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Epicureans and Atheists in France, 1650–1729

Atheism was the most foundational challenge to early-modern French

certainties. Theologians and philosophers labeled such atheism as
absurd, confident that neither the fact nor behavior of nature was
explicable without reference to God. The alternative was a categorical
naturalism, whose most extreme form was Epicureanism. The dynam-
ics of the Christian learned world, however, which this book explains,
allowed the wide dissemination of Epicurean argument.
By the end of the seventeenth century, atheism achieved real voice
and life. This book examines the Epicurean inheritance and explains
what constituted actual atheistic thinking in early-modern France, dis-
tinguishing such categorical unbelief from other challenges to orthodox
beliefs. Without understanding the actual context and convergence of
the inheritance, scholarship, protocols, and polemical modes of ortho-
dox culture, the early-modern generation and dissemination of atheism
are inexplicable. This book brings to life both early-modern French
Christian learned culture and the atheists who emerged from its intel-
lectual vitality.

Alan Charles Kors is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History,

University of Pennsylvania. He taught at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes
Etudes and the Folger Library. He is also co-founder of the Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education. He has published the Encyclopaedia
of the Enlightenment (2003), Atheism in France, 1650–1729 (1990),
and D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (1976).
Epicureans and Atheists in France,
1650–1729

ALAN CHARLES KORS

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107132641
© Alan Charles Kors 2016
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2016
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc.
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Names: Kors, Alan Charles, author.
Title: Epicureans and atheists in France, 1650–1729 / Alan Charles Kors.
Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008144 | isbn 9781107132641 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Epicurus. | Epicureans (Greek philosophy) |
Atheism–France–History–17th century. | Atheism–France–History–18th century. |
France–Intellectual life–17th century. | France–Intellectual life–18th century.
Classification: LCC b573.k67 2016 | DDC 194–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008144
isbn 978-1-107-13264-1 Hardback
Additional resources for this publication at www.cambridge.org/9781107132641
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To My Beloved Erika
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1
1 Reading Epicurus 5
2 The Epicureans 49
3 At the Boundaries of Unbelief 91
4 Historians’ Atheists and Historical Atheists 139
Conclusion 198

Bibliography 205
Index 239

vii
Acknowledgments

During the long period of this work’s germination and budding, I have been
encouraged and stimulated by my intellectual (and other human) interac-
tions with Lewis Bateman, Michael J. Buckley (S.J.), Sebastien Charles, Karel
D’huyvetters, Roger Emerson, Gary Hatfield, Jacques Le Brun, Anton Matytsin,
Martin Mulsow, Edward Peters, Dale Van Kley, Harvey Schoolman, and Ann
Thomson. Our mutual interest in Epicureanism (and my memory of her as an
extraordinary visiting student) brought me back in contact with Ada Palmer,
whom I admire greatly, and whose book on Lucretius in the Renaissance is
a truly exemplary work of scholarship. I had superb undergraduate research
assistants at the University of Pennsylvania, whose skills and minds made work-
ing with them a privilege: Victor Ngai, Rebecca Shifera, Andrew Van Duyn,
and Ivy Wang. I was fortunate to have found a wonderful copy-editor, Mary
Eagan, whose dedication and craft meant a very great deal to me. I am forever
in debt to my colleague Miguel Benítez, whose work, whose scholarly generos-
ity of spirit, and whose kindnesses toward me have touched me profoundly.
My beloved wife, Erika, herself a singular editor, has been at my side from the
idea to the words in print. She is my sustenance, and she is my ideal reader,
without whom all my writing would be both equivocal at critical junctures
and possessed of thousands of superfluous commas. To my children, Samantha
and Brian, to Mua and Michelle, and to my joyful grandchildren (I have fallen
in love all over again), I owe more than I dare try to express in public words.

ix
Introduction

The religious and theological debates that most sharply divided early-modern
French culture were not over ultimate issues of whether or not we inhabit a
nature created and governed by an omnipotent, omniscient, and transcend-
ent God. There were controversies that were far more contemporaneously fer-
vent and that drew in almost every Christian author in France: Catholicism or
Protestantism; views of sin, grace, and the role of sacrament; Jansenists and
their multitude of powerful critics. Nonetheless, the emergence of atheism was
qualitatively unlike any of these phenomena: It challenged the culture’s deepest
beliefs about the world and the place of human beings within it, and if it were
true, all of the other matters would be extraneous.
The atheist was always a presence in Christian theistic learning. To prove
God formally, one had to posit or create, and overcome, the objections of “the
atheist,” confront the dilemmas passed on by prior apologists, and defend one-
self against the contemporaneous critics of one’s demonstrations. In a prior
work, I looked at the culture’s claims that theoretical atheism was impossible
and unthinkable and that disbelief in God could only be an act of will, not
intellect. Beneath (and perhaps, in part, because of) the nominal self-confidence
of Christian theologians, philosophers, and savants, early-modern thinkers
articulated and analyzed the arguments that the atheist might pose. They did
this in their own texts, in accounts and analyses of the ancients, and in accounts
of the thinking of other minds encountered in other places. Further, each of
the main philosophical camps competing to be the (recognized and rewarded)
natural voice of Christian understanding theatrically sought to reduce each
other’s camps to impotence before the would-be atheist, rehearsing, if one adds
them together, how such an atheist would reply triumphantly to any and all
demonstrations of God’s existence. Atheism, even if they did not believe that
anyone could hold such a view sincerely, was wholly thinkable to them.1
1
Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

1
2 Epicureans and Atheists

The hypothetical atheist had a second burden, beyond rejecting demon-

strations of the existence of God. How could one account for the very fact,
the behavior, and the complexity of the natural (let alone the animate) world
without reference to God? Here, too, as I sought to show in a quite recent
work, the reiterated assurance of almost all of the theologians, philosophers,
and savants – that the existence, phenomena, and fitness of nature manifestly
depended upon God – was simultaneously almost universal and almost always
under threat. The bookshelves of the learned abounded in texts of the ancients
and of the Church Fathers (explicating and generally condemning the ancients)
that sought to portray pre-Christian thought as so benighted that it either
rejected the impossibility of nature without there having been an act of God’s
will or ignored the categorical distinction between nature and God. Further, as
they had done in dismissing each other’s demonstrations of God, each philo-
sophical school – Aristotelian, Cartesian, and Malebranchist – sought to reduce
the other to impotence against the categorical naturalist who believed in the
self-sufficiency of nature. Indeed, each camp sought to show how and why,
from the premises of the other’s metaphysics and physics, one ought to reach,
if logically consistent, atheistic conclusions. (Indeed, when they read Spinoza,
they read him through the prisms both of ancient philosophy and of their own
contemporaneous debates.) To argue that, given nature, only one’s own phi-
losophy entailed recognition of God was not to reassure those seeking natural
certainty. Early-modern French authors, editors, and translators offered copi-
ous lessons, with approbation and privilege, on how to think atheistically. The
learned journals gave these lessons great resonance.2
The most naturalistic philosophy of all among the ancients, Epicureanism,
had been a vivid part of the Christian inheritance. Epicurean thinking, in
works widely read in early-modern France, was explained in a wide variety
of still popular ancient texts and in the writings of the Church Fathers. It also
was the source of commonplace objections – easily overcome, almost everyone
believed – to proof of nature’s dependence upon God. It had its own major
voice, read in early-modern France with ever more frequency and now also in
the vernacular: Lucretius, whose De rerum natura was pored over from a great
variety of perspectives (some purely literary, some ethical, and some philosoph-
ical) and with a great diversity of agendas. The flourishing of early-modern
classical scholarship disseminated Epicurean views of nature and the gods yet
more widely.
Some philosophers, for diverse reasons, wished to embrace Epicurean atom-
istic physics without what they saw as Epicurean categorical naturalism and
denial of divine providence. Pierre Gassendi – priest, and canon then provost of
the Cathédrale Saint-Jérome de Digne – was deemed both pious and an advocate
of atomism, but his Christian Epicureanism came to pose a problematic set of

2
Alan Charles Kors, Naturalism and Unbelief in France, 1650–1729 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2016).
 Introduction 3

difficulties later in the seventeenth century. Among self-proclaimed Epicureans,

Guillaume Lamy, in particular, docteur-régent and professor of anatomy at the
Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris, offered an unabashed celebra-
tion of the superiority of Epicureanism over both Aristotelian and Cartesian
philosophies. He applied this categorical naturalism to the study of human
beings themselves, occasioning public debates and published exchanges in
which he defended himself with exceptional vigor and assertiveness. With a
few fideistic disclaimers, he published his work with the approval of his Faculty
and with the permission of royal censors. The central lesson of his work was
that, in terms of natural knowledge, we studied the world and found no evi-
dence of divine mind or natural dependence upon God.
Doubt about God’s goodness based on the sufferings and injustices of the
world – the stuff of faith put to the test throughout the whole of the Christian
era, then and now – was not a system of philosophy or a Weltanschauung.
For such doubt, or any doubt about the reality of God, to become more than
an ephemeral experience, it required a way of thinking about reality. Atheists
were few. “Chance” seemed an absurd explanation of the world to most minds,
and “chance,” Christian thinkers argued, was the alternative to God as the
cause of things. When those atheists emerged, however, they did so precisely
from within Christian intellectual life, framing questions as Christian thinkers
and scholars had framed them, and, unsurprisingly, speaking the conceptual
language that they inherited from their teachers and from the works pervasive
in their milieux. The atheist had been a constant virtual presence in Christian
thought. Now, the atheist, heir to the debates, philosophical fratricide, schol-
arship, and texts of a thoroughly theistic domain, was unmistakably real. This
work then, in addition to seeking to overdetermine the emergence of athe-
ism, is also, perhaps above all, a study of the learned world of early-modern
France.
The appearance of atheism in Christian France is so striking, seemingly
such a notable discontinuity, that it has attracted, we shall see, a copious and
(more than) talented group of contemporary students. These researchers and
specialists have been, on the whole, particularly drawn to what came to be
known as “the clandestine manuscripts,” hand-copied texts that circulated in
the early-modern world and found their way into private collections (most
now in public libraries). This work continues the argument that the content of
those “clandestins” was not original, but was primarily an embrace of themes
ubiquitous in the texts, debates, scholarship, and learned journals of the ortho-
dox world. Orthodoxy begat heterodoxy from its own substance, which is not,
to say the least, startling. Atheism was an eclectic synthesis, in positive form, of
ideas ubiquitous in the theistically orthodox world.
This work also, in its final chapter, will seek to exclude for demonstrable
cause some works that outstanding scholars have placed in the category of
evident atheism. Having done so, we shall explore the thought of explicit,
emphatic, positive atheists. If I have done my work well, one should see what
4 Epicureans and Atheists

