Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 81. 2. In the original (bk. 3, l. 661), “Primus in orbe timor fecit deos” (Thebiad, in Statius [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955], 1.500). Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this book are my own. The notion that fear produced the deities had long been a commonplace by the time Statius gave it this formulation. The same line, with slightly changed word order, will also be found in Petronius, fragment 27. A hundred years before Hume made his particular intervention, Thomas Hobbes, in his dissection of the religious impulse in Leviathan (1651), remarked, “This perpetual fear, always accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes (as it were in the dark), must needs have for object something. And therefore, when there is nothing to be seen, there is nothing to accuse, either of their good or evil fortune, but some power or agent invisible; in which sense, perhaps, it was some of the old poets said that the gods were at ¤rst created by human fear” ([Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994], 64). 3. Peter Gay examines the in®uence of Lucretius and other ancients at length in The Rise of Modern Paganism, vol. 1 of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967). 4. Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, La contagion sacrée (London [i.e., Amsterdam ]: M. M. Rey, 1768), 8. D’Holbach quotes Statius’s words on the title page. The text is itself a freely elaborated and much expanded translation of a diatribe against religion by John Trenchard entitled The Natural History of Superstition that was published anonymously in 1709 (London: A. Baldwin). Frank E. Manuel discusses the fear theory of religion, including Trenchard and d’Holbach, in The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (New York: Atheneum, 1967). See in particular pp. 70–81, 144–148, and 228–241. 5. On Bayle and the development of critique as a category of eighteenth-century thought, see Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 107–123. 6. Published anonymously as De la cruauté religieuse (London [i.e., Amsterdam], 1769). The English work on which d’Holbach based his is the likewise anonymous Considerations upon war, upon cruelty in general, and religious cruelty in particular. Also, an attempt to prove that everlasting punishments are inconsistent with divine attributes. In several letters and essays. To which are added, essays on divers other subjects, and An oration in praise of deceit and lying (London: T. Osborne, 1758). 7. Carsten Zelle examines Gottsched’s work as an instance of the use of the stage as a tool to deter violence in the early Enlightenment in “Angenehmes Grauen”: Literaturhistorische Beiträge zur Ästhetik des Schrecklichen im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1987), 29–56. 8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 33. 9. Voltaire, claiming simply to report the position of the Unitarians and Socinians , writes of original sin as follows: “It is to offend god, they say, it is to accuse him of the most absurd barbarity, to dare to say that he made all the generations of men in order to torment them by eternal sufferings on the pretext that their ¤rst father ate some fruit in a garden” (Philosophical Dictionary, trans. Theodore Besterman [London: Penguin, 1971], 331). Ernst Cassirer considered the rejection of the Fall and its consequences a fundamental point of unity for the period: “The concept of original sin is the common opponent against which all the different trends of the philosophy of the Enlightenment join forces” (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove [Boston: Beacon, 1955], 141). Carl Becker also noted in this regard, “What Locke aimed at, no doubt, what the eighteenth century acclaimed him for having demolished, was the Christian doctrine of total depravity, a black, spreading cloud which for centuries depressed the human spirit” (The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers [1932; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959], 64–65). 10. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (2nd ed., 1758; Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976), 11. The term “cement of society” will also be found under the rubric “sympathy” in the index to Kames’s Elements of Criticism, 3 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), index unpaginated. The topic is...