Fontenelle and Bekker shared a mission to reorient their world by placing the familiar in a startling new contexts. The secularizing, disenchanting force of their works redrew lines of intellectual and cultural division between men and women, between Europeans and the wider world, and between the enlightened and the superstitious. Questions of human difference by gender, region, and culture play a key role in The Conversations and in The World Bewitched. Fontenelle and Bekker figure very differently in the early Enlightenment, but in their projects of education and enlightenment they both propose new zones of ignorance and new boundaries between light and darkness. Both rely on a hierarchy of perception to break down old barriers and create new divisions.
References to region and race set the stage for the last lesson in Fontenelle’s explication of astronomy. At the end of the final evening, the marquise asks “‘haven’t I always heard that the Chinese were very great astronomers?’” The narrator agrees as to their reputation, but corrects the marquise. He explains:
In truth, I am more and more persuaded there is a certain Genius which has hitherto been confined within our Europe, or which at least has extended very little beyond it.103
Here the fundamental distinction between the raisonneurs and the vulgar is generalized across the earth. Among the Europeans some few would be enlightened; among other peoples, likely none. The Europeans stand in the same relationship to other peoples as the raisonneurs to the vulgar, at the summit of a hierarchy of perception and understanding. This European claim on enlightenment is underscored throughout the Conversations by reference to the astrological and cosmological “fallacies” of other peoples, for example in the discussion of the fear caused by eclipses or comets. Indeed, Fontenelle describes the earth itself demarcated by “complexions.” Looking down from the height of understanding, Fontenelle explained:
I sometimes imagine that I’m suspended in the air, motionless while the Earth turns under me for twenty-four hours, and that I see passing under my gaze all the different faces: white, black, tawny, and olive complexions. At first there are hats, then turbans; wooly heads, then shaved heads.
The text brings the “certain Genius” of the Europeans together with the visible contrast between “societies.” Trying to imagine what inhabitants of other worlds would look like, Fontenelle’s narrator generalizes about human variety, observing that “‘All faces in general are made on the same model, but those of two large societies – European, if you like, and African – seem to have been made on two specific models’.”104 Visible difference and intellectual superiority coincide in the construction of race.
In Fontenelle’s most popular work the intellectual darkness of “the vulgar” serves as a backdrop to the glittering intellects of the marquise and the narrator, who agree not to even address the irrational masses. On a larger scale, the absurd beliefs, barbaric practices, and scientific ignorance of the “Africans and Tartars,” “Iroquois,” and Chinese which decorate the Conversations reveal the new hierarchies of race and region built into this fundamental Enlightenment text.
The relationship between gender and race in the Conversations is mirrored in the contemporary Code noir regulating slavery in France’s American colonies, also published in 1687.105 The gender inclusion of the Conversations, in which the beautiful blond marquise becomes the intellectual superior of the waggish noblemen who fail to understand the solar system, is consolidated as the marquise takes her place in the European superiority asserted by Fontenelle. The inclusion of enlightened women takes place in a new hierarchy which is based on European knowledge of the natural world and marked by race. The authors of the Code noir sought to consolidate difference through gender in similar terms by decreeing that slave status followed the maternal line. Articles 8–13 of the code asserted that all persons born in the French Caribbean colonies “will follow the condition of their mother.” The maternal transmission of status in the Code noir contrasted sharply with French practice and noble ideology, which relentlessly emphasized the male line of descent.106 In the colonies, however, concubinage with female slaves was an overriding factor. The Code noir punished such “free men who will have one or several children from their concubinage with their slaves,” fining them heavily. “Beyond the fine, they [would] be deprived of the slave and the children, and … she and they be confiscated for the profit of the [royal] hospital, without ever being manumitted.” Creating race as a category of division shifted the transmission of civil status from men to women in the Code noir. In practice, racial separation in the French Caribbean hardened in the following years, making the Code noir appear relatively liberal in its tolerance for mixed-race marriages, for example. The Conversations and theCode noir use gender in similar ways to draw new boundaries between learning and ignorance, or between freedom and slavery, in order to consolidate the category “European” or “French,” defined in opposition to extra-European ignorance, superstition, dark skin, and servility.
