DIALOGUE BETWEEN A PRIEST AND A DYING MAN

The prisoner who had been in Vincennes since the early autumn of 1777 did not look round his cell one day and suddenly take up his pen in an onset of desperate frustration. He was already a writing man who had composed poetry (not very good, apparently, to judge from quotations) and plays, some of them produced during the private theatricals at La Coste. He wrote endless letters, many of which have survived, and kept a journal, which was burnt after his death. He continued to write plays and by mid-July 1782 he had completed a piece that is now fairly well known, first published in France in 1926 with a foreword by the Sade scholar Maurice Heine. This is the Dialogue entre un Prêtre et un Moribond (Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man).

The dialogue form was fashionable in eighteenth-century France, much used by Fontenelle and Diderot, and popular with Sade, who obviously relished its quasi-theatrical aspect. Speaking through the dying man the author uses the method of special pleading – he called it logic – which he developed all his life: he explains and attempts to justify his theories concerning 'nature' and 'reason', expressing his atheistic, anti-clerical beliefs in a style that seems fairly moderate when compared with some of his later exaggerations on the same theme. Sade presumably hoped to prove his powers of persuasion, for the priest joins the dying man in a last few hours of sensual pleasure, the nature of which is left (for once) to the reader's imagination.

PRIEST: Now that you have reached the fatal moment when the veil of illusion is torn aside only to enable the misguided man to see the cruel tableau of his vices and mistakes, do you not repent, my son, of the manifold errors to which weakness and human frailty have led you?

DYING MAN: Yes, my friend, I repent.

PRIEST: Profit then from this blessed remorse to obtain from Heaven, in the short interval which remains to you, general absolution for your sins, and consider that it is only by the mediation of the very holy sacrament of penitence that you may receive it from the eternal God.

DYING MAN: I understand you no more than you understood me.

PRIEST: What?

DYING MAN: I told you that I had repented.

PRIEST: I heard it.

DYING MAN: Yes, but without understanding it.

PRIEST: What is your interpretation?

DYING MAN: Here is my meaning. I was created by nature with most active tastes, sent into the world solely to surrender myself to them, and to satisfy those desires. As these effects of my creation are only the necessities relative to the first designs of nature, or, if you prefer it, the developments essential to her projects for me, owing to her laws, I repent only that I did not recognize sufficiently all her power, and my sole remorse merely extends to the mediocre use I have made of those faculties (which you would call criminal, I natural) given me by nature for her service. Sometimes I resisted her and that I repent. Blinded by the absurdity of your doctrines, through them I have fought all the violence of the desires communicated to me through a much more divine inspiration, and I repent gathering only flowers when I could have taken a generous harvest of fruit. These are the exact motives for my regrets. Esteem me highly enough not to attribute others to me.

PRIEST: Where are your errors leading you, where are your sophistries taking you! You lend to the thing created all the power of its creator, and you do not see that these unfortunate inclinations which have misguided you are only the effects of this corrupt nature to which you attribute all power.

DYING MAN: It seems to me, friend, that your dialectic is as false as your thought. I wish you would either reason more exactly or leave me to die in peace. What do you mean by creator, and what do you understand by corrupt nature?

PRIEST: The creator is the master of the universe, he who has made all, created all, and who conceives all by a simple effect of his entire power.

DYING MAN: He is a great man, obviously. Now, tell me why such a man who is so powerful has nevertheless made, according to you, a corrupt nature?

PRIEST: What merit would men possess, if God had not left them freedom of choice, and what merit would they enjoy if there were not on this earth the possibility of doing good, and that of avoiding evil?

DYING MAN: And so your God has wished to make everything crooked solely to tempt or to try his creature. Does he not know that creature then, is he in any doubt of the result?

PRIEST: He knows him, doubtless, but once again he wishes to leave him the merit of choosing.

DYING MAN: TO what good, once he knows the decision his creature will take, and only holds to it, since you call him all-powerful, to make him choose the good?

PRIEST: Who can understand the immense infinite designs of God for man? Who can understand all that we see?

DYING MAN: He who simplifies things, my friend. Above all, he who does not multiply causes the better to confuse effects. What need is there for a second difficulty when you cannot explain the first? Since it is possible that nature alone has made all that you attribute to your God, why look for a master for her? The cause of that which you cannot understand is perhaps the most simple thing in the world. Improve your physics and you will understand nature better, purify your reasoning, banish your prejudices, and you will no longer need your God.

