A Descent Into Textual Paranoia

How do we interpret the world around us? How do we make sense of the ever-growing proliferation of texts — in books, on tablets and phones, on Twitter and in tabloids — in a turbulent age?

The first question has always been with us and always will be. The second might seem unique to our time and related to the unprecedented speed with which information circulates today — and its mind-numbing volume. More information is available more quickly than ever before. In many ways, that’s good. But it has also led to paranoia, suspicion, and conspiracy theorizing, from such sources as QAnon, Mark Crispin Miller, and the anti-vaccination community. Those who subscribe to these theories are “doing their own research,” and they are doing it in the context of proliferating information with few gatekeepers.

Something like this has happened before, during an earlier moment when information, skepticism, and conspiracy-thinking collided. I’m thinking of the French Jesuit Jean Hardouin, now largely forgotten. Born in the middle of the 17th century in Brittany, Hardouin was better known as Harduinus, the Latin version of his name. Although Hardouin was French by birth, we can identify him as a citizen of another polity, a borderless one in which citizenship was not recognized by law, but by reputation: the Republic of Letters, whose citizens wrote in Latin, believed in the self-evident importance of Greco-Roman antiquity, and were immersed in an environment of discovery, debate, and mutual interaction.

Hardouin’s specialty was the Latin literature of the ancient world. He was a “philologist,” a term little used today but one with a rich history. Philologists specialize in editing texts. Consider a modern edition of some speeches of Cicero. How did it come into being? That is, how did it go from its original messy handwritten state to the clean version you could pick up inexpensively at a bookstore or online?

Cicero likely dictated it to a scribe, and the scribe wrote on papyrus — the ancient world’s basic writing material, made from the pith of the papyrus plant. “Books,” for the ancients, were made in the form of rolls, which you would need to unroll while reading. Then, in the early Christian era, a new form of the book emerged, the “codex.” It looked like the book as we think of it today: pages, bound together. Papyrus had trouble surviving northern European climates, so during the Middle Ages, when learning moved north and German, French, Irish, and other monks copied and recopied works like Cicero’s, “parchment” became the basic material out of which people made books. This treated animal skin was expensive — a large book might require the skins of hundreds of sheep or goats, so each book represented a significant investment.

Two other momentous changes occurred in the history of the book. First, Europeans began manufacturing paper. Invented in Asia, paper entered Europe during the “high” Middle Ages — the years from roughly 1000 to 1300. Made from macerated rags, paper cost about one-sixth the price of parchment. It was still expensive, but it made books more affordable.

Finally, there was the emergence of printing with movable type in the 1450s, which spread quickly from Germany throughout the rest of Europe, taking especially firm hold early on in Italy. There, joined with the energies of the Italian Renaissance, books were produced at rates unthinkable in the manuscript era.

Cicero’s speeches passed through all those divergent technologies, from rolls, to handwritten codices, to printed books. There was no universally agreed-upon standard version of the text to begin with. So, along the way, people did their best. They tried when copying by hand to be accurate — even as they inevitably fell short, producing slightly different versions of the same text with every new copy. When it came to the era of printing with movable type (especially in its early years, when it was a new industry trying to find its footing), sometimes a printer would print the text from the closest handwritten version available — without comparing copies or editing.

As the centuries went by, these texts amassed ever more complicated “textual traditions.” All the errors, solutions, and suggestions from former editors that each version of every text possessed needed to be disentangled and set right. Sometimes they still do. Picking apart the problems in these textual traditions and editing those texts to make sure they were as accurate as possible became a profession: the profession of the philologist.

Philology was Hardouin’s specialty. Coming of age in the later 17th century, he was immersed in a world of books. Printing was well over two centuries old, many classical texts were accessible, and there were centuries of scholarly work available on them. But there were still no universally accepted copyright laws, and clandestine publishing was routine. If one were afraid to publish a dangerous work in Paris, for example, one might do so anyway and say it was published in Amsterdam — or not inscribe the place at all.

Hardouin emerged as a leading scholar of the ancient Roman author Pliny the Elder, whose Natural Histories had a complicated textual history. The most popular work of its kind from the ancient world, this illustrated encyclopedia was selected for inclusion in the prestigious 17th-century “Delphinus” series, books created notionally for the “Dauphin” — the son of Louis XIV. These were to be eminently reliable issues of the classics. Hardouin’s edition of Pliny came out in 1685 in five volumes, and it was a success. That he was charged with the edition shows that he was respected as a philologist, an expert by the lights of his day.

By the early 1690s, something changed. For it was then, as Hardouin later wrote, that he “began to scent fraud in Augustine.” Augustine’s two masterpieces, the Confessions and The City of God, profoundly shaped medieval Christianity. The first offered a narrative of personal conversion and surrender to Christ, the second a framework for how to view history — not as a meaningless series of rises and falls of empires but rather as a progression, one in which (someday, at the end of time) the City of God would triumph over the City of Man. Hardouin had come to believe that the writings of the most important Church Father were fake.

Things got worse. Hardouin came to see what he believed to be Augustine’s forgeries as only one tile in a vast mosaic of forgery. Almost every ancient and authoritative text, he concluded, was forged.

Who did it? Why? And how did he know?

Hardouin reasoned that medieval thinkers had invented all that ancient and early Christian work to give themselves a backstory for their heretical imaginings. Remember that Hardouin was a Jesuit. So, he had been educated in a tradition that combined two premodern Western ways of looking at the world. First, there was medieval scholastic theology — the kind of thing practiced by the very medieval thinkers Hardouin was impugning. The Jesuits, founded in the 16th century, had considered it important to educate their charges in the theology of Thomas Aquinas and other medieval thinkers. These medieval luminaries had tried in ever greater detail to reconcile the Christian faith with the rationalism of Aristotle, whose work rose to prominence in the 13th century. Next to this tradition sat Italian Renaissance humanism, a style of thinking that privileged smooth classical Latin (think Cicero). Humanists often denigrated their medieval predecessors and favored close and deep reading of the classics.

