were founded in the principle all the so-called occult sciences of
which the principal four, relating to the human Quaternary, were
Theurgy, Astrology, Magic, and Chemistry.[610] I have already spoken
of the astrological science, and I have given sufficient evidence of
what I think regarding the ridiculous and petty ideas concerning it
that the modems have conceived. I will refrain from speaking of the
other three, on account of the prolixities into which the discussions
that they would provoke might lure me. In another work I will
endeavour to show that the principles upon which they were supported
differed greatly from those which superstition and blind credulity
have given them in times of ignorance; and that the sciences taught to
the initiates in the ancient sanctuaries, under the names of Theurgy,
Magic, or Chemistry, differed much from what the vulgar have
understood in later times by the same words.
29. _So that, as to thy true rights enlightened,
Thine heart shall no more feed on vain desires._
That is to say, that the disciple of Pythagoras, having attained
through knowledge of himself to that of truth, ought to judge sanely
of the possibility or impossibility of things, and to find in wisdom
itself that just mean which he has found in virtue and in science.
Equally distant from that blind credulity which admits and seeks
without reflection the things most incompatible with the laws of
Nature, and from that presumptuous ignorance which rejects and denies
without examination all those things which issue from the narrow
circle of its empirical notions; he should understand with exactness
the limits and the forces of Nature, know instantly what is contained
therein or what exceeds them, and not form any vow, any project, or
any enterprise beyond his power.
30. _Thou shalt see that the evils which devour men
Are of their choice the fruit.…_
Undoubtedly one of the most important things for man to understand is
the nearest cause of his evils, so that, ceasing from murmuring
against Providence, he may blame only himself for the misfortunes of
which he is the proper artisan. Ignorance, always weak and
presumptuous, concealing its own mistakes, holds responsible, with
their consequences, the things which are most foreign there: thus the
child which hurts itself, threatens with his voice and strikes with
his hand the wall against which he has stumbled. Of all errors this is
the most common. Likewise he acknowledges with as much difficulty his
own wrongs as he accuses with ease those of others. This baleful habit
of imputing to Providence the evils which afflict humanity has
furnished, as we have seen, the strongest arguments to the skeptics to
attack its influence, and to undermine thus in its foundation the very
existence of the Divinity. All peoples have been guilty of this[611];
but the moderns are, as I believe, the only ones who coldly and
without passion, in order to sustain certain opinions that they have
embraced, have raised systematically their ignorance concerning the
cause of evil, and made an irresistible fatality proceed from the
All-Powerful and divine Prescience, which drawing man on to vice and
misfortune, damns him by force; and by a consequence determined by the
will of God, delivers him to eternal sufferings.[612] Such were those
among the Christians of the fifth century, who were named
Predestinarians on account of their terrible system. Their opinion, it
is true, was condemned by the councils of Arles and Lyon[613]; but
they declared that the church fell into inconsistency, since the
sentiment in this respect, being exactly conformable with that which
Saint Augustine had advanced against the Pelagians, this church could
not condemn the one without condemning the other and therefore,
without deciding in favour of the opposed doctrine which they had
already condemned. It is certain that the Predestinarians were right
on this last point, as well as Gotescalc, Baius, and Jansenius, who,
with the book of Saint Augustine in hand, proved it later on, by
causing in this church, at different times, troubles more or less
violent on the subject.
This is the moment to complete the proofs of what I advanced in my
Seventh Examination, that the liberty of man can be established only
by the sole theosophical tradition, and the assent that all the sages
of the earth have given to it; and that there is no doctrine, which,
becoming separated, does not abandon the Universe to the irresistible
impulse of an absolute fatality. I have shown sufficiently the
emptiness of all the cosmogonical systems, whether their authors have
founded them upon a sole principle or upon two, upon spirit or upon
matter; I have sufficiently indicated the danger that would have
ensued from divulging the secret dogma of divine Unity, since this
disclosure drew with it the necessity of explaining the origin of Good
and Evil, which was impossible; I have cited the example of Moses, and
I have demonstrated as a decisive point in this matter that those of
his followers who rejected the oral tradition of this great man, to
attach themselves to the literal meaning only of his Sepher, fell into
fatalism and were led to make God himself the author of Evil; finally
I have announced that Christianity and Islamism, issuing alike from
the Mosaic doctrine, have not been able to evade the dogma of
predestination: this dogma, although often repulsed by the Christian
and Mussulman doctors, alarmed at its consequences, is shown, none the
less, from the facts. The Koran which teaches it openly exempts me
from other proofs in defence of the Mussulmans. Let us turn to the
Christians.
