Kitabı oku: «A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 03», sayfa 16
In a similar manner the unfortunate preacher Antony, misled by the apparent contradictions which he imagined he saw between the new and the old law, between the cultivated olive and the wild olive, wretchedly abandoned the Christian religion for the Jewish; and, more courageous than John Meslier, preferred death to recantation.
It is evident from the will of John Meslier that the apparent contradictions of the gospel were the principal cause of unsettling the mind of that unfortunate pastor, who was, in other respects, a man of the strictest virtue, and whom it is impossible to think of without compassion. Meslier is deeply impressed by the two genealogies, which seem in direct opposition; he had not seen the method of reconciling them; he feels agitated and provoked to see that St. Matthew makes the father and mother of the child travel into Egypt, after having received the homage of the three eastern magi or kings, and while old King Herod, under the apprehension of being dethroned by an infant just born at Bethlehem, causes the slaughter of all the infants in the country, in order to prevent such a revolution. He is astonished that neither St. Luke, nor St. Mark, nor St. John make any mention of this massacre. He is confounded at observing that St. Luke makes Joseph, and the blessed Virgin Mary, and Jesus our Saviour, remain at Bethlehem, after which they withdraw to Nazareth. He should have seen that the Holy Father might at first go into Egypt, and some time afterwards to Nazareth, which was their country.
If St. Matthew alone makes mention of the three magi, and of the star which guided them to Bethlehem from the remote climes of the East, and of the massacre of the children; if the other evangelists take no notice of these events, they do not contradict St. Matthew; silence is not contradiction.
If the three first evangelists – St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke – make Jesus Christ to have lived but three months from his baptism in Galilee till his crucifixion at Jerusalem; and if St. John extends that time to three years and three months, it is easy to approximate St. John to the other evangelists, as he does not expressly state that Jesus Christ preached in Galilee for three years and three months, but only leaves it to be inferred from his narrative. Should a man renounce his religion upon simple inferences, upon points of controversy, upon difficulties in chronology?
It is impossible, says Meslier, to harmonize St. Mark and St. Luke; since the first says that Jesus, when he left the wilderness, went to Capernaum, and the second that he went to Nazareth. St. John says that Andrew was the first who became a follower of Jesus Christ; the three other evangelists say that it was Simon Peter.
He pretends, also, that they contradict each other with respect to the day when Jesus celebrated the Passover, the hour and place of His execution, the time of His appearance and resurrection. He is convinced that books which contradict each other cannot be inspired by the Holy Spirit; but it is not an article of faith to believe that the Holy Spirit inspired every syllable; it did not guide the hand of the copyist; it permitted the operation of secondary causes; it was sufficient that it condescended to reveal the principal mysteries, and that in the course of time it instituted a church for explaining them. All those contradictions, with which the gospels have been so often and so bitterly reproached, are explained by sagacious commentators; far from being injurious, they mutually clear up each other; they present reciprocal helps in the concordances and harmony of the four gospels.
And if there are many difficulties which we cannot solve, mysteries which we cannot comprehend, adventures which we cannot credit, prodigies which shock the weakness of the human understanding, and contradictions which it is impossible to reconcile, it is in order to exercise our faith and to humiliate our reason.
Contradictions in Judgments Upon Works of Literature or Art.
I have sometimes heard it said of a good judge on these subjects, and of exquisite taste, that man decides according to mere caprice. He yesterday described Poussin as an admirable painter; to-day he represents him as an ordinary one. The fact is, that Poussin has merited both praise and censure.
There is no contradiction in being enraptured by the delicious scenes of the Horatii and Curiatii, of the Cid, of Augustus and of Cinna, and afterwards in seeing, with disgust and indignation, fifteen tragedies in succession, containing no interest, no beauty, and not even written in French.
It is the author himself who is contradictory. It is he who has the misfortune to differ entirely from himself. The critic would contradict himself, if he equally applauded what is excellent and detestable. He will admire in Homer the description of the girdle of Venus; the parting of Hector and Andromache; the interview between Achilles and Priam. But will he equally applaud those passages which describe the gods as abusing and fighting with one another; the uniformity in battles which decide nothing; the brutal ferocity of the heroes, and the avarice by which they are almost all actuated; in short, a poem which terminates with a truce of eleven days, unquestionably exciting an expectation of the continuation of the war and the taking of Troy, which, however, are not related?
A good critic will frequently pass from approbation to censure, however excellent the work may be which he is perusing.
CONTRAST
Contrast, opposition of figures, situations, fortune, manners, etc. A modest shepherdess forms a beautiful contrast in a painting with a haughty princess. The part of the impostor and that of Aristes constitute a very admirable contrast in "Tartuffe."
The little may contrast with the great in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Opposition of colors contrasts; but there are also colors contrary to each other; that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.
"Contradictory" is a term to be used only in logic. It is contradictory for anything to be and not to be; to be in many places at once; to be of a certain number or size, and not to be so. An opinion, a discourse, or a decree, we may call contradictory. The different fortunes of Charles XII. have been contrary, but not contradictory; they form in history a beautiful contrast.
It is a striking contrast – and the two things are perfectly contrary – but it is not contradictory, that the pope should be worshipped in Rome, and burned in London on the same day; that while he was called God's vicegerent in Italy, he should be represented in the streets of Moscow as a hog, for the amusement of Peter the Great.
Mahomet, stationed at the right hand of God over half the globe, and damned over the other half, is the greatest of contrasts. Travel far from your own country, and everything will be contrast for you. The white man who first saw a negro was much astonished; but the first who said that the negro was the offspring of a white pair astonishes me much more; I do not agree with him. A painter who represents white men, negroes, and olive-colored people, may display fine contrasts.
CONVULSIONARIES
About the year 1724 the cemetery of St. Médard abounded in amusement, and many miracles were performed there. The following epigram by the duchess of Maine gives a tolerable account of the character of most of them:
Un décrotteur à la Royale,
Du talon gauche estropié,
Obtint, pour grâce speciale,
D'être tortueux de l'autre pied.
A Port-Royal shoe-black, who had one lame leg,
To make both alike the Lord's favor did beg;
Heaven listened, and straightway a miracle came,
For quickly he rose up, with both his legs lame.
The miracles continued, as is well known, until a guard was stationed at the cemetery.
De par le roi, défense à Dieu
De faire miracles en ce lieu.
Louis to God: – To keep the peace,
Here miracles must henceforth cease.
It is also well known that the Jesuits, being no longer able to perform similar miracles, in consequence of Xavier having exhausted their stock of grace and miraculous power, by resuscitating nine dead persons at one time, resolved in order to counteract the credit of the Jansenists, to engrave a print of Jesus Christ dressed as a Jesuit. The Jansenists, on the other hand, in order to give a satisfactory proof that Jesus Christ had not assumed the habit of a Jesuit, filled Paris with convulsions, and attracted great crowds of people to witness them. The counsellor of parliament, Carré de Montgeron, went to present to the king a quarto collection of all these miracles, attested by a thousand witnesses. He was very properly shut up in a château, where attempts were made to restore his senses by regimen; but truth always prevails over persecution, and the miracles lasted for thirty years together, without interruption. Sister Rose, Sister Illuminée, and the sisters Promise and Comfitte, were scourged with great energy, without, however, exhibiting any appearance of the whipping next day. They were bastinadoed on their stomachs without injury, and placed before a large fire; but, being defended by certain pomades and preparations, were not burned. At length, as every art is constantly advancing towards perfection, their persecutors concluded with actually thrusting swords through their chairs, and with crucifying them. A famous schoolmaster had also the benefit of crucifixion; all which was done to convince the world that a certain bull was ridiculous, a fact that might have been easily proved without so much trouble. However, Jesuits and Jansenists all united against the "Spirit of Laws," and against, and against… and against… and… And after all this we dare to ridicule Laplanders, Samoyeds, and negroes!
CORN
They must be skeptics indeed who doubt that pain comes from panis. But to make bread we must have corn. The Gauls had corn in the time of Cæsar; but whence did they take the word blé? It is pretended that it is from bladum, a word employed in the barbarous Latin of the middle age by the Chancellor Desvignes, or De Erneis, whose eyes, it is said, were torn out by order of the Emperor Frederick II.
But the Latin words of these barbarous ages were only ancient Celtic or Teutonic words Latinized. Bladum then comes from our blead, and not our blead from bladum. The Italians call it bioda, and the countries in which the ancient Roman language is preserved, still say blia.
This knowledge is not infinitely useful; but we are curious to know where the Gauls and Teutons found corn to sow? We are told that the Tyrians brought it into Spain, the Spaniards into Gaul, and the Gauls into Germany. And where did the Tyrians get this corn? Probably from the Greeks, in exchange for their alphabet.
Who made this present to the Greeks? It was the goddess Ceres, without doubt; and having ascended to Ceres, we can scarcely go any higher. Ceres must have descended from heaven expressly to give us wheat, rye, and barley. However, as the credit of Ceres, who gave corn to the Greeks, and that of Ishet, or Isis, who gratified the Egyptians with it, are at present very much decayed, we may still be said to remain in uncertainty as to the origin of corn.
Sanchoniathon tells us that Dagon or Dagan, one of the grandsons of Thaut, had the superintendence of the corn in Phœnicia. Now his Thaut was near the time of our Jared; from which it appears that corn is very ancient, and that it is of the same antiquity as grass. Perhaps this Dagon was the first who made bread, but that is not demonstrated.
What a strange thing that we should know positively that we are obliged to Noah for wine, and that we do not know to whom we owe the invention of bread. And what is still more strange, we are still so ungrateful to Noah that, while we have more than two thousand songs in honor of Bacchus, we scarcely sing one in honor of our benefactor, Noah.
A Jew assured me that corn came without cultivation in Mesopotamia, as apples, wild pears, chestnuts, and medlars, in the west. It is as well to believe him, until we are sure of the contrary; for it is necessary that corn should grow spontaneously somewhere. It has become the ordinary and indispensable nourishment in the finest climates, and in all the north.
The great philosophers whose talents we estimate so highly, and whose systems we do not follow, have pretended, in the natural history of the dog (page 195), that men created corn; and that our ancestors, by means of sowing tares and cow-grass together, changed them into wheat. As these philosophers are not of our opinion on shells, they will permit us to differ from them on corn. We do not think that tulips could ever have been produced from jasmine. We find that the germ of corn is quite different from that of tares, and we do not believe in any transmutation. When it shall be proved to us, we will retract.
We have seen, in the article "Breadtree," that in three-quarters of the earth bread is not eaten. It is pretended that the Ethiopians laughed at the Egyptians, who lived on bread. But since corn is our chief nourishment, it has become one of the greatest objects of commerce and politics. So much has been written on this subject, that if a laborer sowed as many pounds of wheat as we have volumes on this commodity, he might expect a more ample harvest, and become richer than those who, in their painted and gilded saloons, are ignorant of the excess of his oppression and misery.
Egypt became the best country in the world for wheat when, after several ages, which it is difficult to reckon exactly, the inhabitants found the secret of rendering a destructive river – which had always inundated the country, and was only useful to the rats, insects, reptiles, and crocodiles of Egypt – serviceable to the fecundity of the soil. Its waters, mixed with a black mud, were neither useful to quench the thirst of the inhabitants, nor for ablution. It must have required a long time and prodigious labor to subdue the river, to divide it into canals, to found towns on lands formerly movable, and to change the caverns of the rocks into vast buildings.
All this is more astonishing than the pyramids; for being accomplished, behold a people sure of the best corn in the world, without the necessity of labor! It is the inhabitant of this country who raises and fattens poultry superior to that of Caux, who is habited in the finest linen in the most temperate climate, and who has none of the real wants of other people.
