Toleration and other essays

by Voltaire

I believe what seems to reason impossible—in other words, I believe what I do not believe—and therefore I must hate those who boast that they believe an absurdity opposed to mine. Such is the logic—such, rather, is the madness—of the superstitious. To worship, love, and serve the Supreme Being, and to be of use to men, is nothing; it is indeed, according to some, a false virtue, a “splendid sin,” as they call it. Ever since men made it a sacred duty to dispute about what they cannot understand, and made virtue consist in the pronunciation of certain unintelligible words, which every one attempted to explain, Christian countries have been a theatre of discord and carnage.

You will tell me that this universal pestilence should be imputed to the fury of ambition rather than to that of fanaticism. I answer that it is due to both. The thirst for domination has been assuaged with the blood of fools. I do not aspire to heal men of power of this furious passion to subject the minds of others; it is an incurable disease. Every man would like to see others hastening to serve him; and, that he may be the better served, he will, if he can, make them believe that their duty and their happiness are to be slaves. Find me a man with an income of a hundred thousand pounds a year, and with four or five hundred thousand subjects throughout Europe, who cost him nothing, besides his soldiers, and tell him that Christ, of whom he is the vicar and imitator, lived in poverty and humility. He will reply that the times are changed, and to prove it he will condemn you to perish in the flames. You will neither correct this man [the Pope] nor a Cardinal de Lorraine, the simultaneous possessor of seven bishoprics. What can one do, then? Appeal to the people, and, brutalised as they are, they listen and half open their eyes. They partly throw off the most humiliating yoke that has ever been borne. They rid themselves of some of their errors, and win back a part of their freedom, that appanage or essence of man of which they had been robbed. We cannot cure the powerful of ambition, but we can cure the people of superstition. We can, by speech and pen, make men more enlightened and better.

It is easy to make them see what they have suffered during fifteen hundred years. Few people read, but all may listen. Listen, then, my brethren, and hear the calamities which have fallen on earlier generations.

Hardly had the Christians, breathing freely under Constantine, dipped their hands in the blood of the virtuous Valeria,[32] daughter, wife, and mother of the Cæsars, and in the blood of her young son Candidian, the hope of the Empire; hardly had they put to death the son of the Emperor Maximin, in his eighth year, and his daughter in her seventh year; hardly had these men, who are described as so patient for two centuries, betrayed their fury at the beginning of the fourth century, than controversy gave birth to those civil discords which, succeeding each other without a moment of relaxation, still agitate Europe. What are the subjects of these bloody quarrels? Subtilties, my brethren, of which not a trace is to be found in the Gospel. They would know whether the Son was engendered or made; whether he was engendered in time or before time; whether he is consubstantial with, or like, the Father; whether the divine “monad,” as Athanasius puts it, is threefold in three hypostases; whether the Holy Ghost was engendered, or proceeded; whether he proceeds from the Father only, or the Father and the Son; whether Jesus had one will or two, or two natures, or one or two persons.

In a word, from “consubstantiality” to “transubstantiation”—terms equally difficult to pronounce and to understand—everything has been a matter of dispute, and every dispute has caused torrents of blood to flow.

You know how much was shed by our superstitious Mary, daughter of the tyrant Henry VIII., and worthy spouse of the Spanish tyrant Philip II. The throne of Charles I. became a scaffold; he perished ignominiously, after more than two hundred thousand men had been slaughtered for a liturgy.

You know the civil wars of France. A troop of fanatical theologians, called the Sorbonne, declare Henry III. to have forfeited the throne, and at once a theological apprentice assassinates him. The Sorbonne declares the great Henry IV., our ally, incapable of ruling, and twenty murderers rise in succession; until at last, on the mere announcement that the hero is about to protect his former allies against the Pope’s followers, a monk—a schoolmaster—plunges a knife in the heart of the most valiant of kings and best of men in the midst of his capital, under the eyes of his people, and in the arms of his friends. And, by an inconceivable contradiction, his memory is revered for ever, and the troop of the Sorbonne which proscribed and excommunicated him and his faithful subjects, and has no right to excommunicate anybody, still survives, to the shame of France.

It is not the ordinary people, my brethren, not the agricultural workers and the ignorant and peaceful artisans, who have raised these ridiculous and fatal quarrels, the sources of so many horrors and parricides. There is, unhappily, not one of them that is not due to the theologians. Men fed by your labours in a comfortable idleness, enriched by your sweat and your misery, struggled for partisans and slaves; they inspired you with a destructive fanaticism, that they might be your masters; they made you superstitious, not that you might fear God the more, but that you might fear them.

The gospel did not say to James, Peter, or Bartholomew: “Live in opulence; deck yourselves with honours; walk amid a retinue of guards.” It did not say to them: “Disturb the world with your incomprehensible questions.” Jesus, my brethren, touched none of these questions. Would you be better theologians than he whom you recognise as your one master? What! He said to you: “All consists in loving God and your neighbour”; yet you would seek something else.

Is there any one among you, is there any one on the whole earth, who can think that God will examine him on points of theology, not judge him by his deeds?