A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 18 – Robertson · Verses Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 18Freethought in the Renaissance
18
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 18
Freethought in the Renaissance
RobertsonEnglish
§ 1. THE ITALIAN EVOLUTION
What is called the Renaissance was, broadly speaking, an evolution of the culture forces seen at work in the later "Middle Ages," newly fertilized by the recovery of classic literature; and we shall have to revert at several points of our survey to what we have been considering as "medieval" in order to perceive the "new birth." The term is inconveniently vague, and is made to cover different periods, sometimes extending from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, sometimes signifying only the fifteenth. It seems reasonable to apply it, as regards Italy, to the period in which southern culture began to outgo that of France, and kept its lead--that is, from the end of the fourteenth century to the time of the Counter-Reformation. That is a comparatively distinct sociological era.
Renascent Italy is, after ancient Greece, the great historical illustration of the sociological law that the higher civilizations arise through the passing-on of seeds of culture from older to newer societies, under conditions that specially foster them and give them freer growth. The straitened and archaic pictorial art of Byzantium, unprogressive in the hidebound life of the Eastern Empire, developed in the free and striving Italian communities till it paralleled the sculpture of ancient Greece; and it is to be said for the Church that, however she might stifle rational thought, she economically elicited the arts of painting and architecture (statuary being tabooed as too much associated with pagan worships), even as Greek religion had promoted architecture and sculpture. By force, however, of the tendency of the arts to keep religion anthropomorphic where deeper culture is lacking, popular belief in Renaissance Italy was substantially on a par with that of polytheistic Greece.
Before the general recovery of ancient literature, the main motives to rationalism, apart from the tendency of the Aristotelian philosophy to set up doubts about creation and Providence and a future state, were (1) the spectacle of the competing creed of Islam, made known to the Italians first by intercourse with the Moors, later by the Crusades; and further and more fully by the Saracenized culture of Sicily and commercial intercourse with the east; (2) the spectacle of the strife of creeds within Christendom; and (3) the spectacle of the worldliness and moral insincerity of the bulk of the clergy. It is in that atmosphere that the Renaissance begins; and it may be said that freethought stood veiled beside its cradle.
In such an atmosphere, even on the ecclesiastical side, demand for "reforms" naturally made headway; and the Council of Constance (1414-1418) was convened to enact many besides the ending of the schism. But the Council itself was followed by seven hundred prostitutes; and its relation to the intellectual life was defined by its bringing about, on a charge of heresy, the burning of John Huss, who had come under a letter of safe-conduct from the emperor. The baseness of the act was an enduring blot on the Church; and a hundred years later, in a Germany with small goodwill to Bohemia, Luther made it one of his foremost indictments of the hierarchy. But in the interim the spirit of reform had come to nothing. Cut off from much of the force that was needed to effect any great moral revolution in the Church, the reforming movement soon fell away, and the Church was left to ripen for later and more drastic treatment.
How far, nevertheless, anti-clericalism could go among the scholarly class even in Italy is seen in the career of one of the leading humanists of the Renaissance, Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457). In the work of his youth, De Voluptate et Vero Bono, a hardy vindication of aggressive Epicureanism--at a time when the title of Epicurean stood for freethinker --he plainly sets up a rationalist standard, affirming that science is founded on reason and Nature, and that Nature is God. Not content with a theoretic defiance of the faith, he violently attacked the Church. It was probably to the protection of Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, who though pious was not pro-clerical, that Valla was able to do what he did, above all to write his famous treatise, De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione, wherein he definitely proved once for all that the "donation" in question was a fiction. Such an opinion had been earlier maintained at the Council of Basle by Æneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II, and before him by the remarkable Nicolaus of Cusa; but when the existence of Valla's work was known he had to fly from Rome afresh (1443) to Naples, where he had previously been protected for seven years. Applying the same critical spirit to more sacrosanct literature, he impugned the authenticity of the Apostles' Creed, and of the letter of Abgarus to Jesus Christ, given by Eusebius; proceeding further to challenge many of the mistranslations in the Vulgate. For his untiring propaganda he was summoned before the Inquisition at Naples, but as usual was protected by the king, whom he satisfied by professing faith in the dogmas of the Church, as distinguished from ecclesiastical history and philology.
It was characteristic of the life of Italy, hopelessly committed on economic grounds to the Church, that Valla finally sought and found reconciliation with the papacy. He knew that his safety at Naples depended on the continued anti-papalism of the throne; he yearned for the society of Rome; and his heart was all the while with the cause of Latin scholarship rather than with that of a visionary reformation. In his as in so many cases, accordingly, intellectual rectitude gave way to lower interests; and he made unblushing offers of retractation to cardinals and pope. In view of the extreme violence of his former attacks, it is not surprising that the reigning Pope, Eugenius IV, refused to be appeased; but on the election of Nicholas V (1447) he was sent for; and he died secretary to the Curia and Canon of St. John Lateran.
Where so much of anti-clericalism could find harbourage within the Church, there was naturally no lack of it without; and from the period of Boccaccio till the Catholic reaction after the Reformation a large measure of anti-clerical feeling is a constant feature in Italian life. It was so ingrained that the Church had on the whole to leave it alone. From pope to monk the mass of the clergy had forfeited respect; and gibes at their expense were household words, and the basis of popular songs. Tommaso Guardati of Salerno, better known as Masuccio, attacks all orders of clergy in his collection of tales with such fury that only the protection of the court of Naples could well have saved him; and yet he was a good Catholic. The popular poetic literature, with certain precautions, carried the anti-clerical spirit as far as to parade a humorous non-literary skepticism, putting in the mouths of the questionable characters in its romances all manner of anti-religious opinions which it would be unsafe to print as one's own, but which in this way reached appreciative readers who were more or less in sympathy with the author's sentiments and stratagems. The Morgante Maggiore of Pulci (1488) is the great type of such early Voltairean humour: it revives the spirit of the Goliards, and passes unscathed in the new Renaissance world, where the earlier Provençal impiety had gone the way of the Inquisition bonfire, books and men alike. Beneath its mockery there is a constant play of rational thought, and every phase of contemporary culture is glanced at in the spirit of always unembittered humour which makes Pulci "the most lovable among the great poets of the Renaissance." It is noteworthy that Pulci is found affirming the doctrine of an Antipodes with absolute openness, and with impunity, over a hundred years before Galileo. This survival of ancient pagan science seems to have been obscurely preserved all through the Middle Ages. In the eighth century, as we have seen, the priest Feargal or Vergilius, of Bavaria, was deposed from his office by the Pope, on the urging of St. Boniface, for maintaining it; but he was reinstated, died a bishop, and became a saint; and not only that doctrine, but that of the two-fold motion of the earth, was affirmed with impunity before Pulci by Nicolaus of Cusa (d. 1464); though in the fourteenth century Nicolaus of Autricuria had to recant his teaching of the atomistic theory. As Pulci had specially satirized the clergy and ecclesiastical miracles, his body was refused burial in consecrated ground; but the general temper was such as to save him from clerical enmity up to that point.
The Inquisition too was now greatly enfeebled throughout central and northern as well as southern Italy. In 1440 the materialist, mathematician, and astrologer Amadeo de' Landi, of Milan, was accused of heresy by the orthodox Franciscans. Not only was he acquitted, but his chief accuser was condemned in turn to make public retractation, which he however declined to do. Fifty years later the Inquisition was still nearly powerless. In 1497 we find a freethinking physician at Bologna, Gabriele de Salò, protected by his patrons against its wrath, although he "was in the habit of maintaining that Christ was not God, but the son of Joseph and Mary ...; that by his cunning he had deceived the world; that he may have died on the cross on account of crimes which he had committed," and so forth. Nineteen years before, Galeotto Marcio had come near being burned for writing that any man who lived uprightly according to his own conscience would go to heaven, whatever his faith; and it needed the Pope, Sixtus IV, his former pupil, to save him from the Inquisition. Others, who went further, ran similar risks; and in 1500 Giorgio da Novara was burned at Bologna, presumptively for denying the divinity of Jesus. A bishop of Aranda, however, is said to have done the same with impunity, in the same year, besides rejecting hell and purgatory, and denouncing indulgences as a device of the popes to fill their pockets.
During this period too the philosophy of Averroës, as set forth in his "Great Commentary" on Aristotle, was taught in North Italy with an outspokenness not before known. Gaetano of Siena began to lecture on the Commentary at Padua in 1436; it was in part printed there in 1472; and from 1471 to 1499 Nicoletto Vernias seems to have taught, in the Paduan chair of philosophy, the Averroïst doctrine of the world-soul, thus virtually denying the Christian doctrine of immortality. Violent opposition was raised when his pupil Niphus (Nifo) printed similar doctrine in a treatise De Intellectu et Dæmonibus (1492); but the professors when necessary disclaimed the more dangerous tenets of Averroïsm. Nifo it was who put into print the maxim of his tribe: Loquendum est ut plures, sententiendum ut pauci--"think with the few; speak with the majority."
