BOOKS BY PETER GAY THE

The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria .to Freud

Education of the Senses (1984)
The Tender Passion (1986)
Erilightenment:
The Cultivation of Hatred (1993)
'The Naked Heart (1995)
AN
Pleasure Wars (1998)

Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments (1990)

INTERPRET ATION,
Freud: A Life for Ou~Time (1988)

A Godless Jew:
Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (1987) The Rise ,of
Freud for Historians (1985)

Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Modern Paganism

Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (1978)

Art and Act: On Causes in History-Manet, Gropius, Mondrian (1976)

Style in Hisrory (1974)

.. Modern Europe (1973),with R. K.Webb \by PETER GAY

The Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues on the Enlightenment: (1970)

The Enlightenment: An Interpretation

Vol. II The Science of Freedom (1969)

I " Weimar Culture:The Outsider as InsiderIroox)

A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (1966) ,

The Enlightenment: An Interpretation

Vol. t The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966) 11
. W . W· NORTON & COMPANY -i!
The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (1964) 'I
II
New York· London
Voltaire's Politics:The Poet as Realist (1959)

The Dilemma 'of Democratic Socialism:

\

r
Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (1952)

If the Antients, in their Purity, are as yet out of your
Reach; search the Moderns, that are nearest to them.
If you cannot converse with the most Antient, use the
most Modern. For the Authors of the middle Age, and
all that sort of Philosophy, as well as,Divinity, will be
of little advantage to you.
Lord Shaftesbury
to Michael Ainsworth.
May 5.1709
Lassen Sie uns bei den Alten in die Schule gehen.
Was konnen noir nach der N atur fur bessere Lehrer
, -uiablen?
Lessing
to Moses Mendelssohn.
, 1756
Lecteur eclaire et judicieux ... de grace apprenez a
uos amis quelle est Nnorme distance des Offices de.
Ciceron du Manuel d'Epictete,des Maximes de l'em-
"
pereur Antonin, a taus les plats ouorages de morale
,
[crits dans nos jargons du Nord. Auons-nous seule-
ment, dans taus les liores faits depuis six cents ans, rien
de comparable a une page de Seneque? Non, nous
n'avons rien qui en approche, et nous osons nouseleuer
contre nos maltres! ' adversary worthy of their hostility: when the philosophes pro-
Voltaire,
.,'claimed that it was their mission to eradicate bigotry and super-
. Note of 1769. to the poem Les trois empereurs en Sorbotme .
, on .this issue, history became not past, but present politics: the
, ,
,,,'•.. 1
CHAPTER ONE
The Useful and Beloved Past
, ,
I. HEBREWS AND HELLENES
I
. ,.,
A ,
s CULTIVATED MEN in a c~ltivated age, the philosophes loved
classicalantiquity and took r-ure pleasure in it; as reformers,
they did.not hesitate to exploit, shrewdly and unscrupulously. the
classics they loved., They could exploit'them because, though
their affection was authentic, they confronted the ancients with
the self-confidence of men who had become their own masters.
~'Boerhave utilior Hippocrate, Neuiton totd antiquitate, T'assus
.Homero; 'sed-gloria primis," Voltaire jotted down in one of his
notebooks: "Boerhaave is worth more than Hippocrates. Newton'
more than all antiquity, Tasso more than Homerjbut glory to
the first."!
For the men of the Enlightenment, glory to the first ancestors
implied disrespect for the second. All men have a single past with
,many facets, but the philosophes divided their past into two
sectors and put both to work. The Christian sector gav,e them an
stition, they meant that it was a: historic mission. At this point,
philosophes never tired of pointing to the record Christians 'had
compiled through the ages as evidence confirming the need' for
drastic remedial action in their own time. In the same manner,
~he'pagan sector had its uses: it supplied them with Illustrious
.
;{~;
Notebooks, :409.
 I: THE APPEAL TO ANTIQillTY
32
models and a respectable ancestry. The philosophes liked. to
visualize themselves reenacting historic battles, to denounce re-
ligIous fanaticism and popularize Newton wrapped in the toga
of Cicero or Lucretius. This is how they gave, their polemics the
dignity of an age-old struggle between reason and unreason, a
struggle that had been fought and lost in the ancient world and
was now being fought again, this time with good prospects of
success.
The historical writings-of the Enlightenment are more than.
special pleading; they are comprehensive, critical, often' brilliant
-they are true history. Reversing Tacitus' famous precept, the
philosophes wrote history, with rage and, partisanship, and their
very passion often allowed them to penetrate into regions hitherto. .
inaccessible to historical explorers. Yet it also. made them con-
.\.~descending ~nd o~dly p~rochial:their. sense of the pa~ merged .
: )h\\.,,[1\:lf~ all too readily With their sense of the present., Whet?er, they
, 'I were imitating Lucretius, maligning St. Augustine, or flattering
Catherine the Great, they. were the same men facing different '
quarters of their intellectual horizon. Even more often than they
intended, Enlightenment. historians advanced the mission and
buoyed up the missionaries; they looked into the past as into a
mirror and extracted from their history 'the past they could use.
This limits the range of philosophic history but enhances its
value as a clue:' 'it permits us to look over the philosophes'
shoulders to discover in their historical portraits a portrait of
themselves, and to read in their accounts of Seneca's heroism, or
the iniquities of the Inquisition, the mind of the Enlightenment.
II
With all their-passion for history, the philosophes' vision
of the past was remarkably pessimistic. History was a register of
crimes, a tale of cruelty and cunning, at best the record of unre-
mitting conflict. All was not black: each age, each civilization
had its defenders of the oppressed, its champions of reason and
humanity. Diderot's bleak ',Essai sur les regnes de Claude et de
N eron pits courageous Stoics against superstitious tyrants; Hume
1: THE USeFUL AND BELOVED PAST
33
finds a minority of sensible men in the midst of darkest medieval
England. In general, barbarism arid religion had dominated the
p~st, but a few glorious ages testified to the possibility that reason
mIght not merely be the critic but the master of civilization.
. It is possible to' explain this pessimism as a projection of the
phIlosophes' own situation, as a mixture of self-pity and self-
Importance which exaggerates the difficulties of their position to
enhance the significance of their achievement. But it was more
th.an. that: it Was a coherent account of the motive power both
within and among epochs. As the Enlightenment saw it, the
w.o:ld was, a~d had always been divided between ascetic, super-
St1tIOUSenemies of the flesh, and men who affirmed life, the body,
knowledge, .and generosity; between mythmakers and realists,
pri~sts and philosophers. Heinrich Heine, wayward son 'of the
Enlightenment, would later call ,these parties, most suggestively,
Hebrews and Hellenes.
This conflict between' two irreconcilable patterns of life,
t~o~ght and feeling, divided historical periods internally; it also
divided them from one another. Each era had a dominant style,
:vi~h either re~son o~ superstition in control, but thephilosophes
msisred that this dominance was merely the temporary ascendancy
of one combatant over the other: few periods in history were
without their admixture of reason or superstition-the darkest,
most primitive ages had their philosophers, the most brilliant ages
of reason and cultivation were infected by the survivals of old,
or the seeds of new superstitions, This is What Voltaire meant
w~en he said that the eighteenth century was both th~ Age of
Philosophy and the Age of Superstition; it gives new'meaning to r
Kant's observation that his age was the Age of Enlighten'ment,
but not. an enlightened age. The conflict between Hebrews and
Hellenes was at once the source of disast~r and of progress.
I
;1
I'
This dualist view of history, rather than the celebrated theory Ii
of progress,. characterizes the mind of the Enlightenment. The
theory of prowess was. a: special case of this dualism: it gave
I
f
forma,l expreSSIOnto the hope that the. alternations between Ages
of Philosophy and Ages of Belief were not inescapable, that man );1
wa.s not ~orever. trapped' on the, -treadmill of historical cycles.
Philosophical SOCIOlogyand philosophical history. supported and
-- - ~-'-----.-~- .. -_. _._'.
---~ -" -.:...
 I: THE APPEAL TO ANTIQUITY
34
confirmed eich other: both studied the conflict betw~en reason
and unreason. The first sought laws that might decide the struggle;
the second traced its course through the ages. In fact, the philo-
sophes developed a kind of comparative history which they ex-
plicitly distinguished from the study of the past for its own sake.
This history, first practiced by Montesquieu, later explored by
