Significance of Pascal.—It is not as a systematic thinker that Pascal is of importance to the historian of thought. He typifies that more or less inarticulate and unreasoned revolt which the arrogance and optimism of a new science or a new philosophy arouse against themselves. He voices the eternal protest that it is not by bread alone that men live. As is generally the case with such protests, the pessimism of Pascal was no doubt exaggerated; but exaggeration is necessary if minds are to be impressed; and those who feel strongly see only one side of a question.
Results.—Thus in the three figures that have passed before us, we see a threefold protest against that exclusion of the spiritual from the human view of life. Spinoza, the pantheist, sees God everywhere;[14] Leibniz finds in every recess of nature the principle of personality; Pascal finds the only cure for human frailty and misery in religion.
RISE OF AN ANTI-RELIGIOUS SCIENCE
Atmospheric Conditions.—As we have seen, a mechanical view of the universe was not felt by thinkers like Descartes or Newton, or even Hobbes, to involve any consequences that were necessarily hostile to religion. The new science sometimes might be anti-theological, because the current theology still seemed too much infected with Scholasticism, but it was not, in the hands of its most notable exponents, anti-religious. Science had no quarrel with religion as such, nor even with a rational type of theology.
Of course the new views aroused many suspicions, and did not escape criticism at the hands of Church authorities, both Protestant and Catholic. And (as we have seen) some early scientists paid very dearly for their allegiance to the spirit of scientific enquiry; but as time went on, actual persecution became impossible, morally and practically. But theologians were never, during the seventeenth century at least, quite reconciled to a science and a philosophy which seemed to them to be leading men towards areas quite uninhabitable for religion. But in spite of suspicions on either side, and the prevalence of some measure of intolerance, it cannot be said that relations between the scientists or philosophers and the theologians were very seriously strained until well on in the eighteenth century.
Anti-Religious Propaganda.—That this comparatively pacific state of affairs came to an end was the fault, primarily, at least, neither of the theologians nor of the scientists. A different atmosphere gradually began to envelop and to embitter the controversy. Orthodox religion, especially in Catholic countries, came to be associated with political reaction, and the most envenomed onslaughts began to be made upon what seemed to be the chief stronghold of a discredited regime. Especially was this the case in France, where corrupt political conditions were aggravated by the intense social misery which they had created.
Thus France became the cradle of the phenomenon known as anti-clericalism, which is the product not so much of disbelief in a creed as of hatred of a system; it was the correlative of a Church in which religion was extinct, for genuine Catholicism had been rooted out of France early in the eighteenth century, just as Protestantism had been drowned in blood a century before.[15]