His was on the other hand a distinctly jesting outlook upon religious beliefs, God, Christ, Paradise, angels and saints; and Charlemagne's prayer to God, the vision of the angel Michael upon earth and the voyage of Astolfo to the world of the Moon, his conversations with John the Evangelist, the deeds and words of the hermit with whom Angelica and Isabella find themselves, and finally those of the saintly hermit who baptises Ruggiero, accord with this laughing and almost mocking spirit. Here we do not find even the seriousness of the game and in the game, with which he treats of knightly doings; nor could there be, because relation towards religion admits only of complete reverence or complete irreverence. And Ariosto was irreverent, or what comes to the same thing, indifferent; his spirit was as areligious as it was aphilosophical, untormented with doubts, not concerned with human destiny, incurious as to the meaning and value of this world, which he saw and touched, and in which he loved and suffered. He was altogether outside the philosophy of the Renaissance, whether Ficino's or Pomponazzi's, as he was outside every sort of philosophy. This limits and as it were deprives of importance his mockeries and to salute him as some have done "the Voltaire of the Renaissance" or as a precursor of Voltaire, and Voltaire himself who so much enjoyed Ariosto's profanations of sacred things, maliciously underlining the witticism that escapes from the lips of St. John about "my much-praised Christ" (after having said that writers turn the true into the false, and the false into the true, and that he also had been a "writer" in the world), has given Ariosto a place which does not belong to him at all. Voltaire was not areligious or indifferent, and was only irreligious in so far as he attacked all historical religions with a religion of his own, which was deism or the religion of the reason; and for this reason his satires and his lampoons possess a polemical value, which is not to be found in the jests of Ariosto.