At the same time that Descartes had been seeking complete certainty regarding basic philosophical truths, some religious contemporaries were seeking the same kind of certitude with regard to religious truths. Some of these people interacted with Descartes while he was alive and continued developing their answers to Cartesianism and scepticism later on.
A little vignette has come down to us of a discussion between Descartes and the Scottish Protestant minister John Dury. They met at a tea of the Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and the Palatine in The Hague in 1634. Descartes is presented as explaining to Dury that he, Descartes, was seeking the basis for all certainty in mathematics.
He discoursed with Mr. Dury complaining of the uncertainties of all things, which Dur. refuteth by the truths and certainty of those reports in Scripture and an infallible way of interpreting them which he [Descartes] denyed. But being brought to many absurdities, left off. Indeed D. [Dury] hims [himself] was in great straits once in these very particulars. He could find no certainties almost in any thing, though he was able to discourse as largely of any thing as any other. Yet solidly and demonstratively he knew nothing; till he betooke hims. to the Scriptures and lighted upon an infallible way of interpreting them. He professeth that he could [have] bene much with men and grant them a latitude of judgment and differences if they were honest and godly.1
Dury gave some reasons for doubting that Descartes would find certainty in mathematics and said that he, Dury, instead was seeking the foundations of certainty in scriptural prophesies. Descartes went on to write the Discourse on Method, while Dury for the next forty years was writing versions of his method for finding absolute certainty from Scripture. In one of Dury’s last works, Touchant l’intelligence de l’Apocalypse par l’Apocalypse mesme, comme toute l’Ecriture Ste.doit estre entendue Raisonablement,2 he gave his fullest statement of his method for finding certainty in Scripture prophecies.
In 1642 the leader of the Moravian Brethren, Johann Amos Comenius, met with Descartes at the castle of Endegeest near Leiden, to see if they could find common ground in their search for certainty. Comenius was on his way back from England where he and Dury and others had been advising the Puritan revolutionaries. Descartes, we are told, defended his physics and metaphysics, and even more his theory of eternal truths and of the rational basis of faith, in this four-hour encounter with Comenius. Comenius, in reply, contended that man’s intelligence was too imperfect to attain any truth by its own means, and, consequently, all certitude rested finally on divine revelation. The two great thinkers parted with Descartes complaining that Comenius was mixing up religion and science, and Comenius fearing that Descartes’ views would lead to scepticism and irreligion.
Comenius said:
We exchanged speech for about four hours, he expounding to us the mysteries of his philosophy, I myself maintaining all human knowledge, such as derived from the senses alone, and reasonings thereon to be imperfect and defective. We parted in friendly fashion: I begging him to publish the principles of his philosophy (which principles were published the year following), and he similarly urging me to mature my own thoughts, adding this maxim, “Beyond the things that appertain to philosophy, I go not, mine therefore is that only in part, whereof yours is the whole.”3
This kind of religious encounter with Descartes became much more explicit and profound in the thought of Henry More (1614–87).
Henry More, like his teacher Joseph Mede, went into a sceptical crisis as soon as he began his studies at Cambridge. Mede reported that in 1603, as a first-year student, he chanced upon a copy of Sextus Empiricus and all of his views became dubious. He asked himself whether “the whole Frame of things, as it appears to us, were any more than a mere Phantasm or Imagination.” He struggled with his crise pyrrhonienne by seeking truth in all of the subjects taught at Cambridge, and finally found it in proper reading of biblical prophecies. Mede wrote one book, Clavis apocalyptica, which had his answer. He had found the truth that the Millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth, was soon to begin. The rest of Mede’s writings are explanations of his interpretations and expansions of them.4 His disciple William Twisse tried to give his view an epistemological basis in his book The Doubting Conscience Resolved. An Answer to a pretended perplexing Question, etc. Wherein it is evidently proved, that the holy Scriptures (not the Pope) is the Foundation whereupon the Church is built. Or that a Christian may be infallibly certain of his Faith and Religion by the Holy Scripture (1652).5
Henry More arrived at Cambridge in 1631, and began his studies at Christ’s College. He avidly sought the truth in the philosophies of Aristotle, Cardano, and J. C. Scaliger, among others. But, he found, most of what they said “seemed to me either so false or uncertain, or else so obvious and trivial.” After four years of study of philosophy, he reported that he “ended in nothing, in a manner, but mere Scepticism.” He described his crise pyrrhonienne in a poem that he wrote in Greek and translated as follows:
Know I
Nor whence, nor who I am, poor Wretch!
Nor yet, O Madness! Whither I must goe:
But in Griefs crooked Claws fast held I lie;
And live, I think, by force tugg’d to and fro.
Asleep or wake all one. O Father Jove,
Tis brave, we Mortals live in Clouds like thee.
Lies, Night-dreams, empty toys, fear, fatal love,
This is my life: I nothing else do see.6
More began to wonder if knowledge of things would yield supreme happiness, or there was some greater and more divine way. Should he read more authors, contemplate the world, or purge his mind of vice? He started reading Platonic, Hermetic, and mystical authors who led him to see that purgation had to precede illumination from God. He was finally saved by “that Golden little book,” the Theologica Germania, a pious mystical work that had transformed Luther about a century and a half earlier.7 This work led More to accept whatever God pleased to communicate to him. In so doing, he found “greater Assurance than ever I could have expected.”8
More then discovered and rejected Descartes’ philosophy and began to formulate his own. He corresponded with Descartes and discussed some points in Descartes’ Metaphysics. More is the first person from England to take Descartes seriously. The correspondence stopped when More realized that, as far as he could tell, Descartes’ views were leading to materialism and atheism. (When More later examined Spinoza’s views, he announced that he knew it would happen—that a Cartesian would become a professed atheist!) As he said in the preface to the collection of his early works of 1662, Descartes took the low road of materialism and More the high road of Platonism, but they met at the entrance of the Holy Scripture, trying to give the most approvable interpretation of the first three chapters of Genesis since the ancient Jewish Kabbalah was lost.9 Using Cartesianism and Platonism, More found the golden key to unlock the secrets of Genesis, “those two dazeling Paradoxes of the Motion of the Earth and the Praexistence of the Soul”—the basis for the new science and a new spiritology.10
From the time of his rejection of Descartes, More worried that a materialistic explanation of the world could lead to atheism, as could an “enthusiastic one.” In 1655 he published An Antidote against Atheism. Or An Appeal to the Natural Faculties of the Minde of Man whether there be not a God, dedicated to Lady Anne Conway.
Oddly, More, in order to refute atheism, felt he had to base his case on the free use of the natural faculties of the human mind, which would overcome the atheist’s scepticism. “If the atheists ‘wil with us but admit one Postulate or Hypothesis, that Our faculties are true,” then he will profess there is a God.11 But what is the evidence for this “postulate” or “hypothesis”? More immediately admitted that his arguments are not such “that a mans understanding shall be forced to confesse that it is impossible to be otherwise than I have concluded.”12 In fact, More said, nothing can be so demonstrated, “For it is possible that Mathematicall evidence itself, may be but a constant undiscoverable delusion, which our nature is necessarily and perpetually obnoxious unto, and that either fatally or fortuitously there has been in the world time out of minde such a Being as we call Man, whose essential property it is to be then most of all mistaken, when he conceives a thing most evidently true.” If there is no God, why can’t this perpetually deluded human being exist?13
In this, More had developed as radical a scepticism as appears in Descartes’ First Meditation. He had been poring over Sextus Empiricus and was willing to accept a contention that nothing can be proven because any proof would require the use of our faculties. In this, he was plunging into what Hume described as an “incurable scepticism,” as mentioned in the previous chapter.14 If one doubted one’s faculties, one would have nothing by which to overcome scepticism. Whether Hume is right that Descartes cannot undo the damage by proving that God is no deceiver is not relevant to my present concerns. More developed his special kind of Cambridge Platonism as a way of dealing with this fundamental problem, and, as I will show later in this chapter, Blaise Pascal developed quite a different response.
More did not say he would, like Descartes, prove that God is no deceiver. He would not even produce such arguments “that the Reader shall acknowledge so strong, as he shall be forced to confesse that it is utterly unpossible that it should be otherwise.” Nonetheless, his arguments will be such as shall deserve full assent, and win full assent from any unprejudiced mind.15
More had clearly set up an “incurable scepticism” to eliminate the possibility of necessarily true demonstrations. The value of any argument depends on the value or function of our faculties. As long as our faculties can be delusive and/or deluded, any result of reasoning “may possibly be otherwise.” Nonetheless, More, instead of giving up rational discourse, then proceeded to offer his antidote to atheism. For the rest of his life he was working out “the true Grounds of the Certainty of Faith in Points of Religion,” which appears in a book that is dedicated to “Jesus of Nazareth, the Crucified Son of God” and that has, on one of its title pages, a motto from Sextus Empiricus on why nothing can be proved.16 More gave the text from Sextus in Greek without any translation by putting it on the title page. This would seem to be an homage to complete scepticism, before the reader turned to the next page with the dedication to Jesus. The honorary position of Sextus and Jesus gives one food for thought about the relation of scepticism and religion in More’s philosophy. It is of some interest that More’s cohort, Ralph Cudworth the Regius professor of Hebrew at Cambridge and leading Cambridge Platonist, kept appealing to Sextus in two different ways in his book The True Intellectual System of the Universe. He would use Sextus over and over again as an authority on ancient philosophical views and as a source for information about the ancient world in general. He also occasionally would cite someone called “Sextus the Philosopher” who wrote the same books as “Sextus the Source.” Sextus the philosopher provided ammunition against Cudworth’s opponents, especially Descartes and Spinoza. So scepticism as an antidote to wrongheaded dogmatism was acceptable both to More and Cudworth.
The antidote is to point out that a person who does not assent to certain evidences is “next door to madness or dotage” and does enormous violence to the free use of his faculties.17 This does not answer or remove or overcome the incurable scepticism. The atheist can say over and over again that in spite of all of More’s evidence “it may possibly be otherwise.” The clearest mathematical evidence may be false, unless our faculties are true. If we can accept mathematical truths “supposing no distemper nor violence offered to her Faculties,” then we can accept a proof of the existence of an absolutely perfect being.18
Having made the case that one would be mad, senile, or obtuse to refuse to accept some evidence, although it may be false due to our faulty faculties, More had to hold off another avenue to certainty, namely that something is true because we are firmly persuaded of it. Living through, and staying aloof from, the Puritan Revolution, More encountered lots of people who were sure completely sure. His Enthusiasmus Triumphatus of 1656 is directed against this kind of personal certainty. “For Enthusiasm is nothing else but a misconceit of being inspired. Now to be inspired is, to be moved in an extraordinary manner by the power or Spirit of God to act, speak, or think what is holy, just and true. From hence it will be easily understood what Enthusiasm is, viz, A full but false, persuasion in a man that he is inspired.”19 More then sought to diagnose why people thought they were inspired when they were not and offered a rudimentary theory that enthusiasts were a type of mad persons, while genuinely inspired people were not. Various signs or symptoms were pointed out for distinguishing the sick enthusiast from the healthy religious person.20
In More’s book The Immortality of the Soul, so Farre forth as it is demonstrable from the Knowledge of Nature and the Light of Reason, published in 1659, he seemed to have realized that his scepticism, with regard to our faculties, could be carried too far and make any knowledge impossible. So, he said, “to stop all Creep-holes and leave no place for the subterfuges and evasions of confused and cavilling spirits,” he would offer some axioms that are so plain and evident “that no man in his wits but will be ashamed to deny them, if he will admit any thing at all to be true.”21 This, of course, does not establish the truth of the axioms since they can be doubted. But this constitutes “perfect Scepticisme, it is a disease incurable, and a thing rather to be pitied or laughed at, than seriously opposed. For when a man is so fugitive and unsettled that he will not stand to the verdict of his own Faculties, one can no more fasten any thing upon him, than he can write in the water, or tye knots of the wind.”22 Doubt of our faculties may not be answerable but leads to intellectual catastrophe. Those who are reasonable will accept More’s rules, which involve accepting our faculties as reliable. Axiom 5, which is central to having any assurance, is “Whatever is clear to any one of these Three Faculties, is to be held undoubtedly true, the other having nothing to evidence to the contrary.”23
When he came to lay out “the Grounds of the Certainty of Faith in Points of Religion,” More managed to present a basis for “a certain and firm Faith” and a true one in spite of the incurable scepticism about our faculties. This, More claimed, would be accepted by “all impartial and unprejudiced Examiners” whose judgments had not been perverted by education, passion or interest.24 The first basis of the certainty of faith presupposes certainty of both reason and sense rightly circumstantiated. Reason is needed to persuade us that testimony is infallible, and sense to guarantee us of the infallible testimony of sense, such as that Moses actually did converse with God, and that the report was not a dream, and that Jesus was resurrected and the eyewitness reports were not a delusion, “wherefore to take away the Certainty of Sense rightly circumstantiated, is to take away all Certainty of Belief in the main Points of Religion.”25
So, if true religion depends on our faculties properly employed, More then offered Aristotle’s criterion for right-functioning senses and an argument from catastrophe to define right-functioning reason. The senses are rightly circumstantiated when the sense organ is sound, the medium “fitly qualified,” and the distance of the object duly proportionated. Reason functions properly in a “perfectly-unprejudiced Mind, or at least unprejudiced touching the Point propounded.” There are some truths that are so clear that they have to be assented to, unless a person is besotted or quite mad. From this, More concluded there are natural truths in logic, physics, and mathematics that are so palpably true that they “appear so as well to the Wicked as the Good, if they be Compotes mentis, and do not manifest Violence to their Faculties.”26 This is made stronger by contending that these natural truths are so palpably true that they appear so both to evil and good persons and are at least as certain and indubitable as anything that reason and understanding can give assent to. “There is at least as great a Certainty of the Axioms that they are true, as there can be of any.”27 The unstated point still remains that these truths appear or are assented to as certain, provided our faculties can be trusted. Then, on the basis of these truths, More built up his case for his version of Christianity.
Thus, More, having introduced the “incurable scepticism” with regard to reason, pushed it aside by insisting only madmen or fools doubted their faculties. The certainty of reason and the senses should lead all unprejudiced people to the true morality and true religion.
More’s original statement in the Antidote to Atheism was that of a most extreme scepticism. He immediately retreated to build his case for religious and scientific knowledge on what one had to believe if one trusted one’s faculties. Given how sceptical More had been, there is still the haunting possibility that being compos mentis is also being deluded. More never overcame this, but just insulted anyone who still entertained it as wicked or stupid.
My interpretation of More’s involvement with scepticism has been discussed and criticized by Alan Gabbey.28 Gabbey says that the Cambridge Platonists did not use scepticism methodologically. He prefers instead to describe them as “admitting to a theoretical scepticism with regard to certain kinds of knowledge, but dismissive or contemptuous of any suggestion that such a scepticism be taken seriously in the practical affairs of the mind, and especially of the Christian soul in its quest for divine knowledge and understanding.”29 On the whole, I tend to agree with him but would also want to point out that More’s emphasis on the sad fact that we cannot establish the reliability of our faculties did produce a lingering kind of scepticism in Wilkins, Glanvill, and others formulating the basic theory of knowledge for the Royal Society of England.
Considering how monumental More’s original sceptical crisis was, it is touching that he ended up calmly presenting his interpretation of the Book of Revelation, and his use of the Kabbalah, as the surest view humans could have.30 More ended his life arguing strenuously with his colleague Sir Isaac Newton about how to interpret the various vials and trumpets mentioned in the Book of Revelation. Two of More’s friends and partial disciples, John Wilkins and Joseph Glanvill, still accepted More’s original incurable scepticism but so mitigated it, or trivialized it, as to make it uninteresting and unexciting. Their views will be discussed in chapter 13. The more dramatic presentation of the possibilities that might follow from questioning our faculties appears in the French contemporary Blaise Pascal.
Blaise Pascal (1623–62) was privately educated. His father was a financial official of the French government who wanted his son to have a good humanistic background before he learned of mathematics and science. So, at the age of twelve, Pascal discovered by himself the principles of geometry, after which his father abandoned his original plan for his son’s education and encouraged his mathematical development. While still a teenager, Pascal published important mathematical and scientific papers and was a young prodigy in the Parisian intellectual circles. His father and he became members of a scientific discussion group organized by Father Mersenne. There he would have met a wide range of people, probably including Thomas Hobbes, Descartes, and others.31
In 1646, after his father was injured, two Jansenists came to take care of him. The whole family, including Blaise, became interested and involved with this Catholic reform movement, with his sister Jacqueline becoming a nun at Port-Royal de Paris. After a traumatic experience crossing the Pont Neuf in Paris during a storm, Pascal had a religious conversion. This religious experience, which he recorded in The Memorial, ends with “certitude, certitude, certitude.” A year later, in 1655, with the encouragement of his sister, he made his first retreat at Port-Royal-des-Champs.32
After his religious conversion Pascal objected vehemently to the philosophy of Descartes. He kept contrasting the God of the philosophers—namely, Descartes’ God—with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In the Pensées there are many fragments addressing points in Descartes. Pascal probably did not have contact directly with the ideas of Sextus Empiricus, but he read and deplored what he read in Montaigne. When he retired to the monastery at Port-Royal he explained to its leader, Isaac Le Maistre de Saci, the views of Montaigne and described them as “the misery of man without God.” Their meeting is recorded in the Conversation with M. De Saci.33 In the Pensées there is running tension between the force of sceptical points and the certitude of religious belief.
In one of his most forceful analyses of the foundations of knowledge and belief in the Pensées, Pascal dealt with the question of the reliability of our faculties. In the well-known pensée 131–434, Pascal asserted that the strongest argument of the sceptics was that we cannot be sure of any principles apart from faith and revelation, except by some natural intuition. But this natural intuition gives us no proof of their truth, because “there is no certainty, apart from faith, as to whether man was created by a good God, an evil demon, or just by chance, and so it is a matter of doubt, depending on our origin, whether these innate principles are true, false or certain.”34
As Pascal developed the problem, the reliability of any knowledge depended on the reliability of our faculties. And the reliability of our faculties depended on their source. If they have been created by a good God, then we can rely on them. But if they have been created by a demonic force, we may always be in error. And if our faculties are just the chance result of how the natural world has developed, we are uncertain as to how reliable they may be. The dogmatists can point out that we cannot actually doubt natural principles, but the sceptics can reply “that uncertainty as to our origin entails uncertainty as to our nature.”35 And, as Pascal observed, dogmatists have been trying to answer the question about our origin ever since the world began.
However, as Pascal pointed out, Nature prevented man from doubting everything but at the same time left him unable to justify any knowledge because of our not knowing our true condition and the reliability of our faculties. “What sort of a freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious. Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!”36 We cannot even discover our true condition through natural reason, since we cannot tell what our origin is. As Pascal increased to a fever pitch the conflict between complete doubt and the need to know, he finally offered his religious solution. “Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature. Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.”37
Presumably if one hears anything, then one can have a basis for natural knowledge grounded on revealed knowledge. Natural knowledge in mathematics and physics, areas where Pascal himself made enormous contributions, remain suspended in their truth-value since one can never justify the axioms involved, or collect enough data to establish anything with certainty. Pascal’s Esprit géometrique is probably the best analysis of what an axiom system amounts to, written before the development of modern symbolic logic. It is self-contained and its truth-value depends on that of the axioms, which, in the nature of the case, cannot be demonstrated.38 In the preface to the treatise on the vacuum, Pascal gave as clear an analysis of the limitations of inductive reasoning as appeared before Karl Popper’s work, and Pascal pointed out that all that the empirical scientist can accomplish is to falsify hypotheses, not establish them.39
On the level of human knowledge Pascal insisted we had to be sceptics as long as there were dogmatists. However, as he also said, if everyone were a sceptic we would have to become dogmatists.
Pascal is not just presenting the problem of human knowledge in philosophical terms. As he once explained to his fellow members at Port-Royal, what he was working on as the culminating statement of his views was “an apology for the Christian religion.” The Pensées either are this apology or reflect a good deal of its content or design. The sceptical problems and the sceptical attitude are part of the apologetic project. But Pascal sees scepticism not as leading to religious knowledge or religious truth but more as neutralizing man’s rational impulses. Pascal was not following the route of Montaigne, Charron, and La Mothe le Vayer. He was using their sceptical weapons to combat the dogmatists and to make the sceptics aware of the religious dimension. Pascal did not see scepticism as leading to the relaxed, tranquil view of the ancient Pyrrhonists but rather to a sharpened and heightened desperation. The desire to know could not be satisfied by man’s rational faculties, but there was a necessity to know.
What Pascal contributes to the sceptical discussion is what José Maia Neto has called the “Christianization of Pyrrhonism.”40 The Christianization of Pyrrhonism is seen in Pascal’s description of man’s state without God. This state, theologically, is what has happened to mankind in the Fall. Man in this condition can find no security through reasoning or the use of his faculties, and he can, unfortunately, realize the desperation of his situation. He still has a glimmer or afterglow of the prelapsarian state of affairs, but he is unable to reach it.
This equating of the theological state of the Fall of Man with the sceptical result of doubting everything actually occurs prior to Pascal in the writings of Joseph Glanvill (who will be discussed in chapter 13). Glanvill’s Vanity of Dogmatizing was published in 1661, at the same time that Pascal was jotting down his Pensées. Glanvill, in expressing the basic reasons for being a sceptic, cited first and foremost the human condition after the Fall and next turned to epistemological reasons in Sextus Empiricus. I am not sure of his source, but it may be that some discussions by severe English Puritans came to more or less the same dim view of the human situation.
The Christianization of Pyrrhonism of Pascal was possibly foreseen in the earlier Jansenist writers like Saint-Cyran, who defended Charron and Montaigne from Jesuit attacks. The Jansenists saw the sceptics as going part of the way but not realizing why man in his present state will always linger in doubt. And because the sceptics do not understand their situation they cannot see that the only solution lies beyond any human, rational undertakings. The ability to know requires divine intervention, an act of grace. Short of that, the sad truth-seeker, wallowing in scepticism, can try to find the merits and demerits of religious and scientific evidences. A good deal of the Pensées is devoted to presenting religious evidences and giving persuasive, but not conclusive, reasons for accepting them. Pascal asks: Should we accept China or Moses? The dichotomy is between human secular history and sacred history. One can argue, as Pascal does, that rejecting sacred history is not justified, but accepting it is not based on any conclusive evidence. In fact, as he sees it, the evidence contains extreme difficulties. The Jews are the witnesses to divine history, but they did not see how divine history continued into the Christian era. They could see some of what was going on but were blind to the rest. So if they cannot be trusted about the latter part of the story, can they be trusted about the earlier part?
Pascal’s dialectic in his religious apologetics prods people to realize that there is not enough evidence to confirm the religious hypothesis and not enough to reject it. So man in his fallen state chooses on moral characters rather than philosophical ones.
Pascal uses the scepticism of Montaigne as a way of challenging the new dogmatism of Descartes and the emerging religious scepticism of the libertins érudits. Scepticism can only be overcome or set aside by divine intervention and by the desperate human desire to get beyond the state of man after the Fall. As Kierkegaard later said, his mission was not to make human life better, since he did not know how to do it, but he could make it worse. So Pascal, in most ingenious ways, tried to make the reader first become a sceptic, then to realize his actual state of affairs and to cry out for help. The help, on the mundane side, could be probabilistic evaluations of the evidences for religion. The ultimate evidence would be the effects of divine grace.
Thus both Henry More and Pascal present kinds of total scepticism as the fruits of human reasoning. If humans are unaided by any spiritual or divine forces, scepticism, in this state of affairs, would be incurable, as Hume suggested, since human faculties could never be relied on or even used to discover any certainty. Faith in spiritual forces or faith in divine grace then provided the sort of security that humans are seeking. Each in their own way, More and Pascal, offered a way beyond the sceptical crisis.
Pascal’s version of “incurable scepticism” does not have the easy solution of Henry More or his probabilistic friends Wilkins and Glanvill. One does not move from an unresolveable doubt about the merits of our faculties to an evaluation of what reasonable, decent Englishmen believe, within a “reasonable doubt.” For Pascal, there is no human solution. Faith on man’s side and revelation from God have to meet to provide any answer. If not, man can only disintegrate into despair and hopelessness and realize that everything he thinks he knows may just be part of the sink of uncertainty and error. With revelation, one still does not have genuinely certain knowledge, as Pascal observed: “The prophecies, even the miracles and proofs of our religion, are not of such a kind they can be said to be absolutely convincing.” On the other hand, “it cannot be said to be unreasonable to believe in them. There is thus evidence and obscurity, to enlighten some and obfuscate others” (835). The evidence on each side is great enough, so that the decision to believe or not believe is not a rational decision. Disbelieving is then a matter of concupiscence and wickedness of heart. “Thus there is enough evidence to condemn and not enough to convince.” Those who follow religion then “are prompted to do so by grace and not by reason, and those who evade it are prompted by concupiscence and not by reason.”41 So, for Pascal, the religious beliefs that make it possible to overcome scepticism about the reliability of our faculties are the result of divine grace, not human action. Humans can only reject or refuse. God provides the solution.
Pascal, the Jansenist, sees God’s grace as the sole way of overcoming “incurable scepticism.” Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, and his Latitudinarian friends, Bishop Wilkins and Joseph Glanvill, were quasi-Pelagians. Recognizing the ultimate scepticism about our faculties, one did not have to hear God or await his or her action. One could step back into the human world, albeit one filled with doubts, and find sufficient certainty to “justify” More’s interpretation of the Book of Revelation, the new science, the existence of witches, a reasonable legal system, and a reasonable Christianity. For them, the light of reason, deceptive though it might be, provided sufficient guidance.42 Glanvill saw that accepting it was an act of faith, but one that quickly became reasonable as it led to evidence of God’s existence and sufficient guarantees of beliefs in various areas of human concern.
A somewhat different religious use of scepticism appears in the mystical movement called Quietism. The main writers of this group put their case theologically rather than philosophically. Some of them were actually teachers of philosophy. Their central message was that people should suspend judgement about human knowledge claims and, more important, that they should suspend their volition, turning themselves over to the divinity. Thus they would quiet all human impulses and follow whatever God chose to make them believe and make them do. One of the chief spokesmen for Quietism was the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos.
Molinos was born in Spain in 1627. In 1669 he made a trip to Italy, where he became a great success as a preacher and spiritual adviser. The trip was intended to bring support for the canonization of one Gregorio Lopez, a Spanish religious figure who spent most of his life helping Indians in Mexico and uttering spiritual messages. Lopez was considered so perfect that “Jesus could find a home in his soul.” Molinos, carrying documents about Gregorio Lopez, arrived in Italy, where he quickly became a leading religious preacher. He was invited to stay in the Vatican and became a close friend of the future Pope Innocent XI. Queen Christina of Sweden, living in Rome as a convert to Catholicism, chose Molinos as her spiritual adviser. He had a tremendous following in Italy. His teachings were hailed by many as a new religion, although he carefully said that his views were those of Santa Teresa of Avila and San Juan de la Cruz. His book, The Spiritual Guide (1675), was soon translated into Italian, French, Latin, German, and English.43 In it, he does not present a formal philosophical scepticism but reiterates the themes in Santa Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz about the unreliability of our sense images and our reason and the need to reject all forms of human knowledge. Coupled with this is the Spanish mystical claim that one should also suspend any personal volition and turn one’s soul over to God and do whatever God orders.
Gilbert Burnet, who became the bishop of Salisbury and who was in Rome then, summed up Molinos’ view as “that in our Prayers and other Devotions, the best methods are to retire the mind from all gross Images, and to form an Act of Faith [an auto de fe], and thereby to present ourselves before God, and then to sink into a Silence or Cessation of new Acts, and to let God act upon us, and so follow His Conduct.”44 An auto de fe was the proceeding by which heretics were condemned, and then burned at the stake by the Spanish Inquisition.
Jesuits immediately saw the subversive dangers in Molinos’ teachings. They pointed out that he was minimizing or eliminating the role of Church activities, prayer, penitence, and maybe even Communion. Molinos himself refused to hear confession from his followers, since if they were real Quietists, God was directing their activities, not themselves. Hence they had nothing to confess. One of Molinos’ opponents indicated that there would then be no need for the Church. Any moral aberration, including fornication between a priest and a nun, could be excused if the persons had given over control of their activities to God.45
After ten years of complaints, especially by Jesuits, Molinos was called before the Roman Inquisition. Twenty thousand letters to him by followers, mainly female, were seized (including two hundred from Queen Christina). He remained in prison, where Christina sent him clean laundry and food.46 In 1687 he was condemned for having taught and practiced “godless doctrines,” “dangerous and destructive of Christian morality.”47 It was rumored that the letters showed he gave spiritual advice during sexual encounters, that he was a libertine, debauching the finest ladies of Rome. It was rumored that he was not even a Christian, that he was a Jew who had never even been baptized.48
Although his condemnation was very public, and he recanted at the same place Galileo had, Molinos was sentenced to life in prison. Even to this day, the documentary evidence has not been published or made available for inspection. Sixty-eight theses of his were condemned, and his reputation was sullied for the next three centuries.49
His views indicated both the spiritual force of this kind of scepticism and the possibility that it would lead beyond and outside Christianity. H. C. Lea, the famous historian of the Spanish Inquisition, claimed that Spanish mysticism, which first appeared around 1500, was originally just a cover or fig leaf to allow forcibly converted priests and nuns to carry on their sex lives. When they were arrested in flagrante delicto, they offered as a defense that they were illuminated and carried away by God. Lea traced the history of the alumbrados (the Illuminati) from fakery to genuine piety in the course of the sixteenth century.50 It became in the teaching of Luis de Leon, Santa Teresa, and San Juan de la Cruz a most forceful personal involvement in religious experience. Its early exponents were mainly from the forced converts in Spain, who may have found it easier to reach God through mysticism than through the Church.51 The revival of this by Molinos came at a time when mystical movements were battering the established worlds of Protestantism as well as French Catholicism. The emphasis on denying one’s desires, motives, reasons, on opening oneself totally to God (while living in the world), made the need for established churches, creeds, and organized activities questionable.
I do not know if Molinos was a fake, a fraud, a great mystic, or a secret subversive agent against the Church. The matter is still being debated by historians of theology. His movement and his book, the Guide, had a great effect throughout Europe and America.52 Associated Protestant movements spelled out, in more philosophical terms, the ultimate scepticism involved in Quietism, and the final formulation went beyond all creeds and teachings.
The central Protestant figure Jean de Labadie has been treated as a misfit, troublemaker, and nut. (A very rare volume, a German history of heretics and fanatics of 1702, has a rogue’s gallery pictures of most of the abhorrent figures of the time. Labadie’s picture is labeled “archfanatic.”)53 Not until 1987 did a full, documented study of his life, career, and influence appear.54
Labadie was born in 1610 in southwestern France. He studied at the same high school that Montaigne had attended. Then he became a Jesuit. After further study, he left the Jesuits in 1639 and became involved with the Carmelites of Santa Teresa. He took the name St. John of Christ and proclaimed that the reign of grace, the divine kingdom, would begin before 1666. He joined the Jansenists at Port-Royal during their persecution. The Catholic authorities were suspicious of his views and their possible effects. Labadie left Catholicism and became a Calvinist. He preached and taught in Geneva, where he greatly influenced such religious figures as Jacob Spener, the founder of Lutheran pietism.55 Labadie became a minister in the Netherlands and is supposed to have preached to one thousand people in 1666 that the king of the Jews (Sabbatai Zevi) had arrived.56 The most learned woman of the time, Anna Maria van Schurmann (who knew twenty languages and wrote an Ethiopic grammar), joined with him and helped formulate the very antirational, sceptical attack on theology, philosophy, and science that was part of the path to genuine religion.57 People’s souls should be made bare so that God can act immediately on them. Labadie and Schurmann fought with the more rationalistic Calvinists in the Netherlands, and finally, in 1668, they broke with Calvinism and founded their own sect. They were driven out of tolerant Holland in 1670, so they must have been pretty obnoxious. They moved in with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and the Palatine, the niece of Charles I of England.58 Princess Elisabeth had been a friend and critic of Descartes. She became the abbotress of a medieval abbey at Herford, near Munster, in Germany, where she had taken in various Chrétiens sans église,59 like the Quakers, Mennonites, and Socinians, and was happy to have her old friend Anna Maria van Schurmann and the notorious Labadie as guests also.60 There is a wonderful picture of the hothouse atmosphere of unaffiliated religion at Herford given in William Penn’s journal of his trip to Holland and Germany.61 Labadie eventually left and set up a commune at Altona, outside of Hamburg, where he died in 1674.62
The Labadie–van Schurmann view was first an aggressive scepticism against any rational foundations for belief. (As far back as 1640, Schurmann led the attack against Cartesianism at the University of Utrecht.63 She is supposed to have become furious about Descartes when he came into her house and found her reading Genesis in Hebrew. He looked at the text and said he once tried to make sense of that but could not. And so he turned to physics instead!)64 As another Quietist, Pierre Poiret, put it, reason must be placed on the dunghill, destroyed, so that God’s actions can take over one’s soul.65 Poiret developed a violent scepticism, a way of negation of all of one’s beliefs, to open oneself totally to God. And in so doing, Poiret, unlike Schurmann, ended up a Cartesian by faith, instead of by reason, because that was what God revealed to him.66
Some of these Quietists, in turning against all reason or belief, found they also turned against Scripture as a necessary aid to salvation, against any religious laws or ceremonies. They denied the need for any Sabbath observances and insisted that from the human point of view, all days are equal. They rejected all existing Christian churches as degenerate and irrelevant to the spiritual life, although they saw themselves as ardent, pious Christians.67 Instead, they set up a communist community, where everyone’s life was dominated by the immediate action of the Holy Spirit upon them. Two Labadist colonies were set up in the New World, perhaps the first utopian communist communities in America.68
The quietism of Molinos and of Labadie, van Schurmann, and Poiret led beyond and maybe outside Christianity. By denying all human bases for finding religious truth, by denying all human rational activities, they turned themselves over solely to divine influence. They saw churches, observances, scriptures, as unnecessary human ways of trying to bridge the gulf between the human and the divine—unnecessary and even dangerous, since corrupt human beings could misdirect and misuse the situation. As a Spanish study of Molinos suggests, the logic of quietist mysticism eliminates any source of knowledge except direct revelation from God.69 This can then make Jesus and Mary unnecessary as intermediaries. When one reaches this point, then one is beyond Christianity and outside it, just pursuing the unrestricted mystical path to opening oneself to God.
Quietism was not a way of Christianizing scepticism. Rather, instead it was a use of scepticism to break out of rational and moral confines imposed by religious groups. Quietism, to some extent, looks like the ataraxia that the ancient sceptics sought to achieve. However, for the Quietists, this state of what Sextus had called “quietude” leads to a new spiritual dimension, when God directs the thoughts and activities of those who have found sceptical happiness. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mystics were living in a world of religious fervor, so they could drop or eliminate the human guidelines provided by rationality and morality and still have complete assurance of divine guidance. This was both liberating and fulfilling within the mystical religious context. The opponents, from the Spanish Inquisitors onward, saw this as fraught with danger and as a way of casting sceptical doubts on all accepted religious practices and teachings. But this, from the Quietist point of view, did not lead to sceptical despair but rather to complete assurance, no longer affected by any sceptical doubts.