“Ah no, it’s not then to be amongst the Jews I’ll go looking for a universal Almighty; finding in that hapless nation nothing better than some repulsive phantom, spawn of the uncurbed imaginations of a handful of ambitious rogues, I must abhor the contemptible God wickedness dreamt up. And now let’s have a glance at the Christians.
“And what a host of further absurdities we have here! It’s no longer a mountain-climbing madman’s Tablets that rattle out the rules to me; this time the God in question proclaims himself through a much nobler envoy: Mary’s meeching bastard is entitled to a very different kind of respect than that claimed by the abandoned son of Jochebed. So let’s peer closely at this sinister little cheat; what’s he up to, what does he contrive to demonstrate his God’s truth to me, what are his credentials, his methods? Capers and droll antics, suppers with sluts, fraudulent cures, puns, jests and duperies. ‘I am the Son of God,’ bleats this stammering little boor, incapable as he is of uttering one coherent phrase about his Father, of penning a line to describe him; yes, ‘I am the Son of God,’ and better still: ‘I’m God,’ that’s what I’m to believe simply because the drivel emanates from him. The rascal’s hanged up there on a cross, does it matter? His followers desert him, it makes no difference at all: there he is, and no one else: God of the universe, nailed. Where did he take form? Why, in a Jewess’ womb. His birthplace? In a stable. How does he gain my belief in him? By abjectness, poverty, imposture, he has no other means to win me over. And if I waver, if I fail of belief? Woe unto me! eternal tortures are my destiny. There’s a God, I’ve omitted nothing from the portrait and in it there’s not one feature that stirs the soul or appeals to the heart. Oh, matchless contradiction! ’tis upon the ancient law the new one is grounded, and nevertheless the new supersedes, sets at nought the old: what then is the basis of the new? This Christ, is he the lawgiver we’re to hearken to? All by himself, he alone is going to give me an understanding of the God who’s dispatched him here; but if it was to Moses’ interest to preach to me about the God whence his power derived, think of how eager must be the Nazarene to tell me about the God from whom he descends! Surely, the more modern lawgiver must be better informed than the earlier one; Moses was at best able to chat familiarly with his master, but Christ is God’s blood offspring. Moses, content to ascribe natural causes to miracles, convinces his people that lightning blazes forth for the chosen only; the cleverer Jesus accomplishes the miracle himself; and if both do indeed merit their contemporaries’ profound scorn, it has nevertheless to be admitted that the later of the two was, through his superior insolence, the more justified in claiming the esteem of men; and the posterity that judges them by assigning a ghetto to the Jews shall definitely be obliged to grant the other a priority on the gallows.
“So, Juliette, it is apparent, is it not, the vicious circle into which men fall as soon as they begin to rave about this rubbish: religion proves its prophet, the prophet his religion.
“This God so far not having shown hide nor hair of himself either to the Jewish sect or to that of the otherwise but hardly less contemptible Christians, I persevere in my quest for some solid evidence of him, I summon reason to my aid, and lest it deceive me I subject reason itself to analysis. What is reason? The faculty given me by Nature whereby I may dispose myself in a favorable sense toward such-and-such an object and against some other, depending upon the amount of pleasure or pain I derive from these objects: a calculation governed absolutely by my senses, since it is exclusively through them that I receive the comparative impressions which constitute either the pains I wish to avoid or the pleasures I must seek.
“Thus, as Fréret says, the reason is nothing other than the scales we weigh objects in, and, balancing those of these objects that are external to ourselves, the reasoning mechanism tells us what conclusions we are to come to: when the scales tip beneath what looks to be the greatest pleasure, it is to that side our judgment always inclines. As you observe, this rational choice, in us as in animals which are also full of reason, is but the effect of the grossest and most material mechanical operation. But as reason is the only touchstone we possess, it must be the test whereunto we submit the faith knaves imperiously insist that we exhibit for objects which either lack reality or are so prodigiously vile in themselves that they can only aspire to our loathing. Well now, Juliette, the very first thing this rational faculty essays is, as you sense, to assign an essential difference that distinguishes the thing which presents its appearance to the perceiver from the thing which the perceiver perceives. The representational perceptions of a given object are of still another species. When they show us objects as absent now and as having been at some time in the past present to our minds, that is what we call memory, remembrance, recollection. If these perceptions propose objects to us, but do not advise us of their real absence, that is what we call imagination, and this imagination is the true cause of all our errors. Now, the most abundant source of these errors lies in our ascribing an independent existence to the objects of these inner perceptions and, more, in our supposing that they exist outside of ourselves and separately just as we conceive of them as separate from one another. To make myself clear to you, upon this separate idea, upon this idea born of the object which makes its appearance before the perceiver, I’ll bestow the term objective idea in order to distinguish it from the impression the object generates in the perceiver, which I shall call the real idea. It is of utmost importance that these two varieties of existence not be confused; merely neglect to characterize these distinctions, and the way is open to boundless error. The infinitely divisible point, so necessary to geometry, belongs to the class of objective existences; solid bodies to that of real existences. However abstract this may seem to you, my dear, you must make an effort to keep apace with me if you wish to follow my lead to the goal I wish my reasonings to bring us both to.
