as an evil magician. Mersenne and Gassendi used skepticism against what they
saw as the prime enemy of established religion, the Neoplatonist occultism
which claimed to know the essences of the universe. Mersenne held up Galileo’s
science as an appropriately modest form of knowledge; eschewing essences, it
settled for a mathematical description of the pattern of sensory appearances.
Mersenne held that mathematics provided a way to detect the principles out
of which God had fashioned the universe, and that science, more than theology,
was an effective basis for sermons (Schuster, 1980; Popkin, 1979; Joy, 1987;
Dear, 1988).
Gassendi used many of the same ingredients as Descartes: clearing the decks
with epistemological skepticism, proposing a system of physics, working in
mathematics, for which he acquired the chair at the Collège de France in 1645.
But he occupied the attention space too close to Descartes to keep up an
independent identity, and became famous mainly as the reviver of the old
Epicurean atomism. He criticized his rival Descartes with the skeptical argu-
ment that the criterion of clear and distinct truth needs a further criterion of
what is clear and distinct, but he was unable to stop the juggernaut of Cartesian
rationalism, even its revival of the philosophy of essences. Gassendi’s reputa-
tion became assimilated to the growing camp of corporeal philosophy; the
doctrine of Descartes, who kept his distance on the periphery of the Mersenne
circle, was propagated as its emblem.
Raison d’État and Secularization by Opportunism
The intersection of clashing movements is a wonderful transmuter of fervors
and hostilities. Out of polarization, held together long enough in a balance,
comes political realism and opportunism that borders on cynical secularism.
Emblematic of the period is Richelieu, who figures prominently in the networks
as patron and protector of Grotius, Comenius, and Campanella, of Descartes
and the circle of the Libertins Érudits. A cardinal of the church, he destroyed
the French Huguenots in 1628 but subsidized the Protestants in the Thirty
Years’ War against Spain. Like his protégé and successor Cardinal Mazarin,
Richelieu was backstage ruler of France, manipulating a weak king while
fighting off the plots and intrigues of the nobility. This subordination of
religious fanaticism to political opportunism has a long history. Henri IV, the
patron whose coat of arms is on the Jesuit college at La Flèche, was the
Huguenot king who converted to Catholicism with the words “Paris is worth
a mass.” After Richelieu’s death in 1642, the premier patron of intellectuals
was the duke of Condé. He was the military commander of the French armies
against Spain in the 1640s, but eventually went over to the Fronde, the
domestic uprising of aristocrats against Mazarin’s centralizing hand; defeated
in 1653, he became a general in the Spanish army until he was defeated by the584 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths