A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern 92

A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern 92

Only thus could the principle of natural causation be affirmed in the

Spain of Philip II. Huarte is careful to affirm miracles while denying

their recurrence; and throughout he writes as a good scripturist and

Catholic. But he sticks to his naturalist thesis that "Nature makes

able," and avows that "natural philosophers laugh at such as say,

This is God's doing, without assigning the order and discourse of

the particular causes whence they may spring." [2155] The fact that

the book was dedicated to Philip tells of royal protection, without

which the author could hardly have escaped the Inquisition. Years

after, we shall find Lilly in England protesting on the stage against

the conception of Natura naturans; and Bacon powerfully reaffirming

Huarte's doctrine, with the same reservations. The Spaniard must have

counted for something as a pleader for elementary reason, if Bacon did.

 

But this is practically the only important contribution from Spain to

the intellectual renascence then going on in Europe. As we have seen,

it was not that Spaniards had any primordial bias to dogmatism and

persecution: it was simply that their whole socio-political evolution,

largely determined by Spanish discovery and dominion in the New World,

set up institutions and forces which became specially powerful to stamp

out freethought. The work of progress was done in lands where lack

of external dominion left on the one hand a greater fund of variant

energy, and on the other made for a lesser power of repression on

the part of Church and State.

 

 

 

 

§ 3. FRANCE

 

While Italy continues to be reputed throughout the sixteenth century

a hotbed of freethinking, styled "atheism," it appears to have been

in France, alongside of the wars of religion, that positive unbelief,

as distinct from scripturalist Unitarianism, made most new headway

among laymen. It was in France that the forces of change had greatest

play. The mere contact with Italy which began with the invasion of

Charles VII in 1494 meant a manifold moral and mental influence,

affecting French literature and life alike; and the age of strife and

destruction which set in with the first Huguenot wars could not but

be one of disillusionment for multitudes of serious men. We have seen

as much in the work of Bonaventure des Periers and Rabelais; but the

spread of radical unbelief is to be traced, as is usual in the ages

of faith, by the books written against it. Already in 1552 we have

seen Guillaume Postell publishing his book, Contra Atheos. [2156]

Unbelief increasing, there is published in 1564 an Atheomachie by

one De Bourgeville; but the Massacre must have gone far to frustrate

him. In 1581 appears another Atheomachie, ou réfutation des erreurs

et impiétés des Athéistes, Libertins, etc., issued at Geneva, but

bearing much on French life; and in the same year is issued the

long-time popular work of the Huguenot Philippe de Mornay, De la

vérité de la religion Chrestienne, Contre les Athées, Epicuriens,

Payens, Juifs, Mahumedistes, et autres Infidèles. [2157] In both the

Epistle Dedicatory (to Henry of Navarre) and the Preface the author

speaks of the great multiplication of unbelief, the refutation of

which he declares to be more needful among Christians than it ever

had been among the heathen. But, like most of the writers against

atheism in that age, he declares [2158] that there are no atheists

save a few young fools and utterly bad men, who turn to God as soon as

they fall sick. The reputed atheists of antiquity are vindicated as

having denied not the principle of deity but the false Gods of their

age--this after the universality of a belief in Gods in all ages had

been cited as one of the primary proofs of God's existence. In this

fashion is compiled a book of nine hundred pages, ostensibly for

the confutation of a few fools and knaves, described as unworthy of

serious consideration. Evidently the unbelief of de Mornay's day was

a more vigorous growth than he affected to think; and his voluminous

performance was followed by others. In 1586, Christophe Cheffontaines

published his Epitome novæ illustrationis Christianae Fidei adversus

Impios, Libertinos et Atheos; and still skepticism gained ground,

having found new abettors.

 

First came the Portuguese Francisco Sanchez (1552-1623?), born in

Portugal, but brought as a child to Bordeaux, which seems to have

been a place of refuge for many fugitive heretics from both sides of

the Peninsula. Sanchez has recorded that in his early youth he had no

bias to incredulity of any kind; but at some stage of his adolescence

he travelled in Italy and spent some time at Rome. The result was not

that special disbelief in Christianity which was proverbially apt

to follow, but a development on his part of philosophic skepticism

properly so-called, which found __EXPRESSION__ in a Latin treatise entitled

Quod Nihil Scitur--"That Nothing is Known." Composed as early as 1576,

in the author's twenty-fourth year, the book was not published till

1581, a year after the first issue of the Essais of Montaigne. It is

natural to surmise that while Sanchez was at Bordeaux he may have known

something of his famous contemporary; but though Montaigne is likely

to have read the Quod Nihil Scitur in due course, he nowhere speaks of

it; and in 1576 Sanchez was a Professor of Medicine at Montpellier,

then a town of Huguenot leanings. Soon he left it for Toulouse, the

hotbed of Catholic fanaticism, where he contrived to live out his

long life in peace, despite his production of a Pyrrhonist treatise

and of a remarkable Latin poem (1578) on the comet of 1577. The Quod

Nihil Scitur is a skeptical flank attack on current science, in no

way animadverting on religion, as to which he professed orthodoxy:

