The Complete Essays (89 page)

[A] This story about a great and famous philosopher clearly illustrates that passion for study which keeps us occupied, hunting after things we can never hope to catch. Plutarch relates a similar anecdote about a man who did not want anyone to enlighten him on a subject of doubt, so as not to lose the pleasure of the search – like that other man, who would not allow his doctor to cure a thirst brought on by fever, so as not to lose the pleasure of quenching it! [C]
‘Satius est supervacua discere quam nihil’
[Better to learn something useless than nothing at all].
¹⁸⁸
It is the same with food of all kinds. Sometimes we eat just for pleasure: there are things we eat which are neither nutritious nor sustaining. So too for the pabulum which our spirits draw from erudition: it may be neither nutritious nor sustaining, but it gives great pleasure.

[B] This is how they put it: contemplating Nature supplies good food to the spirit: it replenishes it, helps it to soar aloft, makes it despise low and earthly things by comparing them with heavenly things. It is delightful merely to study great and abstruse subjects: that remains true even of the man who acquires nothing from study except a sense of awe and a fear of making judgements on such matters.
¹⁸⁹

That, in a few words, is what they profess.

An express image of the vanity of such sickly curiosity can be better seen from another example, which philosophers are always honouring themselves by quoting. Eudoxus prayed to the gods, hoping to be allowed to have just one sight of the sun from close at hand, so as to apprehend its shape, grandeur and beauty. Even if it meant being burned alive, he would pay the price. He wanted to learn, at the cost of his life, something he would lose as soon as he had acquired it. For such a brief and fleeting glimpse of knowledge he was prepared to surrender all the knowledge he already had or could later have acquired.
¹⁹⁰

[A] I cannot really convince myself that Epicurus, Plato and Pythagoras genuinely wanted us to accept their Atoms, Ideas and Numbers as valid currency. They were too wise to base the articles of their belief on foundations so shaky and so challengeable. Each of these great figures strove to bring some image of light into the dark ignorance of this world; they applied their minds to concepts which had at least some subtle and pleasing appearance of truth, [C] their only proviso being that they could stand up to hostile objections:
‘unicuique ista pro ingenio finguntur, non ex scientiae vi’
[such theories are fictions, produced not from solid knowledge but from their individual wits].
¹⁹¹

[A] One of the Ancients was reproved for not judging philosophy to be of much account yet continuing to profess it; ‘That is what being a philosopher means,’ he replied.
¹⁹²
Such men wanted to weigh everything in their mental balances; there is curiosity in all of us: this, they found, was a proper way to keep it occupied. Part of what they wrote was simply designed to meet the social needs of the general public – their accounts of their religion, for example.
¹⁹³
With that end in view it was reasonable not to strip popularly held opinions of their living feathers. They had no wish to spawn ideas which would disturb the people’s obedience to the laws and customs of their land.

[C] When treating religion Plato plays a very open game. Writing in his own name he lays down nothing as certain, but, whenever he acts as Lawgiver, he adopts an assertive professorial style. Even then, he is bold enough to work in a few of his most fantastic notions (which were as useful for convincing the people as they were ridiculous for convincing himself), well aware how receptive our minds are to any impressions, especially to the wildest and most extraordinary ones. That explains why, in the
Laws
, Plato is careful to allow no poetry to be recited in public unless its fables and fictions serve some moral end: it is so easy to impress fancies on the human mind that it is not right to feed minds on useless, harmful lies, when you can feed them on profitable ones. In the
Republic
he says quite bluntly that you must often deceive the people for their own good.
¹⁹⁴

You soon discover that some schools of philosophy were chiefly
concerned to pursue truth, and others – gaining credit thereby – moral usefulness. Our human condition is pitiable: often, the things which strike our imagination as the most true are ones which appear least useful for the purposes of life. Even the most audacious of the schools, the Epicureans, the Pyrrhonians and the New Academy, are constrained in the end to bow to the laws of society.

