intellectual renascence. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century
there are increasing traces of rationalism at the court of the famous
Christina, who already in her youth is found much interested in the
objections of "Jews, heathens, and philosophers against Christian
doctrine"; [1516] and her invitation of Descartes to her court
(1649) implies that Sweden had been not a little affected by the
revulsion of popular thought which followed on the Thirty Years' War
in Germany. Christina herself, however, was a remarkable personality,
unfeminine, strong-willed, with a vigorous but immature intelligence;
and she did much of her early skeptical thinking for herself. In
the course of a few years, the new spirit had gone so far as to
make church-going matter for open scoffing at the Swedish court;
[1517] and the Queen's adoption of Romanism, for which she prepared
by abdicating the crown, appears to have been by way of revulsion
from a state of mind approaching atheism, to which she had been led
by her freethinking French physician, Bourdelot, after Descartes's
death. [1518] It has been confidently asserted that she really cared
for neither creed, and embraced Catholicism only by way of conformity
for social purposes, retaining her freethinking views. [1519] It is
certain that she was always unhappy in her Swedish surroundings. But
her course may more reasonably be explained as that of a mind which
could not rest in deism or face atheism, and sought in Catholicism
the sense of anchorage which is craved by temperaments ill-framed for
the discipline of reason. The author of the Histoire des intrigues
galantes de la reine Christine de Suède (1697), who seems to have
been one of her suite, insists that while she "loved bigots no more
than atheists," [1520] and although her religion had been shaken in
her youth by Bourdelot and other freethinkers, she was regular in all
Catholic observances; and that once, looking at the portrait of her
father, she said he had failed to provide for the safety of his soul,
and thanked God for having guided her aright. [1521]
Her annotations of Descartes are of little importance; but it is
noteworthy that she accorded to his orthodox adherents a declaration
that he had "greatly contributed" to her "glorious conversion" to the
Catholic faith. [1522] Whatever favour she may have shown to liberty
of thought in her youth, no important literary results could follow
in the then state of Swedish culture, when the studies at even the
new colleges were mainly confined to Latin and theology. [1523] The
German Pufendorf, indeed, by his treatises On the Law of Nature and
Nations and On the Duty of Man and Citizen (published at Lund, where he
was professor, in 1672-73), did much to establish the utilitarian and
naturalistic tendency in ethics which was at work at the same time in
England; but his latent deism had no great influence even in Germany,
his Scripture-citing orthodoxy countervailing it, although he argued
for a separation of Church and State. [1524]