Towards the year 1750, the French nation, surfeited with tragedies, comedies, operas, romances, and romantic histories – with moral reflections still more romantic, and with theological disputes on grace and on convulsionaries, began to reason upon corn. They even forgot the vine, in treating of wheat and rye. Useful things were written on agriculture, and everybody read them except the laborers. The good people imagined, as they walked out of the comic opera, that France had a prodigious quantity of corn to sell, and the cry of the nation at last obtained of the government, in 1764, the liberty of exportation.
Accordingly they exported. The result was exactly what it had been in the time of Henry IV., they sold a little too much, and a barren year succeeding, Mademoiselle Bernard was obliged, for the second time, to sell her necklace to get linen and chemises. Now the complainants passed from one extreme to the other, and complained against the exportation that they had so recently demanded, which shows how difficult it is to please all the world and his wife.
Able and well-meaning people, without interest, have written, with as much sagacity as courage, in favor of the unlimited liberty of the commerce in grain. Others, of as much mind, and with equally pure views, have written in the idea of limiting this liberty; and the Neapolitan Abbé Gagliana amused the French nation on the exportation of corn, by finding out the secret of making, even in French, dialogues as amusing as our best romances, and as instructive as our good serious books. If this work did not diminish the price of bread, it gave great pleasure to the nation, which was what it valued most. The partisans of unlimited exportation answered him smartly. The result was that the readers no longer knew where they were, and the greater part took to reading romances, expecting that the three or four following years of abundance would enable them to judge. The ladies were no longer able to distinguish wheat from rye, while honest devotees continued to believe that grain must lie and rot in the ground in order to spring up again.
COUNCILS
Meetings of Ecclesiastics, Called Together to Resolve Doubts or Questions on Points of Faith or Discipline
The use of councils was not unknown to the followers of the ancient religion of Zerdusht, whom we call Zoroaster. About the year 200 of our era, Ardeshir Babecan, king of Persia, called together forty thousand priests, to consult them touching some of his doubts about paradise and hell, which they call the gehen– a term adopted by the Jews during their captivity at Babylon, as they did the names of the angels and of the months. Erdoviraph, the most celebrated of the magi, having drunk three glasses of a soporific wine, had an ecstasy which lasted seven days and seven nights, during which his soul was transported to God. When the paroxysm was over, he reassured the faith of the king, by relating to him the great many wonderful things he had seen in the other world, and having them written down.
We know that Jesus was called Christ, a Greek word signifying anointed; and his doctrine Christianity, or gospel, i.e., good news, because having, as was his custom, entered one Sabbath day the synagogue of Nazareth, where he was brought up, He applied to Himself this passage of Isaiah, which He had just read: "The spirit of the Lord is on me, because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor." They of the synagogue did, to be sure, drive Him out of their town, and carry Him to a point of the hill, on which it was built, in order to throw Him headlong from it; and His relatives "went out to lay hold on Him," for they were told, and they said, "that He was beside Himself." Nor is it less certain that Jesus constantly declared He had come not to destroy the law or the prophecies, but to fulfil them.
But, as He left nothing written, His first disciples were divided on the famous question, whether the Gentiles were to be circumcised and ordered to keep the Mosaic law. The apostles and the priests, therefore, assembled at Jerusalem to examine this point, and, after many conferences, they wrote to the brethren among the Gentiles, at Antioch, in Syria, and in Cilicia, a letter of which we give the substance: "It has seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us, not to impose upon you any obligations but those which are necessary, viz., to abstain from meats offered up to idols, from blood, from the flesh of choked animals, and from fornication."
The decision of this council did not prevent Peter, when at Antioch, from continuing to eat with the Gentiles, before some of the circumcised, who came from James, had arrived. But Paul, seeing that he did not walk straight in the path of gospel truth, resisted him to the face, saying to him before them all. "If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?" Indeed Peter had lived like the Gentiles ever since he had seen, in a trance, "heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet, knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth; wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter, kill and eat."
