The Effects that the Thought of Future Goods and Evils is Capable of Producing in the Mind

If it often happens that small pleasures and slight pains, which one feels at present or even expects to feel, strangely confuse our imagination and prevent us from judging things according to their true ideas, one must not imagine that the expectation of eternity does not act upon our mind; but it is appropriate to consider what it is capable of producing there.

One must first note that the hope of an eternity of pleasures does not act so strongly on minds as the fear of an eternity of torments. The reason is that men do not love pleasure as much as they hate pain. Moreover, by the inner feeling they have of their disorders, they know that they are worthy of hell, and they see nothing in themselves that merits rewards as great as that of participating in the very felicity of God. They feel, when they wish to, and even often when they do not wish to, that far from meriting these rewards, they are worthy of the greatest punishments; for their conscience never leaves them. But they are not similarly incessantly convinced that God wishes to show His mercy upon sinners after having made His justice shine forth against His son. Thus even the just apprehend more vividly the eternity of torments than they hope for the eternity of pleasures. The view of punishment therefore acts more than the view of reward; and here is approximately what it is capable of producing, not by itself alone, but as principal cause.

It gives birth in the mind to an infinity of scruples, and fortifies them to such an extent that it is almost impossible to be delivered from them. It extends, so to speak, faith even to prejudices, and makes one render to imaginary powers the worship due only to God. It stubbornly arrests the mind in vain or dangerous superstitions. It makes one embrace with ardor and zeal human traditions and practices useless for salvation, Jewish and Pharisaical devotions that servile fear has invented. Finally it sometimes throws men into a blindness of despair; so that, confusedly regarding death as nothingness, they brutally hasten to lose themselves, in order to deliver themselves from the mortal anxieties that agitate and frighten them. Women, young people, weak minds are most subject to scruples and superstitions, and men are most capable of despair.

It is easy to recognize the reasons for all these things; for it is visible that the idea of eternity being the greatest, the most terrible and the most frightening of all those that astonish the mind and strike the imagination, it is necessary that it be accompanied by a great train of accessory ideas, which all make a considerable effect on the mind, because of the relation they have to this great and terrible idea of eternity.

Everything that has some relation to the infinite is not small; or, if it is small in itself, it receives by this relation a greatness that has no bounds, and which cannot be compared with anything finite. Thus, everything that has some relation, or even that one imagines to have some relation, to this necessary alternative of an eternity of torments or an eternity of delights that is proposed to us, necessarily frightens all minds that are capable of some reflection and some feeling.

Women, young people and weak minds, having, as I have already said elsewhere, the fibers of the brain soft and flexible, receive very deep traces of this alternative; and, when they have abundance of spirits and are more capable of feeling than of just reflection, they receive, by the vivacity of their imagination, a very great number of false traces and false accessory ideas that have no natural relation to the principal idea. However this relation, although imaginary, nevertheless sustains and fortifies these false traces and these false accessory ideas to which it has given birth.

When litigants have a great affair that occupies them entirely and they do not understand the lawsuit, they often have vain fears, because they fear that certain things may harm them, to which the judges pay no attention and which professionals do not apprehend. The affair is of such great consequence for them that the shock it produces in their brain spreads and communicates itself to distant traces that have no natural relation to it. It is the same with the scrupulous; they make for themselves, without reason, subjects of fear and anxiety. Instead of examining the will of God in the holy scriptures, and relying on those whose imagination is not wounded, they think incessantly of an imaginary law that disordered movements of fear engrave in their brain. And although they are inwardly convinced of their weakness and that God does not demand of them certain duties they prescribe for themselves, since they prevent them from serving Him, they cannot help preferring their imagination to their mind, and yielding rather to certain confused feelings that frighten them and make them fall into error, than to the evidence of reason which reassures them and puts them back on the true path of their salvation.

