Vanini’s philosophy does not go very far; he admires the living energy of Nature; his reasonings were not deep, but were more of the nature of fanciful ideas. He always chose the dialogue form; and it is not evident which of the opinions stated are his own. He wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s works on Physics. We have two other works by Vanini, which are very rare. The one is styled: Amphitheatrum æternæ providentiæ divino-magicum, christiano-physicum, nec non astrologo-catholicum, adversus veteres philosophos, Atheos, Epicureos, Peripateticos et Stoicos. Auctore Julio Cæsare Vanino, Lugd. 1615; in this he gives a very eloquent account of all these philosophies and their principles, but the manner in which he refutes them is rather feeble. The second work is entitled “On the Wonderful Secrets of Nature, the Queen and Goddess of Mortals” (De admirandis Naturæ, reginæ Deæque mortalium, arcanis libr. IV., Lutetiæ 1616); it was printed “with the approval of the Sorbonne,” which at first found in it nothing “which contradicted and was hostile to the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion.” It contains scientific investigations into various matters belonging to physics and natural history, and is also in dialogue form, without definite indication being given as to which of the characters is made the mouthpiece of Vanini’s own opinions. What one finds is assurances from him that he would believe this or that doctrine if he had not received Christian teaching. Vanini’s tendency, however, was towards naturalism; he showed that it is Nature that is the Deity, that all things had a mechanical genesis. He therefore explained the whole universe in its connection by efficient causes alone, not by final causes; but the statement of this is made in such a way that the writer does not give it as his own conclusion.[93]
Thus Vanini placed reason in opposition to faith and church dogma, as had already been done by Pomponatius (supra, p. 111) and others. Yet all the time that they were proving by reason this or that dogma which is in direct contradiction to the Christian belief, they were declaring that they submitted their conviction to the Church—a course which was always adopted by Bayle afterwards in the reformed church. Another practice of these philosophers was to bring forward all sorts of arguments and theories contradictory of theological dogmas, as so many insoluble difficulties and contradictions brought about by reason, which were, however, by them submitted to faith. Thus, for instance, Bayle says in the article “Manichæans” found in his critical Dictionnaire—in which he touches on many philosophic conceptions—that the assertion of the existence of two principles cannot be disproved, but that we must submit herein to the Church. In this fashion all possible arguments were advanced against the Church. Vanini thus states objections against the Atonement, and brings forward arguments to prove that Nature is God. Now men were convinced that reason could not be contradictory of the Christian dogmas, and no faith was placed in the sincerity of a submission which consisted in giving up what one was convinced of by reason; therefore Galileo, because he defended the system of Copernicus, had to recant on his knees, and Vanini was burned at the stake. Both of them had in vain chosen the dialogue form for their writings.
Vanini certainly made one of the speakers in the Dialogues prove (De naturæ arcanis, p. 420) even “out of the text of the Bible, that the devil is mightier than God,” and that therefore God does not rule the world. Among his arguments are the following: It was against the will of God that Adam and Eve sinned, and thus brought the whole human race to ruin (ad interitum): Christ also was crucified by the powers of darkness. Moreover it is the will of God that all men should be saved. But of Catholics there are very few in comparison with the rest of the world, and the Jews often fell away from their faith; the Catholic religion extends only over Spain, France, Italy, Poland and a part of Germany. If there were to be deducted also the atheists, blasphemers, heretics, whoremongers, adulterers, and so on, there would be still fewer left. Consequently the devil is mightier than God. These are arguments of reason; they are not to be refuted; but he submitted himself to the faith. It is remarkable that no one believed this of him; the reason thereof being that it was impossible for him to be in earnest with the refutation of what he asserted to be rational. That the refutation was but weak and subjective does not justify anyone in doubting Vanini’s sincerity; for poor reasons may be convincing for the subject, just as the subject holds to his own rights in respect of objective matters. What lies at the bottom of the proceedings against Vanini is this, that when a man by means of his reason has come to perceive something which seems to him incontrovertible, he cannot but adhere to these definite perceptions, he cannot believe what is opposed to them. It is impossible to believe that faith is stronger in him than this power of perception.
The Church in this way fell into the strange contradiction of condemning Vanini, because he did not find her doctrines in accordance with reason, and yet submitted himself to them; she thus appeared to demand—a demand which she emphasized with the burning pile—not that her doctrines should be considered above reason, but in accordance with it, and that reason should have merely the formal function of explaining the content of theology, without adding anything of her own. This susceptibility of the Church is inconsistent, and entangled her in contradictions. For in earlier times she certainly admitted that reason could not grasp what was revealed, and that it was consequently a matter of little importance to refute and solve by reason the objections which reason itself brought forward. But as she now would not permit the contradiction of faith and reason to be taken seriously, but burned Vanini at the stake as an atheist for professing so to do, it was implied that the doctrine of the Church cannot contradict reason, while man has yet to submit reason to the Church.
There is kindled here the strife between so-called revelation and reason, in which the latter emerges independently, and the former is separated from it. Up to this time both were one, or the light of man was the light of God; man had not a light of his own, but his light was held to be the divine. The Scholastics had no knowledge having a content of its own beyond the content of religion; philosophy remained entirely formal. But now it came to have a content of its own, which was opposed to the content of religion; or reason felt at least that it had its own content, or was opposing the form of reasonableness to the immediate content of the other.
