A — Athée, Athéisme

Formerly, whoever held a secret in some art ran the risk of passing for a sorcerer; every new sect was accused of cutting children’s throats in its mysteries; and every philosopher who departed from the jargon of the schools was accused of atheism by fanatics and by scoundrels, and condemned by fools.

Does Anaxagoras dare to maintain that the sun is not driven by Apollo mounted on a four-horse chariot? He is called an atheist, and he is forced to flee.

Aristotle is accused of atheism by a priest, and, unable to have his accuser punished, he withdraws to Chalcis. But the death of Socrates is the most hateful thing in the history of Greece.

Aristophanes (that man whom the commentators admire because he was Greek, never reflecting that Socrates was Greek too) was the first who accustomed the Athenians to look on Socrates as an atheist.

That comic poet, who is neither comic nor a poet, would not have been admitted among us to put on farces at the Saint-Laurent fair; he seems to me far baser and more contemptible than Plutarch paints him. Here is what the wise Plutarch says of that buffoon: “The language of Aristophanes smacks of the miserable charlatan; its sallies are the lowest and most disgusting; it is not even funny to the common people, and it is unbearable to people of judgment and honor; one cannot endure his arrogance, and honest men detest his malice.” This, then, to say it in passing, is the Tabarin whom Madame Dacier, an admirer of Socrates, dares to admire. This is the man who long beforehand prepared the poison with which infamous judges put to death the most virtuous man in Greece.

The tanners, the cobblers and the seamstresses of Athens applauded a farce in which Socrates was shown raised in the air in a basket, announcing that there was no God, and boasting of having stolen a cloak while teaching philosophy. A whole people, whose bad government allowed such infamous license, well deserved what happened to it: to become the slave of the Romans, and to be so today of the Turks.

Let us cross the whole span of time between the Roman republic and ourselves. The Romans, far wiser than the Greeks, never persecuted any philosopher for his opinions. It is not so with the barbarous peoples who succeeded the Roman Empire. As soon as the Emperor Frederick II quarrels with the popes, he is accused of being an atheist, and of being the author of the book of the three impostors, together with his chancellor de Vineis.

Does our great chancellor de l’Hôpital speak out against persecution? He is at once accused of atheism. A learned man, but a true atheist.¹ A Jesuit, as far beneath Aristophanes as Aristophanes is beneath Homer, a wretch whose name has become ridiculous even among fanatics, the Jesuit Garasse, in a word, finds atheists everywhere; that is what he calls all those against whom he rages. He calls Theodore Beza an atheist; it is he who misled the public about Vanini.

The unhappy end of Vanini does not stir us to indignation and pity as that of Socrates does, because Vanini was merely a foreign pedant without merit; but after all, Vanini was not an atheist, as has been claimed; he was precisely the opposite.

He was a poor Neapolitan priest, a preacher and theologian by trade; an incessant disputant on quiddities and universals; and whether a chimera buzzing in a void can devour second intentions. But otherwise there was not a trace of atheism in him. His notion of God is of the soundest and most approved theology: “God is his principle and his end, father of the one and of the other, and needing neither the one nor the other; eternal, without being in time; present everywhere without being in any place. For him there is neither past nor future; he is everywhere, and outside of everything; governing all, and having created all; immutable, infinite without parts; his power is his will, etc.”

Vanini prided himself on renewing that fine sentiment of Plato, embraced by Averroes, that God had created a chain of beings from the smallest to the greatest, whose last link is fastened to his eternal throne; an idea, in truth, more sublime than true, but as far from atheism as being is from nothingness.

He traveled to make his fortune and to dispute; but unhappily disputation is the road opposite to fortune; one makes as many irreconcilable enemies as one finds scholars or pedants against whom one argues. There was no other source of Vanini’s misfortune; his heat and his coarseness in disputation earned him the hatred of certain theologians; and having had a quarrel with a man named Francon or Franconi, this Francon, a friend of his enemies, did not fail to accuse him of being an atheist teaching atheism.

This Francon, or Franconi, helped by a few witnesses, had the barbarity to maintain at the confrontation what he had advanced. Vanini, on the stool of the accused, questioned about what he thought of the existence of God, answered that he adored with the church a God in three persons. Having taken a straw from the ground: “This straw is enough,” he said, “to prove that there is a creator.” Then he pronounced a very fine discourse on vegetation and movement, and on the necessity of a supreme being, without whom there would be neither movement nor vegetation.

President Grammont, who was then at Toulouse, reports this discourse in his history of France, today so forgotten; and this same Grammont, by an inconceivable prejudice, maintains that Vanini said all this out of vanity, or out of fear, rather than from inner conviction.

On what can this rash and atrocious judgment of President Grammont be founded? It is evident that on Vanini’s answer he ought to have been absolved of the accusation of atheism. But what happened? This unhappy foreign priest also dabbled in medicine; a large live toad was found, which he kept at home in a vase full of water; he was at once accused of being a sorcerer. It was maintained that this toad was the God he adored; an impious meaning was given to several passages of his books, which is very easy and very common, by taking objections for answers, by malignly interpreting some dubious phrase, by poisoning an innocent expression. At last the faction that oppressed him wrung from the judges the decree condemning this wretch to death.

To justify this death it was necessary to accuse the unfortunate man of the most frightful thing. The Minim friar, and a very minimal one, Mersenne carried madness so far as to print that Vanini had set out from Naples with twelve of his apostles to go and convert all nations to atheism. How pitiful! How could a poor priest have had twelve men in his pay? How could he have persuaded twelve Neapolitans to travel at great expense to spread everywhere this abominable and revolting doctrine at the risk of their lives? Would a king be powerful enough to pay twelve preachers of atheism? No one before Father Mersenne had advanced so enormous an absurdity. But after him it has been repeated, the journals have been infected with it, the historical dictionaries; and the world, which loves the extraordinary, has believed this fable without examination.

Bayle himself, in his miscellaneous thoughts, speaks of Vanini as an atheist; he uses this example to support his paradox that a society of atheists can subsist; he asserts that Vanini was a man of very regular morals, and that he was the martyr of his philosophical opinion. He is equally mistaken on both points. The priest Vanini tells us in his dialogues written in imitation of Erasmus that he had had a mistress named Isabelle. He was free in his writings as in his conduct; but he was not an atheist.

A century after his death, the learned La Croze, and the one who took the name of Philaletes, sought to vindicate him; but as no one takes an interest in the memory of an unhappy Neapolitan, a very bad author, hardly anyone reads these apologies.

The Jesuit Hardouin, more learned than Garasse and no less rash, accuses such men as Descartes, Arnauld, Pascal, Nicole, and Malebranche of atheism in his book Athei detecti; fortunately they did not have the fate of Vanini.

From all these facts I pass to the moral question raised by Bayle, namely whether a society of atheists could subsist. Let us note first on this article what an enormous contradiction there is in men when they dispute; those who rose against Bayle’s opinion with the most violence, those who denied, with the most insults, the possibility of a society of atheists, have since maintained with the same intrepidity that atheism is the religion of the government of China.

They were certainly very much mistaken about the Chinese government; they had only to read the edicts of the emperors of that vast country; they would have seen that those edicts are sermons, and that everywhere in them there is talk of the supreme being, governor, avenger and rewarder.

But at the same time they were no less mistaken about the impossibility of a society of atheists; and I do not know how Mr. Bayle could have forgotten a striking example that might have made his cause victorious.

Why does a society of atheists seem impossible? It is because it is judged that men who had no restraint could never live together; that laws can do nothing against secret crimes; that there must be a vengeful God who punishes in this world or in the next the wicked who escape human justice.

The laws of Moses, it is true, did not teach a life to come, did not threaten punishments after death, did not teach the first Jews the immortality of the soul; but the Jews, far from being atheists, far from believing they escaped divine vengeance, were the most religious of all men. Not only did they believe in the existence of an eternal God, but they believed him always present among them; they trembled at being punished in themselves, in their wives, in their children, in their posterity, to the fourth generation; and this restraint was very powerful.

But among the gentiles, several sects had no restraint at all; the skeptics doubted everything; the Academics suspended their judgment on everything; the Epicureans were persuaded that the Divinity could not involve itself in the affairs of men; and at bottom they admitted no divinity. They were convinced that the soul is not a substance but a faculty that is born and perishes with the body; consequently they had no yoke but that of morals and honor. The Roman senators and knights were true atheists; for the gods did not exist for men who neither feared nor hoped for anything from them. The Roman senate, then, was really an assembly of atheists in the time of Caesar and of Cicero.

That great orator, in his speech for Cluentius, says to the whole assembled senate: What harm does death do him? We reject all the foolish fables of the underworld; what, then, has death taken from him? Nothing but the sensation of pain.

Does not Caesar, Catiline’s friend, wishing to save his friend’s life against this same Cicero, object that putting a criminal to death is no punishment, that death is nothing, that it is merely the end of our ills, a moment more happy than fatal? Do not Cicero and the whole senate yield to these arguments? Did not the conquerors and lawgivers of the known universe plainly form a society of men who feared nothing from the gods, who were true atheists?

Bayle then examines whether idolatry is more dangerous than atheism, whether it is a greater crime not to believe in the Divinity than to hold unworthy opinions of it; in this he shares Plutarch’s opinion; he believes it is better to have no opinion than a bad one; but, with all respect to Plutarch, it is evident that it was infinitely better for the Greeks to fear Ceres, Neptune and Jupiter than to fear nothing at all; it is clear that the sanctity of oaths is necessary, and that one must trust more those who think a false oath will be punished than those who think they can swear falsely with impunity. It is indubitable that in a well-ordered city it is infinitely more useful to have a religion (even a bad one) than to have none at all.

It appears, then, that Bayle should rather have examined which is the more dangerous, fanaticism or atheism. Fanaticism is certainly a thousand times more deadly; for atheism inspires no bloodthirsty passion, but fanaticism does; atheism does not oppose crimes, but fanaticism makes men commit them. Let us suppose with the author of the Commentarium rerum Gallicarum that the chancellor de l’Hôpital was an atheist: he made only wise laws, and counseled only moderation and concord. The fanatics committed the massacres of Saint Bartholomew. Hobbes passed for an atheist; he led a tranquil and innocent life. The fanatics of his time flooded England, Scotland and Ireland with blood. Spinoza was not only an atheist but taught atheism; it was certainly not he who had a part in the judicial assassination of Barneveldt, not he who tore the two de Witt brothers to pieces and ate them on the grill.

Atheists are for the most part bold and misguided scholars who reason badly, and who, unable to understand creation, the origin of evil and other difficulties, have recourse to the hypothesis of the eternity of things and of necessity.

Ambitious people and pleasure seekers scarcely have time to reason and to embrace a bad system; they have other things to do than to compare Lucretius with Socrates. That is how things go among us.

It was not so with the senate of Rome, which was almost entirely composed of atheists in theory and in practice, that is, who believed neither in providence nor in a future life; that senate was an assembly of philosophers, pleasure seekers and ambitious men, all very dangerous, who ruined the republic.

I would not want to deal with an atheist prince who found it in his interest to have me pounded in a mortar; I am quite sure I would be pounded. If I were a sovereign, I would not want to deal with atheist courtiers who stood to gain by poisoning me; I would have to take an antidote at random every day. It is therefore absolutely necessary for princes and for peoples that the idea of a supreme being, creator, governor, rewarder and avenger, be deeply engraved in their minds.

There are atheist peoples, says Bayle in his thoughts on comets. The Kaffirs, the Hottentots, the Tupinambá and many other small nations have no God; that may be; but that does not mean they deny a God; they neither deny nor affirm him; they have never heard him spoken of; tell them there is one, and they will readily believe it; tell them everything is done by the nature of things, and they will believe you just the same. To maintain that they are atheists is the same imputation as if one said they are anti-Cartesians; they are neither for nor against Descartes. They are true children; a child is neither atheist nor theist, he is nothing.

What conclusion shall we draw from all this? That atheism is a most pernicious monster in those who govern; that it is so too in closet scholars, even though their life be innocent, because from their studies they can influence those in office; that if it is not so deadly as fanaticism, it is almost always fatal to virtue. Let us add above all that there are fewer atheists today than ever, since philosophers have recognized that there is no growing organism without a germ, no germ without design, etc., and that wheat does not come from rot.

Geometers who are not philosophers have rejected final causes, but true philosophers admit them; and, as a well-known author has said, a catechist announces God to children, and Newton demonstrates him to the wise.

1 Commentarium rerum Gallicarum, L. 28.

Once, knowing a secret technique in a craft could get you called a sorcerer. Every new sect faced claims that it slit children’s throats during its secret rites. Philosophers had only to stop using the schools’ jargon. Fanatics and crooks would call them atheists, and fools would condemn them.

Anaxagoras dares to say the sun isn’t driven by Apollo in a four-horse chariot. They brand him an atheist. He has to run away.

A priest brings a charge of atheism against Aristotle. Aristotle can’t get his accuser punished, so he leaves for Chalcis. But nothing in Greek history is more hateful than Socrates’ death.

Who first taught Athens to see Socrates as an atheist? Aristophanes did. Commentators admire him for being Greek. They forget that Socrates was Greek as well.

This comic poet isn’t funny and isn’t a poet. We wouldn’t have let him perform farces at the Saint-Laurent fair. I think he’s far baser and more contemptible even than Plutarch’s portrait suggests. Here’s what wise Plutarch says about this clown: “Aristophanes’ language stinks of a miserable quack. His jokes couldn’t be cheaper or more disgusting. Even ordinary people don’t find him amusing. Anyone with judgment and honor finds him unbearable. Nobody can stand his arrogance. Decent people hate his malice.” Incidentally, this is the Tabarin whom Madame Dacier dares to admire, though she admires Socrates too. Long before disgraceful judges poisoned the best man in Greece, this man helped prepare the way.

Athens’s tanners, shoemakers, and seamstresses applauded a farce about Socrates. There he was, suspended in a basket up in the air. He declared that no God existed and boasted of stealing a cloak while teaching philosophy. Bad government let a whole people take these shameful liberties. They well deserved what followed: slavery to Rome, and now to the Turks.

Let’s jump across the centuries between the Roman republic and our own time. Unlike the Greeks, the much wiser Romans never persecuted philosophers for their views. The barbarous peoples who came after the Roman Empire were different. Emperor Frederick II need only quarrel with the popes. At once, he’s an atheist. He’s accused of writing the book of the three impostors with his chancellor, de Vineis.

Our great Chancellor de l’Hôpital speaks against persecution. At once comes the charge of atheism: “A learned man, but a real atheist.”¹ Then there’s a Jesuit, as far beneath Aristophanes as Aristophanes is beneath Homer. The poor wretch’s name has become a joke even to fanatics. In short, it’s the Jesuit Garasse, and he finds atheists everywhere. That’s his name for everybody he lashes out at. He calls Théodore de Bèze an atheist. He’s responsible for misleading the public about Vanini.

Vanini’s terrible end doesn’t fill us with anger and pity as Socrates’ does. Vanini was just a foreign pedant with nothing to recommend him. Even so, the claim that he was an atheist is false. He was the exact opposite.

He was a poor priest from Naples, a preacher and theologian by profession. He’d argue endlessly about what things essentially are and about universal concepts, and whether a chimera buzzing in empty space can eat concepts about concepts. But he hadn’t the slightest leaning toward atheism. His account of God followed the soundest and most widely approved theology: “God is his own beginning and end, and the father of both. He needs neither. He’s eternal but isn’t in time, present everywhere but isn’t in any place. For him, there’s no past or future. He’s everywhere and outside everything. He rules everything and created everything. He doesn’t change. He’s infinite, with no parts. His power is his will, etc.”

Vanini took pride in bringing back a beautiful idea from Plato, also adopted by Averroes. God created a chain of beings running from smallest to greatest. Its final link hangs from his eternal throne. The idea is grander than it is true, admittedly. Still, it stands as far from atheism as existence stands from nothingness.

Vanini traveled to seek his fortune and debate. Sadly, debate takes you away from fortune, not toward it. Each scholar or pedant you argue with becomes another enemy who won’t forgive you. That alone was the cause of Vanini’s troubles. His fierce, rude arguments made some theologians hate him. Then he fell out with a man called Francon or Franconi. This man was friendly with his enemies. Sure enough, he accused Vanini of being an atheist and teaching atheism.

Helped by a few witnesses, Francon or Franconi cruelly stuck to his story when confronted with Vanini. They sat Vanini in the defendant’s seat and asked his view of God’s existence. He answered that he worshiped one God in three persons, as the Church did. He picked a straw up off the ground. “This little stalk is proof enough that there’s a creator,” he said. He followed that with a very fine speech about growth in plants and movement. Both, he argued, required a supreme being; without that being, neither could happen.

President Grammont was in Toulouse then. His History of France, now largely forgotten, reports Vanini’s speech. Yet Grammont’s prejudice is hard to understand. He claims Vanini spoke that way from vanity or fear, not so much from inward belief.

What could justify President Grammont’s rash, appalling verdict? Surely Vanini’s reply should have cleared him of atheism. What happened instead? The poor foreign priest also practiced medicine. At his home, they found a large living toad in a jar of water. Straightaway, they called him a sorcerer. They insisted that he worshiped the toad as his god. They made several passages from his books sound irreligious. It’s easy, and common, to do that. Treat an objection as an answer. Read an unclear sentence maliciously. Twist harmless words into poison. In the end, the faction hounding him got a death sentence out of the judges.

To defend that killing, they needed to charge him with the worst things imaginable. Mersenne, a Minim friar with a very tiny mind, took madness this far in print: Vanini had left Naples with twelve apostles to convert all nations to atheism. How pathetic! How could a poor priest keep twelve men on his payroll? Could he persuade twelve Neapolitans to pay heavily for travel, risking their lives? All to spread that horrible, repellent doctrine everywhere? Would even a king have the power to pay twelve preachers of atheism? Until Father Mersenne, nobody had produced an absurdity that enormous. Others repeated it after him. It spread like an infection through journals and historical dictionaries. People love extraordinary stories, and they accepted this tale without checking.

Even Bayle calls Vanini an atheist in his Various Thoughts. He uses him to support his paradox: a society of atheists can keep going. He says Vanini lived a strictly moral life and died for his philosophical belief. He’s wrong on both counts. Vanini’s dialogues imitate Erasmus. In them, the priest tells us he had a mistress called Isabelle. He was as uninhibited in print as in life. But atheism wasn’t his belief.

A hundred years after he died, the scholar La Croze tried to clear his name. So did the writer who called himself Philalethes. But who cares about a poor dead Neapolitan who wrote very badly? Almost nobody reads their defenses.

The Jesuit Hardouin was more learned than Garasse, but no less reckless. His book Athei detecti charges Descartes, Arnauld, Pascal, Nicole, and Malebranche with atheism. Luckily, Vanini’s fate wasn’t theirs.

Now I’ll leave those facts for the moral question Bayle raised: Could a society of atheists keep going? First, look at how enormously people contradict themselves in an argument. Some attacked Bayle’s view with fury. They heaped abuse on him for saying an atheist society was possible. Later, these same people boldly insisted that China’s government had atheism as its religion.

They were certainly badly mistaken about China’s government. They only needed to read the emperors’ edicts in that vast country. Those edicts are sermons. Throughout them, a supreme being rules, punishes, and rewards.

But their claim that an atheist society was impossible was just as wrong. I don’t know how Mr. Bayle missed one striking example. It could have won the argument for him.

Why think an atheist society couldn’t exist? People say men can’t live together if nothing holds them back. Laws can’t stop hidden crimes. There must be a God to punish wrongdoers who escape human justice, here or in the next world.

True, Moses’ laws didn’t teach people about life to come. They threatened no punishment after death. They didn’t teach the earliest Jews that their souls couldn’t die. But the Jews weren’t atheists who thought they could escape God’s punishment. Far from it: nobody was more religious. They believed not just in an eternal God’s existence but in his constant presence among them. They dreaded his punishment falling on themselves, their wives, their children, and their descendants, down to the fourth generation. That held them back very effectively.

Among the Gentiles, though, several sects had nothing of the sort. Skeptics questioned everything. Academics held back from judging anything. Epicureans were sure God couldn’t interfere with human affairs. Really, they didn’t accept any god at all. They were sure the soul wasn’t a substance. It was an ability that came into being with the body and died with it. Only morality and honor held them back. Rome’s senators and knights were genuine atheists. They expected nothing from the gods and feared nothing from them. For such men, the gods didn’t exist. In Caesar’s and Cicero’s day, the Roman senate was really a gathering of atheists.

In his speech defending Cluentius, that great speaker addresses the whole assembled senate: “How has death harmed him? We dismiss all those foolish tales about the underworld. So what has death robbed him of? Just the ability to feel pain.”

Caesar was Catiline’s friend. To save that friend’s life, didn’t he argue against this same Cicero? His point was that killing a criminal wasn’t a punishment. Death is nothing: it only ends our troubles. It’s more a happy moment than a disaster. Didn’t Cicero and the entire senate accept his reasons? The men who conquered the known world and gave it laws plainly formed a society of genuine atheists. They had nothing to fear from any god, did they?

Next, Bayle asks whether worshiping idols is more dangerous than atheism. Is disbelief in God a greater crime than holding opinions unworthy of him? Like Plutarch, Bayle thinks no opinion is better than a bad opinion. With due respect to Plutarch, though, the Greeks were infinitely better off fearing Ceres, Neptune, and Jupiter than fearing nothing. Oaths clearly need to be sacred. Some people believe punishment follows a false oath. Others think they can swear falsely and get away with it. We ought to trust the first group more. In a civilized city, religion, even bad religion, is infinitely more useful than none. There’s no doubt about that.

Bayle should apparently have asked a different question: which is more dangerous, atheism or fanaticism? Fanaticism certainly does a thousand times more harm. Atheism doesn’t stir up a craving for blood. Fanaticism does. Atheism doesn’t prevent crimes; fanaticism drives people to commit them. Let’s assume, with the author of the Commentarium rerum Gallicarum, that Chancellor de l’Hôpital was an atheist. He passed only wise laws. His advice was always to be moderate and live in harmony. Fanatics carried out the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres. Hobbes was called an atheist, but his life was peaceful and harmless. The fanatics around him drenched England, Scotland, and Ireland in blood. Spinoza didn’t just disbelieve in God: he taught atheism. But he certainly wasn’t involved in Barneveldt’s murder through the courts. Nor did he rip the two de Witt brothers apart, grill them, and eat them.

Atheists are mostly bold scholars who’ve lost their way and reason badly. They can’t make sense of creation, evil’s origin, and other problems. So they turn to the theory that things have always existed and happen by necessity.

People chasing power or pleasure scarcely have time to think things through and adopt a bad system. They have better things to do than set Lucretius beside Socrates. That’s how it is among us.

Rome’s senate was different. Almost every member was an atheist in thought and action. That means they believed neither in God’s care for the world nor in a future life. Philosophers, pleasure seekers, and men hungry for power made up this senate. All were highly dangerous. They brought the republic down.

I’d hate to deal with an atheist prince who’d gain from pounding me in a mortar. I’m quite sure he’d pound me. If I ruled, I wouldn’t want atheist courtiers who’d benefit by poisoning me. I’d have to take a chance on an antidote every day. Princes and peoples alike absolutely need a belief planted deep in their minds: a supreme being creates, governs, rewards, and punishes.

In Thoughts on Comets, Bayle says there are atheist peoples. The Kaffirs, Hottentots, Tupinambá, and many other small nations have no God. Perhaps. That doesn’t mean they deny that a God exists. They neither affirm nor deny it; they’ve never heard of him. Tell them there’s a God, and they’ll readily believe you. Tell them everything happens through the nature of things, and they’ll believe that too. Calling them atheists is like calling them opponents of Descartes. They aren’t on either side of that question. They’re really children. Children aren’t atheists or theists. They’re nothing of either kind.

What do we take away from all this? Atheism is a terribly harmful monster in people who rule. It’s harmful in people who sit in their studies too, however innocent their lives. From those studies, they can reach people in power. It isn’t as destructive as fanaticism, but it nearly always destroys virtue. Above all, there are fewer atheists now than ever. Philosophers have recognized that no plant grows without a seed, no seed exists without design, etc. Wheat doesn’t spring from rotting matter.

Some geometers aren’t philosophers and have rejected causes based on purpose. True philosophers accept them. As a well-known writer said, a catechism teacher tells children about God; Newton proves God’s existence to the wise.

1 Commentarium rerum Gallicarum, L. 28.