Toleration and other essays

by Voltaire

ARTICLE III.

It was explained to me that an aged priest, who has been appointed pope by other priests, cannot find either the time or the will to relieve your misery. He can think only of living. What interest should he take in Romans? He is himself rarely a Roman. What care should he take of an estate that will not pass to his children? Rome is not his patrimony, as it was that of the Cæsars. It is an ecclesiastical benefice; the papacy is a kind of commendatory abbey,[46] which each abbot ruins while he lives. The Cæsars had a real interest in seeing Rome flourish; the patricians, under the Republic, had an even greater interest. No dignities could be obtained unless the people were won with benefits, cajoled by the appearance of virtue, or fired by great victories. A pope shuts himself up with his money and his unleavened bread, and gives only his blessing to the people that was once known as “the People King.”

Your misfortunes began with the transfer of the Empire of Rome to the bounds of Thrace. Constantine, chosen emperor by a few barbaric cohorts in distant England, triumphed over the Maxentius chosen by you. Maxentius was drowned in the Tiber in the rout, and left the Empire to his rival. But the conqueror went to hide himself on the shores of the Black Sea; he could not have done more if he had been beaten. Stained with debauch and crime, murderer of his father-in-law, brother-in-law, nephew, son, and wife, abhorred by the Romans, he abandoned the ancient religion under which they had conquered so many States, and cast himself into the arms of the Christians who had found the money to which he owed his crown.[47] He thus betrayed the Empire as soon as he obtained it, and, in transplanting to the Bosphorus the great tree that had sheltered Europe, Africa, and Asia Minor, he did fatal injury to its roots.

Your next misfortune was this ecclesiastical maxim, quoted in a celebrated French poem, “Le Lutrin,” and very gravely true: “Ruin the world, if need be; it is the spirit of the Church.” The Church fought the ancient religion of the Empire, and tore its own entrails in the struggle, dividing, with equal fury and imprudence, on a hundred incomprehensible questions of which none had ever heard before. The Christian sects, hounding each other with fire and sword for metaphysical chimæras and sophisms of the school, united to seize the spoils of the priesthood founded by Numa. They did not rest until they had destroyed the altar of Victory at Rome.

St. Ambrose, passing from the bar to the bishopric of Milan without being a deacon, and your Damasus, whom a schism made bishop of Rome, profited by this fatal success. They secured the destruction of the altar of Victory, which had been set up on the Capitol[48] nearly eight hundred years before—a monument of the courage of your ancestors, destined to maintain their valour in their descendants. The emblematic figure of Victory was no object of idolatry, like your statues of Antony of Padua (who “hears those whom God will not hear”), of Francis of Assisi (who is represented over the door of a church at Rheims with this inscription: “To Francis and Jesus, both crucified”), of St. Crepin, St. Barbe, and so many others; or like the blood of a score of saints (headed by your patron Januarius, whom the rest of the earth knows not) that is liquefied at Naples on certain days, or the prepuce and navel of Jesus, or the milk, and hair, and shift, and petticoat of his mother. These are idolatries, as disgusting as they are accredited. But this Victory, surmounting a globe, with outspread wings, a sword in hand, and head crowned with laurels, was merely the noble device of the Roman Empire, the symbol of virtue. Fanaticism robbed you of the pledge of your glory.

With what effrontery did these new enthusiasts dare to substitute their Rochs, and Fiacres, and Eustaces, and Ursulas, and Scholasticas for Neptune, the ruler of the seas; Mars, the god of war; and Juno, the ruler of the air, under the sovereignty of the great Zeus, the eternal Demiourgos, master of the elements, the gods, and men! A thousand times more idolatrous than your ancestors, these maniacs bade you worship the bones of the dead. These plagiarists of antiquity borrowed the lustral water of the Romans and Greeks, their procession, the confession that was made in the mysteries of Ceres and Isis, their incense, libations, hymns, and the very garments of their priests. They spoiled the old religion, and clad themselves in its vesture. Even to-day they bow down before the statues of unknown men, while they heap reproaches on a Pericles, a Solon, a Miltiades, a Cicero, a Scipio, or a Cato for bending the knee before these emblems of divinity.

Nay, is there a single episode in the Old or the New Testament that has not been copied from the ancient mythologies of India, Chaldæa, Egypt, and Greece? Is not the sacrifice of Idomene the plain source of that of Jephtha? Is not the roe of Iphigenia the ram of Isaac? Do you not recognise Eurydice in Edith, the wife of Lot? Minerva and the winged horse Pegasus drew fountains from the rocks when they struck them; the same prodigy is ascribed to Moses. Bacchus had crossed the Red Sea dry-shod before he did, and he had caused the sun and moon to stand still before Joshua. We have the same legends, the same extravagances, on every side.

There is not a single miraculous action in the gospels that you will not find in much earlier writers. The goat Amalthæa had a horn of plenty long before it was said that Jesus had fed five thousand men, not to speak of the women, with two fishes. The daughters of Anius had changed water into wine and oil before there was any question of the marriage-feast of Cana. Athalide, Hippolytus, Alcestis, Pelops, and Heres had returned to life long before men spoke of the resurrection of Jesus; and Romulus was born of a vestal virgin more than seven hundred years before Jesus began to be regarded as virgin-born. Compare, and judge for yourselves.