PRIEST: Unhappy man, I thought you only a Socinian, and I had arms with which to combat you, but I see indeed that you are an atheist. Since your heart is closed to the immensity of the authentic proofs that we receive every day of the existence of the Creator, I have no more to say to you. You cannot give back the light to a blind man.

DYING MAN: My friend, agree with me on one point, that of two men, the one who is the more blind is he who puts a bandage on his eyes, rather than he who tears it off. You build up, invent and multiply causes. I destroy, I simplify. You pile error upon error. I fight all of them. Which of us is the blind one?

PRIEST: You do not believe in God?

DYING MAN: No, and for a very simple reason. It is quite impossible to believe what one does not understand. There must exist immediate connections between understanding and faith. Understanding is the first nourishment of faith. Where understanding does not have some influence, faith is dead, and in such a case those who claim to have it, deceive themselves. I defy you yourself to believe in the God you preach to me – because you do not know how to prove his existence to me, because you are unable to define him to me, and consequently you do not understand him – since you do not understand him, you can no longer give me a single reasonable proof of him, and finally all that is beyond the limit of the human mind is either illusion or uselessness. As your God can only be one or the other of these two things, I would be a fool to believe in him in the first case, and an imbecile in the second. My friend, prove to me the inertia of matter, and then I will grant you your Creator, prove that nature is not self-sufficient, and I shall allow you to suppose a master for her. Until then, expect nothing from me. I give in only to evidence, which I receive only through my senses. Where they stop, my faith remains powerless. I believe in the sun because I see it. I conceive it as the centre of reunion of all the inflammable matter of nature, its periodic march pleases me without astonishing me. It is an operation of physics, as simple perhaps as those of electricity, but which we are not permitted to understand. What need have I to go any further? Even when you will have built up your God above that, am I any more advanced, shall I not need as much effort to understand the workman as to define his work? Therefore you do me no service by the erection of your chimera, you have troubled my mind but you have not enlightened it, and I owe you only hate for it, not gratitude. Your God is a machine, made by you to serve your passions, and fashioned according to their whim, but as it restricts mine, except the fact that I have overthrown it, and do not, at the very moment when my feeble soul has need of calm and philosophy, come frightening it with your sophistries, which would scare without convincing, and irritate without improving. This soul is my friend, what it has pleased nature it might be, the result, that is to say, of the organs she has been pleased to form in me by virtue of her designs and needs. Since she has an equal need of vices and virtues, when it has pleased her to lead me to the former she has done so, when the latter, she has inspired me with desires for them, and I have followed suit just the same. Look no further than her laws for the sole cause of human inconsequence, and do not seek for any other principles in her laws than her wishes and her needs.

PRIEST: Therefore everything in the world is necessary.

DYING MAN: Certainly.

PRIEST: But if everything is necessary, then everything is regulated.

DYING MAN: Who has said the contrary?

PRIEST: Then who can regulate everything as it is, except an all-wise, all-powerful hand?

DYING MAN: Is it not necessary for powder to flare up if you set a light to it?

PRIEST: Yes.

DYING MAN: And what wisdom do you find in that?

PRIEST: None.

DYING MAN: It is possible then that things may be necessary without wisdom, and possible therefore that everything may stem from a first cause which has within it neither reason nor wisdom.

PRIEST: What are you trying to prove?

DYING MAN: To prove to you that all can be as it is, and as you see it, without any wise or reasonable cause to guide it; that natural effects must have natural causes without any need to imagine anti-natural ones for them, such as your God would be, who, as I have already told you, would himself need explanation without providing any. Since your God, therefore, is good for nothing, he is entirely useless; there is a great likelihood that all which is useless is null, and all which is null is void. So to convince myself that your God is an illusion I need no other reasoning than that furnished by the certainty of uselessness.

PRIEST: On that ground there seems to me little necessity to speak to you of religion.

DYING MAN: Why not? Nothing amuses me like proof of the excess to which men, on that point, have been able to carry fanaticism and imbecility. These kinds of terrors are so fantastic that to me the picture, although horrible, is always interesting. Answer me frankly, and above all banish egoism. If I were weak enough to let myself be ensnared by your ridiculous arguments on the fabulous existence of the being who makes religion necessary, in what form would you advise me to offer him my worship? Would you have me adopt the reveries of Confucius rather than the absurdities of Brama, should I venerate the great serpent of the negroes, the star of the Peruvians, or Moses' God of Battle? To which of the sects of Muhammad would you have me turn, or what heresy of the Christians would, according to you, be preferable? Be careful how you reply.

PRIEST: Can there be any doubt about it?

DYING MAN: It is therefore egotistical.

PRIEST: No, to advise what I believe in is to love you as much as myself.

DYING MAN: And it is loving both of ourselves too little to listen to such errors.

PRIEST: Oh! Who can blind himself to the miracles of our divine Redemptor?

DYING MAN: He who sees in him only the most ordinary of all charlatans and the most unconvincing of all impostors.

PRIEST: Oh Gods, you hear him and you do not thunder!

DYING MAN: No, my friend, all is calm, because your God – whether it is from impotence or reason or whatever you will in a being whom I only admit for one moment out of condescension to you, or, if you prefer it, in order to lend myself to your pettiness – because your God, I say, if he exists, as you in your foolishness believe, cannot in order to convince me use means as ridiculous as those your Jesus imagines.

PRIEST: And what of the prophecies, miracles, martyrs – are they not all proofs?

DYING MAN: How can you logically expect me to admit as proof all that which must be proved itself? Before a prophecy can be accepted as proof I must first have absolute assurance that it has been made. Being dependent on history for it, it can have no more force for me than all other historical facts, of which three-quarters are highly doubtful. If I add to that the more than probable supposition that they have been handed down to me only by prejudiced historians, I shall, as you see, be more than right to doubt them. Who can assure me, furthermore, that this prophecy has not been made after the event, that it has not been the effect of the combination of that very simple policy which sees a happy reign under a just king – or frost in wintertime. And if that is so, how can you hope that prophecy, being in such need of proof, can itself become a proof? As for your miracles, they impress me no more. All the tricksters have performed them, and all the blockheads have believed them. To persuade me of the truth of a miracle, I must be quite sure that the event which you so call a miracle was in fact absolutely contrary to the laws of nature, for only something outside them can pass for a miracle; who knows enough of nature to dare to say that at this point precisely she stops, and at this moment precisely she is transgressed? Only two things are needed to give colour to an alleged miracle, a clown and a few feeble men. Well, look no further for the origin of yours, all the new sectarians have them, and, what is strangest, all have found half-wits to believe them. Your Jesus has done nothing more remarkable than Apollonius of Thiana, yet no one pretends to take him for a god. As for your martyrs, they are undoubtedly the feeblest of all your arguments. It needs only fanaticism and resistance to create them; let the other side offer me as much as yours, I should never be sufficiently persuaded to believe one better than the other, but most inclined, on the other hand, to suppose them both pitiful. Oh, my friend, if it were true that the God you preach existed, would he need miracles, martyrs, and prophecies to establish his dominion? If, as you say, the heart of man were his workmanship, would not that be the very sanctuary he would choose for his law? This equal law, since it originates from a just God, would find itself irresistibly engraved in everyone, and from one end of the universe to the other all men, alike in the possession of this sensitive and delicate organ, would be equally alike in the homage they would render the God from whom they hold it. All men would have only one way of loving him, one way of worshipping or serving him, and it would be as impossible for them to ignore this God as to resist the secret attraction of his worship. But what do I see instead in the world – as many gods as countries, as many varieties of service to them as there are different heads or different types of imaginations. Yet, according to you, this multiplicity of opinions amongst which it is physically impossible for me to choose is the work of a just God. Away, preacher, you despoil your God in presenting him to me in that fashion. Leave me to deny him utterly, for if he exists, I offend him less by my disbelief than you by your blasphemies. Come back to the path of reason, preacher, your Jesus is no more worthy than Muhammad, Muhammad no more than Moses, and all three no more than Confucius, who in fact pronounced some good principles while the other three spoke nonsense. But generally, all these people are nothing but impostors, whom the philosopher mocks, the rabble believe, and justice should have caused to hang.

PRIEST: Alas, she did, only too well for one of the four.

DYING MAN: The most deserving of them all. He was seditious, turbulent, slanderous, deceptive, libertine, vulgar actor and dangerous rogue; he possessed the knack of imposing on the people, and therefore became fit for punishment in a kingdom of that state in which Jerusalem was then found. It was very wise to get rid of him, and this is perhaps the only case where my otherwise gentle and tolerant maxims can permit the severity of Themis; I pardon all errors except those which may become dangerous for the government under which we live. Kings and their majesties are the only things which impress me, which I respect – and he who does not love his king and country is not fit to live.

PRIEST: But look, you admit the existence of something after this life; it is impossible that in your mind you have not frequently amused yourself by trying to pierce the thick shadows of the fate which awaits us. What system then can be more satisfactory than one that allots a multitude of punishments for the evildoer and an infinity of blessings for the righteous?

DYING MAN: What, my friend? The idea of oblivion has never frightened me, and it holds only consolation and simplicity for me. All other systems are the product of pride, this alone of reason. Besides, oblivion is neither terrible nor absolute. Do I not see daily examples of the everlasting generation and regeneration of nature? Nothing perishes, my friend, nothing in this world is destroyed. A man today, worms tomorrow, a fly the day after – is this not everlasting life? And why should I be rewarded for virtues which I do not merit, or punished for crimes for which I was never responsible? Can you reconcile the benevolence of your alleged God with such a system? Could he have wanted to create me just for the pleasure of punishing me, and that only because of a choice of which he does not allow me to be master?

PRIEST: But you are.

DYING MAN: Yes, according to your presumptions. But reason destroys them, and the theory of the Freedom of Man was invented only in order to develop that of grace which is so favourable to your dreams. Where in all the world is the man who, seeing the scaffold beside the crime, would still commit it if he were free not to? We are drawn along by an irresistible force, and not for one moment do the masters of that power choose any path for us but that towards which we are inclined. There is not a single virtue which is not necessary to nature, and conversely not a single crime which is not necessary. It is in the perfect balance maintained between one and the other that nature's whole knowledge resides. But can we be blamed for the side on which she casts us? No more than the wasp can be blamed who plunges his sting into your flesh.

PRIEST: And so the greatest of all crimes should inspire no fear in us.

DYING MAN: I did not say so. It is enough for the law to condemn it and the sword of justice punish it to fill us with fear or aversion, but as soon as it is unfortunately committed we must know how to make up our minds and not give way to barren remorse, the effect of which is in vain, since it has not deterred us from committing the crime, and empty since it does not make it good. It is therefore absurd to give way to it, and even more absurd to fear punishment in the other world if we have been lucky enough to escape it in this. God forbid that I intend to encourage crime, it must be avoided wherever possible, but we must learn to abstain from it by reason and not by false fears which come to nothing, and the effects of which are so soon destroyed in any soul with but a little firmness. Reason, yes, my friend, reason alone should warn us that doing harm to our fellows can never make us happy, and our heart should tell us that to contribute to their happiness is the greatest happiness for us that nature allows us on this earth. All human morality is enclosed in this one saying – Make others as happy as you wish to be yourself – and never do them more harm than you would be willing to suffer yourself. There, my friend, those are the only principles we need to observe, and there is no call for religion or God to admit and appreciate them. A good heart is all that we need.

But I feel I am getting weaker, preacher. Leave your prejudices, be a man, be human, without fear and without hope. Leave your gods and your religions. All that is of no use except to put weapons into men's hands; the name alone of all those horrors has caused more blood to be shed in the world than all other wars and disasters put together. Renounce the idea of another world – there is none. Do not renounce the pleasure of enjoying and causing happiness in this world. That is the only chance that nature offers you of doubling or extending your existence.

My friend, sensual pleasure was always the dearest of my possessions. I have worshipped it all my life and I wish to embrace it in my end. That end is near. Six women, more lovely than the day, are waiting in this next room; I was reserving them for this moment. Take your share, and try by my example to forget on their breasts all the vain sophistries of superstition, all the ridiculous errors of hypocrisy.

Note

The dying man rang the bell, and the women entered: in their arms the preacher became a man corrupted by nature because he had not known how to explain what corrupt nature was.