FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
1. We have seen France, in the first quarter of the seventeenth
century, pervaded in its upper classes by a freethought partly
born of the knowledge that religion counted for little but harm
in public affairs, partly the result of such argumentation as had
been thrown out by Montaigne and codified by Charron. That it was
not the freethinking of mere idle men of the world is clear when
we note the names and writings of La Mothe le Vayer (1588-1672),
Gui Patin (1601-1671), and Gabriel Naudé (1600-1653), all scholars,
all heretics of the skeptical and rationalistic order. The last
two indeed, sided with the Catholics in politics, Patin approving
of the Fronde, and Naudé of the Massacre, on which ground they are
sometimes claimed as believers. [527] But though in the nature of
the case their inclusion on the side of freethought is not to be
zealously contended for, they must be classed in terms of the balance
of testimony. Patin was the admiring friend of Gassendi; and though
he was never explicitly heretical, and indeed wrote of Socinianism
as a pestilent doctrine, [528] his habit of irony and the risk of
written avowals to correspondents must be kept in view in deciding
on his cast of mind. He is constantly anti-clerical; [529] and the
germinal skepticism of Montaigne and Charron clearly persists in him.
It is true that, as one critic puts it, such rationalists were not
"quite clear whither they were bound. At first sight," he adds,
"no one looks more negative than Gui Patin.... He was always
congratulating himself on being 'delivered from the nightmare';
and he rivals the eighteenth century in the scorn he pours on
priests, monks, and especially 'that black Loyolitic scum from
Spain' which called itself the Society of Jesus. Yet Patin was
no freethinker. Skeptics who made game of the kernel of religion
came quite as much under the lash of his tongue as bigots who
dared defend its husks. His letters end with the characteristic
confession: 'Credo in Deum, Christum crucifixum, etc.; ... De
minimis non curat prætor'" (Viscount St. Cyres in Cambridge
Modern History, v, 73). But the last statement is an error, and
Patin did not attack Gassendi, though he did Descartes. He says
of Rabelais: "C'étoit un homme qui se moquoit de tout; en verité
il y a bien des choses dont on doit raisonnablement se moquer
... elles sont presque tous remplies de vanité, d'imposture et
d'ignorance: ceux qui sont un peu philosophes ne doivent-ils
pas s'en moquer?" (Lett. 485, éd. cited, iii, 148). Again he
writes that "la vie humaine n'est qu'un bureau de rencontre et
un théâtre sur lesquels domine la fortune" (Lett. 726, iii,
620). This is pure Montaigne. The formula cited by Viscount
St. Cyres is neither a general nor a final conclusion to the
letters of Patin. It occurs, I think, only once (18 juillet, 1642,
à M. Belin) in the 836 letters, and not at the end of that one
(Lett. 55, éd. cited, i, 90).
Concerning his friend Naudé, Patin writes: "Je suis fort de
l'avis de feu M. Naudé, qui disoit qu'il y avait quatre choses
dont il se fallait garder, afin de n'être point trompé, savoir,
de prophéties, de miracles, de révélations, et d'apparitions"
(Lett. 353, éd. cited, ii, 490). Again, he writes of a symposium
of Naudé, Gassendi, and himself: "Peut-être, tous trois, guéris
de loup-garou et delivrés du mal des scrupules, qui est le
tyran des consciences, nous irons peut-être jusque fort près du
sanctuaire. Je fis l'an passé ce voyage de Gentilly avec M. Naudé,
moi seul avec lui tête-à-tête; il n'y avait point de témoins,
aussi n'y en falloit-il point: nous y parlâmes fort librement de
tout, sans que personne en ait été scandalisé" (Lett. 362, ii,
508). This seems tolerably freethinking.
All that the Christian editor cares to claim upon the latter
passage is that assuredly "l'unité de Dieu, l'immortalité de l'âme,
l'égalité des hommes devant la loi, ces verités fondamentales de
la raison et consacrées par le Christianisme, y étaient placées au
premier rang" in the discussion. As to the skepticism of Naudé the
editor remarks: "Ce qu'il y a de remarquable, c'est que Gui Patin
soutenait que son ami ... avait puisé son opinion, en général très
peu orthodoxe, en Italie, pendant le long séjour qu'il fit dans
ce pays avec le cardinal Bagni" (ii, 490; cp. Lett. 816; iii, 758,
where Naudé is again cited as making small account of religion).
Certainly Patin and Naudé are of less importance for freethought than
La Mothe le Vayer. That scholar, a "Conseiller d'Estat ordinaire,"
tutor of the brother of Louis XIV, and one of the early members of
the new Academy founded by Richelieu, is an interesting figure [530]
in the history of culture, being a skeptic of the school of Sextus
Empiricus, and practically a great friend of tolerance. Standing
in favour with Richelieu, he wrote at that statesman's suggestion a
treatise On the Virtue of the Heathen, [531] justifying toleration by
pagan example--a course which raises the question whether Richelieu
himself was not strongly touched by the rationalism of his age. If it
be true that the great Cardinal "believed as all the world did in his
time," [532] there is little more to be said; for unbelief, as we have
seen, was already abundant, and even somewhat fashionable. Certainly no
ecclesiastic in high power ever followed a less ecclesiastical policy;
[533] and from the date of his appointment as Minister to Louis
XIII (1624), for forty years, there was no burning of heretics or
unbelievers in France. If he was orthodox, it was very passively. [534]
And Le Vayer's way of handling the dicta of St. Augustine and Thomas
Aquinas as to the virtues of unbelievers being merely vices is for
its time so hardy that the Cardinal's protection alone can explain its
immunity from censure. St. Augustine and St. Thomas, says the critic
calmly, had regard merely to eternal happiness, which virtue alone
can obtain for no one. They are, therefore, to be always interpreted
in this special sense. And so at the very outset the ground is
summarily cleared of orthodox obstacles. [535] The Petit discours
chrétien sur l'immortalité de l'âme, also addressed to Richelieu,
tells of a good deal of current unbelief on that subject; and the
epistle dedicatory professes pain over the "philosopher of our day
[Vanini] who has had the impiety to write that, unless one is very
old, very rich, and a German, one should never expatiate on this
subject." But on the very threshold of the discourse, again, the
skeptic tranquilly suggests that there would be "perhaps something
unreasonable" in following Augustine's precept, so popular in later
times, that the problem of immortality should be solved by the dictates
of religion and feeling, not of "uncertain" reason. "Why," he asks,
"should the soul be her own judge?" [536] And he shows a distinct
appreciation of the avowal of Augustine in his Retractationes that
his own book on the Immortality of the Soul was so obscure to him
that in many places he himself could not understand it. [537] The
"Little Christian Discourse" is, in fact, not Christian at all;
and its arguments are but dialectic exercises, on a par with those
of the Discours sceptique sur la musique which follows. He was,
in short, a skeptic by temperament; and his Preface d'une histoire
[538] shows his mind to have played on the "Mississippi of falsehood
called history" very much as did that of Bayle in a later generation.
