Note 122 — Chapter X · FREETHOUGHT IN THE RENAISSANCE

It is difficult to estimate the intellectual effect of his performance, which was probably much greater at the end of the century than during his life. Patericke, the English translator of Gentillet’s famous Discours against Machiavelli (1576), points to Rabelais among the French and Agrippa (an odd parallel) among the Germans as the standard-bearers of the whole train of atheists and scoffers. “Little by little, that which was taken in the beginning for jests turned to earnest, and words into deeds.”122 Rabelais’s vast innuendoes by way of jests about the people of Ruach (the Spirit) who lived solely on wind;123 his quips about the “reverend fathers in devil,” of the “diabological faculty”;124 his narratives about the Papefigues and Papimanes;125 and his gibes at the Decretals,126 were doubtless enjoyed by many good Catholics otherwise placated by his attacks on the “demoniacal Calvins, impostors of Geneva”;127 and so careful was he on matters of dogma that it remains impossible to say with confidence whether or not he finally believed in a future state.128 That he was a deist or Unitarian seems the reasonable inference as to his general creed;129 but there also he throws out no negations—even indicates a genial contempt for the philosophe ephectique et pyrrhonien130 who opposes a halting doubt to two contrary doctrines. In any case, he was anathema to the heresy-hunters of the Sorbonne, and only powerful protection could have saved him.