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De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 1998 (1998)

De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 1998

(1998)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Wiep van Bunge
‘Quelle extravagance’: Balthasar Bekker (1634-1698) in Germanyand France1.

I.

Balthasar Bekker's De betoverde Weereld, first published in 1691-1693 in Leeuwarden and Amsterdam, was soon translated into German, French and English. The World Bewitch 'd2. does not seem to have stimulated much interest, but Die bezauberte Welt3. in particular, as well as Le monde enchanté4., do appear to have reached a substantial audience on the Continent. The reactions to the German and the French editions of Bekker's work did, however, vary markedly. While the publication in 1693 of Die bezauberte Welt gave rise to an extremely violent polemic, in which dozens of pamphlets and books appeared, Le monde enchanté, issued in 1694, never caused the kind ofanger provoked by its German counterpart. Before attempting to explain the differences between the German and the French reception of Bekker's Cartesian assault on what he felt to be prejudices relating to the active engagement of Satan with mankind, I

shall have to say something about the nature of Bekker's impact on the early Enlightenment in Germany and France.

II.

The first signs of German interest in De betoverde Weereld preceded the publication of its translation. In 1691, shortly after the first two parts of the work had appeared, Leibniz was eager to lay his hands on them and often mentioned the work in his correspondence.5. Three years later he praised it as one of those ‘livres [...] excellens pour desabuser le monde des préjugés populaires’. In his Théodicée he also gave expression to his worries about the radicalism of Bekker's exegetics6., whereas Friedrich Wilhelm Stosch made use of Bekker's work in his avowedly atheist and materialist Concordia rationis etfidei of 1692.7. The majority of Bekker's first German readers seem to have been genuinely shocked by the boldness of his conclusions. The tone of the ensuing polemic was set by Friedrich Ernst Kettner's De duobus impostoribus Benedicto de Spinosa et Balthasare Bekkero (Leipzig, 1694) and Petrus Goldschmidt's Höllischer Morpheus (Hamburg, 1698), which even ran to a second edition (1704). Both authors were convinced that Bekker - like Stosch - was an atheist, the next major threat to the Christian creed after Hobbes and Spinoza.8.

By the early eighteenth century, however, the German debate covering Die bezauberte Welt had entered a new phase as a result of the crucial intervention of Christian Thomasius, arguably the most important author of the early German Enlightenment. In his pioneering De crimine magiae (1701), translated as Vom laster der Zauberei (1703), Thomasius overtly praised Die bezauberte Welt, although he was careful not to present himself as a Cartesian. He emphatically rejected Goldschmidt's argument that denying the power of the devil was tantamount to rejecting faith in God.9. Goldschmidt quickly reiterated his claim that Bekker was indeed

‘atheus indirecte talis, subtilis, und palliatus, Denn derselbe, welcher sich erstlich unterstehet, die Gespenste und Hexen zu leugnen, der wird auch bald anfangen die Geister und Teuffel zu leugnen, leugnet er diese, so leugnet er auch bald ein künfftiges Leben, und wird folglich alle Hauptstücke der Religion leugnen’10.

Over the next few decades, however, such vehemence became increasingly rare. In 1715 the first bibliography of Bekkeriana was published, and thus the issue gradually turned into a subject of historical enquiry, rather than of heated debate.11. To all intents and purposes, by the middle of the eighteenth century Die bezauberte Welt was no longer held to have been the work of a Freidenker, let alone an atheist. Trinius' famous Freydenker-Lexicon (Leipzig/Bernburg, 1759-1765) no longer bothered to even mention him.

This is not to say that German interest in Bekker's work had waned. On the contrary, he was dealt with in some detail in Brucker's important Historia criticae philosophiae12., and we know for instance that during the 1750s the young Lessing was trying his teeth at a new translation of De betoverde Weereld. On April 11th 1755 he wrote a letter to his father in Wittenberg, in which he asked him to send

‘ein Pack[e]t holländischer Schriften [...] die ich ehemals gesammelt hatte, und die Streitigkeiten, wegen Beckers bezauberter Welt betreffen. Sie sind alle in Quart und bloss in blaues Papier geheftet, und ich weis ganz gewiss, dass ich sie in Wittenberg gelassen habe. Da ich jetzt an einen neuen Übersetzung von Beckers bezaub. Welt arbeite, der ich eine Geschichte der darüber erregten Streitigkeiten vorsetzen will, [...] so brauchte ich die Gedachten Holländischen Pieçen sehr notwendig.’13.

Apparently, his father could not find the material his son was looking for, and the project was abandoned.

Shortly after this episode, Die bezauberte Welt suddenly acquired a new urgency, when in 1759 a young woman by the name of Anna Elisabeth Lohmann from Horsdoff in Anhalt fell prey to hysterical fits, triggering the so-called ‘Teufelsstreit’.14. This particular debate owes its significance mainly to the intervention of Johann Salomo Semmler, one of the most prominent

theologians of the day. According to Semmler, Ms. Lohmann's attacks did indeed prove the reality of ‘obsessio spiritualis’. Following Die bezauberte Welt, however, Semmler argued that ‘obsessio corporalis’ could not be established.15. In 1781-1782, nearly a century after the original publication of De betoverde Weereld, Semmler, together with Johann Moritz Schwager, produced a completely revised translation of Die bezauberte Welt.16. Remarkably, Bekker's fame in Germany seems to have continued well beyond the eighteenth century. Hegel in his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie mentioned Bekker sympathetically, Bruno Bauer also recognized his importance, as did Wilhem Dilthey and Ernst Bloch.17. Despite the romantically inspired nineteenth-century resurgence of interest in all things supernatural, Bekker has continued to play his part in the tradition of German Enlightenment, not least thanks to Max Weber's much-quoted assessment of the Entzauberungder Welt.

Weber, it should be stressed, was certainly not the first German author to coin this phrase.18. It seems to have been Schiller who first used the expression, after which it was picked up by a host of poets and philosophers - including Novalis, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, and Weber's close personal friend Ernst Troeltsch - well before Weber, in 1917 held his famous Munich lecture entitled Wissenschaft als Beruf.19. In this lecture, he first sketched academic life in Germany and the United States as he saw it in his day, after which he turned his attention to one of his favourite themes, the gradual ‘intellectualization’ of Western culture, arguing that ‘Scientific process is a fraction, the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualization which we have been undergoing for thousands of years and which nowadays is usually judged in such an extremely negative way.’20.

Faced with the question of what this process meant in practice, Weber went on to maintain that it did not indicate ‘an increased and general knowledge of

the conditions under which one lives’:

‘It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means.’21.

Quite apart from the question of the accuracy of Weber's diagnosis22., it does not seem too far-fetched to recognize that De betoverde Weereld contains at least the seeds of this Weberian ‘disenchantment’.23. After having taken stock of the French reception of le monde enchanté, I shall return to the question of Bekker's ‘modernity’.

III.

Bayle was shocked. Not only in his correspondence, but also in his Réponse aux questions d'un provincial he gave expression to his disgust:

‘On fit voir qu'il n'y a point de principe plus pernicieuse à la Religion Chrétienne que de prétendre qu'il ne faut point croire ce qui surpasse la compréhension de notre esprit, ou ce qui n'est point conforme aux notions de la raison humaine. Effectivement un tel principe n'est capable de faire considérer l'Ecriture comme un livre que l'on peut interpréter à sa poste, tantot selon le sens litéral, tantot selon la mesure des idées philosophiques, qui nous semblent les meilleures, jamais avec la docilite qui fait plier la Raison sous l'Autorité de Dieu.’24.

Malebranche was equally dismayed. His sole comment, in a letter to Berrand, was uncharacteristically brief: ‘Quelle extravagance’!25. Similar reactions were voiced in a number of publications issued in Holland by such minor French authors as Benjamin Binet and Pierre Poiret.26. Whereas Bayle had been shocked, many of his greatest admirers took Bekker's conclusions largely for granted. Voltaire was no doubt the most famous French reader of Bekker's

work. In his Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, he devoted an interesting article to him: ‘très bon homme, grand ennemi de l'enfer & du diable’.27. Yet he also found Le monde enchanté profoundly tedious. Commenting on Bekker's removal from his post in Amsterdam as a minister of the Dutch reformed church, Voltaire noticed:

‘Il a grande apparence qu'on ne le condamna que par le dépit d'avoir perdu son tems à le lire. Etje suis persuadé que si le diable lui même avait été forcé de lire le Monde enchanté de Béker, il n'aurait jamais pû lui pardonner de l'avoir si prodigieusement ennuié.’28.

That Bayle was indeed deeply upset by Le monde enchanté is beyond dispute. His assessment of Bekker's hermeneutics constitutes a prime example of the intellectual gulf separating the French Calvinist from his eighteenth-century admirers such as Voltaire. On the whole, however, neither the volume nor the detail of the French response to Le monde enchanté can be compared with the contemporary excitement occasioned by Die bezauberte Welt. Bayle's Dictionaire fails to even mention Bekker. The dictionaries of Moreri and Prosper Marchand also kept silent about Le monde enchanté. Niceron and Chaufepié, however, were well-informed about the quarrels surrounding Bekker29., although by the middle of the eighteenth century David Clement observed that Le monde enchanté ‘commence à devenir rare’.30. While Semmler and Schwager came up with a completely new - and very attractive - rendering of Bekker's work, in France it seems to have been largely forgotten. We know D'Holbach owned a copy, but Diderot and D'Alemberts' Encyclopédie simply ignored the efforts of our Amsterdam cleric.

IV.

One possible explanation for this varying success could, of course, be the difference in quality between the two translations. Since both versions were decried as being equally unreadible, however, this does not seem to offer any very valuable clues for assessing Bekker's reputation, either in Germany or in France. One of Semmler's motives for initiating the issue of a completely revised translation of De betoverde Weereld was the poor quality of the first edition. Chaufepié thought the French translation ‘si mauvaise qu'il faut un grand fonds de patience pour la lire’.31. Another general but not particularly

helpful conjecture which could be made, relates to the obvious religious differences between Bekker's German and French audiences. It could be argued that Bekker' elaborate exegetical digressions struck a chord with his Protestant readers in Germany, since they were accustomed to pondering endlessly over the precise meaning of each and every passage in Scripture, whereas readers of Le monde enchanté, raised in a still predominantly Catholic culture, soon became bored by the niceties of Reformed hermeneutics. Such a general observation, however, inevitably produces unprecise conclusions. More importantly, many of the French commentators on Le monde enchanté were Protestant expatriates. It will, I suppose, be more illuminating to focus on the question what Bekker's views actually had to offer to the indigenous intellectual cultures of these two countries on the doorstep to the Enlightenment.

Meanwhile, it goes without saying that any conclusion concerning the national arenas in which early-modern debates such as those on Bekker, will have to take into account the truly European character of the Republic of Letters. Many of the more prominent participants of this particular discussion were first and foremost citizens of this international body of readers, authors and polemicists. By the early 1690s elaborate reviews of De betoverde Weereld had been published in the Histoire des ouvrages des savans (1691, pp. 410-422) and in the Acta eruditorum (1692, pp. 19-27, 542ff), important European journals, which kept the Republic up to date on the latest intellectual developments.

Nevertheless, Bekker's sceptical approach to the supernatural must have looked far more revolutionary to his German audience than it did to many of his French or Dutch readers. It could even be argued that in the Dutch Republic De betoverde Weereld, rather than bringing about a revolutionary breakthrough, actually concluded a sceptical tradition going back to the early days of the Reformation. It has recently been suggested that a spiritualist like David Jorisz. can be seen as a forerunner of scepticism concerning the physical reality of demonic intervention32., and seventeenth-century Dutch Mennonites such as Abraham Palingh and Antony van Dale33., a Cartesian like Johannes de Mey34., a

Spinozist like Adriaan Koerbagh35., had each in their own way questioned Satanic forces well before the publication of De betoverde Weereld. As a matter of fact, Van Dale was a personal friend of Bekker, who loved to quote from Van Dale's De oraculis. Bekker also possessed the works of Palingh and De Mey.36.

