Вольтер
A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 02
AUTHORITY
Miserable human beings, whether in green robes or in turbans, whether in black gowns or in surplices, or in mantles and bands, never seek to employ authority where nothing is concerned but reason, or consent to be reviled in all ages as the most impertinent of men, as well as to endure public hatred as the most unjust.
You have been told a hundred times of the insolent absurdity with which you condemned Galileo, and I speak to you of it for the hundred and first. I would have it inscribed over the door of your holy office.
Seven cardinals, assisted by certain minorite friars, threw into prison the master of thinking in Italy, at the age of seventy; and made him live upon bread and water because he instructed mankind in that of which they were ignorant.
Having passed a decree in favor of the categories of Aristotle, the above junta learnedly and equitably doomed to the penalty of the galleys whoever should dare to be of another opinion from the Stagyrite, of whom two councils had burned the books.
Further, a Faculty, which possessed very small faculties, made a decree against innate ideas, and afterwards another for them, without the said Faculty being informed, except by its beadles, of what an idea was.
In neighboring schools legal proceedings were commenced against the circulation of the blood. A process was issued against inoculation, and the parties cited by summons.
One and twenty volumes of thoughts in folio have been seized, in which it was wickedly and falsely said that triangles have always three angles; that a father was older than his son; that Rhea Silvia lost her virginity before her accouchement; and that farina differs from oak leaves.
In another year the following question was decided: "Utrum chimæra bombinans in vacuo possit comedere secundas intentiones?" and decided in the affirmative. These judges, of course, considered themselves much superior to Archimedes, Euclid, Cicero, or Pliny, and strutted about the Universities accordingly.
AXIS
How is it that the axis of the earth is not perpendicular to the equator? Why is it raised toward the north and inclined towards the south pole, in a position which does not appear natural, and which seems the consequence of some derangement, or the result of a period of a prodigious number of years?
Is it true that the ecliptic continually inclines by an insensible movement towards the equator and that the angle formed by these two lines has a little diminished in two thousand years?
Is it true that the ecliptic has been formerly perpendicular to the equator, that the Egyptians have said so, and that Herodotus has related it? This motion of the ecliptic would form a period of about two millions of years. It is not that which astounds us, for the axis of the earth has an imperceptible movement in about twenty-six thousand years which occasions the precession of the equinoxes. It is as easy for nature to produce a rotation of twenty thousand as of two hundred and sixty ages.
We are deceived when we are told that the Egyptians had, according to Herodotus, a tradition that the ecliptic had been formerly perpendicular to the equator. The tradition of which Herodotus speaks has no relation to the coincidence of the equinoctial and ecliptic lines; that is quite another affair.
The pretended scholars of Egypt said that the sun in the space of eleven thousand years had set twice in the east and risen twice in the west. When the equator and the ecliptic coincided, and when the days were everywhere equal to the nights the sun did not on that account change its setting and rising, but the earth turned on its axis from west to east, as at this day. This idea of making the sun set in the east is a chimera only worthy of the brains of the priests of Egypt and shows the profound ignorance of those jugglers who have had so much reputation. The tale should be classed with those of the satyrs who sang and danced in the train of Osiris; with the little boys whom they would not feed till after they had run eight leagues, to teach them to conquer the world; with the two children who cried bec in asking for bread and who by that means discovered that the Phrygian was the original language; with King Psammeticus, who gave his daughter to a thief who had dexterously stolen his money, etc.
Ancient history, ancient astronomy, ancient physics, ancient medicine (up to Hippocrates), ancient geography, ancient metaphysics, all are nothing but ancient absurdities which ought to make us feel the happiness of being born in later times.
There is, no doubt, more truth in two pages of the French Encyclopædia in relation to physics than in all the library of Alexandria, the loss of which is so much regretted.
BABEL
SECTION I
Babel signifies among the Orientals, God the Father, the power of God, the gate of God, according to the way in which the word is pronounced. It appears, therefore, that Babylon was the city of God, the holy city. Every capital of a state was a city of God, the sacred city. The Greeks called them all Hieropolis, and there were more than thirty of this name. The tower of Babel, then, signifies the tower of God the Father.
Josephus says truly that Babel signifies confusion; Calmet says, with others, that Bilba, in Chaldæan, signifies confounded, but all the Orientals have been of a contrary opinion. The word confusion would be a strange etymon for the capital of a vast empire. I very much like the opinion of Rabelais, who pretends that Paris was formerly called Lutetia on account of the ladies' white legs.
Be that as it may, commentators have tormented themselves to know to what height men had raised this famous tower of Babel. St. Jerome gives it twenty thousand feet. The ancient Jewish book entitled "Jacult" gave it eighty-one thousand. Paul Lucas has seen the remains of it and it is a fine thing to be as keen-sighted as Paul Lucas, but these dimensions are not the only difficulties which have exercised the learned.
People have wished to know how the children of Noah, after having divided among themselves the islands of the nations and established themselves in various lands, with each one his particular language, families, and people, should all find themselves in the plain of Shinaar, to build there a tower saying, "Let us make us a name lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."
The Book of Genesis speaks of the states which the sons of Noah founded. It has related how the people of Europe, Africa, and Asia, all came to Shinaar speaking one language only, and purposing the same thing.
The Vulgate places the Deluge in the year of the world 1656, and the construction of the tower of Babel 1771, that is to say, one hundred and fifteen years after the destruction of mankind, and even during the life of Noah.
Men then must have multiplied with prodigious celerity; all the arts revived in a very little time. When we reflect on the great number of trades which must have been employed to raise a tower so high we are amazed at so stupendous a work.
The patriarch Abraham was born, according to the Bible, about four hundred years after the deluge, and already we see a line of powerful kings in Egypt and in Asia. Bochart and other sages have pleasantly filled their great books with Phœnician and Chaldæan words and systems which they do not understand. They have learnedly taken Thrace for Cappadocia, Greece for Crete, and the island of Cyprus for Tyre; they sport in an ocean of ignorance which has neither bottom nor shore. It would have been shorter for them to have avowed that God, after several ages, has given us sacred books to render us better men and not to make us geographers, chronologists, or etymologists.
Babel is Babylon. It was founded, according to the Persian historians, by a prince named Tamurath. The only knowledge we have of its antiquities consists in the astronomical observations of nineteen hundred and three years, sent by Callisthenes by order of Alexander, to his preceptor Aristotle. To this certainty is joined the extreme probability that a nation which had made a series of celestial observations for nearly two thousand years had congregated and formed a considerable power several ages before the first of these observations.
It is a pity that none of the calculations of the ancient profane authors agree with our sacred ones, and that none of the names of the princes who reigned after the different epochs assigned to the Deluge have been known by either Egyptians, Syrians, Babylonians, or Greeks.
It is no less a pity that there remains not on the earth among the profane authors one vestige of the famous tower of Babel; nothing of this story of the confusion of tongues is found in any book. This memorable adventure was as unknown to the whole universe as the names of Noah, Methuselah, Cain, and Adam and Eve.
This difficulty tantalizes our curiosity. Herodotus, who travelled so much, speaks neither of Noah, or Shem, Reu, Salah, or Nimrod. The name of Nimrod is unknown to all profane antiquity; there are only a few Arabs and some modern Persians who have made mention of Nimrod in falsifying the books of the Jews.
Nothing remains to conduct us through these ancient ruins, unknown to all the nations of the universe during so many ages, but faith in the Bible, and happily that is an infallible guide.
Herodotus, who has mingled many fables with some truths, pretends that in his time, which was that of greatest power of the Persian sovereigns of Babylon, all the women of the immense city were obliged to go once in their lives to the temple of Mylitta, a goddess who was thought to be the same as Aphrodite, or Venus, in order to prostitute themselves to strangers, and that the law commanded them to receive money as a sacred tribute, which was paid over to the priesthood of the goddess.
But even this Arabian tale is more likely than that which the same author tells of Cyrus dividing the Indus into three hundred and sixty canals, which all discharged themselves into the Caspian Sea! What should we say of Mézeray if he had told us that Charlemagne divided the Rhine into three hundred and sixty canals, which fell into the Mediterranean, and that all the ladies of his court were obliged once in their lives to present themselves at the church of St. Genevieve to prostitute themselves to all comers for money?
It must be remarked that such a fable is still more absurd in relation to the time of Xerxes, in which Herodotus lived, than it would be in that of Charlemagne. The Orientals were a thousand times more jealous than the Franks and Gauls. The wives of all the great lords were carefully guarded by eunuchs. This custom existed from time immemorial. It is seen even in the Jewish history that when that little nation wished like the others to have a king, Samuel, to dissuade them from it and to retain his authority, said "that a king would tyrannize over them and that he would take the tenths of their vines and corn to give to his eunuchs." The kings accomplished this prediction, for it is written in the First Book of Kings that King Ahab had eunuchs, and in the Second that Joram, Jehu, Jehoiakim, and Zedekiah had them also.
The eunuchs of Pharaoh are spoken of a long time previously in the Book of Genesis, and it is said that Potiphar, to whom Joseph was sold, was one of the king's eunuchs. It is clear, therefore, that there were great numbers of eunuchs at Babylon to guard the women. It was not then a duty for them to prostitute themselves to the first comer, nor was Babylon, the city of God, a vast brothel as it has been pretended.
These tales of Herodotus, as well as all others in the same taste, are now so decried by all people of sense – reason has made so great progress that even old women and children will no longer believe such extravagances —"Non est vetula quæ credat nec pueri credunt, nisi qui nondum ære lavantur."
There is in our days only one man who, not partaking of the spirit of the age in which he lives, would justify the fable of Herodotus. The infamy appears to him a very simple affair. He would prove that the Babylonian princesses prostituted themselves through piety, to the first passengers, because it is said in the holy writings that the Ammonites made their children pass through the fire in presenting them to Moloch. But what relation has this custom of some barbarous hordes – this superstition of passing their children through the flames, or even of burning them on piles, in honor of I know not whom – of Moloch; these Iroquois horrors of a petty, infamous people to a prostitution so incredible in a nation known to be the most jealous and orderly of the East? Would what passes among the Iroquois be among us a proof of the customs of the courts of France and of Spain?
He also brings, in further proof, the Lupercal feast among the Romans during which he says the young people of quality and respectable magistrates ran naked through the city with whips in their hands, with which they struck the pregnant women of quality, who unblushingly presented themselves to them in the hope of thereby obtaining a happy deliverance.
Now, in the first place, it is not said that these Romans of quality ran quite naked, on the contrary, Plutarch expressly observes, in his remarks on the custom, that they were covered from the waist downwards.
Secondly, it seems by the manner in which this defender of infamous customs expresses himself that the Roman ladies stripped naked to receive these blows of the whip, which is absolutely false.
Thirdly, the Lupercal feast has no relation whatever to the pretended law of Babylon, which commands the wives and daughters of the king, the satraps, and the magi to sell and prostitute themselves to strangers out of pure devotion.
When an author, without knowing either the human mind or the manners of nations, has the misfortune to be obliged to compile from passages of old authors, who are almost all contradictory, he should advance his opinions with modesty and know how to doubt, and to shake off the dust of the college. Above all he should never express himself with outrageous insolence.
Herodotus, or Ctesias, or Diodorus of Sicily, relate a fact: you have read it in Greek, therefore this fact is true. This manner of reasoning, which is not that of Euclid, is surprising enough in the time in which we live; but all minds will not be instructed with equal facility; and there are always more persons who compile than people who think.
We will say nothing here of the confusion of tongues which took place during the construction of the tower of Babel. It is a miracle, related in the Holy Scriptures. We neither explain, nor even examine any miracles, and as the authors of that great work, the Encyclopædia, believed them, we also believe them with a lively and sincere faith.
We will simply affirm that the fall of the Roman Empire has produced more confusion and a greater number of new languages than that of the tower of Babel. From the reign of Augustus till the time of the Attilas, the Clovises, and the Gondiberts, during six ages, "terra erat unius labii"– "the known earth was of one language." They spoke the same Latin at the Euphrates as at Mount Atlas. The laws which governed a hundred nations were written in Latin and the Greek served for amusement, whilst the barbarous jargon of each province was only for the populace. They pleaded in Latin at once in the tribunals of Africa and of Rome. An inhabitant of Cornwall departed for Asia Minor sure of being understood everywhere in his route. It was at least one good effected by the rapacity of the Romans that people found themselves as well understood on the Danube as on the Guadalquiver. At the present time a Bergamask who travels into the small Swiss cantons, from which he is only separated by a mountain, has the same need of an interpreter as if he were in China. This is one of the greatest plagues of modern life.
SECTION II
Vanity has always raised stately monuments. It was through vanity that men built the lofty tower of Babel. "Let us go and raise a tower, the summit of which shall touch the skies, and render our name celebrated before we are scattered upon the face of the earth." The enterprise was undertaken hi the time of a patriarch named Phaleg, who counted the good man Noah for his fifth ancestor. It will be seen that architecture, and all the arts which accompany it, had made great progress in five generations. St. Jerome, the same who has seen fauns and satyrs, has not seen the tower of Babel any more than I have, but he assures us that it was twenty thousand feet high. This is a trifle. The ancient book, "Jacult" written by one of the most learned Jews, demonstrates the height to be eighty-one thousand Jewish feet, and every one knows that the Jewish foot was nearly as long as the Greek. These dimensions are still more likely than those of Jerome. This tower remains, but it is no longer quite so high; several quite veracious travellers have seen it. I, who have not seen it, will talk as little of it as of my grandfather Adam, with whom I never had the honor of conversing. But consult the reverend father Calmet; he is a man of fine wit and a profound philosopher and will explain the thing to you. I do not know why it is said, in Genesis, that Babel signifies confusion, for, as I have already observed, ba answers to father in the eastern languages, and bel signifies God. Babel means the city of God, the holy city. But it is incontestable that Babel means confusion, possibly because the architects were confounded after having raised their work to eighty-one thousand feet, perhaps, because the languages were then confounded, as from that time the Germans no longer understood the Chinese, although, according to the learned Bochart, it is clear that the Chinese is originally the same language as the High German.
BACCHUS
Of all the true or fabulous personages of profane antiquity Bacchus is to us the most important. I do not mean for the fine invention which is attributed to him by all the world except the Jews, but for the prodigious resemblance of his fabulous history to the true adventures of Moses.
The ancient poets have placed the birth of Bacchus in Egypt; he is exposed on the Nile and it is from that event that he is named Mises by the first Orpheus, which, in Egyptian, signifies "saved from the waters," according to those who pretend to understand the ancient Egyptian tongue, which is no longer known. He is brought up near a mountain of Arabia called Nisa, which is believed to be Mount Sinai. It is pretended that a goddess ordered him to go and destroy a barbarous nation and that he passed through the Red Sea on foot, with a multitude of men, women, and children. Another time the river Orontes suspended its waters right and left to let him pass, and the Hydaspes did the same. He commanded the sun to stand still; two luminous rays proceeded from his head. He made a fountain of wine spout up by striking the ground with his thyrsis, and engraved his laws on two tables of marble. He wanted only to have afflicted Egypt with ten plagues, to be the perfect copy of Moses.
Vossius is, I think, the first who has extended this parallel. The bishop of Avranches, Huet, has pushed it quite as far, but he adds, in his "Evangelical Demonstrations" that Moses is not only Bacchus, but that he is also Osiris and Typhon. He does not halt in this fine path. Moses, according to him, is Æsculapius, Amphion, Apollo, Adonis, and even Priapus. It is pleasant enough that Huet founds his proof that Moses is Adonis in their both keeping sheep: "Et formosus oves, ad flumina pavit Adonis."
He contends that he is Priapus because Priapus is sometimes painted with an ass, and the Jews were supposed, among the Gentiles, to adore an ass. He gives another proof, not very canonical, which is that the rod of Moses might be compared to the sceptre of Priapus. "Sceptrum tribuitur Priapo, virga Most." Neither is this demonstration in the manner of Euclid.
We will not here speak of the more modern Bacchuses, such as he who lived two hundred years before the Trojan war, and whom the Greeks celebrated as a son of Jupiter, shut up in his thigh. We will pause at him who was supposed to be born on the confines of Egypt and to have performed so many prodigies. Our respect for the sacred Jewish books will not permit us to doubt that the Egyptians, the Arabs, and even the Greeks, have imitated the history of Moses. The difficulty consists solely in not knowing how they could be instructed in this incontrovertible history. With respect to the Egyptians, it is very likely that they never recorded these miracles of Moses, which would have covered them with shame. If they had said a word of it the historians, Josephus and Philo, would not have failed to have taken advantage of it Josephus, in his answer to Appion, made a point of citing all the Egyptian authors who have mentioned Moses, and he finds none who relate one of these miracles. No Jew has ever quoted any Egyptian author who has said a word of the ten plagues of Egypt, of the miraculous passage through the Red Sea, etc. It could not be among the Egyptians, therefore, that this scandalous parallel was formed between the divine Moses and the profane Bacchus.
It is very clear that if a single Egyptian author had said a word of the great miracles of Moses all the synagogue of Alexandria, all the disputatious church of that famous town would have quoted such word, and have triumphed at it, every one after his manner. Athenagorus, Clement, Origen, who have said so many useless things, would have related this important passage a thousand times and it would have been the strongest argument of all the fathers. The whole have kept a profound silence; they Had, therefore, nothing to say. But how was it possible for any Egyptian to speak of the exploits of a man who caused all the first born of the families of Egypt to be killed; who turned the Nile to blood, and who drowned in the Red Sea their king and all his army?
All our historians agree that one Clodowick, a Sicambrian, subjugated Gaul with a handful of barbarians. The English are the first to say that the Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans came by turns to exterminate a part of their nation. If they had not avowed this truth all Europe would have exclaimed against its concealment. The universe should exclaim in the same manner at the amazing prodigies of Moses, of Joshua, of Gideon, Samson, and of so many leaders and prophets. The universe is silent notwithstanding. Amazing mystery! On one side it is palpable mat all is true, since it is found in the holy writings, which are approved by the Church; on the other it is evident that no people have ever mentioned it. Let us worship Providence, and submit ourselves in all things.
The Arabs, who have always loved the marvellous, were probably the first authors of the fables invented of Bacchus, afterwards adopted and embellished by the Greeks. But how came the stories of the Arabs and Greeks to agree so well with those of the Jews? It is known that the Hebrews never communicated their books to any one till the time of the Ptolemies; they regarded such communication as a sacrilege, and Josephus, to justify their obstinacy in concealing the Pentateuch from the rest of the world, says that God punished all foreigners who dared to speak of the Jewish histories. If we are to believe him, the historian Theopompus, for only designing to mention them in his work, became deranged for thirty days, and the tragic poet Theodectes was struck blind for having introduced the name of the Jews into one of his tragedies. Such are the excuses that Flavius Josephus gives in his answer to Appion for the history of the Jews being so long unknown.
These books were of such prodigious scarcity that we only hear of one copy under King Josiah, and this copy had been lost for a long time and was found in the bottom of a chest on the report of Shaphan, scribe to the Pontiff Hilkiah, who carried it to the king.
This circumstance happened, according to the Second Book of Kings, six hundred and twenty-four years before our vulgar era, four hundred years after Homer, and in the most flourishing times of Greece. The Greeks then scarcely knew that there were any Hebrews in the world. The captivity of the Jews at Babylon still more augmented their ignorance of their own books. Esdras must have restored them at the end of seventy years and for already more than five hundred years the fable of Bacchus had been current among the Greeks.
If the Greeks had founded their fables on the Jewish history they would have chosen facts more interesting to mankind, such as the adventures of Abraham, those of Noah, of Methuselah, of Seth, Enoch, Cain, and Eve; of the fatal serpent and of the tree of knowledge, all which names have ever been unknown to them. There was only a slight knowledge of the Jewish people until a long time after the revolution that Alexander produced in Asia and in Europe; the historian Josephus avows it in formal terms. This is the manner in which he expresses himself in the commencement of his reply to Appion, who (by way of parenthesis) was dead when he answered him, for Appion died under the Emperor Claudius, and Josephus wrote under Vespasian.
"As the country we inhabit is distant from the sea we do not apply ourselves to commerce and have no communication with other nations. We content ourselves with cultivating our lands, which are very fertile, and we labor chiefly to bring up our children properly, because nothing appears to us so necessary as to instruct them in the knowledge of our holy laws and in true piety, which inspires them with the desire of observing them. The above reasons, added to others already mentioned, and this manner of life which is peculiar to us, show why we have had no communication with the Greeks, like the Egyptians and Phœnicians. Is it astonishing that our nation, so distant from the sea, not affecting to write anything, and living in the way which I have related, has been little known?"
After such an authentic avowal from a Jew, the most tenacious of the honor of his nation that has ever written, it will be seen that it is impossible for the ancient Greeks to have taken the fable of Bacchus from the holy books of the Hebrews, any more than the sacrifice of Iphigenia, that of the son of Idomeneus, the labors of Hercules, the adventure of Eurydice, and others. The quantity of ancient tales which resemble one another is prodigious. How is it that the Greeks have put into fables what the Hebrews have put into histories? Was it by the gift of invention; was it by a facility of imitation, or in consequence of the accordance of fine minds? To conclude: God has permitted it – a truth which ought to suffice.
Of what consequence is it that the Arabs and Greeks have said the same things as the Jews? We read the Old Testament only to prepare ourselves for the New, and in neither the one nor the other do we seek anything but lessons of benevolence, moderation, gentleness, and true charity.
