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Томас де Квинси
Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 1

CASE V

VERACITY

Here is a special 'title,' (to speak with the civil lawyers,) under that general claim put in for England with respect to a moral pre-eminence amongst the nations. Many are they who, in regions widely apart, have noticed with honor the English superiority in the article of veneration for truth. Not many years ago, two Englishmen, on their road overland to India, fell in with a royal cortege, and soon after with the prime minister and the crown prince of Persia. The prince honored them with an interview; both parties being on horseback, and the conversation therefore reduced to the points of nearest interest. Amongst these was the English character. Upon this the prince's remark was—that what had most impressed him with respect for England and her institutions was, the remarkable spirit of truth-speaking which distinguished her sons; as supposing her institutions to grow out of her sons, and her sons out of her institutions. And indeed well he might have this feeling by comparison with his own countrymen: Persians have no principles apparently on this point—all is impulse and accident of feeling. Thus the journal of the two Persian princes in London, as lately reported in the newspapers, is one tissue of falsehoods: not, most undoubtedly, from any purpose of deceiving, but from the overmastering habit (cherished by their whole training and experience) of repeating everything in a spirit of amplification, with a view to the wonder only of the hearer. The Persians are notoriously the Frenchmen of the East; the same gaiety, the same levity, the same want of depth both as to feeling and principle. The Turks are much nearer to the English: the same gravity of temperament, the same meditativeness, the same sternness of principle. Of all European nations, the French is that which least regards truth. The whole spirit of their private memoirs and their anecdotes illustrates this. To point an anecdote or a repartee, there is no extravagance of falsehood that the French will not endure. What nation but the French would have tolerated that monstrous fiction about La Fontaine, by way of illustrating his supposed absence of mind—viz. that, on meeting his own son in a friend's house, he expressed his admiration of the young man, and begged to know his name. The fact probably may have been that La Fontaine was not liable to any absence at all: apparently this 'distraction' was assumed as a means of making a poor sort of sport for his friends. Like many another man in such circumstances, he saw and entered into the fun which his own imaginary forgetfulness produced. But were it otherwise, who can believe so outrageous a self-forgetfulness as that which would darken his eyes to the very pictures of his own hearth? Were such a thing possible, were it even real, it would still be liable to the just objection of the critics—that, being marvelous in appearance, even as a fact it ought not to be brought forward for any purpose of wit, but only as a truth of physiology, or as a fact in the records of a surgeon. The 'incredulus odi' is too strong in such cases, and it adheres to three out of every four French anecdotes. The French taste is, indeed, anything but good in all that department of wit and humor. And the ground lies in their national want of veracity. To return to England—and having cited an Oriental witness to the English character on this point, let us now cite a most observing one in the West. Kant, in Konigsberg, was surrounded by Englishmen and by foreigners of all nations—foreign and English students, foreign and English merchants; and he pronounced the main characteristic feature of the English as a nation to lie in their severe reverence for truth. This from him was no slight praise; for such was the stress he laid upon veracity, that upon this one quality he planted the whole edifice of moral excellence. General integrity could not exist, he held, without veracity as its basis; nor that basis exist without superinducing general integrity.

This opinion, perhaps, many beside Kant will see cause to approve. For ourselves we can truly say—never did we know a human being, boy or girl, who began life as an habitual undervaluer of truth, that did not afterwards exhibit a character conformable to that beginning—such a character as, however superficially correct under the steadying hand of self-interest, was not in a lower key of moral feeling as well as of principle.

But out of this honorable regard to veracity in Immanuel Kant, branched out a principle in Casuistry which most people will pronounce monstrous. It has occasioned much disputing backwards and forwards. But as a practical principle of conduct, (for which Kant meant it,) inevitably it must be rejected—if for no other reason because it is at open war with the laws and jurisprudence of all Christian Europe. Kant's doctrine was this; and the illustrative case in which it is involved, let it be remembered, is his own:—So sacred a thing, said he, is truth—that if a murderer, pursuing another with an avowed purpose of killing him, were to ask of a third person by what road the fleeing party had fled, that person is bound to give him true information. And you are at liberty to suppose this third person a wife, a daughter, or under any conceivable obligations of love and duty to the fugitive. Now this is monstrous: and Kant himself, with all his parental fondness for the doctrine, would certainly have been recalled to sounder thoughts by these two considerations—

1_st_. That by all the codes of law received throughout Europe, he who acted upon Kant's principle would be held a particeps criminis—an accomplice before the fact.

2_d_. That, in reality, a just principle is lurking under Kant's error; but a principle translated from its proper ground. Not truth, individual or personal—not truth of mere facts, but truth doctrinal—the truth which teaches, the truth which changes men and nations—this is the truth concerned in Kant's meaning, had he explained his own meaning to himself more distinctly. With respect to that truth, wheresoever it lies, Kant's doctrine applies—that all men have a right to it; that perhaps you have no right to suppose of any race or nation that it is not prepared to receive it; and, at any rate, that no circumstances of expedience can justify you in keeping it back.

CASE VI

THE CASE OF CHARLES I

Many cases arise from the life and political difficulties of Charles I. But there is one so peculiarly pertinent to an essay which entertains the general question of Casuistry—its legitimacy, its value—that with this, although not properly a domestic case, or only such in a mixed sense, we shall conclude.

No person has been so much attacked for his scruples of conscience as this prince; and what seems odd enough, no person has been so much attacked for resorting to books of Casuistry, and for encouraging literary men to write books of Casuistry. Under his suggestion and sanction, Saunderson wrote his book on the obligation of an oath, (for which there was surely reason enough in days when the democratic tribunals were forcing men to swear to an et caetera;) and, by an impulse originally derived from him, Jeremy Taylor wrote afterwards his Ductor Dubitantium, Bishop Barlow wrote his Cases of Conscience, &c. &c.

For this dedication of his studies, Charles has been plentifully blamed in after times. He was seeking evasions for plain duties, say his enemies. He was arming himself for intrigue in the school of Machiavel. But now turn to his history, and ask in what way any man could have extricated himself from that labyrinth which invested his path but by Casuistry. Cases the most difficult are offered for his decision: peace for a distracted nation in 1647, on terms which seemed fatal to the monarchy; peace for the same nation under the prospect of war rising up again during the Isle of Wight treaty in 1648, but also under the certainty of destroying the Church of England. On the one side, by refusing, he seemed to disown his duties as the father of his people. On the other side, by yielding, he seemed to forget his coronation oath, and the ultimate interests of his people—to merge the future and the reversionary in the present and the fugitive. It was not within the possibilities that he could so act as not to offend one half of the nation. His dire calamity it was, that he must be hated, act how he would, and must be condemned by posterity. Did his enemies allow for the misery of this internal conflict? Milton, who never appears to more disadvantage than when he comes forward against his sovereign, is indignant that Charles should have a conscience, or plead a conscience, in a public matter. Henderson, the celebrated Scotch theologian, came post from Edinburgh to London (whence he went to Newcastle) expressly to combat the king's scruples. And he also (in his private letters) seems equally enraged as Milton, that Charles should pretend to any private conscience in a state question.

Now let us ask—what was it that originally drove Charles to books of Casuistry? It was the deep shock which he received, both in his affections and his conscience, from the death of Lord Strafford. Every body had then told him, even those who felt how much the law must be outraged to obtain a conviction of Lord Strafford, how many principles of justice must be shaken, and how sadly the royal word must suffer in its sanctity,—yet all had told him that it was expedient to sacrifice that nobleman. One man ought not to stand between the king and his alienated people. It was good for the common welfare that Lord Strafford should die. Charles was unconvinced. He was sure of the injustice; and perhaps he doubted even of the expedience. But his very virtues were armed against his peace. In all parts of his life self-distrust and diffidence had marked his character. What was he, a single person, to resist so many wise counsellors, and what in a representative sense was the nation ranged on the other side? He yielded: and it is not too much to say that he never had a happy day afterwards. The stirring period of his life succeeded—the period of war, camps, treaties. Much time was not allowed him for meditation. But there is abundant proof that such time as he had, always pointed his thoughts backwards to the afflicting case of Lord Stratford. This he often spoke of as the great blot—the ineffaceable transgression of his life. For this he mourned in penitential words yet on record. To this he traced back the calamity of his latter life. Lord Stratford's memorable words—'Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of princes,'—rang for ever in his ear. Lord Stafford's blood lay like a curse upon his throne.

Now, by what a pointed answer, drawn from this one case, might Charles have replied to the enemies we have noticed—to those, like so many historians since his day, who taxed him with studying Casuistry for the purposes of intrigue—to those, like Milton and Henderson, who taxed him with exercising his private conscience on public questions.

'I had studied no books of Casuistry,' he might have replied, 'when I made the sole capital blunder in a case of conscience, which the review of my life can show.

'I did not insist on my private conscience; woe is me that I did not: I yielded to what was called the public conscience in that one case which has proved the affliction of my life, and which, perhaps, it was that wrecked the national peace.'

A more plenary answer there cannot be to those who suppose that Casuistry is evaded by evading books of Casuistry. That dread forum of conscience will for ever exist as a tribunal of difficulty. The discussion must proceed on some principle or other, good or bad; and the only way for obtaining light is by clearing up the grounds of action, and applying the principles of moral judgment to such facts or circumstances as most frequently arise to perplex the understanding, or the affections, or the conscience.

GREECE UNDER THE ROMANS.[Footnote: By George Finlae]

[1844.]

What is called Philosophical History we believe to be yet in its infancy. It is the profound remark of Mr. Finlay—profound as we ourselves understand it, i. e., in relation to this philosophical treatment, 'That history will ever remain inexhaustible.' How inexhaustible? Are the facts of history inexhaustible? In regard to the ancient division of history with which he is there dealing, this would be in no sense true; and in any case it would be a lifeless truth. So entirely have the mere facts of Pagan history been disinterred, ransacked, sifted, that except by means of some chance medal that may be unearthed in the illiterate East (as of late towards Bokhara), or by means of some mysterious inscription, such as those which still mock the learned traveller in Persia, northwards near Hamadan (Ecbatana), and southwards at Persepolis, or those which distract him amongst the shadowy ruins of Yucatan (Uxmal, suppose, and Palenque),—once for all, barring these pure godsends, it is hardly 'in the dice' that any downright novelty of fact should remain in reversion for this nineteenth century. The merest possibility exists, that in Armenia, or in a Graeco-Russian monastery on Mount Athos, or in Pompeii, &c., some authors hitherto αιεχδοτοι may yet be concealed; and by a channel in that degree improbable, it is possible that certain new facts of history may still reach us. But else, and failing these cryptical or subterraneous currents of communication, for us the record is closed. History in that sense has come to an end, and sealed up as by the angel in the Apocalypse. What then? The facts so understood are but the dry bones of the mighty past. And the question arises here also, not less than in that sublimest of prophetic visions, 'Can these dry bones live?'. Not only can they live, but by an infinite variety of life. The same historic facts, viewed in different lights, or brought into connection with other facts, according to endless diversities of permutation and combination, furnish grounds for such eternal successions of new speculations as make the facts themselves virtually new. The same Hebrew words are read by different sets of vowel points, and the same hieroglyphics are deciphered by keys everlastingly varied.

To us we repeat that oftentimes it seems as though the science of history were yet scarcely founded. There will be such a science, if at present there is not; and in one feature of its capacities it will resemble chemistry. What is so familiar to the perceptions of man as the common chemical agents of water, air, and the soil on which we tread? Yet each one of these elements is a mystery to this day; handled, used, tried, searched experimentally, in ten thousand ways—it is still unknown; fathomed by recent science down to a certain depth, it is still probably by its destiny unfathomable. Even to the end of days, it is pretty certain that the minutest particle of earth—that a dew-drop scarcely distinguishable as a separate object—that the slenderest filament of a plant will include within itself secrets inaccessible to man. And yet, compared with the mystery of man himself, these physical worlds of mystery are but as a radix of infinity. Chemistry is in this view mysterious and spinosistically sublime—that it is the science of the latent in all things, of all things as lurking in all. Within the lifeless flint, within the silent pyrites, slumbers an agony of potential combustion. Iron is imprisoned in blood. With cold water (as every child is now-a-days aware) you may lash a fluid into angry ebullitions of heat; with hot water, as with the rod of Amram's son, you may freeze a fluid down to the temperature of the Sarsar wind, provided only that you regulate the pressure of the air. The sultry and dissolving fluid shall bake into a solid, the petrific fluid shall melt into a liquid. Heat shall freeze, frost shall thaw; and wherefore? Simply because old things are brought together in new modes of combination. And in endless instances beside we see the same Panlike latency of forms and powers, which gives to the external world a capacity of self-transformation, and of polymorphosis absolutely inexhaustible.

But the same capacity belongs to the facts of history. And we do not mean merely that, from subjective differences in the minds reviewing them, such facts assume endless varieties of interpretation and estimate, but that objectively, from lights still increasing in the science of government and of social philosophy, all the primary facts of history become liable continually to new theories, to new combinations, and to new valuations of their moral relations. We have seen some kinds of marble, where the veinings happened to be unusually multiplied, in which human faces, figures, processions, or fragments of natural scenery seemed absolutely illimitable, under the endless variations or inversions of the order, according to which they might be combined and grouped. Something analogous takes effect in reviewing the remote parts of history. Rome, for instance, has been the object of historic pens for twenty centuries (dating from Polybius); and yet hardly so much as twenty years have elapsed since Niebuhr opened upon us almost a new revelation, by re-combining the same eternal facts, according to a different set of principles. The same thing may be said, though not with the same degree of emphasis, upon the Grecian researches of the late Ottfried Mueller. Egyptian history again, even at this moment, is seen stealing upon us through the dusky twilight in its first distinct lineaments. Before Young, Champollion, and the others who have followed on their traces in this field of history, all was outer darkness; and whatsoever we do know or shall know of Egyptian Thebes will now be recovered as if from the unswathing of a mummy. Not until a flight of three thousand years has left Thebes the Hekatompylos a dusky speck in the far distance, have we even begun to read her annals, or to understand her revolutions.

Another instance we have now before us of this new historic faculty for resuscitating the buried, and for calling back the breath to the frozen features of death, in Mr. Finlay's work upon the Greeks as related to the Roman empire. He presents us with old facts, but under the purpose of clothing them with a new life. He rehearses ancient stories, not with the humble ambition of better adorning them, of more perspicuously narrating, or even of more forcibly pointing their moral, but of extracting from them some new meaning, and thus forcing them to arrange themselves, under some latent connection, with other phenomena now first detected, as illustrations of some great principle or agency now first revealing its importance. Mr. Finlay's style of intellect is appropriate to such a task; for it is subtle and Machiavellian. But there is this difficulty in doing justice to the novelty, and at times we may say with truth to the profundity of his views, that they are by necessity thrown out in continued successions of details, are insulated, and, in one word, sporadic. This follows from the very nature of his work; for it is a perpetual commentary on the incidents of Grecian history, from the era of the Roman conquest to the commencement of what Mr. Finlay, in a peculiar sense, calls the Byzantine empire. These incidents have nowhere been systematically or continuously recorded; they come forward by casual flashes in the annals, perhaps, of some church historian, as they happen to connect themselves with his momentary theme; or they betray themselves in the embarrassments of the central government, whether at Rome or at Constantinople, when arguing at one time a pestilence, at another an insurrection, or an inroad of barbarians. It is not the fault of Mr. Finlay, but his great disadvantage, that the affairs of Greece have been thus discontinuously exhibited, and that its internal changes of condition have been never treated except obliquely, and by men aliud agentibus. The Grecian race had a primary importance on our planet; but the Grecian name, represented by Greece considered as a territory, or as the original seat of the Hellenic people, ceased to have much importance, in the eyes of historians, from the time when it became a conquered province; and it declined into absolute insignificance after the conquest of so many other provinces had degraded Hellas into an arithmetical unit, standing amongst a total amount of figures, so vast and so much more dazzling to the ordinary mind. Hence it was that in ancient times no complete history of Greece, through all her phases and stages, was ever attempted. The greatness of her later revolutions, simply as changes, would have attracted the historian; but, as changes associated with calamity and loss of power, they repelled his curiosity, and alienated his interest. It is the very necessity, therefore, of Mr. Finlay's position, when coming into such an inheritance, that he must splinter his philosophy into separate individual notices; for the records of history furnish no grounds for more. Spartam, quam nactus est, ornavit. But this does not remedy the difficulty for ourselves, in attempting to give a representative view of his philosophy. General abstractions he had no opportunity for presenting; consequently we have no opportunity for valuing; and, on the other hand, single cases selected from a succession of hundreds would not justify any representative criticism, more than the single brick, in the anecdote of Hierocles, would serve representatively to describe or to appraise the house.

Under this difficulty as to the possible for ourselves, and the just for Mr. Finlay, we shall adopt the following course. So far as the Greek people collected themselves in any splendid manner with the Roman empire, they did so with the eastern horn of that empire, and in point of time from the foundation of Constantinople as an eastern Rome, in the fourth century, to a period not fully agreed on; but for the moment we will say with Mr. Finlay, up to the early part of the eighth century. A reason given by Mr. Finlay for this latter date is—that about that time the Grecian blood, so widely diffused in Asia, and even in Africa, became finally detached by the progress of Mahometanism and Mahometan systems of power from all further concurrence or coalition with the views of the Byzantine Caesar. Constantinople was from that date thrown back more upon its own peculiar heritage and jurisdiction, of which the main resources for war and peace lay in Europe and (speaking by the narrowest terms) in Thrace. Henceforth, therefore, for the city and throne of Constantine, resuming its old Grecian name of Byzantium, there succeeded a theatre less diffusive, a population more concentrated, a character of action more determinate and jealous, a style of courtly ceremonial more elaborate as well as more haughtily repulsive, and universally a system of interests, as much more definite and selfish, as might naturally be looked for in a nation now everywhere surrounded by new thrones gloomy with malice, and swelling with the consciousness of youthful power. This new and final state of the eastern Rome Mr. Finlay denominates the Byzantine empire. Possibly this use of the term may be capable of justification: but more questions would arise in the discussion than Mr. Finlay has thought it of importance to notice. And for the present we shall take the word Byzantine in its most ordinary acceptation, as denoting the local empire founded by Constantine in Byzantium early in the fourth century, under the idea of a translation from the old western Rome, and overthrown by the Ottoman Turks in the year 1453. In the fortunes and main stages of this empire, what are the chief arresting phenomena, aspects, or relations, to the greatest of modern interests? We select by preference these:

I. First, this was the earliest among the kingdoms of our planet which connected itself with Christianity. In Armenia, there had been a previous state recognition of Christianity. But that was neither splendid nor distinct. Whereas the Byzantine Rome built avowedly upon Christianity as its own basis, and consecrated its own nativity by the sublime act of founding the first provision ever attempted for the poor, considered simply as poor (i.e. as objects of pity, not as instruments of ambition).

II. Secondly, as the great aegis of western Christendom, nay, the barrier which made it possible that any Christendom should ever exist, this Byzantine empire is entitled to a very different station in the enlightened gratitude of us Western Europeans from any which it has yet held. We do not scruple to say—that, by comparison with the services of the Byzantine people to Europe, no nation on record has ever stood in the same relation to any other single nation, much less to a whole family of nations, whether as regards the opportunity and means of conferring benefits, or as regards the astonishing perseverance in supporting the succession of these benefits, or as regards the ultimate event of these benefits. A great wrong has been done for ages; for we have all been accustomed to speak of the Byzantine empire with scorn, [Footnote: 'With scorn.'—This has arisen from two causes: one is the habit of regarding the whole Roman empire as in its 'decline' from so early a period as that of Commodus; agreeably to which conceit, it would naturally follow that, during its latter stages, the Eastern empire must have been absolutely in its dotage. If already declining in the second century, then, from the tenth to the fifteenth, it must have been paralytic and bed-ridden The other cause may be found in the accidental but reasonable hostility of the Byzantine court to the first Crusaders, as also in the disadvantageous comparison with respect to manly virtues between the simplicity of these western children, and the refined dissimulation of the Byzantines.] as chiefly known by its effeminacy; and the greater is the call for a fervent palinode.

III. Thirdly. In a reflex way, as the one great danger which overshadowed Europe for generations, and against which the Byzantine empire proved the capital bulwark, Mahometanism may rank as one of the Byzantine aspects or counterforces. And if there is any popular error applying to the history of that great convulsion, as a political effort for revolutionizing the world, some notice of it will find a natural place in connection with these present trains of speculation.

