The Complete Essays (92 page)

[A] It has always seemed to me that certain expressions are too imprudent and irreverent for a Christian: ‘God cannot die’; ‘God cannot change his mind’; ‘God cannot do this or cannot do that’. I find it unacceptable that the power of God should be limited in this way by the rules of human language; these propositions offer an appearance of truth, but it ought to be expressed more reverently and more devoutly. Our speech, like everything else, has its defects and weaknesses. Most of the world’s squabbles are occasioned by grammar! Law-suits are born from disputes over the interpretation of laws; most wars arise from our inability to express clearly the conventions and treaties agreed on by monarchs. How many quarrels, momentous quarrels, have arisen in this world because of doubts about the meaning of that single syllable
Hoc
.
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[B] Take the proposition which Logic asserts to be the clearest of all. If you say ‘The weather is fine’ and you say it truly, then the weather is fine. That seems to be clear enough; and yet such a formula can lead us astray. You can see that from the following example: if you say, ‘I lie’, and you say it truly, then you lie! In both cases, the art, reason and force of the conclusion are the same: yet the second leaves you stogged in the mud!
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[A] Pyrrhonist philosophers, I see, cannot express their general concepts in any known kind of speech; they would need a new language: ours is made up of affirmative propositions totally inimical to them – so much so that when they say ‘I doubt’, you can jump down their throats and make them admit that they at least know one thing for certain, namely that they doubt. To save themselves they are constrained to draw an analogy from medicine: without it their sceptical humour would never get purged! When they say
I know not
or
I doubt
that affirmation purges itself (they maintain) along with all the others, exactly like a dose of rhubarb, which evacuates all our evil humours, itself included.
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[B] (Scepticism can best be conceived through the form of a question: ‘What do I know?’ –
Que sçay-je
, words inscribed on my emblem of a Balance.)
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[A] See how people avail themselves of such forms of speech as are full of irreverence. In our present religious strife, if you press your adversaries too hard they will bluntly reply that it exceeds God’s power to make his body be in paradise and in several places on earth all at the same time. How that scoffer
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among the Ancients exploited similar assertions! ‘At least’, he said, ‘it is no light comfort for Man to know that God cannot do everything! God cannot kill himself when he wants to (which is the greatest prerogative attached to the human condition); he cannot bring the dead back to life; he cannot make someone not to have lived who has lived, or not to have received honour who has received honour; he has no jurisdiction over the past other than to make it merge into oblivion; finally (so that this equality of status in God and Man can be further strengthened with amusing examples), God cannot even stop ten and ten from making twenty!’ That is what he says – and what should never pass a Christian’s lips. Whereas, on the contrary, men seem to me to go looking for such insane and arrogant terms in order to cut God down to their own size:

cras vel atra
Nube polum pater occupato,
Vel sole puro; non tamen irritum
Quodcumque retro est, efficiet, neque
Diffinget infectumque reddet
Quod fugiens semel hora vexit
.

[Tomorrow the Father can cover the pole with black clouds or with pure sunlight, but he cannot change the past, he cannot undo or annul anything that fleeting time has borne away.]

When we say that countless ages – ages past and ages yet to come – are but a moment to God and that God’s essence consists in goodness, wisdom, power, we utter words, but our intelligence cannot grasp the sense. Despite that, we, in our arrogance, want to force God through human filters. All the raving errors that this world possesses are bred from trying to squeeze
on to human scales weights far beyond their capacity: [C]
‘Mirum quo procedat improbitas cordis humani, parvulo aliquo invitata successu’
[It is astonishing how far the impudence of the human heart can go, once encouraged by the least success].

How insolently the Stoics taunt Epicurus for holding that essential goodness and happiness belong to God alone, so that the Sage can only possess some shadowy likeness of them. [A] How rashly they subject God to Destiny (would that some who bear the name of Christians did not do so still);
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Thales, Plato and Pythagoras even make God the slave of Necessity. This fierce desire to scan the Divine through human eyes even brought one of our own great Christian figures to endow God with a corporeal shape;
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[B] it also explains why we daily assign to God a peculiar responsibility for any event, the outcome of which seems important to us. We attach particular weight to such events, so God must do so too, paying more attention to them than to others which seem unimportant to us or simply part of the regular order: [C]
‘magna dii curant, parva negligunt!’
[The gods take care of great matters and neglect the small!] Listen to the example given and you will see more clearly what is meant:
‘nec in regnis quidem reges omnia minima curant’
[Even kings in their kingdoms do not concern themselves with every tiny detail]. As though it were more difficult for God to shake an empire than to shake a leaf, or as though his Providence were exercised differently when influencing the outcome of a battle and the jump of a flea.

The hand of God’s governance supports all things with an equal and unchanging sway, with the same order, the same power. Our concerns contribute nothing to this; our human activities and standards are quite irrelevant:
‘Deus ita artifex magnus in magnis, ut minor non sit in parvis’
[In great things God is a great artificer, but in such a way that he is no less great in little things].

Our arrogance constantly finds fresh ways of blasphemously equating man with God: our jobs are a burden to us men, so Strato endows the gods – and their priests – with complete immunity from work! For Strato it is Nature who produces and maintains all things, Nature who constructs every part of the universe with her weights and her forces. In this way he frees mankind of a burden: the fear of divine judgement:
‘Quod beatum
aeternumque sit, id nec habere negotii quicquam, nec exhibere alteri’
[A blessed and eternal Being has no duties and imposes none on others].
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‘Nature’s will is that like things should have like correlatives; for example: the fact that mortals are innumerable leads to the conclusion that the immortals are too; the vast number of things which kill or do harm leads to the conclusion that an equivalent number preserve and do good’; so, just as the souls of the gods have no tongue, eyes or ears yet can understand each other and also judge what we are thinking: so too the souls of men, when free from the bonds of the body in sleep or any kind of ecstasy, have powers of divination, can foretell the future and see such things as they could never see when joined to their bodies… [A] ‘Men’, says St Paul, ‘have become fools, professing to be wise, and have changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the image of corruptible man’.
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[B] Only consider what jugglers’ farces those ‘deifications’ were among the Ancients. After the stately pride and pomp of the funeral procession, just as the fire was taking hold of the apex of the pyre and about to engulf the litter with the dead man on it, they would release an eagle which flew upwards, representing the soul making its way to Paradise. We still possess a thousand medallions (above all, the one of that – oh, so honourable – woman Faustina) where the eagle is portrayed bearing off the deified soul, which is slung over its shoulder just like a dead goat! It is pitiful the way we deceive ourselves with the monkey-tricks that we invent;

Quod finxere timent

[They are terrified of their own creations]

– like children who are scared by the very face of the friend they have just daubed with black. [C]
‘Quasi quicquam infelicius sit homine cui sua figmenta dominantur’
[As though anything were more pitiful than a man overmastered by his own figments].
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We are far from honouring him who made us when we honour a creature we ourselves have made.

[B] Augustus had more temples than did Jupiter, in which he was served with just as much devotion and just as much belief in his miracles.

The Thasians, wishing to repay the benefits they had received from Agesilaus, came to tell him that they had put him on the canonical list of their gods. ‘Are you a people’, he asked, ‘who have the power to make a god of anyone you please? Just to see, first make a god of one of yourselves; and then, [C] when I have learned how he has prospered, [B] I will come and thank you heartily for your offer.’

[C] Man is indeed out of his mind. He cannot even create a fleshworm, yet creates gods by the dozen. Just listen to Hermes Trismegistus praising our sufficiency: ‘Among all the things which can astonish us, one thing has surpassed astonishment itself: Man’s capacity to discover what the Divine nature is and then proceed to create it.’

