by Jean Meslier
But, since it was not libertinism, as some may imagine, which led me to hold these views, and since I neither expect nor even want any of you to take me at my word on something so absolutely important, and since I wish to lead you to a knowledge of the truth of everything I have just said with and clear and convincing arguments and proofs, I will share proofs which are as clear and convincing as can be had in any field of knowledge. I will try to give you some which are so obvious and intelligible that, provided you have basic common sense, you will easily understand that you are in error, and that you are greatly imposed on with respect to religion, and that everything you are made to believe, as if by divine faith, doesn’t even deserve human faith. Here, then, is the first of my arguments and my proofs.
4. FIRST PROOF OF THE VANITY AND OF THE FALSEHOOD OF RELIGIONS: THAT THEY ARE ONLY HUMAN INVENTIONS.
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It is clear and evident that it’s abuse, error, illusions, lies, and imposture to seek to have purely human laws taken for completely supernatural and divine laws and institutions; yet it is certain that all the religions in the world are, as I’ve said, anything but purely human inventions and institutions; and it is certain that those who first invented them, only used the name and authority of God to get a better and easier reception for the laws and the ordinances that they sought to establish. You must either recognize that this is true, at least for the majority of religions, or you must recognize that most religions were truly instituted by God. You cannot say that most religions are truly of divine institution, since, given that all these different religions are contrary and mutually opposed to each other, and even condemn each other, it is plain that, being contradictory in their principles and in their maxims, they cannot all be true together, nor, consequently, can they come from the same true and divine starting-points. This is also why our Roman Christ-cultists recognize, and are even compelled to recognize, that there could only be one true religion, which they claim theirs to be; by consequence of which they take as a fundamental maxim of their doctrine and belief that there is only one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, and only one Church, which is the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman one, outside of which they allege there is no salvation. From which I draw this obvious conclusion: it is, therefore, certain that, the majority, at least, of the world’s religions are, as I have said, only pure human inventions, and that those who first invented them have only used the name and authority of God in order to get their laws and ordinances, which they wanted to establish, better received, and simultaneously to be better honored, more feared, and more respected by the people they wanted to lead, and upon whom they wanted to impose by means of this ruse.
See how a judicious author speaks on this matter[24]:
When I see mankind divided into so many religions, which fight and condemn each other so much, when I see everyone vigorously working for the propagation of his own, and how he uses either artifice or violence, and that there are, however, so few people, and perhaps none, who show by their practice what they believe and profess so angrily, I’m almost led to believe that so many different faiths were originally invented by politicians, each of them fitting his model to the inclinations of the people he intended to deceive. But when I consider, on the other hand, that there is something so natural and naive in the zealous rage and insurmountable opinion of most people, I am prepared to conclude, like Cardan, that all this variety in religion depends on the different influences of the stars... and, he says, each religion seems to contain such equal amounts of truth and falsehood that he cannot, according to human reason, decide in favor of any one of them.
It is no secret that it was by such artifice and ruse that Numa Pompilius, the king of the Romans, softened the crude and wild ways of that people, taming, as one author puts it, the hardness and ferocity of their hearts, with the sweet and pious religious exercises to which he accustomed them with feasts, dances, songs, processions, and other such religious exercises, which he them perform, and which he himself carried out, on the pretext of honoring their Gods. He also taught them the manner of sacrifice; for this he instituted entirely different ceremonies, which he called holy and sacred, and established priests, to attend to all matters concerning the honor and service of the Gods, making them believe that everything he did, and all he commanded originated with the Gods, and that it was his nymph or his goddess Egeria who revealed them to him. In the same way, it’s well known that Sertorius, the false leader of the armies of Spain, used a similar artifice to dispose of his troops at will; which he easily did by persuading them that the white doe, which he always kept nearby, brought him from the Gods all the advice he took. Zoroaster, king of the Bactrians, did the same thing with regard to his people, persuading them that the laws he gave them came from the God Oromazis. Trismegistus, king of the Egyptians, similarly gave them his laws under the name and the authority of the god Mercury. Zamolxis, king of the Scythians, promulgated his laws to his people under the name of the goddess Vesta. Minos, king of Kandia, promulgated his under the name of the god Jupiter. Charandas, the lawgiver of Chalcis, also promulgated his laws under the name of the god Saturn. Lycurgus, the Lacedaemonian lawgiver, promulgated his under the name of the god Apollo. Draco and Solon, the Athenian lawgivers, also promulgated their laws under the name of the goddess Minerva, etc. For there was almost no nation in those days which did not have gods according to its own fancy. Moses, the lawgiver of the Jews, also published his laws under the name of a God who had, he said, appeared to him in a burning bush. Jesus, son of Mary, called the Christ, and the head of the Christian sect and religion, which we profess, equally assured his people, that is, his disciples, that his laws did not come of himself, but that he had been sent by God, his Father: Ego ex Deo processi et veni, neque a me ipso veni, sed ille me misit. John. 8:42, and that he did nothing and said nothing but what his Father had ordered him to say or do, sicut dixit mihi Pater sic loquor. John. 12:50. Et sicut mandatum dedit mihi Pater sic facio, he said, John 14:31. Simon, called the Magician, long abused the peoples of Samaria by persuading them as much by his words as by artifices and enchantments, that he was something extraordinary, to the extent that all those who heard him, from first to the last, called him the great virtue of God: Hic est virtus Dei quae vocatur magna, Acts 8, 9, 10, they said. Menander, his disciple, said he was the savior sent from heaven for the salvation of men. Finally, not to discuss too many others, it was also by this same artifice of deception and imposture that the famous false prophet Muhammad established his laws and religion across the entire Orient, by leading his people to think that it had been sent to him from heaven by the angel Gabriel, etc. All these examples and many other similar things which might be shared, so clearly show that all these different kinds of religions which are seen and have been seen in the world are truly nothing but human inventions, full of errors, lies, illusions and impostures: which led judicious Montaigne[25] to say that:
Tis a way that has been practiced by all the legislators: and there is no government that has not some mixture either of ceremonial vanity or of false opinion, that serves for a curb to keep the people in their duty. 'Tis for this that most of them have their originals and beginnings fabulous and enriched with supernatural mysteries; 'tis this that has caused them to be countenanced by men of understanding.
5. REASONS WHY POLITICIANS MAKE USE OF THE ERRORS AND ABUSES OF THE RELIGIONS.
And, in conformity with this, the great cardinal Richelieu notes, in his political reflections, that princes are nowhere more industrious than in finding pretexts which make their demands look plausible, and since that of religion, he said, makes more of an impression on minds than the rest; they think they have done quite well when they think they can hide their plans beneath it. Under this mask, he says, they have often hidden their most ambitious pretensions (he might have added, their most detestable deeds) and with regard to the conduct of Numa Pompilius with his people in particular, he said that this king could have invented nothing better to make h
is laws and actions agreeable to the Roman people than to say that he made them all by consulting the nymph Egeria, who communicated the will of the Gods to him. Roman history shows that, after the leading men of the city of Rome had fruitlessly tried every kind of artifice to keep the commoners from being raised to the magistracy, they ultimately resorted to religious pretexts, deluding the people that, having consulted the Gods on the matter, they found that it would profane the honors of the Republic to share them with the populace; and that, therefore, they would have to renounce such claims at once, pretending to desire this state of affairs more as a favor to the Gods than a move in defense of their own interests. And the reason why all the great politicians do so with respect to the masses, is, as was said by Scævola, the supreme pontiff, and Varro, a great theologian in their times, because it is necessary, they say, for the people to be ignorant of many things that are true and believe many things that are false[26]. And the theologian Plato himself, speaking on this subject, says so horribly in his Republic that, for the benefit of men, it is often necessary to trick them, as Montaigne noted[27]. Nevertheless, it seems that the first inventors of these holy and pious frauds still retained at least some prudishness and modesty, or that they did not yet know how to bring their ambition as high as they might have done, since they were then content to merely attribute to themselves the honor of being the agents and interpreters of the will of Gods, without attributing even greater prerogatives to themselves. But many of those who came afterwards set their sights far higher; it would have been nothing for them to say that they had merely been sent or inspired by the very Gods. They reached the extremes of folly and presumption of wanting to have themselves seen and honored as Gods.
This was once quite a normal thing for the Roman Emperors, and among others, Roman history tells of emperor Heliogabalus, who was the most dissolute, licentious, infamous, and execrable one they ever had, and still he dared to rank himself among the Gods even during his lifetime, ordaining that, among the names of the other Gods invoked by the magistrates in their sacrifices, they were also to call upon Heliogabalus, who was a new God whom Rome had never known. The Emperor Domitian had the same ambitions; he wanted the senate to erect solid gold statues in his honor, and also commanded by public ordinances that, in all letters and mandates, he must be addressed as the Lord God. Emperor Caligula, who was also one of the nastiest, one of the most infamous, and one of the most execrable tyrants who ever lived, also wanted to be worshiped as a God, had his statues placed in front of Jupiter’s, and had the heads taken off of many of the latter and replaced with his own, and he even sent his statue to be placed in the temple of Jerusalem. Emperor Commodus wanted to be called Hercules, the son of Jupiter, the greatest of the Gods, and to that end he often dressed in the skin of a lion and held a club in his hands, imitating Hercules, and in this outfit, he went roaming day and night, killing many people.
Not only emperors, but also many others of lesser ranks, even low-born and penniless men, have had this mad vanity and this mad ambition of wanting to have themselves seen as Gods; and, among others, the story is told of a certain Psapho the Libyan, an unknown and low-born man, who, wanting to be seen as a God, used this trick: he collected many birds from various countries, and carefully taught them to constantly repeat these words: “Psapho is a great God, Psapho is a great God.” Then, having set released and set these birds free, they dispersed through all the countryside and into the neighboring lands, some on one side and others on another, and were often seen saying and repeating while singing, “Psapho is a great God, Psapho is a great God.” Such that these peoples, when they heard these birds speaking that way, and being unaware of the deception, began to worship this new God and offering sacrifices to him, until they finally uncovered the treachery and stopped worshipping this God. It’s also said that a certain Annon of Carthage tried the same ruse and for the same reason, but that it didn’t work out as well for him as for Psapho, because his birds which he had taught to repeat these words: Annon is a great God, forgot the words they had learned as soon as they were released. The cardinal of Perron mentions, if I’m not mistaken, two particular doctors in theology, who are said to have thought of themselves as the eternal father and the son of the eternal God. Many other examples could be given of those who have been struck by the same follies, or similar temerity, and that it seems that the first beginnings of the belief in Gods only comes from such vain and presumptuous men who likewise wanted the title of Gods: which is quite in harmony with what is reported in the Book of Wisdom, about the beginnings of the kingdom of idolatry[28].
6. THE ANCIENTS HAD A CUSTOM OF RANKING THEIR EMPERORS AND GREAT MEN AMONG THE GODS. THE PRIDE OF THE POWERFUL, THE FLATTERY OF SOME, AND THE IGNORANCE OF OTHERS HAVE PRODUCED AND AUTHORIZED THIS ABUSE.
But if some men happen to be so vain and presumptuous as to want to be called Gods, there are certainly even more who have been stupid enough to want to grant them this attribution, whether due to flattery, or for political reasons or cowardice: for, it is usually only due to flattery and political reasons that men let themselves stoop to such lowly deference. The flatterers of Alexander the Great sought to convince him that he was of the race and bloodline of the Gods, and that he was even the son of Jupiter. After the unaccounted-for disappearance of Romulus, the first Roman king (although it’s thought that the senators put him to death, and that they cut him to bits because he’d become too hateful), they ranked him among the Gods, under the appellative of Quirinus, on the report of someone named Proculus, who said he had appeared to him, glorious and well-armed. Equally, the senate placed emperor Claudius II among the Gods, and set up a golden statue to him beside that of Jupiter[29].
Marcus Aurelius, one of the best emperors who ever was, nevertheless placed Lucius Antoninus Verus, his colleague, among the Gods; he built a temple to his wife Faustina, as shameless as she was: and when the senate attributed divine honors to him, he expressed gratitude to them. Emperor Trajan, who was a very good and very excellent prince, was, after his death, by order of the senate, placed among the Gods. Moesa, the grandfather of emperor Alexander Severus, was ranked among the Gods after he died. Antoninus the good, the most just and moderate prince who ever held the empire, was universally mourned by all at his death; the senate attributed divine honors to him, and the whole world honored him, says the Hist. Rom., Vol. 3, page 143; that this glory had never been awarded to a more deserving prince on Earth, due to his kindness, his piety, his clemency, his innocence, and his moderation in governing the Republic. Emperor Hadrian was so crushed by the death of Antinous, whom he loved tenderly, that he ordered the construction of a city, and gave it the name of his favorite: Antinopolis, and he dedicated altars and statues to him, as if to a God, and put all the pens of Greece to work to celebrate him with eulogies; and his flattery was so excessive that, to please him, the Greeks ranked him among the Gods, and spread word that he had given oracles in his temple: and, as the height of vanity, they dared to claim that his soul had been changed into a star which had appeared immediately after his death: by reason of which Hadrian, quite happy for his passions to be thus flattered, named this star the star of Antinous, and greatly loved those who gave this miserable consolation to his pain, Hist. Rom. Vol. 3, page 108. In the times of emperor Claudius, when Simon the Magician came to Rome, he made such a name there for himself with his imposture and illusions that a statue was set up for him with this inscription: To Simon the Holy God. Emperor Augustus, as Montaigne[30] reports, had more temples than Jupiter and was served with no less zeal or belief in miracles. One day while King Herod was dressed in his royal gowns and delivering a speech to his people from his throne, the masses were so enchanted with his eloquence and the brilliance of his majesty that they took him for a God and cried out, saying, “these are the words of a God, not a man”, dei voces et non hominis[31]. In the end, this was the usual way of Roman emperors, to rank themselves among the Gods: the worst and most despicable ones had themselves rank
ed as such as is noted in the Hist. Rom. Vol. 3.