“Before going farther, let us here observe that nothing is commoner than to make the grave mistake of identifying the real existence of bodies that are external to us with the objective existence of the perceptions that are inside our minds. Our very perceptions themselves are distinct from ourselves, and are also distinct from one another, if it be upon present objects they bear and upon their relations and the relations of these relations. They are thoughts when it is of absent things they afford us images; when they afford us images of objects which are within us, they are ideas. However, all these things are but our being’s modalities and ways of existing; and all these things are no more distinct from one another, or from ourselves, than the extension, mass, shape, color, and motion of a body are from that body. Subsequently, they necessarily bestirred themselves to invent terms to cover in general all particular but similar ideas: cause was the name given to all beings that bring about some change in another being distinct from themselves, and effect the word for any change wrought by whatever cause in whatever being. As this terminology gives rise in us, at best, to a very muddled idea of being, of action, of reaction, of change, the habit of employing it in time led people to believe they had clear-cut and precise perceptions of these things, and they finally reached the stage of fancying there could exist a cause which was not a being nor a body either, a cause which was really distinct from all embodiment and which, without movement, without action, could produce every imaginable effect. They were little concerned to ponder and realize that all beings continually acting and reacting upon one another produce and simultaneously undergo changes; the infinite progression of beings which have been successively cause and effect soon wearied the minds of those who at any cost were driven to find a cause in every effect. Sensing their imaginations worn to defeat by this long sequence of ideas, they hit upon the short cut of skipping in a single great leap back to a primary cause; they fancied it the universal cause in regard to which all particular causes are effects and which, itself, is the effect of no cause at all.
“Behold it, Juliette: such is the God men have got themselves; behold what their enervated imagin
ations have spawned by way of a grotesque fantasy. Linking one sophism to the next, men wound up creating this, ’tis plain to see how they did it; and in keeping with the definition I gave you just a while ago, you recognize that this grandiose phantom, having a merely objective existence, cannot exist anywhere outside the minds of the deluded who rivet their hallucinated attentions upon it, and hence it amounts to no more than the pure and simple effect of their brains’ heated disorder. Ah yes, behold him nonetheless: the God of mortals, gaze well upon the abomination they’ve invented and in whose temples they have shed whole seas of Mood.
“If,” Madame Delbène continued, “I have dilated upon the essential differences between real and objective existences, that is, as, my dear, you understand, because I felt it a matter of urgency that I demonstrate to you the varieties subsisting in men’s practical and speculative opinions, and that I have you see that men are wont to ascribe a real existence to a good many things which actually have a no more than conjectural existence. Well, it is to a product of this conjectural existence mankind has given the name of God. If faulty reasoning were the only result of these exercises, we could dismiss the whole harmless affair; but, unfortunately the thing does not stop there: the imagination catches fire, the habit develops, and one becomes accustomed to considering as something real that which is but the fictive creature of our weakness. One is no sooner convinced that this chimerical being’s will is the cause of all that befalls us than one sets to employing every means to coddling and cockering him, every possible fashion to imploring him.
“Let’s be guided by mature reflection and, deciding upon the adoption of a God only after careful sifting of what has just been advanced, let’s be persuaded that the whole notion of God being unable to occur to us save in an objective manner, nothing but illusions and phantoms can result from it.
“Whatever they may serve up of sophistries, those absurd partisans of man’s deific bogey actually never say anything more than that there can be no effect without a cause. But they’re not prone to insist that if it be causes we’re to discuss, we must trace them back to a first and eternal cause, a universal cause behind all particular and subsequent causes, an original, creative, and self-creating cause, a cause which is independent of any other cause. Admittedly, we do not truly understand the connection, the sequence, and the progression of all causes; but ignorance of one fact is never adequate grounds for establishing and then accrediting another fact. They who want to convince us of their abominable God’s existence have the sauciness to tell us that, because we cannot designate the veritable source of the cause-and-effect series, we must necessarily acknowledge the universal cause they champion. Can you cite me a better example of inane argument? As if it were not preferable to admit ignorance instead of acquiescing in an absurdity; or as if the acceptance of this absurdity became proof of its existence! Idiots may as well sink in their mental limitations; the intelligent run the risk of foundering upon the rocks when it is into the phantom’s haven they undertake to steer.
