness. In fact the tendency that we found earlier, to see an intrinsic relationship between a theory and a political position, now appears to be dependent on the tendency to carry out ideological analyses under the aegis of the science/ideology dichotomy. That is to say, the claim that an epistemological view has an intrinsic ideological valence depends on the assumption that ideas are either intrinsically scientific or intrinsically ideological. But the thrust of our analysis has been to recognize that nothing has an intrinsic ideological valence, that to engage in ideological analysis is not to examine "an ideology" but to examine a theory or structure of thought in ideological terms, in the context, that is, of its role in legitimating sectional interests. As Anthony Giddens puts it: "There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as an ideology: there are only ideological aspects of symbol-systems. . . . To treat a symbol-system as an ideology is to study it as ideological. If we collapse the science/ideology distinction and see that the status of an epistemological stance as ideological is not its essence but merely one of the ways in which it may be considered, then our ability to see how it functions to legitimate sectional interests does not necessarily preclude our examining it in "scientific" terms as well—that is, according to the criteria of a given discipline. The ideological and the scientific dimensions of a symbolic structure are independent variables. This point emerges clearly as part of Steven Shapin's argument for a "new contextualism." Shapin rejects the old tendency to "regard the identification of 'social influences' on science as a way of exposing science, of portraying the science so influenced as corrupted by the action of these factors." One may

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Methodological and Theoretical Introduction

describe the "range of interests and uses to which scientific representations were put and the array of contextual factors which bore upon scientific change" without concluding "that scientific knowledge . . . is thus unfit for esoteric technical uses." A single scientific conception (such as the mid-eighteenth-century Edinburgh model of the body) could be multifunctional: "It was not less good as a technical predictive and explanatory resource for being also good as an ideological legitimating resource. Whether social interests of any particular sort are found to sustain a specific body of science, or indeed whether they are found at all, is a matter for empirical research to discover."36 This mutual independence certainly does not allow us to suppose that philosophical or scientific theories are the products of purely disinterested contemplation and that theories are put to ideological uses only after the fact. Social forces impinge on the production as well as the reception and institutionalization of theories, and Shapin's rejection of the notion that the ideological dimension ipso facto undermines the scientific dimension, and of the notion that the ideological dimension deserves the "purdah of the footnote," is part of an argument for a full-bodied contextualism that depends upon an interdisciplinary mode of analysis and that militates against internalist or intellectualist histories.37 This is a point to which I will return in the final section of this chapter. But in the meantime, it is important to emphasize that just as a given legitimating function is not intrinsically connected to a theory's logic or its explanatory power, neither is it intrinsically connected to the theory's historical genesis. We may well determine both that a set of beliefs serves a given legitimating function and that, beyond this function, it—unlike the example cited by Shapin— has no plausibility according to any known disciplinary norms. We may even have good grounds to suspect that an entire discipline owes its genesis to its legitimating function in a given historical context. In such cases, we may decide that the genesis of the belief or discipline can be understood only in terms of its ideological function. Nonetheless, such a judgment does not imply the sort of essentialism that I have been arguing against. For explaining the genesis of a theory (or style or genre) in social terms is not tantamount to discovering its essence. The notion that the nature of something is determined by its

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41

origin is much older than the contemporary vogue of "theory" in the humanities. Indeed, it underlies the most primitive cosmogonic myths. In the case of such myths it is easy to discern a certain sort of metaphysical presupposition to the effect that the narrative that explains how a state of affairs came into being is ipso facto explaining its essence. Indeed, such a metaphysical view allows the myths to serve a legitimating function: the gods who created the world, for example, established the ruling dynasty, whose essence is therefore primordial and transcendent. 1 * What is perhaps less easy to see is the fact that a secular historical explanation may utilize the same sort of metaphysical presupposition. For example, if, in demystifying a cosmogonic explanation, one supposes that the relationship between the myth and its original function is the defining characteristic of the myth, then one is bound to assume that the relation between the myths and the conditions that generated them is necessary or invariant. But to make this assumption is to adopt the same essentialist logic that underlay the myth itself. The fact that a given set of beliefs came into being in order to serve a given legitimating function does not preclude its coming, in the course of time, or in a different locale, to serve a different sort of legitimating function (or, perhaps, a different sort of cultural function altogether). 39 Let us suppose, for example, that the belief in private revelation came into existence in order to serve the interests of groups wishing to free themselves from the weight of a feudal system of hierarchical authority. That historical fact—if it were a historical fact—would not preclude someone else's appealing to private revelation to justify a hierarchical theocracy or any other authoritarian social or political system. Practitioners of ideological analysis increasingly accuse those who look at things synchronically—structuralists and formalists, for example—of falsifying reality by ignoring or downplaying its historicity. If my analysis is correct, however, then many of those who claim to be supplying the historical corrective are themselves being insufficiently historical. Those who, on the basis of perceived homologies, claim that a given theory or belief logically entails a given legitimating function are, as we have seen, guilty of ideological essentialism—inasmuch as they treat historical questions as if they were theoretical ones. But even those who avoid claiming that a theory logically implies a particular ideological function, who are

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Introduction

so "historical" as to base their ideological analyses on the origins of theories or beliefs, may be equally guilty of ideological essentialism—precisely insofar as they claim to find an intrinsic relationship between a legitimation and the conditions under which it arose. Paul Q. Hirst has observed that "no 'ideological' form or social relation is in essence and in principle bourgeois or non-bourgeois. This may seem a surprising conclusion but is an inevitable and necessary one once the problematic of the origin is abandoned." 40 Hirst's comments may be extended, of course, beyond class analyses to those based on gender, race, or professional interests.41 Any analysis that uses historical origins as a warrant for ideological essentialism is unhistorical. MOTIVES AND EXPLANATIONS

I have said that undoing the science/ideology dichotomy in a rigorous and consistent manner has the result of liberating the ideological critic from any obligation to demonstrate that his or her investigations themselves are ideology-free. For as soon as one recognizes that a mode of analysis is neither essentially ideological nor essentially scientific, then the fact that it has an ideological dimension—the fact, say, that its deployment may be motivated by a desire to demystify the legitimations of inequitable social structures—neither enhances nor reduces its credibility qua science. But such liberation does not come without cost. For my critique of ideological essentialism also defuses the kind of attack that practitioners of ideological approaches have frequently leveled against those who eschew such approaches. In literary studies, the new critics and other formalists whose aesthetic theories exalt the autonomous work of art and devalue attempts to root literary works in the social context in which they arose have frequently been attacked on political grounds. That is to say, their theories have been analyzed in such a way as to "reveal" that formalism is intrinsically right wing or authoritarian.42 By the same token, those who have offered objectivist theories of literary interpretation have been attacked as fascist bullies bent on legitimating authority in general and exerting their personal authority over others. Meanwhile, such antiobjectivist approaches as deconstruction have been attacked for being linked theoretically,

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and hence politically, to formalism. 43 Ryan's attempt to reconcile Marxism and deconstruction undertakes to ward off such attacks by linking the deconstructionist critique of language to the essentialist ideological critique of objectivism. (The tendency for contemporary theorists of various stripes to legitimate themselves by stressing their opposition to the bogey of objectivism [or scientific realism] is reminiscent of the attempt by nearly every faction in the seventeenth century to link its enemies to Scholasticism.) Thus the critique of ideological essentialism serves to undermine not only a certain way of understanding history but also the premises of a good many contemporary polemics among literary scholars. In the historical study of ideas, particularly philosophical and scientific ideas, the counterpart to literary formalism has been the practice of internalist or intellectualist historiography. Practitioners of such an approach have tended to see ideas as solutions to intellectual problems that had themselves arisen in response to previous solutions to still earlier problems, and so on, throughout the history of a disciplinary tradition. Such historians would not deny that individual thinkers may have motivations that arise independently of the self-contained tradition, but these historians have often denied that these motivations—ranging from personal animus to class interests—are relevant to the scientific study of the ideas. They have in fact branded the ideological analysis of ideas as "the genetic fallacy," that is, as a fallacious mode of reasoning that fails to recognize that the truth value of a claim needs to be evaluated independently of that claim's historical genesis. From the perspective of the internalist, therefore, the doggedness of the ideological analyst in stressing the genesis of ideas has been seen as itself ideological rather than scientific. Conversely, the response of Marxists and other ideological critics has been to treat internalist historiography and the invocation of the genetic fallacy as ideological. Thus the intellectualist historian and the ideological historian have both invoked the science/ideology dichotomy, but each was labeling his own work as science and his opponent's work as ideology. It could be charged, however, that my critique of ideological essentialism is actually a reformulation of the genetic fallacy, one that likewise serves to protect intellectualist history from ideological attack. Although I am advocating ideological criticism, I could thus

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be accused of undermining such criticism or, at best, of pleading for a toleration of other approaches and hence of promoting a genteel methodological pluralism that blunts the oppositional force of ideological criticism. Such an objection, however, would miss the point of my enterprise in several crucial respects. Granted, insofar as my critique of ideological essentialism dissolves the science/ideology polarity, it allows for the examination of ideas in respect to their scientific dimension, their plausibility as solutions to technical problems. It also protects internalist historians or formalist critics from ideological attack insofar as it disallows essentialist claims that their methodology is intrinsically an instance of false consciousness that is mystifying sectional interests. But this is not to deny that the appeal to the genetic fallacy or the appeal to literature as an autonomous object of study can be motivated by a repugnance for progressive politics. (Although neither the appeal to the genetic fallacy nor the appeal to the autonomy of the literary text disallows contextual analysis, both tend to disparage it.) Nor is it to deny that in a given context the relationship between a given writer's rejection of cultural studies or ideological criticism as a legitimate scholarly undertaking, on the one hand, and that writer's politics, on the other hand, can be demonstrated by responsible techniques of ideological criticism. What the contextual approach to ideological criticism does not allow is the claim that those who invoke the genetic fallacy or who advocate intellectualist historiography or formalist criticism are ipso facto right wingers by dint of the logic of their intellectualism or formalism or that the ideological dimension of their work necessarily undermines its scientific value. But since the scientific value of intellectualist historiography or formalism can be examined in scientific terms, the critic can legitimately undertake to demonstrate that the intellectualist or formalist approach is, in any given instance, too narrow to be scientifically satisfactory, too narrow, that is, to provide an adequate explanation even by the criteria of the discipline in question. 44 Now, it could be observed that since I grant that the separation of scientific analysis from ideological analysis can be useful to enemies of ideological criticism and social progress, then my analysis in this chapter can be embraced and used by the academic right wing and by the political right wing. But this is to say no

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more than that my analysis is subject to intellectual co-optation by those whose politics I oppose. This is an inevitable consequence of the co-optability of ideas and hence a confirmation of my argument. But just as this fact does not amount to a scientific challenge to my position, neither does it have potency as a political challenge to the approach that I am offering. The fact is that those who do not want to do ideological analyses but who want to do intellectualist history do not need my analysis to justify themselves since they can either ignore the demands of contextualist history or appeal to the genetic fallacy. Indeed, the genetic fallacy has long been available as a justification for doing intellectualist or internal history. What I am doing is taking the genetic fallacy and bringing it over to the other side, using it not as a basis for excluding the social and political context but as a basis for including it in a responsible way and thereby depriving the intellectualist historians of their chief theoretical weapon against ideological criticism. That is to say, my critique of ideological essentialism, insofar as it resembles the genetic fallacy, amounts to an intellectual co-optation of that position. For I am using the undoing of the science/ideology dichotomy not as a way of rejecting ideological criticism but as a way of promoting it. Moreover, I am able to carry out this intellectual co-optation openly and without having to deny that I am motivated by interests. For one thing, I am motivated by professional interests and hope that the method advocated here will be adopted by others, who will thereby enhance my professional status. I also hope that my arguments in this chapter will help to justify my historical approach, both in this book and in other writings. If we could tell, once and for all, that a given philosophical theory, scientific hypothesis, or literary style is intrinsically linked to authoritarian politics or a hierarchical social structure, then historical investigations that uncovered the actual ideological functioning of each theory, hypothesis, or style in its specific historical context would be superfluous—mere mechanical "verifications" of the results stipulated by theory. That is to say, our understanding of the logic of each structure would allow us to know in advance how it served sectional interests—whether those of a given social class, gender, race, or profession. Theory would replace history,

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and there would be no significant work left for historians who were committed to ideological criticism. My critique of ideological essentialism uses historical arguments to justify a historically grounded ideological criticism. It thereby provides ideological criticism with a rationale and a program. I have just acknowledged professional motives for advocating the version of ideological criticism that I have been advocating—namely, the desire to justify and promote my own work in the area of ideological criticism and cultural studies. This work, in turn, is motivated, at least in part, by the larger and more traditional political aims that have often been shared by ideological critics— namely, the desire to unmask the various ways in which shifting hegemonic forces have attempted to present the social and political status quo as natural, logical, or inevitable. I want more people to carry out such inquiries and more people to learn from them. But happily, once we have dissolved the science/ideology dichotomy— not just rhetorically, but in actual practice—then the fact that my motives are not disinterested will not necessarily affect the credibility of my claims. I have advanced them in the language of intellectual inquiry, and, although they are not disinterested, neither are they essentially ideological. For they also claim to be science and therefore ask to be evaluated as such.

2

Dryden's Religio Laid and the Politics of Scriptural Deism O n ne pouvait lire les livres sibyllins sans la permission du sénat, qui ne la donnait même que dans les grandes occasions, et lorsqu'il s'agissait de consoler les peuples. Toutes les interprétations étaient défendues; ces livres même étaient toujours renfermés; et, par une précaution si sage, on ôtait les armes des mains des fanatiques et des séditieux. Montesquieu

O R T H O D O X Y A N D POLITICAL LOGIC

Commentators have generally agreed that Dryden's Religio Laid is a religious poem, but they have disagreed as to the sort of religion that the poem is setting forth. Views attributed to Dryden have ranged from proto-Catholic fideistic skepticism,' to orthodox Anglicanism, 2 to a lingering deism or crypto-deism. 3 One explanation for this disagreement immediately presents itself: the poem and its preface contain individual passages that fit each of the religious views attributed to Dryden. In the face of this fact, the most common critical procedure seems to have been to assume that one set of passages predominates and that the others represent lapses or inconsistencies that are best ignored. Another approach has been to see the opposing tendencies as representing a tension in Dryden's religious outlook. 4 A third conspicuous approach has been to argue that the apparent anomalies can be subsumed under a religious tradition that is sufficiently capacious to embrace all the doctrines that Dryden enunciates. This last view, since being magisterially set forth by Phillip Harth in 1968,5 has been the most influential. Harth argues that Religio Laid is fundamentally an orthodox Anglican poem in which Dryden first rejects deism in favor of revealed Christianity and then rejects Roman Catholicism and Puritanism in favor of the Anglican via 49

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Toleration, the Social Order

media. Armed with a formidable command of the tradition of Anglican apologetics, Harth is able to show that virtually everything that Dryden says in the poem has an antecedent or counterpart in the Anglican tradition. To place various elements of Dryden's Religio Laid in the Anglican tradition, however, is not necessarily to make sense of the poem. The Anglican tradition, after all, can be seen to be nothing more than the sum of the various pronouncements of the various figures who have claimed to be orthodox Anglicans and whose claims to orthodoxy have not been widely rejected. Nor does it help matters to place Dryden more specifically in the tradition of Anglican rationalism or to stress his connection to the efflorescence of rationalism among his latitudinarian contemporaries, most notably Archbishop Tillotson. For one thing, the fact that the orthodoxy of Tillotson and his latitudinarian confreres has been challenged both by his traditionalist contemporaries in the High Church party and by a succession of recent scholars only points up the inconclusiveness of attempting to establish Dryden's orthodoxy through an appeal to his latitudinarian tendencies. But even if we leave aside the question of whether Dryden's affinity to Tillotson guarantees his orthodoxy, there remains the problem of coherence. Tillotson's own position represents a gathering of theological elements whose relationship to one another, from a theological perspective, can at best be termed uneasy. Robert E. Sullivan has summed up the paradoxical theological situation in which the latitudinarians found themselves: Like their predecessors, the Anglican rationalists did not fail to appeal either to the presumed existence of a universal moral principle or to an innate religious faculty in an attempt to demonstrate Christianity's fundamental reasonableness. They were, however, more venturesome in endeavoring to assert simultaneously that idiosyncratic Christian teachings were true and that conformity to the discipline of natural religion was sufficient for salvation. h

In the course of my analysis it will emerge that Dryden, to some extent at least, follows the "venturesomeness" of the latitudinarian divines. In this regard, Harth is perfectly justified in claiming Dryden's affinity to latitudinarian "orthodoxy." But such a theological approach to the poem allows us to conclude nothing more than

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that D r y d e n , borrowing an incoherent set of premises from Anglican sources, had produced an incoherent Anglican poem. I am concerned, however, not so m u c h with challenging the orthodoxy or theological consistency of Religio Laid as with showing that the p o e m has a consistent and rigorous political logic and that this political logic accounts for the theological anomalies. That the p o e m has, at the very least, a conspicuous political dimension is evidenced by the fact that, as Steven N . Zwicker has recently put it, "at the poem's close w e discover that 'common quiet' and not salvation is mankind's concern." Z w i c k e r is somew h a t ironically alluding to the fact that, after several hundred lines in w h i c h " D r y d e n guides the religious pilgrim on the path to salvation [and] narrates a history of philosophical and religious beliefs," he concludes his ostensibly religious argument with an emphatically political exhortation: 7 private Reason 'tis more Just to curb, Than by Disputes the publick Peace disturb. For points obscure are of small use to learn: But Common quiet is Mankind's concern." Z w i c k e r argues convincingly that this concluding political appeal represents n o last-minute switch from religious to political concerns but is the culmination of an attack on the Puritans and the Catholics, an attack that dominates the second half of the p o e m and that is d e e p l y political in nature. Zwicker, however, has little to say about D r y d e n ' s attack on deism in the first half of the poem or about its relationship to the political concerns of the second half. Harth, on the other hand, has a g o o d deal to say about Dryden's attack on deism. His volubility results from the fact that he finds this part of D r y d e n ' s polemic problematic and in need of detailed explanation. There is, of course, no difficulty in understanding w h y an orthodox Anglican w o u l d be unable to countenance deism, but Harth is initially troubled by the question of w h y D r y d e n should, in 1682, feel a need to address deism at all. M y analysis of the political logic of the poem will focus on the relationship of Dryden's attack on deism to everything that follows. This will allow m e to w o r k out the logical and rhetorical articulations of Dryden's overall argument. Harth's careful attempt to

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account for the first half of the poem without any reference to the politics of deism will provide a useful point of departure. DRYDEN'S "OCCASION" Harth is troubled, at least temporarily, by the need to ascertain the occasion for Dryden's attack on deism in the first half of the poem. Dryden, he tells us, "habitually writes as an 'occasional' poet in the best sense of that term. He seizes upon some occasion which has aroused excitement or controversy and makes it the subject of a poem which he publishes before the public's interest has subsided." 9 The discussion of Catholicism and Puritanism in the second half of the poem is, Harth observes, sparked by the publication, by Dryden's own publisher Jacob Tonson, of Henry Dickinson's English translation of Pére Simon's monumental and controversial Histoire critique du vieux testament. Indeed, Dryden acknowledges the occasion by prefacing that discussion with praise of both Dickinson and Simon. But, Harth further observes, in 1682 there was no apparent occasion for an attack on deism. The published writings of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the so-called father of English deism, had appeared many years earlier. There had been no conspicuous recent publication of any deist text. The deist controversy had not yet begun. According to Harth's premise about Dryden's status as an occasional poet, the poet must have been responding to someone or something, but Lord Herbert's temporal distance and lack of prominence make him an unlikely candidate for the role: "To conclude that Dryden interrupted his activities in 1682 to launch an attack on the little noticed and long forgotten writings of a Caroline philosopher w h o had died while the poet was still at school is to make an unwarranted assumption about his habits as a writer for which there is no parallel in his entire career." 10 What, then, is the occasional poet's occasion? Having posed this problem for himself, Harth undertakes to solve it by arguing for the existence of a clandestine deist literature, intervening between Lord Herbert's writings and Dryden's poem, and inducing the poet to enter the lists against deism. The central exhibit in Harth's case is an undated manuscript entitled "Of Natural Religion," which Harth discovered (bound with miscellaneous printed materials) in the British Library. Harth

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finds certain differences between the way in which the deistic position is formulated in this manuscript and the way in which it had been formulated by Lord Herbert in his famous five articles, or " c o m m o n notions." O n the other h a n d , certain features of the formulation in the a n o n y m o u s manuscript are found to recur in Dryden's statement of the Deist's 11 position in Religio Laid (11. 4 3 61), leading Harth to the following equivocal conclusion: "While there is n o reason to suppose that this pamphlet was the only deist tract that Dryden might have seen, the similarities in this case are so close that we are tempted to ask whether some form of the manuscript would have been available to Dryden before the middle of 1682." 12 I characterize this as an equivocal conclusion because, although Harth employs the sublimely diffident locution "we are t e m p t e d to ask," he subsequently goes on with his discussion as if the tentative question has a m o u n t e d to a definitive answer and the problem of the occasion for Dryden's treatment of deism has in fact been resolved. I mention these things not because I wish to engage in a critique of Harth's rhetorical strategies but because I wish to suggest that the explicit caution with which he offers his solution is more warranted than the implicit assurance with which he allows it to play a decisive role in his argument. Without entering into the details of Harth's comparison between Lord Herbert's formulations, Dryden's, and those of the a n o n y m o u s tract, we can observe that n o matter h o w n u m e r o u s or striking the similarities between Dryden's formulations and those of the tract, these similarities cannot establish that Dryden was responding to the a n o n y m o u s author. For Harth's data are also compatible with other hypotheses. According to one alternative explanation, set forth by William Empson, the similarities between the deist tract and Dryden's poem are attributable to Dryden's having been the author of both. 1 3 A second, less provocative, counterhypothesis is suggested by the fact that the manuscript tract is u n d a t e d . As long as we do not know the date of the manuscript, we cannot rule out the possibility that it postdated Religio Laid and that its author—whoever it may have been— borrowed formulations from Dryden's poem. I mention these counterhypotheses, however, only in passing. My p u r p o s e is not to argue for the preferability of one or the other of t h e m over Harth's o w n etiology of Dryden's deistic formulations.

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Indeed, my unease with Harth's painstaking attempt to reconstruct a line of descent between Herbert's formulation of the deist position and Dryden's own lies not so much with the reconstruction itself as with the assumption that the alleged discovery of intermediate formulations of deism is tantamount to the discovery of the reason Dryden saw fit to add an attack on deism to his timely attacks on Catholicism and Puritanism. Harth seems to assume that any heterodoxy that has been stated recently or insistently is a threat to orthodoxy and therefore a suitable target for Dryden's polemical attack. But I will show that Dryden's attacks on Catholicism and Puritanism are motivated by political rather than theological or doctrinal imperatives and that deism, far from posing a similar political threat, gave Dryden a weapon with which to respond to what he saw as the real threat. Dryden's purpose in the poem is not to engage in religious controversy but to dissolve religious controversy for the sake of public order, and Dryden's treatment of deism is subtly but indissolubly tied to that purpose. Once we understand the political logic of the poem, we will be in a position to see that the occasion for Dryden's treatment of deism is embedded in his overall argument and that Harth's laborious reconstruction of a possible line of descent from Herbert to Dryden, whatever its scholarly merits, is irrelevant to an understanding of the role of deism in the Religio Laid.

PERE SIMON AND THE PERILS OF PROTESTANTISM

In posing the question of the occasion for Dryden's attack on deism, Harth curiously fails to confront the fact that Dryden himself explicitly tells us something about what had occasioned his thoughts, or at least some of them, in the first, antideist, half of the poem. After offering a series of refutations of the deistic claim that a sufficient knowledge of God and of our obligations toward him could be obtained by reason alone, independently of revelation, Dryden completes his consideration of deism by answering a hypothetical "Objection of the Deist"—namely, a morally potent objection to Dryden's insistent claim that reason is insufficient. If unaided reason cannot yield the fundamental theological and moral truths of Christianity, then the countless inhabitants of newly

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discovered lands, lands that the gospel had never reached, must be denied salvation: 'Tis said the sound of a Messiah's Birth Is gone through all the habitable Earth: But still that Text must be confin'd alone To what was Then inhabited, and known: And what Provision cou'd from thence accrue To Indian Souls, and Worlds discover'd Neiv? (11. 174-79)

Dryden immediately grants that "Of all Objections this indeed is chief / To startle Reason, stagger frail Belief" (11. 184-85). Then, having acknowledged the force of the objection, he immediately undertakes to address it. His solution is to suppose, or at least to hope, that salvation will indeed be extended to those heathens: because a Rule reveal'd Is none to Those, from whom it was conceal'd, Then those w h o follow'd Reasons Dictates right; Liv'd up, and lifted high their Natural Light; With Socrates may see their Maker's Face.

(11. 206-10)

Dryden thus suggests not only that the heathens cannot be blamed for failing to follow the dictates of revealed Christianity but that, in the absence of revelation, they are nonetheless able to behave morally and thereby achieve salvation. This they can accomplish by following the "natural light" of reason. Dryden here may seem to end up accepting a good deal of what his attack on deism is ostensibly rejecting—a paradox that will recur in the poem and whose significance will become clear in the course of my analysis. In the meantime, though, I am still concerned with the question of the occasion for this series of thoughts. After the discussion of deism, part of which I have just outlined, Dryden moves to what the marginal rubric calls the "Digression to the Translator of Father Simon's Critical History of the Old Testament." Here we have explicit reference to the book that Harth identifies as the occasion for the second half of the poem. But it is interesting to see how Dryden makes his transition from his discussion of deism to his "Digression":

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Religious Epistemologi/, Toleration, the Social Order Thus far my Charity this path has try'd; (A much unskilfull, but well meaning guide:) Yet what they are, ev'n these crude thoughts were bred By reading that, which better thou hast read, Thy Matchless Author's work: which thou, my Friend, By well translating better dost commend. (11. 224-29)

The path that Dryden's "Charity . . . has try'd" is, in the narrowest possible interpretation, the poet's answer to the Deist's objection. For Dryden had twice linked his views on the salvation of the heathens to his charity: "Not onely Charity bids hope the best" (1. 198); "Nor does it baulk my Charity, to find / Th' Egyptian Bishop of another mind" (11. 2 1 2 - 1 3 ) . Of course, since Dryden's charitable sentiments concerning the salvation of the heathens mark the culmination of his treatment of deism, it is possible that the phrase "these crude thoughts" refers to the entire foregoing discussion. But leaving aside the question of just how much of the discussion of deism is encompassed by Dryden's reference to "these crude thoughts," it is noteworthy that the thoughts to which Dryden refers were "bred" by his reading of the book that Dickinson, as translator, has read "better" than Dryden has and that has been enhanced by the skill with which the translator has rendered his "Matchless Author's work." Thus the publishing event that Harth has designated as the occasion for the second half of the poem is explicitly presented by Dryden as the occasion for at least part of his discussion of deism in the first half. I have said that my interest in Dryden's treatment of deism centers on its role in the argument of Religio Laid. Accordingly, my focus on Dryden's remark that his "crude thoughts were bred" by his reading of Simon's Critical History is intended to point not to a seminal event but to the logical and rhetorical strategies by which the individual parts of the poem are made to serve Dryden's overall purpose. How, then, does Dryden's discussion of deism relate to his discussion of Simon? A pioneer of biblical textual criticism, Père Simon is at pains to show the unreliability of scriptural transmission. Copyists and translators introduce errors and distortions; and the result, after many centuries, is a corrupt text. One might, of course, be tempted to see an attack on the reliability of the chief instrument of divine revelation as an attack on revealed religion itself, but Simon is

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careful to ward off such an interpretation of his project. He turns the critique of the reliability of Scripture into a Roman Catholic argument against Protestantism. The Protestants' ability to dispense with the Church's role as mediating authority depends on the reliability and clarity of the biblical text. But Simon argues that the unreliability of the text renders the traditional exegetical authority of the Church all the more indispensable: The great alterations which have happened . . . to the copies of the Bible since the first Originals have been lost, utterly destroy the Protestants and Socinians Principle, who consult onely these same Copies of the Bible as we at present have them. If the truth of Religion remain'd not in the Church, it would be unsafe to search for it at present in Books which have been subject to so many alterations, and have in many things depended upon the pleasure of Transcribers.u

In itself, Simon's argument requires almost no commentary. But it is worth noting that the mention of the Protestants and the Socinians in tandem—thus simultaneously distinguishing them from each other and tying them together—is a pervasive practice that takes on a strategic role in Simon's overall polemic. This practice will culminate in Simon's claim, in book 3, that the antitrinitarian extreme represented by the Socinians is a logical outgrowth of the Protestant principle of lay exegesis and that, consequently, there is no defensible Protestant middle ground between Socinianism and Catholicism: "There have . . . been very few Protestant Divines w h o have sufficiently answer'd the Socinians, w h o affirm that there can be no medium held betwixt their Religion, and the Roman Catholick; for if we take the Scripture, Reason, and Experience for our Rule, we must, say they, be of their Opinion, whereas if w e follow the prejudices of Tradition, we must of necessity joyn with the Roman Catholicks,"15 Thus, by propping weakened Scripture against the authority of Catholic tradition, Simon attempts to deflect the charge that his textual criticism undermines Christianity. It undermines only those branches of Christianity that think they can depend on an unmediated reading of the biblical texts—only, that is, Protestantism. One might expect Dryden, as an avowed defender of revelation and of the Church of England, to have no sympathy for Simon's

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erudite work, either in its prima facie role as an attack on the reliability of the biblical text or in the role to which the author piously applies it, as an instrument of Catholic apologetics. Indeed, since the Church of England presents itself as a via media between traditional authority and unbridled autonomy, and since Simon's scholarship and his arguments militate against the feasibility of any such middle ground, one might expect Dryden to be particularly resistant to Simon's theses. Dryden does not, however, challenge Simon's scholarship or its general implications for the reliability of Scripture. Instead he commends Simon the scholar and adroitly turns this commendatibn into an attack on Simon the Catholic apologist: A Work so full with various Learning fraught, So nicely pondred, yet so strongly wrought, As Natures height and Arts last hand requir'd: As much as Man cou'd compass, uninspir'd. Where we may see what Errours have been made Both in the Copiers and Translaters Trade: How Jewish, Popish, Interests have prevail'd, And where Infallibility has fail'd. (11. 2 4 4 - 5 1 )

After granting Simon's overall claim that the biblical text has been extensively corrupted by copiers and translators, Dryden, in the last two lines of this passage, indicates that he is not going to grant that this fact in any way redounds to the benefit of Catholicism. First, the distortions of the text are attributed not entirely to simple negligence but, at least in part, to "Popish Interests." Moreover, rather than pointing to the need for reliance on the authority of Catholic tradition, the corruption of the scriptural text points to the failure of that tradition, to its fallibility. Dryden's turning of the tables on Simon, transforming an argument for a dependence on Church authority into a thrust against the reliability of Church authority, is not merely a passing jab. Rather, it heralds a lengthy argument in which Dryden begins by claiming that the same sorts of circumstances that, in the course of time, produce distortions in written texts must yield even greater distortions in the oral traditions of the Church: If written words from time are not secur'd, How can we think have oral Sounds endur'd?

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Which thus transmitted, if one Mouth has fail'd, Immortal Lyes on Ages are intail'd: And that some such have been, is prov'd too plain; If we consider Interest, Church, and Gain. (11. 270-75) The argument concludes with the claim that if Church tradition w e r e really all that reliable an authority, it w o u l d be able to employ its infallibility in establishing a correct biblical text: But if this Mother be a Guid so sure, As can all doubts resolve, all truth secure, Then her Infallibility, as well Where Copies are corrupt, or lame, can tell; Restore lost Canon with as little pains, As truly explicate what still remains: Which yet no Council dare pretend to doe. (11. 285-90) H a v i n g seen h o w Dryden's attack against Catholicism d e p e n d s u p o n his acceptance of Simon's critique of the integrity of Scripture, one m a y well w o n d e r w h a t g r o u n d this leaves D r y d e n to stand on in his role as Anglican apologist. A f t e r all, to extend Simon's textual criticism into an attack against Catholic tradition w o u l d seem to spread the destructiveness of the Critical History without in any w a y rescuing the scriptural bastion on which Protestantism depends. To avoid having his o w n position undermined by his attack on Catholicism, D r y d e n , while accepting Simon's claim of extensive textual corruption, places crucial limits upon this corruption. H o w e v e r unreliable the biblical texts m a y be, they are reliable in matters necessary for salvation: the Scriptures, though not every where Free from Corruption, or intire, or clear, Are uncorrupt, sufficient, clear, intire, In all things which our needfull Faith require. (11. 297-300) This solution is not presented as a bare assertion, but is premised on G o d ' s goodness. The premise is presented succinctly, and a bit elliptically, in a single line of italic print: "God wou'd not leave Mankind without a way" (1. 296). But the significance of this line w o u l d be perfectly clear to D r y d e n ' s readers: G o d is good, and although he

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may have allowed human error and Roman Catholic deceit to distort the original revealed text, he, in his goodness, would not have left mankind without the means to attain salvation. Dryden can afford to premise his solution on a single elliptical sentence because the premise is universally acceptable. But it is important to realize that the premise is so universally acceptable that it would be embraced even by the deists. In fact, it is a premise on which deism itself rests. The deist argues that God, in his goodness, would not allow countless heathens who, through no fault of their own, had never received the gospel to suffer everlasting perdition. By the same token, God would not allow Christians who, through no fault of their own, have received a distorted version of the gospel to suffer damnation as a result. For the deists, however, Dryden's premise points to a conclusion different from Dryden's own—namely, that God provided all humankind with the means for salvation by inscribing the needful truths in every human heart. In putting forth his solution, the deist, it should be noted, did not need to reject revealed religion as spurious. He needed only to claim that supernatural revelation is not the sine qua non of salvation but that its "needful truths" are those that God, through other means, has made universally available. Indeed, this was precisely the tack that had been taken by Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Although Simon may have brought unprecedented erudition to bear on the textual criticism of the Bible, he was by no means the first to reveal that biblical texts were ambiguous and could give rise to violently conflicting interpretations. That fact had been amply demonstrated by the entire religious and political history of the sixteenth century. And Hooker, in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, had long since supplied the armory of Anglican apologetics with the notion that "thinges necessarie to all mens salvation . . . are in Scripture plaine and easie to be understood.""' What Lord Herbert had done was to moderate his own iconoclasm by claiming that he was not rejecting either Scripture or Hooker's principle while subsuming them under the more universal religion of deism: It will be worth while . . . to inquire more thoroughly what in the Sacred Scriptures m a y be called the pure and undisputed word of

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God. Not everything indeed that is contained in Scripture, or that the most absurd priest has said, is endowed with equal authority. . . . There remains the question, therefore, what in the Holy Bible is the very word of God, and further what is most necessary to salvation. A n d here in the first place, surely . . . we find our catholic truths, which as the undoubted pronouncements of God, transcribed within us, are to be set apart and preserved. 1 7

Thus, according to Lord Herbert, we recognize the uncorrupted essence of Scripture because it corresponds to what God has imprinted upon our minds independently of any revealed religion. But if there had been no Scripture, or if a remote race of people had never received the Scripture, they would not have been left "without a way." For Dryden, as for Lord Herbert, there is a core of truth in Scripture. But for Dryden, as we shall see, it is recognizable not by appeal to any extratextual criterion, such as truths inscribed in our hearts, but on the basis of the fact that it is clear enough to stand above the fray of all the competing interpretations. In a word, it is impervious to interpretation. This fact will have enormous consequences for our understanding of Dryden's poem, but for now we need to recognize merely that Dryden's "orthodox" premise, that God would not leave us without a way, can yield Lord Herbert's heterodox conclusion and that Herbert's conclusion is in fact a more comprehensive version of Dryden's own. Indeed, the only thing that allows Dryden to offer his own conclusion—that the biblical text is "uncorrupt" in all things necessary for salvation—as if it were the only one that could be elicited from his premise, is the fact that Dryden has already "refuted" deism in the first half of the poem. Having observed that Dryden himself said that his "crude thoughts" in the first half of the poem were "bred / By reading" Simon's book, I undertook to determine how the thoughts occasioned by Dryden's reading of Simon might have given rise to his refutation of deism. For if we could see how the second half of the poem required the first half, then we could take the poet at his word and not have to follow Harth in his inconclusive search for a separate occasion. We have now found at least a part of an alternative solution to Harth's problem. Dryden wishes to turn Simon's

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arguments on their head, to convert precisely that evidence of textual corruption that Simon had used as a Catholic club against Protestantism into a weapon directed against the Church of Rome. But in doing so, he needed to avoid the danger that, by accepting Simon's general case against the reliability of scriptural transmission, he would be pushed toward the deist position that the availability of salvation is not dependent on Scripture at all but is available through reason, through common notions that God, in his goodness, has engraved on the human understanding. To rule out this alternative, and to leave the field to the ostensibly orthodox notion that God, in his goodness, must provide the needful truth in Scripture, Dryden had to preface his entire discussion of Simon and Catholicism with a refutation of deism. MINIMALISM: RATIONAL AND REVEALED To see why Dryden needed to refute deism is, paradoxically, to see how much Dryden's alternative to both deism and Catholicism bears the imprint of deistic thought. Granted, insofar as deism is defined as allowing access to religious knowledge through the inner light of reason and Christianity as requiring scriptural revelation, they represent epistemological contraries. But insofar as the overarching tendency of deism is toward the rejection of mystery and sectarian exclusivity in favor of the universal accessibility of religious knowledge and salvation, Dryden's version of Protestantism may be seen to carry this tendency as far as it can be carried within the arena of revealed religion. Dryden's Protestantism, like deism, is a religion of doctrinal minimalism. After telling us that, despite the extensive textual corruption revealed by Simon, there is a core, "uncorrupt, sufficient, clear, intire," Dryden never specifies just which doctrines are included among the scriptural minima. Instead, he makes it clear that any doctrine that depends upon a disputed interpretation of Scripture is not essential. After stating the principle that the Bible is clear "In all things which our needful Faith require," Dryden gives utterance to an objection, identified by the marginal rubric as an "Objection in behalf of Tradition; urg'd by Father Simon." In keeping with Simon's actual procedures, the hypothetical objection culminates with an attempt to use the heterodox extreme of Socin-

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ianism to illustrate the dangers of trying to adjudicate between conflicting interpretations without appealing to the authority of Catholic tradition: (What one Sect Interprets, all Sects may.) We hold, and say w e prove from Scripture plain, that Christ is GOD; the bold Socinian From the same Scripture urges he's but MAN. N o w what Appeal can end th' important Suit; Both parts talk loudly, but the Rule is mute? (11. 3 1 0 - 1 5 )

This hypothetical objection challenges Dryden to accept the consequences of his principle. If the essential doctrines that God has preserved from textual corruption are so plain that they are not subject to varying interpretations, then these essential doctrines must exclude even the doctrine of the divinity of Christ; for even so fundamental a doctrine as that has been denied by the "bold Socinians" on the basis of their interpretation of Scripture. Dryden boldly accepts the challenge: Shall I speak plain, and in a Nation free A s s u m e an honest Layman's Liberty? I think (according to m y little Skill, To m y o w n Mother-Church submitting still:) That many have been sav'd, and many may, W h o never heard this Question brought in play. T h ' unletter'd Christian, w h o believes in gross, Plods on to Heaven; and ne'er is at a loss. (11. 3 1 6 - 2 3 )

While parenthetically submitting to the Church of England, Dryden denies that the official church's doctrines—beyond those accessible to all other readers (and auditors) of Scripture and, hence, propounded by all other Christian confessions—are necessary for salvation. Dryden's scriptural minimalism is thus so skeletal as to be able to include both trinitarians and Socinians. Like deism, it requires no hierophants, no exegetical tradition, no interpretive skills. Indeed, its doctrines, like those of deism, are accessible independently of all scriptural interpretation. Although the poem never tells us what these minimal doctrines may be, it is hard to see how

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they can be anything other than the doctrines of deism itself. Indeed, the affinity between the deist's rational minimalism and Dryden's revealed minimalism can be seen in the fact that Lord Herbert, in the passage quoted above, is able to present the two sorts of minimalism in the same breath. The only thing that distinguishes Dryden's position from that of Lord Herbert is Dryden's insistence that the necessary doctrines are accessible solely through Scripture. For this reason I propose to characterize the layman's religion of Dryden's poem as "scriptural deism."

T H E SHIFTING POLITICS O F DEISM

Many of Dryden's orthodox contemporaries strongly embraced the principles of natural religion, which led them to stress the aspects of Christianity that are universally available to the inner light of reason and to downplay those dogmas that depend most conspicuously on biblical revelation. "Even amongst theologians who essayed the defence of revelation against the champions of natural religion," as one historian has put it, "the tendency was strong to ignore diversities of confession and church polity as things indifferent; and to concentrate on the proof of the claims of Christianity as enforcing and re-affirming the tenets of natural religion." 18 In any event, the tendency was to present the relationship between natural religion and orthodox theology as one of complementarity. There was even a popular genre of late seventeenthcentury theological works in which orthodox divines first argued in favor of natural religion and then moved on to argue in favor of Christianity. 19 Dryden's procedure, however, is not to show that natural religion and orthodox Christianity are complementary nor to use one to supplement the other. We have already seen how, in the first half of the poem, Dryden says that heathens may be saved by dint of their ability to follow "reason's dictates." But this eminently deistic sentiment comes only after a lengthy attack on deism and is presented as an instance of Christian charity warranted by Pauline principles: Not onely Charity bids hope the best, But more the great Apostle has exprest: That, if the Gentiles, ( w h o m no Law inspir'd,)

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By Nature did what w a s by Law requir'd; They, who the written Rule had never known, Were to themselves both Rule and Law alone: To Natures plain indictment they shall plead; And, by their Conscience, be condemn'd or freed. (11. 1 9 8 - 2 0 5 )

Dryden, both here and in his scriptural deism of the second half of the poem, rather than arguing for the compatibility of Christianity and natural religion, engages in a strategy of co-optation: he explicitly rejects deism while assimilating its principles into the structure of an argument that he presents as orthodox. 20 It could be objected at this point that Dryden's attack on deism does not distinguish him fundamentally from many of his latitudinarian contemporaries. Those who embraced natural religion, even if they did not make a point of attacking deism, very rarely went so far as to repudiate revealed religion or to deny the central mysteries of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Instead, these Anglican rationalists were careful to distinguish themselves from the deists, whom they depicted as claiming to have their religious knowledge exclusively through reason. Accordingly, it could be objected that modern scholars who maintain that "the distinction between orthodoxy and Deism [was] often very tenuous and sometimes only a matter of retaining the conventional theological phraseology" 21 are willfully ignoring the fact that Anglican adherents of natural religion were not satisfied with reason alone and therefore rejected deism. 22 One could presumably apply the same sort of objection to my foregoing analysis and assert that in introducing the designation scriptural deism I am being unduly paradoxical. After all, Dryden does not renounce Christian mysteries. Indeed, not only does he attack deism in the first half of Religio Laici, but a central feature of that attack is the assertion that deism falls short of the crucial revealed doctrines of the fall and redemption through the Incarnation (11. 99-114). 2 3 Such a defense of Dryden's orthodoxy would insist that we take Dryden at his word in the single passage in which he expresses the necessity of believing in Christian doctrines that transcend deistic minimalism. However, if a writer's invocation of revealed dogmas, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, deserves to be treated as a

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touchstone for distinguishing orthodox Christians from deists, we will find ourselves in a bizarre landscape full of people who are attacking deism but virtually devoid of those being attacked. For the people w h o m we generally declare to be at the center of English deism—such as Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal—have an annoying habit of declining to fly their true colors and, instead, of including in their discourses pious pronouncements regarding their belief in the Incarnation and the Trinity. 24 Moreover, we have already seen that Lord Herbert of Cherbury does not overtly reject Scripture in favor of reason but simply sets up reason as the touchstone of biblical interpretation. Nor are these pronouncements palpably ironic; rather, their tone tends, in itself, to resemble and perhaps to imitate that of the most devout believers in the Christian mysteries. 2 5 This being the case, critics and scholars have naturally tended to use an interpretive touchstone that was described, but by no means invented, by Toland himself: "When a man maintains what's commonly believ'd, or professes what's publicly injoin'd, it is not always a sure rule that he speaks what he thinks: but when he seriously maintains the contrary of what's by law established, and openly declares for what most others oppose, then there's a strong presumption that he utters his mind."2'' Our tendency to discount orthodox pieties when they are surrounded by less than orthodox pronouncements is attributable to the fact that there are risks involved in deviating from orthodoxy and hence obvious prudential reasons for paying lip service to orthodox positions. But this is not to say that I am invoking Toland's principle in order to argue that Dryden was an Anglican out of prudence and a deist out of conviction. My view is that Dryden's orthodox appeal to the Incarnation and his surreptitiously heterodox scriptural deism tell us less about his personal beliefs concerning the nature of the divinity or the route to salvation than about his approach to his public duty of defending the established religiopolitical authority. 2 7 Both the pious embrace of revealed doctrines and the appropriation of deism are ultimately products of political calculation. And although my analysis of Dryden's refutation of Simon provides the beginnings of an understanding of the poet's strategy, a full understanding will depend on a grasp of the politics of deism. Seventeenth-century deism presents itself as both a moral and a

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political argument. The moral force of deism, as w e h a v e already seen, is a c k n o w l e d g e d by D r y d e n in his response to the Deist's objection, A l t h o u g h D r y d e n e m p l o y s the moral argument—that without the universality of natural religion to transcend the geographic limitations of revelation, countless innocent souls must be d a m n e d — a s an interlocutor's objection, a deist might h a v e u s e d it as his starting point. For the deist, as for D r y d e n , such an argument serves not merely to rescue the souls of the n e w l y discovered heathens but also to rescue the orthodox concept of G o d as perfectly benevolent and devoid of cruelty or arbitrariness. The political dimensions of deism are, at least for the modern reader, p e r h a p s a bit less apparent. But for the seventeenth-century reader they m u s t h a v e been quite conspicuous. O n the o n e hand, deism could be perceived as a threat to the political order, not only because Christianity w a s generally seen to provide the moral glue of society but m o r e specifically because royal authority w a s comm o n l y legitimated by an appeal to certain biblical passages. In principle, therefore, deism could be perceived not simply as heretical but also as seditious. These factors w o u l d make it extremely risky for a n y Englishman openly to embrace deism, and they w o u l d m a k e it particularly u n s e e m l y for the Poet Laureate to d o so. In the light of the political history of the previous century, h o w e v e r , deism o f f e r e d not only a strategy for achieving public peace but also a justification for imposing and enforcing political obedience. In the Religio Laid, as I will show, the u s e f u l n e s s of deism for conservative p u r p o s e s outweighs its political risks. But D r y d e n tries to reduce these risks still further by using deism surreptitiously a n d by coupling his strategic appropriation with an explicit repudiation. A f t e r more than a century of sectarian persecution and religious w a r f a r e , the need for religious toleration had become increasingly obvious. D e i s m met that need. T h e same religious minimalism that w o u l d allow " I n d i a n S o u l s " in "Worlds discover'd N e w " to obtain their salvation w o u l d also dissolve the points of contention between the warring sects of Europe. A universal religion that consisted of a h a n d f u l of doctrines available to the innate light of h u m a n reason w o u l d render doctrinal disputes, at worst, absurd and destructive superstitions a n d , at best, superfluities that were irrelevant to salvation. Since there is a universal, natural religion underlying the

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vain disputes over scriptural meaning, there is no justification for persecution. Thus, when moved from the N e w World to the Old, deism becomes an argument for religious toleration. 28 We will see in chapter 3 that Pierre Bayle bases his argument for religious toleration at least partly on the individual's right to freedom of conscience. A n d insofar as Bayle argues that monarchs are obliged to respect this right, one might wish to call his argument a moral one. But insofar as Bayle's moral argument represents the interests of his persecuted coreligionists, it is also, of course, a political argument. The deistic version of the argument for toleration does not require a right of conscience but can, as I have just indicated, serve the interests of oppressed groups by removing the justification for religious persecution. But with a shift of context, it can just as easily serve the interests of the established political authority. Religious differences had given rise not only to persecution but, from the point of view of established authority, to sedition and usurpation. Insofar as religious beliefs conduce to the eternal disposition of souls, they provide a strong motivation for disobedience to secular authority. If the state requires adherence to doctrines that imperil one's eternal soul, then obedience to God (and concern for one's salvation) are liable to take precedence over one's duty to the state. Deism insists that the doctrines that are disputed by rival sects are in no w a y essential to salvation since the necessary religious truths depend neither on Scripture nor on the interpretation of Scripture but are universally available to reason. If one's soul is in no way imperiled by submission to secular authority, then one cannot justify disobedience; and if one nonetheless persists in fomenting political disorder under the banner of religion, the state would be justified in seeing religion as a mere pretext for sedition. Thus deism removes the religious justification for political disobedience and provides a justification for political repression. Nor does the foregoing analysis represent my extrapolation or my discovery of a potentially repressive ideology hidden beneath the benign surface of deistic toleration. Rather, it was more or less explicitly offered by Lord Herbert of Cherbury as part of his justification for deism: That it procures for religion, and thence for the hierarchy and the state, an unquestioned authority and majesty. For since there is no

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clear occasion for stealing away from this undoubted doctrine, all men will be unanimously eager for the austere worship of God by virtue, for piety, and for a holy life, and putting aside hatreds along with controversies about religion they will agree on that mutual token of faith, they will be received into that intimate religious

relationship; so that if insolent spirits revolt on account of some portion of it the spiritual or secular magistracy will have the best right to punish them.1" Having already indicated that this political justification is not intrinsic to deism, I think that it is worth adding that it does not necessarily betray Lord Herbert's deepest motives. He offers other arguments against revealed Christianity—such as his argument against the tyranny of orthodoxy and his argument based on the moral unsavoriness of worshiping "a divinity which . . . for its mere good pleasure has destined the greatest part of the world to the everlasting punishments of Hell" 1 0 —and there is no clear evidence that these are mere window dressing. Although much ideological criticism operates on the assumption that the political motive must be the primary one, this assumption does not readily translate itself into a useful methodology precisely because the absence of intrinsic political valences allows for a divergence between the political significance that an author attributes to his views and the ultimate political tendency of his text. For example, explicit statements that one's ideas serve the interests of established authority may be designed merely to placate that authority. We will see in chapter 4 that Bayle, while speaking on behalf of persecuted religious minorities, was at pains to stress the obligation and the willingness of French Calvinists to remain obedient to royal authority and that such professions of loyalty helped him to argue that religious dissent was not tantamount to political sedition. By the same token, Herbert's claim that deism provided a warrant for repressing seditious dissenters might well have been intended to protect himself from the charge that his deistic writings were themselves seditious. In short, the rejection of ideological essentialism requires us to recognize not merely that the same theory can serve divergent political interests but that even explicit statements concerning whose interests are being served cannot necessarily be taken at face value but need to be carefully examined in the context in which they are operating. Thus Lord Herbert's political justification of deism needs to be understood not as re-

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vealing the essence of deism or the essence of Herbert's own political purposes but merely as revealing how, in a given context, the deistic argument for toleration could be useful to those in authority—and to their spokesmen—who wished to exhort obedience and to suppress threats to public order. My purpose in this chapter is to show that Dryden puts deistic toleration to precisely such a use and that we can ascertain this fact not by trying to demystify deism as a concept but by carefully delineating Dryden's deployment of it.31 Before he could deploy deism in the service of royal authority, however, Dryden needed first to perfume its pungent heterodoxy. The political power in England was bound to the state religion, and, however attractive deistic toleration might be as an argument for obedience and a justification for suppressing sedition, it is hard to imagine that an official or quasi-official endorsement of a religion that dispensed with Christian revelation could have been countenanced. What a diligent and skillful spokesman for the royal authority could do, however, was to assimilate the structure of deistic toleration into his version of Christian orthodoxy while at the same time explicitly rejecting deism. Dryden, the Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal, was such a spokesman, and the doctrine that I have called scriptural deism represents such an assimilation. I have already called Dryden's procedure a co-optation, but we can now see that scriptural deism is more precisely understood as the result of a double co-optation. Insofar as royal authority was traditionally legitimated by appeal to revealed Christianity, any rejection of scriptural authority was bound to be perceived as a threat to the political order. Lord Herbert's use of deism as a weapon against sedition had the effect of attempting to transform a threat to royal authority into an Erastian argument for submission to that authority. But for Dryden's purposes, it was not enough to have deism be declared a friend to authority. For the friend was still an unsavory and unruly one that needed to be rendered socially acceptable in order to be politically useful. It was accordingly necessary for deism to be domesticated by being costumed in Christian garb and ushered into the Church of England. Scriptural deism was useful to Dryden not simply in its general tendency to promote "common quiet" but in its specific applicability to the needs of Anglican royalism in Restoration England. In

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the preface to Religio Laid Dryden depicted the threat from Catholicism on the one side and Puritanism on the other in vividly political terms: While we were Papists, our Holy Father rid us, by pretending authority out of the Scriptures to depose Princes, when we shook off his Authority, the Sectaries furnish'd themselves with the same Weapons, and out of the same Magazine, the Bible. So that the Scriptures, which are in themselves the greatest security of Governours, as commanding express obedience to them, are now turn'd to their destruction; and never since the Reformation has there wanted a Text of their interpreting to authorize a Rebel.12

Here w e see that the political danger posed by the Catholics and Puritans stems from their interpretations of Scripture. A n d these interpretations were underpinned, as Dryden had indicated earlier in the preface, by claims to special interpretive authority: "The Papists . . . have reserv'd to themselves a right of Interpreting what they have deliver'd under the pretence of Infalibility: and the Fanaticks more collaterally, because they have assum'd what amounts to an Infalibility, in the private Spirit: and have detorted those Texts of Scripture, which are not necessary to Salvation, to the damnable uses of Sedition, disturbance and destruction of the Civil Government." 3 3 The traditional manner of combatting such dangerous scriptural interpretations had been to offer one's own countervailing interpretations—a mode of legitimation that deism renders obsolete. There is still a trace of this sort of legitimation in Dryden's virtually parenthetical observation, in the first of these passages, to the effect that Scriptures "in themselves," rather than authorizing sedition, command obedience to the state. But the clash of competing scriptural interpretations in the service of competing political programs had conspicuously failed to maintain public order and had, if anything, promoted disorder and civil war—a civil war, moreover, in which the triumphant "Fanaticks" had used the interpretation of Scripture as a warrant for rebellion and regicide. To avoid a recurrence of such catastrophic disorder, Dryden's tack in Religio Laid is not to reiterate the scriptural interpretations that serve his political purposes but to serve his political purposes by banishing scriptural interpretation from the public arena.