In France, by the middle of the seventeenth century, even more radical attacks on ‘prejudices’ had been launched by proponents of the so-called ‘Libertinage érudit’. To the contemporary observer, Bekker's efforts must have looked pretty harmless in comparison with the views of Pierre Gassendi, Guy Patin, Gabriel Naudé and their learned friends.37. By the early eighteenth century a number of equally bold ideas were being put forward in what we now call ‘manuscrits clandestins’, which were often packed with allusions to Spinoza, the most radical philosopher of the day. Apart from a one-off like the mid seventeenth-century Theophrastus redivivus - ‘In quo nullos esse daemonos sive angelos ostenditur’38. - the writings of Jean Meslier, and texts such as L'Ame materielle and the Difficultés sur la religion, went far beyond even the most radical reading of Bekker's work.39. One particular French text which seems to have made Le monde enchanté pretty redundant was Fontenelle's highly successful rendering of De oraculis by Van Dale, with whom Bekker was often compared, both in France and in Germany. Thomasius, for instance, went so far as to state that De betoverde Weereld was largely dependent on De oraculis.40.

In Germany on the other hand, no comparable traditions of radical criticism have been identified. A man like Stosch, the author of the extremely rare Concordia rationis & fidei, must have been an isolated case. What is more, he

has been the subject of widely-varying interpretations, and the precise nature of his eclectic ‘Spinozism’ has turned out to be difficult to assess. If anything, his example proves the absence of a genuinely Spinozistic ‘movement’ in Germany. Although it remains to be seen whether the impact Spinoza's philosophy made in the Dutch Republic and France created a tradition, it has recently been conclusively demonstrated that the early German reaction to Spinozism was even more hostile than the Dutch or the French.41. As a matter of fact, in Germany, during the second half of the seventeenth century, not even Cartesianism acquired the kind of status it enj oyed in the Netherlands and France. In a sense, Johan Clauberg, the most distinguished German follower of Descartes was himself a Dutch Cartesian.42. The only German authors who took up Bekker's defence before Thomasius entered the fray were Zacharias Webber, a Lutheran painter residing in Amsterdam, and Eric Walten, a professional pamphleteer from The Hague. By 1697, however, both were dead. According to one source, Webber passed away just in time, ‘before he fell victim to other errors’.43. Walten, incarcerated on the charge of blasphemy three years earlier, and desperate for his lawsuit to commence, probably committed suicide. Walten, however, took part in the Dutch debate on De betoverde Weereld, and his international contacts seem to have been predominantly English.44.

A second factor which no doubt stimulated German excitement concerning Bekker's relatively moderate scepticism on the power of the devil, must surely have been the all too familiar fact that whereas in the province of Holland the actual prosecution of witches had come to a halt by the early seventeenth century, in Germany the stakes were burning well into the eighteenth century.45.

This obviously lent the debate on Die bezauberte Welt an urgency it lacked in Holland. Antony Collins, in his Discourse of Free-Thinking of 1713, praised the Dutch Republic for its enlightened attitude: ‘Thus the Devil is intirely banish'd [from] the United Provinces, where Free-Thinking is in its greatest perfection; whereas all around that Commonwealth, he appears in various shapes ...’46.

V.

Dutchmen every now and again come across Heinrich Heine's famous dictum that in Holland everything happens fifty years after the event. This really is nothing more than a nineteenth-century joke. As far as the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are concerned, De betoverde Weereld is only one of countless examples which go to show how advanced early-modern Dutch culture was. Let us not forget that Balthasar Bekker was very much a product of the dominant theological orthodoxy of his day, namely Dutch Calvinism. Had he been more tactful in his approach to the Cocceian faction, which in 1688 he had offended with his massive commentary on the Book of Daniel, and more careful in some of the details of his exegetics, in particular on the Fall, and more diplomatic once the Voetians had started their campaign against him, he might well have been able to remain to his death what he had been throughout his career, that is, a well-respected minister of the Dutch reformed church.47.

