Atheism in France, 1650-1729, Volume I: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (Princeton Legacy Library) Paperback – July 14, 2014

This book is an awesome book to have for those interested in the origins of atheism. It was published in 1990 and was supposed to be Volume 1 out of a 2 volume set, but I have not been able to find the second volume by the same author. Nonetheless, these two new books from 2016 seem to make up for the missing volume:

Naturalism and Unbelief in France, 1650-1729
Epicureans and Atheists in France, 1650-1729

In any case, this book is about the emergence of atheistic thinking in France. For sure there have been people in the past that have not had a God belief, but before the 18th century, no one willfully self-identified as an “atheist”. That term had many bad connotations and was used more as an insult than anything respectable during the 1600s and 1700s. The modern concepts of “atheism” and “atheist” were pretty much invented in the 17th century by Christian intellectuals as a hypothetical person (with proposed beliefs, behaviors, quality of morals) and then in the 18th century, few individuals actually started to willfully separate themselves from believers in God by self-identifying as “atheists” either directly or indirectly. The earliest atheistic document to date is an anonymous text from the 1650s from France called “Theophrastus redivivus”.

This book focuses on the origins of atheistic thinking and arguments in France, which was a major center during the Enlightenment. One can say that it was in early-modern France that atheism pretty much got its jump start. It is ironic that pretty much the effects of the Protestant Reformation (splitting of Christendom), colonization and exploration (encountering distant cultures), and conceptual reexaminations of proofs and certainty helped theologians and Christian intellectuals literally create the ideas, beliefs, behavioral expectations and arguments that later on “true” atheists would use. Indeed the book documents well that the freethinking, critical thinking, independent thinking, and pushing for evidence for belief in God and religion was mastered by Christians because they created objections to their own personal beliefs on a regular basis and also provided responses as a part of their exercises in rational thought. Indeed, even Christians were also the ones that pushed for publishing books from the ancient world that were materialistic, pagan, and even nontheistic.

Just a minor note on a defect in physical book itself: Pages 103-104 are found out of place (after page 112).

Summary of all the Chapters is below, but first some recommended reading:

Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment
The Original Atheists: First Thoughts on Nonbelief

Introduction: Intellectual History and the History of Atheism

“The emergence of atheism from the French learned world of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is a dramatic moment of human culture, and it is tempting to seek to explain it by means of long-term phenomena. My own penchant, however, is for understanding human affairs in terms of the actual specific contexts in which they occur. Immersion in the data and details of contextual phenomena creates, of course, a vested interest in the significance of the particular…There is a sense, however, in which this work certainly does reflect, and, indeed, arose from, a concern with the modestly longer-term. If the sequence of research determined the sequence of narrative, I should begin here with the late eighteenth century, with the atheism of d'Holbach, Naigeon, and Diderot, and work back to the clandestine atheistic manuscripts of the early eighteenth century, and, from there, to the debates and dilemmas of the generation that began (since I must stop somewhere) in the year of Descartes's death. That is, in fact, how I have studied the phenomenon of French disbelief. Tracing the sources of late Enlightenment atheism to, among other things, the atheistic manuscripts of the early eighteenth century, I sought, in turn, the roots of the disbelief and philosophical motifs of the first "modern" atheists in France. That inquiry led not to a prior history of free thought, most of which culminated in deeply theistic deisms or in antiphilosophical skepticisms, but to the orthodox culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in France. It was, above all, within the deeply Christian learned culture of those years that there occurred inquiries and debates that generated the components of atheistic thought. It was, to say the least, not what I had expected; it indeed was what I found. I begin, then, with this volume, to retrace my steps in reverse. The thrill (and often tedium) of the detective's trail was in the research; to you I now offer the first part of the dossier thus com-piled. Before one can understand the heterodoxy of early-modern atheism, one first must understand the orthodox sources of disbelief. That is the goal of this volume.” (3-4); two major scholars such as Lucien Febvre and Francois Berriot have looked how “atheism” was used in the 16th century – “For Lucien Febvre, it was evident enough that the sixteenth century hurled about the charge of atheism with great abandon, even when it specified that those accused in some sense had evidenced a disbelief in God. “To say that atheism is the act of denying the deity,” he noted, “is not to say anything very precise.” The accusation of atheism, he concluded, could mean many things, none of which was what one would mean by the term today. Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, and Erasmus, among other reformers or critics of sixteenth-century creed or practice, all were termed atheists by diverse adversaries. Indeed, for Febvre, the charge was generally just a rhetorical device to express the strongest disapproval, or simply “a kind of obscenity meant to cause a shudder in an audience of the faithful.” Saint Paul, in his Epistle to the Ephesians, had termed the pagans who knew neither Christ nor the Jewish covenant “without God in the world,” and in that sense, atheist continued to be an epithet applied to anyone who "did not think about (religious) things exactly the way everyone else did.” ” (7); the most notorious ‘atheistic’ manuscript of the 17th century was the “Theophrastus redivivus”; for Francis Berriot, the first atheists emerged in the 16th century – “Above all, from Berriot’s own evidence, the portrait of the atheist is behavioral and normative, not conceptual and cognitive: he is described as being without religion, as living without God, as attached to sensual things of this world, as voluptuous, carnal, and, the seemingly most common source of the charge, as given to frequent taking of the Lord’s name in vain.” (10)
Part One: Atheists without Atheism; Atheism without Atheists

