Fabre d’Olivet (continued 5)

One thing worthy of notice is that Zoroaster, who has made prayer one of the principal dogmas of his religion, has been imitated in this by Mohammed, who, unknowingly, perhaps, has borrowed a great number of things from this ancient legislator of the Parsees. It is presumable that the followers of Manes, having retired to Arabia, were responsible for these borrowings, by the opinions that they circulated there. But, it must be frankly stated, this dogma, quite in its place in the Zend-Avesta, does not appear so consistent in the Koran, for, of what use is it in a cult where the predestination of men, necessitated by the Prescient and All-Powerful Divine, delivers irresistibly the greatest part of them to an eternal damnation, on account of the original stain imprinted upon mankind by the sin of the first man? One cannot be prevented, in reflecting upon this manifest contradiction, from believing that the theosophical tradition pertaining to the free will of man, and the influencing action of Providence operating the progressive augmentation of good and the gradual diminution of evil, announced openly by Zoroaster, must have acted secretly in the mind of the theocratic legislator of Arabia. If it had not been thus, the prayers that he ordered as one of the first and most essential duties of the religion, would have been without object.

According to the doctrine of Pythagoras revealed by Hierocles, two things agree in the efficacy of prayer: the voluntary movement of our soul, and aid from heaven. The first of these things is that which seeks goodness; and the other that which shows it. Prayer is a medium between our quest and the celestial gift. One seeks, one prays in vain, if one adds not prayer to research and research to prayer. Virtue is an emanation from God; it is like a reflected image of the Divinity, the resemblance of which alone constitutes the good and the beautiful. The soul which is attached to this admirable type of all perfection is aroused to prayer by its inclination to virtue, and it augments this inclination by the effusion of the goodness which it receives by means of prayer; so that it does precisely what it demands and demands what it does.[575] Socrates was not far from the doctrine of Pythagoras in this respect; he added only, that prayer exacted much precaution and prudence, lest, without perceiving it, one demand of God great evils, in thinking to ask great blessings.

The sage [he said] knows what he ought to say or do; the fool is ignorant of it; the one implores in prayer, what can be really useful to him; the other desires often things which, being granted him, become for him the source of greatest misfortunes. The prudent man [he adds], however little he may doubt himself, ought to resign himself to Providence who knows better than he, the consequences that things must have.

This is why Socrates cited as a model of sense and reason this prayer of an ancient poet:

The prayer was, as I have said, one of the principal dogmas of the religion of Zoroaster[577]: the Persians also had the greatest confidence therein. Like the Chaldeans, they founded all magical power upon its efficacy. They still possess today certain kinds of prayers for conjuring maladies and driving away demons. These prayers, which they name tavids, are written upon strips of paper and carried after the manner of talismans.[578] It is quite well-known that the modern Jews use them in the same way. In this they imitate, as in innumerable other things, the ancient Egyptians whose secret doctrine Moses has transmitted to them.[579] The early Christians were inclined to theosophical ideas on this subject. Origen explains it clearly in speaking of the virtue attached to certain names invoked by the Egyptian sages and the most enlightened of the magians of Persia.[580] Synesius, the famous Bishop of Ptolemaïs, initiated into the mysteries, declares that the science, by means of which one linked the intelligible essences to sentient forms, by the invocation of spirits, was neither vain nor criminal, but on the contrary quite innocent and founded upon the nature of things.[581] Pythagoras was accused of magic. Ignorance and weakness of mind have always charged science with this banal accusation.[582] This philosopher, rightly placed in the rank of the ablest physicians of Greece,[583] was, according to his most devoted disciples, neither of the number of the gods, nor even of those of the divine heroes; he was a man whom virtue and wisdom had adorned with a likeness to the gods, by the complete purifying of his understanding which had been effected through contemplation and prayer.[584] This is what Lysis expressed by the following lines:

27. Instructed by them, naught shall then deceive thee; Of diverse beings thou shalt sound the essence; And thou shalt know the principle and end of All.

That is to say, that the true disciple of Pythagoras, placed (en rapport) with the gods through contemplation, arrived at the highest degree of perfection, called in the mysteries, autopsy; saw fall before him the false veil which until then had hidden Truth, and contemplated Nature in its remotest sources. It is necessary, in order to attain to this sublime degree, that the intelligence, penetrated by the divine ray of inspiration, should fill the understanding with a light intense enough to dissipate all the illusions of the senses, to exalt the soul and release it wholly from things material. Thus it was explained by Socrates and Plato.[585] These philosophers and their numerous disciples put no limit to the advantages of autopsy, or theophany, as they sometimes named this highest degree of the telestic science. They believed that the contemplation of God could be carried so far during this same life, that the soul became not only united to this Being of beings, but that it was mingled and blended with it. Plotinus boasted having experienced the joy of this beatific vision four times, according to Porphyry, who himself claimed to have been honoured with it at the age of sixty-eight.[586] The great aim of the mysteries was to teach the initiates the possibility of this union of man with God, and to indicate to them the means. All initiations, all mythological doctrines, tended only to alleviate the soul of the weight of material things, to purify it, so that, desirous of spiritual welfare, and being projected beyond the circle of generations, it could rise to the source of its existence.[587] If one examines carefully the different cults which still dominate upon earth, one will see that they have not been animated by any other spirit. The knowledge of the Being of beings has been offered everywhere as the aim of wisdom; its similitude, as the crown of perfection; and its enjoyment, as the object of all desires and the goal of all efforts. The enumeration of its infinite faculties has varied; but when one has dared fix one’s attention upon the unity of its essence, one has always defined it as has Pythagoras: the principle and the end of all things.

The Spirit whence proceed the created beings [say the Brahmans], by which they live after being emanated from it, toward which they aspire, and in which they are finally absorbed, this Spirit is that, to the knowledge of which thou shouldst aspire, the Great Being.[588] —​The Universe is one of its forms.[589] —​It is the Being of beings: without form, without quality, without passion; immense, incomprehensible, infinite, indivisible, incorporal, irresistible: no intelligence can conceive of its operations and its will suffices to move all intelligences.[590] —​It is the Truth and the Science which never perish.[591] —​Its wisdom, its power, and its plan, are as an immense and limitless sea which no being is in condition either to traverse or to fathom. There is no other God than it. The Universe is filled with its immensity. It is the principle of all things without having principles.[592] God is one,[593] eternal, like unto a perfect sphere which has neither beginning nor end. He rules and governs all that exists by a general providence, resultant of fixed and determined principles. Man ought not to seek to penetrate the nature or the essence of this Ineffable Being: such a research is vain and criminal.—

Thus do the Hindu sages express themselves in sundry places. They commend aspiring to the knowledge of the Being of beings, making oneself worthy to be absorbed in its bosom; and forbid, at the same time, seeking to penetrate its nature. I have already said that such was the doctrine of the mysteries. I am about to add an important reflection in order to cast some light upon a doctrine which, at first glance, appears contradictory.

