Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

potentially lethal penalties that awaited those who strayed beyond the

boundaries of orthodoxy that were locally enforced. This kind of censor-

ship was not limited to any particular church or kingdom. Nonetheless, it

was enforced more widely and more barbarously by the Catholic Church

in all the kingdoms that fell within its ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

The penchant of the Catholic Church for condemning novel ideas was

firmly and widely established when, onNovember,itforbade its

members to read certain books by Descartes until they were corrected.

By this date, Descartes had been dead for thirteen years. The threat of

such an unwelcome intervention from afar had been a constant source of

concern for the French philosopher during the last seventeen years of his

life, during which he tried as best he could to avoid this almost inevitable

fate.However, when Rome eventually spoke, after his death, the effect

was the opposite of what it hoped to achieve. As in the more famous case

of Galileo, the church’s condemnation provided a seal of recognition for

the originality and pervasive influence of a style of philosophy that had

bythen acquired its own distinctive name as ‘Cartesianism’. It was hardly

worthwhile, even for an extremely censorious and interventionist church,

to focus on the writings of someone whose ideas were likely to fade into a

well-deserved oblivion. The problem with Cartesianism, even as early as

, was that it had become so widely known throughout Europe and so

avidly adopted as a replacement for scholastic philosophy that it could no

longer be ignored.

Here, then, was someone who presented himself as a loyal son of the

Roman Catholic Church, and who succeeded throughout his life in at least

avoiding public condemnation by his own church. In developing his ideas,

he encountered more controversy that one might have expected, despite

the extremely private and almost isolationist manner in which he lived

his life. This life began in the comforting embrace of the Loire valley,

and seemed destined by family expectations and education to lead to a

secure, uncontentious career as a lawyer in the king’s service. Instead,

it culminated in the development of a new philosophy that eventually

exceeded the most ambitious hopes of its author and, in the process, won

the distinction of a censure from the Holy Office.

‘Born in Touraine’

Catherine Descartes, the youngest daughter of Descartes’ brother Pierre,

constructed a rather poetic and fanciful summary of Descartes’ origins