Scottish, sociologists like Adam Ferguson, and finally christened
"Theoretical or Conjectural History," was sociology.PBut what-
ever history the Enlightenment historians pursued, they focused
their attention 011 the rise and decline of the philosophic party,
on the fortunes of criticism.
The Enlightenment's conception of history as a continuing
struggle between two types of mentality implies a' general scheme
~:~t.,1u.
\ of periodization. The philosop~es di."i.d.ed~he past, roughly, into
!,~,c:i"'four great epochs: the great nver civilizations of the Near East;
~d;~\ ancient Greece and Rome; the Christian millennium; and modern
times, beginning with the "revival of letters." These four epochs
.\lL were rhythmically related to each other: the first and third were
7f\ paired off as ages of myth,' belief, and superstition, while the
second arid fourth were ages of rationality, science, and enlight-
'enment,
" I should observe immediately that the philosophes did not
propose this scheme as a rigid system. They recognized the stub-
born individuality of cultures, 'and the continuities that link the
most disparate ages. "The arts and sciences, indeed," David Hume
remarked, "have flourished in one period, and have decayed in
another; but we may. observe, that at the time when they rose, to
greatest perfection among ore people, they were perhaps totally
unknown to all the neighboring nations?" Some philosophes
called attention to the autonomous development of Eastern, civi-
.lizations: Voltaire, partly in calculated rebellion against Bossuet's
narrow vision of, the past, partly in unfeigned awe of Oriental
sagacity, opened his Essai sur les mceurs et l'esprit des nations
with some appreciative passages on the civilizations of the Indians
and the Chinese. Others, like Condorcet, musing, on the uneven
2 The phrase is by Ferguson's favorite pupil, Dugald Stewart.
See Gladys Bryson: Man and Society (1945), 88.
3 "Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations," Works, III, 382.'
1: THEUSEFUL AND BELOVED PAST
35
development of social classes and neighboring cultures 'jI;l their jl!
own time; sympathetically described the plight of contemporary d
savages (who 'seemed to have undergone-little significant historical'i
development), and of the lower orders (which remained much 'f j
like their ancestors-in the darkest of dark ages). 'Besides, despite 2 } :1
some extravagant epithets, the most' fanatical anti-Christians I
among the philosophes did !lot claim that the two pairs of ages
matched' pre~iselYI; thdey conc~d~li? tdhat the hChristll'
an ~!ll~en~ium
was more ranona 'an more CIVI ~e t han t e ear y CIVI izanons,
just as they took pride in the superiority of their own time over
.* 'j
,I
:
Greece and Rome. .,:.'I!
_ But while the philosophes themselves sensibly insisted on
these variations, the exceptions they adduced did not invalidate :i
their general scheme; they wrote the history of the human mind "i
as the history of its ~ from myth, in classical antiquity, its dis-
astrous decline under Christianity, and its glorious rebirth. In
One manner or another, whether expressed in the prophetic fervor
of Condorcet or the ironic detachment of Hume, the scheme
,dominates philosophical history. The famous first chapter' of
Voltaire's Siecle de Louis XI V specifies "four happy ages": the
centur~es of Pericles and Plato, and of Caesar and Cicero (which
correspond to what I shall call the First Age of Criticism); and
the ages of the Medicean Renaissance, and of Louis XIV (which
constitute the prehistory of the Enlighteiunent).4 These happy
periods are embedded in two Ages of Belief, which Voltaire dis-
misses with superb disdain as miserable, vicious, and' backward.
• This periodic scheme, interestingly enough, was first devel-
oped in the last two of these four happy ages. Renaissance
historians like Giorgio Vasari periodized Italian art from its
perfection in Greece and Rome, through its decay after
Constantine, to its rebirth in the time of Giotto. And Francis
Bacon wrote: "Only three revolutions and periods of learning
canproperly be reckoned; one among the Greeks, the second
among, the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, the
nations of Western Europe; and to each of these hardly two
centuries can justly be assigned. The intervening ages of the
world, in respect to any rich or flourishing growth of the
sciences, were unprosperous. For neither the Arabians nor the
Schoolmen need be mentioned; who in the intermediate times
, rather crushed the sciences with a multitude of treatises that
