A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern 91

A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern 91

Doubtless the spectacle of Protestant feuds and methods would go

far to foster such unbelief; but though, as we have seen, there were

aggressive Unitarians in Germany before 1530, who, being scholars,

may or may not have drawn on Italian thought, thereafter there is

reason to look to Italy as the source of the propaganda. Thence came

the two Sozzini, the founders of Socinianism, of whom Lelio, the uncle

of Fausto, travelled much in northern Europe (including England)

between 1546 and 1552. [2133] As the earlier doctrine of Servetus

shows clear affinities to that of the Sozzini, and his earlier books

were much read in Italy between 1532 and 1540, he may well have given

them their impulse. [2134] It is evidently to Servetus that Zanchi

referred when he wrote to Bullinger in 1565 that "Spain bore the hens,

Italy hatched the eggs, and we now hear the chickens piping." [2135]

Before Socinianism had taken form it was led up to, as we have seen, in

the later writings of the ex-monk Bernardino Ochino (1487-1564), who,

in the closing years of a much chequered career, combined mystical

and Unitarian tendencies with a leaning to polygamy and freedom

of divorce. [2136] His influence was considerable among the Swiss

Protestants, though they finally expelled him for his heresies. From

Geneva or from France, in turn, apparently came some of the English

freethought of the middle period of the sixteenth century; [2137]

for in 1562 Speaker Williams in the House of Commons, in a list of

misbelievers, speaks of "Pelagians, Libertines, Papists, and such

others, leaving God's commandments to follow their own traditions,

affections, and minds" [2138]--using theologically the foreign term,

which never became naturalized in English in its foreign sense. It was

about the year 1563, again, that Roger Ascham wrote his Scholemaster,

wherein are angrily described, as a species new in England, men who,

"where they dare," scorn both Protestant and Papist, "rejecting

scripture, and counting the Christian mysteries as fables." [2139]

He describes them as "atheoi in doctrine"; adding, "this last word is

no more unknowne now to plane Englishe men than the Person was unknown

somtyme in England, untill some Englishe man took peines to fetch that

develish opinion out of Italie." [2140] The whole tendency he connects

in a general way with the issue of many new translations from the

Italian, mentioning in particular Petrarch and Boccaccio. Among good

Protestants his view was general; and so Lord Burghley in his Advice to

his Son writes: "Suffer not thy sons to pass the Alps, for they shall

learn nothing there but pride, blasphemy, and atheism." As it happened,

his grandson the second Earl of Exeter, and his great-grandson Lord

Roos, went to Rome, and became not atheists but Roman Catholics.

 

Such episodes should remind us that in that age of ignorance and

superstition the Church had always an immense advantage. Those

who, like Gentillet in his raging Discours, commonly known as the

Contre-Machiavel (1576), ascribed to "atheism" and the teaching of

Machiavelli all the crimes and oppressions wrought by Catholics,

[2141] were ludicrously perverting the facts. Massacres in churches,

which are cited by Gentillet as impossible to believing Catholics,

were wrought, as we have seen, on the largest scale by the Church

in the thirteenth century. So, when Scaliger calls the Italians

of his day "a set of atheists," we are to understand it rather of

"the hypocrisy than of the professed skepticism of the time." [2142]

But rationalism and semi-rationalism did prevail in Italy more than

in any other country. [2143]

 

Like the old Averroïsm, the new pietistic Unitarianism persisted

in Italy and radiated thence afresh when it had flagged in other

lands. The exploded Unitarian tradition [2144] runs that the doctrine

arose in the year 1546 among a group of more than forty learned men who

were wont to assemble in secret at Vicenza, near Venice. Claudius of

Savoy, however, emphatically gave out his anti-Trinitarian doctrine at

Berne in 1534, after having been imprisoned at Strasburg and banished

thence; [2145] and Ochino and Lelio Sozzini left Italy in 1543. But

there seems to have been a continuous evolution of Unitarian heresy

in the south after the German movement had ceased. Giorgio Biandrata,

whom we have seen flying to Poland from Geneva, had been seized by the

Inquisition at Pavia for such opinion. Still it persisted. In 1562

Giulio Guirlando of Treviso, and in 1566 Francesco Saga of Rovigo,

were burned at Venice for anti-Trinitarianism. Giacomo Aconzio too,

who dedicated his Stratagems of Satan (Basel, 1565) to Queen Elizabeth,

and who pleaded notably for the toleration of heresy, [2146] was a

decided latitudinarian. [2147]

 

It is remarkable that the whole ferment occurs in the period of the

Catholic Reaction, the Council of Trent, and the subjection of Italy,

when the papacy was making its great effort to recover its ground. It

would seem that in the compulsory peace which had now fallen on

Italian life men's thoughts turned more than ever to mental problems,

as had happened in Greece after the rise of Alexander's empire. The

authority of the Church was outwardly supreme; the Jesuits had

already begun to do great things for education; [2148] the revived

Inquisition was everywhere in Italy; its prisons, as we have seen,

were crowded with victims of all grades during a whole generation;

Pius V and the hierarchy everywhere sought to enforce decorum in life;

the "pagan" academies formed on the Florentine model were dissolved;

and classic culture rapidly decayed with the arts, while clerical

learning flourished, [2149] and a new religious music began with

Palestrina. Yet on the death of Paul IV the Roman populace burned the

Office of the Inquisition to the ground and cast the pope's statue

into the Tiber; [2150] and in that age (1548) was born Giordano Bruno,

one of the types of modern freethought.

