Juliette
“I say unto you, banish forever from your heart this doctrine which is an insult to your God and your reason alike. Such beyond any doubt is the dogma that has produced more atheists than all the others combined, there being not a single man on earth who would not prefer to believe nothing whatsoever rather than subscribe to this confusion of peculiarly dangerous lies; this is the explanation for why so many upright and decent souls consider themselves obliged to repair to thoroughgoing irreligion in their search for relief from, and defense against, the terrors wherewith an infamous Christian creed would lay waste their energies and all their peace of mind. So let’s be rid of these false alarms; let’s forever have done with the dogmas, the ceremonies, the rites of this abominable religion. Better the most inveterate, the most incorrigible atheism than a cult so fraught with perils so immense. Indeed, I am aware of no drawback in not having any belief at all; but I see nothing but disadvantages of the very gravest order arising from the adoption of these dangerous systems.
“There, my dear Saint-Fond, I have presented my views touching this infamous hell dogma. Let it terrify you and chill your pleasures no more. For mortal man there is but one hell, and that is the folly and wickedness and spite of his fellows; but once his life is over, there’s an end to it: his annihilation is final and entire, of him nothing survives. Ah, what a prodigious dupe he must therefore be, who denies himself a single pleasure or curbs his passions for a moment! Let him realize that he exists purely for their satisfaction through whatever excesses this may entail, and that all the effects of these passions, in whatever kind or shape they may have been implanted in him, are the means whereby you serve the Nature whose agents we at all times are, whether we are conscious of it or no, whether we will or no. And now I hand you back the idea of a God which I made brief use of as an instrument for combating the eternal-punishment scare; but there is no God, he does not any more exist than does the devil, than heaven, than hell; and the only duties we have in this world are those toward our pleasures, which we are to satisfy without regard to the interests of others, for we are bound, aye, duty-bound to sacrifice any of them and, if need be, all of them if the least of our desires would have it so.
“I trust I have said enough to prove the absurdity of the principle upon which you base your pointless cruelty. Must I speak of the means you employ? No, to be honest with you, it isn’t worth the trouble; how, in the first place, how have you ever come to think that a signature scribbled in blood can be more binding, less worthless, than one in ink, or none? That, next, this scrap of paper stuffed into a bum can serve as a passport to heaven or to hell, neither of which exists? ’Tis here a patchwork of prejudices so ridiculous as truly does not deserve the honor of critical dissection or disproving. For the voluptuous idea that’s made you giddy, this idea of prolonging the sufferings of a given individual, for it substitute a greater abundance of murders, I beseech you; cease killing the same individual a thousand times over, which is impossible; instead, assassinate individuals by the thousand, which is altogether feasible. Is there anything so mean-spirited as confining oneself to half a dozen victims a week? Trust Juliette, she is clever, she is capable, only say the word and she will double the number, triple it, give her the required money; you’ll want for nothing, your passions will be satisfied.”
“Splendid,” Saint-Fond replied, “I heartily welcome this last conclusion; from now on, Juliette, we shall have not three victims per supper, but six, and the suppers shall be held twice as frequently as heretofore, which will mean twenty-four victims a week, a third of them men, two-thirds women. Your fees shall be augmented proportionally; however, Mesdames, I cannot confess having been vanquished by this learned dissertation upon the nullity of infernal punishments. I admire the erudition it displays, its aim, certain of its implications and consequences: but bow before it, this I cannot do, and to what you have advanced I should like to answer as follows.
“First of all, throughout your entire argument I observe an effort to exculpate God from the barbarity of the dogma of hell. If God exists, you seem to be saying in virtually every sentence, the qualities which he must possess are every one of them incompatible with this execrable dogma. But, my dear Clairwil, it is precisely here that I feel you fall into heaviest error, and this for want of a philosophy comprehensive enough, luminous enough, to enable you to behold the subject properly. The hell dogma creates a hindrance to your pleasures, and from there you go on to assert that hell there is none; facts must be established upon something more solid than personal wishes. To combat the dogma of eternal penalties you begin by gratuitously destroying everything it rests upon: there is no God, we do not have souls, hence there are no sufferings to dread in a life after this. It strikes me that you start at the very outset by committing the greatest blunder one can commit in logic: to posit as granted that which is in question. Far from sharing your way of thinking, I acknowledge a Supreme Being and yet more firmly believe in the immortality of the soul. But let not your pious hearts, enchanted by these initial declarations, run on to suppose they have a proselyte in me; I am not so sure my doctrine will prove to their liking. You yourselves may find it odd. Never mind; I should like to expound it to you all the same, and I am sure I can count upon a fair hearing.
