Book summary : The story of philosophy | Voltaire
Excerpts from the section on Voltaire
By Will Durant | Amazon | Goodreads
How strongly I recommend reading it : 10/10
The Story of Philosophy chronicles the lives and thoughts of some of the most important philosophers. Will Durant gives social and political context to all his chronicling, making the book a very complete introduction to philosophy in the last 2000 years. My current reading on philosophy has been very unstructured, hence I picked this up to figure out where to go deeper. Having started with the aim of reading more on a specific philosopher, Will’s writing has made me want to read more of his own work before going anywhere else.
Will doesn’t start with Voltaire, but with Plato. I start with Voltaire because I do not agree with any other philosopher as much as I do with Voltaire. There’s also an irreverence and wit in Voltaire that’s unlike anyone else. If you want a 100 page taste of Voltaire’s brilliance, read Voltaire’s Candide.
I will let Will Durant describe Voltaire :
“Unprepossessing, ugly, vain, flippant, obscene, unscrupulous, even at times dishonest,—Voltaire was a man with the faults of his time and place, missing hardly one. And yet this same Voltaire turns out to have been tirelessly kind, considerate, lavish of his energy and his purse, as sedulous in helping friends as in crushing enemies, able to kill with a stroke of his pen and yet disarmed by the first advance of conciliation;—so contradictory is man.”
Notes are structured as a chapter-wise collection of prose (mostly verbatim) worth re-reading within the book. # denotes personal notes. “” are used wherever the source (Voltaire) is quoted verbatim. A lot of the contents of this chapter are summaries of Voltaire’s novellas. I have exempted putting them out in their entirety and included only paragraphs which contain their central ideas.
Reading time: ~20 mins
Voltaire and the French Enlightenment
I. Paris: Oedipus
“My trade is to say what I think” : and what he thought was always worth saying, as what he said was said incomparably well.
If we do not read him now, it is because the theological battles which he fought for us no longer interest us intimately; we have passed on perhaps to other battlefields.
Certainly, he worked harder and accomplished more, than any other man of his epoch. “Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the same thing,”
“All people are good except those who are idle.” His secretary said that he was a miser only of his time. “If you do not want to commit suicide always have something to do.”
Destiny gave him eighty-three years of existence, that he might slowly decompose the decayed age; he had the time to combat time; and when he fell he was the conqueror.”
“Voltaire”, that is to say, Francois Marie Arouet was born in Paris in 1694, the son of a comfortably successful notary and a somewhat aristocratic mother. He owed to his father, perhaps, his shrewdness and irascibility and to his mother something of his levity and wit. He came into the world, so to speak, by a narrow margin: his mother did not survive his birth, and he was so puny and sickly of an infant that the nurse did not give him more than a day to live.
His later educators, the Jesuits, gave him the very instrument of skepticism by teaching him dialectic – the art of proving anything and, therefore, the habit of believing nothing.
When the time came for him to earn a living, he scandalized his father by proposing to take up literature as a profession. “Literature”, said M. Arouet, “is the profession of the man who wishes to be useless to society and a burden to his relatives and to die of hunger”. So Francois went in for literature.
Context – after the death of Louis XIV, the succeeding Louis was too young to govern France and power fell into the hands of a regent. Voltaire was undauntedly mocking the regent through some of his poems –
At last, all the bright and naughty things whispered about Paris were fathered upon him; and it was his ill luck that these included two poems accusing the Regent of desiring to usurp the throne. The Regent raged; and meeting the youth in the park one day, said to him: “M. Arouet, I will wager that I can show you something that you have never seen before.” “What is that?” “The inside of the Bastille.” Arouet saw it the next day, April 16, 1717.
While in the Bastille he adopted, for some unknown reason, the pen-name of Voltaire, and became a poet in earnest.
