The Age of Voltaire
Voltaire read these seventy-five pages to Mme. du Châtelet, who apparently discouraged their publication. He seems to have agreed with her; he put the manuscript aside, and it was never printed during his lifetime. Moreover, he became convinced that any rational metaphysics—any attempt by reason to explain the origin, nature, or destiny of the world and man—would be forever beyond human power. He read the philosophers, but he did not admire their systems. “In metaphysics and morals,” he thought, “the ancients have said everything. We always encounter or repeat them. All modern books of this description are merely repetitions.”3 He must have been impressed by Spinoza’s system, for he labored to refute it.
Despite his disclaimers, he could not still his interest in the insoluble. From time to time, during the years 1734–56, he delved into metaphysics and theology. He continued to the end of his life to rest his belief in God upon the argument from design, though he ridiculed the excesses of teleology. “I may not believe that noses were made as convenient bridges for spectacles, but I am convinced that they were made to smell with.”4 And: “To affirm that the eye is not made to see, nor the ear to hear, nor the stomach to digest—is not this the most monstrous absurdity?”5 When a young author knocked at the door of Les Délices (1757), and introduced himself to Voltaire as “a young atheist ready to serve” him, Voltaire replied, “And I have the honor to be a deist employer; but though our professions are so opposed, I will give you supper today and work tomorrow; I can make use of your arms, though not of your head.”6 He called himself a deist, but he was rather a theist: that is, his God was not an impersonal force more or less identical with nature, but a conscious intelligence designing and ruling the world. Generally, after 1750, he called himself a theist;7 and in the Philosophical Dictionary, in the article “Theism,” he wrote in terms that could justify Condorcet’s description of Voltaire as “a deeply religious man”:
The theist is a man firmly persuaded of the existence of a Supreme Being equally good and powerful, who has formed all … existences; who punishes crimes without cruelty, and rewards virtuous actions with kindness. The theist does not know how God punishes, how he rewards, how he pardons, for he is not presumptuous enough to flatter himself that he understands how God acts; but he knows that God acts, and that God is just. The difficulties opposed to a Providence do not stagger him in his faith, for they are only great difficulties, not proofs; he submits himself to that Providence, although he perceives only some of its effects and some appearances; and, judging of the things he does not see by those he sees, he thinks that this Providence pervades all places and all ages.
United in this principle with all the rest of the universe, he does not join any of the sects, who all contradict themselves. His religion is the most ancient and the most extended, for the simple adoration of a God has preceded all the systems in the world.… He believes that religion consists neither in the opinions of incomprehensible metaphysics nor in vain decorations, but in adoration and justice. To do good is his worship; to submit himself to God is his doctrine.… He laughs at Loreto and Mecca, but he succors the indigent and defends the oppressed.8
Was Voltaire sincere in these professions? Some students ascribe them to caution, or to a desire to move to atheism one step at a time,9 or to a hope that religious faith inculcated in his servants would lessen pilferage; and there are passages in Voltaire that seem to justify this interpretation. (“If you have but a village to govern, it must have a religion.”10) One of his most quoted remarks appears to reduce religion to a public utility; but the context of that line puts it in a fairer light. It occurs in the Epistle to the Author of “The Three Impostors”:
Si Dieu n’existait pas il faudrait l’inventer,
Mais toute la nature nous crie qu’il existe.11
—“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, but all nature cries out to us that he does exist,” and the entire poem is a plea for belief. Voltaire returns to the theistic argument again and again, as if to answer his own doubts. In his final decade he wrote as often against atheism as against orthodoxy. Meanwhile he made war upon the popular conception of the deity as a God of Vengeance damning most of mankind to an everlasting hell. “The human race would be too unhappy if it were as common to commit atrocities as to believe in them.”12 “If God made man in his own image, we have well repaid him”13—by making him in ours; nothing could better reveal man’s conception of himself than his conception of God.
Voltaire struggled to reconcile his theism with the existence of evil. In these efforts at theodicy he came close to the optimism of Leibniz (which he was to ridicule in Candide): what is evil from the standpoint of the part may be good, or at least not evil, in the perspective of the whole; this is not the best conceivable, but the best possible, world.14 “When everything is counted and weighed up,” he wrote to Frederick in 1738, “I think there are infinitely more enjoyments than bitterness in this life”15—but this was written in his hale and middle years. He did not believe that man is wicked by nature; on the contrary, he held that man has an innate sense of justice, and a bienveillance naturelle—a natural feeling of good will toward other men.16 There are countless varieties and contradictions in the moral ideas and customs of mankind, but all peoples, Voltaire thought, condemn parricide and fratricide.17
In 1752, at Potsdam, he composed a poem, La Loi naturelle (published in 1756), which summarized his “natural religion.” As it took the form of a letter to the skeptical Frederick II, it could hardly have been an attempt to please the pious; but it comes closer to piety and orthodoxy than anything else that Voltaire ever printed. It not only affirms faith in God the Creator, but describes man’s moral sense as infused into him by the Deity;18 here he speaks like Rousseau, and anticipates the enthusiasm of Kant for the categorical imperative of conscience. He defines his religion in one line: “Adore un Dieu, sois juste, et chéris ta patrie.”19 He surveys the varieties of religious belief, laments their hatreds and fanaticisms, and pleads for mutual toleration among the creeds. He ends with a prayer that any saint might have signed. The Paris Parlement ordered the poem to be publicly burned (January 23, 1759), probably because some lines in it condemned Jansenism.
We may conclude that until 1751—until he was fifty-seven years old—Voltaire refrained from any outright and public attack upon Christianity or the Catholic Church. What was it that aroused him to open war, precisely at an age when most rebels have subsided into peace? It was the suppression of the Encyclopédie, the orthodox explanations of the Lisbon earthquake, and the ferocious executions of Jean Calas and the Chevalier de La Barre.
II. VOLTAIRE AND THE ENCYCLOPÉDIE
He was in Potsdam when the first volume of the Encyclopédie was published (1751). He must have read with warm pleasure the lines by which d’Alembert had paid homage to him in the “Discours préliminaire”: “May I not … render to this rare genius the tribute and eulogy that he merits, which he has so frequently received from his compatriots, from foreigners, and from his enemies, and to which posterity will add full measure when he can no longer enjoy the praise?” Voltaire returned the compliment in a letter of September 5, 1752, to d’Alembert: “You and M. Diderot are accomplishing a work which will be the glory of France and the shame of those who persecute you.… Of eloquent philosophers I recognize only you and him.” He pledged his support, and lost no opportunity to call attention to the enterprise as “an immense and immortal work, which accuses the shortness of human life.”20
However busy with his own major compositions—Le Siècle de Louis XIV and Essai sur les moeurs—and embroiled with Hirsch, Maupertuis, and Frederick, Voltaire found time to send to d’Alembert (1753) some brief articles “only as material which you will arrange at your pleasure in the immortal edifice which you are raising. Add, shorten; I give you my pebbles to insert into some corner of the wall.” 21 He invoked the aid of influential friends to protect the editors. In 1755 he wrote to d’Alembert: “As long as I have a breath of
life I am at the service of the illustrious authors of the Encylopédie. I consider myself greatly honored to be able to contribute, even feebly, to the greatest and handsomest monument of the nation and of literature.”22 With that letter he enclosed articles on fire, force, fornication, French, genius, and taste (goût). Examining the first five volumes, he found much to praise, something to deplore. He asked the editors to require clearness and brevity of all contributors, and he cautioned d’Alembert (whom he mistakenly supposed to be chief editor): “You are poorly seconded; there are bad soldiers in the army of a great general.… I am sorry to see that the writer of the article “Enfer” declares that hell was a point in the doctrine of Moses; now, by all the devils, that is not true.” 23
Soon he sent in several minor articles, and a major disquisition on history. He persuaded a learned priest of Lausanne, Antoine Noé de Polier, to write for the Encyclopédie the articles “Magi,” “Magic,” “Magician,” and “Messiah,” all quietly heretical. We have seen how Voltaire had some responsibility for d’Alembert’s article on Geneva (1757); he weathered the ensuing storm by inviting the betrayed clergymen to dinner. When disaster threatened the great enterprise (January, 1758) he wrote to Diderot:
