Note 155 — Chapter X · FREETHOUGHT IN THE RENAISSANCE

A similar mixture will explain the intellectual life of the poet Ronsard. A persecutor of the Huguenots,155 he was denounced as an atheist by two of their ministers;156 and the pagan fashion in which he handled Christian things scandalized his own side, albeit he was hostile to Rabelais. But though the spirit of the French Renaissance, so eagerly expressed in the Défense et Illustration de la langue françoise of Joachim du Bellay (1549), is at its outset as emancipated as that of the Italian, we find Ronsard in his latter years edifying the pious.157 Any ripe and consistent rationalism, indeed, was then impossible. One of the most powerful minds of the age was Bodin (1530–1596), whose République is one of the most scientific treatises on government between Aristotle and our own age, and whose Colloquium Heptaplomeres158 is no less original an outline of a naturalist159 philosophy. It consists of six dialogues, in which seven men take part, setting forth the different religious standpoints of Jew, Christian, pagan, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic, the whole leading up to a doctrine of tolerance and universalism. Bodin was repeatedly and emphatically accused of unbelief by friends and foes;160 and his rationalism on some heads is beyond doubt; yet he not only held by the belief in witchcraft, but wrote a furious treatise in support of it;161 and he dismissed the system of Copernicus as too absurd for discussion.162 He also formally vetoes all discussion on faith, declaring it to be dangerous to religion;163 and by these conformities he probably saved himself from ecclesiastical attack.164 Nonetheless, he essentially stood for religious toleration: the new principle that was to change the face of intellectual life. A few liberal Catholics shared it with him to some extent165 long before St. Bartholomew’s Day; eminent among them being L’Hopital,166 whose humanity, tolerance, and concern for practical morality and the reform of the Church brought upon him the charge of atheism. He was, however, a believing Catholic.167 Deprived of power, his edict of tolerance repealed, he saw the long and ferocious struggle of Catholics and Huguenots renewed, and crowned by the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day (1572). Broken-hearted, and haunted by that monstrous memory, he died within six months.