Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology

Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ jsrc Jerusalem Studies inReligion and Culture Editors Anthony Grafton (Princeton University) David Shulman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Guy Stroumsa (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) VOLUME 24 Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University LEIDEN | BOSTON Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology Edited by Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts:“Brill”. See and download:brill.com/ brilltypeface. ISSN1570078x ISBN978-90-04-38762-1 (hardback) ISBN978-90-04-38763-8 (ebook) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acidfree paper and produced in a sustainable manner The Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data is available online at http:// catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http:// lccn.loc.gov/2018960517 Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Contents Notes on Contributors vii Introduction:Regimes of Comparatism 1 Renaud Gagné 1 Comparisons Compared: A Study in the Early Modern Roots of Cultural History 18 Anthony Grafton 2 What Was the Comparative History of Religions in 17th-Century Europe (and Beyond)? Pagan Monotheism/Pagan Animism, from T’iento Tylor 49 Dmitri Levitin 3 Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World: Hierarchies, Genealogies and the Idea of European Modernity 116 JoanPau Rubiés 4 Comparison and Christianity:Sacrifice in the Age of the Encyclopedia 177 Jonathan Sheehan 5 The Isis of Turin Affair 210 Renaud Gagné 6 What Has Alexandria to Do with Jerusalem?: Writing the History of the Jews in the 19th Century 244 Simon Goldhill 7 Akbar’s Dream: The Mughal Emperor in Nineteenth-Century Literature 284 Phiroze Vasunia 8 History of Religions:The Comparative Moment 318 Guy G. Stroumsa Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University vi Contents 9 Going Full Frontal: Two Modalities of Comparison in Social Anthropology 343 Matei Candea 10 Placing Self Amid Others:A Mongolian Technique of Comparison 372 Caroline Humphrey 11 Anthropological Comparatisms:Generalisation, Symmetrisation, Bifurcation 402 Philippe Descola 12 Friendship and Kinship:Comparatism and Its Theoretical Possibilities in Anthropology 418 Marilyn Strathern 13 The Fortunes of Comparatism: History, Anthropology, Philosophy 447 Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd Index 459 Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Notes on Contributors Matei Candea Matei Candea is a Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Corsican Fragments:Difference, Knowledge and Fieldwork (Indiana 2010) and Comparison in Anthropology: the Impossible Method (Cambridge 2018), and editor of The social After Gabriel Tarde (Routledge 2010), Detachment (Manchester 2015)and Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory (2018). Philippe Descola Philippe Descola initially specialized in the ethnology of Amazonia under the supervision of Claude LéviStrauss, focussing on how native societies relate to their environment. He has published extensively on his field research with the Achuar of Ecuador and on the comparative analysis of the relations between humans and nonhumans, including images. He is Professor of Anthropology at the Collège de France and a Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Among his books in English are In the Society of Nature, The Spears of Twilight, Beyond Nature and Culture, The Ecology of others. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Renaud Gagné Renaud Gagné is Reader in Ancient Greek Literature and Religion at the University of Cambridge (Faculty of Classics) and Fellow of Pembroke College. He is also a Pro Futura Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. He works on various aspects of Greek literature and religion and the history of classical scholarship, and he is the author of Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece (Cambridge 2013). He won the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2015. Simon Goldhill Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge where he is also Director of the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. He has published widely on classical literature, especially Greek tragedy, and on Victorian culture, focusing both on Britain and Jerusalem. His book Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity won the Robert Lowry Patten Prize for the best book on Victorian Literature in 2012, and his book Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy won the Runciman Prize for the best book on a Greek subject, Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University viii Notes on Contributors ancient or modern, in 2013. He has lectured all over the world. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Anthony Grafton Anthony Grafton studied classics, history and history of science at the University of Chicago and University College London. Since 1975 he has taught European history at Princeton University. His books include Defenders of the Text (1981), The Footnote:A Curious History (1997), and Worlds Made by Words (2009). With Glenn Most and Salvatore Settis he edited The Classical Tradition (2010). Caroline Humphrey Caroline Humphrey is a social anthropologist who has worked in the ussr/ Russia, Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Nepal and India. Her research interests include socialist and postsocialist society, moral economy, the relation between history and anthropology, and the aesthetics of daily life. Until 2010 Sigrid Rausing Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, she is currently a Research Director at the university’s Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit. Dmitri Levitin Dmitri Levitin is a Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He works on all aspects of early modern European intellectual culture, with a particular focus on the continued importance of classical antiquity, the scholarly engagement with nonEuropean religions, and the interactions between ‘humanistic’ and ‘scientific’ modes of thought. His books include Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (2015), and The Kingdom of Darkness (forthcoming). In 2016 he was awarded the Leszek Kołakowski Prize in the history of ideas. Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd Sir Geoffrey Lloyd is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge and Scholar in Residence at the Needham Research Institute. He has published extensively on the ancient philosophy and science of Greece and China, on the comparative study of thought and culture and on the problem of the psychic unity of mankind. His first book was Polarity and Analogy (cup 1966). His books include, most recently, The Ambivalences of Rationality (cup 2018), Analogical Investigations (cup 2015), The Ideals of Inquiry (oup 2014), Being, Humanity and Understanding (oup 2012), and Disciplines in the Making (oup 2009). He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1983. He received the Sarton Medal in 1987 and in 2007 the Kenyon Medal for Classical Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Notes on Contributors ix Scholarship from the British Academy, the Dan David Prize for Classics in 2013, and the Fyssen Prize for Cognitive Science in 2014. Joan-Pau Rubiés JoanPau Rubiés has taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Reading and the London School of Economics, and is currently icrea Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Past publications include Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance:South India through European Eyes, 12501625 and Travellers and Cosmographers. Studies in the history of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology. He is currently writing two monographs, Europe´s New Worlds:Travel Writing and the Origins of the Enlightenment, 15501750 and Misioneros Etnógrafos, and editing a volume on Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment. Jonathan Sheehan Jonathan Sheehan is professor of early modern European history and founding director of the Center for the Study of Religion at the University of California, Berkeley. Most recently, he is coauthor, with Dror Wahrman, of Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 2015). His previous book, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005), won the George Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association and was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. His recent articles have appeared in the Journal of Modern History, Representations, Prooftexts, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and Past and Present. He is currently working on a project on sacrifice and theology in the early modern period. Marilyn Strathern Marilyn Strathern is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology and Life Fellow of Girton College, University of Cambridge. She is probably best known for The gender of the gift (1988), a critique of anthropological theories of society and gender relations applied to Melanesia, which she pairs with After nature (1992), a comment on the UK under Thatcher. She had the good fortune to receive initial– and indelible– research training in Papua New Guinea, which led to work among other things on kinship and gender relations. In the UK she subsequently became involved with anthropological approaches to the new reproductive technologies, intellectual property, audit cultures and interdisciplinarity. Now retired from the Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology, she is (honorary) life president of the asa. Strathern is currently working on issues in the conceptualization of relations, some of which were sketched out in her 2005 book, Kinship, law and the unexpected:relatives are often a surprise. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 6 Gagné little standing of that once mighty comparative enterprise. The dominion of comparative philology/ historical linguistics has long been reduced to a fraction of what it used to be.13 The fragmentation of research in most disciplines has tended to move further in the direction of specialization and atomism, with each scholar locked in the investigation of a particular topic at a precise time and place, supplemented by ready models providing the relevant categories through which to checkbox parallels.14 The fundamental tension between idiographic and nomothetic approaches has been replayed over and over again in skirmishes around the value of comparison. Recent attempts to reestablish grandtheory cultural comparison at the heart of scholarship, such as the Cognitive Science of Religion of the last decades, have had success in some quarters, but they remain on the outskirts, heavily contested by specialists of individual cultures, and they often struggle to demarcate themselves fully from the earlier programs which they regenerate and fight against. Dedicated journals, series and institutes, needless to say, pursue comparative research in many different directions. The majority of scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences remains highly sympathetic to the idea of cultural comparison. But all too often this tends to manifest itself as an ethos of refreshing curiosity or a diffuse interest rather than as a methodical practice. When it is revisited at a symposium or in a collective volume, a frequent outcome is to see the participants each retreat to their own separate fields, each presenting a wellcircumscribed case study for the others, or the view from one culture.15 Comparison, then, is often limited to the observation of juxtaposed analogies and differences that sharpen the contours of each distinctive case and reify the categories at play. Behind the rhetoric of collective volume introductions, grant applications and program descriptions, with their inevitable emphasis on multidisciplinarity and the crossing of boundaries, one often finds a reaffirmation of those very boundaries in practice. With the Humanities and Social Sciences generally forced into a defensive position of doubt and selfjustification and the globalism that had fostered World Literature and Global History itself under attack, scholars have tended to fall back on the center of their fields. Empirical conservatism has been the new radical for quite some time already. Now is a moment of powerful, often explicitly acknowledged disciplinary frontiers, and what people mean by cultural comparison is all too often a banal form of juxtaposition through analogy. The prevailing story of comparison, in other words, ends in aporia, and an open quest for alternatives. 13 See Demoule 2014. 14 Cf. Lloyd 2009. 15 For the retour au village, see Detienne 2009. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Introduction: Regimes ofComparatism 7 There is much to be said for the standard narrative of the comparative method. It offers a compelling account of a significant development in intellectual history. But it is important to recognize that a clear sequential logic is thus imposed on an otherwise dismayingly complex phenomenon. The comparative method is framed teleologically as the apex of a long trajectory, something that reproduces the patterns that used to guide how the history of scholarship was written, with a certain emphasis on determinant origins, and a succession of paradigm shifts governing the gradual progression of knowledge. What does not fit the plot tends to be pigeonholed, explained away or ignored. The Isis of Turin affair, in this view, if it is to play any role, is meaningful only as an error. The contrast with Jones and Champollion makes it a footnote and a folly. The progressive development of effective science has little time for the sterile deadend. The currency of such narratives is largely due to the fact that they make a convincing case for arranging the story around the familiar and powerful comparative moment of the later 19th century. Many aspects of the story will continue to be refined or improved, but for most students of the question the core will hold:the development of comparative methodologies in the scholarship of Belle Époque institutions is bound to remain a dominant object of reference for reflection on the practice of cultural comparison. That being said, the narratives of the genealogical trajectory are open to many critical charges. Two in particular stand out. First, an important set of qualifications can be added to the standard focus on a fundamental breakthrough between the comparative methodologies of the 19th century and the mere parallels of earlier times. Rather than repeat the necessary references to Maimonides, Vossius, de Acosta, de Sahagún, Lafitau, and other wellknown stalwarts as distant antecedents leading the way to later developments, a good amount of recent (and notsorecent) research has renewed the study of these very authors, and early modern European ethnography and antiquarianism more generally, to show how widespread, varied, and often eminently intricate the uses of comparison were centuries before the “comparative turn” of the 19th century. Scholars have been pushing back the earliest attestations of modes and types of analogical investigations ever further, and research into the continued impact of ancient classical ethnography and early Christian apology on such early modern literature has made the identification of origins and destinations even more difficult to defend.16 Any comparative moment can, in that view, be meaningful and interesting as 16 See e.g. Borgeaud 2004, 63– 87; Calame 2011. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 8 Gagné a window into alternative futures past and neglected modes of comparison. Simple trajectories can’t be squared with the crisscrossing webs of the many centuries of comparative thinking that are now so well studied and discussed in specialized literature. The chapters of Anthony Grafton, Dmitri Levitin and Joan Pau Rubiés here shed light on the importance of early modern regimes of comparatism, to take one crucial example, and the fallacy of reducing such creative moments to mere foils or antecedents. Narratives of the Victorian comparative turn that ignore these earlier comparative moments not only fail to take into account fundamental strands of the relevant history, which, it is important to recall, the Victorians knew well, but also fail to identify specific, distinctive traits of modern comparatism. Classical and Biblical paradigms, for instance, remained ubiquitous and powerfully intertwined comparative referents throughout this period, and a fundamental link with the early modern frames of reference. As Simon Goldhill’s chapter shows for the historiography of Judaism, such paradigms, uncomfortably for the focuses of the standard narrative on the development of the comparative method, were creatively renewed time and again. The plurality of comparative methods developed in the course of Western history to investigate cultural difference and similarity covers a much broader range of periods and actors than the ones that have been given the leading role in the prevailing epistemological memories of the relevant disciplines. The standard teleological narrative that describes the evolution of the comparative method has left immense swathes of the relevant material out of even the most basic attention. Agreater appreciation of the diachronic depth, complexity, and richness of comparative approaches to the study of culture should inspire and inform the directions that need to be taken by current comparative research. A second critical charge, much more significant in some ways, comes from the very contestation of genealogy as an appropriate framework for understanding the roles of comparatism. While few will deny the validity of following trajectories and lines of influence in studies that try to situate individual comparative projects or moments, many will resist the notion that this can produce a unified history of comparatism, letalone that genealogy is the key to making sense of the matter. The plurality of tracks that can be followed go in many different directions and the numerous relevant stories that sometimes intersect, and often don’t, are not easily woven into a coherent whole. Narrative violence and creative scissorwork are needed to reduce the messy diversity of comparative moments into an evolution from fantasy antiquarianism to scientific method, or a passage from mere parallel to genuine comparison.17 17 Cf. Hartog 1998. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Introduction: Regimes ofComparatism 9 When set in contrastive relation with other comparative moments, rather than reduced to a role in a linear narrative, any one of the many distinctive struggles over the reach and practice of proper comparison becomes a commentary on all other struggles over the reach and practice of proper comparison. As Phiroze Vasunia’s chapter shows well, different regimes of comparatism can engage in fruitful dialogue across cultures and centuries. The wellknown and still dominant modern Eurocentric blinders further diminish the value of the standard teleological narrative. Avast topography of analogical thought from elsewhere is brushed aside as irrelevant in the search for the development of “the comparative method”. The great majority of the intellectual projects that could be seen to contribute to our understanding of regimes of comparatism are repressed by this genealogical optic. The problem is not a matter of correcting the genealogy. It is that genealogy cannot map the evidence. Too many perspectives have to be occluded for one story to be told. Groups classify other groups. Every group is confronted to other groups, and definitions of what sets one apart invariably involve categorisations of similarity and difference that place self and other on parallel grids. Analogy is one of the most basic tools of cognition; making sense of languages, religions, and customs (some will say) has always gone hand in hand with a broad mapping of comparisons between cultures. And just as thinking the diversity of customs and gods through analogy is not a recent development, neither is reflexive comparison, although it is a much less widespread phenomenon, of course. Needing a complex set of epistemological conditions for the enterprise to even be imaginable, the regime of comparatism is admittedly a product of specialised knowledge only possible in specific moments of history. But those conditions were met at various times before the 19th century, across the world, and they have followed various paths since. Thus it has been argued that the striking lists of god names translated into other god names that appear in the Third Millennium bce written records of Akkad are the earliest traces of cultural comparison.18 Long before the many Greek and Roman experiments with interpretatio and the various comparative forms of knowledge that those experiments will generate, the translatability of Mesopotamian gods became an object of intense interest and debate across the cities and empires of the region. The world of the god lists from the Bronze Age Near East was a distinctive framework of comparative references. As the product of a scribal culture of imperial knowledge keen to make equivalences between the divinities of different peoples in different languages, the god lists 18 Alon, Gruenwald and Singer 1994; Assmann 1996; 1998, 44– 54; Smith 2008. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 10 Gagné were elaborate instruments of theological analogy with precise functions in diplomacy and cult. The wrong equivalence could invalidate an entire international treaty and threaten the offending parties with the anger of the gods. Awhole system of precise knowledge, regularly controlled and updated to minimize risk, underlaid the carving of the world in corresponding categories set up by these lists. Millennia later, the epistemological horizon of Islamic scholarship in 11thand 12thcenturies Iraq and Persia, such as in the treatises of AlBiruni or the Majlis of AlShahrastani, who is sometimes identified as the father of comparative religion, provided ground for largescale intellectual projects that sustained their own regime of comparatism.19 Among many other topics, the religions and philosophies of the known world are reviewed, classified and contrasted in the encyclopaedic research of these men.20 The Greeks, notably, play a prominent role as objects of curiosity and contrast, especially in their comparison to the Hindus, and that tradition of comparative investigation and classification continued to be cultivated into the later middle ages and beyond.21 While the Mesopotamian god lists are sometimes located at the beginning of a movement that leads to the many translatable and untranslatable gods of the Classical world, the comparative classifications of writers like AlBiruni and AlShahrastānī have been claimed as significant antecedents of early modern scholarship. The narratives of origin that insist on such interconnectedness end up reducing distinctive comparative moments to stages in a sequence. Many will prefer the collocation of fragments to the closely woven thread here. The myriad intellectual topographies that have sustained comparative thinking do not fit into any one mold. And a particularly large collection of comparative moments can be found outside any possible links with the standard modern Western narrative, most notably in the Sanskrit world and the wide orbit of imperial China, but by no means only there. The very idea of 19 See e.g. Waardenburg 1999; Sanagustin 2003; McGregor 2015; cf. Gould 2014. 20 AlBiruni 1910; [Shahrastānī] 1986, 1– 84. Cf. Berzon 2016 for Late Antique Christian ethnography and heresiology. 21 [Shahrastānī] 1995, 14– 66. See e.g. 489 (*1219):“Nous avons dit, en tête de ce livre que les Arabes et les Indiens se rapprochent par une méthode identique, et nous avons sommairement expliqué que la parenté entre les deux groupes, le point commun aux deux nations, résident en ce qu’ils considèrent les propriétés des choses et jugent en fonction des quiddités:chez eux domine la disposition originelle et la nature. Tandis que les Grecs et les Iraniens se rapprochent, de leur côté, par une méthode identique, leur point commun résident en ce qu’ils considèrent les qualités des choses et jugent en fonction des natures:chez eux dominent l’acquisition et l’effort”. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Introduction: Regimes ofComparatism 11 comparatism is itself a comparative category with little claim to intrinsic substance. Is the notion of comparatism, in that optic, not a Eurocentric imposition on disparate material?22 No credible answer can deny that it is. But is the distinctive category of reflexive comparison defensible as a heuristic instrument? Is the focus on the variations of human groups not restrictive of systems where the comparative variations that matter will include animals, plants and other categories, and no real distinction between nature and culture?23 Some argue that the infrastructure of analogical thought that sustains the possibility of comparatism is grounded in historically and culturally contingent ontological orders. Others prefer to insist on culturally divergent but typologically shared patterns of human cognition. At the heart of the matter is our own construction of comparables here, and the very process of forging translatable equivalence, a range of questions that is fruitfully explored by the chapters of Philippe Descola, Caroline Humphrey and Marilyn Strathern. The luminous anthropological angles developed in this volume offer powerful tools for thinking the way forward. It is our hope that such critiques of the genealogical method will not dethrone the need to explore and refine the standard narrative, which will rightly continue to have pride of place in any investigation of comparatism. The point here is not simply to offer further criticism of the standard narrative, nor to replace one standard narrative with another, but to combine different ways of looking at the varieties of comparatism; to expand the positionalities from which comparatism is viewed and debated. The openended nature of the potential record makes any attempt at exhaustive coverage impractical. And who would want to read an exhaustive detailed compilation of the many significant comparative endeavors that have emerged across time and cultures? Areasoned selection will suffice. What this volume sets out to do, therefore, is to bring together comparative projects and perspectives that cannot be reduced to the stages of a plot. Each of those projects develops the point of view and contestations of its particular epistemological position. The fragmentary segmentation of perspectives allows for contrasts and similarities to emerge more clearly out of the collection, and for the specificities of each to shed light on the specificities of the others. Beyond the inevitable, fruitful links and intertwined references that bring the individual chapters in dialogue with each other, some of them deep, many much more superficial, the divergences and the chasms that separate the comparative experiences which each chapter 22 See e.g. the collection of essays in Miller and Louis 2012. Cf. Pollock, Elman, and Chang 2015; Grafton and Most 2016; Elsner 2017. 23 Descola 2013; Viveiros de Castro 2014; Skafish 2016; McGregor 2015. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 12 Gagné discusses are the main features of the collection. The distinctive reflexivity and the unique struggle of methods and purposes that mark out each regime of comparatism that is discussed in the following pages does not circumscribe an ensemble of elements that can be abstracted from their intellectual environments. But they can be fruitfully considered together and from a multiplicity of viewpoints. The combination of anthropologists, classicists and historians gathered in this volume reflects the allied diversity of approaches that can be adopted to link perspectives on this topic. While some emphasize intellectual history or the social history of comparative knowledge, others focus on current practice. All are acutely aware of the others. The sustained and generous exchanges of many meetings, workshops, and conferences inform the dialogue of disciplines gathered here. Two sets of interrelated questions run through the volume. One is the interaction of religion, power, and translation at play in the classifications of cultural comparison. How do the different areas of comparison– law, religion, customs, political systems and so forth– change the practices of comparison? At what points and how do cultural comparisons become part of a narrative of political, religious or imperial power? What is the relation between translatio imperii and other forms of translation inherent in comparison? How do different forms of comparison intersect and contest each other? The other set of interrelated questions concerns the differential roles of past and present cultures in the analysis of cultural difference:what are the consequences of adopting a practice of synchronic or diachronic comparison? When and for what purposes does it become critical to compare the contemporary with the past? Or with other contemporary cultures? The link between the first and second sets of questions are evident:the choice for religious, political, social and other comparisons and the agendas such choices embody, find specific form in the construction of comparisons with the great traditions of religious, political, and intellectual pasts that serve as references and paradigms. The three editors of this volume are classicists by training, and this has had a clear imprint on the project. In the chapters gathered here, the Classical and Biblical traditions occupy a central position, something that allows a greater amount of responsion across the different essays, but many other configurations would have been conceivable, and any attempt at finding some balance in the range of possibles is an illusion. Each manifestation of comparatism belongs to an epistemological horizon where the comparative operation has value that resonates with certain shared knowledge and assumptions, and where the aims that are pursued by the operation can be contested or recognized within a discursive framework. Regimes of comparatism show their ramifications more clearly when set sidebyside, whatever their neighbors. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Introduction: Regimes ofComparatism 13 The aim of this book is to turn the comparative insight on itself and compare different comparative moments and questions. The idea is to reconsider the specificities, the obstacles, and the possibilities of modern comparative approaches through a variety of earlier and parallel comparative horizons. 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(1996), Translating Gods:Religion as a Factor of Cultural (Un)Translatability, in:The Translatability of Cultures:Figurations of the Space Between, ed. S. Budick and W. Iser, Stanford, 25– 36. Assmann J. (1998), Moses the Egyptian, Harvard. Bartha P. (2010), Parallel Reasoning:The Construction and Evaluation of Analogical Arguments, Oxford. Beecroft A. (2015), An Ecology of World Literature:From Antiquity to the Present Day, London. Berzon T. S. (2016), Classifying Christians:Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, Oakland. Bhattacharya B. (2016), On Comparatism in the Colony:Archives, Methods, and the Project of Weltliteratur, Critical Enquiry 42:677– 711. Bloch M. (1928), Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes, Revue de synthèse historique 46:15– 50. Boas F. (1896), The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology, Science 103:901– 908. Boespflug F., Dunand F., eds. (1997), Le comparatisme en histoire des religions, Paris. Borgeaud P. (1986), Le problème du comparatisme en histoire des religions, Revue européenne des sciences sociales 24:59– 75. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 14 Gagné Borgeaud P. (2003), Réflexions sur la comparaison en histoire des religions antiques, Métis 1:9– 33. Borgeaud P. (2004), Aux origines de l’histoire des religions, Paris. Borgeaud P. (2016), La comparaison comme pratique des anciens et outil des modernes, Conférence inaugurale du Séminaire interlaboratoires d’étude pratique des religions, Lille. Burger M., Calame C., eds. (2006), Comparer les comparatismes. Perspectives sur l’histoire et les sciences des religions, Paris. Calame C. (2011), Hérodote, précurseur du comparatisme en histoire des religions? Retour sur la dénomination et l’identification des dieux en régime polythéiste, in:Dans le laboratoire de l’historien des religions. Mélanges offerts à Philippe Borgeaud, ed. F. Prescendi and Y. Volokhine, Geneva, 263– 274. Calame C., Lincoln B., eds. (2012), Comparer en histoires des religions antiques. Controverses et propositions, Liège. Candea M. (2018), Comparison in Anthropology:The Impossible Method, Cambridge. Chidester D. (2014), Empire of Religion:Imperialism and Comparative Religion, Chicago. Chow R. (2004), The Old/ New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies:A PostEuropean Perspective, ELH 71:289– 311. Cohen D., O’Connor M., eds. (2004), Comparison and History, NewYork. Currie A. (2016), Ethnographic Analogy, the Comparative Method, and Archaeological Special Pleading, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 55:84– 94. Damrosch D. (2006), Rebirth of a Discipline:The Global Origins of Comparative Studies, Comparative Critical Studies 3:99– 112. Dana D. (2012), Métamorphoses de Mircea Eliade. À partir du motif de Zalmoxis, Paris. Demoule J.