Juliette

by Marquis de Sade

  “The third of these arguments proposed in favor of this frightful dogma is its indispensability: without it, there would be no holding sinners and unbelievers in check.

  “If you would have me grant you that because of his justice and glory God were required to punish sinners and unbelievers with eternal tortures, I ask you to grant me in return that reason and justice would also require that it be within the power of others not to be unbelievers; now what person can possibly be absurd enough to suppose that man is free? Who can be blind to the point of not seeing that our will, having nothing to do with any of our actions, all our actions being determined for us, we are responsible for none of them; and that God who manipulates us puppets would be (if we suppose that he exists, which, as you doubtless notice, I do with loathing), this God, I say, would be beyond words unjust and barbaric if he punished us for helplessly and despite ourselves becoming caught in the snares he first lays and then takes pleasure driving us into.

  “And so is it not clear that it is the temperament Nature gives to humans, the various circumstances in the life of each individual, his education, the society he lives amidst, which determine his behavior and steer him in the direction of good or evil? But (you may perhaps object) if this be the case, the punishments which men are made to undergo in this world for their misdeeds are likewise unjust. They most certainly are. But here the general welfare prevails, individual welfare must cede thereto; it is the duty of every society to eliminate from its midst such elements whose conduct may be prejudicial to the community; and this justifies a quantity of laws which, when viewed alone from the standpoint of the individual’s self-interest, might appear monstrously unjust. But does your God have any comparable reasons for punishing the evildoer? Obviously not; God Almighty suffers not one whit from the evildoer’s rampages, and if the wicked man is wicked at all, it is because omnipotent God was pleased to create him thus. Hence it is atrocious to inflict tortures upon him for having become on earth the evildoer this execrable God knew full well he would become and indeed intended him to become.

  “Let us now demonstrate that the circumstances which decide which religious belief a man will have are utterly outside his control.

  “I ask, to begin with, whether we are allowed to exercise any choice as to the clime we are born in; and whether, once born into this or that church, it is our fault if we happen to lack the capacity for faith. Is there a single religion which can withstand the fire of the passions? And are not passions, which come to us from God, preferable to religions which come to us from man? What then is one to think of this barbaric God who would punish us eternally for our metaphysical doubtings—we who cannot believe, owing to the belief-destroying passions God put in us? It is a sordid joke. From start to finish it is all unutterable nonsense. And how one resents wasting one’s time refuting such transparent absurdities! However, since we have taken it upon ourselves, let us make a thorough job of it and, if possible, leave the lunatic partisans of this most ridiculous dogma not one leg to stand on.

  “Therefore we continue.

  “Even were it left to every man to decide for himself whether he will or will not be virtuous and believe in all the articles of his specific religion; even were this so, we would still have to inquire if it were equitable that men be punished eternally, whether because of this weakness or their incredulity, when it is only too apparent that no good can result from their gratuitous sufferings.

  “To settle this question we must put our prejudices aside and reflect above all upon the justness we acknowledge in God. Is it not the height of illogicality to contend that this God’s justice demands the eternal punishing of sinners and unbelievers? Does not the act of imposing a punishment out of all proportion to the fault speak far more in behalf of vindictiveness and cruelty than of justice? To maintain that God punishes in such a manner is obviously nothing short of blasphemy. What! this God you depict as so good, will you have him express his goodness in bullying and brutalizing his defenseless children? Most assuredly, they who declare that God’s glory requires that he behave like a savage are not fully aware of the enormity of this doctrine. They talk about the glory of God very idly, they know not whereof they speak. Were they able to judge a little of its nature, were they able to arrive at some rational conception of it, they would sense that if this being does indeed exist, he would have to found his glory not upon his capacities for violence, but upon his generosity and kindness, upon his wisdom and his boundless power to communicate happiness to mankind.

  “It is added in passing, with a view to confirming the odious doctrine of punishments everlasting, that it has been espoused by a great many intelligent men and learned theologians. I deny the fact; most intelligent men and learned theologians have doubted this dogma. And if the rest have appeared to credit it, we can readily guess why: the priests, who already held the people in bondage, were delighted to clap this iron collar of a hell dogma around their necks; we are familiar with the sway terror can exert over simple souls, and everyone knows that the politician who wishes to subjugate others cannot do so without employing it.

  “But those purportedly holy books you cite to me, do they come from a source so pure that it is beyond our power to reject what they offer us? The speediest perusal of these texts suffices to convince us that far indeed from being, as we are brazenly told, the work of an illusory God who never wrote a word nor uttered one either, they are to the contrary merely the scribblings of weak-minded and ignorant men; and they deserve our mistrust, nay, our scorn. But even were we to suppose, in defiance of all the evidence, that these writers were not completely devoid of common sense; bah, what sort of a fool would he be, pray tell me, who was able to wax ecstatic over this or that opinion simply because he’d come upon it in some book or other? One may adopt an opinion, that is permissible; but to sacrifice one’s life’s happiness and peace of mind to it—this, I repeat, only a madman is capable of doing.13 Furthermore, do you tell me that the Bible’s contents bear out the hell opinion, and I in my turn will quote you passages from the same book disproving it. I open Ecclesiastes; here is what I see:

  ‘I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.

  ‘For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast: for all is vanity.

  ‘All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.’14

  “What could be less favorable to the theory of an afterlife than these lines? What could be of greater encouragement to the view that denies the immortality of the soul and contests the whole ridiculous dogma of a hell?

  “And so what are the thoughts of the sane individual as he peers critically at this absurd fable of man’s eternal damnation for having eaten of forbidden fruit in paradise? However inconsequential this little tale, however repulsive one finds it, permit me to dwell upon it for a moment, since it is the point of departure for an argument that conducts one to a hell of eternal sufferings. Is not an impartial examination of this absurdity quite enough to convince one of its inexistence? Oh, my friends, answer: would someone full of loving kindness plant in his garden a tree which produces delicious but poisonous fruit, and would he be content to warn his children not to touch it, telling them they will die if they eat thereof? Were he aware of such a tree growing in his garden, would not this thoughtful and wise father proceed without delay to chop it down, and all the more surely take this precaution in the knowledge that from eating its dread fruit his children must perish and precipitate all ensuing generations into irreparable misery? But the tale reads otherwise: God knows that man shall doom himself and his posterity if he bites into the apple: not only does God endow man with the capacity to yield to temptation, his wickedness does not stop short of arranging man’s seduction. Man succumbs, he is lost; he does
what God has enabled him to do, what God has invited and pushed him into doing, and behold him now, fallen, cursed forever. I call this cruelty and viciousness without parallel. No, I repeat, I would have spared you the recital of this dismal anecdote, I would have disdained to include it in my disquisition were it not for the fact that the hell dogma, whereof I wish to leave not one vestige intact, is one of its more sinister consequences.

  “We may consider all this as so much allegory, fit to provide us a moment or two of diversion but not fit for our belief, and of which mention ought to be forbidden save as one speaks of Aesop’s fables and Milton’s gross fantasies; for the latter are of slight importance, whereas Biblical incantation, seeking to engross our faith, to spoil our pleasures, becomes something of the most evident danger and ought to be suppressed ruthlessly until we need bother with it no more.

  “So let us be well persuaded that such facts as those which are entered in the tedious romance known under the title of the Holy Writ are mere abominable falsehoods, worthy of utter contempt only and without the faintest consequence as regards our weal or woe. Let us be further persuaded that the dogma of the immortality of the soul that had first to be propounded before this soul could be rewarded with eternal bliss or damned to eternal torments is the most blatant, the most arrant, the crudest and the clumsiest of all possible lies; let us realize that when we die, all of us dies, as it is with other animals, and that whatever the conduct we have observed in the world, we shan’t be any the more or less happy for it after we have sojourned there for the longer or shorter period Nature is pleased to allot us.

  “It has been asserted that belief in eternal punishments is absolutely necessary if human beings are to be kept in check, and that we must therefore take utmost care to preserve and promote it. But if it becomes evident that this doctrine is false, if it fails completely to withstand scrutiny, will you not agree that there is infinitely more danger than usefulness in employing it as the buttress for your ethics? and may we not wager that it will prove of more harm than good once it has been set before the individual and he, correctly appraising it, dismisses it for the fiction it is and flings himself carefree into evil-doing? is it not a thousand times better not to impose any restraints upon him at all than that there be a one which he can ignore and flout so easily? In the former case, the idea for doing evil may perhaps not occur to him; but it certainly will when it occurs to him to break the restraint, for in the breaking thereof a further pleasure exists; and such is the perversity in man that he never so cherishes an evil, never so eagerly, so gladly performs it, as when he fancies himself somehow hindered from doing it.

  “They who have pondered upon the nature of man will be forced to agree that all perils, all ills, however great they may be, dwindle with distance and appear less dreadful than minor dangers when these are close at hand. It is obvious that the threat of immediate punishment is much more effective, much more apt to deter the would-be criminal than that of punishments to come. As for misdeeds that lie outside the scope of the law, are not men far more effectively deterred from them by considerations of health, decency, reputation, and other such mundane considerations as are apparent at the moment than by the dread of future and unending woes which seldom enter the mind, or which, when they do, are always vaguely shaped, dimly perceived, and reckoned easy to avoid?

  “In order to judge whether the fear of eternal and rigorous punishments in the next world is more likely to deter men from evil than is that of temporal and imminent punishments in this world, let us for a moment suppose that, the first of these fears subsisting universally, the second were entirely removed; would we not perceive the world suddenly flooded with crimes? Now let us imagine the opposite, let us suppose the fear of eternal punishments abruptly done away with, and the fear of immediate, palpable punishments remaining in full force: while we saw these punishments being meted out unfailingly everywhere, would we not also notice that they were making, a much deeper impression upon the minds of men and were having a much greater influence upon their behavior than the remote punishments of the future which one forgets all about as soon as the passions start asserting themselves?

