Music
Feb 26– Hugo’s Preface to Cromwell(1827)
Summary: Victor Hugo is nostalgic for a time before he was born, but thinks the present is perfect.
Commentary: As someone who often skips/skims prologues, I appreciate Hugo acknowledging that they're often not read. I'm a little less sure about a lot of the other content.
Let us set out from a fact. The same type of civilization, or to use a more exact, although more extended expression, the same society, has not always inhabited the earth. The human race as a whole has grown, has developed, has matured, like one of ourselves. It was once a child, it was once a man; we are now looking on at its impressive old age. Before the epoch which modern society has dubbed "ancient," there was another epoch which the ancients called "fabulous," but which it would be more accurate to call "primitive." Behold then three great successive orders of things in civilization, from its origin down to our days.
This is one of those "big ideas with no explanation" that we've seen a few times in these essays. All of history can apparently be neatly dropped into pre-Classical, Classical, and post-Classical (Christian). I'm not a historian, but that seems iffy. Are we in a fourth era now? It feels like he thinks society reached a peak (or at least an end state) 200 odd years ago, which seems insane to me. Can society even reach an end state (short of going extinct)? Everything changes all the time.
A large part of the prologue is a contradictory story of how humanity advanced from the seemingly perfect, pastoral pre-Classical state to the modern TRUTH of Christianity.
Each race exists at its own pleasure; no property, no laws, no contentions, no wars.
A spiritual religion, supplanting the material and external paganism, makes its way to the heart of the ancient society, kills it, and deposits, in that corpse of a decrepit civilization, the germ of modern civilization. This religion is complete, because it is true; between its dogma and its cult, it embraces a deep-rooted moral. and first of all, as a fundamental truth, it teaches man that he has two lives to live, one ephemeral, the other immortal; one on earth, the other in heaven
A portion of these truths had perhaps been suspected by certain wise men of ancient times, but their full, broad, luminous revelation dates from the Gospels. The pagan schools walked in darkness, feeling their way, clinging to falsehoods as well as to truths in their haphazard journeying. Some of their philosophers occasionally cast upon certain subjects feeble gleams which illuminated but one side and made the darkness of the other side more profound. Hence all the phantoms created by ancient philosophy. None but divine wisdom was capable of substituting an even and all-embracing light for all those flickering rays of human wisdom. Pythagoras, Epicurus, Socrates, Plato, are torches: Christ is the glorious light of day.
Thus paganism, which moulded all creations from the same clay, minimizes divinity and magnifies man. Homer's heroes are of almost the same stature as his gods. Ajax defies Jupiter, Achilles is the peer of Mars. Christianity on the contrary, as we have seen, draws a broad line of division between spirit and matter. It places an abyss between the soul and the body, an abyss between man and God.
There's two things to unpack that I find interesting here:
1. Hugo apparently thought that Christianity was the end-goal of all religion and was perfect, and thus the Christian period was the endgame of all civilization.
2. The "primitive" era sounds nearly perfect, but he just kind of breezes past that on his way (through the flawed "ancient" era) to the "better" present.
It's crazy to me to think that someone 200 years ago thought they were living at the apex of history and that nothing could advance from there. They were in the middle of the industrial revolution, supposedly civilizing the world, etc. Things are (I think) better now than they were then (on average) and I still hope/assume that things will be better again in 200 years.
Likewise it's weird to see an artist who's so 100% in on Christianity today. I think artists (as a whole) lean more towards either "none" or new age today. Back then, we see a lot of deists and what not. This was written when Hugo was young (early 20s) and he did seem to move more that way in old age. It's also weird to me to think that people closer to Eden/Genesis (as he says) would be "wrong" religiously. Wouldn't the people who closer physically/chronologically to God know better than some people who were 1500 years post Jesus?
The part about ignoring the seeming perfection of the ancient/pastoral times is what sticks out to me the most though. If we accept that society is broadly progressing for the better (fair) then how is a period with conflict, bad laws, etc. better than peace and freedom?
