CHAPTER 4 Periodical Press: Faith and Knowledge in the Mercurio Peruano IntroductIon: A LIterAry PubLIc SPhere In January 1791, one of Spanish America’s first periodical papers, the Mercurio Peruano, was established in Lima.1 The Mercurio had close ties to the inner circles of power in the Viceroyalty but was a private commercial venture which considered “the Public” its patron.2 It was written by a colonial middle class but displayed habits acquired through contact with the upper echelons.3 It was born into a censorious ancien régime culture but appears to have been an expression of something resembling a distinctive, local Peruvian Ilustración. In the very act of its founding, as much as in its content, the periodical paper coincides with the theme that lies at the heart of Jürgen Habermas’ literary public sphere, precursor to the bourgeois political public sphere: namely, private individuals making “public use of their reason” (1999, p. 227). It is the condensation into one spherical idea of Aristotle on society as gathering, the eighteenth century on the thickening of networks of economic dependencies, and critical reason as democratic agent.4 François-Xavier Guerra has done more than most to adapt Habermas’ idea to a Hispanic context, arguing that the fledgling Hispanic literary public sphere is dominated by two forms, namely, the tertulia and the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, and that the no less fledgling modernity of which such forums are a part lies at the confluence of two opposing tendencies: the movement towards new forms of democratic sociability and the traditional politics of an enlightened elite wanting © The Author(s) 2020 A. Sharman, Deconstructing the Enlightenment in Spanish America, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37019-0_4 105 106 A. SHARMAN top-down enlightenment (Guerra 2009, p. 126). Old family feuds or some esteemed personage’s will to be seen to be concerned for the country’s state of advancement mix, then, with modern forms of sociability and the abolition of such things as prelaciones.5 Legitimacy in such forums derived, not from status (or seat) in an estates-based order, but from the will of the (notionally) equal associates in their shared participation in critical reason. Guerra calls it the “silent revolution.”6 This chapter explores the extent to which Catholicism could be the source of such a revolution. Can there be a Catholic public sphere and a Catholic Enlightenment? In order to address the question of a Catholic Enlightenment, and as a guiding thread through the labyrinth of the periodical’s pages, I shall take just one year’s worth of articles, the first year of the Mercurio’s production, and focus on the question of religion. What is the relationship between faith and knowledge in the Mercurio Peruano? The initial answer is: awkward in the extreme. Religion in general and Catholicism in particular have had a difficult relationship to the various Enlightenments. Circulating below the surface of debates on “the” Enlightenment, the most common, and in many respects dominant, view is that the Enlightenment stands opposed to religion, and thus that those parts of the world thought to be most religious are the parts most inimical to Enlightenment. Thanks to a retrospective view shaped by the religious persecution characteristic of the French Revolution, and by a contaminating association between the deeds of the revolutionaries and the ideas of the philosophes, the Enlightenment became synonymous with the rejection of religion and the embrace of autonomous scientific or critical reason.7 Such that it is by no means certain that a “Catholic” Enlightenment or Ilustración was even possible.8 An important qualification to this view was made by Ernst Cassirer, in a book—in truth still little understood—originally from 1932. Cassirer attributes the gains of eighteenth-century European philosophy to a process of secularisation but insists that not only does much Enlightenment thought not reject religion, it in fact emerges out of a new, active, tolerant religious disposition. For Cassirer, while the Enlightenment, or let us say a significant part of Enlightenment thought, does not reject religion, it does reject religious superstition, along with certain religious dogmas that it believes wholly incompatible with the new spirit. This rejection led, in his view, to the doctrine of original sin becoming the principal target of “all” Enlightenment philosophy. The problem for a “Catholic” Enlightenment is obvious: if “all” Enlightenment philosophy assails the doctrine of original sin, any thought that upholds that doctrine is not an Enlightenment. 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 107 Some recent scholarship has rejected the above and pronounced for the existence of a Catholic Enlightenment. Ulrich Lehner argues that it is the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century that sets Catholicism on the way to reforms that subsequently make it doctrinally consistent for there to be a Catholic Enlightenment, or Catholic Enlightenments, in the eighteenth century. Scholars of the Spanish and Spanish American traditions have likewise challenged the implication that the Catholic Iberian world is effectively disqualified from the story of the Enlightenment.9 Arthur Whitaker and fellow contributors suggested long ago that Latin America’s Enlightenment was Catholic and practical. Eschewing the radical politics of the Lumières, Latin America’s Ilustración was shaped by Catholicism and had a pragmatic, problem-solving approach to technical questions and social reform.10 Impetus for this “applied” Enlightenment comes from the Bourbon monarchy, whose reforms had penetrated the Spanish Indies from 1750 onwards to assert the Crown’s authority over uppity Creoles and over the Church.11 In other words, an important aspect of colonial Spanish America’s so-called Catholic Enlightenment consisted in the reform of the principal institution of Catholicism.12 To get a sense of the Crown’s motives, John Lynch notes that in the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1792, that is, a year after the year that is our focus, there were 1818 secular priests and 1891 religious to serve a population of 1 million; almost a third of buildings in Lima were for religious purposes; and the Archbishop of Lima’s income rivalled that of the viceroy. Bourbon reforms sought to clip the Church’s wings by eroding the fuero eclesiástico that granted the clergy immunity from civil jurisdiction and by diverting the Church’s resources into state coffers.13 The essential point, for our purposes, is that both the ecclesiastical and state reformers who drove the Church reforms were influenced by French Jansenism. Thus, paradoxically, enlightened reform occurred when one of the primary movers of the New Philosophy, that is, the Jesuits, were ousted by the primary upholders of a traditional-looking Catholic doctrine, that is, the Jansenistleaning reformers around Charles III.14 While one understands Lynch’s conclusion that the Enlightenment did not “de-Catholicise America,” in fact a certain de-Catholicisation had taken place.15 Jesuits had been removed from America.16 This story of Bourbon reforms is a reminder of the criss-crossing of religion by temporal interests, and of the fact that there were different Catholicisms, some of them already ceasing to be wholly Catholic.17 108 A. SHARMAN However, the other reason why certain Catholics had ceased being wholly Catholic is because they were engaged in the New Philosophy. We can thus agree only up to a point with a recent invaluable contribution to the debate on the Iberian and Ibero-American Enlightenments. Brian Hamnett (2017) suggests that attributing Enlightenment primarily to eighteenth-century philosophers and government ministers “has caused the original meaning to be practically (though not entirely) lost.” Enlightenment, he says, has a long association with religion—as “awakening and regeneration”—and not only with Buddhism. “In Christian terms, enlightenment may be the working of divine grace.” Thus, when latterday protagonists of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment associate the term specifically with anti-religion, they do something that “few eighteenth-century philosophers did.” Certainly not Iberian and IberoAmerican ilustrados: In the Iberian and Ibero-American Enlightenment, most ilustrados sought to bind together inherited religion with the new methods of thinking. They argued for reform in Church and State, in law and education, and in the practice of science and medicine. When ilustrados who were members of the clergy argued for reform of religious practice, they were calling for an intensification of belief and not for its abandonment. When Imperial monarchy broke down at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the instruments of reform could no longer be kings and their ministers. When constitutional change became necessary for the survival of political society, attention turned to new forms of government and social organisation. Republicanism and federalism were among the offsprings. Most political figures saw the transformation in Christian terms. (pp. ix–x) That most ilustrados sought to bind together inherited religion with the new methods of thinking, that is, the New Philosophy, is an entirely plausible proposition. It corresponds, for instance, to what we know about the Jesuits, such as Clavijero and his towering critique of the prejudices of European philosophical histories of the Americas that we discussed in the previous chapter. It corresponds also to many of the rhetorical formulations about the marriage of philosophy and Christian morality that appear in the Mercurio Peruano. Catholics did (the) Enlightenment. However, the ilustrados in question did not see the transformation indicated by Hamnett “in Christian terms.” The way of seeing had already been transformed by the transformation, such that some of the terms are far from Christian and others Christian only to the extent that they have 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 109 undergone transformation. If we are to be serious in our approach to the Hispanic tradition at the end of the eighteenth century, that is, if we are to take seriously the deeply regressive aspects of the Spanish monarchy, of Peninsular and Creole involvement in the slave trade, of the Inquisition and its autos da fe, rather than alighting solely on those aspects of the Hispanic world that produce a warm glow in us, then we must take seriously the jarring quality of the label “Catholic Enlightenment.” In important respects the Mercurio is radically un-Catholic. Lehner himself writes that “Catholics made use of non-Catholic thought” (p. 135). The New Philosophy is not just yet one more vehicle for Catholicism, but rather a philosophy that would not simply be a theology. In a philosophical tradition dominated by Scholasticism, there is good reason why philosophy might always be taken as the sign of a theology. But there is also good reason why philosophy should be taken as the sign of philosophy. When “Cephalio” writes a “Descripcion Histórica y Filosófica” of a Peruvian province, he does not write a theology of the province; he writes a historical and philosophical “description” of it.18 “Catholic Enlightenment” only makes sense in tandem with “enlightened Catholicism,” that is to say, on the understanding that there is no selfidentical subject called Catholicism that would have glided unscathed and untransformed across the eighteenth century. The distinction may seem inoffensive; in fact, it is nothing less than history itself. The task in respect of the Mercurio is, therefore, to identify the historical source and contours of its thinking, without accepting the truism that thought in an overwhelmingly Catholic context must be Catholic. But that is only half the story. To be faithful to the historical sources of the Mercurio, we might ask whether the thought that produced its texts was empiricism or evolutionary psychology or Tridentine Catholicism or a mixture of all these things. The latter are historical forms of knowledge, determinate idea-formations that provide the precise conditions for acts of science or reason. But there is another dimension to knowledge. This dimension would not be a separate, much less new, version of the Enlightenment but rather would accompany all the other views of it as that which makes them possible. Hamnett provides the clue. The very first words of his book are these: “‘Enlightenment’ is not an ideology but a state of mind. The way from pre-enlightenment to a state of enlightenment is through experience: it passes from a condition of not knowing to one of knowledge” (p. ix). We would prefer the Hegelian idea that subjective spirit (conscience, morality, etc., which is what this resembles) without 110 A. SHARMAN objective spirit (social institutions, law, etc.) is a poor kind of enlightenment. But the point is useful. For it reminds us of the distinction between “the Enlightenment,” that is, a more or less historically specific intellectual and reform movement or historical period, and “enlightenment” without the definite article, that is, a state of mind, the experience of passing from a condition of not knowing to one of knowledge. Hamnett begins thus because he rightly wants to recall the religious connotations of enlightenment. In short, there is “the Enlightenment,” a historically determinate movement or “age,” and there is “enlightenment” in general. The first thinks, perhaps, that it has nothing to do with religion; the second thinks, perhaps, that it is the religious experience itself. But there can be no historical Enlightenment—Catholic, secular, or otherwise—without enlightenment in general, moreover, without enlightenment in general above and beyond religious experience. There can be neither a historical body of philosophical reason, such as empiricism, nor a historical form of religion, such as Tridentine Catholicism, without the possibility of thought in general. No Catholicism, no Protestantism, no secular philosophy, no reason and no religion without synapses, neurones, dendrites, electrical impulses or neuro-transmitters, without spacing and timing. One could neither think nor say “The Catholic religion is the source of my thought” or, alternatively, “Empirical reason is the source of my Enlightenment” without the possibility of ideas, language, and speech, that is, without the possibility of conceptuality or belief in general. At an absolutely originary level, then, “religion and reason have the same source.” One would understand nothing if one continued to oppose so naïvely Reason and Religion, Critique or Science and Religion, technoscientific Modernity and Religion, … if one continued to believe in this opposition, even in this incompatibility, which is to say, if one remains within a certain tradition of the Enlightenment, one of the many Enlightenments of the past three centuries (not of an Aufklärung, whose critical force is profoundly rooted in the Reformation), but yes, this light of Lights, of the Lumières, which traverses like a single ray a certain critical and anti-religious vigilance, anti-Judaeo-Christiano-Islamic, a certain filiation “Voltaire-FeuerbachMarx-Nietzsche-Freud-(and even)-Heidegger”? Beyond this opposition and its determinate heritage (no less represented on the other side, that of religious authority), perhaps we might be able to try to “understand” how the imperturbable and interminable development of critical and technoscientific reason, far from opposing religion, bears, supports and supposes it. It would be necessary to demonstrate, which would not be simple, that religion and reason have the same source. (Derrida 2002, pp. 65–66) 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 111 This common source of reason and religion suggests the radical irreducibility—the irreducibility, not the utter absence of affiliation—of both the Mercurio Peruano and the Spanish American Ilustración as a whole to any determinate historical source. Strictly speaking, neither a reformed postTrent Catholicism nor a secular eighteenth-century reason was or ever could be the source of the Enlightenment. FAIth And KnowLedge: VerSIonS oF the enLIghtenment In this section I outline schematically certain key features of Enlightenment philosophy, precise historical contributions to thought in which the relationship between faith and knowledge is critical. At the end, however, I return to the question of thought beyond all determinate historical formations of knowledge, to the matter of enlightenment beyond all Enlightenments. Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophical Enlightenment For Ernst Cassirer, the Enlightenment did not dismiss religion but rather promoted a new faith based on the active powers of the human spirit. It ushered in a concern with society and politics as the new norms of human existence, held dogma and superstition, not religious belief, to be the enemies of such norms, and singled out the doctrine of original sin for special opprobrium.19 Cassirer’s account of “the” Enlightenment in the singular is teleological; there is always a sense that a given thinker finally got to the obvious logical end-point. But it does not purport to be a comprehensive history that tells the tale of all the national Enlightenments. Cassirer’s story is that of the principal philosophical problems faced by the Republic of Letters, that extended network of the learned of Europe and the Americas among whom circulated the same texts and similar concerns. There is no history of the Enlightenment without an understanding of its supranational, cosmopolitan dimensions. It is what licenses the definite article, the “the,” in the singular. Cassirer’s account is in itself a problem-solving one: what, he asks, were the problems of religion for this Republic beyond all republics? His answer gives priority to those thinkers whom he believes made the greatest contribution to solving the problems. The challenge for Hispanists is, not to criticise Cassirer for omitting to tell us how some Spanish thinker said the same unoriginal thing as some derivative French thinker, but to show that a Spanish or Spanish American author made an 112 A. SHARMAN original contribution that pre-dated or was contemporaneous with whichever French or German author Cassirer credits with the achievement. Cassirer’s philosophical account of “the” Enlightenment and religion begins with the eighteenth century’s new faith in the human mind. For him, the noisy opposition to religion which one hears at the time “should not blind us to the fact that all intellectual problems are fused with religious problems, and that the former find their constant and deepest inspiration in the latter” (Cassirer 2009, p. 136). The eighteenth century draws its inspiration from the Renaissance, which found the “seal of divinity” in the exaltation of the world and the human intellect rather than in their debasement. However, there could be no reconciliation of Renaissance humanism and the Protestant Reformation, while ever the latter upheld the doctrine of original sin. The Reformation’s Augustinian view of the radical corruption of human nature and its inability to attain divinity by its own efforts leaves it far from the idea of free will and tied instead to the Lutheran doctrine of an all-powerful divine grace. It takes Enlightenment theology to break this medieval stranglehold, the doctrine of original sin becoming the principal target of “all” Enlightenment philosophy. Cassirer grants a special place to Rousseau, since the story of Enlightenment modernity is, for him, the story of the gradual emergence of the autonomy of knowledge and of the human. No Enlightenment without autonomy. Rousseau’s contribution is to replace the question of the Fall with the idea of a degeneration for which man alone is responsible. To combat this degeneration, man must create his own community. Rousseau is thus preoccupied, not with God, but with the question of law and social justice, which become “the standard by which human existence is to be measured and tested” (Cassirer 2009, p. 154). Below is perhaps Cassirer’s definitive statement of the change wrought in a certain stratum of intellectual life by the age of Enlightenment. Religion is not abandoned; it is given a new direction: in eighteenth century thought the intellectual center of gravity changes its position. The various fields of knowledge—natural science, history, law, politics, art—gradually withdraw from the domination and tutelage of traditional metaphysics and theology. They no longer look to the concept of God for their justification and legitimation; the various sciences themselves now determine that concept on the basis of their specific form. The relations between the concept of God and the concepts of truth, morality, law, are by no means abandoned, but their direction changes. An exchange of index symbols takes place, as it were. That which formerly had established other 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 113 concepts, now moves into the position of that which is to be established, and that which hitherto had justified other concepts, now finds itself in the position of a concept which requires justification. (pp. 158–159) This gradual withdrawal from the tutelage of traditional metaphysics and theology leads Cassirer to conclude that, far from rejecting religion, the Enlightenment embraced an expanded, active sense of religiosity: the principle of the freedom of faith and conscience is the expression of a new and positive religious force which uniquely characterizes the century of the Enlightenment…. The decisive transformation took place when a genuine religious ethos superseded the religious pathos which had motivated the preceding centuries of religious controversy. Henceforth religion is not to be a matter of mere receptivity; it is to originate from, and to be chiefly characterized by, activity. Man is not merely seized and overwhelmed by this activity as by a strange power, but he in turn influences and shapes the activity from within. It is not supernatural power nor divine grace which produces religious conviction in man; he himself must rise to it and maintain it. From this theoretical principle all the conclusions which the epoch of the Enlightenment drew, and all the concrete and practical demands which the epoch raised, follow of themselves and by an inner necessity. (pp. 164–165) This expanded sense of religiosity had tolerance as its principal article of faith. Enlightenment tolerance is essentially Christian but precisely opposes religious dogma or persecution by the Church. Dogma and superstition, not religion, are the enemies of Enlightenment. Cassirer’s account of the Enlightenment appears essentially to be the story of the rapprochement between humanism and the Reformation. If “the” Enlightenment is generally held to be the triumph of reason, and thus a movement characterised by intellectualism, according to Cassirer the opposite tendency is true of its treatment of religion, which it attempts to emancipate from the domination of the understanding. The Enlightenment criticises dogmatic theology for believing that religious belief consisted in the “mere acceptance of certain theoretical propositions.” For Cassirer, these propositions “must never be taken for anything other than the outside wrapping of religious certainty.” In other words, doctrine, and certainly not dogma or enforced professions of faith, will not be the true markers of religious belief. It is hard not to hear in these statements a petition for an interiorised humanist Protestantism and against an exteriorised Baroque Catholicism. 114 A. SHARMAN Ulrich Lehner’s Catholic Enlightenment Ulrich Lehner appears to rebut Cassirer by arguing that tolerance and freedom of conscience had been widely practised in Catholicism for centuries and thus that a Catholic Enlightenment was a perfectly congruous idea. Catholicism developed “a new, more optimistic view of the human person: one could do deeds without faith or divine help and could freely reject God’s grace” (Lehner 2016, p. 4). It is the story of the Counter-Reformation. Lehner argues that the Catholic Enlightenment can only be understood by going back to the Council of Trent, which lasted from 1545 to 1563 and was established to produce a Catholic response to the Reformation. The “Tridentine” reforms desired no political upheavals but affirmed the importance of individual freedom of conscience, recognised the virtue of religious tolerance, welcomed the engagement with the New Philosophy, attempted to purge Christian theology of its superstitious elements, and urged that priests be properly educated and trained. In other words, for Lehner, the Catholic Enlightenment that supervenes in the eighteenth century is a deepening of an important reformist current already within Catholicism. “At its best, the Catholic Enlightenment was the resuscitation of the Tridentine Reform by modern means” (p. 218). Lehner’s subsidiary point is that this historical continuity between Trent and the Enlightenment subsequently fell almost entirely from view when the Church itself withdrew into an intellectual ghetto that lasted right up until the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. Catholicism itself, Lehner says, contributed to the obscurantist view of its own history and allowed the story of Enlightened modernity to become the story of Protestant, Northern European, and North American progress. In short, Lehner appears to offer the surest support for the view that there can be multiple modes of Enlightenment, as one frequently hears these days, not least a Catholic mode.20 In fact, Lehner makes a remarkable claim in respect of the European Catholic Enlightenment, the irony of which we are not sure he sees. Lehner says that it was French Jansenism, and not the philosophes, that paved the way for Enlightenment religious tolerance. Without a hint of irony, he details how the Jansenists, who thought that Tridentine Catholicism had moved too far from St Augustine’s teachings on divine grace and the impossibility that humans could act without first being touched by God, were persecuted by the French monarch for refusing to bow to state diktat. But the Jansenists’ victory only comes when they successfully persuade the French parliament to ban the Jesuits, who, due to 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 115 their allegiance to the Pope, “symbolized Roman intolerance.” “This was a stunning victory for French modernizers” (p. 53). Lehner’s point is that Voltaire could not fail to attract support for his campaign against intolerance, because Jansenism had already paved the way. The philosophes beguiled later generations, who thought that “they and not a religious, intra-Catholic controversy had won the day for tolerance” (p. 53). This is a fascinating story. In it, the Augustinian Jansenists, upholders of the doctrine of divine grace, persecuted for refusing to submit to state diktat, urge the persecution of the Jesuits, disseminators of Enlightenment knowledge, for refusing to submit to state diktat. Two conclusions suggest themselves. First, there can be no better example of the difficulty of isolating something called religion from other interests that extend beyond the formal institutions of Catholicism. Religious reform is never just about religion; the battle for tolerance never was solely an “intra-Catholic controversy.” And no religious or other reform proposed by “modernizers” is simply on the side of the angels. Second, Lehner frequently proceeds as though the most significant feature of this Enlightenment was that it was Catholic, as though the adjective covered, or worse exhausted, the noun. This is to overestimate the persistence of an unchanged Catholic identity and to underestimate the traces of other forms of thought in the midst of this Catholicism. In truth, there is no form of knowledge that is not traversed by other forms. This sense of contamination emerges when Lehner says the same thing about Spanish Catholic reformers as he says about the French ones, namely, that under the influence of Jansenism they colluded with the Bourbon monarchy to expel the Jesuits in 1767. But the full version of what he says is that these reformers were influenced by Renaissance Humanism, Catholic Enlightenment, and Jansenism (p. 36). In other words, there were competing strands in a single body of thought. The plot, and the weave of influences, thickens if one takes seriously Jonathan Israel’s remark that the Benedictine Feijóo succeeded in making his Enlightenment, which was rooted in British empiricism, into the dominant one in the Iberian Peninsula. Ironically, then, the Hispanic Catholic Enlightenment takes its inspiration from Protestant shores.21 “Catholic reformers” is thus too peaceable a shorthand for the warring factions at work in the so-called Catholic Enlightenment. Catholics, we recall that Lehner says, made use of non-Catholic thought. We will see similar conflicts in the pages of the Mercurio Peruano: a traditional Catholic worldview alongside a growing sense of the autonomy of the mind and of the categories used to speak about the world. 