Faith Rules the Age
The sixteenth century was not a favorable time for philosophy to grow. Theology occupied the thinking minds, and faith, which ruled every house and hostel, dragged reason in its train. Luther rejected reason because he thought it inclined to atheism; but examples of atheism were very rare. A Dutch priest at The Hague was put to death (1512) because he denied creation, the survival of the soul and the divinity of Christ; but he was not himself an open atheist. In 1539 an English chronicler wrote: "This year there died at the University of Paris a distinguished doctor who said there was no God; he had held this belief since he was twenty, lived past eighty, and all that time kept his error hidden in his thoughts." Guillaume Postel in 1552 published a book, Against Atheists, but the word "atheist" was seldom distinguished from "deist," "pantheist" or "skeptic."
Luther and the Doubters
The skeptics were numerous enough that Luther struck at them, and, as the story goes, said of them: "To the blind children of the world, religious matters are too high to be seen: that the three persons are one God, that the true Son of God became man, that in Christ two natures, divine and human, are hidden, and other things of the kind: all these are to them annoying tales and phantoms." He went on to speak of people who doubted that mankind had been created by a God who, from the beginning, had destined them to damnation. In France there were people who doubted the survival of the soul. Bonaventure des Periers, in his Cymbalum Mundi (1537; the Persian source gives the title as "Crucible of the World"), mocked the occurrence of miracles, the contradictions of Scripture and the persecution of heretics. The work was condemned by Calvin and the Sorbonne and burned by the public executioner. Margaret of Navarre had to send the author away from her court at Nerac, but sent him enough money to live in Lyon. In 1544 Bonaventure died, leaving the manuscripts of his works to Margaret, "patron and guardian of all that is good" (the circumstances of his death are not detailed here).
Skepticism in Politics
In politics the spirit of skepticism took the form of attacks on the divine right of kings and the infallibility of their will; and in this field the skeptics were usually either Protestant thinkers pressed by Catholic rulers, or Catholic thinkers who chafed at the state's triumph over them. Bishop John Ponet, who was deeply disgusted with Mary Tudor, published in 1558 a short treatise on political power in which he argued: "The various and repeated examples of the deposing of kings and the killing of tyrants that have from time to time occurred in history prove beyond doubt that such conduct was perfectly just, right and in accord with the divine will ... Kings, princes and rulers got their authority from the people ... and the people have the right to take back the powers they entrusted to them with their vote ... whenever they wish." John Major, the Scottish teacher who had a hand in John Knox's intellectual training, likewise argued that since all secular authority derives from the will of human society, a king hated by his people may be deposed and removed, provided it is done by process of law.
La Boetie and the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
The most interesting opponent of absolute monarchy was a young Catholic who won a fairly lasting name by dying in Montaigne's arms. By that unequaled thinker's account, this young man, Etienne de La Boetie, "was in my opinion the greatest man of our age." Etienne was the son of a high official in Perigord, studied law at Orleans, and was admitted as a counselor to the Parliament of Bordeaux before reaching the legal age.
In 1549, when he was nineteen and the study of Greek and Roman literature had awakened republican ideas in him, he wrote a book of sharp protest against absolute government, which he never published. Its title was On Voluntary Servitude, but because it bitterly condemned the despotic rule of one man over a multitude, it gradually became customary to call it the book against "the One." Listen to its fiery call:
What great shame and disgrace it is, he says, that countless people willingly, even slavishly, take the yoke of a tyrant who recognizes no right to people's property, their parents, wives or children, or even their own lives! What kind of man is he? Neither a Hercules nor a Samson, but often a pygmy and dwarf, and most often the most cowardly of the crowd, not one whose personal strength has set him over the people, but often a slave of base pleasures himself; and how wretched his subjects must be! If two or three or four do not rise against the One, it can be put down to their lack of courage; but when hundreds and thousands do not free themselves from the One's chains, what remains of personal will and human honor? To win liberty one need not fight the tyrant; when the country is worn out by him, he falls of himself. It is enough that the people who live in humiliation and bondage under a tyrant's pressure recognize no right of his over them. Winning freedom takes a firm resolve to throw off the yoke. "Resolve with a strong will to be slaves no more, and you will find yourselves free! Withdraw your support from the tyrant, and he will topple and shatter like a giant statue whose base has been pulled out."
La Boetie anticipated the ideas of Rousseau and Thomas Paine: man by nature wants freedom; inequalities of property among men are accidental and themselves lay an obligation on the wealthy to help their poorer countrymen; all men are brothers, "made from one mold" by one Creator.
Montaigne's Friend
It is strange that reading these very revolutionary ideas drew gentle, cautious Montaigne toward La Boetie, and finally (1557) led the two to one of the most famous friendships in history. At that time Montaigne was twenty-four and Etienne twenty-seven; perhaps Montaigne was still young enough to lodge such revolutionary feelings in himself. Their friendship soon ended with the death of La Boetie at thirty-two (1563). Montaigne described his last days with a pen that seems to have had in mind the account in Plato of the death of Socrates. He was so grieved at the loss of this gentle young friend that seventeen years later he recalled that bereavement as the bitterest memory of his life. Montaigne took no step to have the Voluntary Servitude printed, and when he learned that a Protestant minister of Geneva had published it (1576) he was very sorry. He called the book the product of the liberty-loving spirit of the young generation and put its author's age at sixteen when he wrote it (which does not agree with the nineteen given above). The work was almost a herald of the French Revolution.
Ramus and the Philosophers
The life of Pierre de la Ramee, known as Petrus Ramus, was as poetic, and his death far more cruel (omitted here). He set himself to overthrow the tyranny of Aristotle. It was an absolute despotism that for more than three centuries had ruled not one people but many, not over their bodies but over their minds and even their souls; for had not that unbelieving thinker been chosen as the Church's official philosopher? The humanists of the Renaissance wished to put Plato in Aristotle's place, but the Reformation, or fear of it, was bent on stifling their ideas; and as a result in Protestant Germany and Catholic France Aristotelian scholasticism still rode in the saddle, until Luther died (1546) cursing it. To bring Stagirite Aristotle down from his intellectual throne seemed to the young intellectual generation the most lawful kind of tyrannicide.
At twenty-one Ramus sat the University of Paris examinations for the master's degree (1536) and chose, with complete frankness, the title of the thesis he was to defend for a whole day against professors and all other challengers: Everything Aristotle Said Is False. His story is an ode to study. He was born in a village in Picardy near Noyon, Calvin's birthplace; thirsting to study in the Paris colleges, he twice tried to reach that city on foot and each time gave up on the road and returned dejected to his village. In 1528, when he was no more than twelve, he managed to enter the service of a rich student who wished to pass the entrance examination of the College of Navarre. By working by day and studying by night, he cleared his way through the mass of the curriculum after eight years of effort and entered the faculty of letters. In pursuit of this aim Ramus nearly lost his eyesight, but he found Plato.
He wrote: when I entered Paris I fell into the trap of the sophists' subtleties, and through questions and disputations they introduced me to the arts and sciences of the curriculum, but showed me no path to practical use or intellectual progress. When I finished my studies I saw that these disputes had been nothing but a waste of time to me. While I was alarmed at this thought, a benevolent angel led me to Xenophon and then to Plato, and then I was able to become acquainted with the philosophy of Socrates.
How many of us today, too, in youth have made the same joyful discovery and found delight in reading Plato! We recognized him as a philosopher who had poetry and wine in his blood, who in the air of Athens heard the song of philosophy's bird, took its wing and sent it down the slope of the centuries with the warm breath of life always in it; a philosopher who echoed in the ear of the soul all the voices of Socrates and his pupils, still full of the intoxication and rapture of debating the most exciting questions in the world! What relief after the lifeless lines of Aristotle, after all those thoughts piled up along the road and that tedious kind of moderation! Of course it is quite unfair of us, and of Ramus, to compare the accumulated notes of Aristotle's lectures with his master's worldly dialogues. In truth only white hairs can appreciate the worth of what the free man of Stagira said. The Aristotle Ramus knew was chiefly the logic-chopper of the Organon, the Aristotle of scholastic classrooms, who had barely survived the blows of Latin translation and his transformation into a philosophy fitted to authentic Christianity under the guidance of St. Thomas Aquinas.