Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America (Allison P. Coudert)

Abstract

As the title of her new book indicates, Allison P. Coudert has set herself an impressive challenge: an overview of religion, magic, and science not only in Europe but also in America, spanning the whole of the early modern period. As an eminent scholar who has been investigating this field for decades already, Coudert certainly seems qualified to tackle so large and demanding a project. As she relates in the acknowledgments, she took her first steps under the guidance of Frances Yates at the Warburg Institute. Her research has focused on the interactions of science, religion, and esotericism ever since, and in this book she sets out to show that “religion, magic, and science were all of a piece” (ix) during the early modern period. Published as part of the Praeger Series on the Early Modern World, the result is, regrettably, not satisfactory, even if we take the book as an introductory survey with only limited claims to originality. The passages dealing with the historiography of science, religion, and magic are certainly solid work, if a bit dated—especially with regard to the scientific revolution—and problematic in their use of “magic.”To begin with the most superficial problems, the book would have profited greatly from more careful proofing in the later stages of production. While it goes without saying that some typos always evade even the most searching eyes, there are worse blunders here: Latin phrases, the names of historical actors, and even the titles of their books are misspelled rather too often. Further, potential readers should be aware of the fact that Coudert relies heavily on examples from the Anglophone world. Though she pays some attention to German, French, and Italian material, Spain and Portugal get particularly short shrift. By focusing on the Catholic Inquisition in these contexts, Coudert perpetuates the dated and highly questionable association between Protestantism and progress. The northern and eastern European contexts are largely ignored. As is understandable in a survey where the emphasis lies on momentous changes in the history of ideas, historical personalities do not loom large; the only sustained analysis of an individual centers on the Flemish alchemist Jan Baptist van Helmont (chapter 9). Most detrimental, however, are the grave terminological problems that ultimately prevent this book from delivering on its promises.As a chapter-by-chapter summary of Coudert's work would be somewhat tedious, my remarks shall focus on some of the general themes treated in this book. From the very beginning, it is clear that Coudert is concerned with situating religion, magic, and science in the context of the lived experience of early modern people. To this end, she paints a very vivid picture that contrasts the poor standards of hygiene and questionable medical treatments with the stunning achievements of artists and philosophers. The same thread is taken up again in chapters 4 and 5, which deal with witch hunts and the role accorded to Protestant women at home, respectively. In what is one of the strongest parts of the book, Coudert links these seemingly unrelated issues by showing how the early modern concern with purity was expressed differently at the level of the individual, the family, and society as a whole.Coudert is also concerned with what she calls “miracles” (esp. in chapter 3). However, she does not differentiate between miracles as opposed to wonders, prodigies, and marvels. As has been well established in the classic study on this issue, “miracle” and “wonder” were anything but synonymous terms: the former referred to interventions of the divine in the temporal, whereas the latter designated ultimately natural phenomena that were somehow out of the ordinary, that is, preternatural—a term never once used by Coudert.1 In the same vein, her use of “supernatural” needs to be qualified, for she uses the term without historicizing it in any way. If we consider that what was held to be “natural” or “supernatural” underwent great changes in the early modern period—indeed, if we consider that the shift of certain phenomena (e.g., comets) from one category to the other was crucial to certain aspects of the scientific revolution—such terminological imprecision is a severe shortcoming.Moreover, Coudert treats some of her subjects whiggishly, for she repeatedly describes instances in which our early modern forbears show themselves to be credulous or superstitious about the possibility of witchcraft or miracles. While these people certainly were superstitious if we measure them against a modern understanding of the world, I would argue that early modern scholars, of all people, believed these things on good authority, based on the testimony of respectable classical writers or even the Bible. Coudert passes over this; instead, she chooses to focus on what seems to her to be the striking juxtaposition of innovative scientific ideas and the superstitious or credulous remnants of older natural philosophical traditions as they coexisted not just in society, but often in the minds of a single individual (e.g., Robert Boyle).The central thesis advanced in this book is that the early modern period saw an anthropological revolution that had far-reaching consequences. Taking her cue from Ernst Cassirer, Coudert outlines how Augustine's view of humanity as tainted by original sin came to be gradually rejected (introduction, chapter 6).2 According to her, this in itself was greatly conducive to scientific progress. While reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin subscribed to what Coudert calls a “pessimistic” anthropology, heterodox thinkers, such as Fausto Sozzini, rejected this in favor of a more “optimistic” view of humankind during the second half of the early modern age (1650–1800).While there certainly is something to this trajectory, Coudert's terms render it problematic: “optimism” (while the everyday understanding is dominant here, Cassirer used the term in its strict, philosophical sense, referring back to G. W. Leibniz), as well as its evil twin, “pessimism,” more than anything shed light on the values of the person who uses them rather than the people or attitudes to which they are applied. In her understanding, “optimism” is particularly associated with the idea of “progress,” a notion that would have benefited from further explication itself. Throughout most of the early modern period, the notion of “progress” had little in common with the more familiar nineteenth-century iterations construed in the wake of Darwinian evolution and scientific positivism. If anything, early modern conceptions of “progress” were concerned with restoring humanity's prelapsarian abilities and antediluvian longevity.3 In a sense, the idea is one of “progressing” backward to a primordial state of perfection. Coudert presents some striking examples of this conception yet fails to explore their implications.Moreover, I cannot help but note how this whole argument appears to be Coudert's reformulation of what has come to be known as the Yates thesis. Just like Coudert's optimistic, heterodox thinkers, Yates's Renaissance magi believed in the powers of human agency to influence the world and even the heavens.4 Consequently, for Yates it was not so much the influence of ascetic Protestantism (as Robert K. Merton's thesis would have it, following Max Weber) but the presence of what she called “the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition” that was “most conducive to scientific advance.”5 In this respect, Coudert has simply replaced Yates's identification of a specific tradition with a broader reference to heterodox and esoteric tendencies that emphasized the ability of humankind to act as its own savior, an argument that increasingly takes center stage as we progress through the later chapters of the book.In order to make this case and to show that science, religion, and magic interacted in many ways, Coudert sees esotericists as well as esoteric pursuits left and right. And this is where her use of terminology is fundamentally flawed. Most of her argumentative momentum derives from the fact that such diverse currents—both among each other and within themselves—as “magic, astrology, alchemy, Hermeticism, the Kabbalah, and a host of subjects that were previously relegated to the rubbish bin of history” (153) are indiscriminately lumped together, by virtue, it seems, of having ended up in that said bin. Thus, Coudert allows her scholarship to be guided by the polemical rejection the Enlightenment accorded to these pursuits and philosophies, which in many cases have little in common. The underlying notion is one akin to the supposed unity of the occult sciences—a wholly untenable notion on which Brian Vickers based his crusade against Yates's work.6Moreover, it is important to note, as Coudert does not, that the fates of these various occult sciences were strikingly different. The idea of Hermeticism as an identifiable, independent esoteric philosophy is largely the brainchild of twentieth-century scholars and should be carried over into the twenty-first only with careful qualifications.7 And whereas astrology used to be an integral part of medical university curricula, beginning to recede only during the later seventeenth century, alchemy steadily gained in popularity during the early modern period, entering universities in various forms from the seventeenth century onward.8 But this does not mean that alchemy somehow (by means of transmutation, perhaps?) stopped being alchemy and became chemistry at an identifiable point. Indeed, this supposed dichotomy has rightfully been debunked for the early modern period.9 Much recent scholarship has gone a long way toward establishing that early modern alchemy was also a careful laboratory practice and contributed to large-scale entrepreneurial schemes.10 For Coudert, however, alchemy stands as the quintessential example of esotericism (see chapters 8 and 9), and her very argument hinges on the prima facie labeling of alchemy as esoteric.Coudert also brings to bear a preconceived notion of “magic” in her analysis: when discussing the topic in chapter 2, she emphasizes the spiritual and religious aspects of magic, and then appears to be surprised by the nitty-gritty techniques and practices adopted by men like Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim and Giambattista della Porta as part and parcel of magic. She speaks of a “mix of the sublime and the commonplace” (41). The truth is that early modern magic was something entirely different from what most people nowadays take it to be, and hence it needs to be historicized with the utmost care.11 When Coudert states that there is a definition of magic that “holds true … over the millennia” (35), this is a profoundly ahistorical statement that could just as well have been written by Vickers. These two modern scholars differ mainly in their evaluation of magic—whereas Vickers rejects it wholesale as the outgrowth of a dim-witted occult mentality, Coudert is fascinated by its perceived strangeness and otherness (as was Yates before her, one might add).Granted, it was not Coudert's intention to make magic seem less strange by connecting it to, say, the realities of the medical marketplace.12 Instead, she chooses to argue for its continued existence in spite of religion and science. To this end, we witness her beating a dead horse in the epilogue: the triad of magic, religion, and science as mutually ruling out one another and as representing a trajectory of progress throughout human history. The idea, popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is that humanity moves from irrational, superstitious magic to credulous religion and, finally, to purely rational science. Coudert's central contention—that “religion, magic, and science were all of a piece” (ix)—is directed against this dated, positivist model and is, needless to say, absolutely correct. Among most scholars working on the early modern period, I venture, this point did not need much arguing in the first place.In attempting to make her case, however, Coudert finds herself in the precarious position of having to use the very terms that she intends to criticize as her analytical vocabulary. This is a fundamental problem, and Coudert does not deal with it adequately here. Her Science, Religion, and Magic in Early Modern Europe and America does not present historicized definitions of key terms, nor does it reflect on the relationship between emic and etic vocabularies. Unfortunately, then, this book is far from successful in treating science, religion, and magic according to the standards of current historiography.