As in ancient Greece, humorous blasphemy seems to have fared better than serious unbelief. As is remarked by Hallam, the number of vindications of Christianity produced in Italy in the fifteenth century proves the existence of much unbelief; and it is clear that, apart from academic doubt, there was abundant freethinking among men of the world. Erasmus was astonished at the unbelief he found in high quarters in Rome. One ecclesiastic undertook to prove to him from Pliny that there is no future state; others openly derided Christ and the apostles; and many avowed to him that they had heard eminent papal functionaries blaspheming the Mass. The biographer of Pope Paul II has recorded how that pontiff found in his own court, among certain young men, the opinion that faith rested rather on trickeries of the saints (sanctorum astutiis) than on evidence; which opinion the Pope eradicated. But in the career of Perugino (1446-1524), who from being a sincerely religious painter became a skeptic in his wrath against the Church which slew Savonarola, we have evidence of a movement of things which no papal fiat could arrest.
As to the beliefs of the great artists in general we have little information. Employed as they so often were in painting religious subjects for the churches, they must as a rule have conformed outwardly; and the artistic temper is more commonly credent than skeptical. But in the case of one of the greatest, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), we have evidence of a continual play of critical scrutiny on the world, and a continual revolt against mere authority, which seem incompatible with any acceptance of Christian dogma. In his many notes, unpublished till modern times, his universal genius plays so freely upon so many problems that he cannot be supposed to have ignored those of religion. His stern appraisement of the mass of men carries with it no evangelical qualifications; his passion for knowledge is not Christian; and his reiterated rejection of the principle of authority in science and in literature tells of a spirit which, howsoever it might practise reticence, cannot have been inwardly docile to either priesthood or tradition. In all his reflections upon philosophic and scientific themes he is, in the scientific sense, materialistic--that is, inductive, studious of experiment, insistent upon tangible data. "Wisdom is daughter of experience"; "truth is the daughter of time"; "there is no effect in Nature without a reason"; "all our knowledge originates in sensations" --such are the dicta he accumulates in an age of superstition heightened by the mutability of life, of ecclesiastical tyranny tempered only by indifferentism, of faith in astrology and amulets, of benumbing tradition in science and philosophy. On the problem of the phenomena of fossil shells he pronounces with a searching sagacity of inference that seems to reveal at once the extent to which the advance of science has been blocked by pious obscurantism. In all directions we see the great artist, a century before Bacon, anticipating Bacon's protests and questionings, and this with no such primary bias to religion as Bacon had acquired at his mother's knee. When he turns to the problems of body and spirit he is as dispassionate, as keenly speculative, as over those of external nature. Of magic he is entirely contemptuous, not in the least on religious grounds, though he glances at these, but simply for the folly of it. All that tells of religious feeling in him is summed up in a few utterances expressive of a vague theism; while he has straight thrusts at religious fraud and absurdity. It is indeed improbable that a mind so necessitated to discourse of its thought, however gifted for prudent silence, can have subsisted without private sympathy from kindred souls. Skepticism was admittedly abundant; and Leonardo of all men can least have failed to reckon with its motives.
Perhaps the most fashionable form of quasi-freethinking in the Italy of the fifteenth century was that which prevailed in the Platonic Academy of Florence in the period, though the chief founder of the Academy, Marsilio Ficino, wrote a defence of Christianity, and his most famous adherent, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, planned another. Renaissance Platonism began with the Greek Georgios Gemistos, surnamed Plethon because of his devotion to Plato, which was such as to scandalize common Christians and exasperate Aristotelians. The former had the real grievance that his system ostensibly embodied polytheism and logically involved pantheism; and one of his antagonists, Gennadios Georgios Scolarios, who became patriarch of Constantinople, caused his book On Laws to be burned; but the allegation of his Aristotelian enemy and countryman, Georgios Trapezuntios, that he prayed to the sun as creator of the world, is only one of the polemical amenities of the period. Ostensibly he was a believing Christian, stretching Christian love to accommodate the beliefs of Plato; but it was not zeal for orthodoxy that moved Cosimo dei Medici, at Florence, to embrace the new Platonism, and train up Marsilio Ficino to be its prophet. The furor allegoricus which inspired the whole school was much more akin to ancient Gnosticism than to orthodox Christianity, and constantly points to pantheism as the one philosophic solution of its ostensible polytheism. When, too, Ficino undertakes to vindicate Christianity against the unbelievers in his Della Religione Cristiana, "the most solid arguments that he can find in its favour are the answers of the Sibyls, and the prophecies of the coming of Jesus Christ to be found in Virgil, Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry."
How far such a spirit of expatiation and speculation, however visionary and confused, tended to foster heresy is seen in the brief career of the once famous young Pico della Mirandola, Ficino's wealthy pupil. Parading a portentous knowledge of tongues and topics at the age of twenty-four, he undertook (1486) to maintain a list of nine hundred Conclusiones or propositions at Rome against all comers, and to pay their expenses. Though he had obtained the permission of the Pope, Innocent VIII, the challenge speedily elicited angry charges of heresy against certain of the theses, and the Pope had to stop the proceedings and issue an ecclesiastical commission of inquiry. Some of the propositions were certainly ill adjusted to Catholic ideas, in particular the sayings that "neither the cross of Christ nor any image is to be adored adoratione latriæ"--with worship; that no one believes what he believes merely because he wishes to; and that Jesus did not physically descend into hell. Pico, retiring to Florence, defended himself in an Apologia, which provoked fresh outcry; whereupon he was summoned to proceed to Rome; and though the powerful friendship of Lorenzo dei Medici procured a countermand of the order, it was not till 1496 that he received, from Alexander VI, a full papal remission.
Among the unachieved projects of his later life, which ended at the age of thirty-one, was that of a treatise Adversus Hostes Ecclesiæ, to be divided into seven sections, the first dealing with "The avowed and open enemies of Christianity," and the second with "Atheists and those who reject every religious system upon their own reasoning"; and the others with Jews, Moslems, idolaters, heretics, and unrighteous believers. The vogue of unbelief thus signified was probably increased by the whole speculative habit of Pico's own school, which tended only less than Averroïsm to a pantheism subversive of the Christian creed. It is noteworthy that, while Ficino believed devoutly in astrology, Pico rejected it, and left among his confused papers a treatise against it which his nephew contrived to transcribe and publish; but it does not appear that this served either the cause of religion or that of science. The educated Italian world, while political independence lasted, remained in various degrees freethinking, pantheistic, and given to astrology, no school or teacher combining rationalism in philosophy with sound scientific methods.
One of the great literary figures of the later Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), is the standing proof of the divorce of the higher intelligence of Italy from the faith as well as the cause of the Church before the Reformation. With this divorce he expressly charges the Church itself, giving as the first proof of its malfeasance that the peoples nearest Rome were the least religious. To him the Church was the supreme evil in Italian politics, the "stone in the wound." In a famous passage he gives his opinion that "our religion, having shown us the truth and the true way, makes us esteem less political honour (l'onore del mondo)"; and that whereas the pagan religion canonized only men crowned with public honour, as generals and statesmen, "our religion has glorified rather the humble and contemplative men than the active," placing the highest good in humility and abjection, teaching rather to suffer than to do, and so making the world debile and ready to be a prey to scoundrels. The passage which follows, putting the blame on men for thus misreading their religion, is a fair sample of the grave mockery with which the men of that age veiled their unfaith. Machiavelli was reputed in his own world an atheist; and he certainly was no religionist. He indeed never avows atheism, but neither did any other writer of the epoch; and the whole tenour of his writings is that of a man who had at least put aside the belief in a prayer-answering deity; though, with the intellectual arbitrariness which still affected all the thought of his age, he avows a belief that all great political changes are heralded by prodigies, celestial signs, prophecies, or revelations --here conforming to the ordinary superstition of his troublous time.
It belongs, further, to the manifold self-contradiction of the Renaissance that, holding none of the orthodox religious beliefs, he argues insistently and at length for the value and importance of religion, however untrue, as a means to political strength. Through five successive chapters of his Discourses on Livy he presses and illustrates his thesis, praising Numa as a sagacious framer of useful fictions, and as setting up new and false beliefs which made for the unification and control of the Roman people. The argument evolved with such strange candour is, of course, of the nature of so much Renaissance science, an à priori error: there was no lack of religious faith and fear in primitive Rome before the age of Numa; and the legend concerning him is a product of the very primordial mythopoiesis which Machiavelli supposes him to have set on foot. It is in the spirit of that fallacious theory of a special superinduced religiosity in Romans that the great Florentine proceeds to charge the Church with having made the Italians religionless and vicious (senza religione e cattivi). Had he lived a century or two later he might have seen in the case of zealously believing Spain a completer political and social prostration than had fallen in his day on Italy, and this alongside of regeneration in an unbelieving France. But indeed it was the bitterness of spirit of a suffering patriot looking back yearningly to an idealized Rome, rather than the insight of the author of The Prince, that inspired his reasoning on the political uses of religion; for at the height of his exposition he notes, with his keen eye for fact, how the most strenuous use of religious motive had failed to support the Samnites against the cool courage of Romans led by a rationalizing general; and he notes, too, with a sardonic touch of hopefulness, how Savonarola had contrived to persuade the people of contemporary Florence that he had intercourse with deity. Italy then had faith enough and to spare.
