6
Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture

This paper was prepared for my Faculty Research Lecture at Berkeley in 1975. The lectureship is a formidable assignment, not only because it is a considerable honor but also because the lecture must address an audience composed of ones professional peers as well as students and faculty from the whole range of disciplines in the university. The subject of the paper had long been on my mind, but I had not before attempted to think about it systematically. Some of those who heard the lecture believed that I was offering a description of the contemporary world disguised as an account of the past.

Eventually I published the paper, somewhat revised, in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, ed. Barbara C. Malament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), pp. 215–246. It is reprinted here by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press .

All men may be anxious; but it is commonly observed that some are more anxious than others, both individually and in groups. It is widely believed, for example, that our own age is a time of peculiar anxiety.^[1] But though this impression may derive less from the considered views of professional historians than from the general distress of the later twentieth century, it is obviously a historical judgment; it implies that various moments in the past can be contrasted in terms of the degree of anxiety they exhibit.

But systematic elaboration of such contrast is difficult. "Anxiety" is itself a problematic term; and without some clear conception of its sources in the human personality, its dynamics, and its relation to other subjective states, we may well misread our evidence and above all misunderstand the relation between anxiety and objective experience. The

study of historical anxiety therefore requires some special theoretical resources. But the empirical side of such investigation also presents unusual difficulties. Some degree of anxiety seems latent in the human condition, and various expressions of it can doubtless be discovered in every time and place. At the same time it seems unlikely that, outside of the laboratory, anxiety can ever be submitted to precise measurement. Accordingly, the judgment that one age or social group was more or less anxious than another can hardly be supported by the kind of hard comparative data that may be adduced for more objective phenomena. In dealing with matters of this sort we are therefore likely to find ourselves in the awkward position of basing essentially quantitative conclusions on patently qualitative evidence.^[2] And we may find no evidence at all precisely where we most need it.

Nevertheless these problems have not deterred able historians from speaking about past anxiety. At least one distinguished scholar has used the term to characterize the later hellenistic world.^[3] And it is notably present, at various levels of generality, in recent scholarship dealing with the transition from those centuries that were clearly "medieval" to those almost as clearly not. Historians of this important segment of the European past seem, in fact, to be discovering symptoms of a peculiar anxiety in many places. Origo and Bec have noted the heightened anxiety of Italian merchants; Lewis, that of merchants in France; Dollinger, that of German merchants; Herlihy has found it deeply embedded in the Renaissance family, transmitted from anxious mothers to their children.^[4] Historians with larger purposes are meanwhile coming steadily closer to a general characterization of this as an age of special anxiety. The tendency is apparent in the excellent monographs of Douglass and Steinmetz on later medieval piety, and in the more general studies of Seidlmayer, Meiss, Becker, Delaruelle, Trinkaus, Oberman, Delumeau, Ozment, Dickens, and Walzer.^[5] Garin speaks of the Italian Renaissance as "the beginning of an age of [subjective] torment," whatever it may have represented positively.^[6] And Lynn White, Jr., broadly presenting the three or four centuries after 1300 as a time of "abnormal anxiety," has offered us a general interpretation of the period in these terms.^[7] We seem to be reaching a point at which the general implications of this scholarship, based on both northern and southern Europe, on movements conventionally associated both with the later Middle Ages and with the Renaissance, and on every social group for which evidence is available, must be confronted more deliberately.

A rather different kind of pressure, less clearly the product of professional investigation, is impelling us in the same direction. There has

been a remarkable tendency among recent translators into English, concerned to convey meaning from one time, as well as one language, to another, to read "anxiety" into a wide range of words or phrases in documents of this period. The transformation of the Latin anxietas into "anxiety" may occasional little surprise, though perhaps it should; in medieval usage anxietas signified a vague weariness or distress of heart, and came close to monastic acedia or even tristitia .^[8] But the meaning of anxietas seems to have broadened by the sixteenth century, as we can learn from Calvin, that indefatigable translator of his own Latin into the vernacular. In his French Institution Calvin variously rendered the anxietas of the Latin Institutio into angoisse, destresse, frayeur , and solicitude , and his Latin solicitudo (evidently a close synonym) could become either solicitude or perplexité .^[9] By the time "anxiety" and "anxious" entered English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and that they did so at this time is of obvious interest here), they evidently already conveyed these various possibilities; and we can certainly forgive recent translators, themselves doubtless in some perplexité , at least a part of their freedom, even though it may occasionally raise an eyebrow. From Latin Petrarch's cura and the distractio of Thomas á Kempis can both emerge as "anxiety."^[10] And a host of vernacular expressions come out similarly. The identification of the German Angst and Anfechtung with "anxiety" is sufficiently familiar, although, to be sure, Reformation scholars have been unusually conscious of the nuances of these more technically theological terms. But from the French, Commynes's ce travail et misere now appears as "their anxieties and their worries";^[11] and a recent translation of Alberti's I libri della famiglia converts maninconia, affanno, cura, sollecitudine, sospetto, perturbazione , and agonia di mente indiscriminately into "anxiety," buona diliqenza into "anxious attention," and stare in paura into "to be anxious."^[12] From Spanish both ansia and cuidado emerge as "anxiety."^[13] I do not propose to quarrel here with these renderings; I want only to suggest how, even by so apparently innocent a route we are being led into strange new historiographical territory.

A further impulse behind our sense of the period after about 1300 as an age of unusual anxiety stems from the more benign impression conveyed by the culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In that earlier period, those men whose attitudes are accessible to us appear to have felt reasonably comfortable about human existence.^[14] The prospects for mankind, both in this world and the next, seemed generally happy; the medieval schools could demonstrate, with increasing confidence, the intelligibility and friendliness of the universe; intellectuals were pleased to see themselves, though dwarves, as standing on the shoulders of

giants; and men could hope that, in various walks of life, "the quality of our life should be improved."^[15] The defects of the contemporary scene were not passed over (indeed selective attention to them was a sign of confidence), as we know from such popular works as the Roman de la Rose ; but the essential quality of that work was its bold and exuberant naturalism, and even Dante could still believe in the power of intelligence and love to remedy the ills of existence. Generalized laments about the human condition abounded, like Innocent III's little treatise De miseria (though he had hoped to complement this with a more positive statement about life); but there seemed little specifically wrong with the times, much that was right, and much to look forward to.

