RELIGION.
I
In examining the Voltairean attack upon religion we have to remember
that it was in the first instance prompted, and throughout its course
stimulated and embittered, by antipathy to the external organisation of
the religion. It was not merely disbelief in a creed, but exasperation
against a church. Two distinct elements lay at the bottom of Voltaire’s
enmity to the peculiar form of monotheism which he found supreme around
him. One of them was the intellectual element of repugnance to a system
of belief that rested on miracles and mysteries irreconcilable with
reason, and was so intimately associated with some of the most odious
types of character and most atrocious actions in the Old Testament,
which undoubtedly contains so many of both. The other was the moral
element of anger against the expounders of this system, their
intolerance of light and hatred of knowledge, their fierce yet
profoundly contemptible struggles with one another, the scandals of
their casuistry, their besotted cruelty. Of these two elements, the
second was, no doubt, if not the earlier in time, at least the stronger
in intensity. It was because he perceived the fruit to be so deadly,
that Voltaire laid the axe to the root of the tree. It is easy to say
that these poisonous Jesuitries and black Jansenisms were no fruit of
the tree, but the produce of a mere graft, which could have been lopped
off without touching the sacred trunk. Voltaire thought otherwise, and
whether he was right or wrong, it is only just to him to keep constantly
before us the egregious failure of Catholicism in his day as a social
force. This is a fact as to which there can be no dispute among persons
with knowledge enough and mental freedom enough to be competent to have
an opinion, and Voltairism can only be fairly weighed if we regard it as
being in the first instance no outbreak of reckless speculative
intelligence, but a righteous social protest against a system socially
pestilent. It was the revival of the worst parts of this system in the
cruelty and obscurantism which broke out after the middle of the
century, that converted Voltaire into an active assailant of belief. But
for that he would pretty certainly have remained tranquilly in the phase
of deism of which some of his early verses are the expression.
Philosophy is truly, as Callicles says in the Gorgias, a most charming
accomplishment for a man to follow at the right age, but to carry
philosophy too far is the undoing of humanity.
Voltaire no doubt deliberately set himself to overthrow the Catholic
theology, as well as the ecclesi astical system which was bound up with
it, and he did so for the very sufficient reason that it has always been
impossible for men to become indulgent in act, while they remained
fanatical in belief. They will not cease to be persecutors, he said,
until they have ceased to be absurd.175 The object was to secure
tolerance, and tolerance could only be expected as the product of
indifference, and indifference could be spread most surely by throwing
the fullest light of reason and common sense on the mystical foundations
of revealed religion. To stop short at the inculcation of charity and
indulgence was to surrender the cause; for how should the mere homilies
of a secular moralist soften those whom the direct injunctions of a
deity and his inspired apostles, their own acknowledged masters, failed
to make charitable? It was essential that the superstitions in which
intolerance had its root should be proved detestable and ridiculous.
When men had learnt to laugh at superstition, then they would perceive
how abominable is the oppressive fanaticism which is its champion.
It is hardly possible to deny the service which Protestantism rendered
in preventing the revolution from Catholicism to scientific modes of
thought from being that violent, abrupt, and irreconcilable breach,
which we now observe in France and Italy, when we remember that the
cause of toleration was systematically defended in England by men who as
systematically defended the cause of Christianity. The Liberty of
Prophesying, in which the expediency of tolerance was based on the
difficulty of being sure that we are right, was written by one of the
most devout and orthodox divines; while the famous Letters on Toleration
(1689), in which the truly remarkable step is taken of confining the
functions of civil government to men’s civil interests and the things of
this world, were the work of the same Locke who vindicated the
Reasonableness of Christianity.176 The English Deists pressed home in
a very effectual way the deduction of universal freedom of speech from
the first maxims of Protestantism, and their inference was practically
admitted.177 Hence there was no inseparable association between
adherence to the old religious ideas and the prohibition of free speech
in spirituals, and on the other hand there was no obligation on the part
of those who claimed free speech to attack a church which did not refuse
their claim.
In France the strictly repressive policy of the church in the eighteenth
century, sometimes bloody and cruel as in the persecution of the
Protestants, sometimes minutely vexatious as in the persecution of the
men of letters, but always stubborn and lynx-eyed, had the natural
effect of making it a point of honour with most of those who valued
liberty to hurl themselves upon the religious system, of which rigorous
intolerance was so prominent a characteristic. The Protestant dilution
of the theological spirit seems thus to be in the long run a more
effective preparation for decisive abandonment of it, than its virulent
dissolution in the biting acids of Voltairism, because within limits the
slower these great transformations are in accomplishing themselves, the
better it is for many of the most precious and most tender parts of
human character. Our present contention is that the attitude of the
religionists left no alternative. It is best that creeds, like men who
have done the work of the day, should die the slow deaths of nature, yet
it is counted lawful to raise an armed hand upon the brigand who seeks
the life of another.
Voltaire to the end of his course contended that the church only was to
blame for the storm which overtook her teaching in the later years, when
his own courageous attack had inspired a host of others, less brilliant
but not any less embittered, to throw themselves on the reeling enemy.
The cause of the inundation of Europe by the literature of negativism
and repudiation was to be sought first of all in the fierce theological
disputes which revolted the best of the laity. Of this violent revulsion
of feeling Voltaire himself was the great organ. He furnished its
justification, and nourished its fire, and invested it with a splendid
lustre. Even when with the timidity of extreme age he seemed to
deprecate the growing ferocity of the attack, he still taunted the
clerical party with their own folly in allowing a mean and egotistic
virulence to override every consideration of true wisdom and policy.
‘Now,’ he wrote in 1768, ‘a revolution has been accomplished in the
human mind, that nothing again can ever arrest. They would have
prevented this revolution, if they had been sage and moderate. The
quarrels of Jansenists and Molinists have done more harm to the
Christian religion than could have been done by four emperors like
Julian one after another.’178
It cannot be too often repeated that the Christianity which Voltaire
assailed was not that of the Sermon on the Mount, for there was not a
man then alive more keenly sensible than he was of the generous humanity
which is there enjoined with a force that so strangely touches the
heart, nor one who was on the whole, in spite of constitutional
infirmities and words which were far worse than his deeds, more ardent
and persevering in its practice. Still less was he the enemy of a form
of Christian profession which now fascinates many fine and subtle minds,
and which starting from the assumption that there are certain inborn
cravings in the human heart, constant, profound, and inextinguishable,
discerns in the long religious tradition an adequate proof that the
mystic faith in the incarnation, and in the spiritual facts which pour
like rays from that awful centre, are the highest satisfaction which a
divine will has as yet been pleased to establish for all these
yearnings of the race of men. This graceful development of belief,
emancipated from dogma and reducing so many substantial bodies to pale
shades, so many articles once held as solid realities to the strange
tenuity of dreams, was not the Christianity of Voltaire’s time, any more
than it was that of the Holy Office. There was nothing resembling the
present popularity of a treatment which gives generals so immense a
preponderance over particulars—somewhat to the neglect of the old
saying about the snare that lies hidden in generals, many persons being
tolerably indifferent about the dolus so long as they can make sure of
the latet. He attacked a definite theology, not a theosophy. We may,
indeed, imagine the kind of questions which he would have asked of one
pressing such a doctrine on his acceptance; how he would have sought the
grounds for calling aspirations universal, which the numerical majority
of the human race appear to have been without, and the grounds for
making subjective yearnings the test and the measure of the truth of
definite objective records; how he would have prayed to be instructed of
these cravings, whether they spring up spontaneously, or are the
products of spiritual self-indulgence, and also of the precise manner in
which they come to be satisfied and soothed by the momentary appearance
of a humane figure far off upon the earth; how he would have paused to
consider the intelligibility of so overwhelming a wonder as the
incarnation having been wrought, for the benefit of so infinitesimally
small a fragment of mankind. We can imagine this and much else, but
Voltaire would never have stirred a finger to attack a mysticism which
is not aggressive, and can hardly be other than negatively hurtful.
If any one had maintained against Voltaire that the aspirations after a
future life, the longing for some token that the deity watches over his
creatures and is moved by a tender solicitude for them, and the other
spiritual desires alleged to be instinctive in men, constitute as
trustworthy and firm a guide to truth as the logical reason, we may be
sure that he would have forgiven what he must have considered an
enervating abnegation of intelligence, for the sake of the humane, if
not very actively improving, course of life to which this kind of
pietism is wont to lead. He might possibly have entertained a little
contempt for them, but it would have been quiet contempt and unspoken.
There is no case of Voltaire mocking at any set of men who lived good
lives. He did not mock the English Quakers. He doubtless attacked many
of the beliefs which good men hold sacred, but if good men take up their
abode under the same roof which shelters the children of darkness and
wrong, it is not the fault of Voltaire if they are hit by the smooth
stones shot from his sling against their unworthy comrades. The object
of his assault was that amalgam of metaphysical subtleties, degrading
legends, false miracles, and narrow depraving conceptions of divine
government which made the starting-point and vantage-ground of those
ecclesiastical oppressors, whom he habitually and justly designated the
enemies of the human race. The evil and the good, the old purity and the
superadded corruptions, were all so inextricably bound up in the
Catholicism of the eighteenth century, that it was impossible to a deal
a blow to the one without risk of harm to the other. The method was
desperate, but then the enemy was a true Chimæra, a monster sodden in
black corruption, with whom in the breast of a humane man there could be
no terms.
The popes during the Voltairean period were above the average in virtue
and intelligence, but their power was entirely overshadowed by that
wonderful order which had assumed all effective spiritual supremacy for
something like two centuries. Nor was this order the only retrogressive
influence. The eighteenth century was the century not only of the Sacré
Cœur, but of the miracles of the dead abbé Pâris, transactions in which
Jansenist emulated Jesuit in dragging men and women into the deepest
slough of superstition. A Roman augur fresh from the inspection of the
sacrificial entrails would have had a right to despise the priests who
invented an object for the adoration of men in the diseased and hideous
visions of Mary Alacoque. The man who sells rain to savages may almost
be held to add to the self-respect of the race, if you contrast him with
the convulsionnaires and the fanatics who were transported by their
revolting performances.179
France is the country where reactions are most rapid and most violent.
Nowhere else can the reformer count so surely on seeing the completion
of his reform followed so instantly by the triumph of its adversaries.
The expulsion of the Jesuits, under circumstances of marked and
uncompromising harshness, was not consummated, before the tide of
religious bigotry flowed in from the opposite shore, and swelled to a
portentous height. The exultation of the philosophers at the coming fall
of their old foes, was instantly checked by the yet worse things which
befell them and their principles at the hands of new enemies. The reign
of the Jansenists was speedily pronounced more hateful than the reign of
the Jesuits. Various accommodations were possible with heaven, so long
as the Jesuits had credit, but the Jansenists were pitiless.180
The parliament or supreme judicial tribunal of Paris181 was Jansenist,
mainly out of political hatred of the Jesuits, partly from a hostility,
very easily explained, to every manifestation of ultramontane feeling
and influence, partly from a professional jealousy of the clergy, but
partly also because the austere predestinarian dogma, and the
metaphysical theology which brought it into supreme prominence, seem
often to have had an unexplained affinity for serious minds trained in
legal ideas and their application. The Jesuits had systematically
abstained as far as was possible from purely speculative theology.
Suarez is pronounced one of the greatest writers in speculative ethics
and jurisprudence; but in the technical metaphysics of theology the
Jesuits with all their literary industry did not greatly care to
exercise themselves. Their task was social and practical, and as
confessors, directors, preachers, and instructors, they had naturally
paid less attention to abstract thought than to the arts of eloquence,
address, and pliancy. Then, too, in doctrine they had uniformily clung
to the softer, more amiable, more worldly, less repulsive,
interpretation of the eternally embarrassing claims of grace, election,
free-will. The Augustinian, Calvinistic, or Jansenist view of the
impotence of will and the saving importance of grace is the answer of
souls eager to feel immediate individual contact with a Supreme Being.
The Jesuits and their power represented extremely different sentiments,
fundamentally religious, but still fundamentally social also, the desire
of men for sympathetic and considerate guidance in conduct, and their
craving for such a unity of the external ordering of the faith as should
leave them undistracted to live their lives. The former concentrated
feelings upon the relations of men directly and immediately with a
Supreme Being; the latter upon their relations with this Being only
mediately, through their relations with one another, and with the church
to which a measure of divinity had been attributed. Hence the decline of
the Jesuits assumed the form of a depravation of morals, while the
Jansenists held more and more tightly to a narrow and bigoted
correctness of belief. The parliament was willing to resist a Molinist
archbishop and his satellites, when they refused burial to all who
should die without having received a certificate of conformity to the
famous bull Unigenitus, which proscribed Jansenist opinion.182 But
none the less for this was it bent on suppressing the common enemy, who
despised the bull and the Five propositions, Molina and Jansenius,
archbishop Beaumont and Quesnel, all equally. Voltaire’s natural
sagacity made him alive to the fact, which perhaps remains as true now
as then, that the professional and middle classes are a worse enemy of
liberal opinion and are more intolerant than the remnants of the old
aristocratic orders. He says to D’Alembert, ‘You are right in declaring
yourself the enemy of the great and their flatterers; still, the great
protect one upon occasion, they despise the Infamous, and they will not
persecute philosophers; but as for your pedants of Paris, who have
bought their office, as for those insolent bourgeois, half fanatics,
half imbecile, they can do nothing but mischief.’183 He had not learnt
to look away from both classes, professional and aristocratic alike, to
that third estate where the voice of the reformer has always found the
first response. Still what he said was true as against the lawyers,
whose vision perhaps never extends beyond the improvement of that mere
surface of order with which their profession is concerned. The
Parliament of Paris was the eager ally of the bigots of the court in
1757, in fulminating deadly edicts against the Encyclopaedia and all
concerned in its production or circulation. In 1762, the year of the
publication of Emile and the Contrat Social, not all the influence of
Rousseau’s powerful protectors could prevent the launching of a decree
of arrest against him. Bloodier measures were not wanting.
In 1762 Morellet had published under the title of a Manual for
Inquisitors a selection of the most cruel and revolting portions of the
procedure of the Holy Office, drawn from the Directorium Inquisitorium
of Eymeric, a grand inquisitor of the fourteenth century. The
cold-blooded cruelties of the regulations, which were thus brought into
the light of the eighteenth century, created the most profound sensation
among the rapidly increasing adherents of tolerance and humanity.
Voltaire was intensely stirred by this resuscitation of horrors that he
mistook for dead. It made the same impression upon him, he said, as the
bleeding body of Caesar made upon the men of Rome.184 But he soon
found that it was an error to impute a special cruelty to the spiritual
power. Malesherbes, in giving Morellet the requisite permission to print
his Manual, had amazed his friend by telling him, that though he might
suppose he was giving to the world a collection of extraordinary facts
and unheard of processes, yet in truth the jurisprudence of Eymeric and
his inquisition was as nearly as possible identical with the criminal
jurisprudence of France at that very moment.185 This was very soon to
be proved.
The bigots, infuriated by the blows which were destroying the Jesuits,
hunted out against heretical enemies some forgotten portions of this
terrible jurisprudence. A protestant pastor, Rochette, was hung for
exercising his functions in Languedoc. The Catholics on the occasion of
the arrest of Rochette were summoned by sound of tocsin, and three young
Protestants, who were brothers, fearing massacre in the midst of the
agitation, took up their arms: for this offence they were convicted of
rebellion, and had their heads struck off.186 It became painfully
clear how great a mistake it was to suppose the clergy touched with some
special curse of cruelty. Then, as usually, for good or for evil, they
were on about the same moral level with an immense number of laymen, and
were not much more than the incarnation of the average darkness of the
hour. If Eymeric’s procedure only copied the ordinary criminal
jurisprudence, the bigotry of the ecclesiastics was accurately reflected
in the bigotry of the secular tribunals. The Protestant Calas was broken
on the wheel (1762), because his son had been found dead, and some one
chose to say that the father had killed him, to prevent him from turning
Catholic. There was not the smallest fragment of evidence, direct or
indirect, for a single link in the chain of circumstances on which the
unfortunate man’s guilt depended; while there were many facts which made
the theory of his guilt the most improbable that could have been brought
forward. The widow and the children of Calas were put to the torture,
and eventually fled to Geneva to take refuge with Voltaire. During the
same year the same tribunal, the parliament of Toulouse, did its best to
repeat this atrocity in the case of Sirven. Sirven was a Protestant, and
his daughter had been with perfect legality snatched away from him, and
shut up in a convent, there to be better instructed in the faith. She
ran away, and was found at the bottom of a well. Sirven was accused of
murdering his daughter, and he only escaped the wheel by prompt flight.
His wife perished of misery amid the snows of the Cevennes, and he
joined the wretched family of Calas at Geneva, where the same generous
man furnished shelter and protection.
In the north of France the fire of intolerance burnt at least as hotly
as in the south. At Abbeville a crucifix was found to have been
mutilated in the night. Two lads of eighteen, to one of whom Frederick
gave shelter in Prussia, were accused under cover of the sacrilege, and
La Barre was condemned by the tribunal of Amiens, at the instance of the
bishop, to have tongue and right hand cut off, and then be burnt alive;
a sentence that was presently commuted by the Parliament of Paris to
decapitation (1766). There was no proof whatever that either of the two
youths was in any way concerned in the outrage. The bishop of the
diocese had issued monitory proclamations, and conducted a solemn
procession to the insulted crucifix. The imagination of the town was
kindled, and the sacrilege became the universal talk of a people growing
more and more excited. Rumour ran that a new sect was being formed,
which was for breaking all the crucifixes, which threw the host on the
ground and cut it with knives. There were women who declared that they
had seen these things. All the horrible stories were revived which had
been believed against the Jews in the middle ages. A citizen took
advantage of this fierce agitation to gratify a private grudge against a
relative of La Barre. He set inquiries on foot among the lowest persons
for proof that the youth had been concerned in the original crime. By
one means or another he got together material enough to support an
indictment. Proceedings once begun, a crowd of informers rose up. It was
deposed that La Barre and D’Etallonde had passed within thirty yards of
the sacred procession without removing their hats, that La Barre had
spoken irreverently of the Virgin Mary, that he had been heard to sing
unseemly songs and recite ribald litanies. This testimony, given with a
vagueness that ought to have proved it legally valueless, was the fruit
of the episcopal monitory, which as at Toulouse in the case of Calas,
virtually incited the dregs of the people to bring accusations against
their superiors, and menaced a man with the pains of hell if he should
refuse to put his neighbour in peril of his life. The tribunal, as
excited as the witnesses and the rest of the public, relied on a royal
ordinance of 1682, directed against sacrilege and superstition and
designed to put down sorcery. In the sentence inflicting so bloody a
punishment, the offence was described as consisting in singing
abominable songs against the Virgin Mary.187 To exact such a penalty
for such a delinquency was to make human life a mere plaything for the
ignorant passion of the populace and the intellectual confusion of the
tribunals. These atrocities kindled in Voltaire a blaze of anger and
pity, that remains among the things of which humanity has most reason to
be proud. Everybody who has read much of the French writing of the
middle of the eighteenth century, is conscious from time to time of a
sound of mocking and sardonic laughter in it. This laugh of the
eighteenth century has been too often misunderstood as the expression of
a cynical hardness of heart, proving the hollowness of the humanitarian
pretensions in the midst of which it is heard. It was in truth something
very different; it was the form in which men sought a little relief from
the monotony of the abominations which oppressed them, and from whose
taint they had such difficulty to escape. This refrain, that after all a
man can do nothing better than laugh, apparently so shallow and inhuman,
in reality so penetrated with melancholy, we may count most certainly
on finding at the close of the narration of some more than usually
iniquitous or imbecile exploit of those in authority. It was when the
thought of the political and social and intellectual degradation of
their country became too vivid to be endured, that men like Voltaire and
D’Alembert would abruptly turn away from it, and in the bitterness of
their impotence cry that there was nothing for it but to take the world
and all that befalls therein in merriment. It was the grimacing of a man
who jests when he is perishing of hunger, or is shrinking under knife or
cautery. Thus D’Alembert having given Voltaire an account of the
execution of the unfortunate La Barre, in words that show how intensely
his own narrative was afflicting him, suddenly concludes by saying that
he will add no more on this auto-da-fé, so honourable to the French
nation, for it made him ill-humoured, and he meant only to mock at
whatever might happen.188 But Voltaire could not rest thus. The
thought of so hateful a crime, perpetrated by a tribunal of justice,
clothed him in the shirt of Nessus. All aflame, he wrote to D’Alembert
with noble impetuosity:
“This is no longer a time for jesting: witty things do not go well with
massacres. What? These Busirises in wigs destroy in the midst of
horrible tortures children of sixteen! And that in face of the verdict
of ten upright and humane judges! And the victim suffers it! People talk
about it for a moment, and the next they are hastening to the comic
opera; and barbarity, become the more insolent for our silence, will
to-morrow cut throats juridically at pleasure. Here Calas broken on the
wheel, there Sirven condemned to be hung, further off a gag thrust into
the mouth of a lieutenant-general, a fortnight after that five youths
condemned to the flames for extravagances that deserved nothing worse
than Saint Lazare. Is this the country of philosophy and pleasure? It is
the country rather of the Saint Bartholomew massacre. Why, the
Inquisition would not have ventured to do what these Jansenist judges
have done.”189 When he had received D’Alembert’s letter, ending as we
have seen, his remonstrance waxed vehement: ‘What, you would be content
to laugh? We ought rather to resolve to seek vengeance, or at any rate
to leave a coimtry where day after day such horrors are committed....
No, once more, I cannot bear that you should finish your letter by
saying, I mean to laugh. Ah, my friend, is it a time for laughing?
Did men laugh when they saw Phalaris’s bull being made red-hot?’190
This revival in the tribunals of Paris and the provincial towns alike,
of the ignorant fanaticism and the unscientific jurisprudence of the
most unenlightened times, was the more bitter and insupportable from the
new light which shone around such horrors. Beccaria’s treatise on
Offences and Penalties had just been translated into French by Morellet,
and furnished a strange commentary upon the atrocities of Toulouse and
Abbeville. It seemed, men said, as if at every striking vindication of
the rights of humanity the genius of cruelty broke its chains, and, to
prove the futility of all such vindications, inspired new acts of
barbarism and violence.191 The philosophic group had yielded to a
premature exultation, and in their inexperience supposed that they who
planted the tree should see the gathering-in of the fruit. The reign of
reason was believed to be close at hand, and this belief made the
visible recrudescence of fanatical unreason signally insupportable. It
is a high honour to Voltaire and his disciples that the trial did not
prove too strong for their faith, and that when they saw how far too
sanguine they had been, they were more astonished than they were
discouraged, and their energy redoubled with the demands made upon it.
