Overview
Histoire des oracles is a short prose essay — an “essai historique et philosophique,” as bibliographers classify it — in which Fontenelle turns the erudition of the Dutch scholar Antonius van Dale into a brisk, ironic, polemical argument. The work’s thesis, announced and pursued throughout, is that the oracles of the pagan world were not supernatural communications at all. They were, in Fontenelle’s account, human contrivances: impostures worked by priests, exploited by statesmen, and sustained by the credulity of those who consulted them. The English translation’s title, The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests, states the argument plainly.
Fontenelle’s book is not a catalogue of oracles for their own sake. Its historical material — drawn from the classical authors and from van Dale’s learning — is marshalled for a double purpose: to explain the oracles naturalistically, and to dismantle a cherished piece of Christian apologetics.
Oracles as imposture
The core of the argument is that the machinery of the oracles was a political and priestly invention. Fontenelle presents the oracles as an instrument of government: the early legislators and priests of the pagan world, he suggests, found in the pretense of divine consultation a means of lending authority to their laws and of managing the people. The responses were deliberately ambiguous, so that whatever happened the oracle could be credited with foresight; the sanctuaries were maintained by those who profited from the offerings of consulters; and the “inspiration” of the priestesses was produced and staged rather than received.
In this connection the book examines the mechanics of the most famous sanctuaries — above all Delphi — and the characteristic tricks of the trade: equivocal answers, the exploitation of the consulter’s hopes, and the various physical devices and confederacies by which a fraudulent voice could be made to seem divine. Fontenelle treats the ecstatic transports of the Pythia in the same spirit, as something that could be explained by the conditions of the place and the manipulation of the priest, rather than by any indwelling power. The general principle is his guiding rule throughout: where a natural and human explanation is available, there is no warrant for invoking a supernatural one.
Against the demons: the quarrel with the Fathers
Much of the book’s originality and much of its bite lie in its treatment of the Church Fathers. The standard Christian account, inherited from the apologists and repeated by learned divines, held that the pagan oracles had been real — but that the beings who spoke in them were demons, who foretold the future or counterfeited predictions in order to keep mankind in error.
Fontenelle refuses this concession. He argues that the Fathers, whose intentions he does not disparage, were too credulous: in their zeal to credit the testimony of antiquity and to magnify the power of the enemy they were fighting, they accepted as fact what was in truth only the fraud of the pagan priests. To attribute the oracles to demons is, on his account, to do the demons more honour than they deserve and to leave standing a superstition that reason should abolish. The argument is deliberately provocative, since it removes a familiar weapon from the apologetic arsenal: Christians had long used the oracles, and their silencing, as evidence for the truth of their religion.
The chronology: oracles did not cease at Christ’s birth
The apologetic commonplace that Fontenelle attacks most directly is the claim that the oracles fell silent at the coming of Christ. He denies the chronology. The oracles, he maintains, continued to be consulted and to give answers long after the birth of Christ — for centuries, in fact — and the testimonies adduced to show an immediate and universal cessation do not bear examination. The decline, when it came, was gradual, uneven, and local, not a sudden miraculous extinction coinciding with the Nativity.
Fontenelle’s most celebrated piece of argument belongs here: his discussion of Plutarch’s story of the pilot Thamus, who, sailing past the Echinades, heard a voice calling on him to announce that “the great Pan is dead.” This tale had been taken up by Christian writers as a report of the death of the demons at the crucifixion and hence of the end of the oracles. Fontenelle examines it coolly and offers natural explanations — a rumour, a misunderstanding, the death of some being or personage named Pan — and concludes that the story, whatever it means, cannot carry the weight placed on it. The episode is characteristic of the book’s method: a famous and much-allegorized anecdote is taken apart, and its supernatural interpretation is shown to rest on nothing but the will to believe.
Why the oracles declined
Having denied the miraculous cessation, Fontenelle must supply an alternative account of the decline, and he does so in terms of natural and political causes. The oracles lost credit as philosophy advanced and as the educated classes ceased to believe in them; the frauds were detected and exposed, and contempt followed. Political changes mattered too: the growth of Roman power, the depopulation or decline of the cities that maintained the sanctuaries, the withdrawal of the patronage and prestige on which the priesthoods depended, and eventually the legislation and ascendancy of Christianity all contributed to the same result. The extinction of the oracles was thus the slow working of human causes — enlightenment, political change, and the loss of the credulity on which the institution lived — and not a single decisive event.
The book’s most general lesson, stated and restated in various forms, concerns the origin of religion in policy and credulity. Fontenelle treats the pagan oracles as an instructive case of how religious authority is manufactured and how it decays, and he writes with the detached, urbane irony of a man of letters addressing educated readers rather than the erudite few. His prose is brief, pointed, and epigrammatic; the heavy documentary apparatus is van Dale’s, but the argument, the organization, and the manner are Fontenelle’s own.
Character of the work
Histoire des oracles is a compact essay rather than a systematic treatise. It proceeds thematically — the origin and institution of the oracles, the frauds of the priests, the errors of the Fathers, the chronology of the decline, the examination of particular famous cases such as the death of Pan, and the natural causes of the final extinction — rather than by a continuous narrative. Its learning is worn lightly and put to controversial use. The work is at once a piece of historical criticism, a rationalist assault on superstition, and a discreet but unmistakable critique of the credulity of Christian apologetics, which is why it was read in its own time as a dangerous book as well as an ingenious one.
The critique of testimony
The book is as much an essay in historical evidence as in religious controversy. Fontenelle asks how stories about oracles were formed, transmitted, and credited. He is attentive to the gap between an event and its report, to the taste for the marvellous, to the interests of those who repeat and those who record, and to the ease with which a natural incident becomes a prodigy. His handling of Thamus is therefore not an isolated exercise but an example of a general rule: extraordinary ancient testimony is to be suspected in proportion to its distance from reliable witnesses and to the strength of the desire to believe it. The argument is not that every oracle was a fraud, but that the evidence does not sustain the supernatural account, and that human explanations — chance, ambiguity, enthusiasm, political calculation, and legend — are sufficient.
Oracles as an institution
Fontenelle treats the oracle less as a theological mystery than as a social and political institution. Its credit depended on organisation, ceremony, and the interests of priests and cities; its answers were framed to preserve reputation, often by ambiguity or delay; and its authority rose or fell with the credulity and political convenience of those who consulted it. This institutional view is central to the book’s polemic: once oracles are seen as human arrangements serving human purposes, their extinction no longer needs a miraculous cause. The same perspective allows Fontenelle to compare pagan superstition with other forms of religious imposture without singling out antiquity as uniquely benighted.
The Fathers and the danger of bad proofs
The book’s controversial edge lies in its treatment of the early Christian writers. Fontenelle treats the Fathers as witnesses whose reports must be judged by ordinary historical rules rather than as authorities exempt from criticism. He suggests that in their zeal to show the power of Christianity over demons they repeated popular tales and turned the silence of the oracles into a miracle. For the book, this is a strategic error: a religion whose truth is thought to depend on such anecdotes is exposed when the anecdotes fail. The argument thus separates the credibility of Christian doctrine from the credibility of a particular apologetic commonplace, and it warns against defending sacred history with profane credulity.
Significance
The book’s importance lies in this combination of erudition and philosophical ease. It turns a learned controversy over pagan cults into a general lesson about evidence, custom, and the social manufacture of belief. Its rationalism is not systematic or metaphysical but historical and psychological: it explains belief by interest, habit, and imagination, and it explains the decline of belief by the same causes. In doing so it offers a model of critical history writing addressed to polite society, in which a mass of antiquarian learning is made to yield a clear and disabused view of human credulity.
