poetry wholly to the influence of the classical revival; for the romantic
epic in which they occur is the offshoot of the old prose romance of
mediæval chivalry, which had in earlier ages amused the courts of princes
by directing its banter against ecclesiastical persons and
institutions.(303) But the tone of the poetry is now changed. The satire
is directed against religion itself, not merely against the abuse of it,
or the eccentricities of its adherents. Free thought is not merely
political dissatisfaction, but religious unbelief. And with the alteration
of the tone agrees also the increasing disposition to carry satire into
the domain of the supernatural; which thus witnesses to the widespread
unbelief in the hearers for whom it was designed. Italian critics have
doubted indeed whether these epics are designed to convey a caricature, or
pass beyond lawful satire:(304) yet even when allowance is made for the
fact that they are an historic reproduction, and for the fund presented
for humour by ecclesiastical peculiarities, it seems impossible to
overlook the covert satire intended on church beliefs.(305) The
intermixture of a comic element would not alone prove this. The miracle
plays of the middle ages admitted comedy without intending
irreverence;(306) and a gentle humour pervades many of the Autos of
Calderon, which were acted on solemn festivals.(307) But there exists in
the manner in which the supernatural element is managed by such poets as
Pulci, Bello, and Ariosto, such evident purpose to bring into ridicule the
existence of belief, that its parallel can only be found in the banter
used by their imitator Byron, in his Vision of Judgment, and implies
indifference both in author and reader; the expression of contempt, not of
anger.(308)
The unbelief which existed in the courts for which this poetry was
written, is a specimen of the general incredulity, or indifference to
Christianity, which prevailed among the educated classes, and was fostered
by classical studies and tastes. It seems strange to us, who have been
long accustomed to regard classical culture as the basis of general
education, and who are impressed with the conviction of the great
assistance ministered by it to theological study, to regard it as the
producing cause of unbelief. This result of it however was a transitory
one, originating in the shock which arose from the novel thoughts and
tastes which mingled themselves with the ancient pursuits, and altered the
previous ideal of life. Ever since the earliest times, a chasm had
unavoidably separated heathen literature from Christian; and a dislike to
heathen studies existed, which found its full expression in Gregory the
Great.(309) The result was, that the Christian civilization did not
consciously admit the introduction of heathen thought; and when the mind
awoke suddenly to a perception of its beauty and depth, though deeper
spirits, like Erasmus, regarded it with the enlightened Christian
approbation which Origen had formerly shown, others were led, like Julian
of old, from their admiration of it, to look with indifference or
hostility on Christianity. Some of the brilliant and elevated minds that
adorned the court of the Medicis were suspected of unbelief, or of
preferring Platonism to Christianity;(310) and after the woes of the
French invasion at the end of the century had deepened the corruption of
morals, and stamped out political liberty, the last freshness of artistic
creation, which had linked the public mind to Christianity through the
deep instincts of the taste, disappeared. The art and literature which
succeeded are an index of the tone which prevailed. Gaining perfection in
form by the imitation of classic models, they were cold, sensuous,
unspiritual.(311) Classical mythology was intermixed with gospel
doctrines; and the early years of the sixteenth century represent the
semi-heathen tone of thought which was the transition to the perfect
fusion which afterwards took place of the old learning and the new. It was
an age similar to those of modern times in France and Germany, which have
been called periods of humanism, when hope suggests the inauguration of a
new moral and social era, and the pride of knowledge produces a general
belief in the power of civilization to become the sole remedy for
evil.(312)
The social conditions of the age added moral causes to the intellectual,
which tended to increase the unbelief, especially in the literary classes.
One of them is perhaps to be found in the fact that the church prizes were
the only reward for authorship. By the beginning of the sixteenth century
authors became largely appreciated through the press, and received
patronage at the courts of the various Τύραννοι who had established
themselves on the ruins of the old republics. In the absence of any law of
copyright there was no protection for them,(313) and consequently no
reward except church patronage, which was therefore conferred
indiscriminately, and tended to foster disbelief in the very recipients of
it. A merely professional hold of religion is the surest road to absolute
disbelief. It is inconceivable that the ecclesiastical scandals which
history blushes to narrate, could have been perpetrated by believers; and
the unbelief imputed to persons in high station, such as Leo X with other
popes, and cardinals such as Bembo, was doubtless, if true, partly the
result of the degrading effects of professional insincerity.
Such a state of unbelief could not be permanent, whether it was the result
of a decaying system, or of the introduction of new influences. Nor would
we use unnecessarily a polemical tone in speaking of a period where there
is so much cause for Christian humiliation; yet it is worthy of notice
that such facts are a refutation of the attack which has frequently been
made on Protestantism, as the cause of eclecticism and unbelief. The two
great crises in church history, when faith almost entirely died out, and
free thought developed into total disbelief of the supernatural, have been
in Romish countries; viz., in Italy in this period, and in France during
the eighteenth century. In both the experiment of the authoritative system
of the catholic religion had a fair trial, and was found wanting.
Other causes besides the classical revival were operating to stimulate
activity of mind and freedom of inquiry. It was an age in which the great
system of the middle ages was finally dissolving. The discovery of new
worlds seemed at once to call to Europe to break connexion with the old
centre of ecclesiastical centralization; and to invite to that study of
nature which should elevate, and as it were emancipate the mind, by
teaching physical truth and the true method of discovery.(314) Political
circumstances too, contributed toward the creation of ecclesiastical
autonomy. The European nations had gradually grown into united families,
and were now ready for cooperation in a system of balance of power.(315)
The northern nations, long galled under the power of Rome, were panting
for freedom; Germany first reforming her religion, and then throwing off
her subjection; England first throwing off her subjection, and then
compelled to reform herself. The old systems of thought were at an end.
The change, like all social ones, was not abrupt, but it was decisive and
final. It was the earthquake which shattered for ever the crust of error
which had fettered thought.
It is a matter of wonder that the great revolutions just named passed with
so little development of scepticism. In the nations north of the Alps
there is hardly a trace. The charge of deism, directed in the fifteenth
century against Pecock,(316) bishop of Chichester, appears to have been
unfounded. The contest which Ulrich von Hütten carried on against the
monks and schools of Cologne was literary rather than religious;(317)
Hütten being the literary and political reformer rather than the sceptic.
Even the most advanced spirits of the reformers,(318) Servetus and the
Sozini, came forth from Italy, as from the centre of free thought. Nor
were they unbelievers in the reality of a revelation; and they met with no
support from the northern reformers. Servetus was martyred at Geneva, and
the Sozini were banished into Poland. It was the spiritual earnestness
which mingled with the intellectual movement in the Reformation, which
prevented free thought from producing rationalism or unbelief.
Protestantism was a form of free thought; but only in the sense of a
return from human authority to that of scripture. It was equally a
reliance on an historic religion, equally an appeal to the immemorial
doctrine of the church with Roman Catholicism; but it conceived that the
New Testament itself contained a truer source than tradition for
ascertaining the apostolic declaration of it.(319)
But Italy was the witness of another sceptical tendency, besides that
which resulted from the classic Renaissance, in the last remnant of the
influence of mediæval philosophy. Throughout the sixteenth century,
pantheism manifested itself in connexion with the philosophical studies of
the university of Padua. The form in which it made itself felt was the
disbelief of the immortality of the soul on speculative grounds. The cause
of the disbelief was the influence of the philosophy of Averroes before
noticed.(320)
It will be necessary to explain this system with a little detail. It has
been already stated that Averroes was a noted commentator on Aristotle in
the twelfth century. The two ground principles of his philosophy were, the
eternity of matter and the impersonality of mind. On this high subject
there can be only two theories; the one theistic, which declares that God
is free, a personal first Cause, and the Creator of matter, and that other
minds are free and personal; the other pantheistic, which asserts that
matter is eternal, and that individual minds are only the manifestation of
the impersonal mind, into which the individual is reabsorbed. Averroes
held the latter theory, claiming to derive it from Aristotle. It must be
confessed however that Aristotle’s views are uncertain on this point: he
distinguished between mind, immortal and relative, the latter of which,
being connected with body, ceased at death; the former outlived it. But he
hardly stated the doctrine that all souls are part of the universal soul,
and is silent about their reabsorption into it. These points were added by
Averroes.(321)
The influence of the philosophy of Averroes is observable in three classes
of thinkers; viz., the Spanish Jews of his own century, the scholastic
philosophers of the thirteenth, and the philosophers of the university of
Padua in the fourteenth and succeeding ages. The second of these effects
has been already traced: we must now notice the third.
Padua was the great medical university of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, and was a type of the tendency which at that time manifested
itself in the north-eastern part of Italy toward material and rational
studies, as in Tuscany to ideal and humanistic. It was the medical
philosophy of Averroes which had first attracted attention to him. But the
influence of his teaching was innocuous there until the sixteenth century,
during the whole of which this university became the home of free thought.
