heard the language of the city of peace, the mystical Jerusalem; and you
have heard the language of the city of confusion, which Scripture terms
“the spiritual Sodom.” Which of these two languages do you understand?
which of them do you speak? Those who are on the side of Jesus Christ
have, as St. Paul teaches us, the same mind which was also in him; and
those who are the children of the devil—_ex patre diabolo_—who has been
a murderer from the beginning, according to the saying of Jesus Christ,
follow the maxims of the devil. Let us hear, therefore, the language of
your school. I put this question to your doctors: When a person has
given me a blow on the cheek, ought I rather to submit to the injury
than kill the offender? or may I not kill the man in order to escape the
affront? Kill him by all means—it is quite lawful! exclaim, in one
breath, Lessius, Molina, Escobar, Reginald, Filiutius, Baldelle, and
other Jesuits. Is that the language of Jesus Christ? One question more:
Would I lose my honor by tolerating a box on the ear, without killing
the person that gave it? “Can there be a doubt,” cries Escobar, “that so
long as a man suffers another to live who has given him a buffet, that
man remains without honor?” Yes, fathers, without that honor which the
devil transfuses, from his own proud spirit into that of his proud
children. This is the honor which has ever been the idol of
worldly-minded men. For the preservation of this false glory, of which
the god of this world is the appropriate dispenser, they sacrifice their
lives by yielding to the madness of duelling; their honor, by exposing
themselves to ignominious punishments; and their salvation, by involving
themselves in the peril of damnation—a peril which, according to the
canons of the Church, deprives them even of Christian burial. We have
reason to thank God, however, for having enlightened the mind of our
monarch with ideas much purer than those of your theology. His edicts
bearing so severely on this subject, have not made duelling a crime—they
only punish the crime which is inseparable from duelling. He has
checked, by the dread of his rigid justice, those who were not
restrained by the fear of the justice of God; and his piety has taught
him that the honor of Christians consists in their observance of the
mandates of Heaven and the rules of Christianity, and not in the pursuit
of that phantom which, airy and unsubstantial as it is, you hold to be a
legitimate apology for murder. Your murderous decisions being thus
universally detested, it is highly advisable that you should now change
your sentiments, if not from religious principle, at least from motives
of policy. Prevent, fathers, by a spontaneous condemnation of these
inhuman dogmas, the melancholy consequences which may result from them,
and for which you will be responsible. And to impress your minds with a
deeper horror at homicide, remember that the first crime of fallen man
was a murder, committed on the person of the first holy man; that the
greatest crime was a murder, perpetrated on the person of the King of
saints; and that of all crimes, murder is the only one which involves in
a common destruction the Church and the state, nature and religion.
* * * * *
I have just seen the answer of your apologist to my Thirteenth Letter;
but if he has nothing better to produce in the shape of a reply to that
letter, which obviates the greater part of his objections, he will not
deserve a rejoinder. I am sorry to see him perpetually digressing from
his subject, to indulge in rancorous abuse both of the living and the
dead. But, in order to gain some credit to the stories with which you
have furnished him, you should not have made him publicly disavow a fact
so notorious as that of the buffet of Compiègne.[266] Certain it is,
fathers, from the deposition of the injured party, that he received upon
his cheek a blow from the hand of a Jesuit; and all that your friends
have been able to do for you has been to raise a doubt whether he
received the blow with the back or the palm of the hand, and to discuss
the question whether a stroke on the cheek with the back of the hand can
be properly denominated a buffet. I know not to what tribunal it belongs
to decide this point; but shall content myself, in the mean time, with
believing that it was, to say the very least, _a probable buffet_. This
gets me off with a safe conscience.
-----
Footnote 255:
City of God, book i. ch. 28.
Footnote 256:
See Cujas, tit. dig. de just. et jur. ad l. 3.
Footnote 257:
L. 2, c. 9, n. 66, 72.
Footnote 258:
L. ii., c. 9, n. 74.
Footnote 259:
Treat. i., examp. 7, n. 44.
Footnote 260:
In casuistical divinity, a distinction is drawn between the internal
and the external tribunal, or _forum_, as it is called. The internal
tribunal, or the _forum poli_, is that of conscience or the judgment
formed of actions according to the law of God. The external tribunal,
or the _forum soli_, is that of human society, or the judgment of
actions in the estimation of men, and according to civil law. (Voet.
