Discourse Of An Atheist On All This

An Atheist says to me: It has been proved, I admit, that there is an eternal and necessary principle. But from the fact that it is necessary I infer that all that is derived from it is necessary; you have been compelled to admit this yourself. Since everything is necessary, evil is as inevitable as good.

The great wheel of the ever-turning machine crushes all that comes in its way. I have no need of an intelligent being who can do nothing of himself, and who is as much a slave to his destiny as I am to mine. If he existed, I should have too much with which to reproach him. I should be obliged to call him either feeble or wicked. I would rather deny his existence than be discourteous to him. Let us get through this miserable life as well as we can, without reference to a fantastic being whom no one has ever seen, and to whom it would matter little, if he existed, whether we believed in[238] him or not.

What I think of him can no more affect him, supposing that he exists, than what he thinks of me, of which I am ignorant, affects me. There is no relation, no connection, no interest between him and me. Either there is no such being or he is an utter stranger to me. Let us do as nine hundred and ninety-nine mortals out of a thousand do; they work, generate, eat, drink, sleep, suffer, and die, without speaking of metaphysics, or knowing that there is such a thing.

XX DISCOURSE OF A MANICHÆAN

A Manichæan, hearing the Atheist, says to him: You are mistaken. Not only is there a God, but there are necessarily two. It has been fully proved that the universe is arranged intelligently, and there is an intelligent principle in nature; but it is impossible that this intelligent principle, which is the author of good, should also be the author of evil. Evil must have its own God. Zoroaster was the first to proclaim this great truth, about two thousand years ago; and two other Zoroasters came afterwards to confirm it. The Parsees have always followed, and still follow, this excellent doctrine. Some wretched people or other, called the Jews, at that time in bondage to us, learned a little of our science, together with the names of Satan and Knatbul. They recognised God and the devil; and the devil was so powerful, in the opinion of this poor little people, that one day, when God had descended[239] into their country, the devil took him up into a mountain. Admit two gods, therefore; the world is large enough to hold them and find sufficient work for them.

XXI DISCOURSE OF A PAGAN

Then a Pagan arose, and said: If we are to admit two gods, I do not see what prevents us from worshipping a thousand. The Greeks and Romans, who were superior to you, were polytheists. It will be necessary some day to return to the admirable doctrine that peoples the universe with genii and deities; it is assuredly the only system which explains everything—the only one in which there is no contradiction. If your wife betrays you, Venus is the cause of it. If you are robbed, put the blame on Mercury. If you lose an arm or a leg in battle, it was arranged by Mars. So much for the evil. In regard to the good, not only do Apollo, Ceres, Pomona, Bacchus, and Flora load you with presents, but occasionally the same Mars will rid you of your enemies, the same Venus will find you mistresses, the same Mercury may pour all your neighbours’ gold into your coffers, provided your hand comes to the assistance of his wand.

It was much easier for these gods to agree in governing the universe than it seems to be to this Manichæan to reconcile his Ormuzd, the benevolent, and Ahriman, the malevolent, two mortal enemies, so as to maintain both light and darkness. Many[240] eyes see better than one. Hence all the poets of antiquity are continually calling councils of the gods. How can you suppose that one god is enough to see to all the details of life on Saturn and all the business of the star Capella? What! You imagine that everything on our globe, except in the houses of the King of Prussia and the Pope Ganganelli, is regulated by councils, and there is no council in heaven! There is no better way of deciding things than by a majority of votes. The deity always acts in the wisest way. The Theist seems to me, in comparison with a Pagan, to be like a Prussian soldier entering the territory of Venice; he is charmed with the excellence of the government. “The king of this country,” he says, “must work from morning to night. I greatly pity him.” “There is no king,” people reply; “we are governed by a council.”

Here are the true principles of our ancient religion.

The great being known as Jehovah or Yaa among the Phœnicians, the Jove of other Asiatic nations, the Jupiter of the Romans, the Zeus of the Greeks, is the sovereign of gods and men.

Deum sator atque hominum rex.

The master of the whole of nature, to whom nothing in the whole range of being approaches.

Cui nihil simile, nec secundum.

The animating spirit of the universe.

[241]

Jovis omnia plena.

All the ideas that one may have of God are enfolded in this fine verse of the ancient Orpheus, quoted throughout antiquity, and repeated in all the mysteries.

εἶς ἔστ’, αὐτογενὴς, ἑνὸς ἔkγονα πάντα τέτέυκται.

“He is One, self-born, and all was born of One.”

But he confides to the subordinate gods the care of the stars, the elements, the seas, and the bowels of the earth. His wife, who represents the expanse of space that he fills, is Juno. His daughter, who is eternal wisdom, his word, is Minerva. His other daughter, Venus, is the lover of the poetical generation. She is the mother of love, inflaming all sensitive beings, uniting them, reproducing by the attraction of pleasure all that necessity devotes to death. All the gods have made presents to mortals. Ceres has given them corn, Bacchus the vine, Pomona fruit; Apollo and Mercury have taught them the arts.

The great Zeus, the great Demiourgos, had made the planets and the earth. He had brought men and animals into existence on our planet. The first man was, according to the account of Berosus, Alora, father of Sares, grandfather of Alaspara, who begot Amenon, of whom was born Metalare, who was the father of Daon, father of Everodao, father of Amphis, father of Osiarte, father of the famous Sixutros or Xixutrus, King of Chaldæa, under whom occurred the well-known deluge, which the Greeks called “the deluge of Ogyges”; a flood[242] of which the precise date is still uncertain, as is that of the other great inundation, which swallowed up the isle of Atlantis and part of Greece about six thousand years ago.

