It seems useful, in presenting to English readers this selection of
the works of Voltaire, to recall the position and personality of the
writer and the circumstances in which the works were written. It is
too lightly assumed, even by many who enjoy the freedom which he,
more than any, won for Europe, and who may surpass him in scepticism,
that Voltaire is a figure to be left in a discreetly remote niche
of memory. “Other times, other manners” is one of the phrases he
contributed to modern literature. Let us genially acknowledge that he
played a great part in dispelling the last mists of the Middle Ages,
and politely attribute to the papal perversity and the lingering
vulgarity of his age the more effective features of his work. Thus
has Voltaire become a mere name to modern rationalists; a name of
fading brilliance, a monumental name, but nothing more.
This sentiment is at once the effect and the cause of a very general
ignorance concerning Voltaire; and it is a reproach to us. We
have time, amid increasing knowledge, to recover the most obscure
personalities of the Middle Ages and of antiquity; we trace the
most elementary contributors to modern culture; and we neglect
one of the mightiest forces that made the development of modern
culture possible. I do not speak of Voltaire the historian, who, a
distinguished writer says, introduced history for the first time into
the realm of letters; Voltaire the dramatist, whose name is inscribed
for ever in the temple of the tragic muse; Voltaire the physicist,
who drove the old Cartesianism out of France, and imposed on it the
fertile principles of Newton; Voltaire the social reformer, who
talked to eighteenth-century kings of the rights of man, and scourged
every judicial criminal of his aristocratic age; Voltaire the
cosmopolitan, who boldly set up England’s ensign of liberty in feudal
France. All these things were done by the “flippant Voltaire” of the
flippant modern preacher. But he can be considered here only as one
of the few who, in an age of profound inequality, used the privilege
of his enlightenment to enlighten his fellows; one of those who won
for us that liberty to think rationally, and to speak freely, on
religious matters which we too airily attribute to our new goddess,
Evolution.
The position of Voltaire in the development of religious thought in
Europe is unique. Even if his words had no application in our age,
it merits the most grateful consideration. Trace to its sources the
spirit that has led modern France and modern Portugal to raise civic
ideals above creeds, and that will, within a few decades, find the
same expression in Spain, Italy, Belgium, and half of America. You
find yourself in the first half of the nineteenth century, when, in
all those countries, a few hundred men, and some women, maintained
a superb struggle with restored monarchs and restored Jesuits for
the liberty that had been wrested from them; and you find that the
vast majority of them were disciples of Voltaire. Go back to the very
beginning of the anti-clerical movement; seek the generators of that
intellectual and emotional electricity which, gathering insensibly
in the atmosphere of Europe in the second half of the eighteenth
century, burst at last in the lurid flashes and the rolling thunders
of the Great Revolution. On the religious side, with which alone I
am concerned here, that devastating storm was overwhelmingly due to
the writings of Voltaire. Rousseau, it is true, gave to the world his
simple Deistic creed, and with sweet reasonableness lodged it in the
minds of many; Diderot and d’Holbach and La Mettrie impressed their
deeper scepticism with a weight of learning. But Voltaire was the
oracle of Europe. “I have no sceptre, but I have a pen,” he once said
to Frederick the Great. And when, in his later years, he poured out
from his remote château on the Swiss frontier the flood of satires,
stories, sermons, dialogues, pamphlets, and treatises which ate deep
into the fabric of old Europe, his pen proved mightier than all the
sceptres of its kings. To ignore Voltaire is to ignore history.
My object, however, in introducing to English readers these few
characteristic specimens of his anti-clerical work is not solely to
bespeak some gratefulness for the toleration and freedom which he
enforced on a reluctant world, or to gratify a simple curiosity as
to the character of his power. These are not dead words, not ashes
of an extinct fire, which we disinter; for the world is not dead at
which they were flung. If they cause resentment in the minds of some,
the publication will be the more justified. But before I explain this
paradox, let me show how the works came to be written, and written in
such a way.