The meaner partisans of an orthodoxy which can only make wholly sure of
itself by injustice to adversaries, have always loved to paint the
Voltairean school in the character of demons, enjoying their work of
destruction with a sportive and impish delight. They may have rejoiced
in their strength so long as they cherished the illusion that those who
first kindled the torch should also complete the long course and bear
the lamp to the goal. When the gravity of the enterprise showed itself
before them, they remained alert with all courage, but they ceased to
fancy that courage necessarily makes men happy. The mantle of
philosophy was rent in a hundred places, and bitter winds entered at a
hundred holes, but they only drew it the more closely around them.192
At the very last Voltaire seems to have seen something of the vast space
which every ray of light has to traverse before it reaches the eye of
the common understanding. ‘I now perceive,’ he wrote the year before his
death, ‘that we must still wait three or four hundred years. One day it
cannot but be that good men win their cause; but before that glorious
day arrives how many disgusts have we to undergo, how many dark
persecutions, without reckoning the La Barres, of whom from time to time
they will make an auto-da-fé’193 To speak thus was to recognise the
true character of the revolution, and the many elements which go to the
transformation of an old society. To speak thus, too, was to mark the
true character of the sincere lover of human progress, the soul of
steadfast patience and strong hope, mingled with many a pang for the
far-off and slow-coming good.
It was a natural thing to identify the Jesuits with the strongest part
of the old society, because their organisation was both the strongest
and most striking of its external supports. Their suppression, though
not to be dispensed with except on the condition of an ultimate
overthrow of morality and an extinction of intellectual light, had one
effect which the statesmen of the time could hardly be expected to see,
and which has not been enough considered. Just as the papacy by the
fourteenth century had become more and more exclusively a temporal
power, so the Jesuits by the middle of the eighteenth had become more
and more a commercial power. They were a powerful trading corporation,
and it was as merchants, rather than as casuists and directors of
conscience, that they finally came into collision with secular authority
in France, Portugal, and Spain. Now since the revival of the order it
has been exclusively engaged in the contest for spiritual supremacy, and
for as much of temporal power as has seemed essential to its security.
This, however, is only one of the evils which counterbalance the
advantages of every progressive measure; for, alas, when the statesman
believes most confidently that he has advanced by a league, a very few
years show him or others that his league was after all no more than an
ell or two.
The reactionary outburst of fanaticism for which the humiliation of the
Jesuits was a signal, only showed how well founded the Voltairean
allegations as to the depraving effects of the existing system of
religion had really been. It was the verification of all that Voltaire
ever said against the system, and demonstrated both the virulence and
the tenacity of the influences which Catholicism in the days of its
degradation had exerted over the character of the nation. It was most
illogical to expect a people who had been bred in the Catholic tradition
suddenly to welcome its enemies. If Catholicism had trained men up to
the temper which seeks the light and loves it, how should it have
deserved animosity? Nearly all lovers of improvement are apt in the
heat of a generous enthusiasm to forget that if all the world were ready
to embrace their cause, their improvement could hardly be needed. It is
one of the hardest conditions of things that the more numerous and
resolute the enemies of reform, then the more unmistakably urgent the
necessity for it. It was just because the cruelty, persecution, and
darkness, in the last ten years of the reign of Lewis XV. were things
possible, that the onslaught upon Catholicism was justifiable and
praiseworthy. They showed the depth and strength of the forces of the
old society, and they foreshadowed the violence which marked its
dissolution. If people had remembered in 1789 how few years separated
them from the wide-spread fanaticism which darkened the last days of
Voltaire, they might have calculated better how few years separated them
from the Napoleonic Concordat.
No permanent transformation of a society, we may be sure, can ever take
place until a transformation has been accomplished in the spiritual
basis of thought. Voltaire may have distinctly seen this and formulated
it to himself, or not; in any case, he steered his own course exactly as
he would have done if he had seen it. As M. Guizot expresses it, the
separation between the spiritual and temporal orders was never real in
Europe except in the eighteenth century, when for the first time the
spiritual order developed itself entirely apart from the temporal
order.194 Thus Voltaire acquiesced without murmur or reproach in the
conditions of political absolutism, and the disgrace and ruin which the
nullity of the government brought upon his country in the Seven Years’
War, keenly as he felt it, yet provoked no thought of temporal changes.
His correspondence in that fatal time is marked by a startling apathy
about public events, and even Rossbach seems not to move him to seek its
causes. If we compare his joyful enthusiasm at the accession of Turgot
to power in 1774, we can have no doubt that this strange numbness of
feeling was only the silence of a wise man despairing of saying or
seeing anything useful, and not the criminal folly of a bad citizen to
whom the welfare of his country is not dear. The disasters of France
were as serious to him as to any one else, as may be plainly seen under
the assumed philosophy with which his vivacious spirit loved to veil
real feeling; but the impossibility of doing anything, even of taking a
part in the process with which we English are so familiar as the forming
of public opinion, drove him for consolation to the field where he was
certain of doing efficient work.195 Writing in 1761, a year of
crushing national loss, he says to one of the oldest and most intimate
of his correspondents: ‘There is nothing to laugh at in all this. I am
struck to the heart. Our only resource is in the promptest and most
humiliating peace. I always fancy, when some overwhelming disaster
arrives, that the French will be serious for six weeks. I have not yet
been able to disabuse myself of this notion.’196 Voltaire was
penetrated by the spirit of action, and he perceived and regretted that
the organisation of France did not permit of the effective action of
private individuals in the field of politics.197 There are lines in
the Henriade extolling the freedom of England,198 and he sometimes
indulges in the commonplaces of a literary republicanism; but turning to
the portion of his works which his editors have classified as political,
we scarcely find much beyond the documents, and they are important and
interesting enough, still not truly political, that relate to the
various affairs of Calas, La Barre, and others, in which he exposed the
atrocities of the tribunals. So far as they come into the region of
politics at all, it is only to assail the overt and direct injustice
done to society by the institutions, privileges, and pretensions of the
church. He constantly attacks in a great variety of forms the material
mischief inflicted on society by the vast numbers of monks, mendicant or
other; their unproductive lives, the burden of their maintenance
weighing upon more industrious subjects, the restriction of population
occasioned by their celibacy. The direct refusal of the clergy in 1750
to consent to pay their share of the taxes like other citizens, though
owning as much as a fifth of all the property in the realm, moved him to
insist in a vigorous pamphlet that the distinction in a kingdom between
spiritual and temporal powers is a relic of barbarism; that it is
monstrous to permit a body of men to say, Let those pay who work, we
ought not to pay because we are idle; that superstition inevitably tends
to make bad citizens, and therefore princes ought to protect philosophy
which destroys superstition.199
Voltaire’s task, however, was never directly political, but spiritual,
to shake the foundations of that religious system which professed to be
founded on the revelation of Christ. Was he not right? If we find
ourselves walking amid a generation of cruel and unjust and darkened
spirits, we may be assured that it is their beliefs on what they deem
highest that have made them so. There is no counting with certainty on
the justice of men who are capable of fashioning and worshipping an
unjust divinity, nor on their humanity so long as they incorporate
inhuman motives in their most sacred dogma, nor on their reasonableness
while they rigorously decline to accept reason as a test of truth.
It is necessary to admit from the point of view of impartial criticism,
that Voltaire had one defect of character, of extreme importance in a
leader of this memorable and direct attack. With all his enthusiasm for
things noble and lofty, generous and compassionate, he missed the
peculiar emotion of holiness, the soul and life alike of the words of
Christ and Saint Paul, that indefinable secret of the long hold of
mystic superstition over so many high natures, otherwise entirely
prepared for the brightness of the rational day. From this impalpable
essence which magically surrounds us with the mysterious and subtle
atmosphere of the unseen, changing distances and proportions, adding new
faculties of sight and purpose, extinguishing the flames of disorderly
passion in a flood of truly divine aspiration, we have to confess that
the virtue went out in the presence of Voltaire. To admire Voltaire,
cried a man who detested him, is the sign of a corrupt heart, and if
anybody is drawn to his works, then be very sure that God does not love
such an one.200 The truth of which that is so vehement a paraphrase
amounts to this, that Voltaire has said no word, nor even shown an
indirect appreciation of any word said by another, which stirs or
expands the emotional susceptibility, indefinite exultation, and
far-swelling inner harmony, which De Maistre and others have known as
the love of God, and for which a better name, as covering most varieties
of form and manifestation, is holiness, deepest of all the words that
defy definition. Through the affronts which his reason received from
certain pretensions both in the writers and in some of those whose
actions they commemorated, this sublime trait in the Bible, in both
portions of it, was unhappily lost to Voltaire. He had no ear for the
finer vibrations of the spiritual voice. This had no concern in the fact
that he hated and despised, and was eager that others should hate and
despise, the religious forms that ruled France in his day. The
Christianity which he assailed was as little touched as Voltairism
itself with that spirit of holiness which poured itself round the lives
and words of the two founders, the great master and the great apostle.
The more deeply imbued a man was with this spirit, the more ardently
would he crave the demolition of that Infamous in belief and in
practice, which poisoned the stream of holiness in its springs, and shed
pestilence along its banks, and choked its issues in barrenness and
corruption.
The point where the failure of this quality in Voltaire was especially a
source of weakness to his attack, is to be found in the crippling of his
historic imagination, and the inability which this inflicted upon him of
conceiving the true meaning and lowest roots of the Catholic legend. The
middle age between himself and the polytheism of the Empire was a
parched desert to him and to all his school, just as to the Protestant
the interval between the apostles and Luther is a long night of unclean
things. He saw only a besotted people led in chains by a crafty
priesthood; he heard only the unending repetition of records that were
fictitious, and dogmas that drew a curtain of darkness over the
understanding. Men spoke to him of the mild beams of Christian charity,
and where they pointed he saw only the yellow glare of the stake; they
talked of the gentle solace of Christian faith, and he heard only the
shrieks of the thousands and tens of thousands whom faithful Christian
persecutors had racked, strangled, gibbeted, burnt, broken on the
wheel. Through the steam of innocent blood which Christians for the
honour of their belief had spilt in every quarter of the known world,
the blood of Jews, Moors, Indians, and all the vast holocausts of
heretical sects and people in eastern and western Europe, he saw only
dismal tracts of intellectual darkness, and heard only the humming of
the doctors, as they served forth to congregations of poor men hungering
for spiritual sustenance the draff of theological superstition.
This vehement and blinding antipathy arose partly from the intense force
with which the existing aspect of Catholicism recalled all that was
worst, and shut out all that was best in its former history. One cannot
fairly expect the man who is in the grip of a decrepit tyrant, to do
absolutely full justice to the seemly deeds and gracious promises of his
tormentor’s youth. But partly also this blindness arose from the fact
that Voltaire measured the achievements of Catholicism by the magnitude
of its pretensions. He took its supernatural claims seriously, and his
intelligence was exasperated beyond control by the amazing disproportion
and incongruity between these claims and the most conspicuous of the
actual results. Those who have parted company with a religion, as
Voltaire had parted company with Christianity, can only be counted upon
to award the well-earned praise to its better part, after they have
planted themselves stably on the assumption that the given religion is a
human and natural force like another.
The just historic calm on which our modern prides himself, is only
possible in proportion to the mature completeness with which he takes
for granted, and believes that those to whom he speaks will take for
granted, the absence of supernatural intervention in the processes of
religious action and development. He is absolutely undisturbed by the
thought of that claim, which was omnipotent until Voltaire came to do
deadly battle with it, of Christianity to be a crowning miracle of
divine favour, which should raise men to be only a little lower than the
angels, and should be the instrument for pouring out upon them an
ever-flowing stream of special and extraordinary grace. It is not until
the idea has dropped out of our minds of the great fathers of the church
as saints, that we are free to perceive what services they rendered as
statesmen, and it is only when men have ceased to dispute whether
Christianity was a revelation, that they have eyes to see what services
it has rendered as a system. But in Voltaire’s time, if Catholicism was
justified historically, it was believed dogmatically, and therefore was
to be attacked dogmatically also. The surrender of the written legend
has never hindered its champions from taking ground which implied some
esoteric revelation, that proves to be some special interpretation of
the written legend. So long as the thinker is busy disproving the
position that a man who happens to live on a certain part of the globe
is a being of such singular and exceptional consequence in the universe
as to be held worthy by supreme heavenly powers of receiving a
miraculous message and the promise of this and that unspeakable
privilege in indescribable worlds to come, so long he is not likely to
weigh very fairly the effects of the belief in such power, messages, and
privileges, on the education and advancement of this world. The modern
historic justice which is done to Catholicism is due to the
establishment of a series of convictions that civilisation is a
structure which man by his own right arm has raised for himself, that it
has been exposed to many an era of storm and stress, and to manifold
influences which have been perpetually destroying portions of the great
edifice, adding fresh parts, modifying the old, by an interminable
succession of changes, resounding and volcanic, or still and
imperceptible; that the danger of destruction was never so terrible as
in the days of the dissolution of the old Roman society; that in this
prolonged crisis the Christian church emerged, first by its organisation
and the ability of some of its chiefs, and next by the attraction of
legends that harmonised with the needs of a dark, confused, and
terror-stricken time; that the many barbarous and absurd articles of
belief incorporated in the Christian profession by the sophists of the
East, received from time to time humane modification in the hands of the
wiser churchmen of the West, whose practical judgment was perpetually
softening down the crude, savage, unilluminated doctrines which had
naturally sprung up in the dismal age when the Catholic system acquired
substance and shape. A just recognition of all these things is only
easy to one whose expectations from humanity are moderate, who perceives
how tardy and difficult is the accomplishment of each smallest step in
the long process, and how helpful are even the simplest beliefs of rude
times in transforming men from vagrant animals into beings with a
consciousness of fixed common relations towards some object of common
worship, and so planting the first germs of social consolidation and
growth.
Voltaire was, from the circumstances in which he was placed, too busy
proving the purely human origin of Catholicism to have a mind free to
examine how much, if we suppose it to be of purely human origin, it has
done for those who accepted it. Perhaps we ought rather to praise than
blame him for abstaining from planting himself at the historic point of
view, before settling the previous question whether the historic point
of view is permitted in considering the religious movements of Europe.
Until Voltaire and others had divested the current religion of its
supernatural pretensions, it was impossible for any thinker, who
declines to try to take the second step before he has already taken the
first, to survey the operations of such a religion as a merely secular
force. This surely is a field of thought where no serious inquirer could
content himself with a mere working hypothesis. If the supernatural
claims of Catholicism are well founded, then the historic method of
treating it is either a frivolous diversion or else a grave and
mischievous heresy. The issue being of this moment, everybody who
studies the philosophy of history with effect must have made up his mind
in one way or the other. Voltaire had made up his mind very definitely,
and the conclusion to which, for adequate or inadequate reasons, he came
in this matter was one of the most influential agencies in preparing
men’s minds for the construction and general reception of a sounder
historical philosophy than was within his own reach. That he did not see
the deduction from his work is a limitation of vision that he shares
with most of the men to whom it has fallen to overthrow old sytems, and
clear the ground on which the next generation has raised new.
II.
Having said thus much on the general causes and conditions of Voltaire’s
attack, we may next briefly examine his method. A brief examination
suffices, because, like all his contemporaries, he was so very
imperfectly acquainted with the principles of scientific criticism, and
because his weapons, though sharp and deadly enough for their purpose,
are now likely to become more and more thoroughly antiquated. In
criticism he was, as has often been remarked, the direct descendant of
Bayle. That is, his instruments were purely literary and dialectical. He
examined the various sacred narratives as if he had been reviewing a
contemporary historian. He delights in the minute cavils of literary
pyrrhonism, and rejoices in the artifice of imposing the significance of
the letter, where his adversaries strove for interpretation of the
spirit. As if, for instance, anything could be more childish than to
attack baptism by asking whether Christianity consists in throwing water
on the head, with a little salt in it.201 He is perfectly content with
the exposure of a fallacy in words, without seeking to expose the root
fallacy of idea. Nothing short of the blindest partisanship can pretend
to find in this a proper or adequate method. The utmost that can be
said, and no just historian ought to forget to say it, is that it was
not more improper nor inadequate than the orthodox method of defence.
Bayle’s commentary on the words, ‘Compel them to come in,’ would not
satisfy the modern requirements of scriptural exegesis, but it was quite
good enough to confound those who contended that the text was a direct
warrant and injunction from heaven for the bitterest persecution on
earth. But the unfair parry of unfair thrust, extenuate it as we may,
count it inevitable as we may, even reckoning up such advantages from it
as we can, and in the present case they were enormous, can never be any
pattern or masterpiece of retort; and it is folly to allow admiration
for the social merit of Voltaire’s end to blind us to the logical
demerit of his means. It is deliberately to throw away the advantage of
our distance from the contest, and to sell for a momentary
self-indulgence in the spirit of party the birthright of a free and
equitable historic vision. Let men not fail to do justice to the gains
of humanity won by the emancipation of the eighteenth century; but we
shall be worse off than if they had never been transmitted, if they are
allowed to bind us to approve of every detail of the many movements by
which the final triumph was obtained.
The key to his method of attack is given us in a sentence in one of his
letters to D’Alembert. ‘It is never by means of metaphysics,’ he says,
‘that you will succeed in delivering men from error; you must prove the
truth by facts.’202 In other words, the sublime abstract reasoning of
a Spinoza will do far less to dispel the narrow ideas, unfounded
beliefs, and false restrictive conceptions which cripple the human
intelligence so long as it is in bondage to a theological system, than a
direct disproval of the alleged facts on which the system professes to
rest. It is only by dealing immediately with these that you can make the
repulse of error a real question, substantially interesting to ordinary
men. Always remembering that Voltaire’s intelligence was practical
rather than speculative, and, besides this, that from the time when he
commenced his attack in earnest the object which he had at heart was the
overthrow of a crushing practical institution, we may agree that in such
a humour and with such a purpose the most effective way of harassing so
active and pestilent a foe was to carry the war into the enemy’s
quarters, and to use those kinds of arguments which the greatest number
of men would be likely to find cogent. We may complain that Voltaire
never rises from the ground into the region of the higher facts of
religion; and this is quite true. It would have been controversially
futile if he had done so. There was no audience in those times for the
discussion of the higher facts; and the reason of this was that the
spiritual instructors and champions themselves thrust into the front
place legends, miracles, and the whole of the peculiarly vulgar part of
the theological apparatus, which it would have been as absurd to
controvert metaphysically, as it would be to try to elevate a Gold-coast
negro from his fetish worship by the transcendental parts of Plato.
It nearly always happens that the defenders of a decaying system, when
they find themselves surrounded by the wholly uncongenial atmosphere of
rationalistic method, fall back, not on the noblest, but on the
ignoblest parts of their system. Distressed by the light, they shrink
hurriedly into darkest recesses of the familiar caves, partly because
they have a sense of especial security in a region that they know so
well, and partly because they have misgivings lest the surrender of
articles or practices in which they only half believe, should by too
stringent process of logical compulsion lead to the destruction of
others in which they believe with all their hearts. Such tactics may or
may not be politic, but we can at least be quite certain that they tend
neither to elevation of religion, nor discovery of truth, nor profit and
sincerity of discussion. If a set of doctrines be attacked from many
quarters in an unworthy manner, and taken at their worst instead of at
their best, we may be quite sure that this is as much due to the
defenders as to the assailants. It was not Voltaire’s fault that the
controversy turned on issues which a more modern opponent would not care
to dispute. He is constantly flippant and trivial, and constantly
manifests gross irreverence, but it was the writers whom he was
combating, writers like Sanchez or the stercorists, who had opened
frivolous and unbecoming questions that could hardly be exposed with
gravity. He was making war on an institution, and it was not his concern
to fight on ground which his adversary had never thought, and was too
blind and demoralised to be able to think, of taking up. It was not his
fault that the upholders of the creed he attacked, made a stand upon the
letter of sacred documents, upon prophecy and miracle and special
intervention, upon the virtues of relics and the liquefaction of the
blood of Saint Januarius. The same wise man who forbade us to answer a
fool according to his folly, also enjoined upon us to answer a fool
according to his folly, and the moral commentator agrees that each
prescription is as sage as its contradictory.
If truth means anything, it was worth while to put to rout the
distortions of truth with which the church lowered the understanding of
its votaries. If truth means anything, then it was worth while to reply
to the allegation that the history of the Christian church is a long
witness of the goodness of heaven and the ever-present guidance of its
heavenly founder, by a record of the actual facts; of the simplicity,
equality, absence of multiplied rites, orders, and dogmas, among the
primitive members of the congregation, and of the radical differences
between the use of apostolic times and of times since; of the incurable
want of authority for all those tales of demons being cast out, pious
inscriptions in letters of gold found graven on the hearts of martyrs,
and the rest, which grow rare in proportion as we draw nearer to the
times when the evidence for them would have been preserved; of the
infamous character of many Christian heroes, from Constantine downwards,
and of the promptitude with which the Christians, as soon as ever they
had power, dyed their hands in the blood of their persecutors; of the
stupefying circumstances that after a revelation was made to the human
race by no less a prodigy than the incarnation of supreme power in a
mortal body, and the miraculous maintenance of this event and its
significance in the tradition, doctrine, discipline of the Catholic
church, yet the whole of Asia, the whole of Africa, all the possessions
of the English and Dutch in America, all the uncivilised Indian tribes,
all the southern lands, amounting to one-fifth part of the globe still
remain in the clutches of the demon, to verify that holy saying of many
being called but few chosen.203
It may be said that this kind of argument really proves nothing at all
about the supernatural origin or character of the Christian revelation,
for which you must seek the responses not of ecclesiastical history but
of the human heart. And that may be a fair thing to say, but then this
contention of the new revelation being only a message to the heart has
only been heard since Voltaire thrust aside the very different
contention of his day. Those various beliefs were universally accepted
about the progress of the church, which were true in no sense whatever,
literal or spiritual, mystical or historical. People accepted traditions
and records, sacred and profane, as literal, accurate, categorical
declarations and descriptions of a long series of things done and
suffered. Moreover, the modern argument in favour of the supernatural
origin of the Christian religion, drawn from its suitableness to our
needs and its divine response to our aspirations, must be admitted by
every candid person resorting to it to be of exactly equal force in the
mouth of a Mahometan or a fire-worshipper or an astrolater. If you apply
a subjective test of this kind, it must be as good for the sincere and
satisfied votaries of one creed, as it is for those of any other. The
needs and aspirations of the Mahometan would not be satisfied by
fetishism or polytheism, nor those of the developed polytheist by
totem-worship. It would be ridiculous for so small a minority of the
race as the professors of Christianity to assume that their aspirations
are the absolute measure of those of humanity in every stage. The
argument can never carry us beyond the relativity of religious truth.
