And Le Vayer’s way of handling the dicta of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as to the virtues of unbelievers being merely vices is for its time so hardy that the Cardinal’s protection alone can explain its immunity from censure. St. Augustine and St. Thomas, says the critic calmly, had regard merely to eternal happiness, which virtue alone can obtain for no one. They are, therefore, to be always interpreted in this special sense. And so at the very outset the ground is summarily cleared of orthodox obstacles.[9] The Petit discours chrétien sur l’immortalité de l’âme, also addressed to Richelieu, tells of a good deal of current unbelief on that subject; and the epistle dedicatory professes pain over the “philosopher of our day [Vanini] who has had the impiety to write that, unless one is very old, very rich, and a German, one should never expatiate on this subject.” But on the very threshold of the discourse, again, the skeptic tranquilly suggests that there would be “perhaps something unreasonable” in following Augustine’s precept, so popular in later times, that the problem of immortality should be solved by the dictates of religion and feeling, not of “uncertain” reason. “Why,” he asks, “should the soul be her own judge?”[10] And he shows a distinct appreciation of the avowal of Augustine in his Retractationes that his own book on the Immortality of the Soul was so obscure to him that in many places he himself could not understand it.[11] The “Little Christian Discourse” is, in fact, not Christian at all; and its arguments are but dialectic exercises, on a par with those of the Discours sceptique sur la musique which follows. He was, in short, a skeptic by temperament; and his Preface d’une histoire[12] shows his mind to have played on the “Mississippi of falsehood called history” very much as did that of Bayle in a later generation.
Le Vayer’s Dialogues of Oratius Tubero (1633) is philosophically his most important work;[13] but its tranquil Pyrrhonism was not calculated to affect greatly the current thought of his day; and he ranked rather as a man of all-round learning[14] than as a polemist, being reputed “a little contradictory, but in no way bigoted or obstinate, all opinions being to him nearly indifferent, excepting those of which faith does not permit us to doubt.”[15] The last phrase tells of the fact that it affects to negate: Le Vayer’s general skepticism was well known.[16] He was not indeed an original thinker, most of his ideas being echoes from the skeptics of antiquity;[17] and it has been not unjustly said of him that he is rather of the sixteenth century than of the seventeenth.[18]
2. On the other hand, the resort on the part of the Catholics to a skeptical method, as against both Protestants and freethinkers, which we have seen originating soon after the issue of Montaigne’s Essais, seems to have become more and more common; and this process must rank as in some degree a product of skeptical thought of a more sincere sort. In any case it was turned vigorously, even recklessly, against the Protestants. Thus we find Daillé, at the outset of his work On the True Use of the Fathers,[19] complaining that when Protestants quote the Scriptures some Romanists at once ask “whence and in what way those books may be known to be really written by the prophets and apostles whose names and titles they bear.” This challenge, rashly incurred by Luther and Calvin in their pronouncements on the Canon, later Protestants did not as a rule attempt to meet, save in the fashion of La Placette, who in his work De insanibili Ecclesiæ Romanæ Scepticismo (1688)[20] undertakes to show that Romanists themselves are without any grounds of certitude for the authority of the Church. It was indeed certain that the Catholic method would make more skeptics than it won.
3. Between the negative development of the doctrine of Montaigne and the vogue of upper-class deism, the philosophy of Descartes, with its careful profession of submission to the Church, had at first an easy reception; and on the appearance of the Discours de la Méthode (1637) it speedily affected the whole thought of France; the women of the leisured class, now much given to literature, being among its students.[21] From the first the Jansenists, who were the most serious religious thinkers of the time, accepted the Cartesian system as in the main soundly Christian; and its founder’s authority had some such influence in keeping up the prestige of orthodoxy as had that of Locke later in England. Boileau, who wrote a satire in defence of the system when it was persecuted after Descartes’s death, is named among those whom he so influenced.[22] But a merely external influence of this kind could not counteract the fundamental rationalism of Descartes’s thought, and the whole social and intellectual tendency towards a secular view of life. Soon, indeed, Descartes became suspect, partly by reason of the hostile activities of the Jesuits, who opposed him because the Jansenists generally held by him, though he had been a Jesuit pupil, and had always some adherents in that order;[23] partly by reason of the inherent naturalism of his system. That his doctrine was incompatible with the eucharist was the standing charge against it,[24] and his defence was not found satisfactory,[25] though his orthodox followers obtained from Queen Christina a declaration that he had been largely instrumental in converting her to Catholicism.[26] Pascal reproached him with having done his best to do without God in his system;[27] and this seems to have been the common clerical impression. Thirteen years after his death, in 1663, his work was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, under a modified censure,[28] and in 1671 a royal order was obtained under which his philosophy was proscribed in all the universities of France.[29] Cartesian professors and curés were persecuted and exiled, or compelled to recant; among the victims being Père Lami of the Congregation of the Oratory and Père André the Jesuit;[30] and the Oratorians were in 1678 forced to undergo the humiliation of not only renouncing Descartes and all his works, but of abjuring their former Cartesian declarations, in order to preserve their corporate existence.[31] Precisely in this period of official reaction, however, there was going on not merely an academic but a social development of a rationalistic kind, in which the persecuted philosophy played its part, even though some freethinkers disparaged it.
4. The general tendency is revealed on the one hand by the series of treatises from eminent Churchmen, defending the faith against unpublished attacks, and on the other hand by the prevailing tone in belles lettres. Malherbe, the literary dictator of the first quarter of the century, had died in 1628 with the character of a scoffer;[32] and the fashion now lasted till the latter half of the reign of Louis XIV. In 1621, two years after the burning of Vanini, a young man named Jean Fontanier had been burned alive on the Place de Grève at Paris, apparently for the doctrines laid down by him in a manuscript entitled Le Trésor Inestimable, written on deistic and anti-Catholic lines.[33] He was said to have been successively Protestant, Catholic, Turk, Jew, and atheist; and had conducted himself like one of shaken mind.[34] But the cases of the poet Théophile de Viau, who about 1623 suffered prosecution on a charge of impiety,[35] and of his companions Berthelot and Colletet—who like him were condemned but set free by royal favour—appear to be the only others of the kind for over a generation. Frivolity of tone sufficed to ward off legal pursuit. It was in 1665, some years after the death of Mazarin, who had maintained Richelieu’s policy of tolerance, that Claude Petit was burnt at Paris for “impious pieces”;[36] and even then there was no general reversion to orthodoxy, the upper-class tone remaining, as in the age of Richelieu and Mazarin, more or less unbelieving. When Corneille had introduced a touch of Christian zeal into his Polyeucte (1643) he had given general offence to the dilettants of both sexes.[37] Molière, again, the disciple of Gassendi[38] and “the very genius of reason,”[39] was unquestionably an unbeliever;[40] and only the personal protection of Louis XIV, which after all could not avail to support such a play as Tartufe against the fury of the bigots, enabled him to sustain himself at all against them.
5. Equally freethinking was his brilliant predecessor and early comrade, Cyrano de Bergerac (1620–1655), who did not fear to indicate his frame of mind in one of his dramas. In La Mort d’Agrippine he puts in the mouth of Sejanus, as was said by a contemporary, “horrible things against the Gods,” notably the phrase, “whom men made, and who did not make men,”[41] which, however, generally passed as an attack on polytheism; and though there was certainly no blasphemous intention in the phrase, Frappons, voilà l’hostie [= hostia, victim], some pretended to regard it as an insult to the Catholic host.[42] At times Cyrano writes like a deist;[43] but in so many other passages does he hold the language of a convinced materialist, and of a scoffer at that,[44] that he can hardly be taken seriously on the former head.[45] In short, he was one of the first of the hardy freethinkers who, under the tolerant rule of Richelieu and Mazarin, gave clear voice to the newer spirit. Under any other government, he would have been in danger of his life: as it was, he was menaced with prosecutions; his Agrippine was forbidden; the first edition of his Pédant joué was confiscated; during his last illness there was an attempt to seize his manuscripts; and down till the time of the Revolution the editions of his works were eagerly bought up and destroyed by zealots.[46] His recent literary rehabilitation thus hardly serves to realize his importance in the history of freethought. Between Cyrano and Molière it would appear that there was little less of rationalistic ferment in the France of their day than in England. Bossuet avows in a letter to Huet in 1678 that impiety and unbelief abound more than ever before.[47]
6. Even in the apologetic reasoning of the greatest French prose writer of that age, Pascal, we have the most pregnant testimony to the prevalence of unbelief; for not only were the fragments preserved as Pensées (1670), however originated,[48] developed as part of a planned defence of religion against contemporary rationalism,[49] but they themselves show their author profoundly unable to believe save by a desperate abnegation of reason, though he perpetually commits the gross fallacy of trusting to reason to prove that reason is untrustworthy. His work is thus one continuous paralogism, in which reason is disparaged merely to make way for a parade of bad reasoning. The case of Pascal is that of Berkeley with a difference: the latter suffered from hypochondria, but reacted with nervous energy; Pascal, a physical degenerate, prematurely profound, was prematurely old; and his pietism in its final form is the expression of the physical collapse.
This is disputed by M. Lanson, an always weighty authority. He writes (p. 464) that Pascal was “neither mad nor ill” when he gave himself up wholly to religion. But ill he certainly was. He had chronically suffered from intense pains in the head from his eighteenth year; and M. Lanson admits (p. 451) that the Pensées were written in intervals of acute suffering. This indeed understates the case. Pascal several times told his family that since the age of eighteen he had never passed a day without pain. His sister, Madame Perier, in her biographical sketch, speaks of him as suffering “continual and ever-increasing maladies,” and avows that the four last years of his life, in which he penned the fragments called Pensées, “were but a continual languishment.” The Port Royal preface of 1670 says the same thing, speaking of the “four years of languor and malady in which he wrote all we have of the book he planned,” and calling the Pensées “the feeble essays of a sick man.” Cp. Pascal’s Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon usage des maladies: and Owen French Skeptics, pp. 746, 784.
Doubtless the levity and licence of the libertins in high places[50] confirmed him in his revolt against unbelief; but his own credence was an act rather of despairing emotion than of rational conviction. The man who advised doubters to make a habit of causing masses to be said and following religious rites, on the score that cela vous fera croire et vous abêtira—“that will make you believe and will stupefy you”[51]—was a pathological case; and though the whole Jansenist movement latterly stood for a reaction against freethinking, it can hardly be doubted that the Pensées generally acted as a solvent rather than as a sustainer of religious beliefs.[52] This charge was made against them immediately on their publication by the Abbé de Villars, who pointed out that they did the reverse of what they claimed to do in the matter of appealing to the heart and to good sense, since they set forth all the ordinary arguments of Pyrrhonism, denied that the existence of God could be established by reason or philosophy, and staked the case on a “wager” which shocked good sense and feeling alike. “Have you resolved,” asks this critic in dialogue, “to make atheists on pretext of combatting them?”[53]
The same question arises concerning the famous Lettres Provinciales (1656), written by Pascal in defence of Arnauld against the persecution of the Jesuits, who carried on in Arnauld’s case their campaign against Jansen, whom they charged with mis-stating the doctrine of Augustine in his great work expounding that Father. Once more the Catholic Church was swerving from its own established doctrine of predestination, the Spanish Jesuit Molina having set up a new movement in the Pelagian or Arminian direction. The cause of the Jansenists has been represented as that of freedom of thought and speech;[54] and this it relatively was insofar as Jansen and Arnauld sought for a hearing, while the Jesuit-ridden Sorbonne strove to silence and punish them. Pascal had to go from printer to printer as his Letters succeeded each other, the first three being successively prosecuted by the clerical authorities; and in their collected form they found publicity only by being printed at Rouen and published at Amsterdam, with the rubric of Cologne. All the while Jansenism claimed to be strict orthodoxy; and it was in virtue only of the irreducible element of rationalism in Pascal that the school of Port Royal made for freethought in any higher or more general sense. Indeed, between his own reputation for piety and that of the Jansenists for orthodoxy, the Provincial Letters have a conventional standing as orthodox compositions. It is strange, however, that those who charge upon the satire of the later philosophers the downfall of Catholicism in France should not realize the plain tendency of these brilliant satires to discredit the entire authority of the Church, and, further, by their own dogmatic weaknesses, to put all dogma alike under suspicion.[55] Few thoughtful men can now read the Provinciales without being impressed by the utter absurdity of the problem over which the entire religious intelligence of a great nation was engrossed.