Religion

The Epicureans, who had no religion at all, recommended withdrawal from public affairs, study, and concord. Their sect was a society of friends, for their principal dogma was friendship. Atticus, Lucretius, Memmius, and men of that stamp could live together very decently, and this is seen in every country. Philosophize among yourselves as much as you please. I seem to hear connoisseurs giving a concert of learned and refined music; but take care not to perform this concert before the ignorant and brutal rabble — they might smash your instruments over your heads. If you have a village to govern, it must have a religion.

I am not speaking here of our own; it is the only good one, the only necessary one, the only proven one, and the second to be revealed.

Could the human mind — I will not say adopt a religion approaching ours, but one less bad than all the other religions in the universe combined? And what would such a religion be?

Would it not be the one that proposed to us the worship of the Supreme Being, unique, infinite, eternal, maker of the world, who moves and vivifies it — cui nec simile nec secundum [to whom there is no equal or second] — the one that would unite us to this Being of beings as the reward of our virtues, and separate us from it as the punishment of our crimes?

The one that admitted very few dogmas invented by proud folly — those eternal subjects of dispute — the one that taught a pure morality about which no one ever disputed?

The one that did not make the essence of worship consist in vain ceremonies — such as spitting in your mouth, or removing a piece of your foreskin, or cutting off a testicle — seeing that one can fulfill all the duties of society with two testicles and an intact foreskin, and without anyone spitting in your mouth?

The one of serving one’s neighbor for the love of God, rather than persecuting him, slaughtering him in God’s name; the one that would tolerate all others, and that, meriting thereby the goodwill of all, alone would be capable of making the human race a people of brothers?

The one that had august ceremonies that would strike the common people, without having mysteries that could revolt the wise and irritate the unbelievers?

The one that offered men more encouragement to the social virtues than expiations for perversities?

The one that secured to its ministers a sufficiently honorable income to allow them to subsist with decency, and never let them usurp dignities and a power that could make tyrants of them? The one that established comfortable retreats for old age and sickness, but never for idleness?

A great part of this religion is already in the heart of several princes, and it will be dominant as soon as the articles of perpetual peace that the Abbé de Saint-Pierre proposed are signed by all the potentates.

I was meditating this night; I was absorbed in the contemplation of nature; I was admiring the immensity, the course, the relations of those infinite globes which the common people do not know how to admire.

I admired still more the intelligence that presides over these vast mechanisms. I said to myself: “One must be blind not to be dazzled by this spectacle; one must be stupid not to recognize its author; one must be mad not to worship it. What tribute of adoration should I render him? Should not this tribute be the same throughout all the extent of space, since it is the same supreme power that reigns equally throughout that extent? Does a thinking being who inhabits a star of the Milky Way owe him not the same homage as the thinking being on this little globe where we are? Light is uniform for the star of Sirius and for us; morality must be uniform. If a feeling and thinking animal in Sirius is born of a tender father and mother who were concerned with its happiness, it owes them as much love and care as we here owe to our parents. If someone in the Milky Way sees a crippled pauper, if he can relieve him and does not do so, he is guilty before all the globes. The heart has the same duties everywhere: on the steps of the throne of God, if he has a throne; and in the depths of the abyss, if there is an abyss.”

I was plunged in these thoughts when one of those spirits who fill the spaces between worlds descended toward me. I recognized that same aerial creature who had once appeared to me to teach me how much the judgments of God differ from ours, and how much a good deed is preferable to controversy.

It transported me into a desert covered with piled-up bones; and between these heaps of the dead there were avenues of ever-green trees, and at the end of each avenue a tall man of august aspect, who gazed with compassion upon these sad remains.

“Alas! my archangel,” I said to it, “where have you brought me?”

“To desolation,” it answered.

“And who are these handsome patriarchs I see, motionless and moved to grief, at the end of these green avenues, who seem to weep over this innumerable crowd of the dead?”

“You will know, poor human creature,” replied the spirit of the spaces between worlds, “but first you must weep.”

It began with the first heap.