In The World Bewitched Bekker also redefined the relationship between enlightened Europeans and “all the Pagans in the World … in Asia … in Africa … and at last in America” in far-reaching terms. Bekker considered the place of these “Modern Pagans” in the first book of The World Bewitched, described by an English reviewer as “being but a collection of the various Opinions of Men about this Matter.”107 The reviewer thought that this first book of The World Bewitched “has not been attended with great Difficulties.” Compared to the furor created by the Cartesian and exegetical arguments in books II and III, that was true, and few scholars today have examined the argument Bekker makes in the first book.
Contemporaries did respond to his discussion of belief in the Devil by “Pagans as well Ancient as Modern,” however. These contemporaries, such as Benjamin Binet and John Beaumont, saw that, far from being a noncommittal survey of beliefs in demons, the Devil, ghosts, and witches in all times and places, this first section makes a bold and startling argument that redraws the dividing lines between knowledge and ignorance, shifting the “the frightful Darkness of Paganism” onto the beliefs of the other peoples of world, ancient and modern.108
In the first book of The World Bewitched Bekker assembles evidence about pagan beliefs in the Devil, demons, ghosts, witches, and spirits. He argues that “the difference to be found amongst them is not material, and must be accounted as inconsiderable, comparatively to the conformity that is betwixt them all.” Bekker interprets the consistent pagan belief in evil spirits in light of his assertion, “certain and undoubted, that every Opinion that proceeds from Paganism as from its Original, cannot at the same time be founded upon the Holy Scripture.” Bekker implies here and argues later that pagan belief in spirits is “contrary to true Reason, and … Holy Scripture affords no proofs of it.”109 These pagan beliefs are thus entirely false, not merely distorted misperceptions of a Christian reality that includes ghosts, demons, and witches. The overall claim of The World Bewitched that spirits and demons can affect nothing material, and that the Devil’s reach does not extend to the physical world, is supported in book I by this evidence, leading Bekker to conclude, for example, that “It is … sufficiently proved, by all the quotations of this Book, that there are no Miracles, Oracles, purging Fires, Apparitions of Hobgoblins or Souls, Witchcraft by Letters and Characters, or choice of Days, either in Judaism or Popery; but they draw their Original from Paganism.”110 Rooted in paganism, these beliefs had no place in the further reformation of Christianity Bekker proposed.
The place of the practices and beliefs of modern-day pagans in Bekker’s argument presented the strange reversal of the well-known proof of the existence of God “by universal consent.” The argument from “universal consent” functioned as a “moral proof” of the existence of God, quite familiar to Protestant and Catholic theologians alike.111 According to this proof all nations, ancient and modern, demonstrated some belief in a god or gods. However mistaken these pagan conceptions of the Divine might be, taken as a whole they showed an inescapable underlying truth. No reasonable person would conclude that all these peoples were mistaken; therefore, there must be a real God. Among the many proofs of the existence of God taught by early modern theologians, that from universal consent was a widely cited and seen as a meta-proof, a “consequence of the force of all proofs of God.”112 Theologians distinguished, of course, between the proper Christian understanding of God based on revelation, and the misconceived, anthropomorphic pagan gods. Nonetheless, “the abuse which one does to a truth does not destroy it,” as the Huguenot theologian Benjamin Binet explained, and pagan beliefs testified indirectly to the reality of the Christian God.113 This argument for the existence of God underscored, however tentatively, the fundamental unity of humankind. Belief in the Divine was universal and evident – the only partial exceptions were the European “atheists,” real or imagined, against whom seventeenth-century theologians sharpened their arguments.114 A flicker of the true God was visible even in the darkest pagan idolatry. Recognition of a common truth united all peoples, however distorted or idolatrous pagan understandings of God might be.
Bekker divided this unity. In his view ancient and modern pagans joined most Christians in the common and false belief in the power of the Devil, spirits, and witches. Bekker opposed himself and an enlightened minority of his readers to the superstitious pagans and Christians of his age. He proposed “to the Reader and myself, the lesson of the Apostle in his first Epistle to Timothy. 4:7: ‘Reject prophane, and Old Wives Fables, and exercise thy self to Godliness.’” In the first book or section of The World BewitchedBekker argued from universal error: the age-old and world-wide belief in spirits and the Devil was, according to his Cartesian understanding of spirits, impossible; according to his reading of the Bible it was unscriptural as well. Reason and Scripture showed pagans to be in utter darkness on this issue, and their ignorant belief in ghosts and spirits could only be cleared up from Cartesian and scriptural starting points. Bekker’s reliance on these two sources of authority, the New Philosophy and Scripture, led him to forthrightly deny any truth or value in the beliefs of the “Pagans as well Ancient as Modern” he surveyed. This denial distinguished him from the detached but respectful tone of eighteenth-century works which developed the concept of “comparative religion,” such as Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (1723–37).115
Alongside the outraged responses to Bekker’s application of Descartes, Spinoza, and Cocceius to questions of the Devil, ghosts, and spirits, contemporaries noted his transformation of the well-known argument from universal consent into something quite ominous: after all, Bekker’s claim that belief in physically active ghosts and spirits was a universal error could be expanded by a skeptic or atheist to argue that the universal belief in a deity was just as erroneous. The most widely circulated clandestine manuscript of the early Enlightenment, the Traité des Trois Imposteurs, succinctly made just such a case:
Those who ignore physical causes have a natural fear born of doubt. Where there exists a power which to them is dark or unseen, from thence comes a desire to pretend the existence of invisible Beings, that is to say their own phantoms which they invoke in adversity, whom they praise in prosperity, and of whom in the end they make Gods. And as the visions of men go to extremes, must we be astonished if there are created an innumerable quantity of Divinities?116
The rationalist theologian Benjamin Binet responded to Bekker with a variation on the proof of the existence of God by universal consent, arguing that:
all the peoples of the world are steeped in the opinion of demons. One can infer from this confession that what they know [of demons], however erroneous it might be, must be known to them through the [demons’] operations. And to put this truth in full light, please note the following: It is impossible that one and the same belief universally spread and constantly received may be entirely false in its content.
Following the argument from universal consent, Binet explains “if demons have been universally and constantly accepted by all the peoples of the world, this knowledge must proceed from some solid cause.”117
Evidence from other peoples was important to Bekker and to those who sought to refute the claims he made in book I of The World Bewitched. Binet accused Bekker of trying to “evade the entire supernatural order that our travelers tell us regarding the wizardry of the peoples and the operations of the devils who, they report, molest them.” Binet notes that Bekker “makes fun everywhere of the credulity of humankind.” Indeed, Bekker introduces his work by claiming that only with a proper (Cartesian) perspective can one understand “the inconsistency of the Properties of Bodies with those of Spirits … as I do here … as was necessary … to lay a firm foundation to this work, that is wholly grounded upon that Principle, at least as to those things that are the object of the Light of Reason.” This leads Binet to argue for the universality of human experience with the Devil, unconstrained by the claims of European enlightenment. He rebukes Bekker:
Thus Sir, you mean to make us laugh by denying the operations of demons on the Brazilian peoples, for example, because they are not good enough theologians to rise to the knowledge of God and the mysteries that His word has revealed us, or because they ignore the true [i.e., Cartesian] doctrine of demons.
Binet refuses to accept the division of the world proposed by Bekker (and in the same terms by Fontenelle) into the few (European) enlightened and the many ignorant on such fundamental issues.118 But in the course of the following century the divisions Europeans perceived between themselves and the other peoples of the world would be intensified by adding the opposition enlightened–superstitious to the existing dualities based on religion, race, and civilization.
For a few learned Europeans and a wider circle of readers and fellow-travelers, a new relationship with the night put the prince of darkness and his attendant ghosts, spirits, demons, and witches into a new light. All these shadowy figures were linked in a wave of controversy that helped define the first generation of the Enlightenment. Representations of darkness and the night – literal and metaphorical – shaped key works of the early Enlightenment, such as Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds and Bekker’s The World Bewitched, revealing the imprint of nocturnalization on the new ways of understanding the book of Nature and the book of Scripture at the end of the seventeenth century. Living and working in the most nocturnalized sites on earth, authors like Fontenelle and Bekker depicted themselves as conquerors of darkness, but in their works we see the displacement of darkness characteristic of nocturnalization. They each created hierarchies of perception, understanding, and enlightenment that shifted the darkness of ignorance onto new differences of region and race. And by taking the victory of light over darkness as the very emblem of their heterogeneous movement, the authors of the European Enlightenment invoked both sides of nocturnalization, dispelling and creating darkness in discourses that contrasted the light of reason with the allegedly benighted peoples of the wider world, whose beliefs about ghosts, witches, and spirits were “proof of the obscurity, that is spread over their understanding.”119