increased their weight." The New Organon, LXXVIiI, in
Works,IV,·77.
, i
 ,
36 I: THE APPEAL TO ANTIQUITY
Other .historians use a similar vocabulary, suggesting the rhythmic
alternation of periods: "Mankind," writes Hume, "having at
length thrown off this yoke [of Aristotelianism], affairs are ,now
returned nearly to the same situation as before, and EUROPE is.
at present a copy at large, of what GREECE w~s' formerly a pat-
tern in miniature.?" Rousseau, with all ·the extravagance .of his
early Discours sur les sciences et les arts, characterizes .medieval
I ~•
history asa return to the grossest of antiquity: "Europe had re-
lapsed into the barbarism of tl- ' earliest ages. The peoples of this
part of the world, so enlighte.ied today, lived some centuries ago
. in a condition worse than ignorance."6· D'Alembert, too,' speaks
of the "revival of letters" as' emerging from a long. interval of
.,
ignorance which had been preceded by' centuries of enlighten-
ment, of the "regeneration of ideas," the "return to reason and
good taste," the "revival of spirits," and the "rebirth of light."7
Condorcet, finally, PQrtrays early modern Europe smarting under
medieval tyranny, awaiting the moment when a new enlighten-
ment would allow it to be reborn a free civilization. Cliches, all
of' them, but therefore' all the more eloquent 'witnesses to the
mentality of the philosophes. . into sacr~ddocu~~nts,
, This historical scheme will find few defenders today. It bears
all the stigmata usually imputed to Enlightenment historiography
in general-inadequate grasp of development, deficient sympathy
with cultures alien or hostile to the rnovement.. assimilation of
past events to polemical interests, smuggling in of moral judg-
ments, and rationalistic interpretations. I have no intention of
denying that these indictments, first .presented by. nineteenth-
century historicists and current today, are weighty and valid, but
they concentrate on the' failings of philosophic history at the
expense of its merits. In fact, the historical writings of the En-
. lightenment were part of. a comprehensive effort-of physicists,
epistemologists, and literary critics as much as of historians-to
secure rational control of the world, reliable knowledge of the
past, and freedom from the pervasive domination of. myth.
5 "Of the Rise and Prog-ress of the Arts and Sciences," Works,
III, 183.
6 Rousseau: tEuores, III, 6.
7 Discours prelirninaire de l'Encyclopedie. in Melanljies, I; loi-5.·
1: THE USEFUL AND BELOVED PAST
37
In the midst of the struggle for objectivity they could not them-
selves be o.bjective: 'myth could. be sympathetically understood
only after It had been fully conquered,. but in the course of its
conquest .it.had to be fa.~ed as the enemy. The "pure insight"
charactens:Ic of the Enlightenment, writes Hegel in some fine
pages. of his Phenomenology, "only appears in genuinely active
form in so far as it enters into conflict with belief."8 The Enlight-
enment had to treat religion as superstition and error in order to
recognize itself. Worship of the Chosen People' and submissive
concentration on saints' lives could be overcome only by a violent,
and hence one-sided reaction. Scholars could see the Christian
millennium fairly only after polemicists had freed themselves fr~m
it by seeing it unfairly. '. , . .' .
.. The historians. of the Enlightenment,~, did much. They
did not do everythmg. because they could not do everything, but
at least they freed history from the parochialism of Christian
scholars and from theological presuppositions, secularized the
idea of causation and opened vast new territories for historical
~nqu'iry. They went beyond tedious chronology, endless research
and single-minded hagiography, and im-
posed rational, critical methods of study on social, political, and
I?tellectual d~vej.o.pments. As the organizing principle of En-
lightenment histonography, the fourfold periodic scheme there-
fore. shares its excellences as much as its shortcomings. Its most
glanng an.d.most notorious defect was 'its unsympathetic, often
brutal, .~tlffiat~ of. Ch~istianity; yet it achieved the rudimentary
reC?gOl~IOnthat .historical epochs have a prevailing mental style
Wh.IChinforms their science, their morals, their whole way of
s~e~ng.t~e world; t~at the' spectrum of' available styles may be
dI;I.ded mto. tw~ kinds, ~be mythmaki?g or religious and the
critical or scientific; and finally, that history has discontinuities
as well as continuities, dramatic revolution's as well as slow
