Descartes: A Biography

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Magic, Mathematics, and Mechanics 

love of women’.The Toulouseparlementsentenced Vanini as follows, on

February: that the public executioner should ‘cut out his tongue,

strangle him, and then burn him at the stake to which he is tied and scatter

his ashes in the wind.’The sentence was carried out immediately after

the verdict was reached, when Vanini was thirty-four years old.

These events prompted Mersenne’s move to Paris and his subsequent

contributions to arguments in favour of God’s existence.When advised

byaconfrere, Claude Rangueil, that a published rehearsal of Vanini’s

views could do more harm than good, by drawing the attention of read-

ers to problems they may not have noticed, Mersenne decided to cloak

his discussion of atheism and magic in the guise of a commentary on

Genesis.His unrelenting dedication to the anti-libertine cause resulted

in the publication of three extremely long books in quick succession, each

onedevoted to the same apologetic enterprise.Important Questions about

Genesis, with a correct Explanation of the Text; in this volume, Atheists and

Deists are Combatted and Conqueredappeared in;The Impiety of Deists

appeared inas a two-volume book of almost,pages, and, in

the following year, Mersenne publishedThe Truth of the Sciences, against

Sceptics and Pyrrhonists.

While Vanini’s teaching provided the immediate motivation for

Mersenne’s commentary on Genesis, it must have been obvious that

his subversive opinions did not disappear when he was burned at the

stake. There were many other libertine authors in Paris who strayed into

the protected space of theological discussion. Not only did they mock

the pretensions of the learned, they also undermined the philosophical

language in which theologians expressed their apparently profound and

deeply obscure dogmas. For example, the legal proceedings against the

poet Th ́eophile de Viau (–) lasted for two years, until his death

in September. One of the most sensitive questions that provoked

such an official response was the discussion of the mortality or otherwise

of the human ‘soul’, a question that was later to ensnare Descartes too.

Church councils had defined their position on this question on numer-

ous occasions. In response to various challenges, they had decreed that the

rational soul is the form of the human body, that there is a distinct soul for

each individual human being, and that each soul is immortal.However,

the church claimed that the immortality of the soul was not simply an object

of religious faith. It also claimed that philosophical arguments were con-

vincing enough to support the same conclusion. The connection between