- P. (2014), Mais où sont passés les IndoEuropéens? Le mythe d’origine de l’Occident, Paris. Descola, P. (2013) [2005], Beyond Nature and Culture, Chicago. Detienne M. (2009), Comparer l’incomparable, 2nd ed., Paris. Elsner J., ed. (2017), Comparativism in Art History, London. Éribon D. (1993), Fautil brûler Dumézil? Paris. Espagne M., Werner M., eds. (1988), Transferts:les relations interculturelles dans l’espace francoallemand (XVIIe et XIXe siècles), Paris. Felshi R., Friedman S. S., eds. (2013), Comparison:Theories, Approaches, Uses, Baltimore. Ginzburg C. (1985), Mythologie germanique et nazisme, Annales 40:695– 715. Gould R. R. (2014), The Poetics from Athens to AlAndalus:Ibn Rushd’s Grounds for Comparison, Modern Philology 112:1– 24. Grafton A., G. W. Most, eds. (2016), Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices:A Global Comparative Approach, Cambridge. Hartog F. (1998), Du parallèle à la comparaison, in:Plutarque:Grecs et Romains en Questions, SaintBertranddeComminges, 161171. (= Anciens, Modernes, Sauvages, Paris, 2005, p.197– 219). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Introduction: Regimes ofComparatism 15 Hartog F. (2003), Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps, Paris. Haupt H.- G., Kocka J., eds. (2009), Comparative and Transational History:Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, NewYork. Hewitt M. A. (1996), How New is the ‘New Comparativism’?, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8:15– 20. Idinopulos T. A., Wilson B. C., Hanges J. C., ed. (2006), Comparing Religions:Possibilities and Perils? Leiden. Jullien F. (2012), L’écart et l’entre, Paris. Kaelble H. (1999), Der historische Vergleich, Frankfurt. Kocka J. (2003), Comparison and Beyond, History and Theory 42:39– 44. Laks B. (2002), Le comparatisme: de la généalogie à la génétique, Langages 146: 19– 45. Leach E. (1961), Rethinking Anthropology, London. Lincoln B. (1998), Rewriting the German War God:Georges Dumézil, politics and scholarship in the late 30s, History of Religions 37:187208=Theorizing Myth p.121– 137. Lincoln B. (2012), Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars, Chicago. Lincoln B. (2018), Apples and Oranges:Explorations in the Comparative Study of Religion and Culture, Chicago. Lloyd G. E.R. (2009), Disciplines in the Making:CrossCultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning, and Innovation, Oxford. Lloyd G. E.R. (2015), Analogical Investigations:Historical and CrossCultural Perspectives on Human Reasoning, Cambridge. Mancini S. (2007), Comparativism in the History of Religions:Some Models and Key Issues, Religion 37:282– 293. De Mauro T., Formigari L., eds. (1990), Leibniz, Humboldt, and the origins of comparativism, Amsterdam. McGregor R. (2015), Religions and the Religion of Animals:Ethics, Self, and Language in TenthCentury Iraq, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35:222– 231. Meier C. (1988), Max Weber und die Antike, in: Max Weber. Ein Symposium, ed. C. Gneuss and J. Kocka, Munich, 11– 24. Miller D. (2014), Nouvelle Mythologie Comparée/ New Comparative Mythology, Journal of IndoEuropean Studies 43:553– 560. Miller P. N., Louis F., eds. (2012), Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 15001800, Ann Arbor. Mitchell W. J. T. (1996), Why Comparisons are Odious, World Literature Today 70: 321– 324. Momigliano A. (1983), Premesse per una discussione su Georges Dumézil, Opus 2: 329– 342 (=Studies on Modern Scholarship, ed. G. W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell, Berkeley, 1994, p.286– 301). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 22 Grafton cured parts of the body, involved no break with their pagan origins. As to sources, he used them without reference to age or origin. Medieval manuals on the liturgy could tell him as much as any of the Fathers about Christian use of Jewish practices.14 No one plied this sort of comparison with more precision and learning than Isaac Casaubon, who began his career in the world of learning by showing that Diogenes Laertius had gone absurdly wrong when he tried to show that the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans had not practiced philosophy, since the term itself was Greek:“here’s a dagger made of lead … The Romans might just as well claim that they invented medicine, since medicine is a Roman term, not a barbarian one.”15 Comparisons enabled Casaubon to dispatch more than one commonly received tenet. Considering the question whether the crucifixion of Jesus was really a Jewish affair, Casaubon used comparison to argue the negative. He admitted that, as Cesare Baronio had argued, Jews made a ritual of washing their hands. But he could find no textual evidence that when Pontius Pilate washed his hands and declared his innocence, he followed Jewish rather than Roman customs— which also included washing of hands. In this case, he made clear, comparison was simply too blunt a tool to do the job for which Baronio had used it. It could not establish a clear lineage of inventors and borrowers: Just as this custom was common to all nations, so the actions that accompanied the words were often common. Therefore Pilate no more took the custom of washing his hands to declare his innocence from the Jews, than he took the formula which he used to proclaim his innocence from the story of Susanna in Daniel.16 Where Polydore used the appearance of the same word or thing to connect the dots between the cultures that invented and those that received, so it seemed, Casaubon practiced a more discriminating art. Similarly, when Casaubon set out to compose a comparative study of scholarship in the Hebrew, Greek and Latin traditions, he did not assume that he could simply connect all three in a single genealogy. His collecting of Jewish evidence began with Jewish texts— from the medieval Sefer Hasidim (Book of 14 See, in addition to Atkinson 2007, Zedelmaier 2015. 15 Diogenes Laertius 1616, 9:“En pugionem vere plumbeum. Philosophia Graeca vox est non Barbara:ergo philosophia a Graecis inventa est non a barbaris. Pari iure Romanis dicere liceat medicinam a se inventam, quia medicina appellatio sit Romana non Barbara.” 16 Casaubon 1655, 536. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparisons Compared 23 the Pious), which offered him terms for old and rare books and information about the role of women in the Jewish book trade, to the almost contemporary Masoret haMasoret (Tradition of the Tradition) of Elijah Levita, which he used to learn the practices of the Masoretes who had stabilized the text of the Hebrew Bible.17 It seems likely that this study, had Casaubon completed the research for it, would not have pinioned the complex evidence within the corset of a narrowly genealogical hypothesis.18 Yet Casaubon was not always so careful, or so selfcritical. In a chapter of his attack on Cesare Baronio that has been formidably analyzed by Jonathan Smith, he found in the presence of the term “mystery” in early Christian texts a clue that opened up all too many doors. It enabled him to draw connections between Christian and pagan rituals— even though his major sources were patristic texts, some centuries too late to be primary sources for the earliest centuries of Christian history.19 Similarities, as Margaret Hodgen argued long ago, seemed to many early modern scholars to possess “documentary properties.” Comparison connected peoples and cultures or separated them by establishing genealogies of transmission.20 Comparison, in other words, often assumed much of what its users set out to prove. Most of them concentrated on individual words and things rather on the larger contexts in which these appeared. Most of them took it for granted that the words and things they examined were invented only once:subsequent appearances, however vague the record of them might be, proved a genetic connection. Most of them took resemblance as proof of identity, even when the resemblance in question was slight. Comparison, in other words, usually operated on a microscopic scale, but did not impose a microscopic standard of precision. Most problematic of all, comparison did not operate dialectically. Grounded in these assumptions, it normally verified them again and again, raising few questions about its own method or and suggesting fewer ways of improving that. Hence, for example, the vast Mannerist world of 17 For Casaubon’s reading of Sefer Hasidim, see the note on the flyleaf of his copy, British Library 1934.f.13: “Pag. דצ sive 94. et seqq. agit de scribis et libris eorum scriptione ac descriptione: item de off. doctorum et discipulorum, etc.” Casaubon noted the topics of sections, e.g. 94r: “De scriptoribus librorum”: 101r: “De doctore et discipulis.” But he did not take detailed notes on the terms used in these sections. Cf. Casaubon’s reference to this material in his collection of material on criticism, Bodleian Library MS Casaubon 60, 26v; “sefer yashan noshan sic vocant codicem antiquiss. ut in libro Hachassidim.” For his notes on Elijah Levita see Bodleian Library MS Casaubon 10. 18 Grafton and Weinberg 2011, 308– 318. 19 Smith 1994. 20 Hodgen 1964; see more recently Lupher 2003 and Johnson 2011. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 24 Grafton early modern genealogies of languages, which proved with equal facility that Hebrew was the ancestor of all other languages, that Greek was the ancestor of French, German and Italian, and that a form of Dutch was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden (as was clear from the fact that it had more monosyllables than any other tongue it was compared to).21 No wonder that Leibniz, who drew up a geological rather than biblical history of the earth, also devoted himself to ridiculing this traditional comparative regime and composing rules that could actually yield rigorous etymologies.22 Or consider the case of that polymath of polymaths, Joseph Scaliger. No one was defter than Scaliger at using comparison, in the traditional way, to reveal a historical connection. As he studied the Jewish calendar, for example, he compared it with everything he could manage to learn about the other calendars with which it had coexisted. But these comparisons did not serve to establish its primal independence. Examination of all biblical passages in which months were mentioned showed that they were normally identified only by number. That suggested that the three month names that appear in the Hebrew Bible, Ziv, Bul and Ethanim, were not original with the Jews at all, but drawn— like the rich sculptures that adorned Solomon’s Temple— from the more advanced civilization of the Phoenicians. Comparison of the rabbinical calendar with the scattered information about ancient Chaldean practices— the calendar of ancient Babylon, where the Jews were exiled— revealed a strong, technical link:both divided the hour up into 1,080 units (helakim). In this case, the similarity genuinely had a documentary property:it showed that the Jews had not received the lunar calendar of the rabbis as revelation but created it by imitating the more advanced people among whom they lived.23 For the most part, however— with one great exception to be examined below— Scaliger did not use comparison to undermine, or even to criticize, standard structures of belief. Through revision after revision of his work on the history of calendars, he clung to the belief that the great majority of them had descended from a single original— even the lunisolar ones that were notably hard to derive from a nonlunar year, as critics like Johannes Kepler pointed out.24 He continued also to assume, in accordance with this belief, that very distant calendars might be closely related:hence he could use an account of Japanese calendrics to illuminate the practices of the natives of Cuba, as 21 Borst 1957– 63 remains invaluable as a survey of these discussions. See more recently the important Van Hal 2010. 22 See Aarsleff 1982. 23 Grafton 1983– 93, ii. 24 See the wonderful article by Nothaft 2011. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparisons Compared 25 described by Peter Martyr. When he compared versions of world history, he refused to omit the Chinese and Egyptian dynasty lists that began not only before the Flood, but also before the biblical date of Creation itself. Yet he dismissed them as showing only that those who compiled them had been typical pagans, vain and ignorant.25 Comparison of new information to old structures left the latter apparently unscathed— though later readers, who lacked Scaliger’s biblical faith, would draw different conclusions.26 In some cases, however, Scaliger applied chronology in one of its most radical forms:as a way of rebuking the claims of a supposedly high civilization. In his Opus novum de emendatione temporum of 1583, Scaliger both examined every calendar he could reconstruct, from that of ancient Athens to that of contemporary Ethiopia:he also did his best, conventionally, to link them in a single genealogy that began with the 360day year that had been standard before the Floor. When Scaliger came to the calendar of the ancient Saxons, however, he took a radically different position. The Saxons, he explained, had created a 19year lunisolar cycle, as other ancient peoples had. But they had derived it from observation of the tides, which closely followed the motion of the moon, as well as from watching the skies— and they had done so craftsmanlike a job of charting the tides, working out the motion of the moon and coordinating it with that of the sun that they could give the months names that reflected their position in the cycle of the seasons. “Is it not astonishing,” Scaliger asked, “that the Roman people, who conquered and ruled the world, used a completely stupid form of the year until the time of Julius Caesar? But this people, which the Romans had thought barbarous, not only regulated the lunar year by the standard of nature, that is, the ocean, but also mastered the course of the solar year.” In this case at least, comparison yielded mixed results:it proved that the Hyperboreans had done at least as good a job, using their own methods, at regulating the calendar as the ancient Chaldeans, who had based their 19year cycle entirely on astronomy:“The Chaldeans and the East did not have a monopoly on wisdom. The men of the West and the North were also reasoning beings.”27 Similarly, when Scaliger examined the languages of Europe, they did not form themselves up— as they did for most of his contemporaries— in a neat genealogical tree. He mocked those who insisted on finding “the origin of all names, even Indian and American ones, in Hebrew.”28 And he used the varying terms for God in the European languages to divide them up into what 25 Grafton 1983– 93 ii, 405– 407, 711– 720. 26 See esp. Buchwald and Feingold 2013 and Levitin 2015. 27 Scaliger 1583, 112. 28 Scaliger 1606, Animadversiones, 213. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 26 Grafton he called “linguae matrices”— the womb languages, Greek, Latin, Germanic and Slavonic, from which most others emerged. But he also noted the existence of “six other little languages which have nothing in common with these big ones:Basque, Breton bretonnant, Hungarian, Irish, Lapp or Finnish, and Tartar.”29 In some cases, comparison not only answered questions, it raised them. Two and half centuries after Scaliger, the varieties of world civilization were even more evident than they had been in 1600. The British Museum had displayed the ethnographic collections of Sir Hans Sloane from its creation in 1759, and the materials brought back by Cook and others were added to them. Though the ethnographic rooms were organized by geographical divisions in 1808, by the middle of the century they were reconfigured on comparative lines to illustrate the evolution of society. Similar collections took shape in Berlin, Hamburg, Paris and elsewhere. The creation of these collections, moreover, merely acknowledged the development of scholarship. In the first half of the nineteenth century, archaeologists reconstructed an ancient Near Eastern world whose wealth, creativity and antiquity put those of ancient Israel in the shade, and offered striking contrasts to the civilizations of Greece and Rome. Philologists— who had already created a new genealogy for the languages of what became Western Europe— opened up the lost languages and texts of these civilizations— as well as those of peoples around the world, made newly accessible by imperialism to western explorers and missionaries. As the nineteenth century wore on, both students of the classical world and ethnographers began to see it as natural to group objects in ways that showed their uses and put them into a larger setting. As Franz Boas summed things up, “The main purpose of ethnological collections should be the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative.”30 The best way to see the impact of these developments is to look for them where they seem least likely to appear:in the works of those who regarded themselves as the guardians and transmitters of the classical tradition. Take, for example, August Boeckh, for more than half a century the dominant classical scholar and ancient historian at the University of Berlin.31 Boeckh was no conventional neoclassicist. He showed, in his book on the public economy of Athens, that the building of the Parthenon was made possible by the exploitation of Athens’s allies and the silver mines of Laurion. Noble 29 Scaliger 1601, 119– 122. Cf. Droixhe 1978. 30 Pearce 1992, quotation at 111– 112. 31 On Boeckh see the studies collected in Hackel and Seifert, ed., 2013. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparisons Compared 27 simplicity rested on brutal policies. Yet he also believed, without question, in the supreme value of Greek and Latin. In his lectures on Altertumswissenschaft, which he delivered some 26 times between their first outing in 1809 and their last one in the 1860s, he told his students that “The knowledge of antiquity in all of its aspects must be the purpose of philology. And this is something very much out of the ordinary. It is knowledge of the noblest things that the human spirit has produced in millennia. It grants a deep insight into the essence of divine and human things— even if considerable progress has been made in certain areas in more recent times.”32 No one, Boeckh assured his pupils, could hope to be a historian without knowing ancient history, “since half of history still rests on antiquity.” No one could become a proper philosopher without mastering the history of all the ancient systems of thought. And “the poetic works of antiquity still stand higher than all others. The only ones who fail to grasp this are those who have a superficial knowledge of them. Nowhere does a higher spirit prevail than in the ancient world.”33 Boeckh’s love of antiquity and belief in its continuing ability to serve and educate the modern world expressed itself in many ways— not least the 1843 production of Sophocles’s Antigone for which he produced new translations of the choruses and his landlord, Felix Mendelssohn, the music. Like Mendelssohn and other Berlin intellectuals and artists of his time, from Schinkel to Ranke, Boeckh found resources in particular parts of the past to which he accorded a unique value.34 To be sure, Boeckh insisted that his vision of philology— a comprehensive one, aimed at recovering “knowledge of that which has been known”— need not, indeed could not, be applied only to the ancients. “It would be arbitrary,” he warned his students, “to limit philology to Greek and Roman antiquity, and the concept of philology cannot accept such a limit. The cases of Hebrew, Indian, Chinese and above all Oriental philology show that it is indefensible.”35 Yet even in this passage, he admitted that Greek and Roman antiquity were unique:“great and sublime though Greek and Roman antiquity is, the concept of philology cannot be limited to it.” Though Boeckh repeatedly attempted cultural comparisons, they were shaped in important ways by his evaluation of their objects. When Boeckh discussed the differences between languages, for example, he made their differences in quality absolutely clear: 32 Boeckh 1886, 25. 33 Boeckh 1886, 31. 34 Toews 2004. 35 Boeckh 1886, 6. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 28 Grafton The Greek language, thanks to its wealth of particles, can express the finest and most complex combinations of ideas. By contrast the Hebrew language, which, with its small number of particles, can scarcely express the most general connections of thought, remained stuck at the level of childhood.36. True, Boeckh had to admit that Latin, in this respect, resembled Hebrew more than Greek. But a happy quotation from Tacitus enabled him to show that what had been an inescapable limitation to the Jews was merely a spur to innovation at Rome. By lining clauses up next to one another without explicit connections, Tacitus had expressed an irony as complex as anything in Greek:“If Tacitus had expressed this connection with particles, the impression made by the whole would have been weakened.”37 In connecting comparison and value judgment so explicitly, Boeckh remained within the high tradition of German neoclassicism. He was a close friend and adviser of Alexander von Humboldt, who attended his lectures and corresponded with him fruitfully on everything from the details of Greek myth to the functioning of the Academy of Sciences. In his approach to language, he stuck even closer to Alexander’s brother Wilhelm von Humboldt. Boeckh admired Wilhelm’s passion for the classics— which had led him, Boeckh told his students, to forego writing his memoirs, in order to have more time to read the Greeks (28). But he cited him as the author of a great study of the Kawi language of the island of Java (1836– 39). In this vastly erudite and influential work, Humboldt established the existence of a broad MalayanPolynesian family of languages. In the case of the Kawi language of Java, he showed that it was a special case, in which an original language that formed part of the vast Polynesian group had been reshaped in vital ways by the penetration of Sanskrit. On this empirical foundation, itself based on endless structural comparisons of wordformation and syntax, Humboldt had constructed a second, more speculative structure. He argued, following multiple late 18thcentury precedents, that languages shaped the minds and determined the creative potential of those who spoke and wrote them. Though they could take a number of forms, the inflected ones— those that create their grammar by changing forms internally or adding new endings— were the most perfect:Sanskrit in the first instance, rapidly followed by Greek and then by other European languages. 36 Boeckh 1886, 109. 37 Boeckh 1886, 109– 10. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparisons Compared 29 For all the cosmopolitanism of Humboldt’s scholarship, in the end, it shored up the primacy of western literature and learning: We have everywhere set out at first from the structure of languages alone, and in forming a judgment about it have also confined ourselves solely to this. Now that this structure is better in one than another, is more excellent in Sanskrit than in Chinese, and in Greek than in Arabic, could hardly be disputed by any impartial scholar. However we might try to weigh off their respective virtues, we should always have to admit that one of these languages is animated by a more fruitful principle of mental development than the other. But now we should inevitably have misconstrued all the mutual relations of mind and language, if we were unwilling to extend the various consequences thereof to the reverse action of these languages, and to the intellectuality of the peoples who created them (so far as this lies within human capacity at all). So from this point of view our proposed approach is perfectly justified. Yet it could still be objected to this, that the particular virtues of a language are also capable of fostering particular intellectual characteristics, and that the mental dispositions of nations are themselves far more various in their mixture and composition than could be measured off in degrees … although we gladly concede that the form of Chinese exhibits, more perhaps than any other language, the power of pure thought, and directs the mind more exclusively and urgently to this, precisely because it lops off all the small distracting sounds of connection, and although the reading of just a few Chinese texts reinforces this conviction to the point of admiration, still, even the most resolute defenders of this language can hardly maintain that it guides the mind’s activity to the true center, from which poetry and philosophy, scientific research and eloquent discourse, spring forth with equal readiness.38 Humboldt not only formulated these arguments, but also maintained them in the face of opposition from contemporaries like the American philologists John Pickering and Peter Du Ponceau.39 In theory, he insisted that he meant only to compare languages, not the civilizations that used them. In practice, however, he thought it clear— as Boeckh did— that Sanskrit and Greek allowed the mind to express itself with a unique combination of clarity and freedom.40 38 Humboldt 1988, 217– 18. 39 See Aarsleff’s introduction, Humboldt 1988, lxilxiii. 40 As Aarsleff points out, this is not relativism but absolutism (Humboldt 1988, xxxii). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 30 Grafton Yet Boeckh plied the comparative method in much more creative ways— or so many of the contemporaries who heard him lecture believed— than the segments of his lectures that sound like Founders’ Day speeches for classical secondary schools would suggest. Two creative Jewish philologists— Heymann Steinthal and Louis Benloew— both produced works on the comparative study of languages in the later 1850s. Each of them devoted a few pages of his work to summarizing Boeckh’s vision of philology as a form of knowledge dedicated to recuperating what had been known by other people. Benloew emigrated to France, where he profited, like so many other German scholars of Jewish origins, liberal views, or both, from the beneficence of Karl Benedikt Hase.41 He presented a sketch for a classification of all human languages— eastern as well as western, modern as well as ancient— as the natural product of Boeckh’s program. Language, Benloew explained, was “the marvelous instrument that enabled mankind to control nature, establish society, create the arts and letters and found the sciences.”42 The most delicate and subtle philological investigations were those that gave insight into this process, that caught the human spirit as it progressed towards these goals, and grasped in the endless transformations of a people’s language the ways in which its “conceptions” changed. Language, as revealed by philology, was “the most direct manifestation of the human spirit.”43 And philology, “so well defined by M.Boeckh as cognitio cogniti,”44 was the one discipline that could reveal the general ideas that were at the basis of all cultural forms. While Benloew left Germany for France, where it seemed that a Jew could make a career with fewer sacrifices, Steinthal stayed on, eventually gaining a position in Berlin. And while Benloew offered his readers a provisional but universal scheme, Steinthal gave his something much more solid to chew on:a comparative study of relative pronouns and their functions across many languages. Like Benloew, however, he proclaimed his loyalty to Boeckh and his belief that the phrase cogniti cognitio defined the task of philology, which was to show, as a sort of mirror, the processes by which a free mind produced its creations. Like Boeckh, Steinthal insisted that this was a scholarly inquiry, rooted in the study of minute details:“We do not attain this through abstract ideas at all, but by reducing all the details, once we have perceived and compared them to one another, to unity, to a final explanation and representation of what is to be found in the human mind.”45 Like Boeckh, he saw this process of analysis as 41 Petitmengin 1983. 42 Benloew 1858, 8. 43 Benoew 1858, 9. 44 Benloew 1858, 9. 45 Steinthal 1847. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparisons Compared 31 a form of cultural history, which set out to discover the essential unity of ideas that underpinned the “life, actions, studies, religion and art of each people.”46 Boeckh, as we saw, insisted on the possibility of creating philologies for the ancient East and the modern West. Steinthal went much further. Following Humboldt, he called for a universal comparative linguistics, one that examined and compared all languages. He insisted that these other philologies were as indispensable as the classical form: Those who study antiquity certainly do not carry out the whole task of philology. For the parts, when removed from the whole of which they are parts, cannot be perceived in full. So classical philology, if it is kept within its narrow boundaries, cannot carry out its own mission. Therefore, all true philologists are delighted that in our time at last the Semitic peoples, the Indic peoples, the Tartars, the Chinese, the peoples that inhabit the regions looking north, the Gypsies, the Slavs and above all the Germans have been brought within the province of the philologists.47 The worst outcome possible, he argued, would be if “all of those peoples should each have their own philologists, who have no idea of what the other ones teach.” For Steinthal, what reads in the published text of Boeckh’s lectures like a genial concession was in fact the key to all philologies:comparison, for him, was king. Like Boeckh, Steinthal professed his loyalty to the great Wilhelm von Humboldt and his method. Like Humboldt, he saw language as the spontaneously created key to human culture— and individual languages, because they came into existence spontaneously, as capable of comparison— even if, as Humboldt had shown, they were not themselves descended from a single original. Every language, since it is created by reason without meditation or commentary, but by a kind of poetic impulse, is adapted to reason, and of no small importance in contemplating the historical development of the human mind. Therefore it is also possible and necessary to compare languages with one another.48 These comparisons, Steinthal insisted, were not intended to show that all languages were similar, “for our principal goal, when we compare languages, is not to come to know similar things, but dissimilar ones.” Yet every language has 46 Steinthal 1847, 5. 47 Steinthal 1847, 6. 48 Steinthal 1847, 54. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 38 Grafton Over the next half century, writers of many kinds would make the sorts of comparison that Hythloday plaintively wished for into a normal academic exercise. Just a few years after More, in 1520, Joannes Boemus, canon of Ulm cathedral, published his Omnium Gentium Mores, Leges et Ritus. His introductory remarks sounded very innocent. Anyone involved in public life, he explained, needed to know the religions, customs and laws of other nations. Some might learn these by travel. Others, however, preferred to stay home. All needed information— and information from reliable sources. This Boemus offered. For three years, he explained, he had excerpted information from all the best writers: In my leisure hours … Ihave gathered, and then written out in this register, the more remarkable customs, rites, and laws of the peoples, and the places they inhabit. These were commemorated in passing and, as it were, in pieces by Herodotus, the father of history; Diodorus Siculus, Berosus, Strabo, Solinus, Trogus Pompeius, Ptolemy, Pliny, Cornelius Tacitus, Dionysius Afer, Pomponius Mela, Caesar, Josephus, and, from the more moderns, Vincent, Aeneas Sylvius who later took the name Pius ii, Antonius Sabellicus, Ioannes Nauclerus, Ambrosius Calepinus, Nicolaus Perottus in his Cornucopiae, and many other famous writers. This will allow you to have them recorded in a single book, and it will be easy for you to find them when you need them.67 Like Polydore Vergil, though, Boemus had more in mind than providing an encyclopedic compilation. From this rich body of material, he promised, the reader would not only harvest information but learn to compare primitive to modern and nonChristian to Christian societies. Boemus was as good as his word. Like Vergil, he taught the reader to see that some Christian rituals and customs derived from pagans. More sharply still, he also made clear that contemporary nonChristian nations had laws and customs that seemed more just and reasonable than many Christian ones. Even the Turks, usually reviled as the barbarous enemies of Christianity, had more sensible marriage laws than Christians did. More remarkably still, after covering the world— or at least Africa and Asia— Boemus turned back to Europe. As he had narrated the development of Judaism and Islam, he narrated that of Christianity, in detailed terms, liturgical addition by addition. And when he discussed the customs of his fellow Germans, he made clear that he had learned from studying the strange ways of foreigners to see that European ways could be strange too— so strange as to make the oddest foreign customs perfectly credible:“[The 67 Boemus 1543, 6.On Boemus see e.g. Hodgen 1953; Johnson 2006; and Nothaft 2016. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparisons Compared 39 Franconians] perform many remarkable rites, which Idescribe so that reports about foreigners are not written off as empty stories.”68 After all, once a year the Franconians harnessed all the young women who had gone to dances to plows and had them pulled into lakes or rivers, to the sound of flute music— a practice for which he could only hesitantly advance an explanation.69 Boemus’s comparisons could be superficial. Like Polydore Vergil, he often wrote as if it was obvious why very different countries sometimes passed identical laws. Yet comparison, in his practice, was dialectical, Like Hythloday (or More), he looked at strange peoples and learned that his own was strange too. Comparison, moreover, could take on a sharp political function. It is well known that Calvin, in his Institutes, argued that certain popularly elected inferior magistrates possessed divine rights of their own, including that of resisting monarchs when they acted unjustly. He founded this argument on a comparison between modern French magistrates and ancient Spartan ephors.70 The idea was not new. Philipp Melanchthon had noted in discussing Aristotle’s Politics that Spartan ephors, German electors, and “in France certain dignitaries, of the court known as the Parlament,” moderated the power of kings.71 Zwingli also mentioned the ephors, whom he— like Calvin— described as popularly elected. He may well have helped to inspire Calvin’s famous remarks.72 Over the next four decades, many Protestant political thinkers came to see popular election as essential to the right of magistrates to resist.73 Students of political theory normally class the arguments of Calvin, Melanchthon and others as a form of polemical history. But they are also explicitly comparative. Melanchthon compared ancient and modern magistrates in his commentary on the greatest single comparative work produced in the ancient world, Aristotle’s Politics. Renaissance scholars not only knew this book:they knew about the massive research project on which it rested. Typically, the Elizabethan scholar and dignitary Sir Thomas Smith was living in France when he decided to write his treatise De republica Anglorum. After finishing the work, he explained his project to his friend Walter Haddon: I have set out more or less the entire form [of the English commonwealth, he explained], especially in those respects in which it differs from the 68 Boemus 1543, 221. 69 Boemus 1543, 223. 70 John Calvin, Institutio Christianae religionis iv, 20, 31 (ed. of 1536), in Corpus Reformatorum 1834— , xxix, col. 248. 71 Corpus Reformatorum 1834— , xvi, col. 440. 72 Skinner 1978, ii:230– 33, 314– 36. See also the rich and precise study of Benert 1967. 73 Lee 2016, chap.4. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 40 Grafton rest. But it is different in almost every way, so that the work became longer than Ihad thought it would. Iwrote it in our language, in a style midway between historical and philosophical, in accordance with the form in which, Iconjectured, Aristotle wrote on many of the Greek commonwealths:those books are no longer extant. Ihave offered ample material for discussion to those who like to debate in a philosophical way about individual questions, and to make formal problems about what is fair and what unfair, and which is better, what is taken as law in England, or what is taken as law in those provinces that are ruled by Roman law. For they are just about entirely different, as Ihave explained in rough terms.74 As he made clear, he saw himself as writing a modern counterpart to one of the 158 accounts of individual constitutions from which Aristotle had drawn the empirical foundations for his Politics— and doing the job, as Aristotle’s students had, to facilitate comparison. Many Protestants saw history and comparison as more or less identical. When John Aylmer refuted John Knox’s The first blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment of women, he attacked— among many other things— Knox’s unwillingness to accept the historical and comparative instances that others had offered to justify the existence of female rulers. Aylmer compared Knox, with his insistence on sticking to the Bible, to “the common sort of Germans, which trauailinge no further than they may se the smoke of the stouf:think that in theyr country is the paradise of the world, and that in it is al things and in all other nothing.”75 Aylmer made clear that history, in his view, involved the collecting of information from varied sources, times and places, in the manner of Melanchthon: I make not this comparison, as though Ithought not the Bible to be a paradise, wherin are to be found all the best hearbes and frutes that be:but meaning that all antiquitie of time, all histories and monuments, canne not be conteined in so little rometh. VVherfore, if men wil decide weightie matters, hanging vppon antiquitie:they must not only counsel with the Bible, but exercvse them selfe in anciente stories. And therefore, Philippe Melanchthon (one of the Princes of learning, at this day), trauaileth more in these his last yeares, in the reading, gathering and setting forth of histories:then of any other kinde of learninge, and not withoute reason.76 74 Sir Thomas Smith to Walter Haddon, in Haddon 1567, 305– 306. 75 Aylmer 1559, sig. [E4rv]. 76 Aylmer 1559, sig. [E4v]. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparisons Compared 41 Aylmer’s language, with his emphasis on finding and gathering sources, is as revealing as his argument:history that had religious and political stakes must be comparative. In the next decade, the rise of new forms of Protestantism and the active response of the Catholic church set off modern Europe’s first religious wars, in France and the Low Countries. As Protestant violence against religious objects and Catholic violence against Protestant persons spread, as tens of thousands died and assassination became a normal tool of politics, expert jurists began to ask what form of government might actually be able to restore order. Jean Bodin— jurist and royal counselor— argued in the 1560s that only a systematic program of comparison could explain how states were— and should be— constituted.77 To make his case, Bodin argued, sharply, that existing theories of law and government, which assumed the universal validity of the Roman law, were clearly deficient. Roman law was itself not an eternal monument but a labile product of historical development. It was absurd even to try “to establish principles of universal jurisprudence from the Roman decrees, which were subject to change within a brief period.” Bodin claimed to find inspiration in Plato, who, he said, argued that if “prudent men, having collected all the customs and all the laws of all countries, should compare them, they might compound from them the best kind of state.”78 In fact, the Athenian in Plato’s Laws does posit a comparative process in the formation of an ideal state. As clans assemble into a larger unit, members of each should be chosen “who, after a survey of the legal usages of all the clans, shall notify publicly to the tribal leaders and chiefs (who may be termed their “kings”) which of these usages please them best, and shall recommend their adoption (681cd).” After putting Plato’s text into his Procrustean bed, Bodin admitted that Aristotle had apparently tried more seriously than his teacher to carry out such an inquiry, and that others, from Polybius to Machiavelli, had carried it on. Yet as Bodin also pointed out, none of these writers had anticipated the scale and nature of his own enterprise. His first, programmatic work in this area, the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, begins with an extraordinary evocation of the range of sources he had taken into account: Consideration is given to the decrees of the Persians, the Greeks, and the Egyptians, no less than to the Romans … Not to be without the statutes of the Spaniards and of the British and of all the more famous states of 77 Franklin 1963; Couzinet 1996. 78 Jean Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiae cognitionem, in Wolf, ed., 1576– 79, I, 149 (tr. Reynolds, altered). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 42 Grafton Italy and of Germany (for it would be endless to seek the more obscure) Itrusted to be able to join them to our own at the same time.79 Neither religious enmity nor cultural difference mattered to Bodin, if he could only attain reliable information:“I wish that we might also possess the civil code of the Turks,” he wrote, as an aid to understanding what factors led to the success of that “flourishing empire.” Even more comprehensive was the frame into which Bodin fitted the laws and constitutions that he collected. Each people, he argued, was shaped, above all, by the climate of its original home— Asian extremes of heat had made the inhabitants of the continent docile and fit for subjection to absolute rulers, while Europe’s more temperate weather had created subjects who demanded certain freedoms— above all that to enjoy their property— from their monarchs. To work out where each people had come from, histories must be tested for veracity and then compared with one another. The names of peoples and places must also be examined. Notoriously, Bodin’s reach exceeded his grasp. The Walloons had derived their name, by his account, from the long period during which they had wandered through the forests, asking “Où allonsnous?” Not only the historians he cited, but the tests that made him trust them, came from the greatest forger of the Renaissance, Annius of Viterbo. Still, the bravura scale of Bodin’s enterprise demands respect. So does its dialectical character. His comparisons— more like those of a Steinthal than a Polydore Vergil— called accepted categories into question, much as More had suggested that they would. His terminology and his approach, like Melanchthon’s and Smith’s, largely from Aristotle. But he insisted that comparative evidence radically undermined Aristotle’s definitions of his terms. An Aristotelian citizen had to be able to make judgments, hold offices and discuss policies. Fine for a republic, but, “Since a definition ought to deal with universals, no one will be a citizen in Aristotelian terms, unless born at Athens and in the time of Pericles. The others will be exiles or strangers in their own cities, debarred from honors, judicial matters and public counsels.”80 After all, he pointed out, Antoninus had decreed that all free men in the Roman Empire should be Roman citizens. Yet by Aristotle’s account, “they were aliens because they were denied popular rights.”81 Comparison, moreover, took on a force of its own in Bodin’s work. It led him to revalue laws, and the societies that had produced them. No legal text known to Europeans had met with a harsher response within the western Christian 79 Wolf, ed., 1576– 79, I, sig. ():():(4). 80 Wolf, ed., 1576– 79, I, 152. 81 Wolf, ed., 1576– 79, I, 152. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparisons Compared 43 world than the Talmud. Denounced as the work of Jews who deliberately refused, though they knew better, to accept that Jesus was the Messiah, pilloried as a mountain of irreligious filth, the Talmud was denounced over and over again. In the decade before Bodin— a Catholic— wrote, thousands of copies of the Talmud were burnt, on papal orders, in public in the Campo dei Fiori and other public squares in Italy.82 Bodin, by contrast, swept the Talmud up into his comprehensive program for legal study:“From the Pandects of the Hebrews, also, especially from the book Sanhedrin, Iplanned to take all the best things.” Bodin made clear that he meant not only to study the Talmud, but to do so in its original language:“In this matter Jean Cinqarbres and Mercier, royal professors of the Hebrew tongue, have promised me their help.”83 He did in fact cite Talmudic passages a number of time. More significant than the details, though, is the term he used for the text. The Pandects or Digest is one of the four parts of the Roman Corpus Iuris:a massive collection of the opinions of Roman jurisconsults, topically arranged. It was assembled at Constantinople in the early sixth century— at much the same time that the Babylonian Talmud was assembled— and formed the basis of advanced training in universities for jurists like Bodin.84 In appropriating this eminently Roman title for the laws of the Jews, Bodin made two points:he noted the resemblance between what one might now call these two great late antique compilations, and he defined the Jewish one as comparable in utility to the Roman. In the body of his work, moreover, he did his best to draw comparative materials from tractate Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud.85 Steinthal would have read Bodin with delight— and would not have known, as most have not, that he found his inspiration in Annius of Viterbo.86 Comparison, in Bodin’s hands, also became holistic. Traditional visions of history, as embodied in most chronologies and taught in most classrooms, divided time into coherent ages— the four world empires, each worse than the one before it, symbolized by the components of the statue described in the book of Daniel, or the three ages of two thousand years defined by the rabbinic Tanna debe Eliyyahu. Bodin made no secret of his contempt for the idea that history ran from gold to iron, from good to worse, in segments that could be easily characterized.87 Characteristically, he mingled multiple forms 82 Stow 1972 and 1977. 83 Wolf, ed., 1576– 79, I, sig. ():():(4r). 84 De Lange 2005, 405– 06. 85 Gutmann 1906. 86 Grafton 2016. 87 Klempt 1960; Seifert 1990. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 44 Grafton of evidence. The fragments of Berosus and Cato (actually forged by Annius of Viterbo) told of an earliest period of history full of horrid crimes, from Ham’s castration of his father to Jupiter Belus’s parricide. Comparison of criminal laws confirmed this grim version of primitivism. Theft had been a civil offence in antiquity, “not only by the laws of the Hebrews, but also by those of the Greeks and Romans.”88 Now, happily, it was everywhere punishable by death in Bodin’s day. The very existence of the Turkish empire, whose wealth and power he liked to evoke, made clear that the Roman Empire no longer dominated the world:“it would be more proper to take the oracle of Daniel as referring to the Turkish ruler” rather than the Holy Roman Emperor.89 In many respects, moreover, the moderns had outdistanced the ancients. Gunpowder, navigation and printing had transformed the world and human knowledge of it.90 Bodin did not believe the world was becoming steadily better:knowledge and virtue rose and fell, he argued, in cycles. But he also used an image that made his prejudices clear. Those who insisted that history had begun with an age of gold, he argued— much as Copernicus had argued against those who insisted that the earth stood still— resembled the passengers on a ship, “who, while being carried from port into the ocean, think that the houses and cities are moving away from them.”91 And Bodin also identified his chief source for consciousness that periods differed:“Lest my evidence seem fabulous, let us agree with Thucydides, the truest father of history:for he has attested that a little before his own day, the barbarism in Greece itself was such that robbery took place everywhere, on sea and land.”92 Even in the early modern world— or so it seems— at a time of crisis, the confident speculations of a great Athenian historian could be unfolded into something like a fullthroated program of comparative study. This too has its place in the history of cultural history. 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(2017), History and its Objects:Antiquarianism and Material Culture since 1500, Ithaca, N.Y. Momigliano A. (1950), Ancient History and the Antiquarian, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13:285– 315. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparisons Compared 47 More T. (1965), The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, 4:Utopia, ed. E. Surtz, S.J.and J.H. Hexter, New Haven. More T. (1989, repr. 2002), Utopia, ed. and tr. G. Logan and R. Adams, Cambridge. Nippel W. (2013), Boeckhs Beitrag zur Alten Geschichte, in:August Boeckh, ed. C. Hackel and S. Seifert, Berlin, 45– 58. Nothaft C. P.E. (2011), Noah’s Calendar:The Chronology of the Flood Narrative and the History of Astronomy in Sixteenthand SeventeenthCentury Scholarship, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 74:191– 211. Nothaft C. P.E. (2016), The Early History of Man and the Uses of Diodorus in Renaissance Scholarship:From Annius of Viterbo to Joannes Boemus, in:For the Sake of Learning, ed. A. Blair and A.- S. Goeing, 2 vols. Leiden, II:711– 28. Pearce S. (1992), Museums, Objects and Collections. Washington, D.C. Petitmengin P. (1983), Deux têtes de pont de la philologie allemande en France:le Thesaurus linguae Graecae et la ‘Bibliothèque des auteurs grecs’ (1830– 1867), in:Philologie und Hermeneutik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. M. Bollack and H. Wismann. Göttingen, 76– 98. Pois T. (2013), August Boeckhs PindarStudien, in August Boeckh, ed. C. Hackel and S. Seifert, Berlin, 27– 43. Rubiés J.- P. (2000), Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance:South India through European Eyes, 1250– 1625, Cambridge. Rubiés J.- P. (2007), Travellers and Cosmographers:Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology, Aldershot. Russo A., Wolf, G., Fane, D. (2016), Images Take Flight:Feather Art in Mexico and Europe (1400– 1700), Chicago. Scaliger J. (1583), Opus novum de emendatione temporum, Paris. Scaliger J. (1606), Thesaurus temporum, Leiden. Scaliger J. (2010), Opuscula, Paris. Seifert A. (1990), Der Rückzug der biblischen Prophetie von der neueren Geschichte, Cologne. Sewell W. (1967), Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History, History & Theory 6:208– 218. Skinner Q. (1978), The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. 2 vols. Cambridge. Skocpol T. and Somers, M. (1980), The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry, Comparative Studies in Society and History 22:174– 197. Smiles S. (2009), John White and British Antiquity:Savage Origins in the Context of British Historiography, in:European Visions:American Voices, ed. K. Sloan, London, 106– 12. Smith J. Z. (1994), Drudgery Divine, Chicago. Steinthal H. (1847), De pronomine relativo commentatio philologicophilosophica, Berlin. Stow K. (1972), The Burning of the Talmud in 1553, in Light of SixteenthCentury Catholic Attitudes Toward the Talmud, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 34:435– 49. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 54 Levitin The importance of these texts as sources for the history of religion cannot be overstated. Of course, older pagan texts– Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, etc.– offered a wealth of information. But, because of the demands of apologetics, the Christians texts (and the Jewish works that inspired them) supplied far more arguments about the historical interrelationship between various religions:which sage came first, who stole from whom, and so on.16 In the face of this wealth of material, why did anyone feel that a new kind of historical apologetics was required at all? To answer this question, we must consider the structure of patristic historical apologetics.17 Of course, early Christian writers relentlessly emphasised the errors of paganism:its idolatry, superstition (δεισιδαιμονία), polytheism, etc. But at the same time, educated Christians, seeking elite converts, sought to posit similarities between the pagan wisdom admired by prospective converts (or opponents such as Celsus and Porphyry). In the second century, Justin Martyr, adopting an apologetic strategy already prevalent in Hellenistic Judaism, and playing on the Greeks’ own belief in the antiquity of ‘alien wisdom’, argued that the pagans had derived their religious and philosophical ideas from the Jews, specifically from Moses, and that that wisdom also contained some of the truths of Christianity:hence Plato’s adumbration of the trinity, and so on.18 This argument could be taken in two directions. One, which we may for convenience label the ‘negative/ plagiarism’ thesis– and which Justin’s own works emphasise much more strongly19– suggests that ‘correct’ pagan theology (which meant that practised by a few elites, and distinct from the crude polytheism of the masses) was dependent on access to the Old Testament, or to Jewish teachings (perhaps mediated by travel to other eastern locales, especially Egypt, where they were already known). At its most radical, this apologetic strand denied any independent value to pagan philosophy or theology beyond what was derived from JudaeoChristian revelation. In contrast, the 16 For this kind of ‘culturalintellectual’ history in antiquity more broadly, see esp. Cancik (2008), 3– 27. 17 The subsequent summary necessarily considers only those subjects– broadly ‘theological’– of direct relevance to us, and says nothing of such important matters as Christian attitudes to the history of the pagan oracles, use of images, demonology, and so on. For all of these and more, probably the most valuable single overview remains Hanson 1985, 144– 229, notwithstanding its entertainingly judgmental comments about ‘puritanical’ philistinism among some early Christians (Prof. Hanson was for some time Bishop of Clogher in the Church of Ireland). See also Edwards etal. (1999). 18 There is a huge literature; among the most important overall treatments, see Droge (1989); Pilhofer (1990). 19 E.g. Dial., vii.1– 2; see further Droge (1989), 49– 81. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 55 second strand, which we might label ‘positivesyncretistic’, tended to have a higher opinion of the pagans’ (or at least the pagan philosophers’) capacity to grasp truth independently, usually on the basis of some kind of broadly Neoplatonic conception of the human soul’s ability to participate in the divine, or to communicate with the eternal λόγος. Here we may cite the examples of Clemens Alexandrinus and Origen, although again we should emphasise that this was always combined with the plagiarism thesis.20 Moreover, the claims of this second strand should also be divided into two further strands. What we might label a ‘hard’ similarity thesis would insist that knowledge of even revealed mysteries like the trinity was available to the pagans. ‘Soft’ similarity, by contrast, would only emphasise their acquiescence to truths that could be known naturally, such as monotheism and the immortality of the soul (I ignore for the time being the question of what was considered ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘supernatural’ knowledge in the first centuries ad). Crucially, both arguments depended on emphasis on elements of similarity between Christianity and paganism. We could call this approach a ‘regime’, but we could only do so with the proviso that it could not be a totalitarian one:for contemporary pagans to be persuaded by these arguments about the similarity between pagan and Jewish and Christian ‘theology’, they had to be persuasive. This persuasiveness was varied. When many of the church fathers argued that pagan polytheism had, at least among the elite, in fact been considered a form of monarchical monotheism, they were to some extent pushing at an open door:since the fifth century bc, some educated Greeks had espoused variants of the view that the pantheon of Gods was in fact symbolic of, or subservient to, one cosmic intellect. But on other subjects, their claims for similarity would have been less convincing. When Clement of Alexandria alleged that creation ex nihilo was held not only by Plato (dubious enough) but also by the Stoics (entirely improbable), he cannot have convinced many.21 JudaeoChristian forgeries like the Sibylline Oracles or the prophecies of Hystaspes may have had more immediate success in convincing some of the direct compatibility of paganism and Christianity, but soon led to the emabarassing accusation that Christianity relied on ‘pious frauds’,22 and so to cautious repudiation by Augustine and others.23 Positing that pagan philosophers– especially Plato– knew the trinity may have buttressed Origen against Celsus, but again became an 20 As convincingly shown in Droge (1989), 124– 67. 21 Strom. v.14. 22 E.g. Porphyry, Plot., 16. 23 See generally Grafton (1991), 162– 77, esp.165– 8. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 56 Levitin embarrassment in intraChristian debates, as when Origen’s subordinationist trinitarianism was condemned as Platonic fallacy by Jerome.24 Nonetheless, this search for similarity– which, it should be emphasised, in the minds of its practitioners never impinged on the divine, revealed status of Christianity (why should it?)– was for the most part gleefully adopted by the fifteenth and sixteenth century scholars and apologists who benefited from the systematic rediscovery and publication of the works of the church fathers. Iam not talking here about the neoplatonic fringe– Ficino, Pico della Mirandola with his pseudoCabbala, Reuchlin, Postel– whose importance has probably been overplayed, but about the apologetic mainstream. Above all, the ‘positive’ emphasis on similarity was adopted by Agostino Steuco, whose De perenni philosophia (1540), despite its name, was less a work proposing a new philosophy and more an attempt at a historical apologetics that was prepared to discover almost all of Christian theology– creation ex nihilo, a fully consubstantial trinity, etc.– in much of pagan philosophy.25 Steuco’s enthusiasm for the insights of the pagans was controversial and not widely shared, but he collected so much data that even in the seventeenth century, when everyone knew that the philological foundations on which his edifice was built were decidedly shaky, his book continued to be recommended as an introduction to historical apologetics in reading guides for prospective divines across Europe.26 More common were variants of the negative/ plagiarism thesis. These could be relatively mild, as is in the exceedingly popular (partly because exceedingly uninventive) Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne (1581) by the French Reformed leader Philippe de Mornay.27 Or they could insist strongly on the total incapacity of pagans to achieve almost any truth– whether theological or even philosophical– outside of a Judaic (i.e. post Mosaic) inheritance:this strategy was usually adopted by strongly Reformed or Lutheran writers, who incorporated it into antiPelagian polemics about the limits of fallen reason. Here we might instance such late and philologicallyimpressive examples as the Lutheran Johann Heinrich Ursinus’s 1661 investigation of Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, and Sanchuniathon the Phoenician, which insisted on the chronological priority of Moses to all of them;28 or the huge Court of the Gentiles (1669– 78) by 24 Jerome, Cont. Ruf., i.14. 25 Steuco [1540] (1542), 337– 475 for creation ex nihilo, a subject that will be of particular importance for us later. See further Schmitt (1966), at 515– 24; Muccillo (1988). 26 E.g. Boverio (1617), 132a; and for some English examples, see e.g. Fotherby (1622), sig. [A5]v; Baxter (1673), 928. 27 de Mornay [1581] (1585), 67– 93, passim. See Ménager (2006); Woolford (2011), 180– 6. 28 Ursinus (1661). See Hafner (2010), at 9– 10. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 57 the English nonconformist theologian Theophilus Gale, which consists mostly of a regurgitation of patristic commonplaces about Mosaic intellectual primacy, incorporated into a scheme of Reformed covenant theology.29 Contrary to the assumptions of several modern historians, there was nothing ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ about such emphasis on similarity:whatever the utopian ecumenical dreams of men like Mornay, their works were eagerly recommended as pedagogical reading by the most orthodox, bigoted divines across Europe, for they were intended as preparative to courses of full polemical divinity. Moreover, it was through the lens of the ‘patristic paradigm’ that the discoveries of the religions of the new world and of east Asia were initially interpreted. This should not be unexpected, given the prevalence of patristic texts (and commentaries upon them) within educational curricula. It comes as no surprise to find that the prominent Jesuits José de Acosta and Antonio Possevino recommended that their missionary colleagues reread the relevant early Christian classics before setting off.30 1.2 Questioning Patristic Comparatism Our question now becomes:how and when did European scholars come to modify this patristic paradigm? The key shift occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a period whose importance not just for the issues at hand, but for the prehistory of the Western humanities more generally, remains underappreciated. It was then that humanism gradually shifted to a more contextualised, historicist approach, one which, more and more, emphasised the difference between past and present. As is almost always the case, principle followed practice, and we are dealing here not with methodological theory, but with a set of empirical discoveries, in the making of which the figure of Joseph Scaliger loomed large, even if accompanied by a larger cast of accomplices than some history of scholarship has allowed him. The first, and now most wellknown,31 of these discoveries was chronological. Scaliger’s intense research offered a vision of history in which the antiquity of Egypt in particular was pushed very far back (dangerously far for some of Scaliger’s readers). One longterm impact of this was the negation of the idea of Mosaic intellectual primacy:the biblical Jews started to be portrayed not as the fount of wisdom, but either as an independent, largely primitive people, or, gradually, as inheritors of Egyptian customs and ideas. There was nothing heterodox about these arguments, which, alongside the realisation of the great 29 Gale (1669– 77); Levitin (2015b), 146– 53; Pigney (2010). 30 Ryan (1981), 528. For evidence of the missionaries’ use of patristic precedent, see below. 31 See in brilliant detail Grafton (1993). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 58 Levitin antiquity of Chinese civilisation, culminated in the works of John Marsham and John Spencer in the 1670s and 1680, both of which were designed not to usher in a new secular comparatism, but to defend aspects of orthodox religious belief using the techniques of the new scholarship.32 But one sideeffect was the gradual death of the negative/ plagiarism thesis, and Scaliger and his successors were deeply critical of the Hellenistic Jews and the church fathers for inventing the myth of Jewish intellectual primacy. This brings us to our second transformation:a new, critical attitude to a set of texts that we may broadly label Hellenistic– that is to say, stretching from the Letter of Aristeas (2nd century bc), through to the works of the Hellenistic Jews, and then the early Christian writers (up to Eusebius) who were inspired by them. Scaliger and others not only discovered the phenomenon of Hellenistic Judaism,33 but, just as importantly, recognised that many of the claims about ancient pagan history made by the Hellenistic Jews and their Christian successors were dangerously unreliable, to be read more as pious propaganda than as trustworthy history.34 Casaubon’s famous denunciation of the Corpus Hermeticum was only one part of this historicalphilological project; probably no less important was the repudiation of the Chaldean Oracles as a serious source for the putative similarity between Christian and ancient near eastern theology.35 These sources’ claims for Mosaic primacy, or for more general similarity between pagan and JudaeoChristian ideas– claims which as we have seen lay at the heart of the traditional apologetic project– likewise came under scrutiny. To give only one example, John Selden would soon respond with scandalised incredulity to the idea that Aristotle had been taught by a wandering Jew, an idea he dismissed as a fable concocted by selfaggrandising Hellenistic Jews like Aristobulus.36 The third and final component of this transformative moment was a new, more contextual and distant attitude to Greek philosophy. In this case, this was not the result of Scaligerian philology. Rather, developments within philosophy itself led to a new vision of ancient thought as alien and not directly compatible with ‘modern’ (i.e. postChrist) ideas. The Platonic revival had met with stern opposition that used the history of philosophy to emphasise the 32 In Marsham’s case, the veracity of the Masoretic chronology; in Spencer’s, the liturgy of the English church. See now Levitin (2015b), 156– 64; Levitin (2013); Stolzenberg (2012). For the question of Chinese chronology, stimulated above all by Martino Martini, see von Collani (2000); Poole (2012). 