The negative bearing of the Reformation on freethought is made clear by the historic fact that the new currents of thought which broadly mark the beginning of the “modern spirit” arose in its despite, and derive originally from outside its sphere. It is to Italy, where the political and social conditions thus far tended to frustrate the Inquisition, that we trace the rise alike of modern deism, modern Unitarianism, modern pantheism, modern physics, and the tendency to rational atheism. The deistic way of thinking, of course, prevailed long before it got that name; and besides the vogue of AverroÏsm we have noted the virtual deism of More’s Utopia (1516). The first explicit mention of deism noted by Bayle, however, is in the epistle dedicatory to the second and expanded edition of the Instruction ChrÉtienne of the Swiss Protestant Viret (1563), where professed deists are spoken of as a new species bearing a new name. On the admission of Viret, who was the friend and bitter disciple of Calvin, they rejected all revealed religion, but called themselves deists by way of repudiating atheism; some keeping a belief in immortality, some rejecting it. In the theological manner he goes on to call them all execrable atheists, and to say that he has added to his treatise on their account an exposition of natural religion grounded on the “Book of Nature”; stultifying himself by going on to say that he has also dealt with the professed atheists.1 Of the deists he admits that among them were men of the highest repute for science and learning. Thus within ten years of the burning of Servetus we find privately avowed deism and atheism in the area of French-speaking Protestantism.

Doubtless the spectacle of Protestant feuds and methods would go far to foster such unbelief; but though, as we have seen, there were aggressive Unitarians in Germany before 1530, who, being scholars, may or may not have drawn on Italian thought, thereafter there is reason to look to Italy as the source of the propaganda. Thence came the two Sozzini, the founders of Socinianism, of whom Lelio, the uncle of Fausto, travelled much in northern Europe (including England) between 1546 and 1552.2 As the earlier doctrine of Servetus shows clear affinities to that of the Sozzini, and his earlier books were much read in Italy between 1532 and 1540, he may well have given them their impulse.3 It is evidently to Servetus that Zanchi referred when he wrote to Bullinger in 1565 that “Spain bore the hens, Italy hatched the eggs, and we now hear the chickens piping.”4 Before Socinianism had taken form it was led up to, as we have seen, in the later writings of the ex-monk Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564), who, in the closing years of a much chequered career, combined mystical and Unitarian tendencies with a leaning to polygamy and freedom of divorce.5 His influence was considerable among the Swiss Protestants, though they finally expelled him for his heresies. From Geneva or from France, in turn, apparently came some of the English freethought of the middle period of the sixteenth century;6 for in 1562 Speaker Williams in the House of Commons, in a list of misbelievers, speaks of “Pelagians, Libertines, Papists, and such others, leaving God’s commandments to follow their own traditions, affections, and minds”7—using theologically the foreign term, which never became naturalized in English in its foreign sense. It was about the year 1563, again, that Roger Ascham wrote his Scholemaster, wherein are angrily described, as a species new in England, men who, “where they dare,” scorn both Protestant and Papist, “rejecting scripture, and counting the Christian mysteries as fables.”8 He describes them as “??e?? in doctrine”; adding, “this last word is no more unknowne now to plane Englishe men than the Person was unknown somtyme in England, untill some Englishe man took peines to fetch that develish opinion out of Italie.”9 The whole tendency he connects in a general way with the issue of many new translations from the Italian, mentioning in particular Petrarch and Boccaccio. Among good Protestants his view was general; and so Lord Burghley in his Advice to his Son writes: “Suffer not thy sons to pass the Alps, for they shall learn nothing there but pride, blasphemy, and atheism.” As it happened, his grandson the second Earl of Exeter, and his great-grandson Lord Roos, went to Rome, and became not atheists but Roman Catholics.

Such episodes should remind us that in that age of ignorance and superstition the Church had always an immense advantage. Those who, like Gentillet in his raging Discours, commonly known as the Contre-Machiavel (1576), ascribed to “atheism” and the teaching of Machiavelli all the crimes and oppressions wrought by Catholics,10 were ludicrously perverting the facts. Massacres in churches, which are cited by Gentillet as impossible to believing Catholics, were wrought, as we have seen, on the largest scale by the Church in the thirteenth century. So, when Scaliger calls the Italians of his day “a set of atheists,” we are to understand it rather of “the hypocrisy than of the professed skepticism of the time.”11 But rationalism and semi-rationalism did prevail in Italy more than in any other country.12

Like the old AverroÏsm, the new pietistic Unitarianism persisted in Italy and radiated thence afresh when it had flagged in other lands. The exploded Unitarian tradition13 runs that the doctrine arose in the year 1546 among a group of more than forty learned men who were wont to assemble in secret at Vicenza, near Venice. Claudius of Savoy, however, emphatically gave out his anti-Trinitarian doctrine at Berne in 1534, after having been imprisoned at Strasburg and banished thence;14 and Ochino and Lelio Sozzini left Italy in 1543. But there seems to have been a continuous evolution of Unitarian heresy in the south after the German movement had ceased. Giorgio Biandrata, whom we have seen flying to Poland from Geneva, had been seized by the Inquisition at Pavia for such opinion. Still it persisted. In 1562 Giulio Guirlando of Treviso, and in 1566 Francesco Saga of Rovigo, were burned at Venice for anti-Trinitarianism. Giacomo Aconzio too, who dedicated his Stratagems of Satan (Basel, 1565) to Queen Elizabeth, and who pleaded notably for the toleration of heresy,15 was a decided latitudinarian.16

It is remarkable that the whole ferment occurs in the period of the Catholic Reaction, the Council of Trent, and the subjection of Italy, when the papacy was making its great effort to recover its ground. It would seem that in the compulsory peace which had now fallen on Italian life men’s thoughts turned more than ever to mental problems, as had happened in Greece after the rise of Alexander’s empire. The authority of the Church was outwardly supreme; the Jesuits had already begun to do great things for education;17 the revived Inquisition was everywhere in Italy; its prisons, as we have seen, were crowded with victims of all grades during a whole generation; Pius V and the hierarchy everywhere sought to enforce decorum in life; the “pagan” academies formed on the Florentine model were dissolved; and classic culture rapidly decayed with the arts, while clerical learning flourished,18 and a new religious music began with Palestrina. Yet on the death of Paul IV the Roman populace burned the Office of the Inquisition to the ground and cast the pope’s statue into the Tiber;19 and in that age (1548) was born Giordano Bruno, one of the types of modern freethought.

The great service of Italy to modern freethought, however, was to come later, in respect of the impulse given to the scientific spirit by Bruno, Vanini, and Galileo. On the philosophical or critical side, the Italy of the middle of the sixteenth century left no enduring mark on European thought, though her serious writers were numerous. Aconzio had published, before his De Stratagematibus SatanÆ, a treatise De Methodo, sive recta investigandarum tradendarumque scientiarum ratione (Basel, 1558), wherein he pleads strenuously for a true logical method as the one way to real knowledge of things. In this he anticipates Bacon, as did, still earlier, Mario Nizolio in his Antibarbarus sive de veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra pseudo-philosophos (Parma, 1553). Nizolio’s main effort is towards the discrediting of Aristotle, whom, like so many in the generation following, he regarded as the great bulwark of scholastic obscurantism. He insists that all knowledge must proceed from sensation, which alone has immediate certainty; and thus stands for direct scientific observation as against tradition and verbalism. But Ludovicus Vives had before him (in his De causis corruptarum artium, Antwerp, 1531) claimed that the true Aristotelian went direct to nature, as Aristotle himself had done; and Nizolio did nothing in practical science to substantiate his polemic against the logic-choppers.

