Spirituality Without God by Peter Heehs;

Author:Peter Heehs;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Science, skepticism, rationality

Sometime around 1585, Michel de Montaigne paid a visit to a prince he knew and the two got to talking about witchcraft. Finding that his guest had some doubts about the subject, the prince took Montaigne to his prison to show him some women who were known for sure to be witches. Montaigne reviewed the evidence and heard the confessions, but he still thought it might be better to treat them as madwomen rather than tools of the devil. He did not for a moment doubt that there was such a thing as witchcraft: the Bible, he reminded his readers, “offers us of such things, very certain and irrefragable examples.” But he felt that where absolute proof was lacking it would be best to suspend one’s judgment. “After all,” he observed, “it is putting a very high price on one’s conjectures to have a man [or woman] roasted alive because of them.” Montaigne was writing in the middle of the witch-hunting craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when tens of thousands of women and men were convicted of witchcraft and put to death. In countries where Catholicism prevailed, sorcery was viewed as a special case of heresy and dealt with efficiently by the Inquisition. But in Germany, Scandinavia, Scotland, England, and New England, whole communities got caught up in riotous dramas of accusation and counter-accusation, generally leading to executions. Then, after a run of a hundred fifty years, the show trials became rare and finally stopped. Not everyone was pleased with this. In 1768 John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, expressed disappointment that “most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witchcraft and apparitions, as mere old wives’ fables.” This was a perilous error, he thought: “The giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible.”3

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