I propose formless and unresolved fantasies, as do those who publish dubious questions, to be debated in schools: not to establish the truth, but to seek it. And I submit them to the judgment of those who have the task of regulating not only my actions and my writings, but also my thoughts. Both condemnation and approval will be acceptable and useful to me, holding as execrable anything said by me ignorantly or inadvertently against the holy precepts of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church, in which I die and in which I was born. And yet, always deferring to the authority of their censure, which can do anything to me, I thus rashly meddle in all sorts of discussions, like the one here. I don’t know if I’m wrong, but, since, by a special favor of divine goodness, a certain form of prayer has been prescribed for us and dictated word for word by the mouth of God, it has always seemed to me that we should have more regular recourse to it than we do.
And, if I am to believe it, at the beginning and end of our meals, when we get up and go to bed, and in all our private affairs, to which we have been accustomed to add prayers, I would like to see the Lord’s Prayer used by Christians, if not always, then at least always. The Church can extend and diversify the prayers according to the needs of our instruction: for I know well that it is always the same substance and the same thing. But this one should be given the privilege of being continually on the lips of the people: for it is certain that it says all that is needful, and is most suitable for all occasions. It is the only prayer that I use for everything, and I repeat it instead of changing it. That is why I have no other in my memory as well as that one.
I am currently thinking about where we got this error of turning to God in all our plans and undertakings, and calling on him for all kinds of needs and in whatever place our weakness requires help, without considering whether the occasion is just or unjust; and of writing his name and his power, in whatever state and action we may be, however vicious it may be. He is indeed our one and only protector, and can do all things to help us; but, even if he deigns to honor us with this sweet paternal alliance, he is nevertheless as just as he is good and as he is powerful. But he uses his justice much more often than his power, and favors us according to the reason of the former, not according to our requests. Plato, in his laws, makes three kinds of injurious belief of the Gods: That there are none; that they do not meddle in our affairs; that they refuse nothing to our wishes, offerings and sacrifices. The first error, in his opinion, never lasted unchangeably in man from his childhood to his old age.
The next two can suffer from constancy. His justice and his power are inseparable. For nothing let us implore his strength in a bad cause. We must have a clear conscience, at least at the moment when we pray to him, and free from vicious passions; otherwise we present to him the rods with which to chastise us. Instead of making amends for our fault, we double it, showing to the one from whom we must ask forgiveness an affection full of irreverence and hatred. That is why I do not readily praise those whom I see praying to God more often and more habitually, if the actions that accompany the prayer do not show me some improvement and reformation,
If a nocturnal adulterer, The time of the Holy Season, the sails are covered with a hood. (Juvenal)
And the life of a man who combines devotion with an execrable life seems in no way more reprehensible than that of a man who conforms to himself but is dissolute in all other respects. Yet our Church daily denies entry and company to those whose morals are obstinately marked by some conspicuous wickedness. We pray by custom and habit, or, to put it better, we read or pronounce our prayers. It is only a matter of form. And I am displeased to see three crosses made at the blessing, as much at the grace (and I am even more displeased that it is a sign that I have in reverence and continual use, especially at the bow), and meanwhile, all the other hours of the day, to see them occupied with hatred, avarice, injustice.
To vices their hour, to God his hour, as if by compensation and composition. It is a miracle to see such diverse actions continue, of such a similar nature that there is no sense of interruption or alteration at the very confines and transition from one to the other. What prodigious consciousness can give rest, nourishing in the same seed, of a society so harmonious and so peaceful, crime and the judge? A man whose lewdness constantly rules his head, and who judges it most odious to the divine sight, what does he dictate to God when he speaks to him of it? He ponders; but suddenly he recoils. If the object of divine justice and its presence struck as he dictated, and chastised his soul, however short the penance, fear itself would so often reject his thought that he would immediately find himself master of those vices that are habitual and fierce in him.
But what then! Those who spend their whole life on the fruit and emolument of sin that they know to be mortal? How many jobs and assignments have we received, the essence of which is vicious. And he who, confessing to me, recited to me having made a profession for a whole age and the effects of a religion that he considered damnable and contradictory to that which he had in his heart, so as not to lose his credit and the honor of his positions: how did he suffer this discourse in his courage? Of what language do they speak on this subject to divine justice? Their repentance consisting of visible and manageable reparation, they lose the means to plead it both to God and to us. Are they so bold as to ask for forgiveness without satisfaction and without repentance?
I believe that the same thing happens to the former as to those here; but obstinacy is not so easy to convince. This sudden, violent contrariness and volatility of opinion that they feign to us seems to me to be a miracle. They represent to us the state of an indigestible agony. How fantastic the imagination seemed to me, of those who, in past years, had the habit of reproaching anyone who shone with any clarity of mind, professing the Catholic religion, that it was a pretense, and even held, to give it credit, whatever it apparently dictated, that he could not fail to have his belief reformed along their lines. An unpleasant illness, to believe oneself so strongly, that one is persuaded that one cannot believe the opposite. And even more unpleasant is to be persuaded of such a spirit, which prefers I know not what disparity of present fortune to the hopes and threats of eternal life.
