A SHORT HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT
Chapter I
INTRODUCTORY
§ 1. Origin and Meaning of the Word
The words “freethinking” and “freethinker” first appear in English literature about the end of the seventeenth century, and seem to have originated there and then, as we do not find them earlier in French or in Italian,[1] the only other modern literatures wherein the phenomena for which the words stand had previously arisen.
The title of “atheist” had been from time immemorial applied to every shade of serious heresy by the orthodox, as when the early Christians were so described by the image-adoring polytheists around them; and in Latin Christendom the term infidelis, translating the ἀπίστος of the New Testament, which primarily applied to Jews and pagans,[2] was easily extensible, as in the writings of Augustine, to all who challenged or doubted articles of ordinary Christian belief, all alike being regarded as consigned to perdition.[3] It is by this line of descent that the term “infidelity,” applied to doubt on such doctrines as that of the future state, comes up in England in the fifteenth century.[4] It implied no systematic or critical thinking. The label of “deist,” presumably self-applied by the bearers, begins to come into use in French about the middle of the sixteenth century;[5] and that of “naturalist,” also presumably chosen by those who bore it, came into currency about the same time. Lechler traces the latter term in the Latin form as far back as the MS. of the Heptaplomeres of Bodin, dated 1588; but it was common before that date, as De Mornay in the preface to his De la Vérité de la religion chrétienne (1581) declaims “against the false naturalists (that is to say, professors of the knowledge of nature and natural things)”; and Montaigne in one of his later essays (1588) has the phrase “nous autres naturalistes.”[6] Apart from these terms, those commonly used in French in the seventeenth century were bel esprit (sometimes, though not necessarily, connoting unbelief), esprit fort and libertin, the latter being used in the sense of a religious doubter by Corneille, Molière, and Bayle.[7]
It seems to have first come into use as one of the hostile names for the “Brethren of the Free Spirit,” a pantheistic and generally heretical sect which became prominent in the thirteenth century, and flourished widely, despite destructive persecution, till the fifteenth. Their doctrine being antinomian, and their practice often extravagant, they were accused by Churchmen of licentiousness, so that in their case the name Libertini had its full latitude of application. In the sixteenth century the name of Libertines is found borne, voluntarily or otherwise, by a similar sect, probably springing from some remnant of the first, but calling themselves Spirituales, who came into notice in Flanders, were favoured in France by Marguerite of Navarre, sister of Francis I, and became to some extent associated with sections of the Reformed Church. They were attacked by Calvin in the treatise Contre la sects fanatique et furieuse des Libertins (1544 and 1545).[8] The name of Libertini was not in the sixteenth century applied by any Genevese writer to any political party;[9] but by later historians it was in time either fastened on or adopted by the main body of Calvin’s opponents in Geneva, who probably included some members of the sect or movement in question. They were accused by him of general depravity, a judgment not at all to be acquiesced in, in view of the controversial habits of the age; though they probably included antinomian Christians and libertines in the modern sense, as well as orthodox lovers of freedom and orderly non-Christians. As the first Brethren of the Free Spirit, so-called, seem to have appeared in Italy (where they are supposed to have derived, like the Waldenses, from the immigrant Paulicians of the Eastern Church), the name Libertini presumably originated there. But in Renaissance Italy an unbeliever seems usually to have been called simply ateo, or infedele, or pagano. “The standing phrase was non aver fede.”[10]