enlightenment details: theology, natural history, and the letter h · enlightenment details:...

JONATHAN SHEEHAN

Enlightenment Details: Theology, Natural History, and the Letter h Prosodia autem & Orthographia per totam Grammaticam, ut sanguis & spiritus per universum corpus, fusae sunt.

-Petrus Ramus, Scholae in liberates artes (1569)1

THE SCHOLARLY ANTIQUARIAN LOVES THE ORIGINAL detail, cherished and secret, shown only to a few intimates. Even beyond the joys and econo- mies of collection, he treats the detail carefully, and releases it reluctantly into the glare of publicity, preferring to keep it dusty and obscure. This star of antiquari- anism has always tugged on historians, whose techniques of research and presentation circulate around almost forgotten minutiae. I do not exempt myself from this attraction. I propose, however, to treat here a detail, specifically the letter I, in detail. This attention could render the detail gaudy. But in this case, where the letter h was recognized and discussed as a detail in the complicated orthographical debates of the eighteenth century, we have a rare opportunity to be reflexive about our historical details.

I

In the epilogue to a book that seems itself a moving epilogue to human- istic study in Germany, Ernst Robert Curtius cast his philological method in the words of his fellow admirer of the humanist program:

If we have isolated and named a literary phenomenon, thus is a finding [Befund] secured. We have penetrated in this one place into the concrete structure of the literary material.... If a few dozen or a few hundred of such findings are achieved, a system of points is established. One can bind them together with lines, producing figures. When one observes and connects these, then one has an overlapping context. This is what Aby Warburg meant in the earlier quoted words: "The good God is in the details."2

It is interesting, though not surprising, that Curtius reads this perhaps apocry- phal Warburg motto in such a light. Warburg's words, after all, might be so inter- preted, with details providing, confirming, and testifying to a scholarly probity that refuses to bury the "one place" in a totalizing context. Or Warburg's words might be read to mean God is actually there in the details. Given our own "devil in

REPRESENTATIONS 61 * Winter 1998 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 29

the details" proverb, this reading may bring an ironic gleam to the eye, but its ties to religious tradition are confirmed by Matthew 5.18: "Not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished."3

In contrast, however, to Curtius's revelation of the details of Latinity throughout the panorama of European literature, Warburg looked to Renaissance art for its details, details that announced the inner "liberation of modern man . .. from the antique fear of demons."4 But even as men loosened themselves from fear's clutches, they also, in Warburg's view, began to estrange themselves from the "mint of real life in movement." Baroque excess of emblems, symbols, and images testified to this overexpansion of symbolic credit.5 A powerful source of War- burg's anxiety was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the printing press: in a metaphorical regime of money and credit, the press not only connoted artificial inflation- heaps and heaps of paper-backed by a decreasing supply of intellectual specie but also signified the sublimation of the material book-letters, pages, bindings- into pure representative value.6 In other words, for the detail significant on account of its uniqueness, for the detail through which the scholar either nears godliness or actually finds God himself, technologies of reproduction substitute the merely multiplied.

Twenty years after Warburg's death, when the German cultural landscape had crumbled into ruins, Curtius wrote,

What we have of the literature of ancient Hellas is merely wreckage. Where are the epics of Thebes and the Argonauts now? Lost, nearly all of old Greek lyric is lost, so too most of Attic tragedy and comedy.... The art of printing appeared to protect literature once and for all. But the second World War destroyed millions of books. Spiritual tradition is bound to material strata; and these are destructible.7

The printing press, it seems clear, offered Curtius accumulation, a thesaurus of textual material, as a safeguard against the ravishing of the narrow and broken path of tradition at the hands of history, "the general cultural process."8 Oddly enough, the same combination of loving detail and respect for cultural traditions led Warburg and Curtius in rather different directions. This divergence was clearly a function of context. Whereas Warburg feared the culture of reproduction's threat to the godly detail, Curtius-to whom in 1948 the adulation of original details seemed, I suppose, somewhat self-indulgent-feared the disappearance of the entire tradition itself: "How precarious is our tradition!" he cried. But it is, of course, right here that Curtius and Warburg converge. The rarity of the details, as the canon is eroded over time, demands that the scholar, as the con- server of spiritual memory, concern himself intimately with their preservation and interpretation. And spiritual, as Warburg's motto hints, should be read "after the letters-and after the pneuma."9

The double significance of the detail-scholarly and theological-became particularly pressing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,

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when new institutionalized techniques of printing and distribution produced, or seemed to produce, rapid standardization of literary style, typography, and orthography. This essay reflects upon the last of these: the rationalization of spelling, dream and horror of German Enlightenment literati. More specifically, I am going to discuss, in a schematic fashion, some of the general trends in orthographic thought in the eighteenth century, and will then attend to what seems now, but certainly did not seem then, a trifling matter of the letter h.

I focus on three points: first, that orthographical reform was part of a larger program to establish consistency in German literary and national culture; second, that the violent reaction by the iconoclastic critic Johann Georg Hamann, against this program and specifically against the efforts to rid the German language of the letter h took shape around a peculiar theology of the written idiom; and third, that such theological objections, coming in the last quarter of the century, parallel in an odd and important fashion the arguments of that natural historian of grammar, Johann Christoph Adelung.

What I hope to show is that, while orthographical reform was on the front burner for nearly every European country in the eighteenth century, Germany's own consciousness about its language-as an indication of its barbarism and at the same time the principal sign of its cultural uniqueness-brought orthography and orthographical reform under a cultural and theological scrutiny hitherto un- imagined. The result was a striking synthesis of natural history and theology, where German natural-historical grammarians incorporated into their project an essentially theological ideal: the hope to conserve a people's history within the structures of tradition. This conservation, perhaps conservative, effort sought in particular to reinvigorate a by then antiquated pleasure in language's material presence, its details andfigurae, even the letters on the page. The difficulties in doing so, the effective dialectic of conservation and loss that was both the impetus and result of the affiliation of natural history and theology, produced a radical interest in historical process itself, driven by the impossibility of simultaneously holding objects at a historical distance and recovering them in the fullness of their detail. What was unique to this interest, what cannot be, in my view, assimilated to any form of Romantic or later nineteenth-century historicism, is the embrace of this dialectic in the service of what I call a philologico-critical historiography. To this new, yet transient, historical consciousness, details make the difference, details as minute as the letter h, confirming, as for Warburg and Curtius, both the glory and the presence of human history and our ever increasing distance from it.

II

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates ironically recalls a story of the origin of writing told by the Egyptians: "The story is that in the region of Naucratis in

Enlightenment Details: Theology, Natural History, and the Letter h 31

Egypt there dwelt one of the old gods of the country, the god to whom the bird called Ibis is sacred, his own name being Theuth. He it was that invented number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dices, and above all writing." The god Theuth, the story goes on, approached the Egyptian king Ammon and offered to him the gift of writing; Ammon responded: "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."'0

There is an older story about the origins of language told in Genesis 2.19: "So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name." Obviously, this is not a story about the origins of writing. That the Bible had no absolute canonical proof text for the origins of writing was perplexing and annoying, or alternatively liberating, to many in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. What were the symbols, for instance, used on Moses' stone tablets? Could he read them? Were they hieroglyphs, as some thought, or alphabetical? Unable to provide a satisfying theological solution to the problem of the origins of writing, seventeenth-century thinkers wallowed in a swamp of hypotheses. Nearly all- excepting those who clung to Hebrew as the language of Paradise-agreed, however, that hieroglyphics preceded alphabetical writing; Francis Bacon's 1609 On the Wisdom of the Ancients proclaimed at its outset that "just as hieroglyphics were in use before writing, so were parables in use before arguments," thereby predi- cating (rhetorically at least) his argument about the hidden content of mythic fables on the then accepted truism that hieroglyphics were the first form of graphic language." Such interest in the hieroglyph saturated the work of Gior- dano Bruno, Athanasius Kircher, and any number of Neoplatonist Hermetic philosophers.'2 What distinguished the hieroglyph from alphabetic writing for these writers was the peculiar, extracommunicative content discerned within the hieroglyph.

While such speculations were not set to rest at least untilJean-Francois Cham- pollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone, the eighteenth century for the most part turned its interest from the hieroglyph as a repository of theological significance to the alphabetical letter as a human invention. Alphabetical language, maintained orthographical reformers in the period, is a tool for the pragmatic communication of thoughts. Unlike those fascinated with the hieroglyph, therefore, the rational orthographer rejected the principle that letters had any secret meaning in themselves. For inspiration, he might have looked to the dominant scientist of the period, Isaac Newton, who provided the origin of writing with a wholly secular, one is even tempted to say bourgeois, origin: "It seems therefore that Letters ... were invented by the merchants of the Red Sea, for writing down their mer- chandise, and keeping their accounts."'3 For spelling reformers, however, the his-

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tory of such an attitude began at least with Quintilian, who called orthography "the servant of usage." Suetonius (A.D. 130), for his part, attributed the "elegant and temperate" eloquence of Octavius Caesar Augustus to his rejection of grammarians and his embrace of the principle that "men should write according as they speak."' 4 Suetonius's seductively naive orthographical canon attracted many in our period. In 1735, for instance, Jacob Lochner made Suetonius's "incontro- vertible" first rule, "write as you speak" (schreibe wie du redest), into a natural law, the "most natural foundation" of orthography.'5 And such a rule has a certain intuitive cachet, especially since it proposes not a thorough revision of the entire language, but rather a modification of the existing writing practices to harmonize them with contemporary pronunciation.

