R — Religion

First question.

Warburton, bishop of Worcester, author of one of the most learned works ever written, expresses himself as follows on page 8 of volume 1:

“A religion, a society not founded on belief in another life, must be sustained by an extraordinary providence. Judaism is not founded on belief in another life; therefore Judaism was sustained by an extraordinary providence.”

Several theologians rose against him, and, since every argument can be turned around, his was turned around:

“Every religion not founded on the doctrine of the soul’s immortality and on eternal punishments and rewards is necessarily false. Now Judaism knew nothing of these doctrines; therefore, far from being sustained by providence, Judaism was, on your principles, a false and barbarous religion that attacked providence.”

This bishop had some other opponents who maintained that the immortality of the soul was known among the Jews in the very time of Moses. But he proved to them most clearly that neither the Decalogue, nor Leviticus, nor Deuteronomy had said a single word about this belief, and that it is ridiculous to twist and corrupt a few passages in the other books to extract a truth that is not proclaimed in the book of the law.

Having written four volumes to demonstrate that Jewish law proposed neither punishments nor rewards after death, the bishop has never been able to give his opponents a very satisfactory answer. They told him: “Either Moses knew this doctrine, and then he deceived the Jews by not revealing it; or he did not know it, and in that case he did not know enough to found a good religion. Indeed, if the religion had been good, why would it have been abolished? A true religion must be for all times and all places; it must be like sunlight, illuminating all peoples and all generations.”

Enlightened as this prelate is, he has had great difficulty escaping all these problems. But what system is free of them?

Second question.

Another scholar, a much greater philosopher and one of the most profound metaphysicians of our day, gives powerful reasons to prove that polytheism was humanity’s first religion, and that people began by believing in several gods before reason was sufficiently enlightened to acknowledge only one supreme Being.

I venture to believe, on the contrary, that people began by acknowledging a single God, and human weakness afterward adopted several. Here is how I conceive it.

There were undoubtedly villages before large cities were built, and all people were divided into little republics before they were united in great empires. It is quite natural that a village terrified by thunder, afflicted by the loss of its harvests, mistreated by a neighboring village, feeling its weakness every day and sensing an invisible power everywhere, should soon have said: “There is some being above us who does us good and evil.”

It seems impossible to me that it should have said: “There are two powers”—for why more than one? In every field we begin with the simple; the compound comes next; and often, in the end, superior understanding brings us back to the simple. Such is the course of the human mind.

What being would people first have invoked? The sun? The moon? I do not think so. Let us examine what happens in children; they are much like ignorant adults. They are struck neither by the beauty nor by the usefulness of the star that animates nature, nor by the help the moon gives us, nor by the regular changes in its course. They do not think about these things; they are too accustomed to them. People fear, invoke, and worship only what they dread. All children look at the sky with indifference; but let thunder rumble, and they tremble and go into hiding. The first human beings doubtless did the same. Only some sort of philosophers could have observed the course of the stars, taught others to admire them, and brought them to worship them; simple, unenlightened farmers did not know enough to embrace so noble an error.

A village would therefore have confined itself to saying: “There is a power that thunders, that hails upon us, that kills our children. Let us appease it. But how? We see that we have calmed angry people with little presents; let us therefore make little presents to this power.” It must also be given a name. The first that suggests itself is chief, master, lord; this power is therefore called My Lord. That is probably why the first Egyptians called their god Kneph, the Syrians Adoni, neighboring peoples Baal, or Bel, or Melch, or Moloch, and the Scythians Papaeus: all words meaning lord, master.

This is how almost all America was found, divided into a multitude of small peoples, each with its own protecting god. Even the Mexicans and Peruvians, who were great nations, had only one god. One worshiped Manco Capac, the other the god of war. The Mexicans gave their war god the name Huitzilopochtli, just as the Hebrews had called their lord Sabaoth.

It was not through superior, cultivated reason that all peoples thus began to acknowledge a single divinity. Had they been philosophers, they would have worshiped the God of all nature, not the god of a village; they would have examined those infinite relations among all beings that prove a creating and preserving Being. But they examined nothing: they felt. Such is the progress of our feeble understanding. Each village felt its weakness and its need for a strong protector. It imagined this tutelary and terrible being dwelling in the neighboring forest, on the mountain, or in a cloud. It imagined only one, because the village had only one war chief. It imagined him bodily, because it was impossible to picture him otherwise. It could not believe that the neighboring village did not also have its god. That is why Jephthah says to the inhabitants of Moab: “You lawfully possess what your god Chemosh has made you conquer; you must let us enjoy what our God has given us through his victories.”

This speech, made by one foreigner to other foreigners, is very remarkable. The Jews and Moabites had dispossessed the natives of the country; neither had any right but that of force, and one says to the other: “Your god protected you in your usurpation; allow my God to protect me in mine.”

Jeremiah and Amos both ask: “What reason did the god Milcom have for seizing the country of Gad?” These passages make it seem evident that antiquity assigned a protecting god to every country. Traces of this theology can still be found in Homer.

It is quite natural that, as people’s imaginations grew heated and their minds acquired confused knowledge, they soon multiplied their gods and assigned protectors to the elements, seas, forests, springs, and fields. The more they examined the stars, the more they must have been struck with admiration. How could they not worship the sun when they worshiped the divinity of a brook? Once the first step is taken, the earth is soon covered with gods, and at last people descend from the stars to cats and onions.

Yet reason must surely improve. Time eventually produces philosophers who see that neither onions, nor cats, nor even the stars have arranged the order of nature. All these philosophers—Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Scythians, Greeks, and Romans—admit a supreme God who rewards and avenges.

They do not tell the people at first; for anyone who spoke ill of onions and cats before old women and priests would have been stoned. Anyone who reproached certain Egyptians for eating their gods would himself have been eaten—as indeed Juvenal relates that an Egyptian was killed and eaten raw in a theological dispute.

But what was done? Orpheus and others established mysteries which initiates swore, under dreadful oaths, not to reveal; and the chief of these mysteries is the worship of a single God. This great truth penetrates half the earth; the number of initiates becomes immense. It is true that the old religion still survives; but since it is not contrary to the doctrine of God’s unity, it is allowed to survive. And why abolish it? The Romans acknowledge the Deus optimus maximus; the Greeks have their Zeus, their supreme God. All the other divinities are only intermediate beings. Heroes and emperors are placed in the ranks of the gods—that is, of the blessed. But it is certain that Claudius, Octavian, Tiberius, and Caligula are not regarded as creators of heaven and earth.

In short, it seems proved that in the time of Augustus everyone who had a religion acknowledged a superior, eternal God and several orders of secondary gods, whose worship was afterward called idolatry.

The Jews had never been idolaters; for although they admitted Malachim, angels, celestial beings of a lower order, their law did not command that these secondary divinities should receive worship among them. They did worship angels, it is true—that is, they prostrated themselves when they saw them; but since that did not happen often, there was neither a ceremonial nor a legally established worship for them. The cherubim of the ark received no homage. It is certain that the Jews openly worshiped a single God, just as the countless multitude of initiates worshiped him secretly in their mysteries.

Third question.

It was in those times, when worship of a supreme God was universally established among all the wise in Asia, Europe, and Africa, that the Christian religion arose.

Platonism greatly helped the understanding of its doctrines. The Logos, which in Plato meant the wisdom, the reason of the supreme Being, became among us the Word and a second person of God. A profound metaphysics beyond human understanding was an inaccessible sanctuary in which religion was enveloped.

We will not repeat here how Mary was afterward declared the mother of God; how the consubstantiality of the Father and the Word was established, and the procession of the Pneuma, divine organ of the divine Logos; two natures and two wills resulting from the hypostasis; and finally the higher eating, the soul nourished like the body on the limbs and blood of the God-man, worshiped and eaten in the form of bread, present to the eyes, perceptible to the taste, and yet annihilated. All the mysteries have been sublime.