[B] Here are some arguments from the very school in which Philosophy learned her lessons:

Nosse cui Divos et coeli numina soli,
Aut soli nescire, datum

[Philosophy, she to whom alone it is given to know the gods and the numinous powers of heaven, or, alone, to know that they cannot be known!]
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– If God exists, (she says) he is animate; if he is animate he has senses; if he has senses, he is subject to corruption! If he is incorporeal, he has no soul and consequently is without activity; if he is corporeal, then he is mortal! What a triumph! – [C] We could never make this world; therefore a Nature
even more excellent than ours
must have taken the task in hand! – It would be stupid arrogance to esteem ourselves the most perfect object in the universe: there must therefore be
one
thing better: God! – When you see a rich and stately dwelling you may not know who the master of it is, but at least you could say that it was not built for rats: take the divine architecture of the palaces of heaven, which we ourselves can see; does it not oblige us to believe that it is the dwelling-place of a Master greater
even than we are
? – Is not the higher always more worthy – and we are at the bottom. – Nothing without reason and soul can beget an animate creature capable of reason: the world has begotten us: therefore it has both reason and soul! – Each part of us is less than the whole: we are part of the world: the world is, therefore, provided with wisdom and reason more abundantly
than we are. – It is a fair thing to hold great powers of government: the government of the world must, therefore, belong to some happy Nature. – The heavenly bodies do us no harm: they are, therefore, full of goodness. – [B] We need food: so do the gods, who feed on vapours rising up from here below! – [C] Worldly goods are not goods to God: therefore they are not goods to us. – To do harm and to experience harm are equal proofs of weakness: it is therefore mad to be afraid of God! – God is good by nature, man by industry: which makes man superior! – There is no difference between divine wisdom and human wisdom, except that the divine is eternal: but time adds nothing to the quality of wisdom: therefore we and God are on equal footing! [B] We enjoy life, reason, freedom and we esteem goodness, love and justice: therefore these qualities must be in God!

In short, both constructively and destructively, we forge for ourselves the attributes of God, taking ourselves as the correlative. What a model, what a pattern! Take human qualities and stretch them, raise them, magnify them as much as you please! Wretched little Man, puff yourself up as much as you like! More. More. More still:
‘Non si te ruperis, inquit’…
[‘Not even’, he said, ‘if you burst.’]. [C]
‘Profecto non Deum, quem cogitare non possunt, sed semet ipsos pro illo cogitantes, non illum sed se ipsos non illi sed sibi comparant’
[Indeed, Men cannot conceive of God, so they base their conceptions on themselves instead; they do not compare themselves to him, but him to themselves].
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[B] Even within Nature, effects barely suggest half their causes. But what of this Cause? God is a Cause completely above the order of Nature. His mode of being is too high, too distant, too magisterial to allow our logical conclusions to judge or to bind him. We shall never get that far by our own efforts: our path is too lowly. We are no nearer the heavens on the top of Mount Cenis than we are at the bottom of the sea. Your astrolabe will tell you that.

Yet men even reduce God to having sexual intercourse with women, noting how often he did it and for how many births.

Paulina, the wife of Saturninus, was a Roman matron of great reputation; she thought she was lying with a god, Serapis, but through the pimping of
the temple-priests she found herself in the arms of a lover.
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[C] In his treatises on theology, Varro, the most subtle and learned of Latin authors, wrote of a sexton in the temple of Hercules who cast dice with both hands, one for himself, the other for Hercules. The stakes were a supper and a woman: if he won, he paid for them out of the collection; if he lost, he paid for them himself. He lost; so the cost of the woman and dinner fell to himself. Now the woman was called Laurentina; lying that night with this ‘god’ in her arms, she heard him volunteer the remark that the first man she met when she left in the morning would see that she received from heaven the money she had just earned. She did in fact meet a rich young man called Taruntius who took her back home and eventually left her all his money. She in her turn, hoping to do an action pleasing to this god, left her inheritance to the Roman People, who then bestowed divine honours upon her.
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