Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

55. Bowle, Op. cit., page 381. See: Richard H. Popkin, ‘Spinoza and Bible scholarship’, in: Don Garrett (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pages 383ff, which has many of Spinoza’s more pithy remarks on the scriptures.

56. R. H. Delahunty, Spinoza, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, pages 211–212.

57. Bowle, Op. cit., page 383.

58. Delahunty, Op. cit., page 7.

59. Bowle, Op. cit., page 386.

60. Ibid., page 387.

61. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, page 591.

62. Giuseppe Mazzitta, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999, pages 100–101.

63. Bowle, Op. cit., page 389.

64. Joseph Mali, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s ‘New Science’, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992, page 48.

65. Ibid., pages 99ff, for the role of providence and curiosity.

66. Bowle, Op. cit., page 393.

67. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 233, for the way some of these ideas are echoed by Oswald Spengler.

68. Bowle, Op. cit., page 395.

69. T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, page 2.

70. Ibid., page 137.

71. Ibid., page 208.

72. Ibid., page 151.

73. Ibid., pages 156–159.

74. Israel, Op. cit., page 150.

75. Ibid., page 151.

76. Blanning, Op. cit., page 169.

CHAPTER 25: THE ‘ATHEIST SCARE’ AND THE ADVENT OF DOUBT

1. It was, as Thomas Kuhn puts it, in his monograph on the Copernican revolution, ‘the first European astronomical text that could rival the Almagest in depth and completeness’. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, Op. cit., page 185.

2. Ibid., page 186.

3. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 330.

4. Popkin, The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought, Op. cit., pages 102–103. See also: Moynahan, The Faith, Op. cit., page 354.

5. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 357.

6. Ibid., page 359.

7. Ibid., page 360.

8. Simon Fish, A Supplicacyion for the Beggars Rosa, quoted in Menno Simons, The Complete Writings, Scotsdale: University of Arizona Press, 1956, pages 140–141.

9. Armstrong, Op. cit., page 330.

10. Interestingly, Anaxagoras, an Ionian, and a pupil of Anaximenes of Miletus, held a number of views that anticipated Copernicus. He taught that the sun was not ‘animated’ in the way that the Athenians believed, and neither was it a god, but ‘a red-hot mass many times larger than the Peloponnese’. He also insisted that the moon was a solid body with geographical features – plains and mountains and valleys – just like the earth. Anaxagoras also believed that the world was round. J. M. Robertson, A History of Freethought, volume 1, London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969, page 166.

11. In fact there appears to have been something of a fashion for freethinking in Periclean Athens, where the aristocrats foreshadowed the thought in Voltaire’s France, in believing that ‘the common people’ needed religion ‘to restrain them’, but that they themselves needed no such restriction.

12. Thrower, The Alternative Tradition, Op. cit., pages 173 and 225–226.

13. Robertson, Op. cit., page 181.

14. Thrower, Op. cit., pages 204ff and 223.

15. Ibid., pages 63–65.

16. Ibid., page 84.

17. Ibid., page 122.

18. Robertson, Op. cit., pages 395–396.

19. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Op. cit., page 25.

20. Ibid., page 32.

21. Ibid., page 70.

22. Ibid., page 161.

23. Robertson, Op. cit., pages 319–323.

24. Lucien Febvre, The Problems of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982, page 457.

25. Jim Herrick, Against the Faith, London: Glover Blair, 1985, page 29.

26. Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History, Op. cit., page 712.

27. Though terrible for many people, it was at the same time liberating because, as Harry Elmer Barnes says, it freed man from ‘the medieval hell-neurosis’.

28. Barnes, Op. cit., page 714.