 

The great service of Italy to modern freethought, however, was to come

later, in respect of the impulse given to the scientific spirit by

Bruno, Vanini, and Galileo. On the philosophical or critical side, the

Italy of the middle of the sixteenth century left no enduring mark on

European thought, though her serious writers were numerous. Aconzio had

published, before his De Stratagematibus Satanæ, a treatise De Methodo,

sive recta investigandarum tradendarumque scientiarum ratione (Basel,

1558), wherein he pleads strenuously for a true logical method as the

one way to real knowledge of things. In this he anticipates Bacon, as

did, still earlier, Mario Nizolio in his Antibarbarus sive de veris

principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra pseudo-philosophos

(Parma, 1553). Nizolio's main effort is towards the discrediting of

Aristotle, whom, like so many in the generation following, he regarded

as the great bulwark of scholastic obscurantism. He insists that

all knowledge must proceed from sensation, which alone has immediate

certainty; and thus stands for direct scientific observation as against

tradition and verbalism. But Ludovicus Vives had before him (in his

De causis corruptarum artium, Antwerp, 1531) claimed that the true

Aristotelian went direct to nature, as Aristotle himself had done;

and Nizolio did nothing in practical science to substantiate his

polemic against the logic-choppers.

 

He and Aconzio in effect cancel each other. Each had glimpsed a

truth, one seeing the need for a right method in inference, the

other protesting against the idea that abstract reasoning could lead

to knowledge; but neither made good his argument by any treasure

trove of fact. Another writer of the same decade, Gomez Pereira,

joined in the revolt against Aristotelianism, publishing in 1554 his

Margarita Antoniana, wherein, in advance of Descartes, he maintained

the absence of sensation in brutes. [2151] For the rest, he championed

freedom in speculation, denying that authority should avail save in

matters of faith. But he too failed to bring forth fruits meet for

freedom. Neither by abstract exposition of right methods of reasoning,

nor by abstract attacks on wrong methods, could any vital impulse

yet be given to thought. What was lacking was the use of reason

upon actual problems, whether of human or of natural science. All

the while Europe was anchored to ancient delusion, historical and

scientific. Even as the horrors of age-long religious war could alone

drive men to something like toleration in the religious life, there

was needed the impact of actual discovery to win them to science as

against scholasticism. And rational thinking on the religion which

resisted all new science was to be still later of attainment, save

for the nameless men who throughout the ages of faith rejected the

creeds without publishing their unbelief. Of these Italy had always

a large sprinkling.

 

 

 

 

§ 2. SPAIN

 

The fact that sixteenth-century Spain could be charged, on the

score of Servetus, with producing the "hen" of Socinianism, is an

important reminder of the perpetuity of variation and of the fatality

of environment. The Portuguese Sanchez, whom we shall find laying new

potential foundations of skepticism in France alongside of Montaigne,

could neither have acquired nor propounded his philosophy in his

native land. But it is to be noted that an elder contemporary of

Sanchez, living and dying in Spain, was able, in the generation after

Servetus, to make a real contribution to the revival of freethought,

albeit under shelter of a firm profession of orthodoxy.

 

No book of the kind, perhaps, had a wider European popularity than

the Examen de Ingenios para las ciencias of Huarte de San Juan,

otherwise Juan Huarte y Navarro (c. 1530-1592). Like Servetus and

Sanchez and many another, Huarte had his bias to reason fostered by a

medical training; and it is as a "natural philosopher" that he stands

for a rational study of causation. As a pioneer of exact science,

indeed, he counts for next to nothing. Taking as his special theme

the divergences of human faculty, he does but found himself on the à

priori system of "humours" and "temperatures" passed on by Aristotle

to Galen and Hippocrates, inconsistently affirming on the one hand

that the "characters" not only of whole nations but of the inhabitants

of provinces are determined by their special climates and aliments,

and on the other hand that individual faculty is determined by the

proportions of hot and cold, moist and dry "temperatures" in the

parents. Apart from his insistence on the functions of the brain,

and from broadly rational deliverances as to the kinds of faculty

which determine success in theology and law, arms and arts, his

"science" is naught. Dealing with an obscure problem, he brought

to it none of the exact inductiveness which alone had yielded true

knowledge in the simpler field of astronomy. In virtue, however,

either of his confidence in affirmation or of his stand for rational

inquiry, or of both, Huarte's book, published in 1575, went the

round of Europe. Translated into Italian in 1582 (or earlier; new

rendering 1600), it was thence rendered into English by Richard Carew

in 1594. [2152] A French version appeared in 1598, and two others

in 1661 and 1671. A later English translation, from the original,

was produced in 1698; and Lessing thought the book worth putting into

German in 1785.

 

The rationalistic importance of Huart