He was in fact a deist with the inevitable leaning of the philosophic theist to pantheism; and whatever he may have said to arouse priestly hatred at Toulouse, he was rather less of an atheist than Spinoza or Bruno or John Scotus. On his trial, [248] pressed as to his real beliefs by judges who had doubtless challenged his identification of God with Nature, he passed from a profession of orthodox faith in a trinity into a flowing discourse which could as well have availed for a vindication of pantheism as for the proposition of a personal God. Seeing a straw on the ground, he picked it up and talked of its history; and when brought back again from his affirmation of Deity to his doctrine of Nature, he set forth the familiar orthodox theorem that, while Nature wrought the succession of seeds and fruits, there must have been a first seed which was created. It was the habitual standing ground of theism; and they burned him all the same. It remains an open question whether personal enmity on the part of the prosecuting official [249] or a real belief that he had uttered blasphemies against Jesus or Mary was the determining force, or whether even less motive sufficed. A vituperative Jesuit of that age sees intolerable freethinking in his suggestion of the unreality of demoniacal possession and the futility of exorcisms. [250] And for that much they were not incapable of burning men in Catholic Toulouse in the days of Mary de Medici.
There are in fact reasons for surmizing that in the cases alike of Bruno and of Vanini it was the attitude of the speculator towards scientific problems that primarily or mainly aroused distrust and anger among the theologians. Vanini is careful to speak equivocally of the eternity of the universe; and though he makes a passing mention of Kepler, [251] he does not name Copernicus. He had learned something from the fate of Bruno. Yet in the Dialogue De coeli forma et motore [252] he declares so explicitly for a naturalistic explanation of the movements of the heavenly bodies that he must have aroused in some orthodox readers such anger as was set up in Plato by a physical theory of sun and stars. After an à priori discussion on Aristotelian lines, the querist in the dialogue asks what may fitly be held, with an eye to religion, concerning the movements of the spheres. "This," answers Vanini, "unless I am in error: the mass of the heaven is moved in its proper gyratory way by the nature of its elements." "How then," asks the querist, "are the heavens moved by certain and fixed laws, unless divine minds, participating in the primal motion, there operate?" "Where is the wonder?" returns Vanini. "Does not a certain and fixed law of motion act in the most paltry clockwork machines, made by a drunken German, even as there works silently in a tertian and quartan fever a motion which comes and goes at fixed periods without transgressing its line by a moment? The sea also at certain and fixed times, by its nature, as you peripatetics affirm, is moved in progressions and regressions. No less, then, I affirm the heaven to be forever carried by the same motion in virtue of its nature (a sua pura forma) and not to be moved by the will of intelligence." And the disciple assents. Kepler had seen fit, either in sincerity or of prudence, to leave "divine minds" in the planets; and Vanini's negation, though not accompanied by any assertion of the motion of the earth, was enough to provoke the minds which had only three years before put Copernicus on the Index, and challenged Galileo for venting his doctrine.