Le Vayer's Dialogues of Oratius Tubero (1633) is philosophically
his most important work; [539] but its tranquil Pyrrhonism was
not calculated to affect greatly the current thought of his day;
and he ranked rather as a man of all-round learning [540] than as
a polemist, being reputed "a little contradictory, but in no way
bigoted or obstinate, all opinions being to him nearly indifferent,
excepting those of which faith does not permit us to doubt." [541]
The last phrase tells of the fact that it affects to negate: Le Vayer's
general skepticism was well known. [542] He was not indeed an original
thinker, most of his ideas being echoes from the skeptics of antiquity;
[543] and it has been not unjustly said of him that he is rather of
the sixteenth century than of the seventeenth. [544]
2. On the other hand, the resort on the part of the Catholics to a
skeptical method, as against both Protestants and freethinkers, which
we have seen originating soon after the issue of Montaigne's Essais,
seems to have become more and more common; and this process must rank
as in some degree a product of skeptical thought of a more sincere
sort. In any case it was turned vigorously, even recklessly, against
the Protestants. Thus we find Daillé, at the outset of his work On
the True Use of the Fathers, [545] complaining that when Protestants
quote the Scriptures some Romanists at once ask "whence and in what
way those books may be known to be really written by the prophets
and apostles whose names and titles they bear." This challenge,
rashly incurred by Luther and Calvin in their pronouncements on the
Canon, later Protestants did not as a rule attempt to meet, save in
the fashion of La Placette, who in his work De insanibili Ecclesiæ
Romanæ Scepticismo (1688) [546] undertakes to show that Romanists
themselves are without any grounds of certitude for the authority of
the Church. It was indeed certain that the Catholic method would make
more skeptics than it won.
3. Between the negative development of the doctrine of Montaigne and
the vogue of upper-class deism, the philosophy of Descartes, with
its careful profession of submission to the Church, had at first an
easy reception; and on the appearance of the Discours de la Méthode
(1637) it speedily affected the whole thought of France; the women
of the leisured class, now much given to literature, being among
its students. [547] From the first the Jansenists, who were the most
serious religious thinkers of the time, accepted the Cartesian system
as in the main soundly Christian; and its founder's authority had some
such influence in keeping up the prestige of orthodoxy as had that of
Locke later in England. Boileau, who wrote a satire in defence of the
system when it was persecuted after Descartes's death, is named among
those whom he so influenced. [548] But a merely external influence
of this kind could not counteract the fundamental rationalism of
Descartes's thought, and the whole social and intellectual tendency
towards a secular view of life. Soon, indeed, Descartes became
suspect, partly by reason of the hostile activities of the Jesuits,
who opposed him because the Jansenists generally held by him, though he
had been a Jesuit pupil, and had always some adherents in that order;
[549] partly by reason of the inherent naturalism of his system. That
his doctrine was incompatible with the eucharist was the standing
charge against it, [550] and his defence was not found satisfactory,
[551] though his orthodox followers obtained from Queen Christina a
declaration that he had been largely instrumental in converting her
to Catholicism. [552] Pascal reproached him with having done his best
to do without God in his system; [553] and this seems to have been
the common clerical impression. Thirteen years after his death, in
1663, his work was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, under
a modified censure, [554] and in 1671 a royal order was obtained
under which his philosophy was proscribed in all the universities
of France. [555] Cartesian professors and curés were persecuted and
exiled, or compelled to recant; among the victims being Père Lami of
the Congregation of the Oratory and Père André the Jesuit; [556] and
the Oratorians were in 1678 forced to undergo the humiliation of not
only renouncing Descartes and all his works, but of abjuring their
former Cartesian declarations, in order to preserve their corporate
existence. [557] Precisely in this period of official reaction,
however, there was going on not merely an academic but a social
development of a rationalistic kind, in which the persecuted philosophy
played its part, even though some freethinkers disparaged it.
4. The general tendency is revealed on the one hand by the series
of treatises from eminent Churchmen, defending the faith against
unpublished attacks, and on the other hand by the prevailing tone in
belles lettres. Malherbe, the literary dictator of the first quarter
of the century, had died in 1628 with the character of a scoffer;
[558] and the fashion now lasted till the latter half of the reign of
Louis XIV. In 1621, two years after the burning of Vanini, a young man
named Jean Fontanier had been burned alive on the Place de Grève at
Paris, apparently for the doctrines laid down by him in a manuscript
entitled Le Trésor Inestimable, written on deistic and anti-Catholic
lines. [559] He was said to have been successively Protestant,
Catholic, Turk, Jew, and atheist; and had conducted himself like one
of shaken mind. [560] But the cases of the poet Théophile de Viau,
who about 1623 suffered prosecution on a charge of impiety, [561] and
of his companions Berthelot and Colletet--who like him were condemned
but set free by royal favour--appear to be the only others of the kind
for over a generation. Frivolity of tone sufficed to ward off legal
pursuit. It was in 1665, some years after the death of Mazarin, who had
maintained Richelieu's policy of tolerance, that Claude Petit was burnt
at Paris for "impious pieces"; [562] and even then there was no general
reversion to orthodoxy, the upper-class tone remaining, as in the age
of Richelieu and Mazarin, more or less unbelieving. When Corneille
had introduced a touch of Christian zeal into his Polyeucte (1643)
he had given general offence to the dilettants of both sexes. [563]
Molière, again, the disciple of Gassendi [564] and "the very genius
of reason," [565] was unquestionably an unbeliever; [566] and only
the personal protection of Louis XIV, which after all could not avail
to support such a play as Tartufe against the fury of the bigots,
enabled him to sustain himself at all against them.
5. Equally freethinking was his brilliant predecessor and early
comrade, Cyrano de Bergerac (1620-1655), who did not fear to indicate
his frame of mind in one of his dramas. In La Mort d'Agrippine
he puts in the mouth of Sejanus, as was said by a contemporary,
"horrible things against the Gods," notably the phrase, "whom men
made, and who did not make men," [567] which, however, generally
passed as an attack on polytheism; and though there was certainly
no blasphemous intention in the phrase, Frappons, voilà l'hostie
[= hostia, victim], some pretended to regard it as an insult to the
Catholic host. [568] At times Cyrano writes like a deist; [569] but
in so many other passages does he hold the language of a convinced
materialist, and of a scoffer at that, [570] that he can hardly be
taken seriously on the former head. [571] In short, he was one of
the first of the hardy freethinkers who, under the tolerant rule of
Richelieu and Mazarin, gave clear voice to the newer spirit. Under
any other government, he would have been in danger of his life: as it
was, he was menaced with prosecutions; his Agrippine was forbidden;
the first edition of his Pédant joué was confiscated; during his
last illness there was an attempt to seize his manuscripts; and
down till the time of the Revolution the editions of his works were
eagerly bought up and destroyed by zealots. [572] His recent literary
rehabilitation thus hardly serves to realize his importance in the
history of freethought. Between Cyrano and Molière it would appear
that there was little less of rationalistic ferment in the France of
their day than in England. Bossuet avows in a letter to Huet in 1678
that impiety and unbelief abound more than ever before. [573]
6. Even in the apologetic reasoning of the greatest French prose
writer of that age, Pascal, we have the most pregnant testimony to
the prevalence of unbelief; for not only were the fragments preserved
as Pensées (1670), however originated, [574] developed as part of a
planned defence of religion against contemporary rationalism, [575]
but they themselves show their author profoundly unable to believe
save by a desperate abnegation of reason, though he perpetually
commits the gross fallacy of trusting to reason to prove that reason
is untrustworthy. His work is thus one continuous paralogism, in
which reason is disparaged merely to make way for a parade of bad
reasoning. The case of Pascal is that of Berkeley with a difference:
the latter suffered from hypochondria, but reacted with nervous energy;
Pascal, a physical degenerate, prematurely profound, was prematurely
old; and his pietism in its final form is the expression of the
physical collapse.
This is disputed by M. Lanson, an always weighty authority. He
writes (p. 464) that Pascal was "neither mad nor ill" when
he gave himself up wholly to religion. But ill he certainly
was. He had chronically suffered from intense pains in the head
from his eighteenth year; and M. Lanson admits (p. 451) that
the Pensées were written in intervals of acute suffering. This
indeed understates the case. Pascal several times told his family
that since the age of eighteen he had never passed a day without
pain. His sister, Madame Perier, in her biographical sketch, speaks
of him as suffering "continual and ever-increasing maladies," and
avows that the four last years of his life, in which he penned the
fragments called Pensées, "were but a continual languishment." The
Port Royal preface of 1670 says the same thing, speaking of the
"four years of languor and malady in which he wrote all we have of
the book he planned," and calling the Pensées "the feeble essays
of a sick man." Cp. Pascal's Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon
usage des maladies: and Owen French Skeptics, pp. 746, 784.
Doubtless the levity and licence of the libertins in high places [576]
confirmed him in his revolt against unbelief; but his own credence was
an act rather of despairing emotion than of rational conviction. The
man who advised doubters to make a habit of causing masses to be said
and following religious rites, on the score that cela vous fera croire
et vous abêtira--"that will make you believe and will stupefy you"
[577]--was a pathological case; and though the whole Jansenist
movement latterly stood for a reaction against freethinking, it
can hardly be doubted that the Pensées generally acted as a solvent
rather than as a sustainer of religious beliefs. [578] This charge
was made against them immediately on their publication by the Abbé
de Villars, who pointed out that they did the reverse of what they
claimed to do in the matter of appealing to the heart and to good
sense, since they set forth all the ordinary arguments of Pyrrhonism,
denied that the existence of God could be established by reason or
philosophy, and staked the case on a "wager" which shocked good sense
and feeling alike. "Have you resolved," asks this critic in dialogue,
"to make atheists on pretext of combatting them?" [579]
The same question arises concerning the famous Lettres Provinciales
(1656), written by Pascal in defence of Arnauld against the persecution
of the Jesuits, who carried on in Arnauld's case their campaign against
Jansen, whom they charged with mis-stating the doctrine of Augustine in
his great work expounding that Father. Once more the Catholic Church
was swerving from its own established doctrine of predestination, the
Spanish Jesuit Molina having set up a new movement in the Pelagian or
Arminian direction. The cause of the Jansenists has been represented
as that of freedom of thought and speech; [580] and this it relatively
was insofar as Jansen and Arnauld sought for a hearing, while the
Jesuit-ridden Sorbonne strove to silence and punish them. Pascal had
to go from printer to printer as his Letters succeeded each other, the
first three being successively prosecuted by the clerical authorities;
and in their collected form they found publicity only by being printed
at Rouen and published at Amsterdam, with the rubric of Cologne. All
the while Jansenism claimed to be strict orthodoxy; and it was in
virtue only of the irreducible element of rationalism in Pascal
that the school of Port Royal made for freethought in any higher or
more general sense. Indeed, between his own reputation for piety and
that of the Jansenists for orthodoxy, the Provincial Letters have a
conventional standing as orthodox compositions. It is strange, however,
that those who charge upon the satire of the later philosophers the
downfall of Catholicism in France should not realize the plain tendency
of these brilliant satires to discredit the entire authority of the
Church, and, further, by their own dogmatic weaknesses, to put all
dogma alike under suspicion. [581] Few thoughtful men can now read
the Provinciales without being impressed by the utter absurdity of
the problem over which the entire religious intelligence of a great
nation was engrossed.
It was, in fact, the endless wrangles of the religious factions
over unintelligible issues that more than any other single cause
fostered the unbelief previously set up by religious wars; [582]
and Pascal's writings only deepened the trouble. Even Bossuet, in
his History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (1688), did
but throw a new light on the hollowness of the grounds of religion;
and for thoughtful readers gave a lead rather to atheism than to
Catholicism. The converts it would make to the Catholic Church would
be precisely those whose adherence was of least value, since they
had not even the temperamental basis which, rather than argument,
kept Bossuet a believer, and were Catholics only for lack of courage
to put all religion aside. When "variation" was put as a sign of error
by a Churchman the bulk of whose life was spent in bitter strifes with
sections of his own Church, critical people were hardly likely to be
confirmed in the faith. Within ten years of writing his book against
the Protestants, Bossuet was engaged in an acrid controversy with
Fénelon, his fellow prelate and fellow demonstrator of the existence
and attributes of God, accusing him of holding unchristian positions;
and both prelates were always fighting their fellow-churchmen the
Jansenists. If the variations of Protestants helped Catholicism,
those of Catholics must have helped unbelief.
7. A similar fatality attended the labours of the learned Huet, Bishop
of Avranches, whose Demonstratio Evangelica (1678) is remarkable (with
Boyle's Discourse of Things above Reason) as anticipating Berkeley in
the argument from the arbitrariness of mathematical assumptions. He
too, by that and by his later works, made for sheer philosophical
skepticism, [583] always a dangerous basis for orthodoxy. [584]
Such an evolution, on the part of a man of uncommon intellectual
energy, challenges attention, the more so seeing that it typifies
a good deal of thinking within the Catholic pale, on lines already
noted as following on the debate with Protestantism. Honestly pious
by bent of mind, but always occupied with processes of reasoning
and research, Huet leant more and more, as he grew in years, to
the skeptical defence against the pressures of Protestantism and
rationalism, at once following and furthering the tendency of his
age. That the skeptical method is a last weapon of defence can be
seen from the temper in which the demonstrator assails Spinoza,
whom he abuses, without naming him, in the fashion of his day, and
to whose arguments concerning the authorship of the Pentateuch he
makes singularly feeble answers. [585] They are too worthless to
have satisfied himself; and it is easy to see how he was driven to
seek a more plausible rebuttal. [586] A distinguished English critic,
noting the general movement, pronounces, justly enough, that Huet took
up philosophy "not as an end, but as a means--not for its own sake,
but for the support of religion"; and then adds that his attitude is
thus quite different from Pascal's. [587] But the two cases are really
on a level. Pascal too was driven to philosophy in reaction against
incredulity; and though Pascal's work is of a more bitter and morbid
intensity, Huet also had in him that psychic craving for a supernatural
support which is the essence of latter-day religion. And if we credit
this spirit to Pascal and to Huet, as we do to Newman, we must suppose
that it partly touched the whole movement of pro-Catholic skepticism
which has been above noted as following on the Reformation. It is
ascribing to it as a whole too much of calculation and strategy to
say of its combatants that "they conceived the desperate design of
first ruining the territory they were prepared to evacuate; before
philosophy was handed over to the philosophers the old Aristotelean
citadel was to be blown into the air." [588] In reality they caught,
as religious men will, with passion rather than with policy, at any
plea that might seem fitted to beat down the presumption of "the wild,
living intellect of man"; [589] and their skepticism had a certain
sincerity inasmuch as, trained to uncritical belief, they had never
found for themselves the grounds of rational certitude.