Disp. Theol., iv. 62.)
Footnote 261:
Part. 5, tr. 19, misc. 2, resol. 99.
Footnote 262:
Doubts 4th and 10th.
Footnote 263:
“I am happy,” says Nicole, in a note, “to state here an important
fact, which confers the highest honor on M. Arnauld. A work of
considerable size was sent him before going to press, in which there
was a collection of all the authorities, from Jesuit writers,
prejudicial to the life of kings and princes. That celebrated doctor
prevented the impression of the work, on the ground that it was
dangerous for the life of monarchs and for the honor of the Jesuits
that it should ever see the light; and, in fact, the work was never
printed. Some other writer, less delicate than M. Arnauld, has
published something similar, in a work entitled _Recueil de Pieces
concernant l’ Histoire de la Compagnie de Jesus, par le P. Jouvenci_.”
Footnote 264:
Surely Pascal is here describing the Church of Christ as she ought to
be, and not the Church of Rome as she existed in 1656, at the very
time when she was urging, sanctioning, and exulting in the bloody
barbarities perpetrated in her name on the poor Piedmontese; or the
same Church as she appeared in 1572, when one of her popes ordered a
medal to be struck in honor of the Bartholomew massacre, with the
inscription, “_Strages Hugonotarum_—The massacre of the Hugunots!” Of
what Church, if not the Romish, can it be said with truth, that, “in
her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that
were slain on the earth?”
Footnote 265:
_Providing for their consciences_—that is, for the relief of
conscience, by confessing to a priest, and receiving absolution.
Footnote 266:
See Letter xiii., p. 264.
LETTER XV.[267]
TO THE REVEREND FATHERS, THE JESUITS.
SHOWING THAT THE JESUITS FIRST EXCLUDE CALUMNY FROM THEIR CATALOGUE OF
CRIMES, AND THEN EMPLOY IT IN DENOUNCING THEIR OPPONENTS.
_November 25, 1656._
REVEREND FATHERS,—As your scurrilities are daily increasing, and as you
are employing them in the merciless abuse of all pious persons opposed
to your errors, I feel myself obliged, for their sake and that of the
Church, to bring out that grand secret of your policy, which I promised
to disclose some time ago, in order that all may know, through means of
your own maxims, what degree of credit is due to your calumnious
accusations.
I am aware that those who are not very well acquainted with you, are at
a great loss what to think on this subject, as they find themselves
under the painful necessity, either of believing the incredible crimes
with which you charge your opponents, or (what is equally incredible) of
setting you down as slanderers. “Indeed!” they exclaim, “were these
things not true, would clergymen publish them to the world—would they
debauch their consciences and damn themselves by venting such libels?”
Such is their way of reasoning, and thus it is that the palpable proof
of your falsifications coming into collision with their opinion of your
honesty, their minds hang in a state of suspense between the evidence of
truth which they cannot gainsay, and the demands of charity which they
would not violate. It follows, that since their high esteem for you is
the only thing that prevents them from discrediting your calumnies, if
we can succeed in convincing them that you have quite a different idea
of calumny from that which they suppose you to have, and that you
actually believe that in blackening and defaming your adversaries you
are working out your own salvation, there can be little question that
the weight of truth will determine them immediately to pay no regard to
your accusations. This, fathers, will be the subject of the present
letter.
My design is, not simply to show that your writings are full of
calumnies: I mean to go a step beyond this. It is quite possible for a
person to say a number of false things believing them to be true; but
the character of a liar implies the intention to tell lies. Now I
undertake to prove, fathers, that it is your deliberate intention to
tell lies, and that it is both knowingly and purposely that you load
your opponents with crimes of which you know them to be innocent,
because you believe that you may do so without falling from a state of
grace. Though you doubtless know this point of your morality as well as
I do, this need not prevent me from telling you about it; which I shall
do, were it for no other purpose than to convince all men of its
existence, by showing them that I can maintain it to your face, while
you cannot have the assurance to disavow it, without confirming, by that
very disavowment, the charge which I bring against you.
The doctrine to which I allude is so common in your schools, that you
have maintained it not only in your books, but, such is your assurance,
even in your public theses; as, for example, in those delivered at
Louvain in the year 1645, where it occurs in the following terms: “What
is it but a venial sin to calumniate and forge false accusations to ruin
the credit of those who speak evil of us?”[268] So settled is this point
among you, that if any one dare to oppose it, you treat him as a
blockhead and a hare-brained idiot. Such was the way in which you
treated Father Quiroga, the German Capuchin, when he was so unfortunate
as to impugn the doctrine. The poor man was instantly attacked by
Dicastille, one of your fraternity; and the following is a specimen of
the manner in which he manages the dispute: “A certain rueful-visaged,
bare-footed, cowled friar—_cucullatus gymnopoda_—whom I do not choose to
name, had the boldness to denounce this opinion, among some women and
ignorant people, and to allege that it was scandalous and pernicious
against all good manners, hostile to the peace of states and societies,
and, in short, contrary to the judgment not only of all Catholic
doctors, but of all true Catholics. But in opposition to him I
maintained, as I do still, that calumny, when employed against a
calumniator, though it should be a falsehood, is not a mortal sin,
either against justice or charity: and to prove the point, I referred
him to the whole body of our fathers, and to whole universities,
exclusively composed of them, whom I had consulted on the subject; and
among others the reverend Father John Gans, confessor to the emperor;
the reverend Father Daniel Bastele, confessor to the archduke Leopold;
Father Henri, who was preceptor to these two princes; all the public and
ordinary professors of the university of Vienna” (wholly composed of
Jesuits); “all the professors of the university of Gratz” (all Jesuits);
“all the professors of the university of Prague” (where Jesuits are the
masters);—“from all of whom I have in my possession approbations of my
opinions, written and signed with their own hands; besides having on my
side the reverend Father Panalossa, a Jesuit, preacher to the emperor
and the king of Spain; Father Pilliceroli, a Jesuit, and many others,
who had all judged this opinion to be probable, before our dispute
began.”[269] You perceive, fathers, that there are few of your opinions
which you have been at more pains to establish than the present, as
indeed there were few of them of which you stood more in need. For this
reason, doubtless, you have authenticated it so well, that the casuists
appeal to it as an indubitable principle. “There can be no doubt,” says
Caramuel, “that it is a probable opinion that we contract no mortal sin
by calumniating another, in order to preserve our own reputation. For it
is maintained by more than twenty grave doctors, by Gaspard Hurtado, and
Dicastille, Jesuits, &c.; so that, were this doctrine not probable, it
would be difficult to find any one such in the whole compass of
theology.”
Wretched indeed must that theology be, and rotten to the very core,
which, unless it has been decided to be safe in conscience to defame our
neighbor’s character to preserve our own, can hardly boast of a safe
decision on any other point! How natural is it, fathers, that those who
hold this principle should occasionally put it in practice! The corrupt
propensity of mankind leans so strongly in that direction of itself,
that the obstacle of conscience once being removed, it would be folly to
suppose that it will not burst forth with all its native impetuosity. If
you desire an example of this, Caramuel will furnish you with one that
occurs in the same passage: “This maxim of Father Dicastille,” he says,
“having been communicated by a German countess to the daughters of the
empress, the belief thus impressed on their minds that calumny was only
a venial sin, gave rise in the course of a few days to such an immense
number of false and scandalous tales, that the whole court was thrown
into a flame and filled with alarm. It is easy, indeed, to conceive what
a fine use these ladies would make of the new light they had acquired.
Matters proceeded to such a length, that it was found necessary to call
in the assistance of a worthy Capuchin friar, a man of exemplary life,
called Father Quiroga” (the very man whom Dicastille rails at so
bitterly), “who assured them that the maxim was most pernicious,
especially among women, and was at the greatest pains to prevail upon
the empress to abolish the practice of it entirely.” We have no reason,
therefore, to be surprised at the bad effects of this doctrine; on the
contrary, the wonder would be, if it had failed to produce them.
Self-love is always ready enough to whisper in our ear, when we are
attacked, that we suffer wrongfully; and more particularly in your case,
fathers, whom vanity has blinded so egregiously as to make you believe
that to wound the honor of your Society, is to wound that of the Church.
