Theological Origins of Modernity

descartes’ path to truth 183
and may have been infl uenced by Gibieuf’s notion of divine omnipotence,
but there is little evidence that he saw himself carrying out or participating
in Bérulle’s project. While he was critical of humanistic science because it
sought only the probable truth, he was no friend of religious fanaticism.
Why did Descartes leave Paris and hide himself away from the public
eye? He himself gives us a preliminary answer to this question with his
famous assertion that “he lives well who lives unseen.” 57 Th is humanist
claim, however, does not capture the truth of the matter, for Descartes
did not really retreat from society. In fact, he moved around a great deal,
spending considerable time in Amsterdam, which he called his “urban
solitude,” and in a number of smaller towns. It was not therefore a bucolic,
Petrarchian solitude that Descartes was seeking. It is more likely
that he wanted to fi nd a place he could work and publish more freely and
without fear of retaliation. On May 5, 1632, he wrote a paean on Holland
to his friend, the poet Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac: “What other land [is
there] where one can enjoy a liberty so entire, where one can sleep with
less inquietude, where there are always armies afoot expressly to guard
you, where poisonings, treason, calumnies are less known, and where the
innocence of former times remains?” 58 It is important to remember that he
had already been accused of Rosicrucianism. His fears on this score were
not misplaced, as the actions taken against a number of the libertines indicate.
Already in the Little Notebook, he had recognized the need to conceal
his true features and during his years in Holland he went to great lengths
to develop and perfect this mask. In fact, Descartes assiduously cultivated
the appearance of orthodoxy, although it is clear that at least theologically
he had adopted heterodox positions from very early on. 59
During the early years of his stay in Holland, Descartes tried to lay out
in print his method and the doctrine of clear and distinct ideas that he
had been thinking about for the previous decade. Th is eff ort was a continuation
of the work he had apparently begun the year before (1628) but
left incomplete, his Rules for the Regulation of the Mind. Th is work seems
on the surface to be the realization of the plan for the science that he had
described as early as 1619 to Beeckman and in the interim to Mersenne and
others. Descartes, however, did not complete the work, apparently because
he began to refl ect on the metaphysical and theological assumptions of his
science and saw problems posed for it by the idea of divine omnipotence
as it appeared in nominalism and in the theology of Luther and Calvin.
Descartes’ original idea of an apodictic science rested upon the eternal
truth of mathematics. If God was omnipotent, however, such truths could
not bind him. Indeed, he must have created them and in principle he thus