Some three hundred years ago in the early 1700s, in a small village in the Champagne region of France, there lived a humble Catholic priest who dutifully led mass, administered the sacraments, oversaw baptisms and funerals, and kindly tended to the existential needs of his flock. All the while, he secretly wrote an extensive tome castigating Catholicism, along with every other religion, as utter bullshit—or, in his words: “illusions, errors, lies, fictions, and impostures.”1 In an unprecedentedly searing take-down of religion, this good priest laid out extensive arguments against theism, deconstructed the logical fallacies of religious faith, and promulgated a soundly naturalistic and ethical worldview. This, of course, was dangerous stuff. Thus, knowing that his blasphemous ideas would inevitably lead to his torture and execution, he carefully hid his treatise but made specific arrangements for its publication after his death.
Jean Meslier
Jean Meslier was born in 1664 and died in 1729. Although barely known to even the most ardent secular aficionados—he was completely left out of such comprehensive works as Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History, Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist, Sarah Bakewell’s Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, Samuel Putnam’s 400 Years of Freethought, James Thrower’s Western Atheism, and Alec Ryrie’s Unbelievers—Meslier was, arguably, the first secular humanist of Western culture to publish an extensive, thorough, and detailed articulation of atheism. Indeed, according to French scholar Michel Onfray, “true atheism” begins with Meslier. “For the first time,” Onfray writes, “a philosopher had dedicated a whole book to the question of atheism. He professed it, demonstrated it, arguing and quoting. … His title sets it out clearly: Memoir of the Thoughts and Feelings of Jean Meslier, with the subtitle: Clear and Evident Demonstrations of the Vanity and Falsity of All the Religions of the World.”2
As a young man, Meslier had begun studying theology under the tutelage of a local priest and then went on to join the seminary—mostly to please his parents. After all, it was a respectable and steady gig. But as his atheism blossomed throughout the course of his life, it certainly became a difficult career to uphold. As he wrote to his parishioners:
With respect to the false and fabulous mysteries of your religion and all the other pious but vain superstitious duties and obligations that your religion imposes on you … you could have easily noticed that I hardly devoted myself to the bigotry and I hardly thought much about maintaining you in it or of advising you to practice it. I was, nevertheless, obligated to teach you about your religion … and do the false duty that I committed myself to as priest of your parish. And ever since then I have had the displeasure of seeing myself in this annoying obligation of acting and speaking entirely against my own sentiments; I have had the displeasure of keeping you in the stupid errors, the vain superstitions, and the idolatries that I hated, condemned, and detested to the core.”3
Being a priest—at least outwardly so—Meslier never married, but he did live with a woman who served as his maid. When Church authorities investigated this arrangement, he claimed that she was his niece. They didn’t buy it and punished him with a month of solitary confinement. Several years later, he was living with yet another “niece.” He also got into trouble with his bosses on another occasion for delivering a sermon in which he condemned a local lord for swindling the peasantry.4
Otherwise, Meslier’s life was unremarkable5: he lived simply and poorly. He wasn’t connected to any great movements, wasn’t part of any illustrious salons, or didn’t correspond with any beacons of the Enlightenment. He died knowing no fame. But the brilliant book he left behind was widely circulated in France. Voltaire paid a high price for a copy and published extracts from it in the 1760s. However, Voltaire “edited” Meslier’s work shamefully by chopping up the content to make Meslier out to be a deist in the same mold as Voltaire rather than the hardcore atheist that Meslier truly was. This act of Voltaire’s may be the main reason Meslier was so grossly sidelined from the cannon of European freethinking pioneers.
I first became aware of Meslier from reading Dale McGowan’s masterful Voices of Unbelief, whereby I learned that the first modern, complete English translation of Meslier’s work was only published (by Prometheus Books) in 2009 under the title Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier. Coming in at nearly 600 pages, and with whopping chapter titles such as “Weakness and Vanity of the Arguments the God-cultists Make to Prove the So-Called Spirituality and immortality of the Soul” and “If There Were Some Divinity Worshipped, and Served by Men, Would it Fail to Make Itself Sufficiently Known to Them and to Make Its Will Sufficiently Known to the Them?,” the book is certainly not the quickest or smoothest read. It is pedantic and repetitive. And, still, utterly brilliant.
Key Components
Meslier anticipates nearly every major argument against religion—and for atheism—that would go on to be trumpeted by the great freethinking luminaries of subsequent centuries, including our own. And he does so with clarity of thought, deliberate presentation, engaged attention to preexisting sources (such as the writings of Michel de Montaigne), extensive knowledge of the Bible, solid philosophical rigor, and careful rhetorical scaffolding throughout. And he did all this more or less on his own, because he was not in any active dialogue with other skeptics of his day.
To adequately summarize the multitude of arguments presented in his lengthy treatise is not possible here. But some highlights of this veritable atheist feast include:
The fallaciousness and inanity of Christianity. Meslier lays out prominent and obvious biblical contradictions, citing chapters and verses. He also argues that Jesus was a fool and a fanatic who purposely spoke obscurely and cryptically. And of course, the very legend is largely based on pagan inspiration, with the supposed miraculous details of his life amply anteceded in pagan religious myth and belief. It is a special atrocity of Christianity, Meslier argues, to make our natural inclinations sinful, and an absurdity to believe that a god can be offended or angered by our sins and then punish us for eternity in hell. Additionally, Christianity’s key doctrine of blood sacrifice is baffling, for it is
madness for our Christ-cultists to believe that the ‘God the Father’ wants to be appeased by men only through the punishment and death of his own divine son … monstrous was the inequity and madness in God the Father to want to be appeased by guilty men through the … bloody, cruel, and shameful death of his innocent and divine son. … I cannot find the words to express how crazy this is!6
The god of the Bible is a moral monster. Meslier laments God is a monster who “deserves to be hated, detested, and cursed forever, seeing that [it] is crueler than all the cruelest tyrants who ever lived or could live.”7 But, of course, this whole matter of God’s supposed depraved character is moot because Meslier goes on to insist that God does not exist. There is no convincing evidence for such an imaginary being, and while we may not know or understand all the deep mysteries of being and existence, invoking “God” as some sort of explanation doesn’t help. And of course, even if there were an all-powerful deity, no one ever can agree on what this presumed God supposedly wills or wants. Different religions disagree in this matter, and even people within the very same religions disagree. Oh, and by the way, it is all too obvious that prayers don’t work.
All theology that prattles on about a deity that exists yet doesn’t possess any discernible qualities of existence is obtuse babble. “To speak in this way [of the inconceivable] is to speak without knowing what you are saying, to continue to multiply the absurdities and propose things that are more and more impossible, more and more inconceivable and absurd.”8
The “soul” as some separate entity does not exist. Rather, our minds and thoughts and feelings—even though they may feel like they come from an inner soul—all emerge from the physical, material processes of the brain: “what we call ‘our soul’ can be nothing else but a portion of the finest, subtlest, and most restless matter of our body.”9
Religious scriptures—and their meanings—are always subjectively interpreted and “depend only on the imagination of the interpreter.” If some want a passage to have allegorical or metaphorical meaning, then they give it such; if others want it to have literal meaning, same. And by such fallacious methods, “one could easily make everything true that was the most false and absurd.” 10
The vanity, hypocrisy, and wickedness of the clergy class. Priests, abbots, monks—all are vocations of wastefulness and uselessness:
The lowest of the worst jobs in a good republic are useful and necessary. Somebody has to do them … do not all parishes, for example, need shepherds and swineherds to guard the flocks? Do they not need wool-spinners and laundry women? We certainly need them everywhere; we cannot do without them. But what need is there in a republic for so many priests and monks and nuns who live in idleness and laziness? What need is there of all the pious sluggards whose occupations do nothing useful? Certainly there is no need and they are of no real use in the world.”11
Religion is a social construction with the content all being made up by people: “All the religions that exist or have existed in the world are and have always been nothing but human inventions … all the divinities that we worship are nothing but fabrications and inventions of men.”12 Furthermore, religion is a tool used by those in power to keep the poor and oppressed down. Religion creates castes and inequalities that subvert equal rights for all.
The superiority of empirical truth and reason over superstition and faith. Meslier is insistent that claims lacking evidence—especially miraculous, fantastical claims—ought to be rejected. Because religion is predicated on unsubstantiated claims of miracles, it ought to be dismissed. All the so-called miracles of religion lack evidence:
It is unquestionable that there is no certainty that these so-called miracles really had been performed, no certainty of the honesty and sincerity of those who recorded or said they had seen them, no certainty that they had well understood and noted down all the circumstances, no certainty that the histories really belong to those whom we attribute them, and finally, no certainty that these histories have not been corrupted and falsified.13
Reason is the only way to make sense of the world. Faith is no way at all.
A secular, humanistic ethos is our only option. We need sane and just laws, equality, honesty, truth, and socio-political decisions based on reason and knowledge and evidence and wisdom, not superstition. As Meslier preaches:
You will be miserable and unhappy so long as you follow the errors of religion and subject yourselves to their crazy superstitions. … Reject all these vain and superstitious practices of religions. … Only the natural lights of reason are capable of leading men to the perfection of knowledge and human wisdom, as well as to the perfection of the arts.14
Indeed, “your salvation is in your hands, your deliverance will depend only on if you can understand everything well.”15 And remember:
There is more intelligence, civility, knowledge, eloquence, order, clarity, coherence, precision, and even more wisdom and solid instruction in the books of philosophers, historians, and profane orators than in any of the so-called holy, sacred books. … For example … the fables of Aesop … are certainly more ingenious and instructive than all the base and crude parables that are reported in the so-called Holy Gospels.16
Finally, it must be noted that Meslier was a harsh critic of the political elites and wealthy classes who exploited the working people, an advocate of the socialist ideal of sharing the earth’s bounty in a communal fashion, and an ardent supporter of animals, writing eloquently of their right to not be subject to torture, cruelty, and killing.
The First Atheist?
It is impossible to decide who should be dubbed the first atheist in history. Should it be Brihaspati, a leading member of the Lokoyata materialists of the ancient Indian school of Carvaka philosophy, from the sixth century BCE? Or the Greek poet Diagoras of Melos, from the fifth century BCE? There’s also the Arab skeptic Muhammad al Warraq from the ninth century. And the Pole Kazimierz Łyszczyński, who wrote a small treatise called On the Non-Existence of God in the 1600s. There is also Matthias Knutzen, who wrote several pamphlets in the 1670s on atheism and is considered by many to be the first open, self-identified atheist who embraced the label. Many other contenders abound.
But surely, among this proud firmament of freethought, Jean Meslier should shine brightly. He deserves to be known, to be read, and—even better—agreed with.
Notes
1 Jean Meslier, Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier (translated by Michael Shreve). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009, p. 36.
2 Michel Onfray, In Defence of Atheism, translation by Jeremy Leggatt. New York, NY: Arcade Publishing, 2007, p. 29.
3 Jean Meslier, Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier (translated by Michael Shreve), p. 41.
4 Morgane Guinard, “The Poisoned Will of Jean Meslier.” History Today, vol. 67, no. 10 (October 2017). Available online at https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/poisoned-will-jean-meslier.
5 Michel Onfray, “Jean Meslier and ‘The Gentle Inclination of Nature.’” New Politics, vol. 10, no. 4 (Winter 2006). Available online at https://newpol.org/issue_post/jean-meslier-and-gentle-inclination-nature/.
6 Jean Meslier, Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier (translated by Michael Shreve), p. 153.
7 Ibid, p. 256.
8 Ibid, p. 397.
9 Ibid, p. 570.
10 Ibid, p. 186.
11 Ibid, p. 291.
12 Ibid, p. 63.
13 Ibid, p. 89.
14 Ibid, p. 581.
15 Ibid, p. 583.
16 Ibid, p. 103.
Some three hundred years ago in the early 1700s, in a small village in the Champagne region of France, there lived a humble Catholic priest who dutifully led mass, administered the sacraments, oversaw baptisms and funerals, and kindly tended to the existential needs of his flock. All the while, he secretly wrote an extensive tome …