The Unbeliever

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. —Kant

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At the beginning of 1852, when I was living in Brussels, a young man unknown to me came in. The face of my visitor was pleasant, with a sincere smile and an equally sincere and lively gaze. He was dressed with a certain elegance: he wore a velvet vest with carved buttons, yellow gloves, a flower in his buttonhole, and a cane in his hand, and much very white linen was visible. To the question of who he was, he answered that he was a priest.

“Or rather, was one,” he said. “I have left the false for the true. Now I am the same as you: an exile.”

I asked the exile to sit down.

“My name is Anatole Leray,” he said.

We got into conversation. He told me the story of his life. It turned out that he had been so brought up that, without knowing how or why, at twenty-five he found himself a priest. This awakened him. The dream of his long mystical upbringing was dispelled for him on the day when he saw the impassable wall of darkness—that is, the priesthood—which had arisen between nature and himself. His first Mass was as hard for him as the last hour of life; leaving the altar, he seemed to himself a ghost.

He looked with horror at what awaited him. He was twenty-five. He felt the full force of life in his veins; all nature through him demanded satisfaction. Yet these demands of nature appeared to him only as the seething of sins.

In short, he had no calling and was horrified that he had realized this so late.

This struggle of the priest against what had been placed on him as an obligation, growing ever more intense, continued in him for several years. He was strict, faithful, and honest in the fulfillment of the obligations he had assumed.

But it all ended with his emerging from the struggle defeated after many sufferings—that is, victorious. The man triumphed over the priest.

Leray gave himself over to youth, life, and holy, irresistible nature. These are his own expressions when he explained this to me. He preferred to be an apostate before Rome than a hypocrite before his own conscience. He left the priesthood. For those who leave the church there is only one open door: democracy. All Leray’s inclinations drew him toward it. Before being a clergyman, he was a child of the people. He came from a poor Breton family; so he returned to the people as naturally as a drop of water returns to the ocean. And he felt well.

He told me all this simply, with a naive and strong eloquence. His return to the people had given him maturity. There was a political thinker in him; he wrote for several newspapers. He was a revolutionary, ardent and extreme in his convictions.

Having told the story of his life, he moved on to an exposition of his thoughts. I listened attentively.

In the middle of this exposition, he exploded.

“Yes, sir,” he exclaimed, “let this be a lesson to us. Democracy must take measures. We must remake man, renew the people in their children. Only in education will we show the logic of the revolution.”

“I think so too,” I said.

He became still more animated.

“For me,” he said, “all education is in one thing: to free the human mind from everything supernatural.”

“What do you mean by the supernatural?” I asked.

“I mean that man is perishing from these religious phantasmagories. Superstitions are strangling the future. As long as peoples inhale the ambient fanaticism, one cannot count on human reason. Yes! This old human reason is perishing under coverings and drowning in sacred chimeras. Its boat is leaking from all sides. Let us hold to one indubitable reality. Two times two is four: outside of this there is no salvation. Philosophy must be built only on facts, nothing must be admitted that cannot be verified by reason. Only the visible and the tangible are real. All beliefs must be in my ten fingers. Yes, war, war to the death with everything miraculous. The people must believe only in itself. It must understand that in the cradle there is nothing but what we see—nothing but a germ—and in the coffin nothing but annihilation. Away with all phantoms! There is nothing but the earth and life. There is no other heaven than the one in which we already live; our earth revolves in it. We must reason soberly and clearly, and away with all dreams! He who does not want the fruit prunes the tree: we must deprive religion of every pretext for its existence.”

“What is your religion?” I asked.

“I told you that I am a pupil of the seminary.”

“Well?”

“Therefore I am an atheist.”

“I cannot agree with such a conclusion,” I said. “Jesuit schools do not necessarily produce Voltaires. However, I am listening to you. Continue.”

“I think I have said everything,” he answered. “To get rid of hypotheses, to escape from the prison of chimeras, and to help the human race escape from them—that is what is needed.”

“I am no more fond than you of hypotheses that become superstitions and of those chimeras that stand in the way of human reason,” I said. “So it may seem that we think alike, yet it is unlikely that we agree. However, I would like you to express your opinion more precisely.”

“Very well,” he said. “Here it is: the complete abolition of what spiritualists call the ideal. The ideal is the supernatural, and the supernatural must be banished from the world, and therefore from man. The supernatural in the world is God—let us destroy God; the supernatural in man is the soul—therefore let us destroy the soul; nothing is eternal or immortal. And let these truths be placed at the foundation of education. I am finished.”

“No, you have only just begun,” I replied. “According to you, what is the world?”

“Only matter.”

“And man?”

“Only matter.”

“But do you make a distinction between one kind of matter and another?”

“I would be mad if I did. Matter is always equal to matter. This is the main foundation of equality.”

“Well, and organisms?” I said.

“Organisms are only species. And these species, inevitably appearing and blind in themselves, produce those mirages that constitute, as it were, a ladder, the first rung of which you call mind, the next conscience, the next soul, the next God. All religions set up this ladder. It must be destroyed. All its rungs must be broken: the rung God, the rung soul, the rung conscience, the rung mind, and even the rung organism. Down with the organism if it becomes miraculous, if from the differences of organisms one presumes to deduce the superiority of one form of matter over another! Down with the aristocracy of organisms: the species that vanish are nothing but images of nothing. Everything is done by the atom, the indivisible and unconscious atom. An atom that was higher than others would be God. He who says matter says equality. Matter is always equal to itself.”

