Pagan History and Religion in the Scholarly World of Guillaume Bonjour (1670-1714)
It is my hope that this thesis can contribute to two distinct – if in this case related – areas of study. The first is the scholarship of the currently little-known Augustinian hermit Guillaume Bonjour (1670-1714). The second is the manner in which early modern scholars treated ancient pagan history and religion in the last years of the seventeenth and first years of the eighteenth century. I hope that the specificity of the first will allow for a more fruitful way into the second. Traditionally, historiography has emphasised that this period marked a critical moment in which the divine provenance of the Bible was questioned, its universal authority undermined, and the ancient Jewish religion of which it told contextualized, historicized, and desacralized. I want to examine one particular aspect of this development, namely, the role played by pagan, non-biblical, sources. Often, historians have argued that non-biblical evidence, particularly from Egypt and China, was vital in challenging the tenets of sacred history and chronology, particularly when in the hands of free-thinking or ‘heterodox’ scholars. It is my aim to investigate the manner in which so-called ‘orthodox’ scholars – by which I mean those scholars who consciously attempted to defend what they considered ‘orthodox’ principles, such as the divine provenance or Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch – reacted to these challenges. It is with this in mind that I believe a study of Bonjour, who lived and worked in Rome with close ties to prominent ecclesiasts up to and including the Pope, who maintained a lively correspondence with some of the most important European scholarly luminaries of his day, and who tackled these issues directly, can prove particularly profitable. In this thesis I will predominantly concentrate on three bodies of sources which occupied Bonjour and his contemporaries in the late seventeenth century, and which were, in certain hands, used to challenge scriptural authority. These are, firstly, the corpus of Greek mythology, which held the key to understanding the origins of pagan idolatry and was often thought to have contained corrupted biblical history; secondly, the evidence of ancient Egyptian history, above all Manetho’s dynasties of Egyptian kings which were partially re-discovered in 1602 and which contradicted the accepted chronology of the Bible; and finally the texts and rites of Chinese Confucianism, the nature of which evoked a contentious ecclesiastical debate in Rome and which brought up the question of the historical relationship between Noachian monotheism and pagan idolatry. I hope that my thesis can emphasise, above all, two important developments in the context of the Christian study of these sources on pagan history and religion: firstly, that orthodox, late seventeenth-century conceptualisations of non-biblical evidence advanced a fundamentally new understanding of the relationship between biblical history and religion on the one hand,and pagan history and religion on the other; and secondly, that these conceptualisations were formative for later, eighteenth-century scholars of the Enlightenment. Ultimately, both developments served to break down previously long-standing Christian dichotomies between both biblical historia and pagan fabula, and between the revealed religion of the Israelites and the natural religion of the Gentiles.
Biblical chronology, Guillaume Bonjour, Chinese Rites Debate, Pagan mythology
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations