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A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 01
The Jews, the only people under the conduct of the Divinity Himself, did not at first give names to the angels whom God vouchsafed to send them; they borrowed the names given them by the Chaldæans when the Jewish nation was captive in Babylon; Michael and Gabriel are named for the first time by Daniel, a slave among those people. The Jew Tobit, who lived at Ninevah, knew the angel Raphael, who travelled with his son to assist him in recovering the money due to him from the Jew Gabaël.
In the laws of the Jews, that is, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, not the least mention is made of the existence of the angels – much less of the worship of them. Neither did the Sadducees believe in the angels.
But in the histories of the Jews, they are much spoken of. The angels were corporeal; they had wings at their backs, as the Gentiles feigned that Mercury had at his heels; sometimes they concealed their wings under their clothing. How could they be without bodies, since they all ate and drank, and the inhabitants of Sodom wanted to commit the sin of pederasty with the angels who went to Lot's house?
The ancient Jewish tradition, according to Ben Maimon, admits ten degrees, ten orders of angels:
1. The chaios ecodesh, pure, holy. 2. The ofamin, swift. 3. The oralim, strong. 4. The chasmalim, flames. 5. The seraphim, sparks. 6. The malakim, angels, messengers, deputies. 7. The elohim, gods or judges. 8. The ben elohim, sons of the gods. 9. The cherubim, images. 10. The ychim, animated.
The story of the fall of the angels is not to be found in the books of Moses. The first testimony respecting it is that of Isaiah, who, apostrophizing the king of Babylon, exclaims, "Where is now the exacter of tributes? The pines and the cedars rejoice in his fall. How hast thou fallen from heaven, O Hellel, star of the morning?" It has been already observed that the word Hellel has been rendered by the Latin word Lucifer; that afterwards, in an allegorical sense, the name of Lucifer was given to the prince of the angels, who made war in heaven; and that, at last, this word, signifying Phosphorus and Aurora, has become the name of the devil.
The Christian religion is founded on the fall of the angels. Those who revolted were precipitated from the spheres which they inhabited into hell, in the centre of the earth, and became devils. A devil, in the form of a serpent, tempted Eve, and damned mankind. Jesus came to redeem mankind, and to triumph over the devil, who tempts us still. Yet this fundamental tradition is to be found nowhere but in the apocryphal book of Enoch; and there it is in a form quite different from that of the received tradition.
St. Augustine, in his 109th letter, does not hesitate to give slender and agile bodies to the good and bad angels. Pope Gregory I. has reduced to nine choirs – to nine hierarchies or orders – the ten choirs of angels acknowledged by the Jews.
The Jews had in their temple two cherubs, each with two heads – the one that of an ox, the other that of an eagle, with six wings. We paint them now in the form of a flying head, with two small wings below the ears. We paint the angels and archangels in the form of young men, with two wings at the back. As for the thrones and dominations, no one has yet thought of painting them.
St. Thomas, at question cviii. article 2, says that the thrones are as near to God as the cherubim and the seraphim, because it is upon them that God sits. Scot has counted a thousand million of angels. The ancient mythology of the good and bad genii, having passed from the East to Greece and Rome, we consecrated this opinion, for admitting for each individual a good and an evil angel, of whom one assists him and the other torments him, from his birth to his death; but it is not yet known whether these good and bad angels are continually passing from one to another, or are relieved by others. On this point, consult "St. Thomas's Dream."
It is not known precisely where the angels dwell – whether in the air, in the void, or in the planets. It has not been God's pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.
ANNALS
How many nations have long existed, and still exist, without annals. There were none in all America, that is, in one-half of our globe, excepting those of Mexico and Peru, which are not very ancient. Besides, knotted cords are a sort of books which cannot enter into very minute details. Three-fourths of Africa never had annals; and, at the present day, in the most learned nations, in those which have even used and abused the art of writing the most, ninety-nine out of a hundred persons may be regarded as not knowing anything that happened there farther back than four generations, and as ignorant almost of the names of their great-grandfathers. Such is the case with nearly all the inhabitants of towns and villages, very few families holding titles of their possessions. When a litigation arises respecting the limits of a field or a meadow, the judges decide according to the testimony of the old men; and possession constitutes the title. Some great events are transmitted from father to son, and are entirely altered in passing from mouth to mouth. They have no other annals.
Look at all the villages of our Europe, so polished, so enlightened, so full of immense libraries, and which now seem to groan under the enormous mass of books. In each village two men at most, on an average, can read and write. Society loses nothing in consequence. All works are performed – building, planting, sowing, reaping, as they were in the remotest times. The laborer has not even leisure to regret that he has not been taught to consume some hours of the day in reading. This proves that mankind had no need of historical monuments to cultivate the arts really necessary to life.
It is astonishing, not that so many tribes of people are without annals, but that three or four nations have preserved them for five thousand years or thereabouts, through so many violent revolutions which the earth has undergone. Not a line remains of the ancient Egyptian, Chaldæan, or Persian annals, nor of those of the Latins and Etruscans. The only annals that can boast of a little antiquity are the Indian, the Chinese, and the Hebrew.
We cannot give the name of annals to vague and rude fragments of history without date, order, or connection. They are riddles proposed by antiquity to posterity, who understand nothing at all of them. We venture to affirm that Sanchoniathon, who is said to have lived before the time of Moses, composed annals. He probably limited his researches to cosmogony, as Hesiod afterwards did in Greece. We advance this latter opinion only as a doubt; for we write only to be informed, and not to teach.
But what deserves the greatest attention is that Sanchoniathon quotes the books of the Egyptian Thoth, who, he tells us, lived eight hundred years before him. Now Sanchoniathon probably wrote in the age in which we place Joseph's adventure in Egypt. We commonly place the epoch of the promotion of the Jew Joseph to the prime-ministry of Egypt at the year of the creation 2300.
If, then, the books of Thoth were written eight hundred years before, they were written in the year 1500 of the creation. Therefore, their date was a hundred and fifty-six years before the deluge. They must, then, have been engraved on stone, and preserved in the universal inundation. Another difficulty is that Sanchoniathon does not speak of the deluge, and that no Egyptian writer has ever been quoted who does speak of it. But these difficulties vanish before the Book of Genesis, inspired by the Holy Ghost.
We have no intention here to plunge into the chaos which eighty writers have sought to clear up, by inventing different chronologies; we always keep to the Old Testament. We only ask whether in the time of Thoth they wrote in hieroglyphics, or in alphabetical characters? whether stone and brick had yet been laid aside for vellum, or any other material? whether Thoth wrote annals, or only a cosmogony? whether there were some pyramids already built in the time of Thoth? whether Lower Egypt was already inhabited? whether canals had been constructed to receive the waters of the Nile? whether the Chaldæans had already taught the arts of the Egyptians, and whether the Chaldæans had received them from the Brahmins? There are persons who have resolved all these questions; which once occasioned a man of sense and wit to say of a grave doctor, "That man must be very ignorant, for he answers every question that is asked him."
ANNATS
The epoch of the establishment of annats is uncertain, which is a proof that the exaction of them is a usurpation – an extortionary custom. Whatever is not founded on an authentic law is an abuse. Every abuse ought to be reformed, unless the reform is more dangerous than the abuse itself. Usurpation begins by small and successive encroachments; equity and the public interest at length exclaim and protest; then comes policy, which does its best to reconcile usurpation with equity, and the abuse remains.
In several dioceses the bishops, chapters, and arch-deacons, after the example of the popes, imposed annats upon the curés. In Normandy this exaction is called droit de déport. Policy having no interest in maintaining this pillage, it was abolished in several places; it still exists in others; so true is it that money is the first object of worship!
In 1409, at the Council of Pisa, Pope Alexander V. expressly renounced annats; Charles VII. condemned them by an edict of April, 1418; the Council of Basel declared that they came under the domination of simony, and the Pragmatic Sanction abolished them again.
Francis I., by a private treaty which he made with Leo X., and which was not inserted in the concordat, allowed the pope to raise this tribute, which produced him annually, during that prince's reign, a hundred thousand crowns of that day, according to the calculation then made by Jacques Capelle, advocate-general to the Parliament of Paris.
The parliament, the universities, the clergy, the whole nation, protested against this exaction, and Henry II., yielding at length to the cries of his people, renewed the law of Charles VII., by an edict of the 3d of September, 1551.