Strict accuracy would require the separation of two tendencies in the
Peripatetic school of Padua, each derived from one of Aristotle’s
commentators.(322) The one was the Averroist just named, which consisted
in the disbelief of immortality on the ground of absorption. Man’s soul,
being part of the great soul which animates the universe, both emanates
from it, and is again reabsorbed. The other was the Alexandrist, so called
from following Alexander of Aphrodisias,(323) which consisted in a
tendency to pure materialism, an absolute denial of immortality and of
religion, which almost reaches the incredulity earlier expressed in the
legend of the Three Impostors. Pomponatius is the declared representative
of the latter view soon after the beginning of the century.(324)
Frequently however the unbelief was secret, and a seeming show of
orthodoxy was maintained by drawing a broad distinction between philosophy
and theology; and by teaching that these views, though seen to be true in
the one, were to be accounted false in obedience to the teaching of the
other.
It is customary to class along with the Averroists some philosophers of a
more original turn; some of whom were only indirectly connected with
Padua, but rather were examples of an attempt to substitute a philosophy
in place of that which was expiring. They are said to have manifested the
same kind of pantheism, and to have been led by it to similar disbelief.
Such are Cesalpini, Cardan,(325) Bruno, and Vanini. The charge is perhaps
unfair against the two former, as they seem to have held the separate
immortality of souls, which is more compatible with theism. The two latter
represent the two schools just noticed, about the end of the sixteenth
century.
Bruno(326) belonged mainly to the Averroist school, though his views were
probably formed independently, and certainly extended farther. He not only
held the existence of a soul pervading the universe, which is the form of
Pantheism which has been already considered, but followed the earlier
philosophy of the Neo-Platonists in identifying the soul with the matter
which it animates; regarding the one as an emanation from the other, in
the same manner as an effect is merely cause or force transferred. It is
this belief which occurs in Spinoza, which is properly denominated
Pantheism, where the Creator is forgotten in creation. The former line of
Pantheism noticed in Averroes approaches more nearly to theism. Bruno’s
unbelief was not gay and flippant, but sombre and earnest. With a
fantastical conceit which can hardly be explained, he travelled as the
missionary to propagate his own views like a knight errant tilting at all
opinions, with a soul especially embittered against the Christian
priesthood.(327) On his return to Italy from his travels he fell into the
hands of the church, and suffered death for his opinions.
Vanini(328) similarly led a wandering life, but is a character of less
seriousness: occasionally he manifested the inconsistency of indifference
to his own opinions. Reverencing the memory of Pomponatius, he expressed
the same disbelief of the spiritual and of immortality. He was possibly an
atheist. Certainly his views were tinged with deep bitterness against
religion; and after leading a restless life, he suffered a cruel martyrdom
for his belief.
Bruno and Vanini were the apostles of a doctrine which the world would no
longer hear. The dawn of physical knowledge was turning men to a truer
study of the universe, and caused their labours to be in vain. The age of
indifference was gone. The alarm caused by the Reformation had kindled a
strong ecclesiastical reaction, especially in Italy, and the religious
earnestness and intellectual activity of Germany had awoke an intelligent
reaction on the part of the Catholic church.(329) Hence these two writers
incurred a danger unknown to their predecessors. Martyrs are men who are
before their age or behind it. Their sad fate throws an interest around
their lives. Unbelief must always have its confessors. It is to be hoped
that the inhumanity of Christendom will never again cause it to have its
martyrs.
The survey is now complete of the crisis which occurred in the transition
from the middle ages to modern history, forming the third of those
enumerated in a former lecture, we have witnessed amidst its complexity
the manifestation of the same principles as in former epochs; the
restlessness of the human mind struggling to be free, intellectually,
politically, religiously; and we have endeavoured to trace the operation
of the influence of classical literature and metaphysical philosophy in
inducing the decay of Christian feeling and belief.
The means adopted for counteracting the movement were similar to those
used in former periods, viz. an intellectual argument and a spiritual
awakening. In some instances, indeed, in accordance with the spirit of the
time, or more truly with the spirit of human nature, material force and
cruelty were employed, and the unbeliever was silenced by martyrdom. But
neither material power nor the autocratic unity of the Roman church was
able to repress the growth of the human mind. Conviction must be directed,
not crushed. The revival of books of evidences, as soon as printing became
common, about the close of the fifteenth century, which were designed to
confirm faith, was a more lawful form of warfare.(330) They were
constructed however on a basis unsuited to an age when first principles
were being reconsidered, being an attempt to establish the authority of
the church and the duty of submission to an external form of faith, and
lacked the surer basis adopted in Protestant works of evidence, which is
found in the external divine authority of the Bible rather than the
church. The creation of the order of the Jesuits, though directed more
against Protestantism than against unbelief, was a witness, like the
previous reactionary movement of the scholastic writers in the thirteenth
century, to the wish to wrest the use of learning out of the hands of the
opponents of the church, and to employ the weapons of reason in defence of
it.
