EIGHT
This chapter begins in a faraway world and ends at the doorstep of modernity. We will see bold developments in Skepticism, and a rising struggle between science and religion. Yet, the loudest voice of doubt will come from people furious over the religious persecution that was still being carried out by the churches. For now, we are back in a world that is breaking its head over Skepticism: it seemed that no one had the right to claim anything, and there was no solid ground from which any knowledge could build. It was into this unmoored world that René Descartes loosed a few new tricks.
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
In 1628 the young mathematician and scientist René Descartes was invited to the home of Cardinal Bagni (for whom the libertine Naudé would work) for an intellectual party. It would be one of the red-letter evenings in the history of doubt. A chemist named Chandoux was to entertain a group of leading thinkers of the day with a lecture against the old Scholastic philosophy. The listeners were skeptical fideists: subscribers to the view that we know nothing at all and are therefore free to blindly embrace the idea of God and even the specifics of Catholicism. Mersenne, he of the “fifty thousand atheists in Paris” line, was there. There was warm applause afterward; Descartes alone was peeved—and visibly. When asked what the problem was, he explained that, although glad for the negative attitude toward Scholasticism, he could not abide resting all reality on a good guess suspended above blank uncertainty. He agreed that we could not trust information brought in from the senses and interpreted by the mind, but claimed he had found another way to truth, one that did not depend on the senses or tricks of the mind. He could offer a proof of God. When he explained himself, one of the cardinals there insisted that the young mathematician henceforth devote himself to working out this new philosophy.
What Descartes came up with was this: to determine truth, we must find out if there is one thing that we can know for certain, and build from there just as in ancient geometry. But how? The answer for Descartes was doubt, just as it had been for Augustine; but Descartes’s doubt does different work. His boldly titled Meditations on the First Philosophy in Which the Existence of God and the Distinction Between Mind and Body Are Demonstrated (1641) had six parts; the first was “Of the things which may be brought within the sphere of the doubtful,” and in it he walks his reader through a Skeptical crisis. In this first meditation, he explains that it was “now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis.”1 He had become convinced that his senses deceived him. To explain, he says that as he writes this he is seated by the fire, in a dressing gown, holding paper in his hands, “and how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine?”2 Yet, there are people in the world who “think they are kings when they are really quite poor … or [think they] are nothing but pumpkins or are made of glass.” Leaving aside madness, had he himself not dreamed of sitting by the fire in a dressing gown? Perhaps he was dreaming now. What if God was actually playing with him? he wonders. What if some evil spirit had “employed his whole energies in deceiving” him?3 His every experience might be a lie, down to the idea of extension, and body, and time.
Descartes decides he will fight the evil spirit: he will force himself to believe that everything—the sky, the earth, colors, numbers, sound—is an illusion. Furthermore, “I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses.” This was an awful struggle, since it felt like he did have them. “I shall remain obstinately attached to this idea,” he announces, even though just as a slave does not want to awaken from a dream of freedom, his mind did not want to awaken from the illusion that all its information was reliable. Yet he pledges to do it. The next chapter’s meditation begins with the confession that “The meditation of yesterday filled my mind with so many doubts that it is no longer in my power to forget them”; he feels as if he has fallen into deep water and cannot find the bottom or the top. He needs one Archimedean point from which he can right his world. What he finds is this: he is a thing that thinks. He knows that does not answer everything, even at its own level—for example, “I am, I exist, that is certain. But how often?”4 But he runs over this delightful notion to get to the key point: “Am I not the being who now doubts nearly everything … ?” Even if he were dreaming, he decides, it would be he who was dreaming. Even if none of his perceptions correspond to a real thing in the world, they are still his perceptions. Meditation III was “Of God: that He exists,” and in it Descartes begins from his point of certainty, “I am a thing that thinks, that is to say, that doubts, affirms, denies…, that wills, that desires, that also imagines and perceives.” So there we have it: Descartes’s famous axiom, Cogito Ergo Sum—I think, therefore I am—is perhaps more accurately expressed as Dubito Ergo Sum—I doubt, therefore I am.
He then claims that the certainty with which he knows this first point, that he exists, has taught him to recognize certainty elsewhere, and (and here’s the leap) he claims he is certain that his perception of God came from God. He also perceives by inner knowledge that this God is good and therefore could not be generally deceiving him. We may trust the world and our senses, having confirmed their basic veracity against an inner certainty that was discovered without recourse to those senses. We have seen Stoics, Jews, and Christians claim that the magnificence of the world is evidence that God exists. Skeptics questioned every aspect of our ability to know that outside world. Descartes flipped the argument: it wasn’t that the magnificence of the world proved God exists, it was that inner knowledge of God could prove that the world exists. Consciousness is suddenly esteemed higher than the universe.
Descartes performed this flip in order to protect belief, not erode it, and that is how it was taken by the Church: after an early hostile response, the Church quickly came around. Seeing that Scholasticism was besieged, and that skeptical fideism was too uncomfortably based on knowing nothing, the Church took Descartes’s solution. Yet his work ended up forwarding the history of doubt in a big way. What he had done was to take God completely out of the world, and this allowed the new science a free rein. It’s how religious scientists ever after conceived their project—and they avoided science of the mind. Meanwhile, this God known by inner sensation helped support the validity of scientific inquiry, since our senses could now be trusted.
The Meditations was not Descartes’s first work. The first was a scientific treatise called The World, which he was about to publish in 1634 when he learned that Galileo had been condemned by the Church for teaching Copernicanism. Since The World wasCopernican, and since Descartes valued his liberty above this particular point, he prevented the book’s publication. The story helps us remember the timing. Born in 1564, Galileo Galilei had been trained in the old Aristotelian astronomy but at the University of Padua learned the Copernican system and was converted. Improving on the lens strength of the telescope, he was able to show a universe that was not at all perfect orbs and crystalline spheres: the sun had spots, Jupiter had moons, and the surface of our own moon was rough and raw. The Church asked him to stop teaching that the Copernican system was anything other than a mathematical device, but he would not, because he was convinced. He first published his support of the theory in 1613, about two decades after he came to Padua. The Church banned him from teaching the theory in 1616, and in 1633 he was brought to trial, shown some instruments of torture, and asked to take back his claim that the earth was careening around the sun. He did, but the story goes that on his way out he whispered under his breath, “E pur, si muove” (But still, it moves!). He was an old man by the time the authorities placed him under house arrest at his villa in Florence, and he died five years later, in 1642, at age seventy-eight.
Galileo was one of doubt’s mechanics, one of its great students of the physical world, and he did unravel cherished notions of the faith. Yet, for his part, Galileo seems to have been just trying to get religion right. As early as 1615 he had written his famous “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina” in which he explains his attitude toward scripture. The letter begins, “Some years ago, as Your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age.” This “stirred up against” him many professors, “as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overturn the sciences.” It is hard not to think of Anaxagoras pointing at the meteorite that had fallen in 467 BCE and wondering what the angry authorities wanted him to say. There it was. Bringing on the first-ever indictment for atheism, Anaxagoras’s claim that the stars might be hot rocks rather than gods has a kind of direct descendant in Galileo’s claims, despite vast differences between the two offended religions involved. What Galileo said to the duchess in the rest of his letter sounded like a man who trusted both his senses and the divine origin of the Bible, even though they contradicted each other. To Galileo it was obvious that this schism meant the scriptures had been understood too literally. God wouldn’t have cared whether the science in the background of the Bible’s lessons was correct. God, Galileo said, had let the Bible speak in terms that matched the simplest human perception of things.
The passage in the Bible that gave Galileo’s contemporaries the most trouble was the one in which Joshua bids the sun stop its movement in the sky to give his warriors more time.5 Galileo said that the Bible was just describing how things looked. He then cited the ancient philosophers who had considered heliocentrism; mentioned that Copernicus had been a cardinal and beloved by the Church; and offered quotations from Augustine advising the Church to avoid making decrees about the physical world, lest they be overturned by new knowledge. Citing an unnamed “eminent” ecclesiastic, Galileo quipped that “The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.” After all, if all interpreters of the Bible spoke by divine inspiration there should not be differences among them, but there were. It was this brash attitude, more than his scientific claims, that angered people.6
Galileo said he did not study Epicurus directly, but he wrote a work called Saggiatore in 1623 that made so much use of atomism that it was referred to as his Epicurean book.7 By this time, Gassendi had loosened the connection between Epicurean atomism and atheism, but the Church attacked Saggiatore because it left no room for the doctrine of transubstantiation. The two-millennium connection between atomism and atheism was obviously also significant. From 1632 forward, Jesuit professors were repeatedly warned not to teach atomist physics.8
Galileo was not the only one in this period getting in trouble for reimagining the universe. When the Spanish and Portuguese Jews were exiled in 1492, a lot of them settled in Amsterdam, one of the most open and progressive cities in Europe at the time. Baruch Spinoza was born there in 1632. His family had been Jewish, then Marrano (converted to Catholicism but secretly still Jewish), and then Jewish again. The mother tongue of Amsterdam’s Jewish community was still Portuguese; Spinoza later learned Spanish, Latin, and Dutch. As a young man he ran with a crowd who were admirers of Descartes, and he personally greatly admired Bruno. At some point Spinoza began telling people that the Torah was not literally the word of God, that Jews were not God’s chosen people, and that there is no immortal human soul. Spinoza would not back down and was excommunicated from Judaism in 1656. He was in his early twenties and he never took part in the religion again, or any other. What is more, his reply to the excommunication grew into his great work, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The opening of the book’s preface announced that people would never be superstitious if the world was orderly, or if they were always lucky, “but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear,” people “are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity.” Here’s a keen observation on doubt:
This as a general fact I suppose everyone knows, though few, I believe, know their own nature; no one can have lived in the world without observing that most people, when in prosperity, are so over-brimming with wisdom (however inexperienced they may be), that they take every offer of advice as a personal insult, whereas in adversity they know not where to turn, but beg and pray for counsel from every passer-by.
No plan is then too futile, too absurd, … if anything happens during their fright which reminds them of some past good or ill, they think it portends a happy or unhappy issue, and therefore (though it may have proved abortive a hundred times before) style it a lucky or unlucky omen….
Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as mad as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically.
Although Spinoza never said he was an atheist, he was known as one in his own century, and ever afterward. Descartes had said that the material world was one kind of substance and mind was something else. Yet on a grander scale, Descartes said that the only substance and the only thing one could know for certain was God. Spinoza let this idea inflate until it curled around itself: God and everything were the same. God’s thought did not make the world, God is his thought, and the God-thought is the world. Spinoza’s argument followed the model from geometry, taking one axiomatic idea at a time and building on it. As he had it, the universe was a self-caused substance with infinite attributes; human beings are “nodes” of that substance; and he called that substance “God or Nature.” This is pantheism, although the word did not yet exist. It is no wonder that the Jewish fathers had a problem with it; it left little room for Jewish history, cosmology, or theology. Since the world was the lawful unfolding of the cosmic event, the idea went, everything was predetermined. Each thing led to the next, mechanically, so unavoidably. No one, not human beings, not God, could have free will. That is one of the reasons that even though Spinoza always talked about God, people saw him as an atheist: a god that has no free will and is not separate from the unfolding universe is not much of a god. After Spinoza was excommunicated, he changed his given name to its Latin equivalent, Benedict, and lived out his life as a philosopher, a lens grinder, a maker of fine telescopes and microscopes, and a tutor.
Spinoza resolved to look hard at revealed religion and see whatever was there to be seen. Taking the lead from Isaac la Peyrère, he wrote about a host of logical impossibilities, concluding that the unphilosophical masses needed scripture but that the real truth was more subtle. God did not have purposes. Nature was self-causing and unfolded according to necessary law. There were no miracles. Galileo had viewed Joshua’s miraculous stopping of the sun from the viewpoint of a heliocentric world and declared that whatever happened it accorded with science. Spinoza got further in his doubt because Jewish tradition had precedent for this kind of thing: Maimonides had said that the miracle was extended local daylight, without there actually having been any change in the movement of heavenly spheres. Gersonides, “the first rabbi on the moon,” had said the miracle was that the victory was so fast it took place in that brief time during which the sun seems stopped at the top of the sky, i.e., the whole thing was a literary device. We should not be too surprised, then, to hear Spinoza say in his Tractatus, “Do we have to believe that the soldier Joshua was a skilled astronomer … or that the sun’s light could not remain above the horizon for longer than usual without Joshua’s understanding the cause? Both alternatives seem to me ridiculous.”9 Spinoza was willing to allow that something weird had been perceived, perhaps owing to “excessive coldness of the atmosphere,” and that Joshua had given it a supernatural explanation out of simple ignorance. But he also argued that the book might just be untrue. Spinoza was convinced that the Bible had multiple authors and he rejected divine authorship altogether. His understanding of the Bible was similar to Carneades’s view of the Greek pantheon; its supernaturalism did not have to be rationalized—it could simply be dismissed.
Spinoza’s biblical criticism was lively and memorable, and his indictment of religion could be blunt:
[T]he man who endeavors to find out the true causes of miracles, and who desires as a wise man to understand Nature, and not to gape at it like a fool, is generally considered and proclaimed to be a heretic and impious by those whom the vulgar worship as the interpreters both of Nature and the gods. For these know that if ignorance be removed, amazed stupidity—the sole ground on which they rely in arguing or in defending their authority—is taken away also.10
Privately, he recommended a life the ancients would have recognized: study, wine, good food, the beauty of green things, theater, and sports. His encouragement of such sensualism was expressly set against religious self-denial: “nothing forbids our pleasure except a savage and sad superstition.”11 Above all perhaps, he was known for his advocacy of virtue for its own sake and for the earthly rewards it brings. His ethics were seen in relation to his doubt. A contemporary described Spinoza as offering his work “for public utility,” in order to encourage citizens to “live honestly and obey their magistrates” and to keep themselves virtuous, “not in the hope of a compensation after death, but simply for the excellence of virtue itself and for the advantages for virtuous people in this life.”12 The same contemporary mentioned that in order to do this, Spinoza’s work had as its main objective “the destruction of all religions, particularly the Jewish and Christian religion, and to introduce atheism, libertinism, and freedom in all religions.”
The two great figures of atheism in the seventeenth century were Spinoza and Hobbes—although neither ever described himself as an atheist. Hobbes is best known today for the political science of his masterwork, Leviathan, which claims that without authoritarian government people’s lives would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It was a support for the monarchy of his time, but the book was at least as important for its role in the history of doubt. Hobbes said we do not know anything about God other than that he exists. His biblical criticism treated the Bible like any mixed-up historical text; he teased apart its different authors on the basis of literary and historical analysis, much as Spinoza did. The truth about religion, as Hobbes explained it, is that it had been formed and sustained by people in power, to control their subjects. He allowed that religion was good for people but said there was no reason for the priesthood ever to have power above the monarchy, since the clergy have no special information on God. They just operate the cult. Hobbes understood the world as a machinelike thing that runs itself. He also claimed that our souls are mortal (he cites Job saying so), but that the saved will be revived at Judgment Day while the others simply will not.13 Hell, he said, was just a fantasy to control people. Foolish people, “they that make little or no enquiry into the natural causes of things,” are driven by anxiety about their future and make up fanciful relationships between events and “powers invisible,” and end up “in awe of their own imaginations, and in time of distress… invoke them, and as also in the time of an expected good success, to give them thanks, making the creatures of their own fancy, their Gods.”14
Hobbes said people believe religion as an explanation for why good and bad things happen. When someone “cannot assure himself of the true causes of things (for the causes of good and evil fortune for the most part are invisible), he supposes causes of them, either such as his own fancy suggesteth, or trusteth to the Authority of other men.”15 Hobbes knew that “some of the old Poets said that the Gods were at first created by human Fear,” but “acknowledging of one God eternal, infinite, and omnipotent may more easily be derived from the desire men have to know the cause of natural bodies” than from the fear of what was to befall them in time to come.
Causality leads one to the conclusion of a first mover, “a first and eternal cause of all things which is that which men mean by the name of God.”
It was the same with that of the soul of man; and that the soul of man was of the same substance with that which appeareth in a dream, to one that sleepeth, or in a looking-glass to one that is awake, which men not knowing that such apparitions are nothing else but creatures of the fancy think to be real and external substances and therefore call them Ghosts.16
Hobbes summed up religion as derived from four mistakes: belief in “ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things causal for prognostics,” and from these errors, “different fancies, judgments, and passions of several men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man, are for the most part ridiculous to another.”17 Many people have believed Hobbes was an atheist and that when he made statements that left room for God he was just saving his neck. Then again, why offer one’s own idea of resurrection, dangerously heretical in itself, as part of a believing smokescreen? We cannot know. What we can know is that he argued against religion, and against any conception of God beyond the simplest statement that God exists, and many were unconvinced that he meant that. The effect on his world was monumental.
There is a sense that Hobbes’s reliance on absolute government, despite its abuses, was necessary precisely because the idea of governance by God did not seem likely to have much of a career left to it. People had to be made to be good somehow. Naudé, too, had believed in religious rebellion and political submission, but Hobbes was easily doubt’s greatest political conservative since the Stoics. Still, people were scandalized by his doubt: a bill against atheism was introduced to the English Commons in 1666 that mentioned Leviathan by name. Another great wave of the plague had hit England and it was suggested that this was punishment for harboring an unbeliever; a cry went up to burn Hobbes in hope of turning away the wrath of God. Hobbes, however, was a well-protected man by then, and he died at the ripe old age of ninety-two. For centuries, despite the important political meanings of Hobbes’s work, to be called Hobbesian was to be called an atheist. We have the witness of a contemporary observer, one Richard Bently, who wrote in a letter to his professor, in 1692, “There may be some Spinosists… beyond the seas; but not one English Infidel in a hundred is any other than a Hobbist; which I know to be rank Atheism in the private study and select conversation of these men; whatever it may appear to be abroad.”18
To hear another witness: in 1669 David Scargill caused much ado with his “Recantation,” wherein he confessed that he had “lately vented and publicly asserted” at the University of Cambridge “divers, wicked, blasphemous and Atheistic positions,” including “that there is a desirable glory in being, and being reputed, an Atheist; which I implied when I expressly affirmed that I gloried to be an Hobbist and an Atheist.”19 Scargill thus testified to atheism and to reading Hobbesianism as atheism; that he professed these ideas at Cambridge; and that he had been gloriously proud.
It’s good to keep Scargill’s Hobbesian pride in mind as we sidle up to Blaise Pascal’s famous wager. Pascal knew Mersenne, too, but late; he was a youth in these conversations when the rest of the skeptical fideists were aging. In his 1670 Pensées, Pascal wrote that we are incapable of knowing whether God exists or not, but we have to guess. He proposed that our choice should be influenced by the various results:
“Either God is or he is not.” But to which view shall we be inclined? Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails….
Which will you choose then? Let us see: since a choice must be made, let us see which offers you the least interest.20
In Pensées, Pascal was speaking these questions to an unbeliever, someone who says “I am so made that I cannot believe.”21 Pascal’s answer is that life is full of affliction and death is always threatening the “appalling” possibility of annihilation, and hence “the only good thing in this life is the hope of another life.”22
Pascal claimed that if humanity had to live without God it would be pure misery, and if God did exist, it would be bliss—the various values of the outcomes (rather than the probability of the thing in question, which he insisted was fifty-fifty) changed the guess. This idea that preference for a particular outcome can, in some cases, reasonably influence our choice, was a watershed in decision theory. It was a bit odd that he thought the chance of God’s existing was one in two just because there were two choices; we may be struck by lightning or not, but that doesn’t make it a fifty-fifty proposition. Anyway, the key factor here, as historian Richard Popkin has put it, is that “What Pascal decried as the misery of man without the Biblical God, was for Spinoza the liberation of the human spirit from the bonds of fear and superstition.”23 Hobbes inspired similar pride: the bad outcome for Pascal was not the bad outcome for all others. For some, there was liberation in it.
While the seventeenth century offered doubters who are famous to this day, such as Spinoza and Hobbes, and doubting believers such as Pascal, there were some hugely popular doubters who have been forgotten. The anonymous book Theophrastus Redivivus, published in about 1650, was famous for more than a century. It was a compendium of old arguments against religions and belief in God, and it precipitated a cultural explosion in discussions of unbelief. As historian Tullio Gregory has shown, the author was familiar with the Paduan Averroist, Pomponazzi; the Renaissance secularist Machiavelli; as well as Julius Caesar Vanini. The author had also read the Skeptics Montaigne and Charron, and the Libertine Naudé.
Some of these authors—Pomponazzi and Vanini, for example—seemed to say just what was on their minds. Others—Machiavelli, Montaigne, Charron, and Naudé—capped their doubting treatises at either end with protestations of faith. To some people, that meant that they believed; to others, it meant that these writers were smuggling their arguments past the censors. Whatever the intention, these writers had smuggled a great deal of doubt into the hands of the reading public. Theophrastus Redivivus was testimony that readers were savvy enough to recognize such smuggling. The book was a compilation of the most antireligious, atheist, and variously doubting positions of all these doubters. The book was also famous for having proclaimed that all philosophers, always, had been atheists. The tone and certainty suggested that the author knew other atheists and felt part of a special community, across time.
At the end of the seventeenth century, there was a surge in the persecution and aggressive suppression of unbelief in Italy. The Church now began to silence not only hot blasphemy but also cool materialist philosophy. In Pisa in 1670, Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici discreetly warned the local scholars who supported atomism that the notion would no longer be tolerated.24 The trials in Pisa were stepped up soon after, in 1676. The authorities caught wind of a whole flock of offenders in 1688: eleven men and women who were accused of denying the existence of God and the doctrines of creation, the afterlife, and Christ’s divinity. They believed instead that the world was eternal and best explained by atomism. Across Italy, Inquisition trials increased for atheism and related crimes. From the late 1680s to the early 1690s, in Naples, a de Cristofaro lingered in prison six years for teaching Lucretian atomism.25 There was to be no lull in the campaign against unbelief until the 1720s. Not surprisingly, science went north.
In 1642, the year that Galileo died while under house arrest in Florence, Isaac Newton was born in Lincolnshire, England. Newton profoundly advanced the new concept of the world as understandable and regular. He invented the calculus (primarily, the mathematics of change), explained that white light was made up of colored light, and discovered the law of gravity— all, by the way, by the age of twenty-three, although he waited to publish. His Principia (1687) drew on Descartes’s law of inertia, Galileo’s ideas on acceleration, and Kepler’s laws, and brought it all to a mathematically expressed synthesis that made the world strangely intelligible. One did not need Aristotle’s spheres to hold objects in the heavens, and the problem of the planets’ continuous motion disappeared. Principia was also influenced by Gassandi, and atomism was a cornerstone of Newton’s thinking. In the early drafts for the second edition of Principia, Newton included ninety lines from Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things in association with his concept of inertia.
Newton accomplished a revolution in worldview, yet he spent as much of his life on alchemy and mysticism as he did on physics. He believed in God. For several centuries now, Newton has been called the first physicist and the last magician—and all along historians have wondered how he balanced belief in, say, miracles with having concocted the physics that mechanized our minds and took us to the moon. For the answer we need to note that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, miracles became extremely important in the Protestant world. For Catholics the problem of discovering true miracles had almost always been concerned with evidence of sainthood. Protestants were after bigger quarry. For them miracles are humankind’s crucial evidence that Christianity is true. The Protestant physicist and chemist Robert Boyle (1627–1691), for example, wrote that the evidence of miracles “is little less than absolutely necessary to evince… that the Christian [religion] does really proceed from God.”26 Boyle thought that since miracles were real, scientists would be the best people to identify them.
Newton believed in some miracles. He said that the way our solar system was set up seemed a little unstable, and he thought either it would need adjustment, or that it would fall apart eventually and God would need to set it up again. Recall that Spinoza had already said there could be no miracles, that miracles did not even make sense; God was the universe and its laws. It was known that there were English “deists” by now who agreed that scripture could not always be reconciled to truth. The Newtonians disagreed. There were a few real miracles, where God stepped in and changed things, at creation, in the period of Jesus, and again at the end of time—which Newton associated with the time when our solar system would be destroyed.
Otherwise, the Newtonians reconciled some miracles with their lawful universe but let them maintain a divine component. Take the flood story, a saga of punishment sparing Noah’s family, his ark, and his animals. The Newtonians believed God knew in advance that this period would be sinful and so he built into the pattern of the universe a series of events that led to a natural flood to wipe out the sinners. Even prayer worked that way, so that a god who never intervenes can be said to have heard you in advance and set up a natural chain of events in your behalf. The Cosmologica Sacra (1701), by Nehemiah Grew, which was supposed to be a defense of religion against Spinoza’s way of interpreting the Bible (i.e., that some of this stuff just didn’t happen), suggested that the plagues of Egypt had resulted from “sundry Natural Causes.” When Moses turned the Nile to blood, Grew proposed, it was really because “all the Fish, small and great, with the Hippopotamus, Crocadile, and other Amphibious Creatures were seiz’d with a Dysenterick Murrain.”27 That is, a huge bout of nasty marine dysentery had transformed the river into a stream of bloody effluvia.
All this science and philosophy reached the average person through the popularizing work of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). He was born in France, but the wars of religion had ended with the dominance of a singular authority: Louis XIV, who wanted France Catholic and revoked the tolerant Edict of Nantes. Bayle spent the bulk of his life in Holland, whose cities were joining Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Padua, and Paris as some of doubt’s great centers. Bayle’s was Rotterdam, and he was the leading member of a vibrant intellectual community there. His Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Comet of 1680 argued that the comet was a natural phenomenon and did not presage disaster; but this was not the point of the book. What the work really represented was the first-ever all-out defense of the morals of an atheist. Chapter headings include avowals that “Atheism does not necessarily lead to corruption of morals”; that belief in God does not make people honest; that “In a society of atheists there would be laws of propriety and honor”; that “Belief in the mortality of the soul does not prevent people from desiring to immortalize their name”; and that, historically, atheists have “not been especially conspicuous by the impurity of their morals.” In this last he praised the upright life and unimpeachable moral fiber of Epicurus and his followers, the Jewish sect the Sadducees (who, Bayle reminds his readers, “frankly denied the immortality of the soul”), as well as the atheist Julius Caesar Vanini and a number of lesser-known and anecdo-tally well behaved unbelievers. Epicurus and Vanini themselves had made it explicit that doubters could be even more moral than believers, for the former are motivated by reason. For that matter, so did Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Still, the sense that the common people needed God for morality was strong. Only after Bayle’s aggressive argument do we begin to see the disappearance of an old reason for self-censorship: doubters had chosen to be silent or at least to whisper (even when they did not fear for their lives) because of their fear that without a belief in God and the afterlife, the masses would run wild in the streets. Fear of other people’s behavior, should they lose religion, had always been a reason to stay quiet. Now it was less so.
Bayle’s 1695–1697 Historical and Critical Dictionary is one of the weirdest books ever written and was, in historian Thomas M. Lennon’s words, “the philosophical blockbuster of all time,” reaching more of its potential audience than even Plato.28 Through the eighteenth century, this book was on more shelves than any other. Even after the hugely popular Locke and Voltaire were on the scene, they trailed behind Bayle by leagues. Indeed, they and other philosophers used his tremendous cache of arguments so often that Bayle became known as the “arsenal of the Enlightenment.”
The reason his book is so strange is that for every page of text there are about twenty pages of lengthy footnotes, and even the footnotes have footnotes. In Bayle’s editions the notes to the notes ran in the margins; in modern editions, the footnotes take over pages after the original entry, and the secondary notes take up the foot of these pages. The entries, nearly three thousand of them by the time he was done, were almost all biographies. Bayle would say who the person was in a brief and often ancient sketch and then use a note to leap off on a tangent. The information was already being offered in the least thematic form possible—alphabetically—but when it is combined with the footnotes, the busyness is giddy. What hides in this puzzle box of a book? A good deal of sex and a great deal of philosophical Skepticism. Both could show up anywhere. The entry on Jupiter is festooned with notes on the god’s incestuous proclivities that roamed over several generations. Bayle also lets the notes from Jupiter’s entry carry him off to discuss Skepticism through Carneades, Anaximenes, Epicurus, and Cicero. The entry’s last note finishes up as follows:
Those who claimed to be best acquainted with the doctrines of theology showed, when they expressed themselves clearly, that they did not acknowledge any other gods than air, the stars, and the like. This was at bottom true atheism. It amounted to converting the necessity of nature into god. I have noticed a passage in Euripides in which Jupiter is invoked without actually knowing what he is. It is admitted that he governs all things justly by occult methods, but he is found extremely difficult to know, and one cannot tell if he is the necessity of nature or human intelligence. What a faith! A Spinozist would just about agree to this.29
Then he cites the passage, from the Trojan Women, that he mentioned above: “O vehicle of earth, residing on it, / Whoever thou be, inscrutable to us, / Necessity of nature, or men’s minds, / O Jupiter, I invoke thee.”
Consider Bayle’s entry for Simonides. The ancient poet’s life and work are summed up in a paragraph, within which we read, without introduction of any kind, “The answer he gave to a prince who asked him for the definition of God is very famous.”30 This notion gets two footnotes, which go on for fifteen pages. They explain that Simonides continually asked for more time, finally answering that the more he thought about it, the less he knew. Bayle then brings in Cicero’s skeptical comment on this piece of Skepticism (the Roman guessed the Greek, too, had “despaired of all truth”), and then merrily discusses Skepticism for pages, bringing in Thales, Descartes, La Mothe le Vayer, Aristotle, and Charron. The odd style of texts and subtexts puts us in an ever more private conversation. Bayle speaks of the question of God’s gift of free will, allowing man to sin, in terms of a mother who would allow her daughters to go to a ball although she knew for a fact they would give in to the enticements of some gallant gentlemen there and “part company with their virginity.”
His entry on Spinoza—a relatively long one at a few pages, and the footnotes go on for thirty more—is an attack on the idea of God as indistinguishable from the universe, which Bayle called clear atheism. The second footnote includes an incredible story. It is offered as witness to the contention that Spinoza’s atheism was not new and could be evidenced in many places, including China. Bayle tells of a Chinese teacher, called Foe, who had gone into the desert at the age of nineteen and studied there until he was thirty. He then emerged “to instruct men,” and he “represented himself as a god” and attracted eighty thousand disciples.31 At seventy-nine and near death, he confessed it was time to tell them the truth. “‘It is,’ he said, ‘that there is nothing to seek, nor anything to put one’s hopes on, except the nothingness and the vacuum that is the principle of all things.’” At death Foe “began to announce his atheism.” Afterward, his disciples “divided their doctrine into two parts, one exterior, which is the one that is publicly preached and taught to the people, the other interior, which is carefully hidden from the common people.”32The exterior doctrine is “only like the frame on which the arch is built and which is later taken away when one has finished the building.” Listen to his description of the false exterior doctrine:
It consists in teaching: 1) that there is a real difference between good and evil, justice and injustice; 2) that there is another life in which one will be punished or rewarded for what one will do in this one; 3) that happiness can be attained by means of thirty-two figures and eighty qualities; 4) that Foe is a deity and the savior of mankind, that he was born out of love of them… that he expiated their sins, and that by this expiation they will obtain salvation after death, and will be reborn happier in another world.33
By contrast, the interior doctrine “that is never revealed to the common people because they have to be kept in their place by the fear of hell,” is that there is nothing; “that our first parents came forth from this vacuum and that they returned there after death.”34
In Bayle’s entries on such figures as Pyrrho, Xenophanes, and Pomponazzi, he walks his reader through all sorts of religious doubt, sometimes contesting a point, sometimes reporting calmly. There were doubters in Bayle’s dictionary who became Skeptical heroes after Bayle published: Julius Caesar Vanini was once again known—Bayle calls him western Europe’s great martyr for atheism.35 He dubbed Bruno “the knight-errant of philosophy,” helping to romanticize that freethinker. Bayle was so positive toward Judaism that some have posited that he was secretly of that faith—in any case, he preached tolerance for all religions. He had an entry on Muslim Skeptics that, although tiny, included a long footnote on whether all philosophers end up as atheists. He notes there that most people thought the association was true:
There are those who maintain that the Arabian philosophers were only Mohammedans in appearance, and that they actually made fun of the Koran because they found things in it that were contrary to reason. You cannot get a great many people to stop believing that Descartes and Gassendi were as little convinced about the Real Presence as about the fables of Greece.36
Bayle credits Gassendi for making Sextus Empiricus known to his contemporaries. Others who make appearances in Bayle’s notes include Democritus, Confucius (with whom Bayle argues regarding the nature of nothingness), Montaigne, and Naudé. Bayle also discusses English Socinianism, a movement that rejected the divinity of Jesus but believed in God: Faustus Socinus (1539–1604) left the Roman Catholic Church when, influenced by the writings of his uncle, Laelius Socinus, he came to deny the Trinity. Faustus left Italy to spend his life in the comparatively tolerant Poland. His doctrine spread from there to England through John Biddle (1615–1662). Bayle also spoke of Jansenism, a kind of reformed Catholicism that grew up in these years. Bayle sympathetically argues with Maimonides throughout—indeed, Richard Popkin has written of Bayle’s Dictionary as an attempt to provide a new Guide for the Perplexed.37
The Dictionary became the bible for doubters. Bayle upheld Montaigne’s insistence that religious claims are not confirmed by any inner knowledge, but instead were fed to us in our childhoods. Since all is custom, there is no point in religious intolerance. Bayle also combines the ideas of the ancients with the attitude of the new science to produce a new Skeptical empiricism, but he does not describe himself as a Skeptic. He argues for sensible judgments (on the basis of experience and probability) and the great new world of modern science. “It is therefore only religion that has anything to fear from Pyrrhonism. Religion ought to be based on certainty. Its aim, its effects, its usages collapse as soon as the firm conviction of its truths is erased from the mind.”38 He made excellent Skeptical arguments and then said such ideas destroyed religion, but for himself said that the urge to do good rather than evil might be a satisfactory sign of God. More than that we can only guess, and many have guessed that Bayle did not believe. His advice to believe seemed a cold choice compared to his heated critique of religion. As Popkin puts the question, “Was Bayle, in his forceful, skeptical way, trying to lead people to faith, or was he secretly trying to destroy it, as Voltaire and many others have since suspected, by making it so irrational, so lacking in morality, and so ridiculous?”39
As we leave Bayle, consider his entry on Geoffroy Vallée. Vallée had said he found unbelief in Ecclesiastes and the first psalm and was executed in 1574 for denying God.40 Bayle made much of Vallée as evidence that unchecked reason always leads to unbelief. Bayle wrote as if he were warning against that unbelief, but that is not how it read to his tremendous readership, and it gave Vallée, who had been drifting out of memory, a proper place in the history of doubt. Yet, along with looking to the past, Bayle’s book was fresh: impatient with the variety of philosophies, confident in science, and resigned to ignorance in matters of religion.
In the early eighteenth century a new popular compendium of doubt appeared on the scene, infamously titled The Three Imposters. The impostors in question were Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Under this title, the text was the most widely available of all the clandestine manuscripts that circulated during the eighteenth century.41 It was first published in 1719 under the title The Life and the Spirit of Spinoza, and in fact there were two texts here, one called “The Life” and the other “The Spirit.” “The Life” was a biography of Spinoza, written in about 1678 by a devoted disciple, which drew him as an exceedingly virtuous genius, following truth. “The Spirit” was itself a meld of two things: the first part was the three-impostors legend, which was traceable to Pomponazzi and Averroës and which held that each of the great religious leaders was tricking his followers and was not an agent of the divine; the idea had been recently revived by the Libertines and most recently by the Theophrastus Redivivus. The second part was much more modern: texts of Spinoza that changed a few words here and there, rendering it fully materialist. It was composed sometime between 1702 and 1712 and published anonymously. Historian Silvia Berti has offered evidence for its authorship: Jan Vroesen of Rotterdam, a friend of Bayle’s and founder of The Lantern, the most important philosophical society in town and famous as a company of heretics and freethinkers. The Lantern met in Vroesen’s house.
“The Spirit” also highlighted Spinoza’s discussion of the making of the Bible, including the talmudic story of a council of rabbis who almost removed Ecclesiastes from the Bible but decided for it, finally, because it praised the law of Moses.42 More generally, what “The Spirit” took from Spinoza was an array of spicy quotations critiquing religious ceremony and literal belief in the Bible. “The Spirit” also offers psychological reasons for the development of religion: “Men, feeling that they are capable of wishing and hoping, falsely conclude that this is all that is required to make them free.”43 We fall into this error because wishing would be an efficient way to get what we want, so we hardly even think about what might actually work.
Then, believe it or not, the editors who brought out The Life and the Spirit of Spinoza added whole chapters to Vroesen’s text. One new chapter was an entire section of Spinoza’s Ethics, which actually represented the first French translation of any of it. That was particularly significant since—though popularizations spread the Ethics’ ideas widely—a full French translation was not published until 1842! In the opening passage of the section of Ethics included here, Spinoza gave his account of God acting through the necessity of his nature, but that had been cut, removing even Spinoza’s odd idea of God. The stand-in paragraph was close to one from Hobbes’s Leviathan, where “the chimerical fear of invisible powers” was described as the origin of religion.44 Another added chapter was the intensely irreligious chapter of Leviathan titled “Of Religion.” Still another new chapter was lifted from Charron’s The Three Truths, and one from his Of Wisdom. Four chapters relied on Julius Caesar Vanini (executed exactly a century earlier) and the Libertines Naudé and La Mothe le Vayer, both dead for more than a half-century and in need of a new audience. In Berti’s words, the editors’ purpose “was to construct and disseminate the first portable philosophical compendium of free thought.”45 They succeeded, and it was incredibly popular.
ENGLISH DEISTS
English deism starts with Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), a soldier, poet, and philosopher. He was also ambassador to France from 1618 to 1624 and got to know Mersenne and Gassendi, hung around with the Erudite Libertines, and circulated with those known to discuss Sextus Empiricus.46 In his masterwork, The Truth, published in 1624, he presented to the English world of letters the problem of Skepticism and his refutation of it. The refutation was not much (it had to do with our innate knowledge of truth), but Herbert had gotten the conversation going. He gave deism its name and its first tenets: there was a supreme deity who should be worshiped and who metes out justice in this life and after it; everything the churches added to this was bunk.
English deism was much enlivened with John Locke (1632–1704). Locke studied at Oxford, where he became friends with Newton and Boyle—friendships that persisted all their lives. Locke was also much influenced by Gassendi’s work. He went to France, where he met the bright new minds of French philosophy and science. When he returned to England he was soon suspected of radicalism by the government, and took off for Holland, where he wrote his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Many philosophers had thought our basic ideas about the world (ideas of God, of virtue, of truth) were innate in the human mind or soul. Locke said when we are born the mind is a blank slate, a tabula rasa, and that all knowledge, ideas, images came from sense and experience. To improve human life, do not ask God for help, but change experience and thereby improve people. Locke appreciated the Skeptical critique but thought that sensory knowledge was more manageable than that: we can break it down, following the kind of demonstrations of evidence made by Newton. One can start by saying things have primary qualities like solid-ness or size, and also secondary qualities like taste and sound. The first are all about the object; the second are about the way objects impact our sense organs—the world outside our heads cannot be said to have taste or sound. This was real progress in dealing with Skepticism.
Locke had digested the doubt of the ancient philosophers (there were no anthropomorphic gods) and had digested the doubt of the ancient Skeptics (nothing could be known at all). He also understood how Christian theology had transformed the idea of knowledge (by seeing religion as the new source of it, through revelation), and he saw how the Renaissance Skeptics such as Montaigne had brought the whole thing down again. Locke did not agree with Descartes, because Locke noticed that “I think, therefore I am” is a bit of a leap (as the Buddha might have happily pointed out); that “I think, therefore thinking happens” is pretty much all you can get. Locke did believe in God, as a deist, because there was thinking in the universe. He considered it possible that thinking could be a property of organic matter but decided that, probably, thinking could not have appeared in the universe if it had not come from some great thinking something.
Locke’s ideas spawned one of the history of doubt’s most illustrious of believers. The philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) said that Locke’s primary and secondary qualities were all products of our minds. Berkeley’s doubt of the reality of the material world went further than that of any other philosopher in the West. It took as true what was, in the old Skepticism, only the most extreme of the various possibilities. For Berkeley, the world was only in our minds and the mind of God.
By 1725 J. F. Reimann’s Universal History of Atheism included as atheists: Thomas Hobbes, John Toland, Count Charles Blount, and Anthony Collins. I have spoken of Hobbes. The other three came a half-generation later and, though less known today, were cutting-edge in their own time. Toland had met and become friends with Locke and joined forces with him in the public fray. Yet Toland’s own thought was much influenced by Lucretius and Bruno. Toland was often said to have started the “deist controversy” when he published, in 1696, Christianity Not Mysterious, which read the Bible in the new critical mode and incorporated the most doubting aspects of Locke’s philosophy.47 The book was burned in Ireland in 1697. In England, an Act of 1696 was aimed at any who said there were more gods than one or denied the truth of the Christian religion. Thus, Toland’s choice to attach his name to the second edition of Christianity Not Mysterious meant that he spent most of his life in financial difficulty. His biography of John Milton caused a scandal for doubting the authenticity of the New Testament. He fought for full rights for Jews in England and Ireland in a lifelong campaign for religious toleration. Jonathan Swift called him the “great Oracle of anti-Christians,” and Locke coined the term freethinker in reference to him.48 Toland also may have been one of the editors involved in the production of The Three Imposters.
In Toland’s Letter to Serena (1704), written to Sophia, Queen of Prussia, he coined the term pantheist. He used it again in the title (only) of Socinianism Truly Stated, by a Pantheist (1705); and in 1710, in a letter to the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, he offered a definition: “the pantheistic opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe.” Toland worked it all out in Pantheisticon (1720), which proposed a civic religion with meetings, community rituals, and a secularist liturgy. Although modeled on Masonic lodges (cultish nonreligious citizens’ clubs), Toland’s imagined civic religion was the first of its kind. He clearly wanted more community for doubters. At least he had friends from the past: in 1698 he bought Queen Elizabeth’s bound copy of four dialogues by Bruno, which must have cost him a great deal, and we know he had a copy of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things near him in the room where he died.
Toland was an atomist and believed that Aristotle’s problem with the motion of the world had been proved foolish by the new physics: if matter had motion intrinsically, that is, if it turns out that matter is in motion by its very nature, the hypothesis of a prime mover becomes unnecessary. Newton saw that force is not a thing outside matter that pushes on it, but rather that pieces of matter exert forces on each other. Today we think less of forces at all, and instead think of the pieces of matter having a field of interaction. Still, Toland had noticed that Aristotle had been tricked by friction and gravity into thinking that things needed outside force in order to move. The Prime Mover was unnecessary after all.
Toland did the historian of doubt a remarkable service. He wrote on the hidden or “internal” doctrines of ancient writers—how they had exoteric teachings that were public to all and esoteric teaching that they kept only for special students—and he taught how one could parse a single text and find both the public and the secret, embedded meanings. He was writing about the ancient philosophers, but Toland admits, “I have more than once hinted that the external and internal doctrines are as much in use as ever.”49 He further notes, “considering how dangerous it is made to tell the truth, ’tis difficult to know when any man declares his real sentiments of things.”50 In this way we are told outright that, when criticizing religion can get an author beheaded, a lot of authors hide the true meaning of their books. It’s an obvious point, but historians try hard not to read anything into texts unless there is very good evidence to support it. Toland’s contemporary recipe for subterfuge lets us be a little bolder in our interpretation of the texts of his times. The first step in disguising a thesis, Toland explains, is to start off your work with “a bouncing compliment” to whatever it is you are going to attack. Next, mention that you are not dissembling—it reminds people of the possibility of dissembling. Insisting that you are not a wolf in sheep’s clothing (indignantly!) can subtly influence the innocent reader, while serving as nothing less than a secret handshake to those in the know. Of course, he continues, the best technique for smuggling doubt to the reading public is simply to offer short, lousy arguments for the orthodox view (to which you have offered your “bouncing compliment”) and excellent, extensive arguments for what you really believe.51
Anthony Collins (1676–1729) was friends with Toland and Locke and was much influenced by Spinoza. He said that there was a God, but that God was the world; thus everything is the only way it could have been, and therefore God is not free. Berkeley knew Collins, and Berkeley swore that someone he called “our Diagoras” had announced that he had found a proof against the existence of God. Historian David Berman has done a nice job of showing that this Diagoras was Collins.52 Their contemporary, Samuel Johnson, offered a bit more information when he wrote that Collins had announced finding a demonstration against God and then “soon after published [it] in a pretended demonstration that all is fate, and necessity.”53 That is, Collins told his select crowd about his Spinoza-influenced atheism, but in print he said that everything is mechanistically predetermined, without mentioning that this meant God was not free and was thus not anything more than the universe itself. A contemporary wrote, “I am told by those, who are very capable of informing me, that the modern Atheist [in England] has given up the system of Epicurus as absurd and indefensible and adheres to that of the Fatalists.”54 For many of these people, Fatalism meant not only Spinoza but also ancient Stoicism. Listen to Collins on immortality: “The immortality of the soul was nowhere plain in the Old Testament, was denied by the Sadducees, the most philosophical part of the Jewish Nation… was thought doubtful by most sects of the Greek philosophers and denied by the Stoics, the most religious sect of them all; had never, according to Cicero, been asserted in writing by any Greek extant in his time… and was first taught by the Egyptians.”55 The soul he emphasized was a new, transplanted idea, from the land of mystery cults and animal worship.
The first to translate sections of Spinoza’s Tractatus into English was Count Charles Blount (1654–1693), in his Miracles No Violations of the Laws of Nature (1683). He combined it, paragraph by paragraph in places, with selections from Hobbes’s Leviathan. Blount was a close friend of Hobbes’s and was devoted to ancient Stoicism. One of his favorite aphorisms was Seneca’s line: “After death nothing is, and nothing Death.” Blount put out a scholarly edition of a classical text that camouflaged a compendium of ancient, Renaissance, and contemporary sources of doubt: Pliny, Cicero, and Lucretius; Pomponazzi, Vanini, Montaigne, and Machiavelli; and then Hobbes, Spinoza, and Isaac la Peyrère. Blount also wrote Oracles of Reason—“Lucretius Redivivus.” He seems to have been an important figure of a thriving world of freethinkers. Blount grew ill and, in the end, killed himself—long cited as a proof of his commitment to Stoic over Christian ideas. He has also been remembered as an atheist.
Also part of this group was the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Locke’s patron, like him a deist and champion of Plato, Epicurus, and Marcus Aurelius and of general free thought. The jurist and deist Matthew Tindal was also important, arguing that true religion was universal and all particular dogma was nonsense, based on unverifiable hearsay. There were fights among these thinkers: Bernard Mandeville’s Free Thought on Religion (1720) was understood by many as the great text of English deism. It favored the Epicureanism of Hobbes and Gassendi and Montaigne’s approach to moral problems, and rejected other deists as maintaining frankly Christian ideas in their supposedly rational religion. Amid the squabbles, though, Shaftesbury in particular brought a concentration on politeness and manners to philosophy and this tended to open the conversation to anyone who could learn the civil niceties.
So doubt was thriving among philosophers. What of the rest of the population? Consider the case of young Thomas Aikenhead. The events took place in Scotland and “made a great noise” in London at the end of the 1790s.56 Aikenhead was a medical student at the University of Edinburgh, charged with blasphemy in 1796. He was accused of saying that theology was “a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense” and that the scriptures were “so stuffed with madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that you admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them.”57 His accusers said he described the Old Testament as “Ezra’s fables, by a profane allusion to Esop’s fables [sic], and that being a cunning man he drew a number of Babylonian slaves to follow him, for whom he had made up a feigned genealogy.” Ezra, he guessed, showed the genealogy to the Persian king Cyrus and thereby convinced the king to set them up in Israel. Aikenhead was also accused of calling Jesus “the impostor Christ” and saying Jesus must have learned some magic in Egypt and then “picked up a few ignorant blockish fisher fellows, whom he knew by his skill in physiognomy, had strong imaginations.”58 Jesus then played “pranks” on them with his supposed miracles. Aikenhead was also accused of saying that Moses, “if ever… there was such a man,” had, like Jesus, “learned magic in Egypt, but that he was both the better artist and better politician than Jesus.”
Lectures at the University of Edinburgh were filled with discussions of Hobbes and Spinoza so that the students could learn to refute them. Aikenhead might have gotten the idea of Ezra’s inventing pre-Babylonian Jewish history from Spinoza. Further, the library there had Blount and Toland, among other doubting texts. Faced with these charges, he confessed all and begged forgiveness, reminding the court that he was still a minor, only twenty years old. These were harsh times, though. The world was changing fast, and the old world tried to hang on. In the same year that the Privy council initiated the last major witch-hunt in Scotland, it also decided, by one vote, to execute Aikenhead. This was done on January 8, 1697, about three months before his twenty-first birthday. He died holding the Bible. Our best collection of materials on Aikenhead, by the way, was meticulously preserved by John Locke.
MORE JESUITS IN CHINA
With the fall of the Ming dynasty (which lasted from 1368 to 1644; it was the dynasty that built the Wall) and the rise of the Qing (1644–1911), the Jesuits’ fortunes rose in China. We saw that their mission had been in decline. Now the new Qing emperor, who was avid for Western science and math, would change everything. The Jesuits there responded to his interest by sending for experts and technicians of many types. They even built a harpsichord and started giving lessons. The court seems to have become a campground for science, math, and music. Intellectuals and courtiers scheduled lessons for themselves all day long. They built European fountains, studied geometry, played music, and made windmills.
For all the variety, astronomy was still the Jesuits’ most impressive offering. Soon after the transfer of power in 1644, Jesuits began serving as directors of the imperial calendar, an important state office. Remarkably, however, the Europeans did not want to tell the Chinese about Copernicus and Galileo and heliocentrism. The Jesuits actually taught the Chinese a system proposed by the astronomer Tycho Brahe, in which the earth is stationary and the other planets go around the sun, which in turn orbits Earth. The deception is striking: Brahe’s system had never been accepted in Europe and was now known to be false. But, with the right mathematical corrections, it allowed prediction of the heavenly motions and a version of the old cosmology. The Chinese found the betrayal a little stunning when they learned of it. That happened in 1760 when the missionary Michel Benoist at last brought heliocentric theory to the Qianlong emperor’s attention. By then the Chinese scholars had grown less impressed with the European system anyway, because it was complicated and the calculations were off.
Yet despite the tragic comedy of lying to millions about the nature of the universe for over a century, and the suspicion that it generated, the science that the Jesuits brought into China vitalized Chinese astronomy and math. Wang Xishan (1628–1682), Mei Wending (1633–1721), and Xue Fengzuo (died 1680) were the first scholars in China to respond to the exact sciences brought in by the Jesuits after 1644, and they were responsible for a scientific revolution. Through their work, for example, geometry and trigonometry largely replaced numerical algebra. They convinced Chinese astronomers that mathematical models were not only useful tools for predicting phenomena but were actually explanatory, thus changing the whole tenor of the experience: the work became investigative. This burst of intellectual activity renewed interest in Chinese philosophers, and in historian Joanna Whaley-Cohen’s words, “part of this movement involved a repackaging of the sages of antiquity as initiators of Chinese technology.”59 As she also points out, however, scientists like Mei Wending claimed that one had to disagree with the ancient sages if new scientific truth contradicted them.
The movement that arose around that idea was called kaozheng, or “evidentiary research.” It championed the rationalist sages of the Chinese past as a way of connecting even specifically Western scientific knowledge with the authority of Chinese antiquity. In fact, as Whaley-Cohen puts it, “To encourage serious attention to the new knowledge, eminent scholars created a myth that Western mathematics had evolved out of ancient Chinese ideas.”60 A mid-eighteenth-century kaozheng scholar insisted that “In ancient times … no one could be a Confucian who did not know mathematics…. Chinese methods [now] lag behind Europe’s because Confucians do not know mathematics.” So the great kaozheng movement was keenly inspired by European math and science, but it folded this energy back into China and made itself a profoundly Chinese ideal.
Meanwhile, the effect from the other side was considerable. We saw that Ricci had created a strange brand of Chinese Christianity in the seventeenth century, but missionaries there did not see anything too odd about it, immersed as they were in the local Chinese culture. In the early eighteenth century, new missionaries arrived who knew little about China or the history of Ricci’s decisions, and they were fairly shocked. It looked as if Ricci and his followers had gone mad: the cross was but one of the symbols on family shrines, the word for God was essentially “sky,” and Christians merrily performed rituals at Confucian shrines. The new missionaries ran to Pope Clement XI and said that the entire Catholic flock in China was praying to Confucius, and to their own dead, and praising the sky for sustaining them.
In response, the Jesuits redoubled their claim that all this ritual was civil and secular. The pope decided against them this time, but the idea of widespread atheism was further popularized; it was soon posited elsewhere, too. The concept of universal belief was shattered. When Clement XI condemned Chinese ritual in 1715, Catholic converts were no longer allowed even to watch Confucian rites, “because to be a bystander in this ritual is as pagan as to participate in it actively.”61 This stung and amazed the emperor Kangxi; and missions were banned from China. The Emperor’s Decree of 1721 responded to the pope: “To judge from this proclamation, their religion is no different from other small, bigoted sects of Buddhism or Taoism. I have never seen a document which contains so much nonsense. From now on, Westerners should not be allowed to preach in China, to avoid further trouble.” In England, the idea of an atheist China appealed to many deists. Among Collins’s references to atheists we find “the literati in China” and the “followers of Spinoza.”62 Tindal argued that Jews and Christians cannot be the only people allowed to perceive truth since there were three hundred million atheist Chinese who, he said, were in some ways better off with their Confucianism.
ENLIGHTENMENT
Reason to doubt was not the only thing the Europeans brought back from their travels; they also returned with something to drink while you talked about the problem. Bars or “public houses” had always been the place to find radical talk, because people gathered there and because alcohol loosens lips. In the eighteenth century, suddenly, tea and coffee flooded into Europe. It was an immediate and lasting craze, and it gave rise to teahouses and cafés that could serve the same function as bars, but on a level both more sober and more refined. When Lord Shaftesbury wrote about politeness and philosophy, he was advising on the rules of conversation of the London coffeehouse. In Paris, salons were the great theaters of philosophy and conversation. When the Enlightenment philosophers called themselves “French Lord Shaftesburys,” it was in reference not only to his doubt but also to his commitment to the new politeness that kept serious conversation from ending up in a brawl, or from being dominated by the elites.63
The French salons got started when a few upper-class women of early-eighteenth-century Paris sought to get an education in the new sciences and philosophies of the day. They had been barred from real learning, and the culture of their time was noted for its levity—they were hungry for substance. These parties started for the purpose of self-improvement, bringing together the most interesting scholars, scientists, and authors for a splendid supper and a few hours of talk. The salonnières who started all this, in the first decades of the century, were Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin de Tencin and the Marquise de Lambert, Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles. In the next generation, the three salonnières who created famous, world-changing salons of the mid-century Enlightenment were Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, Julie de Lespinasse, and Suzanne Necker.64 These were respectable events, but they were also a bit on the fringe. Tencin had escaped from a convent and forced vows and then had a baby out of wedlock—and it was no secret. But she was not the biggest scandal around: her guests were such men as Montesquieu, the radical political philosopher, and Bernard Fontenelle, whose great contribution was as a popularizer of modern science, especially astronomy. Fontenelle defended Copernicanism, critiqued miracles, and satirized religious wars. His work was thought of by many as the first discussion of the Bible as myth.65It was Geoffrin who can be said to have invented the Paris salon by making the dinner early, at one P.M., so that the company could talk afterward (and stay alert), and by making each salon fall regularly every week. She held a Monday salon for artists (she was the most prominent collector of contemporary French painting of her age) and a Wednesday salon for writers.66 The other salonnières arranged their salons on various days, so that each could attend the others. For several decades, if invited, a person could attend a salon every day of the week. Some did.
The ideas that were discussed in these salons were important in the history of doubt, but so was the social and political role that these events came to play. At the end of the wars of religion, authority had won: the monarchy grew in strength over the nobles. Nobles responded to the growing power of the state and its religion by inventing the notion of a Republic of Letters, a kind of state within the state where equality reigned and the monarchy was not the judge of all things. The new judge was, first of all, the salonnière. She shaped the conversations in her rooms as she thought interesting and convincing. The men who competed to get letters of invitation so that they could attend, and came back week after week for decades, extolled the salonnières as directors of conversation and as the source of connection to employment and publication. Some Italians returning from Paris wrote to one of the great salonnières and said they had tried to meet on their own, at home, but “There is no way to make Naples resemble Paris unless we find a woman to guide us, organize us, Geoffrinise us.”67
If the salonnières themselves provided the first answer to who should judge intellectual ideas in the Republic of Letters, they also helped to create the second part of the answer, which was public opinion. The salons generated a plethora of publications intended to bring salon conversation and salon news to as wide an audience as possible. Bayle started the first journal of the Republic of Letters, calling it just that. As such journals proliferated, their open nature not only involved average people in the world of ideas but went further and asked all readers to contribute. All this was conceived in terms described by the salonnières: the Enlightenment was to be a social act of mutual education.
It was in salons and journals that Voltaire (1694–1778) showed off his famous wit. Voltaire was not atheistic, but he probably inspired more people to reject their childhood religion than anyone else at that time. As a taste, consider his entry on “the Divinity of Jesus” in The Philosophical Dictionary. Voltaire writes: “The Socinians, who are regarded as blasphemers, do not recognize the divinity of Jesus Christ. They dare to pretend, with the philosophers of antiquity, with the Jews, the Mahometans, and most other nations, that the idea of a god-man is monstrous,” and he goes on to explain how the idea of Jesus as God had grown over the course of Christian history.68
Violent persecution, though tapering off, was still around and Voltaire was a great leader in stopping it. In the 1760s, when he was already a phenomenally well known author, Voltaire embarked on three great campaigns against the current cases of suppression. The first was the Calas affair. The Protestant Jean Calas and his wife, Anne-Rose, were rearing four sons and two daughters in largely Catholic Toulouse. One son had recently converted to Catholicism; another had expressed the desire to do so but did not follow through. One day in 1762 this son was found hanged, and Catholic neighbors suggested that the boy had been killed to keep him from becoming a Catholic. As a result, the whole family was arrested, except for the daughters, who were away—when they returned they were forced to enter a convent. The jury in Toulouse found Jean Calas guilty. He was sentenced to torture “ordinary and extraordinary,” was then broken on the wheel and finally burned at the stake. The brothers ran off to Geneva. Voltaire met the remaining family and took up the cause of exonerating Jean: By 1765, a Parisian tribunal unanimously pronounced Calas innocent. What was left of the family’s property was returned to them, and gifts from average people and the king himself allowed what was left of the Calas family a decent material life. This seems to be the first time a man of letters conjured up a wave of public opinion in support of a cause. His essay on tolerance emerged from this experience.
Voltaire’s second great cause of this period was the Sirven affair, which stretched out across nine years. Here again, the Sirven family was accused of killing one of its own—a daughter this time—to prevent her from converting to Catholicism. The third cause centered on a nineteen-year-old youth named La Barre who refused to take his hat off to a religious procession and also mutilated a wooden crucifix. He was tortured and executed for blasphemy in 1766. Voltaire was particularly stung that La Barre’s death might have been precipitated because the boy was known to possess a copy of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Voltaire rose up against “this sentence so execrable, and at the same time so absurd, which is an eternal disgrace to France.” This is why Voltaire’s works are peppered with the injunction to “Ecrasez l’infame!” (Crush the infamous thing!)—which meant crush the Church, make it stop. Consider his entry on “Martyrs” in his Philosophical Dictionary. Here he has just explained how Christianity overstates the role of martyrdom in its own history:
Do you want good well-authenticated barbarities—good and well attested massacres, rivers of blood which have actually flowed—fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, infants at the breast, who have in reality had their throats cut, and been heaped on one another? Persecuting monsters! Seek these only in your own annals: you will find them in the crusades against the Albigenses,… in the frightful day of St. Bartholomew…
He laughs at the idea of Marcus Aurelius being called a “monster of cruelty” by “you who have deluged Europe with blood and covered it with corpses, in order to prove that the same body can be in a thousand places at once, and that the pope can sell indulgences!”69 It’s amazing that the young La Barre had this book in his hands, and that his death was in part caused by his possession of it: the cruelty was committed in punishment for the accusation of it.
Voltaire had a lot more to say on the subject, but we will settle for a last word from the “Optimism” entry in his Dictionary. Shaftesbury had followed the idea that this world is a self-running mechanism and since God began it without any intention of interfering with it, it must be that it is a good world. What seems like evil is but one side of a balance. Leibniz did the most with this. Voltaire didn’t like it. As so many have noticed—and Voltaire refers to Epicurus in his discussion—there is an awful lot of pain in the world, and it does not seem well distributed. That’s the joke of Candide: the naïf hero’s teacher preaches that this is the best of all possible worlds, as life whittles him down to a nub. Here the main attack is broader, but it narrows down to the same point:
What! to be chased from a delicious place, where we might have lived for ever only for the eating of an apple? What! to produce in misery wretched children, who will suffer everything, and in return produce others to suffer after them? What! to experience all maladies, feel all vexations, die in the midst of grief, and by way of recompense be burned to all eternity—is this lot the best possible?
Voltaire thought the existence of the world was proof of a creator, but of no more. “The question of good and evil remains in remediless chaos for those who seek to fathom it in reality.” His was a very moral critique of religion. Voltaire repeated the ancient Greek smirk over the foolishness of myth, and the ancient Hebrew holler about providence, and added his own howl at religious intolerance. That last one opened people’s minds to the others in this period and brought on the Enlightenment’s efflorescence of secularism. Motivated by this rebellion against the stake, even calmer, more old-style doubters, such as the scientists and historians, were growing political teeth.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and his friend the mathematician Jean d’Alembert (1717–1783) created the Enlightenment’s most famous project, the Encyclopedia, a compendium of knowledge and know-how showing the old secrets of the guilds, the latest technology, and the most scandalous new ideas. It was considered extremely antireligious. It is worth noting that d’Alembert was the illegitimate child of Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin de Tencin, mentioned in the discussion of the salons.70 Diderot is often written of as an atheist, although others note that in some cases he pulled back from the idea that the universe had nothing like a spirit to it. In any case, he was a world-class doubter.
His 1777 “Conversation of a philosopher with the Maréchal de—” was actually the story of a conversation with Madame la Maréchale. A man is waiting for the Marshall to return and the great man’s wife asks, Is he “M. Crudeli… then it’s you who believes in nothing?”71 When he says yes, she expresses surprise that his morals are the same as a believer’s. Diderot explains that one does not disbelieve in order to secure license for oneself. An honest person is honest without threats or supervision, and many a believer is dishonest. He also points out that “if it suddenly took the fancy of twenty thousand Parisians to conform strictly to the Sermon on the Mount [“Blessed are the poor…,” etc.], there would be “so many lunatics that the police wouldn’t know what to do with them.”72 You cannot subject a nation “to a rule which suits only a few melancholic men.” For a better morality, Crudeli suggests, “Make it so that the good of individuals is so closely tied to the general good that a citizen can hardly harm society without harming himself.”73 Madame la Maréchale has many questions. She asks him, sincerely, “Does the idea of being nothing after death not distress you?” He agrees he “would prefer to exist.”
MADAME LA MARÉCHALE: If,… the hope of a life to come seems sweet and consoling even to you, why deprive us of it?
CRUDELI: I haven’t got this hope because the desire hasn’t in the least concealed from me the emptiness of it, but I deprive no one of it.74
But you can keep it, he says, only if you can believe you will see without eyes, hear without ears, think without a head, love without a heart, feel without senses, exist without being anywhere, and be something without place or size. She responds: “But this world of ours, who made it?”
CRUDELI: I ask you that.
MADAME LA MARÉCHALE: God made it.
CRUDELI: And what is God?
MADAME LA MARÉCHALE: A spirit.
CRUDELI: And if a spirit makes matter, why could not matter make a spirit?
MADAME LA MARÉCHALE: But why should it make it?
CRUDELI: Because I see it do so every day.
People invent gods (and mindless things combine to create creatures with mind). Doubt was starting to have fun, and in public. Parts of the above dialog were so risqué that Crudeli felt he had to get up and whisper in the lady’s ear—for instance, that religious morality makes it more admissible to damage a virtuous woman’s reputation than to piss in a sacred vessel, although the first, he said, was a great issue of civil life and it regularly goes unpunished, while the second was harmless nonsense but it would get you killed.75 Like Bayle, Diderot had a touch of Rabelais in him, and, although he played at whispering his impiety and usually denied proselytizing, in truth it all helped broadcast his news. Diderot also said humanity would not be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest.76
Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) was another of the Encyclopedists. His Essays on the Mind (1758) was publicly burned at Paris. He himself was tolerated in part because his wife, who was friends with Voltaire’s mistress, the influential Newtonian author Emilé du Chatelet, was also friends with Queen Marie Antoinette. Anyway, by now condemnation did not always do a book harm: Essays on the Mind was translated into most of the European languages and is said to have been a major best-seller. It was materialist in its conception of the universe and convinced that a nonreligious morality is what really guided most people’s virtue. For at least a century, doubters would credit Helvétius as a major influence.
When people think of the origins of modern doubt, now as then they tend to think of the literary and the comic—it was the light works of Voltaire and Diderot that became emblems of enlightenment. They reached a wide audience and changed the way ordinary people thought. Yet the most innovative philosopher of doubt of the period was the Scotsman David Hume (1711–1776). It is difficult to say whether Hume believed in God. In the penultimate chapter of his Enquiry into Human Understanding (1748), he has a character take up the role of defender of the tenets of Epicurus, which deny “a divine existence and consequently a providence and a future state.” In this way Hume presented many arguments against contemporary believers but exclaimed “O Athenians!” every once in a while to remind readers that he was really just talking to the ancient Greeks. It reads remarkably like a man finished with God, not least because he talks about how useless the concept became once we had agreed that we could not know anything about him. Also, if the order of things as it is, is God, what does it add to say that God exists? The tone of his voice on questions of providence, life after death, and miracles was pretty direct. In the same way, Hume explains that everyday morality is based on the simple fact that doing good brings you peace of mind and praise from others and doing evil brings rejection and sorrow. We don’t need religion for morality, and what is more: religion itself got its morality from everyday morality in the first place.77 That’s a smart little notion. As for adding a God to the system, Hume asks why bother, especially concerning ethics? After all, roars Hume, “Are there any marks of a distributive justice in the world?”78
Hume’s Dialog Concerning Natural Religion of 1779 created a great furor. The conversation was between Philo, Cleanthes, and Demea. Where did he get the names? The answer is that the whole book was a love letter to Cicero’s dialog The Nature of the Gods, and that is where the first two names came from. In Cicero’s dialog, Cotta was the Skeptic and his teacher was named Philo; Balbus was the Stoic and his teacher was Cleanthes (Velleius offered the Epicurean view). Also, Cicero himself introduced and concluded his dialog, yet he was clearly also the Cotta character; and although he favored Cotta’s Skepticism all along, in the end he declared Balbus and his bland Stoic theism the winner. In Hume’s dialog, he takes Cicero’s introduction and reinterprets it a bit but retains the plea that this question of God is one we must address with forthright honesty. He also maintains the conceit that he himself had been present for these arguments and, again, too young to participate. Yet Hume is also the Philo character. This Cleanthes (whose name stood for the Stoic) is a deist philosopher. Demea, named for a famously strict father character of the ancient world, is described as a priest of “rigid inflexible orthodoxy.”
Cleanthes offers the argument from design: houses and machines are made by an intelligent creator, therefore the universe, which is also complex and ordered, must also have one. Demea argues the need for an ultimate cause to explain the great series of cause and effect that we see in the world. Hume presents these as the best arguments for God, and then has Philo take them apart. Philo, named for the ancient Skeptic, here also represents the Epicureans’ insistence that the world is perfectly capable of making itself. Philo was a brilliant and very modern creation. Against the argument from design offered by Cleanthes, Philo explains that the world has its own internal logic and that, in any case, a lot of the order we perceive is actually in our heads—it’s just the way we see things. Against the ancient argument of a first cause, Hume brings in the equally ancient idea that there is no reason to believe in cause and effect in the first place. This doubt had been posed by doubters from the Carvaka to al-Ghazzali to Nicholas of Autrecourt; Hume brought it to modern Europe. Yet even if we do accept it, Hume asks, why should the great stream of cause and effect have to start from some outside force and get its meaning therefrom? Perhaps it started itself and means exactly what it is.
When the conversation first begins, deist Cleanthes teases Philo about his Skepticism: “In reality, would not a man be ridiculous, who pretended to reject Newton’s explication of the wonderful phenomenon of the rainbow, because that explication gives a minute anatomy of the rays of light; a subject, forsooth, too refined for human comprehension?” Hume says yes, there is a “brutish and ignorant skepticism” that supports the vulgar in their prejudice against what they do not easily understand: “They firmly believe in witches, though they will not believe nor attend to the most simple proposition of Euclid.” But the refined and philosophical Skeptics, meanwhile, doubt only our ability to know metaphysics, and believe that we can know the world of daily life. Hume’s position was midway: rational investigation of the world and ourselves is only what it is, but it can be done and is deeply worth doing.
Then turning on the priest Demea, Cleanthes laughs that as soon as reason began making headway against faith, all the arguments of the “ancient academics” were adopted by the Catholic Church, marked now by “all the cavils of the boldest and most determined Pyrrhonism.” A different kind of doubt was building now, one that combined reason and skepticism: Locke, he said, was the first to say that religion “was only a branch of philosophy,” and that just as on any other subject, we are always revising toward truth on the question of God. As Cleanthes tells it, the skepticism of “Bayle and other libertines” had “still further propagated the judicious sentiment of Mr. Locke,” such that it is now “avowed by all pretenders to reasoning and philosophy, that Atheist and Skeptic are almost synonymous.”
Cleanthes adds a polite, “And as it is certain that no man is in earnest when he professes the latter principle, I would fain hope that there are as few who seriously maintain the former,” and that’s when Philo, Hume’s character, breaks in here. Philo sets it up, saying that, “having mentioned David’s fool, who said in his heart there is no God,” Bacon observed “that the Atheists nowadays have a double share of folly; for they are not contented to say in their hearts there is no God, but they also utter that impiety with their lips, and are thereby guilty of multiplied indiscretion and imprudence. Such people, though they were ever so much in earnest, cannot, methinks, be very formidable.”
That is, Hume suggests, the people who are formidable atheists are the ones who are careful what they say. The wise hold their peace—foolish doubters speak. But, says Hume, even though this may cause you to “rank me in this class of fools,” he cannot quite help himself from telling Cleanthes his impression of “the history of the religious and irreligious skepticism with which you have entertained us.” In “ignorant ages… such as those which followed the dissolution of the ancient schools,” people were more trusting, so the priests thought that the best protection against “Atheism, Deism, or heresy of any kind” was to carefully defend a set dogma.
But at present, when… men… have learned to compare the popular principles of different nations and ages, our sagacious divines have changed their whole system of philosophy, and talk the language of Stoics, Platon-ists, and Peripatetics, not that of Pyrrhonians and Academics. If we distrust human reason, we have now no other principle to lead us into religion. Thus, skeptics in one age, dogmatists in another; whichever system best suits the purpose of these reverend gentlemen, in giving them an ascendant over mankind, they are sure to make it their favorite principle and established tenet.
Cleanthes’ response is that it is natural for the Church to use whatever works against “Atheists, Libertines, and Freethinkers of all denominations.” So the conversation ends with Hume’s Philo promoting a quiet atheism, while the believer admits that belief uses any argument in fashion.
Hume offers a few other doubting observations that are too pretty to miss.
The Deity, I can readily allow, possesses many powers and attributes of which we can have no comprehension: But if our ideas, so far as they go, be not just, and adequate, and correspondent to his real nature, I know not what there is in this subject worth insisting on. Is the name, without any meaning, of such mighty importance? Or how do you mystics, who maintain the absolute incomprehensibility of the Deity, differ from Sceptics or Atheists, who assert, that the first cause of all is unknown and unintelligible?
Thus “those who maintain the perfect simplicity of the Supreme Being” are “in a word, Atheists, without knowing it.” A perfect simplicity could not have thought, he explains. “A mind, whose acts and sentiments and ideas are not distinct and successive; one, that is wholly simple, and totally immutable, is a mind which has no thought, no reason, no will, no sentiment, no love, no hatred; or, in a word, is no mind at all. It is an abuse of terms to give it that appellation.”
In another lovely argument, Hume has Philo say that nothing on earth could tell us much about the universe. The wonder of human thought should not make us expect thought elsewhere: “What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe? Our partiality in our own favor does indeed present it on all occasions; but sound philosophy ought carefully to guard against so natural an illusion.” In a formulation that would be much quoted, Hume says that “Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?” For him the universe is neither good nor evil. Philo also defends “the old Epicurean hypothesis,” that the world came into being by chance, that “matter can acquire motion without any voluntary agent or first mover.” Philo enjoys this in the same way Toland did, with yet more sophistication, saying that gravity, elasticity, and electricity all move things without volition, adding, “Besides, why may not motion have been propagated by impulse through all eternity, and the same stock of it, or nearly the same be still upheld in the universe.” The conservation of momentum helps explain where all the new energy is coming from—it’s not new energy.
So how did the animals, human beings, and everything else come into being? Hume says it was trial and error. An animal without the right internal order dies and the stuff of it will reform into another thing—even with collections of objects the ordered ones persist longer, so when you look around you see a lot of order. Even if things were totally random, we could expect accidental order to persist longer than any given example of chaos. Yet he also suggests that patterns of order may be an innate feature of all material things, and these patterns may generate the order that we perceive. In the end of his Dialog, Hume bluntly declares Philo the Skeptic wiser than the orthodox Demea, but in an almost exact quote from the last line of Cicero, Hume’s last line claims that the arguments of deist Cleanthes brought us nearer to the truth. Just as with Cicero, it has been assumed that the gesture was for the sake of safety.
So imagine Hume at age fifty-two visiting Paris. It is 1763 and the city is alive with vibrant salons and a bold Republic of Letters. He has already written many of his great works and is the toast of the town. It was on this trip that Hume visited the house of the Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789) and gave the history of doubt another of its legendary dinner parties. Along with Diderot, d’Holbach was among the most famous of the band of younger, more daring Enlightenment philosophers—by now Diderot and d’Holbach were fifty and forty, respectively, while Voltaire was sixty-nine, for example, and Montesquieu seventy-four. The gathering was a philosophical dinner, modeled on the salons, and Diderot, who was there, relates the story:
The first time that M. Hume found himself at the table of the Baron he was seated beside him. I do not know for what purpose the English philosopher took it into his head to remark to the Baron that he did not believe in atheists, that he had never seen any. The Baron said to him: “Count how many we are here. We are eighteen.” The Baron added: “It is not too bad a showing to be able to point out to you fifteen at once: the three others have not made up their minds.”
David Berman has argued that the reason Hume took it into his head to say he had seen no atheists was “that Hume’s opening gambit was rather like a Masonic handshake: an attempt to elicit a response from, and communicate with, someone whose secret identity he guesses.”79 It is a persuasive argument. The anecdote is clearly written from the perspective of the French group, designed to show how outrageous they were. Hume comes off as a bit of a chump, and the anecdote has been used to prove that Hume himself was not an atheist. However, given what Hume had written by then, and that he was already famous throughout Paris for it, the scene makes sense only if it is read the way Berman suggests—without the smirk Diderot added. In any case, there is something brazen in this conversation coming down to us in the way it has: it is doubt’s great coming-out party.
This was the first group of actual avowed atheists; no dissembling, no caveats, just no gods, no God, nothing like it. For the first time, doubters were silenced neither by fear of being killed or exiled nor by fear of how the masses would behave if they became convinced there was no God and no hell. This crowd believed morality was available to anyone through reason. The central text here was Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature. D’Holbach was steeped in several traditions of the history of doubt (his children’s tutor, for instance, published a new translation of Lucretius).80It is not insignificant that the book’s preface, by d’Holbach’s friend Naigeon, was equally brash in its evangelical atheism. It meant that the author did not stand alone even in his most extreme position. Naigeon opened with the assertion that the idea of God was nonsense and the barrier to all human progress. D’Holbach took over and just kept swinging. He’d gotten the idea that matter did not need outside force, let alone a prime mover, from Toland; and he borrowed from Collins as well. Diderot edited the book and added footnotes referencing doubters from Cicero to Hobbes. The text never hedged its claim that there is no God at all.
Is there anything more frightful than the immediate consequences to be drawn from these revolting ideas given to us of their God, by those who tell us to love him… and to obey his orders? Would it not be a thousand times better to depend upon blind matter, upon a nature destitute of intelligence, upon chance, or upon nothing, upon a God of stone or of wood, than upon a God who is laying snares for men, inviting them to sin, and permitting them to commit those crimes which he could prevent, to the end that he may have the barbarous pleasure of punishing them without measure, without utility to himself, without correction to them, and without their example serving to reclaim others?81
This moral critique about burning in hell was matched by the moral critique about burning on earth, at the stake. No God at all makes human behavior along these lines seem even more horrible. “Abandon your chimeras,” he advised, “occupy yourselves with truth; learn the art of living happy; perfect your morals, your governments, and your laws; look to education, to agriculture, and to the sciences that are truly useful; labor with ardor.” Enjoy pleasures and multiply them, and “If you must have chimeras, permit your fellow-creatures to have theirs also; and do not cut the throats of your brethren, when they cannot rave in your own manner.”82 Finally, he sighed, “if the infirmities of your nature require an invisible crutch, adopt such as may suit with your humor, select those which you may think most calculated to support your tottering frame,” but do not let these “imaginary beings” upset you or let you forget your real duty, to sustain the real people around you. This was the origin of the “crutch” indictment. No one had been quite so brashly dismissive of belief since the ancient world.
Edward Gibbon’s (1737–1794) Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire inaugurated the development of a new, careful, secular history. Before it, the accepted understanding was that Christianity took over the Roman Empire because it was ordained by God, that the horrible Roman emperors martyred the early Christians in droves, and that Christians prevailed through the power of God. In this model, Rome was the best humanity could do until we had further revelation, then God stepped in, fixed the world, and Rome sank away. Not only did Gibbon tell the story without any intervention from God, he also told the story of Rome’s decline as due to the disease of Christianity’s spreading through the Roman Empire and rotting it. This was powerful stuff. To get a quick dose of his mood, listen to Gibbon on Christian universality and exclusivity—the insistence that only Christianity be practiced: “These rigid sentiments, which had been unknown to the ancient world, appear to have infused a spirit of bitterness into a system of love and harmony.”83 Gibbon quoted Tertullian to let us see Christians as the cruel ones: “You are fond of spectacles,” the Church Father wrote,
except the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment of the universe. How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult when I behold so many proud monarchs and fancied gods, groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness… liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red hot flames, with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the tribunal … so many tragedians … so many dancers.84
Then Gibbon said, “But the humanity of the reader will permit me to draw a veil over the rest of this infernal description which the zealous African pursues in a long variety of affected and unfeeling witticisms.”85 Before he published, Gibbon sent some of these pages to Hume in 1776, and when Hume wrote back praising Gibbon’s style and scholarship, he added, “It was impossible to treat the subject so as not to give ground of suspicion against you, and you may expect that a clamor will arise.”86 It did.
Gibbon also explains that persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire was piecemeal and never consistent and widespread. He tells the story not as a battle between good and evil, but rather as the disturbance made by a fanatical cult that would not pay respect to the symbols of the state. There were not that many martyrs anyway, wrote Gibbon, announcing “a melancholy truth which obtrudes itself on the reluctant mind,” that “even admitting” all the Christian martyrdom history has recorded, “or devotion has feigned … it must still be acknowledged that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels.”87 The number of Protestants “executed in a single province and a single reign far exceeded that of the primitive martyrs in the space of three centuries and of the Roman empire.” Gibbon’s name would henceforth represent religious doubt.
There were many lesser-known doubters who popularized these works. I note only one of the best of them, the Marquis d’Argens, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer (1704–1771). His book, the Chinese Letters, pretended to be written by the well-traveled Sioeu-Tcheou, which allowed d’Argens to issue a sustained criticism of European customs as if from an innocent outsider. Montesquieu had already proved the technique, but d’Argens took the device to the question of doubt, including the contemporary debate between atheism and deism. The fictional Chinese narrator saw such debates as universal, and all peoples as animated by the same concerns. In the public imagination, doubt existed, had various levels and personnel, and was the concern of peoples all over the world.
FRANKLIN, PAINE, JEFFERSON, AND ADAMS
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706. When he left town as a teenager it was in part because, in his words, “my indiscrete disputations about religion began to make me pointed at with horror by good people as an infidel or atheist.” He had been brought up piously Presbyterian but soon became a doubter:
But I was scarce fifteen, when, after doubting by turns of several points, as I found them disputed in the different books that I had read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself. Some books against Deism fell into my hands…. It happened that they wrought an effect in me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations. I soon became a thorough Deist.
Franklin joined the earliest Masonic lodge in America and in 1734 became its president. When on state business in Edinburgh, Franklin stayed with Hume; in his later years he knew and encouraged the young Thomas Paine; in his still-later years he lived in Paris for a while, where he proposed to, and was refused by, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, widow of the great doubter Helvétius. Franklin’s doubt was Enlightenment vintage. The next generation was more revolutionary in its claims.
Thomas Paine (1737–1809) is an extraordinary personality in our story. Having profoundly influenced the move toward American independence, he also was elected to the French National Convention during France’s Revolution. While in France he wrote his major treatise on religion, The Age of Reason, and smuggled it out of Paris to be published in 1794. He was almost not so lucky himself, coming very close to losing his life in the revolution. When he returned to the United States in 1802, he was befriended by Jefferson.
Paine was bold: “Every national Church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God…. Each of those Churches accuses the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”88 On the evidence of revelation, Paine said that if someone did hear the voice of God, “it is revelation to that person only.” It is a good point. Paine clarified that “When he tells it to a second person” and that person tells it to others, “it is revelation to the first person only and hearsay to every other; and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.” We would expect some literary pizzazz from the man who had convinced some of England’s far-flung farmers to declare themselves independent of their king. Paine does not disappoint: “When also I am told that a woman, called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not.” The claim reminds us that, in the past, ordinary people and figures of popular culture had attacked the mythic ideas of Jesus’ life, but the philosophers had left him alone and instead wrestled with the God of the philosophers. Paine did both. He weakened the idea of a prime mover but also attacked the mythic aspect of Christianity. Paine found a nice hero in the history of doubt, writing: “It appears that Thomas did not believe the resurrection and as they say would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I: and the reason is equally as good for me and every other person as for Thomas.”89 Thus Doubting Thomas was finally picked up as a positive icon of doubt.
Paine also used history to tremendous effect: “The best surviving evidence we now have respecting this affair is the Jews. They are regularly descended from the people who lived in the times this resurrection and ascension is said to have happened, and they say it is not true.”90 He reminded his readers that Jesus was born Jewish and stayed Jewish; and that the statue of Mary developed from statues of ancient goddesses. “The deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints,” he explained, and over time, “the Church became as crowded with the one as the Pantheon had been with the other and Rome was the place of both.”91 Christian theory is “the idolatry of the ancient mythologist, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue,” and now it is “to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.”
Paine cautioned that his argument was not against the real Jesus: “He was a virtuous and an amiable man. The morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind, and, though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some of the Greek philosophers… and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any.”92 Paine wrote that Jewish priests felt threatened by him, and he probably “had in contemplation the delivery of the Jewish nation from the bondage of the Romans.” Thus between the worry of the Jewish priests and the ire of the Romans, “this virtuous reformer and revolutionist lost his life.” He spoke of Jesus as if he were, well, as if he were Tom Paine. Paine thus thought he was doing the best work that could be done—he was a virtuous reformer and revolutionist—and drew a direct line between his life’s devotions and those of a secular Jesus. In modernity, traditionally religious impulses will be translated into politics for many people.
For a mellower founding doubter, consider Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), the third president of the United States of America. In a private letter to a friend, Jefferson wrote:
As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. Epictetus indeed, has given us what was good of the stoics; all beyond, of their dogmas, being hypocrisy and grimace.93
Epictetus was the Stoic who most emphasized the brotherhood of humanity. With “hypocrisy and grimace,” Jefferson was making fun of the way some Stoics emphasized hiding one’s pain. But he cautions against judging them too harshly. The letter continues (with no break): “Their great crime was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines; in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice.” That’s Jefferson getting annoyed at Cicero for his rough treatment of the Epicurean in The Nature of the Gods—and we may recall how silly Velleius was made to appear. Jefferson continues, still on Cicero:
Diffuse, vapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. His prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention. These they fathered blasphemously on him who they claimed as their founder, but who would disclaim them with the indignation which their caricatures of his religion so justly excite.
Now there’s a presidential indictment. Jefferson here scolds Plato for inventing an unintelligible mystical idea that had since been made into a god by the so-called Christians, who found that their crazy made-up stuff was well supported by Plato’s. Then Jefferson says all this was wrongly hooked on Jesus, who would reject all Christianity were he to know of it. Elsewhere, again speaking against Plato’s inventive mysticism, Jefferson delivered one of the greatest parenthetical statements in history:
(Speaking of Plato, I will add, that no writer, ancient or modern, has bewildered the world with more ignes fatui [misleading influence], than this renowned philosopher, in Ethics, in Politics and Physics. In the latter, to specify a single example, compare his views of the animal economy, in his Timaeus, with those of Mrs. Bryan in her Conversations on Chemistry, and weigh the science of the canonized philosopher against the good sense of the unassuming lady. But Plato’s visions have furnished a basis for endless systems of mystical theology, and he is therefore all but adopted as a Christian saint. It is surely time for men to think for themselves, and to throw off the authority of names so artificially magnified. But to return from this parenthesis.) 94
Margaret Bryan was a natural philosopher and a schoolmistress. Among her works, in 1797 she published a Compendious System of Astronomy, with a portrait of herself and two daughters as a frontispiece. In 1806 Mrs. Bryan published Lectures on Natural Philosophy(thirteen lectures on hydrostatics, optics, pneumatics, acoustics), with a notice in it that “Mrs. Bryan educates young ladies at Bryan House, Blackheath.” Conversations on Chemistry came out the same year. Jefferson’s praise of Mrs. Bryan over Plato is a puzzle whose key is the context of doubt.
In this same letter Jefferson’s friend, William Short, must have asked about moralists, because Jefferson seemed to be making a list, saying Socrates was a great one, but we have nothing he wrote, and that we cannot trust Plato; and Seneca was good.
But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of his own country was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its luster from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill.
Jefferson says that if we had a clean text, one that included only the words of the real Jesus, it would help conquer bigotry and fanaticism.
I have sometimes thought of translating Epictetus (for he has never been tolerably translated into English) by adding the genuine doctrines of Epicurus from the Syntagma of Gassendi, and an abstract from the Evangelists of whatever has the stamp of the eloquence and fine imagination of Jesus. The last I attempted too hastily some twelve or fifteen years ago. It was the work of two or three nights only, at Washington, after getting through the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day. But with one foot in the grave, these are now idle projects for me. My business is to beguile the wearisomeness of declining life, as I endeavor to do, by the delights of classical reading and of mathematical truths, and by the consolations of a sound philosophy, equally indifferent to hope and fear.
Jefferson’s devotion to Epicurus helps explain “the pursuit of happiness” line in the Declaration of Independence. It was Jefferson who put together the bill for establishing religious freedom in the United States, grounded in the belief that a person’s opinions cannot be coerced. This was his great contribution and he fought for it his whole life.
One can read hundreds of wonderfully imaginative lines in which Jefferson publicly says that religion is entirely the business of each person, and his or her God, and not at all the business of anyone else. But to friends, here is his advice:
Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear…. Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you.95
An amazing piece of American history. Also, Jefferson explains, “the superlative wisdom of Socrates is testified by all antiquity, and placed virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you.”96 When Plato tells us more mystical things, we can trust that this was just “whimsies of Plato’s own foggy brain.”
In a letter to Short, Jefferson defends his conception of Jesus, saying that if Jesus claimed the things people said he claimed, he was an impostor, so secularizing Jesus saves him from this ignominy. It is easy, he assures Short, to separate the religious foolishness from the philosophy. After all, when historians “tell us of calves speaking, of statues sweating blood, and other things against the course of nature, we reject these as fables not belonging to history.”97 Jefferson also said Jesus had wanted to make rational the Jewish religion, and therefore was dedicated to discarding “idle ceremonies, mummeries and observances” that were “of no effect towards producing the social utilities which constitute the essence of virtue,” instead preaching “philanthropy and universal charity and benevolence.” Jefferson’s ancient Jews sound like Christians in the Age of Religious Wars, and Jesus sounds like, well, like Jefferson: “The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation, is ever dangerous…. They were constantly laying snares, too, to entangle him in the web of the law. He was justifiable, therefore, in avoiding these by evasions, by sophisms, by misconstructions and misapplications of scraps of the prophets…” Here Jefferson makes Jesus sound like Toland, honorably dissembling in order to look more religious to the censors! His finale is singular:
That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore. But that he might conscientiously believe himself inspired from above, is very possible. The whole religion of the Jews, inculcated on him from his infancy, was founded in the belief of divine inspiration…. he might readily mistake the coruscations of his own fine genius for inspirations of an higher order. This belief carried, therefore, no more personal imputation, than the belief of Socrates, that himself was under the care and admonitions of a guardian Daemon. And how many of our wisest men still believe in the reality of these inspirations, while perfectly sane on all other subjects.
There you have it: Jefferson was enough of a doubter to insinuate that belief was insane. It is not strange that the man is best known for a declaration of independence. Most charmingly, like so many other doubters, Jefferson noted that what he said about Jesus “is no more than is granted in all other historical works.” Doubters often mention that much of the best evidence for doubt is already lying around any well-stocked library. When we look at a nickel or gaze on Mount Rushmore, we should remember the great doubter before us.
John Adams was less a doubter than Jefferson, who seems to have gone all the way, but they had a long correspondence mutually critiquing the religious. Adams seems to have doubted everything until he found the Unitarians, an American sect that grew out of English Socinianism that also embraced the ideal of God but no dogma. As the second president of the United States, Adams signed into law the Treaty of Tripoli (1797), which declares that “the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” and is in no way an enemy to Muslims. On this basis “it is declared… that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” Further, “The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.” It was carried unanimously by the Senate.98
In one of his last letters to Jefferson, January 23, 1825, Adams wrote, “We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects… yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact! There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation.” In America as in Europe, he wrote, there are still such laws on the books. If they were still enforced, “Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? … I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind.” Dupuis was Charles François Dupuis (1742–1809), a historian who explained Jesus’ story as classically mythic: born at winter solstice, beset with difficulties, reborn from beneath the earth in spring. Both Adams and Jefferson died on the Fourth of July of the following year; Jefferson at eighty-one, Adams at ninety.99
TWO GERMANS ANSWER A QUESTION
The philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), grandfather of the great Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn, was given a strictly talmudic education in his youth. Then at age thirteen he found and read Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. (The Guide was written in 1190, and in 1305 a Jewish ban had forbidden the book to anyone under age twenty-five.) The book changed his life. At that young age he got permission to go to Berlin to study, although he’d have to go alone; he was still a boy and it was not a friendly place. Jews were not allowed to live in Berlin outside their ghetto and had to use the livestock gates to come and go. Here Mendelssohn began the traditional Jewish intellectual labors, which he augmented by first learning German (Jews there spoke Yiddish), French, and English and reading widely. As the years passed, Mendelssohn became known for his learning and he became tutor to the children of a “protected Jew,” meaning one who could live in Berlin itself. He himself got a letter of protection years later, with the help of the Marquis d’Argens (the Enlightenment popularizer), with whom he had become friends. The marquis’s letter to King Frederick, requesting that Mendelssohn be allowed to live in Berlin, read: “A philosopher who is a bad Catholic, hereby begs a philosopher who is a bad Protestant, to grant a favor to a philosopher who is a bad Jew. There is too much philosophy in all this for reason not to side with my request.”100 It worked.
Mendelssohn wrote a range of philosophical works, but it was his 1767 Phaidon that caused a craze in Europe. The book started out with a beautiful translation of part of Plato’s Phaedo and then Mendelssohn’s discussion of it. Here are some phrases he gave Socrates: “He who has taken care of his soul on earth by pursuing wisdom and cultivating both virtue and a sense of true beauty has surely every hope of proceeding on the same path after death.”101 His audience had forgotten that philosophical language could be so reverent about the idea of another world. The book was translated into every major European language, and Mendelssohn was soon called “the German Socrates.” He married, and he and his wife, Fromet Gugenheim, began what would become the greatest salon in Berlin. They had three daughters and three sons, of whom we will hear again. Mendelssohn’s writing was at first not specifically Jewish, but because he was a famous philosopher and also a practicing member of a vilified group, there was pressure on him to defend his choices. He resisted it, but one day a German deacon, Johann Lavater, publicly challenged Mendelssohn to either defend Judaism or give it up. Mendelssohn’s response was quiet and composed, and challenged the idea of converting people. The various truths of various people were not at odds: “Why should I convert a Confucius or a Solon?” he asked. “As he does not belong to the congregation of Jacob, my religious laws do not apply to him, and on doctrines we should soon come to an understanding. Do I think there is a chance of him being saved? I certainly believe that he who leads mankind on to virtue in this world cannot be damned in the next.”102
Note that, out of all humanity, he chose Confucius and Solon, two men widely known for having proclaimed rules of conduct without bringing in God or revelation. Lavater replied with newfound respect but it wasn’t about him anymore: the encounter started a hurricane of pamphlets and published letters about Jews that soon forced Mendelssohn to give an Enlightenment account of his people. The result was Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism (1783), and it is this small book for which he is remembered. The second title is more informative: the text was really two little books, one on religious and political power and one on Judaism. In the first, Mendelssohn chides Hobbes for championing authoritarian government and freethinking: “In order to retain for himself the liberty of thought, of which he made more use than anyone else, he resorted to a subtle twist.”103 The “twist” was that Hobbes thought all ideas were fair game so long as one lived within the law. Mendelssohn preferred less inner rebellion and more public freedom. No church should have any legal power at all. How could anyone try to legislate the relationship between God and a human being? Mendelssohn laments that people have always known these obvious principles but never act as if they were true. “Happy will they be if in the year 2240 they cease to act against them.”104 It is a comfort that he gave us more time.
Mendelssohn also says that the “smallest privilege which you publicly grant to those who share your religion” is actually a bribe. You can call it “privilege” if you like, but he cautions: “To the linguist such a notation may be useful, but to the poor wretch who must do without his rights as a man because he cannot say: I believe, when he does not believe, who will not be a Moslem with his lips and a Christian at heart, this distinction brings only a sorry consolation.”105 Mendelssohn rejects “atheism and Epicureanism” as undermining social civility. In this he was not in sync with many of his time, and he knew it. “Let Plutarch and Bayle inquire ever so much whether a state might not be better off with atheism than with superstition.” Still, the state should take note of this “only from a distance.”106
Mendelssohn had a great deal of sympathy for Spinoza, with whom he did not agree, but whom he had always admired. Mendelssohn mentions Judaism only once in part one of Jerusalem, and it is on this issue: “Reader! To whatever visible church, synagogue, or mosque you may belong! See if you do not find more true religion among the host of the excommunicated than among the far greater host of those who excommunicated them.”107 Great doubters are often more invested in religious questions than is the average believer. Mendelssohn rails that to expel a dissident from the church is like barring a sick person from the pharmacy. “By the magic power of sympathy one wishes to transfer truth from the mind to the heart; to vivify, by participation with others, the concepts of reason, which at times are lifeless, into soaring sensations.”108 It is a nice description of the good that religious society can do—with or without belief.
Jerusalem’s second part is about Judaism. It explains that Judaism can be held by a deist. “It is true that I recognize no eternal truths other than those that are not merely comprehensible to human reason but can also be demonstrated and verified by human powers.” But, Mendelssohn writes, when his detractors think this means he has renounced the faith of his fathers, they are “misled by an incorrect conception of Judaism.”109 “To say it briefly: I believe that Judaism knows of no revealed religion in the sense in which Christians understand this term. The Israelites possess a divine legislation.”110 These laws and rules of life “were revealed to them by Moses in a miraculous and supernatural manner, but no doctrinal opinions, no saving truths, no universal propositions of reason. These the Eternal reveals to us and to all other men, at all times, through nature and thing, but never through word or script.”111 After all, “Why must the two Indies wait until it pleases the Europeans to send them a few comforters to bring them a message without which they can, according to this opinion, live neither virtuously nor happily?”112 Whenever Mendelssohn mentions atheism, Epicurus is there. We saw that Jewish thinkers had taken his philosophy seriously from its first appearance; now they also mention Lucretius, Helvétius, and Hume.113
Mendelssohn had a new reason that truth could not have been revealed or proved by miracles, even those in the Old Testament. Eternal truth was not revealed on Sinai:
In reality, it could not have been revealed there, for who was to be convinced of these eternal doctrines of salvation by the voice of thunder and the sound of trumpets? Surely not the unthinking, brutelike man whose own reflections had not yet led him to the existence of an invisible being that governs the visible…. Still less [would it have convinced] the sophist whose ears are buzzing with so many doubts…. He demands rational proofs not miracles. And even if the teacher of religion were to raise from the dust all the dead who ever trod the earth, in order to confirm thereby an eternal truth, the skeptic would say: The teacher has awakened many dead, yet I still know no more about eternal truth than I did before. I know now that someone can do, and pronounce, extraordinary things; but there may be several suchlike beings, who do not think it proper to reveal themselves just at this moment.114
The real showstopper is this: “Among all the prescriptions and ordinances of the Mosaic law, there is not a single one which says: You shall believe or not believe. They all say: You shall do or not do.” It’s fascinating because, while it is true, stating it brings the possibility of unbelief within the flock into the realm of the probable. In Mendelssohn’s conception, “faith,” the Christians’ “easy way” in contrast to the rigorous Jewish laws, had finally backfired. Finally, it was easier to do the laws than to believe. The Jew could step up now and say, All God asked us to do is not eat pork, and so on, and we are free to do science and face truth. “Nowhere does it say: Believe O Israel, and you will be blessed; do not doubt, O Israel, or this or that punishment will befall you.” The Jew had only actions, to do or to avoid. “Belief and doubt, assent and opposition, on the other hand, are not determined by our faculty of desire… but by our knowledge of truth and untruth.”115 Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem gave a lively tour of the history of doubt. It praised anyone who had Socrates’ ability to say I do not know; reprinted a selection from a book on Hinduism; and explained the Cabalist obsession with numbers as a skeptical refusal of all that could be spoken— which it was.116
Yet Mendelssohn was sure Jews should keep up the laws. His counsel was, “Adapt yourselves to the morals and the constitution of the land to which you have been removed; but hold fast to the religion of your fathers too. Bear both burdens as well as you can!”117 To the Christians he says, Do not ask us to convert anymore, we couldn’t stop living this way any more than Jesus could have. He wouldn’t have converted or have married you either. He wouldn’t even have eaten with you. Mendelssohn’s solution echoes the line of the Mishnah: “Better that they [the Jews] abandon Me, but follow My laws.”118 Mendelssohn also combats the growing idea of a universal religion, one with innocuous, agreed-upon rituals derived from all the existing religions. As a practicing Jew, Mendelssohn wasn’t going to like the idea. His response to it was fun; for one thing, “Woe to the unfortunate who comes a day later and finds something to criticize…. To the stake with him!” But the real argument against rationalizing religion so that we could all be one congregation was deeper: it wouldn’t work. “In reality, everyone would then attach to the same words a different meaning of his own, and you would pride yourself on having united men’s faiths, on having brought the flock under a single shepherd?… Brothers, if you care for true piety, let us not feign agreement where diversity is evidently the plan and purpose of Providence.”119 It’s a nice plea for pluralism. The book’s last words are “Love truth! Love peace!”120
In 1783 a prominent Berlin newspaper called for essays in response to the question “What is enlightenment?” Mendelssohn answered, calling it a process, an education of humanity through the use of reason, and explaining that it had only just begun. Immanuel Kant answered, too. For Kant, enlightenment was “man’s release from his self-incurred immaturity.” He famously cheered: “Sapere aude, have the courage to know: this is the motto of the Enlightenment.”
Was Kant, then, a doubter? Well, he had doubt, yes, but faith, too. The truth is, Kant transformed the whole conversation about doubt, but was himself a believer. Kant liked to say that reading Hume knocked him out of his “dogmatic slumber.” Bowled over by Hume’s sophisticated Skepticism, which studied how much our minds create time, space, and shape, Kant set out to solve the problem of knowledge. In the opinion of many, he succeeded.
Kant agreed that the senses deceive, and madness and dreams make us question our certainties. He asked that we follow this deeper, as Hume had begun to do, and accept that it would be very coincidental if we small, fleshy organisms were equipped with sensory-gathering abilities that would provide a good understanding of reality. Our minds, Kant explained, project all the basic categories of human understanding onto the world, so that time, space, and extension are all coming from us. He believed there are real objects in the world—this is not George Berkeley; we are not dreaming all this—it’s just that we have no access to the real stuff because all access is through perception, which changes everything. The world we cannot perceive is the real world, the noumenal. The world we know, the one we live in and snack on, is the phenomenal world. The Skeptical problem of perception was taken so far that it disappeared as a problem. We can’t know “things-in-themselves” at all. But we are free to know this phenomenal world through science, the science of how things seem to us. Philosophy was for awakening to reality.
Kant so fully demolished the last remaining philosophical proofs of God that Mendelssohn called him “the all destroyer,” and the name stuck. Kant would be a major figure of doubt, but the man himself was a believer. He thought that moral feelings were a hint from the unknowable world, and because of our total lack of knowledge of that real, noumenal world, one might as well choose to believe that there is a God out there. He revolutionized philosophy without having to shift much in his pew.
THE FESTIVAL OF REASON
An early priority of the French Revolution, which began in 1789, was to nationalize and democratize the French Catholic Church and its vast holdings of French land and wealth. By 1790 considerable amounts of Church property had been seized for redistribution. Moreover, the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” proclaimed that all clergy now worked for the French state, not Rome, and they had to swear an oath of allegiance. As the Revolution escalated to its most radical phase, the attack on religion also escalated, so that it was no longer an attack on clerical abuse or wealth—that is, no longer a belated Protestant-like break from Rome—and became instead an attack on religion and Christianity, and for a while, the existence of God. It was in January 1793 that the revolutionaries guillotined the king. France was at war abroad and in turmoil at home, yet that October, the elected body governing France—the Convention—made a priority of adopting a new calendar to shake loose the Catholic week with its holy Sunday and the Catholic year with its constant saints’ days and feasts.
Just as the medieval Catholic Church tried to shape the lives of Europeans through the calendar, the Revolution sought to infuse daily life with its values. The years would no longer be counted off from the birth of a Jewish preacher in Palestine. The new calendar called 1792 the year one. Each season had three months with similar names: Germinal was in Spring, Brumaire (foggy) in autumn, and Thermidor overlapped July and August (both named by Caesars). Months were all thirty days long, divided into three ten-day weeks, with each day named for its number. It was just as the Catholic Church had requested centuries earlier in order to get rid of the pagan gods of the weekdays! But because every day in Catholic France had had a saint, which was often how people referred to the days, the revolutionary calendar also gave an individual name to every day of the year, and these names were for animals, vegetables, and herbs. I am writing this on Potato, Firstday, the fifth of Wineharvestmonth, Year 211 (that Primidi of Vendémiaire was Friday, September 27, 2002). The leftover five or six days at the end of each year were holidays called Sansculottides, “workers’ days,” and included the Day of Virtue, the Day of Work, and the Day of Reason. While it lasted (Napoleon brought back the Gregorian calendar in 1806— the new one was tough on anyone doing business outside of France), it was an earnest attempt to change the signposts of everyday life from religious to secular and natural.
In the fall of 1793, an atheist campaign got under way. Its three leaders were the self-proclaimed atheists Pierre Chaumette, Josephe Fouché, and Jacques Hebert. In the department of the Nièvre, Fouché imposed social leveling through taxes and an assault on wealth and privilege that stood out in its severity even amid the Revolution. Fouché stripped the churches of their gold and statues and sent the loot to the national treasury. He also established the cult of the goddess of Reason and ordered an inscription made for the gates of the town’s cemeteries that read: “Death is an eternal sleep.” In September, Fouché and Chaumette met at Nièvre and, soon after, introduced the cult of Reason in Paris. It caught on. Hebert, leader of the sansculottes (after Marat’s murder), was also well known as an atheist. Soon one Parisian section after another was turning its churches into Temples of Reason, marrying off its priests, renaming its streets and its children.
On November 10, 1793, Chaumette and Hebert led the climax of this atheist revolutionary cult by throwing a grand Festival of Reason, gutting Paris’s great Notre Dame to do it. A woman dressed up in white portrayed “reason,” and they paraded her through the streets of Paris with much new-fashioned ritual—based mostly on rites of the ancient world. All Parisian churches were officially closed beginning November 22. Meanwhile, Robespierre was growing in power and decided he could not tolerate the threat Hebert posed. In March of 1794, he had Hebert and his major followers killed by the cartload. Then in April he got rid of the last figure with whom he shared power, the more moderate George Jacques Danton. Fully in charge now, Robespierre repudiated the atheism of Chaumette, Fouché, and Hebert, claiming that people need to believe there is a god and an afterlife. Thus, on June 8, Robespierre threw the Festival of the Supreme Being. He ran this one. It was a celebration of a deist god, of the state, and of state-ordained violence, all without a hint of Christianity. It didn’t last long. The Revolution turned and Robespierre was guillotined in July.
Napoleon Bonaparte would choose to make peace with the papacy when he took over, though he famously did not let the pope crown him emperor. Bonaparte had a scientific worldview, and was not shy about it, but warned against anyone trying to separate the masses from their superstitions. Echoing Critias’s idea, the emperor believed government must make use of religion to keep order and morality—in particular, for Bonaparte, to keep the poor from murdering the rich.
ZEN IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Our last look at the eighteenth century returns us to the great doubting religion of Japan, Zen Buddhism. By now Zen had a long tradition of taking doubt as its central vehicle. Takasui, an eighteenth-century121 Japanese Zen master, laid out the idea like this: “The method to be practiced is as follows: you are to doubt regarding the subject in you that hears all sounds. All sounds are heard at a given moment because there is certainly a subject in you that hears. Although you may hear the sounds with your ears, the holes in your ears are not the subject that hears. If they were, dead men would also hear sounds.” He says, “You must doubt deeply, again and again, asking yourself what the subject of hearing could be.” Ignore the thoughts that come to you. “Only doubt more and more deeply,” concentrate, “without aiming at anything or expecting anything” and “without intending to be enlightened and without even intending not to intend to be enlightened; become like a child in your own breast.” It is striking to note how, across these centuries, people in the East and the West have been waking themselves up to the great fact of doubt by focusing on it, fighting the common trance of life. Takasui continues his instructions:
But however you go on doubting, you will find it impossible to locate the subject that hears. You must explore still further just there, where there is nothing to be found. Doubt deeply in a state of single-mindedness,… becoming completely like a dead man, unaware even of the presence of your own person. When this method is practiced more and more deeply, you will arrive at a state of being completely self-oblivious and empty. But even then you must bring up the Great Doubt, “What is the subject that hears?” and doubt still further, all the time being like a dead man. And after that, when you are no longer aware of your being completely like a dead man, and are no more conscious of the procedure of the Great Doubt but become yourself, through and through, a great mass of doubt, there will come a moment, all of a sudden, at which you emerge into a transcendence called the Great Enlightenment, as if you had awoken from a great dream, or as if, having been completely dead, you had suddenly revived.122
It is wonderful that such different adventures in doubt and enlightenment have swirled around the planet at the same time and across time. What happens next is equally dramatic. This chapter covered the time in which modern doubt came out and pronounced its own name without a negation or a wink. The next century’s doubters will be downright evangelical about it.