Ch.1 - Atheists without Atheism

“To judge by a commonplace theme of the learned literature of the age, “the atheist” was almost everywhere in early-modern France but, strictly speaking, did not exist. This was a paradox appropriate to a culture that was at times obsessed by the image of the atheist and that simultaneously claimed to dismiss his would-be conclusions as unthinkable. The atheist could be both ubiquitous and without true atheism, since being an atheist, book after book agreed, was a function solely of the will, while thinking as an atheist obviously referred in some essential way to a function of the mind. The atheist, it was claimed, could will himself into being but could not truly think atheistically. In that sense, the atheist was presented as a distorted mirror image of the idealized believer. The ideal of Christian intellectual life was faith in search of understanding. The Christian, in his own self-portrait, believing by the will in revelation (with many a different view of the relationship between grace and volition), sought to understand, and discovered in the content of belief, to the delight of the mind, a satisfying, true knowledge of what otherwise made no or little sense. The atheist, in Christian portrait, disbelieving in God only by his will, sought intellectual justification for that disbelief but could go no further than ignorance and self-contradiction. The existence of God, the great majority of teachers proclaimed, was so manifest and inescapable a truth that no people ever had not recognized it, no sane philosopher ever had denied it, no sincere seeker after truth ever had dis-believed it. It was the "fool," the "homo stultus," "l'insense," of the Fourteenth Psalm who had said "in his heart" that "there is no God." The culture taught that he had to be a fool, for no one of sense could say that; and he had to say it in his heart, for no one could think it in his mind. As the Jesuit Rapin put it, early in the eighteenth century, "Of all natural truths, the most deeply engraved in the heart of man is the existence of God.... All times, all nations and all schools agree on it." Thus, "there is nothing more monstrous in nature than atheism: It is a disorder of the mind conceived in libertinism..." (17); “It is often difficult, we have seen, to know precisely what early-modern theologians meant by the terms atheist and atheism. Among the many reasons for this was the seeming equivocation, inherited perhaps from the ancient world itself, in the meaning of godlessness. As Drachmann has argued for the Greeks, 'atheistic' generally meant "ungodly," in the sense of living as if there were no gods or divine laws. As the early Christians learned when they themselves were accused of atheism, it also meant denying the specific "true" gods of specific places. Saint Justin Martyr's First Apology addressed both meanings. He responded to the charge of atheism against the Christians by replying, "We do proclaim ourselves atheists as regards those whom you call gods, but not with respect to the Most True God." Addressing the cause of what he took to be the source of actual disbelief, he wrote: "Before God no man has an excuse if he does evil, for all men have been created with the power to reason and to reflect. If anyone does not believe that God takes an interest in these things [virtue and vice], he will by some artifice imply either that God does not exist,... or that He is [as unmoved] as a stone [by human choice]." (18); in 1641, Andre d’Abillion wrote a defense of God against atheists called “La Divinite defedue contre les athees” using empirical, intellectual, and emphasized moral arguments for God (these were the most important since for him all atheists had gone from vice to depravity to blindness to denial of God); in 1659, Huguenot David Derodon wrote “L’atheisme convaincu” defining atheists as immoral and not intellectual; whether or not real atheists existed in the 1600s and 1700s is open to doubt, but it is clear that many assigned arguments to theoretical or imagined or expected versions of atheists; libertine lifestyles were associated with atheists due to hedonism; there was belief that true atheists did not exist, but if such was the case then why did many writings addressing atheist arguments emerge? – to strengthen the beliefs of people and to address any doubts that could lead to others to the paths of immorality