Inasmuch too as Protestantism had no such ground, and rationalism
was still far from having cleared its bases, Huet, as things went,
was within his moral rights when he set forth his transcendentalist
skepticism in his Quæstiones Alnetanæ in 1690. Though written in very
limpid Latin, [590] that work attracted practically no attention;
and though, having a repute for provincialism in his French style,
Huet was loth to resort to the vernacular, he did devote his spare
hours through a number of his latter years to preparing his Traité
Philosophique de la faiblesse de l'esprit humain, which, dying in 1722,
he left to be published posthumously (1723). The outcry against his
criticism of Descartes and his Demonstratio had indisposed him for
further personal strife; but he was determined to leave a completed
message. Thus it came about that a sincere and devoted Catholic
bishop "left, as his last legacy to his fellow-men, a work of the
most outrageous skepticism." [591]
8. Meanwhile the philosophy of Descartes, if less strictly propitious
to science at some points than that of Gassendi, was both directly and
indirectly making for the activity of reason. In virtue of its formal
"spiritualism," it found access where any clearly materialistic
doctrine would have been tabooed; so that we find the Cartesian
ecclesiastic Régis not only eagerly listened to and acclaimed at
Toulouse in 1665, but offered a civic pension by the magistrates
[592]--this within two years of the placing of Descartes's works on
the Index. After arousing a similar enthusiasm at Montpellier and
at Paris, Régis was silenced by the Archbishop, whereupon he set
himself to develop the Cartesian philosophy in his study. The result
was that he ultimately went beyond his master, openly rejecting the
idea of creation out of nothing, [593] and finally following Locke
in rejecting the innate ideas which Descartes had affirmed. [594]
Another young Churchman, Desgabets, developing from Descartes and his
pupil Malebranche, combined with their "spiritist" doctrine much of
the virtual materialism of Gassendi, arriving at a kind of pantheism,
and at a courageous pantheistic ethic, wherein God is recognized as
the author alike of good and evil [595]--a doctrine which we find even
getting a hearing in general society, and noticed in the correspondence
of Madame de Sévigné in 1677. [596]
Malebranche's treatise De la Recherche de la Vérité (1674) was in fact
a development of Descartes which on the one hand sought to connect
his doctrine of innate ideas with his God-idea, and on the other hand
headed the whole system towards pantheism. The tendency had arisen
before him in the congregation of the Oratory, to which he belonged,
and in which the Cartesian philosophy had so spread that when, in
1678, the alarmed superiors proposed to eradicate it, they were told
by the members that, "If Cartesianism is a plague, there are two
hundred of us who are infected." [597] But if Cartesianism alarmed
the official orthodox, Malebranche wrought a deeper disintegration
of the faith. In his old age his young disciple De Mairan, who had
deeply studied Spinoza, pressed him fatally hard on the virtual
coincidence of his philosophy with that of the more thoroughgoing
pantheist; and Malebranche indignantly repudiated all agreement with
"the miserable Spinoza," [598] "the atheist," [599] whose system he
pronounced "a frightful and ridiculous chimera." [600] "Nevertheless,
it was towards this chimera that Malebranche tended." [601] On all
hands the new development set up new strife; and Malebranche, who
disliked controversy, found himself embroiled alike with Jansenists
and Jesuits, with orthodox and with innovating Cartesians, and with his
own Spinozistic disciples. The Jansenist Arnauld attacked his book in
a long and stringent treatise, Des vrayes at des fausses idées (1683),
[602] accumulating denials and contradictions with a cold tenacity
of ratiocination which never lapsed into passion, and was all the
more destructive. For the Jansenists Malebranche was a danger to the
faith in the ratio of his exaltation of it, inasmuch as reference of
the most ordinary beliefs back to "faith" left them no ground upon
which to argue up to faith. [603] This seems to have been a common
feeling among his readers. For the same reason he made no appeal to
men of science. He would have no recognition of secondary causes,
the acceptance of which he declared to be a dangerous relapse into
paganism. [604] There was thus no scientific principle in the new
doctrine which could enable it to solve the problems or absorb the
systems of other schools. Locke was as little moved by it as were the
Jansenists. Malebranche won readers everywhere by his charm of style;
[605] but he was as much of a disturber as of a reconciler. The very
controversies which he set up made for disintegration; and Fénelon
found it necessary to "refute" Malebranche as well as Spinoza, and
did his censure with as great severity as Arnauld's. [606] The mere
fact that Malebranche put aside miracles in the name of divine law
was fatal from the point of view of orthodoxy.
9. Yet another philosophic figure of the reign of Louis XIV, the Jesuit
Père Buffier (1661-1737), deserves a passing notice here--out of his
chronological order--though the historians of philosophy have mostly
ignored him. [607] He is indeed of no permanent philosophic importance,
being a precursor of the Scottish school of Reid, nourished on Locke,
and somewhat on Descartes; but he is significant for the element
of practical rationalism which pervades his reasoning, and which
recommended him to Voltaire, Reid, and Destutt de Tracy. On the
question of "primary truths in theology" he declares so boldly for
the authority of revelation in all dogmas which pass comprehension,
and for the non-concern of theology with any process of rational proof,
[608] that it is hardly possible to suppose him a believer. On those
principles, Islam has exactly the same authority as Christianity. In
his metaphysic "he rejects all the ontological proofs of the existence
of God, and, among others, the proof of Descartes from infinitude:
he maintains that the idea of God is not innate, and that it can
be reached only from consideration of the order of nature." [609]
He is thus as much of a force for deism as was his master, Locke;
and he outgoes him in point of rationalism when he puts the primary
ethic of reciprocity as a universally recognized truth, [610] where
Locke had helplessly fallen back on "the will of God." On the other
hand he censures Descartes for not admitting the equal validity of
other tests with that of primary consciousness, thus in effect putting
himself in line with Gassendi. For the rest, his Examen des préjugés
vulgaires, the most popular of his works, is so full of practical
rationalism, and declares among other things so strongly in favour
of free discussion, that its influence must have been wholly in the
direction of freethought. "Give me," he makes one of his disputants
say, "a nation where they do not dispute, do not contest: it will be,
I assure you, a very stupid and a very ignorant nation." [611] Such
reasoning could hardly please the Jesuits, [612] and must have pleased
freethinkers. And yet Buffier, like Gassendi, in virtue of his clerical
status and his purely professional orthodoxy, escaped all persecution.
While an evolving Cartesianism, modified by the thought of Locke and
the critical evolution of that, was thus reacting on thought in all
directions, the primary and proper impulse of Descartes and Locke
was doing on the Continent what that of Bacon had already done in
England--setting men on actual scientific observation and experiment,
and turning them from traditionalism of every kind. The more religious
minds, as Malebranche, set their faces almost fanatically against
erudition, thus making an enemy of the all-learned Huet, [613]
but on the other hand preparing the way for the scientific age. For
the rest we find the influence of Descartes at work in heresies at
which he had not hinted. Finally we shall see it taking deep root in
Holland, furthering a rationalistic view of the Bible and of popular
superstitions.
10. Yet another new departure was made in the France of Louis XIV
by the scholarly performance of Richard Simon (1638-1712), who was
as regards the Scriptural texts what Spencer of Cambridge was as
regards the culture-history of the Hebrews, one of the founders of
modern methodical criticism. It was as a devout Catholic refuting
Protestants, and a champion of the Bible against Spinoza, that
Simon began his work; but, more sincerely critical than Huet, he
reached views more akin to those of Spinoza than to those of the
Church. [614] The congregation of the Oratory, where Simon laid the
foundations of his learning, was so little inclined to his critical
views that he decided to leave it; and though persuaded to stay,
and to become for a time a professor of philosophy at Julli, he at
length broke with the Order. Then, from his native town of Dieppe,
came his strenuous series of critical works--L'histoire critique du
Vieux Testament (1678), which among other things decisively impugned
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; the Histoire critique du
texte du Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam, 1689); numerous other volumes
of critical studies on texts, versions, and commentators; and finally
a French translation of the New Testament with notes. His Bibliothèque
Critique (4 vols. under the name of Saint-Jore) was suppressed by an
order in council; the translation was condemned by Bossuet and the
Archbishop of Paris; and the two first-named works were suppressed by
the Parlement of Paris and attacked by a host of orthodox scholars;
but they were translated promptly into Latin and English; and they
gave a new breadth of footing to the deistic argument, though Simon
always wrote as an avowed believer.
