In his Laws, Plato lists three kinds of belief which are insulting to the gods: that there are none; that they do not concern themselves with our affairs; that they never refuse to answer our prayers, oblations and sacrifices. He believes that the first error never remains stable in anyone from childhood to old age but that the other two do allow of constancy.5
[A] God’s power and his justice are inseparable. If we implore him to use his power in a wicked cause it is of no avail. Our soul must be pure, at least for that [C] instant [A] when we make our prayer, free from the weight of vicious passions; otherwise we offer him rods for our own chastisement.6 Instead of amending our faults we redouble them by offering God (from whom we ought to be begging forgiveness) emotions full of irreverence and hatred. That is why I do not approve of those whom I see praying to God frequently and regularly if deeds consonant with their prayers do not bear me witness of some reformation and amendment7 –
[B] si, nocturnus adulter,
Tempora Sanctonico velas adoperta cucullo.
[if, for your nightly adultery, you hide beneath an Aquitanian cowl.]8
[C] The position of a man who mingles devotion with a detestable life seems somehow to deserve condemnation more than that of a man who is self-consistent, dissolute in everything. That is why our Church daily excludes all stubborn notorious evildoers from entry into our fellowship.
[A] We say our prayers out of habit and custom, or to put it better, we merely read and utter the words of our prayers. It amounts, in the end, to [C] outward show. [B] And it displeases me to see a man making three signs of the cross at the Benedicite and three more at grace – displeasing me all the more since [C] it is a sign of which I revere and continually employ, not least when I yawn – [B] only9 to see him devoting every other hour of the day to [C] hatred, covetousness and injustice.10 [B] Give vices their hours, then one hour to God – a sort of barter or arrangement! What a miracle it is to see actions so incompatible proceeding at so even a course that at the very point where they pass from one to the other you can notice no break or hesitation.
[C] What monstrous a conscience it is that can find rest while nurturing together in so peaceful and harmonious a fellowship both the crime and the judge in the same abode. If a man has his head full of the demands of lechery, judging it to be something most odious in the sight of God, what does he say to God when he tells him of it? He repents, only to fall again – at once. If as he claims the concept of divine Justice really did strike home, scourging and chastising his soul, then however short his repentance fear itself would force him to cast his mind back to it, making him thenceforth master of those bloated vices which were habitually his.
And what about those men whose whole life reposes on the fruits and profits of what they know to be a mortal sin? How many trades and vocations are there which gain acceptance, yet whose very essence is vicious?
And then there is the man who confided to me how, all his life, he had professed and practised a religion which he believed to be damnable, quite opposite to the one dear to him, so as not to lose favour or the honour of his appointments. How did he defend such reasoning in his mind? When men address God’s Justice on such matters, what do they say? Since their repentance requires a visible and tangible reparation, they forfeit all means of pleading it before God or men. Do they go so far as to dare to beg forgiveness without making satisfaction, without repentance? I hold that the first ones I mentioned are in the same state as these; but their obstinacy is far less easy to overcome.
Those sudden violent changes and veerings of opinion that they feign for us are a source of wonder to me. They reveal a state of unresolved conflict. And how fantastical seem to me the conceptions of those who, in recent years, have habitually accused anyone who showed a glimmer of intelligence yet professed the Catholic faith of only feigning to do so – even maintaining, to do him honour, that whatever he might actually say for show, deep down inside he could not fail to hold the religion as ‘reformed’ by their standards! What a loathsome malady it is to believe that you are so right that you convince yourself that nobody can think the opposite. And most loathsome still, to convince yourself that such a mind may prefer some chance but present advantage to the hopes and fears of eternal life. They can take my word for it: if anything could have tempted me in youth, a large part would have been played by an ambition to share in the hazards and hardships intendant upon that fresh young enterprise.
[A] It is not without good reason, it seems to me, that the Church has forbidden the indiscriminate, thoughtless and indiscreet use of those venerable sacred songs which the Holy Ghost dictated through David.11 We must only bring God into our activities with reverence and attentiveness full of honour and respect. That Word is too holy to serve merely to exercise our lungs and to please our ears; it must be rendered by our hearts not by our tongues. It is unreasonable to permit some shop-boy to amuse himself playing about with it while his mind is on silly frivolous matters. [B] Nor, certainly, is it right to see the Sacred Book of the holy mysteries of our faith dragged about through hall or kitchen12 – [C] they used to be mysteries: now they serve as amusements and pastimes.
[B] A study so serious, a subject so revered, should not be handled incidentally or hurriedly. It should always be a considered calm activity, prefaced as in our liturgy by the Sursum corda;13 we should bring to it even our bodies disposed in such attitudes as bear witness to a special attentiveness and reverence. [C] It is not a study for just anybody: it is a study for those who are dedicated to it, for people whom God calls to it. It makes the wicked and the ignorant grow worse. It is not a story to be told but a story to be reverenced, feared, adored.
How silly they are who think they have made it accessible to the vulgar simply by translating it into the vulgar tongues. When people fail to understand everything they read is it only the fault of the words! I would go further. By bringing Scripture that little bit nearer they actually push it further away. Pure ignorance, leaving men totally dependent on others, was much more salutary and more learned than such vain verbal knowledge, that nursery of rashness and presumption.
[B] I also believe that the liberty everyone takes of14 broadcasting so religious and so vital a text into all sorts of languages is less useful than dangerous. Jews, Mahometans and virtually all the others have reverently espoused the tongue in which their mysteries were first conceived; any changes or alterations are forbidden; not, it seems, without reason. Can we be sure that in the Basque country or in Brittany there are enough good judges, men adequate enough to establish the right translation in their languages? Why, the Catholic Church has nothing more difficult to do than to decide such matters – and nothing more solemn. When it is a case of preaching or speaking our translations can be vague, free, variable and partial: that is not at all the same thing.
[C] One of our Greek historians15 justly accused his own time of having so scattered the secrets of the Christian religion about the market-place and into the hands of the meanest artisans that everybody could argue and talk about them according to his own understanding: ‘It is deeply shameful,’ he added, ‘that we who by God’s grace enjoy the pure mysteries of our pious faith should allow them to be profaned in the mouths of persons ignorant and base, seeing that the Gentiles forbade even Socrates, Plato and the wisest men to talk or to inquire about matters entrusted to the priests at Delphi.’ He also said that, where Theology is concerned, the factions of princes are armed with anger not with zeal; that zeal itself does partake of the divine Reason and Justice when it behaves ordinately and moderately but that it changes into hatred and envy whenever it serves human passions, producing then not wheat and the fruit of the vine but tares and nettles. And there was another man who rightly advised the Emperor Theodosius that debates never settled schisms in the Church but rather awakened heresies and put life into them; therefore he should flee all contentiousness and all dialectical disputations, committing himself to the bare prescriptions and formulas of the Faith estab
lished of old. And when the Emperor Andronicus came across two great men verbally skirmishing in his palace against Lopadius over one of the more important points of our religion, he reprimanded them, even threatening to have them thrown into the river if they still went on.
Nowadays women and children read lectures about ecclesiastical law to the oldest and most experienced of men whereas the first of Plato’s laws forbids them to inquire even into the reason for merely civil ones, which must be regarded as divine ordinances; he allowed only the older men to discuss laws among themselves and with the Magistrate – adding, ‘provided that it is not done in the presence of the young and the uninitiated’.16
A bishop has testified in writing17 that there is, at the other end of the world, an island which the Ancients called Dioscorides, fertile and favoured with all sorts of fruits and trees and a healthy air; the inhabitants are Christian, having Churches and altars which are adorned with no other images but crosses; they scrupulously observe feast-days and fasts, pay their tithes meticulously and are so chaste that no man ever lies with more than one woman for the whole of his life; meanwhile, so happy with their lot that, in the middle of the ocean, they know nothing about ships, and so simple that they do not understand a single word of the religion which they so meticulously observe – something only unbelievable to those who do not know that pagans, devout worshippers of idols, know nothing about their gods apart from their statues and their names. The original beginning of Euripides’ tragedy Menalippus went like this:
O Juppiter, car de toy rien sinon
Je ne connois seulement que le nom…
[O Juppiter – for I know nothing nothing of thee but thy Name…]18
[B] I have also seen in my time criticisms laid against some books for dealing exclusively with the humanities or philosophy without any admixture of Theology. The opposite case would not be totally indefensible, namely: that Christian Doctrine holds her rank better when set apart, as Queen and Governor; that she should be first throughout, never ancillary nor subsidiary; that Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic should [C] perhaps [B] choose their examples from elsewhere not from such sacred materials, as also should the subjects of plays for the theatre, farces and public spectacles; that Divinity is regarded with more veneration and reverence when expounded on its own style rather than when linked to human reasoning; that the more frequent fault is to see Theologians writing like humanists rather than humanists like Theologians (Philosophy, says St Chrysostom, has long been banished from the School of Divinity as a useless servant judged unworthy of glimpsing, even from the doorway when simply passing by, the sanctuary of the holy treasures of sacred doctrine); that the language of men has its own less elevated forms and must not make use of the dignity, majesty and authority of the language of God. I myself let it say – [C] verbis indisciplinatis [using undisciplined words] – [B] fortune, destiny, accident, good luck, bad luck, the gods and similar phrases, following its own fashion.19
[C] I am offering my own human thoughts as human thoughts to be considered on their own, not as things established by God’s ordinance, incapable of being doubted or challenged; they are matters of opinion not matters of faith: what I reason out secundum me, not what I believe secundum Deum20 – like schoolboys reading out their essays, not teaching but teachable, in a lay not a clerical manner but always deeply devout.
