hounding Gassendi and Arnauld, Bossuet persecuting the Oratorian Richard
Simon in the 1680s and the mysticism of Fénelon and Mme. Guyon in the
1690s. But intellectual creativity is driven by conflict, and much of the inno-
vativeness within the Catholic world was due to the existence of a steady
balance of internal conflicts. Thus della Porta, no outsider but a Jesuit lay
brother, was taken off the Index in 1598 and subsequently went on to partici-
pate in the scientific Accademia della Lincei established at Rome under the eyes
of the pope in the early 1600s. Campanella had been imprisoned by the Spanish
at Naples from 1599 to 1626; when he fled it was to the pope, who in turn
sent him to royal protection in France. Galileo was alternatively feted and
warned in Rome; his sentence was soon commuted into house arrest, amount-
ing to an aristocratic patronage arrangement which allowed him to continue
his researches. What we see here are the twists and turns of contending forces
within Catholicism. The church had a rich lineup of competing bases, each
sufficiently elaborated so that there was room for intellectual maneuver.
By contrast, the Protestant world often gave less autonomous space for in-
tellectuals. Especially where the Reformation found a strong local power base,
the church was prone to be dogmatic. The Calvinists, with their fusion of
church and political community, represented an extreme authoritarian milieu.
Local self-rule here meant that the means of controlling opinion were especially
direct and immediate. Perhaps now we can see the logic in the fact that the
leading edge of the philosophical revolution was not only Catholic but from
the sector that was most explicitly anti-Calvinist. If the Descartes-Mersenne
circle is the network core, notice where it derived its impetus and sponsorship:
the most famous teacher at La Flèche when Descartes and Mersenne were
studying there was Francois Veron, who became the king’s official anti-Calvin-
ist debater (Popkin, 1979: 70). Descartes’s philosophical career was launched
in 1628, when he was encouraged by Cardinal Bérulle, the French anti-Cal-
vinist leader, to develop his system. Descartes’s weapon, the use of skeptical
arguments to clear the ground for certainty, was a piece of cultural capital
inherited from the previous generation of French thinkers; and here we find
Pierre Charron, Montaigne’s friend, who was not only a skeptical fideist but
also a militant anti-Calvinist. In the crucial period of the philosophical revo-
lution, it is closer to the mark to see Catholic intellectuals playing the liberators
against the image of the Calvinists as anti-intellectual authoritarians.
The Protestant Reformation was another act in the long-term struggle over
church organization which had been going on since 1300, a struggle full of
schisms, anti-popes, heresies, and reformers. In some respects the Reformation
was a backward movement against secularization, for the Catholic Church was
an international organization in tension with the consolidating national states,
while the successful Protestant movements represented a downsizing of the
572 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths