Paul Henry Thiry D'Holbach

From Philosopedia

d’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry [Baron] (1723—1789)

“If we go back to the beginning of things,” said the 18th century encyclopedist, “we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture, and deception embellished or distorted them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men.”

The Vatican prohibited all of Baron d’Holbach’s works to be read, which is not surprising inasmuch as d’Holbach imitated the tactic of Voltaire and produced a small library of anti-Christian treatises under a variety of pseudonyms.

His principal work, System of Nature (1770), came out under the name of Mirabaud, an actual person who was then dead. Described as a “thundering engine of revolt and destruction,” it was the first published atheistic treatise of a systematic kind, according to J. M. Robertson, if Robinet is excepted. Berman quotes d’Holbach’s letter to Diderot in 1765 that, although “the Christian religion is nearly extinct in England [and] the deists are innumerable; there are almost no atheists; those who are conceal it. An atheist and a scoundrel are almost synonymous terms for them.”

He also wrote,

•The atheist is a man who destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.

•Ignorance of natural causes created the gods, and priestly impostures made them terrible.

•All religions are ancient monuments to superstitions, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies rejuvenated.

•If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the gods, knowledge of nature is destined to destroy them.

•The Christian burns the Jew at what is called an auto-da-fe because he clings to the faith of his fathers; the Roman Catholic condemns the Protestant to the flames, and makes a conscience of massacring him in cold blood.

•Sometimes the various sects of Christians league together against the incredulous Turk, and for a moment suspend their own bloody disputes that they may chastise the enemies of the True Faith.

Gordon Stein, in Freethought History (#3, 1992), points out that Anna Knoop’s translation, Superstition in all Ages by Jean Meslier . . . Translated from the French, actually is not by Meslier but by Baron d’Holbach.

The baron, publishing his highly anti-religious works in French, from Amsterdam, but with a false London imprint, published his books either anonymously or under the name of a recently-dead man. What Knoop mistook in an 1802 edition as a work by Meslier actually was Le Bon Sens (Good Sense) by d’Holbach.

{CE; CL; ER; EU, Jeroom Vercrysse, translated by Gordon Stein; FUK; HAB; ILP; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}