The Age of Voltaire: The Story of Civilization, Volume IX

by Will Durant

echoing Plato across two thousand years, democracy falls into chaos, invites dictatorship, and disappears.

Montesquieu, like nearly all of us, became increasingly conservative with age. Conservatism is a function and obligation of old age, as radicalism is a useful function of youth, and moderation a gift and service of middle age;

France had almost destroyed itself to compel all Frenchmen to one faith; Voltaire dilated on the comparative toleration of religious differences in England. “This is a land of sects. An Englishman, like a free man, goes to heaven by whatever route he chooses.”

To Locke Voltaire devoted nearly all of Letter XIII. He found in him not only a science of the mind instead of a mythology of the soul, but an implicit philosophy that, by tracing all knowledge to sensation, turned European thought from divine revelation to human experience as the exclusive source and basis of truth.

Voltaire had no patience with the visionaries who were idealizing the “friendly and flowing savage,” or were recommending a “return to nature” as an escape from the strains, hypocrisies, and artifices of modern life. He himself was quite comfortable amid his tribulations, and he thought he ought to say a good word for civilization. He saw no virtue in poverty, and no harmony between bugs and love. Primitive men may have been communists, but only because they had nothing; and if they were sober it was only because they had no wine.

From the birth of Handel and Bach in 1685 to the death of Brahms in 1897 German music was supreme; at any time in those 212 years the greatest living composer, except in opera, was a German.

Bach’s works are the Reformation put to music.

Shall we expose the hesitant reservations with which we admire this massive Mass in B Minor? Bach’s power overrides in many numbers the humility that should infuse an address to the Deity; sometimes it seems that he must have thought God hard of hearing, as having been so long silent in so many languages.

Magnificent monasteries proclaimed the glory of God and the comforts of celibacy.

Finding that pious persons worked more steadily than skeptics, Frederick William supported the Pietist movement. Catholics were grudgingly tolerated. Calvinists were told to stop preaching their predestinarian gloom. Lutherans were ordered to use German instead of Latin in their liturgy, and to abandon surplices, stoles, and the elevation of the Sacrament, as papistical vestiges.

The mice that must be in some little holes of an immense building know not whether it is eternal, or who the architect is, or why he built it. Such mice are we; and the Divine Architect who built the universe has never, that I know of, told his secret to one of us…

They agree on deism; they affirm belief in God, they confess that they know nothing about Him, they detest the clergy who base their power on pretended access to the Deity.

The powers rested for eight years, until the labor of women in child birth could replenish the regiments for another round in the game of kings.

(We must remind ourselves that nearly all democracies are oligarchies; minorities can be organized for action and power, majorities cannot.)

the rival religions—Calvinist and Catholic-gave the worst example of behavior, for they liberated hatred and chained the mind.

He mourned the diverse transmogrifications of the past by current prejudices; in this sense “history … is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.”

to ignore history would be to endlessly repeat its errors, massacres, and crimes. There are three avenues to that large and tolerant perspective which is philosophy: one is the study of men in life through experience; another, the study of things in space through science; a third, the study of events in time through history.

He saw history rather as the slow and fumbling advance of man, through natural causes and human effort, from ignorance to knowledge, from miracles to science, from superstition to reason. He could see no Providential design in the maelstrom of events.

he made organized religion the villain in his story, since it seemed to him generally allied with obscurantism, given to oppression, and fomenting war.

He minimized the persecution of Christians by Rome, and anticipated Gibbon in reckoning this as far less frequent and murderous than the persecution of heretics by the Church.

He declared that the Spanish Inquisition and the massacre of the heretical Albigenses were the vilest events in history.

He was a man at war, and a man cannot fight well unless he has learned to hate. Only the victor can appreciate his enemy.

he knew that facts have sworn eternal enmity to generalizations; and perhaps he felt that any philosophy of history should follow and derive from, rather than precede and decide, the recital of events.

Voltaire saw it in his “Récapitulation,” history (as generally written) was a bitter and tragic story.

I have now gone through the immense scene of revolutions that the world has experienced since the time of Charlemagne; and to what have they tended? To desolation, and the loss of millions of lives! Every great event has been a capital misfortune. History has kept no account of times of peace and tranquillity; it relates only ravages and disasters.… All history, in short, is little else than a long succession of useless cruelties,

We cannot change human nature, but we can modify its operations by saner customs and wiser laws. If ideas have changed the world, why may not better ideas make a better world?

Voltaire replied to his critics that he had stressed the sins of Christianity because others were still defending them; he quoted contemporary authors who commended the crusades against the Albigenses, the execution of Huss, even the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; the world surely needed a history that would brand these actions as crimes against humanity and morality.

