Chapter 44: Ironists and Skeptics

That the most radical work of the Sixteenth Century (and well beyond), The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude,[484] inscribed itself outside of all theological context indicates quite well the disuse of the discourse of God. Religious language, over which the Church and the [various] orthodoxies claimed to exercise control, ceded place to the ideological language in which the changing economy — turning the liberties of yesterday into the constraints of tomorrow — extinguished the blazes that it ceaselessly lit.

If it is true that the principle “He who controls meaning controls the world” has been verified, ecclesiastical power, which conceived no other revolt against it than that of those who were outside of meaning — the senseless, the crazy — began (in the Renaissance) to lose the means of persuasion and terror that somehow or other strengthened the correct line of the dogma around which gravitated the spirit of beings and things, if not their very hearts.

Assuredly, the mockery, sarcasm and irony that whipped the austere and unhealthy ass of religion did not give birth to the tumults of the Sixteenth Century. The difference was that it was formulated in speech [parole] and not in writing. Penal history teems with reports such as the one that Jundt made in his study of popular pantheism:

In 1359, the town council forever banished a certain Claushorn, surnamed Engelbrecht, the school director Selden, and Cuentzelin of Atzenheim because they rapped on a seat of wood and a tripod, and said, ‘Here is God; we would like to break his foot,’ and because they had effaced the black points with which they were marked and said, ‘Here is God, we would like to burst his eyes.’ One of them even threw his knife at the sky and cried out, ‘I would like to strike God with my knife.’[485]

The formidable network of awakening and deadening that the printed press stretched between towns and countrysides had at first thrown between everyone’s hands the two Testaments that were completely filled with the incoherencies, absurdities and infamies through which God manifested his uncertain presence in society. By emphasizing the antitheses contained in the Bible, Johannes Denck abandoned each person to the care of devoting himself (or not) to the convictions of a faith that was intimate and deprived of reason. A little later, those whom the Church called “strong spirits” because they threatened the power of its Holy-Spirit began to disclose in writing the ironies that were capable of dissolving the authority of the Book that, for centuries, had crushed terrestrial and voluptuous life under its weight of guilt, fear, ferocity and contempt.

In this mixture of audacity and pusillanimosity, much remains poorly known.

Valentin Weigel

Despite his weak attachment to violence, Valentin Weigel (1533–1588) does not fail to evoke the parish priest John Meslier. A Lutherian pastor in Zschopau, Weigel led an existence [apparently] deprived of remarkable traits, only to reveal after his death a collection of works, partially published in Halle in 1609, in which he reduced the texts consecrated to the Apocalypse and the Revelations attributed to John to the name of the Beast, the number of which [666] nourished visions of the Third Age. He considered Luther, the Pope, Zwingli and others to be Antichrists, and thought the pastorate to be perfectly useless. Each man possessed in himself the divine spark that, embracing the body and the soul, rendered the Scriptures, grace, the clergy, theology and all historical religion to be null and void. The knowledge of God proceded, not from the Bible nor from the sacraments, but from an inward conviction that one could not restrain.

Dirk Volkertszoon Coornherdt

A polemicist, writer, engraver and humanist, Dirk Coornherdt was among the principal representatives of the Renaissance in Holland. Versatile and courageous, [and] in a country in which Protestant intransigence succeded Catholic intolerance, he led, despite persecution, an incessant fight in favor of religious freedom and against execution for committing heresy. A precursor of free-thinking, he left to each person the care of depending upon his or her own conscience and founding lay morality on the respect for others and a certain stoicism. His belief in a perfection accessible to mankind brought down upon him charges of “Pelagianism,” a term already in disuse in the Sixteenth Century.

Born in Amsterdam in 1522, Coornherdt was educated in the Catholic faith, which he never abjured, even under Orangist power; he would especially keep his evangelistic principles. He traveled to Spain and Portugal, became familiar with biblical exegesis, and learned music and engraving. After his return to Amsterdam, he got married in 1540 and then moved to Haarlem, where he became a professional engraver. Around 1544, he discovered the works of Luther, Calvin and Menno Simonsz. In 1550, he wrote Comedie van de rijcke man, and shortly thereafter translated Boece’s De consolatione philosophiae. Coornherdt associated with Hendrik Niclaes, the founder of the Family of Love, with whom he later quarreled, not without maintaining a certain nostalgia for an original, idyllic community. Thanks to Hans Denck, he was also interested in Sebastian Franck and the mystical fragments of the Deutsche Theologie. In 1560, Coornherdt took exception to Calvin and Menno. Two years later, Calvin threw at him his Response to a Certain Dutchman who, under the Guise of making the Christians completely Spiritual permits them to Pollute their Bodies through Idolatry and, in response to other texts on free will by Coornherdt, would be on his guard against “this man who pushes impiety to the extreme.”

A notary at the court of Holland, Coornherdt was successful at making himself suspect to both the Catholics and the Reformers. Following the riots of the iconoclasts, in which his role has not been clearly established, he was imprisoned at The Hague in 1567. He used his detention to write short texts and pamphlets; he escaped in 1568 and was a secret agent for the Prince of Orange, despite the hostility of the Protestants, until 1572. He returned to Haarlem and, charged in a report about the “Beggars” led by Lumey, he denounced their brutalities and abuses of power, and thus attracted their hatred. Coornherdt hid himself in Leyden, then Zamten. When Requesens, the Governor of the Netherlands, announced a general pardon in 1574, Coornherdt was excluded. He didn’t hesitate to address himself to Philippe II in the hope of recovering his confiscated goods. From whence comes his reputation, which followed him, for “playing all the angles” [manger a tous les rateliers].

When Coornherdt returned to Holland, the hostility of the Reformers towards him had grown and he did nothing to attenuate it. He defended the Catholic minority, which was oppressed in Holland; he produced many appeals for tolerance; he pronounced himself opposed to the death penalty for dissidents of all stripes; and he translated the writings of Sebastian Castellion. It was only because of the influence of William of Orange that Coornherdt was not condemned to life in prison. Chased from Haarlem in 1585, he went to Emden, where he published a work of Stoic inspiration in 1586. Banished from Delft after a stay of three months, he sought refuge in Gouda and died there on 29 October 1590.

In Coornherdt one sees the passage of Christian morality into lay morality, enriched with ideas of tolerance and freedom of spirit. The influence of the mystics and Denck appeared in a language stripped of its sacred references, in an exhortation for the mutual respect of individuals. Finally, the idea that mankind can attain perfection through a constant effort of will, so that it can no longer sin, appears in Pelage’s theses and not — as one sometimes reproached Coornherdt — in the doctrines of the Spiritual Libertines.

Bernardino Ochino

The humanist Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564) practiced all of the religions and doctrines of his time for nearly 80 years. He did not wait for the first fruits of old age to affirm — despite the risks of a contrasted destiny — that the unique value of life is found in terrestrial favors and savors. Born in Sienna in the neighborhood of Oca, from which he drew his name, he entered the Franciscan order and became a nasturtium [capucin] preacher. He met Juan of Valdes and let himself be seduced by Luther’s ideas. Ochino broke with Catholicism and went to Geneva, where his tolerant spirit was found to be repugnant to Calvin. He then went to Augsburg, Strasbourg and Canterbury, where he vituperated the Pope. He wrote The Labyrinth of Free Will or, to speak truly, Servile Will and the Means of Getting Out of It. As he recovered from [attachment to] all systems, he professed a discreet atheism, allied with a Rabelaisian quest for pleasure. At the time, one attributed to him — and no doubt falsely — authorship of The Book of the Three Impostors, which was imputed to other adventurers of his type and whose influence merits being better studied:[486] Simon of Neufrille (from Hainaut), who died in Padua in 1530, a disciple of the skeptic Christopher of Longueil, himself the teacher of Etienne Dolet.

At the age of 60, Ochino wed a young woman. His Dialoghi XXX, which celebrated the merits of polygamy, caused his expulsion from Zurich in 1563. He took refuge in Poland, then in Slavkov (Austerlitz) in Moravia, where he succumbed to the plague in 1565.[487]

Noel Journet

Originally a schoolteacher from Suzanne, near Attigny-en-Rethellois, Noel Journet was among the disciples of Dirk Coornherdt, whom he met during a visit to the Netherlands. He inscribed himself in the line of Johannes Denck through his attention to the inconsistencies and absurdities in the Bible. The publication of his commentaries drew down upon him the denunciations of the Calvinists, who had him burned, along with his book, on 29 June 1582.[488]

Pastor John Chassanion found it useful to refute the lampoon, which thus attached his name to the annals of the infamy of informers and Journet’s name to the unfortunates of reason.

The Refutation of the Strange Errors and Horrible Blasphemies against God and the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Prophets and Apostles made by a certain Misfortunate Person who for such Impieties was justly Condemned to Die and who was Burned in the City of Metz on 29 June, the year of Our Lord MDLXXXII, by John Chassanion, Minister of the Reformed Church of Metz quotes the following statements, among others:

‘Moses was an enemy of humankind, a captain of murderers and brigands. He gave the orders into the hearts of all to sack [the place] when they entered Canaan, to kill the women and all the male children who had been spared by the downfall of the Madianites, only preserving the virginal girls (Nb 31, 17–18; Dt 7, 2).’

‘Jacob was a deceiver. He notably used striped sticks to influence the color of the lambs and to increase his portion of the animals (Gn 30, 37–42).’

‘Moses did not write the Pentateuch, seeing that his own death is related at the end of it (Dt 34).’

’Deuteronomy was drafted in the land of Canaan, because it says, Dt 4, 47, that the children of Israel possessed the land of the two Amorean kings beyond the Jordan.’

Other affirmations more surely brought upon him the sanctions of the justice. He did indeed declare that the magistrates were all “tyrants and thieves,” that the great ones [les tailles] were “true tyrants” and that “a woman no longer married according to her tastes can take another husband so as to avoid debauchery.”

Geoffroy Vallee

Geoffroy Vallee owed his new name and premature death to a lampoon entitled The Beatitude of the Christians, or the Scourge of Faith. Born in Orleans around 1550, the “beautiful Valley,” as his libertine friends called him, allied with the search for the pleasures of existence the taste for publicly critiquing the things that hindered and perverted them. He pushed imprudence as far as signing his name to a pamphlet that was directed, not only against the [established] religions, but against all beliefs, which were all founded on fear, according to him. Sometimes distributed under the title De arte nihil credendi [The Art of Believing in Nothing], this text was accused of committing divine high treason. Arrested on the orders of the Provost-Marshal Nicolas Rapin, Vallee soon thereafter benefited from the support and friendship of the libertine aristocracy that the Seventeenth Century took pride in: people like Desbarreaux (whose great-uncle was Geoffroy), Claude the Small, Belurgey, Theophile of Viau, Blot, and Cyrano de Bergerac, who were free spirits who often despaired of the prohibitions that sanctioned the simple aspiration to live well.

The defense [in Geoffroy’s trial], adopting an old argument of the Church, invoked the “senseless” character of the writing and its author. Rapin was inclined to grant a relative leniency if the Bishop of Nevers, Armand Sorbin, did not personally intervene to demand the youthful man’s execution. On 9 February 1574, Geoffroy Vallee, 84 years old, was hanged then burned. The Jesuit Garasse rejoiced at the “beautiful sacrifice to God at Greve, where he [Geoffroy] was burned half-alive.”[489]

Geoffroy Vallee condemned to execration “this [religious] faith, since it wants all that we are lodged within it, for all of our lives, even to the point of singing the Credo to us at death.” He successively examined the Catholic faith, “from which comes all evil” and that forged the fear of the devil and the executioners; the faith of the Hugeunots, with their “false intelligence (and) fear and baton blows, so that, if they do not believe, they can not be saved.” The faith of the Anabaptists and that of the Libertines were hardly better. Even atheism didn’t find a place, because “I take my sensual pleasure in God; only in God have I torment”; atheism does not abandon the fear that is inherent in all beliefs. “All the religions,” he wrote, with a great lucidity, “have removed from mankind the happiness of the body in God so as to render it still more miserable.”

In sum, the important thing isn’t believing or not believing, but being without fear: “He who is in fear, whatever fear it is, cannot be happy.” Thus one must banish the fear inherent in all the faiths so as to have “reason in one’s head, without seeking it outside oneself or in the sword.” Here Vallee attained a radicality of which the Libertines of the Seventeenth Century, the atheists of the Eighteenth Century and the free-thinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries were ignorant. (The interest of such humanists as Paracelsus, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Guillaume Postel, Tommaso Campanella, Giordano Bruno and Lucio Vanini reveals more than the history of philosophy.)