Chapter X: Freethought in the Renaissance (2)

The whole of the clerical opposition to the new learning at this period is not unjustly to be characterized as a malignant cabal of ignorance against knowledge. In Germany as in France real learning was substantially on the side of the persecuted writers. When, in March of 1537, Dolet was entertained at a banquet to celebrate the pardon granted to him by the king for his homicide at Lyons on the last day of the previous year, there came to it, by Dolet's own account, the chief lights of learning in France--Budé, the chief Greek scholar of his time; Berauld, his nearest compeer; Danès and Toussain, both pupils of Budé and the first royal professors of Greek at Paris; Marot, "the French Maro"; Rabelais, then regarded as a great new light in medicine; Voulté, [1813] and others. The men of enlightenment at first instinctively drew together, recognizing that on all hands they were surrounded by rabid enemies, who were the enemies of knowledge. But soon the stresses of the time drove them asunder. Voulté, who in this year was praising Rabelais in Latin epigrams, was attacking him in the next as an impious disciple of Lucian; [1814] and, after having warmly befriended Dolet, was impeaching him, not without cause, as an ingrate. It was an age of passion and violence; and Voulté was himself assassinated in 1542 "by a man who had been unsuccessful in a law-suit against him." [1815]

Infamous as was the cruelty with which Dolet was persecuted to the death, his execution was but a drop in the sea of blood then being shed in France by the Church. The king, sinking under his maladies, had become the creature of the priests, who in defiance of the Chancellor obtained his signature (1545) to a decree for a renewed persecution of the heretics of the Vaudois; and an army, followed by a Catholic mob and accompanied by the papal vice-legate of Avignon, burst upon the doomed territory and commenced to burn and slay. Women captured were violated and then thrown over precipices; and twice over, when a multitude of fugitives in a fortified place surrendered on the assurance that their lives and property would be spared, the commander ordered that all should be put to death. When old soldiers refused to enact such an infamy, others joyfully obeyed, the mob aiding; and among the women were committed, as usual, "all the crimes of which hell could dream." Three towns were destroyed, 3,000 persons massacred, 256 executed, six or seven hundred more sent to the galleys, and many children sold as slaves. [1816] Thus was the faith vindicated and safeguarded.

Of the freethought of such an age there could be no adequate record. Its tempestuous energy, however, implies not a little of private unbelief; and at a time when in England, two generations behind France in point of literary evolution, there was, as we shall see, a measure of rationalism among religionists, there must have been at least as much in the land of Rabelais and Desperiers. The work of Guillaume Postell, De causis seu principiis et originibus Naturæ contra Atheos, published in 1552, testifies to kinds of unbelief that outwent the doubt of Rabelais; though Postell's general extravagance discounts all of his utterances. It is said of Guillaume Pellicier (1527-1568), Bishop of Montpellier, who first turned Protestant and afterwards, according to Gui Patin, atheist, that he would have been burned but for the fact of his consecration. [1817] And the English chroniclers preserve a scandal concerning an anonymous atheist, worded as follows: "1539. This yeare, in October, died in the Universitie of Parris, in France, a great doctor, which said their was no God, and had bene of that opinion synce he was twentie yeares old, and was above fouerscore yeares olde when he died. And all that tyme had kept his error secrett, and was esteamed for one of the greatest clarkes in all the Universitie of Parris, and his sentence was taken and holden among the said studentes as firme as scripture, which shewed, when he was asked why he had not shewed his opinion till his death, he answered that for feare of death he durst not, but when he knew that he should die he said their was no lief to come after this lief, and so died miserably to his great damnation." [1818]

Among the eminent ones then surmised to lean somewhat to unbelief was the sister of King Francis, Marguerite of Navarre, whom we have noted as a protectress of the pantheistic Libertini, denounced by Calvin. She is held to have been substantially skeptical until her forty-fifth year; [1819] though her final religiousness seems also beyond doubt. [1820] In her youth she bravely protected the Protestants from the first persecution of 1523 onwards; and the strongly Protestant drift of her Miroir de l'âme pécheresse exasperated the Catholic theologians; but after the Protestant violences of 1546 she seems to have sided with her brother against the Reform. [1821] The strange taste of the Heptaméron, of which again her part-authorship seems certain, [1822] constitutes a moral paradox not to be solved save by recognizing in her a woman of genius, whose alternate mysticism and bohemianism expressed a very ancient duality in human nature.

A similar mixture will explain the intellectual life of the poet Ronsard. A persecutor of the Huguenots, [1823] he was denounced as an atheist by two of their ministers; [1824] and the pagan fashion in which he handled Christian things scandalized his own side, albeit he was hostile to Rabelais. But though the spirit of the French Renaissance, so eagerly expressed in the Défense et Illustration de la langue françoise of Joachim du Bellay (1549), is at its outset as emancipated as that of the Italian, we find Ronsard in his latter years edifying the pious. [1825] Any ripe and consistent rationalism, indeed, was then impossible. One of the most powerful minds of the age was Bodin (1530-1596), whose République is one of the most scientific treatises on government between Aristotle and our own age, and whose Colloquium Heptaplomeres [1826] is no less original an outline of a naturalist [1827] philosophy. It consists of six dialogues, in which seven men take part, setting forth the different religious standpoints of Jew, Christian, pagan, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic, the whole leading up to a doctrine of tolerance and universalism. Bodin was repeatedly and emphatically accused of unbelief by friends and foes; [1828] and his rationalism on some heads is beyond doubt; yet he not only held by the belief in witchcraft, but wrote a furious treatise in support of it; [1829] and he dismissed the system of Copernicus as too absurd for discussion. [1830] He also formally vetoes all discussion on faith, declaring it to be dangerous to religion; [1831] and by these conformities he probably saved himself from ecclesiastical attack. [1832] Nonetheless, he essentially stood for religious toleration: the new principle that was to change the face of intellectual life. A few liberal Catholics shared it with him to some extent [1833] long before St. Bartholomew's Day; eminent among them being L'Hopital, [1834] whose humanity, tolerance, and concern for practical morality and the reform of the Church brought upon him the charge of atheism. He was, however, a believing Catholic. [1835] Deprived of power, his edict of tolerance repealed, he saw the long and ferocious struggle of Catholics and Huguenots renewed, and crowned by the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day (1572). Broken-hearted, and haunted by that monstrous memory, he died within six months.

Two years later there was put to death at Paris, by hanging and burning, on the charge of atheism, Geoffroi Vallée, a man of good family in Orléans. Long before, at the age of sixteen, he had written a freethinking treatise entitled La Béatitude des Chrétiens, ou le fléau de la foy--a discussion between a Huguenot, a Catholic, a libertin, an Anabaptist and an atheist. He had been the associate of Ronsard, who renounced him, and helped, it is said, to bring him to execution. [1836] It is not unlikely that a similar fate would have overtaken the famous Protestant scholar and lexicographer, Henri Estienne (1532-1598), had he not died unexpectedly. His false repute of being "the prince of atheists" [1837] and the "Pantagruel of Geneva" was probably due in large part to his sufficiently audacious Apologie pour Hérodote [1838] (1566) and to his having translated into Latin (1562) the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus, a work which must have made for freethinking. But he was rather a Protestant than a rationalist. In the former book he had spoken, either sincerely or ironically, of the "detestable book" of Bonaventure Desperiers, calling him a mocker of God; and impeached Rabelais as a modern Lucian, believing neither in God nor immortality; [1839] yet his own performance was fully as well fitted as theirs to cause scandal. It is in fact one of the richest repertories ever formed of scandalous stories against priests, monks, nuns, and popes. [1840]

One literary movement towards better things had begun before the crowning infamy of the Massacre appalled men into questioning the creed of intolerance. Castalio, whom we shall see driven from Geneva by Calvin in 1544 for repugning to the doctrine of predestination, published pseudonymously, in 1554, in reply to Calvin's vindication of the slaying of Servetus, a tract, De Haereticis quomodo cum iis agendum sit variorum Sententiæ, in which he contrived to collect some passage from the Fathers and from modern writers in favour of toleration. To these he prefaced, by way of a letter to the Duke of Wirtemberg, an argument of his own, the starting-point of much subsequent propaganda. [1841] Aconzio, another Italian, followed in his steps; and later came Mino Celso of Siena, with his "long and elaborate argument against persecution," De Haereticis capitali supplicio non afficiendis (1584). [1842] Withal, Castalio died in beggary, ostracized alike by Protestants and Catholics, and befriended only by the Sozzini, whose sect was the first to earn collectively the praise of condemning persecution. [1843] But in the next generation there came to reinforce the cause of humanity a more puissant pen than any of these; while at the same time the recoil from religious cruelty was setting many men secretly at utter variance with faith.

In France in particular a generation of insane civil war for religion's sake must have gone far to build up unbelief. Even among many who did not renounce the faith, there went on an open evolution of stoicism, generated through resort to the teaching of Epictetus. The atrocities of Christian civil war and Christian savagery were such that Christian faith could give small sustenance to the more thoughtful and sensitive men who had to face them and carry on the tasks of public life the while. The needed strength was given by the masculine discipline which pagan thought had provided for an age of oppression and decadence, and which had carried so much of healing even for the Christians who saw decadence carried yet further, that in the fifth century the Enchiridion of Epictetus had been turned by St. Nilus into a monastic manual, even as Ambrose manipulated the borrowed Stoicism of Cicero. [1844] With its devout theism, the book had appealed to those northern scholars who had mastered Greek in the early years of the sixteenth century, when the refugees of Constantinople had set up Platonic studies in Italy. After 1520, Italian Hellenism rapidly decayed; [1845] but in the north it never passed away; and from the stronger men of the new learning in Germany the taste for Epictetus passed into France. In 1558 the semi-Protestant legist Coras--later slain in the massacre of St. Bartholomew--published at Toulouse a translation of the apocryphal dialogue of Epictetus and Hadrian; in 1566 the Protestant poet Rivaudeau translated the Enchiridion, which thenceforth became a culture force in France. [1846]

The influence appears in Montaigne, in whose essays it is pervasive; but more directly and formally in the book of Justus Lipsius, De Constantia (1584), and the same scholar's posthumous dialogues entitled Manducatio ad philosophiam stoïcam and Physiologia stoïcorum (1604), which influenced all scholarly Europe. Thus far the Stoic ethic had been handled with Christian bias and application; and Guillaume Du Vair, who embodied it in his work La Sainte Philosophie (1588), was not known as a heretic; but in his hands it receives no Christian colouring, and might pass for the work of a deist. [1847] And its popularity is to be inferred from his further production of a fresh translation of the Enchiridion and a Traité de la philosophie morale des stoïques. Under Henri IV he rose to high power; and his public credit recommended his doctrine.

Such were the more visible fruits of the late spread of the Renaissance ferment in France while, torn by the frantic passions of her pious Catholics, she passed from the plane of the Renaissance to that of the new Europe, in which the intellectual centre of gravity was to be shifted from the south to the north, albeit Italy was still to lead the way, in Galileo, for the science of the modern world.

§ 3. THE ENGLISH EVOLUTION

In England as in France the intellectual life undergoes visible retrogression in the fifteenth century, while in Italy, with the political problem rapidly developing towards catastrophe, it flourished almost riotously. From the age of Chaucer, considered on its intellectual side and as represented mainly by him, there is a steep fall to almost the time of Sir Thomas More, around whom we see as it were the sudden inrush of the Renaissance upon England. The conquest of France by Henry V and the Wars of the Roses, between them, brought England to the nadir of mental and moral life. But in the long and ruinous storm the Middle Ages, of which Wiclif is the last powerful representative, were left behind, and a new age begins to be prepared.

Of a very different type from Wiclif is the remarkable personality of the Welshman Reginald (or Reynold) Pecock (1395?-1460?), who seems divided from Wiclif by a whole era of intellectual development, though born within about ten years of his death. It is a singular fact that one of the most rationalistic minds among the serious writers of the fifteenth century should be an English bishop, [1848] and an Ultramontane at that. Pecock was an opponent at once of popular Bibliolatry and of priestly persecution, declaring that "the clergy would be condemned at the last day if they did not draw men into consent to the true faith otherwise than by fire and sword and hanging." [1849] It was as the rational and temperate defender of the Church against the attacks of the Lollards in general that he formulated the principle of natural reason as against scripturalism. This attitude it is that makes his treatise, the Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy, the most modern of theoretic books before More and Hooker and Bacon. That he was led to this measure of rationalism rather by the exigencies of his papalism than by a spontaneous skepticism is suggested by the fact that he stands for the acceptance of miraculous images, shrines, and relics, when the Lollards are attacking them. [1850] On the other hand, it is hard to be certain that his belief in the shrines was genuine, so ill does it consist with his attitude to Bibliolatry. In a series of serenely argued points he urges his thesis that the Bible is not the basis of the moral law, but merely an illustration thereof, and that the natural reason is obviously presupposed in the bulk of its teaching. He starts from the formulas of Thomas Aquinas, but reaches a higher ground. It is the position of Hooker, anticipated by a hundred years; and this in an age of such intellectual backwardness and literary decadence that the earlier man must be pronounced by far the more remarkable figure. In such a case the full influence of the Renaissance seems to be at work; though in the obscurity of the records we can do no more than conjecture that the new contacts with French culture between the invasion of France by Henry V in 1415 and the expulsion of the English in 1451 may have introduced forces of thought unknown or little known before. If indeed there were English opponents of scripture in Wiclif's day, the idea must have ripened somewhat in Pecock's. Whether, however, the victories of Jeanne D'Arc made some unbelievers as well as many dastards among the English is a problem that does not seem to have been investigated.

Pecock's reply to the Lollards creates the curious situation of a churchman rebutting heretics by being more profoundly heretical than they. In his system, the Scriptures "reveal" only supernatural truths not otherwise attainable, a way of safeguarding dogma not likely to reassure believers. There is reason, indeed, to suspect that Pecock held no dogma with much zeal; and when in his well-named treatise (now lost), The Provoker, he denied the authenticity of the Apostles' Creed, "he alienated every section of theological opinion in England."

See Miss A. M. Cooke's art. Reginald Pecock in Dict. of
Nat. Biog. This valuable notice is the best short account of
Pecock; though the nature of his case is most fully made out by
Hook, as cited below. It is characteristic of the restricted
fashion in which history is still treated that neither in
the Student's History of Professor Gardiner nor in the Short
History of Green is Pecock mentioned. Earlier ideas concerning
him were far astray. The notion of Foxe, the martyrologist,
that Pecock was an early Protestant, is a gross error. He held
not a single Protestant tenet, being a rationalizing papist. A
German ecclesiastical historian of the eighteenth century (Werner,
Kirchengeschichte des 18ten Jahrhunderts, 1756, cited by Lechler)
calls Pecock the first English deist. See a general view of
his opinions in Lewis's Life of Dr. Reynold Pecock (rep. 1820),
ch. v. The heresies charged on him are given on p. 160; also in
the R. T. S. Writings and Examinations, 1831, pp. 200-201. While
rejecting Bibliolatry, he yet argued that Popes and Councils
could make no change in the current creed; and he thus offended
the High Churchmen. Cp. Massingberd, The English Reformation,
4th ed. pp. 206-209.

The main causes of the hostility he met from the English hierarchy and Government appear to have been, on the one hand, his change of political party, which put him in opposition to Archbishop Bourchier, and on the other his zealous championship of the authority of the papacy as against that of the Councils of the Church. It was expressly on the score of his denunciation of the Councils that he was tried and condemned. [1851] Thus the reward of his effort to reason down the menacing Lollards and rebut Wiclif [1852] was his formal disgrace and virtual imprisonment. Had he not recanted, he would have been burned: as it was, his books were; and it is on record that they consisted of eleven quartos and three folios of manuscript. Either because of his papalism or as a result of official intrigue, Church and lords and commons were of one mind against him; and the mob would fain have burned him with his books. [1853] In that age of brutal strife, when "neither the Church nor the opponents of the Church had any longer a sway over men's hearts," [1854] he figures beside the mindless prelates and their lay peers somewhat as does More later beside Henry VIII, as Reason versus the Beast; and it was illustrative of his entire lack of fanaticism that he made the demanded retractations--avowing his sin in "trusting to natural reason" rather than to Scripture and the authority of the Church--and went his way in silence to solitude and death. The ruling powers disposed of Lollardism in their own way; and in the Wars of the Roses every species of heretical thought seems to disappear. The bribe held out to the nation by the invasion of France had been fatally effectual to corrupt the spirit of moral criticism which inspired the Lollard movement at its best; and the subsequent period of rapine and strife reduced thought and culture to the levels of the Middle Ages.

A hint of what was possible in the direction of freethought in the England of Henry V and Henry VI emerges in some of the records concerning Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, the youngest son of Henry IV. Gifted but ill-balanced, Humphrey was the chief patron of learning in England in his day; and he drank deeply of the spirit of Renaissance scholarship. [1855] Sir Thomas More preserves the story--reproduced also in the old play, The First Part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster--of how he exposed the fraud of a begging impostor who pretended to have recovered his sight through the virtue of a saint's relics; and a modern pietistic historian decides that the Duke "had long ceased to believe in miracles and relics." [1856] But if this be true, it is the whole truth as to Humphrey's freethinking. It was the highest flight of rationalism permissible in his day and sphere.

On the view that Humphrey was a freethinker, the pious Pauli,
who says (as cited, p. 337) of the Renaissance of letters, "The
weak and evil side of this revived form of literature is that
its disciples should have elevated the morality, or rather the
immorality, of classical antiquity above Christian discipline and
virtue," sees fit further to pronounce that the bad account of
Gloucester's condition of body drawn up eleven years before his
death by the physician Kymer is a proof of the "wild unbridled
passions by which the duke was swayed," and throws a lurid light
upon "the tendencies and disposition of his mind." Humphrey lived
till 55, and died suddenly, under circumstances highly suggestive
of poisoning by his enemies. His brothers Henry and John died
much younger than he; but in their case the religious historian
sees no ground for imputation. But the historian's inference is
overstrained. In reality Humphrey never indicated any lack of
theological faith. The poet Lydgate, no unbeliever, described
him as "Chose of God to be his owne knyghte," and so rigorous
"that heretike dar not comen in his sihte" (verses transcribed in
Furnivall's Early English Meals and Manners, 1868, pp. lxxxv-vi).

His most comprehensive biographer decides that he was "essentially
orthodox," despite his uncanonical marriage with his second wife
and his general reputation for sexual laxity. "He was punctilious
in the performance of his religious duties" and "a stern opponent
of the Lollards"; he "countenanced the extinction of heresy
by being present at the burning at Smithfield of an old priest
who denied the validity of the sacraments of the Church"; and an
Archbishop of Milan pronounced him to be "known everywhere as the
chiefest friend and preserver of Holy Church" (K. H. Vickers,
Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester: A Biography, 1907, pp. 223,
321-23). Of such a personage no exegesis can make a rationalist.

Of other traces of critical thinking in England in that age there is little to be said, so little literature is there to convey them. But there are signs of the influence of the "pagan" thought of the Renaissance in religious books. The old Revelation of the Monk of Evesham, ostensibly dating from 1196, was first printed about 1482, [1857] with a "prologe" explaining that it "was not shewed to hym only for hym butte also for the confort and profetyng of all cristyn pepulle that none man shuld dowte or mystruste of anothir life and world"; "and as for the trowthe of this reuelacyon no man nother woman ought to dowte in any wise," seeing it is thus miraculously provided that "alle resons and mocyons of infydelite the which risith often tymes of man's sensualite shall utwardly be excluded and quenched." Evidently the old problem of immortality had been agitated.

§ 4. THE REMAINING EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

Not till late in the fifteenth century is the intellectual side of the Renaissance influence to be seen bearing fruit in Germany, of which the turbulent and semi-barbaric life in the medieval period was little favourable to mental progress. Of political hostility to the Church there was indeed an abundance, long before Luther; [1858] but amid the many traces of "irreligion" there is practically none of rational freethinking. What reasoned thought there was, as we have seen, turned to Christian mysticism of a pantheistic cast, as in the teaching of Tauler and Eckhart. [1859]

Another and a deeper current of thought is seen in the remarkable philosophic work of Bishop Nicolaus of Kues or Cusa (1401-1464), who, professedly by an independent movement of reflection, but really as a result of study of Greek philosophy, reached a larger pantheism than had been formulated by any Churchman since the time of John the Scot. [1860] There is little or no trace, however, of any influence attained by his teaching, which indeed could appeal only to a very few minds of that day. Less remarkable than the metaphysic of Nicolaus, though also noteworthy in its way, is his Dialogue "On Peace, or Concordance of Faith," in which, somewhat in the spirit of Boccaccio's tale of the Three Kings, he aims at a reconciliation of all religions, albeit by way of proving the Christian creed to be the true one.

In the Netherlands and other parts of western Europe the popular anti-ecclesiastical heresy of the thirteenth century spread in various degrees; but there is only exceptional trace of literate or properly rationalistic freethinking. Among the most notable developments was the movement in Holland early in the fourteenth century, which compares closely with that of the higher Paulicians and mystics of the two previous centuries, its chief traits being a general pantheism, a denial of the efficacy of the sacrament of the altar, an insistence that all men are sons of God, and a general declaration for "natural light." [1861] But this did not progressively develop. Lack of leisured culture in the Low Countries, and the terrorism of the Inquisition, would sufficiently account for the absence of avowed unbelief, though everywhere, probably, some was set up by the contact of travellers with the culture of Italy. It is fairly to be inferred that in a number of cases the murderous crusade against witchcraft which was carried on in the fifteenth century served as a means of suppressing heresy, rationalistic or other. At Arras, for instance, in 1460, the execution of a number of leading citizens on a charge of sorcery seems to have been a blow at free discussion in the "chambers of rhetoric." [1862] And that rationalism, despite such frightful catastrophes, obscurely persisted, is to be gathered from the long vogue of the work of the Spanish physician Raymund of Sebonde, [1863] who, having taught philosophy at Toulouse, undertook (about 1435) to establish Christianity on a rational foundation [1864] in his Theologia Naturalis, made famous later by Montaigne.

To what length the suppressed rationalism of the age could on occasion go is dramatically revealed in the case of Hermann van Ryswyck, a Dutch priest, burned for heresy at the Hague in 1512. He was not only a priest in holy orders, but one of the order of Inquisitors; and he put forth the most impassioned denial and defiance of the Christian creed of which there is any record down to modern times. Tried before the inquisitors in 1502, he declared "with his own mouth and with sane mind" that the world is eternal, and was not created as was alleged by "the fool Moses" that there is no hell, and no future life; that Christ, whose whole career was flatly contrary to human welfare and reason, was not the son of Omnipotent God, but a fool, a dreamer, and a seducer of ignorant men, of whom untold numbers had been slain on account of him and his absurd evangel; that Moses had not physically received the law from God; and that "our" faith was shown to be fabulous by its fatuous Scripture, fictitious Bible, and crazy Gospel. And to this exasperated testimony he added: "I was born a Christian, but am no longer one: they are the chief fools." Sentenced in 1502 to perpetual imprisonment, he was again brought forward ten years later, and, being found unbroken by that long durance, was as an unrepentant heretic sentenced to be burned on December 14, 1512, the doom being carried out on the same day. The source of his conviction can be gathered from his declaration that "the most learned Aristotle and his commentator Averroës were nearest the truth"; but his wild sincerity and unyielding courage were all his own. "Nimis infelix quidam" is the estimate of an inquisitor of that day. [1865] Not so, unless they are most unhappy who die in battle, fighting for the truth they prize. But it has always been the Christian way to contemn all save Christian martyrs.

There is a tolerably full account of Ryswyck's case in a nearly
contemporary document, which evidently copies the official
record. Ryswyck is described as "sacre theologie professorem
ordinis predicatorum et inquisitorum"; and his declaration runs:
"Quod mundum fuit ab eterna et non incipit per creationem
fabricatum a stulto Mose, ut dicit Biblia indistincta.... Nec
est infernus, ut nostri estimant. Item post hanc vitam nulla
erit vita particularis.... Item doctissimus Aristoteles et
ejus commentator Auerrois fuerunt veritati propinquissimi. Item
Christum fuit stultus et simplex fantasticus et seductor simplicium
hominum.... Quot enim homines interfecti sunt propter ipsum et suum
Euangelium fatuum! Item quod omnia que Christus gessit, humano
generi et rationi recte sunt contraria. Item Christum filium Dei
omnipotentem aperte nego. Et Mosen legem a Deo visibiliter et
facialiter suscepisse recuso. Item fides nostra fabulosa est,
ut probat nostra fatua Scriptura et ficta Biblia et Euangelium
delirum.... Omnes istos articulos et consimilos confessus est
proprio ore et sana mente coram inquisitore et notario et testibus,
addens: Ego Christianus natus, sed iam non sum Christianus,
quoniam illi stultissimi sunt." Paul Frédéricq, Corpus documentorum
Inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae, Gent, 1889, i,
494, 501-502.

