A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 2 – Robertson · Verses Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 2The Rise of Modern Freethought—(Continued) (part 2)
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Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 2 2
The Rise of Modern Freethought—(Continued) (part 2)
RobertsonEnglish
Though no public protest was made, the retrospective Fuller testifies that "such burning of heretics much startled common people, pitying all in pain, and prone to asperse justice itself with cruelty, because of the novelty (!) and hideousness of the punishment." It is noteworthy that within a few years of the burning of Legate and Wightman there appeared quite a cluster of treatises explicitly contending for toleration. In 1614 came Religion's Peace: or, a Plea for Liberty of Conscience, by Leonard Busher, the first English book of the kind. In 1615 came Persecution for Religion Judged and Condemned; and in 1620 An Humble Supplication to the King's Majesty, pressing the same doctrine. There is no record of any outcry over these works, though they are tolerably freespoken in their indictment of the coercive school; and they had all to be reprinted a generation later, their point having never been carried; but it may be surmised that their appeal, which is substantially well reasoned from a secular as well as from a theological point of view, had something to do with the abandonment of persecution unto death. Even King James, in opening the Parliament of 1614, professed to recognize that no religion or heresy was ever extirpated by violence.
That an age of cruel repression of heresy had promoted unbelief is clear from the Atheomastix of Bishop Fotherby (1622), which notes among other things that as a result of constant disputing "the Scriptures (with many) have lost their authority, and are thought onely fit for the ignorant and idiote." On this head the bishop attempts no answer; and on his chosen theme he is perhaps the worst of all apologists. His admission that there can be no à priori proof of deity may be counted to him for candour; but the childishness of his reasoning à posteriori excludes the ascription of philosophic insight. He does but use the old pseudo-arguments of universal consent and design, with the simple device of translating polytheistic terms into monotheistic. All the while he makes the usual suggestions that there are few or no atheists to convert, and these not worth converting--this at a folio's length. The book tells only of difficulties evaded by vociferation. And while the growing stress of the strife between the ecclesiasticism of the Crown and the forces of nonconformity more and more thrust to the front religio-political issues, there began alongside of those strifes the new and powerful propaganda of deism, which, beginning with the Latin treatise, De Veritate, of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1624), was gradually to leaven English thought for over a century.
Further, there now came into play the manifold influence of Francis Bacon, whose case illustrates perhaps more fully than any other the difficulties, alike external and internal, in the way of right thinking. Taken as a whole, his work is on account of those difficulties divided against itself, insisting as he does alternately on a strict critical method and on the subjection of reason to the authority of revelation. He sounds a trumpet-call to a new and universal effort of free and circumspect intelligence; and on the instant he stipulates for the prerogative of Scripture. Though only one of many who assailed alike the methodic tyranny of Aristotelianism and the methodless empiricism of the ordinary "scientific" thought of the past, he made his attack with a sustained and manifold force of insight and utterance which still entitles him to pre-eminence as the great critic of wrong methods and the herald of better. Yet he not only transgresses often his own principal precepts in his scientific reasoning; he falls below several of his contemporaries and predecessors in respect of his formal insistence on the final supremacy of theology over reason, alike in physics and in ethics. Where Hooker is ostensibly seeking to widen the field of rational judgment on the side of creed, Bacon, the very champion of mental emancipation in the abstract, declares the boundary to be fixed.
Of those lapses from critical good faith, part of the explanation is to be found in the innate difficulty of vital innovation for all intelligences; part in the special pressures of the religious environment. On the latter head Bacon makes such frequent and emphatic protest that we are bound to infer on his part a personal experience in his own day of the religious hostility which long followed his memory. "Generally," he wrote of himself in one fragment, "he perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion, that the secrets of nature were the secrets of God, and part of that glory whereinto the mind of man if it seek to press shall be oppressed;... and on the other side, in men of a devout policy he noted an inclination to have the people depend upon God the more when they are less acquainted with second causes, and to have no stirring in philosophy, lest it may lead to innovation in divinity or else should discover matter of further contradiction to divinity" --a summary of the whole early history of the resistance to science. In the works which he wrote at the height of his powers, especially in his masterpiece, the Novum Organum (1620), where he comes closest to the problems of exact inquiry, he specifies again and again both popular superstition and orthodox theology as hindrances to scientific research, commenting on "those who out of faith and veneration mix their philosophy with theology and traditions," and declaring that of the drawbacks science had to contend with "the corruption of philosophy by superstition and an admixture of theology is far the more widely spread, and does the greatest harm, whether to entire systems or to their parts. For the human understanding is obnoxious to the influence of the imagination no less than to the influence of common notions." In the same passage he exclaims at the "extreme levity" of those of the moderns who have attempted to "found a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, on the book of Job, and other parts of the sacred writings"; and yet again, coupling as obstinate adversaries of Natural Philosophy "superstition, and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion," he roundly affirms that "by the simpleness of certain divines access to any philosophy, however pure, is well nigh closed." These charges are repeatedly salved by such claims as that "true religion" puts no obstacles in the way of science; that the book of Job runs much to natural philosophy; and, in particular, in the last book of the De Augmentis Scientiarum, redacted after his disgrace, by the declaration--more emphatic than those of the earlier Advancement of Learning--that "Sacred Theology ought to be derived from the word and oracles of God, and not from the light of nature or the dictates of reason." In this mood he goes so far as to declare, with the thorough-going obscurantists, that "the more discordant and incredible the divine mystery is, the more honour is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the victory of faith."