Such argument, in any case, even if untouched by the irony which tinges Machiavelli's, could never avail to restore faith; men cannot become believers on the motive of mere belief in the value of belief; and the total effect of Machiavelli's manifold reasoning on human affairs, with its startling lucidity, its constant insistence on causation, its tacit negation of every notion of Providence, must have been, in Italy as elsewhere, rather to prepare the way for inductive science than to rehabilitate supernaturalism, even among those who assented to his theory of Roman development. In his hands the method of science begins to emerge, turned to the most difficult of its tasks, before Copernicus had applied it to the simpler problem of the motion of the solar system. After centuries in which the name of Aristotle had been constantly invoked to small scientific purpose, this man of the world, who knew little or nothing of Aristotle's Politics, exhibits the spirit of the true Aristotle for the first time in the history of Christendom; and it is in his land after two centuries of his influence that modern sociology begins its next great stride in the work of Vico.
He is to be understood, of course, as the product of the moral and intellectual experience of the Renaissance, which prepared his audience for him. Guicciardini, his contemporary, who in comparison was unblamed for irreligion, though an even warmer hater of the papacy, has left in writing the most explicit avowals of incredulity as to the current conceptions of the supernatural, and declares concerning miracles that as they occur in every religion they prove none. At the same time he professes firm faith in Christianity; and others who would not have joined him there were often as inconsistent in the ready belief they gave to magic and astrology. The time was, after all, one of artistic splendour and scientific and critical ignorance; and its freethought had the inevitable defects that ignorance entails. Thus the belief in the reality of witchcraft, sometimes discarded by churchmen, is sometimes maintained by heretics. Rejected by John of Salisbury in the twelfth century, and by the freethinking Pietro of Abano in 1303, it was affirmed and established by Thomas Aquinas, asserted by Gregory IX, and made a motive for uncounted slaughters by the Inquisition. In 1460 a theologian had been forced to retract, and still punished, for expressing doubt on the subject; and in 1471 Pope Sixtus VI reserved to the papacy the privilege of making and selling the waxen models of limbs used as preservatives against enchantments. In the sixteenth century a whole series of books directed against the belief were put on the Index, and a Jesuit handbook codified the creed. Yet a Minorite friar, Alfonso Spina, pronounced it a heretical delusion, and taught that those burned suffered not for witchcraft but for heresy, and on the other hand some men of a freethinking turn held it. Thus the progress of rational thought was utterly precarious.
Of the literary freethinking of the later Renaissance the most famous representative is Pomponazzi, or Pomponatius (1462-1525), for whom it has been claimed that he "really initiated the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance." The Italian Renaissance, however, was in reality near its turning-point when Pomponazzi's treatise on the Immortality of the Soul appeared (1516); and that topic was the commonest in the schools and controversies of that day. He has been at times spoken of as an Averroïst, on the ground that he denied immortality; but he did so in reality as a disciple of Alexander of Aphrodisias, a rival commentator to Averroës. What is remarkable in his case is not the denial of immortality, which we have seen to be frequent in Dante's time, and more or less implicit in Averroïsm, but his contention that ethics could do very well without the belief --a thing that it still took some courage to affirm, though the spectacle of the life of the faithful might have been supposed sufficient to win it a ready hearing. Presumably his rationalism, which made him challenge the then canonical authority of the scholasticized Aristotle, went further than his avowed doubts as to a future state; since his profession of obedience to the Church's teaching, and his reiteration of the old academic doctrine of two-fold truth--one truth for science and philosophy, and another for theology --are as dubious as any in philosophic history. Of him, or of Lorenzo Valla, more justly than of Petrarch, might it be said that he is the father of modern criticism, since Valla sets on foot at once historical and textual analysis, while Pomponazzi anticipates the treatment given to Biblical miracles by the rationalizing German theologians of the end of the eighteenth century. He too was a fixed enemy of the clergy; and it was not for lack of will that they failed to destroy him. He happened to be a personal favourite of Leo X, who saw to it that the storm of opposition to Pomponazzi--a storm as much of anger on behalf of Aristotle, who had been shown by him to doubt the immortality of the soul, as on behalf of Christianity--should end in an official farce of reconciliation. He was however not free to publish his treatises, De Incantationibus and De Fato, Libero Arbitrio, et Prædestinatione. These, completed in 1520, were not printed till after his death, in 1556 and 1557; and by reason of their greater simplicity, as well as of their less dangerous form of heresy, were much more widely read than the earlier treatise, thus contributing much to the spread of sane thought on the subjects of witchcraft, miracles, and special providences.
Whether his metaphysic on the subject of the immortality of the soul had much effect on popular thought may be doubted. What the Renaissance most needed in both its philosophic and its practical thought was a scientific foundation; and science, from first to last, was more hindered than helped by the environment. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, charges of necromancy against physicians and experimenters were frequently joined with imputations of heresy, and on such charges not a few were burned. The economic conditions too were all unfavourable to solid research.
When Galileo in 1589 was made Professor of Mathematics at Pisa, his salary was only 60 scudi (= dollars), while the Professor of Medicine got 2,000. (Karl von Gebler, Galileo Galilei, Eng. tr. 1879, p. 9.) At Padua, later, Galileo had 520 florins, with a prospect of rising to as many scudi. (Letter given in The Private Life of Galileo, Boston, 1870, p. 61.) The Grand Duke finally gave him a pension of 1,000 scudi at Florence. (Id. p. 64.) This squares with Bacon's complaint (Advancement of Learning, bk. ii; De Augmentis, bk. ii, ch. i--Works, Routledge ed. pp. 76, 422-23) that, especially in England, the salaries of lecturers in arts and professions were injuriously small, and that, further, "among so many noble foundations of colleges in Europe ... they are all dedicated to professions, and none left free to the study of arts and sciences at large." In Italy, however, philosophy was fairly well endowed. Pomponazzi received a salary of 900 Bolognese lire when he obtained the chair of Philosophy at Bologna in 1509. (Christie, essay cited, p. 138.)
Medicine was nearly as dogmatic as theology. Even philosophy was in large part shouldered aside by the financial motives which led men to study law in preference; and when the revival of ancient literature gained ground it absorbed energy to the detriment of scientific study, the wealthy amateurs being ready to pay high prices for manuscripts of classics, and for classical teaching; but not for patient investigation of natural fact. The humanists, so-called, were often forces of enlightenment and reform; witness such a type as the high-minded Pomponio Leto (Pomponius Laetus), pupil and successor of Lorenzo Valla, and one of the many "pagan" scholars of the later Renaissance; but the discipline of mere classical culture was insufficient to make them, as a body, qualified leaders either of thought or action, in such a society as that of decaying Italy. Only after the fall of Italian liberties, the decay of the Church's wealth and power, the loss of commerce, and the consequent decline of the arts, did men turn to truly scientific pursuits. From Italy, indeed, long after the Reformation, came a new stimulus to freethought which affected all the higher civilization of northern Europe. But the failure to solve the political problem, a failure which led to the Spanish tyranny, meant the establishment of bad conditions for the intellectual as for the social life; and an arrest of freethought in Italy was a necessary accompaniment of the arrest of the higher literature. What remained was the afterglow of a great and energetic period rather than a spirit of inquiry; and we find the old Averroïst scholasticism, in its most pedantic form, lasting at the university of Padua till far into the seventeenth century. "A philosophy," remarks in this connection an esteemed historian, "a mode of thought, a habit of mind, may live on in the lecture-rooms of Professors for a century after it has been abandoned by the thinkers, the men of letters, and the men of the world." The avowal has its bearings nearer home than Padua.
While it lasted, the light of Italy had shone upon all the thought of Europe. Not only the other nations but the scholars of the Jewish race reflected it; for to the first half of the sixteenth century belongs the Jew Menahem Asariah de Rossi, whose work, Meor Enayim, "Light of the Eyes," is "the first attempt by a Jew to submit the statements of the Talmud to a critical examination, and to question the value of tradition in its historical records." And he did not stand alone among the Jews of Italy; for, while Elijah Delmedigo, at the end of the fifteenth century, was in a didactic Maimonist fashion doubtful of literary tradition, his grandson, Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, flourishing early in the seventeenth century, "wrote various pamphlets of a deeply skeptical character." That this movement of Jewish rationalism should be mainly limited to the south was inevitable, since there only were Jewish scholars in an intellectual environment. There could be no better testimony to the higher influence of the Italian Renaissance.
§ 2. THE FRENCH EVOLUTION
In the other countries influenced by Italian culture in the sixteenth century the rationalist spirit had various fortune. France, as we saw, had substantially retrograded at the time of the Italian new-birth, her revived militarism no less than her depression by the English conquests having deeply impaired her intellectual life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Thus the true renascence of letters in France began late, and went on during the Reformation period; and all along it showed a tincture of freethought. From the midst of the group who laid the foundations of French Protestantism by translations of the Bible there comes forth the most articulate freethinker of that age, Bonaventure Desperiers, author of the Cymbalum Mundi (1537). Early associated with Calvin and Olivetan in revising the translation of the Bible by Lefèvre d'Etaples (rev. 1535), Desperiers turned away from the Protestant movement, as did Rabelais and Étienne Dolet, caring as little for the new presbyter as for the old priest; and all three were duly accused by the Protestants of atheism and libertinage. In the same year Desperiers aided Dolet, scholar and printer, to produce his much-praised Commentarii linguæ latinæ; and within two years he had printed his own satire, Cymbalum Mundi, wherein, by way of pagan dialogues, are allegorically ridiculed the Christian scheme, its miracles, Bible contradictions, and the spirit of persecution, then in full fire in France against the Protestants. In the first dialogue Mercury is sent to Athens by Zeus the Father to have the "Book of the Destinies" rebound--an adaptation of an ancient sarcasm against the Christians by Celsus. He, robbing others, is robbed of the book, and another (= the New Testament) is put in its place. In the second dialogue figure Rhetulus (= Lutherus) and Cubercus (= Bucerus?), who suppose they have found the main pieces of the philosopher's stone, which Mercury had broken and scattered in the sand of the theatre arena. Protestants and Catholics are thus alike ridiculed. The allegory is not always clear to modern eyes; but there was no question then about its general bearing; and Desperiers, though groom of the chamber (after Clement Marot) to Marguerite of France (later of Navarre), had to fly for his life, as Marot did before him. The first edition of his book, secretly printed at Paris, was seized and destroyed; and the second (1538), printed for him at Lyons, whither he had taken his flight, seems to have had a similar fate. From that time he disappears, probably dying, whether or not by suicide is doubtful, before 1544, when his miscellaneous works were published. They include his OEuvres Diverses--many of them graceful poems addressed to his royal mistress, Marguerite--which, with his verse translation of the Andria of Terence and his Discours non plus Melancoliques que Divers, make up his small body of work. In the Discours may be seen applied to matters of history and scholarship the same critical spirit that utters itself in the Cymbalum, and the same literary gift; but for orthodoxy his name became a hissing and a byword, and it is only in modern times that French scholarship has recognized in Desperiers the true literary comrade and potential equal of Rabelais and Marot. The age of Francis was too inclement for such literature as his Cymbalum; and it was much that it spared Gringoire (d. 1544), who, without touching doctrine, satirized in his verse both priests and Protestants.
It is something of a marvel, further, that it spared Rabelais (? 1493-1553), whose enormous raillery so nearly fills up the literary vista of the age for modern retrospect. It has been said by a careful student that "the free and universal inquiry, the philosophic doubt, which were later to work the glory of Descartes, proceed from Rabelais"; and it is indeed an impression of boundless intellectual curiosity and wholly unfettered thinking that is set up by his entire career. Sent first to the convent school of La Baumette, near Angers, he had there as a schoolfellow Geoffroy d'Estissac, afterwards his patron as Bishop of Maillezais. Sent later to the convent school of Fontenay-le-Comte, he had the luck to have for schoolfellows there the four famous brothers Du Bellay, so well able to protect him in later life; and, forced to spend fifteen years of his young life (1509-24) at Fontenay as a Franciscan monk, he turned the time to account by acquiring an immense erudition, including a knowledge of Greek, then rare. Naturally the book-lover was not popular among his fellow-monks; and his Greek books were actually confiscated by the chapter, who found in his cell certain writings of Erasmus, to whom as a scholar he afterwards expressed the deepest intellectual obligations. Thereafter, by the help of his friend d'Estissac, now bishop of the diocese, Rabelais received papal permission to join the order of the Benedictines and to enter the Abbey of Maillezais as a canon regular (1524); but soon after, though he was thus a fully-ordained priest, we find him broken loose, and living for some six years a life of wandering freedom as a secular priest, sometimes with his friend the bishop, winning friends in high places by his learning and his gaiety, everywhere studying and observing. At the bishop's priory of Ligugé he seems to have studied hard and widely. In 1530 he is found at Montpellier, extending his studies in medicine, in which he speedily won distinction, becoming B.M. on December 1, and a lecturer in the following year. He was later esteemed one of the chief anatomists of his day, being one of the first to dissect the human body and to insist on the need of such training for physicians; and in 1532 we find him characterized as the "true great universal spirit of this time." In the same year he published at Lyons, where he was appointed physician to the chief hospital, an edition of the Latin letters of the Ferrarese physician Manardi; and his own commentaries on Galen and Hippocrates, which had a very poor sale. At Lyons he made the acquaintance of Dolet, Marot, and Desperiers; and his letter (of the same year) to Erasmus (printed as addressed to Bernard de Salignac ) showed afresh how his intellectual sympathies went.
About 1532 he produced his Gargantua and Pantagruel, the first two books of his great humoristic romance; and in 1533 began his series of almanacks, continued till 1550, presumably as printer's hack-work. From the fragments which have been preserved, they appear to have been entirely serious in tone, one containing a grave theistic protest against all astrological prediction. Along with the almanack of 1533, however, he produced a Pantagruelian Prognostication; and this, which alone has been preserved entire, passes hardy ridicule on astrology, one of the most popular superstitions of the day, among high and low alike. Almost immediately the Sorbonne was on his track, condemning his Pantagruel in 1533. A journey soon afterwards to Rome, in the company of his friend Bishop Jean du Bellay, the French ambassador, may have saved him some personal experience of persecution. Two years later, when the Bishop went to Rome to be made cardinal, Rabelais again accompanied him; and he appears to have been a favourite alike with Pope Clement VII and Paul III. At the end of 1535 we find him, in a letter to his patron, the bishop of Maillezais, scoffing at the astrological leanings of the new Pope, Paul III. Nonetheless, upon a formal Supplicatio pro apostasia, he obtained from the Pope in 1536 an absolution for his breach of his monastic vows, with permission to practise medicine in a Benedictine monastery. Shortly before, his little son Théodule had died; and it may have been grief that inspired such a desire: in any case, the papal permission to turn monk again was never used, though the pardon was doubtless serviceable. Taking his degree as doctor at Montpellier in May, 1537, he there lectured for about a year on anatomy; and in the middle of 1538 he recommenced a wandering life, practising in turn at Narbonne, Castres, and Lyons. Then, after becoming a Benedictine canon of St. Maur in 1540, we find him in Piedmont from 1540 to 1543, under the protection of the viceroy, Guillaume de Bellay.
During this period the frequent reprints of the first two books of his main work, though never bearing his name, brought upon him the denunciations alike of priests and Protestants. Ramus, perhaps in revenge for being caricatured as Raminagrobis, pronounced him an atheist. Calvin, who had once been his friend, had in his book De Scandalis angrily accused him of libertinage, profanity, and atheism; and henceforth, like Desperiers, he was about as little in sympathy with Protestantism as with the zealots of Rome.
Thus assailed, Rabelais had seen cause, in an edition of 1542, to modify a number of the hardier utterances in the original issues of the first two books of his Pantagruel, notably his many epithets aimed at the Sorbonne. In the reprints there are substituted for Biblical names some drawn from heathen mythology; expressions too strongly savouring of Calvinism are withdrawn; and disrespectful allusions to the kings of France are elided. In his concern to keep himself safe with the Sorbonne he even made a rather unworthy attack (1542) on his former friend Étienne Dolet for the mere oversight of reprinting one of his books without deleting passages which Rabelais had expunged; but no expurgation could make his évangile, as he called it, a Christian treatise, or keep for him an orthodox reputation; and it was with much elation that he obtained in 1545 from King Francis--whose private reader was his friend Duchâtel, Bishop of Tulle--a privilege to print the third book of Pantagruel, which he issued in 1546, signed for the first time with his name, and prefaced by a cry of jovial defiance to the "petticoated devils" of the Sorbonne. They at once sought to convict him of fresh blasphemies; but even the thrice-repeated substitution of an n for an m in âme, making "ass" out of "soul," was carried off, by help of Bishop Duchâtel, as a printer's error; and the king, having laughed like other readers, maintained the imprimatur. But although it gave Rabelais formal leave to reprint the first and second books, he was careful for the time not to do so, leaving the increasing risk to be run by whoso would.
It was on the death of Francis in 1547 that Rabelais ran his greatest danger, having to fly to Metz, where for a time he acted as salaried physician of the city. About this time he seems to have written the fourth and fifth books of Pantagruel; and to the treatment he had suffered at Catholic hands has been ascribed the reversion to Calvinistic ideas noted in the fifth book. In 1549, however, on the birth of a son to Henri II, his friend Cardinal Bellay returned to power, and Rabelais to court favour with him. The derider of astrology did not scruple to cast a prosperous horoscope for the infant prince--justifying by strictly false predictions his own estimate of the art, since the child died in the cradle. There was now effected the dramatic scandal of the appointment of Rabelais in 1550 to two parish cures, one of which, Meudon, has given him his most familiar sobriquet. He seems to have left both to be served by vicars; but the wrath of the Church was so great that early in 1552 he resigned them; proceeding immediately afterwards to publish the fourth book of Pantagruel, for which he had duly obtained official privilege. As usual, the Sorbonne rushed to the pursuit; and the Parlement of Paris forbade the sale of the book despite the royal permission. That permission, however, was reaffirmed; and this, the most audacious of all the writings of Rabelais, went forth freely throughout France, carrying the war into the enemies' camp, and assailing alike Protestants and churchmen. In the following year, his work done, he died.
It is difficult to estimate the intellectual effect of his performance, which was probably much greater at the end of the century than during his life. Patericke, the English translator of Gentillet's famous Discours against Machiavelli (1576), points to Rabelais among the French and Agrippa (an odd parallel) among the Germans as the standard-bearers of the whole train of atheists and scoffers. "Little by little, that which was taken in the beginning for jests turned to earnest, and words into deeds." Rabelais's vast innuendoes by way of jests about the people of Ruach (the Spirit) who lived solely on wind; his quips about the "reverend fathers in devil," of the "diabological faculty"; his narratives about the Papefigues and Papimanes; and his gibes at the Decretals, were doubtless enjoyed by many good Catholics otherwise placated by his attacks on the "demoniacal Calvins, impostors of Geneva"; and so careful was he on matters of dogma that it remains impossible to say with confidence whether or not he finally believed in a future state. That he was a deist or Unitarian seems the reasonable inference as to his general creed; but there also he throws out no negations--even indicates a genial contempt for the philosophe ephectique et pyrrhonien who opposes a halting doubt to two contrary doctrines. In any case, he was anathema to the heresy-hunters of the Sorbonne, and only powerful protection could have saved him.
Dolet (1508-1546) was certainly much less of an unbeliever than Rabelais; but where Rabelais could with ultimate impunity ridicule the whole machinery of the Church, Dolet, after several iniquitous prosecutions, in which his jealous rivals in the printing business took part, was finally done to death in priestly revenge for his youthful attack on the religion of inquisitorial Toulouse, where gross pagan superstition and gross orthodoxy went hand in hand. He certainly "lived a life of sturt and strife." Born at Orléans, he studied in his boyhood at Paris; later at Padua, under Simon Villanovanus, whom he heard converse with Sir Thomas More; then, at 21, for a year at Venice, where he was secretary to Langeac, the French Bishop of Limoges. It was at Toulouse, where he went in 1532 to study law, that he began his quarrels and his troubles. In that year, and in that town, the young Jean de Caturce, a lecturer in the school of law, was burned alive on a trivial charge of heresy; and Dolet witnessed the tragedy. Previously there had been a wholesale arrest of suspected Lutherans--"advocates, procureurs, ecclesiastics of all sorts, monks, friars, and curés." Thirty-two saved themselves by flight; but among those arrested was Jean de Boysonne, the most learned and the ablest professor in the university, much admired by Rabelais, and afterwards the most intimate friend of Dolet. It was his sheer love of letters that brought upon him the charge of heresy; but he was forced publicly to abjure ten Lutheran heresies charged upon him. The students of the time were divided in the old fashion into "nations," and formed societies as such; and Dolet, chosen in 1534 as "orator" of the "French" group, as distinct from the Gascons and the Tolosans, in the course of a quarrel of the societies delivered two Latin orations, in one of which he vilipended alike the cruelty and the superstitions of Toulouse. A number of the leading bigots of the place were attacked; and Dolet was after an interval of some months thrown into prison, charged with exciting a riot and with contempt of the Parlement of Toulouse. His incarceration did not last long; but never thereafter was he safe; and in the remaining thirteen years of his life he was five more times in prison, for nearly five years in all.
After he had settled at Lyons, and produced his Commentaries, he had the bad fortune to kill an enemy who drew sword upon him; and the pardon he obtained from the king through the influence of Marguerite of Navarre remained technically unratified for six years, during which time he was only provisionally at liberty, being actually in prison for a short time in 1537. Apart from this episode he showed himself both quarrelsome and vainglorious, alienating friends who had done much for him; but his enemies were worse spirits than he. The power of the man drove him to perpetual production no less than to strife; and his mere activity as a printer went far to destroy him.
"No calling was more hateful to the friends of bigotry and superstition than that of a printer" (Christie, as cited, p. 387). Nearly all the leading printers of France and Germany were either avowedly in sympathy with Protestant heresy or suspected of being so (id. p. 388); and the issue of an edict by King Francis in 1535 for the suppression of printing was at the instance of the Sorbonne. We shall see that in Germany the support of the printers, and their hostility to the priests and monks, contributed greatly to the success of Lutheranism.
In 1542 he was indicted as a heretic, but really for publishing Protestant books of devotion and French translations of the Bible. Among the formal offences charged were: (1) his having in his Cato Christianus cited as the second commandment the condemnation of all images; (2) his use of the term "fate" in the sense of predestination; (3) his substitution of habeo fidem for credo; (4) the eating of flesh in Lent; and (5) the act of taking a walk during the performance of mass. On this indictment the two inquisitors Orry and Faye delivered him over to the secular arm for execution. Again he secured the King's pardon (1543), through the mediation of Pierre Duchâtel, the good Bishop of Tulle; but the ecclesiastical resistance was such that, despite Dolet's formal recantation, it required a more plenary pardon, the express orders of the King, and three official letters to secure his release after a year's detention.
That was, however, swiftly followed by a final and successful prosecution. By a base device two parcels were made of prohibited books printed by Dolet and of Protestant books issued at Geneva; and these, bearing his name in large, were forwarded to Paris. The parcels were seized, and he was again arrested, early in January, 1544. He contrived to escape to Piedmont; but, returning secretly after six months to print documents of defence, he was discovered and sent to prison in Paris. The last pardon having covered all previous writings, the prosecutors sought in his translation of the pseudo-Platonic dialogues Axiochus and Hipparchus, printed with his last vindication; and, finding a slight over-emphasis of Sokrates's phrase describing the death of the body ("thou shalt no longer be," rendered by "thou shalt no longer be anything at all"), pronounced this a wilful propounding of a heresy, though in fact there had been no denial of the doctrine of immortality. This time the prey was held. After Dolet had been in prison for twenty months the Parlement of Paris ratified the sentence of death; and he was burned alive on August 3, 1546. The utter wickedness of the whole process at least serves to relieve by neighbourhood the darkness of the stains cast on Protestantism by the crimes of Calvin.
The whole of the clerical opposition to the new learning at this period is not unjustly to be characterized as a malignant cabal of ignorance against knowledge. In Germany as in France real learning was substantially on the side of the persecuted writers. When, in March of 1537, Dolet was entertained at a banquet to celebrate the pardon granted to him by the king for his homicide at Lyons on the last day of the previous year, there came to it, by Dolet's own account, the chief lights of learning in France--Budé, the chief Greek scholar of his time; Berauld, his nearest compeer; Danès and Toussain, both pupils of Budé and the first royal professors of Greek at Paris; Marot, "the French Maro"; Rabelais, then regarded as a great new light in medicine; Voulté, and others. The men of enlightenment at first instinctively drew together, recognizing that on all hands they were surrounded by rabid enemies, who were the enemies of knowledge. But soon the stresses of the time drove them asunder. Voulté, who in this year was praising Rabelais in Latin epigrams, was attacking him in the next as an impious disciple of Lucian; and, after having warmly befriended Dolet, was impeaching him, not without cause, as an ingrate. It was an age of passion and violence; and Voulté was himself assassinated in 1542 "by a man who had been unsuccessful in a law-suit against him."
Infamous as was the cruelty with which Dolet was persecuted to the death, his execution was but a drop in the sea of blood then being shed in France by the Church. The king, sinking under his maladies, had become the creature of the priests, who in defiance of the Chancellor obtained his signature (1545) to a decree for a renewed persecution of the heretics of the Vaudois; and an army, followed by a Catholic mob and accompanied by the papal vice-legate of Avignon, burst upon the doomed territory and commenced to burn and slay. Women captured were violated and then thrown over precipices; and twice over, when a multitude of fugitives in a fortified place surrendered on the assurance that their lives and property would be spared, the commander ordered that all should be put to death. When old soldiers refused to enact such an infamy, others joyfully obeyed, the mob aiding; and among the women were committed, as usual, "all the crimes of which hell could dream." Three towns were destroyed, 3,000 persons massacred, 256 executed, six or seven hundred more sent to the galleys, and many children sold as slaves. Thus was the faith vindicated and safeguarded.
