A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume...

The negative bearing of the Reformation on freethought is made clear by the historic fact that the new currents of thought which broadly mark the beginning of the “modern spirit” arose in its despite, and derive originally from outside its sphere. It is to Italy, where the political and social conditions thus far tended to frustrate the Inquisition, that we trace the rise alike of modern deism, modern Unitarianism, modern pantheism, modern physics, and the tendency to rational atheism. The deistic way of thinking, of course, prevailed long before it got that name; and besides the vogue of Averroïsm we have noted the virtual deism of More’s Utopia (1516). The first explicit mention of deism noted by Bayle, however, is in the epistle dedicatory to the second and expanded edition of the Instruction Chrétienne of the Swiss Protestant Viret (1563), where professed deists are spoken of as a new species bearing a new name. On the admission of Viret, who was the friend and bitter disciple of Calvin, they rejected all revealed religion, but called themselves deists by way of repudiating atheism; some keeping a belief in immortality, some rejecting it. In the theological manner he goes on to call them all execrable atheists, and to say that he has added to his treatise on their account an exposition of natural religion grounded on the “Book of Nature”; stultifying himself by going on to say that he has also dealt with the professed atheists.1 Of the deists he admits that among them were men of the highest repute for science and learning.

Doubtless the spectacle of Protestant feuds and methods would go far to foster such unbelief; but though, as we have seen, there were aggressive Unitarians in Germany before 1530, who, being scholars, may or may not have drawn on Italian thought, thereafter there is reason to look to Italy as the source of the propaganda. Thence came the two Sozzini, the founders of Socinianism, of whom Lelio, the uncle of Fausto, travelled much in northern Europe (including England) between 1546 and 1552.2 As the earlier doctrine of Servetus shows clear affinities to that of the Sozzini, and his earlier books were much read in Italy between 1532 and 1540, he may well have given them their impulse.3 It is evidently to Servetus that Zanchi referred when he wrote to Bullinger in 1565 that “Spain bore the hens, Italy hatched the eggs, and we now hear the chickens piping.”4 Before Socinianism had taken form it was led up to, as we have seen, in the later writings of the ex-monk Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564), who, in the closing years of a much chequered career, combined mystical and Unitarian tendencies with a leaning to polygamy and freedom of divorce.5 His influence was considerable among the Swiss Protestants, though they finally expelled him for his heresies.

From Geneva or from France, in turn, apparently came some of the English freethought of the middle period of the sixteenth century;6 for in 1562 Speaker Williams in the House of Commons, in a list of misbelievers, speaks of “Pelagians, Libertines, Papists, and such others, leaving God’s commandments to follow their own traditions, affections, and minds”7—using theologically the foreign term, which never became naturalized in English in its foreign sense. It was about the year 1563, again, that Roger Ascham wrote his Scholemaster, wherein are angrily described, as a species new in England, men who, “where they dare,” scorn both Protestant and Papist, “rejecting scripture, and counting the Christian mysteries as fables.”8 He describes them as “ἄθεοι in doctrine”; adding, “this last word is no more unknowne now to plane Englishe men than the Person was unknown somtyme in England, untill some Englishe man took peines to fetch that develish opinion out of Italie.”9 The whole tendency he connects in a general way with the issue of many new translations from the Italian, mentioning in particular Petrarch and Boccaccio. Among good Protestants his view was general; and so Lord Burghley in his Advice to his Son writes: “Suffer not thy sons to pass the Alps, for they shall learn nothing there but pride, blasphemy, and atheism.” As it happened, his grandson the second Earl of Exeter, and his great-grandson Lord Roos, went to Rome, and became not atheists but Roman Catholics.

Such episodes should remind us that in that age of ignorance and superstition the Church had always an immense advantage. Those who, like Gentillet in his raging Discours, commonly known as the Contre-Machiavel (1576), ascribed to “atheism” and the teaching of Machiavelli all the crimes and oppressions wrought by Catholics,10 were ludicrously perverting the facts. Massacres in churches, which are cited by Gentillet as impossible to believing Catholics, were wrought, as we have seen, on the largest scale by the Church in the thirteenth century. So, when Scaliger calls the Italians of his day “a set of atheists,” we are to understand it rather of “the hypocrisy than of the professed skepticism of the time.”11 But rationalism and semi-rationalism did prevail in Italy more than in any other country.12

Like the old Averroïsm, the new pietistic Unitarianism persisted in Italy and radiated thence afresh when it had flagged in other lands. The exploded Unitarian tradition13 runs that the doctrine arose in the year 1546 among a group of more than forty learned men who were wont to assemble in secret at Vicenza, near Venice. Claudius of Savoy, however, emphatically gave out his anti-Trinitarian doctrine at Berne in 1534, after having been imprisoned at Strasburg and banished thence;14 and Ochino and Lelio Sozzini left Italy in 1543. But there seems to have been a continuous evolution of Unitarian heresy in the south after the German movement had ceased. Giorgio Biandrata, whom we have seen flying to Poland from Geneva, had been seized by the Inquisition at Pavia for such opinion. Still it persisted. In 1562 Giulio Guirlando of Treviso, and in 1566 Francesco Saga of Rovigo, were burned at Venice for anti-Trinitarianism. Giacomo Aconzio too, who dedicated his Stratagems of Satan (Basel, 1565) to Queen Elizabeth, and who pleaded notably for the toleration of heresy,15 was a decided latitudinarian.16

It is remarkable that the whole ferment occurs in the period of the Catholic Reaction, the Council of Trent, and the subjection of Italy, when the papacy was making its great effort to recover its ground. It would seem that in the compulsory peace which had now fallen on Italian life men’s thoughts turned more than ever to mental problems, as had happened in Greece after the rise of Alexander’s empire. The authority of the Church was outwardly supreme; the Jesuits had already begun to do great things for education;17 the revived Inquisition was everywhere in Italy; its prisons, as we have seen, were crowded with victims of all grades during a whole generation; Pius V and the hierarchy everywhere sought to enforce decorum in life; the “pagan” academies formed on the Florentine model were dissolved; and classic culture rapidly decayed with the arts, while clerical learning flourished,18 and a new religious music began with Palestrina. Yet on the death of Paul IV the Roman populace burned the Office of the Inquisition to the ground and cast the pope’s statue into the Tiber;19 and in that age (1548) was born Giordano Bruno, one of the types of modern freethought.

The great service of Italy to modern freethought, however, was to come later, in respect of the impulse given to the scientific spirit by Bruno, Vanini, and Galileo. On the philosophical or critical side, the Italy of the middle of the sixteenth century left no enduring mark on European thought, though her serious writers were numerous. Aconzio had published, before his De Stratagematibus Satanæ, a treatise De Methodo, sive recta investigandarum tradendarumque scientiarum ratione (Basel, 1558), wherein he pleads strenuously for a true logical method as the one way to real knowledge of things. In this he anticipates Bacon, as did, still earlier, Mario Nizolio in his Antibarbarus sive de veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra pseudo-philosophos (Parma, 1553). Nizolio’s main effort is towards the discrediting of Aristotle, whom, like so many in the generation following, he regarded as the great bulwark of scholastic obscurantism. He insists that all knowledge must proceed from sensation, which alone has immediate certainty; and thus stands for direct scientific observation as against tradition and verbalism. But Ludovicus Vives had before him (in his De causis corruptarum artium, Antwerp, 1531) claimed that the true Aristotelian went direct to nature, as Aristotle himself had done; and Nizolio did nothing in practical science to substantiate his polemic against the logic-choppers.

He and Aconzio in effect cancel each other. Each had glimpsed a truth, one seeing the need for a right method in inference, the other protesting against the idea that abstract reasoning could lead to knowledge; but neither made good his argument by any treasure trove of fact. Another writer of the same decade, Gomez Pereira, joined in the revolt against Aristotelianism, publishing in 1554 his Margarita Antoniana, wherein, in advance of Descartes, he maintained the absence of sensation in brutes.20 For the rest, he championed freedom in speculation, denying that authority should avail save in matters of faith. But he too failed to bring forth fruits meet for freedom. Neither by abstract exposition of right methods of reasoning, nor by abstract attacks on wrong methods, could any vital impulse yet be given to thought. What was lacking was the use of reason upon actual problems, whether of human or of natural science. All the while Europe was anchored to ancient delusion, historical and scientific. Even as the horrors of age-long religious war could alone drive men to something like toleration in the religious life, there was needed the impact of actual discovery to win them to science as against scholasticism. And rational thinking on the religion which resisted all new science was to be still later of attainment, save for the nameless men who throughout the ages of faith rejected the creeds without publishing their unbelief. Of these Italy had always a large sprinkling.