“These,” it said, “are the twenty-three thousand Jews who danced before a calf, together with the twenty-four thousand who were killed over Midianite women. The number massacred for similar offenses or errors comes to nearly three hundred thousand.

“In the avenues beyond are the charnel-houses of Christians slaughtered by one another over metaphysical disputes. They are divided into several heaps of four centuries each. One single heap would have reached to heaven; they had to be separated.”

“What!” I cried, “brothers have treated their brothers this way, and I have the misfortune to belong to this brotherhood!”

“Here,” said the spirit, “are the twelve million Americans killed in their own country because they had not been baptized.”

“Ah, my God! Why did you not leave these horrible bones to dry in the hemisphere where their bodies were born, where they were given over to so many different deaths? Why gather here all these abominable monuments of barbarity and fanaticism?”

“To instruct you.”

“Since you wish to instruct me,” I said to the spirit, “tell me whether there were other peoples besides the Christians and Jews for whom zeal and religion — unhappily turned to fanaticism — inspired such horrible cruelties.”

“Yes,” it told me; “the Mohammedans defiled themselves with the same inhumanities, but rarely; and when they were asked for amman — mercy — and offered tribute, they forgave. As for other nations, there has not been one since the beginning of the world that ever made war purely for religion. Follow me now.”

I followed it.

A little beyond these piles of the dead we found other piles: these were sacks of gold and silver, and each had its label: “Substance of heretics massacred in the 18th century, the 17th, the 16th,” and so back up: “Gold and silver of slaughtered Americans, etc., etc.” And all these piles were surmounted by crosses, miters, croziers, tiaras encrusted with jewels.

“What! my spirit, it was in order to have these riches that all these dead were heaped up?”

“Yes, my son.”

I shed tears; and when I had merited through my grief that he should lead me to the end of the green avenues, he led me there.

“Contemplate,” he said, “the heroes of humanity, who have been the benefactors of the earth, and who have all joined together to banish from the world, as far as they could, violence and plunder. Question them.”

I ran to the first of the band; he had a crown on his head and a small censer in his hand; I humbly asked his name.

“I am Numa Pompilius,” he told me; “I succeeded a brigand, and had brigands to govern: I taught them virtue and the worship of God; they forgot more than once, after me, the one and the other; I forbade any image in the temples, because the Divinity that animates nature cannot be represented. The Romans under my reign had neither wars nor seditions, and my religion did only good. All the neighboring peoples came to honor my funeral, which has happened to me alone.”

I kissed his hand and went to the second; this was a beautiful old man of about a hundred years, dressed in a white robe: he was placing his middle finger to his lips, and with the other hand he was throwing beans behind him. I recognized Pythagoras. He assured me that he had never had a golden thigh, and that he had not been a cock; but that he had governed the Crotoniates with as much justice as Numa governed the Romans, at about the same time, and that this justice was the most necessary and the rarest thing in the world. I learned that the Pythagoreans made their examination of conscience twice a day. Honorable people! And how far we are from them! But we, who for thirteen hundred years have been nothing but murderers, we say that those wise men were arrogant.

I said nothing to Pythagoras to please him, and passed to Zoroaster, who was occupied in concentrating celestial fire in the focus of a concave mirror, in the middle of a vestibule with a hundred doors, all of which lead to wisdom. On the principal of these doors I read these words, which are the summary of all morality, and which abridge all the disputes of the casuists:

“When in doubt whether an action is good or bad, abstain.”

“Certainly,” I said to my spirit, “the barbarians who immolated all the victims whose bones I have seen did not read these fine words.”

We then saw Zaleucus, Thales, Anaximander, and all the sages who had sought truth and practiced virtue. When we came to Socrates, I recognized him quickly by his flat nose.

“Well,” I said to him, “here you are among the intimates of the Most High! All the inhabitants of Europe, except the Turks and Crimean Tartars who know nothing, speak your name with respect. It is revered, it is loved, that great name, to the point that people have wanted to know those of your persecutors. Melitus and Anytus are known because of you, just as Ravaillac is known because of Henri IV; but I know only the name Anytus; I do not know precisely who was that wretch who slandered you and finally managed to have you condemned to the hemlock.”

“I have never thought of that man since my adventure,” Socrates answered me; “but since you remind me of him, I pity him greatly. He was a wicked priest who secretly traded in hides, a commerce considered shameful among us. He sent his two children to my school. The other disciples reproached them for their father the tanner; they were obliged to leave. The father, enraged, never rested until he had stirred up against me all the priests and all the sophists. The council of five hundred was persuaded that I was an impious man who did not believe that the Moon, Mercury, and Mars were gods. Indeed, I thought then as now that there is only one God, master of all nature. The judges handed me over to the poisoner of the republic; he shortened my life by a few days: I died peacefully at the age of seventy; and since that time I have lived a happy life with all these great men you see here, of whom I am the least.”

After enjoying for some time the conversation of Socrates, I advanced with my guide into a grove situated above the thickets where all these sages of antiquity seemed to savor a gentle rest.

I saw a man of a gentle and simple appearance, who seemed to me about thirty-five years old. He was casting from afar looks of compassion upon those heaps of whitened bones through which I had been led to arrive at the dwelling of the wise. I was astonished to find his feet swollen and bleeding, his hands the same, his side pierced, and his ribs flayed with lash-marks.

“Ah, good God!” I said to him, “is it possible that a just man, a wise man, should be in such a state? I have just seen one who was treated in a most odious manner; but there is no comparison between his torment and yours. Wicked priests and wicked judges poisoned him: was it also by priests and judges that you were murdered so cruelly?”

He answered yes with great affability.

“And who were these monsters?”

“They were hypocrites.”

“Ah! That says everything; I understand from that single word that they had to condemn you to the ultimate torment. Had you proved to them, as Socrates did, that the Moon was not a goddess and Mercury not a god?”

“No, these planets were not at issue. My compatriots did not know at all what a planet was; they were all rank ignorants. Their superstitions were entirely different from those of the Greeks.”

“Did you then wish to teach them a new religion?”

He insisted he was not teaching a new religion — only urging people to love God with all their heart, and their neighbor as themselves. “Judge whether this precept is not as old as the universe; judge whether I was bringing them a new cult. I never ceased telling them that I had come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.”

“What! These wretches had not even to reproach you with having departed from their laws?”

“Certainly not.”

“Why then did they put you in the state I see you in?”

“What do you wish me to say? They were very proud and self-interested. They saw that I knew them; they learned that I was making them known to the citizens; they were the stronger; they took my life: and those like them will always do the same, if they can, to whoever has rendered them too much justice.”

“But — did you say nothing, do nothing that could serve them as a pretext?”

“Everything serves as a pretext to the wicked.”

“Did you not tell them once that you had come to bring the sword and not peace?”

“That is a copyist’s error; I told them that I was bringing peace, and not the sword. I never wrote anything; what I said could have been changed without bad intention.”

“You thus contributed nothing through your words — however poorly rendered or interpreted — to those terrible heaps of bones I saw on my way to consult you?”

“I could only see with horror those who made themselves guilty of all those murders.”

“And those monuments of power and wealth, of pride and avarice — those treasures, those ornaments, those signs of grandeur I saw accumulated along the road while seeking wisdom — do they come from you?”

“That is impossible; I and mine lived in poverty and lowliness: my greatness was only in virtue.”

I was about to beg him to be good enough to tell me exactly who he was. My guide warned me not to do so. It told me I was not made to understand those sublime mysteries. I entreated him only to tell me in what true religion consisted.

“Have I not already told you? Love God, and your neighbor as yourself.”

“What! In loving God, could one eat meat on Friday?”

“I always ate what was given me: for I was too poor to invite anyone to dinner.”

“In loving God, in being just, could one not be prudent enough not to confide all the adventures of one’s life to a stranger?”

“That is how I always proceeded.”

“Could I, by doing good, excuse myself from making a pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostela?”

“I was never in that country.”

“Need I confine myself to a retreat with fools?”

“For my part, I always made little journeys from town to town.”

“Must I take sides for the Greek Church or the Latin?”

“When I was in the world, I made no distinction between the Jew and the Samaritan.”

“Well then, if it is so, I take you for my only master.” Then he gave me a nod of his head that filled me with consolation.

The vision disappeared, and a good conscience remained.

First Question

The Bishop of Worcester, Warburton, author of one of the most learned works ever written, expresses himself thus, page 8, volume I: “A religion, a society not founded on belief in another life, must be sustained by an extraordinary providence. Judaism is not founded on belief in another life: therefore Judaism was sustained by an extraordinary providence.”

Several theologians rose up against him; and as one turns all arguments against their authors, his was so turned, and they said to him:

“Any religion not founded on the dogma of the immortality of the soul, and on eternal punishments and rewards, is necessarily false: now Judaism did not know these dogmas; therefore Judaism, far from being sustained by Providence, was — by your principles — a false and barbarous religion that attacked Providence.”

This bishop had some other adversaries who maintained that the immortality of the soul was known among the Jews even in the time of Moses; but he proved very evidently that neither the Decalogue, nor Leviticus, nor Deuteronomy had said a single word about this belief, and that it is ridiculous to want to twist and corrupt a few passages in other books in order to extract a truth that is not announced in the book of the law.

The Bishop, having written four volumes to demonstrate that the Judaic law proposed neither punishments nor rewards after death, was never able to answer his adversaries in a fully satisfying manner. They said to him: “Either Moses knew this dogma, and then he deceived the Jews by not revealing it; or he was ignorant of it, and in that case he did not know enough to found a good religion. Indeed, if his religion had been good, why would it have been abolished? A true religion must be for all times and all places; it must be like the light of the sun, which illuminates all peoples and all generations.”

This prelate, enlightened as he is, had great difficulty extricating himself from all these difficulties; but what system is exempt from them?

Second Question

Another scholar far more philosophical — one of the most profound metaphysicians of our day — gives strong reasons to prove that polytheism was the first religion of mankind, and that men began to believe in several gods before reason was enlightened enough to recognize only one Supreme Being.

I venture to believe, on the contrary, that men began by recognizing one God, and that human weakness afterward adopted several; and here is how I conceive the matter:

It is undeniable that there were villages before large cities were built, and that all men were divided into small republics before being united in great empires. It is quite natural that a village frightened by thunder, afflicted by the loss of its harvests, maltreated by the neighboring village, feeling its weakness every day, feeling everywhere an invisible power, would soon say: There is some being above us who does us good and evil.

It seems to me impossible that it should have said: There are two powers. For why several? In every domain one begins with the simple, then comes the composite, and often in the end one returns to the simple through superior illumination. Such is the march of the human mind.

What is this being that would have been first invoked? Would it be the sun, would it be the moon? I do not think so. Let us examine what happens with children; they are roughly what ignorant men are. They are not struck by the beauty or the utility of the star that animates nature, nor by the assistance the moon lends us, nor by the regular variations of its course; they do not think about it — they are too accustomed to it. One worships, invokes, desires to appease only what one fears; all children see the sky with indifference; but let thunder rumble, they tremble, they go to hide. The first men doubtless did the same. Only a kind of philosopher could have noticed the course of the stars, caused them to be admired, caused them to be worshiped; but simple tillers of the soil without any learning did not know enough to embrace so noble an error.

A village would therefore have confined itself to saying: There is a power that thunders, that hails upon us, that kills our children: let us appease it; but how to appease it? We have seen that we have calmed the anger of irritated people with small gifts; let us therefore make small gifts to this power. We must also give it a name. The first that offers itself is that of chief, of master, of lord; this power is therefore called milord. This is probably the reason why the Egyptians called their god Knef; the Syrians, Adoni; the neighboring peoples, Baal, or Bel, or Melch, or Moloch; the Scythians, Papaeus: all words signifying lord, master.

This is how almost all of America was found divided into a multitude of small communities, all of which had their protecting god. Even the Mexicans and Peruvians, who were great nations, had only one god: one worshiped Manco Capac, the other the god of war. The Mexicans gave their warrior god the name Huitzilopochtli, just as the Hebrews had called their Lord Sabaoth.

It is not through a superior and cultivated reason that all peoples thus began to recognize a single divinity; if they had been philosophers, they would have worshiped the god of all nature, and not the god of a village; they would have examined those infinite relations among all beings that prove a creating and preserving being; but they examined nothing, they felt. That is the progress of our weak understanding; each village felt its weakness and the need it had for a strong protector. It imagined this tutelary and terrible being residing in the neighboring forest, or on the mountain, or in a cloud. It imagined only one, because the village had only one war chief. It imagined it corporeal, because it was impossible to represent it otherwise. It could not believe that the neighboring village did not also have its god. That is why Jephthah said to the inhabitants of Moab: “You legitimately possess what your god Chemosh caused you to conquer; you must let us enjoy what our god has given us by his victories.” (Judges XI, 24.)

This speech, made by a foreigner to other foreigners, is very remarkable. The Jews and the Moabites had dispossessed the native inhabitants of the country; neither had any right but that of force, and one said to the other: Your god protected you in your usurpation; suffer that my god protect me in mine.

Jeremiah and Amos both ask “what reason the god Milcom had for taking possession of the land of Gad.” It seems evident from these passages that antiquity attributed to each country a protecting god. Traces of this theology are still found in Homer.

It is quite natural that as the imagination of men became inflamed, and their minds acquired confused knowledge, they soon multiplied their gods and assigned protectors to the elements, to the seas, to the forests, to the springs, to the fields. The more they examined the stars, the more they were struck with admiration. How could one not worship the sun, when one worships the divinity of a brook? Once the first step is taken, the earth is soon covered with gods; and one descends at last from the stars to cats and onions.

Yet reason must in the end be perfected; time at last forms philosophers who see that neither onions, nor cats, nor even the stars, arranged the order of nature. All these philosophers — Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian, Scythian, Greek, and Roman — admit a Supreme God, rewarder and avenger.

They do not say so at first to the people: for whoever had spoken ill of onions and cats before old women and priests would have been stoned; whoever had reproached certain Egyptians with eating their gods would have been eaten himself, as indeed Juvenal reports that an Egyptian was killed and eaten raw in a dispute over doctrine.

But what was done? Orpheus and others established mysteries that the initiates swore by execrable oaths never to reveal, and the chief of these mysteries is the worship of one God. This great truth penetrates into half the earth; the number of initiates becomes immense: it is true that the old religion always subsists; but since it is not contrary to the dogma of the unity of God, it is allowed to subsist. And why should it be abolished? The Romans recognize the Deus optimus maximus; the Greeks have their Zeus, their Supreme God. All other divinities are only intermediate beings: heroes and emperors are placed in the rank of the gods — that is to say, of the blessed; but it is certain that Claudius, Octavian, Tiberius, and Caligula are not regarded as the creators of heaven and earth.

In a word, it appears proved that in the time of Augustus, all those who had a religion recognized one superior, eternal God, and several orders of secondary gods, whose cult was afterward called idolatry.

The laws of the Jews had never favored idolatry: for although they admitted malachim — angels, celestial beings of an inferior order — their law did not command that these secondary divinities should have a cult among them. They worshiped angels, it is true — that is, they prostrated themselves when they saw them; but since this did not happen often, there was neither ceremonial nor legal cult established for them. The cherubim of the ark received no homage. It is certain that the Jews — at least since Alexander — openly worshiped one God, just as the countless multitude of initiates worshiped him secretly in their mysteries.

Third Question

It was at this time — when the worship of a supreme God was universally established among all the wise men of Asia, Europe, and Africa — that the Christian religion was born.

Platonism greatly aided the understanding of its dogmas. The Logos, which in Plato signified the wisdom and reason of the Supreme Being, became in our tradition the Word and a second person of God. A profound metaphysics beyond human intelligence became an inaccessible sanctuary in which religion was enveloped.

