Kenny Anthony. The Rise of Modern Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 3

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pessimism natural in a Counter-Reformation France torn by sectarian

warfare. Montaigne contrasted the educated and civilized citizens of Euro-

pean states, to their disadvantage, with the simplicity and nobility of the

inhabitants of the recently discovered New World.

However, Montaigne’s emphasis on the limits of the human intellect

does not prev ent him from claiming to be quite certain of the truth of

Catholic Christianity. On the contrary, he can claim that in his scepticism

about philosophy he is following in the footsteps of St Paul in First

Corinthians: ‘Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For

after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it

pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.’

Pauline texts such as these were painted on the beams of Montaigne’s study

along with quotations from Sextus such as ‘all that is certain is that

nothing is certain’.

To reconcile his scepticism with his orthodoxy, Montaigne emphasizes

that what he has been attacking are the pretensions of the human intellect

to achieve truth by its own eVorts. But faith is not an achievement, it is a

free gift of God:

It is not by reasoning or understanding that we have received our religion, it is by

authority and command from above. The weakness of our judgement is more

help than its strength, and our blindness is more help than our clear sight. It is

through ignorance, not through knowledge that we become wise with divine

wisdom. (ME, 166)

Counter-Reformation Philosophy

Montaigne’s exaltation of revelation to the exclusion of reason—‘Wdeism’

as it came to be called—was not typical of the Counter-Reformation. In

reaction against Luther’s insistence that the human intellect and will had

been totally corrupted by the sin of Adam, Catholic controversialists

tended to emphasize that basic religious truths were within the scope of

unaided human intellect, and that faith itself needed the support and

defence of reason.

In the forefront of this optimistic thrust of the Counter-Reformation

were the Jesuits, the members of the new Society of Jesus. This order was

founded by the Spanish ex-soldier Ignatius Loyola and was approved by

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

The ceiling of the church of S. Ignazio in Rome, painted by Andrea Pozzo, depicts the

glorification of the founder of the Society of Jesus

Pope Paul III in 1540. In addition to the vows of poverty, chastity, and

obedience taken by all members of religious orders, the Jesuits took a

further vow of unquestioning loyalty to the papacy. Its members soon

distinguished themselves in educational and mission ary work in many

parts of the world. In Europe they were happy to risk martyrdom in the

Counter-Reformation cause; in America, India, and China they showed

more sympathy with indigenous religions than many other Christian

proselytizers, Catholic or Protestant. In philosophy and theology in the

universities they were soon able to compete with the long-established

religious orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans. They promoted

a new and, as they saw it, improved version of scholasticism.

Whereas medieval scholastics had based their university lectures upon

canonical texts such as the works of Aristotle and the Sentences of Peter

Lombard,8 Jesuits in universities began to replace commentaries with self-

standing courses in philosophy and theology. By the early seventeenth

century this pattern was adopted by Dominicans and Franciscans, and this

led to a sharper distinction between philosophy and theology than had

been common earlier. The pioneer of this movement to reform philosophy

into independent textbook form was the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez,

whose Disputationes Meta physicae (1597) were the W rst such systematic treat-

ment of scholastic metaphysics.

Born in Granada in 1548, Suarez joined the Society of Jesus in 1564 and

spent the whole of his professional life as a university professor, lecturing at

six diVerent universities in Spain and in the Jesuit college in Rome. He was a

devout and erudite man, and in terms of sheer intellectual power he has a

strong claim to be the most formidable philosopher of the sixteenth

century. In the history of philosophy, however, he does not have a place

commensurate to his gifts, for two reasons. First, most of his work is

a restatement and reWnement of medieval themes, rather than an explor-

ation of new territory. Second, as a writer he was not only proliWc, leaving

behind a corpus that Wlls twenty-eight volumes, but also prolix and

tedious. In so far as he had an inXuence on subsequent philosophy, it

was through the writings of lesser but more readable imitators.

The two areas in which he was, indeed, inXuential were metaphysics and

political philosophy. He had a great reverence for St Thomas Aquinas, but

8 See vol. II, p. 56.

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

as a metaphysician he followed in the footsteps of Avicenna and Duns

Scotus rather than those of Aquinas himself. Paradoxically, much that was

to pass for Thomism during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth

centuries was closer to Suarezian metaphysics than to the Summa Contra

Gentiles. In political philosophy Suarez’s contribution was the De Legibus of

1621, which was the unacknowledged source of many of the ideas of better-

known thinkers. In his own day he was most famous for his controversy

with King James I about the divine right of kings, in which he attacked the

theory that temporal monarchs derived their sovereignty directly from

God. King James had his book publicly burnt.9

Of the philosophical issues dividing the Catholic and Protestant camps in

the sixteenth century none was more thorny than human free will, which

had been proclaimed at the Council of Trent in opposition to Lutheran

determinism and Calvinist predestinarianism. The Jesuits made themselves

champions of the libertarian account of human freedom. Suarez and his

Jesuit colleague Luis de Molina oVered a deWnition of free agency in terms

of the availability of alternative courses of action—‘liberty of indiVerence’

as it came to be known. ‘That agent is called free which in the presence of

all necessary conditions for action can act and refrain from action or can do

one thing while being able to do its opposite.’

