Alicia C. Montoya MEDIEVALISM and ENLIGHTENMENT, 1647–1750: JEAN CHAPELAIN to JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
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Alicia C. Montoya MEDIEVALISM AND ENLIGHTENMENT, 1647–1750: JEAN CHAPELAIN TO JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU ritiques of modernity and the Enlightenment project increasingly recog- Cnize the need to historicize the Enlightenment debate (Baker and Reill; Darnton). Reframing criticism of the Enlightenment in its original eighteenth- century setting has shown that such critiques are not new to our own epoch, but draw on a long history and tradition of their own. Not only do historians increasingly distinguish between several varieties of Enlightenment (Israel) but it also appears that questioning the Enlightenment is germane even to the most radical forms of Enlightenment discourse itself. As exemplifed most famously by the supreme “autocritic” of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Enlightenment appears not as a fxed set of philosophical notions but rather as a series of interlocking, often strident debates on what Enlightenment is, or should be, or cannot ever be.1 As Mark Hulliung writes, “Not the least sig- nifcant, albeit the most ignored, of the many critiques of the Enlightenment that have been articulated during the last two centuries is the one the ‘age of criticism’ made of itself, largely through the instigation of Rousseau” (7). The Enlightenment’s self-criticism, as voiced ultimately but not exclusively by Rousseau, was founded in part on the contrasting images of historical light and darkness, equated respectively with modernity and the medieval. The binary opposition “Lumière(s)” versus “ténèbres” was continually and insistently mobilized in the ongoing debate on what human society and cul- ture should be like. So widely accepted were these terms that critics of the Enlightenment came to use the light-dark metaphor as naturally as did the small group of thinkers—the French philosophes—most commonly iden- tifed with the movement (Delon). Yet the very banality of this metaphor invites us to take it seriously. As several scholars have argued, metaphors can fundamentally structure thinking and are central to the performance of culture (Lakoff and Johnson; Sapir and Crocker). Recent studies have drawn attention to the ways in which the Enlightenment metaphor of light could 1. I follow here Jonathan Israel’s “controversialist approach,” which focuses on ar- guments and debates rather than on fnished theories, and on the intellectual process rather than on the individual, canonical works of the major thinkers (21). The Romanic Review Volume 100 Number 4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 494 Alicia C. Montoya structure not only thought but also concrete action, particularly in the politi- cal arena (Reichardt). The Enlightenment metaphor of light is rendered complex by its own gene- alogy. The metaphor was not a new one, for eighteenth-century discourse borrowed it from Italian humanism, which had in turn “borrowed” it from medieval theology. Alluding to the medieval metaphor pitting Christian light against pagan darkness, some varieties of humanism had polemically pre- sented pagan Antiquity instead as a source of light, and the Middle Ages as a period of darkness and ignorance. Petrarch, the “father of Humanism,” was also “the father of the concept or attitude which regards the Middle Ages as the ‘Dark Ages’” (Mommsen 242). At the same time, however, the human- ist light-dark metaphor was subject to nuances and qualifcations. While the most strident versions of humanism did indeed posit a clear opposition to the medieval, humanism as a whole still co-existed with medievalism, exemplifed among others by the pseudo-chivalric epics of Ariosto and Tasso, which mixed classical elements with narrative models drawn from medieval romance. The Enlightenment expressed a more fundamental aversion to the medieval. As an Age of Light, the eighteenth century perceived itself to be the absolute opposite of the Dark Ages. Reacting against the hardening of orthodoxies during the previous centuries, the philosophes saw the medieval institutional- ization of religion as a source of darkness. Following the humanist cue, they opposed the Middle Ages to the pagan culture of classical Antiquity, on which they modeled their own ideals. Antiquity, perceived as the purveyor of time- less, “universal” values rather than divisive particularisms, became a powerful ally in the ideological battle for a new society. As John Pocock has written, “modernity was engrossed in the study of Antiquity, and could not live with- out reinforcing Europe’s obsession with its classical past. The enemy was not the primitive but the medieval” (132). Because of this, the Enlightenment had to construct a new, corresponding Dark Ages—a new historical