The Anatomy of Melancholy

One religion is as true as another: new inventions, all serving human interests. To them, the works of the brilliant Aristotle carry as much authority as Scripture; subtle Seneca’s letters are as canonical as Saint Paul’s; Pindar’s odes are as good as the prophet David’s psalms; Epictetus’s Handbook equals wise Solomon’s proverbs. Some of them say this and more openly and boldly, in every place and company.

The emperor Claudius was angry with heaven because it thundered and challenged Jupiter to battle. What madness! says Seneca. He thought Jupiter could not hurt him, but he could hurt Jupiter.

Diagoras, Demonax, Epicurus, Pliny, Lucian and Lucretius,

—— and Mezentius, despiser of the gods,

all professed atheists in their times—though not outright atheists either, as Cicogna demonstrates in book 1, chapter 1: they mocked only the pagan gods, their multitude, and their base, invented functions. Gilbert Cousin and Erasmus work hard to clear Lucian’s reputation, and some defend Epicurus. But all in vain: Lucian mocks everything, Epicurus denies everything, and his follower Lucretius defends him in it.

When human life lay foully before our eyes, On earth oppressed under heavy religion, Which showed its head from the regions of heaven, Looming over mortals with a terrifying face, and so on.

When humankind was steeped in superstition, With ghastly looks above that frightened mortal men, and so on.

He alone, like another Hercules, freed the world from that monster. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, book 2, chapter 7, and book 7, chapter 55, expressly denies the immortality of the soul. Seneca does little less—or rather more—in book 7, letter 55 to Lucilius and his Consolation to Marcia.

Some Greek commentators would impute as much to Job, making him deny resurrection and the rest; Pineda refutes them at length on Job 7:9. Aristotle is harshly judged by some theologians and philosophers: Saint Justin in the Exhortation to the Greeks; Gregory Nazianzen in the Disputation against Eunomius; Theodoret in book 5 of the Cure of Greek Maladies; Origen in On First Principles.

Pomponazzi upholds it in his treatise entitled—at least so it is styled—On the Immortality of the Soul; Scaliger, who, Patrizi says, would perjure himself at any time in defence of his great master Aristotle, and Dandini, in book 3 On the Soul, acknowledge as much.

Averroes attacks all spirits and supreme powers. More recently Bruno—unfortunate Bruno, as Kepler calls him—Machiavelli, Giulio Cesare Vanini, lately burned at Toulouse in France, and Pietro Aretino have publicly maintained such atheistical paradoxes.

So too the Italian Boccaccio, with his fable of the three rings, from which he infers that one cannot distinguish which religion is truer—Judaism, Islam or Christianity—because they have the same signs, and so on.