Before Simon, the Protestant Isaac la Peyrère, the friend of La
Mothe le Vayer and Gassendi, and the librarian of Condé, had fired
a somewhat startling shot at the Pentateuch in his Præadamitæ [615]
and Systema Theologica ex Præ-adamitarum Hypothesi (both 1655: printed
in Holland [616]), for which he was imprisoned at Brussels, with the
result that he recanted and joined the Church of Rome, going to the
Pope in person to receive absolution, and publishing an Epistola ad
Philotimum (Frankfort, 1658), in which he professed to explain his
reasons for abjuring at once his Calvinism and his treatise. It
is clear that all this was done to save his skin, for there is
explicit testimony that he held firmly by his Preadamite doctrine
to the end of his life, despite the seven or eight confutations of
his work published in 1656. [617] Were it not for his constructive
theses--especially his idea that Adam was a real person, but simply
the father of the Hebrews and not of the human race--he would deserve
to rank high among the scientific pioneers of modern rationalism,
for his negative work is shrewd and sound. Like so many other early
rationalists, collectively accused of "destroying without replacing,"
he erred precisely in his eagerness to build up, for his negations
have all become accepted truths. [618] As it is, he may be ranked,
after Toland, as a main founder of the older rationalism, developed
chiefly in Germany, which sought to reduce as many miracles as possible
to natural events misunderstood. But he was too far before his time to
win a fair hearing. Where Simon laid a cautious scholarly foundation,
Peyrère suddenly challenged immemorial beliefs, and failed accordingly.
11. Such an evolution could not occur in France without affecting the
neighbouring civilization of Holland. We have seen Dutch life at the
beginning of the seventeenth century full of Protestant fanaticism
and sectarian strife; and in the time of Descartes these elements,
especially on the Calvinist side, were strong enough virtually to
drive him out of Holland (1647) after nineteen years' residence. [619]
He had, however, made disciples; and his doctrine bore fruit, finding
doubtless some old soil ready. Thus in 1666 one of his disciples, the
Amsterdam physician Louis Meyer, published a work entitled Philosophia
Sacrae Scripturae Interpres, [620] in which, after formally affirming
that the Scripture is the infallible Word of God, he proceeds to argue
that the interpretation of the Word must be made by the human reason,
and accordingly sets aside all meanings which are irreconcilable
therewith, reducing them to allegories or tropes. Apart from this,
there is somewhat strong evidence that in Holland in the second
half of the century Cartesianism was in large part identified with
a widespread movement of rationalism, of a sufficiently pronounced
kind. Peter von Mastricht, Professor of Theology at Utrecht, published
in 1677 a Latin treatise, Novitatum Cartesianarum Gangræna, in which
he made out a list of fifty-six anti-Christian propositions maintained
by Cartesians. Among them are these: That the divine essence, also
that of angels, and that of the soul, consists only in Cogitation;
That philosophy is not subservient to divinity, and is no less certain
and no less revealed; That in things natural, moral, and practical,
and also in matters of faith, the Scripture speaks according to the
erroneous notions of the vulgar; That the mystery of the Trinity may
be demonstrated by natural reason; That the first chaos was able of
itself to produce all things material; That the world has a soul;
and that it may be infinite in extent. [621] The theologian was thus
visibly justified in maintaining that the "novelties" of Cartesianism
outwent by a long way those of Arminianism. [622] It had in fact
established a new point of view; seeing that Arminius had claimed
for theology all the supremacy ever accorded to it in the Church. [623]
12. As Meyer was one of the most intimate friends of Spinoza, being
with him at death, and became the editor of his posthumous works,
it can hardly be doubted that his treatise, which preceded Spinoza's
Tractatus by four years, influenced the great Jew, who speedily
eclipsed him. [624] Spinoza, however (1632-1677), was first led
to rationalize by his Amsterdam friend and teacher, Van den Ende,
a scientific materialist, hostile to all religion; [625] and it
was while under his influence that he was excommunicated by his
father's synagogue. From the first, apparently, Spinoza's thought
was shaped partly by the medieval Hebrew philosophy [626] (which, as
we have seen, combined Aristotelean and Saracen influences), partly
by the teaching of Bruno, though he modified and corrected that at
various points. [627] Later he was deeply influenced by Descartes,
whom he specially expounded for a pupil in a tractate. [628] Here
he endorses Descartes's doctrine of freewill, which he was later
to repudiate and overthrow. But he drew from Descartes his retained
principle that evil is not a real existence. In a much less degree he
was influenced by Bacon, whose psychology he ultimately condemned;
but from Hobbes he took not only his rationalistic attitude towards
"revelation," but his doctrine of ecclesiastical subordination. [629]
Finally evolving his own conceptions, he produced a philosophic system
which was destined to affect all European thought, remaining the while
quietly occupied with the handicraft of lens-grinding by which he
earned his livelihood. The Grand Pensionary of the Netherlands, John
de Witt, seems to have been in full sympathy with the young heretic,
on whom he conferred a small pension before he had published anything
save his Cartesian Principia (1663).
The much more daring and powerful Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
(1670 [630]) was promptly condemned by a Dutch clerical synod, along
with Hobbes's Leviathan, which it greatly surpassed in the matter of
criticism of the scriptural text. It was the most stringent censure
of supernaturalism that had thus far appeared in any modern language;
and its preface is an even more mordant attack on popular religion and
clericalism than the main body of the work. What seems to-day an odd
compromise--the reservation of supra-rational authority for revelation,
alongside of unqualified claims for the freedom of reason [631]--was
but an adaptation of the old scholastic formula of "twofold truth,"
and was perhaps at the time the possible maximum of open rationalism
in regard to the current creed, since both Bacon and Locke, as we have
seen, were fain to resort to it. As revealed in his letters, Spinoza
in almost all things stood at the point of view of the cultivated
rationalism of two centuries later. He believed in a historical Jesus,
rejecting the Resurrection; [632] disbelieved in ghosts and spirits;
[633] rejected miracles; [634] and refused to think of God as ever
angry; [635] avowing that he could not understand the Scriptures, and
had been able to learn nothing from them as to God's attributes. [636]
The Tractatus could not go so far; but it went far enough to horrify
many who counted themselves latitudinarian. It was only in Holland
that so aggressive a criticism of Christian faith and practice could
then appear; and even there neither publisher nor author dared avow
himself. Spinoza even vetoed a translation into Dutch, foreseeing
that such a book would be placed under an interdict. [637] It was
as much an appeal for freedom of thought (libertas philosophandi)
as a demonstration of rational truth; and Spinoza dexterously pointed
(c. 20) to the social effects of the religious liberty already enjoyed
in Amsterdam as a reason for carrying liberty further. There can
be no question that it powerfully furthered alike the deistic and
the Unitarian movements in England from the year of its appearance;
and, though the States-General felt bound formally to prohibit it on
the issue of the second edition in 1674, its effect in Holland was
probably as great as elsewhere: at least there seems to have gone on
there from this time a rapid modification of the old orthodoxy.
