THE KINGDOM OF DARKNESS
In 1500, speculative philosophy lay at the heart of European intellectual
life; by 1700, its role was drastically diminished. The Kingdom of Darkness
tells the story of this momentous transformation. Dmitri Levitin explores
the structural factors behind this change: the emancipation of natural
philosophy from metaphysics; theologians’ growing preference for philology over philosophy; and a new conception of the limits of the human
mind derived from historical and oriental scholarship, not least concerning China and Japan. In turn, he shows that the ideas of two of Europe’s
most famous thinkers, Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton, were both the
products of this transformation and catalysts for its success. Drawing on
hundreds of sources in many languages, Levitin traces in unprecedented
detail Bayle and Newton’s conceptions of what Thomas Hobbes called
‘The Kingdom of Darkness’: a genealogical vision of how philosophy had
corrupted the human mind. Both men sought to remedy this corruption,
and their ideas helped lay the foundation for the system of knowledge that
emerged in the eighteenth century.
dmitri levitin is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He works on
the history of knowledge: philosophical, scientific, medical, and humanistic. He has previously held positions at Trinity College, Cambridge and at
the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. His first book,
Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (Cambridge University
Press, 2015) was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. He writes
regularly for the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and
The Literary Review. In 2016, he was awarded the inaugural Leszek
Kołakowski Prize for the world’s leading early-career historian of ideas.
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Published online by Cambridge University Press
THE KINGDOM OF
DARKNESS
Bayle, Newton, and the Emancipation of the European
Mind from Philosophy
DMITRI LEVITIN
All Souls College, Oxford
Published online by Cambridge University Press
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108837002
DOI: 10.1017/9781108934152
© Dmitri Levitin 2022
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2022
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Levitin, Dmitri, author.
Title: The kingdom of darkness : Bayle, Newton, and the emancipation of the European mind from
philosophy / Dmitri Levitin.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021024958 (print) | LCCN 2021024959 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108837002 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781108928878 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108934152 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Bayle, Pierre, 1647–1706. | Newton, Isaac, 1642–1727. | Knowledge, Theory of – Europe
– History. | Philosophy, European – History. | Physics – Europe – History. | Europe – Intellectual life –
17th century. | Europe – Intellectual life – 18th century.
Classification: LCC BD161 .L3787 2022 (print) | LCC BD161 (ebook) | DDC 190.9/032–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024958
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024959
ISBN 978-1-108-83700-2 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-108-92887-8 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Published online by Cambridge University Press
THE KINGDOM OF DARKNESS
In 1500, speculative philosophy lay at the heart of European intellectual
life; by 1700, its role was drastically diminished. The Kingdom of Darkness
tells the story of this momentous transformation. Dmitri Levitin explores
the structural factors behind this change: the emancipation of natural
philosophy from metaphysics; theologians’ growing preference for philology over philosophy; and a new conception of the limits of the human
mind derived from historical and oriental scholarship, not least concerning China and Japan. In turn, he shows that the ideas of two of Europe’s
most famous thinkers, Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton, were both the
products of this transformation and catalysts for its success. Drawing on
hundreds of sources in many languages, Levitin traces in unprecedented
detail Bayle and Newton’s conceptions of what Thomas Hobbes called
‘The Kingdom of Darkness’: a genealogical vision of how philosophy had
corrupted the human mind. Both men sought to remedy this corruption,
and their ideas helped lay the foundation for the system of knowledge that
emerged in the eighteenth century.
dmitri levitin is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He works on
the history of knowledge: philosophical, scientific, medical, and humanistic. He has previously held positions at Trinity College, Cambridge and at
the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. His first book,
Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (Cambridge University
Press, 2015) was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. He writes
regularly for the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and
The Literary Review. In 2016, he was awarded the inaugural Leszek
Kołakowski Prize for the world’s leading early-career historian of ideas.
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Published online by Cambridge University Press
THE KINGDOM OF
DARKNESS
Bayle, Newton, and the Emancipation of the European
Mind from Philosophy
DMITRI LEVITIN
All Souls College, Oxford
Published online by Cambridge University Press
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108837002
DOI: 10.1017/9781108934152
© Dmitri Levitin 2022
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2022
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Levitin, Dmitri, author.
Title: The kingdom of darkness : Bayle, Newton, and the emancipation of the European mind from
philosophy / Dmitri Levitin.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021024958 (print) | LCCN 2021024959 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108837002 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781108928878 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108934152 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Bayle, Pierre, 1647–1706. | Newton, Isaac, 1642–1727. | Knowledge, Theory of – Europe
– History. | Philosophy, European – History. | Physics – Europe – History. | Europe – Intellectual life –
17th century. | Europe – Intellectual life – 18th century.
Classification: LCC BD161 .L3787 2022 (print) | LCC BD161 (ebook) | DDC 190.9/032–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024958
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024959
ISBN 978-1-108-83700-2 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-108-92887-8 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Published online by Cambridge University Press
THE KINGDOM OF DARKNESS
In 1500, speculative philosophy lay at the heart of European intellectual
life; by 1700, its role was drastically diminished. The Kingdom of Darkness
tells the story of this momentous transformation. Dmitri Levitin explores
the structural factors behind this change: the emancipation of natural
philosophy from metaphysics; theologians’ growing preference for philology over philosophy; and a new conception of the limits of the human
mind derived from historical and oriental scholarship, not least concerning China and Japan. In turn, he shows that the ideas of two of Europe’s
most famous thinkers, Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton, were both the
products of this transformation and catalysts for its success. Drawing on
hundreds of sources in many languages, Levitin traces in unprecedented
detail Bayle and Newton’s conceptions of what Thomas Hobbes called
‘The Kingdom of Darkness’: a genealogical vision of how philosophy had
corrupted the human mind. Both men sought to remedy this corruption,
and their ideas helped lay the foundation for the system of knowledge that
emerged in the eighteenth century.
dmitri levitin is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He works on
the history of knowledge: philosophical, scientific, medical, and humanistic. He has previously held positions at Trinity College, Cambridge and at
the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. His first book,
Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (Cambridge University
Press, 2015) was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. He writes
regularly for the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and
The Literary Review. In 2016, he was awarded the inaugural Leszek
Kołakowski Prize for the world’s leading early-career historian of ideas.
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Published online by Cambridge University Press
THE KINGDOM OF
DARKNESS
Bayle, Newton, and the Emancipation of the European
Mind from Philosophy
DMITRI LEVITIN
All Souls College, Oxford
Published online by Cambridge University Press
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108837002
DOI: 10.1017/9781108934152
© Dmitri Levitin 2022
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2022
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Levitin, Dmitri, author.
Title: The kingdom of darkness : Bayle, Newton, and the emancipation of the European mind from
philosophy / Dmitri Levitin.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021024958 (print) | LCCN 2021024959 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108837002 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781108928878 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108934152 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Bayle, Pierre, 1647–1706. | Newton, Isaac, 1642–1727. | Knowledge, Theory of – Europe
– History. | Philosophy, European – History. | Physics – Europe – History. | Europe – Intellectual life –
17th century. | Europe – Intellectual life – 18th century.
Classification: LCC BD161 .L3787 2022 (print) | LCC BD161 (ebook) | DDC 190.9/032–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024958
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024959
ISBN 978-1-108-83700-2 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-108-92887-8 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Published online by Cambridge University Press
CONTENTS
Preface
List of Abbreviations and Conventions
page ix
xii
General Prologue: A Study in the History of Knowledge
1
1 The Kingdom of Darkness
1
2 This Book
5
part i: Giving Up Philosophy
I
I.1
I.2
The Transformation of a System of Knowledge
17
Prolegomena: Giving Up Philosophy
19
Emancipating Natural Philosophy from Metaphysics
25
I.1.1 Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy: the Late Medieval
Synthesis
27
I.1.2 The Humanist Critique: Common Language, Anti-Essentialism,
and the Impossibility of Scientia
30
I.1.3 Italian Natural Philosophy and Medicine and the Rise of
Anti-Rationalist Sentiment
33
I.1.4 The Revival and Reinterpretation of Metaphysics
51
I.1.5 Mathematics and Mixed Mathematics: Another Source for the
De-Ontologisation of Natural Philosophy
60
I.1.6 The Synthesis (I): a New Metaphysical Physics
82
I.1.7 The Synthesis (II): an Anti-Metaphysical Physics
96
I.1.8 What Was the Study of Nature in the Later Seventeenth
Century?
104
I.1.9 Conclusion
116
Emancipating Theology from Philosophy
I.2.1 The Medieval Inheritance
120
121
I.2.2 Positive Rather than Philosophical Theology: the Catholic World 123
I.2.3 The Protestant World
138
I.2.4 Conclusion: the Myth of Theological ‘Rationalism’
160
v
Published online by Cambridge University Press
vi
contents
I.3
Reconstructing the Pagan Mind in Seventeenth-Century
Europe: A Historico-Philosophical Critique of Pure Reason
I.3.1 The Post-Patristic Conception of the Pagan Mind
165
167
I.3.2 After Vossius (I): Pagan Animism as Imperfect Monotheism
183
I.3.3 After Vossius (II): Pagan Animism as Naturalist Atheism
191
I.3.4 The Global Debate over Pagan Animism
207
I.3.5 Naturalism Without Spinoza
216
I.3.6 Conclusion: the Pagan Mind in Early Modern Europe
221
part ii: Pierre Bayle and the Emancipation of Religion
from Philosophy
II
II.1
II.2
Prolegomena: Pierre Bayle: a Life in the Republic of Letters
at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century
225
227
1 Fideism, Rationalism, Scepticism, and the Non-Existence
of the ‘Bayle Enigma’
227
2 Pierre Bayle, Reactive Man of Letters
230
Greece, Asia, and the Logic of Paganism: Cartesian
Occasionalism as the Only ‘Christian Philosophy’
251
II.1.1 Bayle on the Logic of Paganism
253
II.1.2 Cartesian Occasionalism as the Only Answer to the Logic
of Paganism
268
II.1.3 The Limits of Cartesian Occasionalism
293
II.1.4 Conclusion: Pierre Bayle, Natural Theologian
301
The Manichean Articles and the ‘Sponge of all Religions’:
The Problem of Evil and the Rationality of Reformed
Predestinarian Belief
308
II.2.1 Introduction
308
II.2.2 The Manichean Challenge: a Summary
312
II.2.3 Did Anyone in the Seventeenth Century Believe that Pure
Reason Could Solve the Problem of Evil?
317
II.2.4 Anti-Philosophical Molinism and the ‘Sponge of All Religions’
322
II.2.5 The Theological Context (I): the Malebranche–Arnauld Dispute
332
II.2.6 The Theological Context (II): Reformed Arguments on Grace,
1670–1690
344
II.2.7 The Theological Context (III): Jurieu Continues
to Set the Agenda
355
II.2.8 The Manichean Articles as a Defence of Reformed
Predestinarianism
363
II.2.9 Predestination and Toleration
367
Published online by Cambridge University Press
contents
II.3
II.4
vii
II.2.10 Conclusion: Pierre Bayle, Reformed Lay Theologian
370
Theological Method and the Foundations of Protestant Faith
375
II.3.1 Fideism or Positive Theology?
375
II.3.2 What Was Bayle’s Dispute with the ‘Rationaux’ Really About?
383
II.3.3 Things Above/Contrary to Reason, Transubstantiation,
and the Foundations of Protestant Faith
404
II.3.4 Conclusion: Bayle, Reformed Polemicist
421
Virtuous Atheism, Philosophic Sin, and Toleration
423
II.4.1 The Pensées diverses in Context
424
II.4.2 Returning to Idolatry and Atheism: the Addition (1694),
Dictionnaire, and Continuation (1705)
452
II.4.3 Philosophic Sin, Anti-Pelagianism, and Toleration
472
II.4.4 Conclusion: Bayle’s Kingdom of Darkness
489
part iii: Isaac Newton and the Emancipation of Natural
Philosophy from Metaphysics
III
III.1
Prolegomena: The Formation of Newton’s
Natural-Philosophical Project, 1664–1687
497
499
1 Introduction: Recovering the Historical Newton
499
2 The Formation of Newton’s Conception of Natural Philosophy:
Towards an Experimental–Mathematical Science of Properties
506
3 The 1671 Hydrostatical Lectures (‘De gravitatione’)
519
4 The Development of Newton’s Interest in Theology
543
5 Towards the Principia
551
6 Conclusion: the Principia as a Manifestation of Disciplinary
Reconfiguration
572
After the Principia: Justifying a Science of Properties
and the Invention of ‘Newtonianism’
577
III.1.1 Newton’s Historico-Philosophical Vision in the Mid-1680s:
‘Theologiae gentilis origines philosophicae’ and ‘De motu
corporum (liber secundus)’
580
III.1.2 The 1690s: the Classical Scholia and Contemporary Texts
586
III.1.3 The New regulae philosophandi: Atomism, Transduction,
and the Analogy of Nature
606
III.1.4 Rational Mechanics and the Mathematisation
of Natural Philosophy
634
III.1.5 Gregory and Keill: Aggressive Newtonianism in 1690s Oxford
637
III.1.6 Conclusion: ‘Newtonianism’ in the 1690s
651
Published online by Cambridge University Press
viii
contents
III.2
III.3
III.4
The Queries to the Optice (1706): An Intelligent God,
the Divine Sensorium, and the Development
of an Anti-Metaphysical Natural Theology
653
III.2.1 The Queries to the Optice (1706): a New Natural Theology
654
III.2.2 The Influence of Samuel Clarke: Predicating an Intelligent God
664
III.2.3 The Debts to George Cheyne: Gravity Like the Circulation
of the Blood
679
III.2.4 Space as the Divine Sensorium
687
III.2.5 Conclusion: Newtonian Disciplinary Demarcation, c.1705
697
The General Scholium: A Non-Metaphysical Physics
703
III.3.1 The Methodological Statements in the General Scholium:
Demarcating the Bounds of Natural Philosophy
705
III.3.2 Clarke and the God of Dominion
725
III.3.3 Clarke, Collins, and ‘Substantial’ Omnipresence
740
III.3.4 Newton Self-Interprets the General Scholium
757
III.3.5 Conclusion: Newton’s Conception of a Non-Metaphysical,
Mathematical Physics, c.1715
760
Newton’s Kingdom of Darkness Complete
766
III.4.1 ‘Of the Church’ and Newton’s Kingdom of Darkness
767
III.4.2 The Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence
781
III.4.3 The Newton–Conti Correspondence and Some
New Definitions for the Principia
787
III.4.4 The ‘Avertissement’
797
III.4.5 ‘Tempus et locus’
802
III.4.6 Conclusion: Newton’s Kingdom of Darkness
808
part iv: The European System of Knowledge, c.1700
and Beyond
IV
Conclusion
817
819
1 Summary
819
2 The European System of Knowledge, c.1700 and Beyond
832
Bibliography
Index
Published online by Cambridge University Press
853
935
PREFACE
This book is the product of a long period of reflection on the nature of
intellectual change in pre-modern Europe. That reflection engendered
a growing conviction that the Kuhnian question concerning how that change
occurred is best answered via a story of disciplinary reconfiguration, changing
ideals of the ends of knowledge, and shifts in conceptions of what real
‘knowledge’ might be, especially when it came to philosophy. The more
I read, the more I came to believe that even the most seminal individual
thinkers were, at some level, the products of these structural factors. One
might, therefore, call this book a study in the social history of philosophy.
At the same time, the book also emerges from a parallel conviction that that
story cannot be told only sociologically or structurally, and that it must
incorporate meticulous attention to the detail of philosophical arguments
themselves. It therefore attempts – perhaps hubristically – to combine two
types of intellectual-historical approach: one focussing on structural shifts over
the longue durée (Part I), the other on intensive, textually precise interpretation
and contextualisation of the works of two major thinkers operating at the turn
of the eighteenth century (Parts II and III). I shall not belabour any tired
metaphors about hedgehogs and foxes when I say that, inevitably, the interpretative methods deployed across the book vary, and that its results may take
on different levels of interest for different readers (students with limited time,
for example, may be particularly interested in Part I). Nonetheless, the whole is
intended to make a coherent argument (summarised in the General Prologue
and then further in the Conclusion), and I hope that the book might show that
combining the two approaches into some kind of hedgehog–fox hybrid is not
an entirely futile exercise.
If I have succeeded at all in that exercise, it is because I have been very
fortunate in the conditions in which I have been able to conduct it, and in the
assistance which I have received. As the spark of the idea for this book grew
into something larger, I realised that to make my case I would have to conduct
extensive reading in several textual corpora: the complete works of Bayle and
Newton; the most important texts that they themselves read; and the significant primary and secondary literature on the history of pre-modern philosophy, science, medicine, mathematics, theology, oriental scholarship, and the
ix
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press
x
preface
interconnections between them. I have only been able to do so because of the
assistance of the library staff in all the institutions whose names appear in the
‘Manuscripts’ section of the Bibliography, but above all Gaye Morgan and her
wonderful team at All Souls College Library. I have long been aware of their
despairing looks as I disappeared behind three different editions of Bayle’s
Dictionnaire on one side and Newton’s Mathematical Papers on the other, and
I am endlessly grateful to them for tolerating my disruptive nesting in their
remarkable institution. More generally, I am obliged to the Warden and
Fellows of All Souls for providing me with the time to conduct serious
research, and especially for all their extraordinary kindness during an unexpected period of serious illness. I am also deeply indebted to the various
organisers, trustees, and judges of the Leszek Kołakowski Prize, of which
I was the first recipient; in this regard, I would particularly like to celebrate
the role played by the late Tamara Kołakowska and by Agnieszka Kołakowska
in promoting new work in intellectual history.
It is usual at this point to thank those who have directly assisted in the
writing of a book. Before I do that, I should like to offer my gratitude to those
scholars whom I have never met (or have only met very briefly), but whose
research – much of it cited in the footnotes – has stimulated so many of my
thoughts. It is with some despair that I have realised that the adage ‘it’s not
what you know but who you know’ has taken root in academia, the last place it
should be manifesting itself. A reader for Cambridge University Press wished
me to cite only a minimal amount of secondary literature: I cannot at all agree
with this approach, which seems to me to go against the very spirit of what
scholarly life is about (especially when the few names which remain in the
footnotes inevitably just happen to be those of the alpha males of AngloAmerican academia). One of the glories of intellectual history is its nonparochialism, and the potential for individual scholars working anywhere in
the world – perhaps without great institutional or financial backing – to make
seminal contributions. This book would not be possible without the work of
many such individuals, who are far too many to list by name.
That being said, I have benefitted enormously from conversations with
immediate colleagues. At All Souls, I have been fortunate to be part of
a community of remarkable scholars of early modern intellectual, religious,
and cultural history: Robin Briggs, Clare Bucknell, Maya Krishnan, Ian
Maclean, Noel Malcolm, Philipp Nothaft, Jenny Rampling, and Keith
Thomas have all taught me more than they can realise. Katherine Backler,
Péter-Dániel Szántó, Claire Hall, Fitzroy Morrissey, and Andrew Wilson have
been a source of discussion and inspiration on matters classical and Asian. In
Oxford, I have also had the privilege of conversations with Maria Rosa
Antognazza, Jim Bennett, John Christie, Howard Hotson, Rob Iliffe, Mogens
Lærke, Kirsten Macfarlane, Will Poole, Joanna Weinberg, and my students
Natasha Bailey, Michelle Pfeffer, and Jessie Simkiss: the last three are all
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press
preface
xi
already making discoveries of which I could never dream. The portion of this
book grounded in the history of orientalism benefitted enormously from the
series of seminars at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and
Humanities organised by Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey Lloyd:
I am particularly grateful to Tony Grafton, Joan-Pau Rubiés, Jonathan
Sheehan, and Guy Stroumsa for many stimulating discussions. For several
years, I had the luck of being able to talk frequently with Nick Hardy about how
one might better integrate the history of theology with intellectual history
more broadly, a subject to which he has made a huge contribution; Jean-Louis
Quantin also continues to offer endless inspiration and assistance on that
front. On Newton, I have benefitted from discussions with several of the
brilliant scholars whose names repeatedly grace my footnotes, above all Moti
Feingold, Niccolò Guicciardini, Andrew Janiak, and Steve Snobelen. Scott
Mandelbrote in particular has shown me what it means to think historically
about Newton, above all by approaching every manuscript scrap with curiosity
(and scepticism) about its dating, provenance, and meaning. I have benefitted
immeasurably from his advice and his example. On Bayle, I have been consistently inspired by conversations with Mara van der Lugt. One of the great Bayle
scholars of our time, Antony McKenna, has been unfailingly helpful in sending
material that I could not get hold of, and supplying me with early versions of
his own writings. I suspect that he will not agree with my conclusions, but that
makes me all the more grateful for his generosity.
Noel Malcolm read the typescript of this book, and offered more suggestions
and corrections than I can begin to enumerate (all remaining errors are my
own). More generally, conversations with him over the last five years have
presented me with a model of scholarly rigour, probity, and brilliance which
has never ceased to inspire, and which – alas! – I can never hope to emulate.
Last but not least, I am hugely grateful to Liz Friend-Smith for the faith she
has shown in me, for making this book so much better, and for permitting the
double-columned footnotes: a small homage to Bayle. In turn, Jane Burkowski
has been the dream copy-editor.
I dedicate this book to the staff at the Oncology Department at the Churchill
Hospital in Oxford, who saved my life; and to my family, friends, and to Lynn,
who make it worth living.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press
ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS
Bayle
APD= Addition aux Pensées diverses [1694], in OD.iii.161–86.
BC= Correspondance de Pierre Bayle, ed. E. Labrousse et al., 15 vols (Oxford, 1999–2017).
CG= Critique générale de l’histoire du Calvinisme de Mr. Maimbourg [1682], in OD.ii.160.
CP= Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus-Christ, Contrains-les d’entrer
[1686], in OD.ii.357–476.
CPD= Continuation des Pensées diverses [1705], in OD. iii.189–417.
DHC= Dictionnaire historique et critique . . . cinquième édition, ed. Pierre Desmaizeaux,
4 vols (Amsterdam, Leiden, The Hague, Utrecht, 1740). Cited by article name,
note letter (in subscript), volume and page.
EMT= Entretiens de Maxime et de Thémiste [1707], in OD.iv.1–106.
Hickson= Dialogues of Maximus and Themistius, ed. and trans. M. W. Hickson (Leiden,
2016).
NL= Nouvelles lettres de l’auteur de la Critique générale de l’Histoire du Calvinisme de
Mr. Maimbourg (Ville-France [Amsterdam], 1685), OD.ii.161–335.
NRL= Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (1684–7).
OD= Œuvres diverses de Mr Pierre Bayle, ed. E. Labrousse et al., 8 vols (Hildesheim,
1964–82).
PD= Pensées diverses, écrites à un Docteur de Sorbonne, à l’occasion de la comète [1682],
in OD.iii.3–160.
RQP= Réponse aux questions d’un provincial [1704–7], in OD.iii.501–1084.
Sup.= Supplément du Commentaire philosophique [1688], in OD.ii.477–540.
Systema= Systema totius philosophiae, in OD.iv.201–521.
Newton
H, followed by a number= The library of Isaac Newton, ed. J. Harrison (Cambridge,
1978).
Herivel= John Herivel, The background to Newton’s Principia: a study of Newton’s
dynamical researches in the years 1664–84 (Oxford, 1965).
MP= The mathematical papers of Isaac Newton, ed. D. T. Whiteside, 8 vols (Cambridge,
1967–81).
NC= The correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull, 7 vols (Cambridge,
1959–77).
Opticks (1952)= Opticks: or, A treatise of the reflections, refractions, inflections and
colours of light. Based on the 4th ed. (New York, 1952).
PW= Isaac Newton, Philosophical writings, ed. A. Janiak, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2014).
xii
Published online by Cambridge University Press
list of abbreviations and conventions
xiii
Principia= Isaac Newton, The principia: mathematical principles of natural philosophy,
ed. and trans. I. B. Cohen and A. Whitman (Berkeley, 1999). The first, second,
and third editions will be referred to as E1, E2, and E3.
Schüller= V. Schüller, ‘Newton’s scholia from David Gregory’s estate on the propositions IV through IX book III of his Principia’, in Between Leibniz, Newton, and
Kant, ed. W. Lefèvre (Dordrecht, 2001), 213–65.
Trin.= Trinity College, Cambridge
USP= Unpublished scientific papers of Isaac Newton, ed. A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall
(Cambridge, 1962).
Yah.= National Library of Israel, Yahuda Manuscripts
Others
Alum. Cantab.= J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1922–7).
AO= Œuvres de Antoine Arnauld, 43 vols (Paris, 1775).
AT= Œuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, 12 vols (Paris, 1964–76).
Bib. ch.= Bibliothèque choisie, ed. J. Le Clerc, 28 vols (1703–13).
BL= British Library, London
Bod.= Bodleian Library, Oxford
Brief. Math.= G. W. Leibniz, Briefwechsel von Leibniz mit Mathematikern, ed.
C. J. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1899).
BUH= Bibliothèque universelle et historique, ed. J. Le Clerc, 26 vols (Amsterdam, 1686–
1702).
BW= The works of Robert Boyle, ed. M. Hunger and E. B. Davis, 14 vols (London, 1999–
2000).
CSM/CSMK= The philosophical writings of Descartes, ed. J. Cottingham, R. Stroothoff,
D. Murdoch, and A. Kenny, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1985–91).
CUL= Cambridge University Library, Cambridge
GO= Pierre Gassendi, Opera omnia, 6 vols (Lyon, 1658).
HO= Œuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens, 22 vols (The Hague, 1888–1950).
Labrousse= E. Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols (Paris, 1963–4).
L–C= The Leibniz–Clarke correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester, 1956).
Cited by letter number and page.
Le Clerc corr.= Jean Le Clerc, Epistolario, ed. M. Sina, 4 vols (Florence, 1987–97).
Math. Schrift.= G. W. Leibniz, Mathematische Schriften, ed. C. J. Gerhardt, 7 vols
(Berlin, 1849–63).
Mersenne corr.= Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne, ed. P. Tannery, 17 vols (Paris,
1945–88).
Millers= René Descartes, Principles of philosophy, ed. and trans. V. R. Miller and
R. P. Miller (Dordrecht, 1983).
MO= Œuvres complètes de Malebranche, ed. A. Robinet, 20 vols (Paris, 1957–78).
Published online by Cambridge University Press
xiv
list of abbreviations and conventions
Muller, PRRD= R. A. Muller, Post-Reformation reformed dogmatics: the rise and
development of reformed orthodoxy, c.1520 to c.1725, 2nd ed., 4 vols
(Grand Rapids, 2003–6).
Nidditch= John Locke, Essay concerning human understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch
(Oxford, 1975).
OFB= The Oxford Francis Bacon, ed. G. Rees et al., 8 vols (1996–).
ODNB= Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition.
Oldenburg corr.= The correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall,
13 vols (Madison, 1965–86).
Opere di Galileo= Le opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. A. Favaro, 20 vols (Florence, 1890–1909).
PG= Patrologiae cursus completus, Series graeca (Paris, 1857–1912).
Phil. Schrift.= G. W. Leibniz, Philosophische Schriften, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1890).
RS= Royal Society, London
Sämtliche Schriften= G. W. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Berlin, 1923–).
Turretin, Inst.= Francis Turretin, Institutes of elenctic theology, ed. and trans.
J. T. Dennison, 3 vols (Phillipsburg, NJ, 1992–7).
Two new sciences= Galileo, Two new sciences: including centers of gravity and force of
percussion, ed. and trans. S. Drake (Madison, 1974).
For the books of the Bible, standard abbreviations are used, and references and
citations are from the Authorised Version, unless stated otherwise. Classical
texts cited in the notes are only referred to by their short titles, usually as given in
the Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, 4th ed.
(Oxford, 2005), and the appropriate book/section number (the editions used
were those of the Loeb, Teubner, or Oxford Classical Texts series). Only in those
cases when the text is relatively obscure, or when I have relied on a specific
translation, have I offered a full reference to the relevant modern edition.
Quotations are given in the original spelling (with expanded contractions
signalled), with the exception that medial ‘u’ (for ‘v’) and initial ‘v’ (for ‘u’) have
been normalised. Manuscript transcriptions are diplomatic, with the following
symbols used: insertions are signalled by <chevrons>, deletions with a strikethrough, underlining as in the original.
Bibliographical references are all repeated in the Bibliography. First references
to primary sources are given in full, with the short title used thereafter. In the
interests of economy, first references to secondary sources are given in
a contracted version, with a short title used thereafter. So what appears in the
Bibliography as Arthur, R., ‘Beeckman, Descartes and the force of motion’,
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 45 (2007), 1–28, appears first in the text as:
Arthur, ‘Force’ (2007), and thereafter as Arthur, ‘Force’.
Cross references to different chapters are in the format I.1.1 (Part, chapter,
section); cross references within the same chapter are in the format §6 (referring to section number).
Published online by Cambridge University Press
u
General Prologue
A Study in the History of Knowledge
1 The Kingdom of Darkness
This is a study in the history of knowledge. Specifically, it is an exploration of
changing conceptions of what kinds of knowledge were considered worthwhile –
and what kinds came to be deemed as worthless or even pernicious – roughly in
the two and a half centuries between 1500 and 1750, with a specific focus on the
period around 1700.
That being premised, I could not blame anyone if, on seeing the title of this
book, they expressed not only surprise but even consternation. Moreover, they
might well do so not once, but twice over. First of all, the two names of my
subtitle do not sit naturally together. To be sure, Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) and
Isaac Newton (1642–1727) were two of the great – perhaps even the greatest –
names of European life at the turn of the eighteenth century. Their vast
influence on European thought over the next hundred years (and beyond) is
unquestionable. But what do they have in common? One was a Huguenot man
of letters, journalist, and polemicist who spent most of his life in Rotterdam,
and who is famous for his defence of religious toleration, his suggestion that
a society of atheists might be able to function, his articulation of the problem of
evil, and – above all – his vast, sprawling Dictionnaire historique et critique
(1697). The other was an English natural philosopher who spent most of his
life in Cambridge and London, and who is most famous for achievements in
a field in which Bayle had no discernible talent or even interest: mathematics.
They seem to make an odd couple indeed; to my knowledge, no historian has
previously sought to construct an interpretation that aligns them in any
meaningful way.
But perhaps even more surprising will be the final words of my subtitle: ‘the
emancipation of the European mind from philosophy’.1 Surely, it will be said,
it was philosophy that did the emancipating? Such a heroic story was already
1
Readers familiar with the literature on this
period will spot the allusion to Hazard,
Crise (1935), trans. as European mind
(1953). Beyond our titles, we adopt very
different visions of the period: see further
the Conclusion to this book.
1
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
2
general prologue
immortalised in the ‘Discours préliminaire’ to the Encyclopédie (1751–72),
written by that master propagandist, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert (1717–
83). D’Alembert told his story in unambiguously political terms, and he knew
exactly who its hero should be:
Descartes at least dared to show intelligent minds how to throw off the
yoke of scholasticism, of opinion, of authority – in a word, of prejudices
and barbarism. And by that revolt, the fruits of which we are reaping
today, philosophy received from him a service perhaps more difficult to
render than all those rendered afterwards by his illustrious successors. He
can be thought of as a leader of conspirators who had the courage to arise,
first, against a despotic and arbitrary power and who, in preparing
a brilliant revolution, laid the foundations of a more just and happier
government, which he himself was not able to see established.2
This story has in time become so powerful that it reaches well beyond the
academy, and, in some parts of Europe in particular, remains a central component of national identity.
However, d’Alembert and his collaborators were men with a political agenda
(intellectually, d’Alembert had no time for Descartes or speculative philosophy
of any sort). In fact, nothing has done more to obscure the reality of sixteenthand seventeenth-century intellectual life than to see it through the eyes of the
eighteenth and nineteenth, and to tell its history as that of a process of
philosophical liberation. That is not to say that the (long) seventeenth century
was not a transformative intellectual period. But the transformation, I contend,
was the opposite of that claimed by d’Alembert: it was not the triumph of
philosophy, but European thinkers’ self-conscious emancipation from its
lures.
What exactly do I mean by this? It is particularly important to be precise on
this score, because the inexact and anachronistic use of terms such as ‘philosophy’ and ‘science’ has done much to confuse our understanding of early
modern intellectual change. I am not concerned, for example, with ethics or
political philosophy, which in any case were minor (and usually quite trivial)
parts of philosophical pedagogy and writing at this period. Nor am I speaking
2
Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert,
‘Discours préliminaire’, in Encyclopédie,
ou Dictionnaire raisonné (Paris, 1751–
72), i.xxvi: ‘Descartes a osé du moins
montrer aux bons esprits à secoüer le
joug de la scholastique, de l’opinion, de
l’autorité, en un mot des préjugés & de la
barbarie; & par cette révolte dont nous
recueillons aujourd’hui les fruits, la
Philosophie a reçu de lui un service, plus
difficile peut-être à rendre que tous ceux
qu’elle doit à ses illustres successeurs. On
peut le regarder comme un chef de
conjurés, qui a eu le courage de s’élever
le premier contre une puissance despotique & arbitraire, & qui en préparant une
révolution éclatante, a jetté les fondemens
d’un gouvernement plus juste & plus
heureux qu’il n’a pû voir établi.’ For the
history of the conception of Descartes as
father-liberator of philosophy, see further
Schütt, Vaters (1998).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
general prologue
3
of ‘philosophy’ as a near synonym for ‘thought’ or even ‘intellectual activity’, as
it came to be used by the philosophes of eighteenth-century France, or by Kant
when he wrote that ‘in all men, as soon as their reason has developed for
speculation, there has always been and will always continue to be some kind of
metaphysics’.3 Rather, I am concerned with ‘philosophy’ in the technical sense
in which it was mostly conceived before 1700: a speculative discipline primarily composed of metaphysics and natural philosophy, to which logic was an
essential propaedeutic.4 What I shall argue is that between 1500 and 1700,
Europeans thinking, teaching, and writing across national and confessional
borders came to conceive of that enterprise as profoundly unfruitful and even
damaging, and in need of quite fundamental reform. Moreover, this was
a concerted intellectual movement – indeed, I shall argue, it was perhaps the
most important intellectual movement of the time. Of course, there had always
been those who, inspired by Paul’s words to the Colossians, had questioned the
place of ‘vain philosophy’ (Col. 2:8) in a Christian society; in fact, in almost any
philosophy commentary or textbook from the period 1200–1700 one can find
warnings about the dangers that the discipline brings with it, at least if treated
without caution. However, I am concerned not with any individual statements
to that effect, but with the large-scale structural changes that saw such critique
become more and more mainstream, and then triumph. In turn, I shall argue,
this trend provides the essential long-term context for full reinterpretations of
the thought and writings of Bayle and Newton.
My main title is taken from Book IV of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651),
in which Hobbes railed against ‘that painted and garrulous whore who has for
a long time now been taken for philosophy’ (these words are from the Latin
version of 1668).5 What is interesting about Hobbes is not such individual
complaints, but rather the fact that they were part of a vast, complex, historicophilosophical vision about the nature of knowledge and its social role, one that
has been well summarised by the last editor of Leviathan:
When the early nineteenth-century radical writer William Cobbett thought
about the many forms of economic and political injustice and manipulation
that surrounded him, he became convinced that they were all somehow
connected as parts of a great, shadowy system of oppression, which he
called ‘the Thing’. It may be said that one of the reasons for writing
Leviathan was the fact that during the late 1640s Thomas Hobbes also
became obsessed with a ‘Thing’ of his own – a complex mass of errors and
3
First Critique, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin,
1900–), iii.21: ‘in allen Menschen, so bald
Vernunft sich in ihnen bis zur Speculation
erweitert, irgend eine Metaphysik zu aller
Zeit gewesen und wird auch immer darin
bleiben’. This conveniently allowed Kant
(and his followers) to present him as the
4
5
man who ‘resolved’ all the tensions in previous philosophies. See further Conclusion,
p. 851.
For the demarcation of philosophical disciplines in medieval and early modern
Europe, see further I.1, passim.
Leviathan, iv.46, iii.1053.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
4
general prologue
absurdities, embracing false metaphysics, primitive delusions, popular
superstitions, bogus clerical pretensions, and seditious political theories –
all in some way connected, and all tending directly or indirectly towards the
destruction of civil government.6
Neither Bayle nor Newton was as concerned with ‘the destruction of civil
government’ as was Hobbes. (Although, as we shall see, neither was unconcerned with the effects that philosophising had had on civil life.) However, they
(and a great number of their counterparts) were also driven by the spectre of
a ‘Thing’ of their own: a genealogical conception of a Kingdom of Darkness in
which ‘philosophy’ as it had been practised since ancient times explained
almost all the errors and vices – intellectual, theological, and even social –
into which mankind had fallen. Moreover, for all the very real differences
between the two men’s visions and the purposes to which they deployed them,
there were also some remarkable similarities. Above all, both Bayle and
Newton came, by the end of their lives, to conceive of the history of the
human mind from Europe to the Far East as one in which a central, driving
force was metaphysical animism and emanationism; in turn, both saw their
own philosophies as, partially, responses to this threat. In an earlier monograph, I insisted on the importance of historical thinking to the philosophical
projects of the seventeenth century.7 Where I previously made that case
synoptically, I shall here put my money where my mouth is, and demonstrate
that neither Bayle nor Newton can be understood without grasping what they
took to be the Kingdom of Darkness which they were opposing. Although
I shall explore the historical and scholarly moves that they made, my first
priority will not be the history of scholarship; rather, it will to be reconstruct
their thought as a whole.
This will involve going into great textual detail, for which I make no
apologies. If we are to understand the intellectual transformation of early
modernity, it is no good resorting to grand, anachronistic generalities (‘rationalism’, ‘empiricism’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘modernity’, etc.); nor will we get very far
if we confine ourselves solely to the social history of knowledge (although that
will be part of our story). Rather, we must try to capture as fully as possible
what mattered to our actors themselves, whether in their philology, their
mathematics, their teaching, or anything else. Just as importantly, we must
not only investigate the totality of what they wrote, but also – as much as
humanly possible – the totality of what they read. This is particularly important in the case of Bayle and Newton. Too often, they are interpreted via
conceptual analysis of snippets of their writing: a famous article from the
Dictionnaire here; a quotation from the General Scholium there. Yet more
reified ‘-isms’ are then applied to the results – ‘scepticism’, ‘fideism’,
6
Malcolm, ‘Introduction’ (2012), 48.
7
Levitin, Ancient wisdom (2015).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
general prologue
5
‘voluntarism’, etc. – which leave us very far from what our thinkers themselves
were thinking and doing. Needless to say, that is not always the case: this book
has been written in dialogue with some of the most remarkable historical
scholarship ever produced. I shall not at this point belabour the reader with
historiographical surveys;8 this book is long enough as it is. Rather, the best
way to introduce my case is simply to summarise it.
2 This Book
(i) Method and Approach
First, a word on method and the wider conversation in which I am engaged.
I began by saying that this book offers a study in the history of knowledge. This
tag is the latest of many that has been applied to the kind of history that I am
writing (history of ideas, intellectual history, etc.).9 Good history is driven not
by methods or approaches but by questions, so what we call our enterprise is
not so important. That being said, there are a few approaches or epistemes with
which I am particularly engaged. First of all, it just so happens that as I write it
is almost exactly fifty years since Quentin Skinner published a famous article
on ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’, in which he called for
a contextual approach to the subject.10 Without entering into the muchdebated methodological implications of Skinner’s ideas, I can say that, in the
broadest sense, I am writing contextual intellectual history. However, I should
like to offer two qualifications. The first is that I am not sure it needs to be
particularly associated with any so-called ‘Cambridge school’. In fact, I should
particularly like to emphasise that in this book I shall be entering into dialogue
with historians who were doing quite brilliant contextual intellectual history
before 1969, whether they knew it or not. Here I mean not only the well-known
Alexandre Koyré, but also the great Anneliese Meier and Elisabeth Labrousse,
who have perhaps not received the recognition they deserve (at least in the
anglophone world) for sad reasons that are still all too prevalent.
Second, it is worth saying that ‘context’ can mean many things. It can mean
short-term context: the local, often polemical aims that a writer has when
composing a text. Several of the revisionist interpretations I shall be offering in
this book fall into that category. They depend, above all, on chronological
precision. I shall show, for example, that the ideas expressed by Newton in the
General Scholium and the Rules of Philosophising added to the second edition
of the Principia (1713) were not articulations of some timeless Newtonian
‘method’, but rather interventions in very specific, local, disputes. In Bayle’s
8
9
For Bayle, see II.Proleg.1; for Newton,
III.Proleg.1.
For attempts to define this approach, see
Vogel, ‘Wissensgeschichte’ (2004); the
10
discussion between Mulsow and Daston
in Tamm and Burke, Debating (2018);
and the works cited there.
Skinner, ‘Meaning’ (1969).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
6
general prologue
case, I shall demonstrate that some of his most famous ideas, not least
concerning atheism, changed significantly over time, almost always as
a response to polemical circumstances and to the reading he had undertaken.
However, to confine context to such local matters is surely mistaken: it is
effectively to turn every text into a pamphlet. For all of world history, at least
some educated men and women have aspired to be something more than hired
pens, hacks, or propagandists, and have held beliefs that can only be explained
as the product of much more long-term intellectual developments, developments which in turn manifest themselves at a deeper, structural level, not least
in formal education (if such has been present). This is why this book opens
with a section comprising three chapters devoted to such structural changes.
The narratives in these chapters, while they are inevitably more synoptic and
dependent on the secondary literature than my analyses of Bayle and Newton,
are original, and – I hope – offer important diachronic analyses of early
modern intellectual life. In turn, I shall suggest that they provide the longterm contexts without which we simply cannot understand either Bayle or
Newton, who will be interpreted both as products of these structural factors,
and as contributors to their development. These factors are those which explain
the dwindling cultural capital of speculative philosophy in early modern
Europe. In this regard, this is a study in the history of forgetting, or more
precisely, of sidelining; a history of how certain questions that had for centuries
been central to knowledge were deemed fruitless or irrelevant. What is particularly interesting is that in the case of Bayle, Newton, and many others, this
was a conscious process which required the postulation of what one might call
‘philosophies of anti-philosophy’; that process was in turn internalised and
incorporated into the structures of knowledge production.
In this first part, but also in the parts on Bayle and Newton, I shall engage
with several branches of intellectual history. Perhaps the most obvious is the
history of philosophy. Although sadly in abeyance in Britain (with some
notable exceptions), this field, particularly its early modern variant, is flourishing across Europe, North America, and Australasia. To testify to this, I need
only offer the names of Roger Ariew, Delphine Bellis, Katherine Brading,
Antonella Del Prete, Mihnea Dobre, Mary Domski, Daniel Garber, Dana
Jalobeanu, Andrew Janiak, Christoph Lüthy, Sophie Roux, Tad Schmaltz,
and the very many others whose works are cited in the following pages. It is
in this field that one finds the most acute textual and conceptual precision,
inevitably grounded on close reading of the primary literature. Moreover, the
field has in recent years seen great leaps forward in terms of historical awareness, to the extent that it now often leads the way in debunking anachronistic
or proleptic myths accrued over the centuries. My own approach, with its
strong focus on institutional history, disciplinary identity, and local context, is
probably more historicist than that of most historians of philosophy. However,
I certainly do not want this to obscure my great debts to the practitioners in
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
general prologue
7
that field, and my desire to engage with them. Indeed, I dare to hope that this
book goes at least a little way towards increasing the level of conversation
between early modern intellectual historians and historians of philosophy
(often based in Philosophy departments).
One of the most fruitful avenues of research in recent years has been the
integration of the history of philosophy and the history of science so as to
explore what was, after all, the early modern discipline of natural philosophy
(to the names listed above, one may add that of Peter Anstey, and those of the
small army of scholars working on Cartesian natural philosophy).11 One of the
great virtues of this scholarship is that it has served to dampen the excesses of
the ‘hard’ social history of science that threatened to take over the field in the
1980s and 1990s, and which confused complex, multifaceted contextualism
with simplistic political reductionism. Accordingly, this is another body of
literature with which I am in dialogue, even if I shall argue that philosophers
have significantly overplayed the extent to which Newton was a metaphysician
or a ‘philosopher’ in the modern sense of the word. Indeed, one of my central
aims is to chart the disciplinary self-conception of early modern natural
philosophers themselves, and to explore where they drew the boundaries
between legitimate and illegitimate approaches to nature – as we shall see,
the latter were increasingly aligned with overly ‘philosophical’ methods.
Where I shall depart from some of this literature is in my heavy emphasis on
the importance of the history of medicine and mixed mathematics to this story,
both of which (especially the former) tend not to be incorporated into the more
intellectualist approaches to the history of science. Their influence, I shall
argue, was central to the de-philosophisation of the investigation of nature.
Another field with which I shall be in dialogue, but which tends to be rather
neglected by both intellectual historians and historians of philosophy, is the
history of theology. By this I mean theology considered not in some grand,
neo-Weberian manner (in that regard, many unconvincing variations on the
Merton thesis continue to appear), but rather the technical discipline as it
actually existed in early modern Europe: conducted primarily in Latin, taught
in scores of universities and academies, and published in hundreds of books
that remain virtually unknown to secular scholarship. Many of these books (at
least those produced in the Reformed world) have been studied expertly by
American and Dutch historians of Reformed theology, most prominently
Richard Muller. Their approaches tend to be very textual, and show limited
interest in placing the texts they so thoroughly explore in institutional or
broader social context. Nonetheless, they have offered some of the most
important revisionist scholarship concerning early modern European thought,
11
My interpretation of early modern
natural-philosophical
change,
as
offered in I.1, was partially developed
in dialogue with Anstey’s work on the
history of experimental philosophy: see
Levitin, ‘Experimental’ (2019).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
8
general prologue
and it is a shame that more historians and philosophers have not engaged with
their findings. As I hope to show, neither Bayle, nor Newton, nor the wider
framework of early modern intellectual history can be understood without
a thorough grounding in the technicalities of the history of theology, however
secular we ourselves may be.
Perhaps the only area of intellectual history that has started to form
a conversation with the historians of theology is the history of scholarship.
This field has exploded in visibility in recent decades (above all due to the
impact of the works of Anthony Grafton, and then Jean-Louis Quantin,
Kristine Haugen, and others) and, as in my previous work, I shall continue
to insist on the necessity of understanding the philological-historical components of the philosophical texts with which we are concerned. These were not
humanist ornamentation: these texts are incomprehensible without
a thorough grounding in the history of early modern scholarship. The early
modern ‘Aristotle’ was certainly not the modern one; indeed, Greek philosophy was not even considered as a unique phenomenon. Particularly important
to my overall thesis will be a reading of early modern oriental scholarship and
its relationship to European philosophical debate. As we shall see, Bayle,
Newton, and a host of other Europeans often conceptualised what philosophy
should (and shouldn’t) be, and what the human mind could (and couldn’t)
achieve, on the basis of their reading of the latest oriental scholarship and
travel literature.
Inevitably, I shall also be brought into contact with other forms of historical
enquiry. For example, when I come to Bayle, it will be very important to place
him precisely in the context of Franco-Dutch politics, and especially debates
concerning toleration that were conducted not just in texts but also at the
highest political levels. It will also be important to think about the social history
of intellectual activity, and the nature of the so-called ‘republic of letters’. This
brings me nicely to the final major body of literature with which I shall be in
contact: that concerning the intellectual history of the period around c.1700
more broadly conceived. As I have previously argued, and as others have since
also come to argue,12 I believe this important period has been misunderstood
because of a conflation of intellectual and sociopolitical change, a conflation
that has generated the misleading category of ‘enlightenment’. Now, I am not
particularly concerned with nomenclature.13 Rather, my main concern is with
doing justice to early modern intellectual history on its own terms, and not
reading the seventeenth century as a mere propaedeutic to the (supposedly)
enlightened glories of the eighteenth. One of the great myths of enlightenment
is the one propagated by d’Alembert with which I began: that philosophy
precipitated some kind of intellectual liberation in the seventeenth century. As
12
See e.g. Bevilacqua, Republic (2018).
13
On this score, see the devastating account
in Schmidt, ‘Inventing’ (2003).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
general prologue
9
we shall see, contemporaries perceived the case to be exactly the opposite: they
were emancipating themselves from the pointless or actively damaging pursuit
of abstract, hubristic, philosophical speculation in favour of forms of knowledge that – they had decided – were preferable. They were not ushering in
a proto-Kantian ‘Age of Reason’, but had a peculiar agenda of their own. Nor,
conversely, was the critique of systematic philosophising the child of the
eighteenth century, as so many eminent historians of the ‘enlightenment’ –
from Ernst Cassirer to J. G. A. Pocock – have claimed.14 In rescuing the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the dogmatic preoccupations of the
eighteenth and nineteenth, my broadest aim (if I may for one moment
overreach myself) is to do for early modern intellectual history what Peter
Brown did for late antiquity: to demarcate it as a rich, fascinating, brilliantly alien subject of study that does not need to be – and suffers from
being – incorporated into sweeping narratives of ‘modernity’ or
‘enlightenment’.
Before I summarise my argument, I should say that this conclusion is not in
the slightest designed as a commentary on modern academic philosophy,
which, as far as I can tell, is a brilliant and flourishing discipline. The issues
addressed in this book can sometimes bring out rather emotive and ideological
responses: from positivists who insist that ‘real’ science is by definition antiphilosophical; secularists who inevitably associate ‘metaphysics’ with ecclesiastical oppression; other types of secularists who insist that ‘philosophy’ has
always been the great liberator of the human mind; anti-secularists who see the
erosion of the Thomist synthesis as the one of the great disasters of Western
civilisation, and so on. I share none of these perspectives, and am inevitably
shocked when various, mutually contradictory presentist intentions are ascribed
to me on the basis of my academic work (to my very real astonishment, one
reviewer of a previous monograph even attempted to connect my ideas to my
ethnic origin). I am a mere historian, and I write solely out of curiosity and
a desire to understand what seems to me to have been a very important moment
in the history of knowledge. There is no further moral to my story. Philosophy
conceived in its most speculative-systematic form survived – if barely – in the
eighteenth century (primarily in Germany (see I.1.9; I.2.4; IV.2)), and then
made a triumphant return via its incorporation into the Humboldtian research
university. This allowed its practitioners – especially neo-Kantians – to rewrite
its history as a mythology in which such philosophy had always flourished, to be
14
Cassirer, Enlightenment (1951), 6–7: ‘The
seventeenth century had seen the real task
of philosophy in the construction of the
philosophical “system” . . . The eighteenth
century abandons this kind of deduction
and proof. It no longer vies with Descartes
and Malebranche, with Leibniz and
Spinoza for the prize of systematic rigor
and completeness.’ Pocock, Barbarism
(1999–2015), i.156: ‘so much of what we
know as Enlightenment consisted in the
substitution of the probable for the metaphysical’. See further IV.2.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
10
general prologue
brought to its apogee by Kant himself.15 My aim is only to get past such
mythology to the reality of early modern intellectual life. The question of what
the role of philosophy should be in the modern university – or modern society –
I leave entirely to others.
(ii) Summary
In the Prolegomena to Part I, I shall provide a brief demonstration of the low
status of philosophy (at least as traditionally conceived) in the years around
1700, even among those who were supposed to be teaching it. I shall ask how
this remarkable situation came about.
In I.1, I shall examine the long-term emancipation of natural philosophy from
metaphysics. By this I do not mean some abstract process that I am reading into
the historical record, but rather a process that the historical actors themselves
recognised, and which many of them sought to promote. Three developments
were particularly important, all of which had their origin in fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century Italy: the humanist critique of scholastic Aristotelianism; the
adoption of that critique by secular natural philosophers and – above all – by
physicians and other medical practitioners; and the development of a parallel
critique of philosophy by mixed mathematicians. By the middle of the seventeenth century, natural philosophy had been colonised by the physicians on
the one hand and the mixed mathematicians on the other (often collaborating
with each other), almost all of whom defined their activity against metaphysics
and ‘philosophy’ as they believed it to have been practised for much of the
previous two millennia. Crucially, this had major intellectual consequences.
Contrary to a prevailing historiographical and philosophical assumption, the
vast majority of practising natural philosophers in the second half of the
seventeenth century were not ontological mechanists. The synthetic, systembuilding labours of Descartes (and even those perceived to be less dogmatic
than him, such as Pierre Gassendi) did not prove successful, at least outside of
pedagogy, and most natural philosophers simply disdained explanation at the
level of fundamental principles, confining themselves to what I call ‘operational’ mechanism. Likewise, they abandoned many of the explanatory ambitions of traditional metaphysics and natural philosophy.
In I.2, I provide another structural explanation for the fading of philosophy:
a shift in theological method. In both Catholic and Protestant Europe, theologians came to identify the triumph of overly philosophical approaches to
theology as one of the great catastrophes of their civilisation. Instead, they
15
For the hugely influential neo-Kantian
rewriting of the history of philosophy,
above all by W. G. Tennemann, see,
inter alia, Hochstrasser, Theories (2000),
206–12; Hunter, Rival (2001), 15–21,
passim; Di Bella, La storia (2008);
Catana, System (2008), 193–281;
Bondeli, ‘Progress’ (2015).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
general prologue
11
said, theology should be a primarily philological enterprise, or what was
sometimes called ‘positive theology’. They did this for a variety of reasons:
some because of their philosophical priorities, others because the argument
allowed them to score points in inter- or intra-confessional polemics. The
claim was not limited to any philosophical, theological, or ideological group. In
other words, it was not the preserve of Cartesians or experimentalists;
Protestants or Catholics; or of ‘Erasmians’ or ‘latitudinarians’. It became
culturally ubiquitous precisely because it served so many ends, including
those of the most orthodox theologians, many of whom were happy to see
theology de-philosophised. In the second half of the seventeenth century,
the theologians making this methodological claim formed a tactical alliance with the anti-scholastic philosophers who had loudly insisted on the
separation of theology and philosophy. The result was a culturally prevalent attitude that sometimes sounds ‘fideist’. In fact, at the epistemological
level, the mainstream conception of the relationship between faith and
reason was not very different from what it had been in 1300. What had
been transformed however, was the practice of theology. In theory, separationism served to liberate philosophy; in practice, it worked to render
marginal its most rationalistic forms. The idea of a growing ‘rationalism’
in theology in this period is a myth.
In I.3, I switch to a more intellectualist context. This chapter shows that the
seventeenth century saw a major shift in Europeans’ conception of the natural
tendency of the human mind. In response to developments in philology and
oriental scholarship, they now declared that a perfectly rational man or woman
bereft of divine revelation would inexorably be led to what we would now label
animism, pantheism, or vitalism. There was considerable debate on this score,
especially concerning whether that animism concealed a corrupt monotheism,
or whether it was more akin to a monist atheism – Gassendi and his followers
across Europe were crucial in promoting the second view. This debate then
meshed with that concerning Asian – especially Chinese – religion and philosophy, which was based on sources brought back and translated by Catholic
missionaries. Gradually, the second reading won out. The emergent set of
historical-philosophical assumptions became so dominant that, by 1700, many
Europeans conceived of a ‘logic of paganism’ that was believed to encompass
religious, theological, and philosophical beliefs across the world, past and
present, from ancient Egypt to modern Japan, all of which were said to be
manifestation of an atheistic immanentism. As we shall see, this development
had largely occurred before Spinoza had put pen to paper, and had little to do
with him (although his ideas came to be assimilated with ‘oriental’ thought).
Rather, it was the product of a kind of historico-philosophical ‘critique of pure
reason’ avant la lettre. The dominance of this set of assumptions in turn had
a remarkable impact on wider discourse about what it was to be ‘rational’, to
believe in the dogmas of Christianity, or to engage in philosophy or theology.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
12
general prologue
Part II of the book turns to Bayle. In the Prolegomena, I outline the famous
‘Bayle enigma’, and a perspective on his intellectual biography that emphasises
its elitist and reactive dimension: almost everything Bayle wrote was at least in
part a response to something he had recently read. I also summarise my own
argument, suggesting that once we place him in his proper historical context,
the Bayle enigma dissolves.
In II.1 I explore Bayle’s historico-philosophical vision as it was presented
above all in the Dictionnaire and the Continuation des Pensées diverses
(1705). Bayle articulated the ‘Gassendist’ line on the history of the human
mind: without revelation, that mind was incapable of conceiving of
a transcendent God, instead postulating various immanent principles.
Bayle’s broader purpose was neither ‘fideist’ nor ‘sceptical’; rather, it was
to present Cartesian occasionalism (grounded in the revealed truth of
creation ex nihilo) as the only possible answer to the atheistic logic of
paganism. For Bayle, occasionalism did face explanatory limits, all deriving
from man’s inability to comprehend the nature of soul–body interaction, but
these were no worse than those faced by other philosophies, and, in any case,
had already been admitted by the Cartesian philosophers on whom Bayle
drew. Above all, I shall show that Bayle needs to be read as a self-conscious
Cartesian natural theologian.
In II.2, I shall turn to the most famous problem that, according to Bayle,
neither Cartesian occasionalism nor any other philosophy could solve: that
of reconciling divine power and the fact of human sin, most famously
articulated in the Manichean articles of the Dictionnaire. This is where
interpreters have most often found a fideist or atheist Bayle. However,
once we place Bayle’s ideas in their proper theological context, both readings prove unsatisfactory. Rather, Bayle was pursuing a twofold polemical
argument. First, he sought to defend the rationality of believing in Reformed
predestinarian dogma. As we shall see, Bayle followed in the footsteps of
several Reformed theologians – many of whom he knew personally – in
arguing that while the problem of evil was unsolvable, the most rational
path to adopt in the face of the irreconcilability of divine power and human
sin was to surrender oneself to a predestinarian theology that at least had the
benefit of best respecting the divine excellence. This argument was designed
to oppose the claim that such a predestinarian theology would have nefarious social consequences by leading men into a destructive fatalism.
Bayle’s second aim in articulating the problem of evil was to contribute to
his case for toleration. Although Bayle believed that the Reformed view was
the correct one, he acknowledged that no side could prove its position
definitively, and so could hardly claim that anyone’s error on the issue
stemmed from wilful error – hence there were no grounds to persecute. In
other words, the emancipation of theology from philosophy would both
diminish odium theologicum and help the Reformed defend their beliefs. All
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
general prologue
13
these ideas Bayle developed through conscious, deliberate, and intense
engagement with the writings and ideas of Reformed theologians.
In. II.3, I continue on this theme by showing that Bayle was not articulating
a fideist position – let alone advocating any doctrine of double truth. Rather, he
was making a case for a shift in theological method, away from philosophising
about the mysteries. In this regard, he was heavily influenced by developments
in theological method over the previous century, above all the shift to ‘positive’
theology charted in I.2. Once this is established, we can explain his disputes
with so-called ‘rationaux’ Jean Le Clerc and Isaac Jacquelot. As it turns out,
neither side was more ‘rationalist’ than the other; in fact, each side accused the
other of rationalism. In reality, the debate was a confessional one. Bayle,
seeking to defend the Reformed account of predestination, accused Le Clerc
of a hubristic, semi-Pelagian rationalism. Le Clerc, seeking to defend
Arminianism, accused Bayle of a hubristic, necessitarian rationalism (and
then of atheism). The greatest irony is that Bayle and Le Clerc – both students
of Louis Tronchin – agreed that theology should be de-philosophised so as to
suppress the odium theologicum that had torn European society apart. That
these two tolerationists themselves engaged in precisely such odium theologicum is a perfect demonstration of the continued force of confessional conflict
on intellectual life even in the early eighteenth century.
In II.4 I turn to Bayle’s earlier writings, so as to explain how he came to
develop his mature position on the place of philosophy in the system of
knowledge. I begin with Bayle’s case for virtuous atheism in his Pensées diverses
sur la comète (1682). I show that that work was largely a literary enterprise which
proved entirely uncontroversial for the first decade after its publication. If Bayle
had a systematic intellectual point to make, it was the anti-Pelagian one that the
Fall had rendered humans incapable of following their reason. Bayle returned to
the issue of virtuous atheism only after his falling out with Pierre Jurieu, who
dug up the book as part of his early-1690s campaign against his former friend.
On the back of a concerted programme of reading in the history of religion and
philosophy, Bayle now developed his thesis substantially, placing it in line with
that explored in II.1. He now argued that history and ethnography demonstrated that philosophers, addicted to hubristic speculation, were the most likely
to fall into speculative atheism. At the same time, they were most likely to
recognise and follow the dictates of natural law imprinted on the hearts of all (in
line with the whole tradition of Reformed theology, Bayle was a dogmatic moral
rationalist). Meanwhile, the common people were most likely to fall into
uncritical idolatry and immorality. When he came to defend the Pensées in
the 1690s and early 1700s, Bayle elaborated significantly on what he perceived to
be the historical manifestations of these eternal sociological truths. He now
deployed them to defend not just his earlier ideas about virtuous atheism, but
also the other themes central to his thought, above all the superiority of
Reformed faith and predestinarian dogma, and the value of religious toleration.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
14
general prologue
In other words, he had constructed his mature vision of his Kingdom of
Darkness, one which explained how philosophy had been responsible for the
evils of the world, and also how it could be reformed to correct them.
In Part III, I turn to Isaac Newton. In the Prolegomena, I outline and
contextualise Newton’s conception of natural-philosophical method before
the publication of the Principia (1687). It was defined above all by the same
themes as had been articulated by mixed mathematicians (including his own
mentor Isaac Barrow) earlier in the century (as introduced in I.1). Crucially,
Newton declared that proper natural philosophy should be a self-limiting
mathematical science of phenomenological properties, one which was unconcerned with deeper ontological or causal explanations. Drawing on new
evidence, I offer a full contextualisation of the notoriously difficult ‘De gravitatione’ manuscript, which – contrary to a literature that presents it as a work
of profound metaphysics – I demonstrate to be the start of some hydrostatics
lectures delivered in the early 1670s, in which Newton again disdained any
non-mathematical philosophical speculation, including on infinite space.
I place the composition of the Principia within the context of mixed mathematics and mechanics as it was being practised in England and Europe at the
time, above all by John Wallis. I also chart Newton’s interest in revealed
theology, which only emerged in 1677, and which did not turn him into an
antitrinitarian until much later. There is no evidence that this interest shaped
his natural philosophy at this time, even at the rhetorical level.
In III.1 I explore Newton’s justifications of the method he had adopted in the
Principia in various writings composed between the mid-1680s and the 1690s.
Only gradually did Newton start referring to God as part of such justifications, or
worrying about the fact that gravity was not ontologically mechanical. Even
then, he made it abundantly clear that he did not know how God enacted
gravitation; all that mattered was that he did. There is no sign of an elaborate
metaphysics of divine omnipresence in the texts written at this time; in fact, both
Newton and his first followers disdained speculation on such matters. Most
importantly, Newton revised the ‘Hypotheses’ of the first edition of the Principia
into the ‘Rules’ of the second. Drawing on previously unknown manuscript
evidence, I chart this process in unprecedented detail, showing that its aim was
to combat the postulation of subtle matter to account for gravitation. In the
process, Newton developed his mature methodological ideas, including his
famous disdain for ‘hypotheses’, and his use of induction and transduction to
establish the limits of natural philosophy’s explanatory potential.
In III.2 I turn to the Queries to the Latin Optice (1706), especially their talk
of space as being akin to the divine sensorium. I provide strong circumstantial
evidence to suggest that these Queries were composed in collaboration with
Samuel Clarke (who translated the Opticks (1704) into English), and that
Newton’s natural-theological ideas were derivative of those of Clarke and
George Cheyne. Most importantly, the sensorium analogy once again has
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
general prologue
15
nothing to do with a metaphysics of divine omnipresence. Rather, it is part of
an anti-Cartesian analogical natural theology, one developed for very specific,
local polemical circumstances. Such a natural theology, Newton and his
collaborators believed, would predicate an intelligent God, rather than the
impersonal, metaphysical first principle which, they claimed, was the logical
consequence of Cartesian and other speculative philosophies.
In III.3 I chart the genesis and intentions behind the famous General Scholium,
and other texts composed around the time of its publication. By this time, open
warfare had broken out between Newton and Leibniz, who had his own historicophilosophical vision of the Kingdom of Darkness (he even used the phrase). In
response, Newton now demarcated more precisely the disciplinary boundaries of
legitimate natural philosophy, becoming ever more convinced that metaphysics
was a philosophical non-discipline. Meanwhile, the famous talk of a ‘God of
Dominion’ that appears in the General Scholium was again derived from Clarke.
Responding to the particularly idiosyncratic Arianism of William Whiston, Clarke
persuaded Newton to abandon his own Arianism in favour of a non-committal
position that condemned both Arians and Trinitarians for metaphysical speculation. The concept of the ‘God of Dominion’ was the product of Clarke’s biblical
researches towards this conclusion. In the General Scholium, its sole role is exactly
the same as that of the natural theology of the Queries to the Optice: to suggest that
the study of nature helps predicate an intelligent, personal deity, rather than an
impersonal metaphysical nature. This is revealed in a manuscript text in which
Newton self-interpreted the General Scholium, printed here for the first time.
Positively, Newton’s conception of the natural philosopher’s true task was coming
more and more to be defined against the persona of the metaphysician.
In III.4 I chart Newton’s mature vision of the Kingdom of Darkness as he
developed it in the years c.1715–20. Newton came to believe that the discipline
of metaphysics was the root of almost all intellectual error that had befallen the
world throughout history: the animism of the pagans from Egypt to Asia; the
pointless, unbiblical theological speculation that had precipitated heresy and
then persecution among Christians; and the erroneous, non-mathematical
natural philosophy that had dominated from antiquity through to the time of
Descartes. He was able to develop this vision because he had conducted a new
programme of reading, including books that emerged from Bayle’s circle, above
all by Jacques Basnage. But where Bayle had argued that the only solution to the
problems caused by such a Kingdom of Darkness was to be found in a neoCartesian natural theology, and a concomitant separation of philosophy from
theology, Newton agreed only with the second point. His followers shared his
opinion, and launched a successful assault on the discipline of metaphysics, and
on the very idea of any non-phenomenological or mathematical philosophy.
In the Conclusion (IV) I shall summarise my thesis, and explore what it
might mean for our wider conception of intellectual life around 1700, and for
its consequences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
16
general prologue
One final historiographical comment is in order. Having read this summary,
some readers may feel that my thesis has similarities with, or even retreads in the
footsteps of, the well-known idea that early modern philosophy was transformed by scepticism, a thesis articulated most powerfully, in many influential
publications, by Richard Popkin.16 In his wake, a great deal of effort has gone
into a kind of taxonomic history that tries to figure out who in the seventeenth
century was an Academic sceptic, who a Pyrrhonist, and so on. While this
approach has produced some very exciting scholarship, some of which will be
cited in parts of this book, I think its overall aims are misguided and have
created unnecessary interpretative confusion, perhaps concerning Bayle more
than anyone else. There were no real sceptics in the seventeenth century, at least
in the philosophical mainstream (it may perhaps be legitimate to extend the tag
to figures such as François de La Mothe Le Vayer (1588–1672), but I do not see
him exerting any great influence on the course of intellectual history). To be
sure, sceptical arguments were often used; moreover, the possibility of attaining
Aristotelian scientia in any one field was frequently questioned.17 However, that
is not at all the same as a totalising scepticism in any of its ancient forms (which
were as much a socio-moral posture as a philosophical position), let alone the
destructive Pyrrhonism that is frequently attributed to Bayle. Indeed, one of the
most surprising conclusions of this book is that if we are to rank philosophers on
a scale from ‘sceptical’ to ‘dogmatic’ then Newton emerges as significantly more
‘sceptical’ than Bayle.
But as my comments will have suggested, I do not think this is a fruitful
mode of analysis. The real debate was about the disciplinary identity of
philosophy as a positive enterprise and its place within a legitimate system of
knowledge. In this regard, someone using the most destructively sceptical
arguments to attack, say, the viability of metaphysics as a philosophical discipline might at the same time construct the most elaborate set of explanations in
physics (as we shall see, there were many such people). The total destruction of
knowledge or a moral posture of constant suspension of belief on all matters
were not real options in early modern Europe, just as they are not today.
16
See esp. Popkin, Scepticism (2003).
The
most
important
syntheses
informed by his work, with which I
am implicitly in dialogue, are Lennon,
Battle (1993) and Watson, Downfall
(1966).
17
For the same distinction regarding medieval philosophy, see Pasnau, ‘Certainty’
(2014). I have previously questioned the
usefulness of telling seventeenth-century
intellectual history as the after-story of
reified ancient ‘-isms’ in Ancient wisdom,
3–4, passim.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press
PART I
Giving Up Philosophy
The Transformation of a System of Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Published online by Cambridge University Press
I
Prolegomena
Giving Up Philosophy
Sometimes it takes an outsider to see the bigger picture. This, I think, has been
the case with the history of early modern philosophy. For it has taken a great
historian of medieval philosophy, Robert Pasnau, to point out an essential
truth about what he calls ‘the fragility of philosophical thought’ that has not
previously been stated, at least so starkly:
as scholasticism collapsed in seventeenth-century Europe, one thing that
might easily have happened is that philosophy simply died. That this did
not happen is due in large part to René Descartes . . . In speaking of the
death of philosophy, I am imagining the end of any flourishing public
inquiry into abstract questions about nature, values, and the like,
approached largely in terms of a priori conceptual connections, developed
in terms of carefully articulated theses, and supported by arguments in
light of potential objections . . . whatever private metaphysical musings we
might be inclined to undertake, it is surely the case that the survival of
institutions that foster the teaching and publication of philosophy cannot
be taken for granted. Such institutions have not emerged in all cultures,
and they have faded in some, such as early medieval Europe and the
modern Islamic world, after thriving there for centuries . . . The early
seventeenth century was a particularly vulnerable time. When ambitious
thinkers considered how best to surmount the stifling legacy of scholastic
philosophy, it was an open question just how much of scholasticism to
throw out. To be sure, much of Aristotle would go, along with the
syllogistic form and the technical vocabulary. But if one looks over the
various ways in which authors attempted to go beyond scholasticism, one
finds very often that they gave up much more than this – that they gave up
the very practice of doing philosophy.1
According to Pasnau, it was only Descartes’s refusal ‘to throw out the philosophy along with the scholastic method’, and his continued belief ‘that the
methods and problems of philosophy were real problems, best solved through
the old-fashioned methods of conceptual analysis and a priori argument’, that
saved philosophy (defined in this way) and allowed it to survive as a discipline
1
Pasnau, Metaphysical themes (2011), 93.
19
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press
20
giving up philosophy
which ‘we take for granted . . . as a mainstay of higher education, an obligatory
offering for any university’.2
I think that Pasnau is quite right in his diagnosis. However, unlike him,
I believe that Descartes only briefly prolonged the life of philosophy considered
in this manner, and that its survival in the modern university is exactly that:
a bare academic survival of something that was far more culturally central until
the seventeenth century. What I should like to tell is the story of how that
cultural centrality was challenged and gradually dislodged. By 1700, a great
number of educated Europeans considered the greatest intellectual triumph of
their society (or its greatest need) to be its emancipation from speculative
philosophy, and especially from metaphysics. That kind of speculative philosophising did survive – barely – in eighteenth-century Germany, and then,
revitalised by Kant in particular, found its institutional home in the research
university that first developed in the German lands; it is now a flourishing
discipline in many such universities across the world. But that has created the
false impression that the story of early modern intellectual history is the story
of philosophy’s triumph. Contemporaries, however, saw things very
differently.
Take, for example, a relatively well-known figure: the Amsterdam-based
Arminian theologian, journalist, and pedagogue Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736). Le
Clerc is sometimes taken for a proponent of a rather ill-defined ‘rationalism’.
However, even a cursory examination of his works reveals an attitude which,
speaking somewhat hyperbolically, we could label ‘anti-rationalist’. Le Clerc
spent the 1680s and 1690s complaining violently about the corruptions
philosophising – Platonic, Aristotelian, and now Cartesian – had supposedly
introduced into theology.3 This attitude became only stronger as time went
on: by the time he published his Historia Ecclesiastica in 1716, he could
conclude that book with a passionate invective against the destructive role
that hubristic ‘reason’ had played in Christian history.4
This could be taken for the tactical rhetoric of a tolerationist church historian. But even more interesting and important in this regard are Le Clerc’s
philosophy textbooks – the Logica, Ontologia, Pneumatologia, and Physica –
published in the 1690s. Although they are now virtually forgotten even by
those who study Le Clerc, these textbooks proved wildly popular across
Europe, reprinted again and again through the first quarter of the eighteenth
century.5 In the Dutch Republic they were ubiquitous; in England, 2,500 copies
2
3
4
ibid., 95.
See above all [Charles Le Cène and Jean Le
Clerc], Entretiens sur diverses matières de
théologie (Amsterdam, 1685). See further
II.3.2; III.4.1.
Jean Le Clerc, Historia Ecclesiastica
duorum
primorum
saeculorum
5
(Amsterdam, 1716), 811–12, discussed
further at III.4.1.
Numerous editions were published in
Amsterdam, London and Cambridge (see
the next note), Leipzig, Nordhausen,
Edinburgh.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
21
were printed between 1700 and 1708, a huge print run that testifies to their
immense pedagogical penetration;6 in the German-speaking lands, even vernacular textbooks often simply regurgitated Le Clerc’s ideas.7 These textbooks
were intended for undergraduate students on arts courses, of the type Le Clerc
himself taught at the Remonstrant seminary in Amsterdam, and which for the
previous half-millennium of European history had prioritised philosophy
above all other subjects. And yet his textbooks read more like injunctions
against doing virtually any philosophising at all.
The Logica presented a synthesis largely adapted from Locke – himself
adamant that pedagogy should move in an anti-philosophical direction8 –
that condemned all previous logics as the tool of pointless disputatiousness;
moreover, this tool had engendered a reckless essentialism among both
Aristotelians and Cartesians who falsely claimed to know something about
the nature of substances, and thus turned the rest of philosophy into pointless
speculation about that nature.9 If such ideas were not uncommon – though less
often expressed so starkly in pedagogy – then the Ontologia and Physica are
much more spectacularly destructive of the whole philosophical enterprise.
The former, Le Clerc explicitly presented as a catalogue of previous errors in
a non-discipline – metaphysics – which he was teaching his students only so
they could vaguely understand the garbled theology of the scholastics, which,
he again declared, was based on the absurd reification of logical concepts, as if
they were Platonic ‘archetypes’.10 Physics, meanwhile, Le Clerc presented as
a discipline that, until recently, had been rendered completely worthless by
abstract speculation upon first principles, an approach that had dominated
from the Greeks until Descartes.11 Little wonder that his textbooks received
a less than warm response from Cartesians in his home town, Geneva.12
6
7
McKenzie, Press (1966), i.100, 161, 166,
255; McKitterick, Press (1992–2004), ii.84.
The Physica was one of the first works
printed at the new Cambridge University
Press for the London bookseller Timothy
Child. A full bibliographical study would
be most revealing of early eighteenthcentury philosophical pedagogy.
See e.g. Johannes Matthaeus Barth,
Physica generalior: oder kurze Sätze von
denen natürlichen Körpern (Regensburg,
1724), 141, passim. For extensive engagement with Le Clerc in a Viennese Jesuit
textbook from the 1750s, see
Karl Scherffer, Institutionum physicae
pars prima (Vienna, 1752), 161, passim.
Such examples could be multiplied many
times over.
8
9
10
11
12
John Locke, Some thoughts concerning
education (London, 1693), 196–7, 225–6.
See e.g. Jean Le Clerc, Logica, sive ars ratiocinandi (Amsterdam, 1692), 15–17. See
further Schuurman, ‘Logic’ (2001). This is
the only one of Le Clerc’s textbooks that
has received serious scholarly attention,
although a brief general survey is also
offered in Pitassi, ‘Bon tâcheron’ (1983).
Jean Le Clerc, Ontologia [1692], in Opera
philosophica
(Amsterdam,
1704),
‘Praefatio’, 287–8. The positive use of
ontology is limited to elaborating on fundamental quasi-logical rules, such as the
principle of non-contradiction.
See further I.1.9.
Louis
Tronchin
to
Le
Clerc,
20 March 1693, Le Clerc corr., ii.92. Le
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press
22
giving up philosophy
What is remarkable about these ideas is not their existence. Rather, it is that
they were now so mainstream, as testified by their popularity among students –
and, more importantly, among their teachers. And indeed, we find similar
ideas being expressed in pedagogical institutions whichever way we look. If we
shift our gaze 600 km (almost) exactly eastwards, to Leipzig, we find an even
more bitter assault on philosophy emanating from the lectern of the professor
of natural law, Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), one which received printed
articulation in his Introductio ad philosophiam aulicam (1688) (translated into
German as Einleitung zur Hoff-Philosophie (1710)), an assault which was
rewarded by an invitation from the Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick III, to
transfer to his new pet project, the University of Halle. Inspired partially by the
ideas of his rather more scholarly father Jakob, whom we shall meet again
(I.3.3), Thomasius told the whole history of philosophy as the story of pagan
theological dualism, a theology which was transformed by the speculative
Athenians into the discipline of metaphysics, which they falsely equated with
all of ‘philosophy’. This (non-)philosophy was in turn adapted first by the
heretical gnostics, and then by Greek Christians such as Origen who were too
proud to accept the gospel mysteries without first adorning them with this
pagan nonsense. Subsequently, this metaphysical conception of philosophy
was developed by the Latin scholastics and only slightly modified by the
arrogant Descartes, despite his protestations of radical novelty.13
Thomasius’ aim was to enhance the role of ‘practical’ – and especially ethical
and legal – disciplines in university pedagogy (an aim in which he was for
a time spectacularly successful once he established his dictatorial control at
Halle).14 It may be thought, therefore, that those with less worldly interests, not
least in establishing the truth about the natural world – which, after all, still
came under the ambit of ‘natural philosophy’ – would be more sympathetic to
the whole philosophical enterprise. And yet if we turn our gaze back westwards
(still travelling along almost precisely the same parallel), to 1690s Oxford –
hardly known as a den of radical intellectual activism – we find even those
dedicated to studying and teaching about nature using the most public of
occasions to rail against abstract philosophising. The occasion was the
Commencement Act of July 1693, a large-scale public event at which all the
university’s leading dignitaries were present, accompanied by as many notable
guests as they could cajole into attending. The speaker was David Gregory
(1659–1708), the recently appointed Savilian Professor of Astronomy, whom
13
Clerc was nonplussed: see his reply of
5 January 1694, Le Clerc corr., ii.115, in
which it is interesting to see some of the
first seeds of the myth of ‘English
empiricism’.
Christian Thomasius, Introductio ad philosophiam aulicam (Leipzig, 1688), 1–46.
14
Later, the condemnation of Descartes
(76–88) is concerned almost entirely
with his (supposed) claim to know
essences. See further Lehmann-Brauns,
Weisheit (2004), 308–54.
Schrader, Friedrichs-Universität (1894),
i.36–72, 131–67, passim.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
23
we shall also meet again on several occasions. One might expect that Gregory,
fresh from accusations of atheism in his native Scotland, and seeking to secure
his reputation among his new employers, would abstain from confrontational
polemic on such an occasion. And yet he launched into a methodological
harangue in which he condemned the vast majority of ancient and modern
natural philosophers – or, as he pointedly put it, those who ‘had been taken for
philosophers’ – for devoting themselves to pointless speculations about ‘innermost causes and natures’; in this condemned group he included not only the
ancient Platonists, Aristotelians, and atomists, but also the modern
Cartesians.15
Even if we cast our eyes south of our northern, anti-philosophical latitude
line, we find it hard to find an advocate for philosophy considered as ‘abstract
questions about nature’ (outside of the Cartesians, that is). It might be thought
that one venue where philosophy might be safe from such critique would be
that which was still the largest network of higher education in Europe: the
academies run by the Jesuits. After all, their centrally coordinated curriculum
had always formally insisted on a metaphysical synthesis that underpinned the
unity of knowledge, and had accordingly produced much in the way of the type
of ‘philosophy’ being condemned by Le Clerc, Thomasius, and Gregory (see
I.1.4). And yet even in the most prestigious of all the Jesuit institutions, the
Collegio Romano, the years around 1700 witnessed a repudiation of ‘philosophy’ so conceived, albeit delivered in far subtler tones than were possible in the
bleak, Protestant north. There, the holder of the philosophy chair between
1692 and 1696, Giovanni Battista Tolomei (1653–1726), worked to separate
metaphysics from physics by placing the former within logic, justifying this
move by saying that it studied universal meanings rather than real entities; in
turn, the physics focussed less on the ontological questions of physica generalis,
and more on the physica particularis, in which many recent, experimental
conclusions could be discussed with barely any reference to deeper foundational concerns.16 Remarkably, Tolomei even justified this move by complaining of the contamination of physics by metaphysics on the part of the
scholastics, a contamination on which he blamed the introduction of metaphysical reifications such as substantial forms.17 As we shall soon see, he was
only adapting a complaint that had a very long and distinguished history.
As should be clear, the arguments being made by Le Clerc, Thomasius,
Gregory, and even Tolomei were not purely intellectual, but also social,
15
16
Aberdeen University Library, MS 2206/3/
3, fol. 65r: ‘Philosophorum aut pro philosophis habitorum’ . . . ‘caussae naturaeque
intimae’. For the full context, see III.1.5.
See Baldini, ‘Boscovich’ (1993), 91–2,
now developed in Rita Capoccia,
‘Modernità’ (2009).
17
Giovanni Battista Tolomei, Philosophia
mentis et sensuum secundum utramque
Aristotelis methodum pertractata metaphysice et empirice (Rome, 1696), 368a–
b. Even the very title of Tolomei’s book is
somewhat remarkable.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press
24
giving up philosophy
pedagogical, and disciplinary. For them, the curtailment of the influence of
philosophy – and especially of metaphysics and of anything else that, in
Pasnau’s words, could be defined as the pursuit of ‘abstract questions about
nature, values, and the like, approached largely in terms of a priori conceptual
connections’ – was an essential moral aim for the good of society. Like Hobbes,
they envisaged philosophy as the central component of a Kingdom of Darkness
(although their intentions were very different from his). I shall argue in Parts II
and III of this book that Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton need to be read as
particularly important case studies of this broader phenomenon. However,
before I turn to these individuals and their contexts, I must establish the
broader structural and institutional framework for my story. How did
European intellectual culture develop in such a way that it went from five
centuries of prioritising the pedagogical importance of philosophy to its
scathing condemnation by the very people who were meant to be teaching it?
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press
I.1
Emancipating Natural Philosophy
from Metaphysics
Why, by the second half of the seventeenth century, were natural philosophers
so convinced that it was abstract philosophising that had led their discipline
astray? It is possible to answer this question with a classically Whiggish claim:
the very force of empirical evidence collected since the fifteenth century had
taught Europeans that ‘empirical science’ was superior to ‘philosophy’. Rather
surprisingly, this case has recently been made with some polemical force:
Copernicus, Digges and Benedetti called themselves mathematicians;
Bruno and Gilbert called themselves philosophers. Copernicus and
Digges wrote books on astronomy; Benedetti on physica (natural science);
Gilbert on physiologia (the study of nature). None of them was a scientist,
because science, as we understand the term, did not yet exist. Newton,
however, was a scientist – who can doubt it? Sometime between the 1600s
and the 1680s, science was invented.1
It might be thought that such claims are so anachronistic that they need no reply:
after all, Newton himself called his masterpiece not the ‘Mathematical principles
of science’, but rather the ‘Mathematical principles of natural philosophy’.2
Nonetheless, we are then left having to explain – non-anachronistically – the
basic truth at which the above passage hints. How could late-seventeenth
century natural philosophers, not least those who claimed to be ‘experimental
philosophers’, say that they were doing natural philosophy while at the same
time rejecting much of what had previously gone under that name?3 Why, for
example, could Le Clerc – not an original or iconoclastic natural philosopher,
1
2
Wootton, Invention (2015), 159. Similarly,
Chalmers, Scientist’s atom (2009).
Although this might be slightly obscured to
readers of the ‘definitive’ translation of the
Principia by I. B. Cohen and A. Whitman,
whose first sentence reads: ‘Since the
ancients . . . considered mechanics to be of
the greatest importance in the investigation
of nature and science . . .’ (Principia, 381).
Newton never said such a thing; the original
Latin reads: ‘Cum Veteres Mechanicam . . .
3
in rerum Naturalium investigatione maxime fecerint . . .’ As for Prof. Wootton, he
may reply that he is not characterising
Newton’s self-conception, but rather our
conception of the Newtonian enterprise.
But why then make the apples and pears
comparison with what Copernicus et al.
‘called themselves’?
This question is also asked in Dear, ‘History
of science’ (2005), which charts the tensions
through to the nineteenth century.
25
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
26
giving up philosophy
but simply a textbook-writer – begin his aforementioned, wildly popular
physics textbook with the claim that the ‘childish conjectures’ of ancient
Greek physics were more befitting of young slaves (servuli) than philosophers,
that the modern system-builders were barely better, and that only recently had
a few men, ‘worthy of eternal commemoration’, rescued humankind from
such conjectures by directing it to experiment?4
This is one of the most important questions in all of Western intellectual
history. This is also why it is so important to exercise caution when answering
it. Not only should we avoid using anachronistic conceptions of ‘science’ and
‘philosophy’ and ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’,5 but we should also apply the
rule in both directions: that is to say, we should not take the fact that the actors’
category was ‘natural philosophy’ as licence to read any early modern natural
philosopher as a metaphysician or ‘philosopher’ in the modern sense.
My argument is that the situation c.1700 was the result of a complex set of
multiple disciplinary reconfigurations that occurred over the previous two
centuries. Late medieval natural philosophy can be characterised as
a ‘metaphysical physics’ (§1), the primary purpose of which was to explain
the underlying principles of natural bodies by exploring the nature and
interrelationship of the various metaphysical parts that were said to constitute
them. This enterprise came to be challenged on several fronts: by humanist
anti-scholastics (§2), by ‘secular’ natural philosophers and physicians, above all
in Italy (§3), and by exponents of the mixed-mathematical disciplines (§5).
These groups precipitated what might be called a ‘de-ontologisation’ of natural
philosophy, one that was directly responsible for many of the methodological
assumptions adopted by the ‘new’ philosophers of the seventeenth century.
However, they did not go unopposed, with plenty of sophisticated attempts to
defend the unity of natural philosophy, some of which contributed further to
a reconceptualisation of the relationship between metaphysics and physics,
and even informed some of the doctrinal claims of the new philosophies of
nature (§4).
However, the two-pronged assault from the physicians and the mixed
mathematicians ultimately proved successful. Crucially, they did not reject
philosophy entirely, but instead claimed to be practising a better version of it.
4
Jean Le Clerc, Physica, sive de rebus corporeis libri quinque (Amsterdam, 1696),
Dedication, sig. *2v–[*3r]: ‘Veteres
Graecorum Physici . . . puerilibus plane
conjecturis, aut quae servulis digniores
erant, quam Philosophis, scatent . . .
aeterna memoria digni, qui a conjecturis
nos sapienter revocarunt, ut totas ad
experimenta converterent.’ See further §9
below.
5
For an excellent historiographical overview of the rationalist/empiricist distinction and the challenges to it, see Dobre
and Nyden, ‘Introduction’ (2013), esp. 3–
8. I have argued that some of the recent
literature on English ‘experimental philosophy’, despite disowning the rationalist/empiricist distinction, threatens to
return to a similar reification: Levitin,
‘Experimental philosophy’.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
27
By the mid-seventeenth century, they had so reconceptualised the ends of
inquiry in the discipline that it was clear that new syntheses were required, not
least for pedagogical reasons. Four main syntheses were developed: those of
Thomas Hobbes, Emmanuel Maignan, and René Descartes, all of whom
offered their own version of a new metaphysical physics, and that of Pierre
Gassendi, who offered a non-metaphysical physics (§6–7). Ultimately, none of
these proved successful, although they had great pedagogical impact. By
the second half of the seventeenth century, the study of nature had been largely
colonised by the physicians and the mixed mathematicians. For the most part,
they disdained any effort to build a physical synthesis, or to explore the
fundamental ontology of nature (whether physical or metaphysical) (§8).
This methodological history has a major doctrinal pay-off. It emerges that
the idea that late seventeenth-century natural philosophy was committed to an
ontological mechanism is a myth. The vast majority of practitioners deployed
only an operational mechanism, one which used tools taken from mechanics to
explain natural phenomena, but which remained largely agnostic about their
ontological underpinnings, and never accepted the stark metaphysical reductionism of the Cartesians.
I.1.1 Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy: the Late Medieval Synthesis
Historians of early modern science, misunderstanding the famous ‘handmaiden’ analogy, still have a tendency to portray late medieval natural philosophy as little more than an exercise in theological metaphysics designed to
provide undergirding for certain Christian dogmas, not least transubstantiation in the Eucharist.6 In reality, much of the natural philosophy taught in this
period had little (if anything) to do with theology, rather concerning itself with
covering the full encyclopaedia of the Aristotelian libri naturales, and often
going beyond it. This was especially the case in the Italian universities, where
the professional telos was not theology but rather medicine.7
That being said, there is a real sense in which much of late medieval natural
philosophy was ‘metaphysical’, and self-consciously so. This was not, first and
foremost, because of the need to provide philosophical resources for the
explanation of Christ’s presence in the Eucharistic host, but rather because
of the more basic need to explain the inner constitution and unity of material
substances, and specifically the relationship between the Aristotelian four
elements (and their qualities) and the seemingly more basic ontological entities
of matter and form, the latter reconceptualised in the Latin West as substantial
6
E.g. Gaukroger, Emergence (2006), 65. For
the relationship between philosophy and
theology, see I.2. For the philosophical
issues generated by medieval Eucharistic
7
theology, see Adams, Theories (2010), esp.
229–56.
Siraisi, Padua (1973); Siraisi and Kibre,
‘Setting’ (1978).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
28
giving up philosophy
form.8 There was nothing anti-experiential about such a philosophy; quite the
opposite. Since common sense revealed that the world was made up of individuated substances, it was imperative to explain how that could be the case, and
what happened when substances changed, whether by mixture or generation
and corruption. The job of the philosopher was to ratiocinate beyond sensible
accidents so as to provide causal answers for such questions. And so the focus of
pedagogy and commentaries, at least outside Italy, was therefore primarily on
those Aristotelian books – the Metaphysics, Physics, and De anima – that could
help towards this kind of ‘metaphysical-ontological analyses’ of material substance, space, time, motion, and so on; of their ‘metaphysical parts’: matter,
form, accidents, modes, etc.; and of the problems that this produced as regards
causality, identity, and the dependence of the world on God.9
This kind of metaphysical physics could gain great intellectual and institutional independence from theology, an independence perhaps best manifested
in the career of the great fourteenth-century Parisian arts master John Buridan
(c.1300–62).10 However, for all its glorious variety, the metaphysical character
of this kind of activity remained consistent. This was also in part because of the
Aristotelian theory of disciplinary subalternation, as enshrined in Aristotle’s
Posterior analytics and Metaphysics.11 In the traditional curriculum, metaphysics was the last of the speculative philosophical disciplines to be taught, after
logic and physics, not least because it was physics that established the existence
of the ‘being’ to be studied by the metaphysician. Nonetheless, this so-called
ordo docendi was inverted in the ‘natural’ order in which the disciplines were to
be categorised, specifically because of the breadth of their subject matter and
the subsequent ‘dependence’ of subalternated sciences on their subalternating
sciences. Because metaphysics was a universal science of being, the other
disciplines, including physics, were subalternate to it (although this never
meant that physics could be deduced from metaphysics). This idea was pervasive throughout the later middle ages,12 and can still be found regularly in
8
9
The pioneer in recognising that this was
the primary problem for medieval natural
philosophers was Anneliese Maier: see her
Naturwissenschaft (1952), esp. 10–27 for
the introduction of the problem,
and Metaphysische Hintergründe (1955).
Subsequent landmarks include Emerton,
Reinterpretation (1984); Lang, Physics
(1992), esp. 161–72; Pasnau, Themes,
esp. 549–632; Brower, Ontology (2014),
esp. 3–55; Ward, Scotus (2014).
For ‘metaphysical-ontological analyses’,
see Maier, Philosophie und Mechanik
(1958), 379; for ‘metaphysical parts’, see
10
11
12
Pasnau, Themes, 6–11, passim. Neither
are actors’ categories.
Zupko, Buridan (2003).
For the specific passages, see McKirahan,
‘Subordinate sciences’ (1978).
Weisheip, Nature and motion (1985),
203–38, esp. 219–20; Livesey, ‘Ockham’
(1985), esp. 141–2. Needless to say, there
was dispute on this issue. For early
debates, see Ashley, ‘Natural science’
(1980), 97; for a fascinating example
from the fifteenth century, see Antonius
de Carlenis, Four questions on the subalternation of the sciences, ed. and trans. S.
J. Livesey (Philadelphia, 1994), 48.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
29
standard philosophy textbooks in the early seventeenth century, such as the
popular Summa by Eustachius a Sancto Paulo (1575–1640), first published in
1609 (the ‘scholastic’ textbook which Descartes considered the best).13
Eustachius is crystal clear on this point, for his discussion of subalternation
culminates in the claim that all sciences are subalternate to metaphysics.14
The fifteenth century witnessed an immense increase in Aristotle commentaries, above all on the Metaphysics, and a concomitant increase in the division
of labour: ‘Increasingly, commentators treated the Metaphysics in conjunction
with the Physics and the De anima . . . a corresponding tendency to neglect
Aristotle’s De caelo, De generatione et corruptione, and Meteorology can be
observed.’15 Various intellectual, political, and ecclesiological factors generated a sense that the previous century had witnessed too much independence
among arts teachers dealing with ‘secular’ natural philosophy, and
a consequent desire to reassert an intellectual unity between the arts and
theology faculties, leading to a Thomist revival (where ‘Thomism’ is construed
broadly). In the universities, starting with Paris, ‘the courses on physics and
mathematics lost the popularity they had enjoyed; the courses on metaphysics
and ethics became the most esteemed – and the most expensive’.16 This
metaphysical approach to all speculative philosophy, including physics, was
perhaps best represented in the influential commentaries and teaching of the
Parisian master of arts Johannes Versor († after 1482).17 The victory of this
approach after the Council of Basel (1431) was by no means a defeat for
independent natural-philosophical enquiry as it was carried out in the arts
faculties, but it did signal a new emphasis on unity between the arts and
theology faculties, with metaphysics, and a concomitantly metaphysical physics, serving as the glue that bound them.18
It is impossible to give a brief characterisation of the metaphysical physics
that emerged that would be entirely satisfactory. But it seems safe to say that it
13
14
15
16
Descartes to Mersenne, 11 November
1640, AT.iii.232 [= CSMK, 156], outlining
his plan to include a commentary on the
Summa with his system of philosophy,
a plan abandoned in favour of producing what became the Principia
philosophiae.
Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, Summa philosophiae quadripartita (Paris, 1609),
i.242. For an excellent discussion, see
Biener, ‘Unity’ (2008), 51–63.
Lohr, ‘Transformation’ (1991), 49–50.
Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’ (1988), 598. For the
Thomist revival in Paris placed in panEuropean context, see Bonino, ‘L’école’
(2000). For a case study, see Goris,
17
18
‘Thomism’ (2002), esp. 7 for the masters
at Cologne arguing for a revived
Thomism on the grounds that ‘the connection of the Arts Faculty with the
Faculty of Theology is so indissoluble
that to prohibit the use of this doctrine
in the arts amounts to prohibiting it in
theology, and to allow it in theology
amounts to allowing it in the arts’. For
Germany more broadly, see Oberman,
‘Rift’ (1981).
Rutten, ‘Versor’ (2005) (who tempers his
Thomism); Weijers, Le travail, V (2003),
170–6; Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, 598–9.
For a fuller evaluation, see Lohr,
‘Metaphysics’, 600.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
30
giving up philosophy
was concerned primarily with exploring and defining the nature of hylomorphic substance, and thus with explaining natural processes via the appearance or disappearance of forms, themselves known via ontologically real
qualities. To question the last of these was beyond the pale.19
I.1.2 The Humanist Critique: Common Language, Anti-Essentialism,
and the Impossibility of Scientia
The story of how this metaphysical physics came to be challenged is, at its
outset, almost entirely an Italian one. It was there that universities followed not
the Paris model (in which the arts, including philosophy, while having great
independence, were still ultimately conceived as propaedeutics to the study of
theology) but rather one that prioritised secular ends, in law and above all in
medicine. It was there that the humanist movement had its first great philosophical impact, both through the rediscovery of various ancient texts and
their incorporation into pedagogy,20 and through the wider critique of scholasticism as linguistically incoherent non-knowledge. And above all, it was
there that we witness the development of a socio-intellectual trend that would
be repeated in different configurations across Europe.
Urbanisation led to growing competition in what we might call the knowledge marketplace. At the same time, the proportion of the population entering
higher education increased immensely, and was combined with a historically
high level of social mobility within the system. These university-trained elites
had to fight constant turf wars with non-‘learned’ practitioners. Particularly
important were the conflicts for medical legitimacy: after all, medicine was the
professional discipline for which natural philosophy was intended to provide
the most direct preparation. These conflicts were waged between universitytrained ‘learned physicians’ on the one hand and surgeons, apothecaries, and –
in time – chymical physicians on the other. They were conducted primarily
with reference to the ancient medical sects: Rationalists, Empirics, and
Methodics. Since the learned physicians accused the practitioners of being
base Empirics, the latter sought to turn the accusation into a positive by
elevating the status of experiential knowledge. They did so through recourse
to the many new texts humanist medicine had made available, above all the
Hippocratic corpus and Dioscorides, as well as through revisionist readings of
the old authorities Aristotle and Galen. The learned physicians responded by
19
See the pessimistic landscape painted in
Pasnau, Themes, 415–18, where it is posited that quality realism is the key explanation for the fact that from 1347 (the year
of the condemnation of Nicholas of
Autrecourt) ‘scholastic thought locks
20
itself into a relatively narrow conceptual
framework’ (415).
See Hankins and Palmer, Recovery
(2008), and the works cited there. For
a narrative overview, see Levitin, ‘Uses’
(2022).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
31
emphasising that it was their brand of medicine that was truly observational,
and even that they disdained pointless philosophising without experience.
Soon, they institutionalised these ideas in the burgeoning universities, establishing chairs in medicinal simples or botany, and insisting on the necessity of
practical knowledge for all learned physicians.21
Before we turn to the separationist, anti-metaphysical – and sometimes
even anti-philosophical – language of the Italian natural philosophers and
physicians, a word needs to be said about the anti-scholastic writings of
some of the humanists. Historians of philosophy (especially of medieval
scholasticism) sometimes have a tendency to dismiss these writings as
superficial and unimportant.22 But whatever their logical inconsistencies,
we are concerned with the history of philosophy as it happened, not as
philosophers think it should have happened, and there is ample evidence of
the long-term impact of humanist anti-scholasticism, and then antiAristotelianism, not only on the first generation(s) of novatores but even
on the self-declared ‘experimental philosophers’ of the late seventeenth
century.23 This is despite the fact that the aim of the great humanist antischolastics, the most important of whom were Lorenzo Valla (c.1407–57),
Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469–1533), and Mario Nizolio (1498–
1576), as well as Petrus Ramus (1515–72) in France, was not primarily to
erect a new natural philosophy but rather to heighten the institutional
prestige of the studia humanitatis by reforming (or even eradicating)
dialectics and promoting rhetoric and a purified Latin style.
Three elements of the humanist critique are particularly important. The first
was a process of self-declared linguistic simplification. Thus, for Valla, ‘the
principal task he has . . . imposed on himself is to cut back this useless
superstructure of technical jargon and empty concepts’ – the ten categories,
six transcendental terms, the predicables, form and matter, act and potency –
‘by reducing them to what he considers the basic elements of a common-sense
worldview. These basic elements are things we perceive either physically or
mentally and that may be analysed as qualified substances.’24 This may seem
a perverse claim to be making when one champions ornate Ciceronian Latin,
but for the humanists that Latin was still a natural outgrowth of the language of
the common people. From a philosophical point of view, the argument can be
21
22
This paragraph offers a simplified summary of a wealth of literature: for introductions, see Reeds, Botany (1991);
Nutton, ‘Medical humanism’ (1997);
Findlen, ‘Theaters’ (2003).
See further the excellent discussion in
Nauta, Valla (2009), 3–4, 296, n. 12,
who also emphasises the need not to
counter-caricature scholasticism using
23
24
the
terms
developed
by
the
humanists.
For some unsystematic examples, see
Levitin, Wisdom, ch. 4. See further
Paganini, ‘Hobbes e Valla’ (1999);
Paganini, ‘Trinity’ (2003); Nauta,
‘Critique’ (2016). More examples follow
in this chapter.
Nauta, Valla, 13.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
32
giving up philosophy
deemed actively unphilosophical and even anti-intellectualist.25 And yet the
anti-abstraction orientation of such talk made it appealing to later natural
philosophers whose aim was not at all to secure an institutional place for
Ciceronian Latin, but to replace scholastic Aristotelianism. We shall find it
being deployed all the way through to Newton.
A second, concomitant element of humanist anti-scholasticism that was
particularly important to philosophy was its tendency to ontological minimisation. This was often accompanied by the portrayal of metaphysics as
a non-discipline which, it was claimed, was the product of a mistaken, almost
Platonic, reification of purely mental entities. Such a reification was unjustified
by any sensory evidence, and, according to the humanists, served to ‘form
a theoretical superstructure that . . . prevents a clear view of the world of
concrete things’. (It remains to be seen how indebted this move was to
Ockham or any other tradition of ‘nominalism’ – the best recent scholarship
suggests not much.)26 Valla reduced the ten categories to three, substance,
quality, and action; Nizolio went even further, accepting only substances and
qualities.27 Pico, inspired by the newly rediscovered works of Sextus
Empiricus, questioned the ability of the Aristotelians – or of anyone – to
grasp the essences of things on the basis of the study of accidents, and to
build a scientia at all.28 This line of critique remained well known, partially
culminating in Franchisco Sánchez’s Quod nihil scitur (1581).29
Such critiques certainly overplayed the extent to which the scholastics
claimed to possess knowledge of essences or even substances.30 And only the
most inveterate cheerleaders for ‘the Renaissance’ could ever claim that there is
a direct line from these salvoes to the ‘new science’. Far more important than
the philosophical specifics of their arguments were the disciplinary reconfigurations they implied: specifically, the rhetorical opposition between ‘metaphysical’ and ‘non-metaphysical’ forms of both natural philosophy and
theology. So, for example, Nizolio explicitly contrasted a metaphysical mode
of ‘pseudophilosophy’ that dealt with abstraction of the mind with one that
25
26
27
28
Pasnau, Themes, 127, can barely hide his
disdain at its use by Locke for antiessentialist purposes: ‘No doubt philosophers have never, in any era, known
as much as ordinary folk.’ This is in
response to Essay, iii.6.24 [= Nidditch,
452].
Nauta, ‘Anti-essentialism’ (2012), 48–9
(few debts to Ockham), 38 (qu.). See
also Nauta, ‘Ockham’ (2003).
Nauta, Valla, 13–125; Nauta, ‘Antiessentialism’, 39–51.
See e.g. Examen vanitatis (Mirandola,
1520), cxxxiir–cxxxviiv on the impossibility
29
30
of attaining demonstrative knowledge of
essences – and thus scientia – on the
basis of sensory experience. The best
discussion remains Schmitt, Pico
(1967), esp. 110–18.
For Sánchez’s anti-essentialism, including a proto-Hobbesian complaint about
the reification of the copula ‘is’, see e.g.
That nothing is known (Quod nihil scitur) [1576], ed. E. Limbrick and
D. F. S. Thomson (Cambridge, 1988),
215–16.
Pasnau, Themes, 635; Hattab, Descartes
(2009), 74–5.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
33
examined individual objects perceptible to the senses.31 There can be no doubt
that such language soon offered ammunition for actual, practising natural
philosophers in their disciplinary battles – in turn, they had to live up to its
promises.
The third element of the anti-scholastic critique most relevant to natural
philosophy, and one that helped it to become a critique of Aristotelianism
more broadly, was the deployment of the latest philological techniques, especially in Greek, to argue that the Corpus Aristotelicum was horribly corrupt and
confused. Particularly important was the claim that the metaphysical and
logical components had become confused with the natural-philosophical
ones. We find this theme developed above all by Pico and later in the sixteenth
century by Francesco Patrizi (1529–97).32 Once again, this is hardly
a philosophical argument. But once again, it proved very important, especially
when combined with the accompanying historical point that Aristotle had
misrepresented his predecessors when he criticised them, and plagiarised them
whenever he had anything of value to offer.
All this being said, we can easily imagine a situation where the antimetaphysical arguments of the humanists were taken up only by the more
destructive, anti-intellectual factions among the Protestants, or by literary
provocateurs such as Montaigne and Charron, and had no influence on
natural-philosophical practice or self-reflection. That this was not the case
was due to their frequent deployment in the methodological and disciplinary
battles that broke out in the sixteenth century.
I.1.3 Italian Natural Philosophy and Medicine and the Rise
of Anti-Rationalist Sentiment
I said above that our story is grounded in the social circumstances of sixteenthcentury Italy, and especially the conflicts between learned and non-learned
physicians. It is equally important to note that this conflict – as well as others
between other ‘learned’ and ‘lower’ practitioners – never really threatened the
existence of foundational, bookish, speculation into nature (that is to say,
university natural philosophy, whatever it became). To indulge in another
31
Mario Nizolio, De veris principiis et vera
ratione philosophandi contra pseudophilosophos [1553], ed. G. W. Leibniz
(Frankfurt, 1670), 258–61 (see also 256
for a contrast between the Aristotle of the
animal books and the Aristotle of contemporary philosophers). This edition of
Nizolio’s book is particularly interesting
for Leibniz’s preface, which constructs
a genealogy from medieval nominalism
32
to ‘modern’ philosophy. For Valla and
natural philosophy, see Trinkaus, ‘AntiAristotelian’ (1993); and, less enthusiastically, Nauta, Valla, 144–51.
Reiner, ‘Entstehung’ (1955); Wilmott,
‘Patrizi’ (1984), 286–8; Deitz, ‘Discussion’
(2019), and works cited there. For Bacon’s
adaptation of the theme, see e.g.
Advancement of learning [1605], OFB.
iv.86.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
34
giving up philosophy
counterfactual: if we abandon our knowledge of the ‘science’ that emerged, it is
perfectly possible to imagine a world in which the artisanal disciplines –
mechanics, botany, pharmacy, chymistry, and so on – became dominant
without ever claiming for themselves the status of philosophical knowledge
and the institutional position that came with it. That is to say, we can imagine
a world in which artisanal knowledge was the only knowledge of nature
deemed worth pursuing. As it happens, some historians have sought to find
in artisanal knowledge the heart of the intellectual transformation in early
modern Europe.33 However, their somewhat moralistic valorisation of nonelite ‘empiricists’ misrepresents the changes that really occurred. Natural
philosophy was not destroyed by ‘practical’ knowledge; rather, it was transformed to incorporate it, at both intellectual and institutional levels. However,
since medieval natural philosophy was considered a causal scientia defined by
its differentiation from artisanal knowledge, this process proved long, torturous, and contentious.
(i) The Senses Against Metaphysics
These debates generated two essential features of the methodological themes
that would become widespread in the seventeenth century. The first was the
idea that knowledge gained through the senses was preferable to that gained
through any form of apriorist philosophising, and, increasingly, a selfconscious aversion to any kind of ‘metaphysical’ philosophy, one that was
at points clearly inspired by humanist anti-Aristotelianism. The dispute was
precipitated by the arrival of the revived neo-Thomist metaphysical physics
into the northern Italian universities in the hands of the mendicant orders,
especially the Dominicans, who had gradually increased their presence once
the granting of theology degrees was liberalised (i.e. from the Paris–Oxford
monopoly) by the papacy in the late fourteenth century. As well as teaching
theology, these friars also taught metaphysics (but were never paid as much
as the leading natural philosophy professors), making a clash between the
two groups of Aristotelians likely, especially when student fees were at
stake.34
33
This moralistic quest to make artisans
‘real scientists’ goes back to the Marxist
historian Edgar Zilsel (Social origins
[1941] (2000)). It is no less anachronistic
than the total exclusion of artisanal
knowledge from the history of naturalphilosophical change that one finds in
purely intellectualist histories. Its recent
exponents are well critiqued in Dear,
‘Historiography’ (2012), 200–1.
34
Grendler, Universities (2002), 355–60
for the establishment and structure;
366–72 for the teaching and relationship with the lay university at Padua,
drawing on Brotto and Zonga, Facoltà
teologica (1922). See further Kristeller,
Thomisme (1967); Mahoney, ‘Padua’
(1974); Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, 601–5.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
35
We need not accept the claim that there was a full culture war between the
metaphysicians and the secular natural philosophers (or the even more farfetched insinuation that the latter were mostly irreligious) to recognise that
a genuine and significant clash soon erupted.35 Under the influence of
Averroes and of the rediscovered Greek commentators, above all Alexander
of Aphrodisias, the secular natural philosophers primarily taught not the
subject matter of the Physics and Metaphysics, but rather that of De generatione
et corruptione and Book IV of the Meteorology: that is to say, sensible bodies
and their immediate principles – the four elements and the sensible qualities.36
The most famous subsequent point of contention was that surrounding Pietro
Pomponazzi’s (1462–1525) seeming denial that the natural immortality of the
soul could be proved in philosophy, and had to be taken on faith, in his
Tractatus de immortalitate animae (1516). As is well known, this denial went
against the Fifth Lateran Council’s bull Apostolici regiminis (1513), which
demanded that philosophy professors make every effort to teach truths that
were in accord with Christianity.37 Pomponazzi himself, as well as openly
criticising the Thomist reading of Aristotle, also hinted to his students that
metaphysics was a non-discipline.38 He combined this claim with a strong
emphasis on sense perception as the source of natural-philosophical knowledge. For example, in his appropriately entitled discussion ‘De modo procedendi in naturalibus’ (1515) he was adamant that knowledge of the natural
world must rely on sense perception, which should trump reason whenever the
latter seems to contradict it.39 His focus on special rather than general physics
also rendered him ready to reject the ideal of certain, syllogistic knowledge in
certain areas of the study of nature, such as meteorology.40
Again, this does not make Pomponazzi some kind of generic ‘empiricist’ or
direct progenitor of experimental science.41 The point is that doctrinal, disciplinary, and methodological points now came together more and more often.
We see this well in the case of Pomponazzi’s student Simone Porzio (1496–
1554), a hugely eminent philosophy teacher in 1540s Pisa. In his De rerum
naturalium principiis (1553), Porzio applied the ‘Alexandrian’ approach to
35
36
37
38
The idea of a clash is tempered in
Gaetano, ‘Thomism’ (2013), esp. 219–68.
See Keßler, ‘Physik oder Metaphysik’
(1995); Keßler, ‘Empirical’ (2001); Lohr,
‘Transformation’.
For Pomponazzi as an ‘Alexandrian’ in
this regard, see Keßler, ‘Alexander’
(2011), 58–67. For his sincere
Christianity, see Perrone Compagni,
‘Introduzione’ (1999), lxxxv–xcvi.
See e.g. Pomponazzi’s 1503–4 lectures on
De anima I, Corsi inediti dell’insegnamento
39
40
41
padovano, ed. A. Poppi, 2 vols (Padua,
1966–70), ii; also Bakker, ‘Something’
(2007), 168–9.
Pietro Pomponazzi, De reactione (Bologna,
1515), sigs Dvb–Diira. Keßler, ‘Empirical’,
85; De Angelis, Anthropologien (2010), 78–
84.
Martin, ‘Conjecture’ (2009), 276–80.