33 Grafton (2014) and the works cited there. 34 See e.g. Scaliger (1606), 4– 5. 35 Grafton and Weinberg (2011), 30– 42; Grafton (1983); Mulsow (2002); Levitin (2015b), 54– 70. 36 Selden (1640), 14– 15. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 59 difference between pagan Platonism and correct natural philosophy or Christian theology.37 Within Aristotelianism, the rediscovery and publication of commentators like Themistius and Alexander of Aphrodisias, combined with the long controversy over Pietro Pomponazzi’s claims that the immortality of the soul could not be proved from Aristotle’s philosophy, similarly led to the realisation– at least in some quarters– that Aristotle may have been even further from the Christian worldview than had previously been assumed.38 The publication of, and growing familiarity with, the fragments of the philosophers we now call the pre socratics also slowly began to convince early modern Europeans that Greek philosophy had been far more alien, and above all, far more ‘pagan’, than they had ever thought. For example, the famous Jesuit commentary on Aristotle produced in late sixteenth-century Coimbra devoted great space to eludiating the opinions of the monists chastised by Aristotle in the first book of the Physics, i.2, making it clear that those like Steuco were wrong to read them as prefiguring a JudaeoChristian conception of a monotheistic transcendent deity, but that they (as well as theogonic poets like Hesiod) should be read as materialists who made the world into an animal, and that their enigmatic manner of philosophising about the first principle was similar to that of the Egyptians and Chaldeans.39 Indeed, it is imperative for everything that follows that the reader remembers that we are dealing with– and attempting to recover– a lost world that existed before nineteenthcentury Philhellenism, a world where Greek philosophy was not considered a unique phenomenon insulated from the rest of pagan thought, but rather one that came more and more to be viewed as a manifestation of a global ‘religious’ worldview. The confluence of these developments challenged the central presuppositions of patristic apologetics, and the regime of religious comparatism it sustained. As we shall see, some of those presuppositions survived– further evidence that unlike political regimes, intellectual ones are not unified entities that at moments of revolution must fall entirely to be replaced by a different ‘regime’. But all this leads us to ask:if it was not going to rely on the church fathers’ historical claims, what should a new, distinctly seventeenthcentury apologetics look like? 37 See above all Crispo (1594), on which see Glawe (1912), 24– 6; Kraye (2002), 394– 7. 38 The fullest overview is now Martin (2014). For the rejection of a ‘metaphysical’ version of Aristotelian natural philosophy in favour of a ‘naturalistic’ one that tended towards animism or vitalism, see Keßler (1995). 39 Fonseca etal. (1616), cols. 173– 77. For an overview of the printing of various pre socratic fragments, see Hankins and Palmer (2008). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 60 Levitin The most important answer to this question was provided in the huge De theologia gentili, et physiologia Christiana sive de origine ac progressu idololatriae, first published in 1641 (with an expanded edition in 1668)by the Dutch polymath G.J. Vossius, a leading inheritor of Scaliger’s Dutch legacy.40 This remarkable book, published in combination with Vossius’s son’s translation of Maimonides’s tractate on idolatry from the Mishneh Torah, seems to have been the most widelyread work of Latin historical apologetics in Europe throughout the seventeenth century and beyond.41 Its impact, Ishould like to suggest, was immense, but also immensely complex. I have argued that at the heart of the change in apologetics and the history of religion in the early seventeenth century lay a modification of the rejection of the patristic paradigm of arguing for (i)Mosaic primacy, and (ii) strong similarities between paganism and Christianity. And so it is no surprise to find Vossius announcing, in a letter to his friend Abraham van der Meer, that from a scholarly perspective, this was exactly his aim. The apologetics of Steuco and the church fathers, he contended, had been rendered obsolete, and something new was required.42 But this being so, what should such a postpatristic, nonsyncretist apologetics look like? Vossius’s answer to this question was ingenious. The pagans did have some knowledge of the true god. This was the Unknown God (Ἄγνωστος Θεός) mentioned by Paul in his disputation against the Athenian philosophers at the Areopagus (Acts 17:22– 31), where Paul himself was happy to quote the pagan poets Epimenides and Aratus to convince his opponents.43 This knowledge was not 40 Vossius, as he himself admitted, was inspired to write his book by John Selden’s De Diis Syris (1617), but constraints of space prevent me from discussing that work here (albeit see n. 70, 155 below). For a summary, see Toomer (2009), i, 211– 56. For more on Selden’s influence in this regard, see now Mulsow (2016). 41 See the examples in Rademaker (1981), 306– 7, 309. Iam not the first to posit Vossius’s importance on this score, but it seems to me that previous commentators have missed the precise nature of the significance of his work. 42 Vossius to Abraham van der Meer, 13 Dec 1627, in Vossius (1690), 112b– 113a. 43 Vossius [1641, 1668] (1700), 5b– 6a. Not least because of the centrality of this passage to theological disputes, the identity of the Unknown God became a subtopic of considerable debate in early modern scholarship. See e.g. Selden (1617), lxi– lxii, 112, 114, arguing that the altar Paul referred to was typical of altars to all the gods in common, on the basis of a commentary of Theophylactus on the passage, which itself was based on a forged inscription from Euthalius (Toomer 2009, i, 219 for the full details), allowing him to claim that pagan polytheism in fact concealed a monotheism derived from observation of nature (lxvii:‘Satis ex his constat Graecorum, Latinorum, & Aegyptiorum, qui nempè omnes longè ante alias gentes Arcanorum naturae studiis incumbebant, abditiorem &, quam in vulgus edere non immeritò abhorrebant, Theologiam non tam Plures quam unum supremum deum agnovisse; ut & sanctiorem Philosophiam’, also lix)– an obvious anticipation of Vossius’s Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 61 innate, but derived either from tradition– not Mosaic tradition, which was limited to the Jews, but the universal tradition that went back to Noah and his sons44– or, more importantly, from nature. Now, what Vossius meant by the latter is hugely important, and opens the door to a component of the early modern discussion of religious thought that has been almost entirely ignored by commentators:the continuing influence of neoscholastic natural theology. Aquinas, drawing on a long tradition of apophatic theology, had asserted that humans were incapable of truly grasping the divine essence. However, through analogical reasoning on the creation, they could come to a predication of the divine attributes.45 This could be done through three viae (ways), which he derived from the writings of pseudoDionysius (whom he believed to be the real Dionysius Areopagite of Acts 17:34), especially the latter’s De divinis nominibus. These were the via causalitatis, which worked from created things back to a necessary cause with powers of efficiency, exemplarity and finality and thus with intelligence and will; the via remotionis (or negationis), which worked by eliminating from creation all its defects to produce attributes such as incorporeity, immutability, and infinity; and the via eminentiae, which attributed to God the perfections found in created things, but in a supereminent way.46 As far as Aquinas was concerned, here was a way of discussing God’s being and relationship to the world while continuing to respect his transcendence and unfathomable infinity on the one hand, and without slipping into univocity, Averroist equivocity, or Maimonidean defeatism about positing any worthy divines names on the other. I cannot stress enough how important it is to recognise that this conceptual apparatus survived well into the early modern period. It was taught in both Reformed and postTridentine theology, and Reformed theologians in particular tended to reject Scotist univocity and insist on the analogical methods by which the divine attributes could be predicated, allowing them to formulate an account of the attributes that both maintained God’s transcendence and to assert his relationship to the created world.47 It is one of the most striking, case. By the late 17thcentury the issue had become a setpiece dispute:see e.g. Bose (1659); Köber (1683); Meursius (1687), 41– 7; Segers, Grube (1712); Fabricius (1713); Bergested 1744. For a modern discussion of Acts as a book of apologetics, see Alexander (1999). 44 This Noahide religion was not directly equivalent to ‘natural religion’, for it also contained revealed truths like postmortem life, spiritual beings subordinate to God, and the origin of evil (Vossius [1641, 1668] 1700, 15– 42, 11b). 45 The central discussions are those in SCG, i.30.3; iv.1; ST, i.QQ.12– 13. For analysis, see e.g. Lyttkens (1952); McInerney (1996); Hall (2007), esp.9– 16, 51– 2. 46 Key loci, among many others, are ST, I.Q3.a.3; Q.13.a.12; SCG, i.14. Among several important studies, see Boland (1996), 94– 146. 47 For a summary of the Reformed context, see Muller (2012), 127– 50, esp.139. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 62 Levitin and most surprising, findings of my research that the writing of the history of religion in the seventeenth century– performed by scholars who often declared that they had little time for scholastic niceties, and who knew that the three viae were derived from a Dionysius whose authenticity they had long rejected– was still so deeply anchored in scholastic natural theology. Vossius is fine proof of this. He referred directly to the pseudoDionysian/ Thomist three viae so as to argue that humans could, from nature, come to an analogical knowledge of God’s various attributes.48 But the fall had rendered human reasoning imperfect:like the blind man of John 9, fallen man had evidence of God in front of him (in nature) but could not acknowledge it.49 The result was that humans gradually failed to recognise the difference between god and nature, and came to revere the creation rather than the creator.50 The apologists’ task became to confute this error, to show that contrary to pagan opinion, ‘God was neither nature, nor a part of it, but its originator’, and to clarify where they had gone wrong.51 This combination of historical and natural theological thinking explains the curious, generically novel title of Vossius’s book:‘On pagan theology and Christian physiology, or the origin and progress of idolatry’. To accuse the pagans of natureworship was of course not revolutionary.52 But as a basis 48 Vossius [1641, 1668] (1700), 4b– 5a, discussing the three viae at length. One assumes that his acceptance of this model stemmed from his education by orthodox Reformed theologians in Leiden; Vossius’s teacher Franciscus Junius, to whom he always declared his intellectual debts, had particularly emphasised this Thomistic argument. For Vossius’s teaching by, and respect for, Junius (whose daughter he married), see Rademaker (1981), 44– 6, 69, 72, 85– 6, 156, 210– 11, 437– 8. For the three viae, see Junius’s ‘Summa aliquot locorum communium SS. Theologiae, tribus libris comprehensa’, in his posthumous Opera theologica:Junius (1613), col. 1840 (and subsequent pages for their use in predicating the divine attributes). My emphasis on these theological elements renders my reading of Vossius very different to that in Somos (2011), 170, 180– 1, 198, 290, 372– 3. 49 Vossius [1641, 1668] (1700), 9a– 10b. 50 Vossius suggested several ways in which this may have happened, which he never entirely reconciled with each other:at one point he simply spoke of the pagans’ wilful ignorance of the transcendent divinity manifested by the creation; subsequently, the forces of nature were ascribed both corporeality and divinity (sig. **3r); elsewhere he suggested that the poets and priests, who knew the truth (at least initially), accommodated to the desires of the masses by representing the gods as physical (not as humans, but as very subtle substances), ultimately leading to the deification of natural substances (114a– b). 51 Ibid., sig. [*4]v– **r (‘Cumque gentiles virtutem illam divinam, quae est ab Deo, minime distinxerint ab altera, quae est in Deo; eoque ex naturae mirandis collegerint, Naturam esse Deum:nobis contra propositum fuit, ostendere Deum non esse Naturam, vel partem illius; sed Naturae auctorem.’) 52 See e.g. Augustine, Civ. Dei, vii.5– 6, 23, 27, 29– 30. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 63 on which to found a largescale apologetics, it was deeply novel. Put in the crudest terms, it allowed Vossius to reject much of the patristic paradigm, which insisted on similarity between paganism and Christianity, and to build an apologetic argument that recognised the difference between the two that had been increasingly discovered in the previous century. Pagans from Asia to Greece had misread the book of nature, and so had come to erroneous conceptions of the divine.53 Yet at the same time, Vossius could combine this emphasis on difference with another apologetic secret weapon. According to him, the popular religions of the people and the poets was formed from the monarchist presupposition that God would have subordinate ministers; this was probably a true polytheism.54 But, across the world, the philosophical elite knew better, recognising that the multiplication of divine names was only a vulgar misrepresentation of the ubiquity of a single divine force throughout the world. What characterised their theology, in other words, was what we would anachronistically call animism, pantheism, vitalism, or monism. This was a function of Vossius’s belief that true knowledge of God was to be gained from nature, to the limited extent that it revealed his attributes through the scholastic viae. Accordingly, incorrect opinions about him almost always consisted of conflations of him with nature. But those opinions were never fully imperfect, for they always concealed at heart the true monotheist notion of the transcendent deity with all the attributes belonging to him. This was again not in itself a brand new argument– several of the church fathers had insisted that the imperfect monotheism supposedly implied by the doctrines of the Greek philosophers could be used as a proof of the truth of the Christian conception of God. Minucius Felix in particular associated the first principles of all the philosophers from Thales onwards with the Christian 53 That starworship was the first cause of idolatry was an old idea:among patristic apologists, see e.g. Clement, Protr., ii.26.1; Eusebius, Praep. Ev., i.6– ii.1, ii.5.3– 5. Influential pagan sources that place starworship at the origin of religion include Plato, Crat., 397cd; Diodorus Siculus, Bib. hist., i.11.1; Cicero, Nat. deor., I. 49– 65. It is usually contrasted with Euhemerism (worship of dead men), but even Euhemerus seems to have held starworship as an alternative (and possibly prior) origin of religious belief:Diodorus Siculus, Bib. hist., vi.1.8. It thus became a standard opinion among both patristic and early modern writers that Euhemerism came after starworship. For early moderns, this idea was strongly reinforced by the authority of Maimonides:Guide, iii.29 (=Maimonides 1963, 514– 22– published in a popular Latin translation by Johann Buxtorf jr in 1629)and the commentary on Mishnah Avodah Zarah translated by Dionysius Vossius to which the Theologia gentilis was nominally a commentary:Maimonides (1641), 3. 54 Vossius [1641, 1668] (1700), 735a– b. F0r the distinction between popular and elite religion Vossius relied on Varro’s famous scheme, as in n. 56 below. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 70 Levitin Animated to be also the Supreme Deity’, and that he thus consisted of parts; it was these parts that were treated as subordinate deities.82 But how could a real theist– letalone a monotheist– think of God as corporeal, or as composed of parts? Even Cudworth realised that this brought such a theism close to yet another type of atheism, the hylopathian, which he associated with the Ionic sect of philosophers, and especially with Anaximander, Anaximenes and Hippon, whose error it was to reify qualities, thus believing that matter itself could generate animation and life.83 Cudworth’s confusion is encapsulated in the fact that he sometimes classified Diogenes as an atheist, and sometimes exculpated him.84 It was precisely such tensions that Pierre Bayle would soon exploit. 2.2 Pagan Animism Is Fundamentally Different from JudaeoChristian Monotheism Well before before Bayle, some Europeans took the Vossian narrative in a different direction:for them, the discovery that all pagans were animists was not a means for building an apologetics that found this animism to be a (corrupt) monotheism; rather, it was a means of insisting even more on the difference between the pagan and JudaeoChristian worldviews. Once again, a large role was played in this process by philosophers, and so again attitudes to the history of religion were often determined by attitudes to the history of Greek philosophy. Particularly crucial here were the works of Pierre Gassendi, culminating in his Syntagma philosophicum, published in the posthumous Opera omnia (1658).85 Gassendi is of course relatively well known, but misconceptions about his project abound, mostly because the primary sources remain untranslated. It is less the case that Gassendi’s aim was exclusively to ‘sanitise’ or ‘baptise’ Epicureanism;86 rather, it was inherently contextualistcomparative, based on the idea that whatever the flaws in 82 Ibid., 533– 5. 83 See the definition at ibid., 115– 6, and the comparison of Heraclitus and Diogenes to the hylopathians at 533. 84 Cf. Cudworth (1678), 124 (where Diogenes is classed alongside Anaximenes and Hippon as an hylopathian atheist) and 533 (where it is claimed that Simplicius ‘vindicates [him] from that Imputation of Atheism, which Hippo and Anaximander lye under’– Cudworth gives no reference, but Isuspect this is a somewhat strained reading of Phys., 151.20– 30). 85 The discussion here will draw primarily on the Syntagma, but readers should be aware that all the key themes were already adumbrated in Gassendi’s huge Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenes Laertii (Gassendi 1649) and so were available to European readers in the 1650s. 86 Which is the central argument of the muchcited account of Osler (1985). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 71 Epicurus’s system, it was generally preferable to its Greek (and other pagan) competitors.87 For Gassendi, much of Epicurus’s philosophy had to be explained contextually as a reaction against a particular pagan worldview– shared by almost all ancient neareastern sages and Greek philosophers– that can only be described as ‘animist’. When put like this, one immediately wonders whether Gassendi might have been influenced by the new, postScaligeran literature on the history of religion. As it happens, Gassendi had conceived of his ‘Epicurean’ project during a late1620s visit to Holland during which he met Vossius and talked to him about the subject; whether he was directly inspired by the Theologia gentilis (or a proleptic relation of its argument) is unclear.88 In any case, Gassendi’s argument had a strong familial relation to Vossius’s. He agreed with him that all pagan thinkers were theological animists, and that this differentiated the pagan worldview from the JudaeoChristian; he deployed much of the same evidence to make the case. But his one crucial twist to the story was to suggest that this animism should not be treated as an imperfect monotheism, but that its immanent deity was in fact so radically different to the Christian God that a modified Epicurean natural philosophy, and the natural theology that it produced, were– for all their faults– better suited to underpin a correct understanding of the relationship between the divine and the world. Like Vossius, Gassendi insisted that there was continuity between near eastern and Egyptian beliefs about the divine, and the philosophy of the Greeks.89 The ancient oriental theosophers– Indian, Ethiopian, Chaldean, and Egyptian– had posited material first principles, from which emerged the four elements and an animated world, in which the celestial bodies were considered gods.90 This emanationist materialism migrated from ancient theology and poetry into Greek philosophy.91 Of the pre socratics, Xenophanes, Parmenides, 87 See e.g. the summary of his argument Gassendi (1658), i, 5. The importance of this contextualistcomparative approach is recognised in the classic study Joy (1987), esp.83– 105, as well as in LoLordo (2006), 20– 4; no studies have recognised the crucial role Gassendi’s rewriting of the history of animism plays in his system. 88 Rademaker (1981), 220– 1, 282; Sassen (1960), 22, 24, 28, 43– 4. Vossius’s book was immediately warmly received in the philosophical circles in which Gassendi operated:Mersenne, for example, was ‘dying to see it’:Constantijn Huygens to André Rivet, 8 October 1641, in Huygens 1911– 17, iii, 243 (‘Je luy [Mersenne] envoye l’Idolatria Vossii par Flissinghe et Calais; il meurt d’envie de la veoir …’). 89 See e.g. Gassendi (1658), i, 6b (in the chapter ‘De origine Philosophiae’). 90 See e.g. ibid., i, 12a– b. 91 A clear statement is offered at ibid., i, 288a. Gassendi then quotes the Orphic hymn to Kronos, ‘ὃς ναίεις κατὰ πάντα μέρη κόσμοιο, γενάρχα’, which he very loosely translates in pantheistic terms as ‘Mundi Progenitor, qui parteis incolis omneis’. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 72 Levitin Melissus, and Zeno of Elea all held that the corporeal universe was One, equivalent with god; hence they also posited the immovability of the universe.92 It was Gassendi’s discussion that brought the figure of Xenophanes– previously of little importance in European scholarship, but to be so important for Bayle and many subsequent thinkers– to the fore.93 In the chapter ‘Sitne Mundus Anima praeditus’, Gassendi went on to explain that this animism was inherited by almost all Greek philosophers:the Ionics with their omnipresent material first principles; the Pythagoreans, Platonists, and Stoics with their variants on a divine anima mundi; those like Hippocrates who posited a vital principle; and even Aristotle, whom Gassendi creatively reinterpreted at length so as to be able to conclude that ‘Aristotle can easily be seen to be drawn to the opinion of the anima mundi’.94 It was thus no surprise that the worst animist of all (pessime omnium) was the Aristotelian Strato, who placed all divine power in nature, without even attributing to it sense or form.95 Why were the pagan philosophers so beholden to animism? First of all, because, lacking revelation, they could not figure out the origin of individual souls, and so assigned that origin to one, universal soul.96 Second, it was because the resulting animism fitted so well with pagan theology, allowing them to explain the many teleological phenomena observed in the world, and how the world itself was god, and natural objects subordinate deities.97 But Gassendi’s most important argument– one that woud shape scholarship until the present day– was that the animist, or even pantheist, theology of all pagan thinkers stemmed from their inability to believe that substances could be created ex nihilo, an inability that was understandable given that such a belief was indeed irrational, and knowledge of it depended on access to revelation. Some were fullout eternalists:most famously Aristotle, whose position could be traced back to the near east, to the Chaldeans.98 But much more common was the belief that the world was created from preexistent matter, held by a 92 Ibid., i, 138b. 93 The fragements of Xenophanes had been published in the important collection Estienne (1573), at 35– 9. Israel (2006), 438 therefore seems wrong to imply that his ideas were not debated before Bayle. 94 Gassendi (1658), ii, 243a:‘Ex quo obiter intelligitur videri posse facile Aristotelem pertrahi ad opinionem de Anima Mundi’. See also the inclusion of Aristotle in the list of animists at i, 333a– b. 95 Ibid., i, 296b– 297a. 96 Ibid., i, 159b. 97 Ibid., i, 160a– b. 98 Ibid., i, 162a– b; Gassendi does not give a precise source for the Chaldeans, saying only ‘de quibus testatur Diodorus’:the reference must be to Bib. hist., ii.30. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 73 huge number of Greek philosophers (all the Milesians, Stoics, and atomists), and traceable back to the Egyptians and Indian Brachmans, as well as ‘innumerable others’.99 Revelation taught that the world is created from nothing, but the pagans, not having such knowledge, ‘all agree that that matter from which the world was created was preexistent, because nothing can be made out of nothing’.100 This had two momentous consequences:paganism gravitated either towards dualism, or to pantheistic monism. The first was reflected in the pagans’ tendency to posit two principles:God and preexistent matter (the latter often represented by chaos), which was the view both of the theogonic poets (Orpheus, Hesiod) and philosophers like Plato and Anaxagoras.101 The second was evident from the fact that they so often conflated God and the world, usually by making him equivalent to some kind of immanent principle like the anima mundi; as we have seen, Gassendi thought this had been the view of everyone from the near eastern sages through to Aristotle, and had only been rejected by Epicurus.102 It was here that lay the philosophical payoff. Epicurus– for all his faults– could now appear as a counterpoint to the dangerously animist physics of all the others pagans:indeed, Gassendi even explicitly spoke of Epicurus as an opponent of ‘idolatry’.103 Where all the pagans animated the heavens, Epicurus refused to anthropomorphise natural bodies.104 On the subject of efficient causation, all the Greek philosophers attributed it to a divine principle immanent in the world; only Epicurus, with his atoms themselves being efficient principles, left space for the correct view, when a transcendent God upon whom material activity is dependent was added. As Gassendi put it, God need not be an anima mundi, for it was ‘enough that he is incorporeal, and penetrates and maintains the whole machine of the world’.105 Or on the subject of 99 Gassendi (1658), i, 162b– 163b. Gassendi again does not give sources, apart from Laërtius for the Egyptians and Strabo for the Brachmans:he must have been thinking of Vit. phil., Proem., 1; Geog., xv.1.70. 100 Gassendi (1658), i, 163a:‘Ut discrimen autem praemittam, quod inter hoc Fidei dogma, & illud de Mundi exortu Philosophorum placitum intercedit; ecce Sacra Fides decernit Mundum Deo Authore coepisse; Philosophorum autem plerique coepisse cum volunt aut serie causarum fatali, aut casu. Omnes deinde in id consentiunt, ut materia praefurit, ex qua procreatus sit, quod nihil ex nihilo fiat; cum Fides tamen Sacra declaret fuisse Mundum ex nihilo, nullave materia creatum’. See also 480b. 101 Ibid., i, 481a. 102 Ibid., i, 288a– 289a. 103 Ibid., i, 161a; also 312a– b. 104 Ibid., i, 520a (in the chapter ‘Sintne Caelum, Sideraque animata?’). 105 Ibid., 333– 7 for the whole discussion, and 334a– b for the quotation (‘Sufficiat Deum quidem esse incorporeum, ac pervadere, fovereque universam Mundi Machinam’). From a philosophical perspective, an excellent discussion is LoLordo (2005); the only aspect Ican Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 74 Levitin the soul, while it could not be denied that Epicurus held the heinous view of it as material and mortal, all the other Greeks– following other pagan predecessors– believed the soul to be a thin material substance that dissipated into the anima mundi upon death; hence they held such equally heinous opinions as the soul’s eternity, and its transmigration.106 In Gassendi’s hands, the Vossian narrative of universal pagan animism was transformed. That animism came to look so distant from the transcendent God of JudaeoChristian theology that Epicurean physics was more likely to function as a preparative for the latter. Indeed, Gassendi even spoke of the way in which Epicurean physics could permit an analogical predication of the divine attributes:Epicurus was effectively turned into Aquinas, inferior in theology but superior in natural philosophy.107 The one thing that Epicurus had failed to recognise– and which it was possible to recognise from nature– was that unity was one of the divine perfections. That unity was recognised by those who equated him with a first principle or an anima mundi, but only at the price of surrendering transcendence:it was precisely because he did not see God as the form or soul of the world that Epicurus did not achieve this quasimonotheism.108 But the immanent God of these pagan ‘monotheists’ was hardly a simple unity in the JudaeoChristian sense, for by definition, he had to consist of parts.109 Such a conception of the divine led to further errors, such as the idea that the soul as a very thin, fiery substance, which Gassendi asserted was prevalent among the pagans; indeed, this was the inevitable notion of the soul for those without revelation.110 This ‘monotheism’ was thus a chimera, and was in fact completely incompatible with Christianity. Unsurprisingly, Gassendi had no time for Herbert’s monotheisic reading of pagan theology.111 disagree with is the claim that Gassendi’s attacks on the anima mundi were covert attacks on Ficino, Fludd, or some other modern exponent of the doctrine (89– 92):the brilliance of Gassendi’s argument was to imply that virtually everyone– crucially including Aristotle– was an animist akin to Plato or the Stoics. 106 See the huge discussion in Gassendi 1658, ii, 238b– 56b; it is here that Gassendi develops most fully his animistic reading of Aristotle. See further ii, 621a– 625a. 107 Ibid., i, 293b– 294b, and the explanation why Epicurus’s analogism was better than the hubristic one of the other pagans at 296b. 108 Ibid., i, 303b– 305a. 109 Ibid., i, 307a– b; also 333a– b, 334a. 110 Ibid., ii, 250– 6. See also LoLordo (2006), 229– 47. 111 See Gassendi’s attack on Herbert’s De veritate, the ‘Ad librum D.Edoardi Herberti Angli, De veritate, epistola’, composed 1634, in Gassendi (1658), iii, 411– 19. Also Gassendi to Elie Diodati, 29 August 1634, in Mersenne (1945– 88), iv, 335– 41, at 336– 8. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 75 Even more than Vossius, Gassendi had identified a ‘logic’ to paganism:from the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit, they had all (Epicurus excepted) arrived either at pantheistic monism or dualism (both, in any case, were animistic). He therefore did not need to offer precise historical or diffusionist explanations for similarities between near eastern religion and Greek philosophy; it was enough to prove that they had stemmed from similar operations of the human mind. This ‘conjectural’ mode of comparatism would become ever more popular in the second half of the seventeenth century, not least because chronological scholarship was rendering the old search for precise genealogical links between pagan and biblical figures ever more unstable. Gassendi’s conceptualisation of paganism would prove hugely influential, as we shall shortly see. This means that if we were to conceptualise seventeenthcentury comparative religion as a ‘regime’, we would also have to recognise divisions within that regime. On the one hand, it was united by the broad consensus that pagan religions were animistic. On the other, it was divided as to whether that animism concealed an imperfect monotheism (Vossius, Herbert, Pfanner, Lescalopier, Cudworth, etc.), or whether it was a pantheism or monism that was entirely incompatible with the true conception of God (the Gassendist argument). In other words, we are not dealing with a monolithic ‘orthodoxy’, but rather a complex debate about the interpretation of a large set of proof texts. So for example, precisely because they both agreed that pagan theology was grounded in animism, Cudworth could use much of Gassendi’s data, while reaching the opposite conclusion:pagan animism was grounded on an (imperfect) monotheism.112 But others did adopt Gassendi’s conclusions, and used them to reconstruct more fully the history of ancient religion. Increasingly, they also incorporated more of the evidence that was flooding in from the extraEuropean world. The natural person to do this was the physician François Bernier (1620– 1688), who studied with, and became secretary to, Gassendi, before embarking on a twelveyear journey to the east, including Palestine, Egypt, Arabia and then India, where he served as a physician at the court of the last of the great Mughal emperors, Aurangzeb.113 The religious beliefs that Bernier encountered there he approached in a Gassendist framework, as we can see from his very first 112 For Cudworth’s huge (often unacknowledged) debts to Gassendi, which he attempted to use against the Frenchman’s conclusions, see Levitin (2015b), 362– 3, 424– 5. 