Some caution is in order here. We know little directly about how, for example, merchants of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries felt about their lives; and it is hard to believe that existence in towns (a subject that will figure prominently in what follows) did not, from the beginning, generate profound inner as well as outer discomfort. It is even more difficult to assess the psychological condition of the vast rural majority. But even granting this, I think it would be a mistake simply to dismiss the optimism of high medieval culture as the invention of an isolated class of intellectuals. Medieval high culture was not altogether detached from its social context, as its hospitality to the more concrete world of Aristotelian thought would seem to demonstrate; and the combination of intellectual and pastoral concern in the great mendicant orders provided a two-way bridge between intellectual constructions and the needs of daily life. The result was that, though human problems might still be acute, men who addressed themselves to such general questions could still contemplate the future with relative confidence.

This positive attitude to the future in the High Middle Ages is of special significance because it is the key to a clearer understanding of the nature of anxiety. It reminds us that anxiety is a function of man's attitude to time. As the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, anxiety is "uneasiness or trouble of mind about some uncertain event." Man is anxious, therefore, because his existence extends into the future , and the future is inherently uncertain . This suggests that, since all human life unfolds in time, anxiety is in some degree inescapable, perhaps especially in the Western tradition, with its peculiar sense of the significance of time. Chaucer's Knight understood the general element in human existence that gives rise to anxiety:

It's good to keep one's poise and be protected
Since all day long we meet the unexpected.^[16]

The unusual anxiety of the period after 1300 is thus implicit in its novel concern with the passage of time, which found general expression in the familiar new historical consciousness of the Renaissance and was manifested more particularly in efforts to mark the flow of time with chronometers and to control its use by profitably filling the hours. The increasing reliance on clocks in later medieval and Renaissance Europe has been often remarked,^[17] and their value celebrated. A fourteenth-century Milanese chronicler praised a new striking clock because it "marks off the hours from the hours, as is supremely necessary for all classes of men."^[18] Calvin emphasized the utility of the sun, and Pascal that of his watch, for marking time.^[19] And Petrarch hinted at the anxiety underlying the concern with time; time, as he wrote the emperor Charles IV, is "so precious, nay, so inestimable a possession, that it is the one thing which the learned agree can justify avarice."^[20] Vergerio proposed that a clock be installed in every library, "that it may catch the eye of the reader, to warn him by the swift lapse of time of the need for diligence."^[21] Rabelais's ideal teacher Ponocrates so arranged the schedule of his young pupil "that not a moment of the day was wasted."^[22] But anxiety over the use of time was not confined to scholars. The anxious wife of the merchant Francesco Datini chided her husband for his misuse of time: "In view of all you have to do, when you waste an hour, it seems to me a thousand. . . . For I deem nought so precious to you, both for body and soul, as time, and methinks you value it too little."^[23] This peculiarly modern concern would eventually find homely expression in Poor Richard's Almanack , but more was at stake here than "profit." For the proper regulation and use of time eliminated some of the uncertainty of life; it warded off, objectively, the blows of fortune, that comprehensive symbol of the uncertainty of life.

The fundamental relationship between the unreliability of fortune and human anxiety seemed, at any rate, obvious to contemporaries. So Alberti's Uncle Adovardo asked, quite rhetorically, "If a man is afflicted with so many anxieties, and always fears the instability of fortune . . . how can we consider him happy or call him anything but unfortunate?"^[24] If the management of time suggested an objective means of escape from this predicament, Petrarch's De remediis (so popular also outside of Italy) promoted, at vast length, subjective remedies, chiefly along Stoic lines.^[25] Machiavelli was following a similar direction of thought in proposing that although men "know not the end and move towards it along roads which cross one another and as yet are unexplored . . . they should not despair, no matter what fortune brings."^[26] We have here further testimony to the general connection between anxi-

ety and the uncertainty inherent in time itself as an inescapable dimension of life. Fortune expressed the radical untrustworthiness of the future.

But back of the future, beyond the limits of time as a dimension of each individual existence, lurks the uncertainty surrounding death. This is why, in some ultimate sense, all anxiety is anxiety about death,^[27] and why the anxiety of this period, often when it was immediately focused on the use of time, tended to accumulate especially around death and judgment, the nameless horror beyond every particular danger. "It is sad, Thomas à Kempis wrote, "that you do not employ your time better, when you may win eternal life hereafter. The time will come when you will long for one day or one hour in which to amend; and who knows whether it will be granted?"^[28] The peculiar obsession of Europeans with these matters from the fourteenth century onward has been of considerable interest to historians;^[29] we seem to be dealing here with something more than a set of perennial platitudes. Death, both as a physiological process and as the entrance into a realm of final uncertainty, was surrounded, even more than fortune, though for the same reason, by a singular dread. For all his piety, Petrarch could not conquer his fear of death, which he described in obsessive and strenuous detail. "Ubi sunt?" he asked, and could only reply, "All has dissolved into worms and into serpents, and finally into nothing." He hated sleep because it reminded him of death, and his bed because it suggested the grave.^[30] For Commynes death showed "what a petty thing man is, how short and miserable his life is, and how empty the differences between the great and the small, as soon as they are dead. For everyone is horrified by a corpse and vituperates it."

But the horror of death was compounded by a deeper anxiety over the uncertainty of judgment. "The soul," Commynes had concluded his little meditation on death, "must immediately go to receive God's judgment. Sentence is given at that very moment in accordance with the works and merits of the corpse."^[31] Calvin spelled out the connection between this apprehension and the general anxiety of the age: "Where does death come from but from God's anger against sin? Hence arises that state of servitude through the whole of life, that is the constant anxiety in which unhappy souls are imprisoned."^[32] Even laymen despaired over the mysteries of predestination and had to be advised to leave such matters to theologians.^[33] The pains of Purgatory were sufficiently feared; Thomas More himself described them in grisly detail,^[34] and the rich provided in their wills for masses to speed their souls to heaven: three thousand for a German merchant, ten thousand for Henry

VII of England (who was prepared to pay above the going rate to insure their being said properly), thirty thousand for the emperor Charles V.^[35] In the Medici Chapel in Florence, the massive figures of Michelangelo brooding over their solemn work, priests dropped with fatigue saying masses for their departed rulers.^[36] But the fear of hell was infinitely worse. A popular catechism pictured the damned feeding on their own flesh and explained, "The pain caused by one spark of hell-fire is greater than that caused by a thousand years of a woman's labor in childbirth."^[37] Nor were such fears alien to more refined minds. Petrarch described his thoughts of hell: "Terror grips my heart / Seeing the others I tremble for myself / Others urge me on, my last hour may be now."^[38]