While Lochner has his place in eighteenth-century orthographical reform, most influential and most original was the work of Hieronymus Freyer, professor at Halle. Like other reformers, Freyer's goal at the outset was frankly pedagogical. He wrote his Anweisung zur Teutschen Orthographie (1722) "to make [orthography] easier for the youth, which in public school is even more necessary."'6 His four principles for orthography, however, made him tremendously influential among grammarians. These principles-(1) pronunciation, (2) etymology or derivation, (3) analogy, (4) usus scribendi or common writerly practice-were repeated throughout the century by nearly all who were interested in orthography.'7 To put Freyer into context, however, let us pause for a moment here and look back a century to Gerhard Johann Vossius, who wrote in Aristarchus, sive de arte Gram- matica (1635): "Orthography: without doubt that part of the arts that examines in detail the nature of letters and their relations, and establishes the correct rule of writing (how and the name), either by analogy, or by etymology, or by authority."''8 Freyer differs from Vossius, one of the more influential grammarians in the Latin tradition, only in his inclusion of pronunciation. We probably ought not be shocked that Vossius would ignore pronunciation in a treatise on a dead language, but the concern with spoken language, characteristic of eighteenth-century ver- nacular grammars, ensured that few of Freyer's contemporaries and followers would dissent from Lochner's stress on pronunciation as the surest and most rational guide to German spelling reform. Despite its appearance of clarity and despite its apparent ease of application, however, this natural law of orthography proved irritatingly problematic.

Take as an example one of the earliest and most original German grammatical treatises: Justus Schottelius's Ausfiihrliche Arbeit von der Teutschen HaubtSprache of 1663. Schottelius's text proposed first that "all of the letters that provide no help to speech, and thus that are extraneous [fiberfiuissig], should not . .. be written."'9 Expected perhaps, but strange given that on the previous page, Schottelius has written clearly that "because . .. our German language is spoken in so many ways and is divided into so many dialects, . . . no correct, thorough orthography can be generated following an entirely uncertain pronunciation [Ausrede]."20 Why the


contradiction? Because, especially when the goal of spelling change isn't reform for its own sake, the argument ultimately is circular. And, in the kaleidoscopic landscape of German dialects circa 1700, orthographical reform almost always served the pedagogical purpose of creating a High German idiom and, as a result, had the goal of unifying the German literary culture. But this task made following the natural law of pronunciation extremely difficult.

What would happen, for instance, if a Swabian, a Swiss, and a Plattdeutsch speaker attempted to use Lochner's rule to come up with a correct written Ger- man? All misunderstandings in speaking aside, such an enterprise would be doomed to failure: from whose pronunciation would the written German grow? Lochner's rule collapses, or tries to collapse, a long-standing distinction between scholarly written language and its spoken manifestations in various regional dialects. In order to effect the collapse, however, one logically needs an already formed High German by which to judge the relative correctness of the new written standard.

For the most part, reformersjust cut this Gordian knot and designated Upper Saxon as the High German dialect, in particular, that German spoken in such intellectual centers as Leipzig, "where the majority of great schools are near one another and where most of the books are printed."'2' All parochialism aside, select- ing Saxon, which logically had nothing more to recommend itself than, say, Swab- ian, strained the natural law of orthography even further.22 Only because of Sax- ony's high-culture literary production and advanced print industry was Saxon an attractive choice. The project of discovering a neutral-pronunciation High German recoursed, ironically, to a written German determined more by the laws of economy and intellectual production, than by anything like nature.

Orthographical reform efforts, therefore, became paradoxical just as soon as they attempted to engage significantly with the problems of German linguistic uniformity. In addition, linguistic uniformity meant not just a single spoken and written language, but a spoken and written German. Making German truly and purely German included, for many, the exclusion of specifically foreign words. This ideal of purity reaches back into the seventeenth century. For Carl Gustav von Hille, for example, the task of the baroque literary society, the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, "consists thus first of all in this: that one devotes oneself entirely to the wisdom that will lead to the advancement of the German language; in other words, that one preserves [the language] purely, in its correct understanding, without the help of foreign words."23 In a similar vein, Schottelius lays out his influential theory of German stem words by attacking philologue Julius Scaliger's claim that German derives from the ancient Hebrew. "We," he maintained, "are sticking to our pure, original [uhralten] German words."24 Gottfried Wilhelm Leib- niz, ever the great irenic, toned down the extremes of this rhetoric of purity, warning against an "excessive appearance of purity" in which language "would be a soup of clear water . . . namely without impurity and without strength," but

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purity and purification remained an issue well into the eighteenth century, com- bining nicely with the pedagogical aims of the orthographical reformers.25 Johann Christoph Gottsched, for example, wrote of this outstanding feature of the language: unlike French and English, German did not need Latin words and "could express almost all technical words with originally German names."26 Such an effort to root the German language in itself is similarly reflected in the mission statements of Leibniz's Prussian Academy, which, at the outset, strove to maintain "the original German language in its natural, proper purity."27

From these urgent attempts to formulate a unified and pure High German over and against other living and dead languages, we see that orthographical reform was integrated within a cultural framework that attempted to pave the way toward a cohesive literary language and national culture. Unlike seventeenth- century language philosophers, the reformers of the 1700s sought to be both pragmatic and prescriptive in their solutions to the perceived dilemmas of irrationality, overabundance of consonants, and unclarity that plagued the German language. Unable, however, to provide a logical and a priori set of rules that would govern all spelling, these reformers turned to pronunciation as their "natural law," a move that required a prestandardized German in order to standardize German in the first place. In part, their difficulties were a legacy of the efforts of the many seventeenth-century grammarians, like Leibniz or the Port Royalists, who sought less to describe grammatical structures than to use grammatical structures to create a framework for an essentially pure and propositional logic.28 Fol- lowing on their heels, eighteenth-century language reformers on the one hand believed in the conventionality of spelling and on the other believed that certain rational principles could and should be found to order the unruly practices of German writers. For the most part, finally, these reformers saw rational orthography as the propaedeutic to their grammatical systems. Orthographical reform as such, then, functioned to clear the underbrush of messy irregularities and ungoverned details to prepare for a more holistic theory and pedagogy of syntax. It must have been rather surprising when their suggestions, and in particular the seemingly innocent suggestion to tame the overuse of the letter A, met the vehement disapproval of that renegade eighteenth-century critic, Johann Georg Hamann.

III

In 1773, Hamann-contemporary and friend of Immanuel Kant, teacher of J. G. Herder, and a strident critic of any ideal of pure rationality-took heterodox theologian Christian Tobias Damm to task for his seemingly peculiar insistence that writing the letter h was "an unfounded practice that appears barbaric in the eyes of foreigners and thus insulting to our nation."29 If Damm was


perhaps eccentric, Hamann's angry response seems downright strange. This moment in the history of language thought, however-the moment when a letter itself was put on trial, deemed barbaric, and sentenced to death-was no freakish aberration. Despite its seeming innocence, historians have noted, the h "was one of the most contested letters in the second half of the eighteenth century," at least in its capacity as a lengthening sign used to differentiate, for instance, between the vowel lengths of in and ihn, ihren and irren, Sohn and Sonne.30 While the letter e annoyed spelling reformers since it too served as a somewhat erratic lengthening sign (for the letter i in ei combinations), it was the curious h used, not in clh combinations, but rather in the middle of German words, "shoved in between the syllables" as Damm said, that made language reformers squirm.3'

Take the example of writer Friedrich Klopstock, whose spelling changes irri- tated Hamann to no end. Klopstock's orthographical dogma proceeded according to two central principles: (1) "to show in writing the propriety of good pronunciation following the rule of parsimony," and (2) that "no sound may have more than one sign; and no sign more than one sound."32 Thus, following rule 2, rather than using the e sound in a word like er, Klopstock consistently wrote di, in order that the sounds of er and gefdhrlich might both be signified by a single sign. In general, Klopstock commented,

the concept of a good orthography can be nothing other than to express only what one hears but also all of what one hears.... Now we show lengthening sometimes with an hi and sometimes by the doubling of a vowel, excepting the i, whose lengthening we express through an e placed next to it. But to come to an agreement about the words in which the sign is missing and the hI should be used, and those in which the doubling should be used, would be more difficult than to conform these matters by introducing a universal sign of lengthening. Which sign? Not the doubling; also not the hi. Perhaps an oval underneath the consonant.33

Klopstock was not alone in his dislike of the letter h. Indeed, a few years later, one Jakob Hemmer proposed that "we ban this mute letter from all words," and the grammarian Friedrich Karl Fulda declaimed that "nothing is younger and more misbehaved in our language than this ha. 34 Nor was this concern about the letter h new to the 1770s. Gottsched's 1748 position was far less polemical than Klopstock's-he rejected those who "would have banned it almost entirely from the language"-and yet he was still concerned by this unruly letter and proposed that it not be used for vowels that needed no lengthening.35

In fact nearly all grammarians in our period were skeptical about the It because it represented, for them, a superabundance, an Uberfliij3, in and of written language. The h immoderately overflowed the parameters set by the natural law of orthography insofar as its use was irregular, unpredictable, and thoroughly unrestricted by the confines of proper pronunciation. In effect, the Ih represented, like consonant doubling, a marker of written language itself and its difference

36 REPRESENTATIONS

from its spoken counterpart. Hence, Schottelius's first rule of orthography: "All of the letters that provide no help to speech, and thus that are extraneous [iibe4flus- sig], should and must be left out and not written."36 While Gottsched was divided about this superabundance of letters, calling "richness and excess the first perfection of a language," he also, in concordance with the perceived "purpose of language, namely the clear explanation of thoughts," believed that such excesses as doubled consonants ought to be eliminated.37 Klopstock's law of parsimony was only a more extreme example of an effort to weed out those letters significant only as material signs on the written page.

This effort provided the major impetus to Hamann's disagreement with the reformers. "Necessity is no virtue," he wrote, "and parsimony no law."38 But Ha- mann was particularly disgusted by the theological implications of reform. At the outset, it seems hard to disagree with Ignaz Weitenauer, the Jesuit theologian and grammarian who complained in 1774 that "it is difficult to understand why one mixes [religion] into orthography."39 When Hamann noted, however, "that [Damm's] philosophical concept of a letter will ... extend to a simple breath or spiritum," we should pay attention.40 Even as he played on the orthographical definition of the h as mere breath (Hauch), he alerts us to its barklike theological encrustation.4' We could look at Cabala, Jewish or Christian, for extensive com- mentaries on the Hebrew letter h (71). But even in the eighteenth century the work on the origins of the Hebrew alphabet is oddly resonant: one William Massey, for instance, in his Origin and Progress of Letters (1763) commented on the strangeness of a letter that, unlike other supposedly referential Hebrew letters, represented in written form a pure sound.42 That the Hebrew n could function as a mater lectionis, noting only the presence of the vowel a43 or, for that matter, that in Greek, the h is marked only by rough breathing (I meaning "or" versus i meaning "which"), only added to the mystique surrounding this letter. More directly relevant to my account was this remark concerning the Latin and Germanic alphabets by the seventeenth-century mystic Jakob Boehme:

For the name Jehova has nothing in it except the five vowels A, E, I, 0, V.... Since, however, the ancient wise men,judicious in this tongue, inserted an H in the nameJ EOVA, and called itJEHOVA: this was done with great understanding, for the H reveals the holy name, with its five vowels, in the outward nature. It shows how the holy name of God breathes itself out and reveals itself in the creature . . . so the H, as the breathing spirit, takes the word, and leads it on the tongue into the mouth; there it is the master builder, the Fiat, which is instrument of the divine, and figures the sense of the properties out of the letters.44

Grouping the h with the vowels, Boehme valued it notjust as a sign of breath, but as that letter that took the "breathing spirit" and brought it out of the mouth, transforming it into words and language. The h refashioned the divine breath into linguistic meaning. Language, and in particular written language and the


language of Scripture, thus in a baroque fashion revealed itself to be a constella- tion of logoglyphs, ciphers, and codes that on the one hand stand between us and God but on the other are cracked and revealed by the letter h.45

In general, like the Cabalists or like Schottelius himself, who said that he who "becomes rightly experienced in language," could "even speak with God himself," Boehme understood written language as far more than a pragmatic tool of communication.46 His near contemporary and author of Sinmplicius simplicissimlius, Hans Grimmelshausen, put it clearly; berating those grammarians who "disputed whether the H . .. should also be a letter, or only a nota aspirationis," Grimmels- hausen argued that "it is known that the very names of words of the holy Scrip- tures in this manner are filled with secrets [and] principally each letter has its own specific meaning."47 More disturbing, therefore, to him than the "many different sinners [who] lay violent hands so terribly on the person of our Messiah," were those who would "assail and dishonor his holiest name with alteration and adjust- ment of a letter, as is done, namely, when one exchanges the C for a K and tosses out the H."48 Similarly, for Hamann, the h both belonged to the canon of holy letters marking the text of Scriptures and, as with Boehmne, traced out in a twofold manner the possibility of God's communication with man.

First of all, Hamann claimed, the letter Ih was a breath, and one that was, as his student Herder wrote in his Vom Geist der ebraischen Poesie (1782), "the very breath of the soul."49 As in the case of Hebrew, whose lack of vowels opened it up to the criticism that it was "a dead hieroglyph," breath stood as the invigorating force of language.50 We hear echoes here of one of Hamann's favorite Biblical passages, Genesis 2.7: "Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being." Like other grammarians of the eighteenth century, Hamann viewed the h as a visual representation of the bodily expulsion of breath. Unlike these grammarians, however, Hamann cherished a language that did not exist for the clear expression of thoughts, and a writing exceeding its function as a mirror of speech. Rather, writing was to preserve the speech of God or, even more precisely, the breath of God: keeping the h on the page thus served as a constant reminder of this Godly creation and invigoration of man and his language.

The h, furthermore, not only represented the breath but also was itself the very sign of superabundance and overflow in human language that hearkened to God's hidden hand. Thus, Hamann's commentary on Genesis 1.20: "Overflowing: ... This overflow still shows itself in nature."5' For Hamnann, the same immodera- tion that Klopstock banished guaranteed that in language, and in written language in particular, was buried a trace of its nonhuman origins. "All freedom degenerates into mechanism through the persevering exertion 'to give solidity to the undetermined and to excise the excessive [Uberfiuissige],"' Hamann wrote.52 A parsimonious orthography concealed "headstrong stupidities under the cover of philosophy," since it eliminated received linguistic eccentricities and transformed

38 REPRESENTATIONS

them from a transmitted canon to a canon of man's imperfect reason.53 When, as for Hamann, the excess of God's creation "still displays itself in nature," and thus still was present in language and testified to this original act of creation, the significance of letter h to a theology, a linguistic theory, and a cultural genealogy becomes clear.

Rather than just reversing the terms of the reformers, then, Hamann's theology of the h displaces the terms by asking the principal question at stake: what is language for? Is it truly, as Gottsched maintained, for "the clear explanation of thoughts"? If clarity is the principal quality of a perfected language, then certainly the excesses, of the h or of doubled consonants, need be removed. But what if language had another purpose? What if language was not merely a medium for interpersonal communication, but a sign itself signifying something particular about either a specific people or people in general? "Because letters," Hamann wrote, "are not only signs of articulated tones, but can also represent syllables, and once in a while words, even perhaps the name of an extraordinary religious teacher."54 To Hamann's mind language is what is left to us; the first opening word of God, Creation itself, is a "speaking to the creature through the creature."55 The creaturely language that we speak retains traces of this Creation as does nature itself, the poetry of God. The goal is not to change language, but to look inside it, to interpret it, to unravel its mysteries, for therein too, for Hamnann, lie the mysteries of the divine.

IV

It is tempting to write Hamann off as a grouchy old enthusiast. But his theology of excess and his stance toward the purpose of language are echoed, strangely enough, in the writings of his contemporary Johann Christoph Ade- lung-writer, translator, and grammarian in Leipzig, known perhaps best for his Versuch eines vollstdndigen grammatisch-kritischen W&rterbuches der Deutschen Mundart (1775)-who joined Hamann in deprecating the rationalist schemes of Klopstock and Gottsched. These last were recipients of the legacy of the seventeenth-century grammatical tradition that held grammar subservient to logical categories and in effect collapsed the classical trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric into, at best, a "bivium" of logic and rhetoric. The disappearance of formally based grammars (as grammar itself loses credibility as a distinct science) in favor of semasiological grammars purporting to ground within language itself essentially Aristotelian logical categories was, as G. A. Padley points out, symptomatic of this shift.56 In- deed, it was owing, to the intense interest in the creative capacity of grammar, I believe, that many seventeenth-century language philosophers had so little trou- ble understanding language as purely conventional: their goal was less an evaluation or description of existent grammars than an attempt to create a grammar


adequate to the perfection of logic.57 Bacon, for instance, embraced convention- alism when he wrote in 1605 that "whilst we are treating, as it were, of the coin of intellectual matters, it is not improper to observe that, as money may be made of other materials besides gold and silver, so other marks of things may be invented besides words and letters."58 Likewise, Thomas Hobbes at midcentury took it for granted that, after the tragedy at Babel, man invented a conventional language prompted only by "need, the mother of all invention."59

Following John Locke, however, and his efforts to escape the terms of pure rationalism into a more nuanced idea of nature's interaction with human beings, eighteenth-century grammarians began to reverse the position on linguistic convention that the seventeenth century, with its continual parallels between language and money, proposed. Locke and his sensualist adherents in the eighteenth century discerned an alternative to the rigid choice between received and conventional language: namely, they began to ascribe a certain logic to the encounter of man with nature such that, even given the presumption that man created language, still "nature, even in the naming of things, unawares suggested to men the originals and principles of all their knowledge."60 This logic manifested itself in Freyer almost not at all; for Gottsched, it glimmered in claims like this: "Because all languages first arise among a multitude of primitive peoples, often they are confused by the mixture of foreign languages and through general misuses that slip in are even more damaged."6' The principal reason, for Gottsched, for an orthographical reform effort was to purify and remove the mistakes and mix- tures, in some sense to return to the language before it deteriorated. The origins of language debate, however, that followed the publication of Etienne Condillac's Essay on the Origin of Human Knozwledge (1746) and that spread in Germany through the works of Herder, Johann Siissmilch, and many others-a debate that en- shrined Locke and his historical psychology-pushed such a theory of contingent, historical logic into the foreground, affecting with special vigor the work of Jo- hann Christoph Adelung.