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DESPOTISM A N D A N A R C H Y

Dryden needs only to show, first, that interpretation is unnecessary for salvation and, second, that it tends to be disruptive of "publick Peace." Having accomplished the first part of his task through his elaboration of scriptural deism, Dryden turns to his attack on the pernicious uses of biblical interpretation. The Catholic Church, not content with having transmitted the Scriptures, has arrogated to itself the role of interpreting them: yet grant they were The handers down, can they from thence infer A right t'interpret? or wou'd they alone W h o brought the Present, claim it for their own? The Book's a Common Largess to Mankind; Not more for them, than every Man design'd: The welcome News is in the Letter found; The Carrier's not Commission'd to expound. (11. 3 6 0 - 6 7 )

As we might by now expect, this usurpation on the part of the messenger is attacked not on the conventional Protestant ground that biblical interpretation should be left to those who receive the message but rather on the ground that there is no need for interpretation at all: "It speaks it Self, and what it does contain, / In all things needfull to be known, is plain" (11. 368-69). The interpretive mediation of the Church was not simply superfluous but was motivated by tyrannical impulses. The exclusive authority to interpret was an instrument of domination: When want of Learning kept the Laymen low, And none but Priests were Authoriz'd to know: When what small Knowledge was, in them did dwell; And he a God w h o cou'd but Reade or Spell; Then Mother Church did mightily prevail: She parcel'd out the Bible by retail: But still expounded what She sold or gave; To keep it in her Power to Damn and Save. (11. 3 7 2 - 7 9 )

Dryden's accusation against Rome is really a double one: the Church insisted on withholding the text and on interpreting it. Accordingly, the enlightened rejection of Catholicism consists of

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two moments. The first is the realization that what had appeared to be expert interpretation of the text was really priestly distortion, presumably politically motivated: "At last, a knowing Age began t'enquire / If they the Book, or That did them inspire" (11. 388-89). The second, presented as the culmination of a long string of commercial and financial images, is the laity's realization that the priestly possession of the texts represented a theft of the laity's rightful inheritance: they [the laity] found, tho late, That what they thought the Priest's, was Their Estate: Taught by the Will produc'd, (the written Word) How long they had been cheated on Record. Then, every man who saw the Title fair, Claim'd a Child's part, and put in for a Share. (11. 3 9 0 - 9 5 )

Dryden is careful to make the distinction between misinterpretation and misappropriation because once the Reformation wrested the texts back from the priests, Protestant fanatics would themselves insist on carrying out unnecessary and pernicious interpretation: The Book thus put in every vulgar hand, Which each presum'd he best cou'd understand, The Common rule was made the common Prey; And at the mercy of the Rabble lay. The tender Page with horney Fists was gaul'd, And he was gifted most that loudest baul'd. . . . Plain Truths enough for needfull use they found; But men wou'd still be itching to expound.

(11. 400-10) Thus begins the poem's forceful attack on sectarian fanaticism. Although Dryden does not repeat the specific political charge of the preface (that the fanatical interpretation of texts unnecessary to salvation twists them "to the damnable uses of Sedition, disturbance and destruction of the Civil Government"), he brings into play the harshest imagery of the poem, imagery beside which priestly larceny and deceit seem quite tame: While Crouds unlearn'd, with rude Devotion warm, About the Sacred Viands buz and swarm, The Fly-blown Text creates a crawling Brood;

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(11. 417-20)

This, as Steven Zwicker observes, "is the manner not of spiritual quest but political condemnation." 14 But Dryden does not rely on comparisons between sectarian exegetes and swarming flies to do all his denunciatory work for him. The fanatics are not only disgusting; like the Catholics, they are dangerous: "The Danger's much the same; on several Shelves / If others wreck us, or we wreck our selves" (11. 425-26). In line with the characterization of the Catholic and Puritan extremes, both in the preface and in the poem, this couplet would seem to present the external danger of the tyranny of Rome as that of others and the internal sedition of Protestant fanatics as the danger—already realized in the Civil War and Interregnum—that "we wreck our selves." Both of these political threats, as we have seen, come from interpreting biblical texts that are not necessary for salvation. And the logic of Dryden's scriptural deism would seem to militate against all biblical interpretation whatsoever. For if there is a core of scriptural truth that is immune from textual corruption, that is clear to all who read it and not subject to interpretive disputes, and if this core is all that is needed for salvation, then we would seem to have the basis for an argument that all scriptural interpretation is vain and dangerous. But just as practical considerations prevented Dryden from dispensing with Scripture and the official church, they also prevent him from ignoring the fact that the official church has theologians who interpret Scripture. Nor can he condemn their activities. Thus we find that just as Dryden prefaced his propounding of scriptural deism with an attack on deism, he prefaces his attack on scriptural interpretation with a bow to "good interpretation," namely that performed under the aegis of the Church of England: The few, by Nature form'd, with Learning fraught, Born to instruct, as others to be taught, Must Study well the Sacred Page; and see Which Doctrine, this, or that, does best agree With the whole Tenour of the Work Divine.

(11. 326-30)

But to keep this lip service from undermining his scriptural deism,

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Dryden presents this judicious mode of interpretation without contradicting his general claim that interpretation is in no way necessary and without any reference to its results—namely, those positive doctrines of belief that distinguish Anglicanism from other confessions. I said at the beginning of this chapter that Dryden follows the "venturesomeness" of the latitudinarian divines in both asserting that Anglican doctrines were true and denying that they were necessary for salvation.35 And Dry den's perfunctory praise of Anglican theologians in a passage—and, indeed, in an entire "Anglican" poem—in which the doctrinal result of their exegetical efforts is carefully suppressed serves both to remind us of this theological paradox and to highlight the political logic that generates it and the rhetoric that obscures it.36 CONCLUSIONS

As we saw earlier, Père Simon had charged that once the Protestants turned away from the authority of Catholic tradition they would be hard-pressed to keep from sliding to the Socinian extreme in which autonomous reason discards the central beliefs of Christianity. In contemporary parlance, Simon's point could be formulated as an assertion that there is no conceptual space between Catholicism and Socinianism, no middle ground between submission to the authority of the Church and the anarchic autonomy of reason. Dryden's history of the shift in exegetical authority from the Catholic monopoly, "When want of Learning kept the Laymen low, / And none but Priests were Authoriz'd to know," to the appropriation of the text by the homey-fisted rabble, while setting up the dichotomy in terms of Catholic versus Puritan instead of Catholic versus Socinian, would seem essentially to concede Simon's point. The fact that Dryden sets up the historical shift not in terms of doctrines of belief but strictly in terms of opposing models of exegetical authority leaves no role for Anglicanism as a via media. For, once the authority to interpret Scripture is wrested from the monopoly of the despotic few, it is hard to keep it out of the "vulgar hands" of the dangerous multitudes. Both the Church and the Puritans claim to be infallible, and there is no acceptable conceptual space between them.

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Dryden's poem is occasioned by a political dilemma: he needs to protect the state and the social order against the dangers of Catholic usurpation on the one side and Puritan sedition on the other, and he has to do so in such a way as to utilize the myth of the Anglican via media and make it seem as if he is speaking from the religious center. His solution, as we have seen, is to step outside the religious continuum of exegetical authority altogether, by taking interpretive authority away from each confession and putting the Bible beyond the reach of interpretation—while rhetorically couching this Erastian shift to secular authority in the language of Anglican moderation. But this Erastian shift does not merely protect the state from disruption. It reduces the authority of all religions and thereby increases the authority of the secular power. The state, in tearing down the interpretive authority of every religion, is, in effect, arrogating all interpretive authority to itself. In that respect, the state comes to have the authoritarian structure that Dryden had decried and condemned in his attack on Catholicism. What is ultimately being co-opted, then, is not merely deistic rationalism but also the centralized structure of Catholic authority. The state is consolidating its authority by taking on the additional role of arbiter of immortality. But whereas the Catholic church had ruled by promulgating and enforcing doctrines under the aegis of its exegetical authority, the secular state will enforce its authority by peeling away both the religious doctrines and exegetical authority of others until the doctrines required for salvation are precisely those that prevent Christians from being anything but obedient citizens.

3 Bayle's Theory of Toleration: The Politics of Certainty and Doubt Your d o u b t . . . w h i c h contains so m u c h anxiety and such a thirst for absolute truth is so different from the skepticism of the G r e e k , from the mental play of the Mediterranean M i n d with its deliberate resort to sophistry as part of the game of thought; for y o u r t h o u g h t is a w e a p o n , a theology. L a w r e n c e Durrell

B A Y L E , D R Y D E N , A N D L O R D HERBERT

D r y d e n , as w e h a v e just seen, perceived biblical interpretation as a threat to the established religio-political authority and contrived a version of Christianity that d o e s w i t h o u t biblical interpretation but that nonetheless preserves the appearance of orthodoxy by retaining the Bible as the source of religious truth. Pierre Bayle, in his Commentaire philosophique, is also attempting to counteract the d a n g e r s of biblical interpretation. In this case, however, the fatal interpretation has been e m p l o y e d not by dissenters, and not "to the damnable u s e s of Sedition, disturbance and destruction of the civil g o v e r n m e n t , " but by the civil g o v e r n m e n t of France, w h i c h , in its quest to stamp out heresy, has e n g a g e d in the persecution of its Protestant dissenters. Bayle, himself a H u g u e n o t refugee in Holland, published the first t w o parts of the Commentaire in October of 1686, a year to the m o n t h after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. 1 The persecution of the French Protestants, h o w e v e r , had b e g u n long before the revocation and had intensified throughout the reign of Louis XIV. Bayle had fled to Rotterdam in 1681, shortly after the A c a d é m i e Réformée de S e d a n — w h e r e he had held the chair in p h i l o s o p h y — w a s closed b y the authorities. W h e r e a s D r y d e n had m a d e his opposition to biblical interpretation vivid by depicting the enthusiasts as s w a r m i n g flies that

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"turn to Maggots what was meant for f o o d " Bayle, not given to pungent metaphors, achieves vividness in his condemnation of the Catholic authorities by the straightforward technique of cataloging their cruelties and suggesting that these are inconsistent with Christian principles. 2 Invoking their interpretation of the gospels, the civil powers claim that they are authorized by God ruiner leurs Sujets hérétiques, les emprisonner, les dragonner, les pendre, et les brûler,3 to reduce their heretical subjects to poverty, to imprison them, to dragoon them, to hang them, to burn them, and that Jesus' gospel of peace is to be understood to mean battez, fouettez, emprisonnez, pillez, tuez ceux qui seront opiniâtres, enlevez-leurs leurs femmes, et leurs enfants. (CP, 114) beat, whip, imprison, pillage, kill all those who remain obstinate, carry off their wives and children. This technique may be seen to culminate in Bayle's hypothetical depiction of an emperor of China who, horrified by the willingness of Christian missionaries to induce conversion by coercive means, would bar them from entering his country. This emperor could not reasonably be blamed, Bayle asserts, if he decided that the religion preached by these missionaries was ridiculous and diabolical: ridicule en ce qu'il verra qu'elle est fondée par un auteur qui dit d'un côté, qu'il faut être humble, débonnaire, patient, sans aigreur, pardonnant les injures, et de l'autre qu'il faut rouer de coups de bâton, emprisonner, exiler, pendre, fouetter, abandonner au pillage du soldat tous ceux qui ne voudront pas le suivre. Il verra qu'elle est diabolique, puis qu'outre son opposition diamétrale aux lumières de la droite raison, il verra qu'elle autorise tous les crimes, dès qu'ils seront entrepris pour son avantage, et qu'elle ne laisse plus d'autre règle du juste et de l'injuste, que son profit, ou sa perte; qu'elle ne tend qu'à rendre l'univers un théâtre affreux de carnage et de violence. (126-27) ridiculous in that he would suppose that it was founded by a Creator who says on the one hand that one must be humble, meek, patient, without spite, ready to forgive injuries; and, on the other hand, that anyone who did not wish to follow him must be beaten unmercifully, imprisoned, exiled, whipped, and exposed to the rapacity of soldiers.

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H e would consider it diabolical since, beyond being diametrically opposed to the light of reason, it authorizes any crimes that it finds advantageous to itself, it judges whether something is just or unjust on the basis of no other rule than that of its o w n profit or loss, and it turns the world into a horrifying spectacle of violence and carnage.

With its use of breathtaking catalogs of evils, added to the technique of having a rational non-Christian evince disgust and astonishment at the gap between Christian moral principles and Christian practices, Bayle's depiction of the Chinese emperor may be seen as a precursor of the stunning denunciation of Christian Europe that Jonathan Swift will later put into the mouth of the King of Brobdingnag. Just as Dryden applies insect imagery to those who pervert Scripture to seditious purposes, the King of Brobdingnag will, of course, compare Christian Europe, which flouts its own moral principles, to a "pernicious race of little odious vermin." 4 But, although dispensing with such imagery, 5 and with the dramatic power of direct speech, Bayle's moral indignation comes across with considerable vehemence, a vehemence fueled by the fact that the list of Bayle's tortured and imprisoned coreligionists included his brother Jacob, who had died in a dungeon in Bordeaux less than a month after the revocation. Bayle thus approaches the terrors resulting from biblical interpretation from a social perspective quite unlike that found in Dryden. He speaks as a victim of persecution by the established religiopolitical authority and as a spokesman for an oppressed group. At first glance, this standpoint would seem to make it impossible for Bayle to place himself, as Dryden had, above the interpretive fray. The advocates of forced conversion, invoking the exegetical (and persecutorial) authority of St. Augustine, had repeatedly cited a single biblical verse that they claimed enjoined them to constrain heretics to accept the orthodox faith, and Bayle undertakes to challenge their interpretation. His title, as it appears atop the first page of the Première partie, reads as follows: COMMENTAIRE PHILOSOPHIQUE SUR C E S PAROLES DE L'E V A N G I L E S E L O N S. L U C , C H A P . XIV. V E R S . 23. Et le Maitre dit au Serviteur, va par les chemins &

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par les haies, ET CONTRAINS-LES D'ENTRER, Afin que ma Maison soil remplie" (CP, 83)

The text with which Bayle is concerned is the parable of the supper, in which the master tells his servant to compel guests to attend. This had been interpreted, beginning with St. Augustine, as a command to force orthodoxy upon heretics and unbelievers. When Bayle undertakes to refute the "literal" sense of the parable, he seems not to concern himself with disputing the view that the house in which the supper takes place is to be understood, figuratively, to signify the Church. But he wishes to refute the interpretation that Augustine had given to the phrase compelle inlrare. Although Bayle, unlike Dryden, is refuting a particular biblical interpretation, he tries to avoid miring himself in the fruitless exegetical realm of interpretation and counterinterpretation. In fact, as we shall see, Bayle's procedures in attempting to refute the persecutors' interpretation of the phrase compelle intrare have a good deal in common with Dryden's adaptation of deistic rationalism. It will be recalled that Lord Herbert of Cherbury had offered deism not strictly as an alternative to revelation and the problems of scriptural interpretation but as a kind of adjunct to revelation. It is precisely because the original biblical text has been distorted, and because the one that we have received is subject to diverse interpretations, that it is necessary to distinguish between "the pure and undisputed word of God" and those parts of Scripture that are not authoritative or that have been distorted by priestly interpretation. What is needed is a criterion for isolating the texts that are "necessary to salvation," and deism represents that criterion. 7 Insofar as the universal truths that God inscribes in every human mind allow us to ascertain which parts of Scripture represent the true and essential word of God, it might be said that we contain within ourselves, thanks to the light of reason, the authoritative text that we can use as a touchstone for interpreting the confusing biblical text. When Bayle undertakes to refute the "literal" sense of compelle intrare, he is, in fact, not engaging in traditional biblical exegesis but is following a procedure very much like the one set forth by Herbert. He begins by explicitly distinguishing his task from the

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sort of biblical interpretation that is carried out by theologians and other biblical exegetes: Je laisse aux théologiens et aux critiques à c o m m e n t e r ce p a s s a g e , en le c o m p a r a n t a v e c d ' a u t r e s , en e x a m i n a n t ce qui p r é c è d e et ce qui suit, en faisant voir la force d e s termes d e l'original, et les divers s e n s d o n t ils sont susceptibles, et qu'ils ont e f f e c t i v e m e n t en plusieurs endroits d e l'Ecriture. Je p r é t e n d s faire un C o m m e n t a i r e d ' u n n o u v e a u g e n r e , et l ' a p p u y e r sur d e s principes p l u s g é n é r a u x et plus infaillibles. (CP, 85) I leave it to the theologians a n d critics to p r o v i d e c o m m e n t a r y on this p a s s a g e , b y c o m p a r i n g it w i t h others, b y e x a m i n i n g w h a t prec e d e s it a n d w h a t f o l l o w s it, b y bringing out the significance of the t e r m s in the original l a n g u a g e s , a n d the v a r i o u s m e a n i n g s that they can h a v e , a n d that they h a v e in fact h a d in several other places in the Bible. I shall u n d e r t a k e to p r o v i d e a n e w t y p e of c o m m e n t a r y , a n d to s u p p o r t it w i t h the m o s t general a n d infallible principles.

Bayle's "Commentaire d'un nouveau genre" will appeal not to contextual or philological evidence but to ce principe d e la lumière naturelle, que tout sens littéral l'obligation

de faire des crimes,

est faux.

this principle of the natural light, that any entails

the obligation

qui

contient

(85-86) literal

interpretation

that

to commit crimes is false.

What the internal light of reason will do, then, is to provide him with a basis not necessarily for offering a positive interpretation but for rejecting an incorrect one. For Bayle, as for Lord Herbert, the natural light will serve as the supreme criterion of truth. But whereas Herbert uses the rational criterion to challenge the authenticity of the texts themselves, so as to shrink drastically the realm of divinely revealed truth, Bayle uses the same criterion not to challenge the status of texts as revelation but only to prevent them from being interpreted literally. Thus, whereas Herbert's principles might require him to judge that compelle intrare cannot be the "very word of God," Bayle can leave the sacred status of the words unchallenged—even though he rejects the literal interpretation of the words and feels no pressing need to offer an alternative interpretation."

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Toleration, the Social Order

In explicitly setting up reason as the criterion of truth, and the sovereignty of philosophy over theology, Bayle does not wish to relinquish his claim to Calvinist orthodoxy. 9 Like Dryden, he serves as a spokesman for a group that defines itself in doctrinal terms. In both cases, therefore, rationality risks undermining its political effectiveness unless it stresses its adherence to the appropriate orthodoxy. Dryden follows Herbert in fundamentally narrowing the extent of scriptural revelation, but since he transfers the touchstone of authenticity from the light of reason to Scripture itself, he manages, as we have seen, to mask his indebtedness to unorthodox principles. Since Bayle's argument does not allow him to mask his rationalism but requires him to make it explicit, he needs somehow to legitimate it in Christian terms. And his strategy—or, at least, one of the first of his strategies—will be to show that rationalism is in no way inconsistent with Christianity. Those who appeal to the superiority of religious authority over human reason are, Bayle argues, in fact surreptitiously appealing to reason after all: C'est à quoi se terminent tous les grands discours des catholiques romains contre la voie de la raison, et pour l'autorité de l'Eglise. . . . Ils ne font qu'un grand circuit pour revenir après mille fatigues, où les autres vont tout droit. Les autres disent franchement et sans ambages, qu'il faut s'en tenir au sens qui nous paraît meilleur: mais eux ils disent qu'il s'en faut bien garder, parce que nos lumières nous pourraient tromper, et que notre raison n'est que ténèbres et qu'illusion; qu'il faut donc s'en tenir au jugement de l'Eglise. N'est-ce pas revenir à la raison? Car ne faut-il pas que celui qui préfère le jugement de l'Eglise au sien propre, le fasse en vertu de ce raisonnement: L'Eglise a plus de lumières que moi, elle est donc plus croyable que moi? C'est donc sur ses propres lumières que chacun se détermine. (CP,

96) This is how the grand discourses of the Roman Catholics against the rule of reason and in favor of the authority of the Church always finish up. . . . They do nothing more than travel in a great circle in order to return, much fatigued, to the very spot that others reach by a more direct route. The others say openly and straight out that we must hold to the meaning that seems best to us. But these say that we must beware because our natural light could deceive us, and because reason is nothing but shadow and illusion, and that we must therefore submit to the judgment of the Church. But isn't this to return to reason? For is it not the case that he who prefers the Church's judgment over his own does so by virtue of the following

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argument: The Church has more lights than I; her beliefs are therefore more reliable than my own. It is thus that each person makes up his mind on the basis of his own lights.

Bayle's methodological self-justification, then, stipulates that reason, rather than being a threat to Christianity, is the sine qua non of all religious belief. By showing that the Catholic appeal to the weakness of human reason as a warrant for submitting to Church authority is ultimately a rationalistic argument, Bayle is not only legitimating his claim for the supremacy of reason but is demystifying the Catholic appeal to ecclesiastical authority by subsuming it under the Protestant principle of individual judgment. Moreover, he is raising questions regarding the nature of fideism and its relationship to reason. All this will eventually bear on our understanding of Bayle's overall strategy in the Commentaire philosophique. For the moment, however, I am still interested in a preliminary comparison of Bayle's appeal to rationalism with the strategies of Herbert of Cherbury and of Dryden. We have already seen that Dryden, like Lord Herbert, wishes to ascertain, in a very minimalist way, what is the very word of God but that in doing so he co-opts Herbert's deism by giving it a scriptural guise. Bayle explicitly appeals to the inner light of reason as the ultimate criterion of interpretation but undertakes to establish his own orthodoxy by showing that his criterion is a universal one and by demystifying the pious attempts of his enemies to pretend that they are subordinating reason to some higher authority. Bayle's critique of those who disguise the rational basis for their submission to authority is directed against his Catholic enemies. But a convenient way to see how Bayle's strategy differs from Dryden's scriptural deism would be to consider how easily Bayle's démystification of the Catholic apologists could be applied to Dryden's own procedures. We saw that the Religio Laid prefaces its scriptural deism with an explicit rejection of deism. That rejection of deism, as it happens, was introduced with a famous poetic expression of the weakness of human reason: DIM, as the borrow'd beams of Moon and Stars

To lonely, weary, wandring Travellers, Is Reason to the Soul: And as on high,

Those rowling Fires discover but the Sky

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So dyes, and so dissolves in Supernatural Light.

(11. 1-11)

Dryden's attempt to portray reason's relationship to Christianity as like that of the moon and stars to the sun is consistent with his attempt to portray the Bible as the source of religious knowledge, but at the same time it resembles the strategy of Catholic fideists who assert that the weakness of human reason requires submission to the Church. 10 And just as Bayle argues that if reason submits to the authority of the Church it does so on rational grounds—that is, for reasons—he could likewise demonstrate that Dryden's positing of scriptural deism, like the Catholic's submission to the authority of the Church, is ultimately rational, even though it attempts to occult its rationality. According to Dryden, the reason that we know that the biblical text is not totally corrupt and must contain a core of truths necessary for salvation is that God is good and that therefore he "wou'd not leave Mankind without a way." But how do we know that God is good and would not leave mankind without a way? If this crucial knowledge were derived from the biblical text itself, then Dryden's argument would be hopelessly circular. The notion that God is good and wishes to provide mankind with the means of salvation must, implicitly, be extratextual: it must, in a word, like the common notions of Herbert of Cherbury, be the product of the inner light of reason. Moreover, Bayle's attempt to demonstrate the primacy of reason could be used to demystify Dryden's attempt to transfer the criterion of biblical truth from human reason to Scripture itself. That is, Bayle could easily show that an argument to the effect that the scriptural passages that have elicited divergent interpretations are unessential for salvation is not really a proof that the interpretive criterion is inside the text; it is an appeal to an extratextual rational principle. Bayle, then, like Dryden and Herbert of Cherbury, uses an appeal to the universal truths of reason in order to repudiate biblical interpretations that give rise to repugnant political behavior. But

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whereas Dryden and Herbert are warding off seditious exegesis that threatens the established religio-political authority, Bayle is attacking persecutorial exegesis carried out by the established religio-political authority. On the other hand, whereas Dryden sees fit to mystify his rationalism, Herbert and Bayle make their rationalism explicit and undertake to demystify irrationalism. Bayle, however, has more to ward off than literal readings of compelle intrare or charges that appeals to the supremacy of reason are ipso facto heterodox. His arguments will give rise to other difficulties; his logical and rhetorical strategies have just begun. THE DELIMITATION OF RATIONALISM

No sooner has Bayle, in the first two paragraphs of the Première partie of his Commentaire, set forth his claim that the literal reading of compelle intrare is repugnant to the light of reason, and therefore false, than he finds himself impelled to ward off the accusation that reason leads to Socinianism: A Dieu ne plaise que je veuille étendre, autant que font les sociniens, la jurisdiction de la lumière naturelle et des principes métaphysiques, lorsqu'ils prétendent que tout sens donné à l'Ecriture qui n'est pas conforme à cette lumière et à ces principes-là est à rejeter, et qui en vertu de cette maxime refusent de croire la Trinité et l'Incarnation: Non, non, ce n'est pas ce que je prétends sans bornes et sans limites.

(CP, 86-87)

God forbid that I would wish to extend the jurisdiction of the natural light and the principles of metaphysics as far as the Socinians do when they assert that every interpretation of Scripture that is not in keeping with this light and with these principles is to be rejected. By virtue of this maxim, they refuse to believe in the Trinity or the Incarnation. No, that is not at all what I maintain, without boundaries or limits.

The need to delimit his rationalism, to keep it from extending to the anti-Trinitarian extreme, arises immediately because the Socinians represent a conspicuous case of the unacceptable theological consequences of submitting Christian doctrines to the test of reason. Following Descartes, Bayle presents rationality as founded on the intuitive truths of mathematics, those propositions that, no matter how closely examined, present themselves so clearly and

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distinctly to the mind that they cannot be doubted. His prime example of such clear and distinct truths, one that he cites repeatedly throughout the Commentaire, is the proposition that the whole is greater than its parts. In order to be able to claim that attempting to instill religious beliefs by coercive means is contrary to the light of reason, Bayle has to assert that we have an innate awareness of our obligations toward God that is no less clear and distinct than our awareness that the whole is greater than its parts. But the Socinians would claim that there cannot be three persons, each of whom is God, without there being three Gods and therefore that the doctrine of the Trinity is self-contradictory and contrary to the natural light." In order to be able to delimit his rationalism in such a way as to keep it from yielding anti-Trinitarian conclusions, Bayle needs somehow to demarcate the class of clear and distinct truths so as to have it include those truths that will allow him to refute the literal reading and to exclude those alleged truths that would allow one to challenge the doctrine of the Trinity. The way he does this is to separate truths about morality or equity, which are accessible to the light of reason, from alleged truths about so-called speculative doctrines such as the Trinity, which evidently are not: Je le répète encore une fois: A Dieu ne plaise que je veuille étendre ce principe autant que font les sociniens; mais s'il peut avoir certaines limitations à l'égard des vérités spéculatives, je ne pense pas qu'il en doive avoir a u c u n e à l'égard des principes pratiques et généraux, qui se rapportent aux moeurs. Je veux dire, que sans exception, il faut soumettre toutes les lois morales à cette idée naturelle d'équité, qui, aussi bien que la lumière métaphysique, illumine tout homme venant au monde. {CP, 8 9 - 9 0 ) Let m e repeat once again: God forbid that I would wish to extend this principle as far as do the Socinians. But although there can be certain limitations regarding speculative truths, I don't think there can be a n y with regard to the practical or general principles having to d o with morals. I m e a n that every moral law, without exception, m u s t be submitted to our natural idea of equity, which, no less than the light of metaphysical truth, shines innately in every h u m a n being.

This delimitation, coming as it does at the point at which the charge of Socinianism needs to be deflected, may at first glance appear to

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rest on an ad hoc distinction that a Socinian would be unlikely to find very convincing. But it will turn out that, however convincing or unconvincing the distinction, it does not merely serve an ad hoc role vis-à-vis Socinianism; it lies at the center of the intellectual structure of the Commentaire. THE ERRING CONSCIENCE

In order to appreciate the significance of Bayle's willingness to limit the efficacy of the natural light "à l'égard des vérités spéculatives," without limiting it "à l'égard des principes pratiques et généraux, qui se rapportent aux moeurs," we will need to place the appeal to the supremacy of reason alongside the second great pillar of Bayle's analysis, his theory of the erring conscience. First, however, I need briefly to indicate why the appeal to the supremacy of reason cannot stand on its own. The arguments in the Première partie center on what the natural light tells us about the nature of God, the nature of religion, and the nature of morality. Religion is essentially a matter of internal acts of the soul, and these cannot be compelled. All that can be compelled is external compliance, which, in itself, does no honor to God and is not pleasing to him. Moreover, the means by which these forced conversions are carried out are, according to what the natural light teaches us about right and wrong,12 themselves wicked. To compel conversion is thus contrary to religion and to morality. The burden of the Première partie, then, is to show that the persecutors are not following the wishes of God. Meanwhile, however, there remains the problem of the eternal disposition of the souls of heretics. Even if one grants that God does not wish token honor and obedience that does not correspond to inner feelings and convictions, Christian tradition stipulates that heretics will be damned precisely on the basis of their inner feelings and convictions and that attempting to convert heretics is therefore an act of Christian charity.13 Accordingly, merely to argue that forced conversion is wrong could be seen to result in the paradoxical position that God's morality protects men from persecution in this world and thereby condemns them to everlasting torments in the next. Bayle would, of course, allow the orthodox to try to persuade heretics to change their convictions, but if persuasion failed, the orthodox

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would, then, according to the principles established in the Première partie, be obliged to stand by while the deluded heretic went down the path to eternal sufferings far worse than anything that could be inflicted by zealous persecutors in this world. It is this potential paradox that requires Bayle to shift his focus from the persecutors to the heretics and to complement his condemnation of the one with the exculpation of the other. This he does by means of the doctrine of the erring conscience, the development of which dominates the second part of the Commentaire.14 This doctrine may be seen as a rational analysis of our concept of moral culpability. The natural light requires us to act in accordance with our conscience—since conscience is informed by what we take to be God's wishes, and actions that follow conscience are performed in order to please God. Accordingly, to act against conscience is a sin that deserves punishment. Conversely, acts that are performed in good conscience are not culpable (283-84). 15 In order to illustrate his point, Bayle offers the striking example of the woman who sleeps with an imposter whom she sincerely takes to be her husband (301-2). Insofar as she is unable to ascertain the true facts, she is blameless. Likewise with heretics. Just as the natural light of reason prohibits attempts to compel the consciences of heretics, it mandates that they follow their own conscience and suggests that a conscience that errs in good faith need not be considered sinful but that a person who acts against the promptings of conscience is always a sinner. To this point, my outline of Bayle's theory of the erring conscience treats as unproblematic the perspective of an orthodox Catholic who considers his beliefs to be true and heretical beliefs to be false. This follows Bayle's own procedure, which is continually to place himself in the standpoint of his own persecutors, to grant them one of their grandest and most controversial claims—namely, that their church is the true Church and their beliefs the true beliefs—and to show them that, even if one granted all this, their persecutions would nonetheless be unjustified and immoral. 16 As I have presented it thus far, Bayle's theory of the erring conscience is basically an extension of the opening strategy of the Première partie—namely, a demonstration that the moral truths that are revealed by reason vanquish all arguments in favor of forced conversion. Just as reason overrules appeals to Scripture on

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behalf of persecution, so does it neutralize any arguments for forced conversion that are grounded on alleged concerns for the souls of the misguided. To this extent Bayle's theory may be seen as a rigorous philosophical defense of the traditional Calvinist doctrine of the rights of private conscience. But that doctrine, as was indicated in the discussion of the Puritan ideology in chapter 1 (see page 25), was sometimes linked to the doctrine of private revelation, the notion that individuals had been given direct access to the truth. And even when Calvinists did not appeal to divine inspiration, most would have presumably been unwilling to presuppose that their rights of conscience were completely independent of the truth of their beliefs. 17 Thus there is something quite daring about Bayle's strategy of arguing for toleration without challenging the Catholic claim that their beliefs are true. But this strategy is not one that can ultimately be carried through to the end of Bayle's exposition. For Bayle's argument, as it has been presented thus far, leaves itself open to two sorts of objections on the part of the advocates of Catholic intolerance. First, if the Catholics are allowed to retain the certitude that their doctrines are true and those of the heretics false, then they will have a basis for assuming that the heretics have not examined the issues conscientiously enough, that their consciences have fallen into error precipitously and can be led out of error if forced to consider matters more carefully. On the other hand, the doctrine of the erring conscience can be co-opted by the persecutors themselves, who can claim that they are acting in good conscience when carrying out their persecutions, that they are acting in accordance with what they take to be the will of God. In order to be able to defuse such objections, Bayle will find himself obliged to go to another level of analysis, where he will reach epistemological conclusions that protect his theory at the cost of putting great strains on his claim to Calvinist orthodoxy. THE PARADOX OF THE PERSECUTOR'S CONSCIENCE

I have said that Bayle's argument that the erring conscience must not be compelled leaves itself open to two sorts of objections. It will be convenient to begin with the second. In the ninth chapter

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of the Seconde partie, Bayle raises the following hypothetical objection against himself: La deuxième difficulté qu'on nous propose est qu'il s'ensuit de ma doctrine le renversement de ce que je veux établir; je veux montrer que la persécution est une chose abominable, et cependant tout homme qui se croira obligé en conscience de persécuter, sera obligé, selon moi, de persécuter, et ferait mal de ne persécuter pas. (CP, 3") The second difficulty to be raised against us is that my doctrine yields consequences that are just the reverse of what I am trying to establish. I wish to show that persecution is an abominable thing; however, anyone w h o believed himself to be obliged by his conscience to persecute would, according to my doctrine, indeed be obliged to persecute and would do evil if he did not persecute. This may well strike the reader as a powerful objection that uses one aspect of Bayle's theory to undermine the other. In Bayle's discourse, however, it is presented as one of many hypothetical objections raised against one of Bayle's numerous arguments. Bayle does not give the objection special prominence, and his response to it is relatively short, all of which serves to give the impression that Bayle is being uncompromisingly thorough and rigorous and that this objection, like all the others, can be readily dismissed. Indeed, the response begins by treating the objection not as a special paradox but as a reiteration of the basic situation that the Commentaire

is addressing:

Je réponds que le but que je me propose dans ce commentaire . . . étant de convaincre les persécuteurs, que Jésus-Christ n'a pas commandé la violence, je ne ruine pas moi-même mon dessein, pourvu que je montre par de bonnes preuves que le sens littéral de ces paroles est faux, absurde et impie. Si je me sers même de fortes raisons, j'ai lieu de croire que ceux qui les examineront sincèrement, éclaireront les erreurs de conscience où ils pourraient être quant à la persécution; et ainsi mon dessein est juste. (311) I respond that the goal that I have set for myself in this commentary . . . being to convince the persecutors that Jesus Christ has not commanded violence, I do not undermine my project, provided that I demonstrate with solid proofs that the literal interpretation is false, absurd, and impious. Even if I avail myself of nothing more than strong arguments, I have reason to believe that those who examine

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t h e m sincerely will clear u p w h a t e v e r errors of conscience they m a y h a v e r e g a r d i n g persecution. T h u s , m y project is just.

Bayle here undertakes to justify his attempt to persuade the persecutors of their error, and he does so by appealing to the epistemological principles upon which his general argument has been based. According to these principles the persecutors are violating a moral principle that is clear and distinct. Therefore they are wrong and can be shown to be wrong; and Bayle is undertaking precisely to persuade them that their beliefs are erroneous. The problem is, however, that this initial response does not address the actual objection, which is not really challenging Bayle's right to declare that the persecutors are in error or to try to persuade them to discard their error but is challenging his right to condemn them morally for doing something abominable. Until now the erring conscience has been associated with persecuted heretics. In this hypothetical objection, however, the appeal to the rights of the erring conscience is being made on behalf of the persecutors, w h o could claim that they are carrying out their persecutions in good conscience—that is, with the conviction that they are obeying the will of God. Since Bayle has been at pains to exculpate the erring conscience, w h y shouldn't he find himself forced to exculpate the persecutors w h o claim to be following their consciences? But if his principles require him to extend his toleration to the persecutors themselves, then his case for toleration would be vitiated by dint of its very inclusiveness: he would be obliged to tolerate those w h o m he has set out to condemn. 18 Bayle's response does move on to confront the issue at hand by acknowledging that, according to his principles, persecutors w h o believe their actions to be willed by God are obliged to persecute: ]e ne nie p a s q u e ceux q u i sont actuellement p e r s u a d é s qu'il faut, p o u r obéir à D i e u , abolir les sectes, ne soient obligés d e suivre les m o u v e m e n t s d e cette fausse conscience, et q u e ne le faisant pas ils ne t o m b e n t d a n s le crime d e désobéir à Dieu; puisqu'ils font u n e c h o s e qu'ils croient être u n e désobéissance à Dieu. (CP, 311) I d o not d e n y that those w h o are presently p e r s u a d e d that they m u s t , in order to o b e y G o d , eliminate the sects are obliged to follow the dictates of their e r r o n e o u s conscience, a n d that for t h e m not to

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After first sidestepping the objection, Bayle would here seem to be acknowledging its full force. He refuses, however, to accept the apparently inescapable consequence, that the persecutors cannot be morally condemned for their crimes. What is most striking about this refusal is that it is expressed in a single short sentence, and without any argumentation. Mais . . . il ne s'ensuit pas qu'ils fassent sans crime ce qu'ils font avec conscience. ( 3 1 1 ) But . . . it does not follow that what they do in good conscience is guiltless.

Walter Rex, a very knowledgeable and acute critic of Bayle's Commentaire, suggests that the attentive reader may be able to supply the reasoning that Bayle leaves out: "Bayle does not explain his reasoning here; however other sections suggest the answer to be that the error of the persecutor is not invincible, as are those of the adultress and the heretic. The latter, Bayle assumes, have done all they could to find the truth; but with persecution, Bayle apparently believes that the evidence of natural light is so strong against it, that failure to see it must be willful and therefore criminal." Although Rex is able to supply what he considers to be Bayle's strongest possible response, he does not feel that Bayle's best response would be entirely adequate. The distinction between the invincible conscience and the one amenable to correction, he suggests, "seems tenuous in view of the increasing relativity of the context."20 Rex believes that, after setting up the power of reason to recognize clear and distinct truths, Bayle, in the Seconde partie, undermines the status of rationality by making truth more and more elusive and reason more and more impotent. And he appears to think that this movement toward uncertainty renders problematic any attempt to blame the persecutors for not knowing something that is allegedly clear and distinct.

THE F O R C E OF U N C E R T A I N T Y

In order to be able to evaluate Rex's view, we need first to examine closely the epistemological corollary that Bayle attaches to his

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d o c t r i n e of t h e erring c o n s c i e n c e , a corollary w i t h o u t w h i c h it w o u l d b e e x c e e d i n g l y difficult for h i m to establish t h e veniality of doctrinal error. T h e o r t h o d o x w h o feel justified in c o m p e l l i n g t h e c o n v e r s i o n of h e r e t i c s m a i n t a i n not o n l y that t h e heretics are in error b u t that t h e y are obstinately so, in that t h e y p e r v e r s e l y refuse to a c c e p t t h e e v i d e n c e in favor of orthodoxy. Bayle, a p p l y i n g a p r o c e d u r e that h e h a s u s e d from t h e o u t s e t , first points out that this v i e w p o i n t of t h e o r t h o d o x p e r s e c u t o r s p r e s u p p o s e s that their c o n s c i e n c e s are g u i d e d by a divinely e s t a b l i s h e d law to t h e effect that w e are o b l i g e d to act in a c c o r d a n c e w i t h the truth, a law that w e r e p r e s e n t to o u r s e l v e s a s set forth by G o d in t h e following terms: Je veux que la vérité engage les hommes à la nécessité de la suivre, et ceux qui la suivront feront une bonne action. (CP, 331) I wish the truth to place men under the obligation of following it, and those who do follow it will be acting virtuously. N o t o n l y d o e s Bayle s u g g e s t that his o p p o n e n t s are actually m a k i n g a rationalist a r g u m e n t b a s e d o n a n appeal to universal m o r a l principles, to t h e effect that w e h a v e a moral obligation to act in a c c o r d a n c e w i t h t h e truth, b u t t h e a r g u m e n t that h e attributes to t h e m is an a r g u m e n t that h e w h o l e h e a r t e d l y accepts. H e a g r e e s that w e h a v e a n obligation to follow t h e truth a n d m a i n t a i n s that w e are a w a r e of this obligation t h r o u g h t h e natural light. W h a t d i s t i n g u i s h e s B a y l e from his o p p o n e n t s is his denial of their ass u m p t i o n that t h o s e w h o r e c o g n i z e this obligation to follow the t r u t h , a n d w h o , accordingly, diligently s e a r c h for it, will necessarily arrive at t h e same truth that is e m b r a c e d b y t h e o r t h o d o x . If t h o s e w h o r e c o g n i z e a moral obligation diligently to search for the truth a n d to follow w h a t t h e y d e t e r m i n e to be t h e truth turn o u t n o n e t h e l e s s to h a v e heretical beliefs, t h e n t h e y c a n n o t b e a c c u s e d of obstinacy: Dieu nous propose de telle manière la vérité, qu'il nous laisse dans l'engagement d'examiner ce qu'on nous propose, et de rechercher si c'est la vérité ou non. Or dès là on peut dire qu'il ne demande de nous sinon de bien examiner et de bien chercher, et qu'il se contente qu'après avoir examiné le mieux que nous ayons pu, nous consentions aux objets qui nous paraissent véritables, et que nous les amions comme un présent venu du ciel. Il est impossible qu'un amour sincère pour l'objet que l'on reçoit comme un don de Dieu,

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Religious Epistemologi/, Toleration, the Social Order après l'avoir examiné soigneusement, et que l'on n'aime qu'en conséquence de cette persuasion, soit mauvais, quand même il y aurait erreur dans notre persuasion. (332) God offers us the truth in such a manner as to leave us under the obligation of examining what has been offered and of ascertaining whether or not it is indeed the truth. Now, from there, one can conclude that he requires no more of us than to examine carefully and to search carefully and that he is satisfied if, after having searched to the best of our ability, we give our assent to those things that seem to be true and we love them as one loves a gift from heaven. If one sincerely loves an object that, after careful examination, one welcomes as a gift of God, and if one loves it precisely because one is persuaded that it is God's gift, it is impossible that such love should be wicked, even if we have been persuaded in error.

But just w h a t is it that allows Bayle to repel the charge that the erroneous convictions, however sincere, are nonetheless the product of a perverse refusal to recognize the truth? What is it that allows one to determine that one's diligent examinations have been diligent enough? Bayle's answer is that while certain truths are so clear and distinct that it would be inexcusable not to believe them (332), others are not clear and distinct, lacking any marks that w o u l d allow us to distinguish them from falsehood: Dieu n'a pas imprimé aux vérités qu'il nous révèle, à la plupart du moins, une marque ou un signe auquel on les puisse sûrement discerner; car elles ne sont pas d'une clarté métaphysique et géométrique; elles ne produisent pas dans notre âme une persuasion plus forte que les faussetés; elles n'excitent point des passions que les faussetés n'excitent. (333) God has not imprinted upon the truths that he has revealed to us, at least not on most of them, any mark or sign that would allow us to recognize them. They lack the clarity of metaphysical and geometric truths, they do not produce in our souls stronger convictions than those produced by falsehoods: the reactions that they elicit in us are indistinguishable from the reactions elicited by falsehoods. By this time, of course, the perspective of orthodoxy contemplating heresy has become utterly detached from the perspective of truth contemplating error, since the ability to distinguish between truth and error is precisely w h a t is being denied. The reason that the heretic cannot be blamed for his "error" is that it cannot

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be demonstrably proved to him that he is in error, any more than it can be proved that the orthodox are in possession of the truth. Orthodoxy, by now, can be nothing more than the official doctrines, heresy, the unofficial ones. Bayle's denial, in the above passage and elsewhere, that the truth can be recognized as such seems to be the basis for Rex's view that there has been a perilous shift between epistemological poles. Having begun with the claim that reason is the supreme arbiter of religious truth, Bayle ultimately props his theory of toleration on the inability of human reason to differentiate between truth and error. Rex presents this denouement as a paradoxical threat to the integrity of Bayle's theory: "The God-given criterium of natural light by which we could discern God's eternal laws and know that persecution was wrong appears to have darkened into incertitude. There seems to be nothing left but ruin. One wonders if even the idea of tolerance remains."21 In Rex's view, then, Bayle's Commentaire is structured around two antithetical poles, and the shift from reason to skepticism would seem to have fatal consequences. THE DELIMITATION OF SKEPTICISM

Here, as elsewhere in this study, my ultimate concern is with the ways in which ideas are put to specific uses in specific contexts rather than the extent to which philosophical problems have been solved through a rigorous adherence to principles of reasoning. Therefore, if the apparently conflicting ideas—such as rationalism and revelation, or rationalism and skepticism—that are brought to bear on a problem are reconciled by means that are more rhetorically ingenious than logically meritorious, I am pleased to be able to point that out. Indeed, if by delineating the ways in which ideological pressures push logic in one direction or another—or give rise to rhetorical solutions—I can demonstrate the amenability of logic to ideological pressures or the versatility of epistemological ideas, then I will have succeeded in my purpose. Accordingly, if Rex were correct in his claim that Bayle's skepticism is inconsistent with his rationalism and puts unbearable pressures on his argument, this would in no way impede me in my project.22 However, I think that Rex is not correct and that Bayle's attempt to bring a combination of rationalism and skepticism to bear on the problem

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of religious persecution is—provided that one accepts his premises—remarkably consistent. This is not to say that the logic of the Commentaire stands entirely on its own, with no need for rhetorical virtuosity. But in order to be able to show where Bayle's logic alone falls short of fulfilling his political purposes, we need to be able to see just how far his logic is able to take him. Since the human incapacity to distinguish orthodox from heterodox beliefs on the basis of their truth value is a fundamental aspect of Bayle's doctrine of the erring conscience, and since this doctrine gets elaborated toward the end of the work, it is not surprising that the theme of incertitude becomes increasingly conspicuous in the Seconde partie. But I do not think that Rex is correct in saying that Bayle's appeal to the light of reason becomes proportionally muted or that the coexistence of reason and uncertainty in Bayle's argument is necessarily problematic. It will be noted that, in the passage that I just quoted to demonstrate that Bayle's doctrine of the erring conscience depends on the claim that we cannot be certain regarding most of God's revelation, this uncertainty is established by contrasting those alleged "truths" that lack the mark that would distinguish them from falsehood with the metaphysical and geometric truths whose certainty is not in question because they do carry the requisite mark. Unlike the skeptics, who challenge all claimants to the status of truth by showing that one after another lacks the requisite mark or criterion that a successful candidate would have, Bayle contrasts uncertain "truths" not with a hypothetical ideal but with real truths that are accessible and can be recognized by dint of their clarity and distinctness. Although the paradigms for truths that can be clearly and distinctly known are found in metaphysics and geometry, Bayle is at pains throughout the Commentaire to give moral truths the same paradigmatic status. I indicated earlier that Bayle asserted, in the first chapter of the Première partie, that there were certain limitations to the power of reason regarding so-called speculative truths, whereas there were no limits regarding the "principes pratiques et généraux, qui se rapportent aux moeurs." In the context of Bayle's defense against the accusation that rationalism leads to Socinianism, it might have seemed as if he was merely stipulating that reason is not a dangerous instrument that produces radically heterodox doctrines. But I suggested that the distinction

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between speculative truths and moral ones had a much deeper significance. We are now in a position to understand at least part of that deeper significance. The Socinians would claim that reason tells us that the concept of the Trinity is not a clear and distinct one and needs to be rejected. In distinguishing between speculative and moral knowledge, Bayle does not dispute the Socinians' claim that the Trinity is inconsistent with reason; he broadens that claim in such a way as to put all positions on the issue, including the Socinians' own, beyond the jurisdiction of reason. If the relationship between Jesus and God is a speculative matter about which we do not have clear and distinct knowledge, this means that reason does not force us to become either Socinians or Trinitarians. Indeed, it becomes clear in the course of Bayle's exposition that the dubious "speculative truths" are precisely those doctrinal issues, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Eucharist, that have been at the center of religious controversy and religious persecution throughout the history of Christianity. To say that the truth regarding these issues cannot be clearly and distinctly known is, of course, consistent with the traditional orthodox notion that the Christian embraces mysteries that are beyond the ken of reason. But in the context of Bayle's overall argument, according to which reason is the supreme authority, what had been a mystery is suddenly transformed into an uncertainty. Traditionally, mysteries needed to be embraced as part of a Christian's submission to the doctrinal authority of the Church. And even uncertainty had been employed by Catholic fideists, as we saw above (pp. 82-83), a s a reason for submitting to the authority of the Church. 23 But Bayle's argument has shifted the ideological valence of uncertainty from an instrument of authority to an argument for autonomy: our inability to know serves to empower and protect the individual conscience. We may make our individual choices, establish our convictions, as to whether we accept or reject the Trinity, accept or reject the notion that the eucharistic bread is the body of Christ, but, insofar as the truth in these matters is beyond the reach of human reason, no one can say that a believer in this or that doctrine is obstinately refusing to recognize the truth, is not acting in accordance with the dictates of conscience. For what conscience dictates in these speculative matters is not corrigible by any appeal to clear and distinct ideas. Thus

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d o e s Bayle's t h e o r y of the erring c o n s c i e n c e , a n d ultimately his t h e o r y of toleration, d e p e n d o n the elusiveness of speculative truths. But the e l u s i v e n e s s of speculative truths d o e s n o t i m p i n g e o n the accessibility of m o r a l truths, w h i c h — B a y l e repeatedly c l a i m s — c a n be clearly a n d distinctly k n o w n . T h e first time that Bayle gives e x a m p l e s of truths that c a n n o t be overruled by a n y doctrine of religion is in the third p a r a g r a p h of the P r e m i è r e partie, the very p a r a g r a p h in w h i c h he first w a r d s off the c h a r g e that

reason

a u t h o r i z e s a refusal to believe in the Trinity a n d the Incarnation. In this instance, the list consists only of so-called metaphysical principles: Je sais bien qu'il y a des axiomes contre lesquels les paroles les plus expresses et les plus évidentes de l'Ecriture ne gagneraient rien, comme que le tout est plus grand que sa partie; que si de choses égales on ôte choses égales, les résidus en seront égaux; qu'il est impossible que deux contradictoires soient véritables; ou que l'essence d'un sujet subsiste réellement après la destruction du sujet. (CP, 87) I know well that there are axioms that cannot be overturned by the most plain and explicit words of Scripture, such as that the whole is greater than its part; that if one takes equal parts away from two equal things, the remainders will be equal; that it is impossible that two contradictories are both true; that the essence of a subject subsists in reality after the destruction of the subject. T o w a r d the e n d of the s a m e chapter, however, w h e n Bayle again h a s o c c a s i o n to offer s u c h a list, h e begins with the s a m e principle b u t t h e n s w i t c h e s to radically different e x a m p l e s of clear a n d distinct truths: Un esprit attentif et philosophe conçoit clairement que la lumière vive et distincte, qui nous accompagne en tous lieux et en tous temps, et qui nous montre que le tout est plus grand que sa partie, qu'il est honnête d'avoir de la gratitude pour ses bienfaiteurs, de ne point faire à autrui ce que nous ne voudrions pas qui nous fût fait, de tenir sa parole, et d'agir selon sa conscience; il conçoit, dis-je, clairement que cette lumière vient de Dieu, et que c'est une révélation naturelle. (94-95) A n attentive and philosophical mind clearly conceives that the vivid and distinct natural light that accompanies us at all times and in all places, and that shows us that the whole is greater than its part, that justice requires us to be grateful to our benefactors, not to do unto others what we would not wish to have done to ourselves, to keep our word, and to

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act in accordance with our conscience; it clearly conceives, I say, that this light c o m e s from God, and that it is a natural revelation.

