In a little fable, Diderot tells us of a man wandering through a dark forest by the light of a single torch that guides his step. A stranger approaches him and advises him that he will see much better once he has put out his torch. “The stranger,” the philosophe remarks drily, “was a theologian.”

From Philipp Blom’s A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment, New York: Basic Books, 2010, p. 253.