A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern 90
It is in the wake, then, of the overthrow of Catholicism in the
second generation that a far-reaching freethought begins to be heard
of in England; and this clearly comes by way of new continental and
literary contact, which would have occurred in at least as great a
degree under Catholicism, save insofar as unbelief was facilitated by
the irreverence developed by the ecclesiastical revolution, or by the
state of indifference which among the upper classes was the natural
sequel of the shameless policy of plunder and the oscillation between
Protestant and Catholic forms. And it was finally in such negative
ways only that Protestantism furthered freethought anywhere.
§ 3. THE NETHERLANDS
Hardly more fortunate was the earlier course of things intellectual
after the Reformation in the Netherlands, where by the fifteenth
century remarkable progress had been made alike in science and the
arts, and where Erasmus acquired his culture and did his service to
culture's cause. The fact that Protestantism had to fight for its
life against Philip was of course not the fault of the Protestants;
and to that ruinous struggle is to be attributed the arrest of the
civilization of Flanders. But it lay in the nature of the Protestant
impulse that, apart from the classical culture which in Holland was
virtually a successful industry, providing editions for all Europe,
it should turn all intellectual life for generations into vain
controversy. The struggle between reform and popery was followed by
the struggle between Calvinism and Arminianism; and the second was
no less bitter if less bloody than the first, [2123] the religious
strife passing into civil feud.
The secret of the special bitterness of Calvinist resentment
towards the school of Arminius lay in the fact that the latter
endorsed some of the most galling of the Catholic criticisms of
Calvinism. Arminius [Latinized name of Jacob Harmensen or van Harmin,
1560-1609, professor of theology at Leyden] was personally a man of
great amiability, averse to controversy, but unable to reconcile the
Calvinist view of predestination with his own quasi-rational ethic,
and concerned to secure that the dogma should not be fastened upon
all Dutch Protestants. In his opinion, no effective answer could be
made on Calvinist lines to the argument of Cardinal Bellarmin [2124]
that from much Calvinist doctrine there flowed the consequences: "God
is the author of sin; God really sins; God is the only sinner; sin
is no sin at all." [2125] This was substantially true; and Arminius,
like Bellarmin, unable to see that the Calvinist position was simply
a logical reduction to moral absurdity of all theistic ethic, sought
safety in fresh dogmatic modifications. Of these the Calvinists, in
turn, could easily demonstrate the logical incoherence; and in a ring
of dilemmas from which there was no logical exit save into Naturalism
there arose an exacerbated strife, as of men jostling each other in a
prison where some saw their nominal friends in partial sympathy with
their deadly enemies, who jeered at their divisions.
The wonder is that the chaos of dispute and dogmatic tinkering which
followed did not more rapidly disintegrate faith. Calvinists sought
modifications under stress of dialectic, like their predecessors;
and the high "Supralapsarian" doctrine--the theory of the certain
regeneration or "perseverance" of "the saints"--shaded into
"the Creabilitarian opinion" [2126] and yet another; while the
"Sublapsarian" view claimed also to safeguard predestination. So long
as men remained in the primary Protestant temper, convinced that they
possessed in their Bibles an infallible revelation, such strife could
but generate new passion, even as it had done on the other irrational
problem of the eucharist. For men of sane and peaceful disposition,
the only modes of peace were resignation and doubt; and in the case
of the doubters the first intellectual movements would be either
back towards Rome [2127] or further on towards deism. The former
course would be taken by some who had winced under the jeers of the
Catholics; the latter by the hardier spirits who judged Catholicism for
themselves. As most of the fighting had been primed by and transacted
over texts, the surrender of the belief in an inspired scripture
greatly reduced the friction; and in Holland as elsewhere deism would
be thus spontaneously generated in the Protestant atmosphere. A few
went even further. "I have no doubt that many persons have secretly
revolted from the Reformed Church to the Papists," wrote Uitenbogaert
to Vorstius in 1613. "I firmly believe," he added, "that Atheism is
creeping by degrees into the minds of some." [2128]
Where mere Arminianism could bring Barneveldt to the block, even deism
could not be avowed; and generations had to pass before it could have
the semblance of a party; but the proof of the new vogue of unbelief
lies in the labour spent by Grotius (Hugo or Huig van Groot, 1583-1645)
on his treatise De Veritate Religionis Christianæ (1627)--a learned and
strenuous defence of the faith which had so lacerated his fatherland,
first through the long struggle with Spain, and again in the feud of
Arminians and Calvinists. When Barneveldt was put to death, Grotius had
been sentenced to imprisonment for life; and it was only after three
years of the dungeon that, by the famous stratagem of his wife, he