By giving moral truisms the same paradigmatic status as the clear and distinct truths of metaphysics, Bayle is no doubt attempting to substantiate the distinction that he had made a few paragraphs earlier, between speculative and moral propositions. But he is also preparing the reader to accept the certitude of a series of moral propositions—including the crucial proposition, unostentatiously embedded in this list, that we are morally obliged to follow our consciences—that will form the backbone of his general argument.24 Several of the supposedly indubitable moral propositions will be offered throughout the Seconde partie, where the uncertainty of the speculative propositions at the heart of religious controversy will be juxtaposed with the certitude of moral propositions regarding the rights and obligations of the erring conscience. Nor is this juxtaposition contradictory or paradoxical; for the argument depends precisely on both the indubitability of the moral propositions and on the dubitability of the speculative ones. Although we will have occasion below to look more closely at some of the moral propositions that provide the foundation for Bayle's doctrine of the erring conscience, it would require an excessive degree of quotation to demonstrate that the moral propositions are as insistent and conspicuous toward the end of the Commentaire as are the statements about the human incapacity to obtain certitude. But such a demonstration is unnecessary for our purposes. As long as Bayle consistently adheres to the distinction between moral truths and speculative ones, and as long as the moral truths remain clear to the light of reason while the speculative truths remain unclear, then there is no need to accept Rex's view that Bayle's theory is vitiated by a conflict between his rationalism and his skepticism. If we return to the paradox of the persecutor's conscience with this distinction in mind, then there would seem to be a solid basis for finding the persecutor guilty of crimes despite the fact that he has acted in good conscience. Whereas the heretic's convictions have to do with speculative matters and hence cannot be overruled by the light of reason, the persecutor's convictions are a perversion of moral truths that God has imprinted on us. Accordingly, in order

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to remain persuaded that God wishes us to persecute heretics, one would need obstinately to ignore the clear and distinct moral truths that God has revealed to us through the inner light. It will be recalled that Bayle had earlier asserted that when the persecutors claim that they are acting in accordance with God's wishes they are presupposing a prior divine command—the truth of which Bayle vigorously accepts—to the effect that the truth places human beings under the obligation of following it and that those who do follow it are acting virtuously. But now we can see that in formulating this maxim Bayle was equivocating on the word vérité. With regard to ethical matters, we are obliged to follow the truth. With regard to speculative matters, we are obliged to follow what we take to be the truth, since, here, truth itself is inaccessible. Because the speculative beliefs that the persecutors attempt to force on the "heretics" cannot be clearly and distinctly known to be true, those "heretics" who, in good conscience, hold to their own speculative beliefs are under no obligation to give them up. They are not violating the moral imperative regarding the obligation to follow the truth; for the imperative in this case requires them only to hold their beliefs in good conscience. Nothing further can be demanded of them. But the imperative to follow the truth applies with its full force to the persecutors themselves: the moral truth that it is evil to compel consciences is available to the light of reason. Therefore, as Rex suggested, the persecutors' error is not invincible and they are morally culpable if they fail to follow the truth. 25 Thus, by combining the general distinction between the moral and the speculative with the specific moral imperative to seek and to follow the truth, Bayle gives himself the capacity not only to deflect the paradox of the persecutor's conscience but to turn the tables on the persecutors by showing that it is they, and not the heretics, who are obstinate. If Bayle's theory gives him this capacity, then why is he so reticent when confronted with the appeal to the persecutor's conscience? Why does Bayle, who otherwise conducts his arguments with astonishing perspicuousness and thoroughness, see fit to omit the heart of his response to what appears to be the most powerful objection that could have been raised against him? Why does he pass up this opportunity to turn the tables on his enemies? The answer, I think, lies in the fact that Bayle's argument for

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toleration achieves its power at the expense of the very idea of religious truth. For Dryden and for the deists, the fact that doctrines are uncertain is sufficient to make them inessential. Bayle agrees that they are uncertain but cannot agree that they are inessential. For to declare that the questions, say, of the Trinity and the Incarnation are inessential would be to repudiate Calvinism and to open oneself to the charge of deism. Hence, Bayle's position is that we cannot know whether God is three persons or only one but that we nonetheless can commit ourselves to one view or another in good conscience. Although the Socinians cannot rationally demonstrate that they are right, neither can they be shown to be wrong. Therefore, they too, like the Calvinists and all others who hold their speculative beliefs in good conscience, need to be tolerated (276). The notion that one is right to hold beliefs that cannot be shown to be true or false is certainly a species of fideism, but, unlike the usual sort of fideism, which postulates that one must submit to the revealed truths of one's own religion, this is a promiscuous fideism that postulates that one is guiltless in submitting to one or another set of speculative doctrines. Moreover, it is a fideism that, paradoxically, is ultimately grounded in reason.26 Even the deists had clung to the idea that one must obey the true religion in order to achieve salvation, but they had pared the true religion down to a small core of beliefs to be found at the heart of all religions. Bayle, on the other hand, is not necessarily cutting back on the number of beliefs that are required; he is removing the requirement that they be true. The ultimate thrust of Bayle's argument, then, is to urge toleration of religious beliefs while at the same time devaluing the epistemological status of those beliefs. His rhetorical strategy is to emphasize the need for toleration while playing down the fact that the argument for toleration goes hand in hand with the devaluation of the actual content of religious belief. This is presumably why the distinction between moral and speculative truths is introduced explicitly when Bayle is warding off Socinianism and why Bayle fails to call attention to the fact that the distinction applies equally to more orthodox versions of Christianity. Although Bayle, unlike Dryden, does not mask his rationalism, he does attempt to mute it by not blaring out its full significance. While most philosophers paper over the weaknesses of their arguments, there is a strong

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sense, then, in which Bayle finds it prudent in some degree to paper over his argument's remarkable strengths, and this may well be one of the reasons for his taciturnity in the face of the paradox of the persecutor's conscience. To point out that Bayle stresses the unknowability of speculative truths only when it suits his purposes to do so is to point out that Bayle's principles are established with great strength and consistency but are applied differentially. Bayle's motivation for this is partly, no doubt, that he does not wish to outrage the very people whose rights he is so painstakingly defending.27 But this is not so much a matter of playing favorites as it is a matter of applying the lessons of his analysis only where they are needed. One result of this differential procedure, as we will see in the next section, is the transmutation of the political valence of skepticism.

MORAL TRUTHS AND THE POLITICS OF DOUBT

Thus far, in attempting to demonstrate the usefulness of Bayle's distinction between speculative and moral truth, I have stressed the way in which it renders the errors of the heretics pardonable and the errors of the persecutors condemnable. Since any doctrinal errors embraced by the heretics are in the speculative realm and cannot be corrected by the natural light, the heretics, unlike the persecutors, can take shelter in the doctrine of the erring conscience. Meanwhile, the persecutors' appeal to the erring conscience can be overruled on the ground that they are obliged not to settle for moral error but to search for the moral truth that is available to them. It is important to note, however, that Bayle does not content himself with arguing that it is merely pardonable for the heretics to adhere to the speculative doctrines that they have fixed upon; he wishes to suggest that it is positively meritorious for them to do so. The merit derives partly from the fact that the heretics are depicted as having, like the good Calvinists on whom they are modeled, diligently searched for the truth before settling on their speculative doctrines.28 Thus they have obeyed the moral imperative to search for the truth and to follow it. But Bayle refuses to assign merit to the search alone. That is to

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say, h e w o u l d not consider it meritorious to continue searching for the truth a n d rejecting e v e r y candidate that failed to meet the Cartesian criterion of clarity and distinctness. To search thus w o u l d be to follow the path of skepticism, and this is a course that Bayle rejects: Après tout dans la religion on ne peut pas faire toute sa vie le sceptique, et le pyrrhonien; il faut se fixer à quelque chose, et agir selon ce à quoi on se détermine. (CP, 299) After all, in religion one cannot be a skeptic or Pyrrhonist for one's entire life; one must settle on something and act in accordance with what one has chosen. Bayle is ruling out skepticism not on the familiar ground that it is a psychological impossibility to maintain such an attitude but on the ground that it would be morally unacceptable to do so. 29 Granted, since Bayle's overall p u r p o s e is to s h o w that the secular authority in France is obliged to tolerate religious beliefs that are held in good conscience, he is no doubt pleased to be able to s h o w that if the persecutors insist that heretics continue searching until they find the true religion, then the persecutors w o u l d , in effect, be advocating skepticism. For in the absence of clear and distinct marks of truth on speculative doctrines, those w h o do not satisfy themselves with the dictates of conscience will be forced to search interminably for the true religion. But Bayle is not merely turning the tables on his enemies by suggesting that their principles w o u l d encourage something that they w o u l d d e e m highly undesirable. Skepticism is something that he, too, considers highly undesirable, something that e m e r g e s from his analysis as a baleful alternative to fixing on s o m e religion or other a n d following its dictates. For Bayle, it will be recalled, to b e h a v e morally is to b e h a v e in accordance with the dictates of one's conscience, which means, by definition, to behave in accordance with w h a t o n e takes to be the will of G o d . Morality is inseparable f r o m conscience, which, in turn, is inseparable from religion. This is not to s a y that Bayle is suggesting that, without religion, o n e w o u l d necessarily b e h a v e in a criminal manner. Bayle in fact became i n f a m o u s in his o w n time for arguing that atheists are no less capable of civic virtue than Christians and that an orderly society of atheists is therefore quite conceivable. 3 0 In making that

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claim, h o w e v e r , Bayle w a s referring to the ability of atheists to conform to social norms rather than to their ability to please G o d . The " v i r t u e " of atheists lies in their public behavior, which, like that of most Christians, is motivated by amour-propre and pride rather than by conscience. Atheists are no less motivated than are Christians by the desire for public approval and the wish to avoid censure or punishment, and therefore they are equally capable of being g o o d citizens. But, conversely, as Bayle says in the Commentaire, atheists, unlike heretics, do not have the right to disseminate their v i e w s because, unlike heretics, they cannot claim that they are acting in good conscience: Un athée ne pouvant être poussé à dogmatiser par aucun motif de conscience, ne pourra jamais alléguer aux magistrats cette sentence

de saint Pierre, il vaut mieux obéir à Dieu qu'aux hommes. (CP, 312) 11

Since an atheist cannot be impelled to dogmatize by any motive of conscience, he can never invoke before the magistrates this maxim

of St. Peter: it is ivorthier to obey God than to obey men. In other w o r d s , since someone w h o preaches atheism cannot claim to be acting in accordance with G o d ' s will, he is, by virtue of Bayle's definition of conscience, unable to claim the right of conscience for his actions. T h u s Bayle's assertion that any religious beliefs are better than none at all is made not from the point of v i e w that sees religion as an instrument of social control but from the point of v i e w that sees the possibility of acting in accordance with one's conscience as the prerequisite for being able to please G o d and attain salvation. 3 2 Soit que l'on se fixe au vrai, soit au faux, il est également certain qu'il faut faire des actes de vertu, et d'amour de Dieu. (299) 11 Whether one settles on the truth or on falsehood, it is equally certain that one must perform actions that are motivated by virtue and love of God.

Since G o d does not c o n d e m n those w h o sincerely follow an erring conscience, those w h o insist on searching eternally for absolute religious truth are guilty of a s u p r e m e folly:

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C'est vouloir que toute sa vie passe dans une pure spéculation, sans qu'il consulte jamais sa conscience pour agir selon ses lumières. Or ce serait la plus grande de toutes les absurdités. (299-300) That would be willingly to spend one's entire life in pure speculation, without ever consulting one's conscience in order to act in accordance with its lights. Now, that would be the greatest of all absurdities.

The skeptic's mistake, like that of the persecutors, would be to assume that what matters is the content of belief, and that embracing false doctrines is culpable in God's eyes. Indeed, not only is it forgivable to commit oneself to false doctrines, but it seems positively dangerous to refuse to engage in such erroneous commitments. For Bayle sees the skeptical search for certainty in doctrinal truth as "la plus grande de toutes les absurdités" not simply because such a vain search is irrelevant to salvation but because it is positively inimical to salvation. The point at which Bayle, after using skeptical techniques to argue that doctrinal truth is inaccessible and hence not required for salvation, goes on to reject skepticism itself as inimical to salvation is perhaps the point at which the structure of Bayle's argument and the structure of his commitments most vividly intersect and illuminate one another. We saw earlier that one of the fundamental axioms of Bayle's moral rationalism is that God places human beings under the obligation of acting in accordance with the truth. Since the skeptic has limitless respect for the truth and refuses to accept specious substitutes, it might well seem to a skeptic that he is acting morally in not making any premature commitments and, instead, in continuing his search for truth. Moreover, it might seem as if Bayle's moral rationalism ought to endorse such behavior or at least ought to consider it to be no more culpable than making commitments to speculative beliefs that lack the marks of certitude. To such an objection, Bayle could reply that just as an atheist cannot proselytize in good conscience—since conscience is, by definition, one's sense of what it is that God requires of us—by the same token, a skeptic cannot appeal to conscience without first committing himself to the belief that there is a God and that in pursuing his skeptical inquiries he is acting in accordance with what he takes to be God's will. By thus appealing to conscience, the skeptic would cease to be a skeptic, since he would be commit-

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ting himself to the truth of God's existence and of the requirement to act in accordance with his will. But why, it might be asked, could one not accept belief in God but remain skeptical with regard to speculative beliefs concerning the Trinity and the Incarnation? Such a move would seem to be consistent with Bayle's principles as they have been set forth thus far and would seem to allow him to argue for religious toleration from a universalist perspective that transcended the various doctrinal disputes that had led to war and persecution. We have already seen that Bayle's argument brings him to heterodox positions, and it might seem as if the universalist argument for toleration would simply be the logical culmination of Bayle's heterodoxy. We have already seen, however, in the case of Lord Herbert's and Dryden's deism, that in the context of late seventeenth-century religio-political discourse, the paring down of religious beliefs to the minima that were beyond dispute could be used as a means of discounting the particular beliefs that distinguished one sect from another and hence as a basis for setting aside those particular beliefs as a threat to social order. Bayle is arguing not simply that his coreligionists should not be persecuted for their beliefs but that they must be allowed to hold them. His position is that the fact that all speculative positions are equally dubious does not—contrary to Dryden—render them equally unnecessary to salvation. Rather, it renders them all equally necessary for salvation, insofar as God requires that one consult one's conscience on these matters and follow its dictates. In avoiding the sort of universalism that would discount differences instead of protecting them, 34 Bayle is not simply avoiding one of the ideological dangers of deism but is going against the traditional ideological justification of skepticism. Although skeptics spent their lives in search of that which could not be doubted, without accepting as true anything that proved to be merely a speculative uncertainty, they were always at pains to assure the authorities that their activities posed no threat to public order. Sextus Empiricus, the codifier of Pyrrhonism—the most rigorous and self-consistent skeptical procedure—acknowledged that the essence of the skeptical search was to question appearances, and not to settle for apparent truths, but nonetheless asserted that Pyrrhonists submitted to appearances (and hence to authority) in

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their everyday lives. They followed, he wrote, "a line of reasoning which, in accordance with appearances, points us to a life conformable to the customs of our country and its laws and institutions, and to our own instinctive feelings." 35 Religion is not given any special attention here, presumably because—as Gibbon will assert in the Decline and Fall—pagan religion is seen by pagan philosophers as simply an aspect of one's public duties. 36 The skeptical tradition of submission to local laws and customs is still in evidence when Descartes, in the Discours de la méthode, establishes a provisional morality that will guide him in his daily activities while he suspends his beliefs and searches for indubitable principles. But Descartes, living in France during the early seventeenth century, cannot simply slide over religion. The first maxim of his provisional morality était d'obéir aux lois et aux coutumes de mon pays, retenant constamment la religion en laquelle Dieu m'a fait la grâce d'être instruit dès mon enfance, et me gouvernant, en toute autre chose, suivant les opinions . . . reçues en pratique par les mieux sensés de ceux avec lequels j'aurais à vivre. Car commençant dès lors à ne compter pour rien les miennes propres, à cause que je les voulais remettre toutes à l'examen, j'étais assuré de ne pouvoir mieux que de suivre celles des mieux sensés." was to obey the laws and customs of my country and to hold constantly to that religion in which, owing to the grace of God, I had been instructed since childhood, and to govern myself in all other matters by following the opinions . . . put into practice by the most judicious of those among whom I would be living. For, putting no stock in my own opinions from that point on, since I wished to subject them all to examination, I felt confident that I could do no better than to follow the opinions of those who were most judicious.

Although Descartes gives his retention of Catholicism a pious formulation that serves to ward off charges that his faith is merely token and external, the fact that his provisional morality is explicitly presented as guiding only his actions, while his judgment is being suspended, makes it hard to take his piety seriously.3* Thus, Descartes, like the skeptics before him, would seem to be submitting to appearances in order to protect his freedom to carry out his rigorous search for truth. But these individual acts of prudence end up allowing skepticism to associate itself with social conservatism

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and even, paradoxically, to provide a positive argument for conservatism: in the absence of certitude, one recognizes one's own weakness, and the impulse to follow custom and obey authority comes to seem not merely prudent but virtually irresistible. In chapter 2, we found later versions of this very argument raised on behalf of the authority of the Catholic church: because of the weakness of reason, or because of our inability to establish the authentic biblical text, we need to submit to the traditional authority. Moreover, when the skeptic gives up the search for truth and achieves a state of ataraxia, or unperturbedness, he is undisposed to be anything but a model of obedience. Thus Montaigne finally extols skepticism in the "Apologie de Raimond Sebond" on the ground that those minds that do not look into matters divine and human are docile and tractable before the laws of religion and those of the state. Pyrrhonism, as he goes on to explain, présente l'homme nu et vide, reconnaissant sa faiblesse naturelle, propre à recevoir d'en haut quelque force étrangère, dégarni d'humaine science, et d'autant plus apte à loger en soi la divine, anéantissant son jugement pour faire plus de place à la foi; ni mécréant ni établissant aucun dogme contre les observances communes; humble, obéissant, disciplinable, studieux, ennemi juré d'hérésie, et s'exemptant par conséquent des vaines et irréligieuses opinions introduites par les fausses sectes. w reveals man to be naked and empty, recognizing his natural weakness, and ready to accept some external, higher power; stripped of human knowledge, and hence all the more inclined to make room for the divine; annihilating his judgment in order to make w a y for faith; neither an infidel nor an establisher of beliefs contrary to the community's observances; humble, obedient, amenable, zealous, a sworn enemy of heresy, and therefore impervious to the foolish and irreligious opinions introduced by false sects.

Bayle, of course, cannot follow the skeptics in submitting, if only externally, to the prevailing religious beliefs, since his plea for toleration is premised on an abhorrence for token submission to the religion of the French king, a submission that would require Protestants to violate their consciences and hence endanger their souls. The "heretic" must be able to reject the religion of those who wield the authority of the state and who claim to be the wisest and

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most knowledgeable. And his submission to the religion of his conscience, unlike the skeptic's submission to appearances, must be sincere, a matter of deep conviction. In fact, whereas the skeptics would attain speculative freedom at the cost of external submission to the customs, including the religious customs, of their country, Bayle undertakes to save his coreligionists from having to accept even external submission to the prevailing religion, and he does so precisely by rejecting unlimited speculative freedom (i.e., skepticism) in favor of conviction. For it is conviction that is essential to the moral status of conscience. Yet Bayle's argument depends on his ability to see things through the eyes of a skeptic—that is, on his ability to recognize, in the classical skeptical manner, the failure of claimants to the status of truth to exhibit the marks that clearly and distinctly distinguish truth from falsehood. For the modern reader, there is a danger at this point that philosophical issues will give way to intriguing psychological ones and that the question of how Bayle is able to sustain his double perspective will press itself upon us. This pressure would distract us from the task at hand and needs to be resisted. 40 But there is a closely related question that does need to be addressed. Since Bayle's argument depends on an understanding of the claims of reason and those of conscience, as well as the limitations of reason as exposed by skeptical scrutiny, and the interrelationship between all of these, the reader who is to be convinced by Bayle's arguments needs to be able to recognize and understand all these claims and perspectives. I have already suggested that the fact that Bayle avoids underlining the uncertainty of speculative truths indicates that he is not anxious to trumpet one of the more provocative elements of his theory. Bayle's coreligionists might not be inclined to welcome a defense of religious toleration that demeaned the epistemological status of their beliefs. But there is no immediate reason why they need to be made painfully aware of this epistemological corollary of Bayle's argument for toleration. Bayle's fellow Protestants, insofar as they are submitting to beliefs that are not clearly and distinctly known to be true, are ultimately, like the skeptics, submitting to appearances. It is necessary that they do so with conviction. But whereas it is necessary that the skeptic—in order to be a

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skeptic—be aware that he is submitting to appearances rather than to the truth, it is not necessary that the Christian who submits to beliefs in good conscience be aware of the fallibility of conscience— the fact that the certainty of his or her beliefs cannot be guaranteed. That is to say, there is no indication that God requires that the commitment of the ordinary Christian needs to be made in the face of doubt, as a heroic triumph of faith over reason, in the manner of Pascal or Kierkegaard or, indeed, of Bayle. God requires only that the commitment be sincere and that it be followed. Thus Bayle's fellow Huguenots do not need to share his exquisite epistemological self-awareness. The only time that one needs to be aware that it is impossible to know whether one's Christian beliefs are true is at such time as one has the power and the disposition to force one's beliefs upon others. 41 It is precisely in that situation that one needs to understand every element of Bayle's argument: one needs to recognize the moral truth that it is a crime against God to constrain the consciences of others, and one needs to recognize that this moral truth is supported by the fact that the speculative beliefs of religion are dubious but that God nonetheless rewards those who follow their consciences. In the political context in which Bayle is writing, there is only one person who needs to share Bayle's skeptical self-consciousness; there is only one person who needs to understand everything that Bayle has set forth in his Commentaire and who can afford to ignore Bayle's arguments only at the peril of his eternal soul, and that person is the king of France. 42 For when the king understands that religious truths are uncertain and that, in the absence of certainty, God rewards those who follow their conscience, then the king's own conscience should be informed by the moral obligation to tolerate religious diversity. The conservatism of traditional skepticism came from the fact that the role of skeptic was assigned to the citizen, or political subject, whose very awareness of the dubiety of appearances impelled him to submit to authority. Bayle changes the ideological valence of skepticism by assigning the role of the skeptical doubter not to the subject—who needs to stop the endless search and to obey his private conscience—but to the ruler, who, in the absence of certitude, is obliged by God to give the utmost latitude to his

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subjects, both as they search for truth and as they submit to the doctrines that their consciences present to them as true. Ultimately, Bayle transforms skepticism into an instrument of subversion not by questioning authority or by questioning our ability to know the truth but by making it morally imperative that authority question itself.

4 Paganism, Christianity, and the Social Order The Erastian philosophy found its cohesion in the principle of civil order at all costs. . . . It represents a very significant disposition to shift religious sovereignty from the clergy to the State. . . . The State's attention will be focused upon the maintenance of civil peace rather than upon the support of a religious system deemed to be the true Church of God. W. K. Jordan

BOSSUET AND THE TRADITION OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY When traditional Christian ideas about the source of religious knowledge came under attack in the ways that we have looked at in the preceding chapters, what w a s at stake w a s not merely the status of dogmas and mysteries and epistemologies but also the status of the Christian conception of history. Bossuet's Discours de I'histoire universelle (1681) provides us with an epitome of traditional Christian historiography as well as a vivid introduction to the w a y in which that historiography is implicated in and threatened by the religio-political struggles of the period. Bossuet "perhaps more than any other [man] stands for the transmission of the early Christian historical tradition into the modern period." 1 But Bossuet was not simply a transmitter of historiographic tradition. He was Versailles's most eloquent spokesman for royal authority and Catholic hegemony. He urged Louis XIV to "complete" the conversion of the Protestants and cheered the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. 2 His justification—before the king on 21 October 1685 (two days before the revocation)—of measures already taken against the Protestants made use of an appeal to compelle intrare and "les principes de Saint Augustin" 1 and was evidently one of the specific factors surrounding the revocation that moved Bayle to write his Commentaire.4 112

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It should not be surprising to find Bossuet's absolutist and antischismatic viewpoints reflected in his Histoire universelle. Nor, indeed, should it be surprising that the conflict between Bossuet and Bayle over religious toleration should be fought not merely in the philosophical and theological arena but in the historiographie one as well. The historiographie differences between the two writers are nonetheless worth our attention; for they will help us to understand a surprising aspect of the evolution of the high Enlightenment's interpretations of Christianity and paganism, culminating in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—namely, the way in which individual writers were motivated by religio-political considerations to embrace apparently inconsistent evaluations of pagan and Christian cultures. Consequently, as we will see below, the trajectory that carries us from Bossuet to Gibbon will involve not merely the transvaluation of the traditional attitudes toward Christians and pagans but a series of dilemmas that will arise from the need to condemn what one is valorizing and to valorize what one is condemning. Insofar as he is transmitting the traditional Christian historiography, Bossuet is concerned with depicting all of history as the unfolding of God's providential scheme and with showing that the central event around which that scheme is organized is the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth / In narrating the history of religion, Bossuet has little difficulty in presenting the advent of Jesus as the watershed. In a chapter entitled "Prodigieux aveuglement de l'idolâtrie avant la venue du Messie," Bossuet sets forth the depravity of pagan religion before it was supplanted by Christianity: C o m m e . . . la conversion de la gentilité était une oeuvre réservée au Messie, et le propre caractère de sa venue, l'erreur et l'impiété prévalaient partout. . . . Qui oserait raconter les cérémonies des dieux immortels, et leurs mystères impurs? Leurs amours, leurs cruautés, leurs jalousies, et tous leurs autres excès étaient le sujet de leurs fêtes. . . . Ainsi le crime était adoré, et reconnu nécessaire au culte des dieux." Since the conversion of the gentiles was a task reserved for the Messiah, and of a character appropriate to his advent, error and impiety prevailed everywhere. . . . W h o would dare to describe the ceremonies of the immortal gods and their polluted mysteries? The

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Religious Epistemologi/, Toleration, the Sodili Order gods' carnal passions, their cruelties, their jealousies, and all their other excesses were the subject of their festivals. . . . Thus was crime adored and deemed a necessary part of divine worship. A s depicted in this passage, paganism is an abomination not

simply because it is a false religion but because it sets forth vile examples of immoral behavior a m o n g the g o d s and requires evil behavior in its rituals. For the Christian historian, the history of religion is closely related to the history of morality in that the Incarnation of G o d in the person of Jesus needs to be seen as bringing into the w o r l d — a l o n g with a n e w conception of religion and a n e w offer of eternal bliss—a n e w morality, a n e w concept of virtue. A n d Bossuet appears to be eager to make this point: Avec de si nouvelles récompenses, il fallait que Jésus-Christ proposât aussi de nouvelles idées de vertu, des pratiques plus parfaites et plus épurées. La fin de la religion, l'âme des vertues et l'abrégé de la loi, c'est la charité. ( D H U , 848) Along with such new rewards, it was also necessary that Jesus Christ should set forth new ideas of virtue, purer and more perfect standards of behavior. The end of religion, the core of the virtues, and the essence of the law is charity. But no sooner does Bossuet seem to assert that the Christian doctrine of charity represents a moral revolution than he goes on to treat Christian morality more as an extension and purification of p a g a n morality than as an absolute innovation: Mais, jusqu'à Jésus-Christ, on peut dire que la perfection et les effets de cette vertu n'étaient pas entièrement connus. C'est Jésus-Christ proprement qui nous apprend à nous contenter de Dieu seul. Pour établir la règne de la charité, et nous en découvrir tous les devoirs, il nous propose l'amour de Dieu, jusqu'à nous haïr nous-mêmes, et persécuter sans relâche le principe de corruption que nous avons tous dans le coeur. Il nous propose l'amour du prochain. (DHU, 848) But before Jesus Christ, it can be said that the perfection and the effects of this virtue were not completely known. It is properly Jesus Christ w h o teaches us to find our happiness in God alone. In order to establish the regime of charity and reveal to us all of the duties entailed therein, he instructs us to love God to the extent that we hate ourselves and to persecute unremittingly the source of corruption in all our hearts. He tells us to love our neighbor.

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The central moral concept of charity was evidently available to the pagans, albeit only imperfectly. This abrupt shift in Bossuet's narrative points to the fact that he is undertaking to reconcile the traditional view of Christianity as a new moral system with the theologically unexceptionable notion that there was a natural light that informed pagan morality before the advent of Jesus. Nor is Bossuet merely bowing to the technical demands of orthodoxy. The notion that moral knowledge was available to pagans through the natural light is something that serves more particular purposes. First, pagan virtue is a useful tool for him in his role as moral teacher. The Histoire universelle is addressed to the Dauphin— whose education had been placed under Bossuet's pious supervision—and is replete with explicit lessons for him as well as implicit lessons for his father, Louis XIV. Christian moralists and satirists often used the notion of virtuous pagans or heathens—real or imagined 7 —as a way of reproaching Christians for failing to live up to the explicit dictates of revealed Christianity, and such a technique would seem to be at work in Bossuet's text, for example, in the following passage regarding the Athenians: Ils détestaient l'adultère, dans les hommes et dans les femmes; la société conjugale était sacrée parmi eux. Mais quand ils s'appliquaient à la religion, ils paraissaient comme possédés par un esprit étranger, et leur lumière naturelle les abandonnait. (DHU, 821) They detested adultery, in men as well as in women; the marital state was sacred among them. But when they turned to religion, it was as if they were possessed by an alien spirit, and their natural light abandoned them.

In metaphorically associating Greek religion with possession by alien spirits, Bossuet is summoning up the old idea that pagan religion was the work of demons. But beyond this, in contrasting this demonic religion with the virtuous detestation of adultery that is attributed to the natural light, Bossuet is evidently availing himself of an opportunity to reproach Louis XIV for his adulteries by reminding him that even pagans were more virtuous in this regard than the divinely ordained Christian monarch." Bossuet does not limit his moralizing to matters of personal behavior but also mines ancient history for institutions and policies that highlighted the failures of Christian governments to follow

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Christian precepts. He is able, for example, to praise the early Roman institution of the College of Fetiales for refusing to allow Rome to engage in unjust wars and to use this example to chide Christian monarchs who flout revealed Christianity by engaging in wars of conquest: Sainte institution s'il en fut jamais, et qui fait honte aux chrétiens, à qui un Dieu venu au monde pour pacifier toutes choses n'a pu inspirer la charité et la paix! (DHU, 1008) A venerable institution if there ever was one, an institution that shames Christians, in whom even a God bringing universal peace to earth could not inspire charity and peace!

That the virtuous pagans are able to reject adultery and unjust wars despite the fact that their religions teach bad morals, and that Christian kings engage in adultery and military conquest despite the fact that their religion—the true religion—prohibits these things, gives the above passages their satiric force. Paradoxically, however, the more extensive and estimable the virtues of the pagans, the more danger there is of creating the impression that a religion whose adherents exhibit so much personal virtue and so many enlightened institutions may not be in such dire need of supplantation; and such an impression would threaten the entire structure of providential history. One way to ward off such danger is by stringently distinguishing between the natural light that informs pagan morality and the darkness that hangs over pagan religion. Bossuet attempts to guarantee such a separation in a very straightforward way, by dividing his Histoire universelle into separate narratives; the history of religions is the subject of Part Two, the history of civilizations, Part Three. (Part One deals with the history of epochs.) By dint of such a separation, Bossuet, in principle, is able to protect his orthodoxy while moralizing about the repeated failure of Christians to be as virtuous as pagans. Bossuet, however, is writing not simply as an inheritor of the tradition of Christian historiography, nor simply as a Christian moralist; he does not, by any means, use ancient history merely for examples of ways in which pagans informed by the natural light could be more virtuous than Christians endowed with divine revelation. Like other historians, Bossuet looked to the past for ideological legitimation in order to justify those contemporary interests,

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outlooks, policies, and institutions that he favored. But, as the analysis to this point has made abundantly clear, political issues in the seventeenth century were inseparable from religious ones. Thus when Bossuet, the relentless enemy of schism and zealous advocate of religious unity through force of arms—for whom the Christian summum bonum of charity manages to get transmuted into obedience 9 —praises obedience among the ancients, even in the ostensibly secular context of the Roman army (DHU, 994), it is hard not to see the projection of hierarchical and antischismatic Catholic values. The same may be said of his extended idealization of Egypt—perhaps the most striking feature of his history of civilizations—which focuses, as Paul Hazard has pointed out, on the Egyptians' grave conservatism and horror of novelty. 10 Nor does Bossuet's political animus allow him to content himself with projecting religio-political values onto the civic institutions of the ancients. He cannot keep himself from directly praising their religio-political arrangements when he finds them exemplary—for example, when he tells us that although the Egyptian monarchy was hereditary, the kings were obliged by ancient custom to obey (religious) laws, including a body of law that applied to them alone. This submission of otherwise inviolable kings to the power of religion and tradition is represented as enhancing rather than diminishing their godlike qualities." Thus in Egypt (as in France) the glory of civilization and the majesty of kings is seen to depend on a proper submission to religious tradition. A more explicit, and, for our purposes, more crucial, example of Bossuet's exaltation of pagan religion—or, at least, of the role that it played in an orderly society—is to be found in his remarks on the foundations of Roman religion. Romulus, he tells us, établit l'ordre et réprima les esprits par des lois très saintes. Il commença par la religion, qu'il regarda comme le fondement des Etats. Il la fit aussi sérieuse, aussi grave, et aussi modeste que les ténèbres de l'idolâtrie le pouvaient permettre. Les religions étrangères et les sacrifices, qui n'étaient pas établies par les coutumes romaines, furent défendus. Dans la suite, on se dispensa de cette loi; mais c'était l'intention de Romulus qu'elle fût gardée, et on en retint toujours quelque chose. (DHU, 1013) imposed order and tamed unruly spirits by means of extremely venerable laws. He began with religion, which he considered the foundation of states. He made it as serious, as solemn, as modest,

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as the darkness of idolatry would allow. Foreign religions and sacrifices that were not grounded in Roman custom were prohibited. Subsequently, this law was not always enforced; but it was Romulus's intention that it be preserved, and at least part of it was retained.

I have suggested that the orthodoxy of Bossuet's traditional Christian historiography depended on the separation of religious history from the history of civilizations, so that those aspects of pre-Christian civilization that were meritorious and thus reflected the benefit of the natural light would not lead one to question the need for the Incarnation of God and the revelation of the true religion. After all, the profound threat to providential history that deism was beginning to pose was precisely that, by making all of the fundamental truths about morality and religion equally available to pagans, it removes any need for the Incarnation.' 2 Despite this danger, however, Bossuet's virtual sanctification of Romulus's institution of religious conformity indicates how religiopolitical imperatives could drive even the staunchest orthodoxy to put strains on itself. On the one hand, the fact that pagan religion is not revealed might seem to leave room for the idea that it was invented by humans for human purposes. But if religions that are invented by wise pagans turn out to be exemplary, then that would seem to cast a shadow on the glory of the true religion, which will be brought down to humanity by the incarnate God. Indeed, Bossuet's qualifying statement in the passage just quoted—that Roman religion as set up by Romulus was as serious and as modest as the darkness of idolatry could allow—is clearly a rhetorical attempt to reassert the distinction between the benighted pagan religion and the redeeming light of Christianity. But here, notwithstanding Bossuet's vaunted rhetorical skill, his qualification seems lame. Rather than smoothing over the problem, it only underscores it: to the extent that the natural light illuminates not only pagan morality and political institutions but even pagan religion, to that extent does the historical centrality of the Incarnation become eroded. In the religio-political discourse of the seventeenth century, then, the central world-historical importance of Christian revelation was being undermined by defenders of orthodoxy as well as by its deistic opponents. But the greatest danger that faced Bossuet's

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traditional Christian historiography was to come from a different direction and take a different form. For the Enlightenment would pose its most profound challenge to traditional historiography not by undermining the distinction between paganism and Christianity but by retaining the distinction while inverting its valorization so that paganism comes to be associated with positive values and Christianity with negative ones. Of course, Bossuet, to the extent that he finds pagan virtues putting Christians to shame, manifests a slight tendency in the direction of this inversion. But he still sees the religio-political structure of French absolutism as a model of hierarchical perfection. A crucial step in the transvaluation of authoritarian Catholicism in particular and of Christianity in general will be the transvaluation of religious toleration. The writers that I will be discussing in the remainder of this chapter, starting with Pierre Bayle, find the exemplary manifestation of toleration in ancient paganism, especially that of ancient Rome. 13 Less obvious than the shift in lessons drawn from history—but no less important for our purposes—will be a series of shifts in ideas concerning what counts as historical evidence and what methods need to be applied in turning evidence into explanations. It will be useful, therefore, before returning to Bayle, this time in his role as historian, to glance at the mode of explanation that Bossuet used in his comments on Romulus. Bossuet's valorization of the wisdom of Romulus's prohibition of alien religions is not based on historical evidence in the sense that it adduces data that point to some sort of causal relationship between a given policy and its consequences. Bossuet does tell us that Romulus's original decree was eventually set aside, but he omits to tell us whether Romulus's decree had desirable consequences to the extent that it was obeyed or whether its suspension had undesirable consequences. For Bossuet, it is sufficient to say that when the Romans did allow alien religions to come into their republic, they were going against Romulus's intentions—as if that fact, in itself, were sufficient to condemn their actions. In a word, Bossuet's valorization of Romulus's action is based on its originary status and hence is similar in nature to his own appeal to scriptural authority in his argument that French Protestants should be compelled to enter the Catholic church. This is the same essentialist logic that we found

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in our brief look at cosmogonic myths in chapter i . Value is conferred on intolerance by dint of its primordial origins. 14 In the next section, we will see that Bayle's approach to Roman history differs from Bossuet's not only in the lessons that it gleans but in the methodology that it employs. Whereas Bossuet, as a priestly historian, approaches history in search of the transhistorical, Bayle approaches history as an empiricist in search of causal explanations. This shift, as we will see, will have consequences not only for Bayle's attitude toward Roman history but also for his attitude toward Christian history.

BAYLE ON RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY AND SOCIAL ORDER

In the "Discours préliminaire" to the Commentaire philosophique, Bayle, while not addressing Bossuet's appeal to the wisdom of Romulus, addresses a somewhat similar appeal to ancient authority in support of religious intolerance. Catholic polemicists, he tells us, had invoked the advice regarding the proliferation of religions that—according to the Roman historian Dio—Maecenas supposedly gave to the Emperor Augustus: 15 Servez Dieu . . . en tout temps et en toutes manières selon la religion de vos ancêtres, et faites que les autres en fassent autant. Haïssez, et reprimez ceux qui innovent quelque chose dans les matières de religion, non seulement à cause des dieux; mais aussi parce que ces novateurs, en introduisant de nouvelles divinités, poussent plusieurs personnes à troubler l'Etat d'où naissent des conjurations, des séditions, des conciliabules, choses préjudiciables à la monarchie. 1 " Serve God everywhere and in every way in accordance with the religion of your forefathers, and compel all others to do likewise. Those who attempt to distort our religion with strange rites you should abhor and punish, not merely for the sake of the gods, but because such innovators, by introducing new divinities in place of the old, persuade many men to trouble the state, creating conspiracies, factions, and cabals, which are harmful to a monarchy.

This appeal to the wisdom of Maecenas, unlike Bossuet's appeal to the wisdom of Romulus, includes a rationale for intolerance based on the alleged motivations of religious innovators. But this rationale is still not based on an examination of historical causes

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and effects. Part of Bayle's response, as we will see, will be to argue that Maecenas's advice needs to be contextualized and that, once it is contextualized, it will lose its force as an argument for persecuting French Calvinists. But first Bayle will address a more blatant fault in his enemies' argument—namely, the fact that Maecenas's maxim itself, regardless of its rationale, is a double-edged sword. For if religious innovation should be suppressed out of raison d'état, then this would justify the Roman suppression of Christianity as well as the suppression of Catholic missionaries in Asia: Ces paroles considérées en gros, et comme venant d'un politique païen, paraissent de fort bon sens; néanmoins rien ne peut être plus ridicule que de s'en servir, comme f o n t . . . les catholiques romains, pour pousser les princes à persécuter les autres communions chrétiennes; car premièrement en vertu de ce conseil, Auguste et ses successeurs auraient dû persécuter les juifs et les chrétiens, et les empereurs du Japon, de la Chine, etc. devraient s'opposer de toutes leurs forces à ceux qui leur parlent du christianisme; à quoi le pape ni ses adhérents ne s'accorderont pas. (72) These words, taken broadly and seen as coming from a pagan politician, seem to make good sense; nonetheless there could be nothing sillier than to use them as the Roman Catholics do, as a means of persuading princes to persecute other Christian communions. In the first place, in heeding this advice, Augustus and his successors would have had to persecute the Jews and the Christians, and the Emperors of Japan, and of China, and of other lands, would have had to throw all of their strength against those who came to them to preach Christianity—something that neither the Pope nor his followers will endorse.

But in thus pointing out that the political argument against religious proliferation can also justify the suppression of Christianity, Bayle is by no means attempting to sidestep the political issue altogether. That is to say, Bayle recognizes that the fear that religious dissenters will bring about social upheaval—a fear that we have already found at the core of Dryden's Religio Laid—is an inescapable factor in the religio-political discourse of his time, a factor that no argument for religious toleration can ignore. Elsewhere, Bayle will deflect this accusation against dissenters by insisting that the demands of conscience, while they may require a subject to reject the religion of his king, cannot require him to challenge the king's secular authority. 17 Nor does he claim that the rights of conscience ought to protect a religion from being sup-

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pressed if the religion presents itself as a threat to the public order. Rather, he grants that governments have the right to preserve the peace and that religious innovators should not be allowed to use religion as a pretext for sedition. 18 Accordingly, the question remains, W h e n should a n e w religion be treated as a threat to the public peace, and w h e n should it be left alone? Maecenas's answer is that religious innovation should always be treated as a threat. A n d the Catholics w h o cite him wish to use his ancient authority to justify their persecution of the Protestants. But the Catholics, of course, w o u l d not wish this blanket right to be invoked against themselves and w o u l d therefore have to exempt the "true religion." For Bayle, as w e have already seen in chapter 3, the criterion of truth is not available since no religion can satisfactorily demonstrate that it is the true religion. This being the case, the problem of the criterion remains, and the continuation of Bayle's response to Maecenas seems to offer a context-based criterion: La maxime de Mécène était plus judicieuse en ce temps-là qu'elle ne l'est aujourd'hui, parce que les Romains accordant pleine liberté de conscience à toutes les sectes du paganisme, et adoptant souvent les cultes des autres pays, la présomption était qu'un homme qui ne trouvait pas son compte dans un culte si étendu et si libre, et qui cherchait des innovations, avait pour but de se faire chef de parti, et de cabaler en matière de politique, sous le prétexte du service des dieux. Mais on ne doit pas aisément présumer cela d'un chrétien, tant parce qu'il est persuadé que Jésus-Christ nous a laissé une certaine règle qu'il faut suivre exactement, que parce que l'Eglise romaine impose la nécessité de croire tout ce qu'elle décide; après quoi un homme qui n'est pas persuadé qu'elle ait raison, doit en conscience, pour éviter l'hypocrisie, sortir de son sein. (72) Maecenas's maxim was more sensible in his own time than it would be today. For since the Romans accorded full liberty of conscience to all the pagan sects, often adopting the cults of other countries, the presumption was that a man w h o couldn't find something that suited him in a religion so expansive and so free, and who sought to promote innovations, must wish to become the head of a party and engage in political plots, all under the pretext of serving the gods. But it is not easy to entertain such suspicions regarding a Christian, both because he is convinced that Jesus Christ left us certain rules that need to be followed exactly, and because the Roman Church insists that its creeds be embraced in toto. Accordingly, anyone who

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is not persuaded that the Church imposes the right beliefs is required by conscience to avoid hypocrisy by leaving the fold.

On the face of it, Bayle seems to be saying that Maecenas's advice might make sense in his historical context, since there was already so much religious diversity that there could be no reasonable motive to ask for more religious innovations and that, therefore, anyone who asked for more might justly be suspected of seditious intentions. In the case of the Christians who are now being persecuted by the Catholic authorities, however, there is no reason to suspect their motivations for abandoning Catholicism and setting up a new religion. They have done so because, as Christians, they are obliged to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ in the way their consciences dictate; the Catholic church would not allow them to do so; therefore they had no choice but to leave the Catholic church and set up their own religion. This ostensible argument, however, is a bit puzzling. It seems to suggest both that religious toleration was not harmful to Roman society and that intolerance was more justified then than it is now. That Bayle considers Roman religious toleration not to have been harmful is beyond doubt. By the time of the historical Maecenas, Romulus's supposed prohibition against allowing alien religions into Rome has been long since abandoned. Rome, as Bayle indicates here, has allowed full liberty of conscience to all pagan sects and has even adopted the cults of other countries. And the results of all this, as his next paragraph will make clear, is that Roman toleration, like pagan toleration in general, has proved to be conducive to civil peace: Pour montrer évidemment l'absurdité de ceux qui accusent la tolérance de causer des dissensions dans les Etats, il ne faut qu'en apeller à l'expérience. Le paganisme était divisé en une infinité de sectes, et rendait à ses dieux des cultes fort différents les uns des autres, et les dieux même principaux d'un pays n'étaient pas ceux d'un autre pays; cependant je ne me souviens point d'avoir lu qu'il y ait jamais eu de guerre de religion parmi les païens . . . faite à dessein de contraindre un peuple à quitter sa religion pour en prendre une autre. . . . II n'y a que Juvénal qui parle de deux villes d'Egypte qui se haïssaient mortellement, à cause que chacune soutenait qu'il n'y avait que ses dieux qui fussent des dieux. Partout ailleurs grand

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calme, et grande tranquillité; et pourquoi? Parce que les uns toléraient les rites des autres. Il est donc vrai, comme je le montre dans mon Commentaire, que c'est la non-tolérance qui cause tous les désordres qu'on impute faussement à la tolérance. (CP, 73) To clearly demonstrate the absurdity of those who accuse toleration of causing political turmoil, one need only appeal to the facts of experience. Pagan religion was divided into an infinite number of sects and approached their gods with cults that were quite different from one another; and even the principal gods of one country were not those of another. However, I do not remember having read that there was ever a religious war among the pagans . . . waged in order to constrain people to give up their religion and to accept another one. . . . There is only Juvenal who speaks of two Egyptian towns with a mortal hatred for one another because each thought that its gods were the only true gods. Everywhere else, great peace and tranquility. And why? Because they were tolerant of one another's religions. It is therefore true, as I show in my Commentaire, that it is intolerance that causes all the tumults that are falsely imputed to tolerance.

Bayle is appealing to the history of Roman paganism in particular and that of pagan religion in general as an argument for religious toleration. In the arguments discussed in chapter 3, he used rationalism as a weapon against Catholic appeals to biblical authority; here in his preface to the Commentaire, he uses empiricism as a weapon against Catholic appeals to the authority of the ancients. The facts of experience show—regardless of what venerable authorities may have said or may be interpreted as having said—that toleration is conducive to civil peace. (The role of Egypt as the exception to the rule of pagan toleration, a piquant sidelight in the history of the bouleversement of Bossuet's hierarchy of values, will, as we will see in "Montesquieu on Roman Toleration and Social Control," become something of a leitmotif in the discourse on pagan toleration.) 19 But this brings us back to the puzzle that I just mentioned: in the light of Bayle's praise of pagan religious toleration, how are we to understand the statement in the previous passage, according to which Maecenas's maxim regarding the political dangers of religious innovation was "judicieuse" in its original historical context? In that earlier passage Bayle had said that because the Romans allowed full liberty of conscience and often adopted the cults of

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other countries they therefore had a right to suspect that a religious innovator might be using religion as a pretext for sedition. Are we to assume that Bayle is really claiming that at a certain point toleration reaches its limit, that when there are so many religions available that any additional ones would be superfluous, and that at that point religious innovation should be looked upon with political suspicion? Or perhaps, as seems more likely, Bayle is distinguishing between, on the one hand, the addition of new religions as a result of territorial expansion and, on the other hand, innovation in the sense of the invention of a new religion within the boundaries of the empire. But, whether it came from within or from without, what is it that would make a new religion dangerous? If the political success of pagan toleration is a function of its continual openness to and assimilation of alien cults, then w h y should there come a point at which such a successful practice ought to give w a y to intolerance? A n d even if there were such a point, how could we recognize it? H o w could w e tell that the variegated structure of Roman religion, the product of continuous growth, had reached a point at which any further addition or innovation should be considered politically unacceptable? 20 What, in short, could serve as a criterion that would allow us to decide that an additional religion posed a threat to the public order and needed to be suppressed? There is, I submit, only one possible criterion available to Bayle. Maecenas's maxim regarding the dangers of innovation would make no sense if applied to an innovation that offered merely a n e w elaboration of the polytheistic structure of pagan religion. But it would make very good sense if applied to a new religion that, instead of adding to the luxuriance of Roman paganism, rejected it altogether by claiming to be in exclusive possession of the truth. In other words, the identifying mark of a truly seditious religious innovation could only be its intolerance of other already established religions. Only if a religion insisted upon forcing the consciences of pagan believers, only then should that religion be suppressed. A s Bayle explicitly says elsewhere in the Commentaire, "une religion qui force les consciences ne mérite point d'être soufferte" (CP, 275). For the forcing of conscience, besides being immoral, has bad consequences for the social order, and, in the case of ancient Rome, a religion that refused to take its place among the others and instead

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offered to overturn them by any means necessary would clearly be seditious and therefore subject to Maecenas's maxim and, indeed, to Bayle's o w n . But what religion would meet this criterion and deserve to be suppressed? T h e religion that c o m e s to mind is, of course, Christianity. A s Bayle himself is at pains to point out at various places in his writings, Christians have been intolerant toward other religions and toward other Christian sects throughout their history. Even w h e n they have advocated toleration, it was only w h e n they were the victims of the intolerance of others and too weak to protect themselves from persecution. As soon as they have had the power to force their beliefs on others, they have abandoned pleas for tolerance in favor of the practice of intolerance. This was n o less true of the primitive Christians in their relationship to Roman paganism: as soon as they had the power to suppress paganism, they did so. 21 For Bayle, it has been observed, intolerance is fundamentally a Christian practice. 22 In short, if we look at Christianity in terms of its history, then the supposed advice of Maecenas to Augustus, the advice that Catholic polemicists have invoked to justify the suppression of Protestants, would justify the Roman persecution of early Christianity—not on the ground that just any religious innovation was a threat to the public order but rather on the ground that Christianity in particular is a threat to the public order because it is intolerant of other religions. Such an interpretation of Bayle's argument sees him as once again turning the tables on his enemies. But this time he would be doing so m u c h less explicitly than in other cases that we have e x a m i n e d — a n d for very good reason. For unlike the many other instances in which Bayle shows that following out the principle being invoked by his Catholic e n e m i e s would backfire against them, this is a case in which the blast would seem also to strike Protestantism and the Protestant view of history. For a Protestant, it is far from daring to suggest that the Catholics have deviated from the spirit of Christianity. But it is quite another thing to suggest that the primitive Christians did so as well. For the Protestant rejection of Catholicism characteristically appealed to primitive Christianity as normative and depicted the rise of Catholic despotism and superstition as a falling away from the purity of original Christian practices. T h e Protestant Reformation

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presented itself as a return to primitive Christianity. But Bayle's critique of intolerance quietly, but inevitably, treats primitive Christianity as already d e e p l y f l a w e d , thereby depriving Protestantism of its originary model. A n d it finds the historical paradigm for religious toleration and civic peace outside of Christian history altogether, in p a g a n R o m e . T h u s does Bayle undermine the foundations of Christian historiography in general and of Protestant historiography in particular. All of this is d o n e in rather undramatic fashion. If Bayle's critique of religious intolerance impels him to question the t w o dichotomies—primitive Christianity v e r s u s p a g a n i s m and primitive Christianity v e r s u s Catholicism—that underlie the Protestants' v i e w of their place in history, then it is not surprising that these conclusions, like the conclusion that w e examined in chapter 3 regarding the dubiety of religious beliefs, are expressed without fanfare a n d , i n d e e d , sotto voce. If I a m correct in m y reading of the Maecenas passage, then it not only u n d e r m i n e s Protestant historiography but also sets u p a startling paradox between the t w o halves of the same paragraph: on the o n e h a n d Christians are intolerant a n d therefore are a danger to public peace and d e s e r v e to be s u p p r e s s e d ; on the other hand, Christians set u p n e w sects because their conscience dictates it, and their conscience needs to be respected. It m a y seem that I h a v e labored too much over a puzzle that p e r h a p s has n e v e r puzzled a n y o n e else. It may also seem that a paradox is not an entirely satisfactory solution to a puzzle. Moreover, in order to construct the paradox, I h a v e had to g o outside of the text u n d e r discussion, to Bayle's later remarks about Christian history. But the truth is that I a m less concerned with solving the puzzle of the M a e c e n a s p a s s a g e than I a m with using the passage as an opportunity for pointing out a paradox that is undoubtedly present in Bayle's w o r k as a w h o l e and that lies at the heart of his v i e w of Christianity. This paradox will ultimately allow us to understand the nature of Bayle's pivotal position between traditional Christian history a n d the Enlightenment's treatment of paganism a n d Christianity. T h e first thing to observe about this paradox is that it arises as a result of the fact that Bayle is looking at Christianity in two different w a y s . O n the o n e hand, he is looking at it as a philosophical

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theologian, examining its fundamental teachings as illuminated by the light of reason. This perspective allows him to condemn Christian intolerance as contrary to the nature of Christian religion and morality and to argue that Christianity requires that various sects be tolerated. O n the other hand, Bayle is looking at Christianity as an empirical historian, and the facts of history reveal that Christians h a v e consistently violated the fundamental principles of their religion and morality. Seen thus, the paradox resembles one that can be formulated in very familiar Christian terms: the history of Christianity is a history of the failure of Christians to live u p to the principles of their religion. It is important to recognize, however, that the error that Bayle is attacking as a ubiquitous factor in Christian history differs f u n damentally from the sorts of errors that Christian moralists such as Bossuet generally c o n d e m n as failures to behave in accordance with Christian teachings. Bossuet and other Christian moralists h a v e not c o n d e m n e d intolerance; they have preached it. Christian theologians, according to Bayle, h a v e universally insisted on intolerance. 2 3 In those rare cases in which Christian rulers have decreed religious toleration in their domains, they h a v e done so not for religious reasons but for "raisons h u m a i n e s " — i n complete defiance of the theologians w h o represented the official teachings of their churches. 2 4 In short, the history of Christian intolerance is a history of consistent agreement between w h a t w a s preached and w h a t w a s practiced, but it has also been a history in which both precept and practice h a v e been a perversion of reason and of the Gospels. A n o t h e r w a y of saying this is that Christianity, according to Bayle, is consistently intolerant, but not essentially intolerant. 25 Does this m e a n that the consistent history of Christian intolerance is merely a historical accident, that there is nothing in Christianity that tends to make it intolerant, no underlying explanation that w o u l d account for the historical record? There w o u l d seem to be one factor that, according to Bayle, accompanies intolerance, a n d that is the certainty that one's o w n religion is the true religion. We s a w in chapter 3 that Bayle's attack on intolerance ultimately required him to challenge the idea that speculative truths can be k n o w n . This could imply that the religions that tend to be intolerant are those that believe that they h a v e exclusive access to the truth a n d that Christianity is particularly inclined in this direction. This

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conjunction between certainty and intolerance would seem to be borne out in the exception to the rule of pagan toleration. In the passage quoted above in which Bayle refers to the ubiquity of toleration among the pagans, the significant exception is Juvenal's account of the religious warfare between two Egyptian towns. 26 But if it is a misguided certitude that has inclined the Christians (and at least some Egyptians) to be intolerant, then why is it that Christians have a greater sense of certitude than believers in other religions? For Enlightenment thinkers who pick up the problem at this point, a satisfactory analysis will be one that fills this explanatory gap by showing that there was an intrinsic connection between Christianity's history of intolerance and the religion and morality of the Gospels. Rather than attempting to follow Bayle in linking the Gospels to the natural light, these writers would wish to show that the Gospels go against the natural light of reason and preach a perversion of natural moral impulses and that this perversion of reason and nature is intimately connected to intolerance. The Enlightenment's search for such explanatory coherence will not be motivated by a desire to correct Bayle's errors or to resolve his paradoxes. The writers that we will be looking at tended to assume that Bayle's claims to be a Christian were disingenuous— since they seemed inconsistent with the spirit of his attacks on superstition and intolerance. 27 Nor will these writers be motivated simply by an intellectual imperative to construct the most thoroughgoing possible explanation. There were, as we will see, ideological considerations, political benefits to be derived from a demonstration that the superiority of paganism over Christianity was no mere historical accident. But before we can understand these ideological considerations, we need to see how an essentialist analysis of Christian intolerance took shape. And for this purpose, we will turn to David Hume's Natural History of Religion.