“But, with a cool head, let’s proceed and, if you like, momentarily grant our antagonists the existence of the vampire1 that is the author of their felicity. Within this hypothesis, I ask them whether the law, the rule, the will whereby God supervises beings is of the same nature as our mortal will and power, whether in the same circumstances God can want and not want, whether the same thing can please and displease him, whether his sentiments are unchanging, whether the scheme by which he operates is immutable. If he is subject to a law, his function is merely executive; if this be so, he follows instructions and is not autonomous, has no power of his own. The unaltering law behind his gestures, what then is it? is it distinct from him, or inherent in him? If, on the other hand, this superior being can change his sentiments and his will, I wish to know why he does so. Certainly, he must have some motive for changing them, a much more logical motive than any that impels us, for God to outstrip us in wisdom as he surpasses us in prudence; well, can we possibly imagine this motive without lessening the perfection of the being who cedes to it? I’ll go farther: if God knows beforehand that he shall change his mind and will, why, since the Omnipotent can do anything, has he not arranged circumstances in such sort as to obviate the need for this mutation, always tiresome and proof always of weakness? And if he doesn’t know what’s coming next, what kind of omniscient God is it who cannot foresee what he’s going to have to do? If he does have foreknowledge thereof—as, if one is to arrive at any notion of him at all, one must suppose—it is then fixed and decreed, apart from his will, that he shall act in this manner or in that: well, what law determines his will? where is that law? whence does it draw its force?
“If your God is not free, if he is compelled to act in obedience to laws that govern him, then he amounts to something like destiny or chance which vows don’t touch nor prayers melt nor offerings appease and which you’d better contemn forever than beseech with such little success.
“But if yet more dangerous, more wicked, more ferocious, your execrable God hid from man what was becoming necessary to man’s happiness, his aim was then not to make man happy, he thus loves him not, thus he is neither just nor benevolent. It should seem to me that a God ought not to will anything impossible, and it is not possible that man respect laws that tyrannize or are unknown or unknowable to him.
“And there is yet more to it: this scurvy God hates man for being ignorant of what he has not been taught; he punishes man for having violated an unknown law, for pursuing bents and tastes man cannot have acquired from anyone but his creator. Oh, Juliette!” my tutor exclaimed, “can I conceive of this infernal and detestable God otherwise than as a despot, a barbarian, a monster to whom I owe all the hatred, all the wrath, all the scorn my quickened physical and moral faculties can excite in me?
“And so even were they to bring off their demonstration, even were they to present me with proof of God’s existence; were they to succeed in convincing me that he has dictated the laws, singled out certain individuals to attest them to mortals; were I to be made to see that in man’s relationship to God there is none but the purest consistency and harmony; even so nothing could prove to me that I please him by observing his commandments, for if he is not good he can deceive me, and my reason, which comes to me only from him, shall not be my guarantee, for it would not be unthinkable that he endowed me with rational powers simply in order that, using a treacherous instrument, I thrust myself all the deeper into error.
“To continue. I now ask you deists how this God, whose existence I’ve no objection to allowing for the sake of a brief discussion, is going to behave in regard to those who are altogether unacquainted with his laws. If God punishes the invincible ignorance of those to whom his laws have not been promulgated nor announced, he is unjust; and if he is incapable of instructing them, he is impotent.
“There is no doubt: the revelation of the Eternal’s laws must bear the hallmark of the God whence they emanate. Well, we have been regaled with revelations in quantity; which amongst them is stamped with an equally evident and indispensable seal of authenticity? Thus it is by religion itself that the religion-announcing God is repudiated and destroyed; and what, I wonder, is to become of this religion when the God it established no longer exists save in the unhinged minds of fools?
“Whether or not human knowledge be real or illusory, true or false, it matters little to the happiness of life; but that does not hold in what pertains to religion. Once men have as it were got their teeth into the imaginary objects religion proposes, they develop passionate enthusiasms for these objects: they come to believe that these ghosts flitting about in their heads really do exist, and from there on there’s no checking them. Every day, fresh occasion to tremble and more adepts quaking: such are the sole effects the perilous idea of God produces in us. This idea alone is responsible for the most withering and appalling ills in the life of man; ’tis this idea that constrains him to deprive himself of life’s most delectable pleasures, terrified a
s he is at all times lest he displease this disgusting fruit of his delirious imagination. You, my good little friend, you must therefore and as soon as you can deliver yourself from the frights this goblin inspires; and to achieve your liberty you without doubt have but to lift a steady fist to smash the idol into small bits.
Juliette Page 5