Chapter XV · FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

It is true that, as one critic puts it, such rationalists were not “quite clear whither they were bound. At first sight,” he adds, “no one looks more negative than Gui Patin.... He was always congratulating himself on being ‘delivered from the nightmare’; and he rivals the eighteenth century in the scorn he pours on priests, monks, and especially ‘that black Loyolitic scum from Spain’ which called itself the Society of Jesus. Yet Patin was no freethinker. Skeptics who made game of the kernel of religion came quite as much under the lash of his tongue as bigots who dared defend its husks. His letters end with the characteristic confession: ‘Credo in Deum, Christum crucifixum, etc.; ... De minimis non curat prætor’” (Viscount St. Cyres in Cambridge Modern History, v, 73). But the last statement is an error, and Patin did not attack Gassendi, though he did Descartes. He says of Rabelais: “C’étoit un homme qui se moquoit de tout; en verité il y a bien des choses dont on doit raisonnablement se moquer ... elles sont presque tous remplies de vanité, d’imposture et d’ignorance: ceux qui sont un peu philosophes ne doivent-ils pas s’en moquer?” (Lett. 485, éd. cited, iii, 148). Again he writes that “la vie humaine n’est qu’un bureau de rencontre et un théâtre sur lesquels domine la fortune” (Lett. 726, iii, 620). This is pure Montaigne. The formula cited by Viscount St. Cyres is neither a general nor a final conclusion to the letters of Patin. It occurs, I think, only once (18 juillet, 1642, à M. Belin) in the 836 letters, and not at the end of that one (Lett. 55, éd. cited, i, 90).

Concerning his friend Naudé, Patin writes: “Je suis fort de l’avis de feu M. Naudé, qui disoit qu’il y avait quatre choses dont il se fallait garder, afin de n’être point trompé, savoir, de prophéties, de miracles, de révélations, et d’apparitions” (Lett. 353, éd. cited, ii, 490). Again, he writes of a symposium of Naudé, Gassendi, and himself: “Peut-être, tous trois, guéris de loup-garou et delivrés du mal des scrupules, qui est le tyran des consciences, nous irons peut-être jusque fort près du sanctuaire. Je fis l’an passé ce voyage de Gentilly avec M. Naudé, moi seul avec lui tête-à-tête; il n’y avait point de témoins, aussi n’y en falloit-il point: nous y parlâmes fort librement de tout, sans que personne en ait été scandalisé” (Lett. 362, ii, 508). This seems tolerably freethinking.

All that the Christian editor cares to claim upon the latter passage is that assuredly “l’unité de Dieu, l’immortalité de l’âme, l’égalité des hommes devant la loi, ces verités fondamentales de la raison et consacrées par le Christianisme, y étaient placées au premier rang” in the discussion. As to the skepticism of Naudé the editor remarks: “Ce qu’il y a de remarquable, c’est que Gui Patin soutenait que son ami ... avait puisé son opinion, en général très peu orthodoxe, en Italie, pendant le long séjour qu’il fit dans ce pays avec le cardinal Bagni” (ii, 490; cp. Lett. 816; iii, 758, where Naudé is again cited as making small account of religion).

This is disputed by M. Lanson, an always weighty authority. He writes (p. 464) that Pascal was “neither mad nor ill” when he gave himself up wholly to religion. But ill he certainly was. He had chronically suffered from intense pains in the head from his eighteenth year; and M. Lanson admits (p. 451) that the Pensées were written in intervals of acute suffering. This indeed understates the case. Pascal several times told his family that since the age of eighteen he had never passed a day without pain. His sister, Madame Perier, in her biographical sketch, speaks of him as suffering “continual and ever-increasing maladies,” and avows that the four last years of his life, in which he penned the fragments called Pensées, “were but a continual languishment.” The Port Royal preface of 1670 says the same thing, speaking of the “four years of languor and malady in which he wrote all we have of the book he planned,” and calling the Pensées “the feeble essays of a sick man.” Cp. Pascal’s Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon usage des maladies: and Owen French Skeptics, pp. 746, 784.

The able treatise of Prof. E. E. Powell on Spinoza and Religion is open to demur at one point—its reiterated dictum that Spinoza’s character was marred by “lack of moral courage” (p. 44). This expression is later in a measure retreated from: after “his habitual attitude of timid caution,” we have: “Spinoza’s timidity, or, if you will, his peaceable disposition.” If the last-cited concession is to stand, the other phrases should be withdrawn. Moral courage, like every other human attribute, is to be estimated comparatively; and the test-question here is: Did any other writer in Spinoza’s day venture further than he? Moral courage is not identical with the fanaticism which invites destruction; fanaticism supplies a motive which dispenses with courage, though it operates as courage might. But refusal to challenge destruction gratuitously does not imply lack of courage, though of course it may be thereby motived. A quite brave man, it has been noted, will quietly shun a gratuitous risk where one who is “afraid of being afraid” may face it. When all is said, Spinoza was one of the most daring writers of his day; and his ethic made it no more a dereliction of duty for him to avoid provoking arrest and capital punishment than it is for either a Protestant or a rationalist to refrain from courting death by openly defying Catholic beliefs before a Catholic mob in Spain. It is easy for any of us to-day to be far more explicit than Spinoza was. It is doubtful whether any of us, if we had lived in his day and were capable of going as far in heresy, would have run such risks as he did in publishing the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. For those who have lived much in his society, it should be difficult to doubt that, if allowed, he would have dared death on the night of the mob-murder of the De Witts. The formerly suppressed proof of his very plain speaking on the subject of prayer, and his indications of aversion to the practice of grace before meals (Powell, pp. 323–25) show lack even of prudence on his part. Prof. Powell is certainly entitled to censure those recent writers who have wilfully kept up a mystification as to Spinoza’s religiosity; but their lack of courage or candour does not justify an imputation of the same kind upon him. That Spinoza was “no saint” (Powell, p. 43) is true in the remote sense that he was not incapable of anger. But it would be hard to find a Christian who would compare with him in general nobility of character. The proposition that he was not “in any sense religious” (id. ib.) seems open to verbal challenge.

