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Skepticism and the Problem of Atheism in Early-Modern France

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Skepticism and the Problem of Atheism in Early-Modern France ALAN CHARLES KORS SKEPTICISM AND THE PROBLEM OF ATHEISM IN EARLY-MODERN FRANCE The early-modern Christian, and, especially, Catholic learned world possessed a complex and ambivalent set of attitudes towards philosophical skepticism. It was not only that the various schools of Christian philosophy responded quite differently to formal issues of certainty and the limits of human knowledge, but that the same schools and individuals could respond quite diversely depending upon the context in which these issues were raised and the per­ ceived nature and purposes of the interlocutors. Two tendencies coexisted uneasily within a Catholic learned world whose educa­ tion and traditions linked it both to the mystery of revealed faith and to the philosophical systems of the Greeks. On the one hand, it believed that it possessed a creed whose superior truth and wisdom would be foolish to the profane world and whose salvific character­ istics were categorically beyond the fruits of natural learning; on the other, it believed that its doctors and educated believers could prevail in philosophical and theological disputations with the sages of all the nations. From the first tendency, it could be deeply moved by the humbling of natural human reason and natural scientia; philosophical skepticism was a wondrous means of achieving that end. From the other, it could be deeply offended and threatened by claims that natural certainty was not among the gifts of philosophy; philosophical skepticism was an arrogant and insidious means of making such claims. Piety admired humility and sought ataraxia, and it feared the pride and concupiscence of natural mind; learned theology gloried in disputation and demonstration, and it feared the anarchy of a natural reason that suspended judgment where philosophers offered compelling proofs. The educated Christian world, of course, contained so many minds that were simultaneous­ ly pious and learnedly philosophical. It is no wonder that the motifs of philosophical skepticism were so multivalent within that world's reflections and debates. As Mersenne had noted in his Questions harmoniques (1633): 186 ALAN CHARLES KORS One and the same sword can serve an evil man to commit an infamous homicide and can be the instrument of a heroic action in the hands of a virtuous man. He who puts divine things under the scrutiny of Pyrrhonism is as blameworthy as another man is estim­ able for having formed ideas that represent to him the greatest worldly wisdom as a kind of folly before God, and all human science as dependent upon a night's dream. ,1 "Atheism" as a concept functioned with at least as much complex­ ity as philosophical skepticism in the learned world of early- modern France. On the one hand, it was a commonplace to state that no mind sincerely could deny the existence of God, that in the presence of a remarkable variety of proofs of His being, both moral and demonstrative, fitted to the unlearned or to the most learned, only wickedness in search of impunity could will the appearance of disbelief. Atheism, the culture taught, only could be the product of depraved will, not of mind.2 On the other hand, the culture sought precisely to prove God against the often very complex imagined arguments of the heuristically useful "atheist", generating difficult "objections" and "doubts" to belief in God that learned theology had to overcome, and addressing an inordinate number of works to "atheists" whom it claimed did not exist.3 If we examine responses to philosophical skepticism in the con­ text of the early-modern French encounter with the problem of atheism, the tensions inherent in the learned world's attitudes toward skepticism emerge in bolder relief. These tensions are not always apparent when one focuses solely on explicit and seemingly settled discussions of skepticism in the formal treatises of thinkers still deemed to be major figures in the history of philosophy. If we look at the contemporaneously respected professors, theologians, apologists and critics of early-modern France, however, in more than one context, we find a more problematic and unstable set of relationships to skepticism than otherwise might appear. The prob­ lem of "atheism" is an excellent foil to the problem of philosophical skepticism. * * * 1 Marin Mersenne, Minim, (Questions harmoniques. ., Paris 1633, 161-163. 2 Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 1650-1729, Volume I: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, 17-43 ("Atheists Without Atheism"). 3 Ibid., 44-109 ("Thinking About the Unthinkable" and "Atheism Without Atheists"). .
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