A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 02

It has been asked whether the bastards of the popes might be popes in turn. Pope John XI. was, it is true, a bastard of Pope Sergius III., and of the famous Marozia; but an instance is not a law.

BISHOP

Samuel Ornik, a native of Basle, was, as is well known, a very amiable young man, who, moreover, knew his German and Greek New Testament by heart. At the age of twenty his parents sent him to travel. He was commissioned to carry books to the coadjutor at Paris in the time of the Fronde. He arrived at the archbishop's gate and was told by the Swiss that monseigneur saw no one. "My dear fellow," said Ornik, "you are very rude to your countrymen; the apostles allowed every one to approach, and Jesus Christ desired that little children should come unto him. I have nothing to ask of your master; on the contrary, I bring him something." "Enter, then," said the Swiss.

He waited an hour in the first ante-chamber. Being quite artless he attacked with questions a domestic who was very fond of telling all he knew about his master. "He must be pretty rich," said Ornik, "to have such a swarm of pages and footmen running in and out of the house." "I don't know," answered the other, "what his income is, but I hear Joli and the Abbé Charier say that he is two millions in debt." "But who is that lady who came out of a cabinet and is passing by?" "That is Madame de Pomereu, one of his mistresses." "She is really very pretty, but I have not read that the apostles had such company in their bedchambers in a morning." "Ah! that, I believe, is monsieur, about to give audience." "Say sa grandeur, monseigneur." "Well, with all my heart…" Ornik saluted sa grandeur, presented his books, and was received with a most gracious smile. Sa grandeur said three words to him, and stepped into his carriage, escorted by fifty horsemen. In stepping in, monseigneur dropped a sheath and Ornik was astonished that monseigneur should carry so large an inkhorn. "Do you not see," said the talker, "that it is his dagger? every one that goes to parliament wears his dagger?" Ornik uttered an exclamation of astonishment, and departed.

He went through France and was edified by town after town. From thence he passed into Italy. In the papal territories he met a bishop with an income of only a thousand crowns, who went on foot. Ornik, being naturally kind, offered him a place in his cambiatura. "Signor, you are no doubt going to comfort the sick?" "Sir, I am going to my master." "Your master? He, no doubt, is Jesus Christ." "Sir, he is Cardinal Azolino; I am his almoner. He gives me a very poor salary, but he has promised to place me with Donna Olimpia, the favorite sister-in-law of nostro signore." "What! are you in the pay of a cardinal? But do you not know that there were no cardinals in the time of Jesus Christ and St. John?" "Is it possible!" exclaimed the Italian prelate. "Nothing is more true; you have read it in the Gospel." "I have never read it," replied the bishop; "I know only the office of Our Lady." "I tell you there were neither cardinals nor bishops, and when there were bishops the priests were almost their equals, as St. Jerome, in several places, assures us." "Holy Virgin" said the Italian, "I knew nothing about it; and what of the popes?" "There were no popes either." The good bishop crossed himself, thinking he was with the evil one, and leaped from the side of his companion.

BLASPHEMY

This is a Greek word signifying an attack on reputation. We find blasphemia in Demosthenes. In the Greek Church it was used only to express an injury done to God. The Romans never made use of this expression, apparently not thinking that God's honor could be offended like that of men.

There scarcely exists one synonym. Blasphemy does not altogether convey the idea of sacrilege. We say of a man who has taken God's name in vain, who, in the violence of anger, has sworn – as it is expressed – by the name of God, that he has blasphemed; but we do not say that he has committed sacrilege. The sacrilegious man is he who perjures himself on the gospel, who extends his rapacity to sacred things, who imbrues his hands in the blood of priests.

Great sacrileges have always been punished with death in all nations, especially those accompanied by bloodshed. The author of the "Institutes au Droit Criminel" reckons among divine high treasons in the second degree, the non-observance of Sundays and holidays. He should have said the non-observance attended with marked contempt, for simple negligence is a sin, but not, as he calls it, a sacrilege. It is absurd to class together, as this author does, simony, the carrying off of a nun, and the forgetting to go to vespers on a holiday. It is one great instance of the errors committed by writers on jurisprudence, who, not having been called upon to make laws, take upon themselves to interpret those of the state.

Blasphemies uttered in intoxication, in anger, in the excess of debauchery, or in the heat of unguarded conversation have been subjected by legislators to much lighter penalties. For instance, the advocate whom we have already cited says that the laws of France condemn simple blasphemers to a fine for the first offence, which is doubled for the second, tripled for the third, and quadrupled for the fourth offence; for the fifth relapse the culprit is set in the pillory, for the sixth relapse he is pilloried, and has his upper lip burned off with a hot iron, and for the seventh he loses his tongue. He should have added that this was an ordinance of the year 1666.

Punishments are almost always arbitrary, which is a great defect in jurisprudence. But this defect opens the way for clemency and compassion, and this compassion is no other than the strictest justice, for it would be horrible to punish a youthful indiscretion as poisoners and parricides are punished. A sentence of death for an offence which deserves nothing more than correction is no other than an assassination committed with the sword of justice.

Is it not to the purpose here to remark that what has been blasphemy in one country has often been piety in another?

Suppose a Tyrian merchant landed at the port of Canope: he might be scandalized on seeing an onion, a cat, or a goat carried in procession; he might speak indecorously of Isheth, Oshireth, and Horeth, or might turn aside his head and not fall on his knees at the sight of a procession with the parts of human generation larger than life; he might express his opinion at supper, or even sing some song in which the Tyrian sailors made a jest of the Egyptian absurdities. He might be overheard by the maid of the inn, whose conscience would not suffer her to conceal so enormous a crime; she would run and denounce the offender to the nearest shoen that bore the image of the truth on his breast, and it is known how this image of truth was made. The tribunal of the shoens, or shotim, would condemn the Tyrian blasphemer to a dreadful death, and confiscate his vessel. Yet this merchant might be considered at Tyre as one of the most pious persons in Phœnicia.

Numa sees that his little horde of Romans is a Collection of Latin freebooters who steal right and left all they can find – oxen, sheep, fowls, and girls. He tells them that he has spoken with the nymph Egeria in a cavern, and that the nymph has been employed by Jupiter to give him laws. The senators treat him at first as a blasphemer and threaten to throw him headlong from the Tarpeian rock. Numa makes himself a powerful party; he gains over some seniors who go with him into Egeria's grotto. She talks to them and converts them; they convert the senate and the people. In a little time Numa is no longer a blasphemer, the name is given only to such as doubt the existence of the nymph.

In our own times it is unfortunate that what is blasphemy at Rome, at our Lady of Loretto, and within the walls of San Gennaro, is piety in London, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Berlin, Copenhagen, Berne, Basel, and Hamburg. It is yet more unfortunate that even in the same country, in the same town, in the same street, people treat one another as blasphemers.

Nay, of the ten thousand Jews living at Rome there is not one who does not regard the pope as the chief of the blasphemers, while the hundred thousand Christians who inhabit Rome, in place of two millions of Jovians who filled it in Trajan's time, firmly believe that the Jews meet in their synagogues on Saturday for the purpose of blaspheming.

A Cordelier has no hesitation in applying the epithet of blasphemer to a Dominican who says that the Holy Virgin was born in original sin, notwithstanding that the Dominicans have a bull from the pope which permits them to teach the maculate conception in their convents, and that, besides this bull, they have in their forum the express declaration of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The first origin of the schism of three-fourths of Switzerland and a part of Lower Germany was a quarrel in the cathedral church of Frankfort between a Cordelier, whose name I forget, and a Dominican named Vigand.

Both were drunk, according to the custom of that day. The drunken Cordelier, who was preaching, thanked God that he was not a Jacobin, swearing that it was necessary to exterminate the blaspheming Jacobins who believed that the Holy Virgin had been born in mortal sin, and delivered from sin only by the merits of her son. The drunken Jacobin cried out: "Thou hast lied; thou thyself art a blasphemer." The Cordelier descended from the pulpit with a great iron crucifix in his hand, laid it about his adversary, and left him almost dead on the spot.

To revenge this outrage the Dominicans worked many miracles in Germany and Switzerland; these miracles were designed to prove their faith. They at length found means to imprint the marks of our Lord Jesus Christ on one of their lay brethren named Jetzer. This operation was performed at Berne by the Holy Virgin herself, but she borrowed the hand of the sub-prior, who dressed himself in female attire and put a glory round his head. The poor little lay brother, exposed all bloody to the veneration of the people on the altar of the Dominicans at Berne, at last cried out murder! sacrilege! The monks, in order to quiet him as quickly as possible administered to him a host sprinkled with corrosive sublimate, but the excess of the dose made him discharge the host from his stomach.

The monks then accused him to the bishop of Lausanne of horrible sacrilege. The indignant people of Berne in their turn accused the monks, and four of them were burned at Berne on the 13th of May, 1509, at the Marsilly gate. Such was the termination of this abominable affair, which determined the people of Berne to choose a religion, bad indeed in Catholic eyes, but which delivered them from the Cordeliers and the Jacobins. The number of similar sacrileges is incredible. Such are the effects of party spirit.

The Jesuits maintained for a hundred years that the Jansenists were blasphemers, and proved it by a thousand lettres-de-cachet; the Jansenists by upwards of four thousand volumes demonstrated that it was the Jesuits who blasphemed. The writer of the "Gazettes Ecclésiastiques" pretends that all honest men blaspheme against him, while he himself blasphemes from his garret on high against every honest man in the kingdom. The gazette-writer's publisher blasphemes in return and complains that he is starving. He would find it better to be honest and polite.

One thing equally remarkable and consoling is that never in any country of the earth, among the wildest idolaters, has any man been considered as a blasphemer for acknowledging one supreme, eternal, and all-powerful God. It certainly was not for having acknowledged this truth that Socrates was condemned to the hemlock, for the doctrine of a Supreme God was announced in all the Grecian mysteries. It was a faction that destroyed Socrates; he was accused, at a venture, of not recognizing the secondary gods, and on this point it was that he was accused as a blasphemer.

The first Christians were accused of blasphemy for the same reason, but the partisans of the ancient religion of the empire, the Jovians, who reproached the primitive Christians with blasphemy, were at length condemned as blasphemers themselves, under Theodosius II. Dryden says:

This side to-day, to-morrow t'other burns,And they're all Gods Almighty in their turns.

BODY

Body and matter are here the same thing although there is hardly any such thing as synonym in the most rigorous sense of the word. There have been persons who by this word "body" have understood "spirit" also. They have said spirit originally signifies breath; only a body can breathe, therefore body and spirit may, after all, be the same thing. In this sense La Fontaine said to the celebrated Duke de la Rochefoucauld: "J'entens les esprits corps et pétris de matière." In the same sense he says to Madame Sablière:

Je subtiliserais un morceau de matière,Quintessence d'atome, extrait de la lumière,je ne sais quoiplus vif et plus subtil encor…

No one thought of harassing good Monsieur La Fontaine, or bringing him to trial for his expressions. Were a poor philosopher, or even a poet, to say as much nowadays, how many would there be to fall on him! How many scribblers to sell their extracts for sixpence! How many knaves, for the sole purpose of making mischief, to cry philosopher! peripatetic! disciple of Gassendi! pupil of Locke, and the primitive fathers! damnable!

As we know not what a spirit is, so also we are ignorant of what a body is; we see various properties, but what is the subject in which those properties reside? "There is nothing but body," said Democritus and Epicurus; "there is no such thing as body," said the disciples of Zeno, of Elia.

Berkeley, bishop of Cloyne, is the last who, by a hundred captious sophisms, has pretended to prove that bodies do not exist. They have, says he, neither color, nor smell, nor heat; all these modalities are in your sensations, not in the objects. He might have spared himself the trouble of proving this truth for it was already sufficiently known. But thence he passed to extent and solidity, which are essential to body, and thinks he proves that there is no extent in a piece of green cloth because the cloth is not in reality green, the sensation of green being in ourselves only, therefore the sensation of extent is likewise in ourselves only. Having thus destroyed extent he concludes that solidity, which is attached to it, falls of itself, and therefore that there is nothing in the world but our ideas. So that, according to this doctor, ten thousand men killed by ten thousand cannon shots are in reality nothing more than ten thousand apprehensions of our understanding, and when a female becomes pregnant it is only one idea lodged in another idea from which a third idea will be produced.

