Chapter X: Freethought in the Renaissance (1)

§ 1. THE ITALIAN EVOLUTION

What is called the Renaissance was, broadly speaking, an evolution of the culture forces seen at work in the later "Middle Ages," newly fertilized by the recovery of classic literature; and we shall have to revert at several points of our survey to what we have been considering as "medieval" in order to perceive the "new birth." The term is inconveniently vague, and is made to cover different periods, sometimes extending from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, sometimes signifying only the fifteenth. It seems reasonable to apply it, as regards Italy, to the period in which southern culture began to outgo that of France, and kept its lead--that is, from the end of the fourteenth century [1669] to the time of the Counter-Reformation. That is a comparatively distinct sociological era.

Renascent Italy is, after ancient Greece, the great historical illustration of the sociological law that the higher civilizations arise through the passing-on of seeds of culture from older to newer societies, under conditions that specially foster them and give them freer growth. The straitened and archaic pictorial art of Byzantium, unprogressive in the hidebound life of the Eastern Empire, developed in the free and striving Italian communities till it paralleled the sculpture of ancient Greece; and it is to be said for the Church that, however she might stifle rational thought, she economically elicited the arts of painting and architecture (statuary being tabooed as too much associated with pagan worships), even as Greek religion had promoted architecture and sculpture. By force, however, of the tendency of the arts to keep religion anthropomorphic where deeper culture is lacking, popular belief in Renaissance Italy was substantially on a par with that of polytheistic Greece.

Before the general recovery of ancient literature, the main motives to rationalism, apart from the tendency of the Aristotelian philosophy to set up doubts about creation and Providence and a future state, were (1) the spectacle of the competing creed of Islam, [1670] made known to the Italians first by intercourse with the Moors, later by the Crusades; and further and more fully by the Saracenized culture of Sicily and commercial intercourse with the east; (2) the spectacle of the strife of creeds within Christendom; [1671] and (3) the spectacle of the worldliness and moral insincerity of the bulk of the clergy. It is in that atmosphere that the Renaissance begins; and it may be said that freethought stood veiled beside its cradle.

In such an atmosphere, even on the ecclesiastical side, demand for "reforms" naturally made headway; and the Council of Constance (1414-1418) was convened to enact many besides the ending of the schism. [1672] But the Council itself was followed by seven hundred prostitutes; [1673] and its relation to the intellectual life was defined by its bringing about, on a charge of heresy, the burning of John Huss, who had come under a letter of safe-conduct from the emperor. The baseness of the act was an enduring blot on the Church; and a hundred years later, in a Germany with small goodwill to Bohemia, Luther made it one of his foremost indictments of the hierarchy. But in the interim the spirit of reform had come to nothing. Cut off from much of the force that was needed to effect any great moral revolution in the Church, the reforming movement soon fell away, [1674] and the Church was left to ripen for later and more drastic treatment.

How far, nevertheless, anti-clericalism could go among the scholarly class even in Italy is seen in the career of one of the leading humanists of the Renaissance, Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457). In the work of his youth, De Voluptate et Vero Bono, a hardy vindication of aggressive Epicureanism--at a time when the title of Epicurean stood for freethinker [1675]--he plainly sets up a rationalist standard, affirming that science is founded on reason and Nature, and that Nature is God. Not content with a theoretic defiance of the faith, he violently attacked the Church. It was probably to the protection of Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, who though pious was not pro-clerical, [1676] that Valla was able to do what he did, above all to write his famous treatise, De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione, wherein he definitely proved once for all that the "donation" in question was a fiction. [1677] Such an opinion had been earlier maintained at the Council of Basle by Æneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II, and before him by the remarkable Nicolaus of Cusa; [1678] but when the existence of Valla's work was known he had to fly from Rome afresh (1443) to Naples, where he had previously been protected for seven years. Applying the same critical spirit to more sacrosanct literature, he impugned the authenticity of the Apostles' Creed, and of the letter of Abgarus to Jesus Christ, given by Eusebius; proceeding further to challenge many of the mistranslations in the Vulgate. [1679] For his untiring propaganda he was summoned before the Inquisition at Naples, but as usual was protected by the king, whom he satisfied by professing faith in the dogmas of the Church, as distinguished from ecclesiastical history and philology.

It was characteristic of the life of Italy, hopelessly committed on economic grounds to the Church, that Valla finally sought and found reconciliation with the papacy. He knew that his safety at Naples depended on the continued anti-papalism of the throne; he yearned for the society of Rome; and his heart was all the while with the cause of Latin scholarship rather than with that of a visionary reformation. In his as in so many cases, accordingly, intellectual rectitude gave way to lower interests; and he made unblushing offers of retractation to cardinals and pope. In view of the extreme violence of his former attacks, [1680] it is not surprising that the reigning Pope, Eugenius IV, refused to be appeased; but on the election of Nicholas V (1447) he was sent for; and he died secretary to the Curia and Canon of St. John Lateran. [1681]

Where so much of anti-clericalism could find harbourage within the Church, there was naturally no lack of it without; and from the period of Boccaccio till the Catholic reaction after the Reformation a large measure of anti-clerical feeling is a constant feature in Italian life. It was so ingrained that the Church had on the whole to leave it alone. From pope to monk the mass of the clergy had forfeited respect; and gibes at their expense were household words, [1682] and the basis of popular songs. Tommaso Guardati of Salerno, better known as Masuccio, attacks all orders of clergy in his collection of tales with such fury that only the protection of the court of Naples could well have saved him; and yet he was a good Catholic. [1683] The popular poetic literature, with certain precautions, carried the anti-clerical spirit as far as to parade a humorous non-literary skepticism, putting in the mouths of the questionable characters in its romances all manner of anti-religious opinions which it would be unsafe to print as one's own, but which in this way reached appreciative readers who were more or less in sympathy with the author's sentiments and stratagems. The Morgante Maggiore of Pulci (1488) is the great type of such early Voltairean humour: [1684] it revives the spirit of the Goliards, and passes unscathed in the new Renaissance world, where the earlier Provençal impiety had gone the way of the Inquisition bonfire, books and men alike. Beneath its mockery there is a constant play of rational thought, and every phase of contemporary culture is glanced at in the spirit of always unembittered humour which makes Pulci "the most lovable among the great poets of the Renaissance." [1685] It is noteworthy that Pulci is found affirming the doctrine of an Antipodes with absolute openness, and with impunity, over a hundred years before Galileo. This survival of ancient pagan science seems to have been obscurely preserved all through the Middle Ages. In the eighth century, as we have seen, the priest Feargal or Vergilius, of Bavaria, was deposed from his office by the Pope, on the urging of St. Boniface, for maintaining it; but he was reinstated, died a bishop, and became a saint; and not only that doctrine, but that of the two-fold motion of the earth, was affirmed with impunity before Pulci by Nicolaus of Cusa [1686] (d. 1464); though in the fourteenth century Nicolaus of Autricuria had to recant his teaching of the atomistic theory. [1687] As Pulci had specially satirized the clergy and ecclesiastical miracles, his body was refused burial in consecrated ground; but the general temper was such as to save him from clerical enmity up to that point.

The Inquisition too was now greatly enfeebled throughout central and northern as well as southern Italy. In 1440 the materialist, mathematician, and astrologer Amadeo de' Landi, of Milan, was accused of heresy by the orthodox Franciscans. Not only was he acquitted, but his chief accuser was condemned in turn to make public retractation, which he however declined to do. [1688] Fifty years later the Inquisition was still nearly powerless. In 1497 we find a freethinking physician at Bologna, Gabriele de Salò, protected by his patrons against its wrath, although he "was in the habit of maintaining that Christ was not God, but the son of Joseph and Mary ...; that by his cunning he had deceived the world; that he may have died on the cross on account of crimes which he had committed," [1689] and so forth. Nineteen years before, Galeotto Marcio had come near being burned for writing that any man who lived uprightly according to his own conscience would go to heaven, whatever his faith; and it needed the Pope, Sixtus IV, his former pupil, to save him from the Inquisition. [1690] Others, who went further, ran similar risks; and in 1500 Giorgio da Novara was burned at Bologna, presumptively for denying the divinity of Jesus. [1691] A bishop of Aranda, however, is said to have done the same with impunity, in the same year, [1692] besides rejecting hell and purgatory, and denouncing indulgences as a device of the popes to fill their pockets.

During this period too the philosophy of Averroës, as set forth in his "Great Commentary" on Aristotle, was taught in North Italy with an outspokenness not before known. Gaetano of Siena began to lecture on the Commentary at Padua in 1436; it was in part printed there in 1472; and from 1471 to 1499 Nicoletto Vernias seems to have taught, in the Paduan chair of philosophy, the Averroïst doctrine of the world-soul, thus virtually denying the Christian doctrine of immortality. Violent opposition was raised when his pupil Niphus (Nifo) printed similar doctrine in a treatise De Intellectu et Dæmonibus (1492); but the professors when necessary disclaimed the more dangerous tenets of Averroïsm. [1693] Nifo it was who put into print the maxim of his tribe: Loquendum est ut plures, sententiendum ut pauci--"think with the few; speak with the majority." [1694]

As in ancient Greece, humorous blasphemy seems to have fared better than serious unbelief. [1695] As is remarked by Hallam, the number of vindications of Christianity produced in Italy in the fifteenth century proves the existence of much unbelief; [1696] and it is clear that, apart from academic doubt, there was abundant freethinking among men of the world. [1697] Erasmus was astonished at the unbelief he found in high quarters in Rome. One ecclesiastic undertook to prove to him from Pliny that there is no future state; others openly derided Christ and the apostles; and many avowed to him that they had heard eminent papal functionaries blaspheming the Mass. [1698] The biographer of Pope Paul II has recorded how that pontiff found in his own court, among certain young men, the opinion that faith rested rather on trickeries of the saints (sanctorum astutiis) than on evidence; which opinion the Pope eradicated. [1699] But in the career of Perugino (1446-1524), who from being a sincerely religious painter became a skeptic in his wrath against the Church which slew Savonarola, [1700] we have evidence of a movement of things which no papal fiat could arrest.

As to the beliefs of the great artists in general we have little information. Employed as they so often were in painting religious subjects for the churches, they must as a rule have conformed outwardly; and the artistic temper is more commonly credent than skeptical. But in the case of one of the greatest, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), we have evidence of a continual play of critical scrutiny on the world, and a continual revolt against mere authority, which seem incompatible with any acceptance of Christian dogma. In his many notes, unpublished till modern times, his universal genius plays so freely upon so many problems that he cannot be supposed to have ignored those of religion. His stern appraisement of the mass of men [1701] carries with it no evangelical qualifications; his passion for knowledge is not Christian; [1702] and his reiterated rejection of the principle of authority in science [1703] and in literature [1704] tells of a spirit which, howsoever it might practise reticence, cannot have been inwardly docile to either priesthood or tradition. In all his reflections upon philosophic and scientific themes he is, in the scientific sense, materialistic--that is, inductive, studious of experiment, insistent upon tangible data. [1705] "Wisdom is daughter of experience"; [1706] "truth is the daughter of time"; [1707] "there is no effect in Nature without a reason"; [1708] "all our knowledge originates in sensations" [1709]--such are the dicta he accumulates in an age of superstition heightened by the mutability of life, of ecclesiastical tyranny tempered only by indifferentism, of faith in astrology and amulets, of benumbing tradition in science and philosophy. On the problem of the phenomena of fossil shells he pronounces with a searching sagacity of inference [1710] that seems to reveal at once the extent to which the advance of science has been blocked by pious obscurantism. [1711] In all directions we see the great artist, a century before Bacon, anticipating Bacon's protests and questionings, and this with no such primary bias to religion as Bacon had acquired at his mother's knee. When he turns to the problems of body and spirit he is as dispassionate, as keenly speculative, as over those of external nature. [1712] Of magic he is entirely contemptuous, not in the least on religious grounds, though he glances at these, but simply for the folly of it. [1713] All that tells of religious feeling in him is summed up in a few utterances expressive of a vague theism; [1714] while he has straight thrusts at religious fraud and absurdity. [1715] It is indeed improbable that a mind so necessitated to discourse of its thought, however gifted for prudent silence, can have subsisted without private sympathy from kindred souls. Skepticism was admittedly abundant; and Leonardo of all men can least have failed to reckon with its motives.

Perhaps the most fashionable form of quasi-freethinking in the Italy of the fifteenth century was that which prevailed in the Platonic Academy of Florence in the period, though the chief founder of the Academy, Marsilio Ficino, wrote a defence of Christianity, and his most famous adherent, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, planned another. Renaissance Platonism began with the Greek Georgios Gemistos, surnamed Plethon because of his devotion to Plato, which was such as to scandalize common Christians and exasperate Aristotelians. The former had the real grievance that his system ostensibly embodied polytheism and logically involved pantheism; [1716] and one of his antagonists, Gennadios Georgios Scolarios, who became patriarch of Constantinople, caused his book On Laws to be burned; [1717] but the allegation of his Aristotelian enemy and countryman, Georgios Trapezuntios, that he prayed to the sun as creator of the world, [1718] is only one of the polemical amenities of the period. Ostensibly he was a believing Christian, stretching Christian love to accommodate the beliefs of Plato; but it was not zeal for orthodoxy that moved Cosimo dei Medici, at Florence, to embrace the new Platonism, and train up Marsilio Ficino to be its prophet. The furor allegoricus which inspired the whole school [1719] was much more akin to ancient Gnosticism than to orthodox Christianity, and constantly points to pantheism [1720] as the one philosophic solution of its ostensible polytheism. When, too, Ficino undertakes to vindicate Christianity against the unbelievers in his Della Religione Cristiana, "the most solid arguments that he can find in its favour are the answers of the Sibyls, and the prophecies of the coming of Jesus Christ to be found in Virgil, Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry." [1721]

How far such a spirit of expatiation and speculation, however visionary and confused, tended to foster heresy is seen in the brief career of the once famous young Pico della Mirandola, Ficino's wealthy pupil. Parading a portentous knowledge of tongues [1722] and topics at the age of twenty-four, he undertook (1486) to maintain a list of nine hundred Conclusiones or propositions at Rome against all comers, and to pay their expenses. Though he had obtained the permission of the Pope, Innocent VIII, the challenge speedily elicited angry charges of heresy against certain of the theses, and the Pope had to stop the proceedings and issue an ecclesiastical commission of inquiry. Some of the propositions were certainly ill adjusted to Catholic ideas, in particular the sayings that "neither the cross of Christ nor any image is to be adored adoratione latriæ"--with worship; that no one believes what he believes merely because he wishes to; and that Jesus did not physically descend into hell. [1723] Pico, retiring to Florence, defended himself in an Apologia, which provoked fresh outcry; whereupon he was summoned to proceed to Rome; and though the powerful friendship of Lorenzo dei Medici procured a countermand of the order, it was not till 1496 that he received, from Alexander VI, a full papal remission.

Among the unachieved projects of his later life, which ended at the age of thirty-one, was that of a treatise Adversus Hostes Ecclesiæ, to be divided into seven sections, the first dealing with "The avowed and open enemies of Christianity," and the second with "Atheists and those who reject every religious system upon their own reasoning"; and the others with Jews, Moslems, idolaters, heretics, and unrighteous believers. [1724] The vogue of unbelief thus signified was probably increased by the whole speculative habit of Pico's own school, [1725] which tended only less than Averroïsm to a pantheism subversive of the Christian creed. It is noteworthy that, while Ficino believed devoutly in astrology, [1726] Pico rejected it, and left among his confused papers a treatise against it which his nephew contrived to transcribe and publish; [1727] but it does not appear that this served either the cause of religion or that of science. The educated Italian world, while political independence lasted, remained in various degrees freethinking, pantheistic, and given to astrology, no school or teacher combining rationalism in philosophy with sound scientific methods.

One of the great literary figures of the later Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), is the standing proof of the divorce of the higher intelligence of Italy from the faith as well as the cause of the Church before the Reformation. With this divorce he expressly charges the Church itself, giving as the first proof of its malfeasance that the peoples nearest Rome were the least religious. [1728] To him the Church was the supreme evil in Italian politics, [1729] the "stone in the wound." In a famous passage he gives his opinion that "our religion, having shown us the truth and the true way, makes us esteem less political honour (l'onore del mondo)"; and that whereas the pagan religion canonized only men crowned with public honour, as generals and statesmen, "our religion has glorified rather the humble and contemplative men than the active," placing the highest good in humility and abjection, teaching rather to suffer than to do, and so making the world debile and ready to be a prey to scoundrels. [1730] The passage which follows, putting the blame on men for thus misreading their religion, is a fair sample of the grave mockery with which the men of that age veiled their unfaith. [1731] Machiavelli was reputed in his own world an atheist; [1732] and he certainly was no religionist. He indeed never avows atheism, but neither did any other writer of the epoch; [1733] and the whole tenour of his writings is that of a man who had at least put aside the belief in a prayer-answering deity; [1734] though, with the intellectual arbitrariness which still affected all the thought of his age, he avows a belief that all great political changes are heralded by prodigies, celestial signs, prophecies, or revelations [1735]--here conforming to the ordinary superstition of his troublous time.

It belongs, further, to the manifold self-contradiction of the Renaissance that, holding none of the orthodox religious beliefs, he argues insistently and at length for the value and importance of religion, however untrue, as a means to political strength. Through five successive chapters of his Discourses on Livy he presses and illustrates his thesis, praising Numa as a sagacious framer of useful fictions, and as setting up new and false beliefs which made for the unification and control of the Roman people. The argument evolved with such strange candour is, of course, of the nature of so much Renaissance science, an à priori error: there was no lack of religious faith and fear in primitive Rome before the age of Numa; and the legend concerning him is a product of the very primordial mythopoiesis which Machiavelli supposes him to have set on foot. It is in the spirit of that fallacious theory of a special superinduced religiosity in Romans [1736] that the great Florentine proceeds to charge the Church with having made the Italians religionless and vicious (senza religione e cattivi). Had he lived a century or two later he might have seen in the case of zealously believing Spain a completer political and social prostration than had fallen in his day on Italy, and this alongside of regeneration in an unbelieving France. But indeed it was the bitterness of spirit of a suffering patriot looking back yearningly to an idealized Rome, rather than the insight of the author of The Prince, [1737] that inspired his reasoning on the political uses of religion; for at the height of his exposition he notes, with his keen eye for fact, how the most strenuous use of religious motive had failed to support the Samnites against the cool courage of Romans led by a rationalizing general; [1738] and he notes, too, with a sardonic touch of hopefulness, how Savonarola had contrived to persuade the people of contemporary Florence that he had intercourse with deity. [1739] Italy then had faith enough and to spare.

Such argument, in any case, even if untouched by the irony which tinges Machiavelli's, could never avail to restore faith; men cannot become believers on the motive of mere belief in the value of belief; and the total effect of Machiavelli's manifold reasoning on human affairs, with its startling lucidity, its constant insistence on causation, its tacit negation of every notion of Providence, must have been, in Italy as elsewhere, rather to prepare the way for inductive science than to rehabilitate supernaturalism, even among those who assented to his theory of Roman development. In his hands the method of science begins to emerge, turned to the most difficult of its tasks, before Copernicus had applied it to the simpler problem of the motion of the solar system. After centuries in which the name of Aristotle had been constantly invoked to small scientific purpose, this man of the world, who knew little or nothing of Aristotle's Politics, [1740] exhibits the spirit of the true Aristotle for the first time in the history of Christendom; and it is in his land after two centuries of his influence that modern sociology begins its next great stride in the work of Vico.

He is to be understood, of course, as the product of the moral and intellectual experience of the Renaissance, which prepared his audience for him. Guicciardini, his contemporary, who in comparison was unblamed for irreligion, though an even warmer hater of the papacy, has left in writing the most explicit avowals of incredulity as to the current conceptions of the supernatural, and declares concerning miracles that as they occur in every religion they prove none. [1741] At the same time he professes firm faith in Christianity; [1742] and others who would not have joined him there were often as inconsistent in the ready belief they gave to magic and astrology. The time was, after all, one of artistic splendour and scientific and critical ignorance; [1743] and its freethought had the inevitable defects that ignorance entails. Thus the belief in the reality of witchcraft, sometimes discarded by churchmen, [1744] is sometimes maintained by heretics. Rejected by John of Salisbury in the twelfth century, and by the freethinking Pietro of Abano in 1303, it was affirmed and established by Thomas Aquinas, asserted by Gregory IX, and made a motive for uncounted slaughters by the Inquisition. In 1460 a theologian had been forced to retract, and still punished, for expressing doubt on the subject; and in 1471 Pope Sixtus VI reserved to the papacy the privilege of making and selling the waxen models of limbs used as preservatives against enchantments. In the sixteenth century a whole series of books directed against the belief were put on the Index, and a Jesuit handbook codified the creed. Yet a Minorite friar, Alfonso Spina, pronounced it a heretical delusion, and taught that those burned suffered not for witchcraft but for heresy, [1745] and on the other hand some men of a freethinking turn held it. Thus the progress of rational thought was utterly precarious.

