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quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns
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{{short description|Literary and artistic debate that started in the 17th century}}{{redirect|Ancient and Modern|the hymn book|Hymns Ancient and Modern}}{{Use mdy dates|date=September 2021}}File:ChPerrault.jpg|thumb| Charles PerraultCharles PerraultThe Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns () was a debate about literary and artistic merit, which expanded from the original debaters to the members of the Académie Française and the French literary community in the 17th century.- the content below is remote from Wikipedia
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Origins of the debate
It was an essential feature of the European Renaissance to study the culture and institutions inherited from classical (Greek and Roman) antiquity.BOOK,weblink Renaissance Humanism, from the Middle Ages to Modern Times, 978-1-351-90439-1, Monfasani, John, 2016, Taylor & Francis, In contrast to the medieval scholastic emphasis on Christian theology and unchanging monarchy, Renaissance humanists launched a movement to recover, interpret, and assimilate the language, literature, learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome.Burke, P., "The spread of Italian humanism", in The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, ed. A. Goodman and A. MacKay, London, 1990, p. 2. The 15th century rediscovery of ancient texts and their wide distribution after the introduction, in about 1440, of the printing press into Europe, allowed a faster propagation of culture and ideas; and the resurgence of learning based on classical sources brought revolutions in many intellectual and social scientific pursuits.Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 1.WEB, BBC Science {{!, Learn about Leonardo da Vinci |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/leonardo/ |access-date=2024-01-22 |website=www.bbc.co.uk}}WEB, BBC - History - Michelangelo,weblink 2024-01-22, www.bbc.co.uk, en-GB, For example, in the field of architectural theory, Filippo Brunelleschi revolutionized medieval architecture using the knowledge he rediscovered after studying the remains of ancient classical buildings, analyzing the works of 1st century BC writer Vitruvius, and understanding the mathematical principles that could be discerned from them.Hooker, Richard. Architecture and Public Space {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070522160730weblink|date=May 22, 2007}} (Retrieved May 10, 2007).This cultural rebirth of the classical ideals of ancient times, and the following changes in scientific and artistic thought, gave rise to a reaction from those who perceived it as a danger to the stability of Christian civilization and wished to reassert the social and political values of medieval modernity.Hause, S. & Maltby, W. (2001). A History of European Society. Essentials of Western Civilization (Vol. 2, pp. 245â246). Belmont, CA: Thomson Learning, Inc. The debate became known as a "quarrel," after the frequently made pun on Charles Perrault's title Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (Parallel between Ancients and Moderns, 1688â92); the word querelle being used in the place of parallèle.Debate in France
The quarrel between the Classics and the Moderns opposes two distinct currents:The Ancients (Anciens), led by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, say that literary creation has its roots in the fair appreciation of the heritage of antiquity. According to them, it's the test of time that makes the masterpieces, not the pedantic opinion of an elite of scholars; the worth of the famous authors from Greece and Rome is established by twenty centuries of universal admiration.George Alexander Kennedy, H. B. Nisbet, Claude Rawson, Raman Selden: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 4, The Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005. While recognizing the merits of the great writers of his time (Boileau predicted that Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine and Molière would be acclaimed as geniuses in centuries to come) it is also important to recognize the cumulative dimension of culture and study our predecessors.Marcel Hervier, L'Art poétique de Boileau, étude et analyse (in French), Paris, Chefs-d'Åuvre de la littérature expliqués, Mellottée, 1948, p. 213-219. The metaphor of the dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants illustrates this principle: by learning from the works of the great men of the past, it's possible to surpass them. Boileau has on his side the greatest French writers of his time, including Racine, Jean de La Fontaine, François Fénelon and Jean de La Bruyère.Paddy Bullard, Alexis Tadié: Ancients and Moderns in Europe: Comparative Perspectives, Voltaire Foundation, 2016.The Moderns (Modernes), represented by Perrault, maintain that, since the France of King Louis XIV surpasses all other states in history by its political and religious perfection, accomplished and matchless, it follows that the works created by 17th century authors to the glory of King and Church are necessarily superior to anything produced in the past centuries.Joan DeJean: Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siecle, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997. Therefore