Le VIe traité du Theophrastus redivivus: Nature, Raison, bonheur et liberté?

Abstract

In 1937, the scholar Spink (1909–1985) discovered at the Bibliotheque nationale de France a bulky anonymous manuscript, written in Latin, with an impressive title: Theophrastus redivivus, sive historia de iis quae dicuntur de diis, de mundo, de religione, de anima, de inferis et daemonibus, de contemnenda morte, de vita secundum naturam. Opus ex philosophorum opinionibus constructum et doctissimis theologis ad diruendum propositum. That text supposedly dated back to 1659. Translated, presented and annotated by Ostrowiecki-Bah, the VIth and last treatise of the Theophrastus (Life According to Nature), is reproduced in Volume II of, Libertins du XVIIe siecle. It is on that latter part that my study rests. That libertine voice, as eloquent as it is anonymous, is resolutely atheistic. From the outset, the author lists several philosophical doctrines from Antiquity, rejecting them one after the other because he finds them tainted with religion (rather surprising, especially for epicureanism). The only philosophical school he finds acceptable is stoicism, because it preaches that the sovereign good is to live according to virtue, that is “according to the experience of what conforms to that nature common to all animate beings and to Man…” For the Theophrastus, all that conforms to Nature also conforms inevitably to Reason, to which it attributes an absolute axiarchy, paradoxically resulting, in the end, in a tyranny just as oppressive as that of religion.