HUME ON CHRISTIAN MORALITY AND CHRISTIAN INTOLERANCE

At first glance, Hume does not seem to be undertaking the devalorization of Christianity. His work purports to explain the evolution of monotheism out of polytheism, and this evolution is presented

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as a movement from a more barbaric form of religion to a higher and more philosophical form. It turns out, however, that, although monotheism may be noble from a philosophical perspective, when it actually takes shape in the historical world it tends, according to Hume, to be debased by the superstitious habits of the mass of its believers. It will become increasingly clear that the debased versions of monotheism that concern Hume are those that come under the heading of Christianity and that the corruptions that concern him—and us—are those that have dire ethical and political consequences. According to Hume, monotheists ("theists" in his terminology) feel a vast gulf between themselves and their deity. The gods of polytheism, on the other hand, are not so distant and awesome. In fact, polytheism, precisely because its gods are so much less fearsome and so much easier to emulate, tends to place moral value on heroism instead of asceticism, and the shift from polytheism to Christianity is consequently a shift from "Hercules, Theseus, Hector, Romulus" to "Dominic, Francis, Anthony, and Benedict": "Instead of the destruction of monsters, the subduing of tyrants, the defence of our native country; whippings and fastings, cowardice and humility, abject submission and slavish obedience, are become the means of obtaining celestial honors among mankind." 2 " Hume, writing in a Protestant society, follows the convention of using Catholic submission to authority as his stalking horse. But everything he says about the contrast between polytheistic veneration of heroes and Catholic veneration of saints is readily applicable to the contrast between pagan morality and primitive Christian morality. After all, the rejection of worldly heroes in favor of paragons of asceticism is clearly linked to the early Christian moral imperatives of humility and otherworldliness. It needs to be stressed, however, that Hume does not attribute this morality to monotheism per se but to monotheism in combination with superstition, the hallmark of which is irrational fear. When a superstitious man feels a deep gulf between himself and his deity, he experiences fear and a need to placate the deity. Fulfilling one's natural obligations to society does not seem adequate to placate the deity, precisely because "the virtuous conduct is deemed no more than what we owe to society and to ourselves." Thus, in following his natural moral inclinations, the "superstitious man . . . finds nothing, which

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he has properly performed for the sake of his deity." The paradoxical result of assuming that G o d will not value one's performance of duties to one's family or country precisely because they are natural is to develop a set of religious practices that reject the natural and exalt the unnatural: " H e still looks out for some more immediate service of the supreme Being, in order to allay those terrors, with which he is haunted. A n d any practice, recommended to him, which either serves to no purpose in life, or offers the strongest violence to his natural inclinations; that practice he will the more readily embrace, on account of those very circumstances, which should make him absolutely reject it" (NHR, 359). Thus, far from maintaining the traditional Protestant distinction between the purity of the primitive Christians and the superstition of the Catholics, Hume implicitly allows the two to merge insofar as both manifest the moral consequences of uniting monotheism with superstition. 29 Paganism is associated with natural inclinations toward friends and family and the state, while Christianity is associated with a perverse and unnatural tendency to turn one's back on one's natural duties. Hume's differentiation between the nature of polytheism and that of monotheism also yields something that Bayle, with his insistence that Christian history is a perversion of gospel morality rather than a consequence of it, cannot provide—namely, an explanation of Christian intolerance as a function of Christian beliefs. Just as the fact that the pagan gods are numerous, and limited in power, makes them less fearsome, it also makes them less jealous and exclusive—all of which conduces "naturally" to religious toleration: "idolatry is attended with this evident advantage, that, by limiting the powers and functions of its deities, it naturally admits the gods of other sects and nations to a share of divinity, and renders all the various deities as well as rites, ceremonies, or traditions, compatible with each other" (336). Monotheism, on the other hand, despite its philosophical superiority to polytheism, has the disadvantage of lending itself to intolerance: "These mighty advantages [of theism] are . . . somewhat diminished, by inconveniencies which arise from the vices and prejudices of mankind. While one sole object of devotion is acknowledged, the worship of other deities is regarded as absurd and impious" (336-37). For Hume, to speak of the intolerance of theists in terms of "inconve-

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niencies" that s o m e w h a t diminish its mighty advantages is to nod ironically in the direction of the official monotheism of his time and place. But before long this understatement gives w a y to a much stronger characterization of religious intolerance: " I may venture to affirm, that f e w corruptions of idolatry and polytheism are more pernicious to society than this corruption of theism, w h e n carried to the utmost height" (338). Here, H u m e no longer treats intolerance as a mere inconvenience but as a pernicious corruption. Evidently, the vast gulf between a finite creature and an infinite G o d does not necessarily result in an unnatural morality and in religious intolerance; but these pernicious consequences ensue w h e n this gulf is subjected to the "vices and prejudices of mankind." But just w h a t are the "vices a n d prejudices of mankind," and h o w do they m a n a g e to turn monotheism, which is in itself philosophically meritorious, into an instrument of fanaticism and intolerance? I h a v e said that H u m e sees Christianity as monotheism debased by an admixture of superstition. A n d there can be no doubt that superstition is an element of the vices and prejudices that lead to intolerance. When H u m e talks about superstitious people, he is talking about the masses. Indeed, section 1 4 of Hume's text, which deals with the tendency of the superstitious monotheist to try to please the divinity with " a n y practice . . . which either serves to no p u r p o s e in life, or offers the strongest violence to his natural inclinations," has as its title " B a d influence of popular religions on morality." Here and throughout Hume's analysis, " p o p u l a r " is being u s e d interchangeably with "superstitious." H u m e , however, does not see the historical p h e n o m e n o n of Christian intolerance as simply the expression of vulgar superstition. " D e s i g n i n g m e n " h a v e consciously exploited these superstitions for their o w n selfish political purposes: " N a y , this unity of object [i.e., the unity of G o d in monotheism] seems naturally to require the unity of faith a n d ceremonies, and furnishes designing m e n with a pretence for representing their adversaries as profane, a n d the objects of divine as well as h u m a n v e n g e a n c e " (NHR, 337). Here, then, w e h a v e the two ingredients that w o u l d seem to make u p the "vices and prejudices" that turn monotheism into an instrument of fanaticism. This analysis of the combination of superstition and designing m e n w h o w o u l d exploit it is, of course, reminiscent of a standard Protestant attack on Catholicism, includ-

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ing the usurpation of authority by the Catholic priesthood. And there can be no question that when Hume refers to these "designing men," most of his readers will immediately think of Catholic priests. But in Hume's discourse, while the alternative to such priestly inciting of intolerance is happily to be found in England (and Holland), it is not attributed to Protestantism per se but rather to secular control of religion: "if, among CHRISTIANS, the ENGLISH and DUTCH have embraced the principles of toleration, this singularity has proceeded from the steady resolution of the civil magistrate, in opposition to the continued efforts of priests and bigots" (338). All of which can only leave the careful reader with the conclusion that Christianity in general has an innate tendency toward promoting fanatical intolerance, a tendency that makes Christianity more pernicious than idolatry and polytheism and that lends itself to exploitation for political purposes by those who have authority over the superstitious masses. On the other hand, this tendency of Christianity can be curbed by the actions of an enlightened and independent secular authority. There has begun to emerge from my analysis of Hume's theory a second dichotomy without which the dichotomy of polytheism versus monotheism would not be able to account for the historical manifestations of Christian intolerance, and that is the dichotomy of elite versus masses. It is clear that bad elites, presumably including secular leaders as well as priests and other religious leaders, have exploited the Christian tendency toward intolerance by channeling it against their adversaries—by using it, that is, as a political weapon. Good elites, on the other hand, such as the secular authorities in England and in Holland, have neutralized the destructive power of Christian intolerance by enforcing religious toleration. There is one significant loose end in Hume's brilliant and complex analysis, and that is the relationship between masses and elites in pagan society. In an important sense, Hume's analysis of the intrinsic connection between Christian beliefs and Christian intolerance takes as its starting point the notion that Christianity values behavior that goes against our natural moral impulses. Paganism, on the other hand, follows nature by valuing the love of family and country that manifests itself in heroism. The fact that Hume not only associates pagan religion with natural virtue but also treats

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religious tolerance as a natural outgrowth of polytheism might seem to allow for the moral and political autonomy that was associated with ancient republics. 10 But Hume does not indicate whether paganism lends itself to political arrangements that would be incompatible with monotheism. That is to say, while Hume's theory asserts that Christians need to be controlled from above— whether by cunning exploiters of intolerance or by enlightened suppressors of intolerance—the theory is silent on the question of whether pagans too need to be guided by a ruling elite or whether their natural morality would allow them to sustain a republic of virtue. Hume's analysis allows him to find his political ideals in the present, by showing that it is necessary for secular magistrates to impose religious toleration on superstitious Christians and on the priests and bigots who would otherwise use Christian intolerance to subvert the public peace. He can thus make his political point without having to project his political values onto the pagan past. Consequently, he does not need to decide which of the two aspects of his theory ought to take precedence with regard to the pagan populace: whether the religious differences between Christians and pagans are sufficient to allow for the possibility of a different sort of political arrangement; or whether the populace in any time or place always needs to be controlled by a vigilant elite. For Gibbon, however, the Roman Empire is precisely the place where political values are to be projected. Gibbon will have to decide how to present the relationship between the Roman people and their political leaders; and he will do so in such a way to have it reflect his views of political realities. Gibbon will find Hume's contrast between natural impulses and a perverted religio-ethical system to be an attractive one because it provides a rhetorically powerful structure on which to hang his ironic treatment of Christianity. But Gibbon will also be attracted by an explanation of ancient religion that differs from Hume's naturalistic one, an explanation according to which Rome's religious structure, with its emphasis on civic duty and social cohesion, was the invention of clever elites.

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MONTESQUIEU ON ROMAN TOLERATION AND SOCIAL CONTROL

We have already seen that, as part of his attempt to preserve the providential structure of Christian history, Bossuet acknowledged that pagans could be virtuous by dint of the natural light but stipulated that this virtue came despite the evil morality that was enshrined in pagan religion. Paradoxically, Bossuet could see religion itself—as in the case of Romulus's establishment of Roman religion—as a product of pagan wisdom. Since both Christians and non-Christians generally saw religion as a necessary ingredient of an orderly society, and since both groups generally saw order as something imposed on people from above, this second perspective had a long and variegated history. According to Bossuet's favorite Roman historian, Livy, Roman religion was invented as an instrument of social control. 31 Whereas Romulus, according to Livy, had so much authority himself that he did not need to invoke supernatural forces as an instrument of legitimation, the situation was different for Numa, who fearing lest relief from anxiety on the score of foreign perils might lead men who had hitherto been held back by fear of their enemies and by military discipline into extravagance and idleness, . . . thought the very first thing to do, as being the most efficacious with a populace which was ignorant and, in those early days, uncivilized, was to imbue them with the fear of Heaven. As he could not instil this into their hearts without inventing some marvellous story, he pretended to have nocturnal meetings with the goddess Egeria, and that hers was the advice which guided him in the establishment of rites most approved by the gods, and in the appointment of special priests for the service of e a c h . "

Machiavelli, unlike Bossuet, was able to derive religio-political lessons from Roman history without having to concern himself with reconciling pagan wisdom with Christian providential history. Thus, after retelling the story of Numa, he is able to offer the following generalization: E veramente mai fu alcuno ordinatore di leggi straordinarie in uno popolo che non ricorresse a Dio; perché altrimente non sarebbero accettate: perché sono molti i beni conosciuti da uno prudente, i quali non hanno in sé ragioni evidenti da poterli persuadere a altrui. 11

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N o r in fact w a s there ever a legislator who, in introducing extraordinary laws to a people, did not have recourse to God, for otherwise they would not have been accepted, since many benefits of which a prudent man is aware, are not so evident to reason that he can convince others of them.

What Machiavelli has learned from Livy's account of Numa is a political lesson about the prudent use of religion as an instrument of social control. The efficacy of religion derives from the fact that it can instill fear of the gods in the populace and can lead them to obey their rulers by persuading them that such obedience is required by the gods. For the eighteenth century, the chief ingredient that needs to be added to this view of Roman religion as an instrument of social control—in order to wrest it from the grasp of traditional historians such as Bossuet—is the notion that Roman toleration, far from promoting social instability and undermining the centralized authority of the state, actually promoted stability and enhanced governmental authority. A n extremely interesting formulation of this view is to be found in an early work of Montesquieu, the "Dissertation sur la politique des romains dans la religion" (1716): Quand les législateurs romains établirent la religion, ils ne pensèrent point à la réformation des moeurs, ni à donner des principes de morale. . . . Ils n'eurent donc d'abord qu'une vue générale, qui était d'inspirer à un peuple qui ne craignait rien, la crainte des dieux, et de se servir de cette crainte pour le conduire à leur fantaisie. 14 When the Roman thinking about the moral principles. . instilling the fear of utilizing this fear to

lawgivers established religion, they were not improvement of manners or the inculcation of . . They had at first only the general aim of the gods in a people w h o feared nothing and of allow them to govern as they pleased.

The same writer who, five years later, in the Lettres persanes, would treat particular revealed religions as instruments of oppression imposed on people w h o would otherwise be capable of moral and political autonomy here presents religion as a civilizing force imposed from above on ignorant and unruly people. Indeed, in both the Lettres persanes and De l'esprit des lois, Montesquieu will identify fear as the political principle of despotism, which allows despots to rule by caprice instead of by law. Here in the Dissertation,

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the application of fear is being valued positively. Granted, it is fear of the Gods, rather than fear of the rulers themselves, but it is functioning as a means of allowing the kings to rule "à leur fantaisie." Here, however, the "fantaisie" is being associated not with personal caprice, and hence despotism, but with the civilizing impulse. Indeed, the fact that the Roman kings, in their establishment of religious fear as a means of government, are to be seen as wise lawgivers rather than capricious despots becomes particularly clear when Montesquieu describes the persistence of religious fear after the kings have been overthrown and the Roman republic established: Romulus, Tatius et Numa asservirent les dieux à la politique: le culte et les cérémonies qu'ils instituèrent furent trouvés si sages, que, lorsque les rois furent chassés, le joug de la religion fut le seul dont ce peuple, dans sa fureur pour la liberté, n'osa s'affranchir. ("DPR," 38) Romulus, Tatius, and Numa made gods servants of the state: the doctrines and rituals that they created were found to be so wise that even after the kings were expelled the yoke of religion was the single thing that the people, with all their passion for liberty, did not dare to throw off.

The religion established by the kings is to be understood in institutional terms: it has a positive restraining influence on the people, even when all kings have left the scene. Just as Roman religion was consciously devised as a political tool, so was the "tolerant" practice of embracing the religions of conquered peoples and integrating them into the structure of Roman religion. Bayle had associated this practice with "pleine liberté de conscience," thus implying that Rome accorded religious autonomy to its subjects and that this autonomy was not abused. But Montesquieu sees Roman religious policy quite differently: Rome se soumit elle-même aux divinités étrangères; elle les reçut dans son sein; et par ce lien, le plus fort qui soit parmi les hommes, elle s'attacha des peuples qui la regardèrent plutôt comme le sanctuaire de la religion que comme la maîtresse du monde. (49) Rome accepted foreign gods, took them to her bosom, and by this tie, the strongest one to be found among men, she secured the loyalty of peoples who viewed her more as the sanctuary of religion than as the ruler of the world.

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Here the toleration of foreign religions, like the original institution of Roman religion, is nothing more than a clever stratagem that utilizes "ce lien, le plus fort qui soit parmi les hommes" to pacify and subdue people w h o would otherwise pose a danger to the state. Montesquieu's analysis of the calculated political use of Roman religion and religious toleration is not necessarily at odds with Hume's notion that there is something about the nature of polytheism that disposes its adherents to be tolerant of one another. On the contrary, Montesquieu speaks at one point of polytheism as naturally giving rise to the tolerance and mildness that reigned in the Roman world: Comme le dogme de l'âme du monde était presque universellement reçu, et que l'on regardait chaque partie de l'univers comme un membre vivant dans lequel cette âme était répandue, il semblait qu'il était permis d'adorer indifféremment toutes ces parties, et que le culte devait être arbitraire comme était le dogme. Voilà d'où était né cet esprit de tolérance et de douceur qui régnait dans le monde païen: on n'avait garde de se persécuter et de se déchirer les uns les autres: toutes les religions, toutes les théologies, y étaient également bonnes: les hérésies, les guerres, et les disputes de religion, y étaient inconnues. (45) Since the doctrine of the universal soul was embraced almost everywhere, and since each part of the universe was regarded as a living organ infused with this soul, it seemed permissible to treat every part with the same adoration and without distinguishing between different religions and beliefs. Thus arose the spirit of tolerance and mildness that characterized the pagan world. There was no sense of a duty to persecute adherents of other religions or to tear them limb from limb. All religions, all theologies were equally valid; heresy, religious warfare, and controversy were unknown. Where the Montesquieu of the "Dissertation" would seem to differ from Hume is in failing to associate the civic virtue of the Roman citizens with any natural impulses and instead in attributing the orderly behavior of the Roman populace entirely to the political wisdom of their lawgivers. It needs to be noted, however, that in this regard the Roman lawgivers distinctly resemble civil magistrates of England and the United Provinces, whom Hume would praise for their "steady resolution . . . in opposition to the continued

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efforts of priests and bigots." This resemblance becomes most conspicuous at the very point at which the contemporary political relevance of Montesquieu's historical excursus concerning Roman religion itself becomes most conspicuous—namely, in his discussion of the Egyptians. We have already seen that Bayle qualified his generalization about pagan religious toleration by mentioning a significant exception, namely the case of religious warfare in Egypt as described by Juvenal. In a footnote early in the Decline and Fall, Gibbon likewise will qualify a generalization concerning the fact that "the devout polytheist. . . admitted with implicit faith the different religions of the earth." The footnote mentions that "some obscure traces of an intolerant spirit appear in the conduct of the Egyptians," then goes on as follows: "the Christians as well as Jews, w h o lived under the Roman empire, formed a very important exception: so important indeed, that the discussion will require a distinct chapter of this work." 3 5 When Gibbon goes on to discuss Christian intolerance, he will cloak his disdain in a rather transparent irony. 16 But Montesquieu chooses instead to make the most of the "obscure traces" of Egyptian intolerance 37 by using the Egyptians as allegorical substitutes for the Christians and finding in them the faults that his perceptive reader is expected to transfer over to the Christians: Il est vrai que la religion égyptienne fut toujours proscrite à Rome; c'est qu'elle était intolérante, qu'elle voulait régner seule, et s'établir sur les débris des autres; de manière que l'esprit de douceur et de paix qui régnait chez les Romains fut la véritable cause de la guerre qu'ils lui firent sans relâche. ("DPR," 45-46) It is true that the Egyptian religion was always prohibited in Rome; but that is because it was intolerant, because it wished to exercise sole dominion, to establish itself on the ruins of other religions; so that the spirit of mildness and peace that prevailed among the Romans was the true cause of the unremitting war that they waged against it.

To avoid any doubt that this is satiric allegory, Montesquieu adds the following remark: Il faut remarquer que les Romains confondirent les Juifs avec les Egyptiens, comme on sait qu'ils confondirent les chrétiens avec les Juifs. (46)

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It needs to be noted that the Romans confused the Jews with the Egyptians, just as they famously confused the Christians with the Jews. T h e continuation of the discussion of the E g y p t i a n s shifts the f o c u s f r o m the threat p o s e d by an intolerant people w h o are u n w i l l i n g to live in p e a c e w i t h a d h e r e n t s of other religions to the internal threat p o s e d b y an E g y p t i a n priestly caste that is not u n d e r the control of the state: Chez les Egyptiens, les prêtres faisaient un corps à part, qui étaient entretenu aux dépens du public: de là naissaient plusieurs inconvénients; toutes les richesses de l'Etat se trouvaient englouties dans une société de gens qui, recevant toujours et ne rendant jamais, attiraient insensiblement tout à eux. Les prêtres d'Egypte, ainsi gagés pour ne rien faire, languissaient tous dans une oisiveté dont ils ne sortaient qu'avec les vices qu'elle produit; ils étaient brouillons, inquiets, entreprenants, et ces qualités les rendaient extrêmement dangereux. Enfins un corps dont les intérêts avaient été violemment séparés de ceux de l'Etat était un monstre; et ceux qui l'avaient établit avaient jeté dans la société une semence de discorde et de guerres civiles. (47) Among the Egyptians, the priests constituted a separate body, which was supported at public expense. This gave rise to several unfortunate consequences: all the wealth of the state was devoured by a group of men who, always taking and never giving, gradually amassed everything for themselves. The Egyptian priesthood, thus paid for doing nothing, languished in an indolence from which they never emerged without the vices that indolence fosters: they were fractious, unruly, ambitious, and these characteristics made them extremely dangerous. Ultimately, a body of men whose interests diverge violently from those of the state was a monster; and those who had established it had sown the seeds of discord and of civil war. T h e first part of this p a s s a g e , w i t h its e m p h a s i s on the indolence a n d other vices of the priests, s e r v e s to cue the reader to the fact that the " E g y p t i a n s " h a v e shifted their allegorical role f r o m representing the early Christians to representing the R o m a n Catholic priesthood. O n c e this identification has b e e n established, Montesq u i e u can concentrate o n his main concern regarding the " E g y p tians," w h i c h is i n d e e d his m a i n concern in the entire "Dissertat i o n " — n a m e l y , that the existence within the state of a religious b o d y w h o s e interests d o not c o r r e s p o n d to those of the state is a

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monstrosity that any prudent statesman will strive to avoid. A n d the w a y to avoid it is to follow the example of the Romans. In the second paragraph of the "Dissertation," Montesquieu had written: Je trouve cette différence entre les législateurs romains et ceux des autres peuples, que les premiers firent la religion pour l'Etat, et les autres l'Etat pour la religion. ("DPR," 38) I find this difference between the Roman lawgivers and those of other peoples: the first created religion for the sake of the state, and the others, the state for the sake of religion. But it is not until the discussion of the Catholic church in the guise of the Egyptian priesthood that w e can see the full significance of Montesquieu's concern that the religious functions of the state be under the strict control of the secular authority. Indeed, the very sentence in which Montesquieu declares that the existence of an independent priesthood is a monstrosity is followed by a passage that contrasts the "Egyptian" state of affairs with that in ancient Rome: II n'en était pas de même à Rome: on y avait fait de la prêtrise une charge civile; les dignités d'augure et de grand pontife, étaient des magistratures; ceux qui en étaient revêtus étaient membres du sénat, et n'avaient pas, par conséquent, des intérêts différents de ceux de ce corps. Bien loin de se servir de la superstition pour opprimer la république, ils l'employaient utilement à la soutenir. "Dans notre ville," dit Cicéron, "les rois et les magistrats qui leur ont succédé, ont toujours eu un double caractère, et ont gouverné l'Etat sous les auspices de la religion." (47-48) It was not the same in Rome: there the priesthood was under civil authority. There the offices of augurer and of high pontiff were part of the magistracy; holders of these offices were members of the Senate and consequently did not have interests different from those of that body. Far from exploiting superstition to oppress the republic, they employed it beneficially in support of the republic. "In our city," said Cicero, "the kings and the magistrates who succeeded them have always had a double role: they have governed the state under the auspices of religion." Here w e find Bossuet's priestly glorification of Egypt getting turned on its head. Bossuet had congratulated the pharaohs for

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being subservient to religion and thus had found in them an ancient model of the religio-political hierarchy gloriously achieved in Louis XIV's France. For Montesquieu, writing shortly after Louis's death, the independent power of Egyptian religion, and specifically of the priestly caste, is indeed a perfect simulacrum for the role of the Catholic church in French politics, and that is precisely what makes it so odious. Bossuet was so attracted to the conservative and theocratic aspects of Egyptian civilization that he was willing to strain the entire structure of providential history by praising Egyptian religion. Montesquieu is happy to attack the traditional structure of Christian history by finding in pagan Rome the ideal role for religion, not one that anticipates the French monarchy but that avoids its evils by having the priests and even the rituals serve the needs of the state. Toleration takes its part in such a religious structure, as the social glue of a far-flung empire, and as part of the political strategy that forces religion to serve the interests of the state. I introduced Montesquieu's "Dissertation" to provide an alternative to Hume's way of looking at Roman religion. Whereas Hume seemed to stress the superiority of natural impulses over the unnaturalness of the Christians, Montesquieu presented the superiority of Rome not in terms of the natural impulses of citizens but in terms of the prudence of lawgivers. Both Hume and Montesquieu, to be sure, rejected the superstitious fanaticism of the early Christians and the machinations of the Catholic priesthood, and Hume's valorization of English and Dutch toleration resembles Montesquieu's valorization of Roman religious politics. But at the same time their similarities are offset by differing views about human nature and its relationship to politics. That is to say, Hume presents the civic virtue of pagan Rome as the result of natural impulses, whereas Montesquieu presents it as the fruit of an enlightened and prudent elite. Gibbon, like both Hume and Montesquieu, will find an essential connection between Christianity and social disorder and will see the secular control of religion as the cure to the evils of Christian fanaticism and priestly despotism. Where Hume and Montesquieu go in different directions regarding the basis of pagan civic virtue, it might be supposed that Gibbon will be forced either to choose between the alternatives or to attempt to reconcile them. But as we

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will see, he does neither. Like H u m e , he will present Christianity as violating the natural impulses that conduce to social order, but, like Montesquieu, he will attribute the virtues of Roman religion to the w i s d o m of a ruling elite. He will accomplish this double vision by placing R o m a n religion in t w o separate dichotomies—that of the natural v e r s u s the unnatural and that of masses versus elite— w h e r e they serve his larger p u r p o s e s without coming into direct conflict with one another. Likewise, he will place the early Christians in t w o separate dichotomies—that of asocial fanaticism versus civic religion and that of republican autonomy versus Catholic imperialism. In this way, he will be able to valorize paganism on the one h a n d and attack Catholicism on the other. The result of this procedure, as w e will see in the next section, is a system of interlocking narratives in which the same characters play different roles.

GIBBON AND THE RHETORIC OF DICHOTOMIES In Gibbon's narrative of the early history of Christianity, centering in chapters 1 5 and 16 of the Decline and Fall, the incompatibility between Christian morality a n d natural impulses is sometimes presented as a direct e n g a g e m e n t , in which asceticism either seeks out encounters with temptation—as in the case of priests and deaconesses w h o shared their b e d s " a n d gloried amidst the flames in their unsullied p u r i t y " (DF, 2:3j) 3 *—or judges it, as in the case of Origen's self-mutilation, " m o s t prudent to disarm the tempter" (DF, 2:37). But although these misguided attempts to preserve chastity by d e f y i n g nature are d u l y recorded, with amusement or scorn, the sorts of conflicts that evoke Gibbon's deepest concern, indeed, the o n e s around w h i c h this aspect of his narrative is structured, are, as in H u m e , those that involve the individual's duties toward those around him, toward friends, family, and ultimately the state. A n d here the battle is not presented as a direct one between virtuous Christians and jealous nature, or as an internal psychomachia, but as one that is mediated by the institutions of pagan religion. For p a g a n religion here takes on the role of the institutionalized form of the natural inclinations, and the Chris-

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tian battle against paganism is depicted as at once a battle against natural moral principles and a battle against the social order: The innumerable deities and rites of polytheism were closely interwoven with every circumstance of business or pleasure, of public or private life; and it seemed impossible to escape the observance of them, without, at the same time renouncing the commerce of mankind, and all the offices and amusements of society. The important transactions of peace and war were prepared or concluded by solemn sacrifices, in which the magistrate, the senator, and the soldier were obliged to preside or to participate. The public spectacles were an essential part of the cheerful devotion of the Pagans, and the gods were supposed to accept, as the most grateful offering, the games that the prince and people celebrated in honour of their peculiar festivals. (2:16-17) Pagan religion is thus a civic religion, and the Christian's pious refusal to participate in its rituals is seen—by the pagans, and by Gibbon, w h o , here as elsewhere, v i e w s things through their e y e s — as a refusal to make even a token expression of one's obligation to the state: " T h e most trifling mark of respect to the national worship he [the Christian] considered as a direct homage yielded to the daemon, and as an act of rebellion against the majesty of G o d " (2:18). T h e notion that the slightest b o w to the "national w o r s h i p " w o u l d , for the Christian, constitute a rebellion against the majesty of G o d strongly suggests that to be loyal to the Christian G o d requires rebelling against the state. A n d it is this conflict of loyalties that underlies Gibbon's entire discussion. But the zealous Christian is moved by his exclusive and transcendent loyalty not only to abandon his duty to the state but also to turn his back on friends and family: The Christian, who with pious horror avoided the abomination of the circus or the theatre, found himself encompassed with infernal snares in every convivial entertainment, as often as his friends, invoking the hospitable deities, poured out libations to each other's happiness. When the bride, struggling with well-affected reluctance, was forced in hymenaeal pomp over the threshold of her new habitation, or when the sad procession of the dead slowly moved towards the funeral pile; the Christian on these interesting occasions, was compelled to desert the persons w h o were the dearest to him. (2:17)

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By thus placing early Christianity in a dichotomous structure in which pagan religion is seen to enshrine those values that Gibbon's readers would consider natural and estimable, and in which the Christians are seen to turn their backs on these natural values in such a way as to threaten social harmony and civic peace, Gibbon's history undoubtedly has the effect—in much the same way as had Hume's Natural History—of dramatically challenging traditional Christian attitudes. But how much does this juxtaposition tell us about Gibbon's view of the world? I indicated earlier that the elevation of toleration to the status of a fundamental ethico-political value had the effect of calling into question the traditional notion that the early Christians were morally superior to their pagan neighbors as well as the more specifically Protestant notion that the early Christians were unsullied until they were swallowed up by the corrupt and despotic Roman Catholic Church. We have just seen that Gibbon's challenge to the pagan/Christian dichotomy takes the form not of a leveling of differences but of a dramatic contrast between pagan civic virtue and Christian fanaticism. Since the early Christians fare so poorly in contrast to the pagans, one might suppose that when Gibbon comes to trace the movement from isolated zealotry to centralized Catholic authority he would be inclined or impelled drastically to revise the traditional Protestant dichotomy of primitive purity versus corrupt despotism. In this instance, however, Gibbon adheres to the Protestant historiography and, accordingly, sets forth a historical dichotomy in which the early Christians are associated with virtue and the Catholics with tyranny. He accomplishes this by treating the consolidation of ecclesiastical authority as a process in which the early Christians play the role of innocent republican citizens about to be swallowed up by the forces of empire, the empire in this case being that of the Roman church: "Such was the mild and equal constitution by which the Christians were governed more than a hundred years after the death of the apostles. Every society formed within itself a separate and independent republic; and although the most distant of these little states maintained a mutual as well as friendly intercourse of letters and deputations, the Christian world was not yet connected by any supreme authority or legislative assembly" (DF, 2:43). Before long, however,

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As the legislative authority of the particular churches was insensibly superseded by the use of councils, the bishops obtained by their alliance a much larger share of executive and arbitrary power. . . . They were enabled to attack, with united vigour, the original rights of their clergy and people. The prelates of the third century imperceptibly changed the language of exhortation into that of command, scattered the seeds of future usurpations, and supplied, by Scripture allegories and declamatory rhetoric, their deficiency of force and of reason. (2:43) Ultimately, of course, there e m e r g e s , e v e n w h i l e the u n a r m e d church is subject to R o m a n armies, a kind of intimidating ferocity that G i b b o n is able to link to the i m a g e r y of empire: The progress of ecclesiastical authority gave birth to the memorable distinction of the laity and the clergy. . . . [The clergy's] zeal and activity were united in the common cause, and the love of power, which (under the most artful disguises) could insinuate itself into the breasts of bishops and martyrs, animated them to increase the number of their subjects, and to enlarge the limits of the Christian empire. . . . They had acquired, and they employed within their own society, the two most efficacious instruments of government, rewards and punishments; the former derived from the pious liberality, the latter from the devout apprehensions, of the faithful. (2:46-47) W h e r e a s the Christians o c c u p y the negative pole in the dichoto m y of early Christians v e r s u s p a g a n s , here the s a m e Christians clearly o c c u p y the positive pole in the dichotomy of early Christians v e r s u s the Catholic church. If o n e w e r e determined to seek s o m e sort of consistency here, o n e might be tempted to s u p p o s e that the v a l u e of each pole is being relativized, a n d that w h a t is e m e r g i n g is a hierarchy of v a l u e s according to w h i c h the early Christians h a v e a l o w e r rank than the p a g a n s but a higher o n e than the R o m a n Catholics. I n s o f a r as G i b b o n is associating the p a g a n s with natural moral inclinations, it could be a r g u e d , he is valorizing them at the e x p e n s e of the early Christians, w h o s e revealed religion is more c o n c e r n e d w i t h ritual purity than with social a n d political obligations. O n the other h a n d , i n s o f a r a s he is valorizing the early Christians at the e x p e n s e of the R o m a n Catholic church, he is valorizing a u t o n o m y o v e r d e s p o t i s m . T h u s , it could be s u p p o s e d , on the basis of the t w o dichotomies that w e h a v e examined thus

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far, that although the roles assigned to the early Christians differ, the overall structure of values remains the same. The problem with such a reconciliation of the two dichotomies, however, is that it presupposes that the system of values in the abstract is more important than the question of w h o is playing which role. It is supposing, that is, that although the early Christians are assigned different roles in different contexts, the valorization of social duty and individual autonomy remains constant. Yet this is a presupposition that Gibbon's account ultimately cannot sustain. For the logic that underlies the dichotomies around which Gibbon's narrative of early Christianity is structured is a political logic, and one thing that this study has been demonstrating is that—since moral and religious and epistemological ideas have no intrinsic political valences—the political logic of early modern writers requires them not simply to invoke the ideas that suit their purposes but to manipulate them in such a way as to make them yield the right political results. In Gibbon's case, the political logic begins to take shape when w e focus on the third dichotomy, one that reflects a different hierarchy of values and reveals that the question of w h o is assigned to which role is one that does matter. The dichotomy to which I am referring is that of enlightened rulers versus superstitious populace. It is the dichotomy that will allow us to make political sense of the Decline and Fall and to see how the political sense utilizes the elements that we found in Hume and Montesquieu. In the second chapter of the Decline and Fall, Gibbon characterizes Roman religion in general and Roman religious toleration in particular from three perspectives, that of the rulers, that of the enlightened citizens (or philosophers), and that of the people (the superstitious): The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. (DF, 1:28)

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A l t h o u g h Gibbon's stylistic parallelism distinguishes between the epistemological perspective of the philosophers and the pragmatic perspective of the magistrates, it is clear that the philosophers— w h o knowingly a p p r o v e of the religious policies of the emperors a n d senate—consider the religion to be both false and useful, and there can be no doubt that the magistrates see things precisely the s a m e w a y . The three perspectives are thus reducible to two, that of the enlightened elite, consisting of magistrates and philosophers, a n d that of the superstitious masses. The perspective of the enlightened Roman elite is generally the perspective that Gibbon himself takes throughout his discussions of Christianity and p a g a n i s m , and this adds a significant complication to our understanding of the relationship between paganism a n d Christianity as well as the relationship between early Christianity and Catholic despotism. The philosopher, recognizing that the religious beliefs of the p a g a n m a s s e s are both false and politically u s e f u l , goes through the motions of religious observance as part of his civic duty: " T h e philosopher, w h o considered the system of polytheism as a composition of h u m a n f r a u d and error, could disguise a smile of contempt u n d e r the m a s k of devotion, without apprehending that either the mockery or the compliance w o u l d expose him to the resentment of any invisible, or, as he conceived them, imaginary p o w e r s " (DF, 2:15). From the philosopher's point of view, the superstitious p a g a n masses are credulous and ignorant, just as the Christians are credulous and ignorant. It just h a p p e n s that the superstitions of the p a g a n masses are conducive to public order, while the superstitions of the Christians are a threat to public order. Here w e can see w h a t Gibbon has done with Hume's "loose end." He evidently does not w i s h to exempt the p a g a n masses from the blight of superstition that requires that they be guided by a philosophical elite, an elite e n d o w e d with Gibbon's o w n combination of religious skepticism and political wisdom. 3 9 W h e n the Christians are being reproached for treating s o m e p a g a n ritual or belief as an abomination instead of being willing to make the "most trifling mark of respect to the national worship," they are in fact being reproached for not understanding, as the magistrates and philosophers do,

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that religion need not be a matter of beliefs about transcendent reality but merely a token gesture that helps to reinforce social bonds. A s satirists long before Gibbon had discovered, it is easier to reproach people for being unnatural and immoral than it is to reproach them for not being philosophers, and this is presumably w h y Gibbon's dichotomy of pagan ethical naturalism versus Christian perversity is so rhetorically useful. It mediates between the pagan philosophers and the fanatical Christians and allows the Christians to be condemned for their credulity—even though, from the philosophical perspective, they are no more credulous than their pagan counterparts. It accomplishes this by making it seem as if the superstitious pagan masses, rather than being the instruments of the enlightened magistrates, are in fact paragons of natural virtue and that the Christians are perversely violating natural moral feelings. In order to use the pagan masses as a weapon against the Christians, Gibbon even goes so far, on occasion, as to give the impression that the pagan masses, like the pagan philosophers, recognize that they are performing public duties rather than true acts of religious devotion. Consider, for example, Gibbon's justification of the deification of emperors in the face of Christian abhorrence: "This legal, and, as it should seem, injudicious profanation, so abhorrent to our stricter principles, was received with a very faint murmur by the easy nature of Polytheism; but it was received as an institution, not of religion, but of policy" (DF, 1:69). Here Gibbon seems to suggest that the pagan masses are not mere dupes but that they, like everyone else—except the benighted Christians— recognize that the worship of emperors is merely a political act. The dichotomy of elite versus masses also greatly complicates our view of Gibbon's history of the consolidation of ecclesiastical authority. For the depiction of a pagan elite that uses religion to manipulate the pagan masses has a somewhat unsettling resemblance to the depiction of the Christian empire that later evolved through the separation of laity from priesthood, and to the consolidation of ecclesiastical authority in the hands of those empowered to wield "the most efficacious instruments of government, rewards and punishments." The despotic Christian priesthood, culminating in the Pope himself, thus serves the same hegemonic

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role as the tolerant pagan magistracy, that of exploiting for political purposes the superstitions of the masses. But this structural similarity is not one to which Gibbon wishes to draw our attention. While the earlier paradox was one in which the same primitive Christians were being mocked in one context and valorized in another, here the same structure of authority is being condemned in one context, praised in another. When the manipulators of superstitious masses are Catholic prelates, they are treated as despots; but when the same role is given to Roman magistrates, they are treated as enlightened and beneficent leaders. CONCLUSION: STRUCTURES OF ERASTIANISM

The radical shift in the roles that Gibbon assigns to the early Christians in the first two dichotomies is facilitated by a radical shift in narrative perspective. In presenting the Christians as dangerous fanatics, Gibbon is looking at them through the eyes of the pagan authorities. But in presenting them as victims whom the ecclesiastical authorities will rob of their political autonomy, he is taking the perspective of the Christians themselves. This technique is remarkable but also has a familiar ring to it. In chapter 2, we saw Dryden trace the same sort of historical movement—except in reverse—that is, from the tyranny of papal authority to the dispersion of authority during the Reformation. When Dryden talks about the despotic Roman Catholic monopoly on exegetical authority, he speaks from the perspective of a laity who are robbed of their proper inheritance, but when he discusses the "horney-fisted rabble" who turn this inheritance to seditious purposes, he speaks, unmistakably, from the perspective of established political authority. The comparison with Dryden serves not only to broaden the context in which Gibbon's technique is being placed but also to broaden the context of the political values that underlie the technique. When the early Christians are being perceived as dangerous fanatics, they are taking the role of seditious Puritans. When they are being portrayed as innocent republican victims of Catholic despotism, they are serving to highlight the political danger presented by that other extreme.40 The fact that both Dryden and Gibbon depict Christian history

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as a shift between two extremes, one a kind of anarchic enthusiasm and the other a kind of imperial Catholic despotism, reflects the continued ideological usefulness of this dichotomy across more than a century of post-Restoration religio-political discourse. 41 What is remarkable, I think, is the w a y both writers find the benign alternative to the two extremes not at some midpoint between them but at a point that is outside the continuum altogether. In Dryden's case the external point, as w e have seen, is a nominal Anglicanism, which is in fact a kind of civic deism. In Gibbon's case—and here I am limiting myself to his history of early Christianity—the external point is Roman paganism. But Gibbon's paganism, like Dryden's Anglicanism, is a civic religion established by the ruling elite in order to promote political obedience and social order. We saw in chapter 2 that just as the Erastian impulse can present deism in the guise of Anglicanism, it can present submission to the power of the state in the guise of freedom. One thing that emerges from the present chapter is the fact that while Hume and Montesquieu represent two different w a y s of looking at Roman civic virtue, Hume's praise of Dutch and English toleration and Montesquieu's praise of the Roman toleration represent one and the same solution to the problem of religious fanaticism. For both Hume and Montesquieu (like Dryden) advocate the suppression of the religious threat to the authority of the state by giving the state authority over religion. For Bossuet, submission of the people to an absolute monarch, w h o himself submitted to the authority of God as mediated by the Catholic church, w a s the hierarchical structure that represented perfect order. For Hume, Montesquieu, and Gibbon— as for Dryden—social order is again the goal, but the structure of the hierarchy is different: religion must be subsumed under the authority of the state. I mentioned in chapter 3 that Bayle w a s reviled in his own time for suggesting that a society of atheists could be just as orderly as a society of Christians. When, several years later, Bayle undertook to answer the various inevitable attacks that his assertion had elicited, he did not temper his original audacity but actually intensified it by insisting that a society of atheists could be more orderly than a society of religious people because it would be free of the strife and cruelty that the intolerance of contemporary Christianity had given rise to. Indeed, he observes that the French Protestants

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(and, presumably, France as a whole) w o u l d h a v e been much happier if the French king and his zealous Catholic subjects had been atheists. Atheists w o u l d not h a v e been concerned that the H u g u e n o t s embraced this or that religion and w o u l d have left them in peace. 4 2 A t first glance, it might seem that the reason Bayle's remarks about atheism were so shocking is that they disparaged Christianity. But those w h o m Bayle outraged evidently were often less committed to the proposition that the specific moral teachings of Christianity w e r e conducive to civic virtue than to the more general proposition that religion w a s an essential instrument of social control. That is w h y Christians could valorize pagan religion as the socially u s e f u l invention of prudent lawgivers. The apologists for Christianity w h o invoked the pagan lawgivers were clearly not d e f e n d i n g Christianity but were d e f e n d i n g precisely w h a t H u m e , Montesquieu, and Gibbon were defending—namely, the notion that the m a s s e s n e e d e d a religion in order to be controllable by the elite. Gibbon's depiction of R o m a n society is one that follows Bayle in the assumption that atheists can understand w h a t is requisite for social order, but it treats atheists not as a general population but as an enlightened elite. What is really shocking about Bayle's assertion that atheists could be g o o d citizens is the notion that an entire society could be virtuous without the hierarchical differentiation between the elite and the populace. Seen in this light, Bayle's argument about the virtuous atheists and his Christian plea for the rights of conscience are not simply technically consistent; they are equally radical in their social implications. For while both the enemies of toleration and the enlightened defenders of toleration differ only on the question of which elite wields control of religion and thereby maintains social order, it is Bayle alone w h o can envision a society in which order can be achieved in the absence of any authority over religious belief.

5 Cosmic Politics and Counter-hypothetical Fictions Nicht die Kinder bloß speist man Mit Märchen ab. Lessing

PRELIMINARY

Bayle's empirical approach to the history of Roman toleration, as we saw in chapter 4, used the data of historical experience as an argument for the political value of religious diversity: a pluralistic religious polity had yielded a politically desirable result. Bayle's approach to history stood in sharp contrast with Bossuet's tendency to mine history for practices that were authoritative by dint of their venerable originary status rather than by dint of their actual effects. Thus in Bayle's hands historical empiricism was used to undermine both an authoritarian justification for intolerance and an archly traditional mode of legitimation. This use of empiricism as an epistemological antidote to traditional modes of legitimation bears an ideological resemblance to "democratic" uses of Baconian inductivism, mentioned in chapter 1, whereby those who lacked institutionalized intellectual authority could attack traditional knowledge claims by appealing to their own untutored powers of perception. In this chapter and the next, we will look at two mid-eighteenthcentury writers who embraced inductivist ideas without any apparent seditious intent and who, in fact, wished to allow inductivism to serve conservative ends. In the light of the historical principles that have been established in this study, it is not surprising that social conservatives could also be inductivists. Indeed, the principles established thus far provide at least two possible explanations as to how this might come to pass. On the one hand, since

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the "scientific" status of ideas can be considered in disciplinary terms, independently of their social uses, it is possible that ideas about scientific or intellectual method could be embraced purely on technical grounds. And since empiricism in general, and Baconian inductivism in particular, had, by the middle of the eighteenth century, attained enormous prestige—thanks in large measure to the perception that Newton and others had made great discoveries by rejecting "hypothetical" or speculative reasoning in favor of observation and experimentation—it is possible to imagine that writers convinced of the efficacy of inductivism as an explanatory resource might embrace it independently of its possible role as a legitimating resource. On the other hand, even if the prestige of inductivism should have derived from its apparent success as an explanatory instrument, such technical success could provide a strong incentive for attempting to harness this prestige by putting it into the service of one's ethico-social or sociopolitical convictions—that is, by treating one's own convictions as grounded in responsible, inductivist intellectual method and the convictions of one's enemies as products of illicit, noninductivist claims to knowledge. 1 It is important to recall, however, that the amenability of ideas to intellectual co-optation remains double-edged: the fact that one is motivated—for technical reasons, for ideological reasons, or for a combination of the two—to embrace an inductivist methodology does not preclude the possibility that this embrace, while being used to repel charges that one's beliefs are grounded in spurious knowledge claims, may give rise to new dangers. For example, even as one develops ways of appropriating inductivism on behalf of one's ethico-political commitments, one may come to realize that inductivism can be used to challenge other modes of cognition or legitimation that one is not prepared to give up. Indeed, one's enemies may threaten to employ one's newly appropriated mode of legitimation for alien or subversive purposes. Such dangers may give rise to techniques of secondary co-optation or counter cooptation, attempts to neutralize the intellectual or counterideological dangers that remain in ideas that one has already co-opted. The analyses in this chapter and the following one will reveal two versions of such complex appropriations of inductivism, appropriations that run afoul of other commitments and that require either—as in the case of Voltaire—that the epistemological foun-

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dations of the other commitments be reconciled with inductivism or—as in the case of Samuel Johnson—that the appropriated principles give way to more traditional conceptions of intellectual authority. Although this chapter will deal mainly with Voltaire, and the next mainly with Johnson, each writer will appear in the other's chapter. I expect this exchange of supporting roles to throw additional light on each writer's work. Voltaire, in two works to be examined in this chapter—the Discours en vers sur I'homme and Micromegas—wishes to exhort his readers to submit to the universal order of things. Humanity's moral task is to accept the limitations of human nature and its appointed place in the universal hierarchy. Voltaire is echoing Pope, who, in turn, bases his exhortations on theories of cosmic optimism that centered on the concepts of the Great Chain of Being and the best of all possible worlds. Like the deism that we encountered in chapter 2, the rationalistic theodicies excogitated by Leibniz (and others) and versified by Pope serve to justify the goodness of God by explaining apparent blemishes on that goodness. Lord Herbert of Cherbury and his followers were anxious to explain God's apparent willingness to deprive untold millions of the knowledge needed for salvation. Their solution was to claim that the necessary knowledge was less mysterious and less extensive than it had seemed and that it was universally available to human reason. The theodicean project with which we are concerned in this chapter, on the other hand, is to explain God's willingness to allow humanity in general to suffer the painful consequences of moral and physical evil, of human cruelty and rapacity, and of the natural disasters that are regularly unleashed upon the world. The explanation centers on the claim that our limitations and sufferings are a necessary part of an overarching whole that, in turn, is a necessary manifestation of God's goodness and wisdom. Those w h o complain about the order of things, or their place in it, are acting as if they have a greater knowledge of the overall system than they are capable of having: He, w h o thro' vast immensity can pierce, See w o r l d s on w o r l d s compose one universe, O b s e r v e h o w system into system runs, What other planets circle other suns, What vary'd being peoples e v ' r y star, M a y tell w h y H e a v ' n has made us as w e are.

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Science, Moral Knowledge, the Social Order But of this frame, the bearings, and the ties, The strong connections, nice dependencies, Gradations just, has thy pervading soul Look'd thro'? or can a part contain the whole? 2

Such a condemnation, based on the charge that the part cannot k n o w the w h o l e , of course paradoxically presupposes that the poet has e n o u g h understanding of the w h o l e to see the fault of those w h o dare to complain. In order to be able to understand that partial evil is universal good, and to m o d i f y our behavior accordingly, the poet n e e d s to appeal to a theory that takes us beyond our limited perspective and far beyond the teachings of revealed religion. The theory is derived from metaphysical speculation about the nature of absolute goodness and its relationship to cosmic creation. There is thus a significant epistemological difference between the theodicean project discussed in chapter 2 and that with which w e are concerned in this chapter. Lord Herbert w a s anxious to s h o w that w h a t w e needed to k n o w w a s much less than w h a t w e f o u n d in the Bible and in the libraries of theological disputation and that the h a n d f u l of necessary maxims were inscribed on every h u m a n heart. Dryden's version of this rationalistic minimalism merely transferred the handful of religious truths back into the biblical text. Pope, on the other hand, unlike Herbert and D r y d e n , cannot content himself with simply rejecting the epistemological pretensions of his enemies. The complaints of those w h o m Pope attacks are attributable to their ignorance, and his corrective is g r o u n d e d in a d e e p understanding of things. Voltaire, in turn, writing as an admirer and disciple of Pope, is anxious to embrace the moral teachings that Pope has set forth; but he is constrained by his commitment to an epistemological attitude that will not allow him to appeal to the metaphysical system in which Pope's moral teachings are inscribed. Before examining Voltaire's epistemological principles, and the dilemma to which they give rise, w e need to look more closely at the theory of the universe that these principles prevent him from embracing and at the relationship between this cosmic scheme and the social and political ideas of the time.

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THE C H A I N OF BEING A N D SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

The Discours en vers sur l'homme is Voltaire's Essay on Man, and it includes condemnations of two moral failings that Pope had condemned in his poem. The first is a cosmic anthropocentrism that Pope had attributed to human pride: A s k for w h a t end the h e a v ' n l y bodies shine, Earth for w h o s e use? Pride answers, " ' T i s for mine: For me kind N a t u r e w a k e s her genial p o w ' r , Suckles each herb, and spreads out e v ' r y flow'r. . . . Seas roll to w a f t me, suns to light m e rise; M y foot-stool earth, m y c a n o p y the skies." (Essay, 1 , 1 3 1 - 4 0 )

And the second is a kind of presumptuous querulousness, a dissatisfaction with humankind's limited place in the scheme of things: "Presumptuous Man! the reason wouldst thou find, / Why form'd, so weak, so little, and so blind!" (Essay, 1, 35-36). Voltaire takes up these matters in the "Sixième discours," where he tells us that he admires Pope's rejection of such anthropocentrism and querulousness partly because it was joined to Pope's rejection of the opposite extreme, the tendency (presumably inspired by Voltaire's theological bête noir, the doctrine of original sin) to be excessive in one's condemnation of humankind. Thus Pope (along with Leibniz) represents a happy medium between two extreme views of human nature: Despréaux et Pascal en [de l'homme] ont fait le satire; Pope et le grand Leibnitz, moins enclins à médire, Semblent d a n s leurs écrits prendre un sage milieu. 1 D e s p r é a u x [Boileau] and Pascal h a v e mocked mankind; Pope and the great Leibniz, less apt to scorn, seem, in their work, to follow a w i s e middle course.

The "sage milieu" offered by Pope and Leibniz depends on the notion of the Great Chain of Being, according to which humanity occupies a middle rank in the general scheme of things and, rather than being fallen or favored, is merely a necessary part of a necessary whole.

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Pope's attack on anthropocentrism and querulousness add up to an attack on what A. O. Lovejoy called "generic pride/' which causes the entire human race to have too high an opinion of itself.4 This generic pride pertains to the status of the human race in the universe rather than to discontent that individuals or classes of people may feel regarding their rank in society. Nonetheless, since the Great Chain of Being, with its step-by-step descent from God down to nothingness, is rigidly and immutably hierarchical, it has been easy to suppose that this cosmological principle has social implications and that cosmic optimism thus serves the ideological function of justifying the social status quo. According to such an interpretation, an attack on those who complain about humanity's limited place in the cosmic order would apply equally to those who complain about their own inferior position in the social order. This would seem to be what Basil Willey had in mind when he dubbed the eighteenth-century vogue for the Great Chain of Being "cosmic Toryism" and derided it as follows: Eighteenth-century optimism . . . was in essence an apologia for the status quo, presenting you with a God who loved abundance and variety better than happiness or progress, and a universe whose "goodness" consisted in its containing the greatest possible range of phenomena, many of which seemed evil to all but the philosophers. Cease then, nor order imperfection name! Submit! This glorification of Things as They Are, and of the God who wills them so, naturally had social implications (or shall we say, a social basis?).15

It would be hard to deny that a characterization of a hierarchical universe as the necessary embodiment of God's wisdom and goodness is potentially useful to the defenders of an immutable social hierarchy, and Willey's ideological critique might seem to find quick confirmation in the fact that Pope, in the Essay on Man, asserted not only that humankind had its necessary place in the great cosmic hierarchy but also that the social hierarchy was part of God's plan: ORDER is Heav'n's first law; and this confest, Some are, and must be, greater than the rest, More rich, more wise. (Essay, 4, 4 9 - 5 1 )

However, despite the resemblance between the hierarchy within society and the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being, and despite

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the fact that both are exalted in Pope's poem, it is interesting to note that Pope does not explicitly link the two. In fact, he presents them at opposite ends of his poem, in the first and the fourth epistles respectively, and treats them, as we will see in due course, in rather different ways. To see why he might have done this, it will be necessary to focus briefly on the relationship between the Great Chain as a justification for apparent evil in the world and Christian providential justifications of social inequality. The concept of the Great Chain of Being depends on what A . O. Lovejoy has called the Principle of Plenitude, according to which divine wisdom and goodness requires the creation of the greatest possible amount of being. 6 Since God's creation of anything beyond himself involves a diminution of perfection in favor of variety, the Principle of Plenitude assumes that the greatest amount of possible being requires the greatest number of possible kinds of being, that is to say the greatest possible number of species of plants and animals, as well as the most possible kinds of invisible spiritual entities stretching from the realm of living material beings to God himself, and the greatest variety of inanimate matter stretching d o w n to nothingness. Thus the requirement that there be the greatest possible amount of being gives rise to a hierarchical system in which there must be no gaps between kinds or species. Accordingly, there must be such a creature as man with precisely the degree of imperfection that his flesh is heir to. Thus does the Great Chain of Being serve its theodicean role of justifying God's goodness. We might be tempted to ask whether the Principle of Plenitude and the concept of the Great Chain entail the extension of the hierarchical structure within species, in such a way as to require that there be different social ranks or classes. But to pose such a question would be to presuppose that the doctrine of the Great Chain is a free-standing entity with its own immutable logic. Although the rise of cultural studies in general and ideological criticism in particular has made us increasingly suspicious of such attempts to isolate ideas, it is important to recognize that one need not appeal to the role of social context or ideological purposes in order to see the inadequacy of a decontextualized approach to ideas. Jaakko Hintikka, in opposing Lovejoy's notion that there are "unit ideas," of which the Principle of Plenitude is the prime example, 7 has argued that the Principle itself has various faces,

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depending on the intellectual context in which it is placed: "[The] interaction of different ideas is what lends to clearly formulated assumptions like the so-called Principle of Plenitude one of their most important roles in the history of ideas. The Principle is not independent of the surrounding ideas. It can serve as a mirror in which these other presuppositions can be seen, often implicitly held ones."" If we extend this intellectual contextualism into the realm of the ideological, we can recognize that the decision to extend, or not to extend, the Great Chain to hierarchies within the human species has nothing to do with the logic of the doctrine— since the doctrine itself does not tell us whether to consider social classes as having an ontological basis. But it has everything to do with the social purposes of its advocates. For while there was no real logical impediment to such an extension, there were in fact ideological impediments. Whereas Willey and others have assumed that the homologies between the Great Chain and social conservatism pointed to an implicit link between them, the interesting historical question is this: During a period when social hierarchies were considered a fundamental requirement for social order, and when the Great Chain of Being was a fashionable theodicy that justified a hierarchical universe, why did Pope (and others) refrain from explicitly linking the justification of social inequality to the Great Chain? To answer this question, I think, one needs to focus on the relationship between the Great Chain and more traditionally eschatological justifications for social inequality. To bring the Great Chain into the social sphere would be to imply not merely that social hierarchy is part of a universal order decreed by divine wisdom but—much more provocatively—that those who are higher in the social hierarchy are more perfect beings, more spiritual, closer to God. Christianity, quite to the contrary, had traditionally undertaken to protect the social status quo precisely by portraying it as transitory or illusory, as a highly unreliable index of the eternal disposition of souls. Eternal happiness was no less available to the poor than to the rich, and the consolation for the wretched lay not so much in the fact that their poverty was required by God as in the fact that it was a fleeting illusion. It has often been observed that the relationship between the theodicy of the Great Chain and traditional Christian theodicies was an uneasy one at best. But to

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subsume social inequality under the Great Chain would be to bring that conflict into the open and give it a powerfully ideological dimension. For to extend the Great Chain's intrinsic hierarchical divisions to the social realm would have the effect of robbing the poor of their traditional solace and thus, paradoxically, could have ideological implications unfavorable to the material interests of ruling elites.

JENYNS, JOHNSON, AND THE CONFLICT OF LEGITIMATIONS

The uneasy relationship between the traditional eschatological consolation, on the one hand, and the Great Chain, on the other hand, is a salient feature of Soame Jenyns's A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil and of Johnson's famous, devastating review of Jenyns's book. Although Johnson characterized the Free Inquiry, at least in part, as "little more than a paraphrase" of Pope's Essay on Man, "yet less than a paraphrase, a mere translation of poetry into prose," 9 Jenyns had in fact gone beyond Pope insofar as he had made a greater attempt to correlate the doctrine of the Great Chain with traditional Christian doctrines: the Supreme Being, infinitely good as well as powerful, desirous to diffuse happiness by all possible means, has created innumerable ranks and orders of beings, all subservient to each other by proper subordination. One of these is occupied by man, a creature endued with such a certain degree of knowledge, reason, and freewill, as is suitable to his situation, and placed for a time, on this globe, as in a school of probation and education. Here he has an opportunity given him of improving or debasing his nature, in such a manner, as to render himself fit for a rank of higher perfection and happiness, or to degrade himself to a state of greater imperfection and misery; necessary, indeed, towards carrying on the business of the universe, but very grievous and burdensome to those individuals who, by their misconduct, are obliged to submit to it.1,1

The reward for obedience to the divine will is here characterized not as eternal heavenly bliss but as elevation in the next life to a higher rank in the Chain of Being, one above that occupied by mere mortals; and the torments of hell are here translated into "a state of greater imperfection or misery." It is to be noted that in this

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merger of the Great Chain—which, by its nature, does not allow movement from one rank to another—with the Christian view of eternal rewards and punishments, Jenyns, while explicitly placing humankind in one rank, seems to be implicitly presupposing that there are not different ranks of being or perfection within the species. For the role of earthly existence as a "school of probation or education," as a testing ground for souls, would make sense in a Christian culture only if souls, qua souls, were on an equal footing, and it would be vitiated if differential rankings were handed out before the test had even begun. All this would seem to be consistent with the traditional Christian idea that social stratification, however necessary or laudable it might be, is not tied to ontological differentia or to the eternal disposition of souls. Johnson, despite the fact that he repeatedly casts doubt on the general plausibility of the Great Chain, does not offer a critique of the passage from the Free Inquiry just quoted; indeed, he himself quotes it approvingly. 11 Perhaps Johnson sees the notions that heavenly reward is elevation to a higher rank on the Chain of Being and that infernal punishment is relegation to a lower one as basically consistent with the doctrines of heaven and hell and is here willing to pass over Jenyns's metaphysical special pleading. In any event, since Johnson believes in the necessity of social subordination as well as in its independence from the eternal disposition of souls, he has reason to be tolerant of Jenyns's formulation. He is much less tolerant, however, when Jenyns, elsewhere in his treatise, undertakes to defend enforced ignorance as an opiate of the poor. Jenyns had invoked divine providence in justifying depriving the poor of education: "Ignorance, . . . the appointed lot of all born to poverty, and the drudgeries of life, is the only opiate capable of infusing that insensibility which can enable them to endure the miseries of the one, and the fatigues of the other. It is a cordial administered by the gracious hand of providence; of which they ought never to be deprived by an ill-judged and improper education. It is the basis of all subordination, the support of society" (FIE, 49-50)- 1 2 In response, Johnson undertakes, in effect, to remind us of the availability of another opiate besides ignorance—namely, the "knowledge" that comprises Christianity's traditional consolation:

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Concerning the portion of ignorance necessary to make the condition of the lower classes of mankind safe to the publick, and tolerable to themselves, both morals and policy exact a nicer inquiry than will be very soon or very easily made. There is, undoubtedly, a degree of knowledge which will direct a man to refer all to providence, and to acquiesce in the condition with which omniscient goodness has determined to allot him; to consider this world as a phantom, that must soon glide from before his eyes, and the distresses and vexations that encompass him, as dust scattered in his path, as a blast that chills him for a moment, and passes off for ever. ("Review," 5 5 56) Johnson's invocation of the traditional view that this earthly existence is a transitory phantom is not so resolutely otherworldly as it seems. For Johnson also insists on the need for some degree of social mobility. Just as all souls need to be equally eligible for salvation, people, in their earthly existence, Johnson feels, should not be condemned to inescapable poverty. Although Jenyns refrained from claiming that the imposition of this opiate on the poor is connected to their intrinsic inferiority, Johnson recognizes that to condemn the poor to ignorance is, so to speak, to lock them into their social status for all eternity: Though it should be granted, that those who are born to poverty and drudgery, should not be deprived, by an improper education, of the opiate of ignorance; even this concession will not be of much use to direct our practice, unless it be determined, who are those that are born to poverty. To entail irreversible poverty upon generation after generation, only because the ancestor happened to be poor, is, in itself, cruel, if not unjust, and is wholly contrary to the maxims of a commercial nation, which always suppose and promote a rotation of property, and offer every individual a chance of mending his condition by his diligence. ("Review," 56-57) Johnson thus embraces the traditional notion that earthly poverty, like the phenomenal world itself, is a mere phantom, a blast that chills for but a moment; but he also embraces an early version of the capitalist dogma that poverty can be overcome by education and hard work. The wretchedness of poverty, in this double perspective, is something essentially escapable, whether in this world or in the next. Seen in this light, social mobility appears as a secular pendant to the equality of souls before God.

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Johnson's rejection of Jenyns's justification of the opiate of ignorance, along with his rejection of the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being, does not imply any opposition on Johnson's part to the necessity of social hierarchy. There is no doubt that Johnson, like most of his literary and philosophical contemporaries, 11 believed that subordination is a precondition for social harmony and that a leveling of social distinctions would give rise to discord and strife.14 What Johnson could not accept is a justification of social inequality that told individuals that their class status was necessary and inescapable. The Great Chain of Being, of course, justifies the cosmic rank of humankind in general precisely in fatalistic terms— insofar as one's rank is fixed simply because that particular link in the chain needed to be filled—and provides metaphysical arguments against any attempt to raise oneself above the rank to which one has been assigned. Johnson's unease with a caste system is thus consonant with his rejection of the Great Chain. It might seem as if Jenyns, conversely, embraced both the Great Chain and a fatalistic caste system because the two are part of the same general way of looking at things. But it needs to be noted that even Jenyns himself, while embracing the Great Chain and many other ideas that Johnson considered dubious or silly,15 and while treating the poor in terms that Johnson found objectionably fatalistic, still held back from arguing that social inequality was grounded in the ontology of the Great Chain. He refrained, that is, from claiming that those who are higher in the social order are more perfect or closer to God. Given the disjunction between the Christian providential justification of social inequality—with its equal access to eternal bliss— and the rigid inequality decreed by the Principle of Plenitude, we may observe that Jenyns employed two different techniques in bringing two traditions of legitimation together.16 Sometimes, as in the notion that, after death, the virtuous soul rises in the Chain of Being and the vicious soul descends, he attempts to bridge the differences. In other instances, the ones that elicit most of Johnson's scorn, he simply ignores the differences. Meanwhile, Johnson, as we have seen, does not merely content himself with attacking Jenyns from the standpoint of orthodoxy. Rather, while he does not offer his own solution for the general problem of evil, he does proffer positive justifications for social

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inequality—by cunningly linking the upward mobility of the soul in the next world to an upward mobility of the body in this one. By thus linking Christian eschatology to the worldly social mobility that is consonant with the needs of a "commercial nation," Johnson is bridging metaphysical gaps—between a world that is a mere phantom and a world in which the requirements of commerce are of pressing importance—that are not less formidable than those faced by Jenyns. But he does so in a manner that is more ideologically consistent than what is found in Jenyns's Free Inquiry. In place of Jenyns's more or less feudal conception of social hierarchy, in a word, Johnson offers a capitalistic fluidity that both expresses Christian sympathy with human misery and legitimates the structural inequality of the status quo. 17 POPE, VOLTAIRE, AND THE CONFLICT OF THEODICIES

I said that Jenyns went further than Pope in attempting to reconcile the Great Chain with Christianity. In fact, with regard to the question of social inequality it seems fair to say that Pope makes no attempt at all to reconcile the two systems. I mentioned earlier that Pope's discussion of social inequality and his discussion of the Great Chain appear at opposite ends of the poem. More striking than this physical separation is the fact that the attack on generic pride and the attendant exhortation to accept one's place in the Chain of Being rest on premises that differ radically from the premises that underlie the later exhortation to accept one's place in the social hierarchy. Humanity is exhorted, in the first epistle, to accept limitations as necessary; in the fourth epistle, we learn that limitations that appear to result from social inequality are, in some significant sense, illusory. Whereas Johnson sought to assuage the wretchedness of poverty by considering it something that could be transcended, whether by the prospect of eternity or by the prospect of some degree of social mobility, Pope undertook to deny that poverty was wretched. In his defense of social inequality in the fourth epistle of the Essay, Pope claims that there is a perfectly equal distribution of human happiness in this life.™ Although "Some are, and must be greater than the rest," anyone who

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(Essay, 4, 51-58)

Indeed, the equitable distribution of h u m a n happiness is tied to w h a t seems to be a claim that the h u m a n species is a single unified entity: " H e a v ' n breathes thro' e v ' r y member of the w h o l e / One c o m m o n blessing, as one common s o u l " (4, 6 1 - 6 2 ) . N o w , one could a s s u m e that this expression of the unity of the h u m a n race indicates that Pope sees the Great Chain as not functioning within species. 1 9 To console the dispossessed by assuring them that they are no less h a p p y than those w h o rule over them in p o w e r a n d opulence is to run the danger of d e f y i n g plausibility, but at least this sort of legitimation has the advantage—provided that one can accept it as true—of leaving no doubt as to w h y it ought to be consoling. If those w h o are envied by the dispossessed are indeed no happier than the dispossessed themselves, then it is perfectly clear w h y one is being asked to accept one's lot. U n d e r the scheme of cosmic optimism, on the other hand, even if I accept the claim that the overall scheme of goodness requires that someone fill the rank that I am occupying, it's not clear w h y this fact should keep m e from repining over the fact that someone else has not been given m y assignment and that I have not been assigned to a higher rank in the Great Chain. In other w o r d s , once one accepts the Principle of Plenitude, then it is clear w h y the anthropocentric hypothesis needs to be rejected: if the Chain of Being is the necessary result of perfect divine benevolence, then it must be factually incorrect that the world w a s made for the particular benefit of humankind. The attack on the querulousness of generic pride, on the other hand, is a purely moral one, w h o s e force is less easily grasped. For even if w e are constrained to recognize that w e occupy a middle state between animals and angels, w h y should that prevent us from wishing that w e could occupy a higher state? Christian eschatology, after all, w o u l d seem

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to be premised on precisely such a wish. This gap between cosmic necessity and Christian psychology is precisely what Jenyns would try to close by substituting for heaven an elevation on the Chain of Being as the reward for a virtuous life. These considerations suggest why Pope's justification of social inequality on the ground that there is an equal distribution of happiness might be more consoling than a justification based on the cosmic notion that differences in degree are necessary. But although, as I have indicated, Pope stresses the cosmic necessity of gradation in the first epistle and the illusory nature of gradation in the fourth epistle, he does not altogether ignore the concept of divine necessity in his justification of social inequality. Instead, he tries to have it both ways. Thus the passages just quoted, to the effect that differences in happiness are illusory and that humanity receives "One common blessing, as one common soul," are prefaced by a statement of the necessity of social hierarchy: O R D E R is Heav'n's first law; and this confest, Some are, and must be greater than the rest, More rich, more wise. {Essay, 4, 4 9 - 5 1 )

Since Pope does not indicate that these necessary differences in status correspond to ontological differences, we cannot ascertain whether the Chain of Being is here being extended to the social realm. Indeed, Pope's formulation is too vague to allow us to say just what kind of order and just what kind of necessity require that there be social hierarchy. This vagueness allows Pope to use both kinds of justification for inequality without having to worry about their precise relationship to traditional Christian eschatology. 20 It was once a popular sport for theologians and philosophers to examine the degree to which Pope was guilty of departing from orthodoxy or from coherence and consistency. Our focus on the ideological uses of divergent theodicies yields a rather different picture. It suggests that Pope was trying to get as much mileage as possible from each competing conception while avoiding any overt clashes between them. Thus, while the Great Chain of Being might have resonances that justify social hierarchy, Pope can exploit those resonances while stopping short of allowing the concept of a hierarchy of being to subvert the traditional Christian idea of an equality of souls before God. 21

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Having seen how Pope, in order to avoid an overt clash between two separate and potentially antagonistic traditions, stops short of merging his defense of social hierarchy with his invocation of the Great Chain, we are now in a position to examine Voltaire's "version" of Pope's essay. I have been using quotation marks in referring to Voltaire's Discours as a "version" of Pope's poem because, while the similarities between the two works leap out for the casual reader, the less apparent differences will turn out to have profound importance for this study. The title of the "Premier discours" is "De l'égalité des conditions," and in it Voltaire sets out to argue that "Les mortels sont égaux; leur masque est différent" (DVH, 379). Humans suffer from the same limitations and have equal access to happiness regardless of their social station. This claim gives rise to an objection that Voltaire puts into the mouth of an incredulous interlocutor, an objection based on the conventional perception that differences in social status result in differences in happiness: N'est-il aucun état plus fortuné qu'un autre? Le ciel a-t-il rangé les mortels au niveau? Sous un triple mortier n'est-on pas plus heureux Q u ' u n clerc enseveli dans un greffe poudreux?

(DVH, 379-80)

Is it that no station is happier than another, that heaven has placed all mortals at the same level? . . . Isn't M. le Président happier under his triple mortier than a clerk entombed in his dusty cubicle?

Voltaire's immediate response to this objection is premised on God's goodness: Non: Dieu serait injuste; et la sage nature Dans ses dons partagés garde plus de mesure. Pense-t-on qu'ici-bas son aveugle faveur A u char de la fortune attache le bonheur?

(DVH, 380)

No! G o d would be unjust; wise nature, in parcelling out its gifts, has a greater sense of equity. Can one think that here below, God makes happiness dependent on the blind course of fate?

If differences in happiness were linked to differences in social

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status, then, as Pope had argued, God's goodness would be thrown into question. Hence such differences in happiness must be illusory. Voltaire's discussion of the equal distribution of human happiness certainly sounds very much like a French version of Pope's discussion of the equality of happiness. Moreover, as in Pope's poem, this discussion is separated from the discussion of the Great Chain of Being. In Voltaire's case, however, the order is reversed: the discussion of human happiness takes place at the beginning ("Premier discours"), while the discussion of the Great Chain and the critique of anthropocentrism and querulousness takes place toward the end ("Sixième discours"). More puzzling, perhaps, than this difference is the fact that Voltaire's discussion of the equality of happiness suppresses the Popean assertion that social hierarchy is a necessary function of divine order. The reason I say that Voltaire's omission amounts to a "suppression" is that an earlier version of Voltaire's poem, from which he had quoted in a letter of 1 3 November 1738, had included the notion that people were morally obliged to remain in the social rank to which they have been assigned: Quiqonque en dirigeant la course de sa vie Ecoute prudemment la voix de son génie, N'entend point dans son coeur les cris de repentir: Enfermé dans sa sphère il n'en doit point sortir." Whoever directs the course of his life by listening prudently to the voice of his nature will not hear the cries of discontent in his heart. He should stay in the sphere where he has been confined.

These lines certainly seem to imply that differences in rank are necessary or, at least, that they ought not to be challenged. But w h y does Voltaire omit them from the final version of his poem? After all, since Voltaire, unlike Pope, is not concerned with protecting any pretensions to Christian orthodoxy, he would seem to have less need than Pope to avoid the claim that social hierarchy is necessary or that it is somehow implicated with the Great Chain. But it turns out that Voltaire, while unconcerned with Christian orthodoxy, is very concerned to protect his newfound epistemological orthodoxy. A n d the idea of the Great Chain in particular, and that of necessity grounded in abstract reasoning in general, is a threat to that orthodoxy. Accordingly, as we will see in some detail

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below, Voltaire, in his "Sixième discours," does not embrace the doctrine of the Great Chain but attempts to circumvent it; that is, he attempts precisely to repeat Pope's attacks on cosmic anthropocentrism and querulousness without invoking the metaphysical system on which these attacks are based. Voltaire's departures from his poetic model point to a very significant feature of his logical and rhetorical strategy, both in the Discours en vers sur l'homme and elsewhere. Our excurses on the relationships between cosmic hierarchy and social hierarchy have prepared us for the notion that Voltaire's discomfort with the Great Chain will not necessarily entail any questioning of hierarchical social structures in general or the necessity of poverty in particular.23 In fact, I will argue that Voltaire's departure from Pope amounts to an attempt to produce a more epistemologically respectable justification of both hierarchy and poverty. But before we can examine his strategy, we need to understand the dilemma that it attempts to resolve. Here some background will be useful. THE REJECTION OF HYPOTHESIS

In the fourteenth Lettre philosophique, Voltaire capped his attack on Descartes's philosophy with the withering charge that it was nothing more than a "roman ingénieux." 24 Voltaire's famous rejection of Descartes in favor of Newton and Locke involved more than a preference for a physics of attraction over one of vortices or for a psychology of the tabula rasa over one of innate ideas. What Voltaire admired about the revolutionary English thinkers, at least as much as their results, was their intellectual method—or what he took to be their method. Descartes uncovered the errors of antiquity, we are told in the thirteenth Lettre philosophique, only to replace them with errors of his own invention. For, like many other thinkers, Descartes was blinded by the esprit systématique,2S From the point of view of empiricist philosophy, the esprit systématique—or the esprit de système as it came to be called—is generally characterized as a taste for rationalistic metaphysics, with its attendant habit of intricate reasoning from dubious first principles. 26 But in Voltaire's mind, and in the minds of many of his contemporaries, these faults were intimately connected to the fault of hypothesizing. 27 Hypothesizing and speculative reasoning in fact were often

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seen not as t w o different sorts of deviations from responsible method but as one and the same. To hypothesize w a s precisely to e n g a g e in speculative reasoning, to fall into the esprit de système. This general conception of improper intellectual method is clearly reflected in Johnson's definition of hypothesis: " A supposition; a s y s t e m f o r m e d u p o n some principle not proved." 2 8 From the perspective of the late-twentieth-century philosophy of science, this conflation of hypothesis and speculative metaphysics s e e m s odd. For hypothesis formation has come to be seen as the f u n d a m e n t a l imaginative component of scientific discovery. N o r w a s the eighteenth century u n a n i m o u s on the issue. In 1765, for example, w e find the author of the Encyclopédie article " H y p o t h è s e " insisting on the indispensability of hypotheses: Les hypothèses doivent donc trouver place dans les sciences, puisqu'elles sont propres à faire découvrir la vérité et à nous donner de nouvelles vues. . . . Il y a deux excès à éviter au sujet des hypothèses, celui de les estimer trop, et celui de les proscrire entièrement. Descartes, qui avait établi une bonne partie de sa philosophie sur des hypothèses, mit tout le monde savant dans le goût de ces hypothèses, et l'on ne fut pas longtemps sans tomber dans celui des fictions. Newton et surtout ses disciples, se sont jettés dans l'extrémité contraire.2'' Hypotheses therefore must play a role in the sciences since they allow us to discover the truth and afford us new perspectives. . . . With regard to hypotheses, there are two extremes to be avoided, that of valuing them too much and that of banishing them altogether. Descartes, who based a good portion of his philosophy upon hypotheses, gave the entire learned world a taste for these hypotheses, which gave way before long to a taste for fictions. Newton, and especially his disciples, have fallen into the opposite extreme.

For Voltaire, however, w h o s e admiration for N e w t o n w a s much less qualified than that of the a n o n y m o u s encyclopedist, hypothesizing w a s not part of responsible scientific method; it w a s its utter antithesis. Francis Bacon's Novum Organum had proposed an inductive method that w o u l d m o v e gradually, step by step, from the particulars of experience to more and more general explanatory axioms. O n e w o u l d diligently begin with observation a n d experimentation, and the general explanations w o u l d eventually emerge as the r e w a r d f o r diligence. This careful procedure, based on sense

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perception and the resistance of any temptation to hypothesize, was seen to have borne its greatest fruit in Newton's optics and celestial mechanics. For Newton was an avowed Baconian, who had explicitly declared "hypotheses non fingo." To hypothesize was to ignore the lessons to be learned from observing reality, and to presume to invent one's own reality. Since this pure-induction model of scientific method has come to be seen as a distortion of what really goes on in scientific discovery,30 contemporary scholars have set about to argue that Bacon wasn't really an inductivist11 and that when Newton seemed to be rejecting the feigning of hypotheses, he must have really meant something else. 32 But in the case of Voltaire, at least, any such scholarly revisionism would seem to be doomed to failure. For whatever Newton really meant, Voltaire seems to have taken him literally and to have seen his superiority over Descartes to reside precisely in his refusal to "feign hypotheses." Writing against the Cartesian theory of tourbillons, in his Elémens de la philosophie de Newton, Voltaire asserts: Il n'y a pas la moindre expérience, pas la moindre analogie dans les choses que nous connaissons un peu, qui puisse fonder une présomption légère en faveur de ce tourbillon de matière subtile: ainsi de cela seul que ce système est une pure hypothèse, il doit être rejeté." There is not the slightest experimental evidence, not the faintest analogy among things with which we are even slightly familiar, that would allow us to grant even the slimmest credibility to this vortex of subtle matter: this theory must be rejected for the simple reason that it is purely hypothetical.

A few pages later, to explain why hypotheses lead into error, why they need to be rejected, Voltaire employs the metaphor of the search for the source of a river: N'allons donc point d'abord imaginer des causes et faire des hypothèses: c'est le sûr moyen de s'égarer; suivons pas à pas ce qui se passe réelement dans la nature. Nous sommes des voyageurs arrivés à l'embouchure d'un fleuve: il faut le remonter avant que d'imaginer où est la source. M Let us not proceed then by first imagining causes and making hypotheses; that is the sure way to go astray; let us follow step by

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step that which actually happens in nature. We are travelers who have arrived at the mouth of a river; our task is to follow the river to its source, not to imagine where the source may be.

The notion that responsible intellectual method should resemble the tracing of a river from its mouth to its source illustrates the seductiveness, for Voltaire, of the inductive model, according to which results are gradual and inevitable. It follows that the rejection of hypothesis is the rejection of imaginative guesswork, which attempts, presumptuously, to leap over the painstaking efforts of a conscientious investigator. Consistent with this view of things, Voltaire's rejection of Descartes in the Lettres philosophiques centers on the taint of imagination. Descartes was born with a vivid and powerful imagination, Voltaire tells us, which "ne put se cacher même dans ses ouvrages philosophiques." 35 This would account for the English view of the difference between Descartes and Newton (as it is characterized by Voltaire)—"le premier était un rêveur . . . l'autre était un sage" 36 — an opinion that is soon followed by the one quoted above, that Descartes's philosophy was nothing more than a "roman ingénieux."

VOLTAIRE'S DILEMMA: METHOD VERSUS METAPHYSICS

We have seen that in the "Sixième discours" of the Discours en vers sur l'homme, Voltaire endorses Pope's condemnation of generic pride, a condemnation that was grounded on the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being. The Great Chain, however, flies in the face of Voltaire's Newtonianism in more than one respect. Newton's theory of gravitation, unlike Descartes's theory of vortices and the older Aristotelian physics, postulates a universe that is not a plenum but that contains empty space, and a principle of attraction that, accordingly, can operate across vacuums. The Great Chain of Being, which presupposes plenitude and the absence of gaps, on the other hand, may be seen to be tied to the older conception of physics. And indeed, when Voltaire eventually came to reject the Chain of Being outright, he, like Johnson, would do so partly on the ground that it was inconsistent with the Newtonian physics of vacuity.17 But when he wrote the Discours, Voltaire had not yet rejected the

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Great Chain, and although he had attacked the Cartesian plenum at length in the Elémens de la philosophie de Newton,38 he was not yet ready to bring the critique of the plenum to bear on the philosophy of cosmic optimism. Although the Voltaire of the Discours is not yet ready to discard the Great Chain of Being or to confront its relationship to Newtonian physics, he is acutely troubled by its relationship to Newtonian and Baconian epistemology. The Chain is not observable; it is not verifiable by any experimental procedures. It is the product of a grandiose leap beyond the data of experience. Voltaire's view of intellectual method, as we have seen, does not allow him to accept this sort of reasoning. He would like to be able to invoke the Great Chain in support of his view of human nature, but he cannot. The poet challenges himself by means of an interlocutor: "Montre-moi, si tu peux, cette chaîne invisible Du monde des esprits et du monde sensible; Cet ordre si caché de tant d'êtres divers, Que Pope après Platon crut voir dans l'univers." S h o w me, if you can, this invisible chain, stretching from the spiritual world to the one that w e perceive, this hidden order, made up of so many diverse beings, which Pope, following Plato, thought that he could see.

But he cannot answer this challenge: Vous me pressez en vain; cette vaste science, Ou passe ma portée, ou me force au silence. M o n esprit, reserré sous le compas français, N ' a point la liberté des Grecs et des Anglais. You press me in vain; this vast knowledge is either beyond my ken or humbles me into silence. M y mind, enclosed by narrow French horizons, is not as freewheeling as the minds of the Greeks and the English.

Unable to rise to the metaphysical heights of Pope, Voltaire is forced into silence: "Pope a droit de tout dire, et moi je dois me taire" (DVH, 4x5; 416) (Pope can say whatever he pleases, but I must hold my tongue). This, then, is Voltaire's dilemma: he accepts Pope's view of

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human nature and of humanity's place in the order of things, but he is prevented from setting forth the theoretical foundation upon which this view is built. If he remains silent, he leaves his entire poem without its philosophical justification. But how can he embrace Pope's metaphysical hypothesis unless, like Pope, he hypothesizes? Voltaire's solution comes immediately after the line just quoted, "moi je dois me taire," and it comes in the form of a fable. The fable has as its most significant antecedent a couplet from Pope's Essay: "While Man exclaims, 'See all things for my use!' / 'See man for mine!' replies a pampered g o o s e " (Essay, 3, 44-45). While Voltaire's elaboration of this conceit follows Pope in undermining the anthropocentric hypothesis, it does so in such a w a y as to avoid asserting the hypothesis that stands in opposition to the foolish self-importance of men and geese—namely, the hypothesis of the Chain of Being. Purporting to be a translation, by a Jesuit in Peking, of a Chinese book, the fable deals in the first place with various animals that think the world was created for their benefit. The mouse thinks that " C e s montagnes de lard, éternels aliments, Sont pour nous en ces lieux jusqu'à la fin des temps." "These mountains of bacon, endless supply of food, have been placed here for our everlasting benefit."

and that mice are God's masterpiece, "la fin, le but de tes ouvrages." A s for cats, they have been put on earth for the benefit of mice: "Les chats sont dangereux et prompts à nous manger; Mais c'est pour nous instruire et pour nous corriger." (DVH, 416) "Cats are dangerous and eager to eat us; but this serves to instruct us and to correct our faults."

The mouse is followed by other animals w h o make the same sorts of claims for their respective species. The ass's claim that the world was made for the benefit of asses is based largely on the fact that the members of his species are served by humans:

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Science, Moral Knowledge, the Social Order "L'homme est né mon esclave, il me panse, il me ferre, Il m'étrille, il me lave, il prévient mes désirs, Il bâtit mon sérail, il conduit mes plaisirs."

"Man is born to serve me. He grooms me, he gives me shoes, he combs me, he washes me, he anticipates my desires, he provides me with a harem, he arranges my pleasures." This human being w h o grooms him and ministers to his needs is seen by the pampered ass as envious of the gifts that nature has conferred upon asses: "Et je ris, quand je vois cet esclave orgueilleux Envier l'heureux don que j'ai reçu des deux." "And I laugh when I see this proud slave envying the blessed gift that I have received from heaven." The series of presumptuous animals is capped with the appearance of man, w h o makes his anthropocentric claims, reminiscent of those that Pope had put into the mouth of pride: "Je suis puissant et sage; Cieux, terres, éléments, tout est pour mon usage: L'océan fut formé pour porter mes vaisseaux; Les vents sont mes courriers, les astres mes flambeaux. Ce globe qui des nuits blanchit les sombres voiles Croît, décroît, fuit, revient, et préside aux étoiles: Moi, je préside à tout." (DVH, 416; 417) I am powerful and wise; the sky, the earth, the elements, everything exists for my benefit. The ocean was formed to carry my ships. The winds are my couriers, the stars my torches. Like the orb that brightens the dark veils of night, that waxes, wanes, departs, and returns, that rules over the stars, so do I rule over everything. A t this point in Voltaire's "récit veritable," we are in a position to see how the "Chinese" fable represents a resolution of Voltaire's dilemma. It must first be noted, however, that the resolution cannot lie in the mere fictionality of the fable. For according to the traditional view, a fable's fictionality is merely a veneer over its deeper philosophical truth. Houdar de la Motte, in his Discours sur la fable (1719), put the matter as follows:

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Il faut donc se proposer d'abord quelque vérité à faire entendre; et c'est l'avantage particulier de la fable d'y forcer, pour ainsi dire, son auteur. En beaucoup d'autres ouvrages on peut se déterminer parce que les faits ont d'agréable ou de t o u c h a n t . . . sans aucune vûe d'y renfermer quelque instruction. Mais ce serait une chose monstrueuse d'imaginer une fable sans dessein d'instruire. Son essence est de . . . signifier . . . quelqu'autre chose que ce qu'elle dit à la lettre. . . . La fable est une philosophie déguisée, qui ne badine que pour instruire, et qui instruit toujours d'autant mieux qu'elle amuse. 1 " O n e must begin by having in mind some truth that one wishes to transmit; the special advantage of the fable is that it demands this, as it were, of the author. With many other genres, it is enough for the author to have in mind some incidents that are charming or touching . . . without any design to include some sort of lesson. But to imagine a fable that is not designed to instruct is to imagine something monstrous. A fable's very essence is to . . . signify . . . something other than what it says literally. . . . The fable is a disguised philosophy, one that is fun only in order to be instructive and that is more instructive than it is amusing.

What the fable says "à la lettre" is, of course, what it says about particular characters and events. The reader of La Fontaine's "Le Corbeau et le Renard" for example, recognizes that the particular characters and events are fictive, that statements about the fox and the crow and their activities do not ask to be believed. But the reader also recognizes that when the fox makes general assertions about the nature of flattery, these assertions are meant to be seen as the author's own and as claiming to be true. Thus, the essence of the traditional fable is its implicit or explicit generalizations about the world. Since the fable was conventionally recognized as a vehicle for making general statements that purported to be true, Voltaire could not avoid hypothesizing simply by placing his hypotheses in a fable. To resolve his dilemma, he needed to produce a special sort of fable, one that not only refrained from claiming to be true with regard to its particular assertions about individual characters and events but that even went so far as to refrain from claiming to be true with regard to its larger hypotheses, its generalizations about the world. And it needed to do so in such a way as to underline Voltaire's sympathy for Pope's hypothesis. It needed, in short, to support a hypothesis without hypothesizing. Voltaire began to

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develop such a fable, though in a tentative and partial form, in the "Chinese tale" that we have been examining. We can more readily understand the significance of Voltaire's procedure if we compare his view of hypothesis to the modern one. As I indicated earlier, modern theories of the role of hypothesis in scientific or, more generally, intellectual method, while insisting that hypotheses are indispensable, would not challenge Voltaire's contention that a hypothesis is an imaginative leap, a fiction. According to W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, for example, "What we try to do in framing a hypothesis is to explain some otherwise unexplained happenings by inventing a plausible story, a plausible description or history of a relevant portion of the world."40 A conventional extension of this view would be that the best hypothesis is the best story, the one that is most plausible. Accordingly, an efficient way to attack a given hypothesis would be by offering a better hypothesis, a second story that is more plausible than the first. But a more plausible hypothesis, in addition to attacking a prior hypothesis, may also advance its own truth claims. Rather than merely undermining the other hypothesis, it may offer to supplant it. Such a double function, however, would be unwelcome, if, like Voltaire, one considered hypothesizing to be a violation of proper intellectual method. It is also possible, however, for a second hypothesis to be no more and no less plausible than the hypothesis that it is contesting. Such a counterhypothesis, while making no truth claims of its own, would undermine the plausibility of the original hypothesis. For if two opposing hypotheses are equally plausible, then there are no rational grounds for accepting either one as an adequate explanation of the data. Thus, one can undermine a hypothesis without seriously offering one's own alternative and without accepting the validity of hypothetical reasoning. In the first part of his fable, the part described thus far, Voltaire attacks the hypothesis that the world and everything in it exist for the benefit of humankind. He does so by inventing other stories, counterhypotheses, to the effect that the world exists for the sake of mice, or ducks, or sheep, or asses. The poet does not subscribe to any of these stories; rather, he is suggesting that it is no more reasonable to believe that the world was created for humans than to believe that it was created for mice or asses. The stories serve to cancel one another out and thus to undermine the plausibility of the anthropocentric hypothesis.

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The sort of fable that emerges from my analysis is one that is fictional not only at the level at which fables are conventionally fictional—namely, the level of assertions about particular characters and events—but also at the deeper level at which fables conventionally make assertions about the world. This deeper fiction, however, while not purporting to be true, purports to be no less true than some other assertions about the world, which it thereby undermines. Such fables I call counterhypothetical fictions. 41 Voltaire's counterhypothetical fictions, his stories about presumptuous animals, allow him, as we have seen, to attack the anthropocentric hypothesis without implicating himself in the crime of framing positive hypotheses. But they do nothing against the other hypothesis that Voltaire, following Pope, wished to attack— namely, the querulous view that humans could be and ought to be free of their limitations and hence happier than they are. For although anthropocentric claims are rendered ridiculous by the equally plausible claims of the representatives of other species, the assorted animals say nothing about what they could be or ought to be, and their pronouncements have no logical or rhetorical force vis-à-vis human dissatisfaction. When, therefore, the human character, after making his anthropocentric claim, goes on to say, "Je ne suis point encor ce que je devrais être" (I am not yet that which I should be), he steps outside the counterhypothetical structure of the fable. In undertaking to answer this complaint, and a longer version of it spoken by another character, the remainder of the "Chinese Tale" employs the procedures of traditional fables; it has characters who, speaking for the author, utter general assertions that purport to be true. Thus the Chinese divinity Tien responds to the man's complaint by pointing out that it is he, the god, for whom all else has been made. Everything is as it should be, he declares: "D'un parfait assemblage instruments imparfaits, Dans votre rang placés demeurez satisfaits." "An imperfect part of a perfect whole, you should be content with the rank in which you have been placed."

But despite this injunction, a Chinese philosopher sees fit to complain about man's place in the scheme of things: "Pourquoi suis-je en un point reserré par le temps? Mes jours devraient aller par delà vingt mille ans;

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W h y should I be confined to a moment of time? I should be able to live twenty thousand years and more. I should be at least a hundred cubits tall. W h y should I not be able, in the twinkle of an eye, to travel to the moon, and to change its orbit? W h y should I have to sleep through a full third of my life? W h y shouldn't my wife be able to gratify my modest passion and have a hundred or more of my children in three months' time? W h y must I lose my desire for her after only a day?

In response, the exasperated god has an angel instruct the philosopher as to why things are the way they are. The angel explains, in words rather reminiscent of the Leibnizian doctrine of compossibility, that to fulfill the philosopher's grandiose desires would not be consistent with other features of the universe, that the earth, for example, would not be able to provide nourishment for the gigantic creatures that the philosopher would have humans become. In sum, the angel explains " Q u e l'homme n'est point fait pour ces vastes désirs . . . Que le travail, les maux, la mort sont nécessaires." (DVH, 418) That man is not made for such extravagant desires . . . that toil, disease, and death are his necessary lot.

Thus, through a Chinese god and his angel in a "Chinese" fable, Voltaire has, without explicitly mentioning the Great Chain of Being, nonetheless introduced important aspects of the speculative theodicy upon which both Leibniz and Pope had based their views of human nature. And in so doing, he has dropped the counterhypothetical procedure by which he had, in the first part of his fable, begun to resolve his dilemma. Now, I have already pointed out that Voltaire's counterhypothetical fiction of the proud animals is effective only against the anthropocentric hypothesis and not against the querulous hypothesis that human beings could be (and ought to be) free of limitations and

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hence happier than they are. It may be that, in the absence of an appropriate counterhypothesis to deal with this second hypothesis, Voltaire felt the need to fall back on philosophizing through the procedure of conventional fables—even though this procedure compromised his attempt to avoid hypothesizing. But, without committing ourselves to speculations concerning Voltaire's motivations for this shift, we may observe that if Voltaire could have devised a better story, a counterhypothetical fiction that could undermine both uncongenial hypotheses at once, there would have been no need to fall back on positive hypothesizing. With such a fiction, the resolution of the dilemma of the Discours would be complete. And it is precisely such a fiction that we find in Micromégas.

THE DILEMMA RESOLVED

Ira Wade has argued in some detail that Micromégas was the first Conte philosophique, having been written in 1739, at Cirey.42 If Wade is right, then Micromégas would have come at the end of the period during which Voltaire had labored over Newton, metaphysics, and intellectual method and only a few months after the completion of the Discours sur l'homme. Whether or not Wade is right, there seems to be no doubt that by July 1739 Voltaire had sent Prince Friedrich of Prussia a manuscript entitled Voyage du Baron de Gangan and that this manuscript was, to some extent at least, a forerunner of the Micromégas that was finally published in 1752. 43 But whatever the temporal distance between the Discours and Micromégas, the logical connection between the two is striking and unmistakable. In Micromégas we find not only the culmination of Voltaire's progression from the rejection of hypothesis, on the grounds that it is mere fiction, to the adoption of fiction as counterhypothesis but also a recapitulation of this entire progression. Despite their prodigious size and their multitudinous sense organs, both Micromégas and his relatively dwarfish Saturnian traveling companion at first manifest the foolish habit of hypothesizing (concerning, appropriately enough, human nature), instead of looking carefully at the facts: Le Saturnien et le Sirien s'épuisèrent en conjectures: après beaucoup de raisonnements fort ingénieux et fort incertains, il en fallut venir aux faits. (Micromégas, 2, 11. 34-37)"

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The Saturnian and the Sirian wore themselves out in conjecturing; after a good deal of very ingenious and very inconclusive reasoning, they were forced to come back to the facts of experience.

Once the travelers arrive on the planet Earth, it is the Saturnian who makes judgments "quelquefois un peu trop vite," who, that is, tends to leap from scanty facts to erroneous hypotheses. Since he could, at first glance, perceive no inhabitants on earth, he decides that the planet is uninhabited (4,11. 31-33). When, through an improvised microscope, he subsequently manages to see a whale, he decides that the Earth is populated solely by whales; and, being a "grand raisonneur," he goes on to speculate about whether whales have ideas, a will, and other attributes of rational creatures (4,11. 7 8 - 8 1 ) . Micromégas, on the other hand, rather than speculating, engages in patient observation, by dint of which he determines that there is no reason to believe that whales have souls (4, 11. 83-85). By the time the travelers discover the existence of human beings, and the fact that they are endowed with speech, the Saturnian has finally learned his lesson: "Je n'ose plus ni croire, ni nier," dit le Nain, "je n'ai plus d'opinion. Il faut tâcher d'examiner ces insectes, nous raisonnerons après." (6,

11. 21-23)

"I no longer dare to affirm or to deny," said the Dwarf; "I no longer have any opinion. We need to examine these insects; we'll reason about them afterward."

Thus Voltaire has dramatized the antipathy toward conjecture, which, in the Discours sur l'homme, had prevented him from embracing the Great Chain of Being. But beyond reminding us of Voltaire's dilemma in the Discours, the story of Micromégas and the Saturnian also reenacts and improves upon the earlier resolution of that dilemma. In the Discours, the anthropocentric hypothesis, that the universe was created for the benefit of humankind, was opposed by the counterhypothesis that the universe was created for the benefit of other earthly species. But, as we have seen, the animals did not dispose of the second manifestation of human pride—namely, the querulous hypothesis that humans could and ought to be larger than they are, to live longer, to be able "voyager dans la lune." The disposal of this hypothesis required the final

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intervention of the philosophizing angel. But in Micromégas we are given precisely those vastly superior versions of humanity, capable of traveling to the moon and of much more; and Voltaire manages to undermine both hypotheses at once with the single counterhypothesis, the single fiction, that, in an infinite universe, the larger the planet, the larger and more intelligent are the inhabitants. The inhabitants of Saturn have seventy-two senses; yet they complain that they are too limited (Micromégas, 2, 11. 19-20). Micromégas is not surprised to hear this: "car dans notre Globe nous avons près de mille sens, et il nous reste encore je ne sçai quel désir vague, je ne sçai quelle inquiétude, qui nous avertit sans cesse que nous sommes peu de chose, et qu'il y a des êtres beaucoup plus parfaits." (2,11. 25-28) "for on our planet, we have nearly a thousand senses, and we are still left with a vague, indefinable desire, an indefinable uneasiness, which constantly reminds us that we are not much, and that there are other beings more perfect than we." Thus, instead of opposing man's complaints about his limitations (and the implicit assumption that he could be happier than he is) with the positive metaphysical claims of the Discours, that everything is as it must be and that our limitations are necessary, Voltaire provides a counterhypothesis, a fiction, according to which those imaginary beings that we imagine to be better off than ourselves see themselves as equally shackled with limitations. It goes without saying that the same relativistic counterhypothesis that seeks to confound the querulous philosopher of the sixth discourse also throws into question the anthropocentric view that the universe was created for the benefit of human beings. To the extent that the story of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is plausible, the hypothesis of creation for the sake of Earthlings becomes implausible.45 Hence, by the time the anthropocentric Thomist, at the end of Micromégas, comes to claim that the Sirian and the Saturnian, along with their suns and stars, were made "uniquement pour l'homme" (Micromégas, 7, 1. 133), there is no need for refutation; the "rire inextinguible" of Micromégas and the Saturnian is sufficient. Thus a single fiction serving as a counterhypothesis has eliminated the need for the poetic philosophizing that had remained in

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the Chinese fable of the sixth Discours sur l'homme* The development of the counterhypothetical fiction is now complete. 47 CONCLUSION: INDUCTIVIST TORYISM

We saw earlier that although the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being offers a potential cosmic paradigm for social hierarchy and subordination, Voltaire, in his discussion of social inequality in the "Premier Discours," passes up the opportunity to apply this paradigm. He even suppresses his initial impulse to echo Pope's notion that social stratification is a necessity to which one ought to submit. Instead of arguing for the necessity of social difference and subordination, Voltaire limits himself to a reworking of Pope's argument for sameness; like Pope, he claims that all members of society have the same limitations and the same capacity for happiness. Having in the meantime examined Voltaire's epistemological principles and the counterhypothetical fables with which he attempts to avoid violating those principles, we are finally in a position to place that opening argument in a larger framework. I suggested earlier that Voltaire might have been unwilling to invoke an analogy with cosmic hierarchies in his discussion of society because he was unwilling—for reasons that have since become clear—to invoke cosmic hierarchies in general. But if we suppose that Voltaire avoided bringing the concepts of cosmic optimism to bear on his defense of the social status quo because he wished not to infect that defense with the esprit systématique, then we must also suppose that he saw his story of the equal distribution of happiness across the social spectrum to be consistent with his Baconian principles. Nor would it be implausible to make such a supposition. For it would be easy to claim that that account of human equality is based on the observation of individual instances and on the gradual and unbroken rise from individual observations to higher levels of generalization. Such a supposition would explain why Voltaire's version of Pope's Essay on Man does not, like Pope's poem, move from the cosmic to the social but begins with the social, and later, in the penultimate discourse, finally grapples uneasily with the cosmic. In a word, Voltaire structures his poem so as to turn Pope's procedure around, to replace a rationalistic discourse that moves from high-flown

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principles to the observable world with a discourse that claims to be an empirical one. Seen in this light, the omission of the lines that would have asserted that one ought not to be dissatisfied with one's social station is readily explicable. The canceled lines, while not invoking the Great Chain of Being, appealed to some sort of a priori necessity instead of appealing to the empiricist category of the observable. They therefore needed to be removed for epistemological reasons. Finally, this analysis, in turn, throws an interesting light on the two counterhypothetical fables that we have examined. In the animal fable of the "Sixième discours," Voltaire undermines man's claim that the world was made for him by putting the same claim into the mouths of other animals. In the counterhypothetical fable of Micromégas, he undermines man's claim that he could and ought to be happier than he is by putting the same claim into the mouths of superior beings. These counterhypothetical fables, while not claiming to be true, duplicate the structure of the fable that does claim to be true—namely, Voltaire's "empirical fable" of psychological sameness cutting across hierarchical divisions. Instead of applying the cosmic model of hierarchy to the social microcosm, Voltaire thus extends his social vision outward into the universe. While withholding any truth claims about these secondary, counterhypothetical fables, Voltaire has them echo the message of his "empirical fable," that there is an observable psychological sameness underlying all material differences. Instead of following Pope in appealing to an ought that is grounded in metaphysical speculation, Voltaire appeals to what purports to be an is, grounded in the observation of the empirical world. He treats submission to the social order as submission to reality, thus making protest seem not only transgressive, but pointless. He thus transforms the traditional appeal to divine will and moral necessity into a "scientific" appeal to the "facts of experience."