113 On Bernier’s travels and reports, the most useful recent accounts are those in Tinguely, ‘Introduction’, in Bernier (2008), 7– 36 and Dew (2009), 131– 67. On this and many subsequent subjects Ishould like to signal my very large debt to App (2014), here 161– 74. Burke (1999) recognises that Bernier’s opinions about the east were informed by his philosophical position, but fails to identify that position correctly. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 76 Levitin description (dating from 1667)of what he called the ‘grande Cabale’ (i.e. the inner doctrine, as opposed to the ‘eternal’ idolatry) of the Indian Brahmins: You are not unfamiliar with the doctrine of many of the ancient philosophers, concerning that great Soul of the World, of which they want our souls, and those animals, to be portions; if we were to look carefully in Plato and Aristotle, we would perhaps find that they were of this opinion. It is this that is the universal doctrine of the gentile Indian Pendets, and this same doctrine currently makes up the Cabbala of the Sufis, and of the most part of the learned men of Persia, and which one finds explained in those heightened and emphatic Persian verses, the Goultchenraz, or Garden of Mysteries; it is also the same as that of [Robert] Fludd, which our great Gassendi has refuted so learnedly, and in which the great part of our chymists lost themselves.114 The pneumatological pantheism attributed to Plato and Aristotle, and the subsequent reference to Gassendi’s attack on Fludd, leave us with no doubt what philosophical ideas Bernier had in mind when he encountered texts like the Sufi Gulshani rāz (Secret Rose Garden) by Mahmoūd Shabestarī (1288– 1340), to which he here makes reference (and which was indeed deeply influenced by the neoplatonism of the great Sufi scholar Ibn Arabi (1165– 1240)). Bernier combined his reading of this text with that of another– the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad, a part of the Hindu Vedic scripture– and with oral reports, to arrive at a distinctly ‘Gassendist’ vision of elite South Asian religion.115 On Bernier’s reading, it posited a pantheist first principle, Achar, from whom both souls and all material objects emanated and to whom they returned:this was represented by the allegory of a spider secreting and then retracting its webs. The world 114 ‘Lettre a monsieur Chapelain, envoyée de Chiras en Perse, le 4.Octobre 1667. Touchant les Superstitions, étranges façons de faire, & Doctrine des Indous ou Gentils de l’Hindoustan’, in Bernier 1671, 127– 8 [separate pagination]:‘Il n’est pas que vous ne sçachiez la doctrine de beaucoup d’anciens Philosophes, touchant cette grande ame du Monde, dont ils veulent que nos ames, & celles des animaux, soient des portions:Si nous penetrions bien dans Platon & dans Aristote, peutestre que nous trouverions qu’ils ont donné dans cette pensée; C’est là la Doctrine comme universelle des Pendets Gentils des Indes, & c’est cette mesme Doctrine qui fait encore à present la Cabale des Soufys, & de la pluspart des gens de lettres de Perse, & qui se trouve expliquée en Vers Persiens si relevez & si enfatiques dans leur Goultchenraz ou parterre des Mysteries; Comme ç’a esté cellelà mesme de Flud que nostre grand Gassendy a refute si doctement, & celle oü se perdent la pluspart de nos Chymiques’. 115 My understanding of Bernier’s Indian sources is entirely informed by App (2014), 164– 71, but Prof. App does not recognise the Gassendist origins of Bernier’s whole framework. For a modern pantheistmonist reading of the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad, see e.g. Puligandla (1996). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 77 is thus an illusion, and the only reality is the omnipresent, material deity. Of course, Bernier insisted that he had challenged the Sufis to explain how a corporeal principle could come to constitute the world as humans experienced it, but according to him they could only reply with allegories that failed to clarify how a god ‘who is not corporeal but Biapek, as they say, and incorruptible, should nonetheless be divisible into so many bodies and souls’– the ageold objection to all immanationist theories of the divine.116 The amalgamation of Gassendi’s vision of the history of paganism with such an account of panAsian ‘theology’ was definitively crystallised in Bernier’s Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi (1674), especially in the modified second edition of 1684.117 Here we see two important developments. First of all, the account of Asian pantheism, in the chapter ‘Si le Monde est Animé’ (an exact counterpart to the section in Gassendi’s Syntagma with the same title in Latin), has been incorporated into the full Gassendian ‘conjectural’ history of belief about the divine. All pagans ascribed to the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit; accordingly, they were either fullout eternalists, or believed that the world was made from preexistent matter.118 From here, they logically posited animist, pantheist, or monist systems in which the world either emanated from, or was informed by, an omnipresent divinity, and individual souls were part of the material anima mundi.119 The second development was that the geography of the ‘Asiatic theology’ was now much expanded, to incorporate also the far east, including China and Japan.120 (We shall soon encounter the sources that allowed Bernier to make this claim.) The Gassendist vision of the history of paganism, largely focussed on Greek philosophy, had been expanded to incorporate almost all of Asia, and used to construct a comparatist project of truly epic proportions. Bernier had been driven above all by his curiosity about the culture he encountered. But this comparatist project also presupposed a similar view of natural theology to that of his teacher. Most of the ancients (with some notable exceptions) had correctly recognised the need for a divinity from the order of 116 ‘Lettre’, in Bernier 1671, 131:‘… comme il se peu faire que Dieu n’estant pas corporel, mais Biapek, comme ils auoüent & incorruptible, il soit neanmoins divisé en tant de portions de corps & d’ames’. By ‘Biapek’ Bernier almost certainly meant ‘vyāpaka’ (), meaning ‘all pervading’, which he had already discussed, on the basis of the oral testimony of religious figures in Varanasi, in ‘Lettre’, 123– 4. (This identification is already made in Bernier 2008, 526.) The concept derives from logical thought; see e.g. Bochenski (2001), 141– 2. Iam deeply grateful to my colleage PéterDániel Szántó for confirming my thoughts on the matter. 117 The differences in the editions have already been noted in App (2014), 166– 8. 118 Bernier (1684), ii, 39– 42, 96– 101. 119 Ibid., ii, 81– 4. 120 Ibid., ii, 90. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 78 Levitin nature; this was also true of the Asians.121 But they had mistakenly ascribed that order not to a transcendent god, but to an informing soul. In reality, one couldn’t know the nature of God. All that was possible was a version of the scholastic via negationis:removing the imperfections from the creation to arrive at an analogical account of the divine attributes. An incomplete model of this method has been adopted by Epicurus, as Gassendi had argued.122 But one did not need to have travelled to the east to expand Gassendi’s ‘logic of paganism’ to include most, if not all, of the history of world religions. Before Bernier had put pen to paper, this had already been done with an apologetic purpose in mind by the Leipzigbased Lutheran pedagogue Jakob Thomasius (1622– 84), above all in his Schediasma historicum,123 and by the young English divine Samuel Parker, in his Tentamina de Deo.124 Both books were published in 1665, which should perhaps be recognised as an annus mirabilis not only for mathematics but also for new conceptions of the history of religion. They both sought to show the stark difference between– and therefore incompatibility of– pagan and JudaeoChristian philosophy and theology. Accordingly, they criticized both the church fathers and those moderns– Steuco, Mornay, and in Parker’s case even Scaliger, Selden, and Vossius– who they thought had not gone far enough in recognizing that incompatibility. (Thomasius even accused them of ‘syncretisim’, popularising the phrase.)125 121 Ibid., ii, 225– 6 for the ancient philosophers, and 255– 6 for the Asians:‘N’ajouterayje point icy qu’entre les preuves qui regardent la Providence il n’y en a point qui plûssent davantage à Danechemendkan un des plus celebres sçavans de l’Asie, & des plus puissans Omerahs de la Cour du Grand Mogol, que celles qui si tirent de l’Usage des Parties’. Bernier is here referring to Danishmand Khan (Mullah Shafi’a’i), an official at the court of Aurangzeb to whom he taught Gassendist and Cartesian philosophy and Harvey’s ideas about circulation; for their interactions, see further Dew (2009), 151– 5. 122 Bernier (1684), ii, 261– 2. 123 This work has recently received some attention:the best treatment is LehmannBrauns (2004), 21– 111. No account has recognised the debt to Gassendi. While the Schediasma was the best known of Thomasius’s works, and the first in which his ideas about the history of religion were published, he stated those ideas in pedagogy and subsequent publications both before and after 1665; in what follows, Iwill offer corroborative citations to the most important of these. 124 For a full account of this previously unappreciated book, see Levitin (2014a). 125 For Thomasius’s criticisms of the church fathers, see, among other loci, Thomasius (1665), 38– 9, ‘De secta nominalium’ [lecture delivered 28 Jan1658], in Thomasius (1683), 254; ‘De ideis Platonicis exemplaribus’ [lecture delivered 9 April1659], in Thomasius (1683), 283– 4, 291; ‘De syncretismo Peripatetico’ [lecture delivered 28 Jan1664], in Thomasius (1683), 337; ‘Opposita illorum errori, qui asserunt praeexistentiam animarum humanarum’ [lecture delivered 29 Jan1674], in Thomasius (1683), 474; ‘An gentiles in anima mundi agnoverint spiritum sanctum?’ [lecture delivered 6 June1663], in Thomasius (1693), 353– 4, 355– 6 (a particularly apt summary), 359– 60. Criticism of Steuco and Mornay came as early as the lecture Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 79 Instead, they both drew, with rather less acknowledgement than they might have, on Gassendi’s vision of the ‘logic’ of paganism, so as to explain why pagan and JudaeoChristian religion were necessarily so different. According to Thomasius, the metaphysical basis, or ‘first falsehood’ (Πρῶτον Ψεῦδος) of all pagan religion– from Zoroaster and the Chaldeans in the near east through to the Egyptians and then the Greek philosophical sects– was that nothing could be made from nothing. This assumption led either to an emanationist monism in which the divine essence was the only real substance in the world, or to a dualism in which two uncreated principles– one divine and one material– allowed the pagans to absolve god of the charge of having created evil. What connected all pagan thought was animism, for they simply could not conceive of a transcendent deity, a conception that required revealed knowledge of the irrational doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Parker likewise emphasised in Gassendist fashion the animism that characterized all of pagan religion, discussing a huge range of historical evidence (much of it the same as had been examined by Vossius, whose book he clearly had open when composing his own). The title of his central chapter is ‘The ancient philosophers held the world soul to be the supreme divinity’; within it he charted the growth of such idolatrous animism from the rise of starworship in the east, through to more specific forms of natureworship, such as sunworship and the ‘sacred obscenities’ associated with various fertility gods (such as the permanently erect Priapus and Baal Peor), the belief in which he claimed could be explained by the pagans extrapolating from the generational power of the sun. Philosophical error stemmed from this religious worldview. As the pagans sought to explain the providential operation of the celestial bodies, they attributed to them intelligence, and then omniscience, omnipotence and the power of predetermination. From here it was only a short step to asserting the deity’s omnipresence and to equating God with nature. This move delivered on 20 June 1644, ‘Mysterius SS Trinitatis ex ratione … demonstrari nequaquam posse’, in Thomasius (1683), 5, n.h; also ‘An gentiles in anima mundi agnoverint spiritum sanctum’, Thomasius (1683), 354– 5, listing Steuco and Mornay among those ‘Qui omnes accuratis voluminibus laboraverunt, ut Religionem nostrum e Paganica, veritatem scilicet e mendaciis, aurum e cloaca elicerent’; 362; also Thomasius (1676), 20. F0r Parker contra Scaliger, Selden, and Vossius, see Parker (1665), 269. As for ‘syncretism’, Thomasius knew that the term had first been deployed in this way by Georg Horn, in Horn (1655), 323– 4:see ‘De syncretismo peripatetico’, in Thomasius (1683), 326, n.b; but he seems to have been more influenced by an academic dissertation by Michael Siricius, a now obscure theology professor at Giessen (on whom, see K.Krause, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Leipzig, 1875– 1912), xxxiv, 417), which argued that Simon Magus was the first of the syncretists:see Siricius (1664), 58, cited at Thomasius (1665), 28, n. q. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 86 Levitin between this vast religious system and the monism of the Greek philosophers, so as to counter Ricci’s ‘scholastic’ reading of Confucianism. He printed Longobardo’s treatise with a commentary in which he regularly drew comparisons with the Greek monists– not least by using the Coimbra Aristotle commentary– so as to prove that ‘the Chineses, according to the Principles of their natural Philosopy, and Physicks, had not the knowledge of a spiritual Substance distinct from the Material, as we assign; and consequently knew not what God, or Angels, or the rational Soul were’.144 This characterisation of the biggest system of religious belief in the world was read by a host of European men of letters. For example, Navarrete’s book was a favourite of John Locke’s, who repeated the ideas about Confucian atheism in the fourth edition of the Essay concerning human understanding to show that even the idea of God was not innate.145 Antoine Arnauld learnt Spanish just to read Navarrete, and subsequently incorporated into his muchread antiJesuit polemics lengthy descriptions of eastern religions as pantheistmonist.146 Before the century was out, Noël Alexandre, the leading French Dominican theologian and a major player on the European scholarly scene, had published books not only propagating the RodriguesLongobardo reading, but also systematically comparing Chinese and GraecoRoman idolatry. Both, according to him, only recognised the heavens as their supreme divinity, with the only difference being that the Chinese (somewhat counterintuitively) worshipped them without thinking them divine. The closest thing the Chinese had to a deity was the Neoconfucian monist first principle, li– original Confucianism was no different. This was reflected in a broader theology of comparativism, justified by a reinterpretation of Acts. Paul had never meant that the Athenians’ Unknown God was the true God, only that he had come to preach to them the God they had been looking for. Otherwise he would surely have encouraged pagan conversion by instructing the Areopagite to place an inscription to the Unknown God in the church at Athens of which he had become the first bishop, and St Mark would have likewise have put an inscription to Kneph– the ageless Egyptian deity who was considered to be the ‘sovereign reason’ of the 154a– b, 183a– 224b (187b– 188a for the point about ‘great resemblance’). The fullest study of Navarrete is Cummins (1993). 144 Churchill (1704), 183a– 224b (184b– 185a for the quotation); see e.g. 193a for the comparison with the Greek monists– he was only developing Longobardo’s own point (see e.g. 200a– b). 145 Locke (1706), 38 [i.4] (=Locke 1979, 88); Talbot (2010), 187 usefully collects evidence but mistakes the edition of the Essay to which the reference to Navarrete was first added. 146 See e.g. Arnauld (1689), 427– 57; Arnauld (1690), 35– 6; Arnauld (1692), e.g. 40– 1. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 87 world– in the church at Alexandria. That they had not was an obvious rebuke to the Jesuits’ tactics.147 In the meantime, the official Jesuit view had received its definitive statement in the longgestating Confucius Sinarum philosophus, finally brought out in Paris by Philippe Couplet in 1687, and containing translations of three of the Confucian Four Books (Daxue, Zhong Yong, and Lunyu).148 Both this spectacular book and other defences of the Jesuits continued to insist that original Confucianism was a true monotheism, and that Ricci had been right to tell the literati that a correct examination of nature, combined with analogical predication of the divine attributes, would lead them back to the ‘original’ Chinese conception of the divine that Confucius had preserved– just as Paul had used pagan notions at the Areopagus.149 That concept had been established too close to the time of Noah himself to be corrupted by idolatry or atheism; only later did the the modifications introduced by Buddhism and the hubristic speculation of the Song Neoconfucians turn it into an esoteric atheist monism for the elite and exoteric idolatry for the masses.150 But the Jesuit missionaries were understandably outofdate when it came to their use of philosophical categories. Ricci and the editors of the Confucius 147 Alexandre (1699), 7– 16, esp. 12– 15 (relying on Longobardo and Navarrete); [Alexandre] (1700), 49– 52 (comparison of Chinese and GraecoRoman heaven worship), 55– 8 (Unknown God, Kneph), 62– 5 (T’ien/ Shangti=li). It should be noted that by this stage the debate had become dominated by the question of whether Chinese rites (ancestor and Confucius veneration) were civil or idolatrous– for the interplay of the two issues, see Lundbaek (1994). Kneph, was known to early moderns from references in Plutarch, Is. Os., 359D and Porphyry quoted in Eusebius, Pr. Ev., iii.11, and through them became a favourite example for Egyptian monotheism or esoteric monism:see e.g. Nicolai (1681), 23; Montfaucon (1719), ii, 269– 70. For Alexandre’s scholarly career more broadly, see above all Quantin (2007). 148 For the composition and circumstances of publication, see Golvers (1998); Dew (2009), 205– 33; for the structure of the argument, the Chinese sources used, and the translation principles, see Mungello (1981); Lundbaek (1983); Meynard (2015), 2– 70. 149 Couplet etal. (1687), lxv, lxvii, xciii (=Meynard 2011, 171, 173– 4, 208:‘Shangdi is not a personal name, like Saturn, or other names, but rather an appellative such as ‘divinity’ or ‘God’. Etymologically, also, it has no imperfection, but on the contrary expresses power and supreme majesty. So, according to the opinion of Doctor Thomas [Aquinas] and other Theologians, the one true God could be called by names expressing perfection without imperfection. It is fair and just for us to glorify the Ancient Chinese, for they knew, expressed and worshipped the true God under such a name’). For the original Latin, Ihave been able to consult the copy presented to Louis xiv (to whom the work was dedicated), now All Souls College, Oxford, shelfmark LR.4.c.2. There are, alas, no annotations. 150 Couplet etal. (1687), lxxiv– lxxv, lxxiv– lxxvii (=Meynard 2011, 177– 8; 183– 8), including the important statement of Lactantius, Div. Inst., ii.13, ‘errant igitur qui deorum cultus ab exordio rerum fuisse contendunt et priorem esse gentilitatem quam dei religionem, quam putant posterius inventam, quia fontem atque originem veritatis ignorant’. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 88 Levitin Sinarum philosophus had not only cited long discredited precedents like Hermes and the Sibyls as for the possibility of pagan monotheism,151 but, more importantly, they had also used a modified scholastic Aristotelianism to ‘save’ Confucianism. But as we have seen, that Aristotelianism was now being lumped together with the pre socratic monism that Aristotle himself had so famously condemned. In other words, it was becoming ever harder to claim that there could be any natural theology that could correctly predicate the divine attributes, and hence that any pagans could have had anything that could be labelled a ‘monotheist’ conception of the divine. Some reviewers of the Confucius Sinarum philosophus made exactly this point. In response to the Jesuits’ argument that preaching Shang ti in China was no different to the early Christians preaching θεός or Deus to the Greeks and Romans, because in both cases they were appellatives predicating the attributes of ‘divinity’ rather than personal names like ‘Saturn’, Henri Basnage noted that this was to ignore the fact that pagans often used personal names to refer to the ‘different qualities’ of one God– Neptune for the sea, Mars for war, etc.152 For this idea, Basnage drew on an extraordinarily learned recent book by the Dutch antiquarian Gisbert Cuper, analysing an Egyptian medal depicting Harpocrates. According to Cuper, the medal was typical of both Egyptian and wider pagan culture, in that it was an allegorical depiction of their one ‘real’ deity:the sun.153 In other words, pagans (at least elite ones) were monotheists, but only in the sense that they worshipped one deity; that deity was a natural object rather than the transcendent, omnipotent immaterial being predicated by correct natural theology. Even this, Cuper at one point admitted, may have been a later ex post facto justification of primitive polytheism by the wisest among the pagan philosophers. This point was in turn emphasised by Jean Le Clerc, who insisted that monotheistic readings of the pantheon of pagan gods were defensive backprojections by later pagan philosophers writing against the Christians.154 On the basis of this exegetical point, he offered a whole developmental theory of myth and religion:all primitive religions were polytheistic, and only later did pagan elites reinterpret them in monotheistc terms. To read pagan polytheism via later philosophy, as Selden and Vossius 151 E.g. Couplet etal. (1687), xcix– c (=Meynard 2011, 216). 152 Basnage de Beauval (1687), 65– 79, at 70– 1. 153 Cuper (1687), 2:‘Scilicet Harpocrates nobis ante oculos ponitur, non silentium tantum digito suatens, verum solis imaginem referens; ad quem ut plerique dii, ita & ille a vesanae religionis cultoribus relatus est’, and esp.111– 17, engaging much with Vossius. 154 See his review of Cuper’s Harpocrates in Le Clerc (1687a), 136– 7. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 89 had done, was a grave anachronism.155 This antiphilosophical interpretation of myth would culminate in the early eighteenth century in the works of the Abbé Banier.156 Le Clerc, meanwhile, when he reviewed the Confucium Sinarum philosophus, was tactfully silent about the veracity of the Jesuits’ interpretation, but he later made it clear that he supported the RodriguesLongobardo line:Chinese religion was either fullout polytheism, or, among the elite, an atheistic monism.157 Indeed, in the final quarter of the century, more and more Europeans were becoming convinced, in Gassendist fashion, that pagan conceptions of the divine were so animistic that they could not be in any way compatible with the JudaeoChristian transcendent god. This point was being made ever more prominently by natural philosophers. Robert Boyle’s hugely influential Free enquiry into the vulgarly received notion of nature (1686) argued in Gassendist fashion that the Western teleogical conception of ‘nature’, made famous in Aristotle definition of it as an internal principle of motion (Physics ii.1), was in fact an inheritance from the animist idolatry of the near east, and needed to be replaced.158 In Germany, this claim was combined with Thomasius’s version of the Gassendi narrative, and proved particularly influential in stimulating debate about what form of natureworship defined ancient philosophies and religions– Leibniz was only one of many to obsess about the issue.159 In France, the leading philosopher of the late seventeenth century, Nicolas Malebranche, in his De la recherché de la vérité (1678) introduced his famous doctrine of occasionalism (the theory of causation that states that all events are caused directly by God) by presenting it as a response to the animism that necessarily characterised all other philosophies and theologies (he cited Vossius), and which 155 See his important piece on Selden’s De Diis Syris in the Le Clerc (1705), 80– 146, esp.122– 3:‘Qu’on lise la fin du III. Chapitre de ses [i.e. Selden’s] Prolegomenes, & l’on verra, qu’il confond des conjectures philosophiques avec la Religion’. The reference is to Selden, De Diis Syris (London, 1617), lxvii, where Selden claimed that the pagans had known of God’s unity from the study of nature, as per n. 43 above. Le Clerc was well aware that Vossius was following Selden’s lead:137, 142– 3. 156 Banier (1711), esp. i, 1– 49; Banier (1738), i, 19– 70; Levitin (2015a), 719. 157 Le Clerc (1687b), even here hinting that the Neoconfucian interpretation of the Four Books was preferable (432), and then Le Clerc (1694), 95– 8. 158 Boyle (1686); Levitin (2014b). The book was quickly made available to continental audiences in a Latin translation published in London in 1687, with an edition appearing in Geneva the year after. 159 The main participants were the Altdorf professor Johann Christoph Sturm, Kiel professor of medicine Günther Christopher Schelhammer, and then Leibniz. Among several discussions, see Baku (1891); Mulsow (2006); Vassányi (2011), 13– 18. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 90 Levitin according to him had derived from eastern religion before impregnating Greek philosophy and, via Aristotle, Christian theology.160 Of course, some continued to use new sources so as to develop Ricciesque arguments about other religions.161 For example in Oxford, Edward Pococke, in his groundbreaking Specimen historiae Arabum (1650), used a barrage of Arabic sources (including that pioneer of Islamic religious comparativism, Muhammad alShahrastānī), to suggest that the most famous dualist of them all, Zoroaster, had in fact been a monotheist.162 Pococke’s student and successor in the Laudian Arabic chair, Thomas Hyde, in his aforementioned Historia religionis veterum Persarum (1700), perhaps the most interesting work of the history of religions published in our period, combined a pioneering use of Persian and other near eastern sources (many brought to him by East India Company merchants) with the Arabic monotheist interpretation of Zoroastrianism and a broader framework clearly adopted from the Jesuits, in particular the Confucius Sinarum philosophus. According to Hyde, who had in Oxford hosted Shen Fuzong, a Chinese convert brought back to Europe by Couplet, Zoroastrian dualism was not really a proper dualism, but a corrupt monotheism in which fire worship was pyrodulia rather than pyrolatria (fire being a symbol of the one true divinity), and Mithra represented not only the sun but also God. The evil principle, Ahâriman, was created, unlike the good principle.163 But such optimistic readings of pagan theology were becoming ever harder to sustain. The culmination of the atheistmonist inteprepretation of pagan religion that had grown in popularity during the seventeenth century can be found in the late works of the famous Huguenot Pierre Bayle, especially his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697, with important additions in the second edition of 1702)and Continuation des pensées diverses (1705).164 Bayle’s 160 See Malebranche [1678] (1958– 84), ii, 309– 20, chapter entitled ‘De l’erreur la plus dangereuse de la Philosophie des Anciens’, and the fifteenth ‘Éclaircissement’ (iii, 203– 52, esp.248– 5). As far as Iam aware, none of the vast literature on Malebranche’s occasionalism has discussed the significance of the fact that its first introduction came in this historicalcomparative mode. 161 Leibniz’s writings on China, composed with one eye on Bayle, are only one example:they are usefully collected and translated in Leibniz (1994). 162 Pococke (1650), 147– 9. The key locus is Shahrastānī (1986– 93), i, 638– 54; for the broader context, see Bürgel 1999, 202– 12. 163 For full details, including Hyde’s combination of this with a plagiarism thesis, see Levitin (2015b), 95– 108; Stausberg (1998), ii, 680– 717; for his meeting with Shen Fuzong, Poole (2015). 164 Full details of how and why Bayle arrived at his conclusions, drawing on all his works and correspondence, will appear in my Kingdom of darkness, ch. 3. To avoid unnecessary confusion for the reader, subsequent references will refer to the name of the text cited, and then to the citation in the Oeuvres diverses (=Bayle 1964– 82 in the Bibliography). As for the Dictionnaire (henceforth DHC) Iwill give the article title with the remark letter Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 91 enemies described him as a philosophe, and the dominant trend of modern scholarship has been to explain his thought by using philosophical labels, above all ‘scepticism’. But the Dictionnaire in particular was as much a product of obsessive reading in historical and ethnographic materials as of philosophical speculation. Bayle’s initial aim had been to compose a dictionary of scholarly errors, an aim that continued to manifest itself in the final version.165 By reading all of Bayle’s oeuvres, Ihave become convinced that he consciously sought to demonstrate that the ‘imperfect monotheism’ version of the history of religion– whether developed in the hands of ancient or modern commentators– was just such an error, and that it had to be replaced in favour of what Ihave called the Gassendist version, which emphasised the pantheism or monism of all nonJudaeoChrisitan system. This was not, as is commonly assumed, a critique of a basic consensus gentium argument. Rather, it was a much more sophisticated, scholarly vision of how cultures bereft of JudaeoChristian revelation– specifically the revealed doctrine of creation ex nihilo– conceived of a first principle and its relationship to the world. Bayle never discussed the origin of paganism systematically, but his thoughts on the subject can be gathered from several places. Like almost everyone in the seventeenth century, he suggested that the origin of idolatry lay in starworship.166 But he did not dwell particularly on this original moment; instead, he discussed at length in various articles of the Dictionnaire how the first full system of pagan religion was developed by the poets. This was a system of pure, polytheist idolatry:there was no deeper allegory behind the myths, and the people believed these myths literally.167 Just like Le Clerc and later the Abbé Banier, Bayle was fiercely critical of an earlier generation of mythographers– above all Natale Conti– who had sought allegorical or philosophical explanations; Conti’s approach had been yet another victim of the scholarly turn against the search for similarity from the late sixteenth century onwards.168 Nonetheless, Bayle did see one connection between this primitive in subscript, followed by page references to the fifth edition of 1740 (=Bayle 1740 in the Bibliography). 165 van Lieshout (2001); Vermeir (2012). For Bayle and travel literature, see Charnley (1998). For his biography, the best account remains Labrousse (1963– 64). 166 E.g. Réponse aux questions d’un provincial [1703– 7] (henceforth RQP), in OD, iii, 726a– b. 167 E.g. DHC, LaïsB (iii.33a):‘… les Paiens ne pouvoient pas dire, que les abominations qu’ils publioient de leurs Dieux n’étoient que des Contes Poëtiques …’. 168 For explicit criticisms of Conti, see e.g. DHC, JupiterA (ii.901a); ThamyrisD (iv.342b). Bayle also seems to have been influenced by Theodorus Janssonius van Almeloveen’s Opuscula, sive antiquitatum e sacris profanarum specimen (Amsterdam, 1685), which he reviewed in the NRL, January 1686, OD, i, 465b, commenting especially on this aspect. This lateseventeenth century turn to developmental theories of myth – in which Cuper and Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 92 Levitin poetic mythology and ideas about nature:the former had stemmed from anthropomorphism, or what Bayle called ‘the ma[king] of natural idols’.169 So for example the anthropomorphisation of trees led to the invention of the wood nymphs.170 Or, refusing to believe that rational humans could simultaneously be responsible for their own passions, the pagans attributed the appearance of such passions to the gods, and in turn anthropomorphised each passion into a god.171 Such a naturalistic origin notwithstanding, this mythological religion was inconsistent and unphilosophical. And so despite surface similarities, the creation narratives of the pagan philosophers could not be mapped onto those of the earlier poets.172 However, there was one similarity between the poetic and the philosophical theologies:both were animistic. But this manifested itself in different levels of consistency. The poets were full polytheists, and so for them, Fortune, for example, was just one of many Gods. The philosophers, meanwhile, believed in one, ubiquitous principle, which they sometimes labelled ‘Fortune’.173 As this suggests, for Bayle, the essence of the philosophical theology of the pagans was a cosmotheist deification of the whole of nature. There was an inherent logic to pagan theology:all of it tended to what Bayle called ‘naturalism’.174 Without revelation, human reason had a natural tendency to conceive of the world as penetrated by an active power.175 This was because the revealed knowledge of creation ex nihilo by a transcendent god was inconceivable to pagans, whose systems– from a nonrevealed point of view, more ‘rational’ than those of Christianity– were inevitably pantheist or dualist, so as to explain creation and activity in the world.176 For all their Janssonius were central– deserves more study; for now, see some of the comments in Mandelbrote (2017). For Janssonius more generally, see Stegeman (2005). But it should be noted that Bayle seems also to have been indebted to the work of Claude Saumaise for this point. See DHC, AbdereD (i.13b):‘Mr. de Saumaise dit làdessus, qu’il ne faut point chercher l’uniformité dans les Fables:il a raison …’ (the reference is to the discussion in Saumaise 1629, 160); also DHC, EsopeL (ii.404). 