[B] And might it not be said, apparently reasonably, that a decree forbidding anyone to write about religion (except very reservedly) unless expressly professing to do so would not lack some image of usefulness and justice – as perhaps would one requiring me too to hold my peace on the subject?
[A] I have been told that for reasons of reverence even those who are not of our Church forbid the use among themselves of the name of God in their everyday speech.21 They do not want it to be used as a kind of interjection or exclamation, nor to support testimony nor when making contracts; in that I consider they are right. Whenever we bring God’s name into our affairs or our society let it be done seriously and devoutly.
I believe there is a treatise in Xenophon somewhere in which he shows that we ought to pray to God less often, since it is not easy for us to bring our souls so frequently into that controlled, reformed and supplicatory state needed to do so; without that, our prayers are not only vain and useless: they are depraved. ‘Forgive us’, we say, ‘as we forgive them that trespass against us.’ What do those words mean if not that we are offering God our souls free from vengeance and resentment? Yet we call on God and his help to connive at wrongdoings [C] and to invite him to be unjust:
[B] Quæ, nisi seductis, nequeas committere divis.
[Things which you would not care to entrust to the gods, except when drawing aside.]22
[A] The miser prays God for the vain and superfluous preservation of his hoard; the ambitious man, for success and the achievement of his desires; the thief uses God to help him overcome the dangers and difficulties which obstruct his nefarious designs or else thanks God when he finds it easy to slit the gizzard of some passer-by. [C] At the foot of the mansion which they are about to climb into and blow up, men say their prayers, while their purposes and hopes are full of cruelty, lust and greed.
[B] Hoc ipsum quo tu jovis aurem impellere tentas,
Dic agedum, Staio, pro Juppiter, ô bone clamet,
Juppiter, at se se non clamet Juppiter ipse?
[Try telling Statius what you are up to, what you have just whispered to Jove: ‘By Jove!’ he’ll say: ‘How dreadful!’ – ‘Well, cannot Jove say By Jove! to Himself?’]23
[A] Queen Margaret of Navarre relates the tale of a young ‘prince’ – and, even though she does not name him his exalted rank is quite enough to make him recognizable; whenever he was out on an assignation (lying with the wife of a Parisian barrister) he would take a short-cut through a church and never failed to make his prayers and supplications in that holy place, both on the way there and on the way back. I will leave you to judge what he was asking God’s favour for when his soul was full of such fair cogitations! Yet she cites that as evidence of outstanding devotion. But that is not the only proof we have of the truth that it hardly befits women to treat Theological matters.
A devout reconciliation with God, a true prayer, cannot befall a soul which is impure and, at that very time, submissive to the domination of Satan. A man who calls God to his aid while he is actually engaged in vice is like a cutpurse calling on justice to help him or like those who produce the name of God to vouch for their lies:
[B] tacito mala vota susurro
Concipimus.
[we softly murmur evil prayers.]24
[A] Not many men would care to submit to view the secret prayers they make to God:
Haud cuivis promptum est murmurque humilesque susurros
Tollere de templis, et aperto vivere voto.
[It is hardly everyone who could take his murmured prayers whispered within the temples and say them aloud outside.]
That is why the Pythagorians believed that prayer should be public and heard by all, so that God should not be begged for things unseemly or unjust – like the man in this poem:
clare cum dixit: Apollo!
Labra movet, metuens audiri: pulchra Laverna,
Da mihi fallere, da justum sandumque videri.
Noctem peccatis et fraudibus objice nubem.
[he first exclaims, ‘Apollo!’ loud and clear; then he moves his lips, addressing the goddess of Theft and fearing to be overheard: ‘O fair Laverna: do not let me get found out; let me appear to be just and upright; cloak my sins with night and my lies with a cloud.’]25
[C] The gods heavily punished the unrighteous prayers of Oedipus by granting them: he prayed that his children should fight among themselves to decide who should succeed to his inheritance, he was wretched enough to be taken literally.
We should not ask that all things should comply with our will but that they should comply with wisdom.
[A] It really does seem that we use prayer [C] as a
sort of jingle and [A] like those who exploit God’s holy words in sorcery and practical magic.26 As for their effect, we apparently count on their structure, their sound and the succession of words, [A1] or on our outward appearance. [A] For, with our souls still full of concupiscence, untouched by repentance or by any fresh reconciliation with God, we offer him such words as memory lends to our tongue, hoping in that way to obtain the expiation of our sins.
Nothing is so gentle, so sweet, so gracious as our Holy Law:27 she calls us to her, all sinful and abominable as we are; she stretches forth her arms and clasps us to her bosom, however base, vile and besmirched we may be now and shall be once again. But we on our part must look favourably upon her. We must also receive her absolution with thanksgiving and – at least for that instant when we address ourselves to her – have a soul loathing its own shortcomings and hostile to those [C] passions [A] which28 drove us to offend her.
[C] Neither the gods nor good men, Plato says, accept gifts from a wicked man:29