The instinct to persecute passed from religion to politics as the state replaced the Church as the guardian of unanimity and order and as the object of heretical dissent.

Hatred grew tense on both sides of the conflict between religion and philosophy; what had begun as a campaign against superstition rose to the pitch of a war against Christianity. Revolution came in France, and not in eighteenth-century England, partly because censorship by state or Church, which was mild in England, was so strong in France that the imprisoned mind could expand only by the violent destruction of its bonds.

Typical of the eighteenth century, as of our own, was a spreading eagerness for knowledge—precisely that intellectual lust which the Middle Ages had condemned as a sin of foolish pride.

By 1789 the middle classes in Western Europe were as well informed as the aristocracy and the clergy. Print had made its way. That, after all, was the basic revolution.

Bayle pointed out (1685) that a Chinese emperor was giving free scope to Catholic missionaries while Louis XIV, revoking Henry IV’s tolerant Edict of Nantes, was enforcing religious conformity through the barbarous violence of dragonnades.

Two priesthoods came into conflict: the one devoted to the molding of character through religion, the other to the education of the intellect through science. The first priesthood predominates in ages of poverty or disaster, when men are grateful for spiritual comfort and moral order; the second in ages of progressive wealth, when men incline to limit their hopes to the earth.

As the century proceeded, a closer rapport grew between practical men seeking production and scientists seeking truth;

philosophy, which is the quest of wisdom, must build upon science, which is the pursuit of knowledge.

The effect of science upon religion—or rather upon Christianity—seemed lethal. Doubtless men would continue to form or favor conceptions of the world that would give hope and consolation, meaning and dignity, to harassed, fleeting lives; but how could the Christian epos of creation, original sin, and divine redemption stand up in a perspective that reduced the earth to a speck among a million stars? What was man that the God of such a universe should be mindful of him?

By philosopher we shall mean anyone who tries to arrive at reasoned opinions on any subject whatever as seen in a large perspective. More specifically, in these chapters, we shall apply the term to those who seek a rational view of the origin, nature, significance, and destiny of the universe, life, or man. Philosophy must not be understood as in opposition to religion, and any large perspective of human life must make room for religion.

The debate that agitated the intellectual classes in the half century before the Revolution was not quite a conflict between religion and philosophy; it was primarily a conflict between the philosophes and Catholic Christianity as it then existed in France. It was the pent-up wrath of the French mind after centuries in which religion had sullied its services with obscurantism, persecution, and massacre.

Man could at last liberate himself from medieval dogmas and Oriental myths; he could shrug off that bewildering, terrifying theology, and stand up free, free to doubt, to inquire, to think, to gather knowledge and spread it, free to build a new religion around the altar of reason and the service of mankind.

as in many cases, the Jesuits lost a novice by sharpening a mind. Denis discovered that Paris had even more brothels than churches. He dropped his cassock and piety and became a lawyer’s apprentice.

He had long since succumbed to the fascination of philosophy—which draws us ever onward because it never answers the questions that we never cease to ask.

Could anything be more absurd than a God who makes God die on the Cross in order to appease the anger of God against a woman and a man four thousand years dead?

Theoretically he was an agnostic, disclaiming any knowledge of, or interest in, anything beyond the world of the senses and the sciences.

brown eyes heavy and sad, as if recalling unrecallable errors, or realizing the indestructibility of superstition, or noting the high birth rate of simplicity.

Like nearly all the philosophes, Helvétius begins with Locke: all ideas are derived from sensation, therefore from the experience of the individual. All mental states are combinations of sensations felt at present, or revived from the past through memory, or projected into the future through imagination.

Having begun with Locke, Helvétius proceeds with Hobbes. All action is desire responding to sensations present or recalled. Desire is the memory of the pleasure that attended certain sensations.

Conservatives stress the differences and influence of heredity, and the need for caution in changing institutions rooted in natural and native inequalities of ability and character. Reformers stress the differences and influence of environment, by which inequalities of ability, power, and wealth seem due to chance—to the accidents of birth and the privileges of condition rather than to innate merit; inequality can therefore be reduced by equalizing education and bettering the environment.

The power of the priest depends upon the superstitions and stupid credulity of the people. It is of little worth to him that they be learned; the less they know, the more docile they will be to his dictates.

In every religion the first objective of the priests is to stifle the curiosity of men, to prevent the examination of every dogma whose absurdity is too palpable to be concealed.

What does the history of religions teach us? That they have everywhere lighted up the torch of intolerance, strewed the plains with corpses, imbrued the fields with blood, burned cities, and laid waste empires.27 … Are not the Turks, whose religion is a religion of blood, more tolerant than we? We see Christian churches at Constantinople, but there are no mosques in Paris.