Still more profound, probably, was the effect of the posthumous Ethica
(1677), which he had been prevented from publishing in his lifetime,
[638] and which not only propounded in parts an absolute pantheism (=
atheism [639]), but definitely grounded ethics in human nature. If
more were needed to arouse theological rage, it was to be found
in the repeated and insistent criticism of the moral and mental
perversity of the defenders of the faith [640]--a position not
indeed quite consistent with the primary teaching of the treatise on
the subject of Will, of which it denies the entity in the ordinary
sense. Spinoza was here reverting to the practical attitude of Bacon,
which, under a partial misconception, he had repudiated; and he did
not formally solve the contradiction. His purpose was to confute the
ordinary orthodox dogma that unbelief is wilful sin; and to retort
the charge without reconciling it with the thesis was to impair
the philosophic argument. [641] It was not on that score, however,
that it was resented, but as an unpardonable attack on orthodoxy,
not to be atoned for by any words about the spirit of Christ. [642]
The discussion went deep and far. A reply to the Tractatus which
appeared in 1674, by an Utrecht professor (then dead), is spoken of
by Spinoza with contempt; [643] but abler discussion followed, though
the assailants mostly fell foul of each other. Franz Cuper or Kuyper
of Amsterdam, who in 1676 published an Arcana Atheismi Revelata,
professedly refuting Spinoza's Tractatus, was charged with writing
in bad faith and with being on Spinoza's side--an accusation which
he promptly retorted on other critics, apparently with justice. [644]
The able treatise of Prof. E. E. Powell on Spinoza and Religion
is open to demur at one point--its reiterated dictum that
Spinoza's character was marred by "lack of moral courage"
(p. 44). This expression is later in a measure retreated from:
after "his habitual attitude of timid caution," we have: "Spinoza's
timidity, or, if you will, his peaceable disposition." If the
last-cited concession is to stand, the other phrases should be
withdrawn. Moral courage, like every other human attribute,
is to be estimated comparatively; and the test-question here
is: Did any other writer in Spinoza's day venture further than
he? Moral courage is not identical with the fanaticism which
invites destruction; fanaticism supplies a motive which dispenses
with courage, though it operates as courage might. But refusal to
challenge destruction gratuitously does not imply lack of courage,
though of course it may be thereby motived. A quite brave man,
it has been noted, will quietly shun a gratuitous risk where
one who is "afraid of being afraid" may face it. When all is
said, Spinoza was one of the most daring writers of his day;
and his ethic made it no more a dereliction of duty for him to
avoid provoking arrest and capital punishment than it is for
either a Protestant or a rationalist to refrain from courting
death by openly defying Catholic beliefs before a Catholic
mob in Spain. It is easy for any of us to-day to be far more
explicit than Spinoza was. It is doubtful whether any of us,
if we had lived in his day and were capable of going as far in
heresy, would have run such risks as he did in publishing the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. For those who have lived much in
his society, it should be difficult to doubt that, if allowed, he
would have dared death on the night of the mob-murder of the De
Witts. The formerly suppressed proof of his very plain speaking
on the subject of prayer, and his indications of aversion to
the practice of grace before meals (Powell, pp. 323-25) show
lack even of prudence on his part. Prof. Powell is certainly
entitled to censure those recent writers who have wilfully kept
up a mystification as to Spinoza's religiosity; but their lack
of courage or candour does not justify an imputation of the same
kind upon him. That Spinoza was "no saint" (Powell, p. 43) is
true in the remote sense that he was not incapable of anger. But
it would be hard to find a Christian who would compare with him
in general nobility of character. The proposition that he was not
"in any sense religious" (id. ib.) seems open to verbal challenge.
13. The appearance in 1678 of a Dutch treatise "against all sorts of
atheists," [645] and in 1681, at Amsterdam, of an attack in French on
Spinoza's Scriptural criticism, [646] points to a movement outside of
the clerical and scholarly class. All along, indeed, the atmosphere of
the Arminian or "Remonstrant" School in Holland must have been fairly
liberal. [647] Already in 1685 Locke's friend Le Clerc had taken up
the position of Hobbes and Spinoza and Simon on the Pentateuch in his
Sentimens de quelques théologiens de Hollande (translated into English
and published in 1690 as "Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of
the Holy Scriptures"). [648] And although Le Clerc always remained
something of a Scripturalist, and refused to go the way of Spinoza,
he had courage enough to revive an ancient heresy by urging, in his
commentary on the fourth Gospel (1701), that "the Logos" should be
rendered "Reason"--an idea which he probably derived from the Unitarian
Zwicker without realizing how far it could take him. His ultimate
recantation, on the subject of the authorship of the Pentateuch,
served only to weaken his credit with freethinkers, and came too late
to arrest the intellectual movement which he had forwarded.
A rationalizing spirit had now begun to spread widely in Holland; and
within twenty years of Spinoza's death there had arisen a Dutch sect,
led by Pontiaan van Hattem, a pastor at Philipsland, which blended
Spinozism with evangelicalism in such a way as to incur the anathema of
the Church. [649] In the time of the English Civil War the fear of the
opponents of the new multitude of sects was that England should become
"another Amsterdam." [650] This very multiplicity tended to promote
doubt; and in 1713 we find Anthony Collins [651] pointing to Holland
as a country where freedom to think has undermined superstition to a
remarkable degree. During his stay, in the previous generation, Locke
had found a measure of liberal theology, in harmony with his own; but
in those days downright heresy was still dangerous. Deurhoff (d. 1717),
who translated Descartes and was accused of Spinozism, though he
strongly attacked it, [652] had at one time to fly Holland, though
by his writings he founded a pantheistic sect known as Deurhovians;
and Balthasar Bekker, a Cartesian, persecuted first for Socinianism,
incurred so much odium by publishing in 1691 a treatise denying the
reality of witchcraft that he had to give up his office as a preacher.
Cp. art. in Biographie Universelle, and Mosheim, 17 Cent. pt. ii,
ch. ii, § 35, and notes in Reid's ed. Bekker was not the first
to combat demonology on scriptural grounds; Arnold Geulincx,
of Leyden, and the French Protestant refugee Daillon having
less confidently put the view before him, the latter in his
Daimonologia, 1687 (trans. in English, 1723), and the former in
his system of ethics. Gassendi, as we saw, had notably discredited
witchcraft a generation earlier; Reginald Scot had impugned its
actuality in 1584; and Wier, still earlier, in 1563. And even
before the Reformation the learned King Christian II of Denmark
(deposed 1523) had vetoed witch-burning in his dominions. (Allen,
Hist. de Danemark, French tr. 1878, i, 281.) As Scot's Discoverie
had been translated into Dutch in 1609, Bekker probably had
a lead from him. Glanvill's Blow at Modern Sadducism (1688),
reproduced in Sadducismus Triumphatus, undertakes to answer some
objections of the kind later urged by Bekker; and the discussion
was practically international. Bekker's treatise, entitled De
Betooverte Wereld, was translated into English--first in 1695,
from the French, under the title The World Bewitched (only 1
vol. published), and again in 1700 as The World turned upside
down. In the French translation, Le Monde Enchanté (4 tom. 1694),
it had a great vogue. A refutation was published in English in
An Historical Treatise of Spirits, by J. Beaumont, in 1705. It is
noteworthy that Bekker was included as one of "four modern sages
(vier neuer Welt-Weisen)" with Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza,
in a German folio tractate (hostile) of 1702.
14. No greater service was rendered in that age to the spread of
rational views than that embodied in the great Dictionnaire Historique
et Critique [653] of Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), who, born in France,
but driven out by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, spent the
best part of his life and did his main work at Rotterdam. Persecuted
there for his freethinking, to the extent of having to give up his
professorship, he yet produced a virtual encyclopedia for freethinkers
in his incomparable Dictionary, baffling hostility by the Pyrrhonian
impartiality with which he handled all religious questions. In his
youth, when sent by his Protestant father to study at Toulouse,
he had been temporarily converted, as was the young Gibbon later,
to Catholicism; [654] and the retrospect of that experience seems
in Bayle's case, as in Gibbon's, to have been a permanent motive
to practical skepticism. [655] But, again, in the one case as in
the other, skepticism was fortified by abundant knowledge. Bayle
had read everything and mastered every controversy, and was thereby
the better able to seem to have no convictions of his own. But even
apart from the notable defence of the character of atheists dropped by
him in the famous Pensées diverses sur la Comète (1682), and in the
Éclaircissements in which he defended it, it is abundantly evident
that he was an unbeliever. The only alternative view is that he
was strictly or philosophically a skeptic, reaching no conclusions
for himself; but this is excluded by the whole management of his
expositions. [656] It is recorded that it was his vehement description
of himself as a Protestant "in the full force of the term," accompanied
with a quotation from Lucretius, that set the clerical diplomatist
Polignac upon re-reading the Roman atheist and writing his poem
Anti-Lucretius. [657] Bayle's ostensible Pyrrhonism was simply the
tactic forced on him by his conditions; and it was the positive
unbelievers who specially delighted in his volumes. He laid down no
cosmic doctrines, but he illuminated all; and his air of repudiating
such views as Spinoza's had the effect rather of forcing Spinozists
to leave neutral ground than of rehabilitating orthodoxy.