His tragedy, Oedipe, was produced in 1718, and broke all the records of Paris by running for forty-five consecutive nights. His old father came to upbraid him, sat in a box, and covered his joy by grumbling, at every hit, “Oh, the rascal! The rascal!”
Through all his tribulations he kept the art not merely of making a spacious income, but of putting it to work; he respected the classic adage that one must live before one can philosophize. In 1729 he bought up all the tickets in a poorly planned government lottery and made a large sum, much to the anger of the Government.
For eight years he basked in the sunshine of the salons, and then fortune turned away. Some of the aristocracy could not forget that this young man had no other title to place and honor than that of genius, and could not quite forgive him for the distinction. During a dinner at the Duc de Sully’s chateau, after Voltaire had held forth for some minutes with unabashed eloquence and wit, the Chevalier de Rohan asked, not sotto voce, “Who is the young man who talks so loud?” “My Lord,” answered Voltaire quickly, “he is one who does not carry a great name, but wins respect for the name he has.” To answer the Chevalier at all was impertinence; to answer him unanswerably was treason. The honorable Lord engaged a band of ruffians to assault Voltaire by night, merely cautioning them, “Don’t hit his head; something good may come out of that yet.” The next day, at the theatre, Voltaire appeared, bandaged and limping, walked up to Rohan’s box, and challenged him to a duel. Then he went home and spent all day practising with the foils. But the noble Chevalier had no mind to be precipitated into heaven, or elsewhere by a mere genius; he appealed to his cousin, who was Minister of Police, to protect him. Voltaire was arrested, and found himself again in his old home, the Bastille, privileged once more to view the world from the inside. He was almost immediately released, on condition that he go into exile in England. He went; but after being escorted to Dover he recrossed the Channel in disguise, burning to avenge himself. Warned that he had been discovered, and was about to be arrested a third time, he took ship again and reconciled himself to three years in England (1726–29).
II. London: Letters on the English
He set to work with courage to master the new language. He was displeased to find that plague had one syllable and ague two; he wished that plague would take one-half the language, and ague the other half.
What surprised him was the freedom with which Bolingbroke, Pope, Addison, and Swift wrote whatever they pleased: here was a people that had opinions of its own; a people that had remade its religion, hanged its king, imported another, and built a parliament stronger than any ruler in Europe. There was no Bastille here, and no lettres de cachet by which titled pensioners or royal idlers could send their untitled foes to jail without cause and without trial. Here were thirty religions, and not one priest. Here was the boldest sect of all, the Quakers, who astonished all Christendom by behaving like Christians. Voltaire never to the end of his life ceased to wonder at them: in the Dictionnaire Philosophique he makes one of them say: “Our God, who has bidden us love our enemies and suffer evil without complaint, assuredly has no mind that we should cross the sea to go and cut the throats of our brothers because murderers in red clothes and hats two feet high enlist citizens by making a noise with two sticks on an ass’s skin.”
“Not long ago,” he writes, “a distinguished company was discussing the trite and frivolous question, who was the greatest man,—Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, or Cromwell? Someone answered that without doubt it was Isaac Newton. And rightly: for it is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not to those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence.”
He recorded his impressions in Letters on the English, which he circulated in manuscript among his friends; he did not dare to print them, for they praised “Perfidious Albion” too highly to suit the taste of the royal censor.
III. Cirey: The Romances
Nevertheless the Regent, not knowing of this chanticleer, sent Voltaire permission, in 1729, to return to France. And then some miscreant of a publisher, getting hold of the Letters on the English, turned them without the author’s permission into print; and Voltaire learned that he was again on the way to the Bastille. Like a good philosopher, he took to his heels—merely utilizing the occasion to elope with another man’s wife.