The peculiar guilt of this period is sometimes attributed to the confessional, but this seems at best a half-truth; the confessional was as much an expression as a cause of anxiety. Men submitted to its scrutiny because they were in desperate fear of appearing before God with a single sin left unrecognized and unabsolved. Even confessors sometimes shrank from so dreadful a responsibility, itself a source of unbearable anxiety.^[39] And men often stayed away from confession because it gave no relief. Some looked instead to conscience, though this could be no more reassuring; for conscience, as Leonardo Bruni wrote, is a judge who "knows all" and "was present at every crime," and who "forces tears from you and compels you to weep among sacred things."^[40] Luther, who had vowed to become a monk through "the terror and agony of sudden death,"^[41] was eloquent on the inadequacy of conscience to relieve anxiety. To the guilty, he wrote, "all creatures appear changed. Even when they speak with people whom they know and in turn hear them, the very sound of their speech seems different, their looks appear changed, and everything becomes black and horrible wherever they turn their eyes. Such a fierce and savage beast is an evil conscience. And so, unless God comforts them, they must end their own life because of their despair, their distress, and their inability to bear their grief."^[42]

The importance of these fundamental dimensions of the anxiety of this period is suggested by the attention given to the problem, both explicitly and implicitly, in the religious thought of the sixteenth century, among Catholics almost as much as among Protestants. The uncertainty we have identified as central to anxiety figured prominently in the Protestant indictment of later medieval piety, and conversely Protestants stressed the certainties implicit in their own understanding of the Gospel. For Luther the "fear, terror, and horror" of death were the peculiar work of the devil; and faith alone could produce that "comfortable certainty" he could not attain by himself.^[43] For Calvin the

terrible "anxiety and trepidation of mind" produced by honest self examination, and the ignorance of providence that is "the ultimate of all miseries," could only give way before the "incredible freedom from worry about the future" that comes from faith. Scripture frees us from seeking "some uncertain deity by devious paths" and brings us to an "assurance that is not assailed by some anxiety." "Surely it is terrifying to walk in the darkness of death," he wrote; "and believers, whatever their strength may be, cannot but be frightened by it. But since the thought prevails that they have God beside them, caring for their safety, fear at once yields to assurance."^[44] Saint Teresa described her own movement from a deep depression of uncertainty about God's favor to the recognition that "I might safely take comfort and be certain that I was in grace."^[45] The personal intensity of both Protestant and Catholic piety in the age of the Reformation can only be understood against the background of the peculiar anxiety that it sought to assuage.

It is essential, to get at the ultimate meaning of anxiety, to notice first its attachment to the problems of time, death, and judgment. But anxiety also has other dimensions; as a diffuse condition of the personality, it can suffuse any area of experience. Indeed, it tends to seek out more particular and immediate expression, for, by providing itself with a local habitation and a name, it is therapeutically transformed into fear. Fear is distinguishable from anxiety by the specificity of its object; and because the object of fear is concrete and may be dealt with by some appropriate action, fear can be reduced or overcome. The effect of anxiety, on the other hand, is likely to be paralysis and depression. Yet the relationship between anxiety and fear remains close, for behind the fear of a particular danger always lurks, again, uncertainty about its eventual outcome. The close connection between these two states accounts for the fact that we encounter in this period not only anxiety about ultimate matters but also a peculiar capacity to be troubled, like Martha, about many things. The worries of this prototypical housewife can tell us, indeed, a good deal about the nature of historical anxiety. Mary and Martha (a point frequently made in a related connection) are two sides of the same existential coin. Mary represents the direct approach to human anxiety; she goes to its source. But Martha prefers to diffuse her anxiety among a variety of household tasks, with which she can immediately cope. We are here, perhaps, close to the psychological roots of the preoccupation of Renaissance moral and political discourse with the vita activa .

Europeans of the fourteenth century, and for some time thereafter,

were thus both profoundly anxious and at the same time frightened by almost every aspect of experience. It is hardly necessary to review here the evidence of their pervasive fear; historians are now discerning it in every sector of life. They have found it among rulers and merchants, and in every social relationship. It poisoned friendships and family ties, and even the sexual bond. The marriage bed itself now seemed less genial, as indeed we might expect; men who had learned a general distrust of life could hardly have been capable of a careless spontaneity in the most intimate realms of experience.^[46] Anxiety also attended the pursuit of learning, which too often seemed only an occasion of further despair; the more one knew, the less sense the world made.^[47]

Each of these particular concerns can doubtless be attributed to objective causes. Politics was a dangerous game, the pursuit of wealth did involve great risks, friends played false, treachery within families did occur, lovers could inflict deep wounds, the wisdom in books might indeed mislead and confuse. But it is not immediately obvious that much of this was not also true in the preceding centuries (or indeed in most centuries), and what is most striking about these expressions of distress is their inclusiveness. They arise in connection with every significant human activity. Indeed they may surround, with equal intensity and a mysterious poignancy, quite insignificant matters. Alberti could debate alternative solutions to the larger and more concrete problems of life, but he suggests that the same degree of anxiety could also surround its more trivial responsibilities, and with paralyzing effect. His uncles were radically upset by the "confusions, worries, and anxieties" of giving a dinner party, in which "upheaval and annoyance overwhelm you until you are tired before you have even began your preparations"; and the difficulties of moving to a new house evoked in them "anxieties that afflict your mind and distract and disrupt spirit and thought."^[48] Alberti seems to be reminding us that the problem of anxiety, the somber thread that runs all through his book, was, after all, more general and diffuse than any particular dangers could account for.

Historians have tended to attribute the peculiar anxiety of this period to the specific character, and above all the disasters, of European life after the beginning of the fourteenth century: to epidemics (and, of course, the Black Death!) more terrible than anyone could remember, to the uncertainties of a depressed economy, to the transition from a corporate to an individualistic society, to political disorder, to the contraction of Christendom in the East, to the disarray of the institutional church, to the pressures of the confessional, or to the novelties of rapid

change. And evidence is not lacking that each of these experiences disturbed and depressed some men, from time to time and in varying degrees. But it is hardly demonstrable, however distressing these matters seem to modern historians, who can envisage them cumulatively and imagine their concentrated impact on themselves, that they had a similar effect on those who experienced them in the past. The men of our period engaged with them not simultaneously but separately and at intervals, and were rarely in a position to draw general conclusions about their meaning.^[49] Nor is it clear that, had they been able to do so, they would have reacted much differently from men in earlier centuries to their own difficulties, which were not objectively insignificant. The diffuseness of the anxiety of our period suggests that the relationship of anxiety to particular disasters was incidental rather than essential. Explanation in these terms appears to neglect the distinction, and the relationship, between anxiety and fear.

Nevertheless it remains true that the malaise of our period was peculiarly its own. It must be seen as a historical phenomenon, and so it was considered at the time, when it became an essential component of a new historical consciousness. "Now the world is cowardly, decayed, and weak, / All goes badly," wrote Eustache Deschamps;^[50] and it is this now that commands our attention: not simply life in general but the times, and above all what they might hold in store, were out of joint. Petrarch stressed the "present woes" that promised, if this were possible, worse to come: "O tempora, o mores!" he exclaimed.^[51] "Now the study of holy eloquence and its professors suffer the laughter and derision of all," declared a French reformer in about 1400.^[52] Machiavelli denounced "the negligence of princes, who have lost all appetite for true glory, and of republics which no longer possess institutions that deserve praise."^[53] Erasmus explained the spate of predictions of the world's end as a judgment on the particular conditions of the present age: "They say it's because men are behaving now just as they did before the Flood overwhelmed them."^[54] Montaigne represented his own time as dull and leaden, all virtue spent.^[55]

Implicit here, obviously, is comparison with a previous period when human affairs had presumably gone better, and with this comparison we begin to sense a contemporary explanation for the anxieties of the time that is somewhat different from the explanations favored by modern historians. There are hints of it in the town chronicles of fourteenth-century Italy, with their idealization of a simpler past,^[56] as well as in Commynes, who believed that "our life-span is diminished, and we do not live as long as men did in former times; neither are our bodies as

strong, and similarly our faith and loyalty to one another has been weakened."^[57] The past now represented a lost ideal of peace, order, freedom, and above all brotherhood, in which men could exist without anxiety. The clue to the peculiar difficulties of the present thus seemed to lie in the deterioration of all social relationships; men had become anxious, contemporaries constantly repeated, because they had come to fear each other. "You are young," a Florentine merchant wrote one of his agents, "but when you have lived as long as I have and have traded with many folk, you will know that man is a dangerous thing, and that danger lies in dealing with him."^[58] Everywhere one meets the charge that now men looked out only for themselves. "Men live among themselves in such a manner," wrote Luther, "that no consideration is given to the state or household. . . . Who does not see that God is compelled, as it were, to punish, yes, even to destroy Germany?"^[59]

And the explanation for this novel egotism lies just below the surface of many expressions of contemporary anxiety: its cause was seen in the replacement of an agrarian by an urban society and in the attitudes and activities particularly associated with townsmen. A long tradition of antiurban sentiment lay behind this, nourished by both the Greek and the Latin classics, given substance by the medieval perception of towns as a disruptive intrusion into the old agrarian order, and finding expression in the Franciscan ideal of poverty. But by the fourteenth century there are signs that European observers were tending to regard towns as the cause of a general historical crisis and the source of their peculiar anxiety. Petrarch, adapting Juvenal, associated many of his worst moments with cities: with filthy, noisy, and bustling Avignon and even with Venice, where, he reported, "wherever I go in full day a crowd of dogs drawn from the populace assails me noisily . . . they are innumerable, turbulent, and noisy, and they are plagued with endless worry because they cannot bite me."^[60] Here, apparently, his anxiety was matched by that of those who surrounded him.

But towns provoked anxiety above all because they were greedy; townsmen preyed on others to benefit themselves, and this was what made them unreliable and dangerous, a threat to the general security of human existence. Even a merchant could lament that "where money is at stake or some personal interest, one finds no relative or friend who prefers you to himself and has not forgotten his conscience."^[61] The rural victims of urban greed made particular complaint, as in the Refomatio Sigismundi: "Nowadays a man going to a city to buy or sell will come away saying 'They have cheated me.' Everything in the city is sold at too high a price."^[62] "Nowadays," declared a Lutheran, "trading and

bartering have brought our land to such a pass that a man, if he would save himself from ruin, is compelled to cheat, defraud, and lie to his neighbors, for he himself is deceived at every turn."^[63]

"Nowadays." Again we are in the presence of a contrast, deeply felt, between a distressed present and a supposedly happier past, but also between man's present and his true home: nostalgia in its primary meaning. Ideally man should, and perhaps once did, reside in a garden: the more sophisticated garden in which Boccaccio's splendid youths found refuge from the horrors of plague-stricken Florence (itself a terrifying reality but even more potent as a symbol of the general malaise of urban life), or the primal garden where, as Luther remarked, Adam and Eve had lived "in the happiest security, without any fear of death and without anxiety."^[64] Piety and brotherhood seemed to come more readily in the country, and radical intellectuals during the early years of the Reformation occasionally went to the land; Karlstadt bought a farm, wore peasant gray, tilled the soil with his own hands (at least for a while), and called on university students to follow his example.^[65] Moralists like Bucer thought agriculture more virtuous than other pursuits,^[66] a sentiment that would receive systematic application by the Physiocrats. Johann Agricola attributed the fall of Rome to its abandonment of its old ways in which "rulers and statesmen used to be summoned directly from the plow and the field" and "plain, honest, hardworking farmers aspired to honor and uprightness, not to riches."^[67] Petrarch found only in the country the peace of mind favorable to the descent of his muse.^[68] The genial host in Erasmus's "Godly Feast" marvelled at "people who take pleasure in smoky cities" when "the whole countryside is fresh and smiling."^[69] Galileo is reported to have considered the city "the prison of the speculative mind" and his own thought liberated "only by the freedom of the countryside."^[70]

We are evidently in the presence of an early formulation of the fruitful modern myth of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft . And there is much in this fragmentary contemporary diagnosis, however it differs from our own more particular explanations, to instruct us about the general causes of the anxiety in this period. Its foundation was, of course, partly a myth even then, as Hutten recognized in reminding the nostalgic Pirckheimer that in the countryside too "each day is filled with anxiety over what the morrow might bring."^[71] Nevertheless it is true that much in urban life induced anxiety among those brought up in the country, as much of the urban population had been; since the death rate in towns tended to exceed the birth rate, even the maintenance of stable population in towns, and much more their growth, depended on substantial immi-

gration from the country. For erstwhile peasants the proliferation of complex laws and bureaucracies meant the substitution of an external, coercive, and mystifying set of social controls for the old internalized sentiments of a simpler community. And the unusual mobility of the urban population meant also that, in cities, much of life was passed among strangers. Potential predators, themselves made anxious by the novelty and insecurity of urban existence.

The needs of survival in this new environment and the increasing differentiation of economic and social roles compelled men to adopt specialized stances in relation to each other. A relaxed and candid self-exposure now became dangerous; human intimacy was inhibited by the need for vigilance in masking the true self. The villain of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage was likely to be a dissembler, but so in some degree was the average honnête homme .^[72] The conception of "friendship" was itself corrupted by self-interest; as a Florentine merchant remarked, "It is good to have friends of all kinds, but not useless men."^[73] The making of friends now depended on the artful presentation of a carefully edited "image," and advice on this delicate operation became necessary. "If there is someone in your gonfalone who can help you and push you ahead," Giovanni Morelli advised his sons, "first try to become intimate with him, if possible, by means of marriage. If that is not practicable, then have dealings with him and his [relatives]; try to serve him, offer him aid, if you can do so without too much loss to yourself, when you see that he is in need; give him presents, honor him by inviting him often to dinner." Morelli cited the example of his own father, who had been skillful in these tactics: "And by such wise and provident means, he had so arranged matters that, in his time of great need, he had friends, and not only relatives, who gave him help and support."^[74] Alberti's Uncle Adovardo advised that "to make friends it is necessary to study the gestures, words, customs, and conversations of others."^[75] No wonder, then, that, as Commynes complained, ours is indeed a miserable life, when we take such trouble and pains to shorten it by saying so many things which are almost the opposite of what we really think."^[76] At the end of his life the disillusioned Poggio Bracciolini confessed that he now spoke "only with the dead, who do not lie."^[77]

But urban life was also closer to the more ultimate sources of human anxiety. In cities time was experienced differently from in the country; change became a function not merely of the eternal rhythms of nature but of the unpredictable human will, and with the future always dependent on the actions of other men it became increasingly uncertain. Even death might seem more grim; it was now all too likely to occur

among strangers or false friends, and without the prayers of a stable community.^[78]

Are we, then, to substitute a more general social explanation of the special anxiety of this transitional age for the particular catastrophes on which historians have recently concentrated? Is the anxiety that seems to have hung over and darkened the lives of so many in this period, like smog, a direct consequence of the practical conditions of urban life? There is much to recommend this explanation; it directs us to the most general European developments to account for a general phenomenon, and it is suggested by contemporary testimony itself.

Yet this seems to me, however essential, not yet a sufficient explanation. For the problem here appears to lie less in the objective changes in the quality of European life that were, in any case, not altogether novel in the fourteenth century, than in the ability of Europeans to cope with them. Although the anxiety and depression of our period eventually declined, so that we can now see it as in this respect an unusual age in contrast not only to the medieval past but also (if a bit less clearly) to succeeding centuries, this can hardly be explained as a consequence either of the decline of cities or of a reduction in the rate of change. I think, therefore, that we must move to a deeper level of explanation: to the problem of man's ability to impose a meaning on his experience that can give to life a measure of reliability and thus reduce, even if it cannot altogether abolish, life's ultimate and terrifying uncertainties. The fundamental problem to which we must thus address ourselves appears to be the problem of culture and of its capacity to manage and reduce the anxiety of existence.^[79]

Medieval culture was conspicuously successful in the performance of this essential task. Applying a common set of distinctions (like other cultures of the type described by anthropologists as primitive)^[80] to all areas of human concern, notably such polarities as inside and outside, high and low, male and female, it was able at once to distinguish, to classify, and to relate all phenomena, and so to create an intelligible and coherent cosmos, apparently rooted in the eternal principles of nature itself, out of the undifferentiated chaos of raw experience. The phenomenal world could thus be reduced to a kind of orderly map; men could feel at home in it because they could distinguish one area from another by clear conceptual boundaries which were reflected in the structures of life as well as thought.

Thus medieval cosmology gave intelligibility to the universe as a whole by supplying it with an external boundary, and within it distin-

guished among its constituent parts. Bounding and distinguishing were fundamental to scholastic method, with its definitions (that is, conceptual boundaries), categories, and species. The sacred was clearly differentiated from the profane, sacerdotium from imperium . The various faculties of the human personality were similarly distinguished: soul and body; intellect, will, and passion. Human acts could be classified as virtuous or vicious, and the several virtues and vices were also unambiguously defined, and exploited to categorize and explain human behavior. Social identity depended on the boundaries between communities and classes, within which the individual was contained and at home. God was himself bounded by his intelligence, which guaranteed not only the immutability and intelligibility of the whole structure but also its ontological status. Boundaries were thus invested with numinous awe and surrounded by religious sanctions.

As a fully articulated system of boundaries, medieval culture was admirably suited to the management of anxiety. It provided well-defined areas of safety and focused the latent anxiety in the human condition at their margins. Anxiety was thus transmuted into a fear of transgressing the boundaries defining the cultural universe, and in various ways men could usually stay away from them.^[81] They were safe in their communities or estates, or as long as the boundary between the sacred and profane was respected, or insofar as the soul was not contaminated by the body or reason by the passions, or in the performance of virtuous and the avoidance of vicious acts. They could even face death with greater confidence, not only because their latent anxiety could be released by the obligations of boundary maintenance, but also because the viator through and beyond this life could take his bearings from the boundaries that continually surrounded him, discover the true way, and above all know his direction. Dante may have strayed briefly from his path, but he was enabled to find it again.^[82]

But certain peculiarities of the medieval system of boundaries made it appropriate only under special conditions. Above all it was based on the notion of absolute qualitative distinctions rooted in ultimate reality and therefore perennially applicable to human affairs. The system depended on the clarity of these distinctions, and it could not tolerate ambiguity. Thus it could remain plausible only as long as it was practicable for men to avoid transgressing its boundaries, for, although our response to experience is conditioned by culture, we also require a culture appropriate to experience and the needs of survival.

And it is at this point that the significance of urban life becomes apparent; the accumulating social changes of the later Middle Ages even-

tually exceeded the flexibility of the inherited culture and forced men increasingly to violate the old boundaries. Lateral social mobility broke down the boundaries between communities; town walls still retained deep symbolic meaning in the thirteenth century but—I suspect for more than demographic or military reasons—seemed increasingly arbitrary and useless thereafter and gradually ceased to be built. Vertical mobility eroded the boundaries between classes; and we now begin to encounter disputes over precedence in ceremonial processions among socially ambiguous groups such as lawyers and university scholars.^[83] The distinction between the sacred and profane was dissolving with the growing responsibility and dignity of lay activity and the secular state. The psychological boundaries by which the old culture had sought to understand the nature of man and predict his behavior were useless when he was no longer inhibited by the pressures of traditional community; and, experienced concretely in a more complex setting, human acts proved too ambiguous for neat ethical classification. Even the boundaries of the physical universe, so intimately linked to those in society and the human personality, were collapsing. No objective system of boundaries could now supply either security or effective guidance. When man still clung to the old culture, he seemed to have become, in spite of himself, a trespasser against the order of the universe, a violator of its sacred limits, the reluctant inhabitant of precisely those dangerous borderlands—literally no man's land—he had been conditioned to avoid. But his predicament was even worse if this experience had taught him to doubt the very existence of boundaries. He then seemed thrown, disoriented, back into the void from which it was the task of culture to rescue him. And this, I suggest, is the immediate explanation for the extraordinary anxiety of this period. It was an inevitable response to the growing inability of an inherited culture to invest experience with meaning.

