Traces of the Atheist

Abstract

AbstractDescartes was always careful to avoid conflict with ecclesiastical authorities and to emphasize his conformity with orthodoxy. Wherever possible, Descartes also sought to iron out any disagreements with the previous philosophical tradition. Sometimes he pursued this task through actual dissimulation techniques. The Discourse on the Method is a particularly striking example of this. To appreciate the prudent approach adopted by Descartes in this text, it is enough to recall the absence of the hypothesis of the deceiving God, which not only weakens the reasons for doubt, but ultimately makes the search for some divine guarantee implausible. Even a theory that essentially seems to favor Christian apologetics, such as that of machine animals, is concealed behind a very traditional analysis of animal behavior. This coexistence of audacity and dissimulation makes the Cartesian texts reminiscent of certain procedures that were widespread in the early modern age and that open up the possibility of approaching many philosophical texts by reading them ‘between the lines’, as theorized by Leo Strauss in his famous study Persecution and the Art of Writing. Reading “between the lines,” however, is tricky when dealing with early modern literature, as the arguments present in apologetic writings are often reproduced by libertine or even atheist authors. Descartes found himself confronted with the intertwining of apologetic texts and libertine-inspired texts when Mersenne, hidden behind the mask of unspecified “theologians,” raised objections which Descartes himself identified as part of the atheists’ repertoire. This episode shows that Descartes was wary of heterodox literature not only for reasons of prudence, but also—and on a deeper level—on account of his own distance from an intellectual universe linked to Renaissance naturalism. At the same time, this episode leads us to reflect on the risks of Strauss’ reading, based on which certain texts are traditionally and unhesitatingly included in atheist literature. Mersenne presented Descartes with a series of objections to the Meditations. A careful analysis of these objections can throw light on the theological context in which those criticisms were grounded. Mersenne’s objections reproduce theses already advanced in the Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim. In this work, in which he intended to refute Vanini, Mersenne used some proofs of the existence of God derived from the Jesuit Lessius, and already used by Vanini himself. These same proofs, together with others developed by Mersenne, were then taken up by the free thinker Pierre Petit. A reconstruction of the origin of the arguments used by Mersenne can provide important elements to evaluate the interweaving of apologetic and heterodox literature in the first half of the seventeenth century and to discuss Leo Strauss’s proposal to “read between the lines.”