Of the freethought of such an age there could be no adequate record. Its tempestuous energy, however, implies not a little of private unbelief; and at a time when in England, two generations behind France in point of literary evolution, there was, as we shall see, a measure of rationalism among religionists, there must have been at least as much in the land of Rabelais and Desperiers. The work of Guillaume Postell, De causis seu principiis et originibus Naturæ contra Atheos, published in 1552, testifies to kinds of unbelief that outwent the doubt of Rabelais; though Postell's general extravagance discounts all of his utterances. It is said of Guillaume Pellicier (1527-1568), Bishop of Montpellier, who first turned Protestant and afterwards, according to Gui Patin, atheist, that he would have been burned but for the fact of his consecration. And the English chroniclers preserve a scandal concerning an anonymous atheist, worded as follows: "1539. This yeare, in October, died in the Universitie of Parris, in France, a great doctor, which said their was no God, and had bene of that opinion synce he was twentie yeares old, and was above fouerscore yeares olde when he died. And all that tyme had kept his error secrett, and was esteamed for one of the greatest clarkes in all the Universitie of Parris, and his sentence was taken and holden among the said studentes as firme as scripture, which shewed, when he was asked why he had not shewed his opinion till his death, he answered that for feare of death he durst not, but when he knew that he should die he said their was no lief to come after this lief, and so died miserably to his great damnation."
Among the eminent ones then surmised to lean somewhat to unbelief was the sister of King Francis, Marguerite of Navarre, whom we have noted as a protectress of the pantheistic Libertini, denounced by Calvin. She is held to have been substantially skeptical until her forty-fifth year; though her final religiousness seems also beyond doubt. In her youth she bravely protected the Protestants from the first persecution of 1523 onwards; and the strongly Protestant drift of her Miroir de l'âme pécheresse exasperated the Catholic theologians; but after the Protestant violences of 1546 she seems to have sided with her brother against the Reform. The strange taste of the Heptaméron, of which again her part-authorship seems certain, constitutes a moral paradox not to be solved save by recognizing in her a woman of genius, whose alternate mysticism and bohemianism expressed a very ancient duality in human nature.
A similar mixture will explain the intellectual life of the poet Ronsard. A persecutor of the Huguenots, he was denounced as an atheist by two of their ministers; and the pagan fashion in which he handled Christian things scandalized his own side, albeit he was hostile to Rabelais. But though the spirit of the French Renaissance, so eagerly expressed in the Défense et Illustration de la langue françoise of Joachim du Bellay (1549), is at its outset as emancipated as that of the Italian, we find Ronsard in his latter years edifying the pious. Any ripe and consistent rationalism, indeed, was then impossible. One of the most powerful minds of the age was Bodin (1530-1596), whose République is one of the most scientific treatises on government between Aristotle and our own age, and whose Colloquium Heptaplomeres is no less original an outline of a naturalist philosophy. It consists of six dialogues, in which seven men take part, setting forth the different religious standpoints of Jew, Christian, pagan, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic, the whole leading up to a doctrine of tolerance and universalism. Bodin was repeatedly and emphatically accused of unbelief by friends and foes; and his rationalism on some heads is beyond doubt; yet he not only held by the belief in witchcraft, but wrote a furious treatise in support of it; and he dismissed the system of Copernicus as too absurd for discussion. He also formally vetoes all discussion on faith, declaring it to be dangerous to religion; and by these conformities he probably saved himself from ecclesiastical attack. Nonetheless, he essentially stood for religious toleration: the new principle that was to change the face of intellectual life. A few liberal Catholics shared it with him to some extent long before St. Bartholomew's Day; eminent among them being L'Hopital, whose humanity, tolerance, and concern for practical morality and the reform of the Church brought upon him the charge of atheism. He was, however, a believing Catholic. Deprived of power, his edict of tolerance repealed, he saw the long and ferocious struggle of Catholics and Huguenots renewed, and crowned by the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day (1572). Broken-hearted, and haunted by that monstrous memory, he died within six months.
Two years later there was put to death at Paris, by hanging and burning, on the charge of atheism, Geoffroi Vallée, a man of good family in Orléans. Long before, at the age of sixteen, he had written a freethinking treatise entitled La Béatitude des Chrétiens, ou le fléau de la foy--a discussion between a Huguenot, a Catholic, a libertin, an Anabaptist and an atheist. He had been the associate of Ronsard, who renounced him, and helped, it is said, to bring him to execution. It is not unlikely that a similar fate would have overtaken the famous Protestant scholar and lexicographer, Henri Estienne (1532-1598), had he not died unexpectedly. His false repute of being "the prince of atheists" and the "Pantagruel of Geneva" was probably due in large part to his sufficiently audacious Apologie pour Hérodote (1566) and to his having translated into Latin (1562) the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus, a work which must have made for freethinking. But he was rather a Protestant than a rationalist. In the former book he had spoken, either sincerely or ironically, of the "detestable book" of Bonaventure Desperiers, calling him a mocker of God; and impeached Rabelais as a modern Lucian, believing neither in God nor immortality; yet his own performance was fully as well fitted as theirs to cause scandal. It is in fact one of the richest repertories ever formed of scandalous stories against priests, monks, nuns, and popes.
One literary movement towards better things had begun before the crowning infamy of the Massacre appalled men into questioning the creed of intolerance. Castalio, whom we shall see driven from Geneva by Calvin in 1544 for repugning to the doctrine of predestination, published pseudonymously, in 1554, in reply to Calvin's vindication of the slaying of Servetus, a tract, De Haereticis quomodo cum iis agendum sit variorum Sententiæ, in which he contrived to collect some passage from the Fathers and from modern writers in favour of toleration. To these he prefaced, by way of a letter to the Duke of Wirtemberg, an argument of his own, the starting-point of much subsequent propaganda. Aconzio, another Italian, followed in his steps; and later came Mino Celso of Siena, with his "long and elaborate argument against persecution," De Haereticis capitali supplicio non afficiendis (1584). Withal, Castalio died in beggary, ostracized alike by Protestants and Catholics, and befriended only by the Sozzini, whose sect was the first to earn collectively the praise of condemning persecution. But in the next generation there came to reinforce the cause of humanity a more puissant pen than any of these; while at the same time the recoil from religious cruelty was setting many men secretly at utter variance with faith.
In France in particular a generation of insane civil war for religion's sake must have gone far to build up unbelief. Even among many who did not renounce the faith, there went on an open evolution of stoicism, generated through resort to the teaching of Epictetus. The atrocities of Christian civil war and Christian savagery were such that Christian faith could give small sustenance to the more thoughtful and sensitive men who had to face them and carry on the tasks of public life the while. The needed strength was given by the masculine discipline which pagan thought had provided for an age of oppression and decadence, and which had carried so much of healing even for the Christians who saw decadence carried yet further, that in the fifth century the Enchiridion of Epictetus had been turned by St. Nilus into a monastic manual, even as Ambrose manipulated the borrowed Stoicism of Cicero. With its devout theism, the book had appealed to those northern scholars who had mastered Greek in the early years of the sixteenth century, when the refugees of Constantinople had set up Platonic studies in Italy. After 1520, Italian Hellenism rapidly decayed; but in the north it never passed away; and from the stronger men of the new learning in Germany the taste for Epictetus passed into France. In 1558 the semi-Protestant legist Coras--later slain in the massacre of St. Bartholomew--published at Toulouse a translation of the apocryphal dialogue of Epictetus and Hadrian; in 1566 the Protestant poet Rivaudeau translated the Enchiridion, which thenceforth became a culture force in France.
The influence appears in Montaigne, in whose essays it is pervasive; but more directly and formally in the book of Justus Lipsius, De Constantia (1584), and the same scholar's posthumous dialogues entitled Manducatio ad philosophiam stoïcam and Physiologia stoïcorum (1604), which influenced all scholarly Europe. Thus far the Stoic ethic had been handled with Christian bias and application; and Guillaume Du Vair, who embodied it in his work La Sainte Philosophie (1588), was not known as a heretic; but in his hands it receives no Christian colouring, and might pass for the work of a deist. And its popularity is to be inferred from his further production of a fresh translation of the Enchiridion and a Traité de la philosophie morale des stoïques. Under Henri IV he rose to high power; and his public credit recommended his doctrine.
Such were the more visible fruits of the late spread of the Renaissance ferment in France while, torn by the frantic passions of her pious Catholics, she passed from the plane of the Renaissance to that of the new Europe, in which the intellectual centre of gravity was to be shifted from the south to the north, albeit Italy was still to lead the way, in Galileo, for the science of the modern world.
