by Paul Hazard
With this line of argument no enlightened Christian would have any fault to find. But Bayle does not stop there. Stop? He never does stop. When you think he has arrived at his Q.E.D., he has other chapters to tack on, long and solid ones at that. And when at last the book is finished—he starts on another one. And, even then, we are only just beginning.
You are not to believe in the power of comets, even if whole nations have borne witness to it, even if millions have sworn to it; nay, even if it is proclaimed by universal consent. Universal consent, the argument used to convince the unbelieving of God’s existence, Bayle energetically repudiates. He also rejects tradition, on which the faithful put their trust as the means by which religious truth is preserved and handed down from age to age. “I have said it before, and I say it again; it is the purest delusion to suppose that because an idea has been handed down from time immemorial to succeeding generations, it may not be entirely false.”
And so the battle begins anew. Bayle produces the argument which is dearest to his heart, which he deems the most original and most novel of them all, the argument, namely, that if comets were a presage of evil, God would have wrought miracles to confirm idolatry in the world. He warms to his task, he waxes eloquent, almost dithyrambic: Ah, he says, let us not, every time we encounter something difficult to explain, let us not jump to the conclusion that it is a miracle. Miracles are against all reason. There is nothing more consonant with God’s infinite greatness than His maintenance of the laws which He Himself established; there could be nothing more unworthy than to imagine Him intervening to interrupt their regular operation. And intervening for what, pray? Intervening about something as paltry and insignificant, compared with the march of the Universe, as the birth or death of a prince!
“The more we study the ways of man, the more we are forced to recognize that pride is his ruling passion, and that he will give himself grandiose airs even when his affairs are at their sorriest. Frail and infirm as he is, he quite persuades himself that when he comes to die, the whole of nature is stirred to its very depths and that Heaven itself must needs go out of its way to lend a touch of splendour to his obsequies. Foolish, ludicrous vanity! If we looked at the universe aright, we should soon realize that the birth or death of a prince was a very small matter indeed against the background of the universal order, far too small for Heaven to make a pother about. We should say, with the wisest and loftiest of all old Rome’s philosophers (Seneca), that it is true indeed that the solicitude of Providence includes even ourselves, but that, though we have our allotted place in the general scheme of things, the Heavenly purpose is directed to something far greater than our particular preservation, and that, while we derive great benefits from the movements of the heavenly bodies, it is not merely for the sake of this earth that they set themselves in motion.[2]
Universal consent, tradition, miracles: Bayle goes on. The idea that comets are to be regarded as portents of public calamities is an ancient superstition which contrived to establish itself among Christians in pagan times, and has lingered on ever since. For it is a fact that many of the errors of paganism have survived throughout the ages and are discernible in the customs, ceremonies and in the actual beliefs of Christians. Nay, more; God, when He delivered the pagans out of darkness, did not take it upon Himself to reveal to them the secrets of Nature, or so to arm them against popular errors and superstitions that they should never succumb to them again. Revelation or no revelation, human nature, liable as it is to all manner of illusions, prejudices, passions and vices, is fundamentally what it always was. Christians fall into the same sins as do the general run of men. Indeed, it may be that religion, so far from dispelling the darkness, has actually intensified it: to revert to the superstitious tendencies which the Evil One has observed in the human mind, I say that that Arch-enemy of God and of man’s salvation has put his shoulder so strenuously to the wheel, and exploited his opportunities so profitably that he has transformed what was best and most valuable in the world, namely, religion, into a conglomeration of quaint, foolish or extravagant customs and, what is worse, of staggering crimes. Worst of all, it has sent mankind down the slippery slope that has landed them at last in the most degrading form of idolatry imaginable.[3]
It may be that idolatry is a characteristic of all the religions that are. It is very evidently a characteristic of religion today. Now there can be no greater evil than idolatry, not excepting atheism itself. We may say, speaking in the abstract, that imperfection is as inimical to the nature of God as complete nonexistence. One way of illustrating the detestable nature of idolatry would be to collect all the solemn denunciations which the Church herself has uttered against it; but instead of doing that, let us examine the facts of the case, for we should always come back to the facts. Is it not a fact, then, that Christians offer examples of every vice that is? Is not the most flagrant immorality found in practice to be perfectly compatible with a belief in God? Conversely, are there not many atheists who live the most exemplary lives, who are keenly sensitive to the dictates of honour, and who, though they do not believe that the soul is immortal, nevertheless strive their utmost to invest their name with the halo of imperishable renown? One might readily imagine an atheistical society, not only as good as, but better than a Christian one. Finally, if the worth of an idea is to be gauged by the heroes it inspires, by the martyrs who lay down their lives for its sake, are we not aware that atheism, too, has had its heroes and its martyrs?
