A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern 93

A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern 93

His conformities, verbal and practical, have set certain

Catholics upon proving his orthodoxy, though his Essays are

actually prohibited by the Church. A Benedictine, Dom Devienne,

published in 1773 a Dissertation sur la Religion de Montaigne,

of which the main pleas are that the Essais often affirm the

divinity of the Christian faith; that the essayist received

the freedom of the city of Rome under the eyes of the pope; and

that his epitaph declared his orthodoxy! A generation later, one

Labouderie undertook to set forth Le Christianisme de Montaigne

in a volume of 600 pages (1819). This apologist has the courage

to face the protest of Pascal: "Montaigne puts everything in a

doubt so universal and so general that, doubting even whether

he doubts, his uncertainty turns upon itself in a perpetual and

unresting circle.... It is in this doubt which doubts of itself,

and in this ignorance which is ignorant of itself, that the essence

of his opinion consists.... In a word, he is a pure Pyrrhonist"

(Pensées, supp. to Pt. i, art. 11). The reply of the apologist

is that Montaigne never extends his skepticism to "revelation,"

but on the contrary declares that revelation alone gives man

certainties (work cited, p. 127).

 

That is of course merely the device of a hundred skeptics of the

Middle Ages; the old shibboleth of a "twofold truth" modified

by a special disparagement of reason, with no attempt to meet

the rejoinder that, if reason has no certainties, there can be

no certainty that revelation is what it claims to be. When the

apologist concludes that Montaigne's aim en froissant la raison

humaine is to "oblige men to recognize the need of a revelation

to fix his incertitudes," it suffices to answer that Montaigne in

so many words declares at the outset of the Apologie de Raimond

Sebonde that he knows nothing of theology, which is equivalent

to saying that he is not a student of the Bible. As a matter of

fact he never quotes it!

 

 

In the last and most characteristic essay of all, discoursing at large

Of Experience, he makes the most daring attack on laws in general,

as being always arbitrary and often irrational, and not seldom more

criminal than the offences they punish. After a planless discourse

of diseases and diets, follies of habit and follies of caprice, the

wisdom of self-rule and the wisdom of irregularity, he contrives to

conclude at once that we should make the best of everything and that

"only authority is of force with men of common reach and understanding,

and is of more weight in a strange language"--a plea for Catholic

ritual. Yet in the same page he pronounces that "Supercelestial

opinions and under-terrestrial manners are things that amongst us I

have ever seen to be of singular accord."

 

There is no final recognition here of religion as even a useful

factor in life. In point of fact Montaigne's whole habit of mind

is perfectly fatal to orthodox religion; and it is clear that,

despite his professions of conformity, he did not hold the Christian

beliefs. [2179] He was simply a deist. Again and again he points to

Sokrates as the noblest and wisest of men; there is no reference to

Jesus or any of the saints. Whatever he might say in the Apology, in

the other essays he repeatedly reveals a radical unbelief. The essay

on Custom strikes at the root of all orthodoxy, with its thrusts

at "the gross imposture of religions, wherewith so many worthy and

sufficient men have been besotted and drunken," and its terse avowal

that "miracles are according to the ignorance wherein we are by

nature, and not according to nature's essence." [2180] Above all, he

rejected the great superstition of the age, the belief in witchcraft;

and, following the lead of Wier, [2181] suggested a medical view of

the cases of those who professed wizardry. [2182] This is the more

remarkable because his rubber-ball fashion of following impulsions

and rebounding from certainty made him often disparage other men's

certainties of disbelief just because they were certainties. Declaring

that he prefers above all things qualified and doubtful propositions,

[2183] he makes as many confident assertions of his own as any man

ever did. But the effect of the whole is a perpetual stimulus to

questioning. His function in literature was thus to set up a certain

mental atmosphere, [2184] and this the extraordinary vitality of

his utterance enabled him to do to an incalculable extent. He had

the gift to disarm or at least to baffle hostility, to charm kings,

[2185] to stand free between warring factions. No book ever written

conveys more fully the sensation of a living voice; and after three

hundred years he has as friendly an audience as ever.

 

 

Owen notes (French Skeptics, p. 446; cp. Champion, pp. 168-69)

that, though the papal curia requested Montaigne to alter certain

passages in the Essays, "it cannot be shown that he erased or

modified a single one of the points." Sainte-Beuve, indeed, has

noted many safeguarding clauses added to the later versions of

the essay on Prayers (i, 56): but they really carry further the

process of doubt. M. Champion has well shown how the profession of

personal indecision and mere self-portraiture served as a passport

for utterances which would have brought instant punishment on an

author who showed any clear purpose. As it was, nearly a century

passed before the Essais were placed upon the Roman Index Librorum

Prohibitorum (1676).

 

To the orthodox of his own day Montaigne seems to have given entire

satisfaction. Thus Florimond de Boemond, in his Antichrist (2e

éd. 1599, p. 4), begins his apologetic with a skeptical argument,

which he winds up by referring the reader with eulogy to the

Apologie of Montaigne. The modern resort to the skeptical method

in defence of traditional faith seems to date from this time. See

Prof. Fortunat Strowski, Histoire du sentiment religieux en France

au xviie siècle; 1907, i, 55, note. (De Montaigne à Pascal.)

 

 

The momentum of such an influence is seen in the work of Charron

(1541-1603), Montaigne's friend and disciple. The Essais had

first appeared in 1580; the expanded and revised issue in 1588;

and in 1601 there appeared Charron's De la Sagesse, which gives

methodic form and as far as was permissible a direct application to

Montaigne's naturalistic principles. Charron's is a curious case of

mental evolution. First a lawyer, then a priest, he became a highly

successful popular preacher and champion of the Catholic League;

and as such was favoured by the notorious Marguerite (the Second

[2186]) of Navarre. On the assassination of the Duke of Guise by

order of Henri III he delivered an indignant protest from the pulpit,

of which, however, he rapidly repented. [2187] Becoming the friend

of Montaigne in 1586, he shows already in 1593, in his Three Truths,

the influence of the essayist's skepticism, [2188] though Charron's

book was expressly framed to refute, first, the atheists; second,

the pagans, Jews, Mohammedans; and, third, the Christian heretics

and schismatics. The Wisdom, published only eight years later, is a

work of a very different cast, proving a mental change. Even in the

first work "the growing teeth of the skeptic are discernible beneath

the well-worn stumps of the believer"; [2189] but the second almost

testifies to a new birth. Professedly orthodox, it was yet recognized

at once by the devout as a "seminary of impiety," [2190] and brought

on its author a persecution that lasted till his sudden death from

apoplexy, which his critics pronounced to be a divine dispensation. In

the second and rearranged edition, published a year after his death,

there are some modifications; but they are so far from essential [2191]

that Buckle found the book as it stands a kind of pioneer manual of

rationalism. [2192] Its way of putting all religions on one level,

as being alike grounded on bad evidence and held on prejudice, is

only the formal statement of an old idea, found, like so many others

of Charron's, in Montaigne; but the didactic purpose and method

turn the skeptic's shrug into a resolute propaganda. So with the

formal and earnest insistence that true morality cannot be built on

religious hopes and fears--a principle which Charron was the first to

bring directly home to the modern intelligence, [2193] as he did the

principle of development in religious systems. [2194] Attempting as it

does to construct a systematic practical philosophy of life, the book

puts aside so positively the claims of the theologians, [2195] and

so emphatically subordinates religion to the rule of natural reason,

[2196] that it constitutes a virtual revolution in public doctrine

for Christendom. As Montaigne is the effective beginner of modern

literature, so is Charron the beginner of modern secular teaching. He

is a Naturalist, professing theism; and it is not surprising to find

that for a time his book was even more markedly than Montaigne's the

French "freethinker's breviary."

 

 

Strowski, as cited, pp. 164-65, 183 sq., founding on Garasse and

Mersenne. Strowski at first pronounces Charron "in reality only a

collector of commonplaces" (p. 166); but afterwards obliviously

confesses (p. 191) that "his audacities are astonishing,"

and explains that "he formulates, perhaps without knowing

it, a whole doctrine of irreligion which outgoes the man and

the time--a thought stronger than the thinker!" And again he

forgetfully speaks of "cette critique hardie et méthodique,

j'allais écrire scientifique" (p. 240). All this would be a new

form of commonplace.

 

 

It was only powerful protection that could save such a book from

proscription; but Charron and his book had the support at once of Henri

IV and the President Jeannin--the former a proved indifferentist to

religious forms; the latter the author of the remark that a peace with

two religions was better than a war which had none. Such a temper had

become predominant even among professed Catholics, as may be gathered

from the immense popularity of the Satyre Menippée (1594). Ridiculing

as it did the insensate fanaticism of the Catholic League, that

composition was naturally described as the work of atheists; but there

seems to have been no such element in the case, the authors being

all Catholics of good standing, and some of them even having a record