---
title: "Paolo Sarpi on the Origin of Religion"
date: 2026-09-21
tags:
  - "converted"
---

# Paolo Sarpi on the Origin of Religion

Source : [https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/fidelio_archive/1996/fidv05n01-1996Sp/fidv05n01-1996Sp_024-paolo_sarpi_on_the_origin_of_rel.pdf](https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/fidelio_archive/1996/fidv05n01-1996Sp/fidv05n01-1996Sp_024-paolo_sarpi_on_the_origin_of_rel.pdf)

Fra Paolo Sarpi, “Theological counselor” to the Venetian Doge and Senate, penned the following for his Pensieri sulla religione (Thoughts on Religion). Sarpi applied his “sociology of religion”—according to which man’s belief in the Divine arises from fear, greed, and limitation—not merely to pagan beliefs, but to the God of Christianity. A modern restatement of Sarpi’s Enlightenment tract can be found in such works as William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. Sarpi writes: The purpose of man, like that of any other animate being, is to live.

To live requires maintaining our existence, by the use of our self, and our parts, as well as of things external; that is how nature operates. Cognition is the origin of human activity, and therefore it is necessary to have cognition of one’s own nature; of the nature of human beings, and of other things; and even of the whole universe. The crude mind forms the following opinion concerning himself: that he is a unity, is passible \[i.e., liable to be acted upon–Ed.\], is deficient, and is free to act. From passibility, there is born the emotion of fear. And out of passibility and fear, he recognizes the possibility of threats to his existence; and such things are deemed Evil.

From deficiency, there arises greed. And from this, he comes to the idea of things which can maintain or restore his original condition; such things are deemed Good. As for objects other than himself, the crude mind presumes that they possess the same qualities of unity and freedom; since, owing to his own internal constitution, he cannot think differently than he is. For those phenomena whose operating entity he cannot perceive, the crude mind now forms the idea of insensible things; this is his first apprehension of Divinity, arising from the foregoing, but principally from fear and greed.

Fear is primary, and the first ideas of divinities are of Evil ones. And, even though through progress he learns that everything does not function as he does (but rather as parts, not operating out of cognition)—such that he distinguishes things whose actions are caused by natural processes, from those which act freely; nonetheless, he continues to make the presumption of freedom for all things whose natures are as yet unclear; a presumption which he maintains perpetually for those things that can never be clarified. And as a consequence, he continues to presume it of everything to which he attributes Divinity.

But, since man is finite and incapable of the infinite, being capable only of operations of an arithmetical sort, when he starts esteeming himself capable of everything, he must deem the universe to be finite, ascribing to it a sort of unity, passibility, and deficiency. And so he ascribes to the Divinity, just what he thinks concerning himself.