And so Bayle, taking a few inoffensive comets for his text, winds up at last with a panegyric on atheism. People there were in plenty, who, like Bayle, wanted to push out beyond the purely philosophical specialists, and to bring their ideas to bear on the world of ordinary men and women; but none of them, not even Toland, though he took a leaf out of his book now and again, can emulate the ferocity of Bayle. Numerous as were his supporters and fellow-travellers, his contradictors and opponents were more numerous still, but they only picked out isolated details for their attack, finding fault, now with this point, now with that. Many years were to elapse before a thinker came along, who, rising above the consideration of mere minutiae, opposed him with general principles as weighty and as cogent as his own. It was not until 1712 that Élie Benoist, a pastor of the Walloon Church, Delft, challenged him in a composition which, though somewhat limited in scope, adumbrated some very material arguments. If, says Élie Benoist, we were to adopt the method employed by Bayle in his discussion of comets, if that is to say we insisted on first-hand evidence and regarded every other testimony as inadmissible, we might quite well prove that he was not the author of his Dictionary. He assures us that he is, but what proof of his bona fides can he offer? He swears on oath that he is telling the truth, but what I want is direct evidence. Many a man has perjured himself ere now. He brings along friends to vouch for his good character; but who’s going to vouch for his friends? He will cite me his publisher, the printer, the proof-reader, but I shall question the trustworthiness of all these witnesses; and so, having found something to challenge in one witness after another, I shall show that, before I have grounds for believing M. Bayle, I shall have to summon a general synod of the whole human race. . . .
What he meant was that there are cases in which one must content oneself with a moral proof, and where Bayle errs is in trying to confine the spirit in a strait-jacket and in insisting on applying his method to every conceivable circumstance that life can offer. Moral proof, though it may not dispose of every difficulty, or dispel every shadow of obscurity, does enable one to make a choice, to have a mind of one’s own, to say “yes” or “no”, to come to a decision and to act on it. “Absolute proofs are so rare, so difficult to come by, that they can play no part in matters in which circumstances call for immediate action, and if it be asserted that to decide on a line of conduct one must have grounds that would be proof against every conceivable objection that some ingenious philosopher, some subtle casuist, might allege against them, we should have to abstain fr
om almost all the functions of life. The Arts, the Sciences, Societies, Laws, Commerce, all depend on such practical demonstrations.” And, he might have added, Religion also.[4]
From the day that was said, forgetting all about comets, the members of the Walloon Church of Delft, and, like them, all the men and women in the world, were free to choose between abstract rationalism, on the one hand, and pragmatism on the other.
Those beauteous Sibyls that Michelangelo depicted in the Sistine Chapel were women inspired of God who, albeit pagans, foretold the coming of Christ, his life, his miracles, his death and resurrection. The Fathers of the Church made great and fruitful use of the oracles of these prophetesses when converting unbelievers. When, in the books wherein the oracular utterances of the Sibyls are recorded, the Gentiles beheld the mysteries of the Christian faith set down in advance, they were constrained to avow that that faith was divine and true. Ten famous Sibyls; eight books, Greek and Latin; the testimony of great writers, such as Virgil, Tacitus, Suetonius; the authoritative pronouncements of the Fathers—St. Justin Martyr, St. Augustine, St. Jerome—what an imposing array! What a rampart against unbelief! Nor will you fail to remark that oracles continued up to the birth of Christ, and not beyond. After that they were silent; they were no longer needed. That miraculous aposiopesis is yet another mark of their heavenly character.
Howbeit, some learned men there were, who were bent on putting their spoke into the wheel. These so-called Sibylline Books, were they genuine? Weren’t they in all probability the fabrication of a group of Messianic Jews? Or, perhaps of the Christians themselves? They had all the appearance of an artificial concoction, and a pretty unskilful one at that. As for the Fathers of the Church, all their learning, all their sincerity was no guarantee against error. They lacked the critical sense; they were prejudiced, ex parte witnesses, and accepted as true certain statements that were palpably false; they had been misled themselves and, with the best intentions in the world, they had misled others in their turn.
Showing scant respect for the Sibyl of Delphi, or for her sisters of Cumae, of the Hellespont, of Phrygia or of Tibur, the learned Vossius, Canon of Windsor, inclined to the theory that the books were of Jewish origin; whereas Johannes Marckius, Doctor in Theology at Groningen, was disposed to ascribe them to the early Christians. Then came a Dutch physician, one Antony Van Dale, heavy-handed but powerful, who, without entering into any learned details, dealt a couple of sledge-hammer blows: in the first place, all these oracles were just a lot of impostures; in the second, they did not cease with the coming of Christ.
Next, a Frenchman arrived on the scene, very much at his ease and very subtle-minded. Moreover, he was the very sort of man who, amid the noise and tumult of the fray, lets fall the telling and decisive word, the word that no one can better, however long the debate goes on. Fontenelle furnishes us with a typical example of the manner in which an idea may evolve. He was a nephew of the great Corneille, but the heroic did not long detain him; the Sublime, to him, was merely so much meaningless bombast. For a time, he toyed with the “precious” school; he had a taste for elegant versification, for writing pretty compliments to ladies, for turning out madrigals, and the discovery of a single silver thread among some fair one’s raven tresses inspired him with a wealth of wonderful conceits. He contributed to the Mercure; he wrote comedies, tragedies, operas; his conception of the art of letters was that it meant producing work in faithful conformity to rigid formulas, and in this occupation, such as it was, he took an infinite delight. Of all these tastes and pursuits he retained a good deal more than the mere recollection, and all his life long there was about him something of the Cydias whom La Bruyère so pitilessly delineated for us.
