IDEAS AND COMMITMENTS

We are accustomed to the notion that people can hold conflicting and apparently irreconcilable beliefs. For example, many explain natural events in nonteleological, mechanistic ways in one sphere of their lives and think in terms of divine providence and mind/body dualism in another sphere. And although we know stories of personal crises—those, for example, experienced by educated Christians who were suddenly confronted with the Darwinian conception of natural history—in which people have felt the need to decide between conflicting beliefs, and to reject one system in favor of another, we do not consider it obligatory, either in a moral or intellectual sense, for people to be troubled by inconsistencies between separate spheres. That is to say, neither our political culture nor the norms of intellectual respectability demand that people attempt to reconcile apparently conflicting systems of belief. Indeed, some sort of compartmentalization has come to have the status of an acceptable and even honorable alternative to thoroughgoing consistency. Thus, when we encounter a zeal for consistency and a refusal to compartmentalize beliefs as when people with the conviction that they are obeying the revealed commands of God undertake to invade and occupy neighboring countries, or to establish theocracies, or to disrupt the lives of physicians who perform abortions—we may feel that the violation of compartmental boundaries poses a threat to civility and to the moral and social order.

I think that these facts about our political and intellectual culture make it difficult for us to understand seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and thought. The intellectual life of early modern Europe did not generally value compartmentalization or even tolerate its most harmless manifestations. Then, as now, people were deeply troubled when the religious beliefs of others were used to justify breaches of civility or disruptions of the public order. But such disruptions were not generally perceived as failures to observe the proper boundaries between religion and politics. There were no proper boundaries between religion and politics; the two realms were virtually inseparable. Religious beliefs that had bad political consequences were bad beliefs, and since it was widely believed that religious diversity had bad political consequences, heterodox beliefs were widely deemed ipso facto politically dangerous. To neutralize the threat posed by fanatics or heretics it was necessary to correct their beliefs—by persuasion or by compulsion—or to eliminate the obstinate dissenters from the body politic. Even the more enlightened thinkers—as we will see in the ensuing chapters those who believed in toleration and ostensibly rejected attempts to compel beliefs, were often interested less in respecting private convictions than in promoting a certain kind of universal religion that everyone ought to accept. Since the right religion was the one that would promise salvation as well as promote social peace, and since any residue of sectarian beliefs that would still be held in private must be irrelevant to salvation or social harmony (and hence superfluous or nugatory), there would be little reason to respect private beliefs that did not conform to the official ones. Accordingly, those who spoke on behalf of persecuted minorities might argue that the maintenance of their beliefs was in fact necessary for their salvation and was at the same time not inimical to the public order. Those minorities who were of a more revolutionary bent might argue that the public order needed to be overthrown precisely in order to allow oneself and one's coreligionists to achieve salvation. Whichever side one was on, one's argument had to be comprehensive and had to include the political and soteriological aspects of one's systems of belief. Thus the intellectual norm shared by the advocates of persecution and compulsion, by the advocates of toleration, and by the advocates of revolution presupposed the need for consistency and would not attribute any value to compartmentalization.

The pressure against compartmentalization did not apply merely to the inseparability of political and religious commitments but also involved the relationship of religio-political issues to epistemological principles. After it became clear that battles over scriptural interpretation would have inconclusive outcomes, there were increasing attempts to buttress one's religio-political position by bringing to bear intellectual methods that appealed to human reason or to systematic observation. But the more elements one needs to tie together, the more difficult it is to maintain consistency. For example, epistemological ideas that one invokes to defend one's scriptural interpretations may ultimately throw into question the status of religious revelation as a guide to the divine will. For the epistemological principles, by dint of their very claims to universal truth, might overshadow or preempt the very texts that they were originally serving to explicate. In fact, there are numerous ways in which the epistemological principles that one embraces on behalf of one aspect of one's beliefs might ultimately threaten other commitments.

The kind of situation that I am describing was dramatized by Montesquieu in his Lettres persanes. Usbek, the central character, has embraced an enlightened rationalism in one realm but clings to a different configuration of beliefs in another realm. As a philosopher who speaks the language of the Enlightenment, he believes that people are capable of obtaining moral knowledge through rational means, by dint of their capacity to grasp transcendent principles of equity and justice, and of behaving virtuously in accordance with that knowledge. Armed with such moral knowledge, individuals can transcend their selfish interests and join with others to form republics in which heroism and self-sacrifice constitute a norm of everyday behavior. Not only are people capable of being virtuous without being constrained to do so; only unconstrained acts can count as virtuous: actions performed out of fear of punishment or hope of reward are not meritorious. The philosophical Usbek is baffled by the specific and mutually inconsistent commandments of revealed religions, commandments according to which objects and practices are arbitrarily designated as pure or impure and hence as pleasing or repugnant to God.