Cp. art. in Biographie Universelle, and Mosheim, 17 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, § 35, and notes in Reid’s ed. Bekker was not the first to combat demonology on scriptural grounds; Arnold Geulincx, of Leyden, and the French Protestant refugee Daillon having less confidently put the view before him, the latter in his Daimonologia, 1687 (trans. in English, 1723), and the former in his system of ethics. Gassendi, as we saw, had notably discredited witchcraft a generation earlier; Reginald Scot had impugned its actuality in 1584; and Wier, still earlier, in 1563. And even before the Reformation the learned King Christian II of Denmark (deposed 1523) had vetoed witch-burning in his dominions. (Allen, Hist. de Danemark, French tr. 1878, i, 281.) As Scot’s Discoverie had been translated into Dutch in 1609, Bekker probably had a lead from him. Glanvill’s Blow at Modern Sadducism (1688), reproduced in Sadducismus Triumphatus, undertakes to answer some objections of the kind later urged by Bekker; and the discussion was practically international. Bekker’s treatise, entitled De Betooverte Wereld, was translated into English—first in 1695, from the French, under the title The World Bewitched (only 1 vol. published), and again in 1700 as The World turned upside down. In the French translation, Le Monde Enchanté (4 tom. 1694), it had a great vogue. A refutation was published in English in An Historical Treatise of Spirits, by J. Beaumont, in 1705. It is noteworthy that Bekker was included as one of “four modern sages (vier neuer Welt-Weisen)” with Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, in a German folio tractate (hostile) of 1702.

The triumphers, doubtless, did not contemplate the expatriation of the myriads of Protestants who escaped over the frontiers in the closing years of the century in spite of all the efforts of the royal police, “carrying with them,” as a later French historian writes, “our arts, the secrets of our manufactures, and their hatred of the king.” The Catholics, as deep in civics as in science, thought only of the humiliation and subjection of the heretics—doubtless feeling that they were getting a revenge against Protestantism for the Test Act and the atrocities of the Popish Plot mania in England. The blow recoiled on their country. Within a generation, their children were enduring the agonies of utter defeat at the hands of a coalition of Protestant nations every one of which had been strengthened by the piously exiled sons of France; and in the midst of their mortal struggle the revolted Protestants of the Cévennes so furiously assailed from the rear that the drain upon the king’s forces precipitated the loss of their hold on Germany.

M. Lanson remarks that “we must not let ourselves be abused by the last chapter [Des esprits forts], a collection of philosophic reflections and reasonings, where La Bruyère mingles Plato, Descartes, and Pascal in a vague Christian spiritualism. This chapter, evidently sincere, but without individuality, and containing only the reflex of the thoughts of others, is not a conclusion to which the whole work conducts. It marks, on the contrary, the lack of conclusion and of general views. What is more, with the chapter On the Sovereign, placed in the middle of the volume, it is destined to disarm the temporal and spiritual powers, to serve as passport for the independent freedom of observation in the rest of the Caractères” (p. 599).

On this it may be remarked that the essay in question is not so much Christian as theistic; but the suggestion as to the object is plausible. Taine (Essais de critique et d’histoire, ed. 1901) first remarks (p. 11) on the “christianisme” of the essay, and then decides (p. 12) that “he merely exposes in brief and imperious style the reasonings of the school of Descartes.” It should be noted, however, that in this essay La Bruyère does not scruple to write: “If all religion is a respectful fear of God, what is to be thought of those who dare to wound him in his most living image, which is the sovereign?” (§ 27 in ed. Walckenaer, p. 578. Pascal holds the same tone. Vie, par Madame Perier.) This appears first in the fourth edition; and many other passages were inserted in that and later issues: the whole is an inharmonious mosaic.

Concerning La Bruyère, the truth would seem to be that the inconsequences in the structure of his essays were symptomatic of variability in his moods and opinions. Taine and Lanson are struck by the premonitions of the revolution in his famous picture of the peasants, and other passages; and the latter remarks (p. 603) that “the points touched by La Bruyère are precisely those where the writers of the next age undermined the old order: La Bruyère is already philosophe in the sense which Voltaire and Diderot gave to that term.” But we cannot be sure that the plunges into convention were not real swervings of a vacillating spirit. It is difficult otherwise to explain his recorded approbation of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The Dialogues sur le Quiétisme, published posthumously under his name (1699), appear to be spurious. This was emphatically asserted by contemporaries (Sentiments critiques sur les Caractères de M. de la Bruyère, 1701, p. 447; Apologie de M. de la Bruyère, 1701, p. 357, both cited by Walckenaer) who on other points were in opposition. Baron Walckenaer (Étude, ed. cited, p. 76 sq.) pronounces that they were the work of Elliès du Pin, a doctor of the Sorbonne, and gives good reasons for the attribution. The Abbé d’Olivet in his Histoire de l’Académie française declares that La Bruyère only drafted them, and that du Pin edited them; but the internal evidence is against their containing anything of La Bruyère’s draught. They are indeed so feeble that no admirer cares to accept them as his. (Cp. note to Suard’s Notice sur la personne et les écrits de la Bruyère, in Didot ed. 1865, p. 20.) Written against Madame Guyon, they were not worth his while.