“Is interrupting discourse by repeated kisses rude and unmannerly and more apt to create aversion than love?” This question, asked anonymously, appeared in October 1691 in the Athenian Mercury, a London periodical aimed at (male) frequenters of London coffee houses. In the early spring of that year, while walking in a London park, the periodical’s publisher, John Dunton, had conceived the idea of a question-and-answer column, and in the 17th March issue had put out a call for questions. Initially, these were on science, history and religion—“Who was Cain’s wife?”, “Did Adam and Eve eat actual apples?”, “Can a crippled person be made straight again?”, “What is a star?”—but the 13th column also contained communications on personal topics, and there was an inquiry from “a lady in the country” as to “whether her sex might not send … questions as well as men”. They could; and the Athenian correspondence became so popular that Dunton began to collect it in large bound volumes, which were sold to coffee house owners for two shillings and sixpence—about $35 in today’s terms, says Mary Beth Norton.
According to Norton, professor emerita of American history at Cornell, the Athenian Mercury had produced the world’s first personal advice column. Her I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer is a compilation of some of the questions and answers from it. Norton has organised them according to topic, slightly modernised the prose and provided commentary.
Of the three Athenian advisers, Samuel Wesley was a clergyman, two of whose 17 children, John and Charles, were to be the founders of Methodism; John Dunton was the son, and grandson, of clerics. They could be judicious, jocular, sympathetic, flippant, well informed. “Not so hasty, good sir!” the repetitive kisser is told, “kissing is a luscious diet”: he should “feed cautiously” as if he were “eating melons”. A young woman whose spurned wooer “became distracted and died” is exonerated from blame; a red-haired man whose beloved can’t stand the colour is tipped off that an expert in dyeing “is to be spoken with near the King’s bathhouse in Long Acre”; young people are informed how to deal “prudently and lawfully” with irksome parental edicts on whom they can marry.
But on sexual behaviour the Athenians were stern. Cohabitation does not constitute marriage, they pronounce, whatever the correspondent might hope, and he “will answer for it at the day of judgment”. Separation is the most a spouse’s infidelity permits. “It is a crime to love or desire” a married woman. Prayer and fasting are helpful, but not infallible, aids to avoiding lust and tackling Satan, “our declared and open enemy”. However obnoxious the correspondent’s husband, she must submit to God’s will and obey him. The marriage issue was not just moral or conventional, however—there was no legal definition of marriage until 1753, says Norton. She could have added that only 40 years earlier, under Cromwell’s Protectorate, adulterers had been tried in church courts and (theoretically, at any rate) been liable to execution.
The hegemony of Christianity was beginning to ebb
When the advice column began, Christianity was all-pervasive in Europe, but its hegemony was beginning to ebb. Admittedly, even 90 years later Kant could still complain that “the pastor says, ‘Do not argue, believe!’” and be all too eagerly obeyed. Most people remained in lifelong immaturity, Kant wrote, which was why “it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians … If I can get a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience … I need not think: others will undertake that irksome work for me.” But, like his fellow-Enlighteners, Kant was optimistic that the shackles—religious, political, conventional—that bound freedom were being broken. “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity,” runs the first sentence of his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?”. It was seeking to define a movement that had been self-consciously flourishing for about 140 years. In 1641, Descartes had made the thinking “I” the ultimately undoubtable starting point for knowing. He had declared “good sense” to be “the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have”. That was partly a joke, but partly a serious reminder that, however many experts I consult, ultimately it is I myself who has to decide what to believe.
Not that my believing something makes it true, of course. “‘Sapere aude!’ Have courage to use your own understanding – that is the motto of enlightenment,” wrote Kant. The second exhortation is often taken as intended to translate, or be synonymous with—even to supersede—the first. But that is to miss the whole point. “Dare to know!” is primary. Thinking for yourself was merely the necessary means for pursuing objective truth. The universalism of the Enlightenment, nowadays so derided, held that rights and reason were equally and ubiquitously distributed, and that therefore all humans, by thinking courageously outside the parameters of convention, could surmount the accidents of geography and tradition—and jointly achieve the ideal society everywhere and knowledge in every discipline. The Enlighteners compared European customs unfavourably with those of: Brazilian cannibals (Montaigne), Africans (Aphra Benn), the Chinese (Leibniz), Tahitians (Diderot), Persians (Montesquieu), Huron Indians (Voltaire). But they spurned Eurocentrism in aid of a communal quest to find the best ways of thinking and living, not to apologetically pretend that the views and customs of all cultures must, by default, be equally valid and praiseworthy—which today’s fashionable relativism tends (if inconsistently) to do.
This deference to tradition would have outraged Enlightenment progressivism. So too would our tendency to treat truth as a purely personal matter, as somehow bespoke. “My truth” may sometimes grate against “your truth”, but (it often seems), “for me”, my judgment is the sole criterion for veracity. Surely, then, I can afford to recline in my opinions unquestioningly and complacently. The “laziness and cowardice” that Kant castigated for curtailing thought has perhaps been amplified, not sloughed off.
Given the allegedly bespoke nature of truth, why is the advice column thriving? In the 17th century, letter writers were seeking less autocratic substitutes for their parents and priests. And it was still feasible to regard a pastor as more attuned to the metaphysical, God-imbued reality than ordinary people. But what excuse have today’s advisees for deferring to some arbitrary other? Their advisers are sometimes psychotherapists, but are equally likely to be selected on the basis of “celebrity” or for being the sibling of a prime minister precisely renowned for his lack of wisdom.
What excuse have today’s advisees for deferring to some arbitrary other?
What, without proper authority or consensual morality, is today’s advice-columnist doing? Putting him- or herself in the questioner’s shoes, presumably. Yet “if I were you …” is a strange locution. For if I, the adviser, were in fact you, I would be in your position—feeling unable to choose between possible courses of action. I can suggest other choices that might sensibly surpass those, but how much less you-like must I be in order to find one of those alternatives preferable? And on what grounds am I myself to adjudicate between them? Typically, one Athenian correspondent was asking advice on “how he should act consistent with prudence, honour, and conscience”. But what could be the criteria for today’s advice? Perhaps how far that advice can accommodate the questioner’s other beliefs, desires, plans and commitments, and in fact these are permeated with prevailing mores—merely ones different to those of the 17th century.
Today’s advice-seekers may congratulate themselves on having cast off the shackles of religion and convention, on being brave and honest in asking questions that would have horrified their 17th-century predecessors—on infidelity, polyamory, threesomes, erectile dysfunction, BDSM. These intimate issues can be aired with impunity; far from being shameful, they are flaunted. Yet there is still much that it is prohibited to say or even think.
And the Athenian correspondents seem more self-lacerating, less self-justifying than today’s. They made no bones about marriage being a goal, were quite forthright about wanting a wealthy spouse, or asking about ploys for winning a beloved’s favour. Their advisers similarly took a spousal candidate’s income into account—although “we advise none to marry but where they can love”, they added.