  “Daily experience furnishes us, does it not, plentiful and convincing proof of the slight effect the fear of punishments in the next world has upon those very persons who believe most staunchly in them. The dogma of eternal sufferings has had particular success with the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Italians; are there any more dissolute peoples? Where does one find more secret crimes committed than among priests and monks, that is, among those who you would think were thoroughly penetrated with religious truths? Indubitable evidence, this, that the good effects produced by the eternal-punishments dogma are very rare and very uncertain. We are about to see that its ill effects are innumerable and definite. Such a doctrine, inevitably filling the soul with bitterness, cannot help but fill the mind with images showing the Divinity in the worst light; it hardens the heart and hurls it into a despair most disadvantageous to the Divinity, belief in whom you mean to bolster by means of this doctrine. Quite the contrary, this frightful dogma fosters atheism, impiety, every right-thinking and decent person finding it a great deal simpler and more convenient not to believe in God at all, rather than acknowledge one so cruel, so inconsistent, so barbaric, as to have created men solely in order to sink them in perpetual misfortune, grief, and anguish.

  “If you insist upon having God as the basis for your religion, at least endeavor to compose a flawless God; for if he is riddled with defects, as yours is, the religion based upon him will soon come into disrepute, and you’ll discover you’ve spoiled each ingredient by unskillful blending of the two.

  “Do you really suppose it is possible that a religion can be believed for long, respected for long, when it is founded upon belief in a God who, according to the rules of the game, must punish a huge—an infinite—number of his creatures for behavior to which that God put them up? Any man who accredits such an arrangement must necessarily live in constant fear of the being who has the power to make him eternally wretched; with that understood, how can he ever love or respect such a being? Were a son to imagine his father capable of condemning him to such cruel tortures or of not wishing to spare him these sufferings if the matter lay in his hands, would that son feel much respect or love for that father? Are not the creatures God has made entitled to expect still more by way of kindness from him than may children from even the most indulgent father? is it not men’s belief, that all the good things of this world are theirs through the goodness of their God; that this God is their guide and protector; that ’tis he who will later procure them the happiness whereof they are in hope; are not all these the assumptions which serve as foundation to a religion? And if you blast them, goodbye religion; whence you see that your idiotic hell dogma wrecks instead of consolidates, that it loosens the underpinnings of the cult instead of tightening them, and that, as a consequence, only dolts have ever been able to believe something only knaves could have invented.

  “No question about it, this being, concerning whom there is so much unending chatter, is sullied, dishonored by the ridiculous colors his portraitists habitually employ; did they not entertain senseless and incoherent ideas of the Divinity, they’d not represent him as cruel; and did they not think him cruel, they’d not fancy him capable of punishing them by infinite torments, or even able to consent that man be deprived eternally of happiness.

  “To elude the force of this argument, partisans of the dogma of eternal damnation affirm that the sore affliction of the reprobate is not arbitrary punishment on God’s part, but a consequence of sin and the immutable order of things. Indeed? Who told you so? If you claim this to be a teaching out of Scripture, you’ll have an awkward time proving it; and if you manage to happen across a single passage where there is some allusion to the matter, oh! the lengths to which you shall have to go in order to convince me of the authenticity, the accuracy, the holiness of these few lines which look to you as though
they read in your favor. Were they your rational faculties which suggested this atrocious dogma to you? In that case, tell me how you manage to conciliate reason with the injustice of a God who confections a creature, all the time knowing full well that the ironclad, immutable shape and design of things is such as will for a certainty forever sink him in an ocean of unremitting woes. If it is true that the universe is created and ruled over by a being infinitely powerful, infinitely wise, then everything must necessarily pass in conformance to his will, coincide with his aims, and conspire to the well-being of all that dwells therein. Now in what way does it further the advantage of the universe that a frail and miserable and helpless creature undergo eternal torture as a punishment for errors he never committed of his own free will?

  “If the vast host of sinners and infidels and unbelievers were really destined to suffer cruel and perpetual torments—what a horrible prospect for mankind! Billions of human beings mercilessly condemned to agonies without end … were it so, indeed, then the lot of man, this thinking and sensitive being, would be truly hideous. For is there not grief and sorrow enough he must face in this life, that he must expect more pain and worse anguish when his career on earth is done? What horror! Oh, ’tis execrable! However can such ideas make their way into the human mind, how is one to avoid the conviction that where they are in currency there lurk imposture, lies, and barbarous politics? Ah! let us be ever more firmly aware that this doctrine, neither useful nor necessary and utterly ineffectual as a means for dissuading men from evil, can be made into the basis for one and only one kind of religion: that whose sole purpose is to keep slaves at heel; let us clearly understand that the unvarying consequences of this abominable dogma are sinister and unwholesome in the extreme, since it is capable only of transforming life into a nightmare of bitterness, horrors, tears, and alarms; and breeds such notions of the Divinity that, save he be paralyzed totally and undone, the individual has no choice but to curse God and a faith wherein belief is tantamount to final degradation.15