With the arrival of a comet in 1680, the moral superiority of Christianity vanished
Does religion lead to more or less tolerance? Pierre Bayle dropped a bombshell in 1682: a society without religion was not such a bad idea at all. The issue he raised continues to divide the world.
C/1680 V1 is now the name of the comet that flew over Europe in 1680. It was an exceptionally large and bright comet with a long tail, which was also visible in daylight. The Rotterdam painter Lieve Verschuier was an eyewitness; he made a painting of it.
The French Protestant Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) had fled to Rotterdam in 1681, where he has since taught philosophy at the École Illustre, an institute for higher education. Bayle — like many Huguenot contemporaries — had had to flee France because Protestants were finding it increasingly difficult. His brother Jacob was imprisoned in France for publishing a book by Pierre, and would die in captivity a few years later. Bayle also got into trouble in Rotterdam when he stood on too many toes; this time he came into conflict with Calvinist orthodoxy.
Bayle was a child of the Enlightenment: unhindered by undue reverence, he skewered Christian morality. His significance for modernity was enormous; his work had a clear influence on the thinking of David Hume and Immanuel Kant and was highly regarded among French philosophes.
Pierre Bayle had also seen the comet. The astronomers knew exactly what was going on, but the appearance of the comet led to an explosion of superstitious theories about the end of times and such. That hysteria made Bayle muse so deeply that he wrote a big book about it.
In that book, Pensées à l'occasion de la comète (1682), Bayle came to a bold conclusion for that time: Christians are not necessarily better citizens. A secular society, stripped of Christian morals, can function perfectly fine.
His reasoning went as follows. People who see comets as divine omens are not very wise. They are like “a woman, who never puts her head out the window on rue Saint Honoré without seeing carriages pass, to imagine that she is the reason why these carriages pass, or at least that she should be a presage to the whole neighbourhood that, when she shows herself at her window, carriages will soon pass.”
He placed those who thought this way on the same level as pagans with their idolatry. (Now Bayle does not explicitly state that Catholics also practise idolatry, but that was a common accusation in Calvinist circles.) Idolatry is very wrong, that was the consensus in his time, but nothing is as bad as atheism. Bayle in particular challenged that view.
When a Christian sins, he argues, it is worse than when an atheist does. Because the Christian recognises the supreme being and knows the rules. While the pagan and the atheist know neither God nor commandments; pagans turned out to be perfectly capable of maintaining a functioning society. For example, think (again) of the Roman Empire.
Are Christians that much better? Bayle disputed that. Although they know very well how to do well, they are no better. “A city like Paris would be reduced in two weeks to the saddest condition in the world, if no other remedy were used against vice than the remonstrances of preachers and confessors.” Religion is of no use to keep the behaviour of citizens in check. No matter how Christian the citizens are, society would be riotous without the city’s finest on the streets. It is not the fear of God but the fear of the law that is decisive.
Christians have no reason to feel morally superior; they are no better than others.
Bayle
We should not judge a religion by its official expressions, but by the behaviour of its believers, Bayle wrote. People naturally sin, regardless of religion. That did not mean that Bayle was an apostate: he was and remained a faithful Christian. But he went to the extreme: no religious opinion, pagan or Christian, is able to control the natural tendencies that determine our actions. Theological insights are completely useless for controlling human behaviour. Christian dogmas such as original sin, free will, predestination and the divine nature of Jesus may be exciting for theologians, but people can do without them in their daily lives.
Moreover, religious zeal has led both pagans and Christians to commit atrocities that would never have occurred to them if they were not religious. Religion is therefore not a deterrent, but can even be an incentive to vice.
In fact, there were so many virtuous pagans in the past, that one may assume that knowledge of God is not necessary for virtuous behaviour.
So if religion does not help keep a society decent, the next question becomes inevitable: could a secular state function properly? What if all citizens were atheists, what kind of society would we get? That was exactly the question Bayle wanted to get to.
Bayle echoed Epicurus that people are essentially seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. As far as Bayle was concerned, pleasure also included social prestige, pride and honour. A state must manage these motivations, with the carrot and the stick, with reward and punishment in the here and now, not in the afterlife. Even reward and punishment in the afterlife appear to have no noticeable effect in practice, so we don't need them.
Many biblical prescriptions also appear to have little effect on our social behaviour. God's laws sometimes seem to fall out of the blue; we have to obey them without understanding why. Take Adam who sinned by eating an apple: “The sin of Adam, who was punished in so terrible a manner, derived its enormity solely from the prohibition, for there was nothing more innocent than eating a certain fruit. It did no harm to human society, to animals, or to the other creatures.” Many Biblical commandments do not go much further than: it must be done because God says so.
People have an ingrained morality that is separate from religion.
Bayle
Bayle thus ripped the social significance of Christian morality apart. A society can do just fine without it. All you need is the carrot and the stick. If you are a Christian, that's very good, but that doesn't matter for social interactions.
With this analysis Bayle put an end to the superiority of Christian morality in public life. If Bayle's ideas were to penetrate, the consequences would be far-reaching. Christians could no longer rely on the superiority of Christian morality in public life. Those who did not care about Christian morality, or had other theological insights, could no longer be punished for this. Christians had to tolerate different views. They could throw a heretic out of the church, but outside the church Christians no longer had a say in the matter of heresy.
The importance of Bayle's statement cannot be overestimated. In essence, Bayle, in 1682, was the first to give us permission to think for ourselves, to have our own morality, our own image of God, even our own religion if necessary.
The traditional attitude towards atheism
By Bayle's time, the image of God had already begun to change. Atheism had always been taboo, but Spinoza was one of the first to openly doubt the Biblical view of God in 1661. In 1674, the German theologian Matthias Knutzen was the first to openly challenge the existence of God. Atheism was certainly not a mainstream idea at that time: anyone who dared to publicly doubt the traditional image of God made themselves a social outcast. But the phenomenon of atheism was well known, even before Knutzen and Spinoza wrote about their view of God.
As early as 1516, the English Catholic Thomas More, statesman under King Charles VIII and friend of Erasmus, described the disadvantage of atheists in his book Utopia, although he did not yet call them that: it concerned those who “have so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature, as to think that our souls died with our bodies, or that the world was governed by chance, without a wise overruling Providence.” Those who do not believe in reward and punishment after life can hardly be seen as human because they “degrade so noble a being as the soul, and reckon it no better than a beast’s.”
In his depiction of a utopian country, More allowed several religions to coexist, as long as they adhered to a few basic conditions. And those who persecuted other religions were severely punished. For the peaceful coexistence of religions under a regime of toleration strengthens the state rather than weakens it.1
Even atheists should be left alone, according to More. They are indeed people who do not hesitate to break all laws, either by deceit or by force, when it suits them. But they are not to be punished: you cannot force people to change their minds. They are despised and are not allowed to play a role in public life. But privately they can say whatever they want. Hopefully serious conversations with priests and other wise men will change their minds.
The otherwise tolerant Sébastien Castellio also had little sympathy for atheists: “If anyone denies the Lord God, he is an unbeliever and an atheist and deserves to be detested in the eyes of everyone.”
An exceptionally tolerant voice for that time came from Dirck Coornhert in 1590. His entire life had been dominated by Erasmian toleration for those who thought differently, and towards the end of his life he explained it one more time in his book Proces vant ketterdooden (The process of killing heretics). Unfortunately, that extensive book can only be consulted in Gothic 16th-century Dutch, and I lack the knowledge and time for that. Let us hope that it will be translated soon, because it is an important work. So I heard it said, but according to Rainer Forst, Coornhert saw atheists as people who have not yet received God's grace. He would have noted that it is not appropriate to punish wicked people for such a defect, while atheists sincerely believe that they are following their conscience. The social stigma an atheist had to live with was bad enough.
It did not come out of the blue that the famous John Locke was not in favour of tolerance for atheists. Everyone hated atheists; the only thing they differed on was which punishment was most appropriate.
It is hard to conceive, how there should be innate moral principles, without an innate idea of a Deity: without a notion of a law-maker, it is impossible to have a notion of a law, and an obligation to observe it.
— John Locke, An essay concerning human understanding (1689)
Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God. Promises, Covenants, and Oaths, which are the Bonds of Humane Society, can have no hold upon an Atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. Besides also, those that by their Atheism undermine and destroy all Religion, can have no pretence of Religion whereupon to challenge the Privilege of a Toleration. As for other Practical Opinions, though not absolutely free from all Error, yet if they do not tend to establish Domination over others, or Civil Impunity to the Church in which they are taught, there can be no Reason why they should not be tolerated.
— John Locke, A letter concerning toleration (1689)
The objections summarised
Before Bayle took the plunge, everyone disapproved of atheists. Let us briefly summarise their arguments.
Atheists do not believe in the afterlife, so they do not believe in reward and punishment after death. This encourages a sinful life.
Morality without God is unthinkable. Human morality can be traced directly back to a divine origin: without God there is no morality. Without that morality, people are nothing more than animals.
Oaths and promises have no hold on atheists because they cannot swear with God as a witness.
After Bayle: cases for a natural religion
The above were precisely the objections that Voltaire repeated in the article on atheism in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764):
It is infinitely more useful to have a religion (even a bad one) than to have none at all.
— Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)
Or, in another bon mot in which Voltaire excelled:
If God did not exist, he would have to be invented.
— Voltaire, Épître à l'auteur du livre des trois imposteurs (1770)
Voltaire had the deepest respect for Bayle, he said, but he dismissed Bayle's objection that religion provokes fanaticism and persecution. Voltaire wanted a universal, non-dogmatic religion with the guiding principle: morality is the same for every person, so it comes from God. He wanted a general religion that teaches citizens virtue, a religion that has only one law: love for God and for your neighbours.
This put Voltaire on the same track as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he really hated, by the way. Rousseau had similarly vague ideas about a natural religion for all humanity, anchored in enforceable principles of morality, and some form of natural law. Because faith answers a general human need. He even had some appreciation for religious fanaticism. Despite the cruelty and bloodlust that comes with it, he respected the passion that comes with it. Atheism, on the other hand:
assaults the life and enfeebles it, degrades the soul, concentrates all the passions in the basest self-interest, in the meanness of the human self; thus it saps unnoticed the very foundations of all society, for what is common to all these private interests is so small that it will never outweigh their opposing interests.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou De l'éducation (1762)
Moreover, he also saw something in a religion that points out people to their moral duties:
The neglect of all religion soon leads to the neglect of a man’s duties.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou De l'éducation (1762)
Voltaire and Rousseau thus had a vague romantic ideal of a universal human religion with enforceable norms and an aversion to religious intolerance. They were not really concerned with how they related to each other. In their view, the relationship between religion and morality was too close to break. But they did not really address Bayle's arguments that religion does not demonstrably make people better, and that we have an ingrained human morality that does not come from religion.
Moreover, the 'natural religion' that Voltaire and Rousseau had in mind looked suspiciously like the religion attributed to Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament, but stripped of all the excess baggage and intolerance that had come to cling to it over the centuries.
Holbach: Religion is the cause of intolerance
An article about the relationship between religion and morality is not possible without the contribution of Paul Heinrich Dietrich, better known as Baron d'Holbach, who had received his education at Leiden University, considered himself indebted to Thomas Hobbes, was familiar with the work of Spinoza and Locke, and maintained good contacts with British thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Hume. The prosperous Holbach held a well-known salon in Paris and enjoyed considerable influence in intellectual circles there. That was remarkable, because d'Holbach openly stated that he did not believe in God. His book Système de la Nature (1770) disgusted even enlightened writers such as Voltaire and Goethe, which I see as a recommendation.
D'Holbach wrote the following. Because supernatural matters cannot be determined by definition, people speculate about them. Due to cultural and personal differences, everyone has their own interpretation of this. This inevitably leads to conflict: everyone sees something different as the essence of their faith. Because there are no objective criteria to resolve these conflicts, this leads to a hardening of positions.
That fanaticism is not the downside of religion, it is the core, because it concerns essential matters for everyone. Because everyone connects religious insights with the highest morality, believers consider violence justified, even if that violence is immoral by human standards.
The supreme being will make the final judgement after death, so that even an appeal to reason has no hold on the fanatics. The reward will come in the afterlife, even if you behave like an animal.
Religion itself leads to religious intolerance.
d’Holbach
Bayle argued that religion does not necessarily lead to better people, but d'Holbach turned it around. People are naturally filled with morality and reason; it is religion that perverts morality. Without a supreme being, people have countless stimuli that encourage a decent life: an innate urge for self-preservation and happiness, a need for social prestige and pride, the knowledge that harmonious cooperation leads to prosperity. Moreover, we can raise our children well, and we can enact laws that promote moral behaviour. It is precisely the different religions that hinder cooperation and fuel moral differences between people.
Everything would have conducted mortals to mildness, to indulgence, to toleration; virtues, unquestionably of more real importance, much more necessary to the welfare of society, than the marvellous speculations by which it is divided, by which it is frequently hurried on to sacrifice to a maniacal fury, the pretended enemies to these revered flights of the imagination.
— Paul Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, Système de la nature (1770)
Kant
This timeline ends with Immanuel Kant, who in a sense drew the ultimate conclusion from Bayle's argument. We need irrefutable moral laws that transcend religious differences, Kant thought, and he went looking. We will discuss Kant's moral theory in detail elsewhere, but here is a preview.
