In the seventeenth century, much more than today, “libertine” was a term of abuse. No one avowed being such, though many were accused of exhibiting behavior and—at the time mostly—thought contrary to accepted morality and—at the time mostly—religion. The word derives from the Latin libertinus, which refers to the former slave who obtained freedom. Broadly speaking and in the context of the history of ideas, one may call “libertine” the person whose mind is no longer imprisoned in an ideological frame which prescribes norms of behavior and thought.1 In this intellectual sense it can be applied to two historical movements which, though related, can be distinguished. The first is moral libertinism, which was expressed mostly in literature and mainly during and after the eighteenth century. The second, whose relevance in the early seventeenth century was pointed out above all by René Pintard, is philosophical—broadly understood—libertinism. It comprises philosophers (including natural philosophers), historians, men and women of letters, antiquarians, proto ethnographers, physicians, with interests and intellectual projects quite diverse but forming a social network of relationships whose main features were the exchange of information and free discussion of subjects, in private and sometimes even secret groups, regardless of their eventual danger to—or conflict with—religious orthodoxy. The common and basic attribute of them all—what enabled them to interact the way they did—was erudition, both antiquarian (knowledge of languages, grammar, history, geography and literature of ancient civilizations) and contemporary (knowledge of indigenous American and African cultures and eastern civilizations such as China about which merchants and missionaries produced reports).
First published in the mid-twentieth century, René Pintard’s Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle is almost as important as Popkin’s History of skepticism in establishing a research program in the historiography of early modern ideas. Pintard intended with his book to challenge the view that intellectual life in France during the first half of the seventeenth century was pious in a hegemonic way. His view was challenged by Popkin who emphasized the fideist—which he argued was not necessarily a cover up for irreligion—nature of the skepticism of the period.
In the present chapter, Huet’s life and work will be focused in relation to the erudite libertinism of his time along three axes. The first axis (Sect. 2.1) deals with Huet’s private meetings during the early 1650s with other erudite scholars such as Gabriel Naudé (one of the three major libertine philosophers according to Pintard), with whom he addressed topics which could not be publicly discussed. The second axis (Sect. 2.2) deals with what at the time was considered moral libertinism, present in Huet’s literary activities during the ‘50s and ‘60s, namely, a translation of a spicy ancient poem, his view of the origin and nature of modern novel, and a novel he authored but did not publish during his lifetime. This same Sect. 2.2 will also examine a fictional character of Madeleine de Scudéry’s—the main writer of fiction in France at the time—in her short story “De l’incertitude,” probably modeled after him. The third axis is on Huet’s personal and intellectual relationship, happened during this same period (which corresponds to Huet early career as an erudite scholar), with the other two major libertine philosophers in Pintard’s book, namely, Pierre Gassendi (Sect. 2.3) and François de La Mothe Le Vayer (Sect. 2.4). Concluding the chapter, I add a section (2.5) on Huet’s reception of Montaigne’s Essais and Charron’s De la Sagesse, two major sources for Naudé, Gassendi and La Mothe Le Vayer. Although not of Huet’s time, Montaigne’s and Charron’s skepticisms were less influential only than Cartesian skepticism during the second half of the seventeenth century.
2.1 Pintard’s Libertinage érudit and Huet’s Place in the Movement
Pintard shows that the main loci of the intellectual exchanges among erudite libertines were the informal “academies” active in Paris during the period (informal meeting of scholars in libraries and private offices). The most important of these were one held by Henri-Louis Montmor and another inspired by the Dupuy brothers (Pierre and Jacques).2 What opened the doors of these academies to Huet was his association in Caen with the Calvinist erudite, expert on Biblical geography and zoology, Samuel Bochart (1599–1667). In his Memoirs, Huet explains why Dupuy’s “academy” attracted scholars. As directors of the Royal library (today, the French National Library—BNF), they mediated the access to archives of one of the richest European libraries. The precious Greek, Latin and Hebrew manuscripts and rare books collections of the library, and the scholars who went after them, were two main objects of Huet’s desire, at the outset of his erudite career.3
Huet’s training as scholar had first a formal, and right after graduation, an informal course. He studied at the Jesuit College of Mont in Caen, in which he went through a classic humanist curriculum not unlike that pursued thirty-six years earlier by Descartes in La Flèche. At school Huet got close to some of his Jesuit teachers which made possible his later connections with major Parisian Jesuit scholars such as Denis Petau, Jacques Sirmond and René Rapin.4 Informally, he took private classes of Greek and Hebrew in Caen with Bochart in order to deepen and extend his humanistic skills.
This secrecy was due not, according to Huet at least, the necessity to hide discussions of irreligious topics, as Pintard says was the erudite libertines’ case, but because Bochart was a Calvinist pastor and Huet’s association with him might lead to gossip concerning the strength of his Catholic faith. Huet says they never discussed points of religious controversy on these occasions.5 This shows Huet’s religious tolerance which was characteristic of most erudite scholars at the time (not only of the libertine). Their common literary and historical interests were valued higher than political and religious particular ones at least as long as they acted as citizens of what was called the Republic of Letters, which comprised scholars of most European countries. These scholars put aside issues which might divide them (mostly religious and political), precluding intellectual exchange of information. Citizenship in this Republic certainly required not being a religious fanatic but included a much larger membership than Pintard’s irreligious libertines.6I then thought if I were to wait upon the author [Bochart, author of Sacred geography], and contract an intimacy with him, I might derive some fruit from his abundance, and obtain assistance from his advice or communications. … it was agreed between us that I should pay my visits with caution, and for the most part by night, and without witnesses. (Memoirs, I, 36)
In 1651 Huet becomes twenty-one years old and is civically emancipated. He then could manage his own finances and begins to travel frequently to Paris.7 He wanted to follow a career of an erudite and Paris was one of the world’s most important centers of erudite scholarship. In Paris he could enrich his own private library—which became, after almost seventy years of acquisitions, probably the best private one in France in quantity and quality.8 In Paris, he could also use the bibliographical and manuscript resources of two of the most complete libraries at the time, the Mazarine and the Royal Library (which became the Bibliothèque Nationale de France after the Revolution). Paris also was the best place to establish social relations with some of the most famous scholars—a crucial step for a successful career in the field. His friendship with Bochart helped him to make crucial friendships with philosophers, historians and other erudite scholars.9
One such friendship was with Gabriel Naudé (1600–1653), one of the vertices of the famous tetrad,10 the term which, according to Pintard, best expresses the nature of the friendship of the four major erudite libertines who held free, unprejudiced discussions of philosophical and religious topics.11 Naudé was the main one responsible for the diffusion of Machiavelli’s political thought in France and exposed the use of diverse religions for political purposes (but rarely mentioning explicitly the case of Christianity).12 The two other major vertices of the tetrad were Gassendi and La Mothe Le Vayer.13 La Mothe’s life long and Gassendi’s initial philosophical project was to rehabilitate ancient skepticism, the latter in view of attacking Aristotelian natural science, the former in view of reforming the whole philosophical scene, in particular the ethical field.14 Gassendi’s philosophical project undertaken after the skeptical destructive one was to rehabilitate Epicureanism in order that it might furnish a model for a new post-Aristotelian philosophy, not only in the physical field. These two Hellenistic philosophies, Skepticism and Epicureanism, were traditionally considered major treats to the Christian religion according to orthodox theologians and philosophers, so the discussions which helped the elaboration of these views had to be secret. The document which most clearly exhibits the mode of action and discussion topics of the erudite libertines according to Pintard is a letter from Guy Patin to La Mothe Le Vayer of August 30, 1648.
After forming a dyad with Bochart in Caen, Huet formed, in Paris, a triad with Naudé and the German scholar Peter Lambeck (1628–1680) in this same suspect (in Pintard’s view) house of Naudé’s.16 Huet recalls in his Memoirs thatMr. Naudé, Cardinal Mazarin’s librarian, an intimate friend of Mr. Gassendi’s, as he is of mine, invited us for dinner and to spend the night at his house in Gentilly. There will be only the three of us and we will make a debauchery. But God knows what debauchery! Mr. Naudé drinks only water and has never tasted wine. Mr. Gassendi has such a delicate stomach that he would not dare drink ... and I drink quite little. However, it will be a debauchery, but philosophical and maybe something more. Maybe we three, unafraid of the werewolf and emancipated from the evil of scruples, which is the tyrant of consciences, we will perhaps get quite close to the sanctuary. I made last year this trip to Gentilly with Mr. Naudé. Only he and myself, face to face. There were no witnesses and there could be none. We freely talked about everything without scandalizing anybody.15
Pintard implies in the chapter dealing with the end of the movement,17 that after Guy Patin’s withdrawal, Huet is the last one to occupy the fourth vertex of the tetrad.[Naudé ] was so much pleased with observing two young men [Huet himself and Lambeck] attached to solid literature, that he often invited us to his rural retreat, and seemed to renew his youth in our company. (Memoirs, I, 61–62)
Pintard’s view of young Huet as a libertine is only partially correct. Huet did share with the so-called erudite libertines the love of erudition, the intellectual freedom to discuss topics considered suspect by orthodox Catholics, and other liberal values such as partial religious toleration of non-Catholics (Calvinists and Lutherans) and, to a certain extent, even non-Christians (Jews). But I do not go along with Pintard’s attribution of irreligious and anti-Christian views to them.19 Pintard is right to point out Huet’s religious crisis at the same occasion he is quite close to Naudé, but Huet gives no indication in his Memoirs or—as far as I know, correspondence—that his intellectual exchanges with the latter favored the crisis. The only reason alleged is the one pointed out by Pintard: his disappointment at the Jesuit Denis Petau’s rational justification of Christian dogma. Also, there is no evidence that Huet’s skepticism played a role in the religious crisis. As I point out in Chaps. 3 and 4, Huet’s first skeptical experience happened earlier, while a student at Caen, not motived by Naudé’s or other libertine’s work, but by Descartes’s. And—as far as he tells both in his Memoirs and in the Traité philosophique—his skepticism remained confined to philosophy, not reaching religious matters. Huet’s knowledge of Sextus’ works, including Sextus’ Against the Physicists I in which the skepsis turns against religion, happened much later, in the mid 60s.Compensating for [Guy Patin’s withdrawal] here it is a new recruit: Pierre-Daniel Huet, recently arrived from Caen, gallant, witty, erudite, fond of pleasure and science, frequenting as much scholars as ladies and so “taken” by his “love of letters” that he forgets his religion. A curious type, this young Huet. He looks for Naudé’s advise concerning books, he reads with passion Petau’s Dogmata theologica and gives them such a credit that each weakness he notes in the Jesuit’s argument in favor of a dogma, his faith in this dogma weakens. An intrepid and untroubled researcher … in whom the flower of a delicate skepticism develops as his piety languishes.18
The next step in Huet’s erudite career was to accept his mentor Bochart’s invitation to follow him to Sweden, where his fellow countryman was hired by the famous Queen Christina. Christina of Sweden (1626–1689) was the European monarch most enlightened at the time. She was engaged in turning her court in Stockholm into a center of philosophical, scientific and classical studies. Descartes was hired two years earlier but could not survive his first winter in the Nordic country.20 Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), seven years older than Huet, dedicated his calculating machine to her in a letter sent when Huet was on his way to Stockholm—“what has truly led me,” writes Pascal to the Queen, “is the union in your sacred person of two things which equally fill me with admiration and respect: sovereign authority and solid science.”21
Apparently Christina did not support with funds Pascal’s invention. She was more interested in classical literature and philosophy. She spent a fortune buying books and rare manuscripts all over Europe. The Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius (1618–1689) was her librarian and at the occasion close to the Queen to the point of possibly being her lover.22 He was a close friend of Bochart’s and arranged that he be hired by the Queen. Vossius recommended that he bring alone with him “a young man well versed in Greek and Latin. He would be of use to him on his journey and would be esteemed at the court of Stockholm as much as Bochart wished.”23 According to Pintard, though not a libertine herself, Christina was quite interested in libertine views and Vossius, though he publicized such views only later, after moving to England,24 was already a covert libertine influencing the Queen.25 For instance, Christina offered a fortune for whom could find and send her the famous—but at the time unknown—Traité des trois imposteurs (Moses, Jesus and Muhammad).26
The trip was, however, a complete disappointment for Bochart and Huet. Between the invitation and their arrival Vossius fell into disgrace and was forbidden to enter the country.27 His influence at court was replaced by that of Christina’s new French doctor, Bourdelot, who for medical reasons drastically reduced Christina’s studies.28 Furthermore, because Bourdelot “established in the Court a school of unbelief and libertinage,”29 the court environment became unfit for the Calvinist minister.30 Officially hired, Bochart could not leave the court right away but Huet was not hindered by this obstacle.31 Despite Christina’s demand that he wait at least the Spring, Huet did not pass the Winter in Stockholm (fear of what had happened to Descartes’s?) and left on September 1652, just two months after his arrival.32 To Christina, Huet justified his unexpected and too soon return to France alleging urgent need to deal with private financial matters. In his Memoirs, he also mentions gossip about his Catholicism for his being with a Calvinist (Bochart) in a Lutheran country.33 Huet’s trip and above all stay in Christina’s court indicates that he was not a zealous Catholic at the time.
On his way back to France, as he did on his way to Stockholm, Huet stopped at various cities to meet scholars, above all in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, Vossius took him to visit the synagogue of the Portuguese Jewish community and introduced him to the rabbi Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657). Huet says that the discussions he held with him at the occasion about Jewish ancient literature and Christianity lead him to elaborate his most famous work during his lifetime, the Demonstratio Evangelica.34
The most important relationship established by Huet during his whole trip was with Claude Saumaise (1588–1653). A French Calvinist exiled in Leiden, Saumaise was one of the major ancient scholars at the time. Professor at Leiden University, he succeeded there the great scholar Joseph Scaliger. Huet met him on his way to Sweden and tightened the friendship through letters while he remained in Stockholm.35 On his way back he had to spend a longer time than expected in Leiden because of an illness that forced him to delay his return to France. The way he describes his meetings with Saumaise in his Memoirs exemplifies quite well what Pintard means with the tetrad. He formed with the older Saumaise and the younger (like him) and Calvinist (as Saumaise) Alexander More (1616–1670) a triad similar to the one he formed with Naudé (older) and Lambeck (younger like him) in the former’s house at Gentilly.36
Huet reveals in his Memoirs one of these secret topics of conversation. While Saumaise was in Christina’s court he was once caught by the Queen while reading the obscene work Le Moyen de Parvenir. Saumaise tried to hide the book but the Queen took it over from his hands and, after realizing its obscene text, ordered “her favorite [Mademoiselle de] Sparre, a young lady of beauty and rank,” to read it aloud, causing her great embarrassment.37 Huet considered prolonging his stay in Leiden, “and even become an innate with [Saumaise], should I obtain Madame Saumaise’s permission.” But the need to take care of his economic affairs in Caen and maybe also the difficulty to obtain the alluded permission made Huet return to France.38For myself, the worth, benevolence and kind office of Saumaise entirely gained my heart; and as much as my still tender health, and his almost constantly invalid state permitted, I enjoyed his company, and he did not seem to disdain mine. For whenever I came to visit him, laying aside all other business, he took me alone into his closet, and there opened his mind to me so candidly, and with so much frankness, that I occasionally wondered within myself to see a man of tried and habitual prudence communicating so freely and familiarly his sentiments on serious and secret matters to one of my immature age. (Memoirs, III, 194)
Based on Huet’s Memoirs and correspondence, Blok suspects Huet held an “homoerotic” relationship with Saumaise.39 He cites a letter from him to his close German scholar friend Johan Georg Graevius (1632–1703) in which he basically repeats what he says in his Memoirs about the jealousy of Saumaise’s wife, adding that the old scholar “seemed to take special delight in his youthfulness.”40 In another letter from Huet to Philippe de la Mare, from 28 April 1697, Huet relates that when he was with Saumaise “in meetings which he had scheduled at certain times and places removed from his house, to talk freely and at leisure, his wife never failed to come in and interrupt the conversation, magisterially carrying her poor husband to the common living room.”41 None of these passages indicate they held a homoerotic relation. They do not indicate a practice of moral libertinism, which probably was only a topic of free conversation, as in the anecdote told by Saumaise about Christina, which was not fit for ladies such as Saumaise’s wife.
2.2 A Man of Letters: Hellenist and Biblical Scholar, Translator, Poet, Literary Theorist, Novelist, and Fictional Character
Erudite scholarship, scientific activities and interest in belles lettres were not segregated during Huet’s lifetime. The great mathematician Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665) was also a poet and so also was the great mathematician and physicist Christian Huygens (1629–1695).42 Occasionally natural philosophers presented their scientific views in verse, as did Huet in a poem about the nature of salt.43 Scholars of ancient literature occasionally also tried their hands in the writing of poems in Latin and Greek. Huet’s poetic production included, besides his poem on the nature of salt, Greek epigrams, epitaphs and odes in Latin to other scholars such as Saumaise and political authorities such as Louis XIV, and a description of his trip to Sweden, the Iter Suecicum (1662).44
As soon as Huet felt habilitated by Bochart’s Greek classes to translate texts originally written in this classical language he endeavored to translate into Latin Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe. Written in the second-century, it ranks as a major ancient novel and precursor to the modern one.45 “I rendered into Latin, little suspecting how much the impurity and licentiousness of that author, whom I had never before read, might contaminate the morals of youth. Of this Bochart was equally ignorant, whom I consulted about my design, which he did not disapprove” (Memoirs, I, 33). In his History of Romances, Huet recalls that he translated “this romance, when I was a child; which is the only age it will please” (History, 80). “[Longus’s] expressions are so obscene, that one must be somewhat of a Cynic, to read them without blushing” (History, 78). Bayle, who dealt at length with obscenity in his Dictionary, included an article on Longus in which he quotes Huet extensively.46
Huet’s translation of Longus’ novel was related to his interest, during his secular period, in the rise of modern novel, in particular in France. This interest was contemporary to his scientific activities (he organized a scientific academy in Caen, the first French one outside Paris) and scholarly erudite activities (he translated into Latin and commented on Origen’s commentary on Matthew—a manuscript which he and Bochart discovered in Christina’s library—and on John).47 Although not as condemned as obscene poems were, novels were also viewed by Christian zealots as a source of moral libertinism. The typical plot dealt with seduction and love affairs involving non- married couples. Huet’s History of Romances is a major work in this rise, both reflecting the early modern literary production and contributing to the establishment of the form of the novel that remained normative until the nineteenth century.48
Huet finished the manuscript of The History of Romances in 1666 and published it in 1670 as a preface to Madame de Lafayette’s novel Zaïde.49 On this occasion he was already acquainted with the works of Sextus Empiricus’ and revealed sympathy for this school in his correspondence with Ménage (see Sect. 2.3 below). Indeed, Huet’s view of the weakness of human understanding already appears in this work written twenty years before the first manuscript of the Traité philosophique.
Novels are fictitious narratives that resemble real life. They derive from legendary ancient tales, though the latter do not care for verisimilitude. So the explanation of the origin of novels begins with the explanation of the origin of fables. Their invention results from the disproportion between the large range that human imagination can reach and the narrow scope of what the mind can empirically verify. Not restricting itself to the few objects it can apprehend with certainty, the mind dwells on imaginary things, future and past.50 The first cause of novels is thus the ignorance derived from “the grossness of our intellect” (History, 131). Unlike fables, novels are presented as fictions, though they resemble true facts much more than fables do. The events narrated in novels, notwithstanding their falsity, please the reader because they do not require intellectual effort. “No long reasonings are exacted; the memory is not overburdened: nothing is demanded, but fancy and Imagination” (History, 128). Serious and sophisticated people dislike fables and novels for being false. They like the latter only when artistically presented with “ingenuity and subtlety” (History, 130) and when they have a moral edifying purpose. Indeed, by pleasing the reader, they can be useful for the moral instruction of those simpleminded incapable of absorbing abstruse moral teaching.
If Huet’s general philosophical background for his view on the origins of novels is skeptical, he may have been influenced by Descartes’s Fourth Meditation, where the latter explains error as resulting from the larger “extension” of the will as compared to the narrow scope of what appears clearly and distinctly in the intellect.51 Descartes claims that to avoid error in the pursuit of truth one needs to suspend judgment about anything which is not perceived clearly and distinctly. Descartes recognizes that such procedure cannot be followed in everyday life,52 which is the field of Huet’s investigation of fables. As indicated in Chap. 4, though not strictly Cartesian, Huet remained sympathetic to Descartes’s views from his school days until the early 60s, though at this earlier time he was already more pessimistic about human beings’ capacity to avoid error. Huet’s theory of fable and novel is important also in explaining his own apologetic strategy employed during his mature religious period in Demonstratio Evangelica (1679) and Alnetanae Quaestiones (1690). Contrary to what most apologists thought at his time, according to Huet the various pagan mythologies were not just false rubbish produced by uncivilized cultures. Once submitted to careful philological investigation they could reveal important historical and above all religious truths. They could be disclosed through erudite scholarship as distortions—produced by the week mind of men—of the original historical narratives told by ancient Hebrews.53 “St. Augustin makes this observation somewhere; ‘that these falsities which carry a signification, and suggest a hidden meaning, are not lies, but the figures of truth; which the most wise and holy persons, and even our Savior himself, have used upon honorable and pious occasions’” (History, 130–131).
Another use of fables Huet considered valid is polemical. His Nouveaux mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du cartésianisme (1692) is a fictional story based on some traces of Descartes’s life revealed by the publication of the first part of Baillet’s biography (1691).54 Descartes’s interest in the Rosicrucian cabala during his youth, for example, was related in Huet’s fiction to a belief in the possibility of moving around spiritually and invisibly. Such exaggerations and distortions aimed at ridiculing what Huet saw as an excessive arrogance of Descartes’s and his followers’, for example in pretending a detachment of the soul from the body which he considered quite impossible for human beings. He also targets the sectarian mentality of the Cartesians’ by portraying a Descartes engaged in making disciples all over Europe, but in particular among simpleminded people (the Lapponians) who would be more docile in accepting his teachings. The inclusion of fabulous facts (in the sense of marvelous and extraordinary as most ancient fables were) and possible but unlikely facts (Descartes only pretended he had died in Stockholm) show Huet’s employment of typical features of fables in philosophical controversy. The work is a fictional letter addressed to the “prince des philosophes cartésiens,” that is Régis, who had responded in an unbecoming way according to Huet to his Censura Philosophiae Cartesianae.55 Rather than continuing the philosophical debate,56 he resorted to a strategy that he probably considered more effective in combatting sectarian Cartesianism.
Coming back to moral libertinism, it is worth mentioning Huet’s explanation for the greater development of the French novel as compared to the Italian and Spanish. In the latter countries, women are kept more secluded by their tutors, rendering more difficult men’s access to them. This access is mediated by the tutors in a way such that when men do succeed in approaching women, less time is wasted with seduction. French women, less controlled by tutors, unlike Spanish and Italian ones, freely socialize with men so the latter must develop and employ gallantry in order to seduce them.
