by the scholarly performance of Richard Simon (1638-1712), who was
as regards the Scriptural texts what Spencer of Cambridge was as
regards the culture-history of the Hebrews, one of the founders of
modern methodical criticism. It was as a devout Catholic refuting
Protestants, and a champion of the Bible against Spinoza, that
Simon began his work; but, more sincerely critical than Huet, he
reached views more akin to those of Spinoza than to those of the
Church. [614] The congregation of the Oratory, where Simon laid the
foundations of his learning, was so little inclined to his critical
views that he decided to leave it; and though persuaded to stay,
and to become for a time a professor of philosophy at Julli, he at
length broke with the Order. Then, from his native town of Dieppe,
came his strenuous series of critical works--L'histoire critique du
Vieux Testament (1678), which among other things decisively impugned
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; the Histoire critique du
texte du Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam, 1689); numerous other volumes
of critical studies on texts, versions, and commentators; and finally
a French translation of the New Testament with notes. His Bibliothèque
Critique (4 vols. under the name of Saint-Jore) was suppressed by an
order in council; the translation was condemned by Bossuet and the
Archbishop of Paris; and the two first-named works were suppressed by
the Parlement of Paris and attacked by a host of orthodox scholars;
but they were translated promptly into Latin and English; and they
gave a new breadth of footing to the deistic argument, though Simon
always wrote as an avowed believer.
Before Simon, the Protestant Isaac la Peyrère, the friend of La
Mothe le Vayer and Gassendi, and the librarian of Condé, had fired
a somewhat startling shot at the Pentateuch in his Præadamitæ [615]
and Systema Theologica ex Præ-adamitarum Hypothesi (both 1655: printed
in Holland [616]), for which he was imprisoned at Brussels, with the
result that he recanted and joined the Church of Rome, going to the
Pope in person to receive absolution, and publishing an Epistola ad
Philotimum (Frankfort, 1658), in which he professed to explain his
reasons for abjuring at once his Calvinism and his treatise. It
is clear that all this was done to save his skin, for there is
explicit testimony that he held firmly by his Preadamite doctrine
to the end of his life, despite the seven or eight confutations of
his work published in 1656. [617] Were it not for his constructive
theses--especially his idea that Adam was a real person, but simply
the father of the Hebrews and not of the human race--he would deserve
to rank high among the scientific pioneers of modern rationalism,
for his negative work is shrewd and sound. Like so many other early
rationalists, collectively accused of "destroying without replacing,"
he erred precisely in his eagerness to build up, for his negations
have all become accepted truths. [618] As it is, he may be ranked,
after Toland, as a main founder of the older rationalism, developed
chiefly in Germany, which sought to reduce as many miracles as possible
to natural events misunderstood. But he was too far before his time to
win a fair hearing. Where Simon laid a cautious scholarly foundation,
Peyrère suddenly challenged immemorial beliefs, and failed accordingly.