We will not repeat here how Mary was later declared the mother of God; how the consubstantiality of the Father and the Word was established; and the procession of the Pneuma, the divine organ of the divine Logos; two natures and two wills resulting from the hypostasis; and finally the supreme manducation — the soul nourished as well as the body by the members and blood of the God-Man, worshiped and consumed in the form of bread, present to the eyes, perceptible to the taste, and yet annihilated. All the mysteries have been sublime.

From the second century men began to cast out demons in the name of Jesus; previously they were cast out in the name of Jehovah or Ihaho: for Saint Matthew reports that the enemies of Jesus having said that he cast out demons in the name of the prince of demons, he replied to them: “If it is by Beelzebub that I cast out demons, by whom do your children cast them out?”

No one knows at what time the Jews recognized Beelzebub — who was a foreign god — as prince of demons; but it is known (and it is Josephus who tells us) that there were in Jerusalem exorcists appointed to drive demons from the bodies of the possessed — that is to say, of men attacked by singular maladies which were then attributed in much of the earth to malevolent spirits.

These demons were driven out with the true pronunciation of Jehovah now lost, and with other ceremonies now forgotten.

This exorcism by Jehovah or by the other names of God was still in use in the early centuries of the Church. Origen, disputing with Celsus, says to him (§262): “If in invoking God, or in swearing by him, one names him the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, one will accomplish certain things by these names, whose nature and force are such that demons submit to those who pronounce them; but if one names him by another name, as the God of the roaring sea, the supplanter, these names will be without virtue. The name of Israel translated into Greek will accomplish nothing; but pronounce it in Hebrew, with the other required words, and you will effect the conjuration.”

The same Origen, in §19, says these remarkable words: “There are names that naturally have virtue, such as those used by the wise men among the Egyptians, the magi in Persia, the Brahmins in India. What is called magic is not a vain and chimerical art, as the Stoics and Epicureans maintain: neither the name of Sabaoth, nor that of Adonai, were made for created beings; but they belong to a mysterious theology that relates to the Creator; from this comes the virtue of these names when they are arranged and pronounced according to the rules, etc.”

Origen in speaking thus does not give his personal opinion; he only reports the universal belief. All religions then known admitted a kind of magic; and celestial magic and infernal magic were distinguished, necromancy and theurgy: everything was prodigy, divination, oracle. The Persians did not deny the miracles of the Egyptians, nor the Egyptians those of the Persians. God permitted the early Christians to be persuaded of oracles attributed to the sibyls, and still left them some unimportant errors that did not corrupt the foundation of religion.

One more thing very remarkable: the Christians of the first two centuries had a horror of temples, altars, and images. Origen confesses this, §347. Everything changed afterward with discipline, when the Church received a permanent form.

Fourth Question

Once a religion is legally established in a state, the courts are all occupied in preventing the renewal of most of the things done in that religion before it was publicly received. The founders assembled in secret in defiance of the magistrates; only public assemblies under the eyes of the law are permitted, and all associations that hide themselves from the law are forbidden. The old maxim was that one must obey God rather than men; the opposing maxim is received: that it is obeying God to follow the laws of the state. One heard of nothing but obsessions and possessions; the devil was then unchained upon the earth; the devil no longer leaves his dwelling today. Prodigies, predictions, were then necessary; they are admitted no longer: a man who predicted calamities in public squares would be committed to the madhouse. The founders secretly received money from the faithful; a man who collected money to dispose of it, without being authorized by law, would be taken up by the authorities. Thus none of the scaffolding that served to build the edifice is used anymore.

Fifth Question

After our holy religion, which is doubtless the only good one, what would be the least bad?

Would it not be the simplest? Would it not be the one that taught much morality and very few dogmas? The one that tended to make men just without making them absurd? The one that did not command belief in impossible, contradictory things, injurious to the Divinity and pernicious to the human race — and that did not dare threaten with eternal punishments whoever had common sense? Would it not be the one that did not support its creed with executioners, and that did not flood the earth with blood for unintelligible sophisms? The one in which an equivocation, a play on words, and two or three forged charters did not make a sovereign and a god of a priest who was frequently incestuous, murderous, and a poisoner? The one that did not subject kings to that priest? The one that taught only the worship of one God, justice, tolerance, and humanity?