ILLUMINATION IN ANCIENT CHURCHES
Monuments of some value are the paleo-Christian lamps, whether in terracotta, bronze, or suspended, as well as those combined with supports; they were used for illuminating sacred places.
### I. Terracotta Lamps
Red, yellow, or even gray in color, these lamps have been found not only in Rome (R. Garrucci, *Storia dell’arte cristiana*, VI, Prato 1880, tavv. 468–76) and in Italy (J. Führer, *Sicilia sotterranea*, Monaco 1897, p. 280), but in all other provinces of the Roman Empire, particularly in Gaul (cf. G. M. Tournet, *Sur quelques objets d’antiquité chrétienne*, in *Revue archéologique*, 1883, pp. 47–55), in Africa (A. Delattre, *Lampes chrétiennes de Carthage*, Lille 1890), and in the East (O. M. Dalton, *Catalogue*, London 1901; O. Wulff, *Altchristliche Bildwerke*, Berlin 1909; R. Forrer, *Die frühchristlichen Altertümer von Achim-Panopolis*, Strasbourg 1893).
In the West, these terracotta lamps were generally oval or round in shape (cf. *Römische Quartalschrift*, 18 [1904], p. 21); in the East, however, they were often zoomorphic or took on forms later characteristic of Arab art (R. Forrer, *op. cit.*, tavv. 2, 7). Equipped with a short handle and one or two protruding nozzles, they had one or more holes on the surface for replenishing the oil. If of medium size (5–15 cm), they were carried by hand, placed in niches, or affixed in tombs. On the reverse side, they often bear a maker’s mark (J. Fink, *Formen und Stempel...*, Monaco 1900, pp. 658–703), the name of the owner or a slave (e.g., Anniser Anni Serapiodori; G. B. De Rossi, in *Bull. arch. crist.*, 2a serie, 1 [1870], p. 77; 3a serie, 4 [1879], p. 29; 3a serie, 6 [1881], p. 14), decorative motifs without particular significance, or Christian symbols (palm, cross, monogram: *ibid.*, 3a serie, 3 [1878], p. 50). On the upper part, animal motifs (lion, horse, eagle, fish), ornamental designs (ansated chalice, seven-branched candelabrum), scenes from mythology (Ulysses), the Old Testament (the two spies carrying the cluster of grapes: cf. O. Marucchi, in *Römische Quartalschrift*, 1 [1887], p. 325), the sacrifice of Abraham (R. Garrucci, *op. cit.*, tav. 475, n. 2), the three youths in the furnace (ibid., n. 7), Jonah (ibid., n. 5), Daniel (cf. *Römische Quartalschrift*, 10 [1896], p. 190), the women at the tomb, the Orant, and the Good Shepherd are sometimes depicted.
Lamps bearing the monogram of Christ are of particular significance, as their evolution through different types illustrates the development of the cross from its monogrammatic form to the Latin cross. Those with inscriptions, whether Latin or Greek, often contain acclamations (e.g., *Herennia... vivas in Deo*: cf. O. M. Dalton, *op. cit.*, n. 713), dedicatory formulas (e.g., *vita Donato Choromagistro*: cf. G. B. De Rossi, in *Bull. arch. crist.*, 3a serie, 2 [1877], p. 142), names of martyrs (v. Schultze, *Archäologie*, Monaco 1895, p. 299), as well as expressions of Christian doctrine (φῶς ἐκ φωτός: cf. *Bull. arch. neapol.*, 1857, p. 111). From such inscriptions, it can be inferred that these lamps were often given as mementos (eulogiae) to distinguished persons in remembrance of holy places.
### II. Metal Lamps
Few ancient lamps were made of gold, silver, or crystal (G. B. De Rossi, in *Bull. arch. crist.*, 1a serie, 1 [1863], p. 53); bronze lamps, however, were more numerous. The Hellenistic type, concave and narrow, sometimes imitating animal forms, served as a model (O. M. Dalton, *op. cit.*, n. 508; J. Strzygowski, *Koptische Kunst*, Vienna 1904, tav. 33): doves (O. M. Dalton, *op. cit.*, tav. 27; J. Strzygowski, *op. cit.*, n. 9139), lions, peacocks, fish (ibid., 9142; O. Wulff, *Altchristliche Bildwerke*, Berlin 1909, n. 777), dragons (G. B. De Rossi, in *Bull. arch. crist.*, 1a serie, 1 [1867], pp. 9–16; 2a serie, 5 [1874], p. 120; 4a serie, 5 [1887], p. 164; 5a serie, 1 [1890], p. 13; La Blanchère-Gauckler, *Catalogue du Musée Alaoui*, nn. 499–503; A. Delattre, *Lampes chrétiennes*, n. 690; O. M. Dalton, *op. cit.*, n. 721), as well as a ship (O. Wulff, *op. cit.*, n. 780) or a basilica (R. Garrucci, *op. cit.*, tav. 469, nn. 2–4; L. Fanciulli, *De lucernis...*, Macerata 1802).
