Faith & Spirit Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

La Bruyere doesn’t argue for God so much as he disqualifies the jury. The line is engineered like a trap: he says he’d respect an atheist verdict if it came from someone impeccably sober, moderate, chaste, and just - the kind of person whose passions can’t be blamed for their metaphysics. Then he snaps it shut: “such a person is not to be found.” The move is less theology than social psychology, a character attack dressed as a compliment.

The intent is to relocate the God question from evidence to motive. If no one meets the saintly standard, then every denial of God can be read as interested speech: the libertine wants permission, the ambitious want autonomy, the vain want to be their own judge. It’s an early-modern version of what we’d now call “follow the incentives,” except the incentives are moral and bodily. Skepticism becomes not an intellectual position but a symptom.

Context matters: La Bruyere writes in a France where Catholic order is political order, and where the salon moralist thrives on diagnosing hypocrisy among “reasonable” people. His wit is in the ostensibly fair setup. He appears open-minded - he’d listen, really he would - while making the conditions of being heard practically impossible. It flatters believers by implying their side attracts the virtuous, and it scolds doubters by assuming a hidden vice.

What makes it work is its counterfeit neutrality. By framing unbelief as something only a rare paragon could responsibly hold, La Bruyere turns the debate into a referendum on the speaker’s purity. The cleverness is also the cruelty: it’s not that atheists are wrong; it’s that they’re untrustworthy.