Theology, Politics and Letters at the Crossroads of European Civilization: Jacques Basnage and the Baylean Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic (review)

312 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:2 APRIL 1991 mental world. That preoccupation derived from a synthesis of the Terminist desymbolizing of nature (which cracked the contained world of similitude and analogy) and Renaissance magic, which imagined the universe as a homogeneous continuum precluding matter-spirit dualities. Such matrices will be familiar enough--not to say old hat--to historians of early modern science. Less evident is the extent to which the increasingly physical God of thinkers such as Henry More and Newton both reinforced and was underwritten by the apocalypticism of the age. Eschatology was neither frivolous nor decorative, neither incidental nor anachronistic, but quite integral to much of the period's most serious reflection. But when did the early modern apocalyptic dreams actually fade before the secular modes of discourse they did so much to create? In fact these dreams have proven remarkably resilient. Apocalyptic images will probably always inform the politics of the great post-Protestant cultures, while sacred prophecy itself continues to speak to the politically marginal with deeper and even more complex voices. As Henry Lewis Gates demonstrates in an utterly fascinating essay, black people have often seen themselves as latter-day Israelites, have identified messianic figures, and anticipated the redemption of mankind in their liberation. But from the sixteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance the vindication of black people's humanity has turned considerably on their perceived capacity to master European arts and sciences. As early as the appearance of Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime in 1764, Gates argues, "the curse of blackness could be eradicated only by the profound breaking of the silence of the African in Western letters" (~o9). The black millenium has turned out to be a literary event, and the black messiah a poet. The range of these essays is truly remarkable, and their editor is to be congratulated for assembling such a volume. It will be of enduring significance. ARTHUR H. WILLIAMSON California State University,Sacramento Gerald Cerny. Theology, Politics and Letters at the Crossroads of European Civilization: Jacques Basnage and the Baylean Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic. International Archives of the History of Ideas, Vol. lO7. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. Pp. xiii + 354- $8o.oo. Jacques Basnage (1653-1723) was one of the leading ministers of the Huguenot refuge. Born in France as the son of a prominent Calvinist layman, he studied at various academies, including that of Geneva. After a pastorate of ten years in France, the events of 1685 forced him to leave his country. He became minister of the flourishing Walloon Church at Rotterdam, where he intensified his friendship with Pierre Bayle, and fell out with his brother-in-law, Pierre Jurieu, Bayle's adversary. In 171o he accepted a call from the Walloon Church at The Hague, where he had close contacts with the leading politician, Antonie Heinsius: more than once he used his position and his diplomatic skills and contacts to intervene on behalf of the persecuted Huguenots. In addition to all this, Basnage found time to write such voluminous works as his BOOK REVIEWS 313 Histoire de la religion des Eglises R~form~es (1690), an able refutation of Bossuet, and his Histoire desJuifs (171 o). A man of such scholarly merits and so many ecclesiastical and political activities deserved a biography, such as we now have from the hand of Gerald Cerny. In the first part of his work the author gives a broad survey of Basnage's life within the context of French Protestantism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries . As a counterbalance to the more severe views of the Protestant historian Emile G. Lkonard, Cerny highlights the elements of strength and vitality rather than the weak points of the French Protestant community in this period. (Perhaps the gap between the two views is not as large as it seems to be: in my opinion they are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary.) Especially the place and situation of the French Walloon Church in the Netherlands receives ample attention. It is not quite correct for the author to designate the Dutch Reformed Church as "the confessional sister church...