Although even he performed some
experiments (probably no fewer
than Bacon): Perfetti, Zoology (2000),
55–8.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
36
giving up philosophy
natural philosophy to Aristotle’s Physics itself, with spectacular results, the
summary of which by Eckhard Keßler it is worth quoting in extenso:
he searches the hierarchy of natural beings from the elements through all
kinds of mixed bodies up to the animals and men – following
Alexander’s example in the introductory part of his treatise On the
soul – with the result that at every step the specific nature and virtue of
the entities examined can be explained in terms of accidental qualities,
their mixtures, temperaments and complexions, and that no such thing
as a substantial form is necessary to serve as efficient cause for natural
beings to be what they are and to act as they do. Thus the Physics in
Portius is no longer a ‘metaphysical’ treatise. The only ‘metaphysical’
part is the first book, which deals with the substance or underlying
matter, the ontological basis of all real being which, although it cannot
be the object of sense-perception itself, can be reached through the
analysis of sensible objects. Everything else, however, since it already
has the determinate essence of a concrete being, a concretum accidentale,
is subject to sense-perception and therefore to empirical investigation
from the effects to the causes according to the processes of qualitative
interactions and elementary mixtures. There is no need to have recourse
to abstract formal causes, which have only an intentional and therefore
secondary being.42
In other words, an Alexandrist methodological emphasis on sense experience
here comes together with an anti-scholastic doctrinal critique of reified forms.
Porzio was quite explicit about this, predictably framing his opposition to the
metaphysical approach to natural philosophy in historical terms. He condemned substantial forms as Platonic (rather than Aristotelian) abstractions
that had no place in natural philosophy.43 He happily evoked the preAristotelian ‘antiquiores’ who posited only two forms of substance (i.e. simple
and composite).44 And, in his neo-Pomponazzian work on the human mind,
he unsubtly critiqued forms of philosophy that mixed natural philosophy with
theology, serving only to undermine both.45
42
43
Keßler ‘Empirical’, 91–4; see further
Vasoli, ‘Porzio’ (2001), 604–6; Del
Soldato, Porzio (2010), esp. 61–100,
173–95.
Simone Porzio, De rerum naturalium
principiis (Naples, 1553), ii.1 [85] (the
work is unpaginated). It is interesting
that this follows a deflationary analysis
of the idea that ‘essence’ is composed of
form and substance both considered as
substances, a discussion in which
Quintilian is evoked ([84–5]). This leads
me to suspect the influence of Valla: cf.
44
45
Dialectical disputations [1439], ed. and
trans. B. Copenhaver and L. Nauta
(Cambridge, MA, 2012), i.63–4, 75.
Porzio, De rerum naturalium principiis,
ii.1 [81]: ‘Antiquiores duos tantum substantias probarunt, (caetera enim omnia
accidentia esse dicebant.) materiam
inquam & compositum, quod etiam
nomine
materiae,
ac
subiecti
nuncupatur.’
Simone Porzio, De humana mente disputatio (Naples, 1551), 12–13. On this work
in the context of the post-Pomponazzi
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
37
Such ideas, now even disseminated in the vernacular,46 had profound
consequences even outside Italian lay Aristotelianism. Methodologically,
they led to a shift in the teaching of Aristotelian natural philosophy even in
the religious orders, with more attention devoted to the ‘naturalistic’ parts, also
known as the physica particularis, and even a conscious division between those
parts and the ‘metaphysical’ parts of physica generalis.47 The Italian Jesuits
incorporated elements of the lay Aristotelianism into their official teaching
guidelines.48 Doctrinally, we can trace Porzio’s reduction of form to accident
into the seventeenth century, for example through its incorporation into the
pedagogical texts of men such as William Pemble (1592–1623), a philosophy
tutor at Oxford. (Remarkably, Pemble’s ideas were still being taught c.1700).49
The final, and perhaps most important, thing to note about Porzio is his
clear affinity for medicine and natural history (especially of marine life); this
comes out not only from the frequent medical references in De rerum naturalium principiis but also from his friendship with the great Bolognese naturalist
Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), and from his zoological lectures, delivered in
Naples in the early 1540s.50 There, Porzio again condemned those philosophers who ‘concern themselves with abstract and “too general” researches
about “prime matter, heaven, intellect and more such things, that perhaps
exceed human intelligence”, neglecting “those things that are around us and
that live with us”’.51 This also involved arguing that zoology was the culmination of natural philosophy, and that peritia (practical knowledge/experience)
was not to be separated from scientia – the opposite view was again attributed
to an erroneously ‘Platonic’ conception of philosophy.52
Such methodological statements are even more common – and even more
uncompromising – in the writings of those mid-sixteenth-century Italian
naturalists who either actively practised medicine or devoted books to it. For
46
47
48
49
disputes, see Facca, ‘L’antiaverroismo’
(1992). Del Soldato, Porzio, emphasises
his desire to free natural philosophy from
its theological bastardisation – for their
mutual benefit – throughout (see p. xiii
for a summary).
Montu, ‘Traduzione’ (1968).
Blum, ‘Standardkurs’ (1988), 132: ‘Am
überraschendsten ist wohl das starke
Gewicht der physica particularis (De
caelo, De generatione usw.).’
Poppi, ‘Integrazione’ (1995).
William Pemble, De formarum origine
(London, 1629), esp. 30–2. The textbook
was reprinted in 1650 (Cambridge) and
1669 (Oxford). For it being read c.1700,
see the anonymous commonplace book,
50
51
52
Folger Library, MS V.b.254, p. 189.
Pemble’s ideas were incorporated into
philosophical pedagogy across Europe:
see e.g. George Meldrum, Theses philosophicae
(Aberdeen,
1659),
14;
Adrian Heereboord, Meletemata philosophica [1665] (Amsterdam and London,
1680), 162–86.
E.g. De rerum naturalium principiis, ii.1
[82]; Castelli, ‘Ricercar’ (2007).
Perfetti, Zoology, 130, qu. and trans. the
lectures (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan,
MS B.Ambr. P 197 sup.) – I have not seen
the originals.
Perfetti, Zoology, 132–5; De Soldato,
Porzio, 84–100.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
38
giving up philosophy
example, in the works of the hugely eminent Padua medicine professor
Girolamo Fracastoro (1483–1553), the pioneer of the germ theory and another
student of Pomponazzi’s, we find what one scholar has described as the
replacement of any ontological grounding for natural knowledge with ‘the
epistemological analysis of metaphysical concepts’.53 And indeed, Fracastoro
deployed the now standard argument that metaphysics searches for truths
which humans are probably not capable of attaining, whereas it is knowledge
of natural phenomena that is most directly available to the senses, and thus
better known.54 His ontology retained only substance and the primary qualities, the latter inhering in the former, and serving as the causal agents in
explaining disease.
Even more spectacular is the language of the famous Padua-trained natural
philosopher Bernardino Telesio (1509–88). Telesio’s great treatise on nature,
De rerum natura, first published in 1565 and considerably enlarged until the
final authorial edition of 1586, replaced Aristotelian matter and form as
fundamental principles with the two qualities of heat and cold. He began the
book by promising that, unlike his predecessors, he would ‘not deal with
metaphysical principles of nature, which are the result of mere theoretical
speculations, but that his philosophy of nature will be based on what is obvious
to sense-perception or can be derived immediately from it’. Knowledge of the
natural world, he announced, should be derived not ‘from reason, as it has
been done by men in former times, but should be perceived by sense, and
obtained from things themselves’.55 He advocated a disciplinary split, where
metaphysics was equated simply with revealed theology, and the philosophers
studied only what was known by sense in this world.56 More explicitly than
Porzio, Telesio aligned his philosophy with that of the pre-Aristotelian ‘antiquiores’, not least Hippocrates, with the main implication again being not that
53
54
55
Kondylis, Metaphysikkritik (1990), 140:
‘der neue Primat der Erkenntnistheorie
und die erkenntnistheoretische Analyse
der
metaphysischen
Begriffe’
–
Fracastoro is discussed at 143–6. See further Rossi, ‘Metodo’ (1954); Hoffmann,
‘Erkenntnisproblems’ (2003).
Girolamo Fracastoro, Turrius sive de
intellectione, in Opera omnia (Venice,
1555), 165a.
Keßler, ‘Empirical’, 97–9; Bernardino
Telesio, De rerum natura [1565]
(Naples, 1586), 1: ‘Mundi constructionem corporumque in eo contentorum
magnitudinem,
naturamque
non
ratione, quod antiquioribus factum est,
56
inquirendam, sed sensu percipiendam,
et ab ipsis habendam esse rebus.’ See
further
Mulsow,
Frühneuzeitliche
Selbsterhaltung (1998), 179–83; Keßler,
‘Alexander’, 74–82. Several early
readers, including Patrizi, thought that
Telesio had betrayed his experiential
claims and had returned to metaphysics
by discussing the underlying principles
of matter: see Trabucco, ‘Controversies’
(2019), 111–13.
At least, this is how I read the short
chapter on the topic at De rerum natura,
369. For its textual history and
a summary of interpretations, see Ángel
Granada, ‘Spiritus’ (2019).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
39
of doctrinal but of methodological continuity.57 Again, the extra-Italian influence of his ideas, not least on Bacon, was significant, if relatively short-lived.58
But while it is right to place Telesio within a story of an Italian natural
philosophy that self-consciously sought to emancipate itself from any metaphysical approaches to the subject – a story that has its institutional culmination in the influential methodological writings of Jacopo Zabarella (1533–89),
where natural philosophy was strictly separated from metaphysics on the one
hand and medicine on the other59 – it is important to recognise that the trend
was as much indebted to physicians who had no great natural-philosophical
ambitions. (Telesio’s own systematic aims were partly the result of his rather
idiosyncratic career, much of which was spent either in a monastery or under
the patronage of Pope Pius IV.) As part of their disciplinary and professional
disputes, they had developed new ways of arguing that the study of nature had
previously been too abstract and metaphysical, and not observational enough,
while at the same time insisting not on bare experience but on an experientia
that could ground a fuller system of therapeutic or even philosophical knowledge. This led to conceptual innovations of lasting significance. Perhaps most
important was the huge rise in talk of observatio, and the introduction of the
term phaenomena to refer to the objects being observed, which, as Gianna
Pomata has noted, ‘first emerged in neo-Hippocratic medical circles with the
recovery of the ancient Empiric/Skeptic philosophical vocabulary’. As she
demonstrates with a wealth of examples, ‘the combined purport of these
terms, in their ancient Empiric/Skeptic acceptation, was an emphasis on the
distinction between direct experience (autopsia) and indirect experience, the
insistence on focused and repeated observation (tērēsis) as the foundation of
empirical knowledge, and the urge to keep to the phenomena (phainomena),
or things as they appear, avoiding useless and contentious theorisation’.60
This is not just a matter of linguistic curiosity. Rather, what is important is
that ‘Observatio . . . kept its ancient antagonism to hypothesis, doctrine, or
theoretical speculation. A suspicion of theory . . . was at the very core of the
concept of observatio as it gained ascendancy in early modern philosophical
language.’61 In turn, because medicine and natural philosophy had such an
intimate relationship, not least in the universities, observatio and phaenomena
soon found their way into broader natural philosophical discourse, including
outside of Italy.62 The new suspicion of theory was in turn used to justify
a further emphasis on direct experience and on disciplinary reconfiguration;
57
58
59
E.g. De rerum natura, 78–9, 81–2, 115–16.
Bianchi, ‘Eruditi’ (1992); Plastina,
‘Telesio nell’Inghilterra’ (2012); Sergio,
‘L’Accademia’ (2012); Garber, ‘Telesio’
(2016).
Mikkeli, Zabarella (1992), 38–40, 106,
159–77.
60
61
62
This is the summary from Pomata,
‘Observation’ (2011), 65; for the evidence, see there, passim, and Pomata,
‘Empirics’ (2011).
Pomata, ‘Observation’, 67.
See Baroncini, Esperienza (1992), esp.
39–62, 116–23. Pomata, ‘Observation’,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
40
giving up philosophy
an explicit disdain for excessive ‘reasoning’, for example, can be found in
Gabriele de Zerbi’s (1445–1505) defence of anatomy, on the basis that ‘singular
things are nearest the senses and therefore easiest for us to know’.63 By the
middle of the century, Giovanni Argenterio (1513–72), who taught medicine
in Pisa and Naples and had probably been influenced by the anti-scholastic
writings of Pico and others, could, in his huge commentary on Galen, deny that
either medicine or natural philosophy should be classed as scientia. But he left
no doubt as to which could claim a better approach to the acquisition of
knowledge about nature: medicine was only dismissed as a base ‘mechanical’
art by ‘idle philosophers, so as to affect for themselves a greater status’ simply
because their ideas were grounded only ‘in contemplation’ – in fact, Argenterio
proudly declared, medicine was the chief of the mechanical arts! Despite this, it
could claim greater knowledge than philosophy, which dealt with things so
‘remote from the senses’ that it could produce no evidence (probatio) for its
claims.64 In language no less violent than anything said by Bacon, Argenterio
in 1550 condemned the philosophers of his time for disputing about the
infinite rather than finding out more about metals, stones, herbs, plants, and
animals.65 He particularly railed against the imperial claims of metaphysics to
provide all arts and sciences with their principles.66 These arguments achieved
great fame among his contemporaries.67
The same tendency to contrast experiential knowledge while deriding that of
the philosophers is also evident in the case of less mainstream medical traditions, above all iatrochymistry, which had increasingly started to claim for
itself a major role in the medical marketplace, especially after the successes of
Paracelsus (1493–1541) in Basel, Nuremberg, and beyond. Paracelsus and his
followers always insisted on the importance of knowledge acquired via the
senses, telling a story of the corruption of such knowledge from a Hippocratic
high point, through to the destructive philosophical abstractions introduced by
Plato and Aristotle and then by Galen.68 Such claims would have been irrelevant
to the history of natural philosophy had they not been institutionalised and
63
64
66–7 suggests a particularly prominent
role for Ramus in this regard.
Mikkeli, Zabarella, 150.
Giovanni Argenterio, In Artem medicam Galeni, in Opera [1566], 3 vols
(Venice, 1592), i.42: ‘. . . otiose philosophi, ut maiorem . . . dignitatem sibi
fingerent, eas censerent esse nobilissimas & otium praestantissimas facultates, quae in sola contemplatione
versarentur’ . . . ‘medicinam melius
posse probare, quae sunt suae facultatis, quam Philosophiam, nimirum
quod a sensibus, & ratione argumenta
65
66
67
68
ducere possit. Philosophus vero de illis
agat saepe, quae a sensibus sunt
remota. adeo ut ex illis nulla probatio
sumi valeat.’ I was led to this source
by the brilliant discussion in Siraisi,
‘Argenterio’ (1990), esp. 172–5.
Giovanni Argenterio, Varia opera de Re
medica (Florence, 1550), ‘Ad lectores’, 9–
10.
Varia opera, 11.
Siraisi, ‘Argenterio’, 175–80.
Webster, Paracelsus (1982), 52; Pagel,
Paracelsus (1982), 58–9; Halleux, ‘La
controverse’ (1980).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
41
presented as significant beyond immediate healing practices. Exactly this
occurred at the end of the century, when Paracelsian ideas were both sanitised
(by stripping them of their religious and magical dimension) and ‘philosophised’,
above all by the Danish physician Petrus Severinus (1542–1601), also notable for
introducing the concept of semina into mainstream European medical and
philosophical discourse. Likewise idolising the time of Hippocrates as a putative
golden age of empirical collection and collaboration and complaining that proceeding from ‘the quick facility of hypotheses’ was now ‘embraced much more
than the long and difficult exercise of experience’, Severinus nonetheless insisted
on the philosophical and learned status of an ideal Paracelsian medicine.69
According to Severinus, Hippocratic medicine had been corrupted by hypothesising and reduction to first principles, in particular that of Galen, from which
medical explanations were then ‘deduced’. This anti-hypotheticalist language was
accompanied by the strongest emphasis on direct experience, only recourse to
which could allow one to be a genuine ‘interpreter of nature’.70 Here again we find
an adumbration of a famous element of Baconian methodological rhetoric,
unsurprising given the English vulgariser’s admiration for Severinus.71
(ii) Historia Before Philosophy
These complaints about the philosophers’ practices were accompanied by
a second, major feature: the insistence that some kind of process of intense data
collection must precede any further form of philosophising. In 1476, in the preface
to his new translation of Aristotle’s animal books, Theodorus Gaza had insisted
that Aristotle had first composed the Historia animalium, and only then the De
partibus animalium and the De generatione animalium, precisely because the two
later books deal with causes, building on the historical knowledge of the thing itself
delivered in the first.72 Gaza’s edition became dominant in sixteenth-century
natural philosophy.73 It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this
move, which resonated not only among natural historians but also such
69
70
71
Petrus Severinus, Idea medicinae philosophicae (Basel, 1571), sig. α3v: ‘Brevitatem
enim Artis, & compendiosam facilitatem
ex Hypothesibus proficiscentem amplexata est potius, quam Experientiae obscuras
& longas exercitationes.’ See Shackelford,
Severinus (2002), esp. 143–208.
Severinus, Idea, 2, 73–4.
The key discussion is now Serjeantson,
‘Interpretation’ (2014). Severinus is discussed at 690, but his use of ‘naturae interpretes’ is not noted (see also Severinus,
Idea, sig. β2r, 104–5). The evidence for
Bacon’s interest in Severinus is collected
72
73
in Shackelford, Severinus, 257–64. Even in
his criticism (Temporis partus masculus, in
The works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding
et al., 7 vols (London, 1857–61), iii.533)
Bacon was probably being semidishonest, given his seeming debts to
Paracelsian philosophical doctrine. For
this, see Rees, ‘Cosmology’ (1975), esp.
83–4, 101, 173 for Severinus.
Theodorus Gaza, ‘In libros de animalibus
praefatio’, Aristotelis Stagiritae operum,
tomus secundus [1476] (Leiden, 1549),
sig. aa3r.
Monfasani, ‘Problemata’ (1999), 205, 212.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
42
giving up philosophy
heavyweights of sixteenth-century natural philosophy as Agostino Nifo (1473–
1538) and Zabarella. ‘The shift from Scholastic Aristotelianism to Renaissance
Aristotelianism implied a shift from historia as knowledge without causes to
historia as knowledge preparatory to the investigation of causes.’74
I shall not recapitulate this story, which has recently been well told. All
I shall note is that it also instilled a tendency to epistemic modesty and implied
disdain for the traditional aims of natural philosophy. We have already seen
how Porzio’s critique of philosophers’ ‘abstract researches’ went hand in hand
with an interest in natural history; others followed in his footsteps to redefine
the very aims of the philosophical enterprise. For example, the Padua-based
Cretan Daniel Furlanus argued that ‘because it is not always given to man to
know the essences of things, he may have to be content with accidental
differences’.75 However, this modesty was also combined with a confidence
that the new emphasis on historia would sweep away the errors of scholastic
natural philosophy and medicine – this was the case as early as Alessandro
Benedetti’s Historia anatomica (1502).76 By the late sixteenth century, the
pioneering anatomist Hieronymus Fabricius (1533–1619), yet another professor at Padua, was adopting the Aristotelian scheme that began with historia as
the basis for his whole physiological research programme.77
Fabricius, who was most keen to have his results recognised as philosophical, knew exactly what kind of ends were worth pursuing. ‘It is perhaps rather
preferable’, he wrote,
to contemplate . . . the whole history and nature of animals . . . than to
read the books of the rest of natural philosophy. For the books which have
been written on physics, the heavens [i.e. De caelo], and on generation [i.e.
De generatione et corruptione] merely contemplate the first principles and
elements of natural philosophy; whereas those on animals study and
pursue its conclusions and the final ends at which it aims. The former
involve universals; the latter, particulars; the former present an initial
outline of philosophy, the latter present it complete . . . so the part of
philosophy which investigates the nature of animals is much more
excellent and richer than the other parts of philosophy.78
74
75
76
77
78
Pomata, ‘Historia’ (2005), 111. For Nifo,
see also Perfetti, ‘Ways’ (1999), 311–12.
Maclean, Learned medicine (2002), 158.
Pomata, ‘Historia’, 114–15.
Cunningham, Anatomical Renaissance
(1997), 175–6.
Hieronymus Fabricius, De brutorum
loquela (Padua, 1603), 1: ‘ita de brutorum
loquela agere, infructuosum non est; immo
hanc forte magis, & cum hac totam animalium historiam naturamque, ac tandem de
ea conscripta volumina, quam reliquae
philosophiae naturalis libros evolvere, ac
contemplari satius erit. Qui enim de physico auditu scripti sunt itemque de Coelo,
& Generatione; prima duntaxat philosophiae naturalis principia, & elementa, contemplantur, qui vero de animalibus;
conclusiones finemque consummatum, &
optatum, perscrutantur, assequunturque:
illi universalia, hi particularia complectuntur; illi philosophiam inchoatam, hi
consummatam
exhibent
. . . sic
reliquis philosophiae partibus multo
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
43
This is not just a defence of a particular object of study as philosophical.
Rather, it is a claim about what kind of philosophy – and philosophical
method – is preferable, a claim that Fabricius’ spectacular anatomical programme, conducted in the new anatomy theatre in Padua, more than lived up
to. Accordingly, alongside such programmes came significant reinterpretations of the very nature of natural philosophy as a speculative scientia. ‘One
delights in practical natural philosophy, which one learns from ocular testimony’, wrote Gabriele Falloppio in 1560; ‘I call this sensory [philosophy] the
mother of universal philosophy, from which it derived its origins’, wrote
Aldrovandi, who would become known as ‘a true sensory Philosopher’. By
the early seventeenth century, such rhetoric had developed into a fully fledged
belief that ‘one ought to believe more in the observation of natural things than
in . . . [pre]suppositions’, independent of any Baconian influence.79
It may well be the case that at a strictly philosophical level these statements
were incoherent: what does it actually mean for the speculative scientia of
natural philosophy to be ‘practical’? But history need not be coherent, and we
cannot any more deny the importance of these various, largely Italian evocations of historia as preparative to natural philosophy to the ‘science’ of the
seventeenth century. Most importantly, we cannot deny that the physicians
struck a deadly blow to natural philosophy as it was traditionally conceived.
(iii) Physicians Versus Philosophers
Indeed, by the time we come to the early seventeenth century we can speak
without any great fear of anachronism of a programme of medical experimental
research that clashed with the traditional philosophical conception of what it
was to explain natural phenomena.80 For example, still in Italy, we may point to
work of Gasparo Aselli (1581–1625), based at the University of Pavia, whose
discovery of the lacteal vessels of the lymphatic system, announced posthumously
in his De venis lacteis (1627), was celebrated as a major scientific event through to
the end of the century and beyond, including by Boyle and other Royal Society
apologists.81 Drawing on Fabricius’ legacy, and on the century-long tradition of
79
praestantior est, floribus & fructibus
excultior, & opulentior ea, quae animalium naturam indagat.’ I have
slightly modified the translation in
Cunningham, ‘Fabricius’ (1985), 205.
Findlen, Possessing nature (1994), 202–3
(qu. Luigi Anguillara’s Simplici (1561),
14–15), 207 (qu. Fabio Colonna’s La
Sambuca lincea (1618)), 205 (qu.
Falloppio from di Pietro, ‘Epistolario’
(1979), 53 (my emphasis)), 206.
80
81
The emergence of this programme
remains one of the great lacunae of the
historiography of the early modern study
of nature. But for an important overview,
see now Ragland, ‘Trials’ (2017); also
Mikkeli, Zabarella, 135–59.
Guerrini, ‘Vivisection’ (2013); Bertoloni
Meli, ‘Live animals’ (2013); Orland, ‘White
blood’ (2012), esp. 470–4. For examples of
the reception of Aselli’s discovery as
a landmark in experimental anatomical
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
44
giving up philosophy
animal vivisection, Aselli insisted that a comprehensive anatomical historia must
lie at the root of all medical-philosophical knowledge, which could only be
provisional.82 In turn, his critics claimed that ‘the mere observation and accumulation of instances that anatomical research entailed did not constitute knowledge, defined as knowledge of causes’.83 In such disputes we see a neat analogue
to Galileo’s contemporaneous battle against the philosophers concerning buoyancy (§5).
Exactly the same issues were at stake in the case of an even more famous
disciple of Fabricius’, William Harvey (1578–1657). The importance of
Harvey’s results concerning the circulation of the blood for generating the
research programme (focussed on respiration in particular) that inspired the
creation of the Royal Society is well known.84 Particularly important for us is
how that process could involve a sharp escalation of anti-philosophical rhetoric. Whereas Harvey himself presented his findings as the result of a method
of discovery known to Aristotle and akin to Zabarella’s regressus, his immediate followers could be much more polemical.85 For example, Harvey’s first
English follower, George Ent, launched in his Apologia pro circulatione sanguinis (1641) a full-out attack on the ‘subterfuges of the philosophers’ who had
introduced the spurious metaphysical concept of ‘faculties’ as explanatory
‘gods in the theatre’. According to Ent, to use such concepts was to explain
something difficult (the distribution of chyle in the veins; its transformation
into blood, etc.) with something even more obscure, ‘a skill which today
everywhere prevails in philosophy’.86
82
83
84
85
research, see Robert Boyle, Certain physiological
essays
(1661),
BW.ii.65;
Simon Patrick, A brief account (London,
1662), 21; Robert Wittie, Pyrologia mimica
(London, 1669), 246; Henry Stubbe,
Legends no histories (London, 1670), 115;
Joseph Glanvill, Essays on several important
subjects
(London,
1676),
iii.4;
Christopher Goodall, The Colledge of
Physicians vindicated (London, 1676), 46.
See e.g. Gasparo Aselli, De lactibus, sive
lacteis venis (Leiden, 1627), sig. A2r,
where the point is interestingly combined with the argument from
design. See further Pomata, ‘Historia’,
118–21.
Guerrini, ‘Vivisection’, 229.
Frank, Oxford physiologists (1980).
Although he himself could draw pretty
blunt distinctions between his practice
and that of philosophers: see e.g.
Exercitationes duae anatomicae de
86
circulatione
sanguinis
(Rotterdam,
1649), 118–19. For Harvey’s method,
see Schmitt, ‘Harvey’ (1984); Wear,
‘Way of anatomists’ (1983); French,
Harvey (1994); Lennox, ‘Harvey’s
Aristotelianism’
(2006);
Goldberg,
‘Harvey on anatomy’ (2016).
George Ent, Apologia pro circulatione
sanguinis
(London,
1641),
40:
‘Tandem ad Facultatem, magnum
illud Philosophorum subterfugium
pervenimus . . . Si quaeras, unde cibi
concoctio, chyli in venas distributio,
ejusdem in sanguinem mutatio, &c.
statim, a facultate aliqua id fieri,
audies. Quod quid aliud est, quam
Deos advocare in theatrum, ut solvent
nodum fabulae? Res enim per se
obscuram nimis, verbis tenebricosis
magis obnubilant: qua ars passim
hodie in Philosophia obtinuit.’ The
marginal reference is to Met., i.2.2.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
45
Such assumptions had a great impact across Europe. Indeed, they became so
ubiquitous that they even shaped the reception of the new, anti-scholastic
natural-philosophical systems, to which one might think the physicians would
have been sympathetic. It would be Dutch physicians – specifically the generation of Johannes Walaeus (1604–49), Franciscus Sylvius (1614–72), and
Johannes van Horne (1621–70) – who would first condemn Descartes for
supposedly holding to an illegitimate, non-experiential, and apriorist method,
while developing an important post-Harveian research programme of their
own. For example, Sylvius, the discoverer of the lateral sulcus (one of the most
prominent features of the brain), compared Harvey, who taught ‘according to
the custom of the Physicians, as much as the Sensible Philosophers, and
according to the testimony of the external Senses’, with Descartes, whom he
accused of ‘trusting more in the laws of his own Mechanics, rather than in his
external Senses’, and thus ending up a slave to ‘the fabrications of his own
philosophy’ – this is despite the fact that Sylvius joined the Frenchman in
unhesitatingly rejecting real qualities of which ‘the philosophers speak’.87
Descartes had barely published his work, and he was already being condemned
as a new scholastic, especially in his approach to organic life. The accusation
would plague him and his followers through the rest of the century.
Sixteenth-century natural philosophy and medicine still regularly get short
shrift in histories of the knowledge transformation of early modernity – if, that is,
they are mentioned at all. The primary reason for this seems clear: it is impossible
to draw a line from them to Descartes, and his reductionist ontological mechanism. And so the sixteenth-century figures are classed as ‘naturalists’, ‘animists’,
‘vitalists’, and so on, offered at best a role as the warm-up act to the main event.
This stems from a category confusion, and from a narrative about philosophical
modernity that far overestimates the transformative importance of Descartes. The
reality is that the physicians played a crucial role in two moves that went hand in
hand: a shift towards an emphasis on experience, experiment, the importance of
natural history, etc.; and an anti-scholastic programme of ontological minimisation directed above all against substantial forms.
Of course, they were not ontological mechanists. But so what? As we shall
see later in this chapter, the reductionist ontological mechanism held to by
Descartes was an aberration in the seventeenth century, adopted by few apart
from the Cartesians themselves. The sixteenth-century naturalists and physicians were most interested in explaining life and other organic phenomena –
mechanical reductionism would have seemed to them no less perverse than
scholastic hylomorphism. Beast-machines would have been laughed out of the
door, exactly as they were in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Fracastoro, who so disdained the metaphysics of the philosophers, maintained
87
Ragland, ‘Mechanism’ (2014), 191, 193,
195 for the examples.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
46
giving up philosophy
real qualities because the idea that disease might be explained solely by
substances in motion seemed to him absurd: ‘contagion is not per se a local
motion, but rather the corruption of certain things and the generation of other
things’.88 Telesio’s medical ambitions also meant that doing away with the
primary quality of heat was unthinkable.
That the critique of traditional natural philosophy developed in this context
was very important. Let us imagine for a moment that ontological mechanism
had been proposed around 1550 in a purely philosophical or metaphysical
manner, by a latter-day Nicholas of Autrecourt (c.1299–1369) or a protoDescartes. I am confident that nobody, apart from a few church officials,
would have batted an eyelid. The challenge to scholastic natural philosophy
had to come not from metaphysical systems-builders – whose ideas would, at
best, have become just one more (minor) metaphysical alternative – but from
an institutionalised intellectual force that could provide a coherent and purposeful alternative. Only once that had been done could a full ontological
massacre be fruitfully suggested.
But even then, a truly mechanical, metaphysical ontology was hardly going
to catch on with people who had spent the previous century and a half
complaining about the pervasiveness of metaphysical speculation about
first principles. In the case of Sylvius and his counterparts among the
Dutch physicians we have already seen how easily the anti-philosophical
sentiment that had been deployed against the scholastics could be deployed
against Descartes. This is despite the fact that Sylvius can accurately be
labelled an ‘iatromechanist’. However, his was not an ontological mechanism,
but an operational one. Mechanism was for him an explanatory ideal because
it absolved one from using the metaphysical parts of the scholastics. He never
posited a full mechanical-corpuscularian model of how the body worked,
because he knew that he did not have the sensory experience to posit such
a model, and because he was aware that certain phenomena, such as kidney
secretion, remained mechanically inexplicable (as they would be for the rest
of the century).89 That did not prevent him and all the other naturalists and
physicians I have been discussing from being no less keen than Descartes to
rid the philosophical world of the metaphysical parts of scholastic natural
philosophy, and rather more keen than him to base the discipline on sense
experience. In this regard, their role in what I shall somewhat awkwardly call
the ‘de-metaphysicisation of natural philosophy’ was central, and chronologically prior to that of the great alpha males of seventeenth-century
philosophy.
88
Pasnau, Themes, 472, qu. and trans. De
contagione et contagiosis morbis et eorum
curatione libri III, ed. W. C. Wright
(New York, 1930), 24.
89
Ragland, ‘Mechanism’, 195; Bertoloni
Meli, Mechanism (2011), 284–9.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
47
I shall return to the important distinction between ontological and operational mechanism in §5. For the moment, it is important to note that we can
again and again draw direct lines from sixteenth-century naturalism and
medicine, and its combination of anti-scholastic ontological scepticism and
emphasis on the importance of sense experience, to the new philosophies of
the seventeenth century. We have already seen several examples to this effect in
medicine in particular: Harvey’s role in shaping the research agenda of the
early Royal Society; the impact of the idea that historia should precede philosophy, and so on. Similar paths can be charted from the secular naturalists to
the most famous of the novatores. For example, drawing on the tradition of
sixteenth-century Meteorology commentaries, the Jesuit Niccolò Cabeo (1586–
1650) claimed, in his 1646 commentary on the same text, that he was exploring
‘almost the whole of experimental philosophy’(!) and that Aristotle had often
been wrong because he had been ‘more accustomed to metaphysical speculation than observation’.90 This was exactly what the humanist anti-Aristotelians
had claimed, and what the secular natural philosophers and physicians had
adopted from them. In turn, Robert Boyle showed great appreciation for
Cabeo’s work, and specifically for the Jesuit’s diagnosis of Aristotle’s tendency
to run to ‘obscure and unsatisfactory Distinctions’ drawn from metaphysics,
rather than to rely on ‘Physical Ratiocinations, founded upon Experience, or
the nature of Things under debate’.91
Another case in which we witness the characterisation of traditional natural
philosophy as unduly ‘metaphysical’ directly informing both a methodological
and a doctrinal programme of reform is evident in the polemics surrounding
iatrochymistry in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France.
Precipitated by a revival of a modified Paracelsianism and its institutionalisation both in the Paris medical faculty and at court,92 the French iatrochymists,
above all Joseph Duchesne (1544–1609), in tandem with his German ally
Andreas Libavius (c.1550–1616), adopted the standard humanist antiAristotelian techniques. That is to say, they argued that the Aristotelians’
errors in doctrine – above all hylomorphism – were the result of
a mistaken method, namely the application of logic and metaphysics to natural
philosophy, a hubristic rationalism that, they claimed, was shared by the
Galenists in medicine. At the same time, they presented themselves as recovering a pre-Aristotelian mode of philosophising – associated above all with the
pseudepigraphical Democritus, alchemist and teacher of Hippocrates.93
90
91
See now the excellent discussion in
Martin, Meteorology (2011), 106–24, qu.
109 (the original is at Cabeo, In quatuor
libros Meteorologicorum Aristotelis commentaria (Rome, 1646), iv.418).
Origin of forms and qualities [1666–7],
BW.v.294–5.
92
93
See the seminal Kahn, ‘Faculté’ (1988);
also Kahn, Alchimie (2007), esp. 195–
351; Debus, Paracelsians (1991).
E.g. Joseph Quercetanus, De priscorum
philosophorum verae medicinae materia
([Geneva], 1603), 4–5; Andreas Libavius,
Alchymia triumphans (Frankfurt, 1607),
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
48
giving up philosophy
This was a way of giving their approach an illustrious, and above all
philosophical, pedigree. But it also committed them to enter into dispute
with the natural philosophers on the latter’s own turf. Particularly important
here was the role of Libavius, who, somewhat like the aforementioned
Severinus, philosophised chymistry by differentiating it from what he took to
be the magical and superstitious cosmological speculations of the older
Paracelsians. At the same time, he continued the assault on the imaginary
entities of Aristotelian physics: its three principles, matter, form, and privation,
were foolishly imported from (Platonic) metaphysics and logic into physics,
a discipline which should have dealt only with principles known to the
senses.94 Libavius’ Democritus was not a reductionist atomist, but a chymical
experimentalist who posited Severinus-esque semina and stood with those
modern chymists who, ‘when reporting on corporeal nature and erecting
a science of nature, see that the fictions of our mind should not be followed,
but only those things should be posited which the senses, with reason and
experience, show to be in the nature of bodies’.95
It was at the hands of physicians that the methodological attack on scholasticAristotelian physics first came together with an admiration for the supposedly
experimental pre-Socratics, whose matter theory was cautiously adopted without
being co-opted into a reductionist ontology. In turn, the physicians inspired the
wider dissemination of such claims. Perhaps most famous are the virulently antihylomorphic theses which shocked Paris in August 1624, proposed by Etienne de
Clave (c.1587–1645), also an iatrochymist, and undoubtedly influenced by
Severinus and Libavius.96 These theses have recently been presented as
a landmark occasion in the history of philosophical anti-Aristotelianism.97
However, they might more accurately be described as another attempted land
grab by a physician seeking to challenge the metaphysical-physical synthesis of
the scholastics by claiming that their principles had no basis in sense experience.98
Descartes may have partially emerged from this world, but he is also an aberration
94
95
154–6, 159–61. See further Joly,
‘Références’ (1995); Lüthy, ‘Democritus’
(2000), 474–7; and for the wider context,
Kahn, Alchimie, 357ff.
Libavius, Alchymia triumphans, 713.
Again we find here the idea that
Aristotelian physics was a bastard mixture of real physics and Platonic metaphysics: see also 714.
Libavius, Alchymia triumphans, 715:
‘Chymici istas logicas causas & contraria
privantia non negant. Quando autem de
natura corporea est disserendum, & physica scientia constituenda vident non
sequenda esse figmenta nostra, sed id
96
97
98
ponendum quod sensus cum ratione &
experientia in natura corporum monstrant.’ For Libavius’ matter theory, see
Newman, Atoms (2006), 66–81;
Clericuzio, Elements (2000), 21.
For his matter theory, see Clericuzio,
Elements, 42–7. The best and fullest discussion of the theses and their reception
is Kahn, Alchimie, 500–67, which
includes transcriptions of many of the
relevant documents.
Garber, ‘Defending Aristotle’ (2002).
For a critical edition of the theses, see
Kahn, Alchimie, 516–21.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
49
from it, one of which the other anti-scholastics – even the corpuscularians – could
never have approved in toto.
An even more spectacular example in this regard is the Philosophiae
naturalis adversus Aristotelem libri XII (1621) by Sébastien Basson
(c.1573–?), now recognised as an important milestone in the shift from
Aristotelianism to corpuscularianism.99 Basson, a teacher at the small
Reformed academy at Die-en-Dauphiné, had a medical degree (unfortunately it is unclear where he studied physic). The importance of humanist
anti-Aristotelianism to his thought is evident from one of his few autobiographical references, concerning his teacher at the Jesuit academy at Pont-àMousson, Petrus Sinsonius. According to Basson, Sinsonius said of
Anaxagoras: ‘I reckon that Aristotle robbed these ancients of their weapons
so that he could subdue them more easily unarmed.’100 We see here the
institutionalisation of the humanist trope that Aristotle had both plagiarised
and misrepresented his predecessors; and indeed, Basson’s own matter
theory posits, in a very Anaxagorean manner, four kinds of elementary
atoms, plus a fifth, composing the aether, which provides activity to the
world and which is directed by God himself, replacing the Aristotelians’
‘form’ as the teleological principle in the world. (Basson was effectively an
occasionalist, a position which he saw as the only alternative to what he took
to be Aristotelian animism.)
Accordingly, much of the first half of the Philosophia naturalis is devoted
to destroying the hylomorphic foundations of Aristotelian natural philosophy, which are presented as ‘logomachy’ completely alien to all sense
experience, especially when it came to the explanation of mixture, where
the chymists’ experiments had shown the scientific vacuousness of
hylomorphism.101 Given such promising beginnings, historians have
expressed disappointment at Basson’s failure to develop a full mechanical
explanatory ontology, and at his talk of ‘aptitudes’ and ‘appetites’.102
However, the development of such an ontology was never Basson’s ideal.
Rather, his whole point was to establish a better foundation for medicine, in
line with the aims of chymical physicians like Duchesne and Libavius.
Hence his lack of interest in speculating on the precise ontological properties (e.g. shape) of his atoms.103 Hence his greater interest in the compound
substances that emerge upon chymical analysis.104 Hence his propensity,
99
100
See above all Lüthy, ‘Basson’ (1997);
Nielsen, ‘Basso’ (1988), esp. 300–1 for
his influence.
Sébastien Basson, Philosophia naturalis
adversus Aristotelem (Geneva, 1621), 13:
‘Puto, inquit, Aristotelem hos veteres suis
armis spoliasse, ut inermes facilius debellaret.’ Basson saw the conspiracy as one
101
102
103
104
against not just Anaxagoras, but a whole
pre-Aristotelian consensus.
E.g. Philosophia naturalis, 40–7.
Lüthy, ‘Basson’, 18–20.
E.g. Philosophia naturalis, 9.
E.g. Philosophia naturalis, 79–80. See also
Kubbinga, ‘Premières théories’ (1984);
also Clericuzio, Elements, 41–2, although
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
50
giving up philosophy
disdained by one commentator, ‘for digressing, often extensively, on specific
matters relating to medicine’.105 And hence his exorbitant praise for the
mythical Hippocrates, student of Democritus.106
In other words, this is not a case of one ancient ontology
(Democritean) replacing another (Aristotelian). Rather, it is a case of
a new conception of the ends of natural philosophical enquiry – sensebased, and unconcerned with necessarily providing explanations on the
basis of ultimate principles – opposing itself to one being presented,
fairly or not, as logical, metaphysical, and obsessed with the hubristic
search for first principles. This is, in other words, the encroachment of
medicine into natural philosophy, with a concomitant reconceptualisation of the philosopher’s whole enterprise.107
Once again, we can trace the direct influence of such a reconceptualisation
on later, institutionalised forms of the new philosophy. Basson’s critique of
scholastic metaphysics was both deployed by other anti-Aristotelians and even
used in university teaching.108 Most interestingly, Basson’s work informed the
rejection of hylomorphism, now characterised as the opinion of all ‘the ancient
philosophers’, by the important Oxford physician and experimentalist
Nathaniel Highmore (1613–85), a disciple of Harvey and a friend, neighbour,
and collaborator of Boyle.109 Boyle likewise referred to the Philosophia
naturalis.110 With their refusal to construct a fully mechanical ontology,
both Highmore and Boyle came much closer to Basson or Libavius than they
did to Descartes.111
105
106
107
it is wrong to say that the ‘ultimate constituents’ of bodies are for Basson ‘the five
principles’ (salt, sulphur, and mercury,
earth and phlegm) – rather, they are the
four elements plus the aether, composed
of its own type of atom.
Nielsen, ‘Basso’, 303. To be fair, Prof.
Nielsen also does an excellent job of
placing Basson in the tradition of
French anti-Aristotelian iatrochymistry
(338–41).
Philosophia naturalis, ‘Ad lectorem’, sigs
[¶¶4]r–[¶¶7]v, where Hippocrates is
treated as the high point of preAristotelian knowledge of nature.
Basson himself clearly states the medical
(and theological) aims of his project,
and his lack of interest in foundational
natural philosophical questions that go
beyond those aims, at ‘Ad lectorem’, sig.
¶¶r–v, after chastising the sectarianism
of philosophers.
108
109
110
111
Gerard Boate and Arnold Boate,
Philosophia
naturalis
reformata
(Dublin, 1641), 23; Meldrum, Theses
philosophicae, 14; BL MS Sloane 1324,
fol. 24r.
Nathaniel Highmore, The history of
generation (London, 1651), 1; the references to Basson are at BL MS
Sloane 546, ‘Anatomia restaurata’,
fols 7v–8r; BL MS Sloane 547,
‘Anatomia
restaurata’,
corrected
draft, fols. 6v–7r. The History of generation is dedicated to Boyle; for
Highmore’s possible influence on
him, see Hunter, Boyle (2009), 90–1.
Boyle, ‘Essay of the Holy Scriptures’
[mid-/late 1650s], BW.xiii.190; Forms
and qualities, BW.v.295.
For more on Boyle, see §8 below.
I have not so far discussed the
important figure of Daniel Sennert;
he will appear in §4.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
51
I.1.4 The Revival and Reinterpretation of Metaphysics
In a masterly account, Charles Lohr has influentially claimed that the
Pomponazzi affair – and specifically the nature of the Dominican response –
marks a turning point in the history of Western philosophy. He has placed the
decisive moment in the response to secular Aristotelianism offered by
Crisostomo Javelli (c.1470–1538), regent in the Studium of the Order at
Bologna, who argued that ‘whatever Aristotle’s opinion might be, the immortality of the soul is a position rationally demonstrable – not in physics, but
rather in metaphysics’, a metaphysics which incorporated the doctrine of
creation and thus could account for the soul as a created immaterial (and
thus immortal) form of the corporeal body. Consequently, ‘Philosophy thus
became metaphysics, while the subject-matter which had belonged to the
Aristotelian physics was free to become natural science.’112 I have been influenced by elements of Lohr’s account. However, seductive as this neat vision is,
it seems to me somewhat proleptic. Rather, what we find from the second half
of the sixteenth century, and then well into the seventeenth, is a constant
negotiation of the relationship between metaphysics and natural philosophy,
and of the character of natural philosophy itself, almost always conducted with
an eye – or two – on the professional structure of the university arts faculty.
On the one hand, change happened because natural philosophers needed to
assert their independence, and to be seen to be in touch with the latest developments, above all in medicine. We have seen already how some of the Italian
natural philosophers, such as Zabarella, defended the independence (and thus
status) of their discipline from both metaphysics and disciplines such as medicine, which they denigrated as ‘practical’. More generally, we have already noted
that even in the religious orders, natural philosophy was influenced by the
naturalistic turn of secular Aristotelianism. On the other hand, it is certainly
true that Catholic universities and Jesuit academies – the latter of which had by
1600 established themselves as the foremost pedagogical institutions in Europe –
made a concerted and coordinated effort to re-establish the teaching of metaphysics in the arts faculty. They now presented it as a necessary propaedeutic for
the unified encyclopaedia of knowledge, which then, at least formally, had to
operate within the confines established by the revived metaphysical syntheses. In
mid-sixteenth-century Italy, both the Dominicans113 and then the Jesuits placed
metaphysics at the heart of the arts curriculum, and used it to delineate the
boundaries of the natural philosophy which was taught in traditional manner by
beginning with the Physics. Crucially, the metaphysics and the natural philosophy would be taught by the same teachers, giving a unity to the enterprise.114
112
113
Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, 604–5.
Gaetano, ‘Thomism’, 164–268.
114
For the metaphysical boundaries of
natural philosophy, see Baldini,
‘Wissenschaften’ (1998).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
52
giving up philosophy
This meant that the writings produced from those institutions in which natural
philosophy was seriously pursued had to present their findings as compatible
with the official metaphysics, however many new results or approaches they
incorporated.
There was nothing intrinsically ‘conservative’ about such a practice. A vast
number of publications came from the Jesuits, who, as Ugo Baldini above all
has shown, adopted this conciliatory approach with great success through to
the end of the seventeenth century.115 In a textbook example of non-Kuhnian
change, we see within the Jesuit order the remarkable capacity for novelty: the
incorporation of new empirical data and subsequent revision of the received
system, not least in astronomy and dynamics,116 and the abandonment (e.g. by
Cabeo) of those elements of the Aristotelian syntheses that were not considered to be ‘deduced from the theory of substance’, including even the four
element theory.117 From within this conciliatory framework emerged specialist
natural-philosophical works of immense significance, most famously those in
physico-mathematics by Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1618–63) and Giovanni
Battista Riccioli (1598–1671). But what could not be abandoned was the
structure established in the mid-sixteenth century. So for example the philosophy textbook published in 1653 by Giovanni Antonio Caprini, philosopher
master at the Collegio Romano, insisted that physics must be grounded in
a Suárezian ontological metaphysics (which he combined with logic).118 Only
with Tolomei’s Locke-esque reduction of metaphysics to a quasiepistemological preparative for physics (p. 23 above) did the situation change.
The Jesuits, in other words, provide an outstanding example of how the
institutional dominance of an ostensibly metaphysical physics was still compatible with great innovation in the study of nature.
I spoke above of ‘official metaphysics’, which might give the impression that
the sixteenth-century response to secular Aristotelianism consisted of an
uncompromising regurgitated Thomism. This would be quite false. Whether
one finds in Javelli the turning point or not,119 it is undoubtedly the case that
115
116
117
118
Baldini, Legem impone subactis (1992),
19–74; Baldini, ‘Development’ (1999);
and outside Italy, Hellyer, Catholic physics (2005), esp. Pt. II.
Baldini, Legem, 251–84.
Baldini, ‘Development’, 267.
Giovanni Antonio Caprini, Summa triumphantis philosophiae (Rome, 1653);
see e.g. 29–30 on real accidents; 36–8
for the explicitly Suárezian notion of
ens rationis metaphysicum; and 44–56
for the application of metaphysical conclusions to physics, e.g. on the continuum and minima physica. I was led
119
to this source by Baldini, ‘Development’,
268–9, who also discusses the ‘metaphysical’ physics teaching of Caprini’s
colleague Giovanni Battista Giattino,
published in textbook format in 1653.
For Jesuit mathematics, see §5 below.
The most bravura attempt to place new
developments in physics within the ‘official’ metaphysical framework was that of
Honoré Fabri, on whom see Blum,
Studies (2012), 199–215.
Lohr’s ideas have been significantly
developed by Annalisa Cappiello:
‘Debate’
(2015);
Cappiello
and
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
53
the new metaphysics that developed in the sixteenth century was sometimes
new. In part, this was a function of a new format, with ideas now more often
presented in synthetic treatises (or textbooks) by an individual rather than in
commentaries on an authority.120 At the intellectual level, the metaphysicians
could not stand still, since they had to formulate responses to the challenges of
secular Aristotelianism and humanist anti-scholasticism. In turn, this could
have a major impact on natural philosophy.
The situation in Padua again provides the most important case study.
The Thomist Dominicans were not the only mendicant order in town. The
Franciscans, who had traditionally followed the teachings of Scotus, also
taught philosophy (chairs in Scotist metaphysics and Scotist theology had
been created by the Venetian senate to accompany their Thomist counterparts), and they also sought to respond to secular Aristotelianism. The first
holder of the metaphysics chair was Antonio Trombetta (†1514),
a Franciscan friar who occupied the post from 1476, and who was
a favourite of Pietro Barozzi (1441–1507), Bishop of Padua from 1487.
The latter was the force behind the 1489 edict banning public disputation
on the unicity of the intellect, whereas the former took part in the Fifth
Lateran Council and helped formulate its importuning of the philosophical
teaching of natural immortality.121 Scotus himself had held immortality to
be incapable of being demonstrated by human reason, but Trombetta used
Scotist tools to argue that it could be. One of those tools was the idea that
substances had multiple substantial forms, developed in contrast to
Aquinas’s postulation of only one such form (this had stimulated one of
the most heated controversies in all of medieval and early modern
philosophy).122 Trombetta’s arguments were in turn developed by his
successor Antonio De Fantis (c.1460–1533).
There can be no doubt that this metaphysical revival was directed against the
secular Aristotelians in the arts faculties. What is most remarkable is that it
influenced heavily the ideas of one of the most important and influential
secular natural philosophers of the sixteenth century, Julius Caesar Scaliger
(1484–1558). Scaliger had probably studied with De Fantis,123 and repeatedly
deployed Scotist metaphysics in his naturalist works, including even his
120
121
122
Lamanna, ‘Principio’ (2014). See also
Kristeller, Thomisme, 59–61.
Reif, ‘Textbooks’ (1962); Schmitt, ‘Rise’
(1988).
See Grendler, Universities, 284–8;
Scapin, ‘Metafisica scotista’ (1976);
Mahoney, ‘Scotus’ (1978); Poppi,
Filosofia (1989), 63–115.
For surveys of the debate, see Pasnau,
Themes, 574–605; Michael, ‘Averroes’
123
(1992); Michael, ‘Descartes and
Gassendi’ (1998), and the many works
cited there. For Trombetta’s adoption of
the idea, see Scapin, ‘Metafisica’, 508–9;
Poppi, Filosofia, 101–6.
The evidence for Scaliger’s Franciscan
education, including time spent in
a
convent,
was
collected
in
Billanovich, ‘Bordon’ (1968), at 224–
5, 233–4.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
54
giving up philosophy
commentary on the Historia animalium (not published until 1619).124 Most
interestingly, he deployed the theory of plural, hierarchical forms (created by
God rather than educed from matter) in his explanation of mixture, an
explanation which in turn underpinned his conception of the structure of
almost the whole material world. He did so in part so as to oppose the
Averroism and Alexandrism he found being deployed by other secular
Aristotelians, above all his great enemy Gerolamo Cardano (1501–76).125
Through the very wide dissemination of Scaliger’s Exotericae exercitationes
(1557), not least in Germany,126 this metaphysical theory of mixture exercised
great influence. Perhaps most importantly, a modified version of it reappears
in the works of the Wittenberg physician Daniel Sennert (1572–1637), who
posited second-order corpuscles (prima mixta) whose qualities flow from their
(plural) substantial forms.127 In turn, these ‘primary mixtures’ proved central
to Boyle’s corpuscularianism, although he stripped them of Sennert’s hylomorphism, which he presented as a metaphysical intrusion into a naturalphilosophical question.128
If this is one way in which the revival of metaphysics directly impacted on
natural philosophy, then we can find more if we return to the extraordinarily
productive Jesuits. As we have seen, everyone in the order agreed – or was
forced to agree as a prerequisite for membership – that a metaphysicalontological base was required for all subsequent speculative endeavour
(whether natural-philosophical or theological), and that it was essential to
assert and teach the unity of knowledge against the secular philosophers.129
At the same time, there was much debate about the specific relationship
between the disciplines and the subject matter of each. This was the case
because the order was young, but also because they so desired to be perceived
124
125
126
127
Perfetti, Zoology, 167–70, concluding
(170): ‘[Scaliger] welds the Historia animalium directly to Aristotle’s entire
doctrinal system’ . . . beginning with
‘first principles of nature and motion’.
See the brilliant analysis in Sakamoto,
Scaliger (2016), 60–3, 160–2, 165–75
(note the modifications to the Lohr and
Keßler theses proposed therein, with
which I am in agreement), and the
other works cited there. See also Blank,
‘Plant’ (2010), esp. 271–4.
Jensen, ‘Metaphysics’ (1990).
For various discussions – not all of
which are in agreement with each
other – see Newman, Atoms, 85–153,
esp. 100–6, 137–53; Michael, ‘Sennert’
(1997); Michael, ‘Sea change’ (2001);
128
129
Hirai, ‘Living atoms’ (2012); Stolberg,
‘Particles’ (2003); Blank, ‘Poisons’
(2011), esp. 203–8.
Clericuzio,
‘Redefinition’
(1990);
Clericuzio,
Elements,
103–48,
Newman, Atoms, 157–215. These two
interpreters do not agree on the fundamental relationship between these
molecular aggregates and the smallest,
foundational corpuscles. For an explicit reference to ‘Prima Mista or Mista
Primaria’, see Sceptical chymist
[1661], BW.ii.296. For Boyle’s rejection of hylomorphism as ‘metaphysical’, see below.
For continued conflict with the secular
Aristotelians, see the evidence collected
in Favaro, Lo Studio (1878).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
55
to be at the vanguard of knowledge. Dogmatically reasserting an unreconstructed Thomism would simply not be enough,130 especially when so many
students who came to the Jesuit schools were ‘seculars’ who studied philosophy
only, without going on to theology.
A particularly important role in this process was played by the prestigious
Collegio Romano (est. 1551). It was there that the philosophy (and then
theology) professor Benedict Pereira (1536–1610) articulated, in his De communibus omnium rerum naturalium principiis (1576), a hugely influential new
account of what metaphysics was, and what role it should play in a unified
system of knowledge and pedagogy.131 Pereira was unhappy with the ambiguity, as old as Aristotle’s Metaphysics itself, about whether the discipline was (i)
a ‘first philosophy’ or science of being qua being (Met., iv, 1003a21)
approached via the transcendentals and the ten categories, or (ii) a theology
studying immaterial substances (1026a19–20), a question which had long
vexed both scholastic and humanist commentators (and still vexes Aristotle
scholars today).132 Pereira’s solution was to propose two separate sciences:
a prima philosophia dealing with being qua being, and the other a natural
theology studying immaterial substances (God, separate souls, angels). The
former of these was now explicitly conceptualised as an ‘ontological’ discipline
that provided the foundations for all the other speculative disciplines, including physics. And indeed, De communibus principiis goes on to discuss several
purely physical subjects, including, strikingly, the intrinsic extension of formless prime matter (a seemingly unique move in scholastic metaphysics) and the
position of the heavens within the universe (Pereira’s account stimulated
Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) into his cosmological heresy).133 Pereira’s aim
in making such innovations was to demonstrate that physical phenomena
130
131
Although this did not stop some from
trying to impose just that, above all
Diego de Ledesma (1519–75), a prefect
of studies at the Collegio Romano. See
Sander, ‘War’ (2014).
His importance on this score has been
recognised in several studies: Vollrath,
‘Gliederung’ (1962); Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’,
606–8; Lamanna, ‘Abstraction’ (2014);
Blum, Studies, 139–82. For his participation in the philosophy teaching cycle at
the Collegio Romano, see Baldini, Legem,
569–70. For his equally important role in
stimulating debate about the relationship
between mathematics and the speculative
disciplines, see §5. More generally, see
Lamanna, ‘Question’ (2019).
132
133
Pereira himself summarises the debate
at De communibus omnium rerum naturalium principiis & affectionibus (Lyon,
1588), 22–3. For medieval discussions,
see Zimmermann, Ontologie (1998);
Forlivesi, ‘Subject’ (2009). For seventeenth-century manifestations, Levitin,
Wisdom, 242–52.
De communibus principiis, 322–6. This
striking anticipation of Descartes is
tempered by the fact that Pereira still
insists that prime matter is defined
by its potentiality to receive substantial
form(s).
See
further
Leinsle,
‘Widerstand’ (2014), 59–65; Pasnau,
Themes, 69–70. For Bruno, see
Lamanna, ‘Question’, 278–9.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
56
giving up philosophy
could be explained not via the naturalism of the secular Aristotelians but only
on the basis of such an onto-metaphysical foundation.134 Such novelties,
justified by the demarcation of an onto-metaphysics as a distinct prima
philosophia, would prove very significant. At an institutional level, some
Jesuits, including influential pedaogues such as Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza
(1578–1641), teaching at Salamanca, now campaigned to have such
a metaphysics taught before physics (but after logic).135
In a pattern we have witnessed before with the new ideas coming out of Italy,
Pereira’s notions were widely disseminated and discussed even in Protestant
circles from the last decades of the sixteenth century. This was primarily
because theological leaders in both confessional spheres were coming to the
conclusion that metaphysics had to be reinstated (at least partially) as
a propaedeutic to divinity.136 A Reformed philosopher based in Marburg,
Rudolph Goclenius (1547–1628), incorporated Pereira’s twofold division of
metaphysics into his hugely influential Lexicon philosophicum (1613), labelling
the prima philosophia ‘ontology’, a division then taken up by such influential
writers as Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638) and Abraham Calov (1612–
86).137 Hence ‘ontology’ emerged as a separate science, and in the German
lands it continued to be pursued seriously through to Wolff and beyond.
Both Protestant and Catholic philosophers drew not only on the products of
Italian Jesuits, but also on those of their Spanish counterparts, above all the
Disputationes metaphysicae (1597) by Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), who had
taught in institutions across Spain and at the Collegio Romano before settling
in Coimbra. Just as in Italy, this text was the product of a disciplinary reconfiguration. Post-Reformation Spanish theologians deemed that their arts faculties had focussed too much on logic and natural philosophy, not least
because metaphysics was taught in the theology faculty. New statutes therefore
instituted a shift to something similar to the Paris model, with metaphysics
taking pride of place on the arts course.138 Coming out of this context, Suárez
did not accept Pereira’s separation of metaphysics into two sciences.139 This
134
135
For a specific statement to that effect, see
e.g.
De
communibus
principiis,
‘Praefatio’, sigs. a3v–a4r. Pereira had
himself been (falsely) accused of doctrinal Averroism: Casalini, ‘Cattivo maestro’ (2014).
See Blum, Studies, 251–2 mentioning,
as well as Hurtado, Bartolomeo Mastri
and Raphael Aversa. For more on the
debate outside Italy, see Leinsle,
‘Widerstand’. For a non-Jesuit textbook adopting the same approach, see
Théophraste Bouju, Corps de toute la
philosophie (Paris, 1614), sig. a iiijv,
136
137
138
139
with ‘special metaphysics’ (i.e. God
and immaterial substances) coming
after physics.
For the institutional story, see
Eschweiler, ‘Die Philosophie’ (1928);
Wundt, Schulmetaphysik (1939); and for
Lutheranism only, Sparn, Wiederkehr
(1976). See further I.2.3.
Lamanna, ‘Prima occorrenza’ (2006).
The classic study is Gallego Salvadores,
‘La aparición’ (1973).
For metaphysics as a unitary science, see
e.g. Disputationes metaphysicae, 2 vols
(Venice, 1619), disp. 1.iii, i.17a. There
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
57
difference notwithstanding, Suárez was no less aware than Pereira of the
challenges to metaphysical physics that had been posed by humanist antiAristotelians and secular natural philosophers.140 Accordingly, we find in
Suárez’s thought, just like in Pereira’s, several developments which were
significant for seventeenth-century natural philosophy, for example concerning the (im)possibility of action at a distance, discussed as part of the section on
efficient causality.141 Most importantly, Suárez, aware of the criticisms the
doctrine had attracted, offered a completely new account of substantial forms
grounded primarily in empirical arguments that supposedly suggested their
existence (for example, why water returns to its original temperature after
having been heated). Consequently, ‘only rarely did Suárez appeal to metaphysically contentious concepts such as prime matter’.142
With such a range of innovative discussions available to them, it is hardly
a surprise that philosophers across Europe writing and teaching in the years
after 1600 developed a huge range of metaphysical physics. Indeed, in some
sense almost all of formal, academic philosophy produced in the period
c.1590–1640 could be characterised in this way.143 We have already seen how
explicitly metaphysical frameworks could accommodate and even stimulate
new physical doctrines, not just among the Jesuits but also in Protestant
authors such as Sennert. It is no surprise to find that Sennert’s muchreproduced pedagogical treatise, the Epitome scientiae naturalis (1600), begins
with a section ‘De principiis rerum naturalium’, in which he establishes matter,
form, and privation as the three principles on which the subsequent physics
was to be based. Sennert had read his Pereira, and had clearly taken the idea of
metaphysics as a separate ontological science from him (indeed, he even
suggested the possibility of splitting the remaining ‘metaphysical’ science
into two: pneumatology studying immaterial spirits, and another studying
God only).144 His account of the three principles was equally indebted to the
recent metaphysics of the Italian and Spanish Jesuits (e.g. Toletus), as well as
the aforementioned debt to Scaliger.145 His evidence for the existence of
substantial form was, like Suárez’s, almost entirely empirical and lacking in
prodigious metaphysical elaboration: quite simply, those who denied its
140
141
has been much debate – much of it ideologically or confessionally inflected –
about Suárez’s conception of metaphysics. A sage overview and a collection of
Suárez’s own statements are presented in
Forlivesi, ‘Impure ontology’ (2005).
For an illuminating case study of
his engagement with recent naturalphilosophical findings, see Edwards,
‘Suárez’ (2012).
Des Chene, ‘Propinquity’ (2012).
142
143
144
145
Hattab, ‘Last stand’ (2012), qu. 109, and
105–7 for the empirical arguments. See
also Des Chene, Physiologia (1996), 73–
5; Pasnau, Themes, 561–2, 564.
See also Des Chene, Physiologia, 8–11.
Daniel Sennert, Epitome naturalis scientiae [1600] (Oxford, 1653), 14.
See e.g. his discussion of the debate concerning the origin of forms, Epitome,
45–9.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
58
giving up philosophy
existence or reduced form to accidents were incapable of explaining substantial
individuation, and would be inexorably led to monism.146 If this sounds ‘conservative’, then Sennert’s subsequent thesis – that substantial forms were not
educed from matter but created by God at the beginning of the world – was
anything but. Indeed, it was accompanied by a thinly veiled critique of those
who had followed Aristotle too dogmatically: as a pagan, Aristotle did not know
the truth of the creation, and so, accepting the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit, had
posited the eduction of forms from matter, an opinion erroneously accepted by
Christian Aristotelians who should have known better. The metaphysics which
underpinned Sennert’s pioneering physics – so full of new chymical ideas and
experiments – was thus itself explicitly founded on the revealed truth of creation
ex nihilo.147 Observing this move, we see how possible it was to combine
Pomponazzi-esque arguments concerning the deficiencies of Aristotelian metaphysics with the new metaphysics developed primarily by the Jesuits.
The new, ontological conception of metaphysics – one that explicitly placed it
before physics – could also lead to spectacular new results that went much
further into anti-Aristotelian or corpuscularian territory than those of Sennert
(even in his final, neo-atomist phase). I am talking here of what Christoph Lüthy
has identified as the ‘tradition of Protestant metaphysics’ whose authors
believed, ‘often for theological reasons, that Aristotelian metaphysics was either
bogus or at least ill-conceived, and that a new philosophia prima de ente, a first,
ontological philosophy, ought to be developed either to replace Aristotle’s
metaphysics entirely, or at least to reformulate it thoroughly’.148 Its two premier
advocates were Nicolaus Taurellus (1547–1606) and David Gorlaeus (1591–
1612). Taurellus was akin to a Protestant Scaliger: a physician (he operated
primarily as professor of medicine and natural philosophy at the University of
Altdorf, a post he held from 1580 until his death) who wanted to oppose secular
Aristotelianism with a new system which refuted any opposition between
revealed truth and philosophy by demonstrating the unity of knowledge.149
Both his Triumphus philosophiae (1573) and Gorlaeus’ Exercitationes philosophicae (1620) repeated the usual humanist critique of Aristotelian metaphysics
as a confused hotchpotch of logic and other disciplines.150 But rather than
eschew metaphysics, they devoted themselves to developing a new prima
146
147
148
149
Epitome, 39–40.
Epitome, 49–52.
Lüthy, ‘Roots’ (2019), 85.
As is made clear in the title of his most
important book, Philosophiae triumphus, hoc est, metaphysica philosophandi
methodus . . . (Basel, 1573). For an attack
on double-truth arguments, see fol. 4r.
See likewise his Synopsis Aristotelis
Metaphysices (Hanau, 1596). Taurellus
150
had studied in Tübingen with Jacob
Schegk, who had been much influenced
by the Italian secular Aristotelians: see
Kusukawa, ‘Lutheran uses’ (1999). For
Taurellus himself, see Leinsle, Methode
(1985), i.147–65; Lüthy, ‘Roots’, 90–6;
Lüthy, Gorlaeus (2012), 122–9; Blank,
‘Taurellus’ (2014).
E.g. David Gorlaeus, Exercitationes
philosophicae (Leiden, 1620), 16–20.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
59
philosophia, one which would contain both a doctrine of being qua being and
one of immaterial substances, and would in turn provide the foundations for
a new physics.
In both cases the results were stunningly original. Taurellus denied the
existence of prime matter and affirmed that forms – immaterial forms! – are
the first ontological building blocks of the world, an argument that in turn
allowed him to defend the philosophical viability of the doctrine of creation.151
Gorlaeus, meanwhile, thought that scholastic-Aristotelian metaphysics needed
to be replaced by an ontological master-discipline composed of theosophia
(studying divine being), angelographia (studying supernatural beings), and
physica (studying natural beings); in his case the resulting ontology was
a physical atomism that denied any substantial change at all. This was combined with a remarkably dualist conception of the body as merely the ‘vehicle’
for the soul, rather than the standard conception of man as a unity, a radical
position in part derived from Taurellus.152 The result was a metaphysically
grounded atomist dualism which, one scholar has plausibly suggested, may
have influenced Descartes.153
That this is a possibility at all is a testament to the intellectual vitality of the
new metaphysical systems being developed in the years around 1600. In the
end, these systems would fail to have their desired impact, and many of them
would fall into obscurity, to be recovered only by recent historians. However, it is
important not to think of this process as inevitable. Had the winds of providence
not scattered Philip II’s armada, and had the universities of Oxford and
Cambridge – then as now ever willing to bend to the whims of those in
power – subsequently become bastions of Salamancan neo-scholasticism and
formed an intellectual alliance with the universities of the Spanish Netherlands,
it is perfectly possible to imagine a seventeenth century in which ‘philosophy’
once again became primarily metaphysics (and a metaphysical physics to go
with it). The Lutheran academic institutions would have been more than happy
to play that game in competition with the Jesuit schools that proliferated in
Germany after the Order entered the university of Ingolstadt in 1556.154 If that
had been the case, then the story of seventeenth-century philosophy might have
been the story of Suárezians fighting against Taurellans, with non-metaphysical
151
152
See above all Blank, ‘Taurellus’. I confess
that, having attempted the Philosophiae
triumphus several times, I struggle to
comprehend the thesis, even if the desire
for a creationist pay-off is clear (e.g. 492).
Lüthy, Gorlaeus, 122–30, showing the
debts to Taurellus; also Pasnau,
Themes, 597–8. Gorlaeus does accept
the real existence of the four qualities,
153
154
hot, cold, light, and darkness
(Exercitationes, 114).
Hattab, Descartes, 158–85, 203–20,
focussing in particular on their shared
substance/mode ontology.
For the institutions, see Hengst,
Jesuiten (1981); for the philosophy
taught, see Blum, ‘Grundzüge’
(2001); for the physics, see Hellyer,
Physics.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
60
giving up philosophy
natural science again confined to some pockets of northern Italy, France, and
perhaps the Dutch Republic.
However, that did not occur, and the anti-metaphysical approach to the
study of nature gradually triumphed. It did so because the secular natural
philosophers and physicians we met in §3 were accompanied in their antimetaphysical campaign by another group seeking to establish their place in the
dazzling disciplinary dance that was occurring in the decades around 1600: the
mathematicians and the mixed mathematicians.
I.1.5 Mathematics and Mixed Mathematics: Another Source
for the De-Ontologisation of Natural Philosophy
Many classic studies portrayed the mathematisation of nature as the product of
a metaphysical turn among Europeans, perhaps towards some kind of
Neoplatonism (at least broadly defined).155 Why, then, do I see the process
of mathematicisation as one of de-metaphysicisation? As is well known, the
problem for the mathematicians was that in sixteenth-century academic institutions, mathematics was conceived to be fundamentally distinct from physics,
because it studied an accident, quantity abstracted from matter, rather than
causes and essences. The mixed-mathematical disciplines, by which I mean
above all astronomy, geometrical optics, and mechanics, while they did take
some of their subject matter from the physical world, were, on the Aristotelian
disciplinary framework, subalternate to a relevant mathematical discipline,
and so equally unconcerned with causes and essences.156 With this lower
standing came lower salaries. And yet at exactly this time various mixed
mathematicians claimed physical status for their findings. In astronomy, this
was done by Copernicus’ successors, above all with Tycho Brahe’s elimination
of the solid celestial spheres, and also as part of the reaction to new comets and
to the novae of 1572 and 1604.157 The same, if less spectacularly, goes for postKeplerian optics.158 With such moves also came epistemological and methodological implications. For example, astronomy, like medicine, had long
incorporated a strong contrast between observationes and phaenomena on
155
Burtt, Foundations (1932); Koyré,
Metaphysics and measurement (1968).
A recent attempt to revive the thesis is
De Caro, ‘Platonism’ (2018). Although
such metaphysical readings of Galileo
et al. are now unfashionable, much of
the recent literature on Newton, which
seeks to present him as a metaphysician,
follows in this tradition. For discussion,
see III.Proleg.1.
156
157
158
The topic is still best approached via
Laird, ‘Scientiae mediae’ (1983).
Westman, ‘Astronomer’s role’ (1980).
Di Liscia, ‘Kepler, Meister’ (2007); Gal
and Chen-Morris, ‘Baroque optics’
(2010), 191–217; Dupré, ‘Without
hypotheses’ (2012). Kepler’s optics may
prove an exception to my general thesis,
if one accepts that it had some of its
roots in Neoplatonic metaphysics:
Lindberg, ‘Genesis’ (1986).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
61
the one hand and ‘hypotheses’ on the other. Accordingly, when sixteenthcentury astronomers asserted the relevance of their discoveries for the study of
nature, they often ended up chastising the philosophers for their supposedly
‘hypothetical’ methods.159
Once again, these developments would have been contained had they not
manifested themselves more generally at an institutional level, first and
foremost in Italy. The discovery and translation of various ancient texts,
not least the pseudo-Aristotelian Quaestiones mechanicae, but also those of
Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria, and Pappus,160 led to an increased integration of mathematics into the university curriculum, with Padua again
playing a central role (it had already emerged as a centre of mixedmathematical teaching much earlier, in part because of the importance of
astrology to medicine).161 Predictably, tensions emerged with the natural
philosophers who were so successfully elevating their status and salaries,
and were thus very protective of both. The crowning statement of such
protectionism was Alessandro Piccolomini’s Commentarium de certitudine
mathematicarum disciplinarum (1547), which went beyond the usual interdisciplinary sniping to challenge the traditional argument (i.e. the one
made by Aristotle) that mathematics possesses the highest degree of certainty; according to Piccolomini, this was precluded by mathematics’ noncausal mode of demonstration.162 So was kicked off the famous dispute de
certitudine mathematicarum. Soon, it reappeared among the dynamic
Jesuits, for whom it was of the utmost urgency because Ignatius Loyola
(1491–1556) had assigned a place for mathematics in the curriculum of
their schools, where it was taught not as a preparative along with other
liberal arts, but in the second or third year, at the same time as physics or
metaphysics.163 Once again, it was the tireless taxonomiser of disciplines
Pereira who took centre stage, arguing in the first book of his De principiis,
that, unlike in metaphysics or physics, the middle term of a mathematical
159
160
161
162
Most famously in the attempt of
Copernicus’ pupil Georg Joachim
Rheticus and Ramus to ‘free’ astronomy
from hypotheses: Delcourt, ‘Lettre’
(1934).
Rose and Drake, ‘Questions’ (1971);
Valleriani, ‘Transformation’ (2009);
Laird, ‘Hero’ (2017); Boas, ‘Hero’s
Pneumatica’ (1949).
Rose, ‘Professors’ (1975); Rose,
Mathematics (1975).
More specifically, Piccolomini argued
that mathematical demonstrations
could not be potissimae demonstrations,
the highest type of demonstration in the
163
neo-Aristotelian scheme developed by
Averroes (in his commentary on the
crucial passage at Met., ii.3, 995a15–16)
and thus much debated in Italy in the
first half of the sixteenth century. See De
Pace, Matematiche (1993), 61–75;
Cozzoli, ‘Piccolomini’ (2007).
The literature is vast, and there is still
disagreement as to the precise amount
of mathematics taught at the Jesuit colleges.
Seminal
discussions
are
Cosentino, ‘L’insegnamento’ (1971);
Crombie,
‘Mathematics’
(1977);
Baldini, Legem; outside Italy, see
Krayer, Studienplan (1991).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
62
giving up philosophy
syllogism referred not to an essence but to an accident, quantity, and that
mathematical objects were therefore abstracted only according to reason,
not nature.164 These objections were then repeated again and again by
philosophers, including non-Jesuits trained at the Collegio Romano, such
as Ludovico Carbone.165
The Jesuit mathematics teachers responded in kind, the role of counsel for
the defence falling first and foremost to Christopher Clavius (1538–1612),
mathematics professor at the Collegio Romano, who reasserted the traditional
ideas about the certitude of mathematics and also insisted – albeit in rather
vague terms – on its importance to natural philosophy, most obviously in the
mixed sciences.166 All of this would have been a minor historical curiosity had
the institutional place of these mixed sciences not been prominent enough for
them to make a stand. In Jesuit institutions, and also in some Italian, French,
and German universities, it was prominent enough. In the wake of Clavius’
defence of mathematics, we find Jesuit exponents of the mixed disciplines –
men like François d’Aguilon (1567–1617), working in optics, and Christoph
Scheiner (1575–1650), in astronomy – not only insisting on the utility of their
sciences to natural philosophy, but also saying that those sciences were subalternated to both the relevant pure mathematical discipline and natural
philosophy, a move that had happened earlier in mechanics.167
Indeed, in mechanics in particular, we find a creeping tendency for both
mathematics and natural philosophy professors to classify mechanics as
a causal scientia and to suggest that it could be extended to topics usually
covered in natural philosophy (including falling bodies).168 This was not
primarily the result of jostling for status; rather, the rediscovered texts of
ancient mechanics proposed very different criteria for what constituted
164
165
166
Pereira, De principiis, 16–17, 24–5. The
most precise discussion, also with reference to Pereira’s teaching at the Collegio
Romano,
is
now
Lamanna,
‘Abstraction’; also Giacobbe, ‘Gesuita
progressista’ (1977).
Ludovico Carbone, ‘Dubitationes
quaedam circa scientias mathematicas’, in Introductio in universam philosophiam (Venice, 1599), 240–3. On
Carbone, see Moss, ‘Rhetoric course’
(1986), 146–50.
For a summary statement, see
Christopher Clavius, ‘Modus quo disciplinae mathematicae in scholis
Societatis possent promoveri’, in
Monumenta paedagogica Societatis Jesu
(1901), 471–4. There are many studies:
see esp. Baldini, Legem, ch. 1.
167
168
For examples from d’Aguilon and
Scheiner, see Dear, Discipline (1995),
164–7, and 168–9 for subalternation. For
the same phenomenon happening in
mechanics, see e.g. Niccolò Tartaglia,
Quesiti [1554], trans. in Drake and
Drabkin, Mechanics (1969), 111; and the
many examples in Hattab, ‘Mechanics’
(2005), at 106–13. The move was made
self-evident in mechanics because it is so
clearly signalled at the opening of the
Quaestiones mechanicae itself.
For mathematicians, the best evidence is
Giuseppe Moletti’s Padua lectures,
translated and edited by W. R. Laird in
Unfinished mechanics (2000). For natural philosophers, see the discussion of
Francesco Buonamici (1533–1603) in
Helbing, ‘Mechanics’ (2008), 191–2.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
63
a legitimate explanation. For example, Archimedes’ Equilibrium of planes
introduced the concept of the centre of gravity (notoriously left undefined,
although a definition was offered in the eighth book of Pappus’ Collectio), which
was intrinsically difficult to redescribe in any causal terms.169 Similarly, the same
work, as well as several of the problems in the Quaestiones mechanicae – which
most people accepted as being by Aristotle himself – proposed the reduction to
the lever as a model of mechanical explanation, a fact that was exploited by those
both inside and outside the universities to suggest the potential for mechanics to
explain natural phenomena.170
These were ‘explanations’ very different from those traditionally offered in
natural philosophy, and it did not take much to spark open conflict. Such
conflict is already evident in the middle of the century in the writings of
Giovanni Battista Benedetti (1530–90), well known for his proto-Galilean
account of free fall. Temperamentally less conciliatory than some of his fellow
mechanics, Benedetti used his works – including an ominously titled
Demonstratio proportionum motum localium contra Aristotilem et omnes philosophos (1554) – to contrast Aristotelian philosophy with what he called an
Archimedean ‘mathematical philosophy’.171 In a similar if somewhat more
muted vein, the great Urbino historian of mathematics Bernardino Baldi
(1553–1617) wrote in his Vita di Archimede (c.1590) that ‘mechanics being
a physical subject but nevertheless demonstrable by mathematical reasoning, it
seems that Aristotle, leaving aside the mathematical aspects, preferred to draw
his demonstrations from physical principles’, with the mathematical component that completed the theories only supplied by Archimedes.172 Others
moved in this direction in a different way. For example, the Parisian mathematics professor Henri de Monantheuil (1536–1606), in his commentary on the
Quaestiones mechanicae, suggested a rather striking disciplinary reconfiguration. Speaking of God as a divine mechanic and geometer and the world as
169
But cf. Guidobaldo Dal Monte’s (1545–
1607) attempt to reconcile it with
Aristotelian cosmology (by positing
that the centre of gravity wants to unite
itself with the centre of the universe):
Van Dyck, ‘Stability’ (2006); and more
broadly,
Renn
and
Damerow,
Equilibrium (2012). The problem of
establishing the centres of gravity of
various classic solids was one of the
premier problems of late sixteenthcentury mathematics, taken on by
Commandino, Clavius, Galileo, and
Stevin among others. See further p. 68
below for Luca Valerio’s work on the
issue as a spur to the defence of the
170
171
172
scientific status of mixed mathematics.
Early modern readers did not know the
discussion in Archimedes’ Method of
mechanical theorems, unknown until
the discovery of the Archimedes
Palimpsest in 1906.
Bertoloni Meli, Thinking (2006), 24–5;
Bertoloni Meli, ‘Dal Monte’ (1992);
Palmieri, ‘Breaking’ (2008); Laird,
‘Introduction’ (2000), 32–6.
Giovanni Battista Benedetti, Diversarum
speculationum mathematicarum et physicarum liber [1585], trans. Drake and
Drabkin, Mechanics, 196.
Trans. Drake and Drabkin, Mechanics,
14.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
64
giving up philosophy
a machine in a way that is profoundly similar to Newton’s use of the same
tropes in the Preface to the Principia, Monantheuil presented his enterprise as
a work of ‘rational mechanics’. This did not lead to an equation of mechanics
with physics, but rather to the positing of a parallel master discipline which
studied artificial things, while physics studied the natural.173
One of the reasons Monantheuil was still sceptical about the possibility
of applying mechanics directly to nature was his resignation to the fact that
the material contingencies of the physical world made it unsuitable for pure
geometrical study, a common theme in late sixteenth-century mixedmathematical writings.174 However, the mathematicians found a way to
turn this problem to their advantage. This was because they had to address
the second part of the Piccolomini–Pereira argument: that mathematics was
a non-causal discipline because its demonstrations did not include essences.
Rather counterintuitively, the mathematicians started to celebrate this
fact.175 This argument allowed them to defend the certainty of mathematics
in comparison with natural philosophy. After all, it did not deal with the
causes and essences which, as every natural philosopher admitted, were
obscure and difficult to grasp! In other words, the mixed mathematicians
now claimed to be able to establish certainty about nature within their own
limited sphere.
We already find a strong argument to this effect in Federico Commandino’s
dedication to Cardinal Ranuccio Farnese in his hugely important edition of
Archimedes’ Opera (1558). Commandino made his case by referring to the
history of philosophy and its long-term inability to establish any kind of
consensus about the basic principles of things:
For if we consider the obscurity of nature (since it is from nature, above
all, that we begin), we will discover that even its smallest parts are
barricaded by innumerable difficulties, and that to find something with
the greatest appearance of truth must be understood to require unusual
intelligence and the greatest good fortune. Not any minor philosophers,
173
174
Henri de Monantheuil, Aristotelis
mechanica (Paris, 1599), Comment., 3,
9–10. See also the comparison of man
qua mechanic to God in the ‘Praefatio’,
sig. i iii3r. I was led to this source by
Hattab, ‘Mechanics’, 113–16. As Hattab
has noted in her Descartes, 103, the divine
mechanic analogy reappears in the
Quaestiones mechanicae commentary by
Galileo’s Jesuit friend Giovanni di
Guevara (1627), also still limiting mechanical investigation to artificial movement.
Monantheuil, Aristotelis mechanica,
Comment., 13: ‘Sunt praeterea vitia
175
materiae
quae
Geometra,
aut
Mechanicus demonstrans non considerat: nec etiam obstant quo
minus quae proposita sunt, vera sint
in intellectu.’ This important point is
not noted by Hattab, nor Hooykaas,
‘Verhältnis’, in Studies (1983), at
176–82. I take the phrase ‘contingencies of matter’ from Galileo’s letter to
Dal Monte, 29 November 1602,
Opere di Galileo, x.97–100; the issue
is
illuminatingly
discussed
in
Bertoloni Meli, Thinking, 32–5.
See also Dear, Discipline, 162–3.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
65
but the very fathers of philosophy itself, Plato and Aristotle, even disagreed about whether the world had always existed or was created. As for
the principles of all things, from which everything originates, when might
we find three or at most four philosophers who thought the same thing?
For on motion, the void, time, the very elements and their nature, the
various and mutually conflicting opinions of the philosophers easily show
that physics [physiologia] is founded on various conjectures rather than
on the firmest proofs; the best we can do is apprehend what is most
probable in it.176
In contrast, ‘the mathematical disciplines . . . not only understand by
themselves that which they consider, but even shine a very clear light on
the other sciences, so that our understanding might grasp them much
more easily’. Accordingly, Commandino went on, of the three speculative
sciences – physics, metaphysics, and mathematics – the first two were
only probable, whereas the last offered certainty, and was thus to be
ranked highest, a conclusion which extended to its application to natural
philosophy and medicine also.177
As the mixed-mathematical disciplines fought to defend their importance, it
did not take long for such sentiments to become widespread, and for development of the implication that physical (and metaphysical) speculations about
matters treated by the mathematicians were doing more harm than good.
Influenced in part by Benedetti, and perhaps even by the young Galileo, the
Pisan professor of philosophy Jacopo Mazzoni (1548–98) developed
a cautiously anti-Aristotelian defence of the applicability of mathematics to
physics.178 For while he agreed with Pereira that mathematics, including mixed
176
Federico Commandino, Archimedis
Opera non nulla (Venice, 1558), sig. *2r:
‘Si enim in naturae obscuritatem (ut ab ea
potissimum ordiamur) intuebimur: ne
minimam quidem partem reperiemus,
non sexcentis obstructam difficultatibus;
in qua quid verisimillimum sit, invenire,
non mediocris ingenii, & summae felicitatis esse iudicandum est. Mundus ipse
utrum nunquam non fuerit, an aliquando
genitus sit, inter non minorum gentium
philosophos, sed philosophiae ipsius parentes Platonem, & Aristotelem summa
fuit dissensio. De principiis autem
rerum, e quibus omnia oriuntur, quando
tres, aut ad summum quatuor philosophi,
qui eadem sentirent, inventi sunt? Nam
de motu, de inani, de tempore, de elementis ipsis, & eorum natura, variae,
atque inter se dissidentes philosophorum
177
178
sententiae facile ostendunt, physiologiam
quibusdam potius conjecturis, quam firmissimis argumentationibus niti; optimeque nobiscum agi, si, quid in ea maxime
probabile sit, intelligamus.’
Opera, sig. *2r–v (‘mathematicae
disciplinae . . . non solum per seipsas,
id, quod spectant, assequuntur; verum
etiam reliquis scientiis clarissimam
lucem afferentes, ut earum multo faciliorem
cognitionem
capiamus,
efficient’).
The best accounts are Purnell, ‘Mazzoni’
(1972), esp. 292–3 for the possible influence of Galileo; and De Pace,
Matematiche, ch. 4. Mazzoni’s familiarity with the humanist anti-Aristotelian
literature is established in Schmitt,
‘Cuttlefish’ (1965), 69.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
66
giving up philosophy
mathematics, does not provide knowledge of essences or causes, it was precisely for this reason that both pure and mixed mathematics offered more
certain knowledge in the limited sphere that they did address.179 In turn,
Mazzoni argued Aristotle had gone wrong – especially in dynamics, as
Benedetti had already suggested – precisely because he had excluded mathematical demonstrations from physics.180 In the next decades, such claims
became more and more commonplace. To give only examples from Jesuit
mixed mathematics, the aforementioned Scheiner, in his Rosa ursina (1630),
an important work of post-Galilean astronomy, contrasted the mathematicians’ approach to the heavens with that of the natural philosopher: ‘In
physical matters many things are unknown about what concerns the heavens;
few things are known for certain; there are many doubtful things, many false
things are asserted; many true things denied.’ Meanwhile Giuseppe Biancani
(Blancanus) (1566–1624), a Jesuit professor of mathematics at the University
of Parma, could begin the chapter of his Sphaera mundi (1619) devoted to ‘The
parts of the world’ by delimiting its territory: ‘This inferior part of the world,
which is composed from the elements (which whether they be three or four we
leave to the disputations of the physicists . . .)’.181
With the growing institutional self-confidence of the mathematicians, it
became more viable to make systematic claims for the applicability of mathematics to natural philosophy particularly because of the non-essentialist
results that would ensue. The position received its canonical statement in
Biancani’s De mathematicarum natura, appended to his Aristotelis loca mathematica (1615), a collection of Aristotelian statements concerning mathematics that remained very influential through the seventeenth century. In this
book, well known to specialists but underappreciated in the wider literature,182
Biancani developed arguments that were far more adventurous than Clavius’.
179
Jacopo Mazzoni, In universam
Platonis, et Aristotelis philosophiam
praeludia (Venice, 1597), 159–64,
with Ptolemy and Archimedes offered
as archetypal examples (164). For
non-essentialism, see esp. 160: ‘all
mathematics, even mixed, such as
astrology and similar disciplines, discern no other quiddity of a thing than
that which emerges from the definitions of mathematical figures’
(‘omnes Mathematicae, & etiam mixtae, ut Astrologia, & similes, nullam
aliam re quidditatem agnoscunt, nisi
eam, quae ex definitionibus figurarum
Mathematicarum emergit’).
180
181
182
In ch. xviii, entitled ‘Disputatur utrum
usus Mathematicarum in Physica utilitatem vel detrimentum afferat, et in hoc
Platonis et Aristotelis comparatio’ (187–
97), summarised in Purnell, ‘Mazzoni’,
282–92.
These two examples are quoted and
translated in Dear, Discipline, 163–4.
The argument was already hinted at by
Clavius: Operum mathematicorum tomus
primus (Mainz, 1611), ‘Prolegomena’.
The seminal discussions are Giaccobe,
‘Biancani’ (1976); Galluzzi, ‘Platonismo’
(1973), at 56–65; Wallace, Sources (1984),
141–8; Dear, Discipline, 36–41; Mancosu,
Mathematics (1996), 16–19.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
67
To be sure, he began with the usual point that geometrical demonstrations are
certain because they include essential definitions which in turn produce causal
explanations. For example, the definition of a square as a plane figure consisting of four equal straight lines and four right angles was not only an essential
definition, but also a potissima causal explanation of the square’s properties, in
part because mathematical definitions were also constructive, ‘when the subject itself, say, square, is demonstrated of a figure as its property, or when it is
shown that a certain construction correctly yields a square, a triangle,
a perpendicular line, and the like’.183
Crucially, this generated a greater degree of certainty in mathematical
demonstrations than in those of other sciences, which Biancani assumed
operated through a version of the regressus. In natural philosophy, the ‘analytic’ stage, which – as all philosophers accepted – began with sensible accidents, could never fully grasp the essence of the object, unlike in mathematics,
where the starting definition of the object was perfect and complete.184 This
state of affairs was exacerbated by the material contingencies of the natural
objects studied by the philosophers, a point which allowed Biancani to turn the
accusation that mathematics studied only an accident (quantity) against his
opponents:
They reproach mathematics for the ignobility of its subject, namely, that it
is an accident. But to this we respond first that even if it is an accident, it is
nevertheless immaterial and abstract, for which reason it is placed
between the subjects of physics and metaphysics. Secondly, it is better to
get to know innumerable, marvellous truths about an accident, than
always to be cast from one side to the other, by the whirlpool of
a thousand opinions and dissensions, especially concerning material
substance, and hence never to arrive at the cognition of any substance at
all. Thirdly, in applied mathematics the case is different, where it is not
bare quantity, but either the heavenly bodies, or musical sounds, or the
modes of vision and deception, or the powers of machines are studied,
with the same ends in mind and with the same scope as in other subjects
studied by other philosophers.185
By the standards of early seventeenth-century philosophical epistemology, this
is a remarkable claim. According to Biancani, it is far preferable to pursue
a limited but certain science of accidents rather than fumbling around
183
All translations are from G. Klima’s version (‘Nature of mathematics’) in
Mancosu, Mathematics. See ‘Nature of
mathematics’, 181–4, qu. 183–4.
Biancani reads this into De an., xii.2.
At 192, Biancani explains how Euclid’s
32nd proposition is equivalent to an
argument from the material cause.
184
185
‘Nature of mathematics’, 184. Against
Piccolomini, this is presented as the
‘real’ Aristotelian position, supposedly
as expounded in Post. an., i.23, 29, 31
(185).
‘Nature of mathematics’, 202 (very
slightly modified).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
68
giving up philosophy
endlessly after the ‘cognition of substance’. This ingenious move turned the
natural philosophers’ self-professed difficulties in reaching the substance in
which perceptible accidents inhered against their theory of demonstration, and
thus their entire enterprise.186 As should be clear, the gambit bears a strong
structural resemblance to some of the anti-essentialist arguments being made
by physicians and humanist anti-Aristotelians.
Most importantly, Biancani declared that this conclusion applied not just to
pure mathematics but even to the mixed-mathematical sciences. This might
seem blatantly self-contradictory. On the one hand, Biancani seems to be
saying, mathematics is more certain than physics because it is entirely
abstracted from matter; but on the other, it is also more certain when comes
to the natural, material world itself. The reason he could say this is precisely
because of the sublimated anti-essentialism: mathematics produces certain,
and even causal, knowledge, but only of accidents or properties (affectiones)
that were well known to the senses. All that needed to be done to justify this
was to produce some examples in line with Aristotle’s claim that in such cases
‘the “what” is to be known by those who perceive, but the “why” by the
mathematicians, for they have the demonstrations of the causes’.187 And so,
Biancani continued, the astronomer provided a potissima demonstration of
the lunar eclipse qua a ‘property’ (affectio) of nature, by using geometry to
explain that its cause was the interposition of the Earth. From this and similar
claims one could proceed to the much grander one that ‘this powerful philosophy manifests the structure and symmetry of the whole world [i.e.
universe]’.188 In the same vein, the optician explained not only why the eye
was spherical – so that perpendicular lines can fall on it from all directions so as
to produce distinct sight – but in doing so also provided even the final cause for
the property in question.189 The reduction of a mechanical object such as
a wedge to the principle of the lever provided a causal explanation of its
operation and power. The explanations of the centres of gravity of the classical
solids by Archimedes, recently completed by Luca Valerio (1553–1618) –
a student of Clavius who taught at the Sapienza University and published his
monumental De centro gravitatis solidorum in 1604 – were, according to
Biancani, no less causal.190
186
187
188
See e.g. ‘Nature of mathematics’, 201–2.
‘Nature of mathematics’, 206. This is
sneaky. The reference is to Post. an.,
79a3–6, where Aristotle’s wider point is
for a broader alliance between the naturalist and the mathematician, not to
reduce the former to someone who
merely ‘perceives’.
‘Nature of mathematics’, 206–7.
Biancani here cites Zabarella, for whose
189
190
complex attitude to the mixed sciences,
see Laird, ‘Scientiae mediae’, 218–53.
‘Nature of mathematics’, 207.
‘Nature of mathematics’, 207. For
Valerio, see now the majestic discussion
in Napolitani and Saito, ‘Royal road’
(2004), which demonstrates the
immense significance of Valerio’s
work, not least for developing a general
method for identifying centres of
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
69
One scholar has commented that this defence of mixed mathematics was
conducted ‘more with rhetoric and examples’ than anything else, and that
Biancani ‘has not solved the difficulties raised in the commentaries on the
Posterior Analytics’.191 This may be true, but by the standards of the time, and
especially by the standards of the conciliatory approach almost inevitably
forced upon any Jesuit author, the idea of a mathematical science of accidents –
or, more accurately, properties (affectiones) – hinted at here is quite
remarkable. It proved so successful, I suggest, because it fed into the
wider anti-essentialist – and anti-philosophical – currents of thought then
manifesting themselves across Europe.
It remained only for those with less conciliatory mindsets to take the next
steps. Those steps were (i) to condemn the search for causal explanations
grounded in the knowledge of essences as a waste of time; (ii) to affirm with
more conviction that the principles of a mathematical science of properties
were derived from sense experience, but nonetheless amenable to mathematical study that produced something akin to demonstrative, certain knowledge.
One person who did both things was Biancani’s acquaintance Galileo.192 I shall
not enter here into the debate about Galileo’s methodology. Suffice to say, we
sometimes find in his published work strong statements of causal nescience,
the search for causes being happily abandoned for mathematical certainty
concerning properties. Although they are very well known, it is worth quoting
in full Salviati’s words in the Third Day of the Two new sciences (1638):
The present does not seem to me to be an opportune time to enter into the
investigation of the cause of the acceleration of natural motion, concerning which various philosophers have produced various opinions, some of
them reducing this to approach to the centre; others to the presence of
successively less parts of the medium [remaining] to be divided; and
others to a certain extrusion by the surrounding medium which, in
rejoining itself behind the moveable, goes pressing and continually pushing it out. Such fantasies, and others like them, would have to be examined
and resolved, with little gain. For the present, it suffices our Author that
we understand him to want us to investigate and demonstrate some
attributes [passiones] of a motion so accelerated (whatever be the cause
of its acceleration) that the momenta of its speed go increasing, after its
departure from rest, in that simple ratio with which the continuation of
time increases, which is the same as to say that in equal times, equal
additions of speed are made.193
191
192
gravity. For his career, see Baldini and
Napolitani, ‘Biografia’ (1991).
Laird, ‘Galileo’ (1997), 266; also Park,
Loss (2018), 211.
The extent of their acquaintance is
known only from the letters from
193
Biancani to Christopher Grienberger,
14 June 1611, and Galileo to
Grienberger, 1 September 1611, Opere
di Galileo, ii.126, 180.
Opere di Galileo, viii.202 [= Two new
sciences, 159].
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
70
giving up philosophy
It is important not to generalise such statements too much, or to speak of
a Galilean worldview completely incommensurable with that of his philosophical contemporaries.194 Nonetheless, its implications are both striking and
important. The passiones here are the same as Biancani’s affectiones and the
English ‘properties’, and the ‘fantasies’ are the causal explanations of the
philosophers.
Galileo may have learned to adopt such aggressive language during his dispute
with those philosophers concerning buoyancy, a dispute which broke out at the
start of the century. During this skirmish, he defended himself from the charge of
‘novelty’ for speaking of momento – a term he self-avowedly imported from
mechanics – as a ‘force’ whose cause was unknown and of buoyancy as a function
of respective weights rather than shape. His critics pounced to attack the noncausal nature of such claims, accusing Galileo and his experiments of producing
only ‘the particular effects, rather than the causes of things’, and his ‘mathematical
propositions and proofs’ of not offering ‘the true causes of the operations of
nature’. All Galileo was saying was that ‘lightness is the cause of floating’, but
Aristotle had actually explained the natural cause of lightness.195
Or, even more bluntly, they used Pereira-esque reasoning to declare that the
theory of subalternation rendered Galileo’s proofs redundant, and the man
himself mentally unstable:
Before we consider Galileo’s demonstrations, it seems necessary to prove
how far from the truth are those who wish to prove natural facts by means
194
195
See the counter-examples in Bertoloni
Meli, Thinking, 67.
Considerazioni sopra il Discorso del Sig.
Galileo Galilei [1612] in Opere di
Galileo, iv.165. The full passage reads
‘But if the Peripatetic opinion [concerning the causes of buoyancy and sinking]
undergoes some opposition, it nevertheless rests on a rather more secure and
sensible foundation than does Galileo’s,
which, amidst a magnificent apparatus
of objections to Aristotle and various
experiences and new demonstrations,
at first seems pompous and graceful.
But, once we look into it carefully and
weigh it, the objections easily dissolve,
and his experiences either waver or
reveal the particular effects, rather than
the causes of things, and the mathematical propositions and proofs do not succeed in proving the force and the true
causes of the operations of nature’ (‘Ma
se questa opinione peripatetica porta
qualche opposizione, si posa nondimeno sopra fondamento assai più sicuro
e senzato che l’opinione Galilea non fa:
la quale, tra un magnifico apparecchio di
obbiezioni ad Aristotile e di varie esperienze e di nuove dimostrazioni, viene
a farsi vedere a prima vista tutta pomposa e leggiadra; ma, considerandola
bene a dentro e pesandola, le opposizioni facilmente si sciogliono, l’esperienze o vacillano o scoprano più tosto
gli effetti particolari che la cagione delle
cose, e le proposizioni e prove matematiche non arrivano a dimostrare la forza
e le vere cagioni dell’operazioni della
natura’). This passage has previously
been adduced in Biagioli, Courtier
(1993), 205, but my translation is different. For the dispute, see Drake, Galileo
(1970), 159–76; Shea, Revolution (1972),
14–48. For the centrality of momento as
a concept permitting the science of
motion, see Galluzzi, Momento (1979).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
71
of mathematical reasoning, among whom, if I am not mistaken, is
Galileo. All the sciences and all the arts have their own principles and
their own causes by means of which they demonstrate the special
properties of their own object. It follows that we are not allowed to
use the principles of one science to prove the properties of another.
Therefore anyone who thinks he can prove natural properties with
mathematical arguments is simply demented, for the two sciences are
very different. The natural scientist studies natural bodies that have
motion as their natural and proper state, but the mathematician
abstracts from all motion.196
To such statements Galileo sometimes responded with the most forthright
counter-positioning between the ‘experience’ of effects and a ‘philosophy’ that
seeks causes: ‘It is foolish to seek a philosophy that shows us the truth of an
effect better than experience and our own eyes.’197 The solution he tended to
adopt publicly was to reformulate causality in phenomenological terms, in part
by condemning the search for internal, structural explanations, such as those
grounded in the four elements, in favour of explanations in terms of phenomenological proximate causes which, he insisted, were known immediately to
the senses:
I say that it is all the same to consider the predominance of the
elements in the moving body as it is to consider the excess or lack
of weight in relation to the medium, because the elements do not
operate in this action except as heavy or light. It is as much as to say
that the fir-wood does not sink because it is predominantly airy, as it is
to say that it is less heavy than water. Indeed, even if the immediate
cause is its being less heavy than water, and being predominantly airy
is the cause of the lesser weight, it is still the case that whoever
adduces as the cause the predominance of the element, puts forward
the cause of the cause, and not the proximate and immediate cause.
Now who does not know that the real cause is the immediate one, and
not the mediated one? Moreover, the one who alleges weight [as the
cause], refers to a cause very well known to the senses, because we can
ascertain very easily whether ebony, for example, and the fir-wood are
more or less heavy than water. But who will tell us whether the earth
196
197
Vincenzo di Grazia, Considerazioni
sopra il discorso di Galileo Galilei
[1613], in Opere di Galileo, iv.385,
trans. Shea, Revolution, 34–5, and also
Laird, ‘Galileo’, 265. Di Grazia was
a philosophy professor at Pisa.
Opere di Galileo, iv.166: ‘È scioccezza il
cercar filosofia che ci mostri la verità di
un effetto meglio che l’esperienza e gli
occhi nostri.’ This is his note against the
Considerazioni. The specific context is
Galileo’s rather dubious attempt to show
that a body with a greater specific gravity
than water, such as a thin slice of ebony,
only seems to float, but is in fact slightly
below the surface and only remains there
because it has some connection to the air
above it.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
72
giving up philosophy
or the air is predominant [within them]? Certainly there is no better
experience than to see if they float or sink.198
Again, a mathematical science of properties known to the senses is being
contrasted with the hubristic search for internal principles. Of course, the
‘proximate cause’ being evoked here was no cause at all in the Aristotelian
sense, but only an effect. By the time of the Third Letter on Sunspots
(December 1612), such talk had blossomed into a full, anti-essentialist research
programme:
in our speculating we seek to penetrate the true internal essence of natural
substances, or content ourselves with a knowledge of some of their
properties [affezioni]. The former I hold to be as impossible an undertaking with regard to the closest elemental substances as with more remote
celestial things. The substances composing the earth and the moon seem
to me to be equally unknown, as do those of our elemental clouds and of
sunspots. I do not see that in comprehending substances near at hand we
have any advantage except copious detail; all the things among which men
wander remain equally unknown, and we pass by things both near and far
with very little or no real acquisition of knowledge.199
It is hard not to see in these statements the inheritance of Valla’s
‘dialectical’ anti-Aristotelianism. But it has here been deployed to
a completely new purpose: the defence of a mathematical approach to
physical questions.
It might be thought that such statements are of necessity ontologically
neutral. What is interesting is that they precipitated, in the First Day of the
Two New Sciences, an implicitly non-hylomorphic theory of matter which
198
Discorso intorno alle cose che stanno in
su l’acqua [1612], in Opere di Galileo,
iv.86–7. ‘Quanto all’altra parte, dico
che tanto è’l considerar ne’mobili il predominio degli elementi, quanto l’eccesso
o’l mancamento di gravità in relazione al
mezzo, perchè’n tale azione gli elementi
non operano se non in quanto gravi
o leggieri. E però tanto è’l dire, che il
legno dell’abeto non va al fondo perchè è
a predominio aereo, quant’è’l dire
perchè è men grave dell’acqua: anzi,
pur la cagione immediata è l’esser men
grave dell’acqua, e l’essere a predominio
aereo è cagion della minor gravità; però
chi adduce per cagione il predominio
dell’elemento, apporta la causa della
causa, e non la causa prossima
e immediata. Or chi non sa che la vera
199
causa è la immediata, e non la mediata?
In oltre, quello che allega la gravità,
apporta una causa notissima al senso,
perchè molto agevolmente potremo
accertarci se l’ebano, per esemplo,
e l’abeto son più o men gravi dell’acqua:
ma s’ei sieno terrei o aerei a predominio,
chi ce lo manifesterà? certo niun’altra
esperienza meglio, che’l vedere se e’ galleggiano o vanno al fondo.’ This is part
of a ‘response’ to the deceased Pisan
philosopher Francesco Buonamici, who
is the interlocutor in the Discorso, and
whose De motu had been published in
1611. On him, see n. 168 above.
Terza lettera . . . delle macchie del sole
[1612], in Opere di Galileo, v.187, trans.
Drake, Discoveries (1957), 123.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
73
could be posited without making any deeper ontological claims.200 This was
possible, as Zvi Biener has recently argued, by showing that the particular
properties of matter responsible for the force of cohesion can be explained by
the universally accepted mathematical principle of the law of the lever (in turn
applied in the Second Day).201 In other words, the only claims which one could
make about matter were those permitted by the mathematical study of phenomenological properties. Thus one returns to the marriage of an emphasis on
the search for principles established via sensory experience – particularly
important for the neo-Archimedean axiomatic structure of Galileo’s
argument202 – and a caution about the explanatory aims of scholastic natural
philosophy, now increasingly caricatured as hubristically essentialist.
Crucially, the ‘mechanism’ we find here is not an ontological mechanism,
but rather an operational one. That is to say, it is suggested that nature could be
explained using the tools of mechanics without explicitly positing a restrictive
ontology to underpin those explanations.203 This distinction, a version of
which we already met among the early seventeenth-century iatrochymists, is
fundamental to understanding seventeenth-century natural philosophy.
Almost the only strict ontological mechanists were the Cartesians. The reason
for this was because theirs was a truly metaphysical physics, one in which the
metaphysics dictated the nature of the ontology, and then the natural
philosophy (see §6). Virtually everyone else, however much they admired
the explanatory potential of mechanics, refused to restrict their ontology
in this way, because they saw the move as unnecessarily reductionist,
dogmatic, and non-experiential.
200
201
202
203
Opere di Galileo, viii.51 (= Two new
sciences, 12–13). Whether the methodological ideas developed in the first decades of the century also led to the
famous, surprising statement of the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities
in the digression on heat in Il saggiatore
(1623) [Opere di Galileo, vi.347–8], I am
not sure (Osler, ‘Essences’ (1973), 509
suggests that they did).
Biener, ‘First new science’ (2004); also
Palmerino, ‘Solutions’ (2001).
See Bertoloni Meli, ‘Axiomatic’ (2010),
and p. 74 below.
I am not the first to posit such
a distinction. It has been suggested for
the later seventeenth century by Dennis
Des Chene, in his ‘Mechanisms of life’
(2005), 246, in a passage worth quoting
in full: ‘The use of mechanistic forms of
explanation does not, however, require
that nature should instance only those
properties
featuring
in
those
explanations . . . There had never been
an entire consensus concerning the
restrictive ontology; what is new in the
work of philosophers such as Borelli and
Perrault is that an outright rejection of
that ontology was combined with
a thoroughgoing commitment to mechanism, and thus to a non-restrictive
mechanism. The combination was
made
possible
by
emphasizing
a traditional division of labour in
which, contrary to the systematic claims
of Cartesians, the study of the transmission and determination of active powers,
which is the province of mechanics,
could be undertaken separately from
the study of those powers themselves
and their principles.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
74
giving up philosophy
Following immediately in his wake, Galileo’s most important followers –
Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598–1647), Evangelista Torricelli (1608–47),
Benedetto Castelli (1578–1643), and Vincenzo Viviani (1622–1703) – happily
applied the lessons of mathematics and mechanics to the physics of motion
without making any foundational ontological or causal claims. (This was what
so annoyed Descartes about Galileo’s own work.)204 Rather, their priority was
to seek for more stable empirical foundations for the axiomatic science they
were pursuing; Torricelli, for example, replaced Galileo’s single axiom (‘that
the degrees of speed acquired by the same moveable over different inclinations
of planes are equal whenever the heights of those planes are equal’) with a more
self-evident one of his own.205 This was in line with the research programme
Galileo himself seemed to have envisaged, in which the search for stable
empirical foundations was connected to the mathematical explanation of
accidents or properties. So, for example, he wrote in 1638 to object to
Giovanni Battista Baliani (1582–1666), who in his De motu naturali (published
that year) had deduced the law of fall of heavy bodies from the assumption that
the length of a pendulum is proportional to the square of its period, that
it is our intention to investigate and demonstrate geometrically the accidents and properties which befall heavy bodies which naturally and freely
descend over rectilinear spaces differing in length or inclination, or in
both together. In coming to the choice of the principles on which science
must be founded, you take as clear signs some accidents which have no
connection with motions made over lines that are not straight . . .206
In his response, Baliani stated unequivocally that ‘experiences’, above all as they
were discovered by the mixed-mathematical sciences, ‘are to be assumed as the
principles of sciences’ and of the knowledge of natural things. The search for
causes was to be left to another discipline, ‘wisdom’ (i.e. metaphysics), something
in which Baliani cautiously allowed himself to indulge in the second edition of
1646, but only after the physico-mathematical treatment had been completed.207
204
205
206
Descartes to Mersenne, 22 June 1637
and 16 October 1638, AT.i.392, ii.380.
For the broader context, see the marvellous overview in Roux, ‘Cartesian mechanics’ (2004).
Bertoloni Meli, Thinking, 119.
Quoted in Caverni, Il metodo sperimentale (1891–1900), iv.313: ‘É la nostra
intenzione investigare e dimostrare geometricamente accidenti e passioni, che
accaggiono ai mobili gravi naturalmente
e liberamente discendenti sopra spazi
retti differenti, o di lunghezza
o d’inclinazione, o d’ambedue insieme.
207
Nel venir poi alla elezione dei principii,
sopra i quali deve esser fondata la
scienza, prendete come chiara notizia
accidenti, i quali niuna connessione
hanno con moti fatti sopra line non
rette . . .’.
Baliani to Galileo, 1 July 1639, Opere di
Galileo, xviii.69: ‘. . . l’esperienze si debbano por per principii delle scienze . . .
sapienza’. That metaphysics is meant is
clear from the second edition, De motu
naturali gravium solidorum et liquidorum (Genoa, 1646), 97–8. The subsequent causal explanation (98–102) is
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
75
More generally, his attitude to philosophers’ explanations was disdainful. In
a later dialogue he launched a long attack on philosophical explanations of first
principles, the two archetypal ones being Democritean atomism and Aristotelian
hylomorphism. Both were based not on experience but on analogical-deductive
reasoning: in effect, they imagined something to be true and then proceeded to
posit effects that necessarily followed, a type of explanation no better than the
imaginary epicycles of the ancient astronomers.208 Far better were the approaches
of the mathematicians and the chymists, both of whom established their principles only through experience and experiment. This was a rather remarkable
coming together of the mathematical and iatrochymical strands of antiphilosophical thinking.
By the time Baliani launched this attack on the philosophers, writers outside
Italy had long emphasised the anti-metaphysical and anti-ontological implications of the merging of mixed mathematics and natural philosophy. Perhaps
the most important person to do this was the Minim friar Marin Mersenne
(1588–1648), the central conduit of the most influential network of naturalists
in the seventeenth century.209 In a pattern we shall find repeated several times
among leading seventeenth-century French philosophers (Gassendi,
Malebranche, and, to an extent, even Descartes), Mersenne was convinced
that some kind of new philosophy could play a central role in religious
apologetics, above all against what he considered to be the two defining
intellectual traits of the irreligion of his day: (i) an animist or pantheist
naturalism, which he perceived to stretch all the way from ancient paganism
to the recent neo-Aristotelian naturalists (Pomponazzi, Telesio, Vanini), and
which equated God with nature and eroded the distinction between the natural
and supernatural; (ii) a pervasive Pyrrhonist scepticism. To simplify somewhat, we can say that his apologetic works of the 1620s sought to play the two
groups off against each other, with the result that physico-mathematics –
a term that Mersenne himself would come to use – was left as the best
propaedeutic to theology, and hence the best subject for an independent
research programme.210
The outcome was an explicit anti-essentialism, articulated not just in the
1620s but also in the more purely physico-mathematical works of the 1630s,
where only mathematics as the study of quantity could escape the uncertainty
208
209
discussed in Moscovici, L’expérience
(1967), 56–72.