The judgment formed on this epoch of free thought, when we have separated
from it the Protestantism which craves other satisfaction for the human
mind than that which is implied in submission to human authority, and the
scepticism which was merely transitional doubt, must be condemnatory. The
unbelief was indeed a phase of the general improvement; but one which is
instructive as a warning rather than as an example, illustrating the abuse
not the use of free thought. The evil nevertheless was temporary, and
belongs to the past; the good was eternal: and the elements of real
intellectual improvement contained in the struggle have been taken up into
the constitution of modern thought and society.
-------------------------------------
We have now considered three great epochs in the history of free thought,
and watched Christianity in contact or conflict with the old heathen
philosophy, with the thought Scholastic or Mahometan of the middle ages,
and with the revival of classical learning. It remains to enter upon the
consideration of the fourth, and to observe it in relation to modern
science.
The seventeenth century introduced as striking a revolution in philosophy
as the corresponding ones which the two preceding ages had produced in
literature and religion.
Two distinct thinkers, Bacon and Descartes, from different points of view,
perceived the necessity for constructing a new method of inquiry. Their
position was similar to that of Socrates of old. They saw that if
knowledge was to be rendered sound, it must be based on a new method.(331)
They both alike sought it in experience; Bacon in sensational, Descartes
in intellectual, the instinctive utterance of consciousness.(332) The
indirect effects on religion produced by their teaching will be seen more
fully hereafter. Our present object is to sketch the influence exercised
by Descartes on the theological speculations of Spinoza, before passing in
succeeding lectures to the detailed study of those peculiarities which
free thought has presented in the different countries in which it has been
manifested.(333)
Spinoza’s memory has been branded with the stigma which attached to his
character during life.(334) Born in Holland, of Jewish origin, his early
repudiation of the legends of the Talmud in which he was educated, caused
his excommunication by his own people. Finding himself an outcast, he
sought society among a few sceptical friends, one of whom was a physician
named Van den Ende, whom a sense of injustice united to him by the bond of
common sympathy. His life was passed in retirement, in hard, griping
poverty. Possessing a mind of great originality, and a fondness for
demonstrative reasoning never surpassed, he lived a model of chaste
submissive virtue, searching for speculative truth; branded as an atheist
in philosophy while living, and regarded since his death as the parent of
many of the worst forms of rationalism in religion. Yet his character is
one that cannot fail to excite a certain kind of pity. Unlike the
frivolous selfish atheism, the immoral Epicureanism, of the French
unbelief of the following century, his investigations were grave, his tone
dignified, his temper gentle, his spirit serious. It is to be feared that
he did not worship God; but he at least worshipped, at the cost of social
martyrdom, what he thought to be truth. If he did not believe in revealed
religion, he at least tried to embody what he believed to be its moral
precepts. Though we may shrink with horror from his teaching, we cannot,
when we compare him with other unbelievers, withhold our pity from the
teacher.
His works are short, but weighty. Of his important treatises, the one, the
_Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, shows him as the Biblical critic; the
other, the _Ethica_, exhibits his philosophy. In the former, written in
early life, he derives his materials and mode of handling from the Jewish
mediæval theologian Maimonides; in the latter, the product of his riper
years, from Descartes.(335) But he had undoubtedly come under the
influence of Descartes before writing the former work, and it is certain
that the effects of it on his own philosophical scheme are already
discernible in it. We shall therefore commence with the latter, and
attempt to understand his philosophy, and its application to religion,
before studying his special criticism of Revelation.
Descartes had aimed, like the great thinkers of earlier times, to gain a
general view of the universe of being; but had sought it by a different
mode. Caring rather for certitude of method, reality in the highest
principles, than for results attained, he had seen that a knowledge of
being must rest on a knowledge of the consciousness which tells us of
being. His principle, “Cogito, ergo sum,” is the expression of this
conviction. Therefore, carrying analysis into the human mind, he had
grasped those ideas which appeal to us with irresistible clearness, and
commend themselves as axioms requiring no proof; and from these ideas, or
rather from the idea of cause, the primitive of them, regarded by him as
innate, he had demonstrated _à priori_ the being and attributes of God,
and the principles which dominate in the great fields of knowledge.(336)