The paying of annats was again forbidden by Charles IX., at the States of Orleans, in 1560: "By the advice of our council, and in pursuance of the decrees of the Holy Councils, the ancient ordinances of the kings, our predecessors, and the decisions of our courts of parliament, we order that all conveying of gold and silver out of our kingdom, and paying of money under the name of annats, vacant or otherwise, shall cease, on pain of a four-fold penalty on the offenders."
This law, promulgated in the general assembly of the nation, must have seemed irrevocable, but two years afterwards the same prince, subdued by the court of Rome, at that time powerful, re-established what the whole nation and himself had abrogated.
Henry IV., who feared no danger, but feared Rome, confirmed the annats by an edict of the 22d of January, 1596.
Three celebrated jurisconsults, Dumoulin, Lannoy, and Duaren, have written strongly against annats, which they call a real simony. If, in default of their payment the pope refuses his bulls, Duaren advises the Gallican Church to imitate that of Spain, which, in the twelfth Council of Toledo, charged the archbishop of that city, on the pope's refusal, to provide for the prelates appointed by the king.
It is one of the most certain maxims of French law, consecrated by article fourteen of our liberties, that the bishop of Rome has no power over the temporalities of benefices, but enjoys the revenues of annats only by the king's permission. But ought there not to be a term to this permission? What avails our enlightenment if we are always to retain, our abuses?
The amount of the sums which have been and still are paid to the pope is truly frightful. The attorney-general, Jean de St. Romain, has remarked that in the time of Pius II. twenty-two bishoprics having become vacant in France in the space of three years, it was necessary to carry to Rome a hundred and twenty thousand crowns; that sixty-one abbeys having also become vacant, the like sum had been paid to the court of Rome; that about the same time there had been paid to this court for provisions for the priorships, deaneries, and other inferior dignities, a thousand crowns; that for each curate there was at least a grâce expectative, which was sold for twenty-five crowns, besides an infinite number of dispensations, amounting to two millions of crowns. St. Romain lived in the time of Louis XI. Judge then, what these sums would now amount to. Judge how much other states have given. Judge whether the Roman commonwealth in the time of Lucullus drew more gold and silver from the nations conquered by its sword than the popes, the fathers of those same nations, have drawn from them by their pens.
Supposing that St. Romain's calculation is too high by half, which is very unlikely, does there not still remain a sum sufficiently considerable to entitle us to call the apostolical chamber to an account and demand restitution, seeing that there is nothing at all apostolical in such an amount of money?
ANTHROPOMORPHITES
They are said to have been a small sect of the fourth century, but they were rather the sect of every people that had painters and sculptors. As soon as they could draw a little, or shape a figure, they made an image of the Divinity. If the Egyptians consecrated cats and gnats they also sculptured Isis and Osiris. Bel was carved at Babylon, Hercules at Tyre, Brahma in India.
The Mussulmans did not paint God as a man. The Guebres had no image of the Great Being. The Sabean Arabs, did not give the human figure to the stars. The Jews did not give it to God in their temple. None of these nations cultivated the art of design, and if Solomon placed figures of animals in his temple it is likely that he had them carved at Tyre; but all the Jews have spoken of God as of a man.
Although they had no images they seem to have made God a man on all occasions. He comes down into the garden; He walks there every day at noon; He talks to His creatures; He talks to the serpent; He makes Himself heard by Moses in the bush; He shows him only His back parts on the mountain; He nevertheless talks to him, face to face, like one friend to another.
In the Koran, too, God is always looked up to as a king. In the twelfth chapter, a throne is given Him above the waters. He had this Koran written by a secretary, as kings have their orders. He sent this same Koran to Mahomet by the angel Gabriel, as kings communicate their orders through the great officers of the crown. In short, although God is declared in the Koran to be neither begetting nor begotten, there is, nevertheless a morsel of anthropomorphism. In the Greek and Latin Churches, God has always been painted with a great beard.
ANTI-LUCRETIUS
The reading of the whole poem of the late Cardinal Polignac has confirmed me in the idea which I formed of it when he read to me the first book. I am moreover astonished, that amidst the dissipations of the world and the troubles in public life, he should have been able to write a long work in verse, in a foreign language; he, who could hardly have made four good lines in his own tongue. It seems to me that he often united the strength of Lucretius and the elegance of Virgil. I admire him, above all, for that facility with which he expresses such difficult things.
Perhaps, indeed, his "Anti-Lucretius" is too diffuse, and too little diversified, but he is here to be examined as a philosopher, not as a poet. It appears to me that so fine a mind as his should have done more justice to the morals of Epicurus, who, though he was a very bad natural philosopher, was, nevertheless, a very worthy man and always taught mildness, temperance, moderation, and justice, virtues which his example inculcated still more forcibly.
In the "Anti-Lucretius," this great man is thus apostrophized:
Si virtutis eras avidus, rectique bonique
Tam sitiens, quid relligio tibi sancta nocebat?
Aspera quippe nimis visa est. Asperrima certe
Gaudenti vitiis, sed non virtutis amanti.
Ergo perfugium culpa, solisque benignus
Periuris ac fœdifragis, Epicure, parabas.
So lam hominum faecem poteras, devotaque fureis
Corpora, etc.
If virtue, justice, goodness, were thy care,
Why didst thou tremble at Religion's call? —
Whose laws are harsh to vicious minds alone —
Not to the spirit that delights in virtue.
No, no – the worst of men, the worst of crimes
Has thy solicitude – thy dearest aim
To find a refuge for the guilty soul, etc.
But Epicurus might reply to the cardinal: "If I had had the happiness of knowing, like you, the true God, of being born, like you, in a pure and holy religion, I should certainly not have rejected that revealed God, whose tenets were necessarily unknown to my mind, but whose morality was in my heart. I could not admit the existence of such gods as were announced to me by paganism. I was too rational to adore divinities, made to spring from a father and a mother, like mortals, and like them, to make war upon one another. I was too great a friend to virtue not to hate a religion which now invited to crime by the example of those gods themselves, and now sold for money the remission of the most horrible enormities. I beheld, on one hand, infatuated men, stained with vices, and seeking to purify themselves before impure gods; and on the other, knaves who boasted that they could justify the most perverse by initiating them in mysteries, by dropping bullock's blood on their heads, or by dipping them in the waters of the Ganges. I beheld the most unjust wars undertaken with perfect sanctity, so soon as a ram's liver was found unspotted, or a woman, with hair dishevelled and rolling eyes, uttered words of which neither she nor any one else knew the meaning. In short, I beheld all the countries of the earth stained with the blood of human victims, sacrificed by barbarous pontiffs to barbarous gods. I consider that I did well to detest such religions. Mine is virtue. I exhorted my disciples not to meddle with the affairs of this world, because they were horribly governed. A true Epicurean was mild, moderate, just, amiable – a man of whom no society had to complain – one who did not pay executioners to assassinate in public those who thought differently from himself. From hence to the holy religion in which you have been bred there is but one step. I destroyed the false gods, and, had I lived in your day, I would have recognized the true ones."
Thus might Epicurus justify himself concerning his error. He might even entitle himself to pardon respecting the dogma of the immortality of the soul, by saying: "Pity me for having combated a truth which God revealed five hundred years after my birth. I thought like all the first Pagan legislators of the world; and they were all ignorant of this truth."
I wish, then, that Cardinal Polignac had pitied while he condemned Epicurus; it would have been no detriment to fine poetry. With regard to physics it appears to me that the author has lost much time and many verses in refuting the declination of atoms and the other absurdities which swarm in the poem of Lucretius. This is employing artillery to destroy a cottage. Besides, why remove Lucretius' reveries to substitute those of Descartes?
Cardinal Polignac has inserted in his poem some very fine lines on the discoveries of Newton; but in these, unfortunately for himself, he combats demonstrated truths. The philosophy of Newton is not to be discussed in verse; it is scarcely to be approached in prose. Founded altogether on geometry, the genius of poetry is not fit to assail it. The surface of these truths may be decorated with fine verses but to fathom them, calculation is requisite, and not verse.
ANTIQUITY
SECTION I
Have you not sometimes seen, in a village, Pierre Aoudri and his wife Peronelle striving to go before their neighbors in a procession? "Our grandfathers," say they, "rung the bells before those who elbow us now had so much as a stable of their own."