He and Aconzio in effect cancel each other. Each had glimpsed a truth, one seeing the need for a right method in inference, the other protesting against the idea that abstract reasoning could lead to knowledge; but neither made good his argument by any treasure trove of fact. Another writer of the same decade, Gomez Pereira, joined in the revolt against Aristotelianism, publishing in 1554 his Margarita Antoniana, wherein, in advance of Descartes, he maintained the absence of sensation in brutes.20 For the rest, he championed freedom in speculation, denying that authority should avail save in matters of faith. But he too failed to bring forth fruits meet for freedom. Neither by abstract exposition of right methods of reasoning, nor by abstract attacks on wrong methods, could any vital impulse yet be given to thought. What was lacking was the use of reason upon actual problems, whether of human or of natural science. All the while Europe was anchored to ancient delusion, historical and scientific. Even as the horrors of age-long religious war could alone drive men to something like toleration in the religious life, there was needed the impact of actual discovery to win them to science as against scholasticism. And rational thinking on the religion which resisted all new science was to be still later of attainment, save for the nameless men who throughout the ages of faith rejected the creeds without publishing their unbelief. Of these Italy had always a large sprinkling.

The fact that sixteenth-century Spain could be charged, on the score of Servetus, with producing the “hen” of Socinianism, is an important reminder of the perpetuity of variation and of the fatality of environment. The Portuguese Sanchez, whom we shall find laying new potential foundations of skepticism in France alongside of Montaigne, could neither have acquired nor propounded his philosophy in his native land. But it is to be noted that an elder contemporary of Sanchez, living and dying in Spain, was able, in the generation after Servetus, to make a real contribution to the revival of freethought, albeit under shelter of a firm profession of orthodoxy.

No book of the kind, perhaps, had a wider European popularity than the Examen de Ingenios para las ciencias of Huarte de San Juan, otherwise Juan Huarte y Navarro (c. 1530–1592). Like Servetus and Sanchez and many another, Huarte had his bias to reason fostered by a medical training; and it is as a “natural philosopher” that he stands for a rational study of causation. As a pioneer of exact science, indeed, he counts for next to nothing. Taking as his special theme the divergences of human faculty, he does but found himself on the À priori system of “humours” and “temperatures” passed on by Aristotle to Galen and Hippocrates, inconsistently affirming on the one hand that the “characters” not only of whole nations but of the inhabitants of provinces are determined by their special climates and aliments, and on the other hand that individual faculty is determined by the proportions of hot and cold, moist and dry “temperatures” in the parents. Apart from his insistence on the functions of the brain, and from broadly rational deliverances as to the kinds of faculty which determine success in theology and law, arms and arts, his “science” is naught. Dealing with an obscure problem, he brought to it none of the exact inductiveness which alone had yielded true knowledge in the simpler field of astronomy. In virtue, however, either of his confidence in affirmation or of his stand for rational inquiry, or of both, Huarte’s book, published in 1575, went the round of Europe. Translated into Italian in 1582 (or earlier; new rendering 1600), it was thence rendered into English by Richard Carew in 1594.21 A French version appeared in 1598, and two others in 1661 and 1671. A later English translation, from the original, was produced in 1698; and Lessing thought the book worth putting into German in 1785.

The rationalistic importance of Huarte lies in his insistence on the study of “second causes” and his protest against the burking of all inquiry by a reference to deity. On this head he anticipates much of the polemic of Bacon. The explanation of all processes and phenomena by the will of God, he observes, “is so ancient a manner of talk, and the natural philosophers have so often refuted it, that the seeking to take the same away were superfluous, neither is it convenient.... But I have often gone about to consider the reason and the cause whence it may grow that the vulgar sort is so great friend to impute all things to God, and to reave them from Nature, and do so abhor the natural means.”22 His solution is the impatience of men over the complexity of Nature, their spiritual arrogance, their indolence, and their piety. For himself, he pronounces, as Middleton did in England nearly two centuries later, that “God doth no longer those unwonted things of the New Testament; and the reason is, for that on his behalf he hath performed all necessary diligence that men might not pretend ignorance. And to think that he will begin anew to do the like miracles ... is an error very great.... God speaks once (saith Job) and turns not to a second replial.”23

