The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  After 1768 he adopted the monastic custom of having devotional works read to him at mealtime; for this purpose he preferred the sermons of Massillon; he could appreciate literature even when it came in a cassock. He had shared in the campaign against the Jesuits, but in 1770 he joined a lay association of the Capuchin friars, and received from the head of that order the title père temporal des capucins de Gex—the little county in which he was a feudal lord. He was quite proud of this honor, wrote a dozen letters about it, signed some letters “Frére Voltaire, capucin indigne” Frederick hailed him as a new saint of the Church, but informed him that the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome had in that same year burned some of the “unworthy Capuchin’s” works.130 It is difficult now to discern whether this rapprochement with the Church was sincere, or whether it was a peace offering to Versailles, or whether it was motived by fear lest his corpse be forbidden burial in consecrated ground—which included all the cemeteries in France. Perhaps all three motives played a part in the divine comedy.

  In these final years, 1770–78, he devoted his pen rather to repudiating atheism then to attacking Christianity. Into the article “God” in the Dictionnaire philosophique he inserted two sections in refutation of d’Holbach’s Système de la nature. In 1772 he composed a vigorous essay, Il’ faut prendre un Parti (We Must Take Sides), in which he argued for “God and toleration.” He confessed to Mme. Necker, to the Duchesse de Choiseul, to Prince Frederick William of Prussia, his fear that the movement for religious toleration would be defeated by the advocacy of atheism. He regretted that his criticism of d’Holbach was endangering the solidarity of the fréres, but he persisted: “I have no doubt that the author, and three supporters of this book, will become my implacable enemies for having spoken my thoughts; and I have declared to them that I will speak out as long as I breathe, without fearing either the fanatics of atheism or the fanatics of superstition.”131 The holbachiens retorted that the rich seigneur was playing politics with Versailles, and was using God to police his servants and peasants at Ferney.

  In the last decade of his life the men whom he had once hailed and spurred on as brothers in the campaign against l’infâme looked upon him as a lost leader. Diderot had never loved him, had never taken to corresponding with him, had resented Voltaire’s evident assumption that d’Alembert was the chief and soul of the Encyclopédie. Diderot applauded the defense of Calas, but he let slip a jealous line: “This man is never more than the second in all genres.”132 Voltaire did not share Diderot’s revolutionary politics, nor his liking for the bourgeois drama of sentiment; the bourgeois become aristocrat could not relish the bourgeois contentedly bourgeois. Neither Diderot nor d’Holbach made the pilgrimage of devotion to Ferney. Grimm commented with undue severity on Voltaire’s criticism of Hobbes and Spinoza: “The ’Ignorant Philosopher’ has with difficulty skimmed the surface of these matters.”133 And now the atheists of Paris, growing in number and pride, turned their backs upon Voltaire. So early as 1765, even amid the battle against l’infâme, one of them dismissed him with scorn: “Il est un bigot, c’est un déiste.”134

  Buffeted from both sides, the frail patriarch began, toward 1770, to lose faith in the prospects of victory. He called himself a “great destroyer” who had built nothing.135 His new religion of “God and tolerance,” he feared, would come only when rulers would accept the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s “project for perpetual peace”—i.e., probably never at all. He had long suspected the frailty of philosophy and the unattractiveness of reason. “No philosopher has influenced the manners of even the street he lived in.”136 He surrendered the masses to “superstition” or mythology. He hoped to win some “forty thousand sages” in France, and the educated strata of the middle class; but even this hope began to fade in the twilight of his years. “To enlighten the young, bit by bit”—this was all the dream that was left to him as he prepared, aged eighty-four, to see Paris and die. Perhaps, in the marvelous welcome that he was destined to receive there, his faith and hope in man would return.