Surely, the bishop of Cloyne might have saved himself from falling into this excessive absurdity. He thinks he shows that there is no extent because a body has appeared to him four times as large through a glass as to his naked eye, and four times as small through another glass. Hence he concludes, that, since a body cannot be at the same time four feet, sixteen feet, and but one foot in extent, there is no extent, therefore there is nothing. He had only to take any measure and say: of whatever extent this body may appear to me to be, it extends to so many of these measures.

We might very easily see that extent and solidity were quite different from sound, color, taste, smell. It is quite clear that these are sensations excited in us by the configuration of parts, but extent is not a sensation. When this lighted coal goes out, I am no longer warm; when the air is no longer struck, I cease to hear; when this rose withers, I no longer smell it: but the coal, the air, and the rose have extent without me. Berkeley's paradox is not worth refuting.

Thus argued Zeno and Parmenides of old, and very clever they were; they would prove to you that a tortoise went along as swiftly as Achilles, for there was no such thing as motion; they discussed a hundred other questions equally important. Most of the Greeks made philosophy a juggle, and they transmitted their art to our schoolmen. Bayle himself was occasionally one of the set and embroidered cobwebs like the rest. In his article, "Zeno," against the divisible extent of matter and the contiguity of bodies he ventures to say what would not be tolerated in any six-months geometrician.

It is worth knowing how Berkeley was drawn into this paradox. A long while ago I had some conversation with him, and he told me that his opinion originated in our being unable to conceive what the subject of this extension is, and certainly, in his book, he triumphs when he asks Hylas what this subject, this substratum, this substance is? It is the extended body, answers Hylas. Then the bishop, under the name of Philonous, laughs at him, and poor Hylas, finding that he has said that extension is the subject of extension, and has therefore talked nonsense, remains quite confused, acknowledges that he understands nothing at all of the matter; that there is no such thing as body; that the natural world does not exist, and that there is none but an intellectual world.

Hylas should only have said to Philonous: We know nothing of the subject of this extension, solidity, divisibility, mobility, figure, etc.; I know no more of it than I do of the subject of thought, feeling, and will, but the subject does not the less exist for it has essential properties of which it cannot be deprived.

We all resemble the greater part of the Parisian ladies who live well without knowing what is put in their ragouts; just so do we enjoy bodies without knowing of what they are composed. Of what does a body consist? Of parts, and these parts resolve themselves into other parts. What are these last parts? They, too, are bodies; you divide incessantly without making any progress.

In short, a subtle philosopher, observing that a picture was made of ingredients of which no single ingredient was a picture, and a house of materials of which no one material was a house, imagined that bodies are composed of an infinity of small things which are not bodies, and these are called monads. This system is not without its merits, and, were it revealed, I should think it very possible. These little beings would be so many mathematical points, a sort of souls, waiting only for a tenement: here would be a continual metempsychosis. This system is as good as another; I like it quite as well as the declination of atoms, the substantial forms, the versatile grace, or the vampires.

BOOKS

SECTION I

You despise books; you, whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure, or in indolence, but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books. All Africa, to the limits of Ethiopia and Nigritia obeys the book of the Koran after bowing to the book of the Gospel. China is ruled by the moral book of Confucius, and a great part of India by the Veda. Persia was governed for ages by the books of one of the Zoroasters.

In a lawsuit or criminal process, your property, your honor, perhaps your life, depends on the interpretation of a book which you never read. It is, however, with books as with men, a very small number play a great part, the rest are confounded with the multitude.

By whom are mankind led in all civilized countries? By those who can read and write. You are acquainted with neither Hippocrates, nor Boerhaave, nor Sydenham, but you place your body in the hands of those who can read them. You leave your soul entirely to the care of those who are paid for reading the Bible, although there are not fifty of them who have read it through with attention.

