Name: Pensées
Author: Blaise Pascal

This is an AI modernization of Pensées into contemporary English. The original is available from French Wikisource (Brunschvicg's edition, Oeuvres de Blaise Pascal XII-XIV, Hachette 1904; scans of the 1925 and 1921 printings). Also available as an epub.

Editor's Introduction

Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont in the Auvergne in 1623. He wrote a treatise on conic sections at sixteen, and in 1642, at eighteen, began building a calculating machine to help his father, a royal tax commissioner at Rouen, with his sums. In 1648, at his request, his brother-in-law Florin Périer carried a tube of mercury up the Puy de Dôme and found it standing lower at the summit than at the foot: the air has weight. In 1654 Pascal wrote his treatise on the arithmetical triangle, and in letters with Pierre de Fermat worked out how to divide the stakes fairly when a game of chance is broken off, the beginning of the mathematics of probability.

On the night of 23 November that year, from about half past ten until half past midnight, he had the experience he recorded in a few lines on a sheet of paper: the date, then "Fire." He sewed the paper into his coat; a servant found it after his death. It stands first in this book as the Memorial. His sister Jacqueline had entered the convent of Port-Royal in 1652, and Pascal now drew close to its circle, the austere Augustinian party its enemies called Jansenists. In 1656 and 1657, as Louis de Montalte, he published eighteen Provincial Letters defending Antoine Arnauld of Port-Royal and mocking the Jesuits' casuistry. In March 1656 his niece Marguerite Périer was cured of a fistula of the eye by a thorn said to be from the crown of thorns; Section XIII, on miracles, returns to it more than once.

He meant to write a defence of Christianity for the comfortable unbeliever. He wrote it in notes on slips of paper, some a page long, some a single word, and sorted many into twenty-seven titled bundles, a step editors date to 1658. He died in Paris on 19 August 1662, aged thirty-nine. His family and friends at Port-Royal published a selection in January 1670 as the Thoughts of M. Pascal on Religion and Some Other Subjects, smoothing the style and leaving out what seemed unfinished or dangerous, including the most startling word in the wager.

Every edition since has had to choose an order. This one follows Léon Brunschvicg's (1897, enlarged in 1904): fourteen sections of his own, from the mind and style through man's wretchedness and the wager to the proofs of Christianity. Scholars now cite Louis Lafuma's order, which keeps Pascal's bundles, but Lafuma's text is still in copyright, while Brunschvicg's critical text is free, and his numbers are the ones older books and translations use. The heart that "has its reasons, which reason does not know" is 277; man "a thinking reed" is 347; the wager, where "you are embarked" and must bet, is 233.

Some of it will read strangely. Many fragments are reminders Pascal wrote to himself, some say a thing twice, and words in square brackets are ones he struck out. Sections IX to XII argue at length from the history of the Jews, from prophecy and from the hidden sense of the Old Testament; they are Pascal's argument, in his terms, translated as he made it.

This edition is translated from Brunschvicg's French text, without his notes; the notes are new. Bible verses are numbered as in English Bibles. Three numbers are missing because Brunschvicg withdrew them in 1904 while keeping his numbering of 1897: 16, an eighteenth-century paraphrase of Gilberte Périer's life of her brother; 603, a sentence Port-Royal had printed apart from 737, where it now stands; and 854, a linking sentence written by a bishop of Montpellier. His appendix of Pascal's questions on miracles, with another man's answers, is left out.

On the cover. The Ex-Voto of 1662, by Philippe de Champaigne, painted for Port-Royal in the year of Pascal's death and now in the Louvre. The painter's daughter, Sister Catherine de Sainte-Suzanne, a nun of Port-Royal, sits with her legs on a stool; the Latin inscription on the wall at the left, outside this crop, records that after a fever of fourteen months, with half her body paralysed and her doctors giving up, she was cured in a moment when she joined her prayers to those of Mother Catherine-Agnès Arnauld, who kneels beside her. Champaigne offered it as the witness of "so great a miracle" and of his joy.

The Memorial

†

The year of grace 1654,

Monday, 23 November, feast of Saint Clement, pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology,

eve of Saint Chrysogonus, martyr, and others,

From about half past ten in the evening until about half past midnight,

Fire.

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,

not of the philosophers and the learned.

Certainty. Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

God of Jesus Christ.

My God and your God.

"Your God shall be my God."

Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except God.

He is to be found only by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Greatness of the human soul.

"Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you."

Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

I have separated myself from him:

They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water.

"My God, will you leave me?"

Let me not be separated from him for ever.

"This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and the one whom you have sent, Jesus Christ."

Jesus Christ.

I have separated myself from him; I have fled him, renounced him, crucified him.

Let me never be separated from him.

He is kept only by the ways taught in the Gospel:

Total and sweet renunciation

Total submission to Jesus Christ and to my spiritual director.

Eternally in joy for one day of trial on earth.

I will not forget your words. Amen.

Section I: Thoughts on the Mind and on Style

1. The difference between the geometrical mind and the mind of finesse. In the one, the principles are palpable but remote from common use, so that for want of habit it is hard to turn one's head that way; but turn it ever so little, and one sees the principles in full; and one would need a thoroughly false mind to reason badly on principles so large that it is almost impossible for them to escape us.¹

But in the mind of finesse, the principles are in common use and before everyone's eyes. There is no need to turn one's head, or to strain oneself; it is only a matter of having good sight, but it must be good, for the principles are so fine and so numerous that it is almost impossible for some not to escape us. Now the omission of one principle leads to error; and so one must have very clear sight to see all the principles, and then a precise mind, so as not to reason falsely on principles that are known.

All geometers would therefore have finesse if they had good sight, for they do not reason falsely on the principles they know; and minds of finesse would be geometers if they could bend their sight towards the unaccustomed principles of geometry.

What makes certain minds of finesse not geometers, then, is that they cannot turn at all towards the principles of geometry; but what makes geometers lack finesse is that they do not see what is in front of them, and that, being used to the clear-cut, coarse principles of geometry, and to reasoning only after they have thoroughly seen and handled their principles, they lose themselves in matters of finesse, where the principles do not let themselves be handled in that way. They are scarcely seen; they are felt rather than seen; it costs infinite pains to make them felt by those who do not feel them for themselves. They are things so delicate and so numerous that it takes a very delicate and very clear sense to feel them, and to judge soundly and precisely according to that feeling, most often without being able to demonstrate them in order, as in geometry, because we do not possess their principles in that way, and it would be an endless task to attempt it. The thing must be seen all at once, at a single glance, and not by steps of reasoning, at least up to a certain point. And so it is rare for geometers to have finesse and for those with finesse to be geometers, because geometers want to treat these fine matters geometrically, and make themselves ridiculous, wanting to begin with definitions and then with principles, which is not the way to proceed in this kind of reasoning. Not that the mind does not do it; but it does it tacitly, naturally and without art, for to express it is beyond every man, and to feel it is given to only a few.

And minds of finesse, on the contrary, being used to judging at a single glance, are so astonished, when they are presented with propositions in which they understand nothing, and which can only be entered by way of definitions and principles so barren that they have never been used to seeing things in such detail, that they are put off and disgusted.

But false minds never have finesse and are never geometers.

Geometers who are only geometers, then, have sound minds, provided everything is well explained to them by definitions and principles; otherwise they are false and insufferable, for they are sound only on principles made perfectly clear.

And those with finesse who have only finesse cannot have the patience to go down to the first principles of speculative and imaginative matters, which they have never seen in the world and which are quite out of common use.

2. Various kinds of sound sense: some in a certain order of things and not in the other orders, where they go wildly astray.

Some draw consequences well from a few principles, and that is one soundness of sense.

Others draw consequences well from things in which there are many principles.

For example, some understand well the effects of water, in which there are few principles; but the consequences are so fine that only an extreme soundness of mind can reach them.

And these would not, perhaps, be great geometers for all that, because geometry comprises a great number of principles, and a mind may be of such a nature that it can penetrate a few principles to the bottom and yet cannot penetrate in the least the things in which there are many.

There are, then, two kinds of mind: one that penetrates the consequences of principles keenly and deeply, and that is the mind of precision; the other that comprehends a great number of principles without confusing them, and that is the geometrical mind. The one is strength and soundness of mind, the other is breadth of mind. Now the one may well exist without the other, since a mind can be strong and narrow, and can also be broad and weak.

3. Those who are used to judging by feeling understand nothing of matters of reasoning, for they want to see to the bottom at a glance and are not used to looking for principles. And the others, on the contrary, who are used to reasoning from principles, understand nothing of matters of feeling, looking there for principles and being unable to see at a glance.

4. Geometry, finesse. True eloquence laughs at eloquence; true morality laughs at morality: that is, the morality of judgement laughs at the morality of the mind, which is without rules.

For feeling belongs to judgement, as the sciences belong to the mind; finesse is the share of judgement, geometry is that of the mind.

To laugh at philosophy is truly to philosophize.

5. Those who judge a work without a rule are, in relation to others, like those who have no watch in relation to the rest. One says, "It's been two hours." The other says, "It's been only three quarters of an hour." I look at my watch, and I say to the one, "You're bored," and to the other, "Time isn't dragging much for you," for it has been an hour and a half; and I laugh at those who say that time drags for me, and that I judge it by fancy: they do not know that I judge by my watch.

6. As we spoil our minds, we spoil our feeling too.

We form our mind and our feeling by conversation; we spoil our mind and our feeling by conversation. Good conversation or bad, then, forms it or spoils it. It matters above all, therefore, to know how to choose well, so as to form it and not spoil it; and we cannot make that choice unless we have already formed it and not spoiled it. This makes a circle, and happy are those who get out of it.

7. The more mind we have, the more men we find who are original; ordinary people find no difference between men.

8. There are many people who listen to a sermon the way they listen to vespers.

9. When we want to correct someone usefully, and show another that he is mistaken, we must notice from which side he is looking at the matter, for from that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but show him the side from which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken and only failed to see all the sides. Now no one is offended at not seeing everything, but no one wants to have been mistaken; and perhaps this comes from the fact that by nature man cannot see everything, and that by nature he cannot be mistaken on the side he is looking at, just as the perceptions of the senses are always true.

10. We are usually more convinced by the reasons we have found ourselves than by those that have come into the minds of others.

11. All great diversions are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those the world has invented, there is none more to be feared than the theatre. It is so natural and so delicate a representation of the passions that it stirs them and brings them to birth in our hearts, and above all the passion of love, most of all when love is represented as very chaste and very decent. For the more innocent it seems to innocent souls, the more capable they are of being moved by it. Its violence pleases our self-love, which at once forms a desire to cause the same effects that we see so well represented; and at the same time we make ourselves a conscience founded on the decency of the feelings we see there, and these take away the fear of pure souls, who imagine that it does no harm to purity to love with a love that seems to them so wise.

And so we leave the theatre with a heart so full of all the beauties and all the sweetness of love, and a soul and a mind so persuaded of its innocence, that we are quite ready to receive its first impressions, or rather to look for the occasion to bring them to birth in someone's heart, so as to receive the same pleasures and the same sacrifices that we have seen so well portrayed on the stage.

12. Scaramouche, who thinks of only one thing.

The Doctor, who talks for a quarter of an hour after he has said everything, so full is he of the desire to talk.²

13. We like to watch the error, the passion, of Cleobuline, because she does not know it; she would displease us if she were not deceived.³

14. When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, we find in ourselves the truth of what we hear, which we did not know was there, so that we are inclined to love the one who makes us feel it; for he has not made a display of his own riches, but of ours; and so this kindness makes him dear to us, besides which the community of understanding we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love him.

15. Eloquence that persuades by gentleness, not by command; as a tyrant, not as a king.

17. Rivers are roads that move, and carry us where we want to go.

18. When we do not know the truth of a thing, it is good that there should be a common error to fix men's minds: the moon, for example, to which people attribute the change of the seasons, the progress of diseases, etc.; for man's chief disease is a restless curiosity about things he cannot know, and it is not so bad for him to be in error as to be in that useless curiosity.

The manner of writing of Epictetus, of Montaigne and of Salomon de Tultie is the most in use, the one that slips into the mind best, stays longest in the memory and is most often quoted, because it is made up entirely of thoughts born of the ordinary talk of life; as when people speak of the common error, current in the world, that the moon is the cause of everything, they will never fail to say that Salomon de Tultie says that when we do not know the truth of a thing, it is good that there should be a common error, etc., which is the thought on the other side of the sheet.⁴

19. The last thing we find in writing a work is what to put first.

20. Order. Why should I undertake to divide my moral teaching into four rather than six? Why should I establish virtue in four, in two, in one? Why in Epictetus's abstine and sustine, abstain and endure, rather than in following nature, or in doing one's own business without injustice, like Plato, or in something else? "But there," you will say, "everything is contained in a single word." Yes, but that is useless unless it is explained; and when one comes to explain it, as soon as one opens this precept that contains all the others, they come out of it in the very confusion you wanted to avoid. And so, when they are all shut up in one, they are hidden and useless, as in a chest, and never appear except in their natural confusion. Nature has established them all without shutting one up inside another.

21. Nature has put each of her truths in itself; our art shuts them up one inside another, but that is not natural: each holds its own place.

22. Let no one say that I have said nothing new: the arrangement of the material is new. When we play tennis, both players play with the same ball, but one places it better.

I would as soon be told that I have used old words. As if the same thoughts did not form a different body of discourse by a different arrangement, just as the same words form different thoughts by their different arrangement!

23. Words differently arranged make a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged make different effects.

24. Language. We must not turn the mind aside to other things except to rest it, and then only when it is fitting: rest it when it needs rest, and not otherwise; for whoever rests it out of season tires it, and whoever tires it out of season rests it, since then we drop everything; so much does the malice of concupiscence delight in doing exactly the opposite of what others want to get from us without giving us pleasure, which is the coin for which we give whatever is wanted.⁵

25. Eloquence. There must be the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true.

26. Eloquence is a painting of thought; and so those who, having painted, go on adding, make a picture instead of a portrait.

27. Miscellany. Language. Those who make antitheses by forcing words are like those who make false windows for the sake of symmetry: their rule is not to speak correctly but to make their figures correct.

28. Symmetry, in what we see at a glance, founded on there being no reason to do otherwise, and founded also on the shape of man; whence it comes that we want symmetry only in breadth, not in height or depth.

29. When we see a natural style, we are astonished and delighted, for we expected to see an author and we find a man. Whereas those who have good taste, and who on seeing a book expect to find a man, are quite surprised to find an author: You have spoken more as a poet than as a man. They do nature great honour who teach it that it can speak of everything, even of theology.

30. [Let the reader look at the Jansenist's speeches in the second, fourth and fifth Letters: that is lofty and serious.⁶

I hate equally the buffoon and the bombastic]: we would make a friend of neither.

We consult only the ear, because we lack heart: the rule is good breeding. A poet and not a gentleman.

[After my eighth Letter, I thought I had answered enough.]

Beauty of omission, of judgement.

31. All the false beauties we blame in Cicero have admirers, and a great many of them.

32. There is a certain model of charm and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature, weak or strong, such as it is, and the thing that pleases us.

Everything formed on this model pleases us: house, song, speech, verse, prose, woman, birds, rivers, trees, rooms, clothes, etc. Everything not made on this model displeases those who have good taste.

And as there is a perfect relation between a song and a house that are made on this good model, because they resemble this single model, though each after its kind, there is likewise a perfect relation between things made on the bad model. Not that the bad model is single, for there is an infinity of them; but every bad sonnet, for example, whatever false model it is made on, perfectly resembles a woman dressed on that model.

Nothing makes us understand better how ridiculous a false sonnet is than to consider its nature and its model, and then to imagine a woman or a house made on that model.

33. Poetic beauty. As we say poetic beauty, we ought also to say geometric beauty and medical beauty; but we do not, and the reason is that we know well what the object of geometry is, and that it consists in proofs, and what the object of medicine is, and that it consists in healing; but we do not know what charm consists in, which is the object of poetry. We do not know what this natural model is that we must imitate; and for want of that knowledge we have invented certain bizarre terms, "golden age, wonder of our days, fateful," etc., and we call this jargon poetic beauty.

But whoever imagines a woman on that model, which consists in saying little things in big words, will see a pretty young lady covered with mirrors and chains, and will laugh, because we know better what a woman's charm consists in than the charm of verse. But those who knew nothing about it would admire her in that get-up; and there are many villages where she would be taken for the queen; and that is why we call sonnets made on that model village queens.

34. In society no one passes for a judge of verse unless he has hung out the sign of poet, of mathematician, etc. But universal people want no sign, and make hardly any difference between the trade of a poet and that of an embroiderer.

Universal people are called neither poets nor geometers, etc.; but they are all of these, and judges of them all. No one can guess what they are. They will talk about whatever was being talked about when they came in. We do not notice one quality in them rather than another, except when there is need to use it; but then we remember it, for it belongs equally to this character that no one says of them that they speak well when language is not in question, and that people do say they speak well when it is.

It is therefore false praise to say of a man, when he comes in, that he is very skilled in poetry; and it is a bad sign when no one turns to a man when it comes to judging some verses.

35. It must be impossible to say of him either "He is a mathematician," or "a preacher," or "eloquent," but only "He is a gentleman." That universal quality alone pleases me. When on seeing a man we remember his book, it is a bad sign; I would like no quality to be noticed except as it is met and there is occasion to use it, nothing in excess, for fear that one quality should prevail and have the man christened by it. Let no one think of his speaking well except when speaking well is in question; but let them think of it then.

36. Man is full of needs: he loves only those who can satisfy them all. "He's a good mathematician," someone will say. But I have no use for mathematics; he would take me for a proposition. "He's a good soldier." He would take me for a besieged town. What is needed, then, is a gentleman who can adapt himself to all my needs in general.

37. [A little of everything. Since we cannot be universal and know all that can be known about everything, we must know a little about everything. For it is far finer to know something about everything than to know everything about one thing; that universality is the finest. If we could have both, better still; but if we must choose, we must choose that one, and the world feels this and does it, for the world is often a good judge.]

38. A poet and not a gentleman.

39. If lightning struck low places, etc., the poets, and those who can reason only about things of that kind, would lack proofs.

40. As for the examples we take to prove other things: if we wanted to prove the examples, we would take the other things as examples of them; for, as we always believe the difficulty lies in what we want to prove, we find the examples clearer and a help in showing it.

And so, when we want to show a general thing, we must give the particular rule of one case; but if we want to show a particular case, we shall have to begin with the general rule. For we always find obscure the thing we want to prove, and clear the thing we use for the proof; for when a thing is put forward to be proved, we at once fill ourselves with the fancy that it is therefore obscure, and, on the contrary, that what is to prove it is clear, and so we understand it easily.

41. Martial's epigrams. Man loves malice; but not against the one-eyed or the unfortunate: against the proud who prosper. Otherwise we go wrong.

For concupiscence is the source of all our impulses, and humanity, etc.

We must please those who have humane and tender feelings.

The one about the two one-eyed people is worthless, for it does not console them, and only gives a point to the author's glory. Whatever is only for the author is worthless. He will cut back ambitious ornament, as Horace has it.

42. Prince said to a king pleases, because it lowers his rank.

43. Certain authors, speaking of their works, say, "My book, my commentary, my history," etc. They smack of the townsman with a house on the street who always has "my place" in his mouth. They would do better to say, "Our book, our commentary, our history," etc., seeing that there is usually more of other people's property in them than of their own.

44. Do you want people to believe good things of you? Do not say any.

45. Languages are ciphers in which it is not letters that are changed into letters, but words into words; so that an unknown language can be deciphered.

46. Clever talkers, bad character.

47. There are some who speak well and do not write well. It is because the place and the audience warm them, and draw more from their minds than they find there without that warmth.

48. When we find repeated words in a discourse and, trying to correct them, find them so apt that we would spoil the discourse by changing them, we must leave them: that is the sign; and here envy plays its part, which is blind, and does not know that repetition is no fault in that place; for there is no general rule.

49. Masking nature and disguising it. No more king, pope, bishop, but august monarch, etc.; no Paris, but capital of the kingdom. There are places where Paris must be called Paris, and others where it must be called the capital of the kingdom.

50. The same meaning changes with the words that express it. Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them. Examples must be sought…

51. "Pyrrhonist" for "obstinate".

52. No one says "Cartesian" but those who are not; "pedant", but a pedant; "provincial", but a provincial; and I would wager that it was the printer who put it in the title of the Letters to a Provincial.

53. A carriage versé or renversé, upset or overturned, according to the intention.

Répandre or verser, to spill or to pour, according to the intention. The plea of Le Maître, the advocate, in the case of the friar forced into his order.

54. Miscellany. A turn of phrase: "I had wanted to apply myself to that."

55. The aperitive virtue of a key, the attractive virtue of a hook.

56. Guessing: "The part I take in your distress." The Cardinal did not want to be guessed.

"My mind is full of anxiety." "I am full of anxiety" is better.

57. I have fared badly with these compliments: "I have given you a great deal of trouble"; "I am afraid of boring you"; "I fear this is too long." Either we carry people along or we irritate them.

58. "You have bad manners: excuse me, please." Without that excuse I would not have noticed there was any insult. Saving your reverence, there is nothing bad in it but their excuse.

59. "To quench the torch of sedition": too luxuriant.

"The restlessness of his genius": two bold words too many.

Pascal's terms are l'esprit de géométrie and l'esprit de finesse. Géométrie stood in his day for mathematics in general, and a géomètre, here a geometer, was any mathematician. Finesse, a word English has borrowed, carries delicacy and subtlety of perception: the mind that takes in a great many fine principles at once, at a glance and by feeling, as a person of taste judges a face or a room. Both terms are kept as Pascal's throughout. ↩
Scaramouche and the Doctor are stock characters of the commedia dell'arte. The Scaramouche of Pascal's Paris was Tiberio Fiorilli, who played there with the Italian troupe in the 1640s and again from 1653; the Doctor is the comedy's learned bore. ↩
Cleobuline, a princess and then queen of Corinth in Madeleine de Scudéry's vast novel Artamène, or the Grand Cyrus (1649-53), loves one of her own subjects without knowing that she loves him. ↩
Salomon de Tultie is an anagram of Louis de Montalte, the name under which Pascal published the Provincial Letters, and of Amos Dettonville, the name he used for his last mathematical writings. Pascal is naming his own manner of writing beside Epictetus's and Montaigne's. ↩
Concupiscence is the theologians' word, and Pascal's, for more than sexual desire: since Augustine it has named the disordered craving of fallen man for anything other than God, the desire that turns us towards ourselves and the world. Pascal follows the First Letter of John (2:16) in dividing it into three: the concupiscence of the flesh, the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life. ↩
The Letters are Pascal's own Provincial Letters (1656-57), published under a false name; in the early letters the narrator's friend, a Jansenist, speaks gravely in the midst of the comedy. ↩

Section II: The Wretchedness of Man without God

60. First part: The wretchedness of man without God.

Second part: The happiness of man with God.

Or, put another way:

First part: That nature is corrupt, proved by nature itself.

Second part: That there is a Redeemer, proved by Scripture.⁷

61. Order. I might well have arranged this discourse in an order like this one: show the vanity of every kind of condition, show the vanity of ordinary lives, and then the vanity of the philosophers' lives, the Pyrrhonists who doubt everything and the Stoics. But the order would not hold. I know a little of what order is, and how few people understand it. No human science can keep it. Saint Thomas Aquinas did not keep it. Mathematics keeps it, but mathematics is useless in its depths.

62. Preface to the first part. Speak of those who have written on knowing oneself: of Charron, Montaigne's follower, and his divisions, which depress and bore you; of Montaigne's muddle, how he felt keenly the want of a straight method and dodged it by jumping from subject to subject, how he was after fine manners. What a foolish project he has, to paint himself! And not in passing, against his own maxims, as anyone may slip; but by his own maxims, as his first and principal design. To say silly things by chance and from weakness is a common failing; but to say them on purpose is not to be borne, and to say such things as these…

63. Montaigne. Montaigne's faults are great. Lewd words: that is worth nothing, whatever Mademoiselle de Gournay says in his defence. Credulous: people without eyes. Ignorant: the squaring of the circle, a greater world. His views on suicide, on death. He breeds a carelessness about salvation, without fear and without repentance. His book was not written to lead anyone to piety, so he was under no obligation there; but we are always under an obligation not to lead anyone away from it. We can excuse his rather free and pleasure-loving views on some occasions of life (Montaigne, 730, 331); but we cannot excuse his entirely pagan views on death, for a man must give up all piety if he does not at least want to die a Christian; and through his whole book he thinks only of dying in a cowardly, easy way.⁸

64. It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there.

65. What is good in Montaigne can only be acquired with difficulty. What is bad in him (I mean apart from his morals) could have been corrected in a moment, if someone had warned him that he told too many stories and talked too much about himself.

66. We must know ourselves. Even if it did not help us find the truth, it at least helps us to order our lives, and nothing is more right than that.

67. The vanity of the sciences. Knowing about external things will not console me, in a time of affliction, for not knowing how to live; but knowing how to live will always console me for not knowing about external things.

68. Men are not taught to be gentlemen, and they are taught everything else; and there is nothing they pride themselves on knowing so much as how to be gentlemen. The one thing they pride themselves on knowing is the one thing they are never taught.⁹

69. When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.

69 bis. Two infinities, the middle. When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.

70. Nature cannot… [Nature has set us so exactly in the middle that if we change one side of the scales, we change the other as well: je fesons, zôa trékei. It makes me think there are springs in our heads so arranged that whoever touches one touches its opposite too.]¹⁰

71. Too much wine and too little: give him none and he cannot find the truth; give him too much, and it is the same.

72. Man's disproportion. [This is where natural knowledge leads us. If it is not true, there is no truth in man; and if it is, he finds in it great cause for humiliation, forced to abase himself one way or the other. And since he cannot go on living without believing it, I want him, before he enters on any larger inquiries into nature, to consider nature seriously and at leisure, just once, and to look at himself as well, and, knowing what proportion there is…] Let man, then, contemplate the whole of nature in its high and full majesty, and turn his eyes away from the low objects around him. Let him look at that blazing light, the sun, hung like an eternal lamp to light the universe; let the earth seem to him a mere point beside the vast circle the sun describes; and let him be amazed that this vast circle is itself only a fine point beside the circle traced by the stars as they roll through the firmament. But if our sight stops there, let the imagination go further: it will tire of conceiving long before nature tires of supplying. This whole visible world is only an imperceptible speck in the ample bosom of nature. No idea comes near it. We may inflate our conceptions beyond every imaginable space; we bring forth only atoms beside the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. In the end, it is the greatest sign we can perceive of God's omnipotence that our imagination loses itself in that thought.¹¹

Let man, coming back to himself, consider what he is beside what exists; let him regard himself as lost in this remote corner of nature; and from the little prison cell where he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him learn to put their true value on the earth, its kingdoms, its cities, and himself. What is a man in the infinite?

But to show him another marvel just as astonishing, let him look into the most delicate things he knows. Let a mite show him, in the smallness of its body, parts incomparably smaller still: legs with joints, veins in the legs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops; let him divide these last things again, and exhaust his powers on such conceptions, and let the last object he can arrive at be the subject of what we are now saying. He will think, perhaps, that he has reached the extreme of smallness in nature. I want to show him a new abyss inside it. I want to paint for him not only the visible universe but all the immensity of nature that can be conceived, within the compass of this miniature atom. Let him see in it an infinity of universes, each with its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportions as the visible world; on that earth, animals, and at last mites, in which he will find again everything the first ones showed him; and finding the same thing yet again in these others, without end and without rest, let him lose himself in these wonders, as astonishing in their smallness as the others in their extent. For who will not marvel that our body, which a moment ago was not perceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, should now be a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, beside the nothingness that no one can ever reach?

Whoever considers himself in this way will be frightened of himself; and seeing himself held up, in the bulk nature has given him, between these two abysses of the infinite and nothingness, he will tremble at the sight of such wonders; and I believe that, as his curiosity turns into awe, he will be more inclined to contemplate them in silence than to investigate them with presumption.

For in the end, what is man in nature? A nothing beside the infinite, an everything beside nothing, a middle between nothing and everything. Infinitely far from grasping the extremes, he finds the end of things and their beginning hidden from him beyond all hope in an impenetrable secret. He is as incapable of seeing the nothing he was drawn out of as the infinite he is swallowed up in.

What will he do, then, but glimpse some appearance of the middle of things, in eternal despair of knowing either their beginning or their end? All things have come out of nothing and are carried on to the infinite. Who will follow these astonishing courses? The author of these wonders understands them. No one else can.

For want of contemplating these infinities, men have flung themselves rashly into the investigation of nature, as if they bore some proportion to it. It is a strange thing that they should have wanted to understand the principles of things, and from there to arrive at knowing everything, with a presumption as infinite as its object. For there is no doubt that no one can form such a plan without a presumption, or a capacity, as infinite as nature.

Once we are taught, we understand that nature has engraved its own image and its author's on all things, and so nearly all of them share in its double infinity. That is how we see that all the sciences are infinite in the range of their inquiries; for who doubts that geometry, for instance, has an infinity of infinities of propositions to set out? They are infinite too in the number and the fineness of their principles; for who does not see that the principles put forward as the last do not stand up by themselves, but rest on others, which rest on others again, and so never allow a last one? But we make some last ones that look final to reason, just as we do with material things, where we call a point indivisible once our senses can perceive nothing beyond it, although by its nature it can be divided to infinity.

Of these two infinities of the sciences, the infinity of greatness is much easier to see, and that is why few people have claimed to know all things. "I am going to speak of everything," said Democritus.

But the infinity of smallness is much less visible. The philosophers have been far readier to claim they had reached it, and that is where every one of them has stumbled. That is what has given rise to such familiar titles as Of the Principles of Things and Of the Principles of Philosophy, and the like, which are as pretentious in fact, though less so in appearance, as that other one which hits you in the eye: De omni scibili, "Of everything that can be known".¹²

We naturally believe ourselves far more capable of reaching the centre of things than of embracing their circumference. The visible extent of the world visibly surpasses us; but because it is we who surpass little things, we believe ourselves better able to master them. And yet it takes no less capacity to reach nothingness than to reach the whole. It takes an infinite capacity for either, and it seems to me that anyone who had understood the ultimate principles of things could also arrive at knowing the infinite. The one depends on the other, and the one leads to the other. These extremes touch and join by having gone so far apart, and they find each other again in God, and in God alone.

Let us know our reach, then. We are something, and we are not everything. What being we have keeps from us the knowledge of first principles, which are born of nothingness; and the little being we have hides from us the sight of the infinite.

Our intelligence holds the same rank in the order of intelligible things as our body in the extent of nature.

Limited in every way as we are, this state that holds the middle between two extremes shows itself in all our faculties. Our senses perceive nothing extreme. Too much noise deafens us, too much light dazzles, too much distance and too much nearness hinder sight, too much length and too much brevity obscure a speech, too much truth bewilders us. I know people who cannot understand that four from nothing leaves nothing. First principles are too self-evident for us; too much pleasure grates; too many consonances in music displease; and too many kindnesses irritate, since we want to be able to overpay the debt: kindnesses are welcome as long as it seems they can be repaid; when they go far beyond that, gratitude turns into hatred, as Tacitus says. We feel neither extreme heat nor extreme cold. Excessive qualities are our enemies, and imperceptible: we no longer feel them, we suffer them. Too much youth and too much age hinder the mind, and so do too much and too little teaching. In short, extreme things are for us as if they did not exist, and we do not exist for them: they escape us, or we escape them.

That is our true state. It is what makes us incapable of knowing anything for certain and of being wholly ignorant. We sail on a vast middle sea, always uncertain and drifting, pushed from one end towards the other. Whatever fixed point we think we can fasten ourselves to and steady ourselves by, it shifts and leaves us; and if we follow it, it slips out of our grasp, glides away from us and flees in an eternal flight. Nothing stays still for us. This is the state that is natural to us, and yet the most contrary to our inclination. We burn with the desire to find firm footing and a last, fixed base on which to build a tower rising to the infinite; but our whole foundation cracks, and the earth opens down to the abyss.

Let us not look for assurance and stability, then. Our reason is always deceived by the inconstancy of appearances, and nothing can fix the finite between the two infinities that enclose it and flee from it.

Once this is well understood, I believe each of us will stay quietly in the state where nature has put him. Since this middle that has fallen to our lot is always far from the extremes, what does it matter if one man understands things a little better than another? If he does, he takes them from a little higher up; but is he not still infinitely far from the end, and is not our life, for all its ten years more, still infinitely far from eternity?

In view of these infinities all finite things are equal, and I do not see why we should settle our imagination on one rather than another. The mere comparison we make between ourselves and the finite is painful to us.

If man studied himself first, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How could a part know the whole? "But perhaps he will aspire at least to know the parts that are in some proportion to him?" But the parts of the world are all so related and so linked together that I believe it impossible to know one without the other and without the whole.

Man, for instance, is related to everything he knows. He needs a place to hold him, time to last in, motion to live, elements to make him up, warmth and food to nourish him, air to breathe. He sees light, he feels bodies. In short, everything is bound up with him. To know man, then, we must know why he needs air to live; and to know air, we must know how it comes to stand in this relation to the life of man, and so on. Flame cannot last without air; therefore, to know the one, we must know the other.

All things, then, are caused and causing, helped and helping, indirect and direct, and all hold together by a natural, imperceptible bond that links the most distant and the most different. I hold it impossible, therefore, to know the parts without knowing the whole, any more than to know the whole without knowing each part in particular.

[The eternity of things, in themselves or in God, must also astonish our little span of life. The fixed and constant stillness of nature, beside the continual change that goes on in us, must have the same effect.]

And what completes our inability to know things is that they are simple in themselves, while we are composed of two natures, opposite and of different kinds, soul and body. For it is impossible that the part of us that reasons should be anything but spiritual; and if anyone claimed that we were simply bodily, that would shut us out from the knowledge of things far more completely, since nothing is so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself. It is not possible for us to know how matter could know itself.

And so, if we are simply material, we can know nothing at all; and if we are composed of mind and matter, we cannot know perfectly the things that are simple, whether spiritual or bodily.

That is why nearly all philosophers confuse the ideas of things, and speak of bodily things in spiritual terms and of spiritual things in bodily terms. They say boldly that bodies tend downward, that they aspire to their centre, that they flee their own destruction, that they abhor a vacuum, that nature has inclinations, sympathies, antipathies, all of them things that belong only to minds. And when they speak of minds, they think of them as being in a place, and attribute to them movement from one place to another, which belongs only to bodies.

Instead of receiving the ideas of these pure things as they are, we dye them with our own qualities, and stamp our composite being on all the simple things we contemplate.

Who would not think, seeing us compose everything of mind and body, that this mixture at least would be perfectly intelligible to us? Yet it is the thing we understand least. Man is to himself the most prodigious object in nature; for he cannot conceive what body is, still less what mind is, and least of all how a body can be united with a mind. That is the height of his difficulties, and yet it is his own being. The way in which spirits are joined to bodies cannot be understood by men, and yet this is man, as Augustine says.

Finally, to complete the proof of our weakness, I shall end with these two considerations…

73. [But perhaps this subject is beyond the reach of reason. Let us examine, then, what reason has come up with on matters within its strength. If there is anything to which its own interest ought to have made it apply itself most seriously, it is the search for its sovereign good, the highest good of all. Let us see, then, where these strong and clear-sighted souls have placed it, and whether they agree.

[One says the sovereign good lies in virtue, another puts it in pleasure; one in the knowledge of nature, another in truth, happy the man who could learn the causes of things, as Virgil sang; another in total ignorance, another in freedom from pain, others in resisting appearances, another in wondering at nothing, to wonder at nothing is almost the one thing that can make a man happy and keep him so, as Horace has it; and the true Pyrrhonists in their ataraxia, their unruffled calm, in doubt and perpetual suspension of judgement; and others, wiser, think they can find something a little better. A fine reward for all our trouble!

[To be moved after the laws, under the next heading.

[Still, we must see whether this fine philosophy has gained nothing certain from so long and so strenuous a labour; perhaps at least the soul will know itself. Let us hear the world's schoolmasters on the subject. What have they thought of its substance? (Montaigne, 395.) Have they had better luck in lodging it? (395.) What have they found out about its origin, its duration and its departure? (399.)

[Is the soul, then, still too noble a subject for reason's feeble lights? Let us bring reason down to matter, then, and see whether it knows what the very body it animates is made of, and the other bodies it contemplates and moves at will. What have they known of it, these great dogmatists who are ignorant of nothing? (393.) Of these opinions…¹³

[That would surely be enough, if reason were reasonable. It is reasonable enough to admit that it has not yet been able to find anything firm; but it does not yet despair of getting there. On the contrary, it is as eager as ever in the search, and confident that it has within itself the strength needed for the conquest. We must finish the job, then, and, having examined its powers in their effects, let us look at them in themselves, and see whether reason has any forms and any holds capable of grasping the truth.]

74. A letter on the folly of human science and philosophy.

This letter to come before diversion.

Happy the man who could… To wonder at nothing.

Two hundred and eighty kinds of sovereign good in Montaigne.

74 bis. For the philosophers, two hundred and eighty sovereign goods.

75. Part I, book 2, chapter 1, section 4.

[Conjecture. It will not be hard to bring it down one more step and make it look ridiculous. For, to begin with itself,] what is more absurd than to say that lifeless bodies have passions, fears, horrors? That insensible bodies, without life and even incapable of life, should have passions, which presuppose a soul to feel them, at least the sensitive soul of an animal? And, on top of that, that the object of this horror should be the vacuum? What is there in a vacuum that could frighten them? What could be lower or more ridiculous? Nor is that all: they are supposed to have in themselves a principle of motion for avoiding the vacuum. Do they have arms, legs, muscles, nerves?¹⁴

76. Write against those who probe the sciences too deeply. Descartes.

77. I cannot forgive Descartes. He would have liked, in his whole philosophy, to do without God; but he could not help making God give the world a flick of the finger to set it in motion. After that, he has no more use for God.

78. Descartes useless and uncertain.

79. [Descartes. We must say, in broad terms, "That is done by shape and motion," because it is true. But to say which shapes and motions, and to assemble the machine, is ridiculous. It is useless, uncertain and laborious. And even if it were true, we do not think the whole of philosophy worth an hour's trouble.]

80. Why does a lame man not irritate us, when a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we walk straight, while a lame mind says it is we who are limping. If it were not for that, we would pity him and not be angry.

Epictetus puts the question far more forcefully: why are we not annoyed if someone says we have a headache, and annoyed when someone says we reason badly, or choose badly? The cause of it is that we are quite certain we have no headache and are not lame; but we are not so sure that we are choosing the truth. Our only assurance of it is that we see it with all our sight, and so when another man sees the opposite with all of his, it leaves us in suspense and shakes us, and still more when a thousand others laugh at our choice; for then we have to prefer our own lights to those of so many others, and that is bold and difficult. The senses never meet this contradiction about a lame man.

81. The mind naturally believes, and the will naturally loves; so that, for want of true objects, they have to fasten on false ones.

82. Imagination. It is the deceiving part of man, this mistress of error and falsehood, and all the more treacherous for not being treacherous always; for it would be an infallible rule of truth if it were an infallible rule of lies. But since it is false most of the time, it gives no sign of its nature, and stamps the true and the false with the same mark.

I do not mean madmen; I mean the wisest; and it is among them that imagination has its great gift of persuasion. Reason can shout as it likes; it cannot set the value of things.

This proud power, the enemy of reason, which loves to check and dominate it to show how much it can do in every field, has established in man a second nature. It has its happy and its unhappy, its healthy, its sick, its rich, its poor. It makes reason believe, doubt and deny. It suspends the senses, and it makes them feel. It has its fools and its wise; and nothing vexes us more than to see that it fills its guests with a satisfaction far fuller and more complete than reason does. Those who are clever by imagination are pleased with themselves in a way the prudent can never reasonably be. They look down on people with an air of command; they argue boldly and confidently, the others fearfully and with misgivings; and that cheerful face often wins them the advantage in the opinion of the audience, so much do the imaginary wise find favour with judges of their own kind. Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, in rivalry with reason, which can only make its friends wretched: the one covers them with glory, the other with shame.

Who hands out reputation? Who gives respect and veneration to persons, to works, to laws, to the great, if not this imagining faculty? All the riches of the earth are not enough without its consent!

Would you not say that this magistrate, whose venerable old age commands the respect of a whole people, governs himself by pure and lofty reason, and judges things by their nature, without stopping at idle circumstances that touch only the imagination of the weak? Watch him go in to hear a sermon, bringing to it the most devout zeal, strengthening the solidity of his reason with the ardour of his charity: there he sits, ready to listen with exemplary respect. Let the preacher appear; let nature have given him a hoarse voice and an odd cast of face, let his barber have shaved him badly, and let chance have smudged him with dirt into the bargain: whatever great truths he announces, I'll wager our senator loses his gravity.

Put the greatest philosopher in the world on a plank wider than he needs, with a precipice beneath it: however surely his reason convinces him he is safe, his imagination will win. Many could not bear even the thought of it without turning pale and breaking into a sweat.

I do not want to list all its effects.

Who does not know that the sight of cats, or rats, or the crunch of a coal underfoot, and so on, can throw reason clean off its hinges? A tone of voice imposes on the wisest, and changes the force of a speech or a poem.

Love or hatred changes the face of justice. And how much juster an advocate finds the case he is pleading when he has been well paid in advance! How much better his bold gestures make it look to the judges, taken in by the show! What a droll thing reason is, steered by a breath of wind, and any way it blows!

I could cite almost every action of men, which hardly move except by imagination's jolts. For reason has been forced to give way, and the wisest reason takes for its principles the ones that men's imagination has rashly brought in, in each place.

[Anyone who wanted to follow reason alone would be a madman in the judgement of the common run of men. We must judge by the judgement of the greater part of the world. Because the world has so decided, we must work all day and wear ourselves out for goods we know to be imaginary; and when sleep has rested us from the fatigues of our reason, we must leap straight up and run after smoke, and take the impressions of this mistress of the world. That is one of the principles of error, but it is not the only one. Man has done well to make an alliance of the true with the false, although in this peace imagination has much the better of it; for in war it has far more. Reason never masters imagination, while imagination often throws reason clean out of the saddle.]

Our magistrates have understood this mystery well. Their red robes, the ermine they swaddle themselves in like Rabelais's Furred Cats, the palaces where they sit in judgement, the fleurs-de-lis, all that august apparatus was most necessary; and if physicians did not have their cassocks and their slippers, and the doctors of the university their square caps and their gowns cut four times too full, they would never have fooled the world, which cannot resist so authentic a display. If they had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no need of square caps; the majesty of their sciences would command respect by itself. But having only imaginary sciences, they must take up these empty instruments that strike the imagination, which is what they have to deal with; and in that way, in fact, they win respect. Only soldiers have not disguised themselves like this, because their part is in fact more essential: they establish themselves by force, the others by play-acting.

That is why our kings have not gone looking for such disguises. They have not masked themselves in extraordinary clothes to look like kings; they have surrounded themselves with guards and halberds. Those armed brutes whose hands and strength are for the king alone, the trumpets and drums marching ahead, and the legions all around, make the steadiest men tremble. Kings do not have the costume only; they have the force. It would take a very refined reason to look upon the Grand Seigneur, the Ottoman sultan, in his superb seraglio, surrounded by forty thousand janissaries, as just another man.

We cannot so much as see a lawyer in his gown with his cap on his head without forming a favourable opinion of his competence.

Imagination disposes of everything. It makes beauty, justice and happiness, which is everything the world has. I should dearly like to see the Italian book I know only by its title, which by itself is worth a good many books: Dell'opinione regina del mondo, "Of opinion, queen of the world". I subscribe to it without having read it, except for whatever is bad in it, if there is anything.

Those are, more or less, the effects of this deceiving faculty, which seems to have been given us on purpose to lead us into a necessary error. We have plenty of other principles of error. Old impressions are not the only ones that can mislead us; the charms of novelty have the same power. Out of this come all the disputes of men, who accuse each other either of following the false impressions of their childhood or of running rashly after new ones. Who holds the just middle? Let him come forward and prove it. There is no principle, however natural, even one held since childhood, that cannot be passed off as a false impression, either of teaching or of the senses.

"Because you have believed since childhood that a box was empty when you saw nothing in it," they say, "you have believed a vacuum possible. That is an illusion of your senses, strengthened by habit, and science must correct it." And the others say: "Because you were told in the Schools that there is no vacuum, your common sense has been corrupted; it grasped the matter clearly before that bad impression, and you must correct it by going back to your first nature." Who, then, has deceived you? The senses, or your schooling?

We have another principle of error in illness. Illness spoils our judgement and our senses; and if serious illnesses alter them visibly, I do not doubt that slight ones make their mark too, in proportion.

Our own interest is another marvellous instrument for putting out our eyes, pleasantly. The fairest man in the world is not allowed to be judge in his own cause. I know some who, to avoid falling into that self-love, have been the most unjust men in the world in the other direction: the sure way to lose a perfectly just case was to have it recommended to them by their close relations.

Justice and truth are two points so fine that our instruments are too blunt to touch them exactly. If they do reach them, they crush the point and press all around it, more on the false than on the true.

[Man is so happily made, then, that he has no accurate principle of the true and several excellent ones of the false. Let us now see how many… But the most amusing cause of his errors is the war between the senses and reason.]

83. The chapter on the deceiving powers must begin with this. Man is nothing but a creature full of error, natural error that cannot be wiped out without grace. Nothing shows him the truth. Everything deceives him. Those two sources of truth, reason and the senses, besides each lacking sincerity, deceive each other in turn. The senses deceive reason with false appearances; and the same trickery they practise on reason they receive from it in their turn: reason takes its revenge. The passions of the soul trouble the senses and make false impressions on them. They vie with each other in lying and deceiving.

But besides these errors, which come by accident and from want of intelligence, with his heterogeneous faculties…

84. The imagination enlarges small objects until they fill our soul, by a fantastic estimate; and with rash insolence it shrinks great ones down to its own measure, as when we speak of God.

85. The things that matter most to us, such as hiding how little we own, are often almost nothing; it is a nothing that our imagination swells into a mountain. Another turn of the imagination lets us see it without any trouble.

86. [My fancy makes me hate a man who croaks and a man who makes a mess when he eats. Fancy carries great weight. What shall we gain from that? That we should follow this weight because it is natural? No; but that we should resist it…]

87. Næ iste magno conatu magnas nugas dixerit: that man will take great pains to say great nonsense.

Quasi quidquam infelicius sit homine cui sua figmenta dominantur: as if anything were more wretched than a man ruled by his own imaginings. (Pliny; Montaigne, 583.)

88. Children who take fright at the face they have daubed are children; but how can a thing so weak in childhood be really strong when it is older! We only change our fancies. Everything that is perfected by growth also perishes by growth, and nothing that was once weak can ever be absolutely strong. It is no use saying, he has grown, he has changed; he is also the same.

89. Custom is our nature. Whoever grows used to the faith believes it, and can no longer help fearing hell, and believes nothing else. Whoever grows used to believing that the king is terrible…, etc. Who doubts, then, that our soul, being used to seeing number, space and motion, believes in that and nothing but that?

90. Quod crebro videt non miratur, etiamsi cur fiat nescit; quod ante non viderit, id si evenerit, ostentum esse censet: what he sees often he does not wonder at, even if he does not know why it happens; if something happens that he has not seen before, he takes it for a portent. (Cicero.)

91. Spongia solis. When we see an effect always happen in the same way, we conclude that it is a natural necessity, as that it will be day tomorrow, etc. But nature often proves us wrong, and does not submit to its own rules.¹⁵

92. What are our natural principles but our habitual principles? In children they are the ones they have received from their fathers' habits, as hunting is in animals.

A different custom will give us other natural principles, as experience shows; and if there are some that custom cannot wipe out, there are also some, of custom against nature, that nature cannot wipe out, nor a second custom either. It depends on the disposition.

93. Fathers are afraid that their children's natural love for them may be wiped out. What sort of nature is this, then, that can be wiped out? Custom is a second nature, which destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is custom not natural? I am very much afraid that this nature is itself only a first custom, as custom is a second nature.

94. The nature of man is all nature, omne animal, every kind of animal.

There is nothing that cannot be made natural; there is nothing natural that cannot be lost.

94 bis. Man is, properly speaking, omne animal.

95. Memory and joy are feelings; and even the propositions of geometry become feelings, for reason makes feelings natural, and natural feelings are wiped out by reason.

96. When we are used to employing bad reasons to prove effects of nature, we will no longer accept the good ones when they are discovered. The example given of this was the circulation of the blood, to explain why the vein swells below the ligature.

97. The most important thing in the whole of life is the choice of a trade, and chance decides it. Custom makes masons, soldiers, roofers. "He's an excellent roofer," people say; and of soldiers, "They're quite mad," people say; and others, on the contrary: "There's nothing great but war; the rest of mankind are good-for-nothings." By hearing these trades praised in childhood, and all the others despised, we choose; for we naturally love truth and hate folly, and these words move us: we go wrong only in applying them. Such is the force of custom that out of those whom nature has made only men, it makes every condition of men; for some regions are all masons, others all soldiers, etc. Nature is surely not so uniform. It is custom, then, that does this, for it constrains nature; and sometimes nature overcomes it, and holds man to his instinct in spite of every custom, good or bad.

98. Prejudice leading into error. It is a deplorable thing to see all men deliberating only about the means, and never about the end. Each thinks about how he will acquit himself in his condition; but the choice of condition, and of country, is handed to us by fate.

It is a pitiful thing to see so many Turks, heretics and infidels follow in their fathers' tracks, for the sole reason that each has been taught in advance that it is the best; and that is what settles each man in each condition, locksmith, soldier, etc.

That is why savages have no use for Provence.

99. There is a universal and essential difference between the acts of the will and all other acts.

The will is one of the chief organs of belief; not that it forms belief, but because things are true or false according to the side from which we look at them. The will, which likes one side better than the other, turns the mind away from considering the qualities of the things it does not like to see; and so the mind, moving in step with the will, stops to look at the side the will likes, and so judges by what it sees there.

100. Self-love. The nature of self-love and of this human self is to love only itself and to consider only itself. But what is it to do? It cannot prevent the object it loves from being full of faults and wretchedness: it wants to be great, and sees itself small; it wants to be happy, and sees itself wretched; it wants to be perfect, and sees itself full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men's love and esteem, and sees that its faults deserve only their aversion and contempt. The predicament it finds itself in produces in it the most unjust and criminal passion that can be imagined; for it conceives a mortal hatred of the truth that rebukes it and convicts it of its faults. It would like to annihilate that truth, and, unable to destroy it in itself, it destroys it as far as it can in its own knowledge and in other people's; that is, it takes every care to hide its faults both from others and from itself, and cannot bear to have them pointed out, or to have them seen.

It is no doubt an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to refuse to admit them, since that adds to them the further evil of a deliberate illusion. We do not want others to deceive us; we do not think it right for them to want more esteem from us than they deserve: it is not right, then, for us to deceive them either, and to want them to esteem us more than we deserve.

Thus, when they discover in us only the imperfections and vices we really have, it is plain that they do us no wrong, since they are not the cause of them; and that they do us good, since they help us to free ourselves from an evil, our ignorance of those imperfections. We ought not to be angry that they know them and despise us, since it is just both that they should know us for what we are and that they should despise us, if we are despicable.

Those are the feelings that would spring from a heart full of equity and justice. What are we to say of our own, then, when we see in it a disposition entirely the reverse? For is it not true that we hate the truth and those who tell it to us, and that we like them to be mistaken in our favour, and that we want them to think us other than we really are?

Here is a proof of it that horrifies me. The Catholic religion does not oblige us to reveal our sins to everyone without distinction: it allows us to stay hidden from all other men; but it makes an exception of one alone, to whom it commands us to reveal the depths of our heart and to show ourselves as we are. This is the only man in the world it orders us to undeceive, and it binds him to an inviolable secrecy, so that this knowledge is in him as if it were not. Can anything kinder and gentler be imagined? And yet man's corruption is such that he finds harshness even in this law; and it is one of the main reasons that has set a great part of Europe in revolt against the Church.

How unjust and unreasonable the heart of man is, to resent being obliged to do towards one man what it would in a sense be just for him to do towards all men! For is it just that we should deceive them?

There are different degrees of this aversion to the truth; but it may be said to be in everyone to some degree, because it is inseparable from self-love. It is this perverse touchiness that forces those whose duty it is to correct others to choose so many roundabout ways and softenings to avoid offending them. They must make our faults smaller, pretend to excuse them, and mix in praise and tokens of affection and esteem. With all that, the medicine is still bitter to self-love. It takes as little of it as it can, always with distaste, and often even with a secret grudge against those who offer it.

The result is that anyone who has an interest in being loved by us shrinks from doing us a service he knows we will find unpleasant; we are treated as we want to be treated: we hate the truth, and it is hidden from us; we want to be flattered, and we are flattered; we love to be deceived, and we are deceived.

That is why each step of good fortune that raises us in the world takes us further from the truth, because people are more afraid of wounding those whose affection is more useful and whose dislike is more dangerous. A prince will be the laughing-stock of all Europe, and he alone will know nothing of it. I am not surprised: telling the truth is useful to the person it is told to, but harmful to those who tell it, because it makes them hated. Now those who live with princes love their own interests more than the interest of the prince they serve; and so they take good care not to do him a service that harms themselves.

This misfortune is no doubt greater and more common in the highest fortunes; but the lesser ones are not exempt from it, because there is always some interest in making men love us. Human life is thus nothing but a perpetual illusion; we do nothing but deceive and flatter one another. No one speaks of us to our face as he speaks of us behind our back. The union that exists among men is founded only on this mutual deceit; and few friendships would survive if each man knew what his friend says of him when he is not there, even though he speaks sincerely then and without passion. Man is therefore nothing but disguise, lies and hypocrisy, both in himself and towards others. He does not want to be told the truth, and he avoids telling it to others; and all these dispositions, so far removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart.

101. I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what they say about one another, there would not be four friends in the world. This is plain from the quarrels caused by the indiscreet reports of it that are made now and then [I will say more: all men would be…]

102. There are vices that cling to us only through others, and that come away like branches when the trunk is cut down.

103. Alexander's example of chastity has not made as many men continent as his drunkenness has made men intemperate. It is no shame not to be as virtuous as he was, and it seems excusable not to be more vicious. We believe we are not quite sunk in the vices of the common run of men when we see ourselves sharing the vices of these great men; and yet we fail to notice that in this they belong to the common run of men. We are joined to them at the end where they are joined to the people; for however high they are raised, they are still joined at some point to the least of men. They are not hung up in the air, quite cut off from our society. No, no; if they are greater than we are, it is because their heads are higher; but their feet are as low as ours. They all stand on the same level and rest on the same earth; and at that end they are as low as we are, as low as the smallest, as children, as beasts.

104. When our passion moves us to do something, we forget our duty: if we like a book, we read it, when we ought to be doing something else. But to remember our duty, we must set ourselves to do something we hate; and then we excuse ourselves on the ground that we have something else to do, and in that way we remember our duty.

105. How hard it is to put something before another person's judgement without corrupting his judgement by the way we put it! If we say, "I find it beautiful," "I find it obscure," or anything of the kind, we draw his imagination into that judgement, or else provoke it the opposite way. It is better to say nothing; then he judges according to what he is, that is, according to what he is at that moment, and to what the other circumstances, which are not of our making, have put into it. But at least we will have put nothing into it; unless our silence too has its effect, according to the turn and the meaning he is in the humour to give it, or according to what he guesses from our gestures and the look of our face, or from our tone of voice, if he is a reader of faces: so hard is it not to unseat a judgement from its natural seat, or rather, so few firm and stable judgements are there!

106. If we know each man's ruling passion, we are sure to please him; and yet each has his fancies, contrary to his own good, in the very idea he has of the good; and that is an oddity that throws us out of tune.

107. Lustravit lampade terras: he lit up the lands with his lamp. The weather and my mood have little to do with each other; I have my fogs and my fine days inside me; even whether my affairs go well or badly makes little difference to it. I sometimes strive of my own accord against fortune; the glory of taming it makes me tame it cheerfully; whereas in good fortune I sometimes play the man who is sick of everything.¹⁶

108. Although people have no interest in what they say, we must not conclude from that, absolutely, that they are not lying; for there are people who lie simply for the sake of lying.

109. When we are well, we wonder how we could manage if we were ill; when we are ill, we take our medicine cheerfully: the illness makes up our minds for us. We no longer have the passions and the desires for diversions and outings that health gave us, and that are incompatible with the necessities of illness. Nature then gives us passions and desires suited to our present state. It is only the fears we give ourselves, and not nature, that trouble us, because they join to the state we are in the passions of the state we are not in.

Since nature makes us unhappy in every state, our desires paint for us a happy state, because they join to the state we are in the pleasures of the state we are not in; and if we reached those pleasures, we would not be happy even so, because we would have other desires suited to this new state.

This general proposition must be worked out in particulars…

110. The feeling that present pleasures are false, and ignorance of the vanity of absent ones, cause inconstancy.

111. Inconstancy. We think we are playing an ordinary organ when we play upon man. He is an organ indeed, but a strange, changing, variable one [whose pipes do not follow each other by adjacent steps. Those who know how to play only ordinary organs] would make no harmonies on this one. You have to know where the keys are.

112. Inconstancy. Things have various qualities, and the soul various inclinations; for nothing that offers itself to the soul is simple, and the soul never offers itself simply to anything. That is why we weep and laugh at the same thing.

113. Inconstancy and oddity. To live by nothing but one's own labour, and to reign over the most powerful state in the world, are very opposite things; they are united in the person of the Grand Seigneur of the Turks.

114. Diversity is so ample that all tones of voice, all ways of walking, of coughing, of blowing the nose, of sneezing… Among fruits we single out grapes, and among them all the muscats, and then Condrieu, and then Desargues, and then this graft. Is that all? Has it ever produced two bunches alike? And has a bunch ever had two grapes alike? Etc.

I cannot judge the same thing in exactly the same way twice. I cannot judge my own work while I am doing it; I must do as painters do and step back from it, but not too far. How far, then? Guess.

115. Diversity. Theology is one science, but at the same time how many sciences it is! A man is one being; but if we dissect him, will he be the head, the heart, the stomach, the veins, each vein, each portion of a vein, the blood, each humour of the blood?

A town or a stretch of country, seen from far off, is a town and a stretch of country; but as we come closer, it is houses, trees, tiles, leaves, grass, ants, the legs of ants, to infinity. All that is wrapped up in the word "country".

116. Thoughts. All is one, all is various. How many natures there are in the nature of man! How many callings! And by what chance each man generally takes up the one he has heard praised! A well-turned heel.

117. A shoe's heel. "Oh, how well turned that is! What a skilful workman! How bold that soldier is!" That is the source of our inclinations and of our choice of condition. "How well that man drinks! How little that one drinks!" That is what makes people sober and drunkards, soldiers and cowards, etc.

118. The master talent, which governs all the others.

119. Nature imitates itself. A seed thrown into good ground bears fruit; a principle thrown into a good mind bears fruit; numbers imitate space, though they are so different in nature.

All is made and guided by one and the same master: the root, the branches, the fruits; the principles, the consequences.

120. [Nature diversifies and imitates; art imitates and diversifies.]

121. Nature always begins the same things over again: the years, the days, the hours; spaces likewise; and numbers follow on, end to end, one after another. In this way a kind of infinite and eternal is made; not that there is anything in all this that is infinite and eternal, but these bounded beings are multiplied infinitely. And so, it seems to me, only the number that multiplies them is infinite.

122. Time heals griefs and quarrels, because we change: we are no longer the same person. Neither the offender nor the offended is himself any longer. It is like a people we have angered and see again two generations later: they are still the French, but not the same ones.

123. He no longer loves the woman he loved ten years ago. I can well believe it: she is no longer the same, and neither is he. He was young, and so was she; she is quite different now. He might love her still, as she was then.

124. We not only look at things from other sides, but with other eyes: no wonder we do not find them the same.

125. Contrarieties. Man is by nature credulous, incredulous; timid, rash.

126. Description of man: dependence, desire for independence, need.

127. The condition of man: inconstancy, boredom, restlessness.

128. The distress of leaving the occupations we have become attached to. A man lives happily at home; let him see a woman who attracts him, let him play for five or six days with pleasure, and he is wretched if he goes back to what he did before. Nothing is more common than that.

129. Our nature lies in motion; complete rest is death.

130. Agitation. When a soldier complains of the hardship of his life, or a labourer, etc., set them to do nothing.

131. Boredom. Nothing is so unbearable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, with nothing to apply himself to. He then feels his nothingness, his abandonment, his insufficiency, his dependence, his helplessness, his emptiness. At once there will rise from the depths of his soul boredom, gloom, sadness, grief, resentment, despair.¹⁷

132. Caesar was too old, it seems to me, to go amusing himself with conquering the world. That amusement suited Augustus or Alexander; they were young men, and young men are hard to stop. But Caesar ought to have been more mature.

133. Two faces that are alike, neither of which makes us laugh on its own, make us laugh together because of their likeness.

134. What a vanity painting is, winning admiration for its likeness to things whose originals we do not admire at all!

135. Nothing pleases us but the struggle, and not the victory. We like to watch animals fight, not the victor savaging the vanquished; and yet what did we want to see but the victory at the end? The moment it comes, we have had our fill. It is the same in games, the same in the search for truth: in debates we like to watch opinions clash, but to contemplate the truth once found, not at all; to make it noticed with pleasure, we must show it being born out of the dispute. In the passions likewise, there is pleasure in watching two contrary ones collide; but once one is master, it is mere brutality. We never seek things, only the seeking of them. In plays, likewise, contented scenes with nothing to fear are worthless, and so are extreme miseries without hope, and brutal loves, and harsh severities.

136. Little consoles us because little afflicts us.

137. Without examining every particular occupation, it is enough to bring them all under diversion.

138. Men naturally roofers, and of every calling, except in a room.

139. Diversion. When I have set myself now and then to consider the various agitations of men, and the dangers and troubles they expose themselves to, at court, in war, from which arise so many quarrels and passions, so many bold and often wicked ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men comes from one thing alone: not knowing how to stay quietly in a room. A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay at home with pleasure, would not leave it to go to sea or to lay siege to a town. No one would pay so dear for a commission in the army except that he would find it unbearable not to stir from the town; and men seek out company and the diversion of games only because they cannot stay at home with pleasure.¹⁸

But when I thought about it more closely, and, having found the cause of all our unhappiness, wanted to discover its reason, I found that there is one very real reason, which lies in the natural unhappiness of our condition, weak and mortal, and so wretched that nothing can console us when we think about it closely.

Whatever condition we picture, if we gather together all the good things that can be ours, kingship is the finest position in the world; and yet imagine a king with every satisfaction that can touch him: if he is without diversion, and is left to consider and reflect on what he is, this listless happiness will not hold him up. He will necessarily fall into thinking of the things that threaten him, of revolts that may come, and finally of death and illnesses, which are inevitable; so that if he is without what is called diversion, he is unhappy, and more unhappy than the least of his subjects, who plays and diverts himself.

That is why gambling and the company of women, war and high office are so much sought after. It is not that there is any real happiness in them, or that anyone imagines true beatitude lies in having the money he can win at play, or in the hare he hunts: he would not want them if they were offered to him. It is not that soft and peaceful use of things, which leaves us free to think about our unhappy condition, that we seek, nor the dangers of war, nor the labour of office; it is the bustle that turns our thoughts away from it and diverts us.

Reasons why we prefer the hunt to the catch.

That is why men are so fond of noise and commotion; that is why prison is so horrible a punishment; that is why the pleasure of solitude is a thing beyond understanding. And it is, in the end, the greatest source of happiness in the condition of kings that people are endlessly trying to divert them and procure them every kind of pleasure.

The king is surrounded by people who think of nothing but diverting the king and keeping him from thinking about himself; for he is unhappy, king though he is, if he thinks about it.

That is all that men have been able to invent to make themselves happy. And those who play the philosopher about it, and think the world very unreasonable to spend the whole day chasing a hare they would not have wanted to buy, hardly know our nature. The hare would not save us from the sight of death and of our miseries, but the hunt, which turns us away from them, does save us. And so…

The advice given to Pyrrhus, to take now the rest he was going to seek through so many labours, ran into a good many difficulties.

[To tell a man to live in rest is to tell him to live happily; it is to advise him to have a condition entirely happy, which he could contemplate at leisure without finding in it any cause for distress. It is not to understand nature, then. And so men who are naturally aware of their condition avoid nothing so much as rest; there is nothing they will not do to look for trouble. Not that they lack an instinct that lets them know that true beatitude…] Vanity, the pleasure of showing it to others.

[It is a mistake, then, to blame them. Their fault is not in seeking tumult, if they sought it only as a diversion; the trouble is that they seek it as if possessing the things they seek would make them truly happy, and that is where we are right to call their seeking vain: so that in all this, both those who blame and those who are blamed fail to understand the true nature of man.]

And so, when they are reproached that what they seek so ardently could never satisfy them, if they answered, as they ought to if they thought it through, that all they are looking for in it is a violent and headlong occupation that turns them from thinking about themselves, and that this is why they set before themselves an attractive object that charms them and draws them on ardently, they would leave their opponents with nothing to say. But they do not answer like that, because they do not know themselves; they do not know that it is only the hunt, and not the catch, that they are after.

The dance: you must think hard about where you will put your feet. The nobleman sincerely believes that hunting is a great pleasure and a royal one; but his huntsman does not share that opinion.

They imagine that if they had obtained this or that office, they would then rest with pleasure, and they do not feel the insatiable nature of their cupidity. They believe they are sincerely seeking rest, and in fact they are seeking only agitation.

They have a secret instinct that drives them to look for diversion and occupation outside themselves, which comes from the feeling of their continual wretchedness; and they have another secret instinct, left over from the greatness of our first nature, which lets them know that happiness in fact lies only in rest, and not in tumult. And from these two contrary instincts a confused plan forms in them, hidden from their sight in the depths of their soul, which drives them to aim at rest through agitation, and always to imagine that the satisfaction they do not have will come to them if, by overcoming some difficulties they see ahead, they can open the door to rest that way.

That is how the whole of life slips by. We seek rest by struggling against some obstacles; and once we have overcome them, rest becomes unbearable; for either we think of the miseries we have or of those that threaten us. And even if we saw ourselves safe enough on every side, boredom, on its own authority, would not fail to rise from the depths of the heart, where it has natural roots, and fill the mind with its poison.

Man is so unhappy, then, that he would be bored even without any cause for boredom, by the very state of his constitution; and he is so vain that, though he is full of a thousand essential causes of boredom, the least thing, a billiard cue and a ball he pushes, is enough to divert him.

"But what is he after in all this?" you will say. The pleasure of boasting tomorrow among his friends that he played better than someone else. In the same way, others sweat in their studies to show the learned that they have solved a problem in algebra that no one had been able to solve until now; and so many others expose themselves to the gravest dangers in order to boast afterwards of a town they have taken, and just as foolishly, to my mind. And finally, others wear themselves to death noting all these things, not to become wiser by it, but only to show that they know them; and these are the greatest fools of the lot, since they are fools knowingly, whereas one may think of the others that they would be fools no longer if they had the same knowledge.

A man spends his life without boredom by gambling a little every day. Give him every morning the money he can win in the day, on condition that he does not gamble, and you make him unhappy. It may be said that what he is after is the amusement of play, and not the winnings. Make him play for nothing, then: he will not warm to it, and he will be bored. It is not the amusement alone that he is after, then: a listless amusement without passion will bore him. He must get heated over it and fool himself, imagining he would be happy to win what he would not want if it were given to him on condition that he did not play, so that he can make himself an object of passion and stir up his desire, his anger and his fear for the object he has made, like children who take fright at the face they have daubed.

How is it that this man, who lost his only son a few months ago, and who, weighed down with lawsuits and quarrels, was so troubled this morning, no longer thinks about it now? Do not be surprised: he is wholly taken up with watching where the boar will break that the hounds have been chasing so hotly for six hours. Nothing more is needed. A man, however full of sadness he may be, if he can be persuaded to take up some diversion, is happy for as long as it lasts; and a man, however happy he may be, if he is not diverted and occupied by some passion or amusement that keeps boredom from spreading, will soon be gloomy and unhappy. Without diversion there is no joy; with diversion there is no sadness. And that is also what makes up the happiness of people of high rank: they have a number of people to divert them, and they have the power to keep themselves in that state.

Look at it closely. What else is it to be superintendent of finances, chancellor, first president of the Parlement, but to be in a condition where, from first thing in the morning, a great number of people come from every side so as not to leave you a single hour in the day when you could think about yourself? And when such men fall into disgrace and are sent away to their country houses, where they lack neither wealth nor servants to see to their needs, they are wretched and forsaken all the same, because no one keeps them from thinking about themselves.

[Diversion is so necessary to people of the world that they are wretched without it. Now some misfortune befalls them, now they think of those that may befall them; or even if they did not think of them and had no cause for grief, boredom, on its own authority, would not fail to rise from the depths of the heart, where it has a natural root, and fill the whole mind with its poison.]

140. [This man so stricken by the death of his wife and of his only son, who has this great quarrel tormenting him, how is it that at this moment he is not sad, and that we see him so free of all those painful and anxious thoughts? We need not be surprised. Someone has just served him a ball, and he has to return it to his partner; he is busy taking it as it drops off the roof, to win a chase. How do you expect him to think about his affairs, when he has this other affair to handle? There is a care worthy to occupy this great soul and to drive every other thought out of his mind. This man, born to know the universe, to judge all things, to rule a whole state, is taken up and filled entirely with the business of catching a hare. And if he will not stoop to that, and wants to be always on the stretch, he will only be the more foolish, because he will want to raise himself above humanity; and he is only a man, when all is said, that is, capable of little and of much, of everything and of nothing: he is neither angel nor beast, but man.]

141. Men busy themselves following a ball and a hare; it is the very pleasure of kings.

142. Diversion. Is not the royal dignity great enough in itself to make the man who holds it happy by the mere sight of what he is? Will he have to be diverted from that thought like ordinary people? I can see that it makes a man happy to divert him from the sight of his troubles at home by filling all his thoughts with the care of dancing well; but will it be the same with a king, and will he be happier pursuing these empty amusements than contemplating his greatness? And what more satisfying object could be offered to his mind? Would it not spoil his joy to occupy his soul with fitting his steps to the measure of a tune, or with throwing a bar neatly, instead of letting him enjoy in peace the contemplation of the majestic glory that surrounds him? Let it be tried: leave a king all alone, with no satisfaction for the senses, no care on his mind, no company, to think about himself at his leisure; and you will see that a king without diversion is a man full of wretchedness. And so this is carefully avoided, and around the persons of kings there is never any lack of people who see to it that diversion follows on their business, and who watch over all their hours of leisure to supply them with pleasures and games, so that there is never a void. That is, they are surrounded by people who take marvellous care that the king is never alone and in a state to think about himself, knowing very well that he will be wretched, king though he is, if he thinks about it.

In all this I am not speaking of Christian kings as Christians, but only as kings.

143. Diversion. From childhood men are charged with the care of their honour, their property and their friends, and even of their friends' property and honour. They are loaded down with business, with learning languages and with exercises, and they are given to understand that they cannot be happy unless their health, their honour, their fortune and those of their friends are in good order, and that a single thing lacking would make them unhappy. And so they are given offices and affairs that keep them bustling from the crack of dawn. "A strange way to make them happy," you will say. "What better could be done to make them unhappy?" What! What could be done? We would only have to take away all these cares; for then they would see themselves, they would think about what they are, where they come from, where they are going; and so they cannot be kept too busy or too turned aside. And that is why, after all the business that has been laid up for them, if they have any time to spare, they are advised to spend it in diverting themselves, in gambling, and in keeping themselves wholly occupied all the time.

How hollow the heart of man is, and how full of filth!

144. I had spent a long time in the study of the abstract sciences, and the little communication one can have in them had put me off them. When I began the study of man, I saw that these abstract sciences are not suited to man, and that I was straying further from my own condition by going deep into them than others were by not knowing them. I forgave others for knowing little of them; but I thought I would at least find plenty of companions in the study of man, since it is the true study proper to him. I was wrong: still fewer people study man than study geometry. It is only for want of knowing how to study man that people look into the rest. But is it not that even this is not the knowledge man ought to have, and that it is better for him not to know himself, if he is to be happy?

145. [A single thought occupies us; we cannot think of two things at once. That is lucky for us, according to the world, not according to God.]

146. Man is plainly made to think; it is all his dignity; and all his merit and all his duty is to think as he ought. Now the order of thought is to begin with oneself, and with one's author and one's end.

Now what does the world think about? Never about that; but about dancing, playing the lute, singing, making verses, tilting at the ring, etc., fighting, making oneself king, without thinking what it is to be a king, and what it is to be a man.

147. We are not content with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being: we want to live an imaginary life in other people's idea of us, and to that end we strive to make a show. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary being, and neglect the real one. And if we have calm, or magnanimity, or loyalty, we hurry to let it be known, so as to attach these virtues to our other being; we would sooner detach them from ourselves to join them to the other; we would gladly be cowards to gain a reputation for courage. A great sign of the nothingness of our own being, that we are not satisfied with the one without the other, and often trade the one for the other! For a man who would not die to preserve his honour would be held in infamy.

148. We are so presumptuous that we would like to be known to the whole earth, and even to people who will come when we are gone; and we are so vain that the esteem of five or six people around us is enough to amuse and content us.

149. In the towns we pass through, we do not care about being esteemed; but when we have to stay in one for a little while, we do care. How long must it be? A time proportioned to our vain and paltry span.

150. Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a camp boy, a cook, a porter boasts and wants his admirers; and even philosophers want them; and those who write against it want the glory of having written well; and those who read them want the glory of having read them; and I who write this have perhaps the same longing; and perhaps those who will read it…

151. Glory. Admiration spoils everything from childhood on: "Oh, how well he said that! Oh, how well he did! How good he is!" etc.

The children at Port-Royal, who are not given this spur of envy and glory, fall into listlessness.

152. Pride. Curiosity is nothing but vanity. Most of the time we want to know things only in order to talk about them; otherwise no one would make a sea voyage, never to say a word about it, for the sole pleasure of seeing, without any hope of ever telling it to anyone.

153. Of the desire to be esteemed by those we are with. Pride holds us in so natural a possession, in the midst of our wretchedness, our errors, etc. We even give up our lives with joy, provided people talk about it.

Vanity: gambling, hunting, visits, plays, a name falsely made to last.

154. [I have no friends [to your advantage].

155. A true friend is so useful a thing, even for the greatest lords, to speak well of them and stand up for them even in their absence, that they ought to do everything they can to have one. But let them choose well; for if they spend all their efforts on fools, it will be of no use to them, however well the fools speak of them; and the fools will not even speak well of them if they find themselves on the weaker side, for they have no authority; and so they will run them down to keep in with the company.

156. A fierce people, who thought there was no life without arms, as Livy says of the Spaniards. They prefer death to peace; others prefer death to war.

Any opinion can be preferred to life, though the love of life seems so strong and so natural.

157. Contradiction: contempt for our being, dying for nothing, hatred of our being.

158. Callings. The sweetness of glory is so great that whatever object we attach it to, even death, we love it.

159. Fine deeds kept hidden are the most estimable. When I see some in history (Montaigne, 184), they please me very much; but after all they were not entirely hidden, since they became known; and although the doers did all they could to hide them, the little by which they came to light spoils everything, for the finest thing about them was the wish to hide them.

160. Sneezing absorbs all the functions of the soul, as completely as the act of love does; but we do not draw the same conclusions from it against the greatness of man, because it is against his will. And although we may bring it on ourselves, it is still against our will that we bring it on; it is not for the sake of the thing itself, it is for some other end; and so it is not a mark of man's weakness, and of his servitude under that act.

It is not shameful for a man to give way under pain, and it is shameful for him to give way under pleasure. This does not come from pain's coming to us from outside while we go looking for pleasure; for we can go looking for pain and give way to it on purpose, without that kind of baseness. Why is it, then, that reason finds it glorious to give way under the assault of pain, and shameful to give way under the assault of pleasure? Because it is not pain that tempts and attracts us; it is we ourselves who choose it of our own will and want to let it rule over us; so that we are masters of the thing, and in this it is man who gives way to himself; but in pleasure, it is man who gives way to pleasure. Now only mastery and command bring glory, and only servitude brings shame.

161. Vanity. That a thing as plain to see as the vanity of the world should be so little known that it is a strange and surprising thing to say that seeking greatness is folly: that is astonishing!

162. Whoever wants to know the full vanity of man has only to consider the causes and the effects of love. The cause is a je ne sais quoi, an I-know-not-what (Corneille), and the effects are dreadful. This je ne sais quoi, so slight a thing that no one can make it out, moves the whole earth, princes, armies, the entire world.

Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have changed.

163. Vanity. The cause and the effects of love: Cleopatra.

163 bis. [Nothing shows the vanity of men better than to consider what causes and what effects love has; for the whole universe is changed by it: Cleopatra's nose.]

164. Whoever does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. And who does not see it, except young people who are all noise and diversion and thoughts of the future? But take away their diversion, and you will see them wither with boredom. They feel their nothingness then without knowing it; for it is surely to be unhappy, to fall into an unbearable sadness as soon as we are reduced to contemplating ourselves and have nothing to divert us from it.

165. Thoughts. In all things I have sought rest. If our condition were truly happy, we would not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it in order to be happy.

165 bis. If our condition were truly happy, we would not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.

166. Diversion. Death is easier to bear without thinking of it than the thought of death without danger.

167. The miseries of human life are the foundation of all this. When men saw that, they took up diversion.

168. Diversion. Since men have not been able to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, to make themselves happy, not to think about them.

169. In spite of these miseries, he wants to be happy, and wants only to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be; but how is he to go about it? To manage it well, he would have to make himself immortal; and since he cannot, he has hit on keeping himself from thinking about it.

170. Diversion. If man were happy, he would be the happier the less he was diverted, like the saints and God. "Yes; but is it not being happy, to be able to be cheered by diversion?" No; for it comes from elsewhere, from outside; and so he is dependent, and therefore liable to be disturbed by a thousand accidents, which make afflictions inevitable.

171. Wretchedness. The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is above all diversion that keeps us from thinking about ourselves and leads us, without our noticing, to our ruin. Without it we would be bored, and that boredom would drive us to look for a more solid way out of it; but diversion beguiles us, and brings us, without our noticing, to death.

172. We never keep to the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if to hurry it on; or we call back the past, to stop it as too quick to go: so imprudent that we wander in times that are not ours and never think of the only one that belongs to us, and so vain that we dream of times that are nothing and let slip, without a thought, the only one that exists. The truth is that the present usually hurts us. We hide it from our sight because it distresses us; and if it is pleasant, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to prop it up with the future, and think of arranging things that are not in our power, for a time we have no assurance of ever reaching.

Let each of us examine his thoughts: he will find them all taken up with the past and the future. We hardly think of the present at all; and if we do think of it, it is only to take from it the light to arrange the future. The present is never our end: the past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. Thus we never live, but we hope to live; and since we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable that we never are.

173. They say that eclipses forebode misfortune, because misfortunes are common, so that, since harm happens so often, they often guess right; whereas if they said eclipses foretold good fortune, they would often be lying. They assign good fortune only to rare conjunctions of the heavens; and so they seldom guess wrong.

174. Wretchedness. Solomon and Job knew the wretchedness of man best and spoke of it best: the one the happiest of men, the other the unhappiest; the one knowing the vanity of pleasures by experience, the other the reality of evils.

174 bis. Wretchedness. Job and Solomon.

175. We know ourselves so little that many think they are about to die when they are well, and many think they are well when they are close to death, not feeling the fever on its way, or the abscess about to form.

176. Cromwell was about to lay waste the whole of Christendom; the royal family was lost, and his own powerful for ever, but for a little grain of sand that lodged in his ureter. Rome itself was about to tremble under him; but once that bit of gravel had lodged there, he died, his family was brought low, all was at peace, and the king was restored.

177. [Three hosts.] Would a man who had enjoyed the friendship of the King of England, the King of Poland and the Queen of Sweden ever have believed he would lack a refuge and a shelter in the world?¹⁹

178. Macrobius: of the innocents killed by Herod.

179. When Augustus learned that among the children under two years old whom Herod had had put to death was Herod's own son, he said it was better to be Herod's pig than his son. Macrobius, Saturnalia, book II, chapter 4.

180. The great and the humble have the same accidents, the same vexations and the same passions; but the one is at the top of the wheel, and the other near the centre, and so less shaken by the same motions.

181. We are so unhappy that we can take pleasure in a thing only on condition of being upset if it goes badly, as a thousand things can, and do, at every hour. Anyone who had found the secret of rejoicing in good without being upset by the contrary evil would have found the point: it is perpetual motion.

182. Those who in troublesome affairs are always hopeful, and rejoice at lucky turns, are suspected, if they are not equally grieved by bad ones, of being glad to see the affair fail; they are delighted to find these pretexts for hope to show that they care about it, and to cover, with the joy they pretend to feel, the joy they feel at seeing the affair lost.

183. We run heedlessly over the precipice, after putting something in front of us to keep us from seeing it.

Pascal's word is misère, and it is stronger than the English "misery" as a mood. It means wretchedness: the poverty, helplessness and fallenness of the human condition. Its opposite throughout the Pensées is grandeur, man's greatness, and the book is built on the two together. ↩
Marie de Gournay was Montaigne's "adoptive daughter" and the editor of the Essays after his death, and her preface defended his frankness. The italic phrases are Pascal's shorthand for passages in the Essays, and the bare numbers, here and below, are page numbers in his own copy of the book. ↩
The French is honnête homme, the ideal of Pascal's society and not a rank: the cultivated, agreeable man of the world who could talk well with anyone and made a display of nothing. "Gentleman" stands for it throughout. ↩
Two grammatical oddities that mirror each other. "Je fesons" is peasant French, a singular subject with a plural verb, something like "I are"; "zôa trekhei" is correct Greek, where a neuter plural subject (animals) takes a singular verb ("runs"). Each language breaks the agreement of number, in opposite directions. ↩
The formula of the infinite sphere is medieval. In the anonymous Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers it is a definition of God; Pascal turns it on nature. ↩
The Principles of Philosophy was Descartes's title (1644). "On every knowable thing" was the boast attached to the nine hundred theses that Pico della Mirandola offered to defend in Rome in 1486. ↩
Pascal gives only the opening words of a sentence from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, which Montaigne quotes after his own long list of the philosophers' opinions on the soul: "Which of these opinions is true, some god must see." ↩
Pascal had done the experiments himself. In 1647 he published his "new experiments touching the vacuum", and in 1648, at his request, his brother-in-law Florin Périer carried a tube of mercury up the Puy de Dôme and showed that the column stood lower at the top of the mountain than at the foot. The column is held up by the weight of the air, not by nature's "horror of a vacuum". ↩
Latin, "the sponge of the sun": the spots on the sun, which the telescope had revealed a dozen years before Pascal was born. ↩
Pascal gives only the end of two lines that Montaigne quotes in the Essays (II, 12), from Cicero's verse rendering of Homer: "Men's minds are like the light with which Father Jupiter has lit up the lands." Our moods, that is, change with the weather. Pascal answers that his own do not. ↩
The French is ennui, a heavier word than the English "boredom" has become: the dull misery of the mind left alone with itself, with nothing to occupy it. "Boredom" stands for it throughout, in that full sense. ↩
Pascal's word is divertissement, from divertir, to turn aside: whatever turns our thoughts away from ourselves, from our condition and our death. It takes in games and the hunt, but also war, high office and the business of the world, and "diversion" stands for it throughout in that sense, the verb "divert" with it. ↩
The three are the rulers who fell in Pascal's last years: Charles I of England, beheaded in 1649; John Casimir of Poland, driven from his kingdom by the Swedish invasion of 1655; and Christina of Sweden, who gave up her throne in 1654. Pascal had sent Christina one of his calculating machines in 1652. ↩

Section III: Why We Must Wager

184. A letter to urge men to seek God.

And then have him look for God among the philosophers, Pyrrhonists and dogmatists, who torment whoever seeks among them.

185. The way of God, who disposes all things gently, is to put religion into the mind by reasons and into the heart by grace; but to try to put it into the mind and the heart by force and by threats is to put there not religion but terror, terror rather than religion.

186. Ne, si terrerentur et non docerentur, improba quasi dominatio videretur: lest, if they were frightened and not taught, it should seem a kind of wicked tyranny (Augustine, Letter 48 or 49).

Volume IV: Against Lying, to Consentius.

187. Order. Men have contempt for religion; they hate it, and are afraid it may be true. To cure this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; that it is venerable, and so give men respect for it; then make it lovable, and make good men wish it were true; and then show that it is true. Venerable, because it has known man well; lovable, because it promises the true good.

188. In every dialogue and discourse, we must be able to say to those who take offence, "What are you complaining of?"

189. Begin by pitying unbelievers; they are unhappy enough in their condition. We should abuse them only if it did some good, but it does them harm.

190. Pity the atheists who seek, for are they not unhappy enough? Inveigh against those who make a boast of it.

191. And will this one laugh at the other? Who ought to laugh? And yet this one does not laugh at the other, but pities him.

192. Reproach Miton for not stirring himself, since God will reproach him.²⁰

193. Quid fiet hominibus qui minima contemnunt, majora non credunt? What will become of men who despise the least things and do not believe the greater?

194. … Let them at least learn what the religion is that they are fighting, before they fight it. If this religion boasted of having a clear view of God, and of possessing him openly and without a veil, one could fight it by saying that we see nothing in the world that shows him with that evidence. But since, on the contrary, it says that men are in darkness and far from God, that he has hidden himself from their knowledge, that this is even the name he gives himself in the Scriptures, Deus absconditus, the hidden God; and since, in short, it labours equally to establish these two things, that God has set visible marks in the Church by which to make himself known to those who seek him sincerely, and that he has nevertheless covered them in such a way that he will be perceived only by those who seek him with all their heart: what advantage can they draw when, in the negligence about seeking the truth that they openly profess, they cry out that nothing shows it to them, when the very obscurity they are in, and which they hold against the Church, only establishes one of the things she maintains, without touching the other, and confirms her doctrine, far from ruining it?

To fight it, they would have to cry out that they had made every effort to seek everywhere, and even in what the Church offers for their instruction, but without any satisfaction. If they spoke in that way, they would indeed be fighting one of its claims. But I hope to show here that there is no reasonable person who could speak in that way, and I even dare to say that no one ever has. We know well enough how those who are in this frame of mind behave. They believe they have made great efforts to instruct themselves when they have spent a few hours reading some book of Scripture and have questioned some churchman on the truths of the faith. After that, they boast that they have searched without success in books and among men. But in truth I will tell them what I have often said, that this negligence is not to be borne. It is not a question here of the slight interest of some stranger, that we should treat it in this way; it is a question of ourselves, and of our all.

The immortality of the soul is a thing of such importance to us, a thing that touches us so deeply, that one must have lost all feeling to be indifferent to knowing the truth of it. All our actions and all our thoughts must take such different paths, according to whether there are eternal goods to hope for or not, that it is impossible to take a single step with sense and judgement unless we govern it by the sight of this point, which ought to be our final object.

And so our first interest and our first duty is to get light on this subject, on which all our conduct depends; and that is why, among those who are not persuaded of it, I make an extreme difference between those who labour with all their strength to learn about it and those who live without troubling themselves about it or thinking of it.

I can feel nothing but compassion for those who sincerely groan in this doubt, who regard it as the worst of misfortunes, and who, sparing nothing to escape from it, make this search their principal and most serious occupation.

But as for those who pass their lives without thinking of this final end of life, and who, for the sole reason that they do not find within themselves the lights that would persuade them of it, neglect to look for them elsewhere, and to examine thoroughly whether this opinion is one of those the people accept out of credulous simplicity, or one of those which, though obscure in themselves, have nevertheless a very solid and unshakeable foundation: these I regard in an entirely different way.

This negligence, in an affair where they themselves are at stake, their eternity, their all, irritates me more than it moves me; it astonishes and appals me; it is a monster to me. I do not say this out of the pious zeal of a spiritual devotion. I mean, on the contrary, that we ought to have this feeling from a principle of human interest and an interest of self-love; for that we need only see what the least enlightened people see.

It does not take a very lofty soul to understand that there is no true and solid satisfaction here, that all our pleasures are only vanity, that our ills are infinite, and that in the end death, which threatens us at every moment, must infallibly, in a few years, put us in the horrible necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy.

There is nothing more real than this, nor more terrible. Let us play the brave as much as we like: that is the end that awaits the finest life in the world. Let us reflect on it, and then say whether it is not beyond doubt that there is no good in this life except in the hope of another life; that we are happy only in proportion as we draw near to it; and that, just as there will be no more unhappiness for those who had an entire assurance of eternity, so there is no happiness either for those who have no light on it at all.

It is certainly a great evil, then, to be in this doubt; but it is at least an indispensable duty to seek, when we are in this doubt; and so the man who doubts and does not seek is at once very unhappy and very much in the wrong. And if, on top of that, he is calm and satisfied, if he openly professes it, and in the end boasts of it, and makes this very condition the subject of his joy and his vanity, I have no words for so extravagant a creature.

Where can anyone come by such feelings? What cause for joy is there in expecting nothing but wretchedness without remedy? What cause for vanity in seeing oneself in impenetrable darkness? And how can such reasoning as this take place in a reasonable man?

"I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself; I am in a terrible ignorance of everything; I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or this very part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects on everything and on itself, and knows itself no better than the rest. I see these appalling spaces of the universe that enclose me, and I find myself fixed to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am placed here rather than somewhere else, or why the little time given me to live is assigned to me at this point rather than at another of all the eternity that came before me and all the eternity that follows me. I see nothing but infinities on every side, enclosing me like an atom, and like a shadow that lasts only an instant and does not return. All I know is that I must soon die; but what I know least of all is this very death that I cannot escape.

"As I do not know where I come from, so I do not know where I am going; and I know only that on leaving this world I fall forever either into nothingness or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which of these two conditions is to be my lot for all eternity. That is my state, full of weakness and uncertainty. And from all this I conclude that I must therefore spend all the days of my life without thinking of looking into what is to happen to me. Perhaps I could find some light on my doubts; but I do not want to take the trouble, or take a single step to look for it; and afterwards, treating with contempt those who wear themselves out with this concern, I mean to go without foresight and without fear to meet so great an event, and let myself be carried softly to death, uncertain of the eternity of my future condition." (Whatever certainty they had, it would be a cause for despair rather than for vanity.)

Who would wish to have as a friend a man who talks in this way? Who would choose him out of all others to confide his affairs to? Who would turn to him in his troubles? And in the end, what use in life could one put him to?

In truth, it is a glory to religion to have such unreasonable men for its enemies, and their opposition is so little dangerous to it that it serves, on the contrary, to establish its truths. For the Christian faith goes almost entirely to establish these two things: the corruption of nature, and the redemption of Jesus Christ. Now I maintain that if these men do not serve to show the truth of the redemption by the holiness of their lives, they serve at least admirably to show the corruption of nature by feelings so unnatural.

Nothing is so important to man as his own state; nothing is so fearful to him as eternity; and so, that there should be men indifferent to the loss of their being and to the peril of an eternity of wretchedness, is not natural. They are quite different about everything else: they fear the very slightest things, they foresee them, they feel them; and the same man who spends so many days and nights in rage and despair over the loss of an office or some imagined insult to his honour is the very one who knows he is going to lose everything by death, and feels no anxiety and no emotion. It is a monstrous thing to see in the same heart, and at the same time, this sensitivity to the smallest things and this strange insensibility to the greatest. It is an incomprehensible enchantment, and a supernatural drowsiness, which points to an all-powerful force as its cause.

There must be a strange perversion in the nature of man for him to glory in being in this state, in which it seems incredible that a single person could be. Yet experience shows me so many of them that it would be astonishing, if we did not know that most of those who dabble in it are pretending and are not really what they seem. They are people who have heard it said that fine manners in the world consist in playing the daredevil in this way. That is what they call having thrown off the yoke, and that is what they try to imitate. But it would not be hard to make them understand how much they deceive themselves in seeking esteem by it. That is not the way to win it, I say even among people of the world who judge things soundly and who know that the only way to succeed there is to show oneself decent, loyal, judicious and able to serve one's friend usefully, because men naturally love only what can be useful to them. Now what advantage is it to us to hear a man say that he has thrown off the yoke, that he does not believe there is a God who watches over his actions, that he regards himself as sole master of his conduct, and that he means to give account of it only to himself? Does he think he has brought us by this to have great confidence in him from now on, and to expect from him consolation, counsel and help in all the needs of life? Do they suppose they have given us great pleasure by telling us that they hold our soul to be only a little wind and smoke, and by telling us so, moreover, in a proud and contented tone of voice? Is this, then, a thing to say gaily? Is it not, on the contrary, a thing to say sadly, as the saddest thing in the world?

If they thought about it seriously, they would see that this is so ill-judged, so contrary to good sense, so opposed to good breeding, and so far in every way from the fine manners they are after, that they would be more likely to set right than to corrupt those who had some inclination to follow them. And indeed, make them give an account of their feelings and of the reasons they have for doubting religion: they will tell you things so weak and so low that they will persuade you of the opposite. It is what someone once said to them, very aptly: "If you go on talking like this," he told them, "you really will convert me." And he was right, for who would not be horrified to find himself holding opinions in which he has such contemptible people for company?

And so those who only pretend to these feelings would be most unfortunate to do violence to their nature in order to make themselves the most impertinent of men. If they are sorry in the bottom of their hearts not to have more light, let them not hide it: that admission will be no disgrace. The only disgrace is to have none. Nothing betrays an extreme weakness of mind more than not to know the unhappiness of a man without God; nothing marks a bad disposition of heart more than not to wish the eternal promises true; nothing is more cowardly than to play the brave against God. Let them leave these impieties, then, to those who are ill-born enough to be truly capable of them; let them at least be gentlemen if they cannot be Christians; and let them recognize, in the end, that there are only two kinds of people who can be called reasonable: either those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, or those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.

But as for those who live without knowing him and without seeking him, they judge themselves so little worth their own care that they are not worth the care of others; and it takes all the charity of the religion they despise not to despise them so far as to abandon them in their folly. But because this religion obliges us always to regard them, as long as they are in this life, as capable of the grace that can enlighten them, and to believe that in a little while they may be more full of faith than we are, while we on the contrary may fall into the blindness they are in, we must do for them what we would wish done for us if we were in their place, and call on them to have pity on themselves, and to take at least a few steps to try whether they will not find some light. Let them give to this reading a few of the hours they spend so uselessly elsewhere; whatever aversion they bring to it, perhaps they will come upon something, and at the least they will not lose much by it; but as for those who bring to it a perfect sincerity and a true desire to find the truth, I hope they will be satisfied, and will be convinced by the proofs of so divine a religion, which I have gathered here, and in which I have followed more or less this order…

194 bis. (1) [We must pity both the one and the other; but we must have for the one a pity born of tenderness, and for the other a pity born of contempt.]

(2) [I do not take this as a system, but from the way the heart of man is made; not from a zeal of devotion and detachment, but from a purely human principle, and from an impulse of interest and self-love, and because it is a thing that concerns us enough to move us, to be sure that after all the ills of life an inevitable death, which threatens us at every moment, must infallibly in a few years… in the horrible necessity…]

(3) [It is beyond doubt that there is no good without the knowledge of God; that the nearer we draw to him, the happier we are, and that the final happiness is to know him with certainty; that the further we move from him, the unhappier we are, and that the final unhappiness would be the certainty of the contrary.

It is an unhappiness, then, to doubt; but it is an indispensable duty to seek, in doubt; and so the man who doubts and does not seek is at once unhappy and in the wrong. And if, on top of that, he is cheerful and presumptuous, I have no word for so extravagant a creature.]

(4) [A fine cause for joy, to expect nothing more but wretchedness without remedy! What a consolation, to despair of every consoler!]

(5) But even those who seem most opposed to the glory of religion will not be useless to it for others. We shall make them the first argument that there is something supernatural: for a blindness of this kind is not a natural thing; and if their folly makes them so contrary to their own good, it will serve to protect others from it, by the horror of so deplorable an example and of a folly so worthy of compassion.

(6) Are they so firm that they are insensible to everything that touches them? Let us test it in the loss of their goods or their honour. What! It is an enchantment…

(7) And yet it is certain that man is so unnatural that there is in his heart a seed of joy in this.

(8) [People of this kind are academy pupils, schoolboys; and it is the worst character of man I know.]

(9) Fine manners consist in showing no complaisance, and true piety in showing complaisance to others.

(10) [A fine subject for rejoicing and boasting, with head held high like this: "Therefore let us rejoice, let us live without fear and without anxiety, and wait for death, since it is uncertain, and then we shall see what becomes of us…" I do not see the consequence.]

(11) Is this a thing to say with joy? It is a thing, then, that one ought to say sadly.

(12) That is not fine manners at all.

(13) "You will convert me."

(14) [Not to be sorry about it and not to love to… is an effect of weakness of mind, and not of malice in the will.]

(15) [Is it courage in a dying man to go, in weakness and in agony, to face an almighty and eternal God?]

(16) [This shows that there is nothing to say to them: not out of contempt, but because they have no common sense; God must touch them.]

(17) [One must really be in the religion they despise not to despise them.]

(18) [How happy I should be, if I were in that state, if someone took pity on my foolishness and had the goodness to drag me out of it in spite of myself!]

(19) Is it not enough that miracles are done in one place, and that Providence appears over one people?

194 ter. (1) I would ask them whether it is not true that they themselves bear out the foundation of the faith they fight against, which is that the nature of man is in corruption.

(2) Nothing is important but this, and this alone is neglected.

(3) It is all that a man could do who was certain that this news was false; and even then he ought not to be joyful, but dejected.

(4) We must not say of this that it is a mark of reason.

(5) The three conditions.

195. Before entering on the proofs of the Christian religion, I find it necessary to show how unjust men are who live indifferent to seeking the truth of a thing so important to them, and which touches them so closely.

Of all their errors, it is no doubt the one that most convicts them of folly and blindness, and the one in which it is easiest to confound them by the first glimmerings of common sense and by the feelings of nature. For it is beyond doubt that the time of this life is only an instant, that the state of death is eternal, of whatever nature it may be, and that therefore all our actions and our thoughts must take such different paths according to the state of that eternity that it is impossible to take a single step with sense and judgement unless we govern it by the truth of this point, which ought to be our final object.

Nothing is plainer than this; and so, by the principles of reason, the conduct of men is wholly unreasonable if they do not take another road. Let us judge by this, then, of those who live without thinking of this final end of life, who let themselves be led by their inclinations and their pleasures without reflection and without anxiety, and who, as if they could annihilate eternity by turning their thoughts away from it, think only of making themselves happy for this instant alone.

Yet this eternity remains, and death, which is to open it and which threatens them at every hour, must infallibly, in a short time, put them in the horrible necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy, without their knowing which of these eternities is prepared for them forever.

That is a doubt of terrible consequence. They are in peril of an eternity of wretchedness; and at that, as if the thing were not worth the trouble, they neglect to examine whether this is one of those opinions the people accept with too credulous an ease, or one of those which, obscure in themselves, have a very solid though hidden foundation. And so they do not know whether there is truth or falsehood in the matter, nor whether there is strength or weakness in the proofs. They have them before their eyes, and they refuse to look; and in this ignorance they take the course of doing all that is needed to fall into this misfortune, if it exists; of waiting to put it to the test at death; of being, meanwhile, well satisfied in this state, professing it openly, and in the end boasting of it. Can anyone think seriously about the importance of this affair without being horrified at conduct so extravagant?

This rest in such ignorance is a monstrous thing, and its extravagance and stupidity must be made felt by those who spend their lives in it, by showing it to them as it is, to confound them with the sight of their own folly. For this is how men reason when they choose to live in this ignorance of what they are, without seeking any light. "I do not know," they say…

195 bis. [Our imagination so magnifies the present, by dint of reflecting on it continually, and so shrinks eternity, for want of reflecting on it, that we make eternity a nothing and nothing an eternity; and all this has roots so alive in us that all our reason cannot defend us against it, and that…]

196. People lack heart; one would not make a friend of such a person.

197. To be insensible enough to despise the things that concern us, and to become insensible on the very point that concerns us most.

198. Man's sensitivity to little things and his insensitivity to the greatest: the mark of a strange inversion.

199. Imagine a number of men in chains, all condemned to death, some of whom are slaughtered each day in sight of the others; those who remain see their own condition in that of their fellows, and, looking at one another in sorrow and without hope, wait their turn. That is the image of the condition of men.

200. A man in a dungeon, not knowing whether his sentence has been passed, with only an hour left to find out, and that hour enough, if he learns that it has been passed, to have it revoked: it is against nature that he should spend that hour, not in finding out whether the sentence has been passed, but in playing piquet. Thus it is supernatural that man, etc.; it is the hand of God weighing heavy upon him. Thus not only the zeal of those who seek him proves God, but the blindness of those who do not seek him.

201. All the objections of either side tell only against themselves, and not at all against religion. Everything the ungodly say…

202. [From those who are unhappy to find themselves without faith, we see that God does not enlighten them; but as for the others, we see that there is a God who blinds them.]

203. Fascinatio nugacitatis: the bewitchment of trifles. That passion may do us no harm, let us act as if we had only a week to live.

204. If we ought to give a week of our life, we ought to give a hundred years.

204 bis. If we ought to give a week, we ought to give our whole life.

205. When I consider the short span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before it and after it, the little space I fill, and even the little I can see, sunk in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am frightened, and astonished to find myself here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose order and whose direction were this place and this time allotted to me? The memory of a guest of one day, who passes on.

206. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

207. How many kingdoms know nothing of us!

208. Why is my knowledge limited? My height? My life to a hundred years rather than a thousand? What reason did nature have for giving it to me so, and for choosing this number rather than another, out of an infinity of numbers among which there is no more reason to choose one than another, none of them tempting more than the rest?

209. Are you any less a slave for being loved and flattered by your master? You are well off indeed, slave: your master flatters you; he will beat you soon enough.

210. The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play may be: at the end they throw some earth over your head, and that is all, for ever.

211. We are absurd to take our rest in the company of our fellows, wretched like us, powerless like us: they will not help us; we shall die alone. We must act, then, as if we were alone; and in that case, would we build splendid houses, etc.? We would seek the truth without hesitating; and if we refuse to, we show that we value the esteem of men more than the search for truth.

212. Slipping away. It is a horrible thing to feel everything we possess slipping away.

213. Between us and hell or heaven there is only life, standing between the two, and it is the most fragile thing in the world.

214. Injustice. That presumption should be joined to wretchedness is an extreme injustice.

215. To fear death when out of danger, and not in danger; for one must be a man.

216. Sudden death the only thing to fear, and that is why confessors live in the houses of the great.

217. He is an heir who finds the title deeds of his house. Will he say, "Perhaps they are forged," and neglect to examine them?

218. Dungeon. I think it right that people should not go deeply into the opinion of Copernicus; but this: it matters to the whole of life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal.

219. It is beyond doubt that whether the soul is mortal or immortal must make an entire difference to morality. And yet the philosophers have drawn up their morality without regard to it: they debate to pass an hour.

Plato, to dispose men to Christianity.

220. The falseness of the philosophers who did not discuss the immortality of the soul; the falseness of their dilemma in Montaigne.

221. Atheists ought to say things that are perfectly clear; now it is not perfectly clear that the soul is material.

222. Atheists. What reason have they for saying that one cannot rise from the dead? Which is harder, to be born or to rise again, that what has never been should be, or that what has been should be again? Is it harder to come into being than to come back to it? Custom makes the one easy for us, the want of custom makes the other impossible: the common people's way of judging!

Why can a virgin not bear a child? Does a hen not lay eggs without a cock? Who can tell those eggs from the others by looking at them? And who has told us that the hen cannot form the germ in them as well as the cock?

223. What have they to say against the resurrection, and against the Virgin's giving birth? Which is harder, to produce a man or an animal, or to reproduce it? And if they had never seen a species of animal, could they guess whether its members are produced without one another's company?

224. How I hate these follies, not believing in the Eucharist, etc.! If the Gospel is true, if Jesus Christ is God, what difficulty is there in that?

225. Atheism, a mark of strength of mind, but only up to a certain point.

226. The ungodly, who profess to follow reason, must be uncommonly strong in reason. What do they say, then? "Don't we see," they say, "the beasts die and live like men, and Turks like Christians? They have their ceremonies, their prophets, their teachers, their saints, their monks, just as we do," etc. Is that contrary to Scripture? Does Scripture not say all this?

If you hardly care to know the truth, that is enough to leave you in peace; but if you long with all your heart to know it, it is not enough: look into the detail. That would be enough for a question of philosophy; but here, where everything is at stake. And yet, after a light reflection of this kind, people go off to amuse themselves, etc. Let them ask this religion itself whether it does not give a reason for this obscurity; perhaps it will teach it to us.

227. Order by dialogues. What ought I to do? I see nothing but darkness everywhere. Shall I believe that I know nothing? Shall I believe that I am God?

"All things change and follow one another." You are mistaken, there is…

228. Objection of the atheists: "But we have no light."

229. This is what I see, and what troubles me. I look on every side, and everywhere I see nothing but darkness. Nature offers me nothing that is not a matter for doubt and disquiet; if I saw nothing in it that pointed to a Divinity, I would settle on denial; if I saw the marks of a Creator everywhere, I would rest in peace in faith; but seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a pitiable state, in which I have wished a hundred times that, if a God upholds nature, nature would show it without ambiguity, and that, if the marks it gives of him are deceptive, it would suppress them altogether; that it would say everything or nothing, so that I might see which side I ought to take; whereas in the state I am in, not knowing what I am or what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My whole heart strains to know where the true good is, in order to follow it; no price would be too high for me to pay for eternity.

I envy those I see living in the faith so carelessly, and making such poor use of a gift of which, it seems to me, I would make so different a use.

230. Incomprehensible that God should exist, and incomprehensible that he should not; that the soul should be joined to the body, that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, that it should not be, etc.; that original sin should be, and that it should not.

231. Do you believe it impossible that God should be infinite and without parts? "Yes." Then I want to show you something infinite and indivisible. It is a point moving everywhere at an infinite speed; for it is one in every place, and whole and entire in each spot.

Let this effect of nature, which seemed impossible to you before, teach you that there may be others you do not yet know. Do not draw from what you have learned the conclusion that nothing is left for you to know, but that infinitely much is left for you to know.

232. Infinite motion; the point that fills everything; the moment of rest: infinite without quantity, indivisible and infinite.

233. Infinity, nothing. Our soul is cast into the body, where it finds number, time, dimensions; it reasons about them, and calls this nature, necessity, and can believe nothing else.

One added to the infinite does not increase it at all, any more than a foot added to an infinite length; the finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite and becomes a pure nothing. Thus our mind before God; thus our justice before divine justice. There is not so great a disproportion between our justice and God's as between one and the infinite. God's justice must be as vast as his mercy; and his justice towards the rejected is less vast, and ought to shock us less, than his mercy towards the elect.

We know that there is an infinite, and we do not know its nature. As we know it is false that numbers are finite, so it is true that there is an infinite in number; but we do not know what it is: it is false that it is even, it is false that it is odd, for adding one to it does not change its nature; and yet it is a number, and every number is even or odd (true, this is meant of every finite number). Thus we can perfectly well know that there is a God without knowing what he is.

Is there not one substantial truth, when we see so many true things that are not truth itself?

We know, then, the existence and the nature of the finite, because we are finite and extended like it. We know the existence of the infinite and do not know its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits as we do. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits.

But by faith we know his existence; in glory, in the life to come, we shall know his nature. Now, I have already shown that we can perfectly well know the existence of a thing without knowing its nature.

Let us now speak according to the light of nature.

If there is a God, he is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is. That being so, who will dare to undertake to settle the question? Not we, who bear no relation to him.

Who, then, will blame Christians for being unable to give a reason for their belief, when they profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason? They declare, in setting it before the world, that it is foolishness, stultitiam; and then you complain that they do not prove it! If they proved it, they would not be keeping their word: it is in being without proofs that they are not without sense. "Yes, but although that excuses those who offer it as such, and clears them of blame for putting it forward without reasons, it does not excuse those who accept it." Let us examine this point, then, and say: God is, or he is not. But which way shall we lean? Reason can settle nothing here: there is an infinite chaos that separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a game is being played, and the coin will come down heads or tails. What will you wager? By reason you cannot back one or the other; by reason you cannot defend either.²¹

Do not blame those who have made a choice for being wrong, then, for you know nothing about it. "No; but I'll blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for although the man who calls heads and the other are equally at fault, they're both at fault: the right thing is not to wager at all."

Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional: you are embarked. Which will you take, then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which choice is less against your interest. You have two things to lose, the true and the good, and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your beatitude; and your nature has two things to shun, error and wretchedness. Your reason is no more offended by choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. That is one point settled. But your beatitude? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in calling heads, that God is. Let us reckon the two cases: if you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, that he is, without hesitating. "That's marvellous. Yes, I must wager; but perhaps I'm wagering too much." Let us see. Since there is an equal chance of gain and of loss, if you had only two lives to win for one, you could still wager; but if there were three to win, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to risk your life to win three in a game where there is an equal chance of loss and of gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness; and that being so, even if there were an infinity of chances of which only one was for you, you would still be right to wager one to have two; and you would be acting without sense, being obliged to play, if you refused to stake one life against three in a game where, out of an infinity of chances, one is for you, if there were an infinity of infinitely happy life to win. But here there is an infinity of infinitely happy life to win, one chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. That leaves no choice: wherever the infinite is, and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against the one chance of gain, there is nothing to weigh, you must give everything. And so, when one is forced to play, one would have to renounce reason to keep one's life rather than risk it for the infinite gain, which is as likely to come as the loss of nothingness.

For it is no use saying that it is uncertain whether we shall win, and certain that we are taking a risk, and that the infinite distance between the certainty of what we stake and the uncertainty of what we shall win makes the finite good we certainly stake equal to the infinite, which is uncertain. That is not so. Every gambler risks with certainty to win with uncertainty; and yet he certainly risks the finite to win the finite uncertainly, without sinning against reason. There is not an infinite distance between this certainty of what we stake and the uncertainty of the gain: that is false. There is, it is true, an infinity between the certainty of winning and the certainty of losing. But the uncertainty of winning is proportioned to the certainty of what we risk, according to the proportion of the chances of gain and loss; and hence, if there are as many chances on one side as on the other, the fair bet is even money; and then the certainty of what we stake is equal to the uncertainty of the gain, so far is it from being infinitely distant from it. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to risk in a game where the chances of gain and of loss are equal, and the infinite to win. This is a demonstration; and if men are capable of any truth, this is one. "I confess it, I admit it. But even so, is there no way of seeing the cards underneath?" Yes: Scripture, and the rest, etc.

"Yes, but my hands are tied and my mouth is shut; I'm being forced to wager, and I'm not free; no one lets me go, and I am so made that I cannot believe. What do you want me to do, then?"

That is true. But at least learn that your inability to believe, since reason brings you to it and yet you cannot, [comes only from the fault of your passions]. Work, then, at convincing yourself, not by increasing the proofs of God, but by diminishing your passions. You want to come to faith, and you do not know the way; you want to cure yourself of unbelief, and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were bound like you, and who now wager everything they have; these are people who know the road you would like to follow, and who have been cured of an illness you want to be cured of. Follow the way they began: it was by doing everything as if they believed, by taking holy water, by having masses said, etc. Even in the natural course of things, this will make you believe, and will make you as simple as the beasts. "But that's just what I'm afraid of." And why? What have you to lose? But to show you that this leads there: it will diminish the passions, which are your great obstacles, etc. End of this discourse. Now, what harm will come to you from taking this side? You will be faithful, decent, humble, grateful, generous, a friend, sincere, truthful. It is true that you will not live among pestilent pleasures, in glory, in luxury; but will you not have others? I tell you that you will gain by it in this life; and that at every step you take along this road you will see so much certainty of gain, and so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will know in the end that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.²²^,²³

"Oh, this discourse carries me away, it enraptures me, etc., etc."

If this discourse pleases you and seems strong to you, know that it was made by a man who knelt down before and after it to pray to that infinite Being without parts, to whom he submits all that is his, that he would submit all that is yours to himself as well, for your own good and for his glory; and that in this way the strength agrees with this lowliness.

234. If we must do nothing except for what is certain, we ought to do nothing for religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do for the uncertain: sea voyages, battles! I say, then, that we would have to do nothing at all, for nothing is certain; and that there is more certainty in religion than there is that we shall see tomorrow: for it is not certain that we shall see tomorrow, but it is certainly possible that we shall not see it. We cannot say as much of religion. It is not certain that it is true; but who will dare to say that it is certainly possible that it is not? Now, when we work for tomorrow, and for the uncertain, we act reasonably; for we ought to work for the uncertain, by the rule of the stakes, which has been demonstrated.²⁴

Saint Augustine saw that we work for the uncertain, at sea, in battle, etc.; but he did not see the rule of the stakes, which demonstrates that we ought to. Montaigne saw that a lame mind offends us, and that custom can do everything; but he did not see the reason for this effect.

All these people saw the effects, but they did not see the causes; they are, compared with those who have discovered the causes, like those who have only eyes compared with those who have a mind; for effects are, as it were, perceptible to the senses, and causes are visible only to the mind. And although these effects are seen by the mind, that mind is, compared with the mind that sees the causes, as the bodily senses are compared with the mind.

235. Rem viderunt, causam non viderunt: they saw the thing, they did not see the cause.

236. By the rule of the stakes, you ought to take the trouble to seek the truth; for if you die without worshipping the true first principle, you are lost. "But," you say, "if he had wanted me to worship him, he would have left me signs of his will." He has; but you neglect them. Look for them, then; it is well worth the trouble.

237. The stakes. We must live differently in the world according to these different suppositions: 1. if we could be here forever; 5. if it is certain that we shall not be here long, and uncertain whether we shall be here an hour. This last supposition is ours.

238. What do you promise me, in the end (for ten years is the stake), but ten years of self-love, of trying hard to please without succeeding, besides the certain pains?

239. Objection. Those who hope for their salvation are happy in that, but they have the fear of hell as a counterweight.

Reply. Who has more cause to fear hell: the man who does not know whether there is a hell, and is certain of damnation if there is; or the man who is firmly persuaded that there is a hell, and hopes to be saved if there is?

240. "I would soon have given up pleasures," they say, "if I had faith." And I tell you: you would soon have faith if you had given up pleasures. Now, it is for you to begin. If I could, I would give you faith; I cannot, nor, therefore, can I test the truth of what you say. But you can perfectly well give up pleasures, and test whether what I say is true.

241. Order. I would be far more afraid of being mistaken, and of finding that the Christian religion is true, than of being mistaken in believing it true.

Damien Mitton, a man of the world and a cultivated unbeliever in Pascal's Paris circle. ↩
Pascal's coin falls "croix ou pile", the French of his day for heads or tails; the croix was the face that bore a cross. When he comes to the bet itself, the side he has you call, that God is, is the cross. ↩
The words in square brackets are struck through in the manuscript. Brunschvicg judged the stroke a slip and kept the words, and they are kept here as he printed them. ↩
Pascal's word is abêtira, from abêtir, built on bête, a beast: to make someone like an animal, and in everyday French to make him stupid. He means the habit that works on us as it works on animals, which act without arguing; it quiets the reasoning that stands in the way of belief. The word was too much for his first editors: Port-Royal left it out of the edition of 1670, and it was first printed by Victor Cousin in the 1840s. ↩
The rule of the stakes is Pascal's règle des partis: the rule for dividing the pot fairly between the players when a game of chance is broken off before the end, each taking a share in proportion to his chances of winning from that point. Pascal worked it out in his letters with Fermat in 1654, the correspondence usually counted as the beginning of the mathematics of probability, and the wager applies it. ↩

Section IV: The Means of Believing

242. Preface to the second part. Speak of those who have treated this subject.

I marvel at the boldness with which these people undertake to speak of God. Addressing their arguments to the ungodly, they make their first chapter a proof of the Divinity from the works of nature. I would not be surprised at their enterprise if they were addressing their arguments to the faithful, for it is certain that those who have a living faith in their heart see at once that everything that exists is nothing other than the work of the God they adore. But for those in whom this light has gone out, and in whom we mean to make it live again, people without faith and without grace, who search with all their light through everything they see in nature that might lead them to this knowledge, and find only obscurity and darkness: to tell them that they have only to look at the least of the things around them and they will see God unveiled, and to give them, as the whole proof of this great and weighty subject, the course of the moon and the planets, and to claim to have completed the proof with such an argument, is to give them reason to believe that the proofs of our religion are very weak indeed; and I see, by reason and by experience, that nothing is more apt to breed contempt for it in them.

That is not how Scripture, which knows better the things that are of God, speaks of it. It says, on the contrary, that God is a hidden God; and that since the corruption of nature he has left men in a blindness from which they can escape only through Jesus Christ, outside whom all communication with God is cut off: No one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

That is what Scripture shows us when it says in so many places that those who seek God find him. It is not of this light that it speaks, like daylight at high noon. Nobody says that those who look for daylight at high noon, or for water in the sea, will find it; and so the evidence of God cannot be of that kind in nature. That is why it tells us elsewhere: Truly you are a hidden God.

243. It is a remarkable thing that no canonical author has ever used nature to prove God. All of them try to make us believe in him. David, Solomon and the rest never said, "There is no vacuum, therefore there is a God." They must have been cleverer than the cleverest people who have come since, all of whom have used it. That is very much worth considering.

244. "What! Do you not say yourself that the heavens and the birds prove God?" No. "And does your religion not say so?" No. For although it is true in a sense for some souls to whom God gives this light, it is nevertheless false for most.

245. There are three means of believing: reason, custom, inspiration. The Christian religion, which alone has reason, does not accept as its true children those who believe without inspiration. It is not that it shuts out reason and custom; on the contrary. But we must open our mind to the proofs, confirm ourselves in them by custom, and yet offer ourselves through humiliations to inspiration, which alone can produce the true and saving effect: lest the cross of Christ be made void.

246. Order. After the letter that we must seek God, write the letter on removing the obstacles, which is the discourse on the machine, on preparing the machine, on seeking by reason.

247. Order. A letter of exhortation to a friend, to move him to seek. And he will answer, "But what good will seeking do me? Nothing shows." And to answer him: Do not despair. And he would answer that he would be glad to find some light, but that by this very religion's account, even if he did believe that way, it would do him no good, and so he would just as soon not seek. And to answer that: the machine.

248. A letter showing the usefulness of proofs, by means of the machine. Faith is different from proof: the one is human, the other is a gift of God. The just man lives by faith: by that faith which God himself puts into the heart, and of which proof is often the instrument, faith comes by hearing; but this faith is in the heart, and makes us say not scio, I know, but credo, I believe.

249. It is superstition to put one's hope in formalities; but it is pride to refuse to submit to them.

250. The outward must be joined to the inward if we are to obtain anything from God: that is, we must go down on our knees, pray with our lips, and so on, so that proud man, who would not submit to God, may now be subject to the creature. To expect help from these outward things is superstition; to refuse to join them to the inward is pride.

251. Other religions, like the pagan ones, are more popular, for they are all outward; but they are not for clever people. A purely intellectual religion would be better suited to the clever; but it would be of no use to the people. The Christian religion alone is suited to everyone, being a mixture of the outward and the inward. It raises the people to the inward, and humbles the proud to the outward; and it is not perfect without both, for the people must understand the spirit of the letter, and the clever must submit their spirit to the letter.

252. For we must not mistake ourselves: we are automaton as much as mind; and that is why the instrument by which persuasion is done is not demonstration alone. How few things are demonstrated! Proofs convince only the mind; custom makes our strongest and most believed proofs; it inclines the automaton, which draws the mind along without its thinking about it. Who has demonstrated that there will be a tomorrow, and that we shall die? And what is more believed? It is custom, then, that persuades us of it; it is custom that makes so many Christians, it is custom that makes the Turks, the pagans, the trades, the soldiers, and so on. (Christians have, over and above the pagans, the faith received in baptism.) In short, we must have recourse to custom once the mind has seen where the truth lies, to steep and dye ourselves in this belief, which slips away from us at every hour; for to have the proofs always present to us is too much trouble. We must acquire an easier belief, which is the belief of habit, which without violence, without art, without argument, makes us believe things, and inclines all our powers to this belief, so that our soul falls into it naturally. When we believe only by the force of conviction, and the automaton is inclined to believe the opposite, it is not enough. We must therefore make both our parts believe: the mind by reasons, which it is enough to have seen once in a lifetime; and the automaton by custom, and by not allowing it to incline to the contrary. Incline my heart, O God.

Reason acts slowly, and with so many views, on so many principles, all of which must always be present to it, that at every hour it dozes off or goes astray, for want of having all its principles present. Feeling does not act that way: it acts in an instant, and is always ready to act. We must therefore put our faith in feeling; otherwise it will always waver.

253. Two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.

254. It is not a rare thing to have to reproach the world for too much credulity. It is a natural vice like unbelief, and just as pernicious. Superstition.

255. Piety is different from superstition.

To carry piety as far as superstition is to destroy it.

The heretics reproach us with this superstitious submission; that is doing what they reproach us with.

Ungodliness, not to believe in the Eucharist because we do not see it.

Superstition, to believe propositions, etc.

Faith, etc.

256. There are few true Christians, I mean even in faith. There are plenty who believe, but out of superstition; there are plenty who do not believe, but out of freethinking: few are between the two.

I do not include in this those who live in true piety of conduct, and all those who believe by a feeling of the heart.

257. There are three kinds of people: those who serve God, having found him; those who are busy seeking him, not having found him; and those who live without seeking him or having found him. The first are reasonable and happy, the last are foolish and unhappy, those in the middle are unhappy and reasonable.

258. Unusquisque sibi Deum fingit: each man makes a god for himself.

Disgust.

259. Ordinary people have the power of not thinking about what they do not want to think about. "Do not think about the passages on the Messiah," said the Jew to his son. Our own people often do the same; that is how false religions are preserved, and even the true one, as far as many people are concerned.

But there are some who do not have the power to keep themselves from thinking in this way, and who think all the more for having been forbidden. These rid themselves of false religions, and even of the true one, if they do not find solid arguments.

260. They hide in the crowd, and call numbers to their aid. Tumult.

Authority. So far from having heard a thing said being the rule of your belief, you ought to believe nothing without putting yourself in the position of one who had never heard it.

It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that ought to make you believe.

Believing is so important! A hundred contradictions would be true.

If antiquity were the rule of belief, then the ancients had no rule? If general consent, what if men had perished?

False humility, pride.

Raise the curtain. Do what you like, you must still either believe, or deny, or doubt. Shall we have no rule, then? We judge of animals that they do well what they do. Will there be no rule for judging men?

To deny, to believe and to doubt well are to man what running is to the horse.

Punishment of those who sin: error.

261. Those who do not love the truth take as their pretext for disputing it the multitude of those who deny it; and so their error comes only from their not loving truth or charity, and so they have no excuse.

262. Superstition and concupiscence.

Scruples, evil desires.

Evil fear: fear, not the kind that comes from believing in God, but the kind that comes from doubting whether he exists or not. Good fear comes from faith, false fear comes from doubt. Good fear is joined to hope, because it is born of faith and we hope in the God we believe in; bad fear is joined to despair, because we fear the God in whom we have no faith. The one kind are afraid of losing him; the other are afraid of finding him.

263. "A miracle," people say, "would strengthen my belief." They say so when they do not see one. Reasons which, seen from a distance, seem to bound our view; but when we have got there, we begin to see beyond them again. Nothing stops the restlessness of our mind. There is no rule, people say, without some exception, and no truth so general that it has no side on which it fails. It is enough that it is not absolutely universal to give us grounds for applying the exception to the case in hand and saying, "This is not always true; so there are cases where it does not hold." It only remains to show that this is one of them; and one must be very clumsy or very unlucky not to find an opening some day.

264. We never tire of eating and sleeping every day, for hunger comes back, and sleep; without that we would tire of them. And so, without hunger for spiritual things, we tire of them. Hunger for righteousness: the eighth beatitude.

265. Faith does say what the senses do not say, but never the contrary of what they see. It is above them, and not against them.

266. How many stars the telescopes have shown us that did not exist for our philosophers before! People used to take on Holy Scripture boldly over the great number of the stars, saying, "There are only a thousand and twenty-two of them; we know it."

"There are plants on the earth; we see them." From the moon we would not see them. "And on these plants there are hairs, and in these hairs little animals; but after that, nothing more." O presumptuous man! "Compounds are made of elements, and the elements are not." O presumptuous man, here is a fine point. "We must not say that there is anything we do not see." Then we must speak like the others, but not think like them.

267. The last step of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things beyond it. It is merely weak if it does not go so far as to know that.

And if natural things are beyond it, what shall we say of supernatural ones?

268. Submission. We must know how to doubt where we must, to be certain where we must, and to submit where we must. Whoever does not do so does not understand the force of reason. There are some who sin against these three principles: either by taking everything as demonstrated, for want of knowing what a demonstration is; or by doubting everything, for want of knowing where to submit; or by submitting in everything, for want of knowing where to judge.

269. Submission and the use of reason: that is what true Christianity consists in.

270. Saint Augustine: reason would never submit if it did not judge that there are occasions when it ought to submit. It is right, then, that it should submit when it judges that it ought to submit.

271. Wisdom sends us back to childhood: Unless you become like little children.

272. There is nothing so in keeping with reason as this disavowal of reason.

273. If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have nothing mysterious or supernatural about it; if we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.

274. All our reasoning comes down to giving way to feeling.

But fancy is like feeling and contrary to it, so that we cannot tell these contraries apart. One man says that my feeling is fancy, another that his fancy is feeling. We would need a rule. Reason offers itself; but it can be bent in every direction, and so there is no rule.

275. Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

276. Monsieur de Roannez used to say, "The reasons come to me afterwards; but at first the thing pleases me or offends me without my knowing why, and yet it offends me for the very reason I discover only later." But I believe, not that it offended him for the reasons found afterwards, but that the reasons are found only because it offends.²⁵

277. The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know; we know it in a thousand things. I say that the heart loves the universal being naturally, and itself naturally, according as it gives itself to either; and it hardens itself against the one or the other, as it chooses. You have rejected the one and kept the other: is it by reason that you love yourself?

278. It is the heart that feels God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God felt by the heart, not by reason.

279. Faith is a gift of God. Do not think that we say it is a gift of reasoning. Other religions do not say this of their faith; they offered only reasoning as the way to reach it, and yet it does not lead there.

280. How far it is from knowing God to loving him!

281. Heart, instinct, principles.

282. We know the truth not only by reason but also by the heart. It is in this second way that we know first principles, and it is in vain that reasoning, which has no part in it, tries to fight them. The Pyrrhonists, who have nothing else in view, labour at it to no purpose. We know that we are not dreaming, however powerless we may be to prove it by reason. This powerlessness proves nothing but the weakness of our reason, and not the uncertainty of all our knowledge, as they claim. For the knowledge of first principles, such as that there is space, time, motion, number, is as firm as any that our reasonings give us. And it is on this knowledge of the heart and of instinct that reason must lean, and on it that reason must found all its argument. The heart feels that there are three dimensions in space, and that the numbers are infinite; and reason then demonstrates that there are no two square numbers one of which is double the other. Principles are felt, propositions are concluded; and all of it with certainty, though by different ways. And it is as useless and as ridiculous for reason to demand of the heart proofs of these first principles before it will agree to them, as it would be ridiculous for the heart to demand of reason a feeling of all the propositions it demonstrates before it will accept them.²⁶

This powerlessness, then, ought to serve only to humble reason, which would like to judge everything, and not to fight our certainty, as if reason alone were able to instruct us. Would to God, on the contrary, that we never needed it, and that we knew all things by instinct and by feeling! But nature has refused us this good; on the contrary, it has given us very little knowledge of this kind; all the rest can be acquired only by reasoning.

And that is why those to whom God has given religion by a feeling of the heart are very fortunate, and very rightly persuaded. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, until God gives it to them by a feeling of the heart, without which faith is merely human, and useless for salvation.

283. Order. Against the objection that Scripture has no order. The heart has its order; the mind has its own, which is by principle and demonstration; the heart has another. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love: that would be ridiculous.

Jesus Christ and Saint Paul have the order of charity, not of the mind; for they wanted to warm, not to instruct. Saint Augustine likewise. This order consists chiefly in digressing on each point that bears on the end, so as to keep pointing to it.

284. Do not be surprised to see simple people believe without reasoning. God gives them love of himself and hatred of themselves; he inclines their heart to believe. No one will ever believe with a belief that is useful and is faith unless God inclines the heart; and they will believe as soon as he inclines it. And that is what David knew well: Incline my heart to…

285. Religion is suited to every kind of mind. The first stop at its establishment alone, and this religion is such that its establishment alone is enough to prove its truth. Others go as far back as the apostles. The most learned go back to the beginning of the world. The angels see it better still, and from further off.

286. Those who believe without having read the Testaments do so because they have an inward disposition that is wholly holy, and what they hear said of our religion agrees with it. They feel that a God made them; they want to love only God; they want to hate only themselves. They feel that they have not the strength for it by themselves, that they are incapable of going to God, and that if God does not come to them they are incapable of any communication with him. And they hear it said in our religion that we must love only God and hate only ourselves, but that, since we are all corrupt and incapable of God, God became man to unite himself with us. Nothing more is needed to persuade men who have this disposition in their heart, and who have this knowledge of their duty and of their incapacity.

287. Those we see to be Christians without knowledge of the prophecies and the proofs judge of them none the less as well as those who have that knowledge. They judge of them by the heart, as the others judge by the mind. It is God himself who inclines them to believe; and so they are very effectively persuaded.

I readily admit that one of these Christians who believe without proofs may not have the means of convincing an unbeliever who will say as much of himself. But those who know the proofs of religion will prove without difficulty that this believer is truly inspired by God, though he could not prove it himself.

For since God said in his prophecies (which are beyond doubt prophecies) that in the reign of Jesus Christ he would pour out his spirit on the nations, and that the sons, the daughters and the children of the Church would prophesy, there is no doubt that the spirit of God is on these people, and that it is not on the others.

288. Instead of complaining that God has hidden himself, you will give him thanks for having revealed himself so much; and you will give him thanks too for not having revealed himself to the proud wise, unworthy to know so holy a God.

Two kinds of people know him: those whose heart is humbled and who love lowliness, whatever degree of mind they have, high or low; or those who have mind enough to see the truth, whatever resistance they may have to it.

289. Proof. 1. The Christian religion, by its establishment: established so strongly, so gently, while being so contrary to nature. 2. The holiness, the loftiness and the humility of a Christian soul. 3. The wonders of Holy Scripture. 4. Jesus Christ in particular. 5. The apostles in particular. 6. Moses and the prophets in particular. 7. The Jewish people. 8. The prophecies. 9. Perpetuity: no religion has perpetuity. 10. The doctrine, which accounts for everything. 11. The holiness of this law. 12. By the conduct of the world.

It is beyond doubt that after this, considering what life is and what this religion is, we ought not to refuse to follow the inclination to follow it, if it comes into our heart; and it is certain that there is no ground for mocking those who follow it.

290. Proofs of religion: morality, doctrine, miracles, prophecies, figures.

Section V: Justice and the Reason of Effects

291. In the letter On Injustice can go the joke about elder sons who get everything: "My friend, you were born on this side of the mountain; so it is just that your elder brother should have everything."

"Why are you killing me?"

292. He lives on the other side of the water.

293. "Why are you killing me?" "What! Do you not live on the other side of the water? My friend, if you lived on this side, I would be a murderer, and it would be unjust to kill you like this; but since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and it is just."

294. On what will he found the order of the world he means to govern? Will it be on the whim of each individual? What confusion! Will it be on justice? He knows nothing of it.

Certainly, if he knew it, he would not have laid down this maxim, the most general of all those current among men, that each should follow the customs of his own country. The brilliance of true equity would have subdued every people, and lawgivers would not have taken as their model, instead of that constant justice, the fancies and whims of Persians and Germans. We would see it planted in every state of the world and in every age, whereas we see nothing just or unjust that does not change its nature with a change of climate. Three degrees of latitude overturn the whole of jurisprudence; a meridian decides what is true; after a few years in possession, fundamental laws change; law has its epochs; the entry of Saturn into Leo marks for us the origin of such and such a crime. A droll justice, that a river bounds! Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other.

They admit that justice does not lie in these customs, but that it resides in the natural laws known in every country. Certainly they would maintain it stubbornly, if the recklessness of chance that has scattered human laws about had hit upon even one that was universal; but the joke is that human whim has diversified itself so thoroughly that there is none.

Theft, incest, the murder of children and of fathers: everything has had its place among virtuous actions. Can anything be more comical than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his prince has a quarrel with mine, although I have none with him?

There are natural laws, no doubt; but this fine reason of ours, being corrupt, has corrupted everything: Nothing is ours any more; what we call ours is a thing of art. Crimes are committed by decrees of the senate and votes of the people. As once we suffered from our vices, so now we suffer from our laws.

Out of this confusion it comes that one man says the essence of justice is the authority of the lawgiver, another the convenience of the sovereign, another present custom; and that is the surest. Nothing, by reason alone, is just in itself; everything shifts with time. Custom makes the whole of equity, for the sole reason that it is accepted; that is the mystical foundation of its authority. Whoever takes it back to its first principle destroys it. Nothing is so faulty as those laws that correct faults. Whoever obeys them because they are just obeys the justice he imagines, but not the essence of the law: law is wholly gathered up in itself; it is law, and nothing more. Whoever cares to examine its motive will find it so weak and so flimsy that, unless he is used to contemplating the prodigies of human imagination, he will marvel that a single century has won it so much pomp and reverence. The art of opposition, of overturning states, is to unsettle established customs by probing them to their source, to bring out their want of authority and of justice. We must go back, people say, to the fundamental and original laws of the state, which an unjust custom has abolished. It is a sure game for losing everything; nothing will be just on those scales. Yet the people readily lend an ear to such talk. They throw off the yoke as soon as they recognize it; and the great profit by it, to the ruin of the people and of those curious examiners of received customs. That is why the wisest of lawgivers, Plato, said that for men's good they must often be deceived; and another good politician: Since he does not know the truth that would set him free, it is good for him to be deceived. The people must not feel the truth of the usurpation. It was brought in long ago without reason, and it has become reasonable. We must make it be regarded as authentic and eternal, and hide its beginning, if we do not want it soon to come to an end.²⁷

295. Mine, yours. "This dog is mine," said those poor children; "that is my place in the sun." There is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of the whole earth.

296. When it is a question of judging whether to make war and kill so many men, to condemn so many Spaniards to death, it is one man alone who judges, and an interested one at that: it ought to be an indifferent third party.

297. Veri juris, of true law. We have none of it any more. If we had any, we would not take as our rule of justice that each should follow the customs of his own country. It is there that, unable to find the just, we have found the strong, etc.

298. Justice, force. It is just that what is just should be followed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be followed. Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical. Justice without force is gainsaid, because there are always wicked men; force without justice stands accused. We must therefore put justice and force together, and to do so make what is just strong, or what is strong just.

Justice is open to dispute; force is easily recognized and beyond dispute. And so it has not been possible to give force to justice, because force has gainsaid justice and said that justice was unjust, and said that it was force that was just. And so, being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.

299. The only universal rules are the laws of the country in ordinary matters, and the majority in others. Where does this come from? From the force that is in them. And that is why kings, who have force from elsewhere, do not follow the majority of their ministers.

No doubt equality of possessions is just; but, unable to make it a matter of force to obey justice, men have made it just to obey force; unable to fortify justice, they have justified force, so that the just and the strong should be together, and there should be peace, which is the sovereign good.

300. "When the strong man, armed, holds his goods, what he holds is in peace."

301. Why do we follow the majority? Is it because they have more reason? No, but more force.

Why do we follow ancient laws and ancient opinions? Is it that they are the soundest? No, but they are single, and take from us the root of diversity.

302. … It is the effect of force, not of custom; for those who are capable of inventing are rare; the strongest in number want only to follow, and refuse glory to those inventors who seek it by their inventions; and if the inventors persist in wanting to have it, and in despising those who do not invent, the others will call them ridiculous names, and would give them a thrashing. Let no one pride himself on this subtlety, then, or let him keep his satisfaction to himself.

303. Force is the queen of the world, and not opinion. "But it is opinion that makes use of force." It is force that makes opinion. Softness is fine, in our opinion. Why? Because whoever wants to dance on the tightrope will be alone, and I shall get up a stronger faction of people who will say it is not fine.

304. The cords that bind the respect of men for one another are in general cords of necessity; for there have to be different degrees, since all men want to rule, and not all can, but some can.

Let us imagine, then, that we see them beginning to form. There is no doubt that they will fight until the stronger party overpowers the weaker, and there is at last a dominant party. But once that is settled, then the masters, who do not want the war to go on, ordain that the force in their hands shall pass on as they please: some hand it over to the election of the people, others to succession by birth, etc.

And that is where imagination begins to play its part. Up to then, sheer force decides the matter; here it is force that maintains itself, by imagination, in a certain party: in France the nobility, in Switzerland the commoners, etc.

These cords, then, that bind respect to this man or that in particular are cords of imagination.

305. The Swiss take offence at being called noblemen, and prove their common birth in order to be judged worthy of high office.

306. Since duchies and kingships and magistracies are real and necessary (because force rules everything), there are such things everywhere and always; but because it is only fancy that makes this man or that one hold them, it is not constant, it is subject to change, etc.

307. The Chancellor is grave and robed in finery, for his position is false; not so the king: he has force, he has no use for imagination. Judges, physicians, and the like have only imagination.

308. The habit of seeing kings attended by guards, drums, officers, and all the things that bend the machine towards respect and terror, means that their face, when it is now and then alone and without these trappings, stamps respect and terror on their subjects, because we do not separate in our thoughts their persons from the retinue we usually see joined to them. And the world, which does not know that this effect comes from that habit, believes it comes from a natural force; and hence such sayings as "The stamp of divinity is on his face," etc.

309. Justice. As fashion makes charm, so it makes justice.

310. King and tyrant.

I too shall have my thoughts at the back of my mind.

I shall be on my guard on every journey.

Greatness of establishment, respect of establishment.

The pleasure of the great is to be able to make people happy.

The property of riches is to be given freely.

The property of each thing must be sought. The property of power is to protect.

When force attacks the play-acting: when a common soldier takes the square cap of a first president and sends it flying out of the window.

310 bis. Obedience out of fancy.

311. Rule founded on opinion and imagination reigns for a time, and this rule is gentle and freely accepted; the rule of force reigns for ever. And so opinion is as it were the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant.

312. Justice is what is established; and so all our established laws will necessarily be held to be just without being examined, since they are established.

313. Sound opinions of the people. The greatest of evils is civil war. Civil wars are certain if we want to reward merit, for everyone will say he has merit. The evil to be feared from a fool who succeeds by right of birth is neither so great nor so certain.

314. God has created everything for himself, has given the power of punishment and of good for himself.

You can apply it to God or to yourself. If to God, the Gospel is the rule. If to yourself, you will take the place of God. As God is surrounded by people full of charity, who ask him for the goods of charity that are in his power, so…

Know yourself, then, and know that you are only a king of concupiscence, and take the ways of concupiscence.

315. Reason of effects. This is wonderful: they do not want me to honour a man dressed in brocade and followed by seven or eight lackeys! Why, he will have me thrashed if I do not bow to him. That coat is a force. It is just the same as with one horse well harnessed beside another! Montaigne is comical not to see what difference there is, and to wonder that anyone finds one, and to ask the reason. "Indeed," he says, "how comes it," etc.

316. Sound opinions of the people. To dress finely is not so very vain; for it shows that a great many people work for you; it shows by your hair that you have a valet, a perfumer, etc., by your collar band, the thread, the lace, etc. Now it is not a mere surface, nor a mere harness, to have many arms. The more arms one has, the stronger one is. To dress finely is to show one's force.

317. Respect is "Put yourself out." That is vain in appearance, but very just; for it is saying, "I would put myself out for you if you needed it, since I do so when it is of no use to you." Besides, respect is there to mark out the great: now if respect meant sitting in an armchair, we would be respecting everyone, and so we would mark out no one; but by putting ourselves out, we mark them out very well.

317 bis. Vanity. Respect means "Put yourself out."

318. He has four lackeys.

319. How right it was to distinguish men by outward things rather than by inward qualities! Which of us two shall go first? Who will give way to the other? The less clever? But I am as clever as he is; we shall have to fight over it. He has four lackeys, and I have only one: that is visible; we have only to count; it is for me to give way, and I am a fool if I dispute it. By this means we are at peace, which is the greatest of goods.

320. We do not choose to steer a ship the passenger who comes of the best family.

320 bis. The most unreasonable things in the world become the most reasonable because of men's unruliness. What is less reasonable than to choose, to govern a state, the eldest son of a queen? We do not choose to steer a boat the passenger who comes of the best family. Such a law would be ridiculous and unjust. But because men are so, and always will be, it becomes reasonable and just, for whom shall we choose? The most virtuous and the cleverest? We are at blows at once: everyone claims to be that most virtuous and cleverest man. Let us attach this quality, then, to something no one can dispute. He is the king's eldest son: that is clear-cut, there is no argument. Reason can do no better, for civil war is the greatest of evils.

321. Children, amazed, see their companions respected.

322. What a great advantage nobility is, which from the age of eighteen puts a man in the running, known and respected, as another might have earned by merit at fifty! That is thirty years gained without effort.

323. What is the self?

A man who stands at the window to watch the passers-by: if I pass that way, can I say he stood there to see me? No, for he is not thinking of me in particular. But someone who loves a person for her beauty: does he love her? No, for smallpox, which will kill the beauty without killing the person, will make him love her no longer.

And if someone loves me for my judgement, for my memory, does he love me? No, for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where, then, is this self, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul? And how can we love the body or the soul except for these qualities, which are not what makes the self, since they are perishable? For would we love the substance of a person's soul in the abstract, whatever qualities might be in it? That cannot be, and it would be unjust. We never, then, love anyone, but only qualities.

Let us no longer mock those who have themselves honoured for their posts and offices, then; for we love no one except for borrowed qualities.

324. The people have very sound opinions: for example,

First, in having chosen diversion and hunting rather than poetry. The half-learned mock it, and triumph in showing the folly of the world by it; but for a reason they do not see into, the people are right;

Second, in having distinguished men by outward things, such as nobility or wealth. The world again triumphs in showing how unreasonable this is; but it is very reasonable: cannibals laugh at a child king;²⁸

Third, in taking offence at a slap in the face, or in so desiring glory. But that is very desirable, because of the other essential goods that go with it; and a man who has taken a slap without resenting it is overwhelmed with insults and wants;

Fourth, working for what is uncertain; going to sea; crossing on a plank.

325. Montaigne is wrong: custom ought to be followed only because it is custom, and not because it is reasonable or just; but the people follow it for the sole reason that they believe it just. Otherwise they would no longer follow it, even though it were custom; for we are willing to be subject only to reason or to justice. Without that, custom would pass for tyranny; but the rule of reason and of justice is no more tyrannical than that of delight: these are the principles natural to man.

It would be good, then, for men to obey laws and customs because they are laws; for the people to know that there are none true and just to bring in, that we know nothing about it, and that we must therefore simply follow those received: in that way they would never be abandoned. But the people are not open to this doctrine; and so, since they believe that truth can be found, and that it is in laws and customs, they believe them, and take their antiquity as a proof of their truth (and not of their authority alone, without truth). And so they obey them; but they are apt to rebel as soon as someone shows them that the laws are worth nothing, which can be shown of all of them, looked at from a certain side.

326. Injustice. It is dangerous to tell the people that the laws are not just, for they obey them only because they believe them just. That is why they must be told at the same time that they must obey them because they are laws, as one must obey superiors, not because they are just but because they are superiors. In that way all sedition is forestalled, if this can be made understood, and what, properly speaking, the definition of justice is.

327. The world judges things well, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man's true seat. The sciences have two extremes that touch. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is the one reached by great souls who, having run through all that men can know, find that they know nothing, and meet again in that same ignorance from which they set out; but it is a learned ignorance that knows itself. Those in between, who have come out of natural ignorance and have not been able to reach the other, have some smattering of this self-satisfied knowledge, and play the experts. These are the ones who trouble the world, and judge everything badly. The people and the clever make up the world's course; those in between despise it and are despised. They judge all things badly, and the world judges all things well.

328. Reason of effects. Continual swing from for to against.

We have shown, then, that man is vain, by the value he sets on things that are not essential; and all these opinions are destroyed. We have shown next that all these opinions are very sound, and that so, all these vanities being very well founded, the people are not so vain as they are said to be; and so we have destroyed the opinion that destroyed the people's.

But now we must destroy this last proposition, and show that it remains true all the same that the people are vain, though their opinions are sound: because they do not feel the truth where it is, and, putting it where it is not, their opinions are always very false and very unsound.

329. Reason of effects. Man's weakness is the cause of so many fine things that are established, such as knowing how to play the lute well.

It is an evil only because of our weakness.

330. The power of kings is founded on the reason and on the folly of the people, and much more on the folly. The greatest and most important thing in the world has weakness for its foundation, and that foundation is admirably sure; for nothing is surer than this, that the people will be weak. What is founded on sound reason is very ill founded, like the esteem of wisdom.

331. We can only picture Plato and Aristotle in the long gowns of pedants. They were gentlemen, and, like other men, laughed with their friends; and when they diverted themselves by writing their Laws and their Politics, they did it in play. That was the least philosophical and least serious part of their lives; the most philosophical was to live simply and quietly. If they wrote about politics, it was as if to bring order to a madhouse; and if they made a show of speaking of it as a great thing, it was because they knew that the madmen they were speaking to believed themselves kings and emperors. They entered into their principles so as to moderate their madness as harmlessly as they could.

332. Tyranny consists in the desire for domination, universal and outside its own order.

Different chambers, of the strong, the handsome, the good minds, the pious, each of whom reigns at home, not elsewhere; and sometimes they meet, and the strong and the handsome fight, foolishly, over which shall be master of the other; for their mastery is of different kinds. They do not understand one another, and their fault is to want to reign everywhere. Nothing can do that, not even force: force can do nothing in the kingdom of the learned; it is mistress only of outward actions.

Tyranny. … So these speeches are false and tyrannical: "I am handsome, so I must be feared." "I am strong, so I must be loved." "I am…"

Tyranny is wanting to have by one way what can be had only by another. We render different duties to different merits: the duty of love to charm, the duty of fear to force, the duty of belief to knowledge.

We ought to render these duties; it is unjust to refuse them, and unjust to demand others. And so it is equally false and tyrannical to say, "He is not strong, so I will not esteem him; he is not clever, so I will not fear him."

333. Have you never seen people who, to complain of how little you think of them, parade before you the example of people of rank who think well of them? I would answer them: Show me the merit by which you charmed those people, and I will think as well of you.

334. Reason of effects. Concupiscence and force are the sources of all our actions: concupiscence makes the voluntary ones, force the involuntary.

335. Reason of effects. It is true, then, to say that everyone is under an illusion: for although the opinions of the people are sound, they are not sound in their heads, for they think the truth is where it is not. The truth is indeed in their opinions, but not at the point where they imagine it. It is true that we must honour noblemen, but not because birth is a real advantage, etc.

336. Reason of effects. We must keep a thought at the back of the mind, and judge everything by it, while speaking all the while like the people.

337. Reason of effects. Gradation. The people honour persons of high birth. The half-clever despise them, saying that birth is not an advantage of the person but of chance. The clever honour them, not for the people's reason but by the thought at the back of the mind. The devout, who have more zeal than knowledge, despise them, in spite of the consideration that makes the clever honour them, because they judge them by a new light that piety gives them. But perfect Christians honour them by another, higher light. And so opinions go on succeeding one another, swinging from for to against, according to the light one has.

338. True Christians nevertheless obey these follies: not that they respect the follies, but the order of God, who, to punish men, has made them subject to these follies: Every creature has been made subject to vanity. It shall be set free. That is how Saint Thomas explains the passage of Saint James on preferring the rich: that if they do not do it with God in view, they step outside the order of religion.

Section VI: The Philosophers

339. I can easily conceive of a man without hands, feet or head (for it is only experience that teaches us the head is more necessary than the feet). But I cannot conceive of man without thought: he would be a stone or a brute.

339 bis. What is it in us that feels pleasure? Is it the hand? Is it the arm? Is it the flesh? Is it the blood? We shall see that it must be something immaterial.

340. The arithmetical machine produces effects that come nearer to thought than anything animals do; but it does nothing that could make us say it has a will, as animals have.²⁹

341. The story of the pike and the frog at Liancourt: they always do it, and never otherwise, nor anything else that shows a mind.³⁰

342. If an animal did by mind what it does by instinct, and if it spoke by mind what it speaks by instinct, in hunting and in warning its companions that the prey is found or lost, it would surely also speak about things it cares about more, and say, for instance, "Gnaw through this cord that hurts me, which I cannot reach."

343. The parrot's beak, which it wipes although it is clean.

344. Instinct and reason, marks of two natures.

345. Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master; for in disobeying the one we are unhappy, and in disobeying the other we are fools.

346. Thought makes the greatness of man.

347. Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The whole universe need not arm itself to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water, is enough to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than what kills him, because he knows that he dies, and the advantage the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of it.

All our dignity, then, lies in thought. It is from there that we must raise ourselves up, and not from space and time, which we could never fill. Let us work, then, at thinking well: that is the principle of morality.

348. Thinking reed. It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the ordering of my thought. I shall have no more by owning lands: by space the universe takes me in and swallows me up like a point; by thought I take it in.

349. Immateriality of the soul. Philosophers who have mastered their passions: what matter could have done that?

350. Stoics. They conclude that what can be done sometimes can be done always, and that since the desire for glory does make those it possesses achieve something, others will be able to do it too. These are feverish movements, which health cannot imitate.

Epictetus concludes, from the fact that there are steadfast Christians, that anyone can be one.

351. Those great efforts of the mind that the soul sometimes reaches are things it cannot stay in; it only leaps up to them, not as onto a throne, for ever, but for a moment only.

352. What a man's virtue can do must not be measured by his efforts, but by his ordinary life.

353. I do not admire the excess of one virtue, valour for instance, unless I see at the same time the excess of the opposite virtue, as in Epaminondas, the Theban general, who had extreme valour and extreme gentleness. For otherwise it is not rising, it is falling. We do not show our greatness by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and filling all the space between. But perhaps it is only a sudden movement of the soul from one of these extremes to the other, and in fact it is only ever at one point, like a firebrand whirled in a circle. Granted; but at least that shows the agility of the soul, if it does not show its breadth.

354. Man's nature is not to go forward all the time; it has its comings and goings.

Fever has its shivers and its burning; and the cold shows the height of the fever's burning just as well as the heat itself.

Men's inventions from century to century go the same way. The same is true of the goodness and the malice of the world in general: change is mostly welcome to princes.

355. Continual eloquence is tedious.

Princes and kings sometimes play; they are not always on their thrones, they get bored there: greatness must be left behind to be felt; continuity is wearisome in everything; cold is pleasant for the sake of getting warm.

Nature works by advances, going and returning. It goes forward and comes back, then goes further, then half as far, then further than ever, and so on.

The tide of the sea goes like this; the sun seems to move like this:

[Figure: a zigzag line, advancing and falling back]

356. The body is nourished little by little. Fullness of nourishment and little substance.

357. When we try to pursue the virtues to their extremes on either side, vices appear that creep in imperceptibly, by their imperceptible ways, on the side of the infinitely small; and vices appear in crowds on the side of the infinitely great; so that we lose ourselves in the vices and no longer see the virtues. We are caught out by perfection itself.

358. Man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune is that whoever wants to play the angel plays the beast.

359. We do not keep ourselves in virtue by our own strength, but by the counterweight of two opposite vices, as we stay upright between two contrary winds: take away one of these vices, and we fall into the other.

360. What the Stoics propose is so difficult and so vain!

The Stoics lay it down that all who are not at the highest degree of wisdom are equally foolish and vicious, like those who are two inches under water.

361. The sovereign good. Dispute over the sovereign good. That you may be content with yourself and with the goods that spring from you, as Seneca puts it. There is a contradiction, for in the end they advise us to kill ourselves. Oh, what a happy life, that we free ourselves of as of the plague!

362. Ex senatus-consultis et plebiscitis…: by decrees of the senate and votes of the people…

Ask for passages like this.

363. Ex senatus-consultis et plebiscitis scelera exercentur: crimes are committed by decrees of the senate and votes of the people. Seneca (Montaigne, 588.)

Nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum: nothing can be said so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher. Cicero, On Divination.

Quibusdam destinatis sententiis consecrati quae non probant coguntur defendere: pledged to certain fixed opinions, they are forced to defend what they do not approve. Cicero.

Ut omnium rerum sic litterarum quoque intemperantia laboramus: in letters, as in everything, we suffer from excess. Seneca.

Id maxime quemque decet, quod est cujusque suum maxime: what suits each man best is what is most his own. Seneca (588.)

Hos natura modos primum dedit: these are the ways that nature first laid down. Virgil, Georgics.

Paucis opus est litteris ad bonam mentem: a sound mind needs little learning.

Si quando turpe non sit, tamen non est non turpe quum id a multitudine laudetur: even if a thing is not shameful in itself, it does not escape shame when the crowd praises it.

Mihi sic usus est, tibi ut opus est facto, fac: this is my way; do what you need to do. Terence.

364. Rarum est enim ut satis se quisque vereatur: for it is rare that anyone respects himself enough.

Tot circa unum caput tumultuantes deos: so many gods in an uproar round a single head.

Nihil turpius quam cognitioni assertionem praecurrere: nothing is more shameful than to let assertion run ahead of knowledge. Cicero.

Nec me pudet, ut istos, fateri nescire quid nesciam: nor am I ashamed, as they are, to confess that I do not know what I do not know.

Melius non incipient: they would do better not to begin.

365. Thought. All the dignity of man lies in thought. But what is this thought? How foolish it is!

Thought, then, is a thing admirable and incomparable by its nature. It would have to have strange defects to be contemptible; but it has such defects that nothing is more ridiculous. How great it is by its nature! How low it is by its defects!

366. The mind of this sovereign judge of the world is not so independent that it cannot be thrown into confusion by the first racket made around it. It does not take the noise of a cannon to stop his thoughts: the noise of a weathervane or a pulley is enough. Do not be surprised if he is not reasoning well just now: a fly is buzzing in his ears, and that is enough to make him incapable of sound counsel. If you want him to be able to find the truth, chase away that creature which holds his reason in check and troubles this mighty intelligence that governs cities and kingdoms. What an amusing god this is! O most ridiculous hero!

367. The power of flies: they win battles, keep our soul from acting, eat our body.

368. When we are told that heat is only the motion of certain globules, and light the conatus recedendi, the outward push, that we feel, we are astonished. What! Is pleasure nothing but a ballet of the animal spirits? We had formed so different an idea of it! And these sensations seem so far removed from the others that we say are the same as the ones we compare them with! The sensation of fire, that warmth which affects us in a way quite unlike touch, the reception of sound and light: all this seems mysterious to us, and yet it is as crude as the blow of a stone. It is true that the smallness of the spirits that enter the pores touches different nerves; but they are still nerves being touched.³¹

369. Memory is necessary for all the operations of reason.

370. [Chance gives thoughts, and chance takes them away: there is no art for keeping or for acquiring them.

A thought escaped me; I wanted to write it down; I write instead that it escaped me.]

[Digression.]

371. [When I was small, I used to hug my book to me: and because it sometimes happened that I… thinking I had held it tight, I distrusted…]

372. In writing down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but that reminds me of my weakness, which I forget at every hour; and this teaches me as much as my forgotten thought, for all I aim at is to know my own nothingness.

373. Pyrrhonism. I shall write my thoughts here without order, and not, perhaps, in a confusion without design: that is the true order, and it will always mark my object by the very disorder. I would be doing my subject too much honour if I treated it in order, since what I want to show is that it is incapable of order.

374. What astonishes me most is to see that everyone is not astonished at his own weakness. We go about things seriously; and each man follows his condition, not because it is good in fact to follow it, since that is the fashion, but as if each knew for certain where reason and justice lie. We find ourselves deceived at every hour; and, by an amusing humility, we believe it is our own fault, and not the fault of the art we always boast of having. But it is a good thing there are so many people of this kind in the world who are not Pyrrhonists, for the glory of Pyrrhonism, to show that man is quite capable of the most extravagant opinions, since he is capable of believing that he is not in this natural and inescapable weakness, and of believing, on the contrary, that he is in natural wisdom.

Nothing strengthens Pyrrhonism more than the fact that there are people who are not Pyrrhonists: if everyone were, they would be wrong.

375. [I spent a long part of my life believing that there was a justice, and in that I was not mistaken; for there is one, so far as God has willed to reveal it to us. But I did not take it in that way, and that is where I was mistaken; for I believed that our justice was essentially just, and that I had the means of knowing it and judging it. But I found myself so often lacking in sound judgement that in the end I came to distrust myself, and then others. I saw all countries and all men changing; and so, after many changes of judgement about true justice, I came to know that our nature was nothing but continual change, and I have not changed since; and if I did change, I would be confirming my opinion.

The Pyrrhonist Arcesilaus, who became a dogmatist again.]

376. This sect is strengthened more by its enemies than by its friends; for man's weakness shows far more in those who do not know it than in those who do.

377. Talk of humility is matter for pride in the vainglorious, and for humility in the humble. In the same way, talk of Pyrrhonism is matter for affirmation in those who like to affirm; few speak of humility humbly, few of chastity chastely, few of Pyrrhonism doubtfully. We are nothing but lies, duplicity and contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

378. Pyrrhonism. Extreme intelligence is accused of madness, like extreme want of it; nothing but the middle is good. It is the majority that has established this, and it bites anyone who escapes from it at either end. I shall not dig my heels in; I am quite willing to be put there, and I refuse to be at the bottom end, not because it is low, but because it is an end; for I would refuse just the same to be put at the top. To leave the middle is to leave humanity. The greatness of the human soul consists in knowing how to keep to it; so far is greatness from lying in leaving it that it lies in never leaving it.

379. It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one needs.

380. All the good maxims are already in the world; we only fail to apply them. For instance, no one doubts that we must risk our lives to defend the public good, and many do; but for religion, no.

It is necessary that there should be inequality among men, that is true; but once that is granted, the door is open not only to the highest domination but to the highest tyranny.

It is necessary to relax the mind a little; but that opens the door to the greatest excesses.

Let the limits be marked. There are no boundaries in things: laws try to put some there, and the mind cannot bear it.

381. If we are too young, we do not judge well; too old, the same.

If we do not think about something enough, or if we think about it too much, we become stubborn and infatuated with it.

If we look at our work immediately after doing it, we are still too taken with it; if too long after, we can no longer enter into it.

It is the same with pictures seen from too far away, and from too near; and there is only one indivisible point that is the true place: the others are too near, too far, too high or too low. Perspective assigns it in the art of painting; but in truth and in morality, who will assign it?

382. When everything is moving equally, nothing appears to move, as on a ship. When everyone is heading into excess, no one seems to be; the one who stops shows up the others' rush, like a fixed point.

383. Those who live in disorder tell those who live in order that it is they who are straying from nature, and they believe they are following it themselves: as those on a ship think it is the people on shore who are moving away. The language is the same on every side. We need a fixed point to judge by. The harbour judges those on the ship; but where shall we find a harbour in morality?

384. Contradiction is a poor mark of truth. Many certain things are contradicted; many false ones pass without contradiction. Contradiction is no mark of falsehood, nor is the want of contradiction a mark of truth.

385. Pyrrhonism. Each thing here is partly true, partly false. Essential truth is not like that: it is wholly pure and wholly true; this mixture dishonours it and annihilates it. Nothing is purely true; and so nothing is true, if we mean the purely true. People will say it is true that homicide is wrong; yes, for we know evil and falsehood well. But what will they say is good? Chastity? I say no, for the world would come to an end. Marriage? No: continence is better. Not to kill? No, for the disorders would be horrible, and the wicked would kill all the good. To kill? No, for that destroys nature. We have truth and goodness only in part, and mixed with evil and falsehood.

386. If we dreamt the same thing every night, it would affect us as much as the objects we see every day; and if a workman were sure of dreaming every night, for twelve hours on end, that he was a king, I believe he would be almost as happy as a king who dreamt every night, for twelve hours on end, that he was a workman.

If we dreamt every night that we were pursued by enemies and harassed by these painful phantoms, and if we spent every day in different occupations, as when we are travelling, we would suffer almost as much as if it were real, and we would dread going to sleep, as we dread waking when we fear to meet such misfortunes in fact. And in fact it would do almost the same harm as reality.

But because dreams are all different, and any one of them varies within itself, what we see in them affects us much less than what we see awake, because of the continuity of waking life; which is not, even so, so continuous and even that it does not change too, but less abruptly, except rarely, as when we travel; and then we say, "I feel as if I were dreaming"; for life is a dream a little less inconstant.

387. [It may be that there are true demonstrations; but that is not certain. And so this shows nothing else but that it is not certain that everything is uncertain, to the glory of Pyrrhonism.]

388. Good sense. They are forced to say, "You are not arguing in good faith; we are not asleep," and so on. How I love to see this proud reason humbled and pleading! For that is not the language of a man whose right is disputed and who defends it with arms and force in his hands. He does not waste time saying that the other is not acting in good faith; he punishes that bad faith by force.

389. Ecclesiastes shows that man without God is in ignorance of everything, and in inescapable unhappiness; for to will and not to be able is to be unhappy. Now he wants to be happy, and to be sure of some truth; and yet he can neither know, nor not want to know. He cannot even doubt.

390. My God! What foolish talk this is: "Would God have made the world in order to damn it? Would he ask so much of people so weak?" and so on. Pyrrhonism is the remedy for this ill, and will bring down this vanity.

391. Conversation. Big words: "Religion? I deny it."

Conversation. Pyrrhonism serves Religion.

392. Against Pyrrhonism. [… It is a strange thing, then, that we cannot define these things without obscuring them. We speak of them with complete assurance.] We suppose that everyone conceives of them in the same way; but we suppose it quite gratuitously, for we have no proof of it. I do see that these words are applied on the same occasions, and that whenever two men see a body change its place, they both express their sight of this same object by the same word, each saying that it has moved; and from this agreement in the application we draw a strong conjecture of an agreement in the ideas. But that is not absolutely convincing, with the last degree of conviction, though the odds are well in favour of yes, since we know that the same conclusions are often drawn from different suppositions.

That is enough at least to muddy the question; not that it entirely puts out the natural light that assures us of these things (the Academics would have won their wager), but it dims it, and troubles the dogmatists, to the glory of the Pyrrhonist cabal, which consists in this ambiguous ambiguity and in a certain doubtful darkness, from which our doubts cannot take away all the clearness, nor our natural lights drive out all the shadows.

393. It is an amusing thing to consider that there are people in the world who, having renounced all the laws of God and of nature, have made laws for themselves which they obey to the letter: Muhammad's soldiers, for instance, thieves, heretics, and so on. And so with logicians.

It seems that their licence ought to be without any bounds or barriers, seeing that they have broken through so many that are so just and so holy.

394. All their principles are true, the Pyrrhonists', the Stoics', the atheists', and so on. But their conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are true as well.

395. Instinct, reason. We have an incapacity for proving things that no dogmatism can overcome. We have an idea of truth that no Pyrrhonism can overcome.

396. Two things teach man his whole nature: instinct and experience.

397. The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

To know oneself wretched, then, is to be wretched; but to know that one is wretched is to be great.

398. All these very wretchednesses prove his greatness. They are the wretchednesses of a great lord, the wretchednesses of a dispossessed king.

399. There is no being wretched without feeling it: a ruined house is not wretched. Only man is wretched. I am the man who sees, in the words of Lamentations.

400. The greatness of man. We have so great an idea of the soul of man that we cannot bear to be despised by it, or not to be esteemed by a soul; and all the happiness of men lies in this esteem.

401. Glory. Animals do not admire one another. A horse does not admire its companion. Not that there is no rivalry between them in a race, but it has no consequences; for once in the stable, the heaviest and worst-built does not give up its oats to the other, as men want others to do for them. Their virtue is satisfied with itself.

402. The greatness of man even in his concupiscence: to have known how to draw from it an admirable order, and to have made of it a picture of charity.

403. Greatness. The reasons of effects show the greatness of man, in having drawn so fine an order out of concupiscence.

404. The greatest baseness of man is the pursuit of glory, but that is the very thing that is the greatest mark of his excellence; for whatever possessions he has on earth, whatever health and essential comfort he has, he is not satisfied unless he stands in the esteem of men. He rates the reason of man so high that, whatever advantage he has on earth, if he is not also placed to advantage in the reason of man, he is not content. It is the finest place in the world; nothing can turn him from this desire, and it is the most indelible quality of the human heart.

And those who most despise men, and put them on a level with the beasts, still want to be admired and believed by them, and contradict themselves by their own feeling; their nature, which is stronger than everything, convincing them of man's greatness more strongly than reason convinces them of his baseness.

405. Contradiction. Pride, counterweighing all our wretchedness. Either it hides its wretchedness; or, if it reveals it, it glories in knowing it.

406. Pride counterweighs all our wretchedness and outweighs it. What a strange monster, and how plainly astray! There he is, fallen from his place, looking for it anxiously; that is what all men do. Let us see who will have found it.

407. When malice has reason on its side, it grows proud, and displays reason in all its lustre.

When austerity or severe choice has not achieved the true good, and one has to go back to following nature, it grows proud of the return.

408. Evil is easy; there is an infinity of it; good is almost unique. But a certain kind of evil is as hard to find as what we call good, and that particular evil is often passed off as good by this mark. It even takes an extraordinary greatness of soul to arrive at it, as much as to arrive at good.

409. The greatness of man. The greatness of man is so visible that it can be drawn even from his wretchedness. For what is nature in the animals we call wretchedness in man; by which we recognize that, his nature being now like that of the animals, he has fallen from a better nature which was once his own. For who is unhappy at not being a king, except a dispossessed king? Did anyone think the Roman general Aemilius Paulus unhappy at being consul no longer? On the contrary, everyone thought him happy to have been one, because it was not in his condition to be one for ever. But people thought Perseus so unhappy at being king no longer, because it was in his condition to be king for ever, that they found it strange that he could bear to live. Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who will not be unhappy at having only one eye? Perhaps no one has ever thought of grieving at not having three eyes, but anyone is inconsolable at having none.

410. Perseus, king of Macedonia; Aemilius Paulus. Perseus was reproached for not killing himself.

411. In spite of the sight of all our wretchedness, which touches us and has us by the throat, we have an instinct we cannot suppress, which lifts us up.

412. Man's civil war between reason and the passions.

If he had only reason without passions…

If he had only passions without reason…

But having both, he cannot be without war, since he can have peace with the one only by being at war with the other: and so he is always divided, and at odds with himself.

413. This inner war of reason against the passions has divided those who wanted peace into two sects. Some wanted to renounce the passions and become gods; the others wanted to renounce reason and become brute beasts: Des Barreaux. But neither has been able to; and reason is always there, accusing the baseness and injustice of the passions and troubling the rest of those who give themselves up to them; and the passions are always alive in those who want to renounce them.³²

414. Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would be to be mad by another twist of madness.

415. The nature of man can be considered in two ways: one according to its end, and then he is great and incomparable; the other according to the common run, as we judge the nature of the horse and the dog by the common run, by seeing in them speed and the spirit to keep strangers off; and then man is abject and vile. And these are the two ways that make people judge him so differently and set the philosophers disputing so much.

For each denies the other's assumption. One says, "He is not born for this end, for all his actions go against it." The other says, "He strays from his end when he does these base actions."

416. For Port-Royal. Greatness and wretchedness. Since wretchedness is concluded from greatness, and greatness from wretchedness, some have concluded wretchedness all the more because they took greatness as their proof of it, and the others, concluding greatness with all the more force because they concluded it from wretchedness itself, all that the one side could say to show greatness has served only as an argument for the others to conclude wretchedness, since the higher one has fallen from, the more wretched one is; and the others the reverse. They have been carried one on top of the other in an endless circle: it being certain that as men have more light, they find both greatness and wretchedness in man. In a word, man knows that he is wretched: he is wretched, then, since he is; but he is truly great, since he knows it.³³

417. This doubleness of man is so visible that there are those who have thought we had two souls. A single, simple subject seemed to them incapable of such great and such sudden changes, from boundless presumption to a horrible dejection of heart.

418. It is dangerous to show man too clearly how much he is on a level with the beasts without showing him his greatness. It is dangerous too to show him his greatness too much without his baseness. It is more dangerous still to leave him ignorant of both. But it is very good for him to have both set before him.

Man must not believe that he is equal to the beasts, nor to the angels, nor be ignorant of both, but know both.

419. I will not allow him to rest in the one or in the other, so that, being without a place to settle and without rest…

420. If he exalts himself, I humble him; if he humbles himself, I exalt him; and I go on contradicting him until he understands that he is an incomprehensible monster.

421. I blame equally those who decide to praise man, and those who decide to blame him, and those who decide to divert themselves; and I can approve only those who seek with groans.

422. It is good to be wearied and tired out by the useless search for the true good, so as to stretch out our arms to the Deliverer.

423. Contrarieties. After showing the baseness and the greatness of man. Let man now value himself at his worth. Let him love himself, for there is in him a nature capable of good; but let him not on that account love the baseness that is in it. Let him despise himself, because this capacity is empty; but let him not on that account despise this natural capacity. Let him hate himself, let him love himself: he has in him the capacity to know the truth and to be happy; but he has no truth, either lasting or satisfying.

I would like, then, to bring man to desire to find it, to be ready, and free of passions, to follow it wherever he finds it, knowing how far his knowledge has been darkened by the passions; I would like him to hate in himself the concupiscence that determines him of its own accord, so that it should not blind him in making his choice, nor stop him once he has chosen.

424. All these contrarieties, which seemed to take me furthest from the knowledge of religion, are what led me soonest to the true one.

The machine is Pascal's own. He began it at nineteen, to help his father, a royal tax official in Rouen, with his endless sums. ↩
Liancourt was the château of Roger du Plessis, Duc de Liancourt, a great lord and a friend of Port-Royal. The story itself has not come down to us. ↩
Pascal is describing Descartes's physics. For Descartes heat was the agitation of small particles, light a pressure that the "globules" of a subtle matter exert as they tend to fly outward from the centre of their whirling (in Latin conatus recedendi, the endeavour to recede), and sensation a motion of the animal spirits, a fine fluid carried in the nerves. ↩
Jacques Vallée Des Barreaux (1599-1673), a poet and a notorious freethinker and debauchee of Paris society. ↩
Pascal's abbreviation is A. P. R., which editors read as "À Port-Royal": notes, it is thought, for the talk on the plan of his apology that he gave at Port-Royal. ↩

Section VII: Morality and Doctrine

425. Second part. That man without faith cannot know the true good, nor justice. All men seek to be happy; there is no exception to this; however different the means they use, they all aim at this end. What makes some go to war and others not is this same desire, which is in both, accompanied by different views. The will never takes the smallest step except towards this object. It is the motive of every action of every man, down to those who go and hang themselves.

And yet, after so great a number of years, no one, without faith, has ever reached the point at which all continually aim. All complain: princes, subjects; nobles, commoners; old, young; strong, weak; learned, ignorant; healthy, sick; of every country, every time, every age and every condition.

A trial so long, so continual and so uniform ought surely to convince us of our inability to reach the good by our own efforts. But example teaches us little: it is never so perfectly alike that there is not some delicate difference; and it is from that difference that we expect our hope will not be disappointed this time as it was the last. And so, the present never satisfying us, experience cheats us, and leads us from misfortune to misfortune until death, which is their eternal crown.

What, then, do this greed and this helplessness cry out to us, if not that there was once in man a true happiness, of which nothing now remains to him but the mark and the empty trace, which he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking from things absent the help he does not get from things present, though none of them is capable of it, because this infinite abyss can be filled only by an infinite and unchanging object, that is to say, only by God himself?

He alone is man's true good; and since man left him, it is a strange thing that there is nothing in nature that has not been able to take his place for him: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. And since he lost the true good, everything alike can look like it to him, even his own destruction, though that is contrary to God, to reason and to nature all at once.

Some seek it in authority, others in curiosities and in the sciences, others in pleasures. Others, who have in fact come closer to it, have considered that the universal good, which all men desire, cannot lie in any of the particular things that can be possessed by only one person, and which, once shared, grieve their owner more by the lack of the part he does not have than they please him by the enjoyment of the part that falls to him. They understood that the true good had to be such that all could possess it at once, without diminution and without envy, and that no one could lose it against his will. And their reason is that, this desire being natural to man, since it is necessarily in everyone and no one can be without it, they conclude from it…

426. True nature being lost, everything becomes its nature; just as, the true good being lost, everything becomes its true good.

427. Man does not know what rank to put himself in. He has plainly gone astray, and fallen from his true place without being able to find it again. He looks for it everywhere, anxiously and without success, in impenetrable darkness.

428. If it is a mark of weakness to prove God from nature, do not despise Scripture for it; if it is a mark of strength to have known these contrarieties, esteem Scripture for it.

429. The baseness of man, going so far as to submit to the beasts, so far as to worship them.

430. For Port-Royal. (Beginning, after explaining the incomprehensibility.) The greatness and the wretchedness of man are so visible that the true religion must necessarily teach us both that there is in man some great principle of greatness and that there is a great principle of wretchedness. It must, then, account to us for these astonishing contrarieties.

To make man happy, it must show him that there is a God; that we are bound to love him; that our true happiness is to be in him, and our only ill to be separated from him; it must acknowledge that we are full of darkness, which keeps us from knowing him and loving him; and that so, since our duties oblige us to love God and our concupiscence turns us away from him, we are full of unrighteousness. It must account to us for this opposition of ours to God and to our own good. It must teach us the remedies for our helplessness, and the means of obtaining these remedies. Let all the religions of the world be examined on this point, and let us see whether there is any other than the Christian that satisfies it.

Will it be the philosophers, who offer us as our whole good the goods that are within us? Is that the true good? Have they found the remedy for our ills? Is it curing man's presumption to have set him equal to God? Those who have put us on a level with the beasts, and the Muslims, who have given us the pleasures of the earth as our whole good, even in eternity: have they brought the remedy for our concupiscence? What religion, then, will teach us to cure pride and concupiscence? What religion, in short, will teach us our good, our duties, the weaknesses that turn us from them, the cause of these weaknesses, the remedies that can cure them, and the means of obtaining these remedies?

All the other religions have failed to. Let us see what the Wisdom of God will do:

Do not look, she says, for truth or for consolation from men. I am she who formed you, and I alone can teach you who you are. But you are no longer now in the state in which I formed you. I created man holy, innocent, perfect; I filled him with light and understanding; I shared with him my glory and my wonders. The eye of man then saw the majesty of God. He was not then in the darkness that blinds him, nor in the mortality and the wretchedness that afflict him. But he could not bear so much glory without falling into presumption. He wanted to make himself his own centre, and independent of my help. He withdrew himself from my rule; and, since he made himself equal to me by the desire to find his happiness in himself, I abandoned him to himself; and, making the creatures that had been subject to him rise against him, I made them his enemies: so that today man has become like the beasts, and so far removed from me that barely a confused light of his maker remains to him, so completely has all his knowledge been put out or troubled! The senses, independent of reason and often its masters, have carried him off in pursuit of pleasures. All creatures either afflict him or tempt him, and lord it over him, either subduing him by their strength or charming him by their sweetness, which is a more terrible and more imperious tyranny.

That is the state men are in today. There remains to them some powerless instinct of the happiness of their first nature, and they are sunk in the wretchedness of their blindness and their concupiscence, which has become their second nature.

From this principle that I open to you, you can recognize the cause of so many contrarieties, which have astonished all men and divided them into such different opinions. Observe now all the stirrings of greatness and glory that the trial of so much wretchedness cannot stifle, and see whether their cause must not lie in another nature.

For Port-Royal, for tomorrow (Prosopopoeia). It is in vain, O men, that you seek within yourselves the remedy for your wretchedness. All your lights can only bring you to know that it is not in yourselves that you will find either truth or the good. The philosophers promised it to you, and they could not do it. They know neither what your true good is nor what [your true state] is. How could they have given remedies for your ills, when they did not even know them? Your chief maladies are pride, which withdraws you from God, and concupiscence, which binds you to the earth; and they have done nothing but feed at least one of these maladies. If they gave you God for your object, it was only to exercise your pride: they made you think that you were like him and conformed to him by your nature. And those who saw the vanity of that claim threw you over the other precipice, by giving you to understand that your nature was like that of the beasts, and led you to seek your good in concupiscence, which is the lot of the animals. That is not the way to cure you of your unrighteousness, which these wise men never knew. I alone can make you understand who you are, to….

Adam, Jesus Christ.

If you are united to God, it is by grace, not by nature. If you are humbled, it is by penitence, not by nature.

And so this double capacity…

You are not in the state of your creation.

These two states being laid open, it is impossible that you should not recognize them. Follow your own impulses, observe yourself, and see whether you do not find in yourself the living marks of these two natures.

Could so many contradictions be found in a simple subject?

"Incomprehensible." Everything incomprehensible exists none the less: infinite number; an infinite space, equal to the finite.

"It is unbelievable that God should unite himself to us." This consideration is drawn only from the sight of our baseness. But if you hold it quite sincerely, follow it as far as I do, and recognize that we are in fact so low that we are incapable by ourselves of knowing whether his mercy cannot make us capable of him. For I would like to know by what right this animal, which knows itself to be so weak, measures the mercy of God and sets it whatever limits its fancy suggests. He knows so little what God is that he does not know what he is himself; and, all troubled by the sight of his own state, he dares to say that God cannot make him capable of communion with him.

But I would like to ask him whether God asks anything else of him than to love him and know him; and why he believes that God cannot make himself knowable and lovable to him, since he is by nature capable of love and of knowledge. There is no doubt that he knows at least that he exists, and that he loves something. If, then, he sees something in the darkness he is in, and if he finds something to love among the things of the earth, why, if God gives him some ray of his essence, will he not be capable of knowing him and loving him in whatever way it pleases God to communicate himself to us? There is, then, beyond doubt an intolerable presumption in reasoning of this kind, though it seems founded on an apparent humility; a humility that is neither sincere nor reasonable unless it makes us confess that, not knowing of ourselves who we are, we can learn it only from God.

I do not mean you to submit your belief to me without reason, and I do not claim to subject you by tyranny. Nor do I claim to account to you for everything. And to reconcile these contrarieties, I mean to make you see clearly, by convincing proofs, divine marks in me, which will convince you of what I am and win me authority by wonders and proofs that you cannot refuse; and that you should then believe without… the things I teach you, when you find no other reason to refuse them except that you cannot know by yourselves whether they are so or not.

God wished to redeem men and to open salvation to those who would seek it; but men make themselves so unworthy of it that it is just for God to refuse to some, because of their hardness of heart, what he grants to others by a mercy they are not owed. If he had wished to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, he could have done so, by revealing himself to them so plainly that they could not have doubted the truth of his essence; as he will appear on the last day, with such a blaze of lightning and such an overturning of nature that the dead will rise and the blindest will see him.

It is not in this way that he chose to appear in his coming in gentleness; because, so many men making themselves unworthy of his mercy, he wished to leave them deprived of the good they do not want. It was not right, then, that he should appear in a way plainly divine and absolutely able to convince all men; but neither was it right that he should come in a way so hidden that he could not be recognized by those who sought him sincerely. He wished to make himself perfectly knowable to them; and so, wishing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart, and hidden from those who flee him with all their heart, he tempers the knowledge of himself, so that he has given signs of himself visible to those who seek him and not to those who do not. There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of the opposite disposition.

430 bis. Everything incomprehensible exists none the less.

431. No one else has known that man is the most excellent of creatures. Some, who knew well the reality of his excellence, have taken for cowardice and ingratitude the low opinions men naturally have of themselves; and the others, who knew well how real this baseness is, have treated as ridiculous pride those feelings of greatness which are just as natural to man.

"Lift your eyes to God," say the first; "see him whom you resemble, and who made you to worship him. You can make yourself like him; wisdom will make you his equal, if you are willing to follow it." "Hold up your heads, free men," says Epictetus. And the others say to him: "Lower your eyes to the earth, puny worm that you are, and look at the beasts whose companion you are."

What, then, will become of man? Will he be equal to God or to the beasts? What a terrifying distance! What, then, shall we be? Who does not see from all this that man has gone astray, that he has fallen from his place, that he is looking for it anxiously, that he can no longer find it again? And who, then, will direct him there? The greatest men have not been able to.

432. Pyrrhonism is the truth; for, after all, men before Jesus Christ did not know where they stood, nor whether they were great or small. And those who said the one or the other knew nothing of it, and guessed without reason and by chance; and they were always wrong, besides, in excluding the one or the other.

What you seek, then, without knowing it, religion proclaims to you.

433. After understanding the whole nature of man. For a religion to be true, it must have known our nature. It must have known its greatness and its smallness, and the reason for both. Who has known it but the Christian religion?

434. The chief strengths of the Pyrrhonists (I leave out the lesser ones) are these: that we have no certainty of the truth of these principles, apart from faith and revelation, except in that we feel them naturally within us. Now this natural feeling is not a convincing proof of their truth, since, there being no certainty apart from faith whether man was created by a good God, by an evil demon, or by chance, it is in doubt whether these principles are given to us as true, or false, or uncertain, according to our origin. Further, that no one has any assurance, apart from faith, whether he is awake or asleep, seeing that in sleep we believe we are awake as firmly as we do now; we believe we see spaces, shapes, movements; we feel time pass, we measure it; in short, we act as we do awake; so that, half of life being spent in sleep, by our own admission, when whatever it may seem to us we have no idea of the truth, all our feelings being then illusions, who knows whether this other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is not another sleep a little different from the first, from which we wake when we think we are falling asleep?

[And who doubts that, if we dreamt in company, and our dreams happened to agree, which is common enough, and if we were awake alone, we would believe things had been turned upside down? In short, as we often dream that we are dreaming, piling one dream on another, may life itself not be only a dream, onto which the others are grafted, from which we wake at death, a dream during which we have as little hold on the principles of the true and the good as during natural sleep: all these different thoughts that stir us being perhaps only illusions, like the passing of time and the vain fancies of our dreams?]

These are the chief strengths on either side.

I leave out the lesser ones, such as the Pyrrhonists' arguments against the impressions of custom, of education, of the manners of different countries, and other such things which, though they carry along the greater part of ordinary men, who dogmatize on nothing but these empty foundations, are overturned by the least breath of the Pyrrhonists. One has only to look at their books, if one is not persuaded enough; one will become so very quickly, and perhaps too much.

I stop at the one stronghold of the dogmatists, which is that, speaking in good faith and sincerely, we cannot doubt natural principles. Against which the Pyrrhonists set, in a word, the uncertainty of our origin, which includes the uncertainty of our nature; and to this the dogmatists have still to reply, ever since the world began.

That is the open war among men, in which each must take a side, and range himself necessarily with dogmatism or with Pyrrhonism. For whoever thinks to stay neutral will be a Pyrrhonist par excellence; this neutrality is the essence of the cabal: whoever is not against them is pre-eminently for them [in which their advantage appears]. They are not for themselves: they are neutral, indifferent, suspended on everything, themselves not excepted.

What, then, will man do in this state? Will he doubt everything? Will he doubt whether he is awake, whether he is being pinched, whether he is being burned? Will he doubt whether he doubts? Will he doubt whether he exists? We cannot come to that; and I lay it down as a fact that there has never been a real, complete Pyrrhonist. Nature props up helpless reason, and keeps it from raving to that point.

Will he say, then, on the contrary, that he certainly possesses the truth, he who, however little he is pressed, can show no title to it and is forced to let go his hold?

What kind of chimera, then, is man? What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm; depository of truth, sewer of uncertainty and error; glory and refuse of the universe.

Who will untangle this tangle? Nature confounds the Pyrrhonists, and reason confounds the dogmatists. What will become of you, then, O men who seek to find out by your natural reason what your true condition is? You can neither escape one of these sects nor live in either.

Know, then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, powerless reason; be silent, feeble nature: learn that man infinitely surpasses man, and hear from your master your true condition, of which you are ignorant. Listen to God.

For in the end, if man had never been corrupted, he would enjoy in his innocence both truth and happiness with assurance; and if man had never been anything but corrupt, he would have no idea either of truth or of beatitude. But, wretched as we are, and more so than if there were no greatness in our condition, we have an idea of happiness and cannot reach it; we feel an image of the truth and possess only falsehood; incapable of being absolutely ignorant and of knowing with certainty: so plain is it that we were once in a degree of perfection from which we have unhappily fallen!

It is an astonishing thing, all the same, that the mystery furthest from our knowledge, which is the transmission of sin, should be a thing without which we can have no knowledge of ourselves! For there is no doubt that nothing shocks our reason more than to say that the sin of the first man has made guilty those who, being so far from that source, seem incapable of sharing in it. This transmission seems to us not only impossible but even most unjust; for what is more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than to damn eternally a child incapable of willing, for a sin in which he seems to have had so little part that it was committed six thousand years before he came into being? Certainly nothing jars on us more harshly than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. The knot of our condition takes its twists and turns in this abyss; so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man.

[From which it appears that God, wishing to make the difficulty of our being unintelligible to us by ourselves, hid the knot of it so high, or rather so low, that we were quite incapable of reaching it; so that it is not by the proud stirrings of our reason, but by the simple submission of reason, that we can truly know ourselves.

[These foundations, solidly laid on the inviolable authority of religion, make us know that there are two truths of faith equally constant: one, that man in the state of creation or in the state of grace is raised above all nature, made as it were like God and a sharer in his divinity; the other, that in the state of corruption and sin he has fallen from that state and been made like the beasts.

[These two propositions are equally firm and certain. Scripture declares them to us plainly when it says in some places: My delight is to be with the sons of men. I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. You are gods, and so on; and when it says in others: All flesh is grass. Man has been compared to the senseless beasts, and has become like them. I said in my heart concerning the sons of men (Ecclesiastes 3).

[By which it appears clearly that man, by grace, is made as it were like God and a sharer in his divinity, and that without grace he is as it were like the brute beasts.]

435. Without this divine knowledge, what could men do but either exalt themselves in the inner feeling that remains to them of their past greatness, or sink in the sight of their present weakness? For, not seeing the whole truth, they could not arrive at perfect virtue. Some regarding nature as uncorrupted, others as beyond repair, they could not escape either pride or sloth, which are the two sources of all the vices; since they can only either give themselves up to the vices out of cowardice or get out of them by pride. For if they knew the excellence of man, they were ignorant of his corruption; so that they did indeed avoid sloth, but lost themselves in pride; and if they recognized the infirmity of nature, they were ignorant of its dignity; so that they could indeed avoid vanity, but only by throwing themselves into despair. Hence the different sects of the Stoics and the Epicureans, the dogmatists and the Academics, and so on.

The Christian religion alone has been able to cure these two vices, not by driving out the one with the other, by the wisdom of the earth, but by driving out both, by the simplicity of the Gospel. For it teaches the righteous, whom it raises even to a share in the divinity itself, that in this sublime state they still carry the source of all corruption, which makes them all their lives subject to error, to wretchedness, to death, to sin; and it cries out to the most ungodly that they are capable of the grace of their Redeemer. And so, making those it justifies tremble and consoling those it condemns, it tempers fear with hope so exactly, through this double capacity for grace and for sin that is common to all, that it humbles infinitely more than reason alone can, but without despair; and it exalts infinitely more than the pride of nature, but without puffing up: showing clearly by this that, being alone exempt from error and vice, it alone has the right both to instruct and to correct men.

Who, then, can refuse to believe these heavenly lights and to adore them? For is it not clearer than day that we feel within ourselves indelible marks of excellence? And is it not just as true that we feel at every hour the effects of our deplorable condition? What, then, does this chaos and this monstrous confusion cry out to us, if not the truth of these two states, with a voice so powerful that it is impossible to resist?

436. Weakness. All men's occupations are directed to getting property; and they could have no title to show that they possess it by justice, for they have only men's whim; nor the strength to possess it securely. It is the same with knowledge, for illness takes it away. We are incapable both of truth and of good.

436 bis. All men's occupations are directed to getting property; and they have neither title to possess it justly nor strength to possess it securely; so too with knowledge and pleasures. We have neither truth nor good.

437. We desire truth, and find in ourselves only uncertainty.

We seek happiness, and find only wretchedness and death.

We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness, and we are incapable of either certainty or happiness. This desire is left to us as much to punish us as to make us feel from where we have fallen.

438. If man is not made for God, why is he happy only in God? If man is made for God, why is he so opposed to God?

439. Nature corrupted. Man does not act by reason, which makes his being.

440. The corruption of reason shows itself in so many different and extravagant customs. Truth had to come, so that man should no longer live in himself.

441. For my part, I confess that as soon as the Christian religion reveals this principle, that the nature of men is corrupt and fallen away from God, it opens our eyes to see the mark of this truth everywhere; for nature is such that it points everywhere to a lost God, both in man and outside man, and to a corrupt nature.

442. The true nature of man, his true good, true virtue and the true religion are things the knowledge of which cannot be separated.

443. Greatness, wretchedness. The more light we have, the more greatness and the more baseness we discover in man. The common run of men; those who are higher, the philosophers: they astonish the common run of men; the Christians: they astonish the philosophers.

Who, then, will be astonished to see that religion only makes us know through and through what we recognize all the more the more light we have?

444. What men had been able to know by their greatest lights, this religion taught to its children.

445. Original sin is folly in the sight of men, but it is put forward as such; you must not, then, reproach me for the want of reason in this doctrine, since I put it forward as being without reason. But this folly is wiser than all the wisdom of men, it is wiser than men; for without it, what are we to say that man is? His whole state hangs on this imperceptible point; and how could he have perceived it by his reason, since it is a thing against reason, and since his reason, far from discovering it by its own ways, recoils from it when it is presented to him?

446. Of original sin. The ample tradition of original sin according to the Jews.

On the saying in Genesis 8: the frame of man's heart is evil from his childhood. Rabbi Moses ha-Darshan: This evil leaven is placed in man from the hour he is formed.

Massekhet Sukkah: This evil leaven has seven names in Scripture; it is called evil, foreskin, unclean, enemy, stumbling block, heart of stone, north wind: all this signifies the malignity that is hidden and stamped in the heart of man.

Midrash Tehillim says the same thing, and that God will deliver the good nature of man from the evil.³⁴

This malignity is renewed every day against man, as it is written in Psalm 37: "The ungodly watches the righteous, and seeks to put him to death; but God will not abandon him." This malignity tempts the heart of man in this life, and will accuse him in the next. All this is found in the Talmud.

Midrash Tehillim on Psalm 4: "Tremble, and you will not sin": Tremble, and strike terror into your concupiscence, and it will not lead you into sin. And on Psalm 36: "The ungodly has said in his heart, Let the fear of God not be before me"; that is to say, the malignity natural to man has said this to the ungodly.

Midrash Kohelet. "Better is a poor and wise child than an old and foolish king who does not know how to foresee the future." The child is virtue, and the king is the malignity of man. It is called a king, because all the members obey it; and old, because it is in the heart of man from childhood to old age; and foolish, because it leads man in the way of perdition, which he does not foresee.

The same thing is in Midrash Tehillim.

Bereshit Rabbah on Psalm 35: "Lord, all my bones shall bless you, because you deliver the poor from the tyrant": And is there a greater tyrant than the evil leaven? And on Proverbs 25: "If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat"; that is to say, if the evil leaven is hungry, give it the bread of wisdom spoken of in Proverbs 9; and if it is thirsty, give it the water spoken of in Isaiah 55.

Midrash Tehillim says the same thing; and that Scripture in this place, in speaking of our enemy, means the evil leaven; and that in giving it this bread and this water, we shall heap coals on its head.

Midrash Kohelet, on Ecclesiastes 9: "A great king laid siege to a little city." This great king is the evil leaven; the great engines he surrounds it with are the temptations; and there was found a wise and poor man who delivered it, that is to say, virtue.

And on Psalm 41: "Blessed is he who considers the poor."

And on Psalm 78: "The spirit goes away and does not come back"; from which some have taken occasion to go astray against the immortality of the soul; but the sense is that this spirit is the evil leaven, which goes along with man until death, and will not come back at the resurrection.

And on Psalm 103, the same thing.

And on Psalm 16.

447. Will it be said that, because they said that justice had departed from the earth, men knew of original sin? No one is blessed before his death: is that to say they knew that eternal and essential beatitude begins at death?

448. Miton sees clearly that nature is corrupt, and that men run contrary to good breeding; but he does not know why they cannot fly higher.

449. Order. After the corruption, say: it is right that all who are in this state should know it, both those who are pleased with it and those who are displeased with it; but it is not right that all should see the redemption.

450. If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, concupiscence, weakness, wretchedness and injustice, we are very blind. And if, knowing it, we do not desire to be delivered from it, what can we say of a man…?

What, then, can we have but esteem for a religion that knows the defects of man so well, and but desire for the truth of a religion that promises such desirable remedies for them?

451. All men naturally hate one another. We have used concupiscence as best we could to make it serve the public good; but this is only pretence, and a false image of charity; for at bottom it is only hatred.

452. To pity the unfortunate is not against concupiscence; on the contrary, we are very glad to be able to give this token of friendship, and to win a reputation for tenderness, without giving anything.

453. Out of concupiscence men have founded and drawn admirable rules of government, of morals and of justice; but at bottom, this vile bottom of man, this evil figment, is only covered: it is not taken away.

454. Injustice. They have found no other means of satisfying concupiscence without doing wrong to others.

455. The self is hateful. You, Miton, cover it up; you do not take it away for all that; you are, then, still hateful. "Not at all, for in acting, as we do, obligingly towards everyone, we give people no further cause to hate us." That is true, if all we hated in the self were the annoyance it causes us. But if I hate it because it is unjust, because it makes itself the centre of everything, I shall hate it always.

In a word, the self has two qualities: it is unjust in itself, in that it makes itself the centre of everything; it is a nuisance to others, in that it wants to enslave them: for each self is the enemy of all the others, and would like to be their tyrant. You take away the nuisance, but not the injustice; and so you do not make it lovable to those who hate its injustice: you make it lovable only to the unjust, who no longer find in it their enemy; and so you remain unjust, and can please only the unjust.

456. What a derangement of judgement it is, by which there is no one who does not set himself above all the rest of the world, and who does not prefer his own good, and the continuance of his happiness and of his life, to that of all the rest of the world!

457. Each man is a whole to himself, for when he is dead, the whole is dead for him. And from this it comes that each believes he is everything to everyone. We must not judge of nature by ourselves, but by itself.

458. "All that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh, or the concupiscence of the eyes, or the pride of life": libido sentiendi, libido sciendi, libido dominandi, the lust to feel, the lust to know, the lust to rule. Unhappy the land of cursing that these three rivers of fire set ablaze rather than water! Happy are those who, being on these rivers, not plunged in, not swept along, but unmoving, but steadfast; not standing, but seated in a low and safe seat, from which they do not rise before the light, but, after resting there in peace, stretch out their hand to him who is to raise them, to make them stand upright and firm in the courts of holy Jerusalem, where pride will no longer be able to fight them and beat them down; and who meanwhile weep, not at seeing all the perishable things flow by that the torrents sweep away, but at the memory of their dear homeland, the heavenly Jerusalem, which they remember without ceasing through the length of their exile!³⁵

459. The rivers of Babylon flow, and fall, and sweep away.

O holy Zion, where everything is stable and nothing falls!

We must sit upon the rivers, not under them or in them, but upon them; and not standing, but seated: to be humble, by being seated, and safe, by being upon them. But we shall stand in the courts of Jerusalem.

Let us see whether this pleasure is stable or flowing: if it passes, it is a river of Babylon.

460. Concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes, pride, etc. There are three orders of things: the flesh, the mind, the will. The carnal are the rich and kings: their object is the body. The curious and the learned: their object is the mind. The wise: their object is justice.

God must reign over everything, and everything be referred to him. In the things of the flesh, it is properly concupiscence that reigns; in the things of the mind, properly curiosity; in wisdom, properly pride. It is not that one cannot be vain of one's wealth or one's knowledge, but that is not the place of pride: for, while granting a man that he is learned, we can still convince him that he is wrong to be proud. The proper place of pride is wisdom, for we cannot grant a man that he has made himself wise and that he is wrong to be vain of it; for that is just. And so God alone gives wisdom; and that is why: Let him who glories, glory in the Lord.

461. The three concupiscences have made three sects, and the philosophers have done nothing but follow one of the three concupiscences.

462. Search for the true good. The common run of men place the good in fortune and in outward goods, or at least in diversion. The philosophers have shown the vanity of all that, and have placed it where they could.

463. [Against the philosophers who have God without Jesus Christ.]

Philosophers. They believe that God alone is worthy to be loved and to be admired, and they have desired to be loved and admired by men; and they do not know their own corruption. If they feel themselves full of feelings that move them to love and adore him, and if they find their chief joy in that, let them think themselves good, and welcome. But if they find themselves averse to it, if they have no inclination except to want to establish themselves in the esteem of men, and if, for their whole perfection, all they do is to make men, without forcing them, find their happiness in loving them, I shall say that this perfection is horrible. What! They have known God, and have not desired solely that men should love him, but that men should stop short at them! They have wanted to be the object of men's freely chosen happiness!

464. Philosophers. We are full of things that throw us outward.

Our instinct makes us feel that we must seek our happiness outside ourselves; our passions push us outward, even when no objects offer themselves to excite them; the objects outside tempt us of themselves and call to us, even when we are not thinking of them. And so it is in vain that the philosophers say, "Withdraw into yourselves, and there you will find your good"; we do not believe them, and those who do believe them are the emptiest and the most foolish of all.

465. The Stoics say, "Go back within yourselves; that is where you will find your rest": and that is not true.

The others say, "Go outside: look for happiness in diverting yourselves": and that is not true: illnesses come.

Happiness is neither outside us nor within us; it is in God, both outside and within us.

466. Even if Epictetus had seen the road perfectly well, he says to men, "You are following a false one"; he shows that there is another, but he does not lead them to it. It is the road of willing what God wills; Jesus Christ alone leads there: the way, the truth.

The vices of Zeno himself.

467. Reason of effects. Epictetus. Those who say, "You have a headache…"; it is not the same thing. We are sure of our health, and not of justice; and in fact his own was folly.

And yet he believed it demonstrable, saying, "Either in our power or not." But he did not see that it is not in our power to rule the heart, and he was wrong to conclude it from there being Christians.

468. No other religion has proposed that we should hate ourselves. No other religion, then, can please those who hate themselves and who seek a being truly worthy of love. And those people, if they had never heard of the religion of a humbled God, would embrace it at once.

469. I feel that I might never have been, for the self consists in my thought: so I who think would never have been, if my mother had been killed before I had been given life: so I am not a necessary being. Nor am I eternal, or infinite: but I see clearly that there is in nature a being that is necessary, eternal and infinite.

470. "If I had seen a miracle," they say, "I would be converted." How can they be sure they would do what they know nothing of? They imagine that this conversion consists in a worship of God carried on as dealings and converse such as they picture them. True conversion consists in annihilating oneself before this universal being whom we have angered so many times, and who can rightfully destroy you at any hour; in recognizing that we can do nothing without him, and that we have deserved nothing from him but his disfavour. It consists in knowing that there is an invincible opposition between God and us, and that without a mediator there can be no dealings with him.

471. It is unjust that anyone should become attached to me, even though they do it with pleasure and of their own free will; I would deceive those in whom I gave birth to the desire, for I am no one's end, and I have not the means to satisfy them. Am I not about to die? And so the object of their attachment will die. Therefore, just as I would be guilty of making someone believe a falsehood, however gently I persuaded him of it, and however much he believed it with pleasure, and gave me pleasure in doing so, in the same way I am guilty of making myself loved. And if I draw people to attach themselves to me, I must warn those who would be ready to consent to the lie that they must not believe it, whatever advantage I might get from it; and, in the same way, that they must not attach themselves to me; for they must spend their life and their care in pleasing God, or in seeking him.

472. Self-will will never be satisfied, even if it had power over everything it wants; but we are satisfied from the moment we renounce it. Without it, we cannot be discontented; with it, we cannot be content.

473. Imagine a body full of thinking members.

474. Members. Begin with that. To rule the love we owe to ourselves, we must imagine a body full of thinking members, for we are members of the whole, and see how each member ought to love itself, etc.

475. If the feet and the hands had a will of their own, they would never be in their order except by submitting this particular will to the first will that governs the whole body. Outside that, they are in disorder and in misery; but in willing only the good of the body, they do their own good.

476. We must love only God and hate only ourselves.

If the foot had always been ignorant that it belonged to the body, and that there was a body on which it depended; if it had had only the knowledge and the love of itself, and then came to know that it belongs to a body on which it depends: what regret, what shame for its past life, for having been useless to the body that poured life into it, which would have annihilated it if it had rejected it and cut it off from itself, as the foot was cutting itself off from the body! What prayers to be kept in it! And with what submission it would let itself be governed by the will that rules the body, even to consenting to be cut off if need be! Or else it would lose its quality of member; for every member must be willing to perish for the body, which is the one thing for which everything is.

477. It is false that we deserve to be loved by others; it is unjust that we should want it. If we were born reasonable, and impartial, knowing ourselves and others, we would not give our will this inclination. Yet we are born with it; we are born unjust, then, for everything tends towards itself. This is against all order: we must tend towards the general; and the bent towards oneself is the beginning of all disorder, in war, in government, in the household, in the particular body of man. The will is therefore depraved.

If the members of natural and civil communities tend to the good of the body, the communities themselves must tend to another, more general body, of which they are members. We must therefore tend to the general. We are therefore born unjust and depraved.

478. When we want to think about God, is there nothing that turns us aside, that tempts us to think of something else? All that is evil, and born with us.

479. If there is a God, we must love him alone, and not the creatures that pass away. The reasoning of the ungodly in the Book of Wisdom is founded only on there being no God. "That granted," it says, "let us enjoy the creatures, then." That is the best of a bad job. But if there were a God to love, it would not have concluded that, but the very opposite; and that is the conclusion of the wise: There is a God, let us not enjoy the creatures, then.

Therefore everything that urges us to attach ourselves to the creatures is evil, since it keeps us either from serving God, if we know him, or from seeking him, if we do not. Now we are full of concupiscence; therefore we are full of evil; therefore we must hate ourselves, and everything that stirs us to any attachment but to God alone.

480. For the members to be happy, they must have a will, and make it conform to the body.

481. The examples of the noble deaths of the Spartans and others hardly touch us; for what do they bring us? But the example of the death of the martyrs touches us; for they are our members. We have a common bond with them; their resolution can form ours, not only by example, but because it has perhaps earned ours. There is nothing of this in the examples of the pagans: we have no tie with them; just as one does not become rich by seeing a stranger who is rich, but by seeing one's father or one's husband who is.

482. Morality. God, having made the heavens and the earth, which do not feel the happiness of their being, wished to make beings who would know it, and who would make up a body of thinking members. For our members do not feel the happiness of their union, of their wonderful understanding with one another, of the care nature takes to pour the spirits into them and to make them grow and last. How happy they would be if they felt it, if they saw it! But for that they would need intelligence to know it, and good will to consent to that of the universal soul. And if, having been given intelligence, they used it to keep the nourishment within themselves, without letting it pass to the other members, they would be not only unjust but also wretched, and would hate themselves rather than love themselves; their beatitude, as well as their duty, consisting in consenting to the guidance of the whole soul to which they belong, which loves them better than they love themselves.

483. To be a member is to have no life, no being and no movement except through the spirit of the body and for the body.

The separated member, no longer seeing the body to which it belongs, has nothing left but a perishing and dying being; yet it believes it is a whole, and, seeing no body on which it depends, it believes it depends only on itself, and wants to make itself centre and body. But having no principle of life in itself, it only wanders, and is bewildered by the uncertainty of its being, feeling clearly that it is not a body, and yet not seeing that it is a member of a body. At last, when it comes to know itself, it has as it were come home, and loves itself only for the sake of the body; it laments its past wanderings.

It could not by its nature love anything else, except for its own sake and to make it serve itself, because each thing loves itself more than everything. But in loving the body, it loves itself, because it has no being except in the body, by it and for it: he who cleaves to God is one spirit with him.

The body loves the hand; and the hand, if it had a will, ought to love itself in the same way as the soul loves it. All love that goes beyond that is unjust.

He who cleaves to God is one spirit. We love ourselves because we are members of Jesus Christ; we love Jesus Christ because he is the body of which we are members. All is one, one is in the other, like the three Persons.

484. Two laws are enough to rule the whole Christian commonwealth, better than all the laws of politics.

485. The true and only virtue, then, is to hate oneself, for one is hateful by one's concupiscence, and to seek a being truly worthy of love, in order to love it. But since we cannot love what is outside us, we must love a being that is within us and is not ourselves; and that is true of each and every man. Now there is only the universal Being that is such. The kingdom of God is within us: the universal good is within us, is ourselves, and is not ourselves.

486. The dignity of man, in his innocence, consisted in using the creatures and ruling over them; but today it consists in separating himself from them and subjecting himself to them.

487. Every religion is false which, in its faith, does not worship one God as the principle of all things, and which, in its morality, does not love one only God as the object of all things.

488. … But it is impossible that God should ever be the end if he is not the principle. We direct our gaze on high, but we lean on the sand: and the earth will melt, and we shall fall while looking at the sky.

489. If there is one sole principle of everything, one sole end of everything: everything by him, everything for him. The true religion, then, must teach us to worship him alone and to love him alone. But since we find ourselves powerless to worship what we do not know, and to love anything other than ourselves, the religion that instructs us in these duties must also instruct us in this powerlessness, and must teach us the remedies as well. It teaches us that by one man everything was lost, and the bond broken between God and us, and that by one man the bond is restored.

We are born so contrary to this love of God, and it is so necessary, that we must be born guilty, or God would be unjust.

490. Men, not being in the habit of creating merit, but only of rewarding it where they find it already formed, judge of God by themselves.

491. The true religion must have as its mark that it obliges us to love its God. That is very just, and yet none has commanded it: ours has. It must also have known concupiscence and powerlessness; ours has. It must have brought the remedies for them; one is prayer. No religion has asked God that we might love him and follow him.

492. Whoever does not hate in himself his self-love, and that instinct which carries him to make himself God, is very blind. Who does not see that nothing is so opposed to justice and to truth? For it is false that we deserve it; and it is unjust and impossible to attain it, since all demand the same thing. It is, then, a manifest injustice into which we are born, which we cannot rid ourselves of, and which we must rid ourselves of.

Yet no religion has noticed that this was a sin, or that we were born in it, or that we were obliged to resist it, or has thought of giving us the remedies for it.

493. The true religion teaches our duties, our powerlessness (pride and concupiscence), and the remedies (humility, mortification).

494. The true religion would have to teach greatness and wretchedness, and lead to esteem and contempt of oneself, to love and to hatred.

495. If it is a supernatural blindness to live without seeking what one is, it is a terrible one to live badly while believing in God.

496. Experience shows us an enormous difference between devotion and goodness.

497. Against those who, trusting in the mercy of God, remain in carelessness, without doing good works. Since the two sources of our sins are pride and sloth, God has revealed to us two qualities in himself to cure them: his mercy and his justice. The property of justice is to bring down pride, however holy the works may be, and enter not into judgement, etc.; and the property of mercy is to fight sloth by inviting to good works, according to this passage: "The mercy of God invites to penitence"; and this other, of the Ninevites: "Let us do penitence, to see whether perhaps he will have pity on us." And so, far from mercy authorizing slackness, it is on the contrary the very quality that expressly fights it; so that instead of saying, "If there were no mercy in God, we would have to make every kind of effort for virtue," we must say, on the contrary, that it is because there is mercy in God that we must make every kind of effort.

498. It is true that there is pain in entering into piety; but this pain does not come from the piety that is beginning to be in us, but from the impiety that is still there. If our senses did not oppose penitence, and our corruption did not oppose the purity of God, there would be nothing painful in it for us. We suffer only in proportion as the vice that is natural to us resists supernatural grace; our heart feels itself torn between contrary efforts; but it would be very unjust to impute this violence to God who draws us, instead of attributing it to the world that holds us back. It is like a child whom its mother snatches from the arms of robbers: in the pain it suffers it must love the loving and lawful violence of the one who wins its freedom, and detest only the impetuous and tyrannical violence of those who hold it unjustly. The cruellest war God can make on men in this life is to leave them without the war he came to bring. "I came to bring war," he says; and, to teach us about this war, "I came to bring the sword and fire." Before him the world lived in this false peace.

499. Outward works. There is nothing so dangerous as what pleases God and men; for the states that please God and men have one thing that pleases God, and another that pleases men; as with the greatness of Saint Teresa of Ávila: what pleases God is her deep humility in her revelations; what pleases men is her illuminations. And so people wear themselves out imitating her words, thinking they are imitating her state, and take less trouble to love what God loves and to put themselves in the state God loves.

It is better not to fast and be humbled by it than to fast and be pleased with oneself for it. Pharisee, tax collector.

What good would it do me to remember it, if it can equally harm me and serve me, and if everything depends on the blessing of God, which he gives only to things done for him, and according to his rules and in his ways, the manner being thus as important as the thing, and perhaps more, since God can draw good out of evil, and without God we draw evil out of good?

500. The understanding of the words good and evil.

501. First degree: to be blamed for doing evil, and praised for doing good. Second degree: to be neither praised nor blamed.

502. Abraham took nothing for himself, but only for his servants; so the righteous man takes nothing for himself from the world, nor from the applause of the world; but only for his passions, which he uses as their master, saying to one, Go, and to another, Come. Your desire shall be under you. His passions, mastered in this way, are virtues: avarice, jealousy, anger; God himself attributes them to himself, and they are as much virtues as mercy, pity, constancy, which are also passions. We must use them as slaves, and, leaving them their food, keep the soul from taking any of it; for when the passions are the masters, they are vices, and then they give the soul their own food, and the soul feeds on it and is poisoned by it.

503. The philosophers have hallowed the vices, by placing them in God himself; the Christians have hallowed the virtues.

504. The righteous man acts by faith in the least things: when he rebukes his servants, he desires their conversion by the spirit of God, and prays God to correct them, and expects as much from God as from his rebukes, and prays God to bless his corrections. And so in his other actions.

505. Everything can be deadly to us, even the things made to serve us; as, in nature, walls can kill us, and stairs can kill us, if we do not walk with care.

The least movement matters to the whole of nature; the entire sea changes for a stone. In the same way, in grace, the least action matters by its consequences to everything. Therefore everything is important.

In each action, we must look, beyond the action itself, at our state present, past and future, and at that of the others whom it concerns, and see the connections among all these things. And then we shall be well restrained.

506. May God not impute our sins to us, that is to say, all the consequences and sequels of our sins, which are terrifying, even of the least faults, if one chooses to follow them out without mercy!

507. The movements of grace, the hardness of heart, the outward circumstances.

508. To make a man a saint, it must surely be grace; and whoever doubts it does not know what a saint is, or a man.

509. Philosophers. A fine thing, to cry out to a man who does not know himself that he should go to God by himself! And a fine thing to say it to a man who does know himself!

510. Man is not worthy of God, but he is not incapable of being made worthy.

It is unworthy of God to join himself to wretched man; but it is not unworthy of God to draw him out of his wretchedness.

511. If someone wants to say that man is too small to deserve communion with God, he must be very great to judge of it.

512. It is wholly the body of Jesus Christ, in his jargon, but he cannot say that it is the whole body of Jesus Christ. The union of two things without change does not allow us to say that one becomes the other: so the soul is united to the body, the fire to the wood, without change; but there must be a change by which the form of the one becomes the form of the other: so the union of the Word with man.

Because my body without my soul would not make the body of a man, therefore my soul, united to any matter whatever, will make my body. He does not distinguish the necessary condition from the sufficient condition: the union is necessary, but not sufficient: the left arm is not the right. Impenetrability is a property of bodies. Identity de numero, numerical identity, with regard to the same time, requires identity of matter. Thus if God united my soul to a body in China, the same body, idem numero, numerically the same, would be in China; the same river that flows there is idem numero with the one that is running at the same time in China.

513. Why God established prayer.

First, to communicate to his creatures the dignity of causality.

Second, to teach us from whom we hold our virtue.

Third, to make us earn the other virtues by labour.

(But to keep the pre-eminence for himself, he gives prayer to whom he pleases.)

Objection: "But people will think they hold prayer from themselves."

That is absurd; for since, having faith, we cannot have the virtues, how should we have faith? Is there not a greater distance from unbelief to faith than from faith to virtue?

Merit: this word is ambiguous.

Meruit habere Redemptorem: it merited to have a Redeemer.

Meruit tam sacra membra tangere: it merited to touch limbs so sacred.

Digno tam sacra membra tangere: worthy to touch limbs so sacred.

Non sum dignus: I am not worthy.

Qui manducat indigne: whoever eats unworthily.

Dignus est accipere: he is worthy to receive.

Dignare me: deem me worthy.

God owes nothing except according to his promises. He has promised to grant righteousness to prayers; he has never promised prayers except to the children of the promise.

Saint Augustine said expressly that strength would be taken away from the righteous. But it was by chance that he said it; for it could have happened that the occasion to say it did not arise. But his principles show that, the occasion presenting itself, it was impossible that he should not say it, or that he should say anything to the contrary. It is more, then, to be forced to say it, the occasion arising, than to have said it, the occasion having arisen: the one being of necessity, the other of chance. But the two are all that can be asked.

514. "Work out your salvation with fear."

Proofs of prayer: To him who asks it shall be given. Therefore it is in our power to ask. On the contrary of…: it is not in our power, since the obtaining, which would pray for it, is not; for since salvation is not in our power, and the obtaining is, prayer is not.

The righteous man ought no longer, then, to hope in God, for he ought not to hope, but to strive to obtain what he asks.

Let us conclude, then, that since man has been iniquity ever since the first sin, and since God does not will that it should be by that that he does not withdraw from him, it is only by a first effect that he does not withdraw.

Therefore those who withdraw have not this first effect, without which one does not withdraw from God, and those who do not withdraw have this first effect. Therefore those who were possessed of grace for some time by this first effect cease to pray, for want of this first effect.

Then God abandons the first in this sense….

515. The elect will not know their virtues, and the rejected will not know the greatness of their crimes: Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty, etc.?

516. Romans 3:27: Glory excluded: by what law? Of works? No, but by faith. Faith, then, is not in our power like the works of the law, and it is given to us in another way.

517. Take comfort: it is not from yourself that you must expect it; on the contrary, it is by expecting nothing from yourself that you must expect it.

518. Every condition, and even the martyrs, have something to fear, according to Scripture.

The greatest pain of purgatory is the uncertainty of the judgement. The hidden God.

519. John 8: Many believed in him. Then Jesus said: If you continue…, truly you will be my disciples, and the truth will make you free. They answered: We are the seed of Abraham, and we have never been slaves to anyone.

There is a great difference between disciples and true disciples. We recognize them by telling them that the truth will make them free; for if they answer that they are free, and that it is in their power to come out of slavery to the devil, they are indeed disciples, but not true disciples.

520. The law did not destroy nature; but it instructed it; grace did not destroy the law; but it puts it into practice.

The faith received in baptism is the source of the whole life of Christians, and of converts.

521. Grace will always be in the world (and nature too), so that it is in a sense natural. And so there will always be Pelagians, and always Catholics, and always conflict; because the first birth makes the one, and the grace of the second birth makes the other.³⁶

522. The law commanded what it did not give. Grace gives what it commands.

523. The whole of faith consists in Jesus Christ and in Adam; and the whole of morality in concupiscence and in grace.

524. There is no doctrine better suited to man than this one, which teaches him his double capacity of receiving and of losing grace, because of the double peril to which he is always exposed, of despair or of pride.

525. The philosophers did not prescribe feelings suited to the two states.

They inspired impulses of pure greatness, and that is not the state of man.

They inspired impulses of pure baseness, and that is not the state of man.

We need impulses of baseness, not of nature but of penitence, not to stay in it but to go on to greatness. We need impulses of greatness, not of merit but of grace, and after having passed through baseness.

526. Wretchedness counsels despair; pride counsels presumption. The incarnation shows man the greatness of his wretchedness by the greatness of the remedy it required.

527. The knowledge of God without the knowledge of our wretchedness makes pride. The knowledge of our wretchedness without the knowledge of God makes despair. The knowledge of Jesus Christ makes the middle way, because in him we find both God and our wretchedness.

528. Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.

529. … Not a lowering that makes us incapable of good, nor a holiness free of evil.

530. Someone told me one day that he felt great joy and confidence on coming out of confession. Another told me that he remained in fear. I thought, on this, that out of these two one could make one good man, and that each fell short in not having the other's feeling. The same often happens in other things.

531. He who knows his master's will shall be beaten with more stripes, because of the power he has by his knowledge. Let him who is righteous be made righteous still, because of the power he has by righteousness. Of him who has received most, the greatest account will be asked, because of the power he has by the help he has been given.

532. Scripture has provided passages to console every condition, and to strike fear into every condition.

Nature seems to have done the same by its two infinites, the natural and the moral: for we shall always have those above us and those below, the cleverer and the less clever, the more exalted and the more wretched, to bring down our pride and raise up our abjection.

533. A broken heart, Saint Paul: there is the Christian character. Alba has named you; I no longer know you, Corneille: there is the inhuman character. The human character is the contrary.³⁷

534. There are only two kinds of men: the righteous, who believe themselves sinners; and the sinners, who believe themselves righteous.

535. We are much obliged to those who warn us of our faults, for they mortify us; they teach us that we have been despised; they do not prevent our being despised in the future, for we have plenty of other faults to be despised for. They prepare us to practise correction and to be rid of a fault.

536. Man is so made that if you keep telling him he is a fool, he believes it; and if he keeps telling it to himself, he makes himself believe it; for man holds by himself an inner conversation, which it is important to keep in good order: Evil talk corrupts good manners. We must keep silence as far as we can, and talk to ourselves only of God, whom we know to be the truth; and so we persuade ourselves of it.

537. Christianity is strange. It commands man to recognize that he is vile, and even abominable, and commands him to want to be like God. Without such a counterweight, this elevation would make him horribly vain, or this abasement would make him terribly abject.

538. With how little pride a Christian believes himself united to God! With how little abjection he makes himself equal to the worms of the earth!

What a fine way to receive life and death, good things and evil!

539. What difference is there between a soldier and a Carthusian monk, as regards obedience? For they are equally obedient and dependent, and in exercises equally hard. But the soldier always hopes to become master, and never becomes it, for even captains and princes are always slaves and dependent; but he always hopes for it, and always works to get there; whereas the Carthusian takes a vow never to be anything but dependent. And so they do not differ in perpetual servitude, which both of them always have, but in hope, which the one always has and the other never.

540. The hope Christians have of possessing an infinite good is mixed with actual enjoyment as well as with fear; for they are not like subjects hoping for a kingdom of which, being subjects, they would have nothing; they hope for holiness, for freedom from injustice, and they have something of it already.

541. No one is so happy as a true Christian, nor so reasonable, nor so virtuous, nor so lovable.

542. Only the Christian religion makes man lovable and happy at once. In good breeding, one cannot be lovable and happy together.

543. Preface. The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote from the reasoning of men, and so involved, that they make little impression; and even if they were of use to some, it would be only during the moment they see the demonstration; an hour afterwards they are afraid they have been mistaken.

What they came to know by curiosity, they lost by pride.

That is what the knowledge of God produces when it is obtained without Jesus Christ: it is to commune without a mediator with the God one has known without a mediator; whereas those who have known God through a mediator know their own wretchedness.

544. The God of the Christians is a God who makes the soul feel that he is its only good; that all its rest is in him, that it will have no joy except in loving him; and who at the same time makes it abhor the obstacles that hold it back and keep it from loving God with all its strength. The self-love and concupiscence that check it are unbearable to it. This God makes it feel that it has this deep-rooted self-love which is its ruin, and that he alone can heal it.

545. Jesus Christ did nothing but teach men that they loved themselves, that they were slaves, blind, sick, unhappy and sinners; that he had to deliver them, enlighten them, bless them and heal them; that this would be done by hating oneself, and by following him through wretchedness and the death of the cross.

546. Without Jesus Christ, man must be in vice and in wretchedness; with Jesus Christ, man is free of vice and of wretchedness. In him is all our virtue and all our happiness. Outside him there is nothing but vice, wretchedness, errors, darkness, death, despair.

547. God through Jesus Christ. We know God only through Jesus Christ. Without this Mediator, all communion with God is taken away; through Jesus Christ we know God. All those who have claimed to know God and to prove him without Jesus Christ had only powerless proofs. But to prove Jesus Christ we have the prophecies, which are solid and palpable proofs. And these prophecies, having been fulfilled and proved true by the event, mark the certainty of these truths, and therefore the proof of the divinity of Jesus Christ. In him and through him, then, we know God. Apart from that, and without Scripture, without original sin, without a necessary Mediator promised and come, we cannot prove God absolutely, nor teach either sound doctrine or sound morality. But through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ, we prove God, and we teach morality and doctrine. Jesus Christ, then, is the true God of men.

But at the same time we know our wretchedness, for this God is nothing other than the Redeemer of our wretchedness. And so we can know God well only by knowing our iniquities; that is why those who have known God without knowing their wretchedness have not glorified him, but have glorified themselves. Because it did not know him by wisdom, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save.

548. Not only do we know God only through Jesus Christ, but we know ourselves only through Jesus Christ; we know life and death only through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what our life is, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.

And so, without Scripture, which has Jesus Christ alone for its object, we know nothing, and see only obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in our own nature.

549. It is not only impossible but useless to know God without Jesus Christ. They have not drawn away from him, but come closer; they have not humbled themselves, but…

The better a man is, the worse he is, if he ascribes to himself the very thing by which he is the best.

550. I love poverty, because he loved it. I love wealth, because it gives the means of helping the wretched. I keep faith with everyone; I do not return evil to those who do me evil; but I wish them a condition like mine, in which one receives neither evil nor good from men. I try to be just, truthful, sincere and faithful to all men; and I have a tenderness of heart for those to whom God has bound me more closely; and whether I am alone or in the sight of men, I have in all my actions the sight of God, who is to judge them, and to whom I have consecrated them all.

Those are my feelings; and I bless every day of my life my Redeemer, who put them in me, and who, out of a man full of weaknesses, wretchedness, concupiscence, pride and ambition, has made a man free of all these evils by the strength of his grace, to which all the glory for it is due, since I have of my own only wretchedness and error.

551. Dignior plagis quam osculis non timeo quia amo: more worthy of blows than of kisses, I do not fear, because I love.

552. The sepulchre of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was dead, but seen, on the cross. He is dead and hidden in the sepulchre.

Jesus Christ was buried only by saints.

Jesus Christ worked no miracles in the sepulchre.

Only saints go into it.

It is there that Jesus Christ takes on a new life, not on the cross.

It is the last mystery of the Passion and of the Redemption.

[Jesus Christ teaches living, dead, buried, risen.]

Jesus Christ had nowhere to rest on earth but in the sepulchre.

His enemies ceased to harass him only at the sepulchre.

553. The Mystery of Jesus. Jesus suffers in his passion the torments that men inflict on him; but in the agony he suffers the torments he inflicts on himself: he troubled himself. It is a torment from a hand not human but almighty, for one must be almighty to bear it.

Jesus looks for some comfort at least in his three dearest friends, and they sleep; he asks them to hold out a little with him, and they leave him with utter indifference, having so little compassion that it could not keep them from sleeping even for a moment. And so Jesus was left alone to the wrath of God.

Jesus is alone on the earth, with no one not only to feel and share his pain, but even to know it: heaven and he are alone in that knowledge.

Jesus is in a garden, not of delights like the first Adam, where he lost himself and the whole human race, but in one of torments, where he saved himself and the whole human race.

He suffers this pain and this abandonment in the horror of the night.

I believe that Jesus never complained except this once; but then he complains as if he could no longer contain his overwhelming grief: My soul is sorrowful, even to death.

Jesus seeks companionship and relief from men. This is the only time in his whole life, it seems to me. But he receives none, for his disciples are asleep.

Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world; we must not sleep during that time.

Jesus, in the midst of this universal abandonment, including that of the friends chosen to watch with him, finding them asleep, is vexed because of the danger to which they expose, not him, but themselves, and warns them of their own salvation and their own good with a heartfelt tenderness for them in the midst of their ingratitude, and warns them that the spirit is willing and the flesh weak.

Jesus, finding them asleep again, since neither the thought of him nor of themselves had kept them from it, has the kindness not to wake them, and leaves them to their rest.

Jesus prays in uncertainty of the Father's will, and fears death; but once he has known it, he goes forward to offer himself to it: Let us go. He went forth (John).

Jesus asked men, and was not heard.

Jesus, while his disciples slept, worked their salvation. He has worked it for each of the righteous while they slept, both in nothingness before their birth and in their sins since their birth.

He prays only once that the cup may pass, and even then with submission, and twice that it may come if it must.

Jesus in anguish.

Jesus, seeing all his friends asleep and all his enemies watchful, commits himself wholly to his Father.

In Judas, Jesus does not look at his enmity, but at the order of God, which he loves; and he acknowledges it, since he calls him friend.

Jesus tears himself away from his disciples to enter into the agony; we must tear ourselves away from those nearest and most intimate to us to imitate him.

Jesus being in the agony and in the greatest pains, let us pray longer.

We implore the mercy of God, not so that he may leave us in peace in our vices, but so that he may deliver us from them.

If God gave us masters from his own hand, oh, how gladly we ought to obey them! Necessity and events are just such masters, infallibly.

"Take comfort. You would not be looking for me if you had not found me.

"I thought of you in my agony; I shed such drops of blood for you.

"To wonder whether you would do this or that thing that is not before you is to tempt me rather than to test yourself: I will do it in you if it comes.

"Let yourself be led by my rules; see how well I have led the Virgin and the saints, who let me act in them.

"The Father loves all that I do.

"Do you want it always to cost me the blood of my humanity, without your giving tears?

"Your conversion is my affair; do not be afraid, and pray with confidence, as though for me.

"I am present to you by my word in Scripture, by my spirit in the Church and by inspirations, by my power in the priests, by my prayer in the faithful.

"The doctors will not cure you, for you will die in the end. But it is I who cure, and make the body immortal.

"Bear chains and bodily servitude; for the present I deliver you only from the spiritual.

"I am more your friend than this one or that; for I have done more for you than they, and they would not bear what I have borne from you, and would not die for you in the time of your unfaithfulness and cruelty, as I have done, and as I am ready to do, and do, in my elect and in the Blessed Sacrament.

"If you knew your sins, you would lose heart."

I shall lose it, then, Lord, for on your word I believe how wicked they are.

"No, for I, by whom you learn it, can cure you of them, and my telling you so is a sign that I mean to cure you. As you expiate them, you will come to know them, and it will be said to you: See the sins that are forgiven you. Do penance, then, for your hidden sins, and for the secret wickedness of those you know."

Lord, I give you everything.

"I love you more ardently than you have loved your defilements, as the unclean loves the mire.

"To me be the glory of it, and not to you, worm and earth.

"Ask your director, when my own words are an occasion of evil to you, and of vanity or curiosity."

I see my abyss of pride, of curiosity, of concupiscence. There is no relation between me and God, nor between me and Jesus Christ the righteous. But he has been made sin for me; all your scourges have fallen on him. He is more abominable than I, and, far from abhorring me, he counts himself honoured that I go to him and help him.

But he healed himself, and will heal me all the more surely.

I must add my wounds to his, and join myself to him, and he will save me in saving himself. But I must add no more to them in future.

You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. Everyone plays the god in judging: "This is good or bad"; and in being too much grieved or too much gladdened by events.

Do little things as if they were great, because of the majesty of Jesus Christ, who does them in us and who lives our life; and great things as if they were small and easy, because of his almighty power.

554. It seems to me that Jesus Christ lets only his wounds be touched after his resurrection: Do not touch me. We must unite ourselves only to his sufferings.

He gave himself in communion as mortal at the Last Supper, as risen to the disciples at Emmaus, as ascended into heaven to the whole Church.

555. Do not compare yourself with others, but with me. If you do not find me in those with whom you compare yourself, you are comparing yourself with something abominable. If you find me there, compare yourself with me. But what will you compare? Will it be you, or me in you? If it is you, it is something abominable. If it is me, you are comparing me with me. Now I am God in everything.

I speak to you and counsel you often, because your director cannot speak to you; for I do not want you to be without a director.

And perhaps I do it at his prayers, and so he leads you without your seeing it. You would not seek me if you did not possess me.

Do not be anxious, then.

These are the rabbinic commentaries, under the names Pascal gives them in his own spelling (Misdrach Tillim, Massechet Succa, Bereschit Rabba): the Midrash on the Psalms, the Talmud's tractate on the feast of Tabernacles, the Midrash on Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) and the great Midrash on Genesis. Pascal read no Hebrew; he took these passages, in Latin, from the Pugio fidei, a thirteenth-century work of the Dominican Raymond Martin, reprinted in Paris in 1651. ↩
Pascal is meditating on Psalm 137, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion." The Latin Bible he read says "super flumina Babylonis", upon the rivers of Babylon: hence the sitting on the rivers, not in them, in this pensée and the next. ↩
Pelagius (died after 418), a British monk opposed by Augustine, taught that man can choose the good and earn salvation by his own will, without a grace that goes before. The Jansenists of Port-Royal accused their Jesuit opponents of reviving his error. ↩
The line is from Corneille's tragedy Horace (1640). Rome and Alba settle their war by a combat of champions; when the Roman Horace learns that his friend and brother-in-law Curiace has been chosen for Alba, he tells him: "Alba has named you; I no longer know you." ↩

Section VIII: The Foundations of the Christian Religion

556. … They blaspheme what they do not know. The Christian religion consists in two points; it matters equally to men to know them, and it is equally dangerous to be ignorant of them; and it is equally a mercy of God's to have given signs of both.

And yet they take occasion to conclude that one of these points is false, from the very thing that ought to make them conclude the other. The wise who said that there is only one God were persecuted, the Jews hated, the Christians still more. They saw by natural light that, if there is a true religion on earth, the whole course of things must tend towards it as towards its centre.

The whole course of things must have for its object the establishment and the greatness of religion; men must have within themselves feelings that conform to what it teaches us; and in short it must be so much the object and the centre towards which all things tend that whoever knows its principles can give an account both of the whole nature of man in particular and of the whole course of the world in general.

And on this ground they take occasion to blaspheme the Christian religion, because they know it badly. They imagine that it consists simply in the worship of a God considered as great and powerful and eternal; which is properly deism, almost as far removed from the Christian religion as atheism, which is its complete contrary; and from this they conclude that this religion is not true, because they do not see that all things work together to establish this point, that God does not show himself to men with all the evidence he could.

But let them conclude what they like from it against deism, they will conclude nothing from it against the Christian religion, which consists properly in the mystery of the Redeemer, who, uniting in himself the two natures, human and divine, drew men out of the corruption of sin to reconcile them to God in his divine person.

It teaches men, then, these two truths together: both that there is a God, of whom men are capable, and that there is a corruption in nature which makes them unworthy of him. It matters equally to men to know each of these points; and it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can cure him of it. One of these kinds of knowledge alone makes either the pride of the philosophers, who have known God and not their wretchedness, or the despair of the atheists, who know their wretchedness without a Redeemer.

And so, as it is equally necessary for man to know these two points, it is equally a mercy of God's to have made us know them. The Christian religion does this; it is in this that it consists.

Let the order of the world be examined on this, and let us see whether all things do not tend to establish the two chief points of this religion. Those who go astray go astray only for want of seeing one of these two things. We can, then, quite well know God without knowing our wretchedness, and our wretchedness without knowing God; but we cannot know Jesus Christ without knowing both God and our wretchedness together. Jesus Christ is the object of everything, and the centre towards which everything tends. Whoever knows him knows the reason of all things.

And that is why I shall not undertake here to prove by natural reasons either the existence of God, or the Trinity, or the immortality of the soul, or any of the things of that kind: not only because I would not feel strong enough to find in nature the means of convincing hardened atheists, but also because this knowledge, without Jesus Christ, is useless and barren. If a man were persuaded that the proportions of numbers are immaterial truths, eternal and dependent on a first truth in which they subsist and which is called God, I would not think him much further on towards his salvation.

The God of the Christians is not a God who is simply the author of the truths of geometry and of the order of the elements; that is the portion of the pagans and the Epicureans. He is not merely a God who exercises his providence over the life and the goods of men, to give a happy run of years to those who worship him; that is the portion of the Jews. But the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians, is a God of love and of consolation; he is a God who fills the soul and the heart of those he possesses; he is a God who makes them feel inwardly their wretchedness and his infinite mercy; who unites himself with them in the depths of their soul; who fills it with humility, with joy, with confidence, with love; who makes them incapable of any other end than himself.

All those who seek God outside Jesus Christ, and who stop at nature, either find no light that satisfies them, or come to fashion for themselves a means of knowing God and serving him without a mediator; and in that way they fall either into atheism or into deism, two things the Christian religion abhors almost equally.

Without Jesus Christ the world would not go on existing; for it would have to be either destroyed or like a hell.

If the world existed to instruct man about God, his divinity would shine out in it on every side in a way that could not be disputed; but since it exists only through Jesus Christ and for Jesus Christ, and to instruct men both of their corruption and of their redemption, everything in it blazes with the proofs of these two truths.

What appears there points neither to a total exclusion nor to a manifest presence of divinity, but to the presence of a God who hides himself. Everything bears this character.

Shall the only being who knows nature know it only to be wretched? Shall the only one who knows it be the only one unhappy?

He must not see nothing at all; nor must he see enough of it to believe that he possesses it; but he must see enough to know that he has lost it; for to know that one has lost, one must see and not see; and that is precisely the state nature is in.

Whatever side he takes, I shall not leave him in peace there.

557. … It is true, then, that everything instructs man about his condition, but this must be rightly understood: for it is not true that everything reveals God, and it is not true that everything hides God. But it is true at once that he hides himself from those who tempt him, and that he reveals himself to those who seek him, because men are at once unworthy of God and capable of God: unworthy by their corruption, capable by their first nature.

558. What, then, shall we conclude from all our darkness, if not our unworthiness?

559. If nothing of God had ever appeared, this eternal privation would be ambiguous, and could as well be put down to the absence of any divinity as to the unworthiness of men to know it; but the fact that he appears sometimes, and not always, removes the ambiguity. If he appears once, he is always; and so we can conclude from it only that there is a God, and that men are unworthy of him.

559 bis. The eternal Being is always, if he is once.

560. We conceive neither the glorious state of Adam, nor the nature of his sin, nor the way it has been passed on to us; these are things that took place in the state of a nature wholly different from ours, and that pass beyond the state of our present capacity.

All this is useless for us to know in order to get out of it; and all that matters to us to know is that we are wretched, corrupt, separated from God, but redeemed by Jesus Christ; and of that we have wonderful proofs on earth.

And so the two proofs, of the corruption and of the redemption, are drawn from the ungodly, who live in indifference to religion, and from the Jews, who are its irreconcilable enemies.

560 bis. Thus the whole universe teaches man either that he is corrupt or that he is redeemed; everything teaches him his greatness or his wretchedness; God's abandonment appears in the pagans, God's protection appears in the Jews.

561. There are two ways of persuading men of the truths of our religion: one by the force of reason, the other by the authority of the one who speaks.

We do not use the second, but the first; we do not say, "You must believe this, for Scripture, which says it, is divine"; but we say that it must be believed for this and that reason, which are weak arguments, reason being pliable to anything.

562. There is nothing on earth that does not show either the wretchedness of man or the mercy of God; either the powerlessness of man without God or the power of man with God.

563. It will be one of the confusions of the damned to see that they are condemned by their own reason, by which they claimed to condemn the Christian religion.

564. The prophecies, even the miracles and the proofs of our religion, are not of such a nature that we can say they are absolutely convincing; but they are also such that we cannot say it is unreasonable to believe them. Thus there is evidence and obscurity, to enlighten some and darken others; but the evidence is such that it surpasses, or at least equals, the evidence for the contrary; so that it cannot be reason that decides us not to follow it; and so it can only be concupiscence and the malice of the heart. And by this means there is enough evidence to condemn and not enough to convince; so that it may appear that in those who follow it, it is grace and not reason that makes them follow; and that in those who flee it, it is concupiscence and not reason that makes them flee.

Truly disciples, truly an Israelite, truly free, truly food.

565. Recognize, then, the truth of religion in the very obscurity of religion, in the little light we have of it, in our indifference to knowing it.

566. We understand nothing of the works of God unless we take as a principle that he wished to blind some and enlighten others.

567. The two contrary reasons. We must begin with that: without it we understand nothing, and everything is heretical; and even at the end of each truth we must add that we remember the opposite truth.

568. Objection. Plainly Scripture is full of things not dictated by the Holy Spirit. Answer. Then they do no harm to faith. Objection. But the Church has decided that everything is from the Holy Spirit. Answer. I answer two things: first, that the Church has never decided that; second, that even if it had decided it, it could be upheld.

There are many false minds.

Denys has charity; he was in his place.

The prophecies cited in the Gospel: do you think they are reported to make you believe? No, it is to keep you from believing.

569. Canonical. The heretics, at the beginning of the Church, serve to prove the canonical books.

570. We must put in the chapter On the Foundations what is in the one On the Figuratives concerning the cause of the figures: why Jesus Christ was prophesied in his first coming; why prophesied obscurely as to the manner.

571. Reason why figures. [They had to keep up a carnal people and make it the trustee of the spiritual Testament]: in order to give faith in the Messiah, there had to have been prophecies beforehand, and they had to be carried by people above suspicion, of an extraordinary diligence, faithfulness and zeal, and known to the whole earth.

To make all this succeed, God chose this carnal people, to whom he entrusted the prophecies that foretell the Messiah as a deliverer and dispenser of the carnal goods this people loved. And so it had an extraordinary ardour for its prophets, and carried before the eyes of the whole world these books that foretell their Messiah, assuring all the nations that he was to come, in the manner foretold in the books they held open to everyone. And so this people, disappointed by the ignominious and poor coming of the Messiah, were his cruellest enemies. And so here is the people of the world least open to the suspicion of favouring us, and the most exact and zealous that can be named for its law and its prophets, which it carries uncorrupted; so that those who rejected and crucified Jesus Christ, who was to them a stumbling block, are the ones who carry the books that bear witness to him and that say he will be rejected and a stumbling block; so that they showed that it was he by refusing him, and that he was proved alike both by the righteous Jews who received him and by the unrighteous who rejected him, the one and the other having been foretold.

That is why the prophecies have a hidden sense, the spiritual, to which this people was hostile, under the carnal, to which it was friendly. If the spiritual sense had been revealed, they would not have been capable of loving it, and could not have carried it: they would have had no zeal for preserving their books and their ceremonies; and if they had loved these spiritual promises, and had kept them uncorrupted until the Messiah, their testimony would have had no force, since they would have been its friends.

That is why it was good that the spiritual sense should be covered; but, on the other hand, if this sense had been so hidden that it did not appear at all, it could not have served as a proof of the Messiah. What, then, was done? It was covered under the temporal sense in the great mass of passages, and revealed so clearly in a few; besides which the time and the state of the world were foretold so clearly that it is clearer than the sun; and this spiritual sense is so clearly explained in some places that it took a blindness like the one the flesh casts over the mind when the mind is subject to it not to recognize it.

That, then, was God's conduct. This sense is covered by another in an infinity of places, and revealed in a few, rarely, but in such a way nevertheless that the places where it is hidden are ambiguous and can fit both senses; whereas the places where it is revealed are unambiguous, and can fit only the spiritual sense.

And so this could not lead into error, and only a people as carnal as this one could mistake it.

For when goods are promised in abundance, what kept them from understanding the true goods, if not their cupidity, which fixed the sense on the goods of the earth? But those who had no good except in God referred them to God alone. For there are two principles that divide the wills of men, cupidity and charity. It is not that cupidity cannot go with faith in God, or that charity does not go with the goods of the earth; but cupidity uses God and enjoys the world, and charity the contrary.

Now it is the last end that gives things their name. Everything that keeps us from reaching it is called an enemy. Thus the creatures, though good, are enemies of the righteous when they turn them away from God; and God himself is the enemy of those whose covetousness he disturbs.

And so, the word enemy depending on the last end, the righteous understood by it their passions, and the carnal understood the Babylonians: and so these terms were obscure only to the unrighteous. And that is what Isaiah says: Seal the law among my chosen; and that Jesus Christ will be a stone of stumbling. But "Blessed are those who will not stumble on him!" Hosea, in his last chapter, says it perfectly: "Where is the wise man? and he will understand what I say. The righteous will understand it: for the ways of God are straight; but the wicked will stumble in them."

572. Hypothesis of the apostles as impostors.

The time clearly, the manner obscurely.

Five proofs from the figuratives.

2,000 { 1,600: prophets. 400: scattered.

573. Blindness of Scripture. "Scripture," said the Jews, "says that no one will know where the Christ will come from" (John 7:27, and 12:34). "Scripture says that the Christ remains for ever, and this man says that he will die."

And so, says Saint John, they did not believe, though he had done so many miracles, so that the word of Isaiah might be fulfilled: He has blinded them, etc.

574. Greatness. Religion is so great a thing that it is just that those who would not take the trouble to seek it, if it is obscure, should be deprived of it. What are people complaining of, then, if it is such that it can be found by seeking it?

575. Everything turns to good for the elect, even the obscurities of Scripture; for they honour them because of the divine clarities. And everything turns to evil for the others, even the clarities; for they blaspheme them because of the obscurities they do not understand.

576. The general conduct of the world towards the Church: God wishing to blind and to enlighten. The event having proved the divinity of these prophecies, the rest must be believed; and by this we see the order of the world in this way: the miracles of the creation and the flood being forgotten, God sends the law and the miracles of Moses, the prophets who prophesy particular things; and, to prepare a lasting miracle, he prepares prophecies and their fulfilment; but since the prophecies could be suspected, he wishes to make them beyond suspicion, etc.

577. God has made the blindness of this people serve the good of the elect.

578. There is enough light to enlighten the elect and enough obscurity to humble them. There is enough obscurity to blind the rejected and enough light to condemn them and leave them without excuse. (Saint Augustine; Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond.)

The genealogy of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament is mixed among so many other useless ones that it cannot be told apart. If Moses had kept a record only of the ancestors of Jesus Christ, it would have been too visible. If he had not marked that of Jesus Christ, it would not have been visible enough. But, after all, whoever looks closely sees that of Jesus Christ clearly marked out by Tamar, Ruth, and so on.

Those who ordained these sacrifices knew their uselessness; those who declared their uselessness did not fail to practise them.

If God had permitted only one religion, it would have been too easily recognized; but if we look closely, we can clearly tell the truth in this confusion.

Principle: Moses was a clever man. If, then, he had been guided by his own mind, he would have said nothing plainly that went directly against the mind.

Thus all the most apparent weaknesses are strengths. Example: the two genealogies of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke. What could be clearer than that this was not done by agreement?

579. God (and the apostles), foreseeing that the seeds of pride would give birth to the heresies, and not wishing to give them occasion to be born through exact terms, has put into Scripture and the prayers of the Church contrary words and sentences, to bear their fruit in due time.

Just as in morality he gives charity, which bears fruit against concupiscence.

580. Nature has perfections, to show that it is the image of God, and defects, to show that it is only his image.

581. God wishes to dispose the will more than the mind. Perfect clarity would serve the mind and harm the will. To bring down pride.

582. We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, and is his image, and an idol, which we must not love or worship; and still less must we love or worship its contrary, which is falsehood.

I can well love total obscurity; but if God commits me to a half-obscure state, the little obscurity there is in it displeases me, and, because I do not see in it the merit of a complete obscurity, it does not please me. That is a fault, and a sign that I am making an idol of obscurity, separated from the order of God. Now we must worship only his order.

583. The weaklings are people who know the truth, but uphold it only so far as their interest coincides with it; but, apart from that, they abandon it.

584. The world exists for the exercise of mercy and judgement: not as if men were in it as they came from the hands of God, but as enemies of God, to whom he gives by grace enough light to come back, if they will seek him and follow him, but to punish them if they refuse to seek him or to follow him.

585. That God chose to hide himself. If there were only one religion, God would be plainly manifest in it. If there were martyrs only in our religion, the same.

God being hidden in this way, every religion that does not say that God is hidden is not true; and every religion that does not give the reason for it is not instructive. Ours does all this: Truly you are a hidden God.

586. If there were no obscurity, man would not feel his corruption; if there were no light, man would not hope for a remedy. And so it is not only just but useful for us that God should be partly hidden and partly revealed, since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his wretchedness without knowing God.

587. This religion, so great in miracles; saints, devout, blameless, learned and great witnesses; martyrs; kings (David) established; Isaiah, a prince of the blood; so great in knowledge: after displaying all its miracles and all its wisdom, it rejects all that, and says that it has neither wisdom nor signs, but the cross and folly.

For those who by these signs and this wisdom have earned your belief, and who have proved their character to you, declare to you that nothing of all this can change us, and make us capable of knowing and loving God, except the power of the folly of the cross, without wisdom or signs; and not the signs without this power. And so our religion is foolish, if we look at the effective cause, and wise, if we look at the wisdom that prepares for it.

588. Our religion is wise and foolish. Wise, because it is the most learned, and the most founded on miracles, prophecies and so on. Foolish, because it is not all that which makes us belong to it; that does indeed condemn those who do not belong to it, but it does not make those who belong to it believe. What makes them believe is the cross, lest the cross be made void. And so Saint Paul, who came in wisdom and signs, says that he came neither in wisdom nor in signs: for he came to convert. But those who come only to convince can say that they come in wisdom and signs.

588 bis. Contrarieties. The infinite wisdom and the folly of religion.

Section IX: Perpetuity

589. On the Christian religion's not being unique. So far is this from being a reason for believing that it is not the true one that, on the contrary, it is what shows that it is.

590. In matters of religion, we must be sincere: true pagans, true Jews, true Christians.

591. [Figure: a diagram; its labels read: J.-C. | Païens | Mahomet | Ignorance de Dieu]

Pagans.

Muhammad.

592. Falseness of the other religions. They have no witnesses; these have. God challenges the other religions to produce such signs: Isaiah 43:9; 44:8.

593. History of China. I believe only the histories whose witnesses would let their throats be cut.³⁸

[Which is the more believable of the two, Moses or China?]

It is not a question of looking at this in the mass; I tell you that there is enough here to blind and enough to enlighten.

With this one word I ruin all your reasonings. "But China obscures it," you say; and I answer: China obscures it, but there is clarity to be found; look for it.

And so everything you say serves one of the purposes, and nothing tells against the other. Thus it helps, and does not harm.

We must, then, look at it in detail; we must put the papers on the table.

594. Against the history of China. The historians of Mexico, of the five suns, the last of which was only eight hundred years ago.

The difference between a book received by a people and a book that forms a people.

595. Muhammad, without authority. His reasons, then, would have to be very powerful, having nothing but their own strength.³⁹

What does he say, then? That we must believe him.

596. The psalms sung throughout the whole earth.

Who bears witness to Muhammad? He himself. Jesus Christ wants his own witness to count for nothing.

The very nature of witnesses requires that they be always and everywhere; and he, wretched man, is alone.

597. Against Muhammad. The Qur'an is no more Muhammad's than the Gospel is Saint Matthew's, for it is cited by many authors from century to century; even its enemies, Celsus and Porphyry, never disowned it.

The Qur'an says that Saint Matthew was a good man. Therefore Muhammad was a false prophet, either in calling wicked men good, or in not agreeing with what they said of Jesus Christ.

598. It is not by what is obscure in Muhammad, and what can be passed off as a mysterious sense, that I want him to be judged, but by what is clear in him, by his paradise and the rest; it is in that that he is ridiculous; and that is why it is not right to take his obscurities for mysteries, seeing that his clear things are ridiculous.

It is not the same with Scripture. I grant that there are obscurities in it as strange as those of Muhammad; but there are admirable clarities, and prophecies that are manifest and fulfilled. The match, then, is not equal. We must not confuse and put on a level things that resemble each other only in their obscurity, and not in the clarity that earns reverence for the obscurities.

599. The difference between Jesus Christ and Muhammad. Muhammad, not foretold; Jesus Christ, foretold.

Muhammad, by killing; Jesus Christ, by causing his own to be killed.

Muhammad, by forbidding reading; the apostles, by commanding reading.

In short, it is so contrary that, if Muhammad took the way of succeeding in human terms, Jesus Christ took the way of perishing in human terms; and that instead of concluding that, since Muhammad succeeded, Jesus Christ might well have succeeded, we must say that, since Muhammad succeeded, Jesus Christ had to perish.

600. Any man can do what Muhammad did; for he worked no miracles, he was not foretold; no man can do what Jesus Christ did.

601. The foundation of our faith. The pagan religion has no foundation [today. It is said that once it had one, in the oracles that spoke. But what are the books that assure us of it? Are they so worthy of belief through the virtue of their authors? Have they been preserved with such care that we can be sure they are not corrupted?]

The Muslim religion has for its foundation the Qur'an and Muhammad; but this prophet, who was to be the world's last expectation, was he foretold? And what mark has he that every man who chooses to call himself a prophet does not have as well? What miracles does he himself say he worked? What mysteries did he teach, even according to his own tradition? What morality, and what happiness?

The Jewish religion must be regarded differently in the tradition of the holy books and in the tradition of the people. Its morality and its happiness are ridiculous in the tradition of the people; but they are admirable in that of their saints (and every religion is the same: for the Christian religion is very different in the holy books and in the casuists). Its foundation is admirable: it is the oldest book in the world and the most authentic; and whereas Muhammad, to make his book last, forbade it to be read, Moses, to make his last, commanded everyone to read it.

Our religion is so divine that another divine religion is only its foundation.

602. Order. See what is clear in the whole state of the Jews, and beyond dispute.

604. The only science that is against common sense and the nature of men is the only one that has always lasted among men.

605. The only religion that is against nature, against common sense, against our pleasures, is the only one that has always existed.

606. No religion but ours has taught that man is born in sin; no sect of philosophers has said it: none, then, has told the truth.

No sect or religion has always existed on earth except the Christian religion.

607. Whoever judges the religion of the Jews by its coarse adherents will know it badly; it is visible in the holy books and in the tradition of the prophets, who made it plain enough that they did not take the law literally. In the same way our religion is divine in the Gospel, in the apostles and in tradition; but it is ridiculous in those who handle it badly.

The Messiah, according to the carnal Jews, is to be a great temporal prince. Jesus Christ, according to carnal Christians, came to dispense us from loving God, and to give us sacraments that do everything without us. Neither the one nor the other is the Christian religion, or the Jewish.

The true Jews and the true Christians have always waited for a Messiah who would make them love God, and by that love triumph over their enemies.

608. The carnal Jews hold the middle ground between the Christians and the pagans. The pagans do not know God, and love only the earth. The Jews know the true God, and love only the earth. The Christians know the true God, and do not love the earth. The Jews and the pagans love the same goods. The Jews and the Christians know the same God.

The Jews were of two kinds: some had only pagan affections, the others had Christian affections.

609. Two kinds of men in every religion: among the pagans, worshippers of beasts, and the others, worshippers of one God in natural religion. Among the Jews, the carnal, and the spiritual, who were the Christians of the old law. Among the Christians, the coarse, who are the Jews of the new law.

The carnal Jews waited for a carnal Messiah, and the coarse Christians believe that the Messiah has dispensed them from loving God: the true Jews and the true Christians worship a Messiah who makes them love God.

610. To show that the true Jews and the true Christians have one and the same religion. The religion of the Jews seemed to consist essentially in descent from Abraham, in circumcision, in the sacrifices, in the ceremonies, in the Ark, in the Temple, in Jerusalem, and finally in the law and the covenant of Moses.

I say that it consisted in none of these things, but only in the love of God, and that God rejected all the other things.

That God did not accept the posterity of Abraham.

That the Jews will be punished by God like the strangers, if they offend him. Deuteronomy 8:19: "If you forget God, and follow strange gods, I warn you that you will perish in the same way as the nations that God destroyed before you."

That the strangers will be received by God like the Jews, if they love him. Isaiah 56:3: "Let not the stranger say, The Lord will not receive me. The strangers who cleave to God, to serve him and love him, I will bring to my holy mountain, and receive sacrifices from them; for my house is the house of prayer."

That the true Jews regarded their merit as coming from God alone, and not from Abraham. Isaiah 63:16: "You are truly our father, and Abraham did not know us, and Israel had no knowledge of us; but it is you who are our father and our redeemer."

Moses himself told them that God would show no partiality to persons. Deuteronomy 10:17: "God," he says, "shows no partiality to persons, and accepts no sacrifices."

The Sabbath was only a sign, Exodus 31:13; and in memory of the departure from Egypt, Deuteronomy 5:15. Therefore it is no longer necessary, since Egypt must be forgotten.

Circumcision was only a sign, Genesis 17:11. And that is why, when they were in the desert, they were not circumcised, because they could not be mingled with the other peoples; and why, since Jesus Christ came, it is no longer necessary.

That the circumcision of the heart is commanded. Deuteronomy 10:16; Jeremiah 4:4: "Be circumcised in heart; cut away the excess from your heart, and harden yourselves no longer; for your God is a God great, mighty and terrible, who shows no partiality to persons."

That God said he would do it one day. Deuteronomy 30:6: "God will circumcise your heart, and your children's, so that you may love him with all your heart."

That the uncircumcised in heart will be judged, Jeremiah 9:26: For God will judge the uncircumcised peoples, and all the people of Israel, because it is "uncircumcised in heart".

That the outward is of no use without the inward. Joel 2:13: Rend your hearts, etc. Isaiah 58:3, 4, etc.

The love of God is commanded throughout Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 30:19: "I call heaven and earth to witness that I have set before you death and life, so that you may choose life, and love God and obey him; for it is God who is your life."

That the Jews, for want of this love, would be rejected for their crimes, and the pagans chosen in their place. Hosea 1:10; Deuteronomy 32:20: "I will hide myself from them, in view of their latest crimes; for they are a wicked and faithless nation. They have provoked me to anger with things that are not gods, and I will provoke them to jealousy with a people that is not my people, and with a nation without knowledge and without understanding." Isaiah 65:1.

That temporal goods are false, and that the true good is to be united to God. Psalm 144:15.

That their feasts displease God, Amos 5:21.

That the sacrifices of the Jews displease God. Isaiah 66:1-3; 1:11; Jeremiah 6:20. David, the Miserere. Even on the part of the good: Exspectavi. Psalm 50:8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14.

That he established them only because of their hardness. Micah 6, admirably; 1 Samuel 15:22; Hosea 6:6.

That the sacrifices of the pagans will be received by God, and that God will withdraw his will from the sacrifices of the Jews. Malachi 1:11.

That God will make a new covenant through the Messiah, and that the old will be cast off. Jeremiah 31:31.

Statutes that were not good. Ezekiel.

That the old things will be forgotten. Isaiah 43:18, 19; 65:17, 18.

That the Ark will be remembered no more. Jeremiah 3:15, 16.

That the Temple would be rejected. Jeremiah 7:12, 13, 14.

That the sacrifices would be rejected, and other, pure sacrifices established. Malachi 1:11.

That the order of Aaron's priesthood would be cast off, and that of Melchizedek brought in by the Messiah. The psalm Dixit Dominus.

That this priesthood would be eternal. The same psalm.

That Jerusalem would be cast off, and Rome admitted. Dixit Dominus.

That the name of the Jews would be cast off, and a new name given. Isaiah 65:15.

That this last name would be better than that of Jews, and eternal. Isaiah 56:5.

That the Jews were to be without prophets (Amos), without king, without princes, without sacrifice, without idol.

That the Jews would nevertheless always endure as a people. Jeremiah 31:36.

611. Commonwealth. The Christian commonwealth, and even the Jewish one, has had only God for its master, as Philo the Jew remarks, On Monarchy.

When they fought, it was only for God; they hoped chiefly from God alone; they regarded their cities only as belonging to God, and kept them for God. 1 Chronicles 19:13.

612. Genesis 17: Statuam pactum meum inter me et te foedere sempiterno… ut sim Deus tuus…: I will establish my covenant between me and you as an everlasting covenant… to be your God…

Et tu ergo custodies pactum meum: and you, therefore, shall keep my covenant.

613. Perpetuity. This religion, which consists in believing that man has fallen from a state of glory and of communion with God into a state of sorrow, of penitence and of separation from God, but that after this life we shall be restored by a Messiah who was to come, has always existed on earth. All things have passed away, and this one, for which all things exist, has lasted.

Men in the first age of the world were swept into every kind of disorder, and yet there were saints, like Enoch, Lamech and others, who waited in patience for the Christ promised from the beginning of the world. Noah saw the wickedness of men at its height; and he earned the saving of the world in his own person, by the hope of the Messiah, of whom he was the figure. Abraham was surrounded by idolaters when God made known to him the mystery of the Messiah, whom he greeted from afar. In the time of Isaac and Jacob, abomination was spread over the whole earth; but these saints lived in faith; and Jacob, dying and blessing his children, cries out, in a rapture that makes him break off his speech: "I wait, O my God, for the Saviour you have promised: I will wait for your salvation, O Lord." The Egyptians were infected with both idolatry and magic; the people of God itself was carried away by their example; but even so Moses and others believed in him whom they did not see, and worshipped him, looking to the eternal gifts he was preparing for them.

The Greeks, and the Latins after them, set false deities on the throne; the poets made a hundred different theologies; the philosophers split into a thousand different sects; and yet there were always, in the heart of Judaea, chosen men who foretold the coming of this Messiah, who was known only to them.

He came at last in the fullness of time; and since then we have seen so many schisms and heresies arise, so many states overthrown, so many changes in everything; and this Church, which worships him who has always been worshipped, has lasted without a break. And what is wonderful, incomparable and wholly divine is that this religion, which has always lasted, has always been under attack. A thousand times it has been on the eve of utter destruction; and every time it has been in that state, God has raised it up again by extraordinary strokes of his power. That is what is astonishing, and that it has held firm without bending and yielding to the will of tyrants. For it is not strange that a state should last when its laws are sometimes made to give way to necessity, but that… (See the circle in Montaigne.)

614. States would perish if the laws were not often made to bend to necessity; but religion has never suffered that, nor made use of it. And so there must be these compromises, or miracles. It is not strange that a thing should preserve itself by bending, and that is not properly holding firm; and even so they perish utterly in the end: there is not one that has lasted a thousand years. But that this religion should always have held firm, and unbending: that is divine.

615. Say what you like. We must admit that the Christian religion has something astonishing about it. "It is because you were born in it," people will say. Far from it; I brace myself against it for that very reason, for fear that this prejudice should lead me astray; but, though I was born in it, I still find it so.

616. Perpetuity. The Messiah has always been believed in. The tradition of Adam was still fresh in Noah and in Moses; the prophets foretold him after that, while always foretelling other things as well, whose events, which came about from time to time before men's eyes, marked the truth of their mission, and therefore that of their promises concerning the Messiah; Jesus Christ worked miracles, and so did the apostles, who converted all the pagans; and by this, all the prophecies being fulfilled, the Messiah is proved for ever.

617. Perpetuity. Consider that, since the beginning of the world, the expectation or the worship of the Messiah has lasted without a break; that there were men who said that God had revealed to them that a Redeemer was to be born who would save his people; that Abraham came after them to say that it had been revealed to him that the Redeemer would be born of him, through a son he would have; that Jacob declared that, of his twelve children, he would be born of Judah; that Moses and the prophets came after that to declare the time and the manner of his coming; that they said the law they had was only to fill the time until the Messiah's; that until then it would be perpetual, but that the other would last eternally; that in this way their law, or the Messiah's, of which it was the promise, would always be on earth; that in fact it has always lasted; that at last Jesus Christ came, in all the circumstances foretold. That is wonderful.

618. This is a matter of fact. While all the philosophers split into different sects, there is found in one corner of the world a people who are the most ancient in the world, declaring that the whole world is in error, that God has revealed the truth to them, that it will always be on the earth. And in fact all the other sects come to an end; this one lasts for ever, and has lasted for four thousand years.

They declare that they hold from their ancestors that man has fallen from communion with God, into an utter estrangement from God, but that he has promised to redeem them; that this doctrine would always be on the earth; that their law has a double sense; that for sixteen hundred years they have had men whom they believed to be prophets, who foretold the time and the manner; that four hundred years afterwards they were scattered everywhere, because Jesus Christ was to be proclaimed everywhere; that Jesus Christ came in the manner and at the time foretold; that since then the Jews have been scattered everywhere, under a curse, and yet still subsisting.

619. I see the Christian religion founded on a religion that came before it, and here is what I find to be fact.

I am not speaking here of the miracles of Moses, of Jesus Christ and of the apostles, because they do not seem convincing at first sight, and because I want only to set out here in plain view all the foundations of this Christian religion that are beyond doubt, and that cannot be called in question by anyone at all. It is certain that we see, in several places in the world, a particular people, separated from all the other peoples of the world, who are called the Jewish people.

I see, then, a profusion of religions in many places in the world and in every age; but they have neither a morality that can please me nor proofs that can hold me; and so I would have refused alike the religion of Muhammad, and that of China, and that of the ancient Romans, and that of the Egyptians, for this one reason, that since the one has no more marks of truth than the other, nor anything that would necessarily decide me, reason cannot lean towards the one rather than towards the other.

But in considering in this way the shifting and bizarre variety of customs and beliefs in different ages, I find in one corner of the world a particular people, separated from all the other peoples of the earth, the most ancient of all, whose histories come several centuries before the most ancient we have.

I find, then, this people great and numerous, sprung from a single man, who worship a single God and live by a law which they say they hold from his hand. They maintain that they are the only people in the world to whom God has revealed his mysteries; that all men are corrupt and out of God's favour; that they are all abandoned to their senses and to their own minds, and that from this come the strange wanderings and the continual changes that happen among them, of religions as of customs, whereas they themselves remain unshaken in their conduct; but that God will not leave the other peoples in this darkness for ever; that a deliverer will come for all; that they are in the world to proclaim him to men; that they were formed on purpose to be the forerunners and the heralds of this great coming, and to call all peoples to unite with them in the expectation of this deliverer.

To come upon this people astonishes me, and seems to me worth attention. I consider this law which they boast of holding from God, and I find it admirable. It is the first law of all, and in such a way that even before the word law was in use among the Greeks, they had received it and kept it without interruption for nearly a thousand years. And so I find it strange that the first law in the world should turn out to be the most perfect as well, so that the greatest lawgivers borrowed theirs from it, as appears from the law of the Twelve Tables of Athens, which was afterwards taken over by the Romans, and as it would be easy to show, if Josephus and others had not dealt with this matter well enough already.

620. Advantages of the Jewish people. In this inquiry the Jewish people catches my attention first of all by a great many admirable and singular things that appear in it.

I see first that it is a people made up entirely of brothers; and whereas all the others are formed by the gathering of an infinity of families, this one, though so strangely numerous, has all sprung from a single man; and being thus all one flesh, and members of one another, they make up a powerful state of a single family. That is unique.

This family, or this people, is the most ancient within the knowledge of men; which seems to me to draw a particular veneration to it, and above all in the inquiry we are making, since, if God has communicated himself to men from all time, it is to these that we must go to learn the tradition of it.

This people is not only remarkable for its antiquity; it is singular, too, in its duration, which has gone on without a break from its origin until now. For whereas the peoples of Greece and of Italy, of Sparta, of Athens, of Rome, and the others who came so long afterwards, perished so long ago, these still subsist; and in spite of the attempts of so many powerful kings who have tried a hundred times to destroy them, as their historians bear witness, and as it is easy to judge from the natural order of things over so long a span of years, they have nevertheless always been preserved (and this preservation was foretold); and reaching from the first times to the last, their history holds within its span the span of all our histories [which it comes before by a very long time].

The law by which this people is governed is at once the most ancient law in the world, the most perfect, and the only one that has always been kept without interruption in a state. That is what Josephus shows admirably against Apion, and Philo the Jew in various places, where they make it plain that it is so ancient that the very name of law was not known to the most ancient peoples until more than a thousand years afterwards; so that Homer, who wrote the history of so many states, never used the word. And it is easy to judge its perfection by simply reading it, where we see that everything has been provided for with so much wisdom, so much equity, so much judgement, that the most ancient lawgivers, Greek and Roman, having caught some light of it, borrowed their chief laws from it; which appears from the law they call the Twelve Tables, and from the other proofs that Josephus gives of it.

But this law is at the same time the most severe and the most rigorous of all in what concerns the worship of their religion, binding this people, to hold them to their duty, to a thousand particular and painful observances, on pain of death; so that it is a most astonishing thing that it should have been preserved so constantly for so many centuries by a people as rebellious and impatient as this one, while all the other states have changed their laws from time to time, though these were far easier.

The book that contains this law, the first of all, is itself the most ancient book in the world, those of Homer, of Hesiod and the others coming only six or seven hundred years after it.

621. The creation and the flood being past, and God being no longer about to destroy the world, nor to create it anew, nor to give such great signs of himself, he began to establish a people on the earth, formed on purpose, which was to last until the people the Messiah would form by his spirit.

622. As the creation of the world began to grow distant, God provided a single contemporary historian, and charged a whole people with the keeping of this book, so that this history should be the most authentic in the world, and that all men might learn from it a thing so necessary to know, and that it could be known from nowhere else.

623. [Japheth begins the genealogy].

Joseph crosses his arms and prefers the younger.

624. Why does Moses make the lives of men so long, and the generations so few?

Because it is not the length of the years but the number of the generations that makes things obscure; for truth is altered only by the changing of men. And yet he puts the two most memorable things that have ever been imagined, namely the creation and the flood, so close together that they touch.

625. Shem, who saw Lamech, who saw Adam, also saw Jacob, who saw those who saw Moses; therefore the flood and the creation are true. That settles it among certain people who understand it rightly.

626. Another circle. The length of the patriarchs' lives, instead of causing the histories of past things to be lost, served on the contrary to preserve them; for what makes us sometimes poorly informed about the history of our ancestors is that we have scarcely ever lived with them, and that they have often died before we reached the age of reason. Now, when men lived so long, children lived a long time with their fathers; they talked with them a long time. And what would they have talked with them about, if not the history of their ancestors, since all history came down to that, and they had no studies, no sciences, no arts, which take up a great part of the talk of life? And indeed we see that in those days peoples took particular care to preserve their genealogies.

627. I believe that Joshua was the first of the people of God to have this name, as Jesus Christ is the last of the people of God.⁴⁰

628. Antiquity of the Jews. What a difference there is between one book and another! I am not surprised that the Greeks made the Iliad, nor the Egyptians and the Chinese their histories.

We have only to see how it came about. These fabulous historians are not contemporaries of the things they write about. Homer writes a work of fiction, which he gives out as fiction and which is received as fiction; [for no one doubted that Troy and Agamemnon had no more existed than the golden apple]. Nor did he think of making a history of it, but only a diversion; he is the only one writing in his time; the beauty of the work makes the thing last: everyone learns it and talks of it; one has to know it; everyone knows it by heart. Four hundred years later the witnesses of the things are no longer alive; no one knows any more from his own knowledge whether it is a fable or a history: people have only learned it from their ancestors, and it can pass for true.

Every history that is not contemporary is suspect; thus the books of the Sibyls and of Hermes Trismegistus, and so many others that have had credit in the world, are false, and are found to be false in the course of time. It is not so with contemporary authors.

There is a great difference between a book that one private man makes and throws out among the people, and a book that a people makes itself. We cannot doubt that the book is as ancient as the people.

629. Josephus hides the shame of his nation.

Moses does not hide his own shame.

Who will grant me that all may prophesy?

He was weary of the people.

630. The sincerity of the Jews. Since they have had no more prophets, the Maccabees; since Jesus Christ, the Masorah.⁴¹

"This book shall be a witness for you."

The defective and the final letters.

Sincere against their own honour, and dying for it: this has no example in the world, nor any root in nature.

631. Sincerity of the Jews. They carry with love and faithfulness this book in which Moses declares that they have been ungrateful to God all their life, that he knows they will be still more so after his death; but that he calls heaven and earth to witness against them, and that he has taught them enough.

He declares that in the end God, growing angry with them, will scatter them among all the peoples of the earth; that as they angered him by worshipping gods that were not their God, so he will provoke them by calling a people that is not his people; and he wants all his words to be preserved for ever, and his book to be placed in the ark of the covenant, to serve for ever as a witness against them.

Isaiah says the same thing, in chapter 30.

632. On Ezra. A fable: the books were burnt with the Temple. Shown false by Maccabees: Jeremiah gave them the law.⁴²

A fable that he recited it all by heart. Josephus and Ezra record that he read the book. Baronius, Annals, 180: There is found no one at all among the ancient Hebrews who has handed down that the books perished and were restored by Ezra, except in 4 Esdras.

A fable that he changed the letters: Philo, in the Life of Moses: The language and the characters in which the law was written in antiquity remained so until the Seventy. Josephus says that the law was in Hebrew when it was translated by the Seventy.

Under Antiochus and Vespasian, when they tried to abolish the books, and when there was no prophet, it could not be done; and under the Babylonians, when no persecution had been made, and when there were so many prophets, would they have let it be burnt? Josephus laughs at the Jews who would not bear….

Tertullian: He could just as well have formed it again in the spirit after it had been wiped out by the violence of the flood, as it is agreed that, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonian conquest, every document of Jewish literature was restored through Ezra. He says that Noah could as well have restored in the spirit the book of Enoch, lost in the flood, as Ezra could restore the Scriptures lost during the captivity.

God, in the captivity of the people under Nebuchadnezzar, when the Scriptures had been destroyed, inspired Ezra the priest, of the tribe of Levi, to set in order again all the words of the prophets who had gone before, and to restore to the people the law given through Moses. He cites this to prove that it is not incredible that the Seventy should have rendered the holy Scriptures with that uniformity which is admired in them. Eusebius, History 5.8; and he took it from Saint Irenaeus.

Saint Hilary, in his preface to the Psalms, says that Ezra put the Psalms in order. The origin of this tradition comes from the fourteenth chapter of the fourth book of Esdras.

_God was glorified, and the Scriptures were believed to be truly divine, since all of them recited the same things, in the same words and with the same names, from beginning to end, so that even the Gentiles who were present knew that the Scriptures had been translated by the inspiration of God; and it was no wonder that God had worked this in them: since, in the captivity of the people brought about by Nebuchadnezzar, when the Scriptures had been corrupted, and when after seventy years the Jews had gone back down into their own country, then afterwards, in the times of Artaxerxes king of the Persians, he inspired Ezra the priest, of the tribe of Levi, to call back to mind all the words of the prophets who had gone before, and to restore to the people the law that was given through Moses._

633. Against the Ezra fable, 2 Maccabees 2. Josephus, Antiquities 2.1: Cyrus took occasion from the prophecy of Isaiah to release the people; the Jews had peaceful possessions under Cyrus in Babylon; so they could quite well have had the law. 2 Kings 17:27.

Josephus, in the whole history of Ezra, does not say a word about this restoration.

634. If the Ezra fable is believable, then we must believe that Scripture is Holy Scripture; for this fable rests only on the authority of those who tell the story of the Seventy, which shows that Scripture is holy.

Therefore, if this tale is true, we get what we need from it; if not, we have it from elsewhere. And thus those who would ruin the truth of our religion, founded on Moses, establish it by the same authority by which they attack it. And thus, by this providence, it still stands.

635. Chronology of Rabbinism. (The page references are to the book Pugio.)

Pugio, 27: Rabbi ha-Kadosh (the year 200), author of the Mishnah, or oral law, or second law.

Commentaries on the Mishnah (the year 340): the one, Sifra; Baraitot; the Jerusalem Talmud; Tosefta.

Bereshit Rabbah, by Rabbi Hoshaiah Rabbah, a commentary on the Mishnah.

Bereshit Rabbah and Bar Nachmoni are subtle discourses, pleasant, historical and theological. This same author wrote books called Rabbot.

A hundred years after the Jerusalem Talmud the Babylonian Talmud was made, by Rav Ashi (440), with the universal consent of all the Jews, who are necessarily bound to observe everything contained in it. Rav Ashi's addition is called the Gemara, that is to say the commentary on the Mishnah.

And the Talmud takes in the Mishnah and the Gemara together.

636. Si, "if", does not mark indifference: Malachi, Isaiah. Isaiah: Si volumus, if we are willing, etc.

In quacumque die: on whatever day.

637. Prophecies. The sceptre was not interrupted by the captivity in Babylon, because the return was promised and foretold.

638. Proofs of Jesus Christ. To be a captive with the assurance of being set free within seventy years is not to have been a captive at all; but now they are captives without any hope.

God promised them that, even though he should scatter them to the ends of the earth, nevertheless, if they were faithful to his law, he would gather them together again; they are most faithful to it, and remain oppressed.

639. When Nebuchadnezzar carried the people away, for fear it should be thought that the sceptre had been taken from Judah, they were told beforehand that they would be there only a short time, and that they would be restored. They were always consoled by the prophets; their kings continued. But the second destruction is without promise of restoration, without prophets, without kings, without consolation, without hope, because the sceptre is taken away for ever.

640. It is an astonishing thing, and worthy of a singular attention, to see this Jewish people subsisting for so many years, and to see it always wretched: since it is necessary for the proof of Jesus Christ both that it should subsist, to prove him, and that it should be wretched, since they crucified him; and though to be wretched and to subsist are contrary, it subsists nevertheless, always, in spite of its wretchedness.

641. It is plainly a people made on purpose to serve as a witness to the Messiah (Isaiah 43:9; 44:8). It carries the books, and loves them, and does not understand them. And all this is foretold: that the judgements of God are entrusted to them, but as a sealed book.

Pascal has in mind the Sinicae historiae of the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini (1658), whose Chinese annals ran back beyond the date then given to the Flood, and so seemed to set China's antiquity against the chronology of Moses. ↩
Pascal calls him Mahomet, as French and English writers did in his day, and the Qur'an l'Alcoran. ↩
Joshua and Jesus are one name: the Hebrew Yehoshua, which the Greek of the Septuagint and of the New Testament writes Iēsous. ↩
The Masorah is the body of notes by which the Jewish scribes fixed and guarded the Hebrew text letter by letter, keeping even its irregular spellings ("defective" words written without a vowel letter) and the special forms some letters take at the end of a word. Pascal returns to these letters at 687. ↩
The "fable" is the story told in 4 Esdras, a Jewish apocalypse of about AD 100 (chapter 14), that the books of the law were burnt when the Babylonians destroyed the Temple, and that Ezra, inspired, dictated them all again. Pascal gathers the witnesses against it here and in the next two pensées. The Seventy are the translators of the Greek Bible, the Septuagint. ↩

Section X: Types and Figures

642. Proof of the two Testaments at once. To prove both at a single stroke, we need only see whether the prophecies of the one are fulfilled in the other. To examine the prophecies, we must understand them; for if we believe they have only one sense, it is certain that the Messiah will not have come; but if they have two senses, it is certain that he will have come in Jesus Christ.

The whole question, then, is to know whether they have two senses.

That Scripture has two senses, which Jesus Christ and the apostles gave it; here are the proofs:

First, proof by Scripture itself;

Second, proof by the Rabbis: Moses Maimonides says that it has two faces, and that the prophets prophesied only of Jesus Christ;

Third, proof by the Kabbalah;

Fourth, proof by the mystical interpretation that the Rabbis themselves give to Scripture;

Fifth, proof by the principles of the Rabbis: that there are two senses; that there are two comings of the Messiah, glorious or abject, according to their merit; that the prophets prophesied only of the Messiah (the law is not eternal, but is to change at the Messiah); that then the Red Sea will no longer be remembered; that the Jews and the Gentiles will be mingled;

[Sixth, proofs by the key that Jesus Christ and the apostles give us to it.]

643. Isaiah 51: the Red Sea, an image of the Redemption. That you may know that the Son of Man has power to forgive sins, I say to you: Arise. God, wishing to make it appear that he could form a holy people with an invisible holiness and fill it with an eternal glory, made visible things. As nature is an image of grace, he did in the goods of nature what he was to do in the goods of grace, so that it might be judged that he could do the invisible, since he did the visible so well.

He saved this people, then, from the flood; he made it spring from Abraham, he redeemed it from among its enemies, and he brought it into rest.

God's object was not to save from the flood, and to make a whole people spring from Abraham, only to bring it into a rich land.

And even grace is only the figure of glory, for it is not the final end. It was figured by the law, and itself figures glory: but it is the figure of it, and also its principle or cause.⁴³

The ordinary life of men is like that of the saints. They all seek their satisfaction, and differ only in the object in which they place it; they call their enemies those who stand in their way, etc. God, then, showed the power he has to give invisible goods by the power he showed he had over the visible.

644. Figures. God, wishing to form for himself a holy people, whom he would separate from all the other nations, whom he would deliver from its enemies, whom he would put in a place of rest, promised to do so, and foretold by his prophets the time and the manner of his coming. And meanwhile, to strengthen the hope of his elect, he made them see the image of it in every age, never leaving them without assurances of his power and of his will for their salvation. For at the creation of man, Adam was its witness, and the keeper of the promise of the Saviour who was to be born of the woman, at a time when men were still so near the creation that they could not have forgotten their creation and their fall. When those who had seen Adam were no longer in the world, God sent Noah, and saved him, and drowned the whole earth, by a miracle that showed plainly enough the power he had to save the world, and the will he had to do it, and to bring to birth from the seed of the woman the one he had promised. This miracle was enough to strengthen the hope of…

The memory of the flood being still so fresh among men, while Noah was still alive, God made his promises to Abraham; and while Shem was still alive, God sent Moses, etc.…

645. Figures. God, wishing to deprive his own of perishable goods, made the Jewish people, to show that it was not for want of power.

646. The synagogue did not perish, because it was the figure; but because it was only the figure, it fell into servitude. The figure lasted until the truth, so that the Church should always be visible, either in the picture that promised it or in the reality.

647. That the law was figurative.

648. Two errors: first, to take everything literally; second, to take everything spiritually.

649. Speak against those who make too much of figures.

650. There are figures that are clear and demonstrative; but there are others that seem a little far-fetched, and that prove nothing except to those who are persuaded on other grounds. These are like the figures of the Apocalyptics; but the difference is that they have none that are beyond doubt; so that nothing is so unjust as when they claim that theirs are as well founded as some of ours; for they have none that are demonstrative, as some of ours are. The match, then, is not equal. We must not put these things on a level and confuse them, because they seem alike at one end, being so different at the other; it is the clarities, when they are divine, that earn reverence for the obscurities.

[It is like people among whom there is a certain obscure language: those who did not understand it would find in it only a foolish sense.]

651. Extravagances of the Apocalyptics, and of the Preadamites, Millenarians, etc. Whoever wants to found extravagant opinions on Scripture will found them, for example, on this. It is said that this generation shall not pass until all these things are done. On that I shall say that after this generation another generation will come, and so on, one after another.⁴⁴

In the second book of Chronicles Solomon and the king are spoken of as if they were two different persons. I shall say that they were two.

652. Particular figures. A double law, double tables of the law, a double temple, a double captivity.

653. Figures. The prophets prophesied by figures of girdles, of beards and of burnt hair, etc.

654. The difference between dinner and supper.

In God the word does not differ from the intention, for he is true; nor the word from the effect, for he is powerful; nor the means from the effect, for he is wise. Saint Bernard, the last sermon on the Missus est.

Augustine, City of God 5.10. This rule is general: God can do everything, except the things which, if he could do them, he would not be almighty, such as to die, to be deceived, and to lie, etc.

Several Evangelists, for the confirmation of the truth: their unlikeness useful.

The Eucharist after the Last Supper: the truth after the figure.

The ruin of Jerusalem: a figure of the ruin of the world, forty years after the death of Jesus.

I do not know: as man, or as envoy. Matthew 24:36.

Jesus condemned by the Jews and the Gentiles.

The Jews and the Gentiles figured by the two sons. Augustine, City of God 20.29.

655. The six ages, the six fathers of the six ages, the six wonders at the opening of the six ages, the six dawns at the opening of the six ages.

656. Adam, the figure of him who was to come. Six days to form the one, six ages to form the other; the six days that Moses sets out for the forming of Adam are only the picture of the six ages for forming Jesus Christ and the Church. If Adam had not sinned, and Jesus Christ had not come, there would have been only one covenant, only one age of men, and the creation would have been shown as done at a single time.

657. Figures. The Jewish and the Egyptian peoples plainly foretold by the two men Moses came upon: the Egyptian beating the Jew, Moses avenging him and killing the Egyptian, and the Jew ungrateful for it.

658. (20v.) The figures in the Gospel for the state of the sick soul are sick bodies; but because one body cannot be sick enough to express it well, several were needed. And so there are the deaf man, the dumb man, the blind man, the paralytic, Lazarus dead, the man possessed; all this together is in the sick soul.

659. Figures. To show that the Old Testament is only figurative, and that by temporal goods the prophets meant other goods, there is this:

First, that this would be unworthy of God;

Second, that their words express the promise of temporal goods very clearly, and that they say nevertheless that their words are obscure, and that their sense will not be understood. From which it appears that this secret sense was not the one they expressed openly, and that, consequently, they meant to speak of other sacrifices, of another deliverer, etc. They say that it will be understood only at the end of time. Jeremiah 33, last verse.

The third proof is that their words contradict each other and cancel each other out; so that, if we think that by the words law and sacrifice they meant nothing but the law and sacrifice of Moses, there is a manifest and gross contradiction; therefore they meant something else, since they sometimes contradict themselves within a single chapter.

Now, to understand the sense of an author…

660. Concupiscence has become natural to us, and has made our second nature; and so there are two natures in us: the one good, the other bad. Where is God? Where you are not; and the kingdom of God is within you. (The Rabbis.)

661. Penance, alone of all the mysteries, was declared openly to the Jews, and by Saint John, the forerunner; and then the other mysteries: to show that in each man, as in the whole world, this order must be kept.

662. The carnal Jews understood neither the greatness nor the lowliness of the Messiah foretold in their prophecies. They failed to know him in his foretold greatness, as when he says that the Messiah will be David's lord, though his son, and that he is before Abraham, and that he has seen him; they did not believe him so great that he was eternal; and in the same way they failed to know him in his lowliness and in his death. "The Messiah," they said, "remains for ever, and this man says he will die." They did not believe him, then, either mortal or eternal: they looked in him only for a carnal greatness.

663. Figurative. Nothing is so like charity as cupidity, and nothing is so contrary to it. And so the Jews, full of goods that flattered their cupidity, were very like the Christians, and very contrary to them; and by this means they had the two qualities they needed to have: to be very like the Messiah, so as to figure him, and very contrary, so as not to be suspect witnesses.

664. Figurative. God made use of the concupiscence of the Jews to make them serve Jesus Christ [who brought the remedy for concupiscence].

665. Charity is not a figurative precept. To say that Jesus Christ, who came to take away the figures and to set up the truth, came only to set up the figure of charity and to take away the reality that was there before: that is horrible.

"If the light is darkness, what will the darkness be?"

666. Fascination. Their sleep. Figura hujus mundi: the figure of this world.

The Eucharist. Comedes panem tuum: you shall eat your bread. Panem nostrum: our bread.

The enemies of God shall lick the earth: sinners lick the earth, that is to say, love earthly pleasures.

The Old Testament held the figures of the joy to come, and the New holds the means of reaching it.

The figures were of joy; the means, of penance; and yet the paschal lamb was eaten with wild lettuces, with bitterness.

I am alone until I pass over: Jesus Christ, before his death, was almost the only martyr.

667. Figurative. The words sword, shield. O most mighty.

668. We go away only by going away from charity.

Our prayers and our virtues are abominable before God if they are not the prayers and the virtues of Jesus Christ. And our sins will never be the object of God's mercy, but of his justice, if they are not the sins of Jesus Christ. He has adopted our sins, and has admitted us into his covenant; for virtues are his own, and sins foreign to him; and virtues are foreign to us, and our sins are our own.

Let us change the rule we have taken until now for judging what is good. We had our own will for a rule; let us now take the will of God: all that he wills is good and just for us, all that he does not will, evil.

All that God does not will is forbidden. Sins are forbidden by the general declaration God has made that he did not will them. The other things, which he has left without a general prohibition and which are called for that reason permitted, are not, however, always permitted; for when God puts one of them out of our reach, and when, by the event, which is a manifestation of God's will, it appears that God does not will us to have a thing, that thing is then forbidden to us as sin is, since God's will is that we should have the one no more than the other. There is this difference only between these two things: that it is certain that God will never will sin, whereas it is not certain that he will never will the other. But so long as God does not will it, we must regard it as sin; so long as the absence of God's will, which alone is all goodness and all justice, makes it unjust and evil.

669. To change the figure, because of our weakness.

670. Figures. The Jews had grown old in these earthly thoughts: that God loved their father Abraham, his flesh and what sprang from it; that for this reason he had multiplied them and set them apart from all the other peoples, without allowing them to mingle with them; that when they were languishing in Egypt he brought them out with all his great signs in their favour; that he fed them with manna in the desert; that he led them into a very rich land; that he gave them kings, and a well-built temple in which to offer beasts, and that by the shedding of their blood they would be purified; and that he was in the end to send them the Messiah to make them masters of the whole world; and he foretold the time of his coming.

The world having grown old in its carnal errors, Jesus Christ came at the time foretold, but not in the splendour expected; and so they did not think it was he. After his death Saint Paul came to teach men that all these things had happened in figure; that the kingdom of God did not consist in the flesh but in the spirit; that the enemies of men were not the Babylonians but the passions; that God took no pleasure in temples made with hands, but in a pure and humbled heart; that the circumcision of the body was useless, but that the circumcision of the heart was needed; that Moses had not given them the bread from heaven, etc.

But God, not having wished to reveal these things to this people, who were unworthy of them, and having wished nevertheless to foretell them so that they should be believed, foretold their time clearly, and sometimes expressed them clearly, but abundantly in figures, so that those who loved the things that figure should stop at them, and those who loved the things figured should see them there.

Everything that does not go to charity is figure.

The only object of Scripture is charity.

Everything that does not go to the only end is the figure of it; for since there is only one end, everything that does not go to it in plain words is figurative.

God thus varies this one precept of charity to satisfy our curiosity, which looks for variety, by a variety that always leads us to the one thing needful; for one thing alone is needful, and we love variety; and God satisfies both by these varieties, which lead to the one thing needful.

The Jews so loved the things that figure, and waited for them so eagerly, that they failed to know the reality when it came at the time and in the manner foretold.

The Rabbis take the breasts of the bride as figures, and everything that does not express the only end they have, temporal goods.

And the Christians take even the Eucharist as a figure of the glory towards which they tend.

671. The Jews, who were called to tame nations and kings, were slaves of sin; and the Christians, whose calling was to serve and to be subjects, are the free children.

672. For formalists. When Saint Peter and the apostles deliberate about abolishing circumcision, where it was a question of acting against the law of God, they do not consult the prophets, but simply the receiving of the Holy Spirit in the persons of the uncircumcised.

They judge it surer that God approves those he fills with his Spirit than that the law must be kept. They knew that the end of the law was nothing but the Holy Spirit; and that therefore, since the Spirit was had without circumcision, circumcision was not necessary.

673. Make it according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.

The religion of the Jews, then, was formed on the likeness of the truth of the Messiah; and the truth of the Messiah was recognized by the religion of the Jews, which was its figure.

In the Jews the truth was only figured; in heaven it is uncovered.

In the Church it is covered, and recognized by its relation to the figure.

The figure was made on the model of the truth, and the truth was recognized from the figure.

Saint Paul himself says that people will forbid marriage, and he himself speaks of it to the Corinthians in a way that is a rat-trap; for if a prophet had said the one, and Saint Paul had said the other afterwards, he would have been accused.

674. Figurative. "Make all things according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain." On which Saint Paul says that the Jews painted heavenly things.

675. And yet this Testament, made to blind some and to enlighten others, marked, in the very people it blinded, the truth that was to be known by the others. For the visible goods they received from God were so great and so divine that it plainly appeared he had the power to give them invisible ones, and a Messiah.

For nature is an image of grace, and the visible miracles are images of the invisible. That you may know… I say to you: Arise.

Isaiah 51 says that the redemption will be like the crossing of the Red Sea.

God, then, showed in the going out of Egypt, in the sea, in the defeat of the kings, in the manna, in the whole lineage of Abraham, that he was able to save, to make bread come down from heaven, etc.; so that the enemy people is the figure and the representation of the very Messiah they do not know, etc.

He taught us at last, then, that all these things were only figures, and what it is to be truly free, a true Israelite, true circumcision, true bread from heaven, etc.

In those promises each man finds what he has at the bottom of his heart, temporal goods or spiritual goods, God or the creatures; but with this difference, that those who seek the creatures in them find them there, but with many contradictions, with the prohibition against loving them, with the command to worship God alone and to love him alone, which is one and the same thing, and to find in the end that no Messiah has come for them; whereas those who seek God in them find him, and without any contradiction, with the command to love him alone, and find that a Messiah has come at the time foretold to give them the goods they ask for.

And so the Jews had miracles, and prophecies they saw fulfilled; and the doctrine of their law was to worship and to love one God alone; it was perpetual, too. And so it had all the marks of the true religion: and indeed it was the true religion. But we must distinguish the doctrine of the Jews from the doctrine of the law of the Jews; now the doctrine of the Jews was not true, though it had the miracles, the prophecies and the perpetuity, because it lacked this other point, to worship and to love God alone.

676. The veil that lies over these books for the Jews lies over them too for bad Christians, and for all who do not hate themselves.

But how well disposed we are to understand them and to know Jesus Christ, when we truly hate ourselves!

677. A figure carries absence and presence, pleasure and displeasure.

A cipher has a double sense: one clear, and in which it is said that the sense is hidden.

678. A portrait carries absence and presence, pleasure and displeasure. The reality excludes absence and displeasure.

Figures. To know whether the law and the sacrifices are reality or figure, we must see whether the prophets, in speaking of these things, stopped their view and their thought there, so that they saw in them only this old covenant, or whether they saw in them something else of which it was the picture; for in a portrait we see the thing figured. For this we need only examine what they say of them.

When they say that it will be eternal, do they mean the covenant of which they say that it will be changed; and the same of the sacrifices, etc.?

The cipher has two senses. When we intercept an important letter in which we find a clear sense, and in which it is said nevertheless that the sense is veiled and obscured, that it is hidden, so that we shall see this letter without seeing it and understand it without understanding it, what are we to think, if not that it is a cipher with a double sense, and all the more so when we find in it manifest contrarieties in the literal sense? The prophets said clearly that Israel would always be loved by God, and that the law would be eternal; and they said that their sense would not be understood, and that it was veiled.

How highly, then, we ought to esteem those who break the cipher for us and teach us to know the hidden sense, and above all when the principles they draw from it are entirely natural and clear! That is what Jesus Christ did, and the apostles: they broke the seal, he tore the veil and uncovered the spirit; to that end they taught us that the enemies of man are his passions; that the Redeemer would be spiritual and his reign spiritual; that there would be two comings: one in wretchedness, to bring proud man low, the other in glory, to raise humbled man up; that Jesus Christ would be God and man.

679. Figures. Jesus Christ opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.

Two great openings are these: first, all things happened to them in figures: truly Israelites, truly free, true bread from heaven; second, a God humbled even to the Cross: Christ had to suffer to enter into his glory, "that he would conquer death by his death." Two comings.

680. Figures. Once this secret has been opened, it is impossible not to see it. Let the Old Testament be read in this light, and let us see whether the sacrifices were true, whether kinship with Abraham was the true cause of God's friendship, whether the promised land was the true place of rest. No; therefore they were figures. Let all the ceremonies that were ordained, and all the commandments that are not for charity, be looked at in the same way, and it will be seen that they are figures of it.

All these sacrifices and ceremonies, then, were either figures or nonsense. Now there are clear things too lofty to be taken for nonsense.

To know whether the prophets stopped their view at the Old Testament, or saw other things in it.

681. Figurative. The key to the cipher: True worshippers. Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

682. Isaiah 1:21. The change of good into evil, and the vengeance of God.

Isaiah 10:1: Woe to those who make unjust laws. Isaiah 26:20: Go, my people, enter into your chambers, shut your doors upon you, hide yourself for a little moment, until the wrath has passed by. Isaiah 28:1: Woe to the crown of pride.

Miracles. Isaiah 33:9: The earth has mourned and languished, Lebanon is confounded and has grown foul, etc.

Now I will rise up, says the Lord, now I will be exalted, now I will lift myself up. Isaiah 40:17: All the nations are as if they were not. Isaiah 41:26: Who has declared it from the beginning, that we may know, and from the first, that we may say: You are righteous? Isaiah 43:13: I will work, and who shall turn it back? Jeremiah 11:21: You shall not prophesy in the name of the Lord, and you shall not die by our hands. Therefore thus says the Lord.

Isaiah 44:20: Nor will he say: Perhaps there is a lie in my right hand.

Isaiah 44:21, etc.: Remember these things, Jacob and Israel, for you are my servant. I formed you, you are my servant, Israel; do not forget me.

I have blotted out your iniquities like a cloud, and your sins like a mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you.

Isaiah 44:23, 24: Sing praise, O heavens, for the Lord has shown mercy…, for the Lord has redeemed Jacob, and Israel shall be glorified. Thus says the Lord, your redeemer, who formed you from the womb: I am the Lord, who make all things, who alone stretch out the heavens, who establish the earth, and there is no one with me.

Isaiah 54:8: In a moment of wrath I hid my face from you for a little while, and with everlasting mercy I have had pity on you, says the Lord your redeemer.

Isaiah 63:12: Who led Moses by the right hand with the arm of his majesty, who divided the waters before them, to make himself an everlasting name.

Verse 14: So you led your people, to make yourself a glorious name.

Isaiah 63:16: For you are our father, and Abraham has not known us, and Israel has not recognized us.

Isaiah 63:17: Why have you hardened our heart, so that we did not fear you?

Isaiah 66:17: Those who sanctified themselves and thought themselves clean… shall be consumed together, says the Lord.

Jeremiah 2:35: And you said: I am without sin and innocent, and therefore let your fury be turned away from me. Behold, I will contend with you in judgement, because you have said: I have not sinned.

Jeremiah 4:22: They are wise to do evil, but to do good they do not know.

Jeremiah 4:23, 24: _I looked at the earth, and behold, it was empty and nothing; and at the heavens, and there was no light in them. I saw the mountains, and behold, they were moving, and all the hills were shaken. I gazed, and there was no man, and every bird of the sky had flown away. I looked, and behold, Carmel was a desert, and all its cities were destroyed before the face of the Lord and before the face of the wrath of his fury. For thus says the Lord: The whole earth shall be desolate, and yet I will not make a full end._

Jeremiah 5:4: But I said: Perhaps these are the poor and the foolish, who do not know the way of the Lord, the judgement of their God. I will go to the great men and speak to them, for they have known the way of the Lord; and behold, these above all have broken the yoke together and burst the bonds. Therefore a lion from the forest has struck them, a leopard keeps watch over their cities.

Jeremiah 5:29: Shall I not punish them for these things, says the Lord? Or shall my soul not be avenged on such a nation as this?

Jeremiah 5:30: Astonishing and wonderful things have been done in the land.

Jeremiah 5:31: The prophets prophesied falsehood, and the priests clapped their hands, and my people loved such things: what, then, will be done at the end of it?

Jeremiah 6:16: Thus says the Lord: Stand upon the ways, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, which is the good way, and walk in it; and you will find refreshment for your souls. And they said: We will not walk in it.

And I set watchmen over you: hear the sound of the trumpet. And they said: We will not hear.

Therefore hear, you nations, how much I will do to them. Hear, O earth: behold, I will bring evils, etc.

Trust in outward sacraments: Jeremiah 7:14: I will do to this house, in which my name is called upon and in which you put your trust, and to the place that I gave to you and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh. As for you, then, do not pray for this people. The essential thing is not the outward sacrifice. Jeremiah 7:22: For I did not speak to your fathers, and I did not command them, on the day I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings and victims. But this is the word I commanded them, saying: Hear my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk in every way that I have commanded you, that it may be well with you. And they did not listen.

A multitude of doctrines. Jeremiah 11:13: For as many as your cities were your gods, O Judah, and as many as the streets of Jerusalem were the altars of shame you set up; as for you, then, do not pray for this people.

Jeremiah 15:2: And if they say to you: Where shall we go? you shall say to them: Thus says the Lord: Those for death, to death; and those for the sword, to the sword; and those for famine, to famine; and those for captivity, to captivity. Jeremiah 17:9: The heart of all men is perverse and unsearchable: who shall know it? that is to say, who shall know all its malice, for it is already known to be wicked. I the Lord search the heart and test the inmost parts. And they said: Come, and let us lay plots against Jeremiah, for the law shall not perish from the priest, nor the word from the prophet. Jeremiah 17:17: Do not be a terror to me, you who are my hope in the day of affliction.

Jeremiah 23:15: For from the prophets of Jerusalem pollution has gone out over all the earth.

Jeremiah 23:17: They say to those who blaspheme me: The Lord has spoken: You shall have peace; and to everyone who walks in the perversity of his heart they have said: No evil shall come upon you.

683. Figures. The letter kills; everything happened in figures. That is the cipher Saint Paul gives us. Christ had to suffer. A humbled God. Circumcision of the heart, true fasting, true sacrifice, true temple. The prophets indicated that all this had to be spiritual.

Not the food that perishes, but the food that does not perish.

"You shall be truly free." Therefore the other freedom is only a figure of freedom.

"I am the true bread from heaven."

684. Contradiction. We cannot make a good likeness except by reconciling all our contrarieties, and it is not enough to follow a run of qualities that agree without reconciling the contraries. To understand the sense of an author, we must reconcile all the contrary passages.

And so, to understand Scripture, we must have a sense in which all the contrary passages agree. It is not enough to have one that suits a number of passages that agree; we must have one that reconciles even the contrary passages.

Every author has a sense in which all the contrary passages agree, or he has no sense at all. We cannot say this of Scripture and the prophets; they certainly had too much good sense. We must, then, look for one that reconciles all the contrarieties.

The true sense, then, is not that of the Jews; but in Jesus Christ all the contradictions are reconciled.

The Jews could not reconcile the end of the kingship and the princedom, foretold by Hosea, with the prophecy of Jacob.

If we take the law, the sacrifices and the kingdom for realities, we cannot reconcile all the passages. Of necessity, then, they must be only figures. We could not even reconcile the passages of a single author, or of a single book, or sometimes of a single chapter, which shows only too well what the author's sense was; as when Ezekiel, in chapter 20, says that men shall live in the commandments of God and shall not live in them.

685. Figures. If the law and the sacrifices are the truth, it must please God and must not displease him. If they are figures, they must both please and displease.

Now throughout Scripture they both please and displease. It is said that the law will be changed, that the sacrifice will be changed, that they will be without law, without prince and without sacrifice, that a new covenant will be made, that the law will be renewed, that the precepts they have received are not good, that their sacrifices are abominable, that God has asked for none of them.

It is said, on the contrary, that the law will last for ever, that this covenant will be eternal, that the sacrifice will be eternal, that the sceptre will never depart from among them, since it is not to depart from them until the eternal King comes.

Do all these passages show that it is reality? No. Do they show, then, that it is figure? No: only that it is reality, or figure. But the first, which exclude reality, show that it is only figure.

All these passages together cannot be said of the reality; all can be said of the figure: therefore they are not said of the reality, but of the figure.

The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. A sacrificing judge.

686. Contrarieties. The sceptre until the Messiah; without king or prince.

An eternal law; changed.

An eternal covenant; a new covenant.

Good laws; bad precepts. Ezekiel.

687. Figures. When the word of God, which is true, is false literally, it is true spiritually. Sit at my right hand: that is false literally; therefore it is true spiritually.

In these expressions God is spoken of in the manner of men; and this means nothing else than that the intention men have in seating someone at their right hand, God will have too; it is, then, a mark of God's intention, not of his manner of carrying it out.

And so when it says: God has received the odour of your incense, and will give you a rich land as a reward, that is to say: the same intention a man would have who, pleased with your perfumes, gave you a rich land as a reward, God will have towards you, because you have had towards him the same intention a man has towards someone to whom he gives perfumes. And so, he was angry, "a jealous God", etc. For the things of God being inexpressible, they cannot be said in any other way; and the Church still uses such language today: For he has strengthened the bars, etc.

It is not permitted to attribute to Scripture senses it has not revealed to us that it has. Thus to say that the closed mem of Isaiah signifies 600 is not revealed. He might have said that the final tsade and the he deficientes would signify mysteries. It is not permitted, then, to say so, and still less to say that this is the method of the philosopher's stone. But we say that the literal sense is not the true one, because the prophets themselves have said so.⁴⁵

688. I do not say that the mem is mysterious.

689. Moses (Deuteronomy 30) promises that God will circumcise their heart to make them capable of loving him.

690. One word of David, or of Moses, such as that God will circumcise hearts, lets us judge their mind. Let all their other words be ambiguous, and leave it doubtful whether they are philosophers or Christians: in the end one word of this kind settles all the others, just as one word of Epictetus settles all the rest the other way. Up to that point the ambiguity lasts, and not after.

691. Of two people who tell foolish stories, one with a double sense understood by the initiated, the other with only one sense, if someone who is not in the secret hears both of them talk in this way, he will judge them alike. But if afterwards, in the rest of the talk, the one says angelic things and the other always flat and commonplace things, he will judge that the one spoke with a mystery and not the other: the one having shown well enough that he is incapable of such foolishness and capable of being mysterious; the other, that he is incapable of mystery and capable of foolishness.

The Old Testament is a cipher.

692. There are some who see clearly that man has no other enemy than concupiscence, which turns him away from God, and not God; nor any other good than God, and not a rich land. As for those who believe that man's good is in the flesh, and evil in what turns him away from the pleasures of the senses, let them glut themselves on it, and let them die in it. But those who seek God with all their heart, whose only displeasure is to be deprived of the sight of him, whose only desire is to possess him, and whose only enemies are those who turn them away from him, who grieve to see themselves surrounded and ruled by such enemies: let them take comfort; I bring them happy news: there is a deliverer for them, I shall let them see him, I shall show them that there is a God for them; I shall not let the others see him. I shall show that a Messiah was promised who would deliver from enemies; and that one has come to deliver from iniquities, but not from enemies.

When David foretells that the Messiah will deliver his people from its enemies, one may believe in a carnal way that it will be from the Egyptians; and then I could not show that the prophecy was fulfilled. But one may very well believe also that it will be from iniquities; for in truth the Egyptians are not enemies, but iniquities are. This word enemies, then, is ambiguous. But if he says elsewhere, as he does, that he will deliver his people from its sins, as Isaiah and the others do too, the ambiguity is removed, and the double sense of enemies reduced to the single sense of iniquities. For if he had sins in mind, he could well denote them by enemies; but if he was thinking of enemies, he could not designate them by iniquities.

Now Moses, and David, and Isaiah used the same terms. Who will say, then, that they did not have the same sense, and that David's sense, which is plainly iniquities when he spoke of enemies, was not the same as that of Moses when he spoke of enemies?

Daniel (chapter 9) prays for the deliverance of the people from captivity to their enemies; but he was thinking of sins, and to show it he says that Gabriel came to tell him that his prayer was heard, and that there were now only seventy weeks to wait, after which the people would be delivered from iniquity, sin would come to an end, and the deliverer, the Holy of Holies, would bring in everlasting righteousness: not the righteousness of the law, but the everlasting one.

A figure, in this section, is what the theologians also call a type: a person, thing or event of the Old Testament that stands for and foreshadows something in the New, as the crossing of the Red Sea foreshadows the Redemption. To be figured is to be foreshadowed in this way; the figurative sense is the hidden one, the sense of the thing figured. ↩
The Apocalyptics read the Book of Revelation as a timetable of coming events; the Millenarians awaited Christ's thousand-year reign on earth; the Preadamites followed Isaac La Peyrère, whose Prae-Adamitae (1655) argued that there were men before Adam. ↩
In Isaiah 9:7 (9:6 in the Hebrew) the word for "increase" is written with the closed form of the letter mem, which belongs only at the end of a word, in its middle; interpreters who gave the final forms of letters their own numerical values read it as 600. The final tsade and the defective he are other irregularities of the Hebrew text, of the kind the scribes kept (see 630). ↩

Section XI: The Prophecies

693. H. 5. When I see the blindness and the wretchedness of man, when I look at the whole silent universe, and man without light, abandoned to himself and as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of all knowledge, I fall into terror, like a man who has been carried asleep to a desert and terrifying island, and wakes not knowing where he is, and with no means of escape. And at this I marvel that people do not fall into despair at so wretched a state. I see other people around me, of a like nature: I ask them whether they are better informed than I am; they tell me they are not. And at this, these wretched strays, having looked around them and seen some pleasing objects, have given themselves to them and become attached to them. For my part, I have not been able to form any attachment to them; and considering how much more likely it is that there is something other than what I see, I have searched to see whether this God might not have left some mark of himself.

I see several contrary religions, and therefore all false except one. Each wants to be believed on its own authority, and threatens unbelievers; I do not believe them, then, on that account. Anyone can say that; anyone can call himself a prophet. But I see the Christian religion, in which I find prophecies, and that is what not just anyone can do.

694. And what crowns all this is the prediction, so that no one could say it was chance that did it.

Whoever, with only a week left to live, does not find that the side to take is to believe that all this is not a stroke of chance…

Now, if the passions did not hold us, a week and a hundred years would be one and the same thing.

695. Prophecies. The great Pan is dead.

696. Susceperunt verbum cum omni aviditate, scrutantes Scripturas, si ita se haberent: they received the word with all eagerness, searching the Scriptures to see whether these things were so.

697. Prodita lege. Impleta cerne. Implenda collige: read what was foretold; see what has been fulfilled; gather what is yet to be fulfilled.

698. The prophecies are understood only when we see the things come to pass: thus the proofs of retreat, and of discretion, of silence, etc., are proved only to those who know them and believe them.

Joseph so inward, under a law wholly outward.

Outward penances dispose us to the inward, as humiliations dispose us to humility. And so the…

699. The synagogue came before the Church; the Jews before the Christians. The prophets foretold the Christians; Saint John, Jesus Christ.

700. It is a fine thing to see with the eyes of faith the history of Herod, of Caesar.

701. The zeal of the Jews for their law and their temple: Josephus, and Philo the Jew, Embassy to Gaius. What other people has such zeal? They had to have it.

Jesus Christ foretold as to the time and the state of the world: the ruler taken from the thigh, and the fourth monarchy. How happy we are to have this light in this darkness.

How fine it is to see, with the eyes of faith, Darius and Cyrus, Alexander, the Romans, Pompey and Herod working, without knowing it, for the glory of the Gospel!

702. The zeal of the Jewish people for its law, and above all since there have been no more prophets.

703. While there were prophets to maintain the law, the people were negligent; but since there have been no more prophets, zeal has taken their place.

704. The devil troubled the zeal of the Jews before Jesus Christ, because it would have brought them salvation, but not after.

The Jewish people mocked by the Gentiles; the Christian people persecuted.

705. Proof. Prophecies with their fulfilment: what came before Jesus Christ and what followed.

706. The greatest of the proofs of Jesus Christ are the prophecies; it is also what God most provided for, for the event that fulfilled them is a miracle that has gone on from the birth of the Church until the end. And so God raised up prophecies for sixteen hundred years; and for four hundred years afterwards he scattered all these prophecies, with all the Jews who carried them, into every place in the world. That was the preparation for the birth of Jesus Christ, whose Gospel, since it was to be believed by the whole world, needed not only prophecies to make it believed, but prophecies spread throughout the whole world, to make the whole world embrace it.

707. But it was not enough that the prophecies should exist; they had to be distributed through every place and preserved through every age. And so that this concert should not be taken for an effect of chance, it had to be foretold.

It is far more glorious for the Messiah that they should be the spectators, and even the instruments, of his glory, besides the fact that God has kept them in reserve.

708. Prophecies. The time foretold by the state of the Jewish people, by the state of the pagan peoples, by the state of the temple, by the number of the years.

709. It takes boldness to foretell one and the same thing in so many ways: the four monarchies, idolatrous or pagan, the end of the reign of Judah, and the seventy weeks had to happen at the same time, and all of it before the second temple was destroyed.

710. Prophecies. If a single man had written a book of predictions about Jesus Christ, as to the time and the manner, and Jesus Christ had come in keeping with these prophecies, that would have infinite force.

But there is much more here. It is a succession of men, over four thousand years, who, constantly and without variation, come one after another to foretell this same coming. It is a whole people that proclaims it, and that has subsisted for four thousand years, to bear witness as a body to the assurances they have of it, and from which they cannot be turned aside by any threats or persecutions brought against them: this is of quite another weight.

711. Predictions of particular things. They were strangers in Egypt, without any possession of their own, either in that country or anywhere else. [There was not the least sign either of the kingship that came there so long afterwards, or of that supreme council of seventy judges which they called the Sanhedrin, which, having been instituted by Moses, lasted until the time of Jesus Christ: all these things were as far from their present state as they could be] when Jacob, dying, and blessing his twelve children, declares to them that they will possess a great land, and foretells in particular to the family of Judah that the kings who would one day govern them would be of his line, and that all his brothers would be his subjects [and that even the Messiah, who was to be the expectation of the nations, would be born of him, and that the kingship would not be taken from Judah, nor the governor and lawgiver from his descendants, until this awaited Messiah came in his family].

This same Jacob, disposing of this future land as if he were its master, gave Joseph a larger portion than the others: I give you, he says, one portion more than your brothers. And blessing his two children, Ephraim and Manasseh, whom Joseph had brought before him, the elder, Manasseh, on his right, and the younger, Ephraim, on his left, he crosses his arms, and laying his right hand on the head of Ephraim and his left on Manasseh, he blesses them in that way; and when Joseph points out to him that he is preferring the younger, he answers him with admirable firmness: "I know it well, my son, I know it well; but Ephraim will grow as Manasseh will not." Which in fact proved so true in what followed that, since Ephraim alone was nearly as numerous as two whole lines that made up an entire kingdom, they were commonly called by the single name of Ephraim.

This same Joseph, dying, charges his children to carry his bones with them when they go into that land, which they reached only two hundred years later.

Moses, who wrote all these things so long before they happened, himself divided up that land among the families before entering it, as if he were its master [and declares at last that God is to raise up from their nation and their race a prophet, of whom he was the figure, and foretells to them exactly all that was to happen to them in the land they were to enter after his death, the victories God will give them, their ingratitude towards God, the punishments they will receive for it, and the rest of their fortunes]. He gives them the arbiters who will make the division, he prescribes for them the whole form of political government they will keep there, the cities of refuge they will build there, and…

712. The prophecies mixed of particular things and of things about the Messiah, so that the prophecies of the Messiah should not be without proofs, and the particular prophecies should not be without fruit.

713. Captivity of the Jews without return. Jeremiah 11:11: "I will bring upon Judah evils from which they will not be able to be delivered."

Figures. Isaiah 5: "The Lord had a vineyard from which he looked for grapes, and it produced only sour grapes. I will lay it waste, then, and destroy it; the land will produce only thorns from it, and I will forbid the sky to rain on it. The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are its delightful planting. I waited for them to do deeds of justice, and they produce only iniquities."

Isaiah 8: "Sanctify the Lord with fear and trembling; fear him alone, and he will be a sanctuary for you; but he will be a stumbling block and a stone to trip on to both the houses of Israel. He will be a snare and a ruin to the people of Jerusalem; and a great number of them will strike against this stone, will fall on it, will be broken on it, and will be caught in this snare, and will perish in it. Veil my words, and cover my law for my disciples.

"I will wait, then, in patience for the Lord, who veils himself and hides himself from the house of Jacob."

Isaiah 29: "Be confounded and amazed, people of Israel; stagger, stumble and be drunk, but not with the drunkenness of wine; stumble, but not from drink; for God has prepared for you the spirit of deep sleep: he will veil your eyes, he will darken your princes and your prophets who see visions."

(Daniel 12: "The wicked will not understand it, but those who are well taught will understand it." Hosea, in the last verse of the last chapter, after many temporal blessings, says: "Where is the wise man? and he will understand these things," etc.) And the visions of all the prophets will be to you like a sealed book, which, if it is given to a learned man who can read it, he will answer: I cannot read it, for it is sealed; and when it is given to those who cannot read, they will say: I do not know letters.

And the Lord said to me: Because this people honours me with its lips, but its heart is far from me (there is the reason and the cause of it; for if they worshipped God with their heart, they would understand the prophecies), and because they have served me only in human ways: for this reason I will add to all the rest by bringing upon this people an astonishing wonder, a great and terrible prodigy; it is that the wisdom of its wise men will perish, and their understanding will be darkened.

Prophecies. Proofs of divinity. Isaiah 41: "If you are gods, come near, tell us the things to come, and we will incline our heart to your words. Teach us the things that were in the beginning, and prophesy to us those that are to happen.

"By this we shall know that you are gods. Do good or evil, if you can. Let us see, then, and reason together. But you are nothing, you are only abominations; etc. Which of you instructs us (by contemporary authors) in the things done from the beginning and the origin, so that we may say to him: You are the righteous one? There is not one who teaches us, nor one who foretells the future."

Isaiah 42: "I, who am the Lord, do not share my glory with others. It is I who caused the things that have happened to be foretold, and who foretell still those that are to come. Sing a new song to God throughout the whole earth.

"Bring here this people that has eyes and does not see, that has ears and is deaf. Let the nations all assemble. Which of them (and of their gods) will instruct you in things past and to come? Let them produce their witnesses to justify them; or let them listen to me, and confess that the truth is here.

"You are my witnesses, says the Lord, you and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know me, and believe that it is I who am.

"I have foretold, I have saved, I alone have done these wonders before your eyes; you are the witnesses of my divinity, says the Lord.

"It is I who for love of you broke the strength of the Babylonians; it is I who sanctified you and who created you.

"It is I who made you pass through the midst of the waters, and of the sea, and of the torrents, and who drowned and destroyed for ever the mighty enemies who resisted you.

"But lose the memory of these old benefits, and no longer turn your eyes towards things past.

"Behold, I am preparing new things that will soon appear, and you will know them: I will make the deserts habitable and delightful.

"I have formed this people for myself; I have established it to proclaim my praises, etc.

"But it is for my own sake that I will blot out your sins and forget your crimes: for (to bring your ingratitude back to your memory, to see whether you have anything to justify yourselves with) your first father sinned, and your teachers have all been transgressors."

Isaiah 44: "I am the first and the last, says the Lord; whoever would make himself equal to me, let him tell the order of things since I formed the first peoples, and let him announce the things that are to happen. Fear nothing; have I not made you hear all these things? You are my witnesses."

Prediction of Cyrus. Isaiah 45:4: "For the sake of Jacob, whom I have chosen, I have called you by your name."

Isaiah 45:21: "Come, and let us argue together. Who has made these things heard from the beginning? Who foretold these things from that time? Is it not I, who am the Lord?

Isaiah 46: "Remember the first ages, and know that there is nothing like me, who announce from the beginning the things that are to happen at the end, and already at the origin of the world. My decrees will stand, and all my wishes will be fulfilled.

Isaiah 42:9: "The first things have happened as they were foretold; and behold, now I foretell new ones, and announce them to you before they have happened.

Isaiah 48:3: "I caused the first things to be foretold, and afterwards I fulfilled them; and they happened in the way I had said, because I know that you are hard, that your mind is rebellious and your brow brazen; that is why I chose to announce them before the event, so that you could not say it was the work of your gods and the effect of their command.

"You see come to pass what was foretold; will you not tell of it? Now I announce new things to you, which I keep in my power, and which you have not yet known; it is only now that I am preparing them, and not long since: I have kept them hidden from you for fear you should boast of having foreseen them by yourselves.

"For you have no knowledge of them, and no one has spoken to you of them, and your ears have heard nothing of them; for I know you, and I know that you are full of transgression, and I gave you the name of transgressors from the first days of your origin.

Isaiah 65: Reprobation of the Jews and conversion of the Gentiles. "Those sought me who did not consult me. Those found me who did not seek me. I said: Here I am, here I am, to the people that did not call upon my name.

"I have stretched out my hands all the day to an unbelieving people that follows its own desires and walks in an evil way, to this people that provokes me without ceasing by the crimes it commits in my presence, that has been carried away to sacrifice to idols, etc.

"These will be scattered like smoke on the day of my fury, etc.

"I will gather up the iniquities of you and of your fathers, and will repay you all according to your works.

"Thus says the Lord: For the love of my servants I will not destroy all Israel, but I will keep back some of them, as one keeps back a grape left on a cluster, of which it is said: Do not pull it off, for there is a blessing in it.

"And so I will take some from Jacob and from Judah to possess my mountains, which my elect and my servants had for an inheritance, and my fertile and wonderfully abundant fields; but I will wipe out all the others, because you have forgotten your God to serve foreign gods. I called you and you did not answer; I spoke and you did not hear, and you chose the things I had forbidden.

"That is why the Lord says these things: Behold, my servants will be filled, and you will languish with hunger; my servants will be in joy, and you in confusion; my servants will sing songs from the fullness of the joy of their heart, and you will utter cries and howls from the affliction of your spirit.

"And you will leave your name as an abomination to my elect. The Lord will wipe you out, and will call his servants by another name, in which whoever is blessed on the earth will be blessed in God, etc., because the former sorrows are forgotten.

"For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the things that are past will no longer be remembered and will not come into the mind.

"But you will rejoice for ever in the new things that I create, for I create Jerusalem, which is nothing but joy, and its people gladness.

"And I will take delight in Jerusalem and in my people, and no more cries and weeping will be heard there.

"I will answer him before he asks; I will hear them when they are only beginning to speak. The wolf and the lamb will feed together, the lion and the ox will eat the same straw; the serpent will eat only dust, and there will be no more murder or violence in all my holy mountain.

Isaiah 56: "The Lord says these things: Be just and upright, for my salvation is near, and my justice is about to be revealed.

"Blessed is he who does these things, and who keeps my sabbath, and keeps his hands from doing any evil.

"And let not the strangers who cling to me say: God will separate me from his people; for the Lord says these things: Whoever keeps my sabbath, and chooses to do my will, and keeps my covenant, I will give them a place in my house, and I will give them a name better than the one I have given my children: it will be an eternal name that will never perish.

"It is for our crimes that justice has gone far from us. We waited for light and we find only darkness; we hoped for brightness and we walk in obscurity; we have groped along the wall like the blind, and we have stumbled at noon as in the middle of the night, and like the dead in dark places.

"We will all roar like bears, we will moan like doves. We waited for justice, and it does not come; we hoped for salvation, and it goes far from us.

Isaiah 66:18: "But I will visit their works and their thoughts when I come to gather them together with all the nations and peoples, and they will see my glory.

"And I will set a sign on them, and of those who are saved I will send some to the nations, to Africa, to Lydia, to Italy, to Greece, and to the peoples who have not heard of me and have not seen my glory. And they will bring your brothers."

Jeremiah 7. Reprobation of the temple: "Go to Shiloh, where I established my name at the beginning, and see what I did to it because of the sins of my people. And now, says the Lord, because you have committed the same crimes, I will do to this temple where my name is called upon, in which you put your trust, and which I myself gave to your priests, the same thing I did to Shiloh. (For I rejected it, and made myself a temple elsewhere.)

"And I will cast you out far from me, in the same way that I cast out your brothers the children of Ephraim. (Cast out without return.) Do not pray, then, for this people.

Jeremiah 7:22: "What good does it do you to add sacrifice to sacrifice? When I brought your fathers out of Egypt, I did not speak to them of sacrifices and burnt offerings; I gave them no order about them; and the precept I gave them was this: Be obedient and faithful to my commandments, and I will be your God, and you will be my people. (It was only after they had sacrificed to the golden calf that I gave myself sacrifices, to turn a bad custom to good.)

Jeremiah 7:4: "Put no trust in the lying words of those who tell you: The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these."

713 bis. Zephaniah 3:9: "I will give my words to the Gentiles, so that all may serve me with one shoulder." Ezekiel 37:25: "David my servant shall be prince over them for ever." Exodus 4:22: "Israel is my firstborn son."

714. The Jews, witnesses of God. Isaiah 43:9; 44:8.

Prophecies fulfilled. 1 Kings 13:2. 2 Kings 23:16. Joshua 6:26. 1 Kings 16:34. Deuteronomy 23.

Malachi 1:11. The sacrifice of the Jews rejected, and the sacrifice of the pagans (even outside Jerusalem), and in every place.

Moses foretells the calling of the Gentiles before he dies, 32:21, and the reprobation of the Jews.

Moses foretells what is to happen to each tribe.

Prophecy. "Your name will be a curse to my elect, and I will give them another name."

"Harden their heart"; and how? By flattering their concupiscence and making them hope to fulfil it.

715. Prophecies. Amos and Zechariah: They sold the righteous one, and for that they will never be called back. Jesus Christ betrayed.

Egypt will be remembered no more; see Isaiah 43:16, 17, 18, 19. Jeremiah 23:6, 7.

Prophecies. The Jews will be spread everywhere. Isaiah 27:6. A new law. Jeremiah 31:32.

Malachi, Grotius. The second temple glorious. Jesus Christ will come into it. Haggai 2:7, 8, 9, 10.

The calling of the Gentiles. Joel 2:28. Hosea 2:23. Deuteronomy 32:21. Malachi 1:11.

716. Hosea 3. Isaiah 42, 48: "I foretold it long ago, so that it might be known that it is I." 54, 60, the last: Jaddua the high priest before Alexander.

717. [Prophecies. An oath that David will always have successors. Jeremiah.]

718. The eternal reign of David's line, 2 Chronicles, by all the prophecies, and with an oath. And it is not fulfilled in the temporal sense: Jeremiah 23:20.

719. One might perhaps think that, when the prophets foretold that the sceptre would not depart from Judah until the eternal king, they spoke to flatter the people, and that their prophecy proved false in Herod's time. But to show that this is not their sense, and that they knew very well, on the contrary, that this temporal kingdom was to cease, they say that they will be without king and without prince, and for a long time. Hosea.

720. Non habemus regem nisi Caesarem: we have no king but Caesar. Therefore Jesus Christ was the Messiah, since they no longer had any king but a foreigner, and wanted no other.

721. "We have no king but Caesar."

722. "Daniel 2. All your soothsayers and your wise men cannot reveal to you the mystery you ask about. But there is a God in heaven who can, and who has revealed to you in your dream the things that are to happen in the last times. (This dream must have weighed heavily on his heart.)

"And it is not by my own knowledge that I have come to know this secret, but by the revelation of this same God, who has disclosed it to me to make it plain in your presence.

"Your dream, then, was this. You saw a great statue, tall and terrible, standing before you: its head was of gold; its breast and arms were of silver; its belly and thighs were of bronze; and its legs were of iron, but its feet were mixed of iron and of earth (clay). You went on gazing at it in this way, until the stone cut without hands struck the statue on its feet of mingled iron and earth, and crushed them.

"And then the iron, and the earth, and the bronze, and the silver, and the gold all went to dust and scattered into the air; but this stone that struck the statue grew into a great mountain, and it has filled the whole earth. That was your dream, and now I will give you its interpretation.

"You who are the greatest of kings, and to whom God has given a power so wide that you are dreaded by all peoples, you are represented by the golden head of the statue you saw. But another empire will succeed yours, which will not be so powerful; and after that will come another, of bronze, which will spread over the whole world.

"But the fourth will be strong as iron; and just as iron breaks and pierces all things, so this empire will break and crush everything.

"And as for what you saw, that the feet and the toes were made partly of earth and partly of iron, that means that this empire will be divided, and that it will have partly the firmness of iron and partly the frailty of earth.

"But as iron cannot be joined solidly with earth, so those who are represented by the iron and by the earth will not be able to make a lasting alliance, though they unite by marriages.

"Now it will be in the time of these monarchs that God will raise up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor ever handed over to another people. It will scatter and bring to an end all the other empires; but it, for its part, will stand for ever, according to what has been revealed to you of this stone, which, not cut by hand, fell from the mountain and broke the iron, the earth, and the silver and the gold. That is what God has disclosed to you of the things that are to happen in the course of time. This dream is true, and its interpretation is faithful.

"Then Nebuchadnezzar fell on his face to the ground, etc.

Daniel 8. "Daniel having seen the fight of the ram and of the he-goat that overcame it and ruled over the earth, whose chief horn having fallen, four others came out of it towards the four winds of heaven; from one of which came out a little horn, which grew great towards the south, towards the east and towards the land of Israel, and rose up against the host of heaven, threw down some of the stars, and trampled them underfoot, and at last struck down the Prince, and put an end to the perpetual sacrifice, and laid the sanctuary waste.

"That is what Daniel saw. He asked for its explanation, and a voice cried out in this way: Gabriel, make him understand the vision he has had; and Gabriel said to him: The ram you saw is the king of the Medes and the Persians; and the he-goat is the king of the Greeks, and the great horn it had between its eyes is the first king of that monarchy.

"And as for this, that when this horn was broken four others came in its place: it is that four kings of that nation will succeed him, but not with the same power.

"Now, in the decline of these kingdoms, when iniquities have grown, there will rise up a king insolent and strong, but with a borrowed power, to whom all things will go as he wishes; and he will lay waste the holy people, and, succeeding in his undertakings with a double and deceitful mind, he will kill many, and will rise up at last against the prince of princes; but he will perish miserably, and yet not by a violent hand."

Daniel 9:20. "As I was praying to God with all my heart, and, confessing my sin and that of all my people, was lying prostrate before my God, behold, Gabriel, whom I had seen in a vision at the beginning, came to me and touched me, at the time of the evening sacrifice; and, giving me understanding, he said to me: Daniel, I have come to you to open to you the knowledge of things. From the beginning of your prayers I came to disclose to you what you desire, because you are a man of desires. Understand the word, then, and enter into the understanding of the vision. Seventy weeks are prescribed and determined upon your people and upon your holy city, to expiate crimes, to put an end to sins and abolish iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, to fulfil the visions and the prophecies, and to anoint the holy of holies." (After which this people will no longer be your people, nor this city the holy city. The time of wrath will be past, the years of grace will come for ever.)

"Know, then, and understand. From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, until the prince Messiah, there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks. (The Hebrews are accustomed to divide numbers and to put the smaller first; these 7 and 62, then, make 69: of these 70 there will remain, then, the 70th, that is to say the last seven years, of which he will speak next.)

"After the square and the walls have been built, in a time of trouble and affliction, and after these sixty-two weeks (which will have followed the first 7. Christ will be killed, then, after the 69 weeks, that is to say in the last week), Christ will be killed, and a people will come with its prince, who will destroy the city and the sanctuary, and flood everything; and the end of that war will complete the desolation."

"Now one week (which is the 70th that remains) will establish the covenant with many, and even the half of the week (that is to say the last three and a half years) will abolish the sacrifice and the offering, and will make astonishing the spread of the abomination, which will spread and will last over the very people who are astonished at it, until the consummation."

Daniel 11. "The angel said to Daniel: There will be (after Cyrus, under whom this still is) three more kings of Persia (Cambyses, Smerdis, Darius), and the fourth (Xerxes), who will come after, will be more powerful in riches and in strength, and will rouse all his peoples against the Greeks.

"But a mighty king will rise up (Alexander), whose empire will be of the greatest extent, and who will succeed in all his undertakings as he desires. But when his monarchy is established, it will perish and be divided into four parts towards the four winds of heaven (as he had said before, 7:6; 8:8), but not to persons of his line; and his successors will not equal his power, for his kingdom will even be scattered among others besides these (these four chief successors).

"And the one of his successors who will reign towards the south (Egypt: Ptolemy, son of Lagus) will become powerful; but another will surpass him, and his state will be a great state (Seleucus, king of Syria. Appian says that he is the most powerful of the successors of Alexander).

"And in the course of the years they will make an alliance; and the daughter of the king of the south (Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy Philadelphus, son of the other Ptolemy) will come to the king of the north (to Antiochus Theos, king of Syria and of Asia, nephew of Seleucus Lagidas), to establish peace between these princes.

"But neither she nor her descendants will hold authority long; for she, and those who had sent her, and her children, and her friends, will be given up to death (Berenice and her son were killed by Seleucus Callinicus).

"But a shoot will rise up from her roots (Ptolemy Euergetes will be born of the same father as Berenice), who will come with a mighty army into the lands of the king of the north, where he will bring everything into subjection, and will carry off into Egypt their gods, their princes, their gold, their silver and all their most precious spoils (if he had not been called back to Egypt by domestic reasons, he would have stripped Seleucus entirely, says Justin); and for some years the king of the north will be able to do nothing against him.

"And so he will return to his kingdom; but the children of the other (Seleucus Ceraunus, Antiochus the Great), provoked, will gather great forces. And their army will come and lay everything waste; at which the king of the south (Ptolemy Philopator), provoked in his turn, will also raise a great army, and will give battle (against Antiochus the Great, at Raphia), and will win; and his troops will grow insolent from it, and his heart will swell with it (this Ptolemy profaned the temple: Josephus): he will overcome thousands of men, but his victory will not be firm. For the king of the north (Antiochus the Great) will come with still more forces than the first time, and then too a great number of enemies will rise up against the king of the south (the young Ptolemy Epiphanes reigning), and even apostate and violent men of your people will rise up, so that the visions may be fulfilled, and they will perish (those who had abandoned their religion to please Euergetes when he sent his troops to Scopas; for Antiochus will take Scopas again and defeat them). And the king of the north will destroy the ramparts, and the best-fortified cities, and all the strength of the south will not be able to resist him, and everything will yield to his will; he will halt in the land of Israel, and it will yield to him. And so he will think of making himself master of the whole empire of Egypt (scorning the youth of Epiphanes, says Justin). And to that end he will make an alliance with him and give him his daughter (Cleopatra, so that she might betray her husband; on which Appian says that, distrusting his power to make himself master of Egypt by force, because of the protection of the Romans, he chose to attempt it by cunning). He will try to corrupt her, but she will not follow his intention; and so he will throw himself into other designs and think of making himself master of some islands (that is to say, places on the sea), and he will take several of them (as Appian says).

"But a great leader will oppose his conquests and will check the shame that would come to him from them (Scipio Africanus, who checked the advance of Antiochus the Great because he was offending the Romans in the person of their allies). He will return, then, to his kingdom, and perish there, and be no more (he was killed by his own people).

"And the one who succeeds him (Seleucus Philopator or Soter, son of Antiochus the Great) will be a tyrant, who will afflict the glory of the kingdom with taxes (that is, the people); but in a short time he will die, and not by sedition nor by war. And there will succeed in his place a contemptible man, unworthy of the honours of kingship, who will slip into it skilfully and by flattery. All the armies will bend before him; he will overcome them, and even the prince with whom he had made an alliance; for having renewed the alliance with him, he will deceive him, and, coming with few troops into his calm and unsuspecting provinces, he will take the best places, and will do more than his fathers ever did, and, laying waste on every side, he will form great designs during his time."

723. Prophecies. The seventy weeks of Daniel are ambiguous as to the date of their beginning, because of the terms of the prophecy, and as to the date of their end, because of the differences among the chronologers. But all this difference comes to no more than two hundred years.

724. Predictions. That in the fourth monarchy, before the destruction of the second temple, before the dominion of the Jews was taken away, in the seventieth week of Daniel, while the second temple stood, the pagans would be instructed and brought to the knowledge of the God worshipped by the Jews; that those who love him would be delivered from their enemies, filled with his fear and with his love.

And it has come about that in the fourth monarchy, before the destruction of the second temple, etc., the pagans in crowds worship God and lead an angelic life; young women consecrate their virginity and their life to God; men renounce all pleasures. What Plato could not persuade a few chosen and highly educated men to believe, a secret force persuades a hundred million ignorant men to believe, by the power of a few words.

The rich leave their wealth, children leave the soft houses of their fathers to go into the austerity of a desert, etc. (See Philo the Jew.) What is all this? It is what was foretold so long before. For two thousand years no pagan had worshipped the God of the Jews; and at the time foretold, the crowd of pagans worships this one God. The temples are destroyed, kings themselves submit to the cross. What is all this? It is the spirit of God poured out over the earth.

No pagan from Moses to Jesus Christ, according to the Rabbis themselves. The crowd of pagans, after Jesus Christ, believes the books of Moses, and keeps their essence and their spirit, and rejects only what is useless.

725. Prophecies. The conversion of the Egyptians (Isaiah 19:19): an altar in Egypt to the true God.

726. Prophecies. 215, In Egypt.

Pugio, 659, the Talmud: "It is a tradition among us that, when the Messiah comes, the house of God, destined for the dispensing of his word, will be full of filth and impurity, and that the wisdom of the scribes will be corrupt and rotten; those who fear to sin will be cast out by the people, and treated as fools and madmen."

Isaiah 49: "Listen, you distant peoples, and you who dwell in the islands of the sea: the Lord has called me by my name from my mother's womb, he protects me under the shadow of his hand, he has made my words like a sharp sword, and has said to me: You are my servant; it is through you that I will make my glory appear. And I said: Lord, have I laboured in vain? is it for nothing that I have spent all my strength? judge it yourself, Lord; my labour is before you. Then the Lord, who himself formed me from my mother's womb to be wholly his, to bring Jacob and Israel back, said to me: You will be glorious in my presence, and I myself will be your strength; it is a small thing that you should convert the tribes of Jacob; I have raised you up to be the light of the Gentiles, and to be my salvation to the ends of the earth. These are the things the Lord has said to him who humbled his soul, who was held in contempt and abomination by the Gentiles, and who submitted himself to the mighty of the earth. Princes and kings will worship you, because the Lord who chose you is faithful.

"The Lord said to me further: I have heard you in the days of salvation and of mercy, and I have established you to be the covenant of the people, and to put you in possession of the most forsaken nations; so that you may say to those who are in chains: Go out free; and to those who are in darkness: Come to the light, and possess rich and fertile lands. They will no longer be troubled by hunger, or thirst, or the heat of the sun, because he who has had compassion on them will be their guide: he will lead them to the living springs of water, and will level the mountains before them. Behold, the peoples will come in from every side, from the east, from the west, from the north and from the south. Let heaven give glory to God for it; let the earth rejoice in it, because it has pleased the Lord to console his people, and he will at last have pity on the poor who hope in him.

"And yet Zion has dared to say: The Lord has forsaken me, and no longer remembers me. Can a mother forget her child, and can she lose her tenderness for the one she has carried in her womb? but even if she were capable of it, I will never forget you, Zion; I carry you always in my hands, and your walls are always before my eyes. Those who are to restore you are hurrying here, and your destroyers will be driven far away. Lift up your eyes on every side, and consider all this multitude gathered to come to you. I swear that all these peoples will be given to you as the ornament with which you will be clothed for ever; your deserts and your solitudes, and all your lands that are now desolate, will be too narrow for the great number of your inhabitants, and the children who will be born to you in the years of your barrenness will say to you: The place is too small; push back the borders, and make room for us to live. Then you will say within yourself: Who has given me this abundance of children, I who bore no more, who was barren, carried away and captive? and who has fed them for me, I who was forsaken, without help? where, then, have all these come from? And the Lord will say to you: Behold, I have made my power appear over the Gentiles, and I have raised my standard over the peoples, and they will bring you children in their arms and at their breasts; kings and queens will be your nurses, they will worship you with their faces to the ground, and kiss the dust of your feet; and you will know that I am the Lord, and that those who hope in me will never be put to shame; for who can take the prey from one who is strong and mighty? But even if it could be taken from him, nothing will prevent me from saving your children and destroying your enemies, and the whole world will acknowledge that I am the Lord your saviour and the mighty redeemer of Jacob.

"The Lord says these things: What is this bill of divorce by which I have put away the synagogue? and why have I delivered her into the hands of your enemies? is it not for her impieties and her crimes that I have put her away?

"For I came, and no one received me; I called, and no one listened. Is my arm shortened, and have I not the power to save?

"That is why I will show the marks of my anger; I will cover the heavens with darkness, and hide them under veils.

"The Lord has given me a well-taught tongue, so that I may know how to console by my word him who is in sorrow. He has made me attentive to his words, and I have listened to him as to a master.

The Lord has revealed his will to me, and I have not rebelled against it.

"I have given up my body to blows and my cheeks to insults; I have abandoned my face to shame and to spitting; but the Lord has upheld me, and that is why I have not been put to shame.

"He who justifies me is with me: who will dare accuse me? who will rise up to dispute with me and accuse me of sin, when God himself is my protector?

"All men will pass away and be consumed by time; let those who fear God, then, listen to the words of his servant; let him who languishes in darkness put his trust in the Lord. But as for you, you do nothing but kindle the wrath of God against yourselves; you walk on the coals and among the flames you yourselves have lit. It is my hand that has brought these evils upon you; you will perish in sorrow.

"Listen to me, you who follow justice and who seek the Lord. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the cistern from which you were drawn. Look to Abraham your father, and to Sarah who bore you. See how he was alone and without children when I called him, and how I gave him so abundant a posterity; see how many blessings I have poured out on Zion, and with how many graces and consolations I have filled her.

"Consider all these things, my people, and give heed to my words, for a law will go out from me, and a judgement that will be the light of the Gentiles."

Amos 8: The prophet, having made a count of the sins of Israel, says that God has sworn to take vengeance for them.

"He says thus: On that day, says the Lord, I will make the sun go down at noon, and I will cover the earth with darkness in the day of light; I will turn your solemn feasts into weeping, and all your songs into laments.

"You will all be in sorrow and in suffering, and I will bring this nation into a desolation like that at the death of an only son; and those last times will be times of bitterness. For behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will send a famine upon this land, a hunger, not a hunger and thirst for bread and water, but a hunger and thirst to hear words from the Lord. They will wander from one sea to the other, and go from the north to the east; they will turn every way, looking for someone to proclaim the word of the Lord to them, and they will find no one.

"And their virgins and their young men will perish in this thirst, they who have followed the idols of Samaria, who have sworn by the god worshipped in Dan, and who have followed the worship of Beersheba; they will fall and never rise again from their fall."

Amos 3:2: "Of all the nations of the earth, I have known you alone to be my people."

Daniel 12:7. Daniel, having described the whole extent of the reign of the Messiah, says: "All these things will be fulfilled when the scattering of the people of Israel is complete."

Haggai 2:4: "You who, comparing this second house with the glory of the first, despise it, take courage, says the Lord, you Zerubbabel, and you Joshua the high priest, and you, all the people of the land, and do not cease to work on it. For I am with you, says the Lord of hosts; the promise I made when I brought you out of Egypt still stands; my spirit is in your midst. Do not lose hope, for thus says the Lord of hosts: Yet a little while, and I will shake the heavens and the earth, and the sea and the dry land (a manner of speaking to mark a great and extraordinary change); and I will shake all the nations. Then will come he who is desired by all the Gentiles, and I will fill this house with glory, says the Lord.

"The silver and the gold are mine, says the Lord (that is to say, it is not by these that I wish to be honoured; as it is said elsewhere: All the beasts of the field are mine; what good is it to offer them to me in sacrifice?); the glory of this new temple will be far greater than the glory of the first, says the Lord of hosts; and I will establish my house in this place, says the Lord."

"In Horeb, on the day you were gathered there, and you said: Let the Lord no longer speak to us himself, and let us no longer see this fire, for fear that we die. And the Lord said to me: Their prayer is just; I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers, in whose mouth I will put my words; and he will tell them all the things I have commanded him; and it will come about that whoever does not obey the words he brings them in my name, I myself will judge him."

Genesis 49: "You, Judah, will be praised by your brothers, and victorious over your enemies; your father's children will bow down to you. Judah, lion's whelp, you have gone up to the prey, O my son! and you have lain down like a lion, and like a lioness that will rouse herself.

"The sceptre shall not be taken from Judah, nor the lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh comes; and the nations will gather to him, to obey him."

727. During the time of the Messiah. A riddle. Ezekiel 17.

His forerunner. Malachi 3.

He will be born. A child. Isaiah 9.

He will be born of the town of Bethlehem. Micah 5. He will appear chiefly in Jerusalem, and will be born of the family of Judah and of David.

He is to blind the wise and the learned, Isaiah 6, 8, 29, etc., and to preach the Gospel to the poor and the lowly, Isaiah 29, to open the eyes of the blind, and give health to the sick, and lead to the light those who languish in darkness. Isaiah 61.

He is to teach the perfect way, and be the teacher of the Gentiles. Isaiah 55; 42:1-7.

The prophecies are to be unintelligible to the ungodly, Daniel 12, Hosea, the last chapter, 10, but intelligible to those who are well taught.

The prophecies that represent him poor represent him master of the nations. Isaiah 52:14, etc.; 52. Zechariah 9:9.

The prophecies that foretell the time foretell him only as master of the Gentiles, and suffering, and not in the clouds, nor as judge. And those that represent him so, judging and glorious, do not mark the time.

That he is to be the victim for the sins of the world. Isaiah 39, 53, etc.

He is to be the precious foundation stone. Isaiah 28:16.

He is to be the stumbling block, the stone to trip on. Isaiah 8. Jerusalem is to strike against this stone.

The builders are to reject this stone. Psalm 118:22. God is to make this stone the head of the corner.

And this stone is to grow into an immense mountain, and is to fill the whole earth. Daniel 2.

That thus he is to be rejected, unrecognized, betrayed, Psalm 109:8, sold, Zechariah 11:12; spat upon, struck, mocked, afflicted in an infinity of ways, given gall to drink, Psalm 69, pierced, Zechariah 12, his feet and his hands pierced, killed, and lots cast for his clothes.

That he would rise again, Psalm 16, on the third day, Hosea 6:3.

That he would go up to heaven to sit at the right hand. Psalm 110.

That kings would take up arms against him. Psalm 2.

That, being at the right hand of the Father, he would be victorious over his enemies.

That the kings of the earth and all the peoples would worship him. Isaiah 60.

That the Jews will subsist as a nation. Jeremiah.

That they would be wanderers, without kings, etc., Hosea 3; without prophets, Amos; waiting for salvation and not finding it, Isaiah.

The calling of the Gentiles by Jesus Christ. Isaiah 52:15; 55:5; 60, etc.; Psalm 82.

Hosea 1:9: "You will no longer be my people, and I will no longer be your God, after you have been multiplied by the scattering. The places where my people is not called, I will call my people."

727 bis. The calling of the Gentiles by Jesus Christ (Isaiah 52:15).

728. It was not permitted to sacrifice outside Jerusalem, which was the place the Lord had chosen, nor even to eat the tithes anywhere else. Deuteronomy 12:5, etc. Deuteronomy 14:23, etc.; 15:20; 16:2, 7, 11, 15.

Hosea foretold that they would be without king, without prince, without sacrifice and without idol; which is fulfilled today, since they cannot make a lawful sacrifice outside Jerusalem.

729. Predictions. It is foretold that in the time of the Messiah he would come to establish a new covenant, which would make them forget the going out of Egypt, Jeremiah 23:5; Isaiah 43:10; which would put his law not in outward things but in hearts; that he would put his fear, which had only been outside, in the midst of the heart. Who does not see the Christian law in all this?

730. … That then idolatry would be overthrown; that this Messiah would cast down all the idols, and bring men into the worship of the true God.

That the temples of the idols would be cast down, and that among all the nations and in every place in the world a pure offering would be offered to him, not of animals.

That he would be king of the Jews and of the Gentiles. And here is this king of the Jews and of the Gentiles, oppressed by the one and the other, who conspire to put him to death, ruler of the one and the other, and destroying both the worship of Moses in Jerusalem, which was its centre, where he makes his first Church, and the worship of idols in Rome, which was its centre, and where he makes his chief Church.

731. Prophecies. That Jesus Christ will be at the right hand, while God subdues his enemies for him.

Therefore he will not subdue them himself.

732. "… That then no one will teach his neighbour any more, saying: Here is the Lord, for God will make himself felt by all." "Your sons will prophesy." "I will put my spirit and my fear in your heart."

All this is the same thing. To prophesy is to speak of God, not by proofs from outside, but by inward and immediate feeling.

733. That he would teach men the perfect way.

And there has never come, either before him or after him, any man who taught anything divine coming near to this.

734. … That Jesus Christ would be small in his beginning, and would grow afterwards. The little stone of Daniel.

If I had never heard anything at all of the Messiah, nevertheless, after such wonderful predictions of the order of the world, which I see fulfilled, I see that this is divine. And if I knew that these same books foretell a Messiah, I would be sure that he had come; and seeing that they put his time before the destruction of the second temple, I would say that he had come.

735. Prophecies. That the Jews would reject Jesus Christ, and that they would be rejected by God for that reason. That the chosen vine would give only sour grapes. That the chosen people would be faithless, ungrateful and unbelieving: a people that does not believe and that speaks against. That God will strike them with blindness, and that they would grope at noon like the blind. That a forerunner would come before him.

736. Prophecies. They pierced, Zechariah 12:10.

That a deliverer was to come who would crush the devil's head, who was to deliver his people from its sins, from all its iniquities. That there was to be a New Testament, which would be eternal. That there was to be another priesthood, after the order of Melchizedek; that it would be eternal. That the Christ was to be glorious, mighty, strong, and yet so wretched that he would not be recognized; that he would not be taken for what he is; that he would be spurned, that he would be killed; that his people, who had denied him, would no longer be his people; that the idolaters would receive him, and turn to him; that he would leave Zion to reign at the centre of idolatry; that nevertheless the Jews would always subsist; that he was to be of Judah, and when there was no longer a king.

Section XII: Proofs of Jesus Christ

737. … On that ground I reject all the other religions.

In that I find an answer to every objection.

It is right that a God so pure should reveal himself only to those whose heart is purified.

On that ground this religion is dear to me, and I find it already vouched for by so divine a morality; but I find more in it.

I find, as a matter of fact, that for as long as the memory of man has lasted (here is a people that still exists, older than any other people), men have been told again and again that they are in a universal corruption, but that a Redeemer will come: a whole people foretells him before his coming, a whole people worships him after his coming; that it is not one man who says it, but an infinite number of men, and a whole people, prophesying, and made for the purpose, for four thousand years; and at the end, they are without idols or kings. Their books scattered for four hundred years.

The more I examine them, the more truths I find in them: both what went before and what followed; and this synagogue, which is foretold, and these wretched people who follow it, and who, being our enemies, are admirable witnesses to the truth of these prophecies, in which their very wretchedness and blindness is foretold.

I find this chain, this religion, wholly divine in its authority, in its duration, in its perpetuity, in its morality, in its conduct, in its doctrine, in its effects, and the darkness of the Jews, appalling and foretold: You shall grope at noonday. The book shall be given to one who knows how to read, and he shall say: I cannot read; the sceptre still in the hands of the first foreign usurper, the rumour of the coming of Jesus Christ.

And so I stretch out my arms to my Deliverer, who, having been foretold for four thousand years, came to suffer and to die for me on earth at the times and in all the circumstances that were foretold of it; and by his grace I await death in peace, in the hope of being united to him for ever; and meanwhile I live with joy, whether in the good things it pleases him to give me or in the ills he sends me for my good, and which he has taught me to suffer by his example.

738. Since the prophecies had given various marks which were all to come to pass at the coming of the Messiah, all these marks had to come to pass at one and the same time. Thus the fourth monarchy had to have come when Daniel's seventy weeks were fulfilled, and the sceptre had then to have departed from Judah, and all this came about without any difficulty; and the Messiah had then to come, and Jesus Christ came then, who called himself the Messiah, and all this, again, is without difficulty; and this shows plainly the truth of the prophecies.

739. The prophets foretold, and were not foretold. The saints after them, foretold, not foretelling. Jesus Christ, foretold and foretelling.

740. Jesus Christ, to whom the two Testaments look: the Old as its expectation, the New as its model, both as their centre.

741. The two oldest books in the world are Moses and Job, the one Jewish, the other pagan, and both look to Jesus Christ as their common centre and their object: Moses, in relating God's promises to Abraham, Jacob, etc., and his prophecies; and Job: Oh that someone would grant me that, etc.? For I know that my redeemer lives, etc.

742. The Gospel speaks of the Virgin's virginity only up to the birth of Jesus Christ. Everything in relation to Jesus Christ.

743. Proofs of Jesus Christ.

Why was the book of Ruth preserved?

Why was the story of Tamar kept?

744. "Pray, lest you enter into temptation." It is dangerous to be tempted; and those who are tempted are so because they do not pray.

And you, when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers. But before that, Jesus turned and looked at Peter.

Saint Peter asks leave to strike Malchus, and strikes before he hears the answer; and Jesus Christ answers afterwards.

The word Galilee, which the crowd of Jews uttered as if by chance when they accused Jesus Christ before Pilate, gave Pilate occasion to send Jesus Christ to Herod; and in this was fulfilled the mystery that he was to be judged by the Jews and by the Gentiles. Chance, to all appearance, was the cause of the fulfilment of the mystery.

745. Those who find it hard to believe look for a reason in the fact that the Jews do not believe. "If it was so clear," they say, "why would they not believe?" And they would almost like them to believe, so as not to be held back by the example of their refusal. But it is their very refusal that is the foundation of our belief. We would be much less disposed to it if they were on our side. We would then have a much ampler pretext. It is a wonderful thing, to have made the Jews great lovers of the things foretold, and great enemies of their fulfilment.

746. The Jews were accustomed to great and dazzling miracles; and so, having had the great strokes of the Red Sea and the land of Canaan as an epitome of the great things their Messiah would do, they expected still more dazzling ones, of which those of Moses were only the samples.

747. The carnal Jews and the pagans have their wretchedness, and so have the Christians. There is no redeemer for the pagans, for they do not so much as hope for one. There is no redeemer for the Jews: they hope for him in vain. There is a redeemer only for the Christians (see Perpetuity).

747 bis. See the two kinds of men under the heading Perpetuity.

747 ter. Two kinds of men in every religion (see Perpetuity): superstition, concupiscence.

748. At the time of the Messiah the people divides. The spiritual embraced the Messiah; the coarse remained, to serve him as witnesses.

749. If this was so clearly foretold to the Jews, how did they not believe it? Or how were they not exterminated for resisting a thing so clear?

I answer: first, it was foretold both that they would not believe a thing so clear and that they would not be exterminated. And nothing is more glorious to the Messiah; for it was not enough that there should be prophets; they had to be preserved above suspicion. Now, etc.

750. If the Jews had all been converted by Jesus Christ, we would have only suspect witnesses left. And if they had been exterminated, we would have none at all.

751. What do the prophets say of Jesus Christ? That he will plainly be God? No; but that he is a truly hidden God; that he will not be recognized; that no one will think it is he; that he will be a stone to trip on, against which many will strike, etc. Let no one reproach us any longer, then, with a want of clarity, since we profess it.

"But," they say, "there are obscurities." And without them no one would trip on Jesus Christ; and that is one of the express designs of the prophets: Blind…

752. Moses first teaches the Trinity, original sin, the Messiah.

David, a great witness: a king, good, forgiving, a fine soul, a fine mind, powerful; he prophesies, and his miracle comes to pass; this is infinite. He had only to say that he was the Messiah, if he had been vain: for the prophecies are clearer of him than of Jesus Christ.

And Saint John likewise.

753. Herod believed to be the Messiah. He had taken the sceptre from Judah, but he was not of Judah. This made a considerable sect.

And Bar Kokhba, and another, received by the Jews. And the rumour that was everywhere at that time: Suetonius, Tacitus, Josephus.

What must the Messiah have been, since through him the sceptre was to be in Judah for ever, and at his coming the sceptre was to be taken from Judah?

To make it so that seeing they should not see, and hearing they should not understand, nothing could have been better done.

The curse of the Greeks on those who count three periods of time.

754. c. c. Homo existens, te Deum facis: being a man, you make yourself God.

Scriptum est "Dii estis", et non potest solvi Scriptura: it is written, "You are gods"; and Scripture cannot be broken.

c. c. Haec infirmitas non est ad mortem, et est ad mortem: this illness will not end in death; and it ends in death.

Lazarus dormit, et deinde dixit: Lazarus mortuus est: Lazarus is asleep; and then he said, Lazarus is dead.

755. The apparent discord of the Gospels.

756. What can we feel but veneration for a man who clearly foretells things that come to pass, who declares his design both to blind and to enlighten, and who mixes obscurities among the clear things that come to pass?

757. The time of the first coming is foretold; the time of the second is not, because the first was to be hidden, and the second was to be dazzling, and so manifest that even his enemies would have to recognize it. But as he was to come only obscurely, and only to be known by those who would search the Scriptures…

758. God, to make the Messiah recognizable to the good and unrecognizable to the wicked, had him foretold in this way. If the manner of the Messiah had been foretold clearly, there would have been no obscurity, even for the wicked. If the time had been foretold obscurely, there would have been obscurity even for the good; for the [goodness of their heart] would not have made them understand that, for example, the closed mem signifies six hundred years. But the time was foretold clearly, and the manner in figures.

By this means the wicked, taking the promised goods for material ones, go astray in spite of the time clearly foretold, and the good do not go astray. For the understanding of the promised goods depends on the heart, which calls good what it loves; but the understanding of the promised time does not depend on the heart. And so the clear prediction of the time, and the obscure prediction of the goods, deceives none but the wicked.

759. [Either the Jews or the Christians must be wicked.]

760. The Jews reject him, but not all of them: the saints receive him, and not the carnal. And so far is this from telling against his glory that it is the last stroke that completes it. Since the reason they give for it, the only one to be found in all their writings, in the Talmud and in the Rabbis, is merely that Jesus Christ did not subdue the nations by force of arms, your sword, O most mighty (Is that all they have to say? Jesus Christ was killed, they say; he was defeated; he did not subdue the pagans by his might; he did not give us their spoils; he gives no riches. Is that all they have to say? It is in this that he is lovable to me. I would not want the one they picture to themselves), it is plain that it was only his life that kept them from receiving him; and by this refusal they are witnesses beyond reproach, and, what is more, by it they fulfil the prophecies.

[Through this people's not having received him, this marvel has come about: the prophecies are the only lasting miracles that can be done, but they are liable to be contradicted.]

761. The Jews, by killing him so as not to receive him as Messiah, gave him the final mark of the Messiah.

And by continuing not to recognize him, they made themselves irreproachable witnesses: and by killing him, and continuing to deny him, they fulfilled the prophecies (Isaiah 60; Psalm 71).

762. What could the Jews, his enemies, do? If they receive him, they prove him by their receiving him, for the keepers of the expectation of the Messiah receive him; if they renounce him, they prove him by their renouncing him.

763. The Jews, in testing whether he was God, showed that he was man.

764. The Church has had as much trouble showing that Jesus Christ was man, against those who denied it, as showing that he was God; and the appearances were as strong.

765. Source of the contrarieties. A God humbled, and even to the death of the cross; a Messiah triumphing over death by his death. Two natures in Jesus Christ, two comings, two states of man's nature.

766. Figures. Saviour, father, priest, victim, food, king, sage, lawgiver, afflicted, poor, who was to bring forth a people whom he was to lead and feed, and bring into his land…

Jesus Christ. Offices. He alone was to bring forth a great people, elect, holy and chosen; lead it, feed it, bring it into the place of rest and holiness; make it holy to God; make it the temple of God, reconcile it to God, save it from the wrath of God, deliver it from the bondage of sin, which visibly reigns in man; give laws to this people, engrave these laws in their heart, offer himself to God for them, sacrifice himself for them, be a victim without blemish, and himself the priest: he was to offer himself, his body and his blood, and yet offer bread and wine to God…

Coming into the world.

"Stone upon stone."

What went before, what followed. All the Jews still in existence, and wandering.

767. Of all that is on earth, he takes part only in its sorrows, not in its pleasures. He loves those near to him; but his charity is not shut within these bounds, and spreads to his enemies, and then to God's.

768. Jesus Christ figured by Joseph: beloved of his father, sent by the father to see his brothers, etc., innocent, sold by his brothers for twenty pieces of silver, and by that made their lord, their saviour, and the saviour of strangers, and the saviour of the world; which would not have happened but for their plot to destroy him, the sale and the rejection they made of him.

In prison, Joseph innocent between two criminals; Jesus Christ on the cross between two thieves. He foretells salvation to the one and death to the other, on the same appearances. Jesus Christ saves the elect and damns the rejected, for the same crimes. Joseph only foretells; Jesus Christ does. Joseph asks the one who will be saved to remember him when he has come into his glory; and the one whom Jesus Christ saves asks him to remember him when he comes into his kingdom.

769. The conversion of the pagans was reserved for the grace of the Messiah alone. The Jews spent so long fighting them without success; all that Solomon and the prophets said of it was useless. The wise, like Plato and Socrates, could not persuade them of it.

770. After many had come before him, Jesus Christ came at last to say: "Here I am, and here is the time. What the prophets said would come about in the course of time, I tell you my apostles are going to do. The Jews are going to be cast off, Jerusalem will soon be destroyed; and the pagans are going to enter into the knowledge of God. My apostles are going to do it after you have killed the heir of the vineyard."

And then the apostles said to the Jews: "You are going to be accursed" (Celsus mocked at this); and to the pagans: "You are going to enter into the knowledge of God." And that is what happens then.

771. Jesus Christ came to blind those who saw clearly, and to give sight to the blind; to heal the sick, and let the healthy die; to call sinners to repentance and justify them, and leave the righteous in their sins; to fill the needy, and leave the rich empty.

772. Holiness. I will pour out my spirit. All the peoples were in unbelief and in concupiscence; the whole earth burned with charity, princes leave their greatness, young girls suffer martyrdom. Where does this strength come from? It is that the Messiah has come; here are the effect and the marks of his coming.

773. The ruin of the Jews and of the pagans by Jesus Christ: all nations shall come and worship him. It is too small a thing that, etc. Ask of me. All kings shall worship him. Unjust witnesses. He shall give his cheek to the one who strikes him. They gave me gall for food.

774. Jesus Christ for all, Moses for one people.

The Jews blessed in Abraham: "I will bless those who bless you." But: "all nations blessed in his seed."

It is too small a thing that, etc. Isaiah.

A light for revelation to the Gentiles.

He has not dealt so with any other nation, said David, speaking of the law. But speaking of Jesus Christ, we must say: He has dealt so with every nation. It is too small a thing that, etc., Isaiah. And so it belongs to Jesus Christ to be universal; even the Church offers the sacrifice only for the faithful: Jesus Christ offered that of the cross for all.

775. It is heresy always to take omnes as meaning all, and heresy sometimes not to take it as meaning all. Drink of this, all of you: the Huguenots are heretics in taking it to mean all. In whom all have sinned: the Huguenots are heretics in excepting the children of the faithful. We must therefore follow the Fathers and tradition to know when, since there is heresy to fear on either side.

776. "Ne timeas pusillus grex": "Fear not, little flock." Timore et tremore: with fear and trembling. Quid ergo? Ne timeas, modo timeas: what then? Do not fear, provided you fear; but if you do not fear, then fear.

He who receives me receives not me, but him who sent me.

No one knows, not even the Son.

A bright cloud overshadowed them.

Saint John was to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and Jesus Christ to set division: without contradiction.

777. The effects, in communi et in particulari, in general and in particular. The semi-Pelagians err in saying of in communi what is true only in particulari; and the Calvinists in saying in particulari what is true in communi (so it seems to me).

778. All the country of Judea, and all the people of Jerusalem, and they were baptized. Because of all the conditions of men who came there.

Stones can be children of Abraham.

779. If we knew ourselves, God would heal and pardon: lest they should be converted, and I should heal them, Isaiah, and their sins should be forgiven them, Mark 3.

780. Jesus Christ never condemned without a hearing. To Judas: Friend, why have you come? To the man who had no wedding garment, the same.

781. The figures of the totality of the redemption, such as that the sun gives light to all, mark only a totality; but the figures of exclusions, such as the Jews chosen to the exclusion of the Gentiles, mark exclusion.

"Jesus Christ the redeemer of all." Yes, for he has offered it, like a man who has ransomed all those who will come to him; those who die on the way, that is their misfortune, but as for him, he was offering them redemption. "That holds good in this example, where the one who ransoms and the one who keeps from dying are two, but not in Jesus Christ, who does both." No, for Jesus Christ, as redeemer, is not perhaps master of all; and so, as far as it is in him, he is the redeemer of all.

When it is said that Jesus Christ did not die for all, you exploit a vice of men, who at once apply this exception to themselves, which is to favour despair; instead of turning them away from it to favour hope. For it is by these outward habits that we grow used to the inward virtues.

782. The victory over death. "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he loses his soul? Whoever would keep his soul shall lose it."

"I have not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it."

"The lambs did not take away the sins of the world, but I am the lamb who takes away sins."

"Moses did not give you the bread from heaven. Moses did not bring you out of captivity, and did not make you truly free."

783. … Then Jesus Christ comes to tell men that they have no enemies but themselves, that it is their passions that separate them from God, that he comes to destroy them, and to give them his grace, so as to make of them all one holy Church, that he comes to bring back into this Church the pagans and the Jews, that he comes to destroy the idols of the one and the superstition of the other. All men set themselves against this, not only through the natural opposition of concupiscence; but, above all, the kings of the earth unite to abolish this new-born religion, as had been foretold (Prophecy: Why do the nations rage… The kings of the earth… against his Christ).

All that is greatest on earth unites: the learned, the wise, the kings. Some write, others condemn, others kill. And in spite of all this opposition, these simple people without strength resist all these powers, and even bring under their rule these kings, these learned men, these wise men, and take idolatry away from the whole earth. And all this is done by the power that had foretold it.

784. Jesus Christ did not want the testimony of devils, nor of those who had no calling; but of God and of John the Baptist.

785. I consider Jesus Christ in every person and in ourselves: Jesus Christ as father in his father, Jesus Christ as brother in his brothers, Jesus Christ as poor in the poor, Jesus Christ as rich in the rich, Jesus Christ as teacher and priest in priests, Jesus Christ as sovereign in princes, etc. For by his glory he is all that is great, being God, and by his mortal life he is all that is paltry and abject. It was for this that he took this unhappy condition, so as to be able to be in every person, and the model of every condition.

786. Jesus Christ in an obscurity (according to what the world calls obscurity) such that the historians, who write only of the important affairs of states, barely noticed him.

787. On the fact that neither Josephus nor Tacitus nor the other historians spoke of Jesus Christ. So far is this from telling against it that, on the contrary, it tells for it. For it is certain that Jesus Christ existed, and that his religion made a great stir, and that these men were not ignorant of it; and so it is plain that they kept silent about it only by design; or else that they did speak of it, and what they said has been suppressed or altered.

788. "I have kept for myself seven thousand." I love the worshippers unknown to the world, and to the prophets themselves.

789. As Jesus Christ remained unknown among men, so his truth remains among common opinions, with no outward difference; so the Eucharist among common bread.

790. Jesus Christ would not be killed without the forms of justice, for it is far more ignominious to die by justice than by an unjust riot.

791. Pilate's false justice serves only to make Jesus Christ suffer; for he has him scourged for his false justice, and then kills him. It would have been better to kill him at once. It is the same with the falsely righteous: they do good works, and bad ones to please the world and to show that they do not belong wholly to Jesus Christ, for they are ashamed of him. And at last, in great temptations and on great occasions, they kill him.

792. What man ever had more splendour? The whole Jewish people foretells him before his coming. The Gentile people worships him after his coming. Both peoples, Gentile and Jewish, look to him as their centre.

And yet what man ever enjoyed this splendour less? Of his thirty-three years, he lives thirty without appearing. For three years he passes for an impostor; the priests and the leaders reject him; his friends and those closest to him despise him. At last he dies, betrayed by one of his own, denied by another and abandoned by all.

What share has he, then, in this splendour? Never did a man have so much splendour; never did a man have more ignominy. All this splendour has served only for us, to make him recognizable to us; and he had none of it for himself.

793. The infinite distance between bodies and minds figures the infinitely more infinite distance between minds and charity; for charity is supernatural.⁴⁶

All the splendour of greatness has no lustre for people engaged in the pursuits of the mind.

The greatness of people of intellect is invisible to kings, to the rich, to captains, to all these great ones of the flesh.

The greatness of wisdom, which is nothing unless it comes from God, is invisible to the carnal and to people of intellect. These are three orders differing in kind.

Great geniuses have their empire, their splendour, their greatness, their victory, their lustre, and have no need of carnal greatness, to which they bear no relation. They are seen not by eyes but by minds: that is enough.

The saints have their empire, their splendour, their victory, their lustre, and have no need of carnal or intellectual greatness, to which they bear no relation, for it neither adds to them nor takes away. They are seen by God and the angels, and not by bodies or by curious minds: God is enough for them.

Archimedes, without splendour, would be held in the same veneration. He did not fight battles for the eyes to see, but he gave all minds his inventions. Oh, how he shone to minds!

Jesus Christ, without wealth and without any outward production of knowledge, is in his order of holiness. He made no discovery, he did not reign; but he was humble, patient, holy, holy, holy to God, terrible to devils, without any sin. Oh, in what great pomp and in what prodigious magnificence he came, to the eyes of the heart, the eyes that see wisdom!

It would have been useless for Archimedes to play the prince in his books of geometry, though he was one.

It would have been useless for our Lord Jesus Christ, in order to shine in his kingdom of holiness, to come as a king; but he did come in the splendour of his own order!

It is quite ridiculous to stumble at the lowliness of Jesus Christ, as if this lowliness were of the same order as the greatness he came to reveal. Let us consider that greatness in his life, in his passion, in his obscurity, in his death, in the choosing of his own, in their deserting him, in his secret resurrection, and in the rest: we shall see it to be so great that we shall have no reason to stumble at a lowliness that is not there.

But there are those who can admire only carnal greatness, as if there were none of the mind; and others who admire only greatness of the mind, as if there were not greatness infinitely higher, in wisdom.

All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are not worth the least of minds; for a mind knows all that, and itself; and bodies know nothing.

All bodies together, and all minds together, and all their productions, are not worth the least movement of charity. That is of an order infinitely higher.

From all bodies together one could not succeed in drawing one little thought: that is impossible, and of another order. From all bodies and minds together one could not draw one movement of true charity: that is impossible, and of another order, supernatural.

794. Why did Jesus Christ not come in a visible manner, instead of drawing his proof from the prophecies that went before?

Why did he have himself foretold in figures?

795. If Jesus Christ had come only to sanctify, all Scripture and all things would tend that way, and it would be very easy to convince unbelievers. If Jesus Christ had come only to blind, all his conduct would be confused, and we would have no means of convincing unbelievers. But since he came for sanctification and for a stumbling block, as Isaiah says, we cannot convince unbelievers and they cannot convince us; but by that very fact we do convince them, since we say that in all his conduct there is nothing conclusive, either way.

796. Jesus Christ does not say that he is not of Nazareth, so as to leave the wicked in their blindness; nor that he is not the son of Joseph.

797. Proofs of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ said great things so simply that he seems not to have thought them, and yet so clearly that we can see what he thought of them. This clarity joined to this artlessness is admirable.

798. The style of the Gospel is admirable in so many ways, and among others in never putting in any invective against the executioners and enemies of Jesus Christ; for there is none in the historians against Judas, Pilate or any of the Jews.

If this modesty of the Gospel historians had been affected, like so many other traits of so fine a character, and they had affected it only to have it noticed, then even if they had not dared to point it out themselves, they would not have failed to find friends to make these remarks to their credit. But since they acted in this way without affectation, and from a wholly disinterested impulse, they did not point it out to anyone; and I believe that many of these things have not been noticed until now, and that is what shows the coolness with which the thing was done.

799. A workman who talks of riches, a lawyer who talks of war, of kingship, etc.; but the rich man talks well of riches, the king speaks coolly of a great gift he has just made, and God speaks well of God.

800. Who taught the evangelists the qualities of a perfectly heroic soul, that they paint it so perfectly in Jesus Christ? Why do they make him weak in his agony? Do they not know how to paint a steadfast death? Yes, for the same Saint Luke paints the death of Saint Stephen as stronger than that of Jesus Christ.

They make him capable of fear, then, before the necessity of dying has come, and then wholly strong.

But when they make him so troubled, it is when he troubles himself: and when men trouble him, he is wholly strong.

801. Proof of Jesus Christ. The hypothesis that the apostles were impostors is quite absurd. Follow it through to the end; imagine those twelve men gathered after the death of Jesus Christ, plotting to say that he has risen. By this they attack all the powers. The heart of man is strangely inclined to fickleness, to change, to promises, to goods. If any one of them had gone back on his word in the least, through all these lures, and, what is more, through prisons, tortures and death, they were lost. Follow that through.

802. The apostles were either deceived or deceivers; either is hard to believe, for it is not possible to mistake a man for one risen from the dead.

While Jesus Christ was with them, he could sustain them; but after that, if he did not appear to them, who made them act?

Section XIII: Miracles

803. Beginning. Miracles discern doctrine, and doctrine discerns miracles.

There are false ones and true ones. There must be a mark by which to know them; otherwise they would be useless. Now they are not useless; on the contrary, they are a foundation. Now the rule he gives us must be such that it does not destroy the proof that true miracles give of the truth, which is the chief end of miracles.

Moses gave two: that the prediction does not come to pass, Deuteronomy 18, and that they do not lead to idolatry, Deuteronomy 13; and Jesus Christ one.

If the doctrine rules the miracles, the miracles are useless for the doctrine.

If the miracles rule…

Objection to the rule. The discernment of the times. One rule in the time of Moses, another rule now.

804. Miracle. It is an effect that exceeds the natural power of the means employed for it; and a non-miracle is an effect that does not exceed the natural power of the means employed for it. Thus those who heal by invoking the devil do not perform a miracle; for that does not exceed the natural power of the devil. But…

805. The two foundations, one inward, the other outward; grace, miracles; both supernatural.

806. Miracles and truth are necessary, because the whole man must be convinced, in body and in soul.

807. Always either men have spoken of the true God, or the true God has spoken to men.

808. Jesus Christ proved that he was the Messiah, never by proving his doctrine from Scripture and the prophecies, and always by his miracles.

He proves by a miracle that he forgives sins.

"Do not rejoice in your miracles," says Jesus Christ, "but that your names are written in heaven."

If they do not believe Moses, they will not believe one risen from the dead.

Nicodemus recognizes from his miracles that his doctrine is from God: We know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do the things that you do unless God is with him. He does not judge the miracles by the doctrine, but the doctrine by the miracles.

The Jews had a doctrine of God, as we have one of Jesus Christ, and confirmed by miracles; and a prohibition against believing all workers of miracles; and, besides, an order to have recourse to the high priests, and to abide by them.

And so all the reasons we have for refusing to believe workers of miracles, they had with regard to their prophets.

And yet they were very guilty in refusing the prophets, because of their miracles, and Jesus Christ; and would not have been guilty if they had not seen the miracles: If I had not done… they would not have sin. Therefore all belief rests on miracles.

Prophecy is not called a miracle: thus Saint John speaks of the first miracle at Cana, and then of what Jesus Christ says to the Samaritan woman, uncovering all her hidden life, and then he heals the son of a royal official, and Saint John calls that "the second sign".

809. The combinations of miracles.

810. The second miracle can presuppose the first; the first cannot presuppose the second.

811. Without the miracles, there would have been no sin in not believing Jesus Christ.

812. I would not be a Christian but for the miracles, says Saint Augustine.

813. Miracles. How I hate those who make a show of doubting miracles! Montaigne speaks of them as he should in the two places. In the one we see how cautious he is; and yet in the other he believes, and laughs at the unbelievers.

However that may be, the Church is without proof if they are right.

814. Montaigne against miracles.

Montaigne for miracles.

815. It is not possible to believe reasonably against miracles.

816. Unbelievers, the most credulous of men: they believe the miracles of Vespasian so as not to believe those of Moses.

817. Title: How it comes about that we believe so many liars who say they have seen miracles, and believe none of those who say they have secrets for making man immortal or making him young again. Having considered how it comes about that so much faith is placed in so many impostors who say they have remedies, to the point of often putting one's life in their hands, it has seemed to me that the true cause is that there are true ones; for it would not be possible for there to be so many false ones, and for so much credence to be given them, if there were none that were genuine. If there had never been a remedy for any ill, and all ills had been incurable, it is impossible that men would have imagined they could give remedies; and still more impossible that so many others would have believed those who boasted of having them: just as, if a man boasted of keeping people from dying, no one would believe him, because there is no example of it. But since there were a number of remedies that were found to be genuine, by the knowledge even of the greatest men, men's belief was bent that way; and the thing having been known to be possible, it was concluded from that that it was. For the people ordinarily reason thus: "A thing is possible, therefore it is"; because, since the thing cannot be denied in general, there being particular effects that are genuine, the people, who cannot tell which of these particular effects are the genuine ones, believe them all. In the same way, what makes us believe so many false effects of the moon is that there are true ones, like the tides of the sea.

It is the same with prophecies, miracles, divination by dreams, sorcery, etc. For if there had never been anything genuine in all this, nothing of it would ever have been believed: and so, instead of concluding that there are no true miracles because there are so many false ones, we must say on the contrary that there certainly are true miracles, since there are so many false ones, and that there are false ones only for this reason, that there are true ones. We must reason in the same way about religion; for it would not be possible for men to have imagined so many false religions if there were not a true one. The objection to this is that savages have a religion: but the answer to it is that they have heard tell of the true one, as appears from the flood, circumcision, Saint Andrew's cross, etc.

818. Having considered how it comes about that there are so many false miracles, false revelations, sorceries, etc., it has seemed to me that the true cause is that there are true ones; for it would not be possible for there to be so many false miracles if there were no true ones, nor so many false revelations if there were no true ones, nor so many false religions if there were not a true one. For if there had never been any of all this, it is all but impossible that men would have imagined it, and still more impossible that so many others would have believed it. But since there have been very great things that were genuine, and since they have therefore been believed by great men, this impression has been the cause of almost everyone's becoming capable of believing the false ones too. And so, instead of concluding that there are no true miracles, since there are so many false ones, we must say on the contrary that there are true miracles, since there are so many false ones, and that there are false ones only for this reason, that there are true ones; and that in the same way there are false religions only because there is a true one. The objection to this: that savages have a religion; but it is because they have heard tell of the true one, as appears from Saint Andrew's cross, the flood, circumcision, etc. This comes from the fact that the mind of man, finding itself bent that way by the truth, thereby becomes susceptible to all the falsehoods of this…

819. Jeremiah 23:32, the miracles of the false prophets. In the Hebrew, and in the Hebraist Vatable, the word is frivolities.

Miracle does not always mean miracle. In 1 Samuel 14:15, miracle means fear, and is so in the Hebrew. Likewise, plainly, in Job 33:7. And again Isaiah 21:4; Jeremiah 44:12. Portentum means simulacrum, an image, Jeremiah 50:38, and is so in the Hebrew and in Vatable. Isaiah 8:18: Jesus Christ says that he and his own will be for miracles.

820. If the devil favoured the doctrine that destroys him, he would be divided, as Jesus Christ said. If God favoured the doctrine that destroys the Church, he would be divided: Every kingdom divided… For Jesus Christ was acting against the devil, and destroying his empire over hearts, of which exorcism is the figure, to establish the kingdom of God. And so he adds: If by the finger of God… the kingdom of God has come upon you.

821. There is a great difference between tempting and leading into error. God tempts, but he does not lead into error. To tempt is to provide occasions which impose no necessity: if we do not love God, we shall do a certain thing. To lead into error is to put a man under the necessity of concluding and following a falsehood.

822. Abraham, Gideon: signs above revelation. The Jews blinded themselves by judging miracles by Scripture. God has never abandoned his true worshippers.

I would rather follow Jesus Christ than anyone else, because he has the miracles, prophecies, doctrine, perpetuity, etc.

The Donatists: no miracle, which obliges them to say it is the devil. The more we particularize God, Jesus Christ, the Church…

823. If there were no false miracles, there would be certainty. If there were no rule for telling them apart, miracles would be useless, and there would be no reason to believe.

Now there is not, humanly speaking, any human certainty, but there is reason.

824. Either God has confounded the false miracles, or he has foretold them; and by the one and by the other he has raised himself above what is supernatural with respect to us, and raised us there ourselves.

825. Miracles serve not to convert, but to condemn (1st part, 113, art. 10, ad 2).

825 bis. Miracles. Saint Thomas, vol. III, book 8, chapter 20.

826. Reasons why we do not believe.

John 12:37. But though he had done so many signs, they did not believe in him, so that the word of Isaiah might be fulfilled: He has blinded, etc.

Isaiah said these things when he saw his glory and spoke of him.

"The Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Jesus crucified." But full of signs, but full of wisdom; and you preach a Christ not crucified, and a religion without miracles and without wisdom.

What makes us not believe the true miracles is the want of charity. John: But you do not believe, because you are not of my sheep. What makes us believe the false ones is the want of charity, 2 Thessalonians 2.

The foundation of religion: it is the miracles. What then? Does God speak against miracles, against the foundations of the faith we have in him?

If there is a God, faith in God had to be on earth. Now the miracles of Jesus Christ are not foretold by Antichrist, but the miracles of Antichrist are foretold by Jesus Christ; and so, if Jesus Christ were not the Messiah, he would indeed have led us into error; but Antichrist cannot really lead us into error. When Jesus Christ foretold the miracles of Antichrist, did he think he was destroying faith in his own miracles?

Moses foretold Jesus Christ, and commanded that he be followed; Jesus Christ foretold Antichrist, and forbade following him.

It was impossible that in the time of Moses anyone should keep his belief in reserve for Antichrist, who was unknown to them; but it is quite easy, in the time of Antichrist, to believe in Jesus Christ, who is already known.

There is no reason for believing in Antichrist that is not a reason for believing in Jesus Christ; but there are reasons in Jesus Christ that are not in the other.

827. Judges 13:23: "If the Lord had meant to kill us, he would not have shown us all these things."

Hezekiah, Sennacherib.

Jeremiah. Hananiah, a false prophet, dies in the seventh month.

2 Maccabees 3: the temple, about to be plundered, rescued by a miracle. 2 Maccabees 15.

1 Kings 17: the widow to Elijah, who had raised her child to life: "By this I know that your words are true."

1 Kings 18: Elijah with the prophets of Baal.

Never, in a contest over the true God, over the truth of religion, has a miracle happened on the side of error and not of truth.

828. Contest. Abel, Cain; Moses, the magicians; Elijah, the false prophets; Jeremiah, Hananiah; Micaiah, the false prophets; Jesus Christ, the Pharisees; Saint Paul, Bar-Jesus; the apostles, the exorcists; the Christians and the unbelievers; the Catholics, the heretics; Elijah, Enoch. Antichrist.

The true always prevails in miracles. The two crosses.

829. Jesus Christ says that the Scriptures bear witness to him, but he does not show in what.

Even the prophecies could not prove Jesus Christ during his life; and so no one would have been guilty for not believing in him before his death, if the miracles had not been sufficient without the doctrine. Now those who did not believe in him while he was still alive were sinners, as he says himself, and without excuse. Therefore they must have had a demonstration that they resisted. Now they did not have ours, but only the miracles; therefore the miracles are sufficient, when the doctrine is not contrary, and they must be believed.

John 7:40. A dispute among the Jews, as among the Christians today. Some believed in Jesus Christ, the others did not, because of the prophecies that said he was to be born in Bethlehem. They should have taken better care to find out whether he was not from there; for, his miracles being convincing, they should have made quite sure of these supposed contradictions between his doctrine and Scripture; and this obscurity did not excuse them, but blinded them. Thus those who refuse to believe the miracles of today, on account of a supposed and chimerical contradiction, are not excused.⁴⁷

The people who believed in him on account of his miracles; the Pharisees said to them: "This people is accursed, who do not know the law; but is there a ruler or a Pharisee who has believed in him? For we know that no prophet comes out of Galilee." Nicodemus answered: "Does our law judge a man before it has heard him?"

830. The prophecies were ambiguous: they are so no longer.

831. The five propositions were ambiguous, they are so no longer.⁴⁸

832. Miracles are no longer necessary, because we have them already. But when tradition is no longer listened to, when nothing is put forward but the Pope, when he has been taken by surprise, and when, the true source of truth, which is tradition, having thus been shut out, and the Pope, who is its keeper, having been prejudiced, truth no longer has freedom to appear: then, since men no longer speak of the truth, the truth must itself speak to men. That is what happened in the time of Arius. (Miracles under Diocletian and under Arius.)

833. Miracle. The people conclude this of themselves; but if you must be given the reason…

It is a vexing thing to be the exception to the rule. One must even be severe, and opposed to the exception. But nevertheless, since it is certain that there are exceptions to the rule, one must judge them severely, but justly.

834. John 6:26: Not because you saw signs, but because you were filled.

Those who follow Jesus Christ because of his miracles honour his power in all the miracles it produces; but those who, while professing to follow him for his miracles, in fact follow him only because he comforts them and fills them with the goods of the world, dishonour his miracles when they go against their comforts,

John 9: This man is not from God, for he does not keep the sabbath. Others: How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?

Which is the clearer?

This house is not of God; for they do not believe there that the five propositions are in Jansenius. The others: This house is of God; for he works strange miracles in it.

Which is the clearer?

What do you say of him? I say that he is a prophet. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.

835. In the Old Testament, when they turn you away from God. In the New, when they turn you away from Jesus Christ. These are the occasions for excluding faith in miracles, marked out. No other exclusions must be made.

Does it follow from this that they had the right to exclude all the prophets who came to them? No. They would have sinned in not excluding those who denied God, and would have sinned in excluding those who did not deny God.

As soon, then, as we see a miracle, we must either submit, or have strange marks to the contrary. We must see whether it denies God, or Jesus Christ, or the Church.

836. There is a great difference between not being for Jesus Christ and saying so, and not being for Jesus Christ and pretending to be. The first can do miracles, not the others; for it is clear of the first that they are against the truth, not of the others; and so miracles are clearer.

837. It is a thing so plain, that we must love one God alone, that it needs no miracles to prove it.

838. Jesus Christ did miracles, and the apostles after him, and the first saints, in great number; because, the prophecies not yet being fulfilled, and being fulfilled through them, nothing bore witness but the miracles. It was foretold that the Messiah would convert the nations. How would that prophecy have been fulfilled without the conversion of the nations? And how would the nations have been converted to the Messiah, not seeing this final effect of the prophecies that prove him? Before he had died, risen again and converted the nations, then, not everything was fulfilled; and so miracles were needed during all that time. Now they are no longer needed against the Jews, for the fulfilled prophecies are a lasting miracle.

839. "If you do not believe in me, at least believe the miracles." He refers them to the miracles as to the strongest proof.

It had been said to the Jews, as well as to the Christians, that they should not always believe the prophets; but nevertheless the Pharisees and the scribes make much of his miracles, and try to show that they are false, or done by the devil, since they would be bound to be convinced if they acknowledged that they are from God.

We are not today put to the trouble of making this discernment. It is, however, very easy to make: those who deny neither God nor Jesus Christ do no miracles that are not sure. No one who does a mighty work in my name can soon after speak evil of me.

But we have no need to make this discernment. Here is a sacred relic; here is a thorn from the crown of the Saviour of the world, over whom the prince of this world has no power, which works miracles by the very power of that blood shed for us. Here is God himself choosing this house to make his power shine out in it.

It is not men who do these miracles by an unknown and doubtful virtue, which would oblige us to a difficult discernment. It is God himself; it is the instrument of the Passion of his only Son, which, being in many places, chooses this one, and brings men from every side to receive in it these miraculous reliefs in their infirmities.

840. The Church has three kinds of enemies: the Jews, who have never been of its body; the heretics, who have withdrawn from it; and the bad Christians, who tear it apart from within.

These three different kinds of adversaries usually fight it in different ways; but here they fight it in one and the same way. As they are all without miracles, and as the Church has always had miracles against them, they have all had the same interest in evading them, and have all made use of this excuse: that we must not judge doctrine by miracles, but miracles by doctrine. There were two parties among those who listened to Jesus Christ: the ones who followed his doctrine for his miracles; the others who said… There were two parties in Calvin's time… There are now the Jesuits, etc.

841. Miracles discern in doubtful matters: between the Jewish and the pagan peoples, Jewish and Christian; Catholic, heretic; the slandered and the slanderers; between the two crosses.

But to heretics miracles would be useless; for the Church, authorized by the miracles that took possession of belief first, tells us that they do not have the true faith. There is no doubt that they are not in it, since the first miracles of the Church exclude faith in theirs. There is thus miracle against miracle, and the first and greatest on the side of the Church.

These nuns, astonished at what is said of them, that they are on the road to perdition; that their confessors are leading them to Calvin's Geneva; that they teach them that Jesus Christ is not in the Eucharist, nor at the right hand of the Father; they know that all this is false, and so they offer themselves to God in this state: See if there is any way of wickedness in me. What happens thereupon? This place, which they say is the temple of the devil, God makes his temple. They say the children must be taken out of it: God heals them there. They say it is the arsenal of hell: God makes it the sanctuary of his graces. Finally they threaten them with all the furies and all the vengeance of heaven; and God heaps his favours on them. One would have to have lost one's mind to conclude from this that they are, then, on the road to perdition.

(We have, no doubt, the same marks as Saint Athanasius.)

842. "If you are the Christ, tell us."

"The works that I do in my Father's name, these bear witness of me. But you do not believe, because you are not of my sheep. My sheep hear my voice."

John 6:30. "What sign, then, do you do, that we may see and believe you?" They do not say: What doctrine do you preach?

"No one can do the signs that you do unless God is with him."

2 Maccabees 14:15. "God, who protects his portion with evident signs."

"We want to see a sign from heaven," testing him. Luke 11:16.

"An evil generation seeks a sign; and none shall be given. And sighing deeply he said: Why does this generation seek a sign?" (Mark 8:12.) It asked for a sign with evil intent.

"And he could not do it." And yet he promises them the sign of Jonah, of his resurrection, the great and incomparable sign.

"Unless you see signs, you do not believe." He does not blame them for not believing unless there are miracles, but for not believing unless they are themselves the spectators of them.

Antichrist "with lying signs," says Saint Paul, 2 Thessalonians 2, "according to the working of Satan, in the deceiving of those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, so as to be saved; therefore God will send them the working of error, so that they believe the lie." As in the passage of Moses: for God is testing you, to know whether you love him.

See, I have told you beforehand: you, therefore, take heed.

843. This is not the country of truth: she wanders unknown among men. God has covered her with a veil, which leaves her unrecognized by those who do not hear her voice. The field is open to blasphemy, even about truths that are at least very evident. If the truths of the Gospel are published, contrary ones are published too, and the questions are so obscured that the people cannot discern. And they ask: "What have you, to make yourselves believed rather than the others? What sign do you do? You have only words, and so have we. If you had miracles, well and good." It is a truth, that doctrine must be supported by miracles, and they abuse it to blaspheme the doctrine. And if miracles happen, they say that miracles are not enough without doctrine; and that is another truth, used to blaspheme the miracles.

Jesus Christ healed the man born blind, and did a number of miracles, on the sabbath day. By this he blinded the Pharisees, who said that miracles must be judged by doctrine.

"We have Moses; but this man, we do not know where he comes from." That is what is wonderful, that you do not know where he comes from; and yet he does such miracles.

Jesus Christ spoke neither against God nor against Moses.

Antichrist and the false prophets, foretold by both Testaments, will speak openly against God and against Jesus Christ. Whoever is not hidden… Whoever was a secret enemy, God would not permit him to do miracles openly.

Never, in a public dispute where both parties profess to be for God, for Jesus Christ, for the Church, are the miracles on the side of the false Christians, and the other side without miracle.

"He has a devil." John 10:21. "And the others said: Can a devil open the eyes of the blind?"

The proofs that Jesus Christ and the apostles draw from Scripture are not demonstrative; for they say only that Moses said a prophet would come; but they do not prove by this that it is this one, and that was the whole question. These passages serve only, therefore, to show that one is not contrary to Scripture, and that no conflict with it appears, but not that there is agreement. Now that is enough: the exclusion of conflict, with miracle.

There is a mutual duty between God and men, to make and to give. Come: What ought I to have done? "Accuse me," says God in Isaiah.

God must fulfil his promises, etc.

Men owe it to God to receive the religion he sends them. God owes it to men not to lead them into error. Now they would be led into error if the workers of miracles proclaimed a doctrine that did not appear plainly false to the light of common sense, and if a greater worker of miracles had not already warned them not to believe them.

Thus, if there were division in the Church, and the Arians, for example, who claimed to be founded on Scripture just as the Catholics did, had done miracles, and not the Catholics, men would have been led into error.

For, as a man who proclaims to us the secrets of God is not worthy to be believed on his private authority, and that is why the ungodly doubt him; so a man who, as a mark of the communion he has with God, raises the dead, foretells the future, moves the seas, heals the sick: there is no ungodly man who does not yield to him; and the unbelief of Pharaoh and of the Pharisees is the effect of a supernatural hardening.

When, therefore, we see miracles and unsuspected doctrine together on one side, there is no difficulty. But when we see miracles and suspect doctrine on the same side, then we must see which is the clearer. Jesus Christ was suspect.

Bar-Jesus blinded: the power of God overcomes that of his enemies.

The Jewish exorcists beaten by the devils, who said: "Jesus I know, and Paul, but who are you?"

Miracles are for doctrine, and not doctrine for miracles.

If the miracles are true, will anyone be able to win belief for any doctrine whatever? No, for that will not happen. If an angel…

Rule: We must judge doctrine by miracles; we must judge miracles by doctrine. All this is true, but it is not contradictory, for we must distinguish the times.

How glad you are to know the general rules, thinking by that to stir up confusion and make everything useless! You will be prevented, Father: truth is one and firm.

It is impossible, by God's duty, that a man hiding his bad doctrine, and showing only a good one, and claiming to be in conformity with God and the Church, should do miracles so as to slip in imperceptibly a false and subtle doctrine: that cannot be.

And still less that God, who knows hearts, should do miracles in favour of such a man.

844. The three marks of religion: perpetuity, the good life, miracles. They destroy perpetuity by probabilism, the good life by their morality; miracles, by destroying either their truth or their consequence.⁴⁹

If they are believed, the Church will have no use for perpetuity, holiness or miracles. The heretics deny them, or deny their consequence; they do the same. But one would have to have no sincerity to deny them, or else to have lost one's mind to deny the consequence.

No one has ever got himself martyred for the miracles he says he has seen; for as for those the Turks believe by tradition, the folly of men goes perhaps as far as martyrdom, but not for those they have seen.

844 bis. Perpetuity. The Jesuit Molina: novelty.

845. The heretics have always attacked these three marks, which they do not have.

846. First objection: "An angel from heaven. We must not judge truth by miracles, but miracles by truth. Therefore miracles are useless."

Now they are of use, and they must not be against the truth; therefore what Father Lingendes said, that God will not permit a miracle to lead into error…

When there is a dispute within the same Church, the miracle will decide.

Second objection: "But Antichrist will do signs."

Pharaoh's magicians did not lead anyone into error. Thus no one will be able to say to Jesus Christ about Antichrist: "You led me into error." For Antichrist will do them against Jesus Christ, and so they cannot lead into error. Either God will not permit false miracles, or he will bring about greater ones.

[Jesus Christ has subsisted since the beginning of the world: that is stronger than all the miracles of Antichrist.]

If in the same Church a miracle happened on the side of those in error, men would be led into error. The schism is visible, the miracle is visible. But schism is more a mark of error than the miracle is a mark of truth: therefore the miracle cannot lead into error.

But, apart from schism, error is not as visible as the miracle is visible; therefore the miracle would lead into error.

Where is your God? The miracles show him, and are a flash of lightning.

847. One of the antiphons of Christmas vespers: Light has risen in the darkness for the upright of heart.

848. If God's mercy is so great that he instructs us to our salvation even when he hides himself, what light must we not expect from him when he reveals himself?

849. Will Est et non est, it is and it is not, be accepted in faith itself, as well as in miracles? And if it is inseparable from it in the others…

When Saint Francis Xavier does miracles. [Saint Hilary. Wretches, who oblige us to speak of miracles.] Woe to you who decree.

Unjust judges, do not make laws on the spot; judge by those that are established, and established by yourselves: Woe to you who decree unjust laws.

Continual miracles, false.

To weaken your adversaries, you disarm the whole Church.

If they say that our salvation depends on God, they are heretics. If they say they are submissive to the Pope, it is hypocrisy. If they are ready to sign all his constitutions, that is not enough. If they say that one must not kill for an apple, they are attacking the morality of Catholics. If miracles happen among them, it is no mark of holiness, and is on the contrary a ground for suspecting heresy.

The way in which the Church has subsisted is that the truth has been uncontested, or, if it has been contested, there has been the Pope, or, failing that, there has been the Church.

850. The five propositions condemned, no miracle, for the truth was not under attack. But the Sorbonne…, but the bull…

It is impossible for those who love God with all their heart to fail to recognize the Church, so evident is it. It is impossible for those who do not love God to be convinced of the Church.

Miracles have such power that God had to warn us not to think of them against him, plain as it is that there is a God; otherwise they would have been capable of disturbing us.

And so, far from these passages, Deuteronomy 13, telling against the authority of miracles, nothing marks their power more. And the same for Antichrist: "So as to lead astray even the elect, if it were possible."

851. The story of the man born blind.

What does Saint Paul say? Does he speak of the agreement of the prophecies at every moment? No, but of his miracle. What does Jesus Christ say? Does he speak of the agreement of the prophecies? No: his death had not fulfilled them; but he says: If I had not done. Believe the works.

Two supernatural foundations of our wholly supernatural religion: one visible, the other invisible. Miracles with grace, miracles without grace.

The synagogue, which was treated with love as the figure of the Church, and with hatred because it was only its figure, was raised up again when it was ready to fall, while it stood well with God; and so a figure.

Miracles prove the power God has over hearts, by the power he exercises over bodies.

The Church has never approved a miracle among heretics.

Miracles, a support of religion: they have discerned the Jews, they have discerned the Christians, the saints, the innocent, the true believers.

A miracle among schismatics is not so much to be feared; for the schism, which is more visible than the miracle, plainly marks their error. But when there is no schism, and the error is in dispute, the miracle discerns.

If I had not done among them the works that no other did. These wretched people, who have obliged us to speak of miracles.

Abraham, Gideon: confirming faith by miracles.

Judith: God speaks at last, in the final oppressions.

If the cooling of charity leaves the Church almost without true worshippers, miracles will rouse some. It is one of the last effects of grace.

If a miracle happened among the Jesuits!

When the miracle disappoints the expectation of those in whose presence it happens, and there is a disproportion between the state of their faith and the instrument of the miracle, then it must lead them to change. But you, otherwise. There would be as much reason to say that if the Eucharist raised a dead man, one ought to become a Calvinist rather than remain a Catholic. But when it crowns the expectation, and those who hoped that God would bless the remedies see themselves healed without remedies…

The ungodly. Never has a sign come from the devil without a stronger sign from God, or at least without its having been foretold that it would happen.

852. Unjust persecutors of those whom God visibly protects: if they reproach you with your excesses, they speak like heretics; if they say that the grace of Jesus Christ discerns us, "they are heretics"; if miracles happen, "it is the mark of their heresy".

Ezekiel. They say: Here is the people of God speaking like this. Hezekiah.

It is said: "Believe in the Church", but it is not said: "Believe in miracles", because the latter is natural, and not the former. The one needed a precept, not the other.

The synagogue was the figure, and so did not perish; and was only the figure, and so has perished. It was a figure that contained the truth, and so it lasted until it no longer had the truth.

Reverend Father, all this happened in figures. The other religions perish; that one does not perish.

Miracles are more important than you think: they served for the founding of the Church, and will serve for its continuance, until Antichrist, until the end.

The two Witnesses.

In the Old Testament and in the New, miracles are done by attachment to figures. Salvation, or a useless thing, if not to show that we must submit to the Scriptures: figures of the sacrament.

853. [We must judge divine ordinances soberly, Father.

Saint Paul on the island of Malta.]

855. Suppose we believe the miracles: you corrupt religion either in favour of your friends or against your enemies. You dispose of it as you please.

856. On the miracle. As God has made no family happier, may he also find none more grateful.

The miracles of today are those that Pascal's side claimed in its quarrel, above all the miracle of the Holy Thorn. On 24 March 1656, at the convent of Port-Royal in Paris, Pascal's niece Marguerite Périer, a boarder there, about ten years old, was cured of a lachrymal fistula, an ulcer at the corner of the eye, after she was touched with a relic venerated as a thorn from Christ's crown; the diocesan authorities of Paris later declared the cure miraculous. It came while Port-Royal was under attack, and Pascal took it as God's own word in the quarrel; most of the fragments on miracles were written in its wake. "This house" (834) is Port-Royal. ↩
The five propositions on grace that Pope Innocent X condemned in 1653 as the teaching of Cornelius Jansen, Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, in his Augustinus (1640). Port-Royal accepted the condemnation but denied that the propositions were in Jansenius's book in the sense condemned: the "question of fact", which Alexander VII settled against them in 1656 by declaring that they were. ↩
Pascal's word is la probabilité, the doctrine the theologians called probabilism, which he had attacked in the Provincial Letters (the fifth and sixth): that one may lawfully follow any "probable" opinion, one that a single grave doctor has held, even against a more probable one. "They" are the Jesuit casuists. ↩

Section XIV: Polemical Fragments

857. Clarity, obscurity. There would be too much obscurity if truth had no visible marks; it is an admirable one, to have always been preserved in a visible Church and assembly. There would be too much clarity if there were only one opinion in this Church; the one that has always been in it is the truth; for the truth has always been in it, and no falsehood has always been in it.

858. The history of the Church should properly be called the history of truth.

859. It is a pleasure to be in a ship beaten by the storm when we are sure that it will not sink: the persecutions that trouble the Church are of this kind.

860. After so many marks of piety, they have persecution as well, which is the best of the marks of piety.

861. A fine state for the Church, when it is upheld by God alone.

862. The Church has always been attacked by contrary errors; but perhaps never at the same time, as now. And if it suffers more from them, because of the multiplicity of errors, it gains this advantage from them, that they destroy each other.

It complains of both, but far more of the Calvinists, because of the schism.

It is certain that many on both of the contrary sides are deceived; they must be disabused.

Faith embraces many truths that seem to contradict each other: A time to laugh, to weep, etc. Answer, do not answer, etc.

The source of this is the union of the two natures in Jesus Christ; and also the two worlds (the creation of a new heaven and a new earth; new life, new death; all things doubled, and the same names remaining); and finally the two men who are in the righteous (for they are the two worlds, and a member and image of Jesus Christ. And so all the names suit them: righteous, sinners; dead, living; living, dead; elect, rejected, etc.).

There are, then, a great number of truths, both of faith and of morals, which seem incompatible, and which all subsist in an admirable order. The source of all heresies is the exclusion of some of these truths; and the source of all the objections the heretics make to us is ignorance of some of our truths. And it usually happens that, unable to conceive the relation between two opposite truths, and believing that to admit the one is to shut out the other, they hold to the one, they shut out the other, and think that we do the opposite. Now the exclusion is the cause of their heresy; and their ignorance that we hold the other causes their objections.

First example: Jesus Christ is God and man. The Arians, unable to reconcile these things, which they believe incompatible, say that he is man: in this they are Catholics. But they deny that he is God: in this they are heretics. They claim that we deny his humanity: in this they are ignorant.

Second example, on the subject of the Holy Sacrament: we believe that, the substance of the bread being changed, and transubstantially, into that of the body of our Lord, Jesus Christ is really present in it; that is one of the truths. Another is that this Sacrament is also a figure of the cross and of glory, and a commemoration of both; that is the Catholic faith, which comprehends these two truths that seem opposed.

The heresy of today, not conceiving that this Sacrament contains at once both the presence of Jesus Christ and his figure, and that it is both sacrifice and the commemoration of a sacrifice, believes that one of these truths cannot be admitted without excluding the other for that reason.

They hold to this point alone, that this Sacrament is figurative; and in this they are not heretics. They think that we exclude this truth; and that is why they make so many objections to us from the passages of the Fathers that say it. Finally they deny the presence; and in this they are heretics.

Third example: indulgences.

That is why the shortest way to prevent heresies is to instruct in all the truths; and the surest way to refute them is to declare them all; for what will the heretics say?

To know whether an opinion is a Father's…

863. They all go astray the more dangerously because each of them follows a truth; their fault is not in following a falsehood, but in not following another truth.

864. Truth is so obscured in these times, and falsehood so established, that unless we love the truth we cannot know it.

865. If there is ever a time when we must profess both contraries, it is when we are reproached with leaving one out. Therefore the Jesuits and the Jansenists are wrong to conceal them; but the Jansenists more so, for the Jesuits have professed both better.

866. Two kinds of people put things on a level, such as feast days with working days, Christians with priests, all sins with one another, etc. And from this the one kind concludes that what is wrong for priests is wrong for Christians too; and the other, that what is not wrong for Christians is allowed to priests.

867. If the ancient Church was in error, the Church has fallen. Should it be in error today, it is not the same; for it always has the higher maxim of tradition, from the hand of the ancient Church; and so this submission and this conformity to the ancient Church prevails and corrects everything. But the ancient Church did not presuppose the future Church and did not look to it, as we presuppose and look to the ancient one.

868. What spoils us when we compare what happened in the Church long ago with what we see there now is that we usually regard Saint Athanasius, Saint Teresa and the others as crowned with glory and… as gods. Now that time has made things clear, it seems so. But at the time when he was being persecuted, this great saint was a man called Athanasius; and Saint Teresa, a girl. "Elijah was a man like us, and subject to the same passions as we are," says Saint Peter, to disabuse Christians of that false idea which makes us reject the example of the saints as out of proportion with our condition. "They were saints," we say, "it is not the same with us." What was happening then? Saint Athanasius was a man called Athanasius, accused of several crimes, condemned in such and such a council for such and such a crime; all the bishops consented, and the pope at last. What is said to those who resist? That they disturb the peace, that they make a schism, etc.

Zeal, light. Four kinds of persons: zeal without knowledge; knowledge without zeal; neither knowledge nor zeal; and both zeal and knowledge. The first three condemn him, and the last acquit him, and are excommunicated from the Church, and save the Church nevertheless.

869. If Saint Augustine came today and had as little authority as his defenders, he would accomplish nothing. God guides his Church well in having sent him earlier, with authority.

870. God would not absolve without the Church; as it has a share in the offence, he wants it to have a share in the pardon; he associates it with this power as kings do their parlements, the high courts. But if it absolves or binds without God, it is no longer the Church; as with the parlement: for even if the king has pardoned a man, the pardon must still be registered; but if the parlement registers without the king, or refuses to register at the king's order, it is no longer the king's parlement, but a body in revolt.

871. Church, pope. Unity, multitude. Considering the Church as a unity, the Pope, who is its head, is as the whole; considering it as a multitude, the Pope is only a part of it. The Fathers considered it now in one way, now in the other; and so spoke of the Pope in different ways (Saint Cyprian: Priest of God). But in establishing one of these two truths, they did not exclude the other. Multitude that is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity that does not depend on multitude is tyranny. There is now hardly any country but France where it is permitted to say that the council is above the Pope.

872. The Pope is first. What other is known to all? What other is recognized by all, having power to reach into the whole body, because he holds the main branch, which reaches everywhere? How easy it was to let this degenerate into tyranny! That is why Jesus Christ laid down this precept for them: But not so with you.

873. The Pope hates and fears the learned who are not bound to him by vow.

874. We must not judge what the Pope is by a few words of the Fathers, as the Greeks said in a council (important rules), but by the actions of the Church and of the Fathers, and by the canons.

Unity and multitude. Two or three. Into one: it is an error to exclude either of the two, as the papists do who exclude multitude, or the Huguenots who exclude unity.

875. Would the Pope be dishonoured by holding his light from God and from tradition? And is it not dishonouring him to separate him from this holy union?

876. God does no miracles in the ordinary conduct of his Church. It would be a strange one if infallibility were in one man; but for it to be in the multitude seems so natural that God's conduct is hidden under nature, as in all his other works.

877. Kings dispose of their empire; but popes cannot dispose of theirs.

878. Summum jus, summa injuria: the height of right is the height of wrong.

The majority is the best way, because it is visible, and has the force to make itself obeyed; yet it is the opinion of the least able. If it had been possible, force would have been put into the hands of justice; but since force does not let itself be handled as we please, because it is a palpable quality, whereas justice is a spiritual quality that we dispose of as we please, justice has been put into the hands of force; and so we call just what we are forced to observe. Hence the right of the sword, for the sword gives a real right; otherwise we would see violence on one side and justice on the other (the end of the twelfth Letter). Hence the injustice of the Fronde, which sets up its pretended justice against force. It is not the same in the Church, for there is a true justice there, and no violence.

879. Injustice. Jurisdiction is given not for the one who judges, but for the one who is judged. "It is dangerous to tell the people so." But the people have too much faith in you; it will not harm them, and may serve you; it must therefore be published: Feed my sheep, not yours; you owe me pasture.

880. We love security; we love the Pope to be infallible in faith, and the grave doctors in morals, so as to have our assurance.

881. The Church teaches and God inspires, both infallibly. The work of the Church serves only to prepare for grace or for condemnation; what it does is enough to condemn, not to inspire.

882. Every time the Jesuits take the Pope by surprise, the whole of Christendom will be made perjured.

The Pope is very easily taken by surprise, because of his affairs and the trust he has in the Jesuits; and the Jesuits are very capable of taking him by surprise, because of calumny.

883. The wretches, who have obliged me to speak of the foundation of religion.

884. Sinners purified without penance, the righteous justified without charity, all Christians without the grace of Jesus Christ, God without power over the will of men, a predestination without mystery, a redemption without certainty.

884 bis. Sinners without penance, the righteous without charity, a God without power over the will of men, a predestination without mystery.

885. Whoever wants to be a priest is made one, as under Jeroboam. It is a horrible thing that the discipline of the Church of today is put before us as so good that it is made a crime to want to change it. Once it was infallibly good, and we find that it could be changed without sin; and now, such as it is, we may not wish it changed! It was quite permitted to change the custom of making priests only with such circumspection that there were hardly any who were worthy of it; and it will not be permitted to complain of the custom that makes so many unworthy ones!

886. Heretics. Ezekiel. All the pagans spoke ill of Israel, and so did the prophet: and so far were the Israelites from having the right to say to him, "You speak like the pagans," that he draws his greatest strength from the fact that the pagans speak as he does.

887. The Jansenists resemble the heretics in the reformation of morals; but you resemble them in evil.

888. You do not know the prophecies if you do not know that all this must happen: princes, prophets, pope and even the priests; and yet the Church must subsist. By the grace of God we have not come to that. Woe to these priests! But we hope that God will show us the mercy that we shall not be among them.

Saint Peter, chapter 2: false prophets past, an image of those to come.

889. … So that if it is true, on the one hand, that some lax members of religious orders and some corrupt casuists, who are not members of the hierarchy, have had a hand in these corruptions, it is certain, on the other, that the true pastors of the Church, who are the true keepers of the divine word, have preserved it unchanged against the efforts of those who have undertaken to ruin it. And so the faithful have no pretext for following these laxities, which are offered them only by the alien hands of these casuists, instead of the sound doctrine that is presented to them by the fatherly hands of their own pastors.

And the ungodly and the heretics have no ground for giving these abuses out as marks of a failure of God's providence over his Church; since, the Church being properly in the body of the hierarchy, so far is it from being possible to conclude from the present state of things that God has abandoned it to corruption, that it has never been clearer than today that God visibly defends it from corruption.

For if some of those men who, by an extraordinary calling, have made profession of leaving the world and taking the religious habit so as to live in a more perfect state than the common run of Christians have fallen into aberrations that horrify the common run of Christians, and have become among us what the false prophets were among the Jews, it is a private and personal misfortune, which must indeed be deplored, but from which nothing can be concluded against the care God takes of his Church; since all these things are so clearly foretold, and it was announced so long ago that these temptations would arise from people of this kind, that when we are well instructed we see in this the marks of God's guidance rather than of his forgetting us.

890. Tertullian: the Church will never be reformed.

891. The heretics who take advantage of the doctrine of the Jesuits must be made to know that it is not the doctrine of the Church; and that our divisions do not separate us from the altar.

892. "If in differing we condemned, you would be right. Uniformity without diversity, useless to others; diversity without uniformity, ruinous for us. The one harmful without, the other harmful within."

893. By showing the truth, we make it believed; but by showing the injustice of ministers, we do not correct it. We set the conscience at rest by showing the falsehood; we do not set the purse at rest by showing the injustice.

894. Those who love the Church lament to see morals corrupted; but at least the laws remain. But these men corrupt the laws: the model is spoiled.

895. Men never do evil so fully and so cheerfully as when they do it from conscience.

896. It is in vain that the Church has established these words, anathemas, heresies, etc.: they are used against it.

897. The servant does not know what the master is doing, for the master tells him only the action and not the end; and that is why he submits to it slavishly, and often sins against the end. But Jesus Christ has told us the end. And you destroy that end.

898. They cannot have perpetuity, and they seek universality; and for that they make the whole Church corrupt, so that they may be sound.

899. Against those who misuse passages of Scripture, and who take advantage of finding one that seems to favour their error. The chapter at Vespers on Passion Sunday, the prayer for the king.

An explanation of these words: "He who is not for me is against me"; and of these others: "He who is not against you is for you." A person who says, "I am neither for nor against": we must answer him…

900. Whoever would give the sense of Scripture and does not take it from Scripture is an enemy of Scripture. (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine.)

901. "He gives grace to the humble." Then did he not give them humility?

"His own did not receive him." All those who did not receive him, then, were they not his own?

902. "It must be," says the Feuillant monk, "that this is not so certain; for controversy marks uncertainty (Saint Athanasius, Saint Chrysostom; morality, the unbelievers)."

The Jesuits have not made the truth uncertain, but they have made their own ungodliness certain.

Contradiction has always been left standing, to blind the wicked; for all that offends truth or charity is evil: that is the true principle.

902 bis. Hearing the talk about the Feuillants, I went to see one of my old friends; as we talked of devotion, he thought I had some feeling for it and might well be a Feuillant, and that I could do some good by writing, especially at this time, against the innovators.

We have lately acted against your general chapter, which is that the bull should be signed.

That he wished God would inspire me.

"Father, ought one to sign?"⁵⁰

903. All the religions and sects of the world have had natural reason for their guide. Christians alone have been bound to take their rules from outside themselves, and to learn those that Jesus Christ left to the ancients to be handed down to the faithful. This constraint wearies these good Fathers; they want to have, like the other peoples, the liberty of following their own imaginations. In vain do we cry to them, as the prophets once said to the Jews: Go into the midst of the Church; learn the ways the ancients left it, and follow those paths. They have answered as the Jews did: We will not walk in them: but we will follow the thoughts of our own heart; and they have said: We will be like the other peoples.

904. They make the exception the rule.

The ancients gave absolution before penance: do it in the spirit of exception. But you make the exception a rule without exception, so that you no longer want even the rule to be the exception.

905. On confessions and absolutions without signs of regret. God looks only at the inward: the Church judges only by the outward. God absolves as soon as he sees penitence in the heart; the Church, when it sees it in works. God will make a Church pure within, which confounds by its inward and wholly spiritual holiness the inward ungodliness of the proud sages and of the Pharisees: and the Church will make an assembly of men whose outward morals are so pure that they confound the morals of the pagans. If there are hypocrites in it, but so well disguised that it does not recognize their venom, it tolerates them; for although they are not accepted by God, whom they cannot deceive, they are accepted by men, whom they do deceive. And so it is not dishonoured by their conduct, which appears holy. But you would have the Church judge neither the inward, because that belongs to God alone, nor the outward, because God looks only at the inward; and so, taking from it all choice of men, you keep in the Church the most dissolute, and those who dishonour it so badly that the synagogues of the Jews and the sects of the philosophers would have banished them as unworthy and abhorred them as ungodly.

906. The conditions easiest to live in according to the world are the hardest to live in according to God; and the reverse. Nothing is so hard, according to the world, as the religious life; nothing is easier than to live it according to God. Nothing is easier than to hold a great office and great wealth according to the world; nothing is harder than to live in them according to God, without taking a share in them and a taste for them.

907. The casuists submit the decision to corrupt reason, and the choice of decisions to the corrupt will, so that everything corrupt in the nature of man may have a share in his conduct.

908. But is it probable that probabilism gives assurance?

The difference between repose and security of conscience. Nothing gives assurance but the truth; nothing gives repose but the sincere search for the truth.

909. The whole society of their casuists together cannot give assurance to a conscience in error, and that is why it is important to choose good guides.

Thus they will be doubly guilty: both for having followed ways they should not have followed, and for having listened to doctors they should not have listened to.

910. Can it be anything but the indulgence of the world that makes you find things probable? Will you make us believe that it is the truth, and that if duelling were not the fashion, you would find it probable that one may fight, looking at the thing in itself?

911. Must we kill to prevent there being wicked men? That is to make two instead of one: Overcome evil with good. (Saint Augustine.)

912. Universal. Morality and language are particular sciences, but universal.

913. Probabilism. Anyone can put in, no one can take out.

914. They let concupiscence act and hold back scruple, whereas they ought to do the opposite.

915. Montalte. Lax opinions please men so much that it is strange that theirs displease; it is because they have gone beyond every bound. And besides, there are many people who see the truth and cannot reach it; but there are few who do not know that the purity of religion is contrary to our corruptions. Ridiculous to say that an eternal reward is offered to the morals of Escobar.

916. Probabilism. They have some true principles; but they abuse them. Now the abuse of truths ought to be punished as much as the introduction of falsehood.

As if there were two hells, one for sins against charity, the other against justice!

917. Probabilism. The ardour of the saints in seeking the truth was useless, if the probable is safe. The fear of the saints, who had always followed the safest course (Saint Teresa having always followed her confessor).

918. Take away probabilism, and you can no longer please the world; put in probabilism, and you can no longer displease it.

919. These are the effects of the sins of the peoples and of the Jesuits: the great wished to be flattered; the Jesuits wished to be loved by the great. They have all deserved to be abandoned to the spirit of lies, the one to deceive, the others to be deceived. They have been avaricious, ambitious, voluptuous: They will heap up teachers for themselves. Worthy disciples of such masters, they are worthy. They looked for flatterers, and found them.

920. If they do not renounce probabilism, their good maxims are as little holy as their bad ones, for they are founded on human authority; and so, if they are more just, they will be more reasonable, but not more holy, they take after the wild stock on which they are grafted.

If what I say does not serve to enlighten you, it will serve the people.

If these keep silent, the stones will speak.

Silence is the greatest persecution. The saints never kept silent. It is true that a calling is needed, but it is not from the decrees of the Council of State that we must learn whether we are called, it is from the necessity of speaking. Now, after Rome has spoken, and it is thought that it has condemned the truth, and they have written it down; and the books that said the contrary are censured: we must cry out all the louder the more unjustly we are censured, and the more violently they try to stifle speech, until a pope comes who hears both sides, and consults antiquity to do justice. And so the good popes will still find the Church in an uproar.

The Inquisition and the Society of Jesus, the two scourges of truth.

Why do you not accuse them of Arianism? For they have said that Jesus Christ is God: perhaps they mean it, not by nature, but as it is said: You are gods.

If my letters are condemned at Rome, what I condemn in them is condemned in heaven: To your tribunal, Lord Jesus, I appeal.

You yourselves are corruptible.

I was afraid that I had written badly, seeing myself condemned; but the example of so many pious writings makes me believe the contrary. It is no longer permitted to write well, so corrupt or ignorant is the Inquisition!

"It is better to obey God than men."

I fear nothing, I hope for nothing. The bishops are not like that. Port-Royal fears, and it is bad policy to break them up, for they will fear no longer and will make themselves more feared. I do not even fear your particular censures, unless they are founded on those of tradition. Do you censure everything? What! Even my respect? No. Then say what, or you will achieve nothing, unless you point out the evil, and why it is evil. And that is what they will have great trouble doing.

Probabilism. They have given an amusing explanation of safety; for after establishing that all their ways are safe, they no longer called safe what leads to heaven without danger of not arriving there by it, but what leads there without danger of leaving that way.

921. [What have you gained by accusing me of mocking holy things? You will gain no more by accusing me of imposture.]

[I have not told everything; you will see that soon enough.]

I am no heretic; I have not upheld the five propositions. You say it and do not prove it. I say that you have said this, and I prove it.

You threaten me.

Will you say that I am an impostor?

I tell you that you are impostors. I prove it to you; and that you do not hide it, and that you insolently sanction it: Brisacier, Meynier, d'Alby. Elidere.⁵¹

When you believed Monsieur Puys an enemy of the Society, he was an unworthy pastor of his Church, ignorant, a heretic, of bad faith and bad morals. Since then he has been a worthy pastor, of good faith and good morals.

Since you have touched only on that, you approve all the rest.

To slander, this is great blindness of heart; not to see the evil of it, this is greater blindness of heart; to defend it instead of confessing it as a sin, then the depth of iniquity shuts a man in, etc. 230th, passim, Elidere, Caramuel.

The great lords divide in civil wars, and so do you in the civil war of men.

[I mean to say it to you yourselves, so that it has more force.]

[Those who examine the books, I am sure of their approval. But those who read only the titles, and they are the greater number, those might believe your word, not supposing that men in religious orders would be impostors.]

[It is not that I do not see how embarrassed you are: for if you were willing to retract, it would be over, but, etc.]

The saints refine in order to find themselves guilty, and accuse their best actions; and these men refine in order to excuse the worst.

Do not imagine that this will pass off as a dispute: your works will be printed whole, and in French, and everyone will be made the judge.

I ask to be done the justice of no longer believing them on their word.

A building equally beautiful outside, but on a bad foundation: the wise pagans built it; and the devil deceives men by this outward resemblance, founded on the most different foundation.

Never has a man had so good a cause as mine; and never have others laid themselves so wide open as you.

The people of the world do not believe they are on the right road.

The more weakness they point out in my person, the more they lend authority to my cause.

You say that I am a heretic. Is that permitted? And if you do not fear that men will not do justice, do you not fear that God will?

You will feel the force of the truth, and you will yield to it.

The world would have to be obliged to believe you, on pain of mortal sin.

Elidere. It is a sin to believe slanders rashly. (The slanderer shall not be believed rashly.) (Saint Augustine.)

And by falling he made me fall on every side, by the maxim of slander.

There is something supernatural in such a blindness. A fitting necessity.

Am I alone against thirty thousand? Not at all. Keep the court for yourselves, and imposture; I keep the truth: it is all my strength; if I lose it, I am lost. I shall not lack accusations and persecutions. But I have the truth, and we shall see who wins.

I do not deserve to defend religion, but you do not deserve to defend error and injustice. May God in his mercy, not regarding the evil that is in me, and regarding the good that is in you, give us all the grace that truth may not fall in my hands, and that falsehood may not…

Mentiris impudentissime: you lie most impudently.

The extreme sin is to defend it (230). Elidere.

The luck of the wicked (340, 23).

A man is known by his teaching.

The labour of lying (66).

Unjust gods (80).

False piety, double sin.

922. Probable. Let us see whether we are seeking God sincerely, by comparison with the things we care about. It is probable that this meat will not poison me; it is probable that I shall not lose my lawsuit by not pressing it…

Even if it were true that grave authors and reasons were sufficient, I say that they are neither grave nor reasonable. What! A husband may make a profit of his wife, according to Molina! Is the reason he gives reasonable? And is the contrary one of Lessius reasonable too?

Will you dare, you, to trifle in this way with the king's edicts? as in saying that it is not fighting a duel to go into a field and wait for a man.

That the Church has indeed forbidden duelling, but not walking.

And usury too, but not…

And simony, but not…

And vengeance, but not…

And the sodomites, but not…

And the quam primum, the "as soon as possible", but not…

923. It is not absolution alone that remits sins in the sacrament of penance, but contrition, which is not genuine unless it seeks the sacrament.

In the same way, it is not the nuptial blessing that keeps procreation from being sin, but the desire to beget children for God, which is genuine only in marriage.

And as a contrite man without the sacrament is more disposed to absolution than an impenitent man with the sacrament, so the daughters of Lot, for example, who had only the desire for children, were purer without marriage than married people without the desire for children.

924. People without word, without faith, without honour, without truth, double of heart, double of tongue, and like, as you were once reproached, that amphibious animal of the fable which kept itself in an ambiguous state between the fish and the birds.

Port-Royal is well worth Voltigerod.

As just as your proceeding is from this angle, so unjust is it if we look at Christian piety.

It matters to kings and princes to be held in esteem for piety; and for that they must confess to you.

925. Examine the motive of the censure by the phenomena: make a hypothesis that fits them all.

The habit makes the doctrine.

[You confess so many people who confess only once a year.]

[I thought there was one opinion against another.]

[When one is so wicked as to have no remorse left, one cannot displease. You persecute Monsieur Arnauld, then, without remorse.]

I distrust this doctrine, for it is too sweet for the malice they say is in me.

I distrust their union, given their particular contradictions. I shall wait until they agree before I take sides. For one friend I would have too many enemies. I am not learned enough to answer them.

[Why did you not choose some gross heresy!]

[The wager.]

[I quite believed that one could be damned for not having had good thoughts, but to believe that nobody has any, that is new to me.]

[What is that for? To console the righteous and ward off despair? No, for no one can be in a state to believe himself righteous.

[Monsieur Chamillard would be a heretic, which is a manifest falsehood, for he has written for Monsieur Arnauld.

Those who believe they are doing right in sinning.]

In the year 1647, grace for all; in 1650, it became rarer, etc.

Luther: everything except the truth.

If there had never been such occasions in the Church; but I take my parish priest's word for it.

Only one tells the truth.

If it is the least bit inconvenient, they make others (graces), for they dispose of them as of their own handiwork. [For each occasion, its grace; for each person: grace for the great, grace for the rogues.]

In the end Monsieur Chamillard comes so close to it that, if there are steps for going down into nothingness, this sufficient grace is now at the most proximate.⁵²

[A pleasant thing, to be a heretic for that!]

There is no one who would not be surprised at it; for it has never been seen in Scripture or in the Fathers, etc.

How long has it been an article of faith, Father? At most only since the words "proximate power"; and I believe that at its birth it made this heresy, and that it was born for this one purpose alone.

[The censure forbids only speaking in this way of Saint Peter, and nothing more.]

[I am much obliged to them. They are clever people; they were afraid that the letters written to the provincials…

It is not worth the trouble, for one word.

I think they are sorcerers. They say everything except the truth. Member. Heretic. Unam sanctam.

The Enluminures, the satire on the Jesuits' almanac, have done me harm.

A proposition is good in one author and bad in another.

Yes; but then there are other bad propositions.

There are people who defer to the censure; others to reasons; and all to reasons. I am surprised, then, that you did not take the general way instead of the particular one; or at least that you did not join it to the other.

How relieved I am! No Frenchman a good Catholic.

The… Clement VIII. Paul V. Censure.

God visibly protects us.

"Man is quite mad. He cannot make a mite."

Instead of desiring grace in order to go there. A plurality of graces.

Jansenist translations.

Saint Augustine has the most of it because of the divisions among his friends. Besides a thing that may be regarded as an unbroken tradition of twelve thousand popes, councils, etc.

Monsieur Arnauld must, then, have very bad opinions, to infect those he embraces.

The censure does them this good only for when they are censured; they will fight it by saying that they are imitating the Jansenists.

926. Both parties must be heard; I have taken care to do so.

When we have heard only one party, we are always on that side; but the opposing party makes us change, whereas here the Jesuit confirms us.

Not what they do, but what they say.

It is only against me that they cry out. I am quite willing: I know to whom I must render account.

Jesus Christ was a stumbling block.

Condemnable, condemned.

Politics. We have found two obstacles to our design of relieving men: one, the inward laws, of the Gospel; the other, the outward laws, of the State and of Religion. Of the first we are masters; as for the others, here is what we have done: amplianda, restringenda, a majori ad minus, widen, narrow, from the greater to the less. Junior.

Probable. If reasons as bad as these are probable, everything will be:

First reason: Dominus actuum conjugalium, master of the conjugal acts. Molina.

Second reason: Non potest compensari, it cannot be compensated. Lessius.

Set against them not holy maxims, but abominable ones.

They reason like those who show that it is night at noon: Bauny, burner of barns.

… The Council of Trent, for priests in mortal sin: quam primum…

927. The mad idea you have of the importance of your Society has made you establish these horrible ways. It is quite plain that this is what has made you follow that of calumny, since you condemn in me as horrible the very impostures that you excuse in yourselves, because you regard me as a private person and yourselves as Imago.⁵³

It is quite plain that your praises are follies, from such follies as the privilege of being not damned.

Is it encouraging your children, to condemn them when they serve the Church?

It is a device of the devil, to divert elsewhere the weapons with which these people fought heresies.

You are bad politicians.

928. Diana. [This is very useful to us.] Fundamental corruption.

It is permissible not to give benefices that have no cure of souls to the most worthy (11). The Council of Trent seems to say the contrary; but here is how he proves it: For if that were so, all the prelates would be in a state of damnation, for they all do it that way.

The king and the pope are not obliged to choose the most worthy. If that were so, the pope and the kings would have a terrible burden.

And elsewhere, 21: If this opinion were not true, penitents and confessors would have a great deal of trouble, and that is why I hold that it should be followed in practice.

And in another place, 22, where he sets out the conditions needed to make a sin mortal, he puts in so many circumstances that one hardly sins mortally at all; and after establishing it, he cries out: Oh, how sweet and light is the yoke of the Lord!

And elsewhere, 11: One is not obliged to give alms from one's superfluity in the common necessities of the poor; if the contrary were true, most of the rich and their confessors would have to be condemned.

These reasons were making me impatient, when I said to the Father: "But what prevents us from saying that they are?" "He has foreseen that too, in this place," he answered me, "where after saying, If that were true, the richest would be damned, he adds, 22: To this Arragonius answers that so they are; and Baunez adds besides that their confessors are too. But I answer, with Valentia, another Jesuit, and other authors, that there are several reasons for excusing these rich men and their confessors."

I was delighted with this reasoning, when he capped it with this one: If this opinion were true for restitution, oh, what a lot of restitutions there would be to make!

"Oh, Father," I said to him, "what a good reason!" "Oh!" said the Father, "what an accommodating man!" "Oh, Father," I answered, "without your casuists, what a lot of people would be damned! Oh, how wide you make the way that leads to heaven! Oh, how many there are who find it! Here is a…"

929. [And they are preparing to drive out of the Church those who refuse this admission. In v…] Everyone declares that they are.

Monsieur Arnauld (and his friends) protests that he condemns them in themselves and wherever they are to be found; that if they are in Jansenius, he condemns them there; that even if they are not there, if the heretical sense of these propositions which the Pope has condemned is found in Jansenius, he condemns Jansenius.

But you are not satisfied with these protestations: you want him to affirm that these propositions are in Jansenius word for word. He has answered that he cannot affirm it, not knowing whether it is so; that he has looked for them there, and an infinity of others have, without ever finding them. They have begged you and all your people to cite the pages where they are; no one has ever done it. And yet you want to cut him off from the Church for this refusal, although he condemns everything it condemns, for this one reason, that he does not affirm that some words, or a sense, are in a book where he has never found them, and where no one will show them to him. In truth, Father, this pretext is so empty that there has perhaps never been in the Church a proceeding so strange, so unjust and so rash as…

The Church may well oblige.

One need not be a theologian to see that their heresy consists only in the opposition they make to you. I experience it in myself, and we see the general proof of it in all those who have attacked you: the parish priests of Rouen, Jansenists… of Caen.

You think your designs so decent that you make them a matter of vow.

Two years ago their heresy was the bull; last year it was inward; six months ago it was totidem, "in so many words"; now it is the sense.

Do I not see clearly that you want only to make them heretics? Holy Sacrament. Preface. Villeloin…

Jansenius. Aurelius. Arnauld. The Letters.

I quarrelled with you while speaking for others.

You are quite ridiculous to make a noise about the propositions; that is nothing. It must be understood.

With no names of authors; but as your design was known, seventy opposed it.

Date the decree.

In order that the man you had been unable to make a heretic on his own words, etc.

[That I have shown that all this is from your authors, down to the most horrible.] For everything becomes known.

[Have you nothing but that to answer, and that way of proving it?]

Either he knows that it is so, or that it is not, or he doubts; either a sinner or a heretic.

Considering only the pagans.

That same light which reveals supernatural truths reveals them without error, whereas the light that…

[A body of the rejected. All the alms boxes of Saint-Merri could be opened without your being any the less innocent.]

[And so it is not strange… False right… For my part I would rather be unjustly than.]

What reason have you for it? You say that I am a Jansenist, that Port-Royal upholds the five propositions, and that therefore I uphold them: three lies.

And I beg you not to come and tell me that it is not you who set all this in motion. Spare me the answer. I would answer you with things that would please neither you nor others.

The Pope has not condemned two things; he has condemned only the sense of the propositions; will you say that he has not condemned it? "But the sense of Jansenius is included in it," says the Pope. I see well that the Pope thinks so, because of your totidem; but he has not said it on pain of excommunication. How could he not have believed it, and the bishops of France too? You said it totidem, and they did not know that you are capable of saying it even when it is not so. Impostors, my fifteenth letter had not been seen.

How could the sense of Jansenius be in propositions that are not his?

Either it is in Jansenius, or it is not. If it is there, then he is condemned for it; if not, why do you want to have him condemned?

Let just one of your propositions of Father Escobar be condemned, and I will go carrying Escobar in one hand and the censure in the other, and make a formal argument of it.

930. That they have been treated as humanely as it was possible to do, to keep the middle way between love of the truth and the duty of charity. That piety does not consist in never rising up against one's brothers; it would be very easy, etc.

It is a false piety to keep the peace at the expense of truth; it is also a false zeal to keep the truth by wounding charity; and so they have not complained of it.

Their maxims have their time and their place.

Their vanity tends to raise itself on their errors.

Like the pagans in their faults, and like the martyrs in their punishment.

And yet they disavow none of them, of…

They had only to take the extract and disavow it.

They sanctify war.

Monsieur Bourseys. At least they cannot deny that he opposes the condemnation.

931. Casuists. A considerable alms, a reasonable penance: even if we cannot assign the just amount, we see well enough what is not. The casuists are amusing, to think they can interpret this as they do!

People who grow used to speaking ill and thinking ill.

Their great number, far from marking their perfection, marks the contrary.

The humility of one makes the pride of many.

932. He will be well condemned who is condemned by Escobar!

933. Those who wrote this in Latin speak in French. Since the harm of putting them into French had been done, the good of condemning them had to be done too.

There is one single heresy that is explained one way in the Schools and another in the world.

934. Generals. It is not enough for them to bring such morals into our temples, templis inducere mores. Not only do they want to be tolerated in the Church, but, as if they had become the stronger, they want to drive out of it those who are not of them…

Mohatra. To be astonished at it is to be no theologian.⁵⁴

Who would have told your generals that a time was so near when they would give these morals to the universal Church, and would call the refusal of these disorders war: So many and such great evils they call peace?

935. The Jesuits. The Jesuits have tried to join God to the world, and have won only the contempt of God and of the world. For on the side of conscience this is evident, and on the side of the world they are no good at intrigue. They have power, as I have often said, but only with regard to other religious orders. They will have the influence to have a chapel built and to have a station of the jubilee, not to get bishoprics and the governorships of fortresses. The position of monks is a foolish one in the world, and they hold it by their own admission (Father Brisacier. Benedictines). Yet… you bow to those more powerful than you, and you oppress with all your little influence those who have less intrigue in the world than you.

936. It is good that they commit injustices, for fear it should appear that the Molinists have acted with justice. And so they must not be spared, they are worthy of committing them.

937. The world must be very blind if it believes you.

938. I have reread them since, for I had not…

939. You never accuse me of falsehood about Escobar, because he is well known.

940. It is a matter of indifference to the heart of man whether it believes in three or four persons in the Trinity; but not, etc. And that is why they grow heated in upholding the one and not the other.

It is good to do the one; but we must not leave the other undone. The same God who told us, etc.

And so whoever believes only the one, and not the other, does not believe it because God has said it, but because his covetousness does not desire it, and he is very glad to consent to it, and so to give, without trouble, a testimony of his conscience which… But it is a false testimony.

941. End. Are we safe? Is this principle sure? Let us examine.

Testimony of oneself, null. Saint Thomas.

942. Now probabilism is necessary for the other maxims, as for that of Lamy and of the slanderer.

By their fruits: judge their faith by their morals.

Probabilism is little without the corrupt means, and the means are nothing without probabilism.

There is pleasure in being assured that we can do right and in knowing how to do right; grace, scire et posse, to know and to be able, and probabilism give it, for we can give account to God with assurance on the strength of their authors.

943. Monsieur de Condren: There is no comparison, he says, between the union of the saints and that of the Holy Trinity. Jesus Christ says the contrary.

944. There is a contradiction; for on the one hand they say that we must follow tradition, and would not dare disavow that, and on the other they will say whatever they please. People will always believe the former, since in any case not to believe it would be to go against them.

945. The day of judgement.

This, then, Father, is what you call the sense of Jansenius: this is what you give the Pope and the bishops to understand.

If the Jesuits were corrupt, and it were true that we were alone, all the more reason for us to stay.

What war has made firm, let a feigned peace not take away.

He is moved neither by blessing nor by cursing, like the angel of the Lord.

The greatest of Christian truths is under attack, which is the love of truth.

If the signature means that, let us be allowed to explain it, so that there is no ambiguity; for it must be agreed that many believe that signing marks consent.

If the reporting judge did not sign, the decree would be invalid; if the bull were not signed, it would be valid; it is not, then…

"But you may have been mistaken?" I swear that I believe I may have been mistaken; but I do not swear that I believe I have been mistaken.

One is not guilty for not believing, and one would be guilty for swearing without believing.

… fine questions, he…

I am sorry to tell you everything; I am only giving an account.

This, with Escobar, puts them at the head of the table; but they do not take it so, and show their displeasure at seeing themselves between God and the Pope.

946. There is so great a disproportion between the merit he thinks he has and his stupidity that we cannot believe he is so badly mistaken about himself.

946 bis. Annat. He plays the disciple without ignorance and the master without presumption.

947. You abuse the trust the people have in the Church, and make them believe.

948. By corrupting the bishops and the Sorbonne, if they have not had the advantage of making their judgement just, they have had that of making their judges unjust. And so, when they are condemned by them in the future, they will say ad hominem that these judges are unjust, and so refute their judgement. But that serves no purpose. For as they cannot conclude that the Jansenists are rightly condemned for the sole reason that they are condemned, so they will not then be able to conclude that they themselves are wrongly condemned because they are condemned by corruptible judges. For their condemnation will be just, not because it is given by judges who are always just, but by judges who are just in this; which will be shown by the other proofs.

949. As peace in states has no other object than to keep the goods of the peoples in safety, so peace in the Church has no other object than to keep in safety the truth, which is its good, and the treasure where its heart is; and as it would be going against the end of peace to let foreigners into a state to plunder it, without opposing them, for fear of disturbing its repose, because peace, being just and useful only for the safety of the goods, becomes unjust and pernicious when it lets them be lost, and the war that can defend them becomes both just and necessary; so in the Church, when the truth is wronged by the enemies of the faith, when they mean to tear it from the hearts of the faithful so as to make error reign there, would remaining at peace then be serving the Church or betraying it? Would it be defending it or ruining it? And is it not plain that, as it is a crime to disturb the peace where truth reigns, it is also a crime to remain at peace when truth is being destroyed? There is, then, a time when peace is just, and another when it is unjust. It is written that there is a time for peace and a time for war; and it is the interest of truth that tells them apart. But there is not a time for truth and a time for error; and it is written, on the contrary, that the truth of God endures for ever. And that is why Jesus Christ, who says that he came to bring peace, says also that he came to bring war. But he does not say that he came to bring both truth and falsehood. Truth, then, is the first rule and the last end of things.

950. After tormenting you well, they will send you home.

It is as feeble a consolation as that of the appeals against abuse, from the Church's judges to the king's courts; for a great means of abuse is (besides the fact that most people will not have the means to come from the depths of Périgord and Anjou to plead before the parlement of Paris) that they will at any hour have decrees of the Council to forbid these appeals against abuse.

For even if they cannot obtain what they ask for by it, the asking still makes their power appear, which is all the greater for having led them to ask for a thing so unjust that it is plain they cannot obtain it.

That only makes their intention better known, then, and the need there is not to authorize, by registering it, the bull they mean to make the foundation of this new establishment.

This is not a simple bull, but a foundation.

On coming out of the Palace of Justice.

The Pope forbids the king to marry his children without his permission (121; 1294).

Si volumus, 124 (1302).

951. In the bull Cum ex apostolatus officio of Paul IV, published in 1558:

"We ordain, enact, decree and define that each and every one of those who are found to have gone astray or fallen into heresy or schism, of whatever quality and condition they may be, laymen, clerics, bishops, archbishops, patriarchs, primates, cardinals, counts, marquises, dukes, kings and emperors, besides the sentences and penalties aforesaid, shall by that very fact, without any process of law or of fact, be deprived wholly and entirely, and for ever, of their orders, bishoprics, benefices, offices, kingdom, empire, and be incapable of ever recovering them.

"We leave them to the discretion of the secular power, to be punished; we grant no other grace to those who, moved by a true penitence, come back from their error, but that, by the kindness and clemency of the Holy See, they be judged to deserve to be shut up in a monastery, there to do perpetual penance on bread and water; but they shall remain for ever deprived of every dignity, order, prelacy, county, duchy, kingdom. And those who harbour and defend them shall by that very fact be judged excommunicated and infamous, deprived of every kingdom, duchy, property and possession, which shall belong by right and ownership to those who first seize them.

"If… they exterminate, they shall be justified. 23, question 5, of Urban II: We do not count them murderers who, burning with zeal for their catholic mother against the excommunicated, have happened to kill any of them."

952. As the two chief interests of the Church are the preservation of the piety of the faithful and the conversion of heretics, we are overwhelmed with grief to see the factions being formed today to bring in the errors most capable of closing for ever to heretics the entrance to our communion, and of mortally corrupting what pious and Catholic persons we have left. This undertaking, carried on so openly today against the truths of religion, and those most important for salvation, fills us not only with displeasure but also with fright and fear, because, besides the feeling every Christian must have of these disorders, we have in addition the obligation to remedy them, and to use the authority God has given us to make the peoples he has committed to us, etc.

953. A letter on the violent establishments of the Jesuits everywhere.

Supernatural blindness.

This morality, which has at its head a crucified God.

These are the ones they have vowed to obey, as Christ.

The decadence of the Jesuits.

Our religion, which is wholly divine.

A casuist, a mirror.

We are the ones…

If you think it good, it is a good sign.

It is a strange thing that there is no way of giving them the idea of religion.

A crucified God.

By making this affair public, in order to speak of the formulary, they are punished.

But what a reversal! The children love corruption, and embrace it. Their enemies abhor them.

As for the crowd of casuists, so far is it from being a ground of accusation against the Church that it is on the contrary a ground of lament for the Church.

And so that we may not be suspected, like the Jews who carry the books, which are not suspect to the Gentiles, they bring us their Constitutions.

954. Venice. What advantage will you draw from it, if from the need the princes have of it, and the horror the peoples have of it…? If they had asked for you, and to obtain it had implored the help of the Christian princes, you might make something of this request. But that for fifty years all the princes should have worked at it in vain, and that it should have taken so pressing a need to obtain it…!⁵⁵

955. A bit of a hood arms twenty-five thousand monks (751).

956. "Have you the idea of our Society that you ought to have?"

The Church subsisted so long without these questions. Others ask them, but it is not the same.

What comparison do you think there is between twenty thousand separated and two hundred million joined together, who would perish for one another? An immortal body. We stand by each other to the death (Lamy). We drive our enemies hard (Monsieur Puys).

Kings. Pope. III, Kings, 246.

Everything depends on probabilism.

The world naturally wants a religion, but a gentle one. Grant me this principle, and I will prove this to you: that the Society and the Church share the same fortune. Without this principle nothing can be done. Men do not live long in open ungodliness, nor naturally in great austerities. An accommodating religion is fit to last. People seek them out of freethinking.

I feel the urge, then, to show it to you by a strange supposition. I will say, then: even if God did not uphold us by a particular providence for the good of the Church, I mean to show you that, even speaking humanly, we are not at all… Private persons who do not wish to rule by arms, I do not know whether they could do better.

Upright and in good faith in devotion (6). Kings who nourish us (vi, 452). Hated because of their merit (4). Apol. Univ.

The decree of the Sorbonne (59). The kings, 241, 228. Jesuits hanged. Religion and learning, 112. Every man a Jesuit. Colleges, parents, friends, children to be chosen.

Poverty, ambition (253).

Chiefly the princes, the great lords who can harm and serve (257).

The useless rejected (12). A good appearance. Wealth, nobility, etc. What! Were you afraid people would fail to take them in sooner? 27.

A universal, immortal body. Affirmation for the community, great and without scruple: dangerous.

Giving one's goods to the Society, for the glory of God (47). Declarations.

Union of opinions (51, 52). Declarations: to submit to the Society, and so keep uniformity. Now today this uniformity lies in diversity, for the Society wills it.

The Constitutions (117): the Gospel and Saint Thomas. The Declarations: some accommodating theology.

Rare pious scholars (65), but today we change our minds.

Begging (74, 23).

Not to give to one's relatives, and to rely on the counsellors given by the superior (79).

Not to practise the examination (1). Declarations.

Entire poverty (2): no masses, neither for a sermon nor as alms, compensation.

The Declarations of the same authority as the Constitutions (4), end; to read the Constitutions every month.

The Declarations spoil everything (143).

Neither to urge people to give perpetual alms, nor to sue for them, nor an alms box (154). (Declarations.) Non tanquam eleemosyna, sed tanquam compensatio: not as alms, but as compensation.

But informed of everything (200, 4).

The Constitutions do not mean to deceive (190). The Declarations, interpreted, deceive.

By religion we would all be rich, without our Constitutions; and so we are poor; and, by the true religion and without them, we are strong.

Clavis Placentium. Our generals feared decline: because of outward occupations (208, 152, 15); because of the court (209, 200, 216, 218); because the safest and most authoritative opinions, Saint Thomas, etc., were not being followed (215, 218). Fees, against the Constitutions (218). Women (224, 225, 228). Princes and politics (227, 168, 177).

Probabilism. Novelty (279, 156).

Novelty. Truth.

To pass the time and divert themselves, more than to help souls (158).

Lax opinions (160).

Mortal sin into venial.

Contrition (162, 64).

Politics (162, 64).

"Whether it be lawful" (162, 182).

The comforts of life increase among the Jesuits (166). Apparent and false goods that deceive them (192, ad). Complaints of the generals: none from Saint Ignatius; none from Laynez; a few from Borgia and Aquaviva; endless ones from Mutius, etc.

Father Lemoine: ten thousand crowns outside his province.

See how weak the foresight of men is (182, 157): all the things through which our first generals feared the ruin of our Society are the very things by which it has grown: through the great, through going against our institutions, through the multitude of religious, the diversity and novelty of opinions, etc.

Politics (181).

The first spirit of the Society extinguished (184 to 189-170, 171 to 174).

Non è più quella, it is no longer what it was (Vitelescus, 180).

957. We ourselves have not been able to have general maxims. If you look at our Constitutions, you will hardly know us: they make us beggars and shut us out of courts; and yet, etc. But that is not breaking them, for the glory of God is everywhere.

There are various ways of getting there. Saint Ignatius took some, and now others. It was better at the beginning to propose poverty and retirement; it has been better afterwards to take the rest. For it would have frightened people, to begin at the top: that is against nature.

This is not to deny that the general rule is to keep to the Institutions; for otherwise they would be abused. There would be few like us, who know how to rise without vanity.

Two obstacles: the Gospel; the laws of the State. A majori ad minus. Junior. Unam sanctam. The Jansenists pay the penalty for it.

God visibly protects us against rash judgements and scruples. Falso crimine. Subtiliter. "All the truth on one side: we extend it to both."

Father Saint-Jure; Escobar; "Tanto vero" (Aquaviva, 14 December 1621); Clement and Paul V; Saint Teresa (474) (1660); the Romance of the Rose, etc.

To speak of personal vices. A fine letter of Aquaviva (18 June 1611) against probable opinions. Saint Augustine (282). And for Saint Thomas, the places where he treated the matters expressly. Climacus… (277). And Novelties. And it is no excuse for the Superiors not to have known it, for they ought to have known it (279-194-192). For morality (283, 288). Aquaviva confessed women (360). The Society blamed on the Church, for good and ill (236, 156).

958. Ep. 16 of Aquaviva: De formandis concionatoribus, on the training of preachers. 373. Longe falluntur qui ad … irrigaturae. | All the Fathers, to make them conform to his imagination, instead of forming his thought on that of the Fathers. Ep. 1 of Mutius Vitelescus. 389. Quamvis enim probe norim … et absolutum. 390. Dolet ac queritur … esse modestiam. | Modesty. 392. Lex ne dimidiata … reprehendit. | The Mass. I do not know what he means. 408. Ita feram illam … etiam irrumpat. | Politics. 409. Ad extremum pervelim circumferatur. | By a misfortune, or rather a singular good fortune, of the Society, what one does is attributed to all. 410. Querimoniae … deprehendetis, to 412. | To obey the bishops exactly; that it may not appear that we claim to measure ourselves against them, after the example of Saint Xavier. 412. Ad haec si a litibus … aviditatis. | Wills, lawsuits. 413. Patris Borgiae … illam futuram. | They exaggerate, they even invent false stories. 415. Ita res domesticas … nunc dimittis, etc. Ep. 2 of Mutius Vitelescus. 432. Quarto nonnullorum … quam ardentissime possum urgere. | Probabilism: Tueri pius potest, probabilis est, autore non caret, a pious man may defend it, it is probable, it does not lack an author. 433. Quoniam vero de loquendi licentia … aut raro plectatur. | Failure to punish slanderers. Ep. 3 of Mutius Vitelescus. 437. Nec sane dubium … nihil jam detrimenti acceperit. | That the Society may not be spoiled. 440. Ardentissime Deum exoremus … operari non est gravatus et tu fili, etc. Ezekiel 37. 441. Secundum caput … tanti facimus. | Want of obedience: to seek their own reputation. 442. Haec profecto una si deficiet … qui haec molitur, etc. | Want of obedience: seeking the support of the great. 443. Ex hoc namque vitio … importunum praebeas. | They do unseemly things, outside the state of the Society, and say that the great lords press them to it; but it is they who press the great lords, so that one must either have them as enemies if one refuses, or ruin the Society by granting it. 443. Spectabit tertium caput … mutatus est color optimus. | Chastity. 445. De paupertate … non adversentur veritati. | Poverty. Laxity of opinions contrary to the truth. 445. Nobilis quidam Romae … collocabit. 446. Faxit Deus … atque si praetermitterentur. | Vines, etc.

The bull is that of Alexander VII (1656), which declared that the five propositions were in Jansenius's book and condemned them in his sense. The Assembly of the French Clergy drew up a formulary accepting it, and the demand that priests and nuns sign it became the long crisis of Port-Royal; the "signature" in later fragments is this one. ↩
Elidere, "to crush", is the last word of a thesis maintained at Louvain in 1645 that Pascal quotes in the fifteenth Letter: that it is only a venial sin to destroy, by a false accusation, the credit of someone who speaks ill of us. Brisacier and Meynier were Jesuits who had written against Port-Royal, and the Letter shows the Jesuit d'Alby slandering Monsieur Puys, a parish priest of Lyon, and then retracting when he found that Puys was no enemy of the Society. ↩
Sufficient grace and proximate power are the catchwords of the first Provincial Letters, written in 1656 while the Sorbonne was condemning Arnauld, the theologian of Port-Royal. The Jesuits and the Dominicans agreed that all the righteous have the "proximate power" to keep the commandments, and that a "sufficient grace" is given to all men, while meaning opposite things by the words: for the Dominicans this sufficient grace did not suffice, without an efficacious grace that God does not give to all. Arnauld was condemned, among other things, for writing that grace had failed Saint Peter when he denied Christ. ↩
The Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu, "The Image of the First Century of the Society of Jesus" (Antwerp, 1640), the lavish volume in which the Jesuits celebrated their first hundred years. ↩
The mohatra contract, which the eighth Letter takes from Escobar, is a loan at interest in disguise: a man buys goods on credit at a high price and at once sells them back to the same merchant for cash at a lower one. ↩
Venice had expelled the Jesuits in 1606, in its quarrel with Pope Paul V over the Interdict, and readmitted them in 1657 at the Pope's insistence, when the Republic needed his help in its long war with the Turks over Crete. ↩

Three Books to Read Next

Selected Essays by Michel de Montaigne

Pascal's constant sparring partner. The Pensées borrow Montaigne's examples and argue with his conclusions: "It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there." This selection includes "Of Cannibals", whose Brazilians at Rouen, puzzled that grown men obeyed a child king, Pascal answers in fragment 324, and "Of Custom", which Section V takes up.
Philosophical Works by René Descartes

"I cannot forgive Descartes," Pascal wrote: God given a flick of the finger to set the world going and then no further use. Read the Discourse on Method and the Meditations to see what he was refusing, a proof of God built by reason from a single certainty, and the mechanical physics he called "useless and uncertain."
Confessions by Augustine of Hippo

The Port-Royal party took its theology from Augustine, and so does Pascal, down to the word concupiscence. Book Ten of the Confessions examines the three temptations of the First Letter of John, the craving of the flesh, the craving of the eyes and the ambition of the world, which Pascal takes up as the three concupiscences of fragment 458.