The Origin of Enlightenment Aesthetics

Dorothea E. von M端cke the

P R A C T IC ES of the

EN LI G H T EN M EN T f Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public

1 THE SURPRISING ORIGINS OF EN LI G H T EN M EN T A ES T H E T I C S

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raditionally, when discussing the beginnings of Enlightenment aesthetics, intellectual historians and historians of philosophy point to the philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, who set out to investigate the particularities of sensuous cognition.1 With the creation of a philosophical subdiscipline, which he called aesthetics, Baumgarten designated a domain that valued the lower faculties, that attributed to the work of art a specific insight-generating power, and that reflected on the pleasures of the imagination.2 For the purposes of this chapter, however, I shall bracket this approach. Instead of tracing a certain trend in philosophical discourse about the value of art and the specific kind of access to truth that could be provided by works of art, I shall turn to a set of practices and habits. I am interested in investigating what in the wider population of a general, not philosophically specialized readership would have prepared the ground for radically rethinking the nature of aesthetic pleasure, so that it would be considered no longer an exclusive domain of connoisseurs but instead would become valued as a universal human and humanizing capacity. I shall do so by investigating practices of attention, of serious, committed observation directed at seemingly trivial, mundane, quotidian phenomena, which in the process of contemplation would reveal to the observer a hidden significance. My goal is to show that these practices of attention ultimately served to form habits of cultivating a pure, pleasurable contemplation utterly different from the interested engagement with something agreeable, capable of satisfying the senses.

Such practices of attention, capable of endowing objects of observation

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with the ability to elicit in the observer a pleasure that would transcend sensuous gratification, constitute an important component of many kinds of spiritual exercises and practices of sublimation that can be found throughout history. Thus it is the challenge of this chapter to isolate one specific strand of spiritual exercises, which would have been widespread and enduring enough to be considered relevant for having actually shaped a certain mindset of the general readership of that period.

The practices of attention and observation I shall isolate as the cultural site that prepared the ground for the promotion of “disinterested interest” as the key to Enlightenment aesthetics can be clearly distinguished from other practices of attention that also gained significance during the eighteenth century. In her “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” Lorraine Daston examines how within the framework of natural theology the practices of observation of eighteenth-century naturalists lead to the enshrinement of the moral authority of nature expressed in Pope’s dictum from his “An Essay on Man”: “Whatever is, is Right.”

She shows how such naturalists as Charles Bonnet would devote endless hours to highly focused attention on the lowliest insects, to recording the most exacting, detailed descriptions of these observations, but also to the pleasures and joys they would take in these thus individualized creatures beautified by the art of attention and description. Daston argues that it was especially the focus on “what Bonnet would call the ‘organic Economy’ in which the ‘arrangement and play of different parts of organized bodies’ explained operations like growth and generation” that would guide the focus of these naturalists to analyze “objects into interlocking parts” and trace “the fit of form to function with an eagle eye for ‘fitness.’ ” 3 By contrast, the practices of attention that I will discuss in this chapter did not have as their goal the precise, detailed observation of natural phenomena within an overall framework of natural theology aimed at understanding and explaining the fitness and utility of each and every creature. Their aim instead consisted in the transformation of the observer and in the spiritual growth of the believer. And although these practices might focus on a mundane, lowly object, they are aimed at a spiritual realm beyond that of the senses. They are very distinct from the practices of attention of the naturalists, which involve the observer’s active interaction with concrete natural phenomena, placing them under the microscope, anatomizing, taking notes, and drawing details. The practices I shall study revolve entirely around the training of the observer’s own mental

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and emotional faculties. The activity of observing a specific sight or object is primarily a means to that other end, and in this regard such practices of attention are highly self-reflexive. These practices of attention began to take hold somewhat earlier than those studied by Daston, and they were much more popular. They emerged in the realm of popular religion, in Protestant areas during the seventeenth century.

In what follows I shall base my argument on the analysis of one of the most popular books among the vernacular literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Johann Arndt’s devotional guide Vom wahren Christenthum (On True Christianity). First published in 1605, True Christianity went through numerous editions throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it was translated into many languages. The cultural influence of this book was enormous. Arndt’s True Christianity gave lasting shape to the form of piety that became known as Pietism.4 Its formative, pivotal role for the development and spread of this religious movement can be glimpsed from one moment in its publication history. In 1675 Jakob Spener (1635–1707), generally considered the founder of Pietism, chose to publish his critique of the orthodox church establishment and hope for both institutional reform and religious renewal, his Pia Desideria, as part of a preface to a new edition of True Christianity. Already this move— Spener’s decision to integrate his programmatic manifesto into the preface of Arndt’s by then established devotional guidebook—indicates the kind of intervention that was at stake in this religious reform movement: religion was to rid itself of doctrinal pedantry and institutional authority and be based instead on a lived, practiced spirituality.

Johann Arndt’s True Christianity went through numerous editions, was translated into many languages, and became, among the vernacular literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of the most widely read, or rather most widely used, books of the Protestant region of that time. It is a book that does not demand a linear reading, but offers itself as an organized resource of instructions for concrete exercises. In that sense, True Christianity is not a book that attempts to deliver a message but rather a guide that aims at recruiting practitioners. In order to get a better understanding of what was so special about Arndt’s approach to spiritual exercises, it is worthwhile to compare True Christianity with another quite popular devotional text. For Arndt was not the only one composing Protestant meditational literature. Beginning with Martin Luther there was an entire tradition of cultivating meditation as a means

