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still able to influence the outcome of events. Christian denominations each staked out their
territory based on the extent to which God intervened in human affairs. Calvinists believed
that the entire history of the universe, including human history, was predetermined by God
from the outset. Deists made generous allowances for free will, with the occasional miracle
at critical junctures. Most Protestants and Catholics shared the view that God regularly
intervened in human affairs, differing mainly in the importance of the Church as divine
mediator. In the atheist version, God was dispensed with entirely and the universe func-
tioned on its own for all eternity according to natural laws. Just such an uncompromisingly
mechanistic vision of the universe was put forward by Baron d’Holbach, a French- German
philosopher and encyclopedist. To no one’s surprise, it was denounced by clergy of all
denominations, but especially by the Catholic clergy.
Holbach published his The System of Nature in 1770, under the name of one of his ene-
mies, Jean- Baptiste de Mirabaud, a pious religious philosopher and former Secretary of the
Académie Française. Mirabaud had died ten years earlier at the age of eight- five and was
thus unable to defend himself.^9 Sardonically written in the guise of Mirabaud’s deathbed
testimony, Holbach exhorted Parisians to cease their slavish dependence on a nonexistent
deity in the vain hope of procuring “a happiness nature refuses to grant.” Instead of embrac-
ing a life of willful ignorance and superstition, one should submit to one’s fate as Nature
unfolds and seek solace through an understanding of her laws:[L] et them study that nature, let them learn her laws, and contemplate the energy and
the unchanging fixity with which she acts; let them apply their discoveries to their
own felicity, and submit in silence to laws from which nothing can withdraw them;
let them consent to ignore the causes, surrounded as they are by an impenetrable veil;
let them undergo without a murmur the decrees of universal force.^10In a deterministic, mechanical universe, “free will” is a pernicious illusion invented to
justify human suffering by blaming the victim:The system of man’s liberty seems only to have been invented in order to put
him in a position to offend his God, and so to justify God in all the evil that he
inf licted on man, for having used the freedom which was so disastrously con-
ferred upon him.^11The impact of The System of Nature on the rigid theocratic society that was eighteenth-
century France was electrifying. The Catholic Church threatened to withhold its monetary
largesse from the crown unless the king immediately ordered all copies of Holbach’s book
confiscated and burned. Many celebrated intellectuals felt it prudent to dissociate them-
selves from the heretical tract by publishing high- minded refutations. According to Goethe,
however, the reaction among students in Germany was more muted, as he describes in his
autobiography:We had neither impulse nor tendency to be illumined and advanced in a philosophical
manner; on religious subjects we thought we had sufficiently enlightened ourselves,
and therefore the violent contest of the French philosophers with the priesthood was