Voltaire attributed this piece to Saint-Hyacinthe, a deceased writer and journalist who had criticized his epic poem, La Henriade. The people portrayed at this dinner were all well-known bygone personages he had known in his twenties. Count de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722) wrote on feudalism, on Mahomet, and is mentioned in Letters…on Rabelais…, as is his erudite friend, Fréret (1688–1749).1 This Dinner was a huge success. The single copy that first appeared was passed around with startling rapidity, its sixty-page brochure copied out by hand by many, according to Grimm. Every anti-religious pamphlet out was now being attributed to Voltaire, and the Parlementarian Pasquier, who had just had the young Chevalier de La Barre beheaded and burned alongside Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, was threatening his arrest, even though Voltaire was outside his jurisdiction. Fearing the local authorities might be persuaded, Voltaire implored Grimm and others to stop attributing these texts to him. The entreaties were largely ignored, but so were the threats, since the “infernal factory at Ferney” continued churning out pamphlets.
FIRST CONVERSATION
Before dinner
ABBÉ COUET
What! Count de Boulainvilliers, you believe that philosophy is as useful to the human race as the Roman Catholic Apostolic religion?
COUNT DE BOULAINVILLIERS
Philosophy's empire is spread throughout the world, and your church only dominates a small part of Europe. And, even there, it has many enemies. But you should admit that philosophy is a thousand times more wholesome than your religion as it has long been practiced.
THE ABBÉ
You astonish me. What on earth then do you mean by philosophy?
THE COUNT
I mean love enlightened by wisdom, sustained by love of the Eternal Being, rewarder of virtue and avenger of crime.
THE ABBÉ
Well! Is that not what our religion teaches?
THE COUNT
If that is what you teach, then we are in agreement: I am a good Catholic, and you're a good philosopher. Let neither of us take it further then. Let us not dishonor our religious and holy philosophy with either sophisms or absurdities that outrage reason, or with unbridled greed for honors and for riches that corrupt every virtue. Let us only listen to the moderation and the truths of philosophy. Then philosophy will adopt religion as its daughter.
THE ABBÉ
With your permission, Sir, this kind of talk lights stakes.
THE COUNT
As long as you continue to talk of stakes and use them to burn people alive instead of using reasons, you will have only hypocrites and imbeciles for followers. The opinion of a single wise man undoubtedly prevails over the prestige of rogues and the enslavement of a thousand idiots. You asked me what I understood by philosophy. Now I ask what you understand by religion.
THE ABBÉ
I would need a good deal of time to explain all our dogmas to you.
THE COUNT
That is already one big bias against you. You need thick books, I only need four words: Serve God, be just.
THE ABBÉ
Our religion has never said the contrary.
THE COUNT
I would like to never find the contrary in your books. These cruel words: “Force them to enter,” which have been abused with so much barbarity, or these: “I have come to bring the sword, not peace,” or these: “Let he who does not listen to the Church be viewed as a pagan, or as a tax collector,” and a hundred similar maxims that frighten common sense and humanity.
Is there anything harsher and more odious than these words? “I speak to them in parables, so that in seeing, they will not see, and in listening, they will not hear”?2 Is that the way one explains wisdom and eternal goodness?
The God of all the universe, who became a man to enlighten and to save all men, could he have said, “I have only been sent for the children of Israel,”3 which is to say, for a tiny country thirty leagues in size at most?
Is it possible that this God, who was made to pay the per capita tax, told his disciples that they should pay nothing, that kings “only receive taxes from foreigners, and that his children are exempt?”4
THE ABBÉ
Those lines, which shock everyone, are explained by other passages.
THE COUNT
Good heavens! What kind of God has need of a commentary, and is perpetually made to say everything and its contrary? What kind of legislator has never written anything? What are four divine books whose date is unknown and whose authors, no better known, contradict each other on each page?
THE ABBÉ
All that can be reconciled, I tell you. But you will at least admit that you are very pleased with the Sermon on the Mount.
THE COUNT
Yes. They claim that Jesus said those who call their brother Raca will be burned,5 as your theologians do every day. He says that he came to accomplish the Law of Moses, which you loathe. He asks with what we will salt if the salt fades. He says, “Happy are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” I know too that they have him say that wheat rots and dies in the earth to germinate, that the kingdom of heaven is a mustard seed or that it is money lent at usurious rates, or that one must not give dinner to ones parents if they are rich. Perhaps these expressions had some respectable meaning in their original language. I adopt all those that can inspire virtue, but have the goodness to tell me what you think of another passage, which is this one:
It is God who made me. God is everywhere, and in me. Will I dare soil him with lowly and criminal actions, with impure words, with vile desires?
May I, at my last moments, say to God, Oh master! Oh father! You wanted me to suffer and I have suffered with resignation. You wanted me poor, and I embraced my poverty. You put me in servility, and I did not wish for grandeur. You wanted me to die, and I die adoring you. I leave this magnificent spectacle giving you thanks for admitting me and for having let me contemplate the splendid order with which you rule the universe.”
THE ABBÉ
That is sublime. In which Church Father did you find this divine piece? In the writings of St. Cyprian? In St. Gregory of Nanzianzus, or in St. Cyril?
THE COUNT
No, they are the words of a pagan slave, named Epictetus, and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius never thought any differently than this slave.
THE ABBÉ
Yes, I remember having read in my youth moral precepts from the pagan authors that made a great impression on me. I will even admit to you that the laws of Zaleucus, of Charondas, the guidelines of Confucius, the moral commandments of Zoroaster, and the maxims of Pythagoras seemed dictated by wisdom for the happiness of the human race to me. It seemed to me that God had deigned honor these great men with a purer light than ordinary men, just as he gave greater harmony to Virgil, greater eloquence to Cicero, and greater wisdom to Archimedes than to their contemporaries. I was struck by these great lessons in virtue that antiquity had left us. However, none of those people knew theology. They did not know the difference between a cherub and a seraph, between efficient grace, which one cannot resist, and sufficient grace, which does not suffice. They did not know that God was dead, and that having been crucified for all, he had nevertheless only been crucified for some. Ah, Count! If the Scipios, the Ciceros, the Catos, the Epictetuses, the Antonines had known that “the Father engendered the Son, and did not make him, that the Spirit was neither engendered nor made, but proceeds by spiration sometimes from the Father and sometimes from the Son and that the Son has everything the Father does except paternity,” if the ancients, our masters in everything, I say, could have known a hundred truths of this force and clarity, in short, if they had been theologians, what advantages would they not have brought to men! Consubstantiality, above all, Count, transubstantiation, are such beautiful things! If only Scipio, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius had examined these truths! They could have been great vicars for the archbishop, or receivers at the Sorbonne.
THE COUNT
Tell me in all conscience, between us and before God, if you think the souls of these great men are on spits, being eternally roasted by devils until they have regained their bodies, which will then be eternally roasted with them, and all that for not having been receivers at the Sorbonne or great vicars for the archbishop?
THE ABBÉ
You embarrass me a great deal, because “Outside the Church, no salvation.”
None shall please heaven but us and our friends.6
“Whoever hears not the Church, let him be to you like a pagan or tax collector.”7 Scipio and Marcus Aurelius did not hear the Church. They were not received at the Council of Trent. Their spiritual souls will be roasted forever, and when their bodies, dispersed to the four elements, are found, they will also be roasted forever with their souls. Nothing is clearer, or more just. That much is positive.
On the other hand, it's very hard to burn for eternity Socrates, Aristides, Pythagoras, Epictetus, the Antonines, and all those who led such pure and exemplary lives, while according eternal bliss to the soul and body of François Ravaillac, who died a good Christian, his confession heard, and armed with efficient or sufficient grace. I'm a little perplexed in this matter, because, after all, I am a judge of all men. Their eternal happiness or misery depends on me, and I do have some repugnance to save Ravaillac and damn Scipio.
There is one thing that consoles me, and that is that we theologians can pull anyone out of hell we want to. We read in the Acts of St. Thecla, a great theologian and disciple of St. Paul (she disguised herself as a man to follow him) that she delivered her friend Faconilla from hell, who had had the misfortune of dying a pagan.
The great saint, John of Damascus, reports that the great saint Macarius, the one who obtained the death of Arius from God by his ardent prayers, interrogated the skull of a pagan about his salvation one day in a cemetery. The skull told him that the prayers of theologians gave infinite relief to the damned.
Moreover we know from exact science that the great pope St. Gregory pulled from hell the soul of Emperor Trajan. Those are fine examples of the divine mercy of God.
THE COUNT
What a wag. Then pull Henri IV out of hell with your holy prayers, who died without the sacraments like a pagan, and put him in heaven with Ravaillac, the well-confessed. The difficulty I see is how they will get along together and their faces when they see each other.
THE COUNTESS DE BOULAINVILLIERS
Dinner is getting cold. Here is M. Fréret arriving. Let us sit down to eat. You can pull out of hell whoever you like afterwards.
SECOND CONVERSATION
During dinner
THE ABBÉ
Ah, Madame! You're eating meat on Friday without express permission from the archbishop or from me! Don't you know it is a sin against the Church? The Jews are not allowed to eat hare, because it ruminates and does not have cleft feet. And it is a horrible crime to eat ixion and griffin.8
THE COUNTESS
You are always joking, Abbé. For pity's sake, tell me what an ixion is.
THE ABBÉ
I have no idea, Madame, but I do know that whoever eats a chicken wing on a Friday without the permission of his bishop, instead of gorging himself on salmon and sturgeon, commits a mortal sin. And that his soul will be burned while awaiting his body, and that when his body joins it, they will both burn forever without ever being consumed, as I said earlier.
THE COUNTESS
Surely nothing is more judicious or fair. What a pleasure to spend ones days in such a wise religion. Would you care for a wing of this partridge?
THE COUNT
Take it, believe me. Jesus Christ said, “Eat what is given you.” Eat, eat. Don't let shame prevent you.
THE ABBÉ
Ah! In front of your servants, on a Friday, which is the day after Thursday! They will go tell it all over town.
THE COUNT
So you have more respect for my lackeys than for Jesus Christ.
THE ABBÉ
It is true enough that our Savior never knew distinctions between days with or without meat. But we have changed his doctrines for the better. He gave us full power over heaven and earth. Did you know that, in more than one province, we condemned people who ate meat during Lent to death by hanging? I could give you examples.
THE COUNTESS
Good Lord! How edifying! And how well we see that your religion is divine!
THE ABBÉ
So divine that, in the very regions where we had those who had eaten an omelet with bacon hanged, we had those who had taken the lard off a larded chicken burned, which the Church still does occasionally, so well does she know how to be proportional to the various weaknesses of men! Wine please…
THE COUNT
Speaking of proportional, Grand Vicar, does your Church allow marrying two sisters?
THE ABBÉ
Both at the same time, no. But one after the other, according to need, to circumstances, payment to Rome and protection…Mind you, everything changes all the time, and everything depends on our Holy Church. The holy Jewish church, our mother that we detest and always cite, found it quite good that the patriarch Jacob married two sisters at the same time. It forbid marrying the widow of one's brother in Leviticus, and ordered it expressly in Deuteronomy. And the custom in Jerusalem allowed marrying your own sister, since you know that when Amnon, son of the chaste King David, raped his sister, Thamar, this chaste and prudent sister said to him, “My brother, don't do foolish things to me, but ask for me in marriage from the king and he won't refuse you.”9
But to get back to our divine law about the approval of marrying two sisters or the wife of one's brother, it varies according to the times, as I told you. Our pope Clement VII did not dare to declare the marriage of the English king Henry VIII with the wife of his brother, Prince Arthur, invalid for fear that the Emperor Charles V would put him in prison a second time and have him declared a bastard, which he was. But you may be certain that, as far as marriages go, as in all the rest, the pope and the archbishop are the masters of everything, when they have the most power. Wine please…
THE COUNTESS
Come, M. Fréret, you don't respond to these fine speeches. You say nothing!
