This soul, which you have imagined to be a substance, is therefore really only a faculty, granted by the Great Being, and not by a person. It is a property given to our organs, and not a substance. Man, his reason uncorrupted by metaphysics, could never imagine that he was double; that he was composed of two beings, the one mortal, visible, and palpable – the other immortal, invisible, and impalpable. Would it not require ages of controversy to arrive at this expedient of joining together two substances so dissimilar; tangible and intangible, simple and compound, invulnerable and suffering, eternal and fleeting?
Men have only supposed a soul by the same error which made them suppose in us a being called memory, which being they afterwards made a divinity.
They made this memory the mother of the Muses; they embodied the various talents of nature in so many goddesses, the daughters of memory. They also made a god of the secret power by which nature forms the blood of animals, and called it the god of sanguification. The Roman people indeed had similar gods for the faculties of eating and drinking, for the act of marriage, for the act of voiding excrements. They were so many particular souls, which produced in us all these actions. It was the metaphysics of the populace. This shameful and ridiculous superstition was evidently derived from that which imagined in man a small divine substance, different from man himself.
This substance is still admitted in all the schools; and with condescension we grant to the Great Being, to the Eternal Maker, to God, the permission of joining His concurrence to the soul. Thus we suppose, that for will and deed, both God and our souls are necessary.
But to concur signifies to aid, to participate. God therefore is only second with us; it is degrading Him; it is putting Him on a level with us, or making Him play the most inferior part. Take not from Him His rank and pre-eminence: make not of the Sovereign of Nature the mere servant of mankind.
Two species of reasoners, well credited in the world – atheists and theologians – will oppose our doubts.
The atheists will say, that in admitting reason in man and instinct in brutes, as properties, it is very useless to admit a God into this system; that God is still more incomprehensible than a soul; that it is unworthy a sage to believe that which he conceives not. They let fly against us all the arguments of Straton and Lucretius. We will answer them by one word only: "You exist; therefore there is a God."
Theologians will give us more trouble. They will first tell us: "We agree with you that God is the first cause of all; but He is not the only one." A high priest of Minerva says expressly: "The second agent operates by virtue of the first; the first induces a second; the second involves a third; all are acting by virtue of God, and He is the cause of all actions acting."
We will answer, with all the respect we owe to this high priest: "There is, and there can only exist, one true cause. All the others, which are subsequent, are but instruments. I discover a spring – I make use of it to move a machine; I discovered the spring and made the machine. I am the sole cause. That is undoubted."
The high priest will reply: "You take liberty away from men." I reply: "No; liberty consists in the faculty of willing, and in that of doing what you will, when nothing prevents you. God has made man upon these conditions, and he must be contented with them."
My priest will persist, and say, that we make God the author of sin. Then we shall answer him: "I am sorry for it; but God is made the author of sin in all systems, except in that of the atheists. For if He concurs with the actions of perverse men, as with those of the just, it is evident that to concur is to do, since He who concurs is also the creator of all."
If God alone permits sin, it is He who commits it; since to permit and to do is the same thing to the absolute master of all. If He foresees that men will do evil, he should not form men. We have never eluded the force of these ancient arguments; we have never weakened them. Whoever has produced all, has certainly produced good and evil. The system of absolute predestination, the doctrine of concurrence, equally plunge us into this labyrinth, from which we cannot extricate ourselves.
All that we can say is, that evil is for us, and not for God. Nero assassinates his preceptor and his mother; another murders his relations and neighbors; a high priest poisons, strangles, and beheads twenty Roman lords, on rising from the bed of his daughter. This is of no more importance to the Being, the Universal Soul of the World, than sheep eaten by the wolves or by us, or than flies devoured by spiders. There is no evil for the Great Being; to Him it is only the play of the great machine which incessantly moves by eternal laws. If the wicked become – whether during their lives or subsequently – more unhappy than those whom they have sacrificed to their passions; if they suffer as they have made others suffer, it is still an inevitable consequence of the immutable laws by which the Great Being necessarily acts. We know but a very small part of these laws; we have but a very weak portion of understanding; we have only resignation in our power. Of all systems, is not that which makes us acquainted with our insignificance the most reasonable? Men – as all philosophers of antiquity have said – made God in their own image; which is the reason why the first Anaxagoras, as ancient as Orpheus, expresses himself thus in his verses: "If the birds figured to themselves a God, he would have wings; that of horses would run with four legs."
The vulgar imagine God to be a king, who holds his seat of justice in his court. Tender hearts represent him as a father who takes care of his children. The sage attributes to Him no human affection. He acknowledges a necessary eternal power which animates all nature, and resigns himself to it.
General Reflection On Man.
It requires twenty years to raise man from the state of a plant, in which he abides in his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state, which is the lot of his earliest infancy, to that in which the maturity of reason begins to dawn. He has required thirty ages to become a little acquainted with his own bodily structure. He would require eternity to become acquainted with his soul. He requires but an instant to kill himself.
MARRIAGE
SECTION I
I once met with a reasoner who said: "Induce your subjects to marry as early as possible. Let them be exempt from taxes the first year; and let their portion be assessed on those who at the same age are in a state of celibacy.
"The more married men you have, the fewer crimes there will be. Examine the frightful columns of your criminal calendars; you will there find a hundred youths executed for one father of a family.
"Marriage renders men more virtuous and more wise. The father of a family is not willing to blush before his children; he is afraid to make shame their inheritance.
"Let your soldiers marry, and they will no longer desert. Bound to their families, they will be bound to their country. An unmarried soldier is frequently nothing but a vagabond, to whom it matters not whether he serves the king of Naples or the king of Morocco."
The Roman warriors were married: they fought for their wives and their children; and they made slaves of the wives and the children of other nations.
A great Italian politician, who was, besides, learned in the Eastern tongues, a thing rare among our politicians, said to me in my youth: "Caro figlio," remember that the Jews never had but one good institution – that of abhorring virginity. If that little nation of superstitious jobbers had not regarded marriage as the first of the human obligations – if there had been among them convents of nuns – they would have been inevitably lost.
The Marriage Contract.
Marriage is a contract in the law of nations, of which the Roman Catholics have made a sacrament.
But the sacrament and the contract are two very different things; with the one are connected the civil effects, with the other the graces of the church.
So when the contract is conformable to the law of nations, it must produce every civil effect. The absence of the sacrament can operate only in the privation of spiritual graces.
Such has been the jurisprudence of all ages, and of all nations, excepting the French. Such was the opinion of the most accredited fathers of the Church. Go through the Theodosian and Justinian codes, and you will find no law proscribing the marriages of persons of another creed, not even when contracted between them and Catholics.
It is true, that Constantius – that son of Constantine as cruel as his father – forbade the Jews, on pain of death, to marry Christian women; and that Valentinian, Theodosius, and Arcadius made the same prohibition, under the like penalty, to the Jewish women. But under the emperor Marcian these laws had ceased to be observed; and Justinian rejected them from his code. Besides, they were made against the Jews only; no one ever thought of applying them to the marriage of pagans or heretics with the followers of the prevailing religion.
Consult St. Augustine, and he will tell you that in his time the marriages of believers with unbelievers were not considered illicit, because no gospel text had condemned them: "Quæ matrimonia cum in fidelibus, nostris temporibus, jam non putantur esse peccata; quoniam in Novo Testamento nihil inde preceptum est, et ideo aut licere creditum est, aut velut dubium derelictum."
Augustine says, moreover, that these marriages often work the conversion of the unbelieving party. He cites the example of his own father, who embraced the Christian religion because his wife, Manica, professed Christianity. Clotilda, by the conversion of Clovis, and Theolinda, by that of Agilulf, king of the Lombards, rendered greater service to the Church than if they had married orthodox princes.
Consult the declaration of Pope Benedict XIV. of Nov. 4, 1741. You will find in it these words: "Quod vero spectat ad ea conjugia quæ, absque forma a Tridentino statuta, contrahuntur a catholicis cum hæreticis, sive catholicus vir hæriticam feminam ducat, sive catholica fæmina heretico viro nubat; si hujusmodi matrimonium sit contractum aut in posterum contracti contingat, Tridentini forma non servata, declarat Sanctitas sua, alio non concurrente impedimento, validum habendum esse, sciat conjux catholicus se istius matrimonii vinculo perpetuo ligatum." – With respect to such marriages as, transgressing the enactment of the Council of Trent, are contracted by Catholics with heretics; whether by a Catholic man with a heretical woman, or by a Catholic woman with a heretical man; if such matrimony already is, or hereafter shall be contracted, the rules of the council not being observed, his holiness declares, that if there be no other impediment, it shall be held valid, the Catholic man or woman understanding that he or she is by such matrimony bound until death.
By what astonishing contradiction is it, that the French laws in this matter are more severe than those of the Church? The first law by which this severity was established in France was the edict of Louis XIV., of November, 1680, which deserves to be repeated.
"Louis… The canons of the councils having forbidden marriages of Catholics with heretics, as a public scandal and a profanation of the sacrament, we have deemed it the more necessary to prevent them for the future, as we have found that the toleration of such marriages exposes Catholics to the continual temptation of perverting it, etc. For these causes… it is our will and pleasure, that in future our subjects of the Roman Catholic and Apostolic religion may not, under any pretext whatsoever, contract marriage with those of the pretended reformed religion, declaring such marriages to be invalid, and the issue of them illegitimate."
It is singular enough, that the laws of the Church should have been made the foundation for annulling marriages which the Church never annulled. In this edict we find the sacrament confounded with the civil contract; and from this confusion have proceeded the strange laws in France concerning marriage.
St. Augustine approved marriages of the orthodox with heretics, for he hoped that the faithful spouse would convert the other; and Louis XIV. condemns them, lest the heterodox should pervert the believer.
In Franche-Comté there exists a yet more cruel law. This is an edict of the archduke Albert and his wife Isabella, of Dec. 20, 1599, which forbids Catholics to marry heretics, on pain of confiscation of body and goods.
The same edict pronounces the same penalty on such as shall be convicted of eating mutton on Friday or Saturday. What laws! and what law-givers! – "A quels maîtres, grand Dieu, livrez-vous l'univers!"
SECTION II
If our laws reprove marriages of Catholics with persons of a different religion, do they grant the civil effects at least to marriages of French Protestants with French persons of the same sect?
There are now in the kingdom a million of Protestants; yet the validity of their marriage is still a question in the tribunals.
Here again is one of those cases in which our jurisprudence is contradictory to the decisions of the Church, and also to itself.
In the papal declaration, quoted in the foregoing section, Benedict XIV. decides that marriages of Protestants, contracted according to their rites, are no less valid than if they had been performed according to the forms established by the Council of Trent; and that a husband who turns Catholic cannot break this tie and form a new one with a person of his new religion.
Barak Levi, by birth a Jew, and a native of Haguenan, had there married Mendel Cerf, of the same town and the same religion.
This Jew came to Paris in 1752; and on May 13, 1754, he was baptized. He sent a summons to his wife at Haguenan to come and join him at Paris. In a second summons he consented that this wife, when she had come to join him, should continue to live in her own Jewish sect.
To these summonses Mendel Cerf replied that she would not return with him, and that she required him to send her, according to the Jewish forms, a bill of divorce, in order that she might marry another Jew.
Levi was not satisfied with this answer; he sent no bill of divorce; but he caused his wife to appear before the official of Strasburg, who, by a sentence of Sept. 7, 1754, declared that, in the sight of the Church, he was at liberty to marry a Catholic woman.
Furnished with this sentence, the Christianized Jew came into the diocese of Soissons, and there made promise of marriage to a young woman of Villeneuve. The clergyman refused to publish the banns. Levi communicated to him the summonses he had sent to his wife, the sentence of the official of Strasburg, and a certificate from the secretary of the bishopric of that place, attesting, that in that diocese baptized Jews had at all times been permitted to contract new marriages with Catholics, and that this usage had constantly been recognized by the Supreme Council of Colmar. But these documents appeared to the parson of Villeneuve to be insufficient. Levi was obliged to summon him before the official of Soissons.
This official did not think, like him of Strasburg, that the marriage of Levi with Mendel Cerf was null or dissoluble. By his sentence of Feb. 5, 1756, he declared the Jew's claim to be inadmissible. The latter appealed from this sentence to the Parliament of Paris, where he was not only opposed by the public ministry, but, by a decree of Jan. 2, 1758, the sentence was confirmed, and Levi was again forbidden to contract any marriage during the life of Mendel Cerf.
Here, then, a marriage contracted between French Jews, according to the Jewish rites, was declared valid by the first court in the kingdom.