[It was probably such deliverances as these that led to the ascription to Bacon of The Christian Paradoxes, first published (surreptitiously), without author's name, in 1645. As has been shown by Dr. Grosart (Lord Bacon NOT the Author of "The Christian Paradoxes," 1865) that treatise was really by Herbert Palmer, B.D., who published it in full in part ii of his Memorials of Godliness and Christianity, 5th ed. 1655. The argument drawn from this treatise as to Bacon's skepticism is a twofold mystification. The Paradoxes are the deliberate declaration of a pietist that he believes the dogmas of revelation without rational comprehension. The style is plainly not Bacon's; but Bacon had said the same thing in the sentence quoted above. Dr. Grosart's explosive defence against the criticism of Ritter (work cited, p. 14) is an illustration of the intellectual temper involved.]
Yet even in the calculated extravagance of this last pronouncement there is a ground for question whether the fallen Chancellor, hoping to retrieve himself, and trying every device of his ripe sagacity to avert opposition, was not straining his formal orthodoxy beyond his real intellectual habit. As against such wholesale affirmation we have his declarations that "certain it is that God worketh nothing in nature but by second causes," and that any pretence to the contrary "is mere imposture as it were in favour towards God, and nothing else but to offer to the author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie"; his repeated objection to the discussion of Final Causes; his attack on Plato and Aristotle for rejecting the atheistic scientific method of Democritus; his peremptory assertion that motion is a property of matter; and his almost Democritean handling of the final problem, in which he insists that primal matter is, "next to God, the cause of causes, itself only without a cause." Further, though he speaks of Scriptural miracles in a conventional way, he drily pronounces in one passage that, "as for narrations touching the prodigies and miracles of religions, they are either not true or not natural, and therefore impertinent for the story of nature." Finally, as against the formal capitulation to theology at the close of the De Augmentis, he has left standing in the first book of the Latin version the ringing doctrine of the original Advancement of Learning (1605), that "there is no power on earth which setteth up a throne or chair in the spirits and souls of men, and in their cogitations, imaginations, opinions, and beliefs, but knowledge and learning"; and in his Wisdom of the Ancients he has contrived to turn a crude myth into a subtle allegory in behalf of toleration.
Thus, despite his many resorts to and prostrations before the Scriptures, the general effect of his writings in this regard is to set up in the minds of his readers the old semi-rationalistic equivoque of a "two-fold truth"; reminding us as they do that he "did in the beginning separate the divine testimony from the human." When, therefore, he announces that "we know by faith" that "matter was created from nothing," he has the air of juggling with his problem; and his further suggestion as to the possibility of matter being endowed with a force of evolution, however cautiously put, is far removed from orthodoxy. Accordingly, the charge of atheism--which he notes as commonly brought against all who dwell solely on second causes --was actually cast at his memory in the next generation. It was of course false: on the issue of theism he is continually descanting with quite conventional unction; as in the familiar essay on atheism. His dismissal of final causes as "barren" meant merely that the notion was barren of scientific result; and he refers the question to metaphysic. But if his theism was of a kind disturbing to believers in a controlling Providence, as little was it satisfactory to Christian fervour: and it can hardly be doubted that the main stream of his argument made for a non-Biblical deism, if not for atheism; his dogmatic orthodoxies being undermined by his own scientific teaching.
Lechler (Gesch. des englischen Deismus, pp. 23-25) notes that Bacon involuntarily made for deism. Cp. Amand Saintes, Hist. de la philos. de Kant, 1844, p. 69; and Kuno Fischer, Francis Bacon, Eng. tr. 1857, ch. xi, pp. 341-43. Dean Church (Bacon, in "Men of Letters" series, pp. 174, 205) insists that Bacon held by revelation and immortality; and can of course cite his profession of such belief, which is not to be disputed. (Cp. the careful judgment of Prof. Fowler in his Bacon, pp. 180-91, and his ed. of the Novum Organum, 1878, pp. 43-53.) But the tendency of the specific Baconian teaching is none the less to put these beliefs aside, and to overlay them with a naturalistic habit of mind. At the first remove from Bacon we have Hobbes.
As regards his intellectual inconsistencies, we can but say that they are such as meet us in men's thinking at every new turn. Though we can see that Bacon's orthodoxy "doth protest too much," with an eye on king and commons and public opinion, we are not led to suppose that he had ever in his heart cast off his inherited creed. He shows frequent Christian prejudice in his references to pagans; and can write that "To seek to extinguish anger utterly is but the bravery of the Stoics," pretending that the Christian books are more accommodating, and ignoring the Sermon on the Mount. In arguing that the "religion of the heathen" set men upon ending "all inquisition of nature in metaphysical or theological discourse," and in charging the Turks with a special tendency to "ascribe ordinary effects to the immediate workings of God," he is playing not very scrupulously on the vanity of his co-religionists. As he was only too well aware, both tendencies ruled the Christian thought of his own day, and derive direct from the sacred books--not from "abuse," as he pretends. And on the metaphysical as on the common-sense side of his thought he is self-contradictory, even as most men have been before and since, because judgment cannot easily fulfil the precepts it frames for itself in illuminated hours. Latter-day students have been impressed, as was Leibnitz, by the original insight with which Bacon negated the possibility of our forming any concrete conception of a primary form of matter, and insisted on its necessary transcendence of our powers of knowledge. On the same principle he should have negated every modal conception of the still more recondite Something which he put as antecedent to matter, and called God. Yet in his normal thinking he seems to have been content with the commonplace formula given in his essay on Atheism--that we cannot suppose the totality of things to be "without a mind." He has here endorsed in its essentials what he elsewhere calls "the heresy of the Anthropomorphites," failing to apply his own law in his philosophy, as elsewhere in his physics. When, however, we realize that similar inconsistency is fallen into after him by Spinoza, and wholly escaped perhaps by no thinker, we are in a way to understand that with all his deflections from his own higher law Bacon may have profoundly and fruitfully influenced the thought of the next generation, if not that of his own.
The fact of this influence has been somewhat obscured by the modern dispute as to whether he had any important influence on scientific progress. At first sight the old claim for him in that regard seems to be heavily discounted by the simple fact that he definitely rejected the Copernican system of astronomy. Though, however, this gravely emphasizes his fallibility, it does not cancel his services as a stimulator of scientific thought. At that time only a few were yet intelligently convinced Copernicans; and we have the record of how, in Bacon's day, Harvey lost heavily in credit and in his medical practice by propounding his discovery of the circulation of the blood, which, it is said, no physician over forty years old at that time believed in. For the scientific men of that century--and only among them did Copernicanism find the slightest acceptance--it was thus no fatal shortcoming in Bacon to have failed to grasp the true scheme of sidereal motion, any more than it was in Galileo to be wrong about the tides and comets. They could realize that it was precisely in astronomy, for lack of special study and expert knowledge, that Bacon was least qualified to judge. Intellectual influence on science is not necessarily dependent on actual scientific achievement, though that of course furthers and establishes it; and the fact of Bacon's impact on the mind of the next age is abundantly proved by testimonies.
For a time the explicit tributes came chiefly from abroad; though at all times, even in the first shock of his disgrace, there were Englishmen perfectly convinced of his greatness. To the winning of foreign favour he had specially addressed himself in his adversity. Grown wary in act as well as wise in theory, he deleted from the Latin De Augmentis a whole series of passages of the Advancement of Learning which disparaged Catholics and Catholicism; and he had his reward in being appreciated by many Jesuit and other Catholic scholars. But Protestants such as Comenius and Leibnitz were ere long more emphatic than any Catholics; and at the time of the Restoration we find Bacon enthusiastically praised among the more open-minded and scientifically biassed thinkers of England, who included some zealous Christians. It was not that his special "method" enabled them to reach important results with any new facility; its impracticability is now insisted on by friends as well as foes. It was that he arraigned with extraordinary psychological insight and brilliance of phrase the mental vices which had made discoveries so rare; the alternate self-complacency and despair of the average indolent mind; the "opinion of store" which was "cause of want"; the timid or superstitious evasion of research. In all this he was using his own highest powers, his comprehension of human character and his genius for speech. And though his own scientific results were not to be compared with those of Galileo and Descartes, the wonderful range of his observation and his curiosity, the unwearying zest of his scrutiny of well-nigh all the known fields of Nature, must have been an inspiration to multitudes of students besides those who have recorded their debt to him. It is probable that but for his literary genius, which though little discussed is of a very rare order, his influence would have been both narrower and less durable; but, being one of the great writers of the modern world, he has swayed men down till our own day.
Certain it is that alongside of his doctrine there persisted in England, apart from all printed utterance, a movement of deistic rationalism, of which the eighteenth century saw only the fuller development. Sir John Suckling (1609-1641), rewriting about 1637 his letter to the Earl of Dorset, An Account of Religion by Reason, tells how in a first sketch it "had like to have made me an Atheist at Court," and how "the fear of Socinianism at this time renders every man that offers to give an account of religion by reason, suspected to have none at all"; but he also mentions that he knows it "still to be the opinion of good wits that the particular religion of Christians has added little to the general religion of the world." Himself a young man of talent, he offers quasi-rational reconciliations of faith with reason which can have satisfied no real doubter, and can hardly have failed to introduce doubt into the minds of some of his readers.
§ 5. Popular Thought in Europe
Of popular freethought in the rest of Europe there is little to chronicle for a hundred and fifty years after the Reformation. The epoch-making work of Copernicus, published in 1543, had little or no immediate effect in Germany, where, as we have seen, physical and verbal strifes had begun with the ecclesiastical revolution, and were to continue to waste the nation's energy for a century. In 1546, all attempts at ecclesiastical reconciliation having failed, the emperor Charles V, in whom Melanchthon had seen a model monarch, decided to put down the Protestant heresy by war. Luther had just died, apprehensive for his cause. Civil war now raged till the peace of Augsburg in 1555; whereafter Charles abdicated in favour of his son Philip. Here were in part the conditions which in France and elsewhere were later followed by a growth of rational unbelief; and there are some traces even at this time of partial skepticism in high places in the German world, notably in the case of the Emperor Maximilian II, who, "grown up in the spirit of doubt," would never identify himself with either Protestants or Catholics. But in Germany there was still too little intellectual light, too little brooding over experience, to permit of the spread of such a temper; and the balance of forces amounted only to a deadlock between the ecclesiastical parties. Protestantism on the intellectual side, as already noted, had sunk into a bitter and barren polemic among the reformers themselves; and many who had joined the movement reverted to Catholicism. Meanwhile the teaching and preaching Jesuits were zealously at work, turning the dissensions of the enemy to account, and contrasting its schism upon schism with the unity of the Church. But Protestantism was well welded to the financial interest of the many princes and others who had acquired the Church lands confiscated at the Reformation; since a return to Catholicism would mean the surrender of these. Thus there wrought on the one side the organized spirit of anti-heresy and on the other the organized spirit of Bibliolatry, neither gaining ground; and between the two, intellectual life was paralysed. Protestantism saw no way of advance; and the prevailing temper began to be that of the Dark Ages, expectant of the end of the world. Superstition abounded, especially the belief in witchcraft, now acted on with frightful cruelty throughout the whole Christian world; and in the nature of the case Catholicism counted for nothing on the opposite side.
The only element of rationalism that one historian of culture can detect is the tendency of the German moralists of the time to turn the devil into an abstraction by identifying him with the different aspects of human folly and vice. There was, as a matter of fact, a somewhat higher manifestation of the spirit of reason in the shape of some new protests against the superstition of sorcery. About 1560 a Catholic priest named Cornelius Loos Callidius was imprisoned by a papal nuncio for declaring that witches' confessions were merely the results of torture. Forced to retract, he was released; but again offended, and was again imprisoned, dying in time to escape the fate of a councillor of Trèves, named Flade, who was burned alive for arguing, on the basis of an old canon (mistakenly named from the Council of Ancyra), that sorcery is an imaginary crime. Such an infamy explains a great deal of the stagnation of many Christian generations. But courage was not extinct; and in 1563 there appeared the famous John Wier's treatise on witchcraft, a work which, though fully adhering to the belief in the devil and things demoniac, argued against the notion that witches were conscious workers of evil. Wier was a physician, and saw the problem partly as one in pathology. Other laymen, and even priests, as we have seen, had reacted still more strongly against the prevailing insanity; but it had the authority of Luther on its side, and with the common people the earlier protests counted for little.
Reactions against Protestant bigotry in Holland on other lines were not much more successful, and indeed were not numerous. One of the most interesting is that of Dirk Coornhert (1522-1590), who by his manifold literary activities became one of the founders of Dutch prose. In his youth Coornhert had visited Spain and Portugal, and had there, it is said, seen an execution of victims of the Inquisition, deriving thence the aversion to intolerance which stamped his whole life's work. It does not appear, however, that any such peninsular experience was required, seeing that the Dutch Inquisition became abundantly active about the same period. Learning Latin at thirty, in order to read Augustine, he became a translator of Cicero and--singularly enough--of Boccaccio. An engraver to trade, he became first notary and later secretary to the burgomaster of Haarlem; and, failing to steer clear of the strifes of the time, was arrested and imprisoned at the Hague in 1567. On his release he sought safety at Kleef in Santen, whence he returned after the capture of Brill to become secretary of the new national Government at Haarlem; but he had again to take to flight, and lived at Kleef from 1572 to 1577. In 1578 he debated at Leyden with two preachers of Delft on predestination, which he declared to be unscriptural; and was officially ordered to keep silence. Thereupon he published a protest, and got into fresh trouble by drawing up, as notary, an appeal to the Prince of Orange on behalf of his Catholic fellow-countrymen for freedom of worship, and by holding another debate at the Hague. Always his master-ideal was that of toleration, in support of which he wrote strongly against Beza and Calvin (this in a Latin treatise published only after his death), declaring the persecution of heretics to be a crime in the kingdom of God; and it was as a moralist that he gave the lead to Arminius on the question of predestination. "Against Protestant and Catholic sacerdotalism and scholastic he set forth humanist world-wisdom and Biblical ethic," to that end publishing a translation of Boëthius (1585), and composing his chief work on Zedekunst (Ethics). Christianity, he insisted, lay not in profession or creed, but in practice. By way of restraining the ever-increasing malignity of theological strifes, he made the quaint proposal that the clergy should not be allowed to utter anything but the actual words of the Scriptures, and that all works of theology should be sequestrated. For these and other heteroclite suggestions he was expelled from Delft (where he sought finally to settle, 1587) by the magistrates, at the instance of the preachers, but was allowed to die in peace at Gouda, where he wrote to the last.
All the while, though he drew for doctrine on Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius equally with the Bible, Coornhert habitually founded on the latter as the final authority. On no other footing could any one in his age and country stand as a teacher. It was not till after generations of furious intolerance that a larger outlook was possible in the Netherlands; and the first steps towards it were naturally taken independently of theology. Although Grotius figured for a century as one of the chief exponents of Christian evidences, it is certain that his great work on the Law of War and Peace (1625) made for a rationalistic conception of society. "Modern historians of jurisprudence, like Lerminier and Bluntschli, represent it as the distinctive merit of Grotius that he freed the science from bondage to theology." The breach, indeed, is not direct, as theistic sanctions are paraded in the Prolegomena; but along with these goes the avowal that natural ethic would be valid even were there no God, and--as against the formula of Horace, Utilitas justi mater--that "the mother of natural right is human nature itself."
