Note 100 — Chapter XIX · FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES

But Ganganelli’s own thinking on the issues between reason and religion was entirely commonplace. “Whatever,” he wrote, “departs from the account given of the Creation in the book of Genesis has nothing to support it but paradoxes, or, at most, mere hypotheses. Moses alone, as being an inspired author, could perfectly acquaint us with the formation of the world, and the development of its parts.... Whoever does not see the truth in what Moses relates was never born to know it.”100 It was only in his relation to the bigots of his own Church that his thinking was rationalistic. “The Pope,” he writes to a French marquis, “relies on Providence; but God does not perform miracles every time he is asked to do it. Besides, is he to perform one that Rome may enjoy a right of seignory over the Duchy of Parma?”101 At his death an Italian wrote of him that “the distinction he was able to draw between dogmas or discipline and ultramontane opinions gave him the courage to take many opportunities of promoting the peace of the State.” His tolerance is sufficiently exhibited in one of his letters to Algarotti: “I hope that you will preach to me some of these days, so that each may have his turn.”102 Freethought had achieved something when a Roman Cardinal, a predestinate Pope, could so write to an avowed freethinker. Concerning Galiani we have the warm panegyric of Grimm. “If I have any vanity with which to reproach myself,” he writes, “it is that which I derive in spite of myself from the fact of the conformity of my ideas with those of the two rarest men whom I have the happiness to know, Galiani and Denis Diderot.”103 Grimm held Galiani to be of all men the best qualified to write a true ecclesiastical history. But the history that would have satisfied him and Grimm was not to be published in that age.