These metal vessels, with a stylized handle and a more or less protruding spout, sometimes had a lid surmounted by a dove or a cross. Suspended by chains (ἄνθος, *lychnus pensilis*: cf. C. M. Kaufmann, *Handbuch der christlichen Archäologie*, Paderborn 1922, p. 590, fig. 294) or placed on tripod stands (id., *Die sepulkralen Jenseitsdenkmäler der Antike und des Christentums*, Mainz 1900, tav. 3; J. Strzygowski, *op. cit.*, n. 9124; O. M. Dalton, *op. cit.*, n. 49), they were used to illuminate the cubicles of martyrs and especially the early Christian churches, as attested by the *Testamentum Domini Nostri* : «Sint omnia loca illuminata tam propter figuram quam propter lectionem» (I. E. Rahmani, I, Mainz 1889, p. 19).
### III. CROWNS (coronae, φᾶρα, κανθάρα, πολυκάνθηρον)
From the 4th century onward, suspended crowns were introduced as a new type of illumination. One early form consisted of a horizontal, perforated wheel for holding glass lamps in various colors (J. Strzygowski, *op. cit.*, n. 9156; O. Wulff, *op. cit.*, n. 1004; O. M. Dalton, *op. cit.*, n. 259); another took the shape of a low cylindrical metal plate with outward-projecting arms, often in the form of dolphins (J. Strzygowski, *op. cit.*, n. 9153), serving as chandeliers. All these crowns were suspended by chains, whose rings alternated with decorative crosses and monograms.
Through the empiricist current, it arrives at a negation of what it had at first supremely valued, namely the goddess Reason, and it reclaims once more, over the values of a cold abstraction distant from experience, the value of instinct, impulse, and passion. Skeptical currents thus intertwine in this climate with affirmations of the crudest materialism, and the desire to apply the results of theory and experience to lived life—common to both the empiricist and rationalist currents—ensures that this wave of thought, subversive of the past, overflows into the ethical and religious domain. This occurs all the more easily because, first in England and later in France, methods of exposition were adopted that were clear, popular, and accessible to every class of people. With differing tactics and from seemingly divergent viewpoints—exalting the abstract and exalting the concrete—all institutions are undermined at their foundations, and every authority is stripped from custom, religion, and the State. By declaring tradition false and pernicious, a new order is hailed that must even destroy the memory of the old order; progress is applauded, contingent values are exalted, a reform of social institutions is demanded, and the rights of man are proclaimed (cf. A. Espinas, *La philosophie sociale au XVIIe siècle*, Paris 1908; M. Ferraz, *La philosophie de la Révolution*, ibid. 1900).
It is undeniable, however, that though it has destroyed, it has also sought to rebuild; in every sphere it has attempted—not in vain—to erect, amid the ruins, a new edifice and to lay a foundation beside the remnants of its own corrosive work. Indeed, one cannot deny the positive character of certain attitudes of the Enlightenment, which have borne fruit even where they seemed only to demolish, if only by awakening a broad and active intelligence, by stimulating thought and the scrutiny of all things through thought, and by subjecting to reason what one believes, does, dreams, and lives. Many aberrations of the Age of Enlightenment are mingled with truth, and within its very errors lie brilliant and fertile intuitions.
