ABSTRACT
Erasmus literary output shows an almost uncanny resemblance to that of a contemporary whom he neither met nor ever referred to: Richard Payne Knight. Knight's attack on Burke's absolutist aesthetics is of a piece with his anti-Burkean view of politics as a dialectical process, which repeatedly confounds the sublime-beautiful distinction by being both at once. Despite Knights scepticism about the formal attributes of breasts, both authors also wrote enthusiastically about sex; a theme which both linked in various ways to pagan mythology. Like Knight, Darwin makes the Burkean categories of the sublime and beautiful subsets of a picturesque whose attractions depend largely on mental association. Despite the mention of Christ, Darwin's utopian vision is knowingly blasphemous. In fact Darwin's plans suggest no intrinsic role for revolutionary violence. This chapter discusses the Robert Palters essay on Eighteenth Century Historiography in Black Athena disputes Bernals tone and numerous details but leaves his central claims about the Enlightenment largely intact.