The life of Voltaire, which some conceive as a prolonged adolescence,
has a very clear and instructive division into adolescence, manhood,
and ripe age. All the works given in this volume belong to the
last part, but we must glance at the others. François Marie Arouet
was born, in the very comfortable _bourgeois_ family of a staid
Parisian notary, in 1694. He became a precocious, sharp-eared boy.
His godfather was an _abbé_, a kind of ecclesiastic--not usually
a priest--in the France of the time who drew his income from the
Church, and therefore felt more entitled than the ordinary layman
to scoff at its dogmas and ignore its morals. He could plead the
example of his bishops. Several of these _abbés_ visited the
home of the Arouets, and gave little “Zozo” his first lessons in
Biblical criticism. In the great college of the Jesuits he learned
to articulate his scepticism. In his seventeenth year he set out on
the career of letters. The kindly _abbé_, who, having answered to
God for him at the baptismal font, felt bound to guide his fortunes,
introduced him to one of the most brilliant and dissolute circles
in Paris. It was a kind of club of _abbés_, nobles, writers, etc.,
and in it he would rapidly attain that large and peculiar knowledge
of the Old Testament which appears in his writings. He sparkled so
much at the suppers of the Epicureans, and earned such reputation,
that he was put in the Bastille for certain naughty epigrams, which
he had not written; and he was exiled for another epigram, on a
distinguished sinner, which he had written. In the pensive solitude
of the Bastille he changed his name to Voltaire.[1] He emerged bolder
than ever, wrote tragedies and poems and epigrams, was welcomed in
the smartest salons of Paris, and behaved as a young gentleman of the
time was expected to behave, until his thirty-first year.
In 1726 he was, through the despotic and most unjust action of a
powerful noble, again put in the Bastille, and was then allowed to
exchange that fortress for the fogs of London. Up to this time he
had no idea of attacking Church or State. He had, in 1722, written a
letter on religion--in the vein, apparently, of some of Swinburne’s
unpublished juvenilia--which a distinguished writer of the time,
to whom he read it, described as “making his hair stand on end”;
it was, however, not intended for circulation. But experience of
England, for which he contracted a passionate admiration, and which
(as Mr. Churton Collins has shown) he studied profoundly, sobered him
with a high and serious purpose. He met all the brilliant writers
of that age in England, and took a great interest in the religious
controversy which raged over Anthony Collins’s _Discourse_. He
returned to France in 1729, vowing to win for it the liberty and
enlightenment he had enjoyed in England. The splendid _English
Letters_ which he wrote with that aim, and was afraid to publish,
leaked out in 1734. The book was burned by the hangman, and he had to
retire once more, for letting France know how enlightened England was
in the days of George I.
I pass over twenty years of his strenuous and brilliant career. He
wrote his most famous tragedies and histories; he made an ardent
study of, and introduced to France, the new science of Isaac Newton,
whose funeral he had witnessed in London; he was banished from his
country for smiling at Adam and Eve; he deserted France for Germany,
and then quarrelled with Frederick the Great; he tried liberal
Switzerland, and found that it gave you liberty only to attack other
people’s dogmas; and in 1760 he settled at Ferney, since the shrine
of Continental Rationalism, on the frontier, so that he could talk
to Calvinists from the French side, and cross the border, if need
were, to talk to France. But France was at his feet. For eighteen
years more he showered his rain of publications on it. Even in those
illiterate days some of his publications sold 300,000 copies. And
when at last, in 1778, he was tempted to revisit Paris, the roar of
delight, of esteem, of abject worship, overwhelmed him, and he died
in a flood of glory.
To those last twenty years of his life belong the anti-Christian
works reproduced in this volume. He was now a man of mature judgment,
vast erudition, and grave humanitarian purpose. The common notion in
England of Voltaire’s works, as superficial gibes thrown out by the
way in a brilliant career, is sheer nonsense. His command of history
was remarkable; and he had, for the time, a thorough grasp of science
and philosophy. His arguments for the existence of God will compare
with those of the ablest lay or clerical theologians of his time.