the poem is a frontal attack on the whole creed of astrology, then

commonly held by Averroïsts and Aristotelians, as well as by orthodox

Catholics. Yet he seems never to have been molested. It would seem as

if a skepticism which ostensibly disallowed all claims to "natural"

knowledge, while avowedly recognizing "spiritual," was then as later

thought to make rather for faith than against it. That such virtual

Pyrrhonism as that of Sanchez can ever have ministered to religious

zeal is not indeed to be supposed: it is rather as a weapon against

the confidence of the "Naturalist" that the skeptical method has

always recommended itself to the calculating priest. And inasmuch as

astrology could be, and was, held by a non-religious theory, though

many Christians added it to their creed, a polemic against that was

the least dangerous form of rationalizing then possible. At all times

there had been priests who so reasoned, though, as we have seen in

dealing with the men of the Protestant Reformation, the belief in

astral influences is too closely akin to the main line of religious

tradition to be capable of ejection on religious grounds.

 

With his hostility to credulous hopes and fears in the sphere of

Nature, Sanchez is naturally regarded as a forerunner and helper

of freethought. But there is nothing to show that his work had

any effect in undermining the most formidable of all the false

beliefs of Christendom. [2159] Like so many others of his age,

he flouted Aristotelean scholasticism, but was perforce silent as

to the verbalisms and sophistries of simple theology. It may fairly

be inferred that his poem on the comet of 1577 helped to create that

current of reasoned disbelief [2160] which we find throwing up almost

identical __EXPRESSION__s in Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Molière, [2161]

concerning the folly of connecting the stars with human affairs. But

a skepticism which left untouched the main matter of the creeds could

not affect conduct in general; and while Sanchez passed unchecked the

watchdogs of the Inquisition, the fiery Bruno and Vanini were in his

day to meet their fiery death at its hands--the latter in Toulouse,

perhaps under the eyes of Sanchez. Having resigned his professorship

of medicine, he seems to have lived to a ripe age, dying in 1623.

 

Probably those very deaths availed more for the rousing of critical

thought than did the dialectic of the Pyrrhonist. To the life of

the reason may with perfect accuracy be applied the claim so often

made for that of religion--that it feeds on feeling and is rooted in

experience. Revolt from the cruelties and follies of faith plays a

great part in the history of freethought. In the greatest French writer

of that age, a professed Catholic, but in mature life averse alike

to Catholic and to Protestant bigotry, the shock of the Massacre of

Saint Bartholomew can be seen disintegrating once for all the spirit

of faith. Montaigne typifies the kind of skepticism produced in an

unscientific age by the practical demonstration that religion can

avail immeasurably more for evil than for good. [2162] A few years

before the Massacre he had translated for his dying father [2163] the

old Theologia Naturalis of Raymond of Sebonde; and we know from the

later Apology in the Essays that freethinking contemporaries declared

the argument of Raymond to be wholly insufficient. [2164] It is clear

from the same essay that Montaigne felt as much; though the gist of

his polemic is a vehement attack upon all forms of confident opinion,

religious and anti-religious alike. "In replying to arguments of so

opposite a tenour, Montaigne leaves Christianity, as well as Raimond

Sebonde, without a leg to stand upon. He demolishes the arguments of

Sebonde with the rest of human presumption, and allows Christianity,

neither held by faith nor provable by reason, to fall between

the two stools." [2165] The truth is that Montaigne's skepticism

was the product of a mental evolution spread over at least twenty

years. In his youth his vivid temperament kept him both credulous

and fanatical, so much so that in 1562 he took the reckless oath

prescribed by the Catholic Parlement of Paris. As he avows with

his incomparable candour, he had been in many things peculiarly

susceptible to outside influences, being always ready to respond to

the latest pressure; [2166] and the knowledge of his susceptibility

made him self-distrustful. But gradually he found himself. Beginning

to recoil from the ferocities and iniquities of the League, he yet

remained for a time hotly anti-Protestant; and it seems to have

been his dislike of Protestant criticism that led him to run amuck

against reason, at the cost of overthrowing the treatise he had set

out to defend. The common end of such petulant skepticism is a plunge

into uneasy yet unreasoning faith; but, though Montaigne professed

Catholicism to the end, the sheer wickedness of the Catholic policy

made it impossible for him to hold sincerely to the creed any more

than to the cause. [2167] Above all things he hated cruelty. [2168]

It was the Massacre that finally made Montaigne renounce public life;

[2169] it must have affected likewise his working philosophy.

 

That philosophy was not, indeed, an original construction: he found

it to his hand partly in the deism of his favourite Seneca; partly in

the stoical ethic of Epictetus, then so much appreciated in France;

and partly in the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus, of which the Latin

translation is known to have been among his books; from which he took

several of the mottoes inscribed on his library ceiling, [2170] and

from which he frequently quotes towards the end of his Apology. The

body of ideas compacted on these bases cannot be called a system: it

was not in Montaigne's nature to frame a logical scheme of thought;

and he was far from being the philosophic skeptic he set out to be