A Memoir- the Testament

by Jean Meslier

  60. THE SEVENTH PROOF OF THE VANITY AND FALSENESS OF RELIGION, TAKEN FROM THE VERY FALSENESS OF MEN’S OPINIONS ON THE SUPPOSED EXISTENCE OF THE GODS.

  But since all those abuses, along with all the other abuses and errors I’ve discussed, are based only on the belief and persuasion that there is a God, i.e., on the belief and persuasion that there is an all-powerful Supreme Being who is infinitely good, infinitely wise, and infinitely perfect, who wants to be worshiped and served by mankind in a particular way; and since the Princes and Kings of the Earth also ground their power and authority in that of an all-powerful God, by whose grace they claim to have been established to govern and command all other men; it is now necessary to clearly show that there is no such Being and that there is no God, and, consequently, men use the name and authority of a God falsely and abusively to establish and maintain the errors of their religion, as well as to maintain the tyrannical power of their Kings. I will show this plainly with conclusive arguments, derived from the principles of metaphysics, physics, and morality; and this is my seventh conclusive proof I of the vanity and falsehood of all the religions that we see in the world.

  61. MOST OF THE LEARNED AND WISE MEN OF ANTIQUITY DENIED OR QUESTIONED THE EXISTENCE OF THE GODS.

  But before this, I should note here that the belief or the persuasion of the existence of a God has not always been so universally, or so constantly accepted among men, without many who not only questioned, but absolutely denied it; for, without mentioning many Nations which, according to the histories, have recognized no Divinity at all, one might say that in all the past ages, many of the more enlightened, more knowledgeable, and even the wisest, at least they were universally thought to be, were the very ones who had least belief in the existence of a God. Consider Socrates for example, who was considered the wisest Philosopher of his times, and even by the oracle of Apollo; this Socrates, accused of having a bad opinion of the Gods, refused even to justify and purge himself of this allegation, but also swallowed, with an unparalleled firmness, the poison he had been given to drink. Aristotle[712], the greatest Philosopher of his own age, and called the genius of nature, who, having been accused of wicked views about the Gods, was forced to retire to Chalcis, where he died at the age of 63. Also consider Plato, that Philosopher who was surnamed “the divine” due to his great self-importance, who, in his writings on law, forbade the intimidation by fear of the Gods. Consider Diagoras, Pythagoras, both great Philosophers, who were exiled and banished and whose books were burned, for having spoken evil of the Gods and written against them, along with many similar Philosophers, such as Vanini, a famous Atheist, Theodorus, called the Atheist, Zozias, Aetius, or Averroes, that famous Arab Medical Doctor, or Pliny, the famous naturalist, who mocked all human opinions about Gods, and who said that, if he had to recognize some Divinity, he would recognize none but the Sun itself[713]. Consider Tribonian, the famous jurisconsult, Lucian, the famous humorist, Rabelais, the curate of Meudon near Paris, who mocked all the world’s religions, or Spinoza, who recognized no Divinity. Or consider Pope Julius III, 225, who mocked his own Dignity and his own Religion, and finally, leaving out many others, consider Leo X, the Florentine Pope from the illustrious house of Medicis, a learned man who, jesting about his own Religion, sneered, Ha! How rich we get from this fable of Christ! There seems to be good reason to think that our famous Duke of Orléans, formerly the Regent of France, had similar thoughts about his religion, if what they say is true: that, on the occasion of his Mother’s pious remonstrances against him, that he feared nothing in this world and that he expected nothing in the next one.

  But is it necessary to cite all the individual views of so many people, since it’s rather clear to see everywhere that these are the true views of most people in the world, especially the powerful and the best educated men of the age? It’s quite apparent every day, in the indifferent or cavalier way they treat religious things, in their excessive love for the present life and all of the Earth’s blessings, in their absence of zeal for the glory of their God, and for the salvation of their own souls, in their disinclination for the alleged eternal rewards of Heaven, which are promised to them in such an advantageous and magnificent fashion, and finally by how little fear they have of these supposed eternal punishments in Hell, by which they are so horribly threatened. All that, I say, manifestly shows that they are in no way persuaded by what they’re told about these things, and that the Priests are no surer of what they say than anyone else; for if either party were actually convinced, it would be morally impossible for them to be affected and moved to such a slight degree.