§ 3. THE ENGLISH EVOLUTION
In England as in France the intellectual life undergoes visible retrogression in the fifteenth century, while in Italy, with the political problem rapidly developing towards catastrophe, it flourished almost riotously. From the age of Chaucer, considered on its intellectual side and as represented mainly by him, there is a steep fall to almost the time of Sir Thomas More, around whom we see as it were the sudden inrush of the Renaissance upon England. The conquest of France by Henry V and the Wars of the Roses, between them, brought England to the nadir of mental and moral life. But in the long and ruinous storm the Middle Ages, of which Wiclif is the last powerful representative, were left behind, and a new age begins to be prepared.
Of a very different type from Wiclif is the remarkable personality of the Welshman Reginald (or Reynold) Pecock (1395?-1460?), who seems divided from Wiclif by a whole era of intellectual development, though born within about ten years of his death. It is a singular fact that one of the most rationalistic minds among the serious writers of the fifteenth century should be an English bishop, and an Ultramontane at that. Pecock was an opponent at once of popular Bibliolatry and of priestly persecution, declaring that "the clergy would be condemned at the last day if they did not draw men into consent to the true faith otherwise than by fire and sword and hanging." It was as the rational and temperate defender of the Church against the attacks of the Lollards in general that he formulated the principle of natural reason as against scripturalism. This attitude it is that makes his treatise, the Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy, the most modern of theoretic books before More and Hooker and Bacon. That he was led to this measure of rationalism rather by the exigencies of his papalism than by a spontaneous skepticism is suggested by the fact that he stands for the acceptance of miraculous images, shrines, and relics, when the Lollards are attacking them. On the other hand, it is hard to be certain that his belief in the shrines was genuine, so ill does it consist with his attitude to Bibliolatry. In a series of serenely argued points he urges his thesis that the Bible is not the basis of the moral law, but merely an illustration thereof, and that the natural reason is obviously presupposed in the bulk of its teaching. He starts from the formulas of Thomas Aquinas, but reaches a higher ground. It is the position of Hooker, anticipated by a hundred years; and this in an age of such intellectual backwardness and literary decadence that the earlier man must be pronounced by far the more remarkable figure. In such a case the full influence of the Renaissance seems to be at work; though in the obscurity of the records we can do no more than conjecture that the new contacts with French culture between the invasion of France by Henry V in 1415 and the expulsion of the English in 1451 may have introduced forces of thought unknown or little known before. If indeed there were English opponents of scripture in Wiclif's day, the idea must have ripened somewhat in Pecock's. Whether, however, the victories of Jeanne D'Arc made some unbelievers as well as many dastards among the English is a problem that does not seem to have been investigated.
Pecock's reply to the Lollards creates the curious situation of a churchman rebutting heretics by being more profoundly heretical than they. In his system, the Scriptures "reveal" only supernatural truths not otherwise attainable, a way of safeguarding dogma not likely to reassure believers. There is reason, indeed, to suspect that Pecock held no dogma with much zeal; and when in his well-named treatise (now lost), The Provoker, he denied the authenticity of the Apostles' Creed, "he alienated every section of theological opinion in England."
See Miss A. M. Cooke's art. Reginald Pecock in Dict. of Nat. Biog. This valuable notice is the best short account of Pecock; though the nature of his case is most fully made out by Hook, as cited below. It is characteristic of the restricted fashion in which history is still treated that neither in the Student's History of Professor Gardiner nor in the Short History of Green is Pecock mentioned. Earlier ideas concerning him were far astray. The notion of Foxe, the martyrologist, that Pecock was an early Protestant, is a gross error. He held not a single Protestant tenet, being a rationalizing papist. A German ecclesiastical historian of the eighteenth century (Werner, Kirchengeschichte des 18ten Jahrhunderts, 1756, cited by Lechler) calls Pecock the first English deist. See a general view of his opinions in Lewis's Life of Dr. Reynold Pecock (rep. 1820), ch. v. The heresies charged on him are given on p. 160; also in the R. T. S. Writings and Examinations, 1831, pp. 200-201. While rejecting Bibliolatry, he yet argued that Popes and Councils could make no change in the current creed; and he thus offended the High Churchmen. Cp. Massingberd, The English Reformation, 4th ed. pp. 206-209.
The main causes of the hostility he met from the English hierarchy and Government appear to have been, on the one hand, his change of political party, which put him in opposition to Archbishop Bourchier, and on the other his zealous championship of the authority of the papacy as against that of the Councils of the Church. It was expressly on the score of his denunciation of the Councils that he was tried and condemned. Thus the reward of his effort to reason down the menacing Lollards and rebut Wiclif was his formal disgrace and virtual imprisonment. Had he not recanted, he would have been burned: as it was, his books were; and it is on record that they consisted of eleven quartos and three folios of manuscript. Either because of his papalism or as a result of official intrigue, Church and lords and commons were of one mind against him; and the mob would fain have burned him with his books. In that age of brutal strife, when "neither the Church nor the opponents of the Church had any longer a sway over men's hearts," he figures beside the mindless prelates and their lay peers somewhat as does More later beside Henry VIII, as Reason versus the Beast; and it was illustrative of his entire lack of fanaticism that he made the demanded retractations--avowing his sin in "trusting to natural reason" rather than to Scripture and the authority of the Church--and went his way in silence to solitude and death. The ruling powers disposed of Lollardism in their own way; and in the Wars of the Roses every species of heretical thought seems to disappear. The bribe held out to the nation by the invasion of France had been fatally effectual to corrupt the spirit of moral criticism which inspired the Lollard movement at its best; and the subsequent period of rapine and strife reduced thought and culture to the levels of the Middle Ages.
A hint of what was possible in the direction of freethought in the England of Henry V and Henry VI emerges in some of the records concerning Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, the youngest son of Henry IV. Gifted but ill-balanced, Humphrey was the chief patron of learning in England in his day; and he drank deeply of the spirit of Renaissance scholarship. Sir Thomas More preserves the story--reproduced also in the old play, The First Part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster--of how he exposed the fraud of a begging impostor who pretended to have recovered his sight through the virtue of a saint's relics; and a modern pietistic historian decides that the Duke "had long ceased to believe in miracles and relics." But if this be true, it is the whole truth as to Humphrey's freethinking. It was the highest flight of rationalism permissible in his day and sphere.
On the view that Humphrey was a freethinker, the pious Pauli, who says (as cited, p. 337) of the Renaissance of letters, "The weak and evil side of this revived form of literature is that its disciples should have elevated the morality, or rather the immorality, of classical antiquity above Christian discipline and virtue," sees fit further to pronounce that the bad account of Gloucester's condition of body drawn up eleven years before his death by the physician Kymer is a proof of the "wild unbridled passions by which the duke was swayed," and throws a lurid light upon "the tendencies and disposition of his mind." Humphrey lived till 55, and died suddenly, under circumstances highly suggestive of poisoning by his enemies. His brothers Henry and John died much younger than he; but in their case the religious historian sees no ground for imputation. But the historian's inference is overstrained. In reality Humphrey never indicated any lack of theological faith. The poet Lydgate, no unbeliever, described him as "Chose of God to be his owne knyghte," and so rigorous "that heretike dar not comen in his sihte" (verses transcribed in Furnivall's Early English Meals and Manners, 1868, pp. lxxxv-vi).
His most comprehensive biographer decides that he was "essentially orthodox," despite his uncanonical marriage with his second wife and his general reputation for sexual laxity. "He was punctilious in the performance of his religious duties" and "a stern opponent of the Lollards"; he "countenanced the extinction of heresy by being present at the burning at Smithfield of an old priest who denied the validity of the sacraments of the Church"; and an Archbishop of Milan pronounced him to be "known everywhere as the chiefest friend and preserver of Holy Church" (K. H. Vickers, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: A Biography, 1907, pp. 223, 321-23). Of such a personage no exegesis can make a rationalist.
Of other traces of critical thinking in England in that age there is little to be said, so little literature is there to convey them. But there are signs of the influence of the "pagan" thought of the Renaissance in religious books. The old Revelation of the Monk of Evesham, ostensibly dating from 1196, was first printed about 1482, with a "prologe" explaining that it "was not shewed to hym only for hym butte also for the confort and profetyng of all cristyn pepulle that none man shuld dowte or mystruste of anothir life and world"; "and as for the trowthe of this reuelacyon no man nother woman ought to dowte in any wise," seeing it is thus miraculously provided that "alle resons and mocyons of infydelite the which risith often tymes of man's sensualite shall utwardly be excluded and quenched." Evidently the old problem of immortality had been agitated.
§ 4. THE REMAINING EUROPEAN COUNTRIES
Not till late in the fifteenth century is the intellectual side of the Renaissance influence to be seen bearing fruit in Germany, of which the turbulent and semi-barbaric life in the medieval period was little favourable to mental progress. Of political hostility to the Church there was indeed an abundance, long before Luther; but amid the many traces of "irreligion" there is practically none of rational freethinking. What reasoned thought there was, as we have seen, turned to Christian mysticism of a pantheistic cast, as in the teaching of Tauler and Eckhart.
