Human Reason

30. Thus what we have just said of human reason, which is extolled and decried by turns, and often without rule or measure, may show our lack of exactitude and how much we are accessary to our own errors.

Nothing would be so easy to terminate as these disputes on the rights of faith and of reason if men would make use [92]of the commonest rules of logic and reason with even a modicum of attention.

Instead of that, they become involved in oblique and ambiguous phrases, which give them a fine field for declamation, to make the most of their wit and their learning.

It would seem that they have no wish to see the naked truth, peradventure because they fear that it may be more disagreeable than error: for they know not the beauty of the Author of all things, who is the source of truth.

31. This negligence is a general defect of humanity, and one not to be laid to the charge of any particular person. Abundamus dulcibus vitiis, as Quintilian said of the style of Seneca, and we take pleasure in going astray. Exactitude incommodes us and rules we regard as puerilities.

Thus it is that common logic (although it is more or less sufficient for the examination of arguments that tend towards certainty) is relegated to schoolboys.

There is not even a thought for a kind of logic which should determine the balance between probabilities, and would be so necessary in deliberations of importance.

So true is it that our mistakes for the most part come from scorn or lack of the art of thinking: for nothing is more imperfect than our logic when we pass beyond necessary arguments.

The most excellent philosophers of our time, such as the authors of The Art of Thinking, of The Search for Truth and of the Essay concerning Human Understanding, have been very far from indicating to us the true means fitted to assist the faculty whose business it is to make us weigh the probabilities of the true and the false: not to mention the art of discovery, in which success is still more difficult of attainment, and whereof we have nothing beyond very imperfect samples in mathematics.

32. One thing which might have contributed most towards M. Bayle’s belief that the difficulties of reason in opposition to faith cannot be obviated is that he seems to demand that God be justified in some such manner as that commonly used for pleading the cause of a man accused before his judge.

But he has not remembered that in the tribunals of men, which cannot always penetrate to the truth, one is often compelled to be guided by signs and probabilities, and above all by presumptions or prejudices; whereas it is agreed, as we have already observed, that Mysteries are not probable.

For instance, M. Bayle will not have it that one can justify the goodness of God in the permission of sin, because probability would be against a man that should happen to be in [93]circumstances comparable in our eyes to this permission.

God foresees that Eve will be deceived by the serpent if he places her in the circumstances wherein she later found herself; and nevertheless he placed her there.

If a father or a guardian did the same in regard to his child or his ward, if a friend did so in regard to a young person whose behaviour was his concern, the judge would not be satisfied by the excuses of an advocate who said that the man only permitted the evil, without doing it or willing it: he would rather take this permission as a sign of ill intention, and would regard it as a sin of omission, which would render the one convicted thereof accessary in another’s sin of commission.

33. But it must be borne in mind that when one has foreseen the evil and has not prevented it although it seems as if one could have done so with ease, and one has even done things that have facilitated it, it does not follow on that account necessarily that one is accessary thereto.

It is only a very strong presumption, such as commonly replaces truth in human affairs, but which would be destroyed by an exact consideration of the facts, supposing we were capable of that in relation to God. For amongst lawyers that is called ‘presumption’ which must provisionally pass for truth in case the contrary is not proved; and it says more than ‘conjecture’, although the Dictionary of the Academy has not sifted the difference.

There is every reason to conclude unquestionably that one would find through this consideration, if only it were attainable, that reasons most just, and stronger than those which appear contrary to them, have compelled the All-Wise to permit the evil, and even to do things which have facilitated it. Of this some instances will be given later.

34. It is none too easy, I confess, for a father, a guardian, a friend to have such reasons in the case under consideration.

Yet the thing is not absolutely impossible, and a skilled writer of fiction might perchance find an extraordinary case that would even justify a man in the circumstances I have just indicated.

But in reference to God there is no need to suppose or to establish particular reasons such as may have induced him to permit the evil; general reasons suffice.

One knows that he takes care of the whole universe, whereof all the parts are connected; and one must thence infer that he has had innumerable considerations whose result made him deem it inadvisable to prevent certain evils.

35. There must have been invincible reasons which prompted the divine Wisdom to the permission of the evil that surprises us, from the mere fact that this permission has occurred: for nothing can come from God that is not altogether consistent with goodness, justice and holiness.

