“When men stop believing in God, they believe in everything”

“When men stop believing in God, they believe in everything” is a maxim about the hunger for meaning that can turn uncertainty into credulity. In the novel, its force lies in the movement it describes: when a transcendent explanation no longer holds, an all-encompassing conspiracy can take its place, and the search for a secret can become more compelling than any answer it might disclose.

The maxim and its context

The narrator recalls hearing the saying from someone who may have been Rubinstein, in response to a question about belief in God; he also wonders whether Chesterton made a related observation. The uncertainty about attribution is part of the moment, but the claim itself is pointed: disbelief does not necessarily leave an empty space. It may instead encourage belief in “everything,” without the discrimination that would distinguish a supported explanation from an attractive pattern.

The surrounding discussion sets the maxim against the appeal of conspiratorial explanations. People blame an unseen plot for failures they cannot explain, while dictatorships invoke external enemies to bind their followers together. The narrator’s more paradoxical formulation is that a secret society might exist whose plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists. The joke exposes a serious mechanism: the belief in a hidden design can explain frustration by assigning it an agent, even when the design itself has been invented.

From playful connections to belief

The maxim also illuminates how the three researchers’ invented Plan gains force. At first, they treat their associations as a parody of the reasoning used by their esoteric sources. They recognize that their leaps are unwarranted and would be ashamed to claim that they truly believe them. Yet gathering evidence and repeatedly connecting one thing to another makes the procedure habitual. The narrator distinguishes their different degrees of entanglement: he believes daily life with Lia and the baby leaves him least affected; Diotallevi trains himself to think like a Diabolical; Belbo identifies with the game more consciously. They are, in the narrator’s retrospective account, becoming addicted, corrupted, and converted in different ways.

The decisive loss is their capacity to tell similarity from identity, or metaphor from reality. The Plan’s construction makes this confusion visible: the researchers invent it, but its believers fit fragments of their own disordered mythologies into its network of analogy, resemblance, and suspicion. The maxim therefore describes more than a general change in religious belief. It clarifies how an interpretive habit can supply its own apparent evidence, turning the absence of a reliable explanation into permission to accept an unlimited number of explanations.

The Plan becomes consequential

The invented Plan does not remain harmless once others believe in it. The narrator observes that if a plan is invented and other people carry it out, it exists in its consequences. Its adherents come to see themselves as having belonged to it for ages, identifying scattered fragments of their mythology as moments in a single, irrefutable design. The researchers’ fiction thus acquires social reality without acquiring a factual foundation.

The same logic appears in the maxim about the Templars: if even one fact in the universe is allowed not to disclose a mystery, Hermetic thought is violated. The comic extension of that premise eventually admits Minnie Mouse into the system and makes the Templars relevant to everything. The humor marks the point at which interpretation has ceased to set limits on itself. Under such a rule, no counterexample can end the search; every stray detail can be recruited as confirmation.

The secret without content

The narrator’s reflection on the Plan’s final secret gives the maxim a darker consequence. A secret is imagined as the answer that would end frustration or bring salvation, but once revealed it is liable to disappoint. The secret’s power depends on its remaining unknown. The narrator calls it an empty secret: meanings lead onward to further meanings, so initiation becomes the practice of never stopping rather than the arrival at a final truth.

This framework explains why Belbo’s refusal to disclose a secret strengthens the believers’ conviction that he possesses one. The more he denies it, the larger it becomes in their eyes; they treat his refusal as evidence that the secret is genuine. Their belief has closed around itself: disclosure would end the mystery, while silence confirms it. In this way, the maxim is not merely a warning that people may believe too much. It identifies the appetite that lets a fabricated mystery command real allegiance, until the search for certainty sustains itself precisely by never finding anything that could settle it.