Chapter XIX
FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES
§ 1. Holland
Holland, so notable for relative hospitality to freethinking in the seventeenth century, continued to exhibit it in the eighteenth, though without putting forth much native response. After her desperate wars with Louis XIV, the Dutch State, now monarchically ruled, turned on the intellectual side rather to imitative belles lettres than to the problems which had begun to exercise so much of English thought. It was an age of “retrogression and weakness.”[1] Elizabeth Wolff, née Bekker, one of the most famous of the numerous Dutch women-writers of the century (1738–1804), is notable for her religious as well as for her political liberalism;[2] but her main activity was in novel-writing; and there are few other signs of freethinking tendencies in popular Dutch culture. It was impossible, however, that the influences at work in the neighbouring lands should be shut out; and if Holland did not produce innovating books she printed many throughout the century.
In 1708 there was published at Amsterdam a work under the pseudonym of “Juan di Posos,” wherein, by way of a relation of imaginary travels, something like atheism was said to be taught; but the pastor Leenhof had in 1703 been accused of atheism for his treatise, Heaven on Earth, which was at most Spinozistic.[3] Even as late as 1714 a Spinozist shoemaker, Booms, was banished for his writings; but henceforth liberal influences, largely traceable to the works of Bayle, begin to predominate. Welcomed by students everywhere, Bayle must have made powerfully for tolerance and rationalism in his adopted country, which after his time became a centre of culture for the States of northern Europe rather than a source of original works. Holland in the eighteenth century was receptive alike of French and English thought and literature, especially the former;[4] and, besides reprinting many of the French deists’ works and translating some of the English, the Dutch cities harboured such heretics as the Italian Alberto Radicati, Count Passerano, who, dying at Rotterdam in 1736, left a collection of deistic treatises of a strongly freethinking cast to be posthumously published.
The German traveller Alberti,[5] citing the London Magazine, 1732, states that Passerano visited England and published works in English through a translator, Joseph Morgan, and that both were sentenced to imprisonment. This presumably refers to his anonymous Philosophical Dissertation upon Death, “by a friend to truth,” published in English in 1732.[6] It is a remarkable treatise, being a hardy justification of suicide, “composed for the consolation of the unhappy,” from a practically atheistic standpoint. Two years earlier he had published in English, also anonymously, a tract entitled Christianity set in a True Light, by a Pagan Philosopher newly converted; and it may be that the startling nature of the second pamphlet elicited a prosecution which included both. The pamphlet of 1730, however, is a eulogy of the ethic of Jesus, who is deistically treated as a simple man, but with all the amenity which the deists usually brought to bear on that theme. Passerano’s Recueil des pièces curieuses sur les matières les plus interessants, published with his name at Rotterdam in 1736,[7] includes a translation of Swift’s ironical Project concerning babies, and an Histoire abregée de la profession sacerdotale, which was published in a separate English translation.[8] Passerano is noticeable chiefly for the relative thoroughness of his rationalism.[9] In the Recueil he speaks of deists and atheists as being the same, those called atheists having always admitted a first cause under the names God, Nature, Eternal Germs, movement, or universal soul.[10]
In 1737 was published in French a small mystification consisting of a Sermon prêché dans la grande Assemblée des Quakers de Londres, par le fameux Frère E. E., and another little tract, La Religion Muhamedane comparée à la païenne de l’Indostan, par Ali-Ebn-Omar. “E. E.” stood for Edward Elwall, a well-known Unitarian of the time, who, as we saw, was tried at Stafford Assizes in 1726 for publishing a Unitarian treatise, and who in 1742 published another, entitled The Supernatural Incarnation of Jesus Christ proved to be false ... and that our Lord Jesus Christ was the real son of Joseph and Mary. The two tracts are both by Passerano, and are on deistic lines, the text of the Sermon being (in English) “The Religion of the Gospel is the true Original Religion of Reason and Nature.” The proposition is of course purely ethical in its bearing.
The currency given in Holland to such literature tells of growing liberality of thought as well as of political freedom. But the conditions were not favourable to such general literary activity as prevailed in the larger States, though good work was done in medicine and the natural sciences. Not till the nineteenth century did Dutch scholars again give a lead to Europe in religious thought.