International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 45: 1–11, 1999.

1
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

On the intellectual sources of modern atheism ∗

LOUIS DUPRÉ
Yale University, USA

The fundamental principles that have determined modern culture since the
eighteenth century conflict with those that have given rise to traditional
theism. Some have described the modern ones as implicitly ‘atheistic’. The
term is not new. Socrates was branded with it for undermining the polytheist
religion of his time and so, in a different way, was Epicurus. Those who
attempted to rethink the nature of transcendence have always been called
atheists. Yet both believed in God or the gods. Closer to our own time the
pious Spinoza was charged with atheism for having articulated the relation
between transcendence and immanence in concepts that varied from the
traditional ones. The stigma adhered to his name all through the eighteenth
century. Lessing’s reputation as a religious thinker changed overnight when
Jacobi revealed his Spinozistic leanings. Even the devout Fichte lost his chair
at the university of Jena in the Atheismusstreit. The ‘atheism’ dealt with
in this paper was both more radical and more comprehensive. It consisted
not in a shift of the relation between immanence and transcendence, but
in a gradual evanescence of the very idea of transcendence. Unlike earlier
‘atheisms’, it failed to replace what it abolished. It was in fact the final stage
in an intellectual movement derived from Christian theological assumptions.
Nominalist theology in the late Middle Ages had, in a one-sided emphasis
on divine omnipotence, ruptured the bond of analogy that had linked Creator
and creature. This changed the relation between reason and revelation in a
manner that caused endless controversies and eventually broke up the unity of
Christendom altogether. When the protracted religious wars of the sixteenth
century finally forced Europeans to search for a new spiritual unity, the
compromise that emerged bore the marks of the theological meltdown of
the previous century. The original attempts to restore religious peace still
∗ An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 49th annual meeting of the
Metaphysical Society of America, held at the University of South Carolina, March 1998.
2 LOUIS DUPRÉ

retained the theological categories of nature and grace, reason and revelation.
But reason provided the basis. This signaled the birth of deism.
A religious ‘deism’ had existed for a long time, longer in the Islam than
in Christianity. The ninth century Baghdad theologian, al-Kindi, had shown
the rational and hence universal nature of the prophetic revelation. (Al-Farabi
(d. 980) and Ibn-Sina (Avicenna) (d. 1037) had professed similar beliefs.) All
had been religious. The idea of a religious universality based on reason was
implicit in Thomas Aquinas and had been explicitly accepted by a number of
early Renaissance thinkers such as Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino, Pico, and Bodin.
The human mind naturally longed for its divine source, they asserted. This
earlier deism, far from excluding revelation, had, in fact, been based upon a
presumed aboriginal revelation to the entire human race that had left traces
in all existing religions. This primeval revelation had at all times conveyed to
religious persons of all faiths an inner experience of the divine. Vestiges of its
aboriginal monotheism survived in Egyptian, Greek, and Roman polytheism.
As late as the eighteenth century the Cambridge Platonists still regarded it as
the foundation of a universal religious disposition.
Later deists promoted a different kind of universalism: reason alone,
independently of any revelation – primeval, Hebrew, or Christian – estab-
lishes the necessary and sufficient principles of transcendence needed for
the support of morality and the foundation of cosmology. They returned
to the Roman sources in which Christians ever since Augustine had found
an arsenal of weapons against polytheism and atheism. But for a different
purpose, namely, to establish a natural theology that could dispense with
revelation altogether. The new deism became a rival religion. Its principles
included the existence of a Creator, source of cosmic motion, who rewards
good and punishes evil, and whose providence guides history toward ever
greater progress of morals and culture. This deist religion, proclaimed to be
a product of reason alone, was in fact the result of a filtering process that
had strained off all historical and dogmatic data from Christian theology and
retained only that minimum which, by eighteenth century standards, reason
demands. It appeared to be more an attenuated version of Christianity than
a religion of pure reason. Its idea of God displayed sufficient remnants of its
origin to be recognizable as the ghost of the Christian God. It was a rationalist
abstraction of a specifically religious idea. ‘I know of no greater tribute ever
paid to the God of Christianity, Gilson quipped, than His survival in this
idea, maintained against Christianity itself and on the strength of pure natural
reason’.1
In fact, the earliest forms of this rationalist deism continued to admit
revelation as practically necessary because of the weakness of human reason.
Fausto Sozzini to whom friends as well as enemies traced the deist lineage,
 ON THE INTELLECTUAL SOURCES OF MODERN ATHEISM 3

and even Matthew Tindal, author of Christianity as Old as Creation (1730),

the ‘Bible of the deists’, accepted a primeval revelation, the core of which
Christianity shared with reason and with all other religions. The very text
that may have been most responsible for the spreading of rationalist deism
in Britain and France, John Locke’s On the Reasonableness of Christianity
(1695), was intended as a work of Christian piety, written by a believing
Christian. What earned it a place in deist literature – a place Locke himself
firmly recused – was the thesis that the content of revealed religion is compat-
ible with reason and that the credibility of its revealed authority can be
rationally justified. The deist appropriation may seem unfair. Still Locke’s
interpreters were not entirely wrong in finding the most essential thesis of
their position implied in his work insofar as reason must be the final judge
of the Gospel’s truth. This thesis reversed the traditional priority of divine
transcendence with respect to human reason. For deism, reason provides
the sole foundation of meaning, including the one concerning the idea of
transcendence. That idea had to be proven. Thus the ‘arguments’ for the exis-
tence of God assumed an unprecedented importance, both among believers
and among deists. While earlier philosophical theology had merely ‘justified’
revelation in the light of reason, deism required that reason first establish the
foundation of faith.
The deist inversion of transcendence and immanence appeared nowhere
more clearly than in the reduction of religion to the domain of morals.
With characteristic assurance Voltaire defined natural religion as ‘the prin-
ciples of morals common to the human race’.2 In ethics, the person takes
the initiative; in religion as traditionally understood, the initiative comes
from God. ‘A religious ethos superseded the religious pathos which had
motivated the preceding centuries of religious controversy’.3 Religion had
scarcely any function left but that of sanctioning morality, as d’Alembert
openly declared in the Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie: ‘One would
do a great service to mankind if one could make men forget the dogmas; if
one would simply preach them a God who rewards and punishes and who
frowns on superstition, who detests intolerance and expects no other cult
of man than mutual love and support’.4 Moreover, the divinely sanctioned
virtue is defined entirely by its use to society, Voltaire emphasized. 5 For
the deists, religion was the conclusion of an argument, rather than a given
received from an original revelation which philosophy then may attempt to
justify before reason. For traditional Christian, Jewish, or Muslim thinkers,
philosophy encounters the idea of God; it does not deduce it.6 In Aquinas’s
view God had not even been an object of metaphysics. He admitted, to be
sure, that philosophy necessitates the acceptance of a transcendent principle.
But the specification of this principle as the God of Christians and Jews
4 LOUIS DUPRÉ

is derived from faith. Modern readers rightly consider the five ways inade-
quate or incomplete as ‘arguments’. Aquinas concludes each of them with
the words: Et hoc est quod omnes vocant Deum long before all the neces-
sary elements of a formal argument are in place. The Summa Theologiae,
like so many other scholastic works, is a theological text written with the
assistance of philosophical concepts. The deists, however, claimed to deduce
God’s existence as well as God’s attributes from religiously neutral premises.
Their natural theology, though it owed its origin to the Christian idea of God,
initiated a religion of reason alone.

II

Eighteenth century deism subjected any conception of transcendence so

exhaustively to the control of reason that the distinction between immanence
and transcendence lost much of its meaning. In doing so they inevitably paved
the way to atheism. Now atheism need not have the anti-religious meaning we
commonly attach to that term. Early Buddhism had been wholly indifferent
concerning the nature and existence of the gods. Spinoza also rejected the
idea of a personal God, but his thought cannot be called a-religious. The non-
religious or anti-religious atheism that forms the subject of this discussion
includes an additional element that distinguishes it from religious atheism and
pantheism in that it abolishes any form of absolute transcendence. Its earliest
protagonists ascribed to matter the creative power formerly attributed to God.
Why, they argued, should matter itself not contain the perfections which it
was gradually to manifest? The critical issue is whether nature requires a
principle that, in a theist, pantheist, or a panentheist way, transcends natural
processes.
What constituted the decisive factor in the genesis of modern atheism? It
appears to have been the reduction of God’s creative act to one of efficient
causality. The subsequent collision between this primary divine cause and
the secondary created ones could not but result in some form of naturalism.
When the nominalist theology of the late Middle Ages separated the realms
of nature and grace as two independence realms – the natural and the super-
natural – it paved the road to naturalism. A nature that could be conceived
independently of any transcendence might exist independently. In the new
cosmology developed by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, the operative prin-
ciple of causality was the so-called efficient one. Soon modern philosophy
with few exceptions (Leibniz) reduced all forms of causality to the efficient
one conceived on the model of the mechanist theory of motion. Creation had
always been interpreted in a causal way, but never as the exclusive effect of an
efficient cause: God was as much formal as efficient cause. Gradually in late
 ON THE INTELLECTUAL SOURCES OF MODERN ATHEISM 5

medieval thought this divine causality had become more and more external.
The process had begun with the assumption of a virtus inhaerens, a power
inherent within the moving object that rendered any constantly renewed
input of power unnecessary. Motion thereby appeared to have become less
dependent on a continued divine causality. Still this budding naturalism had
ascribed nature’s creative powers themselves to a transcendent source. Even
the founders of mechanism, Descartes and Newton, considered God’s creative
act indispensable for bringing the physical mechanism into being as well as
for setting it in motion. That dependence on God as on an efficient cause
meant more than what Pascal had described as ‘a mere flip of the hand’
to start motion. Descartes had never restricted God’s creative impact to a
one-time communication of divine power, but had insisted that creation is
a never-ending process without which the cosmos would immediately return
to nothingness. In the third Meditation he writes: ‘The same power and action
are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment of its duration as
would be required to create that thing anew if it were not in existence. Hence
the distinction between preservation and creation is only a conceptual one’.7
Hence Descartes’s notion of causality does not tie him directly to eighteenth
century deism, much less to atheism. Still it is true that in his mechanistic
system, motion once instilled, became relatively autonomous. In the earlier
cosmology divine causality had not only secured a steady influx of power: it
had also directed that power. In the new view no divine intervention was ever
required or permitted: the scientific system ruled itself. Nor did the start of
motion remain the crucial problem it once had been, after Newton showed
that a state of rest was not more ‘natural’ (and therefore primary) than one of
motion.
The principle of inertia had abrogated the traditional assumption that rest
had a natural priority over motion. If we also abandon, then, the unproven
principle that the cosmos must have a beginning, the need for an efficient
cause of motion outside the universe ceases to exist. Such was the conclusion
of Diderot and of all later French materialists. Diderot attempted to solve the
remaining problem how life could emerge from inorganic matter by giving to
the static mechanistic doctrine a dynamic, vitalist interpretation. He assumed
that matter possessed creative powers that far exceeded the one needed to
maintain its motion. Diderot saw them at work in the generative process:
life originates from the union of sperm and ovum, neither one of which, he
thought, is a truly living being. Could life itself not result from a develop-
ment of matter’s own evolution? Do even the highest forms of mental life
become more intelligible when we ascribe their origin to an unknown cause
outside nature rather than to nature’s own developing processes? The case for
a dynamic conception of matter has resurfaced in contemporary naturalism,
6 LOUIS DUPRÉ

bolstered by an impressive array of scientific support. Philosophers reflect-

ing on the data of modern biology, attempt to explain the development of
mental life from the drive toward self-preservation inherent in all life and, to
some extent, in matter itself. What do we gain by attributing to an unknown
cause outside the process what could be more persuasively explained through
the process itself? Is this scenario indeed not more probable than that of
God creating a chaos from which a universe, worthy of God’s wisdom and
power, was never to emerge? The presence of some order in this universe,
though not enough to show it to be the work of a perfect Creator, could
be explained by the fact that disorder eliminates itself. The blind Oxford
professor Saunderson in whose mouth Diderot deceptively places his own
theory observes: ‘I conjecture that in the beginning, when fermenting matter
was hatching out the universe, men such as myself were quite common. And
why should I not assert what I believe about animals to be true of worlds
also? How many maimed and botched worlds have melted away, reformed
themselves, and are perhaps dispersing again at any given moment, far way
in space?’8

III

The reduction of causality to efficiency and of creation to efficient causality

led to even greater problems for the idea of God in the moral area. Morality
had remained deism’s chief defense against naturalist assaults. Indeed, deism
had virtually identified the content of religion with the sanction of moral
rules. But the conflict between freedom and necessity that had already
been severe during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century disputes on
divine predestination, grew worse as the implications of an idea of creation
conceived exclusively in terms of efficient causality became fully evident. For
the emancipatory philosophers of the eighteenth century, a freedom subject to
an external causal agency was hard to accept. As self-constituting spontane-
ity freedom is indeed incompatible with the kind of efficient causality early
modernity introduced and never retracted. They were, of course, right. Even
Kant found no adequate solution for that problem. He posited that the idea of
God provides extrinsic support to the moral life, but in no way does God inter-
fere with the moral imperative. Freedom tolerates no external intervention: it
creates its own values.
Nietzsche’s atheism originated in the conflict between God conceived as
the absolute source of value and freedom that must establish its own values.
At the same time he realized that without an absolute foundation freedom
becomes trammeled in an unlimited competition of possibilities. For that
reason he regarded the death of God the symbolic event of the age. ‘The
 ON THE INTELLECTUAL SOURCES OF MODERN ATHEISM 7

greatest recent event – that “God is dead”, that the belief in the Christian God
has ceased to be believable – is even now beginning to cast its first shadows
over Europe. For the few, at least, whose eyes, whose suspicion in their eyes is
strong and sensitive enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set just
now and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt. . . . ’9
The term ‘God’, as Heidegger has shown, refers not only to the Christian God
but to the entire suprasensory realm of ideals, including such secular ones as
Progress, Science, Reason which modern times have substituted to God. 10
That the entire realm of values is devalued, that according to Nietzsche is
the essence of nihilism. Therefore, Heidegger concludes, nihilism itself is the
fundamental event of Western history.11 It has inescapably led that history to
‘atheism’.
The problem the idea of a divine Creator conceived exclusively as an effi-
cient cause posed to human freedom extended to the entire domain of history.
If history was essentially a project of human freedom, as the great historians
of the eighteenth century, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Gibbon thought it was,
the idea of a divine Providence guiding humanity along a predetermined
course was hard to maintain. Such an idea, defended by the Church, could
only bar the road to progress. Hence the rabid hatred of the philosophes
and later of the rising masses against a religion that appeared to consecrate
the social status quo as having been divinely preordained. To the problems
of freedom the new concept of history added another objection. How could
values have been divinely established from all eternity when they varied so
much from one society to another? With regard to religion itself, how could
the eternal truth it claimed to possess be contained in one historical body or
in one historical person, as the historical revelations of Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam claimed? What would be the fate of humans living at other times
or in other places, not to mention other planets, if Fontenelle’s and Diderot’s
hypotheses on the plurality of worlds proved true? What used to be a strong
argument in support of Western monotheism, namely, its universal acceptance
by the most advanced civilization, turned out to be its Achilles heel once
the historical boundaries of the world came to be replaced. From a global
perspective, former absolutes turned out to be narrowly European assump-
tions. How could a divine source of values have tolerated such a confusing
variety of other contradictory values? Moreover, as Lessing was to point out,
no amount of historical evidence can ever establish a universal truth, yet all
Western religions are historical.12
If the modern concept of freedom has proven incompatible with creation
presented as an act of efficient causality we may yet wonder whether freedom
does not require some form of transcendence. Do the limiting conditions
within which freedom operates not force us to recognize its very existence as
8 LOUIS DUPRÉ

a given, natural fact, ‘opaque and gratuitous’?13 I possess neither knowledge

of, nor control over, my freedom. Indeed, I am not free to be free. Its norms
and ideals, even its actualization, cannot but be autonomous by nature – to
an even higher degree than Kant asserted. Yet the contingency of its exis-
tence (its being there) as well as the conditionedness of its operation are not
self-justifying. We resist admitting any relation of dependence only because
we have come to understand dependence exclusively as subject to efficient
causality. Yet the Platonic and Aristotelian concept of causality allows for a
more intrinsic mode of dependence. The kind of causality by participation
presented by Plato and the Neoplatonic tradition poses no obstacle to the
autonomous creativity of the free act. Within that kind of participatory depen-
dence freedom would be transcendently “informed” without being effectively
predetermined.
The irreducibility of the human subject, reflected in freedom’s resis-
tance to external causality, is also what has inspired modern atheism to
reduce all forms of transcendence to subjective projections. Anticipated to
Hume’s Natural History of Religion the projective theory was first fully
articulated by Ludwig Feuerbach. It subsequently diverged in two directions.
Marx interpreted religion as a utopian projection needed to compensate for
unsatisfactory social conditions. The question whether this function of ‘super-
structure’ of social relations exhausts the very nature of religion is never
posed. In Freud’s writings religion appears as a more complex phenomenon
rooted partly in an attempt to cope with the guilt incurred in the child’s
oedipal relation to the father and partly in a wishful desire to reconquer
the original wholeness. Projection unquestionably plays a role in building
up the phenomenal content of the religious act. But it does not answer
the metaphysical question: Does the apparent givenness of human existence
require a transcendent dimension, or is it the case that subjectivity by its
very nature excludes any such dimension? Instead of arguing that ques-
tion philosophically projectionist theories mostly dismiss it as being itself
projectionist.
All atheist theories assume that the real must be of a homogeneous nature.
Their rejection of any kind of absolute otherness reveals in fact the most
fundamental feature of modern atheism. That indeed is the common factor
that links all contemporary forms of atheism as well as all secular alternatives
of religion. Neither the existence nor the operation of the cosmos requires or
tolerates any reality beyond it. Freedom, viewed as source of value, tolerates
no authority beyond its own in the establishment of values. Nor does polit-
ical and social activity. In all these cases otherness has been reduced to an
aspect of the mind itself. Even the idea of God in those forms of deism that
 ON THE INTELLECTUAL SOURCES OF MODERN ATHEISM 9

exclude revelation serves no other than human or intra-cosmic purposes. It

lacks transcendent otherness.
This exclusion of absolute otherness is the crucial issue that separates
secular alternatives from religion itself, even though they share significant
features with it. A coherent world view requires, beyond an absence of contra-
dictions, a unifying factor to integrate the disparate experiences of reality
within a meaningful totality. Before the modern period, and in traditional
societies even today, the idea of God or of gods fulfilled that integrating
function. In recent thought, however, non-religious ideologies (I use the term
in the neutral sense of comprehensive views of the nature of the real) often
replace religious ones. One may doubt that atheism would ever have taken
hold of the Western mind if secular substitutes of a religious integration had
not been available.
Despite a clear opposition to religion, these secular alternatives display
nevertheless such a similarity with it that one cannot but suspect that a secret
dialectic links them together. The existence of such a dialectic was obvious
in the oldest forms of atheism that consisted in a mere negation of theism.
The secularist alternatives are not so much interested in fighting religion as
in filling the cultural vacuum left by the earlier atheism. Their protagonists
often claim to ignore religion altogether. But the dialectic of ideas occurs on
a deeper level than that of their proponents’ intentions. Spinoza attributed
to nature all the qualities theists attribute to God, though, for him, nature
itself has a transcendent as well as an immanent character. His Infinite Nature
both includes its finite modes and transcends them. But his system served
as a model for later, genuine atheists. They also attributed divine predicates
to nature in such a way that the whole surpasses the sum of the parts,
without, however, admitting any absolute transcendence. Ludwig Feuerbach
showed how atheist humanism continued to fulfill the functions of religion:
a universal love for humankind, an integration of all human values, an ideal
that surpassed individual aspirations. In our own century we have witnessed
the birth of secular ‘quasi-religions’. Not only do these atheist ideologies
function as religions, but according to Paul Tillich, they appear to play a
mediating role in the contemporary dialogue among the religions themselves.
‘Even the mutual relations of the religions proper are decisively influenced by
the encounter of each of them with secularism and one or more of the quasi-
religions which are based on secularism’. 14 This fascinating phenomenon
shows how even in our time a secret dialectic links comprehensive secularist
movements to religion.15 Atheist quasi-religions enable their followers to
dedicate themselves to a cause that surpasses individual interests and that
integrates their lives in a manner similar to religion.
10 LOUIS DUPRÉ

Among those secular quasi-religions scientific naturalism, with or without

ecological connotations, may be the most popular. But it is neither the only
one, nor perhaps the most effective substitute for the integrating function
of faith. Scientific humanism radically centers on humanity for achieving
this integration. Corliss Lamont, its articulate interpreter, describes it in the
following phrases. ‘Whatever it be called, Humanism is the viewpoint that
men have but one life to lead and should make the most of it in terms of
creative work and happiness; that human happiness is its own justification and
requires no sanction or support from supernatural sources; that in any case the
supernatural, usually conceived of in the form of heavenly gods or immortal
heavens, does not exist; and that human beings, using their own intelligence
and cooperating liberally with one another, can build an enduring citadel of
peace and beauty upon this earth’.16 The similarity of this humanist world
view with religion has struck some humanists sufficiently to call their own
movement ‘religious’. Lamont rightly rejects this as a misnomer because of
the absence of any ‘supernatural’ element in the humanist position. Recent
atheist ideologies that aim at transforming the social and cultural order have
offered powerful practical alternatives. Marxism and fascism presented their
followers with some of the synthesizing power of which religion used to have
a monopoly.
One secular alternative to religious transcendence that has attracted many
of our contemporaries is the aesthetic one. Apart from uniting the various
and often discrepant appearances of reality within a single, coherent field
of vision, the aesthetic experience conveys a glow of transcendence to the
ordinary that seems to make the acceptance of an ‘other’ dimension of the
real unnecessary. To be sure, aesthetic transcendence, contrary to the religious
one, emerges from an essentially transient experience. Nor do most people
make ontological claims for it. Still its intrinsically symbolic quality adds
a surplus of meaning that, without referring to an absolute transcendence,
nevertheless opens a different dimension in the real. Beauty, even as reli-
gion, albeit only for a moment, justifies the world.17 The language of the
poet rings as true in the atheist’s ear in the believer’s, though perhaps with a
different meaning. ‘After one has abandoned a belief in God, Wallace Stevens
claims, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption’.18 To
place this statement in proper perspective, however, we must realize that this
interpretation of the aesthetic phenomenon depends itself on a fundamental
change in our attitude toward the aesthetic experience. Whereas previously
beauty had been viewed as a reflection of religious transcendence or as an
artistic imitation of a sacred model in the modern age it came to assume
a self-expressive or formal character, and thereby lost both is transcendent
and its ontological significance. Without the transformation of beauty into
 ON THE INTELLECTUAL SOURCES OF MODERN ATHEISM 11

a subjective experience aesthetics could not have become an alternative to

theistic belief.

Notes
1. Etienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1941), p. 106.
2. Voltaire, Elémens de philosophie de Newton (1738) in Œuvres (Paris, 1785), Vol. 63, part
I, ch. 6.
3. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koeln and James
P. Pettegrove (Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 164.
4. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, ‘Discours préliminarie’, Encyclopédie (ed. Picaret), p. XV.
5. Voltaire, Elémens de philosophie de Newton.
6. Henry Duméry, Le problème de Dieu (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1975), p. 15.
7. René Descartes, Meditations, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John
Cottingham, a.o. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Vol. II, p. 33.
8. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, in Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Le Club Français du
Livre, 1969), Vol. II, pp. 198–99; trans. Derek Coltman in Diderot’s Selected Writings
(New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 198–99.
9. The Gay Science, Book V (1887) #343, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche
(New York: The Viking Press, 1954), p. 447.
10. ‘The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead’, in The Question Concerning Technology and
Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 64–66.
11. Ibid., p. 67.
12. ‘On the Proof of Spirit and Power’, in Lessing’s Theological Writings, selected and trans.
by Henry Chadwick (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), p. 53.
13. Henry Duméry, Foi et interrogation (Paris: Téqui, 1953), p. 100; trans. Stephen
McNierney and M. B. Murphy in Faith and Reflection, ed. by Louis Dupré (New York:
Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 17.
14. Paul Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religious (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1963), p. 5.
15. The problem has recently been taken up by Michael Buckley in At The Origins of Modern
Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), ch. 6; John E. Smith, Quasi-
Religions: Humanism, Marxism, and Nationalism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994);
Louis Dupré, ‘The Dialectic of Faith and Atheism in the Eighteeenth Century’, in Finding
God in All Things, Essays in Honor of Michael J. Buckley, S. J., ed. Michael J. Himes and
Stephen J. Pope (New York: The Crossroad Publ. Co., 1996), pp. 38–52.
16. Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (1949; New York: The Philosophical
Library, 1957), p. 11.
17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random
House, 1967), #5, p. 52.
18. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (New York: A. Knopf, 1977), p. 158.

Address for correspondence: Professor Louis Dupré, Department of Religious Studies, Yale
University, 320 Temple Street, New Haven, CT 06520, USA