Person

Jean Meslier

French Catholic parish priest (1664-1729) who served the village of Étrépigny in Champagne for four decades and, in secret, wrote a long manuscript arguing that God does not exist, that the soul is not immortal, and that religion is a fraud maintained for the benefit of the powerful. Found in his house after his death, the work is usually called his Testament; its own title calls it a memoir of his thoughts and sentiments. The French atheist philosopher Michel Onfray has called him the first person to devote an entire book to atheism, and the codex's history of Atheism treats him as the first systematic atheist manifesto of modern Europe.

He matters to apologetics for two reasons. His arguments, especially the argument from evil and the charge that religion serves oppression, are still the arguments most people meet first. And his life is an uncomfortable case study: a man who preached what he privately rejected, which raises real questions about the Church of his day as well as about him.

Biography

• 1664, born in Mazerny in the Ardennes, to a family in the textile trade; began learning Latin from a local priest and entered the seminary, later saying he did so to please his parents
• 1689, became curé of Étrépigny, where he served until his death; his life was outwardly unremarkable apart from a public dispute with the local lord, Antoine de Touilly, over the lord's treatment of the peasants
• 1729, died at Étrépigny; three handwritten copies of his manuscript, a work of more than six hundred pages, were found in his house
• After his death, manuscript copies circulated in the clandestine trade of eighteenth-century France
• 1762, Voltaire published the Extrait des sentiments de Jean Meslier, a heavily selective abridgment that presented Meslier as a deist rather than the atheist he was
• 1772, the Baron d'Holbach's Le Bon Sens appeared anonymously and was long misattributed to Meslier, which further blurred what Meslier himself had written
• 1864, the first complete edition was published in Amsterdam by Rudolf Charles
• 2009, an English translation by Michael Shreve, Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier, appeared from Prometheus Books

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The core argument

Meslier's case, stated in its strongest form, runs on four lines.

1. The argument from evil. A good and wise God would not permit the suffering the world contains. Meslier turned the design argument of the deists against them: if the world shows design, it also shows the evils its designer allowed. He denied that suffering carries any spiritual value.
2. No God at all, not even the deists' God. He rejected the God of natural religion as firmly as the God of the Church. He also denied the immortality of the soul and the reality of free will, which places him among the earliest thoroughgoing materialists.
3. The theologians cannot agree. Meslier drew much of his material from the disputes of his own time between Jesuits, Cartesians and Jansenists. Since the learned could not agree on a proof of God, he concluded there was no compelling ground for belief.
4. Religion as an instrument of power. His sharpest pages are social. He argued that religion is a fabrication that keeps the poor submissive, that it teaches the acceptance of suffering and obedience to tyranny, and that the early Christians, who shared their goods, had been betrayed by a Church allied with kings and lords. He reported, with approval, a common man's wish to see the nobles hanged and strangled with the guts of priests, a line Diderot later reworked into verse.

Historians of philosophy note that none of these arguments was new. His originality lay in assembling them into one sustained, explicit case.

A Christian response

His moral outrage is the strongest thing in the book, and it is not atheist property. Meslier's anger at landlords who crushed his parishioners is the anger of the Hebrew prophets. Scripture says it before he did: "Behold, the hire of the laborers who mowed your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth out: and the cries of them that reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth" (James 5:4, ASV). The question is what grounds the outrage. If there is no God and no soul, the suffering of a peasant is a physical event with no claim on anyone. Meslier writes as if injustice is objectively wrong, which is exactly the premise the Moral Argument needs. See Argument from Justice.

The argument from evil. This is the serious philosophical line, and the codex answers it at length in Problem of Evil, Theodicy and Evidential Problem of Evil Defeater. The short form: the logical version fails if God could have morally sufficient reasons we cannot see, and the Christian claim is not that suffering is good but that God entered it in Christ and will undo it.

Disagreement among theologians does not show there is no good argument. Physicists disagree about the interpretation of quantum mechanics; nobody concludes there is no physical world. Meslier's inference from quarrelling schools to atheism is a non sequitur.

The hypocrisy he confessed is a real indictment, but of what? A priest who preached for forty years what he privately thought false is a damning picture of a Church that ordained men to please their parents and allied itself with the powerful. The New Testament condemns exactly that pattern of shepherds who serve themselves. It shows that institutions can betray the faith. It does not show the faith is false. See Christians Behaving Badly.

He was not quite the first. Kazimierz Łyszczyński's treatise De non existentia Dei predates Meslier, and Łyszczyński was executed for atheism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1689. Claims of absolute priority should be stated with care.

See also

• Atheism, the domain hub; Meslier stands in its seventeenth and early eighteenth century precursors
• Baruch Spinoza, the other major precursor in the same period
• Problem of Evil, the central philosophical argument of the Testament
• Theodicy, the Christian tradition of answering it
• Deism, the natural religion Meslier rejected and Voltaire tried to make him fit
• Materialism, the metaphysics Meslier adopted
• Moral Argument, the argument his moral outrage quietly presupposes
• Argument from Justice, the case that the demand for justice points beyond nature
• Christians Behaving Badly, the right frame for the clerical hypocrisy he exposed
• Religion Is a Crutch Objection Defeater, on the related charge that religion is a tool or a sedative
• Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the next generation of French materialism