Thus we can judge by the event (or a posteriori) that the permission was indispensable, although it be not possible for us to show this (a priori) by the detailed reasons that God can have had therefor; as it is not necessary either that we show this to justify him. M. Bayle himself aptly says concerning that (Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, vol. III, ch. 165, p. 1067): Sin made its way into the world;

God therefore was able to permit it without detriment to his perfections; ab actu ad potentiam valet consequentia.

In God this conclusion holds good: he did this, therefore he did it well. It is not, then, that we have no notion of justice in general fit to be applied also to God’s justice; nor is it that God’s justice has other rules than the justice known of men, but that the case in question is quite different from those which are common among men.

Universal right is the same for God and for men; but the question of fact is quite different in their case and his.

36. We may even assume or pretend (as I have already observed) that there is something similar among men to this circumstance in God’s actions.

A man might give such great and strong proofs of his virtue and his holiness that all the most apparent reasons one could put forward against him to charge him with an alleged crime, for instance a larceny or murder, would deserve to be rejected as the calumnies of false witnesses or as an extraordinary play of chance which sometimes throws suspicion on the most innocent.

Thus in a case where every other would run the risk of being condemned or put to the torture (according to the laws of the country), this man would be absolved by his judges unanimously.

Now in this case, which indeed is rare, but which is not impossible, one might say in a sense (sano sensu) that there is a conflict between reason and faith, and that the rules of law are other in respect of this person than they are in respect of the remainder of mankind.

But that, when explained, will signify only that appearances of reason here give way before the faith that is due to the word and the integrity of this great and holy man, and that he is privileged above other men; not indeed as if there were one law for others and another for him, nor as if one had no understanding of what justice is in relation to him.

It is rather because the rules of universal justice do not find here the application that they receive elsewhere, or because they favour him instead of accusing him, since there are in this personage qualities so admirable, that by virtue of a good logic of probabilities one should place more faith in his word than in that of many others.

37. Since it is permitted here to imagine possible cases, may one not suppose this incomparable man to be the Adept or the Possessor of

’that blessed Stone

Able to enrich all earthly Kings alone’

and that he spends every day prodigious sums in order to feed and to rescue from distress countless numbers of poor men? Be there never so many witnesses or appearances of every kind tending to prove that this great benefactor of the human race has just committed some larceny, is it not true that the whole earth would make mock of the accusation, however specious it might be?

God is infinitely above the goodness and the power of this man, and consequently there are no reasons at all, however apparent they be, that can hold good against faith, that is, against the assurance or the confidence in God wherewith we can and ought to say that God has done all things well. The objections are therefore not insoluble.

They only involve prejudices and probabilities, which are, however, overthrown by reasons incomparably stronger. One must not say either that what we call justice is nothing in relation to God, that he is the absolute Master of all things even to the point of being able to condemn the innocent without violating his justice, or finally that justice is something arbitrary where he is concerned.

Those are rash and dangerous expressions, whereunto some have been led astray to the discredit of the attributes of God. For if such were the case there would be no reason for praising his goodness and his justice:

Rather would it be as if the most wicked spirit, the Prince of evil genii, the evil principle of the Manichaeans, were the sole master of the universe, just as I observed before. What means would there be of distinguishing the true God from the false God of Zoroaster if all things depended upon the caprice of an arbitrary power and there were neither rule nor consideration for anything whatever?

38. It is therefore more than evident that nothing compels us to commit ourselves to a doctrine so strange, since it suffices to say that we have not enough knowledge of the facts when there is a question of answering probabilities which appear to throw doubt upon the justice and the goodness of God, and which would vanish away if the facts were well known to us.

We need neither renounce reason in order to listen to faith nor blind ourselves in order to see clearly, as Queen Christine used to say: it is enough to reject ordinary appearances when they are contrary to Mysteries.

This is not contrary to reason, since even in natural things we are very often undeceived about appearances either by experience or by superior reasons.

All that has been set down here in advance, only with the object of showing more plainly wherein the fault of the objections and the abuse of reason consists in the present case, where the claim is made that reason has greatest force against faith:

We shall come afterwards to a more exact discussion of that which concerns the origin of evil and the permission of sin with its consequences.