As early as the second century, people began casting out demons in the name of Jesus. Before that they cast them out in the name of Jehovah, or Yhaho; for St. Matthew relates that when Jesus’s enemies said he cast out demons in the name of the prince of demons, he answered: “If I cast out demons through Beelzebub, through whom do your children cast them out?”

We do not know when the Jews acknowledged Beelzebub, who was a foreign god, as prince of demons; but we know—and Josephus tells us—that there were exorcists in Jerusalem appointed to cast demons out of the bodies of the possessed: that is, people afflicted with strange diseases then attributed, throughout a large part of the earth, to evil spirits.

These demons were therefore cast out with the true pronunciation of Jehovah, now lost, and other ceremonies now forgotten.

This exorcism by Jehovah or the other names of God was still practiced in the Church’s first centuries. In his dispute with Celsus, Origen tells him, no. 262: “If, when invoking God or swearing by him, we call him the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we will accomplish certain things through these names, whose nature and force are such that demons submit to those who pronounce them. But if we call him by another name, such as God of the roaring sea, supplanter, these names will have no power. The name Israel translated into Greek will accomplish nothing; but pronounce it in Hebrew, with the other required words, and you will perform the conjuration.”

The same Origen, at number 19, says these remarkable words: “There are names that naturally possess power, such as those used by the wise among the Egyptians, the Magi in Persia, the Brahmins in India. What is called magic is not an empty, chimerical art, as the Stoics and Epicureans maintain. Neither the name Sabaoth nor the name Adonai was made for created beings; they belong to a mysterious theology relating to the Creator. From this comes the power of these names when they are arranged and pronounced according to the rules, etc.”

In speaking thus, Origen does not give his private opinion; he merely reports the universal opinion. All religions then known admitted a kind of magic, distinguishing celestial from infernal magic, necromancy from theurgy; everything was prodigy, divination, oracle. The Persians did not deny the Egyptians’ miracles, nor the Egyptians those of the Persians. God allowed the first Christians to believe in the oracles attributed to the Sibyls, and still left them a few unimportant errors that did not corrupt the substance of religion.

Another very remarkable thing is that the Christians of the first two centuries abhorred temples, altars, and images. Origen admits this at no. 374. Everything changed afterward, along with discipline, when the Church received a settled form.

Fourth question.

Once a religion is legally established in a state, the courts are wholly occupied with preventing the renewal of most of the things done in that religion before it was publicly accepted. Its founders assembled in secret despite the magistrates; now only public assemblies under the eyes of the law are permitted, and all associations that evade the law are forbidden. The old maxim was that it is better to obey God than human beings; the opposite maxim is accepted now: to follow the laws of the state is to obey God. Formerly one heard of nothing but demonic harassment and possession; the devil was then unleashed on earth; today the devil no longer leaves his dwelling. Prodigies and predictions were necessary then; they are no longer admitted. A man who foretold calamities in public squares would be put in the madhouse. The founders secretly received the faithful’s money; a man who collected money to dispose of it without legal authorization would fall into the hands of justice. Thus none of the scaffolding used to construct the building is used any longer.

Fifth question.

After our holy religion, which is undoubtedly the only good one, which would be the least bad?

Would it not be the simplest? Would it not be the one that taught much morality and very few doctrines? The one that tended to make people just without making them absurd? The one that did not command belief in impossible, contradictory things, insulting to the Divinity and harmful to the human race, and did not dare threaten eternal punishment to anyone with common sense? Would it not be the one that did not uphold its belief through executioners or flood the earth with blood for unintelligible sophistries? The one in which an ambiguity, a play on words, and two or three forged charters would not make a sovereign and a god of a priest often incestuous, murderous, and a poisoner? The one that did not subject kings to this priest? The one that taught only the worship of one God, justice, tolerance, and humanity?

Sixth question.

It has been said that the religion of the Gentiles was absurd in several respects, contradictory, pernicious. But has it not been charged with more harm than it did, and more follies than it preached?

For when I see Jupiter as a bull,A serpent, swan, or something else,I find no beauty in it,Nor wonder if it sometimes sets tongues wagging.

Prologue d’Amphitrion.

Undoubtedly this is very foolish. But show me, in all antiquity, a temple dedicated to Leda sleeping with a swan or a bull. Was a sermon ever preached in Athens or Rome to encourage girls to have children with the swans in their farmyards? Are the fables collected and embellished by Ovid the religion? Do they not resemble our Golden Legend, our Flower of the Saints? If some Brahmin or dervish came to confront us with the story of St. Mary of Egypt, who, having nothing to pay the sailors who had brought her to Egypt, gave each of them what are called favors in place of money, we would tell the Brahmin: “Reverend Father, you are mistaken; our religion is not the Golden Legend.”

We reproach the ancients for their oracles and prodigies. If they came back into the world, and we could count the miracles of Our Lady of Loreto and those of Our Lady of Ephesus, in whose favor would the balance stand?

Human sacrifice was established among almost all peoples, but very rarely practiced. Among the Jews we have only Jephthah’s daughter and King Agag sacrificed; for Isaac and Jonathan were not. The story of Iphigenia is not well authenticated among the Greeks. Human sacrifices were very rare among the ancient Romans. In short, pagan religion caused very little bloodshed, and ours has covered the earth with blood. Ours is undoubtedly the only good one, the only true one; but we have done so much harm through it that when we speak of the others we ought to be modest.

Seventh question.

If a man wishes to persuade foreigners or his fellow countrymen to accept his religion, should he not proceed with the most insinuating gentleness and the most engaging moderation? If he begins by saying that what he proclaims is demonstrated, he will find a crowd of unbelievers. If he dares tell them that they reject his teaching only insofar as it condemns their passions, that their hearts have corrupted their minds, that their reason is merely false and proud, he disgusts them, rouses them against him, and himself ruins what he wishes to establish.

If the religion he proclaims is true, will rage and insolence make it truer? Do you become angry when you say that we must be gentle, patient, beneficent, just, and fulfill all the duties of society? No, for everyone agrees with you. Why, then, do you insult your brother when you preach mysterious metaphysics to him? Because his good sense irritates your self-love. You are proud enough to demand that your brother submit his understanding to yours. Humiliated pride produces anger; it has no other source. A man wounded by twenty gunshots in battle does not become angry; but a scholar wounded by a single vote withheld becomes furious and implacable.

First question.

Warburton, bishop of Worcester, wrote one of the most learned works ever produced. Here’s what he says, page 8. of the 1st volume.

“A religion, a society that doesn’t rest on belief in another life, must have extraordinary help from providence. Judaism doesn’t rest on belief in another life. So Judaism had extraordinary help from providence.”

Several theologians challenged him. Any argument can be turned against its maker, and they turned his against him:

“Any religion that doesn’t teach the soul’s immortality and eternal punishments and rewards must be false. Judaism knew nothing of those teachings. So, by your principles, providence didn’t support Judaism at all. It was a false, barbaric religion that attacked providence.”

Other opponents insisted the Jews knew about the soul’s immortality even in Moses’ time. But the bishop showed them very clearly that the Ten Commandments, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy never mentioned that belief. He showed how ridiculous it is to twist and distort passages from the other books. You can’t squeeze out of them a truth that the book of the law never states.

The bishop wrote four volumes proving that Jewish law promised no punishments or rewards after death. Yet he’s never managed to give his opponents a very satisfying answer. They told him, “Either Moses knew this teaching or he didn’t. If he knew it, he deceived the Jews by keeping it from them. If he didn’t, he didn’t know enough to found a good religion. Indeed, if that religion was good, why was it abolished? A true religion must suit every time and place. It must be like sunlight, lighting every people and every generation.”

For all his understanding, this bishop has struggled to get out of those difficulties. But what system is free of them?

Second question.

Another scholar is much more of a philosopher. He’s one of our deepest thinkers on metaphysics. He makes a strong case that humanity’s first religion was polytheism. People believed in several gods before their reason developed enough to recognize one supreme being.

I dare to think it happened the other way around. People first recognized one God, and human weakness led them to adopt several afterward. Here’s how I picture it.