  Was he a philosopher? Yes, though he made no system, vacillated on everything, and too often remained on the surface of things. He was not a philosopher if the word means the maker of a system of unified and consistent thought about the world and man. He turned away from systems as the impudent sallies of the minuscle into the infinite. But he was a philosopher if that means a mind seriously occupied with the basic problems of nature, morals, government, life, and destiny. He was not considered profound, but perhaps that was because he was uncertain and clear. His ideas were seldom original, but in philosophy nearly all original ideas are foolish, and lack of originality is a sign of wisdom. Certainly the form that he gave to his ideas was original; Voltaire is without question the most brilliant writer that ever lived. Was he second in every field, as Diderot charged? Second in philosophy to Diderot, yes, and in drama to Corneille and Racine; but he was first and best in his time in his conception and writing of history, in the grace of his poetry, in the charm and wit of his prose, in the range of his thought and his influence. His spirit moved like a flame over the continent and the century, and stirs a million souls in every generation.

  Perhaps he hated too much, but we must remember the provocation; we must imagine ourselves back in an age when men were burned at the stake, or broken on the wheel, for deviating from orthodoxy. We can appreciate Christianity better today than he could then, because he fought with some success to moderate its dogmas and violence. We can feel the power and splendor of the Old Testament, the beauty and elevation of the New, because we are free to think of them as the labor and inspiration of fallible men. We can be grateful for the ethics of Christ, because he no longer threatens us with hell, nor curses the men and cities that will not hear him.137 We can feel the nobility of St. Francis of Assisi, because we are no longer asked to believe that St. Francis Xavier was heard in several languages while he spoke in one. We can feel the poetry and drama of religious ritual now that the transient triumph of toleration leaves us free to worship or abstain. We can accept a hundred legends as profound symbols or illuminating allegories, because we are no longer required to accept their literal truth. We have learned to sympathize with that which we once loved and had to leave, as we retain a tender memory for the loves of our youth. And to whom, more than to any other one man, do we owe this precious and epochal liberation? To Voltaire.

  * * *

  I. Oh, miserable mortals, grieving earth!

  Oh, frightful gathering of all mankind!

  Eternal host of useless sufferings!

  Ye silly sages who cry, “All is well,”

  Come, contemplate these ruins horrible,

  This wreck, these shreds and ashes of your race;

  Women and children heaped in common death,

  These scattered members under broken shafts;

  A hundred thousand luckless by the earth

  Devoured, who, bleeding, torn, and still alive,

  Buried beneath their roofs, end without help

  Their lamentable days in torment vile!

  To their expiring and half-formed cries,

  The smoking cinders of this ghoulish scene,

  Say you, “This follows from eternal laws

  Binding the choice of God both free and good”?

  Will you, before this mass of victims, say,

  “God is revenged, their death repays their crimes”?

  II. This was in an Apologie de Louis XIV(1762), by the Abbé de Caveyrac. Many Catholic clergymen condemned this book.54

  III. “The Lutheran and Calvinist preachers would probably be as little inclined to pity, as obdurate and intolerant, as they upbraid their antagonists with being. The barbarous law whereby any Roman Catholic is forbidden to reside more than three days in certain countries is not yet revoked.”—Essay on Free Toleration, in Works, XXIa, 257. Cf. Voltaire’s denunciation of the intolerant Huguenot Jurieu in the article “David” in the Dictionnaire philosophique.

  CHAPTER XXIII<
br />
  The Triumph of the Philosophes

  1715–89

  I. THE CLERGY FIGHTS BACK

  THERE was much to be said for Christianity, and its defenders said it with vigor, sometimes with blind misjudging of the age, sometimes with the grace and clarity that France expects even of theology. There were ecclesiastics who still insisted that any deviation from defined Catholic doctrine should be punished by the state, and that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew was as legitimate as surgery.1 But there were others who took up the gage like gentlemen, and allowed the enemy to choose the weapon-reason. It was a gallant gesture, for when a religion consents to reason it begins to die.

