Description
You may ask: ‘Why were there no wars of religion in the
pagan world, where each state had its own form of worship
[culte] and its own gods?’ My reply is that just because
each state had its own form of worship as well as its own
government, no state distinguished its gods from its laws.
Political war was also theological war; the gods had, so to
speak, provinces that were fixed by the boundaries of nations.
The god of one people had no right over other peoples. The
gods of the pagans were not jealous gods
[= ‘didn’t demand that their followers have nothing to do with any other gods’]
; they sharedthe world among themselves. Even Moses and the Hebrews
sometimes adopted that point of view by speaking of ‘the
God of Israel’. It’s true that they regarded as powerless the
gods of the Canaanites, a proscribed people condemned to
destruction, whose place they were to take; but look at how
they spoke of the divinities of the neighbouring peoples they
were forbidden to attack! ‘Isn’t the territory belonging to
your god Chemosh lawfully yours?’ said Jephthah to the
Ammonites. ‘We have the same title to the lands that our
conquering God has made his own’ (Judges
11:24). . . . Here,I think, there is a recognition that the rights of Chemosh are
on a par with those of the God of Israel.
Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance
are, to my mind, mistaken. The two intolerances are insepa-
rable. You can’t possibly live at peace with people you regard
as damned; loving them would be hating God who punishes
them: we absolutely must either reform them or torment
them. Wherever theological intolerance is admitted, it must
inevitably have some civil effect; and as soon as it does the
sovereign is no longer sovereign even in the temporal sphere;
from then on, priests are the real masters, and kings only
their ministers. Now that there no longer are, and no longer can be, any
exclusive national religions, tolerance should be given to all
religions that tolerate others, so long as their dogmas
contain nothing contrary to the duties of citizenship. Anyone
who ventures to say: ‘Outside the Church is no salvation’
should be driven from the state, unless the state is the
Church and the prince the pope. Such a dogma is good
only in a theocratic government; in any other it is fatal. The
reason Henry IV is said to have had for embracing the Roman
religion— namely that the Roman Catholics did, while the
Protestants didn’t, say ‘Our faith is the only possible route to
heaven’.—ought to make every honest man leave it, especially
any prince who knows how to reason.
But I’m wrong to speak of a Christian republic—those
two terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches
only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable
to tyranny that it always profits by such a régime. Genuine
Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and don’t
much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.
Christian troops are excellent, we are told. I deny it. Show
me an example! For my part, I don’t know of any Christian
troops. The Crusades? Without disputing the courage of the
Crusaders, I answer that far from being Christians they were
the priests’ troops, they were citizens of the Church: they
fought for their spiritual country, which the Church had
somehow made temporal. Properly understood, this goes
back to paganism: because the Gospel doesn’t establish any
national religion, there can’t possibly be a holy war among
Christians.
They tell us that a populace of true Christians would
form the most perfect society imaginable. I see in only one
great difficulty about this idea, namely that a society of true
Christians wouldn’t be a society of men. I go further: such a society, with all its perfection,
wouldn’t be the strongest or the most durable; its very
perfection would deprive it of its bond of union; the flaw
that would destroy it would lie in its perfection.
Everyone would do his duty; the people would be law-
abiding; the rulers would be just and temperate, and the
magistrates upright and incorruptible; the soldiers would
regard death as a minor thing; there would be no vanity or
extravagant luxury. So far, so good; but let’s look further.
Christianity is an entirely spiritual religion, occupied
solely with heavenly things; the Christian’s country is not
of this world. He does his duty, certainly, but does it with
a deep lack of interest in whether the work he has put in
has produced good or bad results. Provided he has nothing
to reproach himself with, it doesn’t matters much to him
whether things go well or ill here below. If the state prospers,
he hardly dares to share in the public happiness, for fear he
may become puffed up with pride in his country’s glory; if
the state goes downhill, he blesses the hand of God that is
hard upon His people. For the society to be peaceable and for harmony to be
maintained, all the citizens would have to be equally good
Christians. If there happened to be a single self-seeker or
hypocrite—a Catiline or a Cromwell, for instance—he would
certainly get the better of his pious compatriots. Christian
charity doesn’t make it easy for a man to think ill of another
man. As soon as our bad man has worked out a way of
deceiving everyone else and getting hold of a share in the
public authority, you have a man established in dignity; God wants us to respect
him. Then before long, you have a power; God wants us to obey it.
If the person who has the power abuses it, that is the
whip God uses to punish his children. There would be
scruples about driving out the usurper: it would involve
disturbing public peace, using violence, spilling blood; none
of this squares with Christian gentleness; and anyway what
does it matter in this vale of sorrows whether we are free
men or serfs? The essential thing is to get to heaven, and
resignation— i.e. putting up with hardship patiently and
without complaining —is just one more way of getting there.
If a foreign war breaks out, the citizens march readily out
to battle; not one of them thinks of flight; they do their duty,
but they have no passion for victory; they know how to die
better than they know how to conquer. What does it matter
whether they win or lose? Doesn’t Providence know better
than they do what should happen to them?
Rousseau
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