Now the French apologist a hundred years ago dealt in the most absolute
possible matter. Christianity to him meant a set of very concrete ideas
of all sorts; any one who accepted them in the concrete and literal form
prescribed by the church would share infinite bliss, and any one who
rejected them, whether deliberately or from never having been so happy
as to hear of them, would be infinitely tormented. If this theory be
right, then Voltaire must naturally be abhorred by all persons who hold
it, as a perverse and mischievous hinderer of light. If it be wrong, and
we must observe that from its terms this is not one of the marvellously
multiplying beliefs of which we hear that they may be half wrong and
half right, then Voltaire may take rank with other useful expellers of
popular error. Everybody must admit how imperfect is all such treatment
of popular error; how little rich, how little comprehensive, how little
full. Yet the surgeon who has couched his patient’s cataract has surely
done a service, even if he do not straightway carry him to enjoy the
restored faculty on some high summit of far and noble prospect.
Voltaire’s attack was essentially the attack of the English deists, as
indeed he is always willing enough to admit, pursued with far less
gravity and honest search for truth, but, it is hardly necessary to say,
with far more adroitness, rapidity, and grace of manner than any of
them, even than Bolingbroke. As we have seen, he insisted on throwing
himself upon the facts in the records that are least easily reconciled
with a general sense of probability and evidence, as gradually developed
in men by experience. He placed the various incidents of the Bible, the
interpretation of them by the church, the statement of doctrine, the
characters of prominent actors, in the full light of common experience
and of the maxims which experience has made second nature. ‘I always
speak humanly,’ he says mockingly, ‘I always put myself in the place of
a man who, having never heard tell either of Jews or Christians, should
read these books for the first time, and not being illuminated by grace,
should be so unhappy as to trust unaided reason in the matter, until he
should be enlightened from on high.’204
It is superfluous to detail the treatment to which he subjected such
mysteries of the faith as the inheritance of the curse of sin by all
following generations from the first fall of man; the appearance from
time to time, among an obscure oriental tribe, of prophets who foretold
the coming of a divine deliverer, who should wash away that fatal stain
by sacrificial expiation; the choice of this specially cruel,
treacherous, stubborn, and rebellious tribe, to be the favoured people
of a deity of spotless mercy and truth; the advent of the deliverer in
circumstances of extraordinary meanness and obscurity among a generation
that greeted his pretensions with incredulity, and finally caused him to
be put to death with ignominy, in spite of his appeal to the prophets
and to the many signs and wonders which he wrought among them; the
rising of this deliverer from the dead; the ascription to him in the
course of the next three or four centuries of claims which he never made
in person, and of propositions which he never advanced while he walked
on the earth, yet which must now be accepted by every one who would
after death escape a pitiless torment without end; the truly miraculous
preservation amid a fiery swarm of heresies, intricate, minute, subtle,
barely intelligible, but very soul-destroying, of that little fragile
thread of pure belief which can alone guide each spirit in the divinely
appointed path. Exposed to the light, which they were never meant to
endure, of ordinary principles of evidence founded on ordinary
experience, the immortal legends, the prophecies, the miracles, the
mysteries, on which the spiritual faith of Europe had hung for so many
generations, seemed to shrivel up in unlovely dissolution. The
authenticity of the texts on which the salvation of man depends, the
contradictions and inconsistencies of the documents, the incompatibility
between many acts and motives expressly approved by the holiest persons,
and the justice and mercy which are supposed to sit enthroned on high in
the bosoms, the forced constructions of prophecies and their
stultifying futility of fulfilment, the extraordinary frivolousness of
some of the occasions on which the divine power of thaumaturgy was
deliberately and solemnly exerted,—these were among the points at which
the messenger of Satan at Ferney was permitted sorely to buffet the
church. What is the date of the Apostles’ Creed? What of the so-called
Athanasian Creed? How were the seven sacraments instituted one after
another? What was the difference between the synaxis and the mass? And
so forth through many hundreds of pages.
Along with rationalistic questions in scriptural and ecclesiastical
history, are many more as to doctrine, and the assumption on which a
doctrine rests; questions as to the trinity, as to redemption by the
shedding of innocent blood, as to the daily miracle of
transubstantiation, as to the resurrection of the body, as to the
existence of an entity called soul independently of that matter which,
apart from miracle, seems an inseparable condition of its manifestation.
His arguments on all these subjects contain a strange mixture of shallow
mockery and just objection. The questions which he suggests for the
doctors as to the resurrection of the body may serve for an example.
Among them are these:
‘A Breton soldier goes to Canada. It happens by a not uncommon chance
that he falls short of food; he is forced to eat a piece of an Iroquois
whom he has killed over night. The Iroquois had fed on Jesuits for two
or three months, a great part of his body had thus become Jesuit. So
there is the body of the soldier with Iroquois, Jesuit, and whatever he
had eaten before, entering into it. How then will each resume exactly
what belongs to him?’ ‘In order to come to life again, to be the same
person you were, you must have a lively and present recollection; it is
memory that makes your identity. Having lost memory, how are you to be
the same man?’ Again, ‘considering that only certain material elements
are proper for the composition of the human body, where is earth enough
to be found to remake all the bodies needed for so many hundreds of
generations? And supposing that by a prodigious miracle the whole human
race could be resuscitated in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where are all
the spirits meanwhile?’205
Another very favourite mode of approaching the beliefs, incidents, and
personages of Jewish and Christian history was to show that they had
counterparts in some pagan fables or systems, in the books of Chinese
philosophers or Brahminical sages. The inference from this identity or
correspondence between some Judaical practices and myths, and the
practices and myths of Arabians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Hindoos, was
that they were in all cases equally the artificial creations of
impostors preying on the credu-lity of men, ‘the first prophet or
diviner having been the first rogue who met the first fool.’ It is
curious to observe how the modern argument from constantly extending
discoveries in comparative mythology tends to the demolition of the
special pretensions of Judaical myths of all sorts, by the very opposite
inference to that on which the Voltairean school rested. Voltaire urged
that as these myths resembled one another in this and that important
feature, therefore they were all equally spurious, false, and absurd.
The modern, on the contrary, would hold them all equally genuine,
equally free from the taint of imposture in priest or people, and
equally faithful representations of the mental states which produced and
accepted them. The weakening of the particular sanctity and objective
reality of any one form of these common primitive ways of thinking about
the action of non-human agents would be just as strong, whether we take
the new or the old view of the generation of myths, but the difference
of the effect of the two views upon the justice and fertility of
historic spirit is immeasurable.
There is no sign, however, that Voltaire was ever seriously conscious of
the importance of a right consideration of the mental conditions of
primitive peoples. This study had been commenced in his own time by De
Brosses, the inventor of the term fetishism, and pronounced by competent
modern authorities to have been a powerful and original thinker upon the
facts of the infancy of civilisation.206 Yet Voltaire treated the
speculations of this industrious inquirer with the same ignorant
contempt and scorn that the theological enemies of geology were once
accustomed to bestow on men who chipped bits of rock and cherished
fossils.207 Oddly enough, Voltaire’s carelessness and want of thought
on these matters left him with that very theory of the nature of the
development of cultivation, on which the theological school insists to
this day as against the scientific ethnologists. The question is whether
the earliest men were savages, or partially civilised; in other words,
whether civilisation has consisted in a certain uniform progression from
a state a little above the brutes, or whether the savage is not a being
who has degenerated from a partial degree of civilisation. The
progression theory was no doubt in a general way a characteristic
doctrine of the men of the eighteenth century, for which De Maistre, an
ardent and most ingenious advocate of the degeneration theory, reviled
them with his usual heartiness. Yet his eagerness to depress revelation
by exalting natural theology led Voltaire to the essentially theological
position that the earliest men had a clear and lofty idea of a Supreme
Being, and a ready appreciation of justice and charity in their
relations with one another, until the vile ambition of priestly and
prophetic impostors succeeded in setting upon their necks the yoke of
systems which corrupted the heart and conscience, and sophisticated a
pure and simple faith.
He did not hold that men were conscious of the one God as they were
conscious of light, or that they had perceptions of such a being, as
they had perceptions of the ground they tilled. The idea was derived by
process of natural logic from the contemplation of astonishing natural
effects, of harvest and dearth, of fair days and tempests, of
benefactions and scourges. They saw all these things, and felt the work
of a master.208 Just as in each community there were men who by the
force of their reason found out that triangles with the same base and of
the same height are equal, and others who in sowing and reaping and
tending their flocks perceived that the sun and moon returned pretty
nearly to the point from which they had started, and that they never
travelled beyond a certain limit to north or south, so there was a third
man who considered that men, animals, stars could not have made
themselves, and who saw that therefore a Supreme Being must exist; while
a fourth, struck by the wrongs that men inflicted on one another,
concluded that if there exists a being who made the stars, the earth,
and men, such a being must confer favour on the virtuous, and
punishments on the wicked. This idea, Voltaire declares, is so natural
and so good that it was most readily embraced.209 The various forms of
revelations were only so many corruptions of that simple, serviceable,
and self-proving monotheism, and so were the conceptions of polytheism.
He had no notion that monotheism is a later development of the
theological spirit than polytheism. Unable to deny that the Greeks and
Romans, about whom he knew so little and talked so much, had plurality
of gods, he drew a distinction between one Supreme Being and all the
rest, and contended that you may search all their records in vain for a
single fact or a single word to counterbalance the many passages and
monuments which attest their belief of the sovereignty of the one deity
and his superiority over all the rest.210 We do not know whether this
was a fortuitous kind of growth in his own mind, or whether it was a
scrap of recollection from the painstaking pages in which Cudworth had
worked at the establishment of that explanation of polytheism. Voltaire
too often writes on these weighty subjects, as if trusting to a memory
that snatched effectively at plausible theories, while losing much of
their evidence and all their deeper bearings.
It would be not a little extraordinary, if we did not constantly
remember that Voltaire’s strength did not lie in speculation or
systematic thought, that he saw none of the objections to this account
of things, and that he was content with so limited an observation of the
facts. If De Brosses had magnanimously suffered himself to be cheated in
the transaction of the fourteen cords of wood, Voltaire would perhaps
have read his book candidly, and if he had read it otherwise than with a
foregone resolution to despise it, he would have come upon a number of
circumstances entirely fatal to his smooth theory that many gods are
always subordinate to the one, because he would have had to consider
those states of the human mind in which there are no spiritual gods at
all, but in which every object whatever is invested with volition and
power. In one place he shows something like a recognition of the true
nature of the process. ‘I have always been persuaded,’ he says in a
letter to Mairan, ‘that the phenomena of the heavens have been in the
main the source of the old fables. Thunder was heard on the inaccessible
summit of a mountain; therefore there must be gods dwelling on the
mountain, and launching the thunder. The sun seems to speed from east to
west, therefore he has fine coursers. The rain does not touch the head
of one who sees a rainbow, so the rainbow is a token that there will
never again be a deluge.’211 But then Voltaire was no systematic
thinker, and thus there was no security that any given right idea which
came into his mind would either remain present to him, or would be
followed up and placed along with other ideas in a scientific order.
Apart from this, however, it is extraordinary that Voltaire’s extreme
acuteness did not suggest to him the question, how it was that the
artless and clear belief in one God became more and more obscured by the
growing multitude of other gods, just in proportion as the primitive
tribes became more civilised in all the arts of life. If the nomad
progenitors of the Greeks had only one god, how was it that, as
knowledge, social feeling, love of beauty, and all the other ennobling
parts of man became more fully developed, the power of superstition
waxed greater, and temples and images were multiplied!
Again, the theologist might, consistently with his deliberate principle
of resort to the miraculous, contend that this first conception of a
single supreme power, in the fact of the existence of which he is
entirely at one with Voltaire, was directly implanted by a supernatural
force. But Voltaire, debarred from such an explanation as this, was
driven silently to assume and imply the truly incredible position that
the rudest savages, being what we know them, urgently occupied in the
struggle for means of subsistence, leading lives purely animal,
possessed of no vocabulary for any abstract idea, should yet by one leap
of natural logic have risen to one of the very highest pinnacles of
speculation, and both felt and expressed the idea of cause in the most
general and comprehensive of all its forms. Surely this assumption,
measured by any of those standards of experience or probability to which
he professed to appeal, was as much of a miracle as those which he so
decisively repudiated.
In one of his letters Voltaire declared that Locke was the only
reasonable metaphysician that he knew, and that next to him he placed
Hume.212 Did he ever read, we may wonder, that masterly essay on the
Natural History of Religion, where Hume not only combats with his usual
vigour and effectiveness the idea of the belief in one omniscient,
omnipotent, and omnipresent spirit being the primary religion of men,
and shows that polytheism precedes monotheism, but also traces the
origin of all religion to its rudiment, in that ‘universal tendency
among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to
every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted,
and of which they are intimately conscious?’213 The greater the
knowledge we acquire of the spiritual rudiments of primitive people, the
more certainly is it established that the idea of theism as the earliest
and most elementary belief, which Voltaire had picked up from
Bolingbroke and Pope, is untenable, and that Hume has been more and more
fully warranted in saying that the only point of theology on which the
consent of mankind is nearly universal is that ‘there is an invisible,
intelligent power in the world, but whether this power be supreme or
subordinate, whether confined to one being or distributed among several,
what attributes, qualities, connections, or principles of action, ought
to be ascribed to these beings, concerning all these points there is the
widest difference in the popular systems of theology.’214 This might
be placing natural theology very low, but Hume at any rate placed it
where he did and described it as he did, because he had knowledge enough
of the condition of various nations in various parts of their history,
and was sufficiently penetrated with a cautious and scientific spirit,
to abstain from the unsupported and purely metaphysical conjectures of
men like Voltaire and Rousseau. Well might the keen-eyed De Maistre
describe him from the Catholic point of view as the most dangerous and
the guiltiest of all those pestilent writers,—the one who employed most
talent with most coolness to do most mischief.215
If Voltaire had studied Hume, moreover, he might have learnt how futile
and inappropriate it is in the long run to examine a religion otherwise
than in its most fundamental and comprehensive general ideas, and how
narrow and superficial would every philosophic appreciation ultimately
find what he called refutation by facts. For his own immediate purpose,
which was to cover the church and its creed with ridicule, the method of
collecting all the ludicrous, immoral, and inconsistent circumstances in
the Scriptures and their current interpretation, was, as we have already
said, a weapon potent enough. Voltaire, however, not only did not use,
he never understood nor perceived, the fact that a religion rests for
its final base on a certain small number of ideas, or that it is only by
touching these, by loosening the firmness of their hold, by revealing
their want of coherency and consistency with other accepted ideas, that
we can expect to shake the superstructure. For example, if only the
official exponents of religion had not been so firmly bent on making
the feeblest of all their ramparts into their very citadel, it would
have been a very small thing to urge the truly singular quality of such
miracles as those of the water made wine at Cana, of the cursing of the
barren fig-tree, of the unfortunate swine who rushed violently down a
steep place and were choked. These were legends that from the right
point of view of religion were not worth defending, any more than from
the right point of view of truth they were worth attacking. The details
of the use of a supernaturally conferred power may best be let alone,
until the probability of the existence and bestowal of such power has
been discussed and decided. The important issue and matter of vital
concern turned upon the general idea of the miraculous; yet this was
what Voltaire, perhaps from an instinctive consciousness of the little
capacity he possessed for genuine speculation, postponed to the really
secondary purpose of disparaging particular cases of miraculous
performance.
We are now touching what, before Hume, was the central defect of the
eighteenth-century attack, judged philosophically rather than
practically. The movement was a reaction against a certain set of ideas
which had been incorporated in the Christian system, as that system was
elaborated by the oriental sophisters. Yet the exact conflict between
the old ideas and the new was never conceived, much less was it
expressed, in clear comprehensive formulas. Consequently the most
general terms for the debate were neither sought nor found, and hence
the oppressive narrowness, the stifling want of free air, throughout the
controversy. The truth or falsehood which it is good for us to discover
in connection with a religion resides not in detail, but in the largest
general ideas of the subject. These draw all else along with them. Let
us take an illustration from a characteristic of the anti-christian
attack which has already been mentioned. The Voltairean school, as we
have before observed,216 habitually derided the sacred importance
attached by the church in all ages, from Saint Paul downwards, to the
practice of continence. But there is no sign, so far as the present
writer’s knowledge goes, that they ever were near perceiving the origin
of that superstition lying deep down for so many centuries in the human
mind. The sanctity of continence was only one product of the old
far-spreading conviction of all the evil and unholiness essentially
inherent in matter. This conviction, which has itself a history and
genesis well worth tracing, probably accounts for more of the peculiar
manifestations contained in Christianity than any one principle of
belief besides. From this metaphysical idea sprang the whole theory of
asceticism; it had much to do indirectly with the first establishment of
the doctrine of the divinity of Christ; it entered into the triumph of
indispensable grace.217 The speculative origin of practices and
sentiments which the heads of the western church valued, modified, and
sagaciously used for ecclesiastical or political reasons, ought never to
be lost sight of, because their duration has depended on the
circumstance of the original speculative idea remaining deeply sunk,
though not often put into articulate form, in the minds of the faithful,
and of all others whom these practices and sentiments have influenced.
One key to the central movement of the eighteenth century is the
dispersion of this association of evil and corruption from matter. There
was energetic and triumphant progress in the discovery of the laws of
matter, in their most stupendous, overwhelming, and majestic order.
There was a steady tendency to resolve mental manifestations into
functions of matter. There was a general inclination to forget those
depressing facts connected with the decay and dissolution of matter,
which, in the dismal times when the church was founded, had been thrust
into a prominence so humiliating to human dignity. The general movement
was carried too far by extreme spirits, but on the whole it was a
salutary and much-needed protest against the limitation of knowledge
within airy cloudlands where no true knowledge was to be reached, and of
emotion within transcendental aspirations where the deep reality of
human relations faded into dim distance.
It is only when controversy is conducted with reference to ground ideas
of this kind, that the parties to it can be sure of being on the same
plane, and, if they are not on the same plane, one of the least
mischiefs is that their arguments fly over one another’s heads.
Voltaire failed, partly from want of historic knowledge, partly from
insufficient depth of nature, to see what these ground ideas were,
against which he was fighting. Thus, to take another instance, he failed
to see that the belief in the exertion of supernatural power, even on
occasions which struck him as so frivolous, and in a manner undoubtedly
incompatible with justice, was merely an incidental result of a
profoundly rooted idea of the closeness, constancy, and mixed holiness
and majesty, of the relations between man and an awful being other than
man, endowed with powers denied to us, and animated by motives
inscrutable to us. He chose, if we are not wrong in using a term that
may imply much conscious deliberation, to identify his own conception of
deity with the conception of deity in the first four centuries of the
Christian era, simply because the object of each was called by a common
name. He found that the actions attributed to the Supreme Being whom the
church revered, were unworthy of a personage endowed with the qualities
which he ascribed to a supreme power, in his own version of that
culminating conception. He was thus never on the same plane of thought
or argument, but he never was near finding this out. The God whom he
conceived was incapable, from the very nature attributed to him by his
worshippers, of the various transactions, lofty and mean, sublime and
puerile, described in the documents on which Catholicism relied, and
the tradition by which it corroborated and interpreted them. The ground
idea of the belief in the miraculous was an extremely anthropomorphic
notion of a divinity, possessed of complete power, but using it in
obedience to motives which finite understandings cannot pretend to
fathom or measure. Such a notion was the natural growth of the human
mind, amid such a set of circumstances as attended the development and
establishment of Christianity. Men sat in darkness, forlorn and without
hope, and it is not hard for us to imagine the exultation with which
some greater spirit would produce, and all others would embrace, the
idea of this misery and darkness being no more than an outer accident,
the mysterious and incomprehensible dispensation of a divine being, ever
alive to the destinies of men, but holding them in the hollow of an
unseen hand, and guiding them in ways that are not as our ways; ever
remote from corporeal vision, but operating at a multitude of points on
the spirit of each man through grace, and finally, by a consummating
miracle repeated daily some thousands of times, severing this spirit
from the probation of flesh, and prolonging its existence independently
of the body through all eternity in modes of being, none the less real
for being impossible to conceive. To Voltaire this was unspeakable
foolishness. The prodigies of grace, of the resurrection of the body, of
the incarnation of divinity, were inconsistent with the qualities which
he imputed to the creator of the universe, and hence he contented
himself with mocking at them; the real state of the case was simply that
a number of influences had drawn men aside from that conception of the
creator, with which such prodigies were not inconsistent, but were on
the contrary logically and inseparably associated.
This failure to rise to the highest ideas involved in the great debate
explains, along with much besides, two striking facts connected with it.
It explains the intense acerbity of the conflict, and the flaming depth
of the chasm which divided and divides the two camps in France. For the
best natures are most violently irritated and outraged by mocking and
satiric attack upon the minor details, the accidents, the outside of the
objects of faith, when they would have been affected in a very different
way by a contrast between the loftiest parts of their own belief and the
loftiest parts of some other belief. Many persons who would listen to a
grave attack on the consistency, reasonableness, and elevation of the
currently ascribed attributes of the godhead, with something of the
respect due to the profound solemnity of the subject, would turn with
deaf and implacable resentment upon one who should make merry over the
swine of Gadara.
The same circumstance, secondly, explains the absence of permanent
quality about all that Voltaire wrote upon religion. For instance, men
who sympathise with him in his aims, and even for their sake forgive him
his method, who have long ago struck the tents under which they once
found shelter in the lands of belief, to whom Catholicism has become as
extinct a thing as Mahometanism, even they will turn with better chance
of edification to the great masters and teachers of the old faith, than
to the fiery precursor of the new. And why, if not for the reason that
while he dealt mainly with the lower religious ideas, or with the higher
ideas in their lowest forms, they put these into the second place, and
move with an inspiring exultation amid the loftiest and most general
conceptions that fine imagination and a soaring reason could discover
among the spiritual treasures of their religion. They turned to the
diviner mind, and exercised themselves with the weightiest and most
universal circumstances of the destiny of mankind. This is what makes
their thought and eloquence of perpetual worth, because the
circumstances with which they deal are perpetually present, and the
elements of life and character to which they appeal perpetually
operative. The awful law of death, the impenetrable secret of the first
cause, the fierce play of passion and universal distribution of pain,
the momentariness of guilt and eternity of remorse, the anguish of
bereavement that chokes and rends, the hopeless inner desolation which
is the unbroken lot of myriads of the forlorn of the earth,—these
ghostly things ever laying siege to the soul were known to a Bossuet or
a Pascal, and resolved by a series of ideas about the unknowable power
and the government of the world, which are no longer the mighty weapons
of exorcism they once were, but they are at any rate of due magnitude
and proportion, sublime, solemn, never unworthy. We touch the hands of
those who have walked with the most high, and they tell us many moving
wonders; we look on faces that have shone in rays from the heaven of
noble thoughts; we hear solemn and melodious words from men who received
answers from oracles that to us are very mute, but the memory of whose
power is still upon us. Hence the work of these glowing mortals lives
even for those to whom their faith is dead, while the words that
Voltaire wrote on religion are lifeless as the Infamous which they so
meritoriously slew. As we have said, he never knew the deeper things of
Catholicism. This is what he wrote about the immortal Dante: ‘Everybody
with a spark of good sense ought to blush at that monstrous assemblage
in hell of Dante and Virgil, of Saint Peter and Madonna Beatrice. There
are to be found among us, in the eighteenth century, people who force
themselves to admire feats of imagination as stupidly extravagant and as
barbarous as this; they have the brutality to oppose them to the
masterpieces of genius, wisdom, and eloquence, that we have in our
language. O tempora, O judicium!’218 To which prodigy of criticism
we can only exclaim with the echo, O tempora, O judicium!
III.
Let us see shortly what was Voltaire’s own solution of those facts of
life with which religion has to deal. The Catholic solution we know, and
can definitely analyse and describe; but the vagueness of Voltairean
deism defies any attempt at detailed examination. We can perceive a
supernatural existence, endowed with indefinable attributes, which are
fixed subjectively in the individual consciousness of each believer, and
which therefore can never be set forth in a scheme of general
acceptance. The Voltairean deist—and such persons exist in ample
numbers to this day—hardly ever takes the trouble to reconcile with one
another the various attributes which he imputes at various times to some
great master power of the universe. There is scarcely one of these
attributes to which, when it comes to be definitely described, he does
not encounter affronting contradiction in the real occurrences that
arise from time to time to search and try all our theories, deistical,
or other. The phenomena of moral and physical evil on the earth, and the
arrival of disasters which make no discrimination between their victims,
are constantly dealing sore blows to the conceptions which the deist
loves to erect in moments of optimistic expansion, of the clemency,
justice, and illimitable power of a being who governs the universe, and
is a something outside and independent of it. These optimist
conceptions, vague, unverified, free of definite relations with any
moral or social system, and furnishing no principle of active human
association as the Catholic idea of deity had done, constitute the
favourite religion or religiosity of those classes in all modern
countries, which have found the Voltairean kind of objection to the
Christian revelation insuperable, and which are so fortunate as to enjoy
a full measure of material prosperity. To these classes the black side
of life is strange and a matter of hearsay; and hence the awkwardness of
reconciling their complacent theory with the horror of facts is never
forced upon them. In their own happiness they love to superadd the
luxury of thankfulness to the bounty of a being to whom they owe all,
and to swell the tide of their own emotions by meditation on his
infinite and unspeakable perfections. Proof they require none, beyond
the loveliness and variety of external nature, the innocence and delight
of all young creatures, the order of the seasons bearing us their
copious fruit, the vivid intelligence and serviceable power of man, who
is the divinely appointed recipient of all these multitudinous favours.
Hence in proportion as this sort of deism stirs the soul of a man, the
more closely are his inmost thoughts reserved for contemplation of the
relations between the Supreme Being and his own individuality. It is a
creed which is specially adapted for, and has been generally seized by,
those with whom the world has gone very well, owing to their own
laudable exertion, and who are inclined to believe that the existing
ordering of society is fundamentally the best possible. It is the
superlative decoration of optimism.
The mass of men, those who dwell in dens and whose lives are bitter,
have never, in spite even of Rousseau’s teaching, accepted deism. An
opportunity for trying the experiment had occurred in the fourth
century, and the lesson should not be forgotten. Deism had been the
prevailing opinion in religion, but, as the most instructive of all the
historians of the dissolution of the Empire observes, it was generally
felt that deism did not supply the void occasioned by the absence of the
multitude of sympathetic divinities of the pagan system. Its influence
was cold and inanimate.219 The common people are wont to crave a
revelation, or else they find atheism a rather better synthesis than any
other. They either cling to the miraculously transmitted message with
its hopes of recompense, and its daily communication of the divine voice
in prayer or sacrament, or else they make a world which moves through
space as a black monstrous ship with no steersman. The bare deistic
idea, of a being endowed at once with sovereign power and sovereign
clemency, with might that cannot be resisted and justice that cannot be
impugned, who loves man with infinite tenderness, yet sends him no word
of comfort and gives him no way of deliverance, is too hard a thing for
those who have to endure the hardships of the brutes, but yet preserve
the intelligence of men.
Comment concevoir un Dieu, la bonté même,
Qui prodigua ses biens a ses enfans qu’il aime,
Et qui versa sur eux les maux a pleines mains?
Quel œil peut penetrer dans ses profonds desseins?
De l’etre tout parfait le mal ne pouvait naitre!
Il ne vient point d’autrui puisque Dieu seul est maitre:
Il existe pourtant. O tristes verittés!
O melange etonnant de contraritéttés!
Un Dieu vint consoler notre race affligée;
Il visita la terre et ne l’a point changée!
Un sophiste arrogant nous dit qu’il ne l’a pu;
Il le pouvait, dit l’autre, et ne l’a point voulu;
Il le voudra, sans doute; et tandis qu’on raisonne,
Des foudres souterraines engloutissent Lisbonne,
Et de trente cites dispersent les débris,
Des bords sanglans du Tage à la mer de Cadix.220
A bald deism has undoubtedly been the creed of some of the purest and
most generous men that have ever trod the earth, but none the less on
that account is it in its essence a doctrine of self-complacent
individualism from which society has little to hope, and with which
there is little chance of the bulk of society ever sympathising. In
truth, one can scarcely call it a creed. It is mainly a name for a
particular mood of fine spiritual exaltation; the expression of a state
of indefinite aspiration and supreme feeling for lofty things. Are you
going to convert the new barbarians of our western world with this fair
word of emptiness?
Will you sweeten the lives of suffering men, and
take its heaviness from that droning piteous chronicle of wrong and
cruelty and despair, which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear
like moaning of a midnight sea; will you animate the stout of heart with
new fire, and the firm of hand with fresh joy of battle, by the thought
of a being without intelligible attributes, a mere abstract creation of
metaphysic, whose mercy is not as our mercy, nor his justice as our
justice, nor his fatherhood as the fatherhood of men? It was not by a
cold, a cheerless, a radically depraving conception such as this, that
the church became the refuge of humanity in the dark times of old, but
by the representation, to men sitting in bondage and confusion, of
godlike natures moving among them under figure of the most eternally
touching of human relations, a tender mother ever interceding for them,
and an elder brother laying down his life that their burdens might be
loosened.
We have spoken of Voltairean deism, and the expression is a convenient
one to distinguish from the various forms of mystic theology, which
gloomily disclaim any pretence to be rational, the halting-place of
spirits too deeply penetrated with the rationalistic objections of
Voltaire to accept revelation, and either too timorous or too confident
to acquiesce in a neutral solution. It is unjust, however, to attribute
to Voltaire himself a perfect adherence to the deistical idea. For the
first half of his life there is no doubt that it floated in his mind,
as in so many others, in a random manner, as the true explanation of the
world. His introduction to the teaching of Newton would give a firmer
shape to such a belief. He has indeed told us that it was so. He
mentions that in the course of several interviews he had with Doctor
Samuel Clarke in 1726, this philosopher never pronounced the name of God
without a curious air of awe and self-collection, and he commemorates
the impression which the sight of this habit, and reflection upon its
significance, made upon him221. Still it was not a very active or
vital element of belief with him even then, but rather of the nature of
the sublimest of poetic figures.
Oui, dans le sein de Dieu, loin de ce corps mortel,
L’esprit semble écouter la voix l’Eternel222.
Clearly this kind of expression means very little, and has no source in
the deeper seats of the writer’s feeling. A considerable number of
Voltaire’s deistical ejaculations, and on these occasions he threw into
them a measure of real unction, may be fairly traced to the
extraordinary polemical utility of an idea of spotless purity, entire
justice, inexhaustible mercy, as an engine of battle against men who in
the sacred name of this idea were the great practitioners of intolerance
and wrong.
Ignorer ton être suprême,
Grand Dieu! c’est un moindre blasphème,
Et moins digne de ton courroux
Que de te croire impitoyable,
De nos malheurs insatiable,
Jaloux, injuste comme nous.
Lorsqu’un dévot atrabilaire
Nourri de superstition,
A par cette affreuse chimère,
Corrompu sa religion,
Le voilà stupide et farouche:
Le fiel découle de sa bouche,
Le fanatisme arme son bras:
Et dans sa piété profonde
Sa rage immolerait le monde
A son Dieu, qu’il ne connaît pas.223
To have a conception of perfect goodness was a manifest convenience in
confronting men who were to be proved masters of badness. But when the
pressure of circumstance forced Voltaire to seek in earnest for an
explanation of the world, which he had formerly been content to take in
an easy way upon trust, then the deism, which had been barely more than
nominal at best, was transformed into a very different and far sincerer
mood. It would obviously be a gross blunder from a logical point to
confound optimism with deism, but it is clear that what shook Voltaire’s
conviction of the existence of a deity was the awakening in him of a
keener sense of the calamities that afflict the race of man. Personal
misfortunes perhaps had their share. It was after the loss of Madame du
Châtelet, and after the rude dispersion of his illusions as to
Frederick, when he barely knew whither to turn for shelter or a home,
that the optimism which he had learnt in England began to lose its hold
upon him. We must do him the justice to add that he was yet more
sensible of disasters which affected others. The horrid tide of war
which devastated Europe and America, the yet more hateful tide of
persecution for opinion which swept over France, and the cruel
maladministration of justice which disgraced her tribunals, stirred all
that was best in him to the very depths. The only non-dramatic poem of
his which has strength, sincerity, and profundity of meaning enough
firmly to arrest the reader’s attention, and stimulate both thought and
feeling, is that fine and powerful piece which he wrote on the occasion
of the great earthquake of Lisbon.224 Here he threw into energetic and
passionately argumentative verse the same protest against the theory
that whatever is is best, which he afterwards urged in a very different
form in the ‘refined insolence’ of Candide.225 He approaches more
nearly than a quarter of a century before he would have thought
possible, to the deep gloom of the Pascal against whose terrible
pictures he had then so warmly protested. He sees mankind imprisoned in
a circle of appalling doom, from which there is no way of escape. Unlike
Pascal, he can find no solution, and he denounces that mockery of a
solution which cries that all is well in accents stifled with
lamentation. He protests against the delusion of forcing the course of
the world’s destiny into a moral formula, that shall contain the terms
of justice and mercy in their human sense.
Aux cris demi-formés de leurs voix expirantes,
Au spectacle effrayant 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 voyant cet amas de victimes:
Dieu s’est vengé, leur mort est le prix de leurs crimes?
Quelle crime, quelle faute ont commis ces enfans
Sur le sein maternel écrasés et sanglans?
Lisbonne, qui n’est plus, eut-elle plus de vices
Que Londres, que Paris, plongés dans les délices?
Lisbonne est abîmée, et l’on danse á Paris.
He equally refuses, though not in terms, to comfort himself by the
reflection that, in default of a better, the current ragged theory of
the providential government of the universe, because it may be possible,
must be true. He can find no answer, and confesses his belief that no
answer is to be found by human effort. Whatever side we take, we can
only shudder; there is nothing that we know, nothing that we have not to
fear. Nature is mute, and we interrogate her in vain; the book of
destiny is closed to our eyes.
L’homme, étranger à soi, de l’homme est ignoré.
Que suis-je? où suis-je? où vais-je? et d’où suis-je tiré?
Atomes tourmentés sur cet amas de boue,
Que la mort engloutit, et dont le sort se joue,
Mais atomes pensans, atomes dont les yeux,
Guidés par la pensée, ont mesuré les cieux,
Au sein de l’infini nous élaçons notre être,
Sans pouvoir un moment nous voir et nous connaître.
*****
Le passé n’est pour nous qu’un triste souvenir;
Le présent est affreux, s’il n’est point d’avenir,
Si la nuit du tombeau détruit l’être qui pense.
He abandons Plato and rejects Epicurus. Bayle knows more than they, as,
with the balance in his hand, he teaches men to doubt; wise enough,
great enough, to be without a system.
In a note he adds to this glorification of Bayle, whom he styles the
advocate-general of the philosophers—the thinker in whose pages all
opinions are set forth, all the reasons which shake them and all which
uphold are equally investigated, while he abstains from giving any
conclusions.226 Elsewhere he explains that when he describes reason as
having made immense progress in Germany, he does not refer to those who
openly embrace the system of Spinoza; but the good folk who have no
fixed principles on the nature of things, who do not know what is, but
know very well what is not, these are my true philosophers.227
It would not be difficult to find a score of passages in which the
writer assumes or declares certainty on this high matter to be
attainable, and to be entirely in one direction. His opinions
undoubtedly shifted with the veering of his moods, but on the whole
these axioms of suspense mark the central point to which they constantly
tended to return, and at which they rested longest. That dark word, Shut
thine eyes and thou shalt see, opened no road for him. The saying that
the Most High may be easily known, provided one does not press for
definition, offered no treasure of spiritual acquisition to the man who
never let go, even if he did not always accurately appreciate, Locke’s
injunction to us to be careful to define our terms. We cannot label
Voltaire either spiritualist or materialist. The success with which he
evades these two appellations is one of the best available tests of a
man’s capacity for approaching the great problems with that care and
positive judgment, which are quite as proper to them as to practical
affairs or to physical science.
Thus with reference to the other great open question, he habitually
insisted that the immortality of the soul can never possibly be
demonstrated, and that this is why it has been revealed to us by
religion,228 which is perhaps Voltaire’s way of saying that it is no
near concern of his. Sometimes he argued from considerations of general
probability. The brutes feel and think up to a certain point, and men
have only the advantage over them of a greater combination of ideas; the
more or less makes no difference in kind. ‘Well, nobody thinks of giving
an immortal soul to a flea; why should you give one any the more to an
elephant, or a monkey, or my Champagne valet, or a village steward who
has a trifle more instinct than my valet?’229 Again, he retorted
significantly on those who contended with a vehemence of prejudice
known in some places even to this day, that belief in the immortality of
the soul is an indispensable condition of probity; as if the first Jews
accepted that dogma, and as if there were no honest men among them, and
no instruction in virtue.230
In fine, then, we search Voltaire in vain for a positive creed, which
logic may hold in coherent bonds, or social philosophy accept as a
religious force. The old word about his faith must be pronounced true.
It remains a creed of negation. But still, be it always understood,
negation of darkness. And this inevitably leads in the direction of the
day. It was an indispensable step in the process of transition. Men, it
is constantly being said since the violent breaking-up of French
society, will never consent to live on no better base than articles of
denial and formulas of suspense, for are not the deepest parts of human
character moved by strong yearning for relationship with the unknowable?
It may be so, and if it be, the Voltairean movement was the great
instrument in leading, not merely a scanty group of speculative
intellects, but vast bodies, large nations, of common folk to perceive,
or dimly to conjecture, that this object of adoration which their eyes
strain after is unknowable, and that there is no attainable external
correlative of their deep desire. Voltaire never went so far in the
direction of assertion as Rousseau, and he never went so far in the
direction of denial as Holbach. And, whatever we may say generally of
the horror of the world for the spirit that denies, all that was best
and most truly progressive in French society during the eighteenth
century, Turgot and Condorcet no less than Beaumarchais, showed itself
content to follow him in this middle path. His appreciation of religion
was wanting in a hundred vital things, just as some may say that
Luther’s was, but it contained the one idea which the deepest spirit of
the time prompted men to desire, the decisive repudiation of the
religious notions of the past. We must call this negative, no doubt, but
no word should frighten us away from seeing how much positive aspiration
lay underneath. When men are in the mood of France a century and a
quarter since, when all that an old civilisation has bestowed on them of
what is best and strongest, rises up against all that the same
civilisation has bequeathed to them of what is pestilent and dangerous,
they are never nice critics. They do not decline a reinvigorating
article of faith, because it is not a system, nor do they measure a
deliverer by syllogism. The smallest chink may shine like light of the
sun to prisoners long held in black and cavernous recesses.
When Bayle’s Dictionary came out, we read, so great was the avidity to
have sight of it, that long before the doors of the Mazarin library were
open, a little crowd assembled in the early morning of each day, and
there was as great a struggle for the first access to the precious book,
as for the front row at the performance of a piece for which there is a
rage.231 This was the beginning of an immense impulse of curiosity,
eager to fill the vacuum occasioned by the slow subsidence of the old
religion, which had once covered not only faith, but science, history,
dialectic, and philosophy, all in a single synthesis. It was this
impulse which Voltaire both represented and accelerated. In these
periods of agitation, men forgive all to one who represents without
compromise or diminution their own dominant passions. Vehemence of
character counts for more than completeness of doctrine, and they crave
a battle-cry, not a dissertation. They need to have their own sentiment
aggressively presented, and their own defects of boldness or courage at
once rebuked and supplemented by a leader whose purpose can never be
mistaken, and whose words are never nipped by the frost of intellectual
misgiving. All through the century there was slowly growing up an inner
France, full of angry disgust against the past. Its germ was the crowd
eager to read Bayle. Its outcome was the night of the Fourth of August
1789, when the civil order of society was overthrown between a sunset
and a dawn. Voltaire, as we have seen, studiously abstained from any
public word upon things political, but it was he who in the long
interval between these two events held men by a watchword to which the
political decay of the country gave such meaning, that of hatred to the
old. And there was no such steadfast symbol of the old as the church,
to him and his school a lurid beacon on a monster-haunted shore.
Voltaire’s selection of the church as the object of his attacks marks an
important difference between him and the other great revolutionary
precursor. Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar was perfectly willing to accept the
cultus of Christianity, even when he had ceased to accept its dogma. He
regarded all particular religions as so many salutary institutions, all
good so long as they were the organs for a due service of God. He
actually celebrated mass with more veneration after the acquisition of
his new principles, than he had been accustomed to do when he supposed
that the mass was an occasion of personal divine presence. This kind of
teaching was clearly to perpetuate and transfix for ever the form of
religion which each country, or any given set of men in it, might
possess. It was to stereotype belief, as it is stereotyped among the
millions in the East. Whence was reform to come, whence any ray of new
light, whence a principle of growth and activity for the intelligence of
men? How on these terms is truth to win the battle at a single point?
This was the beginning of a fatal substitution of bland emotional
complacency for robust cultivation of the reason, and firm reverence for
its lessons as the highest that we can learn. Voltaire no doubt did in
practice many a time come to terms with his adversary while he was yet
on the way with him; but, disagreeable as these temporisings are to us
who live in an easier day, they never deceived any one, nor could they
ever be mistaken for the establishment of intellectual treason as a
principle, or of philosophic indifference as a climax. As has been said,
though he writes in the midst of the old régime, in the face of the
Bastille, and with the fetters of the enemy in some sort actually upon
him, he still finds a thousand means of reaching you.232 He is always
the representative of reason, and never of sentimentalism. He was not
above superficial compromises in matters of conduct, and these it is
hard or impossible to condone; but at any rate he is free from the
deeper and more penetrating reproach of erecting hypocrisy into a
deliberate doctrine.
We do not know how far he ever seriously approached the question, so
much debated since the overthrow of the old order in France, whether a
society can exist without a religion? He says in one place that to
believe God and spirits corporeal is an old metaphysical error, but
absolutely not to believe in any god would be an error incompatible with
wise government. But even this much was said for the sake of introducing
a taunt against the orthodox, who by a strange contradiction had risen
up with fury against Bayle for believing it possible that a society of
atheists could hold together, while they insisted with just as much
violence that the empire of China was established on a basis of
atheism.233 His natural sagacity would most likely have shown him
that this is one of the sterile problems, with which the obstructive
defender of things as they are tries to draw the soldier of improvement
away from his strongest posts. Whether a society can exist without
religion or not, at least its existence as a structure for whose
duration we can be anxious, must depend on the number of men in it who
deal honestly with their own understandings. And, further, is no man to
be counted to have a religion who, like Voltaire, left great questions
open, and put them aside, as all questions, that must from the
limitations of human faculty eternally remain open, well deserve to be
put aside? Must we ever call an unknown God by one name? Are there so
few tasks for one on earth, that he must strain all his soul to fix the
regimen of high heaven?
Voltaire, there is every reason to think, did in an informal kind of way
suppose in the bottom of his heart that there is nothing in human nature
to hinder a very advanced society from holding perfectly well together,
with all its opinions in a constant state of analysis. Whatever we may
think of it, this dream of what is possible, if the activity of human
intelligence were only sufficiently stimulated and the conditions of
social union were once so adjusted as to give it fair play,
unquestionably lies at the root of the revolutionary ideas with all
those who were first stirred by Voltaire rather than by Rousseau.
Condorcet, for instance, manifestly depends with the firmest confidence
upon that possibility being realised. It is the idea of every literary
revolutionist, as distinguished from the social or economic
revolutionist, in France at the present day. The knowledge that this was
the case, added to the sound conviction that men can never live by
analysis alone, gave its fire to De Maistre’s powerful attack, and its
immense force to Burke’s plea for what he called prejudice. But the
indispensable synthesis need never be immovably fixed, nor can it soon
again be one and single for our civilisation; for progress consists in
gradual modifications of it, as increase of knowledge and unforeseen
changes in the current of human affairs disclose imperfections in it,
and wherever progress is a law the stages of men’s advance are unequal.
Above all, it is monstrous to suppose that because a man does not accept
your synthesis, he is therefore a being without a positive creed or a
coherent body of belief capable of guiding and inspiring conduct.
There are new solutions for him, if the old are fallen dumb. If he no
longer believes death to be a stroke from the sword of God’s justice,
but the leaden footfall of an inflexible law of matter, the humility of
his awe is deepened, and the tenderness of his pity made holier, that
creatures who can love so much should have their days so shut round with
a wall of darkness. The purifying anguish of remorse will be stronger,
not weaker, when he has trained himself to look upon every wrong in
thought, every duty omitted from act, each infringement of the inner
spiritual law which humanity is constantly perfecting for its own
guidance and advantage, less as a breach of the decrees of an unseen
tribunal, than as an ungrateful infection, weakening and corrupting the
future of his brothers. And he will be less effectually raised from
inmost prostration of soul by a doubtful subjective reconciliation, so
meanly comfortable to his own individuality, than by hearing full in the
ear the sound of the cry of humanity craving sleepless succour from her
children. That swelling consciousness of height and freedom with which
the old legends of an omnipotent divine majesty fill the breast, may
still remain; for how shall the universe ever cease to be a sovereign
wonder of overwhelming power and superhuman fixedness of law? And a man
will be already in no mean paradise, if at the hour of sunset a good
hope can fall upon him like harmonies of music, that the earth shall
still be fair, and the happiness of every feeling creature still receive
a constant augmentation, and each good cause yet find worthy defenders,
when the memory of his own poor name and personality has long been
blotted out of the brief recollection of men for ever.