His knowledge was defective and inaccurate because all knowledge was
defective and inaccurate in the eighteenth century, when research
was only just beginning to recover from its long ecclesiastical
paralysis. No man in France had a larger command of such knowledge
as the time afforded, and the use he made of it was serious and
high-purposed. It is only the superficial who cannot see the depth
below that sparkling surface; only the insensible who cannot feel the
strong, steady beat of a human heart behind the rippling laughter.
_Écrasez l’infame_--“Crush the infamous thing”--the battle-cry
which he sent over Europe from the Swiss frontier, was but a fiery
expression of his love of men, of liberty, of enlightenment, and of
progress. Read the stories of brutality in the guise of religion that
are told in these pages--stories which ran into Voltaire’s day--the
stories of “religious” processions and relics and superstitions, the
story of how this ignorant credulity had been imposed on Europe, and
how it was maintained by sceptical priests, and say, if you dare,
that the phrase was not a cry of truth, sincerity, and humanity.
There was even a profoundly religious impulse in his work. A clerical
friend once confided to me that he found a use in Voltaire. It
seemed that, when inspiration for the Sunday sermon failed, he fell
upon my “atheistic friends,” Voltaire and Rousseau, and the French
Revolution they brought about. He was amazed to hear that they
believed in God as firmly as, and much more reasonably than, he and
his colleagues did. Voltaire’s aim was a sincere effort to rid pure
religion of its morbid and abominable overgrowths.
Very good, you say; but why not have set about it more politely? For
two plain reasons. First, because the character of his opponents
fully justified him in directing his most scathing wit upon
them. The Jesuits, whom he chiefly lashed, were in his own time
ignominiously expelled by nearly every Catholic Power in Europe, and
were suppressed by the Pope. The other clergy were deeply tainted
with scepticism in the cities, and befogged with dense ignorance in
the provinces. One incident will suffice to justify his disdain.
His latest English biographer, S. G. Tallentyre, who is not biassed
in his favour, says that it is most probable, if not certain, that
while the Catholic authorities were burning his books in Paris, and
shuddering at his infidelity, they were secretly tempting him, with
the prospect of a cardinal’s hat, to join the clergy. It is certain
that they invited him to do religious work, and that, at the height
of his anti-clerical work, he received direct from the Pope certain
relics to put in a chapel he had built for his poor neighbours. Could
a prince of irony restrain himself in such circumstances? The other
reason is the character of the dogmas and practices he assailed. Read
them in the following pages.
It is true that there are passages in Voltaire which none of us
would, if we could, write to-day. The taste of the eighteenth
century, still fouled by the Middle Ages, is not the taste of the
twentieth. Besides some longer passages which have been omitted from
the _Treatise on Toleration_, as will be explained, a few lines
have been struck out or modified here and there in one or two of
the works in this selection. Let me not be misunderstood, however.
They are mainly words of the Old Testament, and comments inspired
only by those words, that have been omitted. In the eighteenth
century one could quote and comment in public on these grossnesses.
Indeed, by some singular mental process, which Voltaire alone could
characterise, the books containing these crudely sexual passages are
still thrust into the hands of children and of confined criminals by
the joint authority of Church and State in England; and grave bishops
and gentle women say that they are the Word of God.
