Note 17 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

It is remarkable that the whole ferment occurs in the period of the Catholic Reaction, the Council of Trent, and the subjection of Italy, when the papacy was making its great effort to recover its ground. It would seem that in the compulsory peace which had now fallen on Italian life men’s thoughts turned more than ever to mental problems, as had happened in Greece after the rise of Alexander’s empire. The authority of the Church was outwardly supreme; the Jesuits had already begun to do great things for education;17 the revived Inquisition was everywhere in Italy; its prisons, as we have seen, were crowded with victims of all grades during a whole generation; Pius V and the hierarchy everywhere sought to enforce decorum in life; the “pagan” academies formed on the Florentine model were dissolved; and classic culture rapidly decayed with the arts, while clerical learning flourished,18 and a new religious music began with Palestrina. Yet on the death of Paul IV the Roman populace burned the Office of the Inquisition to the ground and cast the pope’s statue into the Tiber;19 and in that age (1548) was born Giordano Bruno, one of the types of modern freethought.