Man, who aspires by the inner movement of his will, to attain to the highest degree of human perfection, and who, by the purification of his understanding, and the acquisition of celestial virtues, puts himself in a state to receive the truth, must observe that the higher he rises in the intelligible sphere, the nearer he approaches to the unfathomable Being whose contemplation must make his happiness, the less he can communicate the knowledge of it to others; for truth, coming to him under intelligible forms more and more universalized, can never be contained in the rational or sentient forms that he might give it. Here is the point where many mystic contemplators have gone astray. As they had never adequately fathomed the triple modification of their being, and as they had not known the intimate composition of the human Quaternary, they were ignorant of the manner in which the transformation of ideas was made, as much in the ascendant progression as in the descendant progression; so that, confusing continually understanding and intelligence, and making no difference between the products of their will according as it acted in one or the other of its modifications, they often showed the opposite of what they intended to show; and instead of the seers that they might, perhaps, have been, they became visionaries. I could give a great many examples of these aberrations; but I will limit myself to a single one, because the man who furnishes it for me, immeasurably great on the side of intelligence, lacked understanding and felt keenly himself, the weakness of his reason. This man, whose audacious gaze has penetrated as far as the divine sanctuary, is a German shoemaker of obscure birth, called Jacob Boehme. The rusticity of his mind, the roughness of his character, and more than all that, the force and the number of his prejudices, render his works almost unintelligible and therefore repel the savants. But when one has the patience and talent necessary to separate the pure gold from its dross and from its alloy, one can find there things which are nowhere else. These things, which present themselves nearly always under the oddest and most absurd forms, have taken them by passing from his intelligence to his instinct, without his reason having had the force to oppose itself. This is how he artlessly expresses this transformation of ideas: “Now that I have raised myself so high, I dare not look back for fear that giddiness may seize me … for as long as I ascend, I am convinced of my impulse; but it is not the same when I turn my head and when I wish to descend; then I am troubled, I am bewildered, it seems to me that I shall fall.”[594] And in truth he fell so rapidly that he did not perceive, either the terrible disparity between his ideas and his expressions, nor the manifest contradictions into which his prejudices had drawn him.

These grave disadvantages, which do not strike the vulgar, were perfectly understood and appreciated by the sages. The institutors of the mysteries were not ignorant of them and it is for this that they had imposed the most absolute silence upon the initiates and particularly upon the epopts, to whom they gave their highest teachings. They made them feel readily that intelligible things can only become sentient by being transformed, and that this transformation requires a talent and an authority even, which cannot be the appanage of all men.

I am now at the close of my reflection. The diverse cults established upon earth are but the transformations of ideas; that is to say, particular forms of religion, by means of which a theocratic legislator or theosophic sage renders sentient that which is intelligible, and puts within reach of all men what, without these forms, would have been only within reach of a very small number; now, these transformations can only be effected in three ways, according to the three faculties of the human Ternary; the fourth, which concerns its Quaternary or its relative unity, being impossible. I beg the reader to recall what I have said, touching the intimate composition and movement of this Quaternary, and grant me a little attention.

The aim of all the cults being to conduct to the knowledge of the Divinity, they differ only by the route that they travel in its attainment, and this route depends always upon the manner in which the Divinity has been considered by the founder of the cult. If this founder has considered it in his intelligence, he has seen the Divinity in its universal modifications, and, therefore, triple, as the Universe; if he has considered it in his understanding, he has seen it in its creative principles, and, therefore, double as Nature; if he has considered it in his instinct, he has seen it in its faculties and its attributes, and, therefore, infinite, as Matter; if he has considered it, finally, in its proper volitive unity, acting at once in its three modifications, he has seen this same Divinity according to the force and movement of his thought, either in its absolute essence or in its universal essence; that is, One in its cause, or One in its effects. Examine closely what I have said and see if there exists a single cult upon the face of the earth that you may not connect with one of the kinds whose origin I have indicated.

I have said that the Divinity, considered in the human intelligence, is shown under the emblem of the universal Ternary; hence all the cults which are dominated by three principal gods as in India,[595] in Greece and in Italy,[596] three principal modifications in the same God, as in China,[597] in Japan, in Tibet and among the considerable followers of Fo-Hi or Buddha.[598] This cult, which has been called that of the Tritheists, is one of the most widespread on earth, and one which has mingled most easily with the others. It pleases the imagination and gives to wisdom great power to rise to intelligible truths.

I have said that the Divinity, considered in the human understanding, is manifest under the emblem of two natural principles: hence, all the cults wherein two opposed beings appear, as in the cult of Zoroaster. This cult, which is rarely encountered as pure as among the ancient Persians, or among the followers of Manes, mingles readily with tritheism and even polytheism: it was quite recognizable in Egypt and among the Scandinavians, and much more involved among the Indians, Greeks, and Latins. This cult could be considered as a natural Diarchy, and those who follow it, Diarchists. Judgment and reason conform very well in it; one also sees ordinarily, profound reasoners and skeptics, inclining there nolens volens.[599] Its abuse leads to atheism; but it offers great means, when one knows how to make good use of it, to penetrate the essence of things and succeed to the explanation of natural phenomena.

Again I say, that the Divinity considered in the instinct is presented under the emblem of material infinity: hence, all cults where, by a contrary movement, the intelligible becomes sentient and the sentient intelligible; as when the attributes and faculties of the Divinity are particularized and personified, and as the agents of Nature, the parts of the Universe and the individual beings themselves, are deified. This cult, to which I have given the name of Polytheism, is everywhere, under different forms and under different names, the portion of the vulgar. More or less apparent it insinuates itself in the midst of the other two, multiplies the images of the intellectual modifications and the natural principles, and whatever attentions the theosophists bring to forestall its invasion, end by stifling utterly the spirit of it beneath the material covering which envelops them. This cult, the cradle of all religions, with which the other two can never entirely dispense, which nourishes and lives in their life, is also the tomb. It pleases singularly that faculty of man which is developed first, sense perception; it aids the development of instinct and can, by the sole medium of common sense, lead to the knowledge of the natural principles. Its abuse precipitates peoples into idolatry and superstition; its good use arouses the talents and gives birth to heroic virtues. One becomes artist or hero through the exaltation of Polytheism; savant or philosopher through that of Diarchy; and sage or theosophist through that of Tritheism. These three cults, whether pure or variously mixed, are the only ones in which transformation may be possible; that is to say, which may be clothed in ostensible forms and enclosed in any sort of ritual. The fourth cult, which is founded upon the absolute unity of God, is not transformable. This is the reason.

The Divinity considered in the volitive unity of man, acting at the same time in its principal faculties, is manifested finally, in its absolute essence, or in its universal essence; One in its cause, or One in its effects: thence, not only all public cults, but all secret mysteries, all doctrines mystic and contemplative; for how can that which has no likeness to anything be represented? How render sentient that which is beyond all intelligence? What expressions will be consistent with that which is inexpressible, with that which is more ineffable than silence itself? What temples will one raise to that which is incomprehensible, inaccessible, unfathomable? The theosophists and sages have realized these difficulties; they have seen that it was necessary to suppress all discourse, to set aside all simulacra: to renounce all enclosures, to annihilate finally all sentient objects or to be exposed to give false ideas of the absolute essence of a Being that neither time nor space can contain. Many have dared the undertaking. One knows, in delving into ages long since past, that the ancient Magians of Persia erected no temple and set up no statue.[600] The Druids acted in the same manner.[601] The former invoked the Principle of all things upon the summits of mountains; the latter, in the depths of the forests. Both deemed it unworthy of the divine Majesty to enclose it within precincts and to represent it by a material image.[602] It even appears that the early Romans shared this opinion.[603] But this cult, entirely intellectual and destitute of forms, could not subsist long. Perceptible objects were needed by the people, on which they might place their ideas. These objects, even in spite of the legislator who sought to proscribe them, insinuated themselves.[604] Images, statues, temples were multiplied notwithstanding the laws which prohibited them. At that time if the cult did not undergo a salutary reform, it was changed, either into a gross anthropomorphism, or into an absolute materialism: that is to say, that a man of the people being unable to rise to the divine Unity, drew it down to his level; and the savant, being unable to comprehend it and believing nevertheless to grasp it, confused it with Nature.

It was to evade this inevitable catastrophe that the sages and theosophists had, as I have said, made a mystery of the Unity of God, and had concealed it in the inmost recesses of the sanctuaries. It was only after many trials, and not until the initiate was judged worthy to be admitted to the sublime degree of autopsy, that the last veil was lifted to his gaze, and the principle and end of all things, the Being of beings, in all its unfathomable Unity, was delivered to his contemplation.[605]

28. If Heaven wills it, thou shalt know that Nature, Alike in everything, is the same in every place.

I have already said that the homogeneity of Nature was, with the unity of God, one of the greatest secrets of the mysteries. Pythagoras founded this homogeneity upon the unity of the spirit by which it is penetrated and from which, according to him, all our souls draw their origin.[606] This dogma which he had received from the Chaldeans and from the priests of Egypt was admitted by all the sages of antiquity, as is proved at great length by Stanley and the astute Beausobre.[607] These sages established a harmony, a perfect analogy between heaven and earth, the intelligible and the sentient, the indivisible substance and the divisible substance; in such a manner that that which took place in one of the regions of the Universe or of the modifications of the primordial Ternary was the exact image of that which took place in the other. This idea is found very forcibly revealed by the ancient Thoth, called Hermes Trismegistus,[608] by the Greeks, in the table of Emerald which is attributed to him.

In truth, and without fiction, in truth, in truth, I say to you, that things inferior are like unto the superior; both unite their invincible forces to produce one sole thing, the most marvellous of all, and as all things are emanated by the will of one unique God, thus all things whatsoever must be engendered by this sole thing,—​by a disposition of Universal nature.[609]

I must say, however, that it is upon the homogeneity of Nature that were founded in the principle all the so-called occult sciences of which the principal four, relating to the human Quaternary, were Theurgy, Astrology, Magic, and Chemistry.[610] I have already spoken of the astrological science, and I have given sufficient evidence of what I think regarding the ridiculous and petty ideas concerning it that the modems have conceived. I will refrain from speaking of the other three, on account of the prolixities into which the discussions that they would provoke might lure me. In another work I will endeavour to show that the principles upon which they were supported differed greatly from those which superstition and blind credulity have given them in times of ignorance; and that the sciences taught to the initiates in the ancient sanctuaries, under the names of Theurgy, Magic, or Chemistry, differed much from what the vulgar have understood in later times by the same words.

29. So that, as to thy true rights enlightened, Thine heart shall no more feed on vain desires.

That is to say, that the disciple of Pythagoras, having attained through knowledge of himself to that of truth, ought to judge sanely of the possibility or impossibility of things, and to find in wisdom itself that just mean which he has found in virtue and in science. Equally distant from that blind credulity which admits and seeks without reflection the things most incompatible with the laws of Nature, and from that presumptuous ignorance which rejects and denies without examination all those things which issue from the narrow circle of its empirical notions; he should understand with exactness the limits and the forces of Nature, know instantly what is contained therein or what exceeds them, and not form any vow, any project, or any enterprise beyond his power.

30. Thou shalt see that the evils which devour men Are of their choice the fruit.…

Undoubtedly one of the most important things for man to understand is the nearest cause of his evils, so that, ceasing from murmuring against Providence, he may blame only himself for the misfortunes of which he is the proper artisan. Ignorance, always weak and presumptuous, concealing its own mistakes, holds responsible, with their consequences, the things which are most foreign there: thus the child which hurts itself, threatens with his voice and strikes with his hand the wall against which he has stumbled. Of all errors this is the most common. Likewise he acknowledges with as much difficulty his own wrongs as he accuses with ease those of others. This baleful habit of imputing to Providence the evils which afflict humanity has furnished, as we have seen, the strongest arguments to the skeptics to attack its influence, and to undermine thus in its foundation the very existence of the Divinity. All peoples have been guilty of this[611]; but the moderns are, as I believe, the only ones who coldly and without passion, in order to sustain certain opinions that they have embraced, have raised systematically their ignorance concerning the cause of evil, and made an irresistible fatality proceed from the All-Powerful and divine Prescience, which drawing man on to vice and misfortune, damns him by force; and by a consequence determined by the will of God, delivers him to eternal sufferings.[612] Such were those among the Christians of the fifth century, who were named Predestinarians on account of their terrible system. Their opinion, it is true, was condemned by the councils of Arles and Lyon[613]; but they declared that the church fell into inconsistency, since the sentiment in this respect, being exactly conformable with that which Saint Augustine had advanced against the Pelagians, this church could not condemn the one without condemning the other and therefore, without deciding in favour of the opposed doctrine which they had already condemned. It is certain that the Predestinarians were right on this last point, as well as Gotescalc, Baius, and Jansenius, who, with the book of Saint Augustine in hand, proved it later on, by causing in this church, at different times, troubles more or less violent on the subject.

This is the moment to complete the proofs of what I advanced in my Seventh Examination, that the liberty of man can be established only by the sole theosophical tradition, and the assent that all the sages of the earth have given to it; and that there is no doctrine, which, becoming separated, does not abandon the Universe to the irresistible impulse of an absolute fatality. I have shown sufficiently the emptiness of all the cosmogonical systems, whether their authors have founded them upon a sole principle or upon two, upon spirit or upon matter; I have sufficiently indicated the danger that would have ensued from divulging the secret dogma of divine Unity, since this disclosure drew with it the necessity of explaining the origin of Good and Evil, which was impossible; I have cited the example of Moses, and I have demonstrated as a decisive point in this matter that those of his followers who rejected the oral tradition of this great man, to attach themselves to the literal meaning only of his Sepher, fell into fatalism and were led to make God himself the author of Evil; finally I have announced that Christianity and Islamism, issuing alike from the Mosaic doctrine, have not been able to evade the dogma of predestination: this dogma, although often repulsed by the Christian and Mussulman doctors, alarmed at its consequences, is shown, none the less, from the facts. The Koran which teaches it openly exempts me from other proofs in defence of the Mussulmans. Let us turn to the Christians.

