Abstract
The chapter addresses the “Catholic Enlightenment” through a reading of eighteenth-century Peruvian periodical the Mercurio Peruano. It analyses the place of the Counter-Reformation and of Christian caritas in the paper. But it identifies the articles on public works, commerce, and mining as the place where the language of a technoscientific critical reason emerges. Sharman suggests that a fragile colonial literary public sphere is the sign of a New Philosophy that would not simply be a theology. However, using Derrida on religion, he issues a vital challenge to the conventional account of the Enlightenment as the advent of autonomous reason. He reminds us that there is no enlightened reason that does not presuppose an act of faith—in the testimonial pact that subtends all knowledge.
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- 1.
The Mercurio was produced by a group of Creoles in their mid-twenties who formed the core of the Lima Sociedad Académica de Amantes del País. It ran from 1791 to 1795 and then was reincarnated in a different form in 1827. Periódicos were reserved for commentary on “literary” or scientific matters; gacetas, for political news. See Poupeney-Hart (2010, p. 19).
- 2.
Poupeney-Hart (2009, p. 175). The Mercurio’s subscribers included a viceroy and an archbishop. On the public, see 1 September 1791. The paper was funded by subscriptions of 14 reales a month, or else bought from Don Lino Cabrera’s shop on Calle de Bodegones on Thursday and Sunday mornings from 8 am onwards (“Prospecto”). At its height it had 517 subscribers. Clément (1997, pp. 73, 76–77) details the social composition of subscribers as 46.3% commoners or Third Estate (estado llano), 35.1% nobles, 16.3% clergy, 2.3% unknown. He estimates the Mercurio may have achieved a readership-cum-listenership of between 4500 and 5400 people.
- 3.
Clément (1997, p. 34) categorises the anonymous contributors as: “intellectuals” (24%), public administrators (18%), professionals “con actividades económicas” (15%), clergy (14%), military (4%), unknown (25%).
- 4.
- 5.
Prelaciones are the traditional practice of seating people in order of rank. The prelación usually went to ecclesiastical personages. Prelado means “Persona que ocupa cualquiera de las dignidades superiores de la Iglesia” (Diccionario de uso del español).
- 6.
- 7.
See Lehner (2016, p. 11). Some of the revolutionaries were former Catholic priests involved in murderous violence against other Catholics (p. 213).
- 8.
Lehner (2016, p. 2): “Is such a thing as a ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ even possible? … Is Catholicism compatible with the values modernity cherishes?”
- 9.
- 10.
Whitaker (1961).
- 11.
Lynch (2001, p. 54).
- 12.
This point is made by Lehner (2016, p. 10), who notes that the papacy was regarded as static in the eighteenth century (p. 6).
- 13.
Lynch (2001, p. 111).
- 14.
Lehner tells the story of the group gathered around Charles III (p. 36) but does not indicate the paradox.
- 15.
Lynch (2001, p. 117).
- 16.
Lynch is resisting the “French” version of the Enlightenment. But this occasions contradictions. On later Mexican independence, Lynch writes that the Mexican identity forged by the exaltation of the Indian past, resentment at Peninsular privileges, and the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe created a banner under which all ethnic groups could march, and concludes that Morelos’ declaration that “All the inhabitants except Europeans will no longer be designated as Indians, mulattos or other castes, but all will be known as Americans” owes nothing to any declaration of the rights of man but derives rather from “awareness of a common identity as Mexicans” (p. 118). The statement would seem, on the contrary, to share profound roots with Enlightenment and Christian universalism and thus to have both nationalist and Enlightenment (and, as Lynch goes on to say, religious) affiliations. Perhaps at stake here is the hybrid and endlessly inflected nature of a common language.
- 17.
French Catholicism, Lehner says, had through its early interaction with Protestantism become more austere than its Baroque Spanish counterpart (2016, p. 174).
- 18.
