Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman

Introduction

Introduction Although we might ¤nd it odd today, many eighteenth-century thinkers located the origins of moral monstrosity in the powers of imagination. David Hume in The Natural History of Religion (1757) thus writes concerning our propensity for belief, “The primary religion of mankind arises chie®y from anxious fear of future events; and what ideas will naturally be entertained of invisible, unknown powers, while men lie under dismal apprehensions of any kind, may easily be conceived. Every image of vengeance , severity, cruelty, and malice must occur and augment the ghastliness and horror, which oppresses the amazed religionist.”1 Hume here makes reference to one of the most repeated lines of his time, borrowed from the ¤rst-century Roman poet Statius: “Fear ¤rst begot the gods of this world.”2 Statius, however, only provided a useful slogan for what was once called, without much ado, the Enlightenment. Far more prominent in the pantheon of ancients called on to provide an intellectual genealogy of rationalist critique was the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius, who banished the gods to the so-called intermundia—empty spaces where the deities cogitate entirely detached from human affairs—and then ¤rmly linked superstition to ignorance.3 In the classical Enlightenment model, inhumanity springs spontaneously from this conjunction. The atheist philosophe Baron d’Holbach in The Holy Contagion (1768) surmises that, given its benighted state, we should not be surprised to see “the human race everywhere trembling under cruel Gods, shuddering at the idea of them, and in order to disarm them submitting itself to a thousand inventions that make good sense indignant.”4 Imagined cruelty brings forth real cruelties : animal and human sacri¤ces, crusades, and autos-da-fé. Given these parameters, ¤ghting barbarity entails replacing misguided belief with knowledge. To take an early example, Pierre Bayle in his in®uential Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695) consistently uses the study of the past as a tool to upset orthodoxy, clarify mystery, and instill a rational skepticism.5 And while the cruel practices of religion could be explained as purely involuntary productions, such explanations were usually supplemented by attempts to expose the cui bono of superstition. Often vehement attacks on priestcraft evoked visions of demonic pro¤teers of the sacred. Through his printer in Amsterdam, d’Holbach continually issued anti-clerical diatribes and free translations of like-minded works, with incisive titles such as On Religious Cruelty.6 Such output was part of a rapidly expanding print culture that helped spread the news that cruelty had had its day. Other media too, especially drama, were used as tools in the struggle. In France, Baculard d’Arnaud in his play Coligny (1740) would summon up the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the fruit of hatred directed against the Huguenots, to inculcate tolerance. In Germany, Gottsched would call on the same event in like manner in his drama Parisian Blood Wedding (1745).7 Voltaire’s critique of fanaticism in his play Mahomet (1741) riled many because its scenes of horror and its depiction of the hypocrisy of the founder of Islam could be easily read as thinly veiled attacks on the most basic beliefs of Christianity. Of a different temper, Lessing’s endearing Nathan the Wise (1779) provides perhaps the most lasting example of the staging of cosmopolitan acceptance as an epochal ideal. My aim is not to recapitulate some of the more salient features of what we can still, in spite of reservations, call the project of the Enlightenment. Intellectual historians have thoroughly and usefully covered the territory. Rather, what I wish to point out is that the philosophes, their fellow travelers , and many others at the time locate the origins of cruelty “out there.” Wicked priests and persistent ignorance are considered not so much problems internal to philosophical and literary production as external referents to be negated. The positive counterpart of the critique of credulity is what could best be described as philosophical anthropology. The accreted layers of history, marked as it is by religious enthusiasm and suchlike distortions , are peeled back in a search for the “human being.” Rousseau in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) asks his readers to consider contemporary humanity to be like the statue of Glaucus, “which time, sea and storms had dis¤gured to such an extent that it looked less like a god than a wild beast.”8 Although Rousseau was considered an apostate by the Enlightenment elite, his trope is consonant with the general drift of philosophical thought. Accordingly...