I. ENGLISH ENLIGHTENMENT
It essentially draws from Hobbes and Locke; from Hobbes, who conceives religion as an *instrumentum regni*, a matter therefore of human legislation, and considers any existence chimerical that does not possess the corporeality and solidity of matter (cf. *Elementorum philosophiae*, sectio prima: *de corpore*, London 1655; sectio secunda: *de homine*, ibid. 1658; sectio tertia: *de cive*, Paris 1642); from Locke, who claims that critical knowledge is exhausted in sensory experience, thereby eliminating from the intelligible realm causality, substance, and the act of being (cf. *An Essay Concerning Human Understanding*, Bk. I). Locke’s system serves as the point of departure for Berkeley’s religious idealism, Hume’s skepticism, and the scientific materialism of D. Hartley (v.) and J. Priestley (v.); it inspires the speculative sensism of Condillac (v.), Voltaire’s subtle irony directed against speculative constructions devoid of empirical data, the school of French ideologists, Bayle (v.) DIDEROT, DENIS (v.) and d’Alembert (v.), and indirectly gives rise to deism (v.), the natural religion of the freethinkers (v.). The leading exponents of English deism—a distinctly Enlightenment product—such as M. Tindal (v.), J. Toland (v.), A. Collins (v.), and H. Bolingbroke (v.), accentuate religious rationalism aimed at separating from Christian Revelation the empiricist and skeptical motifs that support the autonomy of natural religion. Allied to deism is the current of “natural morality,” which embraces three distinct directions: the intellectualist, represented by the theologian S. CLARISSE (v.), who accepts the concepts of divine transcendence, the immortality of the soul, final causes, etc.; the sentimentalist, MALMESBURY (v.), which grounds morality not in reason but in sentiment and compares the moral sense to the aesthetic sense; and the idealist, BERGER, ELIE (v.), J. Norris (v.), COLLERA (v.).II. FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT
The influence of English thought in France—something to be reckoned with when studying the origins of the Enlightenment in the land of Voltaire—must be placed in its proper proportions, not severed from the subterranean currents guiding France in those years nor from the intellectual inheritances that nourished its speculation. It suffices to recall that before the English freethinkers there had been French “precursor” books of Voltairean thought against which Pascal had inveighed (cf. F. Strowski, *Pascal et son temps*, I, Paris 1907; P. Serini, *Pascal*, Turin 1942, pp. 85–114; M. F. Sciacca, *Pascal*, 2nd ed., Brescia 1945, pp. 44–51). The French Enlightenment takes its departure from Descartes and Newton. The genuine vein of Enlightenment rationalism is indeed to be sought in Descartes, who, under the aspect of mechanistic theories—duly considering the influence of Newton—lives on in the writings of La Mettrie (v.), Cabanis (v.), Bonnet (v.), and, under the aspect of antihistoricist theories, in Bayle, Diderot, Condorcet (v.), etc.With Newton, but beyond his premises and intentions, the French Enlightenment substitutes for Descartes’ ideal of deductive logic the ideal of intellectual certainty, and for the metaphysics of the *ancien régime* the systematic study of physical laws (a study that would found science exclusively on experience and calculation so as to exclude the supernatural from the domain of nature). Voltaire, who had noted the affinity between Locke and Newton and the unitary tendency of English philosophy toward scientific rationalism, sought, in his *Lettres sur les Anglais* (Paris 1734), to spread in France the new philosophical orientation of the English Enlightenment; and his appeal did not fall on deaf ears in an environment that sympathized with England not only for its speculative direction but also for its religious and political ideas. In France, however, the Enlightenment immediately shifted from the purely speculative and scientific terrain to the ideological, assuming an “extremist” character.
Among the “founders” of the French Enlightenment must be mentioned P. Bayle, author of the *Dictionnaire historique et critique* (5th ed., Amsterdam 1734), who, through minute critical revision of the entire past, demolishes with his skepticism the foundations of religious thought and of ethical and social conceptions; FONTENELLE, BERNARD (v.), who, by mocking all traditional constructions and theses, puts human credulity on trial (cf. *L’origine des fables*; *L’histoire des oracles*, in *Œuvres*, Amsterdam 1744). In this skeptical current are found nearly all the dominant figures of the French Enlightenment, among whom Voltaire (v.) stands out for accentuating Bayle’s antireligious stance, considering Providence and spirituality absurd hypotheses, denying free will, reducing the conception of the supernatural to the plane of pure immanence, setting himself up as judge of Christianity, and dreaming of a universal religion based on the negation of every positive religion—though his negation is not as total as that of Holbach (v.) and the materialists, yet it finds perhaps more persuasive accents through the violence that inspires it (cf. *Traité de la tolérance*, in *Œuvres*, Paris 1878; *Traité de métaphysique*, ibid.; *Homélie sur l’athéisme*, ibid.). In the materialist and sensist current, which includes names such as La Mettrie, Holbach, Helvétius, Condillac, Bonnet, Destutt de Tracy, Diderot, Cabanis, Robinet, etc., a conception gains ground that, seeking to rid itself of everything not reducible to Hobbesian corporeal reality, eliminates the last remnants of spiritualism still lingering in the skeptical current.
