Peter Adamson
speaker
1,322 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard today
Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
in light of which, it's rather amazing that the text survives.
A few years after Messelier's death in seventeen twenty nine, copies of the work started to circulate clandestinely, and extracts were published by Voltaire in seventeen sixty one, albeit that these avoided the most incendiary parts of the Testament.
This cautious and incomplete reception meant that Meslier did not inspire the revolution of politics and conscience he hoped to provoke.
And I wonder whether the arguments he presents would merely have shocked his readership, rather than shaking their beliefs.
Most of his arguments would have seemed all too familiar to them, because such anti religious arguments had often been considered, but for the sake of refuting them.
The Testament is extraordinary for its intensity of feeling and for its political agenda, but when it comes to the arguments over religion and God, the work is a bit like a scholastic treatise that only keeps the hypothetical objections and omits the responses.
The theologians Meslier despised would thus have had little difficulty in meeting the challenge he laid down, at least in their own minds.
Yet they would surely have been appalled that someone had reached such conclusions, and even more so by the fact that he was not the only one.
Decades before Messier, in sixteen fifty nine, a work was written that likewise survives only in several manuscript copies.
It was not published until the early nineteen eighties.
So again, this is by no means a famous work, but if it had appeared at the time, it would surely have been infamous.
It is called Theophrastus Redivos, meaning Theophrastus revived.
The titular philosopher, who was a scientist and student of Aristotle, is named on the title page of the work, along with other ancient thinkers.
Alongside the predictable names of Diagorus, the Epicureans, and skeptics like Sexus Epiricus, we have Protagoras, who once said that he could not know whether the gods exist or not.
To be pedantic, that's really agnosticism rather than atheism, but close enough.
Weirdly, the very much theistic Plato and Aristotle are also named on the frontispiece.
This is explained within the work, they were atheists too, but concealed their true beliefs behind a dogmatic veil.
You might think someone who says that could believe anything, but this turns out not to be the case.
The anonymous author is, like Nestlé, evidently a convinced atheist.
He contrasts faith to natural reason and says that in a fair debate, Christian theologians should try to make their case to philosophers without any assumptions about revelation, using only purely rational premises that the philosophers would accept.
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