Ch.2 - Thinking about the Unthinkable

Saint Augustine distinguished 3 modes of belief in God: belief that God exists, to believe God, and to believe his revelation in Scripture; though many saw atheism as inconceivable, they still gave it highly complex theoretical content; “Thus, the “Dictionnaire” of the Academie francais, published in 1694, defined ‘atheist’ as “one who does not recognize any God” (“celui qui ne reconnoist point de Dieu”) and ‘atheism’ as “an impiety which consists of not recognizing any Divinity” (“impiete qui consiste a ne reconnoistre aucune Divinite”). If one kept to this definition, accusations of atheism arising from disagreements over lesser matters would not be valid.” (45); theoretical conceptions of “atheist” served numerous purposes – it could simulate ideas that would have been held by people who would live their lives without God, it could create objections which would be overcome by philosophy and theology; it could be a hypothetical construct what would result if one gave into their own doubts; Thomas Aquinas had argued that atheism can come out from just being the opposite of “God exists” and wrote extensively on atheistic formal arguments; the concept of divine providence was sometimes seen as problematic with some experiences about how the world is governed (including incongruence – lightning strikes trees instead of villains); religious believers very often generated and responded to arguments that could be used by atheists as a practice of rationalism; in French culture, there were many areas that allowed for variant degrees of uncertainty in God’s existence or providence; Nature and the laws of nature as arguments against atheism; fine line between honest doubt and having that convert to disbelief (77); “The emergence of atheism in France would not be an affair of a merely nominal Christian culture, but, rather, in very large part, an affair precisely of the Christian mind or soul. “Theism” entails the concept, if not the categories, of “atheism.” It is a believing culture that generates its own antithesis, disbelief in the principles of its own belief. Early-modern theists, Catholic, Protestant, and heterodox, sought to reassure themselves that no one could give doubts about God’s being coherent argument or positive content. They themselves, however, were the source or conduit of such argument and the discoverers or creators of such atheistic teaching. Such an argument may sound paradoxical, but, we shall see, it restores both the potential and the reality of atheism to the culture of which they were themselves a living part. We know, in one sense, the end of the story: the emergence of an atheistic strain of thought in early-modern France. Let us examine more closely what made such atheism possible, and, in one sense, even theologically “necessary.” After that let us examine what appears to have effected that potential in actual being as a philosophical and attitudinal position embraced by some and offered to all.” (79-80)

Ch.3 – Atheism without Atheists

“People do not learn from “a” society, of course, but from the mediating institutions, relationships, places, and events that actually link individual lives to larger groups, structures, and histories, and that separate, often dramatically, beings of the same historical era. The same phenomena, however, if not always the same lessons learned from them, can permeate whole strata of a diverse world. The educated public of the French seventeenth century, whose own thought in so many ways would transform fundamentally the mental and material culture of its heirs, was indeed diverse, but, on the whole, it shared a certain manner of formal education that provided a great many of its ways of being and thinking. We cannot understand it without knowing, among other things, some essential elements of the education through which it passed and the expectations and habits created there. In particular, the necessity of “atheism” in some form followed from that education. Early-modern thinkers who denied that there could be any genuine “speculative” atheists knew that there nonetheless had to be an “atheism” in the form of atheistic argumentation, whether or not there were any minds who actually held to or proselytized for such a point of view. It did not require an atheistic mind to conceive of an atheistic objection to claims of theistic proof. If atheism in that sense did not exist, the members of the learned world would have had to invent it. Simply put, there was, in the very imperatives of the manner of thought into which almost all of them were educated, the obligation to create the antithesis of their own beliefs. Before a university student moved to the higher faculties, such as that of theology, he studied at the faculty of arts, and there after two years of Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and grammar, he spent at least two years in the study of philosophy, an exercise devoted primarily to the mastering of Aristotelian thought. This was the rule at all of the ‘colleges de plein exercise’. At the heart of this, in the first year of reading philosophy, lay what the culture saw as the “method” or “system,” Aristotle’s ‘Organon’.” (81) – the Organon was about method of knowledge and rules of logic; Aristotle taught “If we have no one else with whom to argue, we must do so with ourselves.” (82) and Aristotle’s teaching was prominent in the medieval to early modern period as is echoed by Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s “Men who look for the truth without considering their doubts first are like people who do not look where they are going.” (83); in order to go from a baccalaureate to a higher degree in the 17th century Faculty of Theology at Paris students had to go through three disputations – this philosophical and theological training produced minds like Newton, Locke, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes; the full force of atheist arguments were fleshed out and addressed in a popular book called “Traite de la verite de la region chretienne” by Jacques Abbadie who was a Huguenot theologian; other writers flesh out their own atheistic arguments and reply to them; many detailed arguments for and against theism that believers made in that time period; Thomas Aquinas back in the 1200s had already addressed and anticipated atheist arguments like the problem of evil and metaphysical naturalism (107); “The obligation to propose objections to its own most sacred beliefs was a salient characteristic of that philosophical and theological tribe descended from the Greeks, from the men deemed Fathers of the Church, and from the medieval doctors.” (108); “The dominant model of education, then, recognized the theological and philosophical necessity of atheism, and it offered first to its chosen students, then to a vast reading public, a catalog of all the basic categories, objections, and difficulties of antitheistic thought. Scholastic minds had accepted a breathtaking invitation: “If we have no one else with whom to argue, we must do so ourselves.” One did not have to search for atheistic views in the seventeenth century; they were published with permission and approval. The atheist of the objections, then was a heuristic device, a hypothetical mind whose need to be convinced by argument of theistic proofs allowed the establishment beyond even hypothetical doubt of one’s natural belief in God. This atheist could be derived from a great diversity of sources and could stand in for oneself and one’s students awaiting compelling proof. On questions of providence and, perhaps, other issues as well, he could even be the doubts one encountered alive in one’s own mid. He shared one’s principles of dialectic and science, and he was generally cooperative or, at least, silent after one relied to him with insistence. He was, as the analysis of his will by Christian authors almost always showed, the worst miscreant among men. He was also, as their inquiries and apologias almost always showed, an indispensable and even intimate intellectual companion. In the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to the astonishment of most, he would come to life and seek converts of his won. From one perspective, the voices of the Christian learned world, seeing his nature primarily in terms of perverted will, denied his right to share the world with them. From another perspective, we next shall see, they invited him to enter.” (109)

Ch.4 – Before Belief: Philosophy and Preamble

“The obligation to prove God against the objections of the “atheists” was understood by the learned culture in a diversity of ways, most of which made no explicit claims about the role of demonstration in religious belief. Proof against “atheistic” objections could be an exercise in the science and art of demonstration; a warning to the immoral that nothing could support their enterprise to secure impunity; a self-reassurance, consistent with received philosophies, that there was no conflict between natural light and supernatural faith on this most essential element of Christian theistic belief. Indeed, if these had been the only reasons for such an obligation, the drama of early-modern French theology might have been far different from what in fact it turned out to be.” (110); Christians were the ones who elevated proofs for God and religion to be to be essential for having an adequate belief; the catechisms of 21 dioceses are reviewed; “The Church taught its educated minds that belief in the mere existence of God was a “preamble” to the faith, demonstrable by philosophy, not an “article” of the faith itself. Belief in a God who revealed was logically prior and in that sense prefatory to belief in the content of revelation. The Church further taught that such demonstrations were compelling and that it was, somewhat paradoxically to modern ears, a matter of faith that belief in God’s being was entailed by natural lights. If that were the case, such demonstrability must be evident in the actual world. All of this elevated the issue of philosophical proofs to a remarkable and dynamic place in the intellectual life of the culture, one that, ironically, would contribute mightily to the possibility of atheistic belief.” (118); Thomas Aquinas acknowledged that Paul the Apostle had said that belief in God can be derived from natural reasoning so mere belief in God, broadly speaking, was not an article of Christian faith; “No less a theologian and philosopher than Malebramche himself completed the equation of “preamble” with a concept of an essential obligation to prove God by reason prior to real faith.” (125-126); according to St. Augustine, reason and faith can both lead to the same conclusions about God existing; “Important theological and philosophical voices, then, with great confidence in the support offered to theology by philosophy, could claim that conviction by natural lights of the existence of God was a prerequisite of reasonable and perhaps all faith, if not on the part of the unlearned, then at least on the part of those who taught them. They made such claims in works published often with high approbation and explicit ecclesiastical support. To many, such a claim, in the right context, obviously did not problematic. Atheism, the culture taught, was unthinkable and inexcusable precisely because it was so eminently demonstrable that there was a God. Only a miscreant seeking to blind himself to truth could be an atheist. Fideism and even behavioral evidence of disbelief threatened such confidence, so the culture, confronting these, argued often from its sense of evidence of the preamble or foundation of its creed. It generally denounced fideism as disturbing to sincere Christians, contrary to divine teaching, and irrational. Fideism, considered as abandonment of reason, was no comfort to the faithful: one could not demonstrate the inexcusability and stultified nature of disbelief if it required grace and faith to believe in God. Fideism, considered as a critique of the rationality of belief in God, was incorrect: God, the Church itself taught as doctrine, was demonstrable. Fideism, considered as a philosophical position, was illogical: before one believed in revelation one needed to be certain of the existence of God who truly revealed, a certainty available from philosophy. Disbelief was a moral and not a philosophical phenomenon. Indeed, it was so evident to the natural faculties that God existed, the main voices of theological and intellectual culture insisted, that there existed a virtual universal consent among all peoples and sages to such a belief. Such views formed powerful barriers against the notion that there could be any such thing as reasonable disbelief, critical barriers at a time when major voices could declare demonstration and proper belief inseparable. What, in the life of the learned world, could challenge such confident convictions?” (130-131)

Part Two: Other Peoples and Other Minds:

Ch.5 – Other Peoples

“Meetings of cultures are always extraordinary affairs. It was both profoundly stimulating and profoundly disconcerting for Europeans to confront the other peoples of the globe and to try to comprehend their ways of being and thinking. (It surely was at least that for those other peoples to confront the Europeans!) Few early-modern French, of course, actually set eyes on distantly foreign climes or nations. As the reading public grew, however, publishers became aware of (and to some extent created) its insatiable curiosity concerning the earth’s diversities. The flora, fauna, human mores, and religious practices and beliefs of other lands were object of boundless fascination. Missionaries and secular travelers were among many other things, the variously reliable eyes and ears of the learned world to avid to know with whom and with what it shared its abode. European authors and readers attempted to learn a great deal about their earth, and, with often far less success, to integrate all of this new information into their traditionally received notions of things. In the long term, such encounters, for the learned world, expanded its “database” exponentially, created whole new sciences ,and gave rise to theoretical problems that culminated in distinctly novel ways of thinking anthropologically, sociologically, historically, and, in the broadest sense, geographically. In the short term, such encounters added a large amount of specific knowledge to the European storehouse, engendered new degrees of relativism in some quarters, educed in diverse minds increased or decreased self-confidence in the superiority of Christian, European culture, and, for our purposes here, occasioned something of a major crisis in the proof of God from universal consent.” (135); “The force of the argument from universal consent lay precisely in the view that any common human beliefs within such startling diversity were proof of the obvious and, thus, compelling evidence indeed. Increased familiarity with accounts of that diversity, however, exposed readers to a striking line of testimony, rightly or wrongly offered, that there was no universal consent to the existence of God. A majority of travelers found what they took to be belief in God almost everywhere, but that was not news. A significant number believed that they had encountered atheistic peoples, and some virtuous ones at that, and this was news indeed.” (136); the argument from universal consent was mostly treated not as a demonstrative proof, but as a moral proof; early Christians had acknowledged that even pagans had belief in God and even the Roman Cicero used the argument of universal consent to doubt that there would be groups of people so uncivilized that they would not have a belief in god or gods; multiple contacts with Indians in North America, South America and the Caribbean resulted in travel and missionary reports of people without religion or belief in God; debates on whether some Indian groups really had no religion or belief in God; many Indian groups merely focused on the here and now – they were mundane; encounters with Asian cultures (including Chinese - Confucian, Buddhist - and Japanese ones) and African cultures yielded people without much belief in God also; some groups were reported to be without God and yet also virtuous – not evil or morally deprived; the Chinese culture caused debate because it was morally sophisticated and virtuous and yet it did not include belief in God (difficulties the Jesuits faced are detailed); the Jesuits thought the Chinese character for “material sky” or “heaven” meant “true God” and ultimately even the French Catholic view became that the Chinese had never acknowledged God (161 - 177)

Ch.6 - The Ancients

The argument from universal consent did not disappear from the literature in the wake of missionary and travel accounts that alleged the “atheism” of many peoples. Within the learned culture of early-modern France, however, there now were widely discussed grounds for rejecting the factual basis of that argument. Was unbelief in God in fact so unnatural and so exceptional that it had to be attributed to a depravity of will beyond that which all the heirs of Adam shared? As Lafitau and Le Comte had recognized and warned against, there now were orthodox voices suggesting that whole peoples did not share the essential foundation (or had not reached the essential conclusion) of European theism.” (178); possible atheism in Greek & Roman history and philosophy and how the re-emergence of ancient writings impacted France between 1650-1729

Ch.7 - Ch.11 on Comment #1 below