These remarks were included in Lessius’s most important work, Divine Providence and the Immortality of the Soul (1612), a treatise directed “against atheists and politicians.” There had been some concern in recent years about the emergence of “atheism,” though at this date the term did not yet mean an outright denial of God’s existence. It usually referred to any belief that the writer deemed incorrect. For Lessius, “atheism” was a heresy of the past: the only “atheists” he could name were the ancient Greek philosophers. He was especially concerned about the “atomists”—Democritus, Epicurus,
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