Only thus could the principle of natural causation be affirmed in the Spain of Philip II. Huarte is careful to affirm miracles while denying their recurrence; and throughout he writes as a good Scripturist and Catholic. But he sticks to his naturalist thesis that “Nature makes able,” and avows that “natural philosophers laugh at such as say, This is God’s doing, without assigning the order and discourse of the particular causes whence they may spring.”24 The fact that the book was dedicated to Philip tells of royal protection, without which the author could hardly have escaped the Inquisition. Years after, we shall find Lilly in England protesting on the stage against the conception of Natura naturans; and Bacon powerfully reaffirming Huarte’s doctrine, with the same reservations. The Spaniard must have counted for something as a pleader for elementary reason, if Bacon did.

But this is practically the only important contribution from Spain to the intellectual renascence then going on in Europe. As we have seen, it was not that Spaniards had any primordial bias to dogmatism and persecution: it was simply that their whole socio-political evolution, largely determined by Spanish discovery and dominion in the New World, set up institutions and forces which became specially powerful to stamp out freethought. The work of progress was done in lands where lack of external dominion left on the one hand a greater fund of variant energy, and on the other made for a lesser power of repression on the part of Church and State.

While Italy continues to be reputed throughout the sixteenth century a hotbed of freethinking, styled “atheism,” it appears to have been in France, alongside of the wars of religion, that positive unbelief, as distinct from scripturalist Unitarianism, made most new headway among laymen. It was in France that the forces of change had greatest play. The mere contact with Italy which began with the invasion of Charles VII in 1494 meant a manifold moral and mental influence, affecting French literature and life alike; and the age of strife and destruction which set in with the first Huguenot wars could not but be one of disillusionment for multitudes of serious men. We have seen as much in the work of Bonaventure des Periers and Rabelais; but the spread of radical unbelief is to be traced, as is usual in the ages of faith, by the books written against it. Already in 1552 we have seen Guillaume Postell publishing his book, Contra Atheos.25 Unbelief increasing, there is published in 1564 an Atheomachie by one De Bourgeville; but the Massacre must have gone far to frustrate him. In 1581 appears another Atheomachie, ou rÉfutation des erreurs et impiÉtÉs des AthÉistes, Libertins, etc., issued at Geneva, but bearing much on French life; and in the same year is issued the long-time popular work of the Huguenot Philippe de Mornay, De la vÉritÉ de la religion Chrestienne, Contre les AthÉes, Epicuriens, Payens, Juifs, Mahumedistes, et autres InfidÈles.26 In both the Epistle Dedicatory (to Henry of Navarre) and the Preface the author speaks of the great multiplication of unbelief, the refutation of which he declares to be more needful among Christians than it ever had been among the heathen. But, like most of the writers against atheism in that age, he declares27 that there are no atheists save a few young fools and utterly bad men, who turn to God as soon as they fall sick. The reputed atheists of antiquity are vindicated as having denied not the principle of deity but the false Gods of their age—this after the universality of a belief in Gods in all ages had been cited as one of the primary proofs of God’s existence. In this fashion is compiled a book of nine hundred pages, ostensibly for the confutation of a few fools and knaves, described as unworthy of serious consideration. Evidently the unbelief of de Mornay’s day was a more vigorous growth than he affected to think; and his voluminous performance was followed by others. In 1586, Christophe Cheffontaines published his Epitome novÆ illustrationis Christianae Fidei adversus Impios, Libertinos et Atheos; and still skepticism gained ground, having found new abettors.

