It is reasonable that we attribute the ease of believing and allowing oneself to be persuaded to simplicity and ignorance. I seem to have learned in the past that belief was like an impression made on our soul; and, the more it became softer and offered less resistance, the easier it was to impress something on it.
“As the scale of the balance must necessarily sink under the weight placed upon it, so must the mind yield to evident things.” (Cicero)
If your soul is empty and without counterweight, it bends more easily under the weight of the first persuasion. That is why children, the vulgar, women and the sick are more likely to be led by the ears. But also, on the other hand, it is a foolish presumption to scorn and condemn as false what does not seem plausible to us. This is a typical vice of those who think they have some superiority over the common people. I was once like that, and if I heard talk of spirits returning, or of predicting future events, enchantments, witchcraft, or any other story that I couldn’t get my teeth into,
“Dreams, witches, miracles, magic charms, Nocturnal specters, and Thessalian charms” (Horace)
I felt compassion for the poor people deceived by these follies. And now I find that I am at least as much to be pitied myself. Experience has shown me nothing above my first beliefs, and my curiosity has not been satisfied; but reason has taught me that to condemn so resolutely something as false and impossible is to give oneself the advantage of having in one’s head the boundaries and limits of the will of God and the power of our mother nature; and that there is no greater folly in the world than to reduce them to the measure of our capacity and sufficiency.
If we call what our reason cannot reach monsters or miracles, how many of them are continually presented to our eyes? Let us consider through what clouds and by what groping we are led to the knowledge of most things that are in our hands: we shall certainly find that it is rather habit than knowledge that robs us of their strangeness,
“But no one now, so tired of seeing are our eyes, Deigns to look up at the bright temples of the skies.” (Lucretius)
These things, if they were presented to us again, we would find them as incredible or more incredible than any others,
”If they were here for the first time for men to see, If they were set before us unexpectedly, Nothing more marvelous than these things could be told, Nothing more unbelievable for men of old.” (Lucretius)
He who had never seen a river thought that the first one he came across was the ocean. And the things that are known to us as the greatest, we consider to be the extremes that nature achieves in this respect,
“A fair sized stream seems vast to one who until then Has never seen a greater; so with trees, with men. In every field each man regards as vast in size. The greatest objects that have come before his eyes.” (Lucretius)
“The mind becomes accustomed to things by the habitual sight of them, and neither wonders nor inquires about the reasons for the things it sees all the time.” (Cicero)
The novelty of things encourages us more than their greatness to seek their causes.
We must judge with more reverence of this infinite power of nature and with more gratitude of our ignorance and weakness. How many unlikely things are attested by trustworthy people, of which, if we cannot be persuaded, we must at least leave them in abeyance: for to condemn them as impossible is to claim, through reckless presumption, to know the limits of possibility. If one fully understood the difference between the impossible and the unusual, and between what is against the course of nature and against the common opinion of men, by not believing rashly, nor also not disbelieving easily, one would observe the rule of: Nothing too much, commanded by Chilo.
When we find, in Froissard, that the Count of Foix learned, in Bearn, of the defeat of King John of Castile at Juberoth the day after it happened, and the means he alleges, we can laugh at it; and likewise when our annals say that Pope Honorius, on the very day that King Philip Augustus died at Mante, had his public funeral and ordered them to be held throughout Italy. For the authority of these witnesses is not, by any chance, of sufficient rank to keep us in check.
But what if Plutarch, in addition to several examples he cites from antiquity, says that there is certain knowledge that, in the time of Domitian, the news of the battle lost by Antonius in Germany several days later, was published in Rome and spread throughout the world on the same day that it had been lost; and if Caesar maintains that it has often happened that fame has preceded the event: shall we not say that these simple people allowed themselves to be led by the crowd, for not being as far-sighted as we are? Is there anything more delicate, more clear and more lively than Pliny’s judgment, when he pleases to put it into play, anything further removed from vanity?
I leave aside the excellence of his knowledge, of which I have less to say: in what way do we surpass him? However, there is no such a small schoolboy who does not convince him of falsehood, and who does not want to teach him about the progress of works of nature. When we read, in Bouchet, of the miracles of the relics of Saint Hilary, so be it: his reputation is not great enough to deny us the license to contradict him. But to condemn all such stories in one fell swoop seems to me to be singularly impudent.
The great Saint Augustine testifies to having seen, on the relics of Saint Gervais and Protase, in Milan, a blind child recovered his sight; a woman, in Carthage, was cured of cancer by the sign of the cross that a newly baptized woman made to her; Hesperius, one of his acquaintances, had driven away the spirits that infested his house with a little earth from the Sepulchre of our Lord, and, this earth having since been transported to the Church, a paralytic was suddenly cured; a woman in a procession, having touched a sprig of St. Stephen’s chaste in a procession, and having rubbed her eyes with it, recovered her sight, which had been gradually lost; and several other miracles, which he himself claimed to have witnessed. For which shall we accuse him and the two Saint Bishops, Aurelius and Maximinus, whom he calls for his records?
Is it ignorance, simplicity, ease, or malice and imposture? Is there a man in our century so impudent as to think he is comparable to them, either in virtue and piety, or in knowledge, judgment and sufficiency?
“Who, though they brought forth not proof, might crush me by their mere authority.” (Cicero)
It is a dangerous boldness and one with consequences, in addition to the absurd temerity that it entails in terms of itself, to despise what we do not understand. Because after you have established the limits of truth and falsehood according to your fine understanding, and it turns out that you necessarily have to believe things that are even stranger than what you deny, you have already forced yourself to abandon them.
Now what seems to me to bring so much disorder into our consciences, into these troubles in which we find ourselves, is religion, this dispensation that Catholics make of their beliefs. They seem to be very moderate and understanding when they leave their opponents none of the articles that are under debate. But, besides the fact that they do not see what advantage it is to the one who charges you to begin to yield to him and to pull you back, and how much this encourages him to those articles that they choose as the lightest are sometimes very important.
Either we must submit completely to the authority of our ecclesiastical police, or completely dispense with it. It is not for us to establish the degree of deference we owe them. And what is more, I can say this from experience, having once exercised this freedom of my choice and particular judgment, nonchalantly setting aside certain points of observance of our Church, which seem to have a face that is either more vain or more strange, coming to communicate them to learned men, I have found that these things have a massive and very solid foundation and that it is only foolishness and ignorance that makes us receive them with less reverence than the rest.
How much contradiction do we not feel in our own judgment? How many things that were articles of faith for us yesterday are fables for us today? Glory and curiosity are the two scourges of our soul. The first leads us to stick our nose into everything, and the second makes us afraid of leaving anything unresolved or undecided.