Villages certainly came before large cities. People were divided into small republics before they joined together in great empires. Picture a village frightened by thunder, suffering from lost harvests and attacks by its neighbor. Every day it feels its own weakness and senses an invisible power everywhere. It would naturally soon say, “There’s some being above us who does us good and harm.”

I can’t imagine it saying, “There are two powers.” Why more than one? In everything, we start with the simple and move on to the complex. Often, better understanding finally brings us back to the simple. That’s how the human mind develops.

What being would people have called on first? The sun? The moon? I don’t think so. Look at children: they’re much like ignorant adults. The beauty and usefulness of the sun that brings nature to life don’t impress them. Neither does the help the moon gives us, or the regular changes in its course. They don’t think about those things. They’re too used to them. People fear, call on, and worship only what frightens them. Children all look at the sky without concern. But when thunder rumbles, they shake and run to hide. Surely the earliest humans did the same. It would’ve taken people with a philosopher’s outlook to notice the stars’ movements. They could then get others to admire and worship them. Simple, uneducated farmers didn’t know enough to take up such a noble error.

A village would’ve gone no further than this: “There’s a power that thunders, sends hail on us, and kills our children. Let’s calm its anger. But how? Small gifts have calmed angry people down. Let’s give this power small gifts.” It also needs a name. The first that comes to mind is Chief, Master, or Lord. So people call this power My Lord. That’s probably why the earliest Egyptians called their God Kneph, and the Syrians Adoni. Neighboring peoples used Baal, Bel, Melch, or Moloch; the Scythians used Papaeus. All those words mean Lord, Master.

That’s how we found almost all America: divided into many small peoples, each with a protecting God. Even the Mexicans and Peruvians, great nations though they were, had only one God each. One worshiped Manco Capac, the other the God of war. The Mexicans called their war God Huitzilopochtli, just as the Hebrews called their lord Sabaoth.

These peoples didn’t start with one deity because their reason was highly developed. Had they been philosophers, they’d have worshiped the God of all nature, not a village God. They’d have studied the endless connections between all beings. Those connections prove a being who creates and preserves them. But they studied nothing: they felt. That’s how our weak understanding moves forward. Each village felt its weakness and its need for a strong protector. It imagined this protective, terrifying being in the nearby forest, on the mountain, or in a cloud. It pictured just one, because it had just one leader in war. It gave him a body because it couldn’t picture him any other way. It couldn’t believe the next village didn’t have its own God too. That’s why Jephthah tells the people of Moab, “You rightfully possess what your God Chemosh helped you conquer. You must let us enjoy what our God gave us through his victories.”

Those words are remarkable: one foreigner speaking to other foreigners. The Jews and Moabites had both driven out the native inhabitants. Neither had any right beyond force. One tells the other, “Your God protected you as you seized land. Let my God protect me as I seize mine.”

Jeremiah and Amos both ask, “What reason did the God Milcom have to take the land of Gad?” These passages seem to make it clear. Ancient peoples assigned each country a protecting God. We still find traces of that theology in Homer.

As people’s imaginations grew excited and they picked up confused ideas, they’d naturally multiply their gods. They’d give protectors to the elements, seas, forests, springs, and fields. The more they studied the stars, the more they’d marvel at them. If you worship a stream’s deity, how can you not worship the sun? Once you’ve taken the first step, gods soon cover the earth. Finally you come down from the stars to cats and onions.

Still, reason has to develop. Time finally produces philosophers who see that onions and cats didn’t arrange nature’s order. Not even the stars did that. These philosophers all recognize a supreme God who rewards and punishes: Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Scythians, Greeks, and Romans.

They don’t tell the people at first. Speak against onions and cats before old women and priests, and you’d be stoned. Tell certain Egyptians off for eating their gods, and you’d be eaten yourself. Juvenal actually tells of an Egyptian killed and eaten raw in a religious dispute.

So what did people do? Orpheus and others establish mysteries. Those let into them swear not to reveal them, calling down terrible curses on themselves if they do. The chief mystery is the worship of one God. This great truth spreads through half the world, and vast numbers join the mysteries. The old religion survives, of course. It doesn’t conflict with belief in one God, so people leave it alone. Why abolish it? The Romans recognize God, the best and greatest. The Greeks have their Zeus, their supreme God. All the other deities are only beings in between. People rank heroes and emperors among the gods, meaning among the blessed. But nobody thinks Claudius, Octavian, Tiberius, and Caligula created heaven and earth.

In short, this seems proved. In Augustus’ time, everyone who had a religion recognized a higher, eternal God. They also recognized several ranks of lesser gods, whose worship was later called idolatry.

The Jews had never been idolaters. They accepted Malachim, angels, heavenly beings of a lower rank. But their law didn’t tell them to worship these lesser deities. They did worship angels, it’s true: they bowed down whenever they saw them. That didn’t happen often, though. So there wasn’t any set ceremony or legally established worship for angels. Nobody paid homage to the ark’s cherubim. The Jews certainly worshiped one God openly. Countless people in the mysteries worshiped him secretly.

Third question.

Christianity began when all the wise people of Asia, Europe, and Africa already worshiped a supreme God.

Platonism helped people understand its teachings. Plato’s Logos meant the wisdom, the reason of the supreme being. For us it became the Word, a second person of God. Deep metaphysics, beyond human understanding, became an unreachable sanctuary that enclosed religion.

We won’t repeat how Mary was later declared God’s mother. Or how the Father and the Word were said to share one substance. Or how the Pneuma comes forth, the divine instrument of the divine Logos. Or the two natures and two wills that result from the union in one person. Or, finally, eating on a higher level: the soul, like the body, feeds on the God-man’s limbs and blood. The God-man is worshiped and eaten in the form of bread—visible to the eye, perceptible to taste, yet reduced to nothing. All the mysteries have been sublime.

As early as the second century, people began driving out demons in Jesus’ name. Before that, they used the name Jehovah, or Yhaho. Saint Matthew tells us that Jesus’ enemies accused him of using the prince of demons’ name. He answered, “If I drive out demons through Beelzebub, through whom do your children drive them out?”

We don’t know when the Jews made Beelzebub, a foreign god, prince of demons. But Josephus tells us Jerusalem had exorcists appointed to drive demons out of possessed people’s bodies. Those people had unusual illnesses. Much of the world then blamed such illnesses on evil spirits.

People drove out these demons by pronouncing Jehovah correctly, a pronunciation now lost. They also used ceremonies that we’ve now forgotten.

Exorcism by Jehovah or God’s other names was still practiced in the church’s first centuries. Arguing against Celsus, Origen says, n°. 262. “When you call on God or swear by him, call him the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Those names will let you do certain things. Their nature and power make demons submit to whoever pronounces them. But use another name, such as God of the roaring sea, supplanter, and those names have no power. The name Israel can’t do anything translated into Greek. Pronounce it in Hebrew, though, with the other required words, and you’ll work the spell.”

The same Origen makes these remarkable statements in number 19. “Some names have power by nature. Among them are the names used by Egypt’s wise men, Persia’s Magi, and India’s Brahmins. What we call magic isn’t an empty, imaginary art, as Stoics and Epicureans claim. Neither the name Sabaoth nor Adonai was made for created beings. They belong to a mysterious theology concerned with the Creator. That’s why these names have power when arranged and pronounced by the rules, and so on.”

Origen isn’t giving his private opinion here. He’s only reporting what everyone thought. All the religions then known accepted some kind of magic. People distinguished heavenly magic from hellish magic, necromancy from theurgy. Everything was miracles, divination, and oracles. Persians didn’t deny Egyptian miracles, and Egyptians didn’t deny Persian ones. God let the first Christians believe the oracles credited to the Sibyls. He also left them a few unimportant errors that didn’t spoil the heart of their religion.

There’s another striking point. Christians in the first two centuries hated temples, altars, and images. Origen admits it, n°. 374. All that changed later, along with church discipline, when the church took a settled form.

Fourth question.

Once a religion is legally established, the state’s courts all work to stop certain things happening again. These are most of the things the religion did before it won public acceptance. Its founders met secretly, in defiance of the magistrates. Now only public meetings under the law’s supervision are allowed. Any association that hides from the law is banned. The old rule said it was better to obey God than men. Now people accept the opposite: obeying state laws means obeying God. Once you heard nothing but talk of demons harassing and possessing people. The devil was loose on earth. Today he doesn’t leave home anymore. Miracles and predictions were needed then. Now they’re no longer accepted. A man predicting disasters in public squares would be put in a madhouse. The founders secretly took money from believers. Collect money to use without legal permission today, and you’d be prosecuted. None of the scaffolding used to put up the building is used anymore.

Fifth question.

After our holy religion, undoubtedly the only good one, which would be least bad?

Wouldn’t it be the simplest? Wouldn’t it teach a lot of morality and very few doctrines? Wouldn’t it try to make people just without making them absurd? It wouldn’t demand belief in impossible, contradictory things that insult God and harm humanity. Nor would it dare threaten anyone with eternal punishment for having common sense. Wouldn’t it be a religion that didn’t use executioners to uphold its beliefs? One that didn’t flood the earth with blood over misleading arguments nobody can understand? There’d be no ambiguity, pun, or two or three forged charters turning a priest into a sovereign and a God. Often that priest commits incest, murders, and poisons people. Wouldn’t it be a religion that didn’t put kings under that priest? One that taught only worship of one God, justice, tolerance, and humanity?

Sixth question.

We’re told pagan religion was absurd in several ways, contradictory, and harmful. But haven’t people blamed it for more harm than it did? And for more foolishness than it preached?

For when I see Jupiter as a bull,A snake, a swan, or something else,I don’t find that beautiful,And I’m not surprised if people sometimes talk about it.

Prologue d’Amphitrion.

That’s certainly very ridiculous. But show me an ancient temple dedicated to Leda sleeping with a swan or bull. Did anyone preach a sermon in Athens or Rome encouraging girls to have children with their farmyard swans? Are the stories Ovid collected and dressed up the religion itself? Aren’t they like our Golden Legend, our Flower of the Saints? Suppose a Brahmin or dervish challenged us with Saint Mary of Egypt’s story. She couldn’t pay the sailors who took her to Egypt. Instead of money, she gave each man what people call favors. We’d tell the Brahmin, “My reverend father, you’re mistaken. Our religion isn’t the Golden Legend.”

We criticize the ancients for their oracles and miracles. Suppose they came back, and we could count the miracles of Our Lady of Loreto and Our Lady of Ephesus. Which side would the balance favor?

Almost all peoples established human sacrifice, but very rarely practiced it. Among the Jews, only Jephthah’s daughter and King Agag were sacrificed. Isaac and Jonathan weren’t. The Greeks’ story of Iphigenia isn’t well established. Human sacrifices were very rare among the ancient Romans. In short, pagan religion spilled very little blood, while ours has covered the earth with it. Ours is undoubtedly the only good religion, the only true one. But we’ve done so much harm through it that we should speak modestly about others.

Seventh question.

Suppose you want to win foreigners or your fellow citizens over to your religion. Shouldn’t you be as gently persuasive and as appealingly restrained as possible? Start by saying your message is proved, and you’ll find plenty of unbelievers. Dare to say they reject your teaching only because it condemns their passions. Tell them their hearts have corrupted their minds and their reasoning is false and proud. You’ll offend them and turn them against you. You’ll destroy what you’re trying to establish.

If your religion is true, will rage and arrogance make it truer? Do you get angry when you say people should be gentle, patient, kind, and just? When you say they should meet all their duties to society? No, because everyone agrees with you. So why insult your brother when you preach mysterious metaphysics to him? His common sense hurts your pride. You’re proud enough to demand that he submit his understanding to yours. Humiliated pride produces anger; there’s no other source. A man hit by twenty musket shots in battle doesn’t get angry. But deny a learned theologian a vote of support, and that wound makes him furious and unforgiving.