Ridicule a Fair Weapon When Employed Against Absurd Opinions—Rules to Be Observed in the Use of This Weapon—The Profane Buffoonery of Fathers Le Moine and Garasse.
Reverend Fathers,—I have seen the letters which you are circulating in opposition to those which I wrote to one of my friends on your morality; and I perceive that one of the principal points of your defence is, that I have not spoken of your maxims with sufficient seriousness. This charge you repeat in all your productions, and carry it so far as to allege, that I have been “guilty of turning sacred things into ridicule.”
Such a charge, fathers, is no less surprising than it is unfounded. Where do you find that I have turned sacred things into ridicule? You specify “the Mohatra contract, and the story of John d’Alba.” But are these what you call “sacred things?” Does it really appear to you that the Mohatra is something so venerable that it would be blasphemy not to speak of it with respect? And the lessons of Father Bauny on larceny, which led John d’Alba to practise it at your expense, are they so sacred as to entitle you to stigmatize all who laugh at them as profane people?
What, fathers! must the vagaries of your doctors pass for the verities of the Christian faith, and no man be allowed to ridicule Escobar, or the fantastical and unchristian dogmas of your authors, without being stigmatized as jesting at religion? Is it possible you can have ventured to reiterate so often an idea so utterly unreasonable? Have you no fears that, in blaming me for laughing at your absurdities, you may only afford me fresh subject of merriment; that you may make the charge recoil on yourselves, by showing that I have really selected nothing from your writings as the matter of raillery, but what was truly ridiculous; and that thus, in making a jest of your morality, I have been as far from jeering at holy things, as the doctrine of your casuists is far from the holy doctrine of the Gospel?
Indeed, reverend sirs, there is a vast difference between laughing at religion, and laughing at those who profane it by their extravagant opinions. It were impiety to be wanting in respect for the verities which the Spirit of God has revealed; but it were no less impiety of another sort, to be wanting in contempt for the falsities which the spirit of man opposes to them.1
For, fathers (since you will force me into this argument), I beseech you to consider that, just in proportion as Christian truths are worthy of love and respect, the contrary errors must deserve hatred and contempt; there being two things in the truths of our religion—a divine beauty that renders them lovely, and a sacred majesty that renders them venerable; and two things also about errors—an impiety, that makes them horrible, and an impertinence that renders them ridiculous. For these reasons, while the saints have ever cherished towards the truth the two-fold sentiment of love and fear—the whole of their wisdom being comprised between fear, which is its beginning, and love, which is its end—they have, at the same time, entertained towards error the two-fold feeling of hatred and contempt, and their zeal has been at once employed to repel, by force of reasoning, the malice of the wicked, and to chastise, by the aid of ridicule, their extravagance and folly.
Do not then expect, fathers, to make people believe that it is unworthy of a Christian to treat error with derision. Nothing is easier than to convince all who were not aware of it before, that this practice is perfectly just—that it is common with the fathers of the Church, and that it is sanctioned by Scripture, by the example of the best of saints, and even by that of God himself.
Do we not find that God at once hates and despises sinners; so that even at the hour of death, when their condition is most sad and deplorable, Divine Wisdom adds mockery to the vengeance which consigns them to eternal punishment? “In interitu vestro ridebo et subsannabo—I will laugh at your calamity.” The saints, too, influenced by the same feeling, will join in the derision; for, according to David, when they witness the punishment of the wicked, “they shall fear, and yet laugh at it—videbunt justi et timebunt, et super eum ridebunt.” And Job says: “Innocens subsannabit eos—The innocent shall laugh at them.”2
It is worthy of remark here, that the very first words which God addressed to man after his fall, contain, in the opinion of the fathers, “bitter irony” and mockery. After Adam had disobeyed his Maker, in the hope, suggested by the devil, of being like God, it appears from Scripture that God, as a punishment, subjected him to death; and after having reduced him to this miserable condition, which was due to his sin, he taunted him in that state with the following terms of derision: “Behold, the man has become as one of us!—Ecce, Adam quasi unus ex nobis!”—which, according to St. Jerome3 and the interpreters, is “a grievous and cutting piece of irony,” with which God “stung him to the quick.” “Adam,” says Rupert, “deserved to be taunted in this manner, and he would be naturally made to feel his folly more acutely by this ironical expression than by a more serious one.” St. Victor, after making the same remark, adds, “that this irony was due to his sottish credulity, and that this species of raillery is an act of justice, merited by him against whom it was directed.”4