Theological Origins of Modernity

334 notes to pages 177–182
37. Watson, Cogito, 134.
38. Cole points to the signifi cance of this date. “Olympian Dream,” 63–86.
39. Baillet refers to three dreams even though by his own account there were only
two. In all likelihood his emphasis on three dreams is an attempt to assimilate
Descartes to Ignatius Loyola, who also had three dreams that determined the
course of his life. Watson, Cogito, 134.
40. Ibid., 109–110.
41. Alan Gabbey and Robert Holly, “Th e Melon and the Dictionary: Refl ections on
Descartes’s Dreams,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59, no. 4 (1998): 655. Paul
Arnold claimed that Olympica was allegorical fi ction composed in the manner of
the Rosicrucians. “Le songe de Descartes,” Cahiers du Sud 35 (1952): 274–91.
42. Watson has pointed out that these subtitles are very likely Rosicrucian. Traiano
Boccolini’s Advertisements from Parnassus was published with Th e Fame of the
Order of the Rosy Cross in 1614, and the prolifi c Rosicrucian writer Michael Maier
speaks of Olympic Houses where brethren might work and dwell in his Golden
Th emis. Cogito, 108. Th e connection to the scientifi c houses described in Bacon’s
New Atlantis is clear, although this work was not published until 1627. It thus
could not have been the source of the ideas in the Little Notebook. Th e similarities
are probably the result of a mutual indebtedness to Hermeticism.
43. Cited in Cole, Olympian Dream, 28.
44. Ibid., 25.
45. He probably derived this notion from Bacon or Pico, as Richard Kennington
points out in his “Descartes’ ‘Olympica,’” Social Research 28, no. 2 (Summer, 1961):
184.
46. Th e evil spirit is clearly linked to Descartes’ sins, and therefore sin and not a spirit
is the cause of the fi rst dream. Ibid., 177. Descartes is perhaps refl ecting here on the
problems that arise for both Luther and Calvin in their attempts to explain evil.
As omnipotent, God must also be the source of evil. Th is is the hidden God that
Luther argues we must not investigate and that he fruitlessly sought to placate by
entering the monastery.
47. And not reasons in the simple sense, as Kennington asserts. Ibid., 180.
48. Ibid., 200.
49. Georg Sebba, Th e Dream of Descartes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1987), 53.
50. Keefer, “Th e Dreamer’s Path,” 47. Pyrrhonist skepticism was more radical than
Academic skepticism. It was founded by Aenesidemus in the fi rst century B.C.E.
and named aft er the earlier skeptic Pyrrho. It became increasingly important for
early modern thought, when the Outlines of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus was
published in 1562.
51. Ibid., 45.
52. On the challenge of skepticism for Descartes, see Popkin, Skepticism, 178–79. For
an alternative account of Descartes’ relationship to skepticism, see Gaukroger,
Descartes, 311–15. On the libertines, see ibid., 135–39; and René Pintard, Le Libertinage
érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Boivin, 1943).