A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 08

by Voltaire

The two principles of Zoroaster and Manes, so minutely investigated by Bayle, are a duller jest still. They are, as we have already observed, the two physicians of Molière, one of whom says to the other: "You excuse my emetics, and I will excuse your bleedings." Manichæism is absurd; and that circumstance will account for its having had so many partisans.

I acknowledge that I have not had my mind enlightened by all that Bayle has said about the Manichæans and Paulicians. It is all controversy; what I wanted was pure philosophy. Why speak about our mysteries to Zoroaster? As soon as ever we have the temerity to discuss the critical subject of our mysteries, we open to our view the most tremendous precipices.

The trash of our own scholastic theology has nothing to do with the trash of Zoroaster's reveries. Why discuss with Zoroaster the subject of original sin? That subject did not become a matter of dispute until the time of St. Augustine. Neither Zoroaster nor any other legislator of antiquity ever heard it mentioned. If you dispute with Zoroaster, lock up your Old and New Testament, with which he had not the slightest acquaintance, and which it is our duty to revere without attempting to explain.

What I should myself have said to Zoroaster would have been this: My reason opposes the admission of two gods in conflict with each other; such an idea is allowable only in a poem in which Minerva quarrels with Mars. My weak understanding much more readily acquiesces in the notion of only one Great Being, than in that of two great beings, of whom one is constantly counteracting and spoiling the operations of the other. Your evil principle, Arimanes, has not been able to derange a single astronomical and physical law established by the good principle of Oromazes; everything proceeds, among the numberless worlds which constitute what we call the heavens, with perfect regularity and harmony; how comes it that the malignant Arimanes has power only over this little globe of earth?

Had I been Arimanes, I should have assailed Oromazes in his immense and noble provinces, comprehending numbers of suns and stars. I should never have been content to confine the war to an insignificant and miserable village. There certainly is a great deal of misery in this same village; but how can we possibly ascertain that it is not absolutely inevitable?

You are compelled to admit an intelligence diffused through the universe. But in the first place, do you absolutely know that this intelligence comprises a knowledge of the future? You have asserted a thousand times that it does; but you have never been able to prove it to me, or to comprehend it yourself. You cannot have any idea how any being can see what does not exist; well, the future does not exist, therefore no being can see it. You are reduced to the necessity of saying that he foresees it; but to foresee is only to conjecture.

Now a god who, according to your system, conjectures may be mistaken. He is, on your principles, really mistaken; for if he had foreseen that his enemy would poison all his works in this lower world, he would never have produced them; he would not have been accessory to the disgrace he sustains in being perpetually vanquished.

Secondly, is he not much more honored upon my hypothesis, which maintains that he does everything by the necessity of his own nature, than upon yours, which raises up against him an enemy, disfiguring, polluting, and destroying all his works of wisdom and kindness throughout the world!

In the third place, it by no means implies a mean and unworthy idea of God to say that, after forming millions of worlds, in which death and evil may have no residence, it might be necessary that death and evil should reside in this.

Fourth, it is not deprecating God to say that He could not form man without bestowing on him self-love; that this self-love could not be his guide without almost always leading him astray; that his passions are necessary, but at the same time noxious; that the continuation of the species cannot be accomplished without desires; that these desires cannot operate without exciting quarrels; and that these quarrels necessarily bring on wars, etc.