Enlightenment?
A YOUNG WRITER BROUGHT THE aging Bernard de Fontenelle, censeur royal, a manuscript to examine. Fontenelle refused to give his approval. ‘How, Sir,’ said the other, ‘can you, who have written the Histoire des oracles, refuse to pass my work?’ The philosophe replied, with a great sang-froid: ‘If I had been the censor of the Oracles, I should not have approved it.’1
This apocryphal story dates from the eighteenth century, when Fontenelle’s Histoire des oracles (1686), a popular French adaptation of Van Dale’s treatise, had become notorious as bait for the Church.2 Twenty years after its publication, Jesuit influence waxed at the Parisian court. An obscure member of that order, one Jean-François Baltus (1667–1743), then teaching theology at Strasbourg, composed a long Réponse to Fontenelle’s book in 1707. The Histoire was impious, argued Baltus, for its subversion of Catholic authorities, and for its levity about the cessation of the oracles, a true Christian miracle. Behind Fontenelle, however, the real culprit was evidently Van Dale, and Baltus’s tone is that of a disappointed father whose son has been mixing with the wrong crowd after school. The next year Jean Le Clerc printed an anonymous defence of Fontenelle in his Bibliothèque choisie, and Baltus in turn published a sequel to his Réponse.3 In 1709 Michel Le Tellier, a hard-line Jesuit and cofounder of the Journal de Trèvoux, was elected as Louis’s confessor. Fontenelle was now formally barred from responding to Baltus’s attack.
By mid-century, the episode had become a symbol of reason, or philosophy, struggling against orthodoxy.4 Fontenelle was then a grand old man of letters, among the most celebrated in France: an Immortal, and secrétaire perpétuel to the Académie des Sciences since 1697.5 He had pioneered the éloge, and when he died in 1757, a month shy of a century, éloges for Fontenelle flooded in from Parisian savants.6 Nor was he an enemy to the Jesuits, whose enormous school at Bourbon he had attended; he remained on good terms with René-Joseph Tournemine, editor of the Journal de Trèvoux with Le Tellier.7 His wit and moderation were praised by all: Trublet, his friend and biographer, remarked that Fontenelle was ‘always so reasonable [raisonnable] that he has no need to be argumentative [raisonneur]’.8 Nonetheless, he had shown a tendency toward scepticism since his twenties, publishing the satire La comète in 1681, in anticipation of Pierre Bayle’s melancholy work on that subject. He must have enjoyed the Devineresse of his uncle and godfather, Thomas Corneille, performed in 1680; and Van Dale would later compare the Histoire unfavourably to that play.9 It is telling also that he knew Van Dale’s Dissertationes before Bayle reviewed them in March 1684.10 Clandestine works followed. The Baltus affair, in hindsight, only strengthened Fontenelle’s reputation as a hero of the early Enlightenment.
But in 1686 the Histoire was not so obviously a threat to authority. It was unconventional, certainly, and critical of convention. Fontenelle, like Van Dale, was aware that his views might offend. He had read of Moebius’s response to Van Dale, and he knew that theologians did not like their beliefs shaken from the tree. In a gesture of politesse, he granted Moebius, and other potential critics, that the Witch of Endor had been diabolical—the Bible was safe. Beyond this, he could legitimately observe that at least one pious theologian, Louis Thomassin, had accepted something like the imposture thesis of the oracles.11 Thomassin, as we have seen, was far from unusual, and it is telling that Fontenelle was left untouched for two decades.
Despite this, the Histoire, after the Baltus affair, was long ambered as an attack on Church dogma, and its author as a free-thinking champion of modern values. ‘No man of his time’, wrote J. B. Bury, ‘was more open-minded and free from prejudice than Fontenelle’.12 When Fontenelle asserts that his only duty is to the truth—‘it is more reasonable to disentangle error from truth, than to venerate error because it is mixed with truth’—we are ready to believe.13
Baltus, by contrast, seems now to have been guided not by the truth, but by the demands of orthodoxy, and so he has fallen into obscurity, as Voltaire claimed he already had.14 In his own century, in fact, his Réponse to Fontenelle was cited and admired in many circles. But there is no doubt he was on the losing side of history, meriting two columns in the 1816 Biographie universelle to Fontenelle’s seventeen.15 His other works were all theological: notably, a defence of the Church Fathers from Matthieu Souverain’s charge of Platonism (1711), and further patristic apologetics in the 1730s. Few modern accounts of Fontenelle show any proper acquaintance with the Réponse, and those that do are almost uniformly hostile. Louis Maigron, who edited the Histoire, sneered that Baltus’s ‘clumsiness is equalled only by his naïvety and stupidity’.16
If we are predisposed to credit the intellectual seriousness of a Fontenelle, but not that of a Baltus, it is because our conception of Enlightenment is still essentially Kant’s: ‘Enlightenment is the departure of man from his self-inflicted immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to make use of one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.’17 Baltus, still reliant on the Church for his views, must be treated like a child. But his Réponse and its Suite merit greater attention: although we may not agree with their conclusion—that the oracles were indeed the work of the Devil—they represent a powerful defence of the Catholic intellectual enterprise, at once spirited and erudite. Baltus is not sceptical, but he is critical, supporting many of his positions with a careful study of the sources. His methodological presuppositions, opposite to those of Fontenelle, were common in early modernity, and worth taking seriously today. If we limit our assessment to their conclusions, then, we cannot reach a fair judgement of the two authors’ contretemps. Only by a detailed analysis of Baltus’s work can we fully understand the significance of Fontenelle. In ignoring Baltus, we run the risk of making his opponent’s conclusions too easy, so apparently similar are they to our own. But these conclusions were not foregone: as we saw, Bayle, whose critical apparatus Fontenelle adopted, had expressed a view on the oracles closer to that of Baltus, even as he praised Van Dale. As the Oxford student James Bowles Mozley, in a prize-winning 1835 essay on the subject, would warn his reader, ‘we must look to the way in which an opinion is held, and not to the opinion itself’.18 The apparent familiarity of Fontenelle’s thesis is deceptive, and the force of his arguments differs greatly from our expectations. Behind his treatise are assumptions equally as problematic as those of Baltus’s Réponse—or even more so.
• • •
Fontenelle’s Histoire, as we have said, derived most of its content from Van Dale, but not all, as its author admitted: ‘one cannot extend one’s liberty farther than I have; for I have changed the entire arrangement of the book.… I have sometimes reasoned against him, and I have not scrupled to insert many arguments which are wholly my own’.19 Most importantly, Fontenelle added to his source an array of methodological remarks and human insights derived from Bayle, a writer whom Van Dale knew and had much in common with.
For Fontenelle, as for both Bayle and Van Dale, the great majority of mankind is governed by ignorance, superstition, and deference to authority. People are naturally credulous; ‘if we study the human spirit a little’, he writes, ‘we shall know what force the marvellous has upon it’. Following this claim is a revealing flourish: ‘I will not try to extend this reflection: those who give it some thought will easily believe me, without my going to the effort of proving it, while those who do not are unlikely to believe me even after all my proofs’.20 Human beings are unreflective, steadfast in their own views, and unreceptive to reason. It is established authority, rather, that determines most of our beliefs—everywhere in the Histoire, authority and custom are opposed to reason, and stronger than it: ‘Everything the ancients said, whether good or bad, bears repeating; and what they could not prove with sufficient reason is now proven by their authority alone’21; ‘Custom has a force over men which needs no reason for its support’.22 The most provocative statement of this principle, and the most frequently cited by modern scholars, is as follows:
Show me a half-dozen individuals whom I can persuade that it is not the sun which makes the day, and I should not despair of convincing entire nations of this opinion. However ridiculous a thought may seem, one need only find a way to mantain it for a while: thus it becomes ‘ancient’, and is sufficiently proven.23
For us, highly conscious of the mechanics of cultural transmission, this flamboyant passage has the ring of truth—Fontenelle is describing what we would call an urban legend. Here as elsewhere, he appears strikingly modern.24 If he adduces no evidence for his claim, it is because he is writing à la Rochefoucauld, and expects to appeal to a shared intuition of human nature. For those lacking this intuition, his argument must appear thin.
Baltus is peculiarly stung by his adversary’s boast: ‘I know a very intelligent and enlightened man, who, upon seeing this passage in your book, found a great deal of venom hidden therein, which he greatly deplored’.25 He presents two objections. His second targets the logical consistency of the six figures: ‘To this end they had to be at once infinitely stupid and infinitely clever—stupid to fall into an error so gross and palpable, clever to be able to convince entire nations of it.’26 How, in fact, would one go about persuading these six? Baltus here puts his finger on a key problem in Fontenelle’s argument—the problem of adding anything to a closed system. We can present the same difficulty in another way. The proposition of the sunless day cannot be first introduced to wise men, who would reject it on the grounds of reason; nor can it be first introduced to the unreflective polloi, who would reject it for not conforming to custom or authority. Thus the proposition cannot be accepted in the first place: Fontenelle can explain only how it might be perpetuated. This is the problem faced by all conventionalist arguments. Herder, for instance, offers a similar critique of Condillac on the origin of language: how can language have its origin in convention, if conventions require language?27
Baltus’s first objection, meanwhile, is to Fontenelle’s low estimate of human understanding:
Assuredly you count a great deal on the stupidity of men. Nonetheless it seems to me that they do not so easily accept everything that one would persuade them of, especially if these things are contrary to their senses and experience. However little esprit and intelligence they might have, they demand proofs and reasons, and, what’s more, they demand these even in the event of prodigies and miracles, whether true or only apparently so.28
This passage offers a very different portrait of mankind: we are suspicious, relying more on our ‘senses and experience’, as well as our reason, than on the authority of others. Baltus agrees with his adversary that men trust in miracles, but unlike Fontenelle he accepts this as reasonable, for the miraculous is a reliable sign of truth in obscure matters, if it is not always what it seems. The note of caution in Baltus’s last clause is entirely characteristic. Further statements in the Réponse reiterate the difference between the two views of human nature:
Since, as others have remarked before me, men are naturally incredulous, not believing easily, they are suspicious of anything beyond what they can see and do themselves, anything marvellous and extraordinary. They always suspect fraud and imposture.… It happens only too often, on account of their reluctance to believe anything which seems extraordinary, that they suspect trickery when they have the least reason to do so.29
This is the polar opposite of Fontenelle, for whom people more easily believe an established truth than disbelieve it—belief comes from ignorance, whereas disbelief comes from knowledge and understanding. To go against the common opinion requires will and reason:
In general, to abandon a common opinion, or receive a new one, we must make some use of our reason, good or bad, but we have no need of this to reject a new opinion, or to take up a common one. We need strength to resist a torrent, but not to follow it.30
Baltus, on the contrary, disputes both claims. It requires neither reason nor will to receive a new theory against the common opinion, but only a fickleness of the intellect: ‘in our own age, we can be certain that a new opinion, however ill-founded it may be, will never want for followers, provided it favours men’s predisposition to incredulity’.31 Truth is the daughter of Time, but, far from adhering to doctrines which have held up to historical scrutiny, men are always seeking the latest ideas, especially those heterodoxies that flatter their own contempt for the establishment. Likewise, Baltus flatly denies Fontenelle’s picture of believers and disbelievers:
Those who believe are inclined to examine the reasons for not believing, in the hope of freeing themselves, if possible, from such a distressing servitude. And those who do not believe, in appreciation of being delivered from this uncomfortable yoke, naturally avoid everything that might harness them, and are far more inclined to apprise themselves of the reasons for not believing, so as to fortify themselves still further in their incredulity, than to learn those reasons which could oblige them to believe.
In other words, there is in faith a ‘servitude against which the human spirit naturally revolts’.32 Baltus’s position, like Fontenelle’s, had its forebears. The Jesuit Leonard Lessius, for instance, had expressed a similar judgement to support the veracity of true miracles against a charge of imposture.33 Fontenelle and Baltus thus present two complementary sides of human character: credulity and suspicion. In doing so they tell us more about themselves than about humanity: both place themselves against what they perceive as the common attitude. For the one, we are credulous when we should be critical; for the other, we are suspicious when we should have faith. Today’s politicians rely on the same arguments: that we should be open to change, or that we should trust experience. The dichotomy persists in human reasoning, and many later accounts of the oracle dispute reflect one side or the other.
Behind such a disagreement about human nature lie still more fundamental differences as to the very nature of knowledge, reason, and belief. On these points, Fontenelle is essentially Cartesian and sceptical, Baltus essentially Augustinian, anti-Cartesian, antisceptical.
Few scholars fail to acknowledge Fontenelle’s debt to Descartes.34 The influence exists in some fields at the level of doctrine; but its pervasiveness is more general, harder to define. In the later seventeenth century, as still today, Descartes served as a figurehead for the attack on dogma, scholasticism, received opinion, and superstition. Implicit in Fontenelle’s work is the idea that each individual must assess the facts, and reason from them, for himself: the testimony of others, authority and custom, are merely ‘received opinions and enshrined prejudices’.35 Superstition, he holds, declined in the ancient world, and is declining in his own, as men begin to reason for themselves; modernity itself is defined as the watershed between superstition and reason. Today’s scholars have been easily flattered by this triumphalism. One writes:
To the extent that the Cartesian idea—according to which each person is capable, with reason, of arriving at the truth—took hold of the masses, and to the extent that the private sense established its supremacy, the Christian idea, built on revelation and tradition, disintegrated, and the arguments spread by Fontenelle, building opinion on this path, had their effect in preparing the new age.36
Fontenelle is pessimistic about the common man’s credulity but optimistic about the triumph of reason among an enlightened élite—those, that is, with sufficient education and leisure to read his popular accounts of the new learning. He would inculcate in his readers his own critical spirit, and so cautions distrust toward the authority of others, as a source of error: ‘people must take precautions against those errors into which others may throw them’. Man is protected from external sources of error both by the providence of God, and by his own reason:
God is obliged by the laws of his goodness only to protect me; in other things it remains for my reason to do its duty.37
The similarity to the Descartes of the Meditations could hardly be closer. And if the necessity of a sceptical spirit in dealing with authorities strikes us as common sense, it is because we are still Cartesians. To understand Fontenelle’s position in its true context, then, and especially to challenge it, will require a little background. C. A. J. Coady, in his 1992 treatise Testimony, outlines a prehistory of what he labels the ‘reductionist thesis’: that the evidence of testimony can be reduced to the evidence of sense-perception (ourselves perceiving the testifier, and the testifier perceiving the event about which he testifies) and of reason and memory.38 According to the thesis, even if testimony can provide us with truths, the fact that it is testimony is not in and of itself a warrant for accepting it; we should therefore trust our own reason and experience above the testimony of others. As Locke puts it, in a famous passage of 1689:
Not that I want a due respect to other men’s opinions; but, after all, the greatest reverence is due to truth: and I hope it will not be thought arrogance to say, that perhaps we should make greater progress in the discovery of rational and contemplative knowledge, if we sought it in the fountain, in the consideration of things themselves; and made use rather of our own thoughts than other men’s to find it.39
Coady’s early chapters explore the development of the reductionist thesis in Descartes, Locke and Hume; Fontenelle stands squarely in the same tradition. The main thrust of Testimony, however, is not historical, but critical: Coady argues at length, against reductionism, that testimony both is, and should be, the basis for the vast majority of our knowledge. Even the greatest liars speak far more truth than falsehood; even the most sceptical believe testimony far more often than they disbelieve it.40 If the reductionist thesis has a distinguished history, Coady’s antireductionism, by his own admission, also has its antecedents. The locus classicus is a passage in Thomas Reid’s 1764 Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, aimed at Locke:
The wise and beneficent Author of Nature, who intended that we should be social creatures, and that we should receive the greatest and most important part of our knowledge by the information of others, hath, for these purposes, implanted in our natures two principles that tally with each other. The first of these principles is, a propensity to speak truth, and to use the signs of language so as to convey our real sentiments.… Another original principle implanted in us by the Supreme Being, is a disposition to confide in the veracity of others, and to believe what they tell us. This is the counterpart to the former: and, as that may be called the principle of veracity, we shall, for want of a more proper name, call this the principle of credulity.41
Reid argues for a strong analogy between knowledge by perception and knowledge by testimony: both means are susceptible to error, and yet both function correctly far more often than not—both are, as Robert Nozick would say, predominantly ‘truth-tracking’.42 Reid, like Nozick, depends on an externalist view of epistemic justification: for both, the possibility of knowledge as knowledge comes from outside, from knowledge-favouring conditions, rather than from the individual’s capacity to overcome doubt. Reid’s two principles of veracity and credulity, underwritten by divine providence, ensure that we are right to believe, and that therefore, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we may claim knowledge, not just belief, from testimony. In this respect he stands in stark contrast to Descartes and Locke, for whom knowledge is grounded internally by ‘clear and distinct’ ideas, with God as a remote guarantor.43 The latter internalist view is a product of (and solution to) scepticism; the externalist, of a reaction against the sceptical process. Even beyond the realms of formal philosophy, the same pattern emerges: the Cartesian Fontenelle reasons like an internalist, while Baltus, writing to confute the sceptic, reasons like an externalist.
The rôle of God in Reid’s antireductionist epistemology is significant, for his ideas have their roots in Christian apologetics and theology. Augustine, as so often, is the ultimate source, in this case his response to Academic scepticism. In a number of works, from Contra academicos (386) to De utilitate credendi (391) and De fide rerum quae non videntur (ca. 400), Augustine defends an epistemology that favours faith and belief as the default position on a given issue, especially where the facts cannot be verified by perception. All human religion and society, he argues, is predicated on a basic level of trust, a thesis defended with most vigour in De fide:
I omit to mention in how many things they, who find fault with us because we believe what we see not, believe report or history; or concerning places where they have not themselves been; and say not, we believe not, because we have not seen.44
All of us, reasons Augustine, believe reports of foreign places and histories of earlier times that we cannot ourselves witness and verify. We cannot therefore claim direct personal testimony as a necessary criterion for belief. Here we have a weak statement of the credulity principle, that men, simply as a matter of fact, are naturally inclined to believe each other.
Augustine’s De utilitate and De fide are cited as sources by the Dominican theologian Melchior Cano, in a chapter on the authority of testimony from his Locorum theologicorum libri (1562), a standard reference work of Catholic theology for two centuries after publication.45 Like Augustine, Cano was reacting against a rising tide of scepticism among Western intellectuals, represented by the historical Pyrrhonism of Agrippa and the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus.46 Cano’s focus is not oral testimony, as for Augustine, but the written testimony of historical sources; nonetheless, he reiterates and develops the Augustinian arguments on the social and individual necessity of believing what one is told, as well as providing a strong statement of the credulity principle: ‘the author of nature impressed upon the minds of men a natural inclination towards belief’.47 As with Augustine, acceptance of testimony should be one’s default position on a subject, and Cano adds that consensus—especially the consensus patrum—is even stronger grounds for belief than the authority of a single witness:
If all upright and serious historians concur on the same matter, then the argument produced by their authority is certain, just as the firm dogmas of theology are established by reason.48
This is not to say that all testimonies should be accepted unquestioningly:
Someone who is well instructed, and rightly adapted to human life, does not deny a credible thing to which a serious man has assented. I say ‘a credible thing’, because some things are reported by Pliny and the historians, even very serious ones, that are scarcely credible, so that we do not weaken the authority of history by denying them.49
Cano offers no criteria to distinguish the credible from the incredible; we are simply to rely on personal judgement. He thus implicitly presents the sceptic with a loophole: he does not have to accept authority in matters which are not intrinsically credible. It is just that sort of incredible occurrence—the miracle—which would prove so contentious in the next centuries. But Cano’s caveat is an anomalous detail in a chapter whose essential aim is to move the locus of historical judgement from the critical individual to the authority of consensus.50
Another problem with Cano’s position is that if we are to rely on the testimony of others, we must have some criteria for deciding between different testimonies when they conflict. We need, in other words, a method of weighing authorities. But Cano only offers the vaguest of suggestions on this front.51 He cites the rules of evidence formulated by Annius of Viterbo, which favour the transparency of public records and accounts.52 He then goes on to provide three rules of his own: the first insists that historians possess ‘probity and integrity’, the second that they ‘have equipped themselves with a certain prudence both in choosing and in judging’, and the third that they be granted authority by the Church.53 Authorities, that is, must be both honest and competent—standard classical stipulations—as well as acceptable to Catholic tradition. None of these rules can provide much leverage in specific cases of disagreement.
Augustine and Cano, then, propound a largely coherent and plausible epistemology that grounds the reliability of testimony in the probity of its author: a calculus centred not on intrinsic plausibility but rather on judgements of character. Such an epistemology promotes stability over innovation, and is thus ideally suited to a religious system such as Catholicism, with its great weight on tradition. Clearly, it is the very antithesis of the Cartesian attitude. Baltus, a good Jesuit, has precisely this intellectual heritage. He cites no authorities for his theoretical statements, although he mentions Cano’s book elsewhere.54 Despite the lack of explicit citation, Augustinian epistemology is evident throughout the Réponse and Suite. Baltus’s outlook can be encapsulated in his judgement of the demon thesis that ‘the constant tradition of the whole Church ought to convince everybody of it’.55 Where Augustine and Cano encouraged the individual to put his faith in reliable testimony, Baltus pushes this position to its extreme:
The people are very easy to fool: this is true, if we understand by it that we can easily persuade people into errors of speculation and belief, and maintain these after we have seduced them. This, I agree, is easy, above all when those who undertake to fool them take care to remove from under their eyes the only sensible, evident and infallible rule which could restrain them from their error, and manage to persuade them that they themselves should be the rule of their belief, and that they should be judged by their own private sense—the wicked source of all errors of the human spirit in religious matters.56
This passage could almost be read as a parodic inversion of the Cartesian Meditations, where the ‘sensible, evident, and infallible rule’ is a faith not in one’s own clear and distinct ideas, but in the authority of others. Whereas for Fontenelle we are deceived by trusting corrupt institutions, and especially the priesthood, for Baltus we are deceived by trusting our own judgement, for we are still children requiring the guidance of our elders, especially in religious matters. Both positions have some truth in them. As individuals we can be manipulated by authority, but also tricked by too much faith in our own reason. Sometimes it really is in our interest to follow convention, sometimes not: Fontenelle and Baltus, then, have only half the truth each.
It is no wonder that two writers with such fundamentally opposed views of human nature, belief and reason, authority and knowledge, should manifest their differences in specific disagreements over the nature of historical evidence. Fontenelle’s observations on this subject are very much in tune with his Cartesian epistemology. Descartes had discussed, in his first Meditation, the sources of error in sense perception.57 Fontenelle likewise displays a particular sensitivity toward the possibilities of error in the transmission of testimony:
We reason from what the historians have said, but are these historians not biased, credulous, ill-informed and negligent? We need find but one who, objective and diligent, has witnessed all things.58
The substance of this passage is entirely traditional; the importance accorded to eyewitnesses, for instance, is as old as Polybius, and the same can be found in Cano.59 Fontenelle’s stipulation that historians be ‘unbiased and diligent’ had been a sixteenth-century commonplace, reflected, again, in Cano’s insistence on honesty and competence.60 But the tone reveals his own bias: his plea that we ‘look out for one’ unbiased historian reflects an attitude quite different to that of Cano, whose Locorum libri had not doubted the existence of trustworthy historians.61 Fontenelle reiterates his scepticism toward religious historiography:
Above all, when we write about facts connected to religion, it is quite difficult, given our own allegiances, not to give a false religion those advantages which it does not deserve, or a true religion the advantages it does not need.62
Fontenelle’s attitude here recalls Francesco Patrizi’s notorious demolition of faith in history.63 All historical testimony, especially on religious issues, should be subject to a basic doubt, and we ought to remain suspicious until the credibility of a given source has been established. He does, however, provide one criterion of reliability. Because men are inclined to perpetuate established opinions, it requires willpower and reason to challenge these opinions. The testimony of someone who has made this challenge, then, has greater authority than the testimony of someone who has not. It is worth quoting this passage at length:
The testimony of those who believe a thing already established has no force to support it, but the testimony of those who do not believe it has the force to destroy it. Those who believe cannot have apprised themselves of the reasons for not believing—but those who do not believe must have learnt the reasons for believing.
It is quite the reverse when the thing is to be established: here, the testimony of those who believe it is, in itself, stronger than the testimony of those who do not believe it, for those who believe it must naturally have examined it, and those who do not believe it, cannot have done so. I do not mean that in one or the other case, the authority of those who believe, or not, makes the final decision; I mean only that if one ignores the reasons on which the two sides are based, sometimes the authority of one side is more acceptable, sometimes that of the other.64
Fontenelle is the first to make this double claim. His wording betrays an admission of the rôle of trust: he trusts that those who go against the common opinion must have examined the matter (‘doivent l’avoir examinée’), while those who do not need not have done (‘peuvent ne l’avoir pas fait’). Fontenelle, however, puts his trust not in consensus, as Cano had done, but in any challenge to consensus. It is a principle that promotes innovation over stability.
Cano would have been astonished. Baltus is astonished: ‘This proposition seems very odd to me’, he exclaims, ‘and its consequences may be stranger still. Christianity is established and spread throughout the world: should the authority of a few libertines of little faith prevail over that of all the other faithful who believe it, and who recognise it as the only true religion?’65 The implication is that if Fontenelle follows his rule, he will have to abandon Christianity itself. Within the limits of discourse open to Fontenelle, such a conclusion is completely unacceptable. This is why he has to include his crippling caveat that neither authority provides ‘a final decision’.
Baltus not only puts forward his objection; he also makes the contrary case, based on his own view of human nature. Because those who believe are more trustworthy than those who do not, we ought to trust the majority opinion: ‘in the matter of suffrages and authorities, the greatest and soundest part should always prevail’.66 Like Cano, Baltus emphasises the epistemological significance of consensus, and, like many early modern theorists, he adduces the analogy of law:
Do we not always adduce the consensus of secular historians to prove a point of history? And when we can show that all agree unanimously on a point, who is bold enough to dare contradict them? Do we not produce the consensus of attorneys on a point of law?67
The anonymous respondent of the Bibliothèque choisie would later level at Baltus an objection symmetrical to that brought by Baltus against Fontenelle:
It is not so much the quantity of believers who persuade us of its [Christianity’s] truth. Otherwise the number of infidels and Mahometans would be most worthy of faith in Asia and Africa, and one would have had to believe Christianity false when it began to appear among the Jews and pagans, for the unbelievers were infinitely more numerous than the believers.68
To us this objection is just as reasonable as that of Baltus: to safeguard the truth of the Christian religion, we can cite the authority of neither minority nor majority opinion per se. But just as Fontenelle had crippled his position by admitting that neither type of authority on an issue is decisive, so Baltus, in his Suite, qualifies his own stance, by denying the equivalence of the two disputes—Christians contra atheists, and Christians contra heathens. In the latter case, the Christian side has much stronger evidence at its disposal, namely its ‘many extraordinary Prodigies and Miracles’, which counterbalance its lack of superior numbers.
Thus it remains agreed that, ceteris paribus, the greater number should always be preferred over the smaller, and that the smaller can never prevail over the greater, unless it show for itself new proofs and clear reasons which make it superior to the greater.69
This ‘except’, here, hobbles the strong claim. Baltus, like Cano, must qualify his principles: neither can accept a critical calculus based purely on testimonial quantity, any more than Fontenelle can accept a calculus determined entirely by the direction of argument. As Kenneth Minogue has argued, historiography ‘is, of almost all academic activities, one of the most resistant to reduction to form’—generalisations can always be countered.70 What is required, and what Fontenelle and especially Baltus indeed provide, despite themselves, is a case-by-case assessment of specific issues and the authorities relevant to them.
Fontenelle had, in fact, already suggested a much more radical view of historical composition, in his Sur l’histoire, published posthumously in 1758, but probably written around 1675–80.71 In this short text, Fontenelle attempts to reconstruct history as rationalist philosophy—as a search for the universal causes of human behaviour, entirely unconcerned with actual events:
A man of esprit, simply by considering human nature, could divine all history past and future, without ever having heard tell of any events. He would say: human nature is composed of ignorance, credulity, vanity, ambition, wickedness, a little good sense and probity beyond this, but in a dose so small by comparison to the others.… After which, if this man wanted to examine the truths that these general principles could produce, and to put them to work, so to speak, he would imagine in detail an infinity of facts, which either have effectively occurred, or are very similar to those that have occurred.72
It is an astonishing statement, the logical limit of a Cartesian attitude applied to history, and as far from Augustine and Baltus as we can imagine. As an abstract claim it is not repeated in the Histoire, but its basic sentiment, as we shall see, can nonetheless be detected behind Fontenelle’s approach to his subject in that work.
Baltus and Fontenelle disagree, finally, on the very nature of authority itself. If Fontenelle is, at the last count, more interested in the ‘reasons on which the two sides are based’ than in the parties themselves, Baltus, like Cano, remains concerned with the moral character of his witnesses. For the Jesuit, Fontenelle and his ally are too quick to dismiss good authorities along with bad; when the latter chides him that admitting late antique miracles ‘would open the door to all sorts of fables’,73 he responds sarcastically:
So, if we believe the miracles reported by the Fathers, so illustrious in holiness and learning, we must, by an inevitable consequence and indispensable necessity, believe all sorts of fables, however absurd they be, and from whatever author they come?74
For Baltus we believe miracles and not fables, not because of any difference in intrinsic plausibility, but because miracles, unlike fables, are affirmed by reliable authorities.75 He thinks again of law, contrasting ‘the testimony of a man of honour’ to that of ‘suspect or denounced’ witnesses.76 For Fontenelle, authority supplants reason in practice, although it should not; for Baltus, on the contrary, reason is centred on authority. The two are distinct, but not in opposition.
It is for these reasons that Baltus misunderstands the basis of Fontenelle’s position on the oracles. This is evident from a passage in the Réponse, quoted and discussed by the American scholar Leonard Marsak. In Marsak’s translation, Baltus writes:
Tell the truth, Sir, have you not felt some repugnance … to proving that the oracles did not cease at the coming of the Savior of the world? It is rude of a Christian to feel himself obliged to lessen the glory of the one he recognises as his God, and to deny, contrary to his feeling, that it is to Him that he owes the happiness of being delivered from the shadows of paganism and the tyranny of the demon. You will tell me perhaps that you believed you had to sacrifice all these repugnances to the truth, which ought to override all other considerations. The pretext is specious…77
Marsak comments:
Nothing could be a clearer description of the two varieties of mentality that were set in opposition: the one for whom empirically demonstrated truth was unimportant, the other for whom it was all important. Fontenelle certainly did mean to let truth carry the field.78
Marsak is correct that Fontenelle and Baltus represent ‘two varieties of mentality that were set in opposition’. But he is utterly caught up in a notion of science as ‘empirically demonstrated truth’, and so fails to grasp the real distinction between his two subjects. Baltus was well aware of the value of observation, adducing for support the eyewitness evidence of both the Fathers and modern Catholics.79 It is not that Baltus would suppress the truth for ‘other considerations’—it is that, from his point of view, Fontenelle has wrongly conceived the relationship between the two. His words are careful: Fontenelle’s position is a prétexte for something else, and this pretext is not merely wrong but specious, deceptively attractive. All writers claim to follow the truth alone: for Baltus, Fontenelle’s real motivation is a bias against authority. The rest of Baltus’s argument, which Marsak truncates, runs as follows:
The pretext is specious, but it seems to me that you should first assure yourself of this truth, by consulting the works of the Church Fathers, and examining carefully the sense of their words, before you cleave to the authority of Van Dale, who ought to be suspect to you in these matters for many reasons.80
What Baltus misunderstands is that Fontenelle has based his argument not on Van Dale’s authority, but on his reasons. Baltus is perfectly capable of attacking those reasons; nevertheless, it is clear that the Jesuit regards bad authority and poor reasoning as close cousins.
Fontenelle and Baltus, despite their shared Jesuit origins, were heirs to opposed epistemologies, the one Cartesian, the other Augustinian. This difference is manifest in their views of human nature, of knowledge and belief, of the relationship between reason and authority, and of the right method of historical enquiry. In 1700, Fontenelle stood for the new, and Baltus for the old. It is no coincidence that Fontenelle argued passionately for the modernes in that famous controversy; nor that he belonged to the Academies, which were replacing the religious orders as the chief centres of French learning.81 But this historical fact should not blind us to the internal coherence of each philosophy, especially that of Baltus, whose pre-Cartesian notion of testimony has much in common with the ideas of both Reid and Coady. Both sides of the dispute had legitimate ideas on the matter, and both encountered problems; both, finally, were suited to perpetuate the intellectual conditions from which they arose.
I have dwelt at such length on these theoretical considerations because they have been almost entirely ignored by earlier scholars, and because, despite this neglect, they are essential to a clear understanding of what was at stake in the controversy over the oracles. It is to the particular arguments of Fontenelle and Baltus on this subject that we now turn.
• • •
Fontenelle’s Histoire, as he admits at the very beginning, is an histoire only incidentally.82 The narrative is there, rather, to support a critical argument about the oracles. This is why the work has been described as a substantial departure from the historiographical norms of its period—a rejection of ‘scissors-and-paste’ history, and the accumulation of testimonies, in favour of critical analysis, grounded in the concepts of pure reason.83 Such a shift would seem the natural product of applying Cartesian epistemology to a historical genre.
The plan of his work is methodical: he begins with the Church Fathers, on whose authority all later Christian positions rest. In chapters one to three, Fontenelle offers three reasons why the Fathers believed that the oracles were demonic—the existence of pagan stories that attribute the oracles to demons; the reasonableness of this belief for a religion that already admits demons; and the Platonism of the Fathers. In chapters four to six, Fontenelle dismisses these reasons seriatim. In chapters seven and eight, he adduces pagan authorities against the Christian thesis, and in chapter nine, he discusses the patristic authorities. Chapters one to nine, therefore, represent Fontenelle’s engagement with historical sources; the remaining chapters of the first book purvey more speculative arguments against the plausibility of supernatural oracles.
It is crucial to appreciate Fontenelle’s strategy—he is not content to argue against the conclusion that the oracles were demonic, but wants also to explain the reasoning behind that conclusion. Such a strategy is natural to the foundational scepticism of Cartesian philosophy. And the three reasons he discusses share two important attributes in line with this scepticism. First, they all turn on the uncritical acceptance of narrative or theoretical material—pagan fables, demonology, Platonism. Each case, for Fontenelle, involves either a superficial adaptation of irrelevant matter, or a misreading of harmful matter: this is the ethnicismus decried by Van Dale. The implication is that these are errors characteristic of an institution—the Church—eager to establish intellectual continuity and stability at the expense of the truth. Fontenelle, in turn, takes up the rôle of the critic who, by careful and disinterested analysis from outside the system, is able to reveal careless mistakes of reasoning within it.
The second attribute shared by all three reasons is that none of them is given explicitly by the Fathers for their beliefs. This disparity is essential to his argument, for it suggests that Fontenelle, with his historical perspective, can see in them what they themselves could not see. His attempt to explain the Christian position thus has a historicising effect: that position comes to be understood as arising within a specific intellectual context, and as insupportable without it. As a rhetorical device, this is a shrewd move. For a reader of the Histoire to admit that he still accepted the demon thesis would be to concede that he, too, could be comprehended historically from Fontenelle’s vantage point—that he, too, was a mere bit of history, a product of his time, and blind to enlightenment. Such a reader, so to speak, would be voting for Nixon after Watergate.
The best example of this pattern lies in Fontenelle’s adaptation of Van Dale on the Platonism of the Fathers. ‘Never has any philosophy been so à la mode’, he declares, ‘as that of Plato among the Christians of the first centuries of the Church’.84 The Platonic view of demons, in particular, was adopted by the Christians to explain marvellous phenomena: it was easier, and more persuasive, to attribute these marvels to malevolent causes than to deny their existence altogether. The Christians, in other words, attacked the pagans with their own intellectual weapons. In scholarly terms, the argument appears remarkably modern: Fontenelle understands that one system of thought—and he frequently uses this word, système—triumphs over another, not by mere force of reason but by the reuse and reinterpretation of its opponent’s ideas.85 This goes beyond what Van Dale had said, because it recasts the Fathers not as the passive and ingenuous recipients of a false doctrine, but as historical actors seeking the best strategy for persuasion and conversion, given the special demands of their milieu. To some degree, this could hardly be denied, and Baltus himself admits that Eusebius had made use of dubious material for rhetorical purposes.86 But Fontenelle quietly suggests something far more problematic: that, for the Fathers, truth could yield to rhetoric. This idea would be stated openly by Fontenelle’s friend and supporter Jacques Basnage.87 Slowly, but with crucial implications, the Fathers were becoming historicised.
Fontenelle thus argues that the Christian doctrine of evil demons was historically derived from Platonic theories. He must now demonstrate, at a nonhistorical level, that this derivation was unjustified, and this he attempts in chapter six. To this end, he argues that Plato’s concept of demons—as mediators between the divine and the human—is theologically unsound, since God’s distance from man and the world is infinite, lacking the possibility of a middle term.88 The existence of demons may be granted only by revelation, not reason. Moreover, Plato took his own idea of demons from the poets, Homer and Hesiod: it was to be understood in a sens galant. For Fontenelle, then, Plato’s apparent belief in the existence of demons could provide no sound basis for Christian doctrine. And if we cannot be sure of the nature of demons, we have no reason to believe that they had delivered the oracles.
Baltus rejects each of the reasons ascribed to the Fathers by Fontenelle in turn, substituting three genuine reasons instead; he thus attempts to dismantle each beam supporting his opponent’s argumentative edifice, and to erect in its place a fortified Catholic position on the oracles. The notion that the Fathers had been unduly influenced by Platonism was particularly irritating to the Jesuit. By the time he came to write his Réponse, this particular critique, with its roots in the anti-Trinitarian arguments of the seventeenth century, had reached its pinnacle in Matthieu Souverain’s Le Platonisme dévoilé (1700). Not only does Baltus mention this treatise in his Réponse: in 1711 he published an entire treatise in refutation of it, the Défense des SS. peres accusez de Platonisme.89 The idea for this book was already in his mind in 1707: parts of the Défense are clearly worked up from passages in the Réponse, and in the Suite he states his intention to write the Défense.90
Against Fontenelle, Baltus argues that the early Christians despised Plato and wrote against his ideas, not in their defence—they denied ‘the plurality of gods, the transmigration of souls, the commonality of wives, homicide, and a great number of other detestable errors’ taught by Plato.91 He cites Eusebius, Justin Martyr, Lactantius, Augustine, Theodoret, and Epiphanius to show that the learned Christians rejected pagan philosophy, and Platonism in particular.
You say that almost all learned ancient Christians embraced the sect of Plato; but I sustain that there was not a single one of all those whose works survive for us, who did not make a profession of rejecting Plato and his philosophy, to cleave alone to Jesus Christ and his doctrine.92
It is therefore irrelevant if Plato’s doctrine of demons was confused or allegorical, since the Fathers did not accept it from him, or from his followers. Nonetheless, in a passing remark Baltus sees a logical inconsistency in Fontenelle’s claim that the Christians took their doctrine from a source that lacked, or only dubiously possessed, that doctrine. Implied, again, is a critique of conventionalism: how could Platonists, and therefore Christians, profess a literal belief in demons if Plato himself never did? This time Baltus’s argument is less convincing, for Plato’s works might be misread, and the idea of demons may have been elaborated by the later Platonists themselves; modern scholarship is quite comfortable with the notion that the Fathers, while openly attacking Platonism, were still operating within a framework that was fundamentally Platonic.93 We, like Fontenelle, want to historicise the Fathers—just as we are presently historicising Fontenelle and Baltus. But Baltus cannot conceive of history in this way. Sources, rather, are to be taken at face value, and we have no warrant to read between the lines.
Recognise, Sir, that this reason, like the two before it, which you have attributed to the ancient Christians, and on whose basis, you claim, they believed that the pagan oracles were given by demons, are only chimaeras, of which they never conceived, and which you have imagined only so as to combat their opinion more easily.94
Baltus can make no sense of Fontenelle’s claims: the two disputants are facing in opposite directions. There is evidently no argument for Fontenelle’s position that could persuade Baltus, as is manifest in the subsequent exchange. Of the proposition that the Fathers were influenced by Platonism, Le Clerc’s correspondent asserts: ‘I do not believe that it can be contested; and those who have any idea of Platonism, and who have read anything of the oldest Fathers, will be in no doubt about it.’95 But to Baltus this is mere assertion: the opinion is ‘so often produced, but never proven’.96 What for one is common sense—a term belonging to this period—is for another an unproved, and unprovable, opinion: a ‘chimaera’.
Fontenelle also expands on another passage in Van Dale, concerning the oracles, attributed to Porphyry, in which Apollo openly ceded his authority to another power.97 These oracles had been deployed by Philippe de Mornay and others in support of the Christian cessation: along with the ‘Hebrew boy’ response, they were ripe for dismantling. But Van Dale had been rather vague on the subject, refusing to convict Eusebius, the apparent intermediary of these oracles, of disingenuity, and suspecting only an error of understanding.
Fontenelle, by contrast, offers a detailed hermeneutics. The problem, as Van Dale had recognised, is that the oracles were evidently prejudicial to paganism—why, then, should Porphyry, one of the fiercest pagan critics of Christianity, have furnished his enemies with such weapons? Eusebius, again, would have been unlikely to impute oracles to Porphyry of which the latter made no mention.98 Fontenelle offers three solutions, each more confident than the last. The first, which amounts to a plea for context, is only suggested: ‘Eusebius gives us [the oracles] deprived of everything which accompanied them in Porphyry’s writings. How do we know that he did not refute them?’99 The second solution is still tentative:
One suspects Porphyry was wicked enough to invent false oracles, and present them to the Christians with the aim of mocking their credulity if they accepted them as true and based their religion on such foundations.100
Fontenelle here presents Porphyry as an early Alan Sokal, exposing the vacuity of an intellectual community by convincing it to accept the spurious. What is certain, according to Fontenelle, is that Porphyry believed the oracles to have been delivered by lying spirits, and that if he was not trying to trick the Christians into accepting the oracles, he was trying to trick all his readers into rejecting them and their mendacious Christian content:
It could well have happened that he put into oracles all the mysteries of our religion, in an attempt to destroy them, and make them suspected of falsehood, because they had been attested by false witnesses.101
These are ingenious explanations, no doubt; but they are hardly convincing. Fortunately, we can spare ourselves much of Fontenelle’s original problem—as Baltus pedantically observes, only one of the quoted oracles is actually from Eusebius, and this makes no reference to Christianity, even allegorically.102 The function and import of the other oracles thus drop out of the Jesuit’s view.
Baltus, however has not finished with Fontenelle—far from it. Instead, he sets out to refute every one of his adversary’s claims and suggestions about Porphyry, devoting five entire chapters to the task. First, Eusebius’s extensive quotation of Porphyry does not imply that the pagan text represents one of his own reasons for accepting the demonic oracles; rather, he uses Porphyry to persuade other pagans, because they would reject Christian authorities.103 Eusebius himself is content to accept Porphyry’s admission that the oracles had ceased, while rejecting his many heresies.104 Second, Eusebius does give us some context for the oracle he quotes, which shows that Porphyry did not intend to refute its message. Porphyry’s aim was not to deride Christian credulity—it was to demolish the foundations of the religion, by demonstrating that the object of their worship was merely a pious man, and that their worship itself was therefore a ‘pernicious error’.105 Lastly, the Christians did not found their beliefs on Porphyry’s oracles, because they, not he, attributed the oracles to the ‘Father of Lies’.106
Baltus’s account of the issue is thus the mirror-image of Fontenelle’s. For Fontenelle, Porphyry presented his oracles as lies, and they were taken as truths by the Christians. For Baltus, on the contrary, Porphyry presented his oracles as truths, but they were recognised as lies by the Christians. Neither account does justice to the complexity of the cultural struggle between pagans and early Christians. But Baltus’s position is substantially the correct one; his sources are sound and well interpreted, and his arguments are unforced. Baltus concludes:
In truth, Sir, if you had taken the trouble to read Eusebius and Augustine a little more attentively, you would not have been carried away into all these conjectures so unworthy of a man of esprit like yourself. Condescend at least to give them your attention now, and you will easily recognise that all the things you have said on the oracles, and on Porphyry’s book, are only chimaeras, which would be destroyed and overturned completely by what survives of this philosopher alone.107
The apparent simplicity of this passage is deceptive. Fontenelle, says Baltus, has made two related but distinct mistakes. His first error is that he has not read Eusebius and Augustine for himself, and so fails to realise that his source texts are badly selected. Van Dale, of course, had made the same complaint about uncritical apologists.108 The subtext of Baltus’s critique is clear in light of their theoretical differences: Fontenelle, despite himself, has been too trusting—not of received Christian wisdom but of his libertine allies, for whom the rejection of blind trust, in favour of clear and distinct ‘pure reason’, had been a central tenet. Fontenelle himself parrots Van Dale’s mistaken attribution of oracles; the irony, for Baltus, is palpable. In the Jesuit’s eyes, the supposed neutrality of Fontenelle’s criticism is merely the disguise for an array of prejudices against tradition. Given his own faith in consensus, he can only scoff at Van Dale’s boast not to ‘lean on the authority of others’.109 Each writer’s worldview leads him to find prejudice in the other, while assuming his own to be founded on reasonable principles.
Baltus, moreover, is more alert than Fontenelle to the implications of minutiae. To a Fontenelle, his misattribution of the oracles would appear a minor and irrelevant mistake: but to a Baltus—and in this respect we may agree—it is exactly these fine points that make or break a broader case.110 God, as we now know, is in the details. If the two oracles cannot be attributed to Porphyry, then we have no Porphyrian statement admitting the triumph of Christianity, a fact with radical implications for our understanding not only of Porphyry, but more importantly of Eusebius. Eusebius has not been hornswoggled by a pagan trick, but rather is using pagan words as a rhetorical weapon to convince other pagans. Eusebius himself had much better reasons for believing that the oracles were demonic—and so, argues Baltus, have we.
One of these reasons is scripture. For Baltus, this is another case, and a much more serious one, in which Fontenelle has failed to read properly, mistakenly putting his trust in Van Dale. In the prologue to his first dissertation, Fontenelle, following Van Dale, had asserted that
the Holy Scripture does not at all teach us that the oracles were delivered by demons, and so we are free to choose sides on the matter; it is among those things which divine wisdom has judged indifferent enough to leave us to our disputes.111
And in his fifth chapter, Fontenelle had gone further, arguing that scriptural silence was grounds for believing the oracles not to be demonic—after all, it was impossible that the Bible should fail to inform us about such an important religious issue.112 Baltus, on the other hand, is quite certain that the Bible does teach the Catholic position.113 He lists and discusses a number of scriptural references identifying pagan gods as demons: Psalms 96:5 and 106:37, 1 Corinthians 10:20, Deuteronomy 32:17, 1 Kings 22:22 and 5:23, 2 Kings 1:2, and so on. This biblical authority, indeed, was one reason that the Fathers had believed the oracles to be demonic.
Fontenelle, it seems, was too hasty in dismissing the evidence of scripture. And his haste has further ramifications. Although Baltus can easily provide a list of scriptural references, he insists that the silence of scripture would not have the force to overthrow unanimous Catholic tradition. This, for the Jesuit, is the true danger:
I regret only that Van Dale’s ill-digested erudition, which has so dazzled you, has prevented you from considering the consequences of his sytem, which directly threatens to ruin the authority of the Church Fathers, and overturn the most constant and best established traditions.114
Baltus is accusing Fontenelle, in essence, of Protestantism. Any Huguenot or Mennonite would happily accept the above principle. But Fontenelle, with his royal privilege and high rank in the French academies, is officially a Catholic, and as such he cannot deny the weight of Church tradition. The tone is condescending: Fontenelle has simply not thought through the consequences of his adherence to Van Dale’s authority. As in the case of Porphyry, Fontenelle has trusted his source too much, and so failed to read the ancient texts for himself, or with sufficient care.
What can we make of Baltus’s scriptural citations? They fall into two groups. Psalms 96:5 and 1 Corinthians 10:20 are general statements that the pagans worshipped false gods or devils. 2 Kings 1:2, on the other hand, is a particular case parallel to that of Delphi: Ahaziah of Israel sends messengers to entreat the oracle of Baalzebub of Ekron about his own sickness. If a demon—as Baalzebub certainly is—was the author of this oracle, why should he not also be author of the pagan oracles?115 Baltus’s evidence is, as Fontenelle’s lawyer might put it, circumstantial at best. That the pagan gods were demons does not mean that they operated the oracles. Ekron, equally, is not Delphi: the parallel may be suggestive, but it cannot sustain a critical argument. Even if we accorded supreme authority to scripture, Baltus’s citations can prove at most that the pagans worshipped false deities, not that any given pagan institution was genuinely demonic.
Baltus attacks Fontenelle’s biased misreadings, and his misplaced trust in Van Dale, throughout the Réponse and its Suite. The critique is often cogent: just as the Bible cannot support Baltus’s claims, so many of Fontenelle’s citations from pagan and Christian writers are poor collateral for his own propositions. In the intricacies of the arguments, we find many echoes of the two scholars’ epistemological differences. The rôle of Eusebius is central, both for his own views and for the fragments he preserves of others, especially Oenomaus. Fontenelle’s admiration for Oenomaus and his ‘Cynical Liberty’ may be contrasted to Baltus’s jibe that the authority of the Cynics is of ‘no very great weight’.116 As we would expect, where the philosophe has respect for the ancient iconoclast, the Jesuit has only contempt. Baltus proceeds to dismiss Fontenelle’s unwarranted assumption that other pagans who attacked the oracles did so on the same grounds of human imposture as Oenomaus: neither Cicero nor the unnamed ‘Peripatetics, Cynics, and Epicureans’ mentioned by Eusebius can justify this reading.117
A later problem concerns the apparent contradiction in Eusebius’s own view. As we saw in chapter one, Eusebius suddenly switches from the imposture thesis to the demon thesis in Praeparatio evangelica IV.4.118 For Fontenelle, the transition is purely strategic, as if Eusebius should have said to himself:
I see well that all the oracles could have been only frauds; nonetheless, I would not believe it. Why? Because I am quite content to see demons in them. What a pitiable kind of reasoning! As for myself, I believe I can see clearly that he asserted the existence of demons only to acquit himself, and by a forced respect he had for common opinion.119
Baltus agrees that the reasoning is ‘pitiable’, but denies that it belongs to Eusebius. As he justly observes, the Father spends three entire books of the Praeparatio, as well as the fifth book of the Demonstratio evangelica, arguing that the oracles were demonic—we would hardly find this if the proposition were merely ‘forced respect for the common opinion’.120 The influence of Van Dale, again, is ultimately to blame.121
Baltus thus seeks to demonstrate, with varying success, that his opponent’s positions do not stand up to a proper evaluation of the textual evidence. Without the correct facts at his disposal, Fontenelle’s interpretations amount only to implausible ‘conjectures’—his second fundamental error. In this respect, again, Baltus points Van Dale’s weapons back at Fontenelle. The Mennonite had accused the Fathers, and their modern inheritors, of resting on ‘hypotheses’, unproven by ancient evidence.122 Likewise, the notion of conjecture underwrites Baltus’s entire critique of Fontenelle. The most serious problem faced by Fontenelle is that his case runs counter to almost every ancient testimony, both pagan and Christian—on his side, Oenomaus is the only figure we can name with any confidence. Since for Baltus, as for Cano, practising history consists chiefly of weighing testimonies or authorities, how can Fontenelle get his case off the ground?
The problem is radical; so Fontenelle’s solution must also be radical. What he does is historicise his sources, taking them not at face value: he historicises the Fathers, for instance, to make them closet Platonists. This solution allows him to arrange the sources in a new reconstruction of events, founded on what is, for Baltus at least, mere conjecture; his reconstruction can therefore have, at best, only an internal coherence. Such a process approaches the programme of rationalist historiography outlined in Fontenelle’s Sur l’histoire, in which history ‘past and present’ is to be divined from first principles, and factual assertions are not to be distinguished from those that are only factlike.123 It is not surprising that Baltus could make little sense of this approach. As he writes of Van Dale in the preface to his Réponse:
When one reads his work, what does one find? Much reading of truth and erudition, but very confused and ill-digested—no proof, no reason, no authority, but everywhere a great swarm of frivolous conjectures and false suppositions, on which he has built his entire system.124
Similarly, of Le Clerc and his friend, in the preface to the Suite:
For want of antiquity, which denied them the testimonies they needed, they believed they could have recourse to their imagination, which has furnished them with possibilities and conjectures in abundance.125
For Baltus, such conjecture is dangerous because it makes a mockery of tradition, of established procedures of enquiry. It is the practice of individualists. The vanity of conjecture for Baltus is encapsulated in one of his favourite words—chimère, which he applies to Fontenelle’s reasoning three times in the Réponse (including its use in the passages quoted above, n. 94 and n. 107), and to his second critic’s reasoning three times in the Suite.126 It is a chimère, for instance, to reason against logic, that, just because some oracles had been fraudulent, necessarily all were.127
Fontenelle’s chief chimère is his speculative reconstruction, translated from Van Dale, of the methods of fraud used by temple priests—the priests were easily bribed, keeping a ‘warehouse of written prophecies’ adaptable to any circumstance, and restricted visting hours to protect their own mystery; their oracles were delivered from tricked-up statues, situated in resounding underground cavities so as to inspire religious awe, and so on. Best of all were the speaking trumpets which had so delighted Van Dale:
Perhaps also those trumpets which multiply the sound were not entirely unknown; and perhaps Sir Morland has only rediscovered a secret which the pagan priests had known before him, and with which they preferred to reap profits by withholding the secret, than to reap honour by publishing it.128
Fontenelle’s characteristic ‘perhaps’ allows him to hypothesise with more wit than evidence, and so it is easy for Baltus to dismiss these trumpets as pure fantasy.129 The speaking statues, moreover, were unsupported by the ancient evidence, which almost unanimously showed the oracles of pagan Greece delivered by a human voice.130 Fontenelle is, yet again, attacking chimaeras he himself has conjured.