It is certain that one of the greatest men of the primitive church, Origen, perceiving to what consequences the explanation of the origin of Evil led, by the way in which it was vulgarly understood, according to the literal translation of the Sepher of Moses, undertook to bring all back to allegory, recalling Christianity being born to the theosophical tradition pertaining to the free will of man[614]; but his books, wherein he exposed this tradition according to the doctrine of Pythagoras and Plato,[615] were burned as heretical, by the order of Pope Gelasius.[616] The church at that time paid little attention to the blow dealt by Origen, occupied as it was with examining the principal dogmas of incarnation, of the divinity of Jesus, of the consubstantiality of the Word, of the Unity of its person and the duality of its nature; but when, following the energetic expression of Plucquet, the flame of conflagration had passed over all these opinions, and when the waves of blood had drenched the ashes, it was necessary to offer new food for its activity. An English monk named Pelagius,[617] born with an ardent and impetuous mind, was the foremost to attack this thorny question of the liberty of man, and, wishing to establish it, was led to deny original sin.

Man [he said] is free to do good or evil: he who tries to lay the blame of his vices on the weakness of nature, is unjust: for what is sin, in general? Is it a thing that one may evade, or not? If one cannot evade it, there is no evil in committing it and then it does not exist: if one can evade it, it must be evil to commit it and therefore it exists: its very existence is born of the free will, and proves it.[618] The dogma of original sin [continued Pelagius] is absurd and unjust to God; for a creature which does not exist would not be an accomplice of a bad action; and it outrages divine justice, to say that God punishes him as guilty of this action.[619] Man [added Pelagius] has therefore a real power of doing good and evil, and he is free in these two respects. But the liberty of doing a thing supposes necessarily the union of all causes and of all conditions requisite for doing that thing; and one is not free regarding an effect, every time that one of the causes or conditions naturally exigent for producing this effect is lacking. Therefore, to have the liberty of seeing the subjects, it is necessary not only that the sense of sight be well developed, but also that the subjects be discriminated, and placed at an equitable distance.[620]

This far, the doctrine of Pelagius was wholly similar to that of Pythagoras, as explained by Hierocles[621]; but it differs from it afterwards, in what the English monk asserted, that since man is born with the liberty of doing good and evil, he receives from nature and unites in him all the conditions and all the causes naturally necessary for good and evil; which robs him of his most beautiful prerogative,—​perfectibility; whereas Pythagoras held, on the contrary, that these causes and these effects were only accorded to those who, on their part, concurred in acquiring them, and who, by the work that they have done for themselves in seeking to know themselves, have succeeded in possessing them more and more perfectly.

However mitigated the doctrine of Pelagius might be, it appeared still to accord too much with free will and was condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities, who declared, through the medium of several councils, that man can do nothing of himself without the aid of grace. Saint Augustine, who had been the soul of these councils, pressed by the disciple of Pelagius to explain the nature of this grace and to say how God accorded it to one man rather than to another without being induced by the difference of their merits, replied that man being in the (masse de perdition), and God having no need of them, and being furthermore independent and all-powerful, he gave grace to whom he willed, without the one to whom he did not give it having the right to complain; everything coming to pass as a result of his will, which had foreseen all and determined all.[622] Assuredly one could not establish more forcibly the necessity of all things, nor submit men to a sterner fatality, since the want of grace deprived them, not only of virtue in the fleeting course of this life, but delivered them without hope to the torments of an eternal hell. But Saint Augustine, who obeyed a severe and consistent reason, felt very well that he could not speak otherwise, without renouncing the dogma of original sin and overthrowing the foundation of Christianity. All the rigid Christians, all those who, at different times, have undertaken to restore Christianity to its constitutive principles, have thought as Saint Augustine, and although the church, alarmed at the terrible inferences that were drawn from the canonical doctrine, may have essayed to temper it, by condemning, as I have said, the Predestinarians and by approving of the persecutions directed against Gotescalc; and, at the time when Luther drew in his reform a great part of Christendom toward the dogma of predestination, this did not prevent Baius, who remained faithful to orthodoxy, from preaching the same dogma; nor Calvin, soon after, from adding new lights to what Luther had left doubtful, and Jansenius, finally, corroborating what Baius had only outlined, from raising in the very midst of the church that formidable faction which all the united efforts of the Pope and the Jesuits have been unable to convict of erring in the doctrine of Saint Augustine, which it has sustained with a force worthy of a better cause.

According to Calvin, who of all of them expresses himself most clearly, the soul of man, all of whose faculties are infected with sin, lacks force to resist the temptation which lures him on toward evil. The liberty of which he prides himself is a chimera; he confounds the free with the voluntary, and believes that he chooses freely because there is no constraint, and that he wills to do the evil that he does.[623] Thus following the doctrine of this reformer, man, dominated by his vicious passions, can produce of himself only wicked actions; and it is to draw him from this state of corruption and impotence that it was necessary that God should send his son upon earth to redeem him and to atone for him; so that it is from the absence of liberty in man that Calvin draws his strongest proofs of the coming of Christ: “For,” he said, “if man had been free, and if he had been able to save himself, it would not have been needful that God should offer up his Son in sacrifice.”[624]

This last argument seems irresistible. Besides when the Jesuits had accused Calvin and his followers of making God the author of sin, and of destroying thus all idea of the Divinity[625] they knew better than to say how it can be otherwise accomplished. They would not have been able, without doing a thing impossible for them—​that is, without giving the origin of evil. The difficulty of this explanation, which Moses, even as I have said, has enveloped with a triple veil, has in no wise escaped the fathers of the primitive church. They have well felt that it was the important point whereon depended the solution of all other questions. But how can one attempt even the explanation? The most enlightened among them had agreed that it is an abyss of nature that one would not know how to fathom.[626]

31. … that these unfortunates Seek afar the goodness whose source within they bear.

The source of all goodness is wisdom, and wisdom begins with the knowledge of oneself. Without this knowledge, one aspires in vain to real goodness. But how is it obtainable? If you interrogate Plato upon this important point, he will respond to you, that it is in going back to the essence of things—​that is to say, in considering that which constitutes man in himself. “A workman, you will say to this philosopher, is not the same thing as the instrument which he uses; the one who plays the lyre differs from the lyre upon which he plays. You will readily agree to this, and the philosopher, pursuing his reasoning, will add: And the eyes with which this musician reads his music, and the hands with which he holds his lyre, are they not also instruments? Can you deny, if the eyes, if the hands are instruments, that the whole body may likewise be an instrument, different from the being who makes use of it and who commands?” Unquestionably no, and you will comprehend sufficiently that this being, by which man is really man, is the soul, the knowledge of which you ought to seek. “For,” Plato will also tell you, “he who knows his body, only knows that it is his, and is not himself. To know his body as a physician or as a sculptor, is an art, to know his soul, as a sage, is a science and the greatest of all sciences.”[627]

From the knowledge of himself man passes to that of God; and it is in fixing this model of all perfection that he succeeds in delivering himself from the evils which he has attracted by his own choice.[628] His deliverance depends, according to Pythagoras, upon virtue and upon truth.[629] The virtue, that he acquires by purification, tempers and directs the passions; the truth, which he attains by his union with the Being of beings, dissipates the darkness with which his intelligence is obsessed; and both of them, acting jointly in him, give him the divine form, according as he is disposed to receive it, and guide him to supreme felicity.[630] But how difficult to obtain this desired goal!

32. For few know happiness: playthings of the passions, Hither, thither tossed by adverse waves, Upon a shoreless sea, they blinded roll, Unable to resist or to the tempest yield.

Lysis shows in these lines what are the greatest obstacles to the happiness of man. They are the passions: not the passions in themselves, but the evil effects that they produce by the disordered movement that the understanding allows them to take. It is to this that the attention must be directed so that one should not fall into the error of the Stoics. Pythagoras, as I have said, did not command his disciples to destroy their passions, but to moderate their ardour, and to guide them well. “The passions,” said this philosopher, “are given to be aids to reason; it is necessary that they be its servants and not its masters.” This is a truth that the Platonists and even the Peripatetics have recognized, by the evidence of Hierocles.[631] Thus Pythagoras regarded the passions as instruments of which the understanding makes use in raising the intellectual edifice. A man utterly deprived of them would resemble a mass inert and immovable in the course of life; it is true that he might be able not to become depraved, but then he could not enjoy his noblest advantage, which is perfectibility. Reason is established in the understanding to hold sway over the passions; it must command them with absolute sovereignty, and make them tend towards the end that wisdom indicates. If it should not recognize the laws that intelligence gives it, and if, presumptuously, it wishes, instead of acting according to given principles, to lay down principles itself, it falls into excess, and makes man superstitious or skeptic, fanatic or atheist; if, on the contrary, it receives laws from the passions that it ought to rule, and if weak it allows itself to be subjugated by them, it falls into error and renders man stupid or mad, brutish in vice, or audacious in crime. There are no true reasonings except those admitted by wisdom; the false reasonings must be considered as the cries of an insensate soul, given over to the movements of an anarchical reason which the passions confuse and blind.[632]

Pythagoras considered man as holding the mean between things intellectual and sentient, the lowest of the superior beings and the highest of the inferior, free to move either toward the heights or the depths, by means of his passions, which bring into action the ascending or descending movement that his will possesses with potentiality; sometimes being united with the immortals and, through his return to virtue, recovering the lot which is his own, and other times plunging again into mortal kind and through transgression of the divine laws finding himself fallen from his dignity.[633] This opinion, which had been that of all the sages who had preceded Pythagoras, has been that of all the sages who have followed him, even of those among the Christian theosophists whose religious prejudices have removed them farthest from his doctrine. I shall not stop to give the proofs of its antiquity; they are to be found everywhere, and would be superfluous. Thomas Burnet, having vainly sought for the origin without being able to discover it, decided that it was necessary that it should descend from heaven.[634] It is certain that one can only with difficulty explain how a man without erudition, like Boehme, never having received this opinion from anyone, has been able to explain it so clearly. “When one sees man existing,” says this theosophist, “one can say: Here all Eternity is manifested in one image.”[635]

The abode of this being is an intermediate point between heaven and hell, love and anger; that, of the things to which he is attached, becomes his kind.… If he inclines toward the celestial nature, he assumes a celestial form, and the human form becomes infernal if he inclines toward hell; for as the mind is, so is the body. In whatever way the mind projects itself, it shadows forth its body with a similar form and a similar source.[636]

It is upon this principle, which one finds still everywhere diversely expressed, that the dogma of the transmigration of souls is founded. This dogma, explained in the ancient mysteries,[637] and received by all peoples,[638] has been to such an extent disfigured in what the moderns have called Metempsychosis, that it would be necessary to exceed considerably the limits of these Examinations in order to give an explanation which could be understood. Later I will endeavour to expose my sentiment upon this mystery, when I treat of Theurgy and other occult sciences to which it is allied.

33. God! Thou couldst save them by opening their eyes.

Lysis here approaches openly one of the greatest difficulties of nature, that which in all time has furnished to the skeptics and to the atheists the weapons that they have believed most formidable. Hierocles has not concealed it in his Commentaries, and he expresses it in these terms: “If God is able to bring back all men to virtue and to happiness, and if he does not will to do so, is God therefore unjust and wicked? Or if he wills to bring them back and if he is unable, is God therefore weak and impotent?”[639] Long before Hierocles, Epicurus seized upon this argument to support his system, and had extended it without augmenting its force. His design had been to prove by its means that, according as he had advanced it, God does not interfere with the things of this world, and that there is, consequently, no Providence.[640] Lactantius, thinking that he was answering this, has quoted from Epicurus and has afforded Bayle, the most learned and the most formidable of modern skeptics, the occasion for demonstrating that, until now, this terrible argument had remained unrefuted notwithstanding all the efforts made for its overthrow.

This indefatigable reasoner said:

The evil exists; man is wicked and unhappy: everything proves this sad truth. History is, properly speaking, only a miscellany of the crimes and adversities of mankind. However, at intervals, there have been seen shining some examples of virtue and happiness. There is, therefore, a mixture of evils and of moral and physical goodness.… Now, if man is the work of a sole principle, sovereignly good, sovereignly holy, sovereignly potential, how is he exposed to the maladies of cold, heat, hunger, thirst, pain, and sorrow? How has he so many wicked inclinations? How does he commit so many crimes? Can the sovereign sanctity produce a criminal creature? Can the sovereign bounty produce an unfortunate creature?[641]

Bayle, content with his anti-providential declaration, believes that he has triumphed over all the dogmatists of the world; but whilst he recovers his breath, observe that he admits a mixture of good and evil, and allow him to continue.

“Origen,” he said, “asserts that evil has come from the wicked use of the free will. And why has God allowed man to have so pernicious a free will?” “Because,” Origen answers, “an intelligent creature who had not enjoyed free will would have been immutable and immortal as God.” What pitiable reason! Is it that the glorified souls, the saints, are equal to God, being predestined to good, and deprived of what is called free will, which, according to Saint Augustine, is only the possibility of evil when the divine grace does not incline man towards the good?”[642]

Bayle, after several outbursts of this sort, finishes by declaring that the way in which evil is introduced under the rule of a sovereign being, infinitely good, infinitely potential, infinitely holy, is not only inexplicable but even incomprehensible.[643] Bayle is right on this point; also I have always said, in the course of this work, that the origin of evil, comprehensible or not, could never be divulged. But the matter of the origin of evil is not the question here. Bayle was too good a reasoner not to have felt it, not to have seen that the argument of Epicurus, and all the elocution with which he furnished it, did not bear upon the cause of evil itself, but upon its effects; which is quite different. Epicurus did not demand that the origin of evil be explained to him, but the local existence of its effects—​that is to say, one should state clearly to him, that if God was able and willing to take away the evil from the world, or to prevent it from penetrating there, why he did not do so. When any one’s house is the prey of flames, one is not so insensate as to be concerned with knowing what the essence of the fire is, and why it burns in general, but why it burns in particular; and why, being able to extinguish it, one has not done so. Bayle, I repeat, was too clever a logician not to have perceived this. This distinction was too simple to have escaped him; but seeing that its very simplicity had concealed it from the doctors of the Christian church, he was content to affect an ignorance of it to his adversaries, to have the pleasure, so precious to a skeptic such as he, of seeing them one after another exhaust themselves upon the argument of Epicurus:

God, whether he wills to take away evil, and can not; whether he can and does not will to; whether he does not will it nor can; whether he wills it and can. If he wills it and can not, he is weak; which does not accord with God. If he can and does not will it, he is wicked; which accords with him no better. If he does not will it nor can, he is wicked and weak, which could not be. If he can and wills it, that which alone is worthy of his divinity, whence then come the evils? Or why does he not take them away?[644]

Lactantius, to whom Bayle owed his argument, had thought to overthrow it, by saying that God, being able to take away evil, did not will it; so as to give to men, by its means, wisdom and virtue.[645] But the skeptic philosopher had no trouble to prove that this answer was worth nothing, and that the doctrine that it contained was monstrous; since it was certain that God was able to give wisdom and virtue without the means of evil; since he had even given them, following the belief of Lactantius himself, and that it was because he had renounced them that man had become subject to evil. Saint Basil was no more fortunate than Lactantius. Vainly he asserted that the free will, whence results evil, had been established by God himself in the design that this All-powerful Being had for being loved and freely served. Bayle, attacking him in his own faith, asked him, if God is loved and served by force in Paradise, where the glorified souls do not enjoy the fatal privilege of being able to sin.[646] And with the same blow with which he struck him, he brought down Malebranche who had said the same thing.[647] The downfall of Malebranche, and the desire to avenge him, bestirred in vain a crowd of audacious metaphysicians. Bayle pierced them one after another with the weapons of Epicurus, whose steel they did not know, and died with the glory of their having said the greatest piece of stupidity which could be said upon a like matter: namely, that it was possible that God might prescribe another end, in creating the world, than to make his creatures happy.[648]

The death of Bayle did not extinguish the ardour that his works had excited. Leibnitz, justly displeased with all that had been said, thought he could answer the skeptic philosopher better; and raising himself with a great force of genius to that pristine moment when God formed the decree of producing the world, he represented the Being of beings choosing among an infinity of worlds, all possible, all present at his thought, the actual world, as most conformable to his attributes, the most worthy of him, the best finally, the most capable of attaining to the greatest and most excellent end that this all-perfect Being may have been able to purpose.[649] But what is this magnificent and worthy end which the Divinity has chosen, this goal which not alone constitutes the actual world such as it is, but which also presents it to the mind, according to the system of Leibnitz, as the best of possible worlds? This philosopher does not know.

We are not able [he said] to penetrate it, for we are too limited for this; we can only infer, by reasoning with the insight that God has given us, that his bounty only has been able to purpose, by creating the greatest possible number of intelligent creatures, by endowing them with as much knowledge, happiness, and beauty as the Universe might admit without going away from the immutable order established by his wisdom.[650]

Up to this point, the system of Leibnitz sustained itself, and was able even to lead to a relative truth; but its work was not accomplished. It was necessary to explain, following the demand of Epicurus so much repeated by Bayle, how in this immutable order established by the divine Wisdom in this best of worlds, that physical and moral evil make felt such severe effects. The German philosopher, instead of stopping at these effects, and stating the primordial cause, inaccessible to his researches, still scorned it, as had all the adversaries of Bayle, and asserted that physical and moral evils were necessary to maintain this immutable order, and entered into the plan of this best of worlds. Fatal assertion which overthrew his system instantly: for, how dares one to say that evil is necessary, and above all necessary not only in what is best, but in what is the best possible!

Now, whatever may be the primordial cause of Evil, concerning which I can not nor do I wish to explain myself, until the triple veil, extended over this formidable mystery by Moses, may have been raised, I will say, according to the doctrine of Pythagoras and Plato, that its effects can be neither necessary, nor irresistible since they are not immutable and I will reply to the much-lauded argument of Epicurus, that by this very thing they are neither necessary nor irresistible; God can and will remove them and he does remove them.

And if certain disciples of Bayle, astonished by a reply so bold and so new, asked me when and how God works so great a benefit, of which they have perceived no traces, I will say to them: by time and by means of perfectibility. Time is the instrument of Providence; perfectibility, the plan of its work; Nature, the object of its labour; and Good, its result. You know, and Bayle himself agrees, that there exists a mixture of good and evil: and I repeat to you here what I have already said[651]; and I maintain that this good emanates from Providence, and is its work, and replaces in the sphere where it has been transported, an equivalent amount of evil which it has transmuted into good; I maintain that this good continues augmenting itself unceasingly and the evil which corresponds to it, diminishing in an equal proportion; I maintain finally that, having left absolute evil and having arrived at the point where you now are, you will arrive by the same road and by the same means, that is, by favour of time and of perfectibility, from the point where you are to absolute Good, the crown of perfection. This is the answer to your question, When and how does God take away evils? Still if you claim you cannot see any of this, I will reply that it is not for you, arguing with the weakness of your view, to deny the progress of Providence, you whose imperfect senses mistake all the time even the subjects within your range, and for whom the extremes are touching so forcibly, that it is impossible for you to distinguish upon the same dial the movement of the needle which traverses it in a cycle, from the movement of that which traverses it in less than a second; one of these needles appearing to you immobile and the other not existing for you.[652]

If you deny what I affirm, bring other proofs of your denial than your weakness and cease, from the little corner where Nature has placed you, presuming to judge its immensity. Still if you lack negative proofs, wait a moment more, and you shall have from me affirmative proofs. But if, going back, and wishing to sustain the argument of Epicurus which is giving way, you believe that you will succeed by saying that this philosopher had not asked, in the case where God was able and willed to remove evils, how he removed them, but why he did not remove them; I will reply to you that this question is a pure sophism; that the how is implicitly contained in the why, to which I have replied in affirming that God, being able and willing to remove evils, removes them. And if you recall an objection that I have already overthrown concerning the manner in which he removes them, and that bringing you to judge of his ways, you would assume that he ought to remove them, not in a lapse of time so long that you would be unconscious of it, but in the twinkling of an eye; I would reply that this way would be to you quite as imperceptible as the other; and that furthermore, that which you demand exists, since the lapse of time of which you complain, however long it may appear to you, is less than the twinkling of an eye for the Being of beings who employs it, being absolutely nihil compared to Eternity. And from there I will take occasion to tell you that evil, in the way in which it is manifest in the world, being a sort of malady, God, who alone can cure it, knows also the sole remedy which may be applicable to it and that this sole remedy is time.

It seems to me that however little attention you may have given to what I have just said, you ought to be tempted to pass on from the knowledge of the remedy to that of the malady; but it is in vain that you would demand of me an explanation concerning its nature. This explanation is not necessary to overthrow the argument of Epicurus and that is all that I have wished to do. The rest depends upon you and I can only repeat with Lysis:

“God! Thou couldst save them by opening their eyes.”

