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

by the scholarly performance of Richard Simon (1638-1712), who was as regards the Scriptural texts what Spencer of Cambridge was as regards the culture-history of the Hebrews, one of the founders of modern methodical criticism. It was as a devout Catholic refuting Protestants, and a champion of the Bible against Spinoza, that Simon began his work; but, more sincerely critical than Huet, he reached views more akin to those of Spinoza than to those of the Church. [614] The congregation of the Oratory, where Simon laid the foundations of his learning, was so little inclined to his critical views that he decided to leave it; and though persuaded to stay, and to become for a time a professor of philosophy at Julli, he at length broke with the Order. Then, from his native town of Dieppe, came his strenuous series of critical works--L'histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), which among other things decisively impugned the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; the Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam, 1689); numerous other volumes of critical studies on texts, versions, and commentators; and finally a French translation of the New Testament with notes. His Bibliothèque Critique (4 vols. under the name of Saint-Jore) was suppressed by an order in council; the translation was condemned by Bossuet and the Archbishop of Paris; and the two first-named works were suppressed by the Parlement of Paris and attacked by a host of orthodox scholars; but they were translated promptly into Latin and English; and they gave a new breadth of footing to the deistic argument, though Simon always wrote as an avowed believer. Before Simon, the Protestant Isaac la Peyrère, the friend of La Mothe le Vayer and Gassendi, and the librarian of Condé, had fired a somewhat startling shot at the Pentateuch in his Præadamitæ [615] and Systema Theologica ex Præ-adamitarum Hypothesi (both 1655: printed in Holland [616]), for which he was imprisoned at Brussels, with the result that he recanted and joined the Church of Rome, going to the Pope in person to receive absolution, and publishing an Epistola ad Philotimum (Frankfort, 1658), in which he professed to explain his reasons for abjuring at once his Calvinism and his treatise. It is clear that all this was done to save his skin, for there is explicit testimony that he held firmly by his Preadamite doctrine to the end of his life, despite the seven or eight confutations of his work published in 1656. [617] Were it not for his constructive theses--especially his idea that Adam was a real person, but simply the father of the Hebrews and not of the human race--he would deserve to rank high among the scientific pioneers of modern rationalism, for his negative work is shrewd and sound. Like so many other early rationalists, collectively accused of "destroying without replacing," he erred precisely in his eagerness to build up, for his negations have all become accepted truths. [618] As it is, he may be ranked, after Toland, as a main founder of the older rationalism, developed chiefly in Germany, which sought to reduce as many miracles as possible to natural events misunderstood. But he was too far before his time to win a fair hearing. Where Simon laid a cautious scholarly foundation, Peyrère suddenly challenged immemorial beliefs, and failed accordingly.