Descartes and Father Gibieuf's Book

During his travels, Father Mersenne had sent Mr. Descartes various literary news, including one on the recent publication of a book by Father Gibieuf.

The book, titled On the Liberty of God and the Creature, was written in Latin and had recently been published by Cottereau in Paris.

Mersenne also provided a summary of the book’s main points. The importance of the subject matter and the author’s reputation immediately sparked Descartes’ desire to acquire the book.

While waiting for it to become available at Amsterdam bookshops, he wrote back to Father Mersenne in these terms:

“If you see Father Gibieuf, you will oblige me greatly by telling him how much I esteem him and Father De Gondren, and how much I have shown you that I approve of and follow the opinions you told me are in his book. You will tell him that I have not yet dared to write to him, because I am ashamed of not yet having been able to get it to read it, having only heard of it since you left Paris. I will not be upset if he also knows, more particularly than my other friends, that I am studying something other than the art of using weapons. As for the others, you have obliged me by speaking to them as you did, (by taking away the idea that I have any intention of ever having anything printed in my life, and that I want to study for other purposes than my own private instruction).”

Father Gibieuf had not forgotten Descartes in the distribution of his book to his friends.

However, he had not found a convenient way to send Descartes the copy he had intended for him during the entire time Father Mersenne was away, as Mersenne was the only person in France who knew Descartes’s address. Upon his return, Mersenne did not fail to send the book to him, along with other books and novelties or curiosities of the time he had been able to collect, as was his custom.

Descartes received the package towards the end of the year and replied to Gibieuf around February of the following year to thank him and share his thoughts:

“I have only read very little of Father Gibieuf’s book yet: but I greatly esteem what I have seen of it, and I completely subscribe to his opinion. Mr. Reneri has asked me to lend it to him, which has prevented me from reading it all the way through. Besides, as my mind is now filled with other thoughts, I believed I would not be able to fully understand this matter, which is in my opinion one of the highest and most difficult in metaphysics. If you see Father Gibieuf, I beg you not to let him know that I have yet received his book. For my duty would be to write to him now to thank him for it. But I will be very happy to delay for two or three more months, in order to let him know news of what I am doing at the same time.”

We have lost the letter that Descartes wrote to Father Gibieuf to give him an account of the benefit he got from reading his book. However, we learn from what he told Father Mersenne on various occasions that he highly approved of the work, that he was in complete agreement with the author on free will, and that he later studied how to explain the indifference of God and man and the other matters concerning will and liberty in the same manner as this author. When objections were raised to him ten years later on the part of his meditations where he speaks of this matter, he did not believe he should be too bothered to answer them, judging that it was more the cause of Father Gibieuf than his own, or at least that he would have a skilled advocate in him.

“Indifference is rather a defect than a perfection of liberty in us, it does not follow from that that it is the same in God. And yet I do not know that it is a matter of faith to believe that he is indifferent. I promise myself that Father Gibieuf will defend my cause well on this point. For I have written nothing that does not agree with what he has put in his book On the Liberty of God and the Creature.”

Father Gibieuf’s book made a great sensation in its early days among scholars, especially among those who dabbled in theology. A religious of the Augustinian order named A. Riviere lent his name to a famous theologian who lived in Lyon to examine it. This theologian was not entirely to Descartes’s taste in the judgment he made of it. For having published a book in the same year against the Calvinists on the liberty of man and the grace of Jesus Christ, under the title of (…), he appeared to have wanted to give Calvinism wider boundaries than it had had until then, and to include various Roman Catholics, the main ones being Bannés or Bagnez, a Spanish Dominican, Estius, chancellor of the university of Douay, and particularly Father Gibieuf. But this pretended Riviere did not succeed in discrediting the doctrine of these authors, and he had the confusion of seeing himself condemned in Rome, where his book was put on the “index”, and censored in a decree of the sacred congregation given on the 19th day of March of the year 1633.

Descartes’s Math Problems

The reputation that Mr. Descartes had made for himself in France on mathematics gave Father Mersenne a lot of exercise. Individuals, knowing that there was no other way of communication than the channel of this father to send their consultations to Mr. Descartes, and to receive the answers, went in crowds to his convent to bring him their questions, and returned to take the solutions and clarifications of Mr. Descartes. This competition gave this father an occupation of which he had the kindness of never complaining: and not content with exhorting Mr. Descartes to answer all the questions that were proposed to him in the packets he sent him, he still challenged him to send him on his side problems to propose to others, of which he took charge of sending him back the solutions. Descartes, who perhaps did not have the patience of Father Mersenne, reminded him that he had given up the study of mathematics for several years; and that he was trying not to waste his time anymore on sterile operations of geometry and arithmetic, whose end led to nothing important. He made him know that he was no longer in the intention of proposing any problem to others, and that he believed he was taking a lot on himself to reduce himself from now on to solving only the problems of others, of which he was already very tired.

In the same year that Mr. Descartes sent Father Mersenne for the last time problems of his own making, which he had found long before with no other help than that of simple geometry, that is to say, of the rule and the compass, the public lost one of the first mathematicians of this century in the person of Jean Kepler, who died in the month of November. He was born in Weil in Swabia in the duchy of Württemberg on the 27th day of December of the year 1571, and he had made himself known since the year 1595 by works that had attracted him the esteem of Galileo and Tycho Brahe. He had particularly cultivated astronomy and optics: and although he left behind him many things to discover or to perfect, it must nevertheless be admitted that the reading of his writings had not been useless to Mr. Descartes. He had been a professor of mathematics in Graz in Styria since the year 1594, until in 1600 he went to live in Bohemia with Tycho Brahe; and he was made mathematician to the emperor, on the condition nevertheless that he would not leave Tycho, and that he would work under him. The care of his appointments having made him go to the diet of Regensburg which was held in 1630, he was attacked in this city by a disease, which carried him away at the beginning of November, after 58 years ten months and a few days of life.

Descartes’s London Journey

At the same time, Le Comte de Marcheville, named by the king to be his ambassador to the Porte, was thinking about the preparations for his trip to be in a state to leave at the end of the winter.

This count who had no less generosity to advance the sciences was thinking of making his embassy remarkable, especially by the number and the merit of the scholars he intended to take to Constantinople and in the Levant.

Gassendi was retained to make the trip, and he had already written to his friends in Germany and the Netherlands, to offer them his services in all the places where he was to go.

Sieur Jean Jacques Bouchard, a Parisian living in Rome, Sieur Holstein or Holstenius of Hamburg, canon of the Vatican, and some other scholars of Italy were preparing to join the embassy. Mr. de Chasteüil and Father Théophile Minuti, a Minim, were to be found immediately at Peiresc’s in Beaugensier to wait there for the ambassador: and they were talking of nothing less than taking away from the East all its manuscripts and its other rarities concerning the advancement of the sciences. The Count de Marcheville had Mr. Descartes asked if he would honor the embassy with his company, and Sieur Ferrier, who was looking for every opportunity to get back into commerce with Mr. Descartes, was charged with the commission of writing to him about it.

Descartes was extremely surprised by the proposal of Mr. de Marcheville, because he did not believe he was known to him, and that they had no relation together in any way. This is what made him suspect the fidelity of Sieur Ferrier, and which obliged him to write back to Father Mersenne in these terms.

“It has been eight days since I received a letter from Sieur F, by which he invites me as on behalf of Mr. de Marcheville to make the trip to Constantinople. I laughed at that: for besides that I am now very far from the intention of traveling, I believed it was more a pretense of my man to oblige me to answer him, than to imagine that Mr. de Marcheville, of whom I do not have at all the honor of being known, had given him the charge of it, as he tells me. Nevertheless, if by chance that were true, which you can know without a doubt from Mr. Gassendi who must make the trip with him; I will be very happy that he knows that I feel extremely obliged to serve him for the honest offers he makes me, and that I would have cherished such an occasion four or five years ago, as one of the best fortunes that could have happened to me. But I am now busy with designs that cannot allow me to: and Mr. Gassendi would oblige me extremely, if he would take the trouble to tell him that on my behalf, and to testify to him that I am his very humble servant. As for Sieur Ferrier, as he is not a man on whose letters I would want to rely to make some resolution, I also did not believe I should answer him. I will be very happy that you show Mr. Gassendi what I am writing to you on this subject, and that you assure him that I esteem and honor him extremely. I would have written to him in particular for that, if I had thought that what was being told to me was true. For the rest, I will be very happy that it is known that I am not, thanks to God, in a condition to travel, to seek fortune; and that I am content enough with the one I possess, not to bother to have another: but that if I travel sometimes, it is only to learn, and to satisfy my curiosity.”