116 A. SHARMAN Jacques Derrida on Faith and Knowledge Underpinning “the” Enlightenment, Cassirer sees a historical form of religion identifiable as a humanist Protestantism; Lehner says there was a post-Trent Catholicism. But even if one suspected it was a more Jansenist than Jesuit Catholicism, what if one could not say with certainty what religion or thought was the source of the Mercurio Peruano, because all faith and knowledge share the same source? Religio seems to come either from relegere, bringing together in order to return and begin again—whence religio as “scrupulous attention, respect, patience, even modesty, shame or piety” (Derrida 2002, p. 73)— or from religare, link, ligature, or tie to an obligation or debt. Above and beyond its disputed etymology, religion marks the convergence of two experiences: the experience of belief (of trust, trustworthiness, confidence, faith, credit) and the experience of sacredness (or of holiness or the unscathed). Neither experience need accompany the other.22 But something in the two experiences of religion may be found in reason, since reason puts into play a certain “faith,” the faith of a testimony, or of what Derrida calls a “performative of promising.” Without this performative, there would be “neither convention, nor institution, nor constitution, nor sovereign state, nor law, nor above all, here, that structural performativity of the productive performance that binds from its very inception the knowledge of the scientific community to doing, and science to technics” (Derrida 2002, pp. 80–81). In other words, even if I am preternaturally cynical about, say, the ability of the state to deliver a good education or a sensible agreement with a larger political union, I still harbour some kind of belief in the state’s existence. Even when I say I have lost faith in the state, I affirm a certain belief in the thing I say no longer commands my confidence. More fundamentally, when I say, “I don’t believe in the state,” I trust in the possibility that language will more or less communicate my meaning, even if that meaning is my lack of trust in the state. Every act of language is an act of belief, of trust, of confidence, of communion. Whether the dominant reason underpinning the state or a periodical paper is good, bad, Catholic, or Protestant, there is, from the beginning, a certain faith “in the already common experience of a language and of a ‘we’” (p. 96). And the opposite is also true: namely, that religion is marked by a certain experience of reason in general. Not only, then, by a particular historical instance of reason, such as Newton’s theory of gravity, but by the very 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 117 possibility of reason. If the experience of belief and the experience of sacredness render possible something like a religion, “an instituted apparatus consisting of dogmas or of articles of faith that are both determinate and inseparable from a given historical socius” (p. 93), there is an irreducible gap between this or that determinate form of religion (e.g. Catholicism) and the possibility of religion or religiosity in general, that is, the possibility that someone could found a religion or could experience feelings of religiosity that would make them found a religion in the first place.23 And because this possibility of religion or of religiosity exists in general, it is always possible to criticise or reject particular instances of religious belief or authority, in the name of this originary possibility. The crucial point is this: that this general possibility of religion, of religiosity and, just as important, of critique would be identical neither with a determinate historical religion or religiosity, nor with any tradition that believes it owns the keys to the critique of religion. In short, “before and after all the Enlightenments in the world, reason, critique, science, tele-technoscience, philosophy, thought in general, retain the same resource as religion in general” (pp. 93–94). Derrida’s insight is not easy to digest, and is even harder to “apply” to a context (colonial Spanish America) and an object (the Mercurio Peruano) that are so little understood, and that would thus seem to cry out, first and foremost, for sympathetic historical understanding rather than difficult theoretical analysis. In what follows, however, I shall attempt both things, that is, a reconstruction of the main contemporary historical forms of knowledge in play in the Mercurio (Tridentine Catholicism, secular empiricism, etc.) and a deconstruction of those same forms. I shall do the latter, not out of ignorance of history, but out of an unshakeable conviction, bordering on religious faith, that if we are to understand the Enlightenment or the Peruvian or Spanish American Ilustración, we must scrutinise academic articles of faith such as “Catholic Enlightenment” or “reason,” and that this scrutiny must involve an expanded sense of the historicity of thought. It is a reminder that people thought and believed before the Enlightenment and beyond Catholicism. the MERCURIO PERUANO And chArIty The new periodical founded by the Lima Sociedad Académica de Amantes del País blends philosophy, religion and patriotism, love of knowledge, love of God, and love of country.24 Its “principal objective,” it announces 118 A. SHARMAN in the inaugural edition of 2 January 1791, “es hacer mas conocido el País que habitamos, este Pais contra el qual los Autores extrangeros han publicado tantos paralogismos.” This is the dual sense of enlightenment as shedding light on, making luminous, and as instruction, making free from prejudice.25 A significant proportion of the Mercurio Peruano’s articles are dedicated to correcting foreign paralogisms, to the task of uncovering and publicising accurate fragments of Peru and of Peruvian history. Here, an assiduous empiricism best practised by those with intimate knowledge of the country is the order of the day. In contrast, in order to secure its Enlightenment, the patria requires instruction to reform it as opposed to light shed on its existing form; the patria needs commerce, communication, and culture, it says on 17 April. As in the philosophical histories examined in the previous chapter, there is a keen sense among the periodical’s writers that culture without an improvement in material conditions is meaningless. While the overwhelming impetus for reform will seem to come from empirical knowledge concerning practical improvements, the Mercurio will periodically reserve space for the importance of abstract reason in the process of enlightenment, for abstraction as cutting off.26 No cutting off from the patria as it is, that is, from tradition, habit, custom, and opinion, no possibility of reform. On 6 February 1791, in a piece entitled “Noticia histórica de los Concilios Provinciales de Lima,” the Mercurio addresses a very particular “reform,” or better, a reform that is a counter-reform. The article tells the history of the five religious Provincial Councils of Lima that began in the mid-sixteenth century. The first council was held in 1552 but the most important council was the one held in 1582–1583 that furnished the Indies with an Ecclesiastical Disciplinary Code. After many decrees by successive councils, the writer continues, a moment was reached, in the Council of 1601, when it was decided not to issue yet more decrees but rather to ask that those already issued be observed, that the clergy use the existing acts of the 1582–1583 Council as a mirror for their own conduct. The mirror appears to have been tarnished, since in 1621 a Royal decree was issued. That a Royal decree should be necessary shows how little effect the Councils’ decrees had, a situation he attributes to the pressures of “otra potestad distinta de la espiritual,” in other words, to the clash between royal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions (6 February, fol. 101 and 104). This is the Counter-Reformation. The councils in question are, pace Lehner, evidently those set up by the Council of Trent. The article’s express objective is to correct the inaccuracies of the French Diccionario 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 119 portatil de los Concilios, which is currently “in everyone’s hands” but whose French authors cannot be trusted, since it is well known that they obscure (obscurecer) the truth of the great men or glories of Spain. The author’s objective is to publicise the fact that Spain and her colonies played their part in the Counter-Reformation. Indeed, he goes so far as to compare the first of Peru’s councils to the traditional Spanish parliament, calling it “una especie de Cortes Peruanas.” Here the intention is not just to lay claim to the Tridentine movement; it is to tie the reforming spirit to the earliest governance of the patria: we reform, therefore we are. By some distance the central feature of the Catholic tradition upon which the periodical draws, however, is the notion of caritas, charity.27 Caritas is inseparable in the periodical’s view from the humanity of humanity. If religion is the “consolation of the unfortunate” (16 June), it is the duty of the fortunate to deploy their humanity—specifically their Christian charity—in the service of others. The notion of charity has particular significance in the Hispanic tradition. According to the most traditional form of this tradition, because Catholic man was born in sin, he had lost control over human affairs. Man was without rights, since he was incapable of exercising them and existed only by virtue of God’s grace.28 At the heart of this conviction was the idea of original sin, according to which man’s only freedom was the evangelical freedom to obey the divine precept. In this view of man as sinner redeemed through grace, man had no political obligation towards any public establishment but rather a purely moral and religious obligation born of caritas and not of a pactum: Siempre en conflicto con los fundamentos de la filosofía política moderna, esta otra católica seguirá durante los primeros años del siglo XIX … promoviendo una antropología natural que vinculaba al hombre a un orden trascendente al mismo, sobre el que no le cabía capacidad decisoria alguna, que también se traducía en los ordenamientos civiles y en las formas de gobierno. Se insistirá en presentar un hombre esencialmente pecador, incapacitado por sus propias pasiones para la política, inválido absolutamente para conformar cualquier voluntad general que no transfiriera al orden de la política sus “voluntades particulares viciadas.” (Portillo Valdés 2000, pp. 120–121) The concepts of original sin and grace are understood differently in the various Catholic as opposed to Protestant traditions. It is generally—and wrongly—assumed that Protestantism is, in its very origins, closer to an 120 A. SHARMAN attitude of active religiosity, since it holds that the individual does not need the intercession of the Church to worship God. But, in at least one historically dominant form of Protestantism, that is, Lutheranism, fallen man could not hope to apprehend the will of God; humans could only wait for salvation through God’s grace; and there was therefore no prospect of producing “a reflection of God’s justice in the arrangement of their lives” (Skinner 2012, p. 13). This is why Cassirer says that the Reformation must wait for humanism for the old religious pathos, which involved the passive wait for divine grace, to be replaced by an active religious ethos. In contrast, it is the Catholic tradition which believes it is possible for men to receive God’s grace, and to earn salvation, through their good works. Where Catholicism perhaps joins Protestantism in displaying what Cassirer calls “mere receptivity” is in the Augustinian view that God’s grace was only open to the baptised, in other words, that humanity could only know the will of God and thus produce a reflection of his laws in human society through the intercession of the Church, that is, by ceding to a strictly hierarchical view of a divinely ordained universe and society. Portillo Valdés describes how Spain’s late eighteenth-century Enlightenment moderates, such as Jovellanos, challenged this view. The moderates were reformist monarchists who sought moral rather than political reform. Jovellanos urged that the technical and administrative reforms that Spain needed in order to progress would come about only through the cultivation of a “public zeal” that was currently lacking because there was no institutional network binding individuals into the economic management of the communities in which they lived.29 Jovellanos appears to have been working with an adapted, classical concept of virtue and even thinking of a species of civic republicanism without the republic. However, and as Portillo Valdés notes, even if Jovellanos did not develop a politics as such, his work gestured towards a political relationship between the prince and his subjects. Here, then, was a new Catholic man: man as virtuous citizen, man as social man.30 Mentioning repeatedly the importance of charitable work and institutions, the Mercurio Peruano appears caught between the earlier, traditional Hispanic Catholic, in significant respects anti-Enlightenment, view of charity and the more moderate, reformist, ilustrado view. In its second ever full edition, on 6 January 1791, a piece entitled “Historia de la Hermandad, y Hospital de la Caridad” recounts the founding of the Hermandad de la Caridad, y de la Misericordia, which resulted from the merger of two existing charitable institutions in Lima dating back to the 1550s. A triumvirate 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 121 of Spanish noblemen (the history deals for the most part with men but does mention the role played by a rich and virtuous widow, Doña Ana Rodriguez de Solorzano), united by a burning desire to “socorrer a sus semejantes, y no por la furiosa ambicion de dominarlos,” obtained the necessary permission from Church and Crown to establish the Hermandad in the main cathedral in 1562. A footnote confirms our sense that this history of a Peruvian charitable institution is an attempt to repair the reputation of a country tarnished by the Black Legend, the writer observing that the presence of “fundaciones piadosas” during the Conquest should be enough to silence critics in other nations who speak only of the cruelties of pacification in the Americas. On the contrary, the Code governing the Hermandad covered: rescuing the poor, curing the ill, burying the dead, educating orphan girls, accompanying and then burying convicted criminals. With the passage of time, the Code was altered to exclude from the institution anyone who was not a Spaniard, mestizo, or quarteron (the offspring of Spaniard and mulato). Since increasing its capacity in 1784, the hospital, the writer calculates, has cured about 1136 people a year. Extrapolating from this description some general consequences for similar institutions, he says that a prudent economy and a truly Christian zeal are the most important resources of all pious work. A series of propositions that have the air of a founding statement on the subject of charity then appear in the next article in the same edition of 6 January. This would-be