After Desgabets left Paris, he toured Benedictine abbeys in the countryside to spread the gospel of Cartesianism. Desgabets eventually published a text whose title spelled out the central matter pretty clearly: Considerations on the present state of the controversy touching the Very Holy Sacrament of the host, in which is treated in a few words the opinion which teaches that the matter of the bread is changed into that of the body of Jesus Christ by its substantial union to his soul and to his divine person. Together with his other activities, this little text got Desgabets branded as a heretic, with the result that his work was suppressed and his name largely forgotten by history. Meanwhile, Father Mesland, for his persistence in pursuing the question, was eventually banished to Canada.
This then was the climate of increasing danger in which the Cartesians operated. Still, some—Rohault among them—continued to argue that their principles could be put in the service of both the ruling civil and spiritual authorities. Far from being a threat, they claimed, the new philosophy could be the protector of the faith. Descartes himself had taken this line. There were many in power who were intrigued by the idea of this strange and dimly understood new tool actually becoming part of the arsenal of the church or state. The climate alternated between curiosity and fear. The situation of the Cartesians in the late seventeenth century thus mirrors in some way that of the early Christians in the catacombs of ancient Rome. They were alternately tolerated, suspected, then persecuted—and of course eventually triumphant in the spread of their philosophy.
There were other parallels that existed in the seventeenth century between Descartes and Jesus. Many of the early Cartesians were themselves Catholic priests. In some sense the new philosophy was to be a replacement for Christianity as the foundation of Western culture, and indeed the Cartesians referred to themselves as “disciples of Descartes.” Their physics collided with Catholic views about the body of Christ, and they were about to use the material body of Descartes, or what remained of it, to promote their philosophy. Then there was the fact that during his life Descartes had seemed to believe that he could somehow override death’s dominion—the irony being that his “eternal life” idea rested on scientific rather than religious beliefs.
Also like the early Christians, the Cartesians believed devoutly in their cause. Some held it in almost mystical regard. They were keepers of a legacy and carriers of a flame that they believed would light the future of the world. They knew that what they were about was dangerous, and that it required knowledge not only of the intricacies of philosophy and science but of how power worked. In order to survive and advance their cause they needed to employ tools of persuasion. And now, at the turning of the year 1667, a new tool was about to arrive.
IT WAS IN THE COLD of January, three months after they had set out, that the two Frenchmen, l’Epine and du Rocher, arrived at the outskirts of Paris. Long as the journey had been, as with any modern road trip, reaching the metropolis would have meant slowing down further. Paris was still largely a medieval city, with dirt roads that were only beginning to be paved and streets in an irregular tangle. It was bigger, noisier, and dirtier than London, and the large-scale improvements that Louis XIV’s chief adviser, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, had recently begun—driving through wide boulevards, clearing away crumbling parts of the old medieval walls, constructing the colonnade of the Louvre—at this stage merely added to the congestion. People complained, but the king stayed mostly at his Versailles palace, visiting Paris only a few times a year and otherwise keeping it out of mind. The most noticable change from the last time Descartes had visited the city in life was visible in the streets. Early in the century, transportation was either on foot or on mule. By now a revolution had occurred: vehicles of every description, thousands of them, from simple rickshawlike contraptions pulled by men known as “baptized mules” to gilt carriages with glass windows and shock absorbers, clogged the streets, so that the wagon carrying Terlon’s parcels, including the remains of the philosopher, would have had to weave a contorted passage. They would have come through one of the two crumbling medieval gates at the north end of the city, the Porte St.-Martin or the Porte St.-Denis, made their way across the fashionable neighborhood of Le Marais, and come to stop, finally, at a stately residence in the midst of bureaucratic Paris, just north of the Seine.
Soon after the wagon arrived at the home of Pierre d’Alibert, treasurer general of France and the highest-ranking Cartesian in the French government, Jacques Rohault, in his home just a few blocks to the west, Madame de Sévigné, who lived an even shorter distance away, and other Cartesians got word of it. Foremost among these was Claude Clerselier, the fifty-three-year-old government official who had been one of the earliest converts to Cartesianism. During Descartes’ life, and even more so after his death, Clerselier made himself indispensable as a kind of literary agent. Descartes had deemed some of his writings too incendiary to publish during his lifetime; Clerselier edited them and oversaw their posthumous publication. He also published the philosopher’s correspondence, which wasn’t easy. Descartes’ effects, including his letters, were shipped to France after his death in Sweden, but the ship sank. Clerselier took charge of the salvage operation, employing a team of workers to recover the thousands of sheets and dry them out.
Through the 1660s and 1670s, Clerselier kept the volumes of Descartes’ works appearing in print, giving the educated classes of late-seventeenth-century Europe fresh intellectual fuel and both keeping Descartes himself in living memory and using his works to further the cause. In doing so, he became the leader of the Cartesians—not in a philosophical or scientific sense but as a general or chief strategist. The followers of Descartes formed a diffuse group that ranged all across the Continent, but its core was remarkably tight knit. Those in the inner circle were linked not only by their devotion but also by ties of blood and marriage. Rohault was married to Clerselier’s daughter, while Clerselier had married Pierre Chanut’s sister.
It may have been Clerselier—who had been working for so long on the body of Descartes’ writings—who came up with the idea of putting the physical body of the master to use as well. Sixteen years earlier, Chanut and Christina had decided, for their own reasons, to bury the philosopher in Stockholm, but soon after Chanut’s letters announcing the death reached France certain parties began to clamor for a translation to French soil. Nationalism may have been the initial motivation, but in time another thought dawned, and the irony in it probably did not escape their notice. Descartes’ revolutionary philosophy had been rooted in his focus on bodily health, in particular on his own body; that philosophy had recently come into conflict with official views about the physical body of Jesus Christ. Now, in their effort to legitimize that philosophy, and to protect themselves, Descartes’ followers would put his own physical remains into service.
It took months to organize the sanctification of Descartes. The Cartesians—Rohault, Clerselier, d’Alibert and others—laid out their plans with the exquisite orchestration of political operatives. Their goal was to influence people in church and government, so the effect they hoped to create was one of power and force, something inexorable, that demanded official sanction and respect. Finally, on an evening in late June, their spectacle was ready. As the sun slowly set, a vast group of people gathered in the narrow street in front of d’Alibert’s home just off the Seine. Clergymen, aristocrats, and friends of the philosopher were among the crowd. But, just as important, large numbers of ordinary Parisians, including some of the city’s poorest inhabitants, filled the street. The poor were given flaming torches to carry; the rich rode in carriages. They formed a procession, heading north to the rue St.-Antoine. Here they turned left and came to the blocky edifice of the church of St. Paul, in whose chilly interior the coffin containing the remains of Descartes had been left since the winter. Bearing it with them, the funeral cortege headed south, making a dramatic bisection of the city, crossing the Ile de la Cité to the Latin Quarter, and following the rise of the lan
d until they reached a broad, breezy summit, the highest spot in Paris. As they arrived, church bells rang out. Two churches stood side by side on the hilltop. Before the one on the right—the Gothic Ste.-Geneviève-du Mont, named for the patron saint of Paris—stood its abbot, the Reverend François Blanchard, in full habit, a miter on his head and a crucifix in his hands. Next to him were the canons of the church, each holding a lighted candle.
Into the church the whole procession filed. D’Alibert had given the abbot suggestions as to the type of religious spectacle he might mount, but the abbot exceeded them. The procession itself referenced the annual pilgrimage from the church through the streets of Paris carrying the bones of St. Geneviève. The spectacle aroused the city—the next day, even larger masses of people gathered in the vast open square before the church to see what was going on. Clerselier had planned for a public funeral oration, but at the last minute an order came from Louis XIV’s government forbidding it, so it was given in private. The prayers and celebration culminated with the coffin’s being brought to a vault of honor that had been designated for it, next to the remains of St. Geneviève.
After the abbot blessed the remains of Descartes, the proceedings moved into an administrative phase, in which a series of formal reports was offered. The Cartesians presented to the church a written account documenting the steps in “this famous translation,” including statements by Clerselier and the late Chanut, certificates by religious authorities testifying to Descartes’ unswerving Catholic faith and the “exemplary innocence” of his life, and a remarkable letter written from Rome by Christina, in which (still maintaining the royal pronoun) she certified that Descartes had “contributed greatly to our glorious conversion.” All of this data, so carefully compiled, was meant to dispel the notion that Descartes himself—and by extension his philosophy—was in any way anti-Catholic or, for that matter antireligion. Finally, Clerselier presented a copper sword on which the details of the whole translation from Sweden and the ceremony in Paris were engraved, along with the names of the most prominent men present. The abbot placed the sword in the coffin “in the presence of these friends,” as Descartes’ seventeenth-century biographer noted (a detail that will become important later), the vault was sealed, and the ceremony ended.
Then the parties began. D’Alibert hosted the main banquet, which included as many important people as Clerselier and his cohorts could muster; other feasts—“splendid and sumptuous”—were held around the city. Dukes, lawyers, mathematicians, courtiers, members of the Parlement of Paris and of the French Academy, the king’s supervisor of fortifications as well as his physician all took part in the extended banquet over the returned bones of the philosopher. There was one purpose here: to advance the cause, to demolish, once and for all, the tenacious old structure of knowledge and win society over to Cartesianism, to the cult of reason, to the belief that the truest and trustiest foundation was the human mind and its “good sense.” At the same time, the model—Catholic treatment of holy bones as relics—was so closely copied in all its particulars that it isn’t even right to speak of the reburial as a secular co-opting of a religious event. It was a religious event—an attempt to carry the scientific perspective into a world circumscribed by religious awareness.
In part, the program succeeded. As one measure of success, over the next few years Descartes himself, in various guises, became a fixture in society. Stories and poems featured him. He became, as the French historian Stéphane Van Damme puts it, “a fictional literary personage who inhabited literary writings,” appearing in some works as a man of science, in others as a disembodied thinker, and in still others as a spiritual presence. Literary games were a fashionable pastime in salons, and in the 1670s Descartes entered these as a character. One variety was a type of séance; in a poem referring to one such game, a young woman holds a conversation with Descartes’ “illustrious and learned ghost.”
In the years after the funeral over the translated remains, then, Descartes achieved a different type of popularity, and as he gained force as a cultural character his philosophy rooted in new places. Important aristocrats and churchmen—the prince de Condé, the duc de Liancourt, Cardinal de Retz—took Cartesians under their protection. As the Cartesians accepted these powerful patrons, Cartesianism became adopted by what might be described as opposition parties in both church and state. The prince de Condé, one of the most famous and dashing figures in Europe, had rebelled against Louis XIV and become leader of the opposition during the Fronde, the French civil war, which had ravaged the country between 1648 and 1653. He was now technically loyal once again, but from his castle in Chantilly he led a kind of rival power structure to that of the king, one element of which was the circle of Cartesians. Cardinal de Retz had also opposed the king in various ways; in punishment Louis had recently forced him to give up his position as archbishop of Paris, but he stayed active in politics and remained a champion of Cartesianism. Even the site chosen for the repose of Descartes’ remains had “opposition party” associations. As revered as the church of Ste.-Geneviève was, it and its abbot had a long history of struggles with both the king and the diocese.
