You know one of the most difficult things when reading history, especially an intellectual history, is understanding just how revolutionary the changes during the period are. Living in a time when we have a robot exploring Mars and sending back photos and data; when some speculate that life on Earth arrived on a meteorite; when in our everyday lives with a few keystrokes we can be video chatting with someone on the other side of the world; when interacting with people from other countries, other cultures, other skin colors, other religious beliefs on a daily basis is no big deal; when in a large part of the world people are allowed to think for themselves, question authority, call it to account, make of their lives more or less what they want to; when living in a world like this, it is close to impossible to fully imagine what it must have been like living in the period Hazard covers in Crisis of the European Mind, 1680-1715.
Prior to this period was the Reformation and the Counterreformation. The Reformation itself was monumental. The Catholic Church was a monolithic power in Europe to which even Kings submitted. Luther cracked the edifice but even after that the Catholic Church was still very powerful and though there was no longer a single religion (yes, there have always been Jews and Muslims and a others, but in Europe they had no power) they were all still recognizably Christian and God was in charge of everything. Sure, there was science but science was an attempt to explain the works of God. And when an explanation could not be found it was because God’s ways were mysterious and there was no way we could fully grasp His plans for us.
So when people began talking about Reason and proof, when evidence and logic started to be called on to explain things, this was huge. People began to doubt God’s active involvement in the world and many people doubted the existence of God Himself. Religious belief and unbelief multiplied and, while to challenge God’s dominance was still frowned on by many and could bring persecution in some circles and countries, for the most part no one was tossed into jail or burned at the stake. Once people were allowed to ask questions and seek their own answers instead of having to obey the church, the doors of change were thrown wide open and there was no going back.
It was not easy or smooth going by any means. Nor was there a switch that flipped where one day everyone believed God was all and it was our duty to submit to His will and the next day God was demoted, forced to submit to Reason and the laws of Nature. It was a lurching build up to reach:
Malebranche, who refused to believe that the Almighty would put himself to such endless trouble as these constant interventions would involve, comes on the scene to inform us that God acts by way of general laws, and not by special ad hoc enactments to suit each individual case.
And it wasn’t long after that Spinoza declared religious belief no longer had any effect on conduct. The gloves came off. Spinoza was both lauded and reviled.
The champions of Reason and the champions of Religion were, in the words of Pierre Bayle, fighting desperately for the possession of men’s souls, confronting each other in a contest at which the whole of thoughtful Europe was looking on.
The debates happened very publicly with books being furiously published and translated. Some areas attempted to ban certain books but trade across borders had become so fluid that outright bans were impossible.
John Toland came on the scene and insisted there was no such thing as mystery or the supernatural. Mystery is nothing but superstition and must be stamped out. Science made advances. It was discovered that the movement of comets followed laws and had nothing to do with omens. Geometry became the language of Reason. Then Leibniz and Newton invented calculus and Newton published his book on gravity and the laws of motion.
With Reason making strong headway against Religion and science adding fuel to the fire, with morals separated from religious belief, people began to wonder what was Truth? Happiness? How should one live? Enter John Locke.
I’ve been having a similar sort of discussion this afternoon with a class studying ‘Measure for Measure’. Of all Shakespeare’s plays it is the one I think is most rooted in his own time because if you don’t understand what the customs were pertaining to ante-nuptial contracts and don’t accept the fact that the state has the right to legislate on sexual matters then you can’t even begin to fathom the world that the characters are living in. A modern reader or audience has to be prepared to take a deep breath and embrace an entirely different world.
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Alex, good point. Even with Shakespeare who we, I, tend to think of as modern, context can be everything. And even if it is so against our current customs, one must be willing to suspend that as much as possible or miss so very much.
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To “embrace an entirely different world” is what the study of history and of literature gives us a chance of trying to do. It is a bit chastening to realise just how hard that imaginative empathy can be when we are dealing with “early modern” history that is very well sourced. A period like the middle ages (of course an entirely eurocentric concept) is even harder not to distort either in a sort of hostile ignorance (someone like Dickens or Wells) or impossibly idealization (Scott or Chesterton). And for most of the world’s history most of us have only the sort of bare summary you might find in World Book Encyclopedia….
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Ian, so very true! Who was it that said The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there? Google tells me L.P. Hartley. It is chastening to realize how difficult imaginative empathy can be, how we insert our own hopes and fears and desires and prejudices. And it is alarming when I stop to think about how little world history I know.
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I really should have read these in the right order, but I’m fascinated by the ascent of reason over the numinous. Yay for reason! I didn’t realise Spinoza was busy about that – I have a soft spot for the idea of Spinoza because he was hugely influential to Flaubert, and Bertie Wooster so often found Jeeves reading him (and said he hoped he hadn’t interrupted him just as they’d got to the discovery of the second body). But what a time to live when basic ideology was changing so drastically. That’s so hard for us to imagine.
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Litlove, Spinoza was a big player. He was early though so he tried to find a balance between Reason and Religion but the very idea of Reason coming first was enough to make a good many people not like him very much. Clarice Lispector was also very influenced by his work. I’ve never read him but I probably should one of these days considering how he pops up so many places. We’ve had drastic changes in our time but nothing to quite equal the period Hazard writes on.
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What Hazard writes about is quite revolutionary isn’t it? I really need to get back to the book–I was enjoying it–and it is such great foundation reading!
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Danielle, it is and it is hard to think of it as begin such since for us all these years later it seems no big deal. But then, it was quite eventful.
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