founding statement has elements of traditional Catholicism, such as the essential corruption of mankind, and even a tilt at the typical enlightened man then in vogue. “Análisis de la Humanidad Contrahida a la Caridad christiana; y exemplos practicos de su exercicio” declares that philosophers nowadays are wary of Christian charity, and that those who do exercise it disguise the fact beneath the name “humanity.” Likewise, among the century’s scholars Philosophy and Humanity are considered the cause and effect of a single virtue. This conflation means, the writer goes on, that even the libertine can give alms, and the atheist pay tribute, when in fact they both have but a superficial compassion designed to gain renown. In opposition to such a view, he will venture the paradox: that humanity is a pure phantom of virtue if we conceive of it as independent from charity and from the religious spirit. Enter any hospital full of suffering people, and you will not find there any panegyrists of philosophical Humanity, any fashionable enlightenment man (ilustrado a la moda), because they are too busy proclaiming their virtue in cafés to do anything that requires effort. There is no plausible philosophy without 122 A. SHARMAN religion, and only the maxims of Christianity can inspire a true humanity. When, on the contrary, man directs his actions exclusively towards the impulses of instinct and geniality, the “depravación de la naturaleza” mixes with all his actions, just as in the composition of remedies there always enters a little poison. The piece strikes a note uncommon in the Mercurio, readers thrown back into a world ruled by the doctrine of original sin and the corruption of man and nature: “san Agustin sostiene que los motivos humanos no pueden producir una virtud verdadera.” There then follows a series of examples of practical charitable endeavours, mostly by nobles in Lima, that prove that only religion can overcome man’s natural corruption and ensure that humanity and philosophy are practised in a virtuous and lasting way. The Mercurio will say the same thing repeatedly: there is no true humanity without religion, and no authentic philosophy without Christianity, whose greatest virtue is charity.31 Christian charity in action is the subject of “Proyecto económico sobre la Internacion y Poblacion de los Andes de la provincia de Guamalies, propuesto y principiado por D. Juan de Bezares” (21 April), though one of the conclusions to draw from this piece is the absence of charity in the majority of the country’s rich and powerful. The writer remarks that happiness among men resides, more than in wealth, in having men with the necessary values of love for their country, sobriety, candour, disinterestedness, spirit, power, and generosity. These are virtuous men who would share their bread with others. But how few such men there are in the current epoch! The writer sees only men of ambition and inertia, tyrannical men, men who are the offspring (naturales partos) of barbarous egoism. The criminal industry of some of these men is an affront to religion, since it is destined merely to feed on their “macilenta substancia.” This is the proper condition of big fish and voracious serpents (los grandes peces y … las serpientes voraces) who recognise no power greater than themselves. These men are pseudo-men (Pseudo-hombres). However, among these “civiles Antropófagos,” there is the occasional true man, one of whom is the subject of the rest of the article. The piece goes on to recount how Don Juan de Bezares went to this fertile but inaccessible Andean area armed with the instruments of God in order to facilitate trade but also to exercise charity by gathering into a settlement vagrants who had been living in a “semipagan” state in the woods. The result was a religious colony in 1785 and, by 1789, a road connecting the area more easily to the outside world. Bezares is a charitable entrepreneur, though the Mercurio casts 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 123 him as a New Testament Christ-figure feeding the five thousand and firmly on the side of the oppressed. In two other articles devoted to charity, on orphanages and orphans’ hospitals, the Christian charity of the people of Lima is duly acknowledged, though not without barbed comment on the functioning of religion in the Hispanic world. In the first article, of 6 March, “Noticia histórica y económica del colegio de las Niñas Expósitas de esta Capital,” the author concludes that good administration is the most valuable principle of pious work, by which is meant the Tridentine view that religiosity without the material support of organised religion is insufficient. Five months later, on 21 August (continued on 25 August), the Mercurio publishes “Noticia histórica de la fundacion, Progresos, y actual estado de la Real Casa Hospital de Niños Expósitos de Nuestra Señora de Atocha.” The law of Christ, the writer avers, dictates that the strong support the weak. Examples of Creole charity from history abound but, he continues, this charitable morality is nowadays not widely adopted in practice; the norm, rather, is selfishness. However, there are those in Peru who have turned their zeal towards the innocent weak, that is, children, above all orphaned children. In fact, he continues, charity towards orphans was a practice known to the Incas.32 And even at the time of the Conquest, one sees ancestors (i.e. the conquistadors) with a sword in one hand, holding out the other to infirm and destitute girls. This is the “spirit of charity” (espíritu de caridad). All of the writer’s efforts in this piece guide the reader to a greater patriotism. Having sacrificed any special claim for the priority of Christian charity over non-Christian cultures (after initially stressing the importance of Christian caritas, he highlights the presence of charity among the Indians before the Conquest, in other words, recognises that charitable behaviour towards the weak does not belong exclusively to the Hispanic Christian tradition), his larger purpose is to show that Indians, conquistadors, and present-day Creoles are all now examples of the Peruvian charitable spirit. On the basis of the historical evidence, he writes, one cannot say that benevolence in Peru is a modish thing, as it is, like fashion, in France. Unlike the picture of a cruel country portrayed by historians, charity has always been part of the Peruvian character. The piece ends by bringing the story of the institution up to date, informing readers that when the hospital decided to accept other castas, it set about educating them separately. Here caritas stops short of Christian fraternisation. And 124 A. SHARMAN stops short likewise, where Indians and blacks are concerned, of a politics that might prevent the original suffering. Caritas, then, but not pactum.33 The Mercurio Peruano contains articles from multiple pseudonymous contributors and letters from named and anonymous private individuals. Even if it recognisably belongs to that thing called the Peruvian Ilustración, it nevertheless speaks with different voices.34 There is the historical voice, the philosophical voice, the classical voice, the honorific voice, and the religious voice. Voices seldom ring out alone (the classical voice is often called upon to show the ancient pedigree of some very modern scientific innovation). On occasion the voices contradict each other. At other times a single voice contradicts itself, as when the religious voice cannot be sure whether charity comes before or after depravity, begins with or predates the Christian patria. the hIStorIogrAPhy oF Abject objectS Charity is the hallmark of the patria, even if it is unclear whether charity predates the Christian patria or emanates from an entity that transcends it. In tracing the work of charity in the country, the Mercurio Peruano places its historiography in the service of patriotism. It should not be forgotten that the interior of the patria was still largely unknown or inaccurately known by the 1790s—whence the obsession with mapping, with mapping the small fragments of a vast and important land, a “Tierra pingüe” (pingüe, plentiful, abundant, rich), as the Mercurio puts it on 20 October.35 The patriotic intent is manifest from that expression of the desire to correct the “paralogisms” of foreign authors voiced in the first edition, of 2 January 1791. The piece is dismissive of all the histories, geographies, and general meditations on Peru compiled on the banks of the Seine or Thames with “el espíritu de Sistema.” The systematising spirit and national prejudice have presented a completely different Peru to the one laid bare by “conocimiento practico.” The Mercurio’s preference here for empirical practical knowledge is apparent, even if it is underpinned by an uncritical schema according to which the empirical as local knowledge stands over and against the abstract as distant, that is, foreign knowledge.36 Be that as it may, a patriotic historiography that is not heterogeneous to religion offers readers accurate fragments of Peruvian history and geography. In a dissertation that runs across three issues, from 28 July to 4 August 1791, entitled “Peregrinacion por el Rio Huallaga hasta la laguna de la gran Cocama, hecha por el Padre Predicador Apostólico Fray Manuel 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 125 Sobreviela en el año pasado de 1790,” the Mercurio charts the expedition of Father Sobreviela to a “felicitous piece of South America” that he believed could be a great centre of maritime trade. The Mercurio raised the necessary funds to produce a new map of the area based on Sobreviela’s journey, a journey that charts previously uncharted areas as well as remapping areas thought to have been adequately surveyed. Thus, according to Sobreviela, the River Marañon is 450 varas wide and 30 deep while La Condamine, a footnote informs us, had it at just 250 toises. The geographical expedition, as well as supplying the Indians with agricultural tools and seed, is at the same time an evangelising one, Padre Sobreviela’s “fervour” impelling him to “restaurar los perdidos” (reclaim lost souls). Knowing how important it is that all subjects speak the same language, so that many different nations may form one people, the article reports that the Indians made progress in their command of Castilian (28 July).37 Again, the region’s geography is inseparable from a certain religious social fabric, in this instance woven by the Jesuits whose discipline the writer admires. Throughout the dissertation a clear sense of the superiority of the civilised Spanish Catholic legacy sits alongside a near-anthropological description, full of pathos, of Indian produce, and production. The fruits they produce, the skill with which they hunt tigers, and the way in which they distinguish themselves in the production of beautiful blankets and feathered hats does not go unnoticed (31 July). In the conclusion to the piece, the periodical recounts how the Sobreviela expedition comes across fragments of an Inca bridge close by the Royal road so admired by Peruvian historians, stretches of which time, quadrupeds, or man have not been able to annihilate the memory of, memories which give the lie to the ancient and modern superstition of a few fatuous people (la antigua y moderna supercheria de algunos fatuos) (4 August). Here is where the Mercurio’s attention and pathos, which chime with the (Christian) Enlightenment virtue of tolerance, is also a patriotism, since it is the patria’s past, here the great indestructible roads of the Incas, that is being recovered. The great Inca roads of the past lead, naturally, to the kindred achievements of the present. For the final triumph of the expedition has to do with communication. By re-establishing the Lima–Maynas route, the writer notes, it now takes only three months for news to reach Madrid. The dissertation demonstrates well two voices of the Mercurio. The Apostolic Father’s achievements are ceremoniously lauded in appropriately elegant language (“El Padre Sobreviela … fué recibido por el 126 A. SHARMAN Presidente de las Misiones y por el Teniente Gobernador con todas las demostraciones de admiracion y hospitalidad á que es acreedor un Peregrino, que dirigiéndose por rutas creídas intransitables aporta repentinamente á nuevas regiones en que encuentra amigos y co-hermanos interesados en las glorias de la propia Nacion” [fol. 239]), while his scientific accomplishments are outlined with meticulous notation (“El padre Sobreviela lo pasó con felicidad á las dos y quarenta minutos de la tarde; y continuó su navegacion hasta las 6 en cuya hora se arrimaron las canoas á la orilla izquierda, enfrente de la confluencia del río Chipurana á los 6 grados y 32 minutos” [fol. 238]). However, in the edition of 10 February the Mercurio does something different, which it will signal as one of its trademarks. Against the histories of conquests, councils and kings, it will tell the story of the ordinary and the mundane, the story even of abject objects, since for a heart full of humanity and philosophy “son dignos de meditacion hasta los objetos que parecen mas despreciables” (7 April). A story of abject objects of course fits well, in the eyes of European historians, with the story of that place held to be abject called Peru, which, because it is poor, is the “object of few studies.” What follows would not be out of place in twenty-firstcentury postmodern historiography: La pobreza en las cosas humanas hace el mismo efecto que las lentes inversas en los tubos ópticos: empequeñece los objetos y los confunde. A estas calidades, que en cierto modo le son inherentes, la opinion tirana de los conceptos ha añadido otras mas sensibles. El hombre pobre es casi necesariamente obscuro, incivil, abatido, defectuoso, y por colmo de infelicidad se vuelve ridículo. No le basta el ser virtuoso para merecer el aprecio de sus semejantes: es menester que sea un monstruo, ó que haga milagros. … La ninguna riqueza de estas partes [i.e. the places discovered by explorers such as Cook] apénas permitió se les designase un miserable lugar en los mapas geográficos …. El zelo doctrinal, el espíritu de conquista, el comercio, el estudio de la antigüedad, ó de la historia natural, raras veces se dirigen á los países pobres, y casi nunca se fixan en ellos. (8 May) The tyrannical opinion of concepts ignores poor countries and their people, makes them appear ridiculous even. It is not enough for them to be virtuous; to be noticed they must be monstrous or miraculous. Learned knowledge rarely addresses poor countries, and almost never concentrates on them. 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 127 Despite its histories of monuments, history is never reduced to monumentalisation. In many respects, as the piece on Peru’s ancient monuments itself says (17 March), this non-monumentalising approach is forced upon the Mercurio, owing to the destruction of the archives of Cuzco, Caxamarca, and Quito, the disintegration of the Quipos, and subsequently the ignorance or carelessness of those charged with safeguarding tradition. The observer is forced instead to have recourse to the interpretation of fragments and ancient ruins (llamémosle interpretacion de los fragmentos y ruinas antiguas). Let us not overstep the mark here by attempting to turn the author of this piece into a postmodernist avant la lettre. The final clause of the above sentence reads “para completar el imperfecto retrato que nos trazó Garcilaso de su antiguo imperio”; he is still clearly interested in completing the picture in traditional style. What one sees elsewhere in the Mercurio, however, and in keeping with its insistence on the value of objetos que parecen mas despreciables, is a penchant for seemingly insignificant fragments. Stepping away from the history of the formal institutions of the territory, the Mercurio meditates on objects of a different order. By the dictates of format as much as by temperament, the Mercurio prefers fragments. Fragments of an Inca bridge. Or of the Arabic language.38 The fragments pile up as the weeks go by: the birth of a deformed child (6 January), children who tutean their parents (16 January), meteorological and astronomical observations, the death of a 135-year-old man (10 February), machinery to alleviate the work done by blacks on cacao (13 February), the country’s exports (17 February), how to avoid lightning in the sierra (20 February), the dearth of women among the periodical’s subscribers (27 February), the prowess of the Incas (17 March), women who insist on the title of señorito/a for their child in the middle of childbirth (19 May), botanical taxonomy (29 May), black slave congregations (16 June), young people who follow a bad example (26 June), poetry (3 July), vengeance (4 August), degeneration (14 August), navigation (3 September), women flower-sellers (18 September), Indians (2 October, 11 December), music in the theatre (20 October), a discalced Trinitarian monastery (23 October), cedar trees (10 November), the word “subscription” (8 December), the origin of winds (15 December), the yaraví (22 December), and the Bishop of Quito’s edict on a new road (29 December).39 All the fragments of the territory variously called “Peru,” “Nacion,” “pais,” “patria,” “República,” and even “Imperio Peruano” (28 April, 7 August) are worthy of attention. Especially since the few studies of poor countries that do exist are invariably inaccurate, not least de 128 A. SHARMAN Pauw’s mendacious view that Peru’s university has not produced a single writer capable of producing so much as a bad book. The writer addresses de Pauw directly: ¿Puedes tú acaso desde la larga distancia en que nos separa la tierra, y el oceano, sin haber pisado nuestro suelo Peruano, corrido sus Provincias, considerado nuestra policia, aprendido nuestros idiomas, y penetrado nuestras modales, acertar en algo en tus reflexiones Americanas, y pronunciar sobre el mérito de los autores Limeños sentencias que logren executoriarse entre los verdaderos Sabios? (10 July, fol. 182) What of Peralta, Pardo de Figueroa, and Miguel de Lima, he continues? The Mercurio Peruano is under no illusions: the reason why Spanish American genius is not well known, the author remarks, citing words from Father Tomas Torrejon, is because the region is so far from the powerful countries: “Nacen tan cerca del Sol que alumbra, como lejos del que manda” (17 July). Of course, the single, most distinctive thing that makes the region a “nation” is its Indian past. The dearth of articles on Indian matters suggests the subject is a dangerous one for Creoles. Present-day Indians remained an awkward subject, often a source of embarrassment, for contributors. Less so the Incas. Despite the risk of bestowing legitimacy on their direct descendants by praising the Indian past unduly, the Mercurio could, through a metonymic operation which focused on the territory, geography, and geology of the patria, and which involved no small leap of faith, make the Indians’ Inca forebears into the ancestors of the Creole patria.40 And a patria with a distinctive—glorious, imperial—past is nothing less than a nación. On several occasions, however, patriotic historiography is indistinguishable from the most traditional, at times crude religious discourse of Empire on the civilising mission of the Conquest. In a piece entitled “Historia de las Misiones de Caxamarquilla” (30 June), the writer claims that there is heroism when man makes himself superior to his weak nature and through virtue approximates the divinity. This “virtue of heroes” that is proper to missionaries is driven by celestial philosophy. There then follows an account of events from 1757, in which three reverend fathers embark on a raid, with 300 Indians, of a pueblo called Matemague, the result of which is the kidnapping of three children, the eldest of whom, “catequizada, civilizada, e inteligente en el idioma castellano,” went on to act as their interpreter and to provide valuable details of Indian life—including how to “reduce” them (fol. 141).41 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 129 This is the communitas christianae used to legitimise Creole, not just conquistador, violence against the Indians. The Mercurio is at times unequivocal. Contemporary missionaries, Fray Manuel Sobreviela writes in a letter published on 9 October, are following in the footsteps of the conquistadors to subdue “Naciones bárbaras” and to take advantage of the wealth that is to be had in the Interior. If Peruvian Creoles such as Sobreviela can follow in La Condamine’s footsteps (which is literally what he has done by following La Condamine’s trail [9 October]), and in so doing become the heirs to his knowledge, this is because, as the Mercurio puts it in a later piece, as direct descendants of the conquistadors they enjoy the right of conquest that is the product of God’s light (11 December). This is enlightenment, and the Enlightenment, as conquest. AnAtomy oF enLIghtenment In a different vein, though indissociable from the patriotic historiography, are the Mercurio’s articles on Enlightenment reforms. Here, as much as it is a question of knowing the country, of shedding light on what it was in the past and on what it is in the present, it is about reforming the country, making it other than what it is. This strain of the Enlightenment cannot but be critical of the patria as it is currently configured, and as such will always invite accusations of wanting to make the patria in the image of other patrias, in accordance perhaps with a thought based on foreign paralogisms. A paradigmatic statement of Peruvian ilustrado values appears in “Historia de la Fundacion, Progresos, y Actual Estado de la Real Universidad de San Marcos de Lima” (7 July). The way for this article on university reform has been prepared by a letter from the Bishop of Quito, published in the Mercurio on 23 June, which laments the education that he had to suffer in his youth. In the Bishop’s view, in order to eradicate the “enfermedad, y cancer” that is this education, it is necessary to impose enlightened methods with an iron will, lest all remain in darkness. The later piece, which runs from 7 to 17 July, then focuses on the curriculum reform at the University of San Marcos: El fomento y cultivo de las Ciencias asegura el esplendor y prosperidad de los Estados. En vano el eloqüente y peligroso Rousseau, uniendo á la sutileza de Sócrates el espíritu altivo é independente [sic] de Diógenes, ha pretendido hacernos envidiar la infeliz suerte de aquellas abatidas naciones, que oprimi- 130 A. SHARMAN das con las duras cadenas de la ignorancia vegetan tristemente en la obscuridad y las tinieblas. La imperiosa luz de la verdad, superior á las ilusiones de los sofismas y al engañoso prestigio de las declaraciones, ha disipado con los socorros de la razon, la autoridad, y la experiencia, las negras sombras que acumulaba el espíritu de singularidad sobre la imágen sagrada de la Sabiduría. (7 July, fol. 160) These sonorous declarations have something of the pulpit about them. Declamatory, haughty, they declare, contra Rousseau, that a state with enlightened knowledge is categorically superior to those downtrodden nations (abatidas naciones) that lack it. Everything happens as though there were not different types of knowledge, different kinds of light, but rather knowledge, reason, authority, and experience ranged against ignorance, darkness, dusk, illusions, and shadows. As though illusions did not require light. In the continuation of the piece, on 17 July, the writer invokes the Conde de Campomanes (a figure already invoked on 7 and 10 July), the intellectual driving force behind similar reforms in Spain. In Spain before Campomanes, the writer says, dusty abstractions and arcane reasoning (it is not, now, a matter of reason versus unreason but of different types of reason) were the order of the day, as they were in many European universities. However, San Marcos anticipated Campomanes by introducing reforms that Spanish universities would not. Salamanca, for instance, refused to teach the New Philosophy. In allied pieces throughout 1791, there is an ongoing meditation on the validity of Aristotle’s legacy, a legacy synonymous with the dominant philosophical tradition of Scholasticism. The Mercurio’s position shifts in this respect. At times it will vilify Aristotle; at others, petition for the need to incorporate Aristotelianism into a “filosofía libre moderna” (17, 20 November). There is an indissoluble link in the Western tradition between the university and religion. Universities were established as extensions of religious orders, and theology was the principal discipline taught in them. And yet, in this instance, for all their continued close ties to religion and theology, the universities’ proposals to introduce new subjects are necessarily at the same time reforms aimed at altering the traditional relationship between the university and religion. In the quotation above from 7 July, the writer speaks of dissipating ignorance with the help of reason, authority, and experience. With the proposed new reforms, and indeed in the very fact of proposing them, however, it is no longer the same authority. 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 131 The Mercurio Peruano is a roll-call of Enlightenment topoi. A good number of the articles deal with public works. Everything done in the name of public works is done for the “pública Felicidad,” the Bishop of Quito says in a letter of 23 June. On 7 April the Mercurio announces a competition for the best dissertation, or Memoria, on the subject of the need for toilets in houses.42 On 18 September it broadcasts a similar competition for the best dissertation on road-building, necessary because the interior provinces’ roads are the worst in the world. Dissertations, it states, must be anonymous. In this as in all such propositions, the Mercurio never misses the opportunity to assess the degree to which Peru is up with or behind the times. Modernity is, in this sense, an attitude of mind.43 To determine Peru’s relative position in the modern scheme of things, the periodical constantly draws comparisons with other places—above all with Spain. The edition of 20 October, for instance, comments on Antonio de Ulloa’s plan for a salubrious city. Spain features as the model, not because it is the most enlightened country, but because it is the Motherland and, consequently, the closest rival. Spain is thus simultaneously the best example of the difficulties facing any Hispanic Ilustración and the country which those in the colonies most want to outshine. But there are oddities in the midst of such pieces. The editions of 9 and 12 June feature two extensive articles by a private individual on the phenomenon of tides. The Mercurio gives over more than five of its pages on each occasion to rambling pieces which argue that tides are produced when the sea bumps into the land mass. Only on 23 June, in a response by one of the Mercurio’s regular contributors, does it become apparent that the content of the original articles is not sanctioned by the periodical. The author of the response makes it clear, rather, that tides are caused largely by the moon.44 Another oddity is perhaps less odd and signals the Mercurio’s more or less conventional post-Trent Enlightenment stance on miracles. In the edition of 12 May, in the “Continuacion de la Descripcion Histórica y Corográfica de la Provincia de Chichas y Tarija,” the writer discusses the phenomenon of a buried wooden cross that was found by conquistadors in the 1570s. The cross was immediately taken by people to be a miracle, a supposition supported by many ecclesiastics who argued that it was proof that St Thomas Aquinas had been in America. The writer refutes this suggestion, observing that there was nothing supernatural about its presence in the area, given that there had been Christian inhabitants there earlier, and arguing that there is no hard evidence that would support the 132 A. SHARMAN hypothesis of Aquinas’ presence. Instead, he continues, a few “miserable conjectures,” prejudice (la preocupacion), and personal interest have taken the place of truth and criticism. A footnote on Feijóo and the Peruvian Macanaz’s work on supposed miracles soon mutates into a fullfrontal attack on the Jesuits, whose accounts, the writer says, are not to be trusted on the matter of the missions and antiquities. The aside concludes with the words of Don Pedro Montengon: “De las cosas mas seguras/la mas segura es dudar.”45 From the rich variety of articles on Enlightenment reforms treated in the Mercurio’s pages, I shall concentrate on three that are altogether less odd, three areas that attract significant attention throughout the year: public health, commerce, and mining. The treatment of these three areas of reform will take us close to the periodical’s “modern” understanding of the relationship between faith and knowledge. Public Health On the matter of public health is where the Mercurio hopes to bring its enlightened knowledge to bear for the most immediate impact on the public good. Leaving aside minor matters, such as municipal baths, which are the work of God and a lesson in patriotism (28 April), the single most important public health concern that runs throughout the year’s writing is that of burials. The Mercurio effectively launches a campaign, beginning on 27 January 1791, to dissuade the authorities from burying people in churches in the middle of towns. Such burials are bad for public health. The mephitic airs that emanate from decomposed corpses threaten the well-being of the living; much better that people be laid to rest outside the city walls in dedicated