Of the literary freethinking of the later Renaissance the most famous representative is Pomponazzi, or Pomponatius (1462-1525), for whom it has been claimed that he "really initiated the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance." [1746] The Italian Renaissance, however, was in reality near its turning-point when Pomponazzi's treatise on the Immortality of the Soul appeared (1516); and that topic was the commonest in the schools and controversies of that day. [1747] He has been at times spoken of as an Averroïst, on the ground that he denied immortality; but he did so in reality as a disciple of Alexander of Aphrodisias, a rival commentator to Averroës. What is remarkable in his case is not the denial of immortality, which we have seen to be frequent in Dante's time, and more or less implicit in Averroïsm, but his contention that ethics could do very well without the belief [1748]--a thing that it still took some courage to affirm, though the spectacle of the life of the faithful might have been supposed sufficient to win it a ready hearing. Presumably his rationalism, which made him challenge the then canonical authority of the scholasticized Aristotle, went further than his avowed doubts as to a future state; since his profession of obedience to the Church's teaching, and his reiteration of the old academic doctrine of two-fold truth--one truth for science and philosophy, and another for theology [1749]--are as dubious as any in philosophic history. [1750] Of him, or of Lorenzo Valla, more justly than of Petrarch, might it be said that he is the father of modern criticism, since Valla sets on foot at once historical and textual analysis, while Pomponazzi anticipates the treatment given to Biblical miracles by the rationalizing German theologians of the end of the eighteenth century. [1751] He too was a fixed enemy of the clergy; and it was not for lack of will that they failed to destroy him. He happened to be a personal favourite of Leo X, who saw to it that the storm of opposition to Pomponazzi--a storm as much of anger on behalf of Aristotle, who had been shown by him to doubt the immortality of the soul, as on behalf of Christianity--should end in an official farce of reconciliation. [1752] He was however not free to publish his treatises, De Incantationibus and De Fato, Libero Arbitrio, et Prædestinatione. These, completed in 1520, were not printed till after his death, in 1556 and 1557; [1753] and by reason of their greater simplicity, as well as of their less dangerous form of heresy, were much more widely read than the earlier treatise, thus contributing much to the spread of sane thought on the subjects of witchcraft, miracles, and special providences.

Whether his metaphysic on the subject of the immortality of the soul had much effect on popular thought may be doubted. What the Renaissance most needed in both its philosophic and its practical thought was a scientific foundation; and science, from first to last, was more hindered than helped by the environment. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, charges of necromancy against physicians and experimenters were frequently joined with imputations of heresy, and on such charges not a few were burned. [1754] The economic conditions too were all unfavourable to solid research.

When Galileo in 1589 was made Professor of Mathematics at Pisa,
his salary was only 60 scudi (= dollars), while the Professor
of Medicine got 2,000. (Karl von Gebler, Galileo Galilei,
Eng. tr. 1879, p. 9.) At Padua, later, Galileo had 520 florins,
with a prospect of rising to as many scudi. (Letter given
in The Private Life of Galileo, Boston, 1870, p. 61.) The
Grand Duke finally gave him a pension of 1,000 scudi at
Florence. (Id. p. 64.) This squares with Bacon's complaint
(Advancement of Learning, bk. ii; De Augmentis, bk. ii,
ch. i--Works, Routledge ed. pp. 76, 422-23) that, especially
in England, the salaries of lecturers in arts and professions
were injuriously small, and that, further, "among so many noble
foundations of colleges in Europe ... they are all dedicated
to professions, and none left free to the study of arts and
sciences at large." In Italy, however, philosophy was fairly well
endowed. Pomponazzi received a salary of 900 Bolognese lire when
he obtained the chair of Philosophy at Bologna in 1509. (Christie,
essay cited, p. 138.)

Medicine was nearly as dogmatic as theology. Even philosophy was in large part shouldered aside by the financial motives which led men to study law in preference; [1755] and when the revival of ancient literature gained ground it absorbed energy to the detriment of scientific study, [1756] the wealthy amateurs being ready to pay high prices for manuscripts of classics, and for classical teaching; but not for patient investigation of natural fact. The humanists, so-called, were often forces of enlightenment and reform; witness such a type as the high-minded Pomponio Leto (Pomponius Laetus), pupil and successor of Lorenzo Valla, and one of the many "pagan" scholars of the later Renaissance; [1757] but the discipline of mere classical culture was insufficient to make them, as a body, qualified leaders either of thought or action, [1758] in such a society as that of decaying Italy. Only after the fall of Italian liberties, the decay of the Church's wealth and power, the loss of commerce, and the consequent decline of the arts, did men turn to truly scientific pursuits. From Italy, indeed, long after the Reformation, came a new stimulus to freethought which affected all the higher civilization of northern Europe. But the failure to solve the political problem, a failure which led to the Spanish tyranny, meant the establishment of bad conditions for the intellectual as for the social life; and an arrest of freethought in Italy was a necessary accompaniment of the arrest of the higher literature. What remained was the afterglow of a great and energetic period rather than a spirit of inquiry; and we find the old Averroïst scholasticism, in its most pedantic form, lasting at the university of Padua till far into the seventeenth century. "A philosophy," remarks in this connection an esteemed historian, "a mode of thought, a habit of mind, may live on in the lecture-rooms of Professors for a century after it has been abandoned by the thinkers, the men of letters, and the men of the world." [1759] The avowal has its bearings nearer home than Padua.

While it lasted, the light of Italy had shone upon all the thought of Europe. Not only the other nations but the scholars of the Jewish race reflected it; for to the first half of the sixteenth century belongs the Jew Menahem Asariah de Rossi, whose work, Meor Enayim, "Light of the Eyes," is "the first attempt by a Jew to submit the statements of the Talmud to a critical examination, and to question the value of tradition in its historical records." And he did not stand alone among the Jews of Italy; for, while Elijah Delmedigo, at the end of the fifteenth century, was in a didactic Maimonist fashion doubtful of literary tradition, his grandson, Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, flourishing early in the seventeenth century, "wrote various pamphlets of a deeply skeptical character." [1760] That this movement of Jewish rationalism should be mainly limited to the south was inevitable, since there only were Jewish scholars in an intellectual environment. There could be no better testimony to the higher influence of the Italian Renaissance.

§ 2. THE FRENCH EVOLUTION

In the other countries influenced by Italian culture in the sixteenth century the rationalist spirit had various fortune. France, as we saw, had substantially retrograded at the time of the Italian new-birth, her revived militarism no less than her depression by the English conquests having deeply impaired her intellectual life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Thus the true renascence of letters in France began late, and went on during the Reformation period; and all along it showed a tincture of freethought. From the midst of the group who laid the foundations of French Protestantism by translations of the Bible there comes forth the most articulate freethinker of that age, Bonaventure Desperiers, author of the Cymbalum Mundi (1537). Early associated with Calvin and Olivetan in revising the translation of the Bible by Lefèvre d'Etaples (rev. 1535), Desperiers turned away from the Protestant movement, as did Rabelais and Étienne Dolet, caring as little for the new presbyter as for the old priest; and all three were duly accused by the Protestants of atheism and libertinage. [1761] In the same year Desperiers aided Dolet, scholar and printer, to produce his much-praised Commentarii linguæ latinæ; and within two years he had printed his own satire, Cymbalum Mundi, [1762] wherein, by way of pagan dialogues, are allegorically ridiculed the Christian scheme, its miracles, Bible contradictions, and the spirit of persecution, then in full fire in France against the Protestants. In the first dialogue Mercury is sent to Athens by Zeus the Father to have the "Book of the Destinies" rebound--an adaptation of an ancient sarcasm against the Christians by Celsus. [1763] He, robbing others, is robbed of the book, and another (= the New Testament) is put in its place. In the second dialogue figure Rhetulus (= Lutherus) and Cubercus (= Bucerus?), who suppose they have found the main pieces of the philosopher's stone, which Mercury had broken and scattered in the sand of the theatre arena. Protestants and Catholics are thus alike ridiculed. The allegory is not always clear to modern eyes; but there was no question then about its general bearing; and Desperiers, though groom of the chamber (after Clement Marot) to Marguerite of France (later of Navarre), had to fly for his life, as Marot did before him. The first edition of his book, secretly printed at Paris, was seized and destroyed; and the second (1538), printed for him at Lyons, whither he had taken his flight, seems to have had a similar fate. From that time he disappears, probably dying, whether or not by suicide is doubtful, [1764] before 1544, when his miscellaneous works were published. They include his OEuvres Diverses--many of them graceful poems addressed to his royal mistress, Marguerite--which, with his verse translation of the Andria of Terence and his Discours non plus Melancoliques que Divers, make up his small body of work. In the Discours may be seen applied to matters of history and scholarship the same critical spirit that utters itself in the Cymbalum, and the same literary gift; but for orthodoxy his name became a hissing and a byword, and it is only in modern times that French scholarship has recognized in Desperiers the true literary comrade and potential equal of Rabelais and Marot. [1765] The age of Francis was too inclement for such literature as his Cymbalum; and it was much that it spared Gringoire (d. 1544), who, without touching doctrine, satirized in his verse both priests and Protestants.

It is something of a marvel, further, that it spared Rabelais (? 1493-1553), whose enormous raillery so nearly fills up the literary vista of the age for modern retrospect. It has been said by a careful student that "the free and universal inquiry, the philosophic doubt, which were later to work the glory of Descartes, proceed from Rabelais"; [1766] and it is indeed an impression of boundless intellectual curiosity and wholly unfettered thinking that is set up by his entire career. Sent first to the convent school of La Baumette, near Angers, he had there as a schoolfellow Geoffroy d'Estissac, afterwards his patron as Bishop of Maillezais. Sent later to the convent school of Fontenay-le-Comte, he had the luck to have for schoolfellows there the four famous brothers Du Bellay, so well able to protect him in later life; and, forced to spend fifteen years of his young life (1509-24) at Fontenay as a Franciscan monk, he turned the time to account by acquiring an immense erudition, including a knowledge of Greek, then rare. [1767] Naturally the book-lover was not popular among his fellow-monks; and his Greek books were actually confiscated by the chapter, who found in his cell certain writings of Erasmus, [1768] to whom as a scholar he afterwards expressed the deepest intellectual obligations. Thereafter, by the help of his friend d'Estissac, now bishop of the diocese, Rabelais received papal permission to join the order of the Benedictines and to enter the Abbey of Maillezais as a canon regular (1524); but soon after, though he was thus a fully-ordained priest, we find him broken loose, and living for some six years a life of wandering freedom as a secular priest, sometimes with his friend the bishop, winning friends in high places by his learning and his gaiety, everywhere studying and observing. At the bishop's priory of Ligugé he seems to have studied hard and widely. In 1530 he is found at Montpellier, extending his studies in medicine, in which he speedily won distinction, becoming B.M. on December 1, and a lecturer in the following year. He was later esteemed one of the chief anatomists of his day, being one of the first to dissect the human body and to insist on the need of such training for physicians; [1769] and in 1532 [1770] we find him characterized as the "true great universal spirit of this time." [1771] In the same year he published at Lyons, where he was appointed physician to the chief hospital, an edition of the Latin letters of the Ferrarese physician Manardi; and his own commentaries on Galen and Hippocrates, which had a very poor sale. [1772] At Lyons he made the acquaintance of Dolet, Marot, and Desperiers; and his letter (of the same year) to Erasmus (printed as addressed to Bernard de Salignac [1773]) showed afresh how his intellectual sympathies went.

About 1532 he produced his Gargantua and Pantagruel, the first two books of his great humoristic romance; and in 1533 began his series of almanacks, continued till 1550, presumably as printer's hack-work. From the fragments which have been preserved, they appear to have been entirely serious in tone, one containing a grave theistic protest against all astrological prediction. Along with the almanack of 1533, however, he produced a Pantagruelian Prognostication; and this, which alone has been preserved entire, [1774] passes hardy ridicule on astrology, [1775] one of the most popular superstitions of the day, among high and low alike. Almost immediately the Sorbonne was on his track, condemning his Pantagruel in 1533. [1776] A journey soon afterwards to Rome, in the company of his friend Bishop Jean du Bellay, the French ambassador, may have saved him some personal experience of persecution. Two years later, when the Bishop went to Rome to be made cardinal, Rabelais again accompanied him; and he appears to have been a favourite alike with Pope Clement VII and Paul III. At the end of 1535 we find him, in a letter to his patron, the bishop of Maillezais, scoffing at the astrological leanings of the new Pope, Paul III. [1777] Nonetheless, upon a formal Supplicatio pro apostasia, he obtained from the Pope in 1536 an absolution for his breach of his monastic vows, with permission to practise medicine in a Benedictine monastery. Shortly before, his little son Théodule had died; [1778] and it may have been grief that inspired such a desire: in any case, the papal permission to turn monk again was never used, [1779] though the pardon was doubtless serviceable. Taking his degree as doctor at Montpellier in May, 1537, he there lectured for about a year on anatomy; and in the middle of 1538 he recommenced a wandering life, [1780] practising in turn at Narbonne, Castres, and Lyons. Then, after becoming a Benedictine canon of St. Maur in 1540, we find him in Piedmont from 1540 to 1543, under the protection of the viceroy, Guillaume de Bellay. [1781]

During this period the frequent reprints of the first two books of his main work, though never bearing his name, brought upon him the denunciations alike of priests and Protestants. Ramus, perhaps in revenge for being caricatured as Raminagrobis, pronounced him an atheist. [1782] Calvin, who had once been his friend, had in his book De Scandalis angrily accused him of libertinage, profanity, and atheism; and henceforth, like Desperiers, he was about as little in sympathy with Protestantism as with the zealots of Rome.

Thus assailed, Rabelais had seen cause, in an edition of 1542, to modify a number of the hardier utterances in the original issues of the first two books of his Pantagruel, notably his many epithets aimed at the Sorbonne. [1783] In the reprints there are substituted for Biblical names some drawn from heathen mythology; expressions too strongly savouring of Calvinism are withdrawn; and disrespectful allusions to the kings of France are elided. In his concern to keep himself safe with the Sorbonne he even made a rather unworthy attack [1784] (1542) on his former friend Étienne Dolet for the mere oversight of reprinting one of his books without deleting passages which Rabelais had expunged; [1785] but no expurgation could make his évangile, as he called it, [1786] a Christian treatise, or keep for him an orthodox reputation; and it was with much elation that he obtained in 1545 from King Francis--whose private reader was his friend Duchâtel, Bishop of Tulle--a privilege to print the third book of Pantagruel, which he issued in 1546, signed for the first time with his name, and prefaced by a cry of jovial defiance to the "petticoated devils" of the Sorbonne. They at once sought to convict him of fresh blasphemies; but even the thrice-repeated substitution of an n for an m in âme, making "ass" out of "soul," was carried off, by help of Bishop Duchâtel, as a printer's error; and the king, having laughed like other readers, maintained the imprimatur. But although it gave Rabelais formal leave to reprint the first and second books, he was careful for the time not to do so, leaving the increasing risk to be run by whoso would.

It was on the death of Francis in 1547 that Rabelais ran his greatest danger, having to fly to Metz, where for a time he acted as salaried physician of the city. About this time he seems to have written the fourth and fifth books of Pantagruel; and to the treatment he had suffered at Catholic hands has been ascribed the reversion to Calvinistic ideas noted in the fifth book. [1787] In 1549, however, on the birth of a son to Henri II, his friend Cardinal Bellay returned to power, and Rabelais to court favour with him. The derider of astrology did not scruple to cast a prosperous horoscope for the infant prince--justifying by strictly false predictions his own estimate of the art, since the child died in the cradle. There was now effected the dramatic scandal of the appointment of Rabelais in 1550 to two parish cures, one of which, Meudon, has given him his most familiar sobriquet. He seems to have left both to be served by vicars; [1788] but the wrath of the Church was so great that early in 1552 he resigned them; [1789] proceeding immediately afterwards to publish the fourth book of Pantagruel, for which he had duly obtained official privilege. As usual, the Sorbonne rushed to the pursuit; and the Parlement of Paris forbade the sale of the book despite the royal permission. That permission, however, was reaffirmed; and this, the most audacious of all the writings of Rabelais, went forth freely throughout France, carrying the war into the enemies' camp, and assailing alike Protestants and churchmen. In the following year, his work done, he died.

It is difficult to estimate the intellectual effect of his performance, which was probably much greater at the end of the century than during his life. Patericke, the English translator of Gentillet's famous Discours against Machiavelli (1576), points to Rabelais among the French and Agrippa (an odd parallel) among the Germans as the standard-bearers of the whole train of atheists and scoffers. "Little by little, that which was taken in the beginning for jests turned to earnest, and words into deeds." [1790] Rabelais's vast innuendoes by way of jests about the people of Ruach (the Spirit) who lived solely on wind; [1791] his quips about the "reverend fathers in devil," of the "diabological faculty"; [1792] his narratives about the Papefigues and Papimanes; [1793] and his gibes at the Decretals, [1794] were doubtless enjoyed by many good Catholics otherwise placated by his attacks on the "demoniacal Calvins, impostors of Geneva"; [1795] and so careful was he on matters of dogma that it remains impossible to say with confidence whether or not he finally believed in a future state. [1796] That he was a deist or Unitarian seems the reasonable inference as to his general creed; [1797] but there also he throws out no negations--even indicates a genial contempt for the philosophe ephectique et pyrrhonien [1798] who opposes a halting doubt to two contrary doctrines. In any case, he was anathema to the heresy-hunters of the Sorbonne, and only powerful protection could have saved him.

