Meet the Atheist Priest
Jean Meslier’s story isn’t a story of a man and his beliefs. It’s a story of a man and the people who relied on him.
It’s winter in the Ardennes, and Jean Meslier is beginning his day.
Outside the small window above his writing desk, rain is falling on the French countryside. The January chill whispers its way into the one-room dwelling Meslier has called home for forty years. His hands shake as he pulls the chair from beneath the desk, searches for his goose-quill pen.
The year is 1729.
In a few months, Jean Meslier will be dead.
Maybe he knows it. At age 65, the walk from his bed to his writing desk takes longer than it used to. As he sits, he finds that his lungs don’t seem to fill with each breath. Every inhale brings the sensation of a ball rolled up a hill, always running out of momentum before it crests the top.
He knows he doesn’t have long. And so, he writes. He writes even though his manuscript already stretches across nearly 1,000 pages. He has more to say, and only a few minutes before he must begin working, a few weeks before he must lie down for the last time.
What’s Meslier writing?
A 1,000-page criticism of religion. A manifesto denouncing all forms of faith in the harshest possible terms. A text in which he denies the existence of the soul and calls Jesus “a madman.”
After a few minutes of furious scribbling, the writing somewhat messy as his hands become numb from the cold, Meslier sets down his quill. He has more yet to say, but there’s work to be done.
His parishioners need him.
Jean Meslier stands from his desk, exits his room, and emerges outside the church at the commune of Étrépigny, where he’s spent the last forty years as a Catholic priest.
In the centuries since Meslier’s death and the discovery of his book-length philosophical essay denouncing religion, he’s become something of an obscure hero in the world of atheism and rationalism. Some even argue that his text earns him the title of “the first atheist philosopher.”
But personally, I’m not all that interested in what Meslier wrote, the words discovered after his death. For one, I’m not an atheist. Meanwhile, historians note that none of the ideas in Meslier’s text are particularly original — as a work of philosophy, it’s derivative. Even Meslier seemed to acknowledge this in the text, calling on career intellectuals to take up the cause of reason after his death.
But I’m much more interested in Meslier’s life. Those forty years he spent serving his parishioners as their religious leader, all the while not believing any of it.
Even that life, it turns out, isn’t all that remarkable. By all accounts Meslier was a dependable and unexceptional priest. He lived in abject poverty, donating every last cent he had to the poor in his care. He once publicly called out a wealthy local lord for profiting off the subjugation of the poor, a sermon that resulted in his being disciplined by an archbishop.
And so the big question is:
Why?
Why live a life of poverty in service of a faith you don’t believe in? Why subject yourself to the will of a church you hate?
Of course, what Meslier wrote was the kind of thing that got you beheaded back then. But that only explains why Meslier kept his beliefs a secret. It doesn’t explain why he entered and remained in the church all those years. It certainly wasn’t for wealth, fame, or power — he lived and died a dirt-poor priest in an obscure town in rural France.
If Meslier discovered his unbelief in his lifetime, why stay where he was? Why not leave his post, make up a reason besides “I think this is all nonsense” and find a more comfortable life that was more true to his values?
Because, I think, Jean Meslier’s story isn’t a story of a man and his beliefs. It’s a story of a man and the people who relied on him.
To understand why Meslier lived the way he did, you have to read more into his famous essay than its denunciation of religion.
After all, Meslier didn’t address his text to the leaders of the Catholic Church. He addressed it to his parishioners. It was for them. His writing wasn’t a critique — it was a letter to the people he loved most.
Once you realize that, you begin to see that there was really no contradiction between what Meslier wrote and how he lived. There was no double life.
Meslier wrote what he wrote because, in death, he was trying to do for his parishioners what he had done for four decades — protect them.
He wanted to protect them from the Catholic Church of the time, yes, but he also wrote about the way that kings and the wealthy would poison their self-worth and keep them in misery. He wrote about his vision for a world in which people like his poor parishioners could rely on each other for safety and security, rather than on the whims of people in a higher social class. Hell, he even wrote about his love for animals and his belief that they should never be harmed.
In the end, it’s a shame that Meslier’s legacy is that of a philosopher. Because he was something so much greater, and so much more important: a kind person, one who devoted his life to protecting people who couldn’t protect themselves. In doing so, he forces us to consider something besides whether God is real or not.
Maybe service is the greatest philosophy. Maybe being kind is more important than being right. Maybe the noblest sacrifice is to sacrifice our ability to say exactly what we feel, whenever we want. After all, what we do will always matter more than what we know.
Jean Meslier remained for forty years in a faith he didn’t believe in for a reason: because people were counting on him. The poor in his parish needed him there.
Remember that sermon where Meslier called out a local lord for robbing the poor? Imagine Meslier every night, pacing his miserable little room, pained by the dissonance between his beliefs and his priesthood, thinking for the thousandth time, “This is it. Tomorrow I finally walk away.”
But then, in his agony, realizing that if he weren’t there, watching over those people, someone else would be. Someone who wouldn’t defend them against manipulation, against oppression. Someone that wouldn’t care for them and know them the way Meslier did. Someone who wouldn’t stand up to his archbishop the way Meslier did.
In death, Meslier shared what he felt to be true. But his life was not a sham. As much as he believed that his church was a lie, he believed that his work was true — the work of serving the poor, of looking out for the marginalized, of defending those who couldn’t defend themselves. In his continued role as priest, Meslier didn’t commit an act of self-preservation. He made a sacrifice — maybe one of the greatest sacrifices a person can make. He set aside who he was and what he believed in favor of what he could do. He helped the people who depended on him, even if it meant hiding who he was.
Today, historians and admirers of Meslier like to hone in on the harshest, most extreme aspects of his writing — his calls for the death of kings and the end of all priests, his violent criticism of the Holy Trinity.
But it’s the three words that begin Meslier’s essay that are the most striking to me, most representative of who he was and what we can learn from him.
Despite it all, Meslier opens his text with:
“My dear friends.”
Questions for the Comments
Who’s the most selfless person you’ve ever personally known? What do you think drove them?
What do you think about Meslier and the idea of someone living a “lie” to serve something other than themselves?
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