The Unorthodoxy of de Vallone

Abstract

This completes the account both of de Vallone’s life and of his manuscript. As far as the latter is concerned one can say that it is a cogently written and consistent piece of work. Apart from his imaginative speculations on Christology, and the solution which he, accidentally, almost, proposes for the problem of evil, as far as it concerns the lot of men unhappy in this life, it is, in its individual components, not original. That is to say, one can trace the influences that have affected its author; Plato, Origen and Augustine; Descartes, de Cordemoy and Malebranche; the men who talked or wrote of the anima mundi and the “grand tout”; Spinoza and Richard Simon; and, of course, Pierre Bayle. The remarkable thing is that this eclectic collection has been woven into a coherent whole — into the system which as a young man he showed signs of wanting to develop, though he could hardly then have guessed at the form which it would ultimately take. This system can be criticised. The individual elements are open to the objections which can be brought against their first begetters — against de Cordemoy’s occasionalism, for example. In giving the analysis which has just been concluded, the conciseness of the whole may have been exaggerated, though the system is remarkably consistent. On the other hand de Vallone’s knowledge of the Latin poets, whom he frequently quotes, and his inclusion of a number of good stories, such as that related by the Jesuit, Le Comte, of the Chinese whom he converted because the old man had been told, by his pagan priests, that, since he was in receipt of a pension from the Emperor, he would, in the next life, be a horse in the Imperial service, have perforce had to be omitted.^[1]