The world is now so entirely governed by books that they who command in the city of the Scipios and the Catos have resolved that the books of their law shall be for themselves alone; they are their sceptre, which they have made it high treason in their subjects to touch without an express permission. In other countries it has been forbidden to think in print without letters-patent.

There are nations in which thought is considered merely as an article of commerce, the operations of the human understanding being valued only at so much per sheet. If the bookseller happens to desire a privilege for his merchandise whether he is selling "Rabelais," or the "Fathers of the Church," the magistrate grants the privilege without answering for the contents of the book.

In another country the liberty of explaining yourself by books is one of the most inviolable prerogatives. There you may print whatever you please, on pain of being tiresome, and of being punished if you have too much abused your natural right.

Before the admirable invention of printing, books were scarcer and dearer than jewels. There were scarcely any books in our barbarous nations, either before Charlemagne or after him, until the time of Charles V., king of France, called the Wise, and from this time to Francis I. the scarcity was extreme. The Arabs alone had them from the eighth to the thirteenth century of our era. China was full of them when we could neither read nor write.

Copyists were much employed in the Roman Empire from the time of the Scipios until the irruption of the barbarians. This was a very ungrateful employment. The dealers always paid authors and copyists very ill. It required two years of assiduous labor for a copyist to transcribe the whole Bible well on vellum, and what time and trouble to copy correctly in Greek and Latin the works of Origen, Clement of Alexandria and all the others writers called Fathers!

St. Hieronymos, or Hieronymus, whom we call Jerome, says, in one of his satirical letters against Rufinus that he has ruined himself with buying the works of Origen, against whom he wrote with so much bitterness and violence. "Yes," says he, "I have read Origen, if it be a crime I confess that I am guilty and that I exhausted my purse in buying his works at Alexandria."

The Christian societies of the three first centuries had fifty-four gospels, of which, until Diocletian's time scarcely two or three copies found their way among the Romans of the old religion.

Among the Christians it was an unpardonable crime to show the gospels to the Gentiles; they did not even lend them to the catechumens.

When Lucian (insulting our religion of which he knew very little) relates that "a troop of beggars took him up into a fourth story where they were invoking the Father through the Son, and foretelling misfortunes to the emperor and the empire," he does not say that they showed him a single book. No Roman historian, no Roman author whomsoever makes mention of the gospels.

When a Christian, who was unfortunately rash and unworthy of his holy religion had publicly torn in pieces and trampled under foot an edict of the Emperor Diocletian, and had thus drawn down upon Christianity that persecution which succeeded the greatest toleration, the Christians were then obliged to give up their gospels and written authors to the magistrates, which before then had never been done. Those who gave up their books through fear of imprisonment, or even of death, were held by the rest of the Christians to be sacrilegious apostates, they received the surname of traditores, whence we have the word "traitor," and several bishops asserted that they should be rebaptized, which occasioned a dreadful schism.

The poems of Homer were long so little known that Pisistratus was the first who put them in order and had them transcribed at Athens about five hundred years before the Christian era.

Perhaps there was not at this time in all the East a dozen copies of the Veda and the Zend-Avesta.

In 1700 you would not have found a single book in all Rome, excepting the missals and a few Bibles in the hands of papas drunk with brandy.

The complaint now is of their too great abundance. But it is not for readers to complain, the remedy is in their own hands; nothing forces them to read. Nor for authors, they who make the multitude of books have not to complain of being pressed. Notwithstanding this enormous quantity how few people read! But if they read, and read with advantage, should we have to witness the deplorable infatuations to which the vulgar are still every day a prey?

The reason that books are multiplied in spite of the general law that beings shall not be multiplied without necessity, is that books are made from books. A new history of France or Spain is manufactured from several volumes already printed, without adding anything new. All dictionaries are made from dictionaries; almost all new geographical books are made from other books of geography; St. Thomas's Dream has brought forth two thousand large volumes of divinity, and the same race of little worms that have devoured the parent are now gnawing the children.