GREASING THE SKIDS TO THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES:

Charlie Hebdo has suddenly become the best-known example of a venerable French tradition: vituperative and unrelenting anti-religious satire, a provocative yet regular phenomenon of French public life. And now--not, alas, for the first time in that nation's history--it has occasioned actual bloodshed.

Lampooning of the Bible, Christian doctrine, and clergy dates back almost 400 years to the "strong thinkers," French learned skeptics in the 16th century. The primary target of anti-religious satire was France's official religion, Catholicism, the Church's ties to the state, and its control over education. And the ridiculing wit long directed against these targets would eventually play a central and crucial role in reducing the status and influence of religion in the French Republic.

This tradition began among a small number of French theology students studying in Italy, where they encountered Renaissance humanism--free of the magisterial synthesis of Aristotelianism and Catholicism provided by St. Thomas Aquinas. Reading Aristotle, and newly re-discovered ancient materialists like Epicurus and Lucretius, as rejecting the immateriality and immortality of the soul, Pietro Pompanazzi (1463-1525) and Cesare Cremonini (1550-1631) fomented skepticism among their French students.

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