Dualisms: The Agons of the Modern World (review)

The dualisms in The Agons of the Modern World are not the traditional binary concepts — good vs. evil, mind vs. matter, realism vs. idealism — dichotomies that the author calls “too facile, too euphonious, too easy in themselves” (4). Rather, Quinones writes about cross-rivalries, tensions between writers of consciousness, who believe in the power of reason and are suspicious of inspiration, and their antagonists, daemonic writers, who are open to the inner voice, to pressures coming from the marginal areas of experience.

Although only the first of the four pairs discussed (Erasmus/Luther, Voltaire/Rousseau, Turgenev/Dostoevsky, Sartre/Camus) is of immediate concern to scholars of early modern Europe, the book is relevant because it develops linkages and establishes a broader historical pattern. Quinones does more than compare and contrast; he offers a typology. The rivalries have four aspects in common. 1) The protagonists are in the intellectual vanguard of their time and leaders of a reform movement. Because they have enemies in common, they are presumed to be comrades-in-arms. 2) Although there are genuine affinities between them, fault-lines become apparent in their relationship: mutual suspicions and dislikes, which eventually result in a public confrontation. 3) This confrontation reveals essential differences between the rivals as well as the fact that their alliance was only circumstantial. 4) The rivals become the diagnosticians of their age’s discontent; their debate becomes the defining debate of the age.

Developing this typology, Quinones shows that the famous controversy between Luther and Erasmus over free will is not unique. Emblematic of the intervention of the Reformation in the intellectual life of Western Europe, it also shows the reaction of the writer of consciousness and supporter of reason to the daemonic writer insisting on inner conviction. The contentious principle behind the two men’s polemic recurs and is replicated in later historical epochs.

The engagements described by Quinones bring together the personal and the intellectual, moving psychological profiling into the sphere of philosophy and literary criticism. Controversies of any kind make for riveting reading, and so do the dualisms described here. It adds to the reader’s enjoyment that Quinones has a good narrative voice. He picks the defining phrase and spans the centuries, when he explains, for example, that Sartre had a “profound Lutheran moment”: “When Sartre writes of the horrors of existence, he might in a larger anthropological sense add more weight and meaning to the sixteenth-century theologians’ malaise. Emptiness exists; acts do not hold together. There is only yawning in the breast of the beast, a sense of his own nullity. Is this too what Luther felt and knew?” (326). Raising such questions, Quinones avoids presenting us with a “museum spectacle,” as he puts it, and instead makes the reader the continuator of the debate described.

An erudite book, Agons has much to offer to intellectual historians and provides the impetus for an honest debate, offering insight into our own culture through the prism of the past.