The establishment hardened and clarified its stance. In 1671, Louis XIV came down decisively against the Cartesians. The new philosophy had penetrated the University of Paris, where it was infecting the young, causing them to question beliefs about the Eucharist, the Mass, and the authority of the priesthood. The archbishop of Paris asked Louis to act, and he did, forbidding teaching that “could bring confusion in the explanation of our mysteries.” Later he clarified that his opposition was to “the opinions and sentiments of des Carthes.” The city of Paris followed suit by decreeing that anyone promulgating such doctrines would face the death penalty. One ironic result of the state condemnation was that when the French Academy of Sciences was formed in 1666, in an effort to bring the disparate salons and gatherings of freelance philosophers under state control, the Cartesians—men like Rohault, people who were doing the closest thing to scientific work—were expressly forbidden from joining.
Official Catholic opposition began in earnest even before the translation of the remains. In 1663, the Holy Office of the Catholic Church—that is to say, the Inquisition—condemned four of Descartes’ books and placed them on its index of banned works. Its reasoning was kept secret until 1998, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope Benedict XVI, who then held the title of prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—the modern variant of Grand Inquisitor—ordered its files open through the year 1903. The dossier on Descartes’ censure reveals depths of interest on the part of those studying the new philosophy, one of the churchmen writing, “I admired the author’s subtle spirit, his inventive new speculations, the elegance of a style far from ordinary, and the modesty with which he submits his work to the censure of the theologians, and I pay homage to the merits of this writer.” The end result, however, was condemnation and forbidding of Catholics to read the books on pain of sin, and the files show that of crucial concern to the church was the conviction that Descartes’ reckoning of matter and the material world undermined the doctrine of the Eucharist and the real presence of Jesus Christ in the host.
Yet the boundaries of the struggle over Cartesianism were constantly shifting as people of various backgrounds worked to understand just what it was and what it might mean. While the Vatican opposed it, many if not most of the Cartesians were themselves churchmen, and some important orders within the church adopted it—so that besides the battle between Cartesians and those who held what was still the establishment worldview, built around the Bible and Aristotle, there were also struggles among the Cartesians for control of the philosophy and what it represented. And if Descartes’ body could be used in this struggle, so could his life. Church leaders who had “converted” to Cartesianism but wanted to keep it within a church context succeeded in getting the first comprehensive biography of Descartes written by one of their own, Father Adrien Baillet, wh
o also wrote a seventeen-volume Lives of the Saints and who gave Descartes’ life story a similarly saintly cast.
Most significant for history was the fight among the Cartesians over the meaning of the philosophy. Three years before the reburial of the bones, a priest named Nicolas Malebranche was browsing the bookstalls that lined the banks of the Seine (as indeed they still do) and came upon a copy of Descartes’ Treatise on Man. It was his first encounter with the new philosophy, and it struck him so forcefully that as he read he experienced shortness of breath and heart palpitations. He became one of the dominant Cartesians and, in particular, an advocate of what might be called Cartesian theology. Cartesians were in agreement in believing that the mind was the base of knowledge. But do ideas have a deeper foundation than the famously shifting and untrustworthy mind? Malebranche claimed that Descartes was clear on this. To talk of Cartesian dualism is somewhat misleading; Descartes actually wrote that the universe consisted of not two but three substances: mind, body (that is, the material world), and God. God is the guarantor that the mind and world can interact meaningfully—that we can reach truth using the power of reason. Malebranche insisted that human intellect and its ability to make sense of the natural world rested on God. As he put it, “We see all things in God.” Malebranche thus interpreted Descartes as being an apologist both for science and for faith. Other Cartesians—including Rohault and the Parisian priest Antoine Arnauld—read Descartes as asserting that ideas exist in the mind of their own accord, as it were. While they didn’t dismiss the relevance of God, they also didn’t feel that God necessarily played a role in the relationship between the world and the mind that perceives it. The difference between this and Malebranche’s interpretation of Descartes may seem slight, but it would widen, ultimately, into the idea, so characteristic of the modern centuries, of a firm division between faith and reason and would lead, seemingly inexorably, to the modern concept of atheism.
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