As the master of a seraglio back in Persia, on the other hand, Usbek sequesters his wives in order to protect them from defilement. Purity is not enhanced by being the product of free choice,

just as impurity is not mitigated by good intentions.^[1] The taboos of the seraglio are enforced by fear of punishment and follow the mandates of a revealed religion.

Usbek is a fictional character who is evidently untroubled by the fact that he appeals to universal reason when talking as a philosopher but appeals to narrow religious taboos when talking about the politics of the seraglio. But the sophisticated writers who participated in the polemical battles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—writers whose texts are now often read as timeless works of art or philosophy—were acutely conscious of the fact that their embrace of new ideas risked running afoul of other commitments. They were aware that ideas needed to be handled with care if they were to achieve the right results. Their purpose was not to achieve peace of mind or any other sort of personal fulfillment that might be derived from philosophical consistency; their purpose was to defeat their enemies and to avoid catastrophe for themselves.

Usbek's crude compartmentalization of beliefs in fact results in catastrophe. The rebellion in the seraglio that serves as the dramatic climax of the novel has as its ideological justification precisely those principles that Usbek had accepted in the abstract but had attempted to keep from penetrating into the seraglio. These principles had, however, been taken up by one of his wives, Roxane, and had been used to legitimate her violation of the chastity taboo and her violent actions against the eunuchs who had enforced Usbek's authority.

Although fiction sometimes has the virtue of dramatizing and highlighting phenomena that are less clearly defined in the world of everyday experience, my inquiries are ultimately concerned with clashes of ideas and perspectives as they were experienced by real historical figures, participants in early modem polemical battles involving religion, ethics, politics, and epistemology. Like Usbek, these writers often embraced new principles that were not in complete accord with other social, religious, or political commitments. They did so for various reasons. Perhaps it was because the new ideas were taken up when they seemed useful and before it became apparent that they were double-edged; perhaps it was because the new ideas carried a great deal of prestige by dint of their association with powerful new scientific explanations; or perhaps the ideas had already been used effectively by the other side,

and it was felt that it would be imprudent to leave such powerful weapons in the hands of one's enemies.

These writers could not hope to get away with a compartmentalization of their beliefs. The sharply honed ability to point out inconsistencies and contradictions in the writings of one's enemies was a conspicuous feature of the intellectual life of the time. Montesquieu's satiric exposure of Usbek could readily be repeated in real life, against more formidable opponents and with greater acerbity and rancor. Or Roxane's appropriation of Usbek's arguments in the cause of rebellion could be carried out by other sorts of radicals who knew how to manipulate ideas that had previously been withheld from them or used against them. When each side has access to the same weapons, then success depends upon the subtlety of one's strategies, the ways in which potential inconsistencies are smoothed over, dangerous arguments neutralized, recalcitrant ideas made to fit—or to appear to fit—together.

The world that I have been describing—a world in which politics, religion, ethics, and epistemology were inseparable, in which attempts to compartmentalize beliefs were liable to be exposed and used against one, and in which ideas were appropriated, neutralized, and put to new uses—is the world to be examined in this study. The intellectual dynamics of this world should be of interest not only to students of early modern literature and thought but also to those concerned with some of the theoretical debates that have been raging across the humanistic discourses.

When I talk about religious and epistemological ideas as serving social and political ends, I am referring to phenomena that generally come under the heading of ideology—that is, ways in which particular symbolic structures play roles in overarching patterns of legitimation. But to talk about the ways in which individual writers appropriate ideas and thereby alter their ideological significance, or attempt to neutralize ideas that might otherwise prove to be dangerous, is to diverge radically from what has come to be a fashionable way of talking about texts and of talking about ideology. Indeed, one of the purposes of this book is to challenge contemporary assumptions about the ideological analysis of texts and to offer an alternative conception that is supported both theoretically and historically.

I will argue that the ideological valences of ideas are not intrinsic

to them but are context-dependent, and that the relevant context is not a given but is something that can be redefined by individual authors. Insofar as I talk about the recontextualization of ideas in terms of appropriation and neutralization, I am assuming that it is precisely the amenability of ideas to such procedures that poses a profound challenge to conspicuous currents in the contemporary theory and practice of ideological criticism. I wish to pose this challenge both by way of justifying my own methodology and by way of illuminating the broader relevance of the historical investigations that follow. Accordingly, I will introduce chapters 2 through 6 by discussing in relatively abstract terms the way intellectual appropriation or co-optation bears on our understanding of ideological mechanisms. It will be useful to begin by contrasting my approach to two theories of co-optation that have successively held the stage during the past twenty-five years.