  A second piece of suggestive evidence for Gassendi's materialism is historiographical and rhetorical in character. Epicurus and Lucretius were the great ancient materialists, Gassendi is their great early modern exponent, hence Gassendi too was a materialist—his Church-oriented misgivings notwithstanding. This thesis requires thinking of Gassendi as holding closeted views relative to the Church and Holy Writ, and indeed many of his views are highly nuanced in this regard (q.v. his stance on Galileo). It is not clear, however, that Gassendi intends anything other than a carefully delimited set of accounts of materialist ilk, within what he considers to be the proper realm of the physical. Strictly speaking, though, materialism is not a doctrine by degrees, and that Gassendi's proposed realm of the material extends beyond the reach of other, competing views of his time does not make him a materialist in the pure sense.