It is certain that one of the greatest men of the primitive church,
Origen, perceiving to what consequences the explanation of the origin
of Evil led, by the way in which it was vulgarly understood, according
to the literal translation of the Sepher of Moses, undertook to bring
all back to allegory, recalling Christianity being born to the
theosophical tradition pertaining to the free will of man[614]; but
his books, wherein he exposed this tradition according to the doctrine
of Pythagoras and Plato,[615] were burned as heretical, by the order
of Pope Gelasius.[616] The church at that time paid little attention
to the blow dealt by Origen, occupied as it was with examining the
principal dogmas of incarnation, of the divinity of Jesus, of the
consubstantiality of the Word, of the Unity of its person and the
duality of its nature; but when, following the energetic expression of
Plucquet, the flame of conflagration had passed over all these
opinions, and when the waves of blood had drenched the ashes, it was
necessary to offer new food for its activity. An English monk named
Pelagius,[617] born with an ardent and impetuous mind, was the
foremost to attack this thorny question of the liberty of man, and,
wishing to establish it, was led to deny original sin.
Man [he said] is free to do good or evil: he who tries to
lay the blame of his vices on the weakness of nature, is
unjust: for what is sin, in general? Is it a thing that one
may evade, or not? If one cannot evade it, there is no evil
in committing it and then it does not exist: if one can
evade it, it must be evil to commit it and therefore it
exists: its very existence is born of the free will, and
proves it.[618] The dogma of original sin [continued
Pelagius] is absurd and unjust to God; for a creature which
does not exist would not be an accomplice of a bad action;
and it outrages divine justice, to say that God punishes him
as guilty of this action.[619] Man [added Pelagius] has
therefore a real power of doing good and evil, and he is
free in these two respects. But the liberty of doing a thing
supposes necessarily the union of all causes and of all
conditions requisite for doing that thing; and one is not
free regarding an effect, every time that one of the causes
or conditions naturally exigent for producing this effect is
lacking. Therefore, to have the liberty of seeing the
subjects, it is necessary not only that the sense of sight
be well developed, but also that the subjects be
discriminated, and placed at an equitable distance.[620]
This far, the doctrine of Pelagius was wholly similar to that of
Pythagoras, as explained by Hierocles[621]; but it differs from it
afterwards, in what the English monk asserted, that since man is born
with the liberty of doing good and evil, he receives from nature and
unites in him all the conditions and all the causes naturally
necessary for good and evil; which robs him of his most beautiful
prerogative,――perfectibility; whereas Pythagoras held, on the
contrary, that these causes and these effects were only accorded to
those who, on their part, concurred in acquiring them, and who, by the
work that they have done for themselves in seeking to know themselves,
have succeeded in possessing them more and more perfectly.
However mitigated the doctrine of Pelagius might be, it appeared still
to accord too much with free will and was condemned by the
ecclesiastical authorities, who declared, through the medium of
several councils, that man can do nothing of himself without the aid
of grace. Saint Augustine, who had been the soul of these councils,
pressed by the disciple of Pelagius to explain the nature of this
grace and to say how God accorded it to one man rather than to another
without being induced by the difference of their merits, replied that
man being in the _masse de perdition_, and God having no need of them,
and being furthermore independent and all-powerful, he gave grace to
whom he willed, without the one to whom he did not give it having the
right to complain; everything coming to pass as a result of his will,
which had foreseen all and determined all.[622] Assuredly one could
not establish more forcibly the necessity of all things, nor submit
men to a sterner fatality, since the want of grace deprived them, not
only of virtue in the fleeting course of this life, but delivered them
without hope to the torments of an eternal hell. But Saint Augustine,
who obeyed a severe and consistent reason, felt very well that he
could not speak otherwise, without renouncing the dogma of original
sin and overthrowing the foundation of Christianity. All the rigid
Christians, all those who, at different times, have undertaken to
restore Christianity to its constitutive principles, have thought as
Saint Augustine, and although the church, alarmed at the terrible
inferences that were drawn from the canonical doctrine, may have
essayed to temper it, by condemning, as I have said, the
Predestinarians and by approving of the persecutions directed against
Gotescalc; and, at the time when Luther drew in his reform a great
part of Christendom toward the dogma of predestination, this did not
prevent Baius, who remained faithful to orthodoxy, from preaching the
same dogma; nor Calvin, soon after, from adding new lights to what
Luther had left doubtful, and Jansenius, finally, corroborating what
Baius had only outlined, from raising in the very midst of the church
that formidable faction which all the united efforts of the Pope and
the Jesuits have been unable to convict of erring in the doctrine of
Saint Augustine, which it has sustained with a force worthy of a
better cause.
According to Calvin, who of all of them expresses himself most
clearly, the soul of man, all of whose faculties are infected with
sin, lacks force to resist the temptation which lures him on toward
evil. The liberty of which he prides himself is a chimera; he
confounds the free with the voluntary, and believes that he chooses
freely because there is no constraint, and that he wills to do the
evil that he does.[623] Thus following the doctrine of this reformer,
man, dominated by his vicious passions, can produce of himself only
wicked actions; and it is to draw him from this state of corruption
and impotence that it was necessary that God should send his son upon
earth to redeem him and to atone for him; so that it is from the
absence of liberty in man that Calvin draws his strongest proofs of
the coming of Christ: “For,” he said, “if man had been free, and if he
had been able to save himself, it would not have been needful that God
should offer up his Son in sacrifice.”[624]
This last argument seems irresistible. Besides when the Jesuits had
accused Calvin and his followers of making God the author of sin, and
of destroying thus all idea of the Divinity[625] they knew better than
to say how it can be otherwise accomplished. They would not have been
able, without doing a thing impossible for them――that is, without
giving the origin of evil. The difficulty of this explanation, which
Moses, even as I have said, has enveloped with a triple veil, has in
no wise escaped the fathers of the primitive church. They have well
felt that it was the important point whereon depended the solution of
all other questions. But how can one attempt even the explanation? The
most enlightened among them had agreed that it is an abyss of nature
that one would not know how to fathom.[626]
31. … _that these unfortunates
Seek afar the goodness whose source within they bear_.
The source of all goodness is wisdom, and wisdom begins with the
knowledge of oneself. Without this knowledge, one aspires in vain to
real goodness. But how is it obtainable? If you interrogate Plato upon
this important point, he will respond to you, that it is in going back
to the essence of things――that is to say, in considering that which
constitutes man in himself. “A workman, you will say to this
philosopher, is not the same thing as the instrument which he uses;
the one who plays the lyre differs from the lyre upon which he plays.
You will readily agree to this, and the philosopher, pursuing his
reasoning, will add: And the eyes with which this musician reads his
music, and the hands with which he holds his lyre, are they not also
instruments? Can you deny, if the eyes, if the hands are instruments,
that the whole body may likewise be an instrument, different from the
being who makes use of it and who commands?” Unquestionably no, and
you will comprehend sufficiently that this being, by which man is
really man, is the soul, the knowledge of which you ought to seek.
“For,” Plato will also tell you, “he who knows his body, only knows
that it is his, and is not himself. To know his body as a physician or
as a sculptor, is an art, to know his soul, as a sage, is a science
and the greatest of all sciences.”[627]
From the knowledge of himself man passes to that of God; and it is in
fixing this model of all perfection that he succeeds in delivering
himself from the evils which he has attracted by his own choice.[628]
His deliverance depends, according to Pythagoras, upon virtue and upon
truth.[629] The virtue, that he acquires by purification, tempers and
directs the passions; the truth, which he attains by his union with
the Being of beings, dissipates the darkness with which his
intelligence is obsessed; and both of them, acting jointly in him,
give him the divine form, according as he is disposed to receive it,
and guide him to supreme felicity.[630] But how difficult to obtain
this desired goal!
32. _For few know happiness: playthings of the passions,
Hither, thither tossed by adverse waves,
Upon a shoreless sea, they blinded roll,
Unable to resist or to the tempest yield._
Lysis shows in these lines what are the greatest obstacles to the
happiness of man. They are the passions: not the passions in
themselves, but the evil effects that they produce by the disordered
movement that the understanding allows them to take. It is to this
that the attention must be directed so that one should not fall into
the error of the Stoics. Pythagoras, as I have said, did not command
his disciples to destroy their passions, but to moderate their ardour,
and to guide them well. “The passions,” said this philosopher, “are
given to be aids to reason; it is necessary that they be its servants
and not its masters.” This is a truth that the Platonists and even the
Peripatetics have recognized, by the evidence of Hierocles.[631] Thus
Pythagoras regarded the passions as instruments of which the
understanding makes use in raising the intellectual edifice. A man
utterly deprived of them would resemble a mass inert and immovable in
the course of life; it is true that he might be able not to become
depraved, but then he could not enjoy his noblest advantage, which is
perfectibility. Reason is established in the understanding to hold
sway over the passions; it must command them with absolute
sovereignty, and make them tend towards the end that wisdom indicates.
