The Age of Reason
Glossary
A
- Apocrypha
- The body of Jewish and early Christian texts excluded from the canonical Bible, which Paine cross-references in his authorship analysis of Ezra and Nehemiah — noting, for instance, that Ezra is identified with the Esdras named in the Apocrypha — as part of his broader case that biblical authorship and canon-formation were human, contested processes.
- Related: Moses and the Pentateuch, The Bible as a Human Document
C
- Christian Mythologists
- Paine's recurring, deliberately provocative label for the authors and interpreters of Christian doctrine, used to place Christian narratives — the virgin birth, the atonement, Satan's temptation — in the same category as pagan myth rather than history. Chapter 8 uses the term to describe those who claim "Christ died for the sins of the world," a claim he treats as an invented plot device rather than a recorded fact.
- Related: Redemption and the Doctrine of Atonement, The Bible as a Human Document
- Committees of Public Safety and General Surety
- The revolutionary French bodies whose joint order authorized Paine's arrest as a foreigner in December 1793, named in Chapter 19 as the instruments of the Terror that imprisoned him even as he continued composing his defense of reason against both revealed religion and revolutionary excess.
- Related: The National Convention, The Luxembourg Prison
- Common Sense
- Paine's first published work (1776), mentioned in Chapter 13 as the pamphlet that launched his career as a political writer and made the case for American independence — cited here to establish the same reasoning habit of mind, tested against inherited authority, that Paine now turns on religion.
- Related: Deism
- Confucius
- Cited in Chapter 3 alongside Greek philosophers and Quakers as proof that benevolent moral teaching of the kind Paine credits to Jesus was neither unique to Christianity nor dependent on any claim of divine revelation — good men in many ages and traditions taught similar morality on reason alone.
- Related: Deism
D
- Deism
- Paine's own religious position, stated in Chapter 1: belief in "one God, and no more," known not through any book or church but through reason applied to the study of nature — "the creation." He treats deism as distinct from both atheism and any revealed religion, and hopes for "happiness beyond this life" on the strength of that belief alone.
- Related: Revealed Religion, First Cause, Natural Religion
F
- First Cause
- Paine's philosophical name, in Chapter 10, for God as reason infers Him: "the only idea man can affix to the name of God, is that of a first cause, the cause of all things." He argues belief in a first cause is unavoidable because denying it is even harder to conceive than accepting it, and that this bare, reasoned belief is sufficient without any additional revealed doctrine.
- Related: Deism, Natural Religion
H
- Havre Marat / Havre-de-Grace
- The French port town Paine cites in Chapter 21 as a dating test for texts: renamed "Havre Marat" in 1793 after the assassinated revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, its appearance in an undated document would prove that document postdates 1793 — a small demonstration of the same internal-evidence method Paine applies throughout to biblical texts.
- Related: The Bible as a Human Document, Moses and the Pentateuch
J
- Joel Barlow
- The American poet and diplomat in Paris to whom Paine entrusted the manuscript of The Age of Reason's first part on his way to arrest and imprisonment in 1793, ensuring the work survived and reached publication even if Paine himself did not.
- Related: The Luxembourg Prison
M
- Moses and the Pentateuch
- Paine devotes much of Part Two to disputing that Moses personally wrote the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch) traditionally attributed to him, pointing to internal evidence — including an account of Moses's own death — that shows later hands compiled these texts long after the events described, likely around the time of the return from Babylonian captivity.
- Related: The Bible as a Human Document, Apocrypha
- Mystery, Miracle, and Prophecy (the Three Frauds)
- Chapter 17's name for "the three principal means... employed in all ages... to impose upon mankind" and pass off human invention as revelation. Paine argues true religion, being a duty owed by every soul alike, must be free of mystery by its very nature — so a religion that depends on secrets, wonders, and predictions is, by that fact, exposed as fraudulent.
- Related: Revealed Religion, The Word of God
N
- Natural Religion
- Paine's alternative to revealed religion: the belief system built entirely on what reason can infer by observing the visible universe — its order, vastness, and design — rather than on any scripture, prophecy, or institutional church. He treats it as available equally to every person regardless of nation or upbringing, unlike revelation, which depends on which book one happened to be raised with.
- Related: Deism, First Cause, The Word of God
- Newton and Descartes
- Scientists Paine invokes in Chapter 13 to argue that organized Christianity historically opposed and persecuted the sciences, claiming that had Newton or Descartes pursued their studies "three or four hundred years" earlier, church authority would likely have prevented them from finishing their work.
- Related: Natural Religion, First Cause
R
- Revealed Religion
- Paine's target throughout Part One: any religion — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — built on a claim that God communicated directly to particular individuals (Moses, Christ, Mahomet) through a book its followers call "the Word of God." Chapter 2 argues that even if such a revelation were genuine, it could only ever be a personal experience to the one who received it, and becomes mere "hearsay" the moment it is passed on secondhand to anyone else.
- Related: Deism, The Word of God, Mystery, Miracle, and Prophecy
- Robespierre
- The Revolutionary leader whose fall on "the 9th of Thermidor" (27 July 1794) Paine marks in Chapter 19 as the event that finally opened the way to his own release from prison — Paine had spent months expecting execution during the period of Robespierre's ascendancy.
- Related: The National Convention, The Luxembourg Prison
T
- The Age of Reason (the title)
- Paine's framing for his own historical moment: an era in which reason, not inherited political or religious authority, ought to be the test of what to believe and how to be governed — the same standard he applied to monarchy in Common Sense now turned on scripture and church doctrine.
- Related: Deism, Common Sense
- The Bible as a Human Document
- Paine's Part Two method, sharpened after he gained access to a Bible in France: examining the Old and New Testaments book by book for authorship, internal contradiction, and historical plausibility, rather than accepting them as divine dictation. He concludes the texts are compilations by unknown human hands assembled long after the events they describe, not "the word of God" in any sense he can credit.
- Related: Revealed Religion, Moses and the Pentateuch, The Book of Job
- The Book of Job
- A text Paine treats unusually favorably among biblical books, citing its poetic passages on creation as examples of deducing God's existence from the visible universe — the same reasoning method Paine uses himself in Chapter 10 — even while he questions its authorship and doubts it originated as a specifically Hebrew work.
- Related: First Cause, The Bible as a Human Document
- The Fall and the Doctrine of Redemption
- The Christian narrative that Adam's original sin required the Son of God to be sacrificed to "redeem" humanity, which Paine subjects to sustained ridicule in Chapters 5 and 8 — asking why an omnipotent Creator would need such a convoluted, violent mechanism to forgive a fault he could simply have chosen not to punish.
- Related: Christian Mythologists, The Plurality of Worlds
- The Koran and Mahomet
- Islam's scripture and prophet, cited by Paine in Chapter 2 as a parallel case to the Christian and Jewish claims of revelation: the story that the Koran was written in Heaven and delivered to Mahomet by an angel is, for Paine, exactly the same kind of unverifiable "hearsay evidence" as the claims underlying the Bible.
- Related: Revealed Religion, The Word of God
- The Luxembourg Prison
- The Paris prison where Paine was held after his arrest as a foreigner during the Terror, entrusting the manuscript of The Age of Reason's first part to his friend Joel Barlow before being taken there. Chapter 19 recounts his imprisonment, a near-fatal fever, and his eventual release.
- Related: The National Convention, Robespierre
- The National Convention
- The revolutionary French legislative body Paine served in as an elected deputy despite being a foreigner, until a motion in late 1793 excluded foreign-born members — a maneuver Paine describes in Chapter 19 as the immediate prelude to his arrest, aimed particularly at him and the Prussian radical Anacharsis Cloots.
- Related: The Luxembourg Prison, Robespierre
- The Plurality of Worlds
- Paine's astronomical argument, developed in Chapter 15, that a universe evidently containing countless other worlds like our own makes the Christian story of a single Creator descending to die for one species on one small planet "little and ridiculous." He insists the two beliefs — a God who fills an immense universe with worlds, and a God narrowly focused on Adam's fall on Earth — "can not be held together in the same mind."
- Related: First Cause, The Fall and Redemption
- The Trinity
- The Christian doctrine of God as three persons in one, which Paine argues has "enfeebled the belief of one God" by dividing a single object of belief into multiple parts — "a multiplication of beliefs acts as a division of belief." He treats it as one of the ways revealed religion complicates what deism keeps simple.
- Related: Deism, Christian Mythologists
- The Word of God
- Paine's deliberately double use of this phrase: the churches apply it to their scriptures, but Paine insists the only genuine "Word of God" is "the Creation we behold" — the physical universe itself, which cannot be forged, altered, or monopolized by any sect the way a printed book can. Chapter 17 builds its whole argument on the "irreconcileable inconsistencies" between these two rival meanings of the phrase.
- Related: Revealed Religion, Natural Religion, First Cause