Le fourvoiement paradoxal du Magisterio de la fe y de la razón (1761) du père Calatayud dans sa guerre contre une hétérodoxie virale : le “libertinage philosophique”

• Main Author: Frédéric Prot
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains 2009-06-01
• Series: Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos
• Subjects: 18th Century; christian scepticism; Feijoo; filosofical libertinism; novatores
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/56502

The multifaceted figure of the “erudite libertine” is a creation of the Christian apologetics of the 17th century in order to disqualify a large variety of philosophical, metaphysical and scientific alternatives to the scholastic-Aristotelian system. In his Magisterio de la fe y de la razon (1761), Jesuit Calatayud recognizes these alternatives as a subversive emancipation of the thought meant to sink into incredulity and atheism. Fighting against a conspirator Century, he denounces the ambitions of the critical philosophy freed of its submission to faith, dogma and Aristotle. In Calatayud’s view, Christian skepticism, which runs the new experimental science, through probabilism or new Cartesian “dogmatism” at the origin of the refoundation of Physics and Metaphysics, is the expression of a wandering and arrogant reason, which does not generate any true certainty but a thunder of opinions gathered against orthodoxy. As a paradox, his scholastic dogmatism, exacerbated by his willingness to fight an inside enemy with multiple identities, leads to a certain heterodoxy, in contradiction with his apparent fideism.