Huet’s interest in novels coincide with his secular period in Paris during which he was a frequent visitor to salons.But in France, the ladies go at large upon their parole; and being under no custody but that of their own heart, erect it into a fort … The men are obliged to make a regular and formal assault against this fort, to employ so much industry and address to reduce it, that they have formed it into an art scarce known to other nations. It is this art which distinguishes the French from other romances, and renders the reading of them so delicious. (History, 139–140)
Commenting on Huet’s secular period, Shelford claims thatHitherto the love of letters had taken such hold of me, that although a disposition to piety, fostered by my preceptors [Huet’s Jesuit teachers in Caen] … trampled down by the constant course of profane studies, and deprived of the celestial dew afforded by a frequent recourse to the holy sacraments, they had nearly withered … I therefore frequented the circles of men, and especially of women, to be a favorite of whom I regarded as the surest proof of politeness. In this view I omitted nothing that I thought necessary to ingratiate myself with them; such as care of my person, elegance of dress, officious and frequent attendance upon them, amatory verses, and gentle whispers, which feed the insanity of love. (Memoirs, I, 48)
Madame de Lafayette, a major salonnière and hidden author of Zaïde, was one of these ladies close to Huet at the time. In a letter written to him from 1664 she says that “it would almost seem that it is love which makes you come and go so quickly and it seems to me that only for the sake of love would one make such a long run.” I disputed above the suspicions of Huet’s homosexuality in his dealings with older famous scholars. A similar claim may be made about his exchanges with women in which the main motivation seems also to have been intellectual. Regretting that Huet did not receive an earlier letter from her, Madame de Lafayette says that in the letter she “talked about Horace, … about my science, about my bel esprit.”57As a man, Huet thoroughly enjoyed flirting. He also had a gift for intellectual endeavors. Thus, Huet was naturally attracted to salon society, probably first in Caen, then in Paris. Moreover, these social venues offered more than company of intelligent, comely females. During the 1650s and ’60s, they were intellectually exciting and culturally vigorous, naturally attractive to a young man drawn to creative activity. (Shelford 2007, 78)
A paradoxical result of the success of French modern novel according to Huet was the contempt in France for ancient fables and literature. First by women, ignorant of the history of the literary genre they appreciated, which required erudite skills most of them lacked,58 “they perceive they had better disapprove what they don’t know, than take the pains to learn it” (History, 141). They were followed by men who “have imitated them, condemned what they dislike, and call that pedantry, which made an essential part of politeness” (History, 141). In Chap. 4 it is shown that Huet made an analogous diagnosis of Descartes and the Cartesians. Although fully indebted to ancient philosophy, Descartes and moreover the Cartesians despised ancient history. The contempt was a strategy, according to Huet, to compensate for their ignorance.
In his Memoirs, Huet is proud of the success of his History of Romances. Relating Madame de Lafayette’s claim that she and Huet had married their children (as remarked above, Huet’s work was published together with Lafayette’s novel Zaïde), Huet says that “nor, indeed, was this an unpropitious opinion; for there is scarcely a country in Europe which has not adopted and transferred to itself our conjugal couple” (Memoirs, II, 52).59 But Huet also recalls that he was accused of promoting moral libertinism with the book.
Huet’s interest in novels was not limited to history and critical theory. He actually wrote one: Le Faux Inca. There is an autograph manuscript of the novel dated 1667 (one year after the completion of the manuscript of The History of Homances), but it was published only posthumously, in 1728, under the title Diane de Castro, the name of the main character.60 In his Memoirs, Huet says that his reading of many novels as preparation for his History of Romances aroused in him “a violent inclination to try my own powers in this kind of composition,” which he did, based on real facts.I do not … wonder that certain austere rigorists have made it a charge against me, that in treating on romances in this work, I have not only abstained from disapproving their composition and perusal, but have even seemed to favor them; and have thus introduced a source of corruption into the lives and manners of youth, and afforded fuel, as it were, to their intemperate passions. Were this the case, I should not be backward to retract, as a better advised old man, what I had inconsiderately uttered as a young one. But if anyone will attend to those cautions with which I recommended every reader of amatory writings previously to fortify his mind, he will perhaps renounce his prejudices, and give me his assent. (Memoirs, II, 52–53)
The plot is rambling as in most novels of the time,62 but shows Huet’s valuation of classical literature, his views on the development of the modern novel, and gives a hint of his skepticism. The chronology of the story—not the order of narration—begins and ends in Saragossa, Spain. This is the city from which Diane and her husband Don Luis depart to South America, crossing the Atlantic Ocean and—by land—Panama to reach the Pacific coast and from there to sail south to Peru. Diane’s husband is killed in Lima and she imprisoned, charged with conspiracy, by the merciless Spanish conqueror Pizarro. Don Alonso, whose love for Diane was unhappy since she had been previously married by her father against her will to Don Luis, secretly followed her to Lima disguised as an ordinary sailor, where he put on another mask, that of an Inca leader—the “Faux Inca”—to rescue the widow from prison and bring her back to their homeland. Like in a classical epic narrative, but partially set in the New World, and updated to the love relationships typical of the modern novel, the journey back through the whole Amazon river displays the heroic values of the hero, at the end revealed as a Spaniard, not indigenous.63I admitted few confidents to this attempt; but forty years afterwards, having incautiously dropt a hint of it among some females, they were so urgent with me to obtain a sight of it, that I was at length constrained to yield to their importunity; I would not, however, suffer it to go out of my hands, or permit any transcript to be made from it. (Memoirs, II, 54)61
In his novel Huet attempted to combine romantic relationships that challenged established morality with the edifying moral purpose novels should have according to him. While married in Spain, Diane managed to control her passion for Don Alonso, remaining sexually faithful to her husband. However, as she confesses to him, she “suffered” Don Alonso’s love. In her case the verb had the sense of suffering the pain of an unhappy love and also the sense of not rejecting (of admitting) and even—an attentive reading makes it clear—indirectly and subtly instigating the sinful love. Don Alonso, on the other hand, was a master of disguise and an audacious and insistent lover, subordinating moral values to his passion for the married woman. Besides disguising himself as an ordinary sailor for the trip and then as an Inca in Peru, earlier in Saragossa he pursued the friendship and pretended to be an intimate friend of Diane’s husband just to be close to her in the intimacy of their home. After Diane’s husband was alerted to his “friend’s’” intention, he moves with his wife to the countryside. Don Alonso then takes the disguise of a gypsy in order to see Diane again despite Diane’s husband prohibition. The discovery of the farce was what led Diane’s husband to move to Lima upon the false assumption that the distance would keep his wife apart from his tireless rival.
The novel shows how deceit prevails in human life, how passion and vanity determine human actions and, more interestingly from the point of view of Huet’s skepticism, the role of verisimilitude in blocking access to truth.64 Take for instance the gypsy plot. Don Alonso wrote Diane a letter informing that he would visit her disguised as a gypsy. To this effect he previously joined a group of gypsies living nearby who, “under the cover of false promises of knowing the future and telling those who consulted them what would be their fortune, insinuate themselves into their homes where they commit all kinds of thefts.”65 Meanwhile a part of the group appeared at Diane’s country house and asked for protection, which she gave assuming that this was part of Don Alonso’s plan. Don Alonso, however, had been arrested by the police with the rest of the group which remained in the camp. The group of gypsies in Diane’s house tried to rob valuable things, including a box in which Diane had kept Don Alonso’s letter. Don Luis’s employees arrested them and Diane’s husband read the letter whose content, plus the presence of the gypsies received by his wife, made quite probable Diane’s adulterous plan. “I am guilty, sir, for having willed to see D. Alonso again after your prohibition. I was imprudent in agreeing to a meeting which could be discovered and without excuse. But, although the appearances are against me and you should trust them more than my words, I dare tell you that my intention was not criminal.”66 The skeptical and Cartesian moral of the story is that even a very high degree of probability may be false and therefore judgment should be suspended.67
Huet concludes his History of Romances praising the French novelist Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701), the greatest in France during Huet’s lifetime. Scudéry’s main novels, Artamène or le grand Cyrus and Clélie or une histoire romaine, are the only French contemporary ones cited in the book (besides a briefer ending note on Madame de Lafayette’s Zaïde). Huet praises Scudéry’s modesty (she hides her name in these novels) and her erudition (her knowledge of ancient Roman history) and says that these two novels justify alone all praise ever made in favor of the literary genre.68 Huet was, indeed, a major friend and admirer of Scudéry’s whom he met in the early ’60s when he was a frequent guest in the Parisian salons.69
Each of these three women represents for Huet one of the human faculties developed to its limited perfection for a human being: Christina represents intelligence/wittiness, Schurman memory, and Scudéry imagination. Shelford (2007, 94–98) examines Huet’s relation to Scudéry and suggests that he inspired the character Philinte in Scudéry’s Célinte, a philosophical fictional conversation about curiosity which serves as a kind of introduction to the novel proper. I think Huet is also Scudéry’s model for the skeptical character Timandre, protagonist of another philosophical conversation—“De l’incertitude”—published in 1686, together with others about a variety of moral topics. Conley (2011) and Burch (2013) examined the philosophical content of “De l’incertitude” and argued that it is a kind of mitigated skepticism. Conley also analyzes other dialogues she wrote which exhibit a similar philosophical outlook, namely a skepticism with respect to certain knowledge of nature but which does not touch morality and religion.71 In the conversation about uncertainty, two parties disagree: Timandre and the beautiful Isidore belong to the Uncertain party (the incertains) and Aristéne and the two other female characters Almathée and Amérinte belong to the Decisive party (the décisifs). Skepticism is thus one of the main topics of the conversation (the other two philosophical ones are atomism and Cartesianism). Huet was thus a likely source for Scudéry’s dialogue, for instance, for three passages from Sextus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism. (1) The experience happened with the painter Apelles which is an analogy to the unexpected way the Pyrrhonian achieves tranquility after suspension of judgment72; (2) Chrysippus’ dog who undermines the Stoics’ view that human beings are rationally superior to other animals (PH I.60); and (3) idiosyncratic Demophon who sweated under shade and shivered when exposed to the sun, exemplifying human variations, the second of the set of ten modes (PH I.80).73 Although La Mothe Le Vayer, another friend of Scudéry’s, could also had been her source, Huet is the more probable one for the author of the Skeptical discourses died fourteen years before the publication of “De l’incertitude.”I knew three females of that age, of high celebrity for learning and talents, Queen Christina, Mademoiselle Schurman of Utrecht,70 and Mademoiselle Scudéry; of whom, if they were to be characterized by their peculiar endowments, I should say that Christina excelled in fire and quickness of intellect, and sudden sallies; Schurman in erudition and variety of attainments; and Scudéry in inexhaustible powers of invention and capacity. (Memoirs, IV, 18)
Further evidence of Huet’s influence on the dialogue is a question Amérinte asks Aristéne. Can she criticize Descartes’s natural philosophy given her friendship with Descartes’s niece? Wouldn’t she be upset? Fabienne Gegou cites a letter from Madame de Sévigné to Madame de Grignan in which the former says that “Mlle Descartes [Descartes ’s niece Catherine Descartes] is quite outraged by [Huet’s Censura], after the infinite compliments she received from him in Paris for her uncle and the immortality of his name.”74 In the next chapter I point out that the manuscript of the Censura was already finished the year before Scudéry published “De l’incertitude.”
Three features of Timandre’s suggest Huet as his model in real life. First, his gallantry towards Isidore. Excluding her from the scope of his épochè, he tells her that no uncertainty is possible on the issue of her beauty and agrees, “without fear of deceiving myself,” with Isidore’s claim that when one sincerely examines one’s heart some degree of uncertainty is inevitable.75 Second, Timandre says (1686, 494), in a comparison typical of Huet, that Aristotle and Solomon both claimed—in their different ways—that our doubts grow together with the extension of knowledge. Of course Huet probably was not the only gallant skeptic habitué of Scudéry’s salon nor the only one who could point out Solomon’s skepticism. But a third similarity is quite specific. After the discussion of doubt, the second philosophical topic of conversation is the revival of ancient atomism which is attributed to Descartes’s natural philosophy.76 When this new subject is introduced, Isidore says that the change of the conversation from doubt to atomism will not be unpleasant to Timandre “since before becoming a complete skeptic (incertain), he travelled a bit to the country of atoms.”77 This corresponds exactly to Huet’s philosophical trajectory. When the dialogue was published Huet was already sympathetic to skepticism,78 and was already planning a refutation of Cartesianism.79 But Huet also was a mitigated atomist, similar to Gassendi (see Sect. 2.3 below), as he tells Mambrun in 1660,80 and from his last school years to 1662, that is partially coinciding with his atomist period, also a mitigated Cartesian in natural philosophy.81 The two philosophical positions are put together in “De l’Incertitude.” When the dialogue is written, however, Huet is already a skeptic, having already known Sextus (see next section) and declared so to Ménage. Timandre is indeed quick in replying that “I confess … that [the atoms] once amused me, but they never persuaded me completely,”82 indicating that even during his Cartesian and atomist period he was not a dogmatist, as Huet’s letters make plain he wasn’t.
The dialogue as a whole, as the two scholars cited above agree, is more sympathetic to the incertains than to the décisives. But it warns of the dangerous proximity of skepticism to libertinism, both moral and religious. On the former, the beautiful Isidore says she is “neither libertine nor coquette,” only uncertain.83 Her friend Amérinte testifies in Isidore’s favor, claiming she is not libertine, only uncertain in order to enliven conversations, that is casually, for light social entertainment. However, some of her friends do enjoy the company of libertines, and libertinism (moral and religious) is more dangerous for women than for men since—the reason remains implicit—the latter are more able to act rightly even free from the subjugation of religion. Isidore thus promises, at the end of the conversation, never again to allow friends to raise, in her presence, topics related to libertinism, “since it is no more contrary to the character of an honnête femme to accept that one speaks at her presence against modesty than against religion.”84
With respect to religious libertinism, all characters agree that skepticism should not be carried to religion and morals. La Mothe Le Vayer, the most famous skeptic at the time, is defended in the dialogue, where it is recalled by one of the décisive females that his skepticism, like Timandre/Huet’s, concerned only the natural realm of reason does not reaching the supernatural which is above reason. She even recalls a passage from him rebutting the atomist attack upon the theistic argument from design. Of course Scudéry defends with this reference not only the memory of her old friend La Mothe Le Vayer but also her current one, Pierre-Daniel.85
2.3 Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655)
Gassendi was one of the greatest (second only to Descartes) French philosophers during Huet’s lifetime.86 Huet was proud of including him in the list of the great scholars—“les princes de la Litérature” (Huetiana, 4)—with whom he was already interacting in his early twenties. He is cited just after Descartes in a list mostly composed by erudite historians of antiquity such as Huet himself.87 In his Memoirs, Huet says he met Gassendi at Montmor’s informal “academy,” after his return from Sweden.
Tolmer (1949, 135–138) suggests Huet may have witnessed earlier (before his trip to Sweden) some of the anatomical exhibitions Gassendi directed at the Du Puys’ informal academy, which probably influenced his own scientific interests.89 Huet indeed made various dissections in Caen, including vivisections, at his initially informal, then officially supported by the King, Physics Academy during the ’60s.90 He and Gassendi never became friends, however. There is no correspondence between them. Huet lived in Caen and could meet Gassendi only when he travelled to Paris and attended Montmor’s gatherings. Furthermore, Gassendi passed away in 1655, just two years after Huet’s return from Sweden. Huet’s acquaintance with Gassendi’s philosophy was therefore mainly through the latter’s work. He owned Gassendi’s two works on Epicurus, the first (1647) on Epicurus’ life, the second (1649) on his philosophy. These are two key works in Gassendi’s project of rehabilitating a philosopher largely rejected in the Christian world. Huet also owned Gassendi’s posthumous Opera in 6 volumes.At [Montmor’s] house, on a certain day and hour of every week, a numerous assembly of learned men was held, who communicated to each other valuable disquisitions on subjects in natural philosophy. These I frequently attended; and I occasionally presented dissertations of my own to their judgment. … A great ornament to this society was … Gassendi … who may justly be placed among the first philosophers of the age.88
Huet was interested and partially engaged in natural philosophy from his college years in the late 1640s to the late ’60s when he is attached to Louis XIV court and begins to dedicate himself to the education of the Dauphin, the edition of the collection ad usum Delphino, and to his Demonstratio Evangelica. Huet’s sympathies in the field of natural philosophy roughly and slowly shift, along these twenty years, from Descartes through Gassendi (holding a king of mitigated skeptical Epicureanism) to a stronger kind of skepticism, but never becoming a sectarian of either. Two events that happened in the middle of this trajectory certainly contributed to the shift. (1) Huet’s acquaintance in 1661 with Louis de Cormis in Caen, who made him read Sextus (more on Cormis bellow). (2) His collaboration with Ménage’s edition of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives, which made him acquainted with other ancient philosophies,91 some of which according to him anticipated Descartes and others which he favored, notably Pyrrhonism, which might be turned against Cartesianism. As I pointed out above, Huet still supported Descartes’s view on light against Vossius (1659),92 but in 1660 writes to his former teacher Mambrun declaring himself an Epicurean though mitigated by the probability of the Academics. The way Huet describes to Mambrun his skeptically mitigated atomism corresponds exactly, as mentioned in the section above, to Scudéry’s characterization of the skeptical Timandre. In 1666, Huet writes to Rapin announcing his plan to refute Descartes.93
In Huet’s philosophical relation to Gassendi’s natural philosophy, more than adoption of particular doctrines, what predominated was the experimental and hypothetical view of science in conjunction to what Popkin called mitigated or constructive skepticism, developed according to him by Gassendi and Mersenne and adopted by most non-Cartesian natural philosophers at the time, notably by Boyle and most other members of the Royal Society.94 The latter was the model of Huet’s Caen academy, during the establishment of which he corresponded with Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society.95 Huet read a French translation of Sprat’s history of the Royal Society, annotating a passage in which Sprat says that the Society is as distant from dogmatists as it is from skeptics who “deny everything,” for after careful inspection “sometimes” it pronounces a hypothesis as more probable than others.96 Huet also remarked Boyle’s Skeptical Chemist and Glanvill’s Vanity of Dogmatizing in Sprat’s list of works produced by members of the Society.
Besides taking interest in and endorsing some of Gassendi’s scientific endeavors,97 Huet showed sympathy for Gassendi’s project of rehabilitating Epicurus. He mentions the project twice in his Traité philosophique. The context of this favorable reception is Huet’s reaction to zealous religious opposition to some ancient philosophies viewed as enemies of Christianity, which of course also was the skeptics’ case. After citing the case of Pythagorism, he cites Epicureanism which was subject to “injures” (Edward Combe translates “reproaches”) in the religious and moral realms, “and for having authorized Libertinism” (Weakness, 222/Traité, 294). These ancient philosophies, despite their bad reputation—such was obviously the case of skepticism, the revival of which is partially the Huet’s project—could be redressed as did Gassendi,98 “who,” like Huet himself, “bore the character of a priest, for which he has had the approbation of many learned and pious persons” (Weakness, 222–223/Traité, 294). As it will be shown in Chap. 3, Huet’s philosophical project did not enjoy the same approval.
The other mention of Gassendi in the Traité philosophique is in the Preface where Huet relates his intellectual journey towards his skeptical system and which will be examined in detail in Chap. 4, Sect. 4.1. Here it suffices to say that he saw—he certainly refers to the meetings at Montmor’s informal academy in 1652–1654 in which Gassendi was the star—“that Gassendi had become the head of a party, and had successfully revived the sect of Epicurus” (Weakness, 5–6/Traité, 6). Gassendi’s success, plus the fact that there were still Aristotelians combatting Descartes’s philosophy, made him disappointed at Cartesianism which after all promised to end all disagreement. Huet does not say that he became on this occasion a member of Gassendi’s party nor that he became as sympathetic towards Gassendi’s views as he was previously towards Descartes’s. But his Memoirs, his brief statement of his intellectual trajectory in the preface of the Traité, and his correspondence, indicate that from the late ‘50s to the early ‘60s he gravitated—as indicated above—from Cartesianism to a mitigated atomism of the Gassendian type, and from the mid ‘60s onward towards skepticism as Scudéry describes Timandre’s philosophical trajectory.
The skepticism of the Traité philosophique, despite general similarities, differs in significant ways from Gassendi’s skepticism exhibited in his first published work, the Exercitationes Adversus Aristoteleos.99 Both the Traité and the second book of Exercitationes make extensive use of Sextus Empiricus but in different ways and for different purposes. Gassendi directs the Pyrrhonian modes against Aristotle’s view of science whereas Alexander’s teacher is not at all targeted by the Dauphin’s teacher.100 The Pyrrhonian modes mainly used are also different. Gassendi explores more Aenesidemus’ set of ten while Huet explores Agrippa’s set of five. Gassendi deploys many of Sextus’ examples of the various kinds of variations observed which preclude that a given appearance be identified as the nature or essence of the thing. He also brings new cases available in other sources multiplying some of the ten tropes in a way that brings to mind his friend La Mothe Le Vayer’s typical procedure with respect to the tenth mode on the diversity of customs, laws, and myths.101 When looked at closer, three apparent similarities display relevant differences.
The first is the skeptical exploitation of the Aristotelian/scholastic requirement that to know something one must determine its genus and its difference.102 Gassendi attacks Aristotle’s definition of difference and argues that in order to know the specific difference of a thing one would need also to know everything else. The conclusion is that in Aristotle’s view of scientific knowledge, either absolutely everything is known, which is obviously false, or nothing is known. The difficulty in establishing the genus and difference of a particular thing is the object of Huet’s third proof that we have no certain knowledge. But his argument there turns on the dialellus problem posed by Sextus’ fifth mode (of the set of five—PH I.169). In order to know the essence of something one must know its genus, that is, what it has in common with another thing of a different species. But this requires that we know the essence of these two things, the knowledge of which requires knowledge of their genus.103
The second issue is the way Gassendi and Huet reply to two classical objections raised against ancient Pyrrhonism. The first is that it is a contradiction to affirm that there is no science, for this itself exhibits a science. In their replies, both Gassendi and Huet use Sextus’ argument that the skeptic’s negative claims are eliminated together with the dogmatic view attacked,104 but Gassendi emphasizes that the dogmatic view of science eliminated is the Aristotelian one and that his own views—including the skeptical arguments he employs—have only probable certainty based on conjectures. “There is a science, but a science based on experience and, I might say, of appearances.”105 Huet also claims that we have no certain knowledge, only a probable one, and, also like Gassendi, that this is a limitation due to our nature, basically our body.106 This was a view held by most skeptics at their time and before, notably by Montaigne and Charron.107 Huet however, as other post-Cartesian skeptics such as Simon Foucher,108 justifies this view by appealing to the modern skeptical problem of representation posed by the way of ideas. We have no way to compare our ideas with their objects in the external world. Assent is given to the probability of ideas, which sets the realm within which we have limited knowledge.109 The second classical objection is that suspension of judgment makes life unlivable. Gassendi’s response follows closely Sextus’ claim that the skeptic accepts the phenomena, which are precisely the objects of pursuit and avoidance that direct one’s life.110 Huet’s response displays, once more, the influence of Cartesian doubt which, given its hyperbolic nature, required a strict separation between ordinary and philosophical life. “When therefore the question is about the conduct of our lives, and the performance of our duty, we cease to be philosophers, to be opponents, doubtful or uncertain, and become poor, simple, credulous idiots” (Weakness, 183/Traité, 242). Huet even cites the example given by Descartes in his second maxim of the provisional morality.111 “And would not a traveler, who does not know what way he is to take, be very silly, if instead of going forward, he should stop and sit still in some corner of the road?” (Weakness, 184/Traité, 245).
A last minor difference between their skepticisms but which reveals Huet’s distance from Gassendi’s mature project of rehabilitating Epicurus (despite his view that the reputation of this ancient philosopher was wrongly damaged by Christian zealots) appears in their respective reactions to Diogenes Laertius’ claim (Lives IX.64) that Epicurus admired Pyrrho. Whereas Gassendi says that their philosophies were similar,112 Huet rejects any similarity on the grounds that Epicurus considered Pyrrho ignorant: “it ill became him to tax Pyrrho with ignorance, when he himself was both ignorant and illiterate” (Weakness, 97/Traité, 128).
The comparison above evidences that Gassendi had no direct role in Huet’s knowledge of Sextus. But he probably had an indirect one through a former student of his, Louis de Cormis (1577–1669). Cormis is a skeptic of the seventeenth-century completely unknown for the reason that he published nothing in philosophy. He was a nobleman and politician from Aix-en-Provence exiled in Caen by the king, where he arrived on 13 May 1661, because of political struggles with other noblemen in his home town.113 Huet reports in his Memoirs that Cormis arrived with a letter of recommendation by Madame de Rambouillet, a major salonnière, and mother-in-law of the Duke of Montausier, Huet’s future protector at Louis XIV’s court. Huet says that they immediately became friends and met every single day.
Huet had heard about ancient skepticism but the skepticism he knew at that time was mainly Cartesian doubt—with which he became acquainted still during his college days. The arrival of Cormis in Caen coincides with Huet’s interest in La Mothe Le Vayer’s renewal of ancient skepticism (see next section). The ‘60s is when Huet moves towards skepticism and at the same time becomes critical of Cartesianism. That Cormis was not only an expert on ancient skepticism but a skeptic himself is attested by a letter Huet sent to Ménage in Paris dated 15 April 1662 recommending Cormis to his friend. The letter is written while Huet is informally collaborating with Ménage’s edition of Diogenes Laertius’s Life of Eminent Philosophers (almost one year after interacting with Cormis in Caen), a work which impacted him strongly.114 Huet’s correspondence with Ménage during this period attests the former’s interest and sympathy for Pyrrhonism. “But concerning the Pyrrhonians, does Mr. du Perier know that Mr. the president [of the Aix-en-Provence Parlament] de Cormis is in Paris? Tell him if he does not know. He is a man of merit, a great skeptic and I would like you to meet him.”115Almost his whole conversation was on the sects of ancient philosophers, in all of which he was excellently learned, especially in those which enjoin the withholding of every degree of mental assent. He therefore greatly approved the doctrine of Sextus Empiricus; and by his recommendation induced me carefully to peruse and render familiar an author as yet known to me only by name. (Memoirs, 79–80)
The editor of Huet’s Traité, Henri du Sauzet, cites the passage quoted above from Huet’s Memoirs to justify his claim that Cormis is the Provençal, the character in the Traité who relates his skeptical views to the narrator.116 Du Sauzet discloses what he thinks is the Provençal identity because for marketing reasons he published the Traité not as if it were written by the pseudonym under which Huet wanted to hide his authorship, Théocrite De Pluvignac, but as written by Huet himself. I show in Chap. 3 that Du Sauzet was wrong, the Provençal being Huet himself and his interlocutor—the narrator of the book—Huet’s friend Jean-Baptiste du Hamel.
The evidence that Cormis learned about ancient skepticism from Gassendi is the following. Gassendi refers to him as “an old friend” in a letter to Louis de Valois.117 In the preface to Exercitationes, Gassendi says that the book grew out of lectures he gave at Aix-en-Provence, of which some students who agreed with the views professed took notes.118 Because Cormis was there at the time, it is quite likely that he was one of them.
Gassendi’s own kind of skepticism, which he held in his first published book, before he developed his project of rehabilitating Epicurus, was therefore not directly influential on Huet’s skepticism. But what about his Fifth set of Objections to Descartes’s Meditationes? Were they not relevant to Huet’s Censura? They certainly were, as Huet scholars have pointed out.119 A number of shared philosophical views are presupposed (even, in particular in Huet’s case, if only for the sake of argument) in their attack upon Descartes’s metaphysics. Both rejected or did not understand Descartes’s strategy, in the end of the First Meditation, of taking as false what he had shown with the dream and God deceiver arguments to be uncertain. Both charged him with replacing old prejudices with new ones, ignoring—consciously or not—Descartes’s justification that the move was necessary to produce suspension of judgment about things which, though uncertain, remained very probable.120 Both—following Montaigne and other Renaissance skeptics such as Vives and Charron—denied that the mind was more easily known than the body, arguing that, on the contrary, it was much less known, indeed the most obscure thing in the natural realm.121 Both reiterated the Peripatetic view that nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.122 Both utterly denied the intellectual metaphysical way pursued by Descartes which required setting the body aside, a view they considered arrogant to the extent that it considered human beings as if they were pure spirits or “Minds,” as Gassendi refers to Descartes in the Fifth set of Objections.123 Both denied that ideas could be anything different from images, taking on a first definition given by Descartes himself in the Third Meditation.124 Both denied Descartes’s intellectualist account of our idea of infinity, which is crucial in Descartes’s a posteriori proof of the exitence of God.125 Both reacted to Descartes’s attacks on the ancient skeptics, Huet to Descartes’s statement in the third part of the Discourse,126 Gassendi in his response to Descartes’s reply to his first doubt about the Second Meditation.127 Both considered Descartes’s Physics (available in his Principles of Philosophy) a chimera.
The above positions, except supporting the skeptics, were also held by many others critics of Descartes’s, including the Aristotelians. But I will take a closer look at the last affinity aforementioned, comparing their respective receptions of Descartes’s Principles. Rapetti (1999, 97n) notes that Huet’s personal copy of his Censura (first 1689 edition) preserved at BNF included three handwritten notes referring to works of Gassendi’s. The first two are from a letter Gassendi wrote to Rivet on 28 January 1645 published in volume VI (letter 351) of Gassendi’s Opera. In this letter, Gassendi replies to Rivet’s demand that he produce a critical analysis of Descartes’s Principles, in particular of its parts 2–4, similar to his objections to Descartes’s metaphysics (the Fifth set of Objections to the Meditations). Gassendi refuses because, he says, unlike the objections to the Meditations, he was not asked to do so, and also because of the fierce polemics caused by Descartes’s strong negative reaction to his objections. However, he gives in the letter his general private judgment, which includes the following statement annotated by Huet in his copy of the Censura: “it is surprising that such an excellent Geometer dared to present so many dreams and chimeras as if they were certain demonstrations.”128 What Gassendi, unlike Huet, does not say is that Descartes’s principles of natural philosophy, just as geometry, appeared quite persuasive, which lead Huet to embrace Cartesianism from his school days to the late 50s.129 The appearance of geometric deduction did not seduce the mature atomist philosopher.
The third annotation is the most relevant one. It concerns the stain, in the list of five Huet attributes to Descartes’s philosophy, to which he dedicates most pages, namely, that “(iv) it offends the faith” (Against, 200/Censura, 172). Huet annotated Gassendi’s article 3 in response to Descartes’s reply to his introductory remark to the Fifth set of Objections. The article reacts to Descartes’s claim, stated in his dedicatory letter to the theology Faculty of Sorbonne, that his arguments for the existence of God and the mind-body distinction were not mere probable proofs—as so many have been provided along the tradition of Christian philosophy—but demonstrations, more certain than those mathematical and such that no more certain could be proposed.130 Huet’s reaction to this in the first edition of his Censura is the following.
In his letter to the Sorbonne Faculty, Descartes goes on, saying that given the relevance of the topics concerned, and the difficulty that his readers attached to their senses would have to follow and be convinced of the accuracy of his demonstrations, he required that the Faculty issue a public statement that he had indeed provided demonstrations and not mere probable proofs. It is this demand that Gassendi questions in the article annotated by Huet. If they were demonstrations, argues Gassendi, there would be no need to beg the Sorbonne’s public statement. Gassendi exhibits in the article views on the reason and faith relationship which are very dear to Huet. He says the Faculty would never comply to Descartes’s request—only the excessive pride of Descartes’s could make him expect such thing, Huet might have thought—for it attests only the truth of religious doctrines and never one particular argument employed to justify them. The Faculty proceeds in this way because “it is aware of how much human reason is uncertain and weak,”132 which is of course the skeptical thesis defended by Huet in his Traité philosophique. And, as it will be argued in Chap. 4, the corollary of the thesis is the refutation of Descartes’s metaphysics which, according to Huet—and Gassendi—wrongly presupposes the opposite about human reason. The uncertainty of human reason is the reason why the proofs can be only probable: some will be convinced by one, others by other proofs, all within the human subjective scope of probability (what appears more persuasive to one may not appear so to other). Cartesian certainty is not achievable by human beings. By appealing to the authority of the Faculty, Descartes actually attempts to “tyrannize” (Gassendi 1962, 21) the judgment of others. This is precisely Huet’s view: “What a gross impiety to have violated the pure and holy doctrine of Descartes with the least suspicion! As if the truth of his own opinions were like that of the decrees of the Faith, and as if it were as permissible to regulate the latter on the basis of the former as it is to judge the former on the basis of the latter” (Against, 201/Censura, 173). Huet’s philosophical project was to establish philosophically that opinions and reason should be regulated by faith. He thus annotates in his copy of Censura with Gassendi’s following question: “because you willed that [your arguments] be considered dogmas of faith” [for they would acquire such status if they were declared demonstrative by the Faculty], “instead of being thus considered, they rather should be rejected,” for “isn’t it not an impiety to consider our belief in these truths as induced more by [Descartes ’s arguments] than by the merit of faith?”133Here, this self-regarding man openly flatters himself, for he would have us take the proofs he advances for God’s existence and the mind-body distinction as “natural demonstrations,” and reject all the rest. As if these arguments of his, which he calls “natural,”131 were more certain than “human, probabilistic arguments;” as if they were not very uncertain; as if they were not obviously false. (Against, 204/Censura, 178–179)
2.4 François de La Mothe Le Vayer (1588–1672)
La Mothe Le Vayer is the main protagonist of Pintard’s Libertinage érudit, the libertine who most exemplifies the heterodox features of the intellectual movement. He was the only plain philosophical skeptic, publically presenting himself as such.134 He qualified his skepticism as Christian, by which he meant a limitation of the scope of épochè to the natural realm, thus excepting the Bible, which was considered supernatural. However, his skepticism did not spare religion as a human institution, clandestinely publishing under the pseudonym of Orasius Tubero a dialogue attacking superstition.135 Despite being the main vertex of the original famous tetrad, and the one whose ancient philosophical sympathies most agreed with those of Huet’s, he is the only one of the four with whom there is no trace of any direct interaction with the bishop. Naudé, as pointed out in Sect. 2.2, became Huet’s closest friend when the latter arrived in Paris from Caen in 1650. In the case of Gassendi, Huet proudly tells in his Memoirs, as remarked in the previous section, his participation in the same scientific gatherings in which the former was the star. His friendship with both could not extend much because of Naudé’s death in 1653 and Gassendi’s in 1655. Elie Diodati, the fourth member of the original tetrad, corresponded with Huet.136 La Mothe Le Vayer outlived his and Huet’s friends Naudé and Gassendi for, respectively, nineteen and seventeen years. He lived in Paris for two decades during which Huet made frequent trips to the capital. During the last three of these years (1670–1672), Huet lived in Paris, holding an office similar to the one earlier held by La Mothe Le Vayer himself.137 The latter was preceptor of the Duc d’Anjou, younger brother of Louis XIV, until 1660, and for a period also of the king himself.138 Huet became assistant preceptor of Louis XIV’s son ten years later. The younger skeptic succeeded the older in the education of the royal family as Louis XIV succeeded Louis XIII in the Kingship of France.139 Huet began working on his skeptical Traité philosophique after he finished his teaching job at the king’s court in 1679. La Mothe Le Vayer published most of his skeptical works after he retired from the same job: Prose chagrine, whose second part is wholly on skepticism, in 1661; Discours sceptique sur la musique (1662); nine dialogues called Promenades with Tubertus Ocella, a character who is a softer version of the clandestine Orasius Tubero, in 1662–1663; Homélies académiques (1664–1666); Problèmes sceptiques (1665); Doute sceptique, si l’étude des belles lettres est préférable à toutes autres occupations (1667); Deux discours, le premier du peu de certitude qu’il y a dans l’histoire, le second de la connaissance de soi-même (1668); Discours sceptique pour montrer que les doutes philosophiques sceptiques sont de grand usage dans les sciences (1669); Soliloques sceptiques (1670), and Hexaméron rustique (1671).
Did Huet personally meet La Mothe Le Vayer? With all probability. They had close friends in common, in particular Gilles Ménage. La Mothe Le Vayer’s second wife, Angélique de La Haye, whom he married in 1664 aged 76, was a frequent guest of Madeleine de Scudéry,140 the writer who, as showed in Sect. 2.2 above, lived very close to Huet. However, there is no correspondence between the two skeptics, nor a single reference to any of La Mothe Le Vayer’s many works in Huet’s publications, not even in his Memoirs, where he proudly lists the many men and women of letters with whom he interacted. I argue in this section that the reason for the omission was the apparent similarity of their philosophical views—but which in fact hid deeper differences—coupled with the suspicions about the sincerity of La Mothe Le Vayer’s faith.141 Huet did not want to compromise his own project which he believed orthodox and, unlike La Mothe’s, at the service of the Christian religion.142 There is no indication that Huet considered La Mothe Le Vayer a libertine or irreligious author. But he probably perceived that La Mothe’s philosophical project, unlike his own, was not religiously motivated.
There is an indication of a possible direct relationship with La Mothe Le Vayer in Huet’s correspondence with their common friend Ménage. The latter wrote from Paris to the former in Caen on 5 November 1661, indicating that he would dispatch to Huet La Mothe Le Vayer’s just published Prose chagrine. Ménage’s letter suggests that La Mothe Le Vayer had communicated to Huet, directly or through someone else, that he would give him a copy of the work.143 The occasion coincides with Huet’s interest in Sextus Empiricus, as pointed out in the section above, resulting from his conversations with Gassendi’s former student Louis de Cormis in Caen. It is therefore likely that Huet would be interested in the works of a philosopher whose project was to revive ancient skepticism. Huet’s three volumes of La Mothe’s Prose chagrine belong now to the rare books collection of the BNF but unfortunately present no signs of reading, as Huet usually left in the works he read.144 Besides the Prose chagrine, whose second volume is entirely about skepticism, Huet also owned two other works of La Mothe Le Vayer’s: the Opuscule, ou Petit traité sceptique sur cette commune façon de parler ‘n’avoir pas le sens commun’ (1647) and the Jugement sur les anciens et principaux historiens grecs et latins dont il nous reste quelques ouvrages (1646).145 The latter has reading marks and passages from the former were annotated by Huet in his own interleafed copy of the 1679 edition of his Demonstratio Evangelica.146 An examination of these notes and some other passages from these three works Huet owned show the little influence La Mothe Le Vayer had upon him and important differences behind their skeptical affinities.
Huet annotated the two passages from the Petit traité sceptique in the Preface to Demonstratio. The first concerns Huet’s claim that geometrical proofs were questioned by skeptics and Academics.147 He paraphrases La Mothe’s Petit traité by writing at the margin of his copy of Demonstratio: “Democritus believed that two contradictory propositions can be true at the same time.”148 A possible use of this source is Huet’s repeated claim in Censura that “Democritus”—sometimes he adds “Democritus and the Academics”—doubted whether we existed.149 The second annotation from the Petit traité sceptique is more important for it concerns not an ancient source of a particular skeptical argument but the general view of the relationship between ancient skepticism and Christianity. This is La Mothe Le Vayer’s compatibility claim which he reiterates in all his skeptical works. I quote La Mothe’s larger passage, italicizing the part Huet annotated in his copy of Demonstratio apud Rapetti.
This handwritten note was added in connection to the passage in the preface of Demonstratio where Huet announces the project he developed after the publication of Demonstratio. Huet claims that “the philosophical schools that consider everything that we know through the senses and reason dubious and uncertain and suspend all assent are much less contrary to Christianity than figured by vulgar men.”151 In the Preface of Demonstratio, after citing Church authorities, Huet concludes his argument probably alluding to La Mothe Le Vayer and other skeptical fideists,152 saying that talented and erudite men attempted to facilitate the acceptation of Christian doctrines by first endeavoring to eradicate philosophical beliefs through use of the skeptics’ arguments.153C’est ce dont nous nous sommes expliqués assez au long en divers autres traités que celui-ci, où nous pensons avoir rendu fort apparent, que de toutes les familles Philosophiques des Anciens, il n’y en a aucune [Huet paraphrases: De toutes les sectes il n’y en a point] qui s’accommode si facilement avec le Christianisme, que la Sceptique respectueuse vers le Ciel, & soumise à la Foi, ce qui me dispensera d’en dire ici davantage.150
Huet therefore does agree with La Mothe le Vayer that skepticism is, of all ancient philosophies, the most reconcilable with Christianity. However, their philosophical projects were quite different. Huet developed his philosophical project in the first half of the ‘80s, after he finished his job at Louis XIV’s court, and began to work on his Alnetanae Quaestiones, whose First Question (planned book I) was an examination of human intellectual faculties which showed their weakness. This examination, which resulted in the text which could be published only posthumously under the title Traité philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain, would contravene the Cartesian optimistic view of the strength of human faculties (Second Question, planned book II, published separately in 1689 under the title Censura Philosophiae Cartesianae), in order to establish another, more modest, relationship between reason and faith in which the latter had a stronger value (Third, Four and Fifth Questions/books in the original plan, published in 1690 as Alnetanae Quaestiones with only these three books).154
La Mothe Le Vayer’s skepticism was little relevant for the skepticism of Huet’s Traité. The skeptical works written by the former typically follow the same pattern: an introduction and conclusion on the benefits of skepticism in which it is underlined that the skepticism proposed is not ancient pagan but Christian and, occupying the middle bulk of the work, a relation of countless cases of variations of beliefs, myths, customs, along the line of the tenth mode of the set of ten in Sextus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism. A closer look at these two features shows how they differ from Huet’s skepticism.
La Mothe typically begins by stating the skeptical viewpoint of the problem examined in the work, including a brief presentation of ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism as well as indicating that his skepticism is not plain ancient, but Christian skepticism, that is, a skepticism whose scope does not include Christian revelation. The problem examined may be music155; the value of belles lettres156; history157; divinity158; or—in the case of the Petit traité—the vulgar man’s view that some philosophers lack common sense; or—in the case of the second book of Prose chagrine—a defense of skepticism against the traditional apraxia (that the skeptic cannot live her skepticism) and contradiction (that skepticism refutes itself) charges.159 The introduction and the conclusion emphasize the advantages of skepticism, including its compatibility with—and even its apologetic value for—Christianity. What connects skepticism with Christianity is what is known today as fideism: the acceptance of faith through means other than reason. Following an argument employed earlier by Montaigne and Charron, La Mothe Le Vayer claims that skepticism clears the mind of false—merely human—beliefs leaving it set to receive supernatural revelation. This means that skepticism is not only compatible with Christianity—provided of course that it does not turn the skeptical weapons to the Bible, considered supernatural—but that it also is an indirect path to Christian faith.
Huet agrees that reason is weaker than faith but he attributes a role to reason absent from La Mothe’s skeptical works. Huet recognizes that reason has a human, limited strength which is employed in the traditional role of giving credibility to Christian doctrines,160 and, though in an ambivalent way, also in the traditional proofs (cosmological and design arguments) of the existence of God.161 La Mothe Le Vayer does not recognize such strength, except in his exceptional work on the immortality of the soul.162 While La Mothe’s skepticism targets dogmatic traditional philosophies (Epicurus’, Aristotle’s, Stoic), Huet’s targets Descartes’s and the “Cartesians” (largely understood to include Malebranche and Spinoza) , which expressed a rational optimism much stronger than the ancient dogmatist did. Contravening the new Cartesian dogmatism did not require lowering reason to the same degree as was required to combat the ancient, more modest, dogmatic schools.
Huet’s arguments for the weakness of reason aimed at justifying his kind of historical—and non-philosophical—apology of Judeo-Christianity, an apology which takes the longest part of the original planned Alnetanae Quaestiones. Unlike La Mothe’s skeptical treatises, the Traité philosophique was not originally meant as a work in itself but as the first book of a much lengthier work whose longest part was designed to make reason and faith consistent. In La Mothe’s case, a reader who takes his introductory fideist claims too seriously might expect that his employment of skepticism would be a kind of ladder to reach Christian faith. Faith achieved, La Mothe would, like Sextus, throw the ladder away.163 But not at all. La Mothe Le Vayer keeps, to continue Sextus’ ladder metaphor, just stepping up it and down and then up and down again. This is what alleviates his chagrin.164 The claim that skepticism is a ladder to Christian faith is just a rebuttal of the established view that this ancient philosophy should not be recovered because it is against religion. This is not to say, as most scholars do, that the compatibility and the apologetic theses are contradictory and La Mothe Le Vayer not sincere.165 This is to say that the place of plain fideism in Le Vayer’s project and mitigated fideism in Huet’s project are quite different. Huet’s project is to show that human faculties cannot give the certainty that faith gives. His philosophical investigation is clearly subordinated to his apologetic views. Of course La Mothe Le Vayer agrees with this view, but he is interested in the human benefits of a philosophy that renounces certainty whereas Huet finds necessary to show the weakness of human reason in order to contravene the tremendous trust in reason resulting from the success of Cartesianism.166 Ignoring Descartes and his followers, La Mothe Le Vayer envisages a Christianized skepticism similar to his friend Gassendi’s Christianized Epicureanism or Aquinas’ Christianized Aristotelianism.167
This major difference implies others. For instance, their respective defenses of the ancient skeptics. Against the accusation of inconsistency, Sextus claims that the skeptical arguments are parasitic on the dogmatic views they target. They are therefore discharged together with the doctrines they refute. In the Petit traité, in order to illustrate this point, La Mothe Le Vayer (V, II, 198–199) cites the case of Samson’s killing himself with the Philistines by bringing down the pillars that sustained the pagan temple where they were all gathered (Judges, 16.23–30). He thus Christianizes Sextus’ analogies of the purge that expels itself together with the fluids, the fire which consumes itself after consuming the fuel, and the ladder thrown away after climbed.168 At this point I indicate the single presence of La Mothe in Huet’s skeptical “system,” as he calls it to his friends. In the Traité, replying in the same way to the same accusation of inconsistency against the skeptics, Huet says that they eliminate their arguments “in the same manner as Samson buried himself under the same ruins with which he crushed his spectators to death” (Weakness, 195/Traité, 258). That La Mothe Le Vayer is Huet’s source is clear from the fact that the former’s long development of his skeptical Samson—of which Huet takes only the analogy just cited—ends with the passage he annotated in his interleafed copy of Demonstratio on the compatibility of skepticism with Christianity examined above. Despite the use of the same analogy, Le Vayer’s defense of ancient skepticism differs from Huet’s. First, it should be noticed that Huet took just one of the various parallels made by La Mothe Le Vayer between Samson and the ancient Pyrrhonians. Second, in the volume of Prose chagrine that deals precisely with this topic, Le Vayer cites Sextus’ analogies against the inconsistency charge (the fire and the purge) and, against the charge that the skeptic despises the sciences, he argues that the skeptic must know them well in order to refute them (III, I, 303–5). Huet’s reply to these same objections (Weakness, 188–189/Traité, 249–251) emphasizes the in utramque partem method of the Academics’ and argues that those of his time (Descartes and the “Cartesians”), who are most against the skeptics, are precisely those who condemn erudition and glorify ignorance.
After presenting his skeptical viewpoint, La Mothe Le Vayer typically proceeds a zetesis through the tenth trope, renewing and much amplifying the cases brought up by Sextus (PH I. 145–163) of conflicting variations of laws, customs, mythical, philosophical and ordinary beliefs.169 His sources are books reporting exotic places and civilizations, gatherings in the informal “academies” above mentioned in which Huet also took place, and letters from friends who were abroad such as Bernier’s letter reporting on Indian culture.170 These pieces of information are about places all over the world which until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were little (such as China and India) or not at all (South, North and Central America) known to Europeans. This zetesis is what is most characteristic of La Mothe Le Vayer’s skepticism—even compared with Sextus’, his main source as far as method is concerned. He says that relation of these cultural diversities gives him a pleasure which is the main justification for the reappraisal of this ancient school.171 The main justification for the reappraisal of ancient skepticism is thus moral—eudemonistic—as it was for the ancient Pyrrhonians, though La Mothe Le Vayer typically goes through the zetesis-epoche-ataraxia Pyrrhonian itinerary employing the tenth mode. In the Petitit traité, his zetesis is introduced as follows: that there is no such thing as common sense “can easily be shown through induction and some appropriate examples … Let us begin by comparing the ancient and the new worlds and then we will show contrariety among what is believed and practiced in closer places.”172 In the second book of Prose chagrine, La Mothe Le Vayer makes clear the therapeutic function of his zetesis: “Let us kind of amuse our sadness by making some little skeptical remarks which the reading of a recent report from Syria can provide me.”173 Huet’s skepticism has no therapeutic function. No ataraxia is alleged or pursued. The only feature of ancient skeptical morality he supports is the Academics’ avoidance of error, which is the immediate end of Huet’s skeptical philosophy.174 Like La Mothe Le Vayer’s, Huet’s immediate end concerns only what human faculties can naturally achieve but, unlike Le Vayer’s ataraxia, it focuses, following Socrates and the Academics, on intellectual integrity in matters purely philosophical.175 The skepticism of the Traité contributes to a remote end, which is not clearing the mind so God can miraculously bring faith, but setting straight the faith/reason relationship.
When we turn to the skeptical arguments deployed, a brief look at the Traité shows how little La Mothe’s skepticism was a source, besides the use of Samson.176 Of the thirteen proofs of the weakness of human understanding, only the fifth reappraises one of the ten modes, namely “that nothing can be certainly known by reason of the difference of men.”177 Huet dedicates only two pages to the argument. He just claims that there is “an infinite difference in such a vast multitude of men” (Weakness, 48/Traité, 64) without giving, in sharp contrast with Le Vayer, a single example.
Another relevant difference which shows how La Mothe Le Vayer is closer to ancient Pyrrhonism than Huet is the status both give to the skeptical claims they make. Le Vayer uses a strategy inspired by Sextus but which assumes a turn of his own to avoid the classical accusation of inconsistency. He says his skeptical statements are not truth claims but intellectual games to exercise his mind and bring satisfaction. The Petit traité sceptique for instance is not so much a “serious work” but an “innocent recreation” (une récréation innocente) (V, II, 185, 204). It presents “trifles” aiming at his “own satisfaction” (ma propre satisfaction) (V, II, 207). In Doute sceptique si l’étude des belles lettres est préférable à toute autre occupation, La Mothe is still more precise. He asks his readers to notice that “all this little composition is under the title of a Skeptical Doubt, which must be regarded as a game (jeu) if they want to be fair with me, and, above all, that they [his readers] do not believe me as unchangeable concerning opinions, which I may either have or pretend to have.”178 By contrast, the skeptical views Huet presents in his Traité are really his views on the weakness of human understanding. Of course, given the thesis defended, he does not pretend to establish them as certain, only as probable in the Neo-Academic fashion.179 In the next chapter I relate Huet’s attempt to publish his skeptical system after he published Alnetanae Quaestiones with only three books as a “Fourth alnetanea question.” The Sorbonne censor Edme Pirot read the manuscript and told Huet he did not believe it was meant as a serious epistemological work but only a “jeu d’esprit” through which Huet exercised his mind, whose publication would not be appropriate for a bishop. Of course his philosophical “System,” as he called it, was not meant by Huet as just a game. His refusal to give it such status might have contributed to the frustration of seeing his skeptical work published.
Huet’s apology for the Christian religion has been considered faulty because it has been seen as similar to La Mothe Le Vayer’s Pyrrhonian examination of the variation of religious beliefs and rituals but grounded upon common features such as allegations of prophecies and miracles. The publication of Alnetanae Quaestiones shocked Arnauld, for instance, who identified its method with Le Vayer’s.180 The second book of the published Quaestiones contains a comparison between Christian and numerous other religions doctrines, beginning with the existence and attributes of God, and then moving on to Angelology, creation, providence, human soul, and the various mysteries (trinity, original sin, Eucharist, etc.). The third book makes a similar comparison of virtues and morals. Books II and III of the published Quaestiones extends further the long section on Moses of Demonstratio in which Huet endeavors to prove that Moses and his relatives lie at the origin of mythological figures all over the world.181 This proof was central for the authenticity of the Old Testament whose historical truth he endeavored to establish. According to Huet, all world religions were historical distortions of primitive Judaism.
A first difference between Le Vayer’s and Huet’s procedures concerns the scope of their erudition, the latter’s being much larger than the former’s, both on what concern Biblical scholarship and other religions. But the main difference, which required Huet’s erudite skills La Mothe Le Vayer lacked such as knowledge of Hebrew, is the effort to point out the antecedence of Judeo-Christianity over the other religions, which required expert philological, historical and geographical knowledge.182 Huet’s effort differs from that of La Mothe Le Vayer, who attempts to establish equipollence between the myths and rituals compared. La Mothe’s zetesis, like Sextus’, aims—according to those who think his fideism is insincere—at épochè about the religious items compared. Given that his readers are Christians, the target is the probability of Christian doctrines. Huet aims, on the contrary, at adding probability to these items by showing how they rest behind all others. According to the plain skeptical interpretation of La Mothe Le Vayer’s philosophy, all religious items are false in the sense of being mere cultural arbitrary inventions pragmatically devised to attend psychological, social and political needs. In Huet’s view, the Pagan religious items are only partially false (man-made), for they are distortions of an originally divinely established religion. Le Vayer’s Petit traité sceptique, for instance, denies that there is a common sense, whereas Huet’s whole effort is to establish this common sense by showing that many differences of religious beliefs and morals are only apparent, hiding a common Hebraic truth which he claims to uncover through philology and other erudite methods. Huet thus corrects a letter he received from Gabriel Daniel.183 Where the Jesuit writes that Huet “mettre en balance” Christian and pagan dogmata, the bishop corrects: “mettre en parallèle.”184 The balanced scales are the Pyrrhonian representation of the equipollence of the things compared.
Against his critics, Huet claims that his method is orthodox, for it was modeled after the first apologists for Christianity, Church Fathers such as Eusebius and others.185 They argued that Pagans could not say that Christian dogmas were incredible because their own myths were similar to Christian ones. Pagans were thereby charged with inconsistency in condemning Christians. Huet just amplified the method including in the comparison many other religions (such as those held in America) unknown to the Church Fathers. Of course, despite the contrariety of purposes, Huet’s procedure may have contributed to the discredit of Christianity as much as Le Vayer’s. Faced with the similarity of myths and doubting the historical precedence of the Hebrew ones, Huet’s reader may be led by Huet’s apology to a religious skepticism similar to Le Vayer’s.186 Lacking a sense of the historical change, Huet apparently did not notice that the Church Fathers wrote to pagans whereas the readers of his Demonstratio and Quaestiones are originally Christians. It is unlikely that those who disbelieved Christian dogmas would become believers because pagans believed in similar ones.
Besides the Petit traité sceptique and the Prose chagrine, Huet also owned a copy of La Mothe Le Vayer’s Jugement sur les anciens et principaux historiens grecs et latins dont il nous reste quelques ouvrages (IV, II). Unlike Prose chagrine, Huet left reading marks in his copy but only up to page 28. It seems that he became disappointed after reading the introduction and the two first chapters on Herodotus and Thucydides, giving up the reading of the rest. One of Huet’s remarks contests La Mothe Le Vayer’s sharp distinction between history and fable.187 Huet gives a counter-example: “However, everyone agrees that Herodotus, who is here included among the historians, in fact elaborated a mix of fable and history.”188 If Huet had prolonged his reading up to Chap. 7 on Josephus, he certainly would be interested on what La Mothe Le Vayer had to say on Josephus’ polemical allusion to Jesus. Josephus’ testimony is considered crucial in the Christian tradition for being one given by an almost contemporary non-converted Jew. Le Vayer says that “although Josephus’ passage on Jesus Christ and the rise of Christianity has been cited … since Eusebius’ time, and by great men since, it does not stop from looking suspect to many others who believe it false and inserted in Josephus’ text by one of these pious frauds.”189 La Mothe then relates the many grounds of suspicion pointed out by different scholars. Shelford (2015) points out how crucial Josephus’ passage on Jesus is in Huet’s Demonstratio Evangelica and the tremendous scholarly effort he spent to support its authenticity.
Huet’s lack of interest in La Mothe Le Vayer’s works derives from, as I argue above, their different philosophical projects which implied different views of skepticism, and their different degrees and valuation of erudite scholarship.190 Both differences ultimately derive from their respective reactions to Descartes and the rise of Cartesianism. After being seduced by Descartes’s Principles in the ‘50s, in the ‘60’s Huet began to see Cartesianism as a major menace to religion and erudition.191 La Mothe Le Vayer ignored Descartes. True, unlike Huet he could not testify to the enormous success Descartes’s philosophy would achieve. But during the ‘60s, La Mothe Le Vayer is intellectually active, Descartes’s fame is rapidly on the rise, and Huet moves away from Cartesianism towards skepticism, realizing the need to combat the new philosophy.
When La Mothe Le Vayer deals with mathematics and physics he ignores Descartes, not in the sense of being unaware of his views, but in the sense of despising them, and reaffirms the Aristotelian view that natural philosophy cannot be mathematical.192 In his answer to a priest who asked him whose authors would he recommend in a library limited to one hundred volumes, Le Vayer recommends for the section on natural philosophy the works by Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius, and “all recent innovators … who have become chefs de parti.” He cites the Italians Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, and Galilei; the Englishmen Bacon and Gilbert, “and let’s not forget our intimate friends Gassendi and Baranzanus.”193 Descartes is not mentioned neither among the natural philosopher nor among the mathematicians, although he was already the main “chef de parti” by then. Huet was fascinated with Descartes’s Principles when he was being initiated in Philosophy at school. Le Vayer, like his friend Gassendi, saw the rise of Descartes when they were already mature philosophers. Gassendi developed another line of natural philosophy in competition with Descartes’s, becoming the second main “chef de parti” in France. La Mothe just ignored him.
2.5 Montaigne and Charron
Although this book is on Huet’s connections with the skeptics and mitigated skeptics of his time, an exception must be made for Huet’s receptions of Montaigne and Charron, given their relevance in early modern skepticism. They are the main non-ancient sources of La Mothe Le Vayer’s skepticism and receive—Charron in particular—much attention from Pintard and contemporary historians of the irreligious ideas of the period.
Huet’s combination of Christian apologetics with skepticism is often related to Michel de Montaigne’s (1533–1592) reappraisal of skepticism, in particular in the Apology for Raymond Sebond (Essays, II, 12).194 The position, known today as fideism, is the same one held by La Mothe Le Vayer examined in Sect. 2.4 above which resembles Huet’s only superficially. It comes therefore with no surprise that Huet, who read the Essays and was very careful in pointing out historical sources and anticipations of philosophical doctrines, did not seem much interested in Montaigne’s skepticism.
Huet’s personal copy of the Essays is preserved in the rare book collection of BNF (RES-Z-2771). He owned a 1669 edition published in Paris, a reprint of the posthumous edition prepared by Marie de Gourney, in which Montaigne’s skepticism is figured in the very frontispiece of the work, just besides his portrait, as a balance (the symbol of Pyrrhonian equipollence) with his famous question: ‘What do I know?’ (Que sçay-je?). Huet left many traces of his reading (marginal vertical traces highlighting some passages) but, unlike his marginalia of other philosophical books related to Cartesianism (by Malebranche, Régis, Descartes) and skepticism (Sextus) or both (Pascal), he wrote very few remarks in the margins of Montaigne’s Essays, none philosophical. One of these notes opposes one of Montaigne’s most famous views to the Bible. Montaigne says that
At this point Huet annotates a reference to Genesis I.28, where God says to Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”196 However, in the Traité, he says that skeptics are despised mainly because they combat the pretention that reason “sets [human beings] up in a rank vastly superior to that of beasts” (Weakness, 220/Traité, 291).when I come across arguments which assay to demonstrate the close resemblance we bear to the animals […] I am led to abase our presumption considerably and am ready to lay aside that imaginary kingship over other creatures which is attributed to us.195
Huet notices Montaigne’s use of Cicero as a source of skepticism (he translated to French some of the Latin quotations, in particular from Cicero’s Academica);197 remarks Montaigne’s suspicion about the veracity of the reports in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Pyrrho’s extravagant behavior;198 notes the beginning of the section of the Apology (II, 12, 559) in which Montaigne follows almost ipsis literis the opening paragraphs of Sextus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism; and highlights some passages in the section of the Apology where Montaigne presents his skepticism about the senses. That our knowledge depends on the senses; that human beings may lack some senses; and that the senses are the main target of the skeptics. None of these appear in the section of the Traité on the senses (Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3), which provides a synthesis of Sextus’ fourth mode (of the ten, PH I.100-117) with a skeptical exploitation of Descartes’s physiology of sense perception, not exhibiting any specific link to Montaigne’s more personal reappraisal of the trope. Finally, one might think that the long passage on the flux of things which concludes Montaigne’s skepticism about the senses in the Apology was a source of Huet’s skeptical argument “that things can never be perfectly and certainly known by reason of their continual change” (Weakness, 45–47/Traité, 59–62). But Huet’s direct source, acknowledged in the chapter, is Plato’s Theaetetus 152d–160e and, indeed, Huet’s flux is based on the rerum natura in general and not, like Montaigne’s, on the skeptic’s self.
Huet also highlighted one of the main fideist statements in the Apology, “that Christians do themselves wrong by wishing to support their belief with human reason: belief is grasped only by faith and by private inspiration from God’s grace” (Essays, II, 12, 491). This is the first objection to Sebond addressed by Montaigne. Some scholars argue that Montaigne agrees with the objection, but his agreement is only partial and the whole development of his reply points out that looking for reasons to support one’s Christian faith is totally legitimate and even necessary, despite the fact that true faith is not acquired in this or any natural way.199 Other fideist passages are not remarked by Huet,200 who agrees—as I remark above concerning his difference from La Mothe Le Vayer’s fideism—with the reason/faith relationship which I attribute to Montaigne, namely, that reason does have a role though subsidiary to faith.201
Neither Montaigne nor any other Renaissance skeptic is cited in the long chapter of the Traité on the history of skepticism, which shows “that the law of doubting has been established by many excellent philosophers.”202 The fact that Huet’s historical review ends before the Renaissance is not an explanation for this absence. In Sect. 2.3 above I pointed out that Huet mentions Gassendi’s rehabilitation of Epicureanism, a philosophy which, like skepticism, was traditionally charged with irreligion. The main reason for Montaigne’s absence is the same reason for the absence of La Mothe Le Vayer’s: Huet elaborates a different kind of skepticism and for a purpose different from theirs.203
Huet’s reading of Montaigne’s Essays does not appear in his Traité philosophique, but he did publish his view on Montaigne. One of the chapters of his Huetiana, published in 1722, is on the “Essais de Montaigne.” He praises Montaigne’s “live imagination” (Huetiana, 17), his style, use of metaphors, which explain the grande vogue of the Essays, “since it is, so to speak, the breviary of the lazy gentlemen and the studious ignorant.”204 But when it comes to content, Huet’s judgment is very harsh, totally rejecting the project of the self-portrait.
Commenting on Montaigne’s claim that he does not present in the Essays what ought to be held by others but only his personal idiosyncratic views,206 Huet says that a reader of a book does not care about “what Michel de Montaigne has thought but what must be thought to think well.”207 The purpose of books according to Huet is to bring knowledge, either religious, historical, scientific or political. It is from this viewpoint that he despises the Essays as a “breviary of the lazy gentlemen and the studious ignorant,” a kind of readers’ digest.208He declares throughout his work that he wanted to portrait himself in his natural … to the eyes of the public. Doesn’t such design presuppose that the original deserves being considered, studied and imitated by everybody? Could such a project be born except from a deep entrenched self-love?205
Huet’s negative reaction to Montaigne’s self-portrait is quite similar to other major French seventeenth-century philosophers’. Huet’s close friend René Rapin says that Montaigne’s Essays and Charron’s Wisdom are favorite readings of an atheist who “never studied anything in depth and knows only some chapters of Montaigne or some paragraphs of Charron.”209 Malebranche, who was probably one of the main targets of Huet’s attack on the Cartesians,210 includes a whole chapter on Montaigne’s Essays in the book on the imagination of his Search after truth. He says that the popularity of the work is due to its style that pleases the imagination despite the weakness of its reasoning. Even more than Huet, Malebranche finds Montaigne’s Essays scandalous and dangerous because, thanks to his skillfull use of the imagination, Montaigne makes his own vanity attractive.211 Montaigne’s self-indulgence in a corrupt self was one of the greatest sins for an Augustinian. Pascal, for instance, complains that Montaigne “[talked] too much about himself.” Referring to the “foolish idea to paint his own portrait,” Pascal says that “talking nonsense by accident, or through some weakness, is a common trouble, but what is intolerable is to talk nonsense deliberately.”212 Huet highlights in his copy of the Pensées Pascal’s fragment La 680: “Montaigne’s faults are great. Lewd words … His views on voluntary homicide, on death.”213
This negative view of the morals of the Essays, shared by Huet, Rapin, Malebranche and Pascal is likely a further reason—behind their different approaches and uses of skepticism—of Huet’s omission of Montaigne’s skepticism since these and other philosophers connected Montaigne’s morals with his skepticism. The title of the first chapter of Silhon (1661) is “Of Pyrrhonism. How much the Christian Religion is offended by this philosophy. Montaigne guilty of having attempted to protect it.”214 In Pascal’s Conversation with M. de Sacy, the latter says that “one could pardon those philosophers of yesteryear named Academics for casting all in doubt. But why did Montaigne need to enliven the mind by reviving a doctrine which Christians now consider foolish?”215 Besides the style that appeals to the imagination, Malebranche also attributes Montaigne’s popularity to his supposed knowledge of “the nature and weaknesses of the human mind.”216 He says Montaigne “affects the air of a Pyrrhonist.”217 Arnauld and Nicole claim in the Port-Royal Logic that Montaigne “tried to revive Pyrrhonism,” which “is not a sect of persons convinced of what they say, but a sect of liars.”218 Finally, Rapin says of the “Pyrrhonians and Skeptics,” a few paragraphs after his judgment aforementioned about Montaigne’s and Charron’s most famous works, that they are “the most extravagant of all philosophers, whom, out of a foolish vanity which they pretend of not believing anything and moved by a ridiculous falsity of mind, prefer to err from opinion to opinion rather than content themselves with something real and solid.”219
One of Huet’s main efforts in the Traité philosophique is to dissociate the skeptics from the bad reputation they had. Because Montaigne was viewed by Huet’s contemporaries as one of the main authors engaged in the renewal of ancient skepticism and this philosophy was associated to the bad morals they, including Huet, identified in the Essays, Montaigne’s skepticism was omitted from the chapter on Montaigne in Huetiana. For this reason and also for their different approaches to skepticism, Montaigne’s played no role in the skepticism of the Traité. The reasons of Huet’s distance from Montaigne’s skepticism are therefore similar to those which lead him to make no mention at all in his published works and correspondence to La Mothe Le Vayer.
Between Montaigne and La Mothe Le Vayer, the main philosopher who supported skeptical fideism was Pierre Charron (1541–1603). Charron’s De la Sagesse, published in 1601, was at least as influential as Montaigne’s Essays during the first half of the seventeenth-century.220 Charron’s Wisdom was highly appreciated in libertine circles. The book was considered their Bible.221 Huet’s friends Naudé and Gassendi were very influenced by him. Gassendi says that it was his reading of De la Sagesse and of Jean-Luis Vives what encouraged him to attack the Aristotelians despite the general approbation of Aristotle.222 Naudé, according to Sorel cited by Bayle, considered Charron superior to Socrates.223 He considered De la Sagesse second only to the Bible.224
Charron also supported skeptical fideism. Embracing, like Huet, the religious life at a mature age, he even proposed skepticism as the best preparatio evangelica. The priests in China would first clean the Chinese’s mind of their false religious beliefs by turning them into skeptics. “Once rendered these men like Academics or Pyrrhonians, one should propose the principles of Christianity as sent from Heaven.”225
Although Charron’s Wisdom was viewed by many since its publication as a mere systematization of Montaigne’s skepticism, scholars have pointed important differences.226 Unlike Montaigne, who combines Pyrrhonian and Academic skepticism, Charron’s view of wisdom is a development and adjustment to his time of the Academic view of wisdom according to which to avoid error is better and safer than to find the truth (which is very hard to find given the weakness of human faculties).227 I have pointed out in the section above that Huet’s skepticism does not include the Pyrrhonian eudemonic morals but takes as its immediate end avoidance of error. Wouldn’t this affinity raise Huet’s interest in Of Wisdom?
The catalogue of Huet’s library lists a copy of a 1632 edition of De la Sagesse.228 I localized the exemplar at BNF.229 Only the éloge of Charron’s life by La Rochemaillet has reading traces. But that Huet read the work is clear from the fact that he adds, in a revised edition of Censura, that Descartes “took many things from Charron’s ethics.”230 The absence of reading marks beyond the eulogy suggests Huet read De la Sagesse in another earlier edition which did not have the eulogy. Huet also read Charron’s second major work, his apology for the Christian religion, Les Trois Vérités.231 Huet left a note on his copy of Pascal’s Pensées indicating that the latter famous argument of the wager was anticipated by a Charronian similar utilitarian argument. Indeed, because of his skepticism, Charron, like Pascal, proposed alternative proofs of Christianity.232
Huet’s readings of Charron’s work but the absence of any relevant trace of these readings in his Traité philosophique, beyond the valuation of academic intellectual integrity but which probably derives from Huet’s direct reading of Cicero’s works, confirms the difference between their versions and uses of ancient skepticism. Even their similar valuation of the Neo-Academic view of wisdom must be put in perspective. Charron found in Academic skepticism a philosophical wisdom compatible with his pessimism with regard to human ability to find truth. In my reading, he proposes a philosophical Academic wisdom which he finds more modest than the dogmatic conceptions (typically, the Stoic view of wisdom) and therefore more compatible with the Christian view that beatitude can be achieved only supernaturally through grace. A view of human natural wisdom based on finding the truth is not realistic. What is up to limited human beings, as argued by the Academics, is to avoid error. Charron’s work in Of Wisdom was to support, develop and detail this Academic view of wisdom. Huet, along with the Academic view of avoiding error, includes a remote end which is pursued in the remaining parts of Huet’s originally planned Alnetanae Quaestiones.
Despite the apparent agreement on the fideist utility of skepticism, whereas Charron, at least in De la Sagesse, is completely focused on the limited wisdom/happiness, Huet elaborates his skepticism in order to point out the superiority of faith and the lines along which an apology for the Christian religion is possible according to him. He is thus on this regard closer to Pascal, who had Charron as a major target,233 than to Charron.The first [end of his skeptical system] is to shun error, obstinacy, and arrogance, and the other is to prepare the mind for the reception of faith. For since God has created us to live and to serve him in this life, and to enjoy eternal felicity after death, the doctrine, I am now establishing, does afford us in both these very considerable helps. For God has given us from our very birth a great desire after happiness; there never being any man, but what desired to be happy. (Weakness, 157/Traité, 209–210)
Huet’s reception of Montaigne and Charron cannot be dissociated from their rejection by Christian philosophers belonging to quite different parties, from Augustinians, anti-skeptics such as Malebranche, to Jesuits, skeptical mitigated Aristotelians, such as one of Huet’s major friends René Rapin. The Essays and Of Wisdom were viewed by them as kinds of reader’s digest of morals and religious views wrong and inadequate.