Where Grotius, defender of the faith, figured as a heretic, unbelief could not speak out, though there are traces of its underground life. The charge of atheism was brought against the Excercitationes Philosophicæ of Gorlæus, published in 1620; but, the book being posthumous, conclusions could not be tried. Views far short of atheism, however, were dangerous to their holders; for the merely Socinian work of Voelkel, published at Amsterdam in 1642, was burned by order of the authorities, and a second impression shared the same fate. In 1653 the States of Holland forbade the publication of all Unitarian books and all Socinian worship; and though the veto as to books was soon evaded, that on worship was enforced. Still, Holland was relatively tolerant as beside other countries; and when the Unitarian physician Daniel Zwicker (1612-1678), of Dantzig, found his own country too hot to hold him, he came to Holland (about 1652) "for security and convenience." He was able to publish at Amsterdam in 1658 his Latin Irenicum Irenicorum, wherein he lays down three principles for the settlement of Christian difficulties, the first being "the universal reason of mankind," while Scripture and tradition hold only the second and third places. His book is a remarkable investigation of the rise of the doctrines of the Logos and the Trinity, which he traced to polytheism, making out that the first Christians, whom he identified with the Nazarenes, regarded Jesus as a man. The book evoked many answers, and it is somewhat surprising that Zwicker escaped serious persecution, dying peacefully in Amsterdam in 1678, whereas writers much less pronounced in their heresy incurred aggressive hostility. Descartes, as we shall see, during his stay in Holland was menaced by clerical fanaticism. Some fared worse. In the generation after Grotius, one Koerbagh, a doctor, for publishing (1668) a dictionary of definitions containing advanced ideas, had to fly from Amsterdam. At Culenberg he translated a Unitarian work and began another; but was betrayed, tried for blasphemy, and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, to be followed by ten years' banishment. He compromised by dying in prison within the year. Even as late as 1678 the juri-consult Hadrian Beverland (afterwards appointed, through Isaac Vossius, to a lay office under the Church of England) was imprisoned and struck off the rolls of Leyden University for his Peccatum Originale, in which he speculated erotically as to the nature of the sin of Adam and Eve. The book was furiously answered, and publicly burned. It was only after an age of such intolerance that Holland, at the end of the seventeenth century, began to become for England a model of freedom in opinion, as formerly in trade. And it seems to have been through Holland, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, that there came the fresh Unitarian impulse which led to the considerable spread of the movement in England after the Revolution of 1688.
Unitarianism, which we have seen thus invading Holland somewhat persistently during half a century, was then as now impotent beyond a certain point by reason of its divided allegiance, though it has always had the support of some good minds. Its denial of the deity of Jesus could not be made out without a certain superposing of reason on Scripture; and yet to Scripture it always finally appealed. The majority of men accepting such authority have always tended to believe more uncritically; and the majority of men who are habitually critical will always repudiate the Scriptural jurisdiction. In Poland, accordingly, the movement, so flourishing in its earlier years, was soon arrested, as we have seen, by the perception that it drove many Protestants back to Catholicism; among these being presumably a number whose critical insight showed them that there was no firm standing-ground between Catholicism and Naturalism. Every new advance within the Unitarian pale terrified the main body, many of whom were mere Arians, holding by the term Trinity, and merely making the Son subordinate to the Father. Thus when one of their most learned ministers, Simon Budny, followed in the steps of Ferencz Davides (whom we have seen dying in prison in Transylvania in 1579), and represented Jesus as a "mere" man, he was condemned by a synod (1582) and deposed from his office (1584). He recanted, and was reinstated, but his adherents seem to have been excommunicated. The sect thus formed were termed Semi-Judaizers by another heretic, Martin Czechowicz, who himself denied the pre-existence of Jesus, and made him only a species of demi-god; yet Fausto Sozzini, better known as Faustus Socinus, who also wrote against them, and who had worked with Biandrata to have Davides imprisoned, conceded that prayer to Christ was optional.
Faustus, who arrived in Poland in 1579, seems to have been moved to his strenuously "moderate" policy, which for a time unified the bulk of the party, mainly by a desire to keep on tolerable terms with Protestantism. That, however, did not serve him with the Catholics; and when the reaction set in he suffered severely at their hands. His treatise, De Jesu Christu Servatore, created bitter resentment; and in 1598 the Catholic rabble of Cracow, led "as usual by the students of the university," dragged him from his house. His life was saved only by the strenuous efforts of the rector and two professors of the university; and his library was destroyed, with his manuscripts, whereof "he particularly regretted a treatise which he had composed against the atheists"; though it is not recorded that the atheists had ever menaced either his life or his property. He seems to have been zealous against all heresy that outwent his own, preaching passive obedience in politics as emphatically as any churchman, and condemning alike the rising of the Dutch against Spanish rule and the resistance of the French Protestants to their king.
This attitude may have had something to do with the better side of the ethical doctrines of the sect, which leant considerably to non-resistance. Czechowicz (who was deposed by his fellow-Socinians for schism) seems not only to have preached a patient endurance of injuries, but to have meant it; and to the Socinian sect belongs the main credit of setting up a humane compromise on the doctrine of eternal punishment. The time, of course, had not come for any favourable reception of such a compromise in Christendom; and it is noted of the German Socinian, Ernst Schoner (Sonerus), who wrote against the orthodox dogma, that his works are "exceedingly scarce." Unitarianism as a whole, indeed, made little headway outside of Poland and Transylvania.
In Spain, meantime, there was no recovery from the paralysis wrought by the combined tyranny of Church and Crown, incarnate in the Inquisition. The monstrous multiplication of her clergy might alone have sufficed to set up stagnation in her mental life; but, not content with the turning of a vast multitude of men and women away from the ordinary work of life, her rulers set themselves to expatriate as many more on the score of heresy. A century after the expulsion of the Jews came the turn of the Moors, whose last hold in Spain, Granada, had been overthrown in 1492. Within a generation they had been deprived of all exterior practice of their religion; but that did not suffice, and the Inquisition never left them alone. Harried, persecuted, compulsorily baptized, deprived of their Arabic books, they repeatedly revolted, only to be beaten down. At length, in the opening years of the seventeenth century (1610-1613), under Philip III, on the score that the great Armada had failed because heretics were tolerated at home, it was decided to expel the whole race; and now a million Moriscoes, among the most industrious inhabitants of Spain, were driven the way of the Jews. It is needless here to recall the ruinous effect upon the material life of Spain: the aspect of the matter which specially concerns us is the consummation of the policy of killing out all intellectual variation. The Moriscoes may have counted for little in positive culture; but they were one of the last and most important factors of variation in the country; and when Spain was thus successively denuded of precisely the most original and energetic types among the Jewish, the Spanish, and the Moorish stocks, her mental arrest was complete.
To modern freethought, accordingly, she has till our own age contributed practically nothing. Huarte seems to have had no Spanish successors. The brilliant dramatic literature of the reigns of the three Philips, which influenced the rising drama alike of France and England, is notably unintellectual, dealing endlessly in plot and adventure, but yielding no great study of character, and certainly doing nothing to further ethics. Calderon was a thorough fanatic, and became a priest; Lope de Vega found solace under bereavement in zealously performing the duties of an Inquisitor; and was so utterly swayed by the atrocious creed of persecution which was blighting Spain that he joined in the general exultation over the expulsion of the Moriscoes. Even the mind of Cervantes had not on this side deepened beyond the average of his race and time; his old wrongs at Moorish hands perhaps warping his better judgment. His humorous and otherwise kindly spirit, so incongruously neighboured, must indeed have counted for much in keeping life sweet in Spain in the succeeding centuries of bigotry and ignorance. But from the seventeenth century till the other day the brains were out, in the sense that genius was lacking. That species of variation had been too effectually extirpated during two centuries to assert itself until after a similar duration of normal conditions. The "immense advantage of religious unity," which even a modern Spanish historian has described as a gain balancing the economic loss from the expulsion of the Moriscoes, was precisely the condition of minimum intellectual activity--the unity of stagnation. No kind of ratiocinative thought was allowed to raise its head. A Latin translation of the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus had been permitted, or at least published, in Catholic France; but when Martin Martinez de Cantatapiedra, a learned orientalist and professor of theology, ventured to do the same thing in Spain--doubtless with the idea of promoting faith by discouraging reason--he was haled before the Inquisition, and the book proscribed (1583).
He was further charged with Lutheran leanings on the score that he had a preference for the actual text of Scripture over that of the commentators. In such an atmosphere it was natural that works on mathematics, astronomy, and physics should be censured as "favouring materialism and sometimes atheism." It has been held by one historian that at the death of Philip II there arose some such sense of relief throughout Spain as was felt later in France at the death of Louis XIV; that "the Spaniards now ventured to sport with the chains which they had not the power to break"; and that Cervantes profited by the change in conceiving and writing his Don Quixote. But the same historian had before seen that "poetic freedom was circumscribed by the same shackles which fettered moral liberty. Thoughts which could not be expressed without fear of the dungeon and the stake were no longer materials for the poet to work on. His imagination, instead of improving them into poetic ideas ... had to be taught to reject them. But the eloquence of prose was more completely bowed down under the inquisitorial yoke than poetry, because it was more closely allied to truth, which of all things was the most dreaded." Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon proved that within the iron wall of Catholic orthodoxy, in an age when conclusions were but slowly being tried between dogma and reason, there could be a vigorous play of imaginative genius on the field of human nature; even as in Velasquez, sheltered by royal favour, the genius of colour and portraiture could become incarnate. But after these have passed away, the laws of social progress are revealed in the defect of all further Spanish genius. Even of Cervantes it is recorded--on very doubtful authority, however--that he said "I could have made Don Quixote much more amusing if it were not for the Inquisition"; and it is matter of history that a passage in his book disparaging perfunctory works of charity was in 1619 ordered by the Holy Office to be expunged as impious and contrary to the faith.
See H. E. Watts, Miguel de Cervantes, p. 167. Don Quixote was "always under suspicion of the orthodox." Id. p. 166. Mr. Watts, saying nothing of Cervantes's approval of the expulsion of the Moriscoes, claims that his "head was clear of the follies and extravagances of the reigning superstition" (id. p. 231). But the case is truly summed up by Mr. Ormsby when he says: "For one passage capable of being tortured into covert satire" against things ecclesiastical, "there are ten in Don Quixote and the novels that show--what indeed is very obvious from the little we know of his life and character--that Cervantes was a faithful son of the Church" (tr. of Don Quixote, 1885, introd. i, 57).
When the total intellectual life of a nation falls ever further in the rear of the world's movement, even the imaginative arts are stunted. Turkey excepted, the civilized nations of Europe which for two centuries have contributed the fewest great names to the world's bead-roll have been Spain, Austria, Portugal, Belgium, and Greece, all noted for their "religious unity." And of all of these Spain is the supreme instance of positive decadence, she having exhibited in the first half of the sixteenth century a greater complex of energy than any of the others. The lesson is monumental.
§ 6. Scientific Thought
It remains to trace briefly the movement of scientific and speculative thought which constituted the transition between the Scholastic and the modern philosophy. It may be compendiously noted under the names of Copernicus, Bruno, Vanini, Galileo, Ramus, Gassendi, Bacon, and Descartes.
The great performance of Copernicus (Nicolaus Koppernigk, 1473-1543), given to the world with an editor's treacherous preface as he lay paralysed on his deathbed, did not become a general possession for over a hundred years. The long reluctance of its author to let it be published, despite the express invitation of a cardinal in the name of the pope, was well founded in his knowledge of the strength of common prejudice; and perhaps partly in a sense of the scientific imperfection of his own case. Only the special favour accorded to his first sketch at Rome--a favour which he had further carefully planned for in his dedicatory epistle to Pope Paul--saved his main treatise from prohibition till long after its work was done. It was in fact, with all its burden of traditional error, the most momentous challenge that had yet been offered in the modern world to established beliefs, alike theological and lay, for it seemed to flout "common sense" as completely as it did the cosmogony of the sacred books. It was probably from scraps of ancient lore current in Italy in his years of youthful study there that he first derived his idea; and in Italy none had dared publicly to propound the geocentric theory. Its gradual victory, therefore, is the first great modern instance of a triumph of reason over spontaneous and instilled prejudice; and Galileo's account of his reception of it should be a classic document in the history of rationalism.
It was when he was a student in his teens that there came to Pisa one Christianus Urstitius of Rostock, a follower of Copernicus, to lecture on the new doctrine. The young Galileo, being satisfied that "that opinion could be no other than a solemn madness," did not attend; and those of his acquaintance who did made a jest of the matter, all save one, "very intelligent and wary," who told him that "the business was not altogether to be laughed at." Thenceforth he began to inquire of Copernicans, with the result inevitable to such a mind as his. "Of as many as I examined I found not so much as one who told me not that he had been a long time of the contrary opinion, but to have changed it for this, as convinced by the strength of the reasons proving the same; and afterwards questioning them one by one, to see whether they were well possessed of the reasons of the other side, I found them all to be very ready and perfect in them, so that I could not truly say that they took this opinion out of ignorance, vanity, or to show the acuteness of their wits." On the other hand, the opposing Aristoteleans and Ptolemeans had seldom even superficially studied the Copernican system, and had in no case been converted from it. "Whereupon, considering that there was no man who followed the opinion of Copernicus that had not been first on the contrary side, and that was not very well acquainted with the reasons of Aristotle and Ptolemy, while, on the contrary, there was not one of the followers of Ptolemy that had ever been of the judgment of Copernicus, and had left that to embrace this of Aristotle," he began to realize how strong must be the reasons that thus drew men away from beliefs "imbibed with their milk." We can divine how slow would be the progress of a doctrine which could only thus begin to find its way into one of the most gifted scientific minds of the modern world. It was only a minority of the élite of the intellectual life who could receive it, even after the lapse of a hundred years.
The doctrine of the earth's two-fold motion, as we have seen, had actually been taught in the fifteenth century by Nicolaus of Cusa (1401-1464), who, instead of being prosecuted, was made a cardinal, so little was the question then considered (Ueberweg, ii, 23-24). See above, vol. i, p. 368, as to Pulci. Only very slowly did the work even of Copernicus make its impression. Green (Short History, ed. 1881, p. 297) makes first the mistake of stating that it influenced thought in the fifteenth century, and then the further mistake of saying that it was brought home to the general intelligence by Galileo and Kepler in the later years of the sixteenth century (id. p. 412). Galileo's European notoriety dates from 1616; his Dialogues of the Two Systems of the World appeared only in 1632; and his Dialogues of the New Sciences in 1638. Kepler's indecisive Mysterium Cosmographicum appeared only in 1597; his treatise on the motions of the planet Mars not till 1609.
One of the first to bring the new cosmological conception to bear on philosophic thought was Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548-1600), whose life and death of lonely chivalry have won him his place as the typical martyr of modern freethought. He may be conceived as a blending of the pantheistic and naturalistic lore of ancient Greece, assimilated through the Florentine Platonists, with the spirit of modern science (itself a revival of the Greek) as it first takes firm form in Copernicus, whose doctrine Bruno early and ardently embraced. Baptized Filippo, he took Giordano as his cloister-name when he entered the great convent of S. Domenico Maggiore at Naples in 1563, in his fifteenth year. No human being was ever more unfitly placed among the Dominicans, punningly named the "hounds of the Lord" (domini canes) for their work as the corps of the Inquisition; and very early in his cloister life he came near being formally proceeded against for showing disregard of sacred images, and making light of the sanctity of the Virgin. He passed his novitiate, however, without further trouble, and was fully ordained a priest in 1572, in his twenty-fourth year. Passing then through several Neapolitan monasteries during a period of three years, he seems to have become not a little of a freethinker on his return to his first cloister, as he had already reached Arian opinions in regard to Christ, and soon proceeded to substitute a mystical and Pythagorean for the orthodox view of the Trinity.
For the second time a "process" was begun against him, and he took flight to Rome (1576), presenting himself at a convent of his Order. News speedily came from Naples of the process against him, and of the discovery that he had possessed a volume of the works of Chrysostom and Jerome with the scholia of Erasmus--a prohibited thing. Only a few months before Bartolomeo Carranza, Bishop of Toledo, who had won the praise of the Council of Trent for his index of prohibited books, had been condemned to abjure for the doctrine that "the worship of the relics of the saints is of human institution," and had died in the same year at the convent to which Bruno had now gone. Thus doubly warned, he threw off his priestly habit, and fled to the Genoese territory, where, in the commune of Noli, he taught grammar and astronomy. In 1578 he visited successively Turin, Venice, Padua, Bergamo, and Milan, resuming at the last-named town his monk's habit. Thereafter he again returned to Turin, passing thence to Chambéry at the end of 1578, and thence to Geneva early in 1579. His wish, he said, was "to live in liberty and security"; but for that he must first renounce his Dominican habit; other Italian refugees, of whom there were many at Geneva, helping him to a layman's suit. Becoming a corrector of the press, he seems to have conformed externally to Calvinism; but after a stay of two and a-half months he published a short diatribe against one Antonio de La Faye, who professed philosophy at the Academy; and for this he was arrested and sentenced to excommunication, while his bookseller was subjected to one day's imprisonment and a fine. After three weeks the excommunication was raised; but he nevertheless left Geneva, and afterwards spoke of Calvinism as the "deformed religion." After a few weeks' sojourn at Lyons he went to Toulouse, the very centre of inquisitional orthodoxy; and there, strangely enough, he was able to stay for more than a year, taking his degree as Master of Arts and becoming professor of astronomy. But the civil wars made Toulouse unsafe; and at length, probably in 1581 or 1582, he reached Paris, where for a time he lectured as professor extraordinary. In 1583 he reached England, where he remained till 1585, lecturing, debating at Oxford on the Copernican theory, and publishing a number of his works, four of them dedicated to his patron Castelnau de Mauvissière, the French ambassador. Oxford was then a stronghold of bigoted Aristotelianism, where bachelors and masters deviating from the master were fined, or, if openly hostile, expelled. In that camp Bruno was not welcome. But he had other shelter, at the French Embassy in London, and there he had notable acquaintances. He had met Sir Philip Sidney at Milan in 1578; and his dialogue, Cena de le Ceneri, gives a vivid account of a discussion in which he took a leading part at a banquet given by Sir Fulke Greville. His picture of "Oxford ignorance and English ill-manners" is not lenient; and there is no reason to suppose that his doctrine was then assimilated by many; but his stay in the household of Castelnau was one of the happiest periods of his chequered life. While in England he wrote no fewer than seven works, four of them dedicated to Castelnau, and two--the Heroic Fervours and the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast--to Sir Philip Sidney.
Returning to Paris on the recall of Castelnau in 1585, he made an attempt to reconcile himself to the Church, but it was fruitless; and thereafter he went his own way. After a public disputation at the university in 1586, he set out on a new peregrination, visiting first Mayence, Marburg, and Wittemberg. At Marburg he was refused leave to debate; and at Wittemberg he seems to have been carefully conciliatory, as he not only matriculated but taught for over a year (1586-1588), till the Calvinist party carried the day over the Lutheran. Thereafter he reached Prague, Helmstadt, Frankfort, and Zurich. At length, on the fatal invitation of the Venetian youth Mocenigo, he re-entered Italian territory, where, in Venice, he was betrayed to the Inquisition by his treacherous and worthless pupil.
What had been done for freethought by Bruno in his fourteen years of wandering, debating, and teaching through Europe it is impossible to estimate; but it is safe to say that he was one of the most powerful antagonists to orthodox unreason that had yet appeared. Of all men of his time he had perhaps the least affinity with the Christian creed, which was repellent to him alike in the Catholic and the Protestant versions. The attempt to prove him a believer on the strength of a non-autograph manuscript is idle. His approbation of a religion for the discipline of uncivilized peoples is put in terms of unbelief. In the Spaccio della bestia trionfante he derides the notion of a union of divine and human natures, and substantially proclaims a natural (theistic) religion, negating all "revealed" religions alike. Where Boccaccio had accredited all the three leading religions, Bruno disallows all with paganism, though he puts that above Christianity. And his disbelief grew more stringent with his years. Among the heretical propositions charged against him by the Inquisition were these: that there is transmigration of souls; that magic is right and proper; that the Holy Spirit is the same thing as the soul of the world; that the world is eternal; that Moses, like the Egyptians, wrought miracles by magic; that the sacred writings are but a romance (sogno); that the devil will be saved; that only the Hebrews are descended from Adam, other men having descended from progenitors created by God before Adam; that Christ was not God, but was a notorious sorcerer (insigne mago), who, having deceived men, was deservedly hanged, not crucified; that the prophets and the apostles were bad men and sorcerers, and that many of them were hanged as such. The cruder of these propositions rest solely on the allegation of Mocenigo, and were warmly repudiated by Bruno: others are professedly drawn, always, of course, by forcing his language, but not without some colourable pretext, from his two "poems," De triplice, minimo, et mensura, and De monade, numero et figura, published at Frankfort in 1591, in the last year of his freedom. But the allusions in the Sigillus Sigillorum to the weeping worship of a suffering Adonis, to the exhibition of suffering and miserable Gods, to transpierced divinities, and to sham miracles, were certainly intended to contemn the Christian system.