For Hardouin’s Jesuit teachers, you needed the theology to buttress your faith, and you needed the smooth classicism because it was a good vehicle for thought and persuasion in a world that held classical Latin — by then the most international language — in high esteem.

But there was another element to Italian Renaissance humanism: a passion for reading closely and, among some humanists, an omnivorousness, a desire to read everything, to have all the information, to stand above it all and to pronounce what was valuable and what was not. And, importantly, to judge whether a literary work was fraudulent or not.

Thinkers like Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano, in the 15th century, had been among the first to walk these new paths, employing critical tools that formed part of the disciplines of modern textual criticism. Through careful comparison of the language of a certain text with that of its contemporaries, they determined whether the language of the text in question “matched.” By looking closely at how handwritten books were bound together, they hoped to discover whether extra sections, not part of the original, had been inserted. They divided up manuscripts of the same text into “families” based on common copying errors. These and other techniques had evolved by Hardouin’s era, as textual scholarship grew ever more sophisticated.

But it was the omnivorousness that was most important, this style of reading that always necessitated more reading, the acquisition of more information, the drive to find out ever more — especially about the ancient world. It led to triumphs, to be sure — the discovery of long-lost works from Greco-Roman antiquity. In a monastic library in the second decade of the 15th century, the humanist Poggio Bracciolini found a full version of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. That work introduced the idea of an impersonal divinity with no interest at all in humanity to devoutly Christian readers, who were as discomfited by its evocation of the lack of a personal afterlife for individuals as they were entranced by its hypnotically beautiful Latin. And there was more like that, a lot more.

There was an underside to that omnivorousness. The more you found out about the ancient world, the more you realized how much you didn’t know — and how much you would never know. For every Greek tragedy that had survived and that could be read now, there were many more that existed once, long ago. And so on for all the other areas of human knowledge. What permanent absences lay behind the important but limited presence of the texts that had survived those long journeys from Greco-Roman antiquity into one’s own era? It was a destabilizing thought.

One might have thought that the widespread availability of texts enabled by printing and movable type would have produced ever more consensus around these matters. Instead, for Hardouin, it did the opposite. No one before his own time, he believed, could have discovered all this fraud. But now things are different. “It is only in our own time,” he wrote, “that nearly all the writings have been brought forth from the libraries.” Knowledge of both ancient languages and bookmaking have grown sophisticated enough that the savvy analyst could discern fraud. For Hardouin, that sophistication became distorted, pathological.

After Hardouin submitted to conspiracy theorizing, his work changed direction if not character. He continued his detail-oriented work, examining texts line by line, word by word. But he began to use those talents in service of proving the conspiracy.

To give one example, he tried to make the case that Virgil’s Aeneid — the most important Latin epic poem and a key literary source for ancient Roman culture — was forged by a medieval Frenchman. To make his case, he used a genre of scholarly work that was common in his day: a line-by-line commentary. Armed with the overriding assumption that Virgil’s Aeneid was fraudulent, Hardouin set about criticizing the great poet’s language. It was full of “gallicisms,” he said (i.e., expressions in Latin that sprang from the mind of a native speaker of French).

For instance, at one point Virgil tells the tale of Troy’s destruction by the Greeks. Aeneas reminisces about that time and remembers taking his penates with him, as the city burned. (Penates were the small, intimate, household statuary representing one’s ancestors and a foundation of Roman domestic religion.) Aeneas says that he took them with him “from the midst of the city’s fires,” expressed in Latin as mediisque ex ignibus Urbis.

Hardouin writes: “Ignes urbis pro incendia Urbis. Gallicismus est, les feux de la ville — or, in English: “Ignes urbis instead of incendia Urbis. This is a Gallicism, like les feux de la ville.” What Hardouin means is that he believes that his suggestion — to use the noun incendia for “fires,” rather than Virgil’s choice, ignes — would have been better and more in line with classical usage.

Who does Hardouin think he is, correcting Virgil? Virgil was ancient Rome’s best Latin poet, not to mention a native speaker of a language Hardouin had learned only in books. To be fair, Hardouin had studied the author Pliny for many years and acquired an almost instinctual command of the language. But Virgil’s language set the standard and was normative. If Virgil wrote it, it was good Latin.

For Hardouin, his own instincts came to take pride of place. He turned all his talents to “proving” the wild allegations of forgery that sustained his paranoid vision.

Hardouin represents a curious case study, drawn from a world little familiar today. What would the equivalent level of literary folly be today? Imagine someone making a case in public that, say, Herman Melville was not really the author of Moby-Dick. In this scenario, it was Jeff Bezos, who had used his Amazon empire to create this so-called classic, had caused a number of seemingly handwritten documents from the epoch to be forged, and had thus helped to create a myth of American literature that in truth was nothing but a sham.

But the real modern analogues are much more sinister: conspiracy theories like QAnon, or once respected feminist theorists spreading anti-vax propaganda. Each theory represents a kind of endless well, into which all sorts of facts and theories can be poured and out of which the wildest conclusions emerge. To see things represented in writing, even in an ephemeral environment like the internet; to have social networks and immediate worldwide audiences for one’s every thought — these are modern parallels to Hardouin’s consciousness that all the philological work of the Renaissance had led to a superfluity of information. One needed to find a way to cut through it all. Like the conspiratorial lost souls of the present day, Hardouin was desperate for meaning.