Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

§ 1. The Italian Influence

The great service of Italy to modern freethought, however, was to come later, in respect of the impulse given to the scientific spirit by Bruno, Vanini, and Galileo. On the philosophical or critical side, the Italy of the middle of the sixteenth century left no enduring mark on European thought, though her serious writers were numerous. Aconzio had published, before his De Stratagematibus Satanæ, a treatise De Methodo, sive recta investigandarum tradendarumque scientiarum ratione (Basel, 1558), wherein he pleads strenuously for a true logical method as the one way to real knowledge of things. In this he anticipates Bacon, as did, still earlier, Mario Nizolio in his Antibarbarus sive de veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra pseudo-philosophos (Parma, 1553). Nizolio’s main effort is towards the discrediting of Aristotle, whom, like so many in the generation following, he regarded as the great bulwark of scholastic obscurantism. He insists that all knowledge must proceed from sensation, which alone has immediate certainty; and thus stands for direct scientific observation as against tradition and verbalism. But Ludovicus Vives had before him (in his De causis corruptarum artium, Antwerp, 1531) claimed that the true Aristotelian went direct to nature, as Aristotle himself had done; and Nizolio did nothing in practical science to substantiate his polemic against the logic-choppers.

§ 2. Spain

The fact that sixteenth-century Spain could be charged, on the score of Servetus, with producing the “hen” of Socinianism, is an important reminder of the perpetuity of variation and of the fatality of environment. The Portuguese Sanchez, whom we shall find laying new potential foundations of skepticism in France alongside of Montaigne, could neither have acquired nor propounded his philosophy in his native land. But it is to be noted that an elder contemporary of Sanchez, living and dying in Spain, was able, in the generation after Servetus, to make a real contribution to the revival of freethought, albeit under shelter of a firm profession of orthodoxy.

But this is practically the only important contribution from Spain to the intellectual renascence then going on in Europe. As we have seen, it was not that Spaniards had any primordial bias to dogmatism and persecution: it was simply that their whole socio-political evolution, largely determined by Spanish discovery and dominion in the New World, set up institutions and forces which became specially powerful to stamp out freethought. The work of progress was done in lands where lack of external dominion left on the one hand a greater fund of variant energy, and on the other made for a lesser power of repression on the part of Church and State.

§ 3. France

First came the Portuguese Francisco Sanchez (1552–1623?), born in Portugal, but brought as a child to Bordeaux, which seems to have been a place of refuge for many fugitive heretics from both sides of the Peninsula. Sanchez has recorded that in his early youth he had no bias to incredulity of any kind; but at some stage of his adolescence he travelled in Italy and spent some time at Rome. The result was not that special disbelief in Christianity which was proverbially apt to follow, but a development on his part of philosophic skepticism properly so-called, which found expression in a Latin treatise entitled Quod Nihil Scitur—“That Nothing is Known.” Composed as early as 1576, in the author’s twenty-fourth year, the book was not published till 1581, a year after the first issue of the Essais of Montaigne. It is natural to surmise that while Sanchez was at Bordeaux he may have known something of his famous contemporary; but though Montaigne is likely to have read the Quod Nihil Scitur in due course, he nowhere speaks of it; and in 1576 Sanchez was a Professor of Medicine at Montpellier, then a town of Huguenot leanings. Soon he left it for Toulouse, the hotbed of Catholic fanaticism, where he contrived to live out his long life in peace, despite his production of a Pyrrhonist treatise and of a remarkable Latin poem (1578) on the comet of 1577. The Quod Nihil Scitur is a skeptical flank attack on current science, in no way animadverting on religion, as to which he professed orthodoxy: the poem is a frontal attack on the whole creed of astrology, then commonly held by Averroïsts and Aristotelians, as well as by orthodox Catholics. Yet he seems never to have been molested. It would seem as if a skepticism which ostensibly disallowed all claims to “natural” knowledge, while avowedly recognizing “spiritual,” was then as later thought to make rather for faith than against it. That such virtual Pyrrhonism as that of Sanchez can ever have ministered to religious zeal is not indeed to be supposed: it is rather as a weapon against the confidence of the “Naturalist” that the skeptical method has always recommended itself to the calculating priest. And inasmuch as astrology could be, and was, held by a non-religious theory, though many Christians added it to their creed, a polemic against that was the least dangerous form of rationalizing then possible. At all times there had been priests who so reasoned, though, as we have seen in dealing with the men of the Protestant Reformation, the belief in astral influences is too closely akin to the main line of religious tradition to be capable of ejection on religious grounds.

