LAUSR

This article provides an account of how Caspar Langenhert (1661–c. 1730) attempted to reconcile teaching a controversial “egoist” metaphysics in Paris with his reasons for rejecting Calvinism, leaving the Netherlands, and joining the Catholic Church. Langenhert had renounced Calvinism especially because he took the Calvinist account of free will to be philosophically, morally, and scripturally dubious. He preferred the notion of indifference in explaining freedom. That did not seem to accord well with his later work, the Novus Philosophus (1701–1702), whose supposedly “egoist” metaphysics appears to deny such freedom to creatures. Langenhert’s own defence would have been that there was no conflict here, because of the unusually strong distinction he drew between the domains of metaphysics and theology, but his attempts to sidestep his apparent unorthodoxy seem to have been unconvincing to the Parisian authorities, and Langenhert was required to cease teaching.