The Bridge of Criticism (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 267 If Dr. Larson's work has not chosen to ask or to answer such broader questions, he has, nevertheless, given us a highly useful foundation upon which these might now be posed. PHILLn' R. SLOAN University of Washington The Bridge of Criticism. By Peter Gay. (Harper and Row. Pp. 171) Doubtless, the temptation is great for historians, philosophers, and English teachers to use their learning in support of a foray into nonexpository writing, a novel for instance, or a drama. Peter Gay, who not long ago completed his two-volume study, The Enlightenment, has recently published an imaginative, playful book called The Bridge oJ Criticism. The title belies the contents: The Bridge of Criticism is a dialogue of the dead in which the dramatis personae are Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire. In an epigraph to the dialogue (there are actually five related dialogues), we learn that Gibbon suggested to Gay the form and its participants. Gibbon mentioned in his autobiography that "I have often thought of writing a dialogue of the dead in which Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire should mutually acknowledge the danger of exposing an old superstition to the contempt of the blind and fanatic multitude." The "superstitions" Gay wishes to reveal consist of the false notions perpetuated by scholars, and accepted by educated readers, of the Enlightenment in general, Voltaire in particular. If "blind and fanatic multitude" seems too strong a characterization of the university populace, the issues themselves remain volatile. As the titles of the dialogues indicate "On Modernity," "On History," "On Optimism," "On Imagination," and "On Existentialism "--the conversations are both intrinsic to Enlightenment study as well as timely for today. But in the best tradition of Enlightenment writing, The Bridge of Criticism intends not merely to inform and instruct, but to delight also, and this it does admirably with its sharp wit and brisk inventiveness. Should we finish the book still disagreeing with Voltaire's spirited defense of his era, our "superstitions" have inevitably been shaken by the book's eloquence and urbanity. In the dialogues, Erasmus falls into the role of prosecutor, Voltaire as defender and subtle attacker, and Lucian appears as the avuncular Ancient, an equitable moderator and just critic. Gay recreates them so well that we do not feel cheated of the acerbic wit and incisiveness we know each of them possessed once. They are a well-matched triumvirate; though of strongly differing ideologies and persuasions, they are also united by the trenchant, satiric portraits they drew of their respective times, and in which they all shared a genuine disgust with folly, superstition, and arrogance. Yet each, of course, stands forth as a particularly definitive spokesman of an epoch. The dialogue of the dead encourages this juxtaposition of brilliant personalities, fosters a juggling of chronology, a gathering together of times as well as protagonists. As the title suggests, Gay's book bridges time, not only their own times of the participants, but in the first and last dialogues they address themselves to our time also, and so link the living with the ostensibly dead. If done well, and I think Gay does it very well--with insight, humor and intelligence--the dialogue of the dead is invariably fascinating, if no longer fashionable. The reader senses it something of a privilege to find these three great critics resuscitated and given the opportunity to comment upon, chastise, and criticize one another. 268 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In the first dialogue, "On Modernity," Voltaire insists on his indentification with the present age: '.'to be modern is to be cut off from the consolations of religion or metaphysics, to be a child--happy or wretched----of science." What the philosophes bequeathed to succeeding ages, and therefore what is forever modern about the Enlightenment, Voltaire claims, is "critical thinking [which] alone prods us to revise, improve, clarify and purify our ideas and our conduct .... [I]t compels man to do without the imaginary certainty offered by priests and closet philosophers, and gives him what is far more precious--the relative but authentic certainty that only reliable knowledge can provide." Arguments such as these do not end with any sort of certainty; Erasmus, unable to attack the...