Kant did not seek morality in the dictates of a supreme being, but in the rationality and autonomy of every thinking and acting being, anywhere in the world, regardless of religion. He looked for moral principles that anyone could agree with who recognizes that he or she does not have moral priority over others. If you believe that you have moral priority over someone else, this will inevitably lead to a conflict: the other person will then claim the opposite with just as much right. Which of course happened systematically after the Reformation. For Kant, it is no longer religion that dictates morality, but it is morality that underlies a 'moral religion of reason'.
Moreover, Kant could not resist: he also saw a 'religion of reason' as the final element of morality, the aim of which is to bridge the differences between the various beliefs, with a pioneering role for Christianity.
In that sense, Bayle was more consistent: he never distanced himself from his Christian faith, but made it crystal clear that you must make a distinction between faith and reason. You cannot attack matters of faith with reason, and you should not pollute rational matters with religious arguments. Faith and reason are two separate domains that we should not try to unite.
To conclude
The issue Bayle raised continues to divide the world. Can you be a moral person without religion? Is morality conceivable without a deity? Roughly half of the world's population or more will think not. Sill in 1880, Dostoyevsky wrote:
If God does not exist, everything is permitted
— Ivan Karamazov, in: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The brothers Karamazov (1880)
Suppose you meet an exotic foreigner at a party. You start talking and he tells you, “I'm a liar and a thief. Morality means nothing to me.” How do you respond? You might burst out laughing. But if he remains dead serious, you probably won't invite him to your home anytime soon.
This is roughly the reaction you can expect as a traveller visiting a Muslim country if you blatantly insist that you are an atheist. As a Christian or, for my part, a Buddhist, you are very welcome, but declared atheists will be kept at a distance: he or she must be devoid of morality.
In Islam there is fairly broad consensus that denial of the existence of God coincides with denial of morality. Empirical science, survival of the fittest, the law of the strongest, these cannot possibly be sources of morality. God is the source of all goodness; if you take that away, people become animals. Characteristic of Islam is the submission of the will to God's laws. Charity, justice, selflessness and compassion are uniquely human qualities with no evolutionary origin, you need a god for that.
In that case, one would expect that religious countries would be more peaceful than non-religious countries, but the opposite seems to be the case. On an individual level, believers may be more peaceful, but religion quickly leads to group conflict, and things quickly get out of hand. In that sense, Bayle was probably right. I will later publish a whole series on the phenomenon of group conflict, which is important for toleration.
You can deduce what I think about it from my article on genetic morality. It will not have escaped your notice that I have a lot of appreciation for Bayle. The leading contemporary German philosopher Rainer Forst also considers him to be the greatest, most consistent thinker on toleration in history, surpassing even Kant in some respects.
Bayle will come into play again in the next episode. Then it will be about the role of freedom of conscience in the discourse on religious toleration.
For further reading
Thomas More, Utopia (1516)
Sébastien Castellio, De haereticis, an sint persequendi (1554), also online available in French.
Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert, Proces vant ketterdooden ende dwang der conscientien (1589-1590)
Pierre Bayle, Pensées diverses écrites à un docteur de Sorbonne à l'occasion de la comète, qui parut au mois de Décembre 1680 (1682), translated and introduced by: Robert Bartlett: Various thoughts on the occasion of a comet (2000)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou De l'éducation (1762), also online in English
Voltaire, Athée, atheïsme, in: Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), also online in English.
Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud (pseudonym of Paul Thiry, Baron d’Holbach), Système de la nature, ou Des loix du monde physique et du monde moral (1770), also online in English
Rainer Forst, Toleranz im Konflikt. Geschichte, Gehalt und Gegenwart eines umstrittenen Begriffs (2003), translated as: Toleration in conflict: past and present (2013)
Eric MacPhail, Religious tolerance from Renaissance to Enlightenment — Atheist’s progress (2019)
Ataur Rehman, Moralities: a contemporary discourse between New Atheism and Islam, Islāmiyyāt (2020)
This was the sixteenth newsletter in a long series on Toleration and Christianity. An overview of all articles in this series can be found in the overview article Toleration in the history of Christianity.
The next episode will be about the meaning of the concept of freedom of conscience in the historical debate about religious toleration.
Heraklion, 31 December, 2023
In the article on religious pragmatism and the politiques in France, I overlooked More's earlier plea. Anyway, More was easy to say; it was 1516 and no one had heard of the Saxon monk Luther, let alone the then seven-year-old Calvin. And More would later not hesitate to condemn Protestants to the stake.