First came the Portuguese Francisco Sanchez (1552–1623?), born in Portugal, but brought as a child to Bordeaux, which seems to have been a place of refuge for many fugitive heretics from both sides of the Peninsula. Sanchez has recorded that in his early youth he had no bias to incredulity of any kind; but at some stage of his adolescence he travelled in Italy and spent some time at Rome. The result was not that special disbelief in Christianity which was proverbially apt to follow, but a development on his part of philosophic skepticism properly so-called, which found expression in a Latin treatise entitled Quod Nihil Scitur—“That Nothing is Known.” Composed as early as 1576, in the author’s twenty-fourth year, the book was not published till 1581, a year after the first issue of the Essais of Montaigne. It is natural to surmise that while Sanchez was at Bordeaux he may have known something of his famous contemporary; but though Montaigne is likely to have read the Quod Nihil Scitur in due course, he nowhere speaks of it; and in 1576 Sanchez was a Professor of Medicine at Montpellier, then a town of Huguenot leanings. Soon he left it for Toulouse, the hotbed of Catholic fanaticism, where he contrived to live out his long life in peace, despite his production of a Pyrrhonist treatise and of a remarkable Latin poem (1578) on the comet of 1577. The Quod Nihil Scitur is a skeptical flank attack on current science, in no way animadverting on religion, as to which he professed orthodoxy: the poem is a frontal attack on the whole creed of astrology, then commonly held by AverroÏsts and Aristotelians, as well as by orthodox Catholics. Yet he seems never to have been molested. It would seem as if a skepticism which ostensibly disallowed all claims to “natural” knowledge, while avowedly recognizing “spiritual,” was then as later thought to make rather for faith than against it. That such virtual Pyrrhonism as that of Sanchez can ever have ministered to religious zeal is not indeed to be supposed: it is rather as a weapon against the confidence of the “Naturalist” that the skeptical method has always recommended itself to the calculating priest. And inasmuch as astrology could be, and was, held by a non-religious theory, though many Christians added it to their creed, a polemic against that was the least dangerous form of rationalizing then possible. At all times there had been priests who so reasoned, though, as we have seen in dealing with the men of the Protestant Reformation, the belief in astral influences is too closely akin to the main line of religious tradition to be capable of ejection on religious grounds.

With his hostility to credulous hopes and fears in the sphere of Nature, Sanchez is naturally regarded as a forerunner and helper of freethought. But there is nothing to show that his work had any effect in undermining the most formidable of all the false beliefs of Christendom.28 Like so many others of his age, he flouted Aristotelean scholasticism, but was perforce silent as to the verbalisms and sophistries of simple theology. It may fairly be inferred that his poem on the comet of 1577 helped to create that current of reasoned disbelief29 which we find throwing up almost identical expressions in Montaigne, Shakespeare, and MoliÈre,30 concerning the folly of connecting the stars with human affairs. But a skepticism which left untouched the main matter of the creeds could not affect conduct in general; and while Sanchez passed unchecked the watchdogs of the Inquisition, the fiery Bruno and Vanini were in his day to meet their fiery death at its hands—the latter in Toulouse, perhaps under the eyes of Sanchez. Having resigned his professorship of medicine, he seems to have lived to a ripe age, dying in 1623.