Giovanni Battista Baliani, ‘Della Filosofia
Naturale, e suoi principii’, in Opere diverse
(Genoa, 1666), 39–58. The point is made
at 53, and explained at 54.
See Lenoble, Mersenne (1943); Dear,
Mersenne (1988).
210
This point is important: Mersenne’s
physico-mathematics cannot be seen
in purely instrumental terms as
a component of an apologetic project,
but took on a life of its own, analogous
to the way Aristotelian physics had
taken on a life of its own in medieval
pedagogy. See likewise Dear, Mersenne,
23–4.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
76
giving up philosophy
caused by our inability to penetrate ‘the surface of corporeal things’.211 At the
earliest stage of Mersenne’s career, it was expressed in terms strikingly similar
to those used by Galileo in the Third Letter on Sunspots:
The greatest persons and the finest minds confess ingenuously that they
know nothing with evidence and certitude about anything that we see: for
whether we look up to the heavens or lower our eyes to the earth, we are
forced to admit that everything is unknown to us. Natural being, which is
the closest to us, and the best proportioned to our senses, is an irreproachable witness to our very great and profound ignorance, since we do not
know the nature of anything, neither in general, nor in particular.212
This anti-essentialism led Mersenne to be as sceptical about the Baconian project
to grasp ‘the nature of things’ as about Aristotelianism in its scholastic mode.213
Knowledge was to be had only of appearances, treated probabilistically as
a mathematical science of accidents.214 Accordingly, Mersenne’s ‘mechanism’
211
212
Marin Mersenne, Les Questions
théologiques, physiques, morales et
mathématiques (Paris, 1634), sig. ā iiijr:
‘surface des choses corporelles’, with the
interesting addition that ‘C’est pourquoy les anciens n’ont peu donner
aucune demonstration de ce qui appartient aux qualités, & se sont restreints
aux nombres, aux lignes, & aux figures,
si l’on en excepte la pesanteur, dont
Archimede
a
parlé
dans
ses
Isorropiques.’ See also e.g. Mersenne,
La Vérité des sciences (Paris, 1625),
13–14, passim.
Marin Mersenne, L’usage de la raison
[1623], ed. C. Buccolini (Paris, 2002),
9: ‘les plus grands personnages, et les
plus rares esprits confessent ingenument qu’ils ne sçavent rien avec
évidence, et certitude de tout ce que
nous voyons: car soit que nous regardions au ciel, soit que nous abaissons la
veuë sur la terre, nous sommes contraints d’advoüer que tout nous est incogneu. L’estre naturale, qui nous est le plus
proche, et le mieux proportionné à nos
sentimens, est un tesmoin irreprochable
de nostre ignorance tres-grande, et tresprofonde, puis que nous ne sçavons la
nature d’aucune chose ny en general, ny
en particulier.’ To my knowledge, the
similarity with the passage from the
213
214
Third Letter on Sunspots quoted on
p. 72 above has not previously been
noted. Mersenne was certainly familiar
with the text: see De Waard’s editorial
commentary in Mersenne corr., i.131.
Daniel Garber has recently made
a case for Mersenne’s continued
Aristotelianism, going as far as to label
him a ‘resolute Aristotelian’: ‘Frontlines’
(2004), 152. This reading, which relies
on rather circumstantial evidence,
seems to me to confuse Mersenne’s
strong apologetic impulse and noniconoclastic approach with a specific
philosophical position. It is difficult to
square Garber’s reading with statements
such as that in Questions théologiques, 9.
The defence of Aristotle from the antiAristotelians at Vérité, 107–29 is muted,
with Aristotle’s ‘intellectualist’ (intellectuel) essentialism again condemned at
126–7. Mersenne even seems to favour
positive theology over its scholastic variant (111) – for this distinction, see I.2.2.
Mersenne believed that essences existed;
they were just inaccessible to philosophers in this world: e.g. Questions
théologiques, 11.
Vérité, 206–18, esp. 212–14. See also
Buccolini, ‘Translator’ (2013).
The last phrase is taken from Dear,
‘Roots’ (1984), 190. For a statement to
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
77
was that of Galileo, concerned not with causal explanation and ontological
foundations, but rather with establishing phenomenological laws. (Indeed, this
even led to gradual scepticism about Galileo’s results concerning free fall,
a scepticism engendered through experimental practice.)215
As for the division of the sciences: Mersenne confined metaphysics to the
study of immaterial substances,216 or considered it as undertaking the same
role as logic, i.e. establishing basic procedural principles like that of noncontradiction.217 Ultimately, this was manifested in Mersenne’s ideal scheme
of learning, in which mathematical and mixed-mathematical learning hugely
outweighed the philosophical.218 What is most remarkable is that by the 1640s,
Mersenne’s ‘ideal’ closely reflected reality, if not at the pedagogical level then at
that of actual natural philosophical practice and publication. Across Italy and
France – and even in the dreary English hinterland – the years c.1630–50 saw
an extraordinary range of mixed-mathematical publications, often now
couched in the language of ‘physico-mathematics’.219 Here we find the demetaphysicisation of the study of nature happening not through noisy polemics, but rather through a kind of intellectual inaction: questions about first
principles and ontology were simply left unexplored.
Often the mixed mathematicians of this period adopted the old strategy of
explaining that they were confining themselves to the mathematical study of
‘appearances’, and leaving the ‘search for true causes’ to unspecified others:
these were the words of Mersenne’s and Descartes’s friend the mathematician
Claude Mydorge (1585–1647).220 Sometimes, however, the creeping colonisation of natural philosophy by mixed mathematics came to be redescribed in
more explicit terms as a conflict between experiential and rationalist modes of
philosophising. We find this happening, for example, in a defence of Pascal’s
215
216
217
this effect from Mersenne himself, see
e.g. Questions théologiques, 18. For the
Biancani-esque defence of mathematics
as more certain than physics, see Vérité,
226. Dear, Mersenne, 68–9 explores
Mersenne’s similarities to Biancani.
Palmerino, ‘Experiments’ (2010).
At least in the Quaestiones celeberrimae
in Genesim (Paris, 1623), cols 92–3.
Vérité, 52–4. The discussion is directed
against those who move from quality
relativism (something that is sweet to
one person is bitter to another) to the
denial of the principle of noncontradiction. I do not know who
Mersenne could have had in mind
here. Dear, Mersenne, 70–6 sees the
establishment of the principle of unity
218
219
220
within metaphysics as underpinning
Mersenne’s defence of mathematics
from the sceptics. The key discussion is
in Vérité, 280.
E.g. Mersenne corr., viii.582–3.
See e.g. the list of publications for the
period 1632–51 in Bertoloni Meli,
Thinking, 161–2. For the growth in
popularity of the term ‘physicomathematics’, see Dear, Discipline,
168–79.
Claude Mydorge, Examen du livre des
recréations mathématiques (Paris, 1639),
75, after discussing a problem concerning boiling water: ‘Ces choses reduictes à
la verité de l’apparence nous laissons
quant à present aux plus curieux à en
rechercher les vrayes causes.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
78
giving up philosophy
experimental proof of the vacuum by Pierre Guiffart (1597–1658), a teacher at
the medical college in Rouen, who told a strikingly simple story about the
history of natural philosophy:
Although Monsieur Pascal’s experiments [experiences] seem new to us, it
seems that they were performed in the past, and that many ancients have
taken them as grounds for maintaining that there may be a void in nature,
or even that the void is a principle of nature [at this point the marginal
note names Democritus, Leucippus, Diodorus, Epicurus, and Lucretius].
But those who have since asserted the contrary have been content to
follow their own reasoning, which, not being founded on the certitude
of the senses, now finds itself overthrown by their [the senses’]
testimony.221
There is something similar in this strange history to the way in which physicians and alchemists had previously told a story of an experiential
Democritean–Hippocratic naturalism being corrupted by Aristotelian–
Galenic speculation. Guiffart was no atomist – his evocation of the Greek
atomists is purely a tool to make the methodological point that a priori
reasoning, of the type supposedly being used by Pascal’s critics, such as the
Rouen philosophy professor Jacques Pierius, had no place in natural
philosophy.
These is a further parallel to draw with the earlier discussion of medicine.
There, we saw how the anti-philosophical language of the physicians, originally directed at their Aristotelian counterparts, could almost immediately be
deployed against Descartes, as it was by the Dutch physicians of the 1640s.
Exactly the same pattern can be found in the case of the mixed mathematicians,
above all in the writings of another close associate of Mersenne – and a mortal
enemy of Descartes – Gilles Personne de Roberval (1602–75), the Ramus
professor of mathematics at the Collège Royal who made important contributions to pure mathematics as well as to mechanics and astronomy.222 As
Roberval put it in an entertaining disquisition on the ‘parts of philosophy’,
where moral philosophy was ‘flatteringly deceptive’ (flateuse) and metaphysics
‘very chimerical’, physics was all true but very hidden, revealing itself to men
only through effects. Thankfully, ‘mathematics has all the fine prerogatives of
physics in that it is true, immutable, and invincible’, but it was also ‘not so
221
Pierre Guiffart, Discours du vuide (Paris,
1647), 54: ‘Quoy que les experiences de
Mr Paschal, nous paroissent nouvelles, il
y a de l’apparence qu’elles ont esté autrefois pratiquées, et que plusieurs anciens
ont prins de là sujet de maintenir qu’il
y pouvoit avoir du Vuide en la Nature,
voire mesme qu’il en estoit un principe;
mais ceux qui depuis ont asseuré le
222
contraire se sont contentez de suivre
leur raisonnement qui n’estant point
fondé sur la certitude des sens se trouve
à present renversé par leur deposition.’
For Guiffart and his arguments for the
void, see Shea, Experiments (2003), 46–7.
Auger, Roberval (1962); Costabel, ‘La
controverse’ (1951); Gabbey, ‘Huygens
et Roberval’ (1982).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
79
hidden from men’, its object being ‘size or number’ rather than the ‘composition of material things’. And ‘due to this makeup, mathematics, being based
on the same principles as physics, which are too much hidden from men, takes
for the foundations of its reasoning facts which are proved by the constant
experience of all times, and on these foundations it establishes mechanics,
optics, astronomy, music and the other particular sciences of geometry, arithmetic and physics’.223
These somewhat rhetorical comments repeat in amplified form many of
the themes we have encountered in the mixed-mathematical tradition,
above all its increasing emphasis on the capacity of mathematics to establish limited certainty about appearances as against the hubristic essentialism of the philosophers. For Roberval, such ideas, previously deployed by
others against the Aristotelians, proved perfect ammunition to undermine
the whole Cartesian project. However, as was so often the case, the exact
manner in which mathematics reflected physical reality here remains
somewhat ambiguous. Rather more precise are the comments Roberval
appended to a work of Mersenne’s, L’optique et la catoptrique, that he
edited for publication in 1652.224 The whole text is an assault on philosophers, who ‘want to seem knowledgeable at any cost – even about things
of which they know themselves to be ignorant’. The examples given are
various hypotheses concerning the nature of light – rebound, an emission
theory, the transmission of pressure through the medium, or some ‘other
even more implausible visions’. But all these explanations were only
223
‘Fragment de Roberval’, in Blaise Pascal,
Oeuvres, ed. L. Brunschvicg and
P. Boutroux, 14 vols (Paris, 1908–23),
ii.49–51: ‘Touchant les parties de la
philosophie . . . La Morale est changeante, flateuse, et qui veut estre
flatée . . . La Metaphysique est fort chymerique. La Physique est toute véritable;
mais elle est fort cachée: elle ne se descouvre aux hommes que par la vertu de
ses effets . . . La Mathematique a toutes
les belles prerogatives de la physique en
ce qui est d’estre veritable, immuable, et
invincible, mais elle n’est pas si cachee
aux hommes: elle aime l’evidence, et elle
la fait paroitre clairement et distinctement dans son object propre, qui est la
grandeur ou le nombre . . . et non dans
la composition des choses materielles.
Car dans cette composition la mathematique, estant fondee sur les mesmes
principes que la Physique, qui sont
224
trop cachez aux hommes, elle prend
pour les fondements de son raisonnement des faits qui sont averez par une
experience constante de tout temps, et
sur ces fondements elle establit la
Mechanique, l’Optique, l’Astronomie,
la Musique et les autres sciences particulieres meslees de geometrie, d’arithmetique et de physique.’
As convincingly argued in Malcolm,
Aspects (2002), at 165–84, the text may
in fact be based on an account of
Hobbesian method ‘as seen through
Mersennian spectacles’ (184). The
whole text is there translated (168–71)
and printed in the original (197–9) from
Marin Mersenne, L’optique et la catoptrique, in La perspective curieuse de
R. P. Niceron, ed. Roberval (Paris, 1682),
88–92 (separate pagination). My quotations are all from Malcolm’s translation.
For Hobbes, see §6 below.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
80
giving up philosophy
analogical, based on ‘some resemblance they think it has with something
else, which they believe they know well’. In reality, all knowledge was ‘by
means of the senses’, which produced either immediate knowledge of
a phenomenon such as light, or provided the understanding with something upon which to reason. (This was accompanied by an unsubtle attack
on the Cartesian cogito – without the senses, ‘one might even doubt
whether it [the understanding] would have an idea of its own existence’.)
That being so, ‘it follows that if there are in nature some things that cannot
fall under any of our senses, either directly or indirectly, the understanding
will not be able to form any ideas of those things’. However, in the case of
light, all we have is the phenomenological knowledge that it exists, and
that it is transmitted, reflected, refracted, etc.; ‘its nature, and the cause of
its existence . . . are unknown to us, and it very much seems as if we do not
have an appropriate sense for discovering what that cause might be, any
more than we do for discovering several other causes which are features of
the nature of the entire universe’. All explanatory theories, posited by the
‘dogmatists of our time’, were attempts precisely to grasp such unknowable
causes.
What, then, was the solution to this impasse? It was that,
where the human sciences are concerned, we should use pure reasoning as far as possible, so long as it is founded on principles that are
clearly and distinctly true, and draw from those principles conclusions
that cannot be doubted. That is what we do in geometry and arithmetic, for which all our senses are appropriate: they inform us that
there is a space or extension everywhere and in all directions, which
prompts understanding to establish pure geometry, and they also
inform us that there are several things in that space, which prompts
it to meditate on number, and establish arithmetic. In the absence of
such principles, we must make use of regular experience [/experiment]
[experience constant], made under the requisite conditions, and draw
plausible conclusions from it . . . the knowledge which comes from the
first type of conclusions [is called] ‘science’; as for the conclusions
drawn from experience . . . the knowledge derived from them [is
called] ‘opinion’. Otherwise, in the same field of purely human
knowledge . . . all the other beliefs men have were so many visions,
which did not deserve any credence.
Geometrical knowledge produced ‘science’; experimental produced ‘opinion’,
and anything not based either on geometry or experiment was just ‘visions’.
Roberval then goes on to say that the results of the mixed-mathematical
sciences – ‘mechanics, optics, astronomy, and some others’ – could be classed
as either ‘science’ or ‘opinion’, but, crucially, even ‘if we wish to call them
opinions, we shall understand that they are very certain opinions, compared
with various other opinions that are of very little weight . . . For these are pure
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
81
sciences, lacking any uncertainty: doubt, which could creep into the other
sciences from their component of experience, is absolutely excluded from
these.’225
Although no previous scholar has noted it, the trichotomy presented at
the end of this passage226 is remarkable in its anticipation of a similar
trichotomy later made by Newton. As we shall see (III.Proleg.2),
Roberval’s ‘science’ maps on to Newton’s ‘certain’ physico-mathematical
phenomenological conclusions (e.g. the unequal refrangibility of white
light); his experimentally grounded ‘opinions’ map on to Newton’s legitimate hypotheses, to be presented only as probable and to be subjected to
further investigation (e.g. the emission theory of light), and his ‘visions’
map on to Newton’s illegitimate hypotheses, for which there was no
experimental evidence (e.g. vortex theory).227 Now, there is no evidence
that Newton, or even Isaac Barrow, knew these statements on Roberval’s
part (his work is absent from their library catalogues). But that makes all
the more remarkable the structural similarity between their arguments.
Across Europe, mixed mathematicians brought together arguments for the
certainty of the mathematical knowledge of accidents with antiessentialism, and ‘philosophy’ was condemned for its hubristic search
for inner causes, or at best, its concerns ignored. As Newton would put
it after having demonstrated that Boyle’s Law holds if an elastic fluid
consists of particles in static equilibrium with a repulsive force inversely
proportional to the distance: ‘whether elastic fluids consist of particles
that repel one another is, however, a question for physics. We have
mathematically demonstrated a property of fluids consisting of particles
of this sort so as to provide natural philosophers with the means with
which to treat that question.’228 As we shall see in Part III, this was
Newton at his most tactful; elsewhere, he was adamant that the mathematical knowledge of properties was the only attainable knowledge, and that
‘philosophers’ traditionally conceived had been wasting their time. In
saying this, he was following a notion of what kind of knowledge was
and wasn’t worthwhile that had already been fully developed almost half
a century earlier.
225
226
227
Malcolm, Aspects, 168–71.
A trichotomy that Roberval deployed elsewhere. See Malcolm, Aspects, 180, n. 88,
quoting Archives de l’Académie des sciences, Fonds Roberval, carton 7, dossier
124, fol. 2v. (I have not seen the original.)
Of course, there are doctrinal similarities too, e.g. the theory of absolute
space just quoted, the claim that there
was no positive evidence for Cartesian
228
subtle matter (see e.g. Roberval, ‘De
vacuo narratio’, in Blaise Pascal,
Oeuvres, ed. L. Brunschvicg and
P. Boutroux, 14 vols (Paris, 1908–23),
ii.21–35); and the explanation of gravity
via an attractive force. These similarities
notwithstanding, I am not claiming any
direct influence of Roberval on Newton.
Principia, 699.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
82
giving up philosophy
I.1.6 The Synthesis (I): a New Metaphysical Physics
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the medical tradition described in §3
and the mixed-mathematical tradition just discussed – both of them drawing
on the ideas of the humanist anti-Aristotelians, and specifically the condemnation of traditional natural philosophy for metaphysical essentialism – had
virtually monopolised the investigation of nature. This conclusion might come
as a surprise to readers of much recent (and not so recent) literature on the
history of science, which continues to have a profoundly philosophical bias
(where ‘philosophical’ is understood in the modern sense). So for example
a recent 550-page book on ‘The Emergence of a Scientific Culture’ neglects to
even mention Thomas Willis, Jan Swammerdam, Francesco Redi, Pierre Petit,
Ole Rømer, Samuel Duclos, Vincenzo Viviani, Fortunio Liceti, Thomas
Bartholin, or Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (apart from once in the context of
astronomy); on the other hand, it does devote a twenty-page section to
Spinoza.229
In fact, even a superficial analysis of ‘scientific’ activity in the middle of the
century reveals that physicians and mathematicians (in which group I include
mixed mathematicians) dominated such activity. To take only one example, in
John Wallis’s famous report concerning the naturalist meetings held in
London in the mid-1640s – meetings in which the sapling which grew into
the Royal Society is often said to have first germinated – the main players are all
either mathematicians or physicians: John Wilkins, Samuel Foster (professor
of astronomy at Gresham College), Jonathan Goddard, George Ent, Francis
Glisson, and Christopher Merrett.230 This state of affairs, repeated across
Europe, reflects the astonishing transformation in the study of nature in the
first half of the seventeenth century. However, given that the umbrella term for
the enterprise was still ‘natural philosophy’, it left the discipline, and especially
its teaching, in a somewhat schizophrenic state.
As we have seen, the Jesuits – still the foremost educators in Europe –
insisted on a unity of knowledge grounded in metaphysics, with the result that
while Jesuit natural philosophers themselves made gestures towards accommodation, there emerged an ever greater gap between their pedagogy and
philosophical practice. But such schizophrenia was barely less evident in the
Protestant world, not because of censorship or the imposition of philosophical
‘orthodoxy’, but because of pedagogical necessity. The fragmentation of natural philosophy did not make it amenable to systematic teaching: one could
hardly set an undergraduate a synthesis that included, say, Galileo, Torricelli,
Libavius, Sennert, Telesio, and Julius Caesar Scaliger, let alone any of the
229
Gaukroger, Emergence, 472–92 for
Spinoza. Harvey is only mentioned
once, in passing (376). Mariotte is
230
fortunate enough to appear in
a footnote (392, n. 108).
Scriba, ‘Autobiography’ (1970), esp. 39–
41.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
83
advanced medical material. And so we find that in 1650s Cambridge (to take only
one of many possible examples), BA students were still fed a diet of largely
‘scholastic’ textbooks published over the previous half century, while MA students
went on to read almost anything and everything, even consciously drawing
a distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ philosophies.231 The situation had barely
changed when Newton attended the university a decade later (see III.
Proleg.2). To use the language of academic publishing, there was a very big
‘gap in the market’ for a new synthesis, if anyone could provide such a thing.
Four men born within thirteen years of each other attempted to do just that:
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Emmanuel Maignan (1601–76), René Descartes
(1596–1650), and Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). As we shall see, for all the wellknown differences between their systems, there are some important similarities. These similarities were not just in their shared anti-Aristotelianism, but
also in their approaches, all of which established an ontological framework
before their special physics, a framework which was to provide the conceptual fence which limited the hypothetical explanations of specific physical
phenomena. In the case of the first three, the project was conceptualised as
a post-scholastic ‘metaphysical physics’. Gassendi, in contrast, developed an
open-ended, non-metaphysical physics (§7 below). But it was Descartes who
was the real outlier. In fact, the idiosyncrasy of his synthesis is revealed by
examining it alongside those of Hobbes and Maignan. Like Descartes, both
placed a prima philosophia before physics. However, in their cases the role of
that first philosophy was largely negative or limited to a quasi-logical function: they were, effectively, anti-ontological ontologies.
(i) Hobbes
In Hobbes’s case, this has been obscured by the assumption that his was
a rigidly deductive, apriorist system of natural philosophy, an assumption
popularised by his early opponents and subsequently taken up by modern
historians.232 When it came to the subject of metaphysics,233 Hobbes accused
231
Serjeantson, ‘Willughby’ (2016). The
textbooks themselves were often deliberately eclectic, renouncing any aims at
systematicity. For a particularly important example, see Adriaan Heereboord,
Meletemata philosophica (Leiden, 1654),
which also includes many of the neohumanist complaints about an overly
metaphysical physics which have been
charted here (e.g. 129–30, on scholastic
‘form’ as absurd Platonic reification).
For this whole tradition of Dutch pedagogical eclecticism, which would prove
232
233
hugely influential in England and elsewhere, see now Hotson, Reformation of
common learning (2020), 60–143, which
reached me very late during the composition of this book.
See esp. Schaffer and Shapin, Air pump
(1985), whose political determinism
compels them to read Hobbes in this
way.
The fullest discussion is Leijenhorst,
Mechanisation (2002), 17–55. See also
Levitin, Wisdom, 243–5.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
84
giving up philosophy
the scholastics – and, to a lesser extent, Aristotle himself – of two types of
essentialism and reification. First there was the theological reification of
immaterial substances and the theological doctrines it was used to uphold,
doctrines which in turn underpinned the papist Kingdom of Darkness.234 In
reality, human reason could only conceive that which was capable of being
perceived by the senses, and thus ‘no man . . . can conceive any thing, but he
must conceive it in some place; and indued with some determinate magnitude;
and which may be divided into parts’.235 Second, there was the reification of
metaphysical entities such as ‘essentia’, ‘quiddity’, etc.236 This is the old
humanist critique, stretching back to Valla.237 Hobbes took its philosophical
implications much further, for where most novatores, including such staunch
anti-Aristotelians as Gassendi, still implied the existence of some underlying
substance or essence (while condemning the scholastics’ supposed attempt to
grasp it), Hobbes resolutely rejected both the substance/accident distinction
and the existence of essences in any meaningful sense.238 All that was conceivable was body.
This radical step is grounded in Hobbes’s philosophy of language, which in
turn underpins his conception of what a philosophia prima can and should be.
Words signify concepts, not things; the task of the philosopher is to ratiocinate
correctly about those concepts by forming propositions in which concepts are
appropriately connected, without introducing nonsensical (‘insignificant’)
speech such as ‘immaterial substance’ or absurd reifications, above all of the
copula est. On this conception, there are no true universals, only universal
names applied to concepts that are sufficiently similar.239 First philosophy is
simply the task of providing solid conceptual definitions to serve as
a grounding for the rest of philosophy, with the concepts defined including
space, time, body, cause and effect, power and act, quantity, etc.240 These are
the entities of physics, considered, however, not as real ontological entities but
only as concepts: ‘First philosophy deals with body qua understood or conceived. It occupies itself with our conceptions of bodies, rather than with the
bodies themselves.’241 In another nod to humanist anti-scholasticism as it had
234
235
236
237
238
See e.g. Hobbes, Critique du De Mundo,
ed. J. Jacquot and H. W. Jones (Paris,
1973), 169–71; Leviathan, iv.46, iii.1076–
88. For the total exclusion of all theological entities from philosophy, see also
De corpore (London, 1655), I.i.8, 6–7.
Leviathan, i.3, ii.46.
Leviathan, i.4, ii.60; De corpore, I.iii.4,
22.
Paganini, ‘Hobbes e Valla’ claims direct
influence.
E.g. De corpore, I.iii.3, 21; II.viii.23, 71;
Critique du De mundo, 452–3; An
239
240
241
answer to . . . Dr Bramhall (London,
1682), 27–8; Seven philosophical problems (London, 1682), 29.
For one summary, see De corpore, I.ii.2–
5, 8–10. There is a large literature: for
a recent overview, see Duncan, ‘Hobbes
on language’ (2016).
E.g. Six lessons to the professors of mathematiques (London, 1656), 14–15. Also
Leviathan, iv.46, iii.1076.
Leijenhorst, Mechanisation, 53. The philosophia prima of De corpore is in II.vii–
xiv.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
85
been developed by Valla, Hobbes grounds the reliability of these definitions in
their near-universal, ‘common’ acceptance, itself seemingly grounded in the
fact that all humans experience roughly the same sensory effects from the same
phenomena.242
So, philosophia prima is simply a quasi-logical (or ‘post-logical’) bedrock of
definitions. Now, that is not to say that it has no ontological content at all: it
sets the boundaries of what a legitimate explanation can be. Such an explanation must be couched only in terms of matter in motion, and an ideal
explanation would be a full causal explanation in those terms.243 However, the
philosophia prima does not prescribe anything further about those explanations.
For example, they might posit a vacuum, or they might deny it (an issue on
which Hobbes famously changed his mind). This is in stark contrast to the role
played by Descartes’s first philosophy, which contains the full ontological
grounding for his physics: matter is res extensa, a vacuum is impossible, etc.
For Hobbes, physics could only posit hypothetical explanations of phenomena –
any two hypotheses might be correct, as long as they were couched in terms of
matter in motion. As he put it in De corpore, physics proceeded ‘from the
phenomena or the effects of nature known to us by sense to investigating
some manner by which they may have been (I do not say were) generated’.244
Accordingly, in his mature presentation of the division of the sciences in De
homine (1658), Hobbes claimed that physics was only a hypothetical science, in
contrast to geometry and politics, where true causal knowledge could be established because the knowledge was constructed by us ourselves (we ourselves
draw the lines and make the laws and covenants).245 The somewhat ambiguous
subsequent passage aligns ‘true physics’ with the mixed-mathematical
disciplines.246 Here Hobbes seems to be drawing, whether consciously or not,
on the methodological rhetoric of those defenders of the mixed-mathematical
disciplines discussed earlier, who had insisted on the superiority of their subjects
to natural philosophy as it was traditionally conceived because of the greater
certainty promised by a geometrical approach. That this polemical point had
influenced him seems likely given that a decade and a half earlier he had written
that ‘all the sciences would have been mathematical if their authors had not
242
243
See e.g. De corpore, I.ii.2, 8 (‘communia’); Six lessons, 16. But see De corpore,
I.ii.4, 10 for a (possibly?) different
opinion.
I am not sure that any other scholar has
connected the nature of Hobbes’s philosophia prima to his hypotheticalist physics in the way I am doing here. However,
the point is relatively trivial. My subsequent discussion is indebted to
Malcolm, Aspects, 184–9.
244
245
246
De corpore, IV.xxv.1, 223: ‘a
Phænomenis, sive effectibus naturae
nobis per sensum cognitis, ad modum
investigandum aliquem juxta quem
(non dico generata sunt, sed) generari
potuerunt.’ My emphasis.
De homine (London, 1658), x.5, 60.
De homine, x.5, 60: ‘Itaque Physica, vera
(inquam) Physica, quae Geometriae
innititur, inter Mathematicas mixtas
numerari solet.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
86
giving up philosophy
asserted more than they were able to prove’.247 To me, this is not a statement of
the naïve hope for total mathematisation that Hobbes is sometimes claimed to
have pursued. Rather, Hobbes seems to have internalised the polemicaldisciplinary argument that was being made by the mixed mathematicians:
mathematical knowledge was certain in its limited sphere, whereas natural
philosophers, with their search for first principles, had ‘asserted more than
they were able to prove’.
However, for the mathematicians, this had meant confining themselves to
the mathematical study of accidents, and abandoning many of the explanatory
aims of traditional natural philosophy. Hobbes, who was not prepared to
abandon those aims, was aware of this fact. Hence his belief that although he
had constructed a mathematical science of morals, even a mixed-mathematical
physics seemed incapable of attaining the status of scientia, due to its foundation in a posteriori empirical knowledge.248 Despite the fact that Hobbes
placed his philosophia prima before his physics, it is only in a highly attenuated
sense that we can speak of a Hobbesian ‘metaphysical physics’. If we are to play
the game of making comparisons, it might not be ridiculous to say that, in this
regard, Hobbes had more in common with Galileo than with Descartes (at
least, if we imagine Galileo forcing himself to produce a full physics).
Unfortunately for Hobbes, his obvious mathematical incompetence, combined
with his materialism, heavily limited the influence his final system could have,
apart from in some isolated fields, above all optics.
(ii) Maignan
The second major synthesis to place metaphysics before physics in our period
is that in Emmanuel Maignan’s Cursus philosophicus (1652). This work is
virtually unknown, which is a great shame, because it is one of the most
interesting philosophical texts of the whole seventeenth century. Moreover,
it was clearly important: it was being read across Europe well into the eighteenth century, and no less an authority than Bayle called Maignan ‘one of the
greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century’.249 As a baby Maignan would
stop crying when a book was placed in his hand, a trait which naturally led to
a Jesuit education. Finding the Jesuits too worldly, he became a Minim – like
Mersenne, whom he met in 1646 – and his intellectual prowess, especially in
mathematics, led to his summons to Rome in 1636, where he stayed until 1650
247
248
Critique du De mundo, 106: ‘scientiae
omnes nisi scriptores plus affirmassent
quam poterant probare fuissent omnes
mathematicae’.
Interesting recent discussions, the conclusions of which tie in with mine, are
249
Adams, ‘Hobbes’ (2016); Biener, ‘Order’
(2016). More broadly, see Malcolm,
Aspects, 146–55.
DHC, Maignant e x t , iii.280: ‘l’un des
plus grands Philosophes du XVII Siècle’.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
87
before returning to his native Toulouse, supposedly rejecting an invitation
from the king and Mazarin to come to Paris in 1660. As well as Mersenne, he
corresponded with Regis, Kircher, Fermat, Digby, and other major naturalists;
he was one of the most important conduits for Hobbes’s wave theory of
light.250
Maignan’s Cursus, after a brief section on logic (reinterpreted in quasiepistemological manner), proceeds to a ‘Philosophia entis, alias metaphysica’.
However, Maignan quickly goes on to say that traditional metaphysics has
mistakenly been taken to incorporate the study of immaterial entities, ‘res
ultras physicas’, which in fact should be the domain only of natural and
revealed theology. In a post-Pereiran move, he declares that his version of
the discipline is better described as ‘Prophysica’, dealing only with being.251
And when we get to that Prophysica itself, we quickly see that its primary
purpose is to reduce all the abstracted beings of scholastic metaphysics to mere
logical entities, inextant in nature. Remarkably, there are strong Hobbesian
echoes, including an assault on the reification of the verb ‘to be’ and the
reduction of the substance/accident distinction to a purely mental one.252
Needless to say, substantial forms go out of the window; individuation is just
the entity of any singular thing itself.253 The positive content of metaphysics is
nothing more than a few basic logical rules, such as ‘Everything either is or is
not’, and the principle of non-contradiction.254 Maignan is clear that questions
concerning the actual physical principles of being, such as that of infinite
divisibility, cannot be answered in metaphysics.255
The reason for this radical reductionism becomes clear as soon as Maignan
turns to the next part of his Cursus, the physics. The long-term deficiencies of
the subject, he unambiguously declares, are due to the fact that natural
philosophers pursued the study of metaphysical abstractions rather than
experiment, and simply responded ‘I deny the experience’ to any sensory
counter-evidence that was presented to them. The remedy, he affirmed, was
a return to the Democritean method – again, this is Democritus the experimentalist rather than the atomist – which will also reveal the hand of God in
nature in a way far preferable to the hubristic ‘intermixing’ of rationalist
250
For his biography, see Ceñal, ‘Vida’
(1952); and for the only serious analysis
of his philosophy, see Ceñal, ‘La
filosofía’ (1954) (although see also
Grant, Nothing (1981), 175–8 for his
ideas on space). For his theory of light,
elaborated primarily in his Perspectiva
horaria (1648), see Shapiro, ‘Kinematic
optics’ (1973), at 172–9; for other scientific activities, Heilbron, Electricity
(1979), 183–9.
251
252
253
254
255
Emmanuel Maignan, Cursus philosophicus [1653] (Lyon, 1673), 2, 114.
Cursus, 55, 73, 83–5, 118. This implies
a completely univocal conception of
being, even in respect to God (56). The
logical possibility of immaterial substances is affirmed at 82, but the proof
of their existence is reserved for physics.
Cursus, 67–8.
Summarised at Cursus, 114–15.
Cursus, 81–2.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
88
giving up philosophy
philosophy and revealed theology by the scholastics in their vain attempts to
explicate the mysteries.256 The whole project of natural philosophy was ‘to
establish its purity’, and to separate it from the (false) metaphysics and logic
which had previously corrupted it.257 The worst example of this corruption
was the idea of the eduction of substantial forms from matter, which broke the
cardinal principle of ex nihilo nihil fit (unless by God).258 As we shall see, this
would also be Bayle’s chief objection to substantial forms. For the time being,
we can note that the Cursus – the product of a lowly Toulouse Minim – may
responsibly be called the first textbook of experimental philosophy ever published in Europe (so much for the uniqueness of Protestant or English experimentalism!). The second edition of 1673 even included a long, experimental
disproof of Cartesian vortex theory, based on the behaviour of a model of
a vortical solar system built by Maignan himself.259
Alas, the full contents of Maignan’s physics are beyond the scope of the
discussion here; a shame, because he develops a fascinating theory in
which the homogeneity of matter is rejected in favour of mutually nontransformable, indivisible minima composed of the four elements
(although he is not dogmatic about the number) whose mechanical
interaction in a vacuum explains all the phenomena of nature.260 These
minima, as well as their intrinsic activity, are posited on the basis of
analogical evidence derived from experiment, a procedure which owes its
spirit – if not its exact conclusions – to Gassendi (see §7 below). Even
from such a short summary, we can see that by the mid-seventeenth
century, even in a pedagogical synthesis that placed metaphysics before
physics, the scope for the former to determine the latter was minimal, and
the primary emphasis was on experimentally grounded explanation of
individual phenomena. (As in Gassendi and then Boyle, many of
Maignan’s explanations do not go all the way down to his minima, but
utilise intermediate principles.) This point was made with emphatic force
by Maignan himself: ‘The physical world does not always follow metaphysical laws, and many errors crept into physics while the common
philosophers wanted to prescribe the same laws to both of them, as if
everything was common to them.’261
256
257
258
259
260
Cursus, ‘Praefatio’ to Physica, sig. [Q4]r–v.
Cursus, 135: ‘ut studeat puritati sui’.
Aristotle himself is then condemned
for mixing metaphysics and physics.
Cursus, 135–8.
Cursus, 634–718.
For a summary, see Ceñal, ‘Filosofía’,
27–50.
261
Cursus, 378: ‘Physis enim non sequitur
semper leges Metaphysices; & inde plurimi irrepserunt in Physicam errores,
dum voluere Phylosophi vulgares,
ambabus leges easdem praestituere,
quasi omnia essent illis communia.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
89
(iii) Descartes
These comments on Hobbes and Maignan should give a sense of just how
unusual the Cartesian synthesis – a truly ‘metaphysical physics’ – really was.
I have no contribution to make to the fascinating debate about whether the
metaphysical dog was wagging the mathematico-mechanical tail, or vice
versa, at various stages of Descartes’s career pre-1640.262 Nor do I seek to
deny the importance of Descartes’s specific contributions to the early modern
study of nature: his ideas in geometry, optics, his popularisation of the
concept of ‘laws of nature’, and so on. Rather, I am concerned with placing
the Principia philosophiae (1644), the systematic work in which most
Europeans encountered Cartesian natural philosophy, in its broader context.
It is, I think, more or less unanimously agreed that from the late 1610s, and
especially from the time he spent with Isaac Beeckman in 1618–19, Descartes
sought to ground physico-mathematics in a corpuscularian ontology. Why
Beeckman and the young Descartes were so determined to ‘read’263 corpuscularianism into the results of what I have called ‘operational mechanism’,
not least their work on hydrostatics, remains somewhat obscure: it may have
been a result of Beeckman’s engagement with ancient texts, above all
Lucretius.264 What is certain is that by the late 1620s, Descartes, via very
important work on physical optics, had developed the outlines and many of
the details of his mechanical worldview: a plenist universe in which the
motion of three different types of element – all reducible to one homogeneous, extended matter – occurs in vortices operating according to three
laws of motion.265 Perhaps even more radical was his development of a fully
mechanical physiology to accompany it.
These writings – Le monde and L’Homme – were not published, because of
the fate which befell Galileo in 1633. When Descartes stated his ‘method’
262
263
Seminal contributions to that debate are
Garber, Metaphysical physics (1992);
Hattab, Descartes; Henry, ‘Origin’
(2004); Schuster, Descartes-agonistes
(2012). Presumably, further refinements
in our understanding will follow the
forthcoming publication of the
Cambridge MS of the Regulae, edited
by Richard Serjeantson and Michael
Edwards, which is missing Rule 4B.
This is the propitious formulation of
John Schuster: Descartes-agonistes, 204,
passim. For more on Beeckman’s influence on and collaboration with
Descartes, see van Berkel, ‘Debt’
264
265
(2000); Gaukroger and Schuster,
‘Hydrostatic paradox’ (2002), which is
very keen to differentiate Descartes
from earlier mixed mathematicians
regarding the extent to which
Descartes’s hydrostatical explanations
had natural-philosophical ambitions.
As argued in Gemelli, Beeckman (2002).
Whether the laws of motion arose from
Descartes’s metaphysics or from his
mechanics is one of the great contested
issues of Cartesian scholarship. I am
agnostic on the matter, but a good case
for Beeckman’s influence is made in
Arthur, ‘Beeckman’ (2007).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
90
giving up philosophy
shortly after, it already tended towards a mix of apriorism concerning first
principles, deductivism, and hypothetico-experimentalism, culminating:
I must also admit that the power of nature is so ample and so vast, and these
principles so simple and so general, that I notice hardly any particular effect
of which I do not know at once that it can be deduced from the principles in
many different ways; and my greatest difficulty is usually to discover in
which of these ways it depends on them. I know no other means to discover
this than by seeking further observations whose outcomes vary according to
which of these ways provides the correct explanation.266
As several commentators have noted, such statements – repeated in the
Principia267 – should inhibit our tendency to attribute to Descartes any strictly
‘deductive’ (let alone non-experiential) method, a tendency that is already
evident amongst his earliest critics. In some ways, the method described
here, with hypothetical explanations of specific phenomena being limited by
an initial conceptual framework, is quite close to Hobbes’s. Nonetheless, we
also see here a tendency to natural-philosophical apriorism (‘I derived these
principles only from certain seeds of truth which are naturally in our souls’)
quite at odds with anything that virtually anyone else was saying at this time.268
That tendency came more and more to the fore in Descartes’s subsequent
writings, concerned as they are with explicitly providing a metaphysical basis
for all knowledge, including that of nature. Again, the precise reasons for
Descartes’s metaphysical turn are the subject of some debate. The subtitle of
the second Latin edition of Meditationes (1642) – ‘on first philosophy, in which
the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated’ – has an
unambiguous apologetic dimension, and, despite the existence of a proud
post-Marx interpretative tradition of questioning any such apologetic intentions on Descartes’s part, it is perfectly plausible that he was seeking to do
something similar to what his friend Mersenne had tried to do in his apologetic
writings: to produce proofs of the immateriality (and thus immortality) of the
soul that were valid against both naturalists and sceptics.269 This could have
been done in an enterprise completely separate from the natural philosophy, or
on the basis of the argument from design and the evidence of natural
266
267
268
Discours de la méthode [1637], AT.
vi.63–5 [= CSM, i.143–4].
AT.viiiA.325–9 [= Millers 285–8]. See
further Clarke, ‘Demonstration’ (1977).
Hints of this metaphysical project are
already present in the Regulae (e.g. AT.
x.397), where it is also made clear that
intuition is a purely intellective act, not
dependent on the senses or the imagination (AT.x.368). The project was in full
flight by the time Descartes was in the
269
Dutch Republic: Descartes to Mersenne,
15 April 1630, AT.i.144 [= CSMK, 23].
After all, he wrote to Mersenne on
25 November 1630 that ‘I may
some day complete a little treatise of
Metaphysics, which I began when in
Friesland, in which I set out principally
to prove the existence of God and of our
souls when they are separate from the
body, from which their immortality
follows’ (AT.i.182 [= CSMK, 29]).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
91
phenomena. However, for whatever reason, Descartes sought to combine his
apologetic metaphysics and his physics, and his metaphysics was from the start
also designed to ground the physics.270
It does so in two ways, one negative and one positive. The negative strips
down the world in such a manner as to render all the metaphysical parts of the
scholastic-Aristotelian universe redundant, at least implicitly.271 The positive
establishes what is left: extended matter and unextended mind. The process by
which this dual aim is achieved, running from the cogito, through Descartes’s
version of the ontological proof of God’s existence and his attributes (classified
as an innate idea (e.g. Principia, i.20)), through to the guarantee of the truth of
our clear and distinct ideas, and culminating in substance dualism, is too well
known to require any regurgitation. Rather, we need to note several things
about this argument that shaped the reception of Descartes’s mature works.272
First, despite Descartes’s continued insistence that his physics only posited
legitimate hypothetical explanations of experienced phenomena, it was nonetheless the case that the metaphysics made it appear very deductive – indeed, much
more so than any other ancient, scholastic, or modern philosophy of nature then
known. I do not just mean by this that Descartes explicitly spoke of ‘deduction’
(e.g. when he said that ‘the best method of philosophising’ was ‘to deduce the
explanation of the things created by Him from the knowledge of God Himself’).273
Rather, I mean that specific, essential components of the Cartesian world seem to
be deduced directly from the introspective metaphysics preceding them. The
plenist account of rarefaction and condensation, for example, is justified on the
grounds that ‘anyone who thinks carefully, and resolves to accept only what he
clearly perceives, will believe that nothing other than change of shape is involved in
these events’.274 This might work well against scholastics who claimed that a fixed
amount of matter really can occupy varied amounts of space.275 But did Descartes
270
271
272
The metaphor is a Cartesian one:
see
Descartes
to
Mersenne,
28 January 1641, AT.iii.297–8
[= CSMK, 173]. It received its foremost public articulation in the tree of
knowledge metaphor of the ‘LettrePreface’ to the French translation of
the Principia (1647), AT.ixB.14.
For Descartes’s caution about being
open on this front, see Météores, AT.
vi.239 [= CSM, ii.173, n. 2] and the letter
to Regius of January 1642, AT.iii.492
[= CSMK, 205].
I do not mean by this the obvious difficulties, such as the rather arbitrary distinction
between
‘infinite’
and
‘indefinite’, the relational definition of
273
274
275
motion (Princ., ii.25) imposed on
Descartes by the need to say that the
earth does not really move, the seeming
absurdity of the third law of motion, etc.
All these, of course, were also repeatedly
attacked almost from the moment the
Principia was published.
Princ., i.24, AT.viiiA.14 [= Millers, 12–
13] – this is the very section in which we
first ‘pass from knowledge of God to
knowledge of his creatures’!
Princ., ii.6, AT.viiiA.43 [= Millers, 41].
For some of their views, see Des Chene,
Physiologia, 107–8; Pasnau, Themes,
301–14. That they are Descartes’s main
targets is clear from Princ., ii.7, AT.
viiiA.43–4 [= Millers, 42].
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
92
giving up philosophy
really believe that this kind of reasoning, and all the other metaphysical anti-void
arguments based on the supposed unintelligibility of empty space, would convince a vacuuist? (Of course, he could not know that as he was finishing the
Principia, Torricelli was performing his famous experiment – but it is not like he
was unfamiliar with atomist arguments as made by Beeckman.) The same
deductivism seems to be in play when the conservation of motion and the laws
of nature are derived from divine immutability.276 Perhaps worst of all was the
posthumously published physiology (1664), in which it was claimed that ‘if one
were to know all the parts of the semen of some species of animal, for example of
man, one could deduce from there alone, by reasons entirely certain and mathematical, the whole figure and structure of each of its members’.277 Such claims
were an embarrassment for the whole project, and were either silently ignored or
modified even by the most devoted of subsequent Cartesians.
It is important that at this point I reiterate that I am not offering an
interpretation of Descartes or his intentions. Cartesian scholars might prove
that all these metaphysical components of his argument were ex post facto
justifications of results achieved otherwise, and my case would still stand. That
is because my argument is that given the context into which these ideas were
published, they would have appeared extraordinarily unusual to many – and
downright absurd to a significant proportion – of those who were otherwise
very sympathetic to the anti-scholastic project of ontological reductionism that
Descartes was also engaged in. Exactly the same can be said for the seeming
essentialism of the Cartesian first philosophy, an essentialism that is separated
by a conceptual chasm from the rest of the anti-Aristotelian tradition, whether
medical, mixed-mathematical, or natural-philosophical. To be sure, Principia
i.53 begins with the seemingly standard point that a substance is known
through its attributes. However, it then immediately declares that ‘each substance has only one principal property which constitutes its nature and
essence, and to which all its other properties are referred. Thus, extension in
length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of corporeal substance; and
thought constitutes the nature of thinking substance.’278 If your aim is only to
276
277
Princ., ii.36–7, AT.viiiA.61–2 [= Millers,
57–8].
La description du corps humain, AT.
xi.277: ‘si on connoissoit bien quelles
sont toutes les parties de la semence de
quelque espece d’animal en particulier,
par exemple de l’homme, on pourroit
deduire de cela seul, par des raisons entierement mathematiques & certaines,
toute la figure & conformation de chacun
de ses membres’.
278
Princ., i.53, AT.viiiA.25 [= Millers, 23,
slightly modified]. This and other passages
have been subject to virtually infinite
(indefinite?) debate between those who
believe Cartesian substances are their
principal attribute, and those who claim
that something underlies the principal
attribute. My point is only to demonstrate
how unusual – and self-defeating –
Descartes’s statements were when considered in context. See likewise Pasnau,
Themes, 145: ‘On balance, though, the
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
93
build a non-scholastic, mechanical-corpuscularian physics, why say this? Why
expose yourself to the ridicule of those like Gassendi, who will scoff at your
claim that introspection reveals the essence of mind? The only plausible answer
I can come up with is, once again, to take Descartes at his word, and to accept
that his metaphysics was designed not solely to underpin his physics, but also
to offer the strongest possible version of the apologetic argument clearly stated
in the subtitle to the Meditations.279
Thankfully, we can leave these intellectual-biographical questions to others.
However, there is another way of arriving at the same broader historical conclusion
that I have just reached. Recall that the mixed mathematicians had made the case
that their approach to nature would provide far more certainty than the search for
underlying principles, causes, or explanations of the (scholastic) natural philosophers. In turn, this implied a de-ontologisation of the whole project of investigating nature, by rendering metaphysical parts explanatorily redundant. Or, in the
hands of someone like Galileo, it might even imply a subtle shift from operational
mechanism to something more akin to ontological mechanism; that is to say, to the
assumption that matter possesses only the properties that can be studied geometrically. It is not difficult to envisage how someone like Beeckman could take that
train of thought to a corpuscularian or even atomist destination, and we can read
Descartes’s La dioptrique (1637) as doing something similar. And it is perfectly
possible to find Descartes building his system of physics by doing nothing more.
Already in the Sixth Meditation, having proved that God is not a deceiver and that
the senses could thus be trusted (at least to an extent), Descartes goes on:
It follows that corporeal things exist. They may not all exist in a way that
exactly corresponds with my sensory grasp of them, for in many cases the
grasp of the senses is very obscure and confused. But at least they possess
all the properties which I clearly and distinctly understand, that is, all
those which, viewed in general terms, are comprised within the subjectmatter of pure mathematics.280
All the way through to the Principia, Descartes could happily resort to such
reasoning ‘from effects’ to ontology: ‘As far as fluid bodies are concerned, even
though our senses may not inform us that their particles move, since they are
too small, this is nonetheless easily inferred from effects . . . ’281 Of course, the
279
first suggestion seems closer to being
right: that extension just is what a body
is, and that thought just is what a mind is.
Such claims are, however, deeply obscure,
and this obscurity in the end undermines
Descartes’s pretensions to transparency
and intelligibility.’
To which Gassendi would reply: there
is a much better way of making this
280
281
apologetic case, and it is well known
to every child: the argument from
design, and from the evidence of the
natural world. See further §7 below;
also II.1.2.
Med., vi, AT.vii.80 [= CSM, ii.55].
Princ., ii.56, AT.viiiA.71 [= Millers, 70,
slightly modified].
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
94
giving up philosophy
specific conclusions he would have achieved from such reasoning would have
proved controversial, just as Gassendi’s and even Newton’s use of inductive
and transductive reasoning from macro to micro would be disputed by those
who broadly shared their methodological principles. Nonetheless, it would
have left Descartes far less open to the charge of hubristic system-building, and
of being a new scholastic, than did his grounding of ontology on metaphysics.
However, that is not what he chose to do. It may be true that at Principia
ii.64, Descartes says that ‘I do not accept or desire in physics any other
principles than those of geometry or abstract mathematics, because all the
phenomena of nature are explained thereby, and certain demonstrations
concerning them can be given’, and therefore that he would recognise ‘no
material substance other than that which can be divided, shaped, and moved in
every possible way, and which geometers call quantity’.282 But it is difficult to
see how any reader could not clearly recognise that these properties of matter
were to be accepted not on these epistemological or mathematical criteria, but
because they had been established as such in Part I: the metaphysics.283
(iv) Cartesianism
As is well established, the Cartesianism of the second half of the seventeenth
century was no monolithic entity. Despite various condemnations and several
powerful, theologically motivated attacks, its systematic clarity, the conciliatory
attitude of some of its most important textbook-writers, and its naturaltheological potential allowed it to attain a major role in philosophical pedagogy
in France and the Dutch Republic in particular.284 Some Cartesians, such as
Géraud de Cordemoy (1626–84), Johannes Clauberg (1622–65), and Antoine Le
Grand (1629–99) maintained a strong, conscious connection between metaphysics and physics. Indeed, with Clauberg and Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) it is
not inappropriate to speak of a fully fledged metaphysical research programme,
focussed above all (but not exclusively) on questions concerning causation. There
can be no doubt that Malebranche was Europe’s foremost metaphysician in the
last quarter of the century (although this is often not recognised in anglophone
survey literature), and I shall have a lot to say about him in what follows.
Others, such as Henricus Regius (1598–1679), François Bayle (1622–
1709), Jacques Rohault (1618–72), Johannes de Raey (1622–1702), Arnold
Geulincx (1624–69), and Burchard de Volder (1643–1709) downplayed or
ignored the metaphysical component of Cartesianism, usually by placing
282
283
Princ., ii.64, AT.viiiA.78 [= Millers, 76–
7, slightly modified].
Princ., i.63–5, AT.vii.30–2 [= Millers,
28–30].
284
The literature is very large: an excellent
overview is Schmaltz, Cartesianisms
(2017). The relationship between
Cartesianism and theology will be considered in the next chapter.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
95
a higher emphasis on the role of sense experience.285 (At points, these
debates about natural-philosophical methodology intersected with those concerning the relationship between philosophy and theology, so we shall return
to them in the next chapter.) However, what nobody could seriously doubt
was that Cartesianism itself was a metaphysical physics. For example, the
most important of the second-generation Cartesians, Pierre-Sylvain Regis
(1632–1707), could hardly be more explicit in his account of the disciplinary
interrelationships within the Cartesian system:
Metaphysics not only enables the soul to know itself, but it is also
necessary for it to know things which are outside it; all natural sciences
depend on metaphysics. Mathematics, physics, and ethics are founded
on its principles. Indeed, if geometers are certain that the three angles
of a triangle are equal to two right angles, they have received this
certainty from metaphysics, which has taught them that everything
they conceive clearly is true, and that it is so because all their ideas
must have an exemplary cause that contains formally all the properties
that these ideas represent. If physicists are assured that extended
substance exists, and that it is divided into several bodies, they know
this through metaphysics, which teaches them not only that the idea
they have of extension must have an exemplary cause, which can be
nothing but extension itself, but also that the different sensations that
they have must have diverse efficient causes corresponding to them,
and which can only be the particular bodies that have resulted from
the division of matter.286
285
286
For a programmatic exploration of the
French scene in exactly these terms,
Dobre, French Cartesianism (2017); and
for the Dutch Republic, Strazzoni, Dutch
Cartesianism (2019). See also Del Prete,
‘Separation’ (2019); Strazzoni, de Volder
(2019), esp. 210–48 on the relationship
between metaphysics and natural
philosophy.
Pierre-Sylvain Regis, Cours entier de philosophie (Amsterdam, 1691), 64: ‘La
Metaphysique ne sert pas seulement à
l’ame pour se connoître elle-même, elle
luy est encore necessaire pour connoître
les choses qui sont hors d’elle, toutes les
Sciences naturelles dependent de la
Metaphysique; la Mathematique, la
Physique & la Morale sont fondées sur
ses principes: En effet, si les Geometres
sont assùrez que les trois angles d’un triangle sont égaux à deux droits, ils ont
receu cette certitude de la Metaphysique,
qui leur a enseigné que tout ce qu’ils
conçoivent clairement est vray, & qu’il
est tel, parce que toutes leur idées doivent
avoir une cause exemplaire qui contient
formellement toutes les proprietez que ces
idées representent. Si les Physiciens sont
assurez que la substance étendue existe &
qu’elle est divisée en plusieurs corps, ils
sçavent cela par la Metaphysique, qui leur
apprend, non seulement que l’idée qu’ils
ont de l’étendue, doit avoir une cause
exemplaire, qui ne peut estre que
l’étenduë même; mais encore que les differentes sensations qu’ils ont, doivent
avoir des causes efficientes diverses qui
leur repondent, & qui ne peuvent estre
que les corps particuliers qui ont resulté
de la division de la Matiere.’ On Regis, see
further I.2.2, II.1.3.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
96
giving up philosophy
Indeed, even Jesuits who disagreed with Descartes’s conclusions agreed that
he had been right to believe that the laws of motion had to be ‘founded on
incontrovertible principles of metaphysics’.287 As it happens, the specific
Jesuit in question, Ignace-Gaston Pardies (1636–73), was writing in 1670, in
the wake of a series of seminal publications on the laws of motion, and
especially on the law of collisions, in which almost all the participants –
among them Christiaan Huygens (1629–95), John Wallis (1618–1703), and
Christopher Wren (1632–1723) – were mathematicians who selfconsciously disdained any reflection on ontological or metaphysical questions (see III.Proleg.2, 5), despite the fact that they were themselves
responding to Descartes. There was certainly no conflict between ‘rationalists’ and ‘empiricists’ in seventeenth-century Europe. But it is not so
anachronistic to speak of one between those who were self-consciously
engaged in metaphysical physics, and those who were not.
I.1.7 The Synthesis (II): an Anti-Metaphysical Physics
To some extent, the latter group comprised almost everyone writing nonpedagogical works of natural philosophy by the middle of the seventeenth
century. One of the reasons was simple: they were mostly physicians, mixed
mathematicians, or both, who had internalised the anti-metaphysical discourse
of their predecessors. Even by the 1650s, they had done so to such an extent that
they could casually disdain the intrusion of metaphysics into natural philosophy,
and blame that intrusion for the errors of their predecessors over the last few
centuries. Often a sense of professional demarcation continued to be influential.
We find this even among some of the founding members of the Royal Society.
For example, Ralph Bathurst (1620–1704), a leading member of the Oxford
physiologists of the 1650s, taught his medical students in 1654 that ‘faculties,
qualities, species and the like’, while they filled the pages of the ‘common physics’
and were babbled about by the students in the schools, had their place only
among the shadowy ‘abstractions of the metaphysicians’, and were unworthy of
physiologists.288 Such associations between ‘philosophy’ and insignificant
287
288
[Ignace-Gaston Pardies], Discours du
mouvement local
(Paris, 1670),
‘Preface’, sig. A 2v: ‘fondées . . . sur des
principes incontestables de la pure
Metaphysique’.
Ralph Bathurst, ‘Tres quaestiones in
Comit. Oxon. 1654’, in Thomas
Wharton, The life and literary remains
of Ralph Bathurst, M.D., 2 vols (London,
1761), ii.227: ‘. . . facultates, qualitates,
species et similia . . . in vulgari physica
utramque fere paginam implent, et quotusquisque est tyronum in scholis
balbutientium . . . in umbraticis metaphysicorum abstractionibus locum suo
jure vendicent, medicis tamen et physiologis ad penitiora contendentibus,
indignum prorsus est hujusmodi commentis acquiescere’. On Bathurst, see
Frank, Physiologists (1980), 68–9, 106–
13, passim.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
97
speech seem to have been a cultural commonplace in Oxford: witness, for
example, the condemnation of the ‘absurd’ doctrines of ‘philosophers’ – again
identified with metaphysical essentialism and the reification of forms – in
George Dalgarno’s Ars signorum (1661).289
None of these naturalists offered an anti-metaphysical synthesis. This was
almost inevitable: after all, one of the central planks of their assault on
traditional natural philosophy was that it had been too concerned with the
search for systematic explanation grounded in underlying principles. It was
thus left to another of Mersenne’s friends to offer such a synthesis: Pierre
Gassendi. Despite some excellent studies, Gassendi still does not have the place
he deserves in histories of early modern thought. For historians of science he
seems too philological; for historians of philosophy he is that, while also not
being metaphysical or systematic enough. However, once we abandon these
presentist concerns, it is possible to make a case for Gassendi as the most
important natural-philosophical synthesiser of the seventeenth century. For it
was he – not Boyle or anyone else – who first found a way to bring together the
experiential, anti-metaphysical strands of the previous century of European
thought into something like a synthesis, one that could be taught to students in
universities and academies across Europe (or at least he was second to
Maignan, but much more influential).290 In turn, they learned from him not
a system but a set of openly hypothetical anti-scholastic arguments that could
be used as starting points for further investigation.
As is well known, Gassendi had from an early stage been a virulent antiAristotelian, his Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624) being
the main conduit through which humanist anti-Aristotelianism was disseminated through seventeenth-century Europe. That book contains repeat evocations
of the anti-metaphysical arguments, including condemnation of reification of
the copula est.291 Gradually, and in parallel with his experimental practice, he
came to defend systematically a non-Aristotelian natural philosophy grounded
solely in sense experience, and in a modified Epicureanism. This final clause
should be read with much caution: the focus on Gassendi’s modified
Epicureanism has concealed the true nature of his project. Epicurus was for
him not an authority, but more a historical starting point – the best system on
which to build when placed alongside all available others. This was in part due to
the demands of natural-theological argument: as we shall see in I.3.3, Gassendi,
289
George Dalgarno, Ars signorum
(London, 1661), 44. Dalgarno goes on
to equate form with the aggregate of all
accidents – had he been reading his
Pemble? On this view any hope of individuation or species realism goes out of
the window, a metaphysical concern
that does not seem to have troubled
290
291
Dalgarno. For the context, see Lewis,
Language (2007), 85–100.
For his reception, see Murr, Gassendi et
l’Europe (1997); Clericuzio, ‘Gassendi
and the English’ (2018); also Lennon,
Battle (1993).
Exercitationes, II, in GO.iii.177b.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
98
giving up philosophy
even more than his friend Mersenne, thought that all ancient philosophy (apart
from Epicurus’) fell into a deadly animistic naturalism. But just as importantly,
Gassendi was convinced that his system was the result of a thoroughgoing
rejection of what he believed to be the hubristic rationalism of almost all
previous philosophies; all in all, atomism simply offered the most coherent
and probable explanatory framework for a huge range of phenomena when
contrasted with its ancient and modern rivals. (This comparative element in
great part explains the historical dimension of Gassendi’s work.)292
Like Mersenne, Gassendi began with the epistemological axiom that knowledge
of essences was impossible – indeed, this point lay at the heart of his antiAristotelianism. According to him, essences exist in the form of some substratum
in which perceptible accidents inhere (with the essential attributes being dictated
by those essences). We can know only the accidents. Consequently, not only all the
metaphysical parts of Aristotelianism, but even the ten logical categories were
thrown out of the window, with only substance and accident retained. Moreover,
this anti-essentialism also rendered Gassendi unimpressed even by Baconian
method, which he discussed at length in the first part of the posthumously
published Syntagma (1658), devoted to logic: according to Gassendi, Baconian
eliminative induction was unable to achieve its aim of providing solid principles.293
And it made him profoundly sceptical about Descartes, whose claims to grasp the
nature of body and mind he mercilessly condemned as the worst type of hubristic
rationalism. Cartesians may find such condemnations philosophically unfair, but
life is unfair – and history all the more so – and there can be no doubt that
Gassendi’s criticisms had an extraordinary impact across Europe, not least because
such anti-essentialism had by then been so ingrained in natural philosophers’
minds by more than a century of anti-scholastic argument to the same effect.
Gassendi’s position has sometimes been called ‘sceptical’. However, while he
used sceptical arguments against the Aristotelians, there is no meaningful
sense in which his own philosophy can be said to have taken a consistently
sceptical stance.294 Indeed, Gassendi saw a clear way to respond to sceptics:
a system of sign-based inference established in the logic with which the
Syntagma opens, a logic whose primary purpose is far more epistemological
than any other that had come before it, being based on a theory of perception
and the ideas that emerge.295 That is to say, one can reason from sensible ‘signs’
to underlying, insensible features of bodies (although not essences or
292
293
A clear statement to that effect is in
Syntagma, GO.i.279b–281. See further
Joy, Gassendi (1987), esp. 66–105, 130–94.
See Cassan, ‘Status’ (2012). I suspect
Gassendi thought Baconian induction to
be as overreaching as its Aristotelian
counterpart, which he discusses and dismisses at Exercitationes II, in GO.iii.207b.
294
295
The best account is Bellis, ‘Probabilism’
(2017).
I agree here with Michael, ‘Logic’ (1997),
although Fisher is right to note that this
account underplays the modified syllogistics also present in Gassendi’s logic:
Atomism (2005), 90.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
99
substances, whatever they are). The presence of sweat, for example, reveals the
existence of pores. Gassendi’s theory of indicative signs no doubt had some
foundations in his reading of Sextus, but I suspect that it also had some origin
in his engagement with medical semiotics.296 Such a theory allowed Gassendi
to combine epistemic modesty (the unknowability of essences; the impossibility of Aristotelian scientia) with experimental optimism, the latter manifested
in his repeated claims that technological improvements, e.g. in microscopy,
would lead to much improved knowledge of nature, even at the microparticular level.297 However, sign-based inference, because it was by definition
analogical, could only ever produce probable knowledge. This in turn fed
back into essence scepticism: when we perceive a collection of accidents
(which Gassendi often interchangeably calls ‘qualities’ or ‘modes’), we ‘conceive that there is something that is the subject of the accidents and changes we
observe; but what this subject is, or what sort of thing it is, we do not know’.298
All of this, I suspect, is ex post facto justification for the more practical aims
Gassendi first declared in the Exercitationes. There, he chastised the lack of
experience and experimentation on the part of the scholastics, who had
ignored those parts of philosophy ‘which ought to be treated in a historical
manner rather than by discussion’, and contrasted it with the ‘active’ philosophy that should be practised:
How desirable it would be to know the history of stones, metals, plants,
animals, and other things of this type, the variety of which is already so
pleasing to know! But all this, they [the scholastics] say, will have been known
by stonecutters, goldsmiths, herbalists, and hunters. And so, considering of
no importance what to them seems too vulgar, they boast of choosing that
which properly belongs to philosophy. Does this mean that Aristotle,
Democritus, and other great men, whose learning is so valued, were not
developing philosophy, when they searched everywhere for such things?299
296
297
298
299
For Gassendi in the context of semiotics,
see Meier-Oeser, Die Spur (1997), 348–50.
E.g. Disquisitio metaphysica, GO.
iii.354b–355a, where microscopical evidence offers for Gassendi a crucial foundation for transductive reasoning.
Fifth Objections, AT.vii.271 [= CSM,
ii.189].
Exercitationes I, GO.iii.107b: ‘Quod
autem de disciplinis Mathematicis dictum est, idem intelligito dictum de illis
partium aliarum Philosophiae capitibus,
quae historico potius stylo, quam disputatorio excipi debuerant. Quam iuvaret
enim nosse historiam lapidum,
metallorum, plantarum, animalium,
caeterorumque huiusmodi, quorum est
adeo iucunda cognitu varietas! Et esta
tamen, inquiunt, noverint lapidarii, aurifices, herbarii, venatores. Flocci nempe
faciunt, quod nimis vulgaria sint: iactantque interea seligere se, quae proprie
spectent ad Philosophiam. Scilicet
Aristoteles, scilicet Democritus, scilicet
alii magni viri, quorum eruditio tanti
aestimatur, Philosophiam non excolebant, cum ista perquirerent?’ For the
same sentiment in the Syntagma, GO.
i.126a–b.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
100
giving up philosophy
The talk of natural history as the most important part of natural philosophy
makes Gassendi a (non-Baconian) inheritor of the sixteenth-century tradition(s)
described in §3 above; likewise, the emphasis on Democritus as an archetypal
experiential philosopher suggests the influence of those like Libavius and
Severinus, for whom Gassendi elsewhere expressed great admiration.300
Predictably, Gassendi’s very next words contrast this ideal programme with
that which sought to explain the eduction of forms, whether they were produced
formally or eminently, whether animal ‘faculties’ were separable from their
subject in reality or only in reason, ‘and other innumerable nonsenses’.301
The result of such experimentation would not be scientia in the traditional
sense. ‘If, in the standard manner, you consider Science to be the certain and
evident knowledge of something, obtained by means of necessary causes or
demonstration, then this experimental knowledge, or knowledge of appearances, does not come up to the name “science”.’302 With conclusions like this,
repeated in the Syntagma – where the epistemic claims of natural philosophy
are compared to those of medicine and ethics303 – it is no wonder that
Gassendi’s works were so favoured by the early propagandists for the Royal
Society.304 Gassendi himself took part in much important experimental work:
he was the first to explain in print the famous barometric experiment performed in 1648 by Florin Périer at Puy-de-Dôme, and later discussed by Pascal
(from the results of which Gassendi adumbrated a primitive version of what
would later be known as Boyle’s Law); he conducted extensive collaborative
work in observational astronomy designed to extend the Rudolphine Tables,
culminating in his observation of the transit of Mercury in 1631; he performed
many optical experiments and did much comparative anatomical work on the
structure of the eye; and he also attempted to determine experimentally the
speed of sound, and to verify experimentally Galileo’s theories about falling
bodies.305 In this respect, I think it is quite right to conceive of the atomist
synthesis of Syntagma ‘as a way of characterising the physical world in keeping
with the very scientific standards [Gassendi] helped to create’.306
300
301
302
303
Bloch, Gassendi (1971), 445–6; Hirai,
‘Mysteries’ (2015), 262.
Exercitationes I, GO.iii.107b: ‘alias innumeras nugas’.
Gassendi, Exercitationes II, GO.iii.192a:
‘Si satis constanter tuereris Scientiam
esse alicuius rei certam, evidentem & per
necessariam causam, seu Demonstratione
habitam notitiam; hac enim ratione illa
experimentalis seu apparentium notitia
nomine Scientia non veniret.’
Syntagma, GO.i.122b–123a. This is the
end of the section ‘De methodo’ of the
304
305
306
Logica – for the comparisons with medicine and ethics see 122b; the same point
is made at the start of the Physica (125b–
126b).
Levitin, Wisdom, 299–300, 302–3.
Matton, ‘Gassendi, Mosnier’ (1994);
Massignat, ‘Elasticité’ (2000), 179–203;
Joy, Gassendi, 106–29; Sakamoto,
‘Reception’ (2009), 69–91; Galluzzi,
‘L’Affaire’ (2000); Palmerino, ‘Theories’
(2004); also Bloch, Gassendi, 326–34;
Brundell, Gassendi (1987), 30–47.
Fisher, Atomism, 324.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
101
This epistemology in turn informed Gassendi’s presentation of disciplinary boundaries in the Syntagma. Riffing on the philological revisionism
of the humanist anti-Aristotelians, Gassendi argued that metaphysics was
a non-discipline created through a misunderstanding of the original
Aristotelian texts. Aristotle himself divided speculative philosophy into
mathematics, physics, and (natural) theology; the Stoics and Epicureans
correctly recognised that the last of these was part of the second, since
God is known only through his works.307 Hence philosophy consisted
solely of logic, physics, and ethics. Now, Gassendi’s physics does begin
with a long section ‘De rebus naturae universe’, so there can be no doubt
that it is an ontology of sorts. But it is essential for Gassendi’s project that
this is considered a part of physics, not only for rhetorical or polemical
reasons, but because the manner of establishing this ontology is exactly
the same as with any other knowledge: through the semiotics which the
logic had introduced. As we shall see in III.Proleg.3, Gassendi’s postulation of real space, categorised as neither substance nor accident, was no
less anti-metaphysical than Roberval’s. His discussion of God qua cause
is, as promised, grounded solely on analogical predication from the
natural world (see further I.3.3; III.2.4). Most importantly, the material
component of the Gassendist ontology was established via his semiotics,
and specifically via analogical reasoning from macroscopic to microscopic,
an inferential process, which, following several previous commentators,
I shall call ‘transduction’ (it will be of great importance for understanding
Newton’s anti-metaphysical physics). The material constitution of bodies,
down to the atomic level, was known only from analogical reasoning
about macro-level signs perceptible to the senses.
Gassendi’s optimism on this front was undoubtedly stimulated by further
experimental work, specifically microscopical observations of chemical operations in which, for example, the crystalline structure of salt remained in
dissolved salt particles.308 There are, of course, numerous problems with
such an argument. One, common to all inductive methodologies, is the latent
assumption of the nomological regularity of nature, something that Gassendi
never properly justified, as Newton would not either (II.1.3). Second, and
specific to Gassendi, various aspects of his explanatory models seem to break
307
308
Syntagma, GO.i.27a. See also i.133b–
134a.
See e.g. Gassendi to Peiresc, 6 July 1635,
Lettres de Peiresc, ed. P. Tamizey de
Larroque, 7 vols (Paris, 1888–98),
iv.538–9, where such experiments are
specifically said to confirm ‘the principles of the philosophy of Epicurus’.
See further Fisher, Atomism, 336–9,
348–9; Lolordo, Gassendi (2006), 99. As
noted by Fisher (353), the optimism of
the letter to Peiresc is tempered in the
Syntagma (GO.i.271a, 472a) where the
relevant experiments are said to reveal
only the molecular structure of crystals,
rather than their underlying atomic
structure.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
102
giving up philosophy
the rules of transduction. Why are atoms indivisible, when macro-bodies are
not? What inductive grounds are there for positing specific types of atoms with
specific shapes to explain qualities such as heat and cold? Why is the intrinsic
motion Gassendi ascribes to his atoms non-inertial, when macro-bodies follow
the principles of Galilean dynamics?309 These problems notwithstanding,
Gassendi’s atomist ontology was, at least in principle, derived solely from
experience.
As we shall see, Newton would rely on a modified version of such transductive reasoning to defend the experiential validity of universal gravitation in his
famous regulae philosophandi, and elsewhere. However, there was also a major
difference between the two men’s approaches. Where Gassendi used transduction to establish a full ontology, Newton used it only to outline the seemingly
universal properties of matter for the sake of a polemical pay-off: to suggest the
philosophical invalidity of arguments positing a weightless subtle matter. For
Gassendi, meanwhile, his ontology could be used to explain, hypothetically,
various natural phenomena, a process justified via a modified version of the
regressus:
It is certainly a condition of our observation and knowledge that while we
cannot perceive the inner nature of things, we can perceive some of their
effects. We should be content if, having divined something of them [the
natures] from certain effects, we may try to accommodate whatever
notions we may have about them to other effects, when we search for
the causes of those effects, or investigate how they have their origin in
their natures.310
In other words, we posit an atomic ontology from effects, and then we use that
ontology to offer explanations of other phenomena. Crucially, those explanations could only be hypothetical and probable; there might well be multiple
viable explanations, as Epicurus had himself recognised.311 Moreover, these
explanations were often not directly reducible to atoms and their motion.
More frequently, Gassendi explained phenomena via second-order corpuscles
309
310
See esp. Palmerino, ‘Theories’ for the
last of these.
Syntagma, GO.i.207b: ‘Ea nempe nostra
perspicaciae, cognitionisque conditione
est, ut, cum pervidere naturas rerum
intimas non possimus; aliquos effectus
possimus; contentos nos esse oporteat,
si hariolati quidpiam circa illas ex quibusdam effectibus, nostras qualescumque de ipsis notiones adnitamur aliis
effectibus accommodare, cum eorum
causas poscimur, seu quomodo a suis
naturis originem habeant, rogamur.’
311
This is in the context of explaining
the Torricelli experiment, and inferring a void to be present above the
mercury.
As repeatedly admitted, e.g. in
Syntagma, GO.i.286b. For the nondeducibility of the explanation of specific phenomena from general principles, see also iii.362b – these
comments
are
directed
against
Descartes. For multiple explanations in
Epicureanism, see e.g. Lucretius, De rer.
nat., v.526–33.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
103
(sometimes called ‘molecules’) whose key property was their ‘texture’, in
principle reducible to the arrangement of atoms, but in practice without
explanation how this could be the case.312
If this is not enough of a break from the ‘pure’ ontological mechanism of
Descartes, then Gassendi’s postulation of seminal corpuscles akin to those
posited by Severinus and Duchesne, endowed with formative power and
constitutive of the (material) souls of plants and animals, and even of the
generative principles within minerals, seems to abandon it altogether.313
Finally, that kind of ontological mechanism is explicitly discarded when
Gassendi comes to the problems of animal generation and sentience, where
he resorts to the incomprehensible operation of God, and perhaps to his
superaddition of animate, teleological principles to nature. This is, effectively,
a version of what modern theologians have termed the ‘God of the gaps’: when
a phenomenon cannot be explained mechanically, all that is left to do is to
acknowledge the limits of our understanding and to ‘recite a hymn to that divine
and incomparable architect, who has created and placed within the seeds of
things these artisans (so to speak) [quasi fabros], equipped with such great
providence, industry and skill’,314 without explaining how exactly God operated.
As we shall see, a Cartesian like Bayle would disdain the argument for both
methodological and natural-theological reasons. In contrast, Newton
embraced it heartily, and developed it in his own way. For now, we need
only note that it is an anti-metaphysical argument, or at least one that
emphasises the strict limits on human reasoning. Its logic is simple: (i) We
posit an operational mechanism in which the whole world is composed only
of the properties found in the macro world – i.e. impenetrable matter in
motion; (ii) We recognise the existence of phenomena that cannot be
reduced to that operational mechanism, which we attribute to a black box
called ‘God’, ‘the soul’, or ‘superaddition’. On these terms, superaddition is
less a philosophical position and more an anti-rationalist statement of
epistemic humility. This, as we shall see, was exactly what it would be for
Locke, and – less systematically – for Newton (III.1.2).
312
See e.g. his reference to the chemical
elements as ‘proximate and immediate
principles’
(Syntagma,
GO.i.472a:
‘Huiusmodi moleculas esse quasi proxima, immediataque principia’), where
these molecules are distinguished from
Anaxagoran homoeomera, which are
irreducible first principles (‘irresolubilia
sint, ac prima principia’). See further
Lolordo, Gassendi, 157–8; Clericuzio,
Elements, 63–71; Kubbinga, ‘Théorie’
(1994).
313
314
Hirai, Le concept (2005), 463–91.
Syntagma, GO.ii.267a (this is the end of
the chapter on spontaneous generation
in the book ‘De generatione animalium’): ‘Quare superest, ut mirari opera
inimitabilia, captumque omnem superantia hymnum canamus divino illi, ac
incomparabili Architecto, qui intra
rerum semina creavit, constituitque
hosce quasi fabros tanta providentia,
industria, atque facultate instructos.’
See also 274a.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
104
giving up philosophy
It would be quite wrong to speak of Gassendi as an ‘empiricist’ and
Descartes a ‘rationalist’. Indeed, it should now be clear that Gassendi’s project
was not as far from Descartes’s as one might initially assume. Both of them, just
like Hobbes and Maignan, established an anti-scholastic ontological foundation which served as a framework within which the hypothetical explanations
of specific natural phenomena had to be constructed. Hobbes’s framework was
materialist, Descartes’s plenist, and Gassendi’s atomist, but for all of them, the
subsequent explanations were only legitimate hypotheses rather than strict
deductions from the ontology.315
That being conceded, we can nonetheless recognise the large gap that
separates Gassendi and Descartes in particular, one which was recognised by
contemporaries. Gassendi’s ontology was – for all the possible problems with
transduction – clearly far more experiential than Descartes’s or even Hobbes’s.
He himself cautioned about the use of reason in making semiotic inferences,316
a caution that was far more in tune with the tenor of post-scholastic natural
philosophy than Descartes’s claim to have grasped the essence of material and
immaterial substance. Moreover, the subsequent physics, with its frequent
recourse to explanations based on intermediate principles, simply appeared
far less deductive than the Cartesian.317 This is surely why Gassendi’s hypothetical explanations of phenomena provided much more inspiration for
experimental activity in all the French academies, including the Académie
des sciences, as well as the Accademia del Cimento, than did Descartes’s (the
Cartesians were strictly excluded from the former, and I know of none in the
latter).318
I.1.8 What Was the Study of Nature in the Later Seventeenth Century?
The synthesisers failed. That is to say, while practising natural philosophers
sometimes followed up and investigated further their individual explanations,
their systems were almost never adopted as full explanatory frameworks. I am
315
316
317
For more on hypotheses among contemporary corpuscularians, see the classic study: Roux, ‘Hypothèses’ (1998).
E.g. Syntagma, GO.i.122a.
In this regard, the strict separation
between reductionist ‘mechanical philosophers’ and ‘experimental philosophers’ who relied on intermediate
causes that is posited in Chalmers,
‘Intermediate’ (2012) seems not to capture the historical complexity of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. On
my reading, several theorists – Gassendi,
but also Boyle – combined the ideal of
318
ontological mechanism with the reality
of operational mechanism, accepting
that they could not reduce their intermediate causes to the ontology they had
posited.
Sturdy, Members (1995), 23–4, 124–5,
157; Taton, Académie royale (1966), 36;
McClaughlin, ‘Les rapports’ (1975), 240;
Knowles Middleton, Experimenters
(1971), 2–3, 45–7, 56–7, 274–5, 331–2;
Boschiero, Experiment (2007), 7–8;
Gómez López, ‘Experiments’ (2009),
53–4, 56; Favino, ‘Oak Academies’
(2009), 98, 102.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
105
aware that this is one of the most controversial things that I shall say in this
whole book. A standard story, still regularly to be found in both survey and
monographic literature, tells us that late seventeenth-century natural philosophy was predicated on systematic ontological mechanism, until Newton came
along to obliterate this cosy consensus. The implicit assumption here is that
either Cartesianism or Boyle’s corpuscularianism was representative of natural
philosophy in this period.
I have tried to tell a rather different story. The two main trends of the
previous century (or more) had been the encroachment on natural philosophical territory by physicians on the one hand and mixed mathematicians on the
other. Using the tools of humanist anti-Aristotelianism, both groups played
a double game: first, they portrayed traditional natural philosophy as rationalist and essentialist; second, they did not disdain the discipline of natural
philosophy altogether, but rather portrayed their own practices as truly constitutive of what the discipline should be. To the extent that they were ‘mechanists’, they were almost always operational mechanists. The only dogmatically
ontological mechanists were the Cartesians (and Hobbes), and they stood
alone and apart, for the large part excluded from the new societies and
academies. Boyle’s corpuscularianism offered a heuristic or ideal, but he
himself admitted that intermediate principles adopted from various subfields of natural enquiry – ‘the Cosmographical, the Hydrostatical, the
Anatomical, the Magnetical, the Chymical, and other Causes or reasons of
Phaenomena’ – were a perfect example of the fact that ‘there are a great many
things of which we may have some knowledge . . . which yet can not with any
convenience be immediately deduc’d from the first & simplest principles;
namely Corpuscles & Motion: but must be derivd from subordinate principles;
such as gravity fermentation, springiness, magnatism, &c’.319 This does not
mean that Boyle conceived of a separation between ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’.
But it does mean that he recognised spheres of activity that were at least
partially distinct.
Boyle devoted his first years as a natural-philosophical practitioner and
writer to a largely destructive purpose: showing that the first principles of
the scholastics and the chymists were not true principles at all. It was in this
context that his ‘corpuscularianism’ was developed. As regards the scholastics,
Boyle again and again complained that they had intruded into natural philosophy claims that were ‘rather Metaphysical, or Logical, than grounded upon
the Principles and Phænomena of Nature’.320 It should be clear by now that in
this regard he was saying nothing new, but simply following in the footsteps of
two centuries of anti-scholastic polemic. The chymists’ practices were
319
320
BW.xiv.169.
Forms and qualities, BW.v.343. See also
289, 294, 309, 344, 472, 474, 479. See
further, among many such statements,
Certain physiological essays [1661], BW.
ii.163.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
106
giving up philosophy
preferable, he continued, but experiments such as the famous reduction to the
pristine state seemed to show that corpuscles with specific chymical properties
survived even the strongest acids.321
However, that corpuscularianism itself played very little positive role in his
actual natural-philosophical explanations, as he himself well knew. As he
entitled one of his manuscript scraps, ‘That we may aspire to, but must not
always Require nor Expect, such a knowledge of things, as is immediately
derived from first principles’.322 According to Boyle, this research programme
was fundamentally different from that of the Cartesians and Epicureans, who
‘pretend to explicate every particular Phænomenon by deducing it from the
Mechanicall affections of Atomes’. (The full passage speaks of ‘those
Epicureans and Cartesians (for I speak not of all those embracers of those
sects)’ – I suspect the qualification refers to Gassendi and his explicit nondeductivism, experimentalism, hypotheticalism, and cautious insistence on
intermediate causes.)323
Boyle knew exactly which discipline had caused philosophers to ‘pretend’
such explanations: metaphysics. ‘It is to be regretted’, he wrote,
yt a great many are so charmed with ye clearness & pleasure of Theorys &
explications, yt are derivd Immediately from metaphysical & mathematicall notions & theorems; yt they oftentimes give forc’d & unnatural
accounts of things, rather than not be thought to have derived them
immediately from these highest principles. <And> wch is much worse,
they despise, & perhaps too condemn or censure, all yt knowledge of ye
works of nature yt Physicians, Chymists & others pretend to, because they
cannot be clearly & easily deduc’d from ye doctrine of Atoms, of ye
Catholick Laws <of> motion. The practice of these virtuosi is like, in my
opinion, to prove so great an impediment to ye advancements of real
learning . . .324
321
322
323
Newman, Atoms, 190–216.
RS, Boyle Papers 8, fol. 184r.
RS, Boyle Papers 7, fol. 166r. Boyle even
seems to have followed Gassendi in his
celebration of Epicurean hypotheticalism: Usefulnesse of experimental natural
philosophy [1663], BW.iii.256. It is difficult not to read this passage as a thinly
disguised endorsement for Gassendi
over Descartes. Prof. Clericuzio has
questioned my previous interpretation
of Boyle’s attitude to atomism
(‘Gassendi and the English’, 24, n. 83).
I am happy to note Boyle’s preference
for Gassendi on this score, not least
because I have so strongly advocated
324
for Gassendi’s experimentist credentials
(‘Experimental philosophy’, 246–8).
Nonetheless, Boyle’s nescience on indivisibility, and his scepticism about
explanations resting on atomic shape
(not least in his treatment of cold) do
I think distinguish him from Gassendi
in more ways than Prof. Clericuzio
allows. Indeed, the whole discussion of
cold is fascinating in this regard: see
New experiments and observations
touching cold [1665], BW.iv.376–83,
containing Boyle’s most committed
engagement with Gassendi.
RS, Boyle Papers 8, fol. 184r.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
107
‘Metaphysics’ thus now meant both the reification of logical entities and
a deductive approach; what united both was an obsessive search for underlying
principles. In this regard, Boyle recognised that transduction from operational
to ontological mechanism was an extremely limited tool which could not
establish much about ultimate particles, including even whether they were
divisible or not, or whether a pure vacuum existed: hence his irenic ‘corpuscularianism’ rather than ‘atomism’.325 These issues, as well as the question of
the ‘Origine of Motion’, were again dismissed as rather ‘Metaphysical than
Physiological Notions’.326
This was not just the rhetoric of epistemic modesty. For in his positive
natural-philosophical project, Boyle really was indifferent to corpuscularian
explanations, and developed intermediate explanations which he aligned with
various sub-fields of natural enquiry: the aforementioned ‘Cosmographical,
the Hydrostatical, the Anatomical, the Magnetical, the Chymical, and other
Causes or reasons of Phaenomena’. His most famous results in this regard were
those concerning the spring of air, which are a textbook example of operational
rather than ontological mechanism at work. He expressed near indifference as
to which particular corpuscularian explanation one should adopt for the
phenomenon he had discovered.327 And when it was pointed out to him that
his explanations in hydrostatics, depending on the ‘intermediate’ principle of
the weight of the air, could not sustain any ontological mechanism, he simply
turned the point into a positive by saying he was pursuing only operational
mechanism, even comparing his method to Archimedean statics:
I did not in that Book intend to write a whole Systeme, or so much as the
Elements of Natural Philosophy; but having sufficiently proved, that the Air,
we live in, is not devoid of weight, and is endowed with an Elastical Power or
springiness, I endeavour’d by those two Principles to explain the
Phænomena exhibited in our Engine, and particularly that now under
debate, without recourse to a Fuga Vacui, or the Anima Mundi, or any
such unphysical Principle. And since such kind of Explications have been
of late generally called Mechanical, in respect of their being grounded upon
the Laws of the Mechanicks; I, that do not use to contend about Names,
suffer them quietly to be so: And to entitle my now examined Explication to
be Mechanical, as far as I pretend, and in the usual sence of that expression,
I am not obliged to treat of the cause of Gravity in general; since many
325
The clearest statement of the transductive inferences that justify corpuscularianism is in ‘The excellency and grounds
of the mechanical hypothesis’ [1674],
BW.viii.107–8, and its limits are recognised in, e.g., Forms and qualities, BW.
v.292. For discussion, see Mandelbaum,
Philosophy (1964), 107–12; Newman,
326
327
3
6
9
12
Atoms, 204–8 (including the evidence
for Gassendi’s influence at 205, n. 31);
Anstey, Boyle (2000), 51–8.
Certain physiological essays [1661], BW.
ii.87. See also New experiments . . .
touching the spring of the air [1660],
BW.i.198.
Spring of air, BW.i.165–6.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
108
giving up philosophy
Propositions of Archimedes, Stevinus, and those others that have written of
Staticks, are confessed to be Mathematically or Mechanically demonstrated,
though those Authors do not take upon them to assign the true cause of
Gravity, but take it for granted, as a thing universally acknowledged, that
there is such a quality in the Bodies they treat of. And if in each of the
Scales of an ordinary and just Ballance, a pound weight, for instance, be
put; he that shall say, that the Scales hang still in Æquilibrium, because
the equal weights counterpoise one another: and in case an ounce be put
into one of the Scales, and not into the opposite; he that shall say that the
loaded Scale is depress’d, because ’tis urged by a greater weight than the
other, will be thought to have given a Mechanical Explication of
the Æquilibrium of the Scales, and their losing it; though he cannot
give a true cause, why either of those Scales tends towards the Center
of the Earth. Since then the assigning of the true cause of Gravity is not
required in the Staticks themselves, though one of the principal and most
known of the Mechanical Disciplines; Why may not other Propositions
and Accounts, that suppose Gravity in the Air, (nay prove it, though
not a priori) be look’d on as Mechanical?328
15
18
21
24
27
30
This passage has been noted by several commentators. However, I think none of
them has fully recognised the extent to which it is in line with the tradition of
(operational) mechanics as it had developed since the late sixteenth century.
‘Mechanical’, it turns out, does not have to mean explicable by matter in motion,
but only obeying mechanical laws (lines 8–10). This was the operational mechanism of Archimedes, which presupposes certain truths known experientially –
gravity, no less – and does not seek to explain them further, at least for the time
being (lines 12–17, 24–8). As far as Boyle was concerned, such operational
mechanism was, on its own level, no more hylomorphist (or animist) than
ontological mechanism (lines 6–7).329 Leibniz and his allies would disagree: to
328
329
An hydrostatic discourse [1672], BW.
vii.148.
In this regard, I do not believe there is as
much of a chasm between Newman,
‘Integrate’ (2010), and Chalmers,
‘Understanding’ (2011) as the polemics
may imply (see also Anstey, ‘Heuristic’
(2002)). The significant difference, at
least as far as I can see, is that Prof.
Chalmers seeks to measure the past
study of nature against a transhistorical
‘science’, and to find it either faulty or
not. Once these value judgements are
removed, his account of Boyle’s hydrostatics seems to me very valuable (Pressure
(2017), 111–34). Both Newman and
Anstey cite the above passage from the
Hydrostatic discourse, but while my ultimate interpretation does not differ from
theirs, they do not note that Boyle was
here really appealing to a different epistemological-methodological
criterion
than that in his essays on corpuscularianism. Newman’s point that Boyle’s corpuscularian explanations were largely
negative in purpose (‘Integrate’, 208:
‘they were meant primarily to act as illustrations of how things might work mechanically in the invisibly small world in
order to show that there was not an overriding necessity to invoke substantial
forms or other explanatory agents’)
seems to me to be exactly right. Hence it
was the mechanical hypothesis!
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
109
them Newton’s operational mechanism was an archetypal example of animism,
or at least scholastic occult qualities.
The vast majority of those practising natural philosophy in the final third of
the seventeenth century cared even less than Boyle about ultimate underlying
explanations.330 This was because natural philosophy had been colonised by
the physicians and the mixed mathematicians who so frequently disdained
what they perceived to be the hubristic aims of ‘the philosophers’. Even the
briefest survey of the activities and memberships of the new societies that
sprang up in England, Italy, and France in the middle of the century reveals the
centrality of the medico-mathematical alliance. I noted earlier the medicomathematical make-up of the London group discussed by John Wallis (§6). We
can follow that up by noting that the men who, as statistical analysis has shown,
were most active in the work of the early Royal Society – John Wilkins, Thomas
Henshaw, William Croone, Jonathan Goddard, Walter Charleton, Christopher
Merrett, and Wallis himself – had almost all received their intellectual formation
in mid-century Oxford, and their interests were almost entirely confined to postHarveian physiology or pure and mixed mathematics.331 Other pre-eminent
naturalists, such as Francis Glisson, Thomas Willis, and Thomas Sydenham,
were likewise medical men; all of them drew on the aforementioned idea of
a ‘Rationalist Empiricism’ which had permeated European universities after
having been developed in sixteenth-century Italy. Not a single one of these
men was an ontological mechanist. The closest to being so was Charleton,
who is often described as such. But his medical and chymical interests and
approaches precluded any full ontological mechanism, as he himself willingly
advertised.332
In France, meanwhile, the group that formed the loose gathering that was the
Compagnie des sciences et des arts, active c.1664–6, engaged in what has been
fairly labelled a ‘radical experimentalism’,333 was dominated by men trained in
330
331
332
Indeed, the extent to which Boyle was
representative of late seventeenthcentury natural philosophy can sometimes be overplayed. That he was not
representative of the Royal Society is
well noted in Hunter, ‘Boyle and the
Royal Society’ (2007), 2–3.
For these men as the most active, and
their background, see Frank, ‘Activity’
(1976), 87–8.
See above all his conclusion to his discussion of animal generation in his
‘Dissertatio epistolica de ortu animae
humanae’, in Oeconomia animalis . . .
editio tertia (London, 1666), 285–91,
where he argues that the obvious need
333
for an intelligent and active agent in
nature explains why the pagan philosophers posited so many animist
entities, such as the anima mundi or
the Averroist universal active intellect,
himself seeming to favour the idea of
a ‘vis Plastica’ imbued in organic creatures by God. See also his Natural history of nutrition (London, 1659), 124.
See further Clericuzio, Elements, 92–
100; Blank, ‘Atoms’ (2006), esp. 136–42.
Roux, ‘Cartesian experimentalism’
(2013), 62–72. See also McClaughlin,
‘Rapports’;
Brown,
Organisations
(1934), 119–47; Sturdy, Members, 16–21.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
110
giving up philosophy
medicine and mathematics: Melchisédech Thévenot, Adrien Auzout, Etienne
d’Espagnet, and the aforementioned Roberval and Petit, as well as visitors like
Huygens, Nicolas Steno, Ole Rømer, and Swammerdam.334 Metaphysics was
explicitly banned, unless strictly necessary.335
Subsequently, the work of the Académie des sciences, founded in 1666, was
no less dominated by mathematicians (and mixed mathematicians) on the one
hand, and chymists and physicians on the other. The Académie was even
divided into two sections, ‘mathematics’ and ‘physics’, but the latter was
concerned almost entirely with experimental activity connected to medicine;
anatomical work was done by Claude Perrault (1613–88), Marin Cureau de la
Chambre (1594–1669), Jean Pecquet (1622–74), and Louis Gayant (†1673),
and chymistry by Samuel Duclos (1598–1685) and the apothecary Claude
Bourdelin (1621–99).336 A huge amount of natural history was collected with
the aim of producing two volumes on plants and animals.337 The chymists
incorporated into their research the Gassendist–Boylean insistence on the use
of intermediate causes.338 This was as close as the society got to any consideration of underlying principles and matter theory, and even that proved
a contentious enterprise – indeed, led by Duclos, they displayed considerable
scepticism about whether Boyle’s experimental work and the reduction to the
pristine state experiment had actually revealed anything about the ontological
mechanism he was seeking. Boyle’s corpuscularianism ‘is not sufficient for
explaining everything’, Duclos correctly recognised.339
This mathematico-medical alliance was reflected not just in institutional
membership, but in actual intellectual collaboration. Across Europe, mathematicians and physicians worked together to explain various anatomical
phenomena. In France, Pecquet (1622–74) worked with Roberval to elaborate
the discovery of the receptacle of the chyle and thoracic duct, not least by
introducing the concept of elasticity into anatomy. In Italy, the Galilean
Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–79), professor of mathematics at Pisa, worked
with the anatomist Marcello Malpighi to explain the functioning of the lungs
and their relationship with the circulatory system. In Oxford, the two groups
had long collaborated on explanations of respiration and muscular action,
culminating in the collaboration between Willis and Wren on the former’s
famous neurological discoveries. The famous Danish physician Steno worked
334
335
336
337
Its mathematico-medical character is
perfectly evoked in Huygens’s ‘Projet
de la Compagnie des Sciences et des
Arts’ [1663–6?], HO.iv.325.
Huygens, ‘Projet’, HO.iv.328.
Boantza, ‘Alkahest’ (2010), esp. 75–8,
83–4; Stroup, Company (1990), 89–102.
The works published were the Mémoires
pour servir à l’Histoire naturelle des
338
339
Animaux (1671) and the Mémoires
pour servir à l’histoire des plantes
(1676). For the immense amount of
work done, see Stroup, Company, 70–
83; Guerrini, Anatomists (2015), 50–
164.
Clericuzio, Elements, 177–81; Boantza,
‘Matter’ (2007).
Boantza, Matter (2013), 48–56, qu. 52.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
111
in Florence with Galileo’s former assistant Vincenzo Viviani on the appropriately titled Elementorum myologiae specimen, seu musculi descriptio geometrica
(1667), which even presented its conclusions in Galilean, axiomatic fashion.340
All of these figures have been described as ‘iatromechanists’. However, as the
Galilean heritage should suggest, their mechanism was only ever operational
rather than ontological. That is to say, they thought that anatomical structures
could be explained by analogy with machines, and without recourse to
Aristotelian–Galenic ‘faculties’. But they never committed themselves to
a fully mechanical natural philosophy (almost all were critical of Descartes).
Willis, for example, rejected any kind of corpuscularian reductionism, which
he argued ‘presupposed, rather than demonstrated’ its principles. He preferred
the chymists’ principles, even though he recognised that they were not fundamental but only intermediate, explanatory principles; this led him to condemn
even Boyle’s attempted corpuscularian-chymical synthesis as ‘dream
philosophy’.341 One of the underlying explanatory mechanisms of Willis’s
whole system, the neo-Helmontian notion of fermentation, was unquestionably non-mechanical; it was widely discussed in these years, and as we shall see,
Newton, who had read Willis’s work carefully, would present it as analogous to
gravitation in being an intermediate explanation.342
Borelli did proudly declare in the dedication to Queen Christina of his
posthumously published De motu animalium (1680) that ‘the idiom and characters with which the Creator of things speaks in his works are geometrical
configurations and demonstrations’, and was more prepared than his collaborator
(and later opponent) Malpighi to expand his mechanism into the realm of matter
theory. But he nonetheless saw the origin of the motion of animals in their souls,
even if the latter were inaccessible to the anatomist, who could only study the
phenomenological manifestations of their activity, and take them for the ‘foundations’ of his physico-mathematical investigation.343 It was particularly
340
341
342
All these are discussed in the
brilliant account by Bertoloni Meli,
‘Collaboration’ (2008). For the Oxford
context, see Frank, Physiologists;
Gibson, ‘Pursuits’ (1970); Bennett,
‘Respiration’ (1976).
Thomas Willis, Diatribae duae medico-philosophicae (London, 1659), 3–4;
Willis, Diatribae duae medicophilosophicae . . . editio secunda
(London, 1660), 4. See also Willis,
De anima brutorum (London, 1672),
3–7.
Clericuzio, ‘Chemical medicine’ (2016),
282–4. Fermentation was a constant
source of debate among operational
343
mechanists, with some rejecting its
explanatory validity.
Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, De motu animalium, 2 vols (Rome, 1680–1), i, sig.
a3r: ‘Tale, inquam, idioma, & characteres, quibus Creator Rerum loquitur
in suis operibus, sunt Geometricae
Configurationes, & Demonstrationes’;
1–4. For the place of matter theory in
Borelli’s project, see Baldini, ‘Borelli
biologo’ (1974); for the difference
between him and Malpighi on this
score, see Gómez López, ‘Malpighi and
atomism’ (1997), although I think this
account perhaps slightly overplays the
extent to which Borelli and his Pisan
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
112
giving up philosophy
important for him to show that only the existence of a sensitive soul could explain
the beating of the heart.344 For Borelli, ‘contrary to the systematic claims of
Cartesians, the study of the transmission and determination of active powers,
which is the province of mechanics, could be undertaken separately from the
study of those powers themselves and their principles’.345
Steno, meanwhile, while he compared even the brain to a machine, likewise
criticised Descartes’s ontological mechanism, preferring to stick to a ‘critical
experimentalism’ that only claimed certainty for a few propositions geometrically demonstrated from experiment, and disdained any broader explanatory
aims, above all about entities such as the soul.346 As Domenico Bertoloni Meli
has persuasively argued,
by mechanical he [Steno] and other anatomists understood ‘machine like’
rather than based on the laws of mechanics: this interpretation goes hand
in hand with a view of seventeenth century mechanics according to which
objects take centre stage and embody more abstract relations. As in
mechanics, in anatomy too understanding a complex structure meant
decomposing it and recognising in it elements associated with simpler,
known objects that could be understood and handled separately.347
This operational rather than ontological sense of ‘mechanical’ was the direct
product of the de-ontologisation of natural philosophy by the mixed mathematicians of the first part of the century. This is important. Operational
mechanism is founded on a division of labour: it studies the mechanics of
motion but leaves the explanation of the origin of that motion unexplained and
unexamined. In other words, the refusal to commit to a fully fledged ontological mechanism is not a return to scholastic Aristotelianism, with its various
metaphysical parts and occult qualities deployed as explanatory devices. All the
inexplicable non-mechanical actions have been confined to a black box
labelled ‘the soul’ (or perhaps to direct divine intervention, or sometimes to
real entities such as plastic powers or semina, or – most importantly – to
‘motions’ or ‘forces’ whose origin and cause remains unstated), which it is no
longer the natural philosopher’s duty to explain further. As Dennis Des Chene
has shown, this exact approach was also standard fare in France, not least in
344
345
346
followers were apriorist systembuilders.
Borelli, De motu animalium, ii.158–61.
For the issue in the seventeenth century,
see Fuchs, Heart (2001), 171–3 for Borelli.
Des Chene, ‘Life’, 251–4 (Borelli), qu.
246.
Nicolas Steno, Discours sur l’anatomie
du cerveau (Paris, 1669), 53 for the
brain–machine analogy. See the
347
excellent discussion in Andrault,
‘Brain’ (2018), esp. 97–109, from where
I
take
the
term
‘critical
experimentalism’.
Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, 13–14. See
also the discussion of the levels of mechanical explanation in Borelli and
Malpighi at 280–9, where the tensions
within operational mechanism are
explored.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
113
Claude Perrault’s seminal contributions on animal motion to the Académie
des sciences’s huge natural history volumes. ‘The source of active power is the
soul, about which very little is said. What remains is to explain the transmission and application of that power to the end of locomotion, and that is
a matter of applying mechanical knowledge.’348
As for the mechanical study of the non-organic, the mixed mathematicians
simply adopted the well-established strategy of declaring themselves uninterested in the underlying causes or metaphysical principles of the phenomena
they were studying, such as collisions or centres of gravity, a stance explicitly
adopted by Wallis and Huygens, among others (III.Proleg.5). Even those who
were more prone to speculations about underlying causes, such as Robert
Hooke, adopted not an ontological mechanism but only an operational one
that sometimes even implied the existence of active powers, the existence of
which was justified by transduction from experiment at a macro level.349 Again
and again, the practising natural philosophers disdained Cartesianism for
hubristically searching for causes, for declaring such causes without nearly
enough experimental evidence to support them, and – most of all – for
supplying reductionist explanations. The apogee of such criticisms, at least in
France, is Edme Mariotte’s Essay de logique (1678), which, as Sophie Roux has
shown, was indebted to both Roberval and Gassendi. Unsurprisingly,
Mariotte – a pioneer in hydrostatics and pneumatics – was also an operational
348
349
Des Chene, ‘Life’, 255.
The classic study is Henry, ‘Incongruous
mechanist’ (1989), esp. 162–6. Where
I differ from Henry is on his claim that
such explanations were in some way
continuous with scholastic occult causes
or ‘magical assumptions’ that ‘grew out
of the natural magic tradition’ (168).
The whole point was to offer phenomenological explanations without supplying any fundamental ontological
account of non-mechanical activity. As
Hooke put it (Posthumous works
(London, 1705), 173): ‘And these are
those which we call the Laws of Nature;
which though at first glance they seem
wholly unsearchable and incomprehensible, yet God has planted in Man
a Faculty by which, I conceive, he has
a Power of understanding and finding
out, by and according to what Order,
Rule, Method, or Law, they act, and produce the Effects that are produced by
them.’ This could be a manifesto for
what I have called ‘operational
mechanism’. For another such example,
specifically disavowing an explanation
of congruity at the level of ‘the general
Principles of Philosophy’ and confining
himself to an investigation of ‘properties’, see Robert Hooke, An attempt for
the explication of the phaenomena
(London, 1661), 9–10. Hooke developed
a more speculative matter theory, justified by transduction from experiment,
in his Lectures de potentia restitutiva
(London, 1678), 7–13, which ultimately
still culminated in phenomenological
nescience: ‘provided we know what the
motion is, and the Rules, Powers, and
Proportions of that, we need not much
consider the Substance of it [light]’
(Posthumous works, 115–16 – this is
a lecture delivered in May 1681).
Hooke’s actual explanations of various
phenomena, especially concerning
springs and elasticity, were solely operational: see Bertoloni Meli, Thinking,
242–6.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
114
giving up philosophy
mechanist. However, the ‘suppositions’ (i.e. hypotheses) of that mechanics,
such as the principle of inertia, were never justified metaphysically but were
said to be known inductively. Metaphysical first principles had been replaced
with phenomenological ones: ‘Talking about principles of experience could
lead one to believe that he is thinking of absolute principles or first causes. In
fact, this is not the case: for Mariotte, these are the stopping points which one
pragmatically admits to circumvent the problem of causal incompleteness. The
investigation of causes which characterises physics is in effect almost always
beset with incompleteness.’350
As we shall see in Part III, a modified version of this self-limiting, antimetaphysical model was adopted by Newton. Above all, his famous reference
to space as akin to the divine sensorium was not at all a contribution to the
metaphysics of space or divine omnipresence. Rather, it was nothing more
than an analogy achieved by bringing exactly this kind of operational mechanism from physiology into cosmology. Its use in physiology was the product
of that most late seventeenth-century of ‘scientific’ activities, the collaboration
between a mathematician and a physician, in this case William Briggs (1642–
1704) (see III.2.4). More radically, Newton’s regulae philosophandi suggested
that explanatory entities that were not ontologically grounded, such as force,
could nonetheless be posited as fundamental properties of nature (III.1.3). In
turn, it was above all Leibniz who created the myth that before Newton,
modern philosophy had been ontologically (rather than operationally) mechanist, with Newton and his followers supposedly shattering this metaphysical
consensus.351 This propagandist narrative has been unwittingly adopted by
a host of historians and philosophers through to the present day.352
The de-metaphysicisation of natural philosophy should not be confused
with a triumphalist story about the emergence of ‘science’. Nonetheless, it is
a story about a very major shift of disciplinary identity, the best evidence for
which is the fact that many of the central, common-sense issues that Arabic
and European natural philosophy had throughout its long history been
intended to address were now left unresolved, and even dismissed as pointless
metaphysical subtleties. There is no better example of this than the marginalisation of the fundamental questions of individuation and identity over time.
To the objection that ‘if there were no substantial Forms, all Bodies would be
but Entia per accidens, as they speak, which is absurd’, Boyle, after halfheartedly denying the consequence, simply affirmed that ‘for my part, That
350
Roux, L’essai (2011), 99: ‘Parler de principes d’expérience pourrait conduire à
croire qu’il s’agit de principes absolus,
de causes premières. En fait, ce n’est pas
le cas – pour Mariotte, ce sont des points
d’arrêt qu’on admet pragmatiquement
pour esquiver le problème vertical de
351
352
l’incomplétude causale. L’enquête sur
les causes qui caractérise la physique
est en effet presque toujours grevée
d’incomplétude.’
L–C, L.v.114 (92–3).
See e.g. the very title of Gaukroger,
Collapse of mechanism (2010).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
115
which I am solicitous about, is, what Nature hath made things to be in
themselves, not what a Logician or Metaphysician will call them in the
Terms of his Art’. Immediately, he then returned to the polemical safeground
established by Valla two centuries earlier: the scholastics themselves admit that
they do not know substances or essences, so why use them to explain natural
things, rather than simply focus on ‘the Essential Differences of things, which
constitute them in such a sort of Natural Bodies, and discriminate them from
all those of any other sort’? (‘Essential differences’ here are the corpuscular
structures of bodies.)353
An even better example to this effect appears in the writings of Pierre Petit
(1594–1677), an important experimentalist, astronomer, and engineer;
a friend of Mersenne, Gassendi, and Pascal; one of the first foreign fellows of
the Royal Society; and another resolute opponent of Descartes. In his
Dissertations académiques sur la nature du froid et du chaud (1671), Petit listed
the principle of individuation among ‘those vain questions, which it is better to
disdain than to settle’, a list which also included inter alia the problem of
universals, substantial forms, formless matter, the separability of relations
from their subject, ‘and a hundred other unintelligibles’.354 Petit’s own mechanism was strictly operational (a colleague even called him ‘that Archimedes of
our time’):355 when he discussed the nature of heat and cold, he did so by
referring to motion, but compared the ‘convenient’ speculations of those who
sought fundamental explanations by positing specific atomic shapes to the
analogical reasoning of a child, ‘who always told me that I had pins on my chin,
when I pricked him when I kissed him’.356 I cannot think of a better example of
the historical fact that the aims of enquiry had fundamentally shifted.
353
354
Forms and qualities, BW.v.344 (which
contains a misprint; cf. the original
(London, 1666–7), 158). For an attempt
to read Boyle as a species realist, see
Jones, ‘Classification’ (2005); Jones,
‘Locke vs Boyle’ (2007). I am not convinced, and would point to the famous
passage in Forms and qualities, BW.
v.356 (which Jones discusses, and
attempts to sideline) as well as to
another (v.472, not discussed by Jones),
in which Boyle, referring to the results of
his chymical experimentation, wonders
whether ‘those forms by which such
kinds are constituted be not a kind of
metaphysical conceptions [sic]’.
Pierre Petit, Dissertations académiques
sur la nature du froid et du chaud
(Paris, 1671), ‘Aux lecteurs’, xxiii: ‘ces
355
356
vaines questions, qu’il est plus avantageux de mépriser que de resoudre . . . &
cent autres inintelligibles’. See also Petit,
Lettre . . . à Monsieur De La Chambre
(Paris, 1666), 7. On his antiCartesianism, see de Waard, ‘Les objections’ (1925).
Pierre Le Gallois, Conversations tirées de
l’Académie de Monsieur l’Abbé Bourdelot
(Paris, 1672), 42, ‘cet Archymede de
notre temps’. For the Academy being
described, see Gabbey, ‘Bourdelot’
(1984), again demonstrating the high
level of medical content (95), and the
deep scepticism about ontological mechanism, especially its capacity to explain
living organisms (101–2).
Petit, Dissertations académiques, 49–50:
‘Tant cette Philosophie des Atomes
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
116
giving up philosophy
I.1.9 Conclusion
When Le Clerc wrote his hugely popular physics textbook, it was medicine
that he celebrated as the premier model of what the new philosophy should
be, and his list of the heroes of the enterprise – Boyle, Borelli, Malpighi,
Hooke, Nehemiah Grew, Redi – consists primarily of medical men.357
According to the Huguenot, it was they who had transformed philosophy
from what it had been since ancient times: a non-experimental, conjectural
science of causes, ultimately rooted in the ‘shallowness of the Greeks’. The
method that those Greeks had begot was a ‘synthetic’ one, always beginning with some teaching on ‘body in general’.358 It was to avoid this
pitfall that Le Clerc took the radical step of placing his discussion ‘De
corpore in genere’ at the end of his textbook, in Book 5, after first
discussing the observational and experimental evidence for various natural phenomena: the world system (Book 1), the earth and the seas
(Book 2), meteorology (Book 3), and plants and animals (Book 4).359 In
scholastic terminology, special physics now preceded the general. Le Clerc
characterised this radical reorientation of the textbook format as expressive of method that began with analysis rather than synthesis, and which,
while it sought to use that method to find underlying causes, could often
admit to falling short.360
Moreover, when we finally reach the discussion of body in general, the
results are philosophically underwhelming, to say the least. According to
Le Clerc, we know virtually nothing about the nature of bodies, and all the
schemes to establish the fundamental principles of bodies – whether
scholastic, Empedoclean, chymical, or the various types of corpuscularianism – were all speculative conjectures. The last of these was preferable
because each of the others had been experimentally disproved, but it was
still replete with difficulties and incapable of explaining most natural
phenomena.361 This fact made a nonsense out of the very idea of
a ‘System of physics’.362 All in all, Le Clerc concluded, rather than
hypothesise about ultimate principles, ‘it is more useful to be ingenious
357
358
359
figurez est commode . . .’; the atomic
explanations are posited ‘chimeriquement
& par analogie . . . comme un petit enfant
que j’ay eu, qui me disoit toûjours que
j’avois des épingles au menton, quand je
le piquois en le baisant.’