On one theme he spoke without any semblance of doubt. Above all
men who had yet written he is the champion of toleration. [658] At
a time when in England the school of Locke still held that atheism
must not be tolerated, he would accept no such position, insisting
that error as such is not culpable, and that, save in the case of
a sect positively inciting to violence and disorder, all punishment
of opinion is irrational and unjust. [659] On this theme, moved by
the memory of his own life of exile and the atrocious persecution
of the Protestants of France, he lost his normal imperturbability,
as in his Letter to an Abbé (if it be really his), entitled Ce que
c'est que la France toute catholique sous le règne de Louis le Grand,
in which a controlled passion of accusation makes every sentence bite
like an acid, leaving a mark that no dialectic can efface. But it was
not only from Catholicism that he suffered, and not only to Catholics
that his message was addressed. One of his most malignant enemies
was the Protestant Jurieu, who it was that succeeded in having him
deprived of his chair of philosophy and history at Rotterdam (1693)
on the score of the freethinking of his Pensées sur la Comète. This
wrong cast a shadow over his life, reducing him to financial straits
in which he had to curtail greatly the plan of his Dictionary. Further,
it moved him to some inconsistent censure of the political writings of
French Protestant refugees [660]--Jurieu being the reputed author of a
violent attack on the rule of Louis XIV, under the title Les Soupirs de
la France esclave qui aspire après la liberté (1689). [661] Yet again,
the malicious Jurieu induced the Consistory of Rotterdam to censure
the Dictionary on the score of the tone and tendency of the article
"David" and the renewed vindications of atheists.
But nothing could turn Bayle from his loyalty to reason and toleration;
and the malice of the bigots could not deprive him of his literary
vogue, which was in the ratio of his unparalleled industry. As a mere
writer he is admirable: save in point of sheer wit, of which, however,
he has not a little, he is to this day as readable as Voltaire. By
force of unfailing lucidity, wisdom, and knowledge, he made the
conquest of literary Europe; and fifty years after his death we find
the Jesuit Delamare in his (anonymous) apologetic treatise, La Foi
justifiée de tout reproche de contradiction avec la raison (1761),
speaking of him to the deists as "their theologian, their doctor,
their oracle." [662] He was indeed no less; and his serene exposure
of the historic failure of Christianity was all the more deadly as
coming from a master of theological history.
15. Meantime, Spinoza had reinforced the critical movement in France,
[663] where decline of belief can be seen proceeding after as before
the definite adoption of pietistic courses by the king, under the
influence of Madame de Maintenon. Abbadie, writing his Traité de
la verité de la religion chrétienne at Berlin in 1684, speaks of an
"infinity" of prejudiced deists as against the "infinity" of prejudiced
believers [664]--evidently thinking of northern Europeans in general;
and he strives hard to refute both Hobbes and Spinoza on points
of Biblical criticism. In France he could not turn the tide. That
radical distrust of religious motives and illumination which can be
seen growing up in every country in modern Europe where religion led
to war, was bound to be strengthened by the spectacle of the reformed
sensualist harrying heresy in his own kingdom in the intervals of
his wars with his neighbours. The crowning folly of the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes [665] (1685), forcing the flight from France of
some three hundred thousand industrious [666] and educated inhabitants
for the offence of Protestantism, was as mad a blow to religion as to
the State. Less paralysing to economic life than the similar policy
of the Church against the Moriscoes in Spain, it is no less striking
a proof of the paralysis of practical judgment to which unreasoning
faith and systematic ecclesiasticism can lead. Orthodoxy in France was
as ecstatic in its praise of the act as had been that of Spain in the
case of the expulsion of the Moriscoes. The deed is not to be laid at
the single door of the king or of any of his advisers, male or female:
the act which deprived France of a vast host of her soundest citizens
was applauded by nearly all cultured Catholicism. [667] Not merely the
bishops, Bossuet and Fénelon [668] and Masillon, but the Jansenist
Arnauld; not merely the female devotees, Mademoiselle de Scudéry
and Madame Deshoulières, but Racine, La Bruyère, and the senile la
Fontaine--all extolled the senseless deed. The not over-pious Madame de
Sévigné was delighted with the "dragonnades," declaring that "nothing
could be finer: no king has done or will do anything more memorable";
the still less mystical Bussy, author of the Histoire amoureuse des
Gaules, was moved to pious exultation; and the dying Chancelier le
Tellier, on signing the edict of revocation, repeated the legendary
cry of Simeon, Nunc dimitte servum tuum, Domine! To this pass had the
Catholic creed and discipline brought the mind of France. Only the
men of affairs, nourished upon realities--the Vaubans, Saint Simons,
and Catinats--realized the insanity of the action, which Colbert
(d. 1683) would never have allowed to come to birth.
The triumphers, doubtless, did not contemplate the expatriation of the
myriads of Protestants who escaped over the frontiers in the closing
years of the century in spite of all the efforts of the royal police,
"carrying with them," as a later French historian writes, "our arts,
the secrets of our manufactures, and their hatred of the king." The
Catholics, as deep in civics as in science, thought only of the
humiliation and subjection of the heretics--doubtless feeling that
they were getting a revenge against Protestantism for the Test Act and
the atrocities of the Popish Plot mania in England. The blow recoiled
on their country. Within a generation, their children were enduring
the agonies of utter defeat at the hands of a coalition of Protestant
nations every one of which had been strengthened by the piously exiled
sons of France; and in the midst of their mortal struggle the revolted
Protestants of the Cévennes so furiously assailed from the rear that
the drain upon the king's forces precipitated the loss of their hold
on Germany.
For every Protestant who crossed the frontiers between 1685 and 1700,
perhaps, a Catholic neared or crossed the line between indifferentism
and active doubt. The steady advance of science all the while
infallibly undermined faith; and hardly was the bolt launched against
the Protestants when new sapping and mining was going on. Fontenelle
(1657-1757), whose Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686)
popularized for the elegant world the new cosmology, cannot but
have undermined dogmatic faith in some directions; above all by
his graceful and skilful Histoire des Oracles (also 1686), where
"the argumentation passes beyond the thesis advanced. All that he
says of oracles could be said of miracles." [669] The Jesuits found
the book essentially "impious"; and a French culture-historian sees
in it "the first attack which directs the scientific spirit against
the foundations of Christianity. All the purely philosophic arguments
with which religion has been assailed are in principle in the work of
Fontenelle." [670] In his abstract thinking he was no less radical,
and his Traité de la Liberté [671] established so well the determinist
position that it was decisively held by the majority of the French
freethinkers who followed. Living to his hundredth year, he could
join hands with the freethought of Gassendi and Voltaire, [672]
Descartes and Diderot. Yet we shall find him later, in his official
capacity of censor of literature, refusing to pass heretical books,
on principles that would have vetoed his own. He is in fact a type of
the freethought of the age of Louis XIV--Epicurean in the common sense,
unheroic, resolute only to evade penalties, guiltless of over-zeal. Not
in that age could men generate an enthusiasm for truth.