Probably those very deaths availed more for the rousing of critical thought than did the dialectic of the Pyrrhonist. To the life of the reason may with perfect accuracy be applied the claim so often made for that of religion—that it feeds on feeling and is rooted in experience. Revolt from the cruelties and follies of faith plays a great part in the history of freethought. In the greatest French writer of that age, a professed Catholic, but in mature life averse alike to Catholic and to Protestant bigotry, the shock of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew can be seen disintegrating once for all the spirit of faith. Montaigne typifies the kind of skepticism produced in an unscientific age by the practical demonstration that religion can avail immeasurably more for evil than for good.31 A few years before the Massacre he had translated for his dying father32 the old Theologia Naturalis of Raymond of Sebonde; and we know from the later Apology in the Essays that freethinking contemporaries declared the argument of Raymond to be wholly insufficient.33 It is clear from the same essay that Montaigne felt as much; though the gist of his polemic is a vehement attack upon all forms of confident opinion, religious and anti-religious alike. “In replying to arguments of so opposite a tenour, Montaigne leaves Christianity, as well as Raimond Sebonde, without a leg to stand upon. He demolishes the arguments of Sebonde with the rest of human presumption, and allows Christianity, neither held by faith nor provable by reason, to fall between the two stools.”34 The truth is that Montaigne’s skepticism was the product of a mental evolution spread over at least twenty years. In his youth his vivid temperament kept him both credulous and fanatical, so much so that in 1562 he took the reckless oath prescribed by the Catholic Parlement of Paris. As he avows with his incomparable candour, he had been in many things peculiarly susceptible to outside influences, being always ready to respond to the latest pressure;35 and the knowledge of his susceptibility made him self-distrustful. But gradually he found himself. Beginning to recoil from the ferocities and iniquities of the League, he yet remained for a time hotly anti-Protestant; and it seems to have been his dislike of Protestant criticism that led him to run amuck against reason, at the cost of overthrowing the treatise he had set out to defend. The common end of such petulant skepticism is a plunge into uneasy yet unreasoning faith; but, though Montaigne professed Catholicism to the end, the sheer wickedness of the Catholic policy made it impossible for him to hold sincerely to the creed any more than to the cause.36 Above all things he hated cruelty.37 It was the Massacre that finally made Montaigne renounce public life;38 it must have affected likewise his working philosophy.

That philosophy was not, indeed, an original construction: he found it to his hand partly in the deism of his favourite Seneca; partly in the stoical ethic of Epictetus, then so much appreciated in France; and partly in the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus, of which the Latin translation is known to have been among his books; from which he took several of the mottoes inscribed on his library ceiling,39 and from which he frequently quotes towards the end of his Apology. The body of ideas compacted on these bases cannot be called a system: it was not in Montaigne’s nature to frame a logical scheme of thought; and he was far from being the philosophic skeptic he set out to be40 by way of confounding at once the bigots and the atheists. He was essentially ondoyant et divers, as he freely admitted. As he put it in a passage added to the later editions of the Essais,41 he was a kind of mÉtis, belonging neither to the camp of ignorant faith nor to that of philosophic conviction, whether believing or unbelieving. He early avows that, had he written what he thought and knew of the affairs of his times, he would have published judgments “À mon grÉ mesme et selon raison,” in his opinion true and reasonable, but “illÉgitimes et punissables.”42 Again, “whatsoever is beyond the compass of custom, we deem likewise to be beyond the compass of reason, God knows how unreasonably, for the most part.”43 Yet in the next breath he will exclaim at those who demand changes. Often he comments keenly on the incredible readiness of men to go to war over trifles; but in another mood he accuses the nobility of his day of unwillingness to take up arms “except upon some urgent and extreme necessity.”44 In the same page he will tell us that he is “easily carried away by the throng,” and that he is yet “not very easy to change, forsomuch as I perceive a like weakness in contrary opinions.”45 “I am very easily to be directed by the world’s public order,”46 is the upshot of his easy meditations. And a conformist he remained in practice to the last, always bearing himself dutifully towards Mother Church, and generally observing the proprieties, though he confesses that he “made it a conscience to eat flesh upon a fish day.”47

In the last and most characteristic essay of all, discoursing at large Of Experience, he makes the most daring attack on laws in general, as being always arbitrary and often irrational, and not seldom more criminal than the offences they punish. After a planless discourse of diseases and diets, follies of habit and follies of caprice, the wisdom of self-rule and the wisdom of irregularity, he contrives to conclude at once that we should make the best of everything and that “only authority is of force with men of common reach and understanding, and is of more weight in a strange language”—a plea for Catholic ritual. Yet in the same page he pronounces that “Supercelestial opinions and under-terrestrial manners are things that amongst us I have ever seen to be of singular accord.”