Go on, brave Diderot, intrepid d’Alembert; … fall upon the knaves, destroy their empty declamations, their miserable sophistries, their historical lies, their contradictions and absurdities beyond number; do not let men of intelligence become the slaves of those who have none. The new generation will owe to you both reason and liberty.24
Diderot made no answer, d’Alembert insisted on withdrawing; Voltaire himself, losing courage, and offended by Diderot’s silence, decided to abandon ship. On February 6 or 7 he wrote again to Diderot, asking him to restore to him his yet unpublished contributions. Diderot replied that the manuscripts were with d’Alembert; but that if Voltaire should repeat the request for their return he would “never forget the injury.” On February 26 Voltaire wrote to d’Argental: “I love M. Diderot, I respect him, and I am angry.” But to the same on March 12: “If you see this good man Diderot, tell the poor slave that I pardon him with as full a heart as I pity him.”25 In May d’Alembert sent the demanded articles to Voltaire; in June d’Alembert resumed work for the Encyclopédie; Voltaire again submitted the articles, but asked that they be published, if at all, without his name. He proposed that the enterprise be moved to another country, where it would suffer less emasculation by censorship actual or feared; Diderot thought the proposal impracticable. Voltaire lost faith in the value of a massive and expensive encyclopedia as a vehicle of liberal propaganda. On June 26, 1758, he notified Diderot that other preoccupations would make it impossible for him to contribute further material; besides, as matters now stood between the editors, the government, and the Church, “one is obliged to lie, and we are persecuted if we have not lied enough.”26 The furor created by Helvétius’ De l’ Esprit (July) frightened the aging rebel into writing an answer to that book. On November 16 he informed Diderot that he had bought a house at Ferney, and intended henceforth to live quietly as a country gentleman.
Was he deceiving himself, or was he planning to resume the war by other means?
III. THE THEOLOGY OF EARTHQUAKES
While the Encyclopédie was in the throes of repeated deaths and resurrections, the Lisbon earthquake sent its tremors throughout European philosophy. At 9:40 A.M. on All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1755, the earth shrugged its shoulders in Portugal and North Africa; in six minutes thirty churches and a thousand houses were demolished, fifteen thousand people were killed, and fifteen thousand more were fatally injured, in one of the most picturesque capitals in the world. There was nothing unprecedented in such wholesale slaughter, but there were some attendant circumstances that troubled the theologians. Why had the Great Inscrutable chosen so Catholic a city, so holy a festival, and such an hour—when nearly all pious citizens were attending Mass? And why had he spared, amid the general ruin, the house of Sebastião de Carvalho e Mello—the future Marquês de Pombal—the ruling minister who was in all Europe the most fervent enemy of the Jesuits?
A Portuguese Jesuit, Malagrida, explained that the quake, and the calamitous tidal wave that had followed it, were God’s punishment for the vice that had prospered in Lisbon;27 but were the sinners the only ones that went to pray in the churches on that awful morning? Why had so many holy priests and dedicated nuns perished in the quake and the conflagration? The Moslems would have hailed the catastrophe as Allah’s revenge upon the Portuguese Inquisition, but the quake had destroyed the great Mosque of Al-Mansur in Rabat. Some Protestant dominies in London ascribed the disaster to divine reprobation of Catholic crimes against humanity; but on November 19 of the same year an earthquake damaged fifteen hundred houses in Boston, Massachusetts, home of the Pilgrims and the Puritans. William Warburton announced that the massacre in Lisbon “displayed God’s glory in its fairest colors.”28 John Wesley preached a sermon on “The Cause and Cure of Earthquakes”; “sin,” he said, “is the moral cause of earthquakes, whatever their natural cause may be; … they are the effect of that curse which was brought upon the earth by the original transgression” of Adam and Eve.29
Voltaire fumed at these explanations, but he himself could find none to reconcile the event with his faith in a just God. Where now was Leibniz’ “best of all possible worlds”? Or Pope’s “Whatever is, is right”—or his pretense that “all partial evil” is “universal good”?30 In an angry reaction against his own early optimism Voltaire composed (1756) his greatest poem—“On the Lisbon Disaster, or An Examination of the Axiom “All Is Well.’” Here is our chance to sample at once his thought and his verse.
