By N.M. Goldberg
PAINE INTENDED The Age of Reason to defend ‘true religion’ from the attacks of atheists. It proved, on the contrary, by the common admission both of his enemies and friends, to be ‘the Bible of the atheists’. And atheists, especially, both hitherto and now, have done and are doing everything to preserve for posterity the name and the works of the great freethinker.
In deciding the basic question of Paine’s philosophy, it stands out that he is a materialist – even though a one less consistent than his contemporaries, the French materialists of the eighteenth century.
According to Paine, a real material world exists outside man and his consciousness: ‘Whether we sleep or wake, the vast machinery of the universe still goes on.’ Man cannot by his own will alter creation: ‘It is an evert-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed.’
Matter, as Paine thought, generates mind; therefore matter is primary and thought, its derivative, secondary. ‘Who can say’, he asks, ‘what exceeding fine section of fine matter it is that produces a thought in what we call the mind?’
He concentrated all the force of his criticism on the Bible, which played an immense role in the life of Protestant America. The least doubt of the truth of the Bible was considered the gravest transgression; and the doubter was cruelly persecuted and punished. Clearly the exposure of Biblical fictions undermined religious beliefs and furthered the spread of unbelief.
Paine relied on the results of scientific criticism of the Bible begun by Hobbes and Spinoza and continued by the English deists: Anthony Collins (1676-17P9), Thomas Chubb (1679-1747), Matthew Tindal (1653-17Y3), Thomas Wooliton (1670-1733) and others. Besides popularizing their results he advanced some original conjectures.
Be begins by attacking the belief in the divine origin of the Bible and the idea of revelation as Spinoza and the English deists had already done. What is this revelation and what does Paine mean? He explains: Revelation is a communication of something which the person to whom the thing is revealed did not know before. For if I have done a thing, or seen it done, it needs no revelation to tell me I have done it, or seen it; nor enable me to tell it, or write it. Revelation, therefore, cannot be applied to anything done upon earth of which man himself is the actor or the witness; and consequently all the historical and anecdotal part of the Bible, which is almost the whole of it is not within the meaning and compass of the s word revelation, and, therefore, is not the word of God.’
Moncure Conway, in his biography of Paine, considers his treatment of the New Testament as more valuable than the discoveries of such representatives of the historical school of criticism as Baur and Strauss. Conway thinks it is a merit of his approach to have shown how the historical Jesus is derived from the mythical Christ. Paine does not go so far as to deny a historical Christ, but states for the first time that the problem of whether Christ existed or not is of no importance.
The mere existence of Mazy, Joseph and Jesus, he writes, ‘is a matter of indiffer- . ence, about which there is no ground either to relieve or disbelieve, and which comes under the common bead of “It may be so; and what then?”‘ Again; ‘It is not, then, the existence or non•existence of the persons that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend.’
He makes the most of the fact that, even if all four gospels agreed with one another, that would not demonstrate the truth of their contents, but that if they do not agree – with one another, their contents are a fortiori false…
The ethics of the Old Testament were obnoxious to him, and in a bitter, destructive fashion he exposes their infirmity. In The Age of Reason he writes: ‘Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness„ that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.’
A great part of the Bible is ‘scarcely anything but a history of the grossest vices. To read the Bible without horror, we ‘most undo everything that is tender, sympathizing, and benevolent in the heart of man. Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that the Bible is fabulous than the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice.’
The Age of Reason was first published in France (to begin with in English, and then also in French, in a translation by the wife of Condorce,,). There,it made no – particular impression, since long before 1794 the French reader had been acquainted with the atheist literature of the French Enlightenment, In England where Paine had ) been outlawed, the publication and distribution of his work were subject to every kind of persecution. For publishing Paine’s pamphlet, An Examination of Prophecies, Daniel Eaton was sentenced to stand once a month in the pillory and to e±even months imprisonment.
In 1819 Richard Carlile, for publishing the ‘theological’ works of Paine, was fined £1,500 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. The reading and dissemination of an ‘atheistical’ book written by an author who bad been outlawed, the publication and distribution his work caused Marx to contemplate in a letter to the New York Pally Tribune (1854) that ‘It is no wonder if Thomas Paine’ Rights of Man was publicly burnt in this free and happy country.’ Nevertheless, in spite of various obstacles, Paine’s books reached the English reader.
Engels repeatedly pointed to the popularity among the English working class of the ‘well-known democrat’, Thomas Paine. In 1843, in Letters from London, Engels described working-class meetings at which. ‘Christianity is subjected to downright attack, and Christians are called “our enemies”‘. Besides, he added emphatically: ‘Workers now have in good cheap editions, translations of the works of French philosophers of the last century, chiefly Rousseau’s Social Contract, the ‘System of Nature, and various works of Voltaire; moreover, in penny or twopenny pamphlets and in newspapers they find an explanation of Communist principles; to just the same way there are in the hands of workers cheap editions of the works of Thomas Paine and Shelley.’
In 1845 Engels called George Forster, who had supported the French !evolution at the end of the eighteenth century and died on the scaffold, a German Thomas Paine. Writing to a meeting of Chartists in London at the end of 1845 in connection with the anniversary of the proclamation of the French Republic of 1792, Engels emphasized the fact that participants in the meeting ‘honoured the memory of Thomas Paine and the democrats of all lands’.
As is shown by the latest investigation by Webb# of the literature read by English workers, the works of Paine, in spite of all impediments, made their way among the working class and were in particular demand. In working-class newspapers and periodicals, especially in the Poor Man’s Guardian, the works of Paine were advertised in every way.
The Age of Reason exerted an anti-religious influence on the world class reader even at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Merciless criticism of the Bible, revelations of the hypocrisy of tho clergy, a passionate call to readers to rely on the facts of Nature and human reason, and not on prevalent religious beliefs – all this, which constituted the spirit and content of The Age of Reason, in combination with Paine’s political radicalism and straightforward humanism, determined the attitude to him of different social groups both in his life and after his death.
Today, as 150 years ago, the words of Thomas Paine sound like a battle-cry: ‘All national institutions of Churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profits.”
*R.K.Webb, The British Working Class Reader, 1790. 1848 (London, 1955).
The above article was originally published in the Annual of the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, Leningrad, 1960, No. IV. It was translated by the late Archibald Robertzon and a digest of it published in The Humanist for December, 1961.