Physica, Praefatio, sigs *3r–*4r, *5v.
Physica, Praefatio, sig. [*7]v–[*8]r: ‘levitate
Graecorum’ . . . ‘de Corpore in genere’.
This radical restructuring, proudly
announced at Physica, Praefatio, sig.
[*8]v, is missed in the only study devoted
360
361
362
to all of Le Clerc’s philosophy teaching,
Pitassi, ‘Tâcheron’, where it is even
claimed that ‘les Opera reflètent dans
leur structure les schémas classiques’
(106).
Physica, ‘Praefatio’, sig. [10*]v. Also sig.
[12*]r–v.
Physica, 362, 374–5; also ‘Praefatio’, sigs
[8*]v–[9*]r.
Physica, ‘Praefatio’, sig. [9*]r: ‘Atque
hinc rursus Systema Physicarum non
posse fieri colligimus . . .’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
117
men who, like Democritus, wear away life in experiments and the search
for truth, so as to light the way for others’.363
It might be tempting to see in such words the emergence of a real distinction
between ‘philosophy’ and ‘science’. This is all the more tempting given Le Clerc’s
very real, historico-philosophical assumption that the study of nature had finally
emancipated itself from the type of metaphysical system-building that began
with ontological first principles, and which – he claimed – had characterised the
activity from antiquity through to the Cartesians. There can be no doubt that
Cartesian philosophy was a particular target of his disdain, and indeed, he selfconsciously reconfigured the meaning of ‘metaphysics’ to create a scholastic–
Cartesian hydra, opposing which was one of his life’s great aims:
You know that the scholastics say that metaphysics is a science which
deals with being in general, and with its various properties. But today we
call ‘metaphysics’ all those abstract principles, which are used not only to
reason about being in general, but which also make us consider all things
in their first origin, and lead us – they claim – to the knowledge of God
and created spirits in particular. In a word, it is said that all the ideas which
can only be conceived by pure understanding are ideas of metaphysics.
And although one may say something true on these matters, I would
maintain that most of the things that we find in the Cartesian metaphysicians, as much as in the scholastics, are nothing but pure chimeras, which
throw us into perplexity and into difficulties insurmountable to the
human mind.364
Le Clerc’s vitriol on this score was particularly directed at Malebranche.365
And indeed, the case of the Oratorian offers an excellent measure of the extent
to which natural philosophy had separated itself from metaphysical concerns
363
364
Physica, 491: ‘Utile est esse viros ingeniosos qui, Democritii instar, in experimentis, & investigatione veri vitam
terant, ut aliis facem praeferant.’ This is
of course still Democritus the experimentalist/friend of Hippocrates, rather
than the atomist.
[Le Cène and Le Clerc], Entretiens, 207–
8: ‘Vous savez que les Scolastiques disent
que la Metaphysique est une science qui
traite de l’Etre en général, et de ses
diverses proprietez; mais qu’on appelle
aujourd’huy Metaphysiques tous ces
Principes abstraits, qui non seulement
servent à raisonner de l’Etre en général,
mais qui nous font encore considerer
toutes choses dans leur premiere origine, et nous conduisent, comme l’on
365
dit, particulièrement à la connoissance
de Dieu et des Esprits créez. En un mot,
on dit que toutes les idées, que l’on ne
peut concevoir que par l’entendement
pur sont des idées de Metaphysique.
Encore que l’on dise quelque chose de
vrai sur ces matieres, je soûtiens que la
plus part des choses que l’on trouve dans
les Metaphysiciens Cartésiens, aussi
bien que dans les Scolastiques, ne sont
que de pures chimeres, qui nous jettent
dans des embarras et dans des difficultez
insurmontables à l’Esprit humain.’ This
part of the book was by Le Clerc; see
further II.3.2.
E.g. Le Clerc to Pierre Allix,
10 January 1685, Le Clerc corr., i.280.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
118
giving up philosophy
by the late seventeenth century. Malebranche was, as I have noted, the premier
metaphysician in late seventeenth-century Europe. And yet, his most famous
idea, the occasionalist account of causation, was almost entirely ignored by the
leading natural philosophers of the day. To be sure, they often shared his
strong contempt for any theories that attributed agency to nature, not least in
the form of any kind of anima mundi (see further I.3). But where he developed
an elaborate metaphysics of causation to respond to this threat, they usually
stopped at proving that no such entity was required to explain nature, and at
vaguely hinting at God’s total causal power – Boyle is again typical here.366 As
we shall see, this total lack of interest in the metaphysics of causation was
shared by Newton.
However, the example of Malebranche also precipitates a cautionary note
against co-opting the story I have told in this chapter into a simple, triumphalist narrative of ‘science’ separating itself from ‘philosophy’. After all, another
of Malebranche’s ideas, the pre-existence of organisms, which was developed
to replace Descartes’s almost universally rejected (and widely mocked)
accounts of animal generation and physiology while still keeping nonmechanical causation to a bare minimum by effectively confining it to the
act of divine creation,367 did have significant purchase in the naturalphilosophical community, including among serious experimentalists such as
Swammerdam (although he did not hold to it dogmatically), Perrault, and
several others.368 In this way, a neo-Cartesian metaphysics could influence
natural philosophy beyond the narrow confines of Cartesian textbook-writers,
even if it could only do so by moving away from Descartes’s own austere
metaphysical mechanism. And once Fontenelle got his hands on the bureaucratic mechanisms of the Académie des sciences (he was appointed secretary in
1697), he packed it with Malebranchists who campaigned against Newton –
not least by insisting on the importance of a foundational metaphysics to
precede physics (see further III.4.6) – while still making important
366
367
368
Boyle’s anti-animism sometimes sounds
like borderline occasionalism (see the
evidence
supplied
in
Anstey,
‘Occasionalism’ (1999)), but ultimately,
he had no metaphysics of causation, and
usually spoke casually of divine concurrence with secondary causes.
Recherche, i.2, MO.i.79ff. For open disdain of Descartes’s mechanistic theory
of generation, see e.g. Entretiens sur
la métaphysique & la religion [1688],
xi.8, MO.xii.264. See further Pyle,
‘Malebranche’ (2006).
See Roger, Life sciences (1997), 259–307;
also Bowler, ‘Preformation’ (1971); Pyle,
‘Generation’ (1987). But for a contrast,
more typical of the nescience exhibited
by leading naturalists on this subject,
also see Leeuwenhoek’s comments in
‘Part of a letter . . . concerning the animalcula in semine humano’, Phil. Trans., 21
(1699), 306: ‘I put this down as a certain
truth, that the shape of a Human Body is
included in an Animal of the Masculine
Seed, but that a Mans Reason shall dive or
penetrate into this Mistery so far, that in
the Anatomizing of one of these Animals
of the Masculine Seed, we should be able
to see or discover the intire shape of
a Human Body, I cannot comprehend.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating natural philosophy from metaphysics
119
contributions to mathematical physics.369 It was only from this state of affairs
that emerged the long-standing myth of French ‘rationalism’ having always
been intractably opposed to English ‘empiricism’.
These examples of Malebranche’s influence are enough to dispel any
Whiggish fantasies about a total separation between ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’
by 1700 or in the decades after. But with this caveat firmly in mind, we can
return to the fact that in Le Clerc’s textbook – read by thousands of eager
students across Europe – we do see a fundamentally new identity for natural
philosophy, one that separates it quite explicitly not just from metaphysics, but
even from physicalist ontology. I have argued here that this was primarily the
result of the disciplinary colonisation of natural philosophy by physicians and
mixed mathematicians. In Part III of this book, I shall show how Newton can
be understood as a product of this momentous long-term transformation.
However, before that can be done, we must recognise that the study of nature
was not the only domain of intellectual enquiry in which abstract philosophising was being subjected to a withering critique. For perhaps an even more
devastating assault was coming from an unlikely group: the theologians.
369
Fontenelle’s Cartesianism, and thus also his intentions during his secretaryship, have
been questioned in Shank, ‘Alleged’ (2003). But I agree with Tad Schmaltz that Prof.
Shank has mistaken an internal difference between different types of Cartesians for their
non-Cartesianism: see Schmaltz, ‘Newton and the Cartesians’ (forthcoming). For the
Malebranchists’ contributions to mathematical physics, see Hankins, ‘Influence’ (1967).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press
I.2
Emancipating Theology from Philosophy
The critiques of the role of philosophy in European history by Le Clerc and
Thomasius were, undoubtedly, in part the product of the natural-philosophical
critique of the overly metaphysical approach to physics just described. But they
were also the product of a second trend: the critique of philosophising in
theology. Historians of philosophy know this story primarily through the
history of the so-called ‘separation thesis’ – the idea that philosophy and
theology should be kept separate – that is most often associated with
Descartes and his followers. Certainly that must be part of our narrative.
However, that narrative starts much earlier, and has to focus much more on
theologians than philosophers themselves. Indeed, we shall find that the new,
anti-scholastic philosophies were often welcomed into their institutions by
numerous theologians – both Catholic and Protestant – because they found in
the insistence on the separation of philosophy and theology a powerful polemical tool for defending their confessional positions, and for promoting
a theological method that was actively anti-philosophical.
For almost two centuries, European theologians had been engaged in
a large-scale methodological dispute, the central question of which we can,
to start with, summarise more clearly than it always manifested itself: should
philology rather than philosophy be the primary handmaiden of theology? If
one favoured the first, then one was concomitantly more likely to condemn an
over-philosophical approach to divinity. As we shall see, by 1700 more and
more theologians did favour philology over philosophy. But, crucially, that did
not involve them in a profound epistemological reconsideration of the relationship between reason and faith. In fact, it turns out that relationship
remained broadly stable between the thirteenth century and 1700 (a few
exceptions notwithstanding). For the most part, there were neither ‘rationalists’ nor ‘fideists’ in Europe at this point. What changed was not the fundamental conception of the faith–reason relationship, but rather the practical
emphasis on how theology was actually to be practised.
It is often assumed that the separation of philosophy and theology effected
the emancipation of philosophy. This is to some extent true. If philosophy is no
longer perceived as the primary handmaiden to theology, it can take roads that
may have previously closed off. Especially in cosmology, the renewed
120
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
121
popularity of the old technique of arguing that the creation account outlined in
Genesis was only accommodated to the vulgar gradually allowed a host of
cosmological theories, including Copernicanism, to gain a foothold. However,
this is only one issue; in any case, it does not signal a qualitative change: after
all, Aristotelians had previously argued exactly the same thing so as to claim
compatibility between their philosophy and the Mosaic cosmology.1 A second
forum where the philosophy–theology relationship continued to inspire philosophical activity was in natural theology. All theologians agreed on the usefulness of natural-philosophical arguments towards proving the existence of God.
But again, it is not apparent that very much changed on this score through the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, apart from the actual philosophical arguments being used.2
What I shall rather be concerned with here is the institutional place of the
more abstract forms of philosophy. It was handmaiden status that had stimulated so much of the abstract philosophising – especially metaphysics – that
had been done in Europe from the thirteenth century onwards. When theologians came to disdain the usefulness of that kind of philosophy, whether in its
Aristotelian or Cartesian (or Malebranchist or Leibnizian) form, they also
seriously limited the need for any kind of speculative philosophising, especially
since they so frequently went further, and blamed speculative philosophising
for the growth of heresy, for the existence of odium theologicum, and for the
divisions in Christendom. This development, coupled with the demetaphysicisation of natural philosophy charted in the previous chapter, left
very little room for much of what had long been taken to be the central core of
‘philosophy’ itself.
I.2.1 The Medieval Inheritance
The standard assumptions of early modern theologians about the relationship
between reason and faith were those of their medieval predecessors. Since this
is hardly the place to launch into a full – or even circumscribed – discussion of
medieval theology, I shall articulate that conception as simply as possible:
1. Certain truths, including the existence of God and the immortality of the
soul, could be proved via natural reason. Additionally, such a natural
theology could predicate many if not all of the divine attributes.
2. The revealed mysteries of the faith – e.g. the Trinity and the Incarnation –
could not be demonstrated by reason. However, they could be defended
1
Williams, Common expositor (1948). Much
has been written on accommodationism,
Genesis, and the new cosmologies: for a
start, see the essays by Magruder, Snobelen,
Granada, Barker, Vermij, Finocchiaro, and
2
Remmert in van der Meer and Mandelbrote,
Nature and Scripture (2008), I, and the
works cited there.
For natural theology, see II.1 and III.2
below.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
122
giving up philosophy
from the charge of being impossible or contradictory. And, once known,
they could be further explicated using the tools of logic and metaphysics.
It is important to put things so bluntly because there still exist many misconceptions about medieval theology, some of them stemming from early modern
misrepresentation, others from more modern confessional polemics. Aquinas
did not represent some all-encompassing ‘rationalism’, and Ockham did not
represent a destructive ‘fideism’.3 When we speak of ‘scholastic’ theology,
which in its various forms dominated European academic theology between
the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries,4 we must abandon the stereotype –
again derived first and foremost from Protestant polemic – that it was
a rationalist, speculative system devoid of foundation in revelation.
Systematic it certainly was, even in the hands of those like Ockham who
were openly very sceptical about the capacity of human reason to grasp
anything about the divine.5 This systematicity was grounded in the principle
of non-contradiction: revealed truths, while unknowable to pure reason (i.e. to
the wisest possible pagan), could not be in contradiction with reason, and the
theologian’s task was to show how exactly that was the case, with the revealed
truths assumed as principles. As with all systems, the intention was not to
obfuscate but rather to clarify, not least to the student audience for which these
systems were designed. In particular, the final aim under number (2) above – to
explicate the revealed truths using the tools of logic and metaphysics – was
paramount.
In time, this intellectual movement, like all flourishing, institutionalised
intellectual movements, produced a complexity and abundance of systems.
In the fifteenth century, partly because of a further shift of the institutional
centre of gravity of academic theology from religious orders to universities,
and partly because of the involvement of leading university divines in ecclesiological and political conflict, theologians became more and more aware of this
fact. This self-awareness manifested itself in the coining of party names, above
all the via antiqua and the via moderna, a development that had institutional
and political significance that went well beyond philosophy and theology.6 In
such circumstances, when adherents of each position flung accusations of
heresy or near-heresy at each other (at least in the wake of the teachings of
3
For a beautifully clear summary, see
Freddoso, ‘Ockham’ (1999), which also
addresses the disputed question of
whether theology was to be considered
a scientia, for which see further Jenkins,
Knowledge (1997), 51–100. For the fourteenth-century trend towards something
that looks ‘fideistic’, but which is not
within the Gilson paradigm of explaining this shift, see Friedman, Traditions
4
5
6
(2013), 652–63; Friedman, Trinitarian
(2010), 133–70.
For an overview, see Leinsle, Introduction
(2010), and the works cited below.
As well noted in Friedman, Traditions, 659.
For earlier shifts to systematisation, see
Cloes, ‘Systématisation théologique’ (1958).
For a masterful summary, see Hoenen,
‘Via antiqua’ (2003), and the works cited
there.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
123
John Wyclif (c.1330–84), Jan Hus (c.1372–1415), and Jerome of Prague (1379–
1416)), a reconsideration of the relationship between theology and philosophy
was, if not inevitable, then certainly understandable. Already at the start of the
fifteenth century, as major a figure as the Chancellor of the University of Paris,
Jean Gerson (1363–1429), proposed quite a radical reform of theology that
sought to replace what he presented as the philosophical squabbling of the
scholastics with biblicism, a ‘theologia mystica’ grounded in direct individual
experience, and naked ecclesial authority.7 A century more of dispute produced the even more radically destructive figure of Martin Luther (1483–
1546).8
I.2.2 Positive Rather than Philosophical Theology: the Catholic World
(i) The Triumph of Positive Theology
At the same time as Luther, another force was offering a methodological
challenge to the methods of professional theologians: that which we now call
humanism, and whose prime exponent came to be Erasmus. In regard to
theology, its main message was that the discipline should be a philological
rather than a philosophical one. Together, the challenges of Luther and
Erasmus elicited a process of self-conscious methodological reflection
among theologians. For example, in 1528, the Scottish divine John Mair
(1467–1550), a leading figure at the University of Paris since the early
sixteenth century, wrote that ‘for some two centuries now, theologians
have not feared to work into their writings questions which are purely
physical, metaphysical, and sometimes purely mathematical’. But, he
continued,
some ten years ago a great army of pestilential heretics, having made
themselves a covering shed out of the bark of the Scriptures, brought
in all sort of abominable ravings – with this good result, however (for
the Lord wished by the vices of some to teach proper behaviour to
all), that professors of theology began really to get to work on the
Sacred Scripture and its explanation, and to put aside their other
interests.9
Mair, in fact, was the very man who popularised among theologians the
distinction between ‘positive’ and ‘scholastic’ theology: the former focusses
7
8
Burrows, Gerson (1991), 102–25; Quinto,
Scholastica (2001), 114–28.
The classic study is Oberman, Harvest
(1963). See further Oberman, Werden und
Wertung (Tübingen, 1977); White, Luther
as Nominalist (1994); Dieter, Der junge
Luther (2001), Dieter, ‘Luther’ (2014).
9
John Mair, In secundum Sententiarum
disputationes theologiae (Paris, 1528),
Preface (dedicated to the humanists’
great opponent Noël Beda!), qu. and
trans. Ong, Ramus (1958), 144. For the
debates, see further Farge, Orthodoxy
(1985), 170–208.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
124
giving up philosophy
on exegesis of Scripture and the fathers, the latter on systematics.10 For the next
two hundred years, the Catholic world witnessed repeated conflict between
adherents of the two methods (although many also advocated the usefulness of
both). Gradually, the positive theologians won, with the result that
a philosophical approach to divinity was more and more condemned. Their
victory went hand in hand with an actual shift in the way theological knowledge was produced, with resources increasingly diverted towards various
forms of philological erudition: the study of Hebrew, Arabic, and other eastern
languages; the collation of manuscripts; the production of editions of the
church fathers and of ecclesiastical histories.11
There was nothing inevitable about this trend. The reinvigoration of scholasticism as a theological method began in Spain, especially in Salamanca. Its
leading lights were Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) and Domingo de Soto
(1494–1560); it spread to Italy primarily through the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano
(by Francisco de Toledo (1515–82), Francisco Suárez, and Gabriel Vásquez
(1549–1609)), from where it disseminated further to the German Catholic
universities of Ingolstadt and Dillingen – Gregory of Valencia (1550–1603)
taught at both.12 This theological scholasticism mostly involved the use of
Aquinas’ Summa (rather than Lombard’s Sentences), and its proponents distanced themselves from what they presented as the decadent excesses of their
medieval predecessors, especially among the nominalists. Nor did Spanish
theologians unanimously reject positive theology. After its first postulation
as a separate method in the early sixteenth century by Mair, it was incorporated
into teaching at Salamanca, and especially into the new theological method
influentially developed by Melchior Cano (c.1510–60) and presented in his De
locis theologicis (1563), which no longer sought to apply logical rules to
a theological question, but rather collected sources of positive knowledge.13
But at the same time, men like de Soto and Johannes Driedo (1480–1535), the
latter teaching at Louvain, explicitly renounced the overreaching aims of ‘the
trilingual men’, and insisted that the scholastic doctors had arranged doctrine
in a more secure and precise manner than either the early fathers or the
modern proponents of positive theology had ever been able to do. According
to them, scholastic theology drew out the implications of positive theology,
10
For overviews, see Congar, ‘Théologie’
(1946), cols 426–30; Tshibangu, Théologie
(1965), esp. 169–210; Quinto, Scholastica,
i.238–95, and below. I do not here address
other major issues concerning the structure of theological teaching, not least the
rise of casuistry.
11
12
13
For a summary of these trends, see the
sections on the Catholic world in Levitin,
‘Confessionalisation’ (2019).
There are many important studies. See
e.g. Giacon, Seconda scolastica (1944–
50). For the influential Gregory of
Valencia, see Hentrich, ‘Gregor’ (1930).
Delgado, ‘Theologische Methode’ (2014)
and the works cited there.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
125
and the scholastic theologian could thus present himself, in contrast to his
future reputation, as being ‘concerned with res, not verba’.14
It is important that we lay aside our knowledge of later caricatures of
theological scholasticism, and remember why it was so successful for so long.
It was designed not first and foremost as a philosophical system, but rather to
serve pedagogical and even pastoral ends. Even Luis de Molina’s (1535–1600)
hugely complex and controversial theory of scientia media – designed to save
divine foreknowledge while allowing humans a true, inalienable power to
exercise their will, known as ‘liberty of indifference’ – which was the most
infamous theological idea generated by sixteenth-century Spanish scholasticism (not least because of its widespread uptake by the Jesuits) was devised as
an enquiry into scriptural revelation and with pastoral ends in mind.15 This
may sound implausible to our secular, de-theologised ears, but we should not
be surprised by the wide concern with theological ideas among the laity at
this time. After all, already in the middle of the fourteenth century Marsilius
of Inghen (c.1330–96) was reporting that the discussion about reconciling
divine foreknowledge and human freedom was being conducted by every
‘common woman or even lay person’;16 the seemingly abstruse debates about
grace that exploded both in the Protestant and Catholic worlds around 1600
can only be understood in the context of their great interest to lay
parishioners.17 It was only Molina’s opponents – first Dominican and then
also Reformed and Jansenist – who presented his position as the outcome of
a rationalist, unbiblical philosophical system. But in turn, one of the leading
Dominicans, Domingo Báñez (1528–1604), the eminent cátedra de prima of
theology in Salamanca, developed his own very influential and hyperelaborate account of predestination, one which he and his followers claimed
to derive from Aquinas, and which foregrounded the philosophical concept
of ‘physical predetermination’ or ‘premotion’, according to which ‘all creaturely movements, including the volitional acts of rational creatures, are
ontologically dependent on God, who, in order for any creaturely motion
to take place, must will that motion concurrently with the creature’.18 The
Molinists countered by asserting that this was a philosophical determinism
that was wrongly and hubristically being applied to revelation and the true
tradition of the Church.
14
15
16
Brett, ‘Authority, reason’ (2000), qu. 80;
66, 73–4 for the examples from de Soto
and Driedo.
See now MacGregor, Molina (2015), esp.
ch. 7; Kaufmann and Aichele, Molina
(2014).
Marsilius of Inghen, I Sent. q. 40, ‘muliercula vel etiam laica persona’, qu. in
Leinsle, Introduction, 235.
17
18
See also de Boer, ‘“O, ye women”’ (2011),
and works cited in n. 83 below.
Muller, Dictionary (2017), s.v. ‘praemotio
physica’. For Báñez, see Beltrán, Báñez
(1968), 13–99; for his ideas in their
immediate Catholic climate, see Belda
Plans, La escuela (2000), 779–94;
Matava, Causality (2016), 16–212.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
126
giving up philosophy
Each side, then, sought to accuse the other of rationalism. This point,
generalised, is central to the argument of this book. No mainstream early
modern theologian – Catholic or Protestant – saw themselves, or can in any
meaningful way be described, as a ‘rationalist’.19 Rather, the accusation was
invariably a polemical slur used in inter- or intra-confessional conflict, so as to
insinuate that the position of one’s doctrinal opponents was grounded in
hubristic philosophising rather than in the modest submission to divine
authority (whether scriptural or that of church tradition). What was important
was when the accusation was generalised and made into a universal methodological rubric to avoid philosophising altogether, and accompanied by the sort
of anti-philosophical discourse that had been made famous by Erasmus and
other humanist critics of scholastic theology.
This pattern began in earnest in the mid-sixteenth-century Spanish
Netherlands, at the theology faculty of the University of Louvain. In the early
sixteenth century, this prominent theological centre had, like Paris and the
Spanish universities, witnessed fierce debates between advocates of scholastic
and humanist approaches to theology, with student supporters of both fighting
in the streets.20 The second half of the century saw renewed splits at the
university between the scholastics like Ruard Tapper (1487–1559) on the one
hand, and those who explicitly favoured a positive theology based on scriptural
exegesis and reading of the fathers on the other. Crucially, the dispute over
method now mapped on to a doctrinal disagreement. A central figure was
Michael Baius (1513–89), whose proto-Jansenist position on grace led to an
emphasis on building theology on positive, especially patristic, grounds (above
all Augustine), and to the accusation that non-Augustinian positions on grace
stemmed from a philosophical rationalism.21 This set the methodological
terms for all subsequent conflicts on grace, of which there were to be many.
Most importantly, Cornelius Jansen of Ypres’s Augustinus (1640) was a direct
product of this emphasis on positive theology, explicitly posited against
a scholastic variant.22 As we shall see, the implications of that argument
would be very significant in late seventeenth-century France.
Before then, the methodological dispute had spilled out into the highest
echelons of the Catholic theological sphere, including in Italy. For example,
both Filippo Neri (1515–95), who in 1575 established the Congregation of the
19
20
I am aware that in saying this I am going
against a great deal of literature, especially that which seeks to find in
a supposed theological ‘rationalism’ the
roots of a ‘religious enlightenment’.
Much of what follows is designed to justify my claims. See further §4.
De Vocht, Collegium (1951–5), i.530–2;
Gielis, ‘Leuven theologians’ (2008).
21
22
Vanneste, ‘Nature et grâce’ (1977);
Ceyssens, ‘Les débuts’ (1977), esp. 383–
6, 389–90; Baius to Cardinal Simonetta,
16 March 1569, in Orcibal, Jansénius
(1989), 30.
Guelluy, ‘L’évolution’ (1941), 111–17
remains essential; see also Orcibal,
Jansénius, 15–56; van Eijl, ‘La controverse’ (1994), esp. 277.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
127
Oratory, and Cesare Baronio (1538–1607), his student, explicitly asserted the
value of theologia positiva.23 Italian university pedagogues such as Paolo Beni
(1552–1625) even considered Baronio’s famous Annales a work of positive
theology that should form the basis of theological teaching, directly contrasting
it to what he presented as a scholastic alternative that was still dominant. The
metaphysicians at the University of Padua, Beni argued, should be replaced by
‘two valiant biblical philologists’ who would also teach the church fathers.24
However, the Jesuit dominance of theological pedagogy, not least at the
Collegio Romano, ensured that the Thomist synthesis – and all the elaborate
metaphysics that came with it – remained pre-eminent until it was challenged
by men like Tolomei around 1700 (I.Proleg.).
Among Catholic countries, it was France that saw the most spectacular
triumph of a positive theology self-consciously posited against a ‘scholastic’
variant. Partially under the influence of the aforementioned developments in
the Spanish Netherlands and the consequent debates over Augustine’s authority on questions of grace and free will, and partly because of the need to
respond to Huguenot biblicism, French theologians came more and more to
emphasise the value of positive over scholastic theology. Unsurprisingly, it was
most vigorously promoted by Baius’ ‘Augustinian’ successors, namely the
French Jansenists. In his explosive Augustinus (1640), Jansen relied on the
well-trodden Augustinian mantra that ‘what we understand, we owe to reason;
what we believe, to authority’ so as to argue that non-Augustinian accounts of
grace and predestination were the product of a systematic overuse of philosophy in theology, one which had culminated in Molinism. A return to positive
theology and true church tradition was the only way to restore Christian
purity.25 Not least because of the propagandist energies of Jansenists such as
Antoine Arnauld (1612–94), the cultural significance of this argument among
both theologians and the laity was immense – certainly no smaller than that of
the separationist arguments being made by philosophers themselves.
We see here how doctrinal controversy precipitated wider debate about
theological method, a pattern that was being repeated across Europe. In
France, the methodological dispute was far from limited to the Jansenists. In
fact, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the idea that a positive theology
23
24
25
Pullapilly, Baronius (1975), 21–2.
Tutino, Shadows (2014), 105–7; for
a transcription of the plan, see Sangalli,
‘Beni’ (2001), 86–134, and for the
broader context, Sangalli, ‘Church’
(2016), esp. 126–7.
See Cornelius Jansen, Augustinus, 3 vols
(Louvain, 1640), ii, cols 1–70, ‘Liber
Prooemialis’ to vol. II, tellingly entitled
‘De ratione et auctoritate in rebus
theologicis . . . in quo limites humanae
rationis in rebus Theologicis indagantur;
& auctoritas S. Augustini in tradendo
mysterio Praedestinationis & gratiae
declaratur’. For a partial translation
with important annotations, see
Quantin,
‘Philosophie
corruptrice’
(2010). The Augustinian motto is from
De utilit. cred., 25.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
128
giving up philosophy
grounded in historical exegesis of the Bible and the church fathers was the best
method for defeating the Protestant heretics, who were a much more tangible
threat in Paris than they were in Rome or Salamanca, was popularised across the
French Catholic theological spectrum, even among the Jesuits who elsewhere
remained so resolutely wedded to neo-Thomist metaphysics. Central here were
the powerful ultramontane Cardinal Jacques Davy Du Perron (1556–1618) and
his ally, the great Jesuit theologian Denis Petau (1583–1662), whose Dogmata
theologica (1644–50) was the most important and influential compilation of
historically grounded dogmatic theology published in the seventeenth century.26
Indeed, Petau’s text offers an excellent example of the fact that large-scale
methodological shifts did not imply fundamental shifts in the underlying
assumptions about the relationship between faith and reason. For, in the
Prolegomena to his great work, Petau rearticulated the standard vision of that
relationship in the usual Thomist terms: reason never contradicts faith, and any
statement to the contrary is wrong and even heretical.27 This theoretical principle being safely established, he went on to rail against the abuses that had been
caused in practice by the deployment of philosophy in theology in terms that
would be repeated frequently by French theologians (most of whom were not
Jesuits) for the rest of the century.28 The main body of Petau’s dogmatics seemed
to show many across the Catholic world that the barrage of abstract philosophical arguments that had been used to elucidate the mysteries was unnecessary –
or perhaps even damaging – for the Catholic cause.
By the second half of the century, major French theologians from various
orders were asserting the superiority of positive theology: from the Benedictine
Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), to the Dominican Noël Alexandre (1639–1724), to
the Oratorians Richard Simon (1638–1712), Louis Thomassin (1619–95),
Bernard Lamy (1640–1715), and Jean-Baptiste Du Hamel (1624–1706), to
the Sorbonne-educated Louis Ellies Du Pin (1657–1719) and Charles Du
Plessis-d’Argentré (1673–1740, future Bishop of Tulle), to the Jesuiteducated Cardinal Fleury (1653–1743) (eventually chief minister to Louis
XV).29 Indeed, by the last third of the seventeenth century, even students at
the Sorbonne were prioritising positive over scholastic theology.30 Hence Du
26
27
Quantin, Catholicisme classique (1999),
103–10; for Petau, see Hofmann,
Theologie (1976), esp. 25–7, 114–26;
Karrer, Historisch-positive Methode
(1970), esp. 16–18, 130–75.
Denis Petau, Theologicorum dogmatum
tomus primus, in quo de Deo uno,
Deique proprietatibus agitur (Paris,
1644), ‘Prolegomena’, §§iv–v, even
jumping through the hoop of chastising
28
29
30
Erasmus for going too far in his critique
of scholasticism (sig. ū2r).
Petau, ‘Prolegomena’, §§i, vi, and passim.
See the examples in Quantin,
Catholicisme classique, 101–9; Congar,
‘Théologie’, cols 426–30. For Fleury, see
also Wanner, Fleury (1975), esp. 141–2.
Gres-Gayer, ‘Modernité’ (2002), 367; also
346, 359, 367, 377 for the gradual growth
of positive theology from the start of the
seventeenth century.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
129
Pin could write somewhat complacently that ‘it is in this [last] century that the
barbarism that used to reign in the theology schools has been driven out, and
that instead of scholastic subtleties and philosophical reasoning, to which
theologians used to apply themselves almost exclusively, we have introduced
a theology based on Scripture and tradition’.31 And hence Lamy could deploy
the seventh Entretien of his popular Entretiens sur les sciences (1683, expanded
in 1694) to launch a fierce assault on the use of philosophy in theology: real
theology, he confidently affirmed, was ‘nothing more than the history of what
God had revealed to mankind’, and the only use of reason was in the way
a ‘critic’ used it: to make sense of Scripture and of the fathers.32
We see from these examples how this methodological shift involved not just
the promotion of humanist method but also, concomitantly, an active disparagement of philosophy. This was often joined with a rhetoric that, in its disdain
for applying the newest philosophy to theology, sounds very ‘fideistic’ to
modern ears. Take, for example, the following words of Richard Simon,
from a letter he wrote to the Huguenot diplomat Nicolas Frémont
d’Ablancourt (1625–93) in the early 1680s:
You are unfounded, when you accuse the Gassendists and the Cartesians
of not being in agreement with the Catholics in the belief in transubstantiation. It is enough that they believe the truth of this mystery, without
dwelling on the consequences that can be drawn from the principles of
their philosophy, on which their belief is not founded. In the case that you
propose, it is not a question of reasoning as philosophers, but as theologians. You need only read Father Petau’s dogmatics, where he refutes
Crellius’ [Socinian] reasoning against the mystery of the Trinity. This
Jesuit scholar is sometimes obliged to abandon the most common notions
of philosophy, without abandoning the truth of the Mystery.33
31
32
Louis Ellies Du Pin, Nouvelle Bibliothèque
des auteurs Ecclesiastiques . . . tome XVII
(Amsterdam, 1711), ‘Avertissement’, sig.
*v: ‘C’est en ce Siecle que l’on a, pour ainsi
dire, chassé entierement des Ecoles de
Théologie, la barbarie qui y avoit regné, &
qu’au lieu des subtilités scholastiques, & des
raisonnemens philosophiques, auxquels on
s’apliquoit presqu’uniquement, on y a
introduit une Théologie fondée sur
l’Ecriture, & sur la Tradition.’
Bernard Lamy, Entretiens sur les sciences
. . . seconde édition (Lyon, 1694), 285–6
(qu. 285: ‘La Theologie, dis-je, n’est
qu’une Histoire de ce que Dieu a revelé
aux Hommes’). On Lamy and the popularity of his book, see Girbal, Lamy (1964).
33
Richard Simon to Nicolas Frémont
d’Ablancourt, early 1680s, in Lettres choisies (Amsterdam, 1721), 55: ‘Vous êtes
mal fondez, quand vous accusez les
Gassendistes et les Cartésiens de ne pas
convenir avec les Catholiques dans la
créance de la Transubstantiation. Il suffit
qu’ils croïent la vérité de ce Mystére, sans
s’arrêter aux conséquences qu’on peut
tirer des principes de leur Philosophie
sur laquelle leur créance n’est pas
fondée. Il n’est pas question de raisonner
en Philosophes dans le cas que vous proposez, mais en Theologiens. Vous n’avez
qu’à lire là-dessus le P. Petau dans ses
dogmes, où il réfute les raisonnemens
de Crellius contre le Mystére de la
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
130
giving up philosophy
It is remarkable how much the language here foreshadows that which we will
find Pierre Bayle using in the 1690s, although the latter deployed it for the
defence of Reformed rather than Catholic dogma. What Simon and Bayle had
in common was not just their insistence on abandoning the ‘common notions
of philosophy’ when it came to matters of faith, but also their confessionally
charged accusation that their opponents were rationalists. As Simon put it to
his correspondent,
This kind of reasoning is peculiar to your writers, who are accustomed to
speak of this mystery [the Real Presence in the Eucharist] only in the light
of their reason. This way of reasoning in the facts of religion produced
most of the first heresies. It was what gave the ancient fathers the occasion
to condemn in general philosophy, which the early heretics made their
main foundation. If this proof from the senses and reason is as strong as
you imagine, why don’t you respond firmly to the Socinians when they
attack you with your own weapons?34
Again, the similarity with Bayle is extraordinary: answering the final question
would be one of the main obsessions of Bayle’s intellectual life (see II.3.3). The
kind of argument being made by Simon was not, as is sometimes supposed,
a peculiarly Catholic form of ‘fideism’ or ‘scepticism’. Rather, it was
a manifestation of a methodological shift that was occurring in all confessions
across Europe, and then being deployed by each for their own polemical ends.
(ii) Separationism and the New Philosophies
Reading Simon’s evocation of the names of Gassendi and Descartes, it is clear
that he was advocating what has come to be called the ‘separation of philosophy and theology’. It is important to recognise that it is only in the broader
context just sketched that we can properly understand the historical significance of the separation thesis. The most famous advocate of that thesis was
Descartes himself. Of course, Descartes insisted that philosophy could prove
God’s existence and the immortality of the soul, which, like most educated
Europeans from 1300 onwards, he thought of as truths that could be known
34
Trinité. Ce savant Jesuite se voit quelquefois obligé d’abandonner les notions les
plus communes de la Philosophie, sans
abandonner pour cela la vérité du
Mystére.’
Simon, Lettres choisies, 54–5: ‘Cette sorte
de raisonnement est singulier à vos
Ecrivains, qui sont accoûtumez à parler
de ce Mystére selon les seules lumiéres de
leur raison. Cette maniére de raisonner
dans les faits qui regardent la Religion
a produit la pluspart des premiéres
Hérésies. Ce fut ce qui donna occasion
aux anciens Peres, de condamner en
général la Philosophie, dont les
Hérétiques des premiers temps faisoient
leur principal fondement. Si cette preuve
tirée des sens et de la raison est aussi forte
que vous vous l’imaginez, pourquoi ne
répondez-vous pas solidement aux
Sociniens quand ils vous attaquent par
vos propres armes?’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
131
solely by reason (i.e. that were available to a pagan). Indeed, he saw one of the
major triumphs of his metaphysics to be that it provided better philosophical
proofs of these truths than those supplied by any of his predecessors.35 But
what about philosophising concerning revealed truths? Descartes himself
could be ambiguous on this issue. On the one hand, he once wrote that
‘there will be no difficulty, it seems to me, in accommodating theology to my
style of philosophising’, and specifically that transubstantiation is ‘very clear
and easy to explain on my principles’, notwithstanding his denial of the
existence of real accidents which did not inhere in a substance.36 And indeed,
he offered at least a partial explanation in the Fourth Replies, and in some
unpublished letters.37
Having read this material, one prominent Cartesian, the Lorraine
Benedictine Robert Desgabets (1610–78), did develop a full ‘Cartesian’ explanation of Eucharistic doctrine.38 This precipitated the first official interdiction
of the teaching of Cartesianism in France, by Louis XIV in 1671.39 From then
on, the standard approach of French Cartesians – both philosophers and
theologians – was to disavow Desgabets’s position and to insist that the
doctrine was not to be established philosophically, but solely by following
‘what the Church and tradition teaches us about this mystery and adhere to it
inviolably, without regard to philosophical principles’ (these are the words of
Pierre Nicole).40 We have just seen this position adopted by Richard Simon.
We can also find it being taken up by, among others, such theological luminaries as Arnauld and Bossuet, both of whom combined it with praise of
a positive theological method and an indictment of its scholastic
alternative.41 As we shall see, Arnauld’s insistence on the separation of theology and philosophy, justified on Cartesian grounds, would greatly influence
Pierre Bayle, who sought to turn it to the ends of Reformed theology.
All these men were able to make such claims because, in some famous
statements, Descartes had insisted that his philosophy had nothing to say to
the purely revealed dogmas of faith, including the Real Presence, or the
compatibility of divine power and human free will. (He may have even learnt
35
36
37
38
E.g. AT.viiiB.343 [= CSM, i.295], among
many possible examples.
Descartes to Mersenne, 28 January 1641,
AT.iii.295 [= CSMK, 172].
The
fullest
discussion
remains
Armogathe,
Theologia
Cartesiana
(1977); see also Schmaltz, Radical
(2002), 34–7; Ariew, Last scholastics
(1999), 140–54.
Robert Desgabets, Discours de la communication ou transfusion du sang (Paris,
1668); Armogathe, Theologia, 83–113;
Schmaltz, Radical, 37–52.
39
40
41
Schmaltz, Radical, 29–34; Schmaltz,
‘Tale’ (2004); McClaughlin, ‘Censorship’
(1979). For an earlier condemnation outside of France, also connected to
Eucharistic doctrine, see Armogathe
and Carraud, ‘Première condamnation’
(2001).
Pierre Nicole, Essais de morale [1671]
(Paris, 1730–5), viii.193, qu. and trans.
Schmaltz, Radical, 44–5.
Schmaltz, Radical, 54–7, 63.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
132
giving up philosophy
to do so on the basis of a reading of positive theologians like Petau.)42 And so
theologians favourable already to positive theological method also evoked
Cartesianism, even when their theology had little to do with the philosophy
(how could it?). Hence the myth that Jansenism had some profound intellectual connection to Cartesianism.43 Rather, the alliance was only tactical, the
Jansenists happily adopting Descartes’s separationist language so as to convict
their opponents of hubristic, scholastic rationalism.
I shall soon return to the most important Cartesian separationist argument,
that of Pierre-Sylvain Regis (1632–1707). Before that, it is important to note
that although the secondary literature has discussed such separationism – and
the concomitant alliance with positive theology – almost entirely in the context
of Cartesianism, it was in fact not at all the sole preserve of the Cartesians, but
was a common component of the methodological discourse of almost all
French non-scholastic philosophers. Indeed, Gassendi’s separationism was
far more explicit than Descartes’s. According to him, the most important
prerequisite for the healthy flourishing of both philosophy and theology was
the establishment of their proper domains and the boundaries between them.44
Philosophy had its source in sense perception, theology in the authoritative
statements of Scripture and the Church – it was, in other words, solely positive
theology.45 That these sources were authoritative was in itself an entirely
rational belief, as had been established through traditional arguments, above
all the historical record of miracles and rise of the true Church. However, this
did not mean that the theologian’s – let alone the philosopher’s – job was to
explicate the dogmas of faith using philosophy.
Gassendi took the implications of such separationism far further than
Descartes. Certain truths that had traditionally been thought to be available
to natural reason (at least by some) Gassendi redescribed as requiring the light
of revelation. The three most important such truths were (i) creation ex nihilo;
(ii) the immateriality of the soul, the nature of its interaction with material
bodies, and its immortality; (iii) the nature of human free will and the existence
of evil in the world.46 As we shall see, Gassendi’s arguments on these issues
would have an immense impact, not least on Bayle. For the time being, we need
only note how popular the advocation of a positive theological method became
among natural philosophers who were tied – strongly or loosely – to Gassendi.
Most important here was his most devoted follower, François Bernier (1620–
42
43
E.g. Descartes to Mesland, 2 May 1644,
AT.iv.119–20; Schmaltz, Cartesianisms,
18–19, 58–9, 187–8. See further II.2.3.
For Descartes’s possible reading of
Petau, see Lennon, ‘Libertarianism’
(2013) and the works cited there.
Schmaltz, ‘Jansenism?’ (1999); Schmaltz,
‘Tale’, 205.
44
45
46
E.g. Exercitationes I, GO.iii.103a–b, 192a.
See also Murr, ‘Foi’ (1992).
E.g. Syntagma, GO.ii.809a–b.
For the first, see extensively I.3.3; for
the second, Syntagma, GO.ii.237–40,
255–60; for the third, II.2.4.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
133
88), whose writings on this issue precipitated much debate in the 1680s, and
again inspired Bayle (II.2.4). But even more specialist natural philosophers
who had no specific theological axe to grind now claimed a tactical alliance
between their method of philosophising and a positive method in theology. For
example, Pierre Petit, whom we met in I.1.8, argued in the preface to his work
on heat and cold that scholastic natural philosophy had to be abandoned not
just because of its deleterious effects on the study of nature, but also because it
had inspired hundreds of ‘vain questions’ in theology, to the ‘great displeasure
of those learned and pious theologians’ Melchior Cano and Juan Maldonado.47
Cano we have already encountered as one of the most important proponents of
positive theology in the Catholic world; Maldonado (1533–83), meanwhile,
was a leading Spanish Jesuit who spent most of his mature career teaching
theology in Paris, and whose rules of exegetical method, contributed to the
Jesuit Ratio studiorum, emphasised the value of using textual variants and early
translations for biblical exegesis and depreciated the value of scholastic
methods in theology, practices that Maldonado lived up to in his own theological publications, which were some of the best known of the late sixteenth
century, and which influenced Petau among others.48
It is important to reiterate that at the level of ideas, Petit’s natural science –
as with that of almost every other practising natural philosopher in the
seventeenth century – had nothing to do with revealed theology. What he
was insinuating was a new system of knowledge: an institutional, antischolastic alliance between the new philosophers and the positive theologians,
one predicated on the separation of philosophy from theology. This was, in
other words, a point about the kinds of knowledge worth pursuing (humanistic
theology, experimental natural philosophy), and those which were not (speculative philosophy of any sort).
(iii) Positive Theology and Separationism: Not Fideism
We should not confuse the separation thesis and its deployment by positive
theologians for any kind of ‘fideism’. That term is a product of nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century Catholic theological polemic, which sought to portray
any deviation from the Thomist synthesis as a betrayal of the ‘true’ church
tradition and a surrender to double-truth theory (which, it was claimed, was
implicitly held by all Protestants and by deviant Catholics).49 When they
evoked Descartes or Augustine saying ‘what we understand, we owe to reason;
47
48
Petit, Dissertations académiques, xxii–
xxiv, ‘ces vaines questions’ . . . ‘grand
déplaisir des sçavans et pieux
Theologiens, Melchior Canus . . .
Maldonat, &c.’
Prat, Maldonat (1856), esp. 171–88, 257–
68. For his teaching and biblical
49
commentaries,
see
Laplanche,
‘L’enseignement’ (2005), at 383–4, 389–
91.
For an analysis of the impact of the modernist crisis on the historiography of philosophy, see Inglis, Spheres (1998), 193–
214.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
134
giving up philosophy
what we believe, to authority’ (p. 127 above), late seventeenth-century theologians were not making any epistemological claims about the actual irreconcilability of faith and reason. Rather, they were making methodological claims
about how theologians and philosophers should proceed in their day-to-day
tasks. The polemical misrepresentation of this position as a form of doubletruth theory began almost immediately, and proved important for stimulating
further debates.50 As we shall see in II.1–3, these debates informed quite
fundamentally Pierre Bayle’s famous statements concerning the relationship
between theology and philosophy.
The most important articulation of such a critique of Cartesian separationism
came at the hands of the eminent Jesuit priest Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721)
in his Censura philosophiae Cartesianae (1689).51 Huet insisted that the
Cartesian separation thesis was in fact a disguised version of a double-truth
thesis: reason contradicts faith. Moreover, Huet claimed that the Cartesian
doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths – already much debated in the
previous decades – was designed to disguise this fact by permitting God to do
‘what reason judges to be impossible and self-contradictory’.52 Huet’s accusations were of particular historical importance, because they precipitated another
anti-Cartesian formulary brought to the University of Paris in October 1691.53
50
51
For the creation of a historiography of
double truth in the mid-seventeenth century, see Radeva, ‘Origins’ (2019).
For Huet himself, see his own
Commentarius de rebus ad eum pertinentibus (The Hague, 1718), the essays in
Guellouz, Huet (1994), and Shelford,
Transforming (2007). Historians of philosophy have found in Huet a great ‘sceptic’
(usually of the Academic variety): Lennon,
Plain truth (2008); Maia Neto, ‘Huet sceptique’ (2008); and, more cautiously,
Hickson, ‘Varieties’ (2018). I diverge from
this reading, which seems to rest on Huet’s
anti-dogmatic self-presentation more than
on any real programmatic scepticism that
exists in his writings. The false idea that he
was a radical Pyrrhonist who questioned
the possibility of establishing even historical fact – and thus undermined Catholic
faith – was begun by Arnauld, who was
predictably angry at Huet’s anti-Cartesian
works (Arnauld to Du Vaucel,
1 February 1692, AO.iii.425–6). The accusation was absurd: Huet’s whole point was
that faith was best established through
probabilistic historical testimony (see
52
53
Quantin, ‘La raison’ (1993)). My reading
is that Huet was advocating positive theology against what he perceived as
a Cartesian theory of double truth
grounded in Descartes’s hubristic certainty
concerning the findings of his philosophy.
This does not a sceptic make.
Pierre-Daniel Huet, Censura philosophiae Cartesianae (Paris, 1689), 175 [=
Against Cartesian philosophy, trans.
T. M. Lennon (Amherst, 2003) 201–2].
Particularly important for our purposes
was the fourth proposition: ‘In philosophy,
one must not exert oneself with the unfortunate consequences that an opinion
might have for faith, even if it seems
incompatible with it. Nevertheless, one
must stop at that opinion, if it is evident.’
Charles Du Plessis d’Argentré, Collectio
judiciorum de novis erroribus tomus tertius
(Paris, 1736), i.149–50 (‘En Philosophie, il
ne faut pas se mettre en peine des consequences fâcheuses qu’un sentiment peut
avoir pour la Foy, quand même il
paroîtroit incompatible avec elle; nonobstant cela, il faut s’arrêter à cette opinion, si
elle semblé évidente’).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
135
Cartesians from across Europe replied to Huet’s accusations (one of the
most important to do so was Arnauld). The fullest of these replies was that of
Pierre-Sylvain Regis, whom we met briefly in I.1.6, and who, having studied
with Rohault in Paris, became an important teacher of Cartesianism in
Toulouse, Montpellier, and then back in the capital.54 In his Réponse (1691)
to Huet, Regis declared that neither Descartes nor his followers had sought to
argue for the actual contradiction of faith and reason, only to point out – as had
Augustine, whom Regis dutifully quoted – that philosophy could not explain
the mysteries.55 Just because a philosopher found something inconceivable, it
did not mean that it was impossible.56 There were certainly no impossibilities
or contradictions in what God did by his ordinary power, and only things that
seemed impossible or contradictory to our limited intellects in what he did by
his extraordinary power. For example, we could understand the production of
a serpent from a serpent, but we could not understand how a rod could become
a serpent (i.e. as in Ex. 7:12). It was thus absurd, Regis concluded, to accuse
Descartes and the Cartesians of holding to some kind of theory of double truth
in disobedience to the Fifth Lateran Council (i.e. that which had condemned
Pomponazzi). The Cartesians thought it was rational to believe in the mysteries, but not that they could be explained rationally.57
It would be easy to dismiss such arguments as philosophically shaky.58
Whether they are is not the historian’s concern, but we must also remember
that Regis was a devout Christian who really did believe that the truths of the
(Catholic) faith could be proved historically, via the tradition of the Church,
and that it was in fact best to stick to proving them in that way only. In other
words, this was again not a purely epistemological point, but rather one about
theological method. This becomes clear when we turn to Regis’s L’usage de la
raison et de la foy (1704), a hugely important text that is all too unknown,
especially in the anglophone literature. The book is grounded in a vision of the
history of theology articulated in the introductory ‘Avertissement’. According
to Regis, the first Christians were so aware of the limits of reason in theology
that they often banned the reading of pagan books altogether (the point had
already been deployed to promote positive theology by both Petau and Simon).
However, Regis continued, as those books did come to be read, more and more
rationalism entered the faith, with sects such as the Artemonians denying
Christ’s divine nature on the basis of purely rational arguments. Such positions
were quickly condemned. More insidious was the idea that while the mysteries
54
55
The fullest overviews are now those of
Antonella
Del
Prete:
see
her
‘Cartésianisme “hérétique”’ (2011); ‘Una
mappa’ (2016), and the works cited there.
Pierre-Sylvain Regis, Réponse au . . .
Censura philosophiae Cartesianae (Paris,
1691), 216–17.
56
57
58
Réponse, 217–18, quoting, slightly imperfectly, the start of the Sixth Meditation.
Réponse, 223.
See e.g. Schmaltz, Radical, 229–30.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
136
giving up philosophy
were indeed incomprehensible, their ‘how’ or ‘mode’ could be explained using
the tools of philosophy.59 According to Regis, this was the essence of the
‘scholasticism’ that proliferated in Christian universities from the twelfth
century, a movement that was inspired by the desire to respond to the Arab
Aristotelians on their own terms, not least after the capture of Constantinople
in 1204. Not only was this theological method ‘prejudicial to piety and religion’, but it also led to the filtering into physics of various philosophical
distinctions that were developed to ‘explain’ the mysteries – real accidents,
substantial forms, etc. – corrupting that discipline too.60
In the third book of L’usage, Regis outlined the solution to this state of
affairs. Using a standard distinction common across the theological spectrum,
he posited that things could be divided into three categories: those conforming
to reason, those contrary to it, and those above it. The first two categories
encompassed only natural things, whereas those above reason were only in the
order of grace, and thus supernatural. This meant that the jurisdictions of
reason and faith were completely different. It was true that the revealed
mysteries could not, at the deepest level of reality, be contrary to reason –
there could be no contradictions between two truths. But ultimately the
mysteries were completely incomprehensible, and known only through the
revelation in Scripture and tradition, and it was known that they were above
rather than contrary to reason only because it was known that God, qua perfect
being, could not perform contradictions. The mysteries were thus not impossible but inconceivable; in fact, reason was incapable of proving that they were
either possible or impossible. This was not, Regis insisted, the doctrine of
double truth condemned by the Lateran Council. However, it did mean that
one could hold to two seemingly contradictory propositions at once, as long as
one acknowledged that one was in the order of nature and the other in the
order of grace.61
The correct use of reason, Regis continued, was not to try and explicate the
mysteries, but to give one’s reasons for adhering to the true revealed faith.
When trying to convert a pagan or a Jew, or to defend Christianity from their
assaults, one should argue from history to defend the contents of revelation. To
mix natural and supernatural things was one of the most dangerous things
59
Pierre-Sylvain Regis, L’usage de la raison
et de la foy (Paris, 1704), ‘Avertissement’:
‘Tous les Philosophes n’ont pas poussé
les choses si loin que ceux-là [i.e. as the
Artemonians]. Il y en a eu, qui ont esté
plus retenus, mais qui ne sont pas moins
dangereux. Ce sont ceux qui reconnoissent de bonne foy qu’on ne peut penetrer
la substance de nos Mysteres, mais qui se
persuadent faussement qu’on en peut
60
61
expliquer le comment ou le mode, et qui
recherchent ensuite ces sortes d’explications, en se servant du secours de la
Philosophie et des autres sciences naturelles.’ The source for Artemon is
Eusebius, Hist. eccl., vi.28.
L’usage, ‘Avertissiment’, sig. ēr–v.
This is a summary of chs 1–3 of Book III
of L’usage (311–20).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
137
imaginable; in fact, in such circumstances ‘philosophy will declare itself for the
infidel against the Christian’.62 Indeed, scholastic, philosophical theology
promotes a kind of relativism: not only does the idea of what the ‘best’
philosophy is change over time, but also from place to place. A Chinese person
would judge the mysteries not against Aristotelianism or even Cartesianism,
but against Confucianism, and would find them sorely lacking. But the truths
of Christianity were universal truths that should be available to all. Hence their
verity should be demonstrated via church tradition and the facts that it teaches:
the fulfilment of prophecies, miracles, etc. These arguments were entirely
‘independent of philosophy’.63 Accordingly, philosophical theology should
only be applied to the proof of natural truths, such as God’s existence. All
revealed theology should be treated positively. The Councils had always acted
in this way, never founding their decisions on the opinions of philosophers,
but only on church tradition.64
Those who had ignored this division of labour had caused innumerable
difficulties: ‘it is inconceivable how many errors have been made by those who
have deviated from this rule’.65 Regis charted those errors at length in sections
concerning philosophical explanations of the Eucharist, the Trinity, and grace
and predestination. Most of his ire was aimed at the Aristotelian scholastics,
but he was clear that modern philosophers who tried to use their principles to
explain such mysteries – such as Desgabets – were equally culpable.66 The
reality was that when considered philosophically, the mysteries appeared to be
contrary to the laws of nature, and nothing more could be said.67 As for grace
and predestination, all the explanations – whether the Thomist one which
emphasised God’s power via the concept of physical predetermination, or the
Molinist one which emphasised human free will and liberty of indifference –
were equally incapable of explaining how an omnipotent and omniscient God
could have permitted man to sin; these difficulties remained ‘whatever system
you care to suppose’.68
62
63
64
65
L’usage, 321: ‘La Philosophie même se
declare pour les Infideles contre les
Chretiens.’
L’usage, 361–2: ‘indépendans de la
Philosophie’.
L’usage, 366–70. Predictably, Regis cites
the Vincentian Rule (367). Equally predictably, this argument involved him in
some unconvincing manoeuvring concerning Trent’s blatant defence of transubstantiation (368).
L’usage, 370: ‘Il n’est pas concevable en
combien d’erreurs sont tombez ceux qui
se sont écartez de cette regle.’
66
67
68
For criticism of Desgabets on the
Eucharist, see L’usage, 337–46.
See e.g. L’usage, 347, on the Trinity: ‘En
effet, ce Mystere paroit d’abord contraire
aux loix de la nature, & par consequent,
ce n’est pas de la nature qu’il en faut tirer
la connoissance.’
L’usage, 349–58, 380–4; qu. 383:
‘les mêmes difficultez se trouvent dans
l’une et dans l’autre . . . [et] dans quelque
autre systême qu’on voulût supposer’.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
138
giving up philosophy
The modern editors of Bayle’s correspondence, seeing that he was in contact
with Regis, have nonetheless claimed that the latter’s Usage was ‘very far
removed from Bayle’s religious philosophy’.69 As we shall see, this could not
be more wrong. Bayle’s position was almost exactly the same as Regis’s, but
with one significant difference: his was a Protestant version, which did not
have recourse to church tradition as the source of ‘positive’ theological truth.
In the 1710s, Newton would also come to insist on a radical separation of
philosophy and theology, in part to defend his own theology, and in part to
offer another justification for his methodological ideas (see III.4). To understand why such a position was possible in the Protestant world in the first
place, we must chart the long-term de-philosophisation of theology in the
Reformed sphere, above all in the Dutch Republic, England, the Swiss
Reformed lands, and Protestant France.
I.2.3 The Protestant World
As is well known, Luther viciously attacked ‘scholastic’ modes of theology.
This led to the emergence of the claim that he held to a theory of double
truth, a claim that would be repeated by Bayle (II.3.1). The claim is
incorrect.70 With the exception of the early seventeenth-century Lutheran
Daniel Hofmann (1538–1611), whose ideas precipitated a short but fierce
controversy at the University of Helmstedt, no major early modern
Protestant held to double-truth theory, or could be described as a ‘fideist’
in any meaningful sense.71 Nonetheless, from the Reformation onwards
Protestants of all stripes agonised over how exactly they should practise
and teach theology.72
As early as Melanchthon, it became clear that secular learning could not be
excluded from the curriculum, at least as a propaedeutic to theology.73
Gradually, even metaphysics was reintroduced, both at Wittenberg and elsewhere in the Lutheran world, and also in Reformed institutions.
Unsurprisingly, this metaphysical focus gradually filtered into theological
teaching and writing.74 At the same time, the pressure to produce quickly
a large cadre of broadly educated theologians led to an ever-increasing focus on
systematisation – indeed, it is no coincidence that the use of the term systema
to cover bodies of theological knowledge became commonplace at precisely
69
70
71
BC.vii.357: ‘très éloigné de la philosophie
religieuse de Bayle’.
Hägglund, Theologie und Philosophie
(1955), 54–70.
The fullest study is Friedrich, Grenzen
(2004). For the Reformed response, see
Muller, ‘Keckermann’ (1984), esp. 354–5.
72
73
74
For an excellent study of how pedagogical pressures shaped theological
method, see Burnett, ‘Roots’ (2004).
Kusukawa, Transformation (1995).
Freedman, ‘Instruction’ (1985), 124–5;
Freedman, ‘Encyclopedic’ (1994), 224,
232–3; Sparn, Wiederkehr; Leinsle,
Methode.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
139
this period.75 The method of organising theology into loci communes, introduced into Protestant pedagogy by Melanchthon, now became modified so
that ‘the notion gradually grew that the corpus doctrinae formed a “system” in
which each article led on to all the rest and formed an “integral body or perfect
and absolute system of Christian doctrine”, as one Protestant theologian put
it’.76 What had begun life as a (highly successful) pedagogical necessity now
became a standard mode of doing theology. The systematisation was defended
on the grounds that Scripture offered a body of revealed truth bound together
by the analogia fidei (the use of clear passages to interpret more ambiguous
ones, presupposing a unified theological meaning). Accordingly, not only was
it legitimate to organise and interpret that truth dialectically, but also that
subsequently, logical consequences derived from that system could also be
taken as doctrinal truths.77 And so if we have recourse to actors’ categories, we
find that by the second decade of the seventeenth century Reformed thinkers
were describing what they perceived as a shift towards a self-consciously
‘scholastic theology’ on the part of an important group of late sixteenthcentury Reformed theological pedagogues78 – scholastic here meant not just
‘taught in the schools’, but akin to the methods of the medieval theologians
such as Lombard.79
It used to be thought – and in much of the literature it is still asserted – that
such developments were the sign of a decadent decline of Reformed divinity.
After a ‘humanistic’ and ‘biblical’ theology dominated in the early Reformation,
the story goes, the age of confessionalisation brought a renewed Reformed
scholasticism which was ‘philosophical’, ‘logical’, ‘deterministic’, and even
‘rationalistic’ to the point of being unscriptural; which made predestination
a central organising dogma; and which ever more insisted on a ‘rigid’, ahistorical
75
76
77
See Freedman, ‘Encyclopedic’, 230–2;
Ritschl, Systematische Methode (1906),
6–40, focussing on theological literature
in both the Reformed and Lutheran
worlds.
Gilbert, Method (1960), 111–12, qu. and
trans. the Lutheran Leonard Hutter
(already quoted in Latin in Ritschl,
Systematische Methode). For the loci
method and its development, see Kolb,
‘Teaching’ (1987); Backus, ‘Ein Medium’
(2009).
Muller, PRRD, ii.493–502 for an overview with many examples, esp. 502: ‘the
drawing of logical conclusions from the
text is an integral part of the method that
serves the basic intention of the method –
the intention to draw sacra doctrina and
sacra theologia out of the sacra pagina’.
78
79
See e.g. Sinnema, ‘Chandieu’ (1994);
Sinnema, ‘Scholasticism’ (1986).
See e.g. the interesting history of ‘scholastic’ philosophy, and of theological systematising more generally, offered by
Lambert Daneau in the ‘Prolegomena’
to his In Petri Lombardi librum primum
sententiarum commentarius triplex
(Geneva, 1580), sigs jr–****iiijr; another
appears in Voetius’ ‘De theologia scholastica’ (n. 119 below). For sensitive discussions of the development of Reformed
‘scholasticism’, see Sinnema, ‘Beza’s
view’ (2007); Sinnema, ‘Decree’ (2007);
Fatio, Méthode (1976), 63–98; Burnett,
‘Roots’;
Freedman,
‘Keckermann’
(1997), 307, 330, 358–9; Menk, Hohe
Schule Herborn (1981), 210–17, 231–56;
Backus, ‘Ramism’ (2010), esp. 237–44.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
140
giving up philosophy
model of scriptural exegesis.80 However, historians of Reformed theology – led
above all by Richard Muller – have now demonstrated the errors of such
a narrative.81 No Reformed theologian was a ‘rationalist’ in any meaningful
sense, and however self-consciously ‘scholastic’ that theologian was, their scholasticism was never developed in opposition to, but only in support of, an
exegetically grounded ‘biblical theology’. Even those who did the most to import
philosophy into Reformed theological pedagogy, such as the Italians Peter
Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) and Girolamo Zanchi (1516–90), still insisted
on the scriptural foundations of theology, relying on the doctrine of analogia
fidei to defend the text’s perspicuity and suitability for logical interpretation.82
Far from being ‘rigid’ or obfuscatory, the introduction of dialectic and other
scholastic tools was intended – just as it was in the Catholic world – to facilitate
the process of theological education, and to render academic theology more
‘practical’.83 Moreover, the fact that any one issue (especially predestination) was
discussed in a more philosophical manner need not mean that such an approach
was applied universally. Rather than see a constant conflict between
a ‘conservative’ Reformed scholasticism and a progressive ‘humanistic–historical theology’, we should chart the gradual emergence of a rhetorical contrast
between the two, which grew out of specific confessional debates and pressures.
The open battle between ‘positive’ and ‘scholastic’ theology that we met in the
Catholic world was not echoed in the Protestant sphere (either Reformed or
Lutheran) until later in the seventeenth century.
That methodological contrast developed largely as a result of intraconfessional controversy, above all concerning predestination (although
other controversies, not least those with non-Trinitarians and Lutherans
about the divine nature and the relationship of Father and Son, also involved
the importation of significant amounts of philosophical vocabulary and discussion into theological discourse).84 The second generation of Reformed
80
81
82
The classic anglophone statement is Hall,
‘Calvin’ (1966); perhaps of longer-lasting
significance is Armstrong, Amyraut
(1969), which remains useful if read
with caution. For a survey of more recent
English and German literature, see
Muller, ‘Problem’ (2001).
Muller’s key works on this score are Decree
[1986] (2008); Unaccommodated (2000);
PRRD; After Calvin (2003); for his many
followers and some of their results, see
Ballor et al., Church and school (2013).
See Zuidema, ‘Primacy’ (2007), esp. 102–
5; Muller, PRRD, ii.103–5 (Zanchi). For
the importance of Vermigli and Zanchi
to the development of Reformed
83
84
scholasticism, see Donnelly, ‘Italian
influences’ (1976).
See e.g. the account of Ramist-influenced
theology at Herborn in Mühling,
‘Theologenausbildung’ (2006), esp. 84.
Another excellent example is Zanchi’s
reception in England: O’Banion, ‘Zanchi’
(2005).
For the methodological implications of
Reformed-Lutheran Christological debates,
see Haga, Lutheran metaphysics (2012). For
the Reformed conception of Christ as autotheos, possessing the divine essence of himself,
developed
in
response
to
antitrinitarians such as Michael Servetus,
see Muller, ‘Christological problem’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
141
theologians, well trained in medieval scholastic theology and philosophy, came
to insist on the fact that their predestinarian position – often attacked by their
Catholic opponents such as Albert Pighius (c.1490–1542) and Robert
Bellarmine (1542–1621) as rendering God a tyrant or the author of sin – was
supposedly to be found in the works of the leading medieval theologians, above
all Aquinas.85 Gradually, many of them adopted the Dominican language of
physical promotion or predetermination, and openly cited the works of Báñez
and others, sometimes engaging with their ideas at considerable length.86
At the same time, some Protestant theologians – both Lutheran and
Reformed – attempted to develop very elaborate philosophico-theological
‘solutions’ to the problem of grace that emphasised the role of free will and
liberty of indifference, and which were structurally comparable to that developed by Molina, or even drew on his concept of scientia media. The most
important of these were Jacob Arminius (1560–1609) and Conrad Vorstius
(1569–1622), successive holders of one of the Leiden theology chairs.87 Later
Arminian mythology claimed that Arminius was a ‘biblical’ theologian who
opposed the ‘rigid’ scholasticism of his Reformed counterparts. Nothing could
be further from the truth: Arminius was no less ‘scholastic’ in his approach to
theology than any of his opponents, who frequently accused him of channelling the ideas of the Jesuit leaders of Spanish scholasticism.88 Not only did he
deploy Molina’s concept of scientia media, but he also engaged in elaborate
discussion of the logical divisions within God’s will, especially emphasising the
distinction of the divine will into its ‘antecedent’ and ‘consequent’ components – as far as his Reformed opponents were concerned, this was the height
of unjustified rationalistic speculation.89 Vorstius’ method was even more
philosophical: his notorious Tractatus de Deo (1606, expanded in 1610)
85
86
87
88
(1988); Bell, ‘Son of God’ (2011); and
III.3.2.
Donnelly, ‘Calvinist Thomism’ (1976),
451; Sytsma, ‘Vermigli’ (2018); and the
essays in Ballor et al., Beyond Dordt
(2019).
See the examples in Muller, Divine will
(2017), 285–9; also van Ruler, Causality
(1995), 285 on Voetius.
Arminius is better known, but Vorstius,
who succeeded him in the Leiden theology chair, in fact preceded him in
using the Molinist concept of scientia
media: Stanglin, ‘Protestant reception’
(2019), 155–8.
Muller, Arminius (1991), 27–9 for attacks
on him for supposed links to the Jesuits;
Dekker, ‘Molinist?’ (1996); Stanglin,
89
‘Protestant reception’, 150–5; also
Ballor, ‘Footsteps’ (2019).
The distinction has its origins in
Aquinas: ST i.19.6 ad. 1; Antoniotti,
‘Volonté antécédente’ (1965). It had
been furiously assaulted by Luther (e.g.
D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar,
1883–1993), xviii.616), but used by
Molina and quickly taken up by antiCalvinists besides Arminius: see Voak,
‘English Molinism’ (2009), 144, 149–58.
For the Reformed assaults, see Muller,
PRRD, iii.442–3, 465–9. Anti-Calvinists
rather desperately tried to claim that the
distinction was patristic rather than
scholastic: e.g. Peter Baro, Summa trium
de praedestinatione sententiarum [1594]
(Harderwijk, 1613), 8–9.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
142
giving up philosophy
proceeds by defining God’s attributes and then ‘deduc[ing] from that that God,
despite his eternity, is capable of undergoing changes in time, and notably of
changing his mind’, among some other decidedly unorthodox results.90 In the
Lutheran world, Nicolaus Taurellus, whom we met in the previous chapter as
a premier advocate for the reintroduction of metaphysics into Lutheran
pedagogy, also developed a highly sophisticated anti-Reformed argument
about predestination that depended on elaborate reasoning about the divine
attributes, one which seems to have influenced Vorstius.91
All these men thought of themselves as biblical theologians: they used philosophical arguments solely to explicate what they took to be the correct reading of
Scripture. However, their prominent use of philosophy caused both sides in the
dispute increasingly to accuse their opponents of rationalism. The Arminians
and their allies accused the Reformed of being necessitarian determinists who,
because of their obsession with developing a theologico-philosophical system,
deviated from biblical truth and made God the author of sin. The Reformed
countered that it was the Arminians who had been led to abandon true revelation by a misuse of philosophy, and by a rationalist obsession with ‘free will’:
hence their (the Arminians’) use of Jesuitic and scholastic concepts such as
scientia media and the distinction of the divine will into antecedent and consequent. We already find exactly this pattern of accusation and counter-accusation
in the long-running and high-profile debate that occurred before the Synod of
Dordt (1618–19) between the important Reformed theologian William Ames
(1576–1633) – who would serve as the secretary to the president of the Synod
and then become theology professor at Franeker – and the Rotterdam-based
Arminian Nicolaas Grevinckhoven (†1632). In this debate, both parties accused
each other of rationalism, scholasticism, and philosophising about the mysteries:
Ames launched the accusation at any discussion of scientia media and plural
divine wills; in turn, Grevinckhoven condemned Ames for his ‘excessively
scholastic, obscure terminology’ concerning the divine will.92 What is particularly important is that Ames internalised and generalised this polemical pattern,
for when he came to teach at Franeker he denounced the use of philosophy, and
especially metaphysics, in theology, calling the Devil ‘summus metaphysicus’
and deploying many of the anti-metaphysical arguments developed by the
humanists that we met in the previous chapter.93 For example, he argued that
90
91
92
Lüthy, Gorlaeus, 120–1.
Salatowsky, ‘God’ (2019), 65, 69.
The debate is well examined in Krop,
‘Philosophy and Dordt’ (2010), 73–5, quoting at 73, n. 77 Grevinckhoven’s accusation
as it appears in William Ames, De Arminii
sententia, in Opera, 5 vols (Amsterdam,
1658), v.2: ‘ex tuis verbis scholasticωs
nimium obscuris’.
93
William Ames, Disputatio theologica
adversus metaphysicam (Leiden, 1632),
6. The whole disputation is directed
against Suárez’s notion that a good theologian needs to be a good metaphysician
(4). Metaphysics is said to have entered
Christianity via the Platonism of some of
the church fathers, such as Justin Martyr,
Origen, and Augustine (5). For more on
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
143
all of metaphysics depended on the false belief that one could know the essences
of things, and also that the Aristotelian ten categories were nonsensical; most of
them were reified mental entities, and substance was the only real being.94 These
arguments would soon be repopularised in Gassendi’s anti-Aristotelian writings.
In this way, the assaults on speculative philosophising by otherwise unconnected
theologians and philosophers were coming together to generate a formidable
cultural force.
In the face of such heightened polemical stakes, theologians faced two
options. One was to emphasise that one’s own side was correct regarding the
logical and philosophical complexities of the dispute, with the inevitable result
that the theological systems that emerged came to be more and more elaborate.
And indeed, we sometimes find this happening on all sides, not just in
polemical publications but also at the level of systematic pedagogy. To give
only one example, in England we find Samuel Brooke (1575–1631), who was
Professor of Divinity at Gresham College in London and who held an antiReformed position on grace, using a Cambridge disputation held in 1616 to
attack Calvin, Beza, and Perkins on the nature of divine causality by offering
a barrage of references to, and arguments taken from, Spanish scholastic
theology.95 Not long after, the English Reformed theologian William Twisse
(1577–1646) would counter such attacks by deploying the full armoury of
Dominican scholasticism, including all the philosophical arguments for physical predetermination.96 In 1618 he even helped to edit the editio princeps of
the locus classicus for medieval scholastic predestinarian theology, Thomas
Bradwardine’s De causa Dei, a work considered so important for the antiArminian cause that it had been subsidised by the King’s Press.97 It and
94
95
this text, see Krop, ‘Philosophy’, 66–8.
For more on Ames, whose writings were
much read and republished across the
Reformed world, see Sprunger, Ames
(1972); van Vliet, Rise (2013).
Ames, Adversus metaphysicam, 11–13
(essences, explicitly drawing on Ramus);
17 (ten categories; substance).
CUL MS Ff.5.25, fols 94r–112v (Samuel
Brooke, ‘Cur quid duo homines aequali
omnino gratia consecuti sint, unus convertatur et credit et non alius’), esp. fol.
95v, for the description of the debate as
concerning ‘Philosophicis illis quaestionibus, quae concursum Dei spectant quatenus is prima causa est’. Brooke goes on
to refer to a huge range of late scholastic
authorities, including Petrus Fonseca,
Gregory of Valencia, Molina, Vásquez,
96
97
Suárez, and Diego Álvarez. See also the
similar approach in his two quaestiones at
CUL MS Add. 44(15), fols 1r–5v; this MS
also contains another version of the
above thesis, where it is stated that it
was debated ‘in Scholis Cantabrigiae’.
See above all William Twisse, Vindiciae
gratiae (Amsterdam, 1632); Dissertatio
de scientia media (Arnhem, 1639); and
the discussion in Muller, Will, 225–35.
Thomas Bradwardine, De causa Dei, contra Pelagium, ed. Henry Savile (London,
1618), with the relevance to contemporary debates immediately signalled at sig.
a3r. That the King’s Press was ‘required’
to print Bradwardine is stated in S.P.
Dom., Charles I, vol. 167, art. 72, printed
in A companion to Arber, ed. W. W. Greg
(Oxford, 1967), 258.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
144
giving up philosophy
Twisse’s other writings were soon incorporated into English theological
pedagogy.98
However, another option was to adopt what we might call the rhetorical–moral
high ground by using the language of epistemic modesty and nescience about the
exact manner of God’s operation, and, consequently, to insist that one did not
indulge in philosophical niceties but rather stuck to scriptural terminology, perhaps
with the testimony of the early church as a guide. Such claims are often confused for
some kind of fluffy ‘Erasmianism’, ‘irenicism’, ‘latitudinarianism’, and so on. In
reality, they were almost always made with a confessional pay-off in mind. So, to
stay for a moment in Cambridge, we find the Regius Professor of Divinity John
Overall (1559–1619), who, like Brooke, held a strong anti-Reformed position,
arguing in the first decade of the seventeenth century that theology students should
not begin their reading with modern divines or engage in ‘Scholasticas futiles
Quaestiones’, but rather begin the explanation of Scripture by reading the church
fathers.99 Or, on the other side of the debate, we find the Bishop of Bath and Wells,
Arthur Lake (1569–1626) – a staunch advocate of the Reformed position on grace –
advising Samuel Ward (1572–1643) before the latter’s departure for the Synod of
Dordt that he should avoid ‘metaphysical ratiocinations . . . which argue from
God’s attributes’.100 This was an accurate description of the method that had been
adopted by men like Taurellus and Vorstius.
In the 1620s, this anti-philosophical rhetoric came to be deployed more and
more systematically, and to be adapted explicitly towards ideological ends.
First, it was deployed by the philologists of the arts faculties, who in the Dutch
Republic enjoyed a particularly prominent role.101 Already at the height of the
dispute between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants, the Leiden
humanist Petrus Cunaeus (1586–1628), who had Arminian sympathies,
98
99
See e.g. Bod. MS Sancroft 5, fols 28r–29r.
These are the teaching notes of William
Sancroft the elder (1582–1637), master
of Emmanuel College.
BL MS Harley 750, ‘Do Overalli dum
Regii professoris munus Cantabrigiae
obiret. In vesperiis Comitorum’, fol.
114r. See also CUL MS Gg.1.29 (a copybook belonging to one of Overall’s
pupils), fols 16r–21r, 22r–25r (this is an
oration by Overall before creating
the Doctors of Theology at the
Commencement of 1599) (esp. fol. 24v
for a direct evocation of patristic learning against Calvin), 62v, 84v, 87r–91r,
103v–104r, 110v (see also the comments
of Overall’s pupil at fols 6r, 29r, and for
the clear order of reading at work see the
100
101
reverse foliation, fols. 16v–21r, ‘Contra
Usuram’); BL MS Harley 750, fols. 114r,
115r–v, 117r–122r, 136r (in ‘Praelectio
D.D. Overalli; cum Regii professoris
munis in Sacra Theologia’); see also BL
RP 2347, fol. 9v for a method of antiCatholic dispute that does not depend
on Calvinist or Lutheran systems. On
Overall’s importance, see Milton,
‘Stealth’ (2006).
Lake to Ward, 12/22 October 1618, in
Milton, Delegation (2005), 98. This was
in relation to the distinction of the divine will into antecedent and consequent.
For the comparatively disproportional
power wielded by arts faculty philologists in the Dutch Republic, see Levitin,
‘Confessionalisation’, 52–64.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
145
composed a widely circulated Menippean satire in which Erasmus sits in
judgement over contemporary theologians (of all factions), who are condemned for their presumptuous philosophical speculations into mysteries
which neither they nor anyone else could understand.102 Enraged students
disrupted Cunaeus’ Hebrew classes, and the university was temporarily shut
down to prevent further chaos. But the point was not limited to Arminian
sympathisers such as Cunaeus: the eminent philologist Daniel Heinsius (1580–
1655) also wrote a popular poem, in his case defending the Reformed position
as the one that was grounded in a solid biblicism that avoided any abstruse
speculation on the divine nature and decrees.103
Slightly less spectacular, if perhaps more important, than Cunaeus’ intervention was that by the Franeker Hebrew professor Sixtinus Amama (1593–
1629), a colleague and friend of Ames. In his rectoral address of 1626,
pointedly entitled ‘On barbarism’, Amama inveighed against current practices of theological education. The Reformation, he averred, had been an
anti-scholastic and humanist endeavour led by men such as Erasmus,
Luther, Melanchthon, Ramus, Calvin, Oecolampadius, and Bucer.
However, theologians were now again devoting themselves to futile philosophical disputes, and neglecting the philological study of Scripture.104
Citing Ames, he argued that students should spend far less time in speculative philosophy, and more in philology.105 These were not empty words:
they were part of a concerted programme of educational reform which was
successful in generating major changes across the Dutch Republic, with
students preparing to study divinity now having to focus much more on
philology, inevitably at the expense of philosophy.106 Once again, this was
102
Petrus Cunaeus, Sardi Venales (Leiden,
1612). The fullest account of this text
and
its
reception
is
Somos,
Secularization (2013), 201–382, but
I find unconvincing the author’s reading
of the text as part of a programme of
radical secularisation.
103
The poem, Lofsanck van Christus
(Hymn in praise of Christ) (1616), contains the lines:
We pass Esau by and refuse to ask
nor inquire too deep why God hated
him, before he was, but praise him that
asks
and keenly inquires who pleases You
most.
The translation is by Freya Sierhuis,
Literature (2015), 62, which also includes
an excellent discussion. For Heinsius’
further thoughts on the corruption of
theology by metaphysics, see his letter
to Isaac Casaubon of 15 May 1612 in
Sylloges epistolarum a viris illustribus
scriptarum, ed. P. Burman, 5 vols
(Leiden, 1727), ii.448–50. Heinsius’
authorship of the letter is established in
Hardy, Criticism (2017), 91, n. 184.
104
Sixtinus Amama, Anti-barbarus Biblicus
(Franeker, 1628), ‘De barbarie oratio’,
passim, esp. sigs [c7]r–[c8]r, d3v–d4r.
105
Amama, ‘De barbarie oratio’, sigs. ev,
e5v, [e8]r–v. Interestingly, he also quotes
to this effect the reformist sentiments of
the major Lutheran theology professor
(at Wittenberg) Wolfgang Franzius
(1564–1628), from his Tractatus theologicus novus & perspicuus (Wittenberg,
1619), 14.
106
de Jonge, ‘Study’ (1975), 67–8; van
Rooden, L’Empereur (1989), 64–75.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
146
giving up philosophy
not a case of ‘irenic’ Erasmianism taking on a rigid, dogmatic orthodoxy:
Amama was no less orthodox than his colleagues, and he saw his reform
programme as part of the implementation of the consensus established at
Dordt, which he hoped would forever stop the philosophical squabbling
over the divine decrees.107
The reformist campaigns of humanists in the arts faculties would not
have caused change on their own. More important was the fact that such
‘humanist’ rhetoric now started to appear more frequently in the mouths
of theologians themselves. Perhaps most important was its deployment by
the Arminians, whose effective defeat at Dordt forced them to make it as
a form of loser’s argument. (The death of Maurice of Orange in 1625 led to
a degree of toleration for them in the Dutch Republic.) Their theological
leader, Simon Episcopius (1583–1643), used the ‘Praefatio’ to the
Remonstrants’ Apologia pro Confessione (1629) – a widely circulated text
that was very important in reshaping the Remonstrants’ theologicalpolemical strategy – to argue that all the devastating recent disputes had
been precipitated by a proliferation of philosophical disputation in
Protestant theology. While his rhetoric was irenic, his point was squarely
confessional: his Reformed opponents’ obsession with predestination –
which he claimed they interpreted in a wholly fatalistic manner – had
been caused by the fact that during their theological education they had
been ‘stuffed full of the inextricable difficulties and subtleties of the
schools’ concerning the mysteries.108 He even said that theologians should
stop trying to establish doctrine by logical consequence from scriptural
proof texts, a major indictment of how Reformed theology was at that time
being taught and publicised.109 Moreover, he now turned against the
standard Reformed doctrine of the total perspicuity and inspiration of
Scripture, and towards a consciously historical defence of the Bible’s
credibility.110
107
108
Amama, ‘De barbarie oratio’, sig. [d8]v.
[Simon Episcopius], Apologia pro
Confessione ([Amsterdam], 1629),
‘Praefatio’, sig. ì2r: ‘difficultatibus & subtilitatibus Scholarum inextricabilibus
refertam’. As early as 1618 (at Dordt),
Episcopius had convinced John Hales
(1584–1656) that the incorporation of
‘the Schoolmens Conclusions’ was ‘the
greatest cause of Contentions in the
Church’: for Hales, this was far from
a non-confessional point, for it
informed
his
burgeoning
antiCalvinism (Hales to George Carleton,
109
110
7 December 1618, in John Hales,
Golden remains (London, 1659), 37–8).
[Episcopius], ‘Praefatio’, sig. ì3r, where
he implies that this is the same method
as adopted by the Catholics when trying
to ‘prove’ transubstantiation. See also
sig. ì4r–v, where he says that the interpretation of Rom. 9 in this manner is the
only way that the Reformed doctrine of
predestination had been produced. Of
course, the simple ‘biblical’ doctrine
turns out to be the Arminian one.
[Episcopius], ‘Praefatio’, sigs è4v–ir. See
further
Daugirdas,
‘Hermeneutics’
(2009), 97–101, 105–8. See also Stanglin,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
147
These ideas were pushed further by Episcopius’ successor as professor of
theology, Etienne de Courcelles (1586–1659). Even more than his predecessor,
he disdained the use of any non-scriptural language in theology. In his case,
this even involved questioning canonical definitions such as that of Christ
being homooúsion (of the same essence) with the Father. In his writings we see
yet again the uptake of humanist anti-scholasticism akin to that which had
been performed by the natural philosophers discussed in I.1, for Courcelles
deployed Lorenzo Valla’s assault on the use of philosophical language in
theology for his own, Arminian ends.111 Positively, his vision of theology
was increasingly directed at elucidating the meaning of Scripture placed in
its immediate context.112
Similar arguments were now being made by the anti-Reformed party in
England that was coalescing around William Laud (1573–1645), most vocally
Richard Montagu (1577–1641).113 In the universities, even divines who did not
share Montagu’s ideological position devoted more energy to patristics and
less to systematics, and increasingly deployed the language of antimetaphysical epistemic modesty when it came to subjects such as predestination. The aforementioned Ward, now Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in
Cambridge, and his colleague, the Regius Professor John Davenant (1572–
1641), were central to this development: they conducted their Cambridge
teaching on predestination in a historical rather than philosophical mode,
arguing from the church fathers (considered as witnesses to scriptural truth)
rather than from modern Reformed divinity, and insisting that such argumentation was far superior to the philosophical rationalism which, they claimed,
was responsible for the errors of both rigid predestinarians and Arminians.114
111
‘Perspicuity’ (2014), esp. 43–4 for
Episcopius’ debate with Johannes
Polyander on perspicuity, and 45–6 for
his views on the role of the testimonium
internum. For Episcopius’ rejection of
Franciscus Junius’ archetypal/ectypal theology distinction as fruitless scholasticism
(Arminius had accepted it), see van
Asselt, ‘Introduction’ (2014), xliv. This
had become a staple part of Reformed
systems: Muller, PRRD, i.224–5; Tipton,
‘Task of the theologian’ (2016).
Etienne de Courcelles, ‘Praefatio’, in
Episcopius,
Opera
theologica,
2
vols (Amsterdam, 1650–65), i, sigs
***2v–***3r. For his biography, see
Arnold Poelenburg, ‘Oratio funebris’,
in
Courcelles,
Opera
theologica
(Amsterdam, 1675).
112
113
114
See e.g. the statement to that effect in his
Institutio religionis Christianae, Opera
theologica, 30b–31a, where such
a method is again contrasted to ahistorical, philosophical attempts to understand doctrines which are in fact
inaccessible to reason. See also
Laplanche, L’écriture (1986), 338–9, 346.
See Montagu’s inflammatory Appello
Caesarem (London, 1625), 11–12.
See Quantin, Antiquity (2008), 177–8
(Ward), and 181–2 (Davenant) for
some examples. As well as the evidence
gathered there, see e.g. John Davenant,
Determinationes quaestionum quarundam theologicarum . . . editio secunda
(Cambridge, 1639), q. xxvi, 119–23;
Expositio epistolae D. Pauli ad
Colossenses (Cambridge, 1627), 169;
Dissertationes duæ (Cambridge, 1650),
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
148
giving up philosophy
Accordingly, Ward’s students who defended the Reformed position on grace
now explicitly dismissed ‘scholastic’ methods of arguing about the subject,
instead presenting their position as a via media to be identified with the ancient
authorities Augustine, Prosper, and Fulgentius.115 Davenant distanced himself
from the ‘Metaphysicall speculations’ that had caused such a rift between
Dominicans and Jesuits, and with which, he disingenuously claimed, ‘our
Protestant Divines love not to torture their braines’.116 When Ward did
venture to cite Báñez or Bradwardine, he was leapt upon by his Arminian
opponents, who dismissed him as a peddler of scholastic nonsense.117
Appearing to be at all philosophical in one’s approach to theology was becoming more and more dangerous.
The next generation of Reformed theologians had to respond to the attacks
on their method coming from the likes of Episcopius and Courcelles.
Inevitably, they pointed out that the point of their systems was not to establish
some rationalist theology but only to present scriptural doctrine in a clearer
manner. By the middle of the century, the battle had not only become more
heated, but had now mutated into a full-out culture war about the nature of
theological knowledge, between defenders of ‘scholastic’ systematisation on
the one hand and those in favour of more humanist methods on the other.
Some of the Reformed, especially in the Dutch Republic, now made the
legitimacy of systematisation an explicit component of their teaching. They
focussed in particular on defending the use of logical consequences against the
Arminians and the new wave of French Catholic polemicists, above all Du
115
41–2; Animadversions . . . upon a treatise
intitled, Gods love to mankind
(Cambridge, 1641), 4, 17–18, 28–9, 60.
See also Davenant to Ward,
23 February 1630, Bod. MS Tanner 73,
fol. 37r, repr. in The life . . . of John
Davenant, ed. M. Fuller (London,
1897), 330; also Bod. MS Tanner 71,
fol. 140r [= Fuller, Davenant, 324–6].
See the 1625 BD thesis of ‘Mr Naylor’ (who
must be Joseph Naylor of Sidney Sussex
College: Alum. Cantab., iii.234b), ‘Homo
in statu naturae Lapsae non est liberi arbitrii in moralibus’, Bod. MS Sancroft 21,
pp. 18–28, esp. 21 (condemnation of all
his opponents for deriving their position
from medieval scholastics), 25–8 (long discussion of the Augustinian view); and
pp. 29–37, ‘Redemptio non est universalis’,
a 1624 BD thesis by ‘Mr Scott’ (who must
be Arthur Scott of Christ’s: Alum. Cantab.,
iv.30b).
116
117
Davenant, Animadversions, 148, 154.
This is a response to Samuel Hoard
(1599–1658), an English minister with
Arminian leanings whose Gods love to
mankind (1633) elicited many responses
both in England and on the Continent.
See also Sytsma, ‘Aquinas in Dordt’
(2019).
Ward cited Báñez and Bradwardine in
his anti-Arminian Gratia discriminans
(London, 1627), 29–30, 37, 40. This precipitated furious accusations of scholasticism from his influential Cambridge
colleague Matthew Wren (1585–1667),
then Master of Peterhouse: see the comments in the margins of these pages in
Wren’s annotated copy of Ward’s book,
Bod., shelfmark Bod. 4° Rawl. 150:
beside Bradwardine’s name, Ward has
simply written ‘hostis Dei’. See also
Hampton, ‘Ward’ (2019).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
149
Perron, Petau, and François Véron.118 Most importantly, the long-serving and
influential Utrecht theology professor and pastor Gisbertus Voetius (1589–
1676) devoted significant energy to defending such methods.119 Voetius is
often portrayed in the literature almost as a comedy villain: the height of
a Reformed scholasticism that sought to stifle all intellectual novelty. This
attitude stems from the conflation of several different issues. It is true that
Voetius was vehemently anti-Cartesian, partly because of a belief that only
Aristotelian scholasticism was compatible with the physical truths contained
in Genesis.120 But this was a niche attitude shared by few: after all, all Dutch
universities had flourishing arts and medicine faculties where one could find
plenty of natural philosophy being done that had nothing to do with Scripture
or any kind of ‘sacred physics’. Rather than see Voetius’ aggressive emphasis
on the usefulness of systematisation in theology as a product of his universal
conservatism, we should understand it as a product of two polemical needs.
First, it was a function of the need to launch a polemical counter-assault
against the kind of ideas being espoused by Episcopius and other Arminians,
as well as Catholic advocates of positive theology. Second, it was a product of
a Dutch ‘further Reformation’ (akin to that being undertaken by those labelled
‘Puritans’ in the British Isles) which emphasised practical piety and thus
sought to make theology as systematic as possible so as to facilitate the retrieval
of easily applicable precepts by an aggressive preaching ministry.121 Voetius
had no idea that his pursuit of this aim – which he considered deeply ‘practical’ – via the tools of Aristotelian–scholastic logic and philosophical vocabulary would soon come to be caricatured as the height of pointless theological
118
119
Véron (1575–1649) had been a Jesuit,
but left the order in 1620 to devote himself to anti-Huguenot controversy, in
which he was hugely successful, gaining
many high-profile converts. For his
method, which depended on proving to
Protestants that their doctrinal conclusions depended not on the principle of
sola scriptura which they claimed to
observe but rather on logic and ratiocination, see Dompnier, Le venin (1985),
179–84.
See esp. the two disputations ‘De ratione
humana in rebus fidei’ (Feb. 1636) and
‘De theologia scholastica’ (Feb. 1640) in
Gisbertus Voetius, Selectae disputationes theologicae, 4 vols (Utrecht,
1648–67), i.1–29, esp. 5–12 for the validity of deducing logical consequences
from Scripture via ratiocination, against
120
121
Véron, partially on the grounds that ‘all
positive theology is also argumentative’
(‘tota Theologia positiva est argumentativa’) at 7, and again for the distinction
of scholastic from positive theology, and
defence of the former, at 14, also 26–7.
At 18, Voetius is adamant that the first
Reformers promoted scholastic theology and philosophy. In general, the
extent to which Voetius uses Catholic
authorities in his defence of scholastic
theology is remarkable, even though he
of course still includes the usual strictures against vain speculation and papal
corruption of the method.
van
Ruler,
Causality,
passim;
Goudriaan, Orthodoxy (2006), 85–142.
The fullest study is now Beck, Voetius
(2007); see there, esp. 25–8, 143–83,
426–30.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
150
giving up philosophy
speculation, and as an example of the toxic intermixture of philosophy and
theology.
Before that happened, Voetius’ defence of scholastic systematisation was
very successful. In particular, he was eagerly followed by his Reformed allies in
England, who had taken over the universities after Charles I’s defeat in the
Civil Wars. The major theological player in Cambridge became Anthony
Tuckney (1599–1670), who dominated the university in the 1650s, serving as
both Lady Margaret and Regius Professor of Divinity. Tuckney not only made
full use of the most elaborate Reformed scholastic arguments in his
teaching,122 but also offered a full methodological defence of ‘systems of
divinity’ and the use of logical extrapolation in scriptural exegesis that drew
heavily on Voetius.123 Ultimately, the case he was making was just a forceful
restatement of the standard Reformed view, but the extent to which the
humanist challenge was now weighing on Reformed theologians’ minds is
revealed by the fact that Tuckney now combined it with a direct polemic
against overly historical approaches. The whole point of systems was to
erode the historical distance between the text and the modern reader.124 The
use of contextual material – whether Hebrew, Greek, or pagan – was unnecessary to elucidate the words of Scripture, which was its own interpreter; difficult
passages were to be interpreted not by reference to context, but through logical
use of the analogia fidei.125 Indeed, the defence of systematics was now
considered so important that Tuckney’s ideas were officially sanctioned by
the Westminster Assembly in their own defence of ‘compendious systems’.126
Had the Restoration not happened, then seventeenth-century England would
have witnessed the production of far more systematic theology than it did;
122
123
See e.g. his use of Twisse at
Anthony Tuckney, Praelectiones theologicae (Amsterdam, 1679), 2nd pagination, 118.
See esp. his sermon on 2 Tim. 1:13
preached at Great St Mary’s in
Cambridge on 30 June 1650, printed in
Anthony Tuckney, A good day well
improved (London, 1656), 244–319. For
the same message in his Cambridge lectures, see Praelectiones theologicae, 163–
6, and 2nd pagination, 3, 28–30, where
his debts to Voetius become clear. That
the Arminians are his main targets is
clear from Good day, 248–9, 251–5,
256–8, 261–2; specifically, he was most
incensed by Episcopius’ ‘Praefatio’, as
discussed above. Tuckney considered
this text especially pernicious in spreading the idea that Reformed theology was
124
125
126
a product of unbiblical philosophical
systematisation: see further ‘Eight letters
of Anthony Tuckney and Benjamin
Whichcote’, in Moral and religious aphorisms (London, 1753), 27–8. He was
not the only major Reformed theologian
in Interregnum Britain to feel so threatened by Episcopius’ text: see likewise
George Gillespie, ‘A treatise of miscellany questions’, in The works, 2 vols
(Edinburgh, 1846), ii.100b–103b.
Tuckney, Good day, 259.
Tuckney, Praelectiones, 28–30. See also
the attack on the overuse of chronology,
church history, and ‘criticisms’ as
opposed to ‘systems’ at Good day, 267–8.
‘To the Reader’, in The confession of
faith, 2nd ed. (London, 1658), sigs.
[A3]v–[A4]r. This passage is not in the
first edition (1646).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
151
concomitantly, it might well have witnessed the development of its own branch
of Reformed Schulphilosophie, perhaps even akin to that being produced by
contemporaries in the German Lutheran sphere from which Leibniz
emerged.127
The English anti-Calvinists associated such a method with an anti-biblical
rationalism. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, they also accused
the Reformed position of an anti-intellectualist enthusiasm because of its
insistence on the role of the testimonium internum of the Holy Spirit. By
combining these two arguments, men like Brian Walton (leader of the team
that prepared the London Polyglot Bible (1656)) and John Pearson now
asserted that their own confessional position was based on a theological
method that avoided excessive philosophising in favour of a historical and
even ‘critical’ approach.128 Upon the Restoration, divinity professors at both
Cambridge and Oxford repeatedly told their students that ‘scholastic’ methods
in theology had led to the fatalistic determinism which, they claimed, characterised Reformed theology and led to civil war in England.129 In other words,
they were advocating – and enforcing – a quiet revolution in the system of
knowledge.
In this regard, they were following dictates from the restored monarch
himself, for in 1662, a set of royal directions was issued, instructing preachers
‘not to spend their time and study in the search of abstruse and speculative
notions, especially in and about the deep points of elections and reprobation,
together with the incomprehensible manner of the concurrence of God’s free
grace and man’s free will’.130 From then on, English theology professors
disdained approaches that they condemned as overly philosophical, and
insisted that students should begin their reading with the church fathers rather
than modern systems, and that theology was best pursued as a process of
recovering biblical doctrine as it had been interpreted by the Christians of the
127
128
129
For an overview, see Sparn, ‘Schulphilosophie’ (2001).
E.g. Brian Walton, The considerator considered (London, 1659), 153–8; [Anon.],
‘Lectori’, in John Bois, Veteris interpretis
cum Beza aliisque recentioribus collatio
in quatuor evangeliis & apostolorum
actis (London, 1655), sigs A2r–A3r;
John
Pearson,
‘Preface’,
in
David Stokes, A paraphrasticall explication of the twelve minor prophets
(London, 1659), sigs a4v–[a5]v.
For examples from Cambridge teaching,
see John Pearson, ‘Oratio I. Inauguralis’
[1661], The minor theological works, ed.
E. Churton, 2 vols (Oxford, 1844), i.402,
130
404–5; ‘Lectiones de Deo’ [early 1660s],
ibid., 245–51, and the remarkably historical-philological ‘Lectiones in Acta
Apostolorum’ [c.1670], ibid., 317–68.
Pearson was Lady Margaret Professor of
Divinity, 1661–73. His colleague, Joseph
Beaumont (1616–99), Regius Professor of
Divinity, 1674–99, was influenced by
Courcelles’s attacks on scholasticphilosophical methods in theology:
Beaumont’s notes from the Arminian’s
Opera theologica are at Peterhouse,
Cambridge, MS Beaumont 43.
Concilia
Magnae
Britanniae
et
Hiberniae, ed. D. Wilkins, 4 vols
(London, 1737), iv.577.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
152
giving up philosophy
first four centuries.131 The most systematic expression of this new, antiphilosophical theological method appears in the advice manual for divinity
students composed by the Oxford-based scholar Henry Dodwell (1641–1711)
in 1671. Philosophy, he said, could be useful in ethics and in natural theology:
to prove the existence of God and establish his attributes.132 But it was useless
in explaining revelation.133 Particularly misguided was the use of medieval
Aristotelianism or modern Cartesianism to interpret a New Testament revelation that had been accommodated to Hellenistic Jews who knew nothing of
either, but were rather Neoplatonists.134 Accordingly, the theologian’s job was
not to philosophise but to perform historical-contextual exegesis of the
revealed Word.
Dodwell was a product of the uniquely anti-Calvinist theology of the
Restored English church, of his own remarkable abilities as a patristic and
Greek scholar, and of his theological idiosyncrasies. And so, while we should
certainly not take him as completely representative of Protestant theological
method in the second half of the seventeenth century, we should nonetheless
recognise that his disdain for the use of philosophy in theology was echoed
across the European Reformed world, in the Dutch Republic, France, and the
Swiss lands, with the result that there was far less incentive for students to
devote much energy to philosophical studies – let alone original writing. As in
Catholic France, this was partially the result of the influence of the new, antischolastic philosophies. It is one of the great myths of European intellectual
history that the rise of Cartesianism either generated or contributed to
a ‘Protestant rationalism’.135 A Christian theologian who happens to be
a Cartesian is in no way more ‘rationalist’ than one who happens to be an
Aristotelian: both will believe that the mysteries of the faith cannot be
131
132
133
134
This is a simplified summary of a complex
story, for which see Quantin, Antiquity,
284–395; Levitin and Mandelbrote,
‘Becoming’ (2019), 321–38.
Henry Dodwell, Two letters of advice
(Dublin, 1672), 179–80, 205–6. Dodwell
did not believe in the natural immortality
of the soul, and thus did not think it could
be established philosophically. For the
uproar this caused when he made this
public in the 1700s, see Quantin,
‘Dodwell’ (2006), 307–11; Pfeffer,
‘Mortalism’ (2020), 174–200. The Two
letters were subsequently republished in
London (1680, 1691), undoubtedly with
the student market in mind.
Two letters, 33, 165–9.
Two letters, sigs b8b–cr, passim.
Dodwell’s point was not that
135
Neoplatonism was in any way a correct
philosophy, but rather that it offered the
contextual framework in which the New
Testament language had to be understood. See further Levitin, Wisdom,
516–23 for his development of these
views in many important and influential
texts published between 1671 and 1706.
For his insistence that apologetics
should rest on exegesis of the New
Testament rather than Cartesian philosophy, see his remarkable letter to
John Falconer, 27 February 1711, Bod.
MS St. Edmund Hall 14, fol. 47r.
Perhaps the most sophisticated statement of that myth appears in the classic
study by Walter Rex, Essays on Bayle
(1965). I shall engage extensively with
Prof. Rex’s seminal book in Part II.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
153
demonstrated via reason. Nor were they inevitably going to subscribe to a more
‘liberal’ form of Christianity: after all, both Pierre Jurieu and Francis Turretin
were good Cartesians (as was Bossuet)!136 Far from advocating a theological
rationalism, Reformed theologians who were also Cartesians in philosophy
were in fact much more likely to take the route adopted by Arnauld or Regis:
that is to say, to insist that theology was still far too philosophical and that the
discipline should focus on the investigation of ‘positive’ statements of revealed
authority. Of course, they continued to insist on the usefulness of philosophy
for natural theology, which had always been practised across the Reformed
world.137 But while in the first half of the seventeenth century the results of
metaphysical enquiry into the divine attributes had been relatively confidently
applied to explicating the revealed truths of Scripture, there was now increasing scepticism about the usefulness of such a method, and thus of any metaphysical speculation in the first place.
Accordingly, the term ‘rationalist’ should be reserved for fringe figures such as
the Dutch physician Lodewijk Meyer (1629–81), who argued in his notorious
Philosophia S. Scripturae interpres (1666) that ‘human reason ought to be the sole
guide in determining the meaning of biblical texts, even if this sometimes meant
emending the text to make it conform to reason’.138 However interesting it is,
Meyer’s position was rejected by almost everyone (as was Spinoza’s, which was
even more on the fringes, especially when it became clear that the biblical
exegesis of Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) was underpinned by the metaphysics of the Ethics (1677)).139 We might also wish to label as ‘rationalists’ the
new generation of Socinians, who started to argue that biblical dogmas which
seemed to be against reason should not be accepted.140 This position was
likewise mostly rejected, including by Arminians, who have been mistakenly
136
137
138
139
For Jurieu and Turretin, see II.2.6.
The well-known Reformed rejection of
natural theology (e.g. in Karl Barth)
emerged much later than the early modern period: see now Sudduth, Reformed
objection (2009), 9–56; Goudriaan,
Orthodoxy, 74–84; Muller, PRRD, iii.164–
94.
Lodewijk Meyer, Philosophia S. Scripturae
interpres ([Amsterdam], 1666). The
quotation is from Touber, Biblical philology (2018), 14. For the debate around
the book, see Preus, Biblical authority
(2001),
34–67;
Bordoli,
Ragione
e scrittura (1997).
The best account of the rejection of rationalist hermeneutics by Dutch theologians is
now Touber, Biblical philology. See also
the comments in Verbeek, Descartes
140
(1992), 76–7, among others. An alternative account, propagated by Straussian
esotericists, tries to find Spinozism wherever possible. This approach depends on
very far-fetched interpretations, or on
accepting uncritically the accusations of
Spinozism that were launched at various
Dutch ministers from time to time. It
attributes immense, improbable importance to the figure of Frederik van
Leenhof (1647–1712), a minor pastor in
Zwolle who was accused of Spinozism by
some of his co-religionists.
The fullest account is now Salatowsky,
Philosophie (2015), esp. 130–86, showing the role played by Johann Crell and
Joachim Stegmann in particular in leading Socinianism towards a form of
Aristotelian rationalism.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
154
giving up philosophy
called ‘rationalists’ when in fact they claimed to advocate less use of reason in
establishing theological doctrines, as we have seen in the case of Episcopius and
Courcelles, and as was also the case with their successor as head of the
Remonstrant Academy, Philipp van Limborch (1633–1712).141 If anything, the
threat of Socinianism contributed further to the move away from anything that
might be considered philosophical rationalism in theology, and towards a purely
philological-exegetical method. Dodwell, for example, believed that the
Socinians should not be taken on in the field of ratiocination, where they
would win, but rather be challenged solely by means of historical-contextual
exegesis of the New Testament revelation.142
If Cartesianism and other new philosophies had any impact on Reformed
theology, it was the opposite of rationalism. Just as with the Jansenists and
others among French Catholics, they inspired a new generation of theologians
to complain ever more vociferously about the intrusion of philosophy into
theology and the excess rationalism on the part of some of their colleagues, and
to insist that theology should be confined to something akin to the ‘positive
theology’ that was coming to dominate in the French religious orders. In
France itself, where the need to respond to Catholic positive theology was
most pressing, the theologians of the academy at Saumur – the most important
teaching institution in the French Reformed world – came to promote a selfconsciously anti-scholastic, humanist-inspired theological method, one which
came to influence other Reformed theologians both in France and abroad.143
Particularly important was the teaching of Etienne Gaussen (c.1638–75),
theology professor in 1665–75, and one of the most interesting figures of
seventeenth-century intellectual history, albeit now barely known even to
specialists.144 During his tenure as philosophy professor (1661–5), Gaussen
had been the first to introduce Cartesianism into a Reformed academy.145
141
142
143
144
See e.g. van Limborch’s major work of
dogmatics,
Theologia
Christiana
(Amsterdam, 1686), 48a–49b for an
assault on the usefulness of philosophy
in scriptural interpretation, partially directed at Meyer.
Dodwell
to
Thomas
Smith,
22 June 1675, Bod. MS Smith 49, fol.
121r; Levitin, Wisdom, 522–3.
There are several studies; the fullest is
Stam, Saumur (1988). For the importance of engagement with the local
Oratorian seminary for its intellectual
formation, see also Dray, ‘Academy’
(1988).
For his biography, we are reliant on the
account by the English Nonconformist
145
John Quick (1636–1706), Dr Williams’s
Library, MS Quick 38.38.42. Two excellent
discussions are Laplanche, L’écriture, 532–
45 (also 551–2 for Etienne de Brais, theology professor 1674–9, who was no less
orthodox than Gaussen, but equally advocated a philological over a philosophical
method
in
theology);
Gootjes,
‘Smattering’ (2013). The latter reports
(596) on the discovery of Gaussen’s ‘loci
communes course’ in manuscript; I have
not yet seen this.
As discovered by Albert Gootjes on the
basis of a MS account by Jean-Robert
Chouet now held in Geneva: see Gootjes,
‘Smattering’. For Chouet’s later Cartesian
teaching, see Heyd, Chouet (1982).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
155
However, when he came to teach theology, he passionately condemned both
the systematisation of the earlier seventeenth century and the use of any
philosophy in theology (even Cartesian).146
Drawing on Catholic methodological vocabulary, he unambiguously maintained that theology should be ‘positive’.147 If things were to be restored to the
way they should be, he continued, then the humanities (literae humaniores)
would reign in theology, and the theologian would be first and foremost
a philologist.148 Unfortunately, students were arriving into the study of divinity fresh from their philosophy courses, and so believed themselves to be good
theologians when they were in possession of a ‘system’ arranged logically
according to the loci communes method and expressed in Aristotelian–
scholastic philosophical vocabulary.149 Gaussen’s point was not primarily
that much of Aristotelian ‘logomachy’ had been shown to be incorrect by
the Cartesians (although he did believe that too), but rather that the use of
any philosophy was irrelevant to the exposition of scriptural truth. According
to Gaussen, if Descartes were to be asked, he would only insist on the
uselessness of his own philosophy for explaining revealed doctrine.150
All these prescriptions were grounded in an epistemological division
between reason and authority: where philosophy was grounded in reason,
theology was grounded in the authority of revelation.151 In any case, the
Bible had been revealed to all people, not just philosophers; it spoke of God
analogically rather than philosophically, and it was accommodated to Jews and
Greeks who knew nothing of Aristotelianism or any other philosophical
system.152 History showed the confusions that mixing theology and philosophy had brought into Christianity, whether the intermixture with Platonism in
146
147
148
Etienne Gaussen, Quatuor dissertationes
theologicae. I. De ratione studii
Theologici. II. De natura Theologiae.
III. De ratione Concionandi. IV. De utilitate Philosophiae ad Theologiam
(Saumur, 1670). The text’s influence
can be charted through its republication
in Saumur (1676), Utrecht (1678), and
Halle (1727). In what follows, I shall
refer to the text by individual dissertation – the pagination is continuous.
‘De ratione studii Theologici’, 12–13;
‘De natura Theologiae’, 119–21
(Gaussen here explains that theology
has three parts: positive, polemical, and
casuistry, but that the last two are just
‘supplements’ (appendices) to the first).
‘De ratione studii Theologici’, 6; ‘De
natura Theologiae’, 139–40 (theologian
as philologist).
149
150
151
152
‘De ratione studii Theologici’, 13–18,
27–8 (quoting Joseph Scaliger against
interpreting Scripture via logical rules
applied to the loci communes); ‘De natura Theologiae’, 88–9; ‘De utilitate
Philosophiae ad Theologiam’, 302–4.
‘De natura Theologiae’, 139. See also ‘De
ratione studii Theologici’, 70–1.
‘De natura Theologiae’, 98–9, 115–16.
Interestingly, Gaussen frequently compares theology to jurisprudence in this
regard, claiming that the latter is also
grounded in positive authority, and
that theology might even be thought of
as ‘Iuris-divini-prudentia’ (116).
‘De natura Theologiae’, 88–92, 100–1;
‘De
utilitate
Philosophiae
ad
Theologiam’, 318.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
156
giving up philosophy
the early church, the Aristotelian–Christian synthesis of the scholastics, or the
Ramist system-building of the Reformed theologians in Germany, who
couldn’t do anything without their endless binary subdivisions.153 The
Socinian heretics demonstrated where the overuse of philosophical reason in
theology would lead; they were to be confuted from Scripture, not by using
metaphysics.154
Positively, the method of teaching theology advocated by Gaussen was very
different from that which had dominated international Reformed pedagogy at
the start of the century. He began with the historical books of the Bible, also
teaching his students the geography and chronology necessary to understand
them, as well as the history of the Jewish setting of early Christianity as it had
been explored by Joseph Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon. Disputations were
banned, because too many students treated theology like the philosophy they
had previously studied and ended up being ‘swallowed by the scholastic sand’.