This opposition had a different meaning in former times from what it bears now-a-days; the earlier meaning is this, that faith is the doctrine of Christianity, which is given as truth, and by which as truth man has to remain. We have here faith in this content, and opposed to this stands conviction by means of reason. But now this faith is transferred into the thinking consciousness itself; it is a relation of self-consciousness itself to the facts which it finds within itself, not to the objective content of the doctrine. In respect to the earlier opposition a distinction must be drawn in the objective creed; the one part of it is the teaching of the Church as dogma, the teaching as to the nature of God, that He is Three in One; to this pertains the appearing of God in the world, in the flesh, the relation of man to this divine nature, His holiness and divinity. That is the part which has to do with the eternal verities, the part which is of absolute interest for men; this part is in its content essentially speculative, and can be object only for the speculative Notion. The other part, belief in which is also required, has reference to other external conceptions, which are connected with that content; to this pertains the whole extent of what belongs to history, in the Old and New Testament as well as in the Church. A belief in all this finite element may be demanded also. If a man, for instance, did not believe in ghosts, he would be taken for a free-thinker, an atheist: it would be just the same if a man did not believe that Adam in Paradise ate of the forbidden fruit. Both parts are placed upon the one level; but it tends to the destruction of Church and faith, when belief is demanded for these parts alike. It is to the external conceptions that attention has been chiefly directed by those who have been decried as opponents of Christianity and as atheists, down to the time of Voltaire. When external conceptions such as these are held to firmly, it is inevitable that contradictions should be pointed out.
[5. Petrus Ramus.]
Pierre de la Ramée was born in 1515 in Vermandois, where his father worked as a day-labourer. He early betook himself to Paris, in order to satisfy his desire for learning: he was, however, obliged on two occasions to leave it on account of the difficulty he experienced in procuring a subsistence, before he obtained employment as a servant at the Collége de Navarre. Here he found an opportunity of extending his knowledge; he occupied himself with the Aristotelian philosophy and with mathematics, and he distinguished himself in disputation by extraordinary oratorical and dialectical readiness. In a disputation for obtaining the degree of magister, he came publicly forward with a thesis that caused a great sensation: “All that Aristotle taught is not true;” and the honour fell to him. Having became magister, he attacked so bitterly and violently the Aristotelian logic and dialectic, that the government took notice of it. He was now accused of undermining by his anti-Aristotelian opinions the foundations of religion and science; this accusation was brought before the parliament of Paris by the enemies of Ramus, as a criminal case. But because the parliament appeared disposed to act in a judicial way, and seemed favourably inclined to Ramus, the complaint was withdrawn, and brought before the council of the king. The latter decided that Ramus should hold a disputation with his opponent Goveanus before a special commission of five judges, two of whom Goveanus was to choose, and two Ramus, while the king was to appoint the president; these judges were to lay their opinion of the result before the king. The interest of the public was intense, but the contest was conducted in the most pedantic way. On the first day Ramus maintained that the Aristotelian logic and dialectic were imperfect and faulty, because the Organon did not begin with a definition. The commission decided that a disputation or a dissertation requires indeed a definition, but in dialectic it is not necessary. On the second day Ramus criticized the Aristotelian logic for its want of arrangement; this, he asserted, is essential. The majority of the judges, consisting of the commissioner of the king and the two nominees of the opponent Goveanus, now wished to annul the investigation as far as it had gone, and to set to work in another way, since the assertions of Ramus put them in a difficulty. He appealed to the king, who, however, refused to hear him, and decided that the decision of the judges should be considered final. Ramus was hence condemned, but the other two took no share in the matter, and, indeed, resigned. The decision was publicly placarded in all the streets of Paris, and sent to all the academies of learning throughout Europe. Plays aimed against Ramus were performed in the theatres, greatly to the delight of the Aristotelians. The public generally took a very lively interest in such disputes, and a number of contests of this kind had already taken place on similar questions of the schools. For example, the professors in a royal Collége disputed with the theologians of the Sorbonne whether quidam, quisquis, quoniam should be said or kidem, kiskis, koniam, and from this dispute a case before parliament arose, because the doctors took away his benefice from a theologian who said quisquis. Another hot and bitter controversy came before the magistrates as to whether ego amat was as correct as ego amo, and this dispute had to be suppressed by them. Finally Ramus obtained a public educational appointment, a professorship in Paris; but because he had become a Huguenot he had to vacate this office several times in the internal disquietude that prevailed; on one occasion he even went to travel in Germany. On St. Bartholomew’s Eve in 1572, Ramus finally fell, murdered through the instrumentality of his enemies; one of his colleagues who was among his bitterest enemies, Charpentier, had engaged assassins for the purpose, by whom Ramus was frightfully maltreated, and then thrown down from an upper window.[94]
Ramus aroused great interest, more especially by his attacks on the Aristotelian dialectic as it had hitherto existed, and he contributed very greatly to the simplification of the formal nature of the rules of dialectic. He is specially famed for his extreme hostility to the scholastic logic, and for having set up in opposition to it a logic of Ramus—an opposition which has spread so far that even in the history of literature in Germany we find various factions of Ramists and anti-Ramists and semi-Ramists mentioned.