I looked at him intently.

“So the mosquito that flies, the thistle that grows, and the stone that rolls are equal to man?”

He thought for a moment, but then with a complete honesty that seemed stronger than his will, he answered:

“Although your syllogism is harsh, it is true.”

“Consistent thinkers are rare,” I said. “You reason with complete consistency and unfailing conscientiousness. I do not wish to abuse it, and therefore I renounce this harshness of the extreme syllogism. Let us speak only of man, applying your axioms to him: there is no soul, there is no God, there is no supernatural, there is no ideal, matter is equal to itself. I will speak only of one of the innumerable aspects of the question.”

“I am listening,” he said.

“What, in your opinion,” I said, “is the purpose of man’s life on earth?”

“Happiness.”

“I think it is duty, obligation,” I said. “But it is not my thought that matters but yours. I set aside all sentimental arguments. On the scales of the equality of matter, by how much does the happiness of one man exceed in weight and value the happiness of another man?”

“By zero.”

“Before we go further, do you agree that by logic every action necessarily requires motives that determine it?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“I continue. So if a case arises where the happiness of one man must be sacrificed for the happiness of another—on the scales where these two happinesses are weighed, what amount of weight determines the necessity or the legitimacy of the sacrifice of one for the other?”

“Zero.”

“Consequently,” I said, “observing only the material fact, which in your view is the only wisdom, man has no reason to sacrifice himself, his well-being, for the well-being of another man?”

All hesitation seemed to have disappeared from his thought. He answered me calmly:

“None.”

“And consequently,” I objected, “no reason to sacrifice his happiness for the happiness of the human race?”

Here Leray started.

“If it concerns the human race, that is a different matter.”

“Why?” I said. “A sum of zeros is still always zero.”

He was silent for a moment, then with some effort agreed with me.

“Truth is always truth,” he said. “You are harsh, but your syllogism is true.”

I continued:

“I am not discussing your principles; I am only drawing what follows from them. And you yourself step by step are making this deduction. You think with logical correctness, and that is enough for me. So: man is matter; he comes from nothing and returns to nothing. He has only life; only this life belongs to him. His whole reason, his whole common sense, his whole philosophy consists in using this life and making it last as long as possible. The only morality is hygiene; the purpose of life is happiness. The purpose of life is to enjoy it; the purpose of life is to live. From this many conclusions could be drawn, but I do not want to draw them now; I will limit myself only to asking you: do you truly think so?”

“Yes, I truly think so.”

“So if a young man, healthy, gives his life for one or for many people equal to him, his neighbors, the same atoms and the same matter as himself—what would you call such a man?”

“A fool.”

We parted coldly.

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Anatole Leray, having left Brussels, traveled through England, then sailed to Australia. The voyage lasted five months.

On the day the steamer was approaching port, a storm arose. The ship was wrecked; the passengers and sailors were saved almost all, some in boats, some by swimming.

Anatole Leray was one of those who managed to save himself. But in that terrible confusion of the shipwreck, where the terror of the people answers to the chaos of the waves and where everyone thinks only of himself, he saw a broken boat that was tossing on the waves, now appearing, now disappearing. In the boat were three women. The sea was still terribly rough. Not one of the boldest sailors dared throw himself into the sea to help those who were perishing.

But Anatole Leray threw himself into the water, swam to the boat, and with the greatest efforts pulled out one of the women. But two still remained in the boat. He threw himself in a second time and pulled out another. They shouted to him: “Enough! Enough!” But, exhausted, torn, he threw himself in a third time—and did not reappear.

—Victor Hugo (translated by L.N. Tolstoy)

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Translator’s Notes:

• Victor Hugo (1802–1885), the great French novelist and poet, was also a political figure who spent nearly twenty years in exile (1851–1870) after opposing Napoleon III’s coup d’état. The encounter with Leray described here would have taken place during Hugo’s exile in Brussels and the Channel Islands.
• The Kant epigraph is from the conclusion of Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and is one of the most famous passages in all of philosophy.
• The story exemplifies a favorite theme of both Hugo and Tolstoy: the contradiction between intellectual belief and moral instinct. Leray’s logical materialism leads him to conclude that self-sacrifice is foolish, yet when faced with actual drowning women, he acts heroically without hesitation.
• “He who was a murderer from the beginning” in Part I refers to John 8:44, where Jesus calls the devil “a murderer from the beginning.”
• The “syllogism” that Hugo presses on Leray is an example of reductio ad absurdum: if matter equals matter, and happiness equals happiness, then logically there can be no reason to prefer one person’s happiness over another’s—and therefore no reason for self-sacrifice. But this logical conclusion contradicts the deepest moral intuitions.
• Brittany (Bretagne) in western France was traditionally one of the poorest and most devoutly Catholic regions of France, which adds poignancy to Leray’s departure from the priesthood.
• Tolstoy was deeply attracted to this theme throughout his life: the conflict between intellectual doubt and moral certainty, and his conviction that moral truths are known directly through conscience rather than through logical argument.