You can believe me on that. If nothing else should have tempted my youth, the ambition of the hazard and difficulty that followed this recent undertaking would have played a large part in it. It seems to me that it is not without good reason that the Church forbids the promiscuous, reckless and indiscreet use of the holy and divine songs that the Holy Spirit dictated to David. God should only be mixed into our actions with reverence and attention full of honor and respect. This voice is too divine to have any other use than to exercise the lungs and please our ears: it must be produced by the conscience, not the tongue. It is not right that a shop boy should be allowed, amidst these vain and frivolous thoughts, to occupy himself with them and play with them.
Nor is it certainly right to see the Holy Book of the sacred mysteries of our faith troubled by a dirty kitchen and cooking. They were once mysteries; now they are trifles and frolics. Such a serious and venerable study should not be handled in a passing and tumultuous manner. It must be a deliberate and staid action, to which one must always add the preface of our office: Hearts up and bring to it the body itself arranged in a bearing that shows particular attention and reverence. It is not everyone’s study, it is the study of those who are devoted to it, whom God calls to it. The wicked and the ignorant become worse. It is not a story to be told, it is a story to be revered, feared and adored. What pleasant people, who think they have made it accessible to the people by putting it into popular language. Is it only the words they do not understand that they hear in what they read? Shall I say more?
To bring it closer to this little, they push it away. Pure ignorance, handed down to others, was much more beneficial and more knowledgeable than this verbal and vain science, the nurse of presumption and temerity. I also believe that the freedom of each individual to dispel such a religious and important word into so many kinds of idioms is much more dangerous than useful. The Jews, the Mohammedans, and almost all others, have espoused and revered the language in which their mysteries were originally conceived; and alteration and change are forbidden: not without reason. Are we sure that in Basque and in Brittany there are enough judges to establish this translation made into their language?
The universal Church has no more difficult or solemn judgment to make. In preaching and speaking, the interpretation is vague, free, changeable, and partial; thus it is not the same. One one of our Greek historians rightly accuses his century of the fact that the secrets of the Christian religion were spread far and wide, in the hands of the lowest artisans; that anyone could discuss them and say what they meant; and that it should be a great shame to us, who, by the grace of God, enjoy the pure mysteries of piety, to let them be profaned in the mouths of ignorant and common people, seeing that the Gentiles forbade Socrates, Plato and the wisest to speak and inquire about the things committed to the Priests of Delphi. It also dictated that the factions of the Princes on the subject of Theology are armed, not with zeal, but with anger; that zeal is akin to divine reason and justice, behaving in an orderly and moderate manner; but that it turns into hatred and envy, and produces, instead of wheat and grapes, ivy and nettles, when it is driven by human passion.
And rightly too, this other, advising the Emperor Theodosius, said that disputes do not so much lull the schisms of the Church to sleep as awaken them and encourage heresies; that nevertheless it was necessary to flee all contentions and dialectical arguments, and to refer neatly to the prescriptions and formulas of the faith established by the ancients. And the Emperor Androdicus, having met in his palace two great men engaged in a dispute with Lopadius on one of our points of great importance, rebuked them to the point of threatening to throw them into the river if they continued. Children and women, in our day, govern the oldest and most experienced on ecclesiastical laws, where Plato’s first of these laws forbids them from inquiring only about the reason for civil laws that are to take the place of divine ordinances; and, allowing the old to communicate among themselves and with the magistrate, he adds: provided that this is not in the presence of young people and lay persons.
A bishop has left it in writing that, on the other side of the world, there is an island that the ancients called Dioscoride, blessed with fertility of all kinds of trees and fruits and wholesome air: whose people are Christian, having churches and altars adorned only with crosses, without other images; great observers of fasts and feasts, exact in paying tithes to the priests, and so chaste that none of them can acknowledge having known a woman in his life; moreover, so content with his fortune that in the middle of the sea he is ignorant of the use of ships, and so simple that, of the religion he so thoughtfully observes, he does not understand a single word: an incredible thing for those who do not know the Pagans, so devout idolaters, to know of their Gods only their name and their statue. The prologue to Menalippe, a tragedy by Euripides, began thus:
O Jupiter, for of thee I know nothing but the name.
I have also seen, in my time, complaints in some writings that they are purely human and philosophical, without any mixture of theology.
Whoever says on the contrary, it would not be without some reason: That the divine doctrine holds its place better apart, as Queen and dominatrix; That it must be principal in everything, suffragant and subsidiary; And that by chance the examples would be drawn from grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, more appropriately moreover than from such a holy subject, as also the arguments of the Theatres, games and public spectacles; That divine reasons are considered more venerably and reverently alone and in their own style, than when paired with human discourse; That one sees more often this fault that Theologians write too humanly, than this other that humanists write too little theologically: Philosophy, as St. Chrysostom said, is gradually banished from the holy school, as a useless servant, and deemed unworthy of seeing, only in passing, from the entrance, the sanctuary of the holy Treasures of celestial doctrine; That human speech has its lower forms and should not use the dignity, majesty, regency, of divine speech.
I leave it to him, for me, to say, with undisciplined words, fortune, destiny, accident, luck and misfortune, and the Gods and other phrases, according to his fashion. I propose human fantasies and my own, simply as human fantasies, and considered separately, not as arrested and regulated by celestial ordinance, incapable of doubt and altercation: a matter of opinion, not a matter of faith; what I say according to me, not what I believe according to God, as children propose their essays: unteachable, not teaching; in a secular way, not clerical, but always very religious. And would one not also say without appearing to, that the ordinance to only intervene very reservedly in writing about Religion to all others than those who make it an express profession, would not lack some image of utility and justice; and, for me withq, on the off chance, to keep quiet about it?
I have been told that those same people who are not like us, nevertheless forbid the use of the name of God in their common speech. They do not want it to be used as an interjection or an exclamation, neither as a testimony nor as a comparison: in which I find they are right. And, in whatever way we call upon God in our business and society, it must be seriously and religiously. There is, it seems to me, such a speech in Xenophon, where he shows that we must pray to God less often, especially since it is not easy for us to put our soul so often in that regulated, reformed and devout setting where it must be to do so; otherwise our prayers are not only vain and useless, but vicious. Forgive us, we say, as we forgive those who have offended us. What do we mean by that, if not that we offer him our soul free of vengeance and resentment? However, we call on God and his help in the plotting of our faults, and invite him to injustice.
Which, unless you are seduced, you cannot commit to the gods. (Persius)
The avaricious pray to him for the vain and superfluous conservation of their treasures; the ambitious, for their victories and the fulfillment of their passions; the thief uses him to help them overcome the hazards and difficulties that stand in the way of their villainous endeavors, or thanks him for the ease with which they have been able to rob a passer-by. At the foot of the house they are going to rob or burn down, they say their prayers, with cruel, lustful and avaricious intentions and hopes.
This very thing with which you are trying to push Jupiter’s ear, Say, I have done it, Staio, for Jupiter, oh good one, let him cry out. (Persius)
The Queen of Navarre, Marguerite, tells of a young prince, and, although she does not name him, his greatness has made him quite recognizable, that going to a romantic assignation, and to sleep with the wife of a Parisian lawyer, his path leading through a church, he never passed through this holy place, going or returning from his undertaking, without saying his prayers and orations. I leave it to you to judge, her soul filled with this beautiful thought, to what she employed divine favor: however, she alleges this as a testimony of singular devotion.
But this is not the only proof that could be used to verify that women are hardly suited to deal with theological matters. A true prayer and a religious reconciliation of ourselves to God cannot come from an impure soul, even one subjected to the domination of Satan. He who calls on God for assistance while he is in the grip of vice is like the pickpocket who would call on the law for help, or like those who invoke the name of God to bear false witness:
Silently whispering evil wishes; We conceive. (Lucan)
There are few men who would dare to expose the secret requests they make to God,
It is not easy for anyone to remove murmurs and low whispers from the temples, and to live with an open vow. (Persius)
This is why the Pythagoreans wanted them to be public and heard by everyone, so that no one would be asked for something indecent and unjust, as in this one,
When he said clearly: Apollo, He moves his lips, fearing to be heard: beautiful Laverna, Grant me to deceive, grant me to appear just and holy. Cast a cloud over sins and frauds, night. (Horace)
The gods severely punished the wicked vows of Oedipus by granting them to him. He had prayed that his children would settle the succession of his estate by fighting each other. He was so miserable to see himself taken at his word. We should not ask that all things follow our will, but that they follow prudence. It seems, in truth, that we use our prayers like a jargon and like those who use holy and divine words for witchcraft and magical effects; and that we believe that their effect depends on the context, or the sound, or the sequence of words, or our demeanor.
For, having a soul full of concupiscence, untouched by repentance or any new reconciliation towards God, we are going to present to him these words that memory lends to our tongue, and we hope to draw from them an expiation of our faults. Nothing is so easy, so sweet and so favorable as the divine law: it calls us to itself, as wrong and detestable as we are: it holds out its arms to us and receives us in its bosom, however ugly, dirty and filthy we may be and may be in the future. But again, as a reward, it must be looked upon favorably. We must also receive this forgiveness with thanksgiving; and, at least for the moment that we address ourselves to it, be displeased with our faults and enemies of the passions that have led us to offend it; Neither gods nor good men, said Plato, accept a gift from a wicked man.
If the hand touched the altar without protection, No sumptuous, flattering sacrifice softens the averse householders, With pious flour and leaping crumbs. (Horace)