Since Fontenelle’s reconstruction of priestly fraud relies on little direct evidence, its power to convince depends wholly on its rhetorical force and intrinsic plausibility: he is appealing, again, to our intuitions. But here, as throughout the Histoire, the appeal fails if, like Baltus, his reader does not share these intuitions. What to Fontenelle is common sense, or ‘pure reason’, is simply nonsense to the Jesuit. Here the problem inherent in the programme of the Sur l’histoire is brutally evident: the a priori ‘divination’ of history is an impossibility, and the failure to distinguish factual from merely factlike assertions is doomed to incoherence. Fontenelle may have shifted from the cento of authorities to an analytical approach; but the Réponse reminds us that no history, however sophisticated, can escape the reliance on authority.131 Coady, likewise, has argued that ‘we cannot do without testimonial data in history’—the ‘scissors and paste’ method dismissed by Collingwood lies at the basis of all historiography.132 Fontenelle’s argument, as we have seen, ultimately depends on the testimonies of Plato, Eusebius, Porphyry, and so on. Once this fact is appreciated, it becomes clear that, on the level of criticism rather than rhetoric, the Histoire’s value cannot rest on its reconstructions, no matter how plausible they may seem, but only on the quality of his analyses and interpretations of the ancient texts.
Maigron had named these two issues—the Platonism of the Fathers and the interpretation of Porphyry—as representative of Baltus’s ‘sovereign disdain’ for the facts of history.133 This is hardly true. They represent, rather, fine examples of Baltus’s two basic criticisms: that Fontenelle misreads his sources and relies too much on Van Dale, and that, in the absence of direct evidence, he peddles conjecture. These are the complaints of a conservative scholar about a maverick, full of dangerous ideas and careless in his methods. The two cruxes clearly illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of both writers and their epistemologies. It can be seen that, pace Maigron, Baltus’s views on patristic Platonism, and on the Porphyrian oracles, and indeed his attack on Fontenelle as a whole, are rarely weak or sloppy, but rather a curé’s egg—excellent in parts. The Réponse at once exposes the greatest flaws of the Histoire, and illuminates the old world of erudition, obscure to us now, against which it reacted, and against which its worth must be measured.
It is perhaps difficult to appreciate the force of Baltus’s critique, because so few of us can be convinced of his conclusions. But we must take care not to assume that what is now obvious to us was, or should have been, obvious in 1700.134 To forget this is to succumb to presentism, a danger of which Baltus himself was fully aware: ‘See how badly one judges that which was done in all ages, by what is done in one’s own age.’135
The key problem for Fontenelle is his religious commitment. The modern atheist is not troubled by the near-unanimity of ancient sources, both pagan and Christian, on the supernaturalism of the oracles, because his non-historical beliefs about the world override historical testimony. We may contrast this case to a more neutral historical proposition. The traditional example is the existence or assassination of Julius Caesar: if all extant sources agree directly or indirectly that Julius Caesar existed, and that he was murdered on the Ides of March, 44 BC, then we have no good reason to doubt these facts.136 But the oracles do conflict with core beliefs: no matter how many sources insist that the oracles were supernatural, the atheist can legitimately refuse to revise his disbelief. To the modern atheist, then, the pagan oracles were obviously not demonic or otherwise supernatural. But Fontenelle is not the modern atheist. Not only is he explicitly committed to the Christian God—he even accepts in his preface the existence of demons:
Under the rubric of oracles I do not claim to include magic, in which the Devil is undoubtedly involved.137
Fontenelle has thus set himself the difficult task of preserving demons while denying their involvement in the oracles. In an open letter to Bayle’s journal, published in May 1687, Van Dale objected to his adapter’s handicap, which had not hampered his own work and which, he suspected, was merely and disingenuously politic in the Histoire.138
Modern scholars have largely shared Van Dale’s suspicions, reading a more subversive Fontenelle between the lines of the Histoire. In his 1899 history of philosophy Lucien Lévy-Bruhl wrote, ‘Instead of “oracles” read “miracles,” and the work of Fontenelle will at once have a modern meaning, and at the same time seem singularly aggressive.’139 Other prominent voices have agreed. Marsak decided that ‘Fontenelle intended his work to be an attack on contemporary Christian superstition’, and in the same year Frank Manuel remarked that, despite Fontenelle’s caveats about demons and magic, ‘knowing readers still could understand that whenever he bared the machinery of pagan oracles, he was hinting at behind-the-scenes manipulation in all miraculous events’.140 Niderst’s formulation, however, remains the most picturesque:
Fontenelle did not remotely believe that magicians were animated by the devil… In fact, it is impossible, reading Fontenelle’s text, not to think of the magicians of the Poison Affair when one meets the intoxicated and soothsaying Pythia; and anti-clericalism, that is, hatred of Catholicism, is even more pronounced than in Van Dale.141
This interpretation of the Histoire represents a charitable resolution of its inconsistency. It also involves reading between the lines—reading, that is, like a Fontenelle. Only occasional critics have sounded the note of caution.142 As with Pomponazzi, La Mothe Le Vayer and all the rest, there is little basis for deciding either way. Suggestive parallels to Christianity were not the subject of Baltus’s critique, although we may perhaps hear this concern in his comment on Fontenelle’s six persuasive apostles. At any rate, the Histoire’s ambiguity allowed Baltus to pare off the misguided Fontenelle from the malicious Van Dale. The Jesuit repeatedly implores his adversary to consider the heterodox consequences of his analysis, never attributing anti-Christian intentions to Fontenelle himself. Correctly or not, Baltus insists on taking Fontenelle, as he took the Fathers, at face value. And taken at face value, with demons in the picture, and his attack limited to pagan antiquity, Fontenelle’s argument looks decidedly weaker.
Within the framework of early modern Catholic thought, much of Baltus’s critique is convincing. Much, equally, is incoherent outside that framework. One example is particularly revealing. Baltus argues that one of the Fathers’ primary reasons for belief in the demonic oracles was, in fact, firsthand evidence, for they themselves had exorcised demons from such places.143 He notes that Tertullian, Lactantius, and others boast of driving out demons personally, and invite pagans to put them to the test. If the Christians were wrong, why was their boast never refuted or even attacked by the pagans? Baltus here offers Fontenelle a direct challenge. There is little room for exegetical manoeuvre: either one accepts the consensus of the Fathers that they drove out demons, or one rejects them as knaves or fools. The respondent of the Bibliothèque answers Baltus at some length, suggesting the possibility of patristic fraud, in addition to denouncing exorcism as being held in low esteem.144 In his Suite, Baltus plays what is, from his perspective, his trump card: not only can he cite the firsthand experience of the Fathers—he can cite modern firsthand experience. For exorcism has always been, and still is, much prized in the Church.
Does he not know that the means which the Church employs today against demons are the same as those which ancient Christians used—prayer, the invocation of Christ’s name, the reading of the Gospels, the sign of the Cross, and the relics of the saints?145
Here, for the first and only time in the entire dispute between Baltus and Fontenelle, a modern phenomenon is adduced not as mere analogy, but as direct evidence for the historical position. The associative structures of early modern demonologists, which I examined in Chapter Two, are now being put to use in argument, just as Van Dale had brought to the table his own experience of Barbetje Jacobs, to prove the counter case.146 Further eyewitness evidence for the demon thesis would soon be forthcoming, most importantly from the Jesuit Jean-Venant Bouchet, who wrote to Baltus from his mission in Madurai, confirming his experience of devilish oracles among the Indians, as proof against Fontenelle.147 Baltus has forced his opponent into a difficult position: to deny the demon thesis of the oracles would be tantamount to denying modern Catholic experience. And so there is no condition for rational engagement—either Baltus’s position is obviously true or it is obviously false. In the absence of reason, the only basis for adjucation is, in one form or another, the quality of testimony, or, to put it another way, authority.
This argument could remain coherent only within the set of axioms and presuppositions in which it arose. There was no possibility of adaptation as those axioms declined in the course of the century. But in other arguments of the Réponse we find a more lasting value. Even for the non-Catholic reader—even for the atheist—one of Baltus’s points, a direct attack on the plausibility of Fontenelle’s entire thesis, remains powerful to this day:
How could it be that so many clever men, so many great philosophers, so many flourishing realms, towns and republics never realised that they had been the dupes of certain frauds, who knew much less than them in every respect? How could these frauds and impostors have been able to succeed each other continually, without interruption, one after the other, and hide their game so well, for more than two thousand years, that nobody ever perceivd it? Were they of a different species from other men who lived at that time? Were they born infinitely clever and cunning, just as all the others were born stupid and dull-witted to the last degree?148
The basic argument was not new: it had been made by Johann Crellius, for instance, whom Baltus cites elsewhere.149 What was new, rather, was Baltus’s attention to human inconsistency: ancient pagans in general, like Fontenelle’s proselytes for the sunless day, could not simultaneously be cunning and stupid.150 The Jesuit had inherited from his opponent the habit of thinking through the historical implications of a principle: the figures of the past have become living actors.
At any rate, Baltus is surely right to find such well-sustained fraud wildly implausible. As the philosopher David Stove has observed, ‘only the most unteachable rationalist’ will suppose that imposture was the norm in ancient religion.151 Fontenelle, for all his wit and brilliance of imagination, was indeed an unteachable rationalist, and his Histoire is a classic example of what Stove calls the ‘imposition’ theory of religion, typical of the Enlightenment but no longer acceptable today. Its thesis is inextricable from Fontenelle’s epistemology: his view of human nature as essentially credulous, and of knowledge as sceptical and individual, combined with a disdain for historiography based on testimony, led naturally to his position on the oracles. The modern persistence of such an epistemology accounts for the Histoire’s enduring popularity. In 1956 the Jesuit Alfred Desautels, embarrassed by Baltus, could confidently assert: ‘Today we know that the history of the oracles is really only that of chimaeras, in which the credulity of earlier men found satisfaction.’152
Historical positivism has since given way to the new attitudes of social and cultural history. On the subject of the oracles, for instance, the sceptical scholarship of the 1950s has been supplemented with anthropological insights into the purpose and mechanics of divination. Delphi, we now think, must be interpreted as part of a cultural system, intrinsic to the whole; the existence of its divinity, or the truth of its predictions, are simply irrelevant. Fontenelle and Baltus, too, may be counted as anthropological specimens. The Histoire and the Réponse are most usefully studied as the products of two competing cultural narratives, or, perhaps, two interpretations of the same narrative.153 Both make valid arguments; neither tells the truth. Like all early modern discussions of the pagan oracles, these are works of storytelling, moral fables; their aim was to teach their readers the evils of paganism, and the values of the Church, or of philosophy—tradition, or reason. They were destined to teach only those who agreed already. Listening to both voices in dialogue, we may draw our own conclusions.
1 Charles Yves Cousin d’Avallon, ed. Fontenelliana, ou Recueil des bons mots, reponses ingénieuses, pensées fines et délicates de Fontenelle (Paris, 1801), p. 74: ‘Un auteur porta à Fontenelle, désigné pour son censeur, un manuscrit à examiner. Fontenelle refusant son approbation: comment, monsieur, lui dit-on, vous qui avez fait les Oracles, vous ne me passerez pas cela? Le philosophe répondit d’un grand sang-froid: “Si j’eusse été le censeur des Oracles, je n’aurais pas approuvé l’ouvrage.” ’ Arsène Houssaye, Le roi Voltaire (Paris, 1858), p. 216, names Fontenelle ‘censeur royal’ in his own version of the anecdote, embroidered and more widely disseminated.
2 See Steven F. Rendall, ‘Fontenelle and His Public’, Modern Language Notes 86 (1971), 496–508, on the precise cultural setting of Fontenelle’s ‘popularisation’.
3 [Jean-François Baltus], Réponse à l’Histoire des oracles de M. de Fontenelle (Strasbourg, 1707); ‘Remarques sur le Démêlé qui est entre Mr. de Fontenelle, Auteur de l’Histoire des Oracles, imprimée plusieurs fois à Paris et à Amsterdam; et l’Auteur de la Réponse à l’Histoire des Oracles’, in Jean Le Clerc, ed., Bibliothèque choisie 13 (1708), 178–282; [Jean-François Baltus], Suite de la Réponse à l’Histoire des oracles (Strasbourg, 1708).
4 Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, sv. ‘Oracles’, in his Oeuvres, ed. Beaumarchais, 70 vols. ([Kehl], 1784–89), XLII, pp. 191–205; [Augustin Simon Irailh], Querelles littéraires, ou Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des révolutions de la République des Lettres, depuis HOMERE jusqu’à nos jours, 4 vols. (Paris, 1761), II, pp. 1–16. A good modern account of the dispute can be found in Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (London, 2001), pp. 359–370.
5 Fontenelle’s basic biographical information can be found in a number of sources, from Trublet and the many éloges onward. See, e.g., Baron Walckenaer’s entry in M. Michaud, ed. Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, 52 vols. (Paris, 1816), XV, pp. 218–226; Louis Maigron, Fontenelle: L’homme, l’oeuvre, l’influence (Paris, 1906); or, in English, Douglas McKie, ‘Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, F.R.S. 1657–1757’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 12 (1957), 193–200. The definitive work, however, is now Alain Niderst, Fontenelle (Paris, 1991).
6 See, e.g., Michel de Cubières-Palmézeaux, Fontenelle jugé par ses pairs (London, 1783); others are listed in Édouard Frère, Manuel du bibliographie normand, ou Dictionnaire bibliographique et historique, 2 vols. (Rouen, 1858–60), I, p. 477. On Fontenelle’s own éloges, see Gregory Matthew Adkins, ‘When Ideas Matter: The Moral Philosophy of Fontenelle’, Journal of the History of Ideas 61, no. 3 (2003), 433–452, and on éloges more generally, see Charles B. Paul, Science and Immortality: The Éloges of the Paris Academy of Science (1699–1791) (Berkeley, 1980).
7 Niderst, Fontenelle, p. 15.
8 Abbé Nicolas Trublet, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de Mr. de Fontenelle, tirés du Mercure de France 1756, 1757 & 1758, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam, 1759), p. 15: ‘Il est toujours si raisonnable qu’il n’a pas besoin d’être raisonneur’.
9 On the Devineresse, see chapter four above, n. 105; on Van Dale’s critical response to Fontenelle, see below, n. 138.
10 Marcel Bouchard, L’Histoire des oracles de Fontenelle (Paris, 1947), p. 105.
11 Bernard de Fontenelle, Histoire des oracles, ed. Louis Maigron (Paris, 1934), pp. v–ix, On Thomassin, see chapter four above, pp. 171–172.
12 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (London, 1920), p. 108.
13 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 4: ‘plus raisonnable de démêler l’Erreur d’avec la Verité, que de respecter l’Erreur mêlée avec la Verité.’
14 Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, sv. ‘Oracles’, Oeuvres, XLII, p. 198. See also ‘Éloge de M. de Fontenelle’, Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences (1757), 185–200, p. 188.
15 Mathieu-Mathurin Tabaraud, ‘Jean-François Baltus’, in Biographie universelle, III, p. 294. The original source of information on Baltus’s life is his sole éloge, in the Trévoux Memoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux arts (January 1744), 139–149. The same basic data has been parroted ever since; see, e.g., Carlos Sommervogel’s entry in E. Vacant and E. Mangenot, eds., Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, 15 vols. (Paris, 1905), II, p. 137. According to Émile-Auguste Bégin, Biographie de la Moselle, 4 vols. (Metz, 1829), I, p. 67, Baltus was among the ‘Messins illustres’ whose portrait medallions Antoine Louis donated to Metz in the eighteenth century. Today these hang in the grand salon of the town hall, but I have been unable to confirm Baltus’s presence among them.
16 Maigron, in Fontenelle, Histoire, p. d: ‘La maladresse n’a d’êgale chez lui que la naïveté ou l’inintelligence.’ To my knowledge, only Bouchard, L’Histoire, pp. 160–161, has had a kind word to say for Baltus: ‘Sans aucun doute le P. Baltus avait l’avantage de mieux connaitre l’antiquité.’
17 Immanuel Kant, ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’, in his Was ist Aufklärung, ed. Ernst Cassirer (Berlin, 1999), p. 20: ‘Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen.’
18 James Bowling Mozley, The Influence of Ancient Oracles in Public and Private Life: An Essay (Oxford, 1835), p. 64, here discussing the classical debate.
19 Fontenelle, Histoire, pp. iii–iv: ‘on ne peut pas pousser cette liberté plus loin que j’ay fait; j’ay changé toute la disposition du Livre … j’ay quelquefois raisonné autrement que luy, je ne me suis point fait un scrupule d’inserer beaucoup de raisonnemens qui ne sont que de moy’.
20 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 29: ‘si l’on a un peu étudié l’esprit humain, on sçait quelle force le Merveilleux a sur luy. Mais je ne pretens pas m’étendre sur cette reflexion: ceux qui y entreront, m’en croiront bien, sans que je me mette en peine de la prouver, et ceux qui n’y entreront pas, ne m’en croiroient pas peut-estre aprés toutes mes preuves.’
21 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 9: ‘Tout ce qu’ont dit les Anciens, soit bon, soit mauvais, est sujet à estre bien repeté; et ce qu’ils n’ont pû eux-mesmes prouver par des raisons suffisantes, se prouve à présent par leur autorité seule.’
22 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 70: ‘La coûtume a sur les hommes une force qui n’a nullement besoin d’estre appuyée de la raison.’
23 Fontenelle, Histoire, pp. 96–98: ‘Donnez-moi une demy douzaine de personnes, à qui je puisse persuader que ce n’est pas le soleil qui fait le jour, je ne desespereray pas que des Nations entieres n’embrassent cette opinion. Quelque ridicule que soit une pensée, il ne faut que trouver moyen de la maintenir pendant quelque temps: la voilà qui devient ancienne, et elle est suffisamment prouvée.’ Claude Adrien Helvétius, De l’homme, de ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1774), II, p. 230, n. 21, notes a parallel with François Garasse, La doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps (1623), ed. Jean Salem (Paris, 2009), pp. 221–22 (I.15.4). See also Pierre Bayle, Pensèes diverses sur la comète, ed. A. Prat, 2 vols. (Paris, 1911–12), I, pp. 36–37 (§ 7): ‘Je suis sûr que si cela étoit, nous reduirions le suffrage d’une infinité de gens à l’autorité de deux ou trois personnes, qui ayant debité une Doctrine que l’on supposoit qu’ils avoient examinée à fond, l’ont persuadée à plusieurs autres par le prejugé de leur merite’.
24 J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven and London, 1987), p. 45, observes that ‘Fontenelle nicely anticipates the contemporary understanding of how paradigms work as he describes the mythmaking process that follows the initial formation of a cosmology.’ Although Preus is here describing Fontenelle’s De l’origine des fables, he acknowledges the Histoire as a ‘relevant test case’ for the principle. Michael Wood, writing for a popular audience in his The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles (London, 2005), p. 154, remarks of Fontenelle’s approach that ‘It’s as if he has leaped into the twentieth century and taken his place among anthropologically minded historians: fallacies, too, have their history.’
25 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 169: ‘je connois une personne trés-habile et trés éclairée, qui ayant vû cet endroit de vostre livre, y a trouvé je ne sçay quel venin caché qui luy a déplû infiniment.’ Bouchard, L’Histoire, pp. 163–164, suggests that Baltus was offended by the biblical connotations of Fontenelle’s claim: ‘Pour être enveloppée, l’accusation n’en était pas moins claire et directe, puisque deux demi-douzaines d’apôtres ont enseigné l’Evangile.’
26 [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 170-171: ‘Il faudroit pour cet effet qu’elles fussent en même temps infiniment stupides et infiniment habiles: infiniment stupides pour donner dans une erreur si grossiere et si palpable: infiniment habiles pour la persuader à des nations entieres.’
27 J. G. Herder, Über den Ursprung der Sprache, ed. Wolfgang Pross (Munich, 1978), pp. 19–21.
28 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 170: ‘Assurément vous comptez beaucoup sur la stupidité des hommes. Il me semble neanmoins qu’ils ne se rendent pas si facilement à tout ce que l’on veut leur persuader, particulierement si ce sont des choses contraires à leurs sens et à leur experience. Pour peu qu’ils ayent d’esprit et d’intelligence, ils demandent des preuves et des raisons. Ce n’est pas tout, ils veulent encore dans ces occasions, des prodiges et des miracles, ou vrais, ou au moins qui leur paroissent tels.’
29 [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 233–234: ‘Comme les hommes sont naturellement incredules et qu’ils ne croyent pas aisément, ainsi qu’on la remarqué avant moy, ce qui est au de là de ce qu’ils voyent ou de ce qu’ils peuvent faire eux-mêmes, tout ce qui est merveilleux et extraordinaire leur paroit suspect. Ils y soupçonnent toûjours de la fraude et de l’imposture.… Il n’arrive même que trop souvent, par cet éloignement qu’ils ont de croire tout ce qui paroit extraordinaire, qu’ils supposent de la fourberie où ils n’ont pas la moindre raison d’en soupçonner.’
30 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 79: ‘Cela vient en general, de ce que pour quitter une opinion commune, ou pour en recevoir une nouvelle, il faut faire quelque usage de sa raison, bon ou mauvais, mais il n’est point besoin d’en faire aucun pour rejetter une opinion nouvelle, ou pour en prendre une qui est commune. Il faut des forces pour resister au torrent, mais il n’en faut point pour le suivre.’
31 [Baltus], Réponse, fol. 1v: ‘Mais dans le siecle où nous sommes, on peut s’assurer qu’une opinion nouvelle, quelque mal prouvée qu’elle puisse estre, ne manquera jamais de trouver des sectateurs, pourvû qu’elle favorise le penchant que l’on a à l’incredulité.’
32 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 142: ‘C’est une servitude contre laquelle l’esprit humain se révolte naturelle-ment.… Ainsi ceux qui croyent, sont portez à examiner les raisons de ne pas croire, afin de se délivrer, s’il est possible, de cette servitude si fâcheuse: Et ceux qui ne croyent pas, comptant pour beaucoup d’estre délivrez de ce joug incommode, évitent naturellement tout ce qui pourroit les y engager, et sont bien plus portez à s’instruire des raisons de ne pas croire, pour se fortifier toûjours de plus en plus dans leur incredulité, que de celles qui pourroient les obliger à croire.’
33 Leonard Lessius, De providentia numinis et animi immortalitate libri duo adversus atheos et politicos (Antwerp, 1613), pp. 131–132 (I.2.9): ‘Ingenium humanum suspicax est et incredulum, cum de novis miraculis agitur. Hinc studiose omnia examinat, ne forte fraus aliqua subsit, aut error.… Hic [sc. homines] curiosissime omnia excutiunt ut aliquid deprehendant, quo totum negotium in dubium vocent’.
34 See, e.g., Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, History of Modern Philosophy in France, trans. G. Coblence (London, 1899), p. 126: ‘Fontenelle is a Cartesian, but an independent one, who does not regard himself bound to adhere to all the doctrines of Descartes.’ Jean R. Carré, La Philosophie de Fontenelle, ou le Sourire de la raison (Paris, 1932), p. 17: ‘Tout le monde admettra d’abord que Fontenelle est un Cartésien’.
35 Bouchard, L’Histoire, p. 33, ‘opinions reçues et des préjugés consacrés’. Rendall, ‘Fontenelle and his Public’, p. 498, agrees that ‘the Cartesian method’ represented for Fontenelle the ‘first great realization’ of the modern critique of superstition.
36 A. Laborde-Milaà, Fontenelle (Paris, 1903), pp. 80–81: ‘A mesure que l’idée cartésienne, à savoir que chacun est capable, ayant la raison, d’arriver à la vérité, prenait corps dans la masse; à mesure que la suprématie du sens privé tendait à s’établir, l’idée chrétienne, bâtie sur la révélation et sur la tradition, se désagrégeait, et les arguments répandus par Fontenelle, bâtant l’opinion sur ce chemin, avaient leur effet dans la préparation du nouveau siècle.’ Emphasis mine.
37 Fontenelle, Histoire, pp. 53–54: ‘C’est aux hommes à se précautionner contre les Erreurs où ils peuvent estre jettez par d’autres hommes.… Dieu n’est obligé par les loix de sa bonté, qu’à me garantir moy-mesme; pour les autres, c’est à ma raison à faire son devoir.’
38 C. A. J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford, 1992).
39 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1894), I, p. 115 (I.3.23).
40 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994), pp. 8–27, outlines a similar argument as a basis for his study of the transmission of knowledge in the Royal Society.
41 Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, in Inquiry and Essays, ed. Keith Lehrer and Ronald Beanblossom (Indianapolis, 1975), pp. 93–95 (chap. 6, section XXIV). The reader may enjoy the more satirical formulation of Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, in Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Rodger Tarr and Mark Engel (Berkeley, 2000), p. 86: ‘Such perhaps was the aim of Nature, who does nothing without aim, in furnishing her favourite, Man, with this his so omnipotent or rather omnipatient Talent of being Gulled.’
42 Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA, 1981), pp. 230–236.
43 H. A. Prichard, Knowledge and Perception (Oxford, 1950), p. 94. For a series of essays on the concepts of internal and external epistemic justification, see Hilary Kornblith, ed., Epistemology: Internalism and Externalism (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
44 Augustine, De fide rerum quae non videntur, ed. and tr. Giuseppe de Luca (Rome, 1931), pp. 12–14: ‘Omitto dicere quam multa isti, qui nos reprehendunt quia credimus quae non videmus, credant famae et historiae vel de locis ubi ipsi non fuerunt; nec dicant: Non credimus; quia non vidimus.’
45 Melchior Cano, Locorum theologicorum libri xii (1562: Venice, 1567), pp. 552–669 (chap. 11). This chapter, of particular historical interest, has been published in a separate edition and translated into Italian by Albano Biondi as L’Autorità della storia profana (Turin, 1973). Later discussions of the subject were much in harmony, even if less detailed. See, e.g., the Jesuit Martin Bresser, De conscientia libri sex (1630: Antwerp, 1638), pp. 270–78 (III.5), with further references to contemporary Jesuit literature.
46 Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York and London, 1963), pp. 83–88. Franklin, p. 112, argues that Cano is the first to offer ‘a reasonably correct description of the elementary logic of historical belief’.
47 Cano, Locorum theologicorum libri xii, p. 208: ‘naturae auctor in hominum mentibus inclinationem ad credendum naturalem impresserit’. Note that Cano, like Reid, chose to use the expression ‘naturae auctor’—‘Author of Nature’—in this context.
48 Cano, Locorum theologicorum libri xii, p. 568: ‘Si omnes probati ac graves historici in eandem rem gestam concurrant, tunc ex horum auctoritate certum argumentum promitur, ut Theologiae dogmata firma etiam ratione constituantur.’
49 Cano, Locorum theologicorum libri xii, pp. 567–568: ‘Nec enim est hominis bene instituti, et ad vitam humanam recte compositi, viro gravi rem credibilem asserenti non credere. Rem credibilem dixi, quoniam quaedam a Plinio, aliisque historicis vel gravissimis referuntur, quae cum vix credibilia sint, si ea fuisse negemus, non ideo historiae auctoritatem labefacimus.’
50 Jean Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Paris, 1572), p. 61, is more consistent on the subject of consensus: ‘si qua historia tot ac tam multos testes habet ut refelli minime possit, tametsi videtur incredibilis, magnum prae se fert veritatis argumentum’, emphasis mine.
51 See Franklin, Jean Bodin, pp. 113–115.
52 See C. L. Ligota, ‘Annius of Viterbo and Historical Method’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 50 (1987), 44–56.
53 Cano, Locorum theologicorum libri xii, p. 649: ‘Prima lex ex hominum probitate integritateque sumetur’; p. 656: ‘Lex vero secunda in historiae judicio sanciatur, ut eos historicos reliquis anteferamus, qui ingenii severitati quandam prudentiam adjunxerunt et ad eligendum, et judicandum’; p. 659: ‘Tertia regula sit. Si cui historico auctoritatem ecclesia tribuit, hic dubio procul dignus est, cui nos etiam auctoritatem adjungamus.’