There would have been good ground to look on it as something miraculous,
if you had _not_ reduced this maxim to practice. Those who do not know
you are ready to say, How could these good fathers slander their
enemies, when they cannot do so but at the expense of their own
salvation? But if they knew you better, the question would be, How could
these good fathers forego the advantage of decrying their enemies, when
they have it in their power to do so without hazarding their salvation?
Let none, therefore, henceforth be surprised to find the Jesuits
calumniators; they can exercise this vocation with a safe conscience;
there is no obstacle in heaven or on earth to prevent them. In virtue of
the credit they have acquired in the world, they can practise defamation
without dreading the justice of mortals; and, on the strength of their
self-assumed authority in matters of conscience, they have invented
maxims for enabling them to do it without any fear of the justice of
God.
This, fathers, is the fertile source of your base slanders. On this
principle was Father Brisacier led to scatter his calumnies about him,
with such zeal as to draw down on his head the censure of the late
Archbishop of Paris. Actuated by the same motives, Father D’Anjou
launched his invectives from the pulpit of the Church of St. Benedict in
Paris, on the 8th of March, 1655, against those honorable gentlemen who
were intrusted with the charitable funds raised for the poor of Picardy
and Champagne, to which they themselves had largely contributed; and,
uttering a base falsehood, calculated (if your slanders had been
considered worthy of any credit) to dry up the stream of that charity,
he had the assurance to say, “that he knew, from good authority, that
certain persons had diverted that money from its proper use, to employ
it against the Church and the State;” a calumny which obliged the curate
of the parish, who is a doctor of the Sorbonne, to mount the pulpit the
very next day, in order to give it the lie direct. To the same source
must be traced the conduct of your Father Crasset, who preached calumny
at such a furious rate in Orleans that the archbishop of that place was
under the necessity of interdicting him as a public slanderer. In his
mandate, dated the 9th of September last, his lordship declares, “That
whereas he had been informed that Brother Jean Crasset, priest of the
Society of Jesus, had delivered from the pulpit a discourse filled with
falsehoods and calumnies against the ecclesiastics of this city, falsely
and maliciously charging them with maintaining impious and heretical
propositions, such as, That the commandments of God are impracticable;
that internal grace is irresistible; that Jesus Christ did not die for
all men; and others of a similar kind, condemned by Innocent X.: he
therefore hereby interdicts the aforesaid Crasset from preaching in his
diocese, and forbids all his people to hear him, on pain of mortal
disobedience.” The above, fathers, is your ordinary accusation, and
generally among the first that you bring against all whom it is your
interest to denounce. And although you should find it as impossible to
substantiate the charge against any of them, as Father Crasset did in
the case of the clergy of Orleans, your peace of conscience will not be
in the least disturbed on that account; for you believe that this mode
of calumniating your adversaries is permitted you with such certainty,
that you have no scruple to avow it in the most public manner, and in
the face of a whole city.
A remarkable proof of this may be seen in the dispute you had with M.