The second year moved on to equally historical treatments of the more difficult
scriptural books, with winter evenings devoted to reading Eusebius’ Historia
Ecclesiastica. The later years introduced controversy, which was again grounded
above all in works of ecclesiastical history, including the Magdeburg Centuries,
Casaubon, Hottinger, Selden, Baronio, and Du Perron.155 None of this was
intended to undermine any aspect of Reformed orthodoxy. But revealed truths
such as the propagation of sin, predestination, and the Trinity were to be taught
only in their scriptural formulations, without resorting to philosophical vocabulary, and without claiming to penetrate their secrets.156
We can find similar sentiments (albeit not always expressed quite so forcefully) being put forward contemporaneously in the Dutch Republic. Here the
key role was played by the loose grouping of theologians called ‘Cocceians’,
after Johannes Cocceius (1603–69), professor of theology first at Franeker
(1643–50) and then at Leiden (1650–69): central figures include Abraham
Heidanus (1597–1678, professor of theology at Leiden, 1648–76), Christoph
Wittich (1625–87, professor of theology at Nijmegen and then Leiden), Jacob
Alting (1618–78, professor of theology at Groningen, 1667–79), and Antonius
Perizonius (1626–72, professor of theology at Deventer). The prevalence of
two misrepresentations has led to much confusion about the Cocceians. One is
that their theology was profoundly influenced by Cartesianism, even to the
153
‘De ratione studii Theologici’, 66–7, 68–
9, 70 (‘. . . praesertim in Germania,
Theologos Ramistas . . . nihil actum
putent, ni omnia minima maxima in
duas partes secent’), 73–80. In the
earliest church, theology was nonphilosophical: ‘De utilitate Philosophiae
ad Theologiam’, 300–1.
154
155
156
‘De ratione studii Theologici’, 29–30;
‘De natura Theologiae’, 115; ‘De utilitate
Philosophiae ad Theologiam’, 331–2.
‘De ratione studii Theologici’, 20–1, 23–
5 (25: ‘in pulvere Scholastico consumpserunt’), 32–8, 38–43, 57–8.
‘De natura Theologiae’, 90, 99–100; ‘De
utilitate Philosophiae ad Theologiam’,
304, 313–14, 319–20, 331, 335–6.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
157
point of rationalism. In reality, they only used the Cartesian separation of
philosophy and theology to chastise some of their colleagues, above all the
followers of Voetius, for allegedly getting bogged down in scholastic minutiae;
their ‘Cartesianism’ did not go much further than this, and they used the
distinction to build a theology that they claimed was more philological and
biblical.157 This has precipitated the second misrepresentation: that the
Cocceians advocated a historical-contextual approach to Scripture that can
be directly compared with nineteenth-century historical criticism. In fact, their
exegesis of the Old Testament was deeply Christological and typological, to the
extent that many of their contemporaries and immediate successors accused
them of excessive allegorising.158 Rather than look for ‘rationalist’ or ‘historical-critical’ Cocceians, we should appreciate them for what they were:
Reformed theologians who insisted on the separation of philosophy and
theology and increasingly emphasised that theology should be a philological
enterprise.
In Cocceius himself, this anti-philosophy polemic remained relatively
muted, even if it is easily detectable.159 However, the demands of intraconfessional polemic rendered his allies more and more aggressive. In the
observations on theological method made by Heidanus, Wittich, Alting, and
Perizonius, we repeatedly find remarks similar to those made by Gaussen in
Saumur: a disdain for the use of logic in arranging theology into systems;
complaints against the use of excessive logical and metaphysical terminology
to pry into revealed mysteries that were better discussed using primarily
scriptural vocabulary; and the concomitant insistence that theology should
be a philological rather than a philosophical enterprise.160 Perizonius even
proposed a full-scale reform of academic theology in a humanistic direction;
157
158
See van Bunge, Stevin to Spinoza (2001),
51–4, concluding that ‘the fact is that
nothing in Cocceian theology refers to
Cartesianism, or the other way around’.
See also Scholder, Bibelkritik (1966),
152; van Asselt, Cocceius (2001), 76–93;
Touber, ‘Biblical philology’ (2017), 327–
8. When Heidanus et al. did use
Cartesianism for theological purposes,
it was only in natural theology. For selfconsciously ‘scholastic’ opposition to
Wittich by Voetius’ successor at
Utrecht, Petrus van Mastricht, see
Neele, Petrus van Mastricht (2009), 67,
74, 84–5, 89–92, 93–4, 104, 155, 158–60;
Goudriaan, Orthodoxy, 14–20, 54–65.
Van Asselt, Cocceius, 122–35; Yoffie,
‘Literalism’ (2009), 282–359; Hardy,
Criticism, 352–7.
159
160
A good example is the undated Leiden
disputation ‘Responsio ad quaestionem
an theologiae studioso prius philosophia
discenda, an vero linguae sanctae?’, in
Johannes Cocceius, Opera anecdota, theologica et philologica, 2 vols (Amsterdam,
1706), ii.506–7. More are collected in van
der Flier, Specimen historico-theologicum
de Johanne Coccejo anti-scholastico
(Utrecht, 1859), but the interpretative
comments try to make Cocceius
a nineteenth-century historicist; more
balanced is van Asselt, Cocceius, 94–105.
For Heidanus, see above all his
Considerationes ad res quasdam nuper
gestas in Academia Lugduno-Batava
(Hamburg, 1678), e.g. 20–1. (This text,
written in the wake of the Leiden controversy over Cartesianism, was
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
158
giving up philosophy
disputations of the type which (he claimed) currently prevailed in Dutch
Reformed universities, which prioritised the scholastic-philosophical analysis
of doctrine arranged in loci communes, would be replaced by philological
analysis of individual scriptural passages, which could in turn be used to settle
doctrinal issues.161
These were programmes of methodological reform. At the epistemological
level, none of these men challenged the traditional conception of theological
truth that had been inherited from the medieval period: truth was unitary, and
the mysteries did not contradict reason, but were only impenetrable by it.
Accordingly, it would be wrong to describe any of them as either more
‘rationalist’ or more ‘fideist’ than any of their counterparts, even among the
Voetians. Nor were they intrinsically more ‘liberal’: all of them opposed
Arminianism, and indeed they frequently used their anti-rationalist rhetoric
to chastise the Arminians for supposedly coming close to the position of the
Socinians or, even worse, of those like Meyer. Every one of them was horrified
by Spinoza.162 Their primary methodological agenda was to foreground the
role of philology in theology, at the expense of philosophy, the intellectual
dominance of which they increasingly portrayed as one of the great social evils
of the history of Christendom.
The final area of the Reformed world in which we find the same trend is the
Swiss lands, and specifically at the Geneva Academy, one of the great intellectual centres of the Protestant world.163 There again, the greatest impact of
Cartesianism on theology was not to instil a new rationalism, but rather to
engender a new emphasis on the methodological separation of philosophy and
theology, a concomitant stress on the primarily philological nature of proper
theological study, and a discourse that could be quite strongly disdainful about
originally published as Consideratien,
over eenige saecken onlangs voorgevallen
in de Universiteyt binnen Leyden
(Leiden, 1676); see there, 17–18.) For
Wittich, see e.g. his Dissertationes duae
(Amsterdam, 1653), 7–9. This text was
written during the debate about the
compatibility of Cartesian (and
Copernican) cosmology with Genesis,
but its significance is that it generalised
the question into a wider one about
theological methodology. See also
Verbeek, Descartes, 74–5; Eberhardt,
Wittich (2018), esp. 125–93. For Alting,
see his Academicarum dissertationum
heptades duae (Groningen, 1671), sigs
[D4]v–E2r, part of a full-out articulation
of the case for a theology grounded in
philology. For Alting’s method and
161
162
163
practice as a theologian, see further
Touber, ‘Philology’ (2013), 482–90.
Perizonius is the most spectacular of
them all, preparing a 600-page treatise
on the reform of theological method
that was notorious in its time, and
deserves further study: De ratione studii
theologici tractatus (Deventer, 1669),
esp. 424–56 for the curtailment of
philosophy.
See Antonius Perizonius (praes.),
Disputatio theologica (Deventer, 1665);
De ratione; and the discussion of his
correspondence with Cocceius in
Touber, ‘Biblical philology’, 329–30.
See now Touber, Biblical philology,
passim.
Borgeaud, Université (1900); Maag,
Seminary (1995).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
159
philosophy in its more speculative forms. Part of the impetus here came from
Jean-Robert Chouet (1642–1731), who had been an associate of Gaussen at
Saumur and who taught philosophy (including Cartesian) at Geneva between
1669 and 1686. When it came to theology, Cartesianism offered for Chouet
a way of affirming Reformed dogma by rejecting the value of elaborate
speculation concerning the divine decrees and other matters: ‘Chouet distinguished between the finite and the infinite and admitted that, at times, humans
fail to understand the reasons why God does certain things such as to create the
world’; he ‘thus adopted a fideistic position toward theological concepts of God
that are philosophically impossible to reconcile . . . [On] issues such as the
Trinity, [he] recommended tacit acceptance without the need for philosophic
justification.’164
Even more important than Chouet’s adoption of this attitude was its uptake
by his colleagues in the Geneva theology faculty, above all Louis Tronchin
(1629–1705), who held one of the theology chairs from 1661 until his death.165
I shall have a lot more to say about Tronchin when I come to discuss Bayle,
who studied with him in the early 1680s. For now, we need only note that
Tronchin, partially inspired by Gaussen,166 taught his students to refrain from
delving into explanations of revealed truths, but rather to accept them even
with their seeming inconsistencies and contradictions. As he wrote in 1674:
We must always remember that God is a being incomprehensible to man,
and in whom there are and always will be depths which we will never be
able to penetrate completely, nor to conceive fully. But we must not cease
to believe what he tells us clearly, even though it cannot be grasped by our
understanding. And this is the practice of all orthodox theologians, when
it comes to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the divine decrees, and
especially when we have to reconcile the liberty of the free will with the
infallible determination and prescience of God. Even though it is difficult
to conceive of this reconciliation, we do not abandon belief in one or the
other of these doctrines, because God teaches them both clearly and
distinctly.167
164
165
166
167
Klauber, Between (1994), 44. The fullest
account is Heyd, Chouet.
All studies have been superseded by the
magisterial Fatio, Tronchin (2015).
Laplanche, L’écriture, 574.
Louis Tronchin to David Wyss,
8 September 1674: ‘Il nous faut tousjours souvenir que Dieu est un estre
incomprehensible à l’homme, et dans
lequel il y a et y aura tousjours des profondeurs, que nous ne pourrons jamais
tout à fait penetrer, ni bien concevoir;
mais il ne faut pas laisser de croire ce
qu’il nous dit clairement, encore qu’il ne
puisse pas estre tout à fait compris par
nostre entendement; et c’est ainsi qu’en
usent tous les Theologiens orthodoxes,
quand il est question de la doctrine de la
Ste Trinité, des decrets de Dieu, et surtout quand il faut accorder la liberté du
franc arbitre avec la determination, et la
prescience infaillible de Dieu; bien qu’il
soit difficile d’en concevoir l’accord, on
ne laisse pas de croire l’une et l’autre de
ces doctrines, parce que Dieu les
enseigne distinctement et clairement
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
160
giving up philosophy
Oliver Fatio has elegantly summarised the polemical thrust of Tronchin’s
message: ‘using Cartesian terminology, Tronchin suggests that one can explain
not what God and his work are in themselves, as an overconfident scholastic
might think, but rather what God says about them clearly and distinctly in
Scripture’;168 accordingly, his teaching minimised the use of philosophy.
This is about as far from rationalism as theological method can get without
degenerating into a theory of double truth. Tronchin, like Chouet and many
other Reformed theologians, did use Cartesian philosophy to attack the Roman
Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist – or specifically, that of transubstantiation –
but they considered this to be categorically different from subjecting revealed
truths such as predestination or the Trinity to the test of philosophical reason:
where one subject concerned a real physical body on Earth, the other two were
revelations about the unfathomable divine nature. Just as with the Dutch
separationists, we need not assume that there was anything intrinsically ‘liberal’, let alone secularising, about the adoption of this theological method by
Tronchin. It was deployed at the service of confessional polemic: to make it
clear that the errors of the Socinians, Arminians, and Jesuits had stemmed
from a hubristic rationalism that could not threaten the biblically grounded
faith of the Reformed.
I.2.4 Conclusion: the Myth of Theological ‘Rationalism’
I began this chapter with Jean Le Clerc. Historians who have written about him
have repeatedly sought to find a philosophical underpinning for his ideas,
whether in Cartesianism, Lockeianism, or (even more implausibly)
Spinozism.169 But while he was to some extent influenced by the second of
these, his ideas about the relationship between philosophy and theology, and
that between faith and reason, could only be described as profoundly antirationalist and anti-philosophical. The reason for this is simple: he had been
deeply influenced by the new wave of ‘separationist’ theologians, both
Protestant and Catholic. He had studied in Geneva with Tronchin, before
adopting Arminianism under the influence of the writings of Courcelles. He
admired Dodwell hugely, adopting many of his conclusions and contextualist
methods.170 In 1700, he even republished Petau’s vast Theologica dogmata, not
because he was a closet Catholic, but because he believed that the great Jesuit’s
method of positive theology would further his own, confessional agenda, by
toutes deux.’ I was led to this letter by
Fatio, Tronchin, 317; it is quoted in full
in Stauffenegger, Eglise et société (1983–
4), i.482 (the original is Archives
Tronchin, Société du Musée historique
de la Réformation, Bibliothèque de
Genève, vol. 43, fol. 54v).
168
169
170
Fatio, Tronchin, 317. Tronchin’s Geneva
teaching is discussed at 317–403.
E.g. Pitassi, Croire et savoir (1987), esp.
45–50; Pocock, Barbarism (1999–2015),
v.89–114; Hardy, Criticism, 391–7;
Israel, Contested (2006), 425.
Levitin, Wisdom, 539, n. 569.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
161
demonstrating the historical sources of Arminian beliefs concerning predestination and subordinationist Trinitarianism in particular.171 As I have already
noted, he spent most of his life from the early 1680s onwards arguing against
the catastrophic influence which, he claimed, the intermixture of philosophy
and theology had had on Christendom; the application of Cartesianism to
theology, he insisted, would be as catastrophic as the application of
Aristotelianism by the scholastics (we shall encounter the specifics of his
arguments on several occasions in this book).
Again, it should be stressed that this was not fideism, but rather separationism, and a particularly humanist one at that. First of all, Le Clerc, like almost
everyone else discussed in this chapter, was sure that reason could establish at
least some of the truths of natural theology, above all the existence of some
kind of first being (although perhaps not replete with the full list of divine
attributes of the Judaeo-Christian deity). Nor did he or anyone else claim that
the truths of philosophy really did contradict the truths of revelation – to say
this really would have been to go beyond the whole of the mainstream Western
theological tradition. As we saw in the case of Regis, the separationists came
closest to this position when they said that philosophical common notions
seemed to contradict the revealed truths, and that there was nothing more the
exegete could do apart from to assert that this was only a seeming contradiction, because the (rational) conception of God did not permit him to perform
contradictions. To us modern secularists this may appear a tiny, immaterial
distinction, but to the early moderns it meant the world. For it allowed them to
preserve the traditional epistemological conception of the relationship
between faith and reason while waging a full-out methodological campaign
against the intrusion of philosophy into theology, and in favour of a theological
method that was grounded in the exegesis of positive, authoritative statements
via the ‘literae humaniores’ (to use Gaussen’s phrase).
This was, in other words, another instance of humanism triumphing over
abstract philosophising. Again, it should be reasserted that there is nothing
intrinsic to the separation thesis that threatens such philosophy (after all, it
was also articulated by Spinoza). It is just that in later seventeenth-century
Europe, it was primarily deployed by theologians who wanted to make
theology more humanistic, and so tended to portray much of speculative
philosophising as the product of previous efforts to mix philosophy and
theology. Hence Le Clerc’s eager appropriation of the experimentalists’ and
171
Denis Petau, Opus de theologicis dogmatibus, ed. Theophilus Alethinus [= Jean Le
Clerc], 6 vols (Amsterdam, 1700). See Le
Clerc’s ‘Praefatio’ in i, sigs **3r–[**4]v,
pitting Petau against both Arians and
the Reformed. Le Clerc repeated the
technique of using classic Jesuit publications to advance his Arminian agenda
three years later when he republished several Jesuit anti-Augustine works in the
Appendix
Augustiniana
(‘Antwerp’
[= Amsterdam], 1703).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
162
giving up philosophy
physicians’ anti-philosophical rhetoric. What we witness across Europe
c.1700 is a tactical alliance between the positive theologians and the new
natural philosophers, with speculative philosophy – especially in its most
metaphysical forms – coming out as the loser. Natural philosophy would help
prove God’s existence from his creation; exegesis would deal with his
revealed world. The two were not to be mixed, and all forms of abstract
speculation were to be discouraged, or historicised as the product of the
barbarous theology–philosophy hybrid that was scholasticism. The only
place (at least in the Protestant world) where a heavily philosophical theology
really survived was in Germany, where, partly under the influence of Leibniz,
an alliance between metaphysics and theology – one that did sometimes
come close to forms of ‘rationalism’ that were unknown in the seventeenth
century – was advocated by Wolff and especially by Baumgarten,172 and
picked up by some minor Reformed theologians.173 But even there, such
a theology was in time swept away by the historicist approach to theology of
the so-called ‘neologists’. (In some of the more backward-looking parts of the
Catholic world the alliance between metaphysics and theology was also
preserved through the eighteenth century, but it is difficult to see this as
having much influence on European intellectual life.)174
If, as I have argued, this kind of separationism was the dominant intellectual
force in seventeenth-century Europe, then why have we for so long looked for
the triumph of ‘rationalism’ at this time? One reason is the desire to explain
proleptically the rise of deism (see further IV.2). However, perhaps a more
interesting one is the confusion of two types of seventeenth-century theological rationalism: that concerning the epistemology of belief, and that concerning the system of knowledge. It is certainly true that across the Protestant
world, the second half of the seventeenth century, and much of the eighteenth,
witnessed a reaction against what was presented as enthusiasm: a position that
was caricatured as a hyper-individualistic, anti-intellectualist illuminationism,
especially by opponents of Reformed theology such as the Arminians. This
sometimes had quite profound intellectual consequences, not least a shift away
from the idea that the testimonium internum of the Holy Spirit offered the basis
for establishing the veracity and authority of Scripture. But such ideas were
not, for the most part, replaced by philosophical rationalism, but rather by
172
173
For the influence of Wolff on
Baumgarten’s theology teaching, see
Schloemann, Baumgarten (1974), 66–
79.
Such as Daniel Wyttenbach in Marburg:
see his Tentamen theologiae dogmaticae,
3 vols (Frankfurt, 1747–9). For its use in
the Catholic world, see Schäfer, Kirche
(1974), 103–50.
174
See e.g. the case of Würzburg, as discussed in Lesch, Neuorientierung der
Theologie (1978). But even outlying
parts of the Catholic world now
favoured positive theology: see, e.g., for
Portugal, Souza, ‘Catholic enlightenment’ (2011), 359–62.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
emancipating theology from philosophy
163
a form of historicism: the claim that scriptural authority could be established
by historical means, not least the (supposedly) reliable evidence of early
miracles.175
Further confusion on this score has been introduced by the fact that the
Arminians – as well as some others within the Reformed fold, above all John
Cameron (1579–1625) and his followers at Saumur such as Moïse Amyraut
(1596–1664), as well as many English anti-Calvinists – subscribed to an
anthropology of belief that was different from the Reformed mainstream,
insisting that the process of conversion affects the intellect rather than the
will.176 If we wish, we can call this ‘intellectualism’, but it was certainly no
rationalism (however much others among the Reformed tried to portray it as
such).177 Reading the works of Cameron, Amyraut, or the Dutch and English
Arminians we always find exactly the same attitude to the role of reason in
theology as among their Reformed counterparts: reason cannot penetrate the
revealed mysteries, but is otherwise very useful, not least in ethics and natural
theology. In this regard, the vast majority of academically educated Europeans
had been ‘rationalists’ since the thirteenth century.
The reification of an Arminian ‘rationalism’, which is sometimes presented
as virtually indistinguishable from Socinianism, unwittingly adopts the position of the Arminians’ enemies. On the relationship between faith and reason,
the Arminians were entirely within the mainstream of the Christian tradition.
Contrary to an oft-repeated interpretation, they neither invented, nor were the
sole users of, the distinction between things above and contrary to reason,
which was a standard argumentative technique deployed by Protestants since
the sixteenth century to attack the doctrine of transubstantiation (supposedly
contrary to reason) while defending the existence of other mysteries (supposedly above reason). This was not the strongest argument, and Catholics
could easily counter it by claiming that the Protestants were picking and
choosing their mysteries, a claim that became more rhetorically powerful
with the growth of Socinianism, which seemed to ‘prove’ that Protestantism
harboured a rationalism waiting to break out. Accordingly, many Protestants
were cautious about using the distinction: Bayle is again the most interesting
case in this regard (see II.3.3).
To finish, let me rearticulate why the shift I have charted here is so important
to this book. If we return to Le Clerc’s Ontologia, we find something quite
remarkable: a hugely popular metaphysics textbook, read across the Protestant
world, teaching students about the near uselessness of the discipline. A century
175
176
Grotius played an important role in
popularising this method: see Heering,
Apologist (2004), esp. 127–37.
My summary is an oversimplification: for
details, see Stam, Saumur; Gootjes, Pajon
177
(2014), 37–48; Moore, Hypothetical universalism (2007).
The confusion of this intellectualism
with some kind of rationalism is the
great defect of Rex’s classic Essays.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
164
giving up philosophy
earlier, such an attitude would have been confined to radical anti-intellectualists
such as Hofmann, whose ideas were quickly suppressed and silenced. Now they
were being expressed not at the service of such anti-intellectualism, but rather as
part of a programme of intellectual reform that was being implemented across
the continent, one in which theology was more and more being equated with
‘positive’ theology that focussed solely on conducting historical–philological
exegesis of authoritative texts, and ‘philosophy’ was equated with various
forms of empirical, experimental, and mathematical enquiry that were selfconsciously pursued not as an ‘inquiry into abstract questions . . . approached
largely in terms of a priori conceptual connections’ (Pasnau’s words, p. 19
above). When we turn to Bayle and Newton, we shall find both of them being
profoundly influenced by these developments. Before that, we shall find that
these structural and institutional shifts were accompanied by a remarkable
intellectual shift: a reconceptualisation of the capacities of the human mind
based largely on historical and ethnographic material, not least that deriving
from the Far East.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press
I.3
Reconstructing the Pagan Mind
in Seventeenth-Century Europe
A Historico-Philosophical Critique of Pure Reason
One of the more persistent myths concerning European intellectual life is that
it was only in the eighteenth century that history became ‘philosophical’. To
quote a well-known, seductive essay by Hugh Trevor-Roper on ‘The historical
philosophy of the enlightenment’, first published in 1963:
What was the ‘philosophic history’ of the Enlightenment, and how is it to
be distinguished from the historiography of the seventeenth century? . . .
The broad lines are clear enough. The ‘philosophical historians’ rejected
the mere accumulation of detail and fact . . . Instead they looked for
explanation . . . The philosophical historians also . . . rejected any theoretical predilection for Europe or Christendom, and refused to confine the
course of history within the time-honoured channels so deeply dug and so
faithfully watered by so many Christian writers . . . all humanity came
naturally and equally in, and most of the great eighteenth-century
historians . . . extended their range to other continents and other civilisations, from whose material they impartially drew their conclusions. They
believed mankind to be everywhere essentially the same, subject to the
same laws, and capable of comparative treatment, even in religion.1
Supposedly, the eighteenth century not only invented a philosophical
approach to historical explanation, it also expanded that approach to areas of
the world previously untouched by the Eurocentric pens of the seventeenthcentury pedants concerned only with the ‘mere accumulation of detail and
fact’. Although much excellent work on early modern historiography has been
done in the half century since Lord Dacre delivered these triumphant judgements, the overriding assumption often remains broadly the same. And so we
have recently been told that pre-‘enlightenment’ thinkers were wedded to
a ‘cyclical or providential notion of history’, and only once the spell of such
a notion was broken, and a mentality emerged that ‘assume[d] the possibility
of ever-increasing human knowledge, and valorize[d] philosophical thinking
1
Trevor-Roper, History (2010), 2–4.
165
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
166
giving up philosophy
as a way to bring about such a future’, were Europeans able to produce real
philosophical or conjectural history.2
It is remarkable that such judgements concerning a putative ‘revolution’ in
historical writing can be so confidently offered by historians who often admit
their lack of interest in, and ignorance of, pre-1700 historiography. The
situation has not been helped by the prevalence of two national – and perhaps
nationalist – narratives. One implies that conjectural history was a particularly
Scottish phenomenon, or even that it was unique to the ‘Scottish enlightenment’ or to eighteenth-century commercial society.3 A second concerns
a supposedly French project to tell the history of the human mind, or ‘l’histoire
de l’esprit humain’. Supposedly, ‘the philosophers who developed the revolutionary idea of “l’histoire de l’esprit humain” as a unitary process encompassing the whole of the human condition were Bayle, Fontenelle, Boulainvilliers,
Fréret, Lévesque de Burigny, Mirabaud, Boureau-Deslandes, d’Argens, and
Boulanger, culminating in the young Diderot’.4
One can see easily whence such assumptions are born. Certainly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not for the most part produce grand
histories of ‘civil society’, and so historians of political thought, generalising
from their relatively narrow but self-confident discipline, assume that they
produced no ‘philosophical’ history to speak of. More pragmatically, pre-1700
historical writings were usually written in dense humanist Latin, and were
adorned with a forbidding number of digressions, citations, and quotations
(the last of these often in the original languages). Why bother actually reading
these texts when it is so much easier to dismiss them as dry accumulation, and
to declare that ‘comparative history of religions, history of philosophy, study of
the Church Fathers, ancient Greece and Rome, Jewish history, Islam, and
Chinese civilization’ were all ‘radically transformed’ c.1700?5
Thankfully, such generalisations are gradually becoming a thing of the past.
Transformative studies have shown that the histories of pagan, Jewish, and
Christian religion written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries directly
informed those of the eighteenth, and that it is impossible to posit a radical break
at any point, let alone c.1700.6 However, what has not yet, I think, been offered is
an attempt to explore whether seventeenth-century histories of religion were
‘philosophical’ in the sense so often attributed to those written in the
eighteenth.7 I should like to suggest that they were, in two senses. First, they
2
3
4
5
Brewer, Enlightenment past (2008), 49.
For a recent survey in which the Scots play
a heroic role, see Palmeri, Conjectural history (2016).
Israel, Contested, 496. See likewise Dagen,
L’esprit (1977); Piaia et al., ‘History’
(2015).
Israel, Contested, 410.
6
7
See the overview in Levitin, ‘Sacred history’ (2012), and, since then, Stolzenberg,
Oedipus
(2013);
Ossa-Richardson,
Tabernacle (2013).
For ‘philosophical history’ of religion in
the eighteenth century, see Mills, ‘First
study’ (2015). But as I shall show in
II.1.4, the argument of the Scottish
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
167
were informed not by an ‘uncritical’ desire for simple accumulation, or solely by
the ‘antiquarian’ impulse so beautifully evoked by Arnaldo Momigliano, but by
specific, sophisticated philosophical assumptions about how the human mind
functions. Second, they were ‘conjectural’, in that they filled the gaps in the
ancient sources they now found to be unreliable specifically with philosophical
conjectures concerning how the pagan mind must have worked.8
Thanks to these two factors, the conception of the pagan mind was transformed during the course of the long seventeenth century. The search for any
similarity between Judaeo-Christian monotheism and pagan conceptions of the
divine was gradually abandoned, in favour of a view of almost all pagan thought
(at least among the elites) as inherently and necessarily animist, pantheist,
vitalist, or even monist.9 This reading emerged in great part from new interpretations of Greek philosophy, interpretations which were then generalised to
explain all of pagan religious thought, leading to a fierce debate about the
existence of pagan monotheism. The comparison between Greek philosophy
and Eastern religion become one of the most important intellectual enterprises
of the century. Indeed, it is central to everything that follows that we remember
that we are dealing with – and attempting to recover – a lost world that existed
before nineteenth-century Philhellenism, a world where Greek philosophy was
not considered a unique phenomenon insulated from the rest of pagan thought,
but rather one that came more and more to be viewed as a manifestation of
a global ‘religious’ worldview. The emergent set of historical-philosophical
assumptions became so dominant that, by 1700, they came to represent
a ‘logic of paganism’ that was believed to encompass religious beliefs across
the world, past and present; from ancient Egypt to modern Japan, and well
beyond. The dominance of this set of assumptions in turn had a remarkable
impact on wider discourse about what it was to be ‘rational’, to believe in the
dogmas of Christianity, or to engage in philosophy or theology. As I shall show
in Parts II and III, it was also central to the thought of Bayle and Newton.
I.3.1 The Post-Patristic Conception of the Pagan Mind
(i) The Patristic Paradigm
The texts that I shall be discussing belong to a range of genres: philosophical
treatises and textbooks; works of philological and historical scholarship; tracts
8
thinker studied there had been developed
a century earlier, by Pierre Gassendi!
I have previously made a preliminary
argument for the importance of seventeenth-century histories of religion to the
development of conjectural history in my
‘Egyptology’ (2015).
9
While I will continue to use such terms, it
is important to note at the outset that they
are anachronistic, and that early moderns
struggled to come up with an adequate
vocabulary for religio-philosophical doctrines that made a first principle immanent in the world.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
168
giving up philosophy
of religious apologetics; salvoes in inter-confessional polemics; travellers’
reports, and more. We should respect the differences between these genres.
Each came with expectations about what should be contained in its texts, and,
just as importantly, what should not. No one, for example, expected
a philosophical textbook to engage in deep historical-theological speculation.
Nonetheless, all these texts came to share a set of assumptions derived from
a complex set of developments that occurred from the late sixteenth century
onwards. Those developments are best understood by focussing on one genre
in particular: religious apologetics.
This is a subject that is not entirely unstudied.10 Nonetheless, it is one that
seems to me to have remained somewhat misunderstood, and therefore in
need of being reconstructed from the ground up. To do so, let us begin by
asking a basic question: why did seventeenth-century humanists and theologians feel any need to write new works of historical apologetics at all? After all,
almost all the great works of patristic historical apologetics – Justin Martyr’s
two Apologies, Dialogue with Trypho, and Exhortation to the Greeks; Tatian’s
Address to the Greeks; Athenagoras’ Supplication for the Christians; Clemens
Alexandrinus’ Protrepticus and Stromata; Origen’s Contra Celsum; Marcus
Minucius Felix’s Octavius; Tertullian’s Ad nationes and Apologeticus;
Arnobius’ Adversus nationes; Lactantius’ Institutiones divinae; Eusebius’
Praeparatio evangelica and Demonstratio evangelica; Theodoret of Cyr’s Cure
of pagan maladies, among others – had been republished, often with extensive
commentary and critical apparatus.11 The importance of these texts as sources
for the writing of the history of religion in early modern Europe cannot be
overstated. Older pagan texts – Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, etc. – offered
a wealth of information. But what they did not offer was much in the way of
diachronic analysis of the historical interrelationship between various religions: which sage came first, who stole from whom, and so on. By contrast, the
Christians texts (and the Jewish books that inspired them) supplied far more
arguments about exactly such matters.12 In the face of this wealth of early
Christian material, which by the early seventeenth century was widely available
across Europe in relatively cheap editions used even by students, why did
anyone feel that a new kind of historical apologetics was required at all?
To answer this question, we must consider the structure of patristic historical
apologetics. Of course, Christian writers relentlessly emphasised the errors of
10
E.g. Platt, Reformed (1981); Heering,
Apologist; Pitassi, Apologétique (1991);
Sheppard, Anti-atheism (2015); Laplanche,
L’évidence (1983). Renaissance apologetics
could do with significantly more scholarship. The relevant section in Dulles,
Apologetics (1971), 145–55 is very
11
12
superficial and confused in its use of various key categories.
For a start on a bibliography of patristic
publishing, see Quantin, ‘Pères’ (1993).
For this kind of ‘cultural–intellectual’
history in antiquity more broadly, see
esp. Cancik, Religionsgeschichten (2008),
3–27.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
169
paganism: its idolatry, superstition (δεισιδαιμονία), polytheism, etc. But at the
same time, educated Christians, seeking elite converts, sought to posit similarities between the pagan wisdom admired by prospective converts (or opponents
such as Celsus and Porphyry). In the second century, Justin Martyr, adopting an
apologetic strategy already prevalent in Hellenistic Judaism, and playing on the
Greeks’ own belief in the antiquity of ‘alien wisdom’, argued that the pagans had
derived their religious and philosophical ideas from the Jews, specifically from
Moses, and that that wisdom also contained some of the truths of Christianity:
hence Plato’s supposed adumbration of the Trinity, and so on. This argument
could be taken in two directions. One, which we may for convenience label the
‘negative/plagiarism’ thesis – and which Justin’s own works emphasise much
more strongly13 – suggests that ‘correct’ pagan theology (which meant that
practised by a few elites, and distinct from the crude polytheism of the masses)
was dependent on access to the Old Testament, or to Jewish teachings (perhaps
mediated by travel to other eastern locales, especially Egypt, where they were
already known). At its most radical, this apologetic strand denied any independent value to pagan philosophy or theology beyond what was derived from
Judaeo-Christian revelation. In contrast, the second strand, which we might
label ‘positive/syncretistic’, tended to have a higher opinion of the pagans’ (or at
least the pagan philosophers’) capacity to grasp truth independently, usually on
the basis of some kind of broadly Neoplatonic conception of the human soul’s
ability to participate in the divine, or to communicate with the eternal logos.
Here we may cite the examples of Clemens Alexandrinus and Origen, although
again it should be stressed that this was always combined with the plagiarism
thesis.14 Moreover, the claims of this second strand should also be divided into
two further strands. What we might label a ‘hard’ similarity thesis would insist
that knowledge of even revealed mysteries like the Trinity was available to the
pagans. ‘Soft’ similarity, by contrast, would only emphasise their acquiescence to
truths that could be known naturally, such as monotheism and the immortality
of the soul.
Crucially, both arguments depended on emphasising elements of similarity
between Christianity and paganism. For contemporary pagans to be persuaded
by such arguments, they had to be persuasive. That persuasiveness was varied.
When many of the church fathers argued that pagan polytheism had, at least
among the elite, in fact been considered a form of monarchical monotheism,
they were pushing at an open door: for several centuries, some educated
Greeks had espoused variants of the view that the pantheon of gods was in
fact symbolic of, or subservient to, one cosmic intellect. On other subjects,
patristic syncretisms would have been less convincing. When Clemens
Alexandrinus claimed that creation ex nihilo was held not only by Plato
13
E.g. Dial., vii.1–2; see further Droge,
Homer (1989), 49–81.
14
Droge, Homer, 124–67.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
170
giving up philosophy
(dubious enough) but also by the Stoics (entirely improbable), he cannot have
convinced many.15 Judaeo-Christian forgeries such as the Sibylline Oracles or
the prophecies of Hystaspes may have had more immediate success in convincing some of the direct compatibility of paganism and Christianity, but soon
led to the embarrassing accusation that Christianity relied on ‘pious frauds’,16
and so to cautious repudiation by Augustine and others.17 Positing that pagan
philosophers – especially Plato – knew the Trinity may have buttressed Origen
against Celsus, but again became an embarrassment in intra-Christian debates,
as when Origen’s subordinationist Trinitarianism was condemned as Platonic
fallacy by Jerome.18
Nonetheless, this search for similarity – which, it should be emphasised, in the
minds of its practitioners never impinged on the divine, revealed status of
Christianity (why should it?) – was for the most part gleefully adopted by the
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century scholars and apologists who benefitted from the
systematic rediscovery and publication of the works of the church fathers. I am
not talking here about the Neoplatonic fringe – Ficino, Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola, Reuchlin, Postel – whose importance has probably been overplayed,
but rather about the apologetic mainstream. Above all, the positive/syncretist
emphasis on similarity was adopted by Agostino Steuco, whose De perenni
philosophia (1540), despite its name, was less a work proposing a new philosophy
and more an attempt at a historical apologetics that was prepared to discover
almost all of Christian theology – creation ex nihilo, a fully consubstantial
Trinity, etc. – in much of pagan philosophy.19 Steuco’s enthusiasm for the
insights of the pagans was controversial and not widely shared, but he collected
so much data that even in the seventeenth century, when everyone knew that the
philological foundations on which his edifice was built were decidedly shaky, his
book continued to be recommended as an introduction to historical apologetics
in reading guides for prospective divines across Europe.20
More common were variants of the negative/plagiarism thesis. These could
be relatively mild, as in the exceedingly popular (partly because exceedingly
uninventive) Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne (1581) by the French
Reformed leader Philippe de Mornay (1549–1623).21 Or they could insist
15
16
17
18
19
Strom. v.14.
E.g. Porphyry, Plot., 16.
See Grafton, Defenders (1991), 162–77,
esp. 165–8.
Jerome, Cont. Ruf., i.14.
Agostino Steuco, De perenni philosophia
libri X (Basel, 1542 [1st ed. = Lyon,
1540]), 337–475 for creation ex nihilo,
a subject that will be of particular importance for us later. See Muccillo, ‘Steuco’
(1988).
20
21
E.g. Zacarías Boverio, Demonstrationes
symbolorum verae, et falsae religionis
(Lyon, 1617), 132a; and for some
English examples, see Martin Fotherby,
Atheomastix (London, 1622), sig. [A5]v;
Richard Baxter, A Christian directory
(London, 1673), 928.
E.g. Philippe de Mornay, De la verité de la
religion Chrestienne [1581] (Paris, 1585),
67–93, passim.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
171
strongly on the total incapacity of pagans to achieve almost any truth –
whether theological or even philosophical – outside of a Judaic (i.e. postMosaic) inheritance: this strategy was usually adopted by strongly Reformed
or Lutheran writers, who incorporated it into anti-Pelagian polemics about the
limits of fallen reason. Here we might instance such late and philologically
impressive examples as the Lutheran Johann Heinrich Ursinus’ 1661 investigation of Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, and Sanchuniathon the Phoenician,
which insisted on the chronological priority of Moses to all of them;22 or the
huge Court of the gentiles (1669–78) by the English Nonconformist theologian
Theophilus Gale, which consists mostly of a regurgitation of patristic commonplaces about Mosaic intellectual primacy, incorporated into a scheme of
Reformed covenant theology.23
There was nothing ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ about such emphasis on similarity: whatever the utopian ecumenical dreams of men like Mornay, their works
were eagerly recommended as pedagogical reading by the most orthodox,
bigoted divines across Europe, and used as part of a full course of polemical
divinity. Moreover, it was through the lens of the ‘patristic paradigm’ that the
discoveries of the religions of the new world and of east Asia were usually
interpreted. How could this not be the case, given the prevalence of patristic
texts (and commentaries upon them) within theological curricula? It comes as
no surprise to find that the famous Jesuits José de Acosta (1539–1600) and
Antonio Possevino (1533–1611) recommended that their missionary colleagues reread the relevant early Christian classics before setting off.24
(ii) The Rejection of the Patristic Paradigm
How and when did European scholars come to modify this patristic paradigm?
The key shift occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,
a period of great importance not just for the issues at hand, but for the prehistory of the Western humanities more generally. It was then that humanism
gradually shifted to a more contextualised, historicist approach, one which,
more and more, emphasised the difference between past and present. As is
almost always the case, principle followed practice, and we are dealing here not
with methodological theory, but with a set of empirical discoveries which in
turn generated polemical articulations of ‘correct’ scholarly method.
The first, and now most well-known,25 of these discoveries was chronological. In particular, Joseph Scaliger’s intense research offered a vision of
22
23
Johann Heinrich Ursinus, De Zoroastre
Bactriano (Nuremberg, 1661).
Theophilus Gale, The court of the gentiles
(London, 1669–77). See Levitin, Wisdom,
146–53; Pigney, ‘Gale’ (2010).
24
25
Ryan, ‘New worlds’ (1981), 528. For evidence of the missionaries’ use of patristic
precedent, see below.
See in brilliant detail Grafton, Scaliger II
(1993).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
172
giving up philosophy
history in which the antiquity of Egypt was pushed very far back (dangerously
far for some of his readers).26 One long-term impact of this was the negation of
the idea of Mosaic intellectual primacy: the biblical Jews started to be portrayed
not as the fount of wisdom, but either as an independent, largely primitive
people, or, gradually, as inheritors of Egyptian customs and ideas. There was
nothing heterodox about such arguments, which culminated in the works of
John Marsham (1602–85) and John Spencer (1630–93) in the 1670s and 1680,
works which were designed not to usher in a new secular comparatism, but to
defend aspects of orthodox religious belief using the techniques of the new
scholarship. (The same can be said for the incorporation of Chinese chronology into the biblical framework from the mid-seventeenth century
onwards.)27 One side effect was the gradual death of the negative/plagiarism
thesis, and through the course of the century scholars became increasingly
critical of the Hellenistic Jews and the church fathers for inventing the myth of
Jewish intellectual primacy.
This brings us to our second transformation: a new, critical attitude to a set
of texts that we may broadly label ‘Hellenistic’ – that is to say, stretching from
the Letter of Aristeas (second century bce), through to the works of the
Hellenistic Jews, and then the early Christian writers (up to Eusebius) who
were inspired by them. Sixteenth-century scholars not only discovered the
phenomenon of Hellenistic Judaism,28 but, just as importantly, recognised that
many of the claims about ancient pagan history made by the Hellenistic Jews
and their Christian successors were dangerously unreliable, to be read more as
pious propaganda than as trustworthy history.29 Isaac Casaubon’s famous
denunciation of the Corpus Hermeticum was only one part of this historical–
philological project; no less important was the repudiation of the Chaldean
Oracles as a serious source for the putative similarity between Christian and
ancient Near Eastern theology.30 These sources’ claims for Mosaic primacy, or
for more general similarity between pagan and Judaeo-Christian ideas – claims
which lay at the heart of the traditional apologetic project – likewise came
under scrutiny. To give only one example, John Selden (1584–1654) would
26
27
For the latest word, see Grafton,
‘Chronology’ (2019).
In Marsham’s case, the veracity of the
Masoretic chronology; in Spencer’s, the
liturgy of the English church. See Levitin,
Wisdom, 156–64; Levitin, ‘Spencer’
(2013). Derrick Mosley is preparing
a study of Marsham that will undoubtedly supersede all previous work, including my own. For the question of Chinese
chronology, stimulated above all by
28
29
30
Martino Martini, see von Collani,
‘Theologie und Chronologie’ (2000).
Grafton, ‘Rediscovery’ (2014), and the
works cited there; Hardy, Criticism,
184–9.
See e.g. Joseph Scaliger, ‘Animadversiones’,
in Thesaurus temporum Eusebii Pamphili
(Leiden, 1606), 4–5; see further
Mandelbrote, ‘Aristeas’ (2016).
Grafton, ‘Protestant’ (1983); Mulsow,
Ende (2002); Levitin, Wisdom, 54–70.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
173
soon respond with scandalised incredulity to the idea that Aristotle had been
taught by a wandering Jew, an idea he dismissed as a fable concocted by selfaggrandising Hellenistic Jews.31 Once again, one did not have to be a cuttingedge philologist to make such claims, since they were quickly incorporated into
both university pedagogy and works of haute vulgarisation.
The third and final component of this transformative moment was a new, more
contextual and distant attitude to Greek philosophy. In this case, this was not
primarily the result of philological scholarship. Rather, developments within
philosophy itself led to a new vision of ancient thought as radically alien to, and
not directly compatible with, ‘modern’ (i.e. post-Christ) ideas. The Platonic
revival had met with stern opposition that used the history of philosophy to
emphasise the difference between pagan Platonism and correct natural philosophy or Christian theology.32 More important were developments within
Aristotelianism. The rediscovery and use of commentators such as Themistius
and Alexander of Aphrodisias, combined with the long controversy over
Pomponazzi’s claims that the immortality of the soul could not be proved from
Aristotle’s philosophy, similarly led to the realisation – at least in some quarters –
that Aristotle may have been even further from the Christian worldview than had
previously been assumed.33 Finally, the publication of, and growing familiarity
with, the fragments of the philosophers we now call the Presocratics also slowly
began to convince early modern Europeans that Greek philosophy had been far
more unfamiliar, and above all, far more ‘pagan’, than they had ever thought.34
Once again, the speed with which such historical–philological conclusions
came to be integrated into wider intellectual culture was remarkable. For
example, the famous and hugely influential Jesuit commentary on Aristotle
produced at Coimbra between 1592 and 1606 devoted great space to elucidating the opinions of the monists chastised by Aristotle in the first book of the
Physics. Going beyond narrowly philosophical concerns, it argued that apologists like Steuco had been wrong to read them as prefiguring a JudaeoChristian conception of a monotheistic transcendent deity. Rather, it claimed,
the earliest Greek philosophers – men like Xenophanes, Melissus, and
Parmenides, but also theogonic poets like Hesiod – were monist materialists
who thought the world emerged from one material first principle, certainly
very different from the Judaeo-Christian deity. According to the Coimbrans,
these Greeks consequently conceived of the world as akin to a giant animal,
a fact only concealed by an enigmatic manner of philosophising about the first
31
32
John Selden, De jure naturali & gentium
(London, 1640), 14–15.
See above all Giovanni Battista Crispo,
De ethnicis philosophis caute legendis
(Rome, 1594), on which see Glawe,
Hellenisierung (1912), 24–6.
33
34
The fullest account is now Martin,
Subverting (2014).
For an overview of the printing of various
Presocratic fragments, see the relevant
entries in Hankins and Palmer, Recovery.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
174
giving up philosophy
principle that was similar to that previously adopted by the Egyptians and
Chaldeans.35
The confluence of these three developments challenged the central presuppositions of patristic apologetics and the historical assumptions that they had
sustained. More and more, it became difficult – if not impossible – to insist on
similarity between the pagan and Judaeo-Christian conceptions of God. In turn,
this left writers of apologetics with a problem: if it was not going to rely on the
church fathers’ historical claims, what should a new, distinctly seventeenthcentury apologetics look like? Furthermore, philosophers had good reasons to
keep an eye on the answers offered to these questions. After all, those in the
Catholic world still had to abide, at least in principle, by the injunctions of the
Fifth Lateran Council (see I.2.2). Moreover, both they and their Protestant
counterparts wanted to show that their philosophies – especially if they looked
new – were supportive of the aims of natural theology (this was the case even if
they were strong separationists, as per I.2.3). To do that, it was critical that one
had a conception of what a mind bereft of revelation – that is to say, the mind of
a rational pagan – could and could not establish about the divine.
(iii) G. J. Vossius and the ‘Logic of Paganism’
The most important attempt to supply a new historical apologetics was provided in the huge De theologia gentili, et physiologia Christiana sive de origine
ac progressu idololatriae, first published in 1641 (with an expanded edition in
1668) by the Dutch polymath G. J. Vossius, who held positions as vice rector of
the Latin school in Dordrecht (1600–14), Regent of the Leiden Theological
College (1615–19) and Professor of History at the Amsterdam Athenaeum
Illustre (1632–49). As a philologist, Vossius was a leading inheritor of
Scaliger’s Dutch legacy; as a theologian, he was an Arminian, and suffered
accordingly after Dordt.36 The remarkable Theologia gentilis was published
incomplete in combination with Vossius’ son’s translation of Maimonides’
tractate on idolatry from the Mishneh Torah, and then in its entirety by his
more famous son Isaac in 1668. It was the most widely read work of historical
apologetics in Europe throughout the seventeenth century and beyond, ubiquitous in both clerical and lay libraries across the continent.37 Its impact,
I should like to suggest, was immense, but also immensely complex.
35
36
37
Commentariorum Collegii Conimbricensis
Societatis Iesu, in octo libros physicorum
Aristotelis [1592] (Cologne, 1616), cols
173–7.
Rademaker, Vossius (1981).
It is difficult to convey this quantitatively,
but for contemporary statements to this
effect, see e.g. Pierre Bayle to Jacob Bayle,
21 September 1671, BC.i.67; Paul
Poulson to Henry Dodwell, 2 May 1700,
Bod. MS Eng. Letters c. 28, fol. 49r; and
the examples in Rademaker, Vossius,
306–7, 309. For the numerous editions
see n. 50 below. For Malebranche’s use
of it, see II.1.2; for Newton’s, see III.1.1.
I am not the first to posit Vossius’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
175
Before we turn to the Theologia gentilis itself, we must briefly discuss the text
that Vossius openly acknowledged as his inspiration: John Selden’s De Diis
Syris (1617),38 a book much more concerned with presenting original philological conclusions than Vossius’ later synthesis. Both Selden and Vossius were
deeply influenced by the post-patristic framework: that is to say, they rejected
many of the assumptions of patristic histories about the similarities between
pagan and Judaeo-Christian belief, and consciously sought to build something
new on their ruins. And yet there was at least one type of similarity between the
pagan and the sacred that Selden did not entirely reject.
Idolatry, he suggested, had two origins: the worship of the celestial bodies
(and subsequently other parts of the creation), and of deified dead men –
demons – who were said to reside in the space between heaven and earth.39
This was an entirely unoriginal taxonomy, available in the most widely known
sources, both pagan and patristic.40 What Selden added to it was new data,
derived either from the rabbinic texts which would go on to fascinate him for
the rest of his scholarly life (and which led him, among other things, to
postulate an antediluvian origin for idolatry),41 from inscriptions, or from
the ‘science’ of comparative etymology as it had been developed in the late
sixteenth century, especially by Scaliger.42 Despite the prevalence of idolatry,
Selden argued, some elite pagans (philosophers and theologians) preserved an
esoteric monotheism which conceptualised their multiple deities as aspects of
one god.43 Again, this was by no means a new idea: various early Christian
writers, especially Minucius Felix and Lactantius, had argued that elite pagans
had long shared the Judaeo-Christian belief in one god.44 For Selden, the best
evidence of this imperfect monotheism was the practice of worshipping all
38
39
40
importance on this score, but it seems to
me that previous commentators have
missed the full significance of his work,
and the theological and philosophical
assumptions that underpinned it. See
Wickenden, Vossius (1993), 155–61;
Popkin, ‘Polytheism’ (1990); Häfner,
Götter (2003), 224–48.
See Vossius to Selden, 1 December 1644,
in G. J. Vossius, Opera omnia, 6 vols
(Amsterdam, 1695–1701), iv.368.
John Selden, De Diis Syris (London,
1617), xxvi–xxxviii.
Among patristic apologists, see e.g.
Protr., ii.26.1; Eusebius, Praep. Ev., i.6–
ii.1, ii.5.3–5. Influential pagan sources
that place star-worship at the origin of
religion include Plato, Crat., 397cd;
Diodorus Siculus, Bib. hist., i.11.1;
Cicero, Nat. deor., ii.49–65. It is usually
41
42
43
44
contrasted with Euhemerism (worship of
dead men), but even Euhemerus seems to
have held star-worship as an alternative
(and possibly prior) origin of religious
belief: Diodorus Siculus, Bib. hist.,
vi.1.8. It thus became a standard opinion
among both patristic and early modern
writers that Euhemerism came after starworship.
De Diis Syris, xxviii–xxx, relying on Rashi
and the Targums on Gen. 4:26, as
detailed in Toomer, Selden (2009), i.216.
See Toomer, Selden, i.211–56 for many
examples.
De Diis Syris, lxi–lxii.
E.g. Minucius Felix, Oct., 19.7;
Lactantius, Div. inst., i.5; ii.8.23; iv.6.3;
De ira Dei, 11. Similar arguments are
available throughout Augustine, Civ.
Dei, viii–x.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
176
giving up philosophy
gods together, as evidenced by altars to all gods in common and inscriptions
that reported the practice of calling on all gods and goddesses.45 More importantly, he defended the existence of such elite pagan monotheism – which the
priests preserved from the masses – in two further ways. First, he gave it direct
biblical sanction by arguing that the unitary god worshipped by the elite
pagans was equivalent to the Unknown God mentioned by Paul in Acts.46
Secondly, he argued that the pagans had recognised the existence of one
supreme God through reflection on nature.47
Recent scholarship has presented Selden as the closest early seventeenthcentury Europe had to a pure scholar: someone who rejected theological presuppositions in favour of a ‘destructive’ criticism.48 This may be true, but here
Selden was inheriting a complex set of philosophical and theological assumptions. To understand these better, it is worth turning to Vossius’ magnum opus
on the history of idolatry. Recall that at the heart of the change in apologetics and
the history of religion in the early seventeenth century lay the rejection of the
patristic paradigm of arguing for (i) Mosaic primacy, and (ii) strong similarities
between paganism and Christianity. And so it is no surprise to find Vossius
announcing that the apologetics of Steuco and the church fathers had been
rendered obsolete, and something new was required.49 This being so, what
should such a post-patristic, non-syncretist apologetics look like?
Vossius’ answer to this question was ingenious. The pagans did have some
knowledge of the true god. Just as Selden had argued, this was the Unknown God
(Ἄγνωστος Θεός) mentioned by Paul in his disputation against the Athenian
philosophers at the Areopagus (Acts 17:22–31), where Paul himself was happy to
quote the pagan poets Epimenides and Aratus to convince his opponents.50 This
45
46
47
48
See Toomer, Selden, i.219–20 for the
scholarly details.
De Diis Syris, lxi–lxii, also 112, 114. Selden
believed that the altar Paul referred to was
typical of altars to all the gods in common,
on the basis of a commentary of
Theophylactus on the passage, which itself
was based on a forged inscription from
Euthalius (fifth century ce): see further
Toomer, Selden, i.219.
De Diis Syris, lxvii, also lix.
Hardy, Criticism, 152–180, esp. 179 on
De Diis Syris. From a different perspective, the monumental study by Toomer
(Selden) also studies him as a pure
scholar; in regard to the De Diis Syris
specifically, he is treated as an ‘antiquarian’ in Miller, ‘Paganism’ (2001) and
Mulsow, ‘Antiquarianism’ (2005). For
49
50
one deviation from this approach, see
Quantin, ‘Selden’ (2011).
Vossius to Abraham van der Meer, 13
December 1627, in Gerardi Johan. Vossii
et clarorum virorum ad eum epistolae, ed.
P. Colomiès (London, 1690), 112b–113a.
G. J. Vossius, De theologia gentili, in Opera,
6 vols (Amsterdam, 1695–1701), v.5b–6a.
Unless stated otherwise, references are to
this edition. The first edition was published
in 1641; it was much expanded in 1668.
Other editions are: Amsterdam, 1642;
Frankfurt, 1648; Frankfurt, 1675. Not least
because of the centrality of this passage to
theological disputes, the identity of the
Unknown God became a subtopic of considerable debate in early modern scholarship. By the late seventeenth century the
issue had become a set-piece dispute: see
e.g. Johann Andreas Bose, Dissertatio
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
177
knowledge was not innate, but derived either from tradition – not Mosaic
tradition, which was limited to the Jews, but the universal tradition that went
back to Noah and his sons51 – or, more importantly, from nature. Now, what
Vossius meant by the latter is hugely important, and opens the door to
a component of the early modern discussion of religious thought that has
been almost entirely ignored: the continuing influence of neo-scholastic natural
theology.
Aquinas, drawing on a long tradition of what is called negative (or apophatic) theology, had asserted that humans were incapable of truly grasping
the divine essence. However, through analogical reasoning on the creation,
they could come to a predication of the divine attributes.52 This could be done
through three viae (ways), which Aquinas derived from the writings of pseudoDionysius (whom he believed to be the real Dionysius Areopagite of Acts
17:34), especially the latter’s De divinis nominibus. These were the via causalitatis, which worked from created things back to a necessary cause with
powers of efficiency, exemplarity, and finality and thus with intelligence and
will; the via remotionis (or negationis), which worked by eliminating from the
creation all its defects to produce attributes such as incorporeity, immutability,
and infinity; and the via eminentiae, which attributed to God the perfections
found in created things, but in a supereminent way.53 As far as Aquinas was
concerned, here was a way of discussing God’s being and relationship to the
world while continuing to respect his transcendence and unfathomable infinity
on the one hand, and without slipping into univocity, Averroist equivocity, or
Maimonidean defeatism about positing any worthy divine names on the other.
This conceptual apparatus survived well into the early modern period. (In
fact, much of what has been characterised as proto-enlightened natural theology was just recapitulation of this scholastic argumentation.) It was
a standard element in theology teaching in both Reformed and postTridentine divinity faculties. Reformed theologians in particular tended to
reject Scotist univocity and insist on the analogical methods by which the
51
philologica de Ara Ignoti Dei (Jena, 1659);
Johann Friedrich Köber, Dissertatiuncula
De ara ignoti Dei apud Athenienses (Gera,
1683); Johannes Meursius, Piraeus sive de
Piraeo (Utrecht, 1687), 41–7; Godofredus
Fridericus Grube, Disputatio philologica
posterior ex Act. XVII. 23. de ara ignoti dei
(Königsberg, 1712); Francisco Fabricius,
Dissertatio theologico-philologica, de ara
ignoti
Dei
(Leiden,
1713);
Johannes Bergested, Dissertatio gradualis
De ara Ignoti Dei (Lund, 1744).
It is important to remember that this
Noachic religion was not directly
52
53
equivalent to ‘natural religion’, for it
also contained revealed truths such as
post-mortem life, spiritual beings subordinate to God, and the origin of evil (15–
42, 11b). Vossius was no proto-deist.
The main discussions are those in
Summa contra gentiles, i.30; Summa
theologiae, i.q.12–13. For analysis, see
Hall, Natural theology (2007), esp. 9–16,
51–2 and the works cited there.
See further Boland, Ideas in God (1996),
297–305.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
178
giving up philosophy
divine attributes could be predicated, allowing them both to formulate an
account of the attributes that maintained God’s transcendence and to assert
his relationship to the created world.54 It is one of the most striking, and most
surprising, findings of my research that the writing of the history of religion in
the seventeenth century – performed by scholars who often declared that they
had little time for scholastic niceties, and who knew that the three viae were
derived from a Dionysius whose authenticity they had long rejected – was still
so deeply anchored in scholastic natural theology.
Vossius is fine proof of this. Presumably he had learnt of the pseudoDionysian–Thomist viae during his education at the hands of Reformed
theologians in Leiden; his teacher Franciscus Junius (1545–1602), to whom
he always declared his intellectual debts (and whose daughter he married), had
particularly emphasised their importance.55 Vossius referred to them at the
very outset of the Theologia gentilis, so as to argue that humans could, from
nature, come to an analogical knowledge of God’s various attributes.56 But, he
continued, the Fall had rendered human reasoning imperfect: like the blind
man of John 9, fallen humans had evidence of God in front of them (in nature)
but could not acknowledge it.57 The result was that humans gradually failed to
recognise the difference between god and nature, and came to revere the
creation rather than the creator.58 The apologists’ task became to confute
this error, to show that, contrary to pagan opinion, ‘God was neither nature,
nor a part of it, but its originator’, and to clarify where they had gone wrong.59
This combination of historical and natural-theological argumentation
explains the curious, generically novel title of Vossius’ book: ‘On pagan
theology and Christian physiology [i.e. physics], or the origin and progress
54
55
56
57
For an important summary and many
examples, see Muller, ‘Not Scotist’
(2012), esp. 139.
For Vossius’ teaching by, and respect for,
Junius, see Rademaker, Vossius, 44–6, 69,
72, 85–6, 156, 210–11, 437–8. For the
three viae, see Junius’ ‘Summa aliquot
locorum communium SS. Theologiae’,
in his posthumous Opera theologica, 2
vols (Geneva, 1613), col. 1840 (and subsequent pages for their use in predicating
the divine attributes). My emphasis on
these theological elements renders my
reading of Vossius very different from
that in Somos, Secularization, 170, 180–
1, 198, 290, 372–3.
Theologia gentilis, 4b–5a, discussing the
three viae at length.
Theologia gentilis, 9a–10b.
58
59
Vossius suggested several ways in which
this may have happened, which he never
entirely reconciled with each other: at
one point he simply spoke of the pagans’
wilful ignorance of the transcendent divinity manifested by the creation; subsequently, both corporeality and divinity
were ascribed to the forces of nature
(sig. **3r); he elsewhere suggested that
the poets and priests, who knew the
truth (at least initially), accommodated
to the desires of the masses by representing the gods as physical (not as humans,
but as very subtle substances), ultimately
leading to the deification of natural substances (114a–b).
Theologia gentilis, sigs [*4]v–**r (‘. . .
nobis contra propositum fuit, ostendere
Deum non esse Naturam, vel partem
illius; sed Naturae auctorem’).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
179
of idolatry’. (An even more revealing subtitle was the one Vossius had previously planned: ‘A comparison of pagan religion and natural knowledge, or the
origin and progress of idolatry, and the wonders of nature and their causes,
and the consequent ascent of the human mind to God’.)60 To accuse the pagans
of nature-worship was not at all revolutionary.61 But as a basis on which to
found a large-scale apologetics, it was deeply novel. Put in the crudest terms, it
allowed Vossius to reject much of the patristic paradigm, which insisted on
similarity between paganism and Christianity, and to build an apologetic
argument that recognised the difference between the two that had been
increasingly discovered in the previous century. Pagans from Asia to Greece
had misread the book of nature on various topics ranging from plants to
celestial phenomena, and so had come to erroneous conceptions of the
divine.62 This argument made philosophical opinions about nature central to
the history of religions, and thus brought natural philosophers into close
dialogue with the historians who wrote it. Indeed, Vossius himself may have
been stimulated in his arguments by a similar case made in Mersenne’s
gargantuan Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (1623).63
At the same time, Vossius combined this emphasis on historical difference
with another apologetic secret weapon. Drawing on a famous taxonomy from
Varro (preserved in Augustine), he divided pagan theology into the mythical–
poetic, civil, and natural (i.e. philosophical), the last of which was preserved for
the elite.64 This distinction was inherently ambiguous: how did the civil
theology of the priests differ from that of the poets? And to what extent did
the mythical hide natural-theological truths?65 Vossius argued that the poetic–
civil theology (he linked the two) was formed from the monarchist presupposition that God, who would not lower himself personally to administer all
things, would have appointed ministers to do so; such gods were comparable
to angels in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. This theology was particularly
suited to the common people, who thought of God as a king, and thus expected
60
61
62
Amsterdam University Library, MS RK
Ar.42,
loose
sheet:
‘Comparatio
Religionis Gentilis Et Scientiae Naturalis
Sive De Idololatriae origine ac progressu
Et Naturae Mirandis, earumque caussis;
et ex his humanae mentis adscensum ad
Deum’.
See e.g. Augustine, Civ. Dei, vii.5–6, 23,
27, 29–30.
Vossius himself felt qualified to discuss
all these natural-philosophical subjects
because he had taught the discipline in
Leiden in 1599–1600: his lessons are still
available in Amsterdam University
Library, MS RK III.F.4(2); later natural-
63
64
65
philosophical notes are in MS RK III.
F.4(1).
Marin Mersenne, Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim (Paris, 1623), passim,
but note already the evocation of Strato
Lampsacus at cols 29–30, 1265.
Augustine, Civ. Dei, vi.5; also iv.27 for the
same distinction from Scaevola. Vossius
introduces the distinction as key to his
discussion in Theologia gentilis, ii.1,
115a–b.
Ambiguities already pointed out in
Augustine, Civ. Dei, vi.5–8. On early
modern attitudes to the philosophical
interpretation of myths, see below.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
180
giving up philosophy
him to have subservient ministers. The philosophical elite, however, knew
better, recognising that the multiplication of divine names was only a vulgar
misrepresentation of the ubiquity of a singular divine force throughout the
world.66 In other words, what characterised the theology of the elite pagans
was what we would anachronistically call animism, pantheism, vitalism, or
monism. This was a function of Vossius’ belief that true knowledge of God was
to be gained from nature, to the limited extent that it revealed his attributes
through the scholastic viae. Accordingly, incorrect opinions about him almost
always consisted of conflations of him with nature. However, those opinions
were never fully imperfect, for they always concealed at heart the true monotheist notion of the transcendent deity with all the attributes belonging to him.
This was again not in itself a brand-new argument. As we have seen, Selden
had just deployed it. Long before him, several of the church fathers had insisted
that the imperfect monotheism supposedly implied by the doctrines of the
Greek philosophers could be used as a proof of the truth of the Christian
conception of God. Minucius Felix devoted considerable energy to showing
that the first principles of all the philosophers from Thales onwards were
similar to the Judaeo-Christian God.67 Above all, Augustine in his discussion
of the ‘natural’ theology of the pagans claimed that the philosophers had
erroneously conflated god with the soul of the world or their first
principles.68 But Vossius, more than any other apologist before him, adapted
this old argument to the empirical data available in the mid-seventeenth
century. It allowed him to argue that he was no naïve searcher for similarities
between paganism and Christianity. He insisted that he recognised the fundamental difference between pagan animism and Christian transcendentalism,
and that even the best scholars, such as Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), had been
foolish to follow the church fathers in searching for too much similarity
between Christian and pagan theology. (In Lipsius’ case, Vossius critiqued
the Flemish scholar’s attempt to render Stoic fate compatible with Christian
providence, which Vossius characterised as no better than the misreadings of
Aristotle offered by the scholastics.)69 Nonetheless, Vossius continued, one
could discover the faintest trace of such similarity in the residual monotheism
66
67
68
Theologia gentilis, 735a–b.
Oct., xix.3–15. The whole discussion is
clearly a manipulation of Cicero, Nat.
deor., i.10–15.
Augustine, Civ. Dei, vii.5–17, 23, 27–30;
viii.1–11. In speaking of ‘natural’ theology, Augustine was referring to the
threefold division of theology into poetic,
civil, and natural/philosophical from
Varro’s Antiquitates rerum humanarum
et divinarum, a division that continued to
69
be central to early modern apologetics
and history of religion. For its broader
cultural significance, see Rüpke,
‘Historicizing religion’ (2014).
Theologia gentilis, 213b–214a. For further scepticism concerning the compatibility of Stoicism with Christianity, see
Amsterdam University Library, MS RK
III.F.8(b): ‘Περὶ ἀπόρων, sive De captionibus Stoicorum’.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
181
of the elite pagans. It was because of this emphasis on the natural-philosophical
origins of religious truth that his book – ostensibly devoted to the history of
pagan religion – discussed so exhaustively the doctrines of the Greek philosophers. Within their writings, Vossius found evidence of an animism that, he
claimed, was prevalent throughout the pagan world, but which nonetheless
concealed a corrupt monotheism. (Some later historical apologists would
argue that he had focussed too much on the philosophers.)70
With far more thoroughness and sophistication than any predecessor,
Vossius offered developmental narratives that connected primitive idolatry
with the doctrines of the Greek sages. So, for example, sun-worship began
because the pagans – tam barbari, quam Graeci – associated their gods with the
heavens,71 and the sun was the most prominent object to be found there. Its
antiquity was traceable to at least the time of Job (as per his oath at 31:26–8),
who was contemporaneous with or prior to Moses.72 From there, Vossius
could go on to chart in laborious etymological detail its manifestation in the
various sun deities of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Moabites, etc.,
and its mutation into star-worship more broadly. Because of the celestial
bodies’ perpetual motion, they were assigned sense and reason, and subsequently souls. Here Vossius could point out that philosophers ranging from
Xenocrates and Alcmaeon to the Stoics had all attributed divinity to the
heavenly bodies.73 Most importantly, Aristotle had also deified the firmaments, as could be confirmed by the interpretations offered by his best
commentators: Alexander of Aphrodisias, Simplicius, Philoponus. In reaching
this conclusion, Vossius was contributing to a long debate in the Aristotelian
commentary tradition.74 He explicitly argued that scholastic Aristotelians who
denied this fact and tried to accommodate Aristotle’s ideas to Christianity were
misrepresenting the historical record.75 Of course, Vossius himself was not
making a contribution to philosophy, but rather to a sophisticated attempt to
understand historical opinions about the divine.
The deification of the aether received a similar history: the Persians held ‘the
whole circle of heaven’ for a deity, an opinion shared by many of the Greek
philosophers, including Pythagoras and Plato. Indeed, all the pagans could be
split into two groups: those who thought that the heavens moved by themselves, or, if by God, then from eternity, and hence not really by the will of God
70
71
See e.g. Pierre Jurieu, Histoire critique des
dogmes et des cultes (1704), sig. **3r.
Vossius could cite for this such canonical
statements as Aristotle, De cael. i, 270b6–
10: it is from here that the tam barbari,
quam Graeci formulation comes
(Aristotle has καὶ βάρβαροι καὶ
Ἕλληνες). See also Aristotle, Met., xii.8
(1074a).
72
73
74
75
Theologia gentilis, 116a–b, 118b.
Theologia gentilis, 168b, drawing on
Cicero, Nat. deor. i.13.34 (Xenocrates),
i.11.27 (Alcmaeon); and the usual
sources (Posidonius, Cicero, Augustine)
for the Stoics.
Wolfson, ‘Spheres’ (1962).
Theologia gentilis, 169b–170a.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
182
giving up philosophy
but by a fatal necessity; Aristotle again came in for heavy criticism here.76
Later, Vossius would draw extensively on both ancient commentators
(Alexander Aphrodisias, Simplicius) and Renaissance ones (Andrea
Cesalpino) to insist that Aristotle had animated the heavens, and given them
reason and intelligence. So sublime was his heavenly soul that the Peripatetic
heaven was equivalent to God, in the same manner as the Platonic anima
mundi.77
In fact, all the Greek philosophers equated their first principle or element –
whether it was air, fire, or water – with the heavens. From here stemmed
Anaxagoras’ famous condemnation for denying the divinity of the sun.78 This
deification of the elements was combined with the attribution to them of the
determination of Fortune, first by the Chaldeans – inventors of astrology – and
then by the Greeks, including Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Platonists, for all of
whom Fortune ‘was not so much the one supreme god, but some genius by
which God could effect those things which seem to occur blindly, or by
chance’.79 Even the otherwise resolutely anti-animistic Epicurus had to introduce a quasi-animistic Fortune, in the form of the atomic clinamen (swerve),
so as to escape Democritus’ cold, materialist determinism.80
Again and again, Vossius found such continuities between pagan theology
and Greek philosophy, with the latter helping to explain the former. In further
chapters, he traced the deification of individual elements: when the Milesian
philosophers Anaximenes and Diogenes of Apollonia made air the principle
from which all things were made, they were in fact espousing a kind of
pantheistic monism, which was in turn derived from the air-worship of the
Assyrians, early Arabs, and Egyptians.81 Others, such as the Stoics, conflated
God and the world in a different way, saying that he consisted of a divine mind
and a corporeal body, and that his various parts were called by various names;
76
77
78
79
Theologia gentilis, 188–189b (quoting
Herodotus i.131 for the Persians).
Theologia gentilis, 193b–197a, esp. 195b.
After quoting De caelo, ii.3 (286a9–13),
Vossius states that ‘Ajunt cum Thoma
Conimbricenses, caelum hic vocari
Deum, more Platonico’, which must be
a reference to the discussion in
Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis
societatis Iesu, in quatuor libros De coelo
(Cologne, 1596), cols 199–200, and is
another nice example of the interplay of
philosophical and scholarly discussions.
Theologia gentilis, 189b–190a, 191b.
Theologia gentilis, 201a–b (qu. 201b:
‘Platonicis autem Fortuna non tam summus & unus erat Deus, quam genius
80
81
aliquis, per quem Deus efficeret ea, quae
temere & fortuito fieri videntur’).
Theologia gentilis, 202a. The locus classicus for Epicurus’ dissent from
Democritus, on which Vossius builds, is
Cicero, De fato, xx.46; also De fin., i.17–
18.
Theologia gentilis, 267b–268b. That
Anaximenes’ air was his god is affirmed
in Cicero, Nat. deor., i.26; for the
Assyrians and Arabs, Vossius’ source is
Herodotus’ repeated references to
οὐρανίης
Ἀφροδίτης
(heavenly
Aphrodite, see e.g. i.105, i.131), combined with Firmicus Maternus, De errore,
4. For the Egyptians: Eusebius, Praep. Ev.
iii.2.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
183
individual souls were only parts of this universal soul. But because, unlike the
Platonists, the Stoics thought this universal principle to be corporeal, their
doctrine approached the atheistic vitalism of Strato of Lampsacus, the third
scholarch of the Peripatetic Lyceum, who had not only conflated God with
nature, but also rendered him mindless.82
In all cases, what defined pagan thought was a kind of animism that fused
god with nature. At the same time, that animism, with its tendency towards
monism, almost always concealed a (corrupt) monotheistic core. Vossius’
genius was thus to turn the late humanist insistence on the difference between
paganism and Judaeo-Christianity to an apologetic end: the pagan conception
of the divine was, because of its animism, different from the Judaeo-Christian
conception of God. However, when considered historically, that animism
could still reveal the truth that correct natural theology should lead to: monotheism. Vossius had identified a contingent, historically situated ‘logic of
paganism’, that led both the people and the elite philosophers into an animism
that concealed an imperfect monotheism. From a scholarly perspective, such
an approach meant that one no longer had to defend chronologically and
geographically dubious genealogies of Judaeo-pagan contact; rather, one could
construct something like a conjectural history of the diffusion of pagan religion
from its Noachic original, one based on the assumption that the mind bereft of
revelation tended to some form of animist naturalism.
I.3.2 After Vossius (I): Pagan Animism as Imperfect Monotheism
Here, then, was an attempt to build a new historical apologetics on the ruins of
the patristic predecessor: to recognise the radical difference between the pagan
and Christian mental worlds, but to use that difference to one’s advantage.
Vossius could do this by contrasting the pagan worldview with that produced
by ‘correct’ natural philosophy, filtered through the three viae of Thomistic
natural theology. For all these reasons, Vossius’ apologetics proved hugely
influential. However, it could be taken in two directions, partly because of
some ambiguities in Vossius’ own narrative. Above all, he was ambiguous
about the precise philosophico-theological features of the animism that he
ascribed to all the elite pagans across the world. Was their deity diffused
immaterially, or immanent in nature in a manner more redolent of vitalism
or even monism?83 But, not least because this was a period of such momentous
82
Theologia gentilis, 724a–725a. The
account of Strato’s god is from
Augustine, Civ. Dei, vi.10, which
Vossius quotes, alongside the fuller
Cicero, Nat. deor., i.13. Minucius Felix
had attempted to appropriate even him
for the pagan monotheism: Oct., xix.8.
83
The latter is suggested by the claim in the
important passage from Civ. Dei, viii.1
cited in n. 68 above that the pagan natural theologians thought God ‘naturam
rerum’; see also e.g. ii.84, 268, for the
equation of God with the aether, especially by the Milesians.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
184
giving up philosophy
transformation in European natural philosophy, precisely that issue became
central to debates across Europe and even beyond.
One direction in which this narrative could be taken was to assert, unambiguously, that the elite pagans, for all their animist idolatry and subordinate beings,
had been monotheists, and that this proved the ‘naturalness’ of monotheism.
This was done across Europe by several writers, some well known, some less so.
Important examples include Edward Herbert, First Baron of Cherbury (1582–
1648) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) in England, the Lutheran Tobias Pfanner
(1641–1716) in Germany, and the Jesuit Pierre Lescalopier (1608–73) in
France.84 Herbert was the first writer systematically to adapt Vossius’ findings
for this end, in his posthumously published De religione gentilium, much of the
empirical data in which was simply taken from Vossius’ book, and which was
even published through the good offices of Vossius’ son Isaac, in 1663. Often
described as the founding text of comparative religion due to Herbert’s putatively deistic, pluralistic religiosity, the reality is both more rhetorically mundane
and more historically interesting. Herbert, as he admitted in a letter to Vossius
explaining the purpose behind his book, was writing not to promote deism, but
to defend the possibility of pagan salvation,85 a niche but not unheard-of
position in early modern Europe, and one he had already adumbrated in his
De veritate (1624).86 (Interestingly, Selden, in his discussion of pagan monotheism, had initially rejected it, but then accepted it in the second edition of De Diis
Syris (1629), seemingly on the basis of exactly the same Roman Catholic discussion as Herbert.)87
84
85
86
Pierre Lescalopier, Humanitas theologica
(Paris, 1660); Edward Herbert, De religione gentilium (Amsterdam, 1663);
Ralph Cudworth, The true intellectual
system of the universe (London, 1678),
192–632; Tobias Pfanner, Systema theologiae gentilis purioris (Basel, 1679). On
Lescalopier, see D’Angers, ‘Le Stoïcisme’
(1955); Kors, Atheism (1990), 180, 210.
As shown in Serjeantson, ‘Comparativism
against Christianity?’ (unpublished),
which, by reading the original Latin rather
than the highly defective English translations of the De religione gentilium, has
identified Herbert’s key (Catholic) sources.
Herbert’s letter to Vossius is in Vossius,
Epistolae, in Opera, iv.375; see also Rossi,
Herbert di Cherbury (1947), iii.100–9.
Edward Herbert, De veritate (London,
1645 [1st ed. = Paris, 1624]), 217. This
passage was recognised as central to
Herbert’s purposes by contemporaries:
87
see e.g. Richard Baxter, More reasons for
the Christian religion (London, 1672),
81–2. For the salvation of pagans in this
period, see Harent, ‘Salut’; Krumenacker,
‘Salvation’ (2013).
For the initial rejection, see De Diis Syris,
lxvii–lxix, and the crucial excision of this
passage in the second edition: De Diis
Syris . . . editio altera (Leiden, 1629), 72–
3. Toomer, Selden, i.220–1, notes this, and
says that ‘no doubt [Selden] was influenced
by the Jewish doctrine that the “pious
(‫ )חסידי‬among the Gentiles” would have
a share in the world to come’, as in
Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Teshubah
3.5, which Selden quotes in his De jure
naturali & gentium (London, 1640), 32
(see also 832–4). But Selden there also
cites Francesco Collio’s De animabus paganorum libri quinque (Milan, 1622), which
was Herbert’s key source, as shown in
Serjeantson, ‘Comparativism’. Might
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
185
Like Vossius, Herbert insisted that the true God could be known from
nature. Citing Vossius, he referenced Paul on the Unknown God to confirm
this. Drawing without acknowledgement on Vossius, he stated that the dualism that could be found in many of the pagans, most notably the Persians, was
a misguided answer to the problem of evil, although unlike Vossius he claimed
that for the pagans the good principle was really superior (and then used this
claim to deny the doctrine of original sin!). Like Vossius, he noted that the
pagans were embroiled in a constant debate as to whether God was coeternal
with matter, and whether his creation was ex nihilo or an arrangement of such
a pre-existent matter (as we shall see, others would soon argue that this fact
made Herbert’s own conclusions about pagan monotheism untenable).88
And yet, Herbert used Vossius’ scholarship to make a much more overt case
than the Dutchman for the monotheism of the pagans, and for their subsequent capacity to attain salvation. Vossius had briefly separated pagan worship
into ‘proprius’ – the actual worship of a part of nature – and ‘symbolicus’ –
when God was worshipped through veneration of that part. Even in the
expanded second edition of the Theologia gentilis, Vossius did not devote
much space to the latter type of worship, which he associated with the worship
of statues, and with some forms of sacrifice, where the sacrificed creature stood
for God.89 Herbert, however, made the distinction central to his whole argument. The pagans only deployed the cultus proprius to venerate the true God.
When they venerated other deities it was only via the cultus symbolicus; in any
case, those deities were only representative of the one God.90 Herbert thus
simplified Vossius’ scholarship for the sake of a theological pay-off.
The same might be said of the less famous Lutheran lawyer and pedagogue
Tobias Pfanner, who published his Systema theologiae gentilis purioris in Basel
in 1679. Despite his lay vocation, Pfanner was clearly attracted to sacred
scholarship, publishing numerous works of patristics and Christian history.
The Systema is in some ways similar to Herbert’s De religione, and it even
finishes with an appendix ‘De salute gentilium’, in which Pfanner cautiously
refuses to dismiss the possibility of pagan salvation.91 But Pfanner’s central aim
was far less contentious, for it was a historical apologetics of the type well
known from patristic authors and their later emulators. Indeed, Pfanner
directly cited the church fathers as a defence against those who might consider
88
89
Selden’s reading of this book sometime
between 1622 and 1629 have been the
spur for his acceptance of pagan salvation?
I think this more likely than Prof.
Toomer’s suggestion.
Herbert, De religione gentilium, 158–9,
163–5, 166–7.
The latter, Vossius noted, typologically
prefigured Christ, a nice example of the
90
91
deeper theological presuppositions
behind his scholarship: Theologia gentilis,
ix.7, 773.
De religione gentilium, 183–4. This deviation from Vossius is already noted in
Mulsow, ‘Antiquarianism’, 201–2.
Pfanner, Systema theologiae, 518.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
186
giving up philosophy
offensive the ‘comparison’ (Pfanner uses the word) of Christianity with
paganism.92 However, in line with more recent scholarship, Pfanner was also
aware of the church fathers’ limitations as historians. When he discussed
putative pagan knowledge of the Trinity, for example, he acknowledged that
many of the Greek fathers had gone too far in attributing it to the pagans; in
reality, such knowledge could only be gained by revelation. As for later
apologists, Pfanner acknowledged his debt to those like Mornay, but also
knew that they had been misled by the same syncretic forgeries that had fooled
the church fathers,93 and his greatest praise was reserved for Vossius.94
Nonetheless, despite such knowledge of the latest literature (he had also read
Selden), his approach tended far more towards the uncritical accumulation
typical of the church fathers and their emulators, rather than to the newer
narratives.95 Idolatry, which stemmed from the worship of heroes and of
nature,96 had corrupted all of paganism, but some relics of truth had always
remained, through two sources: tradition and reason. By tradition Pfanner
meant the dissemination of the truths known by Noah’s sons.97 Much more
significant was the case from reason. By this Pfanner meant not some innate
faculty, but the knowledge of God that could be derived from nature. Just like
Vossius, he conceptualised this through the means of the three Thomistic viae,
which could lead men to an analogical predication of God’s attributes: first of
all his unity, and from thence attributes that were both negative (incorporeity,
simplicity, immutability, infinity) and positive (goodness, justice, truthfulness,
wisdom, power, omnipresence, omniscience, and eternity).98 It is under these
headings that the majority of Pfanner’s account of pagan theology is organised.
Most of the discussions consist of rather uncritical accumulation of testimonies taken either from the primary sources or, just as frequently, from the
church fathers, with the conclusion that between themselves, the pagans
possessed knowledge of all the divine attributes.99 From here derived Paul’s
identification of the Athenians’ Unknown God with that of the Christians.100
92
93
94
95
96
97
Systema, sig.):():(2r: ‘instituta ista
Gentilismi
cum
Christianismo
comparatione’.
Systema, 130–1.
Systema, sig.):():(v. Also praised is
Christian Korholt’s interesting university
dissertation, De religione ethnica,
Muhammedana, et Judaica (Kiel, 1666).
My reading is thus different from that in
the only other commentary on Pfanner’s
Systema that I am familiar with: Mulsow,
‘Impartiality’ (2015), 258–9.
Systema, 2.
Systema, passim, but esp. 7–17 for an
introduction.
98
99
100
Systema, 76–7, also quoting Basil,
Advers. Eunom., i.15 (PG 29, 516b);
Athanasius, Ad Serapionem (PG 26,
616). The contours and significance of
Basil’s anti-Eunomian conception of
theology, in which knowledge of God’s
essence was impossible, and which was
clearly of great significance for Pfanner,
are well outlined in Hildebrand,
Trinitarian (2007), 41–56.
Systema, 119.
Systema, 308–10, citing Vossius, among
others. See also 7.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
187
The evidence of nature made it difficult for anyone to be an atheist, and if the
pagans did fall away, it was not to atheism but to polytheism.101 Although the
wise may have talked of many gods, they always meant that one, highest God
ruled over and encompassed them all. That one God may have been called by
many names, but he was still one; and in any case, the pagans often used the
plural θεοί to refer to his powers.102 This belief in divine unity could be found
among the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, and Chinese; among the Greek
philosophers, it was almost ubiquitous. This was because the recognition of
a perfect supreme cause necessitated the recognition of divine unity, and thus
perfection, in a way impossible in any true polytheism.103 The wise may have
sometimes claimed to worship many gods, but they did so only out of a fear of
being called atheists, as Anaxagoras had been; in reality, if they spoke of other
deities they saw them as subordinate creatures, akin to angels or demons.104
Most of this, as I say, was defended with scattergun quotations, with no
sense of historical change over time, and with little acknowledgement of the
past century of scholarship, which had so painstakingly elucidated the differences between the various pagan theologies and the Judaeo-Christian conception of a supreme deity. Nonetheless, Pfanner’s book sometimes reveals that
even he was not immune to incorporating some of the results of that scholarship. At one point, he seemed to succumb to the pressures of the revisionist
view of Aristotle that had been developing since the sixteenth century, admitting that the Stagirite had equated God with the world (this did not stop
Pfanner from amalgamating him into his canon of those who had supposedly
recognised God’s true attributes).105 Like Steuco, he wanted most of the pagans
to have acknowledged a divine creation; but unlike his predecessor, he also
recognised that many of them believed in a pre-existent matter that God had
only organised or actuated, rather than created.106 And he was clearly deeply
uncomfortable about the Milesian school of philosophers, who had made their
first principle a ubiquitous, material being, a monist pantheism that Pfanner
could only reconcile with the ‘correct’ Thomistic conception of God by insisting that it had emerged out of a recognition of God’s ultimate
incomprehensibility.107
101
102
103
104
Systema, 38, 53, referring to this argument as it already appeared in
Augustine, Cont. Faust. xx.19.
Systema, 58–65, 101–3.
Systema, 66, 70, 75–7.
Systema, 57, referring to the patristic
locus classicus for such a claim,
Lactantius, Div. inst., ii.17. For the falseness of the accusation of atheism against
Anaxagoras and others, see Systema, 36–
7.
105
106
107
Systema, 153. This is a particularly significant sign of how far this conclusion
had now reached, for in the relevant
passage in Cicero (Nat. deor., iii.8–9),
only the Stoics are discussed: Aristotle
has now been amalgamated with them
as an animist or pantheist.
Systema, 152–69 (creation); 156–61
(pre-existent matter).
Systema, 123.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
188
giving up philosophy
This tension – between a desire to make elite pagans esoteric monotheists and
a creeping realisation of their pantheism – is evident also in another major work
of apologetics written with pedagogical purposes in mind, this time from the
Catholic world. This is the Humanitas theologica (1660), a commentary on
Cicero’s De natura deorum by the Parisian Jesuit Pierre Lescalopier.
Lescalopier intended the work not as high scholarship, and not even as the latest
scholarly apologetics, but as a student textbook.108 Thus, he could still happily
rely on outdated apologetics such as Steuco’s, citing him for the supposedly
monotheistic conception of God held by Empedocles and Theophrastus, among
others. As this suggests, Lescalopier’s intention was a relatively basic version of
the Ciceronian argument from universal consent. No man in possession of his
reason would willingly become an atheist.109 Those standardly accused of
atheism – Diagoras, Protagoras, etc. – were only opposing pagan superstition.110
However, even Lescalopier had to adjust to the new scholarly climate. First
of all, aware of the works of Gassendi (on whom below), he now had to focus at
much greater length than previous apologists on the seemingly monist theologies of various Presocratics, arguing, for example, that Xenophanes’ pantheism
concealed a monotheistic conception of God.111 And even he could not ignore,
nor save from the charge of atheism, Strato, who had been mentioned by
Cicero but brought to the fore by Vossius (and Gassendi). It was all very well
saying that Strato’s heinous monism should be ignored,112 but his existence sat
rather uneasily within Lescalopier’s framework, and he never reconciled the
existence of Strato’s ideas with the general vision of the history of theology
presented in his book.
These tensions in the evidence were making this kind of apologetics more
and more difficult; certainly neither Pfanner nor Lescalopier had the scholarly
ambition (nor, it must be said, the talent) to deal with them. The same cannot
be said of another attempt to find monotheism hidden in pagan idolatry, Ralph
Cudworth’s True intellectual system of the universe, published in 1678, one year
before Pfanner’s Systema. The standard conception of Cudworth as
a throwback to Renaissance syncretism of the Ficino variety is far wide of the
mark. Cudworth was a cutting-edge philologist engaging with the latest literature at the highest level; his foremost sources were not some vaguely defined
‘Neoplatonic’ tradition, but Vossius and Gassendi. (Indeed, his whole aim was
to turn on its head the fiercely anti-syncretist argument of the latter, for which
see §3.)
108
109
110
Pierre Lescalopier, Humanitas theologica (Paris, 1660), sig. i2v.
Humanitas theologica, 47b, 57b, 89b.
Humanitas theologica, 90a, relying on an
important
passage
in
Clemens
Alexandrinus, discussed in II.4.1.
111
112
Humanitas theologica, 44a–45b.
As is said at Humanitas theologica, 58a–
b, ‘Omnino non est audiendus Atheus
ille Strato . . .’ The section is entitled
‘Stratonis atheologia’.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
189
In the huge, unfinished fourth chapter of the System, Cudworth aimed to
show that ‘no such thing does at all appear . . . as that the Pagans or any others
did publicly or professedly assert a Multitude of Unmade Self-existent
Deities’.113 Like Vossius, he justified this assertion theologically by drawing
on Paul’s invocation of the Athenians’ Unknown God.114 And like Vossius, he
defended it by claiming that pagan theology was basically a pantheistic animism that concealed an imperfect monotheism:
for the fuller clearing of the whole Pagan Theology, and especially this one
point thereof, that the Πολυθεΐα was in great part nothing else but
Πολυωνυμία, their Polytheism or Multiplicity of Gods, nothing but the
Polyonymy of One God . . . Two Things are requisite to be further taken
notice of; First, that according to the Pagan Theology, God was conceived
to be Diffused throughout the whole World . . . Secondly the Pagan
Theology went sometimes yet a strain higher, they not only thus supposing, God to Pervade the whole World, and to be Diffus’d through All
Things (which as yet keeps up some Difference and Distinction betwixt
God and the World) but also Himself to be in a manner All Things.115
According to Cudworth, the pagans believed that such a conception of God
was ‘more suitable’ to his glory than a transcendent one that distanced him
from the world.116
This argument was spectacular, greeted with interest and respect across the
continent, despite being written in a parochial language few Europeans bothered to learn.117 Cudworth expanded greatly on Vossius, both in the level of
historical detail and in larger framework.118 For ancient civilisations, from the
Egyptians to the Persians, he used inscription evidence to justify the claim that
their worship of many deities was ultimately an animistic monotheism – the
Hermetica and the Chaldean Oracles, while indeed containing much that was
spurious and Christian, as Casaubon and others had shown, did nonetheless
113
114
Cudworth, System, 211.
System, 474–7. Cudworth also noted the
independent mention of the Unknown
God in ps.-Lucian, Philopatris, 9, where
the character Critias swears Νὴ τὸν
Ἄγνωστον ἐν Ἀθήναις (that the text was
not by Lucian was not known in the
seventeenth century, but Cudworth
should have recognised that the work
was obviously satirical and that the author
was familiar with the New Testament); he
also countered a problem well known to
early modern scholars, that Philostratus
and Pausanias spoke in the plural of
Ἀγνώστων Θεῶν Βῶμοι, with the
answer – still adopted in modern
115
116
117
118
scholarship – that they were speaking of
many altars rather than many gods (the
relevant loci are Philostratus, Vit. Apol.
vi.3.5; Pausanias, Attica, i.4, v.14.6).
System, 503–6. See also the summative
statements to this effect at 516 and 539.
‘Polyonymy’ is the use of many names
for the same person or thing.
System, 532.
A Latin translation was immediately
commissioned, but never materialised:
Henri Justel to Thomas Smith,
22 December 1677, Bod. MS Smith 46,
p. 264.
For full details, see Levitin, Wisdom,
418–26.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
190
giving up philosophy
contain traces of true ancient (monotheistic) belief. Plutarch, meanwhile, had
systematically falsified the history of ancient theology to make it appear that
almost everyone had been a dualist, like himself.119 As for the Greek philosophers, to whom Cudworth devoted himself at greater length than any other
seventeenth-century scholar, here again he sought to show that almost all of
them subscribed to an animism that was monotheistic, and at the same time
meshed with the positing of subordinate deities that was characteristic of the
paganism in which they lived. Whenever Cudworth found a Greek philosopher proposing some kind of teleological principle – he offered long discussions of Empedocles, Hippocrates, and Heraclitus among others – he claimed
that this was proof of their recognition of divine immanence in the world.120
This may have been a mistaken animism, but it nonetheless confirmed the
ubiquity of an (admittedly imperfect) monotheism.
However, Cudworth was also forced to admit (at great length) that this
monotheistic animism could frequently degenerate into pantheistic or vitalist
atheism. This could be either the ‘Cosmoplastic’, which he attributed to the
later Stoics, and which saw the world not as an animal but as a vegetable,
‘without understanding or sense’; or the ‘Hylozoic’, which ‘makes all Body, as
such, and therefore every smallest atom of it, to have Life essentially belonging
to it . . . though without any Animal Sense or Reflexive Knowledge’,121 and
which he associated – by now predictably – with the Peripatetic Strato.
Cudworth’s version of Vossius’ narrative was the fullest available. But it also
exposed the problems with that narrative. Claiming that pagan theology was
pantheistic, but that that pantheism concealed a (corrupt) monotheism,
begged the question: why might it not have been just pantheism, or even
a monist atheism? Could such a first principle really be the God Paul spoke
of at the Areopagus? At points, Cudworth admitted as much. When he
discussed those philosophers who equated God with the anima mundi or
with an omnipresent first principle, he conceded that they often held it to be
not immaterial, but a very subtle substance, as Heraclitus did with his fire, or
Diogenes with air. Such pagans, ‘who acknowledged no higher Numen than the
Soul of the World, made God to be All Things in a gros[s] sense, they supposing
the whole Corporeal World Animated to be also the Supreme Deity’, and that he
thus consisted of parts; it was these parts that were considered to be subordinate deities.122 But how could a real theist – let alone a monotheist – think of
God as corporeal, or composed of parts? Even Cudworth realised that this
119
120
121
System, 214–18.
System, 151–5.
System, 105. To the standard sources for
Strato (for which see n. 82 above),
Cudworth also added (108–9) the evidence of the ambiguous passage at
122
Plutarch, Adv. Col., 14 1114f–1115b;
the ambiguities of the Greek allowed
him to argue that Strato posited
a world of vital but not animated (i.e.
rationally directed) parts.
System, 505, 533–5.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
191
brought such a theism close to yet another type of atheism, the hylopathian,
which he associated with the Ionic sect of philosophers, and especially with
Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Hippon, whose error it was to reify forms and
qualities, and thus to believe that matter itself could generate animation and
life (new forms, including souls, being educed from matter).123 Cudworth’s
confusion is encapsulated in the fact that he sometimes classified Diogenes as
an atheist, and sometimes exculpated him.124 Such tensions would soon come
to be exploited by a small army of scholars, Gassendi and then Bayle first
among them.
In the meantime, however, some continued to insist that pagan theology
concealed an imperfect monotheism, and to use fascinating new sources to do
so. For example, in Oxford, the great Arabic scholar Edward Pococke (1604–
91), in his groundbreaking Specimen historiae Arabum (1650), used a barrage
of Arabic sources (including that pioneer of Islamic religious comparativism,
Muhammad al-Shahrastānī), to suggest that the most famous dualist of them
all, Zoroaster, had in fact been a monotheist, the evil principle being created.
Indeed, he speculated that many of the pre-Islamic Arabs had believed in the
unity of the deity.125 Later in the century, Pococke’s conclusions would be
repeated in a much expanded form by his Oxford colleague Thomas Hyde
(1636–1703) (§5). However, by that point the scholarly landscape had shifted
significantly. For the universal animism that Vossius, Pfanner, Lescalopier,
and above all Cudworth were suggesting was an imperfect monotheism was
more and more coming to be characterised as a monist atheism. It might be
thought that this development was the result of the appearance of the works of
Spinoza. In fact, it had virtually nothing to do with him, but rather stemmed
from important shifts in philosophy, philology, and theology. These shifts were
central to revising Europeans’ conception of what pure, unaided reason could
and could not achieve, and it is to them that we must now turn.
I.3.3 After Vossius (II): Pagan Animism as Naturalist Atheism
For some Europeans, the discovery that all pagans were animists was not
a means for building an apologetics that found this animism to be
a (corrupt) monotheism; rather, it was a means of insisting even more on the
123
124
See the definition at System, 115–16, and
the comparison of Heraclitus and
Diogenes to the hylopathians at 533.
Cf. System, 124 (where Diogenes is
classed alongside Anaximenes and
Hippon as a hylopathian atheist) and
533 (where it is claimed that Simplicius
‘vindicates [him] from that Imputation
of Atheism, which Hippo and
125
Anaximander lye under’ – Cudworth
gives no reference, but I suspect this is
a somewhat strained reading of Phys.,
151.20–30).
Edward Pococke, Specimen historiae
Arabum (Oxford, 1650), 144–8, also
90–2, 111–16. The key locus, cited by
Pococke, is Shahrastānī, Livre des religions, 2 vols (Paris, 1986–93), i.638–54.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
192
giving up philosophy
difference between the pagan and Judaeo-Christian worldviews. A large role
was played in this process by philosophers, and so attitudes to the history of
religion were again frequently determined by attitudes to the history of Greek
philosophy. Particularly crucial was the historico-philosophical vision developed by Pierre Gassendi.126
(i) Gassendi on the Logic of Paganism
Recall that Gassendi’s project was inherently contextualist–comparative, based
on the idea that whatever the flaws in Epicurus’ system, it was generally
preferable to its Greek (and other pagan) competitors. The historicophilosophical narrative that he consequently produced is astonishing for its
originality. It is not at all hyperbolic to say that Gassendi was a pioneering
historian, whose sophisticated and imaginative approach to the history of the
pagan mind remained vitally important for decades to come, even to the
much-vaunted conjectural historians of eighteenth-century Scotland.127
For Gassendi, much of Epicurus’ philosophy had to be explained contextually
as a reaction against a particular pagan worldview – shared by almost all ancient
Near Eastern sages and Greek philosophers – that can only be described as
‘animist’. This being the case, one immediately wonders whether Gassendi
might have been influenced by the new literature on the history of religion. As
it happens, Gassendi had conceived of his Epicurean project during a late-1620s
visit to Holland during which he met Vossius and talked to him about the
subject.128 Moreover, Vossius’ Theologia gentilis was very warmly received,
immediately upon publication, in the philosophical circles in which Gassendi
operated: already in October 1641, for example, Constantijn Huygens could
report that Mersenne was ‘dying to see it’.129 Alas, whether Gassendi was directly
inspired by the book (or even a proleptic relation of its argument) remains
unclear, although he was of course well familiar with Mersenne’s Quaestiones.
In any case, Gassendi’s argument has strong similarities with Vossius’. He
agreed with him that all pagan thinkers were theological animists, and that this
differentiated the pagan worldview from the Judaeo-Christian; he deployed
much of the same evidence to make the case. His one crucial twist to the story
was to suggest that this animism should not be treated as an imperfect
126
127
The subsequent summary will draw primarily on the Syntagma, but all the key
themes were already adumbrated in
Gassendi’s huge Animadversiones in
decimum librum Diogenes Laertii, 3 pts
in 2 vols (Lyon, 1649), and so were
available to European readers in the
1650s.
For an example, see II.1.4.
128
129
Rademaker, Vossius, 220–1, 282; Sassen,
Reis (1960), 22, 24, 28, 43–4.
Constantijn Huygens to André Rivet,
8 October 1641, De briefwisseling van
Huygens, ed. J. A. Worp, 6 vols (The
Hague, 1911–17), iii.243 (‘Je luy
[Mersenne] envoye l’Idolatria Vossii
par Flissinghe et Calais; il meurt d’envie
de la veoir . . .’).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
193
monotheism, but that its immanent deity was in fact so radically different from
the Christian God that a modified Epicurean natural philosophy, and the
natural theology that it produced, were – for all their faults – better suited to
underpin a correct understanding of the relationship between the divine and
the world.
According to Gassendi, the first religion was a polytheist animism. Seeing
that the world seemed to be as organised and purposeful as the animals to
which they ascribed souls, the pagans posited cosmic animating principles,
which they called gods.130 In time, this view was streamlined to posit only one
animating first principle. The ancient oriental theosophers – Indian,
Ethiopian, Chaldean, and Egyptian – had postulated material first principles,
from which emerged the four elements and an animated world, in which the
celestial bodies were considered gods.131 Like Vossius, Gassendi insisted that
there was continuity between oriental beliefs about the divine and the philosophy of the Greeks.132 This emanationist materialism of the former migrated
from ancient theology and poetry into Greek philosophy.133 Of the
Presocratics, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno of Elea all held
that the corporeal universe was One, equivalent with god; hence they also
posited the immovability of the universe.134 (It was Gassendi’s discussion that
brought the figure of Xenophanes – previously of little importance in
European scholarship, but to be so important for Bayle and many subsequent
thinkers – to the fore.)135 Those of the Ionic succession posited an omnipresent
material first principle: Thales with his water, Anaximander and Diogenes of
Apollonia with their air, and then Empedocles with all four elements.136
Anaxagoras was thus not the first to introduce an all-pervading Mind (νοῦς),
as Aristotle had implied; he was simply the first to posit an immaterial, infinite
principle separate from the world.137 For Pythagoras and Plato there was
a mountain of evidence for their use of the concept of a divine anima mundi,
130
131
132
133
134
135
Syntagma, GO.i.287b–288a.
E.g. Syntagma, GO.i.12a–b.
E.g. Syntagma, GO.i.6b.
A clear statement is Syntagma, GO.i.288a.
Gassendi then quotes the Orphic hymn to
Kronos, ὃς ναίεις κατὰ πάντα μέρη
κόσμοιο, γενάρχα, which he very loosely
translates in pantheistic terms as ‘Mundi
Progenitor, qui parteis incolis omneis’.
Syntagma, GO.i.138b.
The fragments of Xenophanes had been
published in Henri II Estienne’s Ποίησις
φιλόσοφος. Poesis philosophica (Geneva,
1573), 35–9. Israel, Contested, 438 is
wrong to imply that his ideas were not
debated before Bayle.
136
137
See esp. Syntagma, GO.i.297a, beginning ‘Idem pene dicendum de
Empedocle . . .’, and going on to discuss Thales, Anaximenes, Diogenes of
Apollonia, Parmenides (esp. his
Στεφάνη (crown/circle), equated with
God), the Stoics, and Pythagoras. See
also a similar survey for all the Greek
philosophers at Syntagma, GO.i.631–5,
in the chapter ‘Quae sit Motrix
Siderum Causa’.
Syntagma, GO.i.297a. Gassendi’s discussion is effectively a commentary on
Aristotle, Met., i, 984b11–21. The reference to Anaxagoras’ Mind being ἀμιγῆ is
from De anima, i.2, 405a17.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
194
giving up philosophy
which, although it was immaterial, and although they spoke of the divine as
being ‘without body’, was still substantially immanent in the world.138 The
Stoics similarly had their corporeal but nonetheless all-pervading and divine
anima mundi.139 Others, such as Hippocrates, proposed their own, equivalent,
vital principles; even the materialist Democritus has posited atomic souls – this
animism rendered him different from Epicurus.140
Most importantly, Gassendi went against all traditional scholastic readings by
consistently classifying Aristotle as an animist. He did this by drawing on the
commentary tradition that we have already met (e.g. Simplicius’ interpretation of
the passages concerning the celestial intelligences, or Averroes’ reading of Aristotle
as believing in the unicity of the intellect, which Gassendi equated with the world
souls and first principles of other Greek philosophers).141 Or he did it by pointing
to such ambiguous passages as Gen. animal. 736b30–737a1, where Aristotle
asserted that the nature of souls was ‘more divine’, and ‘analogous to the element
of the stars’ (a passage that had already been subjected to more vitalistic readings in
the Renaissance medical tradition);142 and more generally by equating Aristotelian
natural teleology with some kind of divine immanence. By the end he could
unambiguously conclude that ‘Aristotle can easily be seen to be drawn to the
opinion of the anima mundi’.143 It was thus no surprise that the worst animist of all
was the Aristotelian Strato, in whom that animism found its naturalist–atheist
telos:
Of all the other philosophers and those who have represented God as a form
of the world . . . the one with the worst opinions of all seems to have been
Strato the naturalist, for while arguing that all the divine force was located in
nature, he thought that nature contained the causes of generation, increase,
and decrease, while lacking not only any form, but even any sense.144
138
139
140
141
142
143
See e.g. Syntagma, GO.i.155b–157b,
297a (for the conception of God as ‘corporis exerptem’), ii.238b–239b.
E.g. Syntagma, GO.i.155b, 159a, 288a–b,
297a, 333a–b, 521b (where Stoic philosophy is compared to ancient religious
beliefs taken from the poets); ii.244–5.
For Hippocrates, see e.g. Syntagma, GO.
i.159a, 241b, 635a; for Democritus, see
158b, opposing the reading in ps.Plutarch, Plac. phil., ii.3.
Syntagma, GO.i.155b.
Syntagma, GO.ii.621a–625a; for the
medical tradition, see Hirai, Medical
(2011), 25–33, 68–75, 92–6, 111–12,
181–5; Levitin, Wisdom, 401–7.
Syntagma, GO.ii.243a: ‘Ex quo obiter
intelligitur videri posse facile Aristotelem
144
pertrahi ad opinionem de Anima Mundi.’
See also the inclusion of Aristotle in the
list of animists at i.333a–b.
Syntagma, GO.i.296b–297a: ‘Ex caeteris
Philosophis, & qui Deum praesertim
habuerint
ut
formam
Mundi
aliquam . . . Ex caeteris, inquam, videtur
pessime omnium sensisse Strato
Physicus, dum omnem Divinam vim in
natura sitam opinatus, sic illam censuit
habere causas gignendi, augendi, minuendi, ut careat omni non modo figura,
verum etiam sensu, ut Cicero habet; &
animo, ut D. Augustinus.’ The references are to Cicero, Nat. deor., i.13.35,
and its derivative, Augustine, Civ. Dei,
vi.10, as in n. 82 above.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
195
Why were the pagan philosophers so beholden to animism? First of all,
because, lacking revelation, they could not ascertain the origin of individual
souls, and so assigned that origin to one, universal soul. Second, it was because
the resulting animism fitted so well with pagan theology, allowing them to
explain the many teleological phenomena observed in the world, and how the
world itself was god, and natural objects gods. Third, Gassendi’s most important argument – one that would shape scholarship until the present day – was
that the animist, or even pantheist, theology of all pagan thinkers stemmed
from their inability to believe that substances could be created ex nihilo. This
inability was understandable given that such a belief was indeed irrational, and
knowledge of it depended on access to revelation. Accordingly, some of the
pagans were full-out eternalists: most famously Aristotle, whose position could
be traced back to the Near East, to the Chaldeans.145 Much more common was
the belief that the world was created from pre-existent matter, a belief held by
a huge number of Greek philosophers (all the Milesians, Stoics, and atomists),
and traceable back to the Egyptians and Indian Brahmins, as well as ‘innumerable others’.146 Revelation taught that the world is created from nothing, but
the pagans, not having such knowledge, ‘all agree that that matter from which
the world was created was pre-existent, because nothing can be made out of
nothing’.147
According to Gassendi, the near-inevitable presence of this logic within all
pagan thought had a monumental historical consequence: paganism gravitated
either towards dualism, or to pantheistic monism. The first was reflected in the
pagans’ tendency to posit two principles: God and pre-existent matter (the
latter often represented by chaos), which was the view both of the theogonic
poets (Orpheus, Hesiod) and philosophers such as Plato and Anaxagoras.148
The second was evident from the fact that they so often conflated God and the
world, usually by making him equivalent to some kind of immanent principle
like the anima mundi. As we have seen, Gassendi thought this had been the
case for everyone from the Near Eastern sages through to Aristotle, and was
rejected only by Epicurus.149
It was here that lay the philosophical pay-off. Epicurus – for all his faults –
could now appear as a counterpoint to the dangerously animist physics of all
145
146
Syntagma, GO.i.159b, 160a–b, 162a–b;
Gassendi does not give a precise source
for the Chaldeans, saying only ‘de quibus testatur Diodorus’: the reference
must be to Bib. hist., ii.30.
Syntagma, GO.i.162b–163b. Gassendi
again does not give sources, apart from
Diogenes Laertius for the Egyptians and
Strabo for the Brahmins: he must have
147
148
149
been thinking of Vit. phil., Proem., 1;
Geog., xv.1.70.
Syntagma, GO.i.163a: ‘Omnes deinde in
id consentiunt, ut materia praefuerit, ex
qua procreatus sit, quod nihil ex nihilo
fiat; cum Fides tamen Sacra declaret
fuisse Mundum ex nihilo, nullave materia creatum.’ Also 480b.
Syntagma, GO.i.481a.
Syntagma, GO.i.288a–289a.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
196
giving up philosophy
the others pagans: indeed, Gassendi even explicitly spoke of Epicurus as an
opponent of ‘idolatry’ and of pagan superstition.150 Where all the pagans
animated the heavens, Epicurus refused to anthropomorphise natural
bodies.151 On the subject of efficient causation, all the Greek philosophers
attributed it to a divine principle immanent in the world; only Epicurus, with
his atoms themselves being efficient principles, left space for the correct view,
when a transcendent God, upon whom material activity is dependent, was
added. As Gassendi put it, God need not be an anima mundi, for it was ‘enough
that he is incorporeal, and penetrates and maintains the whole machine of the
world’.152 What this actually involved remained ambiguous – what did it mean
for an essence sceptic to say that God is omnipresent and ‘penetrates’ all
things? All Gassendi could say was that the study of nature showed that it
had been animated in some manner, akin to the way that the human body was
animated by the soul. At the same time, the opinion that God was a literal
world soul was absurd, since it implied that he was composed of parts.153 As we
shall see, both Bayle and Newton would make much of this ambiguity. But, for
Gassendi, such nescience only helped his case. On the subject of the human
soul itself, while he admitted that it could not be denied that Epicurus held the
heinous view of it as material and mortal, it was at the same time the case that
all the other Greeks – following their oriental predecessors – believed the soul
to be a thin material substance that dissipated into the anima mundi upon
death. Hence they held such equally heinous opinions as the soul’s eternity,
and its transmigration.154
In Gassendi’s hands, the Vossian narrative of universal pagan animism
was transformed. That animism came to look so distant from the transcendent God of Judaeo-Christian theology that Epicurean physics was
more likely to function as a preparative for the latter. Indeed, Gassendi
even spoke of the way in which Epicurean physics could permit an
analogical predication of the divine attributes: Epicurus was effectively
turned into a sort of ancient Aquinas, inferior in theology but superior
150
151
152
Syntagma, GO.i.161a; also 288b–289b,
312a–b. For Gassendi, the key source
for Epicurus as an opponent of superstition was Augustine, Civ. Dei, xviii.41.
Syntagma, in GO.i.520a (in the chapter
‘Sint-ne Caelum, Sideraque animata?’).
Syntagma, in GO.i.333–7 for the whole
discussion, qu. 334a–b (‘Sufficiat
Deum quidem esse incorporeum, ac
pervadere, fovereque universam Mundi
Machinam’). From a philosophical perspective, an excellent discussion is
LoLordo, ‘Activity’ (2005). The only
aspect I can disagree with is the claim
153
154
that Gassendi’s attacks on the anima
mundi were covert attacks on Ficino,
Fludd, or some other modern exponent
of the doctrine (89–92): the brilliance of
Gassendi’s argument was to imply that
virtually everyone – crucially including
Aristotle – was an animist akin to Plato
or the Stoics.
Syntagma, GO.i.334b.