54 [Baltus], Suite, p. 266, n. 10.
55 [Baltus], Suite, pp. 70–71: ‘la Tradition constante de toute l’Eglise devroit en convaincre tout le monde’.
56 [Baltus], Suite, pp. 332–333: ‘Le Peuple est trés-facile à tromper: cela est vray, si l’on entend par-là, que l’on peut facilement persuader au peuple des erreurs de speculation et de créance, et l’y entretenir aprés l’avoir séduit: cela dis-je, est facile, sur tout lorsque ceux qui entreprennent de le tromper, ont soin de luy oster de devant les yeux la seule regle sensible, évidente et infaillible qui pourroit le retirer de son égarement; et viennent à bout de luy persuader qu’il doit estre luy-même la regle de sa créance, et s’en tenir à son sens particulier: source funeste de tous les égaremens de l’Esprit humain en matiere de Religion.’
57 René Descartes, Méditations I, paragraphs 4–9.
58 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 34: ‘On raisonne sur ce qu’ont dit les Historiens; mais ces Historiens n’ont-ils esté ny passionnés, ny crédules, ny mal instruits, ny negligens? Il en faudroit trouver un qui eust esté spectateur de toutes choses, indifférent, et appliqué.’
59 Polybius, Histories XII.4, on which see F. W. Walbank, Polybius (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 72–74.
60 On the commonplace rules of classical and Renaissance artes historicae, see Franklin, Jean Bodin; John H. M. Salmon, ‘Precept, Example, and Truth: Degory Wheare and the ars historica’, in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric and Fiction, 1500–1800, ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris (Cambridge, 1997), 11–36; and Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007).
61 Cano, Locorum theologicorum libri xii, p. 567: ‘Historici graves ac fide digni, quales nonnulli sine dubio et in ecclesiasticis et in saecularibus fuere.…’
62 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 34: ‘Sur tout quand on écrit des faits qui ont liaison avec la Religion, il est assez difficile que selon le Party dont on est, on ne donne à une fausse Religion des avantages qui ne luy sont point deus, ou qu’on ne donne à la vraye de faux avantages dont elle n’a pas besoin.’
63 Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, ‘Il Contile’, in Della historia diece dialoghi (Venice, 1560), fols. 24v–30r, and see Franklin, Jean Bodin, p. 102; Grafton, What Was History?, p. 132.
64 Fontenelle, Histoire, pp. 78–79:
Le témoignage de ceux qui croyent une chose déja établie, n’a point de force pour l’appuyer, mais le témoignage de ceux qui ne la croyent pas, a de la force pour la détruire. Ceux qui croyent, peuvent n’estre pas instruits des raisons de ne point croire; mais il
ne se peut guere que ceux qui ne croyent point, ne soient point instruits des raisons de croire. C’est tout le contraire quand la chose s’établit; le témoignage de ceux qui la croyent, est de soi-mesme plus fort que le témoignage de ceux qui ne la croyent point; car naturellement ceux qui la croyent, doivent l’avoir examinée; et ceux qui ne la croyent point, peuvent ne l’avoir pas fait. Je ne veux pas dire que dans l’un ny dans l’autre cas, l’autorité de ceux qui croyent, ou ne croyent point, soit de décision; je veux dire seulement que si on n’a point d’égard aux raisons sur lesquelles les deux partis se fondent, l’autorité des uns est tantost plus recevable, et tantost celle des autres.
This passage would be quoted approvingly by Bayle, Continuation des pensées diverses (Rotterdam, 1721), III, pp. 146–147 (§ 21).
65 [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 140-141: ‘Voila une proposition qui me paroit fort étrange, et qui peut avoir des consequences qui le sont encore davantage.… Le Christianisme est établi et répandu par tout le monde: l’autorité de quelques libertins qui n’y ont pas beaucoup de foy, doit-elle prévaloir sur celle de tous les autres Fidéles qui le croyent, et qui le reconnoissent pour la seule véritable religion?’ (140–141).
66 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 141: ‘Jusqu’à présent n’a-t-on point crû, et les simples lumieres du bon sens n’apprennent—elles pas, qu’en matiere de suffrages et d’autoritez, la plus grande et la plus saine partie doit toûjours l’emporter?’
67 [Baltus], Suite, p. 11: ‘Ne presse-t’-on pas tous les jours le consentement des historiens profanes pour prouver un point d’histoire? Et quand on peut montrer que tous s’accordent unanimement sur ce point; qui est l’homme assez hardi pour oser le contredire? Ne produit on pas celuy des Jurisconsultes sur un point de droit?’ The connections and analogies between Renaissance juristics and humanism are discussed in Franklin, Jean Bodin, and Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance (New York and London, 1970).
68 ‘Remarques’, in Le Clerc, ed. Bibliothèque choisie, p. 244: ‘ce n’est pas aussi la multitude des croyans, qui nous persuade de sa verité. Autrement le nombre des Infideles et des Mahometans, se trouveroit le plus digne de foi en Asie, et en Afrique, et il n’auroit pas fallu croire le Christianisme vrai, quand il commença à paroître parmi les Juifs et parmi les Payens; parce que les Incredules étoient infiniment plus nombreux, que le Croyans.’ This had been a stock argument of libertin thought in the previous century, made infamous by François de La Mothe Le Vayer in his Quatre dialogues faits à l’imitation des anciens (Paris, ‘1506’ [ca. 1630]).
69 [Baltus], Suite, p. 290: ‘Ainsi donc il demeure constant que toutes choses égales, le grand nombre doit tousjours l’emporter sur le plus petit, et que le plus petit ne peut jamais prévaloir sur le plus grand, s’il ne produit pour soy de nouvelles preuves et des raisons évidentes qui le rendent superieur au plus grand.’ Compare and contrast Bayle, Pensées diverses, pp. 81–82 (§ 22): ‘toute la faveur qu’on doit faire à la longue possession et au grand nombre, c’est de luy donner la preference, toutes choses étant egales dans le reste: et s’il falloit s’arrêter au prejugé je le trouverois plus legitime pour celui qui seroit seul de son sentiment, que pour la foule.… [I]l est plus probable que les opinions qui se sont établies dans l’esprit de la plus part des hommes sont fausses, qu’il n’est probable qu’elles soient vrayes.’
70 K. R. Minogue, ‘Method in Intellectual History: Quentin Skinner’s Foundations’, Philosophy 56 (1981), 533–552, at p. 542.
71 Niderst, Fontenelle, p. 75, where he goes so far as to call the youthful Sur l’histoire ‘peut-être l’écrit le plus important de Fontenelle’.
72 Bernard de Fontenelle, Sur l’histoire, in Histoire des oracles et autres textes, ed. Willy de Spens (Paris, 1966), 151–168, at pp. 159–160:
Quelqu’un qui aurait bien de l’esprit, en consídérant simplement la nature humaine, devinerait toute l’histoire passée et toute l’histoire à venir, sans avoir jamais entendu parler d’aucune événements. Il dirait: la nature humaine est composée d’ignorance, de crédulité, de vanité, d’ambition, de méchanceté, d’un peu de bon sens et de probité par-dessus tout cela, mais dont la dose est si petite en comparaison des autres ingrédients.… Après quoi, si cet homme voulait examiner toutes les vérités que peuvent produire ces principes généraux, et les faire jouer, pour ainsi dire, de toutes les manières possibles, il imaginerait en détail une infinité de faits, ou arrivés effectivement, ou tout pareils à ceux qui sont arrivés.
Lévy-Bruhl, History, pp. 133–134, notes the implicit importance of Descartes for this conception of history as the product of pure reason.
73 ‘Remarques’, in Le Clerc, ed. Bibliothèque choisie, pp. 224–225: ‘Demander que l’on croye les Miracles du troisiéme, ou du quatriéme siecle et des suivans, c’est trop exiger de la foi des Chrétiens, et c’est ouvrir la porte à toutes sortes de fables, qu’on ne pourroit plus refuser de croire, après avoir laissé passer celles-là.’
74 [Baltus], Suite, p. 197: ‘Ainsi si l’on croit les miracles rapportez par les Peres de l’Eglise les plus illustres en sainteté et en science: Dez là c’est une consequence inévitable selon luy, et une necessité indispensable de croire toutes sortes de fables, quelque absurdes qu’elles soient et de quelque auteur qu’elles viennent.’
75 See, again, Lessius, De providentia, p. 132: ‘talia crebro fiunt, qualia apud Scriptores leguntur, quorum multa innumeris testibus probantur’.
76 [Baltus], Suite, p. 199: ‘De même quand un Juge recevra le témoignage d’un homme d’honneur qui assûre qu’il a vû ce qu’il dépose: ce sera une necessité pour luy d’admettre tous ceux qui se presenteront, quelque suspects, quelque décriez et quelque indignes de foy qu’ils puissent estre.’
77 Leonard Marsak, Bernard de Fontenelle: The Idea of Science in the French Enlightenment, (Philadelphia, 1959), p. 56. Marsak translates from somewhat disparate passages in [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 248–250:
Avouez la verité MONSIEUR, n’avez-vous pas senti quelque répugnance … à prouver que les Oracles n’avoient point cessé à la venuë du Sauveur du monde? … Il est rude à un Chrétien de se voir obligé de diminuer la gloire de celuy qu’il reconnoit pour son Dieu, et de dissimuler contre son inclination, que c’est à luy qu’il doit le bonheur qu’il a d’estre délivré des tenebres du Paganisme et de la tyrannie du démon. Vous me direz peut-estre que vous avez crû devoir sacrifier toutes ces répugnances à la vérité, qui doit l’emporter sur toute force de considerations. Le prétexte est specieux.…
78 Marsak, Bernard de Fontenelle, p. 56.
79 See below, pp. 243–244, and particularly the quotation at n. 145.
80 [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 250–251: ‘Le prétexte est specieux, mais il me semble que vous deviez auparavant vous bien assûrer de cette vérité, en consultant les Peres de l’Eglise dans leurs ouvrages, et en examinant soigneusement le sens de leurs paroles, sans vous en tenir à l’autorité de Mr. Van-Dale, qui vous devoit estre suspect en ces matieres pour bien des raisons.’
81 Bernard de Fontenelle, Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688), ed. Robert Shackleton (Oxford, 1955).
82 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 1: ‘Mon dessein n’est pas de traiter directement l’Histoire des Oracles’.
83 Philippe Hourcade, ‘Les choix historiographiques de Fontenelle vers 1683 et 1686’, in Fontenelle: Actes du colloque tenu à Rouen du 6 au 10 octobre 1987, ed. Alan Niderst (Paris, 1989), 645–656.
84 Fontenelle, Histoire, pp. 21–22: ‘Jamais philosophie n’a esté plus à la mode qu’y fut celle de Platon chez les chrétiens, pendant les premiers Siecles de l’Eglise.’ Compare Bayle’s weaker formulation, Pensées diverses, p. 221 (§ 84): ‘Il paroit par les ouvrages des Peres qui s’étoient convertis du Paganisme, que s’ils avoient été Platoniciens, ils retenoient l’air et l’esprit de cette Secte.’
85 See H. W. Parke and D. E. W. Wormell, The Delphic Oracle, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1956), I, p. 37: Christians ‘did not question the facts of Delphic revelation: they put a new theological construction on them’.
86 [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 17–18.
87 See chapter six below, pp. 250–251.
88 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 59.
89 Jean-François Baltus, Défense des SS. peres accusez de Platonisme (Paris, 1711).
90 [Baltus], Suite, pp. 130–131.
91 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 78: ‘la pluralité des Dieux, le Metempsychose, la communauté des femmes, l’homicide et un grand nombre d’autres erreurs détestables’. Each of these heresies is addressed, in the same order, in the Défense. See book 3, pp. 244–255, on polytheism; pp. 289–296, on the soul and metempsychosis; p. 353, on community of wives; and the brief note on p. 357, on homicides. Baltus also inserts a long section, pp. 255–288, on magic and divination. The chief source for these critiques is Theodoret, Cure of the Greek Maladies, book nine.
92 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 82: ‘Vous dites que presque tous les Anciens Chrêtiens sçavans ont embrassé la secte de Platon: Et moy je vous soûtiens qu’il n’y en a pas un, de tous ceux dont il nous reste des ouvrages, qui n’ait fait profession de rejetter Platon et sa philosophie, pour s’attacher uniquement à JESUS-Christ et à sa doctrine.’
93 See, e.g., Johannes Geffcken, The Last Days of Greco-Roman Paganism, trans. Sabine MacCormack, rev. Richard Vaughan (Amsterdam, etc., 1978), especially pp. 281–295.
94 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 88: ‘Reconnoissez donc Mr. que cette raison, ainsi que les deux autres précedentes, que vous avez supposé aux Anciens Chrêtiens, et pour lesquelles vous prétendez qu’ils ont crû, que les Oracles des Payens estoient rendus par les démons, ne sont que les chimeres, auxquelles ils n’ont jamais pensé, et que vous n’avez imaginé, qu’afin de combattre leur sentiment avec plus de facilité.’
95 ‘Remarques’, Bibliothèque choisie, p. 209: ‘Je ne croyois pas qu’on pût la contester; et ceux qui ont quelque idée du Platonisme, et qui ont lû quelque chose des plus anciens Peres … ne sauroient en douter.’
96 [Baltus], Suite, pp. 127–128: ‘il ne nous apporte point d’autres preuves que le témoignage de deux auteurs de nostre temps … ce sentiment, si souvent produit, mais jamais prouvé’.
97 Antonie van Dale, De oraculis ethnicorum dissertationes duae (Amsterdam, 1683), pp. 62–63; on these oracles, two from the Tübingen Theosophy and one genuinely from Porphyry apud Eusebius, see chapter one above, p. 40, and chapter two, n. 122, for the early modern texts.
