Abstract
From 1708 to 1710, the Cartesian monk François Lamy exchanged several letters with a reader of his work on the value and possibility of knowledge. The young Saint-Laurens teased Lamy on several issues related to what we can know of God, of justice and morality, and of metaphysics, thus progressively revealing surprising aspects of his thought. Was Saint-Laurens a sceptic, a fideist, or a free-thinker? By exploring the main arguments exchanged in this recently published correspondence, this paper ultimately shows the impotence of seventeenth-century rationalism when put on the trial of the new sceptical and libertine trends.
The writing of this text was made possible by a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and has greatly benefited from comments by attendees of the “Scepticism and Enlightenment” conference held on 2–4 December 2010 in São Paulo, Brazil. I would also especially like to thank Plinío J. Smith, Sébastien Charles, and Julie Walsh for their detailed comments on earlier drafts of this text, and Jeff Hilderley for his help with the translation. All translations of quotes from the French are mine.
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Notes
- 1.
In her introduction to François Lamy, La Relligion défenduë par la Raison sur l’Immortalité de l’ame et sur quelques autres importantes verités. En plusieurs lettres reciproques, Florence, Leo Olschki, 2003, which is her edition collecting this correspondence and other unpublished writings, Maria Grazia Zaccone Sina quotes a tribute to Mr. Saint-Laurens by one of his friends, Mr. Guillaume de Ponsan: “this philosopher [i.e., Lamy] could not have been surprised to discover such wisdom in a young man: he knew not whether the person who had written to him was young or old. Mr. de Saint-Laurens expressed his doubts to him without revealing his identity; he had given him a false address and only after the argument did Dom Lami learn the identity of the person with whom he had had an exchange of metaphysical letters,” in Examen de l’Éloge de Mr. De Saintlaurens, Conseiller au Parlement, inserted in Recueil de l’Académie des Jeux Floraux de l’année 1760, N.p., n.d., p. 38. Nevertheless, Father Lamy might have guessed the age-difference between himself and his correspondent after the latter had mentioned that his father was helping him with his writing, a remark (in a lost letter) that did not fail to surprise Lamy: “I am astonished, however, to learn from you that I was dealing at once with you and your honourable father” (Letter VIII, p. 135). Maria Gracia Zaccone Sina specifies that the words “M. votre Père” are crossed out but remain legible (ibid., n. 36).
- 2.
He quotes Pascal in Letter XIII, p. 188.
- 3.
He mentions Arnauld’s dispute with Malebranche over the nature of ideas and sides with Arnauld in his Letter XI of 21 January 1710, p. 143.
- 4.
Letter I, p. 47. It may be noted that exposing one’s “Doubts about…” was a common practice among writers of clandestine literature.
- 5.
Bayle would describe Lamy as “a great philosopher, famous by several excellent works, and exhibiting a very particularly fine spirit” (Œuvres diverses, La Haye, 1737, vol. IV, p. 181), and moreover also as “one of the strongest Cartesians there are in France” (ibid., vol. III, p. 788); and L. Dubois, author of the Histoire de l’Abbé de Rancé et de sa Réforme, would describe him as “very well regarded, as much for his enlightened mind as for the goodness of his heart, for his personal candour and purity in moral conduct, in short, of all the Benedictines of Saint-Maur, the one who wrote French the best” (Paris, Poussielgue frères, 1969, vol. II, p. 327, cited in the introduction to La Relligion défenduë par la Raison, op. cit., p. 25, n. 101).
- 6.
Cf. Letter VI, p. 79, explained below, where Lamy involves himself in refuting Saint-Laurens’s position on the basis of “the strange and terrible repercussions that it can have”.
- 7.
Letter IV, pp. 66–67.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 73.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 72.
- 10.
The paradoxical association of the terms “certainty” and “obscurity” with regard to faith, so typical of the fideist position, is especially remarkable here.
- 11.
Letter V, p. 73.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 74.
- 13.
Letter XIII, p. 188. Cf. infra.
- 14.
Cf. Letters XI and XII.
- 15.