changes.
.' ' . Pa~ad~xical as it may sound, then, Enlightenment historians;
rationalist m sensibility, partisan in purpose, careless in detail,
8 G. W.F. Hegel: Phenomenology of Mind, tr. ). B. Baillie
(1955), 560.
 I: THE APPEAL TO ANTIQUITY
38
hasty in judgment, unfair in char~c.terizati?n, and defi~ient.in
empathy, willful, sectarian, even VICiOUS,still made a historical
discovery of enduring validity. This emergenc~ of truth from
error is neither a dialecrical miracle nor an Instance of pre-
established harmony. It is something far more .modest. For all
their misjudgments and prejudices-and
them-the
sometimes because. of
philosophes took first steps, no more, toward a SCIen-
tific history of culture. Montesquieu's distinction' between fo.rms
and principles of government; Turgor's ladder of theologIcal,
metaphysical, and positive forms of thought:r~vers~d by su~-
ceeding epochs; Hume's analysis of :he religiOus. Impulse m
primitive and civilized countries; Lessing's ,speculatIv~ ac~ount
of the evolution of religious beliefs; even Gibbon's fehne dIss~c-
tion of Christian meekness insinuating itself into the Roman mind
-all these are attempts to grasp the deepest, and he?ce .le~st
visible, convictions that hold a culture together and gIve It Its
distinctive shape. '.'
It is largely the philosophes' own fa~lt If later wnt~r5~ rarely
appreciated their contribution t.o .hist?rIcal understanding. ~he
philosophes' perception of a dIstInctiOn. between mythma~mg
and scientific mentalities ,was the perceptIon of, a fact, but SInce
they came to it first of all through their position a~ cr~tics and
belligerents, they almost ine~i.tably' conve~ted ~e. historical fact
into a moral judgment, praISIng, Indeed identifying themselves
with, one mentality and denigrating the other. They;translated
their insight into an indictment, and this made it no.t only less
valid, but also less palatable and less visible, to succeedI~g genera-
tions. It is hardly surprising that those who l~ter re)ect~d t~e
philosophes' verdict failed to, gi~e them credit 'f?r theIrd~s-
covery. But whatever the ingratItude of a later time, the, dIS-
covery was theirs, and it, reassured, them and gave them:a plac,e
~ to stand. It must be a peculiar pleasure to' be able to kill one s
If\- father and choose another. ' the phrase sapere aude, which 'he had suggested as a motto for the
1: THE USEFUL AND BELOVED PAST
39
2. A CONGENIAL SENSE AND SPIRIT
I
'N ' ,
OT ALL of the philosophes' classicism aimed at anything 50
, ' portentous and liberating as parricide. Precisely because
they were above all men of their times, much of their classical
erudition' was politically innocuous. Instead of separating them'
from the established orthodoxy, it tied them to it. After all, in the
Age of Enlightenment classical literature was the common pos-
session of educated men, not the preserve of the specialist; to quote
a line from Lucretius was to demonstrate ,one's respectability
rather than one's radicalism. Samuel Johnson spoke for the republic
of letters as a whole when he' defended, the practice as demon-
strating "a community of mind." "Classical quotation," he said,
"is the parole 'of literary. men all over the world.t'?
In our time, when Latinity is dying and has retreated to the,
, academy, it is hard to visualize the easy, intimate traffic between'
the eighteenth century and "the ancients.' Educated Christians
never thought for a moment that their classicism might in any
way interfere, with their religious duties. Horace especially,
Horace, the most pagan of poets, was the great favorite of the
century: Swift tried his hand at translating him, and so did Tur-
g!'lt; Diderot imitated him, and so did Wieland. Horace supplied
'topics for Addison's Spectator and rationalizations for country
, squires enjoying rural contentment. When Oglethorpe's expedi-
tion set sail for Georgia, ,Charles Wesley, with no sense ofincon-
gruity, borrowed 'his pious benediction-e-Cbzisro duce et auspice
'Cbristo-i-ircm a Horatian ode.' Even in East Prussia classical
currency was valid coin: Kant did not find it necessary to identify
Enlightenment, as a Horatian tag.2 And so when Diderot quoted
9 Life of Johnson (under May 8,.1781), IV, 101.
1 Epistles, I, 7, 27: nil desperandum Teucro duce et auspice.
See Richard M. Gurnrnere: The American Colonial Mind and
the Classical Tradition (1963), 17.
2 See Horace: 'Epistles, I, I,' 4<r1': "Dimidium .facti qui coepit
habet: sapere aude: Incipe,,-,iTo have begun is to be half, done;
dare to know; start!"