But, some years afterwards, the same question was decided differently in another parliament, on the subject of a marriage contracted between two French Protestants, who had been married in the presence of their parents by a minister of their own communion. The Protestant spouse had, like the Jew, changed his religion; and after he had concluded a second marriage with a Catholic, the Parliament of Grenoble confirmed this second marriage, and declared the first to be null.
If we pass from jurisprudence to legislation, we shall find it as obscure on this important matter as on so many others.
A decree of the council, of Sept. 15, 1685, says: "Protestants may marry, provided, however, that it be in the presence of the principal officer of justice, and that the publication preceding such marriages shall be made at the royal see nearest the place of abode of each of the Protestants desirous of marrying, and at the audience only."
This decree was not revoked by the edict which, three weeks after, suppressed the Edict of Nantes. But after the declaration of May 14, 1724, drawn up by Cardinal Fleury, the judges would no longer preside over the marriages of Protestants, nor permit their banns to be published in their audiences.
By Article XV. of this law, the forms prescribed by the canons are to be observed in marriages, as well of new converts as of all the rest of the king's subjects.
This general expression, "all the rest of the king's subjects," has been thought to comprehend the Protestants, as well as the Catholics, and on this interpretation, such marriages of Protestants as were not solemnized according to the canonical forms have been annulled.
Nevertheless, it seems that the marriages of Protestants having been authorized by an express law, they cannot now be admitted but by another express law carrying with it this penalty. Besides, the term "new converts", mentioned in the declaration, appears to indicate that the term that follows relates to the Catholics only. In short, when the civil law is obscure or ambiguous, ought not the judges to decide according to the natural and the moral law?
Does it not result from all this that laws often have need of reformation, and princes of consulting better informed counsellors, rejecting priestly ministers, and distrusting courtiers in the garb of confessors?
MARY MAGDALEN
I must own that I know not where the author of the "Critical History of Jesus Christ" found that St. Mary Magdalen had a criminal intimacy (des complaisances criminelles) with the "Saviour of the world." He says (page 130, line 11 of the note) that this is an assertion of the Albigenses. I have never read this horrible blasphemy either in the history of the Albigenses, or in their profession of faith. It is one of the great many things of which I am ignorant. I know that the Albigenses had the dire misfortune of not being Roman Catholics; but, otherwise, it seems to me, they had the most profound reverence for the person of Jesus.
This author of the "Critical History of Jesus Christ" refers us to the "Christiade," a sort of poem in prose – granting that there are such things as poems in prose. I have, therefore, been obliged to consult the passage of the "Christiade" in which this accusation is made. It is in the fourth book or canto, page 335, note 1; the poet of the "Christiade" cites no authority. In an epic poem, indeed, citations may be spared; but great authorities are requisite in prose, when so grave an assertion is made – one which makes every Christian's hair stand erect.
Whether the Albigenses advanced this impiety or not, the only result is that the author of the "Christiade" sports on the brink of criminality. He somewhat imitates the famous sermon of Menot. He introduces us to Mary Magdalen, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, brilliant with all the charms of youth and beauty, burning with every desire, and immersed in every voluptuousness. According to him, she is a lady at court, exalted in birth and in riches; her brother Lazarus was count of Bethany, and herself marchioness of Magdalet. Martha had a splendid portion, but he does not tell us where her estates lay. "She had," says the man of the "Christiade," "a hundred servants, and a crowd of lovers; she might have threatened the liberty of the whole world. But riches, dignities, ambitions, grandeur, never were so dear to Magdalen as the seductive error which caused her to be named the sinner. Such was the sovereign beauty of the capital when the young and divine hero arrived there from the extremities of Galilee. Her other passions yielded to the ambition of subduing the hero of whom she had heard."
The author of the "Christiade" then imitates Virgil. The marchioness of Magdalet conjures her portioned sister to furnish her coquettish designs upon her young hero, as Dido employed her sister Anna to gain the pious Æneas.
She goes to hear Christ's sermon in the temple, although he never preached there. "Her heart flies before her to the hero she adores; she awaits but one favorable look to triumph over him, to subdue this master of hearts and make him her captive."
She then goes to him at the house of Simon the Leper, a very rich man, who was giving him a grand supper, although the women were never admitted at these feastings, especially among the Pharisees. She pours a large pot of perfumes upon his legs, wipes them with her beautiful fair hair, and kisses them.
I shall not inquire whether the picture which the author draws of Magdalen's holy transports is not more worldly than devout; whether the kisses given are not expressed rather too warmly; nor whether this fine hair with which she wipes her hero's legs, does not remind one too strongly of Trimalcion, who, at dinner, wiped his hands with the hair of a young and beautiful slave. He must himself have felt that his pictures might be fancied too glowing; for he anticipates criticism by giving some pieces from a sermon of Massillon's on Magdalen. One passage is as follows:
"Magdalen had sacrificed her reputation to the world. Her bashfulness and her birth at first defended her against the emotions of her passion; and it is most likely, that to the first shaft which assailed her, she opposed the barrier of her modesty and her pride; but when she had lent her ear to the serpent, and consulted her own wisdom, her heart was open to all assaults of passion. Magdalen loved the world, and thenceforward all was sacrificed to this love; neither the pride that springs from birth, nor the modesty which is the ornament of her sex, is spared in this sacrifice; nothing can withhold her; neither the railleries of worldlings, nor the infidelities of her infatuated lovers, whom she fain would please, but by whom she cannot make herself esteemed – for virtue only is estimable; nothing can make her ashamed; and like the prostitute in the "Apocalypse," she bears on her forehead the name of mystery; that is, she was veiled, and was no longer known but in the character of the foolish passion."
I have sought this passage in Massillon's sermons, but it certainly is not in the edition which I possess. I will venture to say more – it is not in his style.
The author of the "Christiade" should have informed us where he picked up this rhapsody of Massillon's, as he should have told us where he read that the Albigenses dared to impute to Jesus Christ an unworthy intercourse with Mary Magdalen.
As for the marchioness, she is not again mentioned in the work. The author spares us her voyage to Marseilles with Lazarus, and the rest of her adventures.
What could induce a man of learning, and sometimes of eloquence, as the author of the "Christiade" appears to be, to compose this pretended poem? It was, as he tells us in his preface, the example of Milton; but we well know how deceitful are examples. Milton, who – be it observed – did not hazard that weakly monstrosity, a poem in prose – Milton, who in his Paradise Lost, has, amid the multitude of harsh and obscure lines of which it is full, scattered some very fine blank verse – could not please any but fanatical Whigs, as the Abbé Grécourt says:
En chantant l'univers perdu pour une pomme,
Et Dieu pour le damner créant le premier homme.
..... By singing
How God made man on purpose for hell-fire,
And how a stolen apple damned us all.
He might delight the Presbyterians by making Sin cohabit with Death; by firing off twenty-four pounders in heaven; by making dryness fight with damp, and heat with cold; by cleaving angels in two, whose halves immediately joined again; by building a bridge over chaos; by representing the Messiah taking from a chest in heaven a great pair of compasses to describe the circuit of the earth, etc. Virgil and Horace would, perhaps, have thought these ideas rather strange. But if they succeeded in England by the aid of some very happy lines, the author of the "Christiade" was mistaken in expecting his romance to succeed without the assistance of fine verses, which are indeed very difficult to make.
But, says our author, one Jerome Vida, bishop of Alba, once wrote a very powerful "Christiade" in Latin verse, in which he transcribes many lines from Virgil. Well, my friend, why did you write yours in French prose? Why did not you, too, imitate Virgil?
But the late M. d'Escorbiac, of Toulouse, also wrote a "Christiade." Alas! why were you so unfortunate as to become the ape of M. d'Escorbiac?
But Milton, too, wrote his romance of the New Testament, his "Paradise Regained," in blank verse, frequently resembling the worst prose. Leave it, then, to Milton to set Satan and Jesus constantly at war. Let it be his to cause a drove of swine to be driven along by a legion of devils; that is, by six thousand seven hundred, who take possession of these swine – there being three devils and seven-twentieths per pig – and drown them in a lake. It well becomes Milton to make the devil propose to God that they shall take a good supper together. In Milton, the devil may at his ease cover the table with ortolans, partridges, soles, sturgeons, and make Hebe and Ganymede hand wine to Jesus Christ. In Milton, the devil may take God up a little hill, from the top of which he shows him the capital, the Molucca Islands, and the Indian city; the birthplace of the beauteous Angelica, who turned Orlando's brain; after which he may offer to God all this, provided that God will adore him. But even Milton labored in vain; people have laughed at him. They have laughed at poor brother Berruyer, the Jesuit. They have laughed at you. Bear it with patience!