escaped in 1621. The fact that he devoted his freedom in France first
to his great treatise On the Law of War and Peace (1625), seeking to
humanize the civil life of the world, and next to his defence of the
Christian religion, is the proof of his magnanimity; but the spectacle
of his life must have done as much to set thinkers against the whole
creed as his apologetic did to reconcile them to it. He, the most
distinguished Dutch scholar and the chief apologist of Christianity in
his day, had to seek refuge, on his escape from prison, in Catholic
France, whose king granted him a pension. The circumstance which in
Holland chiefly favoured freethought, the freedom of the press, was,
like the great florescence of the arts in the seventeenth century,
a result of the whole social and political conditions, not of any
Protestant belief in free discussion. That there were freethinkers
in Holland in and before Grotius's time is implied in the pains he
took to defend Christianity; but that they existed in despite and not
by grace of the ruling Protestantism is proved by the fact that they
did not venture to publish their opinions. In France, doubtless, he
found as much unbelief as he had left behind. In the end, Grotius and
Casaubon alike recoiled from the narrow Protestantism around them,
which had so sadly failed to realize their hopes. [2129] "In 1642
Grotius had become wholly averse to the Reformation. He thought it
had done more harm than good"; and had he lived a few years longer
he would probably have become a Catholic. [2130]
§ 4. CONCLUSION
Thus concerning the Reformation generally "we are obliged to confess
that, especially in Germany, it soon parted company with free learning;
that it turned its back upon culture; that it lost itself in a maze
of arid theological controversy; that it held out no hand of welcome
to awakening science. Presently we shall see that the impulse to an
enlightened study and criticism of the scriptures came chiefly from
heretical quarters; that the unbelieving Spinoza and the Arminian Le
Clerc pointed the way to investigations which the great Protestant
systematizers thought neither necessary nor useful. Even at a later
time it has been the divines who have most loudly declared their
allegiance to the theology of the Reformation who have also looked
most askance at science, and claimed for their statements an entire
independence of modern knowledge." [2131] In fine, "to look at
the Reformation by itself, to judge it only by its theological and
ecclesiastical development, is to pronounce it a failure"; and the
claim that "to consider it as part of a general movement of European
thought ... is at once to vindicate its past and to promise it the
future"--this amounts merely to avowing the same thing. Only as an
eddy in the movement of freethought is the Reformation intellectually
significant. Politically it is a great illustration of the potency
of economic forces.
While, however, the Reformation in itself thus did little for the
spirit of freethought, substituting as it did the arbitrary standard of
"revelation" for the not more arbitrary standard of papal authority,
it set up outside its own sphere some new movements of rational
doubt which must have counted for much in the succeeding period. It
was not merely that, as we shall see, the bloody strifes of the two
Churches, and the quarrels of the Protestant sects among themselves,
sickened many thoughtful men of the whole subject of theology; but that
the disputes between Romanists and anti-Romanists raised difficult
questions as to the bases of all kinds of belief. As always happens
when established beliefs are long attacked, the subtler spirits in the
conservative interest after a time begin putting in doubt beliefs of
every species; a method often successful with those who cannot carry
an argument to its logical conclusions, and who are thus led to seek
harbour in whatever credence is on the whole most convenient; but
one which puts stronger spirits on the reconsideration of all their
opinions. Thus we shall find, not only in the skepticism of Montaigne,
which is historically a product of the wars of religion in France,
but in the more systematic and more cautious argumentation of the
abler Protestants of the seventeenth century, a measure of general
rationalism much more favourable alike to natural science and to
Biblical and ethical criticism than had been the older environment
of authority and tradition, brutal sacerdotalism, and idolatrous
faith. Men continued to hate each other religiously for trifles,
to quarrel over gestures and vestures, and to wrangle endlessly over
worn-out dogmas; but withal new and vital heresies were set on foot;
new science generated new doubt; and under the shadow of the aging
tree of theology there began to appear the growths of a new era. As
Protestantism had come outside the "universal" Church, rearing its
own tabernacles, so freethought came outside both, scanning with a
deepened intentness the universe of things. And thus began a more vital
innovation than that dividing the Reformation from the Renaissance,
or even that dividing the Renaissance from the Middle Ages.
CHAPTER XIII
THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT
§ 1. THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE
The negative bearing of the Reformation on freethought is made clear by
the historic fact that the new currents of thought which broadly mark
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