Descartes was not the only one who failed to make the trip to Constantinople. Mr. Gassendi, despite all the desire he showed for it, could not be there.

Bouchard and Holstenius with all their diligence could not have their affairs ready for the time of departure, although Mr. de Marcheville had been obliged to defer it until the 20th day of July 1631. Of so many scholars, there was only Mr. de Chasteüil who embarked at Marseille with Mr. the ambassador.

It was not in the intention of searching for manuscripts or making physical observations that Mr. de Chasteüil undertook this trip. But he had engaged in his company Father Minuti, who some time before had brought back from the Levant to Mr. de Peiresc a beautiful manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch on which Mr. de Chasteüil had made scholarly notes, and who was still charged by the same Mr. de Peiresc to search for and buy what he could find of manuscripts of oriental languages, as Golius had done.

De Chasteüil, nicknamed the hermit of Mount Lebanon, was a gentleman from the city of Aix-en-Provence, a little more than seven and a half years older than Descartes.

He had been noticed from his first youth by the practice of Christian virtues, and by the exercise of his studies in human sciences, and particularly in mathematics and oriental languages. He had then renounced mathematics, and especially astrology, to reduce himself to the unique study of the Holy Scripture according to the literal sense.

This study finished by disgusting him with the company of people of the world, and greatly increased the love of solitude, that the application to mathematics had given him. It even inspired him with the desire to abandon his parents and his own country, to retire to places where he could not be known or frequented by people of his acquaintance.

He believed that Mount Lebanon could provide him with the most advantageous retreat he had known how to find for his purposes, as much because the Maronites who live there are Catholic peoples, subject to the Holy See, living in misery and poverty, as because he hoped to find in the monasteries of his deserts religious intelligent enough in oriental languages to remove for him the difficulties of the Holy Scripture, that the scholars of the West could not resolve.

In this resolution he followed the ambassador of France to Constantinople, from where after various conferences he had with the Jews on the text of the scripture, he passed to Mount Lebanon the following year. He remained there until his death in the exercises of an austere and penitent life, and was sanctified in an exquisite solitude, which could not be altered, either by the solicitations of the world, or by the interior movements of his passions, or by the practices of the enemy of our salvation.

The solitude of Mr. Descartes was not of the same nature: and it does not belong to us to want to penetrate into the designs of God, who always makes the wisdom of his providence known in the diversity of the paths by which he leads men to their end. It seems that it was interrupted this same year by the trip to England, which he had not been able to do the previous year according to the first measures he had taken for it.

We have seen that he had prepared for this trip from the month of March of the year 1630 in the intention of embarking in the following month of April.

The difficulties that arose then led him until the month of December, where he made known that he had not yet lost the intention: and it is very probable that he waited to execute it in the spring or in the summer of the following year. The uncertainty of the time at which this trip should be placed is not a sufficient reason to lead us to deny that he made it.

The way he spoke 9 years later of the city of London, and of some observations he seemed to have made in the vicinity of this city, almost does not allow us to doubt it.

Here is how he explained himself then to Father Mersenne, who had sent him the observation of the declinations of the magnet which vary in England, by a letter of the fourth day of March of the year 1640.

**“I do not believe that the declinations of the magnet come from elsewhere than from the inequalities of the earth, I also do not believe that the variation of these declinations has another cause than the alterations that are made in the mass of the earth; either that the sea gains on one side and loses on the other, as one can see with the eye that it does in this country; or that iron mines are generated on one side, or that they are exhausted on the other; or only that some quantity of iron, or brick, or clay has been transported from one side of the city of London towards the other. For I remember that wanting to see the time on a quadrant where there was a needle rubbed with magnet, being in the fields near a house which had large iron grilles at the windows, I found a lot of variation in the needle, even moving away more than a hundred steps from this house, and passing from its eastern part towards the western, to better notice the difference. As for the sky, it is not believable that enough change has happened there in so few years, to cause this variation: for the astronomers would have easily noticed it.”