Let us, therefore, have permission to throw together a few remarks on these three subjects—1st, on the remarkable distinction by which the eldest of Christian rulers proclaimed and inaugurated the Christian basis of his empire; 2dly, on the true but forgotten relation of this great empire to our modern Christendom, under which idea we comprehend Europe and the whole continent of America; 3dly, on the false pretensions of Mahometanism, whether advanced by itself or by inconsiderate Christian speculators on its behalf. We shall thus obtain this advantage, that some sort of unity will be given to our own glances at Mr. Finlay's theme; and, at the same time, by gathering under these general heads any dispersed comments of Mr. Finlay, whether for confirmation of our own views, or for any purpose of objection to his, we shall give to those comments also that kind of unity, by means of a reference to a common purpose, which we could not have given them by citing each independently for itself.

I. First, then, as to that memorable act by which Constantinople (i. e. the Eastern empire) connected herself for ever with Christianity; viz. the recognition of pauperism as an element in the state entitled to the maternal guardianship of the state. In this new principle, introduced by Christianity, we behold a far-seeing or proleptic wisdom, making provision for evils before they had arisen; for it is certain that great expansions of pauperism did not exist in the ancient world. A pauper population is a disease peculiar to the modern or Christian world. Various causes latent in the social systems of the ancients prevented such developments of surplus people. But does not this argue a superiority in the social arrangements of these ancients? Not at all; they were atrociously worse. They evaded this one morbid affection by means of others far more injurious to the moral advance of man. The case was then everywhere as at this day it is in Persia. A Persian ambassador to London or Paris might boast that, in his native Iran, no such spectacles existed of hunger-bitten myriads as may be seen everywhere during seasons of distress in the crowded cities of Christian Europe. 'No,' would be the answer, 'most certainly not; but why? The reason is, that your accursed form of society and government intercepts such surplus people, does not suffer them to be born. What is the result? You ought, in Persia, to have three hundred millions of people; your vast territory is easily capacious of that number. You have—how many have you? Something less than eight millions.' Think of this, startled reader. But, if that be a good state of things, then any barbarous soldier who makes a wilderness, is entitled to call himself a great philosopher and public benefactor. This is to cure the headache by amputating the head. Now, the same principle of limitation to population a parte ante, though not in the same savage excess as in Mahometan Persia, operated upon Greece and Rome. The whole Pagan world escaped the evils of redundant population by vicious repressions of it beforehand. But under Christianity a new state of things was destined to take effect. Many protections and excitements to population were laid in the framework of this new religion, which, by its new code of rules and impulses, in so many ways extended the free-agency of human beings. Manufacturing industry was destined first to arise on any great scale under Christianity. Except in Tyre and Alexandria (see the Emperor Hadrian's account of this last), there was no town or district in the ancient world where the populace could be said properly to work. The rural laborers worked a little—not much;—and sailors worked a little;—nobody else worked at all. Even slaves had little more work distributed amongst each ten than now settles upon one. And in many other ways, by protecting the principle of life, as a mysterious sanctity, Christianity has favored the development of an excessive population. There it is that Christianity, being answerable for the mischief, is answerable for its redress. Therefore it is that, breeding the disease, Christianity breeds the cure. Extending the vast lines of poverty, Christianity it was that first laid down the principle of a relief for poverty. Constantine, the first Christian potentate, laid the first stone of the mighty overshadowing institution since reared in Christian lands to poverty, disease, orphanage, and mutilation. Christian instincts, moving and speaking through that Caesar, first carried out that great idea of Christianity. Six years was Christianity in building Constantinople, and in the seventh she rested from her labors, saying, 'Henceforward let the poor man have a haven of rest for ever; a rest from his work for one day in seven; a rest from his anxieties by a legal and fixed relief.' Being legal, it could not be open to disturbances of caprice in the giver; being fixed, it was not open to disturbances of miscalculation in the receiver. Now, first, when first Christianity was installed as a public organ of government (and first owned a distinct political responsibility), did it become the duty of a religion which assumed, as it were, the official tutelage of poverty, to proclaim and consecrate that function by some great memorial precedent. And, accordingly, in testimony of that obligation, the first Christian Caesar, on behalf of Christianity, founded the first system of relief for pauperism. It is true, that largesses from the public treasury, gratuitous coin, or corn sold at diminished rates, not to mention the sportulae or stated doles of private Roman nobles, had been distributed amongst the indigent citizens of Western Rome for centuries before Constantine; but all these had been the selfish bounties of factious ambition or intrigue.