Descartes

by A. C. Grayling

  The people of the Val Telline were Catholics, but control of the pass lay with an association of Protestant landlords known as the Grisons (the Grey Leagues or Graubunden) who administered the Val Telline as a vassal province, leasing its offices to whoever would pay most. Because of its acute strategic importance it was coveted by the Spanish in Lombardy, by France, and by Venice. For decades before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War these great powers had vied over it, each seeking to make treaties with the Grisons for its exclusive use. Early in the seventeenth century the Spanish Habsburgs, impatient with the insecurity of their communications, built a fortress at the Val Telline's mouth, and put the Catholics of the pass into their pay, thus gaining an important advantage in the competition for control of it. When the Bohemian troubles were in full spate in 1620, the Catholics of the Val Telline rose against the Grey Leagues and the Spanish sent troops to help them, with the result that the Val Telline fell completely into Habsburg hands. The English ambassador at Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, wrote to London: "The Spaniards are now able to walk (while they keep a foot in the Lower Palatinate) from Milan to Dunkirk upon their own inheritances and purchases, a connexion of terrible moment in my opinion." His fears proved justified when in 1623 a large Spanish force marched through the Val Telline and on towards the Spanish Netherlands.

  France, Savoy and Venice unreservedly shared Sir Henry's anxieties. In February 1623 they signed the League of Lyons, pledging to get the Habsburgs out of the Grisons' lands (while incidentally announcing the intention of helping themselves to some choice Habsburg possessions in north Italy too). Alarmed, the Habsburgs tried to neutralise the threat by ceding control of the Val Telline to the Pope, who sent his own army to guard it. But this was not good enough for the Lyons League, for of course it meant that the Habsburgs still had untrammelled use of the pass. So Louis XIII sent an army to occupy all the Grison territory, and backed the Grisons themselves in capturing Tirano at the pass's eastern end.

  This success plunged the Habsburgs in general and Spain in particular into a terrible fix. The latter could not resupply her troops in the Netherlands, her line of communication to the Austrian Habsburgs was cut, and her hold on Milan was suddenly vulnerable to attack from Savoy.

  At this moment of triumph over the Habsburgs, French policy was subverted by political difficulties at home, in which a renewed Huguenot rebellion played a major part, requiring the recall of France's troops from Italy and Switzerland.1 Thus a crucial moment passed, and another opportunity to shorten the great European 'war went with it. From France's point of view the circumstances were not altogether bleak: the political instability in Paris brought Richelieu to power, so that for the next eighteen years the country had a single continuous administration with a highly able minister at its helm. But that was no consolation on the immediate foreign policy front.

  Descartes travelled through the Val Telline in the spring of 1623, shortly after the League of Lyons was signed with the express purpose of prising that sensitive region from Habsburg control. Apart from the uneasy military situation in the Val Telline, which might itself have discouraged a solitary traveller, for a Frenchman to pass through crucial Habsburg-held (and thus enemy) territory at a time of such high tension would have seemed strange—unless of course he had a purpose, contacts, and safe conduct arrangements in hand.

  Recall again the fact that Jesuit interests were not France's interests, but emphatically Habsburg ones: and leave the circumstances— granting yet again that they might have been innocent, and yet again entirely and purely coincidental—to suggest what they may. It is mightily frustrating, though, that given the possibility that Descartes' visit to the Val Telline was indeed somehow linked to the momentous events of the day, that his own later silence, and the profound secrecy cloaking the frantic espionage of those tumultuous times, means that we can only note the repeated coincidences in this part of Descartes' life, and leave them at that.

  * * *

  From the militarily tense and dangerous Val Telline, Descartes went to Venice, no great distance once the mighty Alps had been left behind. Baillet recounted that he there saw the festivities in which the Doge's marriage to the sea was celebrated. Since this ceremony takes place on Ascension Day, which fell on 16 May that year, the circumstance dates Descartes' visit accurately.

  From Venice, Descartes might have gone to Loretto, having promised himself to make a pilgrimage there after his extraordinary insights and dreams of 10 November 1619. If he did so he again followed in Montaigne's footsteps. And if he did so in earnest— that is, as a devout Catholic believing in the shrine's spiritual importance— the action demonstrated a deeper and less questioning faith than is fully consistent with the attitude of rational enquiry expected of a philosopher. For Loretto is the supposed site on which angels deposited the house of the Holy Family after carrying it thither from its original site in Nazareth. Loretto was for many centuries one of the chief pilgrimage destinations in Europe; in addition to the Holy Family's cottage it contains a fragment of the manger (brought equally miraculously from the stable in Bethlehem), which would explain the degree of hyperbole bestowed on it much later by Pope John Paul II, who called it "the holiest place on earth."

  Did Descartes sincerely believe any of this? At that very time he was writing, or at least meditating, what became his Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Rule 2 states, "We must occupy ourselves only with those objects that our intellectual powers appear competent to know certainly and indubitably." Although he claimed to be able to show, in his Meditations, that the existence of a deity could be known with certainty, it is a long distance from there to the truth of the traditions of a given faith, such as the one about angels carrying the Holy Family house to Loretto. Indeed for anyone to feel "competent to know certainly and indubitably" that the shrine was the Holy Family's house, thus miraculously transported across the eastern Mediterranean (with a temporary lie-over, the tradition adds, in the Balkans), is arguably impossible. In characteristic fashion—politic or pusillanimous, the question is open—Descartes said nothing of the matter.

  Although Descartes' next known stop was Florence, and although he was in Italy for two years and therefore must have remained in all these major centres for several months at a time, he made no effort to meet Galileo.2 If he had wondered beforehand whether Italy might be a place to settle, given the legacy of scientific enquiry there and the bright afterglow of Renaissance arts, he had by this time made up his mind against it. Later he suggested that his reasons turned on the climate—he regarded it as too hot—and the prevalence of crime.3 Another reason he could have given was that the attitude of the Inquisition to science, never friendly and growing yet more inimical, was a major disincentive.

  Indeed, the Inquisition was at that very time bringing Italy's lead in science to an end. Large straws had been in the wind since Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo dei Fiori on 17 February 1600. The Church claimed that Bruno was put to death for his errors in saying that Jesus was not the son of God but a skilful magician, and moreover that God's mercy would ensure that even the devil would be saved at last; but most people knew that he was condemned also for his defence of the Copernican system, and for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds. Descartes doubtless also recognised that it was something of all four.

  Moreover, this was the Italy in which the Carmelite friar Paolo Antonio Foscarini had received a famous and chillingly polite letter from Cardinal Bellarmine in 1615, thanking him for his memorandum showing that Copernicus's theory was not inconsistent with Scripture, but pointing out that, "If there were a real proof that the Sun is in the center of the universe, that the Earth is in the third heaven, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary."

  But the sheathed irony of this remark was blunted by the fact that Bellarmine had already reminded F
oscarini of how matters stood: "As you are aware, the Council of Trent forbids the interpretation of the Scriptures in a way contrary to the common opinion of the holy Fathers. Now if your Reverence will read, not merely the Fathers, but modern commentators on Genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua, you will discover that all agree in interpreting them literally as teaching that the Sun is in the heavens and revolves round the Earth with immense speed, and that the Earth is very distant from the heavens, at the center of the universe, and motionless. Consider, then, in your prudence, whether the Church can tolerate that the Scriptures should be interpreted in a manner contrary to that of the holy Fathers and of all modern commentators, both Latin and Greek."

  Descartes, in his prudence, saw these straws in the wind well enough. In 1625, when he left Italy after his two-year visit, the condemnation of Galileo was only eight years away, and already it was clear that the country held no future for a thinker.

  Descartes left Italy in the early summer of 1625, travelling through Piedmont and entering France via the Mount Cenis pass, observing avalanches as he did so.4 By June he was at his family home of Chatellerault, where he did a most interesting thing: he tried to get a job, and of exactly the kind that his father and brother would strongly have approved. Indeed it was the very job his distinguished great-uncle and godfather Michel Ferrand had held while Descartes was being brought up in his house: lieutenant-general of Chatellerault.

  This uncharacteristic turn of events richly prompts speculation. Suppose the hypothesis about Descartes' intelligence work is true: his seeking a permanent post in family territory and in the family trade—that is, as a local legal dignitary—suggests that for one reason or another his spying life had come to an end. The lieutenant-generalship was at that moment for sale; perhaps Descartes' family had alerted him to its availability, and he had returned to investigate. The asking price was 16,000 crowns, and Descartes had 10,000 to hand. Baillet said that a friend offered to lend him at least some of the extra money required at no interest, and in July Descartes sold some more parcels of family land, doubtless to finish putting the required capital together.

  But matters were not plain sailing. Money could not have been the only consideration, for when Descartes wrote to his father, then in Paris, to discuss the matter, he mentioned that his lack of legal experience was an impediment, and suggested spending some time in a more junior position to learn the ropes. No paternal reply is extant, and the immediate next steps in the venture are lost from view. But evidently the intention of finding a settled and prestigious post was a serious one, because in the following year Descartes returned to the area on the same errand, this time in company with his father's highly distinguished friend Vasseur d'Etoiles, receiver-general of the royal finances. So powerful a supporter implies that at this point Descartes was in earnest.

  Despite the help of the king's receiver-general, however, Descartes did not get an official post. Willingly or otherwise, he abandoned the idea not only of the lieutenant-generalship but of any career in law or administration.

  Perhaps the disappointment was not too great. After the first job-seeking visit in 1625 Descartes settled in Paris, where he spent almost all of the next three years, not leaving again until 1628. There was a good reason for this: the second half of the 1620s was a delirious time to be in Paris, which was experiencing the height of the "libertine era," with new and radical ideas everywhere. Descartes was right in the middle of the excitement, which obviously made the prospect of legal life in the provinces pale by comparison.

  The "libertine" episode in Paris during the 1620s was not, as the term doubtless suggests at first, a matter of wine, women and song, but of intellectual liberty. It was a moment of enlightenment and healthy scepticism, one of the first flowerings of the European mind beyond the foetid post-Reformation conflicts of religious traditions and doctrines.

  The term "libertine" has an interesting history. It was first applied in the mid-sixteenth century to a sect of Protestants in the Netherlands and northern France who, with impeccable logic, concluded that since the deity had ordained all things, nothing could be sinful. They duly acted on this principle. Neither their delightful view nor what they did on the basis of it met with approval from any other sect, whether Catholic at one extreme or Calvinist at the other, and so the libertines became a byword for sensuality, debauchery, depravity and general "Epicureanism." This of course gave rise to the standard and now most familiar sense of "libertine." By association, however, the term also came to apply to anyone suspected, as a result of having advanced views, of rejecting the principles of religion, and especially (given the time and date) Christianity. For a time in the seventeenth century this was indeed the word's chief meaning, and anyone to whom it was applied would thereby have been understood to have an interest in science and philosophy—and therefore to be unorthodox at least, and usually suspect, in matters of religion. As a blanket term it was of course inaccurate, for by no means were all of the leading scientists and philosophers of the time atheists or agnostics, and indeed very few of them publicly avowed being either. Indeed, some of them were sincere believers, or at very least believed that outward adherence to, and profession of, the faith was a necessity—not just for their personal safety (one could be burned at the stake otherwise), but for the good order of society. Such people were in good company: Plato had long before argued that the generality of people should be encouraged to believe in gods so that they would behave well, and would be more prepared to die in battle. Rational self-interest might suggest the wisdom of taking Plato's hint and supporting hoi polloi in their credulities.

  The reason for the seventeenth-century application of the term "libertine" to people with intellectual interests (whether they were atheists or not) was that conservatives assumed that advanced thinking must lead to dissolute morals. This non-sequitur was so established in the public mind by the early eighteenth century that in order to preserve a distinction between people of lax morals and people of advanced views, "libertine" was reserved to the former and the latter came to be called "free thinkers" or "philosophes" instead. While this cluster of terms was in transition, writers like Pierre Bayle attempted to keep the distinction between moral and intellectual libertinage by describing votaries of the latter as "libertines of the mind" (libertins d'esprit) as opposed to "libertines of the body." But in the early seventeenth century a "libertine" was a "philosophe," not (or not necessarily also) a seducer and drunkard; and it is this intellectual sense that is conveyed by the term here.

  It happens that the age of Louis XIV in France was one in which morals and language were equally free—the censorious would say coarse and degraded—so that those who were libertines in our intellectual sense might quite well have kept several simultaneous mistresses, visited bordellos, and interlarded their speech with streams of profanities, all in a way then perfectly acceptable to everyone other than the orthodox and pious among their contemporaries. But moral "laxity" is a thing of fashion, and the succession of ages has seen "laxity" and "puritanism" come and go cyclically, as when Victorian prudery replaced Regency loucheness only to be replaced by the era of Freud in its turn. So this aspect of the Sun King's France was not a consequence but an adjunct of the dawning of modern science and philosophy, both by their own routes stemming from the liberation of the mind from the straitjacket of orthodoxy. But this came later; in Descartes' day the "libertines of the mind" were just beginning.

  The 1620s are important to the libertine story—some historians describe what happened in the 1620s as the "libertine crisis"— because they constituted a crucial moment in the process of the modern world's tearing itself away from the old world. Of course this parturition took much bloody and painful struggle over a far longer period, starting with Luther's nailed theses in 1517 and ending only with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648; but when looked at through the lens of the history of thought, the 1620s take on a pivotal significance. In that decade one saw the last major effort of the ol
d world to repress the new; and in it some of the most significant founding ideas of the new world—among the very foremost of them those of Descartes himself-—were forged and first expressed.

  The "libertine crisis" began when, in 1619 at Toulouse, an itinerant teacher of philosophy and medicine, one Giulio Cesare Vanini, was burned at the stake. His crime was "atheism" (but also, by circuitous implication, homosexuality). His name became a byword throughout Europe for atheism and the "naturalism" that accompanied it—that is, the view that nature was the ultimate reality and source of all things. Until Pierre Bayle defended Vanini later in the seventeenth century, most writers aped the virulent attack launched by a Jesuit apologist called Francois Garasse who stigmatised Vanini as a paradigmatically dangerous threat to religion and therefore the safety of society. The story is of more than passing interest in connection with Descartes for, in the controversies that surrounded him in the 1640s, he found himself being likened to Vanini—a charge he angrily, even violently, resented and rejected.

  Vanini had begun his career as a Carmelite monk, studying theology and medicine in Naples, Rome and Padua before travelling throughout Europe, occasionally serving as a tutor or secretary in noble households. Later critics asserted that he had gotten into trouble for being a homosexual, and that he had killed a man in a fight, this latter being his reason for emigrating for a time to England, where he abjured his Catholicism. On returning to France he travelled under the pseudonym "Pompeio Usiglio," keeping mainly to the south of the country (to avoid Paris and the reach of central government), and supporting himself by giving private lessons. In Toulouse, a city famous for its ardent persecution of heterodoxy, one of his pupils denounced him for "mocking at sacred things, vilifying the Incarnation, refusing God, attributing everything to fate, adoring nature as the bounteous mother and source of all being . . . he had fallen into impiety and sacrilege and disgraced his priest's habit by the publication of a book called The Secrets of Nature."5Toulouse's city fathers chose to act against him because "the unfailing attraction of novelty for the young brought him many disciples, especially from amongst the young men fresh from school."6 Given that Vanini asserted that men had no souls but died as other animals did, and that the Virgin Mary was a woman like any other and needed to have sexual relations to get pregnant, his views were certainly outrageous for their time. While being led to the stake in Toulouse's Place du Salin he cried out in his native Italian, "I die cheerfully, as befits a philosopher!"