If it should not recognize the laws that intelligence gives it, and
if, presumptuously, it wishes, instead of acting according to given
principles, to lay down principles itself, it falls into excess, and
makes man superstitious or skeptic, fanatic or atheist; if, on the
contrary, it receives laws from the passions that it ought to rule,
and if weak it allows itself to be subjugated by them, it falls into
error and renders man stupid or mad, brutish in vice, or audacious in
crime. There are no true reasonings except those admitted by wisdom;
the false reasonings must be considered as the cries of an insensate
soul, given over to the movements of an anarchical reason which the
passions confuse and blind.[632]
Pythagoras considered man as holding the mean between things
intellectual and sentient, the lowest of the superior beings and the
highest of the inferior, free to move either toward the heights or the
depths, by means of his passions, which bring into action the
ascending or descending movement that his will possesses with
potentiality; sometimes being united with the immortals and, through
his return to virtue, recovering the lot which is his own, and other
times plunging again into mortal kind and through transgression of the
divine laws finding himself fallen from his dignity.[633] This
opinion, which had been that of all the sages who had preceded
Pythagoras, has been that of all the sages who have followed him, even
of those among the Christian theosophists whose religious prejudices
have removed them farthest from his doctrine. I shall not stop to give
the proofs of its antiquity; they are to be found everywhere, and
would be superfluous. Thomas Burnet, having vainly sought for the
origin without being able to discover it, decided that it was
necessary that it should descend from heaven.[634] It is certain that
one can only with difficulty explain how a man without erudition, like
Boehme, never having received this opinion from anyone, has been able
to explain it so clearly. “When one sees man existing,” says this
theosophist, “one can say: Here all Eternity is manifested in one
image.”[635]
The abode of this being is an intermediate point between
heaven and hell, love and anger; that, of the things to
which he is attached, becomes his kind.… If he inclines
toward the celestial nature, he assumes a celestial form,
and the human form becomes infernal if he inclines toward
hell; for as the mind is, so is the body. In whatever way
the mind projects itself, it shadows forth its body with a
similar form and a similar source.[636]
It is upon this principle, which one finds still everywhere diversely
expressed, that the dogma of the transmigration of souls is founded.
This dogma, explained in the ancient mysteries,[637] and received by
all peoples,[638] has been to such an extent disfigured in what the
moderns have called _Metempsychosis_, that it would be necessary to
exceed considerably the limits of these Examinations in order to give
an explanation which could be understood. Later I will endeavour to
expose my sentiment upon this mystery, when I treat of Theurgy and
other occult sciences to which it is allied.
33. _God! Thou couldst save them by opening their eyes._
Lysis here approaches openly one of the greatest difficulties of
nature, that which in all time has furnished to the skeptics and to
the atheists the weapons that they have believed most formidable.
Hierocles has not concealed it in his Commentaries, and he expresses
it in these terms: “If God is able to bring back all men to virtue and
to happiness, and if he does not will to do so, is God therefore
unjust and wicked? Or if he wills to bring them back and if he is
unable, is God therefore weak and impotent?”[639] Long before
Hierocles, Epicurus seized upon this argument to support his system,
and had extended it without augmenting its force. His design had been
to prove by its means that, according as he had advanced it, God does
not interfere with the things of this world, and that there is,
consequently, no Providence.[640] Lactantius, thinking that he was
answering this, has quoted from Epicurus and has afforded Bayle, the
most learned and the most formidable of modern skeptics, the occasion
for demonstrating that, until now, this terrible argument had remained
unrefuted notwithstanding all the efforts made for its overthrow.
This indefatigable reasoner said:
The evil exists; man is wicked and unhappy: everything
proves this sad truth. History is, properly speaking, only a
miscellany of the crimes and adversities of mankind.
However, at intervals, there have been seen shining some
examples of virtue and happiness. There is, therefore, a
mixture of evils and of moral and physical goodness.… Now,
if man is the work of a sole principle, sovereignly good,
sovereignly holy, sovereignly potential, how is he exposed
to the maladies of cold, heat, hunger, thirst, pain, and
sorrow? How has he so many wicked inclinations? How does he
commit so many crimes? Can the sovereign sanctity produce a
criminal creature? Can the sovereign bounty produce an
unfortunate creature?[641]
Bayle, content with his anti-providential declaration, believes that
he has triumphed over all the dogmatists of the world; but whilst he
recovers his breath, observe that he admits a mixture of good and
evil, and allow him to continue.
“Origen,” he said, “asserts that evil has come from the wicked use of
the free will. And why has God allowed man to have so pernicious a
free will?” “Because,” Origen answers, “an intelligent creature who
had not enjoyed free will would have been immutable and immortal as
God.” What pitiable reason! Is it that the glorified souls, the
saints, are equal to God, being predestined to good, and deprived of
what is called _free will_, which, according to Saint Augustine, is
only the possibility of evil when the divine grace does not incline
man towards the good?[642]