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Early Modern Aesthetics

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Ancients and Moderns

The works of early modern philosophers and scientists are full of criticisms of the ancients and their medieval interpreters. Bacon condemns "antiquities and citations of authors and authorities; also disputes, controversies, and dissenting opinions — in a word, philology" as irrelevant to the progress of science in his Outline of a Natural and Experimental History (1620). In his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632), Galileo denounces "the most reverent and most humble slaves of Aristotle" for their reliance on the authority of their ancient master. Descartes compares the works of ancient moral philosophers to "very proud and magnificent palaces built only on sand and mud" in his Discourse on Method (1637). Hobbes thought the introduction of ancient Greek philosophy into Christian theology led to so many contradictions and absurdities that the people revolted against the clergy during the Reformation. And Newton dismissed approaches to natural science derived from Aristotle, because he thought their jargon had nothing to contribute to philosophy. The list of these examples could go on indefinitely, though they should be taken with a grain of salt. Early modern philosophers and scientists were prone to misrepresenting the views of their predecessors and overstating the differences between the ancients and the moderns, because they had an interest in promoting the novelty of their own ideas.

Criticism of ancient poetry and art tended to be more moderate than criticism of Aristotle and the Scholastics. Early modern critics of ancient poetry recognized that Homer sometimes "nods," but they still respected his achievements and translated his works. Yet even their most balanced criticism also laid the foundation for critical comparison. The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in the French academy began when Charles Perrault suggested modern science and art were more advanced than those of the ancients. Soon the battle of the books was raging in Britain over the relative merits of ancient poetry and modern scholarship. In this chapter I argue that these debates were just as much a part of the struggle for modernism as the revolutionary transformations that took place in science and philosophy. They are an important part of the prehistory of aesthetics, because they helped bring art and philosophy together in the early modern period.

A SECOND RENAISSANCE

In the conclusion to his book The Crisis of the European Mind (1935), the intellectual historian Paul Hazard describes the early modern period as "a second Renaissance." Hazard is mistaken when he says it is "a Renaissance without a Rabelais, a Renaissance without a smile," since the early modern period saw the publication of a number of witty and irreverent satires. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Voltaire's Candide (1759) are notable examples. Another work published during this period may be the most Rabelaisian novel since Gargantua and Pantagruel (ca. 1532–1564): Lawrence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759). But these are not the works Hazard has in mind when he calls the early modern period a second renaissance. Hazard is referring to the work of those "indefatigable and insatiable bookworms" who carried Renaissance traditions of textual criticism into the modern age. Their scholarship helped frame the debates about modernism in philosophy, science, and the arts.

One side of early modern scholarship focused on the Bible. Spinoza advocated a naturalistic approach to scripture in his Theological-Political Treatise (1670). At the beginning of his treatise, Spinoza proposes a psychological explanation for prophecy, arguing that prophecy is an expression of the magination of the prophets, rather than special revelation or direct communication with God. Sometimes the prophets' imaginations led them to say things that suggest God has a body, that he is present at one time but absent at another, or that he moves from place to place, yet Spinoza did not think these statements should be taken literally. They simply reflect the prophets' ignorance of philosophy and science. When we understand God's nature philosophically, we can no longer accept the anthropomorphic God they describe. Nor can we accept the possibility of miracles that violate the laws of nature. Since God is perfect, everything that comes from God is necessary, and necessity admits no exceptions. The miracles described in scripture are best understood as natural phenomena whose causes were unknown to the authors of the Bible, because they did not possess adequate scientific knowledge or the philosophical sophistication necessary to appreciate God's perfection.

Spinoza's biblical criticism was continued by Richard Simon, who produced historical-critical studies of the Old and New Testaments at the end of the seventeenth century. Simon rejected Spinoza's naturalism, but he was a capable philologist who was able to demonstrate the shortcomings of the biblical text — its erroneous chronologies, transpositions and variations, the corruptions that plague the manuscript tradition, and so forth. For this his books were burned, he was expelled from the religious order to which he belonged, and he was forced into exile in the Netherlands. A later translator, inspired by the rationalism of Christian Wolff, suffered similar persecution. When he published the Wertheim Bible (1735), Johann Lorenz Schmidt was denounced as a "philosophical mocker of religion" by Joachim Lange, the Pietist theologian who had had Wolff expelled from Prussia ten years earlier. Schmidt insisted the Old Testament should be read historically, as the work of ancient Hebrews. He translated the text accordingly, omitting references to Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity. The theologians had the book banned, and Schmidt was imprisoned for more than a year. He eventually escaped to Hamburg, where his work inspired Hermann Samuel Reimarus to write his Apology, or Defense of the Rational Worshippers of God (ca. 1736–1768). Reimarus supported tolerance for deists, maintained that the truth of Christianity could only be demonstrated by reason, rejected miracles and revelation in favor of natural religion, and ruthlessly exposed the inconsistencies of scripture.His views would ignite another storm of controversy when fragments of his Apology were published by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the 1770s.