To the irreligious, sceptical and materialist tendencies is also inspired the ethics of the Enlightenment, marked by that note of hedonism which is found in the works of Voltaire, Helvétius, Holbach, etc. Having abolished religion and transcendent morality, it seeks also to condemn every transcendence in the concept of politics; the empiricist and rationalist vision of life does not allow one to acknowledge a morality inimical to nature nor a law inimical to natural instincts. One of the problems which French Enlightenment most tenaciously posed is that of the relationship between law and power; one of the dreams which it most insistently cherished is that of a better society reformed in its political hierarchy and in its economic foundations, directed towards the happiness of the individual and the well-being of the community (cf. H. Sée, *L'évolution de la pensée politique en France au XVIIIe siècle*, Paris 1925). The direction of the enlightened system, that is, of rational absolutism for the good of peoples and of humanity, which places force at the service of reason and which finds many thinkers of the period in agreement, alternates with that deriving from English constitutional liberalism which instead expresses trust in the people and in the bourgeois class desirous and capable of freedom. The greatest French exponent of this direction is Montesquieu (v.). The fundamental literary work of the Enlightenment, not only French but European in general, is the *Encyclopédie*, directed by D’Alembert, to which the most eminent French philosophers and writers of the period contributed (for whose thought V. ENCYCLOPÉDIE).
Still within French culture, but already on the margins of the movement, Rousseau (v.), a son of the Enlightenment for the attitude which he assumes towards the historical and social problem, for the war which he wages against tradition, for the eudaimonism which inspires his morality and the naturalism which nourishes his religious conception; but anti-Enlightenment in his exaltation of feeling, of natural spontaneity against the abstractness of enlightened reason (v. *Confessions*, part 1, bk. III) and pre-Romantic in the restlessness and passion which mark his activity.
III.
I. GERMAN
The rationalistic exigency of this period appears in Germany in the direction of Leibnizian philosophy and in the figure who may be considered the founder of German Enlightenment, C. Wolff (1679–1754), populariser of the Leibnizian system. It is framed by the age of Frederick II, patron of philosophers, whose long reign (1740–86) spread and accelerated the movement. In a certain way its precursors are Walter Tschirnhaus (1651–1708), who reaffirms the tendency towards that philosophical mathematicism which dominated unchallenged from Descartes to Leibniz to Wolff (cf. *Medicina mentis seu artis inveniendi praecepta generalia*, Amsterdam 1687) until it met with the decisive opposition of Kant; PUFENDORF, SAMUEL VON (v.) REID, THOMAS (v.), who seek to reinstate man in his original rights and extend the individualistic end so as to justify revolution (Pufendorf) or to free natural law from every theological dependence (Thomas). Wolff did not give any new vision of the world, but his vulgarisation of his master’s doctrine allowed a broad and fruitful cross-fertilisation of ideas in German Enlightenment. To it indeed belong the disputes which flared up between the Wolffians and anti-Wolffians over individual points of the Leibnizian system, the critiques of abstract rationalism which made the exigency of grafting into it the new sap of English empiricism live again, the contrasts which arose in the field of physical cosmology over the acceptance or rejection of Newton’s doctrine (among its supporters was M. Knutzen, Kant’s teacher; among its opponents the great physicist L. Euler); and the new way of approaching the problem of knowledge for which J. H. Lambert (1728–1777) borrowed from English empiricists a sense of objective reality that was more concrete than in Wolff, and J. N. Tetens (1736–1805) established that threefold division of feeling, intellect and will which foreshadows Kant’s critical conception (cf. *Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung*, 2 vols., Leipzig 1777).The encounter between Leibniz’s philosophy and English empiricism of Locke and Hume aroused in German Enlightenment a lively interest in the aesthetic problem, and through the work of A. A. BAUMGARTEN, MICHAEL (v.) aesthetics was treated for the first time in the history of thought as a special part of philosophy. The encounter of Pietism (v.) with the current of English freethinkers gave rise also in Germany to deism, in two different directions: one according to which positive religion in general and Christianity in particular coincide with reason; and the other according to which one seeks critically to demolish every religious creed. Exponent of the first direction is the so-called ‘popular philosophy’ MENDELLSSOHN, MOSES (v.), who attributed to metaphysics the same evidence as mathematics and claimed for philosophy the necessity of occupying itself only with what is necessary for human happiness (cf. *Abhandlungen über die Evidenzen in der metaphysischen Wissenschaft*, Berlin 1764); exponent of the second is E. S. Reimarus (v.), who upheld the existence of God and the purposiveness of the world, but strenuously combated the possibility of accepting any form of revelation (cf. *Abhandlungen von den vornehmsten Wahrheiten der natürlichen Religion*, Hamburg 1754). To the current of worldly Enlightenment, of which Mendelssohn was a part, belongs also F. NICOLAI, JEAN (v.), writer, editor and for many years editor of the *Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek*, which, if it did not have a diffusion equal to that of the French *Encyclopédie*, was nevertheless of great importance for Germany. There emerges in Lessing (v.), critic, poet, philosopher, and by certain of his attitudes already an announcer of the Romantic movement. German Enlightenment, which unlike the English and French does not present itself in revolutionary forms and at least in its formal structure remains faithful to tradition, continually betrays openings towards a spiritualist conception of the world which no longer belongs to the rationalism of the 18th century; and this explains the rich poetic production of Germany in those years. It seems to close with Kant, who fully acknowledges the clarifying function of reason, but at the same time wishes the critical spirit to subject to its examination the very notion from which it proceeds.
IV.
I. ITALIAN
With characteristics well defined to itself is presented the Enlightenment also in Italy; it drew upon the experimentalism of Newton, the empiricism of Locke, the sensism of Condillac, the spirit of the *Encyclopédie*, but also reconnecting with the great traditions of the Renaissance. Hence the reaction which, in the full period of Enlightenment, is noted in some Italian philosophers against Cartesian rationalism, antihistoricism, abstractness and antispiritualism, in favour of a religious, Platonising, theistic or Christian conception which, although it had sprung from motives offered by the Enlightenment, already represents its antithesis and its overcoming.In Italy, Illuminism is chiefly concerned with social, economic, juridical, and political questions. Its fundamental note is struck by the revival of civic consciousness, which leads the writers of the period to study how to promote and elevate the relationships of human coexistence, and to pose the problem of science not so much in the service of well-being (as the French Enlightenment wished) but in the service of civilization. Hence the historical nostalgia that appears in Italian Illuminism, the veneration—not the ostracism—accorded to many values of the past, the effort to reconcile the new directions of speculation with the spirituality inherent in the Italian philosophical tradition, its interest—like that of Germany—in literary and aesthetic questions, and finally a sense of humanism that pervades it all and leaves its mark on its historians, jurists, and thinkers. Empiricism inspires at Naples GENOVESI (q.v.), at Parma SOAVE (whose later disciples included ROMAGNOSI and GIOIA).
Political economy is cultivated by GENOVESI and by Abbot FERDINANDO GALIANI (q.v.); juridical studies by NICOLA SPEDALIERI (q.v.), who attempts a synthesis between Christianity and the rights of man proclaimed by the French Revolution, demonstrating that these rights had already been announced to the world by Christianity; by MARIO PAGANO (1748–99), who drafted the constitution of the Parthenopean Republic and in his political essays strives to reconcile VICO and ROUSSEAU; by GAETANO FILANGIERI (q.v.), who, polemicizing with MONTESQUIEU (though inspired by him), seeks to ground all legislation in strictly national exigencies—not in an imaginary state of nature but in the most perfect term of civil society. In the political and juridical field must also be recalled GIANNONE (q.v.), who upholds the claims of the State over the Church (he worked with stark rationalism even in the theological-dogmatic sphere with his *Triregno*); CESARE BECCARIA (q.v.), whose celebrated *On Crimes and Punishments* so powerfully influenced the evolution of modern penal law; and in the literary-political sphere all those who frequented the circle of the VERRI brothers, where, nourished by the new rationalistic, humanitarian, and liberal ideals of the European spirit, the rebirth of national consciousness was being prepared. In the more purely literary and historical sphere are to be remembered GRAVINA, MURATORI, SPALLETI, CESAROTTI, and others.
Italian Illuminism is dominated by the figure of G. B. VICO (q.v.). With his insistence on religiosity and a return to the values of tradition—which he constantly opposes to the direction of the new philosophies—with his theories of historical recurrence and of Providence guiding the destiny of humankind, with his discovery of the imaginative moment, and with his interpretation of language, poetry, and myth, he not only transcends the bounds of eighteenth-century thought and anticipates certain views of Romantic idealism but also imparts to Italian Illuminism tones that already transcend the genuine conception of Enlightenment.