6

Authorized Expérience: Narration and Moral Knowledge in Rasselas Il ne faut pas laisser au jugement de chacun la connaissance de son devoir; il le lui faut prescrire, non pas le laisser choisir à son discours; autrement, selon l'imbécillité et variété infinie de nos raisons et opinions, nous nous forgerions en fin des devoirs qui mettraient à nous manger les uns les autres. Montaigne

DANGEROUS HYPOTHESES In 1739, only a few months after the publication of Voltaire's Elemens de la philosophie de Newton, Samuel Johnson published his Life of Boerhaave, in which we find pronouncements about the virtues of inductivism and the folly of hypothetical reasoning very similar in spirit to Voltaire's pronouncements on the same subject.1 Johnson, for example, refers approvingly to an oration of 1 7 1 5 in which Boerhaave declares himself, in the strongest Terms, in favor of experimental Knowledge, 2 and reflects with just Severity, upon those arrogant Philosophers, who are too easily disgusted with the slow Methods of obtaining true Notions by frequent Experiments; and who, possessed with too high an Opinion of their own Abilities, rather chuse to consult their own Imaginations, than inquire into Nature, and are better pleased with the delightful Amusement of forming Hypotheses, than the toilsome Drudgery of amassing observations. 1 Elsewhere, however, in a famous pronouncement in the Life of Milton, Johnson indicates that he considers the scientific investigation of the external world to be less important than moral and

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religious knowledge: "The knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires, or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong." 4 If we suppose—as many readers of Johnson seem to have done— that the endorsement of Boerhaave's inductivism applies only to the natural sciences and does not impinge on moral questions, then we could further suppose that Johnson's inductivism represents a secondary aspect of his intellectual outlook. 5 That is to say, inductivism would be the appropriate intellectual method for a field of inquiry that is only of secondary importance. But, even if Johnson considers the natural world to be a less worthy object of inquiry than the realms of morality and religion, that would not necessarily imply any derogation of the inductive method qua mode of inquiry. We have just seen, in chapter 5, that Voltaire was loath to abandon his inductivist principles when he turned to moral and social issues and that he went to great lengths to avoid hanging his view of ethics and human nature on blatantly speculative principles. And Johnson, likewise, as we will soon see, had strong motivations for carrying his rejection of speculative metaphysics and his embrace of inductivism beyond the sphere of "external nature." But Johnson, unlike Voltaire, was a Christian and was committed to the reliability of a separate source of knowledge about right and wrong, namely, divine revelation. Accordingly, although he followed Voltaire in taking up inductivism as an alternative to abstract speculation, this commitment to inductivism would become problematic when the context shifted to the dichotomy of human reason versus divine revelation. 6 This is not to say, however, that the two dichotomies could be rigorously separated. Johnson, for all his Christian conservatism, was quite capable of treating morality as a separate and somewhat autonomous sphere of intellectual inquiry. Indeed, in the passage just quoted from the Life of Milton, he speaks of religious and moral knowledge, thus suggesting that he may be capable of seeing moral knowledge as something attained independently of revelation. And, indeed, we will encounter below other passages that substantiate these suspi-

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cions. Johnson, like Voltaire, had reason to try to harness the prestige of inductivism on behalf of his conservative moral vision, and this enterprise—as it had for Voltaire—gave rise to difficulties. Whereas seventeenth-century writers, as we saw in chapter 1, could use inductivism as a way of liberating themselves from the Scholastics and other symbols of hierarchical intellectual authority, one way that eighteenth-century writers were able to put inductivism to more conservative uses was by assimilating it to the positive pole of the dichotomy of social versus solitary knowledge. There was a widespread tendency stretching across eighteenth-century intellectual life to see truth as the product of intellectual interchange, and hence as linked to sociability, and to see error as the product of isolation. One finds striking expressions of this dichotomy even in thinkers with whom Johnson is commonly thought to have had conspicuously little in common. David Hume, for example, in his essay "Of Essay Writing," sets forth the dichotomy as follows: Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the world and good Company. . . . Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir'd by Conversation. Even Philosophy went to Wrack by this moaping recluse Method of Study, and became as chimerical in her Conclusions as she was unintelligible in her Stile and Manner of Delivery. And indeed, what cou'd be expected from Men who never consulted Experience in any of their Reasonings, or who never search'd for that Experience where alone it is to be found, in common Life and Conversation. 7

The usefulness of such a dichotomy was that it allowed one to set up monasticism as a kind of paradigm that encompassed under the heading of isolation every species of error, whether that of Scholasticism or of sectarian fanaticism." Isolation was associated ultimately with grossness or barbarism, whereas society was associated with cultivation and judgment. In order to assimilate the more specific dichotomy of inductivism versus conjecture to this general dichotomy of the social versus the idiosyncratic, it was necessary merely to consider the senses as providing access to that

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which is shareable and universal and to associate conjecture with the faculty that isolates and deceives—namely, the imagination. This gesture is implicit in Voltaire's celebration of Newton and condemnation of Descartes, cited in chapter 5 (p. 175). While Newton's genius is associated with diligent observation of (publicly shareable) phenomena, Descartes's theories were the product of a vivid and powerful imagination. Thus the Englishman was "un sage," the Frenchman " u n rêveur.'"' A n d Descartes's philosophy w a s nothing more than a "roman ingénieux." 1 0 If Voltaire saw the imaginative practitioner of noninductive inquiries as a dreamer, Johnson saw him, in his most extreme manifestation, as a madman. 1 1 Consider the case of the mad astronomer of Rasselas w h o has come to think that he controls the movements of the heavenly bodies. In chapter 44—entitled "The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination"—the mad astronomer's condition is shown to have resulted from reason having been overwhelmed by imagination, a dark triumph that had been facilitated by the man's isolation from society. The genesis of this madness is described by Imlac in great detail, as if to underscore Johnson's sense of the fearsomeness of this "calamity" that is "the most dreadful and alarming" of the "uncertainties of our present state" (Rasselas, 43, 149): 12 "There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who can regulate his attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come and go at his command. . . . All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity. . . . "To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the wing, is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation. When we are alone we are not always busy; the labour of excogitation is too violent to last long; the ardour of enquiry will sometimes give way to idleness or satiety. He who has nothing external that can divert him, must find pleasure in his own thoughts. . . . He . . . amuses his desires with impossible enjoyments, and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion. The mind dances from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all combinations, and riots in delights which nature and fortune, with all their bounty cannot bestow. "In time some particular train of ideas fixes the attention. . . . The mind . . . recurs constantly to the favourite conception, and feasts on the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with the bitter-

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ness of truth. By degrees the reign of fancy is confirmed; she grows first imperious, and in time despotick. Then fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture or of anguish. "This, Sir, is one of the dangers of solitude." (44, 150-53)

I have quoted this striking passage in more detail than might seem strictly necessary to support my claim that Johnson is assimilating the distinction between inductivism and hypothesis to the distinction between society and isolation and to that between judgment and imagination. I have done so partly in order to give a sense of the importance that Johnson attached to these matters and partly because the extensiveness of the similarity between madness and hypothesis is of crucial importance to an understanding of Rasselas and will help me to introduce a central paradox that informs the book. Johnsonians, of course, would be quick to point out that the detailed etiology of madness bespeaks Johnson's very personal fears and glosses some of his celebrated idiosyncracies as well as his self-reproaches regarding indolence and other matters. But however true all that may be, Johnson's manner of conceptualizing madness is not itself idiosyncratic. The association of madness with fancy, and the characterization of fancy as a combinatory faculty ("the mind dances from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all combinations"), hearkens back to the familiar philosophical distinction between judgment and fancy, according to which judgment separates things (and hence orders them) and fancy lumps things together (and hence renders them chaotic). 11 This subversion of the reason by the imagination, resulting in particular "trains of ideas" that allow fancy to become "imperious" and ultimately "despotick," reminds us of Locke's famous chapter on the "association of ideas," in which he describes a species of unreason characterized by a "strong combination of ideas, not allied by nature . . . following one another in an habitual train."14 More crucial for our purposes are the specific parallels between Johnson's analysis of madness and his analysis, in the Life of Boerhaave, of the distinction between inductivism and hypothetical reasoning. Just as the man who is sliding toward madness "amuses his desires with impossible enjoyments, and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion," the philosopher who is unwilling to follow

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the methodical Baconian procedures is characterized as "arrogant" and as being "better pleased with the charming amusement of forming hypotheses, than the toilsome drudgery of making observations." Both madness and hypothetical reasoning are associated with pride, with indolence, and with amusement. The failure to keep busy, the inability to keep at "the labour of excogitation," is what leads to madness, just as the unwillingness to stick with the "toilsome drudgery of making observations" leads one to hypothesize. In both cases precisely the same structure of values informs the distinction between a proper and an improper mode of understanding the world and our relationship to it. Thus, when Johnson writes of "the sport of those w h o delight too much in silent speculation," it would be impossible, I submit, in the absence of the entire passage, to know whether he is talking about madness or hypothesis. The strong moralistic tincture that links both madness and hypothesizing to pride, indolence, and vain pleasures, to an unwillingness to work sufficiently hard and to face reality, points to the fact that Johnson associated both hypothetical reasoning and madness with a species of sinfulness, something to which we are all prone, and that we can resist only with considerable effort. In chapter 42 of Rasselas, two chapters before the one in which the etiology of madness is painstakingly set forth, the astronomer, despite his absolute conviction that he actually possesses his extraordinary power, characterizes his secret as "incredible." "Why, Sir," asks Imlac, " d o you call incredible that which you know, or think you know, to be true?" "Because," answers the madman, "I cannot prove it by any external evidence; and I know too well the laws of demonstration to think that my conviction ought to influence another, w h o cannot, like me, be conscious of its force" (42, 147). A conviction for which there is not shareable, external evidence, and the truth of which, therefore, cannot be demonstrated to others, is precisely the opposite of those observable truths accessible through the inductive method. Thus, although the astronomer does not know that he is mad, he does know that any attempt to convince others of the truth of his convictions will be perceived as nothing more than an appeal to his own authority. If appeals to truths for which there is no observable, shareable evidence can be perceived as appeals to one's own authority, and ultimately as madness, then there are strong reasons to avoid

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making claims that can be perceived as speculative and to try to show that one's beliefs are reachable through observation and experiment. In this way one can harness inductivism to support one's vision of the world and can reject as madness and fanaticism any threats to that vision. But, as we saw in chapter 5, there can be a point at which the attempt to use inductivism in support of one's social vision can become problematic and even threaten one's own legitimation of the social order. After all, some beliefs are grounded in things beyond empirical observation and experimental verification, and some authorities that one may not wish to challenge or accuse of madness happen to legitimate themselves by appeals to the invisible. Likewise, the same ideological instability is to be found in the view that isolation breeds error and madness and that sociability is conducive to judgment and truth. For while this view may be used as an antidote to fanaticism and to dangerously unorthodox conjectures, it may also be used to challenge traditional authority. Hume, after all, unlike Johnson, is an infidel, and his appeal to experience and conversation is quite congruent with his attack on miracles and other traditional beliefs. Moreover, the alleged connection between good sense and what Hume calls "Taste of Life or Manners" and "Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir'd by Conversations" has a specific connection in eighteenth-century Britain with Shaftesbury and his followers, an ethical school that sought to establish a moral epistemology and moral psychology that would allow us to dispense with the truths and the motivations offered by revealed Christianity. Thus it is that a defender of Christianity such as Bishop Berkeley could attack Shaftesbury and other "free thinkers" precisely by mocking their association with polite conversation and could revalorize the discarded model of learning that Hume would later characterize as "being secluded from the world and good Company." In his dialogue Alciphron (1732), Berkeley has one of the spokesmen for free thinking contrast the new model of learning with the old: "Our philosophers . . . are of a very different kind from those awkward students who think to come at knowledge by poring on dead languages and old authors, or by sequestering themselves from the cares of the world to meditate in solitude and

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retirement. They are the best bred men of the age, men who know the world, men of pleasure, men of fashion, and fine gentlemen." 15 Berkeley's mocking attitude toward this speaker is perhaps less clear in isolation than in the context of the dialogue as a whole. But even when excerpted, I suspect, the passage reveals the shallowness of the free thinker who wishes to usurp the title of philosopher from those who have earned it. And Berkeley, in his attempt to rebuke gentlemanly free thinking, is even willing to go so far against the eighteenth-century grain as to embrace—within limits— the despised Scholastics. Thus Berkeley's spokesman Crito opines: "In pure justice to truth one must own they [the Schoolmen] neither banter nor rail nor declaim in their writings, and are so far from showing fury or passion that perhaps an impartial judge will think the minute philosophers [i.e., Shaftesburyian free thinkers] are by no means to be compared with them for keeping close to the point, or for temper and good manners.""' If Johnson has reason, as we have already seen, to embrace the fashionable view that sociability and experience are conducive to good judgment and that isolation yields imagination and madness, he also has reason to embrace Berkeley's rejection of fashionable, sociable philosophy. For, as we will see below, Johnson's attitude toward Shaftesbury and the other thinkers who would supplant Christian moral epistemology and moral psychology is ultimately very close to that of Berkeley. Rasselas, I will argue, is the arena in which Johnson attempts to work out these conflicting attitudes toward knowledge and morality. RASSELAS

A N D ETHICAL INDUCTIVISM

Even without the context of Johnson's inductivist pronouncements, it would be easy to point out the prevalence of observation as a mode of inquiry in Rasselas as well as the more explicit valorization of scientific inductivism. 17 Consider, for example, the suggestion that if Rasselas were to fail in his attempt to escape from the Happy Valley he could console himself with the systematic observation of nature—evidently the most satisfying activity available to him there. This bespeaks a valorization of observation in a specifically scientific mode: "He discerned the various instincts of animals, and proper-

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ties of plants, and found the place replete with wonders, of which he purposed to solace himself with the contemplation, if he should never be able to accomplish his flight; rejoicing that his endeavours, though yet unsuccessful, had supplied him with a source of inexhaustible enquiry" (5, 21-22). 1 8 What I wish to stress, however, is a somewhat more provocative thesis—namely, that the overall project of Rasselas is an inductivist experiment in which moral knowledge is supposed to be obtained through systematic observation and experimentation. Imlac's status as the wise mentor is established in the course of his o w n narrative of the wide-ranging experiences through which his knowledge was acquired. Rasselas's desire to "obtain some knowledge of the w a y s of m e n " (5, 22) is intensified by Imlac's account of his own experiences, by an impatience, as Rasselas puts it, "to see what thou hast seen" (12, 56). 19 He explicitly characterizes their prospective journey as an "experiment," the success of which will depend on direct observation: "Whatever be the consequence of my experiment, I am resolved to judge with my own eyes of the various conditions of men, and then to make deliberately my choice of life" (12, 56). Rasselas's observations of the various conditions of men, commencing in Cairo, where, after lengthy preparations, he "resolved to begin his experiments upon life" (17, 68), have a distinctly systematic character: beginning with an examination of the life of carefree pleasure (chap. 17), then turning to the philosophical control of the passions (chap. 18), then going from the simplicity of the pastoral life (chap. 19) to the opulent life of the wealthy (chap. 20), and from there to the hermit's life (chap. 21). This systematic flavor is underscored in chapter 23, entitled "The Prince and His Sister Divide between Them the Work of Observation," where, after the initial failure to find an example of happiness, Rasselas, "as he was yet young . . . flattered himself that he had time for more experiments and further enquiries." Nekayah suggests that the two researchers "will divide the task between us: you shall try what is to be found in the splendour of courts, and I will range the shades of humbler life" (89). Moreover, although Rasselas is young and naive and given to judgments that are not always to be trusted, there are various ways in which the book seems to endorse the wisdom of his resolution to bring an inductive method to bear on moral questions. Not only

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are we told that Imlac's own wisdom is based on wide-ranging experience and observation, but Imlac himself, in his famous "Dissertation upon Poetry" (chap. 10), characterizes the preparation for the poet's vocation in terms that seem to place a high value on systematic observation of life: "[The poet] must be acquainted . . . with all the modes of life. His character requires that he estimate the happiness and misery of every condition; observe the power of all the passions in all their combinations, and trace the changes of the human mind as they are modified by various institutions and accidental influences of climate or custom. . . . He must divest himself of the prejudices of his age or country" (10, 44). Thus it would seem that the same sort of "experiments upon life" that Rasselas wishes to carry out in order to be able to make his "choice of life" are the ideal preparation for the poetic profession, a profession whose intellectual authority, as we will see below, remains intact throughout the tale.20 If Imlac's precepts and his example are not sufficient endorsement of the prince's desire to go abroad and see life for himself, there is also the fact that Johnson's book is at pains to expose the gap between eloquence and reality, a gap that tends to open up when one looks beyond the eloquence with one's own eyes. Rasselas's second "experiment" is his encounter with the stoic philosopher who eloquently preaches that happiness is achievable through the conquest of passion by reason: His look was venerable, his action graceful, his pronunciation clear, and his diction elegant. He shewed, with great strength of sentiment, and variety of illustration, that human nature is degraded and debased, when the lower faculties predominate over the higher; that when fancy, the parent of passion, usurps the dominion of the mind, nothing ensues but the natural effect of unlawful government, perturbation and confusion. . . . He then communicated the various precepts given from time to time for the conquest of passion, and displayed the happiness of those who had obtained the important victory, after which man is no longer the slave of fear, nor the fool of hope; is no more emaciated by envy, inflamed by anger, emasculated by tenderness, or depressed by grief; but walks on calmly through the tumults or the privacies of life, as the sun persues alike his course through the calm or the stormy sky. (18, 70-72)

Rasselas's high opinion of this eloquent philosopher gives way to

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consternation and disappointment w h e n , a f e w d a y s later, he finds the man in the depths of inconsolable grief over the death of his daughter. Although stoicism itself is being s h o w n to be a philosop h y that is easier to proclaim than to live u p to, the lesson that Rasselas takes a w a y from this experience has less to do with the substance of the man's philosophy than with the hollowness of his eloquence: 2 1 " T h e prince . . . went a w a y convinced of the emptiness of rhetorical s o u n d , and the inefficacy of polished periods and studied sentences" (18, 76). Rasselas had been e x p o s e d to a good deal of beguiling eloquence in the H a p p y Valley throughout his residence there. We are told that as part of the multifarious attempts to make everyone in the H a p p y Valley "pleased with their o w n condition," the sages " w h o instructed them, told them of nothing but the miseries of publick life, and described all beyond the mountains as regions of calamity, w h e r e discord w a s a l w a y s raging, and w h e r e man preyed u p o n man." Moreover, w e learn, that "to heighten their opinion of their o w n felicity, they were daily entertained with songs, the subject of which w a s the happy valley" (2, 1 1 - 1 2 ) . There is thus what amounts to official p r o p a g a n d a that strives to make a virtue of necessity by extolling the pleasures of the H a p p y Valley and disparaging the outside world. Indeed, Rasselas's inductivist project, although fueled by Imlac's narrative, had had its genesis in an unsuccessful attempt, on the part of one of the promulgators of the official propaganda, to reconcile Rasselas to his inability to observe the various conditions of men. In chapter 3, Imlac's predecessor, an u n n a m e d sage, having noticed Rasselas's dejection, approaches the prince, "in h o p e of curing it by counsel" (3, 15). His counsel is based on the fruit of his o w n experience: "Sir . . . if you had seen the miseries of the world, you w o u l d k n o w h o w to value your present state." But rather than accept the counsel that purports to be the fruit of this mentor's experience, Rasselas gives the counsel a paradoxical twist: ' " N o w / said the prince, 'you have given me something to desire; I shall long to see the miseries of the world, since the sight of them is necessary to h a p p i n e s s ' " (3, 16). What w a s intended to be the proffering of a w i s e maxim that w o u l d preclude the need for direct observation turns out to h a v e produced w h a t the narrator calls "the only conclusion which they were intended to p r e v e n t " (4, 1 7 ) — namely, a desire to leave the H a p p y Valley and observe the world.

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B e y o n d the surface paradox that J o h n s o n himself exploits here, there is an additional paradox that cannot yet be grasped by the first-time reader—that the official propaganda is perfectly true and that there is n o g a p between this sage's eloquence and the lessons that Rasselas will derive from his experiences outside the H a p p y Valley. What Rasselas will learn is precisely w h a t he has been told he w o u l d learn, precisely w h a t his mentors h a v e already learned f r o m their o w n experience. This fact will throw a s o m e w h a t different light on the book's endorsement of Rasselas's inductivist project since it renders experience both necessary and superfluous. But before I can attempt to explain the significance of this paradoxical interplay between eloquence and experience, I need to examine another paradox, one that emerges from the nature of the discourse in which Rasselas's experiences will be imparted to the reader.

THE PARADOX OF MEDIATED INDUCTIVISM E v e n if w e leave aside the fact that Rasselas endorses an inductivist approach to the "choice of life," which only confirms w h a t eloquent w i s d o m has already asserted, there is something inherently paradoxical about a book that propels itself into its central narrative by raising suspicions about eloquence and endorsing a quest for unmediated experience. For the lessons of the " u n m e d i a t e d " experience that will constitute Rasselas's experiment can only be presented in mediated form. The events that comprise Rasselas's experiences are, after all, not directly accessible to the reader but are necessarily mediated through the language of the book. A n d to the extent that the experiences are s h a p e d so as to focus on the lesson learned, there is the danger that the rejection of eloquence in f a v o r of experience will w r a p itself in eloquence. This paradox, however, could remain merely a theoretical one, in that the reader need not be a w a r e of it. A book can, through rhetorical m e a n s , avoid calling attention to its o w n mediation of the events depicted and can, instead, give the representation of events a sense of relative immediacy, in such a w a y that the reader feels that he or she is vicariously experiencing what the protagonist experiences and is deriving from the experiences themselves the s a m e lessons that are being derived by the protagonist. But such a

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rhetorical shift from the mediation of eloquence to the immediacy of experience is precisely what the reader of Rasselas does not encounter. Although Prince Rasselas refuses to be satisfied with the maxims that purport to be the fruit of someone else's experience, there is an important sense in which the narrative of what is observed outside of the Happy Valley asks the reader to be satisfied with precisely such maxims. Instead of being given a circumstantial account of the edifying events of the journey, the reader encounters a mode of narration that consistently interposes wise teachers between the reader and the instructive experiences. The events themselves tend to be, at most, schematized rather than narrated and more often completely suppressed in favor of the moral lessons allegedly derived from them. What the reader generally gets are the precepts that have allegedly been distilled from the experiences of others. Although the instances that are most crucial to my argument are to be found in the accounts of the various encounters between Rasselas—or his sister Nekayah—and the people whose modes of life are the subject of the experiment, it will be useful to begin with an extract from Imlac's narrative, delivered while the group was still in the Happy Valley: My companions . . . conjecturing that I was rich, and, by my inquiries and admiration, finding that I was ignorant, considered me as a novice whom they had a right to cheat, and who was to learn at the usual expence the art of fraud. They exposed me to the theft of servants, and the exaction of officers, and saw me plundered upon false pretences, without any advantage to themselves, but that of rejoicing in the superiority of their own knowledge. (9, 36)

This technique, of stating the generalization about human nature while failing to narrate the events—individual cases of theft, extortion, and plunder—that supposedly give rise to that generalization is typical of Imlac's narrative. But Imlac is not the only narrator in Rasselas who mediates between the reader and the events by summarizing and extracting general lessons. There is also the thirdperson narrator, who, in fact, presents the bulk of the tale. This narrator tends to be no more vivid or circumstantial than the pedantic Imlac. For example: "They travelled forward by easy

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journeys, being all unaccustomed to toil or difficulty, and knowing, that though they might be missed, they could not be persued. In a f e w days they came into a more populous region, where Imlac was diverted with the admiration which his companions expressed at the diversity of manners, stations, and employments" (15, 62). The reader is unable to share Imlac's amusement since the narrator has not seen fit to tell us what individual sights or events so impressed the innocent travelers or to describe the reactions that the worldly Imlac found so diverting. It is enough for the reader to be informed that, as a general rule, those w h o had heretofore been immured in the Happy Valley admire things that are familiar to Imlac, who, in turn, is amused by their admiration. Now, since Rasselas has set out to examine the various modes of life in order to discover which is most conducive to happiness, it might be supposed that the technique of narrative summation to which I have been pointing is intended to rush the reader through the interstitial material that lies between those central episodes that throw light on Rasselas's "choice of life." A n d it is indeed the case that more space is given to these central episodes than to the "on the road" experiences that precede or connect them. But the greater space is not devoted to more detailed narration of events but to more extensive generalizations, more voluble statements of the lessons that have been learned from the encounters. Each of these encounters is narrated in one of three ways. The first is for the third-person narrator to tell us what Rasselas, or Nekayah, has learned from the observation of a given category of people. In chapter 1 7 , for example, in which "The Prince Associates with Young Men of Spirit and Gaiety," the narrator synthesizes the young man's experiences into generalizations: "To such societies he was readily admitted, but a f e w days brought him back weary and disgusted. Their mirth w a s without images, their laughter without motive; their pleasures were gross and sensual, in which the mind had no part; their conduct w a s at once wild and mean; they laughed at order and at law, but the frown of power dejected, and the eye of wisdom abashed them" (17, 68-69). chapter 25, likewise, the narrator transmutes Nekayah's observations of the shallow vanity of the daughters of "many families" into the lessons that she has learned: "She found their thoughts narrow, their wishes low, and their merriment often artificial. Their pleasures,

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poor as they were, could not be preserved pure, but were embittered by petty competitions and worthless emulation. They were always jealous of the beauty of each other; of a quality to which solicitude can add nothing, and from which detraction can take nothing away. Many were in love with triflers like themselves" (25, 92)-

The second way of synthesizing the lessons and suppressing the actual experiences from which the lessons are supposedly derived is by having Rasselas or Nekayah utter their own generalizations instead of having them mediated by the omniscient narrator. But these summations are, except for the quotation marks, indistinguishable from those of the narrator and do not bring the reader appreciably closer to the experiences themselves. In chapter 26, for example, Nekayah's observations about domestic life are given, as it were, in her own words: "In families, where there is or is not poverty, there is commonly discord: if a kingdom be, as Imlac tells us, a great family, a family likewise is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions. A n unpractised observer expects the love of parents and children to be constant and equal; but this kindness seldom continues beyond the years of infancy: in a short time the children become rivals to their parents. Benefits are allayed by reproaches, and gratitude debased by envy." (26, 95)

The third category of episodes are those in which the lessons are not mediated by the narrator or by Rasselas or Nekayah but are presented by interlocutors who sum up the lessons learned from their own mode of life. The hermit, for example, lists the disadvantages of his secluded life but, again, does not narrate examples in such a way as to let the reader vicariously experience them: "I have been for some time unsettled and distracted: my mind is disturbed with a thousand perplexities of doubt and vanities of imagination, which hourly prevail upon me, because I have no opportunities of relaxation or diversion. I am sometimes ashamed to think that I could not secure myself from vice, but by retiring from the exercise of virtue, and begin to suspect that I was rather impelled by resentment, than led by devotion, into solitude. My fancy riots in scenes of folly, and I lament that I have lost so much, and have gained so little." (21, 8 2 - 8 3 )

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The hermit is speaking, but it might as well be Imlac or the thirdperson narrator, wisely discoursing on the shortcomings of the life of solitude. 22 For what we are getting from the hermit is precisely what we would have gotten from them, not the individual experiences that gave rise to the conclusions, nor even a single illustrative anecdote, but only the lessons themselves. GENRES AND HABITS OF MIND My claim that Rasselas is characterized by a mode of narration that suppresses the events themselves in favor of the lessons to be learned from them is probably much less controversial than my claim that this technique is anomalous or paradoxical in the context of the tale's inductivist program. Traditional discussions of Johnson's literary and intellectual style might readily give rise to objections to my claim that the narrative mode of Rasselas is somehow anomalous. One possible objection might appeal to the work's genre, another sort might appeal to Johnson's habits of mind. There is something of a critical tradition aimed at defining the nature of the literary genre to which Rasselas belongs, thereby warding off complaints about the work's alleged deficiencies. The defense built into this tradition seems to be premised on the notion that misguided readers expect Rasselas to do what novels do and are disappointed when it fails to do so. The tale does not meet the requirements of the novel because it belongs to a different genre, that of the apologue, a genre whose "informing principle" is one that results in a fiction that, to quote Sheldon Sacks, "from beginning to end has been organized so that . . . interest in what will happen to any character, or to the altering relationship among a group of characters, has been deftly subordinated to consideration of the thematic statement which dictated their inclusion in the first place." In the novel, by contrast, according to Sacks, "ethical statements . . . are always subordinated to the informing principle of represented action." 23 The apologue thus has as its very essence the exemplification of themes rather than the representation of actions. Accordingly, an advocate of such a view might be tempted to greet my claim that Rasselas's mode of narration is at odds with its empiricist program by charging that I am bringing the wrong generic expectations to bear on the reading of Rasselas.

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It is important to recognize, however, that in pointing out the anomaly implicit in a mode of discourse that thwarts the inductivist program that generated it, I have not raised an aesthetic complaint and have not appealed to novelistic criteria. Nor does my analysis presuppose that a more inductivist mode of narration would change Rasselas from an apologue to a novel. This can easily be demonstrated by means of a brief comparison between Rasselas and Candide. The publication of the two works in the same year has been seen as a remarkable literary coincidence. Both works send innocent young men on extensive and sobering travels by means of which they come to reject optimistic views about life. Both works deflect emotional involvement with the fates of their protagonists in order to focus the reader's attention on larger philosophical issues. Both works, it might be added, are supposedly set in exotic locales but provide precious little of the concrete descriptions, or local color, that w e tend to associate with novels. 24 In these respects, both works would seem to meet the definition of the apologue. (Indeed, unless the genre theorists w h o have labored to define Rasselas as an apologue can populate their generic category with other works, one might begin to suspect that the definition of the apologue serves merely as an ad hoc justification of Rasselas.) But Candide's avoidance of emotional involvement or realistic description is not accomplished by transmuting the experiences themselves into generalizations expressed by a mediating narrator. Rather, Candide keeps the reader's attention on the larger philosophical issues by dint of the sheer profusion of events. In this respect, Candide has been compared to slapstick silent film comedies, such as the Keystone Cops movies, in which sympathy is suppressed not because the catastrophes are not shown but because so many of them are shown in rapid succession, and because the protagonists comically d e f y probability by surviving each catastrophe. Johnson's tale, I suspect, has never been likened to the Keystone Cops. Candide, in short, is not a novel and would seem to fit the definition of the apologue, but its mode of narration nonetheless remains consistent with Voltaire's own empiricist pronouncements. In fact, Voltaire had, in his initial response to the Lisbon earthquake, the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne of 1756, answered those w h o cry "Tout est bien," by declaring "L'Univers vous dément." 25 In Candide, it is the young protagonist's mentor Pangloss w h o

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declares "Tout est bien," and the tale may be seen to be set up in such a w a y as to allow the universe to refute him—that is, to make a mockery of his cosmic optimism by means of the rapid narration of the facts of experience, the narrative depiction of a universe filled with catastrophic events. The reader is given the experiences themselves, is asked to share Candide's experience of the world, and, on the basis of that experience, is expected to reject the theories that clash with experience. Thus, seeing Rasselas as belonging to a nonnovelistic genre does nothing to explain a w a y the anomaly with which I am concerned. Instead of being allowed to share Rasselas's experiences, Johnson's reader, unlike the reader of Candide and other apologues, is forced into the position from which the fictional protagonist has escaped— that of the passive recipient of precepts allegedly derived from someone else's experiences. Whereas Candide's experiences refute the precepts of his mentor, Rasselas's experiences, of course, serve to confirm Imlac's precepts. But what makes this mode of narration paradoxical is the fact that this "experimental" confirmation of Imlac's moral precepts takes place, as it were, offstage. Although the quest for experimental verification of these precepts generates the fictional journey, the narrative suppresses the experiences and transmutes them into precepts. Precepts, as it turns out, are confirmed by precepts. I am not suggesting, of course, that Voltaire is any less in control of his story than is Johnson, that he is any less concerned with sustaining or attacking doctrines by means of exemplification. But while Johnson, like Voltaire, wishes to appeal to the prestige of inductivism, he is less willing to play the narrative role of an inductivist—he is less willing to (appear to) step aside and let the facts speak for themselves. The second sort of objection that might be raised against my claim that the narrative mode of Rasselas is anomalous would appeal not to the genre of the work but to the fundamental habits of mind of its author. Johnson, after all, both as a writer and as a conversationalist, is someone w h o habitually expresses himself in moral precepts and grand generalizations. Just as it is hard to imagine him writing a novel, it is also hard to imagine him writing Candide. From the perspective of Johnson's habit of mind, it might be argued, there is nothing anomalous about the way Rasselas stresses

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conclusions rather than the facts of experience on which these conclusions are supposedly based. One w a y of responding to such an objection would be by using it as an occasion to raise my observation about Rasselas to a higher level of significance. That is, we could ask w h y someone who places so much value on observation and experiment, and who sees it as conducive to wisdom, would insist on habitually setting forth his wisdom in a truncated form, cut off from the experience on which it is based. However, I will decline to raise the stakes in this manner, not simply because I do not aspire to deal with the general issue of Johnson's character or habit of mind but also because I am not convinced that Johnson is incapable either of telling a story or of setting forth his conclusions in the context of the evidence on which they are based. A s for story telling, w e need look no farther than Rasselas itself— namely, the story of the abduction of Pekuah. This beloved companion of Princess Nekayah is kidnapped in chapter 33; news of her is sought in chapter 34; the princess "languishes for want of Pekuah" and receives sage advice in chapter 35; the "progress of sorrow" is described in chapter 36; Pekuah is ransomed and reunited with her mistress in chapter 37; and she narrates her adventures—in extraordinary detail—in chapters 38 and 39. This episode of kidnapping and captivity is the only point in Rasselas at which the tale actually resembles the oriental romances to which it is otherwise so superficially related. 26 A n d although we may well speculate whether Johnson decided to include this single narrative episode—centering on a staple convention of the romance tradition—in order to establish a token connection to the genre that was otherwise being excluded, it is sufficient for our present purposes to point out that this narration of an actual adventure, so conspicuous in the context of the tale, serves to remind us that Johnson is not constitutionally incapable of telling a story. 27 Whatever Johnson's reasons for including this adventure, its presence suggests that the rest of the discourse of Rasselas suppresses events for a reason. For an example of a Johnsonian narrative that includes generalizations along with the evidence from which they are drawn, we may conveniently mention the Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Richard B. Schwartz, while celebrating Johnson's Baconi-

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anism, contrasts Rasselas (and the other "anthology pieces"), "where w e see the distillation of experience, and where a focus on process rather than product is lost," with the journey, in which Johnson "makes clear the facts or events which lead to general comment." 2 " If w e accept Schwartz's distinction between two modes of presentation in Johnson's oeuvre, then there would be no basis for attributing the narrative mode of Rasselas to Johnson's fundamental habits of mind. This leaves us once again with the need to explain w h y Johnson suppresses the instructive events in precisely that work in which the virtues of experience as a moral teacher have been conspicuously valorized. The explanation that I wish to offer has to do with Johnson's attitude toward the complex relationship between, on the one hand, the inductivist claim that moral knowledge can be obtained through experience and, on the other hand, the traditional association between moral knowledge and revealed religion.

INDUCTION A N D REVELATION

In the Great Instauration Bacon w a s at pains to protect his program for the inductivist study of the natural world from the charge that it constituted an impious transgression of the divine realm. In defending the knowledge to be obtained through the diligent observation of the natural world, Bacon had occasion to distinguish such knowledge from moral knowledge: My first admonition (which was also my prayer) is that men confine the sense within the limits of duty in respect of things divine: for the sense is like the sun, which reveals the face of earth, but seals and shuts up the face of heaven. My next, that in flying from this evil they fall not into the opposite error, which they will surely do if they think that the inquisition of nature is in any part interdicted or forbidden. For it was not that pure and uncorrupted natural knowledge whereby Adam gave names to the creatures according to their propriety, which gave occasion to the fall. It was the ambitious and proud desire of moral knowledge to judge of good and evil, to the end that man may revolt from God and give laws to himself, which was the form and manner of the temptation.w

However, partly as a result of the success and growing prestige of science and of inductivism as a mode of inquiry, many eigh-

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teenth-century thinkers came to cast off Bacon's distinction between the human realm of natural knowledge and the divine realm of moral knowledge. The orderliness of the universe, as revealed by science, proclaimed the wisdom of God. But if God's wisdom was inscribed in nature, w h y should God's moral wisdom be excluded? Why should the observation of nature not yield moral knowledge as well as scientific knowledge? Just as inductive science is based on sense perception, ethics could emerge as a science that was also based on sense perception—namely, on a moral sense that could, independently of religion, reveal the moral truths that should guide our lives. 30 We saw in chapters 2 and 3 that the notion that moral knowledge is obtainable independently of revelation was not in itself unorthodox but that there was the possibility—exploited by both the seventeenth-century deist tradition and by Pierre Bayle— of giving precedence to the morality obtained through the light of reason and thereby challenging the authority of Scripture itself— or of those w h o claimed the authority to interpret Scripture. In one sense, the appeals of eighteenth-century ethics to a perceptual model of moral epistemology, or to a Lockean version of rationalism that compares ideas in order to ascertain their congruence or "fitness," is neither more nor less threatening to orthodoxy than was the seventeenth-century appeal to the inner light of reason as an alternative source of moral knowledge. But eighteenth-century moral epistemology was increasingly linked to a transformation in the conception of human nature. Human beings, according to the new view, were seen to be naturally inclined to act in accordance with the moral knowledge that was available to them. Such an approach to ethics and human nature would challenge Christianity not simply by challenging its epistemoiogical authority but also by challenging the necessity or the desirability of the entire structure of rewards and punishments that underlay its moral authority. When virtue is understood as the performance of moral actions on the basis of their intrinsic value, then God's approval and God's rewards can come to be seen as superfluous to moral virtue or even as inimical to it. Although this general view was developed in the seventeenth century by Benjamin Whichcote and the Cambridge Platonists, 31 it achieved its most pointed and vehement expression in the writings of Shaftesbury:

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If . . . there be a belief or conception of a Deity who is considered only as powerful over his creature, and enforcing obedience to his absolute will by particular rewards and punishments; and if on this account, through hope merely of reward, or fear of punishment, the creature be incited to do the good he hates, or restrained from doing the ill to which he is not otherwise in the least degree averse, there is in this case . . . no virtue or goodness whatsoever. The creature, notwithstanding his good conduct, is intrinsically of as little worth as if he acted in his natural way, when under no dread or terror of any sort. There is no more of rectitude, piety or sanctity in a creature thus reformed, than there is meekness or gentleness in a tiger strongly chained, or innocence and sobriety in a monkey under the discipline of the whip. 12

But the fact that developments in eighteenth-century ethics posed these dangers to orthodox Christianity did not result in a clear-cut gulf between the new ethical theorists and the defenders of orthodoxy. For reasons that should, by this point in my argument, be quite familiar, there were thinkers who wished to embrace the prestige of new epistemologies and of new views of human nature without compromising the conceptions of order and authority to which they were deeply committed. For our purposes, the most interesting example of an attempt to reconcile the new movements in ethical theory with the traditional authority of Christianity is to be found in the work of Samuel Clarke. On the one hand, Clarke sees "the same necessary and eternal different Relations, that different Things bear to one another, and the same consequent Fitness or Unfitness of the Application of different things or different Relations to one another" as impelling God to "choose to act only what is agreeable to Justice, Equity, Goodness, and Truth" and as determining "the Wills of all subordinate rational Beings, to govern all Their Actions by the same Rules." 33 That is to say, God and humans obey the same laws of justice and goodness, and our moral obligation to be governed by what is fit is therefore independent of God's will and of the rewards and punishments that he sets down to enforce his will. But "it does not at all follow," according to Clarke, "that a good Man ought to have no respect to Rewards and Punishments, or that Rewards and Punishments are not absolutely necessary to maintain the practice of Virtue and Righteousness in this present

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World." For despite the fact that w e can recognize our moral obligations independently of Christianity, our autonomous pursuit of justice is impeded by temptation: The Question N o w in the general practice of the World, supposing all expectation of Rewards and Punishments set aside, will not be, whether a Man would choose Virtue for its o w n sake, and avoid Vice; But the practice of Vice, is accompanied with great Temptations and Allurments of Pleasure and Profit, and the practice of Virtue is often threatned with great Calamities, Losses, and sometimes even with Death itself. A n d this alters the Question, and destroys the practice of that which appears so reasonable in the whole Speculation, and introduces a necessity of Rewards and Punishments."

Samuel Johnson is able to follow Clarke in accepting the notion of an autonomous morality and at the same time in attempting to reconcile this with the need for a Christian system of rewards and punishments. 3 5 Indeed, in his preface to Dodsley's Preceptor (1748), Johnson precisely follows the main lines of Clarke's argument. He establishes "Morality" as an independent science by likening it to logic. Just as logic detects false arguments, morality justifies itself by "proving the Deformity, the Reproach, and the Misery of all Deviations" from moral behavior. But no sooner does Johnson grant this status to ethical analysis than he immediately goes on to stress the indispensability of religion: Yet it is to be remembered, that the L a w s of mere Morality are of no coercive Power; and, however they may, by Conviction of their Fitness please the Reasoner in the Shade, when the Passions stagnate without Impulse, and the Appetites are secluded from their Objects, they will be of little Force against the Ardour of Desire, or the Vehemence of Rage, amidst the Pleasures and Tumults of the World. To counteract the power of Temptations, Hope must be excited by the Prospect of Rewards, and Fear by the Expectation of Punishment; and Virtue may owe her Panegyricks to Morality, but must derive her Authority from Religion. w

In painting this picture of a harmonious relationship between ethics and religion, Johnson does not seem to deny that the "reasoner in the shade" can obtain moral knowledge, or even that such knowledge can be tied to virtuous inclinations; he is simply arguing that neither such knowledge nor such inclinations can be expected to produce virtuous behavior. For virtuous behavior, we need the

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coercive power of Christianity, with its threats of punishment and its promise of rewards. 37 Thus Johnson attempts to accept new moral epistemologies while refraining from accepting new views about human nature. For Shaftesbury, man was a microcosm of a harmonious universe and had a natural desire to be in accord with that universe by performing actions that were harmonious in themselves—that is, by being virtuous. Johnson had no such view of human nature and, as he tells us in his review of Jenyns's A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, the need for "penal sanctions" arose precisely because "no man can be obliged, by nature, to prefer, ultimately, the happiness of others to his own." 18 Johnson's attempt to accept new moral epistemologies while rejecting the new view of human nature, and hence to reconcile ethics and religion, is ultimately difficult to maintain, and not simply because moral theorists do not always limit themselves the way Clarke did, by leaving room for divine sanctions. The most decisive problem for any attempt to reconcile secular ethics and religion is the rise of teleological ethics. Long before the advent of the new moral epistemologies of the eighteenth century, orthodoxy, as we have seen in chapter 2, had allowed space for the truths of natural religion, including moral truths. As long as these "natural" guides to religious truth did not try to overstep their bounds, they were useful to orthodoxy in that they could be adduced as independent confirmation of the truths of revelation. This possibility, of course, depended on the fact that natural religion, as far as it went, duplicated the truths of Christian revelation. This conformity, in addition to allowing reason to serve as a handmaiden to religion, also provided a mechanism that could be employed at such time as advocates of natural religion attempted to give reason precedence over revelation. Such arrogation of authority could be met with the argument that what had been presented by reason as its own truths had actually been learned from religion. 39 But orthodoxy's capacity to thus keep reason in a subordinate position depended on the fact that natural religion did not claim to have knowledge that was at odds with the truths of religion. Even Shaftesbury, however naive Johnson might consider his views about human nature, conceived of virtuous behavior in a way that was in general accord with the teachings of Christianity, not only insofar as unselfish actions were the ones that were valued

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but also insofar as actions were seen to be good or bad in themselves. Shaftesbury's successors in the moral sense tradition, however, notably Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, would bring in a teleological criterion; that is, they would move ethics in the direction of what we would now call utilitarianism. Not only could humans determine for themselves what was morally good and act in accordance with that determination, without being motivated by the threat of sanctions or hope of rewards, but they might determine that an action was good or bad not in itself but in light of its long-term consequences. At this point Johnson's attempt to establish a harmonious relationship between ethics and religion can no longer be sustained. In the review of A Free Inquiry, Johnson writes: the consequences of h u m a n actions being sometimes uncertain, and sometimes remote, it is not possible, in many cases, for most men, nor in all cases, for any man, to determine what actions will ultimately produce happiness, and therefore, it w a s proper that revelation should lay d o w n a rule to be followed, invariably, in opposition to appearances, and, in every change of circumstances, by which we m a y be certain to promote the general felicity, and be set free from the dangerous temptation of doing evil that good may come

If human beings are allowed to determine the principles of morality on their own, independently of revelation, there is the danger that they will devise or obey an ethical system that violates the divine commandments.41 Coercive religious authority then must ultimately function not simply to compel humans to act in accordance with the moral knowledge that they possess but to keep them from following false claims to moral knowledge: therefore to the instructions of infinite wisdom, it was necessary that infinite power should add penal sanctions. That every man, to w h o m those instructions shall be imparted, may know, that he can never, ultimately, injure himself by benefiting others, or ultimately, by injuring others benefit himself; but that, however the lot of the good a n d bad may be huddled together in the seeming confusion of our present state, the time shall undoubtedly come, when the most virtuous will be most happy. 4 2

If, in the confusion of our present state, there is a danger that we may be mistaken about what actions promote general felicity, then there must also be a danger of being mistaken about what is

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harmonious or fitting—if these determinations are made without due deference to the authority of religion. In a word, any attempt to obtain moral knowledge independently of revelation is potentially subversive of religious authority and social order.43 THE DANGER OF INDUCTIVISM

This sense of danger, I submit, informs Rasselas. In chapter 34, Imlac instructs Nekayah not to reproach herself for behavior that had ultimately resulted in the abduction of her beloved servant and companion, Pekuah.44 His consoling speech turns out to be a condemnation of utilitarian ethics: "Great princess . . . do not reproach yourself for your virtue, or consider that as blameable by which evil has accidentally been caused. . . . When w e act according to our duty, w e commit the event to him by whose laws our actions are governed, and w h o will suffer none to be finally punished for obedience. When, in prospect of some good, whether natural or moral, w e break the rules prescribed us, w e withdraw from the direction of superiour wisdom, and take all consequences upon ourselves. Man cannot so far know the connection of causes and events, as that he may venture to do w r o n g in order to do right." (34, 122)

Here, as in the review of A Free Inquiry, the ignorance and confusion that militate against attempts to apply utilitarian criteria overflow into an attack on other moral epistemologies that attempt to supplant revelation. Accordingly, Rasselas also contains a satiric attack on the philosopher who thinks that he can extract moral knowledge by observing the harmony or fitness of things. In chapter 22, entitled "The Happiness of a Life Led according to Nature," we meet the philosopher who responds impatiently to the claim that "the time will surely come, when desire will no longer be our torment, and no man shall be wretched but by his own fault." He denies that the condition being envisioned is a future one and asserts that it is in fact "the present condition of a wise man." Indeed, he goes on to say, " T h e time is already come, when none are wretched but by their own fault. Nothing is more idle, than to enquire after happiness, which nature has kindly placed within our reach'" (22, 85). This is the philosopher who will expatiate upon the happiness

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of a life led according to nature. A n d since he will use the same language that had been used by Samuel Clarke, whom Johnson had admired and w h o m he had virtually paraphrased in his preface to the Preceptor, there may be some surprise in seeing Johnson turn so decisively against him. But since the philosopher of chapter 22 has begun by challenging the Christian, and Johnsonian, view that the cessation of torments and desires will come only in a future state, and since he substitutes the claim that happiness is easily accessible in this life, his philosophy cannot serve as a harmless adjunct to Christianity. What he sets forth is a dangerous alternative to Christianity: " 'The w a y to be happy is to live according to nature, in obedience to that universal and unalterable law with which every heart is originally impressed. . . . Let us therefore . . . throw a w a y the incumbrance of precepts, which they w h o utter them with so much pride and pomp do not understand, and carry with us this simple and intelligible maxim, That deviation from nature is deviation from happiness'" (22, 85-87). When Rasselas inquires precisely what it means to live according to nature (and hence, implicitly, how we can do without precepts), the philosopher responds with jargon that throws no further light on the subject and reveals the emptiness of his reasoning: '"To live according to nature, is to act always with due regard to the fitness arising from the relations and qualities of causes and effects; to concur with the great and unchangeable scheme of universal felicity; to co-operate with the general disposition and tendency of the present system of things'" (22, 88). The speculations of the philosopher in the shade, which the Johnson of the preface to the Preceptor had been able to accept—provided that they remained subordinate to the moral teachings and penal sanctions of Christianity—have here become unmoored from the authority of religion and hence are ridiculed as dangerous nonsense. On the surface, this episode resembles others that w e have looked at, insofar as it presents an individual w h o distills his experiences and observations and, for the benefit of Rasselas and the reader, sums up what he has learned in eloquent maxims. But there is something that sets this episode apart in a very significant way. In most other episodes, where characters have decided that their modes of life have been unsatisfactory—the hermit, for example—the reader is being asked to accept the conclusion derived

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from the unnarrated experiences. But in this case, the conclusions of the philosopher who claims that he can dispense with precepts and obtain moral knowledge strictly from nature are presented as highly dubious. Rasselas becomes aware that the man's claims to moral knowledge amount to nothing more than double talk, and the reader shares Rasselas's experience and learns along with him. In this episode, then, we have a conspicuous exception to the narrative mode that suppresses the events and gives us generalizations. The philosopher's generalizations are worthless, and that is precisely what we need to learn. But, instead of a generalization about the folly of the philosopher, we are shown the folly itself and are left only with the mildly ironic remark that "The prince soon found that this was one of the sages whom he should understand less as he heard him longer." Walter Jackson Bate has characterized Johnson as a satirist manqué, someone who restrains his satiric instincts as a result of his sympathy with his victim. Rasselas represents, for Bate, the culmination of this tendency; the tale "embodies the fading of satire into a more profound analysis of human experience." 45 In effect, Bate is suggesting that satire is dissipated in the book because Johnson is too close to his victims. In the light of our analysis, a quite different explanation suggests itself—namely, that the various people who make bad moral choices tend to escape satiric treatment, not because Johnson is too close to them but because the reader is too far away. Narrative satire normally works by showing folly, by narrating events that make folly apparent. The ridicule emerges from the fact that the reader is made to see the behavior in a different light from that in which the satirized characters see themselves. And the moral lesson emerges from this disparity in viewpoints. In the various episodes of Rasselas in which narrative itself is suppressed in favor of the general precept, satire too is being suppressed. Consider the following example from Imlac's narrative: "'The empereur asked me many questions concerning my country and my travels; and though I cannot now recollect any thing that he uttered above the power of a common man, he dismissed me astonished at his wisdom, and enamoured of his goodness'" (9, 37). The impulse here is satiric, but not the execution. To see that this is satire manqué, we need only imagine what Swift would have done with the encounter that Johnson compresses into a single sentence.

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S w i f t w o u l d h a v e let u s hear w h a t the emperor had to say and w o u l d h a v e allowed u s to witness his folly and to d r a w our o w n conclusions about it—perhaps with the help of an ironic contrast between Gulliver's facile admiration of the emperor and Swift's o w n scorn. The p h e n o m e n o n of satire manqué, like the narrative technique on which I h a v e been focusing m y attention, thus seems to result f r o m the suppression of narrated events. The narrative m o d e that I h a v e been at pains to describe might, in fact, aptly be dubbed "narrative manqué." By contrast, the key episode just discussed—of the philosopher w h o claims to be able to obtain moral k n o w l e d g e from observing the h a r m o n y of nature—departs not only from the dominant m o d e of narrative m a n q u é but also from the prevailing satire manqué. The reader, for once, is obtaining the instructive experience in an unmediated form, and the m o d e of instruction is satiric as well as narrative. We learn along with Rasselas because we see, along with him, the philosopher's folly. Satire is often a response to perceived danger, and the philosopher is d a n g e r o u s — a n d hence deserving of ridicule—because he claims to be able to do without revelation and without the divine sanctions that preserve the social order. The departure from the usual narrative m a n q u é and satire m a n q u é in this crucial episode thus ultimately serves to throw light on the impulse behind that narrative mode. For although the tale is premised on the inductivist notion that moral k n o w l e d g e can be obtained through experience, J o h n s o n also recognizes that those w h o claim to be able to obtain moral k n o w l e d g e through experience m a y threaten the public order. M y attempt to appropriate Bate's v i e w of Johnson as a satirist m a n q u é a n d to turn it to m y o w n p u r p o s e s has left out of account one of Bate's most conspicuous examples, the treatment of the stoic philosopher of chapter 18. In fact, Bate's key example fits into m y analysis more comfortably than it does into his o w n . The episode of the stoic philosopher, w h o told m e n h o w to achieve happiness by controlling the passions, resembles that of the philosopher w h o advocates living according to nature. In both cases, teachers of morality beguile their auditors into thinking that they can achieve happiness, and, in both cases, Rasselas is able to see through their pretensions. The stoic, it is true, unlike his Shaftesburyean coun-

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terpart, is not satirized—because the prince's "humanity would not suffer him to insult misery with reproof" (18, 76). But not even Swift would have ridiculed a man whose pretensions have been exposed through the death of a beloved child. Rather than considering the treatment of the stoic as satire manqué, one should recognize that this w a y w a r d philosopher is simply being punished in a different way—that is, through personal misfortune rather than through ridicule. The advice that Imlac wisely gives to Rasselas regarding the stoic in fact applies equally to both philosophers: " ' B e not too hasty . . . to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like m e n ' " (18, 74). They treat moral knowledge as obtainable independently of revelation and ignore the truth that is imparted by revelation and confirmed, or so Johnson tells us, by experience—namely, that men are not angels but sinners, incapable of happiness in this life, but liable to be misled by dangerous illusions fostered by imagination. Rasselas, however, by dint of his own growing perspicacity, is able to see through the moralist of nature and does not require the revelatory power of calamity. Hence Johnson, in a manner reminiscent of Berkeley's in the Alciphron, is able to undermine philosophical pretension through satire.

