Toleration and other essays

by Voltaire

The position of Voltaire in the development of religious thought in Europe is unique. Even if his words had no application in our age, it merits the most grateful consideration. Trace to its sources the spirit that has led modern France and modern Portugal to raise civic ideals above creeds, and that will, within a few decades, find the same expression in Spain, Italy, Belgium, and half of America. You find yourself in the first half of the nineteenth century, when, in all those countries, a few hundred men, and some women, maintained a superb struggle with restored monarchs and restored Jesuits for the liberty that had been wrested from them; and you find that the vast majority of them were disciples of Voltaire. Go back to the very beginning of the anti-clerical movement; seek the generators of that intellectual and emotional electricity which, gathering insensibly in the atmosphere of Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century, burst at last in the lurid flashes and the rolling thunders of the Great Revolution. On the religious side, with which alone I am concerned here, that devastating storm was overwhelmingly due to the writings of Voltaire. Rousseau, it is true, gave to the world his simple Deistic creed, and with sweet reasonableness lodged it in the minds of many; Diderot and d’Holbach and La Mettrie impressed their deeper scepticism with a weight of learning. But Voltaire was the oracle of Europe. “I have no sceptre, but I have a pen,” he once said to Frederick the Great. And when, in his later years, he poured out from his remote château on the Swiss frontier the flood of satires, stories, sermons, dialogues, pamphlets, and treatises which ate deep into the fabric of old Europe, his pen proved mightier than all the sceptres of its kings. To ignore Voltaire is to ignore history.

My object, however, in introducing to English readers these few characteristic specimens of his anti-clerical work is not solely to bespeak some gratefulness for the toleration and freedom which he enforced on a reluctant world, or to gratify a simple curiosity as to the character of his power. These are not dead words, not ashes of an extinct fire, which we disinter; for the world is not dead at which they were flung. If they cause resentment in the minds of some, the publication will be the more justified. But before I explain this paradox, let me show how the works came to be written, and written in such a way.

The life of Voltaire, which some conceive as a prolonged adolescence, has a very clear and instructive division into adolescence, manhood, and ripe age. All the works given in this volume belong to the last part, but we must glance at the others. François Marie Arouet was born, in the very comfortable bourgeois family of a staid Parisian notary, in 1694. He became a precocious, sharp-eared boy. His godfather was an abbé, a kind of ecclesiastic—not usually a priest—in the France of the time who drew his income from the Church, and therefore felt more entitled than the ordinary layman to scoff at its dogmas and ignore its morals. He could plead the example of his bishops. Several of these abbés visited the home of the Arouets, and gave little “Zozo” his first lessons in Biblical criticism. In the great college of the Jesuits he learned to articulate his scepticism. In his seventeenth year he set out on the career of letters. The kindly abbé, who, having answered to God for him at the baptismal font, felt bound to guide his fortunes, introduced him to one of the most brilliant and dissolute circles in Paris. It was a kind of club of abbés, nobles, writers, etc., and in it he would rapidly attain that large and peculiar knowledge of the Old Testament which appears in his writings. He sparkled so much at the suppers of the Epicureans, and earned such reputation, that he was put in the Bastille for certain naughty epigrams, which he had not written; and he was exiled for another epigram, on a distinguished sinner, which he had written. In the pensive solitude of the Bastille he changed his name to Voltaire.[1] He emerged bolder than ever, wrote tragedies and poems and epigrams, was welcomed in the smartest salons of Paris, and behaved as a young gentleman of the time was expected to behave, until his thirty-first year.

In 1726 he was, through the despotic and most unjust action of a powerful noble, again put in the Bastille, and was then allowed to exchange that fortress for the fogs of London. Up to this time he had no idea of attacking Church or State. He had, in 1722, written a letter on religion—in the vein, apparently, of some of Swinburne’s unpublished juvenilia—which a distinguished writer of the time, to whom he read it, described as “making his hair stand on end”; it was, however, not intended for circulation. But experience of England, for which he contracted a passionate admiration, and which (as Mr. Churton Collins has shown) he studied profoundly, sobered him with a high and serious purpose. He met all the brilliant writers of that age in England, and took a great interest in the religious controversy which raged over Anthony Collins’s Discourse. He returned to France in 1729, vowing to win for it the liberty and enlightenment he had enjoyed in England. The splendid English Letters which he wrote with that aim, and was afraid to publish, leaked out in 1734. The book was burned by the hangman, and he had to retire once more, for letting France know how enlightened England was in the days of George I.

I pass over twenty years of his strenuous and brilliant career. He wrote his most famous tragedies and histories; he made an ardent study of, and introduced to France, the new science of Isaac Newton, whose funeral he had witnessed in London; he was banished from his country for smiling at Adam and Eve; he deserted France for Germany, and then quarrelled with Frederick the Great; he tried liberal Switzerland, and found that it gave you liberty only to attack other people’s dogmas; and in 1760 he settled at Ferney, since the shrine of Continental Rationalism, on the frontier, so that he could talk to Calvinists from the French side, and cross the border, if need were, to talk to France. But France was at his feet. For eighteen years more he showered his rain of publications on it. Even in those illiterate days some of his publications sold 300,000 copies. And when at last, in 1778, he was tempted to revisit Paris, the roar of delight, of esteem, of abject worship, overwhelmed him, and he died in a flood of glory.

To those last twenty years of his life belong the anti-Christian works reproduced in this volume. He was now a man of mature judgment, vast erudition, and grave humanitarian purpose. The common notion in England of Voltaire’s works, as superficial gibes thrown out by the way in a brilliant career, is sheer nonsense. His command of history was remarkable; and he had, for the time, a thorough grasp of science and philosophy. His arguments for the existence of God will compare with those of the ablest lay or clerical theologians of his time. His knowledge was defective and inaccurate because all knowledge was defective and inaccurate in the eighteenth century, when research was only just beginning to recover from its long ecclesiastical paralysis. No man in France had a larger command of such knowledge as the time afforded, and the use he made of it was serious and high-purposed. It is only the superficial who cannot see the depth below that sparkling surface; only the insensible who cannot feel the strong, steady beat of a human heart behind the rippling laughter.

Écrasez l’infame—“Crush the infamous thing”—the battle-cry which he sent over Europe from the Swiss frontier, was but a fiery expression of his love of men, of liberty, of enlightenment, and of progress. Read the stories of brutality in the guise of religion that are told in these pages—stories which ran into Voltaire’s day—the stories of “religious” processions and relics and superstitions, the story of how this ignorant credulity had been imposed on Europe, and how it was maintained by sceptical priests, and say, if you dare, that the phrase was not a cry of truth, sincerity, and humanity. There was even a profoundly religious impulse in his work. A clerical friend once confided to me that he found a use in Voltaire. It seemed that, when inspiration for the Sunday sermon failed, he fell upon my “atheistic friends,” Voltaire and Rousseau, and the French Revolution they brought about. He was amazed to hear that they believed in God as firmly as, and much more reasonably than, he and his colleagues did. Voltaire’s aim was a sincere effort to rid pure religion of its morbid and abominable overgrowths.

Very good, you say; but why not have set about it more politely? For two plain reasons. First, because the character of his opponents fully justified him in directing his most scathing wit upon them. The Jesuits, whom he chiefly lashed, were in his own time ignominiously expelled by nearly every Catholic Power in Europe, and were suppressed by the Pope. The other clergy were deeply tainted with scepticism in the cities, and befogged with dense ignorance in the provinces. One incident will suffice to justify his disdain. His latest English biographer, S. G. Tallentyre, who is not biassed in his favour, says that it is most probable, if not certain, that while the Catholic authorities were burning his books in Paris, and shuddering at his infidelity, they were secretly tempting him, with the prospect of a cardinal’s hat, to join the clergy. It is certain that they invited him to do religious work, and that, at the height of his anti-clerical work, he received direct from the Pope certain relics to put in a chapel he had built for his poor neighbours. Could a prince of irony restrain himself in such circumstances? The other reason is the character of the dogmas and practices he assailed. Read them in the following pages.

It is true that there are passages in Voltaire which none of us would, if we could, write to-day. The taste of the eighteenth century, still fouled by the Middle Ages, is not the taste of the twentieth. Besides some longer passages which have been omitted from the Treatise on Toleration, as will be explained, a few lines have been struck out or modified here and there in one or two of the works in this selection. Let me not be misunderstood, however. They are mainly words of the Old Testament, and comments inspired only by those words, that have been omitted. In the eighteenth century one could quote and comment in public on these grossnesses. Indeed, by some singular mental process, which Voltaire alone could characterise, the books containing these crudely sexual passages are still thrust into the hands of children and of confined criminals by the joint authority of Church and State in England; and grave bishops and gentle women say that they are the Word of God.

And this brings me to the last point that I desire to touch before I introduce, one by one, the works contained in this volume. Why reproduce at all, in the twentieth century, these fitting scourges of the superstitions of the eighteenth? I have said that they deserve to be reproduced for their historical interest and for the great part they have played in the history of Europe; but there is another reason. I have an idea that, if Voltaire were alive in England to-day, he would write with more scathing irony than ever. I imagine him gazing with profound admiration at that marvellous picture of the past which science and archæology have given us, and then asking at what date in the nineteenth century we ceased to dispute about consubstantiality and transubstantiation, took the gilt off our Old Testament, and elevated our bishops to the rank of citizens. I then fancy him peeping into the fine schools of London or Manchester, and learning that the first educational authorities in England still set children to learn about Adam and Eve, the Deluge, the Plagues of Egypt, and the remarkable proceedings of Joshua and David and the rest. I try to conceive him studying the faces of learned judges and professors, as they listen gravely to the reading of the Bible and the creeds in church on Sundays, or reverently handle the book in court. I picture his amazement as he learns that this England, which he thought so enlightened, still, at the dictation of its bishops, retains the most abominable divorce law in the civilised world; or hears preachers and social students seriously expressing concern for the future of Europe on account of the decay of docility to the clergy. What would he have written on such a situation?