Ignacio Ramírez

In 1836 or 1837 a poorly dressed young man of about eighteen stood up before the Academia de Letrán, a literary society in Mexico City, to read the paper that would admit him as a member. He held a fistful of papers, and, as one of the men in the room remembered, "he read in a sure and insolent voice the title, which said: There is no God."¹²³

The room erupted. The rector of the college objected that he could not allow such a thing to be read in a house of education. The president of the society, the poet and statesman Andrés Quintana Roo, answered: "I do not preside where there is a gag."⁴⁵⁶ So Ignacio Ramírez read his paper, and for the rest of his life he was the man who had said, in public, in Catholic Mexico, "No hay Dios." This chapter follows him from that evening into the Constituent Congress, the cabinet of Benito Juárez and the prisons of three governments, and asks what that unbelief became when its owner helped write the laws of a republic. (The translations from Spanish in this chapter are the book's own.)

A liberal's son

He was born in San Miguel el Grande, now San Miguel de Allende, in June 1818; his first biographer gives the 22nd, a friend the 23rd.⁷⁸ His father, Lino Ramírez, was a liberal federalist who, as vice-governor of Querétaro in 1833, carried out what his son's biographer called "the first Reform laws." In 1834 Santa Anna's forces took the state, and the family was driven out.⁹¹⁰ No source describes a devout childhood. On the belief timeline, his faith stands only for being born a Mexican Catholic in a liberal family.

What happened next is the strangest part of his story. His friend Guillermo Prieto says that during the family's persecution the boy hid in the Franciscan convent in Mexico City, for reasons Prieto did not know, and learned the life of the friars "in all its details."¹¹ He read in the cathedral library, where a priest, Padre Cortina, took a liking to him, and he spent his time "devouring the department of forbidden books."¹²¹³ He went on to the Colegio de San Gregorio under a liberal director, and, his biographer says, spent eight straight years reading; he went in "upright and slender" and came out "bent and ill."¹⁴¹⁵ His schoolfellows first mocked him as "volteriano" and then admired him as "the Voltaire of Mexico."¹⁶ The belief timeline places his doubt in those reading years.

No hay Dios

Then came the evening at the Academia. The accounts differ. Prieto, who was there, says the words were the title of the paper, and that the rector, Iturralde, and others spoke against letting it be read, until Quintana Roo refused to preside over a gag.¹⁴ A priest in the society, Father Guevara, defended the reading: "A sad gathering of literary men, that turns into a gathering of customs officers who declare thought contraband; and sad the God and sad the religion that tremble before this heap of papers, well or badly written!"¹⁷ The rector argued that God's beauty is seen in His works.¹⁸¹⁹ Another version, told later by a biographer who is not known to have been present, says the paper's thesis was "There is no God; the beings of Nature sustain themselves," that matter is eternal and needs no creator, and that the members rose in astonishment and then congratulated him; one of them said "Voltaire would not have spoken better on this matter."^20212223 Prieto thought the whole thing partly a pretext to show off years of study, and said that many who came as enemies left as admirers.²⁴

On the timeline, that evening is his declaration, and it came at eighteen, before almost anything else in his public life.

The Necromancer

In 1845 he and Prieto founded a satirical paper, Don Simplicio, and he took the pen name he kept for life: El Nigromante, the Necromancer.²⁵²⁶²⁷ The paper's last issue, in April 1846, came out blank; its editors were jailed.²⁸ In 1847 the governor of the State of México took him to Toluca, where he helped reopen the Instituto Literario and wrote a law sending the best poor Indigenous pupil of every town to study there; one of them was the boy Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, who became his pupil and his biographer.²⁹³⁰ He married Soledad Mateos at Toluca.³¹ As political chief of Tlaxcala in 1848 he banned a procession of the Virgin of Ocotlán; a crowd rioted and threatened him, and he left rather than give way.³² At the Instituto, parents demanded the removal of a teacher "suspected of heresy," and in January 1852 the new director announced that the "heretical ideas" spread in previous years must be banished.³³³⁴ Under Santa Anna he was jailed in chains at Tlatelolco until the dictator fled in 1855.³⁵

In the name of God

In 1856 a Constituent Congress met to write a new constitution. Its draft opened, as Mexican constitutions did, "In the name of God." On 7 July Ramírez rose against it. "The social pact proposed to us is founded on a fiction." "The name of God has everywhere produced divine right; and the history of divine right is written by the hand of the oppressors with the sweat and blood of peoples." "I judge it more dangerous than ridiculous to suppose ourselves interpreters of the Divinity." He spoke, he said, not as a mystic but as a profane man: "I have not come to this place prepared by ecstasies or revelations."^{36373839404142}

He lost. The Congress debated religious freedom for a week and voted, 65 to 46, not even to put the article to a vote; the Archbishop of Mexico, Lázaro de la Garza, told the president that he would rather bear any suffering the new laws could inflict than see the Church's rights encroached upon.⁴³⁴⁴ The Constitution signed on 5 February 1857 opened "In the name of God and with the authority of the Mexican people."⁴⁵

The Reform

The country went to war over the Constitution. When the president, Comonfort, turned against it at the end of 1857, Ramírez was arrested, escaped, was caught again and led to Querétaro on a donkey, and spent a year in prison.⁴⁶ In 1859, at Veracruz, Benito Juárez issued the Reform laws that separated Church and State, and Ramírez, his biographer says, was one of their chief promoters.⁴⁷ In 1861, when the liberals took the capital, Juárez made him Minister of Justice, Public Instruction and Development. He closed the remaining convents, separated Church and State in practice, suppressed the old University, and ordered a national library built from the convents' books; in Puebla he turned the Jesuit church into a library with observatories.⁴⁸⁴⁹

Here the historian Justo Sierra drew the sharpest line. In Juárez's cabinet, he wrote, the other liberals said they made war on the abuses of the clergy, not on the Church; Ramírez, as Sierra reports him, said that their duty was "to destroy the Christian or Catholic religious principle so that society, freed, may walk."⁵⁰⁵¹ Sierra gives no source for the words. He contrasted the Reform leader Melchor Ocampo, who "was not a man of proud and rigid unbelief, like Ignacio Ramírez."⁵²⁵³ And Sierra stated the other side fairly: the conservatives and the clergy held that since the whole attack fell on the Church, "it was Catholicism that was under attack," and fought, as they said, for altars and hearths.⁵⁴⁵⁵

Prisons and the Court

Under the French intervention he spoke for the Republic at Mazatlán, where he said that "The material world is God's first-born child; society is the daughter of man," and that every freedom, of teaching, assembly, trade, the press and worship, was "nothing but the freedom of the human intelligence."⁵⁶⁵⁷⁵⁸ In July 1866 Maximilian's government arrested him with dozens of others and deported him toward Yucatán.⁵⁹⁶⁰ When the Republic was restored in 1867 he went back to journalism, and from 1868 until his death he sat on the Supreme Court.⁶¹⁶²

His late writings did not soften. In 1871 he attacked state-backed religious instruction: "Do we want the priest to accompany us in the cradle, in the marriage bed, in the tribune, in the courts, in pleasures, in misfortunes and even at the doors of death?" "When did God authorize some obscure friars and clerics to condense his words?" But he drew a line that he kept all his life: "A government cannot be atheist, just as it cannot be Christian or Jewish; religiosity consists of belief, which is purely personal." And he was fair about morals: "Between you, blind believers, and us, free-thinkers, I do not see that vice goes with the one or the other more."^6364656667 In a speech of 1875 he said, "In sum, every religion, considered historically, is false, because it relates incredible events," and "for History there is no infallibility but that of science."⁶⁸⁶⁹⁷⁰ In a dialogue he wrote, he declined the name "materialism," but said: "unbelief is the daughter of science."⁷¹

The death of a philosopher

His wife died in 1874, and his biographer says it broke him.⁷² He died in Mexico City in June 1879, after three days in bed, with only his brother and Altamirano beside him. Altamirano wrote: "we watched, moved and silent, that agony like that of a philosopher of ancient times." No priest is mentioned.⁷³⁷⁴ His body lay in state in the Chamber of Deputies, guarded by students and Masons, and he was buried at Tepeyac.⁷⁵ In 1889 a statue of him was unveiled on the Paseo de la Reforma.⁷⁶

Did his unbelief change shape?

It did not retreat. The eighteen-year-old who read "No hay Dios" to the Academia was still, at fifty-seven, calling every religion historically false and science the only infallibility. What changed was the work it did. In youth it was a provocation and a show of learning; in the 1850s and 1860s it became law, the separation of Church and State, the closing of convents, the national library. His unbelief came from a liberal family persecuted by a clerical government, from years among the friars and the forbidden books, and from a conviction that "divine right" had always been the oppressors' tool. And he kept a distinction many of his enemies and some of his friends missed: he wanted the state to be neither Catholic nor atheist, and he left belief to the conscience of each person.

Charles Bradlaugh, who fought in another Parliament against the religious oath, has his own chapter in this book.