[A] There are other subjects which philosophers toss to and fro in their sieves, trying to dredge them (whether they deserve it or not) into some appearance of likelihood. Having discovered nothing so profound as really to be worth talking about, they are obliged to forge some weak and insane conjectures of their own, treating them not as bases for truth but for studious exercises. [C]
‘Non tam id sensisse quod dicerent, quam exercere ingenia materiae difficultate videntur voluisse’
[They do not seem to believe what they say, but, rather, to exercise their wits on difficult material].
¹⁹⁵

[A] If you will not take it that way, how else can we explain the obvious inconstancy, diversity and vanity of the opinions produced by such excellent and, indeed, awesome, minds? What can be more vain, for example, than trying to make guesses about God from human analogies and conjectures which reduce him and the universe to our own scale and our own laws, taking that tiny corner of intellect with which it pleases God to endow the natural Man and then employing it at the expense of his Godhead? And since we cannot stretch our gaze as far as the seat of his Glory, are we to drag him down to our corruption and our wretchedness?

Of all the ancient opinions of men touching religion, it seems to me that the most excusable and verisirnilitudinous was the one which recognized God as some incomprehensible Power, the Origin and Preserver of all things, of all goodness and of all perfection, who took and accepted in good part, the honour and reverence which human beings rendered him, under any guise, under any name and in any way whatsoever.

[C]
Jupiter omnipotens rerum, regumque deumque
Progenitor genitrixque
.

[Almighty Jupiter, Father and Mother of the world, of rulers and of gods.]
¹⁹⁶

Such devotion has always been regarded by Heaven with favour.

All forms of government have profited from their allegiance to it; under it, men and impious deeds have met their just deserts; even pagan histories acknowledge the dignity, order and justice of the portents and oracles manifested in their fabulous religions for the benefit and instruction of men. With such temporal benefits as these God in his mercy may perhaps have deigned to protect those tender principles of rough-and-ready knowledge of Himself which Natural Reason affords us, amid the false imaginings of our dreams. But there are religions Man has forged entirely on his own: they are not only false but impious and harmful.

[A] Of all the religions which St Paul found honoured in Athens, the most excusable, he thought, was the one dedicated to a hidden, ‘unknown God’.
¹⁹⁷

[C] Pythagoras closely adumbrated truth when he concluded that any conception we have of that First Cause, of that Being of beings, must be free of limits, restrictions or definitions; it was in fact the utmost striving of our intellect towards perfection, each of us enlarging the concept according to his capacity.

But if Numa really did attempt to make his people’s worship conform to this model, tying them to an entirely cerebral religion with no object set up before their eyes and no material elements mixed in with it, then his undertaking could serve no purpose.
¹⁹⁸
The human mind cannot stand such wanderings through an infinity of shapeless thoughts: they must be brought together into some definite concept modelled on man. The very majesty of God allows itself to be, in some sense, circumscribed for us within physical limits: God’s sacraments are supernatural and celestial, yet they bear signs of our own condition, which is earthly; and we express our adoration in words and duties perceptible to the senses. After all, it is Man who does the believing and the praying.

I shall leave aside other arguments marshalled on this topic; consider the sight of our crucifixes and the piteous chastisement which they portray; the ornaments and moving ceremonial in our churches; the voices so aptly fitted to the reverent awe of our thoughts, and all the stirring of our emotions: you will have a hard time making me believe that such things do
not set whole nations’ souls ablaze with a passion for religion, with very useful results.

[A] Of all the deities to which bodies have been ascribed (as necessity required during that universal blindness), I think
¹⁹⁹
I would have most willingly gone along with those who worshipped the Sun:

la lumiere commune
,
L’æil du monde; et si Dieu au chef porte des yeux,
Les rayons du Soleil sont ses yeux radieux,
Qui donnent vie à tous, nous maintiennent et gardent,
Et les faicts des humains en ce monde regardent:
Ce beau, ce grand soleil qui nous faict les saisons,
Selon qu’il entre ou sort de ses douze maisons;
Qui remplit l’univers de ses vertus connues;
Qui, d’un traict de ses yeux, nous dissipe les nues:
L’esprit, l’ame du monde, ardant et flamboyant,
En la course d’un jour tout le Ciel tournoyant;
Plein d’immense grandeur, rond, vagabond et ferme;
Lequel tient dessoubs luy tout le monde pour terme;
En repos sans repos; oysif, et sans sejour;
Fils aisné de nature et le pere du jour
.

[… the Common Light, the Eye of the World; if God himself has eyes they are radiant ones made of the Sun’s rays which give life to all, protect and guard us meri, gazing down upon our actions in this world; this fair, this mighty Sun who makes the seasons change according to his journey through his dozen Mansions; who floods the earth with his acknowledged power; who, with a flicker of his eye disperses clouds; the Spirit and Soul of the World, ardent and aflame, encompassing the world in the course of one single day; full of immense grandeur, round, wandering and firm; who holds beneath him the boundaries of the world; resting, unresting; idle, never staying; the eldest Son of Nature and the Father of Light.]
²⁰⁰

Even leaving its grandeur and beauty aside, the Sun is the most distant part of the universe which Man can descry, and hence so little known that those who fell into reverent ecstasies before it were excusable.

[C] Thales
²⁰¹
was the first to inquire into such matters: he thought God was. Spirit who made all things out of water; Anaximander said that the gods are born and die with the seasons and that there are worlds infinite
in number; Anaximenes said God was Air, immense, extensive, ever moving; Anaxagoras was the first to hold that the delineation and fashioning of all things was directed by the might and reason of an infinite Spirit; Alcmaeon attributed Godhead to the Sun, the Moon, the stars and to the soul; Pythagoras made God into a Spirit diffused throughout all nature and from whom our souls are detached; for Parmenides God was a circle of light surrounding the heavens and sustaining the world with its heat; Empedocles made gods from the four natural elements of which all things are compounded; Protagoras would not say whether the gods existed or not or what they are if they do; Democritus sometimes asserted that the constellations and their circular paths were gods, sometimes that God was that Nature whose impulse first made them move; then he said our knowledge and our intellect were God; Plato’s beliefs are diffuse and many-sided: in the
Timaeus
he says that the Father of the world cannot be named; in the
Laws
he forbids all inquiry into the proper being of God: elsewhere, in these very same books, he makes the world, the sky, the heavenly bodies, the earth and our souls into gods, recognizing as well all the gods accepted by ancient custom in every country. Xenophon records a similar confusion in the teachings of Socrates: sometimes he has Socrates maintaining that no inquiry should be made into the properties of God; at other times he has him deciding that the Sun is God, that the soul is God, that there is only one God and then that there are many. The nephew of Plato, Speusippus, holds God to be a certain animate Power governing all things; Aristotle sometimes says that God is Mind and sometimes the World; at times he gives the world a different Master and sometimes makes a god from the heat of the sky. Zenocrates has eight gods: five are named after the planets; the sixth has all the fixed stars as his members, the seventh and eighth being the Sun and Moon. Heraclides of Pontus meanders along beneath these various notions and ends up with. God deprived of all sensation; he has him changing from one form to another and finally asserts that he is heaven and earth. Theophrastus is similarly undecided, wandering about between his many concepts, attributing the government of the world sometimes to Intelligence, sometimes to the sky and sometimes to the stars; Strato says God is Nature, giving birth, making things wax and wane, but itself formless and insensate; Zeno makes a god of Natural Law: it commands good, forbids evil and is animate; he dismisses the gods accepted by custom –Jupiter, Juno and Vesta; Diogenes of Apollonia says God is Time. Xenophanes makes God round, able to see and hear but not to breathe and having nothing in common with human nature; Ariston thinks that the form of God cannot be grasped: he deprives him of senses and cannot tell
whether he is animate or something quite different. For Cleanthes God is sometimes Reason, sometimes the World, sometimes the Soul of Nature, sometimes absolute Heat surrounding and enveloping all things. Perseus, a pupil of Zeno’s, maintained that the name
god
was bestowed on people who had contributed some outstandingly useful improvements to the life of Man – or even on the improvements themselves. Chrysippus made a chaotic mass of all these assertions and included among his thousand forms of gods men who had been immortalized. Diagoras and Theodorus bluntly denied that gods exist. Epicurus has shiny gods, permeable to wind and light, who are lodged between two worlds which serve as fortresses protecting them from being battered; they are clothed in human shape, with limbs like ours which are quite useless.