Samuel Moyn has recently suggested that the language of human rights stems from a 1930s Christian Democratic insistence on the language of human dignity. “No one interested in where human rights came from can afford to ignore Christianity,” he writes.52 Moyn offers a powerfully disruptive model that suggests terms arising from theological doxa can reappear or be reappropriated in surprisingly different contexts. In offering sectarian genealogies for the way we today worry about the relative distance or proximity of suffering or the vexed language of humanity, I do not propose to source an unbroken intellectual history but rather to show how such languages can be swiftly appropriated and reworked for surprisingly varied political ends. In “compassion talk” (like that which Moyn identifies as a language of international politics in the 1990s), we must learn to hear a negative heritage of exclusion and restriction. The language of the human, like the language of compassion, is always polemical; we should eye it with care.
Compassion’s Judgment
Calls to compassion often look to an emergency heroism, an immediate affective response, yet the discourse of compassion also builds a slow and enduringly rigid structure of appraisal.53 Like other social mechanisms of the period, early modern compassion was dependent on a keen sense of timing, for compassionate and compassionable alike. For Saint-Evremond, even the solicitation of courtly pity depended on a particular temporality; he notes that a woman will take pity on her lover’s punctual and discreet expressions of pain but will mock him if he moans too long.54 Some writers presented compassion as an immediate affective reaction to suffering, akin to a passion that one undergoes. The Dominican Nicolas Coeffeteau thought of it as a reaction to suffering immediately present: “Il faudroit avoir renoncé à tous les sentimens de l’humanité pour n’avoir point l’ame attendrie de douleur quand l’image s’en presente à nos yeux.” [“One would have to have had renounced all human feeling to not have the soul touched with pain when the image presents itself to our eyes.”]55 Others imagined it as a mental exercise capable of a more careful and considered temporal reflection. Eustache de Refuge’s Traité de la cour imagined compassion as a possible response to past, present, and future events: “Mais non seulement le mal present, mais aussi l’advenir s’il est proche nous esmeüt à pitié: comme semblablement le passé, s’il n’est trop esloigné de temps, ou que la souvenance en soit encore fraiche.” [“Not only present suffering, but also the future if it is close moves us to pity; as does the past, if it is not too distant, or if the memory of it is still fresh.”]56 For many writers, to label an action compassionate was chiefly to mark it as a heroic event, a one-off, like the incident of the Good Samaritan, around which many such discussions turned; compassion tends to be figured as an incident rather than a more general and steady disposition to be compassionate. It appears more often as noun than as adjective or verb. The quotidian labor of care carried out by women, for instance, something I take up in the final chapter, too often fell under the radar of the compassion label; it simply went unseen.57
In the early modern period as now, compassion is a judgment which, as Lee Edelman puts it, “commits us to a calculus, a quantification of the good.”58 Admirers of compassion often allow for compassion’s appraising nature—even its narrowness—but they see that as part of compassion’s skill and power. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s account, for example, celebrates compassion as “a reasonably reliable guide to the presence of real value. And this appears to be so ubiquitously, and without elaborate prior training.”59 Nussbaum acknowledges that we need to be cautious about compassion, since as the Stoics argued our judgments show partiality and are “narrow and uneven” (386), and she imagines an ideal and properly instructed compassion that would not be subject to such conditions: “Compassion will be a valuable social motive only if it is equipped with an adequate theory of the worth of basic goods, only if it is equipped with an adequate understanding of agency and fault, and only if it is equipped with a suitably broad account of the people who should be the object of an agent’s concern, distant as well as close” (399). Nussbaum reads the altruism available through a properly trained and properly deployed compassion in the light of a Rawlsian understanding of justice, and she concludes that “compassion makes thought attend to certain human facts” but suggests that to do more than this it must take on a larger theory of “desert and responsibility” (342). The seventeenth-century compassionate judge or careful appraiser—always a man—who figures throughout my chapters would certainly like to imagine himself in these terms, even if his improvisational and contingent judgments often remind us of compassion’s partiality.
Nussbaum’s normative distinction between weaker (more immediate) and more valuable (reflective) compassions pursues the same urge to distinguish that characterizes the debate about compassion from Aristotle on. In contrast, I want not to make normative claims about compassion itself, but rather to suspend judgement about its virtues even as I trace what its limitations can tell us about early modern France.60
Compassion’s Gender
Most seventeenth-century instances of the compassionate subject describe men, although before that point compassion is often a female virtue, associated especially with devotion to Christ. But in the wars of religion, compassion is wrenched away from that private devotional context to become a masculine and public emotion, brokering a public religious compromise. This regendering of compassion is central to my story.
In late medieval Europe, compassionate devotion to Christ was chiefly marked as women’s work.61 Sixteenth-century compassion, too, is insistently feminine, whether within a devotional or a Petrarchan context in which women are asked to take pity on their lover’s sufferings, a scene stitched throughout Renaissance love lyrics and reimagined in Marguerite de Navarre’s La Coche, which both represents and elicits a mutual pity between women, with the queen herself promising three weeping women that she will suffer “grant compassion” [“great compassion”] with them.62 In these instances, compassion is women’s domain: embodied and forming a particular form of Christian or courtly community.
In the early seventeenth century, this embodied feminine compassion is still central to the writing of Pierre de Bérulle, founder of the Oratorians and a key figure in postwar French repositionings of state and religion in the role of confessor to the newly converted king, Henri IV.63 In a meditation entitled “Des souffrances de la Vierge compatissante à son Fils,” probably from around 1615, he suggests the particular role female compassion might be imagined to play in the theological mystery of the Incarnation. Bérulle posits that the flesh of Jesus is also and quite literally the flesh of his mother, specifying that the two do not share the same flesh “selon l’animation” [“in life”] but rather “selon l’affection” [“in emotion”].64 This maternal version of the corporate communion makes the mother the essential compassionate because of her embodiment, and makes the primal mothering scene into one of emotional labor: because of Jesus, after Jesus, she gives birth only to pain.65 It suggests that emotions come about through a physically embodied sharing, an understanding also key to the work of Nicolas Malebranche, an Oratorian philosopher active half a century later.66 Since Bérulle’s works circulated in manuscript form among Oratorians, Malebranche might well have been thinking of his incarnate maternal compassion when he declares that the greatest of all human unions is that between the mother and the child in utero. But Malebranche’s pivot from maternal compassion to other forms of emotion also tells us something about the regendering of compassion in seventeenth-century discourse.
Like many seventeenth-century thinkers, Malebranche was insistent that the emotions and experiences of pregnant women affected their unborn children.67 These theories of maternal impression were understood to form part of what contemporary scientists termed “les principes mécaniques de compassion” [“the mechanical principles of compassion”].68 Although Malebranche begins his discussion of compassion with this