Although these debates command our attention, early modern scholarship was not restricted to the Bible. The humanist tradition of studying, editing, and translating works by classical authors continued unabated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of this work was even done by early modern philosophers and scientists. In 1599, when he was only fifteen years old, Hugo Grotius published a commentary on Martianus Capella's Satyricon; later he would publish an annotated edition of Lucan's Pharsalia (1614). Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War (1629) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (1675). Samuel Clarke published his own translation of the Iliad (1729), which was followed by a posthumous edition of his translation of The Odyssey (1759). Other work was done by some of the most famous poets and dramatists of the age. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux's translation of Longinus's On the Sublime, which appeared with his Horatian Art of Poetry in 1674, helped make the sublime one of the central concerns of early modern criticism. Before his death in 1700, John Dryden translated Ovid's Epistles, Plutarch's Lives, Juvenal's Satires, Virgil's Aeneid, Lucian's Dialogues, Aesop's Fables, and even parts of Lucretius's scandalous On the Nature of Things. Alexander Pope's translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey appeared between 1715 and 1720. In Germany, the study of classical art and architecture was advanced by Johann Joachim Winckelmann's Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755), Notes on the Architecture of the Ancients (1762), and his monumental History of Ancient Art (1765). Lessing responded with his Laocoön (1766), an extended meditation on the misunderstandings to which Horace's dictum "poetry resembles painting" (ut pictura poesis) had been subjected, which also demonstrated Lessing's mastery of ancient literature and his discerning eye for visual art.

Of course, most of the work of early modern scholarship was done by figures who are less well known to us today. In 1611 Daniel Heinsius published an edition of Aristotle's Poetics whose appendix, On Plot in Tragedy De tragoediae constituione), became one of the main sources of French neoclassicism. Heinsius's work is discussed in Pierre Corneille's Three Discourses on Dramatic Poetry (1660); René Rapin's Reflections on Aristotle's Poetics (1674); and the critical remarks to André Dacier's French translation of the Poetics (1692), which boasted that it contained "the most exact rules for judging epic poems, works for the theatre, tragedy and comedy." Dacier's wife, Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, was an even more eminent scholar than her husband. Before publishing her prose translations of Homer's Iliad (1699) and Odyssey (1708), Madame Dacier produced editions and translations of Sapphic and Anacreontic poetry; the comedies of Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence; the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the lives of Plutarch. When Antoine Houdar de la Motte, who did not know any Greek, produced his own version of the Iliad (1714) and claimed it was better suited to modern tastes than Dacier's translation, the "Homeric War" began. Although it started as a disagreement about the merits of Homer's poetry, the debate between Dacier and La Motte reignited the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns that had divided the French academy at the end of the seventeenth century, before expanding into a more general debate about the relationship among art, criticism, and society. The debate soon spread to Britain, but German scholars continued to study the classics in the "quiet and modest way" they had during the eighteenth century. It was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that scholars like Johann Matthias Gesner, Johann August Ernesti, Johann Jakob Reiske, and Christoph Gottlob Heyne began to publish the kinds of works that would make Germany famous for philology.

In addition to the editions and translations they produced, early modern scholars thought deeply about how the ancients should be studied. Because "studies pass into manners" (abeunt studia in mores), Bacon advises students to be careful when reading the classics. In his essay "Of Studies," he notes "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." Professional philologists like Richard Bentley did not always share Bacon's moral concerns. By noting linguistic and historical anachronisms, Bentley was able to reveal the Epistles of Phalaris to be a forgery, despite the fact that manuscripts of the letters can be dated back to Lucian's time (ca. 125–180 CE) and a long tradition traces them back to the time of Pythagoras (ca. 570–495 BCE). Bentley's works were marvels of scholarly erudition, but many worried his methods were impediments to the literary appreciation of the classics. In Italy, Giambattista Vico warned that introducing students to the classics through the techniques of "modern philosophical critique" would stifle their imagination. The account of the true Homer that Vico presents in his New Science (1725) is certainly imaginative, but it did not convince his contemporaries to abandon the methods of modern scholarship. Indeed, classical scholarship attained new heights of sophistication at the end of the eighteenth century through the work of Friedrich August Wolf. In his Prolegomena to Homer (1795), Wolf argued that the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey were a patchwork of material invented at different times by various rhapsodes, which were only subsequently arranged in the form of epic poems. His claims were controversial, but Wolf's knowledge of Greek history and his mastery of the texts was unmatched by his contemporaries. Soon he began drawing up plans for the "science of antiquity" (Altertumswissenschaft) that laid the foundation for the systematic investigation of almost every aspect of the classical world in the nineteenth century.