“I raise up my eyes to the universe: I see evil, disorder, crime reigning as despots everywhere. My gaze descends, and it bends upon that most interesting of this universe’s creatures: I behold him likewise devoured by vices, by contradictions, by infamies; what ideas result from this examination? That what we improperly call evil is really not evil at all, and that this mode is of such high necessity to the designs of the being who has created us that he would cease to be the master of his own creation were evil not to exist universally upon the earth. Well persuaded that this is so, I tell myself: there exists a God; some hand or other has necessarily created all that I see, but has not created it save for evil, is not pleased but by evil; evil is his essence, and all that he causes us to commit is indispensable to his plans. What matters it to him that I suffer from this evil, provided it be advantageous to him? Does it not seem I am his favorite child? If the misfortunes that afflict me from the day I am born until the day I die prove his indifference to me, I may very well be mistaken upon what I call evil. What I thus characterize relative to myself seems indeed to be a very great good relative to the being who has brought me into the world; and if I receive evil from others, I enjoy the right to pay them back in kind, to be the first to cast the stone: so, henceforth, evil is good, just as it is for the author of my existence, relatively to my existence: the evil I do others makes me happy, as God is rendered happy by the evil he does me. All confusion and error are gone save in the idea attributed to the word; but in the deed, there is both evil as necessity and evil as pleasure; henceforth, why ought I not call it good?
“Be sure of it: evil, or at least what goes by that name, is absolutely useful to the vicious organization of this melancholy universe. The God who has articulated it is a very vindictive being, very barbarous, very wicked, very unjust, very cruel; that, because vengeance, barbarity, wickedness, iniquity, criminality are the necessary modes, vital to the principle that governs this vast creation, of which we only complain when it brings us hurt: to its victims, crime is bad; to its agents, good. Now, if evil, or at least what we call such, is the essence both of God who has created everything and of the creatures wrought in his image, how can one be anything but certain that the consequences of evil are eternal? It is in evil he made the world, by evil he does sustain it; it is for evil he perpetuates it; it is impregnated with evil that creation must exist; it is into the womb of evil it returns after its term. Man’s soul is merely the action of evil upon a subtle matter, susceptible of being organized only by evil; now, this mode being the soul of the Creator as it is of the being created, just as it existed before this created being that is saturated with it, so it will exist after that created being is no more. All, everyone has got to be wicked, barbarous
, inhuman, like your God: these are the vices the person who wishes to please him must adopt, without, nevertheless, any hope of succeeding: for the evil which harms always, the evil which is the essence of God, will never be, can never be susceptible of love nor of gratitude. If this God, center of evil and of ferocity, torments man and has him tormented by Nature and by other men throughout the whole period of his existence, how may one doubt that he acts likewise and perhaps involuntarily upon this breath of air which outlives him and which, as I have just said, is nothing other than evil itself? But how, you are going to object, how may evil be tormented by evil? Because when it encounters itself, it is increased, and because the force that yields must always be obliterated by the force that compels it to yield—which is in accordance with the logic wherein weakness is always subjugated by strength. That which survives the naturally evil being, that which must survive him, since it is the essence of the being’s constitution, an essence whose existence is prior to the being and which will exist after the being, by falling back into the womb of evil, and because of its relative weakness no longer having the strength to defend itself, will hence be tormented by the entire essence of evil, to which it will be reunited; they are these maleficent molecules that, in the operation of compassing and assimilating those which what we call death reunites to them, compose what poets and others of ardent imagination have named demons. No man, whatever be his conduct in this world, can escape this terrible fate, because it is necessary that everything that emanates from the womb of Nature, that is to say, from the womb of evil, return thereunto: such is the universal law. Thus are the detestable elements of the wicked man absorbed into the source of wickedness, which is God, to return again and to animate other beings which will be born that much more corrupted, in as they will be the fruit of corruption.
“What, you may wonder, what has become of the good being? But there is no such thing as a good being: he whom you call virtuous is not by any means good, or, if he is from your viewpoint, he surely is not from the viewpoint of God, who is only evil, who wants nothing but what is evil, who requires evil alone. The man you speak of is merely feeble, and feebleness is an evil. Weaker than the absolutely and entirely vicious being, and more completely engulfed by the maleficent molecules with which his elementary dissolution will conjoin him, this man will have to suffer a great deal more: and there, precisely, is what ought to oblige every man to render himself in this world as vicious and wicked as possible in order that, more like unto the molecules wherewith he must someday contend, he have, in this act of reunion, infinitely less to suffer from their onslaught. The ant that were to fall into the midst of wild animals, where there prevails such violence as must overwhelm any insect, would, because of its radical defenselessness, have an infinitely more painful time of it than might some large beast which, stronger, more resourceful, better able to resist, would only gradually become swallowed up into the whirlpool. The more vices and crimes a man would have manifested in this world, the more he will be in harmony with his ineluctable fate, which is wickedness, which I consider the primary matter of the world’s composition. Let man then take care to preserve himself well from virtue if he should like to avoid exposure to the most hideous sufferings; for virtue being the mode hostile to the world’s system, all those who will have yielded to it are certain to endure, after this life, the most unspeakable torments by reason of the difficulty they will experience in re-entering the womb of evil, author and regenerator of all we behold.
