Note 240 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT—(Continued)

Vanini, like Bruno, can now be recognized and understood as an Italian of vivacious temperament, studious without the student’s calm, early learned, alert in debate, fluent, imprudent, and ill-balanced. By his own account he studied theology under the Carmelite Bartolomeo Argotti, phoenix of the preachers of the time;240 but from the English Carmelite, John Bacon, “the prince of Averroïsts,”241 he declares, he “learned to swear only by Averroës”; and of Pomponazzi he speaks as his master, and as “prince of the philosophers of our age.”242 He has criticized both freely in his Amphitheatrum; but whereas that work is a professed vindication of orthodoxy, we may infer from the De Arcanis that the arguments of these skeptics, like those of the contemporary atheists whom he had met in his travels, had kept their hold on his thought even while he controverted them. For it cannot be disputed that the long passages which he quotes from the “atheist at Amsterdam”243 are put with a zest and cogency which are not infused into the professed rebuttals, and are in themselves quite enough to arouse the anger and suspicion of a pious reader. A writer who set forth so fully the acute arguments of unbelievers, unprintable by their authors, might well be suspected of writing at Christianity when he confuted the creeds of the pagans. As was noted later of Fontenelle, he put arguments against oracles which endangered prophecy; his dismissal of sorcery as the dream of troubled brains appeals to reason and not to faith; and his disparagement of pagan miracles logically bore upon the Christian.