Note 180 — Chapter X · FREETHOUGHT IN THE RENAISSANCE

Of a very different type from Wiclif is the remarkable personality of the Welshman Reginald (or Reynold) Pecock (1395?–1460?), who seems divided from Wiclif by a whole era of intellectual development, though born within about ten years of his death. It is a singular fact that one of the most rationalistic minds among the serious writers of the fifteenth century should be an English bishop,180 and an Ultramontane at that. Pecock was an opponent at once of popular Bibliolatry and of priestly persecution, declaring that “the clergy would be condemned at the last day if they did not draw men into consent to the true faith otherwise than by fire and sword and hanging.”181 It was as the rational and temperate defender of the Church against the attacks of the Lollards in general that he formulated the principle of natural reason as against scripturalism. This attitude it is that makes his treatise, the Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy, the most modern of theoretic books before More and Hooker and Bacon. That he was led to this measure of rationalism rather by the exigencies of his papalism than by a spontaneous skepticism is suggested by the fact that he stands for the acceptance of miraculous images, shrines, and relics, when the Lollards are attacking them.182 On the other hand, it is hard to be certain that his belief in the shrines was genuine, so ill does it consist with his attitude to Bibliolatry. In a series of serenely argued points he urges his thesis that the Bible is not the basis of the moral law, but merely an illustration thereof, and that the natural reason is obviously presupposed in the bulk of its teaching. He starts from the formulas of Thomas Aquinas, but reaches a higher ground. It is the position of Hooker, anticipated by a hundred years; and this in an age of such intellectual backwardness and literary decadence that the earlier man must be pronounced by far the more remarkable figure. In such a case the full influence of the Renaissance seems to be at work; though in the obscurity of the records we can do no more than conjecture that the new contacts with French culture between the invasion of France by Henry V in 1415 and the expulsion of the English in 1451 may have introduced forces of thought unknown or little known before. If indeed there were English opponents of scripture in Wiclif’s day, the idea must have ripened somewhat in Pecock’s. Whether, however, the victories of Jeanne D’Arc made some unbelievers as well as many dastards among the English is a problem that does not seem to have been investigated.