See the huge discussion in Syntagma,
GO.ii.238b–56; it is here that Gassendi
develops most fully his animistic reading of Aristotle. See further ii.621a–
625a.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
197
in natural philosophy.155 Such an analogical reasoning could still achieve
only limited understanding: crucially, it could not grasp the nature of
incorporeal substance. Epicurus recognised this: when he argued that the
gods could only be conceived of as having human form, he was not being
idolatrous, but arguing analogically in a way that approached what
Tertullian, Augustine, and even the evangelists would later do. His own
errors stemmed not from malice but from ignorance. In this, he was no
worse than the other pagans, whose immanent first principles (the Stoics
were here archetypal) were hardly ‘better’ divinities than Epicurus’ immortal, eternal, and unbegotten deities.156
According to Gassendi, the one thing that Epicurus had failed to recognise –
but which it was possible to recognise from nature – was that unity was one of
the divine perfections. That unity was recognised by those who equated God
with a first principle or an anima mundi, but only at the price of surrendering
transcendence: it was precisely because he did not see God as the form or soul
of the world that Epicurus did not achieve this quasi-monotheism. Once again,
this did not make Epicurus worse than the other pagans. The immanent God of
these pagan ‘monotheists’ was hardly a simple unity in the Judaeo-Christian
sense, for by definition, he had to consist of parts.157 Such a conception of the
divine led to further errors, such as the idea that the soul was a very thin, fiery
substance, which Gassendi asserted was prevalent among the pagans; indeed,
this was the inevitable notion of the soul for those without revelation.158 This
‘monotheism’ was thus a chimera, and was in fact completely incompatible
with Christianity. Unsurprisingly, Gassendi had no time for Herbert’s monotheistic reading of pagan theology.159
Gassendi was no less a devout Christian than Vossius or Cudworth. He
simply disagreed with them about the capacity of the pagan mind to recognise
a transcendent, unified deity. Just as importantly, this was no less
a ‘philosophical’ history than anything written in the eighteenth century.
Gassendi had identified a logic to the pagan mind: from the principle of ex
nihilo nihil fit, they had all (Epicurus excepted) arrived at either pantheistic
monism or dualism (both, in any case, were animistic). He therefore did not
155
156
Syntagma, GO.i.293b–294b, and the
explanation why Epicurus’ analogism
was better than the hubristic one of the
other pagans at 296b. For more references to the scholastic via negationis as
a mode of natural theology, see also
302b–303a. For more on Epicurus’
predication of the correct divine attributes, see 306a–b.
Syntagma, GO.i.297b–298a, 298b–302b,
290a.
157
158
159
Syntagma, GO.i.303b–305a, 307a–b;
also 333a–b, 334a.
Syntagma, GO.ii.250–6; i.297b–298a.
See further LoLordo, Gassendi,
229–47.
See Gassendi’s attack on Herbert’s De
veritate, the ‘Ad librum D. Edoardi
Herberti Angli, De veritate, epistola’,
composed 1634, GO.iii.411–19. Also
Gassendi to Elie Diodati, 29 August
1634, Mersenne corr., iv.336–8.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
198
giving up philosophy
need to offer precise historical or diffusionist explanations for similarities
between Near Eastern religion and Greek philosophy; it was enough to prove
that they had stemmed from similar operations of the human mind. This
conjectural mode of comparatism would become ever more popular in
the second half of the seventeenth century, not least because chronological
scholarship was rendering the old search for precise genealogical links between
pagan and biblical figures (Zoroaster = Ham, and so on) ever more unstable.
(ii) After Gassendi
Gassendi’s conceptualisation of paganism would prove hugely influential.
Moreover, it would quickly come to be deployed explicitly against the
Vossius–Herbert–Pfanner–Lescalopier–Cudworth argument that pagan animism concealed an imperfect monotheism. However, it is important to
remember that both sides agreed that pagan ‘theologies’ were animistic, disagreeing only on the consequences of this animism. In other words, we are not
dealing with a monolithic ‘orthodoxy’, but rather a complex debate about the
interpretation of a large set of proof texts. So, for example, precisely because
they both agreed that pagan theology was grounded in animism, Cudworth
could use much of Gassendi’s data, while reaching the opposite conclusion:
pagan animism was grounded on an (imperfect) monotheism.160
Others adopted not only Gassendi’s evidence but also his conclusions, using
them to reconstruct more fully the history of ancient religion and of the human
mind. Increasingly, they also incorporated more of the evidence that was flooding
in from the extra-European world. The natural person to do this was the physician
François Bernier (1620–88), who had studied with, and became secretary to,
Gassendi before embarking on a twelve-year journey to the East, including
Palestine, Egypt, Arabia, and then India, where he served as a physician at the
court of the last of the great Mughal emperors, Aurangzeb (1618–1707).161 The
religious beliefs that Bernier encountered there he approached in a Gassendist
framework, as we can see from his very first description (dating from 1667) of
what he called the ‘grande Cabale’ (i.e. the inner esoteric doctrine, as opposed to
the ‘external’ exoteric idolatry) of the Indian Brahmins:
You are not unfamiliar with the doctrine of many of the ancient philosophers, concerning that great Soul of the World, of which they want our
160
161
For Cudworth’s huge debts to Gassendi,
which he attempted to use against the
Frenchman’s conclusions, see Levitin,
Wisdom, 362–3, 424–5.
On Bernier’s travels and reports, see
Tinguely, ‘Introduction’ (2008); Dew,
Orientalism (2009), 131–67. On this
and subsequent subjects I must signal
my debt to App, Cult (2012), here 161–
74. Burke, ‘Traveller’ (1999) recognises
that Bernier’s opinions about the East
were informed by his philosophical predilections, but does not identify those
correctly.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
199
souls, and those of animals, to be portions; if we were to look carefully in
Plato and Aristotle, we would perhaps find that they were of this opinion.
It is this that is the universal doctrine of the gentile Indian Pendets, and
this same doctrine currently makes up the Cabbala of the Sufis, and of the
most part of the learned men of Persia, and which one finds explained in
those heightened and emphatic Persian verses, the Goul-tchen-raz, or
Garden of Mysteries; it is also the same as that of [Robert] Fludd, which
our great Gassendi has refuted so learnedly, and in which the great part of
our chymists lost themselves.162
The pneumatological pantheism attributed to Plato and Aristotle, and the
subsequent reference to Gassendi’s attack on Fludd, leave us with no doubt
what philosophical ideas Bernier had in mind when he encountered texts like
the Sufi Gulshan-i rāz (Secret rose garden) by Mahmoūd Shabestarī (1288–
1340), to which he here makes reference. Bernier combined his reading of this
text with that of another – the Mundaka Upanisad, a part of the Hindu Vedic
˙˙
˙
scripture – and with oral reports, to arrive at a distinctly Gassendist vision of
163
elite South Asian religion. On Bernier’s reading, its adherents posited an
immanent deity, Achar, from whom both souls and all material objects emanated and to whom they returned: this was represented by the allegory of
a spider secreting and then retracting its webs. The world is thus an illusion,
and the only reality is the omnipresent, material deity. Bernier insisted that he
had challenged the Sufis to explain how a corporeal principle could come to
constitute the world as humans experienced it, but according to him they could
only reply with allegories that failed to clarify how a god ‘who is not corporeal
162
François Bernier, ‘Lettre a mons.
Chapelain, envoyée de Chiras en Perse,
le 4. Oct. 1667. Touchant les
Superstitions, étranges façons de faire,
& doctrine des Indous ou Gentils de
l’Hindoustan’, in Suite des memoires
sur l’Empire du Grand Mogol (Paris,
1671), 127–8 [separate pagination]: ‘Il
n’est pas que vous ne sçachiez la doctrine
de
beaucoup
d’anciens
Philosophes, touchant cette grande ame
du Monde, dont ils veulent que nos
ames, & celles des animaux, soient des
portions: Si nous penetrions bien dans
Platon & dans Aristote, peut-estre que
nous trouverions qu’ils ont donné dans
cette pensée; C’est là la Doctrine comme
universelle des Pendets Gentils des
Indes, & c’est cette mesme Doctrine
qui fait encore à present la Cabale des
163
Soufys, & de la pluspart des gens de
lettres de Perse, & qui se trouve
expliquée en Vers Persiens si relevez &
si enfatiques dans leur Goul-tchen-raz
ou parterre des Mysteres; Comme ç’a
esté celle-là mesme de Flud que nostre
grand Gassendy a refutée si doctement,
& celle oü se perdent la pluspart de nos
Chymiques.’ By ‘Pendet’ Bernier meant
pandit, a Brahmin scholar.
My understanding of Bernier’s Indian
sources is informed by App, Cult, 164–
71, but Prof. App does not recognise the
Gassendist origins of Bernier’s framework. Bernier’s comparison was not
entirely wrong, since the Gulshan-i rāz
was influenced by the Neoplatonism of
the great Sufi scholar Ibn Arabi (1165–
1240).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
200
giving up philosophy
but Biapek, as they say, and incorruptible, should nonetheless be divisible into
so many bodies and souls’ – the age-old Judaeo-Christian objection to all
immanentist theories of the divine.164
The amalgamation of Gassendi’s vision of the history of paganism with such
an account of pan-Asian ‘theology’ was definitively crystallised in Bernier’s
Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi (1674), especially in the modified third
edition of 1684.165 Here we see two important developments. First, the account
of Asian pantheism, in the chapter ‘Si le Monde est Animé’ (an exact counterpart to the section in Gassendi’s Syntagma with the same title in Latin), has
been incorporated into the full Gassendian conjectural history of belief about
the divine. All pagans ascribed to the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit; accordingly,
either they were full-out eternalists, or they believed that the world was made
from pre-existent matter.166 From here, they logically posited animist, pantheist, or monist systems in which the world either emanated from, or was
informed by, an omnipresent divinity. Individual souls were conceived of as
part of the material anima mundi.167
The second development was that the geography of the ‘Asiatic theology’
was now much expanded, so as to incorporate the Far East:
I cannot wonder enough at how this opinion could so generally capture
the spirit of men, for – to say nothing of our Cabbalists and many of our
chymists, who have difficulty recovering from it – it has infected a large
part of Asia. While travelling to these countries, I noted that the majority
of the Turkish Dervishes, and the Sufis – the learned of Persia – are
stubbornly convinced of it, and I have learned from trustworthy people
that it has penetrated as far as China and Japan. So that almost all of those
who in Asia pass for learned, glory – albeit in private – in saying that they
are parts of the divine substance, and are in some sense little gods.168
164
165
‘Lettre’, 131: ‘. . . comme il se peu faire que
Dieu n’estant pas corporel, mais Biapek,
comme ils auoüent & incorruptible, il soit
néantmoins divisé en tant de portions de
corps & d’ames.’ By ‘Biapek’ Bernier
almost certainly meant ‘vyāpaka’
(व्यापक), meaning ‘all-pervading’, which
he had already discussed, on the basis of
the oral testimony of religious figures in
Varanasi, in ‘Lettre’, 123–4. (This identification is already made in Tinguely,
Voyages (2008), 526). The concept derives
from logical thought; see Bochenski,
‘Indian’ (2001), 141–2. I am very grateful
to Péter-Dániel Szántó for his advice on
this matter.
The differences in the editions have
already been noted in App, Cult, 166–8.
166
167
168
François Bernier, Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi . . . seconde edition, 7
vols (Lyon, 1684), ii.39–42, 96–101.
Abrégé, ii.81–4.
Abrégé, ii.90: ‘Aussi ne scaurois-je
trop m’etonner comment cette
Opinion a pû si generalement s’emparer
de l’Esprit des hommes, & que pour ne
rien dire de nos Cabalistes, & de plusieurs de nos Chymistes qui ont de la
peine à en revenir, elle ait infecté une
bonne partie de l’Asie: Car je me suis
apperceu en voyageant dans ces Pays là,
que la pluspart des Derviches des Turcs,
& des Souphis, ou des Scavans de Perse
en sont entestez; & j’ay appris de personnes dignes de foy qu’elle a penetré
jusques à la Chine, & au Iapon; desorte
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
201
We shall soon come to the ‘trustworthy people’ who may have allowed Bernier
to reach this conclusion about the Far East. For now, let us note that the
Gassendist vision of the history of paganism, largely focussed on Greek
philosophy, had been expanded to incorporate almost all of Asia, and used
to construct a comparatist project of truly epic proportions.
Bernier was no pith-helmeted bigot, refusing to listen to the people he
encountered and dogmatically pigeonholing them into a preconceived system.
He was driven above all by his curiosity about the culture he encountered. But
he approached that culture armed with a historico-philosophical vision of how
the human mind functioned that he had derived from his teacher. According
to Bernier, most of the ancients (with some notable exceptions) had correctly
recognised the need for a divinity from the order and harmony of nature; this
was also true of the Asians.169 But they had mistakenly ascribed that order not
to a transcendent deity, but to an informing soul. In reality, one could not
know the nature of God. As Gassendi had shown, all that was possible was
a version of the scholastic via negationis: removing the imperfections from the
creation to arrive at an analogical account of the divine attributes. An incomplete model of this method had been adopted by Epicurus.170 Only someone
who had had the truth of ex nihilo creation revealed to them – in other words,
only one who had surrendered one of the principles seemingly taught to them
by pure reason – could conceive of a transcendent, unified deity.
One need not have travelled to the East to expand Gassendi’s logic of
paganism to include most, if not all, of the history of world religions. Before
Bernier had put pen to paper, this had already been done with philosophical
and apologetic aims in mind by the Leipzig-based Lutheran pedagogue Jakob
Thomasius (1622–84), above all in his Schediasma historicum,171 and by the
169
170
que presque tous ceux qui passent pour
Doctes en Asie font gloire, quoy qu’en
particulier, de dire qu’ils sont des parcelles de la Substance Divine, & en quelque facon de petis Dieux.’ This passage
is also adduced in App, Cult, 168; the
translation is my own.
Abrégé, ii.225–6 for the ancient philosophers, and 255–6 for the Asians.
Bernier here refers to Danishmand
Khan (Mullah Shafi’a’i), an official at
the court of Aurangzeb to whom he
taught Gassendist and Cartesian philosophy and Harvey’s ideas about circulation; for their interactions, see further
Dew, Orientalism, 151–5.
Abrégé, ii.261–2.
171
This work has recently received some
attention: the fullest account is
Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit, 21–111;
see also Micheli, ‘History’ (1993), 409–
42; Häfner, ‘Häresien’ (1997). But none
of these accounts has recognised the
debt to Gassendi. The dismissive comments in Hochstrasser, Theories, 19–21
are unwarranted. While the Schediasma
was the best known of Thomasius’
works, and the first in which his ideas
about the history of religion were published, he stated those ideas in pedagogy
and subsequent publications both
before and after 1665; in what follows,
I will offer corroborative citations to the
most important of these.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
202
giving up philosophy
young English divine Samuel Parker (1640–88), in his Tentamina physicotheologica de Deo (1665).172 Both books were published in 1665, which should
perhaps be recognised as an annus mirabilis not only for mathematics but also
for new conceptions of the history of religion. They both sought to show the
stark difference between – and therefore incompatibility of – pagan and
Judaeo-Christian philosophy and theology. Accordingly, they criticised both
the church fathers and those moderns – Steuco, Mornay, and in Parker’s case
even Scaliger, Selden, and Vossius – who they thought had not gone far enough
in recognising that incompatibility. (Thomasius even accused them of ‘syncretisim’, popularising this use of the term in this context.)173
Thomasius, writing explicitly for a student audience, made his primary
focus the origin of early Christian heresies – especially various types of
gnosticism and illuminationism – through the intermixture of pagan philosophy into Christianity, an intermixture that affected not only the heretics.
Thomasius’ primary aim was to teach his students the incompatibility of
pagan philosophy and Christian theology; this was an education in the limits
of reason. To do so, Thomasius resolutely followed the narrative offered by
Gassendi (without ever quite acknowledging that he was doing so). The
philosophical basis of all pagan thought – from Zoroaster through the
Chaldeans, Egyptians, and to all the Greek sects – was that nothing could be
made from nothing.174 This ‘first falsehood’ (Πρῶτον ψεῦδος) had two
172
173
For a full account, see Levitin, ‘Parker’
(2014).
For Thomasius’ criticisms of the
church fathers, see, among other loci,
Schediasma historicum (Leipzig, 1665),
38–9; ‘De secta nominalium’ [lecture
delivered 28 January 1658], in
Orationes (Leipzig, 1683), 254; ‘De
ideis Platonicis exemplaribus’ [lecture
delivered 9 April 1659], ibid., 283–4,
291; ‘De syncretismo Peripatetico’ [lecture delivered 28 January 1664], ibid.,
337; ‘Opposita illorum errori, qui
asserunt praeexistentiam animarum
humanarum’
[lecture
delivered
29 January 1674], ibid., 474; ‘An gentiles in anima mundi agnoverint spiritum sanctum?’ [lecture delivered
6 June 1663], in Dissertationes LXIII,
ed. C. Thomasius (Halle, 1693), 353–4,
355–6 (a particularly apt summary),
359–60. Criticism of Steuco and
Mornay came as early as the lecture
delivered on 20 June 1644, ‘Mysterius
SS Trinitatis ex ratione . . . demonstrari
174
nequaquam posse’, in Orationes, 5,
n. h; also ‘An gentiles in anima mundi
agnoverint spiritum sanctum’, 354–5,
362; Thomasius, Exercitatio de Stoica
mundi exustione (Leipzig, 1676), 20.
For Parker contra Scaliger, Selden,
and Vossius, see Tentamina, 269. As
for ‘syncretism’, Thomasius knew that
the term had first been deployed in this
way by Georg Horn, in his Historia
philosophicae (Leiden, 1655), 323–4:
see ‘De syncretismo’, 326, n. b; but he
seems to have been more influenced by
an academic dissertation by Michael
Siricius, theology professor at Giessen,
which argued that Simon Magus was
the first of the syncretists: see Siricius,
Simonis magi haereticorum omnium
patris pravitates (Giessen, 1664), 58,
cited at Schediasma, 28, n. q.
E.g., Schediasma, 12 (‘Πρῶτον ψεῦδος
Gentilium hic fuit, quod persuasi erant,
non posse ex simpliciter nihilo quicquam fieri’); 28–9; ‘De syncretismo’,
346–7.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
203
consequences. First, it led to an emanationist monism in which the divine
essence was the only real substance in the world.175 Second, it led to the dualist
positing of two uncreated principles, one divine, and one material.176 Such
a dualism was held by each of the four Greek sects – the Platonists, Stoics, and
Aristotle all thought, in slightly different ways, that God had joined with
matter, whereas Epicurus believed that matter had mixed with itself.
Ultimately, it could be traced back to Zoroaster. As well as conforming with
the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit, it allowed the pagans to absolve God of the
charge of having created evil.177
Greek philosophy and pagan religion were thus structurally identical, and
could be used to explain each other.178 The worst consequence among the
pagans was the vitalism of Strato, which demonstrated that Aristotelianism
ultimately tended towards an unholy alliance with Epicurean materialism, and
in turn was not so different from the pantheism of the Stoics.179 Among
Christians, the Plato–Scripture syncretism of the early church led to the
various grotesque emanationist heresies of the gnostics and their later followers, as well as to errors even among the ‘orthodox’ church fathers.180 Barely
better was the syncretism of some medieval scholastics: Thomasius focussed in
particular on the French theologian Amalric of Bena († c.1207), who had
taught that all things are God, and on his possible follower David of Dinant
(c.1160–1217), who aligned God with the Aristotelian materia prima.181
Thomasius had thus adopted Gassendi’s ideas so as to construct from them
a much fuller vision of the history of pagan religion (and its connection to
philosophy), and its difference from the truths of Judaism and Christianity.182
He sometimes acknowledged his debt to the Frenchman,183 but their aims were
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
Schediasma, 12, 31; ‘De ideis Platonicis’,
288–9.
E.g. Schediasma, 12, 23–4, 28–31; ‘De
ideis Platonicis’, 288–9 (drawing connections between Zoroaster and the
Greeks more explicitly than in the
Schediasma); ‘De syncretismo’, 346–7;
‘Praeexistentiam’, 476.
Schediasma, 28–9.
See e.g. Schediasma, 31, n. t.
Schediasma, 30–1, esp. 31. This comes as
part of a large attack on Lipsius’ attempt
to differentiate the Stoics from Strato (at
Physiologiae Stoicorum libri tres [1604]
(Antwerp, 1610), 17–18).
Schediasma, 17–25.
See esp. De stoica mundi exustione, 199–
208. Amalric was a well-known heretic,
censured by Pope Innocent III, his body
exhumed and burnt in 1209, and his
182
183
doctrines formally condemned by the
fourth Lateran Council (1215).
Thomasius knew of David from
Bernard of Luxemburg’s Catalogus
haereticorum (1522): see e.g. the edition
of Cologne, 1537, ii, sig. Hv: ‘David de
dinanato, cuius error fuit quod deus est
materia prima . . .’
Thomasius often concluded with statements to that effect: see e.g. ‘De syncretismo’, 348–9.
Most explicitly in Schediasma, 28–9,
when speaking of the ‘Fundamentalis
error Gentilis Philosophiae, de duobus
principiis coaeternis’: ‘Primum hic tangit Gassendus . . .’, and citing Gassendi,
Syntagma, GO.i.163, 484. For further
explicit debts to Gassendi on these matters, see e.g. ‘De syncretismo’, 343, 346–
7; ‘Anima mundi’, 361.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
204
giving up philosophy
not the same. Although Thomasius insisted on Aristotle’s impieties – and thus
condemned those Christian Aristotelians who pretended that they could establish total harmony between Aristotle and the Bible – he nonetheless believed that
a reformed Aristotelianism was still the best basis for philosophical pedagogy.
Partly, this was the case for very pragmatic reasons, which Thomasius
expounded in political terms: the attempt of various innovators to replace
Aristotle would create a philosophical democracy that could only lead to
anarchy.184 More importantly, Thomasius thought that Aristotelianism, for all
its faults, offered a better foundation on which to construct a natural theology
than any of its pagan competitors. Contrary to the claims of Gassendi, Epicurus
was easily dismissed: his materialism could not be more distant from a true
conception of God, and it was no surprise that the early church had wanted
nothing to do with him. As for Plato (and the whole dualist–emanationist
tradition of pagan thought stretching back to Zoroaster), while he did offer an
elaborate theology, that theology began with abstract ideas about God, derived
purely from the intellect. Aristotle, meanwhile, began not with the intellect but
with the senses, and understood better than any other pagan philosopher that
‘God speaks through the book of nature’.185 Once again, we have found the
history of religion being rewritten in the service of a debate over the nature of
scholastic natural theology.
Writing at the same time, but in the vibrant intellectual climate of postRestoration Oxford, Parker believed no less than Thomasius that a history of
the pagan mind was essential for establishing what kind of natural philosophy
modern Christians should adopt. Moreover, just like Bernier and Thomasius,
he was convinced by the Gassendist claim that animism characterised all pagan
thought. But unlike the Frenchman, he discussed a far larger range of theological opinions than those of the Greek philosophers – indeed, much of his
data was clearly taken from Vossius’ Theologia gentilis, which he seems to have
had at his elbow when composing the Tentamina. The title of the central
chapter of his second volume is ‘The ancient philosophers held the world soul
to be the supreme divinity’. Within it is charted the growth of such idolatrous
animism from the rise of star-worship in the east, through to more specific
forms of nature-worship, such as sun-worship and the ‘sacred obscenities’
184
185
The fullest statement is in the lecture of
4 June 1665, ‘Adversus philosophos libertinos’, in Dissertationes, 437–51;
a summary, with an extension of the
political metaphor, is in ‘Adversus philosophos novantiquos’ [9 September 1665],
Dissertationes, 469.
‘Adversus philosophos novantiquos’,
474–5, 479: ‘Deus per librum Naturae
loquitur.’ For the comparison of
Platonic and Aristotelian approaches to
natural theology, see e.g. ‘De ideis
Platonicis’, 279 (and 283 for the claim
that the Platonic view of the world as an
archetype of god’s ideas stretched back
through to Pythagoras, Aglaophamus,
Orpheus, the Egyptians, and the
Chaldeans); ‘Adversus novantiquos’,
476, and 478 for praise of Aristotle’s
non-metaphysical natural theology.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
205
associated with various fertility gods (such as the permanently erect Priapus
and Baal Peor), the belief in which he claimed could be explained by the pagans
extrapolating from the generational power of the sun. Philosophical error
stemmed from this religious worldview. As the pagans sought to explain the
providential operation of the celestial bodies, they attributed to them intelligence, and then omniscience, omnipotence and the power of predetermination. From here it was only a short step to asserting the deity’s material
omnipresence and to equating God with nature. This move was first made
by the devious, fraudulent astrologers so that they could claim to read the
divine operations in the world, but it then became prevalent among the
philosophers too. According to Parker, all of Greek physics had its origins in
the belief in a divine but corporeal anima mundi. For all the philosophers God
was nature, and even those who seemed to be monotheists in fact conceived of
God as a world soul composed of parts. All the pagans – whether Near Eastern
priests or Greek philosophers – thought of ‘spirit’ not as something immaterial
but as a ‘very thin substance’ (substantium pertenuem); in turn, when they
spoke of ‘mind’ (νοῦ ς) they spoke of a faculty rather than a substance.
Creation, providence, and omnipotence were ascribed to it, and souls were
said to arise from and return to it – hence the widespread belief in transmigration, not just among eastern religions, but also Greek philosophers like
Pythagoras. Again and again, Parker reiterated that animism explained the
similarity between pagan religion and pagan philosophy: the same reason that
led Aristotle to ascribe intelligence to the stars explained Egyptian animalworship.
It is not hard to see that Parker was drawing extensively on Gassendi. But to
the Frenchman’s ideas about the Greek philosophers, Parker added much
more argumentation about pagan religion tout court, leading to direct confrontation with Scaliger, Selden, Herbert, and Vossius in the key chapter
‘Pagan notions about God are wrongly applied to the supreme God whom
we honour; rather, they should be understood as referring either to the sun or
to the world soul, which the pagans supposed to be the supreme divinity.’186
For Parker, this meant that even those great humanists had overplayed the
similarity between the pagan and the Christian god.187 Like everyone else we
have considered, Parker combined these historical ideas with a version of
Thomist natural theology, extensively referring to the three viae, and insisting
that the evidence of nature could produce knowledge, albeit imperfect, of
186
Tentamina, 181: ‘Gentilium de Deo placita perperam ad Supremum, quem colimus, Deum traduci: Sed aut de Sole aut de
Anima Mundi, quae Suprema Omnium
Numina esse censuerunt, intelligi oportere’ (this is the title of Book ii, ch. 1).
187
Tentamina, 269. See also 242. At 243–7,
Parker fiercely attacks Steuco’s monotheistic reading of the Presocratic philosophers and their first principles.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
206
giving up philosophy
God’s attributes. According to him, it was only the experiential philosophy of
the Royal Society that could permit such a correct predication of the divine
attributes.188 To reach this natural-theological conclusion, the twenty-fiveyear-old Parker had rewritten the history of ancient religion and theology.
The post-Gassendist comparativism of Thomasius and Parker had significant influence. Thomasius inaugurated a whole school of thought about pagan
religion and philosophy in Germany; Leibniz was just one of those who came
to be influenced by it.189 Parker, meanwhile, would expand his claims in
another book, the Disputationes de Deo (1678); both this and the Tentamina
were widely read in England and on the Continent. As we shall see, both men
would heavily influence Bayle. Both had drawn extensively on Gassendi, but
both had also built substantially on his ideas about the Greek philosophers,
expanding them to encompass all of pagan religion. This led them to a blunt
assertion of the incompatibility of pagan and Judaeo-Christian theologies, as
part of a broader attempt to reform natural theology. For Thomasius this was
to be done on the basis of a reformed, empirical, and non-animist
Aristotelianism; for Parker, by using the new experimental philosophy of the
Royal Society.
Just as importantly, both of these entirely orthodox Christian theologians
were also declaring – as Gassendi had declared – that Christianity was in
a sense less rational than paganism, requiring the revealed doctrine of
creation ex nihilo to attain its superiority.190 Animism was the religiophilosophical opinion that came most naturally to man. The atheist–vitalist
Peripatetic Strato was its logical and most dangerous culmination.191 This
conclusion would become something of an orthodoxy in the eighteenth
century. It had its origins not in the crooked streets of Edinburgh or the
Amsterdam coffee shops frequented by freethinkers; rather, it was born in
the studies and classrooms of mid-seventeenth century theologians and
pedagogues.
Indeed, orthodox theologians readily accepted Gassendi’s historicophilosophical argument, and turned it to confessional and apologetic ends.
For example, Isaac Barrow (1630–77), preaching in the chapel of Trinity
College, Cambridge, plundered Gassendi for testimonies to the fact that all
pagans – Eastern or Greek – had thought that the world had been made from
188
189
Full details in Levitin, ‘Parker’.
As well as the disputations and lectures
cited above, see Jakob Thomasius
(praes.), Theses philosophicae . . . De
quaestione: an Deus sit materia prima?
(Leipzig, 1668). Leibniz, who was very
close to Thomasius in the 1660s, was
always interested in these ideas: see e.g.
his short MS note ‘Deum non esse
190
191
mundi animam’, c.1683–6, Phil.
Schrift., iv.1492.
See e.g. Parker’s summary in his later
Disputationes de Deo (London, 1678),
377–86, discussing Eastern sages,
Greek theogonic poetry, and Greek
philosophy.
E.g. Thomasius, Schediasma, 30–1;
Parker, Disputationes, 373.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
207
uncreated matter.192 But while this belief may have appeared rational to them
because of their acceptance of the principle that ex nihilo nihil fit, revelation
had now demonstrated the truth of God’s ex nihilo creation, which far better
accorded with the beauty and order evident in nature. In turn, this meant that
the Socinian Johannes Volkelius (1565–1616) had been wrong to deny the
possibility of such a creation as unacceptable.193 Remarkably, a fuller version
of exactly the same argument, also deployed against Volkelius, would be made
by Bayle (II.1.2).
I.3.4 The Global Debate over Pagan Animism
The scholarly holes not just in the patristic focus on similarity, but also in the
Vossius–Pfanner–Lescalopier–Cudworth position – that pagan animism concealed an imperfect monotheism – were being exposed. This development was
intensified by the remarkable congruity of the debate within apologetics and
natural philosophy with the debate among missionaries about the nature of
Eastern religion, a debate that erupted on to the domestic European stage in
the final third of the seventeenth century.
Its contours among the missionaries had been established almost a hundred
years earlier. (It is important to differentiate this debate from the more famous
Rites controversy, with which it is often confused, and with which it did
sometimes become entangled.)194 In the 1580s, Alessandro Valignano
(1539–1606), a Jesuit missionary to Japan, developed a hugely influential
vision of Buddhism, one that came to be available to Europeans in a Latin
catechism published in 1586. Informed by an impressive familiarity with Zen
Buddhist texts (the Zen school was particularly prominent in those areas of
Japan where the Jesuits were active),195 Valignano argued that Buddhism,
which had migrated from India in the first century ce, contained two doctrines. One was the public ‘outer’ doctrine, that consisted of idolatrous worship
encouraged by the promise of immortality. The secret ‘inner’ doctrine was
a materialist monism in which ‘Buddha nature’ (busshō, 佛性) or ‘One mind’
192
193
194
Isaac Barrow, Theological works, ed.
A. Napier, 9 vols (Cambridge, 1859),
v.361–7. Gassendi is not cited, but that
he is the secondary source is obvious to
anyone who has read him. For Barrow’s
huge admiration for Gassendi on philosophical matters, see further III.
Proleg.3.
Barrow, Theological works, v.374–5.
Also vii.132–9.
The debate has been illuminatingly
explored in Rule, K’ung-tzu (1986);
Mungello, Curious land (1989); App,
195
Cult. Subsequent citations will prioritise
primary sources, but I am indebted to
these works for offering me guidance
through this complicated and fascinating subject, which has also inspired
much commentary that is either derivative or plain wrong. The importance of
not confusing this debate with that over
rites is already emphasised by Rule,
K’ung-Tzu, 44–6.
Valignano’s Japanese sources are reconstructed in App, Cult, 51–88.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
208
giving up philosophy
(isshin, 一心) was the eternal first principle from which the world emanated.
This first principle lacked intelligence and the power to create ex nihilo, and
was therefore far from the providential creator God of Judaeo-Christianity.
The elite Buddhists’ reverence consisted of a meditative exercise called
sokushin sokubutsu (即心是佛) intended to align the individual mind with
Buddha nature; personal immortality and post-mortem rewards and punishments were rejected. All this Valignano compared to the teachings of the Greek
philosophers: the monist first principle was akin to that of Melissus and
Parmenides; the quest for union with that first principle was redolent of
animism.196
Valignano’s conclusions were quickly popularised in Europe when reprinted
in Antonio Possevino’s Bibliotheca selecta (1593, 1603), a book that had a vast
circulation in both Catholic and Protestant circles.197 They also had a continuing
impact on the missions to the Far East themselves, especially that to China. The
first leaders of the Jesuit China mission, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and Michele
Ruggieri (1543–1607), gradually devised a strategy to convert the Chinese elites
by positing that ‘original’ Confucianism, as enshrined especially in the Four
Books, consisted of the precepts of natural law, including the worship of
a transcendent, monotheist deity, represented in the Confucian classics as Tien
(‘Heaven’, 天) or Shang-ti (‘Supreme Ruler’, 上帝). Crucially, according to
Ricci – well trained in neo-Thomist theology at the Collegio Romano – these
divine names could be predicated by the Thomist analogical natural theology
described earlier. As Ricci put it in his True meaning of the Lord of Heaven
(Tianzhu shiyi, 天主實義), published in Beijing in 1603 with the support of the
important Confucian official Feng Yingjing:
The Lord of Heaven, however, transcends all categories, and does not
belong to any common category. To what category, then, can He be
compared? Since the Lord of Heaven has no form or sound, by what traces
can He be apprehended? His substance is inexhaustible and the material
universe cannot contain Him within its boundaries. How then can one
discover a clue as to how great He is? If one wishes to give some indication
as to His nature, one can find no better way to do so than by employing
words like ‘not’ and ‘lack’, because, if one uses words like ‘is’ and ‘has’ one
will err by too great a margin . . . If we now wish to say what the Lord of
Heaven is we can only say He is not heaven and not earth; His loftiness and
intelligence are much more extensive and much more ample than that of
heaven and earth. He is not a ghost or a spirit; His spiritual essence
transcends all ghosts and spirits. He is not man; He totally surpasses all
196
Alexander Valignano, Catechismus
Christianae fidei (Lisbon, 1586), fols.
3v–44r. The comparison with the Greek
monists is at 18r.
197
Antonio Possevino, Bibliotheca selecta
(Rome, 1593), 459–529. For the influence of this book, see Balsamo, Antonio
Possevino (2006) and the works cited
there.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
209
sages and men of wisdom. He is not morality; He is the source of
morality . . . If I wish to infer the nature of His essence, I find that no
place can contain Him and yet there is no place where He is not present;
that He is unmoving and yet that He is the active cause of all movement;
that He has no hands or mouth, and yet that He creates all things and
instructs all people.198
Thomist natural theology had been redescribed in the language familiar to late
Ming elites, and the missionary strategy had become to convince the Chinese that
the ‘god’ of Confucianism was the same as the God being preached by the
missionaries – just as Paul had preached the Christian God to the pagans by
quoting their own books at them. Unfortunately, Ricci continued, the original
religion of China, which Confucius had only inherited and transmitted, had been
corrupted by the three ‘religious’ movements now dominant: first Buddhism, and
then its bastard children Daoism and Neoconfucianism, the last of which had
grown dominant after its first development under the Sung dynasty. All of these
Ricci studied intensely and interpreted in a manner akin to Valignano’s reading of
Buddhism; that is to say, as an outward idolatry for the people and an esoteric
materialist monism for the elite. Accordingly, all of them had to be reformed and
returned to Confucian purity by the application of neo-scholastic natural
theology.199 His and his collaborators’ reading of Neoconfucianism – what they
called ‘the sect of the literati’ (a fair translation of the self-designation ju-chiao) –
was particularly important. As Nicolas Trigault reported Ricci’s views to Europeans
in Latin in 1615, in a book that would be republished many times and translated
into many vernaculars, becoming ‘in terms of numbers of readers . . . probably the
most influential book on China published in seventeenth century Europe’:
The most common opinion at this time seems to me to have been derived
from the sect of idolaters [i.e. Buddhists], and to have been brought in five
hundred years ago. It asserts that this universe is made up of one and the
same substance, and that its creator, with the heaven and earth, man and
beasts, trees and plants, and finally the four elements, make up a continuous
body, of which great body each thing is one member. From the unity of this
substance they teach by what love all things ought to be united, and that
anyone can come to the likeness of God, since they are one with him. We
fight to refute this nonsense not only through reason but also the testimonies of their ancient sages, who all related something else.200
198
Matteo Ricci, The true meaning of the
Lord of Heaven [Tianzhu shiyi, 天主實
義] [1603], trans. D. Lancashire and
P. Hu Jo-chen (Taipei, 2003), 93–5. See
also 119, and Ricci’s Latin summary of
his argument at 461. There is now a full
study of Ricci’s application of neo-
199
200
Thomism to Chinese religion: Kim,
Names (2004), esp. ch. 3.
Ricci, Meaning, 99ff., esp. 221.
Nicolas Trigault, De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas (Augsburg, 1615), 106:
‘Opinio tamen hoc tempore celebrior
videtur mihi ex Idolorum secta
deprompta, & quinque retro saeculis
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
210
giving up philosophy
As Paul Rule has summarised in his brilliant study of Jesuit views of
Confucianism, ‘Ricci’s view derives from a translation of the Chinese term t’i
as “substance”, and his subsequent conclusion that when the Neo-Confucians
speak of all things being one t’i they are alleging identity of “substance” in the
Western sense.’ Later, Ricci came to claim that the Neoconfucian ‘principles’
t’ai-chi (太極) and li (理) were akin to ‘that which our philosophers call “prime
matter”’.201
So, while the Jesuits emphasised the monotheism of ‘original’ Confucianism,
even they admitted that all the belief systems found in the modern Far East, at
least among the elite, were monist or pantheist. And since Buddhism – whose
monist first principle was, through the influence of Chinese sources, increasingly
recognised as ‘emptiness’ or ‘nothingness’ – was considered the most widespread
religion in Asia, it became common by the second half of the seventeenth century
to suggest that the biggest ‘religion’ in the world was in its exoteric–popular form
a nature-worshipping polytheist idolatry, and in its esoteric–elite form
a materialist monism. (Also contributing to this conception was the fact that
Ricci’s successors were even more negative about Neoconfucianism than he was,
explicitly calling it atheistic when he had not.) This perception was only enhanced
by the writings of the leader of the mission to South India, Roberto de Nobili
(1577–1656), probably the first European to attain fluency in Sanskrit.
Analogously to his counterparts in China he claimed that the dominant Indian
Buddhists were monist atheists and the Hindus idolaters, but that another sect –
the Gnanis (or the Vedānta, the most prominent of the six schools of Hindu
philosophy) – had preserved a monotheistic conception of God and that the term
Sarvēśuran could be used for ‘God’ for the same Thomist reasons as were used by
Ricci in China.202
invecta. Ea asserit universitatem hanc ex
una eademque constare substantia, illiusque conditorem una cum caelo ac terra,
hominibus ac brutis, arboribus ac plantis,
& quatuor denique elementis continuum
corpus unum conflare, cuius magni corporis singulae res singula sunt membra.
Ex huius unitate substantiae docent, quo
amore inter se singula uniri deceat; &
quemlibet ad Dei similitudinem devenire
posse ex eo, quod unum sit cum eo. has
ineptias nos non solis rationibus, sed &
antiquorum suorum Sapientum testimoniis confutare contendimus, qui alia
omnia tradiderunt.’ For the huge popularity of this work both in Latin and in
various vernaculars, see Lamalle, ‘La propagande’ (1940); Mungello, Curious land,
48 (from where I take the quotation about
201
202
‘numbers of readers’). Earlier, Ruggieri
had
interpreted
contemporary
Confucian uses of tien in materialist
terms: Matteo Ricci, Opere storiche, ed.
P. Tacchi Venturi, 2 vols (Macerata,
1913), ii.402.
Rule, K’ung-tzu, 38, 41, qu. Fonti
Ricciane, ed. P. M. d’Elia, 3 vols (Rome,
1942–9), ii.297n.
These ideas were conveyed to
Europeans only in MSS, above all de
Nobili’s ‘Informatio: de quibusdam
moribus nationis Indicae’ (before
1613). See now the translation in
Preaching wisdom to the wise, ed. and
trans. A. Amaladass and F. X. Clooney
(St. Louis, 2000), esp. 91–108. See further Kim, Names, 109–13, and the texts
cited there.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
211
As all these reports gradually filtered their way back in Europe, it became
increasingly common to find in both Latin and vernacular texts the claim that
the largest body of elite pagan thought in the contemporary world was an
animistic atheism. This was, as we have already seen, the thrust of Bernier’s
hugely popular works. We might also note that the Italian missionary
Giovanni Filippo De Marini (1608–82), who had travelled across South East
Asia and had particular knowledge of Vietnam, claimed in his much republished and translated Historia et relatione del Tunchino e del Giappone (1665)
that such a religion – with its ‘exterior’ idolatry and promise of immortality
and rewards and punishments, and its ‘interior’ emanationist monism – was
a ‘hydra that has spread its venom in as many different kingdoms as there are
that make up most of Asia’.203
If everyone agreed on the ‘inner’ materialist monism (and exterior idolatry)
of Buddhism and of the Neoconfucianism of the Chinese literati, there was
vicious disagreement over ‘original’ Confucianism itself. As we have seen,
Ricci and his followers claimed that the Neoconfucians of the Sung dynasty
had corrupted Confucianism, making it a hubristic, speculative monism, when
the original doctrine was in fact an expression of analogical natural theology
that cautiously predicated the divine attributes. But in the early seventeenth
century, Valignano’s interpreter in Japan, João Rodrigues (1561–1633),
inspired partly by the mockery that Ricci’s interpretation of the Confucian
classics had been subjected to by some hostile Chinese, suggested that the
Neoconfucian literati were right. That is to say, the inner doctrine of
Confucianism was and always had been similar to that of Buddhism and
Daoism, and directly comparable to that of the Presocratics. As he put it, ‘all
these three sects of China are totally atheistic in their speculative teaching,
denying the providence of the world. They teach everlasting matter, or chaos,
and like the doctrine of Melissus, they believe the universe to contain nothing
but one substance.’204
According to Rodrigues and Nicolò Longobardo (1559–1654), Ricci’s successor as head of the Jesuit mission, Ricci’s beloved tien was in fact simply
equivalent to the Neoconfucian first principle li/t’ai-chi! All these terms, they
claimed, designated an eternal, material monist first principle from which the
world emanated, and to which it returned. Moreover, Rodrigues and
Longobardo thought that the similarity between the three Eastern religions,
203
Giovanni Filippo de Marini, Historia et
relatione del Tunchino e del Giappone
(Rome, 1665), 107 (‘Sparse quest’Idra il
suo veleno in tanti Regni, in quanti la
maggior parte di quest’ Asia si divide’),
and 110–13 for the doctrine; for further
details on his vision of Buddhism, see
App, Cult, 134–7, 149–51.
204
M. Cooper, ‘Rodrigues in China: the
letters of João Rodrigues, 1611–1633’,
in Kokugoshi e no michi: Doi senseis
shōju kinen ronbunshō, vol. 2 (Tokyo,
1981), 231–355, at 311–12; App, Cult,
98–109.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
212
giving up philosophy
Persian beliefs, and Greek philosophical monism could be explained genealogically. All these doctrines had a common origin: Noah’s son Ham, who was
also Zoroaster, and whose atheist monism spread throughout the world, across
China, India, and the Near East, and then finally to Greece.205 Whatever the
Chinese revered, it was certainly not Paul’s Unknown God, as Ricci had so
passionately contended.206
The victory of the Ricci-supporting faction in the late 1620s ensured that
Rodrigues and Longobardo’s ideas remained largely unknown in Europe for
a long time. But they exploded into the Western republic of letters when
published by the Dominican missionary and arch anti-Jesuit Domingo
Fernández Navarrete (1618–86) in his Tratados . . . de la monarchia de China
(1676). Here one could find all the components of the anti-Ricci reading. It was
absurd to think that European missionaries could know Confucianism better
than native commentators; the outer doctrine of Confucianism was pure idolatry, whereas its inner doctrine was a materialist emanationist monism akin to
that of Buddhists, Daoists, and the Presocratic philosophers; all this probably
derived from Ham, thus explaining the ‘great resemblance’ of elite belief from
Japan to Greece.207 In fact, Navarrete was particularly keen to point out similarities between this vast religious system and the monism of the Greek philosophers, so as to counter Ricci’s ‘Thomist’ reading of original Confucianism. He
printed Longobardo’s treatise with a commentary in which he regularly drew
comparisons between Confucianism and the Greek monists – not least by using
the Coimbra Aristotle commentary – so as to prove that ‘the Chineses, according
to the Principles of their natural Philosophy, and Physicks, had not the knowledge of a spiritual Substance distinct from the Material, as we assign; and
consequently knew not what God, or Angels, or the rational Soul were’.208
205
206
Nicolò Longobardo, Traité sur quelques
points de la religion des Chinois (Paris,
1701), 11–12 (Longobardo’s treatise survived in only one MS, used by Domingo
Navarrete, who published it in his
Tratados (see below); this French translation was the first stand-alone publication.
See likewise Antonio Caballero a
Santa Maria, Traité sur quelques points
importans de la mission de la Chine
(Paris, 1701), 73–4. Santa Maria was
a Franciscan missionary; his treatise was
published with Longobardo’s report, of
which he had possessed a copy, sending
it to the Propaganda Fide in 1662:
Brockey, Journey (2007), 444, n. 18. See
further Rule, K’ung-Tzu, 102–11.
Longobardo, Traité, 15–16; Santa Maria,
Traité, 94–5.
207
208
Domingo
Fernández
Navarrete,
Tratados . . . de la Monarchia de China
(Madrid, 1676). I have used the contemporary translation in John Churchill,
A collection of voyages (London, 1704)
(while checking that all quotations
appear in the original): see esp. 81a–
101a (esp. 89b–90a, 100b–101a, for
comparisons with the Presocratics),
125b–126b, 152b, 154a–b, 183a–224b
(187b–188a for the point about ‘great
resemblance’). For Navarrete, see
Cummins, Navarrete (1993).
Churchill, Collection, 183a–224b (qu.
184b–185a); see e.g. 193a for the comparison with the Greek monists – he was
only developing Longobardo’s own
point (see e.g. 200a–b).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
213
This characterisation of the biggest system of religious belief in the world
was read by a host of European men of letters. Antoine Arnauld learnt Spanish
just to read Navarrete, and subsequently incorporated into his much-read antiJesuit polemics lengthy descriptions of Eastern religions as pantheist–monist.
(We shall encounter again the importance of Arnauld’s use of this
evidence.)209 Navarrete’s book was also a favourite of John Locke’s, who
repeated the ideas about Confucian atheism in the posthumous fifth edition
of the Essay concerning humane understanding, published in 1706, as part of
his argument that even the idea of God was not innate.210 Earlier, before the
century was out, Noël Alexandre (1639–1724), the leading French Dominican
theologian and a major player on the European scholarly scene, had published
books not only propagating the Rodrigues–Longobardo reading, but also
systematically comparing Chinese and Graeco-Roman idolatry. Both, according to him, only recognised the heavens as their supreme divinity, with the only
difference being that the Chinese (somewhat counter-intuitively) worshipped
them without thinking them divine. The closest thing the Chinese had to
a deity was the Neoconfucian monist first principle, li – original
Confucianism was no different. This reading was underpinned by a broader
theology of comparativism, justified by a reinterpretation of Acts. Paul had
never meant that the Athenians’ Unknown God was the true God, only that he
had come to preach to them the God they had been looking for. Otherwise he
would surely have encouraged pagan conversion by instructing the Areopagite
to place an inscription to the Unknown God in the church at Athens of which
he had become the first bishop, and St Mark would likewise have put an
inscription to Kneph – the ageless Egyptian deity who was considered to be
the ‘sovereign reason’ of the world – in the church at Alexandria. That they had
not was, according to Alexandre, an obvious rebuke to the Jesuits’ tactics.211
209
210
211
See e.g. Antoine Arnauld, Morale pratique
des Jesuites, troisième volume ([Cologne?],
1689), 427–57; Cinquième dénonciation
du philosophisme ([Cologne?], 1690), 35–
6; Morale pratique des Jesuites, tome
sixième ([Cologne?], 1692), 40–1. See further II.4.3.
John Locke, An essay concerning
humane understanding . . . fifth edition
(London, 1706), i.4, 38 [= Nidditch, 88].
Noël
Alexandre,
Apologie
des
Dominicains missionnaires de la Chine
(Cologne, 1699), 7–16, esp. 12–15 (relying
on Longobardo and Navarrete); [Noël
Alexandre], Conformité des ceremonies
Chinoises avec l’idolatrie Grecque et
Romaine (Cologne, 1700), 49–52
(comparison of Chinese and GraecoRoman
heaven
worship),
55–8
(Unknown God, Kneph), 62–5 (T’ien/
Shang-ti = li). By this stage the debate
had become dominated by the question
of whether Chinese rites (ancestor and
Confucius veneration) were civil or idolatrous – for the interplay of the two issues,
see Lundbaek, ‘Joseph Prémare’ (1994).
Kneph was known to early moderns
from references in Plutarch, Is. Os., 359d
and Porphyry quoted in Eusebius, Praep.
Ev., iii.11, and through them became
a favourite example of Egyptian monotheism or esoteric monism: see e.g.
Johann Nicolai, Demonstratio qua probatur gentilium theologiam, (ceu tenebras)
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
214
giving up philosophy
Meanwhile, the official Jesuit view received its definitive statement in the
long-gestating Confucius Sinarum philosophus, first composed in the late 1660s
and finally published in Paris by Philippe Couplet in 1687, in a beautiful folio
dedicated to Louis XIV. The volume contained translations of three of the
Confucian Four Books (Daxue, Zhong Yong, and Lunyu).212 Both this spectacular text and other defences of the Jesuits continued to insist that original
Confucianism was a true monotheism, and that Ricci had been right to tell the
literati that a correct examination of nature, combined with analogical predication of the divine attributes, would lead them back to the ‘original’ Confucian
concept of the divine – just as Paul had used pagan notions at the Areopagus.213
That concept had been established too close to the time of Noah himself to be
corrupted by idolatry or atheism; only later did the corruptions introduced by
Buddhism and the hubristic speculation of the Sung Neoconfucians turn it into
an esoteric atheist monism for the elite and exoteric idolatry for the masses.214 In
this regard, the compilers of the Confucius Sinarum philosophus, led by Prospero
Intorcetta (1626–96), went further than Ricci himself. They had studied carefully
parts of the great compendium of Sung philosophy, the Hsing-li ta-ch’üan shu,
which they called the Pandect of natural philosophy, and from which they
derived their monist reading of Neoconfucianism.215
In turn, their followers writing at the end of the century – above all Louis Le
Comte (1655–1728) and Charles Le Gobien (1653–1708) – popularised even
further, now in works written in the vernacular, the idea that the modern
Chinese elites were monist atheists, however much Confucius and his earliest
followers had observed true natural religion that they had inherited from
Noah’s progeny.216 As Le Gobien (who had never been to China) put it in
212
Deos, Sacrificia ex fonte Scripturae (ceu
luce) originem traxisse (Helmstedt, 1681),
23; Bernard de Montfaucon, L’antiquité
expliquée, 15 vols (Paris, 1719–24), ii
(1719), 269–70. For Alexandre’s scholarly
career and influence, see above all
Quantin, ‘Entre Rome et Paris’ (2007).
For the composition and circumstances of
publication, see Golvers, ‘Development’
(1998); Dew, Orientalism, 205–33; for the
structure of the argument, the Chinese
sources used, and the translation principles, see Lundbaek, ‘Image’ (1983);
Mungello, ‘Chang Chü-cheng’ (1983);
Meynard, Reading (2015), 2–70 (henceforth ‘Meynard’). I have been fortunate
to have constant access to the copy presented to Louis XIV, bound in beautiful
red morocco leather: All Souls College,
213
214
215
216
Oxford, LR.4.c.2. Alas, there are no annotations by the Sun King.
Philippe Couplet et al., Confucius
Sinarum philosophus (Paris, 1687), lxv,
lxvii, xciii [= Meynard, 171, 173–4, 208].
Couplet et al., Confucius, lxxiv–lxxv,
lxxvi–lxxvii [= Meynard, 177–8; 183–8].
Lundbaek, ‘Image’; Mungello, ‘Chang
Chü-cheng’.
Louis le Comte, Nouveaux mémoires sur
l’état présent de la Chine, 2 vols (Paris,
1696), ii.131–91, esp. 148–50, where ‘LiKaokun’, i.e. Laozi, the semi-legendary
founder of Daoism, is said to have
‘taught that the sovereign deity is corporeal, and that he governs the other
divinities as a king governs his subjects’
(‘enseigna que le Dieu souverain estoit
corporel, & qu’il gouvernoit les autres
Divinitez comme un Roy gouverne ses
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
215
the elegant and simple summary of Chinese sects that appeared in the preface
to his Histoire de l’édit de l’empereur de la Chine (1698), the modern literati,
who derived their ideas from the naturalism developed by the Sung
philosophers,
recognise in nature only nature itself, which they define as the principle of
movement and rest. They say that it is the highest ‘reason’ [li], which
produces order in the different parts of the universe, and which causes all
the changes which we observe. They add that if we consider the world as
a great building into which men and animals are placed, then nature is the
pinnacle and the peak, so as to make us understand that there is nothing
higher, and that, as the main roof-beam assembles and supports all the
parts which compose the roof of a building, so nature unites together and
preserves all the parts of the universe.217
As Le Gobien helpfully clarified, such a metaphysics rendered the literati pure
necessitarians.218
The ideas espoused in the publications by Le Comte and Le Gobien,
combined with various political factors, led to the high-profile condemnation
of the Jesuit missionary strategy by the Sorbonne in 1700.219 The faculty there
had ties to the Société des Missions étrangères, a rival to the Jesuits established
in 1658, whose Vicars Apostolic had the authority to issue orders to the clergy –
including the Jesuits – in their territories.220 Predictably this created tensions,
217
sujets’; see also 154–5); and 181 for
Neoconfucian ‘naturalism’: ‘They spoke
of the divinity as if it were only nature
itself; that is to say, that natural force or
virtue which produces, arranges, and
preserves all the parts of the universe’
(‘Ils parlerent de la Divinité, comme si
ce n’eust esté que la nature mesme; c’està-dire cette force ou cette vertu naturelle
qui produit, qui arrange, qui conserve
toutes les parties de l’Univers’).
Charles Le Gobien, Histoire de l’édit de
l’empereur de la Chine (Paris, 1698), sig.
[ā viii]r: ‘Le second & la Dominante,
quoyque moins étenduë que quelques
autres, est celle de nouveaux
Philosophes, qui ne reconnoissent dans
la nature que la nature mesme, qu’ils
definissent le principe du mouvement
& du repos. Ils disent que c’est la
Raison [footnote a: ‘Ces Philosophes lui
donnent le nom de Li’] par excellence,
qui produit l’ordre dans les differentes
parties de l’Univers, & qui cause tous les
218
219
220
changemens qu’on y remarque. Ils
ajoûtent que si nous considerons le
monde, comme un grand édifice, où les
hommes & les animaux sont placez, la
nature en est le sommet et la faiste [footnote b: ‘Ils appellant aussi la nature Taikû, qui signifie grand faiste. Ce nom est
tiré d’un des livres Canoniques des
Chinois’]; pour nous faire comprendre
qu’il n’y a rien de plus élevé, et que,
comme le faiste assemble & soutient
toutes les parties, qui composent le toit
du bastiment, de mesme la nature unit
ensemble & conserve toutes les parties
de l’Univers.’ For more on Le Gobien
and his important and much-translated
book, see Mungello, Curious land, 343–
53.
Le Gobien, Histoire, sig. [ā ix]r–v.
Davy, ‘La condamnation’ (1950).
For the initial growth in tensions, see
van den Wyngaert, ‘Serment de
Fidelité’ (1938).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
216
giving up philosophy
which came to a head in March 1693 when Charles Maigrot (1655–1730), the
Vicar Apostolic for Fujian province, issued an edict condemning the Jesuit
interpretation of Confucianism (among other things – the whole question had
now become intermingled with the debate over rites and ancestor
veneration).221 Through the auspices of Nicolas Charmot, he defended his
position in the Historia cultus Sinensium (1700). Written in polemical but clear
Latin, this effectively became the closest to an official anti-Jesuit manifesto.
Unsurprisingly, on the question of Chinese theology, Maigrot followed
Longobardo and Navarrete’s line: Confucianism was and always had been
a monist atheism that conflated the first principle (whether tien, li, or t’aichi) with nature.222 Together with the Sorbonne’s condemnation, this brought
the issue of the ‘naturalness’ of naturalistic atheism to the attention of all of
learned Europe. Locke, for example, read the Historia with pedantic attention
to detail, and incorporated its conclusions into the fifth edition of his Essay.223
I.3.5 Naturalism Without Spinoza
One of the Jesuit missionaries’ problems was that they were understandably
out of date when it came to their use of both philological evidence and
philosophical categories. Ricci and the editors of the Confucius Sinarum
philosophus had not only cited long-discredited precedents such as Hermes
and the Sibyls to justify the possibility of pagan monotheism,224 but, more
importantly, they had also used a modified scholastic Aristotelianism to ‘save’
Confucianism. But as we have seen, back in Europe that Aristotelianism was
now being lumped together with the Presocratic monism that Aristotle himself
had so famously condemned. Moreover, it was widely being suggested that all
elite pagan theologies – from Egypt to Japan, and from Greece to India – had
tended towards an atheistic conflation of an immanent first principle with
nature itself. In other words, it was becoming ever harder to claim that there
could be any pagan natural theology that could correctly predicate the divine
attributes, and hence that any pagans could have had anything that could be
labelled a ‘monotheist’ conception of the divine. In such circumstances, was it
really likely that original Confucianism differed from its atheistic
Neoconfucian descendant?
Some of those who reviewed the Confucius Sinarum philosophus in the
periodicals that now circulated on the continent made exactly this point. In
221
222
223
von Collani, ‘Maigrot’s role’ (1994).
Historia cultus Sinensium (Cologne,
1700), 351–65.
Locke, Essay . . . fifth edition, I.iv.8
[= Nidditch, 88]. For Locke’s reading
of the Historia, see Carey, Diversity
224
(2005), 83–4, drawing on all the relevant
MSS and Locke’s copy (Bod., shelfmark
Locke 7.10), which I have also consulted.
E.g. Couplet et al., Confucius, xcix–c
[= Meynard, 216].
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
217
response to the Jesuits’ argument that preaching Shang-ti in China was no
different from the early Christians preaching θεός or Deus to the Greeks and
Romans because in both cases they were appellatives predicating the attributes
of ‘divinity’ (rather than personal names like ‘Saturn’), the Huguenot scholar
Henri Basnage noted that this was to ignore the fact that pagans often used
personal names to refer to the ‘different qualities’ of one God – Neptune for the
sea, Mars for war, etc.225 For this idea, Basnage drew on an extraordinarily
learned recent book by the Dutch antiquarian Gisbert Cuper, analysing an
Egyptian medal depicting Harpocrates (it was first published in 1676, and
expanded in 1687). According to Cuper, the medal was typical of both
Egyptian and wider pagan culture in that it was an allegorical depiction of
their one ‘real’ deity: the sun.226 In other words, pagans (at least elite ones) were
monotheists, but only in the sense that they worshipped one deity; that deity
was a natural object rather than the transcendent, omnipotent immaterial
being predicated by correct natural theology.
Even this, Cuper at one point admitted, may have been a later ex post facto
justification of primitive polytheism by the wisest among the pagan philosophers. This point was in turn emphasised by Jean Le Clerc, who insisted
that monotheistic readings of the pantheon of pagan gods were defensive
back-projections by later anti-Christian pagan philosophers.227 On the basis
of this exegetical point, he offered a whole developmental theory of myth and
religion. All primitive religions were polytheistic, and only later did pagan
elites reinterpret them in monotheistc terms. To read pagan polytheism via
later philosophy, as Selden and Vossius had done, was a grave
anachronism.228 This anti-philosophical interpretation of myth would culminate in the early eighteenth century in the works of the Abbé Banier
(1673–1741).229 Le Clerc, meanwhile, when he reviewed the Confucius
Sinarum philosophus, was tactfully silent about the veracity of the Jesuits’
interpretation. But he later made it clear that he supported the Rodrigues–
Longobardo line: Chinese religion was either full-out polytheism, or, among
225
226
227
228
Histoire des ouvrages des sçavans
(September 1687), Art. IV, 65–79, at
70–1.
Gisbert Cuper, Harpocrates, sive
Explicatio
imagunculæ
argenteæ
perantiquæ (Utrecht, 1687), 2, also
111–17, engaging much with Vossius.
See his review of Cuper’s Harpocrates in
BUH, 5 (1687), 136–7.
See his important piece on Selden’s De
Diis Syris in the Bib. ch., 7 (1705), 80–
146, esp. 122–3: ‘Qu’on lise la fin du III.
Chapitre de ses [i.e. Selden’s]
Prolegomenes, & l’on verra, qu’il
229
confond des conjectures philosophiques
avec la Religion.’ The reference is to
Selden, De Diis Syris, lxvii, where
Selden claimed that the pagans had
known of God’s unity from the study
of nature. Le Clerc was well aware that
Vossius was following Selden’s lead:
137, 142–3.
Antoine Banier, Explication historique
des fables, 2 vols (Paris, 1711), esp.
i.1–49; Banier, La Mythologie et les fables
expliquées par l’histoire, 3 vols (Paris,
1738), i.19–70; Levitin, ‘Egyptology’,
719.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
218
giving up philosophy
the elite, an atheistic monism.230 For Le Clerc, this was not simply
a historical–philological point, but one about the very nature of the pagan
mind and the way in which the modern scholar should study it. In his famous
Ars critica (1696), Le Clerc used as an archetypal example of the anachronistic application of theological vocabulary the mistaken comparison – made by
Grotius among others – of the ‘god’ of the Stoics with the God described by
Paul in the New Testament. According to Le Clerc, such a comparison might
be tempting, but the former was in fact the anima mundi of which human
souls were a part – hardly the same as the transcendent creator God described
by the apostle.231 This transcendent conception of God was simply unavailable to the pagan mind guided by pure reason.
This was not an isolated opinion. In the final quarter of the century, more
and more Europeans were becoming convinced, in Gassendist fashion, that
pagan conceptions of the divine were so animistic that they could not be in
any way compatible with the Judaeo-Christian transcendent deity. This point
was being made ever more prominently, now not just by scholars and
theologians, but also by natural philosophers. In England, Robert Boyle
drew on Parker’s books in his hugely influential Free enquiry into the vulgarly
receiv’d notion of nature – published in 1686 but composed from the mid1660s – so as to argue that the Western teleogical conception of ‘nature’,
made famous by Aristotle in his definition of it as an internal principle of
motion (Physics, ii.1), was in fact an inheritance from the animist idolatry of
the Near East.232 This was nothing less than ‘the Fundamental Erro[r], that
mis-led the Heathen World, as well Philosophers as others . . . the looking
upon merely Corporeal, and oftentimes Inanimate Things, as if they were
endow’d with Life, Sense, and Understanding; and the ascribing to Nature,
and some other Beings, (whether real or imaginary) things that belong but to
God, have been some, (if not the chief) of the Grand Causes of the Polytheism
and Idolatry of the Gentiles’.233 It could be found not only among the ancient
Persian and Egyptian idolaters and the Greek philosophers, but also among
230
231
BUH, 7 (1687), 387–445, even here hinting that the Neoconfucian interpretation of the Four Books was preferable
(432) and that Confucius himself had
conflated his deity with the material
heaven (394), and then BUH, 13
(1694), 95–8.
Le Clerc’s conclusion is at Ars critica,
2nd ed. (London, 1698), 142–3. Le
Clerc’s comparison is between the nominal similarity of the language of Acts
17:27 (and Eph. 4:30) and Seneca, Ep.,
xli.1–2 (a famous letter to Lucullus on
‘The god within us’). He claims Seneca’s
232
233
real meaning is revealed at 5. The target – not identified by Le Clerc – is
Grotius’ notes to his De jure bellis ac
pacis, as e.g. in the edition of Jena,
1673, at 26.
Robert Boyle, A free enquiry into the
vulgarly receiv’d notion of nature
[1686], BW.x, esp. 470–83; Levitin,
‘Experimentalist’ (2014). The book was
quickly made available to Continental
audiences in a Latin translation published in London in 1687, with an edition appearing in Geneva the year after.
Free enquiry, BW.x.470.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
219
the modern Chinese.234 All of them had been animists, positing an anima
mundi of one sort or another.235 In contrast, the true Christian philosopher
would not ascribe any agency to a personified nature, instead recognising ‘no
other Efficient of the Universe, but God himself’.236
Boyle’s formulation prompted the question of whether there was any true
secondary causation in the world at all. As I have already noted (I.1.8), his
disdain for metaphysics rendered him unconcerned by such matters, and he
remained content to confine himself to ambiguous statements concerning
God’s influence on all ‘natural’ nomological regularities. But before Boyle,
someone who really did care about metaphysics, Nicolas Malebranche, had
introduced his famous doctrine of occasionalism (the theory of causation that
states that all events are caused directly by God) by presenting it first and
foremost as a response to the animism that necessarily characterised all other
philosophies and theologies. According to the Oratorian priest, this belief
system had derived from eastern religion before impregnating Greek philosophy and, via Aristotle, Christian theology. He even cited Vossius’ Theologia
gentilis, a reminder of the continued interplay between scholarship and philosophy in our period.237
Between them, Gassendi, Thomasius, Malebranche, and Boyle forced almost
all other natural philosophers to consider whether their ideas about ‘nature’
unwittingly implied an acceptance of pagan modes of thought. In Germany,
this led to a set-piece debate between the Altdorf professor Johann Christoph
Sturm (1635–1703), the Kiel-based physician Günther Christopher
Schelhammer (1649–1716), and Leibniz.238 Readers may be wondering why
one name in particular is missing from this list, and from the whole discussion
up to now: that of Spinoza. Was it not he who made Europeans so afraid of
naturalism and monism? And were not discussions of Greek or Chinese
thought more often than not ‘really’ about Spinoza?239 Such a conclusion
gets things exactly the wrong way around. In fact, there is something perversely
Eurocentric about it. Why would European elites care about one Jew in
234
235
236
237
Free enquiry, BW.x.473–4. Boyle
declared himself agnostic on the question of ‘whether these Old Heathen
Philosophers did, besides the Stars and
other Beings, that they ador’d as Gods,
Believe one only Numen or Supream
Deity’ (474).
Free enquiry, BW.x.476–81.
Free enquiry, BW.x.469.
Nicolas Malebranche, De la recherche de
la vérité [1678], MO.ii.309–20, chapter
entitled ‘De l’erreur la plus dangereuse
de la Philosophie des Anciens’, and
Eclaircissement XV (iii.203–52, esp.
238
239
248–5). As far as I am aware, none of
the vast literature on Malebranche’s
occasionalism has discussed the significance of the fact that its first introduction came in this historical-comparative
mode. I shall have a lot more to say
about this when I come to discuss
Bayle’s debts to Malebranche in II.1.
See Baku, ‘Naturbegriff’ (1891);
Mulsow, ‘Idolatry’ (2006); Vassányi,
Anima mundi (2011), 13–18.
As claimed in, e.g., Israel, Contested,
640–52; also Ting Lai, ‘Linking’ (1985).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
220
giving up philosophy
Amsterdam who (they were convinced) had simply misunderstood Descartes,
when it turned out that both the elites of most of the rest of the contemporary
world and those of the ancient Near East, Egypt, and Greece – elites for whom
they otherwise had immense respect, and whose societies and morality they
often contrasted positively with those of modern Christendom – were all
monists or naturalists? That conclusion, as we have seen, had been reached
long before Spinoza had ever put pen to paper. It had been reached by
Gassendi, Thomasius, and Parker, working with a modified version of the
historical model established by G. J. Vossius. In the case of Asia, it had been
reached both by the Jesuits and by their opponents (albeit with disagreement
about original Confucianism), and, in Europe, by men such as Bernier.
In short, by the second half of the seventeenth century no one needed
Spinoza to tell them that the most ‘rational’ position a pagan could achieve
was animistic naturalism. Nowhere is this clearer than in some theses presided
over by Johannes Franciscus Buddeus (1667–1729) at Halle in 1701, whose
collective title is De Spinozismo ante Spinozam. Buddeus’ student drew an
elaborate genealogy of those who had pre-empted Spinoza’s monist naturalism: Strato, Xenophanes, Aristotle himself (to an extent), scholastic and
Renaissance Aristotelians such as David of Dinant and Andrea Cesalpino,
the Chinese from Confucius onwards. Luckily for us, Buddeus dutifully
revealed his main secondary sources: Jakob Thomasius and Samuel Parker,
and, on the Chinese, Charles Maigrot.240 None of them, of course, had cared
about Spinoza: the first two wrote without any knowledge of his doctrines, and
the last thought only about the Chinese and the Jesuits whom he so despised.
In the meantime, some continued to try to use new sources so as to develop
Ricci-esque arguments about the imperfect monotheism of various pagan
religions. Pococke’s successor in the Oxford Laudian Chair of Arabic,
Thomas Hyde (1636–1703), in his Historia religionis veterum Persarum
(1700), perhaps the most interesting work of the history of religions published
in our period, combined a pioneering use of Persian and other Near Eastern
sources (many brought to him by East India Company merchants) with the
Arabic monotheist interpretation of Zoroastrianism and a broader framework
clearly adopted from the Jesuits, in particular the Confucius Sinarum philosophus. According to Hyde – who had hosted in Oxford Shen Fuzong (†1691),
a Chinese convert brought back to Europe by Couplet – Zoroastrian dualism
was not really a proper dualism, but a corrupt monotheism in which fireworship was veneration (pyrodulia) rather than true worship (pyrolatria), with
the fire only being a symbol of the one true divinity, and Mithra representing
240
Johannes Franciscus Buddeus (praes.),
Dissertatio philosophica de Spinozismo
ante Spinozam (Halle, 1701); for references to Thomasius, see 13–15, 16–17,
18, 22–3; for Parker, see 12–13, 20, 24;
for Maigrot on the Chinese, see 28–9. He
also still used Vossius (21).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
221
not only the sun but also God. The evil principle, Ahâriman, was created,
unlike the good principle.241 But however much Europeans were impressed
with Hyde’s range of sources and his linguistic skills, they were rarely convinced by his conclusions. The aforementioned Cuper, for example, was
immediately sceptical that ancient Zoroastrianism really was monotheistic or
that fire-worship was only ‘civil’ worship.242 As we have seen, such doubts
emerged from a set of wider assumptions about the functioning of the pagan
mind.
There were also those who tried to take on the ‘Gassendist’ reading on its
own terms. Cudworth was by far the most sophisticated of these; a less
advanced argument of the same sort was made by the veteran Oratorian priest
Louis Thomassin (1619–95) in his Methode d’etudier et d’enseigner
Chrêtiennement & solidement la philosophie (1685), published as part of
a series of popular pedagogical works. Like the Englishman, Thomassin
acknowledged that most of the pagan philosophers were animists, but nonetheless claimed that their world souls were imperfect conceptualisations of the
true God.243 Even if this conclusion was becoming outdated, it could still be
convincing: one of those who was initially convinced was the young Pierre
Bayle (see II.4.1). However, within a decade Bayle would switch his allegiance
to the Gassendist position. The reasons for this switch, and their broader
intellectual significance, will be central to understanding Bayle’s whole intellectual development (see II.1 and II.4).
I.3.6 Conclusion: the Pagan Mind in Early Modern Europe
In the seventeenth century, ‘paganism’ – at least in its elite form – came to be
equated with animism, pantheism, or monism. Gradually, that system of belief
was portrayed more and more not as imperfect monotheism, but as a quasiatheistic monism, fundamentally different from the Judaeo-Christian conception of God. So successful was this narrative that many, not least Bayle,
eventually came to believe that it offered a heuristic for understanding the
religious–theological beliefs of almost the whole of the (non-Judaeo-Christian)
world throughout history: from ancient Egypt to Japan; from Zoroastrianism
to Greek philosophy and Chinese and Indian emanationism. This interpretation was no less ‘philosophical’ than that of the eighteenth-century conjectural historians. It depended on assumptions about how the pagan mind
241
242
For details, see Stausberg, Faszination
(2008), ii.680–717; Levitin, Wisdom,
95–108; also Poole, ‘Shen Fuzong’
(2015).
Gisbert Cuper to Johann Georg
Graevius, 23 November 1699, Bod. MS
D’Orville 478, pp. 169–70.
243
Louis Thomassin, La methode d’etudier
et d’enseigner Chrêtiennement & solidement la philosophie (Paris, 1685), 421–
30.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
222
giving up philosophy
worked, and what patterns of thought could be expected from rational men
and women bereft of divine revelation.
Indeed, this historico-philosophical vision achieved huge influence in the
eighteenth century. The idea that Buddhism and ‘Brahmanism’ were essentially the same, that they were part of a pan-Asian pantheistic theology whose
practical manifestation was a belief in deiformity and transmigration, and that
this religious system had direct historical or conceptual connections with the
Near East, Egypt, and beyond, continued to be popularised by texts as important and widely read as Diderot’s articles in the Encyclopédie (1751–72).244
Hume’s Natural history of religion (1757) repeated, with far less scholarly
detail, the narrative that had become dominant in the second half of the
seventeenth century. According to the Scotsman, there was ‘an universal
tendency among mankind’ to conceive of objects as animated or anthropomorphic; first, this manifested itself in the river gods or hamadryads of the
vulgar; later, philosophers could not ‘entirely exempt themselves from this
natural frailty’: hence the animist–pantheist doctrines of Greek sages, none of
whom could conceive of a world created ex nihilo.245 More importantly, such
assumptions informed far more serious research programmes, including those
that involved the incorporation of new sources, translated from previously
unknown languages. Urs App has now offered us case studies of how they
shaped a set of pioneering eighteenth-century works of oriental scholarship:
the work on the Forty-two-chapter Sutra by Joseph de Guignes, Voltaire’s
influential interpretation of the pseudo-Vedic forgery the Ezour-vedam,
Anquetil-Duperron on the Zend-Avesta, and Charles Wilkins on the
Bhagavad Gita (Sankskrit Hindu scripture, part of the Mahabharata). De
Guignes, for example, mistranslated the Forty-two-chapter Sutra not only
because his Chinese was not up to the task, but also because he expected to
find in its preface something not contained there: an emanationist gnosticism,
with similar Pythagorean influences (for a while, he even speculated that
Indian religion had been established by wandering gnostics).246
244
245
See esp. the articles ‘asiatiques.
Philosophie des Asiatiques en général’;
‘brachmanes’ and ‘bramines’ in
Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné,
28 vols (1751–72), i (1751), 752–5; ii
(1752), 391, 393–4, discussed in App,
Orientalism (2011), 133–87.
David Hume, The natural history of religion [1757], ed. T. L. Beauchamp
(Oxford, 2007), 40–1, 46–8. Hume’s
examples are clearly taken from Bayle.
For absolute confirmation, see the entry
in Hume’s memoranda (late 1730s–
early 1740s): ‘Tho the Antients speak
246
often of God in the singular Number,
that proves not they believed in his
Unity, since Christians speak in the
same manner of his Unity the Devil.
Baile’ (in Mossner, ‘Memoranda’
(1948), 500; see also 501, entries 11, 13
(on Thales), 14 and 15 (‘A Stratonician
cou’d retort the Arguments of all the
Sects of Philosophy . . .’); also 503,
entry 40, from Cudworth). Also
Pittion, ‘Reading’ (1977).
App, Orientalism, 213–23, 231–3, 240–
7.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
reconstructing the pagan mind
223
The story of how such assumptions informed eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century scholarship should be told elsewhere. Particularly important to
us here are the intellectual consequences of its ubiquity in late seventeenthcentury Europe. Above all, it contributed – just like the sociological–disciplinary developments charted in Chapters I.1 and I.2 – to a growing scepticism
about the power of philosophy to attain desirable outcomes; a kind of ‘critique
of pure reason’ avant la lettre. As far as Europeans in the late seventeenth
century were concerned, it was an established empirical reality that ‘pure’
philosophy had led the majority of the world – across the ancient
Mediterranean and modern Asia – to a metaphysics that was animist at best,
and monist–atheist at worst. A small minority embraced the latter position.
But for the vast majority, it became a pressing concern to come up with a way
of opposing such a philosophy. As we shall see in the next two sections of this
book, that concern proved central to perhaps the two most significant
European thinkers of the period: Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press
PART II
Pierre Bayle and the Emancipation of Religion
from Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press
Published online by Cambridge University Press
II
Prolegomena
Pierre Bayle: a Life in the Republic of Letters at the Turn
of the Eighteenth Century
1 Fideism, Rationalism, Scepticism, and the Non-Existence
of the ‘Bayle Enigma’
We move now from the general to the particular. Specifically, we move to the
gloriously complex, mysterious, and important figure of Pierre Bayle, the great
Huguenot refugee, journalist, philosopher, and polemicist. The fame – and notoriety – of Bayle’s writings in his own lifetime and beyond is not in doubt.1 What is
very much in doubt, however, is the nature of Bayle’s own aims. His earliest
opponents came to tarnish him with the tags of ‘sceptic’ (at best) and ‘atheist’ (at
worst), tags that were predictably welcomed by the philosophes in the eighteenth
century and remained consistently attached to his name until the twentieth.2 Such
was the case until Bayle became the subject of one of the most impressive acts of
scholarly reinterpretation that the Western humanities have produced. I am speaking, of course, of the exegetical labours of Elisabeth Labrousse, whose monumental
studies of Bayle in the context of the French Protestantism from which he emerged
painted a picture of a man who was in fact a consistent Reformed Protestant, and
whose ‘scepticism’ was targeted at buttressing his and his co-religionists’ faith,
while also providing an underpinning for his tolerationism.3 Rarely has one scholar
achieved such an extraordinary transformation of an important subject, and
Labrousse’s works led a whole generation of historians to reconsider previously
unexamined elements of Bayle’s life and works.4
1
2
A great deal of work remains to be done
on Bayle’s reception. For important
beginnings, see Rétat, Lutte (1971);
Labrousse, ‘Reading’ (1987). See also the
essays in Bianchi, Bayle e l’Italia (1996);
and the chapters by Quéval, Champion,
van Bunge, de Vet, and van de Schoor in
van Bunge and Bots, Philosophe (2008).
Labrousse, ‘Paris’ (1987); also Mason,
Bayle and Voltaire (1963). For the later
3
4
period, see McKenna, ‘Twentieth century’
(2008).
Labrousse I & II. Like all historiographical
transformations, this was not a solitary
endeavour. See also Serrurier, Bayle en
Hollande (1912); Dibon, Philosophe
(1959); Rex, Essays.
Particularly important subsequent interventions are the works of Ruth Whelan,
esp. her Anatomy (1988), and the essays in
Magdelaine et al., Humanisme (1996).
227
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
228
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
However, even a historian as great as Labrousse could not entirely escape
several of the standard presuppositions about her subject. More concerned
with Bayle’s biography than with the intricacies of philosophical argument, she
continued to take almost as a given Bayle’s putative scepticism; in turn, a small
army of scholars developed that assumption until it had become virtually
unquestionable.5 Concomitantly, Labrousse continued to believe that Bayle’s
‘fideist’ theology was directed against some kind of Protestant ‘rationalism’,
personified in the figures against whom he so passionately wrote in the last
half-decade of his life: Jean Le Clerc and Isaac Jacquelot (1647–1708). This has
opened the door for a new wave of what, in the jargon of the historical
profession, one might call counter-revisionism, whose exponents have forcefully advocated the idea that Bayle was an esoteric critic of religion – and
perhaps an atheist – after all.
Now, to be quite frank, much of the scholarship that makes such claims is not
worth engaging with, since it consists of a toxic mixture of wishful thinking,
Straussian conspiracy theory, and wilful misreading. However, two scholars in
particular have bucked this trend to produce serious challenges to the Labrousse
interpretation: Antony McKenna and Gianluca Mori.6 While both self-avowedly
ground their readings in Straussian esotericism,7 they have nonetheless produced very important results with which any Bayle scholar must engage.
Professor Mori in particular has developed a very sophisticated reading of
Bayle that genuinely challenges some of the age-old assumptions. Above all, he
has argued powerfully that Bayle was not much of a ‘sceptic’ at all, and that on
many matters he adopted strong – and even dogmatic – philosophical positions.
In Mori’s eyes, Bayle sought from the very start of his publishing career to
manipulate contemporary post-Cartesian philosophies, above all those of
Malebranche and Spinoza, so as to develop an atheistic argument hidden
under the historical persona of Strato of Lampsacus (whom readers will remember well from the previous chapter). So powerful has this challenge to Labrousse
been that historians now speak of an insoluble ‘Bayle enigma’.8 ‘The only
5
6
At its vanguard stood Richard Popkin:
Scepticism (2003), 283–302. Among the
more important sceptical readings of
Bayle are: Lennon, Reading (1999);
Bracken, ‘Attack’ (1993); Kreimendahl,
‘Theodizeeproblem’ (1993); Maia Neto,
‘Academic’ (1999); Irwin, ‘Implications’
(2017); Hickson, ‘Disagreement’ (2017).
It is important to note that both
Professors McKenna and Mori have had
the professional misfortune of having
their works co-opted into the notorious
conspiracy theorising of Jonathan Israel;
readers of his many books should be
7
8
aware that the theses developed by
McKenna and Mori are far more interesting and subtle than their appropriation for
the ‘radical enlightenment’ makes them
out to be. Therefore, I shall engage with
their works directly, and leave Professor
Israel’s to others. Those who enjoy such
things may consult the latest instalment:
‘Bayle’s correspondence’ (2019).
See McKenna, ‘Red herring’ (2015); Mori,
‘Persécution’ (2001).
A synoptic discussion is Paganini,
‘Towards’ (2004).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
229
consensus that is gradually emerging among Bayle scholars’, one such leading
scholar has written, ‘is a sense of resignation: an acceptance of the fact that Bayle
can be read in two ways, and that the question of interpretation will probably
remain undecided.’9
I do not believe we should resign ourselves quite yet. In the four chapters
that follow, I shall present what I take to be a solution to the Bayle enigma, one
based on a reading of all of Bayle’s surviving writings (including the whole of
the Dictionnaire) and – perhaps even more importantly – a thorough investigation of what he read. I say ‘solution’, but in fact I really mean something
more like a ‘dissolution’. For I am convinced that when we place Bayle in his
appropriate historical contexts – above all the contexts introduced in the first
Part of this book – the Bayle enigma dissolves. It is quite true that Bayle was no
systematic sceptic: in fact, his ‘scepticism’ was highly circumscribed, developed
only in the late 1680s and applied to a set of very specific theological questions
so as to argue that dogmatism on those questions was unwarranted and that
mutual toleration was prudent. But nor does that mean that he was
a ‘rationalist’, let alone an atheist. In fact, the misapplication of the category
of ‘rationalism’ has probably done more than anything else to prevent us
getting closer to the real Bayle. To put it bluntly: there were no rationaux. In
line with the findings of Chapter I.2, ‘rationalism’ was a polemical slur
deployed for the sake of inter-confessional polemic. When Bayle called Le
Clerc and Jacquelot ‘rationalists’, he was engaging in such polemic, specifically
taking the Reformed side in predestinarian disputes while pretending that he
was not engaging in such disputes at all. Once we free ourselves from our
implicit Baylean prejudices, we shall find that Le Clerc’s position was not any
more (or less) rationalist than Bayle’s own, and even that he himself counteraccused Bayle of rationalism (II.3). A direct corollary of this is that the term
‘fideism’ is no more useful for understanding Bayle. When it came to the
relationship between faith and reason, Bayle’s position was ultimately the
standard one: there were revealed mysteries that were not accessible to reason,
and natural truths that were. What differentiated Bayle was his passionate,
polemic insistence that previous theologians had failed to observe this distinction by philosophising about their faith, and that this had produced the odium
theologicum that had so polluted Christendom.
In what follows, I shall abandon the use of post-Kantian philosophical
categories such as ‘rationalism’ and ‘fideism’, as well as the assumption that
Bayle was some kind of universal sceptic (whether Pyrrhonist or Academic),
and instead seek to reconstruct Bayle’s mental universe as he saw it.
Specifically, I propose that we attempt to reconstruct his own historicophilosophical vision, one which was far too complex to be captured by any
of these labels. By the time he wrote the Dictionnaire, Bayle had a conception of
9
Van der Lugt, Bayle, Jurieu (2016), 6–7.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
230
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
the Kingdom of Darkness no less elaborate than Hobbes’s. It was that conception that animated many of the most famous articles of the Dictionnaire and
the aggressively polemical works that he wrote in its wake. In the next four
chapters, my aim will be to recapture that conception in its full complexity. For
reasons that will emerge, those chapters do not proceed chronologically: the
first three focus primarily on the texts composed in the 1690s and 1700s, and
only the last examines how Bayle reached his mature position. It is thus
particularly important that in the rest of these Prolegomena, I begin by laying
some deeper biographical foundations for my argument.
2 Pierre Bayle, Reactive Man of Letters
The desire to pin Bayle down to a philosophical category has obscured the fact
that at the human level, he was a highly reactive writer. His ideas were almost
always shaped by his reading, and very often by his most recent reading. This
was in part a function of his personality and upbringing, and partly of his
vocation as a journalist and polemicist. Many of the seeming puzzles about
Bayle’s ideas can be resolved by recognising this reactive dimension to his
thought, and by placing each episode in his career in its proper local context.
At the same time, some of Bayle’s assumptions did transcend the immediate
circumstances in which they were deployed. Several of them stemmed from his
earliest education and intellectual formation.
(i) Education and Intellectual Formation
Bayle was born in 1647 in Carla-le-Comte (now proudly renamed Carla-Bayle),
located at the foot of the Pyrenees, in one of the main Protestant enclaves in
France.10 Later in life he would frequently lament his fitful early education, but
he was fortunate to have a pastor father who exposed him to books despite the
family’s poverty. A voracious appetite for undigested reading would define the
rest of Bayle’s life, and those who seek in his thought the reassurance of a tight
philosophical system would do well to remember his own oft-repeated remarks
about the disorganisation that lay behind both his reading and writing. The
desire for more structured learning led Bayle in 1668 to a Jesuit college in
Toulouse, and to predictable conversion to Catholicism, which lasted until
a reconversion, and flight to Geneva, in 1670. There is no more dangerous
tool for the intellectual historian to deploy than psychological explanation, but it
is difficult not to attribute Bayle’s later tendency to equate dogmatic certainty
with hypocrisy, to lecture Protestants on the strength of certain Catholic arguments, and to remind all sides in a dispute that their position was not as self10
All the basic biographical details that follow can be supplemented by the
magisterial account in Labrousse I. See
also Bost, Bayle (2006).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
231
evident as it might seem to them at least in part to his experience of conversion
and reconversion.
Bayle spent less than two years studying at the famous Genevan Academy,
but the importance of his Geneva period to his intellectual formation cannot be
overstated. First of all, he was finally in a city whose flourishing book market
allowed him to obtain almost any publication that he wanted (at least within
the limits set by his curtailed finances).11 Second, the period was central to his
intellectual formation. Not only did he there become a dogmatic Cartesian
under the tutelage of Jean-Robert Chouet,12 but he also absorbed a particular
form of Reformed theology from the two leading professors, Louis Tronchin
and Francis Turretin (the former also inspired his Cartesianism).13 Bayle
remained in contact with both long after he left Geneva, and their influence
on him, almost universally ignored in the literature, was of the utmost importance. It is particularly worth noting that when Bayle arrived in Geneva,
Tronchin and Turretin were in the midst of heated debates concerning the
usual cause célèbre of Reformed divinity: grace.14 In an attempt to form
a united front against Arminians, Pajonists, and hypothetical universalists,
they argued that it was indifferent whether one was a supralapsarian (like
Turretin) or an infralapsarian (like Tronchin): what mattered was not providing rational-philosophical explanations of the problem, but only that one held
to some form of Reformed predestinarian dogma against its Pelagianising
enemies. As we shall see in II.2, Bayle was only one of several Reformed
authors to develop this theme substantially in the next decades.
After three years of tutoring in Coppet, Normandy, and Paris, Bayle in 1675
secured a post teaching philosophy at the Protestant Academy in Sedan.15 It
11
12
By the 1670s, the Genevan book merchants
had started buying up the stocks of their
Lyonnais colleagues and competitors, leading to the later claim that the city was the
best depository for books in all of Europe
(Amsterdam made similar claims). See
Bonnant, Livre genevois (1999), 106. I am
grateful to Ian Maclean for supplying me
with information on this matter, deriving
from his important forthcoming work on
scientific publishing in late seventeenthcentury Europe.
I have chosen my words carefully, for
I believe that Bayle really was
a dogmatic Cartesian from this point
onwards. In this, I am in agreement
with the brilliant recent account in
Ryan, Bayle (2009). For Chouet’s teaching, see his Corsi di filosofia, ed. M. Sina, 2
vols (Florence, 2010).
13
14
15
Bayle to Jean Bayle, 2 November
1670, BC.i.32; Bayle to Jean Bayle, 11
September 1671, BC.i.46–8. The antitransubstantiation
potential
of
Cartesianism, taught by both Tronchin
and Turretin, would be a major theme in
the pieces Bayle published in the Recueil de
quelques pieces curieuses concernant la philosophie de M. Descartes (1684), for which
see p. 233 below.
Genevan theology in this period is now best
approached via Fatio, Tronchin; see esp.
215–82 for the period during which Bayle
was in the city. See also Fatio, ‘Prêcher’
(1996); Candeaux, ‘Genève’ (1996).
There is a need for systematic work on
the Sedan academy. The fullest account
remains Mellon, L’Académie (1913); for
important new information, see
Farquhar, ‘Civility’ (2018).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
232
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
was there that he formed two attachments that would dominate the rest of his
intellectual life. The first was to a professor of theology ten years his senior,
Pierre Jurieu (1637–1713). (Those only distantly familiar with Bayle’s life are
often surprised to learn that Jurieu was one of his closest friends for nearly
a decade and a half – they were still going for walks together in 1688,16 by
which point they had already opposed one another in print.) Once they were
both in Rotterdam, their relationship would eventually sour over toleration
and politics in the mid-1680s, and collapse entirely into vicious recrimination
and insults in the early 1690s. Before that collapse, Jurieu, already a major
theological, spiritual, and political leader when at Sedan,17 influenced Bayle
immensely. This fact has proved somewhat embarrassing to those of Bayle’s
modern commentators who want to find in him a shining example of ‘modernity’ untinctured by the taint of theological involvement, let alone with
someone as distasteful to the modern palate as Jurieu. However, as we shall
see on numerous occasions, there is copious evidence to suggest that Bayle’s
intellectual agenda was very often set by his senior colleague.18 And of course,
it was perfectly natural for a man with a chip on his shoulder about his
provincial education, and who only occupied the lowly status of
a philosophy teacher, to look to his immediate superiors – better trained and
more qualified – for intellectual guidance, especially in matters concerning
theology. Such was the nature of seventeenth-century intellectual life, and it is
only later ages that invented the idea of a Bayle who from his youth heroically
stood aside from – if not against – the theological establishment within which
he lived and worked.19
16
17
18
19
At least as claimed by Bayle in Cabale
chimérique [1691], OD.ii.658b.
The most important study remains
Knetsch, Jurieu (1967), at 38–52 for the
Sedan period.
In stressing this, I am following in the
footsteps of the pioneering studies by
Sandberg (‘Contribution’ (1965)) and
van der Lugt (Bayle, Jurieu). In fact,
I explore and emphasise Jurieu’s theological impact on Bayle even more than
they do (neither says much about Jurieu
himself, or the origin of his theological
ideas).
See also the sage conclusion on this score
in Cerny, Basnage (1987), 310: ‘What
needs to be emphasized . . . is the absolute intimacy of two longtime friends,
thoroughly versed with each other’s publications (which both first issued
anonymously), who moved in the same
Huguenot refugee, Walloon, Dutch, and
English Whig exile circles in Rotterdam.
It is equally significant that one of the two
was an orthodox Calvinist minister
whose theological views have never been
questioned. Pierre Bayle was not only his
parishioner; he also submitted his conscience to Jacques Basnage’s pastoral
examination and cure. Those who question Pierre Bayle’s Calvinism and assert
that he was an unmitigated sceptic, or
a free thinker, or an atheist would find it
difficult to reconcile their hasty and secular interpretation of the philosopher of
Rotterdam with the professed Calvinist
so totally accepted as such by his own
pastor. Moreover, how do they reconcile
Bayle’s desire on his death-bed to be ministered to by Jacques Basnage?’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
233
No less reactive was the second great intellectual attachment that Bayle
formed at Sedan: that which bound him, for the rest of his life, to the
occasionalist version of Cartesianism espoused by Nicolas Malebranche. As
it happens, it may have been Jurieu himself who put Bayle on to the Oratorian
philosopher, for the theologian was at this point using the ideas of the
Recherche in his battle against the theology of Claude Pajon, the foremost
theological dispute in Reformed Protestantism at this time, and one that would
significantly shape Bayle’s own theological thought.20 We are fortunate that we
possess the text of Bayle’s philosophy lectures from Sedan, the ‘Systema totius
philosophiae’, which, while they cannot be used as a straightforward guide to
Bayle’s later thought, are an excellent indication of the Malebranchist direction
it was taking in this period.21 The same can be said of the shorter ‘Theses
philosophicae’ and the anti-Peripatetic ‘Dissertatio’ on the essence of body
(both 1680), both of which strongly defend the basic notions of Cartesian
physics and metaphysics, especially the idea of matter as res extensa. Finally,
the Objectiones against Pierre Poiret (composed 1679, published anonymously
in 1685), commissioned by the Sedan theology professor Henri Sacrelaire and
perhaps written in collaboration with him, show Bayle attempting to move
from basic teaching to a more serious life as a member of a network of
Cartesian philosophers (even if the work does not necessarily reveal Bayle’s
own view, but rather a set of disputational gambits deployed against Poiret).22
Subsequently, Bayle continued his attempts to take part in serious, panEuropean philosophical discussion by means of his participation, via his
journal, in the Malebranche–Arnauld dispute of the early 1680s. In this dispute
Bayle clearly favoured Malebranche, one of whose minor works he also
published in a collection of Cartesian writings, the Recueil de quelques pieces
curieuses concernant la philosophie de M. Descartes (1684), an important but
understudied collection to which I shall return (II.2.4). But, for all his genuine
admiration for the Oratorian, Bayle never accepted his ideas fully or uncritically. Most crucially, he never accepted Malebranche’s famous theory of grace,
first espoused in the Traité de la nature et de la grâce (1680).23
By the standard of his time, Bayle was not a first-rate philosopher. When he
tried to engage Malebranche in correspondence, the latter replied with
20
21
22
See II.2.6.
See also Ryan, Bayle, 6.
The nature and composition – possibly
collaborative – of the text has been discussed in Labrousse, i.158, n. 105; ii.145–
6; Mori, Bayle (1999), 55–69. Prof. Mori
characterises the work as containing ‘un
arsenal d’arguments anti-théologiques
que Bayle ne développera publiquement
que dans sa maturité’ (55), which leads
23
him to deny that the text might have been
a collaboration with Sacrelaire (as
reported in a letter by Jacques Du
Rondel to Pierre Des Maizeaux,
13 September 1711, BL MS Add. 4287,
fol. 270r). I am not convinced by either
argument; in any case, the work was
juvenilia, and needs to be read as such.
See II.2; also Hickson, ‘Reductio’ (2011).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
234
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
politeness, but clearly saw Bayle as no more than the journaliste that he was.24
Bayle’s real genius lay in what is now called metaphilosophy: not in doing
philosophy, but in thinking about philosophising, its consequences, and its
role in society. Throughout the 1670s, he took a particular interest in books
that touched on the discipline’s history,25 and in Geneva he and some of his
acquaintances, including his life-long friend Vincent Minutoli (1639–1709),
set up an ‘academy’ which seems to have been devoted to the discussion of the
history of ancient religion and philosophy in particular.26 Even much later in
his life he thought that these were subjects about which there remained much
to be discovered,27 and we shall find that his reading on the matter was
extensive, and deeply shaped his own conception of what philosophy and
theology should and should not aim to achieve.
It was no doubt some of the fruits of this early reading, preserved in the
notebooks he kept from his youth,28 which found their way into the many
articles on ancient philosophy that appeared in the Dictionnaire.29 A consistent
tradition of interpretation has claimed that those articles were not really about
24
25
Malebranche to Bayle, 9 July 1684, BC.
iv.221–2; Malebranche to Bayle,
21 March 1685, 25 March 1685, BC.
v.294, 304–5; Malebranche to Bayle,
22
January
1686,
BC.vi.210–12.
Malebranche was clearly interested in
keeping Bayle onside against Arnauld,
but not in answering Bayle’s own philosophical queries. Bayle’s side of the correspondence has not, alas, survived.
See e.g. his long, critical commentary on
G. J. Vossius’ De philosophia et philosophorum sectis (1658) and his reflections
on ancient philosophical sects in the letter to Minutoli, 31 January 1673, BC.
i.185–93. See also his references to reading the second edition of Jean-Baptiste
Du Hamel’s De consensu veteris et novae
philosophiae (1675) and René Le Bossu’s
Parallèle des principes de la physique
d’Aristote et celle de Descartes (1674) (to
Jacob Bayle, 9 March 1675, BC.ii.83);
Jacques-Nicolas Colbert’s Philosophia
vetus et nova, ad usum scholae accomodata (1678) (Bayle to Jacob Bayle,
5 June 1678, BC.iii.39); and Pierre de
Villemandy’s Philosophiae Aristotelicae,
Epicureae et Cartesianae parallelismum
(1678) (Bayle to Jacob Bayle,
11 January 1679, BC.iii.139). See also
26
27
28
29
II.1.1 below for his reading of Gassendi
and Bernier. This kind of analysis of
Bayle’s early reading is facilitated by
Cowdrick, Reading (1939), although
that book is not comprehensive and one
must always return to the primary
sources.
See the letters to Minutoli of
19 December 1672, 27 December 1672,
and 31 January 1673, BC.i.146, 147–8,
184–5. Also Whelan, ‘Epistolier’ (1993),
81–2.
DHC, ArchelaüsA (i.290a): ‘Voilà l’état
pitoyable où les Anciens, que l’on
vante tant, ont laissé l’Histoire des
(i.321b);
Philosophes’;
AristonD
ButasA (i.716a).
Only one of these survives, containing
notes from Plutarch’s Lives taken
between July 1672 and 1678: Kongelige
Bibliotek, Copenhagen, MS Thott 1202.
For Bayle’s ‘recueils’ more generally, see
Van Lieshout, Making (2001), 98–103.
That the DHC was largely synthesised
from Bayle’s notebooks was reported by
Henri Basnage in a letter to François
Janiçon, 22 December 1695, in Henri
Basnage de Beauval et sa correspondance,
ed. H. Bots and L. van Lieshout
(Amsterdam, 1984), 107.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
235
the ancient philosophers at all, but simply deployed their names as ciphers for
Bayle’s own, secret opinions. There is no evidence for this view, which refuses
to take seriously Bayle’s self-professed scholarly aims in the work (for which
see further §2.iv below). As I shall show in II.1, Bayle did use the history of
philosophy to make arguments about the very nature of the philosopher’s
enterprise, but he did so because he really believed himself to be in possession
of the truth about the history of the human mind, which he was reporting.
Even in his earlier teaching he had deployed historical evidence as a form of
philosophical argumentation, not least when refuting Spinoza.30
When it came to philosophy itself, Bayle remained committed to
a somewhat ossified version of Cartesianism. His knowledge of the latest
natural-philosophical or mathematical findings was scanty at best.31 The
reason for this, I shall suggest, is that Bayle’s use of philosophy was largely
instrumental, aimed primarily at theological purposes and at the development of two grander sociocultural arguments. First, he wanted to show that
Cartesian occasionalism was the only means of securing the truths of natural
theology. Those who still condemned it – and he had reason to believe that
many still did even in the 1690s – were unwittingly opening the door to
naturalist arguments, and to the ‘logic of paganism’ described in the previous
chapter (this will be the main theme of II.1). Second, he believed that the
replacement of scholasticism with Cartesianism as the default philosophy of
European elites would serve his socio-confessional ends. For he was convinced that its acceptance would help justify the Reformed doctrine of
predestination, that it would undermine the Catholic doctrine of the
Eucharist, and, most importantly, that the Cartesian separation of philosophy and theology would, if enacted, teach educated elites the limits of their
capacity to speculate concerning the divine and thus bring an end to the
odium theologicum that had so destabilised European life (see II.2–3). This
was the essence of Bayle’s vision of the Kingdom of Darkness, and his project
of knowledge reform.
(ii) Rotterdam, 1681–1689
In July 1681, the Sedan Academy was abolished; this move was part of Louis
XIV’s tightening of the noose around French Protestantism. By October 1681
Bayle had moved to Rotterdam (leaving France was still easy) to take up a chair
30
Theses philosophicae, iii, OD.iv.134. For
Bayle’s strong early disapproval of
Spinoza, see e.g. the letters to Jacob Bayle,
19 November 1677, BC.ii.457; and to
Minutoli, 26 May 1679, BC.iii.180–1. For
his rebuttal of Spinoza in the DHC, see
II.1.1.
31
See e.g. his nonplussed reaction to
Leibniz’s attempts to explain to him that
basic empirical reality required something to account for inertia, as discussed
in II.1.2. An effort to save Bayle from the
charge of scientific ignorance was made
in Brown, ‘Science’ (1934).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
236
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
in philosophy and history created for him at the newly founded Ecole illustre.32
The driving force behind the appointment was Adriaen Paets (1631–86), one
of the city regents. Bayle remained politically tied to Paets, an opponent of
William of Orange and a campaigner for political reconciliation with France
(not least because the policy favoured his own business interests), until Paets’s
death in October 1686.33 This politics, so inimical to the Orangist faction to
which Jurieu (who had also come to Rotterdam in 1681) came to be tied, was
more responsible for the troubles into which Bayle got himself by the early
1690s than any theological or philosophical position that he had espoused.
However, that was all in the future. For now, Bayle had settled in an author’s
dream city: one with booksellers, publishers, and educated (if not scholarly)
readers galore, and also with excellent contacts to the rest of the Northern
European book trade.34 Moreover, he helped form a literary and debating
society that served as a partial surrogate for an elite intellectual institution: this
society was unfailingly Protestant, with all its leading members – the pastor
Jacques Basnage (1653–1723) (in Rotterdam from October 1685, and Bayle’s
closest associate from then on), his brother Henri Basnage (1657–1710), the
physician Hermanus Lufneu (1657–1744), Bayle’s publisher Reinier Leers
(1654–1714), and Adriaen Paets the younger – also being members of the
Rotterdam Walloon Church.35 It is also worth noting that the group may well
have stimulated Bayle’s apologetic instincts, since Paets senior was at the heart
of a campaign to refute Spinoza.36
All these benefits notwithstanding, Bayle pined for a rose-tinted vision of
Paris and never really appreciated how lucky he was to have ended up in
Rotterdam.37 This did not prevent him from quickly making use of the
opportunities that it offered, publishing in March 1682 his Pensées diverses
sur la comète (a second, modified and expanded edition was published in
September 1683). He had brought this work with him from Sedan, having
32
33
34
On the history of the Ecole illustre, see
Kan, ‘School’ (1888); Bots, ‘School’ (1982).
The classic study of Paets and his politics is
Solé, ‘Débuts’ (1996). See also Knetsch,
‘Jurieu, Bayle et Paets’ (1971);
Leewenburgh, ‘Politics’ (2004). The treaties
signed in Nijmegen in 1678–9, which
established peace between France and the
Dutch Republic, abolished the anti-Dutch
tariffs introduced by Colbert in 1667 and
so heavily favoured the mercantile interests
of Paets and his allies. See further Roorda,
‘Nijmegen’ (1980), 23–5.
The best introduction to the Rotterdam
book trade in this period is Lankhorst,
Leers (1983).
35
36
37
The society and its activities were discovered and analysed in Cerny, Basnage,
87–9. For the interesting Lufneu, see
Thijssen-Schoute, ‘Lufneu’ (1960).
As detailed in Willem Copes to Lambert
van Velthuysen, 14 May 1680, Leiden
University Library, MS BPL 750. The discovery of this letter is entirely that of
Jetze Touber, who first detailed it in his
Biblical philology, 114. I am very grateful
to him for sending me photographs of the
MS.
See e.g. Bayle to Gilles Ménage,
28 January 1692, BC.viii.493. Famously,
Bayle never learnt Dutch. See further Van
Lieshout, Making, 152–5.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
237
rather naïvely hoped to publish it in the Mercure galant, a Parisian society
journal. That hope betrays the nature of the book: a literary set piece intended
for a fashionable urban audience.38 Its main thesis, that comets were not
portents, while topical after the bright and dramatic comet of winter 1680–1,
was by then almost entirely uncontroversial among elites. Even the famous,
long sub-thesis that this entailed – that a society of atheists might be preferable
to a society of idolaters – initially aroused no controversy whatsoever, not least
because it was so obviously devoted to promoting an anti-Pelagian theological
point about the corruption of most of mankind. Almost all the reactions to the
book praised its style and literary qualities (see II.4.1). As we shall see, there
was more than a hint of elitism about Bayle’s smug condemnation of popular
superstition, although there can be little doubt that such a critique was also
partially targeted at Catholicism.
Bayle’s claims about virtuous atheism only came to be attacked nearly
a decade later, in the early 1690s. Predictably, the assailant was Jurieu, who
was by now raking through all of Bayle’s previous publications in search of
proof for the existence of the atheistic cabal which his zealous mind had
fabricated. Bayle was genuinely shocked to have the ideas of the Pensées
diverses thrown back at him so long after their uncontroversial publication.
His desire to defend himself led to the development of some of the most
famous ideas espoused in the Dictionnaire, and especially in the
Continuation des Pensées diverses published in August 1704. The latter text is
in fact far more interesting, sophisticated, and historically important than the
Pensées diverses itself, and I shall be concerned with it in much of what follows.
After the publication of the Pensées, Bayle used his new-found renown and
contacts to found and edit the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, a review
journal that quickly became the most popular in Europe. This was
a monumental task, which led to nervous exhaustion in 1687.39 It will be
clear to anyone who has read all the reviews that Bayle wrote in these years
that he later recycled much of the material from his reading, which was
gargantuan, in the Dictionnaire. It will also be clear that all declarations of
neutrality notwithstanding, the periodical became more and more partisan for
the Protestant cause as the situation in France became worse, and especially
after the catastrophe of the Revocation and the subsequent death in prison of
Bayle’s brother Jacob, incarcerated partly in punishment for Bayle’s own
writings. While that event had a predictably strong impact on Bayle’s life, it
must be said that it has precipitated an unhealthy amount of pseudopsychological speculation in the literature. A penchant for such speculation
was perhaps Professor Labrousse’s only shortcoming as a historian, and she
38
See II.4.1. On the Mercure galant and its
audience, see Vincent, Mercure (2005)
and the works cited there.
39
For full studies, see Betz, Die Nouvelles
(1987); Bots, Journaliste (1994).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
238
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
came to argue, on the basis of almost no evidence, that it was the emotional
shock caused by Jacob’s death that led Bayle to his famous doubts concerning
the possibility of resolving the problem of evil.40 This was in turn leapt on by
those who otherwise oppose her reading of Bayle, so as to claim that it was at
this point that Bayle definitively succumbed to irreligion, if not outright
atheism.41 It is time to put such dubious psychological speculation to bed
once and for all. Bayle had exhibited scepticism concerning Malebranche’s
putative ‘solution’ to the problem of evil well before 1685.42 (And as we shall
see in II.2.5, that solution in any case was far less ‘rationalist’ or ‘optimistic’
than is usually claimed.) The Revocation and its impact may well have accentuated Bayle’s tolerationism; it may also have contributed to a darkening of his
tone. What it did not do – at least as far as the evidence reveals – was precipitate
any crisis of faith or intellectual revolution.
Not knowing the bitter consequences his actions would have, Bayle had first
turned to religious controversy in 1682, composing in the fortnight of the
Easter vacation his Critique générale of the Histoire du Calvinisme (1682) by
the aged Jesuit Louis Maimbourg (1610–86). The text’s intricate historical–
theological argumentation betrays Bayle’s devout, aggressive, intellectualist
Protestantism, as well as his extensive reading and consideration of both
Protestant and Catholic polemical divinity. It also marks the beginning of his
public argumentation for religious toleration on the basis of the rights of the
errant conscience.43 Such a claim had been common in Huguenot circles for
half a century (see II.4.3), and Bayle did not perceive himself to be saying
anything particularly controversial when he repeated it in the Nouvelles lettres
de l’auteur de la Critique générale (1685). Indeed, Bayle later admitted that all
its themes had been foreshadowed in a Latin book published by Paets in 1685 –
a book celebrating the religious pluralism James II was encouraging in
England! – which Bayle translated into French the next year.44 Bayle’s tolerationism only became controversial because Jurieu, who had previously held to
a similar doctrine, responded to the influx of universalist and Pajonist pastors
40
41
42
43
44
Labrousse, i.199–200. The only ‘evidence’
for it is Bayle’s non-evocation of
a personalised providence in subsequent
letters.
See e.g. McKenna, ‘Théologie’ (2010), 88;
Jossua, L’obsession (1977), 43, passim;
van der Lugt, Bayle, Jurieu, 160; all of
whom adopt, to some extent, the psychohistorical approach.
Hickson, ‘Reductio’.
CG, xx–xxi, OD.ii.85b–97b, and II.4.3.
DHC, SainctesF (iv.118a). The text is
Adriaen Paets, H.V.P. ad B**** [i.e.
Bayle] de nuperis Angliae motibus
Epistola; in qua de diversorum a publica
religione circa divina sententium disseritur tolerantia (Rotterdam, 1685), translated by Bayle as Lettre de Monsieur H.V.
P. à Monsieur B**** sur les derniers
troubles d’Angleterre: où il est parlé de la
tolérance de ceux qui ne suivent point la
Religion dominante (Rotterdam, 1686),
also in OD.Sup.ii.11–52. For Bayle’s initial, propagandist review in NRL,
October 1685, see OD.i.385–7. The best
discussion remains Knetsch, ‘Jurieu,
Bayle et Paets’, 42–5; see also Simonutti,
‘Amis’ (2004), 64–9.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
239
into the Dutch Republic after the Revocation by attacking tolerationist arguments in his Vray système de l’Eglise (1686), to which Bayle’s famous
Commentaire philosophique, published in October 1686 (vols I and II) and
June 1687 (vol. III) and disguised as the work of an English Arminian, was
a partial response.
The argument of that book was based on a dogmatic moral rationalism
which Bayle held throughout his life, and which was entirely standard in
Reformed (and many other) circles in the period. The dictates of natural law,
inscribed on the conscience of every human, demanded that one follow that
conscience. Therefore, to constrain another’s conscience – even one which
seemed to be in error – could not be in line with those dictates.45 Ignorance in
doctrinal matters was invincible, just as a wife who truly but erroneously
believed a man to be her husband still had a duty to treat him as such. To
take ‘compel them to enter’ literally, and to engage in persecution on its
authority, was thus as much to go against God’s own (natural) law as to read
into Scripture the license to curse one’s enemies:
If a casuist were to come and tell us that he finds in Scripture that it is good
and holy to curse his enemies and those who persecute the faithful; let us first
turn our attention to natural religion, strengthened and perfected by the
Gospel, and we shall see by the brightness of that inner truth which speaks to
our minds without saying a word, but which speaks very intelligibly to those
who pay attention. We shall see, I say, that the so-called ‘Scripture’ of this
casuist is only the bilious vapour of his own temperament.46
45
46
Mori, ‘Rights’ (1997), 47 claims that
Bayle’s rationalist morality here has
something to do with Malebranche’s
doctrine of seeing all things in God.
