[Sidenote: Spiritual Reformers]
Somewhat to the left of the Antitrinitarian sects were a few men, who had hardly any followers, who may be called, for want of a better term, Spiritual Reformers. They sought, quite in the nineteenth century spirit, to make Christianity nothing but an ethical culture. James Acontius, born in Trent [Sidenote: 1565] but naturalized in England, published his Stratagems of Satan in 1565 to reduce the fundamental doctrines of Christianity to the very fewest possible. Sebastian Franck of Ingolstadt [Sidenote: Franck, 1499-1542] found the only authority for each man in his inward, spiritual message. He sought to found no community or church, but to get only readers. These men passed almost unnoticed in their day.
[Sidenote: Italian skeptics]
There was much skepticism throughout the century. Complete Pyrrhonism under a thin veil of lip-conformity, was preached by Peter Pomponazzi, [Sidenote: Pomponazzi,1462-1325] professor of philosophy at Padua, Ferrara and Bologna. His De immortalitate animi [Sidenote: 1516] caused a storm by its plain conclusion that the soul perished with the body. He tried to make the distinction in his favor that a thing might be true in religion and false in philosophy. Thus he denied his belief in demons and spirits as a philosopher, while affirming that he believed in them as a Christian. He was in fact a materialist. He placed Christianity, Mohammedanism and Judaism on the same level, broadly hinting that all were impostures.
Public opinion became so interested in the subject of immortality at this time that when another philosopher, Simon Porzio, tried to lecture on meteorology at Pisa, his audience interrupted him with cries, "Quid de anima?" He, also, maintained that the soul of man {628} was like that of the beasts. But he had few followers who dared to express such an opinion. After the Inquisition had shown its teeth, the life of the Italian nation was like that of its great poet, Tasso, whose youth was spent at the feet of the Jesuits and whose manhood was haunted by fears of having unwittingly done something that might be punished by the stake. It was to counteract the pagan opinion, stated to be rapidly growing, that the Vatican Council forbade all clerics to lecture on the classics for five years. But in vain! A report of Paul III's cardinals charged professors of philosophy with teaching impiety. Indeed, the whole literature of contemporary Italy, from Machiavelli, who treated Christianity as a false and noxious superstition, to Pulci who professed belief in nothing but pleasure, is saturated with free thought. "Vanity makes most humanists skeptics," wrote Ariosto, "why is it that learning and infidelity go hand in hand?"
[Sidenote: German skeptics]
In Germany, too, there was some free thought, the most celebrated case being that of the "godless painters of Nuremberg," Hans Sebald Beham, Bartholomew Beham, and George Penz. The first named expressed some doubts about various Protestant doctrines. Bartholomew went further, asserting that baptism was a human device, that the Scriptures could not be believed and that the preaching he had heard was but idle talk, producing no fruit in the life of the preacher himself; he recognized no superior authority but that of God. George Penz went further still, for while he admitted the existence of God he asserted that his nature was unknowable, and that he could believe neither in Christ nor in the Scriptures nor in the sacraments. The men were banished from the city.
[Sidenote: French skeptics]
In France, as in Italy, the opening of the century saw signs of increasing skepticism in the frequent {629} trials of heretics who denied all Christian doctrines and "all principles save natural ones." But a spirit far more dangerous to religion than any mere denial incarnated itself in Rabelais. He did not philosophize, but he poured forth a torrent of the raw material from which philosophies are made. He did not argue or attack; he rose like a flood or a tide until men found themselves either swimming in the sea of mirth and mockery, or else swept off their feet by it. He studied law, theology and medicine; he travelled in Germany and Italy and he read the classics, the schoolmen, the humanists and the heretics. And he found everywhere that nature and life were good and nothing evil in the world save its deniers. To live according to nature he built, in his story, the abbey of Thélème, a sort of hedonist's or anarchist's Utopia where men and women dwell together under the rule, "Do what thou wilt," and which has over its gates the punning invitation: "Cy entrez, vous, qui le saint evangile en sens agile annoncez, quoy qu'on gronde." For Rabelais there was nothing sacred, or even serious in "revealed religion," and God was "that intellectual sphere the center of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere."
Rabelais was not the only Frenchman to burlesque the religious quarrels of the day. Bonaventure des Périers, [Sidenote: Des Périers, d. 1544] in a work called Cymbalum Mundi, introduced Luther under the anagram of Rethulus, a Catholic as Tryocan (i.e., Croyant) and a skeptic as Du Glenier (i.e., Incrédule), debating their opinions in a way that redounded much to the advantage of the last named.