New Conversations

...established; thus, without anyone noticing, Theology and Morality would have necessarily changed their appearance. This would have been easy in those times; I do not know if it will be so now. Disciples of those great men I was telling you about have taken it upon themselves to undertake this, and they are promoting a new Philosophy as best they can. As their intention is good, and as all of this only tends toward continuing the plan of our Reformation, I would be grateful to them if they did not do two things. The first is attributing to Descartes René Descartes (1596–1650), whose "Cartesian" philosophy sought to ground knowledge in reason and doubt, often seen by contemporaries as a threat to traditional religious authority. the glory of an invention that belongs to my Great-Great-Grandfather Trisayeul: A specific term for a great-great-grandfather, emphasizing a long ancestral lineage. and to me. And the second is that they take at face value all the daydreams that Descartes added of his own accord—which are, nonetheless, entirely capable of utterly ruining Christian Morality, were it not already ruined.

They are quite wrong on both these points, I said to him; but I am not clever enough to untangle what Descartes has mixed of his own into the speculations of your Great-Great-Grandfather Jordanus Brunus original: "Jordanus Brunus"; the Latinized name of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), the Italian philosopher and occultist whose cosmological theories led to his execution by the Inquisition., whose works I have never read. I do not even know the Philosophy of Descartes well enough,