There are hints that contemporaries themselves obscurely perceived their problems in these terms. Boundaries establish order by keeping each thing in its place, and the critics of cities were offended because, in them, confusion reigned. This is the deeper significance of the association of cities with dirt; with smoke, which obscures every visual boundary; perhaps even with noise, which intrudes on the inner life. Petrarch was nauseated by Avignon, "the narrow and obscure sink of the earth, where all the filth of the world is collected," with its "streets full of disease and infection, dirty pigs and snarling dogs, the noise of cart-wheels grinding against walls, four-horse chariots dashing down at every crossroad, the motley crew of people, swarms of vile beggars side by side with the flaunting luxury of wealth . . . the medley of charac-

ters—such diverse roles in life—the endless clamor of their confused voices, as the passers-by jostle one another in the streets."^[84] The juxtaposition here of contamination and confusion is instructive. Filth, as Mary Douglas has pointed out, is culturally defined; dirt is matter out of place, and what may be unexceptionable when confined to the barnyard is noxious elsewhere.^[85] Cities, as an anomaly in a traditional agrarian order, increasingly threatened to dissolve the patterns of a culture that had made the world comprehensible and comfortable, and accordingly they represented pollution and a reversion to chaos.

Petrarch's revulsion against cities has an ironic side, though it can be readily understood as expressing his apprehension of the consequences of his own onslaught against the old culture. For his attack on scholastic modes of thought radically challenged the principles underlying that culture. He repeatedly described scholastic efforts to identify the fundamental elements of reality in an orderly and systematic way, and so to define their boundaries, as "infantile babble"; "in total oblivion of the real basis of things," he maintained, the schoolmen "grow old, simply conversant with words."^[86] What this charge amounted to, a charge in which Renaissance humanists were joined by a new breed of scholastics, and later by the Protestant Reformers, was that a culture once able to give an ontological foundation to the phenomena of human experience could no longer do so. It had lost touch with reality and become irrelevant; its definitions and boundaries could no longer supply meaning to life. The result was a crisis of confidence in the significance of human knowledge. For Salutati, "to speak properly, what to us is knowledge is really only a kind of reasonable uncertainty."^[87] Pierre d'Ailly concluded "that the philosophy or doctrine of Aristotle deserves the name of opinion rather than science."^[88] For Melanchthon the schoolmen "continually think up new and prodigious fancies and monstrous expressions by which, since they have no basis in reality, nothing can be understood."^[89] Indeed the inherited culture had become positively mischievous since, though it still claimed ontological status, it no longer possessed any. Thus, though the old culture was now seen to be clearly no more than a human invention, its practical demands, because they could no longer be satisfied, filled men with dread. As Calvin wrote of the schoolmen, "They torture souls with many misgivings, and immerse them in a sea of trouble and anxiety."^[90]

The collapse of the old boundaries can be seen in many areas of cultural expression: for example, in the more fluid definition of nobility that we encounter in both humanists and Reformers, or in Nicholas of Cusa's conception of the infinite in which all polarities are reconciled

and obliterated, or in the paradoxes of Luther, or in the new astronomy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An occasional thinker felt, in the presence of this disintegration, the exhilaration of freedom; this was its effect on Bruno:

There are no ends, boundaries, limits or walls which can defraud or deprive us of the infinite multitude of things. Therefore the earth and the ocean thereof are fecund; therefore the sun's blaze is everlasting, so that eternally fuel is provided for the voracious fires, and moisture replaces the attenuated seas. For from infinity is born an ever fresh abundance of matter.^[91]

But infinity is not, for the majority of mankind, a comfortable habitat, as man's inability to live without culture would seem to attest; and Bruno's tragic fate testifies that his reaction to the new cultural situation was not only eccentric but profoundly threatening to his contemporaries. A more typical response to the implausibility and collapse of cultural boundaries was a frantic, if ultimately unsuccessful, effort to shore them up, of which the increasingly elaborate articulation of the old culture Huizinga noted in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the regressive tendencies of later Renaissance Italy, and the more detailed application of the penitential system are examples.^[92] Gerson proposed to cure the malaise of spiritual life by strengthening the boundary between theology and philosophy: "It is evident that although it surpasses philosophy, the teaching of faith has its predetermined boundaries in the sacred writings which have been revealed to us. One ought not dare define and teach anything beyond these boundaries."^[93] Rulers were increasingly preoccupied with defining the boundaries of their states, which appeared the more plausible in the degree to which they could be attributed to "nature," that is, given a quasi-ontological status.

But none of these efforts was finally of much use, as Pascal in his radical honesty would testify at the conclusion of a long process of cultural disintegration. We may interpret his sensitivity to the frightening "eternal silence of these infinite spaces" as a metaphor for the larger cultural universe of which his new vision of the physical universe had become a part. Both had finally lost those old familiar boundaries by which men could orient themselves and find meaning, and human existence could be made tolerable now only if men could be distracted from reflecting "on what they are, whence they come, whither they go." "Ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end," man, for Pascal, "feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependency, his weakness," and "there will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair." This was

the terrible predicament that had come out of the cultural disintegration of the previous centuries:

When I see the blindness and wretchedness of man, when I regard the whole silent universe, and man without light, left to himself, and, as it were, lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who has put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him at death, and incapable of all knowledge, I become terrified, like a man who should be carried in his sleep to a dreadful desert island, and should awake without knowing where he is, and without means of escape. And thereupon I wonder how people in a condition so wretched do not fall into despair.^[94]

Nevertheless Voltaire's incredulity as he confronted Pascal's vision of the human condition testifies that earthly palliatives for such general despair could be found.^[95] From time to time, to be sure, Europeans have sought to recover the confidence of their medieval predecessors by insisting once again on the ontological basis of human culture. This, I take it, is the significance of both the Protestant and the Catholic Counter-Reformations,^[96] of the more absolutist tendencies of the Enlightenment, and of some recent authoritarian ideologies; our perennial nostalgia for the Middle Ages is perhaps a more innocent expression of the same impulse, which will doubtless continue to seek expression. But such attempts to resurrect the spirit of the old culture, however tempting, have so far proved incapable of meeting for long the need for cultural security. Relief would come rather from the gradual emergence of a new kind of culture, based on quite different principles, that was struggling to be born even as the old one disintegrated. The new culture of post-medieval Europe has often been described, with varying degrees of success; and I want in conclusion chiefly to suggest how it managed to reduce, though it could not eliminate, the terrible anxiety implicit in the disintegration of the medieval certainties.

The new culture of modern Europe was constructed on a quite different pattern of assumptions. It began with the recognition that culture is not an absolute but the creation of men, and therefore a variable and conventional product of changing conditions and shifting human needs. This change in the understanding of culture began in later medieval nominalism and Renaissance humanism, which collaborated, however unwittingly, in setting the West on a new path. For both movements language ceased to link the mind with ultimate reality and so to identify the objective boundaries defining existence.

Human culture was thus seen to consist simply in those matters that

men (or a particular group of men) could agree on; its boundaries, having only a human character, could therefore no longer claim absolute respect.^[97] Renaissance rhetoric was accordingly valued for its plasticity, its ability to flow into and through every area of experience, to disregard and cross inherited boundaries as though they had no real existence, and to create new but always malleable structures of its own. In both nominalism and humanism the word, now humanized, created its own human cosmos out of crude experience.

An important consequence of this humanization was a more modest approach to the kind of cosmos man could discern in chaos, that is, to the scope of culture. Since his culture was simply the product of his own creative impulses, it no longer seemed possible for man to make every dimension of reality permanently intelligible or to comprehend the whole under the same broad categories. The isolated proverb, the pensée , the familiar essay, became favorite vehicles for the transmission of human wisdom. The autonomous painting of modern art is a nice symbol of the new ways of culture formation; a painting is a distinctly bounded little universe, the product of deliberate choices among infinite possibilities, a little area of order separated by its own boundaries from the chaos without. Thus, in place of one overarching cosmos we now encounter a range of uncoordinated and often minuscule structures representing a limited order whose plausibility is only aesthetic or practical. A political construction, for example, could now no longer be justified by its conformity to the order of the heavens, a principle that had achieved few practical benefits, but only by its results. It should therefore also be apparent that this new culture is significant not only for its own novel characteristics but also for its new understanding of culture as such. It made possible the conception of cultures , each relative to its own time and place, as distinguished from Culture .

In addition, quantity now tended to be substituted for quality as the essential principle of orientation; more-or-less, which recognized no impassable boundaries between nothing and infinity, for the either-or suggested by the Aristotelian law of contradiction. The practical foundation for this development was supplied by the growing importance of numerical calculation to artisans and merchants; the numerical arts were the climax of a boy's education in mercantile communities, and their general value for the interpretation of experience was recognized. As the banker Giovanni Rucellai remarked of arithmetic, "It equips and spurs the mind to examine subtle matters."^[98] Mathematical models broadly invaded fourteenth-century philosophy.^[99]

That the practical resort to number implied a cultural revolution was

by no means immediately clear, and its significance was for some time obscured by the sublimation of quantitative approaches to experience into a philosophical mathematics that sought to renew the ontological foundations of the crumbling traditional structure. In this view number became God's language in the book of nature. Salutati insisted on the indispensability of mathematics to theology; as another humanist proclaimed, "Mathematics raises us, prostrate on the earth, to the sky."^[100]

But the growing reliance on measurement and number also provided a means of orientation when qualitative boundaries were disintegrating and all things had become, in a new sense, relative. The mathematician could begin at any point in the welter of the phenomenal world, by measurement in units of his own devising define its relation to other phenomena, and so, like the artist in words or in paint, describe an order in the universe (if not the order of the universe), in accordance with his chosen purposes. The practical meaning of the change is apparent in the new science of probability, for the calculation of probabilities might now present itself as man's best guide through an indeterminate universe. Montaigne, as part of his rejection of the inherited dogmatism that had so disrupted his world, proposed to base life instead on probability;^[101] Pascal's notion of the wager applied the principle even to salvation.^[102] For probability could provide some basis for choice when the old qualitative boundaries had disappeared and give some relief from the terror induced by "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces."

Pascal seems to have grasped the new situation in a general way, and there are hints of such general understanding elsewhere: for example, in Guicciardini's observation that fortune, that ubiquitous symbol of chaos in human affairs, is angry with those who seek to limit (that is, to impose boundaries on) her dominion.^[103] The renewed emphasis on faith, among Catholics as well as Protestants, also reflects some insight into the new situation; a righteousness defined by works is a righteousness largely dependent on culture, and in this context justification by faith alone may be interpreted as a radical solution to the problem of the unreliability of culture. But of all the thinkers in the period of transition from medieval to modern culture, Nicholas of Cusa seems to have discerned most clearly what was happening and to have made the most positive attempt to establish human culture on a new basis. Nourished by both nominalism and humanism, he praised mathematics extravagantly, seeing in it a resource for the reorientation of thought to a universe no longer intelligible in traditional terms. For Cusanus the pursuit of ontological reality that had characterized Western philosophy

in the course of its long previous history had come to nothing. In cosmology, to which he gave particular attention, this meant that the notion of either a fixed center or an external boundary of the universe was illusory. But the point had larger implications; it suggested the indeterminacy of the entire phenomenal world, and the construction of man's conceptual universe became simply a project of the autonomous and creative human mind, and especially of its capacity for measurement. In this light all "reality" was essentially a function of the mathematical relationships between entities with which man, for reasons of his own, happened to concern himself.^[104]

And this conception, applied by Cusanus most immediately to space, and eventually applied also to cartography by locating points on a grid of latitudinal and longitudinal parallels, was meanwhile becoming a general principle of cultural articulation. It was also applied, in much the same way, to time, so fundamentally related to anxiety. Time could no longer be a function of the natural and qualitative rhythms of day and night, the seasons, and the years; it was now shaped in accordance with human needs. The hours were numbered according to a conventional scale imposed on an intrinsically formless temporal flow, and their conventional significance was enforced by the ringing of bells. Their content was also practically defined: hours were designated for opening and closing one's place of business, for meetings with other men, for this task and that.^[105] And once time, like money, could be measured, it became a precious human asset to be calculatedly exploited, as Alberti's Uncle Giannozzo solemnly advised his nephews, stressing also the novelty of the conception: "Keep these thoughts in your memory. . . . These are not sayings of the philosophers but, like the oracles of Apollo, perfect and holy wisdom such as you will not find in all our books."^[106] This, in other words, was nontraditional wisdom.

Time quantified was, like money, related to power; and the same tendency to quantification now intruded itself into political thought in the guise of a concern with balance. Equilibrium became a primary category for analysing the relations both of states and of the social forces within them; the maintenance of political stability was seen to depend on quasi-mathematical calculation and adaptation rather than on the preservation of a pattern of qualitative relationships. Machiavelli aimed to contain the dangerous energies of the various elements in Florentine society not by rigid boundaries but by systematic provision for their dynamic interaction, through which they might contain each other by the opposition of force to force. And the relativity in this new understanding of the political universe paralleled that in the new cosmology.

It was a commonplace of political discussion that, because the structure of forces varies from people to people, every constitution, every set of laws, must suit the peculiarities of the situation to which it is applied.