169 DHC, HamadryadesD (ii.691b):‘On en fit une idole naturelle’. 170 DHC, HamadryadesD (ii.691a– b). 171 See the long remark Y in DHC, Helene (ii.708b– 709b). 172 DHC, ThalèsD (iv.340b– 341b). 173 DHC, TimoleonK (iv.373b). 174 Perhaps the most concise summary Bayle offered was that at Mémoire communiqué par Mr. Bayle [1704], in OD, iv, 182a, describing ‘La doctrine générale & dominante, soit parmi les anciens Païens, soit parmi les Chretiens & les Musulmans’. 175 DHC, CaïnitiesD (ii.7a). See also Continuation des Pensées diverses (henceforth CPD), in OD, iii, 294a– 295a. 176 It is imperative to recognise that Bayle did not think that this made naturalism in toto more rational than Christianity, since it tended to a monism that could not explain Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 93 specific differences, the theologies produced by pagans stretching from Greece to China were ‘naturalist’, a similarity that Bayle drew attention to with all the eagerness of a fullyfledged nineteenthcentury comparatist:‘One cannot sufficiently wonder at the fact that an idea which is so extravagant, and so full of absurd contradictions, should insinuate itself into the mind of so many people so far apart from one another, and so different in their humour, education, customs, and genius’.177 Bayle did not arrive at this view in a vacuum, or because he was secretly promoting Spinozism.178 Rather, he did so because he drew extensively on what I have identified as the second, ‘Gassendist’ strand of seventeenthcentury comparative history of religion. When he considered the religion and emanationist cosmogony of Buddhism and the Indian Brahmins, summarised in the allegory of a spider excreting and then retracting its webs (from which stemmed a belief in the union between the human and divine souls), Bayle simply reproduced Bernier’s Gassendiinspired account; he also drew on the whole, long postValignano tradition of reading Chinese and Japanese Buddhism as at heart a monist atheism.179 When he came to Confucianism, Bayle adopted the antiRicci interpretation (ultimately derived from Rodrigues and Longobardo) of it as equally atheistic. According to Bayle, defenders of Ricci’s position had falled into the same error as the chuch fathers, mistaking movement at all. This was therefore an apologetic argument, albeit one of a very different stripe to that made by Vossius etal. 177 DHC, JaponD (ii.832a):‘On ne peut assez admirer qu’une idée si extravagante, & si remplie de contradictions absurdes, ait pu se fourrer dans l’ame de tant de gens si éloignez les uns des autres, & si différens entre eux en humeur, en education, en coutumes, & en génie’. 178 Which is the thesis of many publications by Jonathan Israel, who rather naively assumes that any European who characterised pagan religion as monist was an esoteric Spinozist:e.g. Israel (2013). 179 DHC, SpinozaA (iv.254a), quoting Bernier, Suite des mémoires, 202, as in n. 114 above. The account in DHC, BrachmanesK– L (i.653b– 654b) is derived from Bernier. Bayle’s use of Bernier is already discussed in App (2014), 228– 9, 231. For Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, see esp. SpinozaB (iv.254b– 255b); JaponC, D (ii.831b– 832a). Bayle’s sources are simply the reviews of the Confucius Sinarum philosophus in the Bibliothèque universelle (as n.ooo above) and the Acta eruditorum (May 1688), 254– 65, and Valignano’s catechism as it appeared in Possevino’s Bibliotheca (n. 134 above)– he was effectively repeating the line on Buddhism that had become standard since Valignano. More interestingly, he noted in Gassendist fashion that while the Chinese Buddhists called their first principle ‘cum hiu’ (i.e. kong xu [空虛], emptiness), it could not really be a true nothingness, for the Chinese, like all pagans, undoubtedly assumed that nothing comes from nothing; rather, it probably referred to something akin to ‘space distinct … from matter’ (‘l’espace … distinct des corps’), imbued with real extension and activity (iv.255b). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 94 Levitin evocation of a supreme first principle for true monotheism.180 The Sorbonne had been right to condemn this argument in 1700, and it was surprising to see that Oxford had not censured Hyde, who had made the same argument concerning the ancient Persians.181 In the long article on Zoroaster added to the second edition of the Dictionnaire, Bayle acknowledged the brilliance of Hyde’s scholarship, but maintained that the Englishman was fundamentally wrong to look for a monotheistic reading of the Persian sage. He had relied too much on later Arabic and Persian writers:the Greek accounts of near eastern religion– which insisted that it was truly dualistic– might sometimes be unreliable, but they were surely preferable to those of Arabs who had lived a millennium later; travellers reporting the monotheism of contemporary Zoroastrians were hardly useful evidence, since these Zoroastrians were surely just accommodating to the Islam that now surrounded them.182 If those who had searched for monotheism among the eastern religions were wrong, the accusation was equally just when applied to those who sought it among the Greek philosophers, whose ideas were directly comparable to those of the Asians. Here Bayle– unnoticed by all his modern commentators– simply reproduced the conclusions of Gassendi and his most prominent followers, especially Thomasius and Parker.183 Because none of the philosophers 180 DHC, MaldonatL (iii.296a– b), drawing on Arnauld (1690), 35 (as n. 146 above); DHC, SommonaCodomA (iv.238a– 239b); CPD, in OD, iii, 210b, 226b– 231b (a long ‘Digression’ on the Sorbonne’s censure of the monotheist reading of Confucianism, focussing in particular on the development of Ricci’s argument made in La Comte 1696), 397b. When he did use the recent French popularisers of Ricci’s argument, he did so only to point out the monist atheism of contemporary Neoconfucianism:CPD, in OD, iii, 343a– 345b, drawing on Le Gobien (1698). 181 CPD, in OD, iii, 229b. 182 DHC, ZoroastreF (iv.559a). Bayle’s friend Cuper had likewise been critical of Hyde’s ‘Jesuit’ reading of Zoroastrianism:Cuper to Johann Georg Graevius, 23 November 1699, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS d’Orville 478, 169– 70. 183 Full evidence will be provided in my Kingdom of darkness. Here Ionly note that Bayle had read Gassendi’s reconstruction of ancient philosophy early in his life, and referred to it as a ‘materpiece’:DHC, EpicureM (ii.370a):‘Ce qu’il [Gassendi] a fait làdessus [i.e. on Epicurus] est un chefd’oeuvre, le plus beau & le plus judicieux Recueil qui se puisse voir’. Bayle’s first explicit mention of Gassendi is in the letter to Vincent Minutoli, 31 Jan 1673, in Bayle 1999– 2017, i, 187. On 29 June 1675 he reported to his brother on Bernier’s Abregé (Bayle 1999– 2017, ii, 213). The most important testimony is for his plans for his studies for the next year in a letter to his brother of 25 November 1675:‘Vous pouvez asseurer Mr Martel que je suis grand ami des nouveaux philosophes, et que je soupire ardemment après l’année de physique, où je me jetterai dans le cartesianisme et dans les atomes d’Epicure que le grand Mr Gassendi a si bien retablis’ (Bayle 1999– 2017, ii, 299). He was certainly well familiar with it by March 1677 (Bayle 1999– 2017, ii, 135). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 95 could believe in creation ex nihilo, they all posited either a dualism or a pantheistic monism in which all substances were god. Indeed, in the case of the Eleatics, this led to a scepticism founded on the denial of all movement and change– Xenophanes’ monism was thus even more consistent than Spinoza’s, for the latter still foolishly believed in mutability, which was logically impossible in a monist system.184 Attempts to sanitise the philosophers’ opinions were wildly misguided. Lescalopier’s claim that Thales’s first principle, water, was not itself divine but had been actuated by a separate deity was absurd; those who ‘tried to justify’ Parmenides and Melissus ‘by giving to their opinion a favourable sense, and a great air of conformity with the orthodox opinion about God’s nature’ had completely misunderstood their monism. The attempt to rescue Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle for the cause of monotheism was no more doomed to fail, for they were all animists who posited an anima mundi of one type or another and for whom divine extension could not in reality be separate from the universe, but only a logical abstraction.185 Whether Aristotle intended it or not, he ‘blazed a trail’ for vitalistic atheism.186 His disciple, Dicaearchus, and our old friend Strato, took Aristotle’s quasivitalism to its logical conclusion.187 Like Gassendi, Bayle argued that the only Greeks to reject animism were Democritus and Epicurus, although the former had to sneak animism in through the back door by attributing to atoms an animating virtue or soul.188 Epicurus was the only pagan to maintain a distance between a transcendent divinity and the creation. Here is Gassendi’s exact framework:the pagan world could be divided into a group consisting solely of Epicurus, who insisted on the divinity’s distance from the world, and everyone else, who forged animist 184 DHC, XenophanesL (iv.524a– b). For the Eleatics, see further DHC, Zenon d’EléeK (iv.546b). 185 DHC, ThalèsD (iv.340b– 341a); AnaxagorasD (i.209a– 211); Zenon d’EléeK (iv.546b):‘Il y a longtems qu’on tâche de les justifier, en donnant à leur opinion un sens favourable, & un grand air de conformité avec le dogme des Orthodoxes sur la Nature de Dieu’; JupiterG (ii.903b); Ovide NasonG (iii.558b– 559b); PericlesA (iii.664a). On generation, see ArchelausB (i.290a– b); Cesalpin, AndréB (ii.118a); Ovide NasonG (iii.556a– 559b). For Pythagoras, see:PythagorasO (iii.747b); RQP, in OD, iii, 724b; DHC, Pauliciens (iii.635– 6). For Plato:CPD, in OD, iii, 283a– 291a; RQP, in OD, iii, 519, 918a– 919a; DHC, PauliciensL (iii.634a– b). For Aristotle:RQP, in OD, iii, 918b– 919a; DHC, DiogeneB (ii.296b); SpinozaA, CC (iv.254a, 267b); PereiraE (iii.652b); PomponaceF (iii.780a– 781b); RorariusE (iv.79a– 80a). 186 CPD, in OD, iii, 335a:‘La doctrine d’Aristote … fraia le chemin à l’Athéïsme de Straton’; again citing Parker (1678), 372. 187 DHC, DicearqueC (ii.285); CPD, in OD, iii, 333a– 336a; RQP, in OD, iii, 882a. 188 DHC, DemocriteP (ii.274a– b); EpicureG (ii.367b– 368a). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 102 Levitin with Judaism and Christianity in the way suggested by Vossius, for it consisted of an animism that Tylor charted from primitive to advanced societies (the latter including both GraecoRoman and Christian religion), using a mixture of modern anthropological and ancient textual evidence. As for anything that looked like true monotheism among contemporary primitive societies, Tylor systematically insisted that it could be dismissed as a later intrusion brought by Christian missionaries.217 Of course, Tylor was not a diffusionist in the early modern sense. But ‘Aryanism’ could for him do much of the work that postNoah diffusion, or conjectural history, could do in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.218 The very last sentence of the first volume of Primitive culture shows beautifully the similarity between the scheme of Tylor and that first developed by Gassendi:‘The divisions which have separated the great religions of the world into intolerant and hostile sects are for the most part superficial, in comparison with the deepest of all religious schisms, that which divides Animism from Materialism’.219 Could anything be more redolent of Gassendi’s ‘Epicurus vs the other pagans’ narrative? Nor is anthropology the only ‘modern’ discipline that seems to have directly inherited some of the basic assumptions of early modern scholarship.220 Recently, a fierce debate has broken out among classicists about the existence and nature of ‘pagan monotheism’. Ican assure the reader that perusing the essays of the late Michael Frede, anyone familiar with the early modern literature might think they were reading Cudworth; reading Martin West’s essay on the progress ‘Towards monotheism’, they may believe themselves transported 217 Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, MS Tylor, Box 15; also the rough notes, all concerning animism, in Box 9.See further Stocking (1992), esp.5– 10. 218 See e.g. the discussion of the soul as a ‘thin substance’ in Tylor (1871), i, 390:‘The conception of the soul as breath may be followed up through Semitic and Aryan etymology, and thus into the main streams of the philosophy of the world’. Or on Chinese animistic heavenworship (ii, 320):‘These stray scraps from old Chinese literature are intelligible to European ears, for our Aryan race has indeed worked out religious ideas from the like source and almost in the like directions’. 219 Tylor (1871), i, 453. 220 In saying this, Ido not seek to imply that modern anthropology operates in the same way as did Tylor:for the reaction against Tylor’s animism among the next generation of anthropologists, see Stocking (1995), esp.42– 4, 55– 6, 61– 3, 165– 6. It is interesting to note, however, that the discipline has seen influential recent calls for a revival of Tylor’s ‘animism’ concept:BirdDavid (1999). Iam well out of my comfort zone here, but as far as Ican tell, this article has stimulated much debate among practising anthropologists. See also the defence of Tylor offered in Stringer (1999). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Was the Comparative History of Religions 103 to the world of eighteenthcentury conjecturalism (albeit with better philology).221 Early modern scholarship has had a very long afterlife indeed. 4 Conclusion At this point, the reader may be expecting me to declare triumphantly that Ihave discovered the ‘religious origins of modern anthropology’, or more generally to announce that seventeenthcentury comparatism was ‘modern’. But Ishould like to resist the temptation to do so (however attentiongrabbing it would be). In fact– and here Ispeak directly to the central theme of this volume, especially as it has been delineated by Geoffrey Lloyd in the Epilogue– my very point throughout has been that comparatist enterprises cannot be reduced to the ideology that produces them. Just because Tylor shared the broad conclusion of my early moderns– i.e., that nonJudaeoChristian religions were defined by adherence to ‘animism’ in one form or another– does not mean that he shared their ideological aims. In fact, while the early moderns made clear their ‘metaphysical’ assumptions– those of neoscholastic natural theology (Selden, Vossius, Ricci, etc.), neoEpicureanism (Gassendi), or Malebranchian occasionalism (Bayle)– Tylor, although he sometimes hinted that he was opposing paganism to a ‘modern’ or ‘scientific’ worldview,222 made it clear that ‘though the doctrines [he] examined bear not only on the development but the actual truth of religious systems’ he felt ‘neither able nor willing to enter into this great argument fully and satisfactorily’.223 The empirical assumptions with which he began may have been very similar to those of our early moderns– and in this we are discovering only one more discipline in which nineteenthcentury scholarship was far more indebted to that of the seventeenth century than we previously thought224– but the chief presupposition with which he started was one of disciplinarity:that is to say, that he was contributing to an intellectual discipline with its own rules and purposes, and one that did not need to be justified by reference to other disciplines, not least theology. 221 The debate was ignited by Frede and Athanassiadi 1999, in which see esp. the editors’ ‘Introduction’ (1– 20) and West’s ‘Towards monotheism’ (21– 40). For a summary, see Mitchell and van Nuffelen (2010). It is amusing to note that some participants in the debate recognise that Cudworth already ‘reproduces all the relevant sources’ (Fürst 2010, 83, n.3). 222 See e.g. Tylor (1871), ii, 167; also Tylor (1881), 356– 7. 223 Tylor (1871), ii, 324– 5. 224 See e.g. Marchand (2010); Marchand (2016); LedgerLomas and Mandelbrote (forthcoming). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 104 Levitin In saying that disciplinarity matters, and that it serves to stifle presuppositions (however much they are still present), Iam not saying something fashionable. Some of the contributors to our sessions would, Ithink, dismiss our intellectual disciplines as yet another ‘power structure’, working to impose a totalitarian categorisation on the ‘other’. From a different perspective, Lloyd writes in the Epilogue that ‘comparatism has often been a weapon of polemic, in effect denying any other comparatisms any legitimacy’, and attributes only to modern anthropologists the ability to return from their comparative endeavours with a selfreflexive attitude. In the interest of stimulating in readers of our volume a comparative approach of their own, Ishould like to say, very modestly, that Iam less interested in this kind of judgemental approach to the history of comparitism, whether written in a condemnatory mode or a defensive one (as some histories of the Jesuit missions in particular still attempt to defend the extent to which Jesuit accommodation was ‘successful’). Rather, Iam interested in getting beyond the bland and uninteresting truism that everyone conducts comparatism on the basis of certain (explicit or unstated) presuppositions, and investigating how, historically, comparatism has actually happened, and how the complex interplay of presuppositions, polemic, and new findings has changed the enterprise. What my research has shown me– and what Ihope the story Ihave told here will convince at least some readers of our volume– is that if we go beyond ideological mapping and instead follow the details of the debates themselves, we find that no comparative enterprise can be reduced to the ‘polemical’ aims that may have inspired it. Early modern comparison may have had as its aim a ‘triumphant reaffirmation of the One True God’ (Lloyd, p. 456 below), but its results were very different:a complete reconceptualisation of the way humans (at least those bereft of revelation) could conceive of the divine, of ‘nature’, and of the ‘human’ qua a being composed of body and soul. As Isaid in one of our sessions, at some point the fetishisation of selfreflexion turns into narcissism:the pleasant, selfsatisfied certainty that no one has ever been as selfreflective as we are today, and that until very recently everyone (or at least every Westerner) was an unthinking bigot incapable of understanding any society but their own, and unwilling to make the attempt. Ihave absolutely no interest in defending ‘Western comparativism’ (as if such a thing has ever existed):such moral judgements are not the historian’s job. 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(2014), Christian Hebraism and the rediscovery of Hellenistic Judaism, in:Jewish culture in early modern Europe, eds. R. I. Cohen etal., Pittsburgh, 169– 80. Grafton A. (2016), Christianity’s Jewish origins rediscovered:the roles of comparison in early modern scholarship, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 1:13– 42. Grafton A. and Weinberg J. (2011), “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”:Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a forgotten chapter in Renaissance scholarship, Harvard. Hafner R. (2010), ‘Shaping early modern comparative studies:the significance of Christoph Arnold (1627– 1685)’, in:Patristic tradition and intellectual paradigms in the 17th century, eds. S.- P. Bergjan and K. Pollmann, Tübingen, 3– 18. Hall A. (2007), Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus:natural theology in the high middle ages, London. Hankins J. and Palmer A. (2008), The recovery of ancient philosophy in the Renaissance:a brief guide, Florence. Hanson R.P.C. 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(2015b), Ancient wisdom in the age of the new science:histories of philosophy in England, c.1640– 1700, Cambridge. Lewis R. (2010), Francis Bacon, allegory, and the uses of myth, Review of English Studies 61:360– 89. Locke J. (1706), An essay concerning humane understanding … the fifth edition, with large additions, London. Locke J. (1979), An essay concerning humane understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch, Oxford. LoLordo A. (2005), The activity of matter in Gassendi’s physics, in:Oxford studies in early modern philosophy, vol. 2, eds. D. Garber and S. Nadler, Oxford, 75– 104. LoLordo A. (2006), Pierre Gassendi and the birth of early modern philosophy, Cambridge. Longobardo N. (1701), Traité sur quelques points de la religion des Chinois, Paris. Lundbaek K. (1994), Joseph Prémare and the name of God in China, in:The Chinese rites controversy:its history and meaning, ed. D. E. Mungello, Nettelal, 129– 49. Lundbaek K. 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Mornay, P. de (1585) [1581] De la verité de la religion Chrestienne, Paris. Mossner E. C. (1948), Hume’s early memoranda, 1729– 1740:the complete text, Journal of the History of Ideas 9:492– 518. Muccillo M. (1988), La “prisca theologia” nel “De perenni philosophia” di Agostino Steuco, Rinascimento 28:41– 111. Muller R. (2012), Not Scotist:understandings of being, univocity, and analogy in earlymodern Reformed thought, Reformation and Renaissance Review 14:127– 50. Mulsow M. (2006), Idolatry and science. Against nature worship from Boyle to Rüdiger, 1680– 1720, Journal of the History of Ideas 67:697– 712. Mulsow M., ed. (2012), Das Ende des Hermetismus, Tübingen. Mulsow M. (2015), Impartiality, individualisation, and the historiography of religion: Tobias Pfanner on the rituals of the ancient church, in History and religion:narrating a religious past, ed. BC. Otto etal., Berlin, 257– 68. Mulsow M. (2016), John Selden in Germany:religion and natural law from Boecler to Buddeus (1665– 1695), in:For the sake of learning:essays in honor of Anthony Grafton, eds. A. Blair and A.- S. Goeing, vol. 1, Leiden, 286– 308. Mungello D. (1981), The Jesuits’ use of Chang Chücheng’s commentary in their translation of the Confucian Four Book (1687), China Mission studies (1550– 1800) bulletin 3:12– 22. Mungello D. (1989), Curious land:Jesuit accommodation and the origins of Sinology, Honolulu. Navarrete D. F. (1676), Tratados historicos, politicos, ethicos, y religiosos de la Monarchia de China, Madrid. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 118 Rubiés which belonged to Acosta’s category of moral history, or in the later idiom of the Enlightenment, history of civilization). Whether in the form of particular relations written by conquerors, merchants, missionaries, ambassadors and other travellers, or as chapters of more ambitious historical accounts, these materials relied on implicit comparisons in order to make the new observations commensurable with traditional notions of human behaviour and belief. At first sight it may seem that the effort to conceptualize difference led to false analogies, such as when some early observers of Mexican temples described them as “mosques”, a familiar marker of religious difference to recent Spanish conquerors of the Muslim kingdom of Granada; however, is becomes quickly apparent that such linguistic usages were provisional shortcuts, and that they do not imply a failure to distinguish the peoples of Mesoamerica, widely understood to be ‘gentiles’, from Muslims. Nobody ever saw a “mosque” in Mexico, if by that we mean something undistinguishable from the buildings used for Muslim prayers. Hence in the early 1540s the translator of the Codex Mendoza, one of earliest and most remarkable colonial documents that sought to interpreted Nahua pictorial traditions in order to obtain information about Mexican history, tributes and social customs, noted that the rush in producing the Spanish version had meant that there was no time to correct words such as “alfaqui” and “mosque”, used by the unknown interpreter, but obviously inappropriate. “Sacerdote” (priest) and “templo” (temple) were the correct words.2 In more specialized areas of learning, such as natural history, the process of linguistic and conceptual refinement fed into to some of the scientific debates of the Enlightenment. Hence in his Natural History of the Gran Chaco (in the north of Modern Argentina) the Catalan Jesuit José Jolis noted that the first Europeans in America found many new animals, but ‘whether because they ignored the names given to them in the various provinces, or because those names were so foreign and hard to retain, pronounce and write down, they imposed new names, albeit often inappropriately, since they took them from those animals already known in Europe, merely on the basis of finding any small similarity”.3 He went on to engage in vigorous debate with European naturalists such as Buffon and De Pauw about, for example, the extent of the differences between American lions (pumas) and tigers (jaguars) and those 2 Codex Mendoza 1992, iii 71v. 3 Jolis 1789, book 3, ch. 1, 136.José (or Josep) Jolis, who had been a missionary in South America, was part of the community of Jesuits exiled in Italy after Charles iii of Spain expelled the Society of Jesus from his dominions in 1769. The second part of his Natural History, his ethnographic account of the peoples of the Chaco, was ready for publication when the author died, but now seems lost. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World 119 in the Old World (in his view American lions were a different species, but the tigers were the same).4 On the other hand, he insisted that reports of circumcision amongst the barbarian nation of the Calchaquíes, and any suggestion that they might be related to ancient Jews, had been exaggerated. In all cases, creating commensurability across cultures, or between the plants and animals of the Old World and the New, relied on conceptual analogies that built on similarities. However, the process of linguistic and cultural learning also required a high degree of differentiation, which meant rejecting false analogies and mistranslations in the light of further experience. Comparison, by which similarities and differences were set against each other, was at the heart of the intense linguistic and cultural learning that made possible the early modern explosion in the production and circulation of ethnographic writings. Against a triumphal, progressivist account of the growth of European ethnographies positing a steady growth of cultural expertise, we could of course ask ourselves whether the kind of commensurability generated by descriptions of cultural difference and their implicit comparisons, however solidly grounded in experience and reflection, may ultimately have been a fiction, given the pervasiveness of ethnocentric biases. For example, some of the most accomplished ethnographers of the sixteenth century were missionaries like the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún in New Spain or the Jesuit Matteo Ricci in China, and their work was logically imbued by strong Christian assumptions. Sahagún’s encyclopaedic twelvebook analysis of Nahuatl culture with the help of native informants– notably in the richly illustrated Florentine Codex containing the latest version of his Historia de las cosas de Nueva España– was conceived as a tool to identify and combat “idolatry”, a concept entirely alien to Nahuatl culture, and possibly the sharpest weapon in the European intellectual arsenal in the project to replace local religions with Christianity in the New World. His account of the conquest of Mexico from a native point of view (in the twelfth book of the Florentine Codex) was also imbued with Christian Providentialism, a perspective probably shared by some of the native students from the College of Tlatelolco who worked for Sahagún in the compilation and interpretation of his materials. In this respect, the presentation of the historical material in two columns, one in Nahuatl, another in Spanish translation, gives a false illusion of cultural equality belied by many of the interpretative choices.5 4 Ibid., book 3, ch. 3, 150–170. Jolis was as a matter of fact mistaken in his efforts to identify the American jaguar with the African leopard and the Indian tiger, but he had never seen the latter. 5 Florentine Codex 1950– 82. The Nahuatl text might be profitably compared to Sahagún’s own Spanish version. On Sahagún’s working methods see D’Olwer 1987, 65– 77; Bustamante García 1992. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 120 Rubiés Similarly, Matteo Ricci’s account of Buddhism and Confucianism was fatally conditioned by his apologetic strategies, which were imbued with a spirit of selective accommodation to local norms. Hence, while Buddhism was “idolatrous” (and all apparent analogies with Christianity perverse and possibly devilish), the ‘sect’ of Confucius had to be constructed, at least in its pure and original form, as a rational, nonreligious civil philosophy which could be made compatible with Christianity. The subsequent rites controversy, together with the parallel debate about whether Chinese traditional terms such as Tien (Heaven) and Shangdi (Ruler on High) could be properly used for God, clearly displayed the potential artificiality of Ricci’s analysis, which in fact did not satisfy many Catholic critics– letalone his Chinese opponents.6 However, it would be quite wrong to conclude that what was at stake in the use of misleading analogies was simply the Jesuit’s capacity for crosscultural analysis, or, more generally, the depth of cultural incommensurability between Europe and China. Cultural distances were real enough, but should not be reified as an absolute barrier to learning.7 Although the image of a clash of mutually unintelligible cultures may be superficially attractive, there was no such thing as entirely separate and stable cultural systems, and on closer inspection the very efforts at translation by the missionaries and by their various opponents could have a transformative effect whose direction was hard to control; indeed, as Ihave discussed elsewhere, the process of debating alternative translations and interpretations throughout much of the seventeenth century did not simply allow the creation of a small and contested Catholic Church in China, but also shook the Christian foundations of European selfunderstanding.8 In this respect, it may be useful to distinguish obvious ideological biases and political agendas, which certainly had a huge impact in the way ethnographic discourses were articulated, interpreted and used, from the sheer capacity to learn about the nuances of other linguistic and cultural codes and make appropriate distinctions. All things considered, we cannot fail to admire the subtlety of analysis and appreciation of the many nonEuropean languages, oral and written, displayed by many missionaries, however ideologically prejudiced they were when it came to their religious and political assumptions. Of course this was not exclusive to religious writers:albeit in slightly different ways, lay observers 6 For the terms controversy– part of the rites controversy– from a Catholic perspective see Rule 1986, and Mungello ed. 1994. For the wider background to the Chinese missions, see Standaert 2001. The Buddhist perspective on the Jesuit account of Christianity is captured by Gernet 1982, and Zürcher 1990. 7 In this respect Idiffer from Jacques Gernet’s emphasis. 8 Rubiés 2005. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World 121 who learnt local languages such as the French traveller in India François Bernier were also, inevitably, imbued with powerful ethnocentric biases. Not only Sahagún and Ricci, but many other missionaries– such as the Jesuits João Rodrigues with the Japanese language, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya with Guaraní, Francisco Alzina with Visayan, or Ippolito Desideri with Tibetan– composed remarkably insightful grammars and vocabularies, when not works of natural and moral history, or even of Christian apologetics, that relied on extensive local knowledge in order to challenge facile translations and superficial analogies. In effect, while ideologically all these writers were staunch Catholics, the work they produced is best understood as culturally hybrid, in the sense that they worked closely with local informants and interpreters who were, in turn, often converts. Albeit the relationship between missionaries and their informants was not one of social equals (and the situations of course varied substantially according to the political context, since it was not the same to rely on defeated Nahua converts than on the collaboration of Chinese literati or mestizo Christians from Macao), in practical terms the degree of cultural accommodation that was appropriate to each translation was defined with the contribution of local cultural experts, perhaps even negotiated with them. The key issue was to know where to draw the line. The evidence suggests that, for those most sensitive matters of theology (such as the identification of idolatry), history (to what extent were the civil laws and customs of the Mexica or the Chinese accepted as legitimate?), and even natural science (where local concepts adequate for a scientific discourse, or was it better to resort to Latin?), it often proved difficult to reach a consensus.9 We must therefore turn from assessing the problem of cultural translation within empirical ethnographies to the more obviously ideological genres that incorporated such materials. Between the anonymous compilers of the Codex Mendoza in the 1540s, engaged with the immediate task of translating accurately local knowledge into European categories, and the Jesuit Jolis in the 1780s, who from his Italian exile sought to confront the armchair natural historians of Europe and correct their Old World assumptions, another Jesuit, the Spanish José de Acosta, in his extremely influential Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias of 1590 had defined the scientific and theological parameters that would frame the new natural and moral history of the New World. His key methodological insight was that human reason needed to reflect on new experiences and observations in order to discipline the scientific imagination and combat false opinions. Indeed, different natural causes could produce similar 9 Rubiés 2017. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 122 Rubiés effects, and the same causes different effects, according to other variables.10 The more important assumption that he made clear, however, was the fundamental comparability of the different parts of the world and its peoples. No matter what new evidence emerged, it would make sense from a perspective that understood the world as a providential creation, and mankind as a single species with a common origin and destiny. The different species of animals found in the New World did not require a separate creation; it was simpler to imagine that they all emerged from Noah’s Ark but settled in different climates and territories.11 Differences between human lineages or races, on the other hand, were merely accidental. The full humanity of the American Indians and their capacity for receiving the faith was of course, by then, a subject that had been settled at least for Catholics by a papal bull of 1537, against any temptation to treat them as beasts without a rational soul.12 But for Acosta it was not simply a matter of correcting the prejudices that impeded evangelization, it was also a matter of guiding thescientific imagination towards the correct path. It was precisely because of the validity of sacred scripture that it was possible to speculate meaningfully and rationally about how the Indies must have been populated through a land migration from Europe or Asia, and to compare different peoples in order to establish a hierarchical classification of the different degrees of “barbarism” that existed in the world. The assumption of common humanity established the fundamental commonalities against which structural analogies between peoples could be detected, and significant differences could be assessed. However wild and inhuman some of the savages in the New World were, close attention to their “antiquities” showed that the American Indians had demonstrated a capacity for acquiring civilization, well before the European conquerors and priests arrived.13 They were clearly comparable to the peoples of the ancient world, both in their capacity for rational government, and in their capacity for error, especially in their idolatry.14 Acosta may be considered the first philosophical historian of the Indies (this is certainly what he claimed), and has also been described as an early 10 This is especially clear in his discussion of the habitability of the antipodes and of the climate in the southern hemisphere, which defied European expectations and received theories. See Acosta 2008, book 2, chapters2– 7. 11 Ibid., book 4, chapter36. 12 Hanke 1974, 20– 21. 13 Acosta 2008, book v, prologue; book vi, chs. 1 and 11. 14 This does not imply they were identical in all respects. Greeks and Romans were more advanced in their natural and moral philosophy. The point was however that they participated in the same human scale between the extremes of reason and error, or civilization and superstition. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World 123 ethnologist.15 While, as we have seen, ethnography was pervasive in a wide range of early modern accounts of the various peoples of the world, and in particular their manners, customs and religious ceremonies, ethnology, understood as a theoretical and systematic discourse about human diversity, was essentially a scholarly pursuit. And while ethnography was built on largely implicit comparisons that penetrated to the deepest levels of linguistic and cultural learning, ethnology was built on explicit comparisons that sought to identify “conformity” between customs, religions, languages, systems of government and other aspects of human society, usually in order to establish genealogical or structural relations between the different peoples of the world. In order to appreciate the emergence of ethnology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it is, however, important to distinguish the history of the word from the history of the discourse. The neologisms ethnographia and ethnologia appeared from about the 1770s primarily in Germanspeaking lands, together with related vernacular terms such as Völkerkunde. Two history professors of the new University of Göttingen, Johann Christoph Gatterer and August Ludwig von Schlözer, competed in the 1770s to coin these new terms in the context of their rival projects to write universal history in a more systematic manner.16 The advantage of these concepts was that they clearly distinguished between the descriptive and theoretical aspects of a science of peoples. However, as we have suggested, well before this academic turn towards systematic disciplines, amongst humanist trained scholars of the previous centuries an ethnological discourse had clearly become part of the focus on human history, either within the framework of natural history or as part of moral, civil and– most crucially– sacred history. In fact, it can be shown that the intellectual agendas developed by the Protestant professors in Göttingen had a genealogy that harked back to the impact of those ethnological discourses in the Republic of Letters, with a marked emphasis on antiquarian erudition. For example, before settling for good in Göttingen, Schlözer spent many crucial years in Russia, where he met Gerhard Friedrich Müller, a member of the new Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg and a systematic ethnographer who played a crucial role in the scientific accomplishments of the second Kamchatka expedition (1733– 1743), also known as the second Bering expedition, to find the longsought NorthEast passage. In turn, Müller’s detailed and systematic ethnographic questionnaires, a reaction to the lack of method 15 In his preface Acosta proclaimed his originality as the first attempt to investigate ‘the causes and reason’ for the natural novelties of the New World, which challenged the assumptions of ancient philosophers. On Acosta’s thought see Pagden 1986, ch. 7; Brading 1991, 184– 95; Burgaleta 1999. 16 See Stagl 1995, and Vermeulen 2008. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 124 Rubiés of the observations usually found in traveller’s accounts, drew from a late humanist tradition of instructions of travellers that throughout he seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had been developed by travel collectors and scientific academies, while his key model for a comparative ethnography was the remarkable work of the Jesuit missionary JosephFrançois Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Paris, 1724). The fact that Lafitau’s great comparative treatise was primarily a work of Christian apologetics, as we shall see in some more detail, illustrates the extent to which the history of a preacademic ethnological discourse should be written as the process by which, over two and a half centuries, modern ethnography was embraced as a fundamental cultural resource by antiquarian historians whose motives were often at least in part (if not primarily) religious. Understanding why early modern Europeans made use of systematic cultural comparisons and transformed them into an essential intellectual resource for their new, ‘modern’ narratives of world history is, Iwould argue, crucial to reassessing the origins of the Enlightenment and its legacy. It also clarifies why the concepts of civilization and, eventually, culture, became central to the hierarchies underlying European selfunderstanding, replacing (but also subsuming) religious categories. In the following pages, Ipropose a contextual reading of the early modern genealogy of ethnological comparatism, paying particular attention to some specific works composed between the 1550s and 1750 that help clarify the logic underlying the interaction between ethnographic evidence, antiquarian erudition, and a variety of religious and philosophical concerns. Iwill emphasize, in particular, the contrasting intellectual agendas behind the antiquarian comparative ethnologies produced by religious writers from the Dominican Las Casas to the Jesuit Lafitau. Through cases of lay writers such as Bernier or La Créquinière, I will also seek to assess the emergence and importance of intellectual concerns other than Christian apologetics. 2 Cultural Hierarchies and the Emergence of Comparative Ethnology: Las Casas, Acosta and Valignano Any account of the early modern history of comparative ethnologies must begin by reflecting on the apparent and not unimportant paradox that a vision of human diversity imbued with an idea of modernity was largely constructed through the comparative practices of antiquarian scholars, whose training and focus were often geared towards the ancient world. This tension was in fact at the very heart of the early modern ethnological discourse, not only because the vast majority of European historians and other scholars were trained (with Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World 125 different degrees of intensity) in the humanities and inspired by classical genres, but also because the broad category of “gentilism” applied to all peoples who were not Jews, Christians or Muslims, whether savage of civilized. The growing importance of the concept of gentile civilization, already prominent in the second half of the sixteenth century in a vast geographical range that extended from Mexico and Peru, through parts of India and SouthEast Asia, to Japan and China, immediately generated a broad category that also encompassed Greeks and Romans, thus also creating a dialectic between ancient and modern gentilism. There were also obvious parallels between ancient and modern barbarians defined by their savagery, albeit not without some moral virtues, and here again the weight of classical literary traditions and rhetorical conventions shaped the way newly observed peoples were depicted, whether in history, poetry or art. Given the prominent role that humanistic culture had in the reception of the new ethnographic materials, the juxtaposition of the ancient and modern gentiles was therefore inevitable.17 How the comparison would be conducted, on the other hand, from generic analogies to more systematic attempts to introduce distinctions or to establish actual connections, was less clear cut. The first substantial effort at comparative ethnology in the sixteenth century was the Apologética Historia Sumaria by Bartolomé de las Casas, a work composed between the 1530s and the 1550s. The Apologética was not published at the time, but it circulated in Spain, and for example it was used extensively by the Augustinian Jerónimo Román for his Repúblicas del Mundo, an encyclopaedic account of the various kingdoms and states of the world, ancient and modern, published in 1575 and reissued (with an additional chapter on China) in 1595.18 Despite this particular use in Spain, the full impact of the comparative effort undertaken by Las Casas was not fully appreciated by his contemporaries, and in this respect, and by contrast with José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies, his work is more important for the motivations and intellectual strategies that it reveals than for its capacity to shape future developments. It is nevertheless clear that the idea of a comparative analysis of the customs of the more civilized nations discovered in the New World– the Mexica and Incas– with those of antiquity had some currency amongst the humanist historians and antiquarians of sixteenth century Spain. Notably, upon assuming his new role of royal chronicler to Charles v in 1555, Juan Páez de Castro (c.1510– 1570) sent the emperor a research plan that mentioned a work 17 On the importance of classical models, and especially Rome, for the interpretation of the History of the New World and its peoples in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries consider Lupher 2004, and MacCormack 2009. 18 On Román’s work see Rubiés 2011; also Johnson 2011. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 126 Rubiés on the Conformity that exists between the customs and religions of these Western Indians with those of antiquity described by the historians of these parts.19 Although there is no evidence that he ever wrote it (in the following years Páez de Castro seems to have been keener on pursuing his passion for collecting books), the title suggests a shared understanding between him and Las Casas, who was finalizing his Apologética in the same years.20 This shared outlook in fact should be extended to the circle of humanist historians and antiquarians that flourished in Spain in the middle decades of the Sixteenth Century:we could mention Ambrosio de Morales and Jerónimo Zurita, the historian of Peru Agustín de Zárate, or, amongst the younger generation, Esteban de Garibay and the Augustinian Román. What prompted the extensive comparative work by Las Casas was of course his political activism in defence of the American Indians. The colonial polemics in which the Dominican was involved over many decades were primarily conducted on theological and legal grounds. However, after the decisive intervention by Francisco de Vitoria in the 1530s, the debate shifted away from questions of principle, which the Dominican theologian had largely settled with a rather restrictive account of the natural law foundations for just war, to questions of fact, that is, of history. Even if there was a growing consensus that the conquest of the Americas could not simply be justified on grounds of religious infidelity or ordinary breaches of natural law, and that any legitimate military intervention in countries inhabited and ruled by gentiles should be limited to securing the universal right to travel and preach the true religion, or the prevention of major crimes against humanity (in this way upholding ius gentium), the debate logically shifted to discussing the particular conditions in which the Spanish had discovered the New World and its peoples and conducted their conquests.21 Las Casas, obviously influenced by Vitoria but always working at 19 Conformidad que hay entre las costumbres y religiones destos indios occidentales con las antiguas que los historiadores escriben de estas partes, mentioned by Páez de Castro in his Método para escribir la historia (1555). See Paéz de Castro 1892, in particular p.608. 20 The possibility of some direct influence from Las Casas on Castro cannot be ruled out, although the lack of evidence, and the fact that Páez de Castro was abroad, in Italy and Flanders, at the time when Las Casas worked on the Apologética in Spain, suggests the need for caution. 21 On Vitoria see Pagden 2015. In general, the Spanish dispute about the conquest of the New World pitted lawyers and humanist clerics at the service of the Crown against theologians connected to the religious orders, but it was the latter who seemed better prepared to deny the supposed temporal jurisdiction of the Roman Church over pagans, and entirely shift the argument to the interpretation of the law of nations. The extent to which the debate was increasingly about judging the historical circumstances for upholding ius communicandi (especially the right to preach) and the law of nations, rather Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World 127 a more practical level as the publicist for a cause that preceded any theoretical formulation, was quick to understand that setting the historical record straight was essential. This was of course urgent in relation to explaining what actually happened during the conquest: in his view the Spanish had repeatedly attacked the natural inhabitants of the lands they ought to evangelize peacefully, and had cruelly “destroyed” the Indies out of greed, rather than because it was necessary in order to preach the gospel. However, for Las Casas establishing the guilt of the conquerors was not sufficient, it also became imperative to clarify that the inhabitants of the New World were fully rational and capable of selfgovernment, against the arguments of opponents like Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who insisted that their crimes against nature and limited moral capacity made it necessary to intervene in order to teach them both religion and humanity. It was therefore in order to prove the capacity of the American Indians for civilization that Las Casas embarked on a massive project of cultural comparison. If, as he claimed, these barbarians were as rational as the ancient Greeks and Romans, they could only be called barbarians in a relative sense, in the same way that the Spanish were barbarians to them.22 Since they were capable of selfrule and had a strong moral sense and many civil virtues, a war of conquest to preach Christianity could not be justified, especially as there seemed to be an opportunity for peaceful preaching. In fact the evidence suggested– Las Casas claimed– that if properly taught, the peoples of the New World would make excellent Christians. It was however both just and necessary to approach them in a genuinely Christian fashion. It may be worth emphasizing the peculiar intellectual background of Las Casas, who for all his Latin was largely selftaught both as historian and theologian. Formerly a secular priest and colonial settler in Cuba, he had become a Dominican friar in order to facilitate his new vocation as defender of Indian rights, but he was no ordinary missionary, and in fact also lacked an elaborate university education. His knowledge of civil and especially canon law, the theological writings of Augustine and Aquinas, Aristotle, and the second scholastic, all belong to the period after his “conversion” in 1514, but especially after he joined the Dominican than opposing natural law to the temporal jurisdiction of the pope over gentiles, has in my view been underestimated, but this seems clear if we consider discussions at the court of Philip ii about the possible conquest of China in the 1570s and 80s. By 1550 even Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the most notorious defender of the justice of the conquest, had on the whole accepted Vitoria’s authority on natural law– with independence of what he may have thought about the moral and political capacity of the American Indians, or the actions of the conquistadores– and framed his imperialist arguments accordingly. 22 Concerning Las Casas’ careful analysis of the concept of barbarian (in his arguments against Sepúlveda, and at the end of the Apologética), see Pagden 1986, 123– 145. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 134 Rubiés Valignano’s racialized hierarchy of three levels of civilization, developed in parallel to Acosta’s similar model in the 1570s and 1580 (coincidentally, De Missione was published the same year as the Natural and Moral History of the Indies), did not involve a systematic comparsion with the ancient gentiles, as this did not immediately affect his accommodation strategies. Ancient examples, however, were highly relevant to the Eastern missions. Jesuit apologetics againt Hinduism and Buddhism naturally took as their starting point the patristic critique of idolatry and atheism, and the missionaries constructed their objects as modern varieties of popular superstition, elite monotheism, and pantheistic monism. Moreover, while for the peoples of the New World the historical connection to sacred history, and in particular to the Bible, could be reduced to solving the problem of a migration of peoples (a few authors were also concerned about the possibility of Saint Thomas having preached the gospel, but this was not an essential issue), for the Eastern Indies a strong historical relationship to the ancient oecumene was widely assumed, and occasionally documented in Greek and Roman sources. In fact, the massive sixteenthcentury expansion of the notion of ‘India’ towards SouthEast Asia, Tibet, China and Japan created problems of its own. Two in particular must be highlighted:the problem of chronologies that defied the Biblical record, especially in China, and the extent to which the evidence of gentile religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, could be connected directly rather than simply analogically to a universal history of idolatry, of course against the background of the history of revealed religion. Both issues had been identified before the end of the century, and invited a comparative analysis. For example, in his account of China in the second edition of the Repúblicas del Mundo, (1595) Jerónimo Román offered the first solution to a problem that Scaliger would turn to not many years later:how to reduce the apparently solid, continuous record of Chinese years to a size compatible with the universal Flood (his suggestion was that Chinese years, like those of the ancient Egyptians, were notional, but not solar years).44 Meanwhile in China, in his interpretation of Confucianism– the ‘sect of the literati’– as a potential ally of Christianity, as we have seen, Matteo Ricci with Valignano’s support decided that this had originally been a natural philosophy with a valid system of rational ethics and compatible with primitive monotheism, not a form of religious worship. Offerings to ancestors and reverence to Confucius did not necessarily involve prayers or a belief in their supernatural powers, and were not therefore superstitious. 44 Román 1595, iii, 226v227r. According to his calculations, the Chinese were claiming to have started 1427years after Creation, that is, or 220years before the Flood, which was a problem. His sources for these dates were the Chinese historical works translated by Friar Martín de Rada. The appeal to shorter nonsolar years was inspired by the discussion of Biblical Egyptian chronologies in Augustine’s City of God, book 15. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World 135 Indeed, any idolatrous and pantheistic elements within Confucianism could be understood as subsequent accretions deriving primarily from Buddhism, in this way creating a distinction between the ‘true’ Confucian literati who followed reason and acknowledged (but did not worship) the Lord of Heaven, and those who, in recent centuries, had embraced pantheism and denied the soul’s immortality (what later scholars termed neoConfucianism).45 In sum, Confucianism was an ‘academy’ devoted to good government and largely compatible with Christianity. Of course this analysis did not meet with everybody’s agreement, and eventually generated the rites controversy.46 In Europe some later opponents of Ricci’s methods would use comparative methods to do exactly the opposite, that is, in order to prove that ceremonies and offerings in honour of Confucius, dead ancestors, and other rites, were not merely civil but involved an idolatrous element, that is, actual worship. The work of the Dominican Noël Alexandre’s Conformité des ceremonies chinoises avec l’idolatrie grecque et romaine (Cologne, 1700), a notable contribution of the dispute about Chinese rites, stands out both for its polemical impact, and for its extended use of the comparative method. 3 Cultural Comparisons and the Search for Common Origins: Kircher, Grotius and Christian Antiquarianism The comparative agenda of seventeenth century antiquarians in relation to gentile civilizations was therefore largely set by the end of the sixteenth century. It concerned primarily the history of gentile peoples, ancient and modern; their civil achievements; the nature of their religion; and their chronology, always within the framework of Biblical history, which asserted the common origins of all mankind, and limited the span of ancient history to the period after 45 Ricci 2000, 94– 98. Hence the true literati only acknowledged the ‘King of Heaven’– whose public cult was reserved to the emperor– and had no idols, although they also believed in inferior tutelary spirits and honoured Confucius. They had no doctrine of Creation and only vague notions of an afterlife, instead focusing on a secular ethical system. Theirs was therefore an incomplete form of natural monotheism, but with ‘less errors’ than any other known gentile religion, and largely compatible with an additional faith. In this scheme, therefore, a minimalist gentile creed was preferable to a more elaborate religion, and it could even be presumed that many of virtuous gentiles of ancient times had been saved through natural law. Unfortunately, in more recent times– the last 500years– the literati had departed from simple monotheism by embracing a Buddhist form of pantheism, one which denied the immortality of the soul and eliminated the distinction between creator and creation. The European Republic of Letters came to read Ricci through Nicola Trigault’s slightly edited Latin version De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas a Societate Iesu suscepta (Augsburg, 1615) and its various vernacular translations. 46 See note 6 above. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 136 Rubiés Creation around 4000 B.C.and in particular the Flood c.2350 B.C. (although this period could be extended by quite a few centuries by recourse to the alternative figures in the Samaritan Pentateuch and, especially and most generously, the Septuagint).47 This agenda gave increasing prominence to historical questions affecting how languages, customs and religious practices changed or migrated– a concern already apparent in the work of José de Acosta when he attempted to reconstruct the ancient history of the more refined peoples of Mexico and Peru as a history of migration, civilization and conquest. But this was just the beginning. The elaborate oeuvre of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, albeit more impressive for its visual apparatus than for its intellectual cogency, is highly symptomatic of how throughout the seventeenth century the use of comparisons between peoples and their languages, religious ceremonies and customs in order to establish cultural hierarchies had been supplemented, and sometimes replaced, by recourse to comparisons in order to establish plausible genealogies connecting the entire world. Arguably, a parallel development was taking place in the field of natural history, with Robert Hooke and a few others calling for a more chronological approach to nature, one that took account of the internal dynamics of nature itself and the movement of sea and land in order to explain fossils as evidence of lost species, opening vistas towards an unknown and remote geological past that put increasing pressure on the supposed dates of Creation and the Flood.48 Kircher’s own study of volcanoes and fossils in his Mundus Subterraneus (Amsterdam. 1665) was, however, far from this spirit, and his belief in spontaneous generation, as well as his attachment to the symbolic interpretations of naturalia, were criticized by many, including those who, 47 Famously Bishop James Ussher in 1650 dated Creation to 4004 B.C.and the Flood 2348 B.C. For Kircher, who also followed the Hebrew text and generally conservative estimates, the dates would be 4050 B.C.and 2394 B.C., although other Jesuits who had studied the Chinese dynastic records, notably Martino Martini, were keen to adopt the Septuagint calculations, which allowed a date for Noah before 3000 B.C. The debate about the Septuagint chronology would rock the world of antiquarian scholars during the second half of the seventeenth century. 48 As noted by Rossi 1984, 12– 16. Notably, in his brilliant Discourse of Earthquakes (a lecture delivered to the Royal Society in 1668, but only published in 1705)Hooke connected the debate about fossils– ‘the greatest and most lasting monuments of antiquity’– to the debate about historical chronology, albeit without challenging the Biblical account, and associated its resolution to the critical assessment of fables about catastrophes such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, employing the same criteria of verification for natural history that applied to medals and other monuments of the human past. Similar thoughts concerning the mutability of the earth were embraced by Matthew Hale and Thomas Burnet. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World 137 like the Sicilian painter Agostino Scilla, were willing to consider not only that fossils had been organisms (a point Kircher did not dispute), but also that the earth and the seas had a natural history of significant change.49 Where Kircher truly displayed his interest in historical origins and transformations was in his notable attempt to interpret Egyptian hieroglyphs as expressing an occult Hermetic philosophy– a traditional Neoplatonic prisca theologia of supposedly Adamic and certainly preMosaic origins– fatally buried in ancient gentilism under a perverse system of idolatry, and his subsequent efforts to demonstrate the historical continuity between Egyptian pagan religion and those of Persia, India and China.50 Starting with Prodromus Coptus (Coptic Forerunner) in 1636, and notably through his Oedipus Aegyptiacus of 1652– 54, the China Illustrata of 1667, and the Turris Babel of 1679, the comparative analysis of textual and physical documents was placed at the service of an ambitious world historical reconstruction in which the spread of idolatry was connected to the division of tongues, and through the influence of Ham and his descendants, ancient Egypt emerged as the centre of a multilayered cultural and religious diffusionism, with Hermetic, idolatrous and even Christian elements all reaching into Asia and even America.51 Underlying this effort was Kircher’s longlife ambition to write the universal history of all languages and systems of writing, a project 49 Rossi 1984, 19– 24, referring to Scilla’s work on fossils:La vana speculazione disingannata del senso. Lettera risponsiva circa i corpi marini che petrificati si trovano in vari luoghi terresttri (Naples 1670). Kircher’s was less hostile than has often been asserted to the idea that some fossils were organic in origin, and also keen to interpret the action of God’s Providence through secondary causes, as noted by Gould 2004, 207– 38. However, the contrast between the baroque complexity of Kircher’s Mundus, with fuzzy concepts such as ‘natura lithogenetica’, and the clarity of vision displayed by Scilla and especially Hooke is more than the figment of a whiggish imagination. 50 In Kircher’s scheme, Hermes Trismegistus (aka Thoth) used hieroglyphs to restore the original wisdom of Adamic and Noachian origins after its corruption by Ham, but his legacy was again corrupted by subsequent priestly superstition; cf. Gagné ‘The Isis of Turin Affair’, in this volume. 51 The role of Egypt as source for both Greek and, to some extent (via Moses “the Egyptian”), Jewish religions, was a legacy of the polemics underlying the religious comparatism of the Hellenistic Age. Philippe Borgeaud in this respect has written about a crosscultural “theological triangle” (Borgeaud 2004, 83– 4). However, Christians fundamentally altered the various triangular equations– all polemical– with their own theology of universal history, transforming the theory of gentile plagiarism and Jewish priority (directly inherited from Hellenistic Judaism) into an apologetic and proselytizing tool. By reviving in a very different context the Hermetic tradition, which led to a fresh emphasis on the lasting legacy of a preMosaic revelation, Christian Platonists from Ficino to Kircher in effect reopened the question of Egyptian origins, problematizing the history of gentilism. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 138 Rubiés he found impossible to complete, despite his confident assumption that all knowledge could by mastered by means of the combinatory art of Ramon Llull.52 Kircher’s reliance on the Hermetic Corpus as authentic was, following Casaubon’s fierce deconstruction as early as 1614, hard to justify, and many of his philological and historical arguments– including many of his comparisons– were obviously farfetched and met with widespread criticism. Consider, for example, Kicher’s interpretation of a Buddhist image (obtained from the fellow Jesuit Johann Grueber, who had travelled from China to Tibet and Nepal) showing the three teachers of China, namely Buddha (in the centre), Confucius (at his right) and Lao Tse (at his left), as ‘clear vestiges’ of Jupiter, Apollo and Mercury.53 Similarly, the image of the Buddhist deity Amida (the bodhisattva Amitabha Tathagata) meditating on a lotus leaf became a version of the equivalent Egyptian image of the solar God Harpocrates (Horus the child) sitting on a lotus leaf, as described by Iamblichus and Clement of Alexandria (see Figure1).54 The iconographic parallel was not entirely arbitrary, but the key to interpretation was the Neoplatonist theory of symbolic religion as applied to the Egyptian tradition, exported to China without any scrupulous analysis of context or dating.55 In the same vein another image a female bodhisattva of compassion with eighteen arms also sitting on a lotus, 52 Stolzenberg 2012. For his later admission that the project of finding a universal language at the root of all historical languages could not be completed see Grafton 2004, 182. 53 Kircher 1667, 136– 7. 54 The parallel had been noted and depicted by Italian the antiquarian Lorenzo Pignoria in the extraEuropean section that he added to Le vere e nove imagini degli dei degli antichi di Vincenzo Cartari (Padua, 1615). For a discussion and reproduction of Pignoria’s engraving see App 2012, 113– 15. 55 The uncanny parallel of Buddhist lotus iconography with the Egyptian image was actually well observed, but Kircher here obviously followed Pignoria (see note 53), even if his iconographic sources were new. Kircher also had a mediocre understanding of Buddhism, and for his account of the Zen theory of Buddhanature (here ‘fombum’) he primarily relied on older Jesuit accounts of Japanese Buddhism, notably the letters of Luis Fróis from the 1560s. The late third century De mysteriis Aegyptiorum by Iamblichus, an essential source for Kircher’s understanding of ancient gentile religion, argued that this figure of Harpocrates signified the transcendence of the divine and its rejection of the materiality of the world (by emerging from the mud), while the circularity of the lotus leaf implied perfection. See Iamblichus 2003, 293. This of course was quite far removed from what the preHellenistic Egyptians might have meant, although the iconography had genuine Egyptian antecedents. Plutarch had also commented on the image of the sunchild rising on the lotus plant as an example of the need for allegorical interpretations of Egyptian myths:see ‘Isis and Osiris’ in Moralia 355b. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World 139 Figure 3.1 We know from Iamblichus and Clement of Alexandria that the Egyptians mystically depicted God sitting on a lotus flower, while the Gnostics followed them by representing Harpocrates sitting on this flower, adorned with various symbols. It seems that this custom penetrated not only into Persia and India, but also to the furthest Orient, as far as China and Japan. They depict their famous deity Amida, otherwise known as Fombum [honbun, primordial], sitting on a flower, a rose or a water lily, and shining with great brightness of rays, as you can see in this picture that the reverend father assistant of Portugal has sent to me, and which Ideemed fit to include here. The sect of the Jenxi [Zenshu] call her Fombum and have a rather different opinion about that Amida than the sect of the Jodoxi [Jodoshu], as we explained. They say that she is an invisible substance, separate from any element, preexisting all creatures, and the source of all good things. Here they paint her symbolically sitting on the flower of a water lily, or more accurately a lotus, to indicate that she offers a glimpse of her hidden virtues and perfections, which is also shown by the clothing that coversher. Kircher, China Illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667), 141 Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 140 Rubiés no doubt Zhǔntí Púsà (Cundi, the Chinese version of Avalokiteśvara), became Isis, or Cybele (see Figure2). In all these cases, what drove Kircher in his comparisons was his desire to prove the Egyptian origin of all branches of gentile idolatry, GraecoRoman and Eastern, and hence the universal validity of his interpretation of such religion as containing elements from prisca theologia, a primitive patriarchal revelation that Hermes Trismegistus, aka Thoth, once sought (but ultimately failed) to restore. Kircher was of course helped by the fact that Middle and Late Platonism had already developed a comparative approach for interpreting the various religious traditions of the ancient world as expressing a common set of universal philosophical principles, or esoteric doctrines, underlying superstitious cults, a model of fundamental translatability that a number of Christian authors influenced by Platonism, from Clement of Alexandria at the turn of the third century to Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth, had been keen to adapt to their interpretation of gentile philosophy (insofar as it concerned wisdom) as a kind of praeparatio evangelica.56 But the ideological emphasis on translatability, grounded on the universality of divine wisdom and the logos, had a methodological cost. One of the paradoxes of Kircher’s comparative project is that while disposing of an extraordinary range of sources from his privileged position at the Collegio Romano, including many brought to him by fellow Jesuit missionaries active in India, Tibet or China, his attempt to subject all the evidence to a preestablished theory of universal connections often ran counter to the effort displayed by some of those same missionaries to historicize gentile traditions locally. Not only was his HermeticEgyptian narrative 56 Plutarch’s essay on Isis and Osiris made the allegorical and universalizing approach explicit– different people gave different names to the same divinities, but the object of their worship was not a particular natural object, but rather the universal power behind it (ibid. 377ce). Many early Christian apologists, especially those in Alexandria, were also attracted to allegorical interpretations and religious symbols, and were often closer to Neoplatonic thinking about the “barbarian wisdom” of nonGreeks (Jews or Gentiles) that they cared to admit. However, from Clement to Eusebius, they increasingly limited the principle of universal translatability so as to deny philosophical legitimacy to pagan religions, and sought to claim the ancient Hebrews (not identical with the later Jews) as the original and only true interpreters of the ancient religion of mankind. Thus they disqualified all gentile religions– especially those of Egypt– as hopelessly mired in demonic idolatry. At the same time, following the lead of Hellenistic Jews such as Philo and Josephus, they insisted that Greek philosophy at its best was derivative from Moses and the Hebrews:notwithstanding their admiration for Socrates and Plato as coming very close to the truth, Greek philosophy was also ultimately inadequate, like a torch when compared to the sun, only useful in the dark. According to Clement, at the source of true philosophy was divine Wisdom, John’s logos; in Eusebius’ formulation, only modern Christians were the true heirs of the ancient Hebrews. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World 141 Figure 3.2 The image or idol of Pussa sits above an aquatic lotus flower. The figure, which is notable for the peculiar contortion of the fingers of her hands, combines singular modesty with an air of authority. She has eight arms on her left side and eight arms on the right. Each hand holds mystical objects, such as swords, halberds, books, fruits, plants, a wheel, ornaments, a box, or a flask … The literati, who seem somewhat wiser than the common people, say that this manyarmed Pussa is no less than the mother of all the gods. The Egyptians, who call her Isis, sometimes describe her hieroglyphically as having many swelling breasts, at other times as having many arms. The Greeks name her Cybele. Those Chinese sages who laugh at polytheism say that this representation of a goddess only describes the strength, power and force of beneficent nature, and, moreover, that the sixteen arms are also symbols, showing the sixteen periods or golden ages that the Chinese have lived in great peace under the protection of this goddess. She sits on a lotus. This plant, floating on the water and irrigated continually by the rich supply of moisture, signifies the moist beginning of all things. The more sensible Chinese literati agree with the ancient Greek philosophers on this. They say that this Pussa is truly the ruler of nature. Imight more aptly say that she is the Chinese Isis or Cybele, by whose influence everything was thought to be conserved and made fertile. Kircher, China Illustrata (Amsterdam, 1667), 141. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 142 Rubiés idiosyncratic within his order, but by presenting the Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist sects as a multilayered system of religion and idolatry which was almost identical to the religious system of ancient Egypt, and by presenting Confucius as a quasideified figure equivalent to ThothHermes, Kircher could undermine the delicate strategy of accommodation of ancient Confucianism inaugurated by Matteo Ricci in China, but fiercely questioned by many within the Church.57 That was in fact the strategy that his own former pupil, Martini Martino, was seeking to salvage in Rome in 1654– 5, just as the two Jesuits met and discussed the Syrian inscriptions of the Nestorian monument in Sian and, no doubt, many other curious subjects.58 One might argue with Daniel Stolzenberg that Kircher’s apologetic concerns on behalf of Christianity were, or became, secondary to his personal desire to claim for himself a unique role as the historical interpreter of the secrets of Egyptian and Oriental paganism.59 Nonetheless, his turn to the ancient history of gentilism was no mere intellectual caprice. Rather, it was symptomatic of the debates of the age, and responded to what we may call the antiquarianization of religious apologetics. This process went beyond the pragmatic logic of missionary efforts in faraway countries by the likes of Acosta, Ricci or Valignano, and can only be understood in the context of the consolidation of the Republic of Letters as a cosmopolitan institution in Europe. Fundamental assumptions about a universal history that was built 57 Hence the monotheistic Confucian literati, the Buddhist idolaters who taught the transmigration of souls, and the practitioners of exorcism and divination who exploited the superstitions of the common people, corresponded to the monotheistic priestly sages– the official lay priesthood– of Egypt, the hierogrammatists or scribes, who taught a Pythagorean doctrine, and the superstitious common people following magi. Kircher was careful to note that Confucius opposed the cult of idols. However, he was himself the object of a public cult. It is notable that the influential but often unreliable French translation of Kircher’s China Illustrata by F.S. Dalquié departed from the careful wording provided by the Jesuit polymath, who quoted Trigault extensively in his description of Confucius as a philosopher, and instead abusively (and not innocently) transformed him into a God, ce Dieu Confutius. Compare Kircher 1667, 132, to Kircher 1670, 176. 58 Martini spent three frenetic years in Europe (1653– 1656) organizing the publication of three historical works concerning the ancient history of China, its geography, and the Manchu conquest, all three of striking originality and importance, whilst defending in Rome with remarkable (if ephemeral) success the Jesuit method of accommodation of Confucianism, and also the contested position of Adam Schall as director of the bureau of Astronomy in Beijing. In the preface to China Illustrata, Kircher would warmly acknowledge Martini– notably his Atlas– as the first among his sources, praising his intelligence, learning and exactitude as an observer. See also note 66 below. 59 Stolzenberg 2013, 150. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University Comparing Cultures in the Early Modern World 143 around the book of Genesis, enhanced by the new geographical horizons of the first truly global age, required that new evidence of religious and ethnic diversity no less than that provided by the ancients be interpreted in relation to the hypothesis of common origins. In effect, while the history of mankind was illuminated by new types of evidence, it could rarely be conceived without considering at the same time the history of religion. However, the intensity of religious differences and political rivalries in Europe itself did not facilitate the emergence of a new consensus narrative:rather, the defence of orthodoxy increasingly relied on being able to participate in the Republic of Letters, a community of learning that no single Church or state institution could control. The great paradox of the period, as a number of specific debates can exemplify, was the consolidation of intellectual pluralism and the possibility of free thinking despite, and often thanks to, the various efforts to combat heresy, heterodoxy and atheism. One important ethnological debate which reflects the antiquarian turn of religious apologetics, and in which the use comparative methods became particularly prominent, concerned the origins of the American Indians.60 Probably the most influential discussion was José de Acosta’s in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), where he questioned the possibility of purposeful navigations across the oceans in ancient times– the magnetic compass, without which such navigations could not be accomplished, was only a relatively late invention. Instead, comparing human technologies and animal species in the Old World and the New, he concluded that the Americas had been populated by savage hunters and by means of a land migration, possibly through a land bridge or narrow straits connecting East Asia to America, to be found in the as yet unexplored NorthWest coast of the continent (although he did not rule out access from the NorthEast, that is Atlantic Europe, or the South, via the straits of Magellan).61 Acosta, like previous and later commentators, took it for granted that the Indians of the New World were part of the same human species and descendants of Adam and Eve. His originality was not in affirming common origins or suggesting a migration by land from the extremes of NorthEast Asia, which was in fact the dominant hypothesis in the Spanish Council of Indies at the end of the sixteenth century, but in the cogent manner in which, through comparisons 60 The two classic works on the subject are Huddleston 1967 and Gliozzi 1977. Gliozzi’s monograph is wonderfully erudite, but the analysis is often questionable. 61 Acosta 2008, 30– 42. The point of comparing animals was to ascertain that many wild species must have also travelled from the Old World, hence making the hypothesis of a land bridge a necessity. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 246 Goldhill era.11 What is more, this religiously inflected historiography is intimately connected with insistent political debates about Jewish emancipation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the restoration of the Jews, a practical ideal dear to some Protestants from the 1840s at least, and embodied in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, or, less directly but no less normatively, in Disraeli’s Tancred.12 The history of the Jews is an arena where religion and politics, as well as literature and theology, heatedly overlap in the nineteenth century. The early modern historians cited by Levitin and Grafton in this volume were undoubtedly fascinated by the history of the Jews. But not only was their work largely forgotten by these 19thcentury scholars (though Bernays’ interest in Scaliger is an obvious and important exception in Germany, just as Mark Pattison’s Casaubon provides a similar counterexample in England),13 but also nineteenthcentury explanatory models have a different framing. Race, nation, and empire change the geopolitical horizon of expectation, and in theological terms the standard model of causation through God’s hand– secondary causation– no longer has a selfevident status in the writing of history.14 The first aim of this chapter is to outline how this particular comparative historiographical discourse takes shape in the 19th century. My second aim, however, is to analyse how one particular question with which nineteenthcentury writers became concerned, reveals in the most telling manner the ideological perspectives that structure the debate about the history of the Jews. The opposition of Jew and Greek– as contrasting ideals, modes of thought, origins of value for Western culture– is a central trope of nineteenthcentury intellectual writing from Moses Mendelssohn, through Hegel, Nietzsche, Matthew Arnold, Marx and Freud.15 Because of this polarizing opposition, Hellenization became a newly critical issue– and revelatory of the strategies of comparatism in nineteenthcentury historiography. Hellenization had been from the beginning a polemical matter for Christianity, which was formulated in conscious opposition to the dominant GrecoRoman culture of the Roman Empire, but which rapidly also appropriated styles of Greek philosophy through neoPlatonism in particular, and modes of Roman social thinking, as it became the dominant force of Empire. The paradox of Greekness for Christianity is encapsulated in the fact that for Greekspeaking 11 From a potentially vast bibliography good background can be found in Kidd 2006; Koditschek 2011; Leerssen 2006; Hesketh 2011; Hall 2002; Hall 2012. 12 Lewis 2010. 13 Grafton 1998; Jones 2007. 14 See Sheehan and Wahrman 2015 on the shift; Levitin 2015 on what is being shifted from. 15 Leonard 2012. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Has Alexandria to Do with Jerusalem? 247 Christians the standard term for “pagan” is Hellên, that is, “Greek”:the very language of Christianity became fissured against itself. Tertullian, the hotheaded Christian apologist from Africa, could ask rhetorically “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”, but, to his chagrin, it proved quite impossible to separate the forces of Hellenized culture and the rise of Christian dominance. But for the nineteenth century, the question took on a different perspective. Romantic Philhellenism, an idealism central to the revolutionary fervour in the early years of the century, by the end of the century had been institutionalized into a more conservative classical education, which set the study of antiquity at the heart of the curriculum across Europe (this background too distinguishes the 19th century from its early modern predecessors).16 In cultural terms, Greece and Rome provided the furniture of the mind for the Victorian educated classes. Yet Christianity, with its selfconscious opposition to the values of GrecoRoman culture, remained the dominant source of spiritual value throughout the century, and the institutions of church and state formed the privileged network of power in Britain. How did the passion for Christianity and the passion for Greek idealism find accommodation together? What was the privileged source of Western cultural value– the bible or the classics? How should the history of Christianity understand its own Hellenizing past? One paradigm of this tension is a pamphlet of more than a hundred pages written by Prime Minister Gladstone which attempted to reconcile Homer and the Bible as signs of God’s Providence, a work which in the wake of the Schliemann’s discovery of Troy, sold over 120, 000 copies to a clearly engaged public.17 In Britain, between 1840 and 1914 more than 200 novels on early Christianity and its place in antiquity were published, exploring this issue imaginatively for a broad public.18 In Germany, by contrast, Adolf von Harnack, the leading Protestant theologian, determinedly viewed Hellenization as a “foreign substructure” in Christianity, something that “secularized” its religious simplicity and truth, even already in the Gospel of John.19 This was provocative from such an authoritative theologian, not least because of the genealogical link repeatedly forged between Germany and Greece, where Germans could emerge as “the New Dorians”– a genealogy that made Greece a privileged origin for the 16 Goldhill 2011, 1– 19; Turner 1981 on Hellenism and politics; Stray 1998 and Dowling 1994 on education; Butler 1935 on Hellenism and German culture are each seminal. 17 Gange 2009; Gange and Bryant Davis 2013, 54– 8; with the background of Parry 1986. 18 Goldhill 2011, 153– 264. 19 Harnack 1886, on which see Meijering 1985. Harnack produced four editions of the Lehrbuch lastly in 1909; the English translation by Neil Buchanan is of the 3rd edition (Harnack 1894– 9). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 248 Goldhill values of German culture in nineteenthcentury German thinking.20 In multiple, complex negotiations between accommodation and resistance, the question of Hellenization remained integral to and problematic for Christian selfrepresentation in the nineteenth century, especially as the origins and purity of Christianity became such a vexed issue of religious identity. This interest in Hellenization took a particular shape with regard to the history of the Jews. There could be no doubt that Jesus and the Christian religion that followed him was intimately bound up with the Jewish society of Palestine in the first century. How, then, was the Judaism of the first century to be understood in relation to the processes of Hellenization? And, in particular, how was the Judaism of Alexandria to be comprehended? There is a great deal at stake for nineteenthcentury thinkers here. On the one hand, there is an investment in seeing the Jews as a pure, stubborn, resistant race, whose rejection of Jesus justified centuries of Christian disdain and violence. These Jews were conceived to be without the privilege of Greek culture and untouched by Philhellenic ideals. On the other hand, the bible that the Gospel writers knew and used was the Septuagint– a Greek translation by Jews from the Greek city of Alexandria. So how Jewish, how Greek were the Jews? This question makes Alexandria a critical question in nineteenthcentury histories of the Jews. To explore specifically how the double comparison between on the one hand the Jews of Alexandria and the Jews of Palestine, and on the other between Jews and Christians, unfurls in nineteenthcentury historiography is my second aim. My third and by far the briefest purpose is to investigate the long legacy of this debate on the History of the Jews– also largely unrecognized in current historiography. The act of cultural forgetting that has made these nineteenthcentury histories seem now quite out of date, can also reveal a blind spot in the current historical imagination of Hellenistic Judaism. In each of these three questions, comparison and comparatism are at the heart. The comparison between past and present is mediated as a genealogical link:the difference of the past is in service of the polemics of the present, and, in particular, this is historiography that is deeply implicated with gestures of selfdefinition in national as well as religious terms. The normative opposition of Jew and Greek, in turn, has a long history:“what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” becomes a founding question of Christianity, never fully comfortable with its own Neoplatonic turn. The contrastive comparison between Christian and pagan, or Christian and Jew is foundational, of course, but becomes transmuted here into an obsessional discrimination between Jew 20 Hall 1997; Lincoln 1999– and the still important Butler 1935. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Has Alexandria to Do with Jerusalem? 249 and Jew– between types and forms of Judaism. As we will see, the split in the comparandum talks directly to the division in the sense of self in the comparators. Yet the nineteenth century is also the great period of grand theorizing about historical comparatism. Marshall’s transformative theory of economics that made graphs and maths central to economics, begins with a history that starts in ancient Greece. Mayne on law, McLellan on social development, Buckle or Marx on world history (and many others) are similarly committed to the notion that a grandscale comparative history, with an ever present teleological drive towards explaining and justifying the present, is the right form of narrative. This in turn prompts explicit comparative theory. For the nineteenth century, as the introduction to this volume makes clear, what is right to call a regime of comparatism links these different fields through shared questions, shared techniques and dynamics of selfawareness, and, above all, sets the study of religion at the very centre of how selfunderstanding now requires such a regime of comparatism. So Matthew Arnold writes:“We must compare … the works of other ages with our own age and country”. And the aim is clear:“To know how others stand, that we may know how we ourselves stand”. This is the teleological imperative of comparatism, and it bites most evidently when it turns to biblical criticism. In biblical criticism, writes Arnold, we must have “a very wide experience from comparative observation in many directions”. Is not the silent and silenced enemy here the Protestant claim of sola scriptura? In 1886 Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett published Comparative Literature, the first work of comparatism in literary studies. He is aware of his own modernity, as one would expect for a good Victorian:“consciously comparative thinking [is] the great glory of the nineteenth century”.21 And his book is organized around the concept of national literatures, a structuring easy to locate within nineteenthcentury regimes of knowledge; and a model of evolution, which is wholly whiggish. It is against such a gradual turn to selfconscious comparatism, with its commitments to national literature and a teleological, genealogical, evolutionary model of development, that the genre of the history of the Jews can be sited. This material will pose most starkly the question of the degree to which comparatism, especially a comparatism which has religion at its heart, can fully escape such normative teleologies of selfplacement (which Lloyd has underlined as a basic question of comparative process).22 Indeed, when Arnold paradigmatically calls for a thoroughgoing comparatism as a gesture of selfunderstanding, 21 Posnett 1886, 76. 22 Lloyd 2015. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University 250 Goldhill it must not be forgotten that this is the same Arnold who in Culture and Anarchy used the comparison of Hebraism and Hellenism to divide and categorize the cultural selfplacement of the English. The turn to comparatism here goes hand in hand with a conscious sense of the division within the national and religious identity of the subject who is making the comparisons. This explicit frontal comparison (as Candea calls it) sets the divided positionality of the British against the divisions of the other. So let us begin with the reaction to Milman’s History of the Jews. Aflavour of the “unmeasured language” which surprised its publisher can be garnered from an anecdote of Christopher Earle who boarded the coach at Oxford on a Monday. The coachman asked him if he had been in church on Sunday to hear the sermon of Godfrey Faussett, who was the then Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, and a polemical, and not very bright High Church ideologue23– and lamented that he had missed a corker. “Dr Faussett was great, sir”, the coachman announced, “He did give it to that Mr Milman. He said, sir– and I am sure it is true– that ‘since the days of Julian the Apostate there has not risen a greater enemy to Christianity than Mr Milman.’ ”24 Milman had anticipated that “wise heads will shake at my views” of what he called “sainted and canonized nonsense”, but everyone was taken aback by the virulence of the opposition.25 So what was all the fuss about? There were two major reasons why Milman provoked the pious so pointedly. Dean Stanley is clear about the first reason. Milman was shocking because this was the “first decisive inroad of German theology into England:the first palpable indication that the Bible could be ‘studied like any other book’ ”.26 It is worth recalling the intellectual and religious context of 1829 to appreciate the impact of The History of the Jews. The translation of Niebuhr’s History of Rome, translated by Julius Charles Hare and Connop Thirlwall, published in 1828, can stand as an icon of the battlelines that were forming in British intellectual and religious circles in these years.27 Niebuhr’s account of Livy was a founding text of critical history, in the rhetoric of the day often set parallel to Wolf’s analyses of Homer, and Strauss’ 23 Nockles 1994 s.v. Faussett for context. 24 Milman 1900, 89. 25 Milman 1900, 84– 5. 26 Stanley 1870, 576. This now looks like an exaggeration, which ignores e.g. the reception of Eichorn. On early modern Christian Hebraism, largely ignored by Millman and others, see Grafton 2014 for discussion and bibliography. 27 Niehbuhr’s history, first published in 1811, is set in context in Goldhill 2011, 171– 6. On Thirlwall, see Thirlwall 1936, surprisingly unhagiographic. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University What Has Alexandria to Do with Jerusalem? 251 unpicking of biblical texts.28 Not only did Niebuhr’s critique show the level of myth and legend in Livy’s history of early Rome, but also suggested that the beginnings of mankind were complex enough to indicate that creation might have taken place in different places– and polygeneticism was incompatible with Biblical narratives.29 Hare and Thirlwall were liberal luminaries, closely connected to Grote and the Prussian intellectual and diplomat, Baron Bunsen, and, through marriage, Hare was related to F.D. Maurice, teacher of Charles Kingsley and others in the Christian Socialist movement.30 Niebuhr’s history thus came trailing clouds of Liberal progressivism. He was in consequence virulently attacked by the conservative and orthodox as a “pert, dull scoffer”, whose work was “pregnant with crude and dangerous speculations” which led “ungovernable youths [to hold] democratic meetings”.31 Both his supporters and his enemies, however, agreed that Niebuhr’s history of Rome spoke to the contemporary politics of church and democracy.32 Indeed, Alfred Lord Tennyson– as quoted approvingly by Benjamin Jowett– declared that “the true origin of biblical criticism was to be ascribed not to Strauss, but to Niebuhr”.33 With Niebuhr, Strauss and Wolf, there was a deeply held sense that the Germans were coming. In particular, the threat of socalled rationalist critiques of the texts of religion from antiquity was perceived as a major threat to the establishment of church and society alike. Indeed, Dr Faussett, in the published version of his sermon, though he doesn’t liken Milman to Julian the Apostate, does make him a harbinger of “the unhallowed speculations of German rationalism”, and thus, in the words of another critic, “extremely defective in the moral and religious instruction which the annals of this wayward nation ought undoubtedly to convey”.34 Faussett’s particular anxiety is that Milman rationalizes away miracles, which is decried as the most damaging aspect of the lamentable attempt to separate history and theology. You cannot tell the story of the Jews without miracles and without God:“Exclude the agency of Heaven, and their whole story is obscure and inconsistent and incredible”.35 Interestingly, Milman thought such a 28 On Wolf, see Grafton, Most and Zetzel 1985; on Strauss see from a large bibliography, Harris 1973; Frei 1985; Larsen 2004, 43– 58; Pals 1982, 19– 58. 29 See Kidd 2006; with the backstory in Kidd 1999, 9– 33; Stocking 1982; Stocking 1987, 247– 52; and for a basic introduction Jackson and Weidman 2006, 35– 59. 30 On Maurice, see in particular Morris 2005. 31 [Barrow] 1829, 8. 32 Turner 1981 is essential background here. Niebuhr seemed much less frightening after 1830. 33 Tennyson 1905, ii:463. 34 Faussett 1830, 9; E, T.1830, 67. 35 Faussett 1830, 12. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd - 978-90-04-38763-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 12/31/2023 04:34:53PM via New York University [Document text truncated for crawler view.]