Thus the Renaissance passed on to the age of the Reformation the seeds of a rationalism which struck far deeper than the doctrine of Luther, but at the same time left a social soil in which such seeds could ill grow. Its own defeat, social and intellectual, may be best realized in terms of its failure to reach either political or physical science. Lack of the former meant political retrogression and bondage; and lack of the latter a renewed dominion of superstition and Bibliolatry--two sets of conditions of which each facilitated the other.

Nothing is more significant of the intellectual climate of the Renaissance than the persistence at all its stages of the belief in astrology, of which we find some dregs even in Bacon. That pseudo-science indeed stands, after all, for the spirit of science, and is not to be diagnosed as mere superstition; being really an à priori fallacy fallen into in the deliberate search for some principle of coördination in human affairs. Though adhered to by many prominent Catholics, including Charles V, and by many Protestants, including Melanchthon, it is logically anti-Christian, inasmuch as it presupposes in the moral world a reign of natural law, independent of the will or caprice of any personal power. Herein it differs deeply from magic; [1866] though in the Renaissance the return to the lore of antiquity often involved an indiscriminate acceptance and blending of both sorts of occult pagan lore. [1867] Magic subordinates Nature to Will: astrology, as apart from angelology, subordinates Will to Cosmic Law. For many perplexed and thoughtful men, accordingly, it was a substitute, more or less satisfying, for the theory, grown to them untenable, of a moral government of the universe. It was in fact a primary form of sociology proper, as it had been the primary form of astronomy; to which latter science, even in the Renaissance, it was still for many the introduction.

It flourished, above all things, on the insecurity inseparable from the turbulent Italian life of the Renaissance, even as it had flourished on the appalling vicissitude of the drama of imperial Rome; and it is conceivable that the inclination to true science which is seen in such men as Galileo, after the period of Italian independence, was nourished by the greater stability attained for a time under absolutist rule. And though Protestantism, on the other hand, adhered in the main unreasoningly to the theory of a moral control, that dogma at least served to countervail the dominion of astrology, which was only a dogmatism with a difference, and as such inevitably hindered true science. [1868] On the whole, Protestantism tended to make more effectual that veto on pagan occultism which had been ineffectually passed from time to time by the Catholic Church; albeit the motive was stress of Christian superstition, and the veto was aimed almost as readily at inductive and true science as at the deductive and false. We shall find the craze of witchcraft, in turn, dominating Protestant countries at a time when freethinkers and liberal Catholics elsewhere were setting it at naught.

There can be little doubt that, broadly speaking, the new interest in Scripture study and ecclesiastical history told against the free play of thought on scientific and scholarly problems; we shall find Bacon realizing the fact a hundred years after Luther's start; and the influence has operated down to our own day. In this resistance Catholics played their part. The famous Cornelius Agrippa [1869] (1486-1535) never ceased to profess himself a Catholic, and had small sympathy with the Reformers, though always at odds with the monks; and his long popular treatise De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium, atque excellentia verbi Dei declamatio (1531) is a mere polemic for scripturalism against alike false science and true, monkish superstition and reason. Vilified as a magician by the monks, and as an atheist and a scoffer by angry humanists, [1870] he did but set error against error, being himself a believer in witchcraft, a hater of anatomy, and as confident in his contempt of astronomy as of astrology. And his was a common frame of mind for centuries.

Still, the new order contained certain elements of help for a new life, as against its own inclement principles of authority and dogma; and the political heterogeneity of Europe, seconded by economic pressures and by new geographic discovery, sufficed further to prevent any far-reaching organization of tyranny. Under these conditions, new knowledge could incubate new criticism. But it would be an error-breeding oversight to forget that in the many-coloured world before the Reformation there was not only a certain artistic and imaginative sunlight which the Reformation long darkened, but even, athwart the mortal rigours of papal rule, a certain fitful play of intellectual insight to which the peoples of the Reformation became for a time estranged.