Review of Världens ordning (2004)
Sverker Sörlin (writer).
Read in 2025.
This is the first volume of two in a series on the intellectual history of Europe, from the beginning of the modern period up until the early 20th century.
The first bookend of that scope is set in what is now Spain, where the Reconquista and Columbus’s departure for America happened in the same year, 1492. In Sörlin’s telling, the fall of al-Andalus, and the expulsion of Muslims and Jews that followed, set the stage for an era of Christian supremacism in Europe. With fewer external enemies at hand, the theological absurdities of the Middle Ages grinding against the higher philosophical ambitions of the late Renaissance, the obvious corruption of the Catholic Church, and the American genocides, the clarity of this Christian supremacism finally brought about the Reformation, which fed into the Scientific Revolution, which is what ultimately pushed Europe to the position of world hegemony.
One of the costs of this development was disenchantment. It was easier for Michel de Montaigne to believe that a woman was mad than to believe her when she said she was a witch. Sörlin writes, in the original Swedish:
Vad som än kan ha varit trolldomens ursprung och orsaker, så mattas den av under 1700-talet och är vid århundradets slut endast möjlig att återfinna i fickor av Europa. Ingen kunde år 1800 räkna med att bli tagen på allvar om man anförde att någon genom trolldom anstiftat skada på ens person eller egendom, låt vara att enstaka exempel på folkliga utbrott av kollektiv övertro kan åberopas genom hela 1800-talet. Även på den folkliga nivån sökte man rationella förklaringar. Detta kan idag förefalla som en tämligen alldaglig upplysning, men det kan vara värt att begrunda att det handlar om en omvälvning av det europeiska medvetandet som är i sanning revolutionerande. En hel värld gick förlorad: gastar, troll, spöken, vättar, änglar, djävlar, häxor och demoner – allt det som funnits fanns inte längre, borta var förklaringar, hopp, sammanhang och mening. Den icke-magiska människan stod i ett nytt och naket ljus, och det är inte säkert att hon, bara för att upplysningens krafter önskade det, upplevde denna värld som bättre eller tryggare. Livet med demonerna var kanske kusligt, men också mindre ensamt.
Freely translated:
Whatever its origins and its reasons, sorcery peters out over the course of the 1700s. By the end of that century, it can be found only in pockets of Europe. Nobody, in the year 1800, could expect a claim of injury or property damage by magic to be taken seriously, notwithstanding that a collective excess of belief still erupts, on occasion, throughout the 1800s. Even on the level of the popular, rational explanations were now sought after. Today, this may seem a commonplace observation, but it may be worth considering that it represents a transformation of European consciousness that is truly revolutionary. An entire world was lost: Mylings, trolls, ghosts, gnomes, angels, devils, witches, and demons — everything that had been was no more. Gone were the explanations, the hope, the context, and the meaning. Non-magical humanity now stood in a new glare, and though the forces of enlightenment wanted her to feel this world a better one and safer, she did not necessarily acquiesce. Life with the demons may have been eery, but it hadn’t been this lonely.
Romanticism ensues, but is not a focal point. This volume is instead focused on, as its title says, “the order of the world”: The idea of nature being in order, first on the assumption that Christian gods make it so, then on the modified assumption that these same gods have lifted their hand after one receding moment of creation, and finally without the need for any gods in the picture. The volume ends by following a thread from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s botanical garden, to Linnean journeys of scientific discovery, to the height of extractive colonialism two centuries later, to the subsequent advances in chemistry that made Europe less dependent on colonial cargoes and therefore less inclined to invest in the colonies it had established in America and elsewhere. Nominally, the final bookend of the chronological scope is the end of the First World War in 1918, but the war is not discussed in any detail in this volume, and developments are actually followed from and to points outside the bookends.
If you think that Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance are way cooler than the early modern period, this book might change your mind. There’s certainly enough substance in it, and it is true as Sörlin says that common people starting to look for rational explanations was revolutionary. That happens nowhere in The Bible (ca. 110 CE), not even in Athens. Skepticism had been an important thread of Western philosophy since Xenophanes, if not earlier, but its popularization in the Enlightenment was not a simple thing. Sörlin refers for example to the French historian Daniel Mornet, who charted the private libraries of 18th-century Frenchmen and found mainly novelists like the madames de Graffigny and Riccoboni, since forgotten. Understanding roughly how reason spread anyway is well worth the reading of this book. I was surprised to learn, for example, of Olympe de Gouges, an illiterate playwright but an effective popularizer.
Political, cultural, military and technological history are all marginalized in Världens ordning, but it’s still a bit mad to try to cover this much ground in one book of 770 pages. In six chapters, each built around one major theme, Sörlin touches on many smaller themes and good examples: Astronomy very slowly creeping away from religious dogma; physics; alchemy as the (legimitate) early practice of chemistry, unfortunately married to untenable metaphysical theory; Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke and many others cutting off that head of metaphysics to focus on experimentation; the changing forms of observation, royal societies, academies, scientific correspondence and public intellectualism; nationalism; French pioneers of the funding of science at a national scale and the Enlightenment at large; Catholic science and the Jesuits travelling the world; a number of protestant strains; new forms of utopianism and pansophism alongside increasingly pragmatic writing on politics, jurisprudence and ethics in the wake of the Reformation; emerging feminism; geology leading into evolutionary biology, ecology, and environmentalism; numerous ways to project power and status, including by mapping, by collecting, and so on. There are meta-threads as well: The historiography of scientific methodology in general, and how some developments impacted Swedish intellectual life in particular. Along the way, there are many characters, necessarily compressed.
In weaving all these things together, Sörlin seems occasionally to wander away from his particular areas of expertise. At his worst, I get the sense that he’s merely summarizing other people’s summaries, but sometimes, even these sections are very good. One is on the Malay “boy” Ali, working for a fevered Alfred Russel Wallace, who was in turn corresponding with, and stumbling on the theory of, Charles Darwin. This narrative forms the centrepiece of its chapter and is adorned with a bit of realistic drama. Men like Johannes Kepler, who are now remembered as giants, wavered on the subject of astrology and other received errors, which Francis Bacon called the “idols of the mind”. Isaac Newton himself was obsessesed with alchemy, probably for the sense of teleological meaning that the pseudoscience gave him, though Sörlin does not speculate on that. It took men like Sebastian Castellio, who is hardly remembered at all, to correctly observe that if a religious claim is only a claim, then a “heretic” is just some guy you don’t agree with. Heresy remained a punishable offence in Castellio’s time, but as Sörlin shows in some detail, science kept pushing back against ignorance until a letter from Wallace finally overcame his mentor’s remaining sense of propriety and self-preservation.
Darwin finally published On the Origin of Species (1859), elegantly skewering on his needle the tick of religious fundamentalism that had poisoned the intellectual life of Christian Europe since Constantine. The section on Ali, Wallace and him is magnificent, deeply touching, and it is the broad context that makes it so: The mortality, the fear, the million other fumbling attempts to discover a little bit of truth for humankind, and in the process, pulling the rug out from under the gods. The book as a whole is not dark or dramatic, but you can certainly read it as being about “stumbling down the path of history”, to quote Shirotsugh on human existence in The Wings of Honneamise (1987).
References here: Detwiller’s mathematical Mythos, Den antisociala äventyraren.