M. FRÉRET
I keep silent, Madame, because I would have too much to say.
THE ABBÉ
And what could you possibly say, Monsieur, that could weaken the authority, dim the splendor or invalidate the truth of our Holy Mother, the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church? Wine please…
M. FRÉRET
Good Lord! I would say that you are Jews and idolaters, that you play us for fools and stuff your pockets with our money.
THE ABBÉ
Jews and idolaters! Listen to you!
M. FRÉRET
Yes, Jews and idolaters, since you force my hand. Was your God not Jewish? Was he not circumcised like a Jew? Did he not perform all the Jewish rituals? Do you not have him say several times that the Law of Moses must be obeyed? Did he not sacrifice in the temple? Was your baptism not a Jewish custom taken from the Middle East? Does your French word for Easter, pâques not derive from the Jewish word pesach for Passover? Have you not been singing for over seventeen hundred years in diabolical music Jewish songs that you attribute to an adulterous, murdering Jewish bandit kingling, “the man after God's own heart”?10 Do you not lend money on collateral in Rome in your Jewries you call pawnbroker shops? And do you not sell off the pawns of the poor without an ounce of pity when they don't pay on time?
THE COUNT
He's right. The only thing you haven't retained of the Jewish law is a good jubilee, a real one, in which the lords recover the lands they gave you like fools when you convinced them that Elijah and the Antichrist were on their way, that the world was going to end, and that it was necessary to give all one's goods to the church “to save one's soul and not be ranked among the goats.” That jubilee would be better than the one in which you only give plenary indulgences. I would earn over a hundred thousand pounds of rent for my part.
THE ABBÉ
I would be happy to see it, as long as you accorded me a big pension from that hundred thousand. But why does M. Fréret call us idolaters?
M. FRÉRET
Why, Monsieur? Ask St. Christopher, the first thing we encounter upon entering your cathedral, as well as the ugliest monument to barbarity you have. Ask St. Claire, who you invoke for eye ailments and to whom you have built temples. Ask St. Genou11 who cures gout. Or St. Januarius, whose blood liquefies so solemnly in Naples when you place it near his head. Ask St. Antoine, who sprinkles the horses in Rome with holy water.
Will you dare deny your idolatry when you offer dulia worship in a thousand churches to the Virgin's milk, to the foreskin and navel of her son, to thorns you say were in his crown, to rotting bits of wood on which you claim the Eternal Being died? You who offer latria worship to a piece of wafer that you enclose in a box to keep the mice away? Your Roman Catholics have pushed their catholic extravagance so far as to say they change this bit of dough into God by virtue of a few words in Latin, and that all the crumbs of this wafer become so many creator-of-the-universe gods. Some vagrant made into a priest, a monk leaving his prostitute, comes dressed up like an actor for a dozen coins, mumbles in a foreign language what you call a “mass,” swings three fingers quartering the air, bows, straightens, turns right, then left, steps up, steps down, and makes as many gods as he wants, drinks them, eats them, and eliminates them later in his chamber pot! And you will not admit that that is the most monstrous, ridiculous idolatry that ever dishonored human nature? Would you not have to be transformed into some kind of stupid animal to imagine you are changing white bread and red wine into God? Later-day idolaters, you cannot compare to the ancients who worshipped Zeus, the Demiurge, the master of gods and men, and who rendered homage to the secondary gods. Ceres, Pomona, and Flora were better than your Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, and the priests of Mary Magdalene should not be mocking the priests of Minerva.
THE COUNTESS
Oh, Father, you have a tough adversary in M. Fréret. Why did you want him to speak? It's your fault.
THE ABBÉ
Oh, Madame, I'm a seasoned warrior. I am not frightened by so little. I've been hearing all these arguments against our holy mother the church for some time now.
THE COUNTESS
By my faith, you sound like a certain duchess some ill-humored person called a strumpet. She replied, “I've been hearing that for thirty years now, and I hope to hear it for another thirty.”
THE ABBÉ
Madame, Madame, a witticism proves nothing.
THE COUNT
That's true. But neither does a witticism prevent one from being right.
THE ABBÉ
And what reason can be opposed to the authenticity of the prophecies, to the miracles of Moses, the miracles of Jesus, or to the martyrs?
THE COUNT
Ah! I don't advise you to speak of the prophecies now that little boys and girls know what the prophet Ezekiel ate for lunch, and which would not be decent to name at dinner, or now that they know the adventures of Oholah and Oholibah, which are difficult to discuss in front of ladies, or that they know that the God of the Jews ordered Hosea to take a whore and make sons of a whore. Alas! Do you find much other than gibberish and obscenities among those wretches?
Have your poor theologians henceforward cease arguing with the Jews over the meaning of the passages of their prophets, over a few Hebraic lines by an Amos, a Joel, a Habacuc, a Jeremiah; over a few words concerning Elijah, transported into the eastern celestial regions in a chariot of fire, who, by the way, never existed.
Let them be ashamed, above all, of the prophecies inserted into their Gospels. Is it possible that there remain any men imbecilic and cowardly enough to not be seized with indignation when Jesus predicts in Luke, “There will be signs in the moon and in the stars; roaring from the sea and ocean waves. Men fainting from terror will await what must happen to the entire world. The heavenly bodies will be shaken and then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with great power and glory. I tell you verily that the present generation will not pass away until all these things have happened.”12
It is assuredly impossible to read a prediction more precise, more detailed, and more false. You would have to be insane to dare claim it was accomplished, and that the son of man came in a cloud of great power and glory. How is it that Paul, in his first Epistle to the Thessalonians (chapter 4, verse 17), confirmed this ridiculous prediction with another even more impertinent? “We who still live and speak to you will be carried off into clouds to meet the Lord in the air, etc.”
For what little knowledge remains to us, we know that the dogma of the end of the world and the forming of a new one was a chimera believed by nearly every nation. You can find the idea in Lucretius, Book IV. You can find it in the first book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Long before that, Heraclitus said this world would be consumed by fire. The Stoics adopted this fancy. The half-Jews, half-Christians, who wrote the Gospels, did not fail to adopt a dogma so widely believed and to make the most of it. But as the world kept on surviving for so long, and as Jesus didn't return in the clouds with great power and glory during the first century of the Church, they said it would happen in the second century, then promised it for the third, and from century to century, the extravagance was renewed. Theologians have behaved like a charlatan I saw at the tip of the Pont Neuf bridge, on the quay of l'Ecole. Every evening, he would show people a rooster and a few bottles of balm, saying, “Gentlemen, I am going to cut off the head of my rooster and bring it back to life the moment after in your presence. But first, you have to buy some of my bottles.” He always found people naive enough to buy them. “So, I'm going to cut off my rooster's head,” the charlatan would continue, “but as it is late and this show is worth seeing in broad daylight, we will do it tomorrow.”
Two members of the Academy of Science had the curiosity and persistence to come back to see how the charlatan would get out of it. The farce continued for eight whole days. But the farce of awaiting the end of the world among the Christians has lasted for eight whole centuries. So after all that, Monsieur, continue citing your Jewish or Christian prophecies.
M. FRÉRET
I don't advise you to speak of the miracles of Moses to people who have hair on their chins.13 If all these inconceivable prodigies had taken place, the Egyptians would have spoken of them in their histories. The record of so many prodigious facts that startle nature would have been conserved by every nation. The Greeks, who knew all the fables of Egypt and Syria, would have made the news of these unnatural acts ring out at the four corners of the earth. But not a single historian, whether Greek, Syrian or Egyptian, says a word on it. Flavius Josephus, such a good patriot and as taken with his Judaism as he was, Josephus who gathered so many testimonies to prove the antiquity of his nation, could not find a single testimony to the ten plagues of Egypt, the parting and passing of the sea on dry foot, etc.
You know that there is no certainty as to who the author of the Pentateuch is. What sensible man could believe, on the faith of I don't know which Jew, Ezra or another, such appalling marvels, unknown to the rest of the earth? Even if all your Jewish prophets repeated these strange events a thousand times, it would still be impossible to believe them. But there is not a single prophet who cites the words of the Pentateuch on this heap of miracles, not one who goes into the slightest detail on these adventures. Explain this silence as you can.
Consider the fact that highly serious motives are required to overthrow all the laws of nature. What motive, what reason could the God of the Jews have had? To favor his little tribe of people? To give them fertile land? Why didn't he give them Egypt instead of performing miracles, most of which you say, were equaled by the Pharaoh's magicians? Why have an exterminating angel slay all the firstborn of Egypt and make all the animals die so that the Israelis, to the number of six hundred thousand combatants, could flee like cowardly thieves? Why part the Red Sea for them, so that they could all go die of hunger in the desert? You sense the enormity of these absurd inanities. You have too much sense to accept, and to seriously believe in a Christian religion founded on Jewish impostures. You sense the ridiculousness of the trivial reply that one must not question God, that one must not probe the abyss of Providence. No, one must not ask God why lice and spiders exist because, though we are certain that lice and spiders exist, we cannot know why they exist. But we are not so certain that Moses changed his rod into a serpent and covered Egypt with lice, however familiar they were to his people. We do not interrogate God. We interrogate madmen who dare put words in God's mouth, and attribute the excess of their own extravagances to him.
THE COUNTESS
My faith, dear Abbé, I do not advise you to speak of Jesus’ miracles either. Would the creator of the universe have made himself a Jew in order to change water into wine at a wedding where everyone was drunk already? Would he have been carried by the devil to a mountain top from which he could see all the kingdoms of the world? Would he have chased demons from the bodies of two thousand pigs in a country that has no pigs? Would he have withered a fig tree for not bearing figs “when it was not the season for figs”? Believe me, these miracles are just as absurd as those of Moses. Bravely admit what you really think in the bottom of your heart.
THE ABBÉ
Madame, a little deference for my robe, please. Let me practice my trade. I have been a little beaten perhaps on the prophecies and the miracles, but as to the martyrs, it is certain they existed. And Pascal, the patriarch of Port-Royal des Champs, said, “I willingly believe stories whose witnesses died for them.”
M. FRÉRET
Ah, Monsieur, what dishonesty and ignorance we find in Pascal! One would think, listening to him, that he saw the interrogations of the apostles, and that he witnessed their tortures. But where did he see that they had been tortured? Who told him that Simon Barjona, nicknamed Peter,14 had been crucified in Rome, upside down? Who told him that this Barjona, a poor fisherman in Galilee, had ever been to Rome and spoke Latin there? Alas! If he had been condemned in Rome and the Christians knew it, the first church they built there in honor of the saints would have been St. Peter's, instead of St. John Lateran's Basilica. The popes would not have missed this chance: their ambition would have found a perfect pretext. What are we reduced to when, to prove that this Peter Barjona lived in Rome, we have to say that a letter attributed to him, dated from Babylonia, was in reality written from Rome? On which subject a famous author wisely said that, to go by such explanations, a letter dated from Saint Petersburg must've been written in Constantinople.
You know very well which impostors spoke of this voyage of Peter. It was an Obadiah who first wrote that Peter came from Lake Gennesaret straight to the emperor in Rome to make an onslaught of miracles against Simon the Magician. It is he who weaves the fairy tale about a relative of the emperor, half brought back to life by Simon, then entirely by the other Simon Barjona; he who sets the two Simons dueling, with one flying through the air till he breaks both legs through the prayers of the other; he who invents the famous tale of two big dogs sent by Simon to eat Peter. The whole thing is repeated by a Marcellus, then by a Hegesippus.15 So there are the foundations of Christianity. You see nothing but a tissue of the most insipid impostures ever invented by the dregs of society, who alone embraced Christianity for a hundred years.
It was an uninterrupted series of frauds. They forged letters from Jesus Christ, letters from Pilate, letters from Seneca, apostolic constitutions, acrostic verses from the Sibyls, over forty Gospels, the Acts of Barnaby, liturgies from Peter, from James, from Matthew, Mark, etc., etc. You know it, Monsieur, you have undoubtedly read these infamous archives of lies that you call pious frauds, and you will not have the honesty to admit, at least in front of your friends, that the pope's throne was only established on abominable chimeras, to the dire misfortune of the human race?
THE ABBÉ
But how would the Christian religion have been elevated so high if it were only based on fanaticism and lies?
THE COUNT
And how would Mohammedanism have been elevated even higher? At least its lies were nobler and its fanaticism more generous. At least Mahomet wrote and fought battles. Jesus neither knew how to write nor how to defend himself. Mahomet had the courage of an Alexander with the spirit of Numa, and your Jesus sweat blood and water as soon as he was convicted by his judges. Mohammedanism has never changed, and you and yours have changed your entire religion twenty times. There is more difference between what it is today and what it was in the beginning than between your customs and those of King Dagobert.16 Miserable Christians. No, you do not worship your Jesus, you insult him by substituting your new laws for his. You ridicule him more with your mysteries, your agnus,17 your relics, your indulgences, your benefices, and your papacy than you do every year on January 5th with your degenerate Christmases in which you cover with ridicule the Virgin Mary, the angel who visits her, the pigeon who impregnates her, the carpenter who is jealous, and the infant king three kings come to compliment between an ox and a donkey, worthy company for such a family.
THE ABBÉ
It is nevertheless this ridiculousness that St. Augustine found divine. He said, “I believe it because it is absurd, and I believe it because it is impossible.”
M. FRÉRET
So? What do we care about the reveries of an African who was sometimes a Manichean, sometimes a Christian, sometimes a debauchee, sometimes devout, sometimes tolerant, and sometimes a persecutor? What do we care about his theological twaddle? Would you like me to respect this senseless rhetorician when he says in his twenty-third sermon that an angel got Mary with child through her ear: impraegnavit per aurem?
THE COUNTESS
Indeed, I see the absurdity, but not the divine. I find it very easy to believe that Christianity took shape among the populace, just like the sects of the Anabaptists and the Quakers did, like the prophets of the Vivarais and the Cévennes began, or like the convulsionaries, already gaining strength.18 Zeal begins it, trickery completes it. The same holds true for religion as for gambling:
We start out dupes, and end up knaves.
M. FRÉRET
That is only too true, Madame. The most likely truth in all the chaos of the stories about Jesus, written against him by the Jews and in his favor by the Christians, is that he was a Jew of good faith who wished to assert himself among the people like the founders of the Recabites,19 the Essenes, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Judaites, the Herodians, the Joanistes, les Therapeutes and so many other little factions begun in Syria, which was the fatherland of factions. It is probable that he got some women to adhere to it, along with all those who wanted to head a sect, that several indiscreet speeches against the local officials escaped him, and that he was cruelly punished with an agonizing death. But whether he was condemned under the reign of Herod the Great, as the Talmudists say, or under Herod Archelaus, as some of the Gospels say, is immaterial. It is known that his disciples were quite unheard of until they met a few Platonists in Alexandria who buttressed the reveries of the Galileans with the reveries of Plato. People were full of demons, evil spirits, obsessions, possessions, and magic in those days, like the savages are today. Nearly every sickness was a possession with evil spirits. The Jews, from time immemorial, had boasted of chasing demons away with barath root,20 held under the nose of the sick person, and a few words attributed to Solomon. Young Tobias chased the devil away with the smoke of a fish on the grill. That is the origin of the miracles the Galileans boasted of.
The Gentiles were fanatical enough to agree that the Galileans could perform these prodigies, because the Gentiles believed they could too. They believed in magic like the disciples of Jesus. If a few sick people improved through the force of nature, they did not fail to assure everyone that they had been delivered from their headaches through enchantments. They told the Christians, “You have superb secrets, and we do too. You cure through words, and so do we. You have no advantage over us.”
But when the Galileans, having won over a good part of the populace, began to preach against the official religion; when, having asked for tolerance, they dared to be intolerant; when they wanted to elevate their new fanaticism on the ruins of the old fanaticism, they horrified the priests and Roman magistrates and their temerity was repressed. What did they do? They dreamt up a thousand works in their favor, as we have seen. From dupes, they became knaves, then forgers. They defended themselves by the most shameful frauds, unable to employ other weapons until the time when Constantine, become emperor with their money, put their religion on the throne. Then the knaves became bloodthirsty. I dare assure you that from the Council of Nicaea up through the seditions in Cevennes, not a single year has passed in which Christianity did not shed blood.
THE ABBÉ
Ah, Monsieur! That's going a bit far.
M. FRÉRET
No, it isn't going far enough. Read Church History21 alone. See the Donatists and their adversaries clubbing each other, the Athanasians and the Arians filling the Roman Empire with carnage over a diphthong. Watch these barbaric Christians bitterly complain that the wise Emperor Julian is keeping them from slaughtering and destroying each other. Watch the horrific procession of massacres, so many citizens dying in tortures, so many princes assassinated, the many stakes lit by your councils, twelve million innocent inhabitants of a new hemisphere, slaughtered like wild beats in a park under the pretext that they didn't want to be Christians.
And in our hemisphere, Christians ceaselessly setting fire to each other: old men, children, mothers, daughters, dying en masse in the Albigensian Crusades, the Hussite Wars, the wars of Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, the St. Bartholomew Massacre, and those of Ireland, Piedmont, the Cevennes, while a bishop in Rome, cushily lounging on a day bed, has his feet kissed while fifty castratos hum to relieve his tedium. God is my witness that this is a faithful portrayal, and you will not dare to contradict me.
THE ABBÉ
I admit that there is some truth in all that, but as I was telling the Bishop of Noyon, these are not subjects for dinner conversation. Suppers would be too morose if conversation turned too long on the horrors of the human race. The history of the Church troubles one's digestion.
THE COUNT
The facts have troubled it even more.