This is certainly incorrect: see II.1.3 for
Bayle’s rejection of that doctrine.
CP, i.1, OD.ii.369a: ‘Si donc un Casuïste
nous venoit dire qu’il trouve dans
l’Ecriture qu’il est bon & saint de maudire
ses ennemis, & ceux qui persécutent les
Fideles, tournons d’abord la vûë sur la
Religion
naturelle
fortifiée
&
perfectionnée par l’Evangile, & nous verrons à l’éclat de cette vérité intérieure qui
parle à notre esprit sans dire mot, mais
qui parle très-intelligiblement à ceux qui
ont de l’attention; nous verrons, dis-je,
que la prétenduë Ecriture de ce Casuïste
n’est qu’une vapeur bilieuse de
tempérament.’ It is crucial to note that
nowhere in these early chapters of the CP
does Bayle say anything that contradicts
his later insistence on the incomprehensibility of the mysteries, for his focus is
strictly on morality: see e.g. 1.i, OD.
ii.370a–b. And even more explicitly, earlier in the same chapter (368b): ‘God forbid I should extend this principle as
much as the Socinians do. But if we may
have limitations with respect to speculative truths, I do not think that we should
have any with regard to those practical
and general principles which concern
morals. That is to say, that all moral
laws, without exception, ought to be submitted to that natural idea of equity,
which enlightens every man coming into
the world as much as metaphysical light’
(my underlining) (‘A Dieu ne plaise que
je veuille étendre ce principe autant que
font les Sociniens; mais s’il peut avoir
certaines limitations à l’égard des véritez
spéculatives, je ne pense pas qu’il en
doive avoir aucune à l’égard des principes
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
240
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
The problem of what to do with someone who conscientiously believed
themselves obliged to persecute was to be resolved on the grounds of sociopolitical expediency rather than moral theory: they were to be prevented from
doing so, so as to preserve civil peace. The same expediency dictated that
Catholics and atheists should not be tolerated, due to their inability to hold to
their political oaths.
I have spoken of ‘moral rationalism’ here, and will continue to do so, but it is
important that we be particularly careful on this score. As I have said, Bayle’s
conviction that the truths of morality were self-evident to the conscience of
almost every human was entirely standard in Reformed thought at this time
(and in most of the Christian theological tradition since Aquinas). However –
and I cannot stress this enough – such an assumption had nothing to do with
any kind of theological ‘rationalism’. Nobody in the seventeenth century
thought that the statement ‘The revealed dictates of God cannot be in conflict
with the moral dictates of natural law as inscribed on the conscience’ was
epistemologically equivalent to the claim that ‘The theological mysteries
revealed by God have to be deducible by reason.’ Of course, more or less
everyone agreed that those mysteries did not contradict reason: to disagree
would be to commit oneself to the doctrine of double truth. (As we shall see,
Bayle remained within the mainstream on this score, even as he exposed some
of the difficulties of the position: II.3.3.) But no one thought that there was any
epistemological symmetry between the moral truths taught by natural law (and
confirmed and supplemented by the Gospel revelation) and theological mysteries. This is best demonstrated by the simple thought experiment of what
a typical seventeenth-century Reformed (and even Catholic) theologian would
expect from a wise pagan. He would expect the pagan to know the truths of
natural law, even if the Fall rendered him incapable of following them. But he
would certainly not expect that pagan to know anything of the theological
mysteries such as the Trinity or predestination.
Many confusions concerning Bayle’s views have arisen from failing to
appreciate this distinction, and especially from the inappropriate use of the
term ‘rationalism’. In particular, there is a frequent tendency to claim that
Bayle moved from the ‘rationalism’ of the Commentaire philosophique to the
‘fideism’ or ‘scepticism’ of the Dictionnaire, and, in some quarters, to claim that
this shift betrays his theological insincerity. Nothing could be further from the
truth. What has been called ‘fideism’ was simply Bayle’s insistence, imposed on
pratiques & généraux, qui se raportent
aux moeurs. Je veux dire, que sans exception, il faut soûmettre toutes les loix
morales à cette idée naturelle d’équité,
qui, aussi-bien que la lumière
Métaphysique, illumine tout homme
venant au monde’). The final quotation
is from John 1:9. When he speaks of
principles known ‘by the light of metaphysics’, Bayle refers to self-evident
truths such as the principle of noncontradiction or that the whole cannot
be greater than the parts.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
241
him by polemical necessity, that the dogmatic truths of religion, especially
concerning the mysteries, were incapable of philosophical confirmation and
that any ignorance or error concerning them was inevitably ‘invincible’. The
polemical reason that Bayle came to emphasise this argument from the time of
the Supplément du Commentaire philosophique (1688), and to press it so hard
in the Janua coelorum reserata (1692) and the Dictionnaire, was that in 1687,
Jurieu, in his Des droits des deux souverains en matière de religion, argued
precisely the opposite. That is to say, he argued that a Christian could not be
invincibly ignorant of some doctrinal truths, such as the Trinity, because they
were so clearly revealed in Scripture (see II.4.3).
Jurieu was accusing Bayle of promoting indifferentism, understood as
a licence for lazy subjectivism. Bayle countered by pointing out that there
was no way in which one could separate the sincere from the insincere. No one
could say that Socinians who denied the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, or
those Molinists or Arminians who denied the orthodox Reformed doctrine of
predestination, could be automatically dismissed as lazy or wilfully ignorant.
After all, had Jurieu not admitted the difficulty of the latter question in
particular in his Jugement sur les méthodes rigides et relâchées, d’expliquer la
providence et grâce (1686)? It is here that we find the origins of the famous
Manichean articles of the Dictionnaire, with their challenge to all philosophical
explanations of predestinarian dogma. What previous interpreters have failed
to recognise is that those articles had a double polemical function. On the one
hand, they sought to demonstrate against Jurieu that the revealed mysteries
were always beyond the grasp of human reasoning, and so were by definition
subject to invincible ignorance. On the other, they sought, with Jurieu, to
defend Reformed predestinarianism by showing that it was no more irrational
than any ‘relaxed’ form of predestinarian dogma (i.e. as upheld by Molinists,
Arminians, and Pajonists) and that it was in fact more rational to stick with the
‘rigid’ position of the Reformed. This complex double polemic will be the
subject of Chapters II.2–3.
(iii) 1689–1693: Political Naïveté
Nothing Bayle had said up to this point had rendered his orthodox Reformed
faith suspect in the eyes of anyone (apart from perhaps Jurieu). However, over
the next few years Bayle made the biggest mistake of his life: he took up writing
about politics. Like so many intellectuals who have done so across historical
time and place, he was simultaneously naïve about political reality and overconfident about the power of his literary abilities to change minds.
The primary reason for entering the lists on the subject was, once again, to
respond to Jurieu, who was only a little less naïve than him. Post-1685, the
Refuge was divided on politics. One group supported William of Orange, his
aims for a pan-Protestant alliance against France, and in turn the Glorious
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
242
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
Revolution. Another, both more pacifist and more hopeful of a return to France,
resisted William’s increasing power, his military ambitions, and any undue
antagonising of Louis; predictably, they favoured the absolutist and antiresistance arguments that had been dominant in seventeenth-century French
Protestantism.47 Jurieu, manipulated by William and by his own selfimportance, and capitalising on the trauma caused by exile, came from his
L’accomplissement des prophéties (1686) onwards to promote an apocalypticalpolitical vision which predicted the imminent downfall of Antichrist (the
papacy) via the holy crusade that was William’s war, with the Stadtholder
increasingly portrayed as an Old Testament theocratic sovereign. To defend
his position further, Jurieu dropped the insistence on non-resistance which until
then had been virtually ubiquitous in Huguenot political thought in favour of
various forms of monarchomach resistance theory as it had been developed in
the sixteenth century.48 His ideas became extraordinarily popular, both because
they suited the mood of the time and because of his own rhetorical skills, not
least as they were deployed in the very widely read Lettres pastorales (1686–9),
smuggled into France through the porous checks on imported books.49
Bayle was repulsed by this doctrine on all levels (not least by its populism,
which was inimical to his elitism and which his own ideas could never achieve).50
Inspired by his loyalty to the deceased Paets, by the standard French Reformed
arguments against theocracy (at least after the abrogation of the Old Covenant)
which he had already deployed in the Commentaire,51 and by a concomitant
unbending absolutism,52 he not only advocated loyalty to Louis but also condemned any action against James II. Had Bayle stuck to doing this in the balanced,
47
48
49
50
The classic study remains Haase,
Einführung (1959). See also Dodge,
Political
(1947);
Labrousse,
‘Political’ (1982); Labrousse, Essai
(1985). For the impossibility of neatly
mapping political positions on to ideas
about toleration or the role of reason in
theology, see the excellent discussion in
van der Lugt, Bayle, Jurieu, 150–6.
Knetsch, Jurieu, 278–319. As well as the
works in the note above, see also
Bracken, ‘Prophecy’ (2001).
Rex, Essays, 217–25.
For Bayle’s bitter complaints against
Jurieu’s populism, see e.g. Bayle to
Minutoli, 27 August 1691, BC.viii.402:
‘un persécuteur tel que Mr Jurieu, dont
la
populace
laïque,
et
même
l’ecclésiastique, suit aveuglement la fureur’. This is only one more example of
Bayle’s elitism, the importance of which
51
52
I shall emphasise on several occasions
below.
CP, ii.4, OD.ii.406b–410a.
For the collection of many statements to
this effect, see Labrousse, ii.474–96; also
Labrousse, Conscience (1996), 159–75. It
is entertaining to watch modern historians perform interpretative cartwheels to
try to save Bayle from the charge of absolutism. See e.g. Jenkinson, ‘Introduction’
(2000), xxxvi, claiming that Bayle cannot
have been an absolutist or opposed the
1688 revolution because ‘he supports
intellectual liberty’(!). A tendency that is
equally wrong-headed is to present
Jurieu as somehow representative of
‘orthodoxy’; by this point, he had abandoned almost all the tenets of standard
seventeenth-century Reformed theology
(Rex, Essays, 213–14 offers a good
summary).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
243
pragmatic, and above all politically sensible manner practised by his great friend
Jacques Basnage, he would only have had to wait until Jurieu’s prophecies failed to
unfold. Instead, he published anonymously a book, the Avis important aux
réfugiez (April 1690), that deployed his talent for scathing irony to accuse his coreligionists of the basest hypocrisy: they had abandoned their principled royalism,
tolerance, and respect for the pacifist spirit of Christianity, and were eroding any
chance of a return to France.53 The book managed the unique success that
‘virtually every faction in the Refuge was incensed or felt wounded by it’ – the proWilliamite camp for obvious reasons, and their opponents ‘not only because some
of them felt that the charges had been grossly exaggerated, but because the
accusations had been made in such a manner that it was almost impossible to
deny them without seeming at the same time to be criticising the government of
Holland and setting themselves against William’.54
Jurieu was at the front of the line. He did so on two fronts. First, he
reasserted the theocratic political thought to which he had now wedded
himself, relying ever more on Old Testament examples to justify his case –
here are the origins of the famous Dictionnaire article on ‘David’, which
restated the traditional Huguenot position against Jurieu.55 Second, he developed an elaborate conspiracy theory, accusing Bayle of being a member of an
atheistic, anti-Dutch ‘cabal’ sponsored by Louis. This accusation, although
founded on the tiniest grain of truth – after all, Paets really had collaborated
with Louis to the extent that he encouraged the Sun King to threaten an
invasion56 – was stated in the most ridiculous, overblown manner. This gave
Bayle an opportunity to go on the polemical counter-attack (something which
he relished),57 all the while denying his authorship of the Avis even to his
closest friends. There ensued an inevitable pamphlet war, despite the attempts
of the city burgomasters and the Walloon Consistory to prevent it.
None of these publications is of great significance for the investigation of
Bayle’s intellectual development,58 apart from the fact that they further reveal his
53
54
Bayle’s authorship of the Avis, for which
much evidence was already brought in
Labrousse, i.219–26, has now been
proved near-definitively by Mori in his
‘Introduction’ (2007). Bayle had adumbrated some of its themes in February of
the previous year in the (also anonymous) Réponse d’un nouveau converti, in
OD.ii.561–75.
Rex, Essays, 227. Non-Orangist opposition to the work came from, among
others, Tronchin du Breuil, Antoine
Coulan, and even Bayle’s great friend
Jacques Basnage, all unaware of its true
authorship.
55
56
57
58
As shown in Rex’s classic essay, ‘David’,
repr. in Essays, 197–255.
Solé, ‘Débuts’; Solé, ‘Diplomatie’ (1969).
For Bayle’s at least partial knowledge of
Paets’s machinations, see Bayle to Joseph
Bayle, 17 April 1684, BC.iv.86; Bost and
McKenna, ‘Introduction’, 21.
See Basnage to Graevius, 8 May 1691,
Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, MS
Thott 1258.4.
Gianluca Mori, who has done such wonderful work to confirm Bayle’s authorship of the Avis, has made a heroic
effort to try and deploy it as evidence
for his thesis about Bayle’s clandestine
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
244
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
absolutism, elitism, and increasing commitment to toleration on the basis of the
fact that one could not be culpably ignorant in matters of doctrine. The episode
crystallised Bayle’s fanatical hatred of Jurieu, explaining many of the more
rhetorically provocative and ill-advised passages that appeared in the
Dictionnaire. It was also at this point that Jurieu returned to the Pensées diverses
and decided to tell the world that they in fact promoted atheism; Bayle’s need to
reply to this charge led him, I shall suggest (II.4.2), to conduct a new, systematic
programme of reading in the history of religion and philosophy whose fruits
found their way first into the Dictionnaire and then the Continuation.
The final significance of the episode was that it precipitated Bayle’s expulsion
from the Ecole illustre in October 1693. Popular histories of the period still
portray the episode as one in which a heroic intellectual liberal was persecuted by
the repressive forces of orthodoxy. The reality is more prosaic.59 In
October 1692, the Stadtholder, capitalising on an episode of civil unrest caused
by the death of a city watchman, purged the Rotterdam city council of antiOrangist elements. This presented Jurieu with an opportunity to conduct his
anti-Bayle campaign at the highest political level. Now stripped of Paets’s
protection, Bayle was left exposed – moreover, still trusting in his powers of
literary persuasion, he chose to submit his case to the most corrupt Orangist
councillor of them all, Jacob van Zuylen (1642–95).60 Unsurprisingly, Bayle lost
his post, nominally on account of the ideas in the Pensées diverses, but really
because of his political stance and associations, as he himself well knew.61
(iv) The Dictionnaire
Thankfully for him, Bayle was saved from self-induced penury by his longterm publisher, Leers,62 who paid him a pension to continue work on the
project he had been engaged in since late 1689: a dictionary of scholarly
errors, not least in Louis Moréri’s hugely popular Grand Dictionnaire historique (first published in 1674). Indeed, Bayle’s dismissal presented him with
irreligion (‘Introduction’). But the case
fails. The type of anti-hypocrisy argument that Bayle made, claiming that
a specific group of Christians should be
ashamed of their behaviour, was virtually
inbuilt into Christianity from the beginning, and if we start accusing everyone
who deployed it of atheism we shall find
that many of the church fathers were
unbelievers. For other powerful arguments against Mori’s interpretation,
which I shall not regurgitate, see
Hickson and Lennon, ‘Significance’
(2009).
59
60
61
62
For the full story, see Bost and McKenna,
‘Introduction’, 54–60.
Bayle to van Zuylen, 5 December 1692,
BC.viii.676–8. For the politics in the city
in this period, see also Melles, Ministers
aan de Maas (1962), 139–45.
See e.g. Bayle to Minutoli, 5 November
1693, BC.ix.171; Bayle to Jacques Du
Rondel, 13 November 1693, BC.ix.188–9.
For their relationship, see Lankhorst, Leers,
esp. 24–5, 51–65, 122–5; Labrousse, i.179–
80, 182–3, 190. Leers’s shop functioned as
an informal salon for many Huguenot
writers: Van Lieshout, Making, 168–71.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
245
the time required to devote himself fully to the mammoth task, which he had
modified into a more constructive and ‘philosophical’ enterprise after an
initial ‘Projet et fragments d’un Dictionnaire critique’, published in
May 1692, had met with only a lukewarm response, some respondents
tactfully pointing out that Bayle had taken an over-pedantic approach and
that his continued assaults on Jurieu were inappropriate in a work of this
kind.63 Bayle ignored the second piece of advice, but took some account of
the first. From mid-1693, the Dictionnaire began to be printed at an everincreasing pace, with which Bayle, who was composing the articles in alphabetical order, struggled to keep up.
The accusation of pedantry was not without warrant, and Bayle in fact
offered a set of beautiful pleas for pedantry in the final text itself.64 Anyone
who has consulted the few surviving notes from the initial stages of the
composition of the Dictionnaire65 will have seen this pedantry at work, and
will realise that the intentions behind such an enterprise can only have been
those of the scholar, not of the subversive intellectual. Perhaps the strangest
thing that has ever been said about Bayle is that he was some kind of historical
Pyrrhonist.66 In fact, Bayle thought that such a position was nothing short of
absurd.67 He was sure that the historical art was a progressive one that had
improved since antiquity, a conclusion he shared with his rival Le Clerc, from
whose Ars critica he adapted it for use in the Dictionnaire.68 Moreover,
philology played a key role in his own historical worldview. Improvements
in philology, he maintained, had precipitated the Reformation, a point he
made with an unsubtle anti-Catholic glee that pre-empts centuries of triumphalist Protestant historiography:
the restoration of the learned languages and the humanities paved the way
for the Reformers, as had been clearly foreseen by the monks and their
allies, who never ceased to declaim against Reuchlin, Erasmus, and other
scourges of barbarism. Thus while Roman Catholics have reason to
63
64
65
66
For the responses, see Van Lieshout,
Making, 15–20. More generally, Prof. Van
Lieshout’s study is a remarkably full
account of the composition of the
Dictionnaire, based on almost all the
known evidence.
DHC, CarneadeB (ii.59a); EpicureE
(ii.366a–367a); and above all MeziracC
(iii.387b–388b).
Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, MS
Thott 1205, first discussed in Gigas,
‘Ebauche’ (1896), and then Nedergaard,
‘Genèse’ (1958).
The idea continues to be stated prominently: see e.g. Burke, ‘History, myth’
67
68
(2012), 264–6; Burke, ‘Crises’ (1998),
where Bayle’s enterprise is compared to
that of Derrida, Lyotard, or Hayden
White!
See e.g. DHC, GuevaraD (ii.632b).
DHC, Quinte CurceTEXT (iv.10), drawing
on Le Clerc’s long, destructive ‘Judicio
de Q. Curtio’, Ars critica, 2 vols
(Amsterdam, 1697–9), ii.535–716. For
Le Clerc on Quintus Curtius and his
views on the ars historica more generally – which no one has ever taken for
historical Pyrrhonism – see Grafton,
History (2007), 3–12.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
246
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
deplore the consequences of the study of the humanities, Protestants have
reason to praise and glorify God for it.69
The self-consciously humanist nature of the Dictionnaire is even more evident
in the ‘Projet’ of 1692, where Bayle compared his corrective efforts to a diluted
version of those undertaken by the great humanist scholars Isaac Casaubon
(1559–1614) and Claude Saumaise (1588–1653), and defended both the popularity and the value of history, philology, and antiquarianism against the
challenge posed by purely utilitarian forms of knowledge. Moreover, in
another smirk at historical Pyrrhonism, Bayle noted that history was far
more likely to achieve the target of moral certainty it set for itself than
mathematics or philosophy was to achieve demonstrative certainty. No one
in their right mind would dispute ‘this truth of fact, that Caesar vanquished
Pompey’.70 This was not simply a professional defence of the historian’s status;
as we shall see, it was a point essential to Bayle’s defence of his Reformed faith
(II.3.3).
Having said all that, Bayle was – and was conscious of being – a passionate
scholarly dilettante. He pined for what he perceived as the age of the great
humanist scholars of the previous century, and his pedantry was designed to
evoke their scholarship without attempting to emulate it properly. As Lenie
van Lieshout has rightly noted of Bayle’s great enterprise, ‘one could be the
master of the minuscule and thus occasionally imagine oneself the equal of the
great ones, and one could paint in with fine strokes to one’s heart’s content
where others, governed by their format or in moments of weakness, had used
the broad brush. It is the characteristic enthusiasm of the amateur, focused on
the details.’71 But while Bayle’s reliance on second-hand scholarly conclusions
may dampen the spirits of those who want to find in him a pioneer of modern
historical method, it is of the utmost usefulness to the historical detective
looking to reconstruct his own ideas and how he reached them. In what
follows, we shall find again and again that those ideas were the direct product
69
DHC, TakkidinA (iv.315b): ‘la restauration des Langues savantes, & de la belle
Litérature, a preparé le chemin aux
Réformateurs; comme l’avoient bien
prévu les Moines & leurs Partisans, qui
ne cessoient de déclamer & contre
Reuchlin, & contre Erasme, & contre les
autres fleaux de la barbarie. Ainsi, pendant que les Catholiques Romains ont
sujet de déplorer les suites qu’ont eues
les études des belles Lettres, les
Protestans ont sujet d’en loüer Dieu, &
de l’en glorifier.’ In the margin, Bayle
cites – entirely unironically – Jurieu’s
Histoire du Calvinisme & celle du
70
71
Papisme mises en parallele, 4 vols
(Rotterdam, 1683), i.66–7, which indeed
supports Bayle’s argument by using
Maimbourg’s claims against himself.
Bayle had read and admired Jurieu’s
book as it was composed: see Bayle to
Joseph Bayle, 9 July 1682, BC.iii.301;
Bayle to Jacob Bayle, 12 April 1683, BC.
iii.335.
‘Projet’, DHC, iv.607–9, 611–14, qu. 614:
‘cette Vérité de fait, que Cesar a batu
Pompée’. The whole section is explicitly
targeted against historical Pyrrhonism.
Van Lieshout, Making, 104–5.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
247
of Bayle’s voracious reading, and – once again – very often manifestations of
his reaction to his most recent reading. This being recognised, the trick will be
to separate his more deeply held assumptions from the immediate polemical
context in which they manifested themselves.
Upon the publication of the Dictionnaire, the indefatigable – and understandably furious – Jurieu tried to have the Walloon Consistory convict its
author of heterodoxy. However, the battle was again primarily political, since it
had its origins in the article ‘David’, which, as we have seen, was really about
the politics of the Refuge. Only then did the consistory turn to the famous
Manichean articles (‘Manichéens’, ‘Marcionites’, ‘Pauliciens’), to that on
‘Pyrrhon’, and to Bayle’s use of ‘obscenities’.72 In other words, just as with
the case of the virtuous atheists, the accusation of heterodoxy only followed the
political dispute, which it was designed to prejudice. Bayle responded with a set
of polemical clarifications of his ideas in another series of pamphlets,73 and
above all in a set of four ‘Eclaircissements’ added to the second edition of the
Dictionnaire, published in December 1701.74 In these we see Bayle in his least
literary – and thus most unambiguous – mode, and they will be of great
importance for what follows, for they contain Bayle’s most explicit acts of selfinterpretation. Nonetheless, we should remember that even they are polemical
texts, and that they do not reveal some kind of transhistorical set of assumptions that Bayle held for the whole of his life. The same goes for the new articles
added to the second edition. Some of these, especially those concerning
‘oriental’ religion and philosophy, are of the utmost interest and importance.
Once again, we shall find that they were the fruits of very recent pan-European
controversies, aspects of which Bayle incorporated into his own historicophilosophical framework, a framework heavily indebted to the scholarship
described in Chapter I.3.
(v) 1703–1706: Religious Controversy in the Republic of Letters
The last years of Bayle’s life were devoted to religious controversy. Liberated
from other duties by his dismissal and from financial worries by the success
of the Dictionnaire, he worked with feverish urgency on the polemics that
always so excited his spirit. The first product of his Stakhanovite capacity for
72
73
For summaries of the proceedings, see
Bost and McKenna, ‘Introduction’, 60–
2; Bost, Bayle, 433ff.; for the proceedings:
Bost and McKenna, L’affaire (2006),
145–54.
Réflexions sur un imprimé qui a pour
titre, Jugement du public [1697]; Suite
des Réflexions sur le prétendu Jugement
du public [1697]; Mémoire présenté à
74
Messieurs du Consistoire de l’Eglise
Wallonne de Rotterdam [1698]; Lettre
de l’Auteur du Dictionnaire Historique
et Critique à Mr. le D.E.M.S [1698],
OD.iv.767–9.
They appear in DHC, iv.626–64. A new
edition with interpretative essays is Bost,
Eclaircissements (2010).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
248
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
disputatiousness was the long-awaited Continuation des Pensées diverses,
published in August 1704, but in preparation for over a decade, since
Jurieu’s early-1690s attacks on the original book. As I have already noted,
the Continuation is far more interesting and sophisticated a work than the
Pensées diverses itself. Where the latter was as much a literary enterprise as a
work of philosophical argumentation, the Continuation presents a refined
historical–philosophical thesis concerning the ubiquity of a monist ‘naturalism’ among almost all pagan peoples, and the great difficulties that the
human mind faced in trying to extricate itself from that naturalism.
Unsurprisingly, it is that argument that has been foregrounded by Professor
Mori in his naturalist–atheist reading of Bayle.75 But as we shall see, Bayle’s real
aims were very different. On a scholarly level, he had absorbed almost all of the
claims of the second strand of historiography of religion described in I.3 – the
strand that found elite paganism to be inherently animist, immanentist, monist, or even atheistic. Bayle deployed those conclusions, which stemmed above
all from Gassendi, to make a novel natural-theological argument: that only
Cartesian occasionalism could serve to convert an elite pagan, such as those
that the Jesuits were encountering in China. The naturalists would find that
their immanent, impersonal first principle could not explain the order and
regularity in the world: at this point, the occasionalist would pounce. However,
even they would need the revealed truth of ex nihilo creation to ensure the
coherence of their system. Hence the only consistent philosophical system also
happened to be a ‘Christian philosophy’ (see II.1). All it could not explain was
the origin of moral evil, but here everyone was equally stumped, unless they
were willing to return to a dualism that was far more incoherent on all other
matters.
It was to that subject that Bayle turned in the final years of his life,
defending the Manichean articles of the Dictionnaire from various attacks,
especially those by Le Clerc and Jacquelot. He did so in the vast, prolix textual
monoliths that are the Réponse aux questions d’un provincial (4 vols, 1704–7)
and the Entretiens de Maxime et de Thémiste (2 vols, 1707). These works have
been almost invariably treated as Bayle’s attacks on the so-called ‘rationaux’,
whether from a fideist, a sceptical, or an atheistic perspective. As I have
already hinted, to adopt this reading is to adopt, unwittingly, Bayle’s mischaracterisation of his opponents, and in turn their mischaracterisation of
him. Le Clerc (on whom I shall focus in II.3) was no more ‘rationalist’ than
Bayle on the questions under dispute: the problem of evil, the possibility of
reconciling divine omnipotence and human freedom, predestination.
Indeed, he counter-accused Bayle of ‘rationalism’. In reality, the debate was
a confessional one. Bayle was upholding the rationality of believing in
75
Mori, Bayle, esp. 217–35.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
prolegomena
249
Reformed predestinarianism;76 Le Clerc was accusing him of a dangerous
determinism, and in turn defended the Arminian position.
What has obscured this is that both parties were trying to conceal the fact
that they were engaging in confessional dispute. After all, both had spent much
of their lives up to this point condemning the odium theologicum they claimed
was responsible for religious intolerance and for the other ills that had befallen
Europe. But at the same time, they both believed that their confessional
opponents were most to blame for instigating that odium theologicum. Bayle
believed that the Arminians, Molinists, Pajonists, and universalists had
engaged in hubristic philosophical rationalism so as to escape the obviously
revealed fact of predestination. Le Clerc, in contrast, believed that it was the
Reformed (and the Dominicans and Jansenists) who had engaged in such
hubristic philosophical rationalism, which had led them into an absurd necessitarianism and into positing a God who willed man to sin. It was these
assumptions, hidden under various rhetorical disguises designed to obscure
their confessional origins, that stimulated the increasingly bitter insults and
accusations that Bayle and Le Clerc threw at each other in the first decade of
the eighteenth century (II.3).
This point necessitates a broader reflection on a topic intrinsically connected to Bayle’s name: the republic of letters. For much of the twentieth
century, historians presented the republic of letters as a quasi-political project
unified by ideals of tolerance and intellectual freedom, and treated its participants as if they were twentieth-century ‘intellectuals’, self-consciously engaged
in a programme of intellectual liberalisation. However, important revisionist
work has suggested that those participants were largely elitist and apolitical,
concerned primarily with their own scholarship and prepared to criticise
established practices only to the extent that the criticism was not intended to
be politically destabilising: ‘within the Republic of Letters, critical thinking can
dismantle all sorts of publicly accepted beliefs and superstitions. But it is
thoroughly non-radical politically: it relies on, and defends, the powers that
be.’77 As I have already noted, and will emphasise again, this combination of
anti-superstition criticism and elitism is very strongly evident in Bayle’s
writings, above all in the original Pensées diverses and in his anti-Jurieu screeds.
Recently, a second important revisionist argument has been made about the
republic of letters: that contrary to the self-presentation of many of its
76
In my experience, this claim has caused
some confusion, so let me be clear as
possible. I am not saying that Bayle
thought that Reformed predestinarianism was rationally explicable. Rather, he
thought it the best of all the available
alternatives, for reasons that could be
rationally argued. Whenever I speak of
77
‘the rationality of predestinarian dogma’
for Bayle, this is what I mean. As we shall
see, he was far from the only one to make
this argument.
Malcolm, Aspects, 541, and the analysis at
537–45. See more broadly Goldgar,
Impolite (1995).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
250
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
members, it continued to be a premier forum for the conduct of inter- and
intra-confessional intellectual warfare. As Nick Hardy has written of Isaac
Casaubon’s confessionally motivated treatment of theological matters: ‘Not for
the first or last time, a lay scholar was forced to circumvent the dangers of
direct involvement in doctrinal controversy by pretending to have dealt solely
in matters of fact.’78 Hardy has focussed on the first half of the seventeenth
century, and he himself implies that the situation changed in the second. But
I shall show that his words apply perfectly to the Bayle–Le Clerc dispute. More
generally, Bayle’s whole life is symptomatic of how confessional concerns still
shaped the intellectual lives of even lay men of letters. Bayle’s personal life,
friendships, reading, and instincts always took him back to theological concerns, especially to the development of an anti-Pelagian anthropology and to
the justification of a life shaped by Reformed principles in the face of the
charges laid upon it by its opponents. Those charges were sometimes political:
that Reformed principles promoted sedition and rebellion (hence his deep
concern with what he saw as Jurieu’s theocratic bastardisation of Reformed
biblicism). Or they could be theological: the charge, made above all by Pierre
Nicole, that the Reformed insistence on individual examination and denial of
the need for an infallible interpreter would lead to theological anarchy and
Socinianism;79 or the charge, made by Catholics and Arminians alike, that the
Reformed predestinating God was a tyrant, belief in whom could only lead one
into a lazy fatalism. If there was a defining feature of Bayle’s intellectual life, it
was the quest to respond to those charges, while at the same time defending the
tolerationism that he believed was necessary for the functioning of European
society. It is my contention that he did so first and foremost by reconceptualising the relationship between philosophy and theology, a reconceptualisation
that he believed could provide a solution to all the problems generated by his
own vision of the Kingdom of Darkness. It is to that vision that we can now
turn.
78
79
Hardy, Criticism, 151.
For the huge importance of this charge to Bayle’s whole career, see II.3.3.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press
II.1
Greece, Asia, and the Logic of Paganism
Cartesian Occasionalism as the Only ‘Christian Philosophy’
As promised, we commence with Bayle’s mature conception of the logic of
paganism, especially as it was developed in the Dictionnaire (most fully in
the second edition of 1702) and the Continuation des Pensées diverses (1705).
In the case of the former, we shall be dealing with some of its most famous
articles, including ‘Anaxagoras’, ‘Dicearque’, ‘Epicure’, ‘Jupiter’, ‘Xenophanes’,
and the most famous of them all, ‘Spinoza’. Two preliminary comments are in
order. The first is that it is a futile exercise to read these famous articles on their
own, outside of the context of the rest of the Dictionnaire, the Continuation,
and the other texts Bayle wrote around this time. More positively, I should like
to go some way towards recovering the real Bayle by avoiding the tendency to
read his historical discussions either esoterically, or as ciphers for pure philosophising. The most sophisticated discussion of this sort is that by Gianluca
Mori, who, in a brilliant and provocative commentary, claims that Bayle used
his historical discussions to promote covertly a form of atheistic naturalism
akin to that of Spinoza.1 Professor Mori’s work is philosophically sophisticated, and grounded in precise engagement with the sources. But in the end, he
reads those sources from the perspective of a (Straussian) philosopher, seeking
to find a strong, systematic conceptual coherence hidden beneath Bayle’s
interpretations of ancient texts. As we shall see, there was a philosophical
coherence to Bayle’s reading (albeit not at all the one attributed to him by
Professor Mori). However, in line with the comments I made in the
Prolegomena, before we seek to recover that coherence we must first study
what Bayle, the real human reader of texts, was actually doing when he
discussed ancient religion and philosophy. In other words, we must try to
recreate his reading, and to identify his scholarly assumptions and polemics.
This is not easy. It involves following up almost all of Bayle’s citations, and
investigating the assumptions of those modern sources upon which he relied.
But the rewards of this process are, as I hope to show, immense. By tracking
down Bayle the scholar we shall emerge in a position to interpret properly
Bayle the thinker, and to turn again to the intentions behind these mature
writings.
1
Mori, Bayle, esp. 133–88, 217–35.
251
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
252
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
In §1 of this chapter I shall reconstruct the scholarly polemics behind the
hundreds and hundreds of pages of historical argumentation in the
Dictionnaire, the Continuation, and related texts. I shall show that Bayle’s
aim was to articulate what I identified in I.3 as the ‘Gassendist’ line on the
history of the pagan mind. Without revelation, that mind was incapable of
conceiving of a transcendent creator God, instead postulating various immanent principles. Bayle drew on almost all the sources discussed in I.3.3 –
Gassendi himself, Bernier, Thomasius, Parker, the anti-Jesuit reading of
Confucianism – for his scholarly case. Moreover, he echoed their polemics,
attacking Vossius, Pfanner, Lescalopier, Cudworth, Hyde, and others who had
claimed that pagan animism contained at its core an imperfect monotheism. In
other words, Bayle’s historical position was not the esoteric expression of
a covert Spinozism, but rather the continuation of seventeenth-century scholarly debates.
In §2 I shall turn to the philosophical assumptions that underpinned Bayle’s
adoption of this historical narrative. Most importantly, I shall demonstrate
that Bayle’s aim was to show that Cartesian occasionalism was the only
possible answer to the atheistic logic of paganism, a logic that culminated in
Epicureanism, Stratonism, or Neoconfucianism. In other words, occasionalism was for Bayle the only foundation for a reliable natural theology. It is true
that he believed that this foundation could be established only once the
doctrine of creation ex nihilo – known solely through revelation – had been
accepted. However, this was not fideism on his part. For he believed that the
‘Christian philosophy’ that emerged was still the most rational philosophical
system ever devised at any time or place in the history of mankind.
Accordingly, he truly believed that it would be of immense use for the
missionaries in the East.
In §3 I shall explore what Bayle took to be the explanatory limits of Cartesian
occasionalism qua ‘Christian philosophy’ (although I shall bracket the problem of evil, which I leave to the next chapter). These limits were all derived
from man’s inability to comprehend the nature of soul–body interaction.
Accordingly, the ‘place’ of immaterial substances and animal rationality
remained the two most fundamental problems for any Christian philosopher.
It may be thought that the admission of such limits renders Bayle the fideist or
sceptic that he is so often reputed to have been. But as I shall show, these were
very commonplace assumptions in late seventeenth-century Cartesianism,
articulated by virtually all the leading French Cartesians of the period, not
least Malebranche and Pierre-Sylvain Regis.
I shall conclude (§4) by demonstrating that the natural-theological purpose
behind Bayle’s argumentation did not go unnoticed in the eighteenth century.
Moreover, I shall explain some of the deeper underlying motivations that led
Bayle to defend Cartesianism so passionately almost a half century after its first
appearance in the world, and how that defence was nonetheless part of
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
253
a profoundly ambiguous attitude to the place of philosophy in society and in
a good system of knowledge.
II.1.1 Bayle on the Logic of Paganism
(i) The Basic Narrative
Bayle never explicitly discussed the origins of religion per se, but his thoughts
on the subject can be gathered from several places. Like almost everyone in
the seventeenth century, he suggested that the origin of idolatry lay in starworship,2 which emerged because primitive peoples came to revere what
provided them with benefits, above all the sun.3 But he did not dwell
particularly on this original moment; instead, he discussed at length in
various articles of the Dictionnaire how the first full system of pagan religion
was developed by the poets. There was no deeper allegory behind their myths,
and the people believed these myths literally.4 Bayle, like almost all scholars
by the second half of the seventeenth century, was fiercely critical of an earlier
generation of mythographers – above all Natale Conti, but also the church
fathers – who had sought allegorical or philosophical explanations of pagan
myths. Among other books, he cited Vossius’ Theologia gentilis, now over
fifty years old, as an authority for the new, non-allegorical approach to the
subject.5 Nonetheless, he did see one connection between this primitive
poetic mythology and ideas about nature: the former had ultimately derived
from the latter, in that it stemmed from anthropomorphism, or what Bayle
called the ‘ma[king] of natural idols’.6 So for example the anthropomorphisation of trees led to the invention of the wood nymphs.7 Or, refusing to
believe that rational humans could simultaneously be responsible for their
unruly passions, the pagans attributed the appearance of such passions to the
gods, and in turn anthropomorphised each passion into a god.8
2
3
4
5
E.g. RQP, cxi, OD.iii.726a–b.
CPD, xix, OD.iii.213a–b; also the vast note
in DHC, PericlesK, (iii.668b–670b).
E.g. DHC, LaïsB (iii.33a).
For explicit criticisms of Conti, see e.g. DHC,
JupiterA (ii.901a); ThamyrisD (iv.342b); for
use of Vossius, see CPD, cxxxi, OD.iii.374b.
Bayle agreed entirely on this matter with his
future rival Jean Le Clerc, citing Le Clerc’s
important review of Selden’s De Diis Syris
(as I.3.5, n. 229). He also seems to have been
influenced by Theodorus Janssonius ab
Almeloveen’s Opuscula, sive antiquitatum
6
7
8
e sacris profanarum specimen (Amsterdam,
1685), which he reviewed in the NRL,
January 1686, OD.i.465b, commenting especially on this aspect. On Almeloveen, see
Stegeman, Patronage (2005).
DHC, HamadryadesD (ii.691b): ‘On en fit
une idole naturelle.’
DHC, HamadryadesD (ii.691a–b). Much of
the evidence here is again plundered,
without acknowledgement, from Vossius:
cf. Theologia gentilis, ii.78, 260a–261a.
See the long remark in DHC, HeleneY
(ii.708b–709b).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
254
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
Such a naturalistic origin notwithstanding, this mythological religion was
inconsistent and unphilosophical.9 And so, despite surface similarities, the
creation narratives of the pagan philosophers could not be mapped on to those
of the earlier poets.10 However, there was one similarity between the poetic and
the philosophical theologies: both were animistic. This manifested itself in
different levels of consistency. The poets were full polytheists, and so for them,
Fortune, for example, was just one of many gods. The philosophers, meanwhile, believed in one, ubiquitous principle, which they sometimes labelled
‘Fortune’.11
Here we encounter the main thrust of Bayle’s argument about the history of
opinions concerning the divine. This argument was contained primarily in the
articles on the Greek philosophers (especially the Presocratics) and on Asian
religion, and then elaborated at length in the Continuation. These were first
and foremost scholarly articles, designed as part of Bayle’s search for the
history of scholarly error. Again and again, Bayle insisted that what many,
including both the church fathers and recent commentators, had taken to be
a monotheism broadly comparable to that of Judaeo-Christianity was in fact an
immanationist animism or monism that was more akin to atheism. According
to Bayle, the essence of the elite, philosophical theology of all pagans was
a pantheistic deification of nature. Indeed, there was an inherent logic to pagan
theology: all of it tended to what Bayle called ‘naturalism’.12 As Bayle put it in
good Gassendist terms in the article ‘Caïnites’: ‘when we represent to ourselves
human reason left to itself, and destitute of the help of Scripture, it seems to me
very easy to apprehend that it must conceive this vast universe as penetrated
throughout by a very active power, one that knows what it does’.13 This was
because the revealed knowledge of creation ex nihilo by a transcendent god was
unavailable to the pagans, who consequently constructed pantheistic or dualist
systems to explain creation and activity in the world.14 Almost invariably, the
9
10
11
12
Bayle seems to have been particularly
indebted to the work of Claude
Saumaise for this point. See DHC,
AbdereD (i.13b): ‘Mr. de Saumaise dit làdessus, qu’il ne faut point chercher
l’uniformité dans les Fables: il
a raison . . .’ (the reference is to the discussion in Saumaise’s Plinianae exercitationes (Paris, 1629), 160); also EsopeL
(ii.404).
DHC, ThalèsD (iv.340b–341b).
DHC, TimoleonK (iv.373b).
Perhaps the most concise summary Bayle
ever offered was that in the Mémoire
communiqué par Mr. Bayle [1704], OD.
iv.182a, describing ‘The general and
13
14
dominant doctrine, whether among the
ancient pagans, the Christians, or the
Muslims’ (‘La doctrine générale & dominante, soit parmi les anciens Païens, soit
parmi les Chretiens & les Musulmans’).
DHC, CaïnitesD (ii.7a): ‘. . . quand on se
représente la raison de l’homme
abandonnée à elle-même, & destituée
du secours de l’Écriture, on comprend
fort aisément, ce me semble, qu’elle a dû
se figurer ce vaste Univers comme
pénétré par tout d’une vertu très-active,
& qui savoit ce qu’elle faisoit’. See also
CPD, lxxiv, OD.iii.294a–b.
I have gathered below all the evidence for
Bayle’s belief in this.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
255
theologies produced by pagan philosophers – stretching from Greece to
China – were pantheistic, a similarity that Bayle drew attention to with all
the eagerness of a fully fledged nineteenth-century comparatist. ‘One cannot
sufficiently wonder’, he wrote, ‘at the fact that an idea which is so extravagant,
and so full of absurd contradictions, should insinuate itself into the mind of so
many people so far apart from one another, and so different in their character,
education, customs, and genius.’15
However, Bayle was no Voltaire, ready to surrender scholarly accuracy for
the sake of a generalised thesis. The specific historical manifestations of this
animism were subtly different, and had different theological consequences;
these differences Bayle charted at vast length – and in vast scholarly detail –
throughout the Dictionnaire and his subsequent works. Like Gassendi, he
focussed above all on the Greek philosophers,16 but like Bernier, Thomasius,
and Parker he expanded the narrative to include all pagan theology throughout
history. As we shall now see, this was largely because he was drawing on all of
them.
Bayle devoted most space to his discussion of the Greek philosophers and
the consequences of their thought, especially in the long articles ‘Ammonius
(Saccas)’, ‘Anaxagoras’, ‘Archelaüs’, ‘Aristote’, ‘Averroes’, ‘Cesalpin’,
‘Chrysippe’, ‘Democrite’, ‘Dicearque’, ‘Diogene’, ‘Diogene’ (the Stoic),
‘Epicure’, ‘Leucippe’, ‘Lucrece’, ‘Pereira’, ‘Pomponace’, ‘Pythagoras’,
‘Pyrrhon’, ‘Rorarius’, ‘Sennert’, ‘Spinoza’, ‘Thalès’, ‘Xenophanes’, ‘Zabarella’,
and ‘Zenon (d’Elée)’. The historical and philosophical connections between
them are complex, but thankfully Bayle offered a self-interpretative guide in
the Continuation. As he pointed out there, in a very important section entitled
‘Reasoning that proves that they [the pagan philosophers] did not believe in
the Unity of God’, those philosophers who had ‘seemed to recognise this unity’
had in fact not admitted ‘any God other than the universe itself, or nature, or
the soul of the world’.17 Their omnipresent first principle was subtle but not
immaterial, and thus ‘the God that they recognised was an accumulation of an
infinity of parts’.18 The reasons why all elite pagan thought tended to this
15
16
DHC, JaponD (ii.832a): ‘On ne peut assez
admirer qu’une idée si extravagante, & si
remplie de contradictions absurdes, ait
pu se fourrer dans l’ame de tant de gens
si éloignez les uns des autres, & si
différens entre eux en humeur, en education, en coutumes, & en génie.’
Bayle’s approach to the history of ancient
philosophy has been discussed in Piaia,
‘Historiography’ (2011), 100–38; Most,
‘Bayle’s Presocratics’ (2011); McKenna,
‘Sondage’ (2017). I have benefitted from
17
18
all three, but my interpretation is very
different from theirs.
CPD, xxvi, OD.iii.224b: ‘ceux qui semblent reconnoître cete unité, ont réduit à la
seule divinité du Soleil tous les autres
Dieux du Paganisme, ou qu’ils n’ont
point admis d’autre Dieu que
l’Univers même, que la Nature, que
l’ame du monde’.
CPD, xxvi, OD.iii.225a: ‘Le Dieu qu’ils
reconnoissoient étoit un amas d’une
infinité de parties.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
256
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
conclusion were explained in the relevant articles of the Dictionnaire, where
Bayle relentlessly pursued those commentators – ancient and modern – who
had tried to ascribe monotheism to the pagans. Before I explore his deeper
reasons for doing so, I must outline in more detail his scholarly explanations
and polemics.
(ii) A Gassendist History of the Pagan Mind: Greek Philosophy
According to Bayle, the first of the Greek philosophers, Thales, with his
primordial water, was undoubtedly a pantheistic monist. Cicero among the
ancients and Lescalopier among the moderns were wrong to claim that for
Thales this water had been actuated by a separate deity – rather, water was
god.19 Bayle here drew directly on Thomasius’ development of Gassendi’s
ideas.20 If Thales’ proto-Spinozist monism was ambiguous, it was far less so
in the case of his successors in the Milesian school of philosophy,
Anaximander and Anaximenes. The a posteriori reason that led them to
adopt what at first glance seemed the absurd position that the gods were
produced from one ubiquitous material principle was because they did not
believe in the immateriality of the human soul, but thought that it was formed
from the most subtle part of the blood, or the seed. If one could imagine this, it
was only a short step to imagining gods formed from a material first
principle.21 Indeed, for Bayle this was only a philosophical formalisation of
the earlier Greek theogonies, in which the gods emerged from a primordial
chaos. When taken to its logical end, this position could be described as
atheism: ‘it was to convert the necessity of nature into God’.22
When Bayle came to the Eleatics Parmenides and Melissus, he continued to
interpret them as followers of this logic of paganism. The fragmentary sources
for both make it clear that they believed in one eternal, infinite, immutable
principle. Bayle knew that this had led many Christian apologists – both
19
20
DHC,
ThalèsD
(iv.340b–341a);
AnaxagorasD (i.210a–211a), arguing
against Cicero, Nat. deor., i.10 and
Lescalopier, Humanitas theologica, 39–
40; also CPD, lxvi, OD.iii.285a–287a.
Bayle cites the oration ‘Dogma Thaletis,
quod aqua sit principium omnium
rerum’, in Observationum selectarum . . .
tomus II (Halle, 1700), 416–27; which
had been sent to him by Christian
Thomasius himself (Bayle to HervéSimon de Valhébert, February 1701, BC.
xii.293). The orations are anonymous,
but the copy in Bibliothèque jésuite des
Fontaines, Lyon (classmark: SJ BF 232/6),
21
22
supplies the name of the author in
a contemporary hand before each oration: the name before this oration is
‘J. Thomasius’.
DHC, JupiterG (ii.903b). See also DHC,
ArchelaüsB (i.290a–b). Bayle’s stated
sources are ps.-Plutarch, Placit. philos.,
iv.3 (which, it could be argued, he was
misusing), and ‘the first book of
Aristotle’s De anima’: Bayle was surely
thinking of i.2, 403b20–405b30.
DHC, JupiterG (ii.906b): ‘C’étoit dans le
fond un vrai Athéisme: c’étoit convertir
en Dieu la nécessité de la Nature.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
257
patristic and early modern – to a monotheistic reading of the fragments: ‘for
a long time people have tried to justify them, by giving to their opinion
a favourable sense, and a great air of conformity with the orthodox opinion
about God’s nature’.23 But this was a great error. The Eleatics, who could not
believe that a transcendent god could create substances ex nihilo, also ascribed
unity to their one principle, and hence had to assume that he was everything,
with no true generation ever occurring. Hence this was also, ultimately,
a monism akin to that of the Milesians,24 who nonetheless were so puzzled
by it that they preferred their material first principles, which allowed for true
generation (Bayle had reached this conclusion as early as the mid-1670s, when
he delivered his philosophy lectures in Sedan).25
The case of the Eleatics thus showed that scepticism also had its origin in
pantheistic monism, the natural implication of which was the denial not only
of generation, but also of all movement; they considered sensory perception of
such movement as only an illusion.26 All this stemmed from the rational (but
supernaturally disproved) principle that ex nihilo nihil fit. On the basis of this
philosophy, movement and change could only be phantasms, and Diogenes
Laertius was thus wrong to maintain that Xenophanes did not believe all things
to be incomprehensible; Lescalopier was even more wrong to try to make him
a monotheist.27 Indeed, Bayle triumphantly finished, such immutable monism,
taken to its logical conclusion by Xenophanes, was a far more rational and
internally consistent position than that adopted by Spinoza, for the latter
naïvely still believed in mutability, which was logically impossible in
a monist system.28 Bayle always held to this claim, and there is no reason
whatsoever to doubt that he held it sincerely. As far as he was concerned,
Spinoza himself was much less of a concern than the ancient and Eastern
atheists, who had pursued the logic of paganism far more doggedly than he
had. But the fact that it led them to the patently absurd consequence of denying
mutability in the world only confirmed the limits of pure reason.
However, what of those who were more famous (at least among patristic and
subsequent apologists), for having supposedly acknowledged one, immaterial
23
DHC, Zenon d’EléeK (iv.546b): ‘Il y a
long-tems qu’on tâche de les justifier,
en donnant à leur opinion un sens favorable, & un grand air de conformité avec
le dogme des Orthodoxes sur la Nature
de Dieu.’ Bayle gives the example of
the Coimbra Jesuits’ Aristotle commentary
(see
Commentarii
Collegii
Conimbricensis . . . in octo libros
Physicorum Aristotelis (Lyon, 1602),
commentary on vi.2, cols 249–50), but
he knew that the trope went back to the
24
25
26
27
28
church fathers (e.g. Eusebius, Praep. Ev.,
i.8.5).
DHC, Zenon d’EléeK (iv.546b).
Systema, OD.iv.273–4.
DHC, XenophanesL (iv.523b).
DHC, XenophanesL (iv.524a–b). The critiques are of Diogenes Laertius, ix.20 and
Lescalopier, Humanitas theologica, 44.
Bayle was here without acknowledgement following a critique first developed
by Eusebius (Praep. Ev., xiv.17).
DHC, XenophanesL (iv.524a–b).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
258
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
deity, in a manner at least loosely comparable to Jews and Christians, such as
Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle? Or what about Anaxagoras, who had famously gone against all his Ionic predecessors in positing ‘Mind’ (νοῦς) as an
ordering force? Once again, Bayle sought to challenge all monotheist readings
of these philosophers. Anaxagoras’ ‘Mind’ may have been a great improvement
on his Ionic predecessors, but this accidental ‘orthodoxy’ was still a ‘bastard
and monstrous production’ – a truth that had ‘entered [his] System not
through the door, but through the window’.29 Like his predecessors,
Anaxagoras refused to admit that creation ex nihilo was possible, and so was
forced to argue not only that his famous homoeomera (substances composed of
tiny parts of that substance) were material principles coeternal with the divine
one, but also that they possessed their own power of generation (humans
originally being generated from the earth), a doctrine that he shared with his
pupil Archelaus, who stated it more clearly.30 So, while not being a monist,
Anaxagoras was at best a dualist (of sorts) and a vitalist (albeit not as bad in this
respect as some later Greeks).
As for Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, Bayle again deployed vast energies in
challenging the monotheistic reading, and in arguing at great length that they
were animists whose first principles were inevitably an anima mundi of one
type or another; consequently, they could not conceive of divine extension as
separate from the universe, but only as a logical abstraction.31 The Renaissance
naturalists had recovered the true Aristotle: a vitalist who assigned the generation of men to material celestial causes and believed that there was no first
principle but the material heavens, and who had posited a material anima
29
30
DHC EpicureF (iv.372a–b): ‘Ce qu’ils
disoient [i.e. that a divine mind had
formed and preserved the world] étoit
vrai; mais ils ne laissoient pas de parler
inconséquemment, & c’étoit une verité
intruse, elle n’entroit point dans leur
Systême par la porte, elle y entroit par
la fenêtre; ils se trouvoient dans le bon
chemin, parce qu’ils s’étoient égarez de
la route qu’ils avoient prise au commencement. S’ils avoient su s’y conduire, ils n’eussent pas été orthodoxes,
& ainsi leur orthodoxie étoit une production bâtarde & monstrueuse, elle
étoit sortie de leur ignorance par accident, ils en étoient redevables à
l’incapacité de raisonner juste.’
DHC,
AnaxagorasD
(i.209a–211a);
JupiterG (ii.903b); Ovide NasonG
(iii.558b–559b); PericlesA (iii.664a). On
generation, see ArchelaüsB (i.290a–b);
31
CesalpinB (ii.118a); see also Ovide
NasonG (iii.556a–559b), for the errors
logically entailed by the adoption of any
scheme in which an intelligence resolves
a pre-existent material chaos, as
Anaxagoras held. For a summary, see
CPD, cv, OD.iii.331a–b.
Pythagoras:
DHC,
PythagorasO
(iii.747b); RQP, cx, OD.iii.724b. See also
CPD, xxvi, OD.iii.225a; Pauliciens, text
and rem. N (iii.635–6), drawing on
Daniel Heinsius’ ‘Notae et emendationes
ad Maximum philosophum’, in Maximi
Tyrii
dissertationes
philosophicae
(Leiden, 1614), 106 (new pagination),
for the precise nature of Pythagorean
dualism. Plato: DHC, PauliciensL
(iii.634a–b); CPD, lxviii, OD.iii.288a–
291a; RQP, xii, III.ix, OD.iii.519a–b,
918a–919a.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
259
mundi.32 Whether Aristotle intended it or not, he ‘blazed a trail’ for vitalistic
atheism.33 His disciples Dicaearchus and – above all – Strato took Aristotle’s
quasi-vitalism to its logical conclusion. The former believed that ‘all the
capacity we have of action or sensation is uniformly diffused in all living
bodies and cannot be separated from the body’.34 But just like so many of his
seventeenth-century predecessors, Bayle saw the logic of paganism culminating in the views of Strato, who held that all of nature was alive, and perhaps
even thought that an eternal nature had produced the world from an internal
necessity. As Bayle insisted in the Continuation, this was the logical consequence of all of Greek philosophy, which, with its conflation of god and nature
(to whatever extent), and its adherence to the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit,
could never find an objection to Strato’s following through of that principle.35
Christians could find objections to the Stratonic system, but only if they
reasoned carefully (see below). Many had not, and had ended up following
through on the pantheistic logic of Aristotelianism: plagiarising Thomasius,
Bayle cited the examples of Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant.36
The only Greek philosophers to reject immanentist animism were
Democritus and Epicurus. However, this left them with the problem of
explaining order in the world. Democritus could solve it only by sneaking in
animism through the back door, by attributing to atoms an animating virtue or
soul.37 Epicurus removed this aspect of Democritus’ system; he was the only
one of the pagans to maintain a distance between a transcendent divinity and
the creation.38 Here we find Bayle adopting Gassendi’s exact framework: the
32
33
34
35
36
E.g. DHC, CesalpinA (ii.117a). Bayle’s
source for this reading was Samuel
Parker: see below. See further DHC,
DiogeneB (ii.296b); SpinozaA, CC
(iv.254a, 267b); PereiraE (iii.652b);
PomponaceF (iii.780a–781b); RorariusE
(iv.79a–80a); RQP, III.ix, OD.iii.918b–
919a.
CPD, cvi, 335a: ‘La doctrine d’Aristote . . .
fraia le chemin à l’Athéïsme de Straton’;
citing Parker, Disputationes, 372.
DHC, DicearqueC (ii.285): this is
a quotation from Cicero, Tusc. disp., i.10.
CPD, cvi, OD.iii.334a–335a. See also e.g.
RQP, II.clxxx, OD.iii.882a.
A claim Bayle was making as early as his
philosophy teaching of c.1680: Theses
philosophicae, iii, OD.iv.134, repeated in
DHC, SpinozaA (iv.253a). Elsewhere,
Bayle
traced the
influence of
Aristotelian animism–pantheism from
John Damascene, who he claimed first
37
38
developed Aristotelian scholasticism,
through the Arab Aristotelians and the
Scotists, and to Galileo’s Parisian opponent Claude Berigard, who had revived the
true, vitalist Aristotle (a conclusion again
taken from Samuel Parker): see DHC,
(ii.240a–b);
FrancusB
DamasceneF
(ii.508b); AbelardC (i.19b); BerigardusA
(i.535a–b), quoting at length Parker,
Disputationes, 67; AverroesE (i.385a–
387a).
DHC, DemocriteP (ii.274a–b). Bayle
knew that this reading was contentious,
depending on a passage in Augustine,
Epist., cxviii.27–8 (itself an adaptation
of Cicero, Nat. deor., i.12.29). For ancient
testimonies on the matter, see Taylor,
Atomists (1999), 214–15.
DHC, EpicureG (ii.367b–368a). This
reading
involved
denying
that
Epicurean divinities were composed of
atoms, and thus preferring the authority
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
260
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
pagan world could be divided into a group consisting solely of Epicurus, who
insisted on the divinity’s distance from the world, and everyone else, who
forged animist systems grounded on a conflation of God and the world.39
However, because Epicurus, bereft of revelation, adhered (like all other
pagans) to the rational principle of ex nihilo nihil fit,40 he fell into other,
insurmountable problems, especially about how material atoms could account
for life and sensation. This was a problem in Epicurus’ system already identified in antiquity by Galen, and Bayle insisted that the only way that it was
possible ‘to solve this problem’ was ‘the hypothesis of the soul of the world’,
which had been adopted by all the other pagans. But as we have just seen, that
solution faced its own insurmountable difficulties.41 Indeed, even Epicurus
was forced to make a concession to animism with his famous swerve (clinamen); this absurd and unwarranted addition to his system stemmed from the
fact that he already suspected ‘how much it was necessary for him to attribute
to each atom an animated and sensitive nature, as it seems Democritus had
done’.42 Nonetheless, Epicurus, with his materialism and his tranquil gods, had
departed farthest from the logic of paganism, which, with its simultaneous
adherence to ex nihilo nihil fit and desire to account for the seemingly obvious
existence of a rational soul in humans, had been forced down the path of
39
40
41
of Lactantius, De ira Dei, 10, to that of
Tertullian, Apol., 48 and Augustine,
Epist., cxviii, 28 (Bayle, using an older
classification, refers to it as Epist., lvi).
Lactantius was presumably building on
Cicero, Nat. deor., i.71. This goes against
the consensus opinion that Epicurean
gods are composed of atoms, but as was
so often the case, Bayle was here silently
drawing on Gassendi: Syntagma, GO.
i.306b–307a, who had relied on exactly
the same Lactantius passage.
Hence the hypothetical debate between
Epicurus and a Platonist in EpicureS
ii.372a–b is really a debate between
Epicurus and the rest of the pagans, of
whom Plato was typical.
DHC, EpicureS (ii.374a), offers a concise
summary. See also rem. T (ii.374a–b).
DHC, EpicureE (ii.367b), drawing on
Galen, De elem. ex Hipp. 2 (K i.415–17)
which Bayle again took from Gassendi’s
discussion of the issue (Syntagma, GO.
ii.343a–b), before going on: ‘One can
turn in all imaginable directions, as
Lucretius and Gassendi have done, so as
to solve this difficulty, but we will still not
42
even be able to touch it, and the best we
can say is that all Philosophers who recognise that the principles of mixed bodies
are deprived of feeling, are as much
exposed as Epicurus to the same difficulty. We must tell things as they are:
the hypothesis of the soul of the world,
or that of automata, is the only way out of
this embarrassment’ (‘Qu’on se tourne de
tous les côtez imaginables, comme ont
fait Lucrece & Gassendi, pour soudre
cette difficulté, on ne pourra pas même
l’effleurer, & ce qu’on dira de meilleur est
que tous les Philosophes qui reconnoissent que les principes des corps mixtes
sont prives de sentiment, s’exposent
autant qu’Epicure à la même difficulté.
Il faut dire les choses comme elles sont,
l’Hypothese de l’ame du Monde, ou celle
des automates, est la seule voie de se tirer
de cet embarras’).
DHC, EpicureE (ii.367b): ‘Epicure eût pu
connoître par là combien il lui importoit
d’attribuer à chaque atôme une nature
animée, & sensitive, comme il semble
que Democrite l’avoit fait.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
261
animism: ‘Those who deny that the soul of man is a substance distinct from
matter, reason childishly, unless they suppose that the whole universe is
animated.’43 In other words, a materialist could not explain animate action
in the world without combining their materialism with some form of animism.
Here was the glue that bound all of Greek philosophy. ‘All the systems of the
pagan philosophers assume the eternity of matter . . . [and] give to god a true
[i.e. substantial] extension.’ To be sure, such systems posited a supreme first
principle. But that first principle, by logical necessity composed of parts, was
not the Christian transcendent deity. ‘One can acknowledge as much as one
wants a first being, a supreme god, or a first principle, [but] it is not enough for
the foundation of a religion . . . it must also be established that this first being
by a single act of his understanding knows all things, and that by a single act of
his will he maintains a certain order in the Universe, or changes it according to
his good pleasure.’44 An Athenian who spent the years between the ages of
twenty-five and thirty examining religious beliefs would quickly reject the
crude polytheism of the common people. But having gone through all the
philosophical schools, they would find that in all of them God is extended and
composed of parts. This impersonal God could only act in a determinist
fashion and could never exercise his providence, returning one to naturalism.
As we shall soon see, Bayle thought such a position absurd, and that a pagan
would recognise it as such. However, this would only leave them in a ‘labyrinth
they could not escape’. It was unsurprising, Bayle concluded, that so many of
them turned to scepticism.45
(iii) A Gassendist History of the Pagan Mind: Asian Monism
Bayle thought that such a logic was primarily displayed in advanced societies
(and even there, only among the philosophical elite), although he did note that
subtle manifestations of it seemed to be present even among the Khoekhoe
people of south-west Africa, known from the ethnographic writings of the
Dutch physician Olfert Dapper (1636–89), who called them ‘Hottentots’ (a
designation that lasted until the twentieth century). These people recognised
a supreme first principle, ‘Humma’, but did not worship it, suggesting that it
43
44
DHC, LucreceF (iii.211a): ‘Dès qu’on nie
que l’ame de l’homme soit une substance
distincte de la matiere, on raisonne
puérilement, si l’on ne suppose pas que
tout l’Univers est animé.’
CPD, civ, OD.iii.329b: ‘tous les systêmes
des Philosophes Païens suposoient
l’éternité de la matiere . . . [et] ils donnoient à Dieu une véritable étenduë . . .
Qu’on reconnoisse tant qu’on voudra
45
un premier être, un Dieu suprême, un
premier principe, ce n’est pas assez pour
le fondement d’une Religion . . . il faut de
plus établir que ce premier être par un
acte unique de son entendement connoît
toutes choses, et que par un acte unique
de sa volonté il maintient un certain
ordre dans l’Univers, ou le change selon
son bon plaisir.’
CPD, civ, OD.iii.330a–b.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
262
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
too was a necessitarian ‘nature’ rather than a transcendent deity.46 But it was
not to Africa but rather to Asia that Bayle looked to confirm his grand thesis
about the logic of paganism.
Bayle’s accounts of Asian religion were no less indebted to the Gassendist
tradition we met in I.3.3, which he combined with the atheistic, anti-Ricci reading
of Confucianism offered by Longobardo, taken up by the Jesuits’ opponents, and
popularised by Arnauld.47 When he considered the religion and emanationist
cosmogony of Buddhism and the Indian Brahmins, summarised in the allegory of
a spider excreting and then retracting its webs (from which stemmed a belief in
the union between the human and divine souls), Bayle simply reproduced
Bernier’s Gassendi-inspired account; he also drew on the whole, long postValignano tradition of reading Chinese and Japanese Buddhism as at heart
a monist atheism.48 When he came to Confucianism, Bayle adopted the antiRicci interpretation of it as a perennial monist atheism. According to Bayle,
defenders of Ricci’s position had fallen into the same error as the church fathers,
mistaking evocation of a supreme first principle for true monotheism.49 As for
46
47
48
CPD, civ, OD.iii.329b–330a. The source is
Olfert Dapper, Description de l’Afrique
(Amsterdam, 1686) [Dutch original,
1668]), 389–90. But Bayle goes well beyond
his source in his conclusion that ‘There is
much evidence that they believe that this
sovereign being is a cause that does not
know what it does, or that can only act as
it acts, and that it is on the basis of this that
they refuse to worship it’ (‘Il y a beaucoup
d’aparence qu’ils croient que cet Etre souverain est une cause qui ne connoît point
ce qu’elle fait, ou qui ne sauroit agir que
comme elle agit, & que c’est sur ce pied-là
qu’ils lui refusent leur hommage’). What
exactly Dapper or his source – Jan van
Riebeek – was referring to is unclear,
since the Khoekhoe language is extinct.
A late eighteenth-century traveller, Robert
Jacob Gordon, recorded that their term for
‘God’ was ‘Jees-Owa’ (Fauvelle-Aymar,
‘Wordlists’ (2005), 168). For Dapper himself, see Schapera, Hottentots (1933); Jones,
‘Decompiling’ (1990).
For the precise circumstances in which
Bayle read Arnauld’s relevant works, see
II.4.3.
DHC, SpinozaA (iv.254a), quoting Bernier,
Suite des mémoires, 202. The account in
DHC, BrachmanesK–L (i.653b–654b) is
also derived from Bernier. Bayle’s use of
49
Bernier is already noted in App, Cult,
228–9, 231. For Chinese and Japanese
Buddhism, see esp. SpinozaB (iv.254b–
255b); JaponC, D (ii.831b–832a). Bayle’s
sources are simply the reviews of the
Confucius Sinarum philosophus in the
BUH (see I.3.5) and the Acta eruditorum
(May 1688), 254–65, and Valignano’s catechism as it appeared in Possevino’s
Bibliotheca (see I.3.4) – he was effectively
repeating the line on Buddhism that had
become standard since Valignano, while
integrating it even more emphatically into
Gassendi’s account of Greek philosophy.
DHC, MaldonatL (iii.296a–b), drawing on
Arnauld, Cinquième dénonciation, 35 (as
I.3.5 above); DHC, Sommona-CodomA
(iv.238a–239b); CPD, xviii, xxvii, OD.
iii.210b, 226b–231b (a long ‘Digression’
on the Sorbonne’s censure of the monotheist reading of Confucianism, focussing in
particular on the development of Ricci’s
argument made in Le Comte,
Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état present de la
Chine, for which see I.3.4). When he did
use the recent French popularisers of
Ricci’s argument, he did so only to point
out the monist atheism of contemporary
Neoconfucianism: CPD, cxiii, OD.iii.343a–
345b, drawing on Le Gobien, Histoire.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
263
Japan, he claimed that the majority of the Japanese people, who simply adhered to
the basic appearances of things, believed in post-mortem life, replete with rewards
and punishments. However, the Buddhist elite – the bonzes – subscribed to
a monistic pantheism; after death, men return into the first principle, and even
in life, it was possible, through meditation, for humans to ‘raise themselves up to
the condition and supreme majesty of the first principle’. This meditative exercise
Bayle called ‘soquxin, soqubut’, which is a reference to the Japanese sokushin
shokubutsu (即身即仏) identified by Valignano back in the 1580s on the basis of
Zen Buddhist texts.50 The only thing that Bayle added to the long anti-Jesuit
tradition, which he also encountered in Noël Alexandre’s French popularisation
(see I.3.4), was more Gassendist reasoning. While the Chinese Buddhists called
their first principle ‘cum hiu’ (i.e. kong xu (空虛), emptiness), it could not really be
a true nothingness, for the Chinese, like all pagans, undoubtedly assumed that
nothing comes from nothing; rather, it probably referred to something akin to
‘space distinct . . . from matter’, imbued with real extension and activity.51 To say
this was to move away from his sources, but it was necessitated by the Gassendist
logic to which Bayle subscribed in his historical–comparative account of pagan
thought concerning the divine.
For Bayle, the Sorbonne’s famous condemnation of Ricci’s position in
1700 came as a glorious delight: it seemed to confirm everything he had
said in the first edition of the Dictionnaire. The university, he declared
triumphantly, had been right to condemn attempts to read the JudaeoChristian transcendent god into pagan thought, and it was surprising to
see that Oxford had not censured Hyde, who had made the same argument
concerning the ancient Persians.52 In the long article on Zoroaster added
to the second edition of the Dictionnaire, Bayle acknowledged the brilliance of Hyde’s scholarship, but maintained that the Englishman was
fundamentally wrong to look for a monotheistic reading of the Persian
sage. He had relied too much on later Arabic and Persian writers: the
Greek accounts of Near Eastern religion – which insisted that it was truly
dualistic – might sometimes be unreliable, but they were surely preferable
to those of Arabs who had lived a millennium later. Travellers reporting
the monotheism of contemporary Zoroastrians were hardly reliable evidence, since these Zoroastrians were surely just accommodating to the
Islam that now surrounded them.53
50
51
52
DHC, ‘Japon’, n. D (ii.831b–832a) (‘Que
l’homme peut en ce monde s’élever jusques à la condition & à la supreme
majesté du premier principe’ (832a)).
DHC, SpinozaA (iv.255b): ‘l’espace . . .
distinct des corps’.
CPD, xxviii, OD.iii.229b.
53
DHC, ZoroastreF (iv.559a). See also
Bayle
to
Jean-Baptiste
Dubos,
12 September 1701, BC.xii.328–9.
Bayle’s friend Cuper had likewise been
critical of Hyde’s ‘Jesuit’ reading of
Zoroastrianism: see I.3.5.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
264
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
(iv) Bayle’s Scholarly Polemics
Hyde was not the only scholar that Bayle opposed. In fact, we find him dissenting
from almost all those modern writers who had adopted the first post-Vossian
approach – identifying pagan pantheism with an imperfect monotheism – as
well as those church fathers, such as Minucius Felix, who he felt were most
responsible for spreading the myth of any commonality between pagan and
Judaeo-Christian theology.54 In line with the general trend of seventeenthcentury scholarship, Bayle had long been aware that the church fathers were
unreliable witnesses for the history of pagan religion, even if one was often
forced to refer to their works.55 Accordingly, he argued that modern apologists
who had used their authority – whether Mornay, or the more scholarly
Lescalopier and Pfanner – had misunderstood the nature of paganism and its
relationship to true ideas about God.56 Vossius himself came in for Bayle’s ire.
As we have seen, Bayle praised the Dutchman for condemning the Stoics’ claim
that Greek polytheism, and the mythology it produced, in fact contained
profound metaphysical or moral truths. But, he continued, Vossius had been
spectacularly wrong to believe that the Stoics ‘recognised one God’. Rather, they
should be ‘accused of the same fault as we found in those who worship nature’.57
It was precisely because he was so opposed to such a reading of paganism
that Bayle, in the Continuations, so passionately attacked Cudworth’s System,
about which he had found out from the long accounts published by Le Clerc in
the Bibliothèque choisie.58 Cudworth, as we have seen, was far from being
a syncretist, or an uncritical adopter of patristic historiography. Rather, he
54
55
CPD, xxvi, OD.iii.224a, citing Minucius
Felix, Octav., 19: that chapter’s title is
‘Moreover, the poets have called him
[God] the parent of gods and men, the
creator of all things, and their mind and
spirit. And the best philosophers have
come to almost the same conclusion as
the Christians about the unity of God’
(‘Praeterea poetae illum divum hominumque Parentem, omnium rerum creatorem,
mentem et spiritum appellarunt. Quin et
ipsimet praestantiores philosophi eadem
fere ac Christiani de Deo uno sensere’).
See e.g. his comments in the review of
Anthonie van Dale’s De oraculis ethnicorum (Amsterdam, 1683), in NRL,
March 1684, Art. I (the very first review
in the NRL), in OD.i.4a. See also Bayle to
Joseph Bayle, 12 August 1683, BC.iii.383.
Van Dale’s project was centred on the
interpretation of the church fathers, as
demonstrated in Mandelbrote, ‘Witches’
56
57
58
(2017), esp. 276. For Bayle’s recognition
of the importance of the church fathers as
sources, see RQP, III.ix, OD.iii.920a.
See e.g. the attacks on Mornay at CPD,
lxvi, lxviii, OD.iii.286b, 290a–b, and the
dissent from Pfanner at CPD, xxvi, OD.
iii.224a. For Lescalopier, see I.3.2.
CPD, cxxxi, OD.iii.374b: ‘Consultez
Vossius, qui a remarqué trois erreurs
grossieres dans la Théologie des
Stoïciens; mais n’aprouvez pas ce qu’il
ajoûte qu’ils n’ont reconnu qu’un Dieu.
Ils devoit les accuser de la même faute
qu’il a trouvée dans ceux qui adoroient la
Nature.’ The reference is to Theologia
gentilis, vii.7, 729b–731a.
Bayle explains that he only read Le
Clerc’s summaries as he wrote the CPD,
hence the attack on Cudworth is not in
chapter xxvi (the initial dismissal of
claims for pagan monotheism), but
appears later: CPD, lxvi, OD.iii.285a.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
265
sought to adapt Gassendi’s empirical data to the Vossian aim of showing that
pagan animism ultimately concealed a consistent (if flawed) monotheism. But
Bayle would have none of this, insisting, again and again, that pantheism
precluded true unity. Cudworth’s claims allowed Bayle to expand even further
his geography of elite pagan monism (as well as reiterating and supplementing
his points about the Greek philosophers). The Englishman, for example, had
attributed monotheism to the ancient Egyptians. In response, Bayle – relying
on a passage from Diodorus Siculus that reported that the Egyptians’ first
deities were the sun and the moon (who became Isis and Osiris), from which
all matter was produced – suggested that far from being true monotheists, the
Egyptians must have held to the same emanationist cosmogony and metaphysics as all other pagans.59 They, like the Greek philosophers, could not envisage
a truly immaterial substance, for not just their conception of the divine but also
of human souls incorporated substantial extension.60
All this was pure Gassendi. When writing against Cudworth’s attribution of
monotheism to Plato, Bayle for once openly cited the Frenchman. Gassendi, he
declared, had shown that in the Platonic system the distinction between God
and the universe which emanated from him was only a logical abstraction, in
the same way that a ‘gold vase and the gold from which it is formed are really
the same substance’, or in the way philosophers artificially distinguished
between passive and agent intellects in the soul.61 For good measure, Bayle
even added that this philosophy had been revived in the seventeenth century
by Robert Fludd: here he simply repeated Gassendi’s attacks on the
Englishman.62 And just to confirm the Gassendist pedigree of his argument,
Bayle reiterated that the similarity between oriental monism and ‘almost all the
hypotheses of the ancient philosophers concerning the divine nature’ that he
was arguing for had previously been reported by Bernier.63
The Bayle–Cudworth debate has been
analysed several times (see esp.
Simonutti, ‘Bayle and Le Clerc’ (1993);
Lennon, ‘Cudworth and Bayle’ (2008)),
but since such studies do not explore
the scholarly dimension of the argument
it seems to me that they have missed the
full meaning of what was at stake. I do
not consider here the spat over plastic
natures, which is well treated in the literature. In short, Bayle thought the concept subject to the same problem as any
superaddition thesis: if such plastic
natures could ‘obey’ divine laws, then it
was legitimate to posit with Strato that
nature could act nomologically by itself.
59
60
61
62
63
CPD, lxvi, OD.iii.285b, relying on Bib.
hist., i.11.
CPD, lxvii, OD.iii.287b–288a.
CPD, lxviii, OD.iii.289b, referring to
Gassendi, Syntagma, GO.i.156 – Bayle
gives an accurate account of Gassendi’s
argument, and then goes on (289a–290b)
to discuss at length Gassendi’s evidence:
passages from Plutarch’s De animae procreatione in Timaeo, and Plotinus’ Enneads.
CPD, lxviii, OD.iii.290a, relying on
Gassendi, Examen philosophiae Fluddi,
GO.iii.217.
CPD, lxix, OD.iii.291b, name-checking
Bernier and cross-referencing to DHC,
SpinozaA, and BrachmanesK, for which
see above.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
266
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
Finally, Bayle not only attacked the empirical data on which Vossius,
Pfanner, Lescalopier, Cudworth, and Hyde had based their arguments; he
also disagreed with the theological assumptions underpinning those arguments, namely the key Pauline passages that spoke of pagan knowledge of
God. Vossius, we will recall, had based this account on Paul’s statement to the
Athenians that their Unknown God was the one God worshipped by Jews and
Christians. Bayle vehemently rejected such a reading. The apostle never
‘wanted to say that they [the pagans] understood the Divinity as an immaterial
being which created all other beings out of nothing’. All he was attributing to
them was a ‘general knowledge of the divine existence’, a general knowledge of
which he was in fact sharply critical. For did he not say that ‘when they knew
God, they glorified him not as God, but became vain in their imaginations and
their foolish heart was darkened’? And did he not elsewhere say to the pagans
that ‘ye knew not God’ (Gal. 4:8; also 1 Thess. 4:5) and even call them atheists
(Eph. 2:12)?64 Bayle repeated such claims throughout all of his later writings.65
(v) Bayle’s as the Culmination of the Gassendist Reading of the Pagan
Mind
Bayle’s vision of the history of the pagan mind – a vision that stretched from
Greece to China, and from Egypt to Japan – was not a covert way of expressing
64
RQP, III.xiv, OD.iii.935a: ‘Or sûrement
cet Apôtre n’a point voulu dire qu’ils
aient connu la Divinité sous la notion
d’une nature immatérielle, qui ait tiré
du néant tous les autres êtres. Si quelques
Païens avoient eu cette notion, c’eut été
sans doute les Philosophes; mais nous
savons certainement que tous les anciens
Philosophes rejettoient la possibilité de la
creation, & qu’ils donnoient presque tous
à Dieu une nature corporelle. Saint Paul
donc n’a prétendu attribuer aux Païens
qu’une connoissance générale de l’existence Divine. Il les croïoit si ignorans làdessus, que tout aussitôt il ajoûte, qu’ils se
sont égarez, dans leurs vains raisonnemens, & que leur coeur destitué d’intelligence a été rempli de tenebres. Il assure en
d’autres endroits qu’ils ne connoissoient
point Dieu, & il les apelle Athées.’ The
Authorised Version text of Eph. 2:12 has
the pagans being ‘without God’ (and contemporary French had ‘sans Dieu’ (as in
Les epitres de S. Paul (Mons, 1667) [i.e.
part of the Bible de Port-Royal], 187], but
65
the original Greek is indeed ἀθέοι, the
only such use of the word in the New
Testament. Earlier, see Bayle, PD, cxvii,
ccxxxiv, OD.iii.76b, 141a.
E.g. DHC, DioscorideB (ii.298b), offering
a non-Vossian reading of Acts 17:23 on
the Unknown God: ‘the idea that they
[the pagans] attached to the word “God”
in no way resembled the divine nature,
and was infinitely distant from it; so that
the Athenians were not the only ones to
whom St Paul could have said that they
had set up an altar to an “Unknown
God”’ (‘l’idée qu’ils [the pagans] attachoient au mot Dieu ne ressembloit nullement à la nature divine, & en étoit
infiniment éloignée; desorte que les
Athéniens n’étoient point les seuls à qui
Saint Paul eût pu dire qu’ils avoient
dressé un Autel au Dieu inconnu’). Also
HipparchiaD (ii.769b), citing Paul’s
words in Rom. 1:22 (‘professing themselves to be wise, they became fools’);
and CPD, lxxxiv, OD.iii.309b, again on
the ἀθέοι of Eph. 2:12.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
267
crypto-Spinozism. Rather, it was a deployment of a vision of that history that
was by then very prominent in the literature. It really is no exaggeration to say
that Bayle was simply aping the claims about Greek philosophy made by
Gassendi, and then followed by Parker above all others.
This is an intellectual debt that Bayle himself advertised again and again.
Bayle had clearly read Gassendi’s reconstruction of ancient philosophy carefully early in his life; by the time he deployed many of its findings in the
Dictionnaire he was calling it ‘a masterpiece’.66 (This admiration did not
prevent Bayle from frequently plagiarising the Frenchman.) But what is even
more remarkable is how much Bayle drew directly on those successors of
Gassendi we have already encountered. Astonishingly – given that he was
Europe’s foremost advocate of religious toleration, and Parker was one of the
most intolerant clerics in Restoration England – Bayle praised the
Englishman’s works to the rafters.67 These were not empty compliments, for
he used Parker’s Latin books as authorities for the claims that Aristotle was in
reality an atheistic vitalist whose doctrine would lead to Strato’s; that the
interpretation of Aristotle offered by Renaissance naturalists such as
Cesalpino was the correct one;68 that saying anything about God nonanalogically was impossible and that the pagans who did so inevitably conflated god and nature;69 that all the pagans held ‘spirits’ to be very subtle
substances (rather than properly immaterial);70 and, above all, for the claim
that the ‘unity’ discovered in pagan polytheism by some apologists – Vossius,
Cudworth, Pfanner, and others – was an illusion based on a fundamental
66
67
DHC, EpicureM (ii.370a): ‘Ce qu’il
[Gassendi] a fait là-dessus [i.e. on
Epicurus] est un chef-d’oeuvre.’ Bayle’s
first explicit mention of Gassendi is
in the letter to Vincent Minutoli,
31 January 1673, BC.i.187. On
29 June 1675 he reported to his brother
on Bernier’s Abrégé (BC.ii.213). The most
important testimony consists of his plans
to study Descartes and Gassendi over the
course of the next year (Bayle to his
brother, 25 November 1675, BC.ii.299).
And indeed, he was certainly well familiar with Gassendi’s work by March 1677
(BC.ii.135).
Bayle’s friend Daniel de Larroque had
already written to Bayle from Oxford in
autumn 1686, praising Parker as ‘un
habile homme et de beaucoup d’esprit’
(BC.vii.171). By the time of the
Continuations and various other works
68
69
70
of the late 1690s and early 1700s,
Parker’s Latin books had become the
main source for Bayle’s thoughts on the
history of pagan theology, and were
accordingly spoken of in the highest
terms, as the only work he needed to
cite, in lieu of other authorities: CPD,
xxvi, OD.iii.224b: ‘I will not quote you
the authorities who prove this, it suffices
that I show you a book [Parker’s
Tentamina] where you can find them all
gathered together’ (‘Je ne vous citerai
point les autoritez qui prouvent cela, il
me doit sufire de vous indiquer un ouvrage [Parker’s Tentamina] où vous les
pourrez trouver toutes rassemblées’).
See n. 32 above; also n. 36 above for
Parker as the source for Berigard. See
similarly CPD, cvi, OD.iii.335a–b.
CPD, xx, OD.iii.214b.
CPD, cxxvi, OD.iii.225a.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
268
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
misunderstanding of their animism, which presupposed an extended, omnipresent (and thus pantheist) deity, who consequently had to consist of parts.71
As I said earlier, one simple reason that Bayle used so many pages of the
Dictionnaire to adumbrate this vision was that he thought it was true. After all,
in a book dedicated to debunking scholarly error, what greater error was there
to debunk than the one shared by the church fathers, by modern writers of
apologetics, by historians of philosophy, and by Jesuit travellers: that the
pagans had conceived of God’s unity (or that they were even capable of
doing so in the first place)? But this was not the only reason that this historical
vision so appealed to Bayle. It also allowed him to launch an elaborate defence
of the philosophical position to which he himself had subscribed for almost all
of his adult life: the occasionalist version of Cartesianism.72
II.1.2 Cartesian Occasionalism as the Only Answer to the Logic
of Paganism
Bayle did not only believe Cartesian occasionalism to be the true philosophy.
More importantly, he also thought it the only possible basis for a truly
Christian natural theology, one which he thought could triumph against any
atheistic objections, whether made by the ancient pagans, by the monists in the
Far East, or by modern Europeans, such as the followers of Spinoza. Bayle’s
main inspiration for this view was Malebranche, whose Cartesian occasionalism he sought to present as the only viable ‘Christian philosophy’. How was it
possible for Bayle to combine Malebranche’s Cartesianism with a Gassendist
view of history and a form of apologetics?
(i) Bayle Versus Atomism and Superaddition
Since we have found that Bayle adopted most of his historical assumptions
about the workings of the pagan mind from Gassendi and his successors, it is
natural to ask whether he also adopted Gassendi’s ideas about how a Christian
should philosophise. Recall that Gassendi had suggested that Epicureanism
was preferable to all other pagan philosophies in part precisely because it
offered a better foundation for a Christian philosopher to build a natural
theology. In opposition to the immanentism and animism of all the other
pagans, Epicureanism – when suitably modified – was the ideal basis for an
71
72
CPD, xxvi, OD.iii.225a–b.
Another reason that Bayle was so keen to
expand the canon of pagan atheists was
because it allowed him to defend the
argument of the Pensées diverses from
the attacks launched on it by Jurieu and
his allies in the early 1690s. That is to say,
the more atheists one found, especially
among the philosophers and other elites,
the easier it was to show that such atheists
could live moral lives. I defer discussion
of this topic until II.4.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
269
analogical predication of the divine attributes (I.3.3). The key modification
was that instead of Epicurus’ eternal, self-moving atoms, one had to posit
atoms created by God, to which he had also superadded the capacity for
motion.
Gassendi was adamant that the created world constantly revealed the evidence of the design implanted in it by its creator. Epicurus’ denial of providence was easily negated by such evidence. Among Christians, the scholastics
had certainly been wrong to attribute teleological intentions (via their scheme
of fourfold causality) to natural objects, but Descartes had been equally wrong
to exclude discussion of final causes from philosophy. The argument from
design was the best natural proof of God’s existence. But, while it was clear that
there was a divine teleology to the natural world, how that teleology operated
was often unclear. Indeed, it had been a central error of the pagans to assume
that they could posit explanations for such teleology by postulating either
divine immanence or entities such as the anima mundi.
Where did that leave the Christian natural philosopher? The clearest
example here is Gassendi’s account of a classic problem – one that gained
increased urgency for European natural philosophers after the abandonment
of hylomorphism – the process of generation and embryological development
in animals and humans. In opposition to Aristotelian epigenesis, Gassendi
argued for a form of preformationism in which all parts of the animal,
including its soul, are present directly after the male and female seed have
combined.73 But, he continued, how exactly the soul teleologically directs the
development of the seed is not only unknown, but perhaps unknowable,
because divine craftsmanship does not work in the same way as human. For
Gassendi, the fact that we see teleology but are unable to explain its exact
operations is a powerful argument for God’s existence and providential operation. ‘Seeds and their souls are secondary causes in virtue of their scientia and
seminal power, but all we can say about the source of that power is that it
ultimately derives from God. We are incapable of understanding the way in
which these worldly powers operate, and hence we should turn our attention
toward the divine. The limits of our knowledge of generation are reinforced in
Gassendi’s discussion of the source of the first seeds.’74 The souls that effect
this teleological process were formed by God at the creation.75 But that was
itself a supernatural mystery. Moreover, the nature of the soul–body union was
likewise incomprehensible.
This ‘teleological modesty’ is prevalent throughout Gassendi’s physics. At
the most foundational level, it is also used to explain the inherent active force
73
Syntagma, GO.ii.272b–278a (i.e. the
chapter ‘De formatione foetus’). See the
excellent discussion in LoLordo,
Gassendi, 193–9.
74
75
LoLordo, Gassendi, 197,
Syntagma, GO.ii.274a.
Syntagma, GO.ii.262b.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
discussing
270
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
present in atoms. Such a force certainly exists, and must have been implanted
by God into atoms at the creation. However, humans are unable to explain how
exactly it operates – only that it serves to imbue the world with purpose.76 In
other words, this was a natural theology founded on the idea of divine
superaddition, but in which superaddition is not a fully fledged explanation
of action (let alone a metaphysics of causation) but rather an acknowledgement of human nescience. Bare mechanism could never explain the order and
design evident in the world, and when presented with evidence of such order,
the natural philosopher could only conclude that God had superadded teleological principles to matter. To use modern philosophical jargon, this is a ‘God
of the gaps’.
Bayle rejected every element of this philosophical system. First, he believed
from his earliest philosophical teaching through to the end of his life that any
atomist scheme – even one in which God animated atoms – would undermine
the idea than which ‘the mind of man has no ideas more clear and distinct’: that
is to say, the Cartesian principle that the only essential property of substance is
extension.77 And so, while he knew that Descartes had failed to persuade
Gassendi with his metaphysical argument for mind–body dualism,78 Bayle
himself stuck to it dogmatically. Most importantly, he did so even in the face of
the objection – one which he himself had expressed in his jejune Objectiones to
Poiret and which he later re-encountered in Locke – that an omnipotent God
could have superadded thought to matter.79 For Bayle, such reasoning was
illegitimate for two main reasons. First, it was quite literally to introduce a deus
76
77
78
Syntagma, GO.i.315.
DHC,
LeucippeG
(iii.102b–103a):
‘L’esprit de l’homme n’a point d’idées
plus nettes ni plus distinctes que celles
de la nature & des attributs de l’étendue.’
DHC, PomponaceF (iii.780a–781a). Bayle
there argues that the logic of Aristotle’s
thought, like that of all pre-Cartesian
philosophers, was mortalist, since he posited a sensitive soul in animals, implying
that sense could be an emergent property
of matter. But Gassendi had not accepted
Descartes’s reasoning, and his rejection
of Cartesian dualism had led many in
Naples to disbelieve in the immortality
of the soul, as reported by Arnauld,
Difficultez proposées à Mr. Steyaërt
[1691], AO.ix.304–6 (quoted at length in
rem. G (iii.781b–782a)) – as Bayle himself there admits, the passage outlines in
brief his own view of the immense apologetic usefulness of Cartesianism. Back in
79
rem. F, there follows, uncharacteristically, a defence of Jurieu, who had argued
in his Religion du Latitudinaire
(Rotterdam, 1696), 393, that we cannot
have a clear and distinct conception of
immaterial substances. For Bayle’s
acceptance of this idea, which derives
from Malebranche, see §3.
For the possibility of God superadding
thought to matter raised against Poiret,
see OD.iv.150b–151a. For Bayle’s revised
understanding of Locke in the RQP (at
OD.iii.940a–942b), see Ryan, Bayle, 58–
62. Mori, Bayle, 71 makes a great deal of
the objection to Poiret, claiming it renders Bayle’s later apologetic argument
‘suspect’. But it was clearly just
a disputational gambit deployed in the
manner of academic disputations, to be
weighted against Bayle’s career-long
insistence that superaddition was not
possible.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
271
ex machina into philosophy. To attribute otherwise inexplicable phenomena to
divine intervention was, according to Bayle, not to do philosophy at all. As
Bayle put it in the article ‘Rorarius’, ‘a Philosopher should not explain phenomena by the immediate operation of God’, a principle repeated at several
points in the Dictionnaire and elsewhere in Bayle’s writings.80
However, even more important to Bayle was the second argument against
the possibility of divine superaddition, one grounded in his natural-theological
assumptions. For according to Bayle, once one ascribed to an atom the intrinsic capacity to motion, it was no more difficult to ascribe to it the capacity for
thought. But, he continued, such a move would then lead to its own absurdities. We will recall that Bayle’s historical investigations had taught him that
Democritus had done just this, by positing atomic souls (only for Epicurus to
return to the original Leucippean formulation of atomism). Bayle insisted that
this Democritean move was the best way in which atomists, on their own logic,
could avoid the strongest objection to their system: that it could not account
for thought. Unfortunately for them, an animated (let alone sensing) atom was
a philosophical absurdity:
Leucippus, Epicurus, and the other atomists could have guarded themselves against various insurmountable objections, if they had convinced
themselves to give a soul to every atom. In this way, they would have
united thought to an indivisible subject – and they had as good ground to
suppose atoms animated as to suppose them uncreated and endued with
a moving virtue. [But] it is as hard to conceive of such a virtue in an atom,
as it is to conceive of it having sensation. Extension and solidity exhaust
our ideas of the nature of an atom. The power to move itself is not
included in it; it is a thing which, just like knowledge, our ideas find to
be foreign and extrinsic to body and extension. So, since the atomists
supposed in their corpuscles a self-moving force, why did they deprive
them of thought?81
80
81
DHC, RorariusK (iv.84b): ‘un Philosophe
ne doit point expliquer les phénomenes
par l’opération immediate de Dieu’. For
this principle restated and explained
more fully, see also AnaxagorasR
(i.217b–218a), SennertC (iv.190b). Bayle
of course meant specific, individual phenomena, rather than God’s causation of
all action by general laws. I shall return to
the argument of Rorarius in §3 below.
DHC, LeucippeE (iii.101b): ‘Leucippe,
Epicure, & les autres Atomistes auroient
pu se garantir de diverses Objections
insurmontables, s’ils se fussent avisez de
donner une ame a chaque atôme. Ils eussent par là uni la pensée avec un sujet
indivisible, & ils n’avoient pas moins de
droit de suposer des atômes animez, que
d’en suposer d’incréez, & de leur donner
la vertu motrice. Il est aussi malaise de
concevoir cette vertue dans un atôme,
que d’y concevoir le sentiment.
L’étendue & la dureté remplissent dans
nos idées toute la nature d’un atôme. La
force de se mouvoir n’y est pas comprise;
c’est un object que nos idées trouvent
étranger & extrinsique à l’égard du corps
& de l’étendue, tout de mêmes que la
connoissance. Puis donc que les
Atomistes suposoient dans leurs corpuscules la force de se mouvoir, pourquoi
leur ôtoient-ils la pensée?’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
272
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
For all these inconsistencies, Bayle still thought that such a godless atomism
was far more coherent than Spinozism, in that it could at least account for the
variety in the natural world. Nonetheless, it could still not supply any explanation for the specific properties of things, an explanation that could only be
provided when one assumed that a thing ‘has been made freely by a cause that
had reasons and motives for producing it’.82
And so, Bayle continued, Gassendi had improved atomism immeasurably
by suggesting that God had imbued the atoms with motion, and with their
teleological purpose. Nonetheless, even Gassendi’s theistic atomism was an
incoherent position. First, Gassendi could not resolve the objection that to
explain sense and understanding in humans, one had to attribute to atoms not
only motion but also those attributes. In modern philosophical terminology,
sense and understanding could not be emergent properties. This objection to
Epicurus had long ago been made by Galen, and Gassendi had reported it
(Bayle knew it only through him). Gassendi himself had not been able to
respond to it apart from by arguing by analogy: non-sensing bodies could
come together to form animate and sensing bodies in the same way that nonigneous things could come together to produce heat (indeed, the material soul
was itself a subtle fiery substance). But in the end, he had been forced to accept
the limits of this explanation: ‘it must be confessed that it is not evident why we
might be able to hope for this matter to become clear, either because we are so
greatly deceived or because human cleverness is completely incapable of
grasping the texture . . . through which the soul senses’.83 For Bayle this
admission was tantamount to surrender for the whole atomic system.84 Only
immaterial substances were capable of sensation, let alone thought. Bayle clung
to this conclusion dogmatically throughout his adult life, despite agreeing with
Malebranche that we have no clear and distinct idea of immaterial substance,85
82
83
84
DHC, DemocriteR (ii.275a): ‘lors qu’elle
a été fait librement par une cause qui a eu
ses raisons, & ses motifs en la
produisant’.
Syntagma, GO.ii.343a–350a. The chapter
is entitled ‘Qui sensile gigni ex insensilibus possit?’; Galen (K i.415–17) is quoted
at 343a; qu. 346b–347a: ‘Sane vero fatendum est, non videri esse quamobrem
speremus posse rem manifestam fieri,
quando aut longe fallimur, aut fugit
omnino humanam solertiam, capere
quae textura sit . . . ut censeri anima, ac
sentiendi principium valeat.’ See also
Lolordo, Gassendi, 74–5, 205–6.
DHC, EpicureF (ii.367b), as n. 41 above.
Ironically, this statement was itself
85
dependent on Gassendi (although Bayle
did not admit it), since Gassendi had
argued that no ancient system, including
Galen’s own, could account for sensation
any better than Epicureanism (Syntagma,
GO.ii.347b–350a). Bayle believed that
Cartesianism had solved this ‘ancient’
problem.
See esp. DHC, SimonideF (iv.211b): ‘the
most subtle Cartesians maintain that we
have no idea of spiritual substance. We
only know from experience that it thinks,
but we do not know what is the nature of
the being whose modifications are
thoughts; we do not know what the subject is and what is the foundation in
which thoughts are inherent’ (‘les plus
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
273
and despite his recognition of the various complications that acceptance of
dualism brought, not least concerning the ‘place’ of immaterial substances (see
§3).
However, the matter went even further than this. Let us recall that Bayle was
unequivocal that even God could not change the essences of things. As Todd
Ryan has observed, ‘for Bayle there is no deep ontological distinction to be
drawn between those powers that follow naturally from the nature of a thing
and those that arise only through superaddition . . . A quality or power is either
compatible with the essence of matter or it is not. If it is not, then even God
cannot endow matter with the power.’86 This meant that once one posited any
attribute of matter that went beyond extension, one opened the door to all
manner of ‘Stratonist’ speculation on the sufficiency of matter to explain all
natural phenomena, or to the positing of intermediate beings (substantial
forms, plastic natures, etc.) that might render God’s active role redundant.87
When in the late 1690s Locke suggested that thought might be superadded to
matter, Bayle devoted much energy to repudiating the claim, and to reasserting
the Cartesian notion of matter as res extensa.88 For Bayle, Locke’s idea
reopened the door to the materialist monism of the pagan philosophers. As
soon as one posited any thinking matter, such as the material soul posited by
all the pagan philosophers, one logically permitted the possibility that an
eternal, material first principle could account for all the phenomena in the
world, including human intelligence.89
From his youth, Bayle had always insisted on the inability of insentient
matter not only to constitute the natural world as humans experienced it, but
86
87
88
subtils Cartésiens soutiennent, que nous
n’avons point d’idée de la substance
spirituelle. Nous savons seulement par
expérience qu’elle pense, mais nous ne
savons pas quelle est la nature de l’être
dont les modifications sont des pensées;
nous ne connoissons point quel est le
sujet, & quel est le fond, auquel les
pensées sont inhérentes’). The ‘most subtle
Cartesian’
is
undoubtedly
Malebranche; Bayle was probably thinking of Recherche, III.ii.7, MO.i.451–5; and
Ecl. xi, MO.iii.163–71. For Bayle’s explicit praise of Malebranche on this score,
see the review of the Réponse de l’auteur
de la Recherche de la Verité, in NRL,
April 1684, OD.i.26b.
Ryan, Bayle, 55–6.
E.g. DHC, EpicureF (ii.367a–b).
See Ryan, Bayle, 50–62 for a full analysis.
The fullest collection of evidence for
89
Bayle’s reading of Locke is Whitmore,
‘Criticism’ (1959).
DHC, JupiterG (ii.903b–904a), arguing
that just as the pagan philosophers’
assumption that ‘the soul of man was
material’ (‘que l’ame de l’homme est corporelle’) opened the door for their theogonies, so the assumption by any
Christian philosophers that matter was
capable of having thought superadded
to it would open the door for the revival
of such pagan world-systems. Bayle links
this discussion to that concerning thinking matter in DicearqueL, M (ii.287b–
288b), where Locke’s dispute with
Stillingfleet on the subject is discussed at
length. In private, Bayle declared himself
firmly on Stillingfleet’s side: Bayle to
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of
Shaftesbury, 23 November 1699, BC.
xii.136–7.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
274
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
even to ‘obey’ any divine laws. As he already taught in the late 1670s, nomological regularities or natural laws cannot be known to matter, but are simply
a shorthand for God’s own operation.90 An atom could no more ‘conform’ to
laws of motion than a rock could be taught to sing.91 Indeed, even more
strongly, Bayle also consistently subscribed to the notion of continuous creation, no doubt under the influence of Malebranche.92 Every substance
depends on God not only for its original creation and subsequent causal action,
but also for its continued existence.
As a direct consequence of this reasoning, Bayle believed that any concession to atomist or vacuist systems was also an inadvertent concession to
atheism, especially in its Stratonist or Neoconfucian variety. Again, Bayle
had from his earliest philosophical teaching in Sedan deployed the standard
Cartesian arguments against the vacuum, all ultimately grounded in
a dogmatic dualism, accompanied with occasionalism to explain motion and
soul–body interaction.93 He moved not one iota from this position in his
teaching at the Ecole illustre in Rotterdam in 1689–90.94 And he disdained
any attempts to do so, even by those whom he otherwise highly respected. For
example, since the late 1670s Leibniz had been developing a hyper-elaborate
metaphysics which denied that bodies could be reduced to extension, and
instead affirmed that they must possess some internal source of activity (here
are the roots of his career-long disagreement with Malebranche). To this the
German added the claim that the Cartesian principle of the conservation of
motion, grounded in the identification of quantity of motion with motive
force, was mistaken and had to be replaced with his own concept of force or
90
91
92
93
94
Theses philosophicae, ix, OD.iv.138b–
140b; Ryan, Bayle, 71–2.
The analogy is my own, but see the statements to this effect in DHC, EpicureU
(ii.376a–b); Bayle to Shaftesbury,
23 November 1699, BC.xi.136–7.
For clear statements, see Systema,
‘Metaphysica’, ii, OD.iv.477–8; DHC,
(iv.65a–b),
ZabarellaH
RodonD
(iv.531b). See further Ryan, Bayle, 81–8.
E.g. Systema, Physica, i.2, ii.2, OD.iv.275–
6, 307–15.
The evidence is contained in: (i) two sets
of theses defended by his students: the
Theses de fluiditate & firmitate defended
by Philippus Muysson on 20 July 1689
and the Theses philosophicae de elementis
defended by Antonius de Massanes on
23 August 1690 (the only known
copies of which are in the library of
the American Philosophical Society,
Philadelphia, and of the second, in the
Amsterdam University Library (CC 560,
no. 3)); (ii) a ‘Synopsis physicae et metaphysicae’ dictated by Bayle during lectures
in 1689. The theses were discovered by
Labrousse (i.288) and explored by Jacob
van Sluis (see ‘Physics’ (2000);
‘Disputaties’ (2003), the second of which
prints the theses and translates them into
Dutch); the dictation, by Van Lieshout
(‘Traces’ (2002)). De Massanes’s theses
in particular highlight the dogmatic
Cartesianism being taught by Bayle. The
only point of dissent is when the student
expresses some scepticism about the
Cartesian explanation for the manner in
which the particles of fluid matter (the
first of the Cartesian three elements)
obtained their great speed (6).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
275
‘power’, conceived of as the product of mass and speed squared (mv2).95
Several of the relevant papers were published by Bayle in the Nouvelles.96
When he read Newton’s Principia, with its newly articulated statement of the
principle of inertia, Leibniz developed these thoughts into his new science of
‘dynamics’, which combined a modified Cartesian vortex theory with his new
metaphysics of substance.97 Via Henri Basnage, he solicited Bayle’s thoughts
on one of the many articulations of his theory. Bayle’s response proved
profoundly disappointing: a simple reassertion of the identification of matter
with extension and a total refusal to consider the problem of inertia, however
obvious empirical results had rendered the need for such a consideration. ‘I
cannot conceive’, wrote Bayle, ‘that a body can have within itself, as an internal
or intrinsic thing, an effort to remain in a certain place’.98
Leibniz was polite in response, but privately disdainful.99 Basnage had to
apologise on Bayle’s behalf, claiming that the latter was overburdened by the
problems Jurieu was causing him in Rotterdam (he was at this point in the
process of losing his position at the Ecole illustre).100 This was undoubtedly
true. But Bayle’s dogmatic rejection of any non-Cartesian reasoning on this
score transcended these contingent circumstances. For ultimately, his position
was a natural-theological one: the ascription of any causal agency to created
objects, however slight, opened the door to ‘pagan’ modes of thought, modes of
thought which would themselves logically lead to an incoherent atheism. At
bottom, Bayle – unlike Leibniz – cared first and foremost not about improving
natural philosophy but about providing a basis for natural theology.
95
96
97
98
See the classic Garber, ‘Foundations’
(1985); and the summary in
Antognazza, Leibniz (2011), 247–56.
NRL, September 1686, OD.i.635a–636b;
NRL, February 1687, OD.i.747a–749b.
For the ensuing dispute, in which
Malebranche and the Abbé Catalan
played a much larger role than Bayle,
see Iltis, ‘Vis viva’ (1971); Papineau,
‘Vis viva’ (1977).
For the composition of these texts, the
falsehoods that Leibniz later spread
about that process, and the ideas contained within them, see Bertoloni Meli,
Equivalence (1993); also Duchesneau,
Dynamique (1994).
Bayle to Henri Basnage de Beauval, end
of 1692, BC.viii.684: ‘je ne sçaurois comprendre qu’un corps puisse avoir en lui
mesme et comme une chose interne ou
intrinseque, un effort pour demeurer en
un certain lieu’. Bayle was commenting
99
100
on a paper by Leibniz reflecting on
Descartes’s Principia (see the editors’
comments in n. 3, and the works cited
there) – the paper can be found in
Animadversiones ad Cartesii principia
philosophiae, ed. G. E. Guhrauer
(Bonn, 1844).
Leibniz to Basnage, October 1693, Phil.
Schrift., iii.102–3. The polite response to
Bayle is in Leibniz to Basnage,
28 February 1693, BC.ix.22–3, 25,
where Leibniz reasserted that resistance
could not be a modification of extension, and noted that even Malebranche
had rejected Descartes’s explanation of
inertia. See also the earlier response to
Bayle in the letter to Basnage, no date
[1693], Phil. Schrift., iii.94, 96–7, where
the positing of inertia is connected to the
rejection of occasionalism.
Basnage to Leibniz, 15 January 1694,
Phil. Schrift., iii.108.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
276
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
Writing in the second edition of the Dictionnaire, Bayle made his assumptions
public, and vividly so. Those recent mathematicians, like Huygens and Newton,
who had insisted on the necessity of a vacuum, inadvertently ‘give greater pleasure
than they realise to the Pyrrhonists’. In positing a penetrable three-dimensional
space they denied the most clear and distinct idea available to man, that of
extension consisting of partes extra partes (i.e. spatially distinct parts) and therefore
being divisible and impenetrable.101 According to Bayle, the best argument that
vacuists like Newton could deploy was that motion was inconceivable without it.
But, he countered, this was an error already disproved in the Port-Royal Logique,
where Gassendi had been charged with the logical fallacy of ‘imperfect enumeration’. That is to say, Gassendi had insisted (as vacuists always did) on the
impossibility of motion in a plenist system. For Bayle, this was to ignore that in
such a system motion was possible in a circle (or more precisely, a closed curve),
where motion occurred simultaneously, so that the space vacated by one body, A,
was immediately filled by the last body, Z.102 Moreover, Bayle added, the vacuists –
unwilling to return to the scholastic conception of space as a privation – were
forced to suggest that ‘space is nothing else but God’s immensity’.103 This was
a gross misrepresentation, but Bayle nonetheless attributed the view to Gassendi
and to Gassendi’s Reformed follower David Derodon (c.1600–64).104 Leibniz
would later launch the same accusation at the Newtonians (III.3.1).
Before that dispute erupted, Bayle tied all these issues together in a 1704 letter
to Pierre Coste. Commenting on the idea that God is substantially extended
(probably in reaction to a suggestion to that effect in Locke’s Essay), Bayle
condemned Gassendi and Derodon for supposedly holding the opinion. He
noted that it had been refuted convincingly by Arnauld. And he concluded:
If one tries not to delude oneself, one cannot find in one’s mind an idea of
extension that is not entirely similar to that of the extension of matter. The
101
102
103
DHC, LeucippeG (iii.102b): ‘font plus de
Plaisir qu’ils ne pensent aux
Pyrrhoniens’. For the long history of
the partes extra partes idea, see Pasnau,
Themes, 54–6.
DHC, LeucippeG (iii.102b), citing
Arnauld and Nicole, La logique ou l’art
de penser, III.xix.4 (Bayle incorrectly has
III.xviii.4) [= Logic, ed. J. V. Buroker
(Cambridge, 1996), 196–7]. Bayle had
used a very similar formulation to that
in the Logique in his earlier teaching:
Systema, Physica, ii.2, OD.iv.308–9.
DHC, LeucippeG (iii.102b): ‘l’espace
n’est autre chose que l’immensité de
Dieu’.
104
DHC, LeucippeG (iii.102b), citing
Derodon’s ‘Physique abrégée’, which is
his ‘Physica’ in the Philosophica contracta,
3 vols (Geneva, 1664), iii.35. See also Bayle
to Pierre Coste, 18 April 1704, BC.xiii.106,
where Bayle says that, like Malebranche,
he finds the doctrine ‘monstrueuse’.
Derodon, who was perhaps the first
philosophical author Bayle read
seriously (Bayle to Jacob Bayle,
2 November 1670, BC.i.33) was, alongside
Bernier, also condemned for denying continuous creation: RodonD (iv.64a–b). For
the dispute which this had engendered,
see Heyd, ‘Derodon’ (1979), 533–5; for
his teaching at Nîmes, see Sina,
‘Introduzione’ (2010), xii–lxx.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
277
vacuum may perhaps be necessary for movement on the assumption that
bodies are the immediate and efficient cause of motion, but if I am not
mistaken, we have no need for it when we assume, with Father
Malebranche, that God alone moves matter.105
The reference to occasionalism is an expansion of the reasoning Bayle had
previously adopted from the Port-Royal Logique. If matter possessed a power
of self-motion, then motion in a plenum – even circular – really was impossible
(on the terms established above, the body Z could never move at exactly the
same time as body A and thus fill the space left by the latter, for all motion is
imparted by impetus, which takes time). But that was not a problem in an
occasionalist system where exactly simultaneous motion was perfectly possible
(since the ‘mover’ was not the bodies themselves or the impetus they produced,
but God). Thereby one could save the clearest and most distinct idea of them
all: that of extension as the essence of matter.106 In turn, that idea led on to the
best possible natural-theological argument: that grounded in Cartesian
occasionalism.
(ii) Bayle after Malebranche: Occasionalism as the Only Answer
to the Logic of Paganism
The whole point of Gassendi’s system was to create a philosophy that was not
‘pagan’ – that is to say, one which while it still acknowledged the reality of
secondary causality, respected God as the ultimate source of activity and
teleology in the world, and never approached pantheism. However, there
were other ways of achieving that aim. One of them was occasionalism: the
ascription of all natural causation directly to God. The theory had long been
known in Western philosophy, having been held by figures such as Peter
D’Ailly (1351–1420) and Gabriel Biel (1420–95), but had generally been
rejected in favour of divine concurrence.107 Gassendi, without much consideration of the issue, accepted the concurrentist account: as he wrote at the very
end of his long discussion of efficient causation, ‘God cooperates with
all second causes.’108 His lack of speculation on the matter reflected his
105
Bayle to Coste, 18 April 1704, BC.
xiii.106–7: ‘Au reste on ne sauroit trouver dans son esprit si l’on tache de ne se
pas faire illusion, l’idée d’une etenduë
qui ne soit point tout à fait semblable à
l’etenduë de la matiere. Le vuide pour le
mouvement pourroit peut-etre etre
necessaire dans la suposition que les
corps sont la cause immediate et efficiente du mouvement, mais si je ne me
106
107
108
trompe, l’on n’en a aucun besoin lors
que
l’on
supose,
avec
le
P. Mallebranche que Dieu seul meut la
matiere.’