Paul, who so loudly reproved Peter for using this dissimulation to make them believe that he still observed the law, had himself recourse to a similar feint at Jerusalem. Being accused of teaching the Jews who were among the Gentiles to renounce Moses, he went and purified himself in the temple for seven days, in order that all might know that what they had heard of him was false, and that he continued to observe the law; this, too, was done by the advice of all the priests, assembled at the house of James – which priests were the same who had decided with the Holy Ghost, that these observations were unnecessary.
Councils were afterwards distinguished into general and particular. Particular councils are of three kinds – national, convoked by the prince, the patriarch, or the primate; provincial, assembled by the metropolitan or archbishop; and diocesan, or synods held by each bishop. The following is a decree of one of the councils held at Macon:
"Whenever a layman meet a priest or a deacon on the road, he shall offer him his arm; if the priest and the layman are both on horseback, the layman shall stop and salute the priest reverently; and if the priest be on foot, and the layman on horseback, the layman shall dismount, and shall not mount again until the ecclesiastic be at a certain distance; all on pain of interdiction for as long a time as it shall please the metropolitan."
The list of the councils, in Moréri's "Dictionary," occupies more than sixteen pages, but as authors are not agreed concerning the number of general councils, we shall here confine ourselves to the results of the first eight that were assembled by order of the emperors.
Two priests of Alexandria, seeking to know whether Jesus was God or creature, not only did the bishops and priests dispute but the whole people were divided, and the disorder arrived at such a pitch that the Pagans ridiculed Christianity on the stage. The emperor Constantine first wrote in these terms to Bishop Alexander and the priest Arius, the authors of the dissension: "These questions, which are unnecessary, and spring only from unprofitable idleness, may be discussed in order to exercise the intellect; but they should not be repeated in the hearing of the people. Being divided on so small a matter, it is not just that you should govern, according to your thoughts, so great a multitude of God's people. Such conduct is mean and puerile, unworthy of the priestly office, and of men of sense. I do not say this to compel you entirely to agree on this frivolous question, whatever it is. You may, with a private difference, preserve unity, provided these subtleties and different opinions remain secret in your inmost thoughts."
The emperor, having learned that his letter was without effect, resolved, by the advice of the bishops, to convoke an ecumenical council —i. e., a council of the whole habitable earth, and chose for the place of meeting the town of Nicæa, in Bithynia. There came thither two thousand and forty-eight bishops, who, as Eutychius relates, were all of different sentiments and opinions. This prince, having had the patience to hear them dispute on this point, was much surprised at finding among them so little unanimity; and the author of the Arabic preface to this council says that the records of these disputes amounted to forty volumes.
This prodigious number of bishops will not appear incredible when it is recollected that Usher, quoted by Selden, relates that St. Patrick, who lived in the fifth century, founded three hundred and sixty-five churches, and ordained the like number of bishops; which proves that then each church had its bishop, that is, its overlooker.
In the Council of Nice there was read a letter from Eusebius of Nicomedia, containing manifest heresy, and discovering the cabal of Arius's party. In it was said, among other things, that if Jesus were acknowledged to be the Son of God uncreated, He must also be acknowledged to be consubstantial with the Father. Therefore it was that Athanasius, a deacon of Alexandria, persuaded the fathers to dwell on the word consubstantial, which had been rejected as improper by the Council of Antioch, held against Paul of Samosata; but he took it in a gross sense, marking division; as we say, that several pieces of money are of the same metal: whereas the orthodox explained the term consubstantial so well, that the emperor himself comprehended that it involved no corporeal idea – signified no division of the absolutely immaterial and spiritual substance of the Father – but was to be understood in a divine and ineffable sense. They moreover showed the injustice of the Arians in rejecting this word on pretence that it was not in the Scriptures – they who employ so many words which are not there to be found; and who say that the Son of God was brought out of nothing, and had not existed from all eternity.
Constantine then wrote two letters at the same time, to give publicity to the ordinances of the council, and make them known to such as had not attended it. The first, addressed to the churches in general, says, in so many words, that the question of the faith has been examined, and so well cleared up, that no difficulty remains. In the second, among others, the church of Alexandria is thus addressed: "What three hundred bishops have ordained is no other than the seed of the only Son of God; the Holy Ghost has declared the will of God through these great men, whom he inspired. Now, then, let none doubt – let none dispute, but each one return with all his heart into the way of truth."
The ecclesiastical writers are not agreed as to the number of bishops who subscribed to the ordinances of this council. Eusebius reckons only two hundred and fifty; Eustathius of Antioch, cited by Theodoret, two hundred and seventy; St. Athanasius, in his epistle to the Solitaries, three hundred, like Constantine; while, in his letter to the Africans, he speaks of three hundred and eighteen. Yet these four authors were eye-witnesses, and worthy of great faith.
This number 318, which Pope St. Leo calls mysterious, has been adopted by most of the fathers of the church. St. Ambrose assures us that the number of 318 bishops was a proof of the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ in his Council of Nicæa, because the cross designates three hundred, and the name of Jesus eighteen. St. Hilary, in his defence of the word consubstantial, approved in the Council of Nice, though condemned fifty-five years before in the Council of Antioch, reasons thus: "Eighty bishops rejected the word consubstantial, but three hundred and eighteen have received it. Now this latter number seems to me a sacred number, for if is that of the men who accompanied Abraham, when, after his victory over the impious kings, he was blessed by him who is the type of the eternal priesthood." And Selden relates that Dorotheus, metropolitan of Monembasis, said there were precisely three hundred and eighteen fathers at this council, because three hundred and eighteen years had elapsed since the incarnation. All chronologists place this council in the year 325 of our modern era; but Dorotheus deducts seven years, to make his comparison complete; this, however, is a mere trifle. Besides, it was not until the Council of Lestines, in 743, that the years began to be counted from the incarnation of Jesus. Dionysius the Less had imagined this epoch in his solar cycle of the year 526, and Bede had made use of it in his "Ecclesiastical History."
It will not be a subject of astonishment that Constantine adopted the opinion of the three hundred or three hundred and eighteen bishops who held the divinity of Jesus, when it is borne in mind that Eusebius of Nicomedia, one of the principal leaders of the Arian party, had been an accomplice in the cruelty of Licinius, in the massacres of the bishops, and the persecutions of the Christians. Of this the emperor himself accuses him, in the private letter which he wrote to the church of Nicomedia:
"He sent spies about me," says he, "in the troubles, and did everything but take up arms for the tyrant. I have proofs of this from the priests and deacons of his train, whom I took. During the Council of Nicæa, with what eagerness and what impudence he maintained, against the testimony of his conscience, the error exploded on every side! repeatedly imploring my protection, lest, being convicted of so great a crime, he should lose his dignity. He shamefully circumvented and took me by surprise, and carried everything as he chose. Again, see what has been done but lately by him and Theogenes."
Constantine here alludes to the fraud which Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theogenes of Nicæa resorted to in subscribing. In the word "omoousios," they inserted an iota, making it "omoiousios," meaning of like substance; whereas the first means of the same substance. We hereby see that these bishops yielded to the fear of being displaced or banished; for the emperor had threatened with exile such as should not subscribe. The other Eusebius, too, bishop of Cæsarea, approved the word consubstantial, after condemning it the day before.
However, Theonas of Marmarica, and Secundus of Ptolemais continued obstinately attached to Arius; and, the council, having condemned them with him, Constantine banished them, and declared by an edict that whosoever should be convicted of concealing any of the writings of Arius instead of burning them, should be punished with death. Three months after, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theogenes were likewise exiled into Gaul. It is said that, having gained over the individual who, by the emperor's order, kept the acts of the council, they had erased their signatures, and begun to teach in public that the Son must not be believed to be consubstantial with the Father.
Happily, to replace their signatures and preserve entire the mysterious number three hundred and eighteen, the expedient was tried of laying the book, in which the acts were divided into sessions, on the tomb of Chrysanthus and Mysonius, who had died while the council was in session; the night was passed in prayer and the next morning it was found that these two bishops had signed.
