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WorkThomas Paine

The Age of Reason

Paine's case for one God known through nature, against every church that claims God has spoken to it alone.

by Thomas Paine233 passages held

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First published
(aged 57)
Original language
English

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Overview

About six hours after he finished the first part of this book, by his own account, guards came for Thomas Paine at three in the morning. Late in December 1793 the National Convention had voted to exclude foreigners from its benches, and Paine, one of only two foreign deputies, had hurried to finish before the arrest he expected. On the way to the Luxembourg prison he handed the manuscript to the American poet Joel Barlow, and it was in print in 1794. Paine had written it without a Bible to hand, though he was writing against both Testaments. He wrote as a believer: France had just abolished its established priesthood, and he feared that people pulling down a false religion would throw away the true one with it. True religion, for Paine, is belief in one God, known through the order of the created world, together with a duty to act justly and mercifully. What he rejected was revelation, the claim that God had spoken to certain men and that everyone else is bound by their report of it: whatever the first hearer received, for everybody after him it is hearsay. Part II, dated October 1795 and finished after his release, took up the Bible he could now consult and went through it book by book, arguing that Moses could not have written books that describe his death and burial, and that the Gospels contradict one another. About fifty replies appeared within four years, the most influential of them An Apology for the Bible by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff. In the United States, where Paine paid to ship 15,000 copies, The Age of Reason did more than anything else he wrote to wreck the standing Common Sense had given him. In Britain the book was prosecuted for decades: the bookseller Thomas Williams got a year's hard labour in 1797 for publishing it, and the radical publisher Richard Carlile, convicted in 1819, spent six years in prison.

Key concepts

Why is revelation only hearsay after the first person who receives it?

Because revelation, by definition, is something communicated directly from God to a person. Whatever the first hearer received was revelation to him; when he tells others, what they receive is his account of it, and believing it means trusting him rather than God. Paine does not deny that God could speak to someone; he denies that anyone else is obliged to treat that person's report as God's word.

What does Paine mean by true religion in The Age of Reason?

Belief in one God, known through the order of the created world, together with a duty to act justly and mercifully. Everything else that churches add, revelation above all, Paine sets aside. He wrote in fear that France, pulling down a false religion, would throw away the true one with it, so the book is a defence of belief as much as an attack on the claims made in its name.

Why does it matter whether Moses wrote the books of Moses?

Because the authority of those books rests on who wrote them. If Moses wrote them, they carry the weight of his witness; if later writers did, they are history composed afterwards and must be judged as such. Paine points out that the books describe Moses's own death and burial, which Moses could not have written, and he treats the failure of the claimed authorship as a failure of the claimed authority.

How do contradictions between the Gospels bear on their authority?

Witnesses who disagree about the same events cannot all be reporting what happened. Part II sets the Gospels side by side and finds them contradicting one another. For Paine this is no quibble about details: a text offered as God's word, yet inconsistent with itself, shows the hand of human writers, and its claims must then be weighed as human testimony, with all the doubt that carries.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Revelation Is Hearsay After the First Hearer

If God spoke to someone once, what reaches everyone else? Only that person's report, Paine answers, and nobody is bound to believe a report as if it were the voice of God.

What Paine rejected was not God but revelation: the claim that God spoke to certain men and that everyone else is bound by their account of it. Whatever the first hearer received was revelation to him alone; for everyone after him it is hearsay, resting on the word of a person who may have been mistaken. A church built on such reports asks for belief in its messengers, and Paine refuses the demand, since a report can never carry more authority than the credibility of whoever passes it on.

  • revelation
  • testimony
  • religious authority
  • scriptural authority
  • epistemology
  • evidence
  • miracles
  • reason
  • christianity
  • atonement

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One God, Known Through the Order of Creation

What is left to believe once revelation is refused? One God, Paine answers, known through the order of the created world, and a duty to act justly and mercifully.

Paine wrote the book as a believer. France had just abolished its established priesthood, and he feared that people pulling down a false religion would throw away the true one with it. True religion, for him, is belief in one God, known through the order of the created world, together with a duty to act justly and mercifully. It needs no priest and no special messenger, because the creation is open to anyone who looks at it, and it asks of its believer nothing beyond the conduct it teaches.

  • deism
  • natural theology
  • creation
  • science
  • morality
  • education

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Reading the Bible as Any Other Book

Who wrote the books of the Bible, and when? Part II asks it as one would of any ancient text, and follows the answer wherever it leads.

Part I was written without a Bible to hand; Part II, finished after Paine's release from prison, went through it book by book. His method was the ordinary one for any old document: ask who wrote it and when, and test it against itself. Moses could not have written books that describe his own death and burial, and the Gospels contradict one another. A book whose authority rests on its authorship loses that authority when the authorship fails.

  • biblical criticism
  • authorship
  • biblical authorship
  • historical reliability
  • textual criticism
  • historical criticism
  • historical dating
  • historical evidence
  • biblical interpretation
  • scriptural criticism
  • contradiction
  • prophecy
  • resurrection
  • scripture

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Within this work

passages held
233
distinct concepts
316
by passages held, corpus-wide
#318

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “authorship” and “biblical criticism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 86 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
authorshipbiblical criticism24
biblical criticismhistorical reliability14
biblical criticismprophecy11
biblical authorshiptextual criticism9
biblical criticismmiracles7
authorshiphistorical reliability6
biblical criticismreligious authority6
authorshiptextual criticism5
biblical criticismtextual criticism5
historical reliabilitymiracles5
historical reliabilitytextual criticism4
prophecyreligious authority4
authorshipreligious authority2
biblical authorshipprophecy2
historical reliabilityprophecy2
historical reliabilityreligious authority2
prophecytextual criticism2
biblical authorshipbiblical criticism1
biblical authorshiphistorical reliability1
biblical authorshipreligious authority1
miraclesprophecy1
miraclesreligious authority1
miraclestextual criticism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1776 Common Sense

    The book that made Paine's name, so much so that he signed the Crisis papers of the following years with its title.

     EN
  2. 1776 The American Crisis

    A serial rather than a book: papers issued one at a time between December 1776 and December 1783, whenever the war's news called for one, each under the title The Crisis.

     EN
  3. 1782 Letter Addressed to the Abbé Raynal on the Affairs of North-America (Letter to the Abbe Raynal)

    Ten months after the victory at Yorktown, with the war winding down, Paine set out to put the record of the Revolution straight for European readers.

     EN
  4. 1791 Rights of Man

    Paine's contribution to the pamphlet war that Burke's Reflections set off in Britain; the writer Mary Wollstonecraft had answered Burke first, in November 1790.

     EN
  5. 1793 Reasons for Wishing to Preserve the Life of Louis Capet (Reasons for Preserving the Life of Louis Capet)

    Second of the three speeches Paine gave in the Convention on the king's fate: the first, in November 1792, argued that Louis should be tried; the last pleaded for a reprieve.

     EN
  6. 1794 The Age of Reason you are here EN
  7. 1795 Dissertation on First Principles of Government

    Here Paine's political principles are condensed into a few dozen pages, in his last attempt to shape a French constitution from inside the Convention.

     EN
  8. 1797 Agrarian Justice

    Published in answer to a bishop's sermon on rich and poor, it carries the welfare proposals of Rights of Man to a principle: that the landless are owed a share of the earth.

     EN
  9. 1797 The Existence of God

    Addressed to the Theophilanthropists, the Paris society whose creed matched Paine's own, it gives the positive side of the case that The Age of Reason made against revealed religion.

     EN
  10. 1807 Examination of the Prophecies

    A companion to The Age of Reason, giving the Gospels' use of prophecy the same close reading that its second part gave the authorship of the Bible.

     EN
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