A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 04

However, after the adventure of Marcellus, it does not appear that the Christians were thought of until the year 303. They had, at Nicomedia, a superb church, next to the palace, which it exceeded in loftiness. Historians do not tell us the reasons why Galerius demanded of Diocletian the instant destruction of this church; but they tell us that Diocletian was a long time before he determined upon it, and that he resisted for almost a year. It is very strange that after this he should be called the persecutor. At last the church was destroyed and an edict was affixed by which the Christians were deprived of all honors and dignities. Since they were then deprived of them, it is evident that they possessed them. A Christian publicly tore the imperial edict in pieces – that was not an act of religion, it was an incitement to revolt. It is, therefore, very likely that an indiscreet and unreasonable zeal drew down this fatal persecution. Some time afterwards the palace of Galerius was burned down; he accused the Christians, and they accused Galerius of having himself set fire to it, in order to get a pretext for calumniating them. The accusation of Galerius appeared very unjust; that which they entered against him was no less so, for the edict having been already issued, what new pretext could he want? If he really wanted a new argument to engage Diocletian to persecute, this would only form a new proof of the reluctance of Diocletian to abandon the Christians, whom he had always protected; it would evidently show that he wanted new additional reasons to determine him to so much severity.

It appears certain that there were many Christians tormented in the empire, but it is difficult to reconcile with the Roman laws the alleged reported tortures, the mutilations, torn-out tongues, limbs cut and broiled, and all the insults offered against modesty and public decency. It is certain that no Roman law ever ordered such punishments; the aversion of the people to the Christians might carry them to horrible excesses, but we do not anywhere find that these excesses were ordered, either by the emperors or the senate.

It is very likely that the suffering of the Christians spread itself in exaggerated complaints: the "Acta Sincera" informs us that the emperor, being at Antioch, the prætor condemned a Christian child named Romanus to be burned; that the Jews present at the punishment began to laugh, saying: "We had formerly three children, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who did not burn in the fiery furnace but these do burn." At that instant, to confound the Jews, a great rain extinguished the pile and the little boy walked out safe and sound, asking, "Where then is the fire?" The account goes on to say that the emperor commanded him to be set free, but that the judge ordered his tongue to be cut out. It is scarcely possible to believe that the judge would have the tongue of a boy cut out, whom the emperor had pardoned.

That which follows is more singular. It is pretended that an old Christian physician named Ariston, who had a knife ready, cut the child's tongue out to pay his court to the prætor. The little Romanus was then carried back to prison; the jailer asked him the news. The child related at length how the old surgeon had cut out his tongue. It should be observed that before this operation the child stammered very much but that now he spoke with wonderful volubility. The jailer did not fail to relate this miracle to the emperor. They brought forward the old surgeon who swore that the operation had been performed according to the rules of his art and showed the child's tongue which he had properly preserved in a box as a relic. "Bring hither another person," said he, "and I will cut his tongue out in your majesty's presence, and you will see if he can speak." The proposition was accepted; they took a poor man whose tongue the surgeon cut out as he had done the child's, and the man died on the spot.

I am willing to believe that the "Acts" which relate this fact are as veracious as their title pretends, but they are still more simple than sincere, and it is very strange that Fleury, in his "Ecclesiastical History," relates such a prodigious number of similar incidents, being much more conducive to scandal than edification.

You will also remark that in this year 303, in which it is pretended that Diocletian was present at this fine affair in Antioch, he was at Rome and passed all that year in Italy. It is said that it was at Rome, and in his presence, that St. Genestus, a comedian, was converted on the stage while playing in a comedy against the Christians. This play shows clearly that the taste of Plautus and Terence no longer existed; that which is now called comedy, or Italian farce, seems to have originated at this time. St. Genestus represented an invalid; the physician asked him what was the matter with him. "I am too unwieldy," said Genestus. "Would you have us exorcise you to make you lighter?" said the physician. "No," replied Genestus, "I will die a Christian, to be raised again of a finer stature." Then the actors, dressed as priests and exorcists, came to baptize him, at which moment Genestus really became a Christian, and, instead of finishing his part, began to preach to the emperor and the people. The "Acta Sincera" relate this miracle also.

It is certain that there were many true martyrs, but it is not true that the provinces were inundated with blood, as it is imagined. Mention is made of about two hundred martyrs towards the latter days of Diocletian in all the extent of the Roman Empire, and it is averred, even in the letters of Constantine, that Diocletian had much less part in the persecution than Galerius.

Diocletian fell ill this year and feeling himself weakened he was the first who gave the world the example of the abdication of empire. It is not easy to know whether this abdication was forced or not; it is true, however, that having recovered his health he lived nine years equally honored and peaceable in his retreat of Salonica, in the country of his birth. He said that he only began to live from the day of his retirement and when he was pressed to remount the throne he replied that the throne was not worth the tranquillity of his life, and that he took more pleasure in cultivating his garden than he should' have in governing the whole earth. What can be concluded from these facts but that with great faults he reigned like a great emperor and finished his life like a philosopher!

DIONYSIUS, ST. (THE AREOPAGITE),

AND THE FAMOUS ECLIPSE

The author of the article "Apocrypha" has neglected to mention a hundred works recognized for such, and which, being entirely forgotten, seem not to merit the honor of being in his list. We have thought it right not to omit St. Dionysius, surnamed the Areopagite, who is pretended to have been for a long time the disciple of St. Paul, and of one Hierotheus, an unknown companion of his. He was, it is said, consecrated bishop of Athens by St. Paul himself. It is stated in his life that he went to Jerusalem to pay a visit to the holy Virgin and that he found her so beautiful and majestic that he was strongly tempted to adore her.

After having a long time governed the Church of Athens he went to confer with St. John the evangelist, at Ephesus, and afterwards with Pope Clement at Rome; thence he went to exercise his apostleship in France; and knowing, says the historian, that Paris was a rich, populous, and abundant town, and like other capitals, he went there to plant a citadel, to lay hell and infidelity in ruins.

He was regarded for a long time as the first bishop of Paris. Harduinus, one of his historians, adds that at Paris he was exposed to wild beasts, but, having made the sign of the cross on them, they crouched at his feet. The pagan Parisians then threw him into a hot oven from which he walked out fresh and in perfect health; he was crucified and he began to preach from the top of the cross.

They imprisoned him with his companions Rusticus and Eleutherus. He there said mass, St. Rusticus performing the part of deacon and Eleutherus that of subdeacon. Finally they were all three carried to Montmartre, where their heads were cut off, after which they no longer said mass.

But, according to Harduinus, there appeared a still greater miracle. The body of St. Dionysius took its head in its hands and accompanied by angels singing "Gloria tibi, Domine, alleluia!" carried it as far as the place where they afterwards built him a church, which is the famous church of St. Denis.

Mestaphrastus, Harduinus, and Hincmar, bishop of Rheims, say that he was martyred at the age of ninety-one years, but Cardinal Baronius proves that he was a hundred and ten, in which opinion he is supported by Ribadeneira, the learned author of "Flower of the Saints." For our own part we have no opinion on the subject.

Seventeen works are attributed to him, six of which we have unfortunately lost; the eleven which remain to us have been translated from the Greek by Duns Scotus, Hugh de St. Victor, Albert Magnus, and several other illustrious scholars.

It is true that since wholesome criticism has been introduced into the world it has been discovered that all the books attributed to Dionysius were written by an impostor in the year 362 of our era, so that there no longer remains any difficulty on that head.

Of the Great Eclipse Noticed by Dionysius.

A fact related by one of the unknown authors of the life of Dionysius has, above all, caused great dissension among the learned. It is pretended that this first bishop of Paris, being in Egypt in the town of Diospolis, or No-Amon, at the age of twenty-five years, before he was a Christian, he was there, with one of his friends, witness of the famous eclipse of the sun which happened at the full moon, at the death of Jesus Christ and that he cried in Greek, "Either God suffers or is afflicted at the sufferings of the criminal."