they fight for a new literature adapted to the modern era, complacent towards the Court of France, respectful of 17th century decorum, zealous for Catholic religion, renouncing the freedom of old classical authors and always seeking to celebrate the French monarchy and the Catholic Church.Larry F. Norman: The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chapters 6 "Modernity & Monarchy" and 7 "The Pagan Menace"), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011. Perrault has on his side the Académie, the devout party, the literary salons and a host of fashionable poetsâwho, in the present-day, are almost completely forgotten.Denis Hollier: A New History of French Literature, Harvard University Press, 1994.The gradual takeover of the literary community by political powers during the 17th centuryâwhich included the creation of the Académie by Cardinal Richelieu (with Richelieu's men acting as supreme judges of all things literary), governmental censorship, the banning of controversial books (which sometimes also carried legal penalties against their authors), and the giving of pensions to authors who flattered the governmentâgreatly favored Perrault, who had risen to prominence through the power and patronage of minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and bolstered his Modern party's views on artistic creation.David T. Pottinger, The French Book Trade in the Ancien Regime, 1500 â 1791, Harvard Univ. Press (1958).George Alexander Kennedy, H. B. Nisbet, Claude Rawson, Raman Selden: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 4, The Eighteenth Century, pg,34â35, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005.From 1637 to 1694, the proponents of a literature adapted to modern times raged against the "Ancients". In 1637, Corneille's Le Cid was attacked in the salons and condemned by the Académie; accused of anti-patriotism and affronting decorum and morality.Corneille and His Times, François M. Guizot; Harper & Bros., New York, 1852. The "Moderns" mobilized again in a 1663 attack against Molière's L'Ãcole des femmes, as well as in 1667 against Racine's Andromaque, and then in 1677 against Racine's Phèdre; all were called irreligious and outrageous to French customs and society.BOOK, Philip George Hill, Our Dramatic Heritage: The Golden Age,weblink 1983, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 978-0-8386-3107-2, 590, In 1674, Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin made a public call on his friend Perrault to "defend France" against "that heretical troop who prefers ancient works to our own." In response to this call, Perrault and his brother Claude tried to charge Boileau with the crimes of blasphemy and lèse-majesté on the grounds that he preferred the works of ancient pagan authors who wrote under a regime of liberty (in Classical Athens or the Ancient Roman Republic) to the works of modern, Catholic authors who submitted to the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV.Antoine Arnauld, Letter to Dodart, 10 July 1694; in Lettres de Monsieur Antoine Arnauld, docteur de Sorbonne, V. 3 (in French), Nabu, 2011.One of the key episodes in the quarrel's development was the so-called Quarrel of the Inscriptions ('), which was triggered by Colbert's plan for a triumphal arch, glorifying Louis XIV's victories, to be erected on the ground that would later become the Place de la Nation in Paris (this construction project ended up being abandoned in around 1680 and the unfinished structures were demolished shortly after Louis XIV's death). The question was whether the inscriptions glorifying the King on the projected arch should be in Latin ("ancient") or French ("modern"). Antiquarian François Charpentier argued in favor of French inscriptions, and was countered by Jesuit Jean Lucas of the College de Clermont,WEB, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Jean Lucas (jésuite, 1638-1716),weblink who defended the option of Latin, in an eloquent address, pronounced at the College on {{date|1676/11/25}} and which was published in 1677 under the title '.{{citation |author=Tim Denecker |title=Taaltheorie ter verdediging van het Latijn: Joannes Lucas S.J., De monumentis publicis Latine inscribendis oratio (1677) |date=2012 |journal=Handelingen - Koninklijke Zuid-Nederlandse maatschappij voor taal- en letterkunde en geschiedenis |volume=66 |pages=195â209 |url=https://openjournals.ugent.be/kzm/article/71984/galley/196150/view/ |location=Mechelen}}.The actual episode that took the name of La Querelle happened a decade later and lasted from 1687 to 1694, starting with the reading in the Académie of Perrault's Le siècle de Louis le Grand (The Century of Louis the Great), in which he supported the merits of the authors of the century of Louis XIV and expressed the Moderns' stance in a nutshell:{{col-begin}}{{col-break}}
La docte antiquité dans toute sa durée
A l'égal de nos jours ne fut point éclairée.
Learned antiquity, through all its extent,
Was never enlightened to equal our times.Perrault's poem was published in 1687 in François de Callières's Histoire poetique de la guerre nouvellement declarée entre les anciens et les modernes ("Poetic history of the war recently declared between the ancients and the moderns"), which was not itself strictly partisan of one side or the other.
Assessment
In the end, the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns was a cover, often a witty one, for opposing views of much deeper significance. One side was attached to the classic ideals of Greece and Rome and rejected a theory of art that turned literature into propaganda for the ruling powers, while the other contested the very idea of intellectual or aesthetic values above the authority of the King and the Church.The renewal of interest in antiquity during the Age of Enlightenment led to a reassessment of the achievements of the classical past, and ended up subjecting the Scriptures themselves to the scrutiny of critical thinkers. The attack on authority in politics and religion had analogues in the rise of scientific inquiry, and the challenge to royal and ecclesiastical authority in the literary field already announced the questioning of state and society at the time of the French Revolution, when absolute monarchy and state-sanctioned religionâthe emblems of modernityâwould be overthrown in the name of the ancient ideas of republic, democracy, and freedom of religion.Fehér, Ferenc: The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity; University of California Press, 1992. {{ISBN|978-0-520-07120-9}}.Doyle, William: The Oxford History of the French Revolution; Oxford University Press, 2002. {{ISBN|978-0-19-160829-2}}.Analogous 16thâ20th-century debates
The Renaissance humanistic revolution, and its rediscovery of the intellectual achievements from classical (Greek and Roman) antiquity, brought about a divergence with medieval scholasticism and set the framework for the Scientific Revolution to come. Much as the Humanists had been preoccupied with uncovering the original meaning of language, literature and culture,BOOK, Nauert, Charles G. Jr., Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, 2006, 978-0-521-83909-9, Second, Cambridge, United Kingdom, so too had the natural philosophers of a century later.René Descartes (1596â1650) and Francis Bacon (1561â1626) set the tone of a return to nature in that they wanted to restart the entire project of science and humanities by determining laws based on an examination of reality rather than relying on authority and tradition. Their questioning would lead Descartes down a path of rationalism and Bacon down a path of empiricism. This calling of the natural philosophers (later to be named scientists) of a return to classical research methods based on observation, experience and rational theorization would allow for a great shift in European scientific thought.Since the Middle Ages, Aristotle had been the backbone of the system of Western academic knowledge officially endorsed by the Catholic Church. All philosophical discourse regarding nature was held within the parameters of Catholic-approved Aristotelianism as set by Thomas Aquinas and other Doctors of the Church, which sought to harmoniously unite the conception of God with a human understanding of nature that didn't contradict Church doctrine and was assumed to be perfect and complete. Aristotle's theories on the natural order were further substantiated by Ptolemy's geography and astronomy.BOOK,weblink Ptolemy in Perspective: Use and Criticism of His Work from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, 2010, Springer Netherlands, 978-90-481-2787-0, Jones, A., Archimedes, en, This Aristotelian-Ptolemaic paradigm of scientific knowledge, particularly physics and astronomy, lasted unchallenged until the transformations in Western thought brought by the Renaissance, at which point the 16th and 17th centuries saw the union of a Copernican-Keplerian system of astronomy open up a hefty first critique which was then completed by the union of the Galilean-Newtonian system of nature. The same transformation occurred in other fields of scientific knowledge, such as the medical theories of Galen and Avicenna becomingâunder the authority of the Churchâthe mainstay of the medieval physician's university curriculum from the 12th century onwards, and the work of Renaissance men like Janus Cornarius and Michael Servetus, who questioned and challenged the established order, bringing about the fierce reaction of the defenders of medieval modernity.BOOK, Schmitt, C. B.,weblink The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Skinner, Quentin, Kessler, Eckhard, Kraye, Jill, 1988, Cambridge University Press, 978-0-521-39748-3, en, This debate in natural philosophy played a part in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.BOOK, Walton, Conor, The Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns, 1995, University of Essex, In 17th century France, the leaders of the Moderns, like Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, were for medieval scholasticism, while the Ancients party supported the new discoveries. Thus, Boileau, Racine, and François Bernier brilliantly defended, in an Arrêt Burlesque (a work of literary satire), the rebirth (in French: Renaissance) of philosophy and science, and ridiculed all those who feared changes in the status quo of modernity.Nicolas Boileau: Le lutrin, Dialogue des héros de roman, Arrêt burlesque, revised and annotated by Charles-Marc Des Granges; Volume 66 of the collection Les Classiques pour tous; Hatier, 1948.JOURNAL,weblink 10.1179/175226907X226029, L'Indiscipline de l'Arrêt burlesque et les deux voies de la légitimation du discours scientifique, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, August 2007, 29, 1, 101â111, Robin, Jean Luc, 194016483, According to Claude Brossette, this Arrêt destroyed a project of the University of Paris to ban Cartesianism.Ch.-H. Boudhors, « Notices et notes », p. 141, in Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Dissertation sur la Joconde, Arrest Burlesque, Traité du Sublime, Paris, Société Les Belles Lettres, 1942. Boileau also wrote in defense of new forms of medical treatment, like the use of quinine, challenging the Moderns who were for Galenism and rejected any new developments.BOOK, Rocco, Fiametta, Quinine: Malaria and the Quest for a Cure that Changed the World, Perennial, 2004, New York, NY, vanc, Isaac Newton took the side of the Ancients, against Robert Hooke, when he wrote that his work relied heavily upon the work of his predecessors, famously stating:
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."Isaac Newton: The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, Volume 3, published for the Royal Society at the University Press, 1959.
See also
Notes
{{reflist}}References
- Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and other writings Ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- David A. Boruchoff, "The Three Greatest Inventions of Modern Times: An Idea and Its Public." In: Entangled Knowledge: Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference. Ed. Klaus Hock and Gesa Mackenthun. Münster and New York: Waxmann, 2012, pp. 133â63. {{ISBN|978-3-8309-2729-7}}.
- Joseph Cropsey (ed.), Ancients and Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss, New York, Basic Books, 1964 {{ISBN|0-465-00326-5}}.
- Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle, Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1997, {{ISBN|978-0-226-14138-1}}.
- Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre, translated and with an introduction by Allan Bloom. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1960.
- Levent Yılmaz, Le temps moderne: Variations sur les Anciens et les contemporains, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2004.
External links
- Dictionary of the History of Ideas Ancients and Moderns in the Eighteenth Century
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