34. But no: ’tis for the humans of a race divine, To discern Error, and to see the Truth.

Hierocles who, as I have said, has not concealed the difficulty which is contained in these lines, has raised it, by making evident that it depends upon the free will of man, and by putting a limit upon the evils which he attracts to himself by his own choice. His reasoning coinciding with mine can be reduced to these few words. The sole remedy for evil, whatever may be the cause, is time. Providence, minister of the Most High, employs this remedy; and by means of perfectibility which results from it, brings back all to good. But the aptitude of the maladies for receiving it acts in proportion to this remedy. Time, always the same, and always nihil for the Divinity is, however, shortened or lengthened for men, according as their will coincides with the providential action or differs therefrom. They have only to desire good, and time which fatigues them will be lightened. But what if they desire evil always, will time therefore not be finished? Will the evils therefore have no limit? Is it that the will of man is so inflexible that God may not turn it towards the good? The will of man is free beyond doubt; and its essence, immutable as the Divinity whence it emanates, knows not how to be changed, but nothing is impossible for God. The change which is effected in it, without which its immutability may in no wise be altered, is the miracle of the All-Powerful. It is a result of its own liberty, and if I dare to say it, takes place by the coincidence of two movements, whose impulse is given by Providence; by the first, it shows to the will, goodness; by the second, it puts it in a fitting position to meet this same goodness.

35. Nature serves them.…

Lysis expresses it thus: Nature, by the homogeneity which, as I have stated, constitutes its essence, teaches men to see beyond the range of their senses, transports them by analogy from one region to another and develops their ideas. The perfectibility which is manifested through the grace of time is called perfection; for the more a thing is perfected the more perfect it becomes. The man who perceives this is struck by it, and if he reflect he finds truth, as I have openly stated, and to which Lysis was content with making allusion, on account of the secret of the mysteries that he was forced to respect.

It is this perfectibility manifested in Nature, which gives the affirmative proofs that I have promised, touching the way in which Providence removes with time the evils which afflict men. These are the proofs de facto. They cannot be challenged without absurdity. I know well that there have been men who, studying Nature within four walls, and considering its operations through the extremely narrow prism of their ideas, have denied that anything might be perfectible, and have asserted that the Universe was immobile because they have not seen it move; but there does not exist today a genuine observer, a naturalist whose learning is founded upon Nature, who does not invalidate the decision of these pretended savants, and who does not put perfectibility in the rank of the most rigorously demonstrated truths.

I shall not quote the ancients on a subject where their authority would be challenged; I shall even limit myself, to evade prolixities, to a small number of striking passages among the moderns. Leibnitz, who ought less than any other to admit perfectibility, since he had founded his system upon the existence of the best of worlds possible, has, however, recognized it in Nature, in advancing that all the changes which are operated there are the consequence of both; that everything tends toward its improvement, and that therefore the present is already teeming with the future.[653] Buffon, inclining strongly toward the system of atoms, ought also to be much opposed, and yet he has been unable to see that Nature, in general, tends far more toward life than toward death, and that it seems to be seeking to organize bodies as much as is possible.[654] The school of Kant has pushed the system of perfectibility as far as it could go. Schelling, the disciple of most consequence of this celebrated man, has followed the development of Nature with a force of thought which has perhaps passed the mark. The former, has ventured to say that Nature is a sort of Divinity in germ, which tends to apotheosis, and is prepared for existence with God, by the reign of Chaos, and by that of Providence.[655] But those are only speculative opinions. Here are opinions founded upon facts.

As soon as one considers the Earth observingly, the naturalists say, one perceives striking traces of the revolutions that it has sustained in anterior times.[656]

The continents have not always been what they are today, the waters of the globe have not always been distributed in the same manner. The ocean changes insensibly its bed, undermines the lands, divides them, rushes over some, and leaves others dry. The islands have not always been islands. The continents have been peopled, with living and vegetating beings, before the present disposition of the waters upon the globe.[657]

These observations confirm what Pythagoras and the ancient sages have taught upon this subject[658]:

Besides [these same naturalists continue], the greater part of the fossil bones that have been assembled and compared are those of animals different from any of the species actually known; has the kingdom of life therefore changed? This one cannot refuse to believe.[659] As Nature proceeds unceasingly from the simple to the composite, it is probable that the most imperfect animals should have been created before the tribes, higher in the scale of life. It even seems that each of the animal classes indicates a sort of suspension in the creative power, an intermission, an era of repose, during which Nature prepared in silence the germs of life which should come to light in the course of the cycles. One might thus enumerate the epochs of living Nature, epochs remote in the night of ages and which have been obliged to precede the formation of mankind. A time may have been when the insect, the shell, the unclean reptile, did not recognize the master in the Universe and were placed at the head of the organized bodies.[660]

These observers add:

It is certain that most perfect beings come from less perfect, and that they are obliged to be perfected in the sequence of generations. All animals tend towards man; all vegetables aspire to animality; minerals seek to draw nearer to the vegetable.… It is evident that Nature, having created a series of plants and animals, and having stopped at man who forms the superior extremity, has assembled in him all the vital faculties that it had distributed among the inferior races.[661]

These are the ideas of Leibnitz. This celebrated man had said: “Men hold to animals; these to plants, and those to fossils. It is necessary that all the natural orders form only one sole chain, in which the different classes hold strictly as if they were its links.”[662] Several philosophers have adopted them,[663] but none have expressed them with more order and energy than the author of the article Nature, in Le Nouveau Dictionnaire d’Histoire naturelle.

All animals, all plants are only the modifications of an animal, of a vegetable origin.… Man is the knot which unites the Divinity to matter, which links heaven and earth. This ray of wisdom and intelligence which shines in his thoughts is reflected upon all Nature. It is the chain of communication between all beings. All the series of animals [he adds in another place] present only a long degradation from the proper nature of man. The monkey, considered either in his exterior form or in his interior organization, resembles only a degraded man; and the same suggestion of degradation is observed in passing from monkeys to quadrupeds; so that the primitive trend of the organization is recognized in all, and the principal viscera, the principal members are identical there.[664]

Who knows [observes elsewhere the same writer] who knows if in the eternal night of time the sceptre of the world will not pass from the hands of man into those of a being more worthy of bearing it and more perfect? Perhaps the race of negroes, today secondary in the human specie, has already been queen of the earth before the white race was created.… If Nature has successively accorded the empire to the species that it creates more and more perfect, why should she cease today.… The negro, already king of animals, has fallen beneath the yoke of the European; will the latter bow the head in his turn before a race more powerful and more intelligent when it enters into the plans of Nature to ordain his existence? Where will his creation stop? Who will place the limits of his power? God alone raises it and it is His all-powerful hand which governs.[665]

These striking passages full of forceful ideas, which appear new, and which would merit being better known, contain only a small part of the things taught in the ancient mysteries, as I shall perhaps demonstrate later.

36. … Thou who fathomed it. O wise and happy man, rest in its haven. But observe my laws, abstaining from the things Which thy soul must fear, distinguishing them well; Letting intelligence o’er thy body reign.

