Besides his letters, with their easy grace and wealth of world-wide knowledge, Horace Walpole’s are but the gossip of a clique; Madame de Sévigné’s the chit-chat of a boudoir; Lady Wortley Montagu’s coarse and clumsy; and Pope’s stilted and artificial. They are also comparatively free from the indecency which mars many other of Voltaire’s writings and almost all the correspondence of his age. His letters remain (as early as 1872 there were seven thousand of them in print, and Beuchot thought at least as many more undiscovered) an almost inexhaustible gold mine of literary delight, and a most liberal education.
As a blasphemous mocker at some of the most sacred convictions of their souls, Voltaire has been naturally, when he touches on religion, anathema not only to Roman Catholics, but to all Christians. The liberal-minded will be ready to own that to attack a system he not only believed to be false but actively harmful, was well within his rights. It is his method which inspires just indignation. A profoundly serious subject has a right to profoundly serious treatment. But, after all, Voltaire’s gibes and laugh turn against himself. Who believes a scoffer? If he had not jeered at the creed of Christendom, he would have made more converts to the creed of Voltaire.
What was his creed? It had only one article. “I believe in God.” In that belief “one finds difficulties; in the belief that there is no God, absurdities.” “The wise man attributes to God no human affections. He recognises a power necessary, eternal, which animates all Nature; and is resigned.”
As for the immortality of the soul, it seems, contrary to the opinion of many of his biographers, that Voltaire rather longed to believe in it, than that he did so. “But your soul, Sir—your soul? What idea have you of it? From whence does it come? Where is it? What is it? What does it do? How does it act? Where does it go? I know nothing about it and I have never seen it.” “For sixty years I have tried to discover what the soul is, and I still know nothing.”
His practical scheme of religion he expressed himself. “To worship God; to leave each man the liberty to serve Him in his own fashion; to love one’s neighbours; enlighten them if one can, pity them when they are in error; to attach no importance to trivial questions which would never have given trouble if no seriousness had been imputed to them. That is my religion, which is worth all your systems and all your symbols.”
The stumbling-blocks he found in the road to Christianity—that is to Roman Catholicism, the only form of Christianity to which he addressed himself—were twofold. The mental stumbling-block was miracle; and the moral, the lives of the believers. He considered the second to be the natural fruit of the first: that the Christian belief must be destroyed to destroy the wickedness, darkness, cruelty, and tyranny he found in Christian lives; that men “will not cease to be persecutors till they have ceased to be absurd.”
It should be remembered—it is not often remembered—that, in the words of Morley, “there is no case of Voltaire mocking at any set of men who lived good lives,” and that “the Christianity he assailed was not that of the Sermon on the Mount.”
Regarding the problems of the future life, of future awards, punishments, and compensations, and the manifold mysteries of this world, he was, broadly speaking, an Agnostic.
“Behold, I know not anything.”
But Voltaire’s real claim to eternal remembrance is far less how he thought or what he wrote, than what his writings did.