The vanity of Pierre Aoudri, his wife, and his neighbors knows no better. They grow warm. The quarrel is an important one, for honor is in question. Proofs must now be found. Some learned churchsinger discovers an old rusty iron pot, marked with an A, the initial of the brazier's name who made the pot. Pierre Aoudri persuades himself that it was the helmet of one of his ancestors. So Cæsar descended from a hero and from the goddess Venus. Such is the history of nations; such is, very nearly, the knowledge of early antiquity.
The learned of Armenia demonstrate that the terrestrial paradise was in their country. Some profound Swedes demonstrate that it was somewhere about Lake Wenner, which exhibits visible remains of it. Some Spaniards, too, demonstrate that it was in Castile. While the Japanese, the Chinese, the Tartars, the Indians, the Africans, and the Americans, are so unfortunate as not even to know that a terrestrial paradise once existed at the sources of the Pison, the Gihon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, or, which is the same thing, at the sources of the Guadalquivir, the Guadiana, the Douro, and the Ebro. For of Pison we easily make Phæris, and of Phæris we easily make the Bætis, which is the Guadalquivir. The Gihon, it is plain, is the Guadiana, for they both begin with a G. And the Ebro, which is in Catalonia, is unquestionably the Euphrates, both beginning with an E.
But a Scotchman comes, and in his turn demonstrates that the garden of Eden was at Edinburgh, which has retained its name; and it is not unlikely that, in a few centuries, this opinion will prevail.
The whole globe was once burned, says a man conversant with ancient and modern history; for I have read in a journal that charcoal quite black has been found a hundred feet deep, among mountains covered with wood. And it is also suspected that there were charcoal-burners in this place.
Phaeton's adventure sufficiently shows that everything has been boiled, even to the bottom of the sea. The sulphur of Mount Vesuvius incontrovertibly proves that the banks of the Rhine, the Danube, the Ganges, the Nile, and the Great Yellow River, are nothing but sulphur, nitre, and oil of guiacum, which only wait for the moment of explosion to reduce the earth to ashes, as it has already once been. The sand on which we walk is an evident proof that the universe has vitrified, and that our globe is nothing but a ball of glass – like our ideas.
But if fire has changed our globe, water has produced still more wonderful revolutions. For it is plain that the sea, the tides of which in our latitudes rise eight feet, has produced the mountains, which are sixteen to seventeen thousand feet high. This is so true that some learned men, who never were in Switzerland, found a large vessel there, with all its rigging, petrified, either on Mount St. Gothard or at the bottom of a precipice – it is not positively known which; but it is quite certain that it was there. Therefore, men were originally fishes – Q.E.D.
Coming down to antiquity less ancient let us speak of the times when most barbarous nations quitted their own countries to seek others which were not much better. It is true, if there be anything true in ancient history, that there were Gaulish robbers who went to plunder Rome in the time of Camillus. Other robbers from Gaul had, it is said, passed through Illyria to sell their services as murderers to other murderers in the neighborhood of Thrace: they bartered their blood for bread, and at length settled in Galatia. But who were these Gauls? Were they natives of Berry and Anjou? They were, doubtless, some of those Gauls whom the Romans called Cisalpine, and whom we call Transalpine – famishing mountaineers, inhabiting the Alps and the Apennines. The Gauls of the Seine and the Marne did not then know that Rome existed, and could not resolve to cross Mont Cenis, as was afterwards done by Hannibal, to steal the wardrobes of the Roman senators, whose only movables were a gown of bad grey cloth, decorated with a band, the color of bull's blood, two small knobs of ivory, or rather dog's bone, fixed to the arms of a wooden chair, and a piece of rancid bacon in their kitchens.
The Gauls, who were dying of hunger, finding nothing to eat at home, went to try their fortune farther off; as the Romans afterwards did when they ravaged so many countries, and as the people of the North did at a later period when they destroyed the Roman Empire.
And whence have we received our vague information respecting these emigrations? From some lines written at a venture by the Romans; for, as for the Celts, Welsh, or Gauls, whom some would have us believe to have been eloquent, neither they nor their bards could at that time read or write.
