The Seventeenth Century
The Seventeenth century in Europe, both the “Age of Reason” in philosophy and the height of the Baroque in art, was in many ways a transitional period. The Reformation was met with the still-formidable Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation. Christianity itself was met with an increased interest in reason, science, and secularized philosophy. The Hapsburg Empire still controlled the majority of Europe, but it was slowly on the decline, while France and then England steadily increased in power.
For France this century was a kind of golden age before the excesses of Versailles reached untenable heights. Bereft of any real power by the absolutism of Richelieu and then Louis XIV, the nobility concerned themselves with continuing the Renaissance obsession with the ideal courtier, in this case the honnête homme, or “upright man.” The arts flourished with the encouragement of Cardinal Richelieu and the establishment of the Académie française, and, frankly, because there was not much else for the aristocracy to do.
After the exhaustion of the Thirty Years’ War, Richelieu came to the conclusion that the only power that counts is “soft” power—cultural dominance. With this in mind, the Académie française began work on a French classicism. At this time, French was not considered a language of intellectual and artistic discourse. The Académie worked to change this by first standardizing the language, particularly with Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, then producing canonical French literature.
In theater, the unities of time, place, and action set forth by Aristotle were taken to ever more stringent lengths. Purity of form, verisimilitude, and decorum were of the utmost importance. To be considered great, plays must take place over the course of twenty-four hours, in the same place, and flow clearly from one scene to the next. They must also be realistic while maintaining societal standards of appropriateness; it must be real, but also moral.
Having just suffered the blow of the Reformation, the Catholic Church at this time was on the offensive. Faced with the austerity of Lutheran and Calvinist theologies, the Church struck back with grandeur and beauty. Theater, long disparaged as a breeding ground for passion and sin, was now considered a tool for conversion. The Jesuits, in particular, patronized theater and the visual arts. The Church still excommunicated actors and forbade them from being buried in sacred ground, but it supported professional theater as a means of both gaining converts and as a part of the Jesuit ideal of a humanist education. The Church understood the importance of beauty in trying to convert followers and combat the encroachment of Protestantism.
In visual art, the Baroque proved a complicated fusion of religion, mysticism, and science—the Age of Reason in constant struggle with the Counter-Reformation.
“What must be taken into account in any consideration of the Baroque is the equilibrium of the secular and the religious. The naturalism of seventeenth-century art is inextricably bound up with a metaphysical view of the world. It is for this reason that the familiar objects of a visible reality may be looked on as emblems of a higher, invisible reality. But that transcendent world can in turn only be apprehended through the faithful rendering of things seen.” (Martin 119)
“In the field of devotional art, the interest in extreme states of feeling led to profound changes in the representation of the visionary experience: Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa (to take the best-known example) may be understood not only as the illustration of a miraculous visitation—the reward of saintliness—but also as a penetrating insight into the psychology of mysticism, in which the self seeks to be released from human limitations and to be absorbed in the infinite. In the same way the great Catholic subjects of death and martyrdom are imbued with a new pathos and a new comprehension of suffering, cruelty and steadfastness.” (Martin 13)
Despite the fruits of the Jesuits’ patronage, the Church was not a united front in its fight against Protestantism. Growing to prominence in the mid-17th century, the Jansenists drew on stoicism rather than the Jesuits’ Epicurean influences. As such their views were harsher, almost a Catholic Calvinism.
“It arose out of the theological problem of reconciling divine grace and human freedom. In France it became connected with the struggle against the papacy by proponents of Gallicanism—a political theory advocating the restriction of papal power—and with opposition to the monarchical absolutism of Armand-Jean du Plessis Cardinal de Richelieu and Louis XIV.” (Encyclopedia Britannica)
While the Jesuits preached a philosophy of grace and good deeds, the Jansenists believed in predestination and a sort of eternal struggle for virtue. One must try mightily to achieve goodness, but never actually think the goal can be achieved. This sterner faction was less amenable to patronage, but did bring forth some of the great thinkers and writers of the time. Both Pascal and Racine were educated in the Jansenist tradition, which emphasized the Greeks over the Romans.
While the Church was mostly concerned with converting as many people as possible in the wake of the Reformation, there was also an increase in secular philosophies. Pascal, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke were all writing and sharing discourse. Philosophy, mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, logic, and the physical sciences were codified, hypothesized, and written about. The philosophers of the age were still somewhat confined by the Church, but the seeds were sown for the increasingly secular humanist views of the Age of Enlightenment.
–Briana Finegan, Dramaturgy Assistant