“Cephalio” is the pseudonym of one of the periodical’s principal contributors. All references to the Mercurio Peruano are to one of the three volumes that collect together editions from the year 1791, available in digitised form through the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. These volumes are from the facsimilar edition published by the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, Lima, 1964. I have kept the original punctuation.
- 19.
Cassirer (2009, p. 135).
- 20.
See Lehner’s useful summary of Latin America’s Enlightenment (2016, p. 104).
- 21.
Israel (2001, pp. 528, 540).
- 22.
For Derrida (2002, p. 70), not every belief—or sworn faith or confidence or trust—need be inscribed in a religion, nor, conversely, every sanctification or sacralisation of the unscathed presuppose an act of belief.
- 23.
The argument is a variation on the one we saw concerning the general structure of thought in Chap. 2.
- 24.
“Nosotros no pretendemos atribuirnos el título de filósofos, si no es en lo que respecta al amor de la patria” (3 November 1791).
- 25.
See Porras Barrenechea (1974) on the Mercurio’s enlightened patriotism.
- 26.
The “Disertacion sobre la ceguera ilustrada” (21 and 24 July) says that reason is a faculty in one sense best exhibited by the blind, since blindness, which is a cutting off from the visible detail of the world, allows for maximum abstraction. This is one of the sharpest and most nuanced articles of the year.
- 27.
Other religious subjects dealt with include: the Creator, albeit frequently mentioned alongside Mother Nature (1 September); the Immaculate Conception (17 July); the Pope of the day, Pius VI (4 September); the part played by the Almighty in the astronomer Kepler’s science (4 September); the divine light that shines through those who rule (25 September).
- 28.
Portillo Valdés (2000).
- 29.
Portillo Valdés (2000, p. 51).
- 30.
I discuss this in Chap. 6.
- 31.
See, for example, 16 June.
- 32.
Footnote 8 details instances of the Indians’ compassion and warns against calling them “barbarians.” According to the Inca Garcilaso, the Incas did have special measures for orphans and widows.
- 33.
In November 1791, the Mercurio conjures the institution synonymous in the European mind with a benighted Hispanic Catholic world, the Inquisition, in the context of the recent censorship by the Santo Oficio of five European periodicals, prohibited in their entirety following the Auto of 27 August (3 and 6 November).
- 34.
Poupeney-Hart (2009) argues that scholars have downplayed the variety of voices in the Mercurio, turning it into an exclusive matter of Peruvian national identity.
- 35.
For meditations on the unknown interior, see 30 June and 22 September. On mapping, see 15 May.
- 36.
In a later, extended essay on Chichas y Tarija, the Mercurio will suggest that the recourse to empiricism is in many respects a return to classical knowledge. The periodical, it claims, will base its knowledge of the region on manuscripts written by people who have taken part in a military officer’s expedition (sponsored by the viceroy’s wife), all of whom had seen and measured the terrain themselves. The piece criticises the Diccionario geografico de las Americas for being too theoretical and lacking practical knowledge, which is what the ancients always used to demand of their histories (19 May). Lehner (2016, p. 106) notes, in a discussion of the Peruvian ilustrado José Gumilla, that it was a common tactic to describe modern science as an organic development of ancient knowledge.
- 37.
The inhabitants in one part of the area certainly need instruction in something, since they do not understand what stones are. When they bump into one, they admire it and hold on to it like some prize diamond, only to throw it away indignantly when they suddenly see how abundant stones truly are. This detail, the footnote makes clear, is actually from Charles Marie de La Condamine’s travel journal, discussed in Chap. 2. The paper comments explicitly on the geodesic expedition of 1735 to Quito in the editions of 29 May and 12 June.
- 38.
“Rasgo histórico y filosófico sobre los cafées de Lima” (10 February) informs us that cafés in Spain were originally built on top of Alogerías and that coffee first came into Spain with the Arabs, along with a fragment of the Arabic language, the word cafée coming from cahué (in fact, originally qahwa). I explore this piece at greater length in Sharman (2017).
- 39.
We should also mention an ongoing, mock-serious series on women (beginning in the “Prospecto” and running through 27 January, 10 February, 27 February, 3 March, and 19 May) and another more serious one (5 June, 14 July, 14 August, 20 October, and 25 December) which thread their way through the year and to which I shall elsewhere dedicate proper attention.
- 40.
See the editions of 30 January (I), 2 and 6 October (III), and 11 December (III) on present-day Indians; and 17 March (I), 4 August (II), and above all 21 and 25 August (II), on the Incas.
- 41.
Cf. the article on pilgrimage by river and the Christian religion as a civilising mission (25 September).
- 42.
In the same issue, there are calls for dissertations on the four Holy books, on moral and liturgical theology, and on why Castilian is better than French.
- 43.
Bayly (2004, p. 10): “Modernity is an aspiration to be ‘up with the times.’ It was a process of emulation and borrowing.” Of course, it is much more than that.
- 44.
In “Justificacion de la Sociedad, y del Peru” (23 June), the Mercurio is as good as its word. In its founding statement, it proposed to rise above criticisms, but to act swiftly whenever the criticism was levelled at the country as a whole. So when Padre Fray Antonio de Olavarrieta, of the Franciscan Order, speaks of Peruvians as “salbajes recien-conquistados,” the Mercurio is moved to act. It charges him with damning Doctor Crespo’s piece on tides without understanding it and without realising that all the best philosophers in Olavarrieta’s Europe are on Crespo’s side. In a satirical put down that anticipates Cien años de soledad by 176 years, the writer remarks that Father Olavarrieta’s algebra and trigonometry are bound up with his penchant for chocolate.
- 45.
Something similar happens in the conclusion to the long dissertation on Chichas y Tarija (22 May), which relates the discovery of an enormous bone buried in the province of Tarija and of a large petrified tooth weighing 5 lbs 3 oz found in the same area by the botanical expedition to Peru and sent back to the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid.
- 46.
This is an immensely rich, but beautifully synthetic piece, which deals not just with the Graeco-Roman and Christian tradition but with many others besides, including the ancient Peruvian. The later article of 20 February concentrates exclusively on the Roman legal tradition and its offshoots, including Alfonso el Sabio, invoking powerful precedent as a way of applying pressure on the authorities.
- 47.
A piece by the Regente Gobernador Intendente, Pedro Antonio Zernadas Bermudez, on 26 May announces that the authorities are preparing plans to build camposantos just outside Lima.
- 48.
The poem was originally published in the Memorial Literario in Madrid in 1787.
- 49.
Cf. 17 February (fol. 124): “Las epidemias, las pestes, que en lo moral son castigos del Cielo, en lo físico son casi siempre efectos de un ayre corrompido.”
- 50.
A footnote indicates that the sentiment is from Matthew, ch. 25, v. 32: Non est Deus mortuorum, sed vivensium.
- 51.
In an article on hygiene and ways to avoid harm befalling pregnant women (a role destined for them by the Supreme Author), we are told that the organs of the machine suffer through sympathy and communication, and that the mother’s anger is one of the main causes of abortions, a danger which may be offset by bloodletting (5 June). In a later piece on hygiene and childbirth, on 25 December no less, we are told that it is desirable to have properly trained midwives in attendance, and necessary to bleed newborns if they are red in the face, and that in the debate between “Antiguos” and “Modernos” on the matter of bloodletting, the latter prevailed in insisting that blood be taken from the arm.
- 52.
See also Pagden (1993, pp. 170ff).
- 53.
This stretch of the article launches a fierce attack on Spain and the galley system.
- 54.
- 55.
The “Carta” is the single most unguarded piece of the year. It deals with black male slaves who dress up as upper-class women.
- 56.
Fisher (1994).
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Sharman, A. (2020). Periodical Press: Faith and Knowledge in the Mercurio Peruano. In: Deconstructing the Enlightenment in Spanish America. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37019-0_4
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