  Some nine hundred works in defense of Christianity were published in France between 1715 and 1789, ninety in one year (1770) alone.2 Diderot’s Pensées philosophiques, Helvétius’ De l’Esprit, Rousseau’s Émile, drew ten refutations each. The Abbé Houteville, in La Religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits (1722), contended (like Archbishop Whately a century later) that the miracles proving the divinity of Christianity were as reliably attested as the accepted events of secular history. The Abbé Guyon spread through two volumes his satirical Oracle des nouveaux philosophes (1759–60). The Abbé Pluche spread out the Spectacle de la nature in eight volumes (1739–46); it went through eighteen costly editions; it displayed the wonders of science, and the evidences of design in nature, to manifest the existence of a Deity supreme in intelligence and power. If the human mind finds some puzzles in the immense scene, let it be modest; we must not reject God because we cannot understand him; meanwhile let us be grateful for the splendor and glory of his works. The Abbé Gauchat in fifteen volumes of Lettres critiques (1755–63) attacked the evolutionary hypotheses of Buffon, Diderot, and others with a reckless argument: “If men were once fishes, … one of two things followed: either man does not have a spiritual and immortal soul or fishes also have such a soul—two equally impious suppositions”;3 the philosophes gladly agreed. The Abbé Sigorgne, in La Philosophie chrétienne (1765), stressed the necessity of religion as a support for morality; purely secular restraints merely sharpen the wits of criminals who no longer believe in the all-seeing eye of God. In 1767 the Abbé Mayeul Chandon published a Dictionnaire antiphilosophique which went through seven editions. In 1770 Père Nonotte, “an ex-Jesuit with the vast erudition of the members of this order,”4 issued his massive Erreurs de Voltaire; this book sold out four editions in its first year, six in eight years; as late as 1857 Flaubert listed it as part of the reading of Emma Bovary. The Abbé Guénée defended the Bible with “spirit, taste, urbanity, and learning” in Lettres de quelques Juifs (1776), letters purporting to come from learned Jews; Voltaire admitted that Guénée “bites to the blood.”5 Catholic apologists, lay and clerical, directed a monthly barrage against the philosophes in La Religion vengée; and in 1771 they began to publish an Encyclopedic méthodique vaster even then Diderot’s, and attacking every weak point in that citadel of doubt.

  The materialists encountered an able opponent in Nicolas Sylvestre Bergier, a parish priest in the diocese of Besançon. His Déisme réfuté par lui-même (1765) was “the answer of a real curé to the Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau’s imagination.”6 For his Certitude des preuves du Christianisme (1767) he received a letter of praise from the Pope. At the age of fifty-one (1769)he was elevated to a canonry in Notre-Dame-de-Paris, and became confessor to the daughters of Louis XV”. In that year he published an Apologie de la religion chrétienne contre l’auteur du Christianisme dévoilé—a blast against d’Holbach. Pleased, the Assembly of the Clergy voted him (1770) an annual pension of two thousand livres to give him more leisure to defend the faith. Within a year he issued a two-volume Examen du matérialisme, a reply to d’Holbach’s Système de la nature. He pointed out again that mind is the only reality immediately known to us; why should it be reduced to something else known only through mind?7 He charged d’Holbach with several inconsistencies: (1) the Baron pronounced God to be unknowable, but then applied to matter those qualities of infinity and eternity which he had found unintelligible in our concept of the Deity; (2) he accepted determinism, and yet exhorted men to reform their conduct; (3) he attributed religion (a) to the ignorance of primitive man, (b) to the chicanery of priests, (c) to the cunning of lawmakers—let him make up his mind. The abbé put aside the criticism of the Old Testament by explaining that the human amanuenses of God had used Oriental metaphors; therefore the Bible must not always be taken literally. The New Testament is the essence of Christianity; the divinity of the religion is proved by the life and miracles of Christ; however, the authority of the Church rests not on the Bible only, but on the Apostolic Succession of her bishops and their traditions of the faith. In Examen de la religion chrétienne (1771) Bergier stressed the argument that atheism, despite the exceptional individualities signalized by Bayle, would ruin morality.

  The finest figure among the clerical defenders of Catholicism in eighteenth-century France was Guillaume François Berthier.8 Entering at the age of twelve (1714) the Jesuit college at Bourges, he distinguished himself by a keenness of mind that did no visible harm to his piety. At seventeen he expressed to his parents his desire to join the Society of Jesus; they bade him think it over for a year; he did, and persisted. In his novitiate at Paris he read, studied, and prayed so assiduously that he seldom gave more than five hours a day to sleep. He developed so rapidly that at nineteen he was appointed to teach the humanities at the Collège de Blois. After seven years there, and another year of novitiate, he was sent to Rennes, then to Rouen, as professor of philosophy. In 1745 the Jesuits made him editor of their Journal de Trévoux, which was then published in Paris. Under his leadership this periodical became one of the most respected voices of educated France.

  He wrote most of the Journal himself. He lived in a small cell, never heated, and worked every hour of the waking day. His door was open to all who came; his mind was open on every subject but the faith that warmed his life. La Harpe, a pupil of Voltaire, described Berthier as “that man universally admired by scholars for his vast knowledge, and by all Europe for his modest virtues.”9 He had the charm of French courtesy, even in controversy; he attacked ideas, not characters, and praised the talents of his opponents.10 Nevertheless, he defended religious intolerance. Believing that the Catholic Church had been founded by Christ the Son of God, he held it a Christian duty to prevent, by any peaceful means, the dissemination of religious error; in a Christian nation anti-Christian propaganda should be banned as injurious to moral conduct and the stability of the state. He thought “it would be wrong to confound Catholic intolerance with zeal for persecution,”11 but he offered no promise that persecution would not be resumed. In 1759 he retorted the charge of intolerance upon the philosophes: “Unbelievers, you accuse us of a fanaticism which we do not have a semblance of possessing, while the hatred which animates you against our religion inspires in you a fanaticism whose too apparent excesses are inconceivable.”12

  He did not admit the universal finality of reason. Even on Locke’s sensationist terms, reason can reach only as far as the senses; beyond these limits there are realities that must forever remain mysteries to finite minds; therefore the “true philosopher limits his search where he cannot reasonably penetrate.”13 To seek to subject the universe, or the traditional and general beliefs of mankind, to the test of individual reason is a form of intellectual pride; a modest man will accept the creed of his fellow men, even if he cannot understand it. In a rare mean moment Berthier suggested that many unbelievers reject religion because it interferes with their pleasures. If such libertins should prevail, he predicted, the moral code would collapse, passion would be loosed, and civilization would disappear in a morass of self-seeking, sensualism, deceit, and crime. If there is no free will, there is no moral responsibility; “since it [determinism] does not admit any law binding the conscience, the only guilty person will be the one who does not succeed.”14 Morality would then be merely a calculus of expediency; no
sense of justice would restrain the clever minority from abusing the simplicity of the majority; no ruler would feel any other obligation to his people than to keep his exploitation of them this side of revolution.15

  Berthier, as we have seen, welcomed and commended the first volume of the Encyclopédie. He exposed its inaccuracies and plagiarisms with incontestable scholarship; so he showed that the article “Agir” (To Act), by the Abbé Yvon, extending to three columns in folio, was taken “completely and word for word from Father Buffier’s Traité des vérités premieres”16 He praised the article on Arab philosophy, but expressed dismay at finding in the article “Athée” the arguments for atheism laid out at the same length, and with the same force, as those against it, leaving the existence of God in serious doubt. When, in Volume II, the anti-Christian bent became more evident, he attacked it with verve and skill. He pointed out that the Encyclopédie derived the authority of a government from the consent of the governed; this, said Berthier, is a view dangerous to hereditary monarchy. He may have been instrumental in having the Encylopédie repressed.17

  In the Journal de Trévoux for April, 1757, he examined Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs. “It is sad for us to find here a living author whose talents we admire, [but who] abuses them in the most essential matters.” He saw in Voltaire’s work an attempt “to destroy the Church and religion, to elevate upon their ruins a philosophic structure, a temple dedicated to license of thought, and vowed to independence from all authority, to reduce and restrict worship and morality to a philosophy purely human and secular.” He charged Voltaire with a bias that disgraced the historian, with an almost complete blindness to the virtues and services of Christianity, and a passionate resolve to find every possible fault in its teachings and career. Voltaire, he said, pretended to believe in God, but the effect of his writings was to promote atheism. When, in the same issue, Berthier turned to Voltaire’s La Pucelle, he lost his temper and cried out: