Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

the countries where we live in order to rescue men, our equals, from error

and death.’

These alleged mysterious and unwelcome visitors prompted trenchant

critiques by a number of French authors, who ridiculed their claims but

were also so worried by their potential for deception that they published

tracts against them. For example, one anonymous tract,ANew Cabal,

argued that Satan was the source of the ‘fraudulent impressions of some

black and cabbalistic science, which consists only of certain characters, fig-

ures, rings, ablutions, sacrifices, invocations...and usurpations of divine

names, so that its members think of themselves as little gods.’Focusing

onthe new sect’s use of magic in the service of religion,A New Cabal

claimed that the whole aim of this diabolical stratagem was to deceive

people and lead them away from the true faith, that is, the Roman Catholic

Church. The same lethal combination of sorcery and deception was the

target of another tract,The Shocking Pacts,which was published in the same

year. Here the members of the brotherhood were described as signing an

oath with their own blood and conspiring to undermine ‘the immortality

of the soul...and to go much further in claiming that there is no God.’

While acknowledging that the ‘true church’ had always been agitated by

heretics and reminding readers of the fate of Vanini, who was burned as

an atheist in Toulouse in, the author asks: ‘Should we fear today that

abunch of ignorant knaves, if ever there were such, could change them-

selves from being visible to invisible by some new doctrine, or by magic

or necromancy; that they could bewitch holy souls, blind the eyes of faith,

bury our faith and, by illusions and spells, make us renounce heaven in

order to embrace hell?’There were many similar replies to the perceived

threat of the Rosicrucians. Among the best-known were those by Gabriel

Naude and Franc ̧ois Garasse. ́ 

Mazarin’s librarian, Gabriel Naude, published in ́ anInstruction

to France about the Truth of the History of the Brothers of the Rose Cross.

He castigated the ‘useless drones and buzzards of the human race’ who

insinuate their ‘useless venom and ridiculous opinion’ into the imagination

of sensitive minds in Paris and, as a result, compromise the reliability of

their judgment.Naude thought that the authors of the ́ Manifestoand

theConfessionwere imposters. Either the tracts are hoaxes, he argues,

or they provide a genuine account of a real confraternity. If they are hoaxes,

then those who believe them are credulous simpletons; if they are genuine,

those who accept them must resemble the Celts, who, ‘when they see the