The Complete Essays (90 page)

[A] Since man was so desirous of making himself the equal of God, it would have been better, said Cicero, to bring the properties of God down to earth and to turn them into human attributes rather than to send our wretchedness and corruption up to heaven.
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But if you look at it aright, equally vain opinions have led Man, in various ways, to do both.

When philosophers go into the hierarchy of their gods and rush to distinguish the alliances, attributes and powers of each of them, I cannot believe they are serious.

When Plato deciphered for us the myth of the ‘Orchard of Dis’
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telling us of the physical pleasures and pains awaiting us (after our bodies have decayed into nothing!); when he associated them with sensations experienced in this present life –

Secreti celant calles, et myrtea circum
Sylva tegit; curae non ipsa in morte relinquunt
.

[They hide away in secret glades, screened by myrtle groves on every side; even when dead their troubles do not leave them] –

and when Mahomet promised his followers a paradise decked out with tapestries and carpets, with ornaments of gold and precious stones, furnished with voluptuous nymphs of outstanding beauty, with wines and choice foods to eat: I realized that they were both laughing at us, stooping low to tempt our brutish stupidity with sweet allurements, enticing us with notions and hopes appropriate to our mortal appetites.

[C] Even some of our Christians have fallen into a similar error, promising themselves an earthly life after our resurrection, a life within time, accompanied by all kinds of worldly pleasures and comforts. [A] Plato’s thoughts were all of heaven; his familiarity with things divine was so great that the surname
Divine
has clung to him ever since;
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are we to believe that even he thought there was, in a wretched creature like Man, something able to approach such incomprehensible Power? Did he believe that we, with our feeble grasp, could actually have a share in eternal
blessedness or reprobation, or that our senses were robust enough to do so?
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This is what we ought to say to him, on behalf of human reason:

If the pleasures you offer me in the next life are related to ones I have experienced here on earth, that can have nothing to do with the Infinite. Even if my five natural senses were overwhelmed with joy; even if this soul of mine were seized of all the happiness she could ever hope for or desire, we know her limitations:
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that would amount to nothing. Where there remains anything of mine, there is nothing divine. If your promises merely relate to what can exist in our present condition, they cannot enter into the reckoning. [C] All the pleasures of mortals are mortal. [A] Take recognizing parents, children and friends in the next world: if that can touch us and titillate us, if we grasp at such pleasures as that, then we still remain within earthbound,
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finite pleasures. We cannot condignly conceive those high, divine promises if we are able to conceive them at all. To imagine them condignly, we must imagine them unimaginable, unutterable, incomprehensible [C] and entirely different from our own wretched experiences. [A] ‘Eye cannot see’, says St Paul, ‘nor can there rise up in the heart of man, what God has prepared for his own.’
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And if (as you assert, Plato, with your ‘purifications’) we have to modify our being in order to render ourselves capable of celestial joy, that would mean a change so extreme and so total that (as we know from Physics) we would cease to be ourselves:

[B]
Hector erat tunc cum bello certabat; at ille,
Tractus ab Aemonio, non erat Hector, equo
.

[Hector was killed in battle: but it was not Hector who was dragged along by Achilles’ horse.]

[A] Something else would receive our rewards.

[B]
quod mutatur, dissolvitur; interit ergo:
Trajiciuntur enim partes atque ordine migrant
.

[When what is changed is loosened asunder, that is death. The elements are displaced and change their ordered places.]
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”

[A] Pythagoras thought up his metempsychosis in which souls change their dwelling-places: are we to think that the lion which is now housing the soul of Caesar has espoused the passions which moved Caesar, [C] or that it really is Caesar? And if it really were Caesar, then victory would lie with those who opposed Plato over this opinion, pointing out, among other absurdities, that a son might well find himself astride his mother, now clothed in the body of a mule.
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Do we doubt [A] that, in such transmigrations as may take place within the same species, the newcomers are different from their forebears? They say that from the ashes of the Phoenix there is born first a worm and then another Phoenix; can anyone think that the second Phoenix is no different from the first? The worm which produces silk for us can be seen dying and shrivelling up: then, from that same body a butterfly appears; that produces another worm: it would be absurd to think it was still the first one. That which once ceases to be no longer exists.

Nec si materiam nostram collegerit aetas
Post obitum, rursumque redegerit, ut sita nunc est,
Atque iterum nobis fuerint data lumina vitae,
Pertineat quidquam tamen ad nos id quoque factum,
Interrupta semel cum sit repetentia nostra
.

[If Time, after we are dead, should gather our matter together and make it as it now is; if the light of life were again granted to us – even that would not concern us, once the thread of our memory has been snapped asunder.]

You assert somewhere or other, Plato, that rewards in the life to come concern the spiritual part of man, but that remains just as unlikely.

[B]
Scilicet, avolsis radicibus, ut nequit ullam
Dispicere ipse oculus rem, seorsum corpore toto
.

[For an eye torn from its socket and removed from its body can see nothing whatsoever.]

[A] By your reckoning, it would no longer be Man who is touched by such Joy – no longer us: for we are built of two principal parts,
which together form our being; to separate them is death and the collapse of our being.

[B]
Inter enim jecta est vitai pausa, vageque
Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes
.

[For life has been interrupted. No motions can affect our senses now; they are quite lost.]

