CHAPTER FOUR

DESCARTES AND THE CARTESIAN PHILOSOPHY: A MANIFESTATION OF ENTHUSIASM?

I have examined so far the theological critique of enthusiasm and the emergence of a medical critique of enthusiasm. Both referred primarily to religious enthusiasm, especially to claims of prophecy, to apocalyptic announcements concerning the approaching Day of Judg• ment, and to pretensions of having direct divine inspiration. By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, the term "enthusiasm" assumed other, broader meanings. It could be applied to intellectual and scientific pursuits besides religious experience proper. The vari• ous connotations of the label can tell us much about the intellectual orientation of those who use it, and the changes in those connota• tions reveal a great deal about the transformations in the intellectual climate of the mid-seventeenth century. This chapter and the follow• ing one will attempt to trace some of these transformations. As we have seen already in the previous chapter, Aristotelian and humanist intellectuals like Casaubon viewed "contemplative philoso• phy" as an important type of enthusiasm. Under that category, sur• prisingly enough, appeared also the philosopher René Descartes. Usually regarded today as the founder of modern rationalist philoso• phy, Descartes was seen by some conservative seventeenth century intellectuals as an enthusiast rather than a rationalist. Borrowing the phrase coined by Richard H. Popkin, who has dealt with what is in some ways the parallel issue of Scepticism, one may say that Descartes was "an enthusiast malgré lui" in the eyes of several of his Aristote• lian and humanist opponents.1 Of course, other accusations were directed against Descartes, such as "scepticism", to which I have just

1 Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), chapter X. It should be remembered that whereas in the sixteenth century, humanism was an innovative movement, often distinguished from (and even contrary to) traditional scholastic Aristotelianism, by the seventeenth century, the humanists were defending the "ancients" as against the "moderns", and humanism was regularly combined with Aristotelianism in the cur• riculum of many of the colleges and universities, both Protestant and Catholic. This fusion, and the conservative character which humanism assumed in the seventeenth 110 CHAPTER FOUR alluded, and even more commonly "atheism". Cartesian philosophy was often suspected of "atheistic" implications, both by Protestants (Reformed as well as Anglican) and by Catholics (especially Jesuits).2 Nevertheless, alongside this charge, the labels "enthusiasm" and "fa• naticism" were assigned to Descartes' philosophy by several English and Continental critics. Such a practice not only indicates the broad• ening of the term "enthusiasm" in that period. More important, it manifests the intellectual and ideological use of that label, and the special cultural role which the concept performed, as well as the social and cultural locus of the phenomenon to which it was applied.

Descartes' Image as "Rosicrucian" and Enthusiast

The first image of Descartes as an enthusiast was linked to his al• leged affiliations with the notorious Rosicrucian order in his early years in Germany. The question of the young Descartes' association with "Rosicrucianism" has been reopened recently.3 Here, I shall focus century is clearly manifest in the work of Meric Casaubon, especially if we compare him to his father Isaac. 2 On the charges of concealed "atheism" uttered by Reformed theologians against Cartesian philosophy see Ernst Bizer, "Die reformierten Orthodoxie und der Cartesianismus", ^TtoAr^yfrr Theologie und Kirche 55 (1958): 306-372. On the Angli• can critique, especially that of Henry More, see Marjorie Nicolson, "The Early Stages of Cartesianism in England", Studies in Philology 26 (1929): 356-74, and the recent article by A. Gabbey, "Philosophia Cartesiana Triumphata: Henry More (1646- 1671)", in T.M. Lennon et al., eds., Problems of Cartesianism (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1982), pp. 171-250. Samuel Parker similarly warned against the atheistic implications of Descartes' philosophy in his Disputationes de Deo et Providentia Divina, London, 1678. Scottish Presbyterians were also making the same charges. See for example Alexander Pitcarnius, Compendiaria et perfadlis Physiobgiae Idea, Aristotelicae forte conformior. . . Una cum anatome Cartesianismi in qua Cartesii speculations metaphysicae examini subjiciuntur (London, 1676), Section I, Art. 1, sect. 1. On the Jesuit critique of Descartes accusing him of atheism see Gaston Sortais, "Le Cartésianisme chez les Jésuites français au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle", Archives de Phibsophie, vol. 6, no. 3 (1929). For one such typical argument concerning the atheistic implications of Car• tesian philosophy see [Ant. Rochon], ^tre d'un Phibsophe à un Cartésien de ses Amis (Paris: Published by le Père Paradies, 1685), pp. 50-62. 3 See William R. Shea, The Magic of Numbers and Motion: The Scientific Career of René Descartes (Canton, MA.: History of Science Publications U.S.A., 1991), chapter 5, as well as his earlier article in Annali DelVlstituto E Museo Di Storia Delia Scienza di Firenze, vol. 4, no. 2 (1979), pp. 29-47. Shea argues that there is enough circumstantial evidence to show that young Descartes was seriously interested in the Rosicrucians and was deeply influenced by the hermetic literature. A similar argument was made by Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 113-117. The sceptical view concerning these links was stated by