Through Nature to God

by John Fiske

Tennyson, The Two Voices.

I
"Deo erexit Voltaire"

The visitor to Geneva whose studies have made him duly acquainted with the most interesting human personality of all that are associated with that historic city will never leave the place without making a pilgrimage to the chateau of Ferney. In that refined and quiet rural homestead things still remain very much as on the day when the aged Voltaire left it for the last visit to Paris, where his long life was worthily ended amid words and deeds of affectionate homage. One may sit down at the table where was written the most perfect prose, perhaps, that ever flowed from pen, and look about the little room with its evidences of plain living and high thinking, until one seems to recall the eccentric figure of the vanished Master, with his flashes of shrewd wisdom and caustic wit, his insatiable thirst for knowledge, his consuming hatred of bigotry and oppression, his merciless contempt for shams, his boundless enthusiasm of humanity. As we stroll in the park, that quaint presence goes along with us till all at once in a shady walk we come upon something highly significant and characteristic, the little parish church with its Latin inscription over the portal, Deo erexit Voltaire, i. e. "Voltaire built it for God," and as we muse upon it, the piercing eyes and sardonic but not unkindly smile seem still to follow us. What meant this eccentric inscription?

When Voltaire became possessor of the manor of Ferney, the church was badly out of repair, and stood where it obstructed the view from certain windows of the chateau. So he had it cleared away, and built in a better spot the new church that is still there. It was duly consecrated, and the Pope further hallowed it with some relics of ancient saints, and there for many a year the tenants and dependents of the manor assembled for divine service. Nowhere in France had Voltaire ever seen a church dedicated simply to God; it was always to Our Lady of This or Saint So-and-so of That; always there was some intermediary between the devout soul and the God of its worship. Not thus should it be with Voltaire's church, built upon his own estate to minister to the spiritual needs of his people. It should be dedicated simply and without further qualification to the worship and service of God. Furthermore, it was built and dedicated, not by any ecclesiastical or corporate body, but by the lord of that manor, the individual layman, Voltaire.

This, I say, was highly characteristic and significant. It gave terse and pointed expression to Voltaire's way of looking at such things. Church and theology were ignored, and the individual soul was left alone with its God. The Protestant reformers and other freethinkers had stopped far short of this. In place of an infallible Church they had left an infallible Book; if they rejected transubstantiation, they retained as obligatory such doctrines as those of the incarnation and atonement; if they laughed at the miracles of mediæval saints, they would allow no discredit to be thrown upon those of the apostolic age; in short, they left standing a large part, if not the larger part, of the supernatural edifice within which the religious mind of Europe had so long been sheltered. But Voltaire regarded that whole supernatural edifice as so much rubbish which was impeding the free development of the human mind, and ought as quickly as possible to be torn to pieces and cleared away. His emotions as well as his reason were concerned in this conclusion. Organized Christianity, as it then existed in France, was responsible for much atrocious injustice, and in neighbouring lands the Inquisition still existed. Ecclesiastical bigotry, the prejudice of ignorance, whatever tended to hold people in darkness and restrain them from the free and natural use of their faculties, Voltaire hated with all the intensity of which he was capable. He summed it all up in one abstract term and personified it as "The Infamous," and the watchword of that life of tireless vigilance was "Crush the Infamous!" Supernatural theology had been too often pressed into the service of "The Infamous," and for supernatural theology Voltaire could find no place in his scheme of things. He lost no chance of assailing it with mockery and sarcasm made terrible by the earnestness of his purpose, until he came in many quarters to be regarded as the most inveterate antagonist the Church had ever known.

Yet among the great men of letters in France contemporary with Voltaire, the most part went immeasurably farther than he, and went in a different direction withal, for they denied the reality of Religion. Few of them, indeed, believed in the existence of God, or would have had anything to do with building a house of worship. It is related of David Hume that when dining once in a party of eighteen at the house of Baron d'Holbach, he expressed a doubt as to whether any person could anywhere be found to avow himself dogmatically an atheist. "Indeed, my dear sir," quoth the host, "you are this moment sitting at table with seventeen such persons." Among that group of philosophers were men of great intelligence and lofty purpose, such as D'Alembert, Diderot, Helvétius, Condorcet, Buffon, men with more of the real spirit of Christianity in their natures than could be found in half the churches of Christendom. The roots of their atheism were emotional rather than philosophical. It was part of the generous but rash and superficial impatience with which they disowned all connection whatever with a Church that had become subservient to so much that was bad. Their atheism was one of the fruits of the vicious policy which had suppressed Huguenotism in France; it was an early instance of what has since been often observed, that materialism and atheism are much more apt to flourish in Romanist than in Protestant countries. The form of religion which is already to some extent purified and rationalized awakens no such violent revulsion in free-thinking minds as the form that is more heavily encumbered with remnants of obsolete primitive thought. Moreover, the rationalizing religion of Protestant countries is commonly found in alliance with political freedom. In France under the Old Régime, the Catholic religion was stigmatized as an ally of despotism, as well as a congeries of absurd doctrines and ceremonies. The best minds felt their common sense shocked by it no less than their reason. No very deep thinking was done on the subject; their treatment of it was in general extremely shallow.

The forms which religious sentiment had assumed in the Middle Ages had become unintelligible; the most highly endowed minds were dead to the sublimity of Gothic architecture, and saw nothing but grotesque folly in Dante's poetry. They seriously believed that religious doctrines and ecclesiastical government were originally elaborate systems of fraud, devised by sagacious and crafty tyrants for the sole purpose of enslaving the multitude of mankind. No discrimination was shown. They were as ready to throw away belief in God as in the miracles of St. Columba, and to scout at the notion of a future life in the same terms as those in which they denounced the forged donation of Constantine. The flippant ease with which they disposed of the greatest questions, in crass ignorance of the very nature of the problem to be solved, was well illustrated in the remark of the astronomer Lalande, that he had swept the entire heavens with his telescope and found no God there. A similar instance of missing the point was furnished about fifty years ago by the eminent physiologist Moleschott, when he exclaimed, "No thought without phosphorus," and congratulated himself that he had forever disposed of the human soul. I am inclined to think that those are the two remarks most colossal in their silliness that ever appeared in print.