The Marquise du Chatelet was twenty-eight; Voltaire, alas, was already forty. She was a remarkable woman: she had studied mathematics with the redoubtable Maupertuis, and then with Clairaut; she had written a learnedly annotated translation of Newton’s Principia; she was soon to receive higher rating than Voltaire in a contest for a prize offered by the French Academy for an essay on the physics of fire; in short she was precisely the kind of woman who never elopes. But the Marquis was so dull, and Voltaire was so interesting—“a creature lovable in every way,” she called him; “the finest ornament in France.” He returned her love with fervent admiration; called her “a great man whose only fault was being a woman”;
In the chateau at Cirey, they did not spend their time billing and cooing. All the day was taken up with study and research; Voltaire had an expensive laboratory equipped for work in natural science; and for years the lovers rivaled each other in discovery and disquisition. They had many guests, but it was understood that these should entertain themselves all day long, till supper at nine. After supper, occasionally, there were private theatricals; or Voltaire would read to the guests one of his lively stories.
ON CANDIDE, ZADIG, MICROMEGAS :
It was in Cirey that he began to write those delightful romances – Zadig, Candide, Micromegas, L’Ingenu, Le Monde comme il va, etc. They are not novels, but humoresque-picaresque novelettes; the heroes are not persons but ideas, the villains are superstitions, and the events are thoughts.
Next to Candide, which belongs to a later period of Voltaire’s life, the best of these tales is Zadig. Zadig was a Babylonian philosopher, “as wise as it is possible for men to be; . . . he knew as much of metaphysics as hath ever been known in any age,—that is, little or nothing at all.”
QUOTE FROM MICROMEGAS :
“Scarce do we begin to learn a little when death intervenes before we can profit by experience.”
FROM ZADIG :
Through his advice the practice of suttee (by which a widow had herself buried with her husband) was abolished by a law which required that before such martyrdom the widow should spend an hour alone with a handsome man.
#Suttee = Anglicised Sati. Need to read on how info of this practice reached France back then.
IV. Potsdam and Frederick
Frederick (Frederick the Great) sent him a copy of the Anti-Machiavel, in which the prince spoke very beautifully of the iniquity of war, and of the duty of a king to preserve peace; Voltaire wept tears of joy over this royal pacifist. A few months later Frederick, made king, invaded Silesia and plunged Europe into a generation of bloodshed.
In 1745 the poet and his mathematician went to Paris, when Voltaire became a candidate for membership in the French Academy. To achieve this quite superfluous distinction he called himself a good catholic, complimented some powerful Jesuits, lied inexhaustibly, and in general behaved as most of us do in such cases. He failed; but a year later he succeeded.
Meanwhile, tragedy and comedy had entered his own life. After fifteen years, his love for Mme. du Chatelet had somewhat thinned; they had even ceased to quarrel.
#Ceasing to quarrel as a measure of how much their love had thinned.
FROM FREDERICK THE GREAT :
An invitation to come to his court at Potsdam. An invitation accompanied by 3000 francs for traveling expenses was irresistible. Voltaire left for Berlin in 1750.
Voltaire tried to learn German, but gave it up after nearly choking, and wished the Germans had more wit and fewer consonants.
“If one can be certain of anything it is the character of the King of Prussia.” However, in November of the same year, Voltaire thought he would improve his finances by investing in Saxon bonds, despite Frederick’s prohibition of such investments. The bonds rose, and Voltaire profited; but his agent, Hirsch, tried to blackmail him by threatening to publish the transaction. Voltaire “sprang at his throat and sent him sprawling.” Frederick learned of the affair and fell into a royal rage. “I shall want him at the most another year,” he said to La Mettrie.
It was now that Voltaire wrote against Maupertiuis his famous “Diatribe of Dr. Akakia.” He read it to Frederick, who laughed all night over it, but begged Voltaire not to publish it. Voltaire seemed to acquiesce, but the truth was that the thing was already sent to the printer, and the author could not bring himself to practice infanticide on the progeny of his pen. When it appeared Frederick burst into flame, and Voltaire fled from the conflagration.