16. Of the new Epicureans, the most famous in his day was
Saint-Evremond, [673] who, exiled from France for his politics,
maintained both in London and in Paris, by his writings, a leadership
in polite letters. In England he greatly influenced young men like
Bolingbroke; and a translation (attributed to Dryden) of one of his
writings seems to have given Bishop Butler the provocation to the
first and weakest chapter of his Analogy. [674] As to his skepticism
there was no doubt in his own day; and his compliments to Christianity
are much on a par with those paid later by the equally conforming and
unbelieving Shaftesbury, whom he also anticipated in his persuasive
advocacy of toleration. [675] Regnard, the dramatist, had a similar
private repute as an "Epicurean." And even among the nominally orthodox
writers of the time in France a subtle skepticism touches nearly all
opinion. La Bruyère is almost the only lay classic of the period
who is pronouncedly religious; and his essay on the freethinkers,
[676] against whom his reasoning is so forcibly feeble, testifies to
their numbers and to the stress of debate set up by them. Even he, too,
writes as a deist against atheists, hardly as a believing Christian. If
he were a believer he certainly found no comfort in his faith: whatever
were his capacity for good feeling, no great writer of his age betrays
such bitterness of spirit, such suffering from the brutalities of life,
such utter disillusionment, such unfaith in men. And a certain doubt
is cast upon all his professions of opinion by the sombre avowal:
"A man born a Christian and a Frenchman finds himself constrained
[677] in satire: the great subjects are forbidden him: he takes them
up at times, and then turns aside to little things, which he elevates
by his ... genius and his style." [678]
M. Lanson remarks that "we must not let ourselves be abused by
the last chapter [Des esprits forts], a collection of philosophic
reflections and reasonings, where La Bruyère mingles Plato,
Descartes, and Pascal in a vague Christian spiritualism. This
chapter, evidently sincere, but without individuality, and
containing only the reflex of the thoughts of others, is not a
conclusion to which the whole work conducts. It marks, on the
contrary, the lack of conclusion and of general views. What is
more, with the chapter On the Sovereign, placed in the middle of
the volume, it is destined to disarm the temporal and spiritual
powers, to serve as passport for the independent freedom of
observation in the rest of the Caractères" (p. 599).
On this it may be remarked that the essay in question is not so
much Christian as theistic; but the suggestion as to the object
is plausible. Taine (Essais de critique et d'histoire, ed. 1901)
first remarks (p. 11) on the "christianisme" of the essay, and then
decides (p. 12) that "he merely exposes in brief and imperious
style the reasonings of the school of Descartes." It should be
noted, however, that in this essay La Bruyère does not scruple to
write: "If all religion is a respectful fear of God, what is to be
thought of those who dare to wound him in his most living image,
which is the sovereign?" (§ 27 in ed. Walckenaer, p. 578. Pascal
holds the same tone. Vie, par Madame Perier.) This appears first
in the fourth edition; and many other passages were inserted in
that and later issues: the whole is an inharmonious mosaic.
Concerning La Bruyère, the truth would seem to be that the
inconsequences in the structure of his essays were symptomatic of
variability in his moods and opinions. Taine and Lanson are struck
by the premonitions of the revolution in his famous picture of
the peasants, and other passages; and the latter remarks (p. 603)
that "the points touched by La Bruyère are precisely those where
the writers of the next age undermined the old order: La Bruyère
is already philosophe in the sense which Voltaire and Diderot
gave to that term." But we cannot be sure that the plunges into
convention were not real swervings of a vacillating spirit. It
is difficult otherwise to explain his recorded approbation of
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The Dialogues sur le Quiétisme, published posthumously under his
name (1699), appear to be spurious. This was emphatically asserted
by contemporaries (Sentiments critiques sur les Caractères de
M. de la Bruyère, 1701, p. 447; Apologie de M. de la Bruyère,
1701, p. 357, both cited by Walckenaer) who on other points
were in opposition. Baron Walckenaer (Étude, ed. cited, p. 76
sq.) pronounces that they were the work of Elliès du Pin, a doctor
of the Sorbonne, and gives good reasons for the attribution. The
Abbé d'Olivet in his Histoire de l'Académie française declares that
La Bruyère only drafted them, and that du Pin edited them; but
the internal evidence is against their containing anything of La
Bruyère's draught. They are indeed so feeble that no admirer cares
to accept them as his. (Cp. note to Suard's Notice sur la personne
et les écrits de la Bruyère, in Didot ed. 1865, p. 20.) Written
against Madame Guyon, they were not worth his while.
If the apologetics of Huet and Pascal, Bossuet and Fénelon, had any
influence on the rationalistic spirit, it was but in the direction of
making it more circumspect, never of driving it out. It is significant
that whereas in the year of the issue of the Demonstratio the Duchesse
d'Orléans could write that "every young man either is or affects to
be an atheist," Le Vassor wrote in 1688: "People talk only of reason,
of good taste, of force of mind, of the advantage of those who can
raise themselves above the prejudices of education and of the society
in which one is born. Pyrrhonism is the fashion in many things: men
say that rectitude of mind consists in 'not believing lightly' and
in being 'ready to doubt.'" [679] Pascal and Huet between them had
only multiplied doubters. On both lines, obviously, freethought was
the gainer; and in a Jesuit treatise, Le Monde condamné par luymesme,
published in 1695, the Préface contre l'incrédulité des libertins sets
out with the avowal that "to draw the condemnation of the world out
of its own mouth, it is necessary to attack first the incredulity of
the unbelievers (libertins), who compose the main part of it, and who
under some appearance of Christianity conceal a mind either Judaic
[read deistic] or pagan." Such was France to a religious eye at the
height of the Catholic triumph over Protestantism. The statement that
the libertins formed the majority of "the world" is of course a furious
extravagance. But there must have been a good deal of unbelief to have
moved a priest to such an explosion. And the unbelief must have been
as much a product of revulsion from religious savagery as a result
of direct critical impulse, for there was as yet no circulation
of positively freethinking literature. For a time, indeed, there
was a general falling away in French intellectual prestige, [680]
the result, not of the mere "protective spirit" in literature, as
is sometimes argued, but of the immense diversion of national energy
under Louis XIV to militarism; [681] and the freethinkers lost some
of the confidence as well as some of the competence they had exhibited
in the days of Molière. [682] There had been too little solid thinking
done to preclude a reaction when the king, led by Madame de Maintenon,
went about to atone for his debaucheries by an old age of piety. "The
king had been put in such fear of hell that he believed that all who
had not been instructed by the Jesuits were damned. To ruin anyone
it was necessary only to say, 'He is a Huguenot, or a Jansenist,'
and the thing was done." [683] In this state of things there spread
in France the revived doctrine or temper of Quietism, set up by the
Spanish priest, Miguel de Molinos (1640-1697), whose Spiritual Guide,
published in Spanish in 1675, appeared in 1681 in Italian at Rome,
where he was a highly influential confessor. It was soon translated
into Latin, French, and Dutch. In 1685 he was cited before the
Inquisition; in 1687 the book was condemned to be burned, and he
was compelled to retract sixty-eight propositions declared to be
heretical; whereafter, nonetheless, he was imprisoned till his death
in 1696. In France, whence the attack on him had begun, his teaching
made many converts, notably Madame Guyon, and may be said to have
created a measure of religious revival. But when Fénelon took it up
(1697), modifying the terminology of Molinos to evade the official
condemnation, he was bitterly attacked by Bossuet as putting forth
doctrine incompatible with Christianity; the prelates fought for two
years; and finally the Pope condemned Fénelon's book, whereupon he
submitted, limiting his polemic to attacks on the Jansenists. Thus
the gloomy orthodoxy of the court and the mysticism of the new school
alike failed to affect the general intelligence; there was no real
building up of belief; and the forward movement at length recommenced.