  Here is what a judicious author, de Comines[714], Seigneur d’Argenton, says on this subject in his Memoirs:

  I say that it’s a lack of faith that leads to all the ills on Earth; and especially the ills of those who complain of being strained and trampled on by those who are stronger. For the poor man or the rich one, who has the true and good faith, whatever it may be, and who would strongly believe that the punishments of Hell truly are as they are, who would also be afraid to wrongly take from another, or that his father or his grandfather had taken it and he had it, be it a Duchy, a County, a city or a castle, furniture, fields, ponds or mills, each of them in his own capacity, and who firmly believed as we ought to I will never enter Paradise if I fail to make satisfaction, and if I do not return this or that to so and so, there is no way to believe that there was ever a Prince or Princess in the world, nor anyone who wanted to retain anything from their subjects, or their neighbors, or who wanted to wrongfully kill anyone, or imprison them, or take from some to give to another and enrich them, which is the most cruel thing they do, or procure dishonest things against one’s relatives and servants for their pleasures, as for a wife or something similar. By my faith, it is not to be believed that, if they had a firm faith, and believed what God and the Church command on pain of damnation, knowing how short the days are, the punishments of hell to be so horrible and endless, nor remission for the damned, they would never do what they do. We must conclude, then, that all these evils come from a lack of faith. And for example, if a King or a Prince is a prisoner and he’s afraid of dying in prison, is there anything so dear in the world that he won’t hand over to escape? He’ll hand over his own, his subjects, and, as you’ve seen with King John of France, when he taken by the Prince of Wales at the battle of Poitiers, he paid 3 million and handed over all of Aquitaine, at least his part, along with many other cities, towns, and places, and something like a third of the Kingdom, and so impoverished the Kingdom that for a long time a leather coin with a little silver nail in it was used as currency. And King John and his son, King Charles the Wise, handed over all of this to free this King John. And if they had refused to hand anything over, they English might have put him to death; but at worst, they would have put him in prison[715]. And even that they would indeed have killed him, if what he paid them wasn’t similar to the thousandth portion of the least penalty of Hell. Why, then, would he deliver all that I’ve said, and destroy his children and his subjects, if not because he believed what his eyes saw, and he knew full well that otherwise he wouldn’t have been freed. But is there no Prince on Earth, or few of them, who, if he has a city from his neighbor, for fear of God will hand it over, for fear of the pains of Hell? And King John handed over so much, to simply get out of prison.

  From which he rightly concludes that there’s a lack of faith and belief in these supposedly great and important truths that Religion teaches. And therefore, what they do have by way of faith or belief, or rather what they pretend to have, is certainly only a vain appearance of faith and religion, refusing, as they do, for political reasons, not to declare or reveal their true feelings more openly.

  When, considering common people, one finds that, by their morals and by their conduct, most of them are no surer of the truth of their Religion than the people discussed above, even if they are more consistent in carrying out its performances. And those among the people with even a lit
tle wit and common sense, as uneducated as they may be, never cease to glimpse and sense something of the vanity and falseness of what they are told to believe on this subject. So, it’s only as if they were forced, as if in spite of themselves, as if against their own lights, against their own reason, and against their own feelings, that they believe or try to believe what they’re told. And that is so true that most of them too, who are the most subject to it, also feel this repugnance and difficulty in believing what Religion teaches and obliges them to believe. Nature feels a secret repugnance and opposition here. For this reason too, our Christ-cultists have a maxim in their Religion that it’s necessary to take the mind captive in obedience to the faith, captivitatem redigentes omnem intellectum in obsequium Christi, 2 Cor. 10:5. Which Faith, as they admit, was often shaken in even the greatest of their Saints, when they saw how the wicked prospered; and they claimed that it is a great merit to capture one’s mind in obedience to their Faith.

  But, to compel and captivate one’s mind in obedience to the Faith and to renounce the very lights of one’s reason in this way, to try to believe against one’s own feelings, is not truly believing; on the contrary, it’s more like showing that one doesn’t truly believe at all, and that one can’t believe; for a true belief is an inward persuasion of the soul and an inward consenting of the mind which sees, or at least thinks it sees, the truth of what it believes. For, as St. Augustine himself says[716]: Suasionibus agit Deus ut velimus et credamus... neque enim credere potest homo quaelibet arbitrio, si nulla sit persuasio, cui credat. But there is no suasion or persuasion without mental constraint: and thus, since this alleged constrained and forced belief which most men have in matters of Faith, doesn’t come from an inward persuasion of the soul, but rather an inward repugnance of the soul or the mind, which doesn’t see and even can’t see the truth of what it’s meant to believe, is not a true belief. It’s as if a man of good sense, who saw the clarity of the Sun at midday, nevertheless wanted to try to believe that it was night, or as if this same man, finding himself in the obscurity and darkness of night, nevertheless tried to believe that he was seeing the clarity of the day and the Sun. It seems obvious that such belief, which is thus constrained and forced, would not be true belief; and that there can’t even be a certain and sure proof of the truth of the truth of what one claimed to want to believe by such belief. “Some,” says Montaigne[717] on this subject, “want everyone to believe that they believe what they don’t believe; others, more in number, make themselves believe this, in their inability to figure out what belief means.”

  Since, then, the supposed mediocre belief in the truths of Religion, and since the belief in the Existence of God is, for most men, only a blind belief, a constrained and forced belief, as I’ve just said, then not only can this be rejected as true belief; but we can also be sure that such a belief is not a proof of the certainty of the truths of Religion, and that it’s not even a proof of the certainty of the Existence of God. Thus, it was in vain for our Christ-cultists to boast of such belief as certain proof of the Existence of a God, since such a belief is clearly more a proof of the uncertainty than of the certainty of His Existence: for it is clear that if His Existence were as certain and evident as is supposed, men would have no reason to force themselves, or to captivate their minds to believe it, as they do; which already clearly shows that the belief in the Existence of a God is not as certain or sure as it is said to be; and consequently, that Atheism is not as strange, monstrous, and unnatural a belief as our superstitious God-cultists would have us believe; which is worth noting, as I’ve done, before advancing with any further proofs.

  62. WHERE THE FIRST BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE OF THE GODS COMES FROM.

  Besides, it seems quite clearly that the first belief in Gods came only from the fact that some men who were more astute, cunning, subtle, and perhaps also more malign and wicked than others, having the ambition of rising above their fellows, and maybe having also sought to toy with their ignorance and stupidity, assumed the name and title of God and Supreme Lord, to make themselves feared and respected all the more, while the rest, whether from fear or idiocy, whether by indulgence or flattery, having let them do it, they have become the Masters, and having become the Masters, they have retained the name of God and the title of supreme Lord, as we see now that the great conquerors, i.e., the great robbers and usurpers of the Earth’s Provinces and Kingdoms, assume the name and title of Duke, King, Emperor, and sovereign Prince, even calling themselves great, lofty, and powerful Lords, so high does their pride strive to rise above other men. It appears, I say, quite clearly that this is the only source of the first belief in the Gods. This seems especially clear from the belief in this God of the Jews and Christians, which is recorded in their History of the supposed creation of the World[718], for there it is explicitly stated that God spoke, argued, walked, and strolled in a garden, nothing more or less than any man would do, and there it says that[719] God had created the first man in his image and likeness, a fairly obvious indication that this supposed God was indeed a man, since there was a resemblance between them. It’s quite likely, then, that this supposed God was a skilled and cunning man who meant to toy with and laugh at the simplicity and coarseness of the man he called Adam, who was, by all appearances, an oaf, a simpleton, and an idiot, since it says in the same story[720] that he was so easily and moronically led astray by the words of a woman and the deceptive promises of a snake, which was subtler and more cunning than him, as the story itself says. Similarly, we must believe that this supposed God who spoke to Moses, was a mere man, since Moses himself attributes not only human words and speeches to him, but all the body parts and all the emotions of a man; and that this God himself, for a laugh at Moses’ expense, when he’d asked to see his face[721], responded amusingly enough that he’d be allowed to see his backside and his buttocks[722], if he wanted; but that he wouldn’t see his face. Videbis posteriora mea, faciem autem meam videre non poteris. This supposed God apparently had a face, and a backside or buttocks; since he himself said so, and consequently he was just a man, who assumed the disguise of a God or counterfeited the God. But, since he only wanted to show his backside and not his face, it seems apparent that he was still afraid of revealing who he was, by showing his face, which is a clear sign that he was truly only a man and not a God, if we don’t wish to say that these supposed words and speeches of God to Moses are only the words and speeches of Moses himself, who attributed them to God to give them more credit and authority with his audience, which might well be the case, for imposters have long used these sorts of artifices to trick humans, that we would have to be true idiots to still accept and believe such things.

  63. THE GOD-CULTISTS HAVE, ULTIMATELY, HAD TO RECOGNIZE THE FALSENESS OF THE OPINION OF THE PLURALITY OF THE GODS.

  Besides, there’s no denying that all the other Gods and Goddesses who came later, and who have been worshiped in all past centuries, under names like Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, Mercury, Aesculapius, and a thousand similar Gods, or under names like Cybele, Juno, Ceres, Diana, Minerva, Pallas, Venus, and a thousand similar Goddesses, were all illustrious men or women, Princes and Princesses, for example, or other distinguished people who have attributed to themselves, or to whom were attributed, as I said, by ignorance, complacency, and flattery the name of God and Gods, since men are so stupid and blind as to believe that weak and mortal men, as we all are, could nevertheless, before or after their death, become immortal Gods. And what is even more surprising is that even the Philosophers have accepted, or have pretended to accept such a vain and stupid thought as that. Plutarch, the great and famous Philosopher, says, according to Montaigne[723], that we should esteem and firmly believe that the souls of men who were virtuous, according to nature and the divine justice, become holy men, and holy demigods, after they are perfectly, as it were sacrifices of purgation, cleaned and purified, being liberated from all suffering and all mortality, they become, both by any civil ordinance, but in truth and accordi
ng to credible reason, complete and perfect Gods, meeting an entirely happy and glorious end. I will not pause here to refute such vain talk, and such a vain opinion as that: it’s enough to note here that there is no certainty or any real foundation in this belief in the Existence of the Gods, since men’s original knowledge thereof comes only from error, ignorance, and imposture: which is so true that it’s long since most men have recognized the error of the Ancients in this; and they have recognized the vanity and falseness of all these ancient Divinities so well that they have been forced to reject, as they also now reject the belief in all these corporeal and human Gods and in all those material and visible Gods of wood, stone, or gold and silver, which the stupidity and ignorance of ancient men led them to worship.

  But since neither our Christ-cultists nor the other God-cultists completely reject a belief in God despite all that, they have been forced to restrict themselves, at least, to believe in a single God, unique in substance and in nature, as they put it, but triple in persons, as our Christ-cultists say: and, this being the case, many Gods are suddenly annihilated; since, among so many Deities that the superstitious God-cultists recognized and worshiped in past ages, their descendants have had to restrict themselves to the belief and adoration of a single God, and at that, an invisible God, an incorporeal and immaterial God, and consequently, a God who has neither flesh nor bones, body nor body parts, who has neither a backbone, nor belly, nor arms, nor legs, nor feet, nor hands, nor eyes, nor head, nor mouth, nor tongue, nor ears, nor teeth, nor nails, nor claws, nor any other body part, and who, therefore, also has no form, shape, color externally, with no side or any configuration internally, or rather, who has no interior to speak of, nor any exterior, nor any below or any above; of a God, however, who, they say, is everywhere, who sees everything, who does everything, who knows everything, who guides all, who governs all, who sustains all, who is complete and entire everywhere in all places, who is all powerful, infinitely good, infinitely wise, infinitely just, infinitely kind, and finally, who is infinitely perfect in all manner of perfections, whose nature is immutable, immobile, and eternal, whose nature is His power, His wisdom, His goodness, and His very will; and of which, in turn, the power, the wisdom, the goodness, and the will are its nature and very essence. This is certainly a surprising concept of Existence; but it can also certainly be said that it’s the idea of a completely imaginary and chimerical Being; and it doesn’t even seem like it would be possible to deliberately form or forge an idea of a Being that would be any more chimerical than this. Neither the chimera of the ancients, the Sphinx or the Typhon, or any the fictions of poets and writers of Romans offer anything approaching the sort of nonsense contained in the idea that our new God-cultists have of their Gods. I calls them new, since they have been forced to restrict themselves, as I said, to belief in a single God, and they have been forced to prune away from Him any body, any form, and any material and tangible shape. In which we can say, in this respect, that they have strayed even more widely, in the vanity of their minds and reasoning, and that, believing they have become wiser and subtler than other men, they have become more insane than ever before[724]. Evanuerunt in cogitationibus suis... dicentes enim se esse sapientes stulti facti sunt.