His conformities, verbal and practical, have set certain Catholics upon proving his orthodoxy, though his Essays are actually prohibited by the Church. A Benedictine, Dom Devienne, published in 1773 a Dissertation sur la Religion de Montaigne, of which the main pleas are that the Essais often affirm the divinity of the Christian faith; that the essayist received the freedom of the city of Rome under the eyes of the pope; and that his epitaph declared his orthodoxy! A generation later, one Labouderie undertook to set forth Le Christianisme de Montaigne in a volume of 600 pages (1819). This apologist has the courage to face the protest of Pascal: “Montaigne puts everything in a doubt so universal and so general that, doubting even whether he doubts, his uncertainty turns upon itself in a perpetual and unresting circle.... It is in this doubt which doubts of itself, and in this ignorance which is ignorant of itself, that the essence of his opinion consists.... In a word, he is a pure Pyrrhonist” (Pensées, supp. to Pt. i, art. 11). The reply of the apologist is that Montaigne never extends his skepticism to “revelation,” but on the contrary declares that revelation alone gives man certainties (work cited, p. 127).

That is of course merely the device of a hundred skeptics of the Middle Ages; the old shibboleth of a “twofold truth” modified by a special disparagement of reason, with no attempt to meet the rejoinder that, if reason has no certainties, there can be no certainty that revelation is what it claims to be. When the apologist concludes that Montaigne’s aim en froissant la raison humaine is to “oblige men to recognize the need of a revelation to fix his incertitudes,” it suffices to answer that Montaigne in so many words declares at the outset of the Apologie de Raimond Sebonde that he knows nothing of theology, which is equivalent to saying that he is not a student of the Bible. As a matter of fact he never quotes it!

In the last and most characteristic essay of all, discoursing at large Of Experience, he makes the most daring attack on laws in general, as being always arbitrary and often irrational, and not seldom more criminal than the offences they punish. After a planless discourse of diseases and diets, follies of habit and follies of caprice, the wisdom of self-rule and the wisdom of irregularity, he contrives to conclude at once that we should make the best of everything and that “only authority is of force with men of common reach and understanding, and is of more weight in a strange language”—a plea for Catholic ritual. Yet in the same page he pronounces that “Supercelestial opinions and under-terrestrial manners are things that amongst us I have ever seen to be of singular accord.”

Owen notes (French Skeptics, p. 446; cp. Champion, pp. 168–69) that, though the papal curia requested Montaigne to alter certain passages in the Essays, “it cannot be shown that he erased or modified a single one of the points.” Sainte-Beuve, indeed, has noted many safeguarding clauses added to the later versions of the essay on Prayers (i, 56): but they really carry further the process of doubt. M. Champion has well shown how the profession of personal indecision and mere self-portraiture served as a passport for utterances which would have brought instant punishment on an author who showed any clear purpose. As it was, nearly a century passed before the Essais were placed upon the Roman Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1676).

To the orthodox of his own day Montaigne seems to have given entire satisfaction. Thus Florimond de Bœmond, in his Antichrist (2e éd. 1599, p. 4), begins his apologetic with a skeptical argument, which he winds up by referring the reader with eulogy to the Apologie of Montaigne. The modern resort to the skeptical method in defence of traditional faith seems to date from this time. See Prof. Fortunat Strowski, Histoire du sentiment religieux en France au xviie siècle; 1907, i, 55, note. (De Montaigne à Pascal.)