Meanwhile, as the social cosmos too threatened to collapse into chaos; as qualitative distinctions in social status were gradually eroded by power, whose increase could be at least roughly measured; and as individuals, no longer defined and protected by traditional social categories, were left increasingly vulnerable to one another, a new set of boundaries was required to protect men from each other. The principle at work here would find expression in the ominous proposition that good fences make good neighbors, a symptom of the new culture that may usefully be contrasted with the open field system of medieval agriculture. And much of the worldly wisdom of the early modern age was directed to building fences. Its complementary emphasis on self-control and vigilance both kept the individual within the boundaries of his self-definition and guarded them against infringement by others;^[107] this is the cultural significance of the famous bourgeois anal personality. It also helps to explain the deep revulsion, in this period, against begging. For the Alberti, "I beg" was a phrase peculiarly "hateful to a free man's mind"; whether represented by a wandering friar or a wretched layman, mendicancy posed a radical threat to individual autonomy and challenged the very basis of the new pattern of human relations.^[108]

We also encounter hints of the new quantifying mentality in the definition of relationships among individuals. Where the absolute categories of status could no longer establish the relation of each individual to his fellows, men now defined themselves against each other by subtle processes of measurement. Life was a strenuous competition with others to become wiser, richer, more esteemed: a race in which one strove to surpass other men by as many paces as possible. "Honor" itself, the term by which Alberti's Uncle Lionardo evaluated success in life, ceased to be an absolute, to be contrasted with dishonor. He personified it as "a public accountant, just, practical, and prudent in measuring, weighing, considering, evaluating, and assessing everything we do, achieve, think, and desire."^[109]

This attitude projected onto the social world that "bookkeeping mentality" often noted in the new mercantile culture, which served not only the needs of business but the deeper psychic needs of men inhabiting a newly problematic universe. Various human contrivances were developed to impose some pattern, when none was otherwise available, on the existence of the individual and his family: books for keeping mercantile accounts, systems for the filing of letters, records of the birth dates of

children, plans for the orderly arrangement of household goods.^[110] The value of such devices in meeting the immediate needs of life is obvious, but they also had a more profound significance. For the Alberti the keeping of family records had a moral quality; it reflected "the conscientiousness of a father." As Uncle Giannozzo informed his wife, "We should have order and system in all that we do."^[111] This does not seem an altogether utilitarian principle.

By such devices postmedieval culture achieved substantial success in reducing anxiety. Its creation of new boundaries focused anxiety on their maintenance and converted it into relatively manageable fears: fear of being late or wasting time, which, translated into the modern work ethic, has been especially effective in holding at bay our more general uneasiness about the meaning of existence; fear that great social and political forces might, uncontained, break out and destroy the precarious balance that makes social existence tolerable; fear lest some relaxation of personal vigilance and control might jeopardize the boundaries that protect man from man; fear of losing out in the competitive business of life. The new culture taught men where to locate particular areas of danger and kept them busy shoring up the various barriers against chaos. And the general dissipation of anxiety by these means also reduced anxiety about death and judgment, the most serious symptom of the failure of the old culture.

The new culture could also reduce anxiety because its relativistic and quantitative principles gave it a measure of control over time. Flexible boundaries could accommodate to contingency and enabled men to construct legal instruments (notable among them wills, contracts, and various types of insurance) to control and shape the future. Practical reason could now impress Alberti as "more powerful than fortune"; planning now seemed "more important than any chance event." "Think well ahead and consider what you are going to need," his Uncle Giannozzo advised, evidently persuaded of the good results of such foresight.^[112]

Various characteristics of the culture of early modern Europe attest to the decline of anxiety. One was a growing acceptance of cities, which found Italian expression in Leonardo Bruni's praise of Florence^[113] and Botero's Greatness of Cities . And if antiurbanism can hardly be said to have died out (for the city has become a perennial symbol of the alarming complexities of modern life), Cowper's "God made the country, and man made the town" is at least no more representative of the eighteenth century than Dr. Johnson's relish of London life. The city was no longer

necessarily a focus of anxiety, and Voltaire challenged Pascal's vision of the world as a "dreadful desert island" by pointing to the felicities of urban existence.^[114]

But an even more fundamental symptom of the change in mood was the gradual decline of nostalgia for the past. The humanists of Italy began to locate the highest achievements of human civilization at the end rather than the beginning of its development;^[115] Castiglione and Machiavelli both expressed reservations about the tendency of mankind to contrast the present unfavorably with the past;^[116] writers of the later Renaissance—Pulci, Boiardo, Cervantes—ridiculed that chivalric heroism with which earlier generations had imaginatively identified themselves.^[117] The Reformers, perhaps obscurely recognizing not only that Adam fell but that Jesus was betrayed in a garden, may have hinted at the same new conception of time. For Luther man could not be reformed—that is, restored to an earlier condition—but only forgiven;^[118] and Calvin from time to time inveighed against the value of precedent as a barrier against change.^[119] Hobbes's famous depiction of natural existence as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" was, in context, a radical rejection of the nostalgic mentality of earlier generations, and implicitly a celebration of the new urban culture.^[120] Man's true home was no longer in the past but increasingly in the future, whatever it might hold in store. And the growing belief in progress from the later sixteenth century onward attests that thoughts of the future were less and less accompanied by anxiety.

The redefinition of culture on the basis of the new principles was not completed in the early modern period, and the progressive substitution of fluid and relative for absolute and qualitative cultural categories has continued to disorient mankind and to release anxiety. We can see the continuation of the process in the emotional reaction to Darwin's attack on the fixity of species in the nineteenth century, and in the profound anxieties released more recently by the challenge to absolute distinctions of sex, an area in which (perhaps because it is peculiarly fraught with uncertainty) the principles of premodern culture have been unusually durable. And the new culture, precisely because of its own relativism, has never been more than relatively successful in the management of anxiety.

There were, certainly, problems that the structures of modern culture could not solve and might rather intensify. Its strategies, indeed, have sometimes themselves induced a peculiar anxiety, as Saint Teresa remarked about her own concern with the effective use of time. "If we

find ourselves unable to get profit out of a single hour," she noted, "we are impeded from doing so for four. I have a great deal of experience of this. . . ."^[121] Even more troubling consequences have come from the need of the individual to adapt to unpredictable circumstances and the changing expectations of others. The needs of survival in a problematic world have tended to alienate the public from any true self or, worse, to require the annihilation of the true for the sake of a social self. Thus, the relation between the boundaries of self-definition and any stable center of the personality have tended to become themselves problematic, and this has been the source of a peculiarly burdensome kind of anxiety in the modern world. Even the artist, his task no longer to discover and illuminate immutable truths but to create some relative cosmos from the chaos that surrounds him, may feel more terror than exuberance as he considers the contingency and fragility of his work. In spite of the impressive accomplishments of postmedieval culture, a higher level of anxiety was now to be a permanent feature of the West.