Clandestine philosophy and the De la Sagesse of Pierre Charron

Abstract

Pierre Charron's De La Sagesse was a very influential book during the seventeenth century, especially for the libertines, who reserved a prominent place for it in their library and used its arguments to fight the religious superstition and even the belief in God. Ideas such as the contradiction of the religion to the reason, the defense of an autonomous morality which leads to happiness without the assistance of grace (superiority of the human nature as human), and the apology of the strong-spirits who cast doubt on everything, are conceptions, disseminated in the libertine literature, that find in the work of Charron its main source. In his work, the principle according to which the wise man should judge everything and the disjunction between the internal and the external reigns would strongly impact on the posterity - reasons why some of its readers would find in De La Sagesse a great risk of impiety. Considering that, this paper will show that the foundations of the clandestine philosophy, which uses reason to attack religion, in a great measure, draws on charronian arguments to construct its discourse. We intend to show how a certain reading of Charron - which by the way distorts his original intentions - has served as the basis for the irreligious philosophical thought of the Enlightenment century.