Now the sciences have been masked; they would appear in all their beauty, if their masks were to be removed. For to anyone who sees clearly the chains linking the sciences, it will seem no more difficult to keep them in mind than to remember the series of numbers.15
These passages appear to tell us that Descartes planned to write a book to be called Thesaurus Mathematicus under the pseudonym "Polybius Cosmopolitanus," and to dedicate it to the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross. That "Polybius" is a pseudonym Descartes actually used is made plausible by the fact that Johann Faulhaber described the clever young French mathematician who visited him in the summer of 1620 as using that name.
Moreover, the dreams reported in Descartes' celebrated notebook have remarkable parallels with a Rosicrucian work published in 1619, the Raptus Philosophicus, by Rudophilus Staurophorus, in which a young man ponders which way to go at a crossroads, meets a woman who informs him that she is Nature and shows him a book containing all knowledge, but whose contents have yet to be methodically arranged.16 Gaukroger carefully observed that there is no certainty that Descartes read Staurophorus, and pointed out that the conceit their accounts share was commonplace—a parting of the ways in the quest for knowledge, a person (usually a woman) who personifies or points the way to wisdom—commonplace enough for it to be possible that they both made independent use of it.
But if it was not Staurophorus' Raptus which provided a model for Descartes' dreams or "dreams," it could well have been Andreae's Chemical Wedding itself, in which Rosencreutz hears a trumpet blast (Descartes' "bang") that announces the angel of truth; his way is made difficult by a powerful opposing wind, but he gains access to a castle where he finds acquaintances and a giant globe in which the stars are visible even by daylight. Moreover he finds an incomplete encyclopaedia, and someone asks him,"Where are you going?" The parallels with Descartes' dreams are striking.
If neither source inspired Descartes' dreams, the similarities constitute a very remarkable coincidence. To it must be added the fact that Descartes knew a surprising number of people who were Rosicrucians, or who were sympathetic to their ideals. One such was Jacob Wassenar, a Rosicrucian he was friendly with in the United Provinces later. In 1624 a treatise called Historich Verbal by one Nicolaes Wassenar actually named Descartes as a Rosicrucian. Nicolaes Wassenar is thought to be Jacob Wassenar's father. Another later friend with Rosicrucian associations was Cornelius van Hooghelande, a physician with an interest in alchemy. Descartes was closely associated with van Hooghelande throughout his years in the United Provinces. Both van Hooghelande and his father were frank about their sympathies for Rosicrucianism. When Descartes went to Sweden in 1649 he left his private papers with van Hooghelande for safekeeping.
Moreover, Descartes corresponded with the Englishman John Pell, who with Samuel Hartlib and Theodore Haak was one of the "Invisible College" that eventually became the Royal Society in London. Later Freemasons claimed that the Royal Society was a Masonic lodge in all but name, and pointed out that Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry were at that time intimately connected. Theodore Haak, moreover, was born in the Palatinate, where members of his family had been counsellors to the Elector. His family left the Palatinate after the Bohemian disaster at the White Mountain. He was educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and later became a naturalised Englishman. He undertook translation work and even spying for the government in London, and when Frederick's son was restored to the throne of the Palatinate in 1648 he was asked to be the new Elector's secretary, but refused. His continental connections—among other things he helped Protestant clergy expelled from Bohemia and the Palatinate—were paralleled by those of Hartlib who, apart from his scientific interests, was also celebrated for the welcome and help he gave exiles from the continent. Educated itinerants and exiles, displaced by the Thirty Years War, were one source of the rich fabric of exchanges of ideas (and intelligence) current in Europe during the first half of the seventeenth century.
These Rosicrucian connections with Descartes have prompted some, from the fanciful Daniel Huet writing in the 1690s to the sober Adam writing in the early twentieth century, and on to the usually sceptical Watson in the late twentieth century, to conclude that Descartes was himself a Rosicrucian. Huet reminds one how easily fanciful theories arise: he claimed that Descartes did not die in 1650, but let it be thought that he had done so, that he thereupon arranged a fake funeral, and went to live in secret in the far north of Sweden in order to pursue the Rosicrucian study of occult sciences. Huet, and those who followed him in this fantasy, cited letters purportedly written by Descartes to Queen Christina of Sweden in the years 1652 and 1656, respectively two and six years after his recorded death.
Apart from the difficulty—again worth repeating—that almost certainly no formal Rosicrucian movement as such existed, the claim that Descartes was himself a Rosicrucian, or at least sympathetic to Rosicrucian ideas, is exceedingly doubtful. Only consider his Jesuit connections and loyalties and, more importantly, the fact that his thought, so crucial for the scientific and philosophical developments of the time, was fundamentally opposed to anything that smacked of "magia, cabala, alchymia."
And consider also the fact that his friend and helper Marin Mersenne, also educated by the Jesuits at La Fleche, was so vehement an opponent of Rosicrucianism. Mersenne was convinced that a Rosicrucian cabal really existed, that its members practised magic, and that they spread evil ideas while moving invisibly from one country to another. By his tireless attacks on everything to do with "magia, cabala, alchymia" and "macro-microcosmical magical philosophy" he helped clear the way for the new science and philosophy of which his friend Descartes was one of the founders.17
It is true that there remain superficial similarities between Rosicrucian rules and Descartes' rules about living "hidden from view," applying his medical knowledge for free, and seeking ways to lengthen life; and also his intense desire to find a single method to unlock all knowledge, and his interest in mathematics and the investigation of nature. But these latter ambitions were not restricted to Rosicrucians alone.
What, then, is one to make of this? The clincher has to be Descartes'Jesuit connections. All his life he was loyal to the Jesuits, and not only painfully careful to avoid offending them but actively keen to have their approval, most especially of his writings, which he wished them to adopt as textbooks in their schools.18 If he was indeed working in the Jesuit interest as an agent commissioned to enquire into Rosicrucian activity and to monitor it, he would only have been one of many employed by them to do so. So to describe him as a Jesuit spy, wandering Europe in search of information about occult societies, is neither so dramatic nor so surprising—for all that it sounds both-—given the circumstances of the time. Only scholars, soldiers and aristocrats travelled, and only scholars and aristocrats knew languages, especially Latin; and only scholars had the right entree to the kinds of circles where Rosicrucians might be expected to gather. So if the Jesuits knew a clever person with both interests and skills in many of the same things as the Rosicrucians professed, they might very well have employed him. I think it quite plausible that they thus employed Descartes, among many others, and that his wanderings in Europe between 1619 and 1625, about which we know so little, are explained thereby. Add to this Descartes' use of pseudonyms, such remarkable coincidences as his turning up in Ulm where Johann Faulhaber lived, his appearance in Bohemia at the time of the Palatinate crisis, his arrival in Paris at the same time as the Rosicrucian scare, and the rumours of his association with Rosicrucians, and the plot thickens. Then consider that, although he had been left a small farm in Poitou, he was not a rich man, and that his years of travel required money. His travelling might have been both required and funded by such work.
And there is one final large clue. In 1628 Descartes was invited to a private interview with one of the King of France's chief ministers. It took place just at the time that Jesuit influence in France was again being opposed by the French government, in parallel with ren
ewed diplomatic support—together with the possibility of military support—from France for the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War. Immediately after that interview Descartes went into exile in the United Provinces, and did not return to France for a dozen years, when the people present and the circumstances obtaining at the time of his departure had both long vanished.
That interview, I suggest, might have been a sticky one, in which Descartes was told that his former association with Jesuit activities in favour of the Habsburg interest was known to France's authorities, and that he would do well to leave the country.
What the story of the Rosicrucian furore shows, when one surveys it for its larger lessons, is that once enquiry had burst open the lid of orthodoxy that had hitherto constrained it—this was the achievement of the Renaissance but especially of the Reformation—the first result was the springing up of a luxuriance of weeds, among them the shoots that, with later more assiduous tending, become the seed crops of science and philosophy Thus from the anarchy of ideas represented by "magia, cabala and alchymia" and the mystical employment of number, strangely but headily admixed with astrology and forms of Protestant zeal, came the steadier growth of responsible science. If one were pressed to put dates on the flow of this tide, one would say "magia, cabala and alchymia" reached its height in the period between 1550 and 1620, with responsible science growing from among its excitements in the later part of the same period, and becoming increasingly vigorous from the early years of the seventeenth century onwards, but especially from the 1620s.
As an added complication, the rejection of Scholastic thought, with its roots in Aristotelian physics and metaphysics, was a premise for some practitioners of the new occultism as well as for those who were bringing responsible science to birth. Given this, together with the fact that the new furore of ideas was contemporaneous with bitter religious divides and the threat to order—both religious and temporal—represented by these divides, it is easy to see why orthodox religion on both sides of the Catholic—Protestant quarrel was made anxious by what was happening. It was hard enough for practitioners of the new sciences and pseudo-sciences alike to grasp the difference between the fanciful and fruitful among them, so observers were at a double disadvantage: they were threatened in their orthodoxy and confused by the Babel of ideas assaulting it. No doubt more astute minds, even in the major religious movements, could tell the difference between a Galileo and a Dr. Dee, but because both kinds of thought were hostile to the interests of orthodoxy, both kinds of thought had therefore to be proscribed. Giordano Bruno (on the "magia, cabala and alchymia" side of things) was burned at the stake in 1600, and Galileo (on the science side of things) was put under house arrest in 1632, showing that to be a votary of unorthodoxy, whether nonsensical as with alchemy or responsible as with science, could be a very dangerous occupation.
5
Nine Years of Travel
According to his own testimony in the Discourse, Descartes followed his spell in Duke Maximilian's army with "nine years of travel" before settling down to systematic work on science and philosophy. These itinerant years were 1620 to 1628 inclusive. They were far from years of idleness; apart from the endeavours that the preceding chapter suggests he was engaged in, Descartes attempted in this period to draft at least two works, the Exercises in Good Sense, now lost, and Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Both were efforts to state the insights about method that had come to him in the seminal years 1618 and 1619, but evidently the task proved much more difficult than he expected at first.
He was also at work on mathematics and science, for by the time he came to wider public notice in Paris in the years between 1625 and 1628 he already had a reputation among cognoscenti in both spheres, based not on publications but on personal contacts and correspondence. This reputation burgeoned from 1625 onwards, largely as a result of the news-spreading activities of the indefatigable Marin Mersenne, who for many years acted as a one-man science newsletter and correspondence centre for Europe, and who told his wide circle of acquaintances about Descartes.
When Descartes and Mersenne first became properly acquainted in the early 1620s the latter was engaged in editing a large compendium of mathematics, the Synopsis Mathematica, which appeared in 1626. Their shared interest in mathematics created an immediate bond. They had been pupils at La Fleche at the same time, but Mersenne was eight years older than Descartes and had entered the college two years earlier than he, so it is unlikely that they knew one another there (though Mersenne probably remembered Descartes' older brother Pierre). Between 1609 and 1611 Mersenne studied theology at the Sorbonne, and then joined the order of Minim Friars. From the early 1620s his lodgings in Paris were a meeting place for the best mathematicians of the day, including Fermat, Gassendi, Roberval, Beaugrand, Descartes himself and, later, Pascal.
Mersenne was a powerful ally for Descartes because his attacks on alchemy, astrology and the Rosicrucians made him an unimpeachable arbiter of orthodoxy. This gave weight to his later defence of Descartes against charges of heterodoxy. Later still, Mersenne defended Galileo in the same way, and even more importantly was the first to make Galileo's work widely known outside Italy, by translating and commenting on it. One of his own main contributions was to the investigation of prime numbers, one type of which is still known as a "Mersenne prime."
Through Mersenne, Descartes also came to know Claude Mydorge, a wealthy man and an enthusiast for physics and mathematics whose independent means enabled him to indulge his passion fully. Mydorge worked on geometry and optics, wrote a book on conic sections, and invented mathematical recreations and puzzles as a sideline, and is remembered for his accurate measurement of the latitude of Paris. The association between him and Descartes proved important later because of their joint labours on optics. Mydorge made Descartes a number of optical instruments for experimental use, with significant results for the understanding of vision.
Descartes' Paris visit of 1623 was therefore a useful one, full of promise for the development of his mathematical work. But he did not stay long. In a letter to his father and brother written on 21 March of that year Descartes announced his intention of setting off to Italy the very next day. The letter appears to have an apologetic tone; he was going, he said, to gather experience of the world, to form better habits, to grow more able even if he did not in the process grow richer. He also had to settle the affairs of a family connection (in fact his godmother's son) who had recently died in Italy, having held the post of commissary general for food supplies to French troops in the Alps. He hinted in the letter that he might have considered purchasing the deceased man's post. Some biographers conclude from this letter that Descartes' family thought him a wastrel for travelling about rather than settling down to the family avocations of law and prosperity. But it is also possible that he needed to offer an explanation for an Italian journey which would seem plausible to them or whoever enquired, given that going without any explanation would otherwise have appeared arbitrary or capricious.
Adam observed that the itinerary Baillet gives of Descartes' route was largely drawn from Montaigne's account of his Italian journey, published in 1581 and remembered now for its amusing account of how, in the interests of becoming a Roman Citizen for the fun of it, Montaigne had to kiss the toe of the Pope's velvet slipper— devout lips being guided to the correct point on the slipper by a cross inked there—after progressing towards the papal throne by going down on alternate knees, zigzag fashion. Using Montaigne as a guide, Baillet gave Descartes' route as Basle, Innsbruck, the Brenner Pass, and thence to Venice through the Val Telline. Once again the impressive innocence of Baillet's account was matched by the later biographers who quote him. For assuming that Descartes indeed travelled via the Val Telline—the highly important and politically significant Val Telline—rather than an alternative route (and there were some safer and easier ones), a brief acquaintance with historical geography and the circumstances of the time combine to make the choice very interesting. For
, yet again, Descartes' doings tied in with the fraught politics of the day.
With Frederick expelled from the Palatinate and Bohemia, and with Protestant rebellion in the latter kingdom quelled, the Habsburg cause must have seemed in fine shape. But France's earlier policy of containing the Habsburgs, begun by Henri IV and interrupted during the regency of his widow Marie de Medici, was at that very point being revived by Louis XIII. Henri IV had seen that the only way to contain Habsburg power was to interfere with the cordon of Spanish possessions strung round France's frontiers, from the Pyrenees through Milan, and up the "Spanish Road" to the coast of Flanders. When Louis XIII was at last able to pay sufficient attention to foreign policy matters—he was distracted at home by renewed Huguenot troubles, largely of his own making—he saw that although the Spanish cordon could not be broken without all-out war, it could be weakened by pressure at strategic points. In particular, he saw that interference with the lines of communication between Spain's Italian possessions and the Spanish Netherlands would be most serviceable to French interests. And the early 1620s was a suitable moment for interference, given that hostilities between Spain and the United Provinces had latterly resumed, and the Spanish Road was in heavy use.
Spain had two routes northwards from Milan to its territories in the Netherlands. One led through Savoy to Franche Comte, the other passed through the Adda valley, the Val Telline north-east of Lake Como, and thence into the Tyrol. Because Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy, was an unreliable ally, and because the Savoy route was vulnerable to French attack from Lyons, the Spanish were cautious about using it. This made the Val Telline an absolutely essential lifeline for supplying the Spanish Netherlands. Louis XIII, therefore, made the Val Telline the jugular on which he proposed to press his finger.
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