PFSCL XLVI, 90 (2019) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2019-0010 Jean-Pierre Cavaillé (ed.) : Libertinage, athéisme et incrédulité. 2, Littératures classiques, n o 93 (2017). p. 184. In a brief Introduction, Professor Cavaillé encourages readers to go back to the Introduction of volume I, in order to comprehend the overall project of advancing historical understanding of Libertinism in the 1620s, the decade in which Garasse raged against it. Volume II goes beyond what occurred in that decade, to propose possible relations on influences between Libertinism and the early Enlightenment. Jean-Michel Gros starts off from Cavaillé’s 2010 volume, Libertinage et philosophie au XVII e siècle, by boldly juxtaposing readings of Cyrano de Bergerac’s Histoire comique des États et Empires de la Lune (1657), Mersenne’s L’Impiété des Déistes (1624), and Pascal’s Pensées. The intention is not to respect genres, disciplines, and chronology: indeed, to have Pascal reading Cyrano on the wager is a topos that appears at least fourteen times in French literary works of the 1620s and that generally is found in straightforward narrative prose without calling particular attention to itself. Both Cyrano and Mersenne present the terms of the wager, although they are located in two very different genres: a philosophical novel and a theological apologetic. Banal and vague, in these works, Pascal would create for the anxious doubter something to hang onto. The wager ceased to be a boutade and became an axiom! Gros is delightfully casual about this outcome and offers no approach to critiquing Pascal’s wager. In the second part of Gros’s close reading of Bayle on evil and Leibniz’s rather overwrought response bring us back, front and center, to the question of diffusing libertine ideas. Gros does not turn biographical. He does not ask why evil in all its terrible details interested Bayle so much. Is he concerned about undermining religious belief as he strove to refute various theological propositions and to enhance the exemplum of the philosopher as one who pursues truth? Augustine argued that religious controversy ultimately builds faith. In his Dix Lamentations (1611), the Spanish Carmelite, Jérôme Gratian de la Mère de Dieu, sought to inventory all aspects, and even all tendencies of heterodox thought; and it is to Sophie Houdard’s credit that she proposes a diverse series of contexts before concentrating on the thought that chagrined Gratian, the most spiritual of athéismes. There were the perfectionists who “sous le titre et sous couleur d’oraison, et de perfection et d’esprit (en paraissant très parfaits) suivent en verité leur liberté, la foi et la loi qu’ils se forgent de leur propre chef, comme s’ils étaient Dieu” (p. 33). The scandal here is of two sorts: faith outside the church, and projection of PFSCL XLVI, 90 (2019) PFSCL XLVI, 90 (2019) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2019-0010 214 the self into belief. There have been, would be, and will be variations on this generic definition. Houdard briefly and convincingly offers accounts of special perfectionism, and she stresses the rise of new religious orders to elucidate, question, convert, or destroy perfectionism, illuminism, essentialism, excellent[ism], etc., each being a unique danger. Was this attractiveness of categories simply a variant of late Aristotle in Spanish “observation,” or was it something else? Ever more precise definitions moved toward lack of comprehension. The tower of Babel comes to mind. A similar obsession with ever more precise definitions occurred in Spanish America about racial distinctions. What can only be considered a perfectly constructed and learned article written in the simplest and most convincing prose by Gianni Paganini recounts the history of the metaphor “condensed analogy,” consisting of comment and reason (meta) with a theme (phore). She then turns to her subject: the world-as-theater, or the theater-as-world. She briefly presents La Mothe Le Vayer’s and Naudé’s thought about it. From its early beginnings in Plato’s Laws, the possibilities of inspiring wonder (my term) and/ or doubt appear often as serious play over the central question of man’s relation to the divine. I am not sure that I agree with Paganini’s interpretation of La Mothe’s purposes in writing Les Monstres. Instead of just offering a critique of human efforts to inventory natural phenomena, which La Mothe does, there is also a question of preserving the unlearnability of nature as being just too complex and too vast for human reason to grasp, and this point comes along in metaphors in a ludic frame with the divine being as the player. Is man merely a plaything in the hands of the divine? Plato makes this assertion and ties it to the role that the theater plays, first in constructing and then in strengthening civic identity, while also gaining more support from the gods. If Plato is thinking about shackling human will, he does not bring up objects to divine play at this point. The theater-world metaphor was known in the Middle Ages, thanks to a pseudo-Aristotelian text; but it would really only attract many writers of the Renaissance. Ficino and Pompanazzi celebrated the metaphor, because in the translation man is made a puppet or a toy. Pompanazzi, who knew no Greek, nonetheless rejected the optimistic interpretation in favor of a darker, more sinister meaning. He persisted that God was good. What becomes of toys, in a world without play? An introductory paragraph about the various recent interpretations of Hobbes’s appendices to his Latin edition of the Leviathan would have enabled this reader to learn exactly what Anne Staquet has accomplished. Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVI, 90 (2019) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2019-0010 215 Were these appendices answers to critics? Hobbes apparently does not name names or write in the form of a rejoinder. Another possibility is that they are simply an afterthought, and that resetting page upon page of cold type in order to integrate these paragraphs into the principal text would have been too costly. The rhetoric, and the argument are sharper edged, and undoubtedly a joy to read for anyone with a philosophic turn of mind. For example, the careful treatment of the drafting of the Credo at the council of Nicea, and of other doctrinal texts, is apparent in Hobbes and Pascal. But the theologians were losing out. The apparent contradictions between sacred texts on such crucial issues as the eucharist no doubt gave Hobbes satisfaction. After a general presentation of Theophrastus redivis (1659), an anonymous work by the writer whom Nicole Gengoux calls l’Anonyme (“Anonymous”) she non-casuistically takes up many but not all of the definitions of atheism. Then, step by step, she reads the Theophrastus to find the absence of familiarity, or the acceptance of atheistic tenets. Studied ambiguity is discovered at almost every turn, except for the argument that all divine figures are the products of law-givers. Anonymous celebrates nature and the natural pre-law moral man, who is an atheist; but he also recognizes that law cannot simply be rejected, for without it, social disorder threatens. Interestingly, while several libertine authors drop one of the initial attributes - immoral conduct - Anonymous keeps it but rejects the notion that libertinism leads to immorality. The decision to compare Anonymous’s attitudes toward atheism and those of Spinoza in his Traité théologicopolitique (1670) leads to finding some interesting similarities, the most important being that neither author found it possible to declare himself an atheist, although with different assumptions each held generally atheistic views. Secondly, both are anxious to refute claims that religion is a necessary pre-condition for moral standards. Spinoza’s naturalism is religious; but in the case of Anonymous’s idea of nature, a more utopian and more evidently mythical element was a point of departure. In Spinoza, by contrast, it is possible for the reader to think of the possibility of experiencing life with Nature as God. It is pleasant to note the rejection of a Leo-Straussian reading-between-the-lines when interpreting Spinoza. Moving along chronologically, after Spinoza (and Bayle) one might expect a non-religious atheistic author in the canon, such as Abbé Meslier; but he does not appear in this volume. Instead, the turn is to Abbé Galiani, the Neapolitan gad-fly and author of pithy dialogues. Azzurra Mauro takes PFSCL XLVI, 90 (2019) PFSCL XLVI, 90 (2019) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2019-0010 216 up his rhetoric, especially Galiani’s way of writing exhortations that he finds in the Dialogue sur le commerce des blés (1770). In his effort to gain a large readership, Galiani wrote in the dialog genre, with masterly control of irony aimed at arguments grounded on exemplarity and experience. He exhorts readers to reflect and rely on bon sens, a theory avant la lettre. There would be no overt skepticism here, but rather a casual doubt about how individuals think and societies work. Dare to philosophize is the motto of “the chevalier.” But the question comes up again about how the eighteenth-century salonniers often lacked an epistemology grounded on a vocabulary that could be distinct from polite rhetoric. To favor réflection over pensée may well have been a move against Cartesianism. But could it inspire systematic doubt? If we follow the trajectory of defining terms across the early modern centuries, we find a shift from behavior to thought, not so much in conformity of belief as in acts incarnating belief, a questioning attitude toward belief became stronger, and this occurred in the sillon of Protestantism. The moeurs of La Mothe Le Vayer, Naudé, Hobbes, and Spinoza seem neglected. Did the seventeenth-century French produce writings of the stamp of a Boccaccio or an Aretino? The celebration of female beauty, so present in the sixteenth century, also dried up. Didier Foucault does not address the impulses that led to newer combinations of philosophy and pornography that did not come together until the 1740s. Arguments grounded on Nature (with a capital N) and medical theory are extended to recommend sexual experience for the betterment of the soul. It is possible to wonder whether the philosophy found in novels by Gervais de la Touche and Abbé Duprat is there to legitimate pornography; but this of course made little difference from the perspective of consequences. Didier Foucault does not give us a reading of Montesquieu’s Temple de Gnide or Diderot’s Bijoux indiscrets; nor does he extend his project to the quite un-Enlightened works of Sade. He makes a strong case, however, for an evolution in thinking about female gender, arguing that there is some humanizing conscience in the Enlightenment, and I would agree. But did the quite vitriolic debates about so many issues in the seventeenth century, which diffused skeptical ideas in works written to refute them (Alan Kors) give way to the heavy hand of politesse? The venerable adage about the charcoal-maker’s faith, or lack thereof (he believes what the church believes, and the church believes what he believes), provides Alain Mothu with a key for proposing a very strong and valuable summa on the religious history of Europe in the early-modern centuries. His account of religious beliefs does not square, however, with Comptes rendus PFSCL XLVI, 90 (2019) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2019-0010 217 what the peasants of Montaillou believed (according to Bishop Fournier). There is little doubt that Catholicism, among country people all across Europe, consisted of a superficial and externalized corpus of rituals and practices. The charcoal-maker adage seems to have appeared as early as the late-sixteenth century, and this fact suggests a more subtle awareness of what was at stake in educating the lower clergy. Tyler Lange’s The First French Reformation (Cambridge, UK, 2014) suggests that the increased independence from Rome prepared by humanist learning and the reading of canonical texts individually would be a problem until French Catholics stopped reading the Bible (they had barely started! ), and reading-preaching matter became much more uniform and univocal. Did the Catholic Church change so much in the sixteenth century that the charcoal-maker lost his way? A sunset moment occurred in the 1620s when debates over Augustinian teachings led to a certain zizanie among clerical elites. During a visit to Paris, the charcoal-maker witnessed a fruit tree in full bloom in the middle of winter, his grandson waited on his knees before a miracle at Port- Royal, and his great-great-granddaughter eagerly worshiped at Saint- Médard. The soundness of Alain Mothu’s history of the church is to be commended. 1 Orest Ranum 1 This last article actually appears between those of Houdard and Paganini; but I took it up last, in order to write a conclusion that suggests continuity.