These words have been differently related by different authors, but in the time of Eusebius of Cæsarea it is pretended that two historians – the one named Phlegon and the other Thallus – had made mention of this miraculous eclipse. Eusebius of Cæsarea quotes Phlegon, but we have none of his works now existing. He said – at least it is pretended so – that this eclipse happened in the fourth year of the two hundredth Olympiad, which would be the eighteenth year of Tiberius's reign. There are several versions of this anecdote; we distrust them all and much more so, if it were possible to know whether they reckoned by Olympiads in the time of Phlegon, which is very doubtful.

This important calculation interested all the astronomers. Hodgson, Whiston, Gale, Maurice, and the famous Halley, demonstrated that there was no eclipse of the sun in this first year, but that on November 24th in the year of the hundred and second Olympiad an eclipse took place which obscured the sun for two minutes, at a quarter past one, at Jerusalem.

It has been carried still further: a Jesuit named Greslon pretended that the Chinese preserved in their annals the account of an eclipse which happened near that time, contrary to the order of nature. They desired the mathematicians of Europe to make a calculation of it; it was pleasant enough to desire the astronomists to calculate an eclipse which was not natural. Finally it was discovered that these Chinese annals do not in any way speak of this eclipse.

It appears from the history of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, the passage from Phlegon, and from the letter of the Jesuit Greslon that men like to impose upon one another. But this prodigious multitude of lies, far from harming the Christian religion, only serves, on the contrary, to show its divinity, since it is more confirmed every day in spite of them.

DIODORUS OF SICILY, AND HERODOTUS

We will commence with Herodotus as the most ancient. When Henry Stephens entitled his comic rhapsody "The Apology of Herodotus," we know that his design was not to justify the tales of this father of history; he only sports with us and shows that the enormities of his own times were worse than those of the Egyptians and Persians. He made use of the liberty which the Protestants assumed against those of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman churches. He sharply reproaches them with their debaucheries, their avarice, their crimes expiated by money, their indulgences publicly sold in the taverns, and the false relics manufactured by their own monks, calling them idolaters. He ventures to say that if the Egyptians adored cats and onions, the Catholics adore the bones of the dead. He dares to call them in his preliminary discourses, "theophages," and even "theokeses." We have fourteen editions of this book, for we relish general abuse, just as much as we resent that which we deem special and personal.

Henry Stephens made use of Herodotus only to render us hateful and ridiculous; we have quite a contrary design. We pretend to show that the modern histories of our good authors since Guicciardini are in general as wise and true as those of Herodotus and Diodorus are foolish and fabulous.

1. What does the father of history mean by saying in the beginning of his work, "the Persian historians relate that the Phoenicians were the authors of all the wars. From the Red Sea they entered ours," etc.? It would seem that the Phœnicians, having embarked at the Isthmus of Suez, arrived at the straits of Babel-Mandeb, coasted along Ethiopia, passed the line, doubled the Cape of Tempests, since called the Cape of Good Hope, returned between Africa and America, repassed the line and entered from the ocean into the Mediterranean by the Pillars of Hercules, a voyage of more than four thousand of our long marine leagues at a time when navigation was in its infancy.

2. The first exploit of the Phœnicians was to go towards Argos to carry off the daughter of King Inachus, after which the Greeks, in their turn, carried off Europa, the daughter of the king of Tyre.

3. Immediately afterwards comes Candaules, king of Lydia, who, meeting with one of his guards named Gyges, said to him, "Thou must see my wife quite naked; it is absolutely essential." The queen, learning that she had been thus exposed, said to the soldier, "You shall either die or assassinate my husband and reign with me." He chose the latter alternative, and the assassination was accomplished without difficulty.

4. Then follows the history of Arion, carried on the back of a dolphin across the sea from the skirts of Calabria to Cape Matapan, an extraordinary voyage of about a hundred leagues.

5. From tale to tale – and who dislikes tales? – we arrive at the infallible oracle of Delphi, which somehow foretold that Crœsus would cook a quarter of lamb and a tortoise in a copper pan and that he would be dethroned by a mullet.

6. Among the inconceivable absurdities with which ancient history abounds is there anything approaching the famine with which the Lydians were tormented for twenty-eight years? This people, whom Herodotus describes as being richer in gold than the Peruvians, instead of buying food from foreigners, found no better expedient than that of amusing themselves every other day with the ladies without eating for eight-and-twenty successive years.

7. Is there anything more marvellous than the history of Cyrus? His grandfather, the Mede Astyages, with a Greek name, dreamed that his daughter Mandane – another Greek name – inundated all Asia; at another time, that she produced a vine, of which all Asia ate the grapes, and thereupon the good man Astyages ordered one Harpagos, another Greek, to murder his grandson Cyrus – for what grandfather would not kill his posterity after dreams of this nature?

8. Herodotus, no less a good naturalist than an exact historian, does not fail to tell us that near Babylon the earth produced three hundred ears of wheat for one. I know a small country which yields three for one. I should like to have been transported to Diabek when the Turks were driven from it by Catherine II. It has fine corn also but returns not three hundred ears for one.

9. What has always seemed to me decent and edifying in Herodotus is the fine religious custom established in Babylon of which we have already spoken – that of all the married women going to prostitute themselves in the temple of Mylitta for money, to the first stranger who presented himself. We reckon two millions of inhabitants in this city; the devotion must have been ardent. This law is very probable among the Orientals who have always shut up their women, and who, more than six ages before Herodotus, instituted eunuchs to answer to them for the chastity of their wives. I must no longer proceed numerically; we should very soon indeed arrive at a hundred.

All that Diodorus of Sicily says seven centuries after Herodotus is of the same value in all that regards antiquities and physics. The Abbé Terrasson said, "I translate the text of Diodorus in all its coarseness." He sometimes read us part of it at the house of de Lafaye, and when we laughed, he said, "You are resolved to misconstrue; it was quite the contrary with Dacier."

The finest part of Diodorus is the charming description of the island of Panchaica – "Panchaica Tellus," celebrated by Virgil: "There were groves of odoriferous trees as far as the eye could see, myrrh and frankincense to furnish the whole world without exhausting it; fountains, which formed an infinity of canals, bordered with flowers, besides unknown birds, which sang under the eternal shades; a temple of marble four thousand feet long, ornamented with columns, colossal statues," etc.

This puts one in mind of the Duke de la Ferté, who, to flatter the taste of the Abbé Servien, said to him one day, "Ah, if you had seen my son who died at fifteen years of age! What eyes! what freshness of complexion! what an admirable stature! the Antinous of Belvidere compared to him was only like a Chinese baboon, and as to sweetness of manners, he had the most engaging I ever met with." The Abbé Servien melted, the duke of Ferté, warmed by his own words, melted also, both began to weep, after which he acknowledged that he never had a son.

A certain Abbé Bazin, with his simple common sense, doubts another tale of Diodorus. It is of a king of Egypt, Sesostris, who probably existed no more than the island of Panchaica. The father of Sesostris, who is not named, determined on the day that he was born that he would make him the conqueror of all the earth as soon as he was of age. It was a notable project. For this purpose he brought up with him all the boys who were born on the same day in Egypt, and, to make them conquerors, he did not suffer them to have their breakfasts until they had run a hundred and eighty stadia, which is about eight of our long leagues.

When Sesostris was of age he departed with his racers to conquer the world. They were then about seventeen hundred and probably half were dead, according to the ordinary course of nature – and, above all, of the nature of Egypt, which was desolated by a destructive plague at least once in ten years.

There must have been three thousand four hundred boys born in Egypt on the same day as Sesostris, and as nature produces almost as many girls as boys, there must have been six thousand persons at least born on that day. But women were confined every day, and six thousand births a day produce, at the end of the year, two millions one hundred and ninety thousand children. If you multiply by thirty-four, according to the rule of Kersseboom, you would have in Egypt more than seventy-four millions of inhabitants in a country which is not so large as Spain or France.

All this appeared monstrous to the Abbé Bazin, who had seen a little of the world, and who judged only by what he had seen.

But one Larcher, who was never outside of the college of Mazarin arrayed himself with great animation on the side of Sesostris and his runners. He pretends that Herodotus, in speaking of the Greeks, does not reckon by the stadia of Greece, and that the heroes of Sesostris only ran four leagues before breakfast. He overwhelms poor Abbé Bazin with injurious names such as no scholar in us or es had ever before employed. He does not hold with the seventeen hundred boys, but endeavors to prove by the prophets that the wives, daughters, and nieces of the king of Babylon, of the satraps, and the magi, resorted, out of pure devotion, to sleep for money in the aisles of the temple of Babylon with all the camel-drivers and muleteers of Asia. He treats all those who defend the honor of the ladies of Babylon as bad Christians, condemned souls, and enemies to the state.

He also takes the part of the goat, so much in the good graces of the young female Egyptians. It is said that his great reason was that he was allied, by the female side, to a relation of the bishop of Meaux, Bossuet, the author of an eloquent discourse on "Universal History"; but this is not a peremptory reason.

Take care of the extraordinary stories of all kinds. Diodorus of Sicily was the greatest compiler of these tales. This Sicilian had not a grain of the temper of his countryman Archimedes, who sought and found so many mathematical truths.

Diodorus seriously examines the history of the Amazons and their queen Theaestris; the history of the Gorgons, who fought against the Amazons; that of the Titans, and that of all the gods. He searches into the history of Priapus and Hermaphroditus. No one could give a better account of Hercules: this hero wandered through half the earth, sometimes on foot and alone like a pilgrim, and sometimes like a general at the head of a great army, and all his labors are faithfully discussed, but this is nothing in comparison with the gods of Crete.

Diodorus justifies Jupiter from the reproach which other grave historians have passed upon him, of having dethroned and mutilated his father. He shows how Jupiter fought the giants, some in his island, others in Phrygia, and afterwards in Macedonia and Italy; the number of children which he had by his sister Juno and his favorites are not omitted.

He describes how he afterwards became a god, and the supreme god. It is thus that all the ancient histories have been written. What is more remarkable, they were sacred; if they had not been sacred, they would never have been read.

It is clear that it would be very useful if in all they were all different, and from province to province, and island to island, each had a different history of the gods, demi-gods, and heroes, from that of their neighbors. But it should also be observed that the people never fought for this mythology.

The respectable history of Thucydides, which has several glimmerings of truth, begins at Xerxes, but, before that epoch how much time was wasted.

DIRECTOR

It is neither of a director of finances, a director of hospitals, nor a director of the royal buildings that I pretend to speak, but of a director of conscience, for that directs all the others: it is the preceptor of human kind; it knows and teaches all that should be done or omitted in all possible cases.

It is clear that it would be very useful if in all courts there were one conscientious man whom the monarch secretly consulted on most occasions, and who would boldly say, "Non licet." Louis the Just would not then have begun his mischievous and unhappy reign by assassinating his first minister and imprisoning his mother. How many wars, unjust as fatal, a few good dictators would have spared! How many cruelties they would have prevented!

But often, while intending to consult a lamb, we consult a fox. Tartuffe was the director of Orgon. I should like to know who was the conscientious director of the massacre of St. Bartholomew.

The gospel speaks no more of directors than of confessors. Among the people whom our ordinary courtesy calls Pagans we do not see that Scipio, Fabricius, Cato, Titus, Trajan, or the Antonines had directors. It is well to have a scrupulous friend to remind you of your duty. But your conscience ought to be the chief of your council.

A Huguenot was much surprised when a Catholic lady told him that she had a confessor to absolve her from her sins and a director to prevent her committing them. "How can your vessel so often go astray, madam," said he, "having two such good pilots?"

The learned observe that it is not the privilege of every one to have a director. It is like having an equerry; it only belongs to ladies of quality. The Abbé Gobelin, a litigious and covetous man, directed Madame de Maintenon only. The directors of Paris often serve four or five devotees at once; they embroil them with their husbands, sometimes with their lovers, and occasionally fill the vacant places.