Note 9 — Chapter XV · FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

And Le Vayer’s way of handling the dicta of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as to the virtues of unbelievers being merely vices is for its time so hardy that the Cardinal’s protection alone can explain its immunity from censure. St. Augustine and St. Thomas, says the critic calmly, had regard merely to eternal happiness, which virtue alone can obtain for no one. They are, therefore, to be always interpreted in this special sense. And so at the very outset the ground is summarily cleared of orthodox obstacles.9 The Petit discours chrétien sur l’immortalité de l’âme, also addressed to Richelieu, tells of a good deal of current unbelief on that subject; and the epistle dedicatory professes pain over the “philosopher of our day [Vanini] who has had the impiety to write that, unless one is very old, very rich, and a German, one should never expatiate on this subject.” But on the very threshold of the discourse, again, the skeptic tranquilly suggests that there would be “perhaps something unreasonable” in following Augustine’s precept, so popular in later times, that the problem of immortality should be solved by the dictates of religion and feeling, not of “uncertain” reason. “Why,” he asks, “should the soul be her own judge?”10 And he shows a distinct appreciation of the avowal of Augustine in his Retractationes that his own book on the Immortality of the Soul was so obscure to him that in many places he himself could not understand it.11 The “Little Christian Discourse” is, in fact, not Christian at all; and its arguments are but dialectic exercises, on a par with those of the Discours sceptique sur la musique which follows. He was, in short, a skeptic by temperament; and his Preface d’une histoire12 shows his mind to have played on the “Mississippi of falsehood called history” very much as did that of Bayle in a later generation.