The name of the famous painting by Paul Gauguin goes back to Fenelon’s «Letters on Religion». In its present form it appeared presumably in 1794, after the Thermidorian coup, and not in a religious, but in a purely political context. The article also traces the prehistory of this sentence starting with the Gnostic work of the second century «Apocrypha of John».
Keywords
оrigin of familiar phrases; religion; life purpose; the Thermidorian coup; Aristotle; P. Gauguin; F. Fenelon; Ghazali; Petrarch; Pascal; Gassendi.