THE ABBÉ
That is not the fault of the Christian religion. It is the fault of abuses.
THE COUNT
It would be fine if there had only been a few abuses. But since priests have wanted to live at our expense ever since Paul, or the man who took that name, said, “Have I not the right to be fed and clothed by you? Myself, my wife, or my sister?” and if the Church has always wanted to invade everyone, employing every arm at its disposal to take our belongings and our lives ever since the alleged adventure of Ananias and Sapphira who, they say, had brought the money of all their inheritance to Simon Barjona's feet, but kept a few drachmas for their own subsistence; if it is obvious that the history of the Church has been a continual suite of quarrels, impostures, vexations, deceits, robberies and murders, then it is apparent that abuse is in the thing itself, just as it is observable that a wolf has always been a flesh-eating beast of prey, and that it is not due to a few fleeting moments of excess that he has drunk the blood of our sheep.
THE ABBÉ
You could say as much of any religion.
THE COUNT
Not at all. I defy you to show me a single war incited by dogma in a single religion in all antiquity. I defy you to show me a single man persecuted for his opinions from Romulus up to the time the Christians overturned everything. That absurd savagery was reserved to you. You blush and sense the truth pressing upon you, and you have nothing to say.
THE ABBÉ
And so I don't answer. I admit that theological disputes are absurd and disastrous.
M. FRÉRET
Then admit that we should uproot a tree that has always borne poisonous fruit.
THE ABBÉ
That is what I will not grant you, because this tree has also borne good fruit. If a republic were perpetually in dissension, I wouldn't want the republic destroyed. Laws can be reformed.
THE COUNT
States are not like religions. Venice reformed its laws and flourished. But when attempts were made to reform Catholicism, Europe swam in blood. And more recently, when the eminent Locke wrote his book, The Reasonableness of Christianity, seeking to conciliate the impostors of that religion with the rights of humanity, he didn't have four disciples—strong enough proof that Christianity and reason cannot subsist together. There only remains a single remedy in the present state of affairs, and even then, it is only a palliative, not a cure. It is to make religion absolutely dependent on the sovereign and the magistrates.
M. FRÉRET
Yes, provided that the sovereign and the magistrates are enlightened, that they know how to tolerate all religions equally, to regard all men as their brothers, to take no regard of what they think but a great deal of regard for what they do, that they leave them free in their dealings with God and fetter them only to the laws in everything they owe to men. For magistrates who uphold their religion with executioners should be treated like wild beasts.
THE ABBÉ
And if all religions are authorized and they battle each other? If Catholics, Protestants, Greeks, Turks, and Jews box each other's ears upon leaving Mass, the sermon, the mosque, or the synagogue?
M. FRÉRET
Then a dragoon regiment must go disperse them.
THE COUNT
Even better than sending in dragoons, I would like to see them get lessons in moderation. We need to start by instructing people before punishing them.
THE ABBÉ
Instructing the people! Are you serious, Count? Do you believe them worthy of it?
THE COUNT
Oh I see. You still think they must only be fooled. You are only half cured. Your old disease was only in remission.
THE COUNTESS
Speaking of which, I forgot to ask you your opinion on something I read yesterday on the history of the good Mahometans that made a striking impression on me. Assan, son of Ali, was in his bath when one of his slaves inadvertently threw a cauldron of boiling water on him. Assan's servants wanted to impale the culprit. Assan, instead of having him impaled, gave him twenty pieces of gold. “There is,” he said, “a level of glory in paradise for those who pay for services, a higher one for those who pardon wrongs, and an even higher one for those who reward involuntary wrongs.” What do you think of this deed and this discourse?
THE COUNT
I recognize in it one of my good Muslims from the first century.22
THE ABBÉ
And me, my good Christians.
M. FRÉRET
As for myself, I am vexed that the scalded Assan, son of Ali, gave twenty pieces of gold to have glory in paradise. I don't like good deeds to be self-serving. I would have liked Assan to be virtuous and humane enough to console the despair of the slave, without thinking of being ranked in the third level of paradise.
THE COUNTESS
Let us go have coffee. I imagine that if, at all the dinners of Paris, Vienna, Madrid, Lisbon, Rome, and Moscow, conversations as instructive were taking place, the world would get on better.
THIRD CONVERSATION
After dinner
THE ABBÉ
This is excellent coffee, Madame. It is pure mocha.
THE COUNTESS
Yes, it comes from the land of the Muslims. Isn't it a pity?
THE ABBÉ
All jesting aside, Madame, mankind must have a religion.
THE COUNT
Yes, no doubt. And God gave them a divine one, eternal, and engraved in every heart. The one that, according to you, Enoch, the Noahides, and Abraham all practiced. It is the one that learned Chinese have conserved for over four thousand years: the adoration of one God, love of justice, and horror of crime.
THE COUNTESS
Is it possible that a religion so pure and holy was abandoned for the abominable sects that have inundated the earth?
M. FRÉRET
In matters of religion, Madame, we have had a conduct in direct contrast with the one we have had in matters of clothing, housing and food. We began in caves, in huts, in animal skins, eating acorns. We then acquired bread, salutary dishes, clothes of woven wool and silk, and clean, comfortable houses. But in matters of religion, we have returned to acorns, animal skins, and caves.
THE ABBÉ
It will be very difficult to get you out of it. You see that the Christian religion, for example, is incorporated into the state everywhere, and that from the pope to the lowest Capuchin monk, each and every one of them bases his throne or his recipes upon it. I have already told you that men are not reasonable enough to content themselves with a pure religion, worthy of God.
THE COUNTESS
You don't believe that. You yourself admit that they followed this religion in the days of your Enoch, your Noah, and your Abraham. Why would people be less reasonable today than they were then?
THE ABBÉ
I suppose I have to say it. It is because then there were no clergymen living off stipends, no Abbé of Corbie with a million in revenue, or any popes with revenues of sixteen or eighteen million. To restore this wealth to human society, it might take wars as bloody as those that were needed to wrest it from them.
THE COUNT
Even though I was a military man, I have no desire to make war on priests and monks. I do not wish to establish the truth through murder, the way they established error. But I would like this truth to enlighten men a little at least, to make them gentler and happier, to make people cease being superstitious, and heads of state tremble at the thought of persecuting anyone.
THE ABBÉ
It is a very awkward difficulty (since I have to explain myself at last) to take the chains they revere away from foolish people. You may well get yourself stoned by the people of Paris if, at a time of too much rain, you prevent them from parading what is said to be the carcass of St. Genevieve throughout the streets to bring fine weather back.
M. FRÉRET
I don't believe what you say. Reason has already made so much progress that this supposed carcass and that of St. Marcel have not been paraded in Paris for over ten years. I think that it is very easy to gradually uproot all the superstitions that have besotted us. Witches are no longer believed in, devils are no longer exorcised, and even though it said that your Jesus sent his apostles out precisely to drive out devils, not a single priest among us is crazy or foolish enough to boast of chasing them away. The relics of St. Francis have become ridiculous, and those of St. Ignatius will perhaps one day be dragged through the mud with the Jesuits themselves. We leave the duchy of Ferrara to the pope, which, in truth, he usurped; the domains that Caesar Borgia stole through the sword and poison, and that were returned to the Church of Rome for whom he did not work. We leave Rome itself to the popes because we do not want the Emperor to seize it. We consent to continue to pay him annates, though it's a ridiculous custom and an obvious simony. No one wants to make a ruckus over such a minor subsidy. People, ruled by customs, don't break a bad bargain made almost three centuries ago all of a sudden. But if the popes had the insolence to send legates a latere like in the old days, to impose tithes on the people, to excommunicate kings, to ban their states, to give their crowns to others, you would see how that legate a latere would be received. I would not despair of seeing the Parlement of Aix or Paris have him hanged.
THE COUNT
You see how many shameful prejudices we have thrown off. Now cast your eyes on the most opulent part of Switzerland, the Seven United Netherlands, as powerful as Spain, on Great Britain, whose maritime forces would carry the day against those of all the other nations combined. Look at the entire north of Germany, and Scandinavia, these inexhaustible nurseries of warriors. All these people have surpassed us by far in the progress of reason. The blood of every head of this hydra they have chopped off has fertilized their countrysides. The abolition of monks has populated and enriched their states. We can certainly do in France what has been done elsewhere. France will be wealthier and more populated.
THE ABBÉ
Well then! Once you have shaken the vermin from the monks in France, once we will no longer see ridiculous relics, once we will no longer pay a shameful tribute to the Bishop of Rome, even once we will scorn consubstantiality and the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son and transubstantiation enough to no longer speak of it; once these mysteries remain buried in the Summa of St. Thomas and when contemptible theologians will be reduced to silence, you will still be Christians. You will want in vain to go farther. That is what you will never obtain. A religion of philosophers is not made for mankind.
M. FRÉRET
Est quodam prodire tenus, si non datur ultra.23
I say to you with Horace, your doctor will never give you the eye of a lynx, but allow him to take the nebula24 from your eyes. We groan beneath the weight of a hundred pounds of chains. Permit us to be delivered of three-quarters of them. The word Christian has prevailed. It will stay. But, little by little, we will adore God without admixture, without giving him either a mother or a son, without giving him a putative father, without saying he died a villainous torturous death, without believing we make gods with flour, in short without this mass of superstitions that set civilized people so far beneath savages. The unadulterated worship of a Supreme Being is beginning to be the religion of all reasonable people today, and soon it will descend among the saner portion of the populace itself.
THE ABBÉ
Do you not fear that disbelief (whose immense progress I am seeing) might have dire consequences in descending among the populace, and lead it to crime? Men are subject to cruel passions and horrible misfortunes. They need a serious brake to restrain them and an error to console them.
M. FRÉRET
The reasonable worship of a just God who rewards and punishes would no doubt make for the happiness of society, but when this salutary awareness of a just God is disfigured by lies and dangerous superstitions, the remedy becomes poison, and what should deter crime encourages it. A vicious person who only half-reasons (and there are a great many of these) is frequently so bold as to deny a God painted in revolting terms.
Another wicked person, one with great passions and a weak soul, is often brought to evil by the assurance of forgiveness that the priests offer him. “Whatever the enormous multitude of crimes that have soiled you, confess to me, and all will be forgiven you through the merits of a man who was hanged in Judea many centuries ago. Plunge yourself in new crimes after that, seven times sixty-seven times, and all will be forgiven once again.”25 Is that not truly leading him into temptation? Is that not smoothing all the roads to iniquity? Did La Brinvilliers not go to confession after every poisoning she committed? Did Louis XI not do likewise in the olden days?
The people of antiquity had confession and atonements like us, but you were not redeemed for a second crime. A second murder of a relative was not pardoned. We took everything from the Greeks and Romans, and we corroded everything.
Their inferno was impertinent, I admit, but our devils are more idiotic than their furies. The furies were not damned themselves. They were considered executioners, and not victims of divine vengeance. To be both executioner and executed, burned and burning, like our devils, is an absurd contradiction, worthy of us, and it is all the more ridiculous that this foundation of Christianity, the Fall of the Angels, is not found in either Genesis or the Gospels. It is an ancient fable of the Brahmins.
Anyway, Monsieur, everyone laughs at your hell today because it is ridiculous. But no one would laugh at a God who rewards and punishes, from whom we can hope a compensation for our virtue and fear a punishment for our crimes, not knowing what type of penalty or justice to expect, but persuaded there will be one because God is just.
THE COUNT
It seems to me that M. Fréret has shown well enough how religion could be a salutary curb. I would like to try to prove to you that a purified religion is infinitely more consoling than yours.
There are pleasures in the illusions of devout souls, you say, and I believe it. There are in madhouses too. But what torments when these souls become disillusioned! In what doubt and what despair certain nuns pass their sad lives! You have witnessed it, you told me yourself.
The cloisters are the abode of repentance, but among the men especially, a cloister is the breeding place of discord and envy. The monks are voluntary galley slaves who battle each other while rowing together. I except a very small number who are truly penitent or useful. But in truth, has God put man and woman on earth to potter their lives away in prison cells, separated from each other forever? Is that the goal of nature? Everyone cries out against the monks, but I feel sorry for them. Most of them sacrificed their liberty forever when barely out of childhood, and out of a hundred, at least eighty wither away in bitterness. Where then are these great consolations that your religion gives humankind? A clergyman in a wealthy benefice is consoled no doubt, but it is by his money, not his faith. If he enjoys some little pleasure, he only tastes it by violating the rules of his order. He is only happy as a man of this world, and not as a man of the church. The father of a family, prudent, resigned to God, fond of his country, surrounded by his children and friends, receives blessings from God a thousand times more appreciable.
Moreover, everything you can say in favor of the virtues of your monks, I can say even more so of dervishes, marabouts, fakirs, and bonzes. They do penances a hundred times more rigorous. They devote themselves to austerities more appalling. And these iron chains beneath which they bend, these arms outstretched always in the same position, these frightful macerations are nothing in comparison with the young women in India who burn themselves alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands, in the insane hope of being reborn with them.
So stop boasting of both the hardships and consolations the Christian religion provides. Admit frankly that it doesn't even approach a reasonable worship that an honest family can offer the Supreme Being without superstition. Forget your convent prison cells. Forget your contradictory and useless mysteries, an object of derision the world over. Preach God and morals, and I promise you that there will be more virtue and felicity on earth.
THE COUNTESS
I am strongly of this opinion.
M. FRÉRET
And me too, without a doubt.
THE ABBÉ
Ah well, since I must tell you my secret, I am too.
At that point, the Président de Maisons, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Monsieur Dufay, and Monsieur Dumarsais arrived,26 and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre read out his thoughts of that morning, as was his custom, on each of which a fine book could be written.
THE MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS OF ABBÉ DE SAINT-PIERRE
Most princes, ministers and men raised to prestigious posts do not have the time to read. They despise books, and are governed by a big book, which is the tomb of common sense.
If they had known enough to read, they would have spared the world all the miseries that superstition and ignorance have caused. If Louis XIV had been a reader, he would not have revoked the Edict of Nantes.
Popes and their henchmen have been so convinced that their power relied on ignorance alone that they have always forbidden the reading of the only book that founds their religion. They have said: “Here is your law, and we forbid you to read it. You will only learn of it what we deign to teach you.” This extravagant tyranny is incomprehensible. It exists, nonetheless, and the entire Bible in one's spoken language is prohibited in Rome. It is only allowed in a language that is no longer spoken.27
All papal usurpations use as pretext a wretched play on words, a misleading street ruse, a line they make God say for which a schoolboy would be whipped. “You are Peter and upon this rock I build my church.”28
If people knew how to read, or read, it would be obvious to them that religion has done nothing but harm government. It still does a great deal in France, through its persecutions of the Protestants, through its discords over Lord-knows-what Papal Bull, more despicable than a street barker's song, through its ridiculous celibacy of priests, through the idleness of its monks, through the bad deals it makes with the Bishop of Rome, etc.
Spain and Portugal, much bigger dolts than France, experience almost all these evils, and have the Inquisition on top of it, which, supposed to be a hell, would be the most abominable thing that hell has produced.
In Germany, there are interminable quarrels between the three sects accepted by the Treaty of Westphalia.29 The inhabitants of countries directly submitted to German priests are brutes that barely have enough to eat.
In Italy, this religion, which destroyed the Roman Empire, left nothing but misery and music, eunuchs, harlequins, and priests. Treasures are heaped upon a little black statue called the Madonna of Loreto. And the lands are left uncultivated.
Theology is to this religion what poison is to food.
Have temples where God is adored, his blessings sung, his justice heralded and virtue recommended. All the rest is nothing but party spirit, faction, imposture, pride, and greed, which must be outlawed forever.
Nothing is more useful to the public than a parish priest who keeps a record of births, who provides assistance for the poor, consoles the sick, buries the dead, makes peace between families, and who is a master only of morals. To put him in a condition to be useful, he must be above poverty himself and not be allowed to testify against his local lord or his parishioners as so many parish priests do. They should be paid according to the region they live in, according to the extent of their parish and have no other cares besides fulfilling their duties.
Nothing is less useful than a cardinal. What is a foreign dignity, conferred by a foreign priest, a dignity without function, which is almost always worth a hundred thousand écus in income when a parish priest does not have enough to assist the poor, nor even to take care of himself?
The best government is unquestionably the one that accredits only the number of priests necessary, because a surplus of them is a dangerous burden. The best government is one in which the priests are married, because they are better citizens. They give children to the state and raise them with integrity. It is one in which the priests dare only to preach morals, for when they stir up controversy, it is the bell toll of discord.
Decent people read the history of the wars of religion with horror. They laugh at theological disputes like at an Italian farce. Let us then have a religion that makes no one shudder or laugh.
Are there sincere theologians? Yes, just as there are people who believe themselves sorcerers.
M. Deslandes of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, who just brought out a History of Philosophy, says in volume III, on page 299, “The Faculty of Theology appears to me to be the most despicable body in the kingdom.” It would become one of the most respectable if it limited itself to only teaching about God and morals. It would be the only way to atone for its criminal decisions against Henri III and the great Henri IV.30
The miracles that the beggars perform at Faubourg St. Médard can go far if Cardinal Fleury doesn't restore order. Peace must be exhorted and miracles strictly forbidden.
The monstrous Papal Bull, Unigenitus, can yet disturb the kingdom. Every papal bull is an assault on the dignity of the crown and the liberty of the nation.
The rabble creates superstitions. Upright people destroy them.
We are trying to perfect the laws and the arts. Can we neglect religion?
Who will start to purify it? Thinking men will. The rest will follow.
Is it not disgraceful that fanatics have zeal and that wise men do not? One must be prudent but not faint-hearted.