Lysis, speaking always in the name of Pythagoras, addressed himself to those of the disciples of this theosophist, who had reached the highest degree of perfection, or autopsy, and the felicity of their welfare. I have said often enough in the course of these Examinations, what should be understood by this last degree, so that I need not refer to it here. I shall not even pause upon what has reference to the symbolic teachings of Pythagoras, the formularies and dietetics that he gave to his disciples, and the abstinences that he prescribed for them, my design being to give incidentally a particular explanation of it, for the purpose of not further prolonging this volume. It is well known that all of the eminent men, as many among the ancients as among the moderns, all the savants commendable for their labours or their learning, are agreed in regarding the precepts of Pythagoras as symbolical, that is, as containing figuratively, a very different meaning from that which they would seem to offer literally.[666] It was the custom of the Egyptian priests from whom he had imbibed them,[667] to conceal their doctrine beneath an outer covering of parables and allegories.[668] The world was, in their eyes, a vast enigma, whose mysteries, clothed in a style equally enigmatical, ought never to be openly divulged.[669] These priests had three kinds of characters, and three ways of expressing and depicting their thoughts. The first manner of writing and of speaking was clear and simple; the second, figurative; and the third, symbolic. In the first, they employed characters used by all peoples and took the words in their literal meaning; in the second, they used hieroglyphic characters, and took the words in an indirect and metaphorical meaning; finally in the third, they made use of phrases with double meaning of historic and astronomical fables, or of simple allegories.[670] The (chef-d’œuvre) of the sacerdotal art was uniting these three ways, and enclosing under the appearance of a clear and simple style, the vulgar, figurative, and symbolic meaning. Pythagoras has sought this kind of perfection in his precepts and often he has succeeded; but the one of all the theosophists instructed in the sanctuaries of Thebes or of Memphis, who has pushed farthest, this marvellous art, is beyond doubt Moses. The first part of his Sepher, vulgarly called Genesis, and that should be called by its original name of Bereshith, is in this style, the most admirable work, the most astounding feat of strength that is possible for a man to conceive and execute. This book, which contains all the science of the ancient Egyptians, is still to be translated and will only be translated when one will put oneself in a condition to understand the language in which it has primitively been composed.

37. So that, ascending into radiant Ether, Midst the Immortals, thou shalt be thyself a God.

Here, said Hierocles, in terminating his commentaries, is the blissful end of all efforts: here, according to Plato, is the hope which enkindles, which sustains the ardour of him who fights in the career of virtue: here, the inestimable prize which awaits him.[671] It was the great object of the mysteries, and so to speak, the great work of initiation.[672] The initiate, said Sophocles, is not only happy during his life, but even after his death he can promise himself an eternal felicity.[673] His soul purified by virtue, said Pindar, unfolds in those blessed regions where reigns an eternal springtime.[674] It goes on, said Socrates, attracted by the celestial element which has the greatest affinity with its nature, to become united with the immortal Gods and to share their glory and their immortality.[675] This deification was, according to Pythagoras, the work of divine love; it was reserved for him who had acquired truth through his intellectual faculties, virtue through his animistic faculties, and purity through his instinctive faculties. This purity, after the end of his material body, shone forth and made itself known in the form of a luminous body, that the soul had been given during its confinement in its gloomy body; for as I finish these Examinations, I am seizing the only occasion which may still be presented of saying that, this philosopher taught that the soul has a body which is given according to his good or bad nature, by the inner labour of his faculties. He called this body the subtle chariot of the soul, and said that the mortal body is only the gross exterior. He adds, “The care of the soul and its luminous body is, in practicing virtue, in embracing truth and abstaining from all impure things.”[676]

This is the veritable aim of the symbolic abstinences that he prescribes, even as Lysis insinuates moreover quite clearly in the lines which make the subject of my preceding Examination, when he said that it is necessary to abstain from the things which are injurious to the development of the soul and to distinguish clearly these things.

Furthermore, Pythagoras believed that there existed celestial goodness proportionate to each degree of virtue, and that there is for the souls, different ranks according to the luminous body with which they are clothed. The supreme happiness, according to him, belongs only to the soul which has learned how to recover itself, by its intimate union with the intelligence, whose essence, changing its nature, has become entirely spiritual. It is necessary that this soul be raised to the knowledge of universal truths, and that it should have found, as far as it is possible for it, the Principle and the end of all things. Then having attained to this high degree of perfection, being drawn into this immutable region whose ethereal element is no more subjected to the descending movement of generation, it can be united by its knowledge to the Universal All, and reflect in all its being the ineffable light with which the Being of beings, God Himself, fills unceasingly the Immensity.

Footnotes

Questa, per affeto, tenerissima lettera mando

A te …

Alma figlia di Giove, inclita madre

Del gran germe d’Enea, Venere bella,

Degli uomini piacere e degli Dei:

Tu, che sotto il volubili e lucenti

Segni del cielo, il mar profundo, e tutta

D’animai d’ogni specie orni la terra:

... etc.

“Now scarce the Trojan fleet with sails and oars

Had left behind the fair Sicilian shores.…”

Æneid, b. i., v. 50.

“Tune ev’ry string and ev’ry tongue,

Be thou the Muse and subject of our song.…”

St. Cecilia’s Day, i., 10.

“How often have I loiter’d o’er thy green,

Where humble happiness endeared each scene.”

The Deserted Village, i., 7.

“Avant que le temps fût, Ymir avait été;

Ni la mer, ni nes vents n’existaient pas encore;

Il n’était de terre, il n’était point de ciel:

Tout n’était qu’un abîme immense, sans verdure.”

Render to the Immortal Gods the consecrated cult;

Guard then thy faith (2): Revere the memory

Of the Illustrious Heroes, of Spirits demi-Gods (3).

“L’homme de bien, paisable au moment qu’il expire,

Tourne sur ses bourreaux un œil religieux,

Et bénit jusqu’au bras qui cause son martyre:

Tel l’arbre de Sandal que frappe un furieux,

Couvre de ses parfums le fer qui le dechire.”

“We accuse the gods of our evils, while we ourselves

By our own errors, are responsible for them.”

… Πρόεισιν ὁ θεῖος ἀριθμὸς

Μονάδος ἐκ κευθμῶνος ἀκηράτου, ἔς τ’ ἂν ἵκηται

Τετράδ’ ἑπὶ ζαθέην, ἣ δὴ τέκε μητέρα πάντων,

Πανδοχέα, πρέσβειραν, ὅρον περὶ πᾶσι τιθεῖσαν,

Ἄτροπον, ἀκαμάτην, δεκάδα κλείουσί μιν ἁγνήν·

“Accordez-moi, grands Dieux, ce qui m’est nécessaire,

Soit que je pense ou non à vous le demander;

Et si de mes désirs l’objet m’était contraire,

Daignez, grands Dieux, daignez ne pas me l’accorder.”

Transcriber’s Note

Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged unless indicated below.

Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and were moved to the end of the book. Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, or partially printed letters, were corrected. Final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were added. Duplicate letters at line endings or page breaks were removed. Minor adjustments to punctuation and diacriticals were made for consistency.

The Golden Verses, midway through the book, were formated in the original on facing pages, with Greek, verso, and French, recto; translation in English was presented as footnotes. The text of the Greek and French was consolidated as units, the English retained as footnotes. The numbers (1) through (36) in the English footnotes relate to the numbered sections of the discussion of the Golden Verses that follow the poem.

In footnote [125], accent grave over the letter c is noted within brackets, thus: [`c]. In footnote [226], the x above the o in the third line of the poem verse in Icelandic is indicated as [=x]o. Anchors were missing to footnotes [371], [539], and [656]; they were added where they likely belong.

Corrections to Greek: ἄγχις to ἄγχιστ ὅϛις to ὅστις

Corrections to Phoenician/Hebrew: יוך to יון [282]: אשר־יהזה to אשר־יהוה