Puys, curate of St. Nisier at Lyons; and the story exhibits so complete
an illustration of your spirit, that I shall take the liberty of
relating some of its leading circumstances. You know, fathers, that, in
the year 1649, M. Puys translated into French an excellent book, written
by another Capuchin friar, “On the duty which Christians owe to their
own parishes, against those that would lead them away from them,”
without using a single invective, or pointing to any monk or any order
of monks in particular. Your fathers, however, were pleased to put the
cap on their own heads; and without any respect to an aged pastor, a
judge in the Primacy of France, and a man who was held in the highest
esteem by the whole city, Father Alby wrote a furious tract against him,
which you sold in your own church upon Assumption-day; in which book,
among other various charges, he accused him of having “made himself
scandalous by his gallantries,” described him as suspected of having no
religion, as a heretic, excommunicated, and, in short, worthy of the
stake. To this M. Puys made a reply; and Father Alby, in a second
publication, supported his former allegations. Now, fathers, is it not a
clear point, either that you were calumniators, or that you believed all
that you alleged against that worthy priest to be true; and that, on
this latter assumption, it became you to see him purified from all these
abominations before judging him worthy of your friendship? Let us see,
then, what happened at the accommodation of the dispute, which took
place in the presence of a great number of the principal inhabitants of
the town, whose names will be found at the foot of the page,[270]
exactly as they are set down in the instrument drawn up on the 25th of
September, 1650. Before all these witnesses M. Puys made a declaration,
which was neither more nor less than this: “That what he had written was
not directed against the fathers of the Society of Jesus; that he had
spoken in general of those who alienated the faithful from their
parishes, without meaning by that to attack the Society; and that so far
from having such an intention, the Society was the object of his esteem
and affection.” By virtue of these words alone, without either
retractation or absolution, M. Puys recovered, all at once, from his
apostasy, his scandals, and his excommunication; and Father Alby
immediately thereafter addressed him in the following express terms:
“Sir, it was in consequence of my believing that you meant to attack the
Society to which I have the honor to belong, that I was induced to take
up the pen in its defence; and I considered that the mode of reply which
I adopted was _such as I was permitted to employ_. But, on a better
understanding of your intention, I am now free to declare, that _there
is nothing in your work_ to prevent me from regarding you as a man of
genius, enlightened in judgment, profound and _orthodox_ in doctrine,
and _irreproachable_ in manners; in one word, as a pastor worthy of your
Church. It is with much pleasure that I make this declaration, and I beg
these gentlemen to remember what I have now said.”
They do remember it, fathers; and, allow me to add, they were more
scandalized by the reconciliation than by the quarrel. For who can fail
to admire this speech of Father Alby? He does not say that he retracts,
in consequence of having learnt that a change had taken place in the
faith and manners of M. Puys, but solely because, _having understood
that he had no intention of attacking your Society_, there was nothing
further to prevent him from regarding the author as a good Catholic. He
did not then believe him to be actually a heretic! And yet, after
having, contrary to his conviction, accused him of this crime, he will
not acknowledge he was in the wrong, but has the hardihood to say, that
he considered the method he adopted to be “such as he was _permitted_ to
employ!”
What can you possibly mean, fathers, by so publicly avowing the fact,
that you measure the faith and the virtue of men only by the sentiments
they entertain towards your Society? Had you no apprehension of making
yourselves pass, by your own acknowledgment, as a band of swindlers and
slanderers? What, fathers! must the same individual, without undergoing
any personal transformation, but simply according as you judge him to
have honored or assailed your community, be “pious” or “impious,”
“irreproachable” or “excommunicated,” “a pastor worthy of the Church” or
“worthy of the stake;” in short, “a Catholic” or “a heretic?” To attack
your Society and to be a heretic, are, therefore, in your language,
convertible terms! An odd sort of heresy this, fathers! And so it would
appear, that when we see many good Catholics branded, in your writings,
by the name of heretics, it means nothing more than that _you think they
attack you_! It is well, fathers, that we understand this strange
dialect, according to which there can be no doubt that I must be a great
heretic. It is in _this_ sense, then, that you so often favor me with
this appellation! Your sole reason for cutting me off from the Church
is, because you conceive that my letters have done you harm; and,
accordingly, all that I have to do, in order to become a good Catholic,
is either to approve of your extravagant morality, or to convince you
that my sole aim in exposing it has been your advantage. The former I
could not do without renouncing every sentiment of piety that I ever
possessed; and the latter you will be slow to acknowledge till you are
well cured of your errors. Thus am I involved in heresy, after a very
singular fashion; for, the purity of my faith being of no avail for my
exculpation, I have no means of escaping from the charge, except either
by turning traitor to my own conscience, or by reforming yours. Till one
or other of these events happen, I must remain a reprobate and a
slanderer; and, let me be ever so faithful in my citations from your
writings, you will go about crying everywhere, “What an instrument of
the devil must that man be, to impute to us things of which there is not
the least mark or vestige to be found in our books!” And, by doing so,
you will only be acting in conformity with your fixed maxim and your
ordinary practice: to such latitude does your privilege of telling lies
extend! Allow me to give you an example of this, which I select on
purpose: it will give me an opportunity of replying, at the same time,
to your ninth Imposture: for, in truth, they only deserve to be refuted
in passing.