narrative or cultural memory of the medieval—against which it could offset its own achievements, “reconstruct[ing] not only the past, but organiz[ing] the expe- rience of the present as well as the future” (Assmann 69). Within these new conceptualizations of the medieval, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as some scholars have intimated, were a key period (Damian-Grint; Edelman; Gossman), inextricably linking attitudes towards the medieval to the major cultural movement of this period, the Enlightenment. I will argue that when the Enlightenment rhetoric of light and dark is reframed in its original historical context, the role of the medieval indeed becomes crucial, revealing tensions inherent in Enlightenment discourse. To make this argument, rather than attempting to produce a synthetic account, I will focus on two texts composed at the beginning and at the end of the process of Enlightenment appropriations of the light-dark metaphor. The The Dark Ages and Enlightenment 495 frst of these texts, Jean Chapelain’s dialogue La Lecture des vieux romans, composed around 1647, dates from the decade during which the intellec- tual transformations culminating in the Enlightenment started, the 1640s. In 1641, René Descartes had introduced in his Meditationes the image of “lumen naturale,” as opposed to divine light, as a source of cognitive cer- tainty, thereby giving metaphorical identity to the intellectual revolution his philosophy was to help bring about (Reichardt 104–105).2 The second text I will examine, Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les arts, was published over a century later, in 1750, a date by which it has been argued—not entirely unpolemically—that “all major intellectual innovations and accomplishments of the European Enlightenment were well advanced if not largely complete” (Israel 20). By this time, the use of the term “Lumières” to refer to the pres- ent historical age was so widespread that it had virtually become a cliché. Although these two texts were produced in entirely different intellectual and literary climates, they are linked by their use of a rhetoric of light and dark that ultimately challenges the notion of Enlightenment. Equally importantly, they share a distinctly modern, post-humanist view of history. Italian human- ism had replaced the biblically-inspired notion of four world monarchies with a division of history into three periods—“ancient,” “medieval,” and “modern” times. Enlightenment thought added to the schema a fourth age: that of French cultural ascendancy, which entailed a re-alignment of previous defnitions of “ancient” and “modern.” The Enlightenment’s most stereotypical view of the Middle Ages is summa- rized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the opening paragraphs of his Discours sur les sciences. Seeking to answer the question whether the progress of the arts has contributed to the moral improvement of humankind, Rousseau initially assumes the role of devil’s advocate, reiterating the traditional opposition between the barbaric past and the enlightened present: C’est un grand et beau spectacle de voir l’homme sortir en quelque maniere du néant par ses propres efforts; dissiper, par les lumieres de sa raison les ténébres dans lesquelles la nature l’avoit envel- oppé . Toutes ces merveilles se sont renouvellées depuis peu de Générations. L’Europe étoit retombée dans la Barbarie des premiers âges. Les Peuples de cette Partie du Monde aujourd’hui si éclairée vivoient, il y a quelques siècles, dans un état pire que l’ignorance. Il falloit une revolution pour ramener les hommes 2. For the dating of modernity, most accounts agree on the crucial role played by the works of Descartes in producing a new “rational” or mechanistic world view. Descartes’ Discours de la méthode was published in 1637, his Meditationes in 1641, and his Principia in 1644. 496 Alicia C. Montoya au sens commun . La chute du Trône de Constantin porta dans l’Italie les débris de l’ancienne Grece. La France s’enrichit à son tour de ces précieuses dépouilles. Bientôt les sciences suivirent les Lettres; à l’Art d’écrire se joignit l’Art de penser. (6) This is the cliché image of the Middle Ages, which underlies the more progressivist strands of Enlightenment discourse. The Middle Ages are described, negatively, as an age of “Barbarie,” and there is a clear opposi- tion between the “lumieres” of the present and the “ténébres” of the past. It is only through “raison,” the Cartesian inner light implicitly contrasted to divine illumination, that humankind has extricated itself from its original state during “les premiers âges.” The passage is marked by an easy mixing of conjectural history with “real” history. Rousseau describes the primor- dial state of humankind as being close to “nature,” a state that often func- tions as a hypothetical construct, yet he follows this passage of conjectural history