Note 55 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

The momentum of such an influence is seen in the work of Charron (1541–1603), Montaigne’s friend and disciple. The Essais had first appeared in 1580; the expanded and revised issue in 1588; and in 1601 there appeared Charron’s De la Sagesse, which gives methodic form and as far as was permissible a direct application to Montaigne’s naturalistic principles. Charron’s is a curious case of mental evolution. First a lawyer, then a priest, he became a highly successful popular preacher and champion of the Catholic League; and as such was favoured by the notorious Marguerite (the Second55) of Navarre. On the assassination of the Duke of Guise by order of Henri III he delivered an indignant protest from the pulpit, of which, however, he rapidly repented.56 Becoming the friend of Montaigne in 1586, he shows already in 1593, in his Three Truths, the influence of the essayist’s skepticism,57 though Charron’s book was expressly framed to refute, first, the atheists; second, the pagans, Jews, Mohammedans; and, third, the Christian heretics and schismatics. The Wisdom, published only eight years later, is a work of a very different cast, proving a mental change. Even in the first work “the growing teeth of the skeptic are discernible beneath the well-worn stumps of the believer”;58 but the second almost testifies to a new birth. Professedly orthodox, it was yet recognized at once by the devout as a “seminary of impiety,”59 and brought on its author a persecution that lasted till his sudden death from apoplexy, which his critics pronounced to be a divine dispensation. In the second and rearranged edition, published a year after his death, there are some modifications; but they are so far from essential60 that Buckle found the book as it stands a kind of pioneer manual of rationalism.61 Its way of putting all religions on one level, as being alike grounded on bad evidence and held on prejudice, is only the formal statement of an old idea, found, like so many others of Charron’s, in Montaigne; but the didactic purpose and method turn the skeptic’s shrug into a resolute propaganda. So with the formal and earnest insistence that true morality cannot be built on religious hopes and fears—a principle which Charron was the first to bring directly home to the modern intelligence,62 as he did the principle of development in religious systems.63 Attempting as it does to construct a systematic practical philosophy of life, the book puts aside so positively the claims of the theologians,64 and so emphatically subordinates religion to the rule of natural reason,65 that it constitutes a virtual revolution in public doctrine for Christendom. As Montaigne is the effective beginner of modern literature, so is Charron the beginner of modern secular teaching. He is a Naturalist, professing theism; and it is not surprising to find that for a time his book was even more markedly than Montaigne’s the French “freethinker’s breviary.”