“Having seen that all was vicious and criminal on earth, the Being Supreme in Wickedness will say unto them, ‘Why did you stray into the paths of virtue? Did I ever announce to you, by any token, that this mode was agreeable to me? Did not the perpetual miseries with which I inundated the universe convince you that I love only disorder, and that to please me one must emulate me? Did I not set grandly before you every day the example of destruction? Why did you heed it not? Did not the plagues wherewith I withered the earth, by proving to you that evil was my joy, enjoin you to perform evil acts in the service of my scheme? Now were you not aware that humankind must satisfy me; and in what aspect of my conduct have you noticed benevolence? Is it in sending you plagues, blights, civil wars, earthquakes, tempests? is it by brandishing above your heads all the serpents of discord that I persuade you that my essence is good? Fool! why did you not imitate my ways? Why did you resist those passions I put in you for no reason other than to prove to you how great is the necessity for evil? Their voice was to have been heard and obeyed; it was necessary to despoil pitilessly, as I do, the widow and the orphan, to pillage the poor, in one word, to make man comply with all your needs, bend before all your caprices—as I do. After having played the idiot and taken the contrary way, what have you come back here for? And how are the soft, flabby elements, emanating from your dissolution, how, I ask, without being shattered and without occasioning you the most excruciating agonies, are they to return now into the womb of maleficence and crime?’
“More of a philosopher than you, Clairwil, I do not have to apply, as you seem obliged to do, either to that rogue Jesus or to that insipid novel, Holy Scripture, in order to demonstrate my system; my study of the universe alone provides me with weapons to oppose you, and simply from the manner in which it is governed I see eternal and universal evil as absolutely indispensable in the world. The author of the universe is the most wicked, the most ferocious, the most horrifying of all beings. His works cannot be anything but the result or the incarnation of his criminality. Without his wickedness raised to its extremest pitch, nothing would be sustained in the universe; evil is, however, a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was able to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world; it is unto evil they will all enter again, in order to re-create others perhaps more wicked yet, and that is why they say all is degraded, all is corrupted in old age; that stems only from the perpetual re-entry and emergence of wicked elements into and out of the matrix of maleficent molecules.
“You are now perhaps going to ask me how, within this hypothesis, I rationalize the possibility of causing a person to suffer for a longer period of time by means of a bit of paper introduced into the anus. It is the simplest thing in the world, and I dare say the surest and least refutable as well; if I have been pleased to call it a weakness, it is because I had no idea you would ever get me into the position of disclosing my doctrines to you. I’ll defend my method, however, and prove its worth.
“When my victims arrive in evil’s womb, they come bearing evidence that in my hands they have endured all the suffering it is possible to endure; they are then classified as virtuous beings. Through my operation they are made better, improved; their adjunction to the maleficent molecules is rendered exceedingly difficult; their agonies, hence, are enormous; and by the laws of attraction essential to Nature, they must be, those agonies, of the same species as those I caused them to suffer in this world. As the magnet draws iron, as beauty whets carnal appetites, so agonies A, agonies B, agonies C call to their like, enchain their like. The person my hand exterminates by means of agony B will, I suppose, only return to the matrix of maleficent molecules via that agony B; and if agony B is the most appalling possible, I am sure my victim will undergo a similar one in entering the womb of evil which necessarily awaits all men and which, by the laws of attraction I just mentioned, only accepts them in the same way by which they went out of the world. But the instrument … merely a formality, I admit … useless, futile, perhaps; but a formality which suits me, and which can have nothing about it contrary to the true meaning, to the assured success of my operation.”
“That,” replied Clairwil, “is the most astonishing, the most unusual, I dare say the most bizarre of all the systems yet to have occurred to the mind of man.”
“Less extravagant than the one you’ve just brought to light,” answered
Saint-Fond; “to maintain yours, you are forced either to wipe God clean of his faults or to deny him; as for me, I acknowledge him with all his vices, and indeed in the eyes of those who are familiar with all the crimes, all the horrors of this curious being whom men only invoke and call good from fear—in the eyes of these people, I say, my ideas will appear less irregular than the ones you have exposed.”
“Your system,” said Clairwil, “arises solely out of your profound horror of God.”
“True; I abhor him; but my system is by no means the issue of the hatred I have for him; no, it is but the fruit of my intelligence and my meditation.”
“I,” said Clairwil, “would rather not believe in God than forge one in order to hate it. Juliette, what do you think of the matter?”
“Profoundly an atheist,” I replied, “arch enemy of the dogma of the soul’s immortality, I will always prefer your system to Saint-Fond’s; and I prefer the certitude of nothingness to the fear of an. eternity of suffering.”
“There you are,” Saint-Fond rejoined, “always that perfidious egoism which is the source of all the mistakes human beings make. One arranges one’s schemes according to one’s tastes and whims, and always by drifting farther from truth. You’ve got to leave your passions behind when you examine a philosophical doctrine.”
“Ah, Saint-Fond,” said Clairwil, “how easy it would be to point out that yours is nothing but the product of those passions which you would have one put by when studying. With less cruelty in your heart your dogmas would be less sanguinary; and you yourself would rather risk the eternal damnation of which you speak than renounce the delicious pleasure of horrifying others with it.”