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by which believers were to practice making connections between biblical passages and their own lives. A popular work of Protestant meditational literature (though not quite as popular as Arndt’s) was Johann Gerhard’s Meditationes Sacrae. Its first edition appeared in 1606, just one year after the first edition of Arndt’s True Christianity. Gerhard’s Meditationes were published first in Latin, then also quite frequently in German, and other translations were made into vernacular languages, including translations into verse. Although some editions of Gerhard’s Meditationes were augmented by visual emblems, these never achieved the lasting impact of the equivalent illustrated editions of Arndt’s True Christianity. The most important difference consists in the way in which the meditations are presented. Gerhard’s Meditationes offer a mixture of prayer and admonition with reflections on aspects of the religious message. They are primarily an ongoing back and forth between the address to God and the address to the believer’s soul. They are only interrupted by admonitions to the believer to remember crucial elements from the life and suffering of Jesus and to apply those to her or his own life. Arndt’s meditations, by contrast, as I will show, are quite differently composed. Whereas the meditation in the case of Gerhard is provided by the verbal text of each meditation as a complete unit, which could be compared to a “libretto,” providing the actual words of prayer to God or Christ, of admonishing one’s own soul, of lamenting one’s own depravity, etc., Arndt’s meditations work like a rebus, a complex set of narratives and images that involve the reader more actively and take the reader beyond the text of the meditation. For they focus the readers’ attention on external, secular phenomena, which then are to be considered and compared in their complex way of functioning to a religious phenomenon.5 Thus it is Arndt’s very special use and selection of images that sets his work apart from other devotional literature of his time.6 In Arndt’s work we can find a deployment of images that crucially involves the external, secular world for meditational purposes, an aspect that I will argue had a deeply transformative potential for this religious practice in the sense that it opened it up for its migration toward an exclusively secular context.

In what follows I shall first show how Arndt’s text makes use of verbal images, of similes and comparisons, for the famous visual illustrations were not added to Arndt’s text until the Riga edition of 1678, about fifty years after its author’s death in 1621.7 Then I shall turn to these visual emblems, which in 1696 were enriched by prose explanations. I shall show

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how these illustrations together with their prose commentaries isolate and heighten the spiritual exercises that are already part of the verbal text such that they prepared the grounds for the cultural practices of observation, contemplation, and reflection that by the second half of the eighteenth century would be considered constitutive of aesthetic experience.

The main goal of True Christianity is to guide each individual believer to become a better Christian, which means to bear the hardships of life without anger or complaint, and to reflect on the basic religious doctrines in terms of their applicability to the reader’s own life. The fallen nature of man, the nature of true faith, the value of patiently enduring suffering— these religious truths are carefully explained in view of complex verbal images that the reader is asked to contemplate.8 Thus, for instance, the second chapter of True Christianity is entirely devoted to bringing home the message of man’s fallen nature. Arndt’s readers are to see themselves as sinful and in dire need of redemption. His method of getting his readers deeply involved in thinking about the fundamental Christian dogma of original sin and applying it to their own lives is already captured in the table of contents below the title of the second chapter: 1) Adam’s fall as the most terrible sin. 2) Can be made clearer by looking at Absalom’s sin. 3) Through which man began to resemble Satan. 4) From this poisonous Seed grow the most horrific fruits, 5) Which already stir in little children, and which are augmented by anger. 6) This poison is hidden in the heart but breaks out in life. 7) This is why anger is strictly forbidden. 8) The fall and original sin [Erbsünde] cannot be eradicated; 9) Because it turned the human being into a beast; 10) thus that man will have to perish in that state unless he converts.9

Arndt selects as the key biblical passage for his discussion of the Fall not Adam’s and Eve’s transgression from Genesis but Absalom’s rebellion from the book of Samuel. Through this move he turns what could be viewed as a single event in human history into a universal human trait.

For Absalom’s rebellion exemplifies for him a ubiquitous human flaw, a son’s aggression and competition with his loving father. He thus begins explaining the fallen nature of man with a universalizing gesture, depicting it as a result of a human tendency that can be commonly observed.

Only then is the Fall explained as a radical transformation of a creature that initially was an image of God but then became an image of Satan.

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The eating of the forbidden fruit is not the cause for the expulsion from paradise, the first act of disobedience, but merely a symptom of man’s perverted heart, understanding, and will.

Arndt’s use of verbal images can be further studied when he sets out to get his reader to imagine the concept of original sin: how the distinguishing feature of man, a creature who originally was created in the image of God and then transformed into its opposite, the image of Satan, was to be passed on from generation to generation. He proceeds by blending two images with one narrative, by having his reader think of a natural seed, invoking the image of the serpent-seed from Moses 3:15 to which he adds the adjective poisonous, and then by embedding this combined image into his retelling of the narrative of the Fall: For just like a natural seed in a hidden fashion contains all features of the plant, its size, thickness, length and breadth, its twigs, leaves, bloom and fruit, such that a big tree is hidden in a tiny little seed, and so many, innumerable fruits; this is exactly how in the poisonous, evil serpentseed, in Adam’s disobedience and self-love, there is hidden for all progeny inherited through natural birth such a poisonous tree, and so many innumerable evil fruit, that in those the image of Satan with all evil behavior and character will appear.10

The concrete, commonly observable phenomenon of the seed is supposed to provide an analogy for how the Fall is to be passed on to the entire species. Yet instead of providing an explanation of how the transmission of man’s altered state works, Arndt’s image makes the fact of that transmission as natural as trusting the apple seed to contain all the traits of the tree that will grow from it. Moreover, while this image naturalizes a point of Christian dogma in everyday experience, it also isolates a humble, everyday phenomenon, such as a plant seed, and invites the reader to contemplate its hidden complexity and latent danger. In what follows I want to argue that it is this kind of isolation and focus on relatively commonly observable phenomena, which are framed as bearers of a complex significance, that not only provides the key to the long-lasting popularity of Arndt’s work but also lays the groundwork for a kind of observational practice that eventually would become the domain of aesthetic experience.