THE CHOICE OF LIFE

In focusing on the issues of moral epistemology and moral psychology, it might seem as if I have given short shrift to what is ostensibly the principal theme of Rasselas—namely, the experimental quest for the "choice of life." That is, it might seem as if I have substituted more theoretical, second-order issues surrounding the form of the quest for the more concrete question that Johnson is explicitly addressing, that of how one ought to live one's life. It could be argued, however, that the issues of moral epistemology on which I have been focusing my attention are very much in the foreground of the tale and deeply imbricated with the issue of vocation. It should be recalled that the introduction—in the first section of this chapter—of the epistemological alternatives between which Johnson w a s torn indicated that there was a connection in Johnson's mind between epistemology and occupation or mode of life. That is to say, we saw that the solitary life could give rise to

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rule of imagination and, ultimately, madness. Although I introduced this connection with a detailed discussion of the astronomer, one finds a very similar, although less extreme, connection between mode of life and mode of knowledge in the case of the hermit, who is on the point of abandoning the life of solitude because his mind has been "disturbed with a thousand perplexities of doubt, and vanities of imagination" and because his "fancy riots in scenes of folly" (21, 82-83). Here we are approaching the madness of the secluded astronomer. But the hermit is still sufficiently sane to be aware that this state of distraction and folly is attributable to the lack of "opportunities of relaxation or diversion" (21, 82)—which presumably are associated with life in society. Moreover, he is able to recognize the value of the "counsel and conversation of the good," from which his isolated life has removed him. Accordingly, he has decided "to return into the world" (21, 82-83). Following the hermit chapter is the one on "The Happiness of a Life Led according to Nature," the chapter, that is, that satirizes the moral philosopher who confidently dispenses with the dicta and sanctions of Christian morality. I have already suggested that this satire recalls that which Berkeley had leveled against the free thinkers of Alciphron. In fact, the resemblance to Berkeley extends beyond what the reader is supposed to see as the shallow and incoherent content of the philosopher's thought and touches upon the issue of the philosopher's own "choice of life." We saw that Berkeley linked his attack on the Shaftesburyean free thinkers very much to their urban sociability and preference for conversation over study as a mode of acquiring knowledge. Johnson, likewise, introduces his Shaftesburyean philosopher in the setting of urban society and conversational enlightenment. Chapter 22 begins as follows: "Rasselas went often to an assembly of learned men, who met at stated times to unbend their minds, and compare their opinions. Their manners were somewhat coarse, but their conversation was instructive, and their disputations acute, though sometimes too violent, and often continued until neither controvertist remembered upon what question they began" (22, 84). Coming on the heels of the hermit's yearning for the "counsel and conversation of the good," this not entirely flattering introduction to the discourse of supposedly learned men who live the kind of life that supposedly facilitates the learned exchange and perfection of

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knowledge follows Berkeley in associating the folly of the free thinkers with their mode of life. This juxtaposition, then, between two opposing choices of life serves to reveal not simply that neither "choice" has yielded happiness but also that neither choice is conducive to the moral knowledge that will allow one to determine how earthly happiness is to be achieved. This epistemological dimension, moreover, is not limited to the juxtaposition and mutual undermining of isolation, on the one hand, and of intellectual society, on the other, but reappears in case after case. Consider the chapters immediately preceding the two just discussed. The hedonistic young men of chapter 17, who fail to make provision for the future, suffer from an inability to comprehend wise counsel when they hear it. Their "general chorus of continued laughter" (17, 70) in response to Rasselas's prudent advice indicates that their failing is not merely an inability to live well but also an inability to obtain moral knowledge. In the following chapter, the stoic philosopher, in his inability to live up to his own maxims ("what comfort. . . can truth and reason afford me?" [18, 75-76]), reveals not only that his wisdom does not bring happiness but also that he is incapable of excogitating the true wisdom that is suited to the human condition. The following chapter (19) contrasts the impotence of philosophy with the ignorance of the shepherds; and, again, the emphasis is not on the shepherds' failure to achieve happiness but on their cognitive incapacities: "They were so rude and ignorant, so little able to compare the good with the evil of the occupation, and so indistinct in their narratives and descriptions, that very little could be learned from them" (19, 77). The fact that the various occupations are being examined at least as much in terms of their conduciveness to moral knowledge as in terms of their conduciveness to happiness 46 is reflected by Prince Rasselas's interim summary of his findings in chapter 23: "Rasselas returned home full of reflexions, doubtful how to direct his future steps. Of the way to happiness he found the learned and simple equally ignorant" (23, 89). It would seem, then, that Rasselas has not been looking for an instance of happiness after all; he appears to have been searching for someone, other than Imlac, who can credibly claim to have achieved moral knowledge. This shift in perspective serves to

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u n d e r m i n e further the inductivist project that l a u n c h e d the prince o n his v o y a g e s in the first place. For insofar as h e is searching for s o m e o n e p o s s e s s e d of moral k n o w l e d g e , his e x p e r i m e n t s cease to b e o f f e r i n g to substitute direct e x p e r i e n c e for s u b m i s s i o n to the authority of Imlac. Instead, it a p p e a r s that Rasselas h a s b e e n looki n g for s o m e alternative authority w h o s e experience has y i e l d e d a m o r e positive result t h a n that w h i c h Imlac reported. Yet this search h a s b e e n in v a i n . N o o n e else, either b y dint of experience or rational powers, has m a n a g e d to support his o w n claim to authority. I said earlier that the b o o k ' s e n d o r s e m e n t of Rasselas's inductivist project w a s paradoxical insofar as Rasselas's e x p e r i m e n t s are pres e n t e d as both n e c e s s a r y a n d s u p e r f l u o u s . We are n o w in a better position to appreciate the significance of this p a r a d o x . In setting u p his e x p e r i m e n t , in o f f e r i n g to substitute his o w n experience for the authority of Imlac (and the u n n a m e d m e n t o r w h o p r e c e d e d him), Rasselas is not treating i n d u c t i v i s m as a source of authority in itself b u t m e r e l y as a m e a n s of s e a r c h i n g for the p r o p e r source of authority. A n d the result of that search is to confirm Imlac's o w n authority. Imlac's o w n authority, of c o u r s e , is s u p p o s e d l y based o n his o w n e x p e r i e n c e , a n d Rasselas's e x p e r i m e n t s are s u p p o s e d l y a n empirical test of Imlac's o w n empirical claims. H o w e v e r , insofar as Imlac's o w n authority y i e l d s the claim that the o n l y true h a p p i n e s s is to b e f o u n d in the next life, Imlac's authority m e r g e s w i t h that of r e v e a l e d religion, a n d Imlac's o w n e x p e r i e n c e s m a y a p p e a r to be just as s u p e r f l u o u s as t h o s e of Rasselas. But this is not to s a y that Imlac's authority is b e i n g u n d e r m i n e d . A l t h o u g h the e x p e r i e n c e o n w h i c h correct k n o w l e d g e is b a s e d is a l w a y s d e f e r r e d in Rasselas, a n d a l t h o u g h it ultimately m e r g e s w i t h the truths of revelation, the w o r k u n d e r t a k e s to teach us that w e c a n c o n f i d e n t l y s u b m i t to the w i s d o m of the p o e t since that w i s d o m , a l l e g e d l y b a s e d o n e x p e r i e n c e , accords w i t h the ultimate w i s d o m d e r i v e d f r o m r e v e a l e d religion. T h e p o e t m a y not b e h a p p i e r t h a n a n y o n e else, b u t h e is surely wiser. T h e narration of Rasselas t h u s e m b o d i e s t w o conflicting attitudes t o w a r d moral k n o w l e d g e : n a m e l y , that it can be obtained t h r o u g h e x p e r i e n c e a n d , paradoxically, that a t t e m p t s to obtain it t h r o u g h e x p e r i e n c e (or reason) are d a n g e r o u s a n d potentially s u b v e r s i v e . For p u r p o s e s of the f o r e g o i n g e x p o s i t i o n , I h a v e at times s p o k e n

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as if the narrative mode, insofar as it is the juncture where these conflicting tendencies meet and find expression, is itself paradoxical. In the climate of contemporary theoretical discourse in the humanities, however, there is a danger that my usage may be taken to imply that insofar as Johnson is asserting the authority of experience and then undermining that authority, he is also undermining his o w n authority. Such a reading would be consonant with the conclusions set forth in an interesting recent essay by Frederic Bogel. Bogel argues that "for Johnson the assumption of authority w a s both necessary and necessarily guilt-ridden, and that he sought w a y s to assume and disclaim that authority in a single gesture, evident and unmistakable role-playing being a principal one of those ways." 4 7 Bogel's argument has the virtue of combining the traditional scholarly fascination with Johnsonian eccentricity and the contemporary penchant for showing how writers allegedly deconstruct themselves and thereby undermine their own authority. But the burden of my analysis has not been to isolate Johnsonian idiosyncrasy or to reveal any process of self-deconstraction. Rather it has been to reveal the operation in Johnson's writings of the logic and the rhetoric of ideology that we have encountered in other writers throughout the early modern period. The logic of ideology is not one that founders on contradiction and inconsistency but one that embraces the prestige of contradictory modes of authority; and the rhetoric of ideology is not one that reveals its own operations but one that seeks to obscure them and thus to enhance the process whereby the knowledge claims of one's enemies are coopted. Accordingly, the paradoxical relationship between modern moral epistemology and the traditional authority of religion is something that my analysis attempts to reveal precisely in order to uncover the process by which Johnson conceals it. For Johnson does not wish to undermine his own authority; he wishes to consolidate the competing modes of authority in order to have them serve an overarching ideological purpose. The narrative mode of Rasselas is paradoxical, not insofar as it calls attention to an epistemological and ideological dilemma but insofar as it attempts to resolve that dilemma. Indeed, the fact that previous readers have not remarked on the anomaly that I have found to be at the heart of the tale suggests that the narrative mode of the tale serves not to call attention to a conflict but to smooth it

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over. It may be, in fact, that Johnson's narrative manqué ought to be seen as a rhetorical attempt to resolve Johnson's ambivalent attitude toward moral epistemology. It purports to show that moral wisdom comes through concrete experience, thus warding off the dangers of imagination while adorning its pronouncements with the prestige of empiricism. But meanwhile, it gives the reader— who is, after all, not a Shaftesburyean microcosm of universal order but a potentially dangerous and subversive moral agent, subject to the ardor of desire and the vehemence of rage, and in serious need of precepts and coercion—it gives that reader the chastening voice of authority.48

Notes

CHAPTER i

1. Cf. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; rpt., London, 1984), 130: "Pollution rules, by contrast with moral rules, are unequivocal. They do not depend on intention or a nice balancing of rights and duties. The only material question is whether a forbidden contact has taken place or not." 2. Gerald Graff, "Co-optation," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York, 1989), 169. 3. Ibid., 170. 4. Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston, 1969), 81. Subsequent citations to this essay, indicated by the abbreviation "RT," will be given in the text. 5. Marcuse does not deny that art can carry a "regressive political message," as in the case of Dostoevsky, but since his conception of art is a formalistic one he is able to claim that "the regressive political content is absorbed, aufgehoben in the artistic form: the work as literature" (ibid., 89). 6. In Marcuse's i960 preface to Reason and Revolution, both art and dialectical thought are linked by the "search for an 'authentic language'— the language of negation as the Great Refusal to accept the rules of a game in which the dice are loaded" (Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory [Boston, i960], x). On Marcuse's conception of rationality, see Alex Callinicos, "Repressive Toleration Revisited: Mill, Marcuse, Maclntyre," in Aspects of Toleration: Philosophical Studies, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (London, 1985). 7. See Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1971). 8. Catherine Gallagher, "Marxism and the New Historicism," in The New Historicism, ed. Veeser, 42. 9. Here I retain Marcuse's term for the sake of convenience but add quotation marks because the term perhaps attributes too much self-consciousness to hegemonic forces. 10. George Orwell, "Politics vs. Literature," in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (London, 1950), 64.

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1 1 . Empirically, it can be urged that cultures are not so monolithic as those w h o talk about "conceptual systems," or the closely related "discursive practices" and "interpretive communities," seem to assume (see G r a f f , "Co-optation," 1 7 5 - 8 0 ) . On a more abstract plane, it can be argued that incommensurability is a self-refuting concept, or one that always anchors itself in one reality while denying the existence of another (see Hilary Putnam, "Philosophers and Human Understanding," in Realism and Reason [Cambridge, 1983]; Oscar Kenshur, "The Rhetoric of Incommensurability," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42 [1984]: 3 7 5 - 8 1 ; Paisley Livingston, Literary Knowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science [Ithaca, N.Y., 1988]). 1 2 . Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 337. 1 3 . See Richard Rorty, "Nineteenth-Century Idealism and TwentiethCentury Textualism," in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, 1982). 14. On this, see Robert Markley and Oscar Kenshur, " A n Exchange on Ideological Criticism," Critical Inquiry 1 5 (1989): 647-68. 1 5 . Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, England, 1968), 140; further references to this work, abbreviated L, will be included in the text. 16. J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes's System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories (London, 1965), 14, 1 5 - 1 6 . 1 7 . Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970; rpt., N e w York, 1982), xxi. 18. Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore, 1982), 3. 19. I make such a comparison in greater detail in "Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism," Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 3 3 5 - 5 3 20. For an analysis of another aspect of Hobbes's ideological relationship to the Puritans in the context of later developments in moral theory, see Oscar Kenshur, " ' T h e Tumour of Their O w n Hearts': Relativism, Aesthetics, and the Rhetoric of Démystification," in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, N.J., 1993). 2 1 . Francis Bacon, New Organon, in The Neio Organon and Related Writings, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (New York, i960), book 1 , aphorism 50. Further references to this work, abbreviated NO, will be included in the text. 22. See Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England, rev. ed. (1961; rpt. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), 1 1 5 - 1 8 and passim. See also Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford, 1965), chapter 3. More recent scholarship, notably that of Charles Webster (The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626-1660 [New York, 1976]), has s h o w n that the "Baconianism" of the Puritans w a s really a matter of various "Baconianisms," various w a y s of interpreting the new scientific philosophy

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on the basis of its ideological usefulness to specific political factions among the Puritans. Such discriminations, pointing as they do to the fact that links between politics and epistemology are constructed by interested parties in specific historical contexts, will fit nicely into m y overall critique. Meanwhile, for the immediate purposes of a relatively schematic argument, I trust that my monolithic treatment of the Puritans serves a heuristic function without being at all misleading. 23. See Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, 1 1 2 - 1 3 . 24. The fact that bitter political enemies could reject the established learning with a single rhetorical voice has its obverse in the fact that the new science w a s embraced by groups of varying religious and political stripes. See Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge, 1981), chapter 5. 25. John Dury, The Reformed School, in Samuel Hartliband the Advancement of Learning, ed. Charles Webster, Cambridge Texts and Studies in the History of Education (Cambridge, 1970), 150. 26. In chapter 3 we will see how Pierre Bayle, a later writer in the Calvinist tradition, will combine two other apparently irreconcilable approaches, Cartesian rationalism and Pyrrhonistic skepticism, in an argument for religious toleration. 27. Elsewhere, in discussing the enthusiasts' mode of biblical interpretation, Hobbes, again in rhetoric reminiscent of that used in conventional attacks on Scholasticism, will characterize their failure to interpret the parts in the context of the whole as a kind of willful obfuscation: "by casting atomes of Scripture, as dust before mens eyes, [the enthusiasts] make every thing more obscure than it is" (L, 626). 28. In reference to the contemporary mode of ideological criticism that associates Hobbes's logocentrism with his authoritarianism, it is worth noting that Hobbes's attack on "nesses," "tudes," and "ties" is part of the general attack on the so-called occult qualities, an attack linked, in turn, to the nominalism with which Hobbes and other seventeenth-century philosophers—dualists as well as materialists—rejected the philosophical realism that the Scholastics had inherited from Aristotle. That is to say, Hobbes, like other nominalists, rejected the notion that words denoted essences. His attempt to smooth over the considerable differences between the Scholastics and the enthusiasts thus utilizes not only a rejection of spiritual entities but also the rejection of an essentialist theory of language. 29. Jonathan Swift, "The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit," in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford, 1 9 3 9 68), 1 : 1 7 6 - 7 7 . 30. But Swift's defense of humanism and authority did not require him to defend the Scholastics. Thus he could give an edge to his attack on the modern scholar Bentley by linking him to the speculative thinking of the Scholastics. See Battle of the Books, in Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Davis, 1:145. 3 1 . To be more precise, with respect to the early modern period, conflict

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gives rise to skepticism, and skepticism gives rise to epistemology. See Richard H. Popkin's discussion of the sixteenth-century revival of skepticism, and its relationship to seventeenth-century epistemology, in The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979)32. Michel de Montaigne, " A p o l o g i e de Raimond Sebond," in Essais, ed. Maurice Rat, 2 vols. (Paris, 1962), 1:559. (Translations mine throughout, except w h e r e otherwise indicated. Archaic French orthography has been m o d e r n i z e d throughout.) 33. T h e fact that ideological valences are not intrinsic to theories allows, as w e will see in chapters 2 and 3, not only for diverse ideological uses for the same theory but also for a possible divergence between, on the one hand, the political valence that an author attributes to his or her v i e w s and, on the other hand, the ultimate political tendency of his or her text. That is to say, the fluidity of the relationship between theory and politics allows not only various political d e p l o y m e n t s of theories but also varying degrees of disingenuousness concerning a given explicit deployment. Consequently, the interpretive procedure that will be applied in the remaining chapters will not be one that contents itself with s h o w i n g h o w authors assign n e w ideological valences to theories; instead it will strive to s h o w h o w those assignments relate to larger patterns of commitments embodied in the texts. 34. See Jtirgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1970), 98-99. In offering his distinction, Habermas clearly recognizes that the "preideological" is no less concerned with legitimation than is the "ideological." The legitimating function of the preideological is merely carried out uncritically—that is, without any epistemological self-legitimation. C o m p a r e this with Jean-François Lyotard's distinction between "narrative k n o w l e d g e " a n d science. Lyotard claims that since narrative is implicitly self-legitimating, it is relatively tolerant, and that since science requires the rejection of competing m o d e s of k n o w l e d g e , it is intolerant and imperialistic (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi [Minneapolis, 1984], 27). Lyotard seems to ignore the historical fact that "narrative tolerance," to the extent that it exists, is attributable precisely to an absence of competing narratives and that it is precisely the challenge of competing narratives or the impetus to dethrone established legitimations that gives rise to the epistemological self-justification that he associates with science. Insofar as Lyotard sees science as intrinsically tyrannical, his v i e w resembles Ryan's, not only in the political valence that it finds in objectivism but in the apparently essentialist analysis by virtue of w h i c h this valence is assigned. 35. A n t h o n y G i d d e n s , Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), 1 8 9 90 (emphasis added). M y indebtedness to Giddens's analysis extends b e y o n d this citation alone.

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36. Steven Shapin, "The Social Uses of Science," in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1980), 1 3 1 . 37. Shapin, "Social Uses of Science," 95-96.1 need hardly mention that Shapin's argument for contextualism in the history of science applies equally to the history of philosophy, literature, music, and so on. 38. See, for example, Thorkild Jacobsen's persuasive ideological analysis of the Babylonian creation myths in his Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamia?! Religion (New Haven, Conn., 1976), chapter 6. 39. See Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720 (Hassocks, England, 1976), 25. 40. Paul Q. Hirst, "Althusser and the Theory of Ideology," Economy and Society 5 (1976): 396-97. 41. For a recent critique of ideological essentialism in feminist aesthetics, see Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). 42. Marcuse presumably did not have the benefit of such analyses when, as in the passage quoted above (pp. 9-10), he declared that art "stands against history, which has been the history of oppression," and that "art subjects reality to laws other than the established one, to the laws of the Form which creates a negation of the established [reality]." 43. For a prominent example of this tendency, see Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago, 1980). 44. This is essentially what I take Shapin to have been arguing in the passage quoted above on pp. 39-40. Of course, I do not deny that practitioners of a given discipline may argue that its criteria are formalist or intellectualist, but I am assuming that there are recognizable higher-order criteria on the basis of which local or fashionable criteria may be challenged. CHAPTER 2 1. See Louis I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden: Studies in Some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Thought (1934; rpt., Ann Arbor, 1956). 2. See Thomas H. Fujimara, "Dryden's Religio Laid: An Anglican Poem," PMLA 76 (1961): 205-17; EliasJ. Chiasson, "Dryden's Apparent Scepticism in Religio Laid," Harvard Theological Review 54 (1961): 207-21; and Phillip Harth, Contexts of Dryden's Thought (Chicago, 1968), chapters 3-6. 3. The last two of these designations represent two possible ways of characterizing the position of William Empson. See William Empson, "Dryden's Apparent Scepticism," Essays in Criticism 20 (1970): 1 7 2 - 8 1 , and "A Deist Tract by Dryden," Essays in Criticism 25 (1975): 74-100. 4. See G. Douglas Atkins, The Faith of John Dryden (Lexington, Ky., 1980). 5. Harth, Contexts, chapters 3-6. 6. Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 64-65.

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7. Steven N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton, 1984), 104. 8. The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1958), 2:322,11. 447-50. S u b s e q u e n t line citations will be given in the text. In this, a n d in all s u b s e q u e n t q u o t a t i o n s f r o m Religio Laid, the italics are Dryden's. 9. H a r t h , Contexts, 67. 10. Ibid. 1 1 . I u s e "Deist" (capitalized) to refer to the interlocutor identified as " t h e Deist" in the p o e m . 12. H a r t h , Contexts, 87. 13. E m p s o n , "A Deist Tract by D r y d e n . " 14. Father [Richard] Simon, Critical History of the Old Testament, trans. H e n r y Dickinson (London, 1682), 1: Preface. 15. Ibid., 3 : 1 1 8 . 16. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, book 5, chapter 22.1 q u o t e f r o m The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, 5 vols., e d . W. S p e e d Hill (Cambridge, Mass., 1977-82), 2 : 1 0 2 - 3 . 17. Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "De Religione Laid," e d . a n d trans. Harold R. H u t c h e s o n ( N e w H a v e n , C o n n . , 1944), 9 9 - 1 0 1 . In the Latin original, t h e t r u t h s are transcribed in the forum interius, which H u t c h e s o n translates as "conscience." H e justifies this translation on the g r o u n d that Herbert m a k e s n o explicit distinction b e t w e e n conscientia a n d forum interius. Elsew h e r e , in fact (p. 88), Herbert says that the c o m m o n notions, or catholic truths, of d e i s m " s u n t e n i m in ipsa m e n t e coelitus descriptae," a n d H u t c h e s o n translates mente as " u n d e r s t a n d i n g . " A l t h o u g h Herbert, unlike the e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y deists, held to a n innatist concept of reason, he w a s not so precise as to require that it be e n g r a v e d or imprinted in a specific o r g a n or faculty of the m i n d . In s e v e n t e e n t h - c e n t u r y usage, the Latin conscientia a n d the French a n d English "conscience" refer in general to internal m e n t a l e v e n t s as well as carrying both the later sense of "conscience" as a n internal moral censor a n d of "consciousness." I have taken t h e liberty of altering H u t c h e s o n ' s translation from the generalized "conscience" to the v a g u e "within u s " in o r d e r to avoid c o n f u s i o n — n o t only because H u t c h e s o n u s e s "conscience" in a n archaic sense that w o u l d be unfamiliar to m a n y m o d e r n readers b u t also because Bayle, as we will see in c h a p t e r 3, u s e s the term "conscience" in a special technical sense that h e stipulates. For Herbert (as for Descartes), intuitive k n o w l e d g e is not different f r o m rational k n o w l e d g e b u t is, rather, the core of philosophical rationalism. H e r b e r t conceives of illumination t h r o u g h the natural light to be internal or innate, but h e h a s n o n e e d to identify it consistently with a particular o r g a n or faculty such as the heart or the intellect. I have att e m p t e d to r e n d e r H u t c h e s o n ' s v a g u e n e s s regarding the locus of natural illumination by varying my o w n formulations. 18. N o r m a n Sykes, Church and State: In England in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1934), 346. 19. See H a r t h , Contexts, 1 0 7 - 8 . Cf. Ernest Campbell Mossner, Bishop

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Butler and the Age of Reason: A Study in the History of Thought (New York, 1936), 27: "It w a s not uncommon for divines accepted as orthodox to treat Natural Religion in the body of a theological work and then to add, as it were, an appendix on Revealed Religion." For a prominent member of this genre, although one in which the defense of revealed religion is rather more than an appendix, see Richard Baxter, The Reasons of the Christian Religion (London, 1667). 20. Of course, Saint Paul's remarks (Romans 2 : 1 4 - 1 5 ) about the salvation of pagans were ipso facto orthodox, but as Norman Sykes observes, in From Sheldon to Seeker: Aspects of English Church History, 1660-1J68 (Cambridge, 1959), 159, "whereas hitherto, 'since the time of Augustine (De Spiritu et Littera, c. 27) the orthodox interpretation had applied this verse (sic) either to the Gentile converts or to the favoured few among the heathen w h o had extraordinary divine assistance,' it was now elevated into an universal principle." (Sykes, in turn, is quoting Mark Pattison, "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750," in Essays and Reviews [London, 1861], 273.) 2 1 . Mossner, Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason, 27. 22. For a recent example of such an objection, directed not at Mossner but at more recent scholars, see Roger L. Emerson, "Latitudinarianism and the English Deists," in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment: Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark, Del., 1987). 23. James Anderson Winn, in his recent biography of Dryden (John Dryden and His World [New Haven, Conn., 1987], 379), makes much of Dryden's discussion of the mystery of the Incarnation as evidence that the poet's expressions of Christian faith are sincere. 24. See David Berman, "Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological Lying," in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment, ed. Lemay. 25. For a recent discussion of this phenomenon, see ibid. See also Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), esp. chapter 12. 26. John Toland, Tetradymus (London, 1720), 96. 27. From a purely theological perspective, it would be hard to make sense of Dryden's position. If salvation can be achieved without belief in the Incarnation and the Trinity, then it is hard to see w h y the deists should be excoriated for denying us access to these doctrines. 28. In moving from the moral to the political, from the N e w World to the Old, I have followed the sequence reflected in the structure of Dryden's poem. In so doing, I have undoubtedly reversed the chronological development of deistic ideas. See Hutcheson's comment in Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "De Religione Laid," 57: "Deism did not develop as a revolutionary philosophy; it was the outgrowth of an attempt to solve, at first Within the limits of Christian orthodoxy, the problem of sectarian persecution." 29. Ibid., 127 (emphasis added). 30. Ibid., 1 1 9 . 3 1 . By the same token, Dryden's deployment of scriptural deism is not

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presented as evidence of his own personal essence—as evidence, for example, that he is an opportunist rather than a sincere believer. 32. Dryden, Poems, ed. Kinsley, 1:310. 33. Ibid., 1:306. 34. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry, 1 2 1 . 35. It may well be that the repressive ideological valence of Dryden's deistic toleration also follows that of the "moderate and tolerant" latitudinarians. See Richard Ashcraft, "Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth versus Political History," in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640-1700, ed. Richard Kroll et al. (Cambridge, 1992), 155: "Latitudinarianism is not a moderate middle ground between contending extremes; it is, rather, part of one of the extremes. It is the acceptable face of the persecution of religious dissent." 36. As already indicated, Dryden does argue, in the attack on deism in the first part of the poem (11. 99-114), that we cannot have an adequate notion of penitence without the revealed doctrine of the Incarnation; but by the time he comes to discuss disputes between Christian confessions and to develop his scriptural deism, this argument seems to have been conveniently forgotten. CHAPTER 3

1. It is the first two parts that I am examining here. In June of 1687 Bayle published a third part consisting of point-by-point refutations of St. Augustine. In 1688 he added the Supplément du commentaire philosophique, in which he responds to attacks by Pierre Jurieu, his chief antagonist among his fellow Huguenot exiles. 2. John Locke, who evidently drafted his Epistola de Tolerantia (1689) in Amsterdam just weeks after the revocation, employs the same sort of cataloging: "For if it be out of a principle of charity, as they pretend, and love to men's souls, that they deprive them of their estates, maim them with corporal punishments, starve and torment them in noisome prisons, and in the end even take away their lives . . ." (A Letter concerning Toleration, ed. Mario Montuori, trans. William Popple [The Hague, 1963], 9). On the time and place of composition of the Epistola, see Montuori's introduction, p. xv. 3. Pierre Bayle, De la tolérance: Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus-Christ "Contrains-les-d'entrer," ed. Jean-Michel Gros (Paris, 1992), 1 1 7 . The original title began with the words "Commentaire philosophique." The words "De la tolérance" were presumably added to make this new paperback edition—to my knowledge, the first complete edition in French since the eighteenth century—seem less recondite. In the few instances in which I found obvious inaccuracies in the new edition, I have corrected them, using as my source the version that appeared in volume 2 of the Oeuvres diverses, 4 vols. (The Hague, 1727). Subsequent page citations, appearing with the abbreviation CP, will be given in the text.

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4. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford, 1939-68), 1 1 : 1 3 2 . 5. Even Bayle's use of the adjective diabolique is not metaphorical, in that he is suggesting that the perversion of Christianity to evil deeds may be literally the work of the devil. 6. The version of the title on the title page is longer still, and more polemical, but does not include the entire biblical verse. 7. Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "De Religione Laid," ed. and trans. Harold R. Hutcheson (New Haven, Conn., 1944), 9 9 - 1 0 1 . The passage that I largely paraphrase here is quoted above on pp. 60-61. 8. Eventually, in the Seconde partie (198), Bayle suggests that the term contrainte "en cent autres occasions signifie les empressements de civilité et d'honnêteté," thus implying that compelle should be interpreted as a kind of friendly urging rather than as violent constraint. But this is offered not as a positive exegetical argument but rather as a parenthetical part of an argument against literal interpretation. Indeed, later in the Commentaire (296), he will suggest that the parable may have "des sens mystiques que tout le monde n'est pas obligé d'entendre." 9. This is not to imply that I do not consider Bayle to be a sincere Calvinist. J am stressing political and strategic considerations precisely because being a sincere Calvinist had drastic political implications, and I am assuming that Bayle's overriding concern in the Commentaire is to make the most persuasive possible case for religious toleration. 10. It was on the basis of this similarity and by dint of ignoring the poem's fundamental rationalism that Louis Bredvold evidently was able to convince a generation of Dryden scholars that the Religio Laid was dominated by a proto-Catholic fideistic skepticism. See chapter 2, p. 49. 1 1 . Cf. Bayle, Commentaire philosophique, 277. 12. Although Bayle has said that his commentary will be philosophical rather than exegetical, he does permit himself, in the fourth chapter of the Première partie, to characterize the general morality of the gospels as being inconsistent with coercion. The argument for toleration based on a general interpretation of the nature of Christianity derives most conspicuously from Erasmus. (Cf. Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration [London, 1967], 24-27.) Bayle evidently cannot resist bringing in this Erasmian tradition, even though it violates the letter of his renunciation of conventional exegesis. He argues, however, that the gospel morality of peace and charity merely elaborates what we know independently through natural light. This position will be echoed in the article "Tolérance" (by M. Romilli le fils) in the Encyclopédie: "Il nous paraît inutile d'opposer aux intolérants les principes de l'Evangile, qui ne fait qu'étendre et développer ceux de l'équité naturelle" (Encydopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 28 vols. [Paris, 1751-72], 16:393). Bayle's treatment of Christian and natural morality will be discussed in the first section of chapter 4 below. 13. This is in fact the repeatedly declared rationale of the Spanish

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Inquisition. See Bartolemé Bennassar, L'inquisition espagnole XVe-XIXe siècle (Paris, 1979). Bayle sardonically echoes this rationale in the Première partie, chapter 9, where he sets forth an imaginary conversation between an early Christian and a Roman magistrate who uses the literal interpretation of compelle intrare as a warrant for suppressing the Christians on the ground that if they had the power they would force the Romans to be baptized. The Christian interlocutor uses the formula of the Inquisition (and of the French persecutors): "Il est vrai monseigneur, que si nous étions les plus forts, nous ne laisserions personne au monde qui ne se fît baptiser; mais en cela paraîtrait notre charité pour le prochain; nous voyons qu'on se damne éternellement, si l'on ne suit notre religion; nous serions donc bien cruels de n'employer pas la contrainte" (163). 14. The most conspicuous alternatives to such a view would be the sort of rationalist minimalism that we have found in Herbert of Cherbury and in Dryden—according to which the few doctrines about which all can agree are the only ones necessary to salvation—or a willingness to accept the notion that conscientious error is punishable but that we are nonetheless not obliged to protect others from the eternal consequences of their errors. Locke, in his Epistola, combines these two alternatives by embracing a minimalist viewpoint but also arguing that, just as we are not responsible for saving others from squandering their wealth or from other temporal imprudence, we are not responsible for preventing them from endangering their eternal souls. See Letter concerning Toleration, passim. 15. For an earlier example of an argument for toleration that wards off pious objections by claiming that God excuses innocent error, see Jean Bodin's Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis, ed. Ludovicus Noack (Paris and London, 1857) which, although unpublished until 1857, enjoyed a clandestine vogue during the seventeenth century. (For an English translation, see Jean Bodin, Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime, trans. Marion Kuntz [Princeton, 1975].) Bayle differs from Bodin—or, more precisely, from Bodin's character Senamus—insofar as he is concerned with exculpating actions that are performed in good conscience, whereas Bodin seems to be concerned only with God's acceptance of diverse forms of worship and belief. On Bodin's attitude toward religion, see J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven, Conn., 1987), chapter 1. 16. Cf. Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle, trans. Denys Potts (New York, 1983), 83: "Bayle's solution to the problem of toleration is the opposite of the one usually found. He does not try to deny that heretics are in error in so far as doctrine is concerned." 17. However, as Bayle points out in a later attempt to defend his own orthodoxy, even the paragon of Calvinist orthodoxy, his enemy Pierre Jurieu, asserts the rights of an erring conscience. (See "Réponse aux questions d'un provincial," in Oeuvres diverses, 3:1015a-b.) 18. Here I use the term "toleration" informally to indicate the withholding of moral condemnation. Otherwise, throughout this chapter and

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chapter 4, I use the term to refer to civil toleration, as opposed to ecclesiastical toleration. Bayle does not object to ecclesiastic intolerance—that is, to the practice of churches to exclude from their communions those whose beliefs depart from orthodoxy. His concern, and the concern of the other writers discussed in chapter 4, is with the issues of civil toleration, comprising the moral question of whether those who wield secular power have the right to attempt to enforce doctrinal conformity as well as the pragmatic question—which will take center stage in chapter 4—of whether such interference with conscience is politically prudent. On the distinction between civil and ecclesiastical toleration, and Bayle's attitudes toward each, see Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1964), 2:520-43. 19. The response concludes with a final sentence (De la tolérance: Commentaire philosophique, 3 1 1 ) that essentially reasserts Bayle's right to try to disabuse the persecutors of their errors, an assertion that, as I have already suggested, is unimpeachable but irrelevant to the actual objection. 20. Walter Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy, International Archives of the History of Ideas, no. 8 (The Hague, 1965), 181. 21. Ibid., 184-85. 22. In fact, when I originally planned this chapter, I thought that Rex was correct. 23. When Bayle dismisses the conventional maxim that "the ways of God are not our ways," he may be seen to be attacking all attempts to turn obscurity into an argument for submission to authority: "vouloir recourir à la maxime, les voies de Dieu ne sont pas nos voies, c'est en vérité radoter, et qui pis est, jeter toutes les connaissances humaines et même la révélation divine dans le pyrrhonisme le plus détestable" (De la tolérance: Commentaire philosophique, 193). 24. In De Cive, Hobbes employs a very similar technique, quietly embedding "the breach of contracts"—the transgression whose status as invariably illicit is crucial to his political theory—in an exemplary list of crimes that would always violate the "immutable and eternal" laws of nature. (Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version, ed. Howard Warrender [Oxford, 1983], chapter 3, section 29.) 25. In the "Réponse aux questions d'un provincial," 3:ioi4a-b, Bayle will restate the paradox of the persecutor's conscience and will resolve it by explicitly stating that the persecutor's ignorance is not invincible. 26. In this respect, it departs from what might be called "pure fideism," which presumably would require that acts of faith not be grounded in rational arguments. Cf. Terence Penelhum, who has observed that Christian fideists who have employed skepticism have likewise found it "essential to maintain that the faith the fideist professes not be offered for reasons" ("Skepticism and Fideism," in The Skeptical Tradition, ed. Myles Burnyeat [Berkeley, 1983], 301). 27. He cannot avoid outraging at least some of them, including Jurieu. 28. Throughout his essay on the Commentaire, Walter Rex demonstrates

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the extent to which Bayle's theory of toleration is compounded of elements to be found in the tradition of Calvinist rationalism. In this respect Rex's project resembles Harth's contemporaneous attempt to show that the elements of Dryden's Religio Laid are to be found in the tradition of Anglican rationalism. Rex, however, unlike Harth, is willing to recognize that traditional elements can be combined in such a w a y as to strain the tradition to its breaking point or to transcend it altogether. 29. Since Bayle would later, in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), prove himself to be a consummate practitioner of skeptical techniques, and since commentators have claimed that Bayle saw skepticism as conducive to religious faith, the decisive rejection of skepticism in the Commentaire may seem puzzling. However, as I have shown elsewhere, Bayle consistently presents skepticism in the Dictionnaire as a never-ending search for truth and religious faith not as the end product of skepticism but as an alternative to it. See Oscar Kenshur, "Pierre Bayle and the Structures of Doubt," Eighteenth-Century Studies 21 (1988): 2 9 7 - 3 1 5 . In this regard at least, the treatment of skepticism in the Commentaire is in no w a y inconsistent with the later stance. 30. See Bayle's 1682 work Pensées diverses sur la comète, ed. A . Prat, 2 vols (Paris, 1939), 2:5-20. 3 1 . Paul Hazard's assertion that the Commentaire allows one to conclude that "an atheist w h o believes it his duty to be an atheist is in no wise to be accounted less worthy than the most orthodox of Protestants" (The European Mind, 1680-1715, trans. J. Lewis May [Cleveland, 1963], 104) thus turns out to be rather misleading. For Bayle does not allow for the possibility that an atheist can be an atheist in good conscience since—according to his definitions—that would be a contradiction in terms. 32. Arguments, by Bayle and others, over the pragmatic dimensions of religion and religious toleration will be a central focus of chapter 4. 33. According to traditional Calvinist doctrine, this love of God, which motivates one to act in accordance with one's conscience, is inspired by G o d himself through an act of grace. (Cf. Bayle, Pensées diverses, 2:67.) If Bayle had reasserted the doctrine of grace at this point, however, he might have found himself forced to conclude that G o d not only tolerates error but even inspires it, a potentially disquieting idea that Bayle, by omitting mention of grace at this point and treating the problem in strictly epistemological terms, avoids raising. 34. Marc Shell has recently argued for the conduciveness of religious particularism to toleration and of religious universalism to intolerance ("Marranos (Pigs), or From Coexistence to Toleration," Critical Inquiry 1 7 [1991]: 306-35). M y comparison of Dryden and Bayle, although using more a philosophical than an anthropological methodology, and using the term "universalism" in the sense of rationalist minimalism rather than in the sense of a community of coreligionists, might nonetheless seem to support Shell's view. It is important to note, however, that I deny that it is the nature of universalism of either sort to be intolerant or of particularism to

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be tolerant and claim only that each can be put to different uses in different contexts. Although Shell recognizes some historical variability, he still seems to tend toward ideological essentialism. 35. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 273 (London, 1933), 13. 36. For Gibbon's Erastian conception of pagan religion, see chapter 4 below. 37. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, in Oeui'res philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquié, 3 vols. (Paris, 1988), 1:592-93. 38. See, however, Alquié's footnote regarding this matter: ibid., 592 n. 439. Michel de Montaigne, "Apologie de Raimond Sebond," in Essais, ed. Maurice Rat, 2 vols. (Paris, 1962), 1:562. 40. For an analysis of the relationship between skepticism and fideism in the Dictionnaire, an analysis that bears on this psychological issue, see my "Pierre Bayle and the Structures of Doubt." 41. Bayle is quite aware that there is a distinct danger that Calvinists themselves would be intolerant if they had the opportunity. Paul Hazard quotes from a letter of 1 7 December 1691: " G o d preserve us from the Protestant Inquisition; another five or six years or so and it will have become so terrible that people will be longing to have the Roman one back again, as something to be thankful for" (Dieu nous garde de l'inquisition protestante; elle serait dans cinq ou six ans si terrible, que l'on soupirent après la romaine comme après un bien [The European Mind, 93]). As we will see in chapter 4, Bayle saw the history of Christianity as a history of intolerance. Although his animus in the Commentaire is against the Catholics, in principle any potential persecutor, of any religious stripe, would stand in need of the lessons of Bayle's argument. 42. A n d by extension, all the religious authorities who urge him to carry out his persecutions and all the secular authorities who follow their urgings. CHAPTER 4 1. Leonard Krieger, "Series Editor's Introduction," in Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History, trans. Elborg Forster, ed. Orest Ranum, Classsic European Historians (Chicago, 1976), ix. 2. It was widely believed by those w h o favored Catholic unity that Protestantism in France was on the decline. See Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680-1715, trans. J. Lewis May (Cleveland, 1963), chapter 1. 3. See Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants (Paris, 1951), 1 1 4 . 4. See Olivier Abel, "De l'obligation de croire: les objections de Bayle au commentaire augustinien de 'Contrains-les d'entrer,'" Etudes théologiques et religieuses, 61 (1986): 36. 5. Cf. Orest Ranum, "Introduction," in Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History, trans. Forster, ed. Ranum: " H e was never reluctant to judge all of

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the past in the light of the single most important historical event of all time: the brief passage of the man-God Jesus through a life on earth" (xxvi). Ranum also points out that the chapter on Jesus and his teachings lies at the physical center of the book in all its various editions. 6. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Discours sur l'histoire universelle, in Oeuvres, ed. L'Abbé Velat and Yvonne Champailler (Paris, 1961), 8 3 0 - 3 1 . Subsequent citations, with the initials DHU, will be given in the text. 7. The imaginary virtuous heathens of More's Utopia and of Swift's Gulliver's Travels—including, arguably, the virtuous H o u y h n h n m s — m a y be seen to exemplify this tradition. 8. Regarding Bossuet's general attitude toward Louis's adulterous behavior, see Ranum, "Introduction," ix-xlvi. 9. See Erich Haase, Einführung in die Literatur des Refuge: Der Beitrag der franzözischen Protestanten zur Entwicklung analytischer Denkformen am Ende des 1 7 . Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1959), 306. 10. Hazard, The European Mind, 14. Cf. DHU, 957: " U n e coutume nouvelle était un prodige en Egypte: tout s'y faisait toujours de même; et l'exactitude qu'on y avait à garder les petites choses, maintenait les grandes." 1 1 . See DHU, 959. 12. Since Bayle w a s arguing not for a deistic minimalism that would level out religious differences but for religious toleration that would allow groups to follow divergent doctrines regarding the Christian mysteries, the historiographie implications of his rationalism may seem less radical than those of the deists. But since Bayle's whole argument depends on the indubitability of independently available moral principles that serve as criteria for interpreting Christian revelation, and hence that allow one to condemn religious intolerance and persecution, he needs to follow the deists in closing the remaining gap between Christian ethics and natural ethics. This he does explicitly in the Commentaire philosophique (De la tolérance: Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de jésus Christ "Contrains-lesd'entrer," ed. Jean-Michel Gros [Paris, 1992], 104-6), where he rejects the notion that natural morality is worldly and self-interested but assimilates it to the Christian rejection of the world and suppression of the passions. Although theological orthodoxy, as we have seen in Bossuet, allowed one to acknowledge the presence of the natural light among pagans and treat it as a glimmering of the moral truths that would be revealed and explained by Jesus, Bayle's argument would seem to require him to say that moral truths are no less clear and distinct to the pagans than they are in Scripture. But, unlike the deists, Bayle does not claim that the natural light tells us enough about religion to allow us to dispense with revelation, only that it allows us to reject certain false interpretations of revelation—namely, those that conflict with moral truth. 1 3 . Bayle and other writers, however, will not neglect to cite the fact that Turks and other Muslims were also much more tolerant than the Christians. 14. Compare Roy Porter's characterization of the historiographie prin-

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37

ciple that animated late seventeenth-century British historians: "What came first was right, so the historian's business was to discover what came first" (Gibbon: Making History [New York, 1988], 18). 15. The advice comes from a long speech, "reported" by Dio, in which Maecenas advises Augustus regarding the governance of the empire. (See Dio's Roman History, trans. Earnest Cary, 9 vols., Loeb Classical Library [London, 1917], bk. 52.) Although contemporary scholarship considers this speech to be "in reality a political pamphlet setting forth Dio's own views of government," which, complete with anachronisms, was put into the mouth of Maecenas (see Cary's introduction, i:xv), Bayle—elsewhere a pioneer of critical historiography—does not question its authenticity. 16. Bayle, De la tolérance: Commentaire philosophique, ed. Gros, 72. Subsequent citations, appearing with the abbreviation CP, will be given in the text. 17. See Walter Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy, International Archives of the History of Ideas, no. 8 (The Hague, 1965), especially the essay on the article "David" in Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique. Although Bayle's position might seem to be the most prudent one for the representative of a persecuted minority to take, it was bitterly opposed by his coreligionist Pierre Jurieu, who argued for the right of revolution against Louis XIV. Jurieu also argued, as did "Maecenas," against the toleration of new religions. See his Le vrai système de l'église et la véritable analyse de la foi (Dordrecht, 1686). See also Guy Howard Dodge, The Political Theory of the French Huguenots of the Dispersion (1947; rpt., New York, 1972), esp. 139-65. 18. In the body of the Commentaire (244), Bayle writes: "Toute secte qui s'en prend aux lois des sociétés, et qui rompt les liens de la sûreté publique, en excitant des séditions . . . mérite d'être incessamment exterminée." 19. The incident to which Bayle refers is the subject of Juvenal's Satire 15. Although Juvenal ultimately focuses more on the barbarism that results from the conflict than on the superstitious exclusivism that generates it, Bayle's characterization of the cause is quite consistent with what we find in Juvenal: summus utrimque inde furor volgo, quod numina vicinorum odit uterque locus, cum solos credat habendos esse deos quos ipse colit. (11. 35-38)

This quotation is from Juvenal and Persius, rev. ed., trans. G. G. Ramsay, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1940), 288-90. 20. Pierre Jurieu would actually argue that sects that are not well established should be abandoned or persecuted, while sects that are well established should be immune from persecution. See Le vrai système, 165 ff. The fact that Jurieu could argue for such a distinction provides one more reason to doubt that Bayle could have had such a thing in mind.

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21. See the first c h a p t e r of Bayle's " R é p o n s e aux questions d ' u n provincial," 3 : 1 0 1 1 b . 22. See Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols. (The H a g u e , 1964), 2:502. 23. See Bayle, " R é p o n s e aux q u e s t i o n s d ' u n provincial," 3 : 1 0 1 1 b . 24. Ibid., 3:1012b. 25. It m i g h t s e e m that in the context of Bayle's theory of toleration the p a r a d o x also p r e s e n t s s o m e practical difficulties since it p r e s e n t s g r o u n d s b o t h for s u p p r e s s i n g Christianity a n d for tolerating it. However, in c h a p t e r 6 of t h e S e c o n d e partie of t h e Commentaire, Bayle will explain that the right of a g o v e r n m e n t to s u p p r e s s t h e threat of sedition that comes f r o m a d a n g e r o u s religion—in this case R o m a n Catholicism—does not extend to i m p i n g i n g o n the rights of conscience. O n e can disarm those w h o threaten the public peace w i t h o u t h a v i n g to try to c h a n g e their religious beliefs. 26. Bayle also refers to taking r e v e n g e o n those w h o have sacked Delphi, b u t this case, as h e indicates, d o e s not involve claims to t r u t h or desires to c o m p e l consciences. O n l y in the Egyptian example is there mortal h a t r e d that is g e n e r a t e d by the fact that the inhabitants of each t o w n think that their religion is the true one. 27. Gibbon cites Bayle frequently a n d approvingly in the Decline and Fall ( t w e n t y - t w o times, according to the c o u n t of David P. Jordan; see his Gibbon and His Roman Empire [Urbana, 111. 1971], 169). Gibbon looked o n Bayle as a k i n d r e d spirit—in part because both h a d m a d e y o u t h f u l conversions f r o m Protestantism to Catholicism—and considered the skepticism of Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique to serve as a n annihilator of "false religions." See E d w a r d Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, e d . G e o r g e s A. B o n n a r d ( L o n d o n , 1966), 64-65. For a r g u m e n t s that h a v e h e l p e d to m o v e scholarly o p i n i o n t o w a r d accepting Bayle's protestations that h e w a s a sincere Calvinist, see Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, vol. 2, a n d Richard Popkin's essays on Bayle in The High Road to Pyrrhonism, e d . Richard A. Watson a n d James E. Force (San Diego, 1980), 29. See also Richard H . Popkin, "Introduction," in Pierre Bayle, The Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis, 1965). For a recent case s t u d y of the eight e e n t h century's a p p r o p r i a t i o n of Bayle, see Elisabeth Labrousse, " R e a d i n g Pierre Bayle in Paris," in Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany, e d . Alan C h a r l e s Kors a n d Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia, 1987). 28. David H u m e , The Natural History of Religion, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, e d . T. H. G r e e n a n d T. H . Grose, 2 vols. (London, 1889), 2:339-40. S u b s e q u e n t citations to this w o r k , abbreviated NHR, will a p p e a r in t h e text. Page n u m b e r s will a p p e a r w i t h o u t the v o l u m e n u m b e r . 29. Elsewhere, in his essay "Of Superstition a n d Enthusiasm," H u m e associates superstitious fear with a willingness to s u b m i t to the p o w e r of priestly m e d i a t o r s a n d distinguishes such superstition f r o m the e n t h u s i ast's disposition "to regard himself as a distinguished favorite of t h e Divinity." This allows for a clear distinction b e t w e e n superstitious Catholics a n d enthusiastic sectarian Protestants. J. G. A. Pocock a r g u e s that Gibbon's

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account of the shift between early Christianity and Catholic hierarchy is a movement from enthusiasm to superstition informed by Hume's distinction ("Superstition and Enthusiasm in Gibbon's History of Religion," Eighm teenth-Century Life, n.s. 8 [1982]: 83-94). y view, Hume's tendency in the Natural History is less to distinguish between early Christian enthusiasm and Catholic superstition than to assimilate early Christianity to Catholicism, particularly with respect to morality and intolerance, and this assimilation informs Gibbon's general contrast between paganism and Christianity. This is not to say that the enthusiasm/superstition dichotomy has no role in Gibbon's analysis. But I will show that the dichotomy is less an organizing principle than a single element in a complex structure of dichotomies. 30. We have briefly encountered such republicanism in our discussion of Usbek's enlightened viewpoint in Montesquieu's Lettres persones. For a deservedly influential study of the transmutation of republican theory to meet the ideological needs of competing parties in the eighteenth century, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). 3 1 . On Bossuet and Livy, see Ranum, "Introduction," xxv. 32. Livy, trans. B. O. Foster, 14 vols., Loeb Classical Library (London, 1919), 1:69. 33. Niccolo Machiavelli, Discorsi, in 11 Principe e Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Milan, 1977), 161. Translation is that of Leslie J. Walker, in The Discourses of Niccolo Machiavelli (New Haven, Conn., 1950), 241-42. 34. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, "Dissertation sur la politique des romains dans la religion, lúe á l'Académie de Bordeaux le 18 Juin 1716," in Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, ed. André Masson, 3 vols. (Paris, 1950-55), 3:38. The "Dissertation" is of interest, despite the fact that it was not published until 1799, because it represents a striking combination and distillation of ideas—some of which we have encountered separately in Bayle, Livy, and Machiavelli—that inform a strand of Gibbon's analysis of Roman paganism. Subsequent citations will be abbreviated " D P R " and given in text; page numbers will appear without the volume number. 35. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols. (London, 1896), 1:22. Subsequent citations will be abbreviated DF and appear in the text. 36. Gibbon's irony is transparent at least to those "similarly enlightened." See Patricia B. Craddock, Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 17721794 (Baltimore, 1989), 62. 37. In addition to the episode in Juvenal referred to by Bayle (see p. 123 above, and n. 19), another ancient discussion of Egyptian intolerance is to be found in Plutarch, who offers several explanations for religious divisions among the Egyptians, including, most prominently, the notion that these divisions were instituted by a cunning and evil Egyptian king in order to keep his volatile people from uniting in rebellion against him.