Dolet (1508-1546) was certainly much less of an unbeliever [1799] than Rabelais; [1800] but where Rabelais could with ultimate impunity ridicule the whole machinery of the Church, [1801] Dolet, after several iniquitous prosecutions, in which his jealous rivals in the printing business took part, was finally done to death in priestly revenge [1802] for his youthful attack on the religion of inquisitorial Toulouse, where gross pagan superstition and gross orthodoxy went hand in hand. [1803] He certainly "lived a life of sturt and strife." Born at Orléans, he studied in his boyhood at Paris; later at Padua, under Simon Villanovanus, whom he heard converse with Sir Thomas More; then, at 21, for a year at Venice, where he was secretary to Langeac, the French Bishop of Limoges. It was at Toulouse, where he went in 1532 to study law, that he began his quarrels and his troubles. In that year, and in that town, the young Jean de Caturce, a lecturer in the school of law, was burned alive on a trivial charge of heresy; and Dolet witnessed the tragedy. [1804] Previously there had been a wholesale arrest of suspected Lutherans--"advocates, procureurs, ecclesiastics of all sorts, monks, friars, and curés." [1805] Thirty-two saved themselves by flight; but among those arrested was Jean de Boysonne, the most learned and the ablest professor in the university, much admired by Rabelais, [1806] and afterwards the most intimate friend of Dolet. It was his sheer love of letters that brought upon him the charge of heresy; [1807] but he was forced publicly to abjure ten Lutheran heresies charged upon him. The students of the time were divided in the old fashion into "nations," and formed societies as such; and Dolet, chosen in 1534 as "orator" of the "French" group, as distinct from the Gascons and the Tolosans, in the course of a quarrel of the societies delivered two Latin orations, in one of which he vilipended alike the cruelty and the superstitions of Toulouse. A number of the leading bigots of the place were attacked; and Dolet was after an interval of some months thrown into prison, charged with exciting a riot and with contempt of the Parlement of Toulouse. His incarceration did not last long; but never thereafter was he safe; and in the remaining thirteen years of his life he was five more times in prison, for nearly five years in all. [1808]

After he had settled at Lyons, and produced his Commentaries, he had the bad fortune to kill an enemy who drew sword upon him; and the pardon he obtained from the king through the influence of Marguerite of Navarre remained technically unratified for six years, during which time he was only provisionally at liberty, being actually in prison for a short time in 1537. Apart from this episode he showed himself both quarrelsome and vainglorious, alienating friends who had done much for him; but his enemies were worse spirits than he. The power of the man drove him to perpetual production no less than to strife; and his mere activity as a printer went far to destroy him.

"No calling was more hateful to the friends of bigotry and
superstition than that of a printer" (Christie, as cited,
p. 387). Nearly all the leading printers of France and Germany
were either avowedly in sympathy with Protestant heresy or
suspected of being so (id. p. 388); and the issue of an edict
by King Francis in 1535 for the suppression of printing was at
the instance of the Sorbonne. We shall see that in Germany the
support of the printers, and their hostility to the priests and
monks, contributed greatly to the success of Lutheranism.

In 1542 he was indicted as a heretic, but really for publishing Protestant books of devotion and French translations of the Bible. Among the formal offences charged were: (1) his having in his Cato Christianus cited as the second commandment the condemnation of all images; (2) his use of the term "fate" in the sense of predestination; (3) his substitution of habeo fidem for credo; (4) the eating of flesh in Lent; and (5) the act of taking a walk during the performance of mass. [1809] On this indictment the two inquisitors Orry and Faye delivered him over to the secular arm for execution. Again he secured the King's pardon (1543), through the mediation of Pierre Duchâtel, the good Bishop of Tulle; but the ecclesiastical resistance was such that, despite Dolet's formal recantation, it required a more plenary pardon, the express orders of the King, and three official letters to secure his release after a year's detention. [1810]

That was, however, swiftly followed by a final and successful prosecution. By a base device two parcels were made of prohibited books printed by Dolet and of Protestant books issued at Geneva; and these, bearing his name in large, were forwarded to Paris. The parcels were seized, and he was again arrested, early in January, 1544. He contrived to escape to Piedmont; but, returning secretly after six months to print documents of defence, he was discovered and sent to prison in Paris. The last pardon having covered all previous writings, the prosecutors sought in his translation of the pseudo-Platonic dialogues Axiochus and Hipparchus, printed with his last vindication; and, finding a slight over-emphasis of Sokrates's phrase describing the death of the body ("thou shalt no longer be," rendered by "thou shalt no longer be anything at all"), pronounced this a wilful propounding of a heresy, though in fact there had been no denial of the doctrine of immortality. [1811] This time the prey was held. After Dolet had been in prison for twenty months the Parlement of Paris ratified the sentence of death; and he was burned alive on August 3, 1546. The utter wickedness of the whole process [1812] at least serves to relieve by neighbourhood the darkness of the stains cast on Protestantism by the crimes of Calvin.