Such a deWnition did ample justice to humans’ consciousness of their

own choices and their attribution of responsibility to others. But by

comparison with more restrictive accounts of freedom, it made it very

diYcult to account for God’s foreknowledge of free human actions, to

which both Catholics and Protestants were committed. Molina, in his

famous Concordia (1589), presented an elaborate solution to the problem,

in terms of God’s comprehensive knowledge of the actions of every possible

human being in every possible world.10 Ingenious though it was, Molina’s

solution was unpopular not only among Protestants but also among his

Catholic co-religionists.

Dominican theologians, of whom the most vociferous was the Thomist

Domingo Banez (1528–1604), thought that the Jesuit theologians were

excessively exalting human freedom and derogating from divine power.

The dispute between the two religious orders became so bitter that in 1605

9 Suarez’s metaphysics is discussed at greater length in Ch. 6 and his political theory in Ch. 9.

10 Molina’s theory of ‘middle knowledge’ is reported in detail in Ch. 10.

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

Pope Clement VIII, without resolving the question at issue, imposed silence

on both sides. Ironically, within the reformed camp, a Leiden divine named

Arminius propounded views which were similar to, if less sophisticated

than, those of Molina. The Synod of Dort in 1619 declared them incom-

patible with Calvinist orthodoxy.

Giordano Bruno

The most colourful philosopher of the latter part of the sixteenth century

operated far outside the bounds of orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Prot-

estant. Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was born near Naples and became a

Dominican there in 1565. By 1576 he was already suspected of heresy and

expelled from the order. He Xed northwards to Geneva, but there became

equally unpopular with the Calvinists. He had better success in France,

studying and lecturing in Toulouse and Paris and enjoying, for a time, the

favour of King Henri III.

Bruno’s Wrst ma jor work, On the Shadows of Ideas, combined an elaborate

Neoplatonic metaphysical system with practical advice on the art of mem-

ory. There is a hierarchy of ideas with human ideas at the lowest level and at

the topmost level the divine Ideas forming a unity in God’s mind. These are,

in themselves, impenetrable to us; but they are expressed in Nature, which is

the universal eVect of God. Images of the celestial world are closer to God

than images of our sublunar world; hence, if we wish to organize our

knowledge in such a way that we can recall it systematically we should

mentally dispose our thoughts within the pattern of the signs of the zodiac.

In 1583 Bruno moved to England and visited Oxford, where he gave

some lectures. His stay there was not a success. He was not to be the last

continental philosopher to visit the university and Wnd himself treated as a

charlatan, and in his turn to regard his philosophical hosts as more

interested in words than in ideas. He expressed his disdain for Oxford

pedantry, along with ideas of more universal philosophical concern, in a

series of dialogues in 1584 beginning with Supper on Ash Wednesday (La cena de le

ceneri). He seems to have written these while acting as a double agent in

London for both the French and the English secret services.

Bruno’s dialogues are not easy reading. They are peopled by beings of

grand but mysterious status, like Wagner’s gods and Tolkien’s creatures,

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

with powers of uncertain limits and motives of slender intelligibility.

Although bearing the names of classical deities, they operate at some

distance from Homer and Vergil. The Latin Mercury, for instance, corres-

ponds not only to the Greek Hermes, but to the Egyptian god Thoth: he

represents often the teachings of the fashionable Hermetic cult. This was

based on recently discovered documents believed to go back to the Egypt of

Moses’ time. Hermetism, in Bruno’s view, was superior to Christianity and

was destined to supersede it.

In the system propounded in the dialogues, the phenomena we observe

are the eVects of a world-soul which animates nature and makes it into

a single organism. The world of nature is inWnite, with no edge, surface, or

limit. But the world’s inWnity is not the same as God’s inWnity because

the world has parts that are not inWnite, whereas God is wholly in the whole

world and wholly in each of its parts. This diVerence perhaps suYces to

distinguish Bruno’s position from pantheism, but the relation between God

and the world remains obscure. It is not really clariWed by Bruno’s august

formulation that God is the Nature making Nature (natura naturans) while the

universe is the Nature made by Nature (natura naturata).

Two features of Bruno’s system have caught the attention of historians

and scientists: his adoption of the Copernican hypothesis, and his postula-

tion of multiple universes. Bruno accepted that it was the earth that went

round the sun, and not the sun that went round the earth. He went on to

develop Copernicus’ ideas in a bold and dramatic manner. The earth was

not the centre of the universe: but neither was the sun. Our sun is just one

star among others, and in boundless space there are many solar systems.

No sun or star can be called the centre of the universe, because all positions

are relative.

Our earth and our solar system enjoy no unique privilege. For all

we know, there may be intelligent life at other times and places within

the universe. Particular solar systems come and go, temporary phases in the

life of the single inWnite organism whose soul is the world-soul. Within

the universe each intelligent being is a conscious, immortal atom, mirroring

in itself the whole of creation. If in his interfusing of God and Nature Bruno

anticipated Spinoza, in his account of rational atoms he anticipated Leibniz.

Bruno’s championship of Hermetism and his theory of multiple universes

challenged the orthodox teaching that God was incarnate uniquely in

Jesus and that Christianity was the deWnitive divine revelation. Nonetheless,

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

after leaving England he was accepted for a while as a Lutheran at Wittenberg

and in 1591 was lecturing in Zurich. Unwisely, he accepted an invitation

from the Doge of Venice, and found himself in the prison of the local

Inquisition in 1592. A year later he was passed on to the Roman Inquisition,

and after a trial that dragged on for nearly seven years in 1600 he was

burned as a heretic in the Campo dei Fiori, where his statue now stands.

There is no doubt that the ideas expressed in Bruno’s writings were

unorthodox. The remarkable things about his trial are that he showed such

constancy in defending his ideas and that it took his inquisitors so long to

Wnd him guilty of heresy. But although theories of multiple universes are

once again popular with cosmologists today, it is a mistake to think

of Bruno as a martyr to science. His speculations were based not on

observation or experiment but on occult traditions and on a priori philoso-

phizing. He was condemned not because he supported the Copernican

system, but because he practised magic and denied the divinity of Christ.

Galileo

Matters are very diVerent when we turn to another Italian philosopher

who suVered at the hands of the Inquisition, Galileo Galilei. Galileo, twelve

years younger than Bruno and an exact contemporary of Shakespeare, was

born in Pisa and studied at the university there, eventually becoming

professor of mathematics in 1589. In 1592 he moved to Padua, and held a

professorship there for eighteen years, which he would recall as the

happiest period of his life.

Already as a young man Galileo had begun to criticize the still dominant

physics of Aristotle, not, like Bruno, on the basis of Neoplatonic metaphys-

ics, but as a result of observation and experiment. His years at Pisa became

famous for one observation that he made and one experiment that he

probably did not make. Observing the motion of a chandelier in the

cathedral he discovered that the length of time taken by the swing of

a pendulum depends only on its own length, not on its weight or the

scope of its swing. He almost certainly did not, as legend tells, drop balls

of diVerent weights from the cathedral’s leaning tower to prove that

Aristotle was wrong to say that heavier bodies fell faster than light ones.

His contemporary Aristotelian opponents, however, did carry out such

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

an exper iment, and their results were closer to his prediction than to

Aristotle’s: a 100 lb ball hit the ground very little sooner than a 1 lb ball.

It was in Padua that Galileo did conWrm by experiment—with balls

rolling down inclined planes—that bodies of diVerent weight, in the

absence of resistance, take the same time to fall a given distance, and that

they accelerate at the same uniform rate. His experiments also tended to

show the falsity of the principle, fundamental to Aristotelian physics, that

nothing moves unless acted on by an external source of motion. On the

contrary, he maintained, a body in motion will continue to move unless

acted on by a contrary force, such as friction. This thesis enabled him to

dispense with the notion of impetus, which earlier critics of Aristotle such

as Philoponus had invoked to explain the continued motion of project-

iles.11 It prepared the way for the principle of inertia stated later by

Descartes and Newton, that any moving object, unless acted on from

outside, tends to move in a straight line at a constant speed. Galileo himself

did not quite arrive at this principle, since in order to explain the orbits of

the planets, he postulated that inertial motion was basically circular.

On its own, Galileo’s work in mechanics would entitle him to a place

among the great scientists, and he also made important discoveries in

hydrostatics. But it was his research into astronomy that brought him

fame and tribulation. Using the newly invented telescope, which he

himself substantially improved, he was able to observe four moons of

Jupiter, which he named ‘Medicean Stars’ in honour of Grand Duke

Cosimo II of Tuscany. He discovered the mountains of the moon and

the variable spots on the sun; discoveries which showed that he heavenly

bodies were not, as Aristotle thought, made out of a uniform crystalline

quintessence, but consisted of the same sort of material as our own earth.

These discoveries were published in 1610 in a book entitled A Messenger from

the Stars (Sidereus Nuncius). The book was dedicated to Duke Cosimo,

who forthwith gave him a lifetime appointment as philosopher and

mathematician to the court of Tuscany.

Shortly afterwards, Galileo observed that the planet Venus went

through phases similar to the phases of the moon. This could only be

explained, he concluded, if Venus was orbiting the sun and not the earth: it

provided a powerful argument in favour of the Copernican hypothesis.

11 See vol. II, p. 180.

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

The discovery of the moons that revolved around Jupiter in its planetary

orbit had already disposed of one of the strongest arguments urged against

heliocentrism, namely that the moon would only be able to orbit the earth

if the earth itself was stationary.

Galileo was initially cautious in publicly expressing the conclusions he

drew from his astronomical discoveries. However, after an ecclesiastical

commission in Rome had taken oYcial notice of his major observations, he

began to propagate heliocentric ideas to a wide circle of friends, and in 1613,

in an appendix to a book on sunspots, he declared his adherence to

Copernicus. A Dominican friar in Florence, in a sermon on Acts 1: 11

(‘Ye Galileans, why stand ye gazing up to heaven?’) denounced heliocentr-

ism as being in conXict with biblical texts, such as the one in which Joshua

tells the sun to stand still so that the Israelites may complete their victory

over the Philistines. Galileo decided to travel to Rome to clarify his

theological status.

In advance he wrote to the powerful Jesuit cardinal, St Robert Bellar-

mine, urging that the sacred authors who spoke of the sun as moving were

merely using popular idiom and were not intending to teach geometry.

Bellarmine referred the matter to a committee of the Inquisition who

determined that the opinion that the sun was the centre of the cosmos was

heretical, and the opinion that the earth moved was at the least erroneous.

On the instructions of Pope Paul V, Bellarmine instructed Galileo that he

must not hold or defend either of these opinions. If there was a real proof

of heliocentrism, he told one of Galileo’s friends, then we would have to

re-examine the biblical texts which appeared to contradict it; but as matters

stood, Copernicus’ theory was only an unproved hypothesis. And indeed,

Galileo’s own heliocentric system, though it Wtted the phenomena better,

was almost as complicated as the geocentric system of his opponents,

demanding constant appeal to epicycles.12 The evidence he had discovered

did not justify the degree of certainty with which he maintained his thesis.

It is often said that in this exchange Bellarmine showed a sounder grasp

of the philosophy of science than the age’s greatest scientist and Galileo

showed a sounder grasp of biblical exegesis than the age’s most famous

theologian. The paradox is an agreeable one, but it is not really a fair

12 Galileo did not incorporate Kepler’s discovery of the elliptical orbits of the planets, which

was needed to achieve the appropriate simpliWcation of heliocentrism.

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

representation of the debate on either side. And whatever the merits of the

case, the upshot was that while Galileo’s writings were not condemned, he

was silenced for several years to come.

In 1624 Galileo travelled to Rome once more. Paul V and Bellarmine

were now dead, and there was a diVerent pope wearing the tiara: Urban

VIII, who as Cardinal Barberini had shown himself an admirer of Galileo’s

astronomical discoveries. Galileo was given permission to write a systematic

treatment of the Ptolemaic and the Copernican models, on condition that

he presented them both impartially without favouring heliocentrism.

In 1632 Galileo published, with the approval of the papal censor, Dialogue

on the Two Chief World Systems. In the book one character, Salviati, presents the

Copernican system, and another, Simplicius, defends the traditional one.

‘Simplicius’ was an appropriate name for the defender of Aristotelianism,

since it had been borne by the greatest of Aristotle’s Greek commentators.

However, it could also be interpreted as meaning ‘simpleton’ and the pope

was furious when he found some of his own words placed in the mouth of

Simplicius. He concluded that Galileo had presented the Copernican

system in a more favourable light than its opponent, and had therefore

deviated from the terms of his licence to publish. In 1633 Galileo was

summoned to Rome, tried by the Inquisition, and under the threat

of torture forced to abjure heliocentrism. He was condemned to life

imprisonment, a sentence that he served out until his death in 1642, in

conWnement in the houses of distinguished friends and eventually in his

own home at Bellosguardo outside Florence.

While under house arrest he was allowed to receive visitors. Among

them was John Milton, who in Areopagitica recorded: ‘I found and visited the

famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner of the Inquisition, for thinking in

Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers

thought.’ The newly founded college at Harvard in the commonwealth

of Massachusetts made an oVer of a visiting professorship, which was

politely declined. Even though going blind, Galileo continued to write,

and incorporated the fruit of his lifetime’s work in Discourses and Mathematical

Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences. This was published in Leiden in 1638

and became the most widely inXuential of his works.

Galileo was treated more humanely than Bruno and many another

prisoner of the Inquisition, but the evil eVects of his condemnation were

felt throughout Europe. ScientiWc investigation in Italy went into decline:

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY