The Specters of Antireligious Rationality Fabula and figmentum in the Theophrastus redivivus

The Theophrastus Redivivus, a materialist and atheist treatise, attacks religion as human invention foreign to nature. Condemning everything that surpasses the natural rationality based on sense experience, it proposes a critique of the imagination, understood as a productive faculty, following two axes: hermeneutical (fabula, linguistic creation) and practical (figmentum, fabrication.) But this naturalist critique exploits arguments similar to those of religion which haunts it like a ghost.