Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (39 page)

The author emphasizes the evidence in the Christian Scriptures:

accounts of ghosts appear in the Old Testament (such as the appearance of the prophet Samuel and similar, etc.), not to speak of the New Testament … which must be mere fables to such a “ghost-buster” if he wants to deny the appearance of spirits.
¹⁸

The association of late-night conversation with the debate over ghosts and spirits extends beyond this image, appearing in several diaries of the period. Far from the intellectual centers of Leipzig or London, for example, the West Country physician Claver Morris of Wells in Somerset noted a similar exchange in his diary on September 6,
1709: “At the [weekly Tuesday night] Music-Meeting there happened to be Captain James Coward; And his asking how a Spirit could throw a Bed-Staff gave me an occasion to prove beyond his denying, & I hope to his satisfaction, that the World was not eternal and that there were future rewards & Punishments after Death.”
¹⁹
The conversation recorded in Morris’s terse entry starts with Coward posing a question raised by Descartes and Spinoza: how could an immaterial spirit interact with the physical world? We do not know exactly what followed this question, but one way or another, the conversation led to Morris shoring up several pillars of Christian doctrine by asserting the last judgment and the reality of
post mortem
punishments, including Hell. As the
Secret Letters
article warned, there seemed to be a slippery slope from skepticism about ghosts to the outright denial of Christian verities.

Only one “ghost-buster” was mentioned by name in the
Secret Letters
article: the Amsterdam Reformed minister Balthasar Bekker (1634–98), who had unleashed an enormous controversy with the publication of his
De betoverde weereld
(
The World Bewitched
, 1691–94).
²⁰
Across the four volumes of this work Bekker argued that “the apparitions of Evil Spirits are contrary to true Reason, and that the Holy Scripture affords no proofs of it.”
²¹
Bekker’s work was immediately translated into German, French, and English and was read and discussed widely in the 1690s.
²²
Bekker was an orthodox Reformed minister, but the intellectual basis of
The World Bewitched
was an explosive combination of Cartesian pneumatology and Spinoza’s accomodationalist biblical exegesis. On Cartesian grounds he questioned whether “a Spirit, as a Spirit, and so much the more as it is a Spirit, can without Body act upon all sorts of Bodies, and upon other Spirits,” concluding that “the operations of such Spirits, as are not joined to a Body; either Angels or Devils” cannot “act upon other Bodies, either of Men, or other matter.”
²³
Denounced as a “Spinozist” and atheist for the claims in
The World Bewitched
, which we will examine below, Bekker was permanently suspended from his post in Amsterdam in 1692.
²⁴
The contrast between Bekker and his predecessor Lavater is especially revealing: these two Reformed pastors and theologians, separated by a century of concentrated intellectual
ferment, held completely opposed views of the existence and effects of demons and spirits in this world.

The denunciations of Bekker’s work in the Netherlands, England, and Germany were intense. His claim that neither reason nor Scripture could prove “that Men have any commerce with Spirits”
²⁵
deeply disturbed Protestant authors who saw in such spirits proof of all things spiritual, and in their denial the prelude to atheism. Some argued for guilt by association: in 1692 the Amsterdam Reformed minister Jacobus Koelman claimed that ideas in
The World Bewitched
“have a lot in common with atheists, Sadducees, Epicureans, Libertines, and other Scripture despisers, and especially with Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, Adrian Koerbach, David Joris, and the like.”
²⁶

Indeed, in the 1690s conservative English Protestants were responding to the same intellectual threats generated by “atheists, Sadducees, Epicureans, [and] Libertines” homegrown and imported. The number of ghost publications in Britain surged and the
Athenian Mercury
(an English periodical similar to the
Secret Letters
) began trading in ghost stories. But the English ghost controversy had its origins a generation earlier. As ghost-story collector John Aubrey (1626–97) explained:

When I was a child … before the Civil Wars … the fashion was for old women and maids to tell fabulous stories nighttimes, of Sprites and walking of Ghosts, etc. … When the wars came, and with them Liberty of Conscience and Liberty of inquisition [inquiry], the phantoms vanished. Now children fear no such things, having heard not of them.
²⁷

The Interregnum unleashed a torrent of heterodox ideas from Thomas Hobbes, the Ranters, other antinomians, and Christian mortalists like Richard Overton and John Milton – all in one way or another denied the existence of ghosts, spirits, demons, the afterlife, or the immortality of the soul. Responding to the “Liberty of Conscience and Liberty of inquisition” that had begun in the 1640s, the Cambridge theologian Henry More (1614–87) began promoting ghost belief in his
1653
An antidote against atheisme, or, An appeal to the natural faculties of the minde of man
. This was the first Protestant defense of the belief in ghosts and spirits:

I thought fit to fortify and strengthen the Faith of others as much as I could; being well assured that a contemptuous misbelief of such like Narrations concerning
Spirits
, and an endeavour of making them all ridiculous and incredible, is a dangerous Prelude to
Atheisme
it self, or else a more close and crafty Profession or Insinuation of it.
²⁸

For writers like More, the night took on a new value as the time of the appearance of ghosts and spirits. Among the defenders of established Christianity in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the spirits of the night held a new meaning. No longer seen as diabolical illusions or as bearers of messages of repentance, justice, or vengeance, now the specters were seen as proof of the immortality of the soul, and of the existence of God and the afterlife as well. As penitential spirits or diabolic apparitions, they drew their meaning from a larger system of belief; now, in an ominous reversal of signification, these apparitions had to serve as evidence of that larger invisible reality.

For many Protestant authors in Britain, the Netherlands, and the Empire, the threat of popery that once surrounded such apparitions was utterly overshadowed by the Christian mortalism of Milton or the “atheism” of Hobbes, Spinoza, or even Bekker. The utility of the ghost to preserve faith in God – and in divine mystery and majesty – became paramount. This utility was initially supported by hopes that the circulation of enough “well-attested” ghost stories would prove their reality
within
the empiricism on the rise at the end of the century.

In this debate, both positions reflected fundamental changes in everyday life for the learned and urbane. As noted earlier, nocturnalization encompassed two seemingly contradictory trends: on the one hand the conquest of the darkness and the night through vastly improved street and domestic lighting, and on the other the creation and manipulation of darkness at royal spectacles, on baroque perspective stages, and in absolutist political display in general. The ghost literature of the seventeenth century presents a similar contrast between dispellers and promoters of the shadowy spirit world. The “ghost-busters” (such as Spinoza and Bekker) claimed to shine the light of Cartesian analysis or rational Scriptural exegesis onto the shadowy existence of ghosts and reveal them to be, in the words of
Spinoza “but dreams, which differ from God as totally, as that which
is not
differs from that which
is
.”
²⁹
Whether materialist, rationalist, or empiricist, the radical Enlightenment promised the elimination of the shadowy world of ghosts, demons, and spirits. The discourses which denied the existence of ghosts circulated in the most nocturnalized spaces of this period. Many issued from the cities of the Netherlands, which enjoyed the oldest and most effective street lighting in Europe. (See
Map 5.2
.) From this dense concentration of nocturnalized daily life, the ideas of the radical Enlightenment radiated through the night, from the genteel evening gatherings of Claver Morris in Somerset to the coffeehouses and taverns of London, Paris, and Leipzig.

In contrast, sovereigns who used darkness and the night to enhance their displays of light and power – such as Charles I, Louis XIV, Augustus the Strong of Saxony, or even Frederick William I of Prussia – mirror those anxious Protestants who assessed the dangers of “atheism” as much greater than those of popery and so emphasized the reports of ghosts and spirits in their own times as “sensible proof of spirits” and therefore of God. In a 1678 treatise on angels Benjamin Camfield referred to “the Supreme Spirit, and Father of Spirits”:

’tis to be observed, among our modern Atheists and Sadducees especially, that their antipathy and aversation, as to the notion and being of Spirits universally, hath carried them on (and naturally doth so) to the dethroning of God, the Supreme Spirit, and Father of Spirits.
³⁰

Terrified by the dethroning of kings and heavenly king alike, apologists for monarchy and revealed Christianity praised darkness as fundamental to divine and earthly majesty. Dryden’s “Astraea Redux” of 1660 presented the night as a time when the truth of monarchy was revealed (“Well might the Ancient Poets then confer / On Night the honour’d name of
Counseller
”), rehabilitating the Stuarts, “In such adversities to Scepters train’d,” by claiming that “We light alone in dark afflictions find.” Rachel Jevon’s poem in celebration of the restoration of Charles II pairs darkness and splendor by proclaiming Charles “More Splendid made by dark Afflictions Night; / Live ever Monarch in Coelestial Light.” The royal spectacles of Louis XIV, beginning with the
Ballet de la Nuit
of 1653, used darkness to enhance
the brilliance of the Sun King.
³¹
The parallel between the importance of darkness to baroque royal spectacle and the importance of ghosts and spirits to Christian faith was first made explicit by Henry More in his
1653
Antidote against atheisme
. More chose to end his 160-page treatise with a ringing simile:

For assuredly that Saying was nothing [i.e., never] so true in Politicks,
No Bishop
,
no King
; as this is in Metaphysics,
No Spirit
,
no God
.
³²

Countless Protestant divines had denounced all apparitions as human or diabolical trickery, but More, Camfield, Koelman and other Protestants writing in response to the New Philosophy saw these specters as heaven-sent evidence of the Divine. By the end of the seventeenth century, Protestant supporters of monarchy and the divine monarch had embraced the night and its ghosts in terms that would have been unthinkable a half-century earlier.

The debate over ghosts and spirits shaded into the more weighty issue of witchcraft. This is no surprise: for early modern people the ghost and the witch were “not merely allied beliefs, but intrinsic parts of the same system.”
³³
The Devil might appear in the form of a ghost, or directly to a witch; witches might summon the spirits of the dead (as the witch of Endor did) – all were manifestations of the same metaphysical order, sharing deep associations with the night.

Though closely associated in popular and learned belief, the stakes were higher when witchcraft was at issue. Ghost belief could have serious theological and political implications, but there were no major legal issues tied to it. Witchcraft, in contrast, was a crime described and denounced in every body of Western law. Its ties to the political order were explicit. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Protestants and Catholics alike had created a stable context for witchcraft that demanded its persecution, despite the publications of skeptics from several confessions. This context framed witches as the Devil’s servants on earth, with their
maleficia
, gatherings, and rituals recognized as inverted reflections of the legitimate servants and
proper worship of God. Imagined nocturnal gatherings were a key part of this inversion. In these terms Stuart Clark has elucidated the political logic behind the persecution of witches, which helps account for the violence of both the persecutions and the flare-ups of debate over it. In response to criticism of the execution of several witches in Scotland in 1697, minister Robert Wylie argued that “unless a man hath so far renounced humanity as well as religion as to deny invisible Spirits, and the being of witches,” the actions of the Scots authorities were irreproachable.
³⁴
The legal and practical context of witchcraft persecution, as well as its theoretical underpinnings in learned demonology, all emphasized the night as the time of diabolical temptation and the witches’ sabbath. The tie between witchcraft and the night intensified at the end the sixteenth century as the learned demonization of the night made its way into popular culture through witch trials and publications.

After 1650, the stable framework of learned demonology and legal persecution was shaken by new challenges that went beyond the humane skepticism of Montaigne, Scot, Wier, or Spee. On an intellectual level, these challenges arose from Cartesian or materialist thought; on a quotidian level, increasing use of the night for respectable sociability undercut its demonization. Spinoza provides some of the most striking expressions, arguing in his
Korte Verhandeling
(
c
. 1660) that “devils cannot possibly exist” and refuting arguments about the existence of spirits in series of letters in 1674.
³⁵
Such authors challenged the possibility of witchcraft on an abstract level, and they presented their arguments as light overcoming the darkness of superstition.