The Age of the Reformation Part 49

He who is gifted with the heavenly knowledge of faith [says the Catechism of the Council of Trent] is free from an inquisitive curiosity; for when G.o.d commands us to believe, he does not propose to have us search into his divine judgments, nor to inquire their reasons and causes, but demands an immutable faith. . . . Faith, therefore, excludes not only all doubt, but even the desire of subjecting its truth to demonstration.

We know that reason is the devil's harlot [says Luther] and can do nothing but slander and harm all that G.o.d says and does. [And again] If, outside of Christ, you wish by your own thoughts to know your relation to {626} G.o.d, you will break your neck. Thunder strikes him who examines. It is Satan's wisdom to tell what G.o.d is, and by doing so he will draw you into the abyss.

Therefore keep to revelation and don't try to understand.

There are many mysteries in the Bible, Luther acknowledged, that seem absurd to reason, but it is our duty to swallow them whole. Calvin abhorred the free spirit of the humanists as the supreme heresy of free thought. He said that philosophy was only the shadow and revelation the substance. "Nor is it reasonable," said he, "that the divine will should be made the subject of controversy with us." Zwingli, antic.i.p.ating Descartes's "finitum infiniti capax non est," stated that our small minds could not grasp G.o.d's plan. Oecolampadius, dying, said that he wanted no more light than he then had--an instructive contrast to Goethe's last words: "Mehr Licht!" Even Bacon, either from prudence or conviction, said that theological mysteries seeming absurd to reason must be believed.

[Sidenote: Radical sects]

Nor were the radical sects a whit more rational. Those who represented the protest against Protestantism and the dissidence of dissent appealed to the Bible as an authority and abhorred reason as much as did the orthodox churches. The Ant.i.trinitarians were no more deists or free thinkers than were the Lutherans. Campa.n.u.s and Adam Pastor and Servetus and the Sozinis had no aversion to the supernatural and made no claim to reduce Christianity to a humanitarian deism, as some modern Unitarians would do. Their doubts were simply based on a different exegesis of the biblical texts. Fausto Sozini thought Christ was "a subaltern G.o.d to whom at a certain time the Supreme G.o.d gave over the government of the world." Servetus defined the Trinity to be "not an illusion of three invisible things, but the manifestation of G.o.d {627} in the Word and a communication of the substance of G.o.d in the Spirit."

This is no new rationalism coming in but a reversion to an obsolete heresy, that of Paul of Samosata. It does not surprise us to find Servetus lecturing on astrology.

[Sidenote: Spiritual Reformers]

Somewhat to the left of the Ant.i.trinitarian 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 pa.s.sed 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, Ta.s.so, 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 cla.s.sics 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 superst.i.tion, 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 "G.o.dless painters of Nuremberg," Hans Sebald Beham, Bartholomew Beham, and George Penz. The first named expressed some doubts about various Protestant doctrines. Bartholomew went further, a.s.serting 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 G.o.d. George Penz went further still, for while he admitted the existence of G.o.d he a.s.serted 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 cla.s.sics, 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 Theleme, 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 G.o.d was "that intellectual sphere the center of which is everywhere and the circ.u.mference nowhere."

Rabelais was not the only Frenchman to burlesque the religious quarrels of the day. Bonaventure des Periers, [Sidenote: Des Periers, 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._, Incredule), debating their opinions in a way that redounded much to the advantage of the last named.

Then there was Stephen Dolet [Sidenote: Dolet, 1509-46] the humanist publisher of Lyons, burned to death as an atheist, because, in translating the Axiochos, a dialogue then attributed to Plato, he had written "After death you will be nothing at all" instead of "After death you will be no {630} more," as the original is literally to be construed. The charge was frivolous, but the impression was doubtless correct that he was a rather indifferent skeptic, disdainful of religion. He, too, considered the Reformers only to reject them as too much like their enemies. No Christian church could hold the worshipper of Cicero and of letters, of glory and of humanity. And yet this sad and restless man, who found the taste of life as bitter as Rabelais had found it sweet, died for his faith. He was the martyr of the Renaissance.

[Sidenote: Bodin]

A more systematic examination of religion was made by Jean Bodin in his _Colloquy on Secret and Sublime Matters_, commonly called the _Heptaplomeres_. Though not published until long after the author's death, it had a brisk circulation in ma.n.u.script and won a reputation for impiety far beyond its deserts. It is simply a conversation between a Jew, a Mohammedan, a Lutheran, a Zwinglian, a Catholic, an Epicurean and a Theist. The striking thing about it is the fairness with which all sides are presented; there is no summing up in favor of one faith rather than another. Nevertheless, the conclusion would force itself upon the reader that among so many religions there was little choice; that there was something true and something false in all; and that the only necessary articles were those on which all agreed. Bodin was half way between a theist and a deist; he believed that the Decalogue was a natural law imprinted in all men's hearts and that Judaism was the nearest to being a natural religion. He admitted, however, that the chain of casuality was broken by miracle and he believed in witchcraft. It cannot be thought that he was wholly without personal faith, like Machiavelli, and yet his strong argument against changing religion even if the new be better than the old, is entirely worldly. With France before his {631} eyes, it is not strange that he drew the general conclusion that any change of religion is dangerous and sure to be followed by war, pestilence, famine and demoniacal possession.

[Sidenote: Montaigne]

After the fiery stimulants, compounded of brimstone and Stygian hatred, offered by Calvin and the Catholics, and after the plethoric gorge of good cheer at Gargantua's table, the mild sedative of Montaigne's conversation comes like a draft of nepenthe or the fruit of the lotus.

In him we find no blast and blaze of propaganda, no fulmination of bull and ban; nor any tide of earth-encircling Rabelaisian mirth. His words fall as softly and as thick as snowflakes, and they leave his world a white page, with all vestiges of previous writings erased. He neither a.s.severates nor denies; he merely, as he puts it himself, "juggles,"

treating of idle subjects which he believes nothing at all, for he has noticed that as soon one denies the possibility of anything, someone else will say that he has seen it. In short, truth is a near neighbor to falsehood, and the wise man can only repeat, "Que sais-je?" Let us live delicately and quietly, finding the world worth enjoying, but not worth troubling about.

Wide as are the differences between the Greek thinker and the French, there is something Socratic in the way in which Montaigne takes up every subject only to suggest doubts of previously held opinion about it. If he remained outwardly a Catholic, it was because he saw exactly as much to doubt in other religions. Almost all opinions, he urges, are taken on authority, for when men begin to reason they draw diametrically opposite conclusions from the same observed facts. He was in the civil wars esteemed an enemy by all parties, though it was only because he had both Huguenot and Catholic friends. "I have seen in Germany," he wrote, "that Luther hath left as many {632} divisions and altercations concerning the doubt of his opinions, yea, and more, than he himself moveth about the Holy Scriptures." The Reformers, in fact, had done nothing but reform superficial faults and had either left the essential ones untouched, or increased them. How foolish they were to imagine that the people could understand the Bible if they could only read it in their own language!

Montaigne was the first to feel the full significance of the multiplicity of sects. [Sidenote: Multiplicity of sects] "Is there any opinion so fantastical, or conceit so extravagant . . . or opinion so strange," he asked, "that custom hath not established and planted by laws in some region?" Usage sanctions every monstrosity, including incest and parricide in some places, and in others "that unsociable opinion of the mortality of the soul." Indeed, Montaigne comes back to the point, a man's belief does not depend on his reason, but on where he was born and how brought up. "To an atheist all writings make for atheism." "We receive our religion but according to our fashion. . . .

Another country, other testimonies, equal promises, like menaces, might sembably imprint a clean contrary religion in us."

Piously hoping that he has set down nothing repugnant to the prescriptions of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman church, where he was born and out of which he purposes not to die, Montaigne proceeds to demonstrate that G.o.d is unknowable. A man cannot grasp more than his hand will hold nor straddle more than his legs' length. Not only all religions, but all scientists give the lie to each other. Copernicus, having recently overthrown the old astronomy, may be later overthrown himself. In like manner the new medical science of Paracelsus contradicts the old and may in turn pa.s.s away. The same facts appear differently to different men, and "nothing comes to us but falsified {633} and altered by our senses." Probability is as hard to get as truth, for a man's mind is changed by illness, or even by time, and by his wishes. Even skepticism is uncertain, for "when the Pyrrhonians say, 'I doubt,' you have them fast by the throat to make them avow that at least you are a.s.sured and know that they doubt." In short, "nothing is certain but uncertainty," and "nothing seemeth true that may not seem false." Montaigne wrote of pleasure as the chief end of man, and of death as annihilation. The glory of philosophy is to teach men to despise death. One should do so by remembering that it is as great folly to weep because one would not be alive a hundred years hence as it would be to weep because one had not been living a hundred years ago.

[Sidenote: Charron, 1541-1603]

A disciple who dotted the i's and crossed the t's of Montaigne was Peter Charron. He, too, played off the contradictions of the sects against each other. All claim inspiration and who can tell which inspiration is right? Can the same Spirit tell the Catholic that the books of Maccabees are canonical and tell Luther that they are not?

The senses are fallible and the soul, located by Charron in a ventricle of the brain, is subject to strange disturbances. Many things almost universally believed, like immortality, cannot be proved. Man is like the lower animals. "We believe, judge, act, live and die on faith,"

but this faith is poorly supported, for all religions and all authorities are but of human origin.

[Sidenote: English skeptics]

English thought followed rather than led that of Europe throughout the century. At first tolerant and liberal, it became violently religious towards the middle of the period and then underwent a strong reaction in the direction of indifference and atheism. For the first years, before the Reformation, the _Utopia_ may serve as an example. More, under the influence {634} of the Italian Platonists, pictured his ideal people as adherents of a deistic, humanitarian religion, with few priests and holy, tolerant of everything save intolerance. They worshipped one G.o.d, believed in immortality and yet thought that "the chief felicity of man" lay in the pursuit of rational pleasure.

Whether More depicted this cult simply to fulfil the dramatic probabilities and to show what was natural religion among men before revelation came to them, or whether his own opinions altered in later life, it is certain that he became robustly Catholic. He spent much time in religious controversy and resorted to austerities. In one place he tells of a lewd gallant who asked a friar why he gave himself the pain of walking barefoot. Answered that this pain was less than h.e.l.l, the gallant replied, "If there be no h.e.l.l, what a fool are you,"

and received the retort, "If there be h.e.l.l, what a fool are you." Sir Thomas evidently believed there was a h.e.l.l, or preferred to take no chances. In one place he argues at length that many and great miracles daily take place at shrines.

The feverish crisis of the Reformation was followed in the reign of Elizabeth by an epidemic of skepticism. Widely as it was spread there can be found little philosophical thought in it. It was simply the pendulum pulled far to the right swinging back again to the extreme left. The suspicions expressed that the queen herself was an atheist were unfounded, but it is impossible to dismiss as easily the numerous testimonies of infidelity among her subjects. Roger Ascham wrote in his _Schoolmaster_ [Sidenote: 1563] that the "incarnate devils" of Englishmen returned from Italy said "there is no G.o.d" and then, "they first l.u.s.tily condemn G.o.d, then scornfully mock his Word . . . counting as fables the holy mysteries of religion. They make Christ and his Gospel only serve civil policies. . . . They boldly laugh {635} to scorn both Protestant and Papist. They confess no Scripture. . . .

They mock the pope; they rail on Luther. . . . They are Epicures in living and [Greek] _atheoi_ in doctrine."

[Sidenote: 1569]

In like manner Cecil wrote: "The service of G.o.d and the sincere profession of Christianity are much decayed, and in place of it, partly papistry, partly paganism and irreligion have crept in. . . .

Baptists, deriders of religion, Epicureans and atheists are everywhere." Ten years later John Lyly wrote that "there never were such sects among the heathens, such schisms among the Turks, such misbelief among infidels as is now among scholars." The same author wrote a dialogue, _Euphues and Atheos_, to convince skeptics, while from the pulpit the Puritan Henry Smith shot "G.o.d's Arrow against atheists." According to Thomas Nash [Sidenote: 1592] (_Pierce Penniless's Supplication to the Devil_) atheists are now triumphing and rejoicing, scorning the Bible, proving that there were men before Adam and even maintaining "that there are no divells." Marlowe and some of his a.s.sociates were suspected of atheism. In 1595 John Baldwin, examined before Star Chamber, "questioned whether there were a G.o.d; if there were, how he should be known; if by his Word, who wrote the same, if the prophets and the apostles, they were but men and _humanum est errare_." The next year Robert Fisher maintained before the same court that "Christ was no saviour and that the gospel was a fable."