PROMOTING MODERNISM

It is against the background of early modern scholarship that modernism began to assert itself in the seventeenth century. Although this section focuses on modernism in the arts, we should not forget that artistic modernism was closely related to the development of modern philosophy and science. Indeed, the champions of artistic modernism often treated the combined achievements of modern philosophy, science, and art as evidence of the superiority of the present over the past.

The poem "The Century of Louis the Great" (1687) by Charles Perrault is one of the most explicit statements of artistic modernism from the seventeenth century. When he read his poem to the Académie française, Perrault had already written works praising modern painters and dramatists. But he began "The Century of Louis the Great" with a shocking admission: Perrault says he does not admire the venerable beauty of antiquity! He goes on to suggest that no one can read an entire dialogue of Plato; that Aristotle's physics is no more reliable than Herodotus's history; that modern poets and orators have surpassed Demosthenes and Cicero; that Homer is guilty of all kinds of excesses and deficiencies; and that the ancients demonstrated their poor taste by ignoring Menander, Virgil, and Ovid. Perrault then argues that the ancient painters are no better than students compared to Raphael and Charles LeBrun; that François Girardon's sculpture Apollo and the Nymphs is vastly superior to the Laocoon, which is so poorly proportioned that it makes Laocoön's sons look like dwarfs; and that the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully is more natural and more touching than the cacophonous din the Greeks called music. Although these claims scandalized his contemporaries, Perrault did not think the reasons for the superiority of modern art were difficult to discern. The mature works of great artists were bound to be better than the works they produced as students, because they had more time to hone their skills and build upon earlier insights. France could boast of greater achievements under Louis XIV than Rome could claim during the rule of Caesar Augustus for the same reason: centuries had passed and modern artists had discovered the secrets of painting, sculpture, and music that were still mysteries to the ancients. Perrault applied the same reasoning to philosophy and science in his Parallel of the Ancients and Moderns (1688–1697) in order to make a general case for the superiority of the moderns over the ancients.

Perrault's poem ignited a firestorm of controversy in the French academy, but he was not without allies in the quarrel that ensued. Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle was one of those who sided with Perrault against the defenders of the ancients. His treatise Of Eclogues (1686) criticizes the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil, claiming they attribute too much ingenuity and gallantry to the shepherds who were the subjects of their poems, making country life seem more refined than it should appear. The moderns, he says, "have not often been guilty of making their shepherds so clownish." Fontenelle attached his A Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns as an appendix at the end of his treatise, because he knew his comments would elicit hostile responses. At the beginning of his Digression, he warns his critics not to hold up the ancients as the source of reason and good taste, because that would suggest that "Nature wore herself out in producing those great originals." Over the next few pages, he shows there can be no natural differences between the ancients and moderns, because they occupied the same regions and enjoyed the same climate. Eventually he declares "we are now all perfectly equal, ancients and moderns, Greeks, Romans, and Frenchmen," but his egalitarianism is short-lived. Responding to those who claim the ancients discovered and perfected the arts and sciences, Fontenelle contends that it was not the intelligence of the ancients, but their errors, that laid the foundation for modern philosophy, science, and art. "We had first to try the ideas of Plato, the numbers of Pythagoras, and the qualities of Aristotle," he writes, "only when these had been recognized as false were we driven to accept the correct theory." Homer's poetry serves as a cautionary tale about the absurd lengths to which the ancients extended their poetic license, whose limits the moderns have finally recognized. In the end, Fontenelle even boasts "the best works of Sophocles, of Euripides, of Aristophanes will not stand up before Cinna, Horace, Ariane, Le Misanthrope, and many oother tragedies and comedies of the great period." The superiority of these works is predicated on their willingness to challenge the authority of the ancients and correct their mistakes.

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Excerpted from Early Modern Aesthetics by J. Colin McQuillan. Copyright © 2016 J. Colin McQuillan. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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