O malheureux mortels! O terre déplorable!
O de tous les mortels assemblage effroyable!
D’inutiles douleurs éternel entretien!
Philosophes trompés qui criez, “Tout est bien,”
Accourez, contemplez ces ruines affreuses,
Ces débris, ces lambeaux, ces cendres malheureuses,
Ces femmes, ces enfants l’un sur l’autre entassés.
Sous ce marbre rompus ces membres dispersés;
Cent mlle infortunés que la terre dévore.
Qui, sanglants, déchirés, et palpitants encore,
Enterrés sous leurs toits, terminent sans secours
Dans l’horreur des tourments leurs lamentables jours!
Aux cris demi-formés de leurs cendres fumantes,
Direz-vous, “C’est l’effet des éternelles lois
Qui d’un Dieu libre et bon nécessitent le choix?”
Direz-vous, en voy ant cet amas de victimes,
“Dieu est vengé, leur mort est le prix de leurs crimes?”I
But what crime, what fault had those infants committed who lay crushed and bloody on their mothers’ breasts? Had London or Paris less vice than Lisbon? Yet Lisbon is shattered, and Paris dances.
Could not an omniscient God have made a world without such meaningless suffering? “I respect my God, but I love mankind.”
The poet looks upon the world of life, and sees everywhere, in a thousand forms, a struggle for existence, in which every organism, sooner or later, is slain. This bitter summary of biology demands a literal translation:
The ferocious vulture darts upon its timid prey, and feasts with. joy upon the bleeding limbs. All seems well for him; but soon an eagle with sharply cutting beak devours the vulture in its turn. Man reaches the lordly eagle with a deadly shot; and man lies in the dust on the battlefield, bloody, pierced with blows, amid a mound of dying men; there he serves as the frightful food of voracious birds. Thus all the world in all its members groans, all born for suffering and for mutual death. And in this fatal chaos you will compose, from the misery of each part, the happiness of the whole! What happiness? Oh, weak and miserable mortal! You cry out in mournful tones that “all is well”; the universe gives you the lie, and your own heart refutes a hundred times the error of your mind. The elements, and animals, an
d men—all are in war. Let us confess it: evil strides the earth.
How does this scene of universal strife and ignominious, agonizing death comport with the belief in a good God? He exists, but he- is a baffling mystery. He sends his son to redeem mankind, yet the earth and man remain the same despite his sacrifice.
What can the farthest-reaching mind say of this? Nothing; the book of fate is closed to our view. Man, a stranger to himself, is unknown to man. What am I? Where am I? Whither do I go? Whence did I come? Atoms tormented on this heap of mud, which death engulfs, and with which fate plays; yet thinking atoms, atoms whose eyes, guided by thought, have measured the skies. We throw our minds across the infinite, yet cannot for one moment see and know ourselves.
This, of course, is the note that Pascal had sounded a hundred years before, in prose greater than Voltaire’s verse. Voltaire had once rejected Pascal; now he echoes his pessimism. From the same premises Pascal had concluded, Let us surrender ourselves to Christian faith and hope. Originally Voltaire ended his poem with a somber, stoic couplet:
Que faut-il, O mortels? Mortels, il faut souffrir,
Se soumettre en silence, adorer, et mourir
—“What must we do, O mortals? Mortals, we must suffer, submit in silence, adore, and die.” His friends protested that such a hopeless ending was unbearable. He changed the final line to read: