The Age of Reason

What It Is

A deist attack on revealed religion, written in Paris during the Terror. Paine finished the first part in 1793 and 1794, when the Jacobins were arresting his friends and he expected to be next; the manuscript was handed to a friend for safekeeping as the arrest closed in. He was imprisoned in the Luxembourg and came close to the guillotine. The second part appeared in 1795, after his release. A third followed in 1807.

It is not an atheist book, and Paine would have been appalled to be called one. He opens by professing belief in one God and in a duty to his fellow creatures, then spends the rest of the book taking a hammer to churches, priesthoods, prophecy, miracles and the authority of scripture.

The manner is the one that made Common Sense the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution. Short sentences. Plain words. No Latin, no learned apparatus, no deference. He is writing for a man who can read and has never been told he is entitled to an opinion.

Why It Matters

Paine believed the French Revolution was sliding from the overthrow of the church into the overthrow of God, and he wrote to stop it. He wanted to show that the choice being forced on his contemporaries was a false one, and he wrote to prove it in language anyone could follow.

The man who had done more than any writer to make American independence thinkable became, within a decade, among the most despised figures in the country he helped invent. He died in New York in 1809 with almost nobody at his funeral. A century later a president could still call him a filthy little atheist and be wrong on both counts.

The consequences for everyone else were larger. It was the first book to carry biblical criticism out of the universities and into the hands of working men, and it was read that way: British radical printers went to prison for issuing it, and nineteenth-century freethought was made by it. Putting these arguments in language a labourer could follow changed what could be publicly said, and that has not been undone.

The scholarship has not aged well. Paine wrote the first part from memory, with no Bible to hand, and the errors show; German scholars overtook his textual criticism within a generation. What survives is not the exegesis but the willingness to publish it.

Before You Read

Four or five hours. The sentences are the easiest of any book on this list.

This was written in a prison's shadow by a man who believed the revolution he had defended was devouring itself. The urgency is not a rhetorical effect.

Part One is the argument, and the part to read closely. Part Two is a long march through the books of the Bible pointing out contradictions, repetitive by design. Read it selectively on a first pass; the case is made in its first fifty pages.

Which Edition to Read

• Thomas Paine: Collected Writings, edited by Eric Foner (Library of America, 1995) — recommended. The Age of Reason complete, alongside Common Sense, The Crisis and Rights of Man, in accurate texts with a chronology and notes. Paine makes sense as a whole, and this is the volume that gives him to you whole. The cost: it is a nine-hundred-page brick, the annotation is light by design, and the Library of America does not print introductions. You get the man, not a guide to him. View on Amazon →
• The Broadview edition, edited by Kerry Walters (2011). The best standalone scholarly Age of Reason: a full introduction, real notes, and material showing what Paine was answering and who answered back. Take it if this is the only Paine you intend to read. The cost: a student edition, and it leaves you with his most notorious book and none of the writing that made him great.
• The Prometheus Books paperback (Great Books in Philosophy). The cheap complete text. The cost: minimal editorial help, and nothing to place a book that is close to unreadable without its context.

Take the Library of America volume. Whatever you buy, check that both parts are there. A great many cheap reprints and free ebooks quietly contain only Part One, and a reader who does not know that will think Paine stopped halfway.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it aloud. Paine wrote for the ear and the tavern, and the prose comes alive spoken.

Read Common Sense first. The same voice on a subject the world came to agree with makes it easier to hear this one.

Do not read it as theology. Its real subject is who is permitted to ask, and the answer he gave cost him everything he had.