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See Plutarch, De ¡side et Osiride, ed. and trans. J. G w y n Griffiths (Cardiff, 1970). Such an explanation, of course, would go against the grain of the Enlightenment argument for secular control of religion but would also be unattractive to early modern proponents of intolerance. Hence it would be surprising to find it mentioned in the discourse under discussion in this chapter. 38. "But," as Gibbon notes in the following sentence, "insulted Nature sometimes vindicated her rights, and this new species of martyrdom served only to introduce a new scandal into the church." 39. For the purpose of this analysis, I am leaving out of account Gibbon's use of the idea that the civic virtue that had obtained in the Roman republic has, by imperial times, undergone a process of corruption. While Gibbon certainly appeals to this notion, his use of it does not require us to see the relationship between elite and masses as specific to the empire. For while it is true, for example, that the legions that were once motivated by patriotism now, during the empire, are pushed by "other motives of a different but not less forcible nature—honour and religion," this does not mean that the same people w h o were once motivated by civic duty now require the spurs of honor and religion. Rather, it means that an army of the propertied with a stake in the republic ("citizens with a country to love and property to d e f e n d " ) has given w a y to a mercenary army " d r a w n from the meanest, and very frequently from the most profligate of mankind." Machiavelli and others in the early modern discourse of civic humanism follow Livy (see pages 1 3 5 - 3 7 ) * n treating religion as an instrument of social control imposed very early in Roman history. Gibbon's notion of the decline of civic humanism in Rome does not seem to depart from this view and hence does not treat the masses as any more virtuous during the republican period, or any less in need of religious control, but merely as less conspicuous. On Gibbon's relationship to the tradition of civic humanism, see J. G. A . Pocock, "Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian," Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 105, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 1 5 3 - 6 9 . 40. See note 29. 4 1 . Hume's distinction between enthusiasm and superstition is part of this tradition. M y reservations about Pocock's perceptive observation that Gibbon organizes his treatment of early Christians and Roman Catholicism around the distinction between enthusiasm and superstition (see note 29) are based partly on my sense that the basic distinction is older than H u m e and partly on m y sense that Gibbon does not use it as a consistent organizing principle but simply as one phase in a shifting structure of dichotomies. 42. See Bayle, " R e p o n s e aux questions d'un provincial," 3:954a. CHAPTER 5 1 . Another w a y of exploiting the apparent success of scientific inductivism, and philosophical empiricism, could be by linking it to the social

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and political structure that produced it. Although this procedure is peripheral to m y concerns in this chapter, it is worth noting, as Peter G a y has done, that it is implicitly employed by Voltaire in the Lettres philosophiques: "The letters on natural philosophy are not directly political, but they make a political point: a society like France, with its useless aristocracy, its privileged clergy, its irrational tax structure, its medieval system of social status, is fated to engender social discord, economic waste, feeble philosophy. The very existence of a Newton and a Locke is a reproach to France— these men are representative of a reasonable, open society where merit is the passport to advancement" (Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist, 2d ed. [New Haven, C o n n . , 1988], 6 1 - 6 2 ) . 2. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle 1 , lines 2 3 - 3 2 . Here and throughout, m y text is that edited by Maynard Mack (London, 1950) in the Twickenham edition of The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, vol. 3, pt. 1 . Subsequent epistle and line citations, preceded by the abbreviated title Essay, will be given in the text. 3. Voltaire, Discours en vers sur l'homme, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. L. Moland, 52 vols. (Paris, 1 8 7 7 - 8 3 ) , 9:415. Subsequent citations, preceded by the abbreviation DVH, will be given in the text. 4. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, "Pride in Eighteenth-Century Thought," in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948). 5. Basil Willey, The Eighteenth-Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (1940; rpt., Boston, 1961), 48. 6. A . O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, 1936), 4 5 - 5 5 , and passim. 7. For Lovejoy's notion of unit ideas, see ibid., 3 - 2 3 . 8. Jaakko Hintikka, " G a p s in the Great Chain of Being: An Exercise in the Methodology of the History of Ideas," in Reforging the Great Chain of Being: Studies of the History of Modal Theories, ed. Simo Knuuttila (Dordrecht, 1981), 1 3 - 1 4 . 9. Samuel Johnson, " R e v i e w of A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil," in Works, 1 1 vols. (1825; rpt., N e w York, 1970), 6:48-49. 10. Soame J e n y n s , A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, in The Works of Soame jenyns, Esq., 4 vols. (London, 1790), 3 : 9 0 - 9 1 . Subsequent citations, preceded by the abbreviation FIE, will be given in the text. Volume number will be omitted from page citations. 1 1 . Johnson, "Review," 6 : 7 0 - 7 1 . Johnson's approbation is expressed thus: "Si sic omnia dixisset. To this account of the essence of vice and virtue it is only necessary to add 1 2 . The same passage is quoted in Johnson, "Review," 6:54. Subsequent citations will be given in the text, and the volume number will be omitted from page citations. 13. See Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History (Philadelphia, 1972), 96: "British social thought from 1660 to 1776 w a s marked by wide-ranging and intense controversy on theological, ethical, political, and economic doctrine. There w a s , however, almost complete unity of expressed opinion with respect to general social

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policy bearing on such matters as class-stratification, the rights and duties of the poor, the proper location of political power, the functions and limitations of public alms and private charity." 14. See James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD., ed. G. Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934-50), 1:408, 442, 447; 3:155, 383. 15. See Johnson, "Review," 6:251: "I must . . . again remark that consequences cannot have greater certainty than the postulate from which they are drawn, that no system can be more hypothetical than this [scale of being], and, perhaps, no hypothesis more absurd." 16. On the discrimination of the two traditions, see Viner, Role of Providence in the Social Order, chapter 4. 17. For commentators "whose inherited hermeneutical impulse—at least where Johnson is concerned—is largely one of appreciation" (Elizabeth Hedrick, "Reading Johnson's Dictionary," in Annals of Scholarship 7 [1990]: 92), Johnson's ability to combine his defense of social order with his rejection of Jenyns's brutality toward the poor is more likely to be seen as evidence of his "sensibility" than as a demonstration of his ideological finesse. A striking example of such an "appreciation" of Johnson is to be found in Richard B. Schwartz, Samuel Johnson and the Problem of Evil (Madison, Wis., 1975), where the praise of "sensibility" is even more deeply infused with the language of capitalism than is Johnson's own discourse: "In his defense of the poor . . . we particularly admire Johnson's sensibility: the temper that can embrace both hierarchy and social and financial mobility, that recognizes the fact that subordination need not be equated with the status quo, that defends old values but welcomes new enterprises" (37). 18. This was a common theme among several of Pope's contemporary apologists (and was adopted by Jenyns). See Viner, Role of Providence in the Social Order, chapter 4. 19. John Andrew Bernstein ("Shaftesbury's Optimism and EighteenthCentury Social Thought," in Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany, ed. Alan Charles Kors and Paul J. Korshin [Philadelphia, 1987], 89) claims that Pope (along with Shaftesbury and Bolinbroke) "used the Great Chain to assert the unity of mankind within the variety of the cosmos, not the stratified plurality of mankind upon the cosmic model." 20. It would, of course, be possible to suppose that the Chain of Being does indeed extend into the social realm, that there are ontological differences between social classes, but that these differences do not correspond to differences in happiness. This second possibility would justify both God's goodness and the social order but would, as I indicated earlier, violate the traditional Christian notion that all souls are equal before God. For if social hierarchy were seen as an extension of the Chain of Being, then social elites would be seen as closer to God and presumably as more worthy of salvation. 21. See, however, W. H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism, and Politics: Two Traditions of English Political Thought (Oxford, 1964), chapter 2. Greenleaf

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does not distinguish between general claims, in Pope and in other writers, that order is hierarchical and the specific metaphysical claims regarding degrees of being or of spirituality. None of his citations linking social hierarchy to general concepts of order attribute greater being or greater spirituality to the members of higher social ranks. 22. Voltaire toThieriot, 13 November 1738, in Correspondence, ed. Theodore Besterman, 51 vols. (Geneva and Toronto, 1968-77), 5:363. 23. Voltaire is, of course, subversive to the degree that he wishes to challenge the entrenched status of the nobility and clergy in favor of the bourgeoisie. But the result of the reforms that he favored would be equally hierarchical, with centralized royal authority on the top and the poor on the bottom. In this respect, he resembles most of the writers discussed in chapter 4. See Gay, Voltaire's Politics, passim. 24. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Gustave Lanson, 2 vols. (Paris, 1909), 2:6. 25. Ibid., 1:168. 26. Condillac, in his Traité des systèmes (1749), introduced the distinction between esprit systématique and esprit de système. It was the second term of this polarity that corresponded to what Voltaire had earlier called the esprit systématique. To avoid terminological confusion, one could ignore Voltaire's actual usage in the Lettres philosophiques and pretend that Voltaire had anticipated Condillac's usage. (For an example of this procedure, see Gay, Voltaire's Politics, 25.) Instead, I choose to quote Voltaire's usage and then ignore Condillac's distinction since it has no bearing on my analysis. 27. For a useful survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century views on hypothesis, see Ellen McNiven Hine, A Critical Study of Condillac's "Traité des systèmes" (The Hague, 1979), chapter 5. 28. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755). Compare Johnson's definition to the following passage from Voltaire's Elémens de la philosophie de Newton (1738): "mais une hypothèse, quand même elle rendrait raison de tout, ne doit être admise. II ne suffit pas qu'un système soit possible pour mériter d'être cru, il faut qu'il soit prouvé" (Oeuvres complètes, ed. Moland, 22:501). 29. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 28 vols. (Paris, 1751-72), 8:417-18. 30. See, for example, Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York, 1959), 279-80: "One might say that progress can . . . come about in two ways: by gathering new perceptual experiences, and by better organizing those which are available already. But this description of scientific progress, although not actually wrong, seems to miss the point. It is too reminiscent of Bacon's induction; too suggestive of his industrious gathering of the countless grapes, ripe and in season, from which he expected the wine of science to flow: of his myth of a scientific method that starts from observation and experiment and then proceeds to theories. . . . Out of interpreted sense-experiences science cannot be distilled, no matter how

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industriously we gather and sort them. Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature; our only organon* our only instrument for grasping her." 3 1 . See, for example, Peter Caws's article, "Scientific Method," in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, 8 vols. (1967; rpt., New York, 1972), 7:340-41; Mary Horton, "In Defence of Francis Bacon: A Criticism of the Critics of the Inductive Method," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 4 (1973): 241-78; and Curt J. Ducasse, "Francis Bacon's Philosophy of Science," in Theories of Scientific Method: The Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century, ed. Edward H. Madden (Seattle, i960), 50-54. 32. See Hine, Condillac's "Traité," 1 3 0 - 3 3 . 33. Voltaire, Elémens de la philosophie de Newton, 22:511. 34. Ibid., 22:517. 35. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, 2:3. 36. Ibid-., 2:5. 37. See Charles H. Hinnant, Samuel Johnson: An Analysis (New York, 1988), 1 - 1 0 . 38. Voltaire, Elémens de la philosophie de Newton, 22:42-47. 39. Houdar de la Motte, Discours sur la fable, in Oeuvres, 10 vols. (Paris, 1754), 9:13-14. The article "Fable" in Chambers's Cyclopaedia has as its core an English paraphrase of la Motte's observations (Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia: Or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences [London, 1728], n.p.). Cf. Karl-Heinz Stierle, "Story as Exemplum, Exemplum as Story: On the Pragmatics and Poetics of Narrative Texts," in Neiv Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, 1979). 40. W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief, 2d ed. (New York, 1978), 66. 41. It might seem that the phenomenon that I have grandly labeled "counterhypothetical fiction" is a form of satire, one, in fact, with a long history. And indeed the speeches of the various animals, insofar as they aim to reduce the anthropocentric hypothesis to absurdity, are distinctly satirical. Moreover, it might be argued that any counterhypothetical fiction, in seeking to undermine a hypothesis without supplanting it, employs ridicule and is therefore satirical. On the other hand, the case could be made that the technique of canceling one hypothesis or system by counterbalancing it with another that is no more and no less plausible is the traditional skeptical procedure of equipollence. (On this, see Oscar Kenshur, "Pierre Bayle and the Structures of Doubt," Eighteenth-Century Studies 21 [1988]: 297-315.) This issue, along with other theoretical implications of the concept of counterhypothetical fiction, remains to be explored. 42. Ira Wade, Voltaire's "Micromégas": A Study in the Fusion of Science, Myth, and Art (Princeton, 1950), 12-36. For a contrary view, see W. H. Barber, "The Genesis of Voltaire's Micromégas," French Studies 1 1 (1957): 1 1543. See Wade, Voltaire's "Micromégas," 15-20.

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44. M y text for Micromégas is that edited b y W a d e in Voltaire's "Micromégas," 1 1 9 - 4 6 . M y citations, g i v e n in the text, are to chapter n u m b e r and line number. 45. T h e v i e w that there is intelligent life o n other planets w a s w i d e l y held in Voltaire's time a n d w a s subscribed to by Voltaire himself. H o w e v e r , Voltaire is o n record as h a v i n g rejected as ridiculous the notion that there w a s s o m e basis u p o n w h i c h w e could calculate the sizes of the inhabitants of other planets. (See W a d e , Voltaire's "Micromégas," 3 7 - 6 0 . ) T h u s the c o u n t e r h y p o t h e s i s that Voltaire d e v i s e d for Micromégas w a s o n e that he is likely to h a v e c o n s i d e r e d sufficiently plausible to u n d e r m i n e the hyp o t h e s e s that he disliked, but insufficiently implausible to s u p p l a n t t h e m . 46. This is not to say that there are n o traces of traditional fabulation in Micromégas. T h e r e are occasional instances of positive h y p o t h e s i z i n g , particularly o n the issue of intellectual m e t h o d itself, as w h e n the Saturnian c o n c l u d e s , "Il faut tâcher d ' e x a m i n e r ces insectes; n o u s raisonnerons après." Since, as w e h a v e seen, Voltaire's counterhypothetical fictions o p e r a t e in the service of a theory of intellectual m e t h o d , it is not surprising to find the theory b e i n g r e p r e s e n t e d . Voltaire, like m a n y other epistemologists, seems to be less troubled b y hypothesizing about intellectual method than h e is by h y p o t h e s i z i n g a b o u t m e t a p h y s i c s . (In fact, as I h o p e to s h o w o n a n o t h e r occasion, Candide has a counterhypothetical structure that y i e l d s the paradoxical h y p o t h e s i s that h y p o t h e s i z i n g results in inconclusive conflicts b e t w e e n rival h y p o t h e s e s . ) But o n the issues of w h e t h e r the w o r l d w a s m a d e for h u m a n i t y ' s benefit, a n d w h e t h e r h u m a n b e i n g s h a v e g r o u n d s to c o m p l a i n about their limitations, Voltaire s e e m s to rely entirely on a counterhypothetical procedure. 47. In claiming that Micromégas arose o u t of the d i l e m m a of the Discours sur l'homme, a n d in a l l u d i n g (in note 46) to Candide's status as a counterh y p o t h e t i c a l fiction, I a m not claiming that Voltaire's conte philosophique is an intrinsically counterhypothetical genre. Further investigations are needed to ascertain the extent to w h i c h the counterhypothetical p r o c e d u r e operates t h r o u g h o u t the contes philosophiques. CHAPTER 6 1. This parallel b e t w e e n Johnson's Baconian remarks and the similar a n d exactly c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s remarks of Voltaire anticipates b y s o m e t w e n t y y e a r s a n o t h e r m o r e f a m o u s parallel b e t w e e n the t w o w r i t e r s — namely, the publication of Johnson's Rasselas and Voltaire's Candide in 1759. (This s e c o n d parallel will require o u r attention later in this chapter.) O n e m i g h t a d d a third, i n t e r v e n i n g parallel: Voltaire's rejection of cosmic optim i s m in Candide w a s p r e c e d e d b y a sort of preliminary statement in the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbon (1756). This harbinger of the m o r e f a m o u s Candide could be paired w i t h Johnson's r e v i e w of S o a m e Jenyns's A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757). A corollary to this rejection of the m e t a p h y s i c s of p l e n i t u d e is Voltaire's and Johnson's v e r y N e w t o n i a n

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rejection of the physics of plenitude in favor of vacuity. Celestial vacuums go against the grain of a theory that abhors gaps. (See chapter 5, "Voltaire's Dilemma: Method versus Metaphysics.") For a general comparison that undertakes to find numerous similarities between Voltaire and Johnson, without, however, pausing over the significance of their shared inductivism, see Donald Green, "Voltaire and Johnson," in Enlightenment Studies in Honor of Lester G. Crocker (Oxford, 1979). 2. The third sense of "experimental" in Johnson's Dictionary (London, 1755) reads as follows: " K n o w n by experiment or trial." 3. Johnson's The Life of Boerhaave (1739) appeared, in revised form, in the first volume of R. James's Medicinal Dictionary (London, 1743). I quote from this version, where, along with other minor changes, the laboriousness of the inductive method is emphasized by the substitution of "amassing observations" for the original "making observations." 4. Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905), 1:99-100. 5. For the claim that Johnson does not bring his inductivism into the moral realm, see Jean Hagstrum, "The Nature of Dr. Johnson's Rationalism," ELH 1 7 (1950): 198. 6. Cf. Leo Damrosch's remark in his Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (Madison, Wis., 1989), 153: "The problem for Johnson, as for many of his contemporaries, is that he is deeply committed to the empiricist philosophy w h o s e logic threatens the foundations of Christian belief." Damrosch's study has certain affinities with this one in that it argues that eighteenth-century social conservatism bridges differences between otherwise dissimilar writers and between antagonistic ideas. 7. David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 2 vols. (London, 1889), 2:368. 8. We saw in chapter 1 that Hobbes linked the Puritans to the Scholastics by portraying both as opposed to a rationalistic method. 9. By the time we get to the Romantics, of course, the association of truth with society and judgment, and of error with isolation and imaginative reverie, will be turned on its head, resulting in Wordsworth's famous characterization of Newton's statue in King's College Chapel as "the marble index of a mind forever/Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone." 10. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Gustave Lanson, 2 vols. (Paris, 1909), 2:3. 1 1 . Cf. Arieh Sachs, Passionate Intelligence: Imagination and Reason in the Work of Samuel Johnson (Baltimore, 1967), ii. 12. Here and throughout, the citation is to chapter number, followed by the page number of the text in the Yale edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 16, Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. G w i n J. Kolb (New Haven, Conn., 1990). 1 3 . See Hobbes, Leviathan, part 1 , chapter 8; Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, book 2, chapter 1 1 , section 2. For an analysis of the early modern distinction between judgment and fancy in the context of

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the traditional distinction between order and chaos, see Oscar Kenshur, Open Form and the Shape of Ideas: Literary Structures as Representations of Philosophical Concepts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Lewisberg, Pa., 1986), chapter 4. 14. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton (London, 1961), book 2, chapter 33, section 6. Earlier seventeenthcentury philosophers, including Hobbes and Spinoza, discussed the same phenomenon under different names. See, for example, Hobbes's discussion of the "Trayne of Thoughts Unguided" (Leviathan, pt. 1, chap. 3), in which he gives an example of what Locke would call the "association of ideas." 15. George Berkeley, Alciphron, Or the Minute Philosopher, ed. T. E. Jessop, in The Works of George Berkeley Bishop ofCloyne, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, 9 vols. (London, 1948-57), 3:47. 16. Ibid., 194. On Berkeley's attack on the Shaftesburyean model of sociable or "polite" philosophy, see Lawrence E. Klein, "Berkeley, Shaftesbury, and the Meaning of Politeness," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 16 (1986): 57-68. 17. Isobel Grundy (Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness [Athens, Ga., 1986], 158), while not concerned with inductivism per se, points out the repeated references to seeing and observing. 18. The hermit of chapter 21 will report, "I employed my hours in examining the plants which grow in the valley, and the minerals which I collected from the rocks," but that "enquiry is now grown tasteless and irksome" (82). 19. Cf. Edward Tomarken, "Perspectivism: The Methodological Implications of 'The History of Imlac' in Rasselas," in The Age of Johnson, ed. Paul J. Korshin, 5 vols. (New York, 1989), 2:271: "He acts like a younger Imlac, the character from the past evoked by and in the poet's autobiography." 20. The significance of the fact that the poetic profession serves as the privileged vantage point that is exempted from the moral and epistemological debunking to which other occupations are subjected will be discussed in the final section of this chapter. 21. For an analysis—couched in the language of deconstruction—of the relationship between philosophy and eloquence in Rasselas, see Charles Hinnant, Samuel Johnson: An Analysis (New York, 1988), 90-93. 22. Cf. W. K. Wimsatt, "In Praise of Rasselas: Four Notes (Converging)," in Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1986), 85: "Who says this? Imlac, Rasselas, Nekayah, the Stoic philosopher, the hermit, the mad astronomer, the old man? Any one of these, at the right moment, might say it. . . . Who says this? Any one of several characters might say it." Wimsatt is referring not to the words of the hermit but to other pieces of wisdom uttered by other characters. 23. Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief: A Study of Henry Fielding, with Glances at Swift, Johnson, and Richardson (Berkeley, 1966), 1 4 - 1 5 , 16. 24. Wimsatt observes: "the local colour of Rasselas is not luxuriant. It is

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even very thin" ("In Praise of Rasselas," 77). The local color of Candide is, of course, thinner still. 25. Voltaire, Poème sur le désastre de Lisbon, in Mélanges, ed. Jacques van den Heuvel (Paris, 1961), 307. 26. Cf. Wimsatt's reference to "Johnson's quasi-oriental and ceremonious no-tale" ("In Praise of Rasselas," 87). 27. The episode may have been partly based on a narrative in Hill's Account of the . . . Ottoman Empire, but this does diminish one's sense that Johnson, at this one point, wishes to imitate the genre that he is appropriating and that he is not incapable of narrating events. On the source of the episode, see Arthur J. Weitzman, "More Light on Rasselas: The Background of the Egyptian Episodes," Philological Quarterly 48 (1969): 265-66. 28. Richard B. Schwartz, Samuel Johnson and the New Science (Madison, Wis., 1 9 7 1 ) , 73-74. Schwartz's book contains an extensive discussion of Johnson's scientific interests in general and his Baconianism in particular. 29. Francis Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. Fulton H. A n d e r s o n (New York, i960), 1 5 . 30. Cf. D. D. Raphael, The Moral Sense (London, 1947). 3 1 . See Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove (1953; rpt., N e w York, 1970), 1 6 2 - 6 5 . 32. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, " A n Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit," in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. J. M. Robertson (1900; rpt., Indianapolis, 1964), 267. Montesquieu's attempt in the Lettres persanes to ground his view of republican civic virtue on a conception of morality as free and unconstrained represents another expression of Shaftesbury's position. 33. Samuel Clarke, Discourse on Natural Religion, in British Moralists, ed. L. A . Selby-Bigge, 2 vols. (1897; r P 1 -/ Indianapolis, 1964), 2:3. 34. Ibid., 2:34, 3 4 - 3 5 . 35. Cf. Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2d ed. (London, 1787), 253: "Dr. [Samuel] Clarke supposes all rational agents as under an obligation to act agreeably to the relations that s u b s i s t . . . or according to what he calls the fitness of things. Johnson w a s ever an admirer of Clarke, and agreed with him in this." 36. Samuel Johnson, "Preface to the Preceptor, Containing a General Plan of Education," in Allen T. Hazen, Samuel Johnson's Prefaces and Dedications (New Haven, C o n n . , 1937), 1 8 6 - 8 7 . 37. The fear of punishment and hope of reward were not seen by Johnson simply as psychologically efficacious but as the essence of religious faith. In the Dictionary, the first sense that Johnson gives for the w o r d "Religion" is: "Virtue, as founded upon reverence for God, and expectation of future rewards and punishments." On this conception of religious faith, see Nicholas Hudson, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Oxford, 1988), 24. 38. Samuel Johnson, " R e v i e w of A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil," in Works, 1 1 vols. (1825; rpt., N e w York, 1970), 6:71, 72.

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39. Dryden uses this argument as part of his attack on deism in the first part of Religio Laid (11. 66-67): "These Truths are not the product of thy Mind, / But dropt from Heaven." Johnson takes the same line in his allegorical Vision of Theodore, The Hermit ofTenerife: "when she [Reason] had once been taught [the truths of Religion], she clearly saw that it was right; and Pride had sometimes incited her to declare that she discovered it herself, and persuaded her to offer herself as a guide to Religion" (Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 16, Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Kolb, 209). 40. Johnson, "Review of A Free Inquiry," 6:71. 41. Elsewhere, when he is not concerned with the threat that teleological criteria pose for his conceptions of religion and authority, Johnson may allow himself to take a different attitude toward the evaluation of moral actions in terms of their consequences. It needs to be stressed that in my analysis here I—unlike Nicholas Hudson, who uses some of the same evidence to argue that Johnson is not a utilitarian—am not attempting to define the essence of Johnson's moral outlook. Not only do 1 doubt that there is any such essence, but I also am more interested in the ideological uses of ideas in particular contexts than in attempts to ascribe overall theoretical positions—especially in the case of such an unsystematic thinker as Samuel Johnson. From the perspective of ideological analysis, it would make perfect sense for Johnson to condemn utilitarian criteria in a context in which they appear to threaten obedience to religious authority and to accept these criteria in a context in which one is concerned with ascertaining which sorts of actions are conducive to social order. In this chapter, I focus on Johnson's rejection of utilitarian principles because this is the view that bears most conspicuously on the ideological dilemma embodied in Rasselas. For a comprehensive discussion of Johnson's moral outlook that attempts to depict him as an "altruistic utilitarian," see Robert Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), esp. chapter 4. For Hudson's argument that Johnson is not a utilitarian but a "Christian Epicurean," see Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought, 166-85. 42. Johnson, "Review of A Free Inquiry," 6:71-72. 43. The tension between Johnson's moral traditionalism, on the one hand, and his acceptance, on the other hand, of the legitimacy of moral inquiry independent of religious authority parallels a common tension in the eighteenth-century attitude toward religious knowledge. Cf. Hudson, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought, 27-28: "On the one hand, orthodox Christians were relying on the authority of tradition and disparaging a reliance on individual judgment; on the other hand, they were making the individual act of study among the most important acts in the religious life." On Johnson's more specific ambivalence regarding moral epistemology, see 44-48. 44. Since Nekayah had done nothing more than accede to Pekuah's request that she not be compelled to enter the pyramid, she had little apparent reason to reproach herself in the first place. One might therefore suspect that Johnson is straining to use this as an occasion for his attack

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on utilitarianism. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for the University of California Press for pointing this out. 45. Walter Jackson Bate, "Johnson and Satire Manqué," in EighteenthCentury Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, ed. W. H. Bond (New York, 1970), 15746. The one case that I have omitted in this sequence is that of the prosperous man of chapter 20, who is deprived of happiness by the constant fear occasioned by the jealousy of others. Here the emphasis seems to be more on the lack of happiness than on the lack of moral knowledge, and Johnson would appear to be engaging in a version of the argument that we encountered in our discussion of Pope and Voltaire in chapter 5. (In Johnson's pessimistic version, however, all stations are equally unhappy rather than equally happy.) Even here, though, there is at least a minor cognitive dimension in the assertion that "appearances are delusive" and in the fact that the man's unhappiness is tied to his uncertainty ("I know not how soon my defenders may be persuaded to share the plunder with the Bassa" [20, 79]). 47. Frederic Bogel, "Johnson and the Role of Authority," in The New Eighteenth-Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York, 1987), 205. 48. In a provocative analysis of historiographical genres ("The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," Critical Inquiry 7 [1980]: 5 27), Hayden White distinguishes between annals, chronicles, and "fullfledged" histories on the basis of the degree to which events are shaped by "narrativity," the degree, that is, to which the events are given a narrative structure that conduces to the establishment or legitimation of a social order. The shaping "narrativity" of history writing is ultimately associated with a "moralizing impulse." White seems to assume that events themselves are the sine qua non of every type of historiography and that narrativity involves merely their moral shaping. He fails to consider the possibility of what we have found in Rasselas, that the moralizing impulse can result in the suppression of the events themselves.

Index

232ni5; compared to Bossuet's historiography, 1 1 3 , 119, 120, 128, 155; compared to Dryden's Religio Laid, 77-85, 1 0 1 , 106, 2 3 i m o , 234n34; and deism, 77-85, 1 0 1 , 106, 236m2; and empiricism, 124, 128, 155; epistemological position of, 89, 92-95, 1 0 1 , 109-10; erring conscience in, 87-89, 91, 96, 98, 99, 102, 104; historical argument for toleration in, 1 1 3 , 120-29, 137- 139' 155' 2 3 5 n 4 i ' 238n25; moral argument for toleration in, 89, 95, 98, 1 0 1 , 103, 106, 109, 1 1 0 , 152, 2 3 i n i 2 ; and paganism, 120-26, 127, 129; persecutor's conscience in, 89-92, 99-100, 102; political aspects of, 102, 107-8, 1 1 0 , 1 2 1 - 2 2 , 125; and rationalism, 80-86, 9 2 ' 93' 95-97' 99' i ° 5 ' 124225n26, 234n28, 236ni2; religious persecution condemned in, 78-79, 87-93, 102, 103, 106; Rex's interpretation of, 92, 95, 96, 99, 100, 2 3 3 - 3 4 ^ 8 ; and skepticism, 36, 9 5 96, 99, 102, 103, 1 0 5 - 1 1 , 234n29; and Socinianism, 85-87, 96-97, 101; speculation distinguished from truth in, 86, 96-103, 109, 1 1 0 , 128 Bentley, Richard, 2 2 5 ^ 0 Berkeley, George, 194-95, 217, 218 Biblical exegesis: and Bayle's Commentaire philosophique, 77-85, 208; and Dryden's Religio Laid, 56-62, 7 1 76, 77-78 Blount, Charles, 66 Bodin, Jean, 232ni5 Boerhaave, Hermann, 188, 189 Bogel, Frederic, 221 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 159 Bolinbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 242ni9

Abrams, M. H., 14 Absolutism, 1 1 3 , 1 1 7 , 119, 142 Althusser, Louis, 1 1 Anglicanism, 4 9 - 5 1 , 57-58, 59, 63, 7 4 75, 76, 1 5 1 , 2 3 4 ^ 8 Anthropocentrism: and Pope's Essay on Man, 159-60, 168, 177, 178; and Voltaire's writings, 1 7 1 , 172, 177, 178, 1 8 0 - 8 1 , 184, 185, 244n4i Apologue, genre of, 203-5 Aristotle, 30, 175, 225n28 Art, Marcuse's theory of, 9 - 1 1 , 12, 18, 20, 223nn, 2271142 Asceticism, 130, 143 Asia, Christian missionaries in, 1 2 1 Atheism, 1 0 3 - 5 , 151> 2341131 Augustine, Saint, 79-80, 1 1 2 , 230m Augustus, Emperor, 120, 126, 237ni5 Bacon, Francis, 36, 155, 186, 193, 243n3o; Great Instauration by, 207-8; Novum Organum by, 3 0 - 3 1 , 173-74 Bate, Walter Jackson, 215, 216 Baxter, Charles, 3 Bayle, Pierre: Dictionnaire historique et critique by, 2 3 4 ^ 9 , 2 3 5 ^ 0 , lyyniy; Gibbon's citation of, 2 3 8 ^ 7 ; and intellectual co-optation, 19-20, 36; Jurieu opposed by, 230m, 232m 7, 237m7; persecution fled by, 77 —Commentaire philosophique: and atheism, 1 0 3 - 5 , 1 5 1 _ 5 2 ' 2341131; biblical interpretation in, 77-85, 208; Calvinist orthodoxy of, 82, 89, 1 0 1 , 102, 23in9, 232ni7, 2 3 4 ^ 8 , 2 3 4 ^ 3 ; Catholicism criticized in, 20, 78, 8 3 85, 120-24, 2351141, 238n25; and Christian historiography, 126-29; clear and distinct truths in, 85-86, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97-98, 100, 103; compared to Bodin's Colloquium,

251

252

Index

Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, Discours de l'histoire universelle by: and absolutism, 1 1 3 , 1 1 7 , 119, 142, 151; Christian morality compared to paganism in, 1 1 3 - 2 0 , 135; compared to Bayle's Commentaire philosophique, 1 1 3 , 119, 120, 128, 155; Egypt glorified in, 1 1 7 , 124, 141-42; political argument of, 1 1 7 , 1 1 9 , 135, 136; providential historiography of, 1 1 2 13, 116, 1 1 8 - 1 9 , 142; Ranum's introduction to, 235-361-15 Bredvold, Louis, 23inio Burke, Edmund, 36 Calvinism, 69, 1 2 1 , 225026; Bayle's orthodox espousal of, 82, 89, 101, 102, 23in9, 232ni7, 2 3 4 ^ 8 , 2 3 4 ^ 3 Capitalism, and social mobility, 165, 167 Catholicism: Bayle's critique of, 20, 8384, 120-24, 235'M1< 2 3 ^ 2 5 ; and biblical exegesis, 57, 58, 62, 71, 72, 75; and Bossuet's religious history, 112, 119, 151; and Cartesianism, 1 0 7 8; and Dryden's Religio Laid, 49, 51, 58-60, 62-63, 7 1 ' 7 2_ 73< 75> 76» 1 5 0 51; Gibbon's critique of, 143, 145, 146, 148, 1 5 0 - 5 1 , 239n29, 24on4i; and Hume's religious history, 130, 1 3 1 , 132-33; and Montesquieu's essay on Roman religion, 140-42; and Scholastic method, 29-34; and Simon's history of the Old Testament, 52, 54-59, 61-62 Christianity: Bayle's history of, 126-29, 235n4i; Bossuet's history of, 1 1 3 - 2 0 ; and Gibbon's Decline and Fall, 142-52, 239029; Hume's history of, 129-34, 142-43; and moral epistemology, 208-13. See also Catholicism; Protestantism Civic virtue, 1 1 5 - 1 8 , 138-39, 142, 145, 1 5 1 , 152, 24on39, 2 4 ^ 3 2 Clarke, Samuel, 209-11, 214, 2 4 8 ^ 5 Colie, Rosalie L., 47 Collins, Anthony, 66 Compartmentalization, 3 - 7 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 2 4 3 ^ 6 Contextual analysis, 8, 39-40; and deistic argument for toleration, 6970; and Maecenas's maxim, 1 2 1 , 122-23; a n c ' Principle of Plenitude, 161-62 Co-optation, intellectual, 9, 19-22, 24, 45, 156; Bayle's strategy of, 19-20, 36;

and Dryden's engagement with deism, 65, 70-76; and Hobbes's critique of Puritanism, 28, 32 Co-optation, structural: absolute version of, 9, 1 2 - 1 7 , 20> 2 1 > 2 2 compared to intellectual co-optation, 19-20; Marcuse's theory of, 9-10, 18-19, 20 Counterhypothetical fictions, in Voltaire's writings, 181-83, 185-86, 187, 244n4i, 245nn45~47 Damrosch, Leo, 246n6 Deconstruction, 28, 39, 42-43 Deism: Dryden's attack on, 49, 52-56, 60-62, 65, 70, 229n27, 230^6, 249n39; Dryden's co-optation of, 6 3 64, 65, 70-76; Herbert's formulation of, 52-54, 60-61, 64, 66, 68-70, 157, 228ni7, 229n28, 232ni4; and natural religion, 64-65, 67; political dimension of, 66-76, 84-85; and providential history, 118; rationalism of, 76, 80-85, 1 0 1 / 228ni7; similarity of Bayle's position to, 80-85, 101, 106, 236ni2; and theodicy, 157, 158 Derrida, Jacques, 28 Descartes, René, 1 6 - 1 7 , 25, 30, 34, 85, 103, 107-8; Voltaire's critique of, 1 7 2 76, 191 Dickinson, Henry, 52, 56 Dio Cassius, 120, 237m 5 Douglas, Mary, 27, 223m Dryden, John, Religio Laici by: Anglican orthodoxy of, 49-51, 57-58, 59, 63, 74-75, 76; biblical interpretation in, 56-62, 71-76, 77-78; Bredvold's interpretation of, 23inio; compared to Bayle's Commentane philosophique, 77-85, 101, 106, 231 nio, 234n34; compared to Gibbon's Decline and Fall, 1 5 0 - 5 1 ; critique of Catholicism in, 49, 51, 58-60, 62-63, 7 1 ' 72~73< 75, 76, 1 5 0 - 5 1 ; critique of Puritanism in, 49, 51, 71, 73-74, 75, 76; critique of Socinianism in, 57, 62-63, 75deism attacked in, 49, 52-56, 60-62, 65, 70, 229n27, 23on36, 249^9; deism co-opted in, 63-64, 65, 70-76; doctrinal minimalism of, 62-64, 83, 158, 232ni4; Harth's interpretation of, 49-54, 61, 234n28; and Herbert's deism, 52-54, 60-61, 64, 66, 68-70; and natural religion, 64-65; political dimension of, 51, 66-76, 121, 2 3 0 ^ 5 ; rationalism of, 76, 83-85, 101,

Index 2321114, 2341128; scriptural deism of, 64, 65, 66, 70, 72, 74, 83; and Simon's Critical History, 52, 54-59, 61-62, 66, 75 Durrell, Lawrence, 77 Dury, John, 3 1 - 3 2 , 34 Edict of Nantes, 77, 1 1 2 Egypt, ancient, 1 1 7 , 124, 129, 139-42, 2 39n37 Elites, religion used as social control by, 1 33 - 34< 142-43' 147-50, 151. 152 Empiricism, 17, 36, 38, 124, 155, 156, 187, 194. See also Inductivism Empson, William, 53 Encyclopédie, 173, 2 3 i n i 2 Enlightenment: and Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, 5; and paganism, 1 1 3 , 119; and science/ideology dichotomy, 22-23; and secular control of religion, 2 4 0 ^ 7 Epistemology: and absolute structural co-optation, 1 5 - 1 6 ; and Bayle's argument for toleration, 89, 92-95, 101, 109-10; and compartmentalization, 5, 6, 7; and Hobbes's critique of Puritanism, 26-34, 37; ideological analysis of, 35-39; and immediacy/ mediation dichotomy, 26-34; ar>d Johnson's moral inductivism, 210-22; and religio-ethical authority, 208-13; and science/ideology dichotomy, 2 3 24, 28, 39; and theodicy, 158; and Voltaire's argument for hierarchy, 158, 1 7 1 , 172, 176, 186-87. See also Moral truth Erasmus, Desiderius, 2 3 i n i 2 Erastianism, 70, 76, 151 Eschatology, Christian, 162-63, 167, 168, 169 Essentialism, ideological, 16, 22, 45; and collapse of science/ideology dichotomy, 39, 42, 43, 44-45, 46; and deistic toleration, 69-70; and genetic fallacy, 43-45; and Hobbes's critique of Puritanism, 27-28, 2 2 5 ^ 8 ; and Hume's religious history, 129; and internalist historiography, 43-44; and Johnson's rejection of utilitarianism, 249n4i; and literary formalism, 42-43, 44; and myths of origin, 4 1 42; and religious universalism, 2 35 n 34 Ethics: and compartmentalization, 5 - 6 , 7; and epistemological authority,

253

208-13; and toleration, 18. See also Moral truth Fable, as literary form, 177-83, 187 False consciousness, 22-23 Fideism, 83, 84, 101, 231 nio, 2 3 3 ^ 6 , 235r>40 Fish, Stanley, 1 3 - 1 4 Formalism, 41, 42-43, 44 Foucault, Michel, 1 1 , 17 Gay, Peter, 241m Generic pride, 160, 168, 175 Genetic fallacy, 43-45 Gibbon, Edward, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by: Bayle's writings cited in, 238n27; Christian struggle against ethical naturalism in, 143-45, 146, 149; and civic humanist tradition, 24on39; compared to Dryden's religious poetry, 1 5 0 - 5 1 ; compared to Hume's religious history, 134, 142-43, 145, 148, 239n29; compared to Montesquieu's "Dissertation," 142-43; critique of Catholicism in, 143, 145, 146, 148, 1 5 0 - 5 1 , 239n29, 24on4i; and paganism, 107, 1 1 3 , 139, 142-45, 146, 148, 149, 151, 239nn; role of enlightened elites in, 143, 147-50, 152 Giddens, Anthony, 39 Great Chain of Being: Christian eschatology contradicted by, 162-63, 166-67, 169; in Jenyns's Free Inquiry, 163-64, 166, 169; in Johnson's review of Jenyns, 164, 166, 175; linked to social hierarchy, 159-64, 166, 1 6 7 69, 1 7 1 , 172, 186-87, 242n2o; in Pope's Essay on Man, 157, 1 5 9 - 6 1 , 167-70, 186, 242ni9; and Principle of Plenitude, 161-62, 166, 168, 175; and theodicy, 161; in Voltaire's writings, 171, 172, 175-77, 182, 184, 186-87 Greece, ancient, 1 1 5 Greenleaf, W. H., 2 4 2 - 4 3 ^ 1 Habermas, Jürgen, 37, 2 2 6 ^ 4 Harth, Philip, 49-54, 61, 234n28 Hazard, Paul, 117, 2 3 4 ^ 1 , 2 3 5 ^ 1 Herbert, Edward (baron of Cherbury), 157, 158, 229n28, 232ni4; and Bayle's Commentaire philosophique, 80-85, 106; and Dryden's Religio Laid, 52-54, 6061, 64, 66, 68-70; Hutcheson's translation of, 228ni7

254

Index

Hintikka, Jaakko, 161 Hirst, Paul Q., 42 Historiography, Christian: and Bayle's argument for toleration, 126-29; and Bossuet's religious history, 1 1 2 - 1 3 , 116, 118-19, 142' ar>d Gibbon's Decline and Fall, 145; and Hume's religious history, 129-34 Historiography, intellectual, 43-45; and narrativity, 2 5 0 ^ 8 Hobbes, Thomas, 24-34, 37' 225nn27~ 28, 233n24, 247ni4 Hooker, Richard, 60 Houdar de La Motte, Antoine, 178-79 Hudson, Nicholas, 249nrt4i-42 Huguenots, 77, 110, 152, 230m Hume, David, 190, 194, 212 —Natural History of Religion: compared to Gibbon's history, 134, 142-43, 145, 148, 239^9; compared to Montesquieu's "Dissertation," 1 3 8 39, 142, 151; and development of monotheism from polytheism, 12932; and elite manipulation of superstitious masses, 132-34, 14243, 148, 152, 238n29; and ideological essentialism, 129; and religious toleration, 131-34 Hutcheson, Frances, 212 Hypothetical method: in Johnson's works, 188, 192, 193, 194; in Voltaire's works, 172-74, 176-77, 179-83 Ideology: and Enlightenment view of paganism, 129; of epistemological claims, 35-39; and Great Chain of Being, 160-63; Habermas's definition of, 37, 226n34; and immediacy/ mediation dichotomy, 26-34; and intellectual co-optation, 20-22; and internalist historiography, 43-44; as legitimating strategy, 7-8, 22, 40; Marxist critique of, 12; and moral epistemology, 221; and science/ ideology dichotomy, 22-24, 37< 39. 42, 43, 44-45, 46; and social context of science, 39-40. See also Essentialism, ideological Imagination, negative effects of, 191, 192, 195, 217, 218 Immediacy, epistemological, 26-34 Incommensurability, 13, 224ml Indoctrination, 9, 10, 11 Inductivism, 30, 34, 38, 155, 207-8, 243n3o; in Johnson's writings, 188-

91, 192, 194, 195-207, 216, 220, 248n28; in Voltaire's writings, 15657, 172-75, 186-87, 204-5, 241m Internalism, historiographical, 40, 43, 44- 45 Jenyns, Soame, 163-67, 169, 242ni7 Johnson, Samuel: and Clarke's ethical theory, 2 1 0 - 1 1 , 214; compared to Voltaire, 157, 175, 188, 189, 190, 243n28; and divine revelation, 189, 212; and Great Chain of Being, 164, 166, 175; and inductivism, 188-91, 192, 194, 245~46nn; and moral knowledge, 188-89, :95< 210-13; ar>d sociability of reason, 190-91, 194, 195; and social hierarchy, 163-67, 242ni7; and speculative-hypothetical method, 188, 189, 192, 193, 194 —Rasselas: and author's habits of mind, 205-7; and choice of life, 196, 199, 201, 217-19; compared to Berkeley's Alciphron, 217, 218; compared to Voltaire's Candide, 204-5, 245ni; and eloquence/experience dichotomy, 195-97; and etiology of madness, 191-93, 218; generic status of, 203-5; and inductivism, 195-207, 216, 220; and mediation of experience, 199203; and moral epistemology, 213-22; and negative effects of imagination, 192, 217, 218; and rejection of utilitarianism, 213, 249^1, 2495on44; satiric effects in, 215-17, 218 —other works: Dictionary of the English Language, 173, 242ni7, 243^8, 248n37; Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 206-7; Life °f Boerhaave, 188, 192, 246n3; Life of Milton, 18889; preface to Dodsley's Preceptor, 210, 213; review of Jenyns's Free Inquiry, 163-67, 211, 213, 242ni7, 245m Jordan, W. K., 1 1 2 Judaism, 139, 140 Jurieu, Pierre, 230m, 232ni7, 237nni7,20 Juvenal, 124, 129, 139, 237ni9, 2 3 9 ^ 7 Kierkegaard, Soren, 110 Kuhn, Thomas, 17 La Fontaine, Jean de, 179 Language: and absolute structural cooptation, 12, 13; deconstructivist

Index critique of, 43; and Hobbes's nominalism, 2 2 5 ^ 8 Latitudinarianism, 50, 65, 75, 2 3 0 ^ 5 . See also Rationalism Legitimation, strategies of, 7 - 8 , 19, 22, 156; and functional explanation, 4041; and historiography, 116, 155; and Puritan critique of authority, 32; and sociability of reason, 194; and social inequality, 166-67 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 157, 159, 182 Livy, 135, 239n34, 2 4 0 ^ 9 Locke, John, 172, 208, 23on2, 232ni4, 2 4 1 m , 247ni4 Logocentrism, 28, 2251128 Louis XIV, 77, 1x2, 1 1 5 , 142 Lovejoy, A. O., 160, 161 Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 226n34 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 135-36, 2 3 9 ^ 4 , 24on39 Madness, linked to social isolation, 191-93, 194, 195, 218 Maecenas, Gaius, 120-23, 124-26, 127, 2 37nl5 Marcuse, Herbert, 8 - 1 1 , 1 2 , 1 6 , 1 7 - 2 1 Marxism: and critique of ideology, 12; and deconstruction, 43; and neoMarxism, 14; and science/ideology dichotomy, 22-23 Mass media, 9 Materialism, 25, 33 Mediation: and Hobbes's critique of Puritanism, 26-34; a r ) d inductivism in Johnson's Rasselas, 199-203 Method, intellectual: Baconian, 3 0 - 3 1 , 34, 38, 156, 173-74, 186» 193, 207-8, 243n3o; Cartesian, 34, 172-75, 191; and Hobbes's critique of Puritanism, 26-27, 31-34; and immediacy/ mediation dichotomy, 26-27, 32-34; and Johnson's inductivism, 1 8 8 - 9 1 , 192, 194, 195-207, 216, 220, 2481128; political interests served by, 16, 2 7 28, 3 1 - 3 2 , 34, 38; role of hypothesis in, 172-75, 180; and Swift's critique of science, 34; and Voltaire's inductivism, 156, 172-76,180, 1 8 6 87, 191, 204-5 Minimalism, doctrinal, 62-64, 83, 158, 2321114 Missionaries, 121 Monotheism, 129-32, 133, 134 Montaigne, Michel de, 36, 108, 188 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat,

255

Baron de: "Dissertation sur la politique des romains dans la religion" by, 136-43, 1 5 1 , 152, 239n34; De ¡'esprit des lois by, 136; Lettres persanes by, 5-7, 19, 136, 239n30, 248n32 Moral truth: and Bayle's Commentaire philosophique, 86, 96-103, 109, 110; distinguished from scientific truth, 188-89, 207-8, 210; epistemological authority of, 208-13, 219; and Johnson's writings, 188-89, 195, 2 1 0 - 1 7 , 219-20 Moral virtue: and Bossuet's Discours de I'histoire universelle, 1 1 3 - 2 0 , 1 3 5 ; and Hume's Natural History of Religion, 1 3 0 - 3 1 , 133-34 More, Thomas, 236 Natural religion, 64-65, 67, 229M9. See also Deism Neo-Marxism, 14 Newton, Isaac, 156, 172-75, 191, 2 4 1 m , 246119 Nominalism, 2 2 5 ^ 8 Novel, genre of, 203-5 Objectivism, 14, 16, 42-43 Objectivity: and absolute structural cooptation, 12; and science/ideology dichotomy, 24 Oppositionality: and intellectual cooptation, 21, 22; Marcuse's theory of, 9 - 1 1 , 12, 1 8 - 1 9 , 2 1 > social construction of, 1 1 - 1 2 ; and structural co-optation, 12, 15, 1 8 - 1 9 , 2 1 Optimism, cosmic, 157, 160, 168, 186, 205, 245m. See also Great Chain of Being Origen, 143 Origin, myths of, 16, 41-42 Orwell, George, 1 1 - 1 2 Paganism: and Bayle's argument for toleration, 120-26, 127, 129; and Bossuet's religious history, 1 1 3 - 2 0 , 135; civic virtue of, 1 1 5 - 1 8 , 138-39, 142, 145, 151; ethical naturalism of, 143-45, 146, 149; in Gibbon's Decline and Fall, 107, 1 1 3 , 139, 142-45, 146, 148, 149, 1 5 1 , 239nn; and Hume's religious history, 129-34, 142; and Montesquieu's "Dissertation," 1 3 6 43, 151; and religious means of social control, 132-38, 142-43, 148-50, 152;

256

Index

Paganism (continued) religious toleration promoted by, 1 1 9 - 2 9 , 136, 137, 138, 147, 1 5 1 Pascal, Blaise, 110, 159 Pattison, Mark, 2 2 9 ^ 0 Penelhum, Terence, 233n26 Platonism, 208 Plenitude, principle of, 161-62, 166, 168, 175, 245m Plutarch, 2 3 9 ^ 7 Pocock, J. G. A., 238n29, 2 4 0 ^ 1 Politics: and Bayle's argument for toleration, 102, 107-8, 110, 1 2 1 - 2 2 , 125; and Bossuet's religious history, 1 1 7 , 119, 135, 136; and collapse of science/ideology dichotomy, 44-45, 46; and compartmentalization, 4 - 5 , 6, 7; and deism, 66-76, 84-85; and Dryden's religious poetry, 51, 66-76, 1 2 1 , 23on35; of epistemological claims, 16, 24, 35-39; and Hobbes's critique of Puritanism, 27-28; and Hume's religious history, 132-34, 138, 142-43; and intellectual cooptation, 20, 45; and literary formalism, 42-43; and religion as social control, 132-38, 142-43, 1 4 8 50, 151, 152; and skepticism, 102, 107-8, 110; and structural cooptation, 1 3 - 1 4 , 1 5 - 1 6 , 20 Polytheism, 125, 129-32, 133, 134, 138, 139, 148, 149 Pope, Alexander, Essay on Man by: anthropocentrism condemned in, 159-60, 168, 177; compared to Leibniz's philosophy, 157, 159, 182; compared to Voltaire's writings, 157, 158, 159, 170, 1 7 1 , 175, 176-77, 178, 181, 186, 187; generic pride condemned in, 168, 175; and Great Chain of Being, 157, 1 5 9 - 6 1 , 167-70, 186, 242ni9; querulousness condemned in, 159-60, 168; and social hierarchy, 1 5 9 - 6 1 , 167-70, 186; and theodicy, 158 Popper, Karl, 2 4 3 ^ 0 Porter, Roy, 236-37ni4 Postmodernism, 13, 2 2 6 ^ 4 Power: and intellectual co-optation, 19-20; and structural co-optation, 1 1 , 15, 18 Protestantism: and Bayle's argument for toleration, 20, 77, 122, 126, 1 5 1 52; and biblical exegesis, 57, 59, 62, 71, 73-74; and Bossuet's antischismatic position, 1 1 2 , 119; critique of Scholasticism in, 29-34;

and Dryden's doctrinal minimalism, 62; historiography of, 126-27, 1 3 0 _ 33, 145; and Hume's religious history, 130-33; persecution of, 77, 122, 126. See also Anglicanism; Calvinism; Puritanism Puritanism: and Baconianism, 3 1 - 3 2 , 224-25n22; and Dryden's Religio Laid, 49, 51, 71, 73-74, 75, 76; Hobbes's critique of, 24-34, 225nn27-28 Pyrrhonism, 103, 106, 108, 225n26. See also Skepticism Quine, W. V., 180 Rationalism: Anglican, 65, 2 3 4 ^ 8 ; and Bayle's argument for toleration, 8086, 92, 93, 95-97, 99, 101, 105, 124, 225n26, 234n28, 236ni2; Cartesian, 1 6 - 1 7 , 2 5- 34- 85, 103, 225n26; deistic, 76, 80-85, 101, 228ni7; Lockean, 208; and science/ideology dichotomy, 23 Rationality: and absolute structural cooptation, 15, 16, 23, 24; Marcuse's theory of, 9 - 1 1 , 12, 18, 20, 223n6 Relativism, 23, 36 Religion: and compartmentalization, 4 5, 6, 7; and social control, 132-38, 142-43, 148-50, 1 5 1 , 152; and universalism, 234-351134 See also Christianity; Deism; Paganism Representation, theory of, 12, 13 Repressive tolerance, 8 - 9 Rex, Walter, 92, 95, 96, 99, 100, 2 3 3 34n28 Romanticism, 246n9 Rome, ancient: Gibbon's history of, 134; moral virtue of pagans in, 116, 1 1 7 - 1 8 , 119-20, 135, 136; religion as social control in, 135-38; religious toleration in, 119-29, 136, 137, 138 Ryan, Michael, 27-28, 37, 39, 43, 226n34 Sacks, Sheldon, 203 Satire, 2 1 5 - 1 7 , 218, 2 4 4 ^ 1 Scholasticism, 29-34, 190, 195, 225nn27~28 Schwartz, Richard B., 206-7, 242ni7, 248028 Science: distinguished from ideological analysis, 44-46; distinguished from moral knowledge, 188-89, 207-8, 210; distinguished from narrative knowledge, 226^4; and Johnson's

Index inductivism, 1 8 8 - 9 1 , 192, 194,195, 248028; and science/ideology dichotomy, 22-24, 28, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44-45, 46; and scientific method, 3 0 3 1 , 34, 38, 172-75, 180, 243030; social context of, 39-40, 240-4ini; and Voltaire's inductivism, 156, 172-76, 180, 186-87, 1 9 1 ' 2 4 1 m Sextus Empiricus, 106 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of, 194-95, 2 ° 8 - 9 , 2 1 1 - 1 2 , 218, 242ni9, 248n32 Shapin, Steven, 39-40 Shell, Marc, 2 3 4 - 3 5 ^ 4 Simon, Richard, 52, 54-59, 61-62, 66, 75 Skepticism: and Bayle's Commentaire philosophique, 36, 95-96, 99, 102, 103, 1 0 5 - 1 1 , 234n2g; and Bayle's Dictionnaire, 2 3 4 ^ 9 , 2 3 5 ^ 0 ; and Cartesian method, 107; and Dryden's Religio Laid, 23inio; and equipollence, 2 4 4 ^ 1 ; and fideism, 23inio, 233n26, 235n4o; Montaigne's formulation of, 36, 108; political aspects of, 102, 107-8, 110; and Pyrrhonism, 103, 106, 108, 2 2 5 ^ 6 Social control, religion as instrument of, 132-38, 142-43, 148-50, 151, 152 Social hierarchy: and Christian equality of souls, 164, 169; in Jenyns's Free Inquiry, 163-67; in Johnson's review of Jenyns, 163-67, 242ni7; linked to Great Chain of Being, 159-64, 166, 167-69, 1 7 1 , 172, 186-87, 242n2o; in Pope's Essay on Man, 1 5 9 - 6 1 , 167-70, 186; in Voltaire's writings, 170-72, 186-87, 2 4 3 n 2 3 Socinianism: and Bayle's Commentaire philosophique, 85-87, 96-97, 101; and Dryden's Religio Laid, 57, 62-63, 75 Spanish Inquisition, 2 3 i - 3 2 n i 3 Speculative thought: distinguished from moral truth, 86, 96-103, 109, 110, 128; distinguished from scientific method, 172-73, 189, 194 Spinoza, Baruch, 247ni4 Stoicism, 197-98 Structuralism, 41 Subjectivity: and absolute structural cooptation, 12, 14, 15-16; social construction of, 1 0 - 1 1 Sullivan, Robert E., 50 Superstition, 129-34, 147- 148, 149, 2 3 ® _ 3 9 n 2 9 ' 2 4on4i Swift, Jonathan, 1 1 , 34, 36, 79, 2 1 5 - 1 6 , 225n30, 2 36n7

257

Sykes, Norman, 229n20 Teleology, 2 1 1 , 212 Theodicy, 157-58, 161, 162, 169, 182 Tillotson, John, 50 Tindal, Matthew, 66 Toland, John, 66 Toleration: Bayle's historical argument for, 1 1 3 , 120-29, 1 3 7 ' 139< Ï55' 235041, 238n25; Bayle's moral argument for, 68, 89, 95, 98, 101, 103, 106,109, 110, 152, 23ini2; Bodin's argument for, 232ni5; deistic version of, 68, 70; distinction between civil and ecclesiastical, 232-33ni8; and Hume's religious history, 1 3 1 - 3 4 , 151; Locke's argument for, 23on2, 232ni4; Marcuse's theory of, 8-9, 1 7 - 2 1 ; and Roman paganism, 1 1 9 2 9/ 136, 137' 138, J47' 151 Tonson, Jacob, 52 Ullian, J. S „ 180 Utilitarianism, 212, 213, 2 4 9 ^ 1 , 2495 o n 44 Voltaire: anthropocentrism condemned by, 159, 1 7 1 , 172, 177, 1 8 0 - 8 1 , 184, 185, 244n4i; compared to Johnson, 157, 175, 188, 189, 190, 204-5, 243n28, 245m; compared to Leibniz, 182; compared to Pope, 157, 158, 159, 170, 1 7 1 , 175, 176-77, 178, 181, 186, 187; counterhypothetical fictions employed by, 181-83, 185-86, 187, 244n4i, 245nn45~47; epistemological suppositions of, 158, 1 7 1 , 172, 176, 186-87; fabular form employed by, 177-83, 187; generic pride condemned by, 175; and Great Chain of Being, 1 7 1 , 172, 175-77, 182, 184, 186-87; a n d inductivism, 156, 1 7 2 76, 180, 186-87, 1 9 1 ' 2 0 4~5' 2 4 i n i ' 245~46ni; querulousness condemned by, 159, 1 7 1 , 172, 181, 182, 184, 185; and social hierachy, 170-72, 186-87, 243n23; and speculative-hypothetical method, 36, 172-74, 176-77, 179-84; and theodicy, 158, 182 —works: Candide, 204-5, 245nn; Discours en vers sur l'homme, 157, 1 7 0 72, 175-84, 185, 186, 187, 245047; Elémens de la philosophie de Newton, 174, 176, 188, 243n28; Lettres philosophiques, 172, 2 4 1 m , 2 4 3 ^ 6 ; Micromégas, 157, 183-85, 2451^45-47;

258

Index

Voltaire (continued) Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, 204, 245m Wade, Ira, 183 Whichcote, Benjamin, 208

White, Hayden, 250048 Willey, Basil, 160, 162 Wimsatt, W. K „ 2 4 7 - 4 8 ™ Wordsworth, William, 2 4 6 ^ Zwicker, Steven N., 51, 74

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