Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett
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something but also to allow; it marked the acceptance of an unacceptable loss of Christian unity. Until the end of the sixteenth century the term “tolerer,” to tolerate, signified the ability to bear one’s own pain, and the modern notion of an acceptance of a belief other than one’s own separates only slowly from that first meaning.20 In 1690 the French lexicographer Antoine Furetière puts it that tolerance is a “patience par laquelle on souffre, on dissimule quelque chose” [“patience with which one suffers and dissimulates something”], while the verb “to tolerate” marks a nonaction toward the other alongside whom one lives: “Souffrir quelque chose, ne s’en pas plaindre, n’en pas faire la punition. Il faut tolerer les defauts de ceux avec qui nous avons à vivre.” [“To suffer something, not to complain about it, not to punish it. We must tolerate the faults of those with whom we have to live.”]21 We can see such suffering at work in the procureur Omer Talon’s infamous note of 1634: “Les Réformés ne sont soufferts que par tolérance et dissimulation, comme on souffre une chose qu’on voudrait bien qui ne fût pas.” [“The Protestants are suffered only through tolerance and dissimulation, as one suffers something one would rather did not exist.”]22 Furetière’s declaration that in tolerance we must suffer those with whom we have to live is remarkably like his definition of “compatir,” to compassionate, whose primary meaning he puts not as the positive virtue of sensitivity to suffering, but rather the capacity to “demeurer ensemble … sans se détruire l’un l’autre … Vivre bien avec quelqu’un” [“remain together … without destroying one another … to live well with someone”].23 Both verbs, to tolerate and to compassionate, describe a base-level putting up with another’s difference, a dealing with difference that might be understood on a national or a domestic scale; both might be heard in today’s French formulations about the importance of the value of “vivre-ensemble,” recently invoked in the court case S.A.S. v. France (2014) as a reason for Muslim women not to cover their faces.24 Living together does not always mean to let live.
In the last twenty years historians have increasingly turned from high-minded narratives of toleration’s virtue to attend instead to the “vivre-ensemble” of early modern civic life, looking at the pragmatic ways in which Catholics and Protestants got on with the task of living alongside one another, sometimes painfully: putting up with differences, observing the necessary distance for coexistence.25 This book provides an account of the affective echoes of such civic projects. Both compassion and toleration were arm’s-length pursuits, dispositions toward difference that leaned on much structural underpinning, and both defined from their edge. In early modern England, Ethan Shagan describes, “toleration was constituted precisely by normalising and naturalising its limitations.”26 Both toleration and compassion looked not to overcome gaps between selves but rather to observe a necessary distance, to mind the gap.
In looking at compassion’s limits as an indicator of the limits of tolerance, I follow recent critiques of tolerance itself in trying to listen to different voices, rather than just according them a space apart from the norm. Kirstie McClure picks apart tolerance’s significance in the history of liberalism by drawing in part on the tools of feminist critique, remembering Audre Lorde, who asked that her existence be more than just tolerated.27 After 9/11, diagnosing “something of a global renaissance in tolerance talk,” Wendy Brown has argued that tolerance manifests “as a strand of depoliticization in liberal democracies … construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict.”28 Brown’s observation holds in both the United States and the United Kingdom, although thinking about difference is mapped differently in each tradition; in recent years the praise of tolerance has become a default response to fundamentalist separatism, much as an automatized “compassion talk” has often surrounded the dismantling of state responses to social difference. The liberal tolerance Brown describes is often imagined to have been established in response to early modern Europe’s violent religious wars.29 In tracing the significance of compassion talk for the understanding of religious and social difference in France after those wars, I point to an alternative genealogy for thinking through the affective promise of liberal narratives.
Compassion’s Lexicon
You might already find my mingled use of the words “pity” or “compassion” hard to tolerate. I began this project with just such an irritation, noting that the seventeenth-century reception of Aristotle’s Poetics translated the eleos of the famous formulation phobos and eleos, fear and pity, sometimes as “pitié,” sometimes as “compassion.” In a first reading of those texts, seventeenth-century usage seemingly did not engage what I took to be a common distinction today, where pity implies a hierarchical relationship and compassion a more companionable sort of fellow-feeling (I return to that distinction in Chapter 2).
Much of this book’s work around lexical shifts arises from close readings of genres that attend to compassion: dramatic and moral theory, religious writing, the novel, pamphlet literature. But France’s seventeenth century is also a boom period for lexicography, and many of the dictionary definitions of emotion were appropriating and recycling material from a range of genres, making them something akin to commonplace books. Dictionary entries for the terms of fellow-feeling show considerably more range and slippage than we would give those terms today, making few firm distinctions: pity is described as compassion and vice versa, allowing for the emphatic hendiadys of “pity and compassion” seen everywhere in this period. Furetière has compassion as a “mouvement de l’ame qui nous porte à avoir quelque pitié, quelque douleur en voyant souffrir un autre” [“movement of the soul which brings us to have some pity, some pain in seeing another suffer”]. Some lexicologists were keen to tip definitions immediately into solid theories, as in Richelet’s 1680 entry for compassion, which gives a paragraph resembling the careful Aristotelian boundaries we will encounter in Chapter 2. For Richelet, compassion is an
afliction qu’on a pour un mal qui semble menacer quelqu’un de sa perte, ou du moins de le faire beaucoup soufrir, quoi qu’il ne mérite nullement qu’un tel malheur lui arrive, à condition toutefois que celui qui a de la compassion se trouve en un tel état que lui-même apréhende qu’il ne lui en arrive autant, ou à quelqu’un des siens.
[affliction one has for some trial which seems to pose a mortal threat to another, or at least to make them suffer greatly, even though they do not deserve such suffering; on the condition that he who feels compassion is in such a situation that he understands such a thing could happen to him, or to one of his own.]
In avoiding reducing compassion to any such singular and tightly defined story, my lexically eclectic gathering takes a lead instead from the definition of Cotgrave, who puts pitié as “Pitie, ruth, compassion, commiseration; charitie, kindnesse, or tendernesse of disposition; also, grace, clemencie, mercifulnesse.” In English and in French in this period, compassion is a synonymically sticky cluster of terms.
These word choices work differently in different vernaculars. Marjorie Garber has shown how, in early modern English, compassion can imply a sharing of suffering or a feeling for the sufferer; only later, she suggests, did compassion take on the hierarchical feeling that I described above as pity, whereas sympathy retains fellow-feeling’s affinity or likeness.30 Compassion’s history is inseparable from a history of translation. Béatrice Delaurenti describes how medieval medical accounts drawing on Aristotle turned to the vocabulary of compassio rather than sympathia to describe an almost contagious physical response to the movements of another, so that subsequent scholastic inquiry drew together the terms of antiquity and Christian resonances.31 In Delaurenti’s account, medieval compassion is a response something more like what seventeenth-century France would term sympathy. In French, sympathy seems to retain its corporeal, material sense longer than it does in English. During the seventeenth century it refers chiefly to the complementary properties of two objects, before a further exploration in the eighteenth century sets it on a more familiar philosophical path.
If in early modern French the use of these terms—pity, compassion, commiseration, mercy, and so on—is often