ABSTRACT
The progress of human knowledge follows the march of the centuries, because human knowledge rests on the experience of the ages. The sages of Greece and Rome may have had more upright hearts than our sages, and some of them may have had more penetrating minds; but there was less enlightenment in their time than in ours, because the world had lived less, and man had less experience. If today, after five thousand years of Mosaic legislation, which the ancients did not know or only knew imperfectly; after two thousand years of Christianity, which they could not witness; fourteen centuries of religious and political constitutions in Europe, founded on natural laws; three centuries of the most learned political and religious discussion; finally, ten years of a politico-religious revolution, and an experiment which can be regarded as the digest of the entire history of human societies; if today the authors of the proposed new Civil Code, distinguished for their learning in a nation which is itself distinguished for its advances; after having recognized this truth unknown to the ancients: “when abuses are the work of the passions, they can be corrected by the laws; but when they are the work of the laws, the evil is incurable, because it lies in the cure itself”; if they have presented the law of divorce as a cure for the evil of separation, and have thereby set, as they themselves say, “a regular libertinism and an authorized inconstancy in the place of marriage itself”; if they have laid down as a principle that “laws are made for men, and should never be more perfect than men’s state admits of,” instead of recognizing that laws 95are promulgated against men’s passions, and should be as perfect today as society’s age allows and its needs require; if, in the nineteenth century, when everything is consummated for society, they allow divorce to Frenchmen, while it is necessary to begin the education of the savage by forbidding him polygamy; if, finally, when there can only be a question of more or less perfect, but always natural laws, they give us a vicious and unnatural one, by allowing the wife to revolt against her husband and tear his children from him; then I say with deep conviction: the legislator of the Christians, had he been only a man, would have known no more of his time than the authors of the proposed Civil Code know of theirs, because they have added eighteen centuries of experience to that which he had in his time, and because the man who is ahead of other men is never ahead of society. He would therefore have thought and spoken as men of the past thought and spoke; he would have, like our legislators, consulted morals and characters, accommodated his laws to men’s penchants, instead of rectifying their penchants by his laws; and far from stopping at divorce, which was no longer a cure for an evil but a means to commit it, he would have sought a cure for divorce itself; and as our legislators have only been able to correct the abuse of separations through divorce, he would only have corrected the abuse of divorce through the community of women, which he found recommended in the laws of Plato, and the example, or nearly so, in the morals of all peoples, including his own. If he had not made his laws more perfect than the men of that time admitted of, then what laws would he have given to men, to women, as they are depicted by Juvenal, Tacitus, Petronius, Suetonius, and Josephus, last historian of the Jews? If he had given men only the laws they could admit of, then men—if indeed the human species had been able to survive this ghastly legislation—would today be worse than their laws; and Europe, the center of all civilization and refinement, Europe, which has made the whole universe the tributary of her knowl 96edge and strength, and where there lies, so to speak, the general depot of all truths and virtues, of everything natural in laws and arts, Europe would, like the rest of the world, be given over to every error and disorder. May eternal thanks be given him! It is not thus that the legislator of the Christians considers man and society. He knows man and his penchants, because he knows his work and that of man; and far from presenting man with weak laws, the accomplices of his passions, or the impotent witnesses of his disorders, he imposes them on him as a bridle, or opposes them to him as a dike: Perfecti estote, “Be perfect,” he tells us; a sublime saying, which no legislator before him had pronounced, and none since him has repeated. “Be perfect,” not, like Aristides and Cato, with that pagan perfection which, alongside the private virtues which honor man, leaves intact all the vices which oppress humanity; * but with the perfection of God himself, that is to say, with that perfection which consists in obeying in all things the most natural laws, which, being the enunciation of the natural relationships of beings, are the expression of the general will of their author; for that is the general or metaphysical meaning of this passage: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” And not only does he tell men, whom he calls to the truth, to be better than the pagans: “For what merit would you have,” he asked them, “in doing what the pagans do?”, None ethnici et hoc faciunt?, but he tells them to be better than the Jews themselves, the least imperfect of all peoples; and he declares to them that “unless your justice exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will surely not enter the kingdom of heaven.” He sets the difference between 97an imperfect and a perfect law before their eyes, when he tells them: “Your fathers were told to love those who loved them; but I tell you to love those who hate you.” He presents the distinction between the evil works of the passions, the imperfect works of the law, and the perfect works of the love of one’s neighbor, in the sublime parable where a man is mistreated by robbers, neglected by the Levite, and rescued by the Samaritan; for it is to be noted here that the Levite represents the imperfect state of the law, whose minister he is.
