A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

intellectual renascence. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century there are increasing traces of rationalism at the court of the famous Christina, who already in her youth is found much interested in the objections of "Jews, heathens, and philosophers against Christian doctrine"; [1516] and her invitation of Descartes to her court (1649) implies that Sweden had been not a little affected by the revulsion of popular thought which followed on the Thirty Years' War in Germany. Christina herself, however, was a remarkable personality, unfeminine, strong-willed, with a vigorous but immature intelligence; and she did much of her early skeptical thinking for herself. In the course of a few years, the new spirit had gone so far as to make church-going matter for open scoffing at the Swedish court; [1517] and the Queen's adoption of Romanism, for which she prepared by abdicating the crown, appears to have been by way of revulsion from a state of mind approaching atheism, to which she had been led by her freethinking French physician, Bourdelot, after Descartes's death. [1518] It has been confidently asserted that she really cared for neither creed, and embraced Catholicism only by way of conformity for social purposes, retaining her freethinking views. [1519] It is certain that she was always unhappy in her Swedish surroundings. But her course may more reasonably be explained as that of a mind which could not rest in deism or face atheism, and sought in Catholicism the sense of anchorage which is craved by temperaments ill-framed for the discipline of reason. The author of the Histoire des intrigues galantes de la reine Christine de Suède (1697), who seems to have been one of her suite, insists that while she "loved bigots no more than atheists," [1520] and although her religion had been shaken in her youth by Bourdelot and other freethinkers, she was regular in all Catholic observances; and that once, looking at the portrait of her father, she said he had failed to provide for the safety of his soul, and thanked God for having guided her aright. [1521] Her annotations of Descartes are of little importance; but it is noteworthy that she accorded to his orthodox adherents a declaration that he had "greatly contributed" to her "glorious conversion" to the Catholic faith. [1522] Whatever favour she may have shown to liberty of thought in her youth, no important literary results could follow in the then state of Swedish culture, when the studies at even the new colleges were mainly confined to Latin and theology. [1523] The German Pufendorf, indeed, by his treatises On the Law of Nature and Nations and On the Duty of Man and Citizen (published at Lund, where he was professor, in 1672-73), did much to establish the utilitarian and naturalistic tendency in ethics which was at work at the same time in England; but his latent deism had no great influence even in Germany, his Scripture-citing orthodoxy countervailing it, although he argued for a separation of Church and State. [1524]