Another and a deeper current of thought is seen in the remarkable philosophic work of Bishop Nicolaus of Kues or Cusa (1401-1464), who, professedly by an independent movement of reflection, but really as a result of study of Greek philosophy, reached a larger pantheism than had been formulated by any Churchman since the time of John the Scot. There is little or no trace, however, of any influence attained by his teaching, which indeed could appeal only to a very few minds of that day. Less remarkable than the metaphysic of Nicolaus, though also noteworthy in its way, is his Dialogue "On Peace, or Concordance of Faith," in which, somewhat in the spirit of Boccaccio's tale of the Three Kings, he aims at a reconciliation of all religions, albeit by way of proving the Christian creed to be the true one.
In the Netherlands and other parts of western Europe the popular anti-ecclesiastical heresy of the thirteenth century spread in various degrees; but there is only exceptional trace of literate or properly rationalistic freethinking. Among the most notable developments was the movement in Holland early in the fourteenth century, which compares closely with that of the higher Paulicians and mystics of the two previous centuries, its chief traits being a general pantheism, a denial of the efficacy of the sacrament of the altar, an insistence that all men are sons of God, and a general declaration for "natural light." But this did not progressively develop. Lack of leisured culture in the Low Countries, and the terrorism of the Inquisition, would sufficiently account for the absence of avowed unbelief, though everywhere, probably, some was set up by the contact of travellers with the culture of Italy. It is fairly to be inferred that in a number of cases the murderous crusade against witchcraft which was carried on in the fifteenth century served as a means of suppressing heresy, rationalistic or other. At Arras, for instance, in 1460, the execution of a number of leading citizens on a charge of sorcery seems to have been a blow at free discussion in the "chambers of rhetoric." And that rationalism, despite such frightful catastrophes, obscurely persisted, is to be gathered from the long vogue of the work of the Spanish physician Raymund of Sebonde, who, having taught philosophy at Toulouse, undertook (about 1435) to establish Christianity on a rational foundation in his Theologia Naturalis, made famous later by Montaigne.
To what length the suppressed rationalism of the age could on occasion go is dramatically revealed in the case of Hermann van Ryswyck, a Dutch priest, burned for heresy at the Hague in 1512. He was not only a priest in holy orders, but one of the order of Inquisitors; and he put forth the most impassioned denial and defiance of the Christian creed of which there is any record down to modern times. Tried before the inquisitors in 1502, he declared "with his own mouth and with sane mind" that the world is eternal, and was not created as was alleged by "the fool Moses" that there is no hell, and no future life; that Christ, whose whole career was flatly contrary to human welfare and reason, was not the son of Omnipotent God, but a fool, a dreamer, and a seducer of ignorant men, of whom untold numbers had been slain on account of him and his absurd evangel; that Moses had not physically received the law from God; and that "our" faith was shown to be fabulous by its fatuous Scripture, fictitious Bible, and crazy Gospel. And to this exasperated testimony he added: "I was born a Christian, but am no longer one: they are the chief fools." Sentenced in 1502 to perpetual imprisonment, he was again brought forward ten years later, and, being found unbroken by that long durance, was as an unrepentant heretic sentenced to be burned on December 14, 1512, the doom being carried out on the same day. The source of his conviction can be gathered from his declaration that "the most learned Aristotle and his commentator Averroës were nearest the truth"; but his wild sincerity and unyielding courage were all his own. "Nimis infelix quidam" is the estimate of an inquisitor of that day. Not so, unless they are most unhappy who die in battle, fighting for the truth they prize. But it has always been the Christian way to contemn all save Christian martyrs.
There is a tolerably full account of Ryswyck's case in a nearly contemporary document, which evidently copies the official record. Ryswyck is described as "sacre theologie professorem ordinis predicatorum et inquisitorum"; and his declaration runs: "Quod mundum fuit ab eterna et non incipit per creationem fabricatum a stulto Mose, ut dicit Biblia indistincta.... Nec est infernus, ut nostri estimant. Item post hanc vitam nulla erit vita particularis.... Item doctissimus Aristoteles et ejus commentator Auerrois fuerunt veritati propinquissimi. Item Christum fuit stultus et simplex fantasticus et seductor simplicium hominum.... Quot enim homines interfecti sunt propter ipsum et suum Euangelium fatuum! Item quod omnia que Christus gessit, humano generi et rationi recte sunt contraria. Item Christum filium Dei omnipotentem aperte nego. Et Mosen legem a Deo visibiliter et facialiter suscepisse recuso. Item fides nostra fabulosa est, ut probat nostra fatua Scriptura et ficta Biblia et Euangelium delirum.... Omnes istos articulos et consimilos confessus est proprio ore et sana mente coram inquisitore et notario et testibus, addens: Ego Christianus natus, sed iam non sum Christianus, quoniam illi stultissimi sunt." Paul Frédéricq, Corpus documentorum Inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae, Gent, 1889, i, 494, 501-502.
Thus the Renaissance passed on to the age of the Reformation the seeds of a rationalism which struck far deeper than the doctrine of Luther, but at the same time left a social soil in which such seeds could ill grow. Its own defeat, social and intellectual, may be best realized in terms of its failure to reach either political or physical science. Lack of the former meant political retrogression and bondage; and lack of the latter a renewed dominion of superstition and Bibliolatry--two sets of conditions of which each facilitated the other.
Nothing is more significant of the intellectual climate of the Renaissance than the persistence at all its stages of the belief in astrology, of which we find some dregs even in Bacon. That pseudo-science indeed stands, after all, for the spirit of science, and is not to be diagnosed as mere superstition; being really an à priori fallacy fallen into in the deliberate search for some principle of coördination in human affairs. Though adhered to by many prominent Catholics, including Charles V, and by many Protestants, including Melanchthon, it is logically anti-Christian, inasmuch as it presupposes in the moral world a reign of natural law, independent of the will or caprice of any personal power. Herein it differs deeply from magic; though in the Renaissance the return to the lore of antiquity often involved an indiscriminate acceptance and blending of both sorts of occult pagan lore. Magic subordinates Nature to Will: astrology, as apart from angelology, subordinates Will to Cosmic Law. For many perplexed and thoughtful men, accordingly, it was a substitute, more or less satisfying, for the theory, grown to them untenable, of a moral government of the universe. It was in fact a primary form of sociology proper, as it had been the primary form of astronomy; to which latter science, even in the Renaissance, it was still for many the introduction.
It flourished, above all things, on the insecurity inseparable from the turbulent Italian life of the Renaissance, even as it had flourished on the appalling vicissitude of the drama of imperial Rome; and it is conceivable that the inclination to true science which is seen in such men as Galileo, after the period of Italian independence, was nourished by the greater stability attained for a time under absolutist rule. And though Protestantism, on the other hand, adhered in the main unreasoningly to the theory of a moral control, that dogma at least served to countervail the dominion of astrology, which was only a dogmatism with a difference, and as such inevitably hindered true science. On the whole, Protestantism tended to make more effectual that veto on pagan occultism which had been ineffectually passed from time to time by the Catholic Church; albeit the motive was stress of Christian superstition, and the veto was aimed almost as readily at inductive and true science as at the deductive and false. We shall find the craze of witchcraft, in turn, dominating Protestant countries at a time when freethinkers and liberal Catholics elsewhere were setting it at naught.
There can be little doubt that, broadly speaking, the new interest in Scripture study and ecclesiastical history told against the free play of thought on scientific and scholarly problems; we shall find Bacon realizing the fact a hundred years after Luther's start; and the influence has operated down to our own day. In this resistance Catholics played their part. The famous Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) never ceased to profess himself a Catholic, and had small sympathy with the Reformers, though always at odds with the monks; and his long popular treatise De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium, atque excellentia verbi Dei declamatio (1531) is a mere polemic for scripturalism against alike false science and true, monkish superstition and reason. Vilified as a magician by the monks, and as an atheist and a scoffer by angry humanists, he did but set error against error, being himself a believer in witchcraft, a hater of anatomy, and as confident in his contempt of astronomy as of astrology. And his was a common frame of mind for centuries.
Still, the new order contained certain elements of help for a new life, as against its own inclement principles of authority and dogma; and the political heterogeneity of Europe, seconded by economic pressures and by new geographic discovery, sufficed further to prevent any far-reaching organization of tyranny. Under these conditions, new knowledge could incubate new criticism. But it would be an error-breeding oversight to forget that in the many-coloured world before the Reformation there was not only a certain artistic and imaginative sunlight which the Reformation long darkened, but even, athwart the mortal rigours of papal rule, a certain fitful play of intellectual insight to which the peoples of the Reformation became for a time estranged.