cemeteries (camposantos), as has happened in the village of Tarma on the order of the enlightened Gobernador Intendente (27 January). The religious matrix of the articles and letters on what is, in late eighteenth-century Peru, an essentially Christian burial practice is apparent. Death, the Mercurio declares, enters the world through the sins of our first Fathers, and the practice of burying the dead by covering them with earth populates the stories of the Bible at every turn. In fact, the Mercurio will use the biblical tradition as a weighty historical precedent. The Jews, it notes, would rather have perished than bury their dead in the city’s temple (13 February).46 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 133 And yet the periodical’s objection to existing burial practice cannot but be critical of the Church. As a result of such practices, Christian churches have become the deposit of what is most filthy (inmundo) in humanity (13 February). Indeed, the Church is doubly criticised, since it is reprimanded, along the lines of a very modern, but doubtless also very traditional Christian, egalitarianism, for the fact that those buried in the centre of town are the monied who have paid for the privilege. In such pieces, there is not only an attempt to force the hand of a determinate religious authority, namely, the Lima Church; there is at the same time an effort to override religion itself.47 However, recalling what we said about a certain idiom shared by Christian and Enlightenment discourse, it is noticeable that the attempted overriding of religion is itself suffused with Catholicism. It is audible, for instance, in the “salvation” brought about by the “provident hand” of Enlightenment reform (the village of Tarma “bendecirá siempre aquella mano próvida [of the Señor Intendente] que la redimió de las enfermedades” [27 January, fol. 58]) or in the Mercurio’s conventional expression of gratitude on learning that the viceroy is examining the possibility of building a camposanto in Lima (the Sociedad “dirige al Cielo los votos mas fervorosos” [17 February, fol. 127]) or in the republication of a poem with a religious theme to counter religious objections to enlightened reforms. The message of the poem is: Die in God’s grace and you will reach heaven, no matter where you are buried; die in sin and no intercession by the Church and no amount of luxury expended on fine tombs will get you there (¡Mas hay de tí, si mueres en pecado!/Jamas para aliviar tal desconsuelo/Te han de valer Iglesia ni sagrado) (20 February, fol. 136).48 For all are equal in the eyes of God; all will be judged on their merits. Using the vehicle of a thoroughly religious idiom, the poem deploys a ChristianEnlightenment egalitarianism against the wrapping of organised religion. Despite the—unavoidable—religious undertones of the discourse on what remains fundamentally a Christian burial practice, the explanation for desisting with current practice is a scientific one before it is a religious or theological one. The already mentioned article of 13 February, “Examen Histórico-Filosófico de las Diversas costumbres que ha habido en el Mundo relativamente á los Entierros,” that is to say, the piece that deals most explicitly with burial as a social, perforce religious practice, ends by emphasising the role of historians as simple compilers of histories and that of philosophers as investigators of causes: 134 A. SHARMAN Hemos visto que la necesidad local, las vicisitudes de la guerra, las proporciones del terreno, los prejuicios de los Pueblos, y la calidad del temperamento, han dado el tono á esta costumbre. En otro Mercurio analizaremos las fatales conseqüencias que tiene en lo físico; y en algun otro rasgo repasaremos los Concilios, y demas Autoridades sagradas y civiles, que la repugnan, y la prohiben expresamente. Queremos que nada falte á la explicacion de este asunto en la parte histórica, filosófica, física, canónica, y legal, para que esta América pueda propender á que se mire sin repugnancia el utilísimo establecimiento de los Campos-Santo. (13 February, fol. 122) Despite its protestations of 7 July cited above, like Rousseau the periodical is preoccupied less with the problem of God and more with historical, philosophical, physical, canonical, and legal explanations. As the pieces on burial never stop repeating, the problem lies in the peculiarly human reasons that cause ayre corrompido.49 In the very fact of this preoccupation, as much as in the particular expression given to it, in other words, in gnawing away at such questions issue after issue, one sees the coincidence with Cassirer’s “new norm for human existence,” the idea of law and social justice as “the standard by which human existence is to be measured and tested” (Cassirer 2009, p. 154). On a far more overtly religious register, which yet appears to us to support rather than refute Cassirer’s claim, a letter published on 26 May on the subject of burials says this: “Feliz el siglo en que consultándose á la salud del Pueblo, se procura al Augusto Monarca del Universo el culto que exige el Dios de los vivos.”50 To pay attention to public health is to worship the God of the living. Old fragment, new meaning: here the gospels are used to urge the reform of institutionalised religion. Let us conclude this section on public health with an important caveat. For all its command of the contemporary empirical sciences, the Mercurio’s science is frequently medieval. Its preferred explanation for the spread of illness caused by town burials is “mephitic airs” (17 February, 10 April). Ceasing the practice of burying the dead in towns will improve the air and enhance “ventilation.” Mephitic airs as the root of disease is an explanation more or less unchanged since the Middle Ages. It was a staple of medieval medicine that corrupt airs caused illness. Not until the latter part of the nineteenth century did the water-borne nature of many diseases become known. In a piece that runs from 16 to 20 October, called “Medicina Práctica. Resultado del Pronóstico y Precauciones para el Otoño Publicados en el Mercurio Peruano Tom. II.Pag. 275,” the writer 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 135 warns people about the risk to health in the autumn. The article is populated by humours and hysterical women, bloodletting and ancient Roman treatments, and claims that sugar is a stimulant salt. “Modernity” has a relative, transient quality.51 Commerce The second major theme of the Mercurio is commerce. Commerce is mentioned in the “Prospecto” and in the first issue. But it makes its full weighty entrance only in March, when it is the subject of perhaps the longest dissertation of the year. Strictly speaking, the theme is less that of commerce and more that of free commerce. In January/February, it was free trade, not just trade, that was described as a blessing that had allowed Lima to thrive despite the loss of territory to the new Viceroyalty of La Plata (2 February). In its insistence on the need for Peru to develop its commerce, the Mercurio Peruano is flirting with danger. While it would seem to be simply echoing the official line of Bourbon reformers, according to which the progress of modern nations flourishes through improved commerce (see 20 March), to speak of commerce in 1791 is to enter a fraught arena in which Spain’s trade monopoly over the Americas is the elephant in the colony. Moreover, the Mercurio’s many and lengthy articles on commerce do not treat of the subject in general; they deal specifically with the history and contemporary situation of Peru. Concern for commerce is patriotic. The first extended piece on commerce, “Disertacion Histórica y Política sobre el Comercio del Perú,” is dated 20 March and runs across eight issues, concluding on 17 April 1791. According to the “universal system” of social and political ties (enlazes), “modern” nations flourish only through improving their commerce. As we saw in Chap. 2 in the context of science, here “universal” and “modern” are synonyms, the author gesturing to the late eighteenth-century theme of the preferability of commercial empires to those built on conquest.52 Although the piece does not itself say as much, it is apparent that the social and political ties (enlazes sociales y politicos) of commerce are the equivalent of the free bonds that bind the members of an association. Given that “la Patria y la Nacion” are currently “defraudadas de estas luces” (have been robbed of this enlightenment), Cephalio’s task is to bring to light the work of contemporary authors on the subject of trade, to publish the true “anatomy” of Peru’s commerce (20 March). In part due to the country’s geography, mining has triumphed while agriculture has been neglected. The Incas had limited 136 A. SHARMAN building technology and were faced with awkward terrain—hence the need for public works reforms if a modern nation is to prosper (24 March). After a lengthy analysis of the country’s faltering trade position, in which Lima registers an overall trade surplus with the surrounding ports of America only because of its huge surplus in its dealings with Buenos Aires, the writer concludes that continuing to import more from these ports than it exports to them is a parlous situation (27 March). The answer to the country’s problem is, he maintains, to look for wealth in its breast (seno) rather than on its surface, that is, to turn to its mines. In a grammatically and syntactically awkward paragraph that appears uncertain as to which is the channel and which the commodity of wealth-creation, the writer seems to praise silver as a species of river (una especie de Rio) along which all useful and necessary things sail (por el qual se transportan, y navegan todas las cosas útiles, y necesarias); and commerce as just the rope of the well (solo la cuerda del pozo), without which the water enclosed in the well’s depths is useless (31 March). The writer urges the country to ensure a balance between the extraction of metals and the volume of imported goods, but comes down heavily on the need for free trade and, above all, against Spain’s monopoly, a “quimérico designio” (fol. 240).53 With the free trade law of 1778, and subsequent uncontrolled increase in imports, many traders have been left with unsellable produce and have made losses. This is not, however, he continues, the result of freedom. Freedom does not consist in doing whatever one wants, but in combining methodically and thoughtfully the companies and their results. Do not try and legislate with fixed tonnages, but instead give to vassals the hope of enjoying the fruits of their own labour; the setbacks experienced will suffice to make them more circumspect. Freedom and self-interest: these are the two principles on which all agriculture, trade, and arts are founded (31 March, fol. 242). The real difference between the trade situation before and after the permiso of 1778 is not the balance between imports and exports, which has remained the same, but the fact that trade is now conducted by a greater number of individuals and that a family can now dress in the most exquisite European textiles for the same cost that a few years ago would have got them only the rude garments that national industry could manage. Citing works by Joseph Childs, Cephalio petitions for the benefits of low interest rates. Here, he maintains, one sees the strict link between cause and effect, and silver interest rates as the “true barometer” of a kingdom’s happiness (fol. 248). Printing paper money rather than dealing in coins 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 137 made from precious metals, he says, following Hume, will in a country rich in gold and silver lead to national ruin (3 April), the sole beneficiary of such a policy being Spain (7 April). Moreover, large companies lead to the ruin of individual commercial ventures, and therefore in the long term to true competition, through the practice of selling at below cost when they see a saturated market (7 April). In the following issue, Cephalio reports without comment on the sale of black slaves, and on the irrigation plans of Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa; and with comment on the common themes dear to Creole hearts of the shortage of labour and consumers in Peru, and the poor condition of the Indians (10 April). The dissertation on commerce ends on 17 April. There, Cephalio does now comment on slaves, speaking of the cruel nature of their treatment. The piece ends with the three Cs, comercio, comunicación, and cultura, and restates the close connection which it sees between mining and the new Enlightenment. In sustained analyses such as this one on Peru’s commerce it is hard to discern a particularly “Catholic” voice anywhere. Mining What, finally, of that industry that is closest to the Mercurio’s heart? In 1791, Peru’s mining industry remained the mainstay of the country’s economy and appears to have increased production and overall earnings in the final years of the eighteenth century, that is, after the loss of Potosí to the Viceroyalty of La Plata (for Potosí see 11 August).54 For the Mercurio, mining is an obsession, which begins in the first edition (2 January) and continues throughout the year. The topic is squarely addressed on 9 January, 30 January (which includes a fifteen-folio supplement, or Dictionary of mineralogical and metallurgical terms), 20 March, 31 March, 17 April, 12 May (letter), 22 May (letter), 12 June (briefly), 19 June, 11 August, and, in a long letter by minerologist Daniel Weber, on 24 and 27 November and 1 and 4 December, to which the Society appends its own reflections on 8 December. The particular object of its obsession is the debate surrounding the so-called barrel method. The Mercurio is convinced that the introduction of the barrel method, and hence the abandonment of the traditional amalgamation or “patio” method first used in America in 1571 by Pedro Fernández Velasco (a fact ignored by the French historical dictionary) (30 January) and given its most brilliant exposition in Barba Cura’s Arte de los metales, which is the subject of praise by Feijóo (12 June), represents the most enlightened reform of all. 138 A. SHARMAN Not only would the barrel method increase the amount of silver extracted, it would at the same time be quicker, cheaper (11 August and 24 November through to 4 December), and even bring health benefits to the Indians (12 May). This would be practical Enlightenment in the service of practical mining. The amalgamation method dominates, less because it has been shown objectively to be more effective, and more out of habit and tradition (4 and 8 December). Throughout all these entries, virtually nowhere is religion or religious faith evoked. Allusions to religion are nowhere apparent in the main pieces of 9 January, 30 January, 20 and 31 March, and 17 