But he was by nature of an enquiring mind; enquiring, and something more besides, eager to arrive at clear and sound conclusions, mathematically exact if possible. No pastime, sport or other recreation could rival the pleasure he derived from analysis and deduction, the pleasure of drawing ever closer and closer to the shadows he is trying to overtake. Fontenelle’s intellect offers an almost ideal example of a gift that was peculiarly his own, the power, that is, to grasp a thing in all its parts and grasp it quickly, allowing no external influence or inward prompting to mar or distort it. To see his mind at work, you would be reminded of a surgeon’s scalpel, so keen it was, so glittering. Add to all this the enthusiasm natural to the convert, enthusiasm from which no one in those days was exempt, no one as yet being wholly disillusioned. However, it must be admitted that he was a terrible egoist, that he was equally immune from the passions of anger and love, that his attitude to the fair sex was dictated by pure selfishness; he disliked the extremes of heat and cold and did his best to avoid them; he detested draughts, and fought shy of people who might ask him a favour, fought shy even of friends, of everyone and everything, in fact, that could possibly curtail his freedom or tax his strength. Finally, the very delicacy of his constitution, by the care which it forced him to take of his health, enabled him to see many of his robuster contemporaries precede him to the grave, and to prolong his own life to a hundred. There is no justification for the reproach that, having his own hand full of truths, he never offered to share them with others. Proselytes are not, all of them, loquacious and ill-bred. Some are delicate and refined, as was Fontenelle himself. So great was his abhorrence of error, that it sometimes led him to forget the caution which held him back from falling into scepticism: “Error is to be found everywhere”, he sadly remarked.
Such, then, was this Fontenelle who came to inspect the Sibyls, and looked at them with a mistrustful eye. It was in 1686 that he brought out his Histoire des Oracles. He had examined no very recondite sources of information. Van Dale furnished him with all he needed. Van Dale indeed was so vigorous and so sound that he almost thought it would suffice merely to translate him, and leave it at that. But then Van Dale was ponderous, bristly, overloaded with quotations, turgid, and, at first sight, anything but inviting. Better titivate him up a bit and put some attractive French trimmings on him, so that people should not be put off by his appearance for “the women, and, there’s no denying it, the vast majority of the men, of this country at any rate, are more taken by the choice of words, by elegance and grace of diction and turns of thought, than they are by the more solid virtues of accurate research and learned arguments. Then again, most people, being averse to mental exertion, like a well-planned book, straightforward and easy to follow, so that they don’t have to keep their brains on the stretch more than is absolutely necessary.” The upshot was that the task was divided, Van Dale supplying the matter, Fontenelle the wit, the grace, the charm, and the trenchant style.
In the first place, there was no truth in the statement that oracles were pronounced by demons. How, then, could such an idea have got abroad? Because a whole literature, devoted to recording strange and startling events, gave it currency; because Christians, having once accepted the idea of oracles, naturally worked them as hard as they could. Besides that, this demon theory seemed to fit in with the Platonic philosophy, and finally, most cogent reason of all, there was the power of the supernatural over the minds of men.
But the whole structure was unsound, unsound from the foundations upward. The tales on which these fabulous ideas were based were apocryphal, or contradictory, or so manifestly untrue that they fell to pieces the moment the light of reason was brought to bear on them. Thus Fontenelle—laying about him right and left. The current idea about oracles does not square so well with religion as people think; the existence of spirits is not satisfactorily established by Platonism; whole schools of pagan philosophy have declared that there is nothing supernatural about oracles; while numbers of people, not philosophers, have also, often enough, shown scant respect for oracles; the early Christians themselves were far from being convinced that oracles were the utterances of spirits. Wherever he came up against something that was affirmed as a certainty, he questioned it, or flatly denied it; and he always gave the reason why.
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Having amply demonstrated that oracles were a fraud, that they were invariably worded to suit the wishes of the great; that the pagan priests employed every trick they could think of to impose them on the credulity of the public; that they were ambiguous and therefore useless; that they proceeded from human knavery and not from divine intervention, he next went on to deny the assertion that they had ceased with the coming of Christ. There had been many oracles subsequent to that date, and, if in the end they had ceased to make themselves heard, it was because they bore within them the cause of their own decay, one which was logically sufficient in itself, apart from any divine interposition, and that was the evidence, the clear evidence, that they were deliberately designed to deceive: “The crimes of the priests, their overweening insolence, the various events that had exposed their knavery, the ambiguity or downright falsity of their answers would have discredited these oracles and made an end of them sooner or later, even if the Pagan system itself had not ceased to exist.” In short, there was nothing supernatural about the matter at all. It is sufficiently accounted for by ignorance on the one side, and fraud on the other. The supernatural—that is the ordinary recourse of human kind; it is also the most misleading, the most deceptive. We rush away to search for the cause without stopping to find out whether the supposed fact is a fact in reality. That is where we make the great mistake. The remedy lies in a rule which we should always bear in mind: Make sure of the fact before worrying your head about its cause.