There is no final recognition here of religion as even a useful factor in life. In point of fact Montaigne’s whole habit of mind is perfectly fatal to orthodox religion; and it is clear that, despite his professions of conformity, he did not hold the Christian beliefs.48 He was simply a deist. Again and again he points to Sokrates as the noblest and wisest of men; there is no reference to Jesus or any of the saints. Whatever he might say in the Apology, in the other essays he repeatedly reveals a radical unbelief. The essay on Custom strikes at the root of all orthodoxy, with its thrusts at “the gross imposture of religions, wherewith so many worthy and sufficient men have been besotted and drunken,” and its terse avowal that “miracles are according to the ignorance wherein we are by nature, and not according to nature’s essence.”49 Above all, he rejected the great superstition of the age, the belief in witchcraft; and, following the lead of Wier,50 suggested a medical view of the cases of those who professed wizardry.51 This is the more remarkable because his rubber-ball fashion of following impulsions and rebounding from certainty made him often disparage other men’s certainties of disbelief just because they were certainties. Declaring that he prefers above all things qualified and doubtful propositions,52 he makes as many confident assertions of his own as any man ever did. But the effect of the whole is a perpetual stimulus to questioning. His function in literature was thus to set up a certain mental atmosphere,53 and this the extraordinary vitality of his utterance enabled him to do to an incalculable extent. He had the gift to disarm or at least to baffle hostility, to charm kings,54 to stand free between warring factions. No book ever written conveys more fully the sensation of a living voice; and after three hundred years he has as friendly an audience as ever.

The momentum of such an influence is seen in the work of Charron (1541–1603), Montaigne’s friend and disciple. The Essais had first appeared in 1580; the expanded and revised issue in 1588; and in 1601 there appeared Charron’s De la Sagesse, which gives methodic form and as far as was permissible a direct application to Montaigne’s naturalistic principles. Charron’s is a curious case of mental evolution. First a lawyer, then a priest, he became a highly successful popular preacher and champion of the Catholic League; and as such was favoured by the notorious Marguerite (the Second55) of Navarre. On the assassination of the Duke of Guise by order of Henri III he delivered an indignant protest from the pulpit, of which, however, he rapidly repented.56 Becoming the friend of Montaigne in 1586, he shows already in 1593, in his Three Truths, the influence of the essayist’s skepticism,57 though Charron’s book was expressly framed to refute, first, the atheists; second, the pagans, Jews, Mohammedans; and, third, the Christian heretics and schismatics. The Wisdom, published only eight years later, is a work of a very different cast, proving a mental change. Even in the first work “the growing teeth of the skeptic are discernible beneath the well-worn stumps of the believer”;58 but the second almost testifies to a new birth. Professedly orthodox, it was yet recognized at once by the devout as a “seminary of impiety,”59 and brought on its author a persecution that lasted till his sudden death from apoplexy, which his critics pronounced to be a divine dispensation. In the second and rearranged edition, published a year after his death, there are some modifications; but they are so far from essential60 that Buckle found the book as it stands a kind of pioneer manual of rationalism.61 Its way of putting all religions on one level, as being alike grounded on bad evidence and held on prejudice, is only the formal statement of an old idea, found, like so many others of Charron’s, in Montaigne; but the didactic purpose and method turn the skeptic’s shrug into a resolute propaganda. So with the formal and earnest insistence that true morality cannot be built on religious hopes and fears—a principle which Charron was the first to bring directly home to the modern intelligence,62 as he did the principle of development in religious systems.63 Attempting as it does to construct a systematic practical philosophy of life, the book puts aside so positively the claims of the theologians,64 and so emphatically subordinates religion to the rule of natural reason,65 that it constitutes a virtual revolution in public doctrine for Christendom. As Montaigne is the effective beginner of modern literature, so is Charron the beginner of modern secular teaching. He is a Naturalist, professing theism; and it is not surprising to find that for a time his book was even more markedly than Montaigne’s the French “freethinker’s breviary.”