Explicitly looking to Locke and, especially, Herder, Adelung consistently stressed the already ordered nature of language and even of orthography itself:

I have held as my first and foremost duty the following: to uncover those principles that, up until now, High German has followed unclearly. This effort will hopefully show that our current orthography is not so arbitrary and absurd as is often reported, that it more often depends on very correct and true principles, that it is more perfect and reasonable than the orthography of any other language.62

What immediately set Adelung apart from most other grammarians of the period was the natural history and genealogy he provided as prolegomena to his grammar proper. Because the Lockean human being is determined by the history of his encounter with the natural world-an aspect of his epistemology of which Locke himself seems only vaguely aware, but whose impetus drives the historical

40 REPRESENTATIONS

sketches of a Condillac, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Herder-Adelung realizes that only in telling this history can the logic of contingency manifest itself in grammatical inquiry. His focus was on language as "the most important mark of difference of a people," where a people provided a zone of local structure within language, without the grammarian having to speak either of a universal ratio or an arbitrary auctoritas.63 So for Adelung, Lochner's rule only applied to a unified people: "The natural law for writing, write as you speak, must become always more restrictive and exactly reflected, the further a language is developed and refined through the contraction of civil society. In a short time, writing will have positive laws.

Thus "Nature," for Adelung, resides within the social organization of a people; this is to say, that only through a particular, closely knit civil structure can the latent natural law of writing be both fixed (by the language theorist) and set into motion (in the ordinary practices of speech and writing). These latter are also governed by positive law, by which Adelung means "derivation": that writing is supposed to preserve at least to some extent the relations between derivative words. Here the orthographical treatise begins to verge on the political one. Not that orthography and the regularization of language can be, as Adelung says, "an object of civil legal regulation," but rather they are a manifestation of society's "inner organization."65 This inner organization exemplifies both ratio and auctoritas; inherited from the past and thus a consequence of tradition, at the same time it has its own logic whose principles can be delimited and reapplied by the teacher of language to positively reinforce what is already the law.

How then does Adelung specifically treat the h? Like his predecessors, Ade- lung systematically describes the orthography of each letter; unlike them, he does not move steadily from a to z, but rather groups letters in terms of their grammatical and orthographical function within words. Hence his discussion of h is part of a general reflection on the lengthening sign, a reflection that includes rumination on the ie combination and the doubling of vowels in general. Here is Adelung:

Lengthening is only marked in words that contain a complete concept and that, thus, also call for a kind of completion in expression. As a result, not in actual particles: da, so, wo, zu, he,; ja ...

The h is not only the most suitable, but also the most general sign of lengthening. It can be used after all lengthened vowels, even if they have in certain cases brought along other lengthening signs....

Lengthening is not marked in all words, not even in all words with completed concepts. Thus no rules can be given for when it should be marked, nor all the times for how it should be marked. This will not be a surprise to him who considers properly what was said in earlier paragraphs about the origin and the goal of this lengthening sign. The most common cases of this type belong thus to the jurisdiction of written practice, which one easily retains, because the violation of the same would upset, for the eye, the easiest possible comprehensibility.3


The h was, for Adelung, less a problematic category of excessive and irrational written practice than a "general" way of representing lengthening whose deploy- ment could be described to a certain extent (it is not used in particles) or limited by a selective etymology (die Fdhre from fahren), but which, in the final analysis, depended on what Adelung called "written practice" (Schreibegebrauch). Because the h is already used in normal everyday language to perform the task of lengthening, it is hence the most suitable for this task within the 'jurisdiction of written practice." An Adelungian orthography was thus less a conventional system subject to rationalization than a representation of essential qualities, expressed in "written practice," about a people's "inner organization" and its political life as a whole.

When Adelung continued his treatment of orthography in the 1788 Vollstdn- dige Anweisung zur Deutschen Orthographie, he expanded the discussion on the letter h and the category of the lengthening vowel into the longest chapter of the entire book, principally because lengthening became, for him, crucial evidence of these essential qualities. At certain times, he commented wryly, orthography was sub- jected to the arbitrary whims of a certain scholared elite; for the contemporary orthographical reformer, "the lengthening signs have provided the most material" for critique.67 What they had all overlooked is what Adelung rather enigmati- cally terms the "mysterious feeling" or the "mysterious something" that governs orthographical practice:

This fundamental law [that of usage] does not stem from either a magisterial arrangement, nor from one or another famous writer, but rather is entirely the work of a mysterious consciousness [dunkeln Bewufitseins] of purpose and means, which our orthography since the beginning of the sixteenth century must thank for its origin and progression. Yet it is always worthy of note, that this consciousness in some cases is so mysterious, that it is often difficult to make clear and distinct its reasons, and yet it operates so strongly, and in addition I might add, so irresistibly, that a nation struggles in a most steadfast manner against those things that work against that mysterious consciousness, even if it does not know how to specify the causes that move it to this end.... An example might be the use of the lengthening signs. I know of no linguist or author who has discovered the true reason for them. All have seen in them no more than a mark of lengthened accent, and because this truly needs no mark, marking it through memory signs appears arbitrary and fickle . . . And yet they would generally retain it, even though no one could make clear the reasons why they retain it.68

The lengthening sign, and especially its paragon, the letter h, thus testified to a "mysterious consciousness," what Adelung also called history, that worked unbeknownst to a people, and yet through their everyday practices. This history could be known either through negative traces (resistance to certain orthographical reforms) or postive traces (persistence of seemingly irrational orthographic practices). In either case, the lengthening sign and the letter h helped to uncover the mystery that surrounds the workings of time and of peoples.

In Adelung's scheme, then, language was more than a mere tool in the hands of some intelligent beasts to make their thoughts more or less accessible to one

42 REPRESENTATIONS

another; it was in fact a raw material of research into the social, political, and, especially, cultural history of man. While he grants that there are various rules one might follow for pedagogical purposes, at bottom he is scornful of Gottsched's superrationalism and Klopstock's overenthusiasm for orthographical change. Even if "a few members of society are competent to change the written practice of a people," Adelung writes, "written practice must also for those people be ... holy," and the grammarian who strives "to change . .. linguistic practice" becomes, in his words, a "despot."69 When push came to shove, orthography depended entirely on a tradition of "written practice"; written practice, handed down from one's forefathers and transmitted through a finite canon of texts, in turn served as a signature and trace of the mysterious workings of a people's natural history.

It is here, at the intersection of "written practice" and "canon"-an intersection one is tempted to describe as that of natural history and tradition-that the affinities between Hamann and Adelung begin to crystallize. While Adelung had his doubts about "excess" in language, he principally saw it as a trace of the history, embodied in written practice, of a people and its organization. "The law of parsimony," he wrote, "holds the h and the doubled vowels, as signs of lengthening, to be extraneous [iibesfl uJig] . . . [but] parsimony ... is a mistake of the first order."70 As with Hamann's theology of breath, the Occam's razor approach threatened the foundations of Adelung's orthographic logic, for in essence it excluded con- sideration of the weight of history, the weight of tradition, and the weight of nature. What parsimony would hold as mere excess served to mark the natural history of a people's linguistic development; erasure of this excess-even were it possible-entailed the erasure of the unique conditions under and through which contingent, historical logic unfolded. In addition, for the scholar-grammarian, this erasure posed the additional threat of eliminating those traces-those excessive details-by which he could write this history and disclose the laws oforthogra- phy: only through the traces of unconscious resistances that were by definition excessive can the mysterious forces of historical change be sensed. just as the h as spiritus revealed to Hamann the existence of God and was itself an imprint of God's very presence in language, Adelung's "holy" written practice was similarly marked by that ambiguity in Warburg's "God is in the details" misotto: details are both the real traces of written practice (or God's reality), and the clues available to the scholar's greedy eye.

