Chapter 48: The End of the Divine Right

In the profusion of its diverse tendencies, the triumph of Protestantism — in which the economic mechanisms that chaotically governed historical evolution burst the skin of the God that had clothed them in his myth — put an end to the notion of repressive orthodoxy and, consequently, the existence of “heresy.”

The sects gave the [Greek] word hairesis the neutral meanings of “choice” and “option.” They entered into the currents of opinions that soon claimed, with Destutt of Tracy and Benjamin Constant, the name “ideologies.” The decapitation of Louis XVI, monarch of divine right, removed from God the ecclesiastical head at which — like a monstrous cephalopod — were articulated the secular arms that were tasked with imposing his writs of mandamus.

The jubilation that, around the end of the [Eighteenth] century, brought down the churches and monasteries began to express itself openly in the works in which the derision of sacred things showed quite well that religion merited the impertinent pikes of quips more than the thrusts of philosophical reason. The execution of the Knight of La Barre recalled that the Church was still capable of biting cruelly, but this was the last crime prescribed by the obedience of civil law to religious power.

Nevertheless, if Diderot, due to his insolence, only received a short period of imprisonment, the anti-religious thinkers of the beginning of the Eighteenth Century still had the most lively interest in being vigilant and dissimulative.

The case of the parish priest Jean Meslier is too well-known to be discussed at length here.[537] We recall that this parish priest of Etrepigny lived — with the exceptions of a disagreement with the lord of the town and a forbidden love affair with his servant — the life of a man fulfilling the duties of his position. His Testament, discovered after his death, eradicated God from society and the universe by extirpating him along with hierarchicalized power and the principle of the exploitation of man by man, which were the foundations of God’s fantastical existence. The text, mutilated by Voltaire, was only distributed in its unabridged version later on, but the celebrity of Meslier himself arrived well ahead of the publication of his work, thanks to the celebrated formula: “Humanity will only be happy when the last priest has been hanged with the guts of the last prince.”[538]

Thomas Woolston

The humorous irreverence and misfortune of Thomas Woolston proceeded from a misunderstanding. Even if it is fitting to not underestimate its corrosive humor, his Discourse on the Miracles of Jesus-Christ obeyed a desire to demonstrate at what points the Scriptures had only allegorical meaning. Such was already the opinion of Origen, Denck and Weigel; today it is the sentiment of the theologians who are dismayed by the common derision that confronts the religions of present-day [commodity] consumption.

Born in 1669 in Northamp, and later a student at Cambridge, Woolston acquired the reputation as an erudite and punctilious man of the Church. His Latin dissertation on a letter from Pontius Pilate to Tiberius on the subject of Jesus put into doubt a fabricated document, as many such documents were, with the sole goal of authenticating the historical Jesus.

Another one of his works expounded his thesis on the necessity of allegorical interpretations of texts claimed to be sacred. Intervening in the quarrel between Collins and the theologians concerning the foundations of Christianity, he wrote his ironic work, Moderator between a Nonbeliever and an Apostate.

Published in 1727, his Discourse on the Miracles of Jesus-Christ completed the quarrel with his friends and exposed him to the persecutions of all the religious spirits, conformist or not. Condemned to a year in prison and to a fine that he could not pay, he aroused the democratic sentiments of many of his fellow citizens. Samuel Clarke solicited his release in the name of the freedom of thought claimed by England. The authorities consented, on the condition that Woolston refrained from publishing anything shocking. He refused to exchange a repudiation for freedom, which he estimated to be the spring of natural rights and died on 27 January 1733, saying, “Here is a battle that all men are forced to fight and that I fight, not only with patience but also willingly.”

He addressed an acerbic dedication to the Bishop of London, his prosecutor; it rendered homage to him “with as much justice as you are due, because of the prosecution that you have wisely brought against the Moderator, as against a nonbeliever who here renders to you very humble thanks, and who declares himself to be an admirer of your zeal, wisdom and conduct.”

His Discourse ridiculed the Scriptures. He was astonished that Jesus-Christ had permitted demons to enter into a herd of pigs and cause destruction. “Where was the goodness and justice of such an action?” With respect to the recovery of a woman who lost some blood, he remarked: “If one reported to you that the Pope had cured a loss of blood similar to that of the woman in the Gospels, what could Protestants say, if not that a stupid, credulous and superstitious woman attacked by some slight illness had imagined herself to have been cured and that an impostor pontiff, helped by people so rascally that, to bring him the veneration of the populace, they had spread the rumor that such a recovery was a great miracle?”

He added: “I am charmed that it is not said in the Gospels that he [Jesus] had taken money from these brave people, for having exercised his trade as a fortune teller; had this happened, our doctors would not have failed to found upon such an example a right to demand taxes, salaries and pensions as payment for their divinations.”

Woolston mocked the curse hurled by Jesus against a fig tree that dried up one night without taking into account the interests of the thus-injured owner. He mocked the resurrection and the fact that Jesus appealed to Lazarus in a loud voice, “as if Lazarus was so deaf that he must have been a dead man.” Like Jacques Gruet, Thomas Scoto and Hermann of Rijswick, Woolston characterized the Savior “as impostor full of deceit.”

Woolston’s caustic spirit did not attack the authority that the Constantinian Church invested in the mythical Jesus-Christ without also aiming at all the truths that were so quick to send to the pyre or prison those who did not kneel down before them. Woolston defended the memory of Servetus against Calvin. His refusal of a freedom purchased at the price of an enslavement to received ideas rested upon a model of dignity struggling for a tolerance in which many were content, like Voltaire, to raise their voices when the danger had passed and their glory was not in peril.

Woolston’s spirit, disencumbered from the scruples of faith in the Church, sharpened itself upon Holbach’s Portable Theology and especially upon the works composed by the Abbey Henri-Joseph du Laurens (1719–1797), whose Matthew the Accomplice, or the Diversity of the Human Spirit was among the funniest texts that ridiculed religious prejudices. (One of his characters says the following, which contains a large part of the mystery of faith: “It is a great way in fact[539] in mystical love to have previously exercised all the faculties of one’s soul on that of a lover.”)

The Book of the Three Impostors

A mythic book if there ever was one, the De tribus impostoribus haunted the imaginations of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance before offering bibliophiles occasions for research and passionate quarrels.

If there ever existed such a manuscript circulated hand to hand with all the attractions of peril and prohibition, its content probably added nothing to the thesis that its title proposed with such pleasing concision: three impostors have led the world — Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Is it necessary to discover authors for such a formula, the obviousness of which would impose itself sooner or later, if only furtively, on anyone disturbed by the chaos and vexations ruling over society and the order of things? Goliards, ribald students, priests without modesty, bishops and popes less concerned with faith than prestige, peasants tyrannized by the aristocracy, bourgeois entangled in fiscal injustice, workers and unemployed workers begging in the streets day and night for a little food or money, women scorned or treated like Satan’s creatures — who, one time or another, has not spit upon the holy figures erected everywhere like bloody totems for monotheism and its ministers?

A slightly exhaustive study of mindsets from the Fourth to the Eighteenth Centuries would show at what point religious belief — perhaps more in certain orthodoxies than in many heretical engagements — was generally only a prudent or comfortable covering, (*) under which the torments and fleeting satisfactions of passion were unleashed.

(*) In 1470, a police ordinance applied to beggars in Nuremberg conceded to them permission to exercise their trade on the condition that they knew how to recite the Pater, the Ave, the Credo and the ten commandments.

In the preface to his reprint of De tribus impostoribus,[540] Gerhardt Bartsch retraced the history of this text, which according to all probability existed as a short affidavit of its provocative assertion before acceding to the typographical reality of a book.[541]

Abu Tahir, a philosopher belonging to the Karmate current that, from the Ninth to the Tenth Centuries, rejected and ridiculed belief in Mohammed and Islam, said: “In this world, three individuals have corrupted mankind: a shepherd, a physician and a camel-driver. And this camel-driver was the worst pickpocket, the worst prestidigitator of the three.” This idea, adopted by Ibn Rachd, better known as Averroes,(*) suggested to the West the existence of a work as elusive as the opinion that it illustrated: the Liber de tribus impostoribus sive Tractatus de vanitate religionum (the Book of the Three Impostors, or the Vanity of the Religions).[542]

(*) “The Jewish religion is a law of children, the Christian religion a law of impossibility and the Muslim religion a law of swine.”[543]

A professor at the Sorbonne and an admirer of Aristotle, Master Simon of Tournai (1130–1301) proclaimed — without being otherwise disturbed — that “the Jews were seduced by Moses, the Christians by Jesus and the Gentiles by Mohammed.”[544]

The scholar La Monnoye, among the first people to study the question, cited the accusation made by Gregoire IX against Frederic II, for whom religion was a simple instrument of domination. For a long time, the book appeared (there was no proof) to have come from his pen, or that of his chancellor, Pierre de la Vigne.

According to Alvaro Pelayo, Thomas Scoto denounced the imposture of the prophets. Hermann of Rijswick referred to it in his confession. Putative authors were not lacking: Arnaud of Villeneuve, Michel Servetus, Jacques Gruet, Fausto Longiano (whose Temple of the Truth [now lost] dismissed all the religions), Jeannin of Solcia, the Canon of Bergamo (who was condemned on 14 July 1459 for affirming that the three impostors “governed the world with their fantasies”[545]) and all of the following: Ochino, Campanella, Le Pogge, Cardan, Pomponaccio and even Spinoza. (I have found no trace in the works of Antoine Couillard of the remark denounced by Drujon: “Jesus-Christ founded his religion on idiots.”)

Studying the printed copy dated 1598, which he found at the Library of Vienna, Bartsch established that it was actually published much later. Without prejudging the prior existence of a manuscript copy, he confirmed Presser’s thesis, according to which the book — published around 1753 — was the work of Johannes Joachim Mueller (1661–1733), grandson of the theologian Johannes Mueller (1598–1672), who was the author of a study entitled Atheismus devictus. Taught about the existence of the mythic book [De tribus impostoribus], Johannes Joachim undertook to give it a reality, and fixed — not without mischievousness — its date of publication at 1598, the date of his grandfather’s birth.

In its modern version, De tribus impostoribus alludes to the Jesuits; it sets the “eternal truths” of each religion against the others. It emphasizes the incoherencies of the sacred texts and reaches this conclusion: there is no other God than nature, and no other religion than the laws of nature.

Matthias Knuetzen

A poet of atheism and the struggle against religious obscurantism, Matthias Knuetzen (1646–1674) knew an impassioned destiny that was exemplary in the history of the emancipation of mankind under the Ancien Regime.

His theses inspired the French encyclopedists, even though — with the exception of Naigeon — they were resolved not to mention him.

Born in 1646 in Oldenmouth, in Holstein, he was the son of an organist. Upon the death of his parents, he was welcomed by Pastor Fabricius, who took care of his education, but without — or so it seems — inculcating in the boy the obedience and austerity of the morals that were pleasing to God. His studies of theology in Koenigsberg ended up winning him over to atheism.

At the age of 21, he returned to his hometown without a strong desire to preach there. In 1668, he enrolled at the University of Copenhagen, where he wrote De lacrimus Christi (now lost). Upon his return to Oldenmouth, he scandalized the good people by taking the floor at Toenningen, in front of an assembly of peasants to whom he extolled rebellion against the Protestantism of the pastors and the absolutism of the princes. Banished by the city council in 1673, he took refuge at Krempen, in Denmark, and again took up his diatribes against the wealth of the consistories. Chased from Krempen, he traveled through Germany, where he publicly preached atheism and the struggle against the aristocracy. On 5 September 1674, he deposited at the principal church of Iena the manuscript of Ein Gesprach zwischen einem Gastwirt und drei ungleichen Religionsgasten[546] and the Latin text Amicus Amicis Amica. These anonymous lampoons, also sent to the principal authorities, aroused excitement in the fortified city.

Knuetzen just barely escaped the repression, went to Cobourg, where he distributed his Amicus, which he diligently recopied. He did the same in Nuremberg. He returned to Iena under the pseudonym of Matthew Donner. He spread the rumor of an international sect, the “Conscious” [conscientaires], of which he was the initiator. The sect only existed in his will to propagate individual freedom and revolt against all forms of power. And in fact his pamphlets — clandestinely printed by his emulators, the existence of whom the probably knew nothing about — circulated in France, where they counted among the first texts that opened a breach in the feudal citadel that the French Revolution would destroy. His traces disappeared in 1674 and the common opinion is that he died in Italy. One of his letters (falsely dated Rome) was published in French in Interviews on Diverse Subjects in History by La Croze in Cologne in 1711.

“Above all,” he wrote in Amicus, “we deny God, and we hurl him down from his heights, rejecting the temple with all its priests. What suffices for us, the Conscious, is science, not one, but the greatest number (...). This is the consciousness that nature, benevolent mother of the humble people, has accorded to all men, in the place of the [various] Bibles.”[547]

The Fall Of God

As Knuetzen wanted, the French Revolution hurled God down to earth, where he agonized for two centuries, surviving in the spirit of the great [political] ideologies that supplanted the European religions. At the end of the Twentieth Century, the collapse of both brought together in a unanimous discredit the residues of celestial thought, sacred and profane, theist and atheist, religious and lay.

The decline and fall of an intellectual conception of the living was completed in a state of indifference that contrasted with the rage that presided over its critique. The hatred of the “church-goers” [calotins], which, from the towns to the countrysides, was a prelude to the Revolution in its sacking of churches and monasteries, was legally consecrated in the Civil Constitution of the clergy, an act of bureaucratization [fonctionnarisation] that marked the end of religious power over the citizenry, for which Statist repression was quickly substituted.

Promulgated in 1790 by the French Revolution, the Civil Constitution of the clergy offered few points in common with the provisions that had subjected the Anglican Church to royal power. More than just the prerogatives of the pope, the influence of religion itself was revoked. The refusal of Roman authority proceeded from the destruction of the divine rights of kings.

Supported by the new exigencies of the economy, philosophy triumphed over a “religious obscurantism” that in fact did not stop haunting it, perpetuating in enlightened mindsets the bloody stupidity that tore the individual away from what was most alive so as to identify it with the frozen truths of science, politics, sociology, ethics and ethos. The flag effaced the cross, before being burned in its turn. Although the collapse of Jacobinism and Bonapartism gave the Church of the Nineteenth Century a considerable power, Catholicism and Protestantism — worn away by social modernity — did not cease to decline. At the dawn of the Twenty-First Century, they only survive as the folklore recounted on Sundays.

In the towns as well as in the countrysides, the first months of the revolutionary effervescence decided the fate of the clergy. The [Church] dignitaries, closer to the aristocracy than to the people, shared the discredit of the Ancien Regime. Some of them chose prudence and conciliation. The others, espousing the convictions of their parishioners, honored themselves by representing them at the National Assembly. From their zeal came the image of “Citizen Jesus,” which demonstrated — even in the theology of liberation — the astonishing capacity of religious values to adapt.

One refused to swear [jurer] allegiance to the Civil Constitution and preferred exile or clandestinity; another gave sermons and perjured himself [se parjurerent] at the opportune moment; and another took a career (full of risks) as a State civil servant. The civil servants’ discomfort grew to the extent that Jacobinite centralism displeased the provinces and countrysides, and aroused liberal insurrections and Catholic peasant revolts.

After eight months of silence, Pope Pius VI condemned the Civil Constitution as “heretical and schismatic.” He was soon hanged and burned in effigy in the garden of the Tuileries. Nevertheless, the parish priests gained in political character what they lost in sacralized virtue. Those who, in the manner of Jacques Roux, took the side of the Enrages succumbed to Jacobin persecution. The unruly [refractaires] were pursued and those who swore allegiance were held to be hypocrites. The high clergy skillfully navigated so as to safeguard their privileges. Emblem of the two centuries to come, Tallyrand — unscrupulous enough to give sermons and consecrate other bishops who swore allegiance — used honorable mimicry to survive the Revolution, Bonapartism, Empire, the Restoration and the monarchy.

His exemplary modernity, his art of chipping away at the sacred in accordance with the necessities of politics, presaged the destiny of Christianity itself, which was condemned to become socialized before it succumbed to the indifference that market society would propagate in matters of opinion at the end of the Twentieth Century.