We have another theogony in Sanchoniathon, without a deluge. Those of the Hindoos, Chinese, and Egyptians are very different again.

All events of antiquity are lost in a dark night; but the existence and blessings of Jupiter are clearer than the light of the sun. The hero who, stirred by his example, did good to men was known by the holy name of Dionysos, son of God. Bacchus, Hercules, Perseus, and Romulus also received this divine name. Some went so far even as to say that the divine virtue was communicated to their mothers. The Greeks and Romans, although they were somewhat debauched, as are to-day all Christians of a sociable nature, rather drunken, like the canons of Germany, and given to unnatural vices, like the French king Henry III. and his Nogaret, were very religious. They offered sacrifice and incense, walked in processions, and fasted.

But everything becomes corrupt in time. Religion changed. The splendid name of Son of God—that is to say, just and benevolent—was afterwards given to the most unjust and cruel of men, because they were powerful. The ancient piety, which was humane, was displaced by superstition, which is always cruel. Virtue had dwelt on the earth as long as the fathers of families were the only priests, and offered to Jupiter and the immortal gods the first of their fruits and flowers; but all this was changed when the priests began to shed[243] blood and wanted to share with the gods. They did share in truth; they took the offerings, and left the smoke to the gods. You know how our enemies succeeded in crushing us, adopting our earlier morals, rejecting our bloody sacrifices, calling men to the Church, making a party for themselves among the poor until such time as they should capture the rich. They took our place. We are annihilated, they triumph; but, corrupted at length like ourselves, they need a great reform, which I wish them with all my heart.

22. DISCOURSE OF A JEW

Take no notice of this idolatrous Pagan who would turn God into a Dutch president, and offer us subordinate gods like members of parliament.

My religion, being above nature, can have no resemblance to others.

The first difference between them and us is that the source of our religion was hidden for a very long time from the rest of the earth. The dogmas of our fathers were buried, like ourselves, in a little country about a hundred and fifty miles long and sixty in width. In this well dwelt the truth that was unknown to the whole world, until certain rebels, going forth from among us, took from it the name of “truth” in the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero; and presently boasted that they were establishing a new truth.

The Chaldæans recognised Alora as their father,[244] as you know. The Phœnicians descended from a man named Origen, according to Sanchoniathon. The Greeks had their Prometheus; the Atlantids had their Ouran, called in Greek Ouranos. I say nothing of the Chinese, Hindoos, or Scythians. We had our Adam, of whom nobody ever heard except our nation, and we only very late.

It was not the Ephaistos of the Greeks, known to the Latins as Vulcan, who invented the art of using metals; it was Tubalcain. The whole of the West was astonished to hear, under Constantine, that it was not Bacchus to whom the nations owed the use of wine, but Noah, whose name none knew in the whole Roman Empire, any more than they knew the names of his ancestors, which were unknown throughout the earth. The anecdote was learned only from our Bible, when it was translated into Greek; it began to spread about that time. The sun was then seen to be no longer the source of light; the light was created before the sun, and separated from the darkness, as the waters were separated from the waters. Woman was made from a rib, which God himself took out of a sleeping man, without awakening him, and without causing his descendants to be short of a rib.

The Tigris, Araxis, Euphrates, and Nile all had their source in the same garden. We do not know where the garden was, but its existence is proved, because the gate was guarded by a cherub.

Animals speak. The eloquence of a serpent was fatal to the whole human race. A Chaldæan prophet conversed with his ass.

God, the creator of all men, is not the father of[245] all men, but of one family alone. This family, always wandering, left the fertile land of Chaldæa to wander for some time in the neighbourhood of Sodom; from this journey it acquired an incontestable right to the city of Jerusalem, which was not yet in existence.

Our family increases at such a rate that seventy men produce, at the end of two hundred and fifty years, six hundred and thirty thousand men bearing arms; counting the women, children, and old men, that amounts to about three millions. These three millions live in a small canton of Egypt which cannot maintain twenty thousand people. For their advantage God puts to death in one night all the first-born of the Egyptians; and, after this massacre, instead of giving Egypt to his people, God puts himself at their head to fly with them dry-foot across the sea, and cause a whole generation of Jews to die in the desert.

We have seven times been in slavery in spite of the appalling miracles that God works for us every day, causing the moon to stand still in midday, and also the sun. Ten out of twelve of our tribes perished for ever. The other two are scattered and in misery. We have always prophets, nevertheless. God descends continually among our people alone, and mingles only with us. He appears constantly to these prophets, his sole confidants and favourites.

He goes to visit Addo or Iddo or Jeddo, and commands him to travel without eating. The prophet thinks that God has ordered him to eat that he may walk better; he eats, and forthwith he is eaten by a lion (1 Kings xiii.).

God commands Isaiah to go forth among his fellow-citizens in a most unbecoming state of attire, discoopertis natibus (Isaiah xx.).

God orders Jeremiah to put a yoke on his neck and a saddle on his back (ch. xxvii. according to the Hebrews).

He orders Ezekiel to have himself bound, to eat a parchment book, to lie for two hundred and ninety days on the right side and forty days on the left side, and then to eat filth with his bread.

He commands Hosea to take a prostitute and have three children by her; then he commands him to pay an adulterous woman and have children by her.

Add to all these prodigies an uninterrupted series of massacres, and you will see that among us all things are divine, because nothing is in accordance with what men call decent laws.

Unhappily, we were not well known to other nations until we were nearly annihilated. It was our enemies, the Christians, who made us known when they despoiled us. They built up their system with material taken from a bad Greek translation of our Bible. They insult and oppress us to this day; but our turn will come. It is well known how we will triumph at the end of the world, when there will be no one left on the earth.