Strowski, as cited, pp. 164–65, 183 sq., founding on Garasse and Mersenne. Strowski at first pronounces Charron “in reality only a collector of commonplaces” (p. 166); but afterwards obliviously confesses (p. 191) that “his audacities are astonishing,” and explains that “he formulates, perhaps without knowing it, a whole doctrine of irreligion which outgoes the man and the time—a thought stronger than the thinker!” And again he forgetfully speaks of “cette critique hardie et méthodique, j’allais écrire scientifique” (p. 240). All this would be a new form of commonplace.

After the assassination of the king in 1610, the last of the bloody deeds which had kept France on the rack of uncertainty in religion’s name for three generations, the spirit of rationalism naturally did not wane. In the Paris of the early seventeenth century, doubtless, the new emancipation came to be associated, as “libertinism,” with licence as well as with freethinking. In the nature of the case there could be no serious and free literary discussion of the new problems either of life or belief, save insofar as they had been handled by Montaigne and Charron; and, inasmuch as the accounts preserved of the freethought of the age are almost invariably those of its worst enemies, it is chiefly their side of the case that has been presented. Thus in 1623 the Jesuit Father François Garasse published a thick quarto of over a thousand pages, entitled La Doctrine Curieuse des Beaux Esprits de ce temps, ou prétendus tels, in which he assails the “libertins” of the day with an infuriated industry. The eight books into which he divides his treatise proceed upon eight alleged maxims of the freethinkers, which run as follows:—

I. There are very few good wits [bons Esprits] in the world; and the fools, that is to say, the common run of men, are not capable of our doctrine; therefore it will not do to speak freely, but in secret, and among trusting and cabalistic souls.

II. Good wits [beaux Esprits] believe in God only by way of form, and as a matter of public policy (par Maxime d’Etat).

III. A bel Esprit is free in his belief, and is not readily to be taken in by the quantity of nonsense that is propounded to the simple populace.

IV. All things are conducted and governed by Destiny, which is irrevocable, infallible, immovable, necessary, eternal, and inevitable to all men whomsoever.

V. It is true that the book called the Bible, or the Holy Scripture, is a good book (un gentil livre), and contains a lot of good things; but that a bon esprit should be obliged to believe under pain of damnation all that is therein, down to the tail of Tobit’s dog, does not follow.

VI. There is no other divinity or sovereign power in the world but Nature, which must be satisfied in all things, without refusing anything to our body or senses that they desire of us in the exercise of their natural powers and faculties.

VII. Supposing there be a God, as it is decorous to admit, so as not to be always at odds with the superstitious, it does not follow that there are creatures which are purely intellectual and separated from matter. All that is in Nature is composite, and therefore there are neither angels nor devils in the world, and it is not certain that the soul of man is immortal.

VIII. It is true that to live happily it is necessary to extinguish and drown all scruples; but all the same it does not do to appear impious and abandoned, for fear of offending the simple or losing the support of the superstitious.

Mersenne’s statistical assertion was made in two sheets of the Quæstiones Celeberrimæ, “qui ont été supprimé dans la plupart des exemplaires, à cause, sans doute, de leur exagération” (Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartésienne, 1854, i, 28, where the passage is cited). The suppressed sheets included a list of the “atheists” of the time, occupying five folio columns. (Julian Hibbert, Plutarchus and Theophrastus on Superstition, etc., 1828; App. Catal. of Works written against Atheism, p. 3; Prosper Marchand, Lettre sur le Cymbalum Mundi, in éd. Bibliophile Jacob, 1841, p. 17, note; Prof. Strowski, De Montaigne à Pascal, 1907, p. 138 sq.) Mersenne himself, in the preface to his book, stultifies his suppressed assertion by declaring that the impious in Paris boast falsely of their number, which is really small, unless heretics be reckoned as atheists. Garasse, writing against them, all the while professed to know only five atheists, three of them Italians (Strowski, as cited).

END OF VOL. I.

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