V

But we resist here the seduction of tautology. Adelung's natUral history of grammar was not merely a secularized version of Hamann's theology. Here is how Adelung concluded his earlier statement: "Parsimony ... is a mistake of the first order, in part because it revokes (auf'hebt) the basic law of writing, write as you


speak, and in part because it disrupts the general and easiest possible comprehensibility, which truly is the highest and single goal of writing."' I Comprehensibility? Such a goal for writing is incomprehensible in Hamann's theology. A dislocation has crept in; just as Hamann's pupil Herder could both accept that the power of Hebrew poetry rested in "the very breath of the soul" and propose a naturalistic account of the origins of language (for which betrayal Hamann was ever bitter), Adelung saw written language as a goal in itself and as a medium for communication.

A seemingly more substantive dislocation surrounded the meaning and significance of the word arbitrary.72 For while Hamann asserted that "without arbitrary founding principles, universal, healthy, practical human language, and human reason, and human religion are . . . an oven made of ice," Adelung proclaimed nearly the opposite, that "nothing arbitrary can become general."73 The key to understanding this discrepancy and, I believe, to understanding why an Adelung or a Herder posed far more of a threat to Hamann than did a Gottsched, is to see that both Hamann and Adelung used the word arbitrary (willkiihrlich) very differently. The arbitrary for Hamann is a trace of God's creation and an example of the presence of His hand in human affairs. For Adelung something arbitrary is a mere product of a single human being's cleverness and wit: the logic of human natural history thus precludes anything truly arbitrary. Hamann would accept this proposition amiably, except that he would call this entire natural- historical logic both theological and, in itself, arbitrary. Hamann's "God in language" view thus moved the arbitrary into the orbit of holy providence; Adelung's "history in language" moved it into historical providence. In both cases, if by different means, everything was essentially conserved and everything was essentially significant.

The dislocation, therefore, at work between Hamann's theology and Ade- lung's natural history was in a sense a formal or structural rather than a substantive one. In essence, the natural history model that Adelung proposed had the power to absorb the theological model even as it blunted the power of its theological critique. We might see this as a "reoccupation" in the way that Hans Blumen- berg used the term in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age: that is, as a retention of the problem (of language in general or orthography specifically) and its formal demands even as the kinds of answers shift.74 What is paradoxical, however, about this displaced similarity between Adelung and Hamann is that it came after the proffering, by any number of grammarians, of seemingly perfectly good rationalist solutions to the problem of orthography. Even in his deliberate evocation of Locke, Adelung seems far more affiliated with a seventeenth-century attempt- seen for instance in Schottelius or Grimmelshausen-to hold together explana- tory devices of human reason and theological revelation, than with Klopstock, Gottsched, or Freyer. Whereas the Blumenbergian Enlightenment shows definite traces of the progressive "reoccupation" of theological sites by the secularized

44 REPRESENTATIONS

tools of modern science, these orthographical contentions reveal an eddy in this river of historical time.

The story gets more complicated and more interesting if we look carefully at Hamann's and Adelung's claims and desires for conservation. The forces of conservation are, for Hamann and Adelung, undoubtedly quite different: God and history respectively. The need for conservation, however, is the same and is in both significant. For to my view one only has to assert conservation in the face of real or perceived loss. Providence, historical or otherwise, is never the story of full and immediate presence, but that of recuperation of things threatening to disappear. The question of loss, then, is part of the dialectic of providential conservation, and for both Hamann and Adelung, it was a question posed by a number of political and cultural factors. When Adelung, at the outset of our discussion, asserts that German orthography "is more perfect and reasonable than the orthography of any other nation"; when Hamann condemns the tyranny of wit and taste-in the background are the French, or at least a German appropriation of their sensibilities.75 Frederick the Great's reneging on the initial promise of the Prussian Academy to maintain "the German language in its original and proper purity" only heightened the sense of the French encroaching into German linguistic territory.76

This political aspect of linguistic conservation is relatively familiar, as are the eighteenth-century transformations in German literary style that for Hamnann represent the loss of the very language of religious faith and for Adelung threaten to sacrifice meaningful traces for what he calls "conveniences, prejudices, and opinions."77 If, however, new literary styles and Francophobia are immediate causes of some of this anxiety about loss, I would suggest that for both Hamann and Adelung, the most decisive anxiety comes from an awareness of history itself.

In Hamann's case, we see this in his odd insistence that the details of material life were at all relevant to divine providence. In a traditional Lutheran anthropol- ogy, where man exists before the law, then under the law, and finally under grace, concern for "dead letters" was wholly subservient to the history of man's salvation. Heaven, not epistemology, was the point at issue. In a system where letters themselves, as signs of divine presence (or former presence), require conservation, what is sought is assurance that providence will continue to reveal itself in human history and through human affairs. Hamann may or may not have known that the letter h, as a lengthening sign, was largely an invention of the sixteenth century; he could hardly have thought it present since Creation. It is his understanding of it as a historical object that makes him aware of its contingent presence, despite its hearkening to God, and its possible absence.

Adelung, on the other hand, who is well aware of when the lengthening h came into the German language, makes the connection between history and loss explicit when he narrows what he means by "mysterious feeling." "Major and fundamental changes," he writes, "can never advance in a language without major


and fundamental disturbances of the nation; otherwise they occur entirely because of the mysterious feeling of loss [Bediirfnisses] in the majority of writers."78 The movement of history for Adelung is driven by vague feelings of lack and loss; to realize this, to see history as it truly operates in the domain of language, is to realize that loss is the condition on which history happens.

I would contend here both that this insight, that the dialectic of loss and presence is the cornerstone of history and the writing of history, extends far beyond Hamann and Adelung and might serve to characterize and set apart the historical task of the Enlightenment-understood not as an ontological period, but rather as a process and style of self-conscious criticism-from both the Renaissance and later Romanticism. Unlike the Renaissance efforts to recover a past and make it present, Hamann and Adelung, and I might add, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, perhaps even Edward Gibbon, applied history as a form of criticism that relied on the very estrangement of past things to highlight and dissolve naturalized conventions. Critical history, in other words, made the time- less once again temporal, and the natural once again historical.

Forced to characterize this historical sense, I would call it essentially philological. In an ironic way, Hamann and Adelung turned the tools of philology against a grammatical method that, with the onset of a formalized, logic-based grammar, sought to distance itself from its philological roots in textual criticism and emen- dation. Even as the study of grammar strove to purge itself of any traces of pragmatic textual analysis, Adelung and Hamann used these pragmatics against it by historicizing grammatical categories and embracing the ostensibly extraneous. In doing so, they echoed Lorenzo Valla's "custom is the most certain instructor of speech," even as they expanded the domain of philological method (where the critic confronts a unique phenomenon with an attitude of both antagonism and sympathy) to include cultural life as whole.79 The "text" of Valla's or Angelo Polizi- ano's philology grew, in other words, to embrace the entirety of human experi- ence. It was probably not an accident that Adelung wrote the first, as far as I know, comprehensive "history of the culture of human kind," and characterized it as the only "truly pragmatic and pedagogically useful" approach to historical study.80 In doing so, he enlarged philology's critical sphere to include all forms of human political, economic, and spiritual activity. In addition to an expanded domain, however, the philologico-critical historiography of the eighteenth century established itself by matching its own desire for conservation with an embrace of historical distance. Absolute fidelity to historical objects (the letter h, for instance) was less important than the use of historical objects as critical tools. Ha- mann's point makes this clear: while the letter h may be a historical convention, its power to mark out God in the written text simultaneously affirms the necessity of historical conventions and erodes contemporary hopes for a completely ratio- nalized culture.

The critical posture of Enlightenment historiography differs in a similar man-

46 REPRESENTATIONS

ner from Romantic and nineteenth-century historicism. Eager to pierce behind the veil of the objects to reveal the dynamics of peoples and nations, later historians sacrificed the uniqueness of historical phenomena on the altar of historical periods. Despite their attempts to understand the individuality of past phenomena, historicists were ultimately willing to renounce an estranged past for the ideals of Zeitgeist and Weltanschauung, and in doing so, they relinquished the critical potential of historiography so important to the eighteenth century. Protesta- tions from Friedrich Meinecke and others aside-that, for instance, historicism "made the process of individuation conscious of itself"-one has only to look at historians as varied as Jules Michelet and Leopold von Ranke to see that they posited individuation only on the level of the historical period, historical spirit, or national people.8' This tradition recurs, albeit for different reasons, in even so sophisticated a lover of details as Erich Auerbach, a contemporary of Ernst Cur- tius with a similarly equivocal relation to the humanist tradition. Auerbach proclaimed, somewhat hieratically, that historicism arises

when one realizes that epochs and societies are not to be judged after a model representation of what is desirable, but rather each after their own premises ... when, in doing so, the sense awakens for the effects of historical forces, for the incomparability of historical occurences and for their present, inner movement; when one achieves insight into the living unity [Lebenseinheit] of the epochs, so that each appears as a whole, whose essence reflects itself in each of its manifestations.82

Here Auerbach moves easily and apparently unproblematically from "incomparability" to "living unity" and epochal essence. If we turn for a moment back to Curtius, the motivations behind Auerbach's paradoxical position might become clearer. Curtius condemns the emphasis on literary, and indeed national, periods in which "each stylistic period is thus endowed with 'essence' by the 'search for essence' [Wesenschau] and populated with a special 'man."' -Gothic man, baroque man, and so on. "Only as a whole," writes Curtius, "can we understand Europe."83 For Curtius, and for Auerbach as well, the turn to the "whole" was a polemic against the nationalist German literary-and in a way historical-scholarship of the previous fifty years. Both turned in other words to literature, the literature of the West in its broadest sense over and against national literatures and national "men." In doing so, however, they sacrificed their philological appreciation for the literary detail to the quest for the literary epoch. As heirs to an Auerbachian project, especially in the form of New Historicism, we ought thus be rather cau- tious about accepting his articulation of the relationship between detail and historical period.

Clearly, the eighteenth-century ideal of human progress, by defining the core of human endeavor as movement ever forward, itself provides a model of epochal essence. This I would hardly deny. What I claim, however, is that in fact the ideal of progress is secondary to the philologico-critical use of history. Whether history was a story of progress, decline, or cyclical stasis depended largely on your politi-


cal stance as a critic. Methodologically the use of history as a critical tool and the mode of analysis where particular phenomena are evaluated as dead but usable material details spanned the political and religious spectrum. Nothing makes this clearer, in my view, than the unbridgeable gap between Adelung and Hamann vis-a-vis progress. While the former's histories of the human race largely centered on the continual development of taste, Hamann rejected not only the criteria of taste but human progress altogether: "All is in vain!" was his battle cry.84 What held them together in the letter h controversy was the work of philology and the critical use to which they put history in that debate-a critical use that marked out their differences from, and tensions with, later historicism precisely insofar as they wielded history as a tool of criticism both in the name of lost or threatened traditions and in recognition of this loss. The pragmatism that nineteenth-century historians loved to criticize about their Enlightenment predecessors turned historical writing, I believe, into a critical tool far more potent than anything historicism had to offer.

Given this, we must address the significance of this convergence of natural history and theology in the last third of the eighteenth century. Take a 1775 comment by rationalist grammarian Johann Nast that the h stands "as the mother of all consonants ... audible next to the hard ones, and inaudible next to the soft ones."85 There is an almost unbearable similarity between Nast's comment and Jakob Boehme's understanding of the h as that first consonant that "takes the word, and brings it upon the tongue into the mouth."86 It is unbearable because it tempts us to equate the functional grammars of the eighteenth century and the mystical musings of the seventeenth, two utterly different investigations into the nature of language and man's relation to it that took place in vastly different contexts and addressed substantially different needs. This difference is certainly clear if one pursues Nast a little further. Advocating the elimination of the lengthening h, Nast argues principally from natural-historical and physiological grounds: "H, a breath, spiritus, aspiration, that the throat generates, when the ... air pushes out from the lungs, forms itself in the throat, and streams out of the mouth."87 To say that Nast was really "Boehmian" or essentially theological is to submit to a kind of idle and simple analogizing that plagues historical scholarship and its attempts to define and delimit the nature of a period.

But if we recognize that the changes in the questions and solutions in the field of grammar and orthography are not necessarily progressive-it is certainly, for instance, possible for late-eighteenth-century grammarians to reread their heritage and to look back in time for new solutions-then we can avoid the simplistic analogy in favor of a logic of strategic invention. Consider the following: in contrast to grammarians like Freyer or Gottsched, Adelung's quasi-scientific historical procedure is arrayed taxonometrically-rather than beginning with a and moving to z in his discussion of letters, he organizes them in functionally equivalent group- ings that supersede the actual figura of the letter-and developmentally-lan-

48 REPRESENTATIONS

guage is first presumed to change through time and then always to be the material record of that change, preserving within itself the history of a people. Available to him were both the science of life with its own impact on the historical sciences and a theology of language that began with the assumption that language is always more meaningful than its communicative potential.88 To claim, furthermore, that language is itself significant material and not merely a semasiological system, Ade- lung could look both to the work of Herder and others like him, who sought to hold providence within the realm of natural development, and to the grammatical work of those like Schottelius, who consistently (or perhaps inconsistently) maintained that even through rational grammars one attained the means even to "speak with God himself."89 Since through these Adelung emplaced within an ostensibly secular grammatical investigation one of the grounding assumptions of a long-standing theology of language, his comment that written practice is "holy" should not go unnoticed.90 The theological gleam that remains in the eye of natural-historical grammar is, for Adelung and others, difficult to conceal.

And yet the final, and perhaps unanswerable, question remains even beyond the historical and methodological ones. That is, why now? Why is it that now, in our post-Enlightenment, ostensibly secular landscape the importance of religion and theology to the Enlightenment cultural scene seems to demand our attention? While my evaluation is hardly objective, I sense a shift of interest among cultural and intellectual historians alike toward this problem of religion's function in the century of lights. From works on wonders and hermeticism to those detailing the import of theology to the natural sciences, in the past ten years scholars have offered many attempts to reinsert religious nuance into our understanding of the Enlightenment. Surely many more will be offered in the next ten years. Part of this interest undoubtedly is connected to the simple project of rendering more textured our historical understanding of the period, asking, for instance, how Newton's theological and chronological writings bear upon the Principia. Part, too, seems related to the interest in aesthetics and problems of irrationality that have, in the past ten years, assumed center stage in literary and historical investigations of the entire modern period. Eighteenth-century religious critics, it is true, diag- nosed the limits of reason as an effort to preserve the domain of faith; as such, they perhaps seem congenial and anachronistically sympathetic to a postmodern skepticism about the claims of rationality.

Even while acknowledging these reasons, I would tentatively suggest that the return to the theological signifies more than just a negative attempt to dismantle Enlightenment ideals of universality and rationality by pointing out its witting or unwitting exclusions and indeed signifies more than our current devotion to the irrational. I believe it was, on the one hand, the exploration of the relations of reason and faith and, on the other, the mutual reinforcement that these domains provided one another that is so inviting to the modern reader, who is daily presented with a seemingly irreconcilable choice between hyperscientific technophi-


lia and religious extremism. As such, there is a recuperative element in the scholarly return to religion that, I believe, hinges on our own concern about the incongruity of the domains of reason and faith in their late-twentieth-century manifestations. To shift the stakes slightly, we might ask, What if the collective debunking of the Enlightenment that has proved so amusing to scholars for the past twenty years actually missed the whole point about the Enlightenment? If indeed the Enlightenment, in the limited form that I have presented it here, involved more a confluence of reason and faith than a naive rationalism, then perhaps a return to it might provide a more circuitous and thus more fruitful itinerary than our present route directly between Scylla and Charybdis. For although the answers have largely changed, the questions-about the limits of human knowledge, the importance of human history, the need for human details- seem more compelling than ever.

Notes

This paper grew out of a talk given at the 1996 University of California Colloquium on Early Modern Central Europe, organized by Thomas Brady, Elaine Tennant, Peter Hanns Reill, and David Sabean, and benefited from comments made by these and other participants. In addition, I owe many thanks for their time and effort in reading earlier drafts to Nina Caputo, James Erb, Daniel Gross, Carla Hesse, Kate Seidl, and Randolph Starn.

1. "Prosody, however, and orthography flow through all of grammar, like blood and spirit through the entire body"; Petrus Ramus, Scholae in liberales artes (Basel, 1569), book 2, column 17. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Citation brought to my attention in G. A. Padley, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe, 1500-1 700: The Latin Tradition (Cambridge, 1976).

2. Ernst Robert Curtius, Europdeische Literatur umd Lateinisches Mittelalter (1948; reprint, Tilbingen, 1993), 386.

3. This and all subsequent Bible citations are to The Nezv Oxford Annotated Bible: Revised Standard Edition (Oxford, 1973).

4. Aby Warburg, "Heidnisch-antike Weissagung im Wort unci Bild zu Luthers Zeiten," in Ausgewdhlte Schriften und Wiirdigungen (Baden-Baden, 1980), 261.

5. Aby Warburg, Bayonne (1927), quoted in Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: Aln Intellectual Biography (Chicago, 1986), 250, which includes Gombrich's commentary on Warburg's inflationary model.

6. The printing press "alone postulates the Esperanto or vulgar Latin of the language of gestures"; Aby Warburg, Allgemeilnen Ideen (1927), in Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 251.

7. Curtius, Europdische Literatur, 396-97. 8. Ibid., 397. 9. Ibid., 399.

10. Plato Phaedrus 274c-275a, in Edith Hamilton, ed., The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton, N.J., 1961), 520.