April. A letter published in the 9 January edition from a mine owner defending accusations levelled at his class does draw on biblical language, the writer bemoaning the price paid by many for the actions of a few sinners (es mucha injusticia que por pocos pecadores parezcan tantos inocentes). A letter published in response on 30 January proposes a series of reforms, principally to ensure that the mining industry has the necessary workforce, before ending with a conventional formula on the need to respect the will of God, which is really a way of asking for patience until such time as people can be persuaded that the coercive solutions required by mine-owners are compatible with the wishes (gusto) of the Indians. Elsewhere, religion makes token appearances, usually in honorific final flourishes such as the letters by Francisco Joseph Rodriguez (12 May) and Francisco Rufia (“ruego al Señor guarde su vida muchos años”) (22 May). Despite the fact that much of the information on mining has been supplied by an archbishop, the Archbishop of Lima (see 19 June, fol. 125), the articles on mining are almost entirely devoid of invocations of God or of explicit references to religion. From another perspective, however, “faith” is in every seam. This is not necessarily the determinate instituted apparatus of faith—the Catholic religion—that one associates with the Hispanic world. We are thinking instead of Derrida’s argument that reason is shot through with a certain experience of religion, that the convergence of the experience of belief and the experience of sacredness shows up in the testimonial function of knowledge. There is faith, trust, confidence, and belief in the ability of the linguistico-conceptual apparatus to speak truthfully and in enlightened fashion about Peru’s mines. It could be no other way. There is no act of enlightened knowledge, even an act that studiously avoids mention of God, religion, or any of the other totemic words of the Christian tradition, that does not presuppose a kind of faith in the testimonial pact that subtends all knowledge, where the truth is promised beyond all knowledge 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 139 and all proof. “It amounts to saying: ‘Believe what I say as one believes in a miracle’” (Derrida 2002, p. 98). Even if one is bearing witness to the most everyday occurrence, testimony must still “appeal to faith as would a miracle.” In other words, even the most elementary speech act already presupposes a minimal shared belief in the intelligibility of language, a shared confidence in the capacity of auditory grunts to mean something for a group; it is, Derrida writes, “that which in faith acquiesces before or beyond all questioning, in the already common experience of a language and of a ‘we’” (p. 96). There are, the Mercurio writer says, many people who are averse to (refractarios, opposed to, resistant to, averse to) testimonies of public faith (la fé pública [19 June]). But what matters, says the issue of 11 August dedicated exclusively to “Nuevos Beneficios de Metales en las Máquinas de Potosi,” is the truth, which the Mercurio has always sought either in the history of the country or in present-day facts. Where history is concerned, truth is sought in the most reliable documents (los documentos mas fidedignos); where present-day facts are concerned, it is sought in the signature of those involved (baxo de la firma de los interesados). In this way, one can flatter oneself that one enjoys the faith, confidence, or trust of the public, that one has public opinion on one’s side (por este camino debiamos lisongearnos de gozar en paz la fe y concepto público [11 August, fol. 267]). The writer’s point is that the Mercurio’s source, in this case Don Francisco Rufia, is an honourable man who has put his name, and lent his signature, to his findings. After all, when one includes in a periodical paper the account of some fact or event, one does so on the basis of (sobre la fe de, putting one’s faith in, trusting to) the signature that has authorised it (la firma que lo autoriza [fol. 267]). One would not, in all good faith, publish something one believed to be false or by someone one believed to be untrustworthy. The edition of 11 August ends by reproducing, firstly, two accounts of the results of the tests conducted to determine which of the two main methods has the greater benefits, accounts supplied, and signed, by Francisco Rufia and Joseph Ascencio de Arizmendi, respectively, and, secondly, the note on “Beneficios Jurídicos” by Rufia. In order for truth to prevail, and for the benefits of the barrel method to be accepted, Rufia writes in this last piece, Daniel Weber has asked Señor Intendente Don Francisco de Paula Sanz to witness new experiments in person (que presencie en persona nuevos experimentos), the results of which will be validated by independent subjects (sugetos indiferentes). 140 A. SHARMAN Y con esto contesto á su Esquela del dia de pedimento de razon de beneficios, rogando á Dios guarde su vida muchos años. Potosi y Junio 22 de 1791. B. L. M. de Vm, su mas atento servidor Francisco Rufia. Three months later, on 24 November, the Mercurio begins publication of Daniel Weber’s lengthy response to an anonymous detractor of the barrel method who has published his own account in a special Diario. Weber writes of the need for moderation in such responses but is palpably incandescent at what he sees as the falsehoods and fakery that have attended the whole process of testing the merits of the new barrel method which he (Weber) supports. The new published account, Weber writes, comes from a man (known to Weber and christened by him the Buen-Serrano) who has not had a single day’s experience in mineralogy. His opponent’s opinion is founded on frivolous reasons based on habit (la costumbre) (4 December, fol. 242). In contrast, any authentic mineralogist hoping to produce valid work should both possess the requisite intellectual training and have descended into the open depths (las profundidades abiertas) (fol. 218), that is, gone down the mines, to lift the veil that covers nature’s work. For physics to progress to where it is today, it had to abandon the systematising spirit that reduces all phenomena to the same general hypothesis and, guided by reason and experience, be led instead along the paths of nature (fol. 219). That being the case, can the Buen-Serrano’s publication of reflections that are contrary to reason and experience really count as, really be credited as being (si será acreedor), patriotic love of one’s country (fol. 221)? The polemic continues on 27 November. The only guarantees of success in knowledge, the writer says, are patience, prudence, application, and perseverance. Such virtues lie at the heart of Europe’s scientific progress. The absence of such things “es y será la causa de los atrasos del Perú.” There then follows a severe questioning of his opponent’s knowledge of chemistry (fol. 228) (interrupted only by news of a small earth tremor in Pasco and by perhaps the strangest item of the entire year, “Carta sobre los Maricones”), a questioning that runs on into 1 December.55 There, Weber reminds his readers of the part played in knowledge (we would say in all knowledge) by faith, trust, confidence, and belief. Weber highlights the testamentary status of the public as the faithful witness of his truth (estos documentos los tiene el Público, y ellos son fieles testigos de mi verdad [fol. 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 141 236]). After all, he writes on 4 December, finally bringing matters to a close, the method they use is the only one known to be true, based as it is on certain principles (to wit, on correct learning) tested by practical experience and experiment (en principios ciertos demostrados por la experiencia) (fol. 244). Their opponents, on the contrary, misuse the new barrels and then proclaim the method useless. You may think you have done the nation a service, Weber writes to his opponent, but your diaries will scarcely amount to a brief almanac, capable of forming a few devout men, perhaps, but not mineralogists. Such an opinion, in view of his prior learning, practical experience and authorised position, and in view of the evidence and arguments laid out in this long letter, as witnessed by the public, he is prepared to sign for: Yo me persuado se halla hoy lleno de lisonja con sus Diarios, imaginando ha hecho uno de los mejores servicios á la Nacion: pero yo le aseguro que apenas podrá servirle de un breve almanaque, capaz de formar unos hombres devotos, pero no mineralogistas. Nuestro Señor prospere la salud de Vms. por muchos años, para que manden A su mas atento y afectísimo servidor Q. S. M. B. Juan Daniel Weber. In “Reflexiones de la Sociedad sobre la Carta Antecedente,” of 8 December, the Mercurio sides with Weber, excoriating “los absurdos de la costumbre, y los errores de la tradición.” The world would have carried on believing in superstition if superior minds (genios superiores) had not shaken the heavy chains of that practice which consists in simply following the established example (fol. 249). The piece then details the attempts made in different countries to resist developments in mining. National pride, the writer notes, frequently attends such resistance. To be taught by foreigners, the foolish enthusiast believes, brings discredit upon the nation (es descrédito del esplendor y gloria de la Patria). In fact, he continues, France would not be where she is today, if she had rejected the Spaniard Martín Poblacion, who was the first Professor of the Exact Sciences at the Royal College of Paris in 1529. Finally, the piece lists further evidence that the world is moving towards barrels: Charles IV has allowed the Baron of Nordenflicht into Peru to oversee mining reform; a young man of thirteen years of age has successfully used the barrel method in Abancay and in 142 A. SHARMAN many other places besides; and the Royal Order of 3 June 1791 to Buenos Aires has officially declared itself supportive of the barrel method. In the latter, above all, there can hardly be a higher and more respectable testimony (testimonio tan superior y respetable). Viz. in which to put one’s faith. concLuSIon It is possible that the growth and prosperity of silver mining in Peru at the end of the eighteenth century was fostered principally by local Peruvian capitalists rather than by any Enlightenment reforms.56 Such a view does not detract from the evidence that elements of the Mercurio Peruano are characterised by a fierce will to know whose objective is societal reform. There is good reason likewise to see in this critical public reflection an emerging, for sure restricted, literary public sphere, in which certain private people are bound together, not first and foremost by virtue of the sovereign’s will and not even by any social pact, but rather through a philosophical activity in the doing of which they learn of the dependency in which knowledge and economic necessity constitute them (la dependencia en que mutuamente los constituye la opinion, y la necesidad), as the Mercurio puts it on 26 May (fol. 66). In other words, this fragile Enlightenment, which Whitaker, Israel, and Astigarraga rightly see as based on a practical, pragmatic, problem-solving approach to technical questions and social reform, is political to the core. It bears on the question of who has the right to know, the right to associate in order to know, and the right to publish in the nation to be. The Ilustración projected by the Mercurio Peruano in 1791 is both Catholic and radically un-Catholic. If it has pronounced Catholic accents, it is also and inseparably not just one more channel for Catholicism but instead a philosophy that would not simply be a theology. While it doubtless maintains multiple attachments to political, social, economic, and religious interests, the New Philosophy on display in the Mercurio Peruano should also be taken literally, as the sign of a new philosophy. Even if its meditations on public health, commerce, and mining are by individuals who professed themselves to be Catholics and whose accounts of charitable Catholic behaviour we have no reason to doubt, and even if Catholicism itself furnished its followers with an important culture of reading and interpretation, the Mercurio Peruano humanises the categories used to speak about the world. Its meditations are frequently couched in a language which, though inseparable from a certain source shared 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 143 with religion, wants to cleave to an autonomous technoscientific critical reason. Cassirer’s remarks concerning a certain secularisation of eighteenth-century knowledge remain pertinent: The various fields of knowledge … gradually withdraw from the domination and tutelage of traditional metaphysics and theology. They no longer look to the concept of God for their justification and legitimation; the various sciences themselves now determine that concept on the basis of their specific form. (Cassirer 2009, pp. 158–159) Especially in the lengthy pieces by Cephalio and Weber, there is an attempt to institute a new authority: the authority of metallurgical texts, works of natural history, treatises on chemistry, and practical experience at the silver face. In the lengthy dissertation that begins on 20 March, all the references are to works of modern geography, political economy, philosophy, natural history, political history, slave trade history, Incan history or classical antiquity, to dictionaries, encyclopaedias of trade, travel narratives, discourses on education, legal documents, treasury reports and treatises on trade, not to the Bible. If, as Daniel Weber puts it, truth is covered by a sacred veil which those anxious to know must tear away, the truth in question will not be revealed by revelation; it must be studied, tested, and checked against the evidence, using patience, perseverance, and application. It may well be less a case of the conscious wearing away of religious dogmas such as the doctrine of original sin, and more a matter of the bypassing of the doctrine’s practical relevance: if God made the silver mines, he is no help in getting the stuff out. Cassirer says that the Enlightenment, by which he means an Aufklärung produced by an amalgamation of humanism and the Reformation, did not dismiss religion but rather promoted a new faith based on the active powers of the human spirit and made law and social justice the new norms of human existence. In this faith, there is no debasement of the world or the human intellect, but rather an exaltation of them. In the Mercurio Peruano, the exaltation of even the apparently most insignificant fragments is closely linked to patriotism. Patriotic Enlightenment historiography wants to map Peru and to put Peru on the map. In all its trivial and abject detail. This does not mean, though, that it is possible to ascribe all the Mercurio’s acts of thought to the Enlightenment. The Peruvian Ilustración does not mine its own vein of ideas out of the darkness, does not beget its own language and concepts ex nihilo. It has precise historical debts to other determinate 144 A. SHARMAN traditions—to the Christian tradition, to the Graeco-Roman classical tradition, to the Peruvian tradition, and to all the Enlightenments of the world. But before any particular historical debt, there is always the debt to the possibility of debt. In other words, behind each and every particular instance of thought there is the possibility of thought in general. Which is also the possibility of religion and of religiosity. One can neither think nor have faith in the mines of Peru without the possibility of thought or belief in general. It is the overdetermination and the indeterminacy of thought. And the ruination of any simple history of ideas. noteS 1. The Mercurio was produced by a group of Creoles in their mid-twenties who formed the core of the Lima Sociedad Académica de Amantes del País. It ran from 1791 to 1795 and then was reincarnated in a different form in 1827. Periódicos were reserved for commentary on “literary” or scientific matters; gacetas, for political news. See Poupeney-Hart (2010, p. 19). 2. Poupeney-Hart (2009, p. 175). The Mercurio’s subscribers included a viceroy and an archbishop. On the public, see 1 September 1791. The paper was funded by subscriptions of 14 reales a month, or else bought from Don Lino Cabrera’s shop on Calle de Bodegones on Thursday and Sunday mornings from 8 am onwards (“Prospecto”). At its height it had 517 subscribers. Clément (1997, pp. 73, 76–77) details the social composition of subscribers as 46.3% commoners or Third Estate (estado llano), 35.1% nobles, 16.3% clergy, 2.3% unknown. He estimates the Mercurio may have achieved a readership-cum-listenership of between 4500 and 5400 people. 3. Clément (1997, p. 34) categorises the anonymous contributors as: “intellectuals” (24%), public administrators (18%), professionals “con actividades económicas” (15%), clergy (14%), military (4%), unknown (25%). 4. Habermas (1999). For Habermas’ doubts about the European public sphere, which, he believes, has been taken over by the mass media and is thus no public sphere to speak of, see Sharman (2017), where I explore the Mercurio Peruano’s material conditions of production. 5. Prelaciones are the traditional practice of seating people in order of rank. The prelación usually went to ecclesiastical personages. Prelado means “Persona que ocupa cualquiera de las dignidades superiores de la Iglesia” (Diccionario de uso del español). 6. Guerra (2009). I deal with Guerra at length in Chap. 6. For a fascinating meditation on associationism in Spanish America at a slightly later date, see Carlos Forment (2003). 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 145 7. See Lehner (2016, p. 11). Some of the revolutionaries were former Catholic priests involved in murderous violence against other Catholics (p. 213). 8. Lehner (2016, p. 2): “Is such a thing as a ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ even possible? … Is Catholicism compatible with the values modernity cherishes?” 9. Stolley (2013) and Cañizares-Esguerra (2001) are two instances where the rebuttal of the traditional view of the Enlightenment runs into difficulties. I have discussed both in Chap. 1. For a clear-sighted view of the Spanish American baroque, see Brading (1993, pp. 414, 420). 10. Whitaker (1961). 11. Lynch (2001, p. 54). 12. This point is made by Lehner (2016, p. 10), who notes that the papacy was regarded as static in the eighteenth century (p. 6). 13. Lynch (2001, p. 111). 14. Lehner tells the story of the group gathered around Charles III (p. 36) but does not indicate the paradox. 15. Lynch (2001, p. 117). 16. Lynch is resisting the “French” version of the Enlightenment. But this occasions contradictions. On later Mexican independence, Lynch writes that the Mexican identity forged by the exaltation of the Indian past, resentment at Peninsular privileges, and the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe created a banner under which all ethnic groups could march, and concludes that Morelos’ declaration that “All the inhabitants except Europeans will no longer be designated as Indians, mulattos or other castes, but all will be known as Americans” owes nothing to any declaration of the rights of man but derives rather from “awareness of a common identity as Mexicans” (p. 118). The statement would seem, on the contrary, to share profound roots with Enlightenment and Christian universalism and thus to have both nationalist and Enlightenment (and, as Lynch goes on to say, religious) affiliations. Perhaps at stake here is the hybrid and endlessly inflected nature of a common language. 17. French Catholicism, Lehner says, had through its early interaction with Protestantism become more austere than its Baroque Spanish counterpart (2016, p. 174). 18. “Cephalio” is the pseudonym of one of the periodical’s principal contributors. All references to the Mercurio Peruano are to one of the three volumes that collect together editions from the year 1791, available in digitised form through the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. These volumes are from the facsimilar edition published by the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, Lima, 1964. I have kept the original punctuation. 19. Cassirer (2009, p. 135). 146 A. SHARMAN 20. See Lehner’s useful summary of Latin America’s Enlightenment (2016, p. 104). 21. Israel (2001, pp. 528, 540). 22. For Derrida (2002, p. 70), not every belief—or sworn faith or confidence or trust—need be inscribed in a religion, nor, conversely, every sanctification or sacralisation of the unscathed presuppose an act of belief. 23. The argument is a variation on the one we saw concerning the general structure of thought in Chap. 2. 24. “Nosotros no pretendemos atribuirnos el título de filósofos, si no es en lo que respecta al amor de la patria” (3 November 1791). 25. See Porras Barrenechea (1974) on the Mercurio’s enlightened patriotism. 26. The “Disertacion sobre la ceguera ilustrada” (21 and 24 July) says that reason is a faculty in one sense best exhibited by the blind, since blindness, which is a cutting off from the visible detail of the world, allows for maximum abstraction. This is one of the sharpest and most nuanced articles of the year. 27. Other religious subjects dealt with include: the Creator, albeit frequently mentioned alongside Mother Nature (1 September); the Immaculate Conception (17 July); the Pope of the day, Pius VI (4 September); the part played by the Almighty in the astronomer Kepler’s science (4 September); the divine light that shines through those who rule (25 September). 28. Portillo Valdés (2000). 29. Portillo Valdés (2000, p. 51). 30. I discuss this in Chap. 6. 31. See, for example, 16 June. 32. Footnote 8 details instances of the Indians’ compassion and warns against calling them “barbarians.” According to the Inca Garcilaso, the Incas did have special measures for orphans and widows. 33. In November 1791, the Mercurio conjures the institution synonymous in the European mind with a benighted Hispanic Catholic world, the Inquisition, in the context of the recent censorship by the Santo Oficio of five European periodicals, prohibited in their entirety following the Auto of 27 August (3 and 6 November). 34. Poupeney-Hart (2009) argues that scholars have downplayed the variety of voices in the Mercurio, turning it into an exclusive matter of Peruvian national identity. 35. For meditations on the unknown interior, see 30 June and 22 September. On mapping, see 15 May. 36. In a later, extended essay on Chichas y Tarija, the Mercurio will suggest that the recourse to empiricism is in many respects a return to classical knowledge. The periodical, it claims, will base its knowledge of the region on manuscripts written by people who have taken part in a military officer’s expedition (sponsored by the viceroy’s wife), all of whom had seen and 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 147 measured the terrain themselves. The piece criticises the Diccionario geografico de las Americas for being too theoretical and lacking practical knowledge, which is what the ancients always used to demand of their histories (19 May). Lehner (2016, p. 106) notes, in a discussion of the Peruvian ilustrado José Gumilla, that it was a common tactic to describe modern science as an organic development of ancient knowledge. The inhabitants in one part of the area certainly need instruction in something, since they do not understand what stones are. When they bump into one, they admire it and hold on to it like some prize diamond, only to throw it away indignantly when they suddenly see how abundant stones truly are. This detail, the footnote makes clear, is actually from Charles Marie de La Condamine’s travel journal, discussed in Chap. 2. The paper comments explicitly on the geodesic expedition of 1735 to Quito in the editions of 29 May and 12 June. “Rasgo histórico y filosófico sobre los cafées de Lima” (10 February) informs us that cafés in Spain were originally built on top of Alogerías and that coffee first came into Spain with the Arabs, along with a fragment of the Arabic language, the word cafée coming from cahué (in fact, originally qahwa). I explore this piece at greater length in Sharman (2017). We should also mention an ongoing, mock-serious series on women (beginning in the “Prospecto” and running through 27 January, 10 February, 27 February, 3 March, and 19 May) and another more serious one (5 June, 14 July, 14 August, 20 October, and 25 December) which thread their way through the year and to which I shall elsewhere dedicate proper attention. See the editions of 30 January (I), 2 and 6 October (III), and 11 December (III) on present-day Indians; and 17 March (I), 4 August (II), and above all 21 and 25 August (II), on the Incas. Cf. the article on pilgrimage by river and the Christian religion as a civilising mission (25 September). In the same issue, there are calls for dissertations on the four Holy books, on moral and liturgical theology, and on why Castilian is better than French. Bayly (2004, p. 10): “Modernity is an aspiration to be ‘up with the times.’ It was a process of emulation and borrowing.” Of course, it is much more than that. In “Justificacion de la Sociedad, y del Peru” (23 June), the Mercurio is as good as its word. In its founding statement, it proposed to rise above criticisms, but to act swiftly whenever the criticism was levelled at the country as a whole. So when Padre Fray Antonio de Olavarrieta, of the Franciscan Order, speaks of Peruvians as “salbajes recien-conquistados,” the Mercurio is moved to act. It charges him with damning Doctor Crespo’s piece on 148 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. A. SHARMAN tides without understanding it and without realising that all the best philosophers in Olavarrieta’s Europe are on Crespo’s side. In a satirical put down that anticipates Cien años de soledad by 176 years, the writer remarks that Father Olavarrieta’s algebra and trigonometry are bound up with his penchant for chocolate. Something similar happens in the conclusion to the long dissertation on Chichas y Tarija (22 May), which relates the discovery of an enormous bone buried in the province of Tarija and of a large petrified tooth weighing 5 lbs 3 oz found in the same area by the botanical expedition to Peru and sent back to the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid. This is an immensely rich, but beautifully synthetic piece, which deals not just with the Graeco-Roman and Christian tradition but with many others besides, including the ancient Peruvian. The later article of 20 February concentrates exclusively on the Roman legal tradition and its offshoots, including Alfonso el Sabio, invoking powerful precedent as a way of applying pressure on the authorities. A piece by the Regente Gobernador Intendente, Pedro Antonio Zernadas Bermudez, on 26 May announces that the authorities are preparing plans to build camposantos just outside Lima. The poem was originally published in the Memorial Literario in Madrid in 1787. Cf. 17 February (fol. 124): “Las epidemias, las pestes, que en lo moral son castigos del Cielo, en lo físico son casi siempre efectos de un ayre corrompido.” A footnote indicates that the sentiment is from Matthew, ch. 25, v. 32: Non est Deus mortuorum, sed vivensium. In an article on hygiene and ways to avoid harm befalling pregnant women (a role destined for them by the Supreme Author), we are told that the organs of the machine suffer through sympathy and communication, and that the mother’s anger is one of the main causes of abortions, a danger which may be offset by bloodletting (5 June). In a later piece on hygiene and childbirth, on 25 December no less, we are told that it is desirable to have properly trained midwives in attendance, and necessary to bleed newborns if they are red in the face, and that in the debate between “Antiguos” and “Modernos” on the matter of bloodletting, the latter prevailed in insisting that blood be taken from the arm. See also Pagden (1993, pp. 170ff). This stretch of the article launches a fierce attack on Spain and the galley system. Fisher (1994). I am grateful to John Fisher for indicating this piece. For a fascinating account of the motives and people behind the Spanish mission sent to reform the Peruvian mining industry, see Whitaker (1951). 4 PERIODICAL PRESS: FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MERCURIO… 149 55. The “Carta” is the single most unguarded piece of the year. It deals with black male slaves who dress up as upper-class women. 56. Fisher (1994). reFerenceS Bayly, C.A. 2004. 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Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lehner, Ulrich L. 2016. The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lynch, John. 2001. Latin America Between Colony and Nation: Selected Essays. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 150 A. SHARMAN Mercurio Peruano. Tomo I, 1791. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/ mercurio-peruano%2D%2D15/html/. Mercurio Peruano. Tomo II, 1791. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/ mercurio-peruano%2D%2D12/html/. Mercurio Peruano. Tomo III, 1791. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obravisor/mercurio-peruano%2D%2D13/html/. Pagden, Anthony. 1993. European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Porras Barrenechea, R. 1974. Los ideólogos de la emancipación. Lima: Editorial Milla Batres. Portillo Valdés, José María. 2000. Revolución de nación. 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