The Lecture
Delivered and published in 1881, “The Great Infidels” is one of Ingersoll’s most ambitious works — a sweeping tour through the history of freethought, arguing that the men and women condemned as infidels and heretics by their own ages are precisely those who advanced human knowledge and human liberty the most.
The Heretics of History
I want to tell you about some people who have been called infidels — men and women who were condemned, burned, imprisoned, excommunicated, and murdered for saying what they thought was true.
I want to tell you about these people because I believe that they were — many of them — the best human beings who ever lived.
The word “infidel” means simply “unfaithful” — unfaithful to the prevailing religion, unfaithful to the doctrine enforced by the authorities of the time. And I submit that faithfulness to truth is a higher virtue than faithfulness to doctrine.
Giordano Bruno (1548–1600)
Giordano Bruno was a Dominican friar who became convinced that the Church’s picture of the universe was wrong. He had read Copernicus, and he believed that the sun was a star among stars, that the universe was infinite, that there were perhaps other worlds with other beings on them.
For these beliefs — for daring to follow the evidence of his reason — he was imprisoned by the Inquisition for eight years, given every opportunity to recant, and finally burned alive in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome on February 17, 1600.
His last words, according to a witness, were: “Perhaps you who pass this sentence upon me are in greater terror than I who receive it.”
He was right.
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
Galileo pointed his telescope at the sky and saw things that the Church said could not exist: moons orbiting Jupiter, craters on the moon, spots on the sun. He confirmed by observation that the earth moved around the sun.
For saying so — for trusting his own eyes, his own instruments, his own mathematics — he was brought before the Inquisition, threatened with torture, and forced to recant.
He recanted. He was an old man, and he was frightened. History has not held this against him, because the facts recanted for cannot recant themselves.
Whether or not the legend is true — that after his forced recantation he muttered “e pur si muove,” “and yet it moves” — the sentiment is true. The earth moves. It moved before the Inquisition said it didn’t, and it moved after.
Voltaire (1694–1778)
Voltaire was the great wit of the French Enlightenment — a man who understood that laughter is a more effective weapon against falsehood than anger, and who used it with incomparable skill.
He spent his life attacking the Church — not Christianity as such, but the organized institution that used the name of Christ to justify censorship, torture, the burning of heretics, and the persecution of Protestants. His campaign against l’infâme — “the infamous thing,” as he called it — was one of the great intellectual campaigns of human history.
He paid for it with exile, imprisonment, and the destruction of his books. He did not pay with his life, because he was too famous and too well-connected. But he paid enough.
And he won. The France that emerged from the Enlightenment was permanently marked by Voltaire’s campaign. The spirit he cultivated — skeptical, irreverent, impatient with cruelty, committed to reason — became a permanent part of the French national character.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
This is the most important single observation about the relationship between religion and violence. Voltaire said it. He was right.
David Hume (1711–1776)
David Hume was perhaps the greatest philosopher who ever wrote in English. His Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding demolished the logical foundations of much natural theology. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion — published posthumously because he knew it was too dangerous to publish in his lifetime — remains the most searching examination of the arguments for God’s existence ever written.
He was not persecuted in the violent sense that Bruno was persecuted. He was merely denounced, kept out of university professorships, and published posthumously. A gentle martyrdom, by the standards of his predecessors.
But he was honest. He followed the argument wherever it led. And the argument, for him, led to skepticism — about miracles, about personal gods, about the reliability of religious testimony.
He died calmly, cheerfully, without repenting of a single thought. His friend Adam Smith recorded his last days with admiration. He faced death like a philosopher — with humor, with equanimity, and with the same intellectual honesty that had characterized his entire life.
Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
Thomas Paine wrote three of the most important books in the history of democracy: Common Sense, which fired the American Revolution; The Rights of Man, which fired the French Revolution; and The Age of Reason, which fired the imagination of freethinkers for generations.
The Age of Reason is a freethought classic — a careful, honest examination of the Bible’s claims from the perspective of reason and natural evidence. It made Paine a pariah. The man who had done more than any other private citizen to create the United States was condemned as an infidel, denied a Christian burial, and died in poverty and virtual isolation.
This was the reward of honesty.
“The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”
Paine wrote that. He lived by it. It is a better creed than any revealed religion has ever given us.
What They Have In Common
What do these people have in common? They were willing to think for themselves. They were willing to follow the evidence. They were willing to say what they believed, at considerable personal cost.
They were, in a word, honest.
I have been called an infidel. I accept the title. If these are the infidels — Bruno, Galileo, Voltaire, Hume, Paine — then I am honored to be counted among them.
“Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith.”
The True Benefactors
The progress of the human race has been achieved not by those who said “thus saith the Lord,” but by those who said “let us examine, let us inquire, let us test.”
The theologians built cathedrals. The scientists built laboratories. The cathedrals are beautiful. But the laboratories are useful.
The heretics were right. The orthodox were wrong. History, on this point, is perfectly clear.
The complete text of “The Great Infidels” is available at Project Gutenberg and the Secular Web.