The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  The most tragic of the Jewish heretics was Uriel Acosta of Amsterdam. His father came of a Marrano family that had settled in Oporto and had fully adjusted itself to the Catholic faith. Gabriel, as the youth was called in Portugal, was educated by the Jesuits, who terrified him with sermons on hell but sharpened his mind with Scholastic philosophy. Studying the Bible, he was impressed by the fact that the Church recognized the Old Testament as the Word of God, and that Christ and the twelve Apostles had accepted the Mosaic Law. He concluded that Judaism was divine; he questioned the right of St. Paul to divorce Christianity from Judaism; and he resolved at the first opportunity to return to the faith of his ancestors. He persuaded his mother and his brothers (his father was now dead) to join in an attempt to elude the Inquisition and escape from Portugal. After many perils they reached Amsterdam (c. 1617). There Gabriel changed his name to Uriel, and the family became members of the Portuguese congregation.

  But the same spirit of inquiry and independent thought that had led him to leave the Church made him uncomfortable within the equally rigorous dogmas of the synagogue. He was shocked by the addiction of even the learned rabbis of Amsterdam to the intellectual puerilities of the Cabala. He boldly reproved his new associates for rites and regulations that had no apparent basis in the Bible, and that sometimes, in his judgment, ran quite counter to Biblical ways. As he had little sense of history, he thought it a great mistake that Jewish ritual and belief had altered in the course of nineteen hundred years. As formerly he had returned from the New Testament to the Old, so now he urged a return from the Talmud to the Bible. In 1616 he had published at Hamburg a Portuguese tract, Propostas contra a tradiçāo—arguments against the traditions upon which the Talmud was based. He sent a copy to the Jewish congregation in Venice; it proclaimed a ban against him (1618); and Leo Modena, himself a heretic, was required, by his position in the rabbinate, to refute Acosta’s claim that the ordinances of the rabbis had in many cases no warrant in Scripture. The Amsterdam rabbis, whom he called Pharisees, warned Acosta that they too would ban him unless he retracted. He refused, and openly ignored the regulations of the synagogue. Excommunication was pronounced against him (1623), excluding him from all relations with his fellow Jews. Even his relatives now shunned him; and as he had not yet learned Dutch, he found himself without a single friend. Children stoned him in the streets.

  In the bitterness of his isolation he proceeded (like Spinoza a generation later), to a heresy that attacked a fundamental belief of nearly every person in Europe. He let it be known that he rejected, as quite alien to the Old Testament, the immortality of the soul; the soul, he said, is merely the vital spirit flowing in the blood, and dies with the body. 63 Seeking to answer Acosta’s contentions, a Jewish physician, Samuel da Silva, published a Portuguese Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul (1623), in which he called Acosta ignorant, incompetent, and blind. Uriel countered with An Examination of the Pharisaic Traditions . . . and a Reply to Samuel da Silva, the False Calumniator (1624). The leaders of the Jewish community, to protect its religious freedom, notified the Amsterdam magistracy that Acosta, in denying immortality, was undermining Christianity as well as Judaism. The magistrates arrested him, fined him three hundred gulden, and burned his book. He was soon released, and apparently suffered no physical harm.

  His punishment was economic and social. His younger brothers became dependent upon him, and therefore upon his freedom—now forbidden—to engage in economic relations with his fellows. Perhaps for this reason, and because he wished to marry again, Uriel decided to submit to the synagogue, to recant his heresies, and, as he put it, “to become an ape among apes.” 64 His recantation was accepted (1633), and for a time the passionate skeptic lived in relative peace. But secretly his heresies continued, and broadened. “I doubted,” he later wrote, “whether Moses’ Law was in reality God’s law, and decided that it was of human origin.” 65 Now he cast aside all religion except a vague belief in a God identical with nature (as in Spinoza). He neglected the burdensome religious usages required of an orthodox Jew. When two Christians came to him and professed a desire to adopt Judaism, he dissuaded them, warning them that they were laying a heavy yoke upon their necks. They reported this to the synagogue. The rabbis summoned and questioned him; they found him unrepentant, and now they pronounced against him a second and severer excommunication (1639). Again his relatives excluded him from their lives, and his brother Joseph joined in persecuting him. 66

  He bore this isolation for seven years, and then, finding himself grievously hampered in business and law, he offered to submit. Angered by his long and troublesome resistance, the Jewish leaders condemned him to a form of recantation and penance imitated from the Portuguese Inquisition. 67 As in an auto-da-fé, he was made to mount a platform in the synagogue, to read before a full congregation a confession of his errors and sins, and to solemnly promise that henceforth he would obey all regulations of the community, and live as a true Jew. Then he was stripped to the waist and was scourged with thirty-nine stripes. Finally he was made to lie across the threshold of the synagogue, and those present, including his hostile brother, stepped over him as they left.

  He rose from this humiliation not reconciled but furious. Going home, he shut himself up in his study for several days and nights, and wrote his last and bitterest denunciation of the Judaism which he had sacrificed much to adopt, but whose introverted history, and protective rigorism under centuries of oppression, he had never sympathetically understood. In this sarcastic Exemplar humanae Vitae he told his intellectual autobiography as an example of what happens to the man who thinks. “All evils,” he felt, “come from not following Right Reason and the Law of Nature.” 68 He contrasted “natural” with revealed religion, and claimed that the latter taught men hatred as the former taught men love. Having finished his manuscript, he loaded two pistols, waited at his window till he saw his brother Joseph pass, fired at him, and missed. 69 Then he shot himself (1647?).

  The Jewish community tried to bury this tragedy in silence, but some members must have found it hard to forget. Spinoza was a lad of fifteen when that excommunication rite was performed; he may have been in the congregation that saw it performed; he may have walked in awe and horror over the prostrate heretic. Through that youth the vision of Acosta, cleansed of its anger, entered into the heritage of philosophy. 70

  BOOK IV

  THE INTELLECTUAL ADVENTURE

  1648–1715

  CHAPTER XVII

  From Superstition to Scholarship

  1648–1715

  I. IMPEDIMENTS

  NATURE, as conceived by all but a small minority of Europeans in the seventeenth century, was the product or battleground of supernatural beings benevolent or malevolent, inhabiting human bodies as souls, or dwelling in trees, woods, rivers, and winds as animating spirits, or entering organisms as angels or demons, or roaming the air as michievous elves. None of these spirits was subject to inviolable or calculable law; any of them could intervene miraculously in the operations of stones or stars, animals or men; and events not visibly due to the natural or regular behavior of bodies or minds were attributed to such supernatural powers taking a mysterious part, portentous or prophetic, in the affairs of the world. All natural objects, all planets and their denizens, all constellations and galaxies, were helpless islands in a supernatural sea.

  We have seen some forms of superstition in earlier ages. Most of them survived the coming of modern science in Copernicus, Vesalius, and Galileo; some flourished in Newton himself. Astrology and alchemy continued their decline, but astrologers were numerous at the court of Louis XIV; 1 and at Vienna, reported Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1717, “there was a prodigious number of alchemists.” 2 Sturdy Britons still believed in ghosts, watched for omens, paid for horoscopes, took their dreams as prophecies, calculated lucky and unlucky days; and less sturdy Britons begged their king to cure their scrofula with his touch. The seventh number of The Spectator described the upheaval caused in
a British family by the spilling of a little salt, or by laying a knife and a fork across each other on a plate, or by allowing thirteen persons in a room or company. (Note the absence of a thirteenth floor in some twentieth-century hotels.) In France Jacques Aymer was the hero of his time (1692) because by the twitching of a hazel twig held in his hand he could (many believed) detect the nearness of a criminal. 3 In Germany a magic wand was used to end hemorrhages, heal wounds, and reset bones. 4 In Sweden Stiernhielm was accused of witchcraft when he burned a peasant’s beard with a magnifying glass; the experimenter was saved from death only by the interposition of Queen Christina. 5

  Skeptics of witchcraft were multiplying, but were probably far out numbered by believers. The courtiers of Charles II took little stock in any goblins that might spoil their sport, but the “immense majority,” and the most prominent authors among the English clergy, still held that human beings might league themselves with the Devil and thereby acquire supernatural powers. 6 Joseph Glanvill, an Anglican clergyman of brilliant mind and forceful style, in Philosophical Considerations touching Witches and Witchcraft (1666), counted it a shocking wonder that “men otherwise witty [intelligent] and ingenious are fallen into the conceit that there is no such thing as a witch or apparition”; doubts of this kind, he warned, would lead to atheism. Another famous divine, Ralph Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), denounced as atheists all who denied the reality of witches. 7 The Cambridge Platonist Henry More, in his Antidote to Atheism (1668?), warmly defended the story of a “witch” who had been married to Satan for thirty years; and he thought it sheer blasphemy to question the ability of witches to raise storms by incantation, or ride the air on a broom. 8

  The persecution of witches tapered off. The Scottish clergy, however, distinguished themselves by their burning zeal. At Leith, in 1652, a variety of tortures induced six women to confess witchcraft; they were hung up by the thumbs and were flogged; lighted candles were placed under their feet and in their forcibly opened mouths; four of the six died of their torments. 9 In 1661 there were fourteen courts trying witches in Scotland; in 1664 nine women were burned together in Leith. Such executions continued sporadically in Scotland till 1722. In England two witches were hanged at Bury St. Edmunds in 1664; three were put to death in 1682, and an uncertain number in 1712. The arguments of Weir and Spee, of Hobbes and Spinoza and others, gradually undermined the witchcraft delusion in the educated laity. Lawyers and magistrates increasingly withstood the theologians, and refused to prosecute or convict. In 1712 a jury of simple Englishmen adjudged Jane Wenham guilty of witchcraft; the judge refused to sentence her; the local clergy denounced him; 10 but there were no executions for witchcraft in England after that year. In France Colbert secured from Louis XIV an edict (1672) forbidding condemnations for witchcraft. 11 The Parlement of Rouen protested that this prohibition violated the Biblical injunction “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus XXII, 18), and some local authorities managed to burn seven “sorcerers” in France between 1680 and 1700; but we hear of no executions after 1718. The belief in witchcraft continued until the temporary triumph of rationalism in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: here and there it still exists.

  Censorship and intolerance co-operated with superstition to check the growth and spread of knowledge. In France the conflicts between kings and popes, between the Gallican Church and the papacy, between Jansenists and Jesuits, between Catholics and Huguenots, prevented that unity, consistency, and thoroughness of censorship which in this age isolated Spain from the movements of the European mind. Heretical authors found ways of evading the censors, and perhaps French wit was stimulated by the necessity of expressing ideas too subtly for officials to comprehend. In Catholic Cologne the Archbishop Elector censored all speech or publications on religion. In Protestant Brandenburg the Great Elector, to quiet religious strife, ordered a thorough censorship. In England, despite the Act of Toleration (1689), the government continued to imprison obnoxious authors and burn heretical books. 12 Nevertheless, the diversity of sects in Protestant lands made censorship less effective there than in Catholic countries; partly for this reason England and Holland, in the seventeenth century, excelled in science and philosophy.

  The competing faiths agreed on intolerance. The Catholic Church argued quite cogently that since nearly all Christians accepted the Bible as the word of God, and as, according to the Bible, the Son of God had founded the Church, it was clearly her right and duty to suppress heresy. Protestant denominations came to a similar but less sanguinary conclusion: since the Bible was God’s word, anyone deviating from its teachings (as officially interpreted) should at least be suppressed, and be thankful that he was not killed. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) recognized three religions as legal in Germany: Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism; each ruler was left free to choose any one of these, and to enforce it upon his subjects. The Scandinavian countries allowed no religious faith but the Lutheran. Switzerland permitted each canton to determine its own creed. France led the way to toleration by the Edict of Nantes (1598), and led the way back by the Revocation (1685). England, after 1689, eased the disabilities of Dissenters, continued those of Catholics, and exterminated a third of all Catholics in Ireland. The rationalist Hobbes agreed with the popes on the necessity of intolerance.

  However, toleration grew. The critical study of the Bible began in this age to free men to admire it as literature while suspecting it as science, and the multiplication of sects made social order increasingly difficult without mutual toleration. In New England Roger Williams announced (1644) that it was “the will and command of God” that “permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships be granted to all men in all nations.” 13 John Milton pleaded for “unlicensed printing” (1644), and Jeremy Taylor defended “liberty of prophesying” (1646). James Harrington (1656) allowed no limits to religious freedom: “Where civil liberty is entire, it includes liberty of conscience; where liberty of conscience is entire . . . , a man, according to the dictates of his own conscience, may have the full exercise of his religion, without impediment to his preferment or employment in the state.” 14 In commercial countries like Holland, and even in Catholic Venice, the necessities of trade compelled tolerance of the diverse religions of merchants from alien lands. It was in liberal Holland that Spinoza published in his Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) a plea for the full toleration of heretical ideas; in Holland Bayle defended toleration in his Philosophical Commentary on the Text, Compel them to come in (1686); and it was after years of residence in Holland that Locke issued his Letters on Toleration (1689). Decade after decade the demand for intellectual freedom rose, and by the end of the seventeenth century no church would have dared to do what had been done to Bruno in 1600, or to Galileo in 1633. Eppur si muove.

  II. EDUCATION

  Knowledge was slowly spreading, through newspapers, journals, pamphlets, books, libraries, schools, academies, universities. News, in the seventeenth century, became a commodity bought and sold, first to bankers, then to statesmen, then to anyone. In 1711 the total circulation of British newspapers, daily or weekly, was 44,000. 15

  The Journal des savants, founded in 1665, recognized that events in the world of literature and scholarship could also be news; soon it established itself as an international medium of scholars, scientists, and literary men. Within a few years it had competitors: the Giornale de’ letterati of Rome (1668), the Giornale Veneto of Venice (1671), and the Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig (1682). Bayle founded a famous review at Rotterdam in 1684, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres; and two years later Jean Le Clerc began the monthly Bibliothèque universelle; some of the most important pronouncements of Locke and Leibniz were made in these periodicals.

  The circulation of books was growing rapidly. In 1701 there were 178 master booksellers in Paris, thirty-six of them printers and publishers. 16 Libraries old and new were making their treasures more widely available. I
n 1610 Sir Thomas Bodley obtained from the Stationers’ Company a grant whereby the Bodleian Library that he had established at Oxford (1598) was to receive a copy of every book published in England; so in 1930 it had 1,250,000 volumes. In 1617 a decree of Louis XIII ordered that two copies of every new publication in France be deposited in the Bibliothèque Royale (now Nationale) at Paris. In 1622 this collection had 6,000 volumes; in 1715, largely through the zeal of Colbert, 70,000; in 1926, 4,400,000. The Great Elector of Brandenburg founded a national library at Berlin in 1661. In that year Mazarin bequeathed his costly library of 40,000 volumes to Louis XIV and France, and in 1700 the descendants of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton deeded the Cottonian Library to the British Museum. The first English library open to the general public was opened by Thomas Tenison in London in 1695.

  Education was laboring to redeem the losses it had sustained from the Religious Wars in France, the Civil War in England, and the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. Not till Lessing (1729–81) did German schools and literature regain the stature they had reached with Luther, Ulrich von Hutten, and Melanchthon two centuries before. In the interval a mediocre Latin remained the esoteric language of the literary few, while German, so lusty in Luther, became a merely plebeian instrument; and not a single writer of German rose to international repute during the long penance for a generation of fratricidal war. The German nobility, disdaining the Latin pedantry of the universities, sent their sons to Ritterakademien—knight schools—or engaged private tutors to prepare pedigreed youth for the tasks and graces of princely courts. At the other end of the social scale August Francke, the Pietist, organized at Halle his Stiftungen, charitable institutions ridiculed by cynics as “ragged schools,” where, through thirty-two years (1695–1727), he fed, clothed, and taught the children of the poor. Soon he added a Hauptschule for the secondary education of his brightest boys, and a höhere Töchterschule for his brightest girls. All these schools gave half their time to religion.