Antediluvian, or the state of philosophy before the flood. Some of those who try to trace back the origin of philosophy do not come to a halt at the first man, who was made in the image and in resemblance of God, but, as if the Earth were not a place worthy of its origins, they set off into the heavens, and seek it among the angels, where they show us its origins in all its brilliant clarity. This view seems to be based on what Scripture tells us about the nature and wisdom of angels. It is natural to think that since their nature is far superior to our own, angels therefore have a more perfect knowledge of things, and that they are much better philosophers than we human beings. Some scholars have gone further, because to prove to us that angels excel in physics, they say that God used them to create the world and to form the different creatures inhabiting it. This opinion, as we can see, is the consequence of the ideas that these scholars have taken from the doctrine of Pythagoras and Plato. These two philosophers, embarrassed by the infinite space existing between God and man, judged it wise to fill it with genies and demons; but, as Mr de Fontenelle has wisely said against Plato, History of Oracles  [1], what will then fill up the infinite space there is between God and these genies, and even these demons? For the distance between God and any creature whatsoever is infinite. As God’s action has to cross, so to speak, this infinite void to reach the demons, it could just as easily reach human beings too, since they are only a few degrees further on, which is out of all proportion to the first distance. When God has dealings with mankind via angels, it does not mean that angels are needed for communication, as Plato claimed; God makes use of them for reasons that philosophy can never penetrate, and which can only be perfectly understood by Himself alone. Plato imagines demons forming a ladder that leads, from more perfect creature to more perfect creature, ultimately to God, so that God only has a few degrees of perfection above the first creatures. But it is obvious that, as they are all infinitely imperfect in comparison to Him, because they are all at an infinite distance from Him, then the differences of perfection between them disappear when one compares them with God: what raises some above others hardly brings them any closer to Him. Thus, by referring only to human wisdom, we have no need of demons, either to bring God’s actions down as far as mankind, or to place something between God and us that is able to come closer to Him than we can.

But if the good angels, who are the ministers of God’s will and his messengers among mankind, are gifted with some philosophical knowledge, why should this prerogative be refused to the bad angels? Their rejection changed nothing in the excellence of their nature, nor in the perfection of their knowledge; the proof of this can be seen in astrology, auguries and haruspices. The demon that tempted our first parents owed his victory over them only to the artifices of a fine and subtle dialectic. Even some Church Fathers who, steeped in platonic dreams, wrote that the rejected spirits taught the men they were able to charm and had contact with, several of nature’s secrets, such as metallurgy, the virtue of elementary bodies, the power of enchantments, and the art of reading the fate of men by looking up at the sky.

I will not amuse myself here by proving how pitiable is the reasoning by which it is claimed that the angels and devils are philosophers, and great philosophers at that. Let us leave aside this philosophy of the inhabitants of the heavens and of Cape Matapan; it is too far above us; let us speak of the philosophy that is suited to mankind, and which is within our terms of competence.

Was Adam, the first man, a philosopher? This is something that many people have no doubts about. In fact, Horn [2] tells us, we believe that before his fall Adam was gifted not only with all the qualities and knowledge that perfect the mind, but even after his fall he kept some trace of his earlier knowledge. The memory of what he had lost, still present in his mind, awoke in his heart a violent desire to retrieve the knowledge that sin had taken away from him, and to remove the darkness that veiled it from him. To satisfy this desire, he strove all his life to question nature, to raise himself to the most sublime knowledge: in fact, there is reason to believe that he did not leave his children ignorant of most of his discoveries, since he lived with them for such a long time. Such are more or less the arguments of Dr Horn, to which we might have readily added the Jewish doctors’ too, if their fables deserved the slightest attention on our part. Here are some more arguments highly worthy of Dr Horn, proving that Adam was a philosopher, and even a first-rate philosopher. If he had not been a physicist [3], how could he have given names, which seem to so many people to express their nature, to all the animals that were brought before him? Eusebius took it as a proof that Adam understood Logic. As for mathematics, it is impossible to doubt that he was familiar with the subject, since otherwise, how could he have made himself clothes from animal hides, build himself a house, observe the movements of the stars and regulate the year according to the course of the sun? Finally, to cap all these decisive proofs in favour of Adam’s being a philosopher is the fact that he wrote Books, and these Books contain sublime knowledge he had acquired through tireless work. It is true that the Books that have been attributed to him are either apocryphal or have been lost, but that is of no matter. They were thought to be Adam’s only because tradition kept the titles of authentic books of which he was the true author.

There is nothing easier than to refute all these arguments: 1°. What we know of Adam’s wisdom before his fall has nothing in common with philosophy in the sense that we understand it, since it consisted of wisdom in the knowledge of God, of himself and above all in the practical knowledge of everything that could lead him to the happiness for which he was born. It is indeed true that Adam had wisdom of this kind, but what does this have in common with the philosophy that is produced by curiosity and wonder, the daughters of ignorance, which are only acquired by a wearisome labour of reflection, and which are perfected only through the conflict of opinions? The wisdom with which Adam was created is the divine wisdom that is the fruit of grace, and which God pours into even the most simple souls. This wisdom is without doubt the true philosophy, but it is completely different from the philosophy that is engendered by the mind and which all the centuries have played a part in increasing. If Adam had no philosophy in the state of innocence, what becomes of the philosophy attributed to him after his fall, and which was only a weak trace of the first? How can we say that Adam, whose sin followed him everywhere, who was only occupied with placating his God and pushing back the miseries of his environment, had enough peace of mind to give himself up to sterile speculations of a vain philosophy? He gave names to the animals; did he know their nature and properties very well as a result? He reasoned with Eve, our common grandmother, and with his children; do you conclude that he knew about dialectics? With this fine reasoning we could transform each person into a dialectician. Adam built himself a miserable hut; he governed his family wisely, he instructed them in their duties, and taught them the cult of religion: are these reasons we can put forward to prove that Adam was an architect, a politician and a theologian? Finally, how can anyone maintain that Adam invented literature when we see people even long after the flood still using hieroglyphics, which is the most imperfect form of writing, and the first effort that mankind made to communicate their crude conceptions with each other? We see by this how far the ingenious and wise author of the critical history of philosophy is subject to contradictions regarding its origins and beginnings: “Philosophy was born,” if we are to believe him, “with the world; and contrary to most human productions, there is nothing in its cradle that spoiled or degraded it. Through the weaknesses and stammerings of its childhood, one can find in it strong and daring features, and a kind of perfection. Men have always indeed thought, reflected, meditated: at all times, too, the sumptuous and magnificent spectacle presented by the universe, a spectacle even more striking when it is studied with more care, has struck their curiosity.”

But, one may reply, if wonder is the mother of philosophy, as this author tells us, it was not born with the world, since it was necessary for men, before they had philosophy, to begin to wonder. But for that, time was needed, experience and thought were needed; and can one imagine that the earliest human beings had enough time to exercise their minds on philosophical systems, when they hardly found the means to live a little decently? One can only satisfy the needs of the mind after satisfying the needs of the body. The first men were thus very far from thinking about philosophy: “The miracles of nature are set out before our eyes long before we have enough reason to be enlightened by them. If we arrived in this world with the reasoning abilities we carry into the opera house the first time we go there, and if the curtain were suddenly raised, then, struck with the grandeur, the magnificence and the interplay of the decorations, we would not have the strength to refuse the knowledge of the great truths that are connected to it; but who could imagine being surprised by something one has seen for fifty years? Some men, busy with their needs, hardly had time to devote themselves to metaphysical speculation; the rise of the morning star called them to work; the most beautiful evening, the most touching night was mute for them, or else told them nothing but that it was time to rest: while others, less busy, either never had the chance to question nature or did not have the intelligence to hear the answer. The wisdom of the philosophical genius who, shaking off the yoke of habit, was the first to be surprised by the prodigies that surrounded him, looking inside himself, questioning himself and explaining to himself everything he saw, must have had to wait a long time, and may have died, before his opinions gained credit”. Essay on Merit and Virtue, page 92 [4] .

If Adam had no philosophy, then there is no difficulty in refusing it to his children Abel and Cain: only Georg Horn was able to see in Cain the founder of a school of philosophy. You may not believe it, but Cain sowed the first seeds of Epicureanism and was an atheist. The reason given for this by Horn is highly unusual. Cain was, according to him, a philosopher, but an impious and atheistic philosopher because he loved amusement and pleasure, and his children followed the lessons in voluptuousness he gave them all too well. If one became an Epicurean philosopher because one listened to the voice of pleasure, and one sought impunity from crimes in practical atheism, then the gardens of Epicurus would not be wide enough to hold all the voluptuous philosophers. What Horn goes on to add about the town that Cain built, and the tools he used to labour the earth, by no means prove that he was a philosopher, because what necessity and experience, mankind’s first teachers, help them to find, need no assistance from the teachings of philosophy. One would also think that God taught the first man how to cultivate the earth, just as the first man instructed his children in it.

The jealous Cain having raised his murderous hand against his brother Abel, God brought Abel to life again in the person of Seth. So it was in his family that the sacred deposit of the earliest religious traditions were kept. The partisans of antediluvian philosophy not only see Seth as a philosopher, but also claim he was a great astronomer. Flavius Josephus, praising the knowledge that the children of Seth had acquired before the flood, says that they raised two columns on which to write down their knowledge and transmit it to posterity [5]. One of the columns was made of brick and the other of stone, and no effort was spared to build them solidly so that they would resist the floods and fires that were threatening the world. Josephus adds that the brick column still stood in his own times. I do not know if we should base much on a passage like this. Exaggeration and hyperbole come easily to Josephus when he wants to make his nation illustrious. This historian aimed above all to show the superiority of the Jews over the Gentiles in arts and science: this is probably what gave rise to his fiction about the two columns raised by the children of Seth. What likelihood is there that a monument of this kind could have stood after the ravages caused by the flood? And also it is hard to understand why Moses, who mentions the arts that were founded by the children of Cain, such as music, metallurgy, iron-working and bronze, etc, says nothing about the great knowledge that Seth had acquired in astronomy, in writing – whose inventor he is said to be – and about the names he gave to the stars or the division he made of the year into months and weeks.

One must not imagine that Jubal and Tubal-cain were great philosophers because one of them invented music and the other discovered the secret of working with iron and bronze; perhaps these two men only perfected what had been discovered before. But if we admit that they invented these arts, what conclusions can we make regarding philosophy? Do we not know that we owe most of the arts that are useful to society to chance? What philosophy does is to reason about the genius that it finds in them, after they have been discovered. It is fortunate for us that chance foresaw our needs, and that it left almost nothing for philosophy to do. We can no more find philosophy among the descendants of Seth than among the descendants of Cain; in truth we see men who kept up the knowledge of the true God, and were the depositories of primitive traditions, who were dealing with solid and serious things, such as agriculture and herding; but we see no philosophers. So it is pointless to look for the origiseen and beginnings of philosophy in the times that preceded the flood. See Philosophy.

Notes

1. Fontenelle et al., Histoire Des Oracles, (Paris: E. Cornély et cie, 1908), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044012981643.

2. Georg Horn, Georgii Hornii Historiae Philosophicae Libri Septem . (Lugduni Batavorum: apud Johannem Elsevirium, 1655), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.31175035132821.

3. The French “ physicien” also has the sense of “natural scientist” in the 18 ^th Century.

4. Denis Diderot, Maurice Tourneux, and Jules Assézat, “Principes de La Philosophie Morale ou Essai Sur Le Mérite et La Vertu,” in Oeuvres Complètes. Revues Sur Les Éditions Originales ... Étude Sur Diderot et Le Mouvement Philosophique Au XVIIIe Siècle , 20 v. (Paris: Garnier, 1875), 3–121, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b4061035.

5. See Flavius Josephus and William Whiston, The Works of Flavius Josephus: ... Containing Twenty Books of the Jewish Antiquities, Seven Books of the Jewish War, and the Life of Josephus , vol. 1, (Philadelphia: J. Grigg, 1829), 15, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nnc1.50218933.