98 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 44.
99 Fontenelle, Histoire, pp. 46-47: ‘Eusebe … nous les donne dépouillez de tout ce qui les accompagnoit dans les écrits de Porphire. Que sçavons-nous s’il ne les refutoit pas?’
100 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 47: ‘On soupçonne que Porphire estoit assez méchant pour faire de faux Oracles, et les presenter aux Chrestiens, à dessein de se moquer de leur crédulité, s’ils les recevoient pour vrais, et appuioient leur Religion sur de pareils fondemens’.
101 Fontenelle, Histoire, pp. 47–48: ‘Il se pourroit donc bien faire qu’il eust mis en Oracles tous les Mysteres de notre Religion exprés, pour tâcher à les détruire, et pour les rendre suspects de fausseté, parce qu’ils auroient esté attestez par de faux témoins.’
102 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 14; to my knowledge, Baltus is the first to point this out.
103 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 19.
104 [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 51–52.
105 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 51: ‘erreur pernicieuse’.
106 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 51.
107 [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 53: ‘En verité Mr. si vous avez pris la peine de lire un peu plus attentivement Eusebe et S. Augustin, vous ne vous seriez pas égaré dans toutes ces conjectures si peu dignes d’un homme d’esprit comme vous. Daignez au moins y faire attention à présent, et vous reconnoitrez sans peine, que tout ceque vous dites sur les Oracles et sur le livre de Porphyre, ne sont que des chiméres, que la seule lecture de ce qui nous reste de l’ouvrage de ce Philosophe, détruit et renverse absolument.’
108 Chapter four above, p. 198.
109 Van Dale, De oraculis ethnicorum (1683), p. 53: ‘minime mihi aliorum auctoritati in hac materia innitendum duxi’, quoted disapprovingly in [Baltus], Suite, pp. 5–6.
110 Baltus corrects his opponents’ minutest errors; for instance, Réponse, pp. 12–13, on Greek geography, and pp. 136–137, on the symbolic number 600; Suite, p. 269, on Oenomaus’s philosophical allegiance.
111 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 8: ‘Mais l’Ecriture Sainte ne nous apprend en aucune maniere que les Oracles ayent esté rendus par les Demons, et dés lors nous sommes en liberté de prendre party sur cette matiere; elle est du nombre de celles que la Sagesse Divine a jugées assez indiferentes pour les abandonner à nos disputes.’
112 Fontenelle, Histoire, pp. 49–50.
113 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 90, ‘Or l’Ecriture sainte leur faisoit entendre fort clairement que les démons en estoient les auteurs’.
114 [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 61–62: ‘Je suis fâché seulement que l’érudition mal digerée de Mr. Van-Dale qui vous a ébloüi, vous ait empêché de faire attention aux consequences de son systeme, qui va directement à ruiner l’autorité des Peres de l’Eglise et à renverser les Traditions les plus constantes et les mieux établies.’ Bury, The Idea of Progress, p. 117, explicitly notes the antipatristic note in Fontenelle: ‘The effect [of the Histoire] was to discredit the authority of the early Fathers of the Church, though the writer has the discretion to repudiate such an intention.’ Alfred R. Desautels, Les Mémoires de Trévoux et le mouvement des idées au XVIIIe siècle, 1701–1734 (Rome, 1956), p. 211, likewise acknowledges that ‘Baltus avait eu l’adresse de mettre le doigt sur ce qui était véritablement en cause: le prestige des Pères. C’est contre eux que la machine de guerre était montée.’
115 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 65.
116 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 63, ‘liberté Cinique’; [Baltus], Réponse, p. 136. ‘pas d’un fort grand poids’; see also p. 346. The Jesuit reasons that the Cynics rejected all liberal sciences—for this he cites Diogenes Laertius, De vita philosophorum 6.103–104—and that they therefore forfeited any claim to learning. We see here a concrete instance of Baltus’s position (see above, n. 225) that the credit given to an authority depends on his character. Jacques Basnage, Antiquitez judaïques, ou remarques critiques sur la République des Hébreux, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1713), II, pp. 857–58, defends the Cynics on this point.
117 [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 131–139.
118 Chapter one, p. 35.
119 Fontenelle, Histoire, pp. 82–83: ‘Je voy bien que tous les Oracles ne peuvent avoir esté que des fourberies, mais je ne le veux pourtant pas croire. Pourquoy? parce que je suis bien aise d’y faire entrer les Démons. Voilà une assez pitoyable espece de raisonnement.… Pour moy, je croy voir clairement que dans l’endroit dont il est question, il n’y a placé les Démons que par maniere d’acquit, et par un respect forcé qu’il a eu pour l’opinion commune.’
120 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 147. Baltus extends his reasoning in the Suite, and makes the more general point of interpretation, pp. 33–34: ‘de deux sentimens opposez qui se trouvent dans le même ouvrage d’un auteur, celuy au quel il paroit s’affectionner davantage, celuy qu’il prouve avec le plus de soin et le plus d’étenduë, celuy qui est le plus conforme aux principes qu’il suit; celuy enfin qu’il propose en son nom, est son veritable sentiment; et que l’autre qu’il ne fait qu’effleurer en passant et avant que d’entrer tout de bon en matiere, et qu’il ne propose que comme celuy d’un autre, est le sentiment étranger qu’il ne suit pas.’
121 [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 147–148.
122 Van Dale, De oraculis, sig. **3v: ‘Primitivae Ecclesiae Scriptores, ex mera Hypothesi … vulgarem Opinionem, de daemonibus, quantum ad Oracula spectat, defendisse’, and p. 223: ‘Sententia autem Vossii mera nititur hypothesi’.
123 On the Sur l’histoire, see above, n. 224.
124 [Baltus], Réponse, fol. 2r–v: ‘Neanmoins quand on lit son ouvrage, qu’y trouve-t-on? Beaucoup de lecture à la verité et d’érudition; mais fort confuse et fort mal digerée: nulle preuve, nulle raison, nulle autorité: par tout grand nombre de conjectures frivoles et de fausse suppositions, sur lesquelles il a bâti tout son systeme.’
125 [Baltus], Suite, fols. 4v–5r: ‘au deffaut de l’Antiquité, qui leur refusoit les témoignages dont ils avoient besoin, ils ont crû pouvoir recourir à leur imagination, qui leur a fourni des possibilitez et des conjectures en abondance’. See also Suite, p. 220, on the vain conjectures of the ‘Remarques’.
126 [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 53, 88, 192; Suite, pp. 60, 244, 349. Chimerique is found in a similar context in Réponse, pp. 182, 232, 332; Suite, pp. 33, 64, 139, 222, 247, 299, 337, 356, 401, 428.
127 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 241; see chapter four above, p. 138.
128 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. 109: ‘peut-estre mesme les Trompettes qui multiplient le son, n’estoient-elles pas alors tout-à-fait inconnues; peut-estre le chevalier Morland n’a-t-il fait que renouveller un secret que les Prestres Payens avaient sceu avant luy, et dont ils avoyent mieux aimé tirer du profit en ne le publiant pas, que de l’honneur en le publiant.’
129 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 194.
130 [Baltus], Réponse, I.7–8.
131 See also Moebius’s response to Van Dale, quoted in chapter four above, n. 200.
132 Coady, Testimony, pp. 237, 247–248.
133 Maigron, in Fontenelle, Histoire, p. e: ‘quelles erreurs se glissent dans ses raisonnements, et avec quel mépris souverain il rejette incontinent et sans même les examiner les faits qui gênent son dogmatisme’.
134 Tabaraud makes the same point in his biography of Baltus for the Biographie universelle, III, p. 294: ‘L’une et l’autre opinion [i.e., those of Fontenelle and Baltus] pouvaient réclamer en leur faveur des autorités respectables’.
135 [Baltus], Suite, p. 133: ‘Voilà comme l’on juge mal à propos de ce qui s’est fait dans tous les siecles par ce qui se fait dans celuy où l’on vit.’
136 The locus classicus for Julius Caesar and the problem of historical knowledge is David Hume, Treatise on Human Understanding I.3.4. Later contributions include G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘Hume and Julius Caesar’, Analysis 34 (1973), 1–7; and Donald W. Livingstone, ‘Anscombe, Hume and Julius Caesar’, Analysis 35.1 (1974), 13–19. Before Hume, the same question, using the same example, had been raised by Jean Le Clerc, ‘Letters concerning the Truth of the Christian Religion’, in A Treatise on the Causes of Incredulity (London, 1697), pp. 284–285.
137 Fontenelle, Histoire, p. vi: ‘je declare que sous le nom d’Oracles je ne pretens point comprendre la Magie, dont il est indubitable que le Demon se mêle’.
138 Antonius van Dale, ‘Lettre a un de ses amis, au sujet de livre des Oracles des Payens, composé par l’auteur du Dialogue des Morts’, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, May 1687, article 1, 459–487, especially pp. 464–465: ‘je lui demande pardon, si je prens la liberté de l’accuser ici de complaisance pour le Pere Thomassin, et le Pere Thomassin et lui de dissimulation contre leurs veritables lumiéres.’ On Thomassin, see above, pp. 171–172. See also Cubières-Palmézeaux, Fontenelle jugé, pp. 39–40.
139 Lévy-Bruhl, History, p. 131. Marsak, Fontenelle, p. 56, quotes this judgement, and Willy de Spens, ‘Fontenelle ou l’indifferent’, in Fontenelle, Histoire et autres textes, ed. Spens, i-viii, at p. vii, paraphrases the same: ‘On a cru les augures par goût du merveilleux, quelques fripons abusaient de la candeur populaire et tout ce qui peut se dire contre les oracles, pourquoi ne le dirait-on des miracles?’
140 Marsak, Fontenelle, p. 56. Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA, 1959), p. 51.
141 Niderst, Fontenelle, pp. 105–106: ‘Fontenelle ne croyait pas du tout que les sorcières fussent animées par le diable.… En fait, il est impossible, en lisant le texte de Fontenelle, de ne pas songer aux sorcières de l’affaire des poisons, quand on rencontre la Pythie intoxiquée et vaticinatrice; et l’anti-cléricalisme voire la haine du catholicisme sont encore plus prononcés que chez Van Dale.’
142 See, e.g., Walckenaer, ‘Bernard de Fontenelle’, p. 222; Bouchard, L’Histoire, p. 114; Wood, Road to Delphi, pp. 153–155.
143 [Baltus], Réponse, p. 98: ‘ils chassoient eux-mêmes les démons, des Oracles et des personnnes par qui ils rendoient leurs réponses’.
144 ‘Remarques’, in Le Clerc, ed. Bibliothèque choisie pp. 217–225.
145 [Baltus], Suite, p. 191: ‘Ignore-t-il que les moyens que l’Eglise employe aujourd’huy contre les démons sont les mêmes que ceux dont toute l’antiquité Chrêtienne s’est servie, et qui sont, la Priere, l’Invocation du nom de Jesus-Christ, la lecture de saints Evangiles, le Signe de la croix, les Reliques des Saints?’
146 On demonological associations, see chapter two above, pp. 47–52; on Barbetje, chapter four, p. 189.
147 Jean-Venant Bouchet, ‘Letter to Baltus’, in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangeres par quelques missionaires de la Compagnie de Jesus 9 (1711), 61–123.
148 [Baltus], Réponse, pp. 171–173: ‘Comment s’est-il pû faire que tant de gens habiles, tant de grandes Philosophes, tant de Royaumes, de Villes et de Républiques si florissantes, n’ayent jamais reconnu qu’ils estoient les dupes de quelques fourbes, qui en sçavoient beaucoup moins qu’eux en toute maniere? Comment ces fourbes et ces imposteurs ont-ils pû sans discontinuation se succeder perpetuellement les uns aux autres, et si bien cacher leur jeu pendant plus de deux mille ans, que personne ne s’en soit jamais apperçû? Estoient-ils d’une espece differente des autres hommes qui vivroient de leur temps? Naissoient-ils tous infiniment habiles et ruzez, tandis que tous les autres naissoient stupides et hébétez au dernier point?’ Parke and Wormell, Delphic Oracle, I, p. 36, remark likewise that ‘the theory of utter charlatanism is hard to maintain in view of the long and distinguished history of the oracle’.
149 Johann Crellius, Liber de Deo et eius attributis (Raków, 1630), p. 60: ‘Fieri autem nulla ratione potest, ut humanis illa omnia artibus perficerentur: cum tot, tam astuti ex omnibus locis ac regionibus ad oracula illa consulenda confluerent homines: qui non potuissent non facillime fraudem humanam … . deprehendere, praesertim cum non deessent, qui ea omnino de caussa accederent, ut fidem oraculorum explorarent. Itaque non potuissent oracula illa diu suam tueri famam atque auctoritatem; nedum per tot secula.’
150 See above, pp. 210–211.
151 D. C. Stove, ‘The Oracles and Their Cessation: A Tribute to Julian Jaynes’, Encounter 72 (1989), 30–38, at p. 37.
152 Desautels, Mémoires, pp. 204-205: ‘Aujourd’hui nous savons que cette histoire des oracles n’est guère que celle des chimères dont se repaissait la crédulité des hommes d’autrefois.’ Desautels follows the entry on oracles in Fernard Cabrol and Henri Leclercq, eds. Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrètienne et de liturgie, 13 vols. (Paris, 1936), XII, col. 2209: ‘Cette histoire n’est guère que celle des chimères dont se repaissait la crédulité des hommes d’autrefois, chimères dont fut composé le tissu d’erreurs qui ne diffère presque pas alors de l’esprit humain.’
153 Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932), p. 29: ‘the Philosophes were nearer the Middle Ages, less emancipated from the preconceptions of medieval Christian thought, than they quite realized or we have commonly supposed’.