Leviathan. (When words don't fail).

I have already had the benefit of the book that helps me understand such acts of malice, so I do not need to turn to it but only ask my memory to bring back its chilling but truthful pages--many of which I have by heart. The book is by Thomas Hobbes and he called it Leviathan. It was the product of bloody times, too--the English Civil War--though a more bloody time than ours would be hard to find. Superstitious zealots--both racial and religious--were ready to cut their own throats to sharpen the knife for another. In the midst of it all, and at much risk to himself (a timorous sort), Hobbes set down his verdict concerning the nature of man in such sentences as glorify at least the utterance of the condemnation. He would insist, I think, that an ideology--not mere men but poisoned men--blew up those buildings.

No English-language philosopher (excepting, perhaps, David Hume) saw more clearly the madness of religious superstition for what it was. The opening sections on religion are devastating, yet none more so than the note on which the entire work ends--a comparison of Ecclesiastes with fairies, for instance: "The Ecclesiastiques take the Cream of the Land, by Donations of ignorant men, that stand in aw of them, and by Tythes: So also it is in the Fable of Fairies, that they enter into the Dairies, and Feast upon the Cream, which they skim from the Milk." The fairies, Hobbes knows, are one kind of fiction, the ecclesiastics are beholden to another.

Finally, "Again, in all Deliberations, and in all Pleadings, the faculty of solid Reasoning is necessary: for without it, the Resolutions of men are rash, and their Sentences unjust: and yet if there be not powerfull Eloquence, which procureth attention and Consent, the effect of Reason will be little." Thomas Hobbes's reasoning is solid if not certain, his sentences are just, and his eloquence unequaled.

William Gass is David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. His most recent book, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999.