Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

ideas set a pattern that was repeated often during the subsequent decades.

It was welcomed by two of the authors who were to figure prominently in

Descartes’ early writing, Marin Mersenne (–) and Jean-Baptiste

Morin (–).

Mersenne had been teaching theology and philosophy at Nevers; in

,hewas transferred to the Minim friary near the Place Royal in Paris,

where he remained (apart from infrequent foreign travel) for the rest of his

life. Mersenne had joined the religious order of Minims after completing

his schooling at La Fleche. The Minims were one of the reformed branches`

of the Franciscans, in part inspired by the experience of their founder,

Saint Francis of Paula, who had lived as a hermit in Calabria (c.).In

addition to the traditional three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience,

they took a vow to live as vegetarians. Two centuries later, motivated by the

Counter-Reformation ambitions of the Council of Trent, the Minims in

France assumed the challenge to counter the arguments of libertines and

atheists. The condemnation of the Italian priest Lucilio Vanini (–

) was the occasion on which Mersenne moved to Paris and joined

forces with the church’s campaign against the libertines.

Vanini had been officially charged at Toulouse with atheism, blasphemy,

and ‘other crimes’.Since he was a priest and the Inquisition was active

in Toulouse, it would have been appropriate to bring him before such an

ecclesiastical tribunal if he had been charged with heresy.However, there

were rumours that he had been expelled from Lyon for a crime that could

not be mentioned, that ‘he was rejected by the Friars and turn’d out of

their monastery’ and that he seemed ‘to approve debauchery’.One of

the sources of these hints was Mersenne’s commentary on Genesis. He

was reported as writing that Vanini ‘was turn’d out of the Convent for his

disorderly behaviour; and among the rest, for a crime deserving of fire and

faggot, which good manners forbid to name, and the Minime dares not

to express himself but in Greek.’Mersenne’s reluctance about naming

the alleged crime was such that most copies of his book omitted this

passage completely.Nonetheless, a number of authors communicated

their message by innuendo; they referred to a couplet quoted by Vanini

from a play by Tasso, in which one of the characters says: ‘All the time that

is not devoted to love is wasted.’Since there had been questions raised

about Tasso’s sexuality, those who wished to insinuate that homosexuality

was Vanini’s real crime needed only to point to this quotation from Tasso

and add a phrase such as: ‘not being willing to dishonour himself by the