Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

belief in the human soul and belief in God was too close to tolerate any

ambivalence on the former, since the very concept of God depended on the

concept of an immaterial soul. Any doubts about the latter were described

as bordering on atheism, and supporters of the Counter-Reformation were

invited to contribute as best they could to defeating atheism.

In addition to the prolix responses from Mersenne, there was an equally

long, rambling discussion of these issues in a book written by one of

Descartes’ friends in Paris, Jean Silhon (–). Silhon publishedThe

Two Truthsin, and he returned to the same themes and arguments

eight years later, inThe Immortality of the Soul(). There is a significant

overlap between the two books, since the full title of the first one was:The

Two Truths of Silhon: one concerning God, and his Providence, the other

concerning the Immortality of the Soul.In both books Silhon identifies

Pyrrhonism – which he understood as the claim that ‘that nothing is

known, and that it is permitted to doubt everything’ – as undermining

belief in God and in the immortality of the soul.

In a sense, these challenges to Aristotelian philosophy and to theolog-

ical discussions of the human soul and God arose within a community of

French intellectuals who were at least conversant with traditional scholas-

tic philosophy. There was an even more worrying threat from the alleged

arrival, in Paris, of a new sect of Protestant enthusiasts who claimed to

draw their inspiration from the Bible and from esoteric sources that had

little in common with scholastic philosophy.

The Rosicrucians

The astronomical theories that are now recognized, in retrospect, as gen-

uinely scientific features of the intellectual revolution in the seventeenth

century were developed in a convulsive flurry of changes that included

studies of natural magic, witches, Paracelsus, and the enigmatic and obscu-

rantist follies of those who claimed to represent divine or satanic inter-

ventions in human affairs. In this extremely fluid intellectual context,

the myth of the Brothers of the Rose Cross spread in Germany during

the second decade of the seventeenth century. Descartes was sufficiently

interested in their claims to advert to the secret knowledge of nature that

featured prominently in their manifestos.

This brotherhood was most likely merely a myth rather than an associa-

tion of real individuals with implausible beliefs, but its mythical character