He spent the March of 1754 seeking “an agreeable tomb” in the neighborhood of Geneva, safe from the rival autocrats of Paris and Berlin; at last, he bought an old estate called Les Delices; settled down to cultivate his garden and regain his health; and when his life seemed to be ebbing away into senility, entered upon the period of his noblest and greatest work.
V. Les Délices: The Essay on Morals
Voltaire published in Berlin “the most ambitious, the most voluminous, the most characteristic, and the most daring of his works.” Its title was no small part of it : Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des Nations, et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’a Louis XIII – an Essay on the Morals and the Spriti of the Nations from Charlemagne to Louis XIII.
“Only philosophers should write history”, he said. “In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of this darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded by centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts, and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.” “History,” he concludes, “is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead”; we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot “history proves that anything can be proved by history.”
He was resolved that his history should deal not with kings but with movements, forces, and masses; not with nations but with the human race, not with wars but with the march of the human mind.
But why did his greatest book bring him exile? Because, by telling the truth, it offended everybody. It especially enraged the clergy by taking the view later developed by Gibbon, that the rapid conquest of paganism by Christianity had disintegrated Rome from within and prepared it to fall an easy victim to the invading and immigrating barbarians. It enraged them further by giving much less space than usual to Judea and Christendom, and by speaking of China, India and Persia, and of their faiths, with the impartiality of a Martian; in this new perspective a vast and novel world was revealed; every dogma faded into relativity; the endless East took on something of the proportions given it by geography; Europe suddenly became conscious of itself as the experimental peninsula of a continent and a culture greater than its own.
VI. Ferney: Candide
Les Delices had been a temporary home, a center from which Voltaire might prospect to find a shelter of more permanence. He found it in 1758 at Ferney, just inside the Swiss line near France.
He had a kind word for everybody but could be forced to sharper speech. One day he asked a visitor whence he came. “From Mr. Haller’s.” “He is a great man,” said Voltaire; “a great poet, a great naturalist, a great philosopher, almost a universal genius.” “What you say, sir is the more admirable, as Mr. Haller does not do you the same justice.” “Ah,” said Voltaire, “perhaps we are both mistaken.”
To one acquaintance who announced that he had come to stay for six weeks, Voltaire said: “What is the difference between you and Don Quixote? He mistook inns for chateaux, and you mistake this chateau for an inn.” “God preserve me from my friends,” he concluded; “I will take care of my enemies myself.”
Persecution and disillusionment had worn down his faith in life; and his experiences at Berlin and Frankfurt had taken the edge from his hope. But both faith and hope suffered most when, in November, 1755, came the news of the awful earthquake at Lisbon, in which 30,000 people had been killed. The quake had come on All Saints’ Day; the churches had been crowded with worshippers; and death, finding its enemies in close formation, had reaped a rich harvest. Voltaire was shocked into seriousness and raged when he heard that the French clergy were explaining the disaster as a punishment for the sins of the people of Lisbon. He broke forth in a passionate poem in which he gave vigorous expression to the old dilemma : Either God can prevent evil and he will not, or he wishes to prevent it and he cannot. He was not satisfied with Spinoza’s answer that good and evil are human terms, inapplicable to the universe, and that our tragedies are trivial things in the perspective of eternity.
ROUSSEAU ON THE EARTHQUAKE IN LISBON:
Man himself was to be blamed for the disaster, said Rousseau; if we lived out in the fields, and not in the towns, we should not be killed on so large a scale; if we lived under the sky, and not in houses, houses would not fall upon us. Voltaire was amazed at the popularity won by this profound theodicy; and angry that his name should be dragged into the dust by such a Quixote, he turned upon Rousseau “that most terrible of all the intellectual weapons ever wielded by man, the mockery of Voltaire.” In three days, in 1751, he wrote Candide.
VII. The Encyclopedia and the Philosophic Dictionary
The popularity of so irreverent a book as Candide gives us some sense of the spirit of the age. Let us look for a moment at the intellectual environment in which the later Voltaire moved and had his being.
#For the reader – good idea to read a brief about materialism vs. idealism
LA METTRIE:
La Mettrie (1709 – 51) was an army physician who had lost his post by writing a Natural History of the Soul, and had won exile by a work called Man a Machine. La Mettrie took up the idea of mechanism where the frightened Descartes had left it and announced that all the world, not excepting man, was a machine. The soul is material, and matter is soulful; but whatever they are they act upon each other, and grow and decay with each other in a way that leaves no doubt of their essential similarity and interdependence. If the soul is pure spirit, how can enthusiasm warm the body, or fever in the body disturb the processes of the mind? Man has the highest intelligence because he has the greatest wants and the widest mobility; “beings without wants are also without mind.”
HELVETIUS:
Though La Mettrie was exiled for these opinions, Helvetius (1715-71), who took them as the basis of his book On Man, became one of the richest men in France, and rose to position and honor. Here we have the ethic, as in La Mettrie the metaphysic, of atheism. All action is dictated by egoism, self-love; “even the hero follows the feeling which for him is associated with the greatest pleasure”; and “virtue is egoism furnished with a spy-glass.” Conscience is not the voice of God, but the fear of the police; it is the deposit left in us from the stream of prohibitions poured over the growing soul by parents and teachers and press. Morality must be founded not on theology but on sociology; the changing needs of society, and not any unchanging revelation or dogma, must determine the good.
DENIS DIDEROT:
The greatest figure in this group was Denis Diderot (1713 – 84). His ideas were expressed in various fragments from his own pen, and in the System of Nature of Baron d’Holbach (1723 – 89), whose salon was the centre of Diderot’s circle. “If we go back to the beginning,” says Holbach, “we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them; and that custom respects and tyranny supports them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests.” Belief in God, said Diderot, is bound up with submission to autocracy; the two rise and fall together; and “men will never be free till the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” Materialism may be an oversimplification of the world – all matter is probably instinct with life, and it is impossible to reduce the unity of consciousness to matter and motion, but materialism is a good weapon against the Church, and must be used till a better one is found. Meanwhile, one must spread knowledge and encourage industry; industry will make for peace, and knowledge will make a new and natural morality. These are the ideas that Diderot and d’Alembert labored to disseminate through the great Encylopedie which they issued, volume by volume, from 1752 to 1772.
Naturally enough, Voltaire, who was interested in everything, and had a hand in every fight, was caught up for a time in the circle of the Encylopedists; they were glad to call him their leader; and he was not averse to their incense, thought some of their ideas needed a little pruning. They asked him to write articles for their great undertaking; and he responded with a facility and fertility which delighted them. When he had finished this work he set about making an encyclopedia of his own, which he called a Philosophic Dictionary.
(In the Philosophic Dictionary..) He rejects all systems, and suspects that “every chief of a sect in philosophy has been a little of a quack.” “The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women. It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one. I do not know how I was made, and how I was born. I did not know at all, during a quarter of my life, the causes of what I saw, or heard, or felt . . . . I have seen that which is called matter, both as the star Sirius, and as the smallest atom which can be perceived with the microscope; and I do not know what this matter is.”
Even if Philosophy should end in the total doubt of Montaigne’s “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?), it is man’s greatest adventure, and his noblest. Let us learn to be content with modest advances in knowledge, rather than be forever weaving new systems out of our mendacious imagination.
VIII. Écrasez l’Infame (Crush the loathsome thing)
Under ordinary circumstances, it is probable that Voltaire would never have passed out of the philosophic calm of this courteous skepticism to the arduous controversies of his later years….even the priests smiled with him over the difficulties of the faith, and cardinals considered whether, after all, they might not yet make him into a good Capuchin.
The incident that turned Voltaire to “crush the infamy”:
Not far from Ferney lay Toulouse, the 7th city of France. In Voltaire’s day the catholic clergy enjoyed absolute sovereignty there; the city commemorated with frescoes the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (an edict which had given freedom of worship to protestants), and celebrated as a great feast the day of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. No protestant in Toulouse could be a lawyer, or a physician, or a grocer, or a bookseller, or a printer; nor could a Catholic keep a Protestant servant or clerk.
Now it happened that Jean Calas, a Protestant of Toulouse, had a daughter who became a Catholic, and a son who hanged himself, presumably because of disappointment in business. There was a law in Toulouse that every suicide should be placed naked on a hurdle, with face down, drawn thus through the streets, and then hanged on a gibbet. The father, to avert this, asked his relatives and his friends to testify to a natural death. In consequence, rumor began to talk of murder, and to hint that the father had killed the son to prevent his imminent conversion to Catholicism. Calas was arrested, put to torture, and died soon after (1761). His family, ruined and hunted, fled to Ferney, and sought the aid of Voltaire. He took them into his home, comforted them, and marveled at the story of medieval persecution which they told.
In 1765 a young man by the name of La Barre, aged sixteen, was arrested on the charge of having mutilated crucifixes. Subjected to torture, he confessed his guilt; his head was cut off, and his body was flung into the flames, while the crowd applauded. A copy of Voltaire’s Philosophic Dictionary, which had been found on the lad, was burned with him.
It was now that he adopted his famous motto, Ecrasez l’infame, and stirred the soul of France against the abuses of the church.
Just at this crisis an effort was made to buy him off; through Mme. de Pompadour he received an offer of a cardinal’s hat as the reward of reconciliation with the Church. Voltaire refused; and like another Cato, began to end all his letters with “Crush the infamy.”
“Christianity must be divine,” he says, in one of his most unmeasured sallies, “since it has lasted 1,700 years despite the fact that it is so full of villainy and nonsense.” He shows how almost all ancient peoples had similar myths, and hastily concludes that the myths are thereby proved to have been the inventions of priests: “The first divine was the first rogue who met the first fool.”
Let it not be supposed from all this that Voltaire was quite without religion. He decisively rejects atheism; so much so that some of the Encylopedists turned against him, saying, “Voltaire is a bigot, he believes in God.” He writes to Diderot :
“I confess that I am not at all of the opinion of Saunderson, who denies a God because he was born sightless. I am, perhaps, mistaken; but in his place I should recognise a great intelligence who had given me so many substitutes for sight; and perceiving, on reflection, the wonderful relations between all things, I should have suspected a Worksman infinitely able.”
To Holbach he points out that the very title of his book, the System of Nature, indicates a divine organising intelligence. On the other hand he stoutly denies miracles and the supernatural efficacy of prayer :
“I was at the gate of the convent when Sister Fessue said to Sister Confite: “Providence takes a visible care of me; you know how I love my sparrow; he would’ve been dead if I had not said nine Ave-Marias to obtain his cure.”…A metaphysician said to her: “Sister, there is nothing so good as Ave-Marias, especially when a girl pronounces them in Latin in the suburbs of Paris; but I cannot believe that God has occupied himself so much with your sparrow, pretty as it is; I pray you to believe he has other things to attend to…”.Sister Fessue : “Sir, this discourse savors of heresy. My confessor…will infer that you do not believe in Providence.” Metaphysician : “I believe in a general Providence, dear Sister. Which has laid down from all eternity the law which governs all things, like light from the sin; but I believe not that a particular Providence changes the economy of the world for your sparrow.”
“His Sacred Majesty, Chance, decides everything.” True prayer lies not in asking for a violation of natural law but in the acceptance of natural law as the unchangeable will of God.
Why do mankind flatter themselves that they alone are gifted with a spiritual and immortal principle? . . . Perhaps from their inordinate vanity. I am persuaded that if a peacock could speak he would boast of his soul, and would affirm that it inhabited his magnificent tail.
And in this earlier mood, he rejects also the view that belief in immortality is necessary for morality: the ancient Hebrews were without it, just when they were the “chosen people”; and Spinoza was a paragon of morality. In later days he changed his mind. He came to feel that belief in God has little moral value unless accompanied by a belief in the immortality of punishment and reward.
Bayle had asked if a society of atheists could subsist? – Voltaire answers, “Yes if they are also philosophers. But men are seldom philosophers; if there is a hamlet, to be good it must have a religion. I want my lawyer, my tailor, and my wife to believe in God; so I imagine, I shall be less robbed and less deceived. If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. I begin to put more store on happiness and life than on truth” – a remarkable anticipation, in the midst of the Enlightenment, of the very doctrine with which Immanuel Kant was later to combat the Enlightenment.
He defends himself gently against his friends the atheists; he addresses Holbach in the article on “God” in the Dictionary: You yourself say that belief in God . . . has kept some men from crime; this alone suffices me. When this belief prevents even ten assassinations, ten calumnies, I hold that all the world should embrace it. Religion, you say, has produced countless misfortunes; say rather the superstition which reigns on our unhappy globe. This is the cruelest enemy of the pure worship due to the Supreme Being. Let us detest this monster (superstition) which has always torn the boson of its mother.
This distinction between superstition and religion is fundamental with him.
At last he built his own church, with the dedication, “Deo erexit Voltaire”; the only church in Europe, he said, that was erected to God. He addresses to God a magnificent prayer; and in the article “Theist” he expounds his faith finally and clearly: The theist is a man firmly persuaded of the existence of a supreme being as good as he is powerful, who has formed all things . . .; who punishes, without cruelty, all crimes, and recompenses with goodness all virtuous actions . . . . Reunited in this principle with the rest of the universe, he does not join any of the sects which all contradict one another. His religion is the most ancient and the most widespread; for the simple worship of a God preceded all the systems of the world. He speaks a language that all peoples understand, while they do not understand one another. He has brothers from Pekin to Cayenne, and he counts all the sages for his fellows. He believes that religion consists neither in the opinions of an unintelligible metaphysic, nor in vain shows, but in worship and in justice. To do good is his worship, to submit to God is his creed. The Mohammedan cries out to him, “Beware if you fail to make the pilgrimage to Mecca!”—the priest says to him, “Curses on you if you do not make the trip to Notre Dame de Lorette!” He laughs at Lorette and Mecca: but he succors the indigent and defends the oppressed.
IX. Voltaire and Rousseau
..and he writes to Vauvenargues: “It is the duty of a man like you to have preferences, but not exclusions.”
#Characteristic of the general openness in the later part of Voltaire’s life
His panacea is the spread of property: ownership gives personality and an uplifting pride. “The spirit of property doubles a man’s strength. It is certain that the possessor of an estate will cultivate his own inheritance better than that of another.”
#Somewhat against the fundamentals of communism
He refuses to excite himself about forms of government. Theoretically, he prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions which, if they do not bring on civil war, at least destroy national unity;
Likewise, he is almost indifferent to nationalities, like a traveled man; he has hardly any patriotism in the usual sense of that word. Patriotism commonly means, he says, that one hates every country but one’s own. If a man wishes his country to prosper, but never at the expense of other countries, he is at the same time an intelligent patriot and a citizen of the universe.
For he hates war above all else. “War is the greatest of all crimes, and yet there is no aggressor who does not color his crime with the pretext of justice. It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
Does he, therefore, think of revolution as a remedy? No. First of all, he distrusts the people: “When the people undertake to reason, all is lost.” The great majority are always too busy to perceive the truth until change has made the truth an error, and their intellectual history is merely the replacement of one myth by another.
And then again, inequality is written into the very structure of society, and can hardly be eradicated while men are men and life is a struggle. “Those who say that all men are equal speak the greatest truth if they mean that all men have an equal right to liberty, to the possession of their goods, and to the protection of the laws”; but “equality is at once the most natural and the most chimerical thing in the world: natural when it is limited to rights, unnatural when it attempts to level goods and powers. Not all citizens can be equally strong; but they can all be equally free; it is this which the English have won . . . . To be free is to be subject to nothing but the laws.” This was the note of the liberals, of Turgot and Condorcet and Mirabeau and the other followers of Voltaire who hoped to make a peaceful revolution; it could not quite satisfy the oppressed, who called not so much for liberty as for equality, equality even at the cost of liberty. Rousseau, voice of the common man, sensitive to the class distinctions which met him at every turn, demanded a leveling; and when the Revolution fell into the hands of his followers, Marat and Robespierre, equality had its turn, and liberty was guillotined.
Voltaire was sceptical of Utopias to be fashioned by human legislators who would create a brand new world out of their imaginations. Society is a growth in time, not a syllogism in logic; and when the past is put out through the door it comes in at the window.
#Applies to character as well. Growth of character in time is the individual analog to society’s growth in time. Both are not simply an exercise in logic.
In these two men (Voltaire and Rousseau) we see again the old clash between intellect and instinct. Voltaire believed in reason always: “we can, by speech and pen, make men more enlightened and better.” Rousseau had little faith in reason; he desired action; the risks of revolution did not frighten him; he relied on the sentiment of brotherhood to re-unite the social elements scattered by turmoil and the uprooting of ancient habits.
When he (Rousseau) sent to Voltaire his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, with its arguments against civilization, letters, and science, and for a return to the natural condition as seen in savages and animals, Voltaire replied: “I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it . . . . No one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes; to read your book makes one long to go on all fours. As, however, it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it.”
He was chagrined to see Rousseau’s passion for savagery continue into the Social Contract: “Ah, Monsieur,” he writes to M. Bordes, “you see now that Jean Jacques resembles a philosopher as a monkey resembles a man.”
After all, when one tries to change institutions without having changed the nature of men, that unchanged nature will soon resurrect those institutions.
Here was the old vicious circle; men form institutions, and institutions form men; where could change break into this ring? Voltaire and the liberals thought that intellect could break the ring by educating and changing men, slowly and peacefully; Rousseau and the radicals felt that the ring could be broken only by instinctive and passionate action that would break down the old institutions and build, at the dictates of the heart, new ones under which liberty, equality and fraternity would reign. Perhaps the truth lay above the divided camps: that instinct must destroy the old, but that only intellect can build the new.
X. Dénouement
“When I am attacked I fight like a devil; I yield to no one; but at bottom, I am a good devil, and I end by laughing.”
When Voltaire had gone to Paris to “die in his own way”:
The next day his room was stormed by three hundred visitors, who welcomed him as a king; Louis XVI fretted with jealousy. Benjamin Franklin was among the callers, and brought his grandson for Voltaire’s blessing; the old man put his thin hands upon the youth’s head and bade him dedicate himself to “God and Liberty.”
Later Voltaire sent for another abbe, Gautier, to come and hear his confession; Gautier came, but refused Voltaire absolution until he should sign a profession of full faith in Catholic doctrine. Voltaire rebelled; instead he drew up a statement which he gave to his secretary, Wagner : “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition. (Signed) Voltaire. February 28, 1778”
He was refused Christian burial in Paris; but his friends set him up grimly in a carriage, and got him out of the city by pretending that he was alive. At Scellieres they found a priest who understood that rules were not made for geniuses; and the body was buried in holy ground. In 1791 the National Assembly of the Triumphant Revolution forced Louis XVI to recall Voltaire’s remains to the Pantheon. The dead ashes of the great flame that had been were escorted through Paris by a procession of 100,000 men and women, while 600,000 flanked the streets. On the funeral car were the words: “He gave the human mind a great impetus; he prepared us for freedom.” On him tombstone only three words were necessary :
HERE LIES VOLTAIRE