It was only powerful protection that could save such a book from proscription; but Charron and his book had the support at once of Henri IV and the President Jeannin—the former a proved indifferentist to religious forms; the latter the author of the remark that a peace with two religions was better than a war which had none. Such a temper had become predominant even among professed Catholics, as may be gathered from the immense popularity of the Satyre MenippÉe (1594). Ridiculing as it did the insensate fanaticism of the Catholic League, that composition was naturally described as the work of atheists; but there seems to have been no such element in the case, the authors being all Catholics of good standing, and some of them even having a record for zeal.66 The Satyre was in fact the triumphant revolt of the humorous common sense of France against the tyranny of fanaticism, which it may be said to have overthrown at one stroke,67 inasmuch as it made possible the entry of Henri into Paris. By a sudden appeal to secular sanity and the sense of humour it made the bulk of the Catholic mass ashamed of its past course.68 On the other hand, it is expressly testified by the Catholic historian De Thou that all the rich and the aristocracy held the League in abomination.69 In such an atmosphere rationalism must needs germinate, especially when the king’s acceptance of Catholicism dramatized the unreality of the grounds of strife.

After the assassination of the king in 1610, the last of the bloody deeds which had kept France on the rack of uncertainty in religion’s name for three generations, the spirit of rationalism naturally did not wane. In the Paris of the early seventeenth century, doubtless, the new emancipation came to be associated, as “libertinism,” with licence as well as with freethinking. In the nature of the case there could be no serious and free literary discussion of the new problems either of life or belief, save insofar as they had been handled by Montaigne and Charron; and, inasmuch as the accounts preserved of the freethought of the age are almost invariably those of its worst enemies, it is chiefly their side of the case that has been presented. Thus in 1623 the Jesuit Father FranÇois Garasse published a thick quarto of over a thousand pages, entitled La Doctrine Curieuse des Beaux Esprits de ce temps, ou prÉtendus tels, in which he assails the “libertins” of the day with an infuriated industry. The eight books into which he divides his treatise proceed upon eight alleged maxims of the freethinkers, which run as follows:—

This is obviously neither candid70 nor competent writing; and as it happens there remains proof, in the case of the life of La Mothe le Vayer, that “earnest freethought in the beginning of the seventeenth century afforded a point d’appui for serious-minded men, which neither the corrupt Romanism nor the narrow Protestantism of the period could furnish.”71 Garasse’s own doctrine was that “the true liberty of the mind consists in a simple and docile (sage) belief in all that the Church propounds, indifferently and without distinction.”72 The later social history of Catholic France is the sufficient comment on the efficacy of such teaching to regulate life. In any case the new ideas steadily gained ground; and on the heels of the treatise of Garasse appeared that of Marin Mersenne, L’impietÉ des DÉistes, AthÉes et Libertins de ce temps combattue, avec la refutation des opinions de Charron, de Cardan, de Jordan Brun, et des quatraines du DÉiste (1624). In a previous treatise, QuÆstiones celeberrimÆ in Genesim ... in quo volumine Athei et Deisti impugnantur et expugnantur (1623), Mersenne set agoing the often-quoted assertion that, while atheists abounded throughout Europe, they were so specially abundant in France that in Paris alone there were some fifty thousand. Even taking the term “atheist” in the loosest sense in which such writers used it, the statement was never credited by any contemporary, or by its author; but neither did anyone doubt that there was an unprecedented amount of unbelief. The Quatraines du DÉiste, otherwise L’Antibigot, was a poem of one hundred and six stanzas, never printed, but widely circulated in manuscript in its day. It is poor poetry enough, but its doctrine of a Lucretian God who left the world to itself sufficed to create a sensation, and inspired Mersenne to write a poem in reply.73 Such were the signs of the times when Pascal was in his cradle.

END OF VOL. I.