Descartes was personally a believer, a sincere Catholic. His education by theJesuits of La Flèche, and the philosophy they had taught him there, had markedhim profoundly. This man, whose mind is so free and enquiring, who was always soconscious of a vitally important intellectual vocation, who grounded all hisphilosophy on a daring effort to doubt everything, that he might vanquish doubtby doubt and is discover the unimpeachable certainties implied in the veryexistence of the thinking self, this founder of modern rationalism never doubtedthe Catholic creed; he could even be blamed for being insufficiently aware ofthat anxious questing restlessness of the soul that is worked upon and deepenedby Faith. To the Protestant theologians who tried to force the religious issueon him, he answered smiling that he preferred to remain in the religion of hisking and his nurse.
He was not giving them his reasons for believing; he meant merely that hepreferred to be left in peace on this matter. His death was nobly and genuinelyChristian. That fine sense he always had of the dignity of reason andintellectual integrity, of the grandeur of created nature, was itself religious.I am sure that at the opening of his philosophical career, with the illuminativeexperience of November 10th, 1619, still vivid within him, he was equallydesirous of establishing the principles of physical geometry—his workpar excellence— and of grounding Christian doctrineon such firm foundations that atheists and sceptics would be silenced for ever.And with all this his hostility to Theology was stubborn and bitter andcalculating. How explain this paradox?