is most often the case: In intellectual history, understanding intellectual context

and convergence is the heart of understanding how and why.
The dates of this work, 1650–1729, are not arbitrary. 1650 marks the death
of Descartes and the beginning of intense debate between Cartesians and their
critics, debates with consequences that participants could not have foreseen.
1729 marks the discovery of the “Testament” of the recently deceased Jean
Meslier, a Catholic priest, country curé, reader of orthodox works, and, to state
it in its mildest terms, committed and ardent atheist. The ultimate purpose of
my scholarly life’s work has been to make the fact of a Meslier historically
comprehensible.
The perspective of this work, thus, is purely historical as opposed to philo-
sophical or theological. In all of my academic undertakings, I have sought
to give honest voice to the widest array of thinkers. Tendentiousness is the
cardinal sin of an historian. My deepest wish is that the intellectual life of
early-modern France should become more understandable, in its patterns and
in its diverse specifics, to readers of all interests and persuasions.
1

Reading Epicurus

The Epicurean tradition had reached the learned world of seventeenth-century

France in a great diversity of forms and by a great diversity of means. It was
known by classical, Patristic, Scholastic, and contemporaneous citations, para-
phrases, commentaries, and explications; by commonplace caricature; by fre-
quent pedagogical reference to its significance as one of the major “schools”
of ancient thought, for purposes both of erudition and of refutation from
Christian perspectives; and by its own preserved texts – above all, Lucretius’s
De rerum natura.
Epicureanism was filtered through a variety of prisms. Those who viewed
it as irreligion and atheism often wrote of it as the ne plus ultra of pagan
disbelief, but it was not the case that everyone saw it in such a light. Some
early-modern orthodox minds found Epicurean atomism quite benign, judging
it to be above all a philosophy of physics or of ethics, or both, with an inciden-
tal and curious theology somehow appended to it. Tocsins and reassurances
about the Epicurean tradition, paradoxically, reinforced each other. The more
frequently certain thinkers presented the system as a kind of madness that no
reasonable mind could embrace, the more it seemed harmless and scholarly
to other savants to explicate Epicureanism calmly. The more frequently cer-
tain thinkers calmly explicated Epicureanism, the more alarmed other minds
became, and the more urgent it seemed to them to defend orthodox culture
against the Epicurean temptation.
On the whole, however, most seventeenth-century commentators claimed
to see the Epicurean doctrine as a patently absurd system, with its atoms, its
void, its plurality of worlds, its material soul, its indifferent gods, and either
its denial of order or its belief that what we termed “order” could be, in some
sense, the product of chance. For such commentators – and their numbers were
legion – Epicureanism was far more an example of the fanciful and benighted
thought of the pre-Christian past than a substantial menace to any orthodox

5
6 Epicureans and Atheists

certainties. A focus on the heterodox potential of Epicurus should not distort

the historical reality of his often quite prosaic role in Christian learning. For
every author who stood in horror or fascination before Epicurean thought,
there were many theologians and philosophers who treated it simply as a con-
venient locus classicus of objections that the human mind had framed against
providence.
In general, the learned Christian world was confident that it definitively had
overcome Epicurus countless times. From the time of its first dissemination
until the seventeenth century (and beyond), Epicurean philosophy derived no
small notoriety from what its critics described as the libertinism of its eudae-
monic ethics, its particular form of equating virtue and happiness. In brief,
Latin translators (following Lucretius himself) almost always had rendered the
pleasure that Epicurus advocated (Ἡδονή, that is, hēdonē, from which “hedon-
ism,” with much change of meaning) as “voluptas,” a sensual “voluptuousness”
quite distinct from the earthly satisfactions of “felicitas” and from the purpose-
ful delight of “delectatio,” let alone from the blessedness of that “beatitudo”
found in union with God. Since among the gods, Hēdonē was the daughter
of Eros, much as Voluptas, for the Romans, was the daughter of Cupid and
Psyche (“cupidity” faring little better than “hedonism” in some moral circles),
the translation made original sense, and, indeed, the critics of Epicurean phil-
osophy long had identified Epicurean “happiness” as debauchery.
Nonetheless, for many interpreters across the ages, the Epicurean notion
of voluptas should not be read as a celebration of sensual pleasure but rather
as a plea for the pleasures to be taken from calm of mind and the absence of
bodily pain. Such readers found the notoriety attached to Epicurus absurd, and
based, they believed, upon a fatal misreading of Epicurean moral teaching.1 To
others, however, the title “Epicurean” conjured every image of a self-indulgent
and bestial gluttony, lust, and sensuality; in short, of a boundless concupis-
cence. Most savants seemed to recognize that Epicurus’s goal of happiness in
fact entailed self-control and the abatement of the passions, but many a debate
about voluptas, felicitas, and beatitudo could be carried on with reference to
presumed Epicurean ethical doctrine.
For some readers, however, in numbers impossible to discern, the particu-
lar frisson of Epicurean philosophy – its thrill and its horror – arose from its
unabashed denial of providence. Scholars, disputants, and dialecticians might
well argue that objections to providence in general, entailing the attribution of
causal agency to chance, were logically absurd and dependent upon an inco-
herent hypothesis. Nonetheless, as noted, shepherds of human souls within
Christendom always had recognized that, in practice, doubts about providence
in the minds of a suffering humanity were the great occasions of doubts about

1
Even among the Church Fathers, there was a remarkable spectrum of opinion about Epicurus,
and he had admirers among the Patristics: See the deeply intriguing and well-documented article
by R.P. Jungkuntz, “Christian Approval of Epicureanism,” Church History 31, 1962, 279–93.
 Reading Epicurus 7

the existence of God.2 Lucien Febvre was correct to note that there is a vast dif-
ference, indeed, between, on the one hand, an ephemeral cry of despair about
the ways of the world, and, on the other, a substantive philosophical position.3
Nonetheless, for any Christian mind that could imagine (or experience) the
uniting of such a cry of despair to the weight of Epicurean objections to provi-
dence, the prospect was quite dreadful.
The Epicureans of tradition and text – preserved, studied, and widely com-
mented upon in the intellectual inheritance of the Christian West – had argued
against providence on the grounds that the gods were too blessed to be con-
cerned with the world. In one sense, that was a theological argument – about
the nature of divine being – that Christian theologians did not find particu-
larly difficult to resolve: Indifference, not the exercise of dominion, was the
contradiction of divine perfection. In another sense, it was a philosophical
argument that touched the heart of categorical naturalism: Did the phenom-
ena of the world truly testify to a perfect being’s providential governance?
Epicureanism, as a set of texts and commonplace positions, was an object
of study and commentary in the early-modern West, and, as such, it exposed
all serious students to a perspective from which a human being might gaze
upon the whole of the world and find no evidence of divine mind or wis-
dom in its being, arrangement, and operations. Learned orthodox culture
preserved and gave lessons on – however much it identified it as pagan folly
and error – the ultimate heterodoxy: The world did not have final purpose
or meaning because it was the product of unintelligent and uncaring chance.
When “ephemeral doubt” sought philosophical footing, and when proofs of
the existence of God no longer seemed universally compelling, there always
was available the Epicurean temptation: to see no divine order, to think of this
world as random and purposeless, and to seek to explain all of nature without
reference to God.

What was Epicurean thought doing in the midst of an orthodox French

Christian culture? Most simply put, Epicureanism was a part of its inheritance.
Whatever the weight that individual thinkers might or might not place on the
naturalist themes of Epicurean thought, the fact remains that Epicureanism
was a standard and widely explicated point of reference in early-modern
France. This was so both because the erudite knew it to have been an essential
school of ancient philosophy and because learned orthodoxy believed it to be
essentially noninfectious. Orthodox Christian culture could read and discuss
“the gods” of Greek and Roman “mythology” with a sense of polytheism as a
deformed theology that posed no real dangers to educated Christian readers.
Similarly, on the whole, it could contemplate and encounter Epicureanism with

2
See Kors, Disbelief, passim, and especially 52–53, 63–65, 193–94, 345–49.
3
Ibid., 8–9. For an extended discussion of the problem of evil, see Kors, Naturalism, Chapter 5.
8 Epicureans and Atheists

a sense of it as an odd and irreligious philosophy that posed few threats to the
educated Christian.
Further, of course, early-modern Christian savants, professors, and doctors felt
no need whatsoever to shrink from objection, analysis, and disputation. They
were thoroughly armed, they believed, against illogic and falsehood, possessing
a truth against which error could not prevail and in the presence of which the
weakness of error was manifest. Whatever protection by censorship and censure
they offered the ignorant and unlearned within their culture, they themselves rev-
eled in the scholarly and disputational role, and they refused to leave major sys-
tems of thought unexamined or, if deemed unorthodox, unrefuted. Epicureanism
was a heterodox presence in early-modern France, but that presence derived
above all else from the inheritance, curiosity, and self-confidence of the orthodox
community.

Any appreciation of the heterodox influence and role of the Epicurean trad-
ition, thus, or of an orthodox recoil from Epicurean themes, should be nuanced
by (if not grounded in) an awareness of the large extent to which Epicurean
thought was simply a common interlocutor in early-modern France and by
how innocuous learned considerations of it seemed to most orthodox minds.
Indeed, even for many thinkers fully sensitive to its irreligious content and
implications, Epicurean thought nonetheless had edifying possibilities, above
all in certain elements of its moral doctrines and of its natural explanations
of natural phenomena. For example, in a sixteenth century fully prepared to
repress heresy by all means necessary, the Jesuit Possevino had advised that the
Epicurean Lucretius might be taught safely if one understood the proper cau-
tions to employ and the proper uses to which he might be put:
Lucretius, among the poets who wrote on natural things, is the most subtle and the most
elegant, but he contains texts not to be exposed to adolescents, such as the invocation to
Venus, and the eulogy of Epicurus in which he [seeks to] destroy the immortality of the
soul, providence, and all religion, not to mention his absurd opinions on the attraction
of atoms by the play of chance alone or on the plurality of worlds. If one explicates him,
one must draw from the Greek poems of Gregory of Nazianzus or from the Latin poems
of Boethius the true manner of thinking on these doctrines. On the other hand, I would
not deny that one can explicate in Lucretius his disputations on contempt for death, the
loss of love, the repression of the passions, the calming of the movements of the mind,
the tranquility of the soul, [and on] sleep, the rising and setting of the stars, the eclipses
of the sun and moon, nature and lightning, rainbows, the causes of illness, etc.4

Likewise, in the sixteenth century, Juan Luis Vives had not objected to teach-
ing Epicurean thought, provided that it was not presented to “any boy inclined

4
Cited in François de Dainville, S.J., L’Education des Jésuites (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles), ed.
Marie-Madeleine Compère (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1978), 182–83. (A very welcome compi-
lation of Dainville’s scattered articles.)
 Reading Epicurus 9

to impiety.”5 Some eminently respectable authors found much to admire in

Epicurean ethical theory. In 1685, canon Cocquelin, “chancellor of the Church
and of the University of Paris, canon of the aforesaid Church, [and] doctor of the
Maison et Société du Sorbonne,” provided the approbation for the publication of
La morale d’Epicure, by the baron Des Coutures (who in the same year published
a French translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura). The honored ecclesiastic
and educator Cocquelin reminded readers that while only Christian grace could
save their souls, it was edifying and justly humbling for Christians to see how
far – and sometimes how much further than so many Christians – pagan philoso-
phers had advanced in the practice of virtue, “aided by the lights of nature alone,
and the force of reason alone.” If this were true when it came to pagan savants,
how much more “shame” should the Christian not feel when realizing that it was
equally true concerning Epicurus, “who among the common passes for being the
farthest removed from the true idea of virtue.” Cocquelin noted in his approba-
tion that his great predecessor Jean de Gerson, when chancellor of the University
of Paris, had explained that tradition offered two portraits of Epicurus: first, and
falsely, the infamous voluptuary; second, known to students of the ancients, the
sage pagan who lacked only knowledge of the fall and of grace through Christ to
complete his ethical virtues. Since the disciples of the great atomist also fell into
those same two camps, Cocquelin concluded, it was doubly useful to the public
to encounter Epicurus’s actual moral wisdom.6
In his preface to his presentation of Epicurus’s moral philosophy, Des
Coutures conceded that Epicurus had held a very imperfect understanding of
God, had believed the soul mortal, had limited all knowledge to that derived
from the senses, and had argued for the eternity of the world. Des Coutures
insisted, however, in mitigation of these errors, that the Christian knew divine
truth about God, soul, and creation by grace, faith, and revelation, not by nat-
ural philosophy. Epicurus’s arguments against providence indeed were palp-
ably false and irreligious, since the order of the world could not conceivably be
the product of chance, and his physical system was faulty, but independently
of these, his ethical theories were austere and wise, as great Christians such
as Saint Jerome, Gassendi, Gerson, and Cocquelin had noted.7 Des Coutures
embodied a broad current of seventeenth-century thinking about Epicurean
philosophy: It posed no dangers to anyone with real faith, and it was an edify-
ing encounter for anyone who wished to see how far both to and from truth
an excellent mind might travel “without lights [of faith] amid the shadows.”8

5
Juan Luis Vives, De tradendis disciplinis III.5. I have used the English translation of Vives, On
Education: A Translation of the De tradendis disciplinis, trans. Foster Watson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1913).
6
Nicholas Cocquelin, “Approbation,” in Jacques Parrain, baron Des Coutures, La morale
d’Epicure, avec des réflexions (Paris, 1685), [4 pp., unpaginated].
7
Des Coutures, La morale d’Epicure, “Préface” [i–xxix, unpaginated].
8
Ibid., [xi–xii].
10 Epicureans and Atheists

The Huguenot Jacques Du Rondel’s La vie d’Epicure (1679) had gone even
farther, presenting as its own Diogenes Laërtius’s view of Epicurus’s “ineffa-
ble piety … and … profound respect for the gods, which composed the most
considerable portion of his virtue.” For Du Rondel, Epicurus had added the
unpredictable “declension,” that is, swerve, of the atoms to Democritus’s physi-
cal theory in order to save free will. Epicurus’s great popularity had displeased
other ancient philosophers, above all the Stoics, Du Rondel explained, and they
jealously had slandered him, accusing this chaste and pious man of voluptu-
ous depravity and irreligion. While Epicurus was wrong to believe that divine
perfection was incompatible with governance in physics, he and Lucretius, Du
Rondel insisted, both believed in gods who “concerned themselves” with the
morality of the world, and there also had been sincere Christians who believed,
however erroneously, that God exercised His providence only in matters of
ethics and theology, not in physics.9
The poet Jean-François Sarasin, in a “Discours de morale” devoted to
Epicurus (published in his Nouvelles oeuvres of 1674), attributed the fact that
“Epicurus fell into public hatred” to the ignorance, prejudice, and hasty verdict
of his judges. Criticism of his moral theories, Sarasin insisted, was based on
appearances and the lives of his self-proclaimed followers, not on his actual
life and work. His doctrine of volupté did not entail what we might now mean
by a gross, sensual notion of volupté, but involved the search for inner calm
and avoidance of pain by means of wisdom. Epicurus’s moral doctrine entailed
a “holy and severe volupté.”10 Other respectable authors admired Epicurean
natural philosophy in general, whatever corrections were required of his theol-
ogy. These currents of praise, of course, had been evident in and given signifi-
cant impetus by Pierre Gassendi’s effort of reconciling Epicurean philosophy
and Christian theology.11
In short, if one eliminated the irreligious elements of Epicureanism, one
was perfectly free to find great merit in Epicurus’s philosophy per se. As the
Minim monk, theologian, and natural philosopher Marin Mersenne had writ-
ten to Rivetus in 1642 about Pierre Gassendi’s revival of Epicurean atomism,
“M. Gassendi powerfully refutes everything that is contrary to Christianity
in the Epicurean Philosophy, and … he takes precautions. I believe that it
will be one of the most accomplished works of the entire century.”12 By
the latter decades of the seventeenth century, admiration of Epicurus was
quite frequently and openly expressed. In 1694, Newton wrote that “The

9
Jacques Du Rondel, La vie d’Epicure (Paris, 1679), 2–81. Du Rondel’s status as a Huguenot
author did not prevent this work from being published “avec permission du roy.”
10
Jean-François Sarasin, Nouvelles oeuvres de Monsieur Sarazin, 2 vols. (Paris, 1674), I, 1–178.
11
Pierre Gassendi, De vita, moribus et doctrina Epicuri (Paris, 1647); Animadversiones in li-
bro X Diogenis Laertii (Lyon, 1649); Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri (The Hague, 1659). On
Gassendi, see below, Chapter 2.
12
Cited in Michael R.G. Spiller, “Concerning Natural Experimental Philosophie,” Meric Casaubon
and the Royal Society (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1980), 89.
 Reading Epicurus 11

philosophy of Epicurus and Lucretius is true and old, but was wrongly inter-
preted by the ancients as atheism.”13 In his Histoire de la médecine, Daniel
Le Clerc opined that “If Epicurus, while retaining atoms, had recognized the
Supreme Cause of their arrangement, he would have reasoned better than
Galen.”14
Simply put, it did not require any “underground” tradition to keep
Epicureanism before the reading public as a major school of classical philoso-
phy, nor, given the widespread discussions of non-Epicurean ancient natural-
isms, did Epicureanism necessarily occasion more outrage than other systems.
In 1670, the French editor of Abraham Roger’s La porte ouverte noted that,
concerning God’s direct governance of the world, “Most Pagans, even the most
significant, erred grievously in this for all time: the Peripatetics … the Stoics …
the Astrologers … the Platonists … Pliny … Ennius … Epicurus … There were
very few who judged of it as is necessary.”15 The theologian and later arch-
bishop Jacques-Nicolas Colbert, in his Philosophia vetus et nova (1678), cited
Epicurus’s use of the moral proof of God by universal consent.16 He offered
Epicurus as a rare dissenter from the proof of God from the useful disposition
of natural things, but noted that Descartes also had committed this error, and
that Epicurus had been “reprehended” by his defender Gassendi for this fault.17
In physics, Colbert, an Aristotelian, explicated Democritus’s and Epicurus’s
atomism fairly and not unkindly, although rejecting it, in the end, as (no small
criticism) too conjectural, logically flawed, and unable to account for laws of
nature.18
The theologian François Diroys noted in 1683 that both Stoics and
Epicureans believed in free will, but he thought that both contradicted their
belief in the materiality of the soul by such a doctrine.19 Diroys conceded that
Epicurus “recognizes a Divinity,” but deprived of the role of creation and
governance, the apologist asserted, such a God “no longer is what the world
means by the term Divinity.” Epicurus’s error was that “in order to render Him
blessed, he rendered Him ignorant, negligent, unomnipotent, or indifferent.”20
Nonetheless, in a review of the “errors” of most major schools of philosophy

13
Cited in ibid., 81 [see also The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H.W. Turnbull (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1961), 434].
14
Daniel Le Clerc, Histoire de la médecine, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1702), II, 159.
15
Abraham Roger, La porte ouverte pour parvenirà la connoissance du paganisme caché, ou la
vraye représentation de la vie … de la religion, et du service divin des Bramines qui demeurent
sur les costes du Chormandel … traduite en françois par le sieur Thomas La Grue (Amsterdam,
1670), editor’s note, 145. On Abraham Roger, see Kors, Disbelief, 217–18.
16
Jacques-Nicolas Colbert, Philosophia vetus et nova, ad usum scholae accommodata, in regia
Burgundia novissimo hoc biennio pertractata … 4 vols. (Paris, 1678), II, 466–72.
17
Ibid., 473–79.
18
Ibid., III, 92–102.
19
François Diroys, Preuves et préjugez pour la religion chrestienne et catholique, contre les fausses
religions et l’athéisme (Paris, 1683), 50–52.
20
Ibid., 59–60.
12 Epicureans and Atheists

(Epicurean, Stoic, Aristotelian, Pythagorean, Platonist, and Confucian), he

charged the Epicureans above all with errors of moral philosophy, warning
that the current “wave” of admiration for Epicurean moral theory threatened
to give legitimacy to his celebration of the “peaceful” rather than “obedient”
soul. For Diroys, the source of Epicurus’s error here was “the idea that the
Epicureans have of God and of the reasonable soul,” one that stressed the
virtues of indifference and moderation rather than the linkage between God’s
command and mankind’s duty.21
In 1684, Jacques Abbadie, admired as Christian apologist among both
Protestants (which he was) and Catholics, argued that if only Epicurus had
drawn the correct logical conclusion from his own system, namely, that “the
parts of the atom” must be at “rest” for atoms to exist incorruptibly, he would
have recognized God as the ultimate source of activity. Properly understood,
Abbadie insisted, atomism would destroy, not lead to, atheism.22 These were
scarcely demonizations of Epicurus or expressions of great fear over contact
with his system.
The Oratorian Thomassin’s influential Méthode d’étudier la philosophie
chrétiennement (1685) also discussed Epicurus in the context of the strengths
and errors to be found in a wide array of ancient philosophies. In Thomassin’s
analysis, Epicurus correctly had seen that the volupté that led to happiness
could be found only in virtue, and his system of physics was not without its
serious admirers. Nonetheless, his most “detestable” errors – his opposition to
the immortality of the soul and to providence – were categorically irreligious.
Whatever Epicurus’s intention, denial of providence, as Cicero had argued
against him, was denial of Divinity. Further, though there was much merit in
Epicurus’s specific moral teachings, his linkage of ethics and volupté, at least in
our fallen state, was dangerous, since it inadvertently could serve as a “pretext”
for vice. In this, however, Epicurus was merely reflecting pagan philosophy in
general, which could not understand, absent revelation, “the disaster of our
common sin and of our fall.”23
At the Sorbonne, the theologian François Feu introduced his Theologici
tractatus (1692–1695) by arguing to “candidates in theology” that one of their
missions was to correct by theology the human error of “celebrated philoso-
phers.” In his list of such errors, Epicurus was merely one of the latter, and
not singled out in any way for particular notoriety. There was Pythagoras on
the transmigration of souls; Lucretius on the mortality of the soul; Leucippus,
Democritus, and Epicurus on the world arising “from the fortuitous concourse
of atoms”; Plato on self-subsistent Ideas; Heraclitus on the self-motion of all

21
Ibid., 61–75.
22
Jacques Abbadie, Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne, 2 vols. (Rotterdam, 1684), I, 51–55.
On Abbadie’s high stature among both Protestants and Catholics, see Kors, Disbelief, 91–93.
23
Louis Thomassin, Oratory, La méthode d’étudier et d’enseigner chrétiennement et solidement
la philosophie… (Paris, 1685), 227–38.
 Reading Epicurus 13

things; Aristotle on the eternity of the world.24 Bordelon’s Théâtre philos-

ophique (1692) emphasized the interest of Epicurus’s physical theories in its
explication of his views, and noted reassuringly that Gassendi had corrected
him on the issues of creation and providence.25 He presented the views of
Empedocles, Diagoras, Bion, and Democritus as being far more dangerous to
religion.26
Pierre Bayle, in his article on Lucretius, explained that no one had denied
providence more boldly, but he insisted that “nothing prevents the sectar-
ies of Epicurus from actually having venerated the gods.”27 In his article on
Leucippus, Bayle noted that atomism and theism were compatible, advising
his readers “that there was a sect of oriental philosophers who granted the
hypothesis of atoms and void; but they rectified it, for they attributed to God
the creation of the atoms.”28 Stanley’s history of philosophy offered a serious
and not unsympathetic portrait of the Epicurean “sect,” insisting that there was
no question whatsoever but that Epicurus believed in the existence of the gods.
For Epicurus, according to Stanley, “Nature herself hath imprinted a notion
of the Gods in our minds.” He explained Epicurus’s views on providence as
arising from the latter’s belief that the gods would have attained felicity, being
divine, and thus would be untroubled by the events of the world; he noted
that this untroubled state was also the very goal of human ethics in Epicurus’s
system.29
The Carthusian monk and savant Alexis Gaudin, in his Abrégé de l’histoire
des sçavans, commenting in 1708 on the atomistic philosophy that had issued
from the fusion of Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, noted that “Gassendi
adopted it, and gave it the best form that he could.” Although Descartes raised
“a thousand crushing difficulties” against atomism, atomists showed that
Descartes’s and Aristotle’s followers both suffered from at least as many dif-
ficulties, equally irresolvable, concerning the infinite divisibility of matter. The
atomist–Cartesian–Aristotelian debate in physics was “a philosophical abyss.”
As for Epicureanism and irreligion, Gaudin assured his readers that Gassendi,
like Cicero, had demonstrated that objections to Epicureanism, including those

24
François Feu, Theologici tractatus …, 2 vols. (Paris, 1692–1695), I, “Praefatio … ad theologiae
candidatos.”
25
Laurent Bordelon, Théâtre philosophique sur lequel on représente par des dialogues dans les
Champs Élisées les philosophes anciens & modernes, et où l’on rapporte ensuite leurs opin-
ions, leurs reparties, leurs sentences, & les plus remarquables actions de leur vie (Paris, 1692),
36, 51–56.
26
Ibid., 142–245.
27
Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 4 vols. (Rotterdam, 1697), art. “Lucrèce,”
rem. K.
28
Ibid., art. “Leucippe” [main text].
29
Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy: Containing the Lives, Opinions, Actions &
Discourses of the Philosophers of Every Sect, 3rd edn. (London, 1701), 533–63. Stanley’s
History was first published in three volumes, London, 1665–1662; Stanley was more generally
read in France in the Latin translation of Leipzig, 1711.
14 Epicureans and Atheists

made by Patristic literature, were based on an inadequate analysis of what

Epicurus actually had taught. Thus, Epicureanism did not logically entail either
the “eternity” or “the fortuitous movement” of the atoms, and once it was thus
understood, it was an “excellent” system for a mechanics of the world.30
For the learned German theologian, philosopher, and savant Johan Franz
Buddeus, in De atheismo (1716) – (this work by the widely admired Buddeus
was translated into French in 1740) – atomism was dangerous, but it was in no
way theoretically incompatible with theism. He judged that Leucippus should
not be excused for having attributed eternity to the atoms, for having made
chance the cause of natural production, and for having “banished the Divinity
from the governance of the world.” Nonetheless, he insisted, the Greek phil-
osopher deserved praise, not shame, for inventing the atomistic system, “since
the hypothesis of atoms, understood in a good sense, contributes strongly to
the explanation of natural causes.”31 As for Epicurus, Buddeus condemned his
view that the notion of divine providence entailed qualities – concern, anger,
and the bestowal of grace – inconsistent with beatitude. He further condemned
Epicurus’s identification of the sovereign good and tranquility of the soul,
arguing that this denied the essential virtue of the fear of God.32 Nonetheless,
these were very far from the strongest charges of irreligion made in Buddeus’s
treatise against other ancient philosophers.33
In short, if appropriately armed with Christian correction of obvious errors
against the faith, one could read Epicurus and Lucretius without excessive con-
cern. In 1717, La Roche noted in the Bibliothèque Anglaise that an excellent
Italian translation of Lucretius, published in London, had been denied permis-
sion to appear in Italy. The reason, La Roche explained, was not “that there was
more piety in countries where the printing of such works is not allowed,” but,
rather, that there was less firmness of faith and of reason. “Since one falls into
Atheism only by corruption of morals or by supremely bad reasoning,” he reas-
sured the French, “the reading of Lucretius could be harmful only to several lib-
ertines, or to certain weak minds who let themselves be easily seduced by a false
philosophy.”34 To the extent that La Roche was arguing that orthodox religious
and intellectual self-confidence was a sine qua non of the open, licit, and wide
circulation of Epicurean themes in early-modern Europe, he was wholly correct.
Thus, in 1724, the Malebranchist Henri de Lelevel, serving as a royal censor,
gave his approbation to Colonne’s Principes de la nature … des anciens, which
then received official permission for licit publication. Colonne’s Principes expli-
cated Epicurean and other ancient naturalisms quite frankly and without any

30
Alexis Gaudin, Carthusian, Abrégé de l’histoire des sçavans, anciens et modernes (Paris, 1708),
133–37.
31
Johann Franz Buddeus, Traité de l’athéisme et de la superstition, par feu Mr. Jean-François
Buddeus … Avec des remarques historiques et philosophiques. Louis Philon, trans. Jean-Chrétien
Fischer, ed. (Amsterdam, 1740), 32–33.
32
Ibid., 34n.–37n.
33
See Kors, Disbelief, 239–44.
34
Bibliothèque Anglaise, 1717, I, 333.
 Reading Epicurus 15

counterbalancing Christian apologetic. Lelevel’s approbation simply employed

the overt commitment of the learned world both to know classical theories and to
know them as correctly as possible. It relied on that world’s confidence that such
knowledge was religiously edifying for the Christian intellect:
The author has so clearly exposed and so learnedly interpreted all these diverse opinions,
that it is evident from the confusions and absurdities with which it [ancient thought] is
filled, how much we are obligated to the great men who, sustained by Faith, have retraced
for us in our days the ways of pure intelligence … and [given us] the natural truths that the
profane always have ignored and confused. It is advantageous to have a reasoned summary
of everything that the ancients thought about nature, not in order to remain adrift among
their diverse doctrines, which manifestly are all false and absurd in their principles, but in
order to be incited by their aberrations.35

From such perspectives, thus, orthodox culture permitted and indeed was
the primary agency of the dissemination of Epicurean thought. At a time of its
own great divisions and debates, where did it discover Epicurus, and what did it
encounter when it discovered him?

The Epicurean fragments, as was the case with those of most of the pre-Socratics,
were scattered throughout a great variety of ancient texts, compilations, and
commentaries, including the works of Aristotle himself, and, a most orthodox
source, throughout Patristic works.36 The Carthusian Gaudin had been correct
to observe that Epicurus indeed had received extensive explication and criti-
cal commentary from the Church Fathers (who, we always should recall, had
far more seventeenth-century than third- to fifth-century readers). The seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries had these portraits in an abundance of
sources. Tertullian, for example, had presented the Epicureans as being among
those pagan thinkers who had found God by reading the Jewish Scriptures,
but who distorted both His nature and His relationship to the world. Thus,
in the Apologeticus, Tertullian portrayed the Epicureans as teaching that God
had a body composed of atoms and did not govern the world: “Others say
He consists of atoms, others of numbers, as do Epicurus and Pythagoras …
The Epicureans picture Him as idle and unemployed, a nobody (so to say) as
regards human affairs.”37 Lactantius was a major Patristic source of information

35
Henri de Lelevel, “Approbation,” in François-Marie-Pompée Colonne, Les principes de la na-
ture, suivant les opinions des anciens philosophes, avec un abrégé de leurs sentimens sur la com-
position des corps: où l’on fait voir que toutes leurs opinions sur ces principes, peuvent se réduire
aux deux sectes, des atomistes et des académiciens, 2 vols. (Paris, 1725) [the “Approbation” is
found at I, 278–79]. For (much) more on Colonne and on Lelevel’s approbation, see below,
Chapter 3.
36
On such sources, see Kors, Disbelief, 178–218, and, in particular, 188, n.34.
37
Tertullian, Apologeticus XLVII.59. It is again important to understand that Patristic works were
not esoteric texts of the early-modern French learned world. In addition to being available in
Latin editions, the Apologeticus was translated into French in editions of Paris, 1636, 1637,
1641, 1646, 1678, and 1684. The French edition of 1684 was reprinted in Amsterdam in 1701
16 Epicureans and Atheists

(and judgment) about the doctrines of Epicurus. In the Divinae institutiones,

Lactantius explained that it was from Epicurus that “the irreligious man hears
that the gods care for nothing.” Citing explicit passages against belief in provi-
dence from book V of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Lactantius shared the views
against which he argued and which he believed were an excuse for vices and
crimes. Epicurus saw that adversities were always befalling the good:
poverty, labors, exiles, loss of dear ones; that the evil, on the contrary, were happy, were
gaining in wealth, were given honors. He saw that innocence was not safe, that crimes
were committed with impunity; he saw that death raged without concern for morals,
without any order or regard for years … and in wars [that] the better ones are con-
quered and die … When, therefore, Epicurus thought on these matters … he believed
that there was no providence.38

In Lactantius’s portrait, widely available to early-modern religiously edu-

cated readers, Epicurus, having decided against providence because of the
course of human affairs, “even undertook that [his rejection of providence] be
defended” with regard to the broader issue of governance of all of nature. This,
in Lactantius’s view, led him “into inextricable errors.” Again citing Lucretius
for his primary view of Epicurus, Lactantius shared the Epicurean conception
of a nature that did not announce divine governance:
For if there is no providence, how was the world effected so orderly, in such arrange-
ment? “There is no arrangement,” he says, “for many things have been done differently
from the way they should have been.” Likewise, if there is no providence, how are
the bodies of animals so ordered that each of the members disposed in a marvelous
arrangement preserves its own functions? He says: “The plan of providence has done
nothing in the procreating of animals. Neither were the eyes made for seeing, nor the
ears for hearing, nor the tongue for speaking, nor the feet for walking, since these were
in existence before there was seeing, hearing, speaking, walking. So these things were
not produced for use, but the use came from them.” If there is no providence, why do
the rains fall, grains rise, trees flower? He says that these are not for the sake of living
things, since they are of no profit to providence, but all things must happen of their own
accord. Whence, therefore, are they born, or how do all things which happen come to
be? He says that it is not the work of providence. There are seeds flying about through
the void, and when these have massed together at random among themselves, all things
are born and grow.39

Being widely discussed in such primary sources, the Epicurean tradition

always had been a part of the European heritage. Early-modern readers of

and 1712. I have used the Loeb edition translation of T.R. Glover: Tertullian, Apology; De spec-
taculis … (New York: Putnam; London: Heinemann, 1931).
38
Lactantius, Divinae institutiones III.17. [On early-modern Latin and French editions of
Lactantius, and on the translation used here, see Kors, Disbelief, 191, n.43. There was a care-
ful Latin edition of the Divinae institutiones prepared by Nicholas Le Nourry in Paris, 1712; it
was translated into French as Les institutions divines …, trans. Drouet de Maupertuy (Avignon,
1710).]
39
Ibid.
 Reading Epicurus 17

Plutarch, for example, could encounter the irreligious implications of Epicurus’s

views in the Greek, the Latin, or in Amyot’s French translation of the “Non posse
suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum.” As Plutarch explained, “the Epicureans …
look to nothing evil or good from the gods.” In terms of public morals, “for
Epicurus the fear of punishment is the only deterrent of vice.” Plutarch quoted
from Epicurean doctrine and, within that, from Epicurus’s cardinal tenets:
You hope for some kind of treatment from the gods for all your piety? You are
deluded: “What is imperishable is prey neither to feelings of wrath nor of favor.” You
conceive of something after this life better than what you found in it? You are deceived,
“for what is dissipated has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.”40

In Cicero’s De natura deorum, of course, Velleius maintained both the posi-

tive and critical doctrines of Epicurean theology, defending the argument on
behalf of divinity from universal consent but denying the providence of the
gods. We knew of the gods by some “preconception” imprinted upon us, our
assurance of their existence resting upon “the unanimous and abiding con-
sensus of mankind.” Part of this innate, universal awareness of the gods was
an awareness that they were “supremely happy” [d’Olivet: souverainement
heureux], from which it followed that “what is blessed and eternal can neither
know trouble itself nor cause trouble to another.” Since governance of the
world would be “a bondage,” the Supreme Being must be absolutely inactive,
delighting only in its own nature. Thus, Velleius explained, there was no crea-
tion and there is no providence: “The world was made by nature [natura effec-
tum esse mundum], without needing an artificer to construct it.” Indeed, given
the fecundity of nature, creation is “so easy that nature will create, is creating,
and has created worlds without number.” Given the immensity and space and
the infinite number of atoms, all things would occur without “recourse to a
god.”41 D’Olivet’s footnotes of 1721 supported the skeptic Cotta’s view that
Epicurus did not really believe in God. He referred the reader to Epicurus’s
fuller argument against providence, including the celebrated conundrum that
if God could prevent evil but chose not to do so He would not be supremely
good, and if He wished to prevent evil but could not do so, He would not
be omnipotent. This, of course, was an Epicurean argument that Bayle had
popularized in the article “Paulicians.” Discussing Lactantius’s criticism of
Epicurus in De ira Dei, d’Olivet described the argument against providence as
“the argument of Epicurus that Lactantius … perhaps better explicated than
refuted [l’argument d’Epicure que Lactance … a peut-être mieux exposé que
réfuté].”42 Again, these were works published with the full approbation of the

40
Plutarch, Moralia, 1100D–1104B, in Les oeuvres morales et philosophiques de Plutarque, trans.
and ed. Jacques Amyot (bishop of Auxerre), 2 vols. (Paris, 1618), I, 277G–291A.
41
Cicero, De natura deorum I.18–56 in Entretiens de Cicéron sur la nature des dieux, abbé
d’Olivet, trans. 3 vols. (Paris, 1721), I, 60–75.
42
Ibid., d’Olivet ed., I, 113, n.2; III, 139, n.9.
18 Epicureans and Atheists

orthodox learned world, and, indeed, frequently encountered in the course of

an orthodox education.43

By far the most influential sources of the Epicurean tradition, however, were
Book X of Diogenes Laërtius’s Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers,
which had served Gassendi as the basis of his own reconstruction of Epicurus’s
life and views, and Lucretius’s De rerum natura. In these, the learned world
could encounter Epicurus as a major force in ancient philosophy. Book X of De
vita was a lengthy summary, explication, and citation of supposedly original
texts from the three divisions of philosophy proposed by Epicurus: canonic,
physics, and ethics. In addition, it presented Epicurus as a man of exceptional
virtue. Indeed, in Diogenes Laërtius’s portrait, “His piety towards the gods
and his affection for his country no words can describe.”44 This widely read
account of Epicurean philosophy was a dramatic lesson in heterodox philoso-
phy, asserting and explaining major components of a categorical naturalism.
Since “nothing comes into being out of what is non-existent,” the world was
both uncreated and imperishable:
Moreover, the sum total of things was always such as it is now, and such it will ever
remain. For there is nothing into which it can change. For outside the sum of things
there is nothing which could enter into it and bring about the change.45

That “sum total,” “the whole of being,” consisted of “bodies and space.”
Our only criterion of truth could be “founded on the clear evidence of sense,”
and the world disclosed by sense was one of bodies and space alone. Since
the world was composed of composite bodies that changed while the world
remained in sum what it was, we knew that bodies were composed of “indi-
visible and unchangeable … corporeal entities.” Because there could be no
something else beyond matter and space, we knew that the sum of things
must be infinite, that both the extent of the void and the multitude of atoms
were unlimited. Since beings were diverse, we knew that the atoms varied
indefinitely in their shapes, and that the phenomena of the world arose from
their continued motion and encounters throughout all eternity. Given such
motion and encounters across a limitless void and during a limitless time,
there were an infinite number of worlds. The beings of the world were the
diverse atoms, “diversely arranged.” The only “self-existent … incorporeal”
could be passive, empty space. If the soul, as some wished, were incorporeal,
“it could neither act nor be acted upon.” “The soul,” thus, “is a corporeal
thing.”46

43
On the place of De natura deorum in the curriculum, see Kors, Disbelief, 51.
44
Diogenes Laërtius, De vita X.9–11. On the early-modern French edition and on the English
translation used here, see Kors, Disbelief, 198, n.65 and n.67.
45
Ibid., X.38–39.
46
Ibid., X.39–73.
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Title: Kotivarkaus
Kuvaus Itä-Suomesta

Author: Aatto Suppanen

Release date: December 12, 2023 [eBook #72383]

Language: Finnish

Original publication: Porvoo: Werner Söderström, 1888

Credits: Juhani Kärkkäinen and Tapio Riikonen

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK

KOTIVARKAUS ***
KOTIVARKAUS

Kuvaus Itä-Suomesta

Kirj.

AATTO S. [Aatto Suppanen]

Porvoossa, Werner Söderström, 1888.

Minä tahdon, että teidän pitää hyvässä viisaat oleman

ja pahuudessa yksinkertaiset (Room. 16:19); ett'ei
yksikään pettäisi veljeänsä missään asiassa; sillä Herra
on kaikkein näiden kostaja (1 Tess. 4:6).
I.

Oli kohtalaisen kylmä, kirkas aamupuoli päivästä kevättalvella.

Suuressa Vaaran tuvassa varustelihe emäntä leivän leivontaan,

nosti piika-Tiinan kanssa taikinan rahineen keskemmälle lattiaa ja
siirsi pöydän jalkoinensa sen viereen, käänsi pöydästä sen puolen
ylös päin, joka jo entisistä leivonnoista oli paksuhkoksi takertunut, ja
kylvi siihen seulekannesta runsaanlaisesti jauhoja.

Samassa pistihe ovesta sisään sisar Mari, sankavasu toisessa,

hinkki toisessa kädessä.

"Terve taloon!" lausui hän.

"Tule tervennä!" vastasi emäntä, keskeytti puuhansa ja kätteli

tulijaa.

"Mitäs sieltä teiltä päin kuuluu?"

"Eipä tuota erikoista. Se ukko pahanen se vain on niin huonona,

että siitä ei ole minkään saajaa. Etkö sinä voisi antaa vähän ruoan
apua?"
 "Kielteleehän se isäntä antamasta, mutta eläähän sitä teidänkin
pitänee. Miten ne lapsesi jaksavat? Joko se tyttösi kykenee yksin
pienempiä hoitamaan?"

"On siitä, jo hyvä apu, vaikka eihän se taitaisi yksin tulla toimeen;
meidän talon emäntä lupasi autella. Terveet ne muuten ovat."

Emäntä nostalsi kolpitsan kantta, otti sieltä jotakin esiliinansa alle

ja läksi sisarensa kanssa ulos.

Poika, noin kahdentoista vuoden ikäinen Mikko, juoksi paljain

jaloin jäljestä, yllä nelivartinen paita, joka ei ollut muutamaan
kuukauteen vettä nähnyt, ja jalassa aikoinaan tummansiniseksi
painetut "kosto"-housut, jotka tuon värinsä tähden muka eivät
tarvinneetkaan nähdä vettä. Oli hän muuten tavallisesti näin
päiväsaikaan vankkana hevosmiehenä mukana metsässä ja silloin
tietysti vahvemmin vaatetettunakin, vaan nyt hänen heponsa oli
vähän sairastunut, joten miehelle jäi vain laiskuus työksi, kun ei tuota
havun hakkelemistakaan päivämääriksi riittänyt.

Pienempi veli, neljän vuoden vanha Jussi, yllä ainoastaan alle

polvien ulottuva paita, yritti myöskin samassa oven avauksessa
pujahtamaan ulos, mutta kun iso sika röhkäsi porstuasta vastaan,
täytyi hänen kinttujensa pelosta pysyä kauniisti sisällä. Hän istahti
lattialle, kaiketi ollen jo tottunut olemaan varomatta sen mustuuden
tarttumista, joka varsinkin ovensuu-puolella näytti melkoisen
paksulta, ehkä ei perempänäkään jättänyt hongan syitä näkymään.

Porstuassa oli ulos menijöille tullut vastaan suntion Liena-tytär.

Tupaan päästyään aikoi hän tervehdittyänsä heti ruveta purkamaan
ompelusnyyttiään; mutta Anna Maija, talon juuri täys'kasvuiseksi
ehtinyt tytär hätäisesti supatti jotain hänelle korvaan, ja siihen se
yritys pysähtyi.

Samassapa piika Tiinalle sattui asiaa ulos: hän ehkä arvasi nyt
olevansa tuvassa liikana. Kun tytöt siten olivat melkein kahden
kesken, sillä eihän tuota paitaressua Jussia kukaan osannut
kaippoa, virkkoi Anna Maija:

"Hyvinpä sinä hätäilet. Ei sitä niin varomaton saa olla. Tuota

vaatetta, jonka sinulle toin ommeltavaksi, ei kukaan vielä ole nähnyt;
minä sen ostin salaa, kun olin voita puotiin viemässä."

"Varastamallako?

"Eihän se mitään varkautta ole, kun oman talon tavaraa ottaa.

Eikä siihen mennytkään muuta kuin kahden naulan hinta. Mitäs se
tuntui niin suuressa pytyssä, sanoin vettä vähän heruneen voista. Ja
nyt sain kunnon yliset kahteen paitaan. Kun ne kerran on yllä, ei niitä
kukaan arvaa kysellä."

"Vai sillä tavalla sinä ostelet! Salaa ottaminen on varkautta,

otettakoonpa vieraalta tai kotoa. On sitä paljo muutakin varkautta,
jota ei siksi luulisikaan. Kyllä ne meille koulussa kaikki selitettiin."

Näin puhui Liena, joka oli kansakoulun käynyt ja siellä saanut

yleisestä tavasta poikkeavia totuuksia mieleensä?

"Mitä vielä. Kaikkipa ne muutkin tekevät samalla tavalla. Ja miten

me muuten saisimmekaan mitään yllemme tai muiksi
varuksiksemme? Ei se isä suinkaan kukkaroansa aukase meidän
tarpeihimme tässä eikä muissakaan taloissa."

"Ei väärä siltä oikeaksi tule, että muka pakko käskee."

 "Kysy keltä hyvänsä, niin ei kukaan sitä sano varkaudeksi, paitsi
meidän isä. Mutta kukapa osaisikaan niin jumalinen olla, kuin hän
tahtoo. Eikä hänkään aina kiellä ottamasta, vaan salaamasta, mutta
julkeaisiko tuota nyt suoraan sanoa: tämän minä nyt otin ja tämän
nyt."

"Kyllä isäsi on oikeassa. Tee sinä vain niin, kuin hän käskee, niin
pysyy omatuntosi puhtaana."

"En minä sitä käsitä. Katsos, tuossa veli Matti juuri kantaa
kymmenkappaista pussia jyväkuormaansa, ja kyllä minä tiedän mitä
varten. Ei se myllyyn joudu muiden säkkien kanssa, vaan puotiin se
siellä livahtaa ja Matti saa herrastupakkaa ja muita pikku tarpeita."

Jopa kuului porstuasta emännän ja täti Marin tulo.

Lienalle pysähtyi huulille ponteva muistutus, että salaamisella tuo

kotitavaran otto juuri tehdään varkaudeksi, joka se muuten ei
olisikaan. Anna Maija kiireesti pisti nyytin taaksensa piiloon tulijain
juuri astuessa ovesta sisään.

"Äiti, tuopiko Matti rinkeliä, kun vie pussin puotiin?" kysyi Jussi
lattialta, jossa oli hyvin toimessaan kuunnellut äskeistä keskustelua.

Anna Maija punastui. Vaan Matti oli jo ehtinyt peittää reen sevälle
heinäin alle pussinsa, jonka oli hyvin ympärilleen vilkuillen kantanut
eloaitasta kolmen pitkän säkin lisäksi.

Emäntä katsahti ikkunasta.

"Mitä sinä joutavia höpiset! Eihän Matilla ole pussia, eikä hän nyt
mene puotiin, vaan myllyyn."
 "Mutta myllylläpä on puoti. Tuopiko Matti rinkeliä?"

"Ei tuo nyt. Tarvitaan ne elot leiväksikin."

Anna Maija istui levottomana ja Liena vähän

välinpitämättömämpänä kuunnellen, miten tuo paitaressun
kieliminen päättyy.

"Joutaisitko sinä kehräämään minulle palttinan kudetta, saisit

jauhoja palkastais?" kysäsi emäntä sisareltaan.

"Miks'käs minä en joutaisi. Eipähän ne omat kehruut

haittannekaan.
Missä sitä kasvattaa, kun ei ole maata."

"Tästä saat aluksi. Ethän nyt enempää jaksa kantaa tällä kerralla.
Tule sitte ottamaan lisää."

Sisar Mari kiitteli, pisti kehruutukun kainaloonsa, otti käteensä

hinkin, toiseen sankavasun, jotka kumpikin näyttivät venyttävän
käsijäntäreitä, ja läksi astua juntustamaan, sanottuansa ovessa
mennessään: "Jääkää terveeks'!", johon emäntä vastasi: "käy
tervennä! käy tervennä!"

Nytpä olikin leipomisella jo kiire. Emäntä alkoi lapiolla mättää

taikinasta tahdasta pöydälle, johon Jussi tällä välin oli ehtinyt käydä
oven suusta löytämällänsä tikulla piirtelemässä rinkelin kuvia, että
edes muodon saisi silmillään nähdä, vaan ei Matin kuitenkaan
sanottu tuovan niitä puodista.

Jo kääräsi emäntä hihojansa hiukan ylemmäksi, kastoi jauhoon

molemmat kämmenensä, joiden peseminen kiireen kahakassa ei
mieleen johtunut, ja alkoi tahtaasta pyöritellä leipäkekosia, jotka
laudalle asetettuina nostettiin uunin päälle seinäneläjäin ihailtavaksi
tahi nousemaan, kuten oli tapana sanoa.

Anna Maija, huomattuaan äitinsä jo olevan niin kiinni työssään,

että hänen sekautumistansa asioihin ei tarvinnut peljätä tuvan
ulkopuolella, nykäsi kyynyspäällään suntion Lienaa, ja molemmat
pujahtivat yht'äkkiä ulos.

Talon tytär vei ikätoverinsa poikki porstuan kylmään tupaan.

Sen lattia ei ollut yhtä musta kuin asuintuvan, mutta muuten siellä
vallitsi irtanaisempi sekamelska, että tuskin vain luuta siellä oli
käynytkään koko talvena. Mitäpä tuota olisi viitsitty siistiä tai laista,
eihän siellä kukaan asunut. Tavaraa siellä oli kaikenlaista: pidettyjä
liinavaatteita huiskin haiskin; hevosloimia ja ajokaluja; niiden mukana
kokoutunutta heinän ruuhkaa; ruokatarpeita ja tuhkaa vierekkäin
sekä kaikenlaista joutavaa romua. Keskellä lattiaa seisoi isohko tiinu
eli amme, kansi sen verran koholla, että hiiret vaivatta pääsivät
sisällystä tutkimaan; muutenhan ne veitikat olisivatkin syöneet koko
tiinun laidoistaan pilalle. Järjestävälle kädelle olisi tuvassa ollut
päiväkausiksi työtä.

Anna Maija nostaisi kannen tiinusta ja kiskoi sieltä irti

lihakimpaleen, asetti sen laidalle valahtamaan ja saattoi vieraansa
puoli lämpimään porstuanpohja-kammariin.

Siellä oli luuta käynyt ainakin myöhemmin kuin kylmässä tuvassa,

mutta hyllyt pitkin seiniä sen sijaan lienevät pari vuotta saaneet
koota maidon rippeitä ja pölyä sekaisin, ja keskellä lattiaa seisova
maitokorvo oli kokonaan yltä päältä kuivaneen maitokuoren peitossa.
 Mustahko, isonlainen voipytty menetti naulan verran säästöistään
Lienan nyyttiin, johon valahtanut lihapalakin osui talteen, ja samaa
tietänsä Liena siirtyi, asuintuvassa enää käymättä, pihalle ja Matin
rekeen, joka häntä odotellen juuri oli kuhnaillut näin kauan.

Anna Maija palasi asuintupaan.

Pojan nassakat sill'aikaa raatoivat omiansa. Mikko oli noussut

penkille seisomaan ja saanut käsiinsä avaimen ikkunan päältä. Sen
kanssa hän hiljaa liihentihe lähemmäksi kaappia, joka seisoi
nurkassa äidin seljän takana.

Riks' raks'! kaapin ovi aukesi raolleen ja Mikon käsi tunkeusi

sisään. Kaiketi se olisi vetäytynyt sieltä takaisinkin ja ovi taas
raksahtaen mennyt lukkoon ihan äidin huomaamatta, mutta Jussi
älysikin Mikon vehkeet, juoksi hänen luoksensa ja iloissaan virkkoi:
"Otapa minullekin!"

Mikko hätäytyi, pudotti avaimen, ja se tipahti lattian raosta

karsinaan.

Anna Maija säpsähti tuostakin pienestä kilauksesta; omatunto ei

sentään ollut oikein tottunut olemaan välittämättä sellaisista muka
joutavista kuin hänen äskeinen tekonsa.

"Mitä te siellä isän kaapissa? Etkä sinäkään, Anna Maija, katso

lapsia!" torui emäntä ja tarttui tahtaisilla jauhokäsillään Mikon
tukkaan. Jauhettuaan sitä vähän aikaa palasi hän lopettelemaan
leivontaansa.

"Älä, älä, äiti!" vaikeroi Mikko "Jussihan se otti avaimen. Minä vain
avasin."
 "Enpään", puolustihe Jussi.

"Mitenkä sen Jussi olisi saanutkaan ikkunan päältä."

"Tuossa se oli ikkunan poskessa ja siitä Jussi kyllä yltää", selitti

Mikko, näyttäen muka paikkaa vasemmalla kädellään ja piilotellen
oikeata.

"Laitakin avain paikoilleen ennen, kuin isä tulee!" käski emäntä.

"Sepä putosi karsinaan."

"Mene etsimään!"

Sitä Mikko juuri oli toivonut, että saisi siellä lattian alla rauhassa
tyhjentää oikean kätensä.

Hän pisti lattian raosta päretikun merkiksi, mistä päin etsisi

avainta, avasi kolpitsan kannen, sytytti toisen päretikun ja alkoi
laskeutua jyrkkiä portaita myöten alas karsinaan. Heti kuin pää
painui piiloon kolpitsan laidan taa, noin multapenkin tasalle, jossa oli
tavallinen multapohjainen leipäin pitopaikka hiirien valtatien vieressä,
kuului hammasten losaus ja sitte hienompaa ritinää.

Mutta ääni hävisi, kun Mikko entiseltä muistilla astui rohkeasti

karsinan seiniviertä, korkeampaa pohjaa myöten, eksymättä
keskemmälle; josta päreen valossa kiilsi tyyni lammikon pinta ja
jossa hän tiesi, paitsi ilmeistä vettä, olevan myöskin aikain kuluessa
kokoutunutta roskaliejua sekä kaikenlaista pimentolan eläjää, joiden
rauhaa hänen ei tehnyt mieli häiritä, eikä myöskään tahrata
jalkojansa, jotka sitte olisi pitänyt pestä lumessa.
 Avain löytyi pian multapenkin laidalta juuri merkkitikun vierestä.
Mutta ei Mikolla siltä ollut kiirettä takaisin. Hampaat ratisivat
ehtimiseen.

Jussi katseli ikkunasta pihalle.

"Isä tulee!" huusi hän juosten kolpitsan luo ja kurkistaen laidan yli
alas, kun Mikkoa ei näkynyt. Vaan kiireessään hän osuikin
sysäämään painavamman puolen ruumiistansa yli laidan. Jalat vain
huilahtivat ja Jussi putosi Mikolle niskaan, joka saatuaan viime
sirusen saaliistaan suuhunsa oli juuri juossut aukon alle.

Koskenta ei niin vaarallinen ollut, mutta älähän siitä sentään pääsi

säikäyksestä.

Pojat vedettiin ylös. Jussi parkui vielä hirveästi, että muiden korvat
tilliä lauloivat.

Mikko juoksi sitä kyytiään penkille seisomaan ja pisti kaapin

avaimen paikallensa ikkunan päälle. Sitte katsahti hän ulos ja
rauhoittui, kun isä vasta näkyi hevosta riisuvan nokisen
rankakuorman edestä.

Nyt tuli emännälle kiire. Olisi pitänyt leipäkeot taputella

litteämmäksi ja toimittaa uuniin, vaan olisi ollut ruokakin saatava
pöytään.

"No, tuo sinä ehk' ruokaa joudukiksi!"

Anna Maija, jota käsky tarkoitti, nosti kolpitsan kantta ja haparoi

kädellään leipäkasaa.

"Eihän täääll' ole yhtään leipää."

 "Näinköhän sitte meni viimeinen sisar Marille? Eivätkä nämäkään
tästä joudu vielä päivälliseksi."

Emäntä meni tulipäreellä tutkimaan.

"No, pane sitte pata tulelle! Pianhan puuro kiehuu. Mitäpä tässä
muuten leivättä syötäisiin."

Isäntä riisuttuaan ja ruokittuaan hevosensa purki rankakuorman ja

astui tupaan. Kesk'ikäinen, vahvavartaloinen mies hän oli ja
vakavan, mutta ei siltä kuitenkaan juron näköinen.

"Mitä se Jussi täällä äsken niin parkui?"

"Niin, kun Mikko ei antanut sokuria!"

"Mitä sokuria?"

Ja isäntä, riisuttuaan enimmät vaatteensa, ryhtyi tutkimaan

kaappia.

"Mikko, sinäkö täällä kävit?"

Mikko yritti selittämään samoin kuin äsken äidilleen, mutta isä

muisti tarkemmin, missä avain oli ollut. Kun poika ei kuitenkaan
ottanut suoraan tunnustaakseen, sanoi isä leppeästi: "Haepas
vitsat!"

Tietäen, että nyt oli leikki kaukana, toi Mikko porstuasta isälleen
käteen kaksi notkeaa, monilatvaista luudan varpua ja antautui
hyvällä kuritettavaksi, kuitenkin jo tehden edeltä päin itkua, joka
kurituksen aikana aika poruksi muuttui; kipeätähän ne vitsat
tietystikin tekevät.
 "Mitäs nyt sanot?" kysyi isä lakattuaan kurittamasta.

"Kiitoksia, hyvä isä."

"Mistäs sait vitsaa?"

"Kun otin sokuria."

"Sano suoraan: kun varastit. Luvatta ottaminen on varastamista.

Mutta eikö muuta syytä ollut?"

Mikko ei tiennyt.

"Kun valehtelit Jussin päähän. Muista nyt, että perkele ei pysy

totuudessa, sillä hän on valheen isä ja samoin varkauden isä. Joka
ensin varastaa vähän eikä siitä tavasta luovu, hän viimein varastaa
paljon. Ja vaikka sitä eivät ihmiset näkisikään, niin Jumala kuitenkin
kaikki näkee."

Isännän purkaessa kuormaansa ja Mikkoa kurittaessa oli puuro

kiehunut. Emäntä oli jo saanut leivät uuniin ja toi pöydälle maidon
heraa ja vähän suolakalaa sekä voikokkareen, pistäen sen veitsensä
kärjestä suorastaan silmäksi puurovatiin, jonka Anna Maija juuri
kantoi pöydälle.

"Taasko sitä puuroa? Vastahan sitä oli aamiaiseksi."

"Eipä tuota näy olevan leipää. Jotainhan pitää syödä."

Kaikki istuutuivat pöytään.

"Hyvinhän tuo maito näyttää siniseltä ja hienolta."

"Ainako sitä paksua riittäisi."

 "Niin, kuu äiti haroi kaikki kokkelit korvosta tädin hinkkiin."

Mikko se tuolla selityksellään koki lepyttää isäänsä.

"No, voi tuota poikaa! ei siltä mikään säily näkemättä."

Isäntä katsoi harmistuneesti sekä Mikkoon että emäntään ja kysyi

sitte:

"Saiko täti leipääkin?"

Mikko ihastui kielimisensä onnistumisesta.

"Sai täti suuren leivän. Ja pani äiti vasuun lihaakin ja voita! selitti
hän riemuiten.

"No, tottahan tuota sen verran saapi auttaa köyhempäänsä, kun

onkin vielä oma sisar.

"En minä kiellä auttamasta, mutta kohtuus pitää sentään olla

kaikessa. Onko tämä nyt kohtuutta, että pitää syödä puuroa kahdesti
päivässä, kun on annettu viimeinen leipä vieraalle ja samalla saatu
maitokin noin haljakaksi?

"No, enhän minä nyt tuota arvannut viimeiseksi.

"Ja sitte vielä torut poikaa, kun hän puhuu, mitä on nähnyt; vaikka
minä juuri äsken opetin häntä pysymään totuudessa.

"Mitä hänen siltä tarvitsee tuollaisen pojan nassakan pistää

nokkansa joka paikkaan vanhempain ihmisten asioihin?

"Ei tällä lailla mitään hyvää tule.

 "Ja mitä sinunkaan tarvitsee kaikkia udella? Ei nuo miehet
ennenkään minun kotitalossani kaikkiin tarttuneet."

"Minä en olekaan niitä sinun kotitalosi miehiä. Ennen ne naiset

tässäkin talossa salailivat, mutta jo nyt toivoin sen toki loppuvan
vähitellen. Tee, mitä teet, julki äläkä aina salaile. Totta tosiaan minua
ei ollenkaan kummastuta, että Mikko sinusta oppii näpistelemään ja
salailemaan tekojansa. Jospa edes tuo Jussi säilyisi! Vanhempia
näitä ei enää osaa varmasti taata."

Anna Maija punastui pahanpäiväisesti.

"Ainako sitä sinä sitte puhut totta ja suoraan, ikään kuin en

muistaisi viimekesäistä pappein veroin maksua. Etkö siellä itsekin
salannut?"

"Enhän minä sanonut muuta kuin että sieltäpähän kirjoistaan

näkevät lehmien luvun, ja minunko oli syyni, että olivat kirjoittaneet
liian vähän?"

"Olisitpa voinut sanoa suoraan, miten monta meillä oli, kun sitä
suoraan kysyttiin, mutta salatapahan piti."

"Mikäs heitä aina muistaa."

"Siinäpä se. Minua torut salaamisesta ja itse teet samaa. Eikö tuo
kuitiksi menne."

"Olenko minä kotiväeltä koskaan salannut mitään?"

"Kukapa teidän miesten hevoskauppojanne ja muita

vaihtamistanne tietää. Viime markkinoillehan tuo jäi se kunnon
ruuna, etkä tainnut kaupasta kostua."
 "Hävittää se piti, kun oli niin aitimus. Eipähän nyt hypi, kun ajurin
tallissa seisoo tai joskus hyvissä kaupungin aidoissa."

"Ja salassahan nuo rahasikin aina pidät."

"Kyllä sitte koota käskisi, jos jokainen saisi kukkaroa kouria omin
lupinsa. Vielä vai?"

"Niin juuri. Sen tähden meidän täytyy pitää omaa neuvoa. Yhdestä
se kaikki lähtee."

Isännältä puuttui puhe siihen; hän jäi miettivän näköiseksi.

Anna Maija istui kuin tulihiilillä. Lienan äskeiset sanat ja nyt isän
moite yrittivät tekemään tehtäväänsä, mutta äidin jyrkkä vastustus
hajoitti taas kaikki.

Viimein isäntä jälleen alkoi vähän epävakaisemmalla äänellä:

"Kyllä te paljonkin rahaa menettäisitte, jos sitä teillä olisi viljalti

käsissänne. Mutta en minä muista olleeni antamatta, milloin vain tosi
tarpeesen olette pyytäneet. Ja se voinmaksu-juttu onkin kiusannut
minua koko ajan, varsinkin siitä asti, kuin viime syksynä
piispanluvuissa valittivat, että täällä ei olla oikein rehelliset. Minä
seisoin melkein esimmäisinä, ja kun piispa sitte alkoi puhua, niin
aivan tuntui, kuin hän olisi minusta läpi katsonut ja nähnyt sen
salaamisen. Ihan minä ensi pyhänä menen ja maksan pois niistä
kahdesta lehmästä, joista jäi maksamatta."

Emäntä katsahti mieheensä niin kummastuneesti, kuin olisi

ajatellut: joko tuo nyt aivan hulluksi tulee, varkaaksihan häntä papit
sanoisivat, eikähän moista tyhmyyttä kellekään muulle suinkaan ole
päähän pälkähtänyt.
 Ei hän sitä kuitenkaan julki lausunut, kun ruoalta nousu keskeytti
pakinan.