V. It is true that the book called the Bible, or the Holy Scripture, is a good book (un gentil livre), and contains a lot of good things; but that a bon esprit should be obliged to believe under pain of damnation all that is therein, down to the tail of Tobit’s dog, does not follow.
VI. There is no other divinity or sovereign power in the world but Nature, which must be satisfied in all things, without refusing anything to our body or senses that they desire of us in the exercise of their natural powers and faculties.
VII. Supposing there be a God, as it is decorous to admit, so as not to be always at odds with the superstitious, it does not follow that there are creatures which are purely intellectual and separated from matter. All that is in Nature is composite, and therefore there are neither angels nor devils in the world, and it is not certain that the soul of man is immortal.
VIII. It is true that to live happily it is necessary to extinguish and drown all scruples; but all the same it does not do to appear impious and abandoned, for fear of offending the simple or losing the support of the superstitious.
This is obviously neither candid[70] nor competent writing; and as it happens there remains proof, in the case of the life of La Mothe le Vayer, that “earnest freethought in the beginning of the seventeenth century afforded a point d’appui for serious-minded men, which neither the corrupt Romanism nor the narrow Protestantism of the period could furnish.”[71] Garasse’s own doctrine was that “the true liberty of the mind consists in a simple and docile (sage) belief in all that the Church propounds, indifferently and without distinction.”[72] The later social history of Catholic France is the sufficient comment on the efficacy of such teaching to regulate life. In any case the new ideas steadily gained ground; and on the heels of the treatise of Garasse appeared that of Marin Mersenne, L’impieté des Déistes, Athées et Libertins de ce temps combattue, avec la refutation des opinions de Charron, de Cardan, de Jordan Brun, et des quatraines du Déiste (1624). In a previous treatise, Quæstiones celeberrimæ in Genesim ... in quo volumine Athei et Deisti impugnantur et expugnantur (1623), Mersenne set agoing the often-quoted assertion that, while atheists abounded throughout Europe, they were so specially abundant in France that in Paris alone there were some fifty thousand. Even taking the term “atheist” in the loosest sense in which such writers used it, the statement was never credited by any contemporary, or by its author; but neither did anyone doubt that there was an unprecedented amount of unbelief. The Quatraines du Déiste, otherwise L’Antibigot, was a poem of one hundred and six stanzas, never printed, but widely circulated in manuscript in its day. It is poor poetry enough, but its doctrine of a Lucretian God who left the world to itself sufficed to create a sensation, and inspired Mersenne to write a poem in reply.[73] Such were the signs of the times when Pascal was in his cradle.
Mersenne’s statistical assertion was made in two sheets of the Quæstiones Celeberrimæ, “qui ont été supprimé dans la plupart des exemplaires, à cause, sans doute, de leur exagération” (Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartésienne, 1854, i, 28, where the passage is cited). The suppressed sheets included a list of the “atheists” of the time, occupying five folio columns. (Julian Hibbert, Plutarchus and Theophrastus on Superstition, etc., 1828; App. Catal. of Works written against Atheism, p. 3; Prosper Marchand, Lettre sur le Cymbalum Mundi, in éd. Bibliophile Jacob, 1841, p. 17, note; Prof. Strowski, De Montaigne à Pascal, 1907, p. 138 sq.) Mersenne himself, in the preface to his book, stultifies his suppressed assertion by declaring that the impious in Paris boast falsely of their number, which is really small, unless heretics be reckoned as atheists. Garasse, writing against them, all the while professed to know only five atheists, three of them Italians (Strowski, as cited).
END OF VOL. I.
[1] Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Viret, note D. [↑]
[2] Calvin, scenting his heresy, warned him in 1552 (Bayle, art. Marianus Socin, the first, note B); but they remained on surprisingly good terms till Lelio’s death in 1562. Cp. Stähelin, Johannes Calvin, ii. 321–28. [↑]