[Sidenote: Bacon]

That one of the prime causes of all this skepticism was to be found in the religious revolution was the opinion of Francis Bacon. Although Bacon's philosophic thought is excluded from consideration by the chronological limits of this book, it may be permissible to quote his words on this subject. In one place he says that where there are two religions contending for {636} mastery their mutual animosity will add warmth to conviction and rather strengthen the adherents of each in their own opinions, but where there are more than two they will breed doubt. In another place he says:

Heresies and schisms are of all others the greatest scandals, yea more than corruption of manners. . . . So that nothing doth so keep men out of the church and drive men out of the church as breach of unity. . . . The doctor of the gentiles saith, "If an heathen come in and hear you speak with several tongues, will he not say that you are mad?" And certainly it is little better when atheists and profane persons hear of so many discordant and contrary opinions in religion.

But while Bacon saw that when doctors disagree the common man will lose all faith in them, it was not to religion but to science that he looked for the reformation of philosophy. Theology, in Bacon's judgment, was a chief enemy to philosophy, for it seduced men from scientific pursuit of truth to the service of dogma. "You may find all access to any species of philosophy," said Bacon, "however pure, intercepted by the ignorance of divines."

The thought here expressed but sums up the actual trend of the sixteenth century in the direction of separating philosophy and religion. In modern times the philosopher has found his inspiration far more in science than in religion, and the turning-point came about the time of, and largely as a consequence of, the new observation of nature, and particularly the new astronomy.

[Sidenote: Revolt against Aristotle]

The prologue to the drama of the new thought was revolt against Aristotle. "The master of them who know" had become, after the definite acceptance of his works as standard texts in the universities of the thirteenth century, an inspired and infallible authority {637} for all science. With him were a.s.sociated the schoolmen who debated the question of realism versus nominalism. But as the mind of man grew and advanced, what had been once the brace became a galling bond. All parties united to make common cause against the Stagyrite. The Italian Platonists attacked him in the name of their, and his, master. Luther opined that no one had ever understood Aristotle's meaning, that the ethics of that "d.a.m.ned heathen" directly contradicted Christian virtue, that any potter would know more of natural science than he, and that it would be well if he who had started the debate on realism and nominalism had never been born. Catholics like Usingen protested at the excessive reverence given to Aristotle at the expense of Christ.

Finally, the French scientist Peter Ramus [Sidenote: Ramus, c. 1515-72]

advanced the thesis at the University of Paris that everything taught by Aristotle was false. No authority, he argued, is superior to reason, for it is reason which creates and determines authority.

[Sidenote: Effect of science on philosophy]

In place of Aristotle men turned to nature. "Whosoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but memory," said Leonardo. Vives urged that experiment was the only road to truth. The discoveries of natural laws led to a new conception of external reality, independent of man's wishes and egocentric theories. It also gave rise to the conception of uniformity of law. Copernicus sought and found a mathematical unity in the heavens. It was, above all else, his astronomy that fought the battle of, and won the victory for, the new principles of research. Its glory was not so much its positive addition to knowledge, great as that was, but its mode of thought. By pure reason a new system was established and triumphed over the testimony of the senses and of all {638} previous authority, even that which purported to be revelation. Man was reduced to a creature of law; G.o.d was defined as an expression of law.

How much was man's imagination touched, how was his whole thought and purpose changed by the Copernican discovery! No longer lord of a little, bounded world, man crept as a parasite on a grain of dust spinning eternally through endless s.p.a.ce. And with the humiliation came a great exaltation. For this tiny creature could now seal the stars and bind the Pleiades and sound each deep abyss that held a sun.

What new sublimity of thought, what greatness of soul was not his! To Copernicus belongs properly the praise lavished by Lucretius on Epicurus, of having burst the flaming bounds of the world and of having made man equal to heaven. The history of the past, the religion of the present, the science of the future--all ideas were trans.m.u.ted, all values reversed by this new and wonderful hypothesis.