Not that our ‘Frisian Hercules’ was a normal cleric, far from it. Wiebe Bergsma, in a provocative essay on Bekker's activities as a Calvinist minister, has attempted to redress the image of him as the champion of rationality - prevalent ever since the publication, in 1906 of Knuttel's biography - by stressing the active role he played in furthering the praxis pietatis among his flock, and by highlighting his apparent lack of toleration.48. Bergsma even went so far as to suggest a kinship with the Further Reformation. As far as his assessment of Bekker's motives is concerned, I agree: Bekker did not want to disenchant the world in order to promote ‘Enlightenment’ in any secular sense. On the other hand, his deeply felt religiosity should not obscure his genuine rationalism.

To begin with, he was exceptionally well-read for a cleric, in particular on contemporary (post-)Cartesian philosophy, and he was willing to draw consequences from his reading. What is more, he was not only prepared to mobilize his erudition in order to understand Holy Writ, since it also led him to a secular assessment of what could perhaps be called the logic of daily experience. This becomes evident from the least-studied fourth part of De betoverde Weereld, in which he deals with a large number of classic ‘horrorstories’ relating to the supernatural, such as the devils of Tedworth and Macon, and the ghosts of Annenberg and Lausanne.49. His insistence on looking for natural explanations of the phenomena in question, and his eagerness to attribute their origins to credulity and fraud bear all the hallmarks of Max Weber's thesis.

In his account of the more famous occurrences at Tedworth, Macon, etc., he could rely on contemporary sceptical literature. As far as I can see, however, his ‘deconstruction’ of a number of lesser-known phenomena was entirely of his own making. One night in Amsterdam, for instance, he and his wife looked out of the window of their house at the Prinsengracht, when a Lady in White seemed to make her appearance on the other side of the canal. Or was she a prostitute, looking for customers? An alarming sight indeed! However, when Bekker went on the street to take a closer look, he simply found out that there was nothing there, except for a piece of cloth, attached to a roof, on which the moonlight was playing.50. So much for the Lady in White! Similarly, a local Poltergeist is revealed as having been the sound of a baker preparing his batter. A ghost fiddling with the curtains appears to have been a kitten. A German will-o'-the-wisp is in reality a lantern, a beast screaming in agony, a kettle of boiling water. An Amsterdam Mennonite who claims to be visited by ghosts foretelling his imminent death, turns out to be a habitual drunk, suffering from nightmares.51. Again and again, Bekker stresses that natural explanations must and can be found. The same goes for accounts of enchantment or possession: ‘exorcists’ only confirm their patients in their credulity because they benefit from their delusions, as is amply demonstrated with examples, mainly from Bekker's personal experience as a minister with frauds or with sufferers from epileptic fits.52.

In short, Bekker was indeed, as Margaret Jacob put it, a Calvinist rationalist.53. The confidence with which late seventeenth-century philosophers

such as Joseph Glanvill, popular scribes such as Simon de Vries and even a Socinian theologian such as Frans Kuyper reported on the actual occurrence of demonic activity, only confirms the modernity of Bekker's scepticism.54. As does, I presume, the furor theologicus he aroused in the Netherlands, Germany and France.

‘Quelle extravagance’: Balthasar Bekker in Germany and France

In this paper the French and German reception of Balthasar Bekker's De betoverde Weereld (1691-1693) are analysed. In Germany in particular Die bezauberte Welt (1693) provoked many furious reactions. This seems to have been due to the absence of any sceptical tradition as regards the supernatural and to the fact that in Germany belief in witchcraft remained strong throughout the eighteenth century. Finally, Bekker's ‘modernity’ is assessed.


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