And this brings me to the last point that I desire to touch before
I introduce, one by one, the works contained in this volume. Why
reproduce at all, in the twentieth century, these fitting scourges of
the superstitions of the eighteenth? I have said that they deserve
to be reproduced for their historical interest and for the great
part they have played in the history of Europe; but there is another
reason. I have an idea that, if Voltaire were alive in England
to-day, he would write with more scathing irony than ever. I imagine
him gazing with profound admiration at that marvellous picture of
the past which science and archæology have given us, and then asking
at what date in the nineteenth century we ceased to dispute about
consubstantiality and transubstantiation, took the gilt off our Old
Testament, and elevated our bishops to the rank of citizens. I then
fancy him peeping into the fine schools of London or Manchester, and
learning that the first educational authorities in England still set
children to learn about Adam and Eve, the Deluge, the Plagues of
Egypt, and the remarkable proceedings of Joshua and David and the
rest. I try to conceive him studying the faces of learned judges and
professors, as they listen gravely to the reading of the Bible and
the creeds in church on Sundays, or reverently handle the book in
court. I picture his amazement as he learns that this England, which
he thought so enlightened, still, at the dictation of its bishops,
retains the most abominable divorce law in the civilised world; or
hears preachers and social students seriously expressing concern
for the future of Europe on account of the decay of docility to the
clergy. What would he have written on such a situation?
The satire of Voltaire is not out of place in modern England. As long
as the Bible is, however insincerely, pressed on us as the Word of
God, and retained in our schools, we are compelled to point out in
it features which make such claims ludicrous. As long as the clergy
maintain that their rule in the past was a benefit to civilisation,
and therefore its decay may be a menace to civilisation, we are
bound to tell the ugly truth in regard to the past. As long as
educated men and women among us profess a belief in the magic of
transubstantiation and auricular confession and miracles, and the
uneducated are encouraged to believe these things literally, the
irony of Voltaire is legitimate. Christian bodies have, of late
years, made repeated attempts to induce our leaders of culture to
profess the Christian faith. The issue has been to make it clear that
the great majority of our professors, distinguished writers, and
artists hold either the simple theism of Voltaire or discard even
that. The doctrines attacked here by Voltaire are wholly discredited.
Yet they are still the official teaching of the Churches (except
of the Congregationalists); they are largely enforced on innocent
children, and they are literally accepted by some millions of our
people. I see no reason to refrain from letting the irony of Voltaire
fall on them once more.
The reader must not, however, conclude at once that the following
pages are so many red-hot charges into the tottering ranks of
mediæval dogmas. My aim has been to illustrate the versatility of
Voltaire’s genius, and to exhibit his own sincere creed no less than
his most penetrating scourges of what most educated men in his time
and ours regard as utterly antiquated delusions. There are pages here
that might receive a place of honour in the most orthodox religious
journals of England; other pages in which the irony is so subtle and
the temper so polite that, without the terrible name, they would
puzzle many a clergyman. In the _Questions of Zapata_, however, and
in parts of one or two other essays, I have given specimens of the
Voltaire who was likened to Antichrist.
The selection opens with the _Treatise on Toleration_, which has
a mainly historical interest, and illustrates the finest side
of Voltaire’s work and character. It shows him as a profound
humanitarian, putting aside, in his seventieth year, his laughter and
his comfort to take up the cause of an obscure sufferer, and shaking
France, as Zola did in our time, with his denunciation of a judicial
crime. The story of the crime is told in the essay itself; but it is
not told, or in any way conveyed, that, but for the action of the
aged rationalist, not a single effort would have been made to secure
redress. His splendid action on that and a few similar occasions has
been held by critical students of his career to atone for all his
errors. Many Protestants who scoff at “Voltaire the scoffer” may
learn with surprise that his noble and impassioned struggle earned
for them the right to live in Southern France. The treatise was
published in 1763. I have omitted a number of lengthy and learned
notes and one or two chapters which are incidental to the argument
and of little interest to-day.
The three Homilies--those _On Superstition_, _On the Interpretation
of the Old Testament_, and _On the Interpretation of the New
Testament_--are selected from five which Voltaire wrote in 1767,
with the literary pretence that they had been delivered before some
liberal congregation at London in 1765. The second of these Homilies
is one of the most effective indictments of the Old Testament,
considered as an inspired book. Nowhere in rationalistic literature
is there an exposure of the essential humanity of the Old Testament
so condensed yet so fluent, so original in form, comprehensive
in range, and unanswerable in argument. It was published, it is
believed, in 1767, though the first edition is marked 1766. Its
humour is malicious from the first line, as the “Dr. Tamponet”
whose name is put to it was really an orthodox champion of the
Sorbonne. It is in this short diatribe that I have chiefly made the
modifications of which I have spoken. It was Voltaire’s aim to show
that the coarseness of many passages of the Old Testament is quite
as inconsistent with inspiration as its colossal inaccuracy and its
childlike superstition. An English translation, similarly modified,
of the _Questions of Zapata_ was made by an anonymous lady, and
published by Hetherington, in 1840. In the present translation some
of the paragraphs are omitted, and the numbering is therefore altered.
The _Epistle to the Romans_, another specimen of Voltaire’s most
deadly polemic, is a just and masterly indictment of the papal
system. It was issued in 1768, and very promptly put on the Index by
the outraged Vatican. But it penetrated educated Italy, and had no
small share in the enlightenment which has ended in the emancipation
of the country. The exquisite imitations of sermons which follow
contain some of Voltaire’s most insidious and delicate irony. The
_Sermon of the Fifty_ was written and published in 1762.
The volume closes with the famous poem which Voltaire wrote, in the
year 1755, when he heard that an earthquake had destroyed between
30,000 and 40,000 people in Portugal. It was one of the chief
festivals of the Catholic year, the Feast of All Saints (November 1),
and the crowded churches were in the very act of worship, when the
ground shook. In a few minutes 16,000 men, women, and children were
slain, and as many more perished in the subsequent fires and horrors.
Voltaire was at Geneva, and the horrible news threw him into the
deepest distress. The poem into which he condensed his pain and his
doubts is not a leisurely and polished piece of art. It has technical
defects, and is unequal in inspiration. Should we admire it if it
were otherwise? But it is a fine monument to his sincerity and just
human passion, and it contains some phrases that became proverbial
and some passages of great beauty. I have altered the structure of
the verse--the original is in rhymed hexameters--only in order that
I could more faithfully convey to those who read only English the
sentiments and, as far as possible, the phrasing of Voltaire. One
allusion that recurs throughout needs some explanation. Browning’s
“All’s right with the world” was a very familiar cry in the
eighteenth century. The English Deists, and J. J. Rousseau in France,
held obstinately to this most singular optimism. Although Rousseau
made a feeble and friendly reply to the poem, it proved a deadly blow
to his somewhat fantastic teaching on that point.
Immediately preceding this poem I have given a translation of
Voltaire’s philosophical essay, _Il faut choisir_. This was written
by him in 1772, six years before his death, and is the most succinct
expression of his mature religious views. It is really directed
against his atheistic friends at Paris, such as d’Holbach. Condorcet
said of it that it contained the most powerful argumentation for the
existence of God that had yet been advanced. Its remarkable lucidity
and terseness enable us to identify his views at once. He did not
believe in the spirituality or immortality of the soul, but he had an
unshakable conviction of the existence of God. It is sometimes said
that the Lisbon earthquake shook his theism. This is inaccurate, as
a careful comparison of the two works will show. He never believed
that the supreme intelligence was infinite in power, and the haunting
problem of evil always made him hesitate to ascribe more than
limited moral attributes to his deity. His one unwavering dogma--it
does not waver for an instant in the poem--is that the world was
designed by a supreme intelligence and is moved by a supreme power.
Had he lived one hundred years later, when evolution began to throw
its magical illumination upon the order of the universe and the
wonderful adaptation of its parts, his position would clearly have
been modified. As it was, he, with constant sincerity, avowed that he
could not understand the world without a great architect and a prime
mover of all moving things. In all his works the uglier features of
the world, which, unlike many theists, he steadfastly confronted,
forbid him to add any other and warmer attributes to this bleak
intelligence and mysterious power.