There is often much virtue and charity in persons afflicted with scruples; but there is much less in those who are attached to some superstitions and who make their principal occupation some Jewish and Pharisaical practices. God wishes to be adored in spirit and in truth; He is not content with grimaces and exterior civilities, with kneeling in His presence and praising Him by a movement of the lips in which the heart has no part. Men are content with these marks of respect only because they do not penetrate the heart; for even men are unjust enough to wish to be adored in spirit and in truth. God therefore demands our mind and our heart: He has made them only for Himself and He preserves them only for Himself. But there are many people who, unfortunately for themselves, refuse Him the things upon which He has all kinds of rights. They have idols in their heart, which they adore in spirit and in truth, and to which they sacrifice all that they are.

But, because the true God threatens them, in the secret of their conscience, with an eternity of torments, to punish the excess of their ingratitude, and that, however, they do not wish to abandon their idolatry, they think of doing exteriorly some good works: they fast, like others; they give alms; they say prayers. They continue some time in such exercises, and, because they are painful to those who lack charity, they ordinarily leave them to embrace certain easy little practices or devotions, which, agreeing with self-love, necessarily overturn, but in an imperceptible manner, the whole morality of Jesus Christ. They are faithful, ardent and zealous defenders of these human traditions, which ill-informed persons persuade them are very useful, and which the idea of eternity, which frightens them, incessantly represents to them as absolutely necessary for their salvation.

It is not the same with the just. They hear, like the impious, the threats of their God; but the confused noise of their passions does not prevent them from hearing the counsels. The false glimmers of human traditions do not dazzle them to the point of not feeling the light of truth. They place their confidence in the promises of Jesus Christ, and they follow His counsels; for they know that the promises of men are as vain as their counsels. Nevertheless, one can say that this fear that the idea of eternity gives birth to in their minds sometimes produces so great a shock in their imagination, that they do not dare entirely condemn these human traditions, and that often they approve them by their example, because they have some appearance of wisdom in their superstition and their false humility, like those Pharisaical traditions of which St. Paul speaks [11].

But what is principally worthy of consideration here, and which concerns not so much the disorder of morals as that of the mind, is that the fear of which we have just spoken extends faith as well as zeal of those who are struck by it quite often to false things or things unworthy of the sanctity of our religion. There are many people who believe, but with a constant and obstinate faith, that the earth is immobile at the center of the world; that animals feel true pain; that sensible qualities are spread upon objects; that there are forms or real accidents distinct from matter, and an infinity of similar false or uncertain opinions, because they have imagined that it would be to go against faith to deny them.

They are frightened by the expressions of Holy Scripture, which speaks to make itself understood, and which consequently uses ordinary ways of speaking, without intending to instruct us in physics. They believe not only what the Spirit of God wishes to teach them, but also all the opinions of the Jews. They do not see that Joshua, for example, speaks before his soldiers as Copernicus himself, Galileo and Descartes would speak to common men, and that even if he had been of the opinion of these latter philosophers, he would not have commanded the earth to stop, since he would not have shown his army, by words that would not have been understood, the miracle that God was performing for his people.

Do not those who believe that the sun is immobile say to their servants, to their friends, even to those who are of their opinion, that the sun rises or sets? Do they think of speaking otherwise than all other men at a time when their principal design is not to philosophize? Did Joshua perfectly know astronomy? Or, if he knew it, did his soldiers know it? Or, if he and his soldiers were well instructed in it, can one say that they wished to philosophize at a time when they thought only of fighting? Joshua must therefore have spoken as he did, even if he and his soldiers had believed what the most skillful astronomers presently believe. However these words of that great captain: “Sun, stand still upon Gibeon,” and what is said afterward, that the sun stopped according to his command, persuade many people that the opinion of the earth’s movement is an opinion not only dangerous, but even absolutely heretical and untenable.

They have heard say that some pious persons, for whom it is just to have much respect and deference, condemned this opinion: they know confusedly something of what happened on this subject to a learned astronomer of our century, and that seems sufficient to them to believe obstinately that faith extends even to this opinion.

A certain confused feeling, excited and sustained by a movement of fear, of which they are hardly even aware, makes them enter into distrust against those who follow reason in these things, which are within the province of reason. They regard them as heretics; it is only with uneasiness and some pain of mind that they listen to them, and their secret apprehensions give birth in their minds to the same respects and the same submissions for these opinions and for many other purely philosophical ones as for the truths that are the object of faith.