Letter VI, pp. 78–79.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 79.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 80.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 89.
- 19.
Here Lamy explicitly distinguishes clear ideas, which suffice for truthful judgement, from comprehensive ones, which are beyond our powers as finite beings: cf. ibid., p. 87.
- 20.
Cf. ibid., p. 96.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
- 23.
Letter VI, pp. 104–105. It is worth noting that Lamy adopts the very same approach in Le nouvel athéisme renversé to refute Spinoza’s monist fundamentals, before proving how, on the basis of new premises (namely, divine purpose and a distinction between the two kinds of substance), all of morality and the entire Christian religion can be reconstructed rationally.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 106: “Most of these gentlemen, who vaunt their belief that creation is inscrutable and impossible, are obliged to say that thinking being, to wit, the better part of these men themselves, derives from matter.”
- 25.
Letter VII, p. 111.
- 26.
Ibid., pp. 113–115.
- 27.
Cf. L’incrédule amené à la religion, “Seventh dialogue,” pp. 260 and 275 sq. It should also be noted that the status of revelation as a “fact” is found in the entry on “Pyrrhonism” in Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique.
- 28.
Cf. Ibid., p. 115. In truth, Saint-Laurens may here be disguising his thought for the sake of maintaining a measure of agreement. On the one hand, soon thereafter he goes back to saying that men are not really in agreement on how to interpret divine law (p. 117, cf. the quotation given subsequently in the text). On the other hand, in one of his last letters, he offers quite a different theory on the origin of social morality, saying that all laws stem from self-interest and the human passions (Letter XIII, pp. 185–187), which is a common thesis in free-thought.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 134.
- 31.
Letter VII, p. 118.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 119.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 120.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 123
- 35.
Letter XI, p.141.
- 36.
Ibid., pp. 142–143.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 143.
- 38.
Letter XII, p. 152.
- 39.
Ibid., pp. 164–165.
- 40.
Letter XIII, pp. 178–179 : “Allow me, Reverend Father, to show you now that one can never prove nor refute, in a metaphysical way, any proposition, by drawing on its consequences […], and what I will say will convince you perhaps that your proofs are not as decisive as you thought.”
- 41.
Ibid., p. 184 : “For the rest, Reverend Father, the mockery and ridicule which you have levelled at my reasoning will not provoke indecent reactions in me. I know that a certain decorum behooves philosophers.”
- 42.
Ibid., p. 179. As Plinío Junquiera Smith rightly pointed out to me, this quotation does not absolutely prove that Saint-Laurens considers himself a sceptic; it may merely be an exhortation to Lamy that he debate principles rather than consequences.
- 43.
In the seventeenth century, the term “Pyrrhonism” had come to replace “Scepticism” in its broad sense. If Saint-Laurens was indeed a sceptic, it must rather have been in the fashion of the Academic sceptics, who were effectively probabilists (as distinguished from the Pyrrhonists in the strict sense).
- 44.
Letter XIII, p. 188.
- 45.
Ibid., pp. 184–185.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 185.
- 47.
Such is how Saint-Laurens refutes the claim of universal moral consent made by Lamy as a proof that peoples everywhere access the rules of divine justice by way of their reason.
- 48.
Letter XIII, p. 186.
- 49.
Ibid., pp. 186–187.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 187.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 179.
- 52.
Ibid., p. 193.
- 53.
It was published by Henry, and re-edited by Maria Grazia Zaccone Sina as an appendix to her edition of La Relligion defenduë par la Raison, op. cit., pp. 261–266.
- 54.
Letter XIII, pp. 191–192.
- 55.
A point highlighted as well by Richard Watson, for example, in The Downfall of Cartesianism, 1673–1712. A Study of Epistemological Issues in Late 17th Century Cartesianism, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1966.
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Malinowski-Charles, S. (2013). Fideism, Scepticism, or Free-Thought? The Dispute Between Lamy and Saint-Laurens over Metaphysical Knowledge. In: Charles, S., J. Smith, P. (eds) Scepticism in the Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment, Lumières, Aufklärung. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 210. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4810-1_3
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