11. The phrase "the language of Paradise" is Maurice Olender's, The Language of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cam-

50 REPRESENTATIONS

bridge, Mass., 1992). Advocates of the Hebrew hypothesis were, of course, a not incon- sequential number, including Biblical critics and theosophists alike; see Arno Borst, Der Turmbau Volfl Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen fiber Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Vilkei; vols. 1-4 (Stuttgart, 1957-63). For hieroglyphics, see Francis Bacon, The Essays; or, Counsels, Civil and Moral (New York, 1900), 285-86. It is surely indicative that, for instance, Giambattista Vico, in his New Science (1744) took up the hieroglyphic hypothesis as an anthropological rather than theological fact, rejecting the Baconian position that wisdom resides behind the tales of myth.

12. See, e.g., Nicholas Hudson, Writing and European Thought, 1630-1800 (Cambridge, 1994).

13. Isaac Newton, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdomis Amended (London, 1728), 212. 14. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 137;

Suetonius, The History of the Twelve Caesars, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1930), 115, 117.

15. Jacob Lochner [Chlorenus Germanus], Neuverbesserte Teutsche Orthographie (Nurem- berg, 1735), 12.

16. Heironymus Freyer, Anweisung zur Teutschen Orthographie (Halle, 1722), unpaginated preface. Freyer was important not only for his grammatical contribution but also for his role in providing a standardized orthography to Halle's Canstein Bibel Anstalt, a press that between 1712 and 1812 churned out the unbelievable 1,000,000 New Testaments and 1,800,000 full Bibles; figures from Beate Kdster, Die Lutherbibel ir frilhen Pietismius (Bielefeld, 1984), 134.

17. Max Jellinek, Geschichte der Neuhochdeutschen Grammatik: Von den Anftngen bis auf Ade- lung (Heidelberg, 1914), 2:62. Jellinek's learned book is by far the most complete survey of the grammarians of Germany in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, told from the perspective of a linguist. Since I have neither the skill nor desire to mimic Jellinek, my survey of orthographical reform will necessarily remain schematic and brief.

18. Orthographiam: neinpe eam artis partem, quae literarunm naturam & affectiones subtiliter in- quirit, rectainque scribendi rationeem (unde et nomen) vel analogia, vel etymiologia, vel auctoritate comiprobat; Gerardus Joannus Vossius, Aristarchus, sive de arte Grammatica libri septeni (Amsterdam, 1695), book 1, 11. For a discussion of Vossius and his place within the investigations of Latin grammar, see Paciley, Grammatical Theory, 118-31, who ascribes to Vossius the beginning of what I, following his lead, will call a semasiological approach to grammar.

19. Justus Georg Schottelius, Ausfiihrliche Arbeit von der Teutschen HaubtSprache (Brunswick, 1663), 188. Jellinek, Neuhochdeutsche Gramimatik, 2:57-58, points out this contradiction as well.

20. Schottelius, Ausfidirliche Arbeit, 187. 21. Johann Christoph Gottsched, Grundlegung einer Deutschen Sprachkunst (Leipzig,

1748), 39. 22. The Swabians themselves recognized this and were part of a backlash against the ratio-

nalist efforts that focused on the North German/Saxon prejudices of most spelling reformers. Swabian Johann Nast, for example, in his unpaginated preface to the first volume of Der Teitsche Spm-ac1forscher (Stuttgart, 1777), specifically addresses this: "Einem stidlichen Tefitschen sinds verdauliche Brocken, wenn er horen und lesen mus, daB3 nordliche Teiitschen z. B. g mitjh, ch mit gh, und das hetitige sch durch sgh erkliren, und ch jot und sch Gott weis wie? nennen. Ein Schwab stuzt, schittelt den Kopf, und denkt in seinem bidern teiitschen Sinn: sind das auch Teiitsche?"


23. Carl Gustav von Hille, Der Teutsche Palmbaum: Das ist, Lobschrift von der Hochloblichen Fruchtbringenden Gesellschaft (Nuremberg, 1647), 75.

24. Schottelius, Ausffhrliche Arbeit, 109. One peculiar variant of German language purity included a mythology of Ascenas, the ostensible first Celt from whom German took its origin. Schottelius, through a derivation analogizing the word Teutsch to the Egyp- tian Tet, goes so far as to say that "the root of the German name is the name of the true God himself" (30).

25. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, "Unvorgreiffliche Gedancken, betreffend die Austibung und Verbesserung der Teutschen Sprache" (1697), ? 14, in G. W. Leibniz: Philosophische Werke, ed. Ernst Cassirer (Leipzig, 1906), 2:525. Alan Kirkness, "Sprachreinheit und Sprachreinigung in der Spataufklarung: Die Fremdwortfrage von Adelung bis Campe," in Dieter Kimpel, ed., Mehrsprachigkeit in der deutschen Aufkldrung (Hamburg, 1985), 85-104, traces the discussion about linguistic purity into the nineteenth century. As he shows, the same questions that plagued the seventeenth century-what is high German? and what is a pure language?-continue for another full century, perhaps becoming even more vexing as the relations between Germany and France deterio- rate (85).

26. Gottsched, Grundlegung, 10. Gottsched writes this precisely at the moment when words of Latinate root began to be printed in German (Fraktur) script. The question of the relation between typographical and orthographical change is largely unanswered here. I read it as quite significant, however, that Leibniz, in his "Unvorgreiffliche Ged- ancken," ?92, wrote that "one must once and for all declare certain words German that still fluctuate equally between German and foreign languages, and henceforth not write them, for the purposes of differentiation, in foreign alphabets, but as the German write them [i.e. in Fraktur]." Typography might be an underhanded solution to the truly impossible task of getting rid of foreign root words (Orthographie, for instance): as Leibniz said, just setting the word in Fraktur makes it German. That a century laterJohann Christoph Adelung, in his discussion of orthography in Umnstdndliches Lehrgebdude, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1782), 2:659, wrote that "one should write German ... with German letters," and furthermore that the older tradition of marking Latinate root words by Latin type should also be dismissed only strengthens the connection between changing the language in the abstract and changing its material presentation in a book.

27. General instructions given by Leibniz and Academy cofounder D. E. Jablonski in July 1700, cited in Adolf Harnack, Geschichte der Kiniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wis- senschaften zu Berlin (Berlin, 1900), 98. One of the more interesting errors made by historians about the Academy has been to see it as dominated by French from the outset. In fact, as Harnack contends, Frederick the Great is mistaken when he writes to Voltaire that Leibniz "had the idea, to found an academy in Berlin after the example of Paris"; Frederick der Grosse, Brief an Voltaire, 6 July 1737, in Otto Bardong, ed., Ausgewdhlte Quellen zurDeutschen Geschichte derNeuzeit (Darmstadt, 1982), 22:68. It was, of course, Frederick the Great himself who made the Academy Francophilic, declaring French the official language of the Academy in 1743 and later appointing Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis president of the Academy (on and off from 1746 to 1756); see Harnack, Geschichte, 95 n. 2.

28. Padley, Grammatical Theory, 120-22. 29. Christian Tobias Damm, Betrachtungen uiber die Religion (Berlin, 1773), 233; also cited

in Johann Georg Hamann, "Neue Apologie des Buchstabens h," in S&mtliche Werke, ed. Josef Nadler, 6 vols. (Vienna, 1951), 3:98.

52 REPRESENTATIONS

30. Renate Baudusch-Walker, Klopstock als Sprachwissenschaftler und Orthographiereformer (Berlin, 1958), 151.

31. Damm, Betrachtungen, 232. 32. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, "Ueber di deutsche Rechtschreibung," in Burck-

hard Garbe, ed., Die Deutsche Rechtschreibung und ihre Reform, 1722-1974 (TUbingen, 1978), 28.

33, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik (1774), in Werke und Briefe, ed. Rose-Maria Hurlebusch, vol. 7, bk.1 (Berlin, 1975), 125-26.

34. Jakob Hemmer, Kern der deutschen Sprachkunst und Rechtschreibung (Mannheim, 1780), 116; Friedrich Karl Fulda, cited in Baudusch-Walker, Klopstock, 151, 152. I was not able to locate this quotation, but Fulda expresses a very similar sentiment in, "Von den stummen Dinstbuchstaben H und E und dem Accent, in der Teutschen Sprache," in Johann Nast, ed., Der Teiitsche Sprachforscher (Stuttgart, 1777), 1:165-66.

35. Gottsched, Grundlegung, 49. 36. Schottelius, Ausfiihrliche Arbeit, 188. 37. Gottsched, Grundlegung, 8, 47. 38. Johann Georg Hamann, "Zwei Scherflein zur neusten Deutschen Litteratur" (1780),

in Werke, 3:237. 39. Ignaz Weitenauer, Zweifel von der deutschen Sprache (Augsburg, 1774), 24. 40. Hamann, "Neue Apologie," 93. 41. The definition of h as mere breath is found in authors as diverse as Schottelius,

Lochner, Gottsched, Charles de Brosses, Friedrich, Nicolai, Klopstock, and others. See, e.g., de Brosses's characterization of the h as a vowel ("voix aspir&e") in his Traite de la formation mechanique des langues (Paris, 1745), 181; or Schottelius, Ausfidirliche Ar- beit, 212; or Lochner's claim that the h after a vowel is a "simple aspiratio" in Neuverbes- serte Teutsche Orthographie, 237, and so on. Clearly this view of the h is rooted in theories of language transmission from the Greeks to the Germans.

42. Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth (London, 1995), 221. Drucker's book also contains a rather brief discussion of Christian Cabala and its reading of the Sephiroth.

43. The other letters that function as such are jod (1) and waw (l); that the name of God is made up of only these letters could not have passed unnoticed to Cabalists.

44. Jakob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, oder Erkldrung uiber das erste Buch Mosis, von der Of- fenbarung Gottlichen Worts, durch die drei Principia Gottliches Wesens, auch vom Ursprung der Welt und der Schbpfung (1623; reprint, n.p., 1730), 331-32 (Commentary on Gene- sis 10).

45. Here is where I would differ with Jeffrey Mehlman, whose very brief analysis of the letter h and Hamann, "Literature and Hospitality: Klossowski's Hamann," Studies in Romanticism 22 (Summer 1983): 339-40, makes the good point that the title of Ha- mann's follow-up article on the letter, "Neue Apologie des Buchstabens h von sich selbst" stresses the ability of the letter of the text to actually speak and defend itself but overlooks the uniqueness of the letter h within an alphabetical canon that ensures theological content.

46. Schottelius, Ausffihrliche Arbeit, 74. 47. Hans Grimmelshausen, Teutschen Michel (1673), in Simpliciana in Auswahl, ed. J. H.

Scholte (Halle, 1943), 169, 170. 48. Ibid., 169-70. 49. Johann Gottfried Herder, Vom Geist der ebraischen Poesie ( 1782), in Werke in zehn Bdnden,

ed. Rudolf Smend (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), 5:68 1. Herder's analysis follows, at least to some extent, Robert Lowth's De sacra poesi Hebraeorum ( 1753), which treated the Old


Testament as a poetic text subject to the same kinds of philological and hermeneutic criticisms as, say, the texts of Homer.

50. Ibid., 5:675. 51. Hamann uses the word iibefliissig here, although it is not clear what Bible he is citing.

That is, "ilberflussig" does not appear in the Luther Bible at Genesis 1.20. The editors of the Londoner Schriften suggest that Hamann was using a 1755 edition of the King James Bible, in addition to consulting with the original, in this case Hebrew, language editions; Hamann, "Biblische Betrachtungen," in Londoner Schriften, ed. Oswald Bayer and Bernd Weissenborn (Munich, 1993), 73.

52. Hamann, "Zwei Scherflein," 234. 53. Hamann, "Neue Apologie," 100. 54. Ibid., 93. 55. Johann Georg Hamann, "Aesthetica in nuce" (1762), in Hans Eichner, Ausgewdhlte

Schriften (Berlin, 1994), 9. 56. Padley, Grammatical Theory, 120-22. 57. The conventionality of language and linguistic signs has a long heritage, of course,

dating at least back to Aristotle's De Interpretatione, 16a 19, in The Works of Aristotle (Ox- ford, 1928). What is interesting is this move back to Aristotle in the grammatical tradition just at the moment when writers like Bacon solemnly exorcise the ghosts of Scho- lastic Aristotelianism from their epistemological writings.

58. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (New York, 1944), book 6, 164. For a short discussion of the money metaphor, see Marcelo Dascal, "Language and Money: A Simile and Its Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy of Language," in Leibniz: Language, Signs, and Thoughts (Philadelphia, 1987), 1-30.

59. Thomas Hobbes, "Of Speech," in Leviathan (London, 1964), 34. 60. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1961), book 3, 10. 61. Johann Christoph Gottsched, Vollstdndigere und Neuerlduterte Deutsche Sprachkunst (Leip-

zig, 1757), 3. 62. Johann Christoph Adelung, Grundsdtze der Deutschen Orthographie (Leipzig, 1782), un-

paginated preface. This book was excerpted from Adelung's Umstdndliches Lehrgeb- dude, vol. 2, and published separately in the same year as the former with this preface appended.

63. Adelung, Umstdndliches Lehrgebiude, 1:4. By ratio and auctoritas, I mean also to indicate the debate as to whether grammar can indeed be a science, whether within language a structure resides that can be described and analyzed. Padley, Grammatical Theory, describes how such emphasis on structure was actually lost in the seventeenth century, as grammarians prescriptively attempted to found a new grammar on what were taken to be the laws of reason. In terms of orthography, which is always prescriptive and descriptive at the same time, the auctoritas is perhaps less that of reason than of prece- dent, since the seemingly arbitrary rules of spelling demand an authorization that reason itself-given the number of dialects and different sounds ascribed to the same letters-is unable to supply.

64. Adelung, Umstdndliches Lehrgebdude, 2:653. 65. Ibid., 2:645. 66. Ibid., 2:745-48 (emphasis added). 67. Adelung, Vollstdndige Anweisung zur Deutschen Orthographie (Leipzig, 1788), 425. 68. Ibid., 406-7. 69. Adelung, Umstandliches Lehrgebdude, 2:709-10. 70. Ibid., 2:718. 71. Ibid. (emphasis added). 72. I believe this latter dislocation is more substantive essentially because Adelung's schema

54 REPRESENTATIONS

is extremely strained by his attempt to retain communication as the highest goal of language. For example, he repeatedly asserts the primacy of written practice, or practice in general, as a counterweight to a rationalist urge to reform, and yet such an assertion will continually fall short of the ideal of transparent communication, riddled as practice is by the same exigencies of historical development that in fact interest Adelung and allow him his critique of Gottsched et al. Far more telling, I believe, than Adelung's gestures to clarity is his thorough rejection of a substantive orthographical reform.

73. Hamann, "Neue Apologie," 97. Adelung, Umstlindliches Lehrgebdude, 2:693. 74. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 49 ff. 75. See for instance Hamann's attack on the criterion of taste ("Who is taste, whose voice

one ought to obey? What was his birth name?") in "Beurtheilung der Kreuzzuige des Philologen, nach dem zwey hundert und vier und funfzigsten Briefe die neueste Li- teratur betreffend . . . ," in Werke, 2:257-74, here 262.

76. Harnack, Geschichte der Preussischen Akademie, 98. 77. See for instance Harold Mah, "The Epistemology of the Sentence: Language, Civility,

and Identity in France and Germany, Diderot to Nietzsche," Representations 47 (Sum- mer 1994): 64-84. Adelung, Vollstdndige Anweisung, 408.

78. Adelung, Vollstdndige Anweisung, 267. 79. Consuetudo vero certissima loquendi magistra; Lorenzo Valla cited in Donald Kelley,

The Foundations of Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renais- sance (New York, 1970), 34.

80. Johann Adelung, Versuch einer Geschichte der Kultur des rnenschlichen Geschlechts, 2d ed. (1800; reprint, Hildesheim, 1979), 460. It is following on Adelung's heels that "cultural history" (indeed, this edition includes an anonymous appendix entitled "Entwuif der neuesten Culturgeschichte") specifically based on philological method (often serving as a euphemism for a combination of folk history and Germanic philology) takes off in the German context. Interesting too is Adelung's emphasis on the progression of Gesch- mack throughout human history and his contrast of this true Geschmnack with "the false Geschmack of the modern French" (459).

81. Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, in Friedrich Meinecke Werke, ed. Carl Hinrichs (Munich, 1965), 3:581.

82. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendldndischen Literatur (Mu- nich, 1967), 412.

83. Curtius, Europdische Literatur, 21, 19. 84. Hamann, "Beurtheilung," 259. 85. Johann Nast, "Grundsaze zur endlichen Berichtigung der tetitschen Sprache in ihrem

Accent," in Der Teitsche Sprachforscher, 2:76. 86. Jakob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, 1:35 1. 87. Nast, "Grundsaze," 60. 88. See, e.g., Peter Reill's work in this area: "Science and the Science of History in the

Spataufklarung," in Hans Erich Bodeker et al., eds., Aufkldrung und Geschichte (Got- tingen, 1986), 430-5 1, and "Science and the Construction of the Cultural Sciences in Late Enlightenment Germany: The Case of Wilhelm von Humboldt," History and The- ory 33, no. 3 (1994): 345-66.

89. Schottelius, Ausfiuirliche Arbeit, 74. 90. This final point addresses and displaces Michel Foucault's argument, in The Order of

Things (New York, 1970), 280 ff., that characteristic of nineteenth-century grammatical work is the "displacement of the word, this backward jump, as it were, away from


its representative value" insofar as the word must "belong to a grammatical totality which, in relation to the word, is primary, fundamental, and determining." While I agree that what I have called a "semasiological" approach loses ground at the end of the eighteenth century, I have tried to show both what this backward jump might consist in and also that the move to make grammar a totality relies on the principle that words themselves represent something beyond their communicative potential; that is to say that to make grammar structural and historical, a notion of words as in themselves the least common denominators of historical meaning is needed. It is this notion that theology provides.

56 REPRESENTATIONS

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