I thus agree with, and develop, the interpretation of this passage offered in Ryan,
Bayle, 19–20.
Freddoso, ‘Concurrence’ (1991).
Syntagma, GO.i.337b, ‘Deus cooperatur
causis secundis omnibus.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
278
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
tendency to agnosticism on the precise nature of divine operation in the world,
and his rejection of metaphysics as a philosophical discipline. But in the last
third of the seventeenth century, a fully developed metaphysical occasionalist
alternative to superaddition made a forceful comeback. Its prime advocate was
Nicolas Malebranche.
The occasionalism of Malebranche and other Cartesians has received much
lucid and penetrating analysis in the recent history of philosophy.109 However,
what has not been noticed in any of these illuminating studies is that
Malebranche first introduced occasionalism primarily not as a philosophical
theory of causation, but rather a form of ‘Christian philosophy’: that is to say,
as a natural theology that rescued the mind from the vestiges of paganism. In
the section of the Recherche de la vérité (1674–5), in which occasionalism was
first introduced, and which the Oratorian himself described as central to his
system, Malebranche argued that the philosophical error that had dominated
ancient and medieval philosophy, and which occasionalism was designed to
avoid, was the animation of nature. This was what he called ‘the most dangerous error of the philosophy of the ancients’. To explain natural causality, the
ancients and the scholastics posited substantial or plastic forms, reified qualities, or active virtues. But this was directly equivalent to the pagan positing of
subordinate deities. Even if the pagans were quasi-monotheists who posited
a sovereign deity ‘on whom all their [other] divinities depended’, they had still
attributed divinity to those objects which seemed to possess causal power, such
as the sun.110 Aristotelianism was no better than any other pagan philosophy
in this regard, for its founding principle was that natural bodies have the power
to move themselves.111
For Malebranche, occasionalism was the only way out of this pagan mode of
philosophising, in which even ‘if the heart is Christian, the mind is basically
pagan’:
In order that we should not doubt of the falseness of this miserable
philosophy, and so that we clearly recognise the solidity of the principles
and the clarity of the ideas which we use, it is necessary to establish clearly
109
110
E.g. Nadler, Causation (1993); Ott,
Causation (2009); Nadler, Occasionalism
(2010); Perler and Bender, Causation
(2020).
Malebranche, Recherche de la vérité
[1674–5], VI.ii.3, MO.ii.309–13, in the
chapter ‘De l’erreur la plus dangereuse
de la Philosophie des Anciens’, qu.
311 (‘duquel toutes leurs divinitez
dépendoient’). See also ‘Eclaircissement
XV’, added to the third ed. of the
Recherche (1678), MO.iii.203. There
111
follows (204–14) a history of philosophy
in which all philosophers who believed in
true secondary causation – from the
ancients through to the most recent of
the scholastics – are compared to those
‘pagan’ philosophies that ‘feign a certain
nature, a first mover, a universal soul’
(‘feindre une certaine nature, un premier
mobile, une ame universelle . . . ce seroit
raisonner en Philosophe payen’) (214).
Recherche, VI.ii.5, MO.ii.346–7.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
279
the truths that are opposed to the errors of the ancient philosophers, and
to prove in few words that there is only one true cause, because there is
only one true God; that the nature or power of every thing is nothing but
the will of God; that all natural causes are not true causes but only
occasional causes, and certain other truths that will be consequences of
these.112
Therefore, for the Oratorian, the very essence of the ‘new’ philosophy lay in its
rejection of this animist logic of paganism, which ascribed real causal action to
created substances (both material and immaterial):
All these little divinities of the pagans and all these particular causes of the
philosophers are only chimeras that the evil spirit tries to establish to ruin
the worship of the true God, occupying the minds and hearts that the
creator has made only for himself. It is not the philosophy received from
Adam that teaches these things; it is that received from the serpent; for
since sin, the mind of man is all pagan. It is this philosophy which,
together with the errors of the senses, caused the worship of the sun,
and which is still today the universal cause of the disorder of men’s minds
and the corruption of their hearts.113
Thankfully, Malebranche continued, the occasionalist version of Cartesianism
offered an escape from the swamp of pagan reasoning:
But the philosophy that is called new, which is represented as a spectre to
frighten impressionable minds, which is scorned and condemned without
being understood; the new philosophy, I say . . . ruins all the arguments of
the libertines by establishing the greatest of its principles, which accords
perfectly with the first principle of the Christian religion: that we must
love and fear only one God, since there is only one God who can make us
112
Recherche, VI.ii.3, MO.ii.310: ‘si le cœur
est Chrétien, le fond de l’esprit est
Payen’; 312: ‘Afin qu’on ne puisse douter de la fausseté de cette miserable
Philosophie, & qu’on reconnoisse avec
évidence la solidité des principes & la
netteté des idées dont on se sert: il est
nécessaire d’établir clairement les
véritez qui sont opposées aux erreurs
des anciens Philosophes, & de prouver
en peu de mots qu’il n’y a qu’une vraie
cause, parce qu’il n’y a qu’un vrai Dieu:
que la nature ou la force de chaque chose
n’est que la volonté de Dieu: que toutes
les causes naturelles ne sont point de
véritables causes mais seulement des
causes occasionnelles, & quelques autres
véritez qui seront des suites de celles-cy.’
113
Recherche,
VI.ii.3,
MO.ii.318–19:
‘Toutes ces petites divinitez des Païens,
& toutes ces causes particulieres des
Philosophes ne sont que des chiméres,
que le malin esprit tâche d’établir pour
ruïner le culte du vrai Dieu, pour en
occuper des esprits & des cœurs, que le
Createur n’a faits que pour lui. Ce n’est
point la Philosophie que l’on a reçûë
d’Adam qui apprend ces choses, c’est
celle que l’on a reçûë du serpent, car
depuis le peché l’esprit de l’homme est
tout païen. C’est cette Philosophie qui
jointe aux erreurs des sens, a fait adorer
le Soleil, & qui est encore aujourd’hui la
cause universelle du déréglement de
l’esprit & de la corruption du cœur des
hommes.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
280
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
happy. For if religion teaches us that there is only one true God, this
philosophy makes us realise that there is only one true cause. If religion
teaches us that all the divinities of paganism are nothing but stones and
metals without life or motion, this philosophy also reveals to us that all
secondary causes, or all the divinities of philosophy, are nothing but
matter and inefficacious wills. Finally, if religion teaches us that we must
not genuflect before false gods who are not God, this philosophy also
teaches us that our imagination and our mind must not bow before the
imaginary greatness and power of causes that are not at all causes.114
As we shall see, Bayle would frequently say things very similar to this. For the
time being, we need only note that Malebranche’s argument in favour of
occasionalism was based on a variation of the historical narrative described
in I.3, one which had been propagated above all by G. J. Vossius and then
modified by Gassendi. And so it is no surprise to find that one of the very few
seventeenth-century books cited in the Recherche is Vossius’ Theologia gentilis,
used to support the claim that paganism was the logical outcome of ‘the
prejudice of the efficacy of secondary causes’. ‘Apparently’, Malebranche
continued, ‘this is how the first authors of idolatry reasoned’, going on to
explain that the whole purpose of his philosophy was to banish the modern
vestiges of such idolatry.115
114
Recherche, VI.ii.3, MO.ii.319: ‘Mais la
Philosophie que l’on appelle nouvelle,
que l’on représente comme un spectre
pour effrayer les esprits foibles, que
l’on méprise & que l’on condamne sans
l’entendre: la Philosophie nouvelle, disje . . . ruine toutes les raisons des libertins par l’établissement du plus grand de
ses principes, qui s’accorde parfaitement
avec le premier principe de la Religion
Chrétienne; qu’il ne faut aimer &
craindre qu’un Dieu, puisqu’il n’y
a qu’un Dieu qui nous puisse rendre
heureux. Car, si la Religion nous
apprend qu’il n’y a qu’un vrai Dieu;
cette Philosophie nous fait connoître
qu’il n’y a qu’une véritable cause. Si la
Religion nous apprend que toutes les
divinitez du Paganisme ne sont que des
pierres & des métaux sans vie & sans
mouvement, cette Philosophie nous
découvre aussi que toutes les causes
secondes, ou toutes les Divinitez de la
Philosophie, ne sont que de la matiére &
des volontez inefficaces. Enfin si la
115
Religion nous apprend qu’il ne faut
point fléchir le genoüil devant des
Dieux qui ne sont point Dieu; cette
Philosophie nous apprend aussi que
nôtre imagination & nôtre esprit ne doivent point s’abatre devant la grandeur &
la puissance imaginaire des causes qui
ne sont point causes.’
Recherche, ‘Eclaircissement XV’, MO.
iii.247–52, qu. 248–9: ‘le préjugé de l’efficace des causes secondes. Et c’est apparemment de cette maniére qu’ont
raisonné les premiers Auteurs de
l’Idolatrie.’
Malebranche
quotes
Maimonides’ tractate on idolatry as
translated by Dionysius Vossius and
appended to the Theologia gentilis as
‘R. Mosis Maimonidae de idololatria
liber’, 2nd pagination, 1, 4–5. For further comments by Malebranche on the
supposed animism of all the pagans, and
indications of his familiarity with the
scholarly literature about it, see also
Conversations chrétiennes [1677], MO.
iv.19–20.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
281
It was this vision of ‘modern’ philosophy as one that finally allowed
Christians to escape the tendrils of pagan animism that so appealed to Bayle.
Again and again, his positive statements about Cartesian occasionalism, which
he came to call the only ‘Christian philosophy’, emphasise its naturaltheological and apologetic potential. Already in his philosophy teaching of
the late 1670s he agreed with Malebranche that the essence of ‘modern’
philosophy lay in rejecting secondary causality: ‘in the hypothesis of the
moderns, nothing is produced among bodies except local motion. Thus if
creatures do not produce local motion, it is true that creatures produce
nothing.’116 In part, this was based on his aforementioned dogmatic subscription to Cartesian metaphysics. Bayle believed that metaphysics was a science of
being qua being that established the fundamental truth on which all philosophy was based: the identification of matter with extension and impenetrability,
and the consequent assertion of mind–body dualism.117 In turn, this led him,
from his Sedan lectures onwards, to rehearse arguments for occasionalism
based on this basic Cartesian ontology, and to defend them from all objections
(including the important objections made by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
in 1686).118
However, what most appealed to Bayle about occasionalism was its usefulness for natural-theological arguments: it was the best (and perhaps only) way
of avoiding the ascription of agency to an animated nature. Such an ascription,
the logical conclusion of which was atheism, characterised the theology and
philosophy of paganism, and of the scholasticism that had grown out of one
branch of that paganism. In the 1690s and early 1700s, he came to develop this
116
117
Systema, ‘Metaphysica’, OD.iv.487a: ‘. . .
in recentiorum hypothesi nihil produci
inter corpora, praeter motum locale,
ergo si creaturae non producant
motum localem, verum esse creaturas
nihil producere’.
For metaphysics as the science of being
qua being, see Systema, ‘Metaphysica’,
Prooemium, OD.iv.463 (also 481–2); for
substance dualism and the impossibility
of real accidents, see ‘Metaphysica’, ii,
OD.iv.496–505; ‘Physica’, i, OD.iv.271–
86; Dissertatio, OD.iv.109–32; Theses philosophicae, iv–v, xi, OD.iv.135–6, 141–3.
See also Bayle (praes.), Theses philosophicae de elementis (Rotterdam, 1690),
Coroll. xviii: ‘Metaphysica est scientia
speculativa entis in communi.’ Cf.
Malebranche’s forceful defence of metaphysics in Recherche, IV.11, MO.90–3.
Late in life, Bayle thought Locke’s
118
argument against this Cartesian position
to be jejune: see Bayle to Coste,
20 July 1703, BC.xiii.41.
Systema, ‘Metaphysica’, II.ii–iii, OD.iv.
496–516.
Bayle’s
response
to
Fontenelle’s Doutes sur le système physique des causes occasionelles (1686), his
‘Réflexions sur la lettre de l’auteur des
Doutes’, is in OD.v1.171–205. I do not
rehearse these arguments at length,
because they have been thoroughly
expounded in Ryan, Bayle, esp. 33–49,
65–88. Note that Bayle’s insistence on
the essential metaphysical properties of
matter overrides even the divine will:
God could not create non-extended
matter, or matter existing in two places
at once (e.g. Systema, ‘Physica’, I.iii, OD.
iv.278; ‘Réflexions sur la lettre’, OD.
v1.200–1). This is not the metaphysical
worldview of a fideist or a sceptic.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
282
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
argument at great length. Recall that Bayle thought that the logical outcome of
pagan philosophising about the divine would always be something akin to the
vitalist monism of Strato and the Neoconfucians: ‘all the systems of the ancient
philosophers concerning the nature of God lead to irreligion’. If any did not
‘fall into this abyss’, it was only because they had mixed some of the popular
opinions into the logic of their system.119 As he elaborated in the Continuation,
the best argument that any Greek philosophers could deploy against Strato
would be that from the obvious order in the world, which an insensible,
unthinking ‘nature’ could never produce. The argument from design, Bayle
insisted, was indeed utterly destructive of Strato’s system: ‘There could be
nothing more overwhelming for a Stratonic Philosopher than to tell him that
a cause destitute of understanding could not have made this world, where there
is such a beautiful order, such an exact mechanism, and such just and constant
laws of movement.’120
Unfortunately for the pagans, they could never deploy that argument without Strato counter-deploying ad hominem reasoning of equal or greater force.
Against Strato, the other pagans would be forced to defend some form of
dualism, where an uncreated intelligence organised uncreated matter. After all,
on the basis of the universally accepted dictum that nothing is made from
nothing, all of them posited a material first principle (whether accompanied by
an immaterial one or not). Strato would then simply deploy a principle of
parsimony to argue that a materialist monism could account for the phenomena of the world just as well as a materialist dualism. For if matter was capable
of ‘obeying’ laws superadded to it by an intelligent deity, then it was already
capable of those nomological operations. This argument was particularly
powerful against those whose first principle was material. For example, against
the Stoics, Strato would point to their divine active principle as composed of
a subtle fire, and ask where that principle acquired its intelligence and
understanding.121 Those who posited an informing world soul might think
they could escape this objection, but they could not, for such a soul would still
be composed of parts, each of which would have to have its own ‘virtues and
particular faculties’, in which case why not ascribe those to matter directly?
119
CPD, cv, OD.iii.332b: ‘tous les systêmes
des anciens Philosophes sur la nature
de Dieu conduisoient à l’irreligion, &
que si tous ces Philosophes ne sont
point tombez dans cet abîme, ils en
ont été redevables au défaut d’exactitude qui les a empéchez de raisonner
conséquemment. Ils sont sortis de leur
route, attirez ailleurs par les idées que
l’éducation avoit imprimées dans leur
120
121
esprit, et que l’étude de la morale nourrissoit et fortifioit.’
CPD, cvi, OD.iii.333b, 334a, qu.: ‘Il n’y
avoit rien, ce me semble, de plus accablant pour un Philosophe Stratonicien
que de lui dire qu’une cause destituée de
connoissance n’a point pû faire ce
monde, où il y a un si bel ordre,
un méchanisme si exact, et des loix du
mouvement si justes et si constantes.’
CPD, cvi, OD.iii.334a–b.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
283
Since all the pagan philosophers had presupposed the eternity of matter, Strato
could retort to them that one may as well make that matter intelligent. For if it
was not created by God, it might be self-organising also: ‘it is no less strange to
assume that it exists on its own without any quality, than that it exists with an
active principle’.122 And so, Bayle went on, Parker had been quite right to argue
that Aristotle’s eternalism directly led to Strato’s atheism.123 More generally,
pagan philosophy ended up in an impasse: Strato could not answer the argument from design; the other philosophers could not answer Strato’s reasoning
against the sufficiency of matter in any eternalist system. No wonder that
Cicero had ended up resigning himself to scepticism on the subject!124
The only philosophical system that could escape this impasse was Cartesian
occasionalism. But that system depended first on the revealed doctrine of
creation ex nihilo, which, like Gassendi, Bayle believed to be unavailable to
a mind operating through pure reason. Because of this, Bayle contended, there
was only one ‘philosophical path’ for the conversion of pagans: ‘It is to start by
stating as a principle that nothing imperfect can exist by itself, and to conclude
from there that matter being imperfect does not exist necessarily; that it has
therefore been produced from nothing; that there is therefore an infinite
power, a sovereignly perfect spirit that has created it.’ By this path, ‘we arrive
assuredly and promptly at religion’. However, one should not imagine that this
path was available ‘without help from above, the grace of God, and the lights of
Scripture’, for no one had yet shown a rational way of disproving the principle
ex nihilo nihil fit.125 The argument from design could be deployed against the
Stratonist pagan, but only if that design was assigned entirely to a transcendent
deity. Any intermediate principle or immanent deity would be jumped on by
the Stratonists (or atheistic Chinese) as proof that matter could be selforganising.
Cartesian occasionalism was thus the only viable ‘Christian philosophy’. To
prove this further, Bayle repeated Malebranche’s own historical–philosophical
122
123
124
125
CPD, cvi, OD.iii.335b: ‘Il n’est pas moins
étrange de suposer qu’elle existe d’ellemême sans aucune qualité, qu’avec un
principe actif.’ Bayle subsequently
engages in an interesting piece of textual
and philosophical reconstruction of the
lost third book of Cicero’s De natura
deorum, on the basis of Lactantius, Div.
inst. ii.8, where Cicero is quoted on the
improbability of matter being created by
divine providence.
CPD, cvi, OD.iii.335a–b; n. 33 above.
CPD, cvi, OD.iii.332b–333a.
CPD, cv, OD.iii.333a: ‘Je ne voi guere
qu’une bonne route philosophique
pour leur conversion. C’est de poser
d’abord pour principe que rien d’imparfait ne peut exister de soi-même, &
de conclure de là que la matiere
étant imparfaite n’existe point
nécessairement; qu’elle a donc été produite de rien; qu’il y a donc une puissance infinie, un esprit souverainement
parfait qui l’a créée. On arrive par la
sûrement et promptement à la
Religion. Mais n’allez pas vous
imaginer que sans le secours d’enhaut,
sans une grace de Dieu, sans les lumieres de l’Ecriture on puisse facilement
s’apercevoir de ce chemin-là.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
284
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
reasoning. Most Christian philosophers had inadvertently maintained the
vestiges of pagan naturalism in their system. Even when they claimed that
‘nature’ was insensible and ignorant of what it performed, they still attributed
to it true causality, and nomological causality at that (although they might
admit that divine concurrence was also required). ‘Modern’ philosophers had
done well to banish faculties and substantial forms and reduce all movement to
local motion. But they believed that ‘bodies are the true cause of movement
and of the effects that result from it; bodies that, as I say, do not know where
they are, nor if they encounter an obstacle, nor what it is to move themselves,
nor how to push – and yet they move with the most perfect exactness according
to admirable laws’.126 In referring to these ‘moderns’, Bayle undoubtedly
meant the Gassendists and similar thinkers – as his footnote stipulated, the
one exception was the Cartesians. All this meant that in effect there was ‘no
other difference between this “nature” of our philosophers and theologians,
and the nature of Strato, except that the latter had its own faculties, whereas the
former received them from God’.127 In other words, Gassendi had failed to
provide an answer to the logic of paganism that he had himself identified.
Bayle knew full well that he was not the first to raise the issue of naturalism
still having a latent presence in Christian philosophy and theology. He knew
that Thomasius had already noted that scholastics such as Gregory of Rimini
had ended up denying that there was a connection between final and efficient
causes or that one could prove by reason that God had produced the world,
denials that effectively reduced them to the Stratonist position. He knew that
Robert Boyle had launched a historical and philosophical assault on the
personification of nature in his famous Free enquiry (see I.3.5), the Latin
translation of which Bayle had reviewed in the Nouvelles in 1686, even commenting on the fact that Boyle’s ideas, and his insistence on a non-idolatrous
natural philosophy, strongly resembled Malebranche’s.128 And he knew that
126
127
CPD, cxi, OD.iii.340b–341a: ‘Les
Philosophes modernes qui ont bani les
facultez, ou qui les ont toutes réduites au
seul mouvement local, croïent que les
corps sont la vraie cause de ce mouvement, et des effets qui en résultent; les
corps, dis-je, qui ne savent ni où ils sont,
ni s’ils rencontrent un obstacle, ni ce que
c’est que de se mouvoir, ni comment il
faut pousser, & cependant ils se meuvent
avec la derniere justesse selon des loix
admirables.’
CPD, cxi, OD.iii.341a: ‘Il est évident
qu’il n’y a point d’autre différence
entre cette Nature de nos Philosophes
et de nos Théologiens, et la Nature de
128
Straton, si ce n’est que celle-ci avoit
d’elle-même ses facultez, et que cellelà a reçu les siennes de Dieu.’ Bayle
added that supposedly Christian philosophers, ‘even those who abandon
Aristotelianism’ (‘mêmes qui abandonnent le Péripatéticisme’), still posited
an animal soul that performed bodily
actions without knowing how to do so,
and that this position was in some
senses worse than Strato’s, since it
attributed intelligent yet insentient
operations to a created material faculty,
rather than Strato’s uncreated matter.
NRL, December 1686, Art. III, OD.
i.706b.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
285
the activity of nature had recently been a matter of major dispute between
Leibniz, Sturm, and Schelhammer (see I.3.5). He referenced all of these prior
discussions in the section of the Continuation devoted to natural theology.129
Immediately after, he declared that occasionalism offered the only resolution:
I continue to insist that the incomprehensibilities that one can present as
objections to Strato form an unanswerable argument, and an insurmountable difficulty. They are incomprehensibilities in comparison with which
all others seem to me easy to stomach, and this is why I have embraced the
Cartesian hypothesis that God is the only and immediate author of all
local motion. Making laws of motion and giving them to an insensitive
‘nature’ to execute is, it seems to me, the same thing as not making these
laws and as wanting nothing to move. Giving efficient and motive faculties
to bodies that can never know that they have these faculties, nor when,
where, or how they should be used, seems to me to be a contradiction in
terms. I therefore conclude that the same God who created matter, and
who gave it its first impulse, is the cause that continues to move bodies,
and who executes the laws of motion that he made. And so I can mock
Strato, and he cannot weaken my proof by retorsion, or by ad hominem
argument.130
This hugely important passage summarises the logic of Bayle’s argument.
Stratonist atheism was the culmination of the pagan ascription of agency to
natural bodies. But in the end, it was itself an absurd system. First, it could not
129
130
CPD, cxi, OD.iii.341a. Bayle’s source was
Thomasius’ Dilucidationes Stahlianae
(Leipzig, 1676), 360, yet another pedagogical work (the discussion comes in
a disputation entitled ‘Quicquid habet
causam finale, habet etiam efficientem’
(‘Whatever has a final cause, also has an
efficient one’), in a section detailing various Aristotelian opinions on the subject).
For the German debate, Bayle’s source
was the summaries of Schelhammer’s
Natura sibi & medicis vindicata (Kiel,
1697) and Leibniz’s ‘De ipsa natura’,
both in Acta eruditorum (1698), 63–7,
427–40 (the latter is also in Phil. Schrift.,
iv.504–16).
CPD, cxi, OD.iii.341b: ‘Mais pour moi,
Monsieur, qui n’ai point à craindre la
rétorsion dans cette dispute, je persiste
à soûtenir que les incompréhensibilitez
qu’on peut objecter à Straton forment
un argument insoluble, & une
dificulté insurmontable. Ce sont des
incompréhensibilitez en comparaison
desquelles toutes les autres me semblent faciles à digérer, & c’est pour cela
que
j’ai
embrassé
l’hypothese
Cartésienne, que Dieu est l’auteur
unique et immédiat de tout mouvement local. Faire des loix du mouvement & les donner à exécuter à une
Nature insensible, c’est toute la même
chose, ce me semble, que de ne point
faire ces loix, & que de vouloir que rien
ne se meuve. Donner des facultez efficientes & motrices à des corps qui ne
peuvent jamais savoir qu’ils aïent ces
facultez, ni quand, ni où, ni comment
il s’en faut servir, me paroît une contradiction dans les termes. Je conclus donc
que le même Dieu qui a créé la matiere,
et qui lui a donné les premieres impulsions, est la cause qui continuë à mouvoir les corps, et qui exécute les loix du
mouvement qu’il a faites. Ainsi je puis
me moquer de Straton, il ne peut pas
afoiblir ma preuve par la rétorsion, ou
par l’argument ad hominem.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
286
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
account for the design evident in the natural world. Second, it led logically to
the denial of movement in the world (hence Xenophanes was more rational
than Spinoza, as we have seen). No other pagan philosophy could offer a retort
to Strato. But occasionalism could, and hence it was rational to embrace it
(even if it did not resolve all philosophical difficulties, as we shall see). This
conclusion is stated with great clarity in the Continuation. However, it was
already present in the Dictionnaire, which – as we have seen – set up the
historical narrative that was necessary to reach it.
(iii) Cartesian Occasionalism Is Also More Rational than Epicureanism
It will be recalled that in his historical account of pagan philosophy, Bayle had
effectively divided the pagans into two groups. Almost all were animists, whose
thought led logically to the monist–vitalist atheism of Strato, Xenophanes, or the
Neoconfucians. The only serious thinker to avoid this path had been Epicurus.
The Epicurean deities were transcendent, but this came at the cost of denying
providence. In other words, it also led to atheism, at least in practice.
According to Bayle, Cartesian occasionalism also offered an answer to this
branch of pagan thought, and a further lesson concerning the limits of pure
reason. This lesson is articulated in the long Dictionnaire article ‘Epicure’.
There, Bayle repeats the point that if one accepts the principle of ex nihilo nihil
fit – as did every rational pagan – then the denial of providence was the most
logical conclusion. For by recognising that principle, and thus inevitably
endorsing the pre-existence of matter, one immediately committed oneself
either to materialism or to a dualism where an intelligent first principle
arranges the pre-existent matter. As we have seen, Bayle thought that many
pagan philosophers had indeed taken the latter approach. But Epicurus could
out-argue them all. First, there was no reason to think that an immaterial God
could operate on tangible matter without being its creator. Moreover, if he
could, he could only make the world worse: a disorganised matter was neither
good nor evil, whereas its organisation and the consequent formation of life
introduced both moral and physical evil into the world. Why would a deity do
such a thing? Most convincingly, Epicurus would argue that any deity by
definition enjoyed perfect felicity, and interaction with a material world
could only disturb that felicity.131
The Epicurean denial of providence thus made it more rational than any
‘theistic’ pagan alternative. But that did not mean that it was more rational
than – or even equally as rational as – the Christian system. Bayle scholars
sometimes have a tendency to reductionism: Bayle noted some difficulties with
131
DHC, EpicureS (ii.373a–b). The last of
these was of course Epicurus’ actual
argument: Bayle draws on Lucretius,
i.57, quoted in full in SpinozaN, n. 103
(iv.261b).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
287
Christian philosophical worldviews, they say, so he was a sceptic who thought
all philosophical explanations equal, since they all contained difficulties. This
not only misrepresents Bayle’s actual texts, but is also philosophically unsustainable. After all, I may think that philosophical system a is not entirely
watertight, but I can still prefer it significantly to system b, which I believe to
be even more problematic. As we have seen, this probabilistic reasoning is
exactly what Bayle adopted against Strato: the problems with occasionalism
were ‘easy to stomach’ when compared to those of the Stratonist system.
Bayle would later explain the nature of this reasoning to Jacques Bernard,
who had accused him of Pyrrhonism:
I warn him that he was deceived when he was told ‘that Mr Bayle
maintained that all evident propositions are equally evident’. I respond
to him that the thesis that all bodies are incapable of thought appears so
evident to Mr Bayle that he judges it certain, but that he does not believe it
to be as evident as the proposition that two plus two makes four.132
He applied exactly such probabilism in ‘Epicure’. According to Bayle, for all its
superiority to the systems of other pagan philosophers, Epicurus’ system faced huge
problems. Above all, it was hopelessly incapable of explaining human free will.
Epicurus’ realisation of the determinism implicit in his own scheme had forced him
to deny the fact that all future contingents were either true or false. Even more
ridiculously, it had forced him into positing his famous clinamen (swerve) as
a deus ex machina that could supposedly solve all problems.133 Triumphantly,
Bayle could thus declare that, while Epicurus might defeat all the pagan philosophers with his objections to animism and providential dualism, he himself was
easily defeated by Christianity. Once one posited ex nihilo creation – and with it
God’s total omnipotence over created matter – all Epicurus’ objections ‘disappear
and vanish like smoke, with respect to those to whom revelation has taught that
God is the creator of the world, in regard to both its matter and its form’.134
132
133
RQP, IV.24, OD.iii.1071a: ‘je l’averti
qu’on l’a trompé, lors qu’on lui a dit
que Mr. Bayle soûtenoit que toutes les
propositions évidentes étoient également
évidentes. Je lui répons que cette these,
les corps sont incapables de penser, paroît
assez évidente pour Mr. Bayle pour la
juger certaine; mais qu’il ne la croit pas
aussi évidente que cette proposition,
deux & deux font quatre.’ The paragraph
in which this appears is extraordinarily
condescending and polemical. For more
on this important theme, see II.3.3.
DHC, EpicureT (ii.374a–375a). The
ascription of souls to atoms, à la
134
Democritus, or even the positing of
‘free’ souls, à la Carneades, only delayed
rather than solved the problem of determinism (ii.374b–375a).
DHC,
EpicureT
(ii.374a),
‘Les
Objections d’Epicure, qui ont été
établées dans la Remarque précédente,
& qui pouvoient mettre à bout les
Philosophes du Paganisme, disparoissent & s’évanoüissent comme de la
fumée par raport á ceux à qui la
Révélation a enseigné que Dieu est
la Créateur du Monde tant à l’égard
de la matiere qu’à l’égard de la forme.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
288
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
The Christian system did not solve all problems; how divine omnipotence
was compatible with human free will remained a mystery (see II.2), as did ‘the
wonderful ends [God] has proposed to himself from all eternity’.135 But it was
still by far the most rational model that one could adopt. Bayle proved this by
immediately outlining the problems that faced the Socinians, who had tried to
reconcile Christianity with pure reason. This, Bayle declared, had only led
them to an even worse position than Epicurus’. For in their rationalism, they
had been forced to deny that God had created the material world ex nihilo. But
then they crashed headlong into all the objections that Epicurus had made
against the pagan dualists!136
Positively, this all led back to occasionalism as the only ‘Christian philosophy’. As Malebranche had argued, the power to move matter was inseparable
from that of creating it. Ultimately, the only alternative to accepting the
doctrine of creation ex nihilo was to subscribe to a monism in which movement was impossible, a position which, as we have seen, Bayle had already
condemned as an absurdity, however much the logic of paganism led to it. This
triumphant conclusion to the discussion of Epicurus – with its long quotation
from Malebranche’s Meditations Chrétiennes – is itself worth quoting at
length:
I am sure one of the greatest philosophers of this age [i.e. Malebranche],
and at the same time one of the most zealous writers for the doctrines of
the Gospel, will agree, that by making an apology for Epicurus such as you
have seen ex hypothesi in the preceding commentary, we are doing much
service to the true faith. He teaches not only that there is no providence if
God did not create matter, but even that God would not know that there is
a matter if it were uncreated. I shall cite his words at some length; the
Socinians will find their condemnation there. ‘How stupid and ridiculous
are the philosophers! They imagine that creation is impossible, because
135
136
DHC, EpicureT (ii.374a), ‘fins adorables
qu’il s’est proposes de toute éternité’.
Uncharacteristically, Bayle does not cite
any actual Socinian texts as proof, and
the denial of creation ex nihilo is not
part of ‘canonical’ Socinianism, as
enshrined in the Racovian Catechism.
However, it does appear prominently
in Johannes Volkelius, De vera religione
libri quinque ([Amsterdam], 1642), ii.4
(new pagination) cols 5–6, where creation ex nihilo is indeed explicitly denied
by interpreting 2 Macc. 7:28 (a classic
proof text on the subject) in light of the
apocryphal Wisd. 11:18, to arrive at the
Aristotelian formulation ‘And so it is
said that God made everything ex nihilo
because he created it from an informing
matter’ (‘Ideo enim Deus ex nihilo
omnia fecisse dicitur, qui ea creavit ex
materia informi’). Whether Bayle had
ever read Volkelius’ text in the original
is unclear, but as he himself made clear
(DHC, VolkeliusA (iv.468a)), it had been
made widely available by being printed
in full alongside the refutation by
Samuel Maresius, Hydra Socinianismi
expugnata, 3 vols (1651–62). Recall that
Isaac Barrow had similarly used
Gassendi’s
historico-philosophical
argument to attack Volkelius: I.3.3.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
289
they do not conceive how the power of God is great enough to make
something out of nothing. But can they conceive how God’s power is
capable of stirring a single straw? If they think carefully, they do not
conceive one more clearly than the other; nor do they have a clear idea of
efficacy or power. So if they followed their false principle, they would have
to affirm that God is not even powerful enough to give movement to
matter. But this false conclusion would commit them to opinions that are
so impertinent and so ungodly that they would soon become the object of
the contempt and indignation of even the least enlightened people. For
they soon find themselves reduced to maintaining that there is no movement or change in the world, or that all these changes have no cause that
produces them, nor any wisdom that regulates them . . . If matter was
uncreated, God could not move it nor form anything from it. Because God
cannot shift matter, nor wisely arrange it, without knowing it. But God
cannot know it, if he does not give it its being. For God can only draw his
knowledge from himself.’137
Here again we find a beautiful summary of Bayle’s natural-theological argument. The two most rational positions for a pagan to adopt were atheistic ones:
either the materialist monism of Xenophanes, Strato, and the Neoconfucians,
or the non-providential atomism of Epicurus. But both faced insurmountable
problems. The first ended up denying movement or change in the world.
137
DHC, EpicureT (ii.374a–b): ‘Je suis sûr
qu’un des plus grans Philosophes de ce
siècle, & en même tems l’un des
Ecrivains les plus zélés pour les dogmes
de l’Evangile, tombera d’accord qu’en
faisant l’Apologie d’Epicure telle qu’on
l’a vue ex hypothesi dans la Remarque
précédente, on rend beaucoup de service
à la vraie Foi. Il enseigne non seulement
qu’il n’y auroit point de Providence, si
Dieu n’avoit point créé la matiere,
mais même que Dieu ignoreroit qu’il
y eût une matiere, si elle étoit incréée.
Je raporterai un peu au long ses paroles:
les Sociniens y trouveront leur condamnation: “Que les Philosophes sont stupides & ridicules! Ils s’imaginent que la
création est impossible, parce qu’ils ne
concoivent pas la puissance de Dieu soit
assez grande pour faire de rien quelque
chose. Mais conçoivent-ils bien que la
puissance de Dieu soit capable de
remuër un fétu? S’ils y prennent garde,
ils ne conçoivent pas plus clairement
l’un que l’autre; puis qu’ils n’ont point
d’idée claire d’efficace ou de puissance.
Desorte que s’ils suivoient leur faux
principe, ils devroient assûrer que Dieu
n’est pas même assez puissant pour donner le mouvement à la matiere. Mais
cette fausse conclusion les engageroit
dans des sentimens si impertinens & si
impies, qu’ils deviendroient bien-tôt
l’objet du mépris & de l’indignation des
personnes mêmes les moins éclairées.
Car ils se trouveroient bien-tôt reduits
à soutenir qu’il n’y a point de mouvement ou de changement dans le Monde,
ou bien que tous ces changemens n’ont
point de cause qui les produise, ni de
sagesse qui les régle . . . Si la matiere
étoit incréée, Dieu ne pourroit la mouvoir ni en former aucune chose. Car
Dieu ne peut remuër la matiere, ni l’arranger avec Sagesse sans la connoître.
Or Dieu ne peut la connoitre, s’il ne lui
donne l’être. Car Dieu ne peut tirer ses
connoissances que de lui-même.”’ The
quotation is from Malebranche,
Meditations Chrêtiennes, ix.3, MO.
x.96–7.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
290
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
The second could only be ‘saved’ with the ridiculous clinamen. Occasionalism
offered the only way out. But it itself required the revealed doctrine of creation
ex nihilo. Once that doctrine was established, occasionalism served to get
around the logical termination in monism or a-providential Epicureanism
that characterised all pagan philosophies, and all Christian attempts to revive
them.
(iv) Defending Cartesianism c.1700
This conclusion was not only a defence against atheistic reasoning, but also
a defence of Descartes himself. If only modern philosophers, Bayle groaned,
‘instead of making it a point of honour to contradict’ Descartes, had worked
with him to banish from the schools the ‘countless number of material
substances to which we give sense, and even some vestiges of reason’, then
they would be in a far better position to take on the naturalist atheists.138 It may
be thought that this was hyperbolic rhetoric on Bayle’s part. But let us not
forget that Malebranche had said exactly the same thing; and Bayle had spent
the previous twenty years teaching his philosophy!
However, there were also more contingent reasons for Bayle to argue so
forcefully for the natural-theological usefulness of Cartesian occasionalism
c.1700. First of all, Bayle believed that a very large group of naturalist atheists
really did exist in the world, in the Far East. The question of how missionaries
should dispute with them was not simply an artificial excuse to engage in
abstract philosophising; rather, it was one of the pressing socio-intellectual
questions of the late 1690s and early 1700s. The Jesuits had taken pride in the
fact that their scholastic reasoning, and specifically their analogical predication
of the divine attributes, had been able to convince the elite among the Chinese
that their tien or shang-ti was equivalent to the Western ‘Deus’. Against them,
the Dominicans and the Société des Missions étrangères de Paris insisted that
the terms had always signified an immanent, material first principle. After the
publication in 1696 of the first volume of Le Comte’s Nouveaux mémoires ‘the
polemics in France reached an almost hysterical pitch from 1697 to the death
of Pope Innocent XII in 1700’.139 As he prepared the second edition of the
Dictionnaire, Bayle followed these polemics with great interest; indeed, some
of the participants, such as the Jesuit Charles Le Gobien, sent him their
138
CPD, cxii, OD.iii.342b: ‘. . . si les plus
grands Philosophes de notre siècle avoient voulu seconder Mr. Descartes, au
lieu de se faire un point d’honneur de
le contredire. S’ils eussent agi de concert
avec ce grand homme ils eussent peutêtre bani des écoles ce nombre innombrable de substances matérielles à qui l’on
139
donne du sentiment, & même quelques
vestiges de raison. Ceux qui enseignent
une telle chose afoiblissent l’un des plus
forts argumens que l’on puisse proposer
contre les Naturalistes.’
Lach and Van Kley, Asia, iii.1 (1993),
429.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
291
contributions and attempted to sway his opinion to their cause (in this case
unsuccessfully).140 As we have seen, Bayle welcomed the Sorbonne’s condemnation of the Jesuit position in 1700. And in both the second edition of the
Dictionnaire and the Continuation, he offered a missionary strategy that tallied
not only with his own philosophical commitments, but also with the anti-Jesuit
strategies of Arnauld, the Dominicans, and the Société.
The dominant philosophico-theological belief in China was a Strato-like
naturalist atheism.141 To convert such philosophers would be a ‘great coup’:
‘The baptism conferred on one of these philosophers would do more honour to
Christianity than the baptism conferred on a hundred idolaters.’142 The way to
argue against them was the same as against the Stratonists: demonstrate that
attributing the order seen in the world to an unknowing nature was absurd.
Unfortunately, all the missionaries were Aristotelians (the Dominicans were
Thomists, the Franciscans Scotists, and the Jesuits neither), and so accepted
Aristotle’s famous definition of ‘nature’ as an internal principle of motion. After
hearing this, the Chinese would respond that there was nothing absurd about
their self-sufficient nature. The theory of divine concurrence would be of no use,
since it retained insentient bodies functioning like sentient efficient causes. All
this would be avoided by the missionaries, if only they were Cartesians.143
However, this was not the only reason to insist on the natural-theological
potential of Cartesianism at this time. In the 1690s, after a long period in which it
seemed Cartesianism had been broadly recognised as an acceptable philosophical position, there emerged a campaign against it at the University of Paris,
stemming in part from the polemical conflation of Cartesianism and Jansenism.
The most direct manifestation of this campaign was the formulary imposed on
the University by the king in 1691 (see I.2.2).144 It will be recalled that the issues
140
141
See e.g. Le Gobien to Bayle, 29 October
1699, BC.xii.128–9, replying to a lost letter
of Bayle asking for comments on Noël
Alexandre’s Apologie des dominicains missionnaires de la Chine (for which see
I.3.4): predictably, Le Gobien condemns
it and the work of Navarrete on which it
depended. Bayle had first been inspired to
look into the question by Arnauld.
CPD, cxiii, OD.iii.343a–344a. It was
irrelevant for Bayle’s purposes at this
stage whether it was a corruption of an
earlier Confucian theism, as the Jesuits
insisted, or the true doctrine of
Confucius himself, so he could simply
rely on the account in Le Gobien’s
‘Preface’ to his Histoire, and on
the second volume of Le Comte’s
Nouveaux mémoires.
142
143
144
CPD,
cxiii,
OD.iii.344a:
‘Les
Missionaires de la Chine feroient un
grand coup s’ils convertissoient cette
secte dominante. Le batême conféré à
l’un de ces Philosophes seroit plus
d’honneur au Christianisme que le
batême conféré à cent Idolatres . . .’
Bayle goes on to explain that converting
a Chinese idolater would be easy, since
the heaven promised by Christianity was
so superior to the transmigration promised by the bonzes’ doctrine.
CPD, cxiii, OD.iii.344b–345b, concluding ‘C’est ce qu’ils éviteroient s’ils
étoient Cartésiens.’
For the text of the formulary, see Charles
Du Plessis d’Argentré, Collectio judiciorum de novis erroribus, 3 vols (Paris,
1736), iii.149–50. For contextualisation,
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
292
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
raised in the formulary were precipitated by Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Censura
philosophiae cartesianae (1689). Huet had accused Descartes of using the doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths so as to defend components of his
philosophy that contradicted the dogmas of faith. According to Huet, Descartes
had sought to protect himself by claiming that God ‘can make things that
conflict with reason and with themselves, because they do so not from their
own nature but by God’s will’.145 The question of whether this reflects
Descartes’s real intentions at all accurately is irrelevant. What is relevant is
that Bayle, like Pierre-Sylvain Regis, read Huet’s book – a book which generalised and radicalised the question of how Cartesianism impinged on the relationship between philosophy and theology – and was deeply affected by it.146 As we
have seen, in the Dictionnaire he dogmatically rejected the doctrine of the
creation of the eternal truths, ‘whatever’ Descartes may have believed on the
matter. In other words, he explicitly distanced himself from the ‘fideist’ defence
of Cartesianism that Huet was attributing to Descartes himself.
More generally, however, in reasserting the natural-theological value of
Cartesianism, Bayle was following in the footsteps of the other most prominent
active Cartesians of the 1690s. The most important of these was Arnauld. In his
Difficultez proposées à Mr. Steyaërt (1691), composed in the wake of the Paris
formulary, Arnauld launched a spirited defence of the natural-theological
potential of Cartesianism. As part of a discussion of erroneously condemned
doctrines (he was writing in defence of Jansen), he suggested that the ecclesiological condemnation of Cartesianism was a perfect example of another such
error. The appearance of Descartes’s proof that ‘the soul and the body, that is to
say, that which thinks and that which is extended, are two totally distinct
substances, so that it is impossible either that extension be a modification of
a thinking substance, or that thought be a modification of an extended
substance’ was, Arnauld suggested, nothing less than a providential act on
God’s part to counteract the libertinism of the age.147
Bayle read Arnauld’s Difficultez immediately upon its publication, and
quoted this passage at great length in the article ‘Pomponace’, agreeing
145
146
see Schmaltz, ‘Cartesianism’ (1999);
Schmaltz, ‘Tale’.
Huet, Censura, 175: ‘Deum ea etiam
facere posse, quae fieri non posse,
secumque ipsa pugnare ratio judicasset;
quippe non ex natura sua, sed ex Dei
voluntate pugnare.’
Bayle to Gilles Ménage, 21 November
1689, BC.viii.52. Subsequently he read in
MS Huet’s satirical Mémoires pour servir à
l’histoire du cartesianisme (1692): Bayle
to Minutoli, 11 November 1692, BC.
viii.665.
147
Arnauld, Difficultez proposées à
Mr. Steyaërt [1691], AO.ix.305–6: ‘que
l’ame & le corps, c’est-à-dire, ce qui
pense, & ce qui est étendu, sont deux
substances totalement distinctes; de
sorte qu’il n’est pas possible, ni que
l’étendue soit une modification de la
substance qui pense, ni que la pensée
en soit une de la substance étendue’.
For Arnauld’s strength of feeling about
Huet’s anti-Cartesianism at exactly this
time, see also his letter to Denis Dodart,
1 November 1691, AO.iii.400–3.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
293
passionately with the Jansenist’s judgement.148 The position he adopted
throughout the Dictionnaire and the Continuation was exactly that propagated
by Arnauld. The main apologetic advantage of Cartesianism was its strict
demonstration of the impossibility of thought being an emergent property of
matter. What Bayle added to this message was the point that anti-pagan
apologetics should begin by convincing the opposition to accept the revealed
doctrine of creation ex nihilo, without which neither side could build
a coherent worldview.
II.1.3 The Limits of Cartesian Occasionalism
None of the above is intended to deny the fact that Bayle also saw limits to the
philosophical problems that Malebranchian occasionalism could solve. I am
not speaking here of those aspects of Malebranche’s philosophy that Bayle
thought simply wrong or unnecessary. The most important of these was the
doctrine of seeing all things in God, a doctrine that Bayle followed Arnauld in
rejecting in part because he thought it redolent of the pantheism of the
pagans.149 Rather, I am talking of those issues that Bayle thought were central
to conceptualising the limits of philosophical understanding as it stood. An
investigation of these issues in turn leads us to the heart of the matter regarding
Bayle’s supposed fideism or scepticism.
The most famous issue on which Bayle believed a Stratonic or Chinese
atheist could challenge even the Cartesian occasionalist apologist for
Christianity was the problem of evil. Unsurprisingly, it is here that
Straussian interpreters find the strongest evidence for Bayle’s irreligion.
Accordingly, I shall treat this at length in the next chapter, so let us bracket
it for now. The other great issue that Bayle believed Cartesian occasionalism
could not resolve was the nature of soul–body interaction. Bayle himself
repeated this message again and again. Placing Bayle’s comments in context
shows him only to have been recognising what plenty of other Cartesians
recognised as unsolved issues in their system.
(i) The Spatial Location of Incorporeal Substances
Two sub-issues in particular stood out for Bayle as exemplary of the problems
involved in philosophising on body–soul interaction. The first was that of the
spatial location of the soul and other incorporeal substances, including God.
This was a problem inherent in Cartesianism, with its strict identification of
148
DHC, PomponaceG (iii.781b–782a). For
Bayle’s reading of the Difficultez, see
Bayle to Pierre Silvestre, 13 November
1691, BC.viii.435.
149
DHC, DemocriteP (ii.274a); also Ryan,
Bayle, 26–8.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
294
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
the essence of immaterial substance with thought and non-extension. Bayle, it
will be recalled, dogmatically and unequivocally endorsed this dualism:
‘Because any mode of thought inhering in an essentially complex subject
would be radically incoherent, Bayle concludes that the subject of mental
acts must be a simple, unextended immaterial substance.’150 But let us remember also that Bayle’s primary inspiration for his Cartesianism was not Descartes
himself, but rather Malebranche. The Oratorian had significantly softened the
Cartesian position, arguing that we know the soul primarily by negation, and
thus while we are sure of its existence and immateriality, we know very little
about its essence.151 Bayle agreed with this.152 One consequence was that for
him, the Cartesian proof of the immateriality of the soul was not enough to
sustain its immortality. Establishing immateriality did not prove that thought
was an essential property of the soul that might not be annihilated (qua
accident) while the immaterial substratum (whatever it is) continued to
exist.153 Bayle was not dogmatic about this conclusion, and some of his
comments imply that Cartesian dualism does offer a strong case for immortality. For him, the point of raising the issue was to provide another demonstration of the fact that truths central to lived religion were better proved from the
authority of revelation than on the basis of philosophical speculation.154 In
other words, this was a political–methodological argument about the social
place of different types of knowledge as much as it was a philosophical one (I
shall return to Bayle’s underlying motives here in II.4).
As for the ‘place’ occupied by immaterial substances such as God and the
soul, Bayle argued that asserting that such substances occupied any location
or place led one to having to posit extended immaterial substances, breaking
the fundamental rule of ‘modern’ (i.e. post-Cartesian) ontology and thus
reopening the door to all the errors of the scholastics, whether on the soul
(which they claimed was omnipresent in every part of the body), or the
150
151
152
Ryan, Bayle, 47.
n. 85 above.
See e.g. Systema, ‘Logica’, vii, OD.
iv.241–2; ‘Metaphysica’, ii, OD.iv.505–
6; NRL, April 1684, Art. II (review of
Malebranche’s Réponse de l’auteur de la
Recherche de la verité (Rotterdam,
1684), OD.i.26b; CP, II.i, OD.ii.397a;
DHC, SimonideF (iv.211b), where the
reference to ‘the most subtle Cartesians
[who] maintain that we have no idea of
spiritual substance’ (‘les plus subtils
Cartésiens soutiennent, que nous
n’avons point d’idée de la substance
spirituelle’)
is
undoubtedly
to
Malebranche.
153
154
DHC, PomponaceF (iii.780b–781a).
This was a conclusion of his later writings; in the 1670s he still asserted that
one could move from immateriality to
immortality: Systema, ‘Physica’, OD.
iv.457–8.
DHC, DicearqueM (ii.288b); PerrotL
(iii.685a–685b); PomponaceF (iii.780b).
Since all these statements were added
only to the second edition of the DHC,
I think it likely they were a result of
Bayle’s new-found knowledge of the
Locke–Stillingfleet dispute (discussed
in the first two of these articles), for
which see n. 89 above.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
295
omnipresence of God (to explain which they had had to resort to spurious
distinctions so as not to make God a body with parts). According to Bayle, the
best answer to the problem of the place of immaterial substances was that of
those Cartesians who said that both God and the soul were ‘nowhere’. But,
Bayle continued, this would never convince the vast majority of people, who
remained tied to the ideas of divine omnipresence and the local union of soul
and body. Occasionalism offered only a partial solution to these problems, in
that it explained that God was the only cause, but did not explain what were
the occasional causes by which he operated in the case of mind–body
interaction.155
Bayle was hardly unique in identifying these problems in the Cartesian
system, even among Cartesians themselves. On the question of the spatial
presence of spiritual substances (both God and others), Descartes, having
skirted the issue in his published writings, had been forced into an embarrassing nescience in his correspondence with Henry More, affirming that such
substances were present only ‘in power’, but also that God was essentially
omnipresent because all his attributes – including that of power – were to be
identified with his simple essence.156 Bayle was well familiar with this correspondence, as he also was with More’s later Latin works in which the
Englishman coined the term ‘nullibism’ to describe the supposed Cartesian
position that held spiritual substances to be nowhere.157 This description was
unfair: most prominent Cartesians, such as Louis La Forge, Antoine Le Grand,
and Johannes Clauberg, while they sometimes spoke in strongly ‘nullibist’
terms of divine presence being by power, also usually resorted to the same
equivocation as Descartes, especially on divine omnipresence, and concluded
that God was also essentially omnipresent. (In turn, More accused them all of
inconsistency.)158 But it is surely no coincidence that the only Cartesian really
to stick his neck out and assert openly that spiritual substances – including
God – had no spatial presence was Pierre Poiret, on whose 1677 Cogitationes
rationales Bayle had offered such a detailed commentary. Poiret argued that
even God was locally present only through the effects of his power.
155
156
RQP, III.xv, OD.iii.940a–941b; DHC,
SimonideF (iv.211b).
Descartes to More, 15 April 1649, AT.
v.342–3 [= CSMK, 372–2]; Descartes to
More, August 1649, AT.v.403 [= CSMK,
381]. See also his famously ambiguous
statement on the subject in a letter to
Princess Elisabeth of 21 May 1643, AT.
iii.664–5 [= CSMK, 218], and the further
examples collected in Reid, ‘Presence’
(2008), 101–5; Des Chene, Physiologia,
387–90. I am indebted to the beautifully
clear discussion in Dr Reid’s important
157
158
study. For the question of extensio virtualis, see further III.3.3.
Henry More, Enchiridion metaphysicum
(London, 1671), 351–2. For Bayle’s
knowledge of More’s book at the time
that he composed the objections to
Poiret, see Bayle to Jacob Bayle,
2 July 1677, BC.ii.426.
Reid, ‘Presence’, 96–110. As shown
there, both Descartes and his followers
tended to come closer to true nullibism
regarding created spirits (e.g. souls).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
296
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
Unsurprisingly, he was opposed by More.159 In the late 1670s, Bayle praised
Poiret for showing that immaterial spirits were not in space, and expressed
a wish that he had done more to combat those who equated space with God (as
he believed More did). However, he criticised Poiret’s nullibism as regards the
divine essence (he did not use the word), instead reaffirming the standard
Cartesian stance that God was essentially omnipresent, although not in the
manner of extended bodies.160 But it was Poiret’s position that Bayle adopted,
in mitigated form, in his maturity.
I think it very likely that Bayle was led to this conclusion by his participation
in the Malebranche–Arnauld controversy of the mid-1680s. In the Recherche,
Malebranche had denied the spatial presence of any spiritual substance apart
from God, who he claimed in traditional Cartesian terms was substantially
omnipresent while being unextended (at least in the way matter was extended).
God was wholly present in all parts (a traditional scholastic doctrine for which
More coined the term ‘holenmerianism’). This omnipresence was necessary
for God’s ubiquitous operation in an occasionalist system.161 But it was
imperative, Malebranche noted, not to employ the analogy between the presence of the soul in the body and the presence of God in the world. God was not
an anima mundi, as the pagans had claimed; the ‘intelligible extension’ attributed to God was very different from material extension.162 Instead he resorted
to declaring man’s nescience when it came to the nature of divine omnipresence. This was already the case in the Recherche, where it was stated that
because ‘Sacred Scripture teaches us in several places that God is a spirit, we
must believe this and call him that; but reason on its own cannot teach us
this.’163 And it was reiterated even more bluntly in the Entretiens sur
la métaphysique & sur la religion (1688) – a popular summary of his philosophy that unquestionably influenced some of Bayle’s own formulations in the
Dictionnaire – where Malebranche declared that the question of ‘the immensity of God and the way in which He exists everywhere’ ultimately ‘appears
incomprehensible’.164
159
160
161
162
For Poiret, see his Cogitationes rationales de Deo, i.6, OD.Siii.132–56. For
More’s unimpressed response, see the
new Latin version of the Divine dialogues in the Opera philosophica, 2 vols
(London, 1679), i.672.
Objectiones, OD.iv.148b–149a.
Entretiens sur la métaphysique & sur la
religion [1688], viii.4–9, MO.xii.173–87
[= Dialogues on metaphysics and religion, ed. N. Jolley (Cambridge, 1997),
131–9]; Reid, ‘Presence’, 114–17.
Entretiens, viii.5–6, MO.xii.181–2.
163
164
Recherche, III.ii.9, MO.i.472: ‘Il est vrai
que puisque . . . l’Ecriture-Sainte nous
apprend en plusieurs endroits que Dieu
est un esprit nous le devons croire, &
l’appeller ainsi: mais la raison toute seule
ne nous le peut apprendre.’
Entretiens, viii.5, MO.xii.180 [= Jolley,
132]. In fact, the whole dialogue is dedicated to demonstrating the impossibility
of finite minds grasping the infinite,
leading to nescience on the manner of
divine omnipresence.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
297
Beyond this self-conscious recourse to divine incomprehensibility, another
downside of this position was that it rendered God so completely sui generis that
it made him in effect a third kind of substance. Arnauld pounced on this,
accusing Malebranche of positing an extended God, and even – quite ridiculously – of Spinozism.165 Malebranche reiterated his view, but ultimately
retreated into the position that the omnipresence of an infinite, incorporeal
substance was incomprehensible, solemnly declaring that ‘for a long time I have
not tormented myself to meditate on subjects that pass by me, and that belong to
the infinite’.166 Making a virtue out of a necessity, the Oratorian again added that
it was the abandonment of such nescience concerning the infinite that had led
the pagans into their (animist) idolatry, and misled some Christians also.167
(ii) Animal Rationality
We have seen that in identifying the inability of Cartesianism to solve the
problem of the spatial location of spiritual substances, and especially God,
Bayle was hardly being more ‘fideist’ or sceptical than many of the Cartesians –
including Malebranche himself! This conclusion applies no less in the case of
the second problem that Bayle thought Cartesian occasionalism unable to
solve definitively: that of animal reasoning. This may seem a separate issue,
but in fact it was just a subset of the first. For, according to Bayle, once one
acknowledged the immateriality of thinking substances, one had to posit an
immaterial rational soul in animals – that or take the Cartesian route of
designating them automata. The latter option would pit one against everyday
experience of animal sensation; the former would lead to all the aforementioned problems concerning the ‘place’ of the animal soul and its union with
the animal body.168 The ancient and oriental philosophers, because they were
all to some extent emanationist animists who believed that souls were composed of a very thin matter, simply ascribed rational souls to animals, and very
often combined this with the doctrine of transmigration of souls, including
between humans and beasts.169 The scholastic solution – limiting animals to
165
166
167
Antoine Arnauld, Defense de Mr Arnauld
(1684), in AO.xxxviii.512–20 (with
a comparison to Spinoza at 517–18).
Trois lettres de l’auteur de la Recherche
de la verité [1685], MO.vi.203–37, qu.
204: ‘c’est une propriété de l’infini, qui
me paroît incompréhensible; & j’en
demeurerai là: car il y a longtemps que
je ne me tourmente point à méditer sur
des sujets qui me passent, & qui tiennent
de l’infini’. See also 213, 219, 223.
Entretiens, viii.7, MO.xii.183 [= Jolley,
136].
168
169
DHC, RorariusG (iv.81b–82a); RQP, III.
xv, OD.iii.940a. The best analyses are
Des Chene, ‘Category’ (2006); Ryan,
Bayle, 106–8 (explaining how Bayle
maintained his thesis in the face of
Leibniz’s pre-established harmony).
DHC, RorariusD (iv.77b–78b); PereiraE
(ii.652b–653b). As for Gomesius Pereira
himself, whom Bayle believed to have
been the first to posit animal automata,
Bayle undoubtedly plundered this idea –
yet again – from Vossius, Theologia gentilis, 345b, whom he plagiarised, more or
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
298
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
possession of only a ‘sensitive’ soul – was again a nonsense designed only to
save the phenomena: sense never occurred without self-reflection, and the
supposed differences between sensitive and rational souls were purely accidental. Meanwhile, speaking theologically, ‘one cannot think without horror
about the consequences of this doctrine’, which would either render men
mortal like animals, or animals immortal like men.170
In pointing out these difficulties, Bayle was again being no more sceptical
than many among his Cartesian contemporaries. The problem of animal
rationality had long been a thorn in the Cartesians’ side; in the correspondence with More, Descartes himself had had to mitigate his claims
somewhat.171 As for Bayle, he drew his collection of anti-Cartesian arguments on the issue from the Voyage du monde de Descartes (1691), a popular
list of objections to Cartesianism by the Jesuit Gabriel Daniel (1649–1728).172
In the years immediately before the publication of the Dictionnaire, this sort
of attack on the animals-as-automata theory had already led Pierre-Sylvain
Regis – the most prominent Cartesian philosopher of the 1690s, whose
frequent resorts to the nescience engendered by the separation of philosophy
and theology we already met (I.2.2) – to declare that ‘whatever inclination we
might have to give beasts a soul distinct from the body, we had rather
suspend our judgement’ on that subject.173 Bayle gleefully quoted this
passage.174
Again, this hardly committed him to scepticism or fideism. According to
him, the Cartesians’ opponents had no better solutions. More importantly, the
Cartesian solution was for the time being preferable because it supported the
fundamental metaphysical conclusion – ‘very advantageous to the true faith’ –
that matter cannot possess either sense or reason, its only property being bare
170
171
172
less word for word, when he first discussed Pereira in NRL, March 1684, Art.
II (review of J. Damanson, La Bête
transformée en Machine (1684)), OD.
i.7b–8a. The details of Bayle’s scholarly
argument were no less derived from
Vossius. For example, his point that
Strato again epitomised the pagan position on this score, because he made
sensation and reasoning equivalent,
was taken from Theologia gentilis, 325a.
DHC, RorariusE (iv.80a): ‘One ne peut
songer sans horreur aux suites de cette
doctrine.’
Descartes to More, 5 February 1649, AT.
v.276–7 [= CSMK, 365–6].
DHC, RorariusG (iv.81b–82a). On the
Voyage, see Solère, ‘Récit’ (1994);
173
174
Armand, Les fictions (2013); Corréard,
‘Egarements’ (2017).
Pierre-Sylvain Regis, Systême de philosophie [1690], 7 vols (Lyon, 1691), v.126
(this is the edition used by Bayle): ‘. . .
quelque panchant que nous puissions
avoir à donner aux bêtes une ame distincte du corps, nous aimons mieux suspendre nôtre jugement à cet égard’. The
whole chapter (123–30) is similar to
Bayle’s discussion in that it attacks the
positing of a separate soul in animals
while admitting the empirical difficulties faced by the Cartesian automata
hypothesis, which is preferable to other
hypotheses primarily due to being the
least worst solution.
DHC, RorariusC (iv.77b).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
299
extension.175 Bayle had already emphasised the apologetic value of the theory
of animals as automata in this manner many years before the composition of
the Dictionnaire, in 1684.176 In the Dictionnaire, the subject offered him
another opportunity to offer a very non-fideist rumination on the limits of
divine power, and on the illegitimacy of recourse to it in philosophical explanations. Writing in response to Daniel’s claim that God might have created
sensitive souls, and that Cartesians of all people should accept the thesis given
Descartes’s emphasis on the limitless capability of the divine will and on the
creation of eternal truths, Bayle retorted: ‘whatever he [Descartes] may have
believed about this or that, his disciples will never believe they are lacking the
respect due to God if they say that a being only capable of sensation is not more
possible than a piece of wax only susceptible of a square figure’.177 That is to
say, to create a sensitive material soul of the sort posited by scholastics and
opposed to Descartes by Daniel was as impossible to God as to limit the
essential properties of matter. As for those who retreated into real fideism on
the question, and attributed the seemingly intelligent actions of animals
directly to God, they had failed to follow the principle that ‘a Philosopher
should not explain phenomena by the immediate operation of God’.178 In
other words, Bayle was explicitly positioning himself as less fideist than
Descartes himself!
More generally, Bayle was confident that a broadly Cartesian solution to the
problem of animal reasoning would present itself in the future. After all,
philosophy was a progressive science. For example, the early Christians had
thought animals might possess reason because ‘at that time the connection
between thought and spirituality was not seen clearly’.179 Cartesianism itself
175
176
177
178
DHC, Rorarius, text and rem. C (ii.76b–
77a). For the futility of other solutions,
see DHC, RorariusB, K (iv.83b–85b).
NRL, March 1684, Art. II (review of
Damanson, Bête transformée), OD.i.8b–
9a, quoted in DHC, RorariusC (iv.77a).
DHC, RorariusG (iv.82a): ‘Qu’il ait cru làdessus ceci ou cela, ses Disciples ne croiront jamais manquer au respect qui est du à
Dieu, s’ils disent qu’un être capable
uniquement de sensation, n’est pas plus
possible qu’un morceau de cire, capable
uniquement de la figure quarrée.’ It is
worth emphasising how explicitly Bayle
states his dissent from Descartes on the
question of the creation of the eternal
truths.
DHC,
RorariusK
(iv.84b):
‘un
Philosophe ne doit point expliquer les
phénomenes par l’opération immediate
179
de Dieu’. See further §2 above. To avoid
confusion, it is worth noting that the
position being critiqued here is very different from occasionalism: Bayle means
that philosophers should not explain
specific phenomena by attributing them
to God. Leibniz, of course, would claim
that occasionalism no less involved the
positing of a constant miracle.
DHC, RorariusD (iv.78a): ‘en ce tems-là on
ne voioit pas clairement la liaison qui se
trouve entre la pensée, & la spiritualité’.
Bayle’s main example was Lactantius, De
ira Dei, vii. Lactantius had posited that
man was a ‘religious animal’, and thus
that the only difference between men
and animals was religion – for the continued (if limited) popularity of this argument in the seventeenth century, see Mills,
‘Defining’ (2019).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
300
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
had been improved on several fronts, including such fundamental issues as the
laws of motion.180 And indeed, Bayle showed a serious willingness to consider
the possibility that Leibniz had provided just such a solution, albeit ultimately
rejecting it because of his refusal to accept that pre-established harmony was
a superior system to occasionalism.181 A similar problem ensued in the case of
animal generation, which, just like Malebranche, Bayle thought could not
occur mechanically. Like the Oratorian, Bayle therefore adopted a theory in
which each organised foetus pre-exists from the moment of creation (itself
a supernatural process).182 But he went beyond even Malebranche in questioning the possibility of a mechanical explanation of the subsequent growth of
the foetus, instead tentatively positing the possible existence of certain ‘intelligences’, which were the occasional causes acting ‘everywhere where the laws of
the communication of motion are not capable of producing certain effects’,
such as in the case of embryological development.183 This was the one occasion
on which Bayle really did go beyond all his Cartesian contemporaries (or at
least, I have been unable to find a Cartesian precedent for his claim).184 It is
a good demonstration of the case made in I.1.8: Cartesian mechanism was not
considered a viable option when it came to explaining organic life, even by the
most devoted Cartesians themselves.
Just like Malebranche, Arnauld, Regis, and almost all Cartesians by the late
seventeenth century, Bayle had accepted that there were issues on which
Cartesianism had yet to offer satisfactory answers, above all concerning the
infinite and the nature of immaterial substance. As I have already noted, and
will come to note again, he had specific sociopolitical reasons for emphasising
this fact, above all his tolerationist insistence that doctrinal error was very easy
to fall into, given the intrinsic difficulty of the subject matter. But that does not
180
181
182
183
See e.g. as early as the Theses philosophicae, vii, OD.iv.137–8 on several of the
laws of motion.
For the discussion of Leibniz’s solution,
see RorariusH, L (iv.82a–83b, 85b–87b),
and the commentary in Lennon,
‘Mouse’ (1993); Ryan, Bayle, 95–113,
esp. 106–13.
DHC, AnaxagorasG (i.214b–215a);
CaïnitesD (ii.7a–b); SennertC (iv.190a–
191b). For Malebranche’s theory and
its sources, see I.1.9; also Detlefsen,
‘Biology’ (2014).
DHC, CaïnitesD (ii.7b): ‘par tout où les
Loix de la communication du mouvement ne sont pas capables de produire
certains effets’; SennertC (iv.190b–
191a).
184
Ryan, Bayle, 147, suggests that Bayle
applied a theory that Malebranche only
used ‘in the order of grace’, where angels
were the intelligent occasional causes.
This is an interesting possibility, but
stems in part from the translation of
‘intelligences’ as ‘angels’, which is somewhat forced. Lennon, ‘Mouse’, 193, goes
further, and calls Bayle’s move ‘peddling
angelology’. But note that Bayle had
good reasons to think these intelligences
were different from the substantial
forms, plastic natures, and world souls
which he so vehemently criticised, since
they ‘received from God the knowledge
and industry that are requisite for such
a work’ rather than acting unknowingly.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
301
mean that, at the philosophical level, he was any more a sceptic than the
Cartesians whom he so admired.
II.1.4 Conclusion: Pierre Bayle, Natural Theologian
The main contextual explanation for Bayle’s argument concerning pagan
theology is that it allowed him not only to defend Cartesian occasionalism as
the foundation of a ‘Christian philosophy’, but also to argue that it was the only
possible foundation for such a philosophy, and for the natural theology that
emerged from it. He believed that it allowed one to predicate many of the
divine attributes predicated by traditional natural theology. For example, he
believed, contrary to Isaac Papin, that divine unity could be proved
rationally.185 But at the same time, he was also certain that revelation –
above all the revealed doctrine of creation ex nihilo – was necessary to establish
the best possible explanation for natural phenomena. True religion was thus
superior to natural religion not just because it supplemented it, but because it
was more coherent when it came to explaining nature.
To be sure, occasionalism had its limits, specifically concerning the
problem of evil and that of the interaction of spiritual and material substance. However, despite these limits, it was far superior to any other
Christian philosophy, whether scholastic, Gassendist, or any other. Most
importantly, it could defeat almost all the arguments that the most ‘rational’
atheists – Epicurus, the Stratonists, and the Neoconfucians – could throw at
the true faith. This is why it was so important to convince the Chinese of the
revealed doctrine of creation ex nihilo. It was not because one could only
sway them by blind adherence to the revealed facts of faith. Rather, it was
because that doctrine opened up a system of philosophy to which it was
ultimately more rational to subscribe, since it could explain more phenomena than any other.
It might be thought that my emphasis on Bayle’s metaphysical Cartesianism
is at odds with the main thesis of this book concerning the dwindling of
philosophy’s role in this period. But this is not the case. First, Bayle has
emerged as the most important conduit for the dissemination and popularisation of the vision of the history of the human mind introduced in I.3 – one in
which speculative philosophising was shown to have led, almost inevitably, to
positions that tended both to atheism and to incoherence. Second, when it
came to the practical implications of the ideas discussed in this chapter, their
impact was to curtail severely the role of philosophy in any system of
185
CPD, cvii, OD.iii.336–337a, arguing
against Papin’s Essais de théologie
(Frankfurt, 1687), 92–4. Papin, like
Bayle, had developed his view to
challenge Jurieu’s anti-tolerationist
insistence that there could be no invincible ignorance of certain dogmatic
truths.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
302
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
knowledge. We can see this from an important example of Bayle’s reception,
and from Bayle’s own ideas about man’s place in God’s creation.
(i) Bayle’s Cartesian Natural Theology Recognised and Deployed
One might assume that Bayle’s natural-theological argument is either so complex,
or so different from that of traditional natural theology, that it cannot have been
adopted by anyone. In fact, such an emphasis on the idea that Christianity not
only supplemented natural religion but also made it possible became a standard
mode of Christian apologetics in the early and mid-eighteenth century. This was
in part a reaction to deism, and in part a response to the recognition that fewer of
the traditional components of natural theology – whether the divine attributes or
human immortality – could be proved rationally. To demonstrate the role Bayle’s
writings played in this process, I shall instance a fascinating and important
example, one which proves that the impact of the Dictionnaire was certainly not
limited to stimulating heterodoxy or atheism.
The example is Archibald Campbell’s The necessity of revelation, or an
enquiry into the extent of human powers with respect to matters of religion
(1739). Campbell (1691–1756) has recently received some attention as
a theorist of sociability.186 In the Necessity, he argued against the forceful
and prominent reassertion of deism made in Matthew Tindal’s notorious
Christianity as old as creation (1730). Against Tindal’s case for the sufficiency
of natural religion, Campbell proposed that the central tenets of such
a religion – that of a transcendent creator god and the immortality of the
individual soul – were in fact unknown to human reason as it had historically
exercised itself. Rather, they required revelation from God himself.
Campbell made much of the fact that his enquiry was a historical and even
an ‘experimental’ one into ‘human nature’, as opposed to the deists’ ‘speculations’ on the capacity of human reason.187 This has led a recent commentator
to claim that, ‘applying the new principles of natural philosophy associated
with Bacon, Newton, and also John Locke, Campbell’s Necessity of Revelation
was the eighteenth century’s new science of human nature’s first treatment of
religious belief’.188 The reality, I think, is somewhat more mundane.
186
187
See Skoczylas, ‘Enquiry’ (2008) (with
important
biographical
details);
Maurer, ‘Issues’ (2016), and works
cited there. These studies focus on
Campbell’s Enquiry into the original of
moral virtue (Edinburgh, 1728, 1733).
See e.g. The necessity of revelation
(London, 1739), 22–9. Campbell had
already presented an early version of
his anti-Tindal argument in an oration
188
held in St Andrews on 2 April 1733, and
published as Oratio de vanitate luminis
naturae (Edinburgh, 1733).
Mills, ‘First’, 730. Similarly, Maurer,
‘Committee’ (2016). Neither recognises
Campbell’s huge debts to Bayle. It is
worth noting that Campbell acutely
spotted (e.g. Necessity, 8–9) that Bayle’s
case was largely compatible with
Arnauld’s attacks on the Jesuit doctrine
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
303
Campbell’s evocations of experimental method were purely rhetorical, and his
case depended entirely on regurgitating Bayle’s vision of the logic of paganism,
as it had appeared in the Continuation, which Campbell cited frequently in
lengthy, Bayle-esque footnotes.
Armed with Bayle’s argument (and his data), Campbell could deploy it for
his anti-deist purposes. It was certainly true that ‘in these latter times the
existence of this infinite mind has been clearly demonstrated, from those
wonderful effects of power, wisdom and goodness, that are every where
about us in the world’. But the question was ‘whether mankind left to themselves, having no revelation, no tradition, can be judged capable, without all
foreign instruction, to search out, and discern this fundamental article of
natural religion?’189 The answer was ‘no’. All the ancient philosophers were
naturalists, attributing life and intelligence to nature itself. Contemporaries
‘may judge it unaccountably silly and absurd in any of human kind to look
upon such lifeless bodies as animals’. But this was the logical position for
pagans to adopt: ‘when a man is left to his own notions of things, as his senses
may happen to inform him, and is without all foreign instruction; how is it
possible he can conceive of them otherwise?’190 All the Greek philosophers
from Thales through to Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics were animists of one
sort or another, usually positing a world soul as their first principle. This was
matched by the ideas of various Eastern nations: the Indian Brahmins, the
Egyptians, and the Persians. Otherwise, they simply made matter itself their
first principle, as one saw in the Milesians.191 Campbell even followed up some
of Bayle’s scholarly polemics, challenging Hyde’s reading of the ancient
Persians as true monotheists worshipping a transcendent deity.192
The consequence of all this was that ‘in order to introduce even natural
religion among human kind, foreign instruction, or supernatural revelation
is . . . absolutely and indispensably necessary’. Above all, what was required
was the history of creation by an infinite, non-immanent, transcendental first
principle. If any pagan peoples had any inkling of this truth, it was almost
certainly because they had inherited vestiges of antediluvian tradition about
it.193 This last point was almost the only original addition to a historical
narrative that was almost entirely pillaged from Bayle. In other words,
Bayle’s natural theology was still alive in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland.
189
190
of philosophic sin, especially as made in
the Seconde dénonciation de la nouvelle
héresie du péché philosophique (1690);
consequently he also made much use of
Arnauld’s historical conclusions. For
this subject, see II.4.
Necessity, 181.
Necessity, 188.
191
192
193
For a summary, see e.g. Necessity, 218–
19, supplemented with a vast quotation
from DHC, JupiterG. The whole argument is contained in Sections V–VII,
which are replete with long quotations
from Bayle throughout.
Necessity, 371.
Necessity, 383 (qu.); 386–408.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
304
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
(ii) Man’s Place in God’s Creation
Campbell recognised that Bayle was proposing a new form of Christian apologetics. The final thing worth noting about Bayle’s project is that for him, this was
a form of apologetics that allowed one to demarcate the line between God’s
‘natural’ and ‘theological’ designs, and consequently what could be known
philosophically and what only theologically. This was a point that Bayle had
already made in the Dictionnaire, in remark T of the article ‘Epicure’. We will
recall that this was the culmination of the article, the point of which was to show
that the rationality of Epicurus’ position from a pagan perspective only proved
the necessity of revelation. The remark is keyed to the words ‘The system of
Scripture is the only one that has the advantage of laying solid foundation for the
providence and perfections of God.’194 Bayle expounded these advantages by
listing what followed from the revealed truth that ‘God is the creator of matter’:
1. That with the most legitimate authority that can be, he disposes of the
universe as he thinks fit.
2. That he needs only a simple act of his will to do whatever he pleases.
3. That nothing happens except that which he has placed in the plan of his work.
At this point he explained again why the Christian system was preferable to the
Epicurean one:
It follows from this that the conduct of the world is a business that can
neither fatigue nor trouble God, and that no events, whatever they may be,
can disturb his felicity. If things happen which he has prohibited, and
which he punishes, they nonetheless do not happen contrary to his
decrees, and they serve the wonderful ends he has proposed to himself
from all eternity, and which are the greatest mysteries of the Gospel.195
In other words, revelation supplied the defects lacking in any other natural
system (at least when it was combined with occasionalism). As for the mysteries that came with that revelation, these all ultimately related to God’s ends in
relation to mankind.
194
195
DHC, EpicureT (ii.374): ‘Le Systéme de
l’Ecriture est le seul qui ait l’avantage
d’etablir les fondemens solides de la
Providence & des perfections de Dieu.’
‘De ce que Dieu est le Créateur de la
matiere, il résulte, 1. Qu’avec l’autorité
la plus légitime qui puisse être, il dispose
de l’Univers comme bon lui semble.
2. Qu’il n’a besoin que d’un simple acte
de sa volonté pour faire tout ce qu’il lui
plait. 3. Que rien n’arrive que ce qu’il
a mis dans le plan de son Ouvrage. It
s’ensuit de là que la conduite du Monde
n’est pas une afaire qui puisse ou fatiguer ou chagriner Dieu, & qu’il n’y
a point d’événemens, quels qu’ils puissent être, qui puissent troubler sa beatitude. S’il arrive des choses qu’il
a défendues, et qu’il punit, elles n’arrivent pas néanmoins contre ses Décrets,
& elles servent aux fins adorables qu’il
s’est proposées de toute éternité, & qui
font les plus grans Mysteres de
l’Evangile.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
305
These slightly gnomic comments were clarified in the Continuation, in part
through further reflection on animals, the uniqueness of humans, and the way
these subjects allowed one to stipulate a quite precise demarcating line between
philosophy and theology. In this section of the book, Bayle, in response to the
atomist physician Guillaume Lamy (1644–83), argued that it was the observed
fact of the generation of living organisms in particular that best repudiated
materialism, and even necessitated the abandonment of preformationism in
favour of immaterial intelligences operating through general laws. As part of
his argument against final causes, Lamy had also questioned anthropocentricism, and specifically man’s superiority over animals. It is initially surprising to
find Bayle agreeing with this position.196 But the puzzle disappears when we
recognise that he deployed it, once again, to demonstrate exactly what revelation added to human understanding of the natural world.
According to Bayle, the fact that the world was created for man – and
especially for the predestined – could only be known by Christians. It required
the revelation of Christ’s hypostatic union, which explained that Christ had
died to save a portion of mankind, so that God could in turn manifest his two
attributes of justice and mercy.197 The anthropocentricism of the creation was
therefore only known through revelation. In fact, the pagans could never have
known it, again because of their adherence to the logic of paganism. To the
extent that the pagan philosophers invoked divine intervention in the world, it
was only when dualists like the Stoics posited an intelligent principle that
arranged the primordial chaos into a world; after that, it exercised no providential interventions. On such a model, no pagan philosopher could recognise
the centrality of mankind to the cosmic plan:
For how can he understand, by reasoning on the greatness of the universe,
and on the idea of God, that a creature as subject as man is to so many
defects, and to so many infirmities of body and soul, was the only end to
which all the actions of nature tend? It belongs to the wisdom of a workman
to put a correct proportion between the means and the end; to perform
great things with very few instruments, rather than to make very big
preparations for the execution of a very small thing. Is this correctness
found in nature if the vast and immense machine of the heavens and the
elements is only moved to grow on earth what man needs?198
196
197
198
CPD, lx, OD.iii.272–6.
CPD, lvi, OD.iii.265a. The whole chapter
is tellingly entitled ‘Essai d’un moïen
d’accommodement entre la Théologie
Chretienne & la Philosophie, sur la
question, Si tout l’Univers a été créé
pour l’homme’.
CPD, lv, OD.iii.264b: ‘Car comment
pouvoit-il comprendre en raisonnant
sur la grandeur de l’Univers, & sur
l’idée de Dieu, qu’une créature aussi sujette que l’homme à tant de défauts, & à
tant d’infirmitez de corps, & d’ame fût la
seule fin à quoi tendissent toutes les
actions de la Nature? Il est de la sagesse
d’un ouvrier de mettre une juste proportion entre les moïens et la fin, de ne
point faire de très-grands préparatifs
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
306
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
Once again, the limits of what was rational from a pagan perspective offered
guidance on where to draw the line between philosophy and theology. On
pagan terms, it was right to reject anthropocentricism. However, ‘when reason
says one thing, and revelation another, we must close our ears to the way of
reason’. Nonetheless, Bayle continued, in a passage crucial for resolving (or
dissolving) the Bayle enigma, ‘such sacrifices should not be required without
great necessity, and it is better to maintain as often as possible a good understanding between the two tribunals of faith and reason’.199 To accommodate
theology with philosophy, one had to realise what each explained: the former
that God created the world for man, with the Incarnation as the telos; the latter
that as well as creating everything needed for the theological purpose, he also
created a vast universe befitting his infinite power and knowledge, one that
functioned according to general laws, and of which man was only one small
part.
To illustrate this further, Bayle used an analogy between God and
a monarch asked by merchants to build a city. The needs of the merchants
were his primary motive in building the city, and so he would supply it
with everything they required. But he would also furnish it with many
other things as a monument to his grandeur and magnificence, to such an
extent that outsiders would ask why those things were present at all.
Accordingly, as far as he was concerned with humans directly, God’s
purposes were circumscribed to the realm of grace and the mystical
union formed with the predestined upon the Incarnation. The rest of
God’s activity could be accounted for by Malebranchian general laws that
did not necessarily have anything to do with mankind. For his narrow
theological (i.e. anthropocentric) purposes, God could have created a much
smaller world. However, that would not have allowed him to express ‘the
infinity of his architectonic science’, which permitted him to produce an
almost infinite variety of things testifying to his power and wisdom, while
199
pour l’exécution d’une très-petite chose,
mais au contraire d’exécuter de grandes
choses avec fort peu d’instrumens.
Trouve-t-on cette justesse dans la
Nature en cas que la vaste & l’immense
machine des cieux, & des élemens ne se
remuë que pour faire croître sur la terre
ce dequoi l’homme a besoin?’ In ch. lviii
(269a–70a) Bayle argues that all
pagan philosophers held this nonanthropocentric view of the world.
CPD, lvi, OD.iii.265b: ‘Lors que la
Raison dit une chose, et la Révélation
une autre, nous devons fermer l’oreille
à la voix de la Raison. La Philosophie
doit plier sous l’autorité de Dieu, et mettre pavillon bas à la vûë de l’Ecriture. La
Raison elle-même nous conduit à nous
soumettre de la sorte. Vous savez ce que
j’ai dit là-dessus dans plusieurs endroits
de mon Dictionnaire, et sur tout dans les
éclaircissemens ajoûtez à la 2. edition.
Mais il ne faut point exiger de tels sacrifices sans une grande nécessité, il vaut
mieux entretenir le plus souvent que
l’on peut une bonne intelligence entre
les deux tribunaux, celui de la Foi &
celui de la Raison.’ Note the double
rationalism here: ‘Reason itself leads us
to submit in this way.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
greece, asia, and the logic of paganism
307
acting solely through general laws. Thus the existence of physical evil in the
world was not at all incompatible with a philosophical predication of
divine wisdom. But this was not the case in the order of grace, where
different rules seemed to apply.200 It is to that vexing issue that we must
now turn.
200
CPD, lvi–lvii, OD.iii.266a–269a.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press
II.2
The Manichean Articles and the ‘Sponge of all
Religions’
The Problem of Evil and the Rationality of Reformed Predestinarian
Belief
II.2.1 Introduction
(i) The Manichean Articles: Fideism, Atheism, or Reformed Theology?
Those who consider Bayle a ‘fideist’ or a ‘sceptic’ may be happy to acknowledge
that on the issues discussed so far, Bayle was no more fideistic or sceptical than
many of his contemporaries. However, they may respond, this was surely not
the case for the issue on which Bayle most often declared philosophy impotent:
the problem of reconciling human free will with divine omnipotence, and, in
turn, of coming up with any solution to the problem of evil that did not make
God the author of sin. After all, Bayle himself admitted that these were the
issues on which a Stratonist or an atheistic Chinese philosopher would be best
placed to challenge Christians. Accordingly, it is here that commentators have
found the best case for a sceptical or even atheist Bayle.1
However, if we place the famous Manichean articles of the Dictionnaire –
‘Manichéens’, ‘Marcionites’, and ‘Pauliciens’ – in their proper context, we shall
find that they were neither an expression of fideism (or at least, that they were
no more fideistic than the theological opinions held by Bayle’s Reformed
counterparts) nor atheism. Rather, they were designed to serve two polemical
purposes. First, they were designed to defend the rationality of believing in
Reformed predestinarian dogma. As we shall see, Bayle followed in the footsteps of several Reformed theologians – many of whom he knew personally –
in arguing that while the problem of evil was unsolvable, the most rational path
to adopt in the face of the irreconcilability of divine power and human sin was
to surrender oneself to a predestinarian theology that at least had the benefit of
best respecting the divine excellence. This argument was itself designed in
opposition to the claim – prominently made by several Molinist theologians
with whose works Bayle was again intimately familiar – that such
a predestinarian theology would have nefarious social consequences by leading
men into a destructive fatalism.
1
See above all Mori, Bayle, 251–72, passim.
308
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press
the manichean articles
309
The second polemical aim of the Manichean articles was to contribute to
Bayle’s case for toleration.2 Although Bayle believed that the Reformed view
was the correct one, he acknowledged that no side could prove its position
definitively, and so could hardly claim that supposed error on the issue
stemmed from wilful error. Even Socinians no doubt held their heretical
position in good faith. Accordingly, they should be tolerated, in line with
Bayle’s theory of the rights of the errant conscience (for which see further II.4).
At a more general level, Bayle’s argument was designed, once again, to
challenge the intrusion of philosophy into theology. That intrusion, he
believed, was in large part responsible for the odium theologicum that had so
decimated European society. This was a point he made most explicitly in the
‘Eclaircissements’ appended to the second edition of the Dictionnaire. It is
worth quoting already the ‘Eclaircissement sur les Manichéens’, in which Bayle
lists the unsolvability of the problem of evil amongst those ‘truths’ which it was
impossible ‘to reconcile with philosophy’. In turn, those divines who ‘become
irritated and indignant when they see someone admitting that all the articles of
the Christian faith, when defended and attacked by the arms of philosophy
alone, do not come out well from the combat’; moreover, they had inadvertently done damage to the faith they sought to defend.3 A far more sensible
policy had been followed by a different type of theologian:
There are in both the Roman and Protestant communion many people
who are dissatisfied with the explications of the scholastics, and who think
that these people have more muddied than explained the mysteries of
religion. Some Protestant theologians wish that the language of Scripture
had been kept to, that everything that concerns the doctrine of the Trinity
had been expressed in five or six lines, and that instead of following the
disputants from objection to objection, they had been told: ‘We do not
propose this to you as something to be understood, but as something to be
believed: if you cannot believe it, beg God for the grace to persuade you; if
you obtain nothing by your prayers, your suffering is incurable. Our
distinctions and our subtilties serve only to harden you; you will not
cease to complain that we explain to you one obscure doctrine by another
more obscure, obscurum per obscurius.’ There is much to suggest that this
mystery, if proposed in a few words according to the simplicity of the
Scriptures, would disturb and revolt reason much less than it does when
accompanied by the great number of explications which accompany it in
Aquinas’ Commentators.4
2
3
See also Hickson, ‘Theodicy’ (2013).
DHC,
‘Eclaircissement
sur
les
Manichéens’ (iv.620): ‘ils s’irritent & ils
s’indignent quand ils voient que l’on
avoue que tous les Articles de la Foi
Chrétienne, soutenus & combatus par les
4
armes de la seule Philosophie, ne sortent
pas heureusement du combat’.
DHC,
‘Eclaircissement
sur
les
Manichéens’ (iv.624): ‘Il y a dans l’une et
dans l’autre Communion, la Romaine et la
Protestante, beaucoup de personnes qui
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press
310
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
As I shall argue in the next chapter, these words were not simply rhetoric;
rather, Bayle was quite consciously inheriting the ‘positive’, anti-philosophical
strand of post-Reformation theology. For the time being, we need only recognise that philosophical speculation on the revealed mysteries – including the
manner of reconciling divine power and human free will – was one of the
central components of the Kingdom of Darkness as Bayle conceived it.
This was not a confessionally neutral conclusion. Bayle was sure that his
confessional opponents – the Arminians and the Jesuits above all – were most
responsible for bringing such speculation into an otherwise peaceful theological landscape. This emerges most clearly from a reconstruction of his views
of the history of post-Reformation theological dispute, a reconstruction that is
offered in §10 of this chapter, and which is made possible by the statements
made in the all-too-neglected Dictionnaire articles ‘Amyraut’, ‘Arminius’,
‘Augustine’, ‘Baius’, ‘Daillé’, ‘Simonide’, and ‘Vorstius’.
(ii) Theological Scene-Setting
The philosophical–theological story that concludes with Bayle’s Manichean
articles is one of the great untold stories of early modern intellectual history.
Perhaps the most important reason why it has not been told is because it
inevitably takes us into the dark forest of predestinarian theology and the
vicious disputes it precipitated. This is unavoidable if we wish to reach a proper
understanding of many of Bayle’s most famous statements. Nonetheless, I am
painfully conscious that most readers will not be aware of the technical terms
which were central to those disputes (although some of them have been
introduced in I.2). The easiest way to keep this material manageable is therefore to introduce these terms at the outset, using the deliberately simplified
version developed by Pierre Jurieu in his Jugement sur les methodes rigides et
sont mal édifiées des Explications des
Scholastiques, & qui jugent que ces genslà ont plus embrouillé que débrouillé les
Mysteres de la Religion. Quelques
Théologiens Protestans souhaiteroient
qu’on s’en fût tenu aux termes de
l’Ecriture, & qu’on eût enfermé en cinq
ou six lignes tout ce qui concerne la
Trinité, & qu’au lieu de suivre les
Disputeurs d’Objection en Objection, on
leur eût dit, Nous ne vous proposons point
cela comme une chose à comprendre, mais
comme une chose à croire: si vous ne pouvez pas la croire, demandez à Dieu la grace
d’en être persuadé: si vous n’obtenez rien
par vos prieres, votre mal est incurable; nos
distinctions, nos subtilitez, ne serviroient
qu’à vous endurcir; vous ne cesseriez de
vous plaindre qu’on vous explique un
dogme obscur par un plus obscur,
obscurum per obscurius. Il y a beaucoup
d’aparence que ce Mystere, proposé en
peu de mots selon la simplicité de
l’Ecriture, éfaroucheroit & révolteroit
beaucoup moins la Raison, qu’il ne
l’éfarouche, & ne la révolte, par le grand
détail d’Explications qui l’accompagne
dans les Commentateurs de Thomas
d’Aquinas.’ For who the ‘many people’
might be, see II.3.1.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press
the manichean articles
311
relachées d’expliquer la providence et la grace (1686) (a text about which I shall
have much to say in what follows).
According to Jurieu, there were essentially two views on the predestinarian
question. One was what he called the ‘rigid’ view, which emphasised divine
power and predetermination. The other was what he called the ‘relaxed’ view,
which emphasised human free will, and especially insisted on the existence of
‘liberty of indifference’, which meant the freedom to choose without the will
being determined by external constraints. Many adherents of the second view
also accepted the concept of divine middle knowledge, first developed by the
Jesuit scholastic theologian Luis de Molina in his Concordia (1588) in an
attempt to reconcile divine foreknowledge of future events with the possibility
that they depend on real choices made with true liberty of indifference.5 The
idea was virulently rejected by adherents of the first view, including all
Reformed theologians.6 They likewise tended to reject the existence of true
liberty of indifference, instead limiting liberty to that of ‘spontaneity’, the
freedom to act in accordance with one’s nature.7
Jurieu (and then Bayle) claimed that the adherents of the rigid and relaxed
views could be divided as follows:
Rigid
Relaxed
Emphasises divine preordination
Denies liberty of indifference
Denies middle knowledge
‘Pure’ predestination
Emphasises human free will
Affirms liberty of indifference
Affirms middle knowledge
Predestination with foreknowledge of good
deeds
Ante-Nicene fathers
Luis de Molina and the Jesuits
Arminians
Socinians
Augustine
Aquinas and the Thomists
Calvin and the Reformed
Domingo Báñez and the ‘New
Thomists’
Jansenists
5
‘Middle knowledge’ was so called to differentiate from the two types of divine
knowledge standard in scholastic theology: God’s ‘natural knowledge’ of all
possibilities, and his ‘free knowledge’ of
all events predetermined by his omnipotent will. Molina’s definition appears in
his Concordia, iv.52.9 [= On divine foreknowledge, trans. A. Freddoso (Ithaca,
NY, 1988), 168]. The literature on
6
7
middle knowledge is largely theological,
but for some historical discussion, see
MacGregor, Molina, and Chiew, Middle
knowledge (2016), 43–76. For its appearance in seventeenth-century Catholic
theology, see Pomplun, ‘Predestined’
(2019). See further I.2.
Muller, PRRD, iii.417–23, 428–30;
Stanglin, ‘Protestant reception’.
The fullest discussion is now Muller, Will.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press
312
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
This was a polemical presentation of the story. Both sides sometimes tried to
claim Augustine or Aquinas for themselves. Much more important is the fact
that neither side was more ‘rationalist’ than the other. On the contrary, as
I have already noted in I.2, both sides consistently accused each other of
rationalism, a tendency that increased significantly after the Synod of Dordt.
The ‘rigid’ accused the ‘relaxed’ of ignoring the revealed truth of predestination
in favour of a rationalist, Pelagian obsession with free will. In turn the ‘relaxed’
accused the ‘rigid’ of ignoring revealed truth in favour of a rationalist, determinist obsession with divine power. In other words, the real debate was about
the content of revelation. The errors of the opponents could then be assigned
to their hubristic rationalism. As we shall see in this and the next chapter, this
would remain the basic structure of debate through to the eighteenth century.
II.2.2 The Manichean Challenge: a Summary
Bayle articulated the problem of evil in many of his writings from the 1690s
onwards. We shall be concerned with all of them (although the writings of the
1700s will be treated primarily in the next chapter). But the simplest way to
introduce the issue as Bayle conceived it is via Remark D of the famous
Dictionnaire article on the Manicheans. Here one is presented with the two
alternatives that humans are led to by reason. A priori reasoning leads them to
posit a single deity ‘endowed with every sort of perfection’.8 Unfortunately,
a posteriori experience unquestionably demonstrates the existence of both
moral and physical evil in the world. The question therefore becomes: can
reason reconcile its a priori and a posteriori conclusions?
Bayle set this up as a debate between pagan representatives of the two
extremes: Melissus, the ultimate monotheist (to such an extent that he was
a monist), and Zoroaster, the ultimate dualist.9 To cut Bayle’s long discussion
short, the conclusion is a stalemate. Zoroaster concedes that Melissus’ system
surpasses his own ‘in the beauty of ideas and in a priori reasons’. But that
system is unable to solve the problem of evil even with recourse to the idea of
human free will, for that free will only exists ‘incessantly and totally by the
action of God’. That being the case, we return to the problem of a perfect deity
creating evil, or at least failing to prevent it. ‘The ideas of order cannot suffer
that an infinitely good and holy cause, which is able to prevent the introduction
of moral evil, does not prevent it, especially if in permitting it that cause finds
8
DHC, ManichéensD (iii.305a): ‘Les idées
les plus sures & les plus claires de l’ordre
nous apprenent qu’un être qui existe par
lui-même, qui est nécessaire, qui est
éternel, doit être unique, infini, toutpuissant, & doüé de toutes sortes de
9
perfections.’ For Bayle’s belief that divine
unity could be proved rationally, see also
II.1.4, n. 185 above.
For Bayle’s rejection of the monotheist
reading of Zoroaster, see II.1.1.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press
the manichean articles
313
itself obliged to condemn its own work to punishment.’10 From a Christian
perspective, the problem was exacerbated by the revealed truth of creation ex
nihilo by a transcendent deity, which seemed to undermine both free will (‘we
do not have any distinct idea that can make us understand how a being [i.e.
man] that does not exist by itself can nevertheless act by itself’) and the idea of
God’s omniscience, power, or goodness (God either did not foresee human sin,
or did foresee it and failed to prevent it).11
Bayle elsewhere addressed the issue of whether pagans who were not
monists like Melissus (or Parmenides) or quasi-monotheists (like the Stoics
with their sovereign Jupiter) might be able to offer a more satisfactory answer
to dualists like Zoroaster (or Plato).12 His answer was that the majority of
them – that is to say, the common people – could indeed offer such an answer,
for they were genuine polytheists who attributed both good and bad actions to
all their gods, and would thus have assumed that ‘by this supposition one can
just as easily explain human history, as by that of Zoroaster’.13 But this popular
polytheism was subject to endless philosophical difficulties of its own, difficulties with which its adherents rarely troubled themselves. In combination with
the material covered in II.1, this meant that the logic of paganism led inexorably to one or other of (i) a monism where God created evil; (ii) Epicurus’
denial of providence; (iii) Zoroastrian dualism; (iv) an incoherent polytheism.
What about possible Christian responses? These were primarily treated in
the article ‘Pauliciens’. Many of them, Bayle noted, simply fell into the same
problem faced by Melissus, in that they attributed sin to human free will, but
failed to explain how this broke the causal chain leading to God. Did he not
create free will, or was he not at least able to prevent its self-destructive
exercise? This objection negated the standard argument that man was the
cause of moral evil through the exercise of his free will – God would surely
not have given free will if he knew that humans would abuse it.14 The
Socinians’ rationalist solution – to deny God full foreknowledge – was in fact
no solution at all, for why did God not prevent Adam’s sin when he did see that
it was occurring?15 All in all, Christians were often no better than dualists like
10
11
DHC, ManichéensD (iii.305b–306b):
‘vous me surpassez dans la beaute des
idées, & dans les raisons a priori’; ‘il existe
incessamment & totalement par l’action
de Dieu’; ‘les idées de l’ordre ne soufrent
pas qu’une cause infiniment bonne &
sainte, qui peut empécher l’introduction
du mal moral, ne l’empêche pas, lors sur
tout qu’en la permettant, elle se verra
obligée d’accabler de peines son propre
ouvrage’.
DHC, ManichéensD (iii.306a): ‘nous
n’avons aucune idée distincte qui puisse
12
13
14
15
nous faire comprendre, qu’un être, qui
n’existe point par lui-même, agisse pourtant par lui-même’.
For Bayle on Plato’s dualism, see II.1.1.
DHC, PauliciensG (iii.631a): ‘Par cette
supposition on pouvoit aussi aisément
expliquer l’histoire humaine, que par
celle de Zoroastre.’
DHC, PauliciensE (iii.626a–b). Bayle
repeated this objection with tiresome
regularity throughout all his subsequent
writings.
DHC, PauliciensF (iii.628b).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press
314
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
the Manicheans; in fact they were worse, since they did not place the two
principles of good and evil in two subjects, but ‘combined them together in one
and the same substance’, a conclusion that was ‘monstrous and impossible’.16
Those who had attempted to soften the consequences of divine omnipotence
via various philosophical manoeuvres, such as the Molinists with their middle
knowledge, had failed to escape this bind. In effect, all they were saying was
that God had ‘decreed to place men in circumstances in which he knew they
would certainly sin’, even though ‘he could have placed them in more favourable circumstances, or not have placed them in these’.17 The classic scholastic
argument that sin was not a real, created entity but rather a privation was
incoherent: evil was no less real than good.18
Indeed, Bayle continued, the situation had recently become even worse. For
the ‘Christian philosophy’ that he had identified as the best – that is to say,
occasionalist Cartesianism – was particularly susceptible to the objection from
the problem of evil. Bayle believed that it could easily explain the existence of
physical evils. Such evils could be attributed to the fact that God was working
most efficiently in accordance with the physical laws that he had himself
established. However, this Christian philosophy simply could not explain
man’s sin:
The sole establishment of occasional causes is sufficient for that [sc. for
saving the simplicity and immutability of divine operation] as long as one
only seeks to explain corporeal phenomena . . . The heavens and the rest of
the universe declare the glory, power, and unity of God; man alone – that
masterpiece of his creator among things visible – man alone, I say, affords
very great objections against the unity of God.19
Since the problem was reducible to the incompatibility of divine creation ex
nihilo and human free will (or divine permission to exercise it), it followed that
16
17
18
DHC, PauliciensF and n. 53 (iii.629a):
‘vous les combinez ensemble dans une
seule & meme substance, ce qui est monstrueux & impossible’. See also
PauliciensH (iii.631b) on the existence of
the Devil not offering a solution, since he
was ultimately created by God.
DHC, PauliciensF (iii.629, n. 53): ‘Selon les
Molinistes il a décreté de mettre les
hommes dans les circonstances ou il savoit
très-certainement qu’ils pécheroient; & il
auroit pu, ou les mettre dans des circonstances plus favorables, ou ne pas les mettre dans celles-là.’
DHC, PauliciensI (iii.632b–633a). Bayle
here relied on the anti-privation arguments deployed by Isaac Papin in his
19
Essais de théologie sur la providence & la
grace (Frankfurt, 1687): for more on
Bayle’s engagement with this book, see §9
below. See also ‘Mémoire communiqué
par Mr. Bayle’, OD.iv.180a–b.
DHC, ManichéensD (iii.305b): ‘le seul
établissement des causes occasionnelles
y suffit, pourvu que l’on n’ait à expliquer
que les phénomenes corporels, & que l’on
ne touche point à l’homme. Les Cieux &
tout le reste de l’Univers préchent la
gloire, la puissance, l’unité de Dieu:
l’homme seul, ce chef-d’œuvre de son
Créateur entre les choses visibles;
l’homme seul, dis-je, fournit de
très-grandes Objections contre l’unité
de Dieu.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press
the manichean articles
315
occasionalism – the philosophical system that best accorded with the revealed
truth of creation – suffered the most. ‘By the ideas we have of a created being
we cannot comprehend that it can be a principle of action, that it can move
itself, and that receiving its existence and that of its faculties entirely from
another cause in every moment of its duration, it creates in itself any modalities
by a power which is its own’.20
The scholastics, Bayle went on, assumed that such modalities were distinct
from the substance of the soul, and thus unwittingly introduced extra acts of
creation ex nihilo into their system. In contrast, the new philosophers believed
that they were not distinct from the substance of the soul: but then they could
not be produced by any cause apart from that which produced the souls
themselves, and one returned to the problem of God as the author of sin.
Malebranche had argued that while God impressed upon humans
a continuous movement towards the good, they could freely stop at
a particular good; sin thus consisted in doing nothing – in stopping rather
than following God’s impression. God was therefore the cause of all actions,
but not of sin.21 For Bayle, this was as absurd as all other privation theories.
‘This is contradictory’, he wrote, ‘for no less power is required to stop that
which moves than to move that which is at rest.’ Sin, in other words, was a real,
positive entity.22
Even the best ‘Christian philosophy’, then, could not resolve the issue. But
this was not a problem, Bayle triumphantly declared, for Christians possessed
a ‘fact’ that could trump any philosophical reasoning. That fact was the
historical revelation contained in Scripture. It explained
the unity of God and his infinite perfections; the fall of the first man and
what followed from it. Anyone can tell us with a great display of reasons
that it is not possible that moral evil should introduce itself into the world
through the work of an infinitely good and holy principle. We shall
20
21
DHC, PauliciensF (iii.628a): ‘. . . par les
idées que nous avons d’un être créé, nous
ne pouvons point comprendre qu’il soit
un principe d’action, qu’il se puisse mouvoir lui-même, & que recevant dans tous
les momens de sa durée son existence &
celle de ses facultez, que la recevant, disje, toute entiere d’une autre cause, il crée
en lui-même des modalitez par une vertu
qui lui soit propre’.
See esp. Recherche, Ecl. I, MO.iii.19.
I shall not enter into the debate about
the coherence of this position and its
compatibility with Malebranche’s occasionalism, for which see esp. Schmaltz,
‘Loves’ (2005); Schmaltz, ‘Rest’ (2015).
22
Malebranche also argued that the existence of free will could be known from
introspection; Bayle repeatedly dismissed
this argument (see further below), above
all against Jacquelot in RQP, II.cxl–cxli,
OD.iii.785a–791b. Malebranche also
argued that our dependence on our bodies diminishes or even destroys freedom
(Recherche, Ecl. I, MO.iii.20–1). Bayle
would have simply dismissed this as
Platonic dualism.
DHC, PauliciensF (iii.628a): ‘Cela est
contradictoire; puis qu’il ne faut pas
moins de force pour arréter ce qui se
meut, que pour mouvoir ce qui se
repose.’
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press
316
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
respond that this was nevertheless done and consequently that it is very
possible. There is nothing more foolish than to reason against the facts;
this maxim, From the actual to the possible is a valid consequence, is as
clear as this proposition that two plus two makes four.23
Against the Manicheans, one should stick to this fact, and not indulge in
philosophical reasoning: ‘The dogma which the Manichaeans attack should
be considered by the orthodox as a truth of fact, clearly revealed. And moreover since in the end it must be agreed that we do not understand the causes
and reasons of it, it is better to acknowledge it from the start, and stop there.’24
As Bayle later put it in the Continuation des Pensées diverses, Cartesian
occasionalism took Christian philosophers as far as they could go. But if
someone were to
reply that the doctrine of the Cartesians leads one to believe that [God] is
also the cause of the acts of our will, I would reply in turn that I will not
enter into this mystery. It is a noli me tangere [i.e. something not to be
touched]; it is an abyss from which it is necessary to distance oneself
without looking back, out of fear of becoming a statue of salt like Lot’s
wife. Philosophy cannot see anything; it is necessary to resort humbly to
the light of revelation.25
This all sounds very much like the fideism or scepticism so often ascribed to
Bayle. Or, according to the Straussians, it offers the best proof for Bayle’s
insincerity. For did he not say in Remark B of the article ‘Pyrrhon’ that the
évidence of moral evil implied serious questions about God’s goodness?26 And
if God was not good, was he a god at all? Nonetheless, I remain convinced that,
when placed in his historical context, Bayle emerges not as a fideist, sceptic or
23
24
DHC, ManichéensD (iii.306b): ‘Nous
y trouvons l’unité de Dieu, & ses perfections infinies; la chûte du prémier
homme, & ce qui s’ensuit. Qu’on nous
vienne dire avec un grand appareil de
raisonnemens, qu’il n’est pas possible
que le mal moral s’introduise dans le
monde, par l’ouvrage d’un Principe infiniment bon & saint, nous répondrons
que cela s’est pourtant fait, & par
conséquent que cela est très-possible. Il
n’y a rien de plus insensé que de raisonner contre des faits: l’axiome, ab actu ad
potentiam valet consequentia, est aussi
clair que cette Proposition 2 & 2 font 4.’
DHC, PauliciensM (iii.636a): ‘Le Dogme
que les Manichéens attaquent doit être
considéré par les Orthodoxes comme
une vérité de fait, révélée clairement, &
25
26
plus qu’enfin il faudroit tomber d’accord
qu’on n’en comprend point les causes ni
les raisons, il vaut mieux en convenir dès
le début, & s’arreter-là.’
CPD, cxi, OD.iii.342b: ‘Si vous me
répliquez que la doctrine des Cartésiens
porte à croire qu’il est aussi la cause des
actes de notre volonté, je vous
répliquerois à mon tour que je n’entre
point dans ce mystere. C’est un noli me
tangere, c’est un abîme dont il faut que
l’on s’éloigne sans tourner les yeux en
arriere, de peur de devenir une statue de
sel comme la femme de Lot: la
Philosophie n’y peut voir goûte, il faut
recourir humblement aux lumieres
révélées.’
DHC, PyrrhoB (iii.733a–b).
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press
the manichean articles
317
atheist. Rather, his discussion of the problem of evil was designed as part of
a two-pronged polemical argument. The first prong was an intervention in the
disputes over predestination that were still raging in the second half of
the seventeenth century. As we shall see in §§5–8, Bayle was following in
the footsteps of several Reformed counterparts – not least his teachers and
closest acquaintances, including Jurieu – in arguing that the unsolvability of
the problem of evil should lead one to accept the ‘rigid’ view of predestination. This argument was designed to counter a similarly anti-philosophical
argument in favour of the ‘relaxed’ view developed above all by Gassendi,
Bernier, and Malebranche. The second prong of Bayle’s polemic, to be
discussed in §9, was directed against Jurieu. Specifically, Bayle sought to
argue that Jurieu’s own defence of predestinarian dogma proved that no one
could claim to possess certainty on the question, so that no one could ever
claim the right to persecute those who disagreed with them on the issue.
When it came to such doctrines, ignorance was always invincible. This
tolerationism notwithstanding, Bayle’s view was grounded in an unambiguously pro-Reformed view of theological history (§10).
II.2.3 Did Anyone in the Seventeenth Century Believe that Pure Reason
Could Solve the Problem of Evil?
Before we reconstruct the specific polemical context in which Bayle developed
his argument, we should begin with a broader question: did anyone in the
seventeenth century actually believe that the problem of evil could be solved by
pure reason? After all, Bayle always insisted that his own position was exactly
that of the philosophical and theological mainstream. It turns out that he was
telling the truth.
Let us begin by noting that in the Manichean articles of the Dictionnaire, Bayle
was in fact making two separate points, depending on the perspective of who was
conducting the conversation about free will and the origin of evil. The first was
that any Christian solution to these problems (which, as we have seen, Bayle
collapsed into each other), could never satisfy the pagans. For ‘without consulting Revelation, but [using] only Philosophical ideas’, the best that one could
respond to the question ‘Why did God permit that man should sin?’ was to say ‘I
do not know; I only believe that he had some reasons for it which are very worthy
of his infinite wisdom, but which are incomprehensible to me.’ From a pagan’s
perspective this was of course no response at all, but – Bayle continued – it had
the tactical value of shutting down the debate, and subsequently shifting its
grounds away from philosophy to the facts contained in Scripture.27
27
DHC, PauliciensM and n. 121 (iii.634b):
‘la meilleure réponse qu’on puisse faire
naturellement [n. 121: ‘C’est à dire sans
consulter la Revelation, mais seulement
les Idées Philosophiques’] à la question,
Pourquoi Dieu a-t-il permis que l’homme
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108934152.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press
318
pierre bayle: emancipating religion from philosophy
This argument is summarised even better in a letter to the Abbé JeanBaptiste Du Bois that Bayle wrote in late 1696, reporting on a book of
apologetics just published by Isaac Jacquelot:
[Jacquelot] proves the freedom of the creator by that freedom which we
experience in our soul. But it is certain that our experience of freedom is
not a good reason to believe that we are free, and I have not yet seen
anyone who has proved that it is possible for a created spirit to be the
efficient cause of its volitions. All the best arguments that are alleged are
that without it man would not sin and God would be the author of evil
thoughts as well as good ones. This is fine when speaking from one
Christian to another, but in disputing with the impious one ends up
begging the question.28
This is strong language. I shall return to explain the reasons for its strength. But
apart from such rhetorical considerations, was it such an unusual or controversial claim that naked philosophical reason could not solve the problem of
evil, or explain the compatibility of divine omnipotence and human free will?
For example, Gassendi and his followers, on whom Bayle drew so much for his
vision of the logic of paganism, made it explicitly clear that a solution to the
problems of free will and the origin of evil was unavailable to the mind
unenlightened by revelation (§4 below). Gassendi may have pushed this argument to the extreme, but he was hardly the only person to make it. In fact, it is
difficult to find any seventeenth-century discussion of paganism that did
suggest that pagans – even their best philosophers – were able to resolve
rationally the problem of evil.
Vossius, for example, argued near the beginning of the Theologia gentilis
that the doctrines of both Zoroastrians and Egyptian dualists were responses to
their inability to solve the problem, combined with a bastardised inheritance of
the true antediluvian revelation concerning the subject – the Dutchman even
posited that the vestiges of this oriental dualism reappeared in Greek
28
pechât? est de dire Je n’en sai rien,