The Anatomy of Melancholy

and, as Thomas maintains, “For one who reflects devoutly, reasons are always available to show the credibility of supernatural mysteries.” We believe it absolutely, and on good grounds, for, as Gregory rightly tells us, “Faith has no merit where human reason seeks proof.” Faith that refuses to accept anything without certain demonstration has no merit and does not deserve the name of faith.

We must and will believe God’s word; and if we are mistaken or err in our common belief, we shall say, as Richard of Saint-Victor vows he will say to Christ himself on the day of judgment, “Lord, if we have been deceived, you alone have deceived us.” This is our plea.

But as for the rest, I will not defend that papal consubstantiation, to which Muslims and Jews justly object. As Campanella admits in Atheism Defeated, chapter 12, folio 125, “it is a most difficult doctrine, and no subject is more exposed to the blasphemies of heretics and the foolish mockery of worldly thinkers.”

They hold it impossible “that God should be eaten in bread”; and they mock it besides: “Look at a people eating their own God,” said a certain Moor.

“Flies and worms mock this God when they foul and devour him. He is subject to fire and water; thieves steal him and throw the golden pyx to the ground, yet this God does not defend himself. How can he be whole in every particle of the host—the selfsame body in so many places, in heaven and on earth?” And so on.

Yet anyone who reads the Turks’ Quran, the Jews’ Talmud and the Papists’ Golden Legend will swear that such gross inventions, fables, empty traditions, monstrous paradoxes and ceremonies could never have proceeded from any spirit but the Devil’s own, the author of confusion and lies. He will wonder, too, how the wise men among the Jews, such learned and intelligent men as Averroes and Avicenna, or those pagan philosophers, could ever have been persuaded to believe or assent to the smallest part of them, “or fail to expose the fraud.” The answer is that, as Vanini says, “For fear of the public authorities, the philosophers did not dare bark against them”: they dared not speak for fear of the law. But I shall come down to particulars: read their various symptoms and then judge.

Of the symptoms that belong specifically to superstition, or that irreligious religion, I may say, as I did of the rest, that some are ridiculous, while others are dreadful to relate. As evidence of the ridiculous ones, nothing could be better than the multitude of their gods, the absurd names, actions and duties they assign to them, their feasts, holy days, sacrifices, acts of worship, and the like.