When the limbs a man had in life are eaten by worms and turning to dust we never say that the man is feeling pain:

Et nihil hoc ad nos, qui coitu conjugioque
Corporis atque animae consistimus uniter apti
.

[That is nothing to us. We are a union formed from the marriage and embrace of body and soul.]
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Moreover, what just grounds do the gods have for noting and rewarding, after death, a man’s good, virtuous deeds? Within that man it is the gods themselves who nurtured and produced them. And why are the gods offended by his vicious deeds? Why do they punish them? They themselves brought him forth in this faulty state; with a mere nod of their will they can prevent his failure.
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Surely Epicurus, with every appearance of human rationality, could have raised such objections to Plato, [C] had he not already covered himself by his oft-repeated conclusion: ‘From mortal nature nothing certain can be inferred about the Immortal.’

[A] Human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially when she concerns herself with matters divine. Who knows that better than we do? For we have supplied Reason with principles which are certain and infallible; we light her steps with the holy lamp of that Truth which God has been pleased to impart to us; yet we can see, every day, that as soon as she is allowed to deviate, however slightly, from the normal path, turning and straying from the beaten track traced for us by the Church, she immediately stumbles and becomes inextricably lost; she whirls aimlessly about, bobbing unchecked on the huge, troubled, surging sea of human opinion. As soon as she misses that great public highway she disintegrates and scatters in hundreds of different directions.

Man cannot be other than he is; he cannot have thoughts beyond his
reach. [B] Plutarch says that it is greater arrogance for mere men to start talking and arguing about gods and demi-gods than for a man who knows nothing whatever about music to start criticizing singers, or for a man who has never been on a battlefield to try and argue about arms and war, from some trivial conjecture presuming to understand an art which far exceeds his knowledge.
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[A] I believe that, in the Ancient World, men thought they were actually enhancing the greatness of God when they made him equal to Man, clothed him with Man’s faculties and made him a present of Man’s fair humours [C] and even of his most shameful necessities; [A] they offered him our food to eat, [C] our dances, mummeries and farces to amuse him; [A] our vestments to clothe him and our houses to dwell in, courting him with odours of incense, sounds of music and garlands of flowers; [C] they made him conform to our own vicious passions, subverting his justice in the name of inhuman vengeance, causing him to rejoice in the smashing and wasting of the very things he had created and protected (as Tiberius Sempronius did when he made a burned sacrifice to Vulcan of the arms and treasures seized as booty from his enemies in Sardinia; as Paul Aemilius did, when he sacrificed the spoils of Macedonia to Mars and Minerva, and as Alexander did, when he reached the shores of the Indian Ocean and sought the favour of Thetis by casting many huge golden jars into the sea).
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More. They loaded his altars with butchered carcasses – not only of innocent beasts but of men, [A] following the established custom of many peoples – including our own; no nation, I believe, is exempt: all have assayed it.

[B]
Sulmone creatos
Quattuor hic juvenes, totidem quos educat Ufens,
Viventes rapit, inferias quos immolet umbris
.

[He took alive four young men, begot by Sulmo, and another four bred by Ufens, to immolate them as sacrifices to the Shades.]
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[C] The Getae think they are immortal; for them, dying is but a
journey to their God Zamolxis. Every five years they dispatch one of their number to him to ask for what they need. The ambassador is chosen by lot. The actual dispatching takes this form: the man is told of his charge by word of mouth; three of those present hold three javelins upright, the others toss the man on to them. If some vital organ is impaled and he dies at once, that is a clear indication of divine approval. If he escapes death, he is thought to be evil and accursed, so another ambassador is similarly dispatched.

On one occasion, when Amestris the mother of Xerxes had grown old and wished to appease some god of the Underworld, she caused fourteen young men from the best families in Persia to be buried alive, in accordance with the religious rites of that country. And even today the cement used to make the idols of Themistitan is mixed with the blood of little children, since the only sacrifices they relish are the pure souls of little boys: Justice hungry for innocent blood!

Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum
.

[So great are the evils Religion has encouraged.]
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[B] The Carthaginians sacrificed their own children to Saturn; those who had none of their own, bought some; their fathers and mothers had to attend the service, looking happy and contented. [A] It is a strange notion to seek to requite divine Goodness with our human affliction; the Spartans did: they courted that Diana of theirs with the suffering of boys who were flogged for her sake – sometimes flogged to death. It was a savage humour which sought to please the Architect by ruining what he had built; to ward off the punishment due to the guilty by punishing the innocent; or to believe that that poor wretched Iphigenia, by her sacrificial death in the port of Aulis, could free the Greek army of the weight of offences they had committed against God.

[B]
Et casta inceste, nubendi tempore in ipso,
Hostia concideret mactatu moesta parentis
.

[At the very time of her wedding, the pure was impurely slaughtered, a victim sadly murdered by her father.]

[C] And there were the fair and noble souls of the two Decii, father and son, who threw themselves wildly into the thick of the enemy, as a propitiation to make the gods favour the affairs of Rome:
‘Quae fuit tanta
deorum iniquitas, ut placari populo Romano non possent, nisi tales occidissent’
[What great wickedness on the part of the gods to refuse to favour the Roman People unless such men were killed!].
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