But, to infer from these that the Gauls or Celts, afterwards conquered by a few of Cæsar's legions, then by a horde of Goths, then by a horde of Burgundians, and lastly by a horde of Sicambri, under one Clodovic, had before subjugated the whole earth, and given their names and their laws to Asia, seems to me to be inferring a great deal. The thing, however, is not mathematically impossible; and if it be demonstrated, I assent: it would be very uncivil to refuse to the Welsh what is granted to the Tartars.
SECTION II
On the Antiquity of Usages
Who have been the greatest fools, and who the most ancient fools? Ourselves or the Egyptians, or the Syrians or some other people? What was signified by our mistletoe? Who first consecrated a cat? It must have been he who was the most troubled with mice. In what nation did they first dance under the boughs of trees in honor of the gods? Who first made processions, and placed fools, with caps and bells, at the head of them? Who first carried a priapus through the streets, and fixed one like a knocker at the door? What Arab first took it into his head to hang his wife's drawers out at the window, the day after his marriage?
All nations have formerly danced at the time of the new moon. Did they then give one another the word? No; no more than they did to rejoice at the birth of a son, or to mourn, or seem to mourn, at the death of a father. Every one is very glad to see the moon again, after having lost her for several nights. There are a hundred usages so natural to all men, that it cannot be said the Biscayans taught them to the Phrygians, or the Phrygians to the Biscayans.
Fire and water have been used in temples. This custom needed no introduction. A priest did not choose always to have his hands dirty. Fire was necessary to cook the immolated carcasses, and to burn slips of resinous wood and spices, in order to combat the odor of the sacerdotal shambles.
But the mysterious ceremonies which it is so difficult to understand, the usages which nature does not teach – in what place, when, where, how, why, were they invented? Who communicated them to other nations? It is not likely that it should, at the same time, have entered the head of an Arab and of an Egyptian to cut off one end of his son's prepuce; nor that a Chinese and a Persian should, both at once, have resolved to castrate little boys.
It can never have been that two fathers, in different countries, have, at the same moment, formed the idea of cutting their sons' throats to please God. Some nations must have communicated to others their follies, serious, ridiculous, or barbarous. In this antiquity men love to search, to discover, if possible, the first madman and the first scoundrel who perverted human nature.
But how are we to know whether Jehu, in Phœnicia, by immolating his son, was the inventor of sacrifices of human blood? How can we be assured that Lycaon was the first who ate human flesh, when we do not know who first began to eat fowls?
We seek to know the origin of ancient feasts. The most ancient and the finest is that of the emperors of China tilling and sowing the ground, together with their first mandarins. The second is that of the Thesmophoria at Athens. To celebrate at once agriculture and justice, to show men how necessary they both are, to unite the curb of law with the art which is the source of all wealth – nothing is more wise, more pious, or more useful.
There are old allegorical feasts to be found everywhere, as those of the return of the seasons. It was not necessary that one nation should come from afar off to teach another that marks of joy and friendship for one's neighbors may be given on the first day of the year. This custom has been that of every people. The Saturnalia of the Romans are better known than those of the Allobroges and the Picts; because there are many Roman writings and monuments remaining, but there are none of the other nations of western Europe.
The feast of Saturn was the feast of Time. He had four wings; time flies quickly – his two faces evidently signifying the concluded and the commencing year. The Greeks said that he had devoured his father and that he devoured his children. No allegory is more reasonable. Time devours the past and the present, and will devour the future.
Why seek for vain and gloomy explanations of a feast so universal, so gay, and so well known? When I look well into antiquity, I do not find a single annual festival of a melancholy character; or, at least, if they begin with lamentations, they end in dancing and revelry. If tears are shed for Adoni or Adonai, whom we call Adonis, he is soon resuscitated, and rejoicing takes place. It is the same with the feasts of Isis, Osiris, and Horus. The Greeks, too, did as much for Ceres as for Prosperine. The death of the serpent Python was celebrated with gayety. A feast day and a day of joy were one and the same thing. At the feasts of Bacchus this joy was